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| October 7, 2007 - October 13, 2007 »
October 5, 2007
Bradford Plumer, writing for the New Republic Online, reports on the Congressional hearing on the American penal system that I mentioned two weeks ago. The right scholars were there, but, according to Plumer, they did not exactly face a rapt audience. Senator James Webb organized the session.
[F]or the past hour, five experts had put forward overwhelming evidence that the sprawling U.S. prison state -- a $200 billion-a-year social program that rivals the New Deal in size and scope -- is devastating inner cities, deepening poverty, and making the crime problem worse, not better. A big deal all around. But now it comes time for questions, and the congressional chairs are mostly empty. Only Webb and fellow freshman Bob Casey of Pennsylvania are still hanging around. Critical, indeed.
By the end of the hearing, Plumer notes, Webb is "the only politician left in the room."
PS A quibble: Plumer writes: "To his credit, Barack Obama has recently vowed, in a speech at Howard University, that he would 'review mandatory minimum drug sentencing' as president. That's about as far as any mainstream presidential candidate can possibly go ..." That's wrong, as I understand it -- or Plumer is writing Joe Biden off as a mainstream candidate. Biden has introduced a bill that would rectify the crack-cocaine/powder-cocaine sentencing discrepancy, and it would do so purely by raising the amount of crack that earns its possessor a five-year (or ten-year) sentence. Other legislators have promoted bills that would raise the amounts of crack that trigger minimum sentences but also lower the amounts of powder cocaine that do so. So Biden, as I understand it, has been more specific than Obama.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 12:22 PM
October 5, 2007
As promised...
***
***
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 10:15 AM
October 4, 2007
***
Joan Brugge is Chair of the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School, and head of a Harvard lab that's making major inroads into the study of breast cancer, and into the hard science of how cells function. Earlier this year, she warned a Senate Appropriations subcommittee that it's dangerous to limit funds for basic research into new cancer therapies just as a tsunami of baby boomers in their cancer-prone years is about to hit.
Brugge is here today to address certain questions: Why cancer prevention and treatment remains such a challenge; how cell biologists can contribute to the development of cancer therapies; and what technological advances are helping them do so.
Cancer has been a difficult disease to tackle, despite Richard Nixon's War on Cancer, which scientists thought would be as winnable as the War on Polio. Cancer isn't just one disease, Brugge says. Each tumor in each individual has a unique set of genetic changes, for one thing. Also, tumors are undetectable until late stages, and they constantly evolve.
Still, we have made enormous progress in understanding the cause of this complex disease. Brugge explains how breast tissue works, shows us different types of tumors, and explains how tumors are heterogeneous (some progress, some don't; some are senitive to drug treatment, some aren't; and so forth). Implications: There isn't a single cause, and there isn't a single treatment. However, working together with physician scientists, cell and molecular biologists have identified the molecular underpinnings of some tumors; this has led to therapies that (so far) seem successful.
OK, Brugge is also a speed-talker. So I will quote a Globe story about her work:
Brugge's lab has so far examined 300 genes that are implicated in breast cancer. "We're looking for drivers, genes that are changing the behavior of cells. We want to understand the mechanism by which they do this."
"We used to culture cells in a Petri dish," she says. This gave scientists a two-dimensional surface on which to grow the cells, but most of the cells that make up the body's organs are grouped in three-dimensional, spherical shapes. So the model didn't work well. Recent developments have allowed scientists to cultivate cells in shapes that are more natural -- ones that look like golf balls.
With increased funding and plans to expand in Allston/Brighton, one reads in the Globe, Harvard is investing heavily in cancer research -- but the complexities of the field pose challenges.
"Technology is so sophisticated that individual labs can't be self-sufficient," says Brugge. "We need biophysicists, mathematicians, and engineers who can collaborate with biologists. We need to reconfigure the organization of the sciences."
Very impressive stuff. Wish I could stay and learn more. However, it's 5:30 -- the conference is running late -- and, like I said, I have to head out to another function.
Besides, my brain is full.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 05:37 PM
October 4, 2007
***
Emmanuel Akyeampong is a professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He serves as the president of the African Public Broadcasting Foundation (US), a partnership of academic researchers, African broadcasters, and African producers dedicated to the production of development-oriented programs for broadcast on television, radio and the Internet.
Akyeampong tells us about how the 1980s were a "lost decade" for African Studies, during which scholars left African universities for greener pastures. He went to college and graduate school in the 1980s, so he was always aware of a "crisis in knowledge production," he says. Africa is "a continent in need of knowledge." Meanwhile, development became something that the West did for Africa, instead of with Africa. African voices were ignored in the West.
African broadcasters, meanwhile, also had problems. Broadcasting became important in Africa during World War II, as a propaganda effort; and radio and television remained government-controlled in Africa after the war. In the 1990s, the World Bank began to insist that media be privatized, but Africa's broadcast industry remained weak. Akyeampong points to a lack of accurate media information (credible market and audience research), not to mention poor physical infrastructure and human resources.
Enter the African Public Broadcasting Foundation, which aims to provide sub-Saharan Africa's 500 million people with "an efficient and sustainable public broadcasting infrastructure that consistently transmits programming which inspires, entertains, informs and educates and with which audiences can easily identify," according to its website. In addition, "APBF will utilize the audio-visual power of television to stimulate Africa's social and economic transformation."
