Improvize

Al Gore: A Generational Challenge to Repower America

Aninda Roy — 2008-07-20T12:07:23-05:00

9/11 and 4/11

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

July 20, 2008 – We are addicted to dirty fossil fuels, and this addiction is driving a whole set of toxic trends that are harming our nation and world in many different ways. More>>

Yes We Can
By BOB HERBERT
Published: July 19, 2008
The thing about visionaries like Al Gore is that they don’t imagine what’s easy. They imagine the benefits to be reaped once all the obstacles are overcome. More>>

Al Gore: A Generational Challenge to Repower America
“Our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges - the economic, environmental and national security crises. We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that's got to change.

“But if we grab hold of that common thread and pull it hard, all of these complex problems begin to unravel and we will find that we're holding the answer to all of them right in our hand. The answer is to end our reliance on carbon-based fuels.

“Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years. This goal is achievable, affordable and transformative. It represents a challenge to all Americans - in every walk of life: to our political leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers, and to every citizen.”

Link on NPR

Link to Full Text and Video

JK Rowling

Aninda Roy — 2008-06-22T20:41:13-05:00

J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.

http://webonly.harvardmagazine.com/159-Rowling.mp3
(Right Click, Save Target As) 32MB

Text of speech here:

http://harvardmagazine.com/go/jkrowling.html

Excerpt:

“Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me… So rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

What is more, those who choose not to empathize may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy. One of the many things I learned was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing.”

Fareed Zakaria on The Post-American World

Aninda Roy — 2008-06-22T10:46:54-05:00

This is a must-hear podcast.

http://wordforword.publicradio.org/programs/2008/05/30/ or
download MP3 (Right Click, Save Target As)

Link to Newsweek article if you want to read rather than listen.

I haven’t read the book yet but it is definitely on my list. It was reviewed in the New York Times:

The New New World
By Josef Joffe
May 11, 2008
In this examination of power, Fareed Zakaria focuses not so much on the decline of America, but on the rise of China and India.

Excerpt:
“We are living through the third great power shift in modern history. The first was the rise of the Western world, around the 15th century. It produced the world as we know it now—science and technology, commerce and capitalism, the industrial and agricultural revolutions. The second shift (19th century) was the rise of the United States. Once it industrialized, it soon became the most powerful nation in the world, stronger than any likely combination of other nations. The third great power shift of the modern age— This will not be a world defined by the decline of America but rather the rise of everyone else.

A series of positive trends over the last 20 years have created an international climate of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

I know. That's not the world that people perceive. We are told that we live in dark, dangerous times. Terrorism, rogue states, nuclear proliferation, financial panics, recession, outsourcing, and illegal immigrants all loom large in the national discourse.

Looking at the evidence, [scholars claim] that we are probably living "in the most peaceful time of our species' existence."

Why does it not feel that way? Why do we think we live in scary times? Part of the problem is that as violence has been ebbing, information has been exploding... Today any bomb that goes off, any rocket that is fired, any death that results, is documented by someone, somewhere and ricochets instantly across the world. "That could have been me," you think. Actually, your chances of being killed in a terrorist attack are tiny—for an American, smaller than drowning in your bathtub. But it doesn't feel like that.”

Power of Green

Aninda Roy — 2008-02-17T23:10:41-06:00

Thomas Friedman: “We don’t just need the first black president. We need the first green president. We don’t just need the first woman president. We need the first environmental president. We don’t just need a president who has been toughened by years as a prisoner of war but a president who is tough enough to level with the American people about the profound economic, geopolitical and climate threats posed by our addiction to oil — and to offer a real plan to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.”

“Equally important, presidential candidates need to help Americans understand that green is not about cutting back. It’s about creating a new cornucopia of abundance for the next generation by inventing a whole new industry. It’s about getting our best brains out of hedge funds and into innovations that will not only give us the clean-power industrial assets to preserve our American dream but also give us the technologies that billions of others need to realize their own dreams without destroying the planet.”

