"Today we will be watching a movie based on a work by the great Spanish realist writer Benito Perez Galdos. The movie is called The Grandfather," I announced in class.
"Great!" the students responded. "What is the movie about?"
"It's about a grandfather," I explained authoritatively.
The students almost choked with laughter.
This does not bode well for the article I have started to work on and which will be based on this work of literature.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Judging Other Cultures
Bill Maher has become a target of a veritable barrage of critical posts, tweets, and articles because he said the following on his show recently:
Let me get to the other religion which is on my mind because I was more excited about the Arab revolution in the Middle East this week, before we heard the horrible news about Lara Logan and I looked at this: 94 journalists last year were killed - that's a lot - a 139 the year before. You know it's forget when you see what we consider tv stars cause there are anchor men and anchor women over there; it's not a reality show. This shit is really dangerous and we do not know the details of what happened there, but I think it's fair to say Muslim men have a bad attitude about women in general and I would just like to say to them, that you're never gonna have this revolution happen, unless there is also a sexual revolution that goes with it.In the ensuing discussion with Tavis Smiley, Maher admitted that he is judging other cultures and defended his right to do so:
I am saying, I'm not prejudiced. That's pre- judging; I'm not pre-judging, I am judging. I'm judging. They're worse, what's wrong with just saying that? You're a cultural relativist; it's not relative.(You can watch the relevant part of the show, read the transcript and see the criticism that has been heaped on Maher as a result of these statements here.)
I'm not going to argue with the strange people who have chosen to see in Maher's words an apology for the kind of sexism that still exists in Western countries. Saying that something is bad can only mean that everything else is good only in a universe that is completely devoid of logic. What I find interesting is Maher's courage in leaving aside the fake pseudo-Liberal "tolerance" of everything that is different. A refusal to judge another culture (person, group, etc.) according to the same standards that one uses to judge oneself or one's own culture is not a sign of respect. It's a sign of a deep-seated condescension and an unabiding fear of otherness.
I have no idea whether Maher is familiar with Žižek, but his closing statement in this discussion is very much in agreement with what the greatest living philosopher has to say about tolerance:
You know what, when you tolerate intolerance, you're not really being a liberal.This statement could have easily come from Žižek himself.
Settling
There is this trend I'm seeing in a lot of popular writing that consists of criticizing people in their twenties and thirties for being immature and irresponsible, especially as compared to the way their parents lived when they were the same age. The Wall Street Journal recently published an article by Kay Hymowitz who sees this phenomenon as mostly limited to men:
Not so long ago, the average American man in his 20s had achieved most of the milestones of adulthood: a high-school diploma, financial independence, marriage and children. Today, most men in their 20s hang out in a novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. This "pre-adulthood" has much to recommend it, especially for the college-educated. But it's time to state what has become obvious to legions of frustrated young women: It doesn't bring out the best in men.
Hymowitz, who is a rabid anti-feminist, blames this state of affairs on mean, nasty feminists who made all men "bad." Her argument is boring and has been made a gazillion times before by other anti-feminist screechers. Hymowitz's hypocrisy is, of course, self-evident. Without feminism, she wouldn't be writing articles for The Wall Street Journal. She'd be making sure that the dinner was ready on time and struggling to avert the disaster of her husband dumping her for a 20-year-old secretary. There is nothing even remotely curious in Hymowitz's desire to dump on a movement that gave her everything.
What I find interesting, though, is that her sentiments as to a prolonged "pre-adulthood" as a negative phenomenon are often echoed in progressive feminist circles. In a discussion of Hymowitz's article, a progressive blogger Hugo Schwyzer made the following comment:
I don’t think that “extended adolescence” is entirely a fiction — the “drifting” phenomenon we see of young men who are waiting for some certainty to strike is real. It’s not in the bars of Manhattan that we have the problems. It’s on the couches and in the basements of much of the rest of the country, where we have an ever-rising percentage of young men hooked on pot, porn, and World of Warcraft, with mama still doing the laundry. It’s not feminism’s fault, of course — it’s the fault of a culture that refuses to believe in men’s capacity to self-regulate and to achieve.
