Bearded dragons change color on different body parts for social signals and temperature regulation
Surrounded by Jew-Haters
Paris Declares War on 'Ghettoes for the Rich'
Slime mold gives insight into intelligence of neuron-less organisms
How to Grow a Weetabix
Old World metals traded on Alaska coast hundreds of years before contact with Europeans
On the Soul-Sustaining Necessity of Resisting Self-Comparison and Fighting Cynicism
Mapping How Stressful Streets Can Limit Cycling
Differences in male, female brain activity found when it comes to cooperation
Between Hell and History
My reading anxieties, numbered
How One Colorado City Instantly Created Affordable Housing
Sea snakes have extra sense for water living
Kilauea: Up close and personal with red hot science!
When High Technology Meets Immortality
Minecraft tree 'probably' the tallest tree in the Tropics
A Cyclist Is Setting Out to Prove You Can Travel Around the U.S. by Bike and Rail
The Citizen-Soldier
Mammals began their takeover long before the death of the dinosaurs
A Rage for Abstraction
Study charts development of emotional control in teens
Why the Very Poor Have Become Poorer
Storm fingerprints show past and future
Artist Louise Bourgeois on How Solitude Enriches Creative Work
A Digital Dive Into Rio de Janeiro's Past
Universe's first life might have been born on carbon planets
DNA: ‘The Power of the Beautiful Experiment’
3
6
13
17
20
39
41
45
47
50
56
58
61
63
66
72
75
78
106
108
115
117
125
128
132
134
136
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
The Legal Policy That Makes Collisions Especially Harrowing for Cyclists
Coral reefs fall victim to overfishing, pollution aggravated by ocean warming
Soldier scientists inventing lighter bullet proof vests, and more
There’s a Legit Mathematical Explanation for Why Your Friends Are More Popular Than You
One More Threat to San Francisco's Homeless: San Francisco Voters
Computer simulations shed light on the Milky Way's missing red giants
In Support of the Federal Big Data Research and Development Strategic Plan
The Rise of Rocket Girls: The Untold Story of the Remarkable Women Who Powered Space Exploration
North Carolina Will Bar Public Access to Police-Cam Footage
Top 10 books to make you a better person
Origami ninja star inspires new battery that runs on a few drops of dirty water
Existential Therapy from the Universe
How Apps Can Help People With Disabilities Navigate Cities
Origin of extraordinary supernovae
Emergent, nsf-funded biotech at 2016 bio innovation zone
144
147
150
153
155
158
160
161
169
171
174
176
187
192
195
2
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Bearded dragons change color on different body parts for social signals and temperature regulation
Source:
University of Melbourne
Summary:
New research shows that bearded dragons are able to partition color change to specific body parts,
depending on whether they are responding to temperature or communicating with other lizards.
Share:
FULL STORY
Photographs of the same bearded lizard at 15 degrees centigrade (left) and 40 degrees centigrade (right).
Credit: Kathleen Smith, University of Melbourne
New research shows that bearded dragons are able to partition colour change to specific body parts,
depending on whether they are responding to temperature or communicating with other lizards.
The study revealed that colour change in the neck area was only linked to social interactions with other
bearded dragons, but by changing their backs to a darker colour in cool weather, the lizards were predicted to
save approximately 85 hours of basking time during the energy-intensive breeding season.
Ms Kathleen (Katie) Smith led the research project, as part of her Masters of Philosophy at the University of
Melbourne.
Twelve wild-caught bearded dragons (Pogona vitticeps) were observed at different temperatures and during
social interactions in the breeding season in northern Victoria, Australia.
3
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
While many lizards use colour change for camouflage, communication and regulating body temperature, we
wanted to understand how an animal might accommodate all of these different functions at once, Ms Smith
said.
"The ideal internal body temperature for a bearded dragon lizard is 35 degrees centigrade. In order to maintain
this temperature, a bearded dragon can change its back to a light yellow colour when it is hot to adark brown
colour when it is cool." Ms Smith added.
"Interestingly, the chest and beard do not change colour in response to temperature, but change dramatically
from cream to jet black during social interactions, accompanied by head-bobs and push-ups.
"Our results suggest that a bearded dragonlizard can balance all of its colour change requirements by only
changing colour on the back for regulating temperature (which appears to be beneficial as it is exposed to the
sun), and only changing the beard/chest colour for social communication (which is the region displayed to
other lizards)."
'The lizards also changed to dark colours very quickly, indicating that this may be an important adaptation for
rapidly warming body temperatures."
The team predicted that the dark colour change would allow more of the sun's energy to enter the lizard's
body and warm it, so they studied the absorption and reflectivity of the bearded dragon's skin.
The bearded dragons were photographed during exposure to temperatures of 15 or 40 degrees centigrade, and
the levels of light reflected from the lizard's skin were recorded to collect the energy-rich wavelengths in the
UV-visible and near infrared range (700-2600nm).
The spectrum of light was analysed by a script written by Professor John Endler from Deakin University, and
then incorporated into a computer program that modeled lizard behavior at different temperatures.
"By changing to a darker colour in cooler temperatures, the bearded dragons reflected much less light than the
paler coloured lizards, at 8% and 23% reflectivity respectively." Prof Endler said.
"The darker lizards would heat up to their active state an average 22 minutes earlier, thereby allowing them to
also move away from predators sooner."
"Our modeling predicted that the lizards with a darker colour only on their backs could save approximately 85
hours of basking time needed to reach active body temperatures during the breeding season."
Ms Smith said that the next steps in the research were to look at temperature-dependent colour change in the
wild and how these lizards might change colour when faced with conflicting requirements (camouflage,
communication, and thermoregulation). .
The work is published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B and was conducted by Ms Kathleen
Smith, Dr Devi Stuart-Fox, Associate Professor Michael Kearney and Dr Viviana Cadena (School of
Biosceinces, University of Melbourne), Professor John Endler (Deakin University) and Professor Warren
Porter (University of Wisconsin).
4
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Melbourne. Note: Materials may be
edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.
Kathleen R. Smith, Viviana Cadena, John A. Endler, Warren P. Porter, Michael R. Kearney, Devi StuartFox. Colour change on different body regions provides thermal and signalling advantages in bearded dragon
lizards. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, June 2016 DOI:10.1098/rspb.2016.0626
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160608112943.htm
5
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Surrounded by Jew-Haters
John Banville
MAY 26, 2016 ISSUE
For Two Thousand Years
by Mihail Sebastian, translated from the Romanian by Philip Ó Ceallaigh
London: Penguin, 231 pp., £9.99 (paper)
Costică Acsinte Archive, Romania
Mihail Sebastian, circa 1930–1945
6
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
In his Journal 1935–44, Mihail Sebastian, lawyer, journalist, novelist, playwright, left a profound and moving
record of some of the most terrible years in the history of Europe. His native Romania may have been on the
geographical periphery, but it was, no less than Spain, one of the cockpits in the struggle between
totalitarianism and democracy that was to lay waste to entire countries, and cause uncountable millions of
deaths and the near annihilation of European Jewry. The wonder of it is that the Journal (not published in
Romania till 1996 and in English till 2000) is not only an invaluable historical document, fully as significant
as the diaries of Victor Klemperer and Anne Frank, but also a beautifully shaped and subtly executed work of
literary art.1 Never has the savagery of which human beings are capable been recorded with such insight,
style, gracefulness, and, amazingly, humor. Now, inFor Two Thousand Years, we have a fictional precursor
of the Journal that in its way is equally fascinating, and equally shocking.
Mihail Sebastian was the pen name of Iosif Mendel Hechter. He was born to a Jewish family in Brăila, a port
on the Danube, in 1907. He studied law in the Romanian capital, Bucharest, which at the time liked to think
of itself as a second Paris, and then in Paris itself, before returning to Bucharest and becoming a typical figure
of the times, an intellectual flaneur, a habitué of literary cafés, a chaser after girls. He worked intermittently as
a lawyer while also writing essays, novels, poems, and plays, and moving in a milieu that included writers and
thinkers such as Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Eugène Ionesco, and Camil Petrescu.
In that fevered year of 1934, with Hitler established as German chancellor and Spain stumbling toward civil
war, Sebastian published For Two Thousand Years. The novel caused an immediate scandal in Romania. The
Zionist left accused him of being anti-Semitic, while the fascist right saw him as a wild-eyed Zionist. He had
asked his friend and hero, Nae Ionescu, charismatic teacher, philosopher, mathematician, and, eventually,
fascist activist, to write a preface to the book. Ionescu obliged, but what he wrote turned out to be not the
sympathetic and approving puff Sebastian had hoped for but a disgraceful indictment concentrating on the
fact of Sebastian’s Jewishness. Assimilation was a foolish fantasy, Ionescu wrote: no Jew could ever belong
to a national community. “Someone can be in the service of a community, can serve it in an eminent way, can
even give his life for this collectivity; but this does not bring him any closer to it.” He told Sebastian bluntly
that he should not even think of himself as Romanian:
ADVERTISING
inRead invented by Teads
It is an assimilationist illusion, it is the illusion of so many Jews who sincerely believe that they are
Romanian…. Remember that you are Jewish!… Are you Iosif Hechter, a human being from Brăila on the
Danube? No, you a Jew from Brăila on the Danube.
It seems inconceivable yet Sebastian, despite sadness and disappointment, went ahead and published this
appalling diatribe as a preface to his novel. Later he was to write that including the piece was his only
possible revenge on Ionescu. This is completely typical of Sebastian’s stoical and endearingly wistful attitude
toward the unashamed, indeed loudly proclaimed, anti-Semitism of so many of his most intimate companions.
When Nae Ionescu died in 1940, at the age of forty-nine, Sebastian wept bitter tears for his lost friend.
Indeed, Sebastian’s capacity to accept and even forgive the excesses of his friends is truly remarkable. In
the Journal he records how at a time when the private houses of Jews were being confiscated by the Romanian
government and distributed to Gentile families, he chanced to meet his friend the novelist Camil Petrescu,
who complained to him that he probably would not be given one of the houses:
“They never give me anything,” he said, disheartened.
7
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
“Well, this time,” I replied, “even if they gave you something, I’m sure you wouldn’t take it!”
“Not take it? Why shouldn’t I?”
Sebastian chose as an epigraph for his novel the famous passage in Montaigne that opens with the declaration:
“I not only dare to talk about myself but to talk of nothing but myself,” which is surely a conscious signal to
the reader that the novel will be closely autobiographical. The book is divided into six parts, but really it has
two: the first is a powerfully affecting opening section, ninety-odd pages long, recounting the horrors of the
nameless protagonist’s time at university, where he and his fellow Jews are at the mercy of a relentlessly antiSemitic student body: “I received two punches during today’s lectures and I took eight pages of notes. Good
value, for two punches.” He recognizes the absolute necessity of holding on to his dignity:
If I cry, I’m lost. I’m still self-possessed enough to know that much. If I cry, I’m lost. Clench your fists, you
fool, if necessary, believe yourself a hero, pray to God, tell yourself you’re the son of a race of martyrs, yes,
yes, tell yourself that, knock your head against the wall, but if you want to be able to look at yourself in the
mirror and not die of shame, don’t cry. That’s all I ask of you: don’t cry.
Like his creator, the protagonist (for convenience let us call him Iosef) is fully aware that the world he knows,
the world he loves—“I’m out in the street. I see a beautiful woman. I see an empty carriage passing by.
Everything is as it ought to be”—is coming to a disastrous end. He is not alone in this conviction. He attends,
by accident—he is in hiding from a gang of students intent on beating him up yet again—a lecture on political
economy by Ghiţă Blidaru, a lightly fictionalized portrait of Nae Ionescu, and takes notes on the
philosopher’s electrifyingly exciting dicta on the collapse of contemporary society: “It’s not only the gold
standard that has been lost,” Blidaru declares, “but any fixed relationship between our symbols and ourselves.
There’s a gulf between man and his context.”
How is this gulf to be bridged? Most of Iosef’s Gentile friends glory in the prospect of a general collapse into
chaos. Here is Ştefan Pârlea, a character closely based on Sebastian’s friend Emil Cioran:
Smashing windows is fine. Any act of violence is good. “Down with the Yids” is idiotic, agreed! But what
does it matter? The point is to shake the country up a bit. Begin with the Jews—if there’s no other way. But
finish higher up, with a general conflagration, with an all-consuming earthquake.
Iosef, and Sebastian too, as we know from the Journal, have ambiguous feelings about anti-Semitism. At one
point, thinking back over his early accounts of what he experienced at the university, he says: “I reduced
everything to the drama of being a Jew…. I was, I believe, two steps away from fanaticism.” He understands,
and acknowledges, the springs of extremism in every heart, Gentile or Jewish, and wonders to what extent the
Jews themselves invite the Gentile world’s resentment. “There is an eternal amity between us [Jews] and the
fact of suffering,” he writes, and goes on to confess that “in my most lamentable moments, I have been
surprised to recognize the mark of pride in this suffering, the indulging of a vague vanity.” He recognizes the
cruelty and stupidity of anti-Semitism, but above all he despises it “for its lack of imagination,” for its
reiteration of the same old accusations—“freemasonry, usury, ritual killing.” How paltry! he exclaims, and
then offers an insight worthy of Kafka himself:
The most basic Jewish conscience, the most commonplace Jewish intelligence, will find within itself much
graver sins, an immeasurably deeper darkness, incomparably more shattering catastrophes.
8
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Reading sentences such as this, and there are others like it, in intent if not in intensity, one understands the
accusations of anti-Semitism hurled at Sebastian by some of his Jewish readers. Yet such accusations
themselves lack imagination. As his translator, Philip Ó Ceallaigh, has remarked, Sebastian “fears that he
finds the psychology of victimhood far too attractive,” but while he has neither a wish to deny nor to be
defined by his Jewishness, “he lives in a society determined to define him by this alone.” For Two Thousand
Years was written in the early 1930s, and while its underlying tone is one of prophetic dread, its author could
not have imagined the immensity of the tragedy that at the end of the decade was to befall Europe and the
Jewish people.
In the annals of anti-Semitism, Romania holds a particularly egregious position. For example, it is estimated
that 130,000 local Jews were slaughtered in Romanian-occupied Ukraine, and that Romanian forces
massacred 150,000 Jews in the area of Odessa and Golta. In a pogrom in 1941, as Sebastian records in
his Journal, Jews were herded into an abattoir and hanged by the neck on meat hooks. “A sheet of paper was
stuck to each corpse: ‘Kosher Meat.’”
Of course, Romania was not unique in this regard. In the early years of Nazi conquests in Eastern Europe the
ravening enthusiasm for pogroms among the indigenous populations of countries such as Poland, Lithuania,
and Estonia startled even the SS. However, the detestation of Jews among all levels of Romanian society,
particularly intellectuals, was unrelenting. Here is a typical outburst, recorded in the Journal in September
1939:
The Poles’ resistance in Warsaw is a Jewish resistance. Only yids are capable of the blackmail of putting
women and children in the front line, to take advantage of the Germans’ sense of scruple…. What is
happening on the frontier with Bukovina is a scandal, because new waves of Jews are flooding into the
country. Rather than a Romania again invaded by kikes, it would be better to have a German protectorate.
Who might the speaker be? Some embittered partisan, perhaps, or a street-corner orator? No: the speaker is
Mircea Eliade, one of Romania’s leading scholars and writers of the time, who after the war slipped away to
America and there became a highly respected and influential thinker and historian of religions. In 1937 Eliade
says of a left-wing student flogged by Iron Guardists that personally he would have put his eyes out as well.
Sebastian writes, “Perhaps one day things will have calmed down enough for me to read this page to Mircea
and to see him blush with shame.”
Similarly, although perhaps not as despicably, E.M. Cioran, the “Ştefan Pârlea” of Sebastian’s novel, threw in
his lot with the Iron Guard, the Romanian fascist movement. Cioran was another expert at survival. When
Marshal Ion Antonescu took power in 1940 and crushed the Iron Guard movement, his government appointed
Cioran cultural attaché in Paris, where he sat out the war years in well-paid comfort and safety, and stayed on
after the war to become a leading intellectual light of émigré life, “one of post-war Paris’s favorite nihilists,”
as Ó Ceallaigh has pointedly observed. In the Journal, Sebastian describes meeting Cioran in January 1941,
on the day of his appointment to Paris. “He was glowing,” Sebastian writes: the new attaché had just received
his call-up papers, and now he will not have to fight. “So like this, everything has been solved. Do you see
what I mean?” Yes, Sebastian thinks sadly, I see what you mean.
Cioran at least expressed regret later for having entered a “pact with the devil”; Eliade made an illustrious
career for himself at the University of Chicago and never wrote a word of apology about his past as an Iron
Guard ideologist, and in his autobiography even sought to justify his support for that appalling gang of thugs.
9
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
The one shining light among Sebastian’s circle is the playwright Eugène, originally Eugen, Ionesco—author
of Rhinoceros, The Chairs—who abhorred and condemned anti-Semitism. Here is a Journal entry for October
1941:
Hitler spoke this afternoon. I was with Eugen [Ionesco]…around six o’clock, just when the speech was being
broadcast. We went to the Buturugă (where there is a radio) and sat down at a table. I wanted to listen—but
after a few seconds Eugen turned pale and stood up.
“I can’t take it! I can’t!”
He said this with a kind of physical desperation. Then he ran off, and of course we went after him. I felt I
could have hugged him.
In its way, For Two Thousand Years is as much a condemnation of Romania, and especially Romanian
intellectuals, in appalling times as is the Journal; indeed, one might say it is a novel written as a journal, while
the Journal is a journal written as a novel.2
In the second section of the novel, beginning at what Sebastian designates Part Three, the tone changes
radically, and the change is not always for the best. Five years have passed, and Iosef is working as an
architect in the provinces, on an ambitious project under the direction of Mircea Vieru, “the master,” and
financed by an American businessman, Ralph T. Rice, who has an oil-drilling contract from the Romanian
government. Since the village of Uioara stands on the site of the oil field, Vieru has decided that the village
“will be moved from its present location to one several kilometers to the right.” Reading the opening pages of
this section, one finds oneself floundering somewhat, like a swimmer out of his depth and searching about for
a rock to put his foot on. At times, it is as if Sebastian has set himself to write a tale in the manner of Somerset
Maugham, with a light Proustian glaze and a dash of Scott Fitzgerald bitters.
We meet an English couple, the Duntons, Marjorie and Phillip. They do not love each other, Iosef observes,
but they get on well enough, in what seems a very English sort of way. Marjorie—“She’s incredibly blonde—
the white-blonde of corn straw”—has a gramophone and regularly receives batches of the latest records from
home. The dialogue here is pure drawing-room comedy:
“If you’ll have me, I’ll come this evening.”
“Can’t this evening. We’re going to the Nicholsons’. Phill has promised a game of bridge. Come along
yourself.”
The function of this little English colony is not made clear—Phillip Dunton is a technician employed by
Ralph Rice, so presumably the other husbands also work in the oil business. Marjorie is loved, in vain and at a
distance, by a shadowy, handsome young man named Pierre Dogany—“His strange head has both Semitic
and Mongolian features”—and it seems too that at some point Iosef himself entertained a mild notion of her,
but nothing came of it, and in the end she leaves her husband and marries, to everyone’s surprise and Iosef’s
subdued chagrin, his colleague on the Uioara project, the rough-hewn womanizer Marin Dronţu.
All this seems entirely inconsequential, but all the same one has the niggling suspicion that Sebastian had
deep though unachieved ambitions for his meandering tale of nostalgia, languid flirtation, and management
squabbles—Vieru the architect and Ralph T. Rice are constantly at odds, and their exchanges will provoke in
10
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
the reader at least a wan smile—and that he meant us to read it as a stylishly jaded study of contemporary
manners.
In the end, however, the main themes reemerge. Iosef discovers, to his consternation and deep
disappointment, that Vieru, his revered “master,” is yet another anti-Semite, just as virulent as all the others,
though softer-spoken. The two men have a confrontation after Vieru remarks that he never sees Iosef in town,
and Iosef answers that he cannot bear the poisoned atmosphere: “At every street corner, an apostle. And in
every apostle, an exterminator of Jews.” He expects sympathetic indignation from the older man, but receives
a violent shock when Vieru calmly responds by saying that “there is a Jewish problem, and it needs to be
solved.”
Let’s be clear. I’m not anti-Semitic…. But I’m a Romanian. And, all that is opposed to me as a Romanian I
regard as dangerous. There is a corrosive Jewish spirit. I must defend myself against it…. If the body of our
state were strong, it would hardly bother me. But it’s not strong. It’s sinful, corruptible and weak. And this is
why I must fight against the agents of corruption.
This is the beginning of a long and intricate exchange, and in places the reader can lose track of which of the
participants is speaking. If this blurring effect is intentional on Sebastian’s part, then it is a brilliant ploy, for it
lets us see yet again the extreme ambiguity in relations between Jews and non-Jews in Romania—and not
only in Romania—in the interwar years. Iosef, like his creator in the Journal, understands anti-Semitism and
even, to a startling degree, empathizes with it. Thus when we read a remark such as “The Jew has a
metaphysical obligation to be detested. That’s his role in the world,” we assume it is Vieru speaking, untl we
realize, to our shock, that in fact it is Iosef himself.
Yet in the end, Vieru’s calm logic and complacent, unshakable certainty make him a far more frightening
figure even than Ghaiţă Blidaru or Ştefan Pârlea, with their overblown, sub-Nietzschean rantings. Vieru, we
suddenly recall, is an architect: What will he be building when the trains with their fully laden cattle cars start
trundling eastward? Yet even here, Iosef’s response is one of sadness more than anger, and at the end of this
quietly terrifying conversation they part without a harsh word:
We both lit our cigarettes. We tried to talk, but it didn’t work—and it was late when we separated, a little
embarrassed, with a truly warm handshake.
A little embarrassed…the beautiful restraint here is heartbreaking.
Yes, restraint is the defining mark of both the novel and the subsequent Journal, as it is of Sebastian’s
personality, as it comes across to us in both books. In a truly atrocious time he refused to compromise on his
duties as a civilized human being, while so many of those around him were throwing wood onto the pyre and
dancing around it in manic and murderous delight. Even on the darkest pages he finds room for a graceful
turn of phrase, a flash of wit, a gesture of understanding and forgiveness. He loved literature, and was widely
read in three or four languages, yet his touch is always light.
Nor was he a dedicated burner of the midnight oil; he is forever bemoaning his lack of application to his
literary work. He adores the sun, likes to lie on a beach doing nothing, or to go off to the mountains to ski. His
love-life has all the intricacy of a Feydeau farce. In affairs of the heart he could be both waspish and witty:
glimpsing a former girlfriend on a train with her husband, Iosef observes: “She’s still beautiful, which makes
me happy about the past—but looks set to put on weight, which makes me happy about the future.”
11
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
As the years darken and catastrophe engulfs Europe, he comes more and more strongly to acknowledge his
ancestry and all that it means. Expressing his contempt for those who urge him to convert to Catholicism as a
way of escaping persecution, he writes in the Journal:
Somewhere on an island with sun and shade, in the midst of peace, security, and happiness, I would in the end
be indifferent to whether I was or was not Jewish. But here and now, I cannot be anything else.
Sebastian survived the war largely because from early on the Romanian regime shrewdly saw that Germany
would be defeated and switched its policy toward the Jews in hopes of placating the victorious Allies. His
survival was cut short, however, in a way that is both tragic and banal. The final note in the Journal reads:
On 29 May 1945, Mihail Sebastian was hit and killed by a truck in downtown Bucharest.
1.
1
See the review by Peter Gay in these pages, October 4, 2001. ↩
2.
2
However, we should keep in mind what Norman Manea writes in his superb essay on Eliade, “Happy
Guilt”: “Literature must meet primarily aesthetic criteria, not moral ones, just as scholarly work must meet
scholarly standards. But journals, memoirs, autobiography: such strictly personal reckonings cannot avoid
the ethical test.” The Fifth Impossibility: Essays on Exile and Language (Yale University Press, 2012), p.
111. ↩
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/05/26/surrounded-by-jew-haters/
12
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Paris Declares War on 'Ghettoes for the Rich'
The city will build public housing in its wealthiest neighborhoods.