Full article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15green.t.html

The Future of the Middle East

Aninda Roy — 2008-01-10T02:10:49-06:00

A very insightful report in the NY Times about disaffected youth in Egypt:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/world/middleeast/17youth.html

From The Atlantic magazine, the most revealing geopolitical account of the Middle East I’ve read.
After Iraq: A report from the new Middle East—and a glimpse of its possible future by Jeffrey Goldberg

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200801/goldberg-mideast

Excerpts:

It was Winston Churchill who, in the aftermath of World War I, roped together three provinces of the defeated and dissolved Ottoman Empire, adopted the name Iraq, and bequeathed it to a luckless branch of the Hashemite tribe of west Arabia. Churchill would eventually call the forced inclusion of the Kurds in Iraq one of his worst mistakes—but by then, there was nothing he could do about it.

The Iraq War has begun to produce "wholesale change"—but "it won't be the one envisioned by the administration." An independent Kurdistan would be just the start… "It's not a question about how America wants the map to look; it's a question of how the map is going to look, whether we like it or not."

While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone—from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious extremism—the greatest taboo in striving to understand the region's comprehensive failure isn't Islam but the awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our own diplomats.

A senior Israeli security official, whispered, "He wants Jordan to be more democratic… Would you rather have a stable monarch who is secular and who has a good intelligence service on your eastern border, or would you rather have a state run by Hamas? That's what he would get if there were no more monarchy in Jordan."

"The PC way of looking at the 21st century is that non-state actors—al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, general chaos—have replaced states as the key players in the Middle East. But states are more resilient than that." He added that a newfound fear of instability might even buttress existing states.

While it would seem eminently vulnerable to the chaos, Jordan is, in fact, almost tranquil… in part because most of its people want quiet, even if that means forgoing all the features of Western democracy.

In the years since his Iraq project fell into disrepair, President Bush has acted like a realist while speaking like a utopian neoconservative. He has touted the virtues of democracy to the very people subjugated by pro-American dictators. The problem is that Iraq has already proven—and Iran continues to prove—that Americans cannot make Middle Easterners do what is in America's best interest.

"I fear that the surge has just provided a break for Sunnis and Shias to better position themselves for further conflict when American forces are drawn down. There's no indication yet that the Shias are prepared to share power or that the Sunnis are prepared to live as a minority under Shia majoritarian rule."

GPS: You have arrived

Aninda Roy — 2008-01-02T09:43:25-06:00

Thanks to my brother in law, Raj, and the recommendation of a friend, Jim, who also visits Ottawa for the holidays, I am now the proud owner of a Garmin Global Positioning System (GPS) Receiver. For some reason, I always assumed they were:

expensive to acquire (based on options at the car dealership)
entailed subscription fees (?)
difficult to use (squinting at friend's mobile phones rigged to GPS)

As it turns out, the technology has really matured:

cheap: $250
no on-going fees
easy and fun to use

The model I chose is the Garmin Nuvi 250 which has a detailed database for all of North America including points of interest, restaurants, etc.

We've been using it for a couple of days and I highly recommend this for anyone. Goodbye paper maps!

You can even use it as a photo viewer using the SD memory card slot. What's nice is that even though it recommends a route to your destination, it quickly adjusts when you are "off course" or allows you to insert a "via point" to take you to an intermediate destination first. Most important though is the touchscreen interface and logical menus that allow you to set your destination very quickly.

Endless Forms Most Beautiful

Aninda Roy — 2007-08-19T17:58:27-05:00

Sean Carroll (University of Wisconsin) provides a captivating and enlightening account of the latest findings in evolutionary developmental biology ("evo devo"). It explains how genetics really works to turn DNA into the visible traits and physical forms of living things. The book is a must-read for anyone who is "interested in the origins of complexity". Have you have ever wondered why there are so many similarities between us and other animals or why in the midst of multitudes, there are so few, common patterns (e.g. two eyes, five fingers, etc.)? This is the place to start.

Here is a bit of what I grasped from his richly exampled book.

All creatures begin as a single cell that divides and differentiates. As this embryonic development gets underway, chemical markers identify the location of the cell in 3 dimensions much like a globe: longitude, latitude, and altitude. Each cell knows where it is relative to the others--its global position.

There are regulatory genes that, based on the cell's position, trigger a cascading series of cell development. These regulatory genes are ancient and nearly identical in all animals. At the very onset, the embryo divides into a "head" and "tail", and into "topside" and "bottomside", and "left and right". Within the "tail" section, cells further subdivide into segments. The future site of arms and legs are marked very early, when the embryo just looks like a blob. Later these marked cells trigger growth of limbs, which involve their own cascading sequence of genetic triggers.