Akyeampong admits that he asks himself: What is a social historian doing in the broadcasting game? He says that when he visits Africa, and Africans ask him questions about pressing everyday matters, he's embarrassed to tell them that he doesn't know the answers. Akyeampong is the author of "Drink, Power, and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c.1800 to Recent Times" (1996), and "Between the Sea and the Lagoon: An Eco-Social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana, c.1850 to Recent Times" (2001). But his publications fail to impress: "You? A professor at Harvard? You don't have an answer to these questions?" So... he's stretching in new directions.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 05:20 PM
October 4, 2007
***
Michael Gandolfi is a composer whose music has been performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, The Houston Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Orchestra, and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, among others. He is also a Music professor who serves on the faculty of the Tanglewood Music Center and is Chairman of the Composition Department at The New England Conservatory of Music.
Gandolfi is here to teach. He tells us that he was taken with Nader Tehrani's comment that an architectural structure grows from its materials, so he wants to talk about composition. He proceeds to intone some nonsense syllables and clap, then he does so again. Which composition was more dense? The second one, most people agree. Not so! The patterns of the two pieces were equally dense, Gandolfi says -- a series of longs and shorts, both times. But his clapping (the "grid behind the rhythmical pattern") was faster the second time, so we perceived the second composition as more dense. He has the audience chant and clap along a few times; we've just had a simple taste of a "pure musical experience."
Gandolfi then deconstructs a Mozart sonata, and shows how the meaning and syntax of a piece of music changes when you shift the "access points" and "stress points." When you listen to music, there is a "grid" upon which a pattern is placed. The meaning of music begins to "flip-flop" when you play with the backdrop grid.
"The Garden of Cosmic Speculation," Gandolfi tells us, is a composition he wrote in 2004 for a Tanglewood festival -- it was inspired by a far-out, 30-acre private garden in the Borders area of Scotland created by postmodernist architect and architectural critic Charles Jencks. He describes the result as a "completely impractical orchestral work." He's still writing it; it's up to 11 movements now. He shows a slide of the garden and plays a minute-long excerpt of his composition.
The Garden of Cosmic Speculation
Gandolfi plays more excerpts, including one inspired by Fractal Terrace, a feature of Jencks's Garden. How to describe? Dramatic without any climax, quirky and fraught: a soundtrack for "Alice in Wonderland," as directed by David Lynch. Another excerpt he plays: "The Jumping Bridge," which will be performed next Thursday through Saturday by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
And that's it!
Ashbrook: "Just when you need a Garden of Cosmic Speculation, one shows up!"
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 04:55 PM
October 4, 2007
Last year, I wrote a column about a scholar's contention that behind the greeting-card surface of many Rockwell paintings lurked something more complex and provocative -- sometimes sexually complex and provocative. Globe readers -- some of them anyway -- were not amused: What the scholar claimed to see simply did not exist.
Lawrence Weschler, director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU and a noted cultural critic, read the book that inspired that article, "Norman Rockwell: The Dark Side of Innocence," by Richard Halpern, and was as struck with it as I was. Inspired by Halpern's book, Weschler has now organized a symposium at NYU titled "Shocked! Shocked!" Its subtitle is "Just How Many Times Can a Country Lose Its Innocence?" and the gathering is scheduled for this weekend.
I emailed Weschler, asking him to briefly explain how the book led to the symposium, and this was his response:
With metronomic regularity, the United States, for one, always seems to be losing its innocence -- the Kennedy assassination, the urban disturbances of the sixties, Vietnam, the Church committee's CIA revelations, Three Mile Island, the smoking cancer scandals, the John Lennon assassination, Iran Contra, the priest pedophile imbroglio, September 11, Abu Ghraib (to detail just one recent trill) -- and yet Americans never seems to learn anything, repeatedly emerging as resolutely innocent (which is to say, unknowing) as they were before the latest brief seizure of lucidity.
Or is that the right way of thinking about things? Richard Halpern, the Johns Hopkins literature professor, recently studied one particular nexus in what he characterizes as the country's "Innocence
Industry" in his book "Norman Rockwell: The Dark Side of Innocence." There he considered a series of Saturday Evening Post covers in which Rockwell depicted his perennial boy perennially shocked at his discovery of the true identity of Santa Claus -- when, for example, burrowing about, he happens upon Saint Nick's outfit in his father's dresser drawer, regarding which, Halpern glosses:
"There are sometimes moments of shocked discovery, to be sure, but these usually release a built-up reservoir of previously unacknowledged doubt. Otherwise, they can always be explained away.
And this gets at a crucial truth about shocked recognition: it is not
the moment of emergence from disavowal into enlightenment. Rather, it
places the seal on disavowal by insisting (falsely) that up until that moment one did not know…. The protecting of a factitious innocence by pretending (to ourselves) to be shocked is an infantile stratagem of which people never seem to tire. Our dresser drawer is Abu Ghraib prison, from which we extract not an empty Santa suit but hooded, naked prisoners, and we stand there with the wide-eyed surprise of Rockwell's boy. Who knew?"
Who knew, indeed. Except that we all of us always knew -- a hearty, seemingly indestructible bad faith seeming to be at the very root of
our country's national identity.
How could a country founded on the genocide of the prior indigenous population and the forced enslavement of a large part of it workforce ever have any "innocence" to lose in the first place? But just how
unique is the United States in that regard? (Consider, by contrast, the example of Japan, where a sort of national fetishization of Hiroshima allows for the systematic occlusion of any other potentially less purely victimized wartime memories.) And how specifically does that bad faith play out in the American instance?
