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Most of the undergraduates who will take ‘Postmodern Fictions’ this year will have been born in 1985 or after, and all but one of the module’s primary texts were written before their lifetime. Far from being ‘contemporary’, these texts were published in another world, before the students were born: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Nights at the Circus, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Blade Runner), White Noise: this is Mum and Dad’s culture. Some of the texts (‘The Library of Babel’) were written even before their parents were born. Replace this cache with other postmodern stalwarts – Beloved, Flaubert’s Parrot, Waterland, The Crying of Lot 49, Pale Fire, Slaughterhouse 5, Lanark, Neuromancer, anything by B.S. Johnson – and the same applies. It’s all about as contemporary as The Smiths, as hip as shoulder pads, as happening as Betamax video recorders. These are texts which are just coming to grips with the existence of rock music and television; they mostly do not dream even of the possibility of the technology and communications media – mobile phones, email, the internet, computers in every house powerful enough to put a man on the moon – which today’s undergraduates take for granted.

somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them.

Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishised [ie placed supreme importance on] the author, even when the author chose to indict or pretended to abolish him or herself. But the culture we have now fetishises the recipient of the text to the degree that they become a partial or whole author of it. Optimists may see this as the democratisation of culture; pessimists will point to the excruciating banality and vacuity of the cultural products thereby generated (at least so far).

“Under no circumstances are you to go to those lectures. Do you hear me?” Kuhn, the head of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science at Princeton where I was a graduate student, had issued an ultimatum. It concerned the philosopher Saul Kripke’s lectures — later to be called “Naming and Necessity” — which he had originally given at Princeton in 1970 and planned to give again in the Fall, 1972.

Whiggishness — in history of science, the tendency to evaluate and interpret past scientific theories not on their own terms, but in the context of current knowledge. The term comes from Herbert Butterfield’s “The Whig Interpretation of History,” written when Butterfield, a future Regius professor of history at Cambridge, was only 31 years old. Butterfield had complained about Whiggishness, describing it as “…the study of the past with direct and perpetual reference to the present” – the tendency to see all history as progressive, and in an extreme form, as an inexorable march to greater liberty and enlightenment. [3] For Butterfield, on the other hand, “…real historical understanding” can be achieved only by “attempting to see life with the eyes of another century than our own.” [4][5].

Kuhn had attacked my Whiggish use of the term “displacement current.” [6] I had failed, in his view, to put myself in the mindset of Maxwell’s first attempts at creating a theory of electricity and magnetism. I felt that Kuhn had misinterpreted my paper, and that he — not me — had provided a Whiggish interpretation of Maxwell. I said, “You refuse to look through my telescope.” And he said, “It’s not a telescope, Errol. It’s a kaleidoscope.” (In this respect, he was probably right.) [7].

Statistics recognizes different measures of an "average," or central tendency. The mean is our usual concept of an overall average - add up the items and divide them by the number of sharers

The median, a different measure of central tendency, is the half-way point.

A politician in power might say with pride, "The mean income of our citizens is $15,000 per year." The leader of the opposition might retort, "But half our citizens make less than $10,000 per year." Both are right, but neither cites a statistic with impassive objectivity. The first invokes a mean, the second a median. (Means are higher than medians in such cases because one millionaire may outweigh hundreds of poor people in setting a mean; but he can balance only one mendicant in calculating a median).

Hari admits to substituting his interviewees’ written words for their spoken words, quoting from their books and pretending that they actually said those words to him over coffee. But that is okay, he says, because his only aim was to reveal “what the subject thinks in the most comprehensible possible words” and to make sure that the reader “understood the point”.

The nub of Hari’s argument is that reality and truth are two different things, that what happens in the real world – in this case a chat between a journalist and some famous author or activist – can be twisted in the name of handing to people a neat, presumably preordained “truth”. It is a cause for concern that more journalists have not been taken aback by such a casual disassociation of truth from fact.

the sad fact is that the BS notion that it is okay to manipulate facts in order to present a Greater Truth is now widespread in the decadent British media. Mark Lawson once wrote a column titled “The government has lied and I am glad”, in which he said it was right for the British authorities and media to exaggerate the threat of AIDS because this “good lie” (his words) helped to improve Britons’ moral conduct. When Piers Morgan was sacked from the Mirror for publishing faked photos of British soldiers urinating on Iraqi prisoners he said it was his “moral duty” to publish the pictures because they spoke to an ugly reality in Iraq. When this month it was discovered that the Syrian lesbian blogger was a fake, some in the media who had fallen for “her” made-up reports said the good thing about the blog is that it helped to “draw attention to a nation’s woes”. And now Hari says it doesn’t matter it he invents a conversation because it helps to express a “vital message” in the “clearest possible words”.

