Mayas did not believe in 2012 doomsday

This video is called Mayan Calendar 2012 Doomsday Scenarios Debunked By NASA Scientist.

From National Geographic:

Unprecedented Maya Mural Found, Contradicts 2012 “Doomsday” Myth

Under the Guatemalan jungle, 1,200-year-old paintings like no others.

Erik Vance in Xultún, Guatemala

for National Geographic News

Published May 10, 2012

In the last known largely unexcavated Maya megacity, archaeologists have uncovered the only known mural adorning an ancient Maya house, a new study says—and it’s not just any mural.

In addition to a still vibrant scene of a king and his retinue, the walls are rife with calculations that helped ancient scribes track vast amounts of time. Contrary to the idea the Maya predicted the end of the world in 2012, the markings suggests dates thousands of years beyond that.

Perhaps most important, the otherwise humble chamber offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of Maya society. (Video: Mysterious Maya Calendar & Mural Uncovered.)

“The paintings we have here—we’ve never found them anyplace else,” excavation leader William Saturno told National Geographic News.

And in today’s Xultún—to the untrained eye, just 12 square miles (31 square kilometers) of jungle floor—it’s a wonder Saturno’s team found the artwork at all.

See also here. And here. And here.

Numbers in ancient Egypt

29 November 2007.

From The Times, in London, England:

Why a Nile tadpole means a great deal

Ancient Egypt’s awkward numerical system was based largely on the natural world

George Hart

Recording numbers and quantities was one of the first requirements of the bureaucracy as soon as hieroglyphs had been invented. Items to be accounted for varied from enemies slain in battle and prisoners to how many jars of beer or bunches of onions were needed to accompany the Pharaoh into the afterlife. Inventories of equipment used in temples were kept meticulously and any damage noted down.

The system of writing numbers was logical but cumbersome and took up a lot of space. A vertical or horizontal stroke indicated numbers 1 to 9, a hobble for cattle 10 to 90, a coil of rope 100 to 900 and a lotus 1,000 to 9,000. For higher numerals 10,000 was represented by a finger raised for counting and 100,000 by a tadpole – of which myriads would emerge in the pools left by the Nile’s annual flood. The concept of a million was confined to royal propaganda to convey the sense of the infinite number of years for which the Pharaoh and his monuments would exist. The notation took the form of a god with his arms raised to support the sky.

Where do you find hieroglyphs? See here.

How to read hieroglyphs: here.

Nubian pharaohs: here.

In a landmark article in the March/April 2010 issue of BAR, Orly Goldwasser, professor of Egyptology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explained how the very first alphabet, from which all other alphabets developed, was invented by illiterate Canaanite miners in the turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadem in the Sinai peninsula. Inspired by Egyptian pictorial hieroglyphs and a desire to articulate their own thoughts in writing, these Canaanites created 22 alphabetic acrophonetic signs scratched into the rock that could express their entire language: here.

Economic ‘Nobel Prize’ for undeserving recipients

This video is called Nobel Prize: Alfred Nobel, the Man P1.

From Monthly Review:

12.10.10

Adding Insult to Injury: On the 2010 Bank of Sweden Economics Prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel

by Yanis Varoufakis

Imagine a world ravaged by a plague, and suppose that the year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine is awarded to researchers whose whole career is based on the assumption that plagues are impossible. The world would have been outraged. That is precisely how we should feel about yesterday’s announcement of the recipients of the 2010 Nobel Prize.

The three academic economists, upon whom the 2010 Economics Nobel Prize was just bestowed, are undoubtedly technically accomplished, innovative in the way that they construct their models, and, in fact, rather nice people. But before we give them a pat on the back, and join in their celebrations, let us have a look at the official description of their contribution to society. This is how the Financial Times (11th October 2010) presented the body of work of the three men: Peter Diamond, Dale Mortenson, and Chris Pissarides:

[They] “have made fundamental contributions to understanding how supply and demand are matched when there are transactions or search costs involved. . . . The laureates “search and matching” theories show that it is not enough to have buyers and sellers who can in principle agree on a price; those buyers and sellers must also find each other and decide to enter into a transaction rather than hold out for a better match. Transactions do not happen by themselves but after a search process that can be costly and time-consuming, the research found. This makes it possible for market outcomes to match supply and demand well, inefficiently or not at all. The laureates’ insights have been applied, by themselves and many other researchers, to a wide range of markets, including the housing market, financial products and even marriage choices. But the most important application has been labour markets. Frictions in the matching of workers and jobs mean that labour market outcomes can be inefficient. In particular, the market may produce outcomes in which unemployment persists even if there are workers who would be willing to work at a wage employers would be willing to pay.”