Hugo refuses to blame "extended preadolescence" on feminists. He, however, still sees it as problematic without ever explaining why it bothers him so much. What's wrong with people not rushing into marriages and careers but, rather, taking the time to enjoy life, pot, porn, and World of Warcraft?
People who have pushed themselves into marriages that are OK but do not make them ecstatic, into jobs that are fine but don't make them light up with joy are begrudging those who refuse to settle for this kind of existence their freedom. Those who settle for something mediocre cannot fail to dislike those who don't. Saddling yourself with a host of duties and responsibilities that you never really wanted and slipping into a lifestyle that could never be described as a bed of roses is likely to make you look with resentment at those who are in no hurry to do the same.
At 15, 20, 25, we wait for our lives to begin. We know that one day our real, adult lives will start, and eagerly await to see what these lives will turn out to be like. And then, one day, we wake up and realize, "Oh my God, this is my life. I'm living it right now. This is kind of it." One might greet this realization with horror or with joy. Of course, it also likely that people who enjoyed an extended pre-adolescence will be as terrified with the life they ended up having as those who pushed themselves into boring marriages and unexciting careers at an early age. However, they will at least have the memory of having had fun with their pot, porn, and World of Warcraft.
Cell Phones Are Somehow Related To The Brain
The BBC says
47 people got 18FDG Positron Emission Tomography. This method measures brain glucose use as a proxy for how hard cells are working. They say that this makes it better than other kinds of PET which merely measure regional blood flow. I bet they really wanted to do this study with fMRI, because PET scans cost loads, but of course you can't take a cellphone into an MRI scanner.
There were two conditions: a control in which they had a phone stuck to each ear but they were both off, and an active condition in which the right-ear phone was switched on and receiving a call - but muted so they couldn't hear anything. Each subject was scanned twice, once under each condition, so that's 94 scans.
What happened? In the Results section they say that (my emphasis):
Their method for correcting for multiple comparisons was also quite unusual and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. It's on the right-hand column of Page 810. Maybe commentators will be able to offer some insight.
There's a few other things to note here. They show a nice big colorful This Is Your Brain On Phone image but it's a "representative" image of one brain, rather than an averaged image from all subjects. This is really not good practice. It's acceptable - but only because there's no alternative - for data which can't be averaged, like microscope pics.
With between-group comparisons of neuroimaging data, the averages are computed as part of the statistical analysis, and should be shown. With single-subject data we're left having to trust the authors to have really picked a "representative" image as opposed to "the best image".
Second, this has nothing to do with cancer. Brain activation happens all the time and very rarely does it have cancerous consequences. In fact this is so unrelated to cancer that I shouldn't even be mentioning cancer in this post. However, I feel the need to because the BBC (and most other outlets) did. Thus we saw curious paragraphs like this (direct quote):
I have no idea if cell phones cause cancer. Just from basic biology though, if they were going to cause any cancer, it'd probably be skin cancer rather than brain cancer, since a) they're closest to the skin, not the brain and b) brain cancer is incredibly rare because the brain contains no rapidly dividing cells, whereas skin cancer is common because skin is made of exactly that.
So even if if this increased brain glucose metabolism somehow was related to cancer of the brain, this would be the least of our worries, because if cell phones somehow caused brain cancer, they'd almost certainly cause many times more cases of skin cancer and the brain cancer would be a footnote.
But the point is, this study has nothing to do with cancer so forget I said that. If you have trouble forgetting, just hold your mobile phone over your temporal lobes until your hippocampus is overloaded and you suffer memory loss.
Link: Also blogged here and here.
Volkow, N., Tomasi, D., Wang, G., Vaska, P., Fowler, J., Telang, F., Alexoff, D., Logan, J., & Wong, C. (2011). Effects of Cell Phone Radiofrequency Signal Exposure on Brain Glucose Metabolism JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 305 (8), 808-813 DOI: 10.1001/jama.2011.186
Mobile phones 'affect the brain'The paper's from Nora Volkow and colleagues from NIDA in the USA. Volkow's best known for her work on addiction.