Maps are great because our brains are good at making sense of pictures. So representing data in a visual form is a good way of understanding it. The question is how.

in reality things are more complicated. You'll probably have thousands of books and customers. Each book now comes, not with a pair of numbers, but with a huge long list containing the rating of each customer or perhaps a blank if a specific customer hasn't rated the book. Now you can't simply plot the data and spot the pattern. This is where topology comes to the rescue: it gives a neat way of turning shapes into networks. Suppose you've got a wobbly circle as in the figure below. You can cover it by overlapping regions and then draw a dot on a piece of paper for each region. You then connect dots corresponding to overlapping regions by an edge. The network doesn't retain the wobbliness of the shape, that information has been lost, but its topology, the fact that it's circular, is clearly visible. And the great thing is that it doesn't matter what kind of covering you use to make your network. As long as the regions are small enough — the resolution is high enough — the network will draw out the topology of the shape.

MIDDLE SCHOOL students are champion time-wasters. And the personal computer may be the ultimate time-wasting appliance.

there is an automatic inclination to think of the machine in its most idealized form, as the Great Equalizer. In developing countries, computers are outfitted with grand educational hopes, like those that animate the One Laptop Per Child initiative, which was examined in this space in April.

Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.

Why did humans evolve the capacity to imagine alternatives to reality? Was story-telling in prehistoric times like the peacock’s tail, of no direct practical use but a good way of attracting a mate? It kept Scheherazade Scheherazade alive through those one thousand and one nights — in the story.

imagining turns out to be much more reality-directed than the stereotype implies.

A reality-directed faculty of imagination has clear survival value. By enabling you to imagine all sorts of scenarios, it alerts you to dangers and opportunities.

THE Saturday Special report last week ('God wants youth') stated that religious groups were determined not to lose a generation to godlessness, especially now with youth gangs in the news.It also noted that what is at stake is the potential of losing the youth to cynicism, violence and even fanaticism.These remarks suggest a prejudice against those without any religious affiliation.

As a society for non-believers, the Humanist Society (Singapore) disagrees.The reality in societies everywhere is that there is no difference between non-believing youth and the religious youth in their propensity towards violence. There are actually higher levels of violence among those who identify themselves as 'religious' or 'faithful'.As for cynicism, there is certainly no correlation between non-belief and a cynical attitude. Many non-believers are involved in the world around them, trying to make it a more humane, compassionate place.

"The reality in societies everywhere is that there is no difference between non-believing youth and the religious youth in their propensity towards violence. There are actually higher levels of violence among those who identify themselves as 'religious' or 'faithful'."were contradictory

For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. —Matthew 25:29

Sociologist Robert K. Merton was the first to publish a paper on the similarity between this phrase in the Gospel of Matthew and the realities of how scientific research is rewarded

Even if two researchers do similar work, the most eminent of the pair will get more acclaim, Merton observed—more praise within the community, more or better job offers, better opportunities. And it goes without saying that even if a graduate student publishes stellar work in a prestigious journal, their well-known advisor is likely to get more of the credit. 

Question #1: Does this mean I don’t have to believe in climate change? Me: I’m afraid not. One of the sad ironies of scientific denialism is that we tend to be skeptical of precisely the wrong kind of scientific claims. In poll after poll, Americans have dismissed two of the most robust and widely tested theories of modern science: evolution by natural selection and climate change. These are theories that have been verified in thousands of different ways by thousands of different scientists working in many different fields. (This doesn’t mean, of course, that such theories won’t change or get modified – the strength of science is that nothing is settled.) Instead of wasting public debate on creationism or the rhetoric of Senator Inhofe, I wish we’d spend more time considering the value of spinal fusion surgery, or second generation antipsychotics, or the verity of the latest gene association study. The larger point is that we need to be a better job of considering the context behind every claim. In 1952, the Harvard philosopher Willard Von Orman published “The Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” In the essay, Quine compared the truths of science to a spider’s web, in which the strength of the lattice depends upon its interconnectedness. (Quine: “The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science.”) One of the implications of Quine’s paper is that, when evaluating the power of a given study, we need to also consider the other studies and untested assumptions that it depends upon. Don’t just fixate on the effect size – look at the web. Unfortunately for the denialists, climate change and natural selection have very sturdy webs.

biases are not fraud. We sometimes forget that science is a human pursuit, mingled with all of our flaws and failings. (Perhaps that explains why an episode like Climategate gets so much attention.) If there’s a single theme that runs through the article it’s that finding the truth is really hard. It’s hard because reality is complicated, shaped by a surreal excess of variables. But it’s also hard because scientists aren’t robots: the act of observation is simultaneously an act of interpretation.