FEARGUS O'SULLIVAN

@FeargusOSull
The Passy neighbourhood, in Paris's western 16th Arrondissement, is one of France's wealthiest.(Guillaume
Baviere/Flickr)
“Rich people’s ghettoes in Paris—they’re finished!”
So shouted the headline of an interview with Paris Habitat Commissioner Ian Brossat this weekend. Charged
with looking after the city’s housing needs, Brossat is hoping to take Paris into uncharted waters by
overseeing an intervention in its wealth map.
The French capital badly needs more affordable housing and is building a large amount of it between now and
2020, with one significant twist. Almost 5,000 of these new affordable units will be built in the city’s center
and west, giving future tenants some of the wealthiest neighbors in all France. As you might expect, the plans
are controversial. So is this a necessary social rebalancing, or class war?
The concept seems somewhat less dramatic when you zoom out to the bigger picture. Paris hopes to create
7,000 new public housing units every yearbetween now and the next elections in 2020. Given that only 5,000
13
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
units in total are planned for especially prosperous areas across this period, that means that most new units
will still be created in the less wealthy east, where most of the city’s public housing is already concentrated.
The insertion of low-income housing into high-income areas is nonetheless causing a stir. Last week, the city
opened an affordable housing development with 113 new homes in a backstreet of the 16th Arrondissement,
just ten minutes walk from the Arc de Triomphe. And on Wednesday, the foundation stone will be laid for 76
apartments set aside for young people in the Espace Beaujon, a youth arts center on Rue du Faubourg Saint
Honoré—one of Paris’s fanciest shopping streets.
Larger and more unusual plans are also in the pipeline. City Hall is creating 376 new public housing units in
the old Ministry of Defense, just around the corner from both France’s National Assembly and the Musée
D’Orsay. By 2018, there will even be affordable homes in the newly refurbished Samaritainedepartment store,
less than two minute’s walk from City Hall itself.
By 2018, the remodeled Samaritaine department store will also include public housing units. (Adrian
Scottow/Flickr)
The logistics of creating these new projects are far from simple. Paris is densely built and doesn’t have a lot of
spare space in any area, wealthy or otherwise. City Hall is trying a clutch of different measures to overcome
the dearth of available land. It plans, for instance, to take over some space owned by the state or such bodies
as the national railway company, SNCF, for new building, on sites including former government buildings
and railway sidings. It will also exercise a right of first refusal when fresh properties come on to the market in
high demand areas, drawing from a list of potential properties created in 2014.
14
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
None of this will come cheap. The city has almost doubled its budget for such purchases, from €85 million
($96 million) to €160 ($181) million. Paris will also will convert some unused office space to housing, mainly
in 19th century buildings that were themselves originally built as homes. Finally, the city will require most
new private housing constructed to contain a percentage set aside for public or affordable housing.
There’s an obvious issue with the plan: land in expensive areas is, well, expensive. Couldn’t Paris house more
people by concentrating construction and conversion in cheaper areas? Commissioner Brossat was dismissive
of the question in his recent interview, without fully answering it:
“This criticism is not valid. The main obstacle is not lack of money—since we devote an annual budget of
500 million euros to this area—but the lack of land. Furthermore, I am very clearly taking on the political
objective of rebalancing [the city]. We want to avoid having two Parises, even if it is expensive to do so.”
For many residents of wealthy areas, this objective is a problem. They fear that in creating greater social
mixing, their neighborhoods are simply being dragged down, with an injection of poorer residents liable to
lower property values and provoke a spike in crime. Many of these objections came to a head in a recent fight
against a temporary homeless shelter to be constructed on the gilded edge of the Bois de Boulogne, where
locals felt they were being singled out partly because they hadn’t voted for the socialist mayor. Despite some
remarkably poisonous public meetings, the residents lost.
Paris’s public housing is mainly concentrated in the city’s east, such as here in Belleville, in the 19th
Arrondissement. (Christophe ALARY/Flickr)
15
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Still, the pressure for more public housing does not come from City Hall alone. Since 2000, French law has
stipulated that public housing must make up at least 20 percent of the housing stock in all municipalities of
over 3,500 inhabitants, or the municipality will face a fine. In reality, these fines are rarely levied, but Paris’s
significant shortfall—only 15.9 percent of city housing stock was public in 2009—means it has to grab land
where it can or be marked down as failing.
Paris has also learned the hard way about the negative effects of social atomization. Massive public housing
construction on the metro area’s periphery in the late 20th century created large areas that were both socially
and geographically isolated from the city core, leading to communities that were marginalized and often
neglected. With control of just 2.2 million of Greater Paris’s 12.4 million inhabitants, the administration of
Paris Proper can’t do that much to rectify this problem. What they can do is prevent social segregation going
yet further within their own jurisdiction. Reintroducing less wealthy tenants to rich central areas—albeit in
essentially homeopathic doses—would in theory get the city back to a level of social mixing that was closer to
the rule several decades back. Ultimately, current residents will probably find their new, poorer neighbors are
not the property-ruining sans culottes they fear.
There’s also a gap between City Hall’s rhetoric and the actual reality of Paris policy. Tough talk from the
likes of commissioner Brossat masks what is on a day-to-day basis a far cozier relationship towards wealth
and private developers. The recent Reinvent Paris competition, which sought private bidders for 23 major
city-owned sites, produced a group of short-listed winners who, on closer inspection, delivered projects that
were far more about private profit than social benefit or architectural imagination. Paris may be talking up key
aspects of its social equality policies, but elsewhere in this wealthy city, it’s largely business as usual.
http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/05/paris-declares-war-on-ghettoes-for-therich/483072/?utm_source=nl__link1_051716
16
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Slime mold gives insight into intelligence of neuron-less organisms
Source:
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Summary:
How do organisms without brains make decisions? Most of life is brainless and the vast majority of
organisms on Earth lack neurons altogether. Plants, fungi and bacteria must all cope with the same
problem as humans -- to make the best choices in a complex and ever-changing world or risk dying without the help of a simple nervous system in many cases.
Share:
AddThis Sharing Buttons
FULL STORY
Bacteria colony (stock image). Plants, fungi and bacteria must all cope with the same problem as humans -- to
make the best choices in a complex and ever-changing world or risk dying -- without the help of a simple
nervous system in many cases.
17
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Credit: © zuki70 / Fotolia
How do organisms without brains make decisions? Most of life is brainless and the vast majority of organisms
on Earth lack neurons altogether. Plants, fungi and bacteria must all cope with the same problem as humans -to make the best choices in a complex and ever-changing world or risk dying -- without the help of a simple
nervous system in many cases.
A team of researchers from New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), the University of Sydney, the
University of Sheffield and the University of Leeds recently studied this problem in the unicellular slime
mold, Physarum polycephalum, a single-cell organism that can grow to several square meters in size. This
giant cell, which typically lives in shady, cool and moist areas of temperate forests, spreads out to search its
environment like an amoeba, extending oozy tendrils along the forest floor in search of its prey of fungi,
bacteria and decaying vegetable matter.
Neither plant, animal nor fungus, P. polycephalum has become an unlikely candidate for studies of cognition,
due to its spectacular problem-solving abilities. In recent studies, Physarum has been shown to solve labyrinth
mazes, make complicated trade-offs, anticipate periodic events, remember where it has been, construct
transport networks that have similar efficiency to those designed by human engineers and even make
irrational decisions -- a capability that has long been viewed as a by-product of brain circuitry.
In this study, the researchers examined the decision-making ability of slime mold using a test classically used
in humans, birds and other brained organisms: the two-armed bandit problem, named for the infamous slot
machine, or one-armed bandit. In a two-armed bandit problem, the subject has two levers to pull, each of
which delivers a certain, randomly determined reward. One of the levers is more likely to deliver a higher
reward overall, so the challenge for participants is to decide at what point to stop exploring both options and
decide to exclusively exploit just the one option in order to maximize their payoff. The phenomenon is called
the exploration-exploitation tradeoff and is relevant to more than just slot machines, applying to many
situations, including investors picking start-up companies to back or drivers choosing a parking space. As
such, it has become a classical tool for testing the decision-making abilities of humans and other animals, but
it has never before been used on an organism without a brain.
The researchers adapted the two-armed bandit test for slime mold by giving the organism the choice to
explore two opposite directions. In each direction, the slime mold encountered discrete patches of food, more
or less regularly distributed. One direction would contain more of these patches than the other. They then
observed how far in each direction the slime mold would explore before switching to the exploitation of one
of the two directions only. The results of these experiments demonstrate that slime mold compares the relative
qualities of multiple options, most often choosing the direction with the higher overall concentration of food.
It was able to sum up the number of food patches encountered in each direction, as well as the quantity of
food present at each patch to make correct and adaptive decisions as to the direction it should move next.
The slime mold's decision-making algorithm can be mathematically described as a tendency to exploit
environments in proportion to their reward experienced through past sampling. The algorithm is intermediate
in computational complexity between simple, reactionary heuristics and calculation-intensive optimal
performance algorithms, yet it has very good relative performance.
"Working with Physarum constantly challenges our preconceived notions of the minimum biological
hardware that is required for sophisticated behavior," says Simon Garnier, an assistant professor of biology at
NJIT and the principal investigator of the study.
18
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
While the biological substrate of the algorithm remains to be identified, this study provides insight into
ancestral mechanisms of decision making and suggests that fundamental principles of decision making,
information processing and even cognition are shared among diverse biological systems.
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by New Jersey Institute of Technology. Note: Materials
may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.
Chris R. Reid, Hannelore MacDonald, Richard P. Mann, James A. R. Marshall, Tanya Latty, Simon
Garnier. Decision-making without a brain: how an amoeboid organism solves the two-armed bandit.Journal of
The Royal Society Interface, 2016; 13 (119): 20160030 DOI:10.1098/rsif.2016.0030
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160608112930.htm
19
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
How to Grow a Weetabix
James Meek on farms and farmers
Between its towns and cities, the rumpled skin of lowland Britain is covered and pierced in many ways, by
church steeples, nuclear reactors, safari parks, six-lane highways, ruined monasteries, radio telescopes, wind
turbines, landfill sites, golf courses. Mostly, though, it’s a patchwork of oblongs of open ground stretching to
the horizon, blocks of single shades of green, brown and yellow, marked at the join by hedges and lines of
trees and narrow lanes. Farmed fields, in other words. We perceive the countryside as if farmed fields were
the default state, as if the two were synonymous. But why should this be true, when so much else has
changed?
To the traveller passing at speed, even to the hiker or dog-walker, farmed fields are anonymous elements that
contribute to a pattern. It’s the landscape the eye seeks, not any of the fields making it up. Most fields have no
individuality to a stranger; at best, a fine oak in the middle, or a pretty horse grazing. Few can tell crops apart,
or estimate a field’s size in acres. Visitors to the countryside see farms without seeing them. They see the odd
farmyard, and they see a mass of fields. A passer-by can’t connect a field to a particular farm.
Besides, in Britain, a walk in the country is a constrained experience. Most fields – that is, most bits of the
lowland countryside – are forbidden to outsiders, by legal, physical and practical barriers. The biggest barrier
is purposelessness: even where a right of way exists, why use it? To walk from one village to another? We
have roads and cars for that. Few who live in ‘the country’ – that is, in villages – stray from metalled roads
except along a handful of known paths for ramblers and dog-walkers, often through woods or along
waterways. Most of the vast mosaic will never be entered by any human being except the farmer, a trickle of
contractors and, once in a while, a government official. Not that such people are often to be seen. Away from
the roads, the space between human habitations in lowland Britain has acquired a ghostly quality. It is rare to
visit the countryside or travel through it and see someone at work in a field; the occasional tractor, no more.
But the work gets done. The chequered pattern changes colour and texture, season by season. It’s surprising
that we treat this epic, continual, land-defining endeavour as if it were both inevitable and eternal. The
colliery tunnels have fallen in, the steel furnaces are winking out, the fishing fleets have gone for scrap;
Britain’s trains are Japanese, its cars German, its clothes from China. And yet Britain still produces threefifths of its own food. Farmers still raise livestock, plough fields, sow and harvest crops, at the mercy of the
weather. They use technology unrecognisable to their forefathers, but the deep processes go back to the Stone
Age and the first farmers. How is this possible? How have so many thriving practices fallen to the
globalisation formula of ‘other countries do what you do better/more cheaply, so you might as well give up,’
while farming, an activity thousands of years old, continues to have mastery of the British lowlands, at a time
when the world is awash with cheap (at least for rich countries) food?
Subsidies help, as does a market of 500 million people protected by high tariffs from global competition. The
European Union has been good to farmers. This may now be coming to an end, for Britain may be about to
leave.
In 1973, when Britain entered the European Economic Community, the forerunner of the EU, everyone older
than their early twenties could remember food rationing, and the government’s priority was affordable,
reliable food supplies. Farmers, accordingly, were subsidised by British taxpayers, but food from abroad
could be imported duty-free. Once inside the EEC, a golden age for farm incomes began. Not only were
20
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
British farmers plugged into the bountiful subsidies of the Common Agricultural Policy, which paid them on
the nail for whatever milk, meat and grain they grew, whether there was demand for it or not; they were also
sheltered by Europe’s tariff barriers. Although they had to compete tariff-free with their fellow European
farmers, they were protected from full-on global competition.
The CAP isn’t quite so generous today. In the latest version, subsidies aren’t based on how much farmers
produce, but on how much farmland they own, and payments to the biggest farmers – companies and wealthy
landowners – have been trimmed by 5 per cent. It still gives out a lot of money. In 2015, British farmers
received slightly more than £3 billion. If, on 23 June, Britain votes to leave the EU, subsidies to farmers
become just another item in the national budget. They could be increased. They could be kept at the same
level. They could be cut. Or a future government could choose to abolish them, as the radical free marketeers
of David Lange’s Labour Party did when they came to power in New Zealand in the 1980s.
Many British farmers support Brexit. Others fear it would destroy them. The National Farmers Union has
come out against, arguing that without subsidies, most British farms would go under. The leaders of the
campaign to leave the EU contradict one another. Some, like the Ukip farming spokesman, Stuart Agnew, and
the Conservative farming minister, George Eustice, insist that, post-Brexit, domestic subsidies would continue
to flow, and may even increase. Yet the official campaign, Vote Leave, has made clear that it’s ready to
sacrifice farmers to contrive a bonus from Brexit for the country as a whole.
Vote Leave’s first campaign poster declared ‘Let’s give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week.’
To understand the significance of this it’s first necessary to be clear that the oft-repeated £350 million figure
is a lie. Not an exaggeration, or a question of interpretation, or a misleading claim, but a lie. It ignores the
rebate Margaret Thatcher negotiated. When you factor that in, the EU actually ‘takes’ about £250 million a
week from Britain. Deepening the dishonesty of the original lie, even that figure overstates Britain’s
contribution by more than half, because the EU gives much of the country’s membership fee straight back.
Subsidies to British farmers make up the biggest element of the money that’s returned, at £61 million a week.
A more accurate version of the Vote Leave poster would run: ‘Let’s abolish farm subsidies, raise taxes and
use all the money we save by leaving the EU so we can spend an extra £350 million a week on the NHS.’
Wordy, but, for a lot of left-leaning Britons, an attractive plan. Throw in the promise of cheaper food if we
drop tariffs on agricultural imports from Africa, Australasia and the Americas, as Michael Gove wants to do,
and it gets even better. Just not for farmers. The spectre haunting the British farmyard is that the EU debate
will turn public attention to what’s happening down on the farm, whatever the referendum result. There is,
after all, another possible version of Vote Leave’s poster: ‘Let’s give our NHS the £61 million our farmers
take every week.’
In The Lost Village, about life in Pitton in Wiltshire in the 1920s and 1930s, Ralph Whitlock describes the
effect on British farming in 1875 of the sudden arrival of ships carrying cheap grain and frozen meat from
Latin America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Prices collapsed, and the seemingly eternal
patchwork of fields began to fray:
the marginal land … was abandoned first, and that included the chalk downlands, large acreages of which had
been laboriously brought into cultivation in the years of prosperity. They included most of the downs to the
north of Pitton. In the 1920s the villagers were aware of them as miles of dereliction, just over the horizon. It
was possible to see the outlines of the deserted fields and even of the plough ridges, for they had been
abandoned without even being sown to grass. On some the dominant vegetation was not even weeds but
21
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
brown and grey lichen … 1875-93 were the worst years. Thousands of efficient farmers, trying to carry on
farming in the well-tried tradition, went bankrupt. Landowners, despairing of finding tenants for their
neglected acres, jettisoned vast areas of farmland.
Stuart Agnew farms just over four hundred acres on two parcels of land a couple of miles apart on the sandy
soil of north Norfolk, near the market town of Fakenham. Agnew’s is a mixed farm, with sheep and chickens
as well as crops, but it’s a measure of how conditions have changed that in the 1970s, his acreage would have
been ample for an arable farmer (that is, one growing only crops) to flourish. These days an arable farmer
needs a thousand acres – a landholding whose perimeter would take about an hour and a half to walk – to be
sure of a decent living in East Anglia.
I went to see Agnew one May morning. Google Maps took me west out of Norwich on a fast road screened by
trees from the countryside, then ushered me into the dense latticework of lanes on either side of the highway.
It was hard to get a sense of the land beyond the hedgerows and woods and shaggy verges, but every so often
the hedges would disappear and the landscape would reveal itself, the familiar swell and hollow, the
individual fields without meaning because I was travelling past them at fifty miles an hour, because they were
like other fields, because they had no grandeur in themselves and were just part of the gentle sweep of the
ground towards the sky.
To their farmer, a field is a named enclosure with specific quirks and history and chemistry, an object of
husbandry, an almanac of work done and work to do, and an item of account. The subsidy each one brings can
be critical to a farm’s survival. A typical field under wheat in East Anglia might spread over ten hectares, or
24 acres. In a good year in Norfolk you could hope to get 85 tonnes of wheat out of a field that size, which
would probably be used for animal feed. While 85 tonnes might sound like a lot, as I write, a tonne of wheat
for delivery after the 2016 harvest is selling for just £111. The entire field would yield the farmer £9435.
Against that, set the cost of the seed, fertiliser, sprays and fuel for the tractor that does the spraying, plus a
share of the cost of the farm equipment, plus a share of the rent to the landowner or loan payments to the
bank, plus a share of a myriad other costs – contractors’ fees, fencing, building maintenance, ditching. Only
after that is there anything left for the farmer’s personal and family needs.
The subsidy is salvation. That same field yields just over £1800 in CAP subsidy, almost a fifth of the current
value of the crop. And although the subsidy fluctuates with the exchange rate – it’s fixed in euros, but paid in
pounds – it’s more stable and reliable than the price of wheat, which, in the past nine years, has twice doubled
and twice halved, sometimes from one year to the next.
Since he became a Ukip MEP in 2009 Agnew has relinquished day to day running of the farm to his wife,
Diana, who deals with their 35,000 chickens, and his son Jethro, who tends their seven hundred breeding
ewes. The livestock are concentrated on the smaller, northern part of the farm, on the hundred acres Agnew
actually owns, up against the former RAF airfield of West Raynham. The rest of the land he farms as a tenant.
Under CAP, farmers get the subsidy either way, as landowners or tenants, as long as they are ‘active farmers’.
In 2015, Agnew got about £40,000.
The family lives and works out of a large red brick house Agnew built after he bought the land. Around the
house, coming right up to it, is sheep pasture, cropped and green as a golf course; close to the front door two
ewes suffering crises of maternity were corralled in phonebox-sized wire pens. The newness of it all was
signified by the immaturity of the saplings lining the drive to the house and the lack of natural shelter for the
sheep.
22
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Set further back from the road was the chicken shed. The hens are free range, which means that at certain
times they are able to come and go between the shed and an outdoor area. Conditions inside the shed at night,
when the hens are confined, were secretly filmed earlier this year by a local animal welfare organisation; the
cameraman’s film, reported by the Mail on Sunday, showed a vast crowd of jostling, scraggly birds, although
a subsequent inspection by the RSPCA concluded that, apart from an outbreak of enteritis, which was being
treated, the birds were fine.
Further on still is the former airfield, now Britain’s largest solar farm, covered in rank after rank of inclined
brown panels. Agnew has negotiated a deal to let his sheep graze underneath them. Since there’s also a plan to
sow wild flowers around the panels, and since those flower patches might include ragwort, which is
poisonous to sheep, Agnew has to divide the solar area into flower paddocks and sheep paddocks. Now he’s
been informed that, since the land used to be a defence base, ‘whenever they sink a fence post, we have to get
a bomb disposal expert in to check for unexploded ordnance. We are living in an age now where everything
has to be wrapped in cotton wool.’
Agnew is a tall, powerfully built, garrulous man in his mid-sixties. A pupil at Gordonstoun at the same time
as Prince Charles, cousin to a baronet with a large estate in Suffolk, he combines a confident, commanding air
and the love of a good story with a peevish ability to articulate complaints in such a way that aligns his
personal disadvantage with the disadvantage to the country. I asked him what would happen if, post-Brexit,
farm subsidies were scrapped, and tariffs on imported food cut. ‘It would look like a lot of land not being
farmed,’ he said. ‘People being laid off, and a worker would then be on benefits. A farmer who had been
making money and paying tax would be wanting a tax refund.’ Just as fracking for shale gas should be
encouraged to make Britain self-sufficient in energy, he said, British farmers needed to be supported to grow
grain, because the country’s grain-importing ports were vulnerable to terrorist attack. It was clear he didn’t
take the prospect of an end of farm subsidies very seriously. He felt that, if anything, EU subsidies weren’t
high enough. Many countries, he pointed out, subsidised their farmers more generously.
As we talked I realised he was treating the referendum as if it were a general election; as if, instead of
resolving a single issue, whether or not to stay in the EU, a vote to leave would usher in a new Britain, where
farmer-hampering officials, Agnew-unfriendly regulations, scientists whose analysis he disagreed with and
popular hostility to genetically modified food would fade away of their own accord.
He blamed the EU for forcing him to bury sheep rather than cremating them. He blamed the EU for stopping
him growing GM crops (he was one of England’s trial growers). He blamed the EU for excessively tight
control of pesticides and for forcing him to place an electronic tag in the ear of each sheep. ‘The trouble is it
can fall out. Then it’s difficult to know what to replace it with,’ he said. ‘They say “This animal does not
exist” and we say “Well, there it is, defecating and urinating on the concrete.”’
I suggested British national bureaucracy, British politicians and British public opinion were capable of
banning GM crops and coming up with clumsy hi-tech ways to track sheep without help from Brussels. He
wasn’t convinced. And although I went to see him to talk about Brexit and farming, because he wanted to
leave the EU and was a farmer, we weren’t really talking about farming.
*
We sat in his kitchen, lit by bright daylight from big picture windows. He had a cold and drank from a pint
glass of amber liquid – juice or some remedy. I’d read that he’d spent time in Rhodesia and asked him about
23
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
it. He worked in Rhodesia in the 1970s as a young soil scientist preventing earth on white-owned farms being
washed away by the rain. He became fond of the country, then run by Ian Smith’s white minority government
in defiance of the rest of the world, including its former colonial master, Britain, and considers Smith’s
Rhodesia a great agricultural success story. By that time the war between black nationalist fighters seeking
majority rule (‘terrorists’, Agnew calls them) and the white-led regime was well under way. Agnew was
sufficiently inspired by the Rhodesian cause to try to join the country’s army, but failed to make it through
officer training. He came back to England when he realised Rhodesia was doomed and a black majority-ruled
Zimbabwe was going to replace it.
‘I wouldn’t have joined the Tories because of what they did to Rhodesia. That was an absolute betrayal,’ he
said. He still views that time through an inner prism giving a high-contrast spectrum of racial and political
categories: the cruel, ruthless ‘terrorists’; the non-combatant blacks – he called them ‘Africans’ – who he
reckons weren’t ready for the responsibility of running the country; the black middle class Smith was
apparently trying to foster; the paternalistic British-descended white farmers who paid their black workers
partly in money, partly in food; the harsh Afrikaaner farmers who chained their black workers up; the even
less pleasant Portuguese.
Of all his Rhodesia memories he was most energised by the story of a training course he went on with other
soil scientists, some of whom were, for the first time, black. He described the mounting apprehension among
the white students as the lunch hour approached, their fear that the black students would expect to join them
for lunch, that the white students might be forced to go to a multiracial restaurant, or would feel obliged to try
to get their colleagues into a whites-only restaurant, where there would be a scene; he described the joy and
relief when the black students reassured them, without being asked, that they would find their own place to
eat. The black students’ acceptance of their status, Agnew said, ‘started a better bonding process’.
When we got back to 2016, Agnew talked about immigration. About immigrants from Eastern Europe
disrupting the orderly running of schools and hospitals in Lincolnshire ‘by sheer force of numbers’. About
farms needing cheap Eastern European labour, so EU immigrants already in Britain shouldn’t be sent back,
but should be closely observed for five years, and deported if they misbehaved.
I told Agnew I wondered whether there wasn’t something quite Ukippy about the EU itself. Couldn’t Europe
be seen, like the Ukip vision of Britain, as a them and us proposition, an exclusive club that wanted to limit
access, to keep out undesirables and prevent its unique character being spoiled? On a world scale, couldn’t he
consider Europe as an entity cohesive enough, homogenous enough, to be local?
‘I would have been happy with that if it were the Netherlands, Denmark, Scandinavia, perhaps France,’ he
said, with sudden intensity of feeling. ‘I thought that was what it was all about. All these Eastern European
countries … to try and say “That’s us” is very difficult.’
*
A patina of ancient power, the kind of power that comes with landed wealth and bonds of marriage and
mateyness within an exclusive social group, lies over north Norfolk. Eleven miles to the north of Agnew’s
house is Holkham Hall, where Thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester, still owns farmland on the scale of his
eponymous Georgian ancestor, the agricultural reformer Coke of Norfolk. Last year the Holkham Farming
Company received £183,000 in subsidies; another Holkham enterprise, Holkham Nature Reserve Ltd, run
with Natural England (conservation organisations are some of the biggest recipients of farm subsidies) got
24
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
£205,000. Ten miles to the west of Agnew’s house lies the Sandringham Estate, the queen’s farm, subsidised
to the tune of about £650,000. Between Agnew’s place and Sandringham is Houghton Hall, family seat of
Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, now the home of David, 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, Lord
Great Chamberlain and beneficiary of £260,000 in subsidies.
The land Agnew’s house stands on was part, until relatively recently, of Marquess Townshend’s Raynham
Estate. The Townshend family still owns the airfield; the solar farm, one of a string around the UK owned by
a specialist investment fund, pays rent to the estate. In its heyday the estate had forty thousand acres. It’s
shrunk to five thousand today, although that’s enough to bring the Townshends a subsidy of £360,000.
All families are old, but there’s something unusually persistent about the Townshends. The family comes up
in written records as farming land around the various hamlets carrying the Raynham name as early as the 14th
century, and they had a lock on the area by the mid-16th. The present marquess, Charles Townshend, lives in
the proto-Palladian mansion, Raynham Hall, his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather
built almost four hundred years ago.
I went to see him one morning, driving through the private park to the house and being shown in by a cleaner
in housecoat and rubber gloves to a vast, black and white chequered flagstoned hall: the wrong entrance, I
think – I’d been expected round the other side. Lord Townshend, seventy, bearded and a little tired-looking,
wearing a body-warmer, blue cords, blue socks and moccasins, took me to a narrow scullery and made me a
cup of instant coffee in a delicate teacup, apologising that the household was between butlers. ‘He was six
foot three,’ he said of the previous incumbent. ‘He was tall enough to reach the windows.’
We went to the library, lined with 18th and 17th-century volumes and with a fine antique 20th-century
electric heater in the fireplace. Lord Townshend showed me a beloved possession, an ivory-handled seal his
ancestor Viscount ‘Turnip’ Townshend had used to endorse the Treaty of Union between England and
Scotland in 1706. Besides being Walpole’s neighbour and brother-in-law, the viscount was Walpole’s partner
in government. He was foreign secretary when Britain had two of them, one for Protestant countries and
another for Catholic and Muslim ones (Townshend’s was the northern department). Then he fell out with
Walpole, retreated to his estate and devoted himself to farming so successfully (hence the nickname: he
proselytised for turnips) that in popular history Raynham competes with Coke’s Holkham to be considered the
birthplace of the British agricultural revolution.
It was an awkward meeting. Lord Townshend agreed to see me after a personal introduction, and I thought I’d
explained in advance who I was and what I was writing about, but it turned out he believed I was writing a
historical piece about agriculture. He’d hoped he might be able to sell me some time in Raynham’s archive of
2.5 million documents, which he’s trying to catalogue and commercialise. When he learned I was writing
about the EU referendum, he said he didn’t want to comment. When his discovery that I’d written about
privatisation came in close proximity to my questions about the reasons the Raynham Estate had decided to
farm its land directly, rather than through tenants, the framework of courtesy on which my presence in his
house depended began to stretch and creak like the stays of a rope bridge in a high wind. It’s not that he was
angry, but he seemed to fear I wished him ill, and it was too late to explain that even if I’d wanted to I
couldn’t blame him for the enclosures, the flight from the land to the cities and the disappearance of the
English peasantry.
25
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
His son, Lord Townshend said, ran the farming side. Having inherited the title and the estate late in life, just
before his 65th birthday, he was focused on the house, which a senior historian at English Heritage had called
the most beautiful in England. ‘I’m restoring Raynham Hall and bringing it into the 21st century. My second
interest is keeping the family and the estate together.’ This wasn’t easy, he explained. ‘The house doesn’t lend
itself to being open to the public. We’ve not got great wings or basements where the family can live as at
Houghton or Holkham. They were built as showcases for the plunder of the Grand Tours. This house was
built as a home, as a private house.’ That said, there are recitals, and anyone can arrange a tour, if they can get
together a party of 14, at £30 a head.
When aristocrats still own so much land, when all the peers I’ve mentioned, out of the thousands of
possibilities, attended the same secondary school, the one attended by David Cameron and Boris Johnson, it
might seem strange to say that the powers of the lords of Norfolk have waned. But in some senses they have.
They no longer wield local power over hundreds of tenants and agricultural workers and their families on
their estates; commuters, retirees and second homers live in the villages now. Nor do they have the wider
power their status once gave them in the armed forces of the Empire and in Parliament, reaching out from the
manor to the world.1 Lord Townshend inherited his title just after the automatic right of hereditary peers to sit
in the House of Lords was abolished. In British national politics the dialectics of inequality are central, but in
the politics of localism, nationalism and globalism, the politics of the EU referendum, a different dynamic
comes into play. In terms of the citizen-Westminster-Brussels arc, it is less significant that the Townshends
have a big house and thousands of acres of land, when so many have no house and no land, than that when I
called Raynham Hall, Lord Townshend answered the phone. In an economy of faceless authorities and
absentee landlords, he is present, and has a face.
Still, in an age of austerity, £360,000 a year is a lot of public dosh to take to the bank when one of your
concerns is finding a new butler. I asked Lord Townshend about the scenario where, post-Brexit, farm
subsidies were slashed, and farmers deserted the land en masse. ‘The idea that a loss of subsidies would lead
to the dereliction of the countryside is defeatist,’ he said. ‘I just feel we have been, throughout history, able to
get through any problem thrown at us by politics, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t be able to continue to do
it. I’ve enough confidence in our abilities to survive in England, based on our history, that we will do the right
thing if subsidies disappear. We will still survive. And farm.’
*
After I left Raynham Hall I got lost in the lanes and the fields. Google Maps will lead you into the depths of
the Norfolk countryside until the signal is too poor for you to be led back. I pulled over to get my bearings
and an agricultural vehicle squeezed past, ten times the size of my car, sprouting prongs and blades, like a
rover sent from another planet to explore the earth. When it had gone all was silent except for the sound of
two wild stags banging their heads together at the edge of a field a few yards away, under the yellow spring
oak leaves.
The Townshends got back the freehold of West Raynham airfield after it closed in the 1990s, but the houses
where RAF personnel and their families lived were bought by a property developer who went spectacularly
bust after the crash, owing a South African bank £20 million. Of 172 homes in what’s become a new village
known as the Kiptons, many have been let or sold. The topography of rank is preserved: big detached and
semi-detached officers’ houses in Kipton Orchard, terraced houses where airmen and their families lived in
Kipton Wood. The promised gym, swimming pool and church never materialised, and there’s no school or
doctor’s surgery, but residents say things have got better since the bank called in its loan to the developer and
26
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
took on the responsibility of refurbishing homes and common spaces. There are buses now. When I visited
Kipton Wood, the grass in front of the severe, solid, red brick terraces was neatly cut, and the children had a
playground. The community shop, which doubles as a pub two nights a week, was open, waiting for a
delivery of eggs from Diana Agnew.
‘Before the shop and pub were open we were bored seven nights out of seven and now we’ve got a darts team
going. Got a proper community feel,’ said Zara England, a shop volunteer. ‘Four and a half years ago nobody
spoke to anybody, the shop was privately run so you couldn’t afford to shop here anyway.’
Peter Harris, another volunteer, was one of the first to move in, from his native Fakenham, in 2008. His career
as a road engineer had been cut short when he slipped while carrying a 75kg kerbstone and badly injured his
back. He hasn’t worked since. The developer offered him a low rent on a shell of a house with holes in the
roof, telling him he was welcome to fix it himself. The move appealed to his wife, who’d lived on the active
base as a little girl, when her father was a radar specialist servicing anti-aircraft missiles. Now the Harrises
have two small children; he’s in pain, on medication and hard to employ, while his wife has completed an
Open University degree and is training to be a teacher.
I asked about the referendum. Harris said he didn’t feel he had enough information. Zara England brought up
immigration, though not in the way I’d got used to. ‘The people who want to come out are pushing the race
card, which I think is bang out of order,’ she said. ‘Polish workers work a damn sight harder than the English.
People can whinge about how they can’t get a job because Polish Jim has got it, but would they flip burgers
eight hours a day?’ She used to work for Burger King.
‘We don’t get much diversity round here,’ she said, ‘95 per cent of the children are white and of that probably
60 per cent are blonde.’
‘Back in the 1980s,’ Harris mused, ‘there was one black person in Fakenham and everybody knew him.
Lovely chap. Now half the time you can walk the streets of the town and hear people speaking languages …
you think you’re on holiday.
‘I guarantee you about 20 per cent of the people here will vote. People feel they’re screwed either way.’
When I’d spoken to Agnew about farm work, he’d described a kind of apartheid, where aboriginal Brits had
come to think of field labour as ‘immigrant work’, and Eastern European gangmasters would only hire
Eastern Europeans. That wasn’t quite the way Harris put it when he talked about his own early experience of
farming. He just thought the farmers were mean. ‘I did two weeks on an organic farm when I was 16 … You
have to go through taking all the weeds out, taking all the stones out. Picking up carrots out of the ground. As
a kid of 16 you see yourself doing much better. If the farmers had paid better, I would have stayed.’
In a sense the people of the Kiptons live in the country, and in a sense they don’t. The feeling of living on a
military base with a secure perimeter has been carried over from RAF days – people talk about ‘going offsite’ – and there’s no connection between the community and farming. There’s even a clause in the tenancy
agreements forbidding the keeping of farm animals. Although it’s two and a half hours from London, one of
Harris’s neighbours is a shift commuter: four days in the capital, four days in Norfolk. All the people of the
Kiptons see of farmers is the tractor the bus gets stuck behind on the way to Fakenham.
27
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
‘You feel separate from them but at the same time you feel they are around you,’ Harris said. ‘You hear
machinery most days in the fields. The sound of a shotgun. You can definitely smell the chicken mess when it
comes across the fields.’
*
There’s a hierarchy of security even among farmers working relatively large farms. The most secure are the
landowner-farmers, like the Townshend family or the big companies growing fruit and vegetables over
thousands of acres in Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. Next come farmers with long-term tenancies; like
Stuart Agnew, they can still call a farm their own, even if they don’t own the land. Finally there are contractor
farmers: farm managers and workers hired job by job, season by season, who take a wage to work land for
somebody else. To make the leap from contractor to fully fledged farmer takes backing, or an inheritance.
Farms big in acreage can still be very small businesses in terms of employees, and they are often family
businesses. One of the great generators of unhappiness in the countryside has nothing to do with politics and
everything to do with generations: some farmers have farms to hand on to children who don’t want to farm
them, while others refuse to step aside to make way for children who are desperate to take over. If farm
subsidies do take a hit, and farms become fewer, it won’t be because of a shortage of people who want to
farm.
Some see their patrimony disintegrate before they have a chance to inherit it. James Lake did. His grandfather
started a mushroom-growing business in Hertfordshire and moved it to Little Fransham in Norfolk, a few
miles south of the Agnew and Townshend farms and the old airfield, in the 1960s. By the time Lake was born
in the 1970s the family had 14 temperature-controlled growing sheds on three acres of concrete. They made
their own growing medium out of a mixture of chicken manure and horse manure from Newmarket racing
stables, then mixed that with mushroom spore-impregnated grain. ‘Put it in growing boxes, which would go
into the growing shed, and six weeks later you would have mushrooms. All picked by hand. We had gangs of
women, mainly. Blokes weren’t dextrous enough.’ That kind of farming got few subsidies in Britain but
mushrooms were a luxury product in those days and the Lakes prospered. They employed 35 people. They
began to export.
Lake maintains that his family’s farm fell victim to unfair practices. In the mid-1990s, Irish competitors –
‘they got a lot of European funding to basically sort themselves out’ – started supplying British supermarket
chains with cheap mushrooms wholesale.
‘The supermarkets would say “We’d love to buy UK mushrooms but you’re going to have to do it at that
price,”’ Lake said. British mushroom growers started going out of business. Their Dutch counterparts were
suffering too. They reacted by buying ailing British mushroom firms, trucking in their own product and
packaging it here, enabling the supermarkets to take advantage of ambiguous EU origin labelling rules to stick
Union Jacks on the packaging. ‘Dad went down to Westminster with a few of the growers,’ Lake said. ‘[The
politicians] just sat there and said “I can’t imagine the supermarkets would do anything like that.”’
They shut down in 2002, after trying to diversify their way out. ‘We looked at all different ideas, from going
upmarket to growing more exotic strains and pre-sliced. We even looked at grow-your-own kits. We were
getting 90p for a pound of mushrooms. We could just about pick them for that price but we couldn’t put them
on a lorry and deliver them so we were getting more and more into debt. Also there was a virus going round,
virus X. We got the start of that. We had to shut the farm down, empty everything out, sterilise it. We said
“Enough is enough.” The year we closed 12 other mushroom farms of similar size or larger went under.’
28
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
The Lakes were comparatively lucky. After giving up their mushroom business they got permission to use the
land to plant the most valuable crop of all: houses. They cleared their debts with a little left over. Now, after
various different jobs, Lake is a contractor, driving agricultural machinery for other people, wanting a farm of
his own but not seeing how he can get one. To start a viable farm from scratch, he reckoned, would cost a
million pounds. ‘However much I want to have my own farm, I don’t think I would want the stress and hassle
of having to borrow that much money.’
He was speaking in the spacious sitting room of his house, a house built with mushroom money in the good
times. I’d arranged to come over after eight in the evening because that was the earliest he could manage.
He’d already cancelled one meeting over farm work. A few days earlier he’d started work at six a.m.,
spraying, then gone combining at lunchtime and carried on till 3.30 a.m. the next day, working by the
combine harvester’s headlights.
Theoretically, a withdrawal of subsidies for British farmers could open up new opportunities as the price of
farmland fell and existing farmers sold up. But most of the insiders I spoke to felt it would simply speed up a
process that was already under way, of consolidation, of small and medium farms being absorbed by larger
ones. ‘The bigger farms are getting bigger,’ Lake said. ‘The days of the small family farm are numbered.
Your traditional mixed farm, where you’ve got land, some cows, some pigs, some sheep, are pretty much
over. You have to go big or go home.’
‘There’s a pretty real risk that if we came out of Europe the level of support for farming would be under
pressure,’ said Hector Wykes-Sneyd, a Suffolk land agent. ‘The results of that would be quite interesting. You
will see a lot of land coming out of production. It will also lead to something that’s been going on quietly, not
necessarily very obviously – economies of scale, big operators. If you can afford this extremely expensive
machinery, if you have the acreage to support it, you can farm huge acreage at low cost. I would see that
process continuing.’ The farmer who employs Lake used to farm the seven hundred acres of land he owns
with just three and a half people – himself, two workers and a student to help out at harvest time. He still has
the seven hundred acres, but on top of that is tenant on another 250, and contract farms a further seven
hundred. The area of land he’s farming has more than doubled, yet three and a half people is still plenty to do
the job.
Those who couldn’t scale up, Wykes-Sneyd said, would suffer. ‘If [subsidies] disappeared entirely there
would be a lot of farming organisations that wouldn’t make a profit. A farmer has this innate desire to keep
farming their land and do the best by it to the extent the old belt-tightening exercise is very real. It’s amazing
how people will get through years where other companies would have folded up. But if you take subsidies out
that will not go on very long.’
*
I remember my school history curriculum bigging up Turnip Townshend and Coke of Norfolk, the great
landowner reformers of the 18th and 19th centuries, who did such clever things, and raised yields, with crop
rotation and clover and rationalising peasants off their bitty fragments of the commons. This narrative of the
agricultural revolution has come under attack in recent years. The most frequent line of criticism is that the
likes of Townshend and Coke weren’t innovators, but brilliant publicists and proselytisers who worked out
how to systemise and promote much older ideas. A fiercer attack came from Robert Allen in his
book Enclosure and the Yeoman(1992). Allen describes two English agricultural revolutions, one by small
yeoman farmers in the 17th century, another by landlords in the 18th. The yeomen’s revolution, he maintains,
led to a big increase in crop yields, with the same amount of labour; the landlords’ revolution used less labour
29
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
to grow the same amount of crops. The earlier revolution, in Allen’s view, enriched the country as a whole
without mass unemployment; the more celebrated landlords’ revolution only benefited the landlords.
Allen’s sally, loaded with data as it was, wasn’t decisive; Turnip and company have their redoubts in the
academy yet. But the bigger point is that we are still on the reforming landlords’ vector, of ever larger farms
run by ever fewer people, economies of scale, the application of science to the problem of growing food, and
the pressure to acquire highly specialised and hence highly expensive machinery. Inflation since 2007 is 31
per cent, while the price of a tractor has doubled, but for that money you get a tractor that drives itself in a
perfectly straight line down a field, guided by GPS. All the farmer has to do is turn it round when it gets to the
end. The word Wykes-Sneyd used to describe modern farming was ‘precise’: the precision with which
vegetables will be planted in a field, again using GPS, so that they can be harvested by machine without loss;
the precision that comes of using the right pesticides and fertilisers, in exactly the right quantity, at exactly the
right time.
And those quantities, on a big, conventional British farm, are large: about 250kg of nitrogen, potash and
phosphate fertiliser per arable hectare. Lately farmers have been putting increasing amounts of sulphur on
their fields to compensate – I know it sounds unlikely – for the essential sulphur they used to receive from
acid rain. This kind of mechanised, chemical-intensive, large-scale farming is widespread around the world,
wherever farmers can afford fertiliser. Lord Townshend described to me how he’d been assured by the
Algerian minister of agriculture that ‘Turnip Townshend was where we started learning our agricultural
procedures.’ The principles of the agricultural revolution – big farms replacing small ones, maximising food
production through science – were followed by 20th-century socialist progressives.
David Laborde, of the International Food Policy Research Institute, pointed out to me that this kind of
farming rendered absurd notions of food self-sufficiency for Britain, or even Europe. Britain grows threefifths of its own food but has no phosphate reserves. Nor does any other EU country. The nearest phosphate is
to be found in Morocco.
I’d approached Laborde with two questions I thought were straightforward. One was about what ‘cheap
imported food’ actually meant in 2016. With oil, it’s easy. There’s one world price, but the cost of getting the
oil out of the ground varies from place to place, mainly according to how difficult it is to get at and how much
local workers are paid. It’s simple, for any oilfield, to work out how low the world price would have to go to
stop oil extraction being profitable.2 Saudi oil is cheap; North Sea oil is expensive. How to find similar
benchmarks for food?
As I talked to Laborde, I realised how naive my question was. It’s not just that the Saudi Arabia of rice, the
Saudi Arabia of prawns and the Saudi Arabia of soya beans are all different. It’s that with staple crops like
wheat, there are multiple different grades, varieties and uses, making it hard to compare like with like. There
was a more obvious problem. I was imagining a scenario where Britain no longer subsidised its farmers and
simply imported the cheapest food from wherever it was available. I’d forgotten that, just because Britain no
longer subsidises its farmers, other countries won’t stop subsidising theirs. Some cheap imported food is
cheap not because it’s grown where it’s most rational to grow it, but because it’s subsidised. The United
States, India and China all subsidise their farmers heavily, as do many smaller countries. And if all subsidies
and all tariffs were magically to disappear? ‘The production of food in developing countries, especially in
Africa but also in Latin America, would start to grow,’ Laborde said. ‘You would have poor farmers in those
countries getting out of poverty.’
30
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
This seemed like an answer to my second question. I wanted to know what Britain should do about subsidies
to farmers if the wellbeing of the world’s 800 million undernourished people were its only concern. Would
the risk of British farmland going unfarmed be outweighed by the benefits to the world’s poor if subsidies
were scrapped after Brexit? Yes, Laborde said; but Britain outside the EU was not a big enough food producer
to tip the scales of global dearth and plenty one way or the other.
And if, as predicted, the world population peaked at ten billion – could the planet support that many mouths?
Again, the answer was yes, but a more nuanced yes. The issue, he said, was not so much whether enough food
could be grown – it could – as whether the poor would be able to afford it. To understand what he was talking
about, you have to look at another, more recent agricultural revolution.
*
In the early 1980s, British farming encountered an unexpected crisis. Propelled towards prosperity and a sense
of their own success by generous European subsidies, ever more ingenious scientific techniques and an
agriculture ministry still fixated on the idea that its only aim was to maximise and streamline the production
of food, farmers lost the trust of the British people. As the old CAP subsidy regime generated grain mountains
and lakes of surplus milk, it began to dawn on the non-farming population that the drive for yield to the
exclusion of all else was altering the appearance of the countryside in a way they didn’t like. Each year, ten
thousand miles of hedgerow were being dug up. In eastern England, up to 90 per cent of trees at field
boundaries had been felled to create space for bigger fields and the manoeuvring of new, bigger machinery.
Conservationists were beginning to note the waning of familiar British species; hedge destruction,
monoculture and pesticides meant that increasingly they had nowhere to live, and nothing to eat. Friends of
the Earth began peaceful direct action against farmers. Farmers burned conservationists in effigy. In her 1980
polemic, The Theft of the Countryside, Marion Shoard unsparingly articulated the alienation, as she saw it,
between farmers and the people as a whole: she called them ‘executioners’ carrying out a death sentence on
the English landscape, turning it into ‘a vast, featureless expanse of prairie’.
Matters came to a head one weekend in June 1984 when a single Norfolk farmer, David Archer, provoked
turmoil at the top of the government. Archer had a farm in the Halvergate Marshes on the Norfolk Broads, an
area of wetland grazing between Norwich and the sea where for centuries domestic cattle, wild birds and wild
flowers have co-existed. In the early 1980s farmers, with the support of the Ministry of Agriculture, began to
press to drain the land and plant crops on it. The Times called Halvergate ‘the Flanders of the great war
between farming interests and the objectives of nature conservation’. The government tried to persuade the
farmers to stop voluntarily while it worked out what to do.
On Thursday, 21 June, Archer told civil servants he was opting out of their voluntary scheme, and that, the
next Monday, he was going to start draining the land for ploughing. The only way he could be stopped was by
a direct order from Patrick Jenkin, the environment secretary. Cabinet papers released recently show a furious
squabble between Jenkin and his counterpart at the Ministry of Agriculture, Michael Jopling. Jenkin wanted
to make the order, rather than lose part of the ‘traditional landscape in the Broads’ and face the ‘outcry from
the conservationists’. Jopling accused him of panicking and of threatening the customary Tory defence of
private property. Thatcher intervened on Jenkin’s side over the weekend; the order was made, and Archer was
forced to stay his ditching gear. But the fundamental problem had become too vexatious for its resolution to
be postponed. How to make farmers respect the needs of conservation without standing in the way of their
need to grow food and desire to make money? How to reconcile a public good – the beauty of the countryside,
31
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
the sound of birdsong – with the fact that the farmers had both legal and customary occupation of the space in
which these public goods were supposed to be maintained?
As far back as 1969, there’d been a recognition that demonising farmers wasn’t the only way to go. At the
Silsoe Exercise in Hertfordshire, farmers and conservationists had worked together on an actual farm. An idea
began to emerge that, rather than trying to subjugate farmers to conservation, farmers might become
conservationists. After all, they were already on the government payroll; why not simply tinker with the
contract? A new set of organisations, the Farming and Wildlife Groups, or FWAGs, appeared as interpreters
between the two hostile cultures. Fifteen years later, when the government needed to resolve the conflict on
the Broads, a set of principles already existed.
In 1985, the government set up the Broads Grazing Marshes Conservation Scheme. The name was
cumbersome, the location obscure, but it was the start of a new revolution in European agriculture. Up till
then the only way governments had found to slow the rush to ever more intensive farming was to pay farmers
compensation for not doing something they would otherwise have done. Farmers got subsidies for farming, or
subsidies for not farming. This was different. Farmers who signed up to the scheme were given an extra
subsidy on top of the old one for farming according to a detailed programme drawn up with wildlife experts.
They were expected to limit the number of animals they grazed, cut hay no more than once a year and restrict
pesticide use. For the first time, farmers were being paid by the state to do something other than maximise
food output or slam on the brakes to stop over-production. They were being paid to be farmerconservationists: a formalisation of a role farmers always thought they had anyway, that of stewards of the
land.
*
At first, the European Commission and other national governments were baffled by and suspicious of what
John Sheail, in his history of British environmentalism, calls ‘the concept of making payments to farmers to
farm below the maximum’. There were mutterings that it was illegal. But the commission came round, and
Europe took up the concept. For the first time, member states could subsidise farmers to provide a public
good as well as to grow food. Farmers were contracted not only to protect the aesthetic value of the
countryside and wildlife habitats but to increase recreational access to their land for the public.
In the beginning, in Britain, the practice was confined to famously pretty and fragile farmed landscapes like
the Broads, the Cotswolds, the Lake District, Shetland and Loch Lomond, which were designated
Environmentally Sensitive Areas. Thirty years later, farmers anywhere who are prepared to adhere to
complex, rigid, tightly inspected regimes of conservation and access can earn handsome sums on top of their
regular subsidies by becoming stewards of the countryside.
More significantly, the idea has been embedded in the CAP itself. The farm subsidy system has two parts. The
first is what non-farmers understand by ‘farm subsidies’: direct payments to help farmers farm, based on
acreage, known as Pillar 1. The second element, Pillar 2, is for what’s vaguely known as ‘rural development’,
which covers everything from preserving traditional farming practices and preventing the depopulation of the
countryside to conservation and public access. Stewardship payments come out of the Pillar 2 pot. But since
2004, farmers getting Pillar 1 payments, the basic subsidy they rely on, have also been obliged to carry out an
extensive list of ‘cross-compliance’ measures, many related to the environment. If they don’t – by not leaving
wide enough wildlife-friendly borders around their crop fields, for instance – they’ll be fined. Since last year,
a third of Pillar 1 payments have become tied to an additional set of ‘greening measures’. These are decisive
32
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
steps by the EU towards obliging farmers to become custodians of the countryside. All the figures I’ve given
for farm subsidies up to now include both the greening tithe and Pillar 2 payments. Much of the Holkham
Estate subsidy is for conservation, rather than conventional farming; and just under a tenth of Agnew’s
subsidy last year came from conservation, a proportion he would like to see increase post-Brexit, though he
seethes at the requirement to erect an ‘EU gratitude plaque’ of statutory size.
‘If we did nothing we would have a UK that would lose the water vole, that would never see a lapwing,’ Heidi
Smith, of Norfolk FWAG, told me. ‘The turtle dove would go. You would go out on a summer’s day and not
see any butterflies. Most farmland is drenched in broad spectrum insecticides so there are no insects to be
found anywhere. Farming birds are threatened because they have nothing to eat and nowhere to live.’ But
FWAG has to work with farmers, not against them. ‘FWAG is very careful we don’t see ourselves as too
niche,’ she said. ‘There is a huge amount they can do without giving up their chemicals.’
Richard Wright is one of FWAG’s star clients. He won an award in 2014 for conservation work. He farms a
little over four hundred acres on the Broads, halfway between Norwich and the coast, 185 acres of grazing for
a herd of 110 beef cattle on the marshes beside the River Yare and the rest arable on the low slopes above.
Last year, according to government records, he got a basic subsidy of £33,265.59, and half as much again
from the stewardship package.
He took me up to a place where his barley field met his wheat field and showed me the kinds of thing he has
to do to earn his stewardship money. ‘The grass strip you see there,’ he said, pointing to the edge of the barley
field, ‘is impregnated with flowers, specially for bees. At the moment the flowers are coming up; in about
four or five weeks’ time they’ll be about that tall, and they’ll come out in flower all through the summer into
the autumn, so the bees will be able to feed on them.’ I looked at the broad strip of uncultivated land running
all around the field. Why was it that width? ‘We’re paid to do a set area. The payment will be compensation
for me not having corn on there. We do one metre extra. Just so we’re covered. Just to be on the safe side. We
can’t afford to lose that money.’
He showed me more. The beetle bank, a ridge of soil that encourages insects and turns into a nesting site for
grey partridges; the insects will eat aphids that prey on the crops, which will let him reduce his spray use. The
bare patches in the fields are for skylarks to nest in. ‘Three years ago we’d have seen one, two pairs of
skylarks; we’re now up to 15, twenty pairs. And it’s rising all the time. We’re contracted to have ten of these
skylark plots on the farm. It’s what we’re paid for. But I’ve looked at it and said, “Well, actually, if we’ve got
so much success with the skylarks, there’s that many more needs nesting sites.” We’re actually up to like 15
plots this year. Each year we’re putting in a few more extra plots at our own expense.’
He showed me bat runs, linking stretches of hedge for bats to follow, hoovering up insects as they fly along.
He showed me an edging strip that looked like a strip of weeds. It was a strip of weeds. Weeds for the
flowers, for the bees, for the birds, for the insects. In another field, more weeds; a ‘low input’ crop of barley
planted with 40 per cent less seed, treated with 30 per cent less fertiliser, sprayed not with weedkiller but with
weed stunter. The soil was busy with a wild bird seed smorgasbord of kale, linseed and mustard. Long, dry
stalks of gold-of-pleasure stuck up sparsely like a bald man’s combover come loose. ‘Winter time, you come
here, clap your hands, there will be flocks, a hundred, a hundred and fifty linnets, goldfinches, skylarks, all
manner of birds,’ Wright said.
33
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
I asked: ‘Do you ever have moments when you kind of shake yourself and you think “They’re paying me to
grow weeds”?’ He laughed. ‘It’s what we’re paid to do. But the point is, our aim is to create a mosaic. You
cannot just pick the options. Everything is in it together. Birds can come in here and then when they grow up
they can nest in here. It’ll be ideal for little chicks to run around in. It’s low density, it’ll give them canopy
from predators, but they can move around in here, feed off the insects. Everything is linked.’
Alongside all this, or within it, Wright is carrying out conventional farming as it’s been practised in Britain
for generations. The wheat might go for animal or human food, perhaps Weetabix, depending on the quality. I
looked at the young green seedlings. How much land did it take to grow one Weetabix? About a foot square,
Wright reckoned. The barley is grown for a whisky distillery in the Highlands. Wright’s acres should produce
enough for 264,000 bottles of Scotch.
He took me through the life of the field: in August, it’s harvested, and the stubble is left over the winter. In
February, it’s ploughed and sown. Once the seed sprouts, the first of two fertiliser applications goes on. I
could see the white nodules of fertiliser lying on the top layer of soil. Wright was about to spray the field with
herbicide. Later there would be one, possibly two fungicides, and, depending on the verdict of an independent
agronomist, a pesticide. What would happen, I asked, if he didn’t spray or use artificial fertilisers? ‘You’d
have a massive infestation of weeds and disease and a massive reduction in crop yield.’ And was there
anything he’d put on the field if he wasn’t constrained by the new rules? ‘No restraints whatsoever? I’d put
houses on there. I’d make a lot more money.’
Wright’s father was a farmer. So was his grandfather, who started working life as a farm labourer in wartime
before getting a farm of his own. Wright is likeable, a cheerful, patient 56-year-old, born in the place where
he farms. He spoke with real enthusiasm and pride of his conservation work. All the same there was a strain
of defensiveness, a sense of injustice, that kept coming through; a feeling that farmers as a class have been
and continue to be defamed, and that a retraction was warranted. He criticised organic farmers for making
poor single mothers feel bad about not being able to afford their products. He criticised Britain’s animalwelfare-motivated ban on intensive pig farmers (he used to be one) as backward. At one point I looked up and
saw Wright’s Land Rover parked on a ridge under a lone tree, framed and illuminated by the mellow May
sunshine, and remarked that it looked like a Land Rover advertisement. It was a throwaway comment, but
Wright was quick to tell me his Land Rover was a working farm vehicle, not a luxury car for the school run. I
remembered something James Lake had said: ‘The image of a farmer here is of tweeds and a Range Rover,
whereas in France and Germany a farmer is just a member of society.’
What surprised me was the anger Wright felt towards big conservation organisations, particularly the Royal
Society for the Protection of Birds. I’d assumed he’d see himself as at least partly in the same sphere as the
charity, given that he was doing so much conservation work; he’s a farmer-conservationist, the RSPB are
conservationist-farmers (the RSPB is the fourth largest UK recipient of farm subsidies, with almost £7 million
last year, not all of it for conservation work). But he didn’t. ‘The RSPB has just got a million pounds to buy a
piece of land further down the valley which they will turn into a nature reserve. They will downgrade the
farming there. They’ve got government funding to buy it, government funding to look after it, they will get all
the farm subsidies on it, they’ve got teams of people who are employed to make sure they get every penny
they can – their membership will pay to visit and look at the wildlife on there – they do not want to say “Well,
actually farmers are doing conservation.” They want to discredit farmers, because their main thing is the
income from the public. To keep that going they have to be seen as the only saviours of the countryside.’
34
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
I asked if he’d embraced the conservation side of his work, or was sad that he had to do it this way. ‘My
father isn’t happy with this, because he was brought up to produce food,’ Wright said. ‘I can see the benefits.
The birds sing etc. And it does bring in an income. When you’ve got the price of corn, one year it’s £110 a
tonne, a few years ago it was £200, the payment we get for [conservation] gives us a little bit of a level
income. I’ve got a family to feed, a mortgage to pay … We’re not like the big corporate charities who get
lottery funding to buy land, government funding, tax relief for being a charity, even though they are becoming
a 21st-century version of the landed gentry.’
He was grateful for one aspect of his new life: he gets to meet people when he talks about his work.
Mechanisation has isolated farmers. Wright and his brother farm alone where once 14 people worked. ‘I can
go seven to seven, I will see no one, I will speak to no one,’ he said. ‘Until we did this and won the award and
there was a piece in the paper about it our standing in the village was rock bottom. We were just farmers who
destroy everything. But when the public hear about this, all of a sudden: hey, you’re the guy who does that –
the butterflies! The birds! And our standing in the village has shot up.’
As I was leaving he told me I’d forgotten to ask a question.
‘What?’
‘Which way I’m going to vote in the referendum.’
‘Which way are you going to vote?’ He’d already told me that post-Brexit the fight to control the countryside
would intensify.
‘Out.’
‘Why?’
‘It’d be bad for farming, but there are some things more important than farming.’
‘What things?’ He wouldn’t say.
*
From the summit of Wright’s fields, you have a fine view of the Broads, green and glittering and perfectly
flat, scored with drainage ditches that surround each square of grazing land, and the silos of the Cantley sugar
factory on the far side of the Yare. Two thousand years ago, when it was Roman land, and the language of the
natives was either Latin or a form of early Welsh, the Broads was tidal, a delta landscape of water and
mudflats. The coastline was a mile further out than today. Three wide rivers, the Bure, the Yare and the
Waveney, opened out into a great estuary, four miles wide at the mouth, where the seaside resort of Great
Yarmouth now stands. The geography of Roman Norfolk can still be seen; the remains of the town of Venta
Icenorum lie close to a small, shallow stream, but in its day it was a port for sea-going vessels, which would
sail east, past Wright’s farm – his arable fields would have been the right bank of the river – and out through
the Great Estuary to the North Sea, between the Roman fortifications of Caister and Burgh Castle, whose flint
ramparts are still there.
35
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
It’s uncertain how much climate change had to do with the collapse of Roman Britain and the subsequent
settlement, or conquest, or trickle-in, of the Angles and the Saxons, or how far climate change was
responsible for the silting up of the estuary that transformed the landscape and eventually created the Broads.
What we do know is that the landscape was transformed. It’s one of the moments in history that the deniers of
human-induced climate change cling to – look, climate changes all the time, it’s not us! – but the
disappearance of the estuary within recorded history is a salutary reminder of the impermanence of land and
the folly of destabilising, as we are doing, an already unstable climate. Farmer-conservationists like Wright
have moved a long way from their old mindset, but according to some radical farmers, when global warming
is the peril, they haven’t moved nearly far enough.
One such is Peter Melchett, the former head of Greenpeace UK, who owns the 890-acre Courtyard Farm in
northwest Norfolk, near Hunstanton. He’s also a hereditary peer, also an Etonian, also in receipt of a sixfigure subsidy (£107,545 last year). But he’s the only member of the Norfolk farming aristocracy to have
spent two nights in a Norwich jail, in 2000, for attempting to purge a local farmer’s field of an experimental
crop of GM maize.3 Like Wright, Melchett is a farmer-conservationist, and rewarded for it by the subsidy
system. Unlike Wright, he’s an organic farmer; he’s the policy director of the Soil Association, which certifies
most British organic produce. Mainstream as it has become, organic farming still struggles with the fact that
in the way we talk about it, we treat it as the deviation. But there’s no semantic reason for this; we could turn
it round and call organic farmers ‘farmers’ and the rest ‘chemical farmers’.
Melchett took me for a walk. We left his house, two former labourers’ cottages knocked together, clad in
lavender and wisteria. A Norfolk Grey hen pecked at the wisteria flowers. We passed through an orchard
where the grass was up to our knees and the cow parsley grew almost as high as the trees. The apple trees are
old Norfolk varieties, Sandringham Royal, Norfolk Beefing, their fruit seldom sold in supermarkets. Further
on an old wood was being extended for wildlife: new oaks, beech, ash, holly and blackthorn. In a place where
the ground was littered with crack willow catkins Melchett bade me not to linger. The blue crates spread out
among the trees were full of bees. Elsewhere a wild-looking stretch of scrub and grass marked the place
where the former owners of the land, the L’Estrange family, had allowed the gathering of furze for fuel by the
newly landless poor their enclosures had created. ‘We still have turtle doves migrating from Africa to the
farm,’ Melchett said. ‘What people would have called wasteland is where the turtle doves still nest.’ It was all
very beautiful; a carefully thought-through and managed order with a rough, sometimes unkempt surface and
abundant space for wildlife. And space, too, for crops, fertilised not synthetically but through the careful
rotation of plants that put nitrogen into the soil.
It is friendlier to wildlife, and, Melchett argues, to human life, than chemical farming. It is also, by his own
admission, a fiddly, labour-intensive process, and, crucially, one that produces less food than chemical
farming. Melchett’s cereal yields are between 60 and 70 per cent of his chemical counterparts, and shop prices
correspondingly higher. He says this misses the point. Not only do such simplistic cost analyses ignore the
public goods that organic farming bring; they don’t take into account the hidden costs of chemical farming –
the devastation of bird and insect populations, the pollution of water through run-off from the fields, the
unsightliness of vast, monotonous fields. These are the opposite of public goods and still more slippery to
value. But someone has to pay in the end. ‘The organic system will cost more to farm, but hugely less to
society,’ Melchett said. ‘I’m not doing anything that will make Anglian Water spend money cleaning up the
water.’
*
The greatest public bane, Melchett maintains, is farming’s contribution to climate change. All farming,
including organic, contributes to this because of the methane emitted by belching livestock. But where
36
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
organic farming brings the financially unrewarded public good of storing high amounts of carbon in the soil,
chemical farming brings the financially unpenalised public bane of enormous carbon emissions during the
manufacture of synthetic fertiliser.
Here we come back to David Laborde and his point about feeding the ten billion: we can grow the food, but
will the poor be able to afford it? Maximum farming – getting the most food out of the soil wherever you are
by whatever means possible – means different things in different places. The high cost of fertiliser means
many poor farmers in places like Africa are closer to organic than chemical farmers, through necessity rather
than choice. But Laborde’s fundamental point was that any deviation from maximum farming, whether to
farm organically, to farm for beauty, to farm to ward off climate change, to shun GM crops, to put taste before
bulk or to farm for birds rather than people, had the potential to make food unaffordable for the poor.
The implications of this depend on the interpretation. One interpretation – the raise-up interpretation – is that
the protection of the environment is no less vital to the wellbeing of the poorest than their daily bread, and
that countries like Britain should follow that philosophy both for its own people’s benefit and as an example
to the world. The other way of looking at it, the level-down version, is that feeding the less well-off at all
levels – the relatively poor of Britain, the absolutely poor of the world – takes precedence over all else, and to
restrict farmers’ ability to do this is elitist at home, selfish abroad.
If the policy of the EU is increasingly tending towards raise-up, Melchett believes the native tendency of the
British government, embodied in the corporate mind of the Treasury, is level-down. ‘The Treasury has said
for years that it is in the interests of UK plc to get food from anywhere in the world where it is cheapest.
That’s been the consistent Treasury view, under successive governments, which is why leaving the EU would
be such a disaster for farming and the environment.’
When the English government recently had the chance to carry out its own, independent CAP reform – in
agriculture, there essentially is an English government, with the four parts of the United Kingdom having
separate policies – it proved eager to go on subsidising the big landowners. When the new EU subsidy regime
kicked in last year, member states were given the freedom to reduce the basic payments received by the
biggest farms and shift the money towards rural development – towards stewardship schemes like Wright’s.
All national governments had to trim subsidy payments over €150,000 (£110,000 in 2015) by at least 5 per
cent, but if they wanted to cut them by more, they could.
Seven European countries used the new powers to cut subsidies to big landowners and transfer money to
smaller farmers and environmental schemes. So did Wales, Northern Ireland and, rather timidly, Scotland. In
England, the government did nothing. The queen’s huge farming dole stayed. The piquancy of the situation
was intensified by the fact that the EU Commission and its abominator, Stuart Agnew of Ukip, were on the
same side: both wanted subsidies to the big farms slashed. Melchett’s certainty that a post-Brexit Britain
would drop barriers to cheap imported food, and the evidence that England, left to itself, would go on
subsidising big farmers, isn’t necessarily a contradiction. It suggests Brexit would return the country to the
pre-EEC days of duty-free imports and subsidised farmers, but with many fewer small farms, and fewer
obstacles to the expansion of large-scale, mechanised, chemical farming.
There is a danger of oversimplifying the wildly heterogeneous farms and farmers of Britain. I spent time with
the mainly arable farmers of Norfolk but I could have visited the dairy farmers of the West Country or the hill
37
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
farmers of Northumbria or smallholders with fewer than 12 acres who don’t qualify for basic subsidies. Out
of 107,000 English farms that were subsidised last year, only 2829 – less than 3 per cent – got more than
£100,000, and 10 per cent got less than £1000. As the millions of people who lost their jobs through
commercialisation, privatisation, globalisation and technology change will tell you, a subsidy isn’t necessarily
a way to get richer; it can be just a way to keep on doing what you do.
Nor can you assume farmers will have straightforward attitudes about one another. The Marquess of
Cholmondeley is a ‘big farmer’, but his neighbour Peter Melchett likes him because he’s gone organic. James
Lake, a farmer with no farm, speaks warmly of the Cokes of Holkham, with a gigantic farm, because ‘they’re
quite down to earth – they’re businessmen now.’ Melchett abhors farmers like Agnew because they’re proGM, yet Agnew wants more money spent on farmer-conservationists.
What is clear is that leaving the EU would leave the British countryside more vulnerable. It takes Britain out
of a protected political space in which there is a fiercely contested balance of power between
environmentalists and agribusiness into an open global arena where agribusiness has the muscle.
There was a telling moment in my conversation with Agnew when he began to rage against the fact that while
Britain bans the growing of GM crops, it can’t ban their import, because of World Trade Organisation rules.
Hang on a minute, I said. Was he claiming we’d still be bound by all sorts of overseas rules and regulations
even if we left the EU, just from an agency still further away?
He blustered that a sovereign Britain wouldn’t have to join the WTO. But this, for a trading nation, would be
unimaginable. What leaving the EU would do would be to leave Britain scrambling to find its niche in a
harsher, more extreme environment of intercontinental deals. The history of privatisation, the failure to
regulate Britain’s wretched banks and the remorseless attacks on the BBC and the NHS all indicate that
Britain’s government has been rewired to accommodate multinational corporate lobbying at the citizen’s
expense. Why should it be any different for farmers outside the Common Agricultural Policy?
It may be a product of farmers’ chronic defensiveness, but it is striking how impenetrable the language of
modern British agricultural policy is to the outsider. Expressions like ‘farmer-conservationist’ and ‘green
tithe’ are my own. Farmers talk about ‘agri-environmental schemes’ and ‘Pillar 2 payments’. European
Commission officials are even worse. Their original name for the grand, idealistic vision of farmers working
as guardians of nature, as well as growers of food? ‘Multifunctionality’. It’s a pity that the language can’t be
clearer when all that European society is asking of farmers, and offering to pay them to do, is to farm more
kindly. In return, with luck, for kindness back. I heard a lot from the farmers I spoke to about the selfishness
of the public, on and off their farms, but the best reproach was Melchett’s. When I was with him, he had
nothing bad to say about walkers or cyclists or litterers on his land. He is 68 now, and walks with the help of a
stick. At one point, walking through one of his bigger fields, he swooped down with some effort, picked up an
old cigarette butt, put it away and walked on, without a word of reproach.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n12/james-meek/how-to-grow-a-weetabix
38
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Old World metals traded on Alaska coast hundreds of years before contact with Europeans
Source:
Purdue University
Summary:
Two leaded bronze artifacts found in northwestern Alaska are the first evidence that metal from Asia
reached prehistoric North America prior to contact with Europeans, according to new research.
Share:
AddThis Sharing Buttons
FULL STORY
Resurrection Bay in Alaska.
Credit: © NoraDoa / Fotolia
Two leaded bronze artifacts found in northwestern Alaska are the first evidence that metal from Asia reached
prehistoric North America prior to contact with Europeans, according to new Purdue University research.
"This is not a surprise based on oral history and other archaeological finds, and it was just a matter of time
before we had a good example of Eurasian metal that had been traded," said H. Kory Cooper, an associate
professor of anthropology, who led the artifacts' metallurgical analysis. "We believe these smelted alloys were
made somewhere in Eurasia and traded to Siberia and then traded across the Bering Strait to ancestral Inuits
people, also known as Thule culture, in Alaska. Locally available metal in parts of the Arctic, such as native
39
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
metal, copper and meteoritic and telluric iron were used by ancient Inuit people for tools and to sometimes
indicate status. Two of the Cape Espenberg items that were found -- a bead and a buckle -- are heavily leaded
bronze artifacts. Both are from a house at the site dating to the Late Prehistoric Period, around 1100-1300 AD,
which is before sustained European contact in the late 18th century."
The findings are published in Elsevier's Journal of Archaeological Science, and the research was funded by
the National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs Arctic Social Sciences.
"This article focuses on a small finding with really interesting implications," said Cooper, who also has a
courtesy appointment in materials engineering and is an expert in metallurgy and archaeology in the western
Arctic and Subarctic. "This will cause other people to think about the Arctic differently. Some have presented
the Arctic and Subarctic regions as backwater areas with no technological innovation because there was a
very small population at the time. That doesn't mean interesting things weren't happening, and this shows that
locals were not only using locally available metals but were also obtaining metals from elsewhere."
The items were found on Alaska's northwest coast at Cape Espenberg on the Seward Peninsula where the
Thule people lived in houses. The field work was led by Owen K. Mason and John F. Hoffecker, both of the
Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder. From 2009-2011, their team
excavated a variety of artifacts including six items with metal. Cooper coordinated the metallurgical analysis.
Metal artifacts are rarely found because they were usually used until they were worn down and, therefore, not
well preserved at field sites.
"These items are remarkable due to curation and preservation issues," Cooper said.
The cylindrical bead and a fragment of a small buckle strap-guide are composed of leaded bronze, which is an
alloy of copper, tin and lead. The fragmented leather strap on the buckle provided radiocarbon dating, and the
item was dated to 500-800 years old, although the metal could be older.
"The belt buckle also is considered an industrial product and is an unprecedented find for this time," Cooper
said. "It resembles a buckle used as part of a horse harness that would have been used in north-central China
during the first six centuries before the Common Era."
Three of the other four items from another house were determined to be copper -- a piece of bone fishing
tackle with a copper hook, an eyed copper needle and a small fragment of sheet copper. The final item was a
bone fishing lure with iron inset eyes. All items were analyzed with X-ray fluorescence technology.
This house is considerably younger, dating to the 17th to 18th centuries, and is part of a trading network in
Alaskan native copper.
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Purdue University. The original item was written by
Amy Patterson Neubert. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.
H. Kory Cooper, Owen K. Mason, Victor Mair, John F. Hoffecker and Robert J. Speakman. Evidence of
Eurasian Metal Alloys on the Alaskan Coast in Prehistory. Journal of Archaeological Science, 2016
DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2016.04.021
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160608095556.htm
40
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
On the Soul-Sustaining Necessity of Resisting Self-Comparison and Fighting Cynicism: A
Commencement Address
“In its passivity and resignation, cynicism is a hardening, a calcification of the soul. Hope is a stretching of
its ligaments, a limber reach for something greater.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
I have long relished the commencement address as one of our few cultural forms that render us receptive to
sincerity — receptive to messages we might dismiss as trite in any other context, but which we recognize here
as the life-earned truth of the human being at the podium, shared in a spirit of goodwill with a group of young
humans just starting out on the truth-earning gauntlet called life.
So I was thrilled to deliver the address to the 2016 graduating class at the University of
Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, my own alma mater. Speech text below.
41
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
I want to talk to you today about the soul. Not the soul as that immortal unit of religious mythology, for I am a
nonbeliever. And not the soul as a pop-culture commodity, that voracious consumer of self-help chicken soup.
I mean the soul simply as shorthand for the seismic core of personhood from which our beliefs, our values,
and our actions radiate.
I live in New York, where something extraordinary happens every April. In the first days of spring, those days
when the air turns from blistering to balmy, a certain gladness envelops the city — people actually look up
from their screens while walking and strangers smile at each other. For a few short days, it’s like we
remember how we can live and who we’re capable of being to one another.
I also practically live on my bike — that’s how I get everywhere — and the other week, on one of those first
days of spring, I was riding from Brooklyn to Harlem. I had somewhere to be and was pedaling pretty fast —
which I like doing and must admit I take a certain silly pride in — but I was also very much enjoying the ride
and the river and the spring air that smelled of plum blossoms. And then, I sensed someone behind me in the
bike path, catching up, going even faster than I was going. It suddenly felt somehow competitive. He was
trying to overtake me. I pedaled faster, but he kept catching up. Eventually, he did overtake me — and I felt
strangely defeated.
But as he cruised past me, I realized the guy was on an electric bike. I felt both a sort of redemption and a
great sense of injustice — unfair motorized advantage, very demoralizing to the honest muscle-powered
pedaler. But just as I was getting all self-righteously existential, I noticed something else — he had a
restaurant’s name on his back. He was food delivery guy. He was rushing past me not because he was trying
to slight me, or because he had some unfair competitive advantage in life, but because this was his daily strife
— this is how this immigrant made his living.
My first response was to shame myself into gratitude for how fortunate I’ve been — because I too am an
immigrant from a pretty poor country and it’s some miraculous confluence of choice and chance that has kept
me from becoming a food delivery person on an electric bike in order to survive in New York City. And
perhaps the guy has a more satisfying life than I do — perhaps he had a good mother and goes home to the
love of his life and plays the violin at night. I don’t know, and I never will. But the point is that the second I
begin comparing my pace to his, my life to his, I’m vacating my own experience of that spring day and
ejecting myself into a sort of limbo of life that is neither mine nor his.
I grew up in Bulgaria and my early childhood was spent under a communist dictatorship. But for all its evils,
communism had one silver lining — when everyone had very little, no one felt like somebody else was
cruising past them motorized by privilege.
I came to Penn straight from Bulgaria, through that same confluence of chance and choice (and, yes, a lot of
very, very hard work — I don’t want to minimize the importance of that, but I also don’t want to imply that
people who end up on the underprivileged end of life haven’t worked hard enough, because this is one of our
most oppressive cultural myth and reality is so much more complex). In any case: When I came to Penn, I had
an experience very different from my childhood. Suddenly, as I was working four jobs to pay for school, I felt
like everybody else was on an electric bike and I was just pedaling myself into the ground.
This, of course, is what happens in every environment densely populated by so-called peers — selfcomparison becomes inevitable. Financial inequality was just my particular poison, but we do it along every
imaginable axis of privilege and every dimension of identity — intelligence, beauty, athleticism, charisma
that entrances the Van Pelt librarians into pardoning your late fees.
But here’s the thing about self-comparison: In addition to making you vacate your own experience, your own
soul, your own life, in its extreme it breeds resignation. If we constantly feel that there is something more to
be had — something that’s available to those with a certain advantage in life, but which remains out of reach
for us — we come to feel helpless. And the most toxic byproduct of this helpless resignation is cynicism —
that terrible habit of mind and orientation of spirit in which, out of hopelessness for our own situation, we
42
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
grow embittered about how things are and about what’s possible in the world. Cynicism is a poverty of
curiosity and imagination and ambition.
Today, the soul is in dire need of stewardship and protection from cynicism. The best defense against it is
vigorous, intelligent, sincere hope — not blind optimism, because that too is a form of resignation, to believe
that everything will work out just fine and we need not apply ourselves. I mean hope bolstered by critical
thinking that is clear-headed in identifying what is lacking, in ourselves or the world, but then envisions ways
to create it and endeavors to do that.
In its passivity and resignation, cynicism is a hardening, a calcification of the soul. Hope is a stretching of its
ligaments, a limber reach for something greater.
You are about to enter the ecosystem of cultural production. Most of you will go into journalism, media,
policy, or some blurry blob of the increasingly amorphous Venn diagram of these forces that shape culture
and public opinion. Whatever your specific vocation, your role as a creator of culture will be to help people
discern what matters in the world and why by steering them away from the meaningless and toward the
meaningful. E.B. White said that the role of the writer is to lift people up, not to lower them down, and I
believe that’s the role of every journalist and artist and creator of culture.
Strive to be uncynical, to be a hope-giving force, to be a steward of substance. Choose to lift people up, not to
lower them down — because it is a choice, always, and because in doing so you lift yourself up.
Develop an inner barometer for your own value. Resist pageviews and likes and retweets and all those sillysounding quantification metrics that will be obsolete within the decade. Don’t hang the stability of your soul
on them. They can’t tell you how much your work counts for and to whom. They can’t tell you who you are
and what you’re worth. They are that demoralizing electric bike that makes you feel if only you could pedal
faster — if only you could get more pageviews and likes and retweets — you’d be worthier of your own life.
You will enter a world where, whatever career you may choose or make for yourself — because never forget
that there are jobs you can get and jobs you can invent — you will often face the choice of construction and
destruction, of building up or tearing down.
Among our most universal human longings is to affect the world with our actions somehow, to leave an
imprint with our existence. Both construction and destruction leave a mark and give us a sense of agency in
the world. Now, destruction is necessary sometimes — damaged and damaging systems need to be
demolished to clear the way for more enlivening ones. But destruction alone, without construction to follow
it, is hapless and lazy. Construction is far more difficult, because it requires the capacity to imagine something
new and better, and the willingness to exert ourselves toward building it, even at the risk of failure. But that is
also far more satisfying in the end.
You may find your fate forked by construction and destruction frequently, in ways obvious or subtle. And you
will have to choose between being the hammer-wielding vandal, who may attain more immediate results —
more attention — by tearing things and people and ideas down, or the sculptor of culture, patiently chiseling
at the bedrock of how things are to create something new and beautiful and imaginative following a nobler
vision, your vision, of how things can and should be.
Some active forms of destruction are more obvious and therefore, to the moral and well-intentioned person,
easier to resist. It’s hard not to notice that there’s a hammer before you and to refuse to pick it up. But there
are passive forms of destruction far more difficult to detect and thus to safeguard against, and the most
pernicious of them is cynicism.
Our culture has created a reward system in which you get points for tearing down rather than building up, and
for besieging with criticism and derision those who dare to work and live from a place of constructive hope.
Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively, in yourself and in those you love and in the communication with
which you shape culture. Cynicism, like all destruction, is easy, it’s lazy. There is nothing more difficult yet
43
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
more gratifying in our society than living with sincere, active, constructive hope for the human spirit. This is
the most potent antidote to cynicism, and it is an act of courage and resistance today.
It is also the most vitalizing sustenance for your soul.
But you — you — are in a very special position, leaving Annenberg, because your courage and resistance are
to be enacted not only in the privacy of your inner life but in your outer contribution to public life. You are
the creators of tomorrow’s ideas and ideals, the sculptors of public opinion and of culture. As long as we feed
people buzz, we cannot expect their minds to produce symphonies. Never let the temptation of marketable
mediocrity and easy cynicism rob you of the chance to ennoble public life and enlarge the human spirit —
because we need that badly today, and because you need it badly for the survival of your soul.
So as you move through life, pedal hard — because that’s how you get places, and because it’s fun and so
incredibly gratifying to propel yourself forward by your own will and power of intention. But make sure the
pace of your pedaling answers only to your own standards of vigor. Remain uncynical and don’t waste any
energy on those who pass you by on their electric bikes, because you never know what strife is driving them
and, most of all, because the moment you focus on that, you vacate your own soul.
Instead, pedal forth — but also remember to breathe in the spring air and to smile at a stranger every once in a
while. Because there is nothing more uncynical than being good to one another.
Thank you and congratulations.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/05/16/annenbergcommencement/?mc_cid=356094a1eb&mc_eid=d1c16ac662
44
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Mapping How Stressful Streets Can Limit Cycling
Montgomery County, Maryland, is using traffic-stress data to determine how biking comfort affects
connectivity.

