This descent from the heights of the conservatism of Buckley et al to its ugly, vulgar form of today is sad indeed.

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more characteristic of conservative leadership are figures on TV, radio and the Internet who make their money by stirring fears and resentments. With its descent to baiting blacks, Mexicans and Muslims, its accommodation of conspiracy theories and an increasing nastiness and vulgarity, the conservative movement has undergone a shift toward demagoguery and hucksterism. Once the talk was of "neocons" versus "paleocons." Now we observe the rule of the crazy-cons.

When I became a conservative, that is what I signed up for: a profound vision granting transcendent significance to public life and hope in private life. The goal wasn't to defeat Democratic officeholders or humiliate left-wing activists. It was, and still is, with those who remember, to save civilization.Read more at www.latimes.com

Here is the transcript from the Nature Podcast of April 15, 2010 (http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/index-2010-04-15.html) where the author of the paper "Catastrophic cascade of failures in interdependent networks" is interviewed and the results discussed. Very interesting as the results _seem_ to be counter to common teaching on networks. I would like to see more research before fully accepting the results of this work as offered by the author. Further questions: How interconnected should the networks be? If a single node failure causes neighbor node failure, is that not the cause of the network's weakness, not its connectedness to the second network?

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This week Eugene Stanley at Boston University and his colleagues have published work describing how small failures in interconnected networks can have catastrophic consequences. I called Eugene to learn more. Nature 464, 1025–1028 (15 April 2010)

H. Eugene Stanley: For want of a nail, the shoe was lost and so forth. It's a wonderful and insightful proverb because it makes clear that you can indeed have a catastrophic cascade, really bad news, what could be more catastrophic than to lose the entire kingdom. However, it's so rare we don't run around you know, being careful about nails. We don't do that because it's very, very, very rare. So the damage of our work, we showed clearly if not dramatically that this was not the case, when networks are coupled. When networks are coupled, it's not at all rare that you'd have a catastrophic cascade.

H. Eugene Stanley: On September 28th, the power went out in Italy, so that's the fundamental fact, power was out. Now what caused the power to go out, the naïve view would be that some transformer burned because a transformer was critical to the functioning of a network, nothing else could function, but that simply is not the case. The power companies built in redundancy, a transformer can burn out, and you still have power; you don't lose power for the whole country of Britain, simply because one transformer burns out because things burn out all the time, so the reason power went out is not that the reason is the power in one transformer so to speak was found to control a computer node as part of the computer network and therefore that computer node became non-functional, that means all the other computer nodes connected to it became non-functional and therefore all the power grid nodes elsewhere could not function; and then there's more and more powered grid node through a now more and more computer grid node through a now back and forth and back and forth and therefore the experience of the person in the street was that suddenly there was no power all over Italy.

Geoff Brumfiel: And this really is the counterintuitive result of your paper, right. I mean, normally in networks we think the more connections there are in a network, the more robust it is, the more routes there are, if there's a failure of the one nodes, but what you've found here is that the more nodes you have interconnected between two networks, the more vulnerable the networks become, isn't that right.

H. Eugene Stanley: Exactly right. But the key thing is two networks, if you'd had only network, for example, if particularly the computer grid do not rely on the power grid, each one relied on battery then it would reasonably robust, but because it depended on another network, which was vulnerable it was not robust, then things happen.

the key statement is that the tightly coupled infrastructures are extremely vulnerable. And that's what we need to be aware of because each decade the world is characterized by more tightly coupled infrastructures and as we go along encouraging these infrastructures, it sounds good, but as we do this we have be cognizant of the fact that they become vulnerableRead more at www.nature.com

A classic case of "siloing" or when human organizations specialize and departmentalize to the degree where they stop communicating with each other.  The example below from planetary sciences where it took 22 years for them to communicate with fluid dynamists on understanding geometric shapes in the clouds of Saturn.  Finding means to bridge these silo gaps often leads to large advances and improved conditions in large organizations (hence the US gov.'s executive branch love of various "czars", e.g."drug czar", to act to bridge different departments and administrations)

Science Magazine Podcast - 9 April 2010
Transcript

Interviewee – David Grimm

Well, what’s happening, Rob, is there’s this very unusual shape known as "Saturn’s Hexagon." This is a giant six-sided figure over Saturn’s North Pole.

Interviewer – Robert Frederick

What’s causing it?