(As Paul Simon sang, “A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.”) Most of the time, these distortions are unconscious – we don’t know even we are misperceiving the data. However, even when the distortion is intentional it’s still rarely rises to the level of outright fraud. Consider the story of Mike Rossner. He’s executive director of the Rockefeller University Press, and helps oversee several scientific publications, including The Journal of Cell Biology.  In 2002, while trying to format a scientific image in Photoshop that was going to appear in one of the journals, Rossner noticed that the background of the image contained distinct intensities of pixels. “That’s a hallmark of image manipulation,” Rossner told me. “It means the scientist has gone in and deliberately changed what the data looks like. What’s disturbing is just how easy this is to do.” This led Rossner and his colleagues to begin analyzing every image in every accepted paper. They soon discovered that approximately 25 percent of all papers contained at least one “inappropriately manipulated” picture. Interestingly, the vast, vast majority of these manipulations (~99 percent) didn’t affect the interpretation of the results. Instead, the scientists seemed to be photoshopping the pictures for aesthetic reasons: perhaps a line on a gel was erased, or a background blur was deleted, or the contrast was exaggerated. In other words, they wanted to publish pretty images. That’s a perfectly understandable desire, but it gets problematic when that same basic instinct – we want our data to be neat, our pictures to be clean, our charts to be clear – is transposed across the entire scientific process.

Too much of the coverage has been meta -- focusing on questions about whether the leaks were justified, while too little has dealt with the details of what has actually been revealed and what those revelations say about the wisdom of our ongoing effort in Afghanistan. There's a reason why the administration is so upset about these leaks.

True, there hasn't been one smoking-gun, bombshell revelation -- but that's certainly not to say the cables haven't been revealing. What there has been instead is more of the consistent drip, drip, drip of damning details we keep getting about the war.

It's notable that the latest leaks came out the same week President Obama went to Afghanistan for his surprise visit to the troops -- and made a speech about how we are "succeeding" and "making important progress" and bound to "prevail."

BECAUSE SCIENCE TELLS US “INCONVENIENT TRUTHS.” If the process of science were all a delusion based on our biases and preconceptions and wishes, it would not give us answers that we don’t like or agree with. Yet scientists often discover things that go against our belief systems, but they must put aside their favorite ideas and face this reality. When Copernicus and Galileo demonstrated that the earth (and us) are not in the center of the universe, the idea wasn’t accepted by the Church or the world in general—but it was true. Everyone except a handful of religious nuts and the uneducated now look at the sun “rising” and “setting” and accept the counterintuitive notion that it is the earth turning instead. When Darwin showed that life had evolved and that we are all closely related to other living things, not specially created, it offended many people (and still does)—but its truth was soon acknowledged by the entire scientific community and nearly all educated Westerners who weren’t religiously biased, even before Darwin died. As the web cartoon puts it: “Science: if you ain’t pissing people off, you ain’t doin’ it right”.

In this case the NGOs and other groups represent environmental and humanitarian groups that have put together a report (in PDF) on what they see as needed and unnecessary policy actions related to climate change. They put together a nice glossy report with findings and recommendations such as: *Limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees (Celsius, p. 4) *Extracting the World Bank from fossil fuels (p. 15) *Opposing the inclusion of carbon sinks in the [Kyoto] Protocol (p. 22)

It is troubling that the Chair of the IPCC would lend his name and organizational affiliation to a set of groups with members engaged actively in political advocacy on climate change. Even if Dr. Pachauri feels strongly about the merit of the political agenda proposed by these groups, at a minimum his endorsement creates a potential perception that the IPCC has an unstated political agenda. This is compounded by the fact that the report Dr. Pachauri tacitly endorses contains statements that are scientifically at odds with those of the IPCC.

perhaps most troubling is that by endorsing this group’s agenda he has opened the door for those who would seek to discredit the IPCC by alleging exactly such a bias. (And don’t be surprised to see such statements forthcoming.) If the IPCC’s role is indeed to act as an honest broker, then it would seem to make sense that its leadership ought not blur that role by endorsing, tacitly or otherwise, the agendas of particular groups. There are plenty of appropriate places for political advocacy on climate change, but the IPCC does not seem to me to be among those places.

meet Eguchi Aimi. She is the latest member of Japanese pop band AKB48, and her perfect good looks and uncanny similarities to other AKB48 members have taken the Internet by storm. Well, no, not really. To put things into context, take a look at the video below: Just a bunch of kawaii Japanese girls advertising some candy, right? Looks tasty, too, like one of Willy Wonka’s Everlasting Gobstoppers. But take special notice of the girl in the center. Yes, the prettiest of the lot. Since the commercial went live on Japanese TV, she has attracted a lot of attention and a large fan base eager to learn more about her.

According to Channel News Asia, Eguchi Aimi took the best features of her real counterparts, namely Atsuko Maeda (eyes), Tomomi Itano (nose), Mariko Shinoda (mouth), Yuko Oshima (hair/ body), Minami Takahashi (outline) and Mayu Watanabe (eyebrows). Her voice was then provided by Yukari Sasaki.

Take a look at how the CGI was done: Astute observers have been pointing out her seemingly photoshopped qualities, so the revelation doesn’t really come as a surprise to many. To top it off, crushes on virtual girls aren’t all that uncommon in Japan or anywhere else.