Links for 22 September

How panhandlers use their money.
A brief history of publication.
Essays via the iTunes model.
Snark.
A lit review on serifs and readability.
A store for time travellers. (h/t SA)
Deleting one gene makes mice smart. (h/t GL)

Visual Representation in Science workshop

Aaron of  False Vacuum is organizing a workshop on Visual Representation to be held at IHPST in December. Here's the poster:

the world is awesome

I'm straight-up stealing these links from Uncertain Principles because they're so good:

• Ancient brew masters tapped antibiotic secrets
  
  
  ' A chemical analysis of the bones of ancient Nubians shows that they were regularly consuming tetracycline, most likely in their beer. The finding is the strongest evidence yet that the art of making antibiotics, which officially dates to the discovery of penicillin in 1928, was common practice nearly 2,000 years ago.'
  
  
  (tags: science archaeology chemistry history news medicine)
  
  
• Physics Buzz: How not to: The Fire Tornado
  
  
  'In the last two weeks, both water and fire tornadoes have been widely covered by the media. First there was the dramatic shots from Japan of a so-called 'waterspout,' then there was the unbelievable footage of this fire tornado in Brazil, followed immediately by this one from Hawaii. And as any good physicists would have, we immediately thought 'I want to do that!'

  
  

  Of course, APS requires me to tell you not to try this at home. So, here's how you would do this, if you were to find yourself attempting to do it, which you should absolutely under no circumstances try to do.'

economies of scale

This might come as news to war hawks. Or stimulus hawks.

Peter Schiff puts things in perspective (Via Marginal Revolution).

But to repeat the impact of World War II today would require a truly massive effort. Replicating the six-fold increase in the federal budget that was seen in the early 1940s would result in a nearly $20 trillion budget today. That equates to $67,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country. Surely, the tremendous GDP growth created by such spending would make short work of the so-called Great Recession. 

To a degree that will surprise many, the US funded its World War II effort largely by raising taxes and tapping into Americans' personal savings. Both of those avenues are nowhere near as promising today as they were in 1941 Current tax burdens are now much higher than they were before the War, so raising taxes today would be much more difficult. The "Victory Tax" of 1942 sharply raised income tax rates and allowed, for the first time in our nation's history, taxes to be withheld directly from paychecks. The hikes were originally intended to be temporary but have, of course, far outlasted their purpose. It would be unlikely that Americans would accept higher taxes today to fund a real war, let alone a pretend one.

That leaves savings, which was the War's primary source of funding. During the War, Americans purchased approximately $186 billion worth of war bonds, accounting for nearly three quarters of total federal spending from 1941-1945. Today, we don't have the savings to pay for our current spending, let alone any significant expansions. Even if we could convince the Chinese to loan us a large chunk of the $20 trillion (on top of the $1 trillion we already owe them), how could we ever pay them back?

writing tips

In keeping with today's "back to school" theme, Michael C. Munger has a great piece on writing in grad school.

Many of the graduate students who were stars in the classroom during the first two years—the people everyone admired and looked up to—suddenly aren't so stellar anymore. And a few of the marginal students—the ones who didn't care that much about pleasing the professors by reading every page of every assignment—are suddenly sending their own papers off to journals, getting published, and transforming themselves into professional scholars.

The difference is not complicated. It's writing.

Munger continues with 10 great writing tips (most of the tips are obvious, but obviously still needed, since most of us don't follow them!)

My favourite:

4. Give yourself time. Many smart people tell themselves pathetic lies like, "I do my best work at the last minute." Look: It's not true. No one works better under pressure. Sure, you are a smart person. But if you are writing about a profound problem, why would you think that you can make an important contribution off the top of your head in the middle of the night just before the conference?

Writers sit at their desks for hours, wrestling with ideas. They ask questions, talk with other smart people over drinks or dinner, go on long walks. And then write a whole bunch more. Don't worry that what you write is not very good and isn't immediately usable. You get ideas when you write; you don't just write down ideas.