The key things to note: The foundational genes that organize the body pattern is the same or similar in almost all animals, especially vertebrates. These body patterns begin forming in the first few hours of embryo formation. Therefore these common basic genes are shared across an incredibly vast variety of creatures large and small. Thus it is no coincidence that we have so much in common with even a fruit fly.

In fact, the same proteins involved in the production of a fruit fly's eyes are used in the formation of our eyes; the same proteins, if disrupted, cause birth defects in humans. The underlying chemical system is the same in all living things. This is to be expected given that we know that DNA is shared by all living things. But what this means is that not only is nature using the same "paper and pencil" but is using the same drawings as a starting point, and "simply" embellishing the drawings with more and more layers and details, or sometimes stretching or repeating patterns to suit a different need.

RNA Revolution

Aninda Roy — 2007-06-18T01:39:20-05:00

When atoms were first proved to exist (a mere century ago), they were thought to be made only of electrons and protons. That explained a lot, but it did not quite square with other observations. Then, in 1932, James Chadwick discovered the neutron. Suddenly everything made sense-so much sense that it took only another 13 years to build an atomic bomb.

It is probably no exaggeration to say that biology is now undergoing its "neutron moment". For more than half a century the fundamental story of living things has been a tale of the interplay between genes, in the form of DNA, and proteins, which the genes encode and which do the donkey work of keeping living organisms living. The past couple of years, however, have seen the rise and rise of a third type of molecule, called RNA.

http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?story_id=9339752&fsrc=RSS

Philosophers of science love this sort of thing. They refer to it as a paradigm shift. Living through such a shift is confusing for the scientists involved, and this one is no exception. But when it is over, it is likely to have changed people's views about how cells regulate themselves, how life becomes more complex, how certain mysterious diseases develop and even how the process of evolution operates.

Another consequence of RNA's rise to prominence is that researchers have a new source of ideas about how diseases might one day be treated. The main hunt for new drugs centres on a technology called RNA interference, or RNAi.

Sudip Shares Lessons Learned

Aninda Roy — 2007-05-06T10:48:42-05:00

Army Doctor Sudip Bose is now living in Chicago, back in the ER at Christ Medical Center. However he finds that the lessons learned on the front lines of Iraq are always there to guide him. I had an opportunity to talk with him.

Here is what he said. (Click for MP3)

(Note: Background Music by Chris Hyatt, a member of the Dean Moriarty Jazz Band)

Earth from Space

Aninda Roy — 2007-04-25T02:32:27-05:00

“It’s hard to appreciate the Earth when you’re down right upon it because it’s so huge. It gives you in an instant, just at a position 240,000 miles away from it, (an idea of) how insignificant we are, how fragile we are, and how fortunate we are to have a body that will allow us to enjoy the sky and the trees and the water ... It’s something that many people take for granted when they’re born and they grow up within the environment. But they don’t realize what they have. And I didn’t till I left it.”
—Jim Lovell, Apollo 8 and 13.

“...From up there, it looks finite and it looks fragile and it really looks like just a tiny little place on which we live in a vast expanse of space.”
—Winston Scott, two-time shuttle astronaut

“I left Earth three times. I found no place else to go. Please take care of Spaceship Earth.”
—Wally Schirra, who flew around Earth on Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions in the 1960s.

Article on MSNBC

Bill Clinton at the TED Conference

Aninda Roy — 2007-04-18T00:51:28-05:00

EXCERPTS from Clinton’s speech at TED:

We live in a world that is inter-dependent but insufficient.

It is profoundly unequal.
It is unstable because of the threats of war, disease, etc.
It is unsustainable because of climate change, resource depletion and species destruction.

I hope for integrated communities:

Broadly shared opportunities
Shared sense of responsibility
A sense of belonging

The central psychological plague of this century is that people think they have more differences than in common.

We have to build systems. In the absence of systems that function, we would not be able to achieve anything. Think about it. However many obstacles you have faced, at critical junctures, you always knew there was a predictable connection between the effort you exerted and the result you achieved. In a world with no systems, in chaos, everything becomes a struggle and this predictability is not there.