And now for the translation: The three laureates have spent the better part of their careers studying what happens when there are jobs around but the workers who want them cannot find the employers who would like to employ them; and vice versa. On occasion they have narrated cases, using elegant mathematical depictions, like the one in which employer Jack would have happily wanted to hire worker Jill had he known that Jill is, in fact, quite productive but does not hire her because poor Jill has no way of convincing him that she is — e.g. because she is so desperate that she would work for a wage so low that it ‘signals’ to Jack that, to be that desperate, she cannot possibly be as productive a worker as she claims! Lastly, one of them (Mortenson) cut his teeth showing that workers can rationally choose to become unemployed as an ‘investment strategy’: that is, to quit a bad job in search of a better one (an activity that may need to be a full-time endeavor).

Interestingly, these three fine mathematical economists have one thing in common, other than their work on labor markets: in their voluminous theoretical output on unemployment and the like, there is not a smidgeon of a hint, of a mention, of an economic crisis which may boost unemployment in every sector and for all types of workers. Not one!

Thus, the plague parallel above. In 2008, for the first time since 1929, capitalism went into a paroxysm at a grand scale. Millions of people lost their homes, even more lost their jobs, houses remain unsold and workers linger in the no man’s land of redundancy. At a time when even Mr. Bernanke is worried about the widespread impact and inexorable dynamic of unemployment, from the construction industry to the high technology sector, these three economists are rewarded for work on unemployment based on models in which mass unemployment is simply impossible.

How can that be? My simple claim is this: Mainstream economics is the most peculiar of all theoretical failures. Unlike astrology or phrenology, economics becomes more discursively powerful the greater its incapacity to inform us on really existing capitalism.

Well, undeserved as this year’s prize is, it is still not as underserved as the prize was for Milton Friedman, quack, big business ideologist, fiddler with statistical data, helpmate of Pinochet‘s drug dealing, torturing, murdering dictatorship, and “intellectual” author of the present economic crisis in Iceland and most of the rest of the world.

That really was an insult to the memory of Alfred Nobel, who, though the inventor of dynamite, was a pacifist, unlike quite some recent Peace Prize recipients; and who, though a capitalist, had anti-capitalist ideas.

The ‘Nobel prize’ for economics is no such thing: here.

Britain: A disgraced hedge fund manager’s collection of luxury teddy bears and soft toys sold for more than £1 million when it went under the hammer today: here.

Bono just managed to hit a new low, proposing we scrap the minimum wage: here.

Recession continues for most Americans, even as Wall Street pay sets new records: here.

Citigroup accused of using recession to get rid of female employees: here.

Billionaire Investor Found Guilty of Fraud and Conspiracy. Peter Lattman, The New York Times News Service: “Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire investor who once ran one of the world’s largest hedge funds, was found guilty of fraud and conspiracy on Wednesday by a federal jury in Manhattan. He is the most prominent figure convicted in the government’s crackdown on insider trading on Wall Street. Mr. Rajaratnam, who was convicted on all 14 counts, could face as much as 19 and a half years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines, prosecutors said on Wednesday. He will be sentenced on July 29″: here.

Textbooks causing science gender gap

This video from the USA is called Oakland Program Aims to Pique Girls’ Interest in Science, Tech Careers.

A video from England which used to be on YouTube used to say about itself:

12 March 2010 — A look at the work Skyswood Primary School in St Albans is doing to encourage girls to enjoy science. When the staff at the school gave the children an annual questionnaire about subjects, they were alarmed to discover that while 70 per cent of boys loved science, only 30 per cent of girls had the same level of enjoyment. The school adopted a number of initiatives to tackle the issue, including more school visits, more science-related visitors in school, and more practical lessons.

From World Science:

Mostly-male book images may reduce girls’ science scores

April 23, 2010
Special to World Science

Part of the rea­son boys tend to out­score girls in sci­ence clas­ses may be that most text­books show pre­dom­i­nantly male sci­en­tists’ im­ages, a small ex­plor­a­to­ry study has found.

The stu­dy, on 81 young high-school stu­dents, saw the “gen­der gap” ap­par­ently re­versed when youths were tested based on a text con­tain­ing only female sci­ent­ist im­ages, in­ves­ti­ga­tors said. The gap re­turned in its usu­al form when ma­le-only im­ages were used—and van­ished when the pho­tos showed equal num­bers of men and wom­en sci­en­tists, re­search­ers said.