The articles and books that will be read decades from now were written by men and women sitting at a desk and forcing themselves to translate profound ideas into words and then to let those words lead them to even more ideas. Writing can be magic, if you give yourself time, because you can produce in the mind of some other person, distant from you in space or even time, an image of the ideas that exist in only your mind at this one instant.

(h/t GL)

academic reading how-to

For my friends who are starting grad school, preparing for quals, or just starting coursework again... the reading probably already looks pretty daunting. And it is. But here are a few tips on getting by.

First, Chad  explains how to read scientific papers without reading every word. (Hint: it applies to HPS papers too!)

The first and most important point is to Know What You're Looking For. Different bits of information are found in different places and in different forms, so what you're looking for will determine where you look, and how you find it.

For example, if you're just trying to get a general sense of what a given paper is about, it's often enough to read only the introduction and conclusion. If you're just after a specific numerical result, it's probably in the abstract, or toward the end of the paper.

You should also be aware that what you're looking for may not be in the paper you're reading. If you want a sense of the context of a field, you're often looking for a reference to earlier work, possibly a review article. If you want the gory details of a measurement technique, you may very well be looking for some reference to an earlier or longer paper by the same group (a sentence of the form "using the method of [citation of earlier paper]"), or, even more annoyingly, some online supplement to the article you have.

(Of course, read the whole thing.)

Next, read Timothy Burke's How to Read in College.

Finally, check out John Bean's Helping Students Read Difficult Texts.

UPDATE

See also Jon's teaching tip on teaching critical reading in history.

Blogs of note

Blog fever has hit Toronto's HPS community, with the recent addition of The Bubble Chamber, there are at least half a dozen blogs written by my colleagues at IHPST.

Here are the Toronto blogs, in no particular order (I hope I haven't forgotten anyone):

• Mike Thicke, Curtis Forbes, Michelle Hoffman, Jonathan Turner, Andrew Munro, Ellie Louson, Michael Cournoyea, and Rebecca Moore are all contributors to The Bubble Chamber (as time goes on, the list will grow).
• Jaipreet Virdi discusses history of medicine, deafness, and quackery at From the Hands of Quacks.
• Ellie Louson muses about grad school at Productive (adj).
• Aaron Sidney Wright is a historian of physics who has been saying interesting things about scientific practice at his blog, False Vacuum.
• Jonathan Turner writes about grad school, teaching, and Cold War defence research in Canada over at Boffins and Cold Warriors.
• Sarah Kriger's Ramblings are more focused on writing, plays, and television than on her research, but it's still great stuff.
• Allan Olley occasionally discusses his work on the history of computing on 4ll4n0.

While I'm at it, here are a few of my favourite non-Toronto HPS blogs:

• Evolving Thoughts (John Wilkins)
• Ether Wave Propaganda (Will Thomas)
• Whewell's Ghost (group blog)
• Honest Toil (Chris Pincock)
• It's Only A Theory (group blog)

That makes for a lot of reading!

we are all apprentices

It's worth reading this essay by Kim Sterelny (via Evolving Thoughts).

It is long, so here is a précis:

Evolutionary psychologists seek to explain the origins of universal human traits, like markedly high intelligence, language, tool-use, and social structures. The details of these explanations vary greatly in timing and detail (e.g., was it cooking food or an environmental shift that made the difference?) but almost all such explanations begin with some common assumptions.

First, "human evolutionary change has been self-generated through positive feedback." This kind of structure helps to explain why the traits of interest are unique to humans and universal among them. The elements of the feedback loop are (a) complex social environments and (b) high cognitive ability. Notice how this works: selection for co-operation also selects for free-riders. But the drag of free-riders selects for vigilance. And vigilance is accomplished with higher intelligence. Higher intelligence allows for greater social complexity (and co-operation). And so on.

