All Things TOK

"After retiring from truck driving in 1987, Teri Horton devoted much of her time to bargain hunting around the Los Angeles area. Sometimes the bargains were discovered on Salvation Army shelves and sometimes, she willingly admits, at the bottom of Dumpsters. Even the most stubborn deal scrounger probably would have been satisfied with the rate of return recently offered to her for a curiosity she snagged for $5 in a San Bernardino thrift shop in the early 1990s. A buyer, said to be from Saudi Arabia, was willing to pay $9 million for it, just under an 180 million percent increase on her original investment. Ms. Horton, a sandpaper-voiced woman with a hard-shell perm who lives in a mobile home in Costa Mesa and depends on her Social Security checks, turned him down without a second thought. Ms. Horton's find is not exactly the kind that gets pulled from a steamer trunk on the "Antiques Roadshow." It is a dinner-table-size painting, crosshatched in the unmistakable drippy, streaky, swirly style that made Jackson Pollock one of the most famous artists of the last century. Ms. Horton had never heard of Pollock before buying the painting, but when an art teacher saw it and told her that it might be his work (and that it could fetch untold millions if it were), she launched herself on a single-minded post-retirement career - enlisting, along the way, a forensic expert and a once-powerful art dealer - to have her painting acknowledged as authentic by scholars and the art market."

"A new exhibition about the brain tries to bring visual arts and science together. But it's a false premise. Art does not help us understand how the world works - and to merge the two disciplines trivialises them both"

"I've come to believe that these failures spring from a single failure: reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature. We have a prevailing view in our society - not only in the policy world, but in many spheres - that we are divided creatures. Reason, which is trustworthy, is separate from the emotions, which are suspect. Society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions. This has created a distortion in our culture. We emphasize things that are rational and conscious and are inarticulate about the processes down below. We are really good at talking about material things but bad at talking about emotion. When we raise our kids, we focus on the traits measured by grades and SAT scores. But when it comes to the most important things like character and how to build relationships, we often have nothing to say. Many of our public policies are proposed by experts who are comfortable only with correlations that can be measured, appropriated and quantified, and ignore everything else. Yet while we are trapped within this amputated view of human nature, a richer and deeper view is coming back into view. It is being brought to us by researchers across an array of diverse fields: neuroscience, psychology, sociology, behavioral economics and so on. "

"Charles Darwin has had a remarkable record over the past century, not only in the affirmation of evolution by natural selection, but in the number of his more specific ideas that have been proved correct. He may, however, have been wrong about invasive species, at least where amphibians are concerned. Darwin believed that when an invasive species entered a region where a closely related species already existed, it would most likely be unsuccessful because of a competition for resources. "Instead, we found the opposite pattern with amphibians," said Reid Tingley, a biologist at the University of Sydney. "When frogs and toads and salamanders invade an area where a similar species exists, they are more, not less, likely to establish themselves." "

So, sometimes even Darwin's predictions turn out to be wrong!

Compare the final commentary on this video to the one in the PBS Documentary, "The Tank Man."

"Have the latest advances in communication technology radically altered the fundamental dynamics of struggles for change in authoritarian settings? Or have cell phones and social media merely brought about small shifts in the dynamics of revolution? Is the Web a godsend to those trapped in oppressive states, as Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo suggests in his essay "The Internet is God's Gift to China"? Or does this thinking give in to a form of "cyber-utopianism" that glosses over the potential of new media to be used by autocrats, their propaganda ministries and security forces to massage public opinion, keep tabs on dissidents and ensure that populations stay docile and distracted, as Evgeny Morozov argues in The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom? This is a fascinating moment to ponder such questions, due both to what is happening on the streets in the Middle East and in the offices of publishing, where Morozov's book is one of many to stake out bold claims about the pros and cons of the newest new media."