The in­ves­ti­ga­tors cau­tioned, based on the small sam­ple size and oth­er fac­tors, that it’s un­real­is­tic to ex­pect it would be so easy to erase the gen­der gap in real life.

None­the­less, the find­ings hint that “pro­vid­ing stu­dents with di­verse role mod­els with­in text­book im­ages” may be an im­por­tant step, the re­search­ers wrote in re­port­ing their re­sults. The stu­dy, by Jes­si­ca J. Good of Rut­gers Uni­vers­ity in New Jer­sey and col­leagues, is pub­lished in the March-Ap­ril is­sue of the Jour­nal of So­cial Psy­chol­o­gy.

Oth­er re­search­ers have pro­posed that so­ci­e­ty can wipe out the pe­r­for­mance gap—which has al­ready shrunk­en in re­cent years—by mak­ing stronger ef­forts to give both sexes si­m­i­lar re­sources and op­por­tun­i­ties. A 2004 re­port by the U.S. Cen­ter for Educa­t­ion Sta­tis­tics not­ed that the pre­vi­ous year, sci­ence scores for eighth-grade boys ex­ceeded those for eighth-grade girls in 28 out of 34 coun­tries sur­veyed.

In the study on text­book im­ages, ninth- and tenth-grade stu­dents, 29 male and 52 fema­le, were asked to read a three-page chem­is­try text with one pho­to per page. Stu­dents were ran­domly as­signed one of three ver­sions of the read­ing: one whose pic­tures showed all male sci­en­tists, anoth­er with only female sci­en­tists and one with equal num­bers of sci­en­tists of both sexes. The text it­self was the same in all cases.

The stu­dents, who had no pri­or for­mal chem­is­try train­ing, were next di­rect­ed to take a short test on the read­ing.

Girls did sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter when us­ing the text with wom­en-only im­ages, the in­ves­ti­ga­tors re­ported. Boys did bet­ter with the men-only im­ages, though the dif­fer­ence here did­n’t reach a sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant lev­el. Over­all, av­er­age scores were high­er for girls than boys among all stu­dents who got the wom­en-only ver­sion.

The com­mon pre­dom­i­nance of ma­le-sci­ent­ist im­ages in text­books is a case of what some read­ers would pe­rceive as “stereo­type threat,” a phe­nom­e­non first de­scribed by re­search­ers at Stan­ford Uni­vers­ity in Cal­i­for­nia in the mid-1990s, ac­cord­ing to Good and col­leagues.

Ster­e­o­type threat oc­curs when a test-taker is pre­sented with, or freshly re­minded of, a ster­e­o­type that re­flects neg­a­tively on his or her abil­i­ties in the sub­ject mat­ter at hand. Stud­ies have found that ster­e­o­type threats push down the test-taker’s score, in the same di­rec­tion the ster­e­o­type would pre­dict.

Thus a pre­dom­i­nance of ma­le-sci­ent­ist im­ages in the ma­jor­ity of sci­ence text­books may re­in­force pop­u­lar no­tions that girls are worse at sci­ence, and then lead to re­sults in line with those ideas, said Good and col­leagues.

Ster­e­o­type threats have been found to af­fect mi­nor­i­ties as well as fema­les. And the new find­ings sug­gest ster­e­o­type threat might work both ways—hurt­ing not only those dis­fa­vored by a com­mon ster­e­o­type, but those fa­vored as well. In par­tic­u­lar, al­though the pop­u­lar ster­e­o­type is that boys are the top pe­rformers in sci­ence, Good’s re­sults hinted that boys’ scores, too, might suf­fer if they saw pic­tures that cut against the flat­ter­ing ster­e­o­type.

A sim­ple so­lu­tion that pre­s­ents it­self, though it re­quires more re­search, would be “mixed-gen­der text­book im­ages,” the re­search­ers wrote. These “may rep­re­sent a sim­ple and cost-ef­fec­tive way to rem­e­dy the neg­a­tive ef­fects of stereo­typic text­book im­ages.”

They cau­tioned that not­with­stand­ing the lat­est re­sults, oth­er stud­ies have found that re­mov­ing ster­e­o­type threats does­n’t com­pletely elim­i­nate pe­r­for­mance gaps among dif­fer­ent groups, though it helps.

How ex­actly ster­e­o­type-threat ef­fects work is un­known, Good and col­leagues said, al­though there is ev­i­dence that they ope­rate largely sub­con­scious­ly. Pos­si­ble rea­sons may in­clude anx­i­e­ty or in­tru­sive thoughts caused by the ster­e­o­type threat, they wrote. Anoth­er ex­plana­t­ion may be that there is a sub­con­scious ten­den­cy to con­form to so­ci­e­tal ex­pecta­t­ions.