Second, "adaptive response to our complex environment depends on innate, evolved, special purpose cognitive mechanisms, for it is only such mechanisms that enable us gather and deploy the information on which action depends." This is commonly known as the "modularity hypothesis," "the idea that our minds are ensembles of innately equipped special purpose devices; devices which adapt us to the challenges posed to our foraging Pleistocene ancestors; challenges which largely persist today. Our minds are integrated arrays of devices each of which solves a particular problem with remarkable efficiency." (e.g., face recognition or cheater detectors.) 

It is this second piece of the puzzle Sterelny takes issue with. In order for such modules to evolve, the information structure would have to remain stable for long periods of time. In some cases, this might be reasonable -- crudely (and slightly off-topic), tigers have always been about the same size and speed, so a tiger-avoidance module could stabilize. But many important features of our information environment have changed drastically, and too rapidly for (genetic) evolution to keep pace. We have become more sedentary and traded field for market and rocks for iPhones. "To the extent that the modularity hypothesis explains competent response to information-hungry problems by appeal to pre-loaded information, it is poorly posed to explain competent response to evolutionarily novel challenges."

Sterelny wants to trade out "modules" for "skills." Skills look a lot like modules: they are task-specific and fast. But there is a big difference: skills are learned wholesale, they are not modules just waiting for parameters to be set:

High volume, high fidelity, inter-generational cultural learning coevolves with social foraging. There is feedback. As the fidelity of social learning improves, social foraging becomes more effective, for technology and technique improve across the generations. As social foraging becomes more profitable, adults can more effectively support the next generation while they acquire skills and information. This loop depends on the fact that humans organise the learning world of the next generation. Humans (like many other organisms) modify their own environment. One important form of human niche construction is informational engineering. Humans of one generation act in ways that transform the learning environment of the next generation. Cultural learning is obviously central to human social life. But most cultural learning is hybrid learning; it is culturally enhanced trial and error learning. Very few humans acquire significant life skills just from instruction and demonstration; very few learn skills by unassisted exploration. Human children explore and experiment on their physical and social environment. But they often explore environments which have been shaped to make it easier or safer for them to acquire critical capacities.

Doing away with formal peer review

The New York Times considers some efforts to do away with peer review and marshall the connectedness of the web.

The most pressing intellectual issue in the next decade is this tension between the insular, specialized world of expert scholarship and the open and free-wheeling exchange of information on the Web. “And academia ... is caught in the middle.”

I think making work publicly available online is Very Good (I do some of that myself). But doing away with peer review is a Bad Idea.

Peer review is a barrier to entry -- and that's a good thing. It's a sort of curated, walled garden of approved content. When I am working firmly within my area of expertise, I am comfortable evaluating the quality and representativeness of the papers I read. But sometimes -- more often than I would like -- I find myself well outside my area of expertise, and without a good sense of the lay of the land. Essay reviews and general resources like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are helpful, but peer reviewed journals are key. Someone with expertise has okayed that content. Peer review is a proxy for knowing I'm not wasting my time.

If peer review is to be done away with, something else must replace it. If curation can be crowdsourced on the internet, I'm for it -- I'm certainly not fond of waiting for referee reports. But moderated internet comments like these ones simply won't do.

Launch of Spontaneous Generations 4:1

I am extremely proud to announce the publication of the fourth instalment of Spontaneous Generation: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science. Here's the table of contents:

Vol 4, No 1 (2010): Scientific Instruments: Knowledge, Practice, and Culture

Table of Contents

Focused Discussion

Scientific Instruments: Knowledge, Practice, and Culture [Editor’s Introduction]	PDF
Isaac Record	1-7

The Challenge of Authenticating Scientific Objects in Museum Collections: Exposing the Forgery of a Moroccan Astrolabe Allegedly Dated 1845 CE	PDF
Ingrid Hehmeyer	8-20

People as Scientific Instruments	PDF
Maarten Derksen	21-29

Equipment for an Experiment	PDF
Rom Harré	30-38

An Instrument for What? Digital Computers, Simulation and Scientific Practice	PDF
Wendy S. Parker	39-44

Great Pyramid Metrology and the Material Politics of Basalt	PDF
Michael J. Barany	45-60