Such at any rate were some of the questions that occurred to this reader of Halpern's remarkably evocative book, thoughts which in turn
occasioned the convening of a daylong conference to be held this coming Saturday at NYU's Cantor Film Center, starting at 11 a.m. ... the specific schedule for which can be found here
Weschler's most recent book is "Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences," which won this year's National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 04:28 PM
October 4, 2007
The conference attendees are back from our 2d and final "artistic break." Coming up in this session:
* Michael Gandolfi, composer and music professor
* Emmanuel K. Akyeampong, a Harvard professor who helped to establish the African Public Broadcasting Foundation
* Joan S. Brugge, Harvard Medical School cell biologist
* Jay Allison, NPR broadcast journalist
And that will be all she wrote. I'll blog the rest of the conference, so stay tuned. But I won't be rubbing shoulders with any of these brainiacs at the reception, I'm sorry to say -- because I gotta run to a potluck dinner at my kids' school. I may post some photos of the conference tomorrow, if they came out OK. If they didn't come out OK, I won't bother. Enjoy the long weekend, Boston!
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 04:24 PM
October 4, 2007
Batteries back down to 43 percent. Wesley Morris was here, now he's gone. We're in the 3:00 pm hour, that time of day -- according to Sartre -- where it's both too early and too late to accomplish anything at all. Should I take a nap? Back in 20 minutes or so...
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 03:48 PM
October 4, 2007
***
Dr. Bisola Ojikutu, who has dedicated her career to rectifying disparities in health care access for HIV-infected patients domestically and abroad, is Director of South Africa HIV/AIDS Programs, Harvard Medical School. In this position, Ojikutu is leading initiatives to increase access to treatment for women and children and integrate HIV management into primary health systems. She has also developed specialization in outcomes research and health worker training. She previously worked in conjunction with the South African government to develop their antiretroviral roll-out plan to treat people living in that country with HIV. In addition, she has provided technical support to multiple organizations, including the World Health Organization.
Ojikutu recounts what it was like to grow up on the South Side of Chicago. She noticed the racial and economic disparities that plague inner cities, she says. Once she became doctor, she says, she started to apply her ideas about social justice to her work. Because she wanted to immerse herself in the HIV/AIDS epidemic, she says, in 2003 she moved to South Africa, the epicenter of the problem. And, she says, she was outraged. Eighty percent of South Africans go to public hospitals, and 20 percent to private ones. South Africa is a well-off country -- yet some 810,000 South Africans with HIV/AIDs don't have access to treatment. "You have the haves and the have-nothings, and this is the legacy of apartheid," Ojikutu says.
Domestically, Ojikutu maintains clinical practice at Massachusetts General Hospital, and she is an advocate for the health needs of minority women. She says America needs a wakeup call: We have 40,000 new HIV cases per year. What are the factors driving the epidemic here? She doesn't know for sure, but she thinks they include: a lack of openness regarding sexual diversity; mistrust of government and health authorities; stigma and denialism about HIV; people are tired of worrying about HIV, and aren't being as careful as they should; and incarceration, maybe. Socioeconomic causes are also crucial: Poverty means a delay in access to health care.
America has a "detachment" problem, concludes Ojikutu. Most of us look at pictures of people dying of HIV (black females, men behind bars, intravenous drug users, gays) and we don't care. She asks us to be passionate and committed.
Lots of applause.
Ashbrook: "We're glad we understand and share this useful anger."
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 03:44 PM
October 4, 2007
***
Edward Glaeser is professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. And he is Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and Director of the Rappaport Institute of Greater Boston. (So what does he teach, you ask? Urban and social economics and microeconomic theory.)
In particular, Glaeser's work has focused on the determinants of city growth and the role of cities as centers of idea transmission. (He also sometimes writes op-ed columns for the Globe.) He claims that Boston, situated in an area with no natural resources of value except cranberries, has thrived because of the power of ideas.
Glaeser asks: Why doesn't human activity sprawl, now that the world is flat? In fact, he argues, New York, London, Tokyo, Bangalore, even Boston have thrived -- not declined -- thanks to globalization. Despite the death of distance, dense places (cities) are much more productive than less dense places. Boston, whose population dropped between 1930 and 1980, and whose economy was in a shambles, and whose housing prices were in steep decline, is now turning around. Because? Cities have always been places where density sped the creation of knowledge; it's easy to share ideas when you live near someone. Almost all human innovation is social -- we learn from those around us -- whether in schools or out of them. Globalization, Glaser argues, has greatly increased the returns to being smart and you become smart by being around other smart people.
Computerization is important, Glaeser admits. But the most important knowledge is still transmitted face-to-face. Cities are machines for producing new ideas, he says.
Boston's edge has always been about being smart; there's always been a great deal of literacy and education. He argues that other American colonies were about production (cash crops); Boston, on the other hand, was founded by the Puritans for reasons of consumption (economist-speak, in this case, for religious salvation). In the 1640s, when the flow of immigrants subsided, Boston reinvented itself: selling foodstuffs and wood to other colonies. It doesn't take brains to grow cash crops, Glaeser says; it takes brains to invent a network like that.