“Re­search should in­ves­t­i­gate the in­flu­ence of di­verse role mod­els pre­sented in text­books as a way of im­prov­ing pe­r­for­mance of mul­ti­ple ster­e­o­typed groups, not just wom­en,” the in­ves­ti­ga­tors con­clud­ed. “Although elim­i­nat­ing gen­der bi­as in text­books will most likely not erad­i­cate the gen­der gap in sci­ence in­ter­est and achieve­ment, it will beg­in to chip away at an ev­er crum­bling founda­t­ion.”

Girls are more interested in studying science if topics are presented in a female friendly way. This is one of the findings of Dr Sylvie Kerger [of] the University of Luxembourg whose research is published online [in] the British Journal of Educational Psychology by BPS Journals in partnership with Wiley-Blackwell: here.

Stereotypes about math and gender are learned young: here.

Women in science: In pursuit of female chemists: here.

Women account for nearly two-thirds of the 776 million illiterate adults in the world: here.

Golden ratio, new research

From Duke University in the USA:

Mystery of golden ratio explained

DURHAM, N.C. — The Egyptians supposedly used it to guide the construction [of] the Pyramids. The architecture of ancient Athens is thought to have been based on it. Fictional Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon tried to unravel its mysteries in the novel The Da Vinci Code.

“It” is the golden ratio, a geometric proportion that has been theorized to be the most aesthetically pleasing to the eye and has been the root of countless mysteries over the centuries. Now, a Duke University engineer has found it to be a compelling springboard to unify vision, thought and movement under a single law of nature’s design.

Also know the divine proportion, the golden ratio describes a rectangle with a length roughly one and a half times its width. Many artists and architects have fashioned their works around this proportion. For example, the Parthenon in Athens and Leonardo da Vinci‘s painting Mona Lisa are commonly cited examples of the ratio.

Adrian Bejan, professor of mechanical engineering at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, thinks he knows why the golden ratio pops up everywhere: the eyes scan an image the fastest when it is shaped as a golden-ratio rectangle.

The natural design that connects vision and cognition is a theory that flowing systems — from airways in the lungs to the formation of river deltas — evolve in time so that they flow more and more easily. Bejan termed this the constructal law in 1996, and its latest application appears early online in the International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics.

“When you look atwhat so many people have been drawing and building, you see these proportions everywhere,” Bejan said. “It is well known that the eyes take in information more efficiently when they scan side-to-side, as opposed to up and down.”

Bejan argues that the world – whether it is a human looking at a painting or a gazelle on the open plain scanning the horizon – is basically oriented on the horizontal. For the gazelle, danger primarily comes from the sides or from behind, not from above or below, so their scope of vision evolved to go side-to-side. As vision developed, he argues, the animals got “smarter” by seeing better and moving faster and more safely.

“As animals developed organs for vision, they minimized the danger from ahead and the sides,” Bejan said. “This has made the overall flow of animals on earth safer and more efficient. The flow of animal mass develops for itself flow channels that are efficient and conducive to survival – straighter, with fewer obstacles and predators.”

For Bejan, vision and cognition evolved together and are one and the same design as locomotion.The increased efficiency of information flowing from the world through the eyes to the brain corresponds with the transmission of this information through the branching architecture of nerves and the brain.

“Cognition is the name of the constructal evolution of the brain’s architecture, every minute and every moment,” Bejan said. “This is the phenomenon of thinking, knowing, and then thinking again more efficiently. Getting smarter is the constructal law in action.”

While the golden ratio provided a conceptual entryway into this view of nature’s design, Bejan sees something even broader.

“It is the oneness of vision, cognition and locomotion as the design of the movement of all animals on earth,” he said. “The phenomenon of the golden ratio contributes to this understanding the idea that pattern and diversity coexist as integral and necessary features of the evolutionary design of nature.”

In numerous papers and books over past decade, Bejan has demonstrated that the constructal law (www.constructal.org) predicts a wide range of flow system designs seen in nature, from biology and geophysics to social dynamics and technology evolution.

Capitalist ideological restrictions hurt science, and the economy

This video is called Culture as the Ideological Battleground of the Capitalist World-System: Part 1.

From the daily News Line in Britain:

Friday, 18 December 2009

RESEARCH FUNDING CHANGES AN ATTACK ON SCIENCE – says UCU

Two UCU members hold up a picture of Einstein outside the House of Commons on Wednesday. Einstein who said about research ‘If we knew what it was what we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?’