Let Freeness Ring: The Canadian Standard Freeness Tester as Hegemonic Engine	PDF
James Hull	61-70

The Machine Speaks Falsely	PDF
Allan Franklin	71-84

Reading Measuring Instruments	PDF
Mario Bunge	85-93

Engineering Realities	PDF
Davis Baird	94-110

Conceptual Sea Changes	PDF
Paul Humphreys	111-115

Extended Thing Knowledge	PDF
Mathieu Charbonneau	116-128

Otto in the Chinese Room	PDF
Philip Murray McCullough	129-137

Humans not Instruments	PDF
Harry Collins	138-147

Apparatus and Experimentation Revisited	PDF
Trevor H. Levere	148-154

Material Culture and the Dobsonian Telescope	PDF
Jessica Ellen Sewell, Andrew Johnston	155-162

Taming the “Publication Machine”: Generating Unity, Engaging the Trading Zones	PDF
François Thoreau, Maria Neicu	163-172

Concepts as Tools in the Experimental Generation of Knowledge in Cognitive Neuropsychology	PDF
Uljana Feest	173-190

Articles

Domesticating the Planets: Instruments and Practices in the Development of Planetary Geology	PDF
Matthew Benjamin Shindell	191-230

“Old” Technology in New Hands: Instruments as Mediators of Interdisciplinary Learning in Microfluidics	PDF
Dorothy Sutherland Olsen	231-254

Opinions

Out the Door: A Short History of the University of Toronto Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments	PDF
Erich Weidenhammer, Michael Da Silva	255-261

Reviews

Ian Hesketh. Of Apes and Ancestors: Evolution, Christianity, and the Oxford Debate	PDF
Sebastian Assenza	262-265

Marc Lange. Laws and Lawmakers: Science, Metaphysics, and the Laws of Nature	PDF
Christopher Belanger	266-269

William Sims Bainbridge. The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World	PDF
Bruce J. Petrie	270-272

Steven Shapin. The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation	PDF
Michael Cournoyea	273-275

Learning From Artifacts: A Review of the “Reading Artifacts: Summer Institute in the Material Culture of Science,” Presented by The Canada Science and Technology Museum and Situating Science Cluster	PDF
Jaipreet Virdi	276-279

Aaron A. Cohen-Gadol and Dennis D. Spencer. The Legacy of Harvey Cushing: Profiles of Patient Care	PDF
Delia Gavrus	280-282

Adrian Parr. Hijacking Sustainability	PDF
R. Moore	283-285

Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rinker, eds. Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis	PDF
Julia Agapitos	286-288

David Pantalony. Altered Sensations: Rudolph Koenig’s Acoustical Workshop in Nineteenth-Century Paris	PDF
Sarah-Jane Patterson	289-291

Michael Strevens. Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation	PDF
Anthony Kulic	292-299

ISSN: 1913-0465

On mosques and the World Trade Center

Irony abounds.

Via Alex Tabarrok (MR): The architect of the World Trade Center designed its plaza as "a mecca, a great relief from the narrow streets and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area."

Yamasaki replicated the plan of Mecca's courtyard by creating a vast delineated square, isolated from the city's bustle by low colonnaded structures and capped by two enormous, perfectly square towers—minarets, really. Yamasaki's courtyard mimicked Mecca's assemblage of holy sites—the Qa'ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca's.

There is much more in the original article, all fascinating.

predictions

via Marginal Revolution 

Robert Sloss predicted the iPhone in 1910

Well, more or less.  Or is it an iPad?  In 1910 Stoss published an essay called "The Wireless Century," intending to predict the world of 2010.  In this world everyone carries around a "wireless telegraph" which:

1. Serves as a telephone, the whole world over.

2. Either rings or vibrates in your pocket.

3. Can transmit any musical recording or performance with perfect clarity.

4. Can allow people to send each other photographs, across the entire world.

5. Can allow people to see the images of paintings, museums, etc. in distant locales.

6. No one will ever be alone again. 

7. Can serve as a means of payment, connecting people to their bank accounts and enabling payments (Japan is ahead of us here).