In the 19th century, Boston's comparative advantage was in human capital -- at the high end (merchants) and in clipper ship sailors. When steam ships became more important than sail, Boston lost its maritime dominance forever. In the 1840-1920 period, Boston reinvented itself as a manufacturing center, and attracted a large flow of poor immigrants. Cities that attract poor people are healthy cities, Glaser says.
In the 20th century, manufacturing left cities, car cities replaced higher density areas. People moved to warmer climes (thanks to the air conditioner), people fled to suburbs. "Boston got hammered." Boston lost a quarter of its population between 1950 and 2000 -- terrible, though not as bad as some manufacturing cities (Detroit, for example). Why was Boston different from the cities that fared worse? As ideas and knowledge became more important, cities with skilled populations began to thrive. One innovation in Boston led to another; it's "a chain of innovations that builds on itself."
Glaeser has more to say -- about high real wages, housing stock, Jane Jacobs's mistakes (she was opposed to new development; Glaeser says cities must grow), environmentalism. But he's now speaking a mile a minute; I've never heard a human being speak so articulately, at such a high rate of speed.
Ashbrook: "OK, now I'm all confused."
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 03:27 PM
October 4, 2007
***
Martha Mason is the co-founder and Artistic Director of Snappy Dance Theater. Founded in 1997, Snappy has grown (she claims) to become the most active contemporary dance company in Massachusetts and has the 12th largest audience of all performing arts organizations in the Boston area.
Bachrach
Mason shows excerpts from "String Beings," a collaboration (it premiered last year in Boston) between herself, violinist Lucia Lin, Berlin Composer Michael Rodach, and
Jonathan Bachrach -- an artist and research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. He researches robotics, sensor networks, programming languages and new art-making platforms.
"String Beings" is cool stuff: It's a compilation of several sections that alternates interaction between musicians and dancers, and dancers and technology, and which explores the subject of "manipulation through the interaction of multiple media."
Mason is refreshingly downbeat about Boston: She says we have a name in science, but not in performing arts. Boston is suffering a talent drain; if you want to make it as a dancer, for example, you have to leave for somewhere else. She's doubtlessly hoping that one of the big wheels in the audience will cut her troupe a check later today -- but she's absolutely right. Almost every talented artist I've known here is gone today.
Bachrach talks about his collaboration with Mason and Snappy Dance. He talks about the challenges of "computational dancing": Rendering, for example. He studies how humans draw, and how that can be incorporated into animation; he shows an example of how a "live scribbling" effect can be rendered by computer. It's wild-looking.
Bachrach shows off some of his "light sculptures," "actuated surfaces," and also his "robotic dancers." He also demonstrates some of his attempts to program forms of "choreography" -- for example, one node of a network that seeks out voids in the network to fill; this could lead to "killer" inventions that automatically fill potholes, he notes.
I've often joked that the Globe should publish a weekly section entirely devoted to cool new technologies and ideas coming out of MIT. The IDEAS conference is starting to feel like an MIT showcase. In a good way, of course.
Ashbrook: "I don't know about you, but I'm starting to brim over."
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 03:02 PM
October 4, 2007
***
Erik Demaine is an MIT professor of Computer Science. His research interests range throughout algorithms, from data structures for improving web searches to the geometry of understanding how proteins fold to the computational difficulty of playing games. He received a 2003 MacArthur Fellowship as a "computational geometer tackling and solving difficult problems related to folding and bending -- moving readily between the theoretical and the playful, with a keen eye to revealing the former in the latter." Demaine recently wrote a book about folding, together with Joseph O'Rourke, called "Geometric Folding Algorithms: Linkages, Origami, Polyhedra" (2007).
At lunch, I noticed that Demaine's father, Martin, who home-schooled him, and who also solves puzzles for a living at MIT, is here, too.
Demaine starts off by saying that the many things on which he works are informed by one central idea: "Having fun." I didn't want to like this guy, but he seems pretty cool.
Folding (or unfolding) is Demaine's area of expertise. Animated graphics, robotic arms for space stations, hydraulic tubes -- all might be improved if we knew more about folding. Proteins, the fundamental building block of life, are folded by nature; if we could fold proteins into any shape that we wanted, Demaine says, we could eradicate HIV, among other things. But it's hard to fold "three-dimensional linkages." Demaine would like to discover nature's folding algorithm; but he admits that there may be no such thing. (These scientists are appealingly honest, and modest.)
Next, we get into origami -- which, as we know from that New Yorker essay not long ago -- has in the past 25 years undergone a revolution. Demaine shows us slides of a Black Forest Cuckoo Clock, a pangolin, a tarantula and a hermit crab -- amazingly accurate models of these things and more, all folded out of one square of paper, "no cuts." Plus: A ship being attacked by a giant squid, folded out of one sheet of paper.
We understand more about origami mathematics and algorithms now, says Demaine; that's why we can make such amazing origami, these days. Demaine then does some magic tricks: He unfolds a red-and-white checkerboard that turns out to be one sheet of paper, red on one side, white on the other. He folds a rectangle of paper into an odd shape, cuts it once, and shows us that one piece of paper has become a swan; then he shows us the mathematical design for that swan. Oohs and aahs.
Nano-manufacturing, car airbags, sculpture, reconfigurable robots (think "Terminator 2"), self-assembly, even DNA manipulation. Folding isn't just fun -- it's amazing.
Ashbrook: "I hoped Erik would be a nerd. But he's so cool!"