"Consider the stories of two squares: Tiananmen Square, 1989. After seven weeks of demonstrations, the Chinese authorities had had enough. The army moved in and cleared the square and the surrounding area of protesters. According to eyewitnesses, the soldiers fired into groups of unarmed people, killing hundreds and maybe thousands. The merciless violence ended the protests. The regime endured. Shift to recent history and Cairo's Tahrir Square. As you surely know, 18 days of mostly nonviolent protests eventually moved though the entire country and brought down the regime of 30-year leader Hosni Mubarak. In this case, the Army was deployed but did not fire. Why did the Chinese protests end in death and failure and the Egyptian protests end with relatively little violence and, at least for the moment, victory?"

"For the second time in just over two decades, China's Communist leaders watch anxiously as a series of popular revolutions in another critical area of the world sweep out entrenched dictators and threaten to reverberate in the People's Republic. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was fellow Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union that toppled under people power. Now it is Arab and Persian tyrants who face the wrath of the people they have oppressed for generations. Events have seemed to reach the critical tipping-point when the regime's fear of the people exceeds the people's fear of the regime. Chinese bloggers have been quick to raise the obvious question - could it happen in China? - and to begin testing the waters. Internet postings have called for silent protests in several Chinese cities to emulate Tunisia's "jasmine revolution." They have spawned a few sporadic gatherings that the authorities quickly snuffed out before they could grow - but it was a surprisingly early indication that the spark of hope for freedom in China is not extinguished."

"For the first time in memory, places like Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen are starting to understand what Thomas Jefferson meant when he wrote that "when the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." Middle East citizens have long been fearful -- but now with protesters overwhelming the streets, the regimes finally are too. Yet as people power has swept autocrats out of Tunis and Cairo, Middle Eastern regimes aren't the only ones getting nervous. Beijing is also paying rapt attention. "

"There are frequent analogies going around these days between events in Cairo and the rise and fall of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. "We cannot afford a Tiananmen Square in Cairo," Senator John McCain said on CNN. One of the few who is well qualified to draw a comparison is Nick Kristof, who shared a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the 1989 protests and crackdown in Beijing. Arriving in Tahrir Square yesterday, he wrote that the mood "reminds me, painfully, of the equally giddy mood at Tiananmen Square before the shooting started. Some of the regime's moves-earlier curfew, buzzing protesters with fighter planes, nasty media-don't seem conciliatory at all." One of the few to frame the comparison in positive terms is the liberal Chinese activist-lawyer Teng Biao; when he saw the video of a lone Egyptian protester, standing before a truck fitted with a water-cannon, he wrote on Twitter, "'Must see! Egypt's Tiananmen movement, a warrior blocks a military vehicle!'""

"Could a Tunisian fruit vendor's self-immolation spark political turmoil - in China? That may be less far-fetched than it sounds. Revolutionaries have always inspired each other, from French san-culottes channeling Thomas Paine to South American Marxists embracing Chairman Mao. And as recent events in Egypt show, civic anger these days is viral; it shows little respect for frontiers. Noted economic historian Barry Eichengreen, for one, thinks Beijing should worry. He sees parallels between the dire political and economic conditions that lit the fuse in Cairo and circumstances in China."

"The comparisons are inescapable, and for many pundits, irresistible. Thousands of jubilant protestors gathered under often tense and volatile circumstances on a landmark national square to voice opposition to their government. It could be Cairo, it could be Beijing. As the world waits to see how Egypt's mass protests will end, talk of China's own disastrous uprising in 1989 continues on. In China, the Tiananmen Square uprising is on the minds of many watching the situation in Egypt, and the political content is being carefully managed and filtered for China's domestic audience."