8. Can connect people to all newspapers, although Sloss predicted that people would prefer that the device read the paper aloud to them (not so much the case).

9. Can transmit documents to "thin tubes of ink," which will then print those documents in distant locales.

10. People will have a better sense of the poor, and of suffering, because they will have witnessed it through their device (not obviously true, at least not yet).

11. People will vote using their devices and this will empower democracy (nope).

12. Judicial testimonies will be performed over such devices, often from great distances.

13. People will order perfectly-fitting fashions from Paris; this guy should be in the Apps business.

14. Married couples will be much closer, and distance relationships will be closer and better.

15. Military targeting and military orders will become extremely precise.

The essay is reprinted in the Arthur Brehmer book Die Welt in 100 Jahren.  The book is interesting throughout; a bunch of the other writers thought in 2010 we would be fighting wars with large zeppelins.

I'm not even going to try predicting what will be the case for 2110.

Links for 24 August

Greeks were tacky.
Lazy 20-somethings are now "emerging adults."
"Council hires ban bid taxi firm" -- one of the all-time great crash blossoms?
Jazz up your game of hangman.
Need some perspective?
Intelligent parking.  (Plus, a roundup of parking policy from MR)

Whoa.

On Neurath (from Jordi Cat).

a nice couple of sentences

Fuelled by grass, the Mongol empire could be described as solar-powered; it was an empire of the land. Later empires, such as the British, moved by ship and were wind-powered, empires of the sea. The American empire, if it is an empire, runs on oil and is an empire of the air. On the world's largest landmass, Iraq is a main crossroads; most aspirants to empire eventually pass through there.

From Ian Frazier (The New Yorker) via Kottke.

maintenance

Charles Stross asks:

What is the minimum number of people you need in order to maintain (not necessarily to extend) our current level of technological civilization?

Stross expects the answer to fall between 100 million and 1 billion. A few commenters question his upper limit, which is based on the population of industrialized nations, because those nations exploit the rest of the world for its labor and natural resources. But most commenters question his lower limit, some expecting that even 1 million individuals (with the first generation properly selected) might be enough to be technologically self-sustaining.


I think a more interesting question is: what is the minimum number of people you need in order to maintain our current way of life?


I don't think a technological civilization can exist without, you know, civilization. And civilization means much more than technology. It also means janitors, politicians, beat cops, caretakers, librarians, athletes, judges, rock stars, journalists, and maybe even bloggers.

Should Journals Get Rid of "Revise and Resubmit"?

Leiter posts a reader question: Should Journals Get Rid of "Revise and Resubmit"?

"A philosopher writes: I think that journals should no longer give revise-and-resubmits. All decisions should be either accept or reject. A journal can certainly send an acceptance that reads 'we are pleased to accept your paper, and ask that you..."

Some reactions, from the obscure to the general:

1. Revise & Resubmit is sometimes the grade editors give when they aren't happy with their referees. Despite appearances to the contrary, editors generally want to get a decision to authors in a timely manner. But sometimes, referees do not cooperate. Useless or capricious referees are a fact of life, but editors (who are known to referees) cannot always overrule their recommendation. An R&R can be a way out for editor and author, especially if the editor directs the author to make reasonable changes (but to ignore requests to write a different paper).
2. There are occasions where an author (typically but not always new, or perhaps from an allied field) has jumped the gun and needs to spend more time with the paper before it can be published. Perhaps she has missed crucial literature or needs to add or remove sections before the paper is in the right form. In such cases, R&R is a signal that the journal wants the paper, and that the work IS worth undertaking.
1. When referee reports make it clear that a paper is of high quality but not right for the journal, it should be rejected, with an explanation from the editor and (if possible) a pointer to the right journal. Referees and editors should never ask authors to write a different paper and submit that instead.
3. An editor is typically looking for papers that are well-reasoned, interesting, original, and are responsive to existing literature. At top journals, they are also looking for papers that will stand the test of time. Papers can be rejected for offences to any or all of these sensibilities, and if possible, editors should say which.
1. "Accept" (typically with minor revisions) means the paper is fundamentally sound, but would be improved with slight changes.
2. "Reject" means the paper is fundamentally unsound, uninteresting, unoriginal, or unresponsive to the literature.
3. "Revise and Resubmit" should be reserved for those papers whose research is there, but which have serious flaws. Usually, the editor has major concerns about the structure of the paper or its responsiveness to literature. (Papers that are unoriginal or uninteresting should be rejected so that the author can try elsewhere. These problems will not be solved with revisions.)