Interviewee – David Grimm

Well, this hexagon is actually made up of a jet stream. If you look at a photo of Saturn, you’ll see various bands wrapping around the planet, and all these bands are part of a jet stream. But if you look at the North Pole, you’ll see that one of these bands is not a circle, it’s a hexagon. And researchers first noticed this in 1988 when the Voyager spacecraft made a pass over Saturn. They said, 'That’s really unusual, you usually don’t see geometric shapes like that.' And it’s been a mystery pretty much ever since. One of the original theories was that when Voyager first spotted this hexagon, it also saw this storm-like vortex near the hexagon, and they thought, you know, maybe like, you know, like a rock that may disrupt the flow of a stream in a river, this vortex was somehowdisrupting this one jet stream and making it form a hexagon. But when Cassini passed by Saturn in 2006, the vortex wasn’t there any more, but the hexagon still was, so clearly there was something else causing it.

Interviewer – Robert Frederick

Did these planetary scientists ever consult a fluid dynamicist?

Interviewee – David Grimm

Well, as far as I know, they didn’t, Rob, but fluid dynamics seems to be the potential answer to the riddle here, and the way researchers figured that out was they said – a group of physicists said – 'You know, can we somehow recreate this hexagon in the lab?' And what they did was actually something very simple. They took a 30-liter cylinder, filled it with water, and placed it on a spinning table, and this spinning table created sort of like what you would see these jet streams around Saturn, you’d see, you know, all of these circular bands around the outside of the cylinder. But then what they did was they added a small ring to the cylinder that whirled inside the cylinder at a different rate at which the cylinder was spinning. And so this ring created its own independent stream, which the researchers were able to follow with a green dye. And you can actually see a really cool video of this on the site. And what the researchers noticed was that the faster this ring spun relative to the rest of the cylinder, it started to create a variety of different geometric shapes, and eventually it created a hexagon. And so what the researchers think is happening is that this particular jet stream over Saturn’s North Pole is moving at a rate relative to the rest of the planet that it’s just optimized for creating this hexagon pattern that all the other jet streams that surround the planet are not creating.

Interviewer – Robert Frederick

Has this kind of thing ever been observed on a planetary scale before, though?

Interviewee – David Grimm

Well, oddly enough, such polygonal formations like this have actually been seen in hurricanes, again where you have these strong, sort of circular forces going on. And what the researchers say is, you know, even at a lot of fluid dynamics experiments that are done every day in the laboratory, you see stuff like that. It’s just that the fluid dynamicists and the astronomers had never really gotten together before, and finally they are in this study. And even though this study doesn’t actually prove this is actually what’s going on on Saturn, it’s the strongest clue yet that may help finally solve this cosmic mystery.

Science Magazine Podcast - 9 April 2010
Transcript

In most, if not every human society, there’s some mechanism that protects innovation and provides a potential reward, too – such as copyright, trademark, and patent laws. That may be because it’s a lot more advantageous to copy someone else than it is to innovate yourself. After all, without any protection or reward, why innovate if everyone else can copy it? But it remains somewhat of a mystery how best to copy others, including when. In a paper in this week’s Science, Luke Rendell and colleagues report their insights from a computer tournament they held in which participants submitted strategies for when to observe and when to innovate in a game that took place in a precisely defined virtual world. The winning strategy relied almost exclusively on observing what others did all the time. I spoke with Rendell from his office at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Animals and human beings copy each other all the time, and they rely on what we call “social information,” that is, information in the environment that’s generated by other individuals, other people, other animals. Fred is tucking into a very nice fruit over there, and you learn from that that that’s a nice fruit to eat. But all our kind of theoretical understanding up to that point has suggested, well, social learning’s okay as long as it’s cheap, so you don’t take any risks, you don’t risk eating a fruit that’s poisonous, for example, which you would have to do if you wanted to figure out fruit palatability for yourself. But if there’s too much of it, then everyone is relying on these "Chinese whispers" because they’re copying someone who copied someone who copied someone who copied someone, and the risk of your information becoming out of date or incorrect is too high. And so there’s a kind of mismatch between our understanding and what we observe in the real world, which is that copying is right. Lots of animals do it, and humans do it all the time. And it’s the basis of our culture, our material and technological culture, which has enabled us to change the environment around us. So we wanted to understand, we wanted to attack this kind of problem, and the main sort of way to get over this kind of mismatch, we thought, was that, well, you don’t just copy blindly, you do it smartly. You copy when it’s a good idea to copy and you figure things out for yourself when that’s the best thing to do. But the question is, what strategy should you use to decide between those two options?