Ken Robinson on Teaching Creativity

Aninda Roy — 2007-04-18T00:10:41-05:00

Sir Ken Robinson speaks at the TED conference. This is a humorous and provocative talk. Check it out: Link to Site

Every eduation system has the same hierarchy. Everywhere, no matter where you go, at the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts. And within the arts, art and music are normally given the higher status than drama and dance. No one teaches dance every day to children the way we teach mathematics… [The way we teach suggests we think] our bodies are only a form of transport for our heads.

All public education systems around the world came into being to meet the needs of industrialization. So you are steered benignly away as a child from subjects on the grounds you would never get a job doing that… Now profoundly mistaken… Many brilliant, creative people think they are not, because the thing they were good at wasn’t valued or was stigmatized. We can’t go on that way.

Viktor Frankl - Man's Search for Meaning

Aninda Roy — 2007-04-10T01:00:34-05:00

Viktor Frankl is a renowned psychologist and survivor of Nazi concentration camps. His book, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, sold two million copies. In it, he expounded “Logotherapy”.

Logotherapy in a Nutshell (Quotes)
Striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man, not a "secondary rationalization" of instinctual drives (Freudian theory). That is why man is even ready to suffer on the condition that his suffering has a meaning.

People have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.

Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.

What man needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Everyone's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.

In the same way fear brings to pass what one is afraid of, likewise a forced intention makes impossible what one forcibly wishes. Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue from the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.

The more one forgets himself - by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love - the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.

Humor is another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well known that humor more than anything else in the human makeup, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves… Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

The true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world of experience rather than within man's own psyche as though it were a closed system. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct... Taking the responsibility to fulfill the tasks which life constantly sets for each individual.

Trust as Social Capital

Aninda Roy — 2006-10-26T04:39:22-05:00

Book by Francis Fukuyama | Excerpt:

The satisfaction we derive from being connected to others in the workplace grows out of a fundamental human desire for recognition. As I argued in The End of History and the Last Man, every human being seeks to have his or her dignity recognized (i.e., evaluated at its proper worth) by other human beings. Indeed, this drive is so deep and fundamental that it is one of the chief motors of the entire human historical process. In earlier periods, this desire for recognition played itself out in the military arena as kings and princes fought bloody battles with one another for primacy. In modern times, this struggle for recognition has shifted from the military to the economic realm, where it has the socially beneficial effect of creating rather than destroying wealth. Beyond subsistence levels, economic activity is frequently undertaken for the sake of recognition rather than merely as a means of satisfying natural material needs. The latter are, as Adam Smith pointed out, few in number and relatively easily satisfied. Work and money are much more important as sources of identity, status, and dignity, whether one has created a multinational media empire or been promoted to foreman. This kind of recognition cannot be achieved by individuals; it can come about only in a social context.

The Philanthropic Brain

Aninda Roy — 2006-10-20T23:51:40-05:00

A recent study shows that philanthropy, while inherently satisfying, taps a uniquely human faculty to make difficult moral choices.

Excerpt from The Economist:

The Joy of Giving (October 12, 2006)

Researchers at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland, wanted to find the neural basis for unselfish acts. They used a standard technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging, which can map the activity of the various parts of the brain.

The subjects of the study were each given $128 and told that they could donate anonymously to any of a range of potentially controversial charities. These embraced a wide range of causes, including support for abortion, euthanasia and sex equality, and opposition to the death penalty, nuclear power and war.

They found that the part of the brain that was active when a person donated happened to be the brain's reward centre—the mesolimbic pathway, responsible for doling out the dopamine-mediated euphoria associated with sex, money, food and drugs. Thus the warm glow that accompanies charitable giving has a physiological basis.

Donating also engaged the part of the brain that plays a role in the bonding behaviour between mother and child, and in romantic love. This involves oxytocin, a hormone that increases trust and co-operation.

A third part of the brain, which lies just behind the forehead and thought to be unique to humans, was involved in the complex, costly decisions when self-interest and moral beliefs were in conflict. Giving may make all sorts of animals feel good, but grappling with this particular sort of dilemma would appear to rely on a uniquely human part of the brain.