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:36 PM
October 4, 2007
Lunch is over, and Deborah Henson-Conant is performing. Coming up in the next hour and a half:
* Erik D. Demaine, MIT mathematician
* Martha Mason, artistic director and choreographer; and Jonathan Bachrach, an artist and research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab
* Edward L. Glaeser, urban and social economist
* Bisola Ojikutu, infectious disease physician and director of international programs at Harvard Medical School's AIDS division
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:12 PM
October 4, 2007
Laptop power down to 30 percent. Blogger power at about same level. Back in an hour.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 12:47 PM
October 4, 2007
***
Panos Panay, a former booking agent (and, before that, Berklee College of Music student), is the Cyprus-born founder and CEO of Sonicbids, a Boston-based website that enables bands and music promoters (people who book music acts at clubs and other venues, but also anyone who wants to use music in, say, a movie) to easily connect with each other online. Sonicbids' membership, according to Panay, consists of 130,000 bands and 10,000 promoters from 104 countries.
"When I was an agent, any act that makes under $3,000 a show really isn't a viable artist for you to handle," Panay told the Globe last year. "But we give those smaller artists a way to have representation and find opportunities."
The world really is getting flatter, Panay says enthusiastically. He's amazed that bands from Rwanda, Brazil, and Russia can now be booked at a concert in Spain, using technology developed in America by a Cypriot. The Internet brings people and cultures together, is his message. And if the Internet has been a crisis for the record labels ("the aristocracy of the music business," according to Panay), that's because it has provided tools to a "new artistic middle class." Who? Bands who previously were at the mercy of the labels and promoters.
Technology and the Internet and knowledge distribution can change lives, Panay says: "That's what gets me up in the morning."
Panay's networking skills are also being put to use in other arenas. He is currently serving as co-chairman of CREATE Boston, an initiative launched by the Mayor of Boston to bolster the creative economy in the city, and he is the chairman of Berklee College of Music's Presidential Advisory Council. Panay is also the co-founder of Boston Young Entrepreneurs, a Boston Redevelopment Authority initiative developed to foster and assist Boston-based entrepreneurs. Oh yeah, and he serves on the board of directors of Mayor Menino's Boston World Partnerships -- which I mentioned in a post earlier today.
Ashbrook: "Linking artists to the world -- how cool is that?"
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 12:43 PM
October 4, 2007
***
Ioannis N. Miaoulis is President and Director of the Museum of Science, Boston. When he came from Greece to study engineering at Tufts, Miaoulis tells us, in a charming Greek accent, he discovered that Americans didn't know what "engineering" meant. In America, an engineer drives a train, fixes a car, mops the floor ("sanitation engineer"). To make matters worse, later he realized that science curricula in American secondary schools teach youth about the natural world, but not the "human-made" world.
"About 98 percent of our day-to-day experience is involved with the human-made world," Miaoulis says. Yet elementary and high school science curricula ignore it. Why? There was no need, in 19th century America, to teach technology in schools, he speculates -- because most technology was agricultural in nature, and Americans learned that outside of school. Today, he insists, we need to teach engineering -- which he defines as the way the human-made world is created -- in American schools.
Miaoulis has done his part. He's championed the introduction of engineering into the Massachusetts science and technology public school curriculum, and since leaving Tufts for the Museum, he's spearheaded the creation of the National Center for Technological Literacy at the Museum to "integrate engineering as a new discipline in schools nationwide and to inspire the next generation of engineers and innovators."
I'm not capturing the flavor of Miaoulis's speech, which has the crowd in stitches. But his anecdotes whip past quickly, and they wouldn't be funny out of context, anyway. The Museum has expanded its role -- now it seeks to introduce the human-made world to students who aren't learning this sort of thing in schools, he says. No child left behind!
Ashbrook: "You've got a great magnetic field, and we hope you keep it high!"
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 12:22 PM
October 4, 2007
Kecia Ali, a Muslim and a feminist, is an assistant professor of Religion at Boston University where she teaches classes that explore the diversity and complexity of Muslim experience in both classical and modern periods. Ali's research interests center on Islamic religious texts, especially jurisprudence and women in both historical and contemporary Muslim discourses. She is the author of "Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur'an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence" (2006) and co-author with Oliver Leaman of "Islam: The Key Concepts" (2007).
Ali says her work on women and gender and sexuality "and lashing and stoning and so on" is what people want to focus on. But her research on jurisprudence is also important, she insists. How so?
The New York Times and other media sources like to quote the Koran verse that -- depending on how you translate -- seems to allow a husband to hit his wife, if there's trouble in the marriage. There's another interpretation of the verse, Ali says: If there's trouble in the marriage, a husband and wife should separate. But the debate over how to translate and interpret the Koran is a modern one. What she wants to highlight is that there are complex debates taking place among modern and premodern Muslim thinkers on this topic. The modern approach of turning to a religious text and expecting it to yield an answer ("Can Muslim men beat their wives?") is not the way the Koran was used historically, or in traditional scholarship. Who has the authority to interpret the text? On what basis does one have that authority?