LAURA BLISS

@mslaurabliss
Bicycle Stress Map
Few cycling thoroughfares in Washington, D.C., are fully protected from traffic. They’re packed with rushing
cars, people backing out of driveways, and shape-shifting bike lanes, when any actually exist. As a daily bike
commuter, I can attest that these factors can make cycling pretty harrying, which in turndiscourages a lot of
other people from doing it. And research shows that fewer cyclists means riskier streets.
Just north of D.C., transportation planners in Montgomery County, Maryland,are taking a systematic
approach to breaking this vicious cycle. With a newBicycle Stress Map, county planners have quantified and
mapped the “traffic stress level” of the county’s bike network, assigning a numeric value and corresponding
color to every street and bike trail.
45
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Based on methodology developed by the Northeastern University transport scholar Peter Furth, the planners
calculated those “TSL” values based on traffic speed and volume, the number and width of car and bike lanes,
parking turnover, how easy it is to get through intersections, and other characteristics. A quiet, residential
road with a low speed limit—which Montgomery County is full of—would be rated low-stress (blue),
comfortable enough for most adults and kids. On the other end of the spectrum, a broad, multi-lane
boulevard with a 40-mile-per-hour speed limit—even with a bike lane—would be rated high-stress (red) and
might deter all but the most hardcore cyclists.
Cyclists can adjust the map to view the streets that fit their personal comfort levels. And local transportation
planners are using the map as they develop the county’s Bicycle Master Plan. As explained on the map’s
website: “When a street has a moderate or high level of stress, it may be a sign that bicycle infrastructure, like
separated bike lanes or shared-use paths, is needed to make it a place where more people will feel comfortable
riding.”
The map makes one thing strikingly clear: Most Metro stations in Montgomery County are accessible only to
cyclists who can tolerate relatively high stress levels. The same is also true for Capital Bikeshare stations
(though those aren’t visible on the map). Working with the map and the underlying data, Stephen Tu, a
planner with Montgomery County, and Alex Rixey, of the transportation consultancy Fehr & Peers, have
identified a number of only moderately stressful streets that, with the addition of just a few low-stress
connections (likely in the form of protected bike lanes), could significantly expand connectivity and
accessibility to Metro and bikeshare stations for cyclists. Though their work is still in the preliminary stages,
it points to a more data-driven approach to creating reliable bike transit.
“Knowing the level of traffic stress gives you a way of evaluating how successful your bike infrastructure
projects will be,” Rixey tells CityLab. “We can show what kind of connectivity you can get from a few
million dollars of investment.”
HTTP://WWW.CITYLAB.COM/COMMUTE/2016/05/MAPPING-HOW-STRESSFUL-STREETS-CANBE-FOR-CYCLISTS/482469/?UTM_SOURCE=NL__LINK2_051716
46
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Differences in male, female brain activity found when it comes to cooperation
Source:
Stanford University Medical Center
Summary:
When the researchers asked people to cooperate with a partner, then tracked the brain activity of both
participants, they found that males and females had different patterns of shared brain activity.
Share:
AddThis Sharing Buttons
FULL STORY
Cooperation -- between family members, friends, coworkers and even governments around the world -- is
viewed as a cornerstone of human society. But not everyone cooperates equally, as anyone who's worked on a
group project knows. And one factor shaping a person's approach to cooperation appears to be gender.
Credit: © Rido / Fotolia
Studies have long shown that when faced with a problem that must be solved by cooperating with others,
males and females approach the task differently. Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of
Medicine have discovered how those differences are reflected in brain activity.
When the researchers asked people to cooperate with a partner and then tracked the brain activity of both
participants, they found that males and females had different patterns of brain activity.
47
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
The new findings, to be published online June 8 in Scientific Reports, could offer some clues into how
cooperative behavior may have evolved differently between males and females, and could eventually help
researchers develop new ways to enhance cooperative behavior.
"It's not that either males or females are better at cooperating or can't cooperate with each other," said the
study's senior author, Allan Reiss, MD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of radiology.
"Rather, there's just a difference in how they're cooperating."
Women vs. men
Cooperation -- between family members, friends, coworkers and even governments around the world -- is
viewed as a cornerstone of human society. But not everyone cooperates equally, as anyone who's worked on a
group project knows. And one factor shaping a person's approach to cooperation: sex. Previous behavioral
studies have found that women cooperate more when they're being watched by other women; that men tend to
cooperate better in large groups; and that while a pair of men might cooperate better than a pair of women, in
a mixed-sex pair the woman tends to be more cooperative.
Theories have circulated about why this is, but the brain science behind them has been scarce. "A vast
majority of what we know comes from very sterile, single-person studies done in an MRI machine," said
Joseph Baker, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford and a lead author of the study. The other lead author is
research associate Ning Liu, PhD.
Scanning pairs
To figure out how cooperation is reflected in the brains of men and women who are actively cooperating -rather than just thinking about cooperating while lying in a machine -- the Stanford researchers turned to a
technique called hyperscanning. Hyperscanning involves simultaneously recording the activity in two people's
brains while they interact. And instead of using an MRI that requires participants to lie perfectly still and flat,
the scientists used near-infrared spectroscopy, or NIRS, in which probes are attached to a person's head to
record brain function, allowing them to sit upright and interact more naturally.
The 222 participants in the study were each assigned a partner. Pairs consisted of two males, two females or a
male and a female. Then, while wearing the NIRS probes, each person sat in front a computer, across the table
from their partner. Partners could see each other, but were instructed not to talk. Instead, they were asked to
press a button when a circle on the computer screen changed color. The goal: to press the button
simultaneously with their partner. After each try, the pair were told who had pressed the button sooner and
how much sooner. They had 40 tries to get their timing as close as possible.
"We developed this test because it was simple, and you could easily record responses," said Reiss. "You have
to start somewhere." It isn't modeled after any particular real-world cooperative task, he said.
Sex influences both behavior and brain
On average, male-male pairs performed better than female-female pairs at timing their button pushes more
closely, the researchers found. However, the brain activity in both same-sex pairs was highly synchronized
during the activity, meaning they had high levels of "interbrain coherence."
"Within same-sex pairs, increased coherence was correlated with better performance on the cooperation task,"
Baker said., "However, the location of coherence differed between male-male and female-female pairs."
Surprisingly, though, male-female pairs did as well as male-male pairs at the cooperation task, even though
they didn't show coherence. Since the brains of males and females showed different patterns of activity during
the exercise, more research might shed light on how sex-related differences in the brain inform cooperation
strategy -- at least when it comes to this particular type of cooperation.
An exploratory study
48
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
"This study is pretty exploratory," Baker said. "This certainly isn't probing cooperation in all its
manifestations." There could be other cooperative tasks, for instance, in which female-female pairs best
males.
And the researchers noted they hadn't measured activity in all parts of the brain. "There are a lot of parts of
the brain we didn't assess," Reiss said, pointing out that interbrain coherence may have been present in other
regions of the brain that weren't examined during the task.
As they continue to study what in the brain underlies cooperation, the scientists' results could help explain
how cooperation evolved in humans -- and whether cooperation was selected for differently in males and
females -- as well as inform methods that use biofeedback to teach cooperation skills.
"There are people with disorders like autism who have problems with social cognition," said Baker. "We're
absolutely hoping to learn enough information so that we might be able to design more effective therapies for
them."
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Stanford University Medical Center. The original item
was written by Sarah C.P. Williams. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.
Joseph M. Baker, Ning Liu, Xu Cui, Pascal Vrticka, Manish Saggar, S. M. Hadi Hosseini, Allan L. Reiss. Sex
differences in neural and behavioral signatures of cooperation revealed by fNIRS hyperscanning.Scientific
Reports, 2016; 6: 26492 DOI: 10.1038/srep26492
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160608095546.htm
49
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Between Hell and History
Luc Sante
NOVEMBER 6, 1997 ISSUE
Underworld
by Don DeLillo
Scribner, 827 pp., $27.50
Don DeLillo; drawing by David Levine
Underworld is the title of the archetypal first gangster movie(written by Ben Hecht and directed in 1927 by
Josef von Sternberg), from which so many conventions of plot and lighting and characterization and
incidental business still employed today directly descend. The term “underworld” now carries the title’s
sense—that of gangland, of a separate criminal sphere existing just under the skin of ordinary life—almost
exclusively, so that its original metaphorical connotation has been nearly lost. But then, far fewer people
believe in a literal hell anymore.
The movie Don DeLillo refers to in his panoramic novel, however, is Unterwelt, the product of Sergei
Eisenstein’s period of exile in Berlin in the 1930s. Long thought lost or maybe apocryphal, this film, or a
portion of it, is restored and shown in a gala presentation at Radio City Music Hall in 1974. The audience,
composed of period hipsters, is agog at the hall, its murals, its lavatories. The orchestra appears and its
platform is mechanically lowered into the pit, a procedure greeted with cheers. The Rockettes come out in
West Point gray with plumed dress hats and bondage collars—speculation runs through the theater that they
are actually a troupe of female impersonators. Then the film begins, haltingly. It is dark and oddly, for the
1930s, silent. In some underground complex a mad scientist fires an atomic ray gun at a deformed victim,
“who begins to glow in the dark, jerking and dancing and then looking rather wanly at his arm, which starts to
50
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
melt away.” There does not appear to be a plot, just more and more of the same. After intermission the film
resumes with an escape scene, accompanied by a Prokofiev march camped up by the theater’s Wurlitzer
organ. But then the scene shifts to “a landscape shocked by light, pervasive and overexposed,” with “many
long shots, sky and plain, intercut with foreground figures, their heads and torsos crowding out the
landscape.” Out in the open, the victims of the previous scenes now seem startlingly human, not Eisenstein’s
habitual social types, but individuals freed from class strictures perversely enough by mutilation. “You could
feel a sense of character emerge…a life inside the eyes, a textured set of experiences.” The escapees are
recaptured; the footage breaks off.
The film, unlike anything Eisenstein is actually known to have made, seems peculiarly plausible—maybe
your imagination, prompted by DeLillo, devises its own montage of fragments from Fritz
Lang’s Metropolis and Dr. Mabuse, intercut with landscapes fromQue Viva Mexico. Certainly the
circumstances of its showing are exactly true to the period, the meeting of camp dazzle and countercultural
scholarship that fleetingly took place in the 1970s. As a historical novelist, DeLillo is pitch-perfect, evoking
times and places with deft, minimal strokes. The scene may at first appear gratuitous, an invention for its own
sake, but it is far from idle. As Klara Sax, an artist, watches the ending, she muses:
All Eisenstein wants you to see, in the end, are the contradictions of being. You look at the faces on the screen
and you see the mutilated yearning, the inner divisions of people and systems, and how forces will clash and
fasten, compelling the swerve from evenness that marks a thing lastingly.
That might serve as a mission statement for the novel. The imaginary movie, meanwhile, provides one of its
many sidelong glimpses of hell.
The title’s sense is at least double: in addition to that infernal connotation, there is also the suggestion of life
taking place in the shadows, not outside convention but beneath history. But then hell and history overlap in
the book; both are determined by nuclear weaponry. Bomb novels aren’t very fashionable these days, unlike
the 1950s and 1960s, when they were issued in batches, either Countdown to Apocalypse or Wanderers in a
Blasted Landscape. Underworld, however, is a bomb novel in the sense that it is a novel of modern history:
the bomb sits, just offstage, throughout. All consciousness includes knowledge of the bomb; every decision is
somehow informed by the presence of the bomb; every action occurs within the shadow of the bomb.
The book’s historical range is as sweeping as its bulk suggests, from 1951 to some not quite definite present
day, which might be right now or might lie a few years hence. Between those two points, the chronology runs
backward; successive clumps of narrative are terraced in stages from 1992 back to 1951. As in many bomb
novels, the time-line begins with an event that can be retrospectively seen as marking the division between
edenic and fallen worlds. That convention of bomb novels—nuclear fission as forbidden fruit—is implicit
here; the symbolic fall is not explicitly tied to Hiroshima or Los Alamos in 1945. The event depicted in the
opening set piece is, rather, what might have been the last innocent expression of community: the 1951
pennant-race game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers decided at the last minute by
Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard ’round the world” home run.
This episode, published in Harper’s several years ago as “Pafko at the Wall,” is a tour de force of cinematic
writing—not text that is camera-ready (as is practiced by too many writers these days), but that challenges the
movies at their own game. It zooms, dollies, tracks, cuts from close-ups to long shots and back, assembles
thousands of bits of visual and auditory information into a montage that spectacularly renders the entire
experience. Not for nothing does DeLillo evoke Eisenstein. His montage, though, made of words, can move
on several tracks at once. He can not only deliver the effect of single shots spliced together using simple
sentences (“A man slowly wiping his glasses. A staring man. A man flexing the stiffness out of his limbs”),
and that of watching a ball game on television by sequencing the radio announcer’s comments antiphonally
between crowd scenes and darting views of players in the outfield, he can also cut suddenly into and out of
various viewpoints—four of them, although the effect is multitudinous. We enter and leave the game with
51
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Cotter Martin, skipping school for the day to sneak into the Polo Grounds, and make rapid visits to Willie
Mays’s inability to shake a radio jingle, the announcer Russ Hodges’s oncoming cold and drift of memories,
and the assortment of observations and emotions that succeed each other in J. Edgar Hoover’s mind.
Hoover is attending the game as the unlikely fourth member of a group also composed of Frank Sinatra,
Jackie Gleason, and Toots Shor. They really were all there together, as DeLillo has noted in interviews. The
significance of the game in both baseball history and New York City folklore—the most dramatic event of the
numerous subway series that took place in the 1940s and 1950s, when the city still had three teams and
distinct neighborhoods to support them—was buttressed in DeLillo’s mind, he has also said, by a coincidence:
the report of the game in The New York Times was balanced across the page by another story with a headline
the same size, an account of a Soviet nuclear test in Kazakhstan. Hoover receives word of this test from an
agent during the game. People throw paper from the stands in the final innings, including, page by page, an
entire issue of Life; a page that falls on Hoover’s shoulder reproduces half of Brueghel’sTriumph of Death.
After Thomson’s homer the ball rolls through the stands as people scramble for it. Cotter Martin snatches it
and takes it home to his family’s Harlem apartment. He makes the mistake of telling his father about it,
though, and the father, Manx Martin, who is unemployed and always looking for an angle, takes the ball up to
Yankee Stadium to sell it to someone in the line of those waiting to buy World Series tickets. Thus the ball
begins to roll through the book as a sort of Grail, one of those migratory objects that are part character and
part leitmotif, like the overcoat in Gogol’s The Overcoat and in Julien Duvivier’s 1942 film Tales of
Manhattan. Here, though, we’re never exactly sure what happens to the ball. It may have been bought by a
father for his son, who became a post-Vietnam drifter and may have resold it to a memorabilia fanatic, who
may in turn have sold it to Nick Shay, our protagonist. By the time he buys it, though, it is by no means
certain that it is still the same ball, although it does bear that apparently convincing smear of green paint from
when it hit the foul post.
His purchase has a rueful irony about it: on October 3, 1951, he was a teenager in the Bronx listening to the
game on the radio and secretly rooting for the losing Dodgers. The game for him has a significance not unlike
the one it has for the novel as a whole—the following day he killed a man, for not much of a reason, and
thereafter spent years in various juvenile institutions. In the historical present he has become an executive of a
waste management company, and lives in Arizona. He and the other major characters are linked by events in
the pre-game, pre-threat past, and do not much intersect subsequently. He had an affair with Klara Sax when
he was delivering cases of soda to groceries and she was a neighborhood wife, older than him and restless;
now she is a world-famous artist. Her then husband, Albert Bronzini, was a science teacher; now he is retired,
a flâneur and maybe a sort of minor saint. He was also chess tutor to Nick’s brother, Matt, who looked like a
prodigy at the time; he is now a physicist, and in the 1970s worked at nuclear bases in the New Mexico desert.
Sister Edgar, who taught both brothers at the local parochial school, is still there in the Bronx, as ancient now
as she then seemed.
The minor characters, all of them vivid, number in the dozens. Their connections with the major figures are
seldom direct; sometimes the links are entirely metaphorical. Even aside from its chronological scheme,
which succeeds in moving simultaneously forward from October 3, 1951, to the present and backward to the
following day, the novel’s organization might be said to be horizontal. Like the migration from viewpoint to
viewpoint at the fateful game, like the ball’s migration from owner to owner in the subsequent decades, the
narrative moves laterally from scene to scene, life to life, against the steady undertow of time.
The book’s Part Two, for example, which is identified as set between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s,
begins with a description of a videotape that has come to occupy the airwaves: recorded by a child from the
back of a car, it shows a man in another car driving along, waving at the camera, when suddenly he slumps—
he has been shot from alongside by an unknown assailant, a serial murderer who has become known as the
Texas Highway Killer. The video keeps playing on TV screens in the scenes that follow, which are not
necessarily connected one with the next, moving from Nick’s wife, Marian, to his colleague Brian Glassic, to
52
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
the baseball-memorabilia fetishist, Marvin Lundy, to Nick, to Matt, to Bronzini, to Sister Edgar, to Marian
and Brian, beginning an affair—and then suddenly we are with a character who comes out of nowhere. He is
someplace semirural, seems idle, exudes some kind of nameless anomie; the scene appears to be drifting away
from the book. And then we suddenly realize that he is the Texas Highway Killer, in person. The effect is
electrifying; the narrative in that instant seems to own the world.
This promise is met in Part Five, which travels from point to point in time and place during the 1950s and
1960s. Alternating with scenes of Nick’s life, from reformatory to courtship, are public and private incidents,
the latter from the lives of peripheral characters, such as the father and son who may have bought the ball
outside Yankee Stadium. The public moments include views of a civil rights march in the South in 1964 (seen
through the eyes of Cotter Martin’s sister), a two-part account of Hoover’s and Clyde Tolson’s appearance at
Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in 1966, and renditions of a series of club dates
around the country by Lenny Bruce in 1962, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The latter scenes have a
particular documentary exactness about them, or appear to. As in the ball game prologue, the narrative homes
in on individual points of view like a telepathic police radio, but with such apparent casualness that the splitsecond soliloquies just register as crowd noise in the room:
There was a Latin band in the lounge doing mambos and cha-chas and a number of Long Island sexpots were
here, looking for second husbands. They traveled in pairs or with a sister, even, like a hunter and her gun
bearer, one divorced, one single—dating an orthopedist here and an iffy sort of businessman there. Says he’s
an executive in the hotel linen supply business? But when I call on him on the phone? I have to ask for
Marty? And his name is Fred?
Lenny Bruce’s voice and the drift of his routines are so convincingly rendered I was almost persuaded that
DeLillo had relied on transcripts or recordings—but then he is current fiction’s most astounding ventriloquist,
as anyone will attest who has read Libraand appreciated his hyperrealist conjuring of Marguerite Oswald in
particular. Bruce, of course, is obsessed with the imminent nuclear war: “We’re all gonna die!” he screams,
his coat over his head, at Basin Street West in San Francisco and Mister Kelly’s in Chicago and the Waves in
Miami Beach, between routines:
…and in the movie version it’s Rod Steiger playing Khrushchev as an Actors’ Studio chief of state. Dig it,
he’s deep, he’s misunderstood, he’s got the accent down pat, the shaved head, he does the screaming fits, he
does the motivation—lonely boy from the coal pits ruthlessly fights his way to the top but all he’s really
looking for is a wisecracking dame who’ll give him some back talk and make him laugh once in a while….
We see his tender feminine side when he has an affair in a coat closet with an American double agent played
by Kim Novak in a butch haircut.
These scenes have a cumulative effect that is the complex literary equivalent of a process shot—like the
leaves of a calendar flipping rapidly or streaks criss-crossing a map and lighting up dots indicating cities.
They convey the motion of time and the migration of facts between public and private spheres that create
what we retrospectively name history. Bruce is a perfect foil for DeLillo here because his shtick involved
among other things an ongoing demonstration of how news is at once reality and artifice—he could articulate
the half-formed thoughts of his audience (“We’re all gonna die!“) and then turn around and look at the same
business from far away, maybe the future. In its rapid swerve from immediacy to distance, Bruce’s
improvisatory genius—DeLillo is particularly brilliant at showing how Bruce made up his routines as he went
along, stumbling and lurching and then seizing a riff and running with it—was mimicking how history is
built.
For DeLillo, though, history is more than just a narrative. The book’s third paragraph begins, “Longing on a
vast scale is what makes history.” In Libra he showed Lee Harvey Oswald walking through an empty Dallas
Sunday afternoon:
53
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
He felt the loneliness he always hated to admit to, a vaster isolation than Russia, stranger dreams, a dead
white glare burning down. He wanted to carry himself with a clear sense of role, make a move one time that
was not disappointed. He walked in the shadows of insurance towers and bank buildings. He thought the only
end to isolation was to reach the point where he was no longer separated from the true struggles that went on
around him. The name we give this point is history.
Here he enters the mind of Hoover, just after he has received word of the Soviet nuclear test:
Edgar looks at the faces around him, open and hopeful. He wants to feel a compatriot’s nearness and affinity.
All these people formed by language and climate and popular songs and breakfast foods and the jokes they
tell and the cars they drive have never had anything in common so much as this, that they are sitting in the
furrow of destruction. He tries to feel a belonging, an opening of his old stop-cocked soul.
History is a connective tissue, or the dream of one, a name for life outside oneself, for that which connects all
human beings except the subjective observer, a narrative that even though it takes up the whole world can
only be seen from a distance. The bomb is a challenge to this notion, because while it manifestly is history, a
cause and effect and article of history, it also invades internal life, not as a consequence of altering external
life the way ordinary war does, but by its potential to do so, sheathed but omnipresent. The bomb,
undetonated, makes history within the psyche.
So it is that those characters whose physical interaction is long past, or possibly never took place at all, are
nevertheless connected by this historical ectoplasm. This can manifest itself in tiny and subtle or in broad and
physical ways: Matt’s career as a nuclear physicist or Klara’s vast artwork on a canvas made up of
decommissioned bombers arrayed in the desert. Sometimes, actually, the manifestations are altogether too
broad for the book’s own good. DeLillo, who has never been afraid of large metaphors, launches a few here
that threaten to topple over. Nick’s field is waste management, which metaphorically takes care both of his
post-homicide, post-Bronx atonement in the desert, and of what occupies the post-bomb world, in the form of
nuclear waste. However casually deployed, though, the subject of garbage would all by itself set off alarms in
anyone’s subtext detector. Here, in addition, it works altogether too symmetrically, and may give the
misleading impression that the rest of the work is similarly programmatic. This is especially unfortunate in a
book that hostile critics (and at least one seemingly approving reviewer) have depicted as a project somehow
aimed at achieving greatness by force of will.
But the risk comes with the territory. DeLillo works with enormous canvases and even larger themes. Private
though he may be as a personality, he is a public artist, immediate and declarative and passionate about the
state of the country and the world. In various interviews as well as in his last novel, Mao II, he has said that
the writer’s task amounts to, in the current phrase, speaking truth to power. As far back as The Names (1982),
he had a character say, “If I were a writer… how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating,
to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.” This sentiment
may at first sound antithetical to the role of a public artist, but serious literature’s marginality does have the
privilege of rendering it immune to the kind of a priori censorship that prevails in, say, the movies. It is,
however, subject to censorship by neglect, by burial in the marketplace, and a way to counteract that is by
working on a large scale.
DeLillo, then, may have to print some of his themes in ten-foot letters on billboards so that nobody can miss
them. He would not be the first great writer to do so. But neither is this his sole strategy, nor is Underworld a
decorated thesis, constructed of themes in various dimensions. It is a kind of world unto itself, for all its
bearing on the one we inhabit, and it is composed of a vast accretion of small details. There are beautiful little
throwaways, for example the evergreen romance between Marvin Lundy, who speaks in Yiddish inflections,
and his English war bride, who supplies on request the words he can’t bring to mind, which would be enough
for a freestanding work by any number of other writers.
54
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
In that subplot as elsewhere,
DeLillo balances the characters’ perfectly observed idiomatic speech with his own laconic, rough-edged
brushstroke of a voice, and when he is attributing thoughts to those characters manages somehow to frame
them in a style that glides between their voices and his. The documentary quality of his writing is on display
on every page, and constantly pleasing not merely for the licked-finish illusionism with which he reproduces
speech, or the camera eye he brings to bear on diverse contexts (a swingers’ convention at a Southern
California resort, a Harlem bar in 1951, a drug party held by bomb researchers, a navigation cubicle in a B52), but for the ways in which the renditions of those things will depart from the known or expected. Large
thematic strokes may define his architecture, but within lies continual surprise at the fluidity and resilience of
the human condition. All he wants you to see, in the end, are the contradictions.
HTTP://WWW.NYBOOKS.COM/ARTICLES/1997/11/06/BETWEEN-HELL-AND-HISTORY/
55
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
My reading anxieties, numbered
REBECCA HUSSEY05-22-16
1. I am eight books behind on my Goodreads challenge. I thought I’d push myself and aim for 100 books this
year, but I may have overshot. I consider myself a slow reader.
2. I read slowly, but I also have a hard time remembering what I read. I am capable of forgetting plot details
like you wouldn’t believe.
3. Perhaps my amazing ability to forget what I’ve read means I actually read too fast. Maybe I should read
even more slowly and then I’d get more out of the books I do read.
4. But then maybe I wouldn’t.
5. I’m capable of reading a good number of books a year — anywhere from 50-100 every year in the last
decade or so — but I have a hard time sitting still to read for long.
6. I read as many books as I do while being a slow reader and having a hard time sitting still because I don’t
do much else in my life. This probably means I read too much.
7. I DO do other things in my life — I have a job, I have a kid, I have friends, I have a partner, I hike and ride
my bike — but I still feel like I should have more hobbies or something. Hobbies besides reading.
8. I don’t fall in love with particular books as often as I used to.
9. I don’t like novels as much as I used to. It seems like people say this a lot as they get older. They tend to
turn to nonfiction more and more as they age. I am getting old.
10. I like doing bookish things — buying books, cataloguing books, reading bookish twitter, organizing my
books. Perhaps I like doing these things more than I actually like reading books?
11. I have over 500 books in my house that I haven’t read. Perhaps I will never read them?
12. I feel bad for picking up library books or egalleys before I pick up books I’ve bought that have been
sitting on my shelves for a long time. Why do I collect all these books I may never read?
13. What will my son do with all my books once I’m gone and he inherits them? I’m not worried about the
fate of the books themselves, but about the burden on my son.
14. Why, when someone asks me what good books I’ve read lately, does my mind go completely blank?
15. I haven’t read the Harry Potter books beyond the first one. I haven’t read The Hunger Games. I haven’t
read Fifty Shades of Gray or Twilight. I’m afraid I don’t belong here at Book Riot because of these things.
16. I don’t even know a bunch of the things I probably should have read, just to keep up.
17. I’m a specialist in eighteenth-century British literature, but I haven’t read anything from that period in a
few years.
18. I read too many contemporary books.
19. I’m also annoyed at people who say you should focus on the classics. I could regret this at some point,
however.
56
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
20. Will I regret all the hours I spent reading when I’m on my deathbed?
21. Will I regret all the hours I didn’t spend reading when I’m on my deathbed?
22. I want to listen to more audiobooks, but I frequently listen to podcasts instead. But I’m missing an
opportunity to read more books because of this.
23. Almost all the podcasts I listen to are bookish ones, which is fine, but there are so many great non-bookish
podcasts out there, and I’m missing out.
24. I have almost 600 books on my Goodreads to-read list, most of which I’ll never get to.
25. I don’t want to get rid of the list or take any books off it, though, because what if I do decide to read those
books someday.
26. I don’t read enough: books in translation, classics, history, biography, romance, science fiction, fantasy,
young adult, thrillers, and westerns. Also self-help books and science.
27. I did an amazing job posting regularly on my blog for a few years, but now I hardly ever do.
28. I didn’t do the cool things on my blog I hoped to, mainly to write about books in a personal but also
critical fashion that digs deeply into books but with an entertaining and highly personal voice.
29. I’m actually not capable of writing like this.
30. I made a lot of great blog friends who don’t get much attention from me these days. I miss them, but I also
continue to not post on my blog and not comment on theirs.
31. My son likes books, but what if he decides in the future he doesn’t anymore? What if I am so into reading
that he purposely goes in the opposite direction and refuses to have anything to do with books?
32. Not that not reading is a bad thing (except, of course, I think it is, or I can’t help but think it is, given all
the reading I’ve done in my life). I want my son to be a reader. But I also worry about the effects of worrying
about this.
33. In spite of trying not to be a book snob, trying hard, I retain some traces of book snobbishness. I’m
working on this.
34. For someone who loves reading, really truly loves reading, I have a lot of anxieties about it. I should
probably figure out how to stop worrying so much.
35. But I worry that it’s my nature to be a worrier, so there you go.
http://bookriot.com/2016/05/22/reading-anxieties-numbered/
57
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
How One Colorado City Instantly Created Affordable Housing
Relaxing rules on “Accessory Dwelling Units” drastically increased affordable housing stock in the small city
of Durango.

ANTHONY FLINT

May 17, 2016
Iriana Shiyan/Shutterstock.com
Planners call them Accessory Dwelling Units—plus the inevitable acronym, ADUs. What they mean are the
granny flats and in-law apartments sprinkled throughout cities and towns across the land, the finished
basements, above-garage studios, rehabbed carriage houses, and other outbuildings on parcels generally zoned
for single-family homes.
But here’s what they really are: an instant source of affordable housing, if only they could be freed from
extensive restrictions that cities and towns have in place that tightly limit who can live there.
When I was at the Office for Commonwealth Development under Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, we
tried to increase the supply of new multi-family housing at smart growth locations, in town centers or by
transit stations. Yet it quickly became apparent that there were thousands of existing homes already, in the
form of Accessory Dwelling Units. The trick was just to open them up.
58
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
This was no small task, as it turned out. Fueled by NIMBYism and concerns about density and school
enrollment and parking and congestion, cities and towns wrote reams of codes requiring that property owners
prove any occupants of ADUs were actually related. If not, owners could expect to be visited by inspectors
checking out separate entrances and working kitchens and evidence of occupation, and brace for a fine. Eagleeyed neighbors spotting a second mailbox or satellite dish were more than happy to alert the authorities.
There were thousands of existing homes already, in the form of Accessory Dwelling Units. The trick was to
open them up.
In the face of this kind of code paralysis and regulatory over-reach, it’s understandable that reformers would
just give up, and try to change policy in other ways. But in recent years, a sensible program of
disentanglement has emerged from an unlikely place—the small city of Durango, Colorado, just north of the
New Mexico border.
Conjured in the era of railways and mining, Durango has become a visitor destination, close to national parks,
monuments, and forests, the Mesa Verde cliff-dwellers World Heritage Site, skiing, mountain biking, and
whitewater rafting. It doesn’t quite have the affordability problem of Aspen or Telluride, but housing is a
major issue for the array of incomes in the population of nearly 17,000.
From 2009 to 2013, confronting development pressures and concerned about housing, Durango overhauled its
Land Use and Development Code, which called out Accessory Dwelling Units as an acceptable component of
housing stock. A predictable process with reasonable standards was put in place for building new ADUs: a
limit on the number of occupants (no more than five unrelated people), rules about how small the living space
could be (550 square feet), an owner-occupied home requirement (no absentee landlords renting out both the
home and the ADU), a ban on short-term vacation rentals such as through Airbnb, and design guidelines for
balconies, window placements, and exterior staircases.
The big problem, however, was what to do with existing ADUs.
Since many of these homes were technically illegal, a form of “ADU Amnesty” was launched. Starting with
two neighborhoods as a pilot program, the city asked owners to come forward about ADUs on their property.
Residents could fess up in three categories—pre-1941, when there were essentially no rules about ADUs;
1941 to 1989, when ADUs could be considered legal but non-conforming use; and 1989 to the present, when
tighter zoning was in place.
If somebody established an ADU completely under the radar, they were asked to pay the fee they were
supposed to pay, ranging from $2,000 to $9,000, and the property got logged into the city’s inventory
database. Owners signed affidavits on basic structural safety, and filled out forms on the number of occupants,
age of the structure, and the utilities in place, and furnished a photo.
Getting the transactional details on the record was basically a process of regularizing what was a robust
informal economy. And with the existing ADUs thus inventoried, and the rules in place for new ADUs, the
city was all set, right? Not exactly. Opposition was fierce, and clever.
Communities across the nation are confronting this very same issue.
Rebellion in the pilot neighborhoods organized as CHEN: Citizens for Healthy Established Neighborhoods,
which churned out letters to editors, op-ed essays, and leaflets with a red slash across “ADU.” The question
was posed: affordable housing, or slums? One resident mapped her neighborhood and came up with hundreds
of units already there, and hundreds more that would be enabled. That didn’t take long to make the front page.
59
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
City Hall and the planning office got mercilessly picketed, and somebody placed an ad in the local newspaper
touting free building lots—listing the telephone number of the planning office as the place to call for more
information.
The planners held firm, making a few minor adjustments, but not compromising on the basic principles of the
program. They also launched a public education campaign, producing a video, Know Your ADUs. Amid the
dark talk about slums, they kept it light and accessible—even fun, to the extent that was possible, what with
lexicon like “legal non-conforming use” being part of the conversation.
The leaders of the effort, the planners Vicki Vandegrift and Scott Shine, shared a game at their presentation at
the American Planning Association National Planning Conference last month in Phoenix. Yes, it was time to
play “Unit or Not a Unit?”—a series of photographs that demonstrated how some single-family homes look
like ADUs, while many ADUs are attractively woven into the urban fabric. (As the quiz went along, we all
got better at spotting the dead giveaways—double meters and two street numbers, for instance).
One thing is certain, and that’s the number of communities across the nation confronting this very same issue.
The APA session, theatrically titled Accessory Dwelling Units: The Durango Experience, was packed. A long
line formed at the microphone for questions. Granny flats and in-law apartments are rising to the top of the
affordability conversation from Boston to Seattle.
There may be no secret sauce for getting this done, but demonstrating the benefits—to owners, and to the
community at large—is surely a centerpiece. Planners need to be flexible, but not compromise. And above all,
stay positive. Even if they’re forced to change their telephone numbers.
Top photo: Iriana Shiyan/Shutterstock.com.
http://www.citylab.com/design/2016/05/how-one-colorado-city-instantly-created-affordablehousing/483027/?utm_source=nl__link3_051716
60
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Sea snakes have extra sense for water living
Source:
University of Adelaide
Summary:
The move from life on land to life in the sea has led to the evolution of a new sense for sea snakes,
an Australian study suggests.
Share:
AddThis Sharing Buttons
FULL STORY
The head of a Beaked sea snake (Hydrophis schistosus) and a close up of a single scale on head. Each scale
has many 'scale sensilla' that protrude from it's surface, these small organs may allow aquatic snakes to 'feel'
their environment. Scale bar, 3 mm.
Credit: Jenna Crowe-Riddell
The move from life on land to life in the sea has led to the evolution of a new sense for sea snakes, a
University of Adelaide-led study suggests.
The international team, led by researchers in the University's School of Biological Sciences, studied tiny and
poorly understood structures on the heads of snakes called 'scale sensilla'. The research has been published in
the Royal Society journal Open Biology.
61
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
"Land snakes and many lizards have small raised structures on the scales on their heads -- called scale sensilla
-- that they use to sense objects by direct touch," says lead author Jenna Crowe-Riddell, University of
Adelaide PhD student.
"We found that the scale sensilla of sea snakes were much more dome-shaped than the sensilla of land snakes,
with the organs protruded further from the animals' scales, potentially making them more likely to be able to
sense vibrations from all directions. We also found that scale sensilla on some of the fully aquatic snakes
covered a much higher proportion of the scales' surface.
"We believe sea snakes use these organs to sense objects at a distance by 'feeling' movements in the water.
This hydrodynamic sense is not an option for land animals. In water, a new way of sensing the environment
becomes possible."
Sea snakes evolved from land-living snakes, taking to life in the sea between 9 and 20 million years ago. They
spend the majority of their lives at sea: hunting fish, swimming and diving using a paddle-shaped tail, and
coming up to the water's surface to breathe air. Although they can also see, little is known about the
underwater sensory perception of the snakes.
"Every movement of a fin or flipper generates vibrations underwater, like when you drop a stone into a pond
and the surrounding ripples spread to every corner of the pond," says Ms Crowe-Riddell.
The researchers, including from the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa and from the University of
Western Australia, looked at 19 species of snakes, including fully-aquatic, semi-aquatic and land species, and
measured the coverage of sensilla over single scales on their heads.
They used DNA sequencing to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships between the snakes; and used
microscope imaging and specially developed software to automatically detect the small organs from silicone
casts of snake heads. They also examined the shape of the sensilla using scanning electron microscopy.
"What we now need to do," says lead scientist Dr Kate Sanders, "is to investigate the physiology of these
scale sensilla and demonstrate exactly what they can sense. If they are hydrodynamic tactile sense organs, as
we suspect, then by comparing them to the scale sensilla of closely related land-snakes we can start to
understand how evolution has changed these organs from direct-touch sensors to distance vibration-sensors
that work underwater."
The researchers believe being able to sense vibrations underwater would mean potential impacts on sea snake
populations from man-derived disturbances such as motor boats and seismic surveys.
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Adelaide. Note: Materials may be edited
for content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.
Jenna M. Crowe-Riddell, Edward P. Snelling, Amy P. Watson, Anton Kyuseop Suh, Julian C. Partridge, Kate
L. Sanders. The evolution of scale sensilla in the transition from land to sea in elapid snakes.Open Biology,
2016; 6 (6): 160054 DOI: 10.1098/rsob.160054
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160608104250.htm
62
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Kilauea: Up close and personal with red hot science!
This geologist has been taking whatever Kilauea and other active volcanoes dish out for decades, gathering
extensive data on eruptions
Many of Alaska's more than 130 volcanoes are located along the 1,550-mile-long Aleutian Arc. It extends
from the Alaska mainland west toward Kamchatka, Russia, and forms the northern part of the tectonically
active "ring of fire" girding the Pacific Ocean basin. To learn more about volcanic hazards in this volatile
region, 25 researchers from 11 institutions studied the Aleutian Arc. The research addresses volcanic systems
-- from magma storage to the chemistry and style of eruptions -- as well as the earthquake and tsunami
hazards that can affect the entire Pacific.
Arc magmatism like that in the Aleutian Islands is the most important process that generates the new crust
that makes up Earth's continents, geoscientists have found. Understanding the genesis of plutonic rocks -those that crystallized from slowly-cooling magma -- is the key to knowing more about continental crust
formation. The Aleutian arc is a unique place to carry out such research because of the extensive exposures of
plutonic rocks, perhaps more than any other such island arc on Earth Find out more in this discovery.
Hawaii's Kilauea volcano is one of the best places on Earth to study processes within basaltic volcanoes. Its
high eruption frequency, easy access to lavas, and distinct geologic setting far from plate boundaries or
continents allow researchers to address fundamental problems related to active volcanoes. Kilauea is also one
of the longest currently erupting volcanoes -- its current active period began in 1983!
63
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Another constant at Kilauea, besides the flowing lava, has been University of Hawaii geologist Mike Garcia.
With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Garcia has been leading studies of Kilauea for a
generation, adding to the extensive knowledge base on this volcano.
Two of the primary goals are to determine what has triggered Kilauea's effusive, explosive cycles over the last
2200 years and when long eruptions, such as the current one, will stop.
Volcanoes are one of the most powerful natural hazards on Earth, but supervolcanoes are so large that they
have the ability to alter the world's climate. Michael Manga from the University of California, Berkeley, is
investigating a supervolcano that erupted hundreds of thousands of years ago, and could do so again. Seven
hundred and fifty thousand years ago, an area in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of northern California was the
scene of an Armageddon. A volcanic eruption occurred that was so large it collapsed the mouth of the volcano
and left a 20-mile-wide crater, called a caldera. Known as the Long Valley Caldera, this "super" volcano's
eruption spread debris across the western half of the United States, and its impacts were felt around the world.
See more in this video.
Credit: NBC Learn in partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF)
The research in this episode was supported by the following NSF awards:

#1449744, Uncovering Hotspot Volcanism: Mantle Melting, Magmatic Plumbing, Explosive Eruptions and
Crustal Contamination at Kilauea Volcano, Hawaii
64
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

#1347915, Nickel Systematics in Olivine as Fingerprints of Magmatic Processes in Hawaiian Basalts

#1219955, Hawaiian Ridge Age, Source, Composition and Melt Flux Variations: Implications for Plume
Dynamics and Plate Kinematics

#1118741, Collaborative Research: Magmatic Evolution of Kilauea Volcano, Hawaii: Past, Present and
Future
Miles O'Brien, Science Nation Correspondent and Producer
https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/science_nation/hawaiivolcanoes.jsp?WT.mc_id=USNSF_51
65
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
When High Technology Meets Immortality
Nathaniel Rich
JUNE 9, 2016 ISSUE
Zero K
by Don DeLillo
Scribner, 274 pp., $27.00
Dominique Nabokov
Don DeLillo, New York City, 1990s
In Zero K Don DeLillo has found the perfect physical repository for his oracular visions, his end-time
reveries, his balladry of dread. The place is called the Convergence. It is a sealed, self-sufficient, subterranean
cryogenic facility, funded by wealthy patrons and secret government agencies. Within are chambers in which
the bodies of hundreds of wealthy patrons are frozen in gleaming pods. The essential organs are stored within
smaller pods. The bodies and organs are to rest in a state of suspended animation until our inevitable,
impending apocalypse has run its course. One character calls this “faith-based technology.” It requires several
forms of faith: that the pods will remain frozen indefinitely; that future civilizations will be able to reanimate
the bodies and grant them immortality; that life in the distant future will be preferable to death.
The Convergence, which is buried underground in the southern Kazakh steppe, has the appearance of an
intergalactic spaceship. The facility looks much like the compound in Alex Garland’s film Ex
Machina (2015), with which Zero K shares a tonal affinity. Access tubes and airlocks and sliding walls
connect long hushed hallways lined with pastel-colored doors. Most of the doors do not open and those that
do require the assistance of an encoded wristband, the kind one might wear at an all-inclusive Caribbean
66
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
resort. The “veer,” a horizontal elevator, travels between various numbered levels, the most distant requiring
special clearance. A visitor’s bedroom is not so much a room as it is a “scant roomscape.” Wandering the
halls are mute, spectral figures draped in priestly gowns, a young boy “in a motorized wheelchair that
resembled a toilet,” and prostitutes from former Soviet states. The Convergence is not merely a laboratory,
after all. It is also a conceptual art project, “a model of shape and form, a wilderness vision, all lines and
angles and jutted wings, set securely nowhere.”
Within it are various installations. We encounter screens projecting images of catastrophic floods, tornadoes,
and war in the Middle East; a catacomb of plastic mannequins; a room in which all four walls are painted with
a continuous image of the room and its furniture; an empty white marble room in which a small barefoot girl
cowers silently in the corner. These tableaux appear suddenly and often without comment, like images
glimpsed while surfing late-night public access television. The Convergence, writes DeLillo, “was a form of
visionary art…with broad implications.” The same description applies to Zero K and, for that matter, much of
DeLillo’s fiction. His vision is ironic, sere, crackling with static like a horror film. But those broad
implications—what are they exactly?
Our escort through the Convergence is a thirty-four-year-old American named Jeffrey Lockhart. He spends
his days “in middling drift,” working at jobs with titles like “cross-stream pricing consultant,”
“implementation analyst—clustered and nonclustered environments,” “human resource planner—global
mobility,” “solutions research manager—simulation models.” He does not appear to have any better sense of
what these words mean than we do. Lockhart is an immediately familiar DeLilloan character, a sibling of the
television executive–turned–documentary filmmaker David Bell (Americana, 1971), the non-Germanspeaking Hitler academic Jack Gladney (White Noise, 1985), the freelance technical writer James Axton (The
Names, 1982). Lockhart is afraid of other people’s houses and addicted to the “puppet drug of personal
technology.” He is obsessed with definitions and the naming of common things: lint,roller, hanger. “The
drift,” he says, “was integral to the man I was.”
Jeffrey’s most distinguishing characteristic is his pedigree: his father is Ross Lockhart, a titan of global
finance. Ross is a Richard Branson figure, a self-made man; his actual birth name, we learn, was the
insufficiently virile “Nicholas Satterswaite.” “Broad-shouldered and agile,” Ross “made an early reputation
by analyzing the profit impact of natural disasters.” He wears gym suits and speaks in short, declarative
sentences. He is not only one of the Convergence’s major benefactors—he’s also a client.
His wife, Jeffrey’s stepmother, Artis Martineau, is in the terminal throes of several illnesses, and he has
brought her to the facility for freezing.* Most of the people entombed within the Convergence are terminally
ill, but not all. Those who wish to enter cryonic suspension before their time are ushered to a special unit
called Zero K. As Artis approaches her freeze-by date, Ross decides that he will enter Zero K and join her in
suspended animation.
“All plots tend to move deathward,” says Jack Gladney in White Noise, but Zero Kbegins steeped in death
and never leaves it. The plot does not advance very far beyond its premise. Jeffrey is disturbed, despite their
distant relationship, by his father’s decision to enter suspension prematurely. But Ross is more fearful of
death than he lets on and, at the last moment, he has a change of heart. During an interlude, set two years later
in New York City, Jeffrey drifts his way into a relationship with Emma Breslow, a counselor at a school for
children with learning disabilities. Emma struggles to understand her adopted adolescent son, Stak, whose
obsessive fascination with disaster arcana mirrors that of White Noise’s Heinrich Gladney (and, for that
matter, DeLillo):
He’s interested in numbers. High, medium, low. Place-names and numbers. Shanghai, he will say. Zero point
zero one inches precipitation. Mumbai, he will say. He loves to say Mumbai. Mumbai…. Riyadh, he will say.
He is disappointed when Riyadh loses out to another city. An emotional letdown.
67
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Jeffrey takes Stak to an art gallery where the lone object, on display for the last twenty years, is a single rock.
This gallery show recalls the scenes that open and close DeLillo’s previous novel, Point Omega (2010), set at
the Museum of Modern Art during an exhibition of Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho. In Gordon’s
installation, Alfred Hitchcock’s film is projected at about 1/12th speed, extending its running time to a full
day. The sustained contemplation of the black-and-white film in a dark room forces its viewer into a depth of
reflection—and boredom—that, DeLillo suggests, is rarely possible in our culture:
The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. This was the point. To see what’s here,
finally to look and to know you’re looking, to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening in the
smallest registers of motion.
DeLillo has always been skeptical of traditional plot convention but this skepticism has passed through three
different phases. His first seven novels, Americana throughThe Names, are filled with action, but little
happens that needs to be taken too seriously, by either the characters or the reader. A representative exchange
in The Names:
“What happens next?”
“Why does something have to happen next?”
Among the Himalayas of his middle career—White Noise, Libra (1988), Underworld(1997)—he allowed
greater concessions to narrative convention. (Mao II, with its indifferent, fragmented plot, is in this aspect a
throwback to the earlier phase.) Matters of great consequence occur, not only within the lives of the characters
but in the life of the nation: an environmental disaster, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the perfection of
the hydrogen bomb. The depth and richness of the narratives align with the scope of his vision. In the five
novels since Underworld, DeLillo has taken a third approach. He has slowed the machinery of plot, applying
obsessive, prolonged scrutiny to a single bleak scenario, much in the way that Lauren Hartke, in The Body
Artist(2001), spends hours watching a live video feed of a deserted road in a small Finnish city at night. “The
dead times,” thinks Hartke, “were best.”
The Body Artist takes place almost entirely within a single house, inhabited by two characters, one of whom
may be a ghost; Falling Man (2007) occurs in the three days following September 11, ending where it
begins; Cosmopolis (2003) is a single crosstown limousine ride. Point Omega is set over the course of a week
“somewhere south of nowhere in the Sonoran Desert or maybe it was the Mojave Desert or another desert
altogether”—an American analogue of Zero K’s Central Asian nowhere. The Iraq War strategist Richard
Elster has retreated there to be alone with the horizon and the passage of time. Point Omega is named after
Teilhard de Chardin’s notion that human thought is rapidly approaching a point of maximum complexity,
which will terminate in an exhaustion of consciousness. “Back now to inorganic matter,” says Elster. “This is
what we want. We want to be stones in a field.”
Stones in a field. A rock in an art gallery. A bloodless body sealed in a gleaming underground pod. Zero K is
DeLillo’s most determined effort yet to deflect attention away from story, or below story, to the questions that
lie beneath our lives and the life of our culture as it marches implacably toward its Omega Point. The point of
maximum complexity—of sensory overload—has been a subject of DeLillo’s since the beginning. But
modern technology has finally caught up to his most paranoid visions. What is the oracle of American fiction
to write about after he has lived long enough to witness his prophecies realized? He inches, ever so slightly,
into the future. It is only surprising that he hasn’t done so sooner.
68
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
A24
Sonoya Mizuno and Alicia Vikander in Alex Garland’s film Ex Machina, 2015
Zero K’s science fiction premise, one gradually realizes, is something of a red herring. None of the most
obvious questions posed by the scenario is answered, let alone addressed. We never learn how the cryogenic
process works, who exactly is behind it, or how it came to be developed. Most crucial of all, there is very little
discussion of how regeneration might work or when it might be expected to take place—in decades?
Millennia? And what exactly will happen then?
Instead, DeLillo pursues more ethereal questions. The Convergence conveniently is staffed by priestly men
and women who hold forth on technology, societal collapse, and fear of death. The world, one of them
intones, “is being lost to the systems. To the transparent networks that slowly occlude the flow of all those
aspects of nature and character that distinguish humans from elevator buttons and doorbells.” DeLillo is
hardly the first novelist to explore the depersonalizing effects of personal technology—the “touch-screen
storm” that makes one “an involuntary man.” But few novelists have scrutinized more closely the nexus
where technology, identity, and mortality meet. This is a sticky web and requires some delicate untangling.
The Convergence is in one aspect a shrine to technology. Its cryogenic pods offer a refuge from mortality. But
the compound is also, for its inhabitants, a refuge from technology. There is no Wi-Fi. There is no LTE. There
are, however, a surfeit of chambers designed—exactly by whom we don’t know—for quietude and
contemplation. Besides the art installations there are empty rooms and walled gardens, landscaped in the
English manner, with benches that resemble church pews. Jeffrey encounters in one of these gardens a
monkish figure wearing a silver skullcap. The man explains that he likes to sit on the bench and imagine
returning to the garden in the distant future after his rebirth, where he will think about how he used to sit on
this garden bench, imagining that very moment. “People who spend time here find out eventually who they
are,” he tells Jeffrey. “Not through consultation with others but through self-examination, self-revelation.”
There is a closed-loop madness to this image but the monk is on to something. Sustained self-examination is
increasingly elusive in our era of maximum technological stimulation—an era DeLillo refers to at one point
69
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
as the “scatterlife.” But are we so scattered? And if so why? Is it simply the availability of the technology? Its
narcotic pull? DeLillo suggests there is more to it than that. “All the voice commands and hyper-connections”
do not just provide cheap distraction. They offer a sense of security. In the same way that the prospect of a
cryogenic afterlife assuages the fear of death by protecting one’s body tissue from decomposition, immersion
in the virtual life of electronic communications makes the body vanish altogether. In the ether of constant
technological engagement, we can free ourselves from “the widespread belief that the future, everybody’s,
will be worse than the past.”
We can tune out, embrace the comforts of total distraction, and all we lose is our souls. In Zero K there is a
running joke in the old DeLilloan style involving ATMs. When Jeffrey examines his withdrawal receipts
(“the flimsy slips of toxic paper”), he discovers a series of persistent errors. The numbers don’t add up. Small
amounts are missing. The convenience of the touch-screen life has hidden costs. The costs seem minor at first,
but they accrue daily. They add up.
Yet the enclosed tomb of the Convergence, with its “stunted monoliths of once-living flesh,” is not a
particularly cheering alternative. Cryogenic suspension offers total escape from history, society, culture. “We
are pledged to an inwardness, a deep probing focus on who and where we are,” says one priestess. “You are
about to become, each of you, a single life in touch only with yourself.” But there is such a thing as too much
self-reflection. The most unsettling scene in a novel filled with them is an interlude set within Artis
Martineau’s consciousness in the frozen pod. Artis is not alive but not dead either. She has no memory and
can receive no sensory stimulus. She is pure, unadulterated self. The interlude takes the form of an inner
monologue that alternates between the first and third person:
I only hear what is me. I am made of words.
Does it keep going on like this.
Where am I. What is a place. I know the feeling of somewhere but I don’t know where it is.
What I understand comes from nowhere. I don’t know what I understand until I say it….
Can’t I stop being who I am and become no one.
She is the residue, all that is left of an identity.
I listen to what I hear. I can only hear what is me….
Is this the nightmare of self drawn so tight that she is trapped forever.
Hell is the absence of other people.
As a scientific experiment, the Convergence seems doomed to fail. The ambiguity and even incuriosity about
the promised second life of its inhabitants suggests as much. But the facility is successful in other ways. It
encourages its visitors to reflect, to ask big questions. It gives hope. “This place was designed by serious
people,” says Ross. “The earth is the guiding principle…. Return to the earth, emerge from the earth.” Ross
may not realize how right he is. The Convergence not only offers the promise of biological immortality; it
offers a kind of artistic immortality. Artis, in one of her final moments of lucidity, acknowledges as much:
This place, all of it, seems transitional to me. Filled with people coming and going…. The only thing that’s
not ephemeral is the art. It’s not made for an audience. It’s made simply to be here. It’s here, it’s fixed, it’s
part of the foundation, set in stone.
Artis is speaking of the art within the structure: the video installations, the wall paintings, the sculptures. But
DeLillo also insists that the Convergence, taken as a whole, is to be considered a work of visionary art, a
modern-day pyramid or megalith, a new Wonder of the World. The idea is that, like the fourteenth-century
70
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi in the nearby city of Turkestan, the compound may grant a kind of
immortality to those entombed inside of it.
It is this notion of artistic immortality that DeLillo emphasizes, while largely ignoring the more conventional
narrative riddles posed by his sci-fi premise. None of the facility’s deep thinkers seems particularly interested,
after all, in discussing the future into which they would be reborn. One comes to wonder whether they even
believe, with any sincerity, that they will be reborn. The closest anyone comes to having an actual vision of
the future is Artis, who imagines awaking in “a deeper and truer reality. Lines of brilliant light, every material
thing in its fullness, a holy object.” But this does not sound like the future. It sounds like heaven. This is the
same “brilliant light” that we find throughout historical accounts of the afterlife. We find it in Beowulf (“the
brilliant light shone…as bright as Heaven’s own candle”) and the Book of Revelation, where the light of New
Jerusalem is as brilliant as “a stone most precious.” As DeLillo puts it, describing Artis’s vision of the future:
“This was transcendence, the promise of a lyric intensity outside the measure of normal experience.”
The Convergence, a work of performance art, reconstitutes religious faith for a coldly technological age.
What, after all, is the difference between death and indefinite cryogenic suspension? The Convergence’s
acolytes are trying, in Saul Bellow’s phrase, to make “sober decent terms” with oblivion. They are relying on
ancient coping strategies. The gleaming pods are their sacraments. The long hushed hallways, airlock doors,
and scant roomscapes form the architecture of their cathedral.
After two years in New York spent mourning his not-exactly-dead wife, Ross Lockhart reverses himself
again. He decides to return to the Convergence and join Artis in suspended animation. Jeffrey reverses
himself too. This time he does not object to his father’s decision. He does not try to argue that Ross is too
young to die. He accepts that his father has lost all desire to live. Jeffrey accompanies Ross back to the
facility, as one might accompany a loved one to a hospice. In their final encounter, Ross undergoes last rites
before being sealed within his capsule. He lies naked on a slab, in a semi-conscious state, “hovering at some
level of anesthetic calm.” He is at peace. His last words are an indecipherable fragment that might have been
taken from a descriptive label at an art museum: “Gesso on linen.”
After he parts with his father, Jeffrey is allowed for the first time to tour the facility’s cryostorage section. He
walks on a catwalk among columns filled with hundreds of pods. He learns that his father wanted him to see
this crypt. The walls are covered with paintings like cave drawings. Jeffrey admires “the bodies regal in their
cryonic bearing.” He is reminded of prehistoric artifacts, of Busby Berkeley dance routines. The chamber has
the air of the innermost sanctum of a pharaonic tomb. Beyond it lies a small stone room in which two casings
are suspended. One awaits Ross, the other contains Artis. Jeffrey responds with awe: “Her body seemed lit
from within…. It was a beautiful sight. It was the human body as a model of creation. I believed this.” This
bizarre art project—this tomb buried beneath the Kazhak steppe—has reconciled him to the unthinkable.
Biological immortality may remain elusive but the hard facts of life and death are eternal. “Death,” writes
DeLillo, “is a tough habit to break.” But art retains its powers of consolation and transcendence, and its
skepticism about both. Like any living thing, it continues to evolve. Of this Zero K is both a reminder and a
bracing example.
DeLillo’s nomenclature sends readers grasping for higher meaning. One notices that “art” recurs in the
names of the novel’s principal figures, and that Artis shares her unusual surname with the roguish, sinister
Scott Martineau, amanuensis to the novelist Bill Gray in Mao II (1991). A Web search reveals that a reallife Scott Martineau is the senior vice president of product strategy at Infusionsoft, an e-mail marketing
company in Chandler, Arizona—just the type of position Jeffrey Lockhart might hold. The real Martineau
is the coauthor of a book titled Conquer the Chaos. ↩
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/09/don-delillo-when-high-technology-meets-immortality/
71
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Minecraft tree 'probably' the tallest tree in the Tropics
Source:
University of Cambridge
Summary:
A tree the height of 20 London double-decker buses has been discovered in Malaysia by
conservation scientists monitoring the impact of human activity on the biodiversity of a pristine
rainforest. The tree, a Yellow Meranti, is one of the species that can be grown in the computer game
Minecraft.
Share:
AddThis Sharing Buttons
FULL STORY
Discovery of an 89.5m tall Yellow Meranti in the Maliau Basin Conservation Area of Malaysia.
Credit: University of Cambridge
A tree the height of 20 London double-decker buses has been discovered in Malaysia by conservation
scientists monitoring the impact of human activity on the biodiversity of a pristine rainforest. The tree, a
Yellow Meranti, is one of the species that can be grown in the computer game Minecraft.
The Yellow Meranti stands 89.5m tall in an area of forest known as 'Sabah's Lost World' -- the Maliau Basin
Conservation Area, one of Malaysia's last few untouched wildernesses. Its height places it ahead of the
previous record-holder, an 88.3m Yellow Meranti in the Tawau Hills National Park.
The giant tree was discovered during reconnaissance flights by conservation scientists from the University of
Cambridge working with the Sabah Forestry Department to help protect the area's biodiversity. It comes at a
72
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
crucial time, as the Sabah government takes measures to protect and restore heavily logged areas in the
region.
Measuring a tree's exact height is tricky when the tree is quite possibly the tallest tree in the Tropics. The only
way is to climb it, and to take a tape measure with you. This is precisely what Unding Jami, an expert treeclimber from Sabah, did recently. When he reached the top, he confirmed the tree's height and texted "I don't
have time to take photos using a good camera because there's an eagle around that keeps trying to attack me
and also lots of bees flying around."
The tree actually stands on a slope: downhill it's 91m tall, and uphill it's around 88m tall. "We'd put it at
89.5m on average," explains lead researcher Dr David Coomes, from Cambridge's Department of Plant
Sciences. "It's a smidgen taller than the record, which makes it quite probably the tallest tree recorded in the
Tropics!"
At this height, the tree is roughly equivalent to the height of 65 people standing on each other's shoulders, or
20 double-decker London buses. It's just a few metres short of London's Big Ben.
"Trees in temperate regions, like the giant redwoods, can grow up to 30m taller; yet around 90m seems to be
the limit in the Tropics. No-one knows why this should be the case," adds Coomes.
The tree was spotted using a LiDAR scanner -- a machine that's capable of producing exquisitely detailed
three-dimensional images of rainforest canopies over hundreds of square kilometres. Its laser range finder
hangs from the undercarriage of the research plane, peppering the forest with 200,000 laser pulses every
second, and calculating distances in 3D from each reflected pulse. The researchers then 'stitch' the images
together, enabling them to map the forest tree by tree.
Threatened by habitat loss, the Yellow Meranti (Shorea faguetiana) is classified as endangered on the
International Union for Conservation of Nature 'Red list', the world's most comprehensive inventory of the
global conservation status of biological species.
"Interestingly, there may be more of this tree in cyberspace than in the world. It's one of the trees that players
can grow in the computer game Minecraft," adds Coomes.
"Conserving these giants is really important. Some, like the California redwoods, are among the largest and
longest-living organisms on earth. Huge trees are crucial for maintaining the health of the forest and its
ecology. But they are difficult to find, and monitor regularly, which is where planes carrying LiDAR can
help."
Globally, around one billion hectares of degraded forest might be restorable, enabling then to continue to
contribute to the planet's biodiversity and its carbon and water cycles. However, a major problem faced by
conservation managers is how to survey extensive areas in which conditions can vary in just a few hundred
square metres and are continually changing through natural regeneration. "LiDAR scanning together with
digital photography and hyperspectral scanners now provide us with unprecedented information on the state
of the forest," explains Coomes.
With funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the Cambridge scientists worked
with the Sabah Forestry Department, the South-East Asia Rainforest Research Partnership and the NERC
Airborne Remote Sensing Facility.
"The Sabah government is extremely proud of this discovery, which lays credence to the fact that our
biodiversity is of global importance," says Sam Mannan, Director of the Sabah Forestry Department. "Our
international collaboration, as in this case, has brought great scientific dividends to the state and we shall
continue to pursue such endeavours."
Adds Coomes: "The discovery of this particular tree comes at a critical moment because, set against a
backdrop of decades of forest loss, the Sabah government has decided to protect and restore a huge tract of
73
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
heavily logged forest just to the east of the Maliau Basin. It's exciting to know that these iconic giants of the
forest are alive and well so close to this major restoration project."
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Cambridge. The original story is
licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160608100733.htm
74
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
A Cyclist Is Setting Out to Prove You Can Travel Around the U.S. by Bike and Rail
Elena Studier’s 38-day trip will highlight the importance of integrated, multi-modal transportation.

EILLIE ANZILOTTI

@eillieanzi
Elena and Stevie on the road to Penn Station in New York. (Mariah Morales)
INWOOD, N.Y., 9:30 a.m. — At the corner of Broadway and Dyckman Street at the northern tip of
Manhattan, Elena Studier is doing some final checks on her bike. She scans to make sure there’s air in the
tires and that the brakes are working. Her backpack, a giant green Opsrey, is packed with the bare minimum.
For the next 38 days, she’ll be traversing the country using only a bike (hers is named Stevie) and Amtrak,
making 18 stops in various cities along the way.
75
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
The ten-mile ride down the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway from Inwood to Penn Station is just the first leg
of her trip. I’m tagging along with representatives from Amtrak and the East Coast Greenway Alliance—an
organization working to connect the major cities along the eastern seaboard by bike paths—to see her off. We
cycle away from the sleepy streets of weekend-morning Inwood and over to the Hudson. The air is cool and
salty; to our right, across the river, are quiet, wooded cliffs; to the left, the Metro-North Hudson line tracks.
It’s hard to believe this bucolic stretch of is part of jam-packed Manhattan; that after an hour’s ride we’ll be in
the midst of Midtown, navigating our bikes through crowds of tourists toward the Amtrak waiting area in
Penn Station. But integrating these diverse transit experiences is the point of Studier’s trip.
As an intern for the National Association of Railroad Passengers, whose aim is to boost the interconnectivity
and ridership of the U.S. railways, Studier devised this journey to demonstrate the possibility of crossing the
country without the use of a car. Throughout the course of her Summer by Rail, which officially began May
15 and will conclude in Washington D.C.’s Union Station on June 20th, Studier will track between cities
along the outer edge of the country, speaking with local transit developers, advocacy groups, and Amtrak
passengers to document the need for integrated, accessible public transportation in places as small as
Bloomington-Normal, Illinois and as large as the Bay Area.
“This is a lifestyle that many more people are gravitating toward,” Studier says. “It’s becoming more
important for people to feel like they can get by in the modern world without necessarily having a car, but
[by] relying instead on public transportation—and transportation in general—that’s really integrated
and manages to serve a variety of needs,” she adds.
The expansion of Amtrak’s walk-on bike service last year has aided the accessibility of railroad travel. First
introduced in 2013, the wildly convenient alternative to the rail system’s bike-box policy has since expanded
to 10 lines; the Capitol Limited became the first overnight train to offer the roll-on service last September.
Speaking to the Chicago Tribune, Melody Geraci, the deputy executive director at the Active Transportation
Alliance, said that as a result of the service, “more people are interested in making inter-modal connections
without having to worry about driving and parking a car.”
It’s those extra miles between an Amtrak stop and a city’s public transportation system, Studier says, that
often mar the convenience of multi-city rail travel. Incorporating a bike as connective tissue certainly helps.
“Rail travel has a tendency in the public discourse to be seen as nostalgic,” Studier says. “I wanted to show
that it’s actually a very current, and needed, system.”
And yet, there’s room for improvement. On its website, the NARP says it “believes the current Amtrak
system is skeletal at best.” Its goal is to increase the number of rail route miles from 22,000 to 45,000—
roughly flush with the size of the current interstate highway system—and put 80 percent of the population
within 25 miles of a train station by 2025. In a recent report, the NARP calculated $209 billion worth
of languishing rail improvement projectsacross the country. In addition to boosting mobility for underserved
populations (parts of rural Wyoming and South Dakota are still completely inaccessible by rail), the
completion of those projects would jolt some life into the economy—the NARP estimates that 20,000 jobs are
created for each billion spent on rail projects.
Studier’s trip will bring her face-to-face with how these abstract figures play out on the local scale. In
Minneapolis-St. Paul, Studier will document the effects of the multi-billion dollar Green Line project,
completed in 2014, but she’ll also consult with the Adventure Cycling Association and the Whitefish Visitor’s
Bureau in Glacier National Park to understand the importance of integrated transit systems for smaller, more
remote towns. “In a place like Whitefish, a few hundred thousand dollars of intrastructure investment can
76
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
make a huge difference,” says Sean Jeans-Gail, the vice president of NARP. “[Towns like Whitefish] really
want to get people out there on their bikes by train, because it’s an important economic lifeline for them.”
By stitching together these different stories about transit systems across the country, Studier’s project will
become a tangible study in the need for cities and town across the country to consider the future of their
transit systems on both a national and a local scale.
“Interconnectivity is a message that people all across the country are really prioritizing; it’s something you’re
starting to see in plans and developments,” Studier says. “I’m just hoping to amplify it.”
http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/05/38-days-18-cities-one-bike-a-trip-acrossamerica/482937/?utm_source=nl__link6_051716
77
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
TheCitizen-Soldier
Moral Risk and the Modern Military
By Phil KlayMay 24, 2016
The rumor was he’d killed an Iraqi soldier with his bare hands. Or maybe bashed his head in with a radio.
Something to that effect. Either way, during inspections at Officer Candidates School, the Marine Corps
version of boot camp for officers, he was the Sergeant Instructor who asked the hardest, the craziest
questions. No softballs. No, “Who’s the Old Man of the Marine Corps?” or “What’s your first general order?”
The first time he paced down the squad bay, all of us at attention in front of our racks, he grilled the would-be
infantry guys with, “Would it bother you, ordering men into an assault where you know some will die?” and
the would-be pilots with, “Do you think you could drop a bomb on an enemy target, knowing you might also
kill women and kids?”
When he got to me, down at the end, he unloaded one of his more
involved hypotheticals. “All right candidate. Say you think there’s an
insurgent in a house and you call in air support, but then when you walk
through the rubble there’s no insurgents, just this dead Iraqi civilian with
his brains spilling out of his head, his legs still twitching and a little Iraqi
kid at his side asking you why his father won’t get up. So. What are you
going to tell that Iraqi kid?”
Amid all the playacting of OCS—screaming “Kill!” with every
movement during training exercises, singing cadences about how tough
we are, about how much we relish violence—this felt like a valuable
corrective. In his own way, that Sergeant Instructor was trying to clue us
in to something few people give enough thought to when they sign up:
joining the Marine Corps isn’t just about exposing yourself to the trials
and risks of combat—it’s also about exposing yourself to moral risk.



U.S. soldiers destroy a statue of Saddam Hussein near Tikrit, Iraq. July 18, 2003. Reuters
I never had to explain to an Iraqi child that I’d killed his father. As a
public affairs officer, working with the media and running an office of
Marine journalists, I was never even in combat. And my service in Iraq
78
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
was during a time when things seemed to be getting better. But that period
was just one small part of the disastrous war I chose to have a stake in.
“We all volunteered,” a friend of mine and a five-tour Marine veteran,
Elliot Ackerman, said to me once. “I chose it and I kept choosing it.
There’s a sort of sadness associated with that.”
As a former Marine, I’ve watched the unraveling of Iraq with a sense of
grief, rage, and guilt. As an American citizen, I’ve felt the same, though
when I try to trace the precise lines of responsibility of a civilian versus a
veteran, I get all tangled up. The military ethicist Martin Cook claims
there is an “implicit moral contract between the nation and its soldiers,”
which seems straightforward, but as the mission of the military has
morphed and changed, it’s hard to see what that contract consists of. A
decade after I joined the Marines, I’m left wondering what obligations
I incurred as a result of that choice, and what obligations I share with the
rest of my country toward our wars and to the men and women who fight
them. What, precisely, was the bargain that I struck when I raised my
hand and swore to defend my country against all enemies, foreign and
domestic?
Grand causes
It was somewhat surprising (to me, anyway, and certainly to my parents)
that I wound up in the Marines. I wasn’t from a military family. My father
had served in the Peace Corps, my mother was working in international
medical development. If you’d asked me what I wanted to do, postcollege, I would have told you I wanted to become a career diplomat, like
my maternal grandfather. I had no interest in going to war.
Operation Desert Storm was the first major world event to make an
impression on me—though to my seven-year-old self the news coverage
showing grainy videos of smart bombs unerringly finding their targets
made those hits seem less a victory of soldiers than a triumph of
technology. The murky, muddy conflicts in Mogadishu and the Balkans
registered only vaguely. War, to my mind, meant World War II, or
Vietnam. The first I thought of as an epic success, the second as a horrific
failure, but both were conflicts capable of capturing the attention of our
whole society. Not something struggling for air-time against a presidential
sex scandal.
So I didn’t get my ideas about war from the news, from the wars actually
being fought during my teenage years. I got my ideas from books.
My novels and my history books were sending very mixed signals. War was either pointless hell, or it was the
shining example of American exceptionalism.
Reading novels like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, or Tim O’Brien’s The
Things They Carried, I learned to see war as pointless suffering,
absurdity, a spectacle of man’s inhumanity to man. Yet narrative
nonfiction told me something different, particularly the narrative
nonfiction about World War II, a genre really getting off the ground in the
79
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
late-90s and early aughts. Perhaps this was a belated result of the Gulf
War, during which the military seemed to have shaken off its postVietnam malaise and shown that, yes, goddamn it, we can win something,
and win it good. Books like Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers and
Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generationwent hand-in-hand with movies
like Saving Private Ryan to present a vision of remarkable heroism in a
world that desperately needed it.
46 36 44 17021 May,
1970
Beginning in 1969, the Selective Service conducted draft lotteries to determine the order of induction into the
Vietnam War.
In short, my novels and my histories were sending very mixed signals.
War was either pointless hell, or it was the shining example of American
exceptionalism. In middle-school, I’d read Ambrose’sCitizen Soldiers,
about the European Theater in World War II. More than anything else, it
was the title that stayed with me, the notion of service in a grand cause as
the extension of citizenship. I never bothered to consider that the mix of
draftees and volunteers who served in World War II wasn’t so different
80
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
from the mix of draftees and volunteers who served in Vietnam, or that
the atrocities committed in that war were no less horrific than those
committed in Vietnam, though no one was likely to write a best-selling
book about Vietnam entitled Citizen Soldiers. The title appealed to me.
Deeply. But I didn’t see any grand causes in the 1990s, just a series of
messy, limited engagements. Of course, in the history of American
warfare, from the Indian Wars to the Philippines to the Banana Wars, it
was the grand causes that were the anomalies, not the brushfire wars at
the edge of empire.
Then 9/11 happened. We all have our stories of where we were that day.
Mine is that I was in the woods, hiking the Appalachian Trail. As my little
group of hikers scrambled over the rough paths we kept running into
people telling stories of planes hitting the World Trade Center. It sounded
preposterous, the sort of rumor that could easily spread in an isolated
place, in the days before everybody had a smartphone. But we kept
hearing the story, in ever more detail, until it became clear—particularly
for those of us from New York—that we had to leave the woods.
I can’t say that I joined the military because of 9/11. Not exactly. By the
time I got around to it the main U.S. military effort had shifted to Iraq, a
war I’d supported though one which I never associated with al-Qaida or
Osama bin Laden. But without 9/11, we might not have been at war there,
and if we hadn’t been at war, I wouldn’t have joined.
It was a strange time to make the decision, or at least, it seemed strange to
many of my classmates and professors. I raised my hand and swore my
oath of office on May 11, 2005. It was a year and a half after Saddam
Hussein’s capture. The weapons of mass destruction had not been found.
The insurgency was growing. It wasn’t just the wisdom of the invasion
that was in doubt, but also the competence of the policymakers. ThenSecretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had been proven wrong about
almost every major post-invasion decision, from troop levels to post-war
reconstruction funds. Anybody paying close attention could tell that Iraq
was spiraling into chaos, and the once jubilant public mood about our
involvement in the war, with over 70 percent of Americans in 2003
nodding along in approval, was souring. But the potential for failure, and
the horrific cost in terms of human lives that failure would entail, only
underscored for me why I should do my part. This was my grand cause,
my test of citizenship.
Citizen-soldiers versus “base hirelings”
The highly professional all-volunteer force I joined, though, wouldn’t
have fit with the Founding Fathers’ conception of citizen-soldiers. They
distrusted standing armies: Alexander Hamilton thought Congress should
vote every two years “upon the propriety of keeping a military force on
foot”; James Madison claimed “armies kept up under the pretext of
defending, have enslaved the people”; and Thomas Jefferson suggested
the Greeks and Romans were wise “to put into the hands of their rulers no
such engine of oppression as a standing army.”
81
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
They wanted to rely on “the people,” not on professionals. According to
the historian Thomas Flexner, at the outset of the Revolutionary War
George Washington had grounded his military thinking on the notion that
“his virtuous citizen-soldiers would prove in combat superior, or at least
equal, to the hireling invaders.” This was an understandably attractive
belief for a group of rebellious colonists with little military experience.
The historian David McCullough tells us that the average American
Continental soldier viewed the British troops as “hardened, battle-scarred
veterans, the sweepings of the London and Liverpool slums, debtors,
drunks, common criminals and the like, who had been bullied and beaten
into mindless obedience.”
A recruitment poster seeks Continental Army soldiers to serve under General George Washington during the
American Revolution.Library of Congress
Even lower in their eyes were the Hessian troops the British had hired to fight the colonists, which were
commanded by Lieutenant-General Leopold Philip von Heister. A veteran of many campaigns, von Heister
82
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
had crankily sailed over from England, touched shore, “called for hock and swallowed large potations to the
health of his friends,” and then, apparently, set out trying to kill Americans.
There’s a long tradition of distrust for mercenaries, from Aristotle
claiming they “turn cowards … when the danger puts too great a strain on
them” to Machiavelli arguing they’re “useless and dangerous …
disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before
friends, cowardly before enemies,” and the colonists would likely have
agreed with such assessments. Mercenaries were at the bottom of the
hierarchy of military excellence, citizen-soldiers at the top. We can see
this view reflected in George Washington’s message to his soldiers before
the first major engagement of the Revolutionary War, the Battle of
Long Island:
Remember, officers and Soldiers, that you are Freemen … Remember
how your Courage and Spirit have been despised, and traduced by your
cruel invaders, though they have found by dear experience at Boston,
Charlestown and other places, what a few brave men contending in their
own land, and in best of causes can do, against base hirelings and
mercenaries.
This was in August 1776, and Washington’s 19,000 men were about to
see whether their civic virtues would triumph over British military skill.
The American line stretched out across central Brooklyn, with British
troops advancing from the south and the east. Though there was
skirmishing during the day on August 26, the real fighting began the next
morning when a column of Hessians marched up Battle Pass, in modern
day Prospect Park.
What followed was a disaster. In the unkind phrasing of historian W.J.
Wood, “Washington and his commanders … performed like ungifted
amateurs,” and that’s exactly how the Hessian mercenaries viewed them.
“The rebels had a very advantageous position in the wood,” wrote one
Hessian soldier, “but when we attacked them courageously in their
hiding-places, they ran, as all mobs do.” Colonel Heinrich von Heeringen,
the commander of a Hessian regiment, wrote, “The riflemen were mostly
spitted to the trees with bayonets. These frightful people deserve pity
rather than fear.” And looking over those he’d captured, von Heeringen
sneered, “among the prisoners are many so-called colonels, lieutenantcolonels, majors, and other officers, who, however, are nothing but
mechanics, tailors, shoe-makers, wig-makers, barbers, etc. Some of them
were soundly beaten by our people, who would by no means let such
persons pass for officers.”
It was a rough education for Washington. At the close of the war he
would submit to Congress his Sentiments on a Peace Establishment,
which noted that “Altho’ a large standing Army in time of Peace hath
ever been considered dangerous to the liberties of a Country, yet a few
Troops, under certain circumstances, are not only safe, but indispensably
necessary.” Congress, however, rejected the idea of even a modest
83
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
standing army for the nation, its only concession being to keep one
standing regiment and a battery of artillery. The rest of the new nation’s
defense would rely mostly on state militias. Hence the Second
Amendment. This idealistic vision of militias as a bulwark of democracy
would soon face a harsh reality check.
There continues to be a cynicism about the motives of those who volunteer for the military. I’ve been
repeatedly told that people don’t really enlist because they want to, but because they have to.
In this case, it was not the British, but the Western Confederacy of
American Indians who’d give the Americans their comeuppance. Mixed
units of American regulars and militiamen had been fighting these tribes
throughout the early 1790s. The first campaign, led by General Josiah
Harmar, was meant “to chastise the Indian Nations who have of late been
so troublesome.” Today, the campaign is known as Harmar’s Defeat,
which tells you all you really need to know about whether or not that
happened. The individual battles within that campaign don’t have much
better titles. There’s Hardin’s Defeat, Hartshorn’s Defeat, the Battle of
Pumpkin Fields. This last doesn’t sound so bad, until you learn that it
supposedly got its name not because it was fought in a pumpkin field, but
because the steam from the scalped skulls of militiamen reminded the
victorious American Indians of squash steaming in the autumn air.
Harmar was succeeded by General Arthur St. Clair, who, though rather
old, rather fat, and afflicted with gout, set out with “sanguine expectations
that a severe blow might be given to the savages yet.” His poorly trained,
undisciplined men engaged an equal-sized force at the Battle of the
Wabash in November 1791, also known by the considerably more
evocative title, the Battle of a Thousand Slain. What followed was the
worst military disaster of U.S. history. Of St. Clair’s 920 troops, 632 were
killed and 264 wounded, a casualty rate of just over 97 percent. Congress,
finally conceding that professionalism did count for something, bowed to
the creation of a standing army beyond absolute bare bones.
Of course, the creation of the Army hardly ended the complicated
relationship Americans had with professional soldiers. When we come to
the Civil War, the first war in which we instituted a national draft, none
other than Ulysses S. Grant would call the professional soldiers who’d
manned the Army prior to the war “men who could not do as well in any
other occupation.” Naturally, he was not talking about his own men, fine
citizen-soldiers who “risked life for a principle … often men of social
standing, competence, or wealth and independence of character.” It took a
grand cause, then, like the Civil War, for military service to count as a
civic virtue.
A collage of U.S. Armed Forces posters from World War I shows various recruitment
slogans.Library of Congress
And not only was it a civic virtue—it could be what made you American in the first place. During World War
I, Assistant Secretary of War Henry Breckinridge maintained that when immigrants and those born in this
country rub “elbows in a common service to a common Fatherland … out comes the hyphen—up goes the
84
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Stars and Stripes … Universal military service will be the elder brother of the public school in fusing this
American race.” During World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt thought military service would
“Americanize” foreigners.

A new soldier holds his order sheet as he arrives for basic training, Fort Sill, Oklahoma. November 4,
2009.Reuters
To this day, however, there continues to be a cynicism about the motives
of those who volunteer for the military. I’ve been repeatedly told that
people don’t really enlist because they want to, but because they have to.
I remember seeing the poet and playwright Maurice Decaul, frustrated
with an insistent questioner who couldn’t accept that an intelligent and
sensitive soul mightwant to join the military, finally just blurt out,
“I wanted to join the Marine Corps since I was eight years old.” And all
the veterans I know who are Ivy League graduates have had the
unpleasant experience of people acting as though they’d made some sort
of bizarre choice to spend time with the peons. At one event a Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist explained to me that, though he felt the Iraq War
was evil, he didn’t feel the soldiers should be blamed for their
participation—they were only in service because they had no
other options.
85
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
This is the “poverty draft”—the idea that with the elimination of the draft,
we shifted the burden from the whole of society to only the most poor and
disadvantaged, who join the military to get a step up in life and then
become cannon fodder. The demographics of the military don’t support
the image—it’s actually the middle class that’s best represented in the
military, and the numbers of high-income and highly educated recruits
rose to levels disproportionate to their percentage of the population after
the war on terror began. But this notion of a military filled with ne’er-dowells who are in it only for the money is frustrating not just because it’s
insulting or false—it takes the decision to put one’s life at risk for one’s
country and transforms it, as if by magic, into a self-interested act.
Veterans have a benefit package … they’re paid in full, right? If the war
was a just one and they saved the world against fascism, or slavery,
maybe more is owed. If not, well, you can pity them, but you can’t take
them seriously as moral agents.

A Marine Corps recruit poses for his file photo at Parris Island, South Carolina. January 6, 2005.Reuters
Messing up your nice, clean soul
The decision to accept my commission was the most important one I’d
made in my twenty-one years of life, and I knew it. I also knew I’d likely
end up in Iraq, that the next four years would be bound up with a
politically and morally contentious conflict, and I was comfortable with
that. But in 2005, it didn’t seem to me that my decision about whether or
86
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
not to join would make me any the more or less responsible for a war that
had started in 2003. There’s a bit in John Osbourne’s play Look Back in
Anger where a character angrily tells his wife:
It’s no good trying to fool yourself about love. You can’t fall into it like a
soft job without dirtying up your hands. It takes muscle and guts. If you
can’t bear the thought of messing up your nice, clean soul you better give
up the whole idea of life, and become a saint. Because you’ll never make
it as a human being.

Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Patrick K. Wiley shouts instructions to new recruits at Parris Island, South
Carolina. January 5, 2005.Reuters
As in love, so in politics. Choices have to be made, without the benefit of
hindsight, and then you have to live with those choices. The chain of
events begun with the invasion of Iraq would neither end nor alter through
my own inaction. So when friends would argue with me about WMDs or
the initial invasion it seemed radically beside the point. I didn’t have a
time machine, neither did they. Nor could I write off the entire war effort
as evil and thereby evade any feeling of responsibility for all the policy
decisions that came later.
87
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Back in 2006, as I was preparing to go to Anbar Province, the “lost”
province, the heart of the Sunni insurgency, it was tempting to think there
was nothing we could do to improve the situation in Iraq, or even that
doing nothing was somehow the best course of action. The following year
Senator Carl Levin would propose a rapid withdrawal in order to
somehow magically force an Iraqi political settlement. “It is time for
Congress to explain to the Iraqis that it is your country,” he said in a
speech before Congress, apparently under the impression that the Iraqis
didn’t know that. To me, this proposal for ending the occupation seemed
little more than a smokescreen to allow us to leave Iraq behind without
feeling too guilty about it.
Though the word “occupation” is often bandied about as though it
represents something inherently evil, occupation is actually a situation
legitimized—and circumscribed—by international law. Article 43 of the
Hague Regulations of 1907 demands that an occupying force “shall take
all the measures in [its] power to restore and ensure, as far as possible,
public order and safety.” Further obligations are spelled out in the Fourth
Geneva Convention of 1949. These apply regardless of whether the war
waged against the occupied country was just or unjust. We waged a just
war against Germany and Japan during World War II and yet afterward
still had an obligation to provide order for those countries’ citizens, many
of whom were starving, homeless refugees. For me, it didn’t follow
that because a war was unjust we were thereby relieved of our obligations
as a country and could happily leave Iraqis to their sorry fate, secure in
the knowledge that our hands were clean as long as we hadn’t voted for
George W. Bush in 2000. We obviously hadn’t lived up to our obligations
to prevent chaos in the aftermath of our invasion of Iraq.
Of course, none of that means that the deployment I was about to go on
would, in fact, be part of an adequate or just national response to the
tragedy unfolding there.
Razor wire on a trench in Anbar Province, Iraq.Getty
We can tell them the truth when we get home
In the first month of my deployment, a suicide truck bomber detonated
among a group of families going to mosque. U.S. forces brought the
injured in to our base hospital, where the line of Marines waiting to give
blood was so long that it extended out the door and wrapped around the
building. Inside there were so many injured that the doctors ran out of
trauma tables and had to do surgery on the floor. In one room, I saw them
slowly stitching a man’s intestines back together. In another, a surgeon
new to the theater hesitated before a man’s bloody, shrapnel-filled body.
Time being of the essence, a doctor who’d been there several months
already pushed him away, stuck a finger into the man’s side, plunged it
knuckle deep, and pulled out a jagged piece of metal from his abdomen.
Not much later a similar attack hit Ramadi. One of my Marines, a
videographer, asked if he could interview one of our doctors after the
88
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
attack. The only quiet place was where they were keeping the bodies of
the dead, so the two sat in a corner, surrounded by civilian bodies, the
men, women, and children the doctors hadn’t been able to save. There, in
the silence, the exhausted doctor wept.
The units moving out of theater around this time—doctors, infantryman,
engineers, and logisticians—had seen a lot of violence, but not much
progress. I remember listening in on an outgoing group of soldiers talking
about what they should tell their families back home about the war. They
couldn’t tell them the truth, they agreed. Instead, they’d tell them proud,
uplifting things. “We can tell them the truth when we get home,” one said.
It was quiet a moment, and another asked, “Will we even tell the
truth then.”

Marine Corps recruits wait for haircuts at the Parris Island receiving station in South Carolina. January 5,
That was early 2007. By 2008, violence had fallen, markets were opening
up, and police forces were swelling. The slowdown in death threw
opponents of the U.S. troop surge for a loop. Moveon.org famously
suggested General David Petraeus was “cooking the books.” More
thoughtful critics came up with other responses: the gains were
temporary, dependent on a political solution, or on untrustworthy allies,
or on arming one side in a civil war. Or, less plausibly, given the actual
89
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
patterns of violence in Iraq, maybe sectarian cleansing had sorted the
country into Sunni and Shia enclaves and so the violence had declined
only because there was no one left to kill. Even today, whether the surge
“worked” is the subject of a fairly intense debate both within the military
and outside of it. It’s clear the Anbar Awakening—the Sunni revolt
against Al Qaeda in Iraq—could not have reshaped the country in the way
it did without significant U.S. support. But those who argue that the surge
didn’t solve Iraq’s underlying issues are, of course, completely correct,
and whether the Bush administration was right to pursue the surge in 2007
remains up for debate. Either way, it wasn’t enough.
I didn’t know that in 2008. I went home feeling great about my
deployment. Iraq was getting better, and I’d been part of the force (even if
a rear-echelon part) that had risked life and limb for that goal. And the
good news kept coming. A year and a half after I got back, the New York
Times had a story about a giant beach party thrown on the banks of Lake
Habbaniyah, near where I’d spent much of my time overseas. Photos
showed hundreds of young Iraqis having fun. A DJ yelled into a
microphone: “Shoutout to everyone from Baghdad. Everyone from
Adhamiyah and Sadr City.” I spoke with another Marine who’d spent
time in that area—the author Michael Pitre. He told me, “I remember
reading that article and thinking, My God, did we win.”
I hoped so. Either way, I didn’t feel I had anything to account for. I was
under the impression that history had justified me. And though I’m a
Catholic, it never even occurred to me to do something once common for
soldiers after war—seek atonement.
Coming back from Iraq, with none of the memories of visceral horror we associate with the authentic
experience of war, I assumed my hands were clean.
In the medieval period, Christian theology carved out a space for war—
what we now call “just war theory.” Nevertheless, killing was still
considered a sin, even in a just war, even when lawful, even when the
Church itself had directed you to do it. One of the more remarkable
consequences of this belief is the Penitential Ordinance imposed on
Norman knights who fought with William the Conqueror on Senlac Hill
at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. “Anyone who knows that he killed a
man in the great battle must do penance for one year for each man that he
killed,” it proclaims, before moving forward and really getting into the
weeds. If you wounded a man and aren’t sure he died, forty days penance.
If you fought only for gain, it’s the same penance as if you’d committed a
regular homicide. For archers, “who killed some and wounded others, but
are necessarily ignorant as to how many,” three Lents worth of penance.

2005.Reuters
90
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Marine Corps recruits take a moment for mandatory prayer before lights out at 9:00 P.M. at Parris Island,
South Carolina. January 6, 2005.Reuters
To modern, rational ears, there seems something bizarre, if not cruel
about demanding something of men and then demanding penance for that
same thing. And yet it is perhaps healthier both for the society that sends
men to war and for the warriors themselves. Vietnam veteran Karl
Marlantes, looking back on his time overseas, described himself
“struggling with a situation approaching the sacred in its terror and
contact with the infinite.” Though he didn’t know it then, what he
desperately wanted was a spiritual guide. “We cannot expect normal
eighteen-year-olds to kill someone and contain it in a healthy way. They
must be helped to sort out what will be healthy grief about taking a life
because it is part of the sorrow of war.”
This route might offer not only redemption, but also genuine growth as a
human being. The philosopher and World War II veteran J. Glenn Gray
wrote that for a soldier, “guilt can teach him, as few things else are able
to, how utterly a man can be alienated from the very sources of his being.
But the recognition may point the way to a reunion and a reconciliation
with the varied forms of the created. … Atonement will become for him
not an act of faith or a deed, but a life, a life devoted to strengthening the
bonds between men and between man and nature.”
91
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
A
U.S. soldier shows his tattooed arm while on patrol in Umm Qasr, Iraq. March 25, 2003.Reuters
But this is a way of thinking distinctly at odds with stories of
uncomplicated military glory. “The notion of war as sin simply doesn’t
play in Peoria—or anywhere else in the United States—because a
fondness for war is an essential component of the macho American God,”
wrote Vietnam War chaplain William Mahedy. “Yet the awareness of
evil—in religious terms of consciousness of sin—is the underlying motif
of the Vietnam War stories.” And of course, it’s not just Vietnam. This is
a recurrent theme in writing from both the wars we celebrate and the wars
we condemn. During an interview, I once cautiously asked a ninety-oneyear-old veteran of World War II what he thought of the idea of the
Greatest Generation. “It’s bullshit!” he shouted, cutting me off. “Bullshit
… War ruined my life.” He later calmed and revised his self-assessment:
“I’m eighty percent sweet and twenty percent bitter.” And the twenty
percent of bitterness he still held with him, over seven decades later, came
from his experiences in what we like to think of as “the Good War.”
In terms of the contract young Marines and soldiers sign when joining the
service, this moral dimension can be added to the physical and emotional
risks they assume, risks present regardless of how we later come to feel
about the particular war we send them off to. “Men wash their hands, in
blood, as best they can,” wrote the poet Randall Jarrell. Coming back
from Iraq, with none of the memories of visceral horror we associate with
the authentic experience of war, I assumed my hands were clean. As a
staff officer, I had the privilege of seeing the war mostly as a spectator,
the same privilege enjoyed by the rest of the American public—that is, if
they bothered to look.
92
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
U.S. Navy Hospital Corpsman Richard Barnett, with the 1st Marine Division, holds an Iraqi child in central
Iraq. Front-line crossfire ripped apart an Iraqi family after local soldiers appeared to force civilians toward
positions held by U.S. Marines. March 29, 2003.Reuters
A saving idea?
Not long after ISIS had made headlines by seizing Fallujah and Ramadi
I went to the screening of a documentary about Afghanistan. During the
Q&A with the director afterward one of the many veterans there stood up.
He was a big, tough-looking guy, must have been the perfect image of a
Marine in dress blues. He said, “I’m a veteran of Iraq. That used to be
something I was incredibly proud of. If you’d asked me, just a few years
ago, to make a resume of my life—not a resume for a job, but a resume of
who I was, what I was—all the biggest bullet points would have been:
Marine sergeant; combat veteran; led Marines in Iraq. But now, I’m
looking at what’s happening in Iraq, and I’m starting to wonder what
I was a part of, and whether I can be proud of it. Was I part of an evil
thing? Because if I was, then I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t
know what my identity is.”
It was a sharper-edged response to the overseas tragedy than I’d
previously heard. Though I’d seen many veterans wondering “What was
this all for?” they often resolved the question by narrowing their focus.
One veteran who served in the Second Battle of Fallujah argued that he
93
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
didn’t think about “Bush or Obama, or about Iraq or Afghanistan,” but
about the men he’d served with and “what we’d done for each other.”
Elizabeth Samet, an instructor at West Point, argues that our recent wars’
“absence of a clear and consistent political vision … forced many of the
platoon leaders and company commanders I know to understand the
dramas in which they found themselves as local and individual rather than
national or communal. The ends they furnish for themselves—coming
home without losing any soldiers or, if someone has to die, doing so
heroically in battle—offer exclusively personal and particular
consolations that make the mission itself effectively beside the point.”
A soldier from the 1st Cavalry Division begins his trip back to the United States from Camp Virginia in
Kuwait. His brigade was the last U.S. military unit to depart Iraq. December 20, 2011.Reuters
In its own way, American pop culture, with its increasing obsession with Special Forces conducting
commando-style raids, seems to have come to a similar conclusion. Zero Dark Thirty, 13 Hours,
and American Sniper offer a vision of war in which highly trained operatives kill undoubtedly evil people—
bomb-makers and torturers and sadists and thugs of all stripes—without forcing too much consideration about
the overall outcome. In a raid, the moral stakes seem clear. Let’s think only about killing “the Butcher,” or the
evil enemy sniper, or Osama bin Laden, not about ending the chaos swirling around them. And though these
movies have the veneer of non-fiction, their impact isn’t so different from the previous generation’s Rambo
franchise, which Vietnam veteran and author Gustav Hasford argued “satisfies our pathetic need to win the
war and gives us another coat of whitewash as bumbling do-gooders, innocent American white-bread boy[s],
pulled down into corruption by wicked Orientals. We should have won, and we could have
94
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
won, Rambo argues, if only the dumb grunts could have been saved by grotesquely muscled civilians who
somehow skated the shooting war.”

Marine Corps recruits undergo aquatic training at Parris Island, South Carolina. January 6, 2005.Reuters
This kind of thinking has become operative not just in the movies but in real life. At his State of the Union
Address, President Obama proclaimed earlier this year, “if you doubt America’s commitment—or mine—to
see that justice is done, just ask Osama bin Laden. Ask the leader of Al Qaeda in Yemen, who was taken out
last year, or the perpetrator of the Benghazi attacks.” He received applause, and it’s not hard to understand
why. Since these kinds of missions don’t put troops in the position of holding territory, when we kill or
capture a target we can mark that off as a success regardless of whether or not we’re making a positive impact
on the region we’re striking. Never mind what’s actually happening on the ground in Libya and Yemen right
now. If you narrow your scope sufficiently, there’s no end to what you don’t have to deal with.
It’s true that, in the middle of a deployment, the specifics of any
individual unit’s experience and the bonds those Marines share might
overshadow their sense of the broader mission. But people join the
military to be a part of something greater than themselves, and ultimately
it’s deeply important for service members to be able to feel their sacrifices
had a purpose.
Joining the military is an act of faith in one’s country—an act of faith that the country will use your life well.
Pat C. Hoy II, a New York University professor who served in Vietnam,
once described the aftermath of a battle in Vietnam waged by soldiers
he’d trained. It had gratified him to see those soldiers recover “through
95
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
the saving rituals they performed together—burying the dead, policing the
battlefield, stacking ammunition, burning left-over powder bags, hauling
trash, shaving, drinking coffee, washing, talking as they restored order
and looked out for one another’s welfare.” These are the kind of small
moments of communal satisfaction that I saw veteran after veteran invoke
as they tried to come to terms with the extent of our failure in Iraq. For
Hoy, such satisfactions are real, but insufficient.
Those men had done the soldiers’ dirty job in a war that will probably
never end—for them or for this nation. The Vietnam War will not be
transfigured by a purifying idea. The men and women who fought there
will forever be haunted by the fact of carnage itself. The ones who
actually looked straight into the eyes of death will scream out in the
middle of the night and awake shaking in cold sweat for the rest of their
lives—and there will be no idea, nothing save the memory of teamwork,
to redeem them. That will not be enough. That loneliness is what they get
in return for their gift of service to a nation that sent them out to die and
abandoned them to their own saving ideas when they came home.
What is the saving idea of Iraq? In some ways, joining the military is an
act of faith in one’s country—an act of faith that the country will use your
life well. What your piece of a war will be, after all, is mostly a matter of
chance. I have friends who joined prior to 9/11, when machine gun
instructors still taught recruits to depress the trigger as long as it takes to
say, “Die, commie, die!” I have friends who joined after 9/11, expecting
to fight al-Qaida, only to invade Iraq. One friend protested the Iraq War,
then signed up because he felt the war was unjust and so we owed the
Iraqis a humane, responsible occupation. The Army sent him to
Afghanistan twice. Another soldier I know, a reservist, had a unit slotted
for one of two deployments—either to help with the Ebola crisis, a
mission few would object to, or to man Guantanamo Bay. Depending on
where they were sent, they knew they’d face radically different reactions
when they came home. Of course, the praise or censure your average
American civilian might dole out to those soldiers would in reality just be
the doling out of the praise or censure they themselves deserve for being
part of a nation that does such things.
The difference, though, is that it’s impossible for the veteran to pretend he
has clean hands. No number of film dramatizations of commandos killing
bad guys can move us past the simple reality that Iraq is destroyed, there
is untold suffering overseas, and we as a country have even abandoned
most of the translators who risked their lives for us.
Yet this fact seems not to have penetrated either the civilians we come
home to, or the government that sent us: “How many American presidents
or members of Congress have suffered from PTSD or taken their own
lives rather than live any longer with the burden of having declared a
war?” asked humanities professor Robert Emmet Meagher. None,
of course.
A tank in Kuwait drives toward the border of Iraq. March 26, 2003.Getty
96
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Total mobilization
When my cell phone buzzed in a Brooklyn bar and the voice at the other
end told me a Marine I’d served with had been shot in Afghanistan,
I looked around, searching for someone to talk to. The band setting up,
the tattooed bartenders, any of them could have plausibly been a
sympathetic ear. I’ve generally found civilians quite interested once you
take the effort. And yet … I couldn’t. It would, I suspected, be treated as a
personal tragedy, as though I were delivering the news that a family
member had been diagnosed with cancer. Not as something that
implicated them.
Specialist Katie Luna of the 572nd Military Intelligence Company pays respects during a memorial service
for a platoon member killed in southern Afghanistan. October 19, 2012.Reuters
There’s a joke among veterans, “Well, we were winning Iraq when I was
there,” and the reason it’s a joke is because to be in the military is to be
acutely conscious of how much each person relies on the larger
organization. In boot camp, to be called “an individual” is a slur. A
Marine on his or her own is not a militarily significant unit. At the Basic
97
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
School, the orders we were taught to write always included a lost Marine
plan, which means every order given carries with it the implicit message:
you are nothing without the group. The Bowe Bergdahl case is a prime
example of what happens when one soldier takes it upon himself to find
the war he felt he was owed—a chance to be like the movie character
Jason Bourne, as Bergdahl explained on tapes played by the
podcast Serial. The intense anger directed at Bergdahl from rank and file
soldiers, an anger sometimes hard for a civilian public raised on notions
of American individualism to comprehend, is the anger of a collective
whose members depend on each other for their very lives directed toward
one who, through sheer self-righteous idiocy, violated the intimate bonds
of camaraderie. By abandoning his post in Afghanistan, Bergdahl made
his fellow soldiers’ brutally hard, dangerous, and possibly futile mission
even harder and more dangerous and more futile, thereby breaking the
cardinal rule of military life: don’t be a buddy fucker. You are not the
hero of this movie.
But a soldier doesn’t just rely on his squad-mates, or on the leadership of
his platoon and company. There’s close air support, communications, and
logistics. Reliable weapons, ammunition, and supplies. The entire
apparatus of war—all of it ultimately resting on American industry and on
the tax dollars that each of us pays. “The image of war as armed combat
merges into the more extended image of a gigantic labor process,” wrote
Ernst Jünger, a German writer and veteran of World War I. After the
Second World War Kurt Vonnegut would come to a similar conclusion,
reflecting not only on the planes and crews, the bullets and bombs and
shell fragments, but also where those came from: the factories “operating
night and day,” the transportation lines for the raw materials, and the
miners working to extract them. Think too hard about the front-line
soldier, you end up thinking about all that was needed to put him there.
Today, we’re still mobilized for war, though in a manner perfectly
designed to ensure we don’t think about it too much. Since we have an
all-volunteer force, participation in war is a matter of choice, not a
requirement of citizenship, and those in the military represent only a tiny
fraction of the country—what historian Andrew Bacevich calls “the 1
percent army. “ So the average civilian’s chance of knowing any member
of the service is correspondingly small.
Moreover, we’re expanding those aspects of warfighting that fly under the
radar. Our drone program continues to grow, as does the special
operations forces community, which has expanded from 45,600 special
forces personnel in 2001 to 70,000 today, with further increases planned.
The average American is even less likely to know a drone pilot or a
member of a special ops unit—or to know much about what they actually
do, either, since you can’t embed a reporter with a drone or with SEAL
Team 6. Our Special Operations Command has become, in the words of
former Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, “an almost industrial-scale
counterterrorism killing machine.”
98
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Since we have an all-volunteer force, participation in war is a matter of choice, not a requirement of
citizenship, and those in the military represent only a tiny fraction of the country.
Though it’s true that citizens do vote for the leaders who run this
machine, we’ve absolved ourselves from demanding a serious debate
about it in Congress. We’re still operating under a decade-old
Authorization for Use of Military Force issued in the wake of 9/11, before
some of the groups we’re currently fighting even existed, and it’s
unlikely, despite attempts from Senators Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Jeff
Flake (R-Ariz.), that Congress will issue a new one any time soon. We
wage war “with or without congressional action,” in the words of
President Obama at his final State of the Union Address, which means
that the American public remains insulated from considering the
consequences. Even if they voted for the president ordering these strikes,
there’s seemingly little reason for citizens to feel personally culpable
when they go wrong.
It’s that sense of a personal stake in war that the veteran experiences
viscerally, and which is so hard for the civilian to feel. The philosopher
Nancy Sherman has explained post-war resentment as resulting from a
broken contract between society and the veterans who serve. “They may
feel guilt toward themselves and resentment at commanders for
betrayals,” she writes, “but also, more than we are willing to
acknowledge, they feel resentment toward us for our indifference toward
their wars and afterwars, and for not even having to bear the burden of a
war tax for over a decade of war. Reactive emotions, like resentment or
trust, presume some kind of community—or at least are invocations to
reinvoke one or convoke one anew.”
The debt owed them, then, is not simply one of material benefits. There’s
a remarkable piece inHarper’s Magazine titled, “It’s Not That I’m Lazy,”
published in 1946 and signed by an anonymous veteran, which argues,
“There’s a kind of emptiness inside me that tells me that I’ve still got
something coming. It’s not a pension that I’m looking for. What I paid out
wasn’t money; it was part of myself. I want to be paid back in kind, in
something human.”
That sounds right to me: “something human,” though I’m not sure what
form it would take. When I first came back from Iraq, I thought it meant a
public reckoning with the war, with its costs not just for Americans but
for Iraqis as well. As time goes by, and particularly as I watch a U.S.
presidential debate in which candidates have offered up carpet bombing,
torture, and other kinds of war crimes as the answer to complex problems
that the military has long since learned will only worsen if we attempt
such simplistic and immoral solutions, I’ve given up on hoping that will
happen anytime soon. If the persistence of U.S. military bases named after
Confederate generals is any indication, it might not happen in my
lifetime. The Holocaust survivor Jean Améry, considering Germany’s
post-war rehabilitation, would conclude, “Society … thinks only about its
continued existence.” Decades later Ta-Nehisi Coates, considering the
99
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
difficulty, if not impossibility, of finding solutions for various historic
tragedies, would write, “I think we all see our ‘theories and visions’ come
to dust in the ‘starving, bleeding, captive land’ which is everywhere,
which is politics.”
At
a truck stop in California, a sign signals support for U.S. forces in the Iraq War. August 2006Getty
Bringing the mission home
Despite this, I don’t see nihilism from my fellow veterans. I see the
opposite. I’ve met veterans who, horrified by the human cost of our wars
overseas, have joined groups like the International Refugee Assistance
Project or the International Rescue Committee. I’ve met veterans who’ve
gone into public service—one of whom also remained in a reserve unit
because, as he put it to me, “I want to know the decisions I make might
affect me personally.” I’ve met veterans who’ve lobbied Congress,
worked to fight military sexual assault, established literary non-profits, or
worked to make public service—military or otherwise—an expectation
within American society. A recent analysis of Census data shows that,
compared with their peers, veterans volunteer more, give more to charity,
vote more often, and are more likely to attend community meetings and
join civic groups. This is the kind of civic engagement necessary for the
functioning of a democracy.
In 2007, Rhodes-scholar and Navy SEAL Eric Greitens made a visit to
the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The men and
women he found there, including amputees and serious burn victims,
generally were eager to return to their units, though that would in many
100
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
cases be impossible. These vets had been repeatedly thanked for their
service. They’d been assured they were heroes and that they had the
support of a grateful nation. But, as recounted in Joe Klein’s book Charlie
Mike, Greitens found what energized them was something different. Four
words: “We still need you.”
Members of the Service Platoon of The Mission Continues—a nonprofit organization that helps war veterans
readjust to life at home—assemble after an event. January 2015.The Mission Continues
Greitens, who is hoping to win the Republican nomination in the Missouri governor’s race this year, went on
to found The Mission Continues, an organization that awards community-service fellowships that “redeploy”
post-9/11 veterans back to their communities to work on projects from education to housing and beyond. One
study found that, though these veterans had high rates of Traumatic Brain Injury (52 percent), PTSD (64
percent) and depression (28 percent), the opportunity to feel that they had made a contribution lead to
remarkably positive post-fellowship experiences. Eighty-six percent reported that the fellowship was a
positive, life-changing experience. Seventy-one percent went on to pursue further education, 86 percent
transferred their military skills to civilian employment, and large majorities reported that the fellowships
helped them become community leaders able to teach others the value of service.
“While most watch the suffering of the world on their TV, we ACT,
rapidly and with great purpose,” wrote Marine sniper Clay Hunt, a
veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who provided relief efforts with the
101
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
veteran-led disaster response organization Team Rubicon in the wake of
earthquakes in Chile and Haiti, raised money for wounded veterans, and
helped lobby Congress for veterans’ benefits. “Not counting the cost and
without hope for reward. We simply refuse to watch our world suffer,
when we have the skills and the means to alleviate some of that suffering,
for as many people as we can reach … Inaction is not an option.”
Strengthening the bonds between menand between man and nature
Clay Hunt, a Marine who served in Iraq, took his own life on March 31, 2011.Courtesy of the Hunt family.
Clay Hunt took his own life in March 2011. His story may be a heroic tale
of a Marine who served with distinction and came home determined to
continue serving, but it is also the much darker story of a Marine who was
never able to get the help he himself needed. Once out of the Corps, Hunt
struggled with the Veterans Administration over his disability rating and
his treatment. He appealed the low level of his benefits only to face one
bureaucratic hurdle after another, including the VA losing his files, the
process dragging out for eighteen months. As for his medical care, he got
almost no counseling for his post-traumatic stress, but was instead
prescribed a variety of drugs, none of which seemed to help. He felt he’d
been used as a “guinea pig” for one failed treatment after another. After
moving to Houston he waited months for his first appointment with a
psychiatrist, and then found the appointment so stressful he resolved
never to return. Two weeks later he killed himself.
102
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
True integration back into society can be overwhelmingly difficult for
veterans struggling with unbearable physical or mental injuries. Hence the
bare minimum of the payment veterans are due: a reliable Veterans
Administration, improved mental health care, and adequate help
transitioning to the civilian sector. The Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for
American Veterans (SAV) Act that President Obama signed into law in
2015 is intended to address some of these needs.
But this is just a starting place. It does not fully repay the debt to a Marine
suffering post-traumatic stress if we provide him access to competent
mental health care, just as we don’t fully repay the debt to a soldier who
lost a limb by handing her a well-made prosthetic. And in the wake of a
war that has left whole societies shattered, hundreds of thousands of lives
lost and more displaced, the debt cannot be solely to an individual, or
even to a class of individuals, like veterans. A therapeutic approach,
however necessary, can only heal wounds. Our problems run deeper
than that.
No civilian can assume the moral burdens felt at a gut level by participants in war, but all can show an equal
commitment to their country.
I began this essay contemplating the oath I swore as a Marine to support
and defend the Constitution. At the time I took the oath it felt like a
special and precious burden I was taking on—sworn to defend not simply
the physical security of my homeland but to defend something broader,
our founding document, and thus the set of ideals embedded within it.
Years later, looking through the section in the U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services’ “Citizen’s Almanac” on citizens’ responsibilities,
I was embarrassed to realize my obligations as a Marine were not so
unique. The very first responsibility listed is to “support and defend the
Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” So I had already
owed that to my country, by virtue of my birth and the privilege of being
American.
Suggested Reading

Afterwar: Healing the Moral Wounds of Our SoldiersNANCY SHERMAN, 2015

Killing from the Inside Out: Moral Injury and Just WarROBERT EMMET MEAGHER, 2014

No Man’s Land: Preparing for War and Peace in
Post-9/11 AmericaELIZABETH SAMET, 2014

The Beauty and Destructiveness of War: A Literary Portrait of the Vietnam ConflictPAT C. HOY II, 2004

The Warriors: Reflections on Men in BattleJ. GLENN GRAY, 1959
The divide between the civilian and the service member, then, need not
feel so wide. Perhaps the way forward is merely through living up to
those ideals, through action, and a greater commitment by the citizenry to
the institutions of American civic life that so many veterans are working
to rebuild. Teddy Roosevelt once claimed a healthy society would regard
the man “who shirks his duty to the State in time of peace as being only
103
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
one degree worse than the man who thus shirks it in time of war. A great
many of our men … rather plume themselves upon being good citizens if
they even vote; yet voting is the very least of their duties.” That seems
right to me. The exact nature of those additional duties will depend on the
individual’s principles. What is undeniable, though, is that there is always
a way to serve, to help bend the power and potential of the United States
toward the good.
No civilian can assume the moral burdens felt at a gut level by
participants in war, but all can show an equal commitment to their
country, an equal assumption of the obligations inherent in citizenship,
and an equal bias for action. Ideals are one thing—the messy business of
putting them into practice is another. That means giving up on any claim
to moral purity. That means getting your hands dirty.
PHIL KLAY is a graduate of Dartmouth College and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. He served in Iraq’s
Anbar Province from January 2007 to February 2008 as a public affairs officer. After being discharged he
104
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
received an MFA from Hunter College. In 2014 Klay’s short story collection Redeployment won the National
Book Award for Fiction. Among his many other accolades, in 2015 he received the Marine Corps Heritage
Foundation’s James Webb Award for fiction dealing with U.S. Marines or Marine Corps life. His writing has
appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Granta, Tin
House, and elsewhere. Learn more at philklay.com.
http://www.brookings.edu/research/essays/2016/the-citizen-soldier?utm_campaign=brookingsessay&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=29892757&_hsenc=p2ANqtz8s7VaLjLh_uckYeVEoeqewzuB--fnqqqsOrtWsjygkO36OxWJP_W_WvkC6unWJMe6TtvcuuDDCQoYo2JnVjv8gkXMBw&_hsmi=29892757
105
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Mammals began their takeover long before the death of the dinosaurs
Source:
University of Southampton
Summary:
New research reports that, contrary to popular belief, mammals began their massive diversification
10 to 20 million years before the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Share:
AddThis Sharing Buttons
FULL STORY
Common treeshrew, Tupaia glis (stock image).
Credit: © kajornyot / Fotolia
New research reports that, contrary to popular belief, mammals began their massive diversification 10 to 20
million years before the extinction of the dinosaurs.
The study, involving Elis Newham from the University of Southampton, questioned the familiar story that
dinosaurs dominated their prehistoric environment, while tiny mammals took a backseat, until the dinosaurs
(besides birds) went extinct 66 million years ago, allowing mammals to shine.
Elis Newham, PhD student in Engineering and the Environment and co-author of the study, which is
published Proceedings of the Royal Society B, said: "The traditional view is that mammals were suppressed
during the 'age of the dinosaurs' and underwent a rapid diversification immediately following the extinction of
106
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
the dinosaurs. However, our findings were that therian mammals, the ancestors of most modern mammals,
were already diversifying considerably before the extinction event and the event also had a considerably
negative impact on mammal diversity."
The old hypothesis hinged upon the fact that many of the early mammal fossils that had been found were from
small, insect-eating animals -- there didn't seem to be much in the way of diversity. However, over the years,
more and more early mammals have been found, including some hoofed animal predecessors the size of dogs.
The animals' teeth were varied too.
The researchers analysed the molars of hundreds of early mammal specimens in museum fossil collections.
They found that the mammals that lived during the years leading up to the dinosaurs' demise had widely
varied tooth shapes, meaning that they had widely varied diets. These different diets proved key to an
unexpected finding regarding mammal species going extinct along with the dinosaurs.
Not only did mammals begin diversifying earlier than previously expected, but the mass extinction wasn't the
perfect opportunity for mammal evolution that it's traditionally been painted as. Early mammals were hit by a
selective extinction at the same time the dinosaurs died out -- generalists that could live off of a wide variety
of foods seemed more apt to survive, but many mammals with specialised diets went extinct.
The scientists involved with the study were surprised to see that mammals were initially negatively impacted
by the mass extinction event. "I fully expected to see more diverse mammals immediately after the
extinction," said lead author David Grossnickle, a Field Museum Fellow and PhD candidate at the University
of Chicago. "I wasn't expecting to see any sort of drop. It didn't match the traditional view that after the
extinction, mammals hit the ground running. It's part of the reason why I went back to study it further -- it
seemed wrong."
The reason behind the mammals' pre-extinction diversification remains a mystery. Grossnickle suggests a
possible link between the rise of mammals and the rise of flowering plants, which diversified around the same
time. "We can't know for sure, but flowering plants might have offered new seeds and fruits for the mammals.
And, if the plants co-evolved with new insects to pollinate them, the insects could have also been a food
source for early mammals," he said.
Grossnickle notes that the study is particularly relevant in light of the mass extinction the earth is currently
undergoing. He said: "The types of survivors that made it across the mass extinction 66 million years ago,
mostly generalists, might be indicative of what will survive in the next hundred years, the next thousand."
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Southampton. Note: Materials may be
edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.
David M. Grossnickle, Elis Newham. Therian mammals experience an ecomorphological radiation during the
Late Cretaceous and selective extinction at the K–Pg boundary. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2016
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2016.0256
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160607220628.htm
107
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
A Rage for Abstraction
Jeremy Harding

BUYThe Other Paris: An Illustrated Journey through a City’s Poor and Bohemian Past by Luc Sante
Faber, 306 pp, £25.00, November 2015, ISBN 978 0 571 24128 6