best of net: BODY RITUAL AMONG THE NACIREMA

In this, the fourth installment of "best of net," I reproduce a section of Horace Miner's "Body Ritual among the Nacirem," originally published in American Anthropologist 58:3, June 1956. It is a seminal work in the field of anthropology, and though by now a bit dated, is nevertheless an instructive read. As always, go read the original.

The anthropologist has become so familiar with the diversity of ways in which different people behave in similar situations that he is not apt to be surprised by even the most exotic customs. In fact, if all of the logically possible combinations of behavior have not been found somewhere in the world, he is apt to suspect that they must be present in some yet undescribed tribe. The point has, in fact, been expressed with respect to clan organization by Murdock (1949: 71).[2] In this light, the magical beliefs and practices of the Nacirema present such unusual aspects that it seems desirable to describe them as an example of the extremes to which human behavior can go.

...

Nacirema culture is characterized by a highly developed market economy which has evolved in a rich natural habitat. While much of the people's time is devoted to economic pursuits, a large part of the fruits of these labors and a considerable portion of the day are spent in ritual activity. The focus of this activity is the human body, the appearance and health of which loom as a dominant concern in the ethos of the people. While such a concern is certainly not unusual, its ceremonial aspects and associated philosophy are unique.

The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease. Incarcerated in such a body, man's only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of ritual and ceremony. Every household has one or more shrines devoted to this purpose. The more powerful individuals in the society have several shrines in their houses and, in fact, the opulence of a house is often referred to in terms of the number of such ritual centers it possesses. Most houses are of wattle and daub construction, but the shrine rooms of the more wealthy are walled with stone. Poorer families imitate the rich by applying pottery plaques to their shrine walls.

While each family has at least one such shrine, the rituals associated with it are not family ceremonies but are private and secret. The rites are normally only discussed with children, and then only during the period when they are being initiated into these mysteries. I was able, however, to establish sufficient [504 begins ->] rapport with the natives to examine these shrines and to have the rituals described to me.

The focal point of the shrine is a box or chest which is built into the wall. In this chest are kept the many charms and magical potions without which no native believes he could live. These preparations are secured from a variety of specialized practitioners. The most powerful of these are the medicine men, whose assistance must be rewarded with substantial gifts. However, the medicine men do not provide the curative potions for their clients, but decide what the ingredients should be and then write them down in an ancient and secret language. This writing is understood only by the medicine men and by the herbalists who, for another gift, provide the required charm.

The charm is not disposed of after it has served its purpose, but is placed in the charmbox of the household shrine. As these magical materials are specific for certain ills, and the real or imagined maladies of the people are many, the charm-box is usually full to overflowing. The magical packets are so numerous that people forget what their purposes were and fear to use them again. While the natives are very vague on this point, we can only assume that the idea in retaining all the old magical materials is that their presence in the charm-box, before which the body rituals are conducted, will in some way protect the worshiper.

Beneath the charm-box is a small font. Each day every member of the family, in succession, enters the shrine room, bows his head before the charm-box, mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds with a brief rite of ablution.[5] The holy waters are secured from the Water Temple of the community, where the priests conduct elaborate ceremonies to make the liquid ritually pure.

