Letters Remain

  • On Being Foreign

    Having (very) recently emigrated from the UK (to the Netherlands), this article on what it means to be ‘foreign’ was not only timely, but quite emotive, too.

    The [complaining foreigner] answers [the question of why he doesn’t go home] by thinking of himself as an exile—if not in a judicial sense then in a spiritual sense. Something within himself has driven him away from his homeland. He becomes even a touch jealous of the real exile. Life abroad is an adventure. How much greater might the adventure be, how much more intense the sense of foreignness, if there were no possibility of return? […]

    The funny thing is, with the passage of time, something does happen to long-term foreigners which makes them more like real exiles, and they do not like it at all. The homeland which they left behind changes. The culture, the politics and their old friends all change, die, forget them. They come to feel that they are foreigners even when visiting “home”. Jhumpa Lahiri, a British-born writer of Indian descent living in America, catches something of this in her novel, The Namesake. Ashima, who is an Indian émigré, compares the experience of foreignness to that of “a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that the previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding”.

    Beware, then: however well you carry it off, however much you enjoy it, there is a dangerous undertow to being a foreigner, even a genteel foreigner. Somewhere at the back of it all lurks homesickness, which metastasises over time into its incurable variant, nostalgia. And nostalgia has much in common with the Freudian idea of melancholia—a continuing, debilitating sense of loss, somewhere within which lies anger at the thing lost. It is not the possibility of returning home which feeds nostalgia, but the impossibility of it.

    Choosing just one or two passages to quote in this article was very difficult.

    via Link Banana

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Art Forgeries and the Uncanny Valley

    In the third instalment of the Bamboozling Ourselves series (a look at the master Vermeer forger, Han van Meegeren), Errol Morris interviews the author of The Forger’s Spell, Edward Dolnick, and the two discuss the application of the uncanny valley in the forgery of art.

    I particularly like Dolnick’s thoughts on the hindrance of expertise (final paragraph of this excerpt).

    You would think a close copy would be the goal of a forger, but it might not be a smart way to go. If you were a brilliant technician it might be an acceptable strategy, but my forger, Van Meegeren, is not as good as that. […] He’s going to get in trouble, because that’s asking for a side-by-side comparison, and he’s not good enough to get away with that. […]

    So how is he going to paint a picture that doesn’t look like a Vermeer, but that people are going to say, “Oh! It’s a Vermeer?” How’s he going to pull it off? It’s a tough challenge. Now here’s the point of The Uncanny Valley: as your imitation gets closer and closer to the real thing, people think, “Good, good, good!” — but then when it’s very close, when it’s within 1 percent or something, instead of focusing on the 99 percent that is done well, they focus on the 1 percent that you’re missing, and you’re in trouble. Big trouble. […]

    Van Meegeren is trapped in the valley. If he tries for the close copy, an almost exact copy, he’s going to fall short. He’s going to look silly. So what he does instead is rely on the blanks in Vermeer’s career, because hardly anything is known about him. […] He’ll take advantage of those blanks by inventing a whole new era in Vermeer’s career. No one knows what he was up to all this time. He’ll throw in some Vermeer touches, including a signature, so that people who look at it will be led to think, “Yes, this is a Vermeer.” […]

    It wasn’t going to be about how “you can’t tell the difference,” because you could. It would be, “How could people look at these things which are manifestly so different and not see what’s going on?” It became a story about how experts can get it wrong, and in fact, how expert knowledge, instead of helping, can be a hindrance. On the surface it seemed to be a story about art and history, but really, it’s a story about psychology.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • For Continuous Learning and Generalisation

    Stating that our “reality is out of date” and coining the term “mesofacts” for those pieces of knowledge that pass us by unawares, Samuel Arbesman shows why continuous learning and generalisation are advantageous behaviours–or at least that specialisation to the degree that it is currently encouraged is outdated.

    Slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling. […]

    Our schools are biased against mesofacts. The arc of our educational system is to be treated as little generalists when children, absorbing bits of knowledge about everything from biology to social studies to geology. But then, as we grow older, we are encouraged to specialize. This might have been useful in decades past, but in our increasingly fast-paced and interdisciplinary world, lacking an even approximate knowledge of our surroundings is unwise.

    So what’s this I hear about Pluto?

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The New Nature-Nurture Argument

    As it stands, the nature-nurture debate is wrong, proposes David Shenk in his book on the subject, The Genius in All of Us. Shenk submits the idea that we overestimate the effect genes have on many heritable traits, especially intelligence (or that ever-elusive ‘genius’).