Ali is working on a biography of the 9th-century jurist al-Shafi'i, who pointed out that the Prophet never beat his wives, yet the Koran seems to justify wife-beating. She ventriloquizes al-Shafi'i: "OK, the Koran gives you permission to do something, but you shouldn't take that permission." Does this mean, Ali asks, that what Muslim feminists should do is identify things in the Koran that seem unfair and follow the example of al-Shafi'i? There's a cost to doing so, she says -- interpretive strategies that make the Koran a collection of texts that you can embrace or reject piecemeal seem opportunistic. What interpretive strategy should feminists (or anti-patriarchalists or those seeking gender equity) adopt? It gets even tricker, she says, because debates among Muslims are scrutinized by unsympathetic non-Muslims.
Ali doesn't have an answer to the problem, but she says: "I hope I'll be part of the solution."
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 11:59 AM
October 4, 2007
***
John C. Warner, a former UMass-Boston and UMass-Lowell professor who has directed a diverse set of projects involving "green chemistry" using principles of crystal engineering, molecular recognition, and self assembly. He has recently become President and Chief Technology Officer for The Warner-Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry in Woburn.
Warner has the crowd in the palm of his hand. His Quincy accent -- the fact that he showed off his scruffy UMass-Boston student ID -- that fact that he used to work construction -- the fact that he was in a local rock band called The Elements. He talks about how he started off as music major, then realized as an undergrad that chemistry can also be creative. By the time he gets around to explaining "noncovalent derivitization," which he and his colleagues at Polaroid used to control the rate of dissolution of molecules in a multilayered system, we're ready to listen.
Warner explains how Polaroid sent him to DC to argue with the EPA about this technology, which was low-energy, non-hazardous; and there he runs into Paul Anastas, Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics... who he knows from Quincy! Anastas helped him coin the phrase "green chemistry," to explain the effort to solve pollution problems not after a technology has been developed, but from the design stage itself. Green chemistry aims to replace toxic chemicals with environmentally benign substances while devising processes that reduce waste, pollution, and energy consumption; the ultimate goal is "zero waste."
Warner tells us that his 2-year-old son died in 1993, because of a birth defect. He thought to himself: What if his son's birth defect was chemical in nature -- and furthermore, what if it was caused by one of the 2,500 molecules he had synthesized? He says he realized that chemistry, in the United States, is a science that doesn't require any knowledge regarding toxicity and environmental impact. Industries assume that chemicals have to be hazardous, so they only deal with protecting against exposure. Warner says: Let's invent safer chemistry!
"A molecule isn't a Democrat or a Republic," Warner concludes. Green chemistry is a movement that everyone can get behind. He wants the phrase "green chemistry" to vanish -- because chemistry, in the future, he hopes, will be non-toxic, and have negligible impact on the environment. "Society wants safe materials. Industry wants safe materials," Warner insists. It's up to us -- and the next generation -- to create the tools to make this possible.
Lots of applause.
Ashbrook: "John Warner for president!"
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 11:36 AM
October 4, 2007
Session 2:
* John C. Warner, green chemistry advocate
* Kecia Ali, a BU professor of religion
* Ioannis N. Miaoulis, Museum of Science director
* Panos Panay, Internet entrepreneur
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 11:11 AM
October 4, 2007
David Kang is professor of Government, and adjunct professor and research director at the Center for International Business at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. His books include: "China Rising: Peace, Power, and Order in East Asia" (2007), "Crony Capitalism: Corruption and Development in South Korea and the Philippines" (2002), and "Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies" (2003, co-authored with Victor Cha).
Kang says he is intimidated by the other presenters -- he's "just a professor." It's true, so far the presentations have been pretty heady.
The big question in his field, according to Kang: "China, how threatening is it, really?" China and Japan are different, he argues. We freaked out when Japan was buying up American real estate and business, and now we've just replaced Japan with China. China's rise doesn't have to be a threat, and China doesn't have to be destabilized, he claims. His argument: East Asia today is more stable and more peaceful today than it has been since the coming of the West blew apart the China-dominated system 150 years ago. The European experience tells us that when a country gets big, it invades everyone else; the only way to stop this from happening is to destabilize the country.
But China and East Asia have a different history. In East Asia now, Kang says, you don't see a fear of China's growth -- instead, East Asian countries are moving closer to China. These countries see their economic future in China. East Asians tend to be less skeptical of China than they are of America; the exception is Japan, which sees China as a rival. Why is it that East Asian countries don't see China as a threat?
Power is not the only thing that matters, Kang says -- what's also important is what you want to do with your power. In the West, we should ask: What does China want to do with its power, as it grows bigger? So far, East Asians believe that a military threat from China is fairly low. (Outside of Taiwan, anyway.) When China is strong and stable, the region is strong and stable; a weak China is dangerous, because other countries want to take it over. China, Korea, Vietnam, Japan have been around for centuries longer than European nation states -- when the Chinese dynasties fell is when everybody started fighting. As China reverts to being a stable society, the other countries "know how to deal with that."
Also: "Japan is not a leader." Japan has never had a leadership role in East Asia. So we're not going to see a multipolar power struggle emerge in East Asia, Kang predicts. The Japanese economic model is zero-sum: Japanese growth was not necessarily a rising tide that would lift other boats. The US economy's growth is beneficial to others, Japan's is not. This is why their economic process wasn't translated into a leadership position. East Asian countries were less sanguine about the rise of Japan than they are about China's rise, according to Kang.
The real question? asks Kang. Not: How threatening is China? But: What will the US's role in East Asia be? Anti-China fervor may play well on the newsstand, but the US has not decided China is a threat. US foreign policy is: We don't have a problem with China, as long as China can convince us that it will be a "responsible stakeholder" in East Asia.