47 people got 18FDG Positron Emission Tomography. This method measures brain glucose use as a proxy for how hard cells are working. They say that this makes it better than other kinds of PET which merely measure regional blood flow. I bet they really wanted to do this study with fMRI, because PET scans cost loads, but of course you can't take a cellphone into an MRI scanner.There were two conditions: a control in which they had a phone stuck to each ear but they were both off, and an active condition in which the right-ear phone was switched on and receiving a call - but muted so they couldn't hear anything. Each subject was scanned twice, once under each condition, so that's 94 scans.
What happened? In the Results section they say that (my emphasis):
SPM comparisons on the absolute metabolic measures showed significant increases (35.7 vs 33.3 µmol/100 g per minute for the on vs off conditions, respectively; mean difference, 2.4 [95% CI, 0.67-4.2]; P=.004) in a region that included the right orbitofrontal cortex and the lower part of the right superior temporal gyrus. No areas showed decreases.In other words a highly signficiant finding of increased glucose uptake in the areas of the brain closest to the cell phone. Whoa, that's big. However, it seems that this result was not corrected for multiple comparisons, because in the table of results they give the corrected p value for the activated cluster as p=0.05 - bang on exactly low enough to be considered significant, but no lower.
Their method for correcting for multiple comparisons was also quite unusual and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. It's on the right-hand column of Page 810. Maybe commentators will be able to offer some insight.
There's a few other things to note here. They show a nice big colorful This Is Your Brain On Phone image but it's a "representative" image of one brain, rather than an averaged image from all subjects. This is really not good practice. It's acceptable - but only because there's no alternative - for data which can't be averaged, like microscope pics.
With between-group comparisons of neuroimaging data, the averages are computed as part of the statistical analysis, and should be shown. With single-subject data we're left having to trust the authors to have really picked a "representative" image as opposed to "the best image".
Second, this has nothing to do with cancer. Brain activation happens all the time and very rarely does it have cancerous consequences. In fact this is so unrelated to cancer that I shouldn't even be mentioning cancer in this post. However, I feel the need to because the BBC (and most other outlets) did. Thus we saw curious paragraphs like this (direct quote):Since the boom in mobile phone use, there has been considerable interest in the effect on the body. The largest study on 420,000 mobile phone users in Denmark, has not shown a link between phone use and cancer. This small study on 47 people...Why mention cancer, if the only thing you say about it is that there's no link? Presumably because of the following chain of associations: cell phones use radiation...radiation causes cancer...cell phones and cancer!
I have no idea if cell phones cause cancer. Just from basic biology though, if they were going to cause any cancer, it'd probably be skin cancer rather than brain cancer, since a) they're closest to the skin, not the brain and b) brain cancer is incredibly rare because the brain contains no rapidly dividing cells, whereas skin cancer is common because skin is made of exactly that.
So even if if this increased brain glucose metabolism somehow was related to cancer of the brain, this would be the least of our worries, because if cell phones somehow caused brain cancer, they'd almost certainly cause many times more cases of skin cancer and the brain cancer would be a footnote.
But the point is, this study has nothing to do with cancer so forget I said that. If you have trouble forgetting, just hold your mobile phone over your temporal lobes until your hippocampus is overloaded and you suffer memory loss.
Link: Also blogged here and here.
Volkow, N., Tomasi, D., Wang, G., Vaska, P., Fowler, J., Telang, F., Alexoff, D., Logan, J., & Wong, C. (2011). Effects of Cell Phone Radiofrequency Signal Exposure on Brain Glucose Metabolism JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 305 (8), 808-813 DOI: 10.1001/jama.2011.186
Cell Phones Are Somehow Related To The Brain
The BBC says
47 people got 18FDG Positron Emission Tomography. This method measures brain glucose use as a proxy for how hard cells are working. They say that this makes it better than other kinds of PET which merely measure regional blood flow. I bet they really wanted to do this study with fMRI, because PET scans cost loads, but of course you can't take a cellphone into an MRI scanner.