    According to Shenk, and he is persuasive, none of this stuff is genetically determined, if by “determined” you mean exclusively or largely dictated by genes. Instead, “one large group of scientists,” a “vanguard” that Shenk has labeled “the interactionists,” insists that the old genes-plus-environment model (G+E) must be jettisoned and replaced by a model they call GxE, emphasizing “the dynamic interaction between genes and the environment.” They don’t discount heredity, as the old blank-slate hypothesis of human nature once did. Instead, they assert that “genes powerfully influence the formation of all traits, from eye color to intelligence, but rarely dictate precisely what those traits will be.”

    The Hacker News discussion on this article is as erudite as ever, and through it I discovered the story of László Polgár and his three daughters:

    [Chess grandmaster Judit Polgár] and her two older sisters, Grandmaster Susan and International Master Sofia, were part of an educational experiment carried out by their father László Polgár, in an attempt to prove that children could make exceptional achievements if trained in a specialist subject from a very early age. “Geniuses are made, not born,” was László’s thesis. He and his wife Klara educated their three daughters at home, with chess as the specialist subject. However, chess was not taught to the exclusion of everything else. Each of them has several diplomas and speaks four to eight languages.

    Shenk’s book sounds like a scientifically-rigourous version of Gladwell’s latest.

    via Intelligent Life

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Language of Signs

    Part five in a Slate series on signage around the world looks at the history of the green “running man” emergency exit sign and its ‘battle’ with the American red EXIT sign.

    We are told how the ISO-accepted emergency exit sign is Yukio Ota’s running man, adopted in the late 1970s. Interesting are Ota’s thoughts on pictograms and their function in society on discovering that the two signs competing for ISO adoption (his and one by a Soviet designer) were remarkably similar:

    Ota, like many designers of pictograms, is a bit of a romantic about the power of symbolic communication. The first real innovator in the field was Otto Neurath, who developed ISOTYPE, a system of pictograms intended to help workers between the world wars relate to Europe’s increasingly industrial economy. […] Like Neurath, Ota believes that through graphical icons, we can transcend our cultural and linguistic differences and speak to one another as global citizens. […]

    The running man is thus the child of both rigorous science and starry-eyed utopianism, and it’s now in use all over the globe.

    Note: The complete set of 50 “passenger/pedestrian symbols” from the AIGI have recently been released to the public and are available for free.

    via @zambonini

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Bilingualism and Dementia

    I’ve noted previously how child bilingualism improves the “executive functions” and a recent study has corroborated these findings while also discovering how bilingualism can stave off dementia in old age:

    [Psychologist Ellen Bailystok] wanted to explore whether enhanced executive control actually has a protective effect in mental aging—specifically, whether bilingualism contributes to the “cognitive reserve” that comes from stimulating social, mental and physical activity. She studied a large group of men and women with dementia, and compared the onset of their first symptoms. The age of onset for dementia was a full four years later in bilinguals than in patients who had lived their lives speaking just one language. That’s a whopping difference. Delaying dementia four years is more than any known drug can do, and could represent a huge savings in health care costs.

    Is there any downside to bilingualism? Yes. […] Bialystok’s studies also found that bilinguals have less linguistic proficiency in either of their two languages than do those who only speak that language. They have somewhat smaller vocabularies, for example, and aren’t as rapid at retrieving word meanings. But compared to the dramatic cognitive advantages of learning a second language, that seems a small price to pay.

    via @siibo

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Blog’s Influence on Writing

    Philip Greenspun on how writing and publishing has evolved since the Internet and, specifically, the blog have become omnipresent in our lives:

    Suppose that an idea merited 20 pages, no more and no less? A handful of long-copy magazines […] would print 20-page essays, but an author who wished his or her work to be distributed would generally be forced to cut it down to a meaningless 5-page magazine piece or add 180 pages of filler until it reached the minimum size to fit into the book distribution system. […]

    Our literary culture is impoverished when every idea is stretched or amputated to fit the Procrustean bed made up by magazine and book publishers. When an author runs out of relevant stuff to say after 20 or 30 pages, that’s how long the essay should be.