Full Story in the Economist

September 11th - 100 Years of Satyagraha

Aninda Roy — 2006-09-09T10:54:36-05:00

“I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”
Mahatma Gandhi

“One hundred years ago Mohandas Gandhi began the movement that would transform him into a Great Soul-the Mahatma. He had been living in South Africa for 13 years when the government proposed a law that would effectively reduce Indians to criminal status. On September 11th, 1906 he convened a meeting at the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg to mobilize his community to oppose the racially degrading legislation. That September 11th, more than 3000 people solemnly pledged to disobey the proposed law, without the use of violence, despite the consequences. With that pledge, Gandhi and his fellow Indians began the nonviolent revolution that would defeat an empire and give birth to the world’s largest democracy.”

Read More from the Nonviolent Peaceforce organization

A brief history of September 11, 1906: Birth of the Satyagraha Movement (PDF)

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?”
Mahatma Gandhi

The Battle for Your Mind

Aninda Roy — 2006-08-27T09:56:46-05:00

In a classic marketing book, Al Ries explains “Positioning: the battle for your mind”. In the first two pages of the book, I have more clearly understood than ever before the last six years of messages coming from Washington. Do the following sound familiar:

“In our overcommunicated society, we oversimplify because that’s the only way to cope.”

“Since so little of your message is going to get through anyway, you concentrate on the perceptions of the prospect, not the reality of the product.”

An editor of The Economist in the 1950s once advised his journalists to “simplify, then exaggerate”. This formula is almost second nature for newspaper columnists and can make for excellent reading, but lousy guide for policy decisions.

Solving Problems

Aninda Roy — 2006-08-26T03:28:12-05:00

From personal to global, there are a lot of hard problems that we need to solve. While there is no single approach to creative problem-solving, there are various frameworks including one that originated in Russia known as “TRIZ”. This technique consists of transforming a hard problem into a different “domain” where known solutions exist, and then translating or mapping back to a specific solution of the matter at hand. The diagram below is my rendering of this methodology.

(Click Image for Larger View)

Working Together

Aninda Roy — 2006-08-19T02:26:10-05:00

"Individual commitment to a group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work."
-Vince Lombardi

"Do what you love in the service of people who love what you do."
-- Steve Farber, author

Stanley Kunitz

Aninda Roy — 2006-06-01T21:36:59-05:00

Former Poet Laureate, Stanley Kunitz, died in May 2006. Here is how he described the feeling of writing poems:

“The poem comes in the form of a blessing—‘like rapture breaking on the mind,’ as I tried to phrase it in my youth. Through the years I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live, therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true: poetry is for the sake of the life.”

I liked these two interesting couplets:

"We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness."

Becoming, never being, till
Becoming is a being still.

Some articles—
In The Economist
In the Washington Post

Natural Language Processing

Aninda Roy — 2006-03-16T10:52:43-06:00

As I was listening to “Science Friday” interview a researcher, I kept thinking how language and behavior are deeply intertwined. While simple interactive programs like "ALICE" are interesting demonstrations, there can be no meaningful natural language processing (NLP) without both a lot of knowledge of the world and an understanding of relationships: connecting self with others. The very foundation of communication seems impossible without knowing your own intentions and the intentions of others and how these relate. So even the crudest NLP should, I suspect, begin by modeling relationships.

NLP seems more and more to be the most important problem in computer science today; without progress on this, we are stuck doing the "same old data processing" only faster and faster…

Science Friday Radio: March 3, 2006
We'll hear about why chimps cooperate and help others. Two new studies look at how chimpanzees respond when faced with others in need of assistance.
UCLA Research on 'Prosocial Preferences' | Joan Silk’s Research Page

NLP References (American Assoc. Artificial Intelligence)

Islam and Democracy

Aninda Roy — 2006-02-07T21:11:24-06:00

NEWSWEEK Is President Bush's plan to spread democracy turning into a fiasco? It doesn't have to. But it does need to change.
LINK: Newsweek Article EXCERTPS:

For decades the Middle East has been a political desert. In Iraq, the reason that there are no countervailing liberal parties is that Saddam Hussein destroyed them. He could not completely crush mosque-based groups and, by the end of his reign, he actually used them to shore up his own legitimacy.