THE government’s changes to research funding threaten the future of science in Britain, leading experts are warning.

According to Professor Donald Braben, Honorary Professor, Department of Earth Sciences, University College London, virtually every major scientific discovery ever made would not have survived the current REF regime with its emphasis on ‘economic impact’.

The University and College Union (UCU) delivered a petition with 17,000 signatures to parliament on Wednesday against research cuts.

The UCU cited several examples of prize-winning scientific research in the UK that may never have occurred if the new funding arrangements had been in place then.

These included:

• Crick and Watson: Nobel Laureates Medicine, 1962.

Serious objections were raised to their proposed use of X-ray crystallography.

Neither Crick nor Watson had previously used X-rays. But they went ahead anyway and discovered the double helix structure for DNA.

• Peter D Mitchell, Nobel Laureate, Chemistry, 1978.

Mitchell proposed the chemiosmotic process in 1961, arguably the most important biological-sciences discovery of the 20th century.

His radical proposal challenged the conventional wisdom of the time, and was received by almost total hostility.

• Max Perutz and John Kendrew, Nobel Laureates, Chemistry, 1962.

They worked on the problem of haemoglobin structure for 25 years.

Dr Robert Kirby-Harris, chief executive of the Institute of Physics, recently said: ‘History shows us that in many cases it is basic research, undertaken purely out of curiosity to understand more about our world, that has delivered revolutionary breakthroughs.

‘X-rays, lasers and semiconductors – technologies which are widely used in every aspect of our lives – all stem from discoveries made through fundamental research, undertaken without any immediate application in mind.’

‘The Institute of Physics has produced the following set of case studies, showcasing the vital contribution that curiosity-driven physics research has made to a number of major technological developments,’ said the UCU.

These in turn, the union added, ‘have led to significant contributions to the UK’s gross domestic product and/or improved the quality of life of its people.’

• Cancer diagnosis and treatment.

‘Physics research has played, and continues to play, an essential role in improving the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.’

• DNA and physics.

‘The discovery of the structure of DNA heralded the birth of the field of molecular biology, in which physicists, chemists and biologists work together to unravel the basic processes of life.’

• The global positioning system.

‘Satellite-based navigation and positioning technology, underpinned by physics research, is no longer the preserve of the military but is now an invaluable aid in all aspects of life.’

• Holography.

‘A technique creating three-dimensional images based on the physics of light waves, and invented in the UK, has a range of applications – from security to data storage.

• Lasers.

‘Lasers provide the archetypal example of how a discovery in basic physics led to an invention, several decades later, that was unpredictably world-changing.’

• Liquid-crystal displays.

‘Liquid-crystal displays have become the image-display technology of choice, following a long chain of physics-based R&D initiated by pioneering work in the UK.’

• Magnetic resonance imaging

‘Magnetic resonance imaging, based on ideas from nuclear physics and developed in the UK, is now a routine, safe, clinical technique for seeing inside the body and diagnosing disease.’

• Optical fibres.

‘Light-carrying glass fibres have transformed communications, thanks to pioneering work carried out by UK physicists.’

• The ozone layer.

‘Understanding and protecting the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere has been a major achievement in physics-based environmental research.’

• The World Wide Web.

‘The World Wide Web is an outstanding example of how research in particle physics changed the world in a totally unforeseeable way.’

In the field of chemistry, the UCU cites the work of Sir Harry Kroto.

He said: ‘I had been fascinated by carbon chains ever since my PhD work (1961-64) and David’s polyynes re-awakened this interest and in particular initiated ideas about how very long carbon chains might vibrate.

‘The image in my mind was of the way I had seen a wave blip travel along a long slackish wire or rope and a travelling wave in a canal or river such as the Severn Bore.

‘I wondered how quantum mechanics would handle these sorts of problems.

‘Could we study the highly excited vibrational levels of such chains and observe quantum properties gradually metamorphose into this sort of classical visually-imaged behaviour as implied by the Bohr Correspondence Principle?’

The discovery of C60 will have its 25th anniversary next year and it is only now that applications appear to be on the horizon.

One of the most important properties of C60 is that it is an outstanding electron trap and the commercialisation of organic solar cells doped with fullerenes (which improve the efficiency of electricity production) and printed on inexpensive thin plastic is now imminent.

On the medical front the fullerene cages are able to trap biologically toxic atoms inside the cage physically, rather than chemically, and their application as non-toxic MRI imaging and radioactive anti-cancer agents appears also to be imminent.