There were two conditions: a control in which they had a phone stuck to each ear but they were both off, and an active condition in which the right-ear phone was switched on and receiving a call - but muted so they couldn't hear anything. Each subject was scanned twice, once under each condition, so that's 94 scans.
What happened? In the Results section they say that (my emphasis):
Their method for correcting for multiple comparisons was also quite unusual and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. It's on the right-hand column of Page 810. Maybe commentators will be able to offer some insight.
There's a few other things to note here. They show a nice big colorful This Is Your Brain On Phone image but it's a "representative" image of one brain, rather than an averaged image from all subjects. This is really not good practice. It's acceptable - but only because there's no alternative - for data which can't be averaged, like microscope pics.
With between-group comparisons of neuroimaging data, the averages are computed as part of the statistical analysis, and should be shown. With single-subject data we're left having to trust the authors to have really picked a "representative" image as opposed to "the best image".
Second, this has nothing to do with cancer. Brain activation happens all the time and very rarely does it have cancerous consequences. In fact this is so unrelated to cancer that I shouldn't even be mentioning cancer in this post. However, I feel the need to because the BBC (and most other outlets) did. Thus we saw curious paragraphs like this (direct quote):
I have no idea if cell phones cause cancer. Just from basic biology though, if they were going to cause any cancer, it'd probably be skin cancer rather than brain cancer, since a) they're closest to the skin, not the brain and b) brain cancer is incredibly rare because the brain contains no rapidly dividing cells, whereas skin cancer is common because skin is made of exactly that.
So even if if this increased brain glucose metabolism somehow was related to cancer of the brain, this would be the least of our worries, because if cell phones somehow caused brain cancer, they'd almost certainly cause many times more cases of skin cancer and the brain cancer would be a footnote.
But the point is, this study has nothing to do with cancer so forget I said that. If you have trouble forgetting, just hold your mobile phone over your temporal lobes until your hippocampus is overloaded and you suffer memory loss.
Link: Also blogged here and here.
Volkow, N., Tomasi, D., Wang, G., Vaska, P., Fowler, J., Telang, F., Alexoff, D., Logan, J., & Wong, C. (2011). Effects of Cell Phone Radiofrequency Signal Exposure on Brain Glucose Metabolism JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 305 (8), 808-813 DOI: 10.1001/jama.2011.186
Mobile phones 'affect the brain'The paper's from Nora Volkow and colleagues from NIDA in the USA. Volkow's best known for her work on addiction.
47 people got 18FDG Positron Emission Tomography. This method measures brain glucose use as a proxy for how hard cells are working. They say that this makes it better than other kinds of PET which merely measure regional blood flow. I bet they really wanted to do this study with fMRI, because PET scans cost loads, but of course you can't take a cellphone into an MRI scanner.There were two conditions: a control in which they had a phone stuck to each ear but they were both off, and an active condition in which the right-ear phone was switched on and receiving a call - but muted so they couldn't hear anything. Each subject was scanned twice, once under each condition, so that's 94 scans.
What happened? In the Results section they say that (my emphasis):
SPM comparisons on the absolute metabolic measures showed significant increases (35.7 vs 33.3 µmol/100 g per minute for the on vs off conditions, respectively; mean difference, 2.4 [95% CI, 0.67-4.2]; P=.004) in a region that included the right orbitofrontal cortex and the lower part of the right superior temporal gyrus. No areas showed decreases.In other words a highly signficiant finding of increased glucose uptake in the areas of the brain closest to the cell phone. Whoa, that's big. However, it seems that this result was not corrected for multiple comparisons, because in the table of results they give the corrected p value for the activated cluster as p=0.05 - bang on exactly low enough to be considered significant, but no lower.
Their method for correcting for multiple comparisons was also quite unusual and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. It's on the right-hand column of Page 810. Maybe commentators will be able to offer some insight.