BUYHow the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People by Sudhir Hazareesingh
Allen Lane, 427 pp, £20.00, June 2015, ISBN 978 1 84614 602 2
A stand-off in Sudan in 1898 between the British and the French was attended by a prodigious rattling of
sabres in London and Paris. The two armies in the field never came to blows, but France lost face at Fashoda
and a tide of Anglophobia engulfed the Parisian press. It lasted through the Boer wars and beyond. Le Petit
Journal, a scurrilous right-wing Republican daily, which rounded on Dreyfus, then Zola, took up the cudgels
on behalf of oppressed Afrikaners. Among the sins it couldn’t forgive the British was the deadpan expression
of Joseph Chamberlain, secretary of state for the colonies, when he toured the battlefields of South Africa.
The paper had a point: the Boers fought – and lost – one of the first modern anti-imperialist struggles in
Africa. Britain’s concentration camps in South Africa gave the world a glimpse of wars to come.
Le Petit Journal had a healthy print run, half a million in its heyday: it reeled in readers like idle fish on an
appetising bait of faits divers. Parisian hoodlums – a particular type known as ‘apaches’ – were said to be
keen browsers, partly because the paper loved to relate their fearsome deeds, and in return its editorial line
rubbed off on them. They became human parchment for the journal’s opinions: in 1902 the police arrested 15
apaches and found they were covered in tattoos – among them, images of the Boer leader, Paul Kruger.
Apaches, as Luc Sante explains in The Other Paris, were propelled to fame by imaginative fin-de-siècle
journalists and pamphleteers who felt the city was at risk from ‘an army of crime’. The cause of the arrests,
and the sudden celebrity of the apaches, was the discovery of a corpse near Père Lachaise, armed to its rotting
teeth with switchblades, revolvers and a hatchet. The crime scene pointed to a feud among new, state-of-theart gangsters – ‘violent poseurs’, Sante calls them, ‘fully attuned to the image they cut, on the street and in the
press’ – and Parisians were flattered by a sense of their own modernity. The moll in the mêlée – her nickname
was Casque d’Or – switched her affections from one rival gangster to another and raised the stakes as they
fought over her ‘crown of strawberry-blonde hair’.
Sante’s ‘other Paris’ is a poetic guide to the city’s underworld across six centuries, a threepenny opera with a
milling crowd of beggars, gangsters, whores and constables, attended by artists, insurrectionaries and
intellectuals. Sudden death on the streets, the guillotine, the prison cell or – in the case of public figures – a
ruined reputation, loomed over this mixed population. Readers enrolling on Sante’s guided tour should
abandon hope at the gate if they’re expecting to go on to purgatory and paradise. For Sante hell is too
invigorating to leave behind: murder, intoxication, libertinage, art and revolution are sublime forms of selfexpression. At the head of this parade is the rogue poet François Villon, imprisoned in the Châtelet in 1462;
on the last float, the heroines from Jacques Rivette’s 1981 movie, Le Pont du Nord, are waving goodbye,
along with the two keynote Situationists, Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem.
The Other Paris is also an elegy to a lost era of rebelliousness. The hold-all counter-culture that Sante
commemorates – including muggers and writers, painters and thieves, drunks and austere revolutionaries – is
no longer a threat to the world his underdogs despised. ‘Market forces’ have done the job they failed to
complete. The next stop, if there is one, will not be a carnival of danger, with knives flashing and ‘wild-eyed’
women lifting their skirts on the barricades as soldiers open fire (an incident from Victor Hugo’sChoses
vues), but a rearguard action against insecurity and the erosion of rights – to jobs, housing, public services,
freedom of movement, asylum.
108
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
For Sante, one suspects, the jig is already up. He is depressed by the tendency of big Western cities to banish
people on low incomes and sweep away their traces. There are, he admits, ‘a few places in Paris where the
poor can live, but the requirement is that those places be inhuman, soulless, windswept’ (he’s referring to a
redevelopment in the 19th arrondissement, not to the banlieues). ‘In the past,’ he writes, ‘the poor were left to
hustle on their own … The bargain they are offered today assures them of well-lit, dust-free environs with upto-date fixtures, but it relieves them of the ability to improvise’ or ‘carve out their own spaces’. Much later in
the book, Vaneigem is invoked to reinforce the theme: ‘Large numbers of former proletarians now have
access to the comforts once reserved for a small elite’ – this was published in 1961 – ‘but isn’t it rather that an
increasing amount of comfort usurps their needs and creates an itch for consumer demands?’ Sante, like
Vaneigem, wants the poorer classes to be gnarled and intransigent, manning the last barricade against white
goods and decent housing. He might as well ask the same of the rich. Yet he loves his characters for their
failings and their impenitence.
One of the liveliest spaces carved out by the poor in Paris was the ‘cour des miracles’. Miracle courtyards,
which date from the Middle Ages, were clusters of cottage tenements in insalubrious parts of the city, offlimits for the police, where a ‘permanent feast of misrule persisted’. Con artists, criminals, and presumably
their children, were the denizens of these autonomous compounds. They had their own cant, borrowed by
Villon, and depended on duplicity to turn a penny. Their ‘miracles’, as Sante explains, were performed every
evening when the crippled, the scabrous and other fakers came home from work and set aside their parts, like
bit-part actors walking off the lot. ‘The blind could see, the hunchbacked stood straight, the clubfooted ran
and danced, leprous skin became clear and unblemished once their disguises had been put away for the night.’
Over the centuries the miracle courtyards swelled with more honest indigents; they became known as cités – a
word associated nowadays with public housing projects – but Sante’s coterie of ne’er-do-wells remained in
charge. In Notre-Dame de Paris, Hugo described a typical cité as a ‘monstrous beehive’, where ‘the hornets of
the social order repaired in the evening with their plunder’.
Sante distinguishes his characters by genre, or degree of misfortune, in a series of marvellous chapters dealing
with policing and prisons, hospitals and disease, and the ragged livelihoods and lifestyles of extramural Paris,
known as the ‘zone’ – a vast area of wasteland beyond a customs wall built around the old fortified city limits.
A chapter on ‘insurgents’ contains an exemplary thumbnail history of 1848, a flawless account of the Siege of
Paris in the winter of 1870 and a dead-eyed résumé of the Commune the following year. During the siege,
Sante reminds us, hunger drove Parisians to extremes: mouse pâté with fur in the mix; cats and rats; ‘dog-liver
brochettes’. Eventually the specimens in the Jardin d’Acclimatation were ‘sacrificed in inverse order to their
popularity: yaks, zebras and water buffalo in late October; antelopes a week later; in mid-November boars,
reindeer, the kangaroo, the cassowary and the rare black swan’; finally ‘the two beloved elephants, Castor and
Pollux’.
There is a tremendous promenade chapter on ‘vice’, in which the players are brought together on stage. The
rich and powerful are here – including Edward VII and Hermann Goering – along with artists and ordinary
johns; modest people who make a living out of sex, others who end up used and destroyed; well-heeled pimps
and madames. At the edge of this satyricon is the vice squad; it was known originally as the ‘Brigade des
moeurs’, but went through several renamings as generations of bureaucrats switched their attention from
STDs to homosexual ‘inversion’ to drugs and back to brothels in case they were dodging taxes.
Sante has dug up a menu from a brothel run in 1915 by ‘Mlle Marcelle Lapompe’, actually Renée Dunan, a
feminist writer in her early twenties, who later took up with Philippe Soupault, Francis Picabia and the tricky
André Breton, though she’s largely absent from the Dada/Surrealism record. Mlle Lapompe charged 4 francs
and 95 sous for complicated sex with ‘the maid’ and upped it five sous for the same complication with ‘the
waiter’: a travesty of equal pay, unless of course the waiter was really the maid with a pencilled moustache.
Hitler called Paris the ‘whorehouse of Europe’ and the Nazis had few objections. But Islamic State – for
109
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
whom Paris is also ‘the capital of prostitution and obscenity’ – has no use for sex work. Sante thinks of the
city more affectionately as ‘the world capital of contradictions’.
The Brigade des moeurs, he tells us, opened a register of homosexuals in the 1840s. Homosexuality was not
‘specifically illegal’ in the 19th century, but male prostitution was. It was the subject of much discussion in
the 20th when a chain of brothels run by Count Radziwill’s former valet – Jupien in A la recherche du temps
perdu –came to light after a raid in 1918. Proust was picked up in one of the sweeps: ‘rentier, 46 years old’,
the police report reads, ‘102 boulevard Haussmann’. Paris had ‘always been more accepting of lesbians’,
Sante tells us, with a customised café scene, and clubs like Le Monocle, which opened in the 1920s. Gay
women were prominent in the entertainment industry, among them Suzy Solidor, who sat for some of the
painters – there’s a famous après-Deco portrait by Tamara de Lempicka from 1933 – and Yvonne George, a
Belgian cabaret star who swept the poet Robert Desnos off his feet.
Members of the Brigade des moeurs were biddable, and liked to get a slice of the action, whatever it happened
to be. They didn’t have much in the way of convictions, in any sense, especially when it came to pornography
and drugs. The painter Gustave Courbet was ‘cited for possession’ of pornographic work, though Sante
doesn’t tell us what it was. The year was 1867; in 1866 Courbet finished L’Origine du monde, which would
have qualified, and perhaps there were still incriminating traces in his studio.＊ The Brigade had no serious
anxiety about opium until the 1930s, and little interest in hashish until the 1960s. ‘Vices’ tended to overlap in
reality, and often in the eyes of the department, which worried for years over a tenuous link between murder
and homosexuality. Yet when cocaine flooded the Paris underworld between the wars, pimps moved more
quickly than officers of the law to neutralise the dealers: cocaine was destroying sex workers faster than old
age, or STDs, which the state was doing its best to control.
Revolutionaries, nameless or famous, play an important part in Sante’s book. The image of Louise Michel,
who makes a star appearance, is among many – archive photos, postcards, prints – which Sante began
assembling years ago. Michel was not a delegate of the Paris Commune: women didn’t have the vote in 1871
and couldn’t be elected. But she was one of many women who played a role in support of the new, shortlived
arrangement. Some, like the leaders of the Union of Women for the Defence of Paris and Aid to the
Wounded, were well educated; many more, who served as ambulance workers and built barricades, were not.
Michel, known as the Red Virgin, ran a grassroots debating society; she set out an agenda for educational
reform; she bore arms. When the Commune was suppressed and the French government put survivors on trial,
she was sent to a penal colony in New Caledonia.
*
We come across her again in Sudhir Hazareesingh’s sharp-eyed survey, How the French Think, as she returns
to France in 1895, after more than one prison term and a spell in exile, to become the Commune’s ‘most
potent living symbol’. Several of Sante’s characters turn up in Hazareesingh: Auguste Blanqui, so clearly
well-suited to lead the Commune that Thiers had him arrested on the eve of the insurrection; Proudhon, a
male supremacist exponent of bucolic socialism; Léo Frankel, a Hungarian jeweller and the Commune’s only
Marxist. Hazareesingh sees the defeat by Prussia and the suppression of the Commune as a turning point for
19th-century political sensibilities. The republic that emerged from this twofold shame was pragmatic and
bent on maintaining public order. Where was the enduring French belief in social transformation supposed to
go next?
Hazareesingh, a political scientist, and a proper historian of ideas, sees it shifting away from metropolitan
France to focus on the colonies, which underwent a huge expansion during the Third Republic, peaking at 12
million square kilometres and 70 million subjects by the end of the 1930s. The early French socialists,
including Saint-Simon, had liked the idea of venturing overseas to seed ‘progressive’ theories on untilled
ground; Etienne Cabet had already founded a socialist community in Texas in 1848 and the ideas of Charles
Fourier had inspired American followers to set up phalansteries. But as the empire grew under Louis
110
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Napoleon, enthusiasm for far-off experiments had less to do with transforming France than with engineering
other people’s societies. Early on, in 1845, Cabet had set the tone, by describing colonialism as ‘the conquest
of the ignorant universe’, and in the 1880s Jules Ferry, who had shed his early idealism and was now the
serving prime minister, could invoke ‘the right of superior races over inferior races’. For Hazareesingh, the
universalist principles of the Revolution were rapidly giving way to a ‘differentialist order which
distinguished between subjects and citizens and condoned systematic violence against native populations’.
His book is not just about how the French think, but about the way these thoughts appear to non-French
thinkers with a plausible claim to the cold light of day. He notices a marked tension between ideas and
practice – for instance, Republican universalism and colonial discrimination – but is careful not to ascribe it to
any disingenuousness or self-deception rooted in French culture. He prefers to see it in terms of a
longstanding, garrulous interest in the life of the mind. The French aren’t the only nation given to thinking out
loud, but the kind of thought that distinguishes their intellectual canon is ambitious, often ‘abstract’, as he
understands it. He likes the essayist Emile Montégut’s remark that no other culture exists in which
‘individuals are so oblivious to facts and possessed to such a high degree with a rage for abstractions’.
Hazareesingh is keen to steer clear of parody, but we have to keep an eye on our own prejudices as we
proceed. ‘Abstraction’, after all, might only be the continuation of one conversation about a second that refers
to a third, and we can tell that French intellectual tradition is often happier than its rival Anglo-Saxon versions
to put the world – and the fact – in parenthesis for as long as these conversations are worth having. We know,
too, that it’s happy to reason on the basis of statistics but loath to slam ‘facts’ on the table like marked aces:
France has a Thomas Piketty but no Malcolm Gladwell. It worries about experiments that naturalise
themselves out of business: why go off to live at the edge of a pond, like Thoreau, when you may as well
explore the relation of human sociability to nature over a book on the subject, or a lavish transformation of
raw into cooked? (It’s also noticeable that nature writing hasn’t caught on there as it has in the UK: in France
writing is still first and foremost a performance of culture. A writer venturing into the wild with a smartphone
and a notepad has got to be joking; only scientists and civil servants should be doing this.)
The evolution of French thinking has been led, according to Hazareesingh, by ‘the prodigious, captivating
power of imagination’. Working through his elegant, often funny book you begin to see much of the thought,
like the art, as a studio project. Painting is not one of Hazareesingh’s subjects; even so if we think of Monet
gesturing at the fields of Giverny in 1880 and announcing that here was ‘his very own studio’, we get a
glimpse of a general modus operandi that queries the distinction between outside and inside in order to bring
everything indoors under the heading ‘work’. Just as the city was a proper object of the mind for the
assiduous 19th-century flâneur, and later for the psychogeographers, so the world itself exists to be
domesticated and transformed by means of radical homework, often done with an eye to what other thinkers
make of it.
Hazareesingh’s exposition of political thought and public discourse over several centuries suggests – to me at
any rate – that the wish to abstract is linked to an enduring fascination with otherness. An ‘other Paris’,
another France, another world entirely: Hazareesingh is a reliable guide to the long history of ‘alternative’
ideas and the writers who ‘imagined that power could be held and exercised in a radically different way’.
Some of the finest commentaries in his book unpack this ‘utopian disposition’ in French thought from
Rousseau onwards. He includes a synopsis of L’An 2440 by Louis-Sébastien Mercier, published in 1770, in
which the narrator wakes from a long slumber to find mid-25th-century Paris basking in a ‘sense of natural
equality’. The rich have abandoned ostentatiousness; the clergy are no longer living the high life; artisans
work shorter hours, and everyone is happy to pay tax. History – ‘the shame of humanity’ – is not taught to
children and a lot of pointless literature has been thrown on the bonfire, including 600,000 dictionaries,
200,000 volumes of jurisprudence and poetry and 1.6 million travel narratives.
111
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
From there we move to Fourier, Cabet – another book-burner – and Saint-Simon, through to the Commune
and onto 20th-century socialism. In a short section that takes us ‘from the Communards to the Communists’,
we encounter a new movement in which the impulse for transformation has recovered its purchase after the
earlier circumspection of the Third Republic. By the end of the 1920s, with around 30,000 members, the
Communist Party was becoming an apprenticeship and ‘a practical goal’ for many working-class French
committed to another version of society: membership would eventually peak at around one million, with a
popular vote of five million. The French party went on to internalise whatever was good about the Soviet
model and repress the remainder: as Hazareesingh explains, Stalin was seen by party members as a
providential figure. ‘May your benevolent Light reign on the planet for many more years,’ a reader’s message,
published in L’Humanité, announced on his 70th birthday.
Hazareesingh’s look at the post-May 1968 era leaves aside a curious moment of utopian dérive, as the
theoreticians at Tel Quel ‘broke’ from the Communist Party in 1971 (the party lived to fight another day) and
set off in search of a more exotic, ennobling other: Maoist China, five years into the Cultural Revolution. In
1974, two years after the French Communists and Socialists signed the ‘common programme’ and set
Mitterrand on the road to power, Tel Quelorganised a works outing to China (Roland Barthes was among the
distinguished guests).
Shortly afterwards, the journal abandoned Maoism. Under Giscard’s technocratic authoritarian regime, radical
alternatives – neither Maoism, nor Stalinism – continued at the margins of the common programme but in
1981 Mitterrand’s victory signalled a lull. He won around 52 per cent of the vote. It was only after his
election, in Hazareesingh’s view, that mainstream French socialists became fully reconciled to the idea of
private property (‘theft’ according to Proudhon) and a mixed economy as ‘unmovable features of the French
polity’. In power Mitterrand went further, preparing the left for a post-socialist landscape in the 21st century.†
Unworldly idealisms – no less respectable for that – still find their echo in the rhetoric of modern French
governance. Enormous effort has been spent trying to wrestle difference into sameness and produce a single,
consensual identity; in the process, vestiges of the utopian idiom have been folded into Republican discourse,
where they hibernate for decades, emerging now and then as proof of high aspiration in public life. In his
speech to the Security Council against the bombing of Iraq in 2003, Dominique de Villepin described the UN
as the ‘guardians of an ideal, a sense of conscience’, and France as a member state which had ‘never ceased to
stand upright, in the face of history, and before mankind’. The speech was also a plea for reason and, as
Hazareesingh says, the last, great public demonstration of ‘Cartesian aplomb’.
*
Otherness and difference still exercise their fascination, but the terms have changed. French Muslims –
sometimes a self-description, sometimes not – are now the refractory other. Non-Muslim France has tried to
incorporate them by coercion, coming down on the veil and the burqa; for their part Muslims have tried to
integrate: a younger generation registered to vote in large numbers after 2005 and helped secure Hollande’s
electoral victory seven years later.
High youth unemployment, seclusion in the banlieues, a growing disgust with the West’s policies in the Arab
world, two horrific terror attacks, and disagreement among non-Muslims about the nature of Republican
inclusion, mean that common ground is scarce. In these conditions utopian instincts easily mutate into
eloquent pessimism, defeatism, even dystopian visions like those of Eric Zemmour, a compulsive bringer of
bad tidings, who believes that migrants and their descendants are forcing France towards ‘de-Christianisation
and de-Francification’.
Zemmour, whose family left Algeria during the colonial war, shares the ‘substitutionist’ view put forward by
Renaud Camus – Gallocentric, openly gay, coyly anti-Semitic – that a ‘great replacement’ of the indigenous
population is underway, as people from the Maghreb ‘counter-colonise’ the Hexagon. Hazareesingh has no
112
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
time for him or his friend, the essayist Alain Finkielkraut, whose 2013 bestseller, L’Identité malheureuse,
bemoans the ‘self-effacement’ of the native French, a population of ‘strangers in their own land’. ‘In his drift
towards this self-pitying and xenophobic nationalism,’ Hazareesingh writes, ‘Finkielkraut illustrates how far
the declinist obsession has pushed mainstream French thought away from its Rousseauist and republican
heritage.’
Another kind of shove has come from the performer-polemicist Dieudonné M’bala M’bala and his entourage
of pick-and-mix extremists, but the dystopian tone in this case is confident and aggressive, rather than
‘décliniste’; often the main object of hostility is ‘Zio-Judaism’, as the ideologue Alain Soral, an associate of
Dieudonné, put it in 2004. Israel/Palestine remains a source of bitter meditation in France. In March, speaking
at a dinner for Jewish community leaders in Paris, the prime minister Manuel Valls denounced anti-Zionism –
take that to mean criticism of Israel’s policies – as ‘a form of anti-semitism’. Under this pall of confusion,
sworn enemies like Valls and Dieudonné can toil ahead, in tandem, to rekindle the Jewish question.
Hazareesingh is reasonably sure that the ‘integration’ of North African French is working, but he speaks as a
multiculturalist not an assimilationist. Textbook assimilationism has failed, while laisser-vivre of the kind that
makes sense to him has carried the story of integration beyond the riots of 2005, when there was still much to
play for, even if it isn’t clear what happens next. The French, he writes, are ‘riven … with contradictions’. He
lists some of the most striking at the end of his book: ‘instinctively attached to the ideal of democratic
governance, but vulnerable to the temptation of the providential hero’ (Bonaparte, De Gaulle, eventually
perhaps Marine le Pen); ‘clinging to a belief in the enabling capacities of the state, but forever complaining
about its distance from the citizenry’; ‘averse to communitarian conceptions of society … yet willing to
devolve ever greater freedoms to regional political institutions’; ‘decisive architects of an economically liberal
Europe, but profoundly contemptuous of capitalism’; ‘increasingly retreating from the public sphere … yet
capable of turning out in their millions on the streets of Paris to reaffirm their Republican values’.
In a secluded space with plenty of northern light, these values are easy enough to represent. But movement of
human beings back and forth across France’s borders is something no administration has mastered to its
satisfaction since the 1970s. Foreign policy, too, puts ‘French’ values under scrutiny, as governments project
their equivocations beyond the studio into a globalised world that their electorates resent for its
encroachments.
One regime after another bangs the drum for universal rights and human dignity, while pursuing a narrow
course that has little to do with either. The dissonance of France’s foreign adventures is loud and clear at
home, in the workshop of French identity. The Elysée and the Quai d’Orsay do not hold a monopoly on
ambiguity, volte-face, compromise and double-standards in the Middle East, but France has the highest
proportion of inhabitants in Western Europe – about 7 or 8 per cent – with ties to the Muslim world, the
majority of Arab origin.
There are still ‘alternative’ visions in play. In March the Nuit Debout movement, a spontaneous commons,
started gathering at night in Paris, then elsewhere. It has brought out thousands of people to express their
impatience with the government (or rather, the political class: ‘The people who represent us have no idea who
we are,’ a student nurse told Le Monde in April. ‘We’ve moved too fast by comparison with them’). Nuit
Debout was triggered by opposition to proposed labour legislation – the 35-hour week, overtime rates and
terms of contract are at issue in a country with long-term youth unemployment at around 20 per cent – but
rapidly announced itself as a many-faced ‘convergence of struggles’. At the time of writing, the trade unions
have mobilised against the reforms, even though they have been driven through the lower house by special
decree.
There is, too, the marginal ‘alternative’ of a nebulous Islamist international; successes in Paris in 2015, along
with the growing authoritarianism of French secular values, will encourage this apocalyptic strand. But
leading the field by a comfortable distance are those who dream of a ‘French’ France. An Ipsos poll published
113
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
in March gives the Front National a narrow victory in round one of next year’s presidential elections if
Nicolas Sarkozy is the centre-right candidate, and second place if it’s Alain Juppé (either way, Hollande does
not go to round two).
Extreme French nationalism has a firm foothold, but how do its exponents think, and where do they go in
search of intellectual respectability? To Voltaire on the Jews, ‘born with raging fanaticism in their hearts’,
eventually ‘deadly to the human race’? Or Ernest Renan on Islam and ‘the intellectual nullity of the races that
hold, from that religion alone, their culture and their education’? Perhaps it’s wiser, with Algeria and Vichy
lurking in the not-so-distant past, for ethnic conservatism not to invoke a lineage at all: trouble ahead is its
strongest suit.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n12/jeremy-harding/a-rage-for-abstraction
114
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Study charts development of emotional control in teens
Source:
Society for Neuroscience
Summary:
In the midst of all the apparent tumult, intense emotion, and occasional reckless behavior
characterizing the teenage years, the brain is, in fact, evolving and developing the neural circuits
needed to keep emotions in check. Research describes how the ability to control emotions moves
from one brain area to another as teens mature into adults, offering an opportunity to understand how
disorders related to emotional control emerge.
Share:
AddThis Sharing Buttons
FULL STORY
Until now, it has not been clear whether and how the delayed development of the prefrontal cortex affects
emotional control during adolescence. (stock image)
Credit: © ra2 studio / Fotolia
In the midst of all the apparent tumult, intense emotion, and occasional reckless behavior characterizing the
teenage years, the brain is, in fact, evolving and developing the neural circuits needed to keep emotions in
check. Research in the June 8, 2016 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience describes how the ability to control
emotions moves from one brain area to another as teens mature into adults, offering an opportunity to
understand how disorders related to emotional control emerge.
115
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
"Our study opens the way for a better understanding of the neurobiology behind adolescent behavior in
emotionally arousing situations," said study author Anna Tyborowska of Radboud University Nijmegen in the
Netherlands. "The findings could also have important clinical implications [as] many psychiatric disorders
emerge during adolescence and are characterized by problems with emotional action control."
Previous research links the spike in sensation-seeking and impulsive behavior during adolescence to the
delayed maturation of the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in reasoning, planning, and
decision-making. Study authors Inge Volman, Ivan Toni, and Karin Roelofs previously demonstrated the
importance of the anterior prefrontal cortex in emotional control in adults. However, it has not been clear
whether and how the delayed development of the prefrontal cortex affects emotional control during
adolescence.
To address this question, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure
brain activity in 47 healthy 14-year-old adolescents while they evaluated the emotional expressions of happy
and angry faces. Sometimes, the teens were instructed to push a joystick toward happy faces and away from
angry faces, a natural, instinctive response. Other times, they had to push the joystick toward angry faces and
away from happy faces, an unnatural response requiring more emotional self-control.
The researchers also measured the adolescents' testosterone levels to gauge their pubertal maturation.
Adolescents with high testosterone levels, or a greater level of maturity, showed stronger activity in the
anterior prefrontal cortex during actions requiring more emotional self-control. Individuals with low
testosterone levels had more activity in the amygdala and the pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus, subcortical
brain regions known to play a key role in emotional processing.
Participants completed the task equally well regardless of testosterone level, suggesting both brain circuits
support emotional control. However, the researchers indicate real-world scenarios may prove more
challenging to subjects with an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex.
"This is one of the few studies that looks at how puberty stage is associated with brain development in young
people who are all the same chronological age," said neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, who studies
adolescent development at University College London and was not involved in the study. She said the results
add to our understanding of typical behavior and how the brain changes in adolescence.
The results may also help us understand how emotional control can go awry during development. It's possible
that the failure of the prefrontal cortex to integrate properly into the emotional control circuit could contribute
to the emergence of affective disorders in adolescence.
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Society for Neuroscience. Note: Materials may be
edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.
A. Tyborowska, I. Volman, S. Smeekens, I. Toni, K. Roelofs.Testosterone during Puberty Shifts Emotional
Control from Pulvinar to Anterior Prefrontal Cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 2016; 36 (23): 6156
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3874-15.2016
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160607220111.htm
116
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Why the Very Poor Have Become Poorer
Christopher Jencks
JUNE 9, 2016 ISSUE
$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America
by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 210 pp., $28.00
Mary Ellen Mark
‘Tiny holding Horsey with Keanna,’ Seattle, 1993; photograph by Mary Ellen Mark from the exhibition
‘Tiny: Streetwise Revisited,’ at the Aperture Foundation, New York City, May 26–June 30. The book
includes essays by Isabel Allende and John Irving and is published by Aperture. The film ‘Tiny: The Life of
Erin Blackwell,’ made by Mark and her husband Martin Bell, will be shown at BAMcinemaFest on June 25.
According to the Census Bureau, the percentage of Americans living in poverty is higher today than it was in
the late 1960s. Last year I argued in these pages that these “official” poverty statistics are extremely
misleading.1 When the United States first explicitly defined an official poverty line in 1969, it was supposed
to be adjusted every year to ensure that it represented a constant standard of living. However, two problems
arose and were never fixed.
First, the Consumer Price Index, which was supposed to be used to adjust the poverty line for inflation, turned
out to have flaws that made it rise faster than the cost of living. Second, the official measure uses pretax
money income to measure families’ economic resources; but anti-poverty measures enacted since then, such
as the expansion of food stamps and then the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), made low-income families’
total economic resources increase faster than their pretax money income. As a result of these problems,
117
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
roughly half the families now counted as officially poor have a higher standard of living than families with
incomes at the poverty line had in 1969.
In $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer argue that what they
call “extreme” poverty roughly doubled between 1996 and 2012. If they are right—and I think they are—the
reader might wonder how I can still claim that poor families’ living standards have risen. The answer is that
inequality has risen even among the poor. Half of today’s officially poor families are doing better than those
we counted as poor in the 1960s, but as I learned from reading $2.00 a Day (and have spent many hours
verifying), the poorest of the poor are also worse off today than they were in 1969. $2.00 a Day is a vivid
account of how such families live. It also makes a strong case for blaming their misery on deliberate political
choices at both the federal and state levels.
ADVERTISING
inRead invented by Teads
1.
Kathryn Edin is a professor at Johns Hopkins University who has spent much of the past twenty-five years
talking with low-income Americans about their lives.2 In 2010, when the national unemployment rate was
over 9 percent, she began meeting parents who said they had no regular income whatever from work, from
welfare, or from any other source. Their economic plight sounded worse than anything she had previously
encountered, and she began pondering how to figure out what had happened, and why.
In 2011 Edin met Luke Shaefer, a young professor at the University of Michigan who had worked extensively
with the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). This survey was the best
available source of data on poor families, and Edin persuaded Shaefer to investigate what it showed about
households with little or no income.3 To do that, they had to decide what criteria to use.
A single mother with two children was officially poor in 2011 if she reported an annual income below
$18,123. If she reported less than half that amount, the Census classified her and her children as living in
“deep” poverty. However, the Census had never had a term for families as poor as those Edin and Shaefer
wanted to count, so they chose their own term: “extreme” poverty.
They also chose a third-world definition of who belonged in their new category. The World Bank counted
third-world families as poor if they lived on less than $1.90 a day per family member. Edin and Shaefer
rounded that up to $2.00.4 This cutoff was between 9 and 13 percent of the official poverty threshold for most
American families. For a single mother of two, for example, Edin and Shaefer’s “extreme” poverty threshold
was $6 a day while the “official” 2011 threshold came to just under $50 a day. Neither measure included
noncash benefits or EITC refunds.
When Shaefer analyzed the SIPP data, he found that 4.3 percent of American households with children
reported living on less than $2 a day per person for at least one month during 2011. When he looked back at
the SIPP data for 1996, only 1.7 percent of parents had reported a month like that (see the first row of Table
1).
118
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Edin and Shaefer were shocked by how much the SIPP estimate had risen, so they checked to see if other
evidence pointed in the same direction. Their best comparison was with data collected by the Food Stamp
Program. Families applying for food stamps must report their income to qualify for assistance, and they must
then keep reporting it every year to remain eligible. The number of parents telling the Food Stamp Program
that they had had a month without income matched the SIPP estimates closely in 1996 and 2005. From 2005
to 2012, however, the number of parents reporting a month without income rose faster in the Food Stamp
119
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Program than in SIPP.5 No one seems to know why the two trends diverged, but the divergence may mean
that the 2011 SIPPestimates in Table 1 are too low.6
For reasons that will become clear momentarily, I now need to mention that Congress renamed the Food
Stamp Program in 2008, calling it the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The name change
reflected the fact that the program now gives recipients an electronic card instead of stamps to pay for their
groceries. Outside Washington, D.C., however, most people still talk about food stamps, not SNAP. I will do
the same, except when I discuss the SNAP card itself.
The most obvious explanation for the increase in extreme poverty between 1996 and 2011 is that jobs were
harder to find in 2011, but that is only half the story. Until 1996 single mothers with no income were eligible
for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Edin and Shaefer argue that extreme poverty rose after
1996 because Congress replaced AFDC with an even less generous welfare program called Temporary
Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Because TANF benefits are much harder to get than AFDC benefits
were, parents who cannot find a job are more likely to find themselves penniless. 7
Prior to 1996 each state had its own AFDC program, with the federal government paying about half the cost
in rich states and far more than half in poor states. States could set their AFDC benefits as high or low as they
wanted, but in each state the eligibility rules had to meet a variety of federal requirements, one of which was
that all legally eligible applicants were entitled to benefits. A state could not turn away eligible applicants
because the legislature wanted to use the money for some other purpose or because a caseworker thought an
applicant had loose morals.
All states still get federal money to cover part of TANF’s cost, but they now have more leeway in deciding
how to spend such money. They can divert federal TANF funds to programs like financial aid for college
students and pre-kindergarten programs, for example. Such programs are worthwhile, but they do nothing to
help poor single mothers pay their electric bill or their rent. States also have almost complete freedom to
decide what applicants must do to qualify for benefits and retain them. States can also shorten the federal time
limit on TANF eligibility.
If states cut the cost of TANF by reducing the number of recipients, they can use the savings for other
purposes. That gives state officials a strong incentive to discourageTANF applications. Potential applicants
may have to spend weeks applying for jobs before they can apply for TANF. Or they may have to produce
documents that they cannot find or do not know how to get. Understaffed welfare offices can create long lines
that discourage applications. Many TANF applicants also report having been turned down with no
explanation at all.
The opening chapter of $2.00 a Day describes a Chicago mother whom the authors call Modonna Harris.
Harris graduated from high school and then took out loans to attend a private university. However, she got no
financial help from her divorced parents, and when she hit her student loan ceiling at the end of her second
year, she dropped out. Misadventures in love followed, and after her marriage broke up she had a child to
support. The best job she could find was as a cashier, but after eight years her employer fired her because her
cash drawer was $10 short. The store eventually found the missing $10, but it did not rehire Harris.
Harris looked for new jobs, without success. After her unemployment benefits ran out, a friend noticed that
Harris had no food in her apartment for herself or her child and persuaded her to apply for TANF. The welfare
office opened at 8:30 AM, so Harris showed up at 8:00. At least on that particular day, however, there were
only enough appointment slots for applicants who had joined the line in the rain outside the welfare office
before 7:30. After waiting most of the day, Harris left without having been given a chance to apply, convinced
that TANF would never help her.
It is tempting to say that Harris was too easily discouraged. However, it is also tempting to say that in Illinois,
as in most other states, TANF’s primary goal is not to protect children whose parents cannot find work by
120
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
ensuring that their family has shelter, heat, light, food, and shoes, but to cut program costs by reducing the
number of recipients. (California, which now accounts for a third of all TANF recipients, is a partial
exception to this rule.)
State efforts to cut the TANF rolls have been quite effective. The overall unemployment rate, which is a fairly
good proxy for how hard it is to find work, was almost twice as high in 2009 as in 1996. Yet the number of
families getting TANF in 2009 was less than half the number getting AFDC in 1996.8 Edin and Shaefer write
about meeting poor parents who said they didn’t know anyone who got TANF. Some parents thought welfare
had been abolished, or that it was no longer accepting new applicants. This grim story deserves more attention
than it has gotten, and Edin and Shaefer deserve a lot of credit for emphasizing it.
They also report a shift in social norms that may have made TANF shrink. When Edin interviewed single
mothers in the early 1990s, they often told her that a good mother should stay home with her children. In
2012, even mothers who could not find work said they wanted a job rather than a welfare check, because a
working mother set a better example for her children than a welfare mother did. This shift in attitude
presumably encourages single mothers to keep looking for work, but it does not create more jobs for them. As
a result, reducing access to TANF leaves more single mothers with neither a paycheck nor a welfare check.
As Edin and Shaefer document in some of their saddest stories, such mothers often find jobs when times are
good, but many of those jobs vanish when the economy slows. When single mothers can’t find work, they sell
their plasma to hospitals and scavenge for cans and bottles in trash barrels. Sometimes they also sell sex or
drugs. As a result, their income is usually meager and erratic.
One basic goal of welfare reform in the 1990s was to “make work pay,” and the Clinton administration
created a new system that did just that. Instead of giving parents more help when they could not find work,
the new system gives parents more help when they find and keep a steady low-wage job. When Modonna
Harris worked as a cashier, Edin and Shaefer estimate that her take-home pay was about $1,325 a month. The
government topped that up with another $160 a month in food stamps.
The Clinton administration also persuaded Congress to increase the Earned Income Tax Credit between 1993
and 1996, so when Harris was working she got a check from the US Treasury for about $3,800 a few weeks
after filing her federal tax return. That check provided her with an additional $317 a month. Overall, the
government supplemented Harris’s paycheck with benefits worth $477 a month. Once she lost her job, she
stopped accumulating EITC benefits. Her food stamp benefits rose from $160 to $367 a month, but she was
still getting $110 a month less than she had from food stamps and the EITCwhen she had a monthly
paycheck.
2.
Edin and Shaefer’s descriptions of families in extreme poverty are both convincing and deeply troubling.
However, two potential objections to their analysis deserve discussion. First, the estimates of extreme poverty
in $2.00 a Day almost never include the value of food stamps, rent subsidies, or EITC refunds for work during
the previous calendar year. Those omissions mean that Edin and Shaefer underestimate the resources
available to most families in extreme poverty.
In papers published elsewhere Shaefer and Edin show how their estimates of extreme poverty change when
they treat the value of EITC refunds, food stamps, and rent subsidies like income. The second row of Table 1
shows that including these resources reduces the estimated prevalence of extreme poverty among households
with children from 1.7 to 1.1 percent in 1996 and from 4.3 to 1.6 percent in 2011. Because the reduction is so
much larger in 2011 than it was in 1996, the increase in extreme poverty between 1996 and 2011 falls from
2.6 to 0.5 percentage points. In other words, the growth of EITC refunds and noncash benefits offsets about
four fifths of the decline in extremely poor families’ pretax money income between 1996 and 2011.
Edin and Shaefer argue that we should not view a SNAP card that buys $500 worth of groceries every month
as equivalent to $500 in cash, because the SNAP card can only buy food, whereas cash can buy whatever a
121
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
family thinks it needs most. That is true. But if a family of three were given $500 in cash and used it to pay
the rent, they would have to depend on local soup kitchens and food pantries to eat. Such institutions do not
exist everywhere, and they are not open every day even in the places where they do exist.
I think Edin and Shaefer’s objection to treating food stamps like cash derives from a more fundamental
problem, which is that a single mother with two children needs more than $500 a month to survive. If Edin
and Shaefer were to treat a single mother’s $500 worth of food stamps like money, food stamps alone would
represent about $16 a day in income. Because they have set the extreme poverty threshold for a three-person
family at only $6 a day, treating food stamps like cash would mean that, according to the standard they have
set, no family that got food stamps could be in extreme poverty, even if they had no money at all for rent,
heat, clothing, or other necessities.
That problem cannot be solved by replacing $500 worth of food stamps with $500 in cash. Unless a single
mother with two children has a federal rent subsidy that limits her payments to 30 percent of her income, she
will need both $500 in food stamps to eat and another $500 (or more) for shelter and other expenses. A more
transparent approach would, I think, be to adopt a broader measure of economic resources that included
the EITC, food stamps, and the rental value of subsidized or owner-occupied housing, and then to set the
threshold for extreme poverty at something like half the official poverty line.
122
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Another concern about Edin and Shaefer’s estimates of extreme poverty in $2.00 a Dayis that they include
families whose income fell below $2 a day per person for even one month. If a single mother loses her job,
has no relatives, no close friends, no romantic partner, and no assets she can sell or borrow against, one month
without income can be catastrophic now that TANF is so hard to get. However, a single mother who has just
lost her job often has some of those assets, as $2.00 a Day shows. When that is the case, her first month
without income does not always mean that her family will go hungry, much less that they will all be put out
on the street for not paying the rent. The longer she goes without income, however, the more likely she is to
exhaust her relatives’ sympathy, her boyfriend’s willingness to bring over pizza for dinner, or the cash she
had left from her EITC refund for her work during the previous year. There is no “one-size-fits-all” rule for
deciding how long a family can survive without income, but for some, at least, one month need not be
disastrous.
The fourth line in Table 1 shows that when Shaefer counted only those who had spent three or more months
living on resources worth less than $2 a day, the prevalence of extreme poverty among households with
children fell from 1.7 to 0.5 percent in 1996 and from 4.3 to 1.0 percent in 2011. This more stringent
definition of extreme poverty among households with children clearly leads to a sharp reduction in its
estimated prevalence. But it does not change the upward trend. The prevalence rises from 0.5 percent in 1996
to 1.0 percent in 2011, and the actual number rises from 189,000 to 373,000 households with children.
3.
The best way to visualize how the economic lives of low-income families have changed since the 1960s is to
track the flow of economic resources to households at different percentiles of the distribution. Figure 1
focuses on the bottom half of the resource distribution, showing changes at the second, fifth, tenth, and fiftieth
percentiles. Each group’s resources are shown as a percentage of its resources in 1967. The labels for the lines
identifying each of these four percentile are shown in boldface. 9 I omit the top half of the resource
distribution, because the rising share of income going to the top 1 percent is already so well known. I also
omit the bottom 1 percent, because of doubts about the accuracy of the estimates.
Between 1967 and 1999 the resources flowing to the second and fifth percentiles grew by an average of two
thirds, whereas the resources of the tenth and fiftieth percentiles grew by about half. As a result, inequality
between the bottom and the middle of the resource distribution narrowed. This narrowing was driven
primarily by the growth of food stamps and the EITC.
After 1999 this egalitarian trend reversed. The second, fifth, tenth, and fiftieth percentiles all suffered some
reduction in their economic resources after 1999, whereas Figure 1 shows that the percentage decline was
much larger at the second percentile than at the fifth, tenth, or fiftieth percentile. The fifth, tenth, and fiftieth
percentiles also received about 50 percent more resources in 2012 than in 1967, but the second percentile
received only 23 percent more, wiping out two thirds of its gains between 1967 and 1999.
Figure 1 supports my claim that Americans at the fifth and tenth percentiles are much better off today than
they were in 1967. Those at the tenth percentile are counted as poor only because the poverty measure is
flawed. However, the estimates in Figure 1 for the second percentile also support Edin and Shaefer’s claim
that the poorest of the poor were a lot worse off in 2012 than in either 1996 or 1999. Had the federal
government not handed their fate back to the states in 1996, these families might still be as well off as they
were in 1999. That is not the kind of speculation that can be either verified or refuted; but it is worth serious
consideration nonetheless.
1.
1
See “The War on Poverty: Was It Lost?,” April 2, 2015. ↩
2.
2
123
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Full disclosure: I chaired Edin’s dissertation committee when she was a doctoral student at Northwestern
University and wrote an introduction to her book with Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet: How Single
Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (Russell Sage, 1997). I had no part in $2.00 a Day and
learned of its existence only a few weeks before it was published. ↩
3.
3
Families have traditionally reported somewhat more income to SIPP than to other Census
surveys. SIPP interviews participants every four months rather than once a year, and survey respondents
are more likely to recall small amounts of income received at irregular intervals within the past few months
than to recall similar amounts received a year before. ↩
4.
4
According to the World Bank, 12.7 percent of the world population lived on less than $1.90 a day per
person in 2012; seewww.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview. ↩
5.
5
See Luke Shaefer and Kathryn Edin, “What Is the Evidence of Worsening Conditions Among America’s
Poorest Families with Children?,” March 2, 2016. ↩
6.
6
The less income food stamp applicants or recipients report, the more free food they get.
Unlike SIPP respondents, therefore, food stamp recipients have an incentive to underreport their income.
However, underreporting income can be risky for food stamp recipients. Employers have to report wage
payments to the state in which their employee works. That makes it easy to identify food stamp recipients
who fail to report all their earnings. Once detected, such a failure can lead to the loss of all food stamp
benefits. ↩
7.
7
Andrea Hetling, Jinwoo Kwon, and Correne Saunders present more detailed evidence on how TANF rules
affect the number of mothers with no income in their paper “The Relationship Between State Welfare
Rules and Economic Disconnection Among Low-Income Single Mothers,” Social Service Review, Vol.
89, No. 4 (December 2015). ↩
8.
8
See the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Chart Book: TANF at 19,” March 29, 2016, p. 3 . ↩
9.
9
Fox and Wimer extended existing estimates of federal and state taxes and noncash benefits back to 1967.
Some of these estimates are fairly rough approximations. They then subtracted taxes from the Annual
Social and Economic supplement (ASEC) estimate of each household’s pretax money income for the
previous calendar year and added the estimated value of each household’s means-tested noncash benefits
and the value of its EITC refund (if any) to get what I am calling “household resources.” At my request
Wimer then divided this total by the square root of household size to adjust for size-based differences in
households’ economic needs. Finally, we converted this total to 2012 dollars using the Consumer Price
Index Research Series (CPI–U–RS). ↩
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/09/why-the-very-poor-have-become-poorer/
124
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Storm fingerprints show past and future
Source:
University of Delaware
Summary:
Researchers are using "fingerprints" left by strong storms on the ocean floor to better understand
storms that have already happened and to model and predict how future storms will behave.
Share:
AddThis Sharing Buttons
FULL STORY
A detail of a UD researcher's 3-D-printed model of a section from Redbird Reef, located off the Delaware
coastline. Researchers are studying "fingerprints" left by strong storms in the area to better understand
previous storms and to model how future storms will behave.
Credit: Photo by Evan Krape/ University of Delaware
Human fingerprints are unique identifiers. The wiggles, curves and ripples cannot be copied or duplicated and
provide a distinct signature that represents an individual.
In the same way, strong storms -- such as Superstorm Sandy -- can leave a signature in the form of ripples on
the seafloor.
Known as ripple bedforms, these small, dynamic swells are formed when waves generate currents that
oscillate back and forth on the seafloor, stirring up sediments and sand. The larger the distance between
successive waves on the water's surface, theoretically, the larger the distance between the peaks of the ripples
on the ocean floor below.
125
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
According to Carter DuVal, a University of Delaware doctoral student studying oceanography, being able to
measure and interpret these ripples can help scientists understand storms that have already happened, and also
can help scientists model and predict how future storms will behave.
DuVal is the lead author of a paper recently published in the journalContinental Shelf Research, detailing the
use of a fingerprint algorithm to more accurately predict what type of bedforms would be expected with a
storm the size and magnitude of Sandy.
Co-authors on the paper include Art Trembanis, associate professor of oceanography in UD's College of
Earth, Ocean, and Environment, and Adam Skarke, a former student of Trembanis who is now an assistant
professor of geology at Mississippi State University.
The work is part of a wider study, started by Trembanis and colleagues in 2012 and sponsored by the Office
of Naval Research, to examine the ecosystem and to create detailed maps of the seafloor at Redbird Reef, an
artificial reef about 16 miles off the coast of the Indian River Inlet. The humanmade structure is comprised of
old subway cars, tugboats, tires and military tract vehicles that provide a habitat for marine organisms, while
encouraging recreational fishing and diving.
The researchers have mapped Redbird Reef every year since 2008, except 2014. In 2012, they placed sensors
and other instruments at Redbird Reef just prior to Hurricane Sandy to measure waves, currents and sand
formations on the seafloor. During the height of the storm, the instruments recorded waves over 24 feet high
and currents rushing back and forth across the seafloor at 5.2 feet per second.
According to Trembanis, in order to predict erosion, storm surge and overwash at the beach, scientists must
correctly predict how a wave will change as it moves across the continental shelf. This is particularly true on
the East Coast, which is characterized by a broad, shallow continental shelf.
"At practical levels, if we are going to appropriately predict and model how storms are going to behave, we
need to be able to determine ripple parameters, such as wavelength and orientation to the shoreline, with
accuracy. Until we began using a fingerprint algorithm, we didn't have strong enough tools to do this," said
Trembanis.
Storms like Jonas, Joaquin and Sandy, he continued, all contained waves so long that they started to feel the
ripples on the ocean floor almost 85 miles offshore. The ripples slow the waves and currents down,
fundamentally changing the way they bend and lose energy as they travel across the ocean shelf -- and
ultimately, how the waves break and end up on the beach.
Part of the fingerprint algorithm's processing -- or job -- is to filter out areas that are featureless and focus
only on areas with texture or directionality. This strengthened the researchers' data analysis because it only
focuses on areas with ripples.
The algorithm can also tell scientists where there aren't ripples, which may indicate areas where there is
"scour," meaning erosion, or hidden objects like a mine, pipeline, shipwreck or even unexploded ordinance.
New developments
According to DuVal, existing models predict that when a storm begins to wane, the ripples will reduce in size
due to the smaller wave conditions. However, using the fingerprint algorithm to analyze data collected during
Hurricane Sandy at Redbird Reef revealed that the ripples actually froze at the highest energy of the storm.
"So not only were we seeing a record of the storm, but of the most energetic part of the storm. This is very
important for recording the storm's dynamics," explained DuVal.
DuVal's work has focused on extending the fingerprint algorithm to help the researchers analyze the
appearance of the ripples, specifically, whether the ripples were straight or curved or something else.
Revisiting Redbird Reef multiple times over a year to take measurements and looking at these minute details
126
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
over large areas, he explained, can help scientists understand a storm's long-lasting effects, especially how the
ripples change over time.
Months after Superstorm Sandy, for example, many of the smaller ripples that were initially present had
disappeared, and larger ripples had been smoothed out into what Trembanis calls "relic ripples."
"Relic ripples that are left behind can become the starting point for the next storm, or because they are
somewhat rigid, they may slow down future storms," Trembanis said. Understanding their directionality, he
continued, is important to distinguishing between the two.
Running a finger across a 3-D printed model of a portion of the reef created from bathymetric sonar images
and other data captured after the storm, DuVal is acutely aware of the widespread geographical and structural
changes wrought by Superstorm Sandy.
"It gives you a perspective that you cannot get by looking at a two- or three-dimensional map on a screen,"
says DuVal. "Not only can we look at the surface, but also the texture too."
It also reminds DuVal and Trembanis of the timeliness of the work they are doing.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, increased greenhouse gas concentrations are
expected to "increase the frequency, intensity and/or duration of extreme events."
"For the Mid-Atlantic, nor'easters really are the dominant storm. What we've seen by looking back at the
records is that the energy level conditions we measured during Hurricane Sandy have a two and a half to three
year recurrence interval," Trembanis said.
Coincidentally, the researchers recently detected major changes at the Redbird site from winter storm Jonas,
including some of the largest ripples they have ever seen. A large Navy barge that previously has been
unmoved during Sandy and any other storm also appeared to have been rotated approximately 60 degrees and
shifted approximately 160 feet by the January storm according to recent images.
One thing is for sure: the UD researchers will be keeping an eye on the ripples and what they might reveal
about the unprecedented weather patterns ahead.
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Delaware. Note: Materials may be
edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.
Carter B. DuVal, Arthur C. Trembanis, Adam Skarke. Characterizing and hindcasting ripple bedform
dynamics: Field test of non-equilibrium models utilizing a fingerprint algorithm. Continental Shelf Research,
2016; 116: 103 DOI: 10.1016/j.csr.2015.12.015
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160607151706.htm
127
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Artist Louise Bourgeois on How Solitude Enriches Creative Work
“You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul… Seek solitude,”young
Delacroix counseled himself in 1824. Keats saw solitude as a sublime conduit to truth and beauty. Elizabeth
Bishop believed that everyone should experience at least one prolonged period of solitude in life. Even if we
don’t take so extreme a view as artist Agnes Martin’s assertion that “the best things in life happen to you
when you’re alone,” one thing is certain: Our capacity for what psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has
termed “fertile solitude” is absolutely essential not only for our creativity but for the basic fabric of our
happiness — without time and space unburdened from external input and social strain, we’d be unable to fully
inhabit our interior life, which is the raw material of all art.
That vital role of solitude in art and life is what the great artistLouise Bourgeois (December 11, 1911– May
31, 2010) explores in several of the letters and diary entires collected in Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the
Father / Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923–1997 (public library) — an altogether
magnificent glimpse of one of the fiercest creative minds and most luminous spirits of the past century.
In September of 1937, 25-year-old Bourgeois writes to her friend Colette Richarme — an artist seven years
her senior yet one for whom she took on the role of a mentor — after Richarme had suddenly left Paris for
respite in the countryside:
128
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
After the tremendous effort you put in here, solitude, even prolonged solitude, can only be of very great
benefit. Your work may well be more arduous than it was in the studio, but it will also be more personal.
A few months later, Bourgeois reiterates her counsel:
Solitude, a rest from responsibilities, and peace of mind, will do you more good than the atmosphere of the
studio and the conversations which, generally speaking, are a waste of time.
Louise Bourgeois at her studio, New York, 1946. (Louise Bourgeois Archive)
129
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
130
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Illustration by Isabelle Arsenault from Cloth Lullaby: The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois by Amy
Novesky, a children’s book about the beloved artist’s early life and how it shaped her art.
For Bourgeois, aloneness was the raw material of art — something she crystallized most potently half a
century later, in a diary entry from the summer of 1987:
You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love. That is why
geometrically speaking the circle is a one. Everything comes to you from the other. You have to be able to
reach the other. If not you are alone…
Complement the immeasurably insightful Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the
Father with Bourgeois on art, integrity, and the key to creative confidence and this almost unbearably
lovely picture-book about her early life, then revisit Edward Abbey’s enchanting vintage love letter to
solitude.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/04/15/louise-bourgeoissolitude/?mc_cid=356094a1eb&mc_eid=d1c16ac662
131
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
A Digital Dive Into Rio de Janeiro's Past
A Rice University mapping project seeks to illustrate “the social and urban evolution” of the city since its
birth.
Rio de Janeiro is “a city of multiple and contradictory layers, at once exposed and hidden by its beauty and
complex topography,” writes Sandra Jovchelovitch, a professor at the London School of Economics and
Political Science. What she means is that, on one hand, this dense Brazilian city boasts some world’s most
iconic architecture and monuments—it’s a cidade maravilhosa or "marvelous city," as Uri Friedman notes. On
the other, it’s home to a sea of favelas—urban shantytowns ridden with poverty and lawlessnessthat are the
most visible evidence of the city’s acute inequalities.
But how did it come to be this way? That’s what a new mapping project by Rice University seeks to illustrate.
“The platform imagineRio is a searchable atlas that illustrates the social and urban evolution of Rio de Janeiro
over the entire history of the city, as it existed and as it was often imagined,” the project’s description reads.
The main map is laid over a timeline spanning from 1500 to 2016, and incorporates urban projects, city plans,
and architectural sketches of the city and its various components that were created along the way. Here’s a
screenshot of the city overlaid with a city plan from 1869, for example:
And here’s one from 1923. Clicking on any one site on the map brings up more details about it:
The creators also added in images that visiting artists had made of the city. “Every image that we could
geolocate, we geolocated,”Alida Metcalf, the chair of the history department and one of the forces behind the
platform, told a Rice University news blog in 2015. “Once you geolocate the image, you click on the map and
see what the artist saw—kind of like time travel.”
Rio’s urban history is particularly suited to this kind of digital treatment, according to imagineRio’s creators:
To make Rio what it is today, mountains were leveled, swamps drained, shorelines redrawn, ridgelines
altered, and islands joined to the mainland, while the adjacent Tijuca Forest was first cleared for planting
132
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
coffee and extracting charcoal only to later be replanted for the protection of the city's water sources. Such a
changing physical and social landscape, with all its political consequences, lends itself to being spatially
contextualized in a digital platform that maps and illustrates transformation over time.
The platform is a pretty cool way for historians, literary scholars, cartographers, architects, urbanists, tourists,
and even locals to explore Rio in the context of its rich and complex urban history. Take a trip back in
time here.
http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/05/the-real-and-imagined-urban-history-of-rio-de-janeiromapped/482889/?utm_source=nl__link5_051716
133
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Universe's first life might have been born on carbon planets
Source:
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Summary:
Our Earth consists of silicate rocks and an iron core with a thin veneer of water and life. But the first
potentially habitable worlds to form might have been very different. New research suggests that
planet formation in the early universe might have created carbon planets consisting of graphite,
carbides, and diamond. Astronomers might find these diamond worlds by searching a rare class of
stars.
Share:
AddThis Sharing Buttons
FULL STORY
In this artist's conception, a carbon planet orbits a sunlike star in the early universe. Young planetary systems
lacking heavy chemical elements but relatively rich in carbon could form worlds made of graphite, carbides
and diamond rather than Earth-like silicate rocks. Blue patches show where water has pooled on the planet's
surface, forming potential habitats for alien life.
Credit: Christine Pulliam (CfA). Sun image: NASA/SDO
Our Earth consists of silicate rocks and an iron core with a thin veneer of water and life. But the first
potentially habitable worlds to form might have been very different. New research suggests that planet
134
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
formation in the early universe might have created carbon planets consisting of graphite, carbides, and
diamond. Astronomers might find these diamond worlds by searching a rare class of stars.
"This work shows that even stars with a tiny fraction of the carbon in our solar system can host planets," says
lead author and Harvard University graduate student Natalie Mashian.
"We have good reason to believe that alien life will be carbon-based, like life on Earth, so this also bodes well
for the possibility of life in the early universe," she adds.
The primordial universe consisted mostly of hydrogen and helium, and lacked chemical elements like carbon
and oxygen necessary for life as we know it. Only after the first stars exploded as supernovae and seeded the
second generation did planet formation and life become possible.
Mashian and her PhD thesis advisor Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) examined a
particular class of old stars known as carbon-enhanced metal-poor stars, or CEMP stars. These anemic stars
contain only one hundred-thousandth as much iron as our Sun, meaning they formed before interstellar space
had been widely seeded with heavy elements.
"These stars are fossils from the young universe," explains Loeb. "By studying them, we can look at how
planets, and possibly life in the universe, got started."
Although lacking in iron and other heavy elements compared to our Sun, CEMP stars have more carbon than
would be expected given their age. This relative abundance would influence planet formation as fluffy carbon
dust grains clump together to form tar-black worlds.
From a distance, these carbon planets would be difficult to tell apart from more Earth-like worlds. Their
masses and physical sizes would be similar. Astronomers would have to examine their atmospheres for signs
of their true nature. Gases like carbon monoxide and methane would envelop these unusual worlds.
Mashian and Loeb argue that a dedicated search for planets around CEMP stars can be done using the transit
technique. "This is a practical method for finding out how early planets may have formed in the infant
universe," says Loeb.
"We'll never know if they exist unless we look," adds Mashian.
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Note:
Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.
Natalie Mashian, Abraham Loeb. CEMP stars: possible hosts to carbon planets in the early universe. Monthly
Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2016 [link]
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160607120805.htm
135
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
DNA: ‘The Power of the Beautiful Experiment’
H. Allen Orr
JUNE 9, 2016 ISSUE
Life’s Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code
by Matthew Cobb
Basic Books, 434 pp., $29.99
1.
DNA is a molecule that does two things. First, it acts as the hereditary material, which is passed down from
generation to generation. Second, it directs, to a considerable extent, the construction of our bodies, telling our
cells what kinds of molecules to make and guiding our development from a single-celled zygote to a fully
formed adult. These two things are of course connected. The DNA sequences that construct the best bodies
are more likely to get passed down to the next generation because well-constructed bodies are more likely to
survive and thus to reproduce. This is Darwin’s theory of natural selection stated in the language of DNA.
The story of DNA as hereditary material is well known. We all know that, in the middle of the twentieth
century, the American James Watson and the Englishman Francis Crick discovered the double-helix structure
of DNA. It is this double helix that makes up our genes. It is thisDNA molecule that is packaged into our eggs
or sperm and that is inherited by our children, making them resemble us. 1
The story of how biologists came to understand the way DNA helps to direct the construction of our bodies is
less well known. Somehow ourDNA tells our cells how to make hemoglobin, collagen, and thousands of other
molecules—and how to make the human form of these molecules, not, say, the cat form, which is slightly
different. How does the information that is encoded in our DNA get read by our cells, specifying the structure
of the many thousands of different molecules that make us up? This is, roughly speaking, the problem of the
genetic code. And this code was cracked during the 1950s and 1960s in some of the most profound and
beautiful work in the history of biology.
ADVERTISING
inRead invented by Teads
Matthew Cobb tells this story in his latest book, Life’s Greatest Secret. Cobb, a professor of zoology at the
University of Manchester, is a working geneticist. He is also a student of the history of science who has
written several previous books on the history of biology. Life’s Greatest Secret is aimed at the general reader
who may have only a passing familiarity with biology, much less with the detailed molecular mechanics of
how DNA does what it does. The book serves as a useful primer for those interested in the brave new world
of genetic intervention made possible by the rise of biotechnology. But Cobb’s book will also be of interest to
professional scientists as it recounts events in one of the most transformative periods in the history of science:
the rise of a molecular understanding of life.
Despite its dense historical detail, Life’s Greatest Secret is an absorbing and, in places, thrilling book. The
race to crack the genetic code is a story with considerable drama and it unfolds remarkably lucidly in Cobb’s
telling.
2.
You might not have noticed that I used the language of information when discussingDNA above. The
“information” that is “encoded” in DNA gets “read” by cells. You likely didn’t notice because this is now a
nearly reflexive way of talking about DNA, even in popular culture. It’s just obvious to us that DNA stores
information—for curly hair or blue eyes—and it’s natural to think of it as an information storage device much
136
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
like the hard disk of a computer. Yet one of Cobb’s main points is that this is a remarkably recent way of
thinking about biology.
Randy
Leffingwell/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
Francis Crick, who discovered the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule with James Watson in 1953,
San Diego, California, 1984
The rise of this style of thinking had everything to do with what was happening in other fields of science
during and immediately after World War II. This period saw the emergence of two new sciences that focused
on information. Claude Shannon and others articulated information theory, which quantified the amount of
information that flows from sender to receiver during, say, electronic communication. And Norbert Weiner
elaborated cybernetics, which formalized ideas like feedback loops, especially negative feedback loops. (A
137
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
thermostat involves a feedback loop: a setting on a thermostat affects a room’s temperature and the
temperature then affects the thermostat.)
Following these developments, some scientists grew excited at the prospect that the mathematical abstractions
developed in these fields might provide a radical new way to think about life. Organisms might not look like
the stuff of equations that describe the flow of information; but the new sciences hinted that they might well
be. Information thinking, Cobb claims, played a crucial part in helping to define what came to be called the
“coding problem,” a problem that dominated biology in the 1950s and 1960s.
To grasp the coding problem, we must first understand that our hereditary material,DNA, is a long molecule
made of two strands that wind around each other, forming the double helix described by Watson and Crick in
1953. On one strand, four different chemicals are found: adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine, abbreviated
A, T, G, and C. In principle, these DNA letters (also called “bases”) can occur along the strand in any order,
for instance, AAGCTG…. The other strand of DNA carries a sequence of chemicals denoted by letters that
“matches” the first strand: A on one strand always pairs with T on the other strand and G always pairs with C.
So, in our example, the second strand would read TTCGAC…. The human genome, the total of all our
genetic information, is made up of several billion of these pairs of DNA letters.
Most of our bodies are not made of DNA. Instead, to a considerable extent, we’re made of a different class of
molecule called proteins. For example, the beta-globin (part of hemoglobin) found in your red blood cells and
the collagen found in your skin are proteins. A tremendous amount of work during the 1930s and 1940s, ably
surveyed by Cobb, revealed that our genes somehow specify our proteins. Roughly speaking, each gene—
which turns out to be a stretch of DNA a few thousand letters long—specifies one protein.2 Thus the
thousands of genes in the human genome somehow encode the thousands of different proteins that constitute
much of your body.
So, finally, what are proteins? Proteins are long molecular chains made of many individual links called amino
acids. Organisms use twenty different kinds of amino acid to build their proteins. Your beta-globin is a
sequence of 146 amino acids in a particular order. If you were to switch any one amino acid in a protein with
another amino acid, things might go terribly wrong. As Cobb notes, the normal and sickle-cell forms of betaglobin—the latter causes sickle-cell anemia—differ by only a single amino acid.
We can now state the coding problem simply: How does the sequence of A, T, G, and C in DNA determine
the sequence of amino acids in proteins? This code, whatever it is, is the code of life. It is the precise physical
connection between what we inherit from our parents and how our bodies are built.
This coding problem was formulated remarkably quickly after the discovery of the structure of DNA. Indeed,
two weeks after the double-helix discovery but before the Watson-Crick paper was published in Nature, Crick
wrote as follows to his son:
Now we believe that the DNA is a code. That is, the order of the bases (the letters) makes one gene different
from another gene (just as one page of print is different from another).
Crick’s letter was auctioned in 2013 for $6 million.
Several weeks after Watson and Crick published their double-helix paper, they wrote, “The precise sequence
of the bases is the code which carries the genetical information.” By 1957, Crick was emphasizing that by
“information” he meant “the specification of the amino acid sequence of the protein.” These statements, Cobb
says, are among some of the earliest explicit usages of the language of information by biologists. (The
physicist Erwin Schrödinger had used somewhat similar language earlier.)
More important, the race to crack the code was on.
138
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
3.
As biologists were soon to realize, that the coding problem could be stated simply did not mean that it could
be solved easily. Much of Cobb’s book is given over to the two main approaches that were taken: theory and
experiment.
Almost immediately after Watson and Crick announced the double helix, a good many mathematicians and
physicists began offering possible solutions to the coding problem. The essence of their approach was
combinatoric. Somehow the four letters in the language of DNA need to specify the twenty amino acids in the
language of protein. This fact alone let theorists rule out some imaginable coding schemes. It’s obvious, for
example, that individual letters of DNA taken singly can’t specify amino acids, since this scheme could only
encode four amino acids. It was less obvious that theory could succeed in the positive task of finding the
correct code. This didn’t seem to dampen theorists’ enthusiasm.
The physicist George Gamow, for example, fired off letters to biologists suggesting a “diamond” model in
which DNA wrapped itself around a cylindrical surface, with the diamond-shaped gaps that appear between
nearby bases on adjacent loops of the DNAhelix somehow coding for amino acids. A calculation showed that
this scheme could encode exactly twenty amino acids. If you can’t picture Gamow’s diamond model, don’t
worry. Like many of the schemes that theorists proposed, this one proved not only fantastically clever but
fantastic. Crick himself conceived a different clever model that could encode exactly twenty amino acids. It
also proved wrong.
Fortunately, speculation about the code didn’t occur in an empirical vacuum. Some possible coding schemes,
for example, placed constraints on which amino acids could occur next to each other in a protein. But when
biochemists characterized many proteins from many species they found that a given amino acid might be
followed by any of the twenty amino acids.
In addition, it was becoming clearer that DNA was not a physical template on which proteins got
built. DNA did not even interact directly with the protein that it encoded. Instead, an intermediate molecule
seemed to be involved. This intermediate proved to be RNA, a close cousin of DNA. Among other
differences, RNA features a different chemical—abbreviated U—instead of T and is typically single-stranded,
not double-stranded like DNA. Biologists soon realized that the sequence of letters on one strand of
a DNA double helix encoded for a matching sequence on an RNA molecule. If aDNA sequence reads
AAGCTG, the matching RNA sequence reads UUCGAC. It was this RNA sequence that then (somehow)
determined the sequence of amino acids in a protein.
So by the mid-1950s biologists had realized something big: information in organisms flows
from DNA through RNA to protein. Crick called this new idea the “central dogma” of biology. 3 Information
can get from DNA into proteins but not the other way around. Incidentally, the central dogma was the final
nail in the coffin of an idea associated with the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in the early
nineteenth century: the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Whatever happens to you during your lifetime
of experiences might well affect your body, but there’s no way for these effects to be transmitted from your
body’s proteins back into your DNA, shaping what gets passed on to your children.
Despite these developments, the code itself remained undeciphered. Just which letters of DNA code
accounted for just which amino acids? Biologists were no nearer to the answer than they were immediately
after the discovery of the double helix. Indeed by 1959 Crick lamented that the coding problem had entered a
“confused phase.”
The confusion would soon disappear. But its resolution would not involve the clever calculations of the
theorists. Nor would it involve the usual suspects, a small circle of brilliant biologists that orbited the yetmore-brilliant Crick. Instead, the code would be cracked by an obscure team: Marshall Nirenberg and
Heinrich Matthaei of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Nirenberg, the older of the pair,
was so unknown that his application to a conference on the genetic code was rejected in 1961. As Cobb puts
139
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
it, “Ironically, while the great and the good of molecular biology were talking about the genetic code,
Nirenberg and Matthaei were cracking it.”
Nirenberg and Matthaei’s approach was beautiful. It was also almost brutally direct. They used
artificial RNA sequences that carried the same letter over and over—UUUUUUU…—and asked what kind of
protein got made. (This was done in a test tube. The resulting protein did not need to be one that is found in
nature.) The answer, in the case of UUUUUUU…, was a protein that carried the amino acid phenylalanine
and nothing else. The code was giving way.
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
Further experiments, including an extraordinarily clever one designed by Crick and Sydney Brenner, soon
showed that the code was “triplet.” Every three letters of DNAspecifies one amino acid. By 1967, variations
on Nirenberg’s experiment, performed by Nirenberg and Matthaei themselves as well as by Severo Ochoa,
Gorind Khorana, and others—replete with some technical setbacks and a few errors—allowed
experimentalists to decipher the entire genetic code.4
140
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Finally, given only a sequence of letters in DNA, biologists could say exactly what protein would result.
Nirenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1968. Upon announcement of the prize, a congratulatory banner
was hung in his laboratory reading “UUU are great Marshall.”
‘An outline of how the genetic code works during protein synthesis’; from Matthew Cobb’s book Life’s
Greatest Secret. According to Cobb, a codon is ‘a sequence of three bases in a DNA or RNA molecule that
codes for an amino acid,’ and a ribosome is a ‘complex RNA structure found in all cells that is the primary
site of protein synthesis.’ A polypeptide is a chain of amino acids.
4.
The last third of Life’s Greatest Secret is devoted to bringing the history of the molecular side of genetics up
to date. Of the many discoveries that followed the cracking of the genetic code, perhaps the most fundamental
was the finding that the code is nearly universal across all life on earth. (Some minor variants on the code
exist.) This finding is of deep evolutionary significance. All of us—bacteria, fungi, plants, and people—share
the same code because we all share an ancestor that lived billions of years ago and that employed this code.
It’s also reasonably clear why the code has remained fixed through this vast stretch of evolutionary time. If it
were to change, with, say, GCA encoding something besides the usual amino acid alanine, the structure of
hundreds or thousands of proteins would suddenly and simultaneously change, a certain formula for disaster
for any organism that tried it. While there’s no obvious physical or chemical reason why certain letters
ofDNA encode certain amino acids, once life settled on a code early in evolutionary history, it couldn’t be
changed without catastrophic consequences. Crick called this the “frozen accident” hypothesis.
Work over the last few decades also revealed that not all DNA codes for protein. In human beings, 98 percent
of our genome is “noncoding” DNA. Some of this DNAseems to do nothing whatever. Other regions of
noncoding DNA act in gene regulation, that is, they help to determine when and in which cells a gene will
produce its protein product. In addition, many species, including human beings, have split genes: one stretch
of DNA might code for the first part of a protein, immediately followed by a stretch of DNA that does little or
nothing, immediately followed by a stretch of DNAthat codes for the remainder of the same protein.
In the last part of Life’s Greatest Secret Cobb turns to developments of social significance that followed from
the cracking of the code particularly and advances in molecular genetics generally. Two are of special
importance: the creation of genetically modified (GM) crops and the attempt to cure human genetic disease.
Biologists have had great success in using DNA technologies to create crops that produce what are deemed
desirable proteins. These engineered proteins typically confer resistance to pests or to herbicides and allow
considerable increases in yield. Despite lingering popular concerns, especially in Europe, about
“Frankenfoods,” the transformation of agriculture by genetic technologies is mostly a fait accompli in
America. As Cobb notes, “in 2014, 94 per cent of US soybean crops were GM, as were 93 per cent of corn
crops, 95 per cent of sugar beet crops and 96 per cent of cotton.”
By contrast, physicians have had mixed success in using genetic technologies to cure inherited diseases in
human beings. (These interventions are usually intended to inject a normal, healthy copy of a gene into a
patient’s diseased tissue, such as the liver, not into the patient’s eggs or sperm. As Cobb notes, the genetic
modification will not, therefore, affect future generations.) Genetic technologies have not, so far, transformed
medicine in the same way that they have agriculture.
This may be about to change. Though the subject has suffered from enough hype to make anyone skeptical—
remember how we were told in the 1990s that the Human Genome Project would revolutionize medicine?—
there are reasons for thinking that new “gene-editing” technologies may finally open the door to more
effective treatment of genetic disease. These new technologies are generally referred to
as CRISPR(pronounced “crisper”) or, more accurately, the CRISPR-Cas9 system. The CRISPRtechnique is
complex but, at base, involves a genetic trick that recognizes a particularDNA sequence in an organism (such
as a mutant gene), cuts it out of the organism’s double helix, and then allows it to be replaced by an
141
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
alternative DNA sequence (such as a normal, healthy gene). CRISPR has been used successfully in many
species and is generally very efficient. While hurdles remain, the recent discovery of these new techniques
(they were announced over the last five years) may ultimately bring about major changes in medical
treatment, as Cobb rightly emphasizes.5
While these more modern developments in molecular genetics are certainly important, the last third of Cobb’s
book can’t compete with the rest. These later chapters are in places a bit rambling and sometimes read more
like a textbook and less like the historical thriller of earlier chapters. Life’s Greatest Secret might have been
better off without this material. But it would be churlish to make too much of that. On the whole Cobb tells
his story beautifully and his book is a pleasure to read. Packed with fascinating detail, Life’s Greatest
Secret is a major accomplishment, particularly for an author who is also a practicing scientist. Though I like
to think that I have a good grasp of the history of genetics and evolutionary biology, I was repeatedly
surprised by events in Cobb’s tale.
5.
Several major themes emerge from Life’s Greatest Secret. The first concerns the influence of information
theory and cybernetic thinking in biology. These disciplines, Cobb concludes, had an important part in
twentieth-century biology “but not in the way in which their partisans might have hoped for.” In the end, the
information sciences provided biologists with loose but useful metaphors and analogies, a language that
allowed scientists to think and speak in new ways. But the high-powered mathematics of these fields proved
mostly impotent in biology. No one, for instance, used Shannon’s equations to say anything especially
interesting about organisms. (A fact that didn’t surprise Shannon himself, who was skeptical all along of this
attempted use of his theory.) The history of science, like the history of anything, is characterized by
considerable nuance, and one subtlety is that the information sciences were, in one sense, critical to the rise of
modern biology and, in another sense, beside the point.
A second theme concerns the respective roles of theory (of any sort) versus experiment in biology. In the
early 1960s, mathematicians confidently declared that “it will be interesting to see how much of the final
solution [to the coding problem] will be proposed by mathematicians before the experimentalists find it.” As
Cobb concludes, the “answer…was simple: not one single part of it.”
The interesting question is why theory failed here. Part of the answer, as Cobb emphasizes, is related to
Crick’s idea of the frozen accident. The genetic code seems at least partly arbitrary. It represents a half-decent
arrangement arrived at by the imperfect, tinkering process of evolution by natural selection and, once settled
on, it couldn’t be “improved,” or made somehow more systematic. In such a situation theory is likely useless.
I suspect there’s another, related, reason that theory contributed so little to cracking the code. There was, at
bottom, a mismatch between the nature of the problem and the nature of much biological theory. Successful
theory in biology typically plays a different part than does successful theory in, say, physics. Theory in
biology often guides thought, or trains intuition, or points to patterns that might hold approximately in nature.
Only rarely does biological theory provide the essentially exact results that physicists are accustomed to. (And
in biology approximate results, or even rules of thumb, are often more useful than exact results.) This kind of
broad-stroke theory doesn’t provide much help with a problem as specific as the coding question.
A rough analogy captures these kinds of concerns. Mathematical theory might tell you something interesting
and general about combination locks: for example, that they should require a sequence of three or more
numbers to prevent a would-be thief from opening them in a few random tries. But place a particular
combination lock before a theorist and he’s probably no better than the rest of us at opening it.
Finally, and perhaps most important, Life’s Greatest Secret highlights the power of the beautiful experiment
in science. Though Cobb pays less attention to this subject than he might have, the period of scientific history
that he surveys was the golden age of the beautiful experiment in biology. Biologists of the time—including
Nirenberg with his UUU, Crick and Brenner with their triplet code work, and others including Matthew
142
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Meselson, Franklin Stahl, and Joshua Lederberg—were masters of the sort of experiment that, through some
breathtakingly simple manipulation, allowed a decisive or nearly decisive solution to what previously seemed
a hopelessly complex problem. Such experiments represent a species of intellectual art that is little
appreciated outside a narrow circle of scientists.
Ironically, the cracking of the genetic code, together with other developments, has ushered in a very different
era in biology, that of big data. Computers now burst at the seams with DNA and protein sequences that
derive from the whole genomes of thousands of species sequenced by automated machines. Many biologists
use sophisticated statistics in an attempt to infer patterns from these data. Increasingly, biologists seem drawn
to such inference, however indirect, and fewer seem captivated by the ideal of the decisive experiment. These
indirect approaches have certainly yielded valuable insights and it would be absurd to doubt that they will
continue to do so. Big data provide important new tools to biology and medicine. But the larger lesson
of Life’s Greatest Secret is one that may be worth remembering. When scientists require definitive answers,
not merely suggestive patterns, they require experiments that are decisive and, if all goes well, beautiful.
1.
1
The story of the discovery of the structure of DNA was told by Watson himself in his best-selling
memoir, The Double Helix (Atheneum, 1968). Crick later recounted his scientific career, including the
discovery of the double helix, in his own memoir, What Mad Pursuit (Basic Books, 1988). Maurice
Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin also made important contributions to the discovery of DNA’s structure. ↩
2.
2
This one gene–one protein idea isn’t quite accurate. But it’s often accurate and will serve for present
purposes. Genes also vary considerably in length. ↩
3.
3
Crick confessed later that he hadn’t fully understood the connotations of the word “dogma” when he
coined the misleading phrase “central dogma.” Unlike most dogmas, the central dogma of molecular
biology is of course supported by mountains of data. ↩
4.
4
Because the code is triplet and any of four letters might appear at a given site in DNA, there are 4 x 4 x 4 =
64 differentDNA triplets that need to encode only twenty amino acids. Consequently, the code is
redundant: more than one triplet can encode the same amino acid. The code is not, however, ambiguous:
given any triplet, one knows exactly which amino acid will appear. ↩
5.
5
For more details, see “The Age of the Red Pen,” The Economist, August 22, 2015. This article also
considers the controversial possibility that CRISPR could be used to edit the “germ line” of human beings,
i.e., to make changes to DNAthat are inherited by future generations. ↩
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/09/dna-power-beautiful-experiment/
143
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
The Legal Policy That Makes Collisions Especially Harrowing for Cyclists
In four states and the District of Columbia, the contributory negligence standard bars most injured bikers from
compensation.