The UCU commented: ‘History has shown time-and-again that the basics of the above story are very often the way that important breakthroughs occur.

‘Indeed it is blindingly obvious that the really unexpected and unpredictable discoveries are invariably more important than those that are the result of targeted initiatives.

‘The discovery of C60 was the result of an experiment to understand stellar and interstellar chemistry. . . Time-and-again it is only when discoveries are made that possible applications become obvious, and then almost invariably made by scientists in a totally different field from that of the original discoverer.’

Excellent examples of this, said the UCU, are the applications of lasers to eye surgery and bar-code scanners at supermarket cash desks.

Professor Donald Braben said: ‘Lasers are used today in everything from surgical procedures to light displays, but it was not until 20 years after the technology was invented by the Nobel prizewinning scientist Charles Townes that industry began to see its potential (Professor Townes certainly did not).

‘What would happen today if a scientist sought funding from UK research councils to pursue inquiry on similar lines?

‘The laser was described, for a very long time, as “a solution looking for a problem’’.’

The same is true in the field of mathematics, said the UCU.

Professor Ari Laptev, President of the European Mathematical Society, said: ‘It is true that many new results in mathematics do not have immediate applications but, eventually, most of them do become applicable.

‘Let me mention a few recent examples where the use of mathematics has proved crucial:

• ‘Integral geometry, dealing with so-called inverse problems, has provided a methodology used in:
medical imaging for identifying tumours, weather radars, the search for oil fields, astronomy, etc.

• ‘The creation of modern fibre optic cables would not be possible without the discovery of special solutions of non-linear equations called solitons.

• ‘The arrival of the Internet made people fear that the world would be drowned in vast amounts of information.

‘This problem has been successfully resolved by Google, which invariably delivers, instantly, the information sought.

‘It seems like magic but the searching algorithm of Google was in fact provided by mathematicians.

• ‘The theory of wavelets has been enormously important in telecommunications.

‘It allows us to transmit information in a most compact way and ultimately gives us the possibility of all sorts of wireless connections.

• ‘Credit card security is only possible thanks to cryptology, which uses a branch of number theory.

• ‘Mathematicians are involved in improving the understanding of fundamental problems in genomics research, cell signalling, systems physiology, infection and immunity, developmental biology, the spreading of disease and ecology.’

The mathematical theories used in these examples were not originally developed with any particular application in mind but purely as a result of the curiosity of scientists.

Capitalism and science: here.

Choice in capitalism: here.

Cool mathematician, Benoit Mandelbrot, dies: here.

British government apology on homophobia after 55 years

From the New York Times in the USA:

Britain: Apology to Gay Mathematician

By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

Published: September 11, 2009

Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized Friday to the mathematician Alan Turing, who committed suicide in 1954 after he was tried and convicted of “gross indecency” for being homosexual.

Mr. Brown said that Turing had been treated “terribly” and that the outcome of World War II could have been quite different had it not been for Turing’s efforts in cracking German codes, notably the Enigma coding machine. Turing is often hailed for his influence on modern computing. Thousands of people have signed a petition calling for a formal apology from the government, though Turing has no known surviving family, The Daily Telegraph reported. Writing in the newspaper, Mr. Brown said: “On behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work, I am very proud to say: We’re sorry. You deserved so much better.” Turing was sentenced, as an alternative to prison, to chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones, the prime minister noted.

See also here.

Comment: Brown’s apology to Alan Turing is not good enough: here. And here.

Homophobia in Britain: here. And here.

Gay Australians want marriage, not partnerships: here.

GAY RIGHTS IN THE FORMER EAST GERMAN DDR: here.

UGANDA – ON THE CUSP OF INTRODUCING DEATH PENALTY FOR GAYS: here.

The Ugandan government will put to death gay citizens repeatedly caught having sex and throw into jail those who touch each other in a “gay” way, if a new proposed Bill becomes law: here.

Arabic medieval chemistry

From the American Chemical Society:

Arabic chemists from the ‘Golden Age’ given long overdue credit

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16, 2009 — You’ve heard of Louis Pasteur and George Washington Carver, no doubt. And probably Joseph Priestley, one of the founders of modern chemistry. Names like Antoine Lavoisier, John Dalton, and Amadeo Avogadro may even bring a twinkle of recognition to the eye for their famous roles in establishing chemistry as a modern science.

But what about Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (“Rhazes”)? Or Jabir ibn Hayyan (“Geber”)? Or Abu Jusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi. Huh?