"IT has been more than three years since the beginning of the Wall Street financial crisis, yet we continue to hear about new evidence of glaring errors and widespread misdoings. Even the smartest minds in finance are left scratching their heads: how did we not catch any of this sooner? When I hear this refrain, I am reminded of Boris Goldovsky. Goldovsky, who died in 2001, was a legend in opera circles, best remembered for his commentary during the Saturday matinee radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. But he was also a piano teacher. And it is as a teacher that he made a lasting - albeit unintentional - contribution to our understanding of why seemingly obvious errors go undetected for so long. One day, a student of his was practicing a piece by Brahms when Goldovsky heard something wrong. He stopped her and told her to fix her mistake. The student looked confused; she said she had played the notes as they were written. Goldovsky looked at the music and, to his surprise, the girl had indeed played the printed notes correctly - but there was an apparent misprint in the music. At first, the student and the teacher thought this misprint was confined to their edition of the sheet music alone. But further checking revealed that all other editions contained the same incorrect note. Why, wondered Goldovsky, had no one - the composer, the publisher, the proofreader, scores of accomplished pianists - noticed the error? How could so many experts have missed something that was so obvious to a novice? This paradox intrigued Goldovsky. So over the years he gave the piece to a number of musicians who were skilled sight readers of music - which is to say they had the ability to play from a printed score for the first time without practicing. He told them there was a misprint somewhere in the score, and asked them to find it. He allowed them to play the piece as many times as they liked and in any way that they liked. But not one musician ever found the err

"When reports emerged 30 years ago that young gay men were suffering from rare forms of pneumonia and cancer, public health investigators scrambled to understand what appeared to be a deadly immune disorder: What were the symptoms? Who was most susceptible? What kinds of infections were markers of the disease? They were seeking the epidemiologist's most essential tool - an accurate case definition, a set of criteria that simultaneously include people with the illness and exclude those without it. With AIDS, investigators soon recognized that injection-drug users, hemophiliacs and other demographic groups were also at risk, and the case definition evolved over time to incorporate lab evidence of immune dysfunction and other refinements based on scientific advances. "If you recognize something is happening, you need a case definition so you can count it," said Andrew Moss, an emeritus professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco, and an early AIDS investigator. "You need to know whether the numbers are going up or down, or whether treatment and prevention work. And if you have a bad case definition, then it's very difficult to figure out what's going on." Once a disease can be diagnosed reliably through lab tests, creating an accurate case definition becomes easier. But when an ailment has no known cause and its symptoms are subjective - as with chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and other diseases whose characteristics and even existence have been contested - competing case definitions are almost inevitable. Now a new study of chronic fatigue syndrome has highlighted how competing case definitions can lead to an epidemiologic "Rashomon" - what you see depends on who's doing the looking - and has stoked a fierce debate among researchers and patient advocates on both sides of the Atlantic. "

"Humans are asymmetric animals. Early in our embryonic development, organs turn to one side or the other - heart to the left, liver to the right and so on. In rare cases, an organ may turn up on the "wrong" side with no untoward effects. (I once examined a child with dextrocardia, or heart on the right.) But there is one form of asymmetry that is common and, until quite recently, stigmatized: handedness. Over the centuries, left-handers have been accused of criminality and dealings with the devil, and children have been subjected to "re-education." In recent years the stigma has largely vanished; among other things, four of our last five presidents - Reagan, the elder Bush, Clinton, Obama - have been left-handed. (Reagan is sometimes cited as ambidextrous.) But the riddle of why about 10 percent of children are born with this essentially human asymmetry remains. "

"In our recent dialogue I have noticed a consistent theme. It was frequently remarked that religious lines of argumentation lack reason. The contention seems to be that most, if not all, religious systems rely solely on wholly unsubstantiated faith to support their beliefs. Is this contention in fact true? From a theistic perspective the reality seems quite inverted in that it would appear to require an unreasonable commitment to naturalism to maintain a denial of the transcendent. Rabbi Moshe Averick has done yeoman's work in deconstructing the popular arguments in favor of naturalistic explanations to the origin of life and has concurrently demonstrated the high degree of intellectual vigor of theistic reasoning. This post is a paraphrase of his analysis of the origin of life problem that confronts the naturalist camp within the scientific community. A full treatment is available in his indispensable book Nonsense of a High Order. One might suppose that in the six or so decades since the discovery of the DNA molecule by Watson and Crick during which researchers have been investigating the origin of life they might have come up with some pretty solid leads to explain it. The truth of the matter is that we see scientists coming up surprisingly empty-handed and that even within scientific circles, the few hypotheses they do have are shredded to ribbons by their colleagues within the scientific community. "