Kang's conclusions: East Asia is more stable now than in the past century (Taiwan and North Korea excepted); rivalry between the US and China is not inevitable (if US and China both make good decisions, conflict can be avoided); Republican containment and Democratic protectionism would be examples of bad decisions.
***
Time for a break. This blogger has to recharge the laptop, and cool off the lap.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 10:24 AM
October 4, 2007
***
Nancy G. Kanwisher is up next. Kanwisher, another MIT professor, studies the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying human visual perception and cognition. Her work investigates high-level vision, including object recognition, visual attention, and perceptual awareness, as well as higher-level cognition. Kanwisher's lab has identified several regions of the brain that play specialized roles in the perception of specific categories of visual stimuli such as faces, places and bodies. She is an Investigator at The McGovern Institute and a professor in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
Kanwisher, perhaps a little defensive, because scientists who study sophisticated medical snapshots (provided by functional magnetic resonance imaging machines) might be regarded by some as today's phrenologists (the 19th-century pseudoscientists who believed they could "read" a subject by studying the bumps on his or her head), argues that phrenologists got a "bum rap." They were onto something -- you can "read" a subject by studying his or her head -- but they had "bad data."
Kanwisher gives a brief history of the brain science that she practices, and explains that her interest is in how the mind is organized. She shows us fMRI slides of her own brain, and slides from other work she's done, and over the course of the lecture, we get the sense that she is an explorer and cartographer, hunting for regions of the brain devoted to specific functions, such as reading, or recognizing body parts, and mapping them. She's excited and can't believe some of the things that she and her colleagues have discovered: For example, one mental process that apparently gets its own region of the brain is "thinking about what someone else is thinking about" -- weird!
Scientific question that Kanwisher would most like to answer, according to a 2006 Globe profile: What is the organization of the mind? Why does the brain have specific areas for certain functions, such as recognizing faces and places, but not for others, such as identifying cars and trees? Why isn't the brain a general purpose machine for all uses? As she wraps up her talk, Kanwisher says the answer to these and similar questions is: "Totally unknown." She seems enthusiastic, not disappointed, about this fact.
Ashbrook: "We're right into the machinery of cognition, there!"
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:36 AM
October 4, 2007
OK, conference moderator Tom Ashbrook announced a schedule change. Derek "Mister Microbe" Lovley will not be here today; and Michael Gandolfi, who was going to speak first, will speak during Session 4, instead.
So, first up: Nader Tehrani, a newly minted professor of Architecture at MIT. (As a researcher, he has focused on materials, methods of aggregations, geometry and the advancement of digital fabrication.) Tehrani is best known as a principal at the cutting-edge Boston-based architectural firm Office dA, which has built the Northeastern University Spiritual Life Center, the RISD Library, The New England House, and the Tongxian Arts Center in Beijing. Office dA is now completing the Macallen Building in Boston.
Tehrani's definition of architecture: It relies on "the structure, the mechanical system, and the skin... and everything else is taken out in the budget-cut process." [Audience laughs.] What does he mean by "skin," you ask? When "Mayor Menino and members of the community want to stone your building for how ugly it is," Tehrani says, getting in a jab at Hizzoner, it's crucially important to understand not just a building's "material logic," but how it looks on the outside. One thinks of Office dA's "House in New England" -- a wood-stud dwelling built in some undisclosed part of the New England countryside and partly sheathed not in cedar shingles but a black rubber membrane. I want to live in that house!
Office dA borrows ideas from other disciplines -- Tehrani mentions fashion -- to inform their architectural work. That's what I took away from this; the actual details were way over my head. It was a fast-paced master class. Will all the presentations be like this? Ashbrook gets up and sighs: "It's so early in the morning."
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:34 AM
October 4, 2007
Mayor Menino is kicking things off.
"Look at what we're doin' with green buildin's!" he says. Also: "Boston leads the nation in discoverin' innovation." The mayor is here to tout Boston World Partnerships - a strategic effort to attract new companies and grow Boston's economy. But he seems genuinely thrilled and moved by this gathering of innovators.
Here's who will be speaking in the next hour and a half.
* Michael Gandolfi, composer and music professor.
* Nader Tehrani, architect and urban designer
* Nancy G. Kanwisher, cognitive neuroscientist
* David C. Kang, an expert on the history and politics of China and North Korea
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:10 AM
October 4, 2007
"Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. Our program will begin in two minutes."
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 08:55 AM
October 3, 2007
Hey! Looks like I'll be blogging the IDEAS Boston 2007 conference tomorrow (Thursday), all day long. So keep an eye on this space.
WHERE: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 600 Atlantic Ave.
WHEN: Thursday, Oct. 4., 8:45 - 5:45. It might be sold out already, but here's the registration site.
WHAT: According to a story that ran in the Globe's Business section on Monday, IDEAS Boston is "a conference that celebrates innovation across multiple disciplines." Is the event sponsored or organized by the Boston Globe's Ideas section, you ask? No! Although -- perhaps confusingly -- the first IDEAS Boston conference, in 2004, was organized by the Boston Globe. Now IDEAS Boston is a nonprofit venture; the Globe, along with WCVB-TV and 90.9 WBUR, is one of the event's "media partners."