    Trough the lens of what was able to be published, Greenspun sees publishing’s evolution like this:

    • Pre-1990: five-page magazine articles and 200-page books.
    • 1990 to 2000: any length essays, with little barrier to entry (static web pages).
    • 2000 onwards: one-paragraph ideas and personal thoughts, widely available (production and consumption) with blogs.
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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The CCTV Trade-Off

    That CCTV doesn’t substantially help in reducing crime has been shown beyond reasonable doubt, proposes Bruce Schneier, so now the pressing question is whether or not the benefits security cameras do afford are worthwhile.

    There are exceptions, of course, and proponents of cameras can always cherry-pick examples to bolster their argument. These success stories are what convince us; our brains are wired to respond more strongly to anecdotes than to data. But the data are clear: CCTV cameras have minimal value in the fight against crime. […]

    The important question isn’t whether cameras solve past crime or deter future crime; it’s whether they’re a good use of resources. They’re expensive, both in money and in their Orwellian effects on privacy and civil liberties. Their inevitable misuse is another cost. […] Though we might be willing to accept these downsides for a real increase in security, cameras don’t provide that.

    In August 2009 Schneier discussed a report that showed only one crime per thousand cameras per year is solved because of CCTV and quotes David Davis MP saying that “CCTV leads to massive expense and minimum effectiveness. It creates a huge intrusion on privacy, yet provides little or no improvement in security.”

    A Home Office study also concluded that cameras had done “virtually nothing” to cut crime (although they were effective in preventing vehicle crimes in car parks), but do “help communities feel safer” (a case of classic security theatre).

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Evidence For (and Against) Health Supplements: a Visualisation

    After collating the results of over 1,500 studies and meta-studies (only “large, human, randomized placebo-controlled trials” were included), Information is Beautiful’s David McCandless collaborated with Andy Perkins to produce a comprehensive data visualisation mapping the the effectiveness (or not) of a wide range of health supplements (there’s a static image and interactive Flash version available).

    Some of the findings:

    • Green tea has been shown to lower cholesterol in a large number of studies, but there’s no sign of cancer prevention properties.
    • There’s strong evidence showing Omega 3‘s cholesterol-lowering abilities and good evidence indicating it can help improve some ADHD behaviour and lower blood pressure. In terms of preventing arthritis and cancer, and in relieving depression, the evidence is conflicting.
    • Fish oil has been shown to help lower blood pressure and the risk of secondary heart disease, but the evidence for it improving general health isn’t strong (but is promising).
    • Vitamin D is fantastic: great for all-round general health and cancer prevention.
    • Vitamins A and E aren’t beneficial for much at all, while Vitamin C studies are somewhat conflicting.
    • Beta carotene‘s position surprised me: there is little-to-no evidence of any health benefits. The same goes for acai and goji berries, ginkgo biloba and copper.

    The raw data used to generate the visualisation is available–along with citations–in a Google document that is occasionally being updated.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Efficacy of Hand Sanitizers

    Given their prevalence in offices, hospitals and pharmacies (how naïve?), I would have thought the effectiveness of hand sanitizers would have been a lot greater than it is:

    In 2005, Boston-based doctors published the very first clinical trial of alcohol-based hand sanitizers in homes and enrolled about 300 families with young children in day care. For five months, half the families got free hand sanitizer and a “vigorous hand-hygiene” curriculum. But the spread of respiratory infections in homes didn’t budge. […] A Columbia University study also found no reduction in common infections among inner-city families given free antibacterial hand soap, detergent, and cleaning supplies. The same year, University of Michigan epidemiologist Allison Aiello summarized data on hand hygiene for the FDA and pointed out that three out of four studies showed that alcohol-based hand sanitizers didn’t prevent respiratory infections. Then, in 2008, the Boston group repeated the study—this time in elementary schools. […] Again, the rate of respiratory infections remained unchanged, though the rate of gastrointestinal infections, which are less common than respiratory infections, did fall slightly. Finally, last October, a report ordered by the Public Health Agency of Canada concluded that there is no good evidence that vigorous hand hygiene practices prevent flu transmission.

    The final advice:

    Follow the data and get a flu shot, wash your hands sensibly after using the bathroom and around meals, and stop wasting money on hand sanitizers.

    via Link Banana, saying “they could (should) have been most explicit on the differences between hand washing […] and hand sanitizers”. Seconded–I’m no longer sure where hand washing fits in this picture.

    Note: The Wikipedia article for hand sanitizers paints them in a slightly more positive light, but with many caveats (e.g. alcohol content and duration of exposure to the product is important, etc.).

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    Lloyd Morgan