EILLIE ANZILOTTI

@eillieanzi
AP Photo/Jens Meyer
Don't miss any of our latest stories, sign up for CityLab's daily e-mail newsletter.
Sign up
As a cyclist, the threat of a collision looms large. On busy streets, you’re acutely aware of your tiny human
frame atop a 25-pound steel contraption, fenced in on either side by many-ton behemoths whose slightest
movements might derail you, or even hurt you.
This is harrowing enough; the process of filing an insurance claim for any damages incurred should not add to
the agony.
144
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Recognizing this, most states abide by a policy of “comparative fault” in the event of a crash. This standard
holds that if a cyclist or pedestrian can claim less than 50 percent of responsibility for a dust-up, they’re
entitled to either a full insurance payment, or one commensurate with their level of negligence as determined
by a jury. The point is, they’re guaranteed some compensation.
But in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, and Washington, D.C., that is not the case. That’s
because in those locales, the standard of contributory negligence has not been written out of the books, like it
has been in the rest of the United States. Broadly applied, contributory negligence maintains that if the
harmed party is deemed more than 1 percent responsible for an accident or injury, they cannot claim any
recovery payment. This standard applies across all conflicts that could lead to a civil lawsuit: workplace
injury, medical malpractice, a slip-and-fall on rented property, collisions between cars and pedestrians or
cyclists.
RELATED STORY
What to Do If You're Hit by a Car
It’s scary and unimaginable, but pedestrians and cyclists must know how to react if it happens to them—or to
someone else.
In Washington, D.C., bike advocates have been working since 2014 to pass a bill that would move the
compensatory standard away from contributory negligence for injured cyclists and pedestrians. The proposed
bill, says Gregory Billing, the executive director of the Washington Area Bicyclist Association (WABA),
states that if a cyclist or pedestrian is less than 50 percent responsible for the collision, their recovery
145
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
compensation cannot be reduced or barred. Essentially, unless a collision is explicitly the fault of a cyclist—
they clearly ran a red light, or careened into a parked car while talking on the phone—they must be entitled to
full medical coverage through their insurance. The D.C. Council is considering an amendment that would
adjust the bill to a more comparative standard—meaning that if the cyclist is deemed 30 percent responsible
for an accident, for instance, they’d be entitled only to a 70 percent payout. Either version, Billing says, would
be a relief from the contributory negligence policy.
The proposed bill went to a vote before the D.C. Council on June 28. Billing and WABA were hopeful that it
would pass; however, the council decided to review the bill again in two weeks—at which point there won’t
be enough time for it to pass before the summer recess. Billing’s frustration over this pushback is undeniable.
“Time is of the essence here,” he says. “Really, every day we delay it is another person who is hit and has to
face all these issues all over again.”
Bruce Deming is the person most injured D.C.-area cyclists turn to after a crash. Known as “The Bike
Lawyer,” Deming says, “it’s frankly outrageous that in the capital of our country, we’re still holding to this
standard that nobody understands to be anything other than punitive and harsh.”
Comparative negligence, Deming says, originated in England in 1809 as a means to shield employers from
having to compensate harmed members of their workforce. Since the advent of workers’ compensation laws
around the middle of the 20th century, comparative negligence has largely been eroded from state laws; most
jurists in the U.S., Deming says, have condemned the doctrine. The five areas that still retain contributory
negligence do so largely out of trepidation toward overhauling such a wide-ranging policy, adds Billing.
D.C.’s approach, Billing says, would grant injured people the level of parity they’re guaranteed in most of the
rest of the country, and it shows the potential for contributory negligence to be struck down on a granular
level in a way that the four other states could emulate. By championing a bill protecting cyclists and
pedestrians from this policy, Billing and WABA hope to give a voice to parties whose voices are largely left
out of police reports, and who rarely make it before a jury.
However, the delayed vote now means that these increased protections for cyclists and pedestrians, if passed,
will not materialize until the fall. In a tragically ironic twist, a cyclist on a D.C. bikeshare was struck and
critically injured near Dupont Circle, just hours removed from the Council procedure on the 28th.
The Washington Post write-up noted:
The collision came the same day the D.C. Council postponed action on legislation that would make it easier
for bikers and pedestrians injured in collisions with vehicles to collect damages.
Contributory negligence, Billing says, “is an unknown part of the law that people don’t learn about until
they’ve been hurt. Then, they realize that all of these things are stacked against them.”
http://www.citylab.com/navigator/2016/06/contributory-negligence-cyclists-policyinsurance/489386/?utm_source=nl__link1_063016
146
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Coral reefs fall victim to overfishing, pollution aggravated by ocean warming
Source:
Oregon State University
Summary:
Coral reefs are declining around the world because a combination of factors -- overfishing, nutrient
pollution, and pathogenic disease -- ultimately become deadly in the face of higher ocean
temperatures, researchers have concluded. The findings are based on one of the largest and longest
studies done on this issue.
Share:
AddThis Sharing Buttons
FULL STORY
Research has found that in some cases, the type of algae control done by parrot fish and other species can
pose a danger to unhealthy corals, instead of the benefit it usually offers.
Credit: Photo by Cory Fuchs, courtesy of Oregon State University
Coral reefs are declining around the world because a combination of factors -- overfishing, nutrient pollution,
and pathogenic disease -- ultimately become deadly in the face of higher ocean temperatures, researchers have
concluded.
147
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
A study published today in Nature Communications, based on one of the largest and longest field experiments
done on this topic, suggests that the widespread coral deaths observed in recent decades are being caused by
this combination of multiple local stressors and global warming.
These forces greatly weaken corals, and allow opportunistic pathogens to build to such levels that corals
cannot survive.
The findings were made by researchers from six institutions following a three-year experiment that simulated
both overfishing and nutrient pollution on a coral reef in the Florida Keys. The large body of field data
collected over an extended period of time helped resolve some of the fundamental questions about the cause
of coral reef declines, scientists said.
"This is grim news, but at least it will help settle the argument over why corals are dying," said Rebecca Vega
Thurber, an assistant professor in the College of Science at Oregon State University and corresponding author
on the study.
"This makes it clear there's no single force that's causing such widespread coral deaths. Loss of fish that help
remove algae, or the addition of excess nutrients like those in fertilizers, can cause algal growth on reefs. This
changes the normal microbiota of corals to become more pathogenic, and all of these problems reach critical
levels as ocean temperatures warm."
The end result, scientists say, is a global decline of coral reefs that is now reaching catastrophic proportions.
"We need to know how human activities are affecting coral reef ecosystems," says David Garrison, program
director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Ocean Sciences, which funded the research. "Coral
reefs are among the most sensitive indicators of the health of the oceans. This report is a major contribution
toward understanding how reefs will fare in the future."
Scientists say the problems caused by bacterial infections due to local stressors and warm temperatures are in
addition to damage from mass coral bleaching events already under way. Only in the early 1980's did
researchers observe the first mass bleaching event in recorded history. There have now been three such events
just in the past 20 years.
"About 25-35 percent of the corals on the Great Barrier Reef are dying right now," Vega-Thurber said. "In
2014-16 large portions of tropical reef across the planet experienced bleaching, and this past April, 90 percent
of the Great Barrier Reef bleached as part of a massive El Nino event. Corals everywhere seem to be dying."
In addition to helping to sort out the effects of known stressors like overfishing and nutrient pollution, the
researchers made one bizarre and totally unexpected finding.
In normal conditions, parrotfish, like many other species, are essential to the health of coral reefs, nibbling at
them to remove algae and causing no permanent damage. But in one part of the experiment corals were so
weakened by nitrogen and phosphorus pollution that when parrot fish would bite them, 62 percent of the
corals would die. A normally healthy fish-coral interaction had been turned into a deadly one.
"We want to make clear that parrotfish are not the problem, they are a normal and essential part of healthy
reef ecosystems," Vega-Thurber said. "The problem is when corals are so weakened they cannot withstand
normal impacts. And the solution will be to help those corals recover their health, by ensuring that their local
environment is free of nutrient pollution and that fish stocks are not depleted."
Among the findings of the study:

Overfishing, nutrient pollution and increased temperature all lead to an increase in pathogens;

The sheer abundance of pathogens is more important than what particular type or species they are;

Coral reef mortality mirrors the abundance of pathogens;
148
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Heat exacerbates these problems, with 80 percent of coral deaths coming in the summer or fall, but
only when fish are removed or nutrient pollution is present;

While high thermal stress has received the most attention, even modest temperature increases make
corals more vulnerable to bacteria;

Loss of fish can increase algal cover up to six times;

In a distressed system with many algae, coral disease levels double and coral mortality increases
eight times;

Increased algal cover or elevated temperature can reduce levels of naturally-secreted antibiotics that
help protect corals from harmful bacteria;

Direct algal contact driven by overfishing and nutrient pollution destabilizes the coral microbiome,
in some cases leading to a 6- to 9-time increase in mortality.
The findings, researchers say, make it clear that in the face of global warming, some of the best opportunities
to protect coral reefs lie in careful management of fishing and protection of water quality. This would give
corals their best chance to have a healthy microbiome and resist warmer conditions without dying.
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Oregon State University. Note: Materials may be
edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.
Jesse R. Zaneveld, Deron E. Burkepile, Andrew A. Shantz, Catharine E. Pritchard, Ryan McMinds, Jérôme P.
Payet, Rory Welsh, Adrienne M. S. Correa, Nathan P. Lemoine, Stephanie Rosales, Corinne Fuchs, Jeffrey A.
Maynard, Rebecca Vega Thurber. Overfishing and nutrient pollution interact with temperature to disrupt coral
reefs down to microbial scales. Nature Communications, 2016; 7: 11833 DOI:10.1038/ncomms11833
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160607120619.htm
149
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Soldier scientists inventing lighter bullet proof vests, and more
It's "boots on the ground" in this Harvard lab where the researchers are on a mission to protect U.S. troops on
the battlefield
Cotton candy machines have inspired a new way to build capillary structures necessary to make full-scale
artificial livers, kidneys, bones and other essential organs. While some may call the approach a little crazy,
engineers have shown the machines make possible a simple technique to make microfluidic networks that
mimic the 3-D capillary system in the human body in a cell-friendly fashion. Vanderbilt University assistant
professor Leon Bellan and his team have used this rather unorthodox spinning method to produce a 3-D
artificial capillary system that can keep living cells viable and functional for more than a week. They're not
using sugar, but a medically safe polymer with a special property: It stays solid, insoluble, at temperatures
above 89.6 degrees. Below that, it "dissolves" or becomes soluble. Hear more in thisDiscovery Files podcast.
Credit: NSF/Karson Productions
Kit Parker is a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve and has served multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan.
Even when he's not in uniform, this Harvard University bioengineer makes it his mission to protect the men
and women of the U.S. armed forces -- from improving wound dressings to designing lighter weight bullet
proof vests.
Parker and his team are developing next generation nanofibers at the Harvard Materials Research Science and
Engineering Center (MRSEC). The center is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The
overarching goal of the Harvard MRSEC is to perform transformative research that significantly advances the
state of knowledge in several areas of soft matter science, and to educate the next generation of leaders in
materials science and engineering.
150
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
The unlikely inspiration for Parker's team is none other than the cotton candy machine. They use their own
version of that technology to spin a wide range of polymers, both natural and synthetic, into new fabrics and
materials for military use.
The NSF MRSECs provide sustained support of interdisciplinary materials research and education of the
highest quality while addressing fundamental problems in science and engineering. The centers support
materials research infrastructure in the United States, promote active collaboration between universities and
other sectors, including industry and international institutions, and contribute to the development of a national
network of university-based centers in materials research, education and facilities.
151
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Materials science and engineering research thrives in collaborative environments. On Feb. 18, 2015, NSF
announced awards for 12 Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers
The research in this episode was supported by NSF award #1420570, Materials Research Science and
Engineering Center.
Miles O'Brien, Science Nation Correspondent
Ann Kellan, Science Nation Producer
https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/science_nation/lighterweightbodyarmor.jsp?WT.mc_id=USNSF_5
1
152
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
There’s a Legit Mathematical Explanation for Why Your Friends Are More Popular Than You
By Melanie Ehrenkranz May 27, 2016
LIKE MIC ON FACEBOOK:
If you feel like your friends on Twitter are more popular than you — congratulations! Your suspicions are
correct.
According to a study published in PLOS ONE, people rarely follow other users on Twitter with fewer
followers than them — in other words, the Twittersphere operates on a "date up" mentality.
The researchers computed a dataset of over 200 million tweets and concluded that this tendency applies all the
way up to the top 0.5% of the population. That explains why Kanye can only follow Kim Kardashian West —
she has 45.6 million followers compared to his measly 23 million.
Source: Larry Busacca/Getty Images
153
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
So if most Twitter users have an inclination to follow other users with the same or more followers than them,
you'll notice that your digital friends are indeed more #popular than you.
These findings speak to a larger phenomenon called the "friendship paradox," which states that "in social
networks, people on average have fewer friends than their friends do," according to the study.
So next time you're feeling like a dweeb on the web, remember — the world is what you make it.
https://mic.com/articles/144667/there-s-a-legit-mathematical-explanation-for-why-your-friends-are-morepopular-than-you?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=miccheck#.nibrhqdHY
154
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
One More Threat to San Francisco's Homeless: San Francisco Voters
A ballot measure is no way to try to solve a problem as complicated as homelessness.

KRISTON CAPPS

@kristoncapps
A California man named Daryl, who is homeless, stands by his tent in an encampment. (Robert
Galbraith/Reuters)
If #Brexit has taught the world anything, it’s that ballot measures may carry unintended consequences. For
both the United Kingdom and the European Union, the fallout from the “Leave” vote appears to be
profound. The Economist’s Intelligence Unit predicts that the June 23 referendum will reverse the U.K.’s
economic recovery. With leadership uncertain and hard-right politics rising across the continent, the fate of
the European Union is in question.
Voters in San Francisco face nothing so cataclysmic on the ballot this fall (save for the vote for the U.S.
presidency). But one referendum that voters will decide will have enormous consequences for the city’s most
vulnerable population: people experiencing homelessness. In its own way, the San Francisco referendum
suffers from the same hastiness as the vote that led to the crisis that is now tearing apart the U.K.
155
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
The ballot measure, which is supported by San Francisco Supervisor Mark Farrell, would effectively ban
homeless camps and tents from San Francisco streets. A “yes” vote on the referendum would enable the city
to forcibly remove encampments 24 hours after providing notice and an offer of shelter. The measure is an
answer to residents’ mounting frustration with encampments in the city and the hygiene problems that attend
them.
Residents are right to be distressed. Many must be angry that the city isn’t doing more to help its most
vulnerable residents, and refuse to accept homeless camps as an answer. Other voters may not care, of course;
they may simply want to see the city remove public eyesores from the sidewalks, and in November, they’ll
pull the lever for this measure to make it happen. Either way, voters will “get the chance to prove just how
willing they are to see [encampments] forcibly cleared,” as The San Francisco Chronicle’s Emily Green puts
it.
San Francisco deserves a better answer to homelessness than an up-or-down vote.
The ballot is a heinous way to decide the fate of San Francisco’s nearly 7,000 homeless residents. A
referendum enables the city’s most callous voters to indulge in indifference, but that’s not even the worst of it.
A referendum asks many more voters to accept a short-term solution to homelessness by pushing them out of
sight and out of mind, which helps to foreclose on the possibility of a viable long-term structural solution.
This ballot measure, like almost any ballot measure, shifts the risk of unintended consequences off of San
Francisco’s elected representatives and onto its residents—specifically, those experiencing homelessness.
Consider this ballot measure specifically. The measure would require the city to identify short-term shelter for
a person before she can be evicted from an encampment. But there currently aren’t enough shelter beds for the
homeless population of the city. (This is one reason why so many resort to sidewalk campsites, though not the
only reason.) So the measure may be doomed to fail—or rather, it may be doomed to fail homeless residents.
Farrell, the measure’s sponsor, tells the Chronicle that the city is adding to its number of beds and shelters.
But if the shelters don’t add up—if the law as enacted is unworkable, meaning that the city either cannot evict
the homeless from encampments because it cannot shelter them, or that the city will evict the homeless
without providing them adequate shelter—no one winds up paying the price for the measure’s shortcomings.
Except for the homeless.
If a law were to be passed by the Board of Supervisors, on the other hand, it would work differently—even if
the law is identical to an ordinance passed by ballot referendum. The difference is accountability. Voters can
hold representatives responsible for their votes on laws, which gives representatives an incentive to make sure
the law works. Voters are less likely to hold themselves responsible for a failed ballot measure. Even if they
did, what would that look like? And what would it matter to the homeless?
Come November, San Francisco voters may in fact face a second ballot measure regarding homelessness, one
supported by Supervisor Aaron Peskin. This measure would call for stricter requirements for how much
notice the city must give a person before eviction and for how long the city must provide shelter afterward.
While this ballot measure does more to provide for the safety and well-being of residents experiencing
homelessness, it does so through shelters that, again, do not appear to exist.
Ballot measures disguise political downsides. Tackling the homelessness crisis in a meaningful way involves
a lot of political downsides. In Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser introduced a plan to build a network
of homeless shelters around the city, short-circuiting the typical neighborhood objections to specific shelters
by planning one in every city ward. Residents and D.C. Council members have called for some changes and
156
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
won some concessions, but the mayor has blunted neighborhood-level objections by asking for sacrifice and
compassion from everyone.
A more detailed plan for San Francisco would no doubt prompt the same criticisms that Mayor Bowser’s plan
has drawn in D.C. A less-detailed plan, on the other hand, may win more votes at the ballot—even if it won’t
work for removing encampments in a respectful way. A ballot measure that bans tents without providing for
the welfare of their occupants is a less-detailed plan.
One complaint that critics have about #Brexit is that its motivations were more political than policy oriented.
Another is that it forged common cause between voters motivated by hate and voters working with a lack of
information. Still another complaint is that it was enacted without a plan for what the country would do if it
succeeded. Too often, ballot measures are instruments that politicians use to accomplish goals that run
contrary to the interests of the people affected most by them. San Francisco deserves a better answer to a
complex infrastructure policy question like homelessness than an up-or-down vote.
http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/06/brexit-and-san-francisco-ballot-measure-referendum-on-homelesstent-camp-evictions/489215/?utm_source=nl__link3_063016
157
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Computer simulations shed light on the Milky Way's missing red giants
Source:
Georgia Institute of Technology
Summary:
Simulations investigate the possibility that red giants at the center of our galaxy were dimmed after
they were stripped of 10s of percent of their mass millions of years ago during repeated collisions
with an accretion disk.
Share:
AddThis Sharing Buttons
FULL STORY
A sequence of snapshots from a simulation showing a red giant star tunneling through a high density gas
clump. The star is moving downward in the illustration, as indicated by the bow-shaped "onion skin" surfaces
of constant density. Soon after the star plunges into the clump, it develops a high temperature "blister" at the
point of impact and a full turbulent wake behind it.
Credit: Georgia Tech
New computer simulations from the Georgia Institute of Technology provide a conclusive test for a
hypothesis of why the center of the Milky Way appears to be filled with young stars but has very few old
ones. According to the theory, the remnants of older, red giant stars are still there -- they just aren't bright
enough to be detected with telescopes.
The Georgia Tech simulations investigate the possibility that these red giants were dimmed after they were
stripped of 10s of percent of their mass millions of years ago during repeated collisions with an accretion disk
at the galactic center. The very existence of the young stars, seen in astronomical observations today, is an
indication that such a gaseous accretion disk was present in the galactic center because the young stars are
thought to have formed from it as recently as a few million years ago.
The study is published in the June edition of The Astrophysical Journal. It is the first to run computer
simulations on the theory, which was introduced in 2014.
Astrophysicists in Georgia Tech's College of Sciences created models of red giants similar to those that are
supposedly missing from the galactic center -- stars that are more than a billion years old and 10s of times
larger in size than the Sun. They put them through a computerized version of a wind tunnel to simulate
collisions with the gaseous disk that once occupied much of the space within .5 parsecs of the galactic center.
They varied orbital velocities and the disk's density to find the conditions required to cause significant
damage to the red giant stars.
158
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
"Red giants could have lost a significant portion of their mass only if the disk was very massive and dense,"
said Tamara Bogdanovic, the Georgia Tech assistant professor who co-led the study. "So dense, that gravity
would have already fragmented the disk on its own, helping to form massive clumps that became the building
blocks of a new generation of stars."
The simulations suggest that each of the red giant stars orbited its way into and through the disk as many as
dozens of times, sometimes taking as long as days to weeks to complete a single pass-through. Mass was
stripped away with each collision as the star blistered the fragmenting disk's surface.
According to former Georgia Tech undergraduate student Thomas Forrest Kieffer, the first author on the
paper, it's a process that would have taken place 4 to 8 million years ago, which is the same age as the young
stars seen in the center of the Milky Way today.
"The only way for this scenario to take place within that relatively short time frame," Kieffer said, "was if,
back then, the disk that fragmented had a much larger mass than all the young stars that eventually formed
from it -- at least 100 to 1,000 times more mass."
The impacts also likely lowered the kinetic energy of the red giant stars by at least 20 to 30 percent, shrinking
their orbits and pulling them closer to the Milky Way's black hole. At the same time, the collisions may have
torqued the surface and spun up the red giants, which are otherwise known to rotate relatively slowly in
isolation.
"We don't know very much about the conditions that led to the most recent episode of star formation in the
galactic center or whether this region of the galaxy could have contained so much gas," Bogdanovic said. "If
it did, we expect that it would presently house under-luminous red giants with smaller orbits, spinning more
rapidly than expected. If such population of red giants is observed, among a small number that are still above
the detection threshold, it would provide direct support for the star-disk collision hypothesis and allow us to
learn more about the origins of the Milky Way."
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Georgia Institute of Technology. Note: Materials may
be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.
T. Forrest Kieffer, Tamara Bogdanović. CAN STAR–DISK COLLISIONS EXPLAIN THE MISSING RED
GIANTS PROBLEM IN THE GALACTIC CENTER? The Astrophysical Journal, 2016; 823 (2): 155
DOI:10.3847/0004-637X/823/2/155
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160607113017.htm
159
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
In Support of the Federal Big Data Research and Development Strategic Plan
Strategy aims to further collaboration among federal agencies, academia, government and industry and
catalyze a Big Data innovation ecosystem
Dr. France A. Córdova, Director, National Science Foundation (NSF)
Credit and Larger Version
May 24, 2016
"NSF has been a leader in supporting fundamental research and development in data analysis methods,
techniques and tools that enhance the benefits brought to us by the data and information revolution," said
France Córdova, NSF director. "The Federal Big Data Research and Development Strategic Plan lays out
opportunities for further collaboration among Federal agencies, academia, government and industry that will
catalyze a Big Data innovation ecosystem and harness the benefits of Big Data for years to come. The strategy
will help guide NSF's future investments in this area of critical national importance."
-NSFThe Federal Big Data Research and Development Strategic Plan provides guidance on strategies for Federal
agencies to use when developing, or expanding, their individual Big Data Research and Development plans.
Media Contacts
Aaron Dubrow, NSF, (703) 292-4489, [email protected]
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=138690&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click
160
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
The Rise of Rocket Girls: The Untold Story of the Remarkable Women Who Powered Space
Exploration
How a small group of “human computers” upended the gender norms of their day to conquer the cosmos.
BY MARIA POPOVA
In 1849, trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell became the first woman employed by the U.S. federal
government for a non-domestic specialized skill. Hired as a “computer of Venus” for the United
StatesNautical Almanac, she acted as a one-woman GPS, performing mathematically rigorous celestial
calculations that helped sailors all over the world navigate the oceans. A century after Mitchell paved the way
for women in science, an entire ecosystem of these female “human computers” had taken root. But like the
women who fought in the Civil War andthe women behind the Manhattan Project, their story is largely
omitted from history and their achievements uncredited.
161
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
In The Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars (public
library), microbiologistNathalia Holt reclaims the role of these unheralded women scientists in the field that
has enchanted humanity’s collective imagination more powerfully than any other: space exploration.
The computers, 1953. First row, left to right: Ann Dye, Gail Arnett, Shirley Clow, Mary Lawrence, Sally
Platt, Janez Lawson, Patsy Nyeholt, Macie Roberts, Patty Bandy, Glee Wright, Janet Chandler, Marie
Crowley, Rachel Sarason, and Elaine Chappell. Second row: Isabel deWaard, Pat Beveridge, Jean O’Neill,
Olga Sampias, Leontine Wilson, Thais Szabados, Coleen Veeck, Barbara Lewis, Patsy Riddell, Phyllis
Buwalda, Shelley Sonleitner, Ginny Swanson, Jean Hinton, and Nancy Schirmer. (Photograph courtesy of
NASA/JPL-Caltech)
In the 1940s, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, managed by Caltech, began recruiting these “human computers” —
mathematically skilled women with fingers callused from gripping a pencil eight hours a day as they
performed calculations that launched the first American satellite and directed the earliest missions exploring
the Solar System. When Neil Armstrong made his “giant leap for mankind,” there was womankind in the
control room. When the Voyagercarried humanity’s message into the cosmos, the “computers” had calculated
and scrutinized its trajectory. When the science boyband of Carl Sagan, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke
sat down todiscuss Mars and the future of space exploration on national television as the Mariner 9 mission
162
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
was about to become the first spacecraft to orbit another planet, the women whose meticulous computations
had powered the mission were nowhere to be seen.
Every moonshot, every so-called “manned” or “unmanned” mission hailed as a feat of human ingenuity, was
womanned behind the scenes. (That we continue to call space missions “manned” and “unmanned” even
today, decades after Sally Ride became America’s first female astronaut in orbit against a backdrop of
questions aboutwhat makeup she took aboard, is a matter on which Ursula K. Le Guin has the only adequate
commentary.)
Illustration from Blast Off, a vintage children’s book that envisioned a black female astronaut decades before
one became a reality.
Holt came to the story of these remarkable women by a delightful happenstance — while pregnant with her
first child, she and her husband found themselves swirled by the indecision of baby-name choice. Each of
them had a favorite name — Eleanor and Frances — so they decided to combine the two. On a whim, Holt
googled “Eleanor Frances.” She recounts:
I was surprised to find, buried in history, an Eleanor Francis Helin, born November 12, 1932. She was a
scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in charge of the program that tracked asteroids nearing Earth.
Like the scientists we so often see personified in movies such as Armageddon, she hunted the asteroids that
163
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
get a little too close to home. During her time at NASA, she discovered an impressive number of asteroids
and comets— more than eight hundred. This was the kind of woman I wanted my daughter to share her name
with. My search came up with an old black-and-white photo of her, blond bouffant hair curling at her
shoulders, a timid smile as she held up an astronomy award for her asteroid discoveries.
Holt was riveted by the mystery of how many such unsung women of space-science might be hidden in
history, what their lives were like in an era very different from our own, and how those lives shaped so much
of what we take for granted today. So began the marvelous obsession that seeded this marvelous book.
Test engineer Sue Finley, NASA’s longest-serving woman, who has worked at JPL for forty-six years.
(Photograph courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech)
From the first “human computers” hired in the 1940s to the women who guide Mars rovers today, Holt
chronicles the extraordinary lives of these women, partway between Galileo and Ada Lovelace, as well as the
complexities and contradictions with which they had to contend in reconciling the era’s gender norms with
their scientific ambitions. She writes:
While we tend to think of the role women played during the early years at NASA as secretarial, these women
were the antithesis of that assumption. These young female engineers shaped much of our history and the
technology we have today.
164
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Saturn’s rings as photographed by Voyager 2, 1981 (Photograph courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Bringing to life the daily reality of these women, Holt paints one particularly emblematic vignette:
The young woman’s heart was pounding. Her palms were sweaty as she gripped the pencil. She quickly
scribbled down the numbers coming across the Teletype. She had been awake for more than sixteen hours but
felt no fatigue. Instead, the experience seemed to be heightening her senses. Behind her she could sense
Richard Feynman, the famous physicist, peeking at her graph paper. He stood looking over her shoulder,
occasionally sighing. She knew that her every move was being carefully watched, her calculations closely
studied. Her work would inform mission control if the first American satellite would be a success or a
crushing failure.
Hours earlier, before the satellite had been launched, her boyfriend had wished her luck. He hadn’t quite
gotten used to the fact that his girlfriend worked late nights as an integral part of the American space program.
Before leaving, he gave her a quick kiss. “I love you even if the dang thing falls in the ocean,” he said with a
smile.
The boyfriend mention midway through this scientific scintillation might at first seem jarring, but that’s
precisely the point — Holt illustrates the ambivalences and confusions of a culture that was only just
beginning to imagine what it might be like for women to take on new ambitions and responsibilities in
165
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
addition to, but not instead of, their traditional feminine duties. This was an era when these female “human
computers” competed for the Miss Guided Missile pageant crown and were still called “sweetheart” by their
male colleagues, who were titled “engineers,” and when the women themselves were more likely to
compliment one another on their Bette Davis haircuts than on their masterful logarithms.
That young woman plotting the path of America’s first satellite was Barbara “Barby” Canright and she was
well aware that if her calculations fell short of perfection, it would spell America’s loss in the Space
Race with the Soviets. Holt recreates the drama of the moment:
Her pride was similarly tied to the fate of the satellite. She’d been here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from
its earliest days, helping to design the rockets powering the tube-shaped spacecraft that was no heavier than a
toddler. Now the project’s ultimate fate was hers to reveal.
Illustration from Bright Sky, Starry City, a children’s book celebrating women’s place in astronomy
As she plotted a curved line across the orange graph paper, she realized the trajectory was coming close to the
point of no return. If the satellite passed this point, it would leave the atmosphere, begin circling the globe,
and become the first American space-success story. The future of space exploration rested on this moment.
But neither failure nor triumph distracted Barby from the task at hand:
When she calculated that the satellite had left Earth’s atmosphere, the critical juncture, she kept quiet. She
made no comment but couldn’t help letting a smile come to her lips.
“Why are you smiling?” Feynman said, his voice irritated as the moments crept by. Until the signal came
through in California, after the satellite had completed a spin around Earth, they couldn’t be sure the satellite
would stay up. Everyone was on edge as they waited for the confirmation of a few faint beeps, proof that
they’d made it. The pounding of the Teletype filled her ears. The numbers came in. Suddenly the satellite’s
166
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
signal came through loud and clear, breaking its long silence. She confirmed her calculations before marking
down the updated position on the graph paper.
“She made it!” she said triumphantly, twisting around in her seat to see the reaction. Behind her, a room of
her colleagues, almost all men, broke into cheers. Ahead of her, the future stretched out, as limitless as space
itself.
But where science saw boundless possibility, culture presented a number of limits seeded by a failure of the
imagination — a failure of even the most fertile imaginations. Barby and her generation of scientists had
come of age at a time when rocket-building was considered a borderline ludicrous endeavor — even by the
great Vannevar Bush, who headed America’s Office of Scientific Research and Development during WWII
and envisioned the Internet in 1945. Holt quotes him to have once scoffed:
I don’t understand how a serious scientist or engineer can play around with rockets.
The early rocket-builders at Caltech — a small group of dreamers and daredevils known as the Suicide Squad
— had gotten the first installment of their first $1,000 funding in crumpled up one- and five-dollar bills
delivered by bicycle. But the few women who bought into this improbable dream — women with wonderfully
old-fashioned names like Macie, Melba, and Virginia — became instrumental in making it a reality.
Macie Roberts (standing right, near window) and her computers at work, 1955. (Photograph courtesy of
NASA/ JPL-Caltech)
Macie Roberts was a particularly pivotal figure in this growing groundswell of women computing the cosmos.
Holt captures her character:
Macie, perhaps because she was twenty years older than her fellow computers and obsessed with using
precise terminology, would get annoyed if someone mistakenly called a rocket propellant “fuel.” She had
come to engineering late in life, after working as an auditor for the Internal Revenue Service, and so had taken
her lessons in rocket science to heart. In her strict and proper way she would gently remind the transgressor
that a propellant is not composed of fuel alone. It also includes an oxidizer, an element such as oxygen that is
able to accept an electron, thus setting in motion a powerful oxidation-reduction reaction, often called a redox
167
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
reaction. These reactions, in which electrons are transferred, create energy whether they occur in a rocket
engine or in a cell in the human body.
[…]
With Macie to lead them, a group of young women were about to leave the lives expected of them. Each
would go from being an oddity in school, one of only a few girls who flourished in calculus and chemistry
classes, to joining a unique group of women at JPL. The careers they were about to launch would be unlike
any other.
What these women went on to launch was something larger than their own careers. Holt writes:
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first humans to tread on another planetary body.
The computers’ fingerprints were all over the historic mission. Their legacy began with the rocket that flew
the men up there. It blasted off in stages, a technique made possible by the women’s computations for the
world’s first two-stage rocket, JPL’s Bumper WAC.
The following year, as women celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the right to vote, a massive movement
called the Women’s Strike for Equality broke out across forty states. Women marched down New York’s
Fifth Avenue bearing signs that read WE ARE THE 51% MINORITY and HOUSEWIVES ARE SLAVE
LABORERS. Holt conveys the tumult of the times:
Although the changes prompted confusion for some, the effects of women’s liberation were spreading
everywhere, even to the offices of JPL.
The women’s titles were shifting. Known as computers since the lab’s inception, they were now officially
engineers. It was a breakthrough as big as landing on the moon.
But this gave rise to a new Catch-22: While the original “human computers” at JPL were grandfathered in —
or, to amend yet another culturally accepted use of gendered language, grandmothered in — as engineers, new
recruits were required to have actual university degrees in engineering. This, Holt points out, at first
contracted rather than expanding the opportunities for women at JPL — major universities had only just
begun to accept women into their engineering programs, something Caltech itself had done that very year, and
women accounted for 1% of the country’s engineering degrees in 1970.
And yet JPL had become an oasis of meritocracy for the women who had by then proven themselves as
brilliant scientists. Holt writes:
The women at JPL had created their own equality. They had formed the lab in their own image, building an
environment welcoming to women, where their work and contributions were every bit as valued as those of
their male counterparts.
In the remainder of the thoroughly wonderful The Rise of the Rocket Girls, Holt goes on to profile more than
a dozen of these trailblazing women, examining how their untold story illuminates the broader cultural
context of changes that are still ripening today. Complement it with Virginia Woolf on gender in creative
culture, Nikola Tesla’s feminist vision for how technology will empower women, and pioneering astronomer
Maria Mitchell on women in science.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/04/15/the-rise-of-rocketgirls/?mc_cid=621080c06b&mc_eid=d1c16ac662
168
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
North Carolina Will Bar Public Access to Police-Cam Footage
A controversial bill on the matter has cleared the House and made its way through the Senate Wednesday.