There's a few other things to note here. They show a nice big colorful This Is Your Brain On Phone image but it's a "representative" image of one brain, rather than an averaged image from all subjects. This is really not good practice. It's acceptable - but only because there's no alternative - for data which can't be averaged, like microscope pics.
With between-group comparisons of neuroimaging data, the averages are computed as part of the statistical analysis, and should be shown. With single-subject data we're left having to trust the authors to have really picked a "representative" image as opposed to "the best image".
Second, this has nothing to do with cancer. Brain activation happens all the time and very rarely does it have cancerous consequences. In fact this is so unrelated to cancer that I shouldn't even be mentioning cancer in this post. However, I feel the need to because the BBC (and most other outlets) did. Thus we saw curious paragraphs like this (direct quote):Since the boom in mobile phone use, there has been considerable interest in the effect on the body. The largest study on 420,000 mobile phone users in Denmark, has not shown a link between phone use and cancer. This small study on 47 people...Why mention cancer, if the only thing you say about it is that there's no link? Presumably because of the following chain of associations: cell phones use radiation...radiation causes cancer...cell phones and cancer!
I have no idea if cell phones cause cancer. Just from basic biology though, if they were going to cause any cancer, it'd probably be skin cancer rather than brain cancer, since a) they're closest to the skin, not the brain and b) brain cancer is incredibly rare because the brain contains no rapidly dividing cells, whereas skin cancer is common because skin is made of exactly that.
So even if if this increased brain glucose metabolism somehow was related to cancer of the brain, this would be the least of our worries, because if cell phones somehow caused brain cancer, they'd almost certainly cause many times more cases of skin cancer and the brain cancer would be a footnote.
But the point is, this study has nothing to do with cancer so forget I said that. If you have trouble forgetting, just hold your mobile phone over your temporal lobes until your hippocampus is overloaded and you suffer memory loss.
Link: Also blogged here and here.
Volkow, N., Tomasi, D., Wang, G., Vaska, P., Fowler, J., Telang, F., Alexoff, D., Logan, J., & Wong, C. (2011). Effects of Cell Phone Radiofrequency Signal Exposure on Brain Glucose Metabolism JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 305 (8), 808-813 DOI: 10.1001/jama.2011.186
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
DOMA One Step Closer to an Inevitable Demise
The Attorney General will no longer support the ridiculous and offensive to any normal human being Defense of Marriage Act. And not a moment too soon. It's mind-boggling that in the XXIst century a country like the US should cater to a small group of crazed religious fanatics by passing silly pieces of legislation such as DOMA. This is from the Attorney General's statement::
Much of the legal landscape has changed in the 15 years since Congress passed DOMA. The Supreme Court has ruled that laws criminalizing homosexual conduct are unconstitutional. Congress has repealed the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. Several lower courts have ruled DOMA itself to be unconstitutional. Section 3 of DOMA will continue to remain in effect unless Congress repeals it or there is a final judicial finding that strikes it down, and the President has informed me that the Executive Branch will continue to enforce the law. But while both the wisdom and the legality of Section 3 of DOMA will continue to be the subject of both extensive litigation and public debate, this Administration will no longer assert its constitutionality in court.
Finally, this Administration has stopped insulting all of us by supporting the Defense of Marriage Act whose only value lies in placating the crazy religious fanatics who can't stop policing other people's personal lives for lack of their own.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Sample Of Letter Of Disconnection Of Telephone
I remembered talking with a friend this movie. I was shocked. With the Argentine cinema'm used to get excited and give me a smile but not fun as he did this movie.
It strikes me that the protagonist is a psychologist (the Argentines have wood to be, all). This in particular is involved in a plot full-fledged police when he was commissioned surveillance and therapy of a policeman on duty. Has moments of anthology and very intelligent dialogues. Perfect for viewing with friends. And, as always, hope you like it.
It strikes me that the protagonist is a psychologist (the Argentines have wood to be, all). This in particular is involved in a plot full-fledged police when he was commissioned surveillance and therapy of a policeman on duty. Has moments of anthology and very intelligent dialogues. Perfect for viewing with friends. And, as always, hope you like it.
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