In much of the Muslim world Islam became the language of political opposition because it was the only language that could not be censored. This pattern, of dictators using religious groups to destroy the secular opposition, played itself out in virtually every Arab country, and often beyond. It was the method by which Pakistan's Gen. Zia ul-Haq maintained his own dictatorship in the 1980s, creating a far stronger fundamentalist movement than that country had ever known.

The broader reason for the rise of Islamic politics has been the failure of secular politics. Secularism exists in the Middle East. It is embodied by Saddam Hussein and Muammar Kaddafi and Hosni Mubarak and Yasir Arafat. Arabs believe that they have tried Western-style politics and it has brought them tyranny and stagnation. They feel that they got a bastardized version of the West and that perhaps the West was not the right model for them anyway.

Islamic fundamentalism plays deeply to these feelings. It evokes authenticity, pride, cultural assertiveness and defiance. These ideas have been powerful sources of national identity throughout history and remain so, especially in an age of globalized economics and American power. In face of the powerlessness, alienation and confusion that the modern world breeds, these groups say simply, "Islam is the solution."

Elections have not created political Islam in the Middle East. They have codified a reality that existed anyway. Hamas was already a major player to be reckoned with in Gaza. The Muslim Brotherhood is popular in Egypt, whether or not Hosni Mubarak holds real elections. In fact, the more they are suppressed, the greater their appeal. If politics is more open, these groups may or may not moderate themselves, but they will surely lose some of that mystical allure they now have. The martyrs will become mayors, which is quite a fall in status.

ABC NEWS LINK: Article EXCERPTS:

President Bush has unwittingly helped Islamists flex their political muscle and sow the seeds of a peaceful Islamic revolution, though not in the direction he envisioned. The secular political order imposed after World War I appears to be coming apart — under the strains of oppression and socioeconomic decline — but it is Islam, not liberal democracy, that is stepping into the breach.

A recent public opinion survey showed three out of every four Arab respondents believe that the main motives of U.S. policies in the Middle East are "oil, protecting Israel, dominating the region and weakening the Muslim world."

Ideologically, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood are closer to the Iranian mullahs than to the modernist Turkish Islamists.

One thing is clear: Islamists will meet a fate similar to their secular precursors if they do not deliver the social goods, or if they entrap their people in costly military adventures against their real or imagined enemies. The electorate would disown them as surely as it is turning away from today's leaders. The Muslim electorate is not itself Islamist in a radical or fundamentalist way; rather, it is disaffected and fed up with oppression, corruption and incompetence, and is "throwing the bums out".

Polymerase Chain Reaction

Aninda Roy — 2006-02-04T09:23:23-06:00

Kary Mullis won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1993 for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) . PCR is a remarkably simply yet revolutionary method of selectively multiplying and mass-producing specific DNA segments in just hours.

Like so many great scientific discoveries, the ideas for PCR came suddenly, as if by direct transmission from another realm. It was during a late-night drive in 1984.

"I was just driving and thinking about ideas and suddenly I saw it," Mullis recalls. "I saw the polymerase chain reaction as clear as if it were up on a blackboard in my head, so I pulled over and started scribbling."

Mullis kept scribbling calculations, right there in the car, until the formula for DNA amplification was complete. The calculation was based on the concept of "reiterative exponential growth processes," which Mullis had picked up from working with computer programs.

After much table-pounding, he convinced the small California biotech company he was working for, Cetus, that he was to something. Good thing they finally listened: They sold the patent for PCR to Hoffman-LaRoche for the staggering $300 million - the most money ever paid for a patent. Mullis meanwhile received a $10,000 bonus.

Link to full article...

Epigenetics

Aninda Roy — 2006-01-29T13:57:32-06:00

Only two percent of our DNA - via RNA - codes for proteins. Until very recently, the rest was considered "junk," the byproduct of millions of years of evolution. Now scientists are discovering that some of this junk DNA switches on RNA that may do the work of proteins and interact with other genetic material.

http://www.mcmanweb.com/epigenetics.htm

These scientists believe your genes are shaped in part by your ancestors' life experiences. At the heart of this new field is a simple but contentious idea – that genes have a 'memory'. That the lives of your grandparents – the air they breathed, the food they ate, even the things they saw – can directly affect you, decades later, despite your never experiencing these things yourself.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/ghostgenes.shtml