WHY: Quoting the Globe again, "Unlike industry and academic forums organized around narrow themes, IDEAS showcases emerging concepts, breakthroughs, and Boston-area researchers, performers, and entrepreneurs in a variety of fields." According to the official website, "IDEAS Boston is meant for those looking to connect the dots in new ways, big thinkers, those wanting to jump-start their imagination."
WHO: Tom Ashbrook, of NPR's "On Point," will moderate. This year's event will introduce innovators in music, architecture, physics, cell biology, and other fields. They include:
* David C. Kang, an expert on the history and politics of China and North Korea
* Derek Lovley, UMass Amherst microbiologist
* Martha Mason, artistic director and choreographer; and Jonathan Bachrach, an artist and research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab
* John C. Warner, green chemistry advocate
* Erik D. Demaine, MIT mathematician
* Bisola Ojikutu, infectious disease physician and director of international programs at Harvard Medical School's AIDS division
* Ioannis N. Miaoulis, Museum of Science director
* Panos Panay, Internet entrepreneur
* Nader Tehrani, architect and urban designer
* Emmanuel K. Akyeampong, a Harvard professor who helped to establish the African Public Broadcasting Foundation
* Nancy G. Kanwisher, cognitive neuroscientist
* Kecia Ali, a BU professor of religion
* Joan S. Brugge, Harvard Medical School cell biologist
* Edward L. Glaeser, urban and social economist
* Jay Allison, NPR broadcast journalist
* Michael Gandolfi, composer and music professor
* Anna Schuleit, painter and installation artist; and Deborah Henson-Conant, performance artist, will perform during the "artistic breaks."
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 07:31 PM
October 2, 2007
I couldn't wait for two books recently published in England to appear in American bookstores, so I ordered them online. Amazon.co.uk, friends -- I use it all the time. Brainiac readers might also enjoy these books. Take a look.
"The Red Men" (Snowbooks), by Matthew De Abaitua, is a dystopian science fiction novel that takes place in Redtown, "a virtual city, inhabited by copies of real people going about their daily business, in which new policies, diseases and disasters can be studied in perfect simulation." It's a first novel for De Abaitua, who is a journalist, a former literary editor of (British) Esquire, a former BBC science fiction series presenter, and currently editor of a BBC film review website, where he launched the Internet-only film review TV show, Movie Rush. (I know De Abaitua from his days as deputy editor of The Idler; he has written for Hermenaut, too.)
"Movies: Over a Century of the Greatest Films, Stars, Scenes, Speeches and Events That Rocked the Movie World (Little Black Book)" (Cassell Illustrated), edited by Chris Fujiwara, is a magnificently attractive, 800-page paperback in which 62 film aficionados -- many of whom are well-known film critics and scholars -- celebrate 1,000 defining "moments" of cinema. These moments include: Orson Welles's "cuckoo clock" speech in "The Third Man," Twentieth Century Fox's adoption of the anamorphic widescreen format (CinemaScope) in 1953, Peter O'Toole disappearing behind a jeep's dirty windshield at the end of "Lawrence of Arabia," the publication of the politically engaged essay "Cinema/Ideology/Criticism" in Cahiers du cinema in October 1969, the downbeat but somehow uplifting musical number at the end of Cassavetes' "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie," the appearance of DVD players in Japan in 1996, the Bush-in-the-schoolroom scene in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11, and the scene in which Olive touches an inconsolable Dwayne on the shoulder in "Little Miss Sunshine." This book is just what the doctor ordered to get us through the coming winter. NB: Fujiwara is a long-time Boston resident (currently living in Japan), and sometime Ideas contributor. Other locals and ex-locals who contribute include Scott Hamrah, former Ideas columnist James Parker, and yours truly.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 10:19 AM
October 1, 2007
This past June, I blogged about the burqas and burqa-like garments that I'd noticed in American women's magazines. Posing as a social psychologist, I half-seriously proposed that Americans might be "identifying with the aggressor" (radical Islamists) in a neurotic effort to avoid punishment (another terrorist attack on American soil). Oddly enough, I only received reader emails agreeing with this far-out proposition. Now I've gathered more evidence.
Here's a TSE ad from the September 07 issue of Town & Country:
Here's another TSE ad, from the September 07 issue of Harper's Bazaar:
Also, there's a new wrinkle! I found the following ad circular for Keri Renewal Serum for Dry Skin inside my Boston Sunday Globe (or was it my New York Times) yesterday:
I wonder what made Keri decide it was OK to use an odalisque -- a Turkish harem concubine -- in their ad? Like the odalisques of Boucher, Ingres, Leighton, Renoir, and other 19th century European painters, Keri depicts a nominally eastern (Muslim) woman lying on her side, on display for the spectator. In fact, the ad is an explicit reference to Ingres's infamous "Grand Odalisque" (1814):
Why use a Muslim sex slave to sell skin lotion to American women? There's no rational explanation. But perhaps there's an irrational one. If you know what I mean.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 12:41 PM
October 1, 2007
Library 2.0 hotshot Jessamyn West explains what Banned Books Week is all about, and she also provides links to examples of how libraries are "celebrating" BBW.
Using Flickr to get the word out is always smart. The U. Michigan's Hatcher Graduate Library uploaded photos of staff reading banned books. Examples:
For more information on intellectual freedom, censorship, and to view some banned book lists, go to these American Library Association pages:
Banned Books Week
100 Most Frequently Challenged Books
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 11:56 AM
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