“You should know them,” Benjamin Huddle, Ph.D., declared in a report presented here today at the 238th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society. They’re chemists from the Golden Age of Arabic-Islamic Science, which stretched from the 8th to the 13th centuries. During this era, science and medicine in Muslim countries — from southern Europe through North Africa to Central Asia and India — flourished and was unrivaled anywhere in the world. Muslim physicians and scientists made advancements that built the foundations for the emergence of modern science and medicine in Europe.

“Science in the early Muslim period is largely forgotten today in the Western world, or relegated to pseudo-science,” Huddle said. “We are rediscovering the fact that from 750 to 1258 A.D. the best science in the world was being done by Arabic-speaking peoples. In chemistry we use language from the Arabs, apparatus and techniques, many chemicals (especially perfumes), and many materials.”

Huddle did his research on the Golden Age, which produced a portrait of Arabic-Islamic love for learning and reverence for education and knowledge that defies popular modern stereotypes.

Danish poetess Inger Christensen dies

This video says about itself:

Sound project (audio only) using Danish poet Inger Christensen‘s long poem “It” (translated Susanna Nied). Section 1 of Prologos : 66 Voices reading a 66 line stanza.

From British daily The Independent:

Inger Christensen: Experimental poet who used mathematical structures in her work

Monday, 2 February 2009

Inger Christensen was one of Denmark’s most innovative experimental poets. She is perhaps best known for her major poem “Alfabet” (“Alphabet”, 1981), a systematic work which uses the letters from “a” (beginning with apricots) to “n” (nights), coupled with the Fibonacci mathematical sequence (0,1,1,2,3,5,8…), representing growth in nature.

Christensen was born in 1935 in Vejle, on the eastern coast of Denmark. Following high school and teacher training college she taught for two years at the College for Arts in Holbæk and subsequently chose to take up writing full time, a decision in which she was encouraged by Poul Borum, whom she married in 1959. Her first volumes of poetry, which emerged during this period, Lys (Light, 1962) and Græs (Grass, 1963), examine the relationship between creativity, language, perception and the self.

A larger collection of poetry, Det (It), was published in 1969 and reflected an era of upheaval and social change across the Western world. A poem from this volume, “The Action: symmetries”, chants in frustration:

Society can be so petrified
That it’s all one solid block
Inhabitants so ossified
That life’s in a state of shock

From another poem by Inger Christensen:

ice ages exists, ice ages exists,
ice of the arctics and ice of the kingfisher;
cicadas exist, chicory, chrome
and the chrome yellow iris, the blue iris; oxygen
indeed; also ice floes in the arctic ocean,
polar bears exist, as fur inscribed
with an individual number he exists, condemned to his life;
& the kingfisher’s mini-drop into the ice-blue rivers

(from ‘Alphabet 9, 10′, in Alphabet, trans. by Pierre Joris)

Racism in Denmark: here.

Egalitarianism in human prehistory

This is a video of a discussion in the USA about the Clovis comet theory about the Pleistocene.

From ScienceDaily:

Egalitarian Revolution In The Pleistocene?

ScienceDaily (Oct. 6, 2008) — Although anthropologists and evolutionary biologists are still debating this question, a new study supports the view that the first egalitarian societies may have appeared tens of thousands of years before the French Revolution, Marx, and Lenin.

These societies emerged rapidly through intense power struggle and their origin had dramatic implications for humanity. In many mammals living in groups, including hyenas, meerkats, and dolphins, group members form coalitions and alliances that allow them to increase their dominance status and their access to mates and other resources. Alliances are especially common in great apes, some of whom have very intense social life, where they are constantly engaged in a political maneuvering as vividly described in Frans de Waal’s “Chimpanzee politics”.

In spite of this, the great apes’ societies are very hierarchical with each animal occupying a particular place in the existing dominance hierarchy. A major function of coalitions in apes is to maintain or change the dominance ranking. When an alpha male is well established, he usually can intimidate any hostile coalition or the entire community.

In sharp contrast, most known hunter-gatherer societies are egalitarian. Their weak leaders merely assist a consensus-seeking process when the group needs to make decisions, but otherwise all main political actors behave as equal. Some anthropologists argue that in egalitarian societies the pyramid of power is turned upside down with potential subordinates being able to express dominance over potential alpha-individuals by creating large, group-wide political alliance.

What were the reasons for such a drastic change in the group’s social organization during the origin of our own “uniquely unique” species? Some evolutionary biologists theorize that at some point in the Pleistocene, humans reached a level of ecological dominance that dramatically transformed the natural selection landscape. Instead of traditional “hostile forces of nature”, the competitive interactions among members of the same group became the most dominant evolutionary factor. According to this still controversial view, known as the “social brain” or “Machiavellian intelligence” hypothesis, more intelligent individuals were able to take advantage of other members of their group, achieve higher social status, and leave more offspring who inherited their parent’s genes for larger brain size and intelligence. As a result of this runaway process, the average brain size and intelligence were increasing across the whole human lineage.