Epigenetics represents a new frontier in cancer research. It is now clear that the genome contains information in two forms, genetic and epigenetic. The genetic information provides the blue print for the manufacture of all the proteins necessary to create a living thing, while the epigenetic information provides additional instructions on how, where, and when the genetic information should be used.

http://www3.cancer.gov/prevention/epigenetics/summary.html

Epigenetic changes are those in which single nutrients, toxins or other environmental exposures can produce subtle changes in a gene’s behavior during embryonic or fetal development without structurally altering the gene in any way. These changes then set the stage for a person’s susceptibility to a host of diseases as an adult. “We can no longer argue whether genetics or environment has a greater impact on our health and development, because both are inextricably linked”.

http://www.niehs.nih.gov/factor/issues/2005dec.pdf

Epigenetics is the study of information within the cell that is heritable during cell division, but does not lie within the DNA sequence itself. There is reason to believe that common human diseases may be related to epigenetic modifiers. Our goal is to develop the tools and paradigms for the nascent area of medical epigenetics, including epigenome discovery, its quantitative analysis, and its application to medicine.

Center for the Epigenetics of Common Human Disease

Network Neutrality

Aninda Roy — 2006-01-16T00:09:08-06:00

In an article by Randall Stross, the New York Times reports:

The superabundance of content in the Internet's ecosystem is best explained by its organizing principle of "network neutrality." The phrase refers to the way the Internet welcomes everyone who wishes to post content. Consumers, in turn, enjoy limitless choices. Rather than having network operators select content providers on our behalf - the philosophy of the local cable company - the Internet allows all of us to act as our own network programmers, serving a demographic of just one person.

Today, the network carrier has a minor, entirely neutral role in this system - providing the pipe for the bits that move the last miles to the home. It has no say about where those bits happened to have originated. Any proposed change in its role should be examined carefully, especially if the change entails expanding the carrier's power to pick and choose where bits come from - a power that has the potential to abrogate network neutrality.

Woe to us all if the Internet's content is limited by the companies who also handle the plumbing. "The Future of Ideas," by Lawrence Lessig (Random House, 2001), shows how innovation and creativity associated with the Internet are the byproducts of its openness, its role as a commons that is accessible, by design, to all. Professor Lessig, who teaches law at Stanford, said last week that even now, broadband carriers have failed to demonstrate their commitment to the principle of network neutrality. "They've fought it at each stage," he said, "and they have never embraced the principle."

The largest Internet companies are the ones that could easily afford whatever terms the carriers demand for exclusive deals that would lock out smaller rivals and new entrants. But they have not done special deals with the carriers and instead have joined together to try to persuade Congress to protect the principle of network neutrality and prevent the Bells from striking exclusive deals with anyone. Last November, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft and Google, among others, formally registered their concern with a House committee that is revising the basic telecommunications law; they noted that a draft version of the bill failed to make network neutrality a matter of policy without exception. Whether the committee has responded positively to the suggestions from the Internet players should be known soon.

Jimmy Carter on Our Endangered Values

Aninda Roy — 2006-01-02T07:54:19-06:00

President Carter has presented a clear, uncompromised view of key issues facing our nation’s future from nuclear proliferation to the separation of church and state to the inequities between the rich and poor across the globe. His voice resonates not only by his experiences as veteran and U.S. President but by the moral authority of decades of serving humanitarian causes through the Carter Center, for which he was awrded the Nobel Peace Prize.

His words are common sense, yet deeply researched, and imbued with faith, yet moderate and secular. I enjoyed every page of this insightful work. President Carter shines a guiding beacon into the storm of controversies about war and peace, power and freedom. This is also a non-partisan warning that we have drifted seriously off course as most Americans must instinctively realize, whether their political affiliation allows them to acknowledge.

Here’s a story on NPR including several interviews.

Heartsongs

Aninda Roy — 2006-01-01T08:37:43-06:00

On New Year’s Day millions of us are thinking the same things: “Did I take all my vacation last year?… This year I’m going to finally make that trip to New York.” We almost always resolve to do something differently (though we might not say it out loud). Yet, maybe we should all resolve to be a little different, more like someone we know or respect.