[more]

Transcript

[W]hat evidence is there that people just got together and that led to the evolution of what we call "human behavior," or what makes us “us”, rather than some change in genes or in human cognition?

Well, so the thing about the working memory hypothesis is that many archeologists think it has one flaw. ... and that is that when you look at the archeological record, you do not see a sudden advance in what people are able to do, as you might imagine you would see if there was a cognitive advance. But that’s not what you see. When you look in the archeological record for things like jewelry and art, what you see is this flickering in and out. For example, about 90,000 years ago in Israel, people were making these little tiny marine shell beads, jewelry: 90,000 years ago. But then they stopped doing that. It vanishes from the record. Then about 75,000 years ago in Africa, thousands of miles away, you find people making more shell beads and also making little geometric scratchings on ochre, and, apparently, using red ochre in decorative ways. So people there have suddenly begun to do symbolic behavior, but then that stops. And then 60,000 years ago, you find people etching these ostrich eggshells with, again, geometric designs. And so what you see in the record is this flickering in and out, and it doesn’t seem to be what you’d expect from a cognitive advance.

So, researchers said, “Well, what could this be?” and they modeled, some folks modeled what they call “demographic aspects.” And what that means is factors that have to do with groups of people, like just population size. [...] So they modeled this with their models in the computer, and they found that that really is what you see: a big population is likely to have more complex culture, that is, better tools, more jewelry, that kind of stuff; and a small population might actually lose culture, that is, you might know how to do something and lose it, and subsequent generations would not know how to do it.

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July 18, 2010

The evolution of human behavior - working memory

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Science Magazine Podcast - 9 April 2010

Transcript

So this is a package on the evolution of human behavior, and it looks at the question of "What is it that humans do that other species don’t?"

And one thing we do, of course, is that we’re smart. And so some scientists have suggested that, in particular, the way in which we’re smart—it’s different from what other animals do—is that we have a better working memory, and working memory is a kind of a short-term memory. You are using your working memory as you are listening to me right now, because you have to remember what it is I just said, you have to remember that you’re listening to a podcast from Science magazine, you’re keeping all that in your mind, and you may be doing something else while you listen, so that you have to put all this together and yet keep your focus on working memory, say. So you’re using your working memory as you listen. So one idea is that working memory—an advance in working memory—was the key thing that allowed humans to become different from other animals to set out on our unique path. But other people have a different idea and they say, “Well, you know, it may not be something that’s related to our individual cognition, it may be what we do in groups. That is, when we get together, we can do so much more than any one person alone.” And so other people have modeled some possibilities how it may be that the way we have been able to create complex culture like art and symbolism comes from getting together rather than an increase in working memory.

[...]

Neanderthals were good toolmakers, but they didn’t really change their tools for a really long time, like hundreds of thousands of years. There’s not much imagination or creativity when you look at their tool record. And when you look at what modern humans did, it’s really different. There’s different kinds of tools for different needs, and they also, of course, have the ability to create art.

[more]

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July 17, 2010

Science Magazine Podcast - 9 April 2010 - Australopithecus sediba

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Two million years ago is right around the time when scientists think the first members of our genus, Homo, evolved. But the fossil record so far has been very limited, especially at around two million years ago, meaning there are a lot of questions about what our genus Homo evolved from. Now in a paper in this week's Science, Lee Berger and colleagues report their discovery of a new species of hominid right around that 2-million- year-old mark: Australopithecus sediba, which the researchers say may be the "Rosetta stone that unlocks our understanding of the genus Homo." I spoke with Berger from his home in South Africa and I began by asking him about the condition and completeness of the two fossilized skeletons he and his team describe.

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July 17, 2010

Mosquito-delivered vaccination

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Cool.

Amplify’d from stm.sciencemag.org

Science Magazine Podcast - 9 April 2010

ONLINE COVER . Mosquito-delivered vaccination. Tropical countries are anxious to find a way to prevent malaria, a destructive disease carried by mosquitoes infected with the Plasmodium parasite. Ongoing efforts to develop a conventional vaccine may ultimately be successful, but an alternative approach could bypass some practical difficulties by harnessing the mosquito itself to deliver the immunogen. In malaria-infected mice that also receive certain antibiotics, the parasite multiplies in the liver as usual but the resulting organisms are noninfectious. When these attenuated parasites are released into the blood, they act as a natural inoculation that protects against infection for months afterwards. (See the Research Article by Friesen et al. ). [CREDIT: DENNIS KUNKEL/MICROSCOPY, INC./VISUALS UNLIMITED] Read more at stm.sciencemag.org