Also increasing were the abilities to keep track of within-group social interactions, to remember friends and their allies and enemies, and to attract and use allies. At some point, physically weaker members of the group started forming successful and stable large coalitions against strong individuals who otherwise would achieve alpha-status and usurp the majority of the crucial resources. Eventually, an egalitarian society was established. Although some of its components are well supported by data, this scenario remains highly controversial. One reason is its complexity which makes it difficult to interpret the data and to intuit the consequences of interactions between multiple evolutionary, ecological, behavioral, and social factors acting simultaneously. It is also tricky to evaluate relevant time-scales and figure out possible evolutionary dynamics.

A new article in PLoS One makes steps towards answering these challenges. The paper is co-authored by Sergey Gavrilets, a theoretical evolutionary biologist, and two computer scientists, Edgar Duenez-Guzman and Michael Vose, all from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

The researchers built a complex mathematical model describing the process of alliance formation which they then studied using analytical methods and large-scale numerical simulations. The model focuses on a group of individuals who vary strongly in their fighting abilities. If all conflicts were exclusively between pairs of individuals, a hierarchy would emerge with a few strongest individuals getting most of the resource. However, there is also a tendency (very small initially) for individuals to interfere in an ongoing dyadic conflict thus biasing its outcome one way or another. Positive outcomes of such interferences increase the affinities between individuals while negative outcomes decrease them. Naturally, larger coalitions have higher probability of winning a conflict.

Gavrilets and colleagues identified conditions under which alliances can emerge in the group: increasing group size, growing awareness of ongoing conflicts, better abilities in attracting allies and building complex coalitions, and better memories of past events.

Most interestingly, the model shows that the shift from a group with no alliances to one or more alliances typically occurs suddenly, within several generations, in a phase-transition like fashion. Even more surprisingly, under certain conditions (which include some cultural inheritance of social networks) a single alliance comprising all members of the group can emerge in which resources are divided evenly. That is, the competition among non-equal individuals can paradoxically result in their eventual equality.

Gavrilets and colleagues argue that such an “egalitarian revolution” could also follow a change in the mating system that would increase father-son social bonds or an increase in fidelity of cultural inheritance of social networks. Interestingly, the fact that mother-daughter social bonds are often very strong in apes suggests (everything else being the same) that females could more easily achieve egalitarian societies.

The model also highlights the importance of the presence of outsiders (or “scapegoats”) for stability of small alliances. The researchers suggest that the establishment of a stable group-wide egalitarian alliance should create conditions promoting the origin of conscience, moralistic aggression, altruism, and other cultural norms favoring group interests over those of individuals. Increasing within-group cohesion should also promote the group efficiency in between-group conflicts and intensify cultural group selection.

“Our language probably emerged to simplify the formation and improve the efficiency of coalitions and alliances,” says Gavrilets. The scientists caution that one should be careful in applying their model to contemporary humans (whether members of modern societies or hunter-gathers). In contemporary humans, an individual’s decision to join coalitions is strongly affected by his/her estimates of costs, benefits, and risks associated as well as by cultural beliefs and traditions. These are the factors explicitly left outside of the modeling framework.

In humans, a secondary transition from egalitarian societies to hierarchical states took place as the first civilizations were emerging. How can it be understood in terms of the model discussed? One can speculate that technological and cultural advances made the coalition size much less important in controlling the outcome of a conflict than the individuals’ ability to directly control and use resources (e.g. weapons, information, food) that strongly influence the outcomes of conflicts.

Journal reference:

1. Gavrilets et al. Dynamics of Alliance Formation and the Egalitarian Revolution. PLoS ONE, 2008; 3 (10): e3293 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0003293

Adapted from materials provided by Public Library of Science, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

So­ci­eties with great­er in­e­qual­ity be­tween rich and poor tend nat­u­rally to ex­pand at the ex­pense of the oth­ers, ac­cord­ing to a new study based on sim­ula­t­ions. Re­search­ers say this may ex­plain why in­e­qual­ity is the norm to­day: here.

Around 12,800 years ago the northern hemisphere was hit by the Younger Dryas mini ice age, or “Big Freeze”. It was triggered by the slowdown of the Gulf Stream, led to the decline of the Clovis culture in North America, and lasted around 1300 years: here.