A few days ago, I was like a bee in a bookstore, moving from flower to flower, sampling a bit here, then winding a path to the next. I alighted upon a remarkable book by a remarkable person: Reflections of a Peacemaker by Mattie Stepanek. I recalled hearing about him on the news when he passed away last year but did not know the details. You can learn more about Mattie’s story on Oprah Winfrey’s website, on Larry King and in this Washington Post article. He wants to be remembered as a “Poet, Peacemaker, and Philosopher Who Played".

Mattie’s words are profound for a fifty-year-old, much more for a boy who wrote from ages 3 to 13. He called our unique message to the world, our “heartsong”:

We each have a song inside our heart
That can make peace in the world,
If we first make peace inside ourselves.

To all of us busy-bodies, he called for stillness and made this wish:

Let us not say
"I am someone
Who will change,
Who can do better,
Who might be gentler."
Rather, let us pray
And let us say,
"I am someone
Who is loving,
Who is peaceful,
Who is thankful for
The fact that I am."

Freakonomics

Aninda Roy — 2005-12-24T20:19:31-06:00

(CBS News)Along with his coauthor Stephen Dubner, Steven Levitt has written a book called Freakonomics, which details his innovative and brilliant way of looking at the world. Levitt's mind works in the following manner: First he asks questions that few have the creativity to ask; then he follows a rigorous statistical analysis to find the answers.

Book Review:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/05/04/opinion/main692911.shtml

The book's website:
http://www.freakonomics.com/

Valuing Life, Whether Disabled or Not

Aninda Roy — 2005-12-23T14:31:19-06:00

From National Public Radio by Ben Mattlin

Morning Edition. December 7, 2005 · Commentator Ben Mattlin has been quadriplegic since birth. At the memorial service for a disabled friend who passed away, he came to realize the world needs to expand its definition of what it means to live a successful life, disability or not.

Ben asks, “Was he better off dead than disabled? I have never done half the things my friend used to love, but I do know one can live a pretty full life with a disability.”

“Indeed, some people find life after disability more intense, more deeply appreciated than it was before. My lifelong experience, with disability, has made me a creative problem-solver.”

Referring to the memorial service, Ben continues, “How limited is this vision of life, and of the afterlife? Are there no wheelchairs in heaven? I'm not buying it. For me, if there is a heaven, it's not a place where I'll be able to walk. It's a place where it doesn't matter if you can't.”

Full Article

The Dalai Lama and Neuroscience

Aninda Roy — 2005-11-12T02:17:52-06:00

Go to Story on NPR or another in Wired

Excerpts
"Most Americans now realize that if they go to the gym or exercise several times a week, they will observe systematic changes occurring in their body," Davidson says. Meditations, he explains, is "exercising the mind in a particular way."

The Dalai Lama rejects so-called scientific materialism -- the idea that consciousness, for example, is no more than a series of chemical reactions in our brains. That wouldn't allow for reincarnation.

"There are a lot of parallels between Buddhist philosophy and Western scientific philosophy, but definitely there are exceptions like reincarnation." says a researcher at Harvard who studies meditation…

Comments

There are strong parallels between Software and Mind. Both are fundamentally about Information and Pattern, Order and Structure, Evolution and Creation. We know that software requires hardware to run on but is independent of the hardware and is routinely transmitted from one hardware device to another. Excel’s millions of lines of software needs a PC but if a PC breaks down, it can be reloaded on a new machine and work the same as before. So the notion of reincarnation– of the software, the mind pattern, being housed again in another body– is easy to imagine.

How does the mind “software” move to the “next body”? Well, how did it get there in the first place? Your mind was “downloaded” to your body both by an initial genetic endowment from your parents and then by absorbing other patterns from the environment in which you lived and grew. Both the genetic “nature” and environmental “nurture” are still “out there” in the world after you die. So what’s so unbelievable that a similar genetically endowed body and similar circumstances will lead to the emergence of a very similar if not virtually identical mind in a new body? The result, for all practical purposes, is a re-implementation or re-incarnation of you.

Of course, if you subscribe to this view, then you will also believe that a person that you once in a rare while encounter with whom everything resonates, who seems to be so much like you, is perhaps a simultaneous re-incarnation, a kindred spirit. Furthermore this view of mind as software confirms that your essence, your “software”, is both unique in key ways and largely shared with other individuals of your kind.