In the hierarchy of magical practitioners, and below the medicine men in prestige, are specialists whose designation is best translated as "holy-mouth-men." The Nacirema have an almost pathological horror of and fascination with the mouth, the condition of which is believed to have a supernatural influence on all social relationships. Were it not for the rituals of the mouth, they believe that their teeth would fall out, their gums bleed, their jaws shrink, their friends desert them, and their lovers reject them. They also believe that a strong relationship exists between oral and moral characteristics. For example, there is a ritual ablution of the mouth for children which is supposed to improve their moral fiber.

The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite. Despite the fact that these people are so punctilious [6] about care of the mouth, this rite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders, and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures.[7]

In addition to the private mouth-rite, the people seek out a holy-mouth-man once or twice a year. These practitioners have an impressive set of paraphernalia, consisting of a variety of augers, awls, probes, and prods. The use of [505 begins ->] these objects in the exorcism of the evils of the mouth involves almost unbelievable ritual torture of the client. The holy-mouth-man opens the client's mouth and, using the above mentioned tools, enlarges any holes which decay may have created in the teeth. Magical materials are put into these holes. If there are no naturally occurring holes in the teeth, large sections of one or more teeth are gouged out so that the supernatural substance can be applied. In the client's view, the purpose of these ministrations [8] is to arrest decay and to draw friends. The extremely sacred and traditional character of the rite is evident in the fact that the natives return to the holy-mouth-men year after year, despite the fact that their teeth continue to decay.

You will have to look to the original to see conclusions about this backward people.

retracting papers

An editorial in Nature 453:258 (15 May 2008) [paywall] tells a "cautionary tale about the weaknesses -- not the strengths -- of the scientific process." Whether we see strength or weakness, it seems, depends on how we tell the story. On one hand,

it seems to be a shining example of the scientific method in action. Two papers published by biochemist Homme Hellinga and his students at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, claimed a breakthrough in rational enzyme design. Last year, another chemist found that Hellinga's enzymes didn't actually work, which led to the retraction of the two papers this February. Then, this March, a third group published research showing that rational enzyme design really is possible. All has ended happily, it seems, with the field marching forward in triumph.

As the editorial goes on to explain, missing from that account is the cost, both in dollars and reputation. The chemist unable to reproduce the results lost both time and money in his attempt to use rational enzyme design in his work. Hellinga's reputation (and previous results) have come under scrutiny, and Hellinga's student's reputation may have been irreparably damaged even though she was cleared of any wrongdoing.

In a game of trust, a retraction is only the first step to regaining status.

best of net: THE ART CATALOG

Morgan Meis (of 3QD) reviews 30,000 years of art in The Smart Set

It’s a piece of coyness. I prefer to imagine a group of art historians sitting around a table with a sixth or seventh bottle of wine giggling to each other like schoolgirls. “Take that, art theorists! We give you a book with all art and no theory. We give you a book that says nothing and simply is what it is. We give you description and description alone. Its subject matter? The entirety of the history of art. Take that!

As with all of my "best of net" series, you should go read the original, but I will quote long sections here:

Art historians and the theorists of art have been at quiet war with one another for a long time. The theorists, per their nature, accuse the historians of “mere” scholarship. The historians, per theirs, accuse the theorists of airy speculation. But it is difficult for the historians to be vocal in their accusations. The central problem is that once you enter into the verbiage you’ve already given up a good deal of ground to the theorists. You’re fighting them on their turf and they’re going to get you tangled up in a morass of “whys.” It is as if entering into the debate at all is already to concede it. Silence, the mute labor of the scholar, is thus a potent weapon in itself. Plus, it drives the theorists to distraction, like dealing with a lover who returns your letters unopened.

This, I think, is the weapon of choice for the folks at Phaidon who put 30,000 Years together. Show, and do not tell. The lack of telling may also be due to the fact that E. H. Gombrich is dead and therefore couldn't write the preface. Gombrich, the pre-eminent art historian of the 20th century, published his book, The Story of Art, with Phaidon in 1950. It has been called the most famous and popular art book ever written. In it, he proposed to do battle with “big ideas” of every stripe. His opening to the text, a sentence of which he was forever fond, goes like this: "There really is no such thing as art, there are only artists."