"The 21-year-old woman was carefully trained not to flirt with anyone who came into the laboratory over the course of several months. She kept eye contact and conversation to a minimum. She never used makeup or perfume, kept her hair in a simple ponytail, and always wore jeans and a plain T-shirt. Each of the young men thought she was simply a fellow student at Florida State University participating in the experiment, which ostensibly consisted of her and the man assembling a puzzle of Lego blocks. But the real experiment came later, when each man rated her attractiveness. Previous research had shown that a woman at the fertile stage of her menstrual cycle seems more attractive, and that same effect was observed here - but only when this woman was rated by a man who wasn't already involved with someone else. The other guys, the ones in romantic relationships, rated her as significantly less attractive when she was at the peak stage of fertility, presumably because at some level they sensed she then posed the greatest threat to their long-term relationships. To avoid being enticed to stray, they apparently told themselves she wasn't all that hot anyway. This experiment was part of a new trend in evolutionary psychology to study "relationship maintenance." Earlier research emphasized how evolution primed us to meet and mate: how men and women choose partners by looking for cues like facial symmetry, body shape, social status and resources. "

"Although Xuanyao's history teachers have taught her a lot about Japanese atrocities, she said, they are reluctant to talk about the Great Leap Forward. And they never mention the deadly Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. "Studying Chinese history is very important because it helps increase our knowledge and our patriotism," said Xuanyao, 16, dressed in purple jeans and a matching backpack. "I wasn't taught anything about Tiananmen. But what the Japanese did, particularly the Nanjing massacre, is unforgivable. Remembering this is very, very important for our national pride." China has criticized Japan in recent weeks for whitewashing its militarist history, focusing in particular on a junior high school textbook recently approved by Tokyo. A wave of anti-Japanese protests swept the world's most populous nation. A close look at China's corresponding textbook, "Chinese History -- Textbook for Junior High School," however, finds several areas where China's official history appears to have gaps of its own. "Yes, what Japan did in World War II is horrible," said Sam Crane, Asian studies professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. "But the embarrassing fact for the Communist Party, and one that is not taught in Chinese schools, is that the party itself is responsible for many more deaths of Chinese people than those caused by Japanese militarism." Historians and China scholars say an underlying theme in many Chinese textbooks is the country's victimization at the hands of foreign powers, particularly the Japanese. Although this is true, they say, China tends to underplay the long periods that it dominated its neighbors."

"When high school students in Shanghai crack their history textbooks this fall they may be in for a surprise. The new standard world history text drops wars, dynasties and Communist revolutions in favor of colorful tutorials on economics, technology, social customs and globalization. Socialism has been reduced to a single, short chapter in the senior high school history course. Chinese Communism before the economic reform that began in 1979 is covered in a sentence. The text mentions Mao only once - in a chapter on etiquette. Nearly overnight the country's most prosperous schools have shelved the Marxist template that had dominated standard history texts since the 1950's. The changes passed high-level scrutiny, the authors say, and are part of a broader effort to promote a more stable, less violent view of Chinese history that serves today's economic and political goals."

"There are, of course, many different ways of categorizing historical revolutions. But for the purposes of understanding what is happening in Egypt -- and the challenges it may pose for the United States -- one simple, rough distinction may be especially useful. This is the distinction between revolutions that look more like 1688 and revolutions that look more like 1789. The first date refers to England's "Glorious Revolution," in which the Catholic, would-be absolute monarch James II was overthrown and replaced by the Protestant William and Mary and the English Parliament claimed powerful and enduring new forms of authority. The second is, of course, the date of the French Revolution, which began as an attempt to create a constitutional monarchy but ultimately led to the execution of King Louis XVI, the proclamation of the First French Republic, and the Reign of Terror. "