BRENTIN MOCK

@brentinmock
Raleigh Police at the scene of a fatal shooting in Raleigh, N.C. (AP/Gerry Broome)
This post has been updated to reflect the bill’s passage through the North Carolina state Senate.
Remember that bill that would restrict police body-camera footage from the the public, the one that North
Carolina’s House judiciary committee passed earlier this month? Well, it has been approved by the full state
House of Representatives and has passed through the state Senate as of Wednesday afternoon. It now heads
back to the House for another vote on language added to the legislation. If that is approved, the bill will go to
Governor Pat McCrory, who is expected to sign it into law.
The bill renders any footage captured by a police officer’s body camera or police dashboard camera closed
from public view. This means that no one will have the right to view the footage—not even the people who
are, themselves, captured on the video. If the bill becomes a law, the only way to view such footage will be to
get a judge’s approval.
“They’re not striking the right balance if, in every instance, a person has to get a court order to see these
videos,” says Susanna Birdsong, an attorney for the ACLU of North Carolina. “[State legislators supporting
169
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
the bill] are making it seem like this is an easy process, but there are real financial and time barriers for people
going to court to do that, so that won’t be an option for a lot of the very communities that police body cameras
are supposed to benefit.”
In February, a Raleigh police officer shot and killed 24-year-old Akiel Denkinsafter chasing him over a
warrant for a drug violation. There’s a dispute over whether Denkins tried to attack police before he was
killed—police cam footage could’ve been helpful in sorting that out. Either way, the officer will not be
charged. The editorial board of Raleigh’s News & Observer called that ruling fair, but acknowledged that the
issue is still unsettled:
But a finding of no criminal wrongdoing by the officer does not resolve all questions raised by the encounter.
There are still questions about the priorities and style of policing in Raleigh’s low-income and mostly black
communities. And while Raleigh Police Chief Cassandra Deck-Brown is African-American, her department’s
officers do not reflect the diversity of the city they serve.
...[P]olice and city leaders should examine how the incident came about and escalated into a fatal encounter.
Denkins was wanted for failing to appear on a drug charge. Was there a better way to bring him in than to
have a lone officer chasing him through backyards until they struggled at a fence?
Given the current cultural climate, where 84 percent of African Americans feel that they are not treated fairly
by police, making police-video footage more available to the public is a necessary move to restore—or,
really, establish— faith in law enforcement.
Chicago has taken this step toward more police transparency—which was badly needed in light of how the
city went out of its way to cover up video of the police shooting of Laquan McDonald for more than a year.
The withholding of that footage only served to fuel rumors that the police were doctoring footage to protect
Jason Van Dyke, the cop who killed McDonald. Van Dyke was ultimately charged with the murder only after
a court ordered the video to be released to the public.
But North Carolina seems less concerned about African Americans’ low confidence in the police, and the
events all over the country that have inspired it. (CityLab has reached out to the Southern States Police
Benevolent Association for comment.)
“If we’re talking about using body cameras to inject more trust and transparency, then this isn’t really getting
the job done,” says Birdsong. “People will believe that if you’re not going to show them something, well then
you must have a reason for not showing it. And without more information, people could think a lot of things.”
http://www.citylab.com/crime/2016/06/north-carolina-is-about-to-pass-its-law-barring-public-access-topolice-cam-footage/489371/?utm_source=nl__link4_063016
170
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Top 10 books to make you a better person
Don’t be put off! Works by WG Sebald, Roberto Bolaño and Wallace Shawn and others can help us to see
ourselves more clearly and understand life better
Astonishing ... Wallace Shawn. Photograph: Tim Knox for the Guardian
Greg Jackson
Wednesday 1 June 2016 12.15 BSTLast modified on Wednesday 1 June 201620.59 BST
“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I
should run for my life,” wrote Thoreau, and this is roughly how I feel about the man giving me a book that
will make me a better person. I dislike him, and yet here I am risking becoming him. Worse still, I seem to be
suggesting that my own book bears mention in this dubious, self-approving category. Writing an “improving”
book sounds like a terrific way of repelling readers.
When I wrote my book, Prodigals, I intended, if anything, no more than to give voice to the tensions I felt
pulling me apart from the inside. Which tensions? The desire for community when we measure our worth
against one another. The desire for fame when we know it is toxic. The need for other people when they are
all unbearable. The need to do work that addresses the spirit when we live in a world that no longer believes
in the spirit. The desire for identity when we know it will never be more than a convenient fiction … Could I
turn my confusion into a suspended ambivalence, a scattered sand stilled and blown into glass, in which
someone else might see himself, herself?
I don’t know. I don’t like even addressing what my work is about because I am in the unfortunate position of
being presumed to know. But I can speak to my experience of other books and say that some have wanted to
punish me with how awful people can be, and some have wanted to charm me with visions of happiness, and
some have seemed very simply to care about me more than I was willing to credit them for. The last are books
that respected me enough to address me honestly, with no concern for the comforting mythologies of our selfregard. They are the books on this list. They are not always hopeful, but they suggest that we might see
ourselves clearly, or see our inability to see ourselves clearly clearly, that we might share private truths in
public or find words for the fugitive shades of experience we value most, and in doing these things, they
offered hope all the same.
‘The grim shadow of self-knowledge’ ... Joseph Conrad, pictured in 1923. Photograph: Hulton Getty
1. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
The story here is based on the true story of the SS Jeddah, a British steamship bearing Muslim pilgrims to
Mecca that was abandoned by its crew. Conrad’s novel follows chief mate Jim as he struggles with his
professional and moral failure. Every bit as harrowing as its predecessor, Lord Jim hovers over the mystery of
Jim’s fateful, impulsive leap, unfurling from this decisive act ever more pleated layers of motive and
rationale, until at last laying flat nothing surer than the sense that “no man ever understands quite his own
artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge”.
2. Memoirs of An Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori
The five stories that make up this “novel” neither overlap, quite, nor share a protagonist, quite, but together
build into a uniquely rich evocation of central Europe in the twilight years of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
171
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
At the centre of each story is an ambiguous stand-in for the author: the child of down-at-heel Austrian
aristocracy. Section by section, we watch this refracted, compound character come of age in a wattle-anddaub empire built of diverse peoples and local myths, in which antisemitism serves as a kind of glue.
Unsparing in its presentation of the convenient attitudes that sanction the vilest regimes, Memoirs turns selfimplication into a subtle and ferocious ethic and teaches that none of us is free from casual, dangerous moral
lapses.
3. Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño
A distillation of Bolaño’s genius, Distant Star tells the story of experimental poet Carlos Wieder’s rise to
prominence during the Pinochet years and the inhuman art he develops under the dictatorship. Written as a
detective story, the novella turns an unblinking eye on the fatuity of literary idealism and the barbarity of art’s
totalising visions. The romance of artist and fascist presents no contradiction: the same desire for a radical
freedom from the moderating compromises of old orders and vocabularies leads the artist, no less than the
fascist, into monstrous longing for a world without limits. Distant Star shows how this warped ideal may reimagine our most heinous acts as aesthetic projects, how literature must stand in opposition to power or else
assume its corruption.
Advertisement
4. Collected Stories by Deborah Eisenberg
Since around the time I was becoming a brand new person, Eisenberg has been writing stories of such
undeceived lucidity about the shades of inner convenience and terror that had I read them then I might have
refused to be born. I would at least have refused to grow up, something not many of us manage. No, we
misuse the only language we have to close the distance between us in order to maintain the very falsehoods
that strand us in flimsy private myths. Moving from New York society, in which money, drugs, art and urban
subsistence form a well-knit system, to economic imperialism, in which the same elements string together the
fortunes of rich and poor, Eisenberg tells the stories of people tremblingly awake to the tenuousness of the
arrangements that make their lives possible.
5. The Boat by Nam Le
A Vietnamese writer in grad school weighs what use to make of his father’s experience at My Lai. A young
Colombian assassin dreams of a paradise shimmering in the Caribbean beaches to the north. An ageing
painter in New York, haunted by lost love and self-loathing, attempts to reconnect with his estranged
daughter. Told with immersive fluency, and a ravishing power and grace, these stories possess an imaginative
range that reflects the ethos of literary endeavour at its best. For all the human frailty Le documents, he
returns again and again to our small acts of perseverance amid violence, reminding us how hard we must fight
to preserve reasonable hope and lending credence to the notion that literature might help us.
Truth in wartime ... the last photograph of Simone Weil. Photograph: UIG via Getty Images
6. Essays by Wallace Shawn
Shawn is best known as a great playwright, but also writes astonishing essays. Theatrically enough,
performance informs the grounding belief of this book: that we could all have been many other people, and
that the person we believe we are is a role we play. Each day, Shawn notes, hundreds of thousands of babies
are born, each with the same capacity as you or I to enjoy life, learn, and make the world a better place – and
our decisions will affect whether they can. These brilliant, mischievous essays break our moral questions
apart and reassemble them in a language that begins to sound like sanity.
7. The Collected Stories by Grace Paley
“I don’t believe civilisation can do a lot more than educate a person’s senses,” Paley writes, and this is what
172
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
her work does. In just a few dozen stories of breathtaking compression, written over 30 years, this collection
brings to life the social and human complexity of New York in the middle decades of last century, seen from
street level. Paley has compassion, even affection, for those who act badly, a warmth offset by a biting irony
and wit. “If someone would hand me the first stone, I would not be ashamed to throw it,” a character remarks.
“But at whom?”
8. Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
Loosely structured as a Heart of Darkness in reverse, where the journey recounted moves from small-town
Sudan to elite London society and back again, this depthless, elusive classic of Arab literature breaks open as
it presents and imposes itself. Salih explores not just the corrosive psychological colonisation observed
byFrantz Fanon, but a more complex two-way orientalism, in which the charms of western thought, embodied
in its poetry and liberal ideals, prove irresistible, even as the novel’s Sudanese narrators understand these as
the tempting fruit of a poisoned tree.
9. War and the Iliad by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff
Written just before and during the second world war, these two long essays unearth a set of moral teachings
antecedent to the Gospels, estranged by history but profoundly relevant to our time. Homer’s Iliad is
remarkable, the essayists agree, for presenting warring sides with equal compassion. As Weil writes, only the
person “who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it”, is capable of justice and
love.
10. The Emigrants by WG Sebald
Against the backdrop of the Holocaust, The Emigrants opens an oblique window on mid-century horrors by
looking at four individuals on the margins of the central tragedy. Only by focusing on the smallest terms of
individual experience might we begin, by implication, to get a sense of the benumbing scale of the destruction
visited on a continent and a race. A faint gleam of hope can be seen in the ruins: that, while buried, the past is
not wholly irrecoverable. In fact it is everywhere impressed on the world, if we can only train our attention to
see it.
Prodigals by Greg Jackson is published by Granta, priced £12.99. It is available from the Guardian bookshop
for £10.39.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/01/top-10-books-to-make-you-a-better-person-wg-sebaldroberto-bolano?CMP=fb_gu
173
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Origami ninja star inspires new battery that runs on a few drops of dirty water
Source:
Binghamton University, State University of New York
Summary:
A new disposable battery that folds like an origami ninja star could power biosensors and other small
devices for use in challenging field conditions. The microbial fuel cell runs on the bacteria available
in a few drops of dirty water.
Share:
AddThis Sharing Buttons
FULL STORY
A new disposable battery that folds like an origami ninja star could power biosensors and other small devices
for use in challenging field conditions.
Credit: Jonathan Cohen/Binghamton University
A new disposable battery that folds like an origami ninja star could power biosensors and other small devices
for use in challenging field conditions, says an engineer at Binghamton University, State University of New
York.
Seokheun "Sean" Choi, assistant professor of computer and electrical engineering at Binghamton University,
along with two of his students, developed the device, a microbial fuel cell that runs on the bacteria available
174
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
in a few drops of dirty water. They report on their invention in a new paper published online in the
journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics.
Choi previously developed a paper-based origami battery. The first design, shaped like a matchbook, stacked
four modules together. The ninja star version, which measures about 2.5 inches wide, boasts increased power
and voltage, with eight small batteries connected in series.
"Last time, it was a proof of concept. The power density was in the nanowatt range," said Choi. "This time,
we increased it to the microwatt range. We can light an LED for about 20 minutes or power other types of
biosensors."
Paper-based biosensors include pregnancy tests and HIV tests. The sensitivity of such tests is limited, Choi
said, and a battery like his could allow the use of more sophisticated fluorescent or electrochemical biosensors
in developing countries. "Commercially available batteries are too wasteful and expensive for the field," he
said. "Ultimately, I'd like to develop instant, disposable, accessible bio-batteries for use in resource-limited
regions."
The new design folds into a star with one inlet at its center and the electrical contacts at the points of each
side. After a few drops of dirty water are placed into the inlet, the device can be opened into a Frisbee-like
ring to allow each of the eight fuel cells to work. Each module is a sandwich of five functional layers with its
own anode, proton exchange membrane and air-cathode.
Choi's original matchbook-sized battery could be produced for about 5 cents. The new ninja star device is
more expensive -- roughly 70 cents -- in part because it uses not only filter paper but also carbon cloth for the
anode as well as copper tape. The team's next goal is to produce a fully paper-based device that has the power
density of the new design and a lower price tag.
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Binghamton University, State University of New
York. The original item was written by Rachel Coker. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.
Arwa Fraiwan, Landen Kwan, Seokheun Choi. A disposable power source in resource-limited environments:
A paper-based biobattery generating electricity from wastewater. Biosensors and Bioelectronics, 2016; 85:
190 DOI: 10.1016/j.bios.2016.05.022
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160607094315.htm
175
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Existential Therapy from the Universe: Physicist Sean Carroll on How Poetic Naturalism Illuminates Our
Human Search for Meaning
“The world is what exists and what happens, but we gain enormous insight by talking about it — telling its
story — in different ways.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“We are — as far as we know — the only part of the universe that’s self-conscious,” the poet Mark Strand
marveled in his beautiful meditation on the artist’s task to bear witness to existence, adding: “We could even
be the universe’s form of consciousness. We might have come along so that the universe could look at itself…
It’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.” Susan Sontag, at the
end of her fully lived and intensely meaningful life, articulated the same idea in consideringwhat it means to
be a good human being: “To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.”
Scientists are rightfully reluctant to ascribe a purpose or meaning to the universe itself but, as physicist Lisa
Randall has pointed out, “an unconcerned universe is not a bad thing — or a good one for that matter.” Where
176
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
poets and scientists converge is the idea that while the universe itself isn’t inherently imbued with meaning, it
is in this self-conscious human act of paying attention that meaning arises.
Physicist Sean Carroll terms this view poetic naturalism and examines its rewards in The Big Picture: On the
Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (public library) — a nuanced inquiry into “how our desire to
matter fits in with the nature of reality at its deepest levels,” in which Carroll offers an assuring dose of what
he calls “existential therapy” reconciling the various and often seemingly contradictory dimensions of our
experience.
A 1573 painting by Portuguese artist,
historian, and philosopher Francisco de Holanda, a student of Michelangelo’s, found in Cosmigraphics by
Michael Benson
With an eye to his life’s work of studying the nature of the universe — an expanse of space and time against
the incomprehensibly enormous backdrop of which the dramas of a single human life claim no more than a
177
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Illustration by Lisbeth Zwerger for a special edition of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm
photon of the spotlight — Carroll offers a counterpoint to our intuitive cowering before such magnitudes of
matter and mattering:
I like to think that our lives do matter, even if the universe would trundle along without us.
178
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
[…]
I want to argue that, though we are part of a universe that runs according to impersonal underlying laws, we
nevertheless matter. This isn’t a scientific question — there isn’t data we can collect by doing experiments
that could possibly measure the extent to which a life matters. It’s at heart a philosophical problem, one that
demands that we discard the way that we’ve been thinking about our lives and their meaning for thousands of
years. By the old way of thinking, human life couldn’t possibly be meaningful if we are “just” collections of
atoms moving around in accordance with the laws of physics. That’s exactly what we are, but it’s not the only
way of thinking about what we are. We are collections of atoms, operating independently of any immaterial
spirits or influences, and we are thinking and feeling people who bring meaning into existence by the way we
live our lives.
Illustration by Soyeon Kim from Wild Ideas
Carroll’s captivating term poetic naturalism builds on a worldview that has been around for centuries, dating
back at least to the Scottish philosopher David Hume. It fuses naturalism — the idea that the reality of the
natural world is the only reality, that it operates according to consistent patterns, and that those patterns can be
studied — with the poetic notion that there are multiple ways of talking about the world and of framing the
questions that arise from nature’s elemental laws.
Echoing Nobel-winning physicist Frank Wilczek’s case for complementarity and Bertrand Russell’s
insistence on “the will to doubt,” Carroll writes:
We have to be willing to accept uncertainty and incomplete knowledge, and always be ready to update our
beliefs as new evidence comes in… Our best approach to describing the universe is not a single, unified story
but an interconnected series of models appropriate at different levels. Each model has a domain in which it is
179
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
applicable, and the ideas that appear as essential parts of each story have every right to be thought of as
“real.” Our task is to assemble an interlocking set of descriptions, based on some fundamental ideas, that fit
together to form a stable planet of belief.
Illustration by Sydney Smith
from The White Cat and the Monk
Carroll considers how poetic naturalism addresses the great paradox of the necessarily self-referential
experience of selfhood unfolding within our creaturely materiality:
The most difficult problem is a philosophical one: how is it even possible that inner experience, the uniquely
experiential aboutness of our lives inside our heads, can be reduced to mere matter in motion? Poetic
naturalism suggests that we should think of “inner experiences” as part of a way of talking about what is
happening in our brains. But ways of talking can be very real, even when it comes to our ability to make free
choices as rational beings.
[…]
180
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Poetic naturalism strikes a middle ground, accepting that values are human constructs, but denying that they
are therefore illusory or meaningless.
In a sentiment that calls Strand’s poetic premise to mind, Carroll adds:
Life is a process, not a substance, and it is necessarily temporary. We are not the reason for the existence of
the universe, but our ability for self-awareness and reflection makes us special within it.
[…]
Purpose and meaning in life arise through fundamentally human acts of creation, rather than being derived
from anything outside ourselves.
Carroll argues that naturalism — “a philosophy of unity and patterns, describing all of reality as a seamless
web” — is the organic byproduct of our expanding knowledge, advancing us toward simpler and more unified
models of how the world works. (Stephen Hawking’s search for a theory of everything is perhaps the most
famous culmination of that impulse.) Carroll peers toward the end point of this knowledge-trajectory:
How far will this process of unification and simplification go? It’s impossible to say for sure. But we have a
reasonable guess, based on our progress thus far: it will go all the way. We will ultimately understand the
world as a single, unified reality, not caused or sustained or influenced by anything outside itself. That’s a big
deal.
And yet, in a passage reminiscent of physicist and novelist Alan Lightman’s beautiful account of a
transcendent experience, Carroll juxtaposes the central proposition of naturalism with some of the most
familiar and universal intensities of being human:
Naturalism presents a hugely grandiose claim, and we have every right to be skeptical. When we look into the
eyes of another person, it doesn’t seem like what we’re seeing is simply a collection of atoms, some sort of
immensely complicated chemical reaction. We often feel connected to the universe in some way that
transcends the merely physical, whether it’s a sense of awe when we contemplate the sea or sky, a trancelike
reverie during meditation or prayer, or the feeling of love when we’re close to someone we care about. The
difference between a living being and an inanimate object seems much more profound than the way certain
molecules are arranged. Just looking around, the idea that everything we see and feel can somehow be
explained by impersonal laws governing the motion of matter and energy seems preposterous.
Although naturalism has furnished our present understanding of how the world works, such skepticism of its
completeness is reasonably grounded in its as-yet unfilled gaps. “This is the greatest damn thing about the
universe,” Henry Miller exclaimed in contemplating the mystery of the universe and the meaning of
existence at the end of his long life, “that we can know so much, recognize so much, dissect, do everything,
and we can’t grasp it.”Generations later, Carroll writes:
We don’t know how the universe began, or if it’s the only universe. We don’t know the ultimate, complete
laws of physics. We don’t know how life began, or how consciousness arose. And we certainly haven’t
agreed on the best way to live in the world as good human beings.
Yet even so, Carroll is quick to remind, naturalism is “still by far the most likely framework” — of how the
world works, that is, but it does little in the way of helping us discern how the world shouldwork. That’s the
domain of practical moral wisdom, which is where poetic naturalism can help. Carroll writes:
In some number of years I will be dead; some memory of my time here on Earth may linger, but I won’t be
around to savor it. With that in mind, what kind of life is worth living? How should we balance family and
career, fortune and pleasure, action and contemplation? The universe is large, and I am a tiny part of it,
constructed of the same particles and forces as everything else: by itself, that tells us precisely nothing about
how to answer such questions. We’re going to have to be both smart and courageous as we work to get this
181
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
right.
Arthur Rackham’s pioneering 1917 illustrations for the Brothers Grimm fairy tales
One of
The craftsmanship of meaning amid the unfeeling laws of nature invariably calls on us to use human tools like
ethics and art to answer questions of what is right and beautiful. Saul Bellow captured this memorably in
his Nobel Prize acceptance speech:“Only art penetrates … the seeming realities of this world. There is another
reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without
art, we can’t receive.” Indeed, Carroll argues that the meaning with which imbue reality — the personal,
182
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
subjective reality of our human experience of life and self, not the universal reality of energy and matter — is
largely contingent upon how we receive and articulate its signals. That reality, he argues, is shaped by how we
talk about it:
Our fundamental ontology, the best way we have of talking about the world at the deepest level, is extremely
sparse. But many concepts that are part of non-fundamental ways we have of talking about the world —
useful ideas describing higher-level, macroscopic reality — deserve to be called “real.”
The key word there is “useful.” There are certainly non-useful ways of talking about the world. In scientific
contexts, we refer to such non-useful ways as “wrong” or “false.” A way of talking isn’t just a list of
concepts; it will generally include a set of rules for using them, and relationships among them. Every
scientific theory is a way of talking about the world.
Illustration by Dasha Tolstikova
from A Year Without Mom
[…]
183
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
The world is what exists and what happens, but we gain enormous insight by talking about it — telling its
story — in different ways.
Carroll’s poetic naturalism is braided of three storytelling strands — the description of the deepest, most
fundamental nature of physical reality, accounting for even the most microscopic detail, which science is yet
to fully discern; emergent descriptions that fully explain a narrow realm of reality; and higher-order values
that offer a framework for concepts of right and wrong, shape our ideas about things like beauty and love, and
address questions of existential purpose. He writes:
Poetic naturalism is a philosophy of freedom and responsibility. The raw materials of life are given to us by
the natural world, and we must work to understand them and accept the consequences. The move from
description to prescription, from saying what happens to passing judgment on what should happen, is a
creative one, a fundamentally human act. The world is just the world, unfolding according to the patterns of
nature, free of any judgmental attributes. The world exists; beauty and goodness are things that we bring to it.
All of this, of course, brings up the inescapable question of free will. I’m reminded of Hannah
Arendt’s exquisite treatise on the subject, in which she cautioned: “Before we raise such questions as What is
happiness, what is justice, what is knowledge, and so on, we must have seen happy and unhappy people,
witnessed just and unjust deeds, experienced the desire to know and its fulfillment or frustration.” Carroll
considers this vitalizing role of willingness, or desire, in our freedom to find meaning amid a universe of fixed
laws:
Illustration by Bonnie Christensen from I, Galileo, a picture-book biography of Galileo
In human terms, the dynamic nature of life manifests itself as desire. There is always something we want,
even if what we want is to break free of the bonds of desire… Curiosity is a form of desire.
184
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
[…]
Our instincts and unreflective desires aren’t all we have; they’re just a starting point for building something
significant.
Human beings are not blank slates at birth, and our slates become increasingly rich and multidimensional as
we grow and learn. We are bubbling cauldrons of preferences, wants, sentiments, aspirations, likes, feelings,
attitudes, predilections, values, and devotions. We aren’t slaves to our desires; we have the capacity to reflect
on them and strive to change them. But they make us who we are. It is from these inclinations within
ourselves that we are able to construct purpose and meaning for our lives.
[…]
The personal desires and cares that we start with may be simple and self-regarding. But we can build on them
to create values that look beyond ourselves, to the wider world. It’s our choice, and the choice we make can
be to expand our horizons, to find meaning in something larger than ourselves.
Reflecting on his own path from his childhood in a family of “regular churchgoers” to a thoroughly
unreligious adult life as a scientist, Carroll considers what that “something larger” might be:
Everything we’ve experienced about the universe suggests that it is intelligible: if we try hard enough we can
come to understand it. There is so much we still don’t know about how reality works, but at the same time
there’s a great deal that we have figured out. Mysteries abound, but there’s no reason to worry (or hope) that
any of them are unsolvable.
[…]
The important distinction is not between theists and naturalists; it’s between people who care enough about
the universe to make a good-faith effort to understand it, and those who fit it into a predetermined box or
simply take it for granted. The universe is much bigger than you or me, and the quest to figure it out unites
people with a spectrum of substantive beliefs. It’s us against the mysteries of the universe; if we care about
understanding, we’re on the same side.
Although I tend to prefer Henry Beston’s notion of whimsicality, for it dances with the language of fairy tales
rather than that of religion, I appreciate Carroll’s endeavor to reclaim the notion of miraculousness from its
antiscientific connotations:
The universe is not a miracle. It simply is, unguided and unsustained, manifesting the patterns of nature with
scrupulous regularity. Over billions of years it has evolved naturally, from a state of low entropy toward
increasing complexity, and it will eventually wind down to a featureless equilibrium. We are the miracle, we
human beings. Not a break-the-laws-of-physics kind of miracle… It is wondrous and amazing how such
complex, aware, creative, caring creatures could have arisen in perfect accordance with those laws. Our lives
are finite, unpredictable, and immeasurably precious. Our emergence has brought meaning and mattering into
the world.
With an urgent eye to the fact that the average human heart will beat three billion times over the course of a
lifetime — a fact rooted in our biological materiality — Carroll encourages us to see this physical exigency as
a mobilizing force for our metaphysical synthesis of meaning:
All lives are different, and some face hardships that others will never know. But we all share the same
universe, the same laws of nature, and the same fundamental task of creating meaning and of mattering for
ourselves and those around us in the brief amount of time we have in the world.
Three billion heartbeats. The clock is ticking.
In the remainder of The Big Picture, Carroll goes on to explore such centralities and subtleties of poetic
naturalism as the perplexity of death, the wild possibilities of the quantum realm, and how the crucial
185
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
difference between awe and wonder illuminates our relationship to mystery. Complement it with Oliver
Sacks’s lived testament to poetic naturalism as a gateway to meaning and legendary psychiatrist Irving D.
Yalom on uncertainty and our search for meaning, then revisit this comparative inquiry into how art, science,
and religion explain the universe.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/05/31/sean-carroll-the-bigpicture/?mc_cid=4c052b899a&mc_eid=d1c16ac662
186
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
How Apps Can Help People With Disabilities Navigate Cities
Broken sidewalks and inaccessible buildings can make for daunting trips, but a slew of mobile applications
could change that.

LINDA POON

@linpoonsays
Jason DaSilva
It was only when Jason DaSilva began navigating New York City with a walker—and eventually in a
motorized wheelchair—that he realized how much he had once taken for granted. He’d formerly had no
problem spontaneously heading out for coffee or to run an errand. Suddenly, it wasn’t so easy to hop on the
subway, or make it up the two steps to get into a restaurant.
The 37-year-old filmmaker recently won an Emmy for When I Walk, a documentary chronicling his life with
multiple sclerosis. DaSilva was diagnosed in 2005, and the disease has affected his vision, hearing, and
muscle control. “Living in the East Village, I was finding that it could be 9 out of 10 businesses on a city
block that would be inaccessible to me,” he tells CityLab.
187
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
For the estimated 53 million U.S. adults living with disabilities, moving through a city may feel like an
obstacle course. Hilly terrain can prove daunting for people with impaired mobility. Then there’s the problem
of busted sidewalks—over which cities like Seattle and Los Angeles have faced lawsuits—as well as poorly
designed curb cuts or ramps.
Sometimes public and private business fail to accommodate wheelchair users or guide dogs, despite the 1990
passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, which laid out standards for making public areas accessible.
The trouble with conventional technology
Currently, assistance available to people with disabilities is “pretty dismal” says Anat Caspi, a researcher at
the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology at the University of Washington. “Because of ADA compliance,
a lot of communities or institutions like universities might generate [accessibility maps],” she says. “The
problem is, everything is static on a PDF, and you can't change it as conditions change, or customize it to a
particular individual's needs.”
The other problem is that streets and pathways don’t stay static. In a city like Seattle, which is undergoing a
building boom, construction sites frequently pop up, blocking pathways, closing sidewalks, and catching
pedestrians by surprise. Jacob Struksma, a Seattle resident who is blind, voiced his frustration to theSeattle
Weekly:
188
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
In particular, rampant sidewalk closures have made the difficult task of getting from point A to point B all the
more so, forcing Struiksma to turn around halfway down a long downtown block and find another path—not
to mention the makeshift walkways and shoddy barriers to dangerous sites.
“I’ve had construction workers yell at me and push me,” he says. “I’ve run into it all over the city. It’s a
problem on every single block of the city.
Popular navigation apps including Google Maps and Tom Tom haven’t filled in the gaps, as they’ve been
designed to describe the road system. So even when Google generates a footpath, Caspi says, the sidewalks
are just attributes of automobile routes.
DaSilva’s disease began to progress around the time he got his first iPhone, which he hoped would planning
trips easier. Initially, he turned to apps such as Yelp, but found them unhelpful. “I would find a place and they
would give me the wrong information,” DaSilva says. “They would say, ‘Yeah, we’re accessible,’ but I’d get
there and find out that there was a step, or that the bathroom is down a flight of stairs.”
Filling in the gap with accessibility apps
Caspi and DaSilva join a growing community of entrepreneurs and researchers looking to technology to fill
these gaps. WheelyApp, for example, aims to help New Yorkers navigate the subway. And ChiSafePath is an
app that allows users in Chicago to report things like broken sidewalks and other obstructions. DaSilva’s AXS
Map, which launched in 2012, addresses the problem of inaccessible buildings.
(AXS Map/Jason DaSilva)
Meeting up with friends became more difficult for DaSilva, a social butterfly. This was a devastating blow.
That’s when he created AXS Map, a mobile and web app that allows users to rate businesses based on how
189
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
accessible they are: How many steps are at the entrance? Do they have space to fit a wheelchair? Are there
bathrooms with appropriate access? Much like on Yelp, businesses are given ratings out of five stars based on
how accessible they are.
“I came up with the idea of having something that would be accessible and usable by people with all different
kinds of disabilities,” says DaSilva, “not just mobility.” There are still many places that have yet to be rated,
but DaSilva says that the more users join, the more informative the app will become.
Earlier this month Caspi and a team of developers from University of Washington began pilot testing a new
interactive map for Seattle calledAccessMap Seattle. It’s the first of its kind, according to Caspi. And one of
its most important features is mapping out the elevation levels of all of the city’s sidewalks using publicly
available information.
“Seattle is a very hilly terrain, and elevation changes are things that people can't necessarily anticipate unless
they consulted a topological map,” she says. “[Having] foreknowledge of how high a grade they are going to
have to scale or descend makes a huge difference.”
The map is simple to use: Search a particular street, and it will show you three colors. Red denotes a steep
slope, yellow is moderate, and green means the ground is relatively level. For those with the mobile app,
Caspi and her team are working on a feature that will allow users to map out their route.
The map will also provide information about the location of bus stops, curb ramps, public elevators, and,
when government data becomes available, updates on new construction sites.
Green lines indicate level sidewalks, while red and yellow lines denote steep and moderate slopes,
respectively. (AccessMap Seattle)
190
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
The future of accessibility maps
That’s just the beginning, says Caspi. Her team is looking to collaborate withOpen Street Map to create a data
layer with information just for pedestrians. This information could then be applied to a map of any city as data
becomes available. If successful, it wouldn’t be a tool only for people with disabilities, but for anyone who
wants more control over their trip route.
DaSilva is also working to take their AXS Map to a new level by integrating it with cutting-edge technology
like visual augmented reality. The team was recently named the winner of the Made in New York Media
Center by IFP’sDemo Day, where they presented a virtual-reality version of their app that would allow users
to tour sites from their homes.
That application could instill a sense of confidence in, for instance, a child with developmental delays. “To be
able to cross the street to go to the park, some have never done it before, and they have a lot of anxiety about
that,” he says. “They can practice that several times [with AXS Map] before he actually gets out there and
makes it a reality.”
For Caspi, the ultimate aim is to make people, with or without disabilities, feel independent; they can plan
trips on the fly instead of three days in advance. "This is a form of freedom that we often overlook because we
don't have to think about these things, but a lot of times communities do,” she says. “That's kind of the burden
that I would like to alleviate.”
http://www.citylab.com/navigator/2016/06/how-apps-help-people-with-disabilities-navigate-thecity/489128/?utm_source=nl__link5_063016
191
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Origin of extraordinary supernovae
Source:
National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
Summary:
Astronomers have demonstrated that the origin of extraordinary supernovae can be explained by the
'accretion scenario.' The researchers discovered an anomalously strong infrared emission from 'the
extraordinary supernova' SN 2012dn, which has never been observed in other Type Ia supernovae to
date. Through detailed analysis, the researchers concluded that the infrared emission comes from the
material ejected from the progenitor system.
Share:
AddThis Sharing Buttons
FULL STORY
Image around SN 2012dn obtained by the Kanata Telescope at Higashi-Hiroshima Observatory. SN 2012dn is
seen near the center of this figure. The host galaxy ESO 462-G016 is seen on the left side of SN 2012dn. The
distance to this galaxy is known to be 130 mega-light-years. Because the supernova is a point source, the
expansion cannot be measured, but the evolutions of the brightness and color are obtained.
Credit: Higashi-Hiroshima Observatory
Using data obtained through the Optical and Infrared Synergetic Telescopes for Education and Research
(OISTER) in Japan, Masayuki Yamanaka, a Taro Hirao Foundation Researcher at Konan University,
demonstrated that the origin of extraordinary supernovae can be explained by the 'accretion scenario.' The
192
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
researchers discovered an anomalously strong infrared emission from 'the extraordinary supernova' SN
2012dn, which has never been observed in other Type Ia supernovae to date. Through detailed analysis, the
researchers concluded that the infrared emission comes from the material ejected from the progenitor system.
Astronomers using the OISTER telescope consortium in Japan have uncovered new information about the
origin of 'extraordinary supernovae' explosions, which are brighter than normal ones. This new information
will help improve measurements of the Universe's expansion, and of the Dark Energy which controls the final
fate of the cosmos.
Type Ia ("One-A") supernovae are a type of exploding star which are used as references when studying the
Universe. What makes these supernovae useful is that the physics governing their evolution ensures that they
all change from a stable state to an explosion at almost exactly the same point in their evolution. This means
that the brightness of a Type Ia supernova explosion is consistent from one star to the next. By using the
known brightness of these supernovae, astronomers can use them to calibrate observations. For example, in
the late 1990's, the accelerating expansion of the Universe was discovered by using the properties of Type Ia
supernovae. Drs. Perlmutter, Riess, and Schmidt were awarded the Novel Prize in Physics in 2011 for this
work.
But it turns out there's a problem with this method. In addition to normal Type Ia supernovae, astronomers
have discovered 'extraordinary supernovae' which are much brighter than they should be. These 'extraordinary
supernovae' may be contaminating the samples used for cosmological research, thereby skewing the
calibration. To correctly measure the expansion of the Universe and understand the Dark Energy driving the
expansion, it is important to determine the origins of both typical supernovae and 'extraordinary supernovae'
so that the latter can be more accurately excluded from the sample.
Despite three decades of debate, astronomers still haven't agreed on the origin of these supernovae. There are
two popular scenarios, 'accretion' or 'merger', as the path to the supernova explosion. Both scenarios consider
a 'binary system,' i.e., two stars orbiting around each other. The 'accretion' scenario uses binary systems
composed of one white dwarf and one normal star, and the 'merger' scenario uses binary systems formed by
two white dwarfs.
When the 'extraordinary supernovae' candidate SN 2012dn was spotted, Masayuki Yamanaka, a Taro Hirao
Foundation Researcher at Konan University, and his colleagues observed it using 11 telescopes in Japan
through OISTER (Optical and Infrared Synergetic Telescopes for Education and Research). The observations
continued until 150 days after the supernova was first observed. As a result of this observing campaign, they
discovered an anomalously strong infrared emission for this object which cannot be seen in typical
supernovae. The groups performed detailed analysis of the infrared emission, and concluded that material
ejected recently from the progenitor system is responsible for this emission.
The mass of the ejected material strongly supports the 'accretion scenario.' In the accretion scenario, gas is
transferred onto the surface of the white dwarf from the companion star in the binary system. During the
transfer, a part of the material escapes from the gravitational potential of the system, forming a dense gas
surrounding the pre-supernovae-explosion star system. The observation results indicate that SN 2012dn
exploded while surrounded by this dense gas.
From here, the team will pursue new observations to determine if typical Type Ia supernovae are also the
results of accretion.
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. Note:
Materials may be edited for content and length.
193
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Journal Reference:
1.
Masayuki Yamanaka, Keiichi Maeda, Masaomi Tanaka, Nozomu Tominaga, Koji S. Kawabata, Katsutoshi
Takaki, Miho Kawabata, Tatsuya Nakaoka, Issei Ueno, Hiroshi Akitaya, Takahiro Nagayama, Jun Takahashi,
Satoshi Honda, Toshihiro Omodaka, Ryo Miyanoshita, Takashi Nagao, Makoto Watanabe, Mizuki Isogai,
Akira Arai, Ryosuke Itoh, Takahiro Ui, Makoto Uemura, Michitoshi Yoshida, Hidekazu Hanayama, Daisuke
Kuroda, Nobuharu Ukita, Kenshi Yanagisawa, Hideyuki Izumiura, Yoshihiko Saito, Kazunari Masumoto,
Rikako Ono, Ryo Noguchi, Katsura Matsumoto, Daisaku Nogami, Tomoki Morokuma, Yumiko Oasa,
Kazuhiro Sekiguchi. OISTER optical and near-infrared observations of the super-Chandrasekhar supernova
candidate SN 2012dn: Dust emission from the circumstellar shell. Publications of the Astronomical Society of
Japan, 2016; psw047 DOI:10.1093/pasj/psw047
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160607080645.htm
194
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Emergent, nsf-funded biotech at 2016 bio innovation zone
50 early-stage, NSF-funded projects with the potential to improve U.S. health care to exhibit at world's largest
annual biotech conference
The 2016 BIO Innovation Zone is dedicated to early stage
companies with frontier biotech.
Credit and Larger Version
May 31, 2016
The U.S. health care system has a tremendous need for novel high- (and low-) tech solutions to increase its
quality, agility and affordability.
To meet this need, the National Science Foundation (NSF) supports research and early-stage development of
novel biomedical products, processes and services.
Fifty NSF-funded startups and small businesses with innovative biotech, based on fundamental research, will
be on display in San Francisco June 6-9 at the 2016 BIO International Convention, the world's largest
gathering of the biotechnology industry.
Companies will be part of BIO Innovation Zone, an exhibit space dedicated to early-stage companies with
frontier biomedical technologies.
Small business innovation
The exhibitors are companies supported through the NSF Small Business Innovation Research/Small
Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) program, a $188 million activity that catalyzes
commercialization of high-risk technological innovations via research and development grants to small
businesses and startups.
195
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
"The biotechnology industry is a fast-paced, high-stakes environment because of its critical, far-reaching
human health and economic impacts," said Jesus Soriano, NSF program director. "Federally supported,
fundamental scientific and engineering research plays a pivotal role in this arena, due to the government's
ability to invest in high-risk projects with long-term, big-payoff potential. Companies funded by NSF
SBIR/STTR have the benefit and added credibility of having undergone NSF rigorous merit review."
Thanks to an NSF SBIR award, small business PharmaSeq is developing a microchip with a sensor that
can be injected into live cells to transmit information without a physical connection. (Image above shows
relative chip size in comparison to ants.)
Credit: PharmaSeq
NSF seed funding provides the critical first step to biotech startups, while the Innovation Zone gathers
potential investors, industry partners, service providers and mentors to make connections for
commercialization.
The zone will also include companies supported by the National Institutes of Health SBIR/STTR program,
meaning more than 100 companies in all will showcase emerging biotech at the convention.
Legacy of support
The Innovation Zone was first launched at the 2014 BIO Convention with 35 companies. Since then, it
has more than tripled in size due to growing interest from the public in early-stage, federally funded projects.
NSF's role in the Innovation Zone is a continuation of a three-decade legacy of support for innovation and the
high-tech small business community. In particular, large-scale trade shows provide startups and small
business exhibitors with opportunities to connect with a multitude of like-minded partners and investors.
196
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
LambdaVision is developing a protein-based retinal implant to restore vision to people with age-related
macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa. The implant will act as an artificial photoreceptor cell
layer and replace function of damaged rods and cones.
Credit: Angelica Messana, University of Connecticut Jordan Greco, University of Connecticut
"The Innovation Zone is a prime example of effective public-private partnership established between the
Federal government and the private sector for the benefit of small businesses and patients alike," Soriano said.
Read NSF company profiles on the BIOtechNow blog.
NSF-funded companies at 2016 BIO Innovation Zone
Diagnostics and Monitoring

Aperiomics Inc. -- identification of more than 40,000 unique genomes in one single test.

Cytomag -- microfluidic systems for rapid cell isolation and analysis.

Gamma Therapeutics -- a product platform based on a naturally occurring clotting protein in human blood
that is associated with cardiovascular disease.

InnSight Inc. -- point-of-service device to diagnose the severity of anterior eye injures with an objective
measure of ocular tear film.

Nanoview Diagnostics -- simple biological nanoparticles characterization.

MetalloPharm -- bacterial point-of-care diagnostics with a rapid, visual yes/no response.
197
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
NSF-funded small business Cardiovate Inc. is developing a technology that replaces damaged or
obstructed blood vessels with healthy tissue without using human cells or drugs.
Credit: Mark Standeford, CEO, Cardiovate Inc.

MicroDevice Engineering Inc. -- faster, portable, affordable, reliable blood typing and red blood cell
concentration test.

Montana Molecular -- genetically encoded fluorescent biosensors and probes for cell-based assays and live
cell imaging.

NanoHybrids -- gold nanoparticles for functionalization and antibody conjugation.

Pharmaseq Inc. -- radio p-chip for real-time, intracellular sensing in living cells.

ROPAmedics LLC -- non-invasive device to objectively measure acute pain.

Sanguina, LLC -- patient-operated, color-based, disposable and affordable diagnostic self-test for anemia.
Drug Discovery and Development

AxumBIo -- genome engineering of model organisms for a novel anti-parasite drug discovery platform.

Carmot Therapeutics Inc. -- rapid identification of novel drugs through evolutionary lead-identification
paradigm.

Extend Biosciences Inc. -- drug discovery and delivery platform technology that improves pharmacokinetic
properties of peptides and proteins.

Longevity Biotech Inc. -- peptide technology for development and delivery of new drugs.

LayerBio -- stabilization of small molecule, protein and nucleic acid therapeutics within an ultrathin polymer
film for controlled release to target tissue.
198
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales

Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Nano3d Biosciences Inc. -- tissue engineering technology based on magnetic nanoparticles for better testing
of drug candidates.
Engineering Biology

Enevolv -- the engineering of better microbes to produce bio-based chemicals.

Ginkgo Bioworks -- a foundry for flexible industrialized organism engineering.

IGG -- technology to produce hypoallergenic peanuts devoid of the most common allergens.

PhylloTech LLC -- innovative biopesticides to inhibit diseases but limit environmental impact.
Manufacturing and Distribution

Advanced Polymer Monitoring Technologies Inc. -- a new tool for biopharmaceutical stability analysis.

Boston Mountain Biotech -- a way to reduce host cell protein load in downstream processing through targeted
cell line modifications.

ConsortiEX -- software and services to manage ordering, distribution and tracking of pharmaceuticals for
hospitals and affiliated networks.

Continuus Pharmaceuticals Inc. -- pharmaceutical manufacturing technologies to deliver more affordable
medications to patients faster and with better quality.

Covaris -- tools and technologies to improve pre-analytical sample preparation, enable novel drug
formulations, and manage compounds in drug development.

Life Magnetics -- RNA isolation and quantification with graphene magnetic beads.

Miromatrix Medical Inc. -- development of a biological mesh for hernia repair.

Protein Dynamic Solutions LLC -- protein characterization for development of viable, stable biological drug
products.

Tangible Science -- contact lens coating that maintains the tear film for more comfortable contact lenses.

Teselagen -- DNA design and fabrication integrating modern cloning, PCR, direct synthesis and gene editing
methodologies.

Vaxess Technologies Inc. -- a silk biopolymer platform to enable storage and distribution of vaccines.
Treatments

Arytha Biosciences -- therapeutics using nanoscale particles that mimic properties and functions of living
cells and organisms.

Camras Vision Inc. -- new ophthalmic medical device for people with glaucoma.

Cardiovate Inc. -- technology that replaces damaged or obstructed blood vessels with healthy tissue without
using human cells or drugs.

Gigagen Inc. -- a way to capture complete immune repertoires as DNA and express them as millions-diverse
recombinant protein libraries.
199
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

Glauconix -- a developing approach for ex-vivo, dynamic 3D human tissue models.

Hospi Corporation -- practical, high-impact medical devices that enhance terminal patient comfort and wellbeing, ease caregiver burden, and reduce cost.

Inserogen Inc. -- treatments for orphan diseases such as AAT deficiency and cystic fibrosis.

Lambdavision Inc. -- protein-based retinal implant to restore vision to people with age-related macular
degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa.

LAP IQ -- biodegradable medical device solutions for laparoscopic surgery.

NanoValent Pharmaceuticals, Inc. -- targeted nanoparticle-based, drug delivery technology to re-position and
enhance cancer therapies.

Prolynx -- drug-delivery technology to extend half-life of proteins, peptides and small molecules.

Otomagnetics -- non-invasive drug delivery to the hard-to-reach middle and inner ear.

Remedium Technologies -- care for severe hemorrhage control.

Stem Cell Theranostics -- genetically targeted therapies for heart failure.

Tevido Biodevices -- custom, bioprinted nipple areola grafts made from a person's own cells for breast cancer
survivors.
About the NSF small business programs
At NSF, SBIR/STTR is an approximately $188 million program that catalyzes commercialization of high-risk
technological innovations via research and development grants to small businesses and startups. In addition,
NSF supports faculty in translational research activities through the PFI:AIR- Technology Translation
program.
-NSF-
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=138773&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click
200
Infoteca’s E-Journal
No. 369 august 2016