Gombrich was crotchety in a lovable and straightforward sort of way and he always stuck to a basic premise: Art is about image making. Those images, he thought, can either come from the "memory image" — the clear and precise idea we have of how things look — or from the "mimetic image" — the attempt to faithfully reproduce the look of things in sensual perception. Artists, in producing images, swing from one option to the other and the history of art is nothing but the "story" of individuals producing images according to their skill in one craft or the other. Period.

The crucial thing about this view of art is that it obliterates periods. In fact, if you take his viewpoint to its logical conclusion you have to say that there isn't really such a thing as a history of art at all. (Which makes sense, since Gombrich has already said that there is no such thing as art. A history of nothing, therefore, would merely be nothing times two.) There are simply a lot of different works, they got created over time, and some of them represent the apex of skill in making visual objects.

And that, it is easy to see, is the hidden polemic behind 30,000 Years of Art. It is a book that doesn't really believe in art with a capital-A at all. Indeed, “art” is in lowercase on the front cover. The book could just as easily have been called, 30,000 Years of Skilled Individuals Producing Things to Look At. The word “art” is just a placeholder for a longer and clumsier sentence.

This anti-art-as-concept approach is heightened by the way that the works chosen for 30,000 Years are visually reproduced in the book. Every “art” object is shown floating in the middle of a white background, popping off the page as an image, pure and vibrant. An image. Sculptures, friezes, and objects, are, along with paintings, flattened out into an absolute, imagistic space. It's beautiful but it's weird. The idea that any of these works need to be seen in the context of the worlds in which they were created is utterly denied. They exist, instead, in a timeless place, a graphical version of the white box.

The accompanying texts for each of the works follows what I'm calling a Gombrichian focus on image and on skill. We get some background, we get some explanation about materials and techniques used in fabrication, and then we get a sense of why the work represents an extraordinary moment in the application of skill. One of the first works shown, for example, is the “Venus of Lespugue,” an ivory figure created in the Gravettian Period around 23,000 B.C. The text says: "As a highly stylized composition in hard material, the piece is a uniquely confident example of very early human sculpture."

...

There is an absolute refusal to rank or to organize except along the indifferent axis of temporality. The closest thing to a guide in the book is the timeline at the very end. But all you get from that is a graph showing how different civilizations overlap over time, which helps to explain why “Sakalava Couple,” a relatively crude statue from Madagascar, is on the same page with Francisco de Goya's “Third of May 1808.” It is extraordinary to watch this leveling instinct at work. There is a kind of historian’s revenge being exhibited on every page. The book is drunk with the power it wields in smashing through every received idea about “Art” and its “development.”

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The first 27,500 years are a reasonably smooth romp. Then things get a little trickier. Gombrich himself was always aware that somewhere in the 18th century the plot thickens considerably. That’s because it was around that time when people in Europe decided that when they were doing art, they were doing Art. It's also the time during which theories of art really start to proliferate and aesthetics becomes a specific discipline. People decided that Art was a specific kind of activity with its own domain and its own rules.

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This can all be summed up with one specific object and one specific question: What in the world is 30,000 Years going to do with Marcel Duchamp's “Fountain,” the factory-produced, ceramic urinal that Duchamp turned upside down, signed R. Mutt, and displayed as a work of art in an exhibit in 1917? It is a work that denies artistic skill in almost every way that Gombrich meant it. It is the quintessential challenge to the story of image and skill. This, in fact, is the question that Arthur C. Danto, the eminent art critic and philosopher, once posed as an attack on the Gombrich line. The fact, Danto noted, that Gombrich cannot account for works like Duchamp's “Fountain” means that Gombrich's claim that art is essentially about visual images breaks down once we get into the modern period. Art, Danto would point out, has changed. To ignore this fact would be to close one's eyes to everything that has been happening in art for at least the last 150 years.

Do the authors succeed in dealing with the self-reference and irony of Dada? Can art have a history without a theory? Find out the answers to this and much more: read the exciting conclusion at The Smart Set!

Also, see my previous writing on Dada.