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O que você não quer ser quando crescer (Revista Fapesp)
HUMANIDADES | PERCEPÇÃO DA CIÊNCIA
Pesquisa mostra que menos de 3% dos adolescentes latino-americanos desejam seguir uma carreira científica
Carlos Haag
Edição Impressa 192 – Fevereiro de 2012
Boneco de Albert Einstein na Estação Ciência, em São Paulo. © EDUARDO CESAR
Mesmo vivendo num mundo imerso em tecnologia, o jovem, ao se deparar com a célebre pergunta “o que você quer ser quando crescer?”, dificilmente responderá “cientista”. Segundo a pesquisa Los estudiantes y la ciência, projeto do Observatório Ibero-americano de Ciência, Tecnologia e Sociedade (Ryct/Cyted), organizado pelo argentino Carmelo Polino, apenas 2,7% dos estudantes secundaristas (de 15 a 19 anos) da América Latina e Espanha pensam em seguir uma carreira nas áreas de ciências exatas ou naturais, como biologia, química, física, e matemática (as ciências agrícolas mal aparecem). Realizada entre 2008 e 2010, foram consultadas cerca de 9 mil escolas, privadas e particulares, em sete capitais: Assunção, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Lima, Montevidéu, Bogotá e Madri. Curiosamente, 56% dos entrevistados se disseram interessados em se profissionalizar em ciências sociais e um quinto deles optou pelas engenharias. A equipe brasileira participante do projeto veio do Laboratório de Jornalismo da Unicamp (Labjor), coordenado pelo linguista Carlos Vogt, responsável pelo capítulo “Hábitos informativos sobre ciência e tecnologia” do livro, lançado em espanhol e disponível apenas para download pelo link www.oei.es/salactsi/libro-estudiantes.pdf.
“São dados preocupantes para sociedades em cujas economias há uma intensa necessidade de cientistas e engenheiros, mas há um baixo interesse dos jovens por essas profissões. E as razões alegadas igualmente são desanimadoras: 78% dos estudantes explicam sua opção por achar que as ciências exatas e as naturais são ‘muito difíceis’, quase metade dos alunos as considera ‘chatas’, enquanto um quarto deles afirma que esses campos oferecem oportunidades limitadas de emprego”, afirma Polino. “O número de alunos de ciências já está num patamar insuficiente para as necessidades da economia e indústria e, acima de tudo, para lidar com os problemas a serem enfrentados pelas sociedades no futuro.” Ainda segundo os entrevistados, o desânimo em face do desafio das ciências está ligado, em boa parte, à forma como elas são ensinadas, e reclamam que os recursos utilizados em sala de aula são limitados. Metade dos adolescentes tampouco acredita que as matérias científicas tenham aumentado sua apreciação pela natureza, nem que sejam fontes de solução para problemas de vida cotidiana.
“Há barreiras culturais, porque os jovens de hoje acham que para ter êxito na vida, ter dinheiro, não é preciso estudar muito. É possível escolher uma carreira de resultados econômicos mais rápidos. A cultura do esforço, que é a cultura da ciência, vem perdendo espaço. Temos a necessidade urgente de uma política pública de educação e comunicação da ciência”, avisa Polino. Em alguns pontos a nova pesquisa reforça algumas tendências observadas no estudo anterior do grupo, Percepção pública da ciência (ver “Imagens da ciência” na edição 95 de Pesquisa FAPESP; “Leitores esquivos”, na 188; e “Avanços e desafios”, na 185), de 2004, mas a pesquisa recente, com o foco nos jovens, traz novos e preocupantes dados. “Num país como o nosso, cujo futuro depende dos avanços de ciência e tecnologia, e onde há uma grande carência de profissionais técnicos e engenheiros, esses números demandam atenção das autoridades e da sociedade em geral para despertar nesses jovens o interesse pelas carreiras científicas. Acima de tudo, é um paradoxo, porque vivemos num mundo estruturado pela presença da tecnologia em todos os espaços da vida das pessoas”, analisa Vogt. “Apreciamos as benesses do esforço científico, mas não nos interessamos em continuar esse trabalho. As facilidades são ofertadas, mas são ilusórias, porque se quisermos tomar posse dessas conquistas é preciso capacitação científica, capacidade de abstração, mesmo com todas essas dificuldades que advêm do estudo das ciências exatas e naturais.”
“Já existem obstáculos grandes para os jovens adentrarem o mundo das ciências, visto como hermético, uma coisa de iniciados com linguagem própria que pouco tem a ver com o mundo sensível em que vivemos, exigindo um alto grau de abstração, e nem sempre se pode encontrar com facilidade analogias na vida pessoal dos estudantes”, observa Vogt. “Imagine tudo isso num país como o nosso em que apenas 2% dos formados desejam seguir uma carreira no magistério. A situação de ensino é lamentável e, na maioria dos casos, quem dá aulas de ciências vem de campos alternativos, como engenheiros ou médicos, pouco interessados em facilitar ou renovar a maneira de ensinar.”
São, portanto, sutis as razões que levam um estudante a optar pela carreira científica. Segundo a pesquisa, 4 em cada 10 estudantes seguiriam a profissão por dois motivos: viajar muito e trabalhar com novas tecnologias. Para um terço dos interessados, o salário, que consideram atrativo, é também uma variável a ser levada em conta para essa escolha. Bem atrás, com menos de 18%, estão motivos como: descobrir coisas novas, solucionar problemas da humanidade e avançar o conhecimento. Bem abaixo, com menos de 5%, estão razões como exercer uma profissão socialmente prestigiada ou trabalhar com pessoas qualificadas. No campo dos fatores que desanimam os jovens, o grande “vilão” é a didática das ciências nas aulas, que afasta da cabeça dos estudantes o desejo de uma carreira científica ou um futuro laboratorial. Em seguida, para 6 em cada 10 alunos, a dificuldade em entender as matérias é um filtro negativo. O “tédio” assola metade dos jovens. Daí, outro fator que os desanima é a ideia de que escolher a área científica é seguir estudando “indefinidamente” algo que consideram “chato”. Em quarto lugar, com 24%, está o receio de que existam poucas oportunidades de conseguir um emprego na área.
Isso não impede os jovens de ver aqueles que escolheram a ciência para profissão como figuras socialmente prestigiadas, cujo trabalho está associado a fins altruístas e ao progresso, e a imagem dos cientistas que predomina é a de apaixonados pelo seu trabalho, com mentes abertas e um pensamento lógico, não vigorando mais o estereótipo do cientista “solitário” e “distante da realidade”. Há, porém, um ponto controverso: os jovens estão convencidos, em sua maioria, de que os cientistas são donos de uma inteligência superior, que embora possa ser vista como uma característica positiva e atrativa afugenta os jovens, que não se consideram capazes de alcançar os patamares dessas “figuras excepcionais”, afetando negativamente a escolha pela carreira científica. “É preciso analisar esses dados a partir do seu potencial, pois é possível mudar esse paradigma atual que reverta a situação, trazendo não apenas mais jovens para as carreiras científicas, como também melhorando a experiência de aprendizagem da educação secundária”, observa Polino.
Diante da afirmação “que a ciência traz mais benefícios do que riscos à vida das pessoas”, 7 em cada 10 entrevistados concordaram com a premissa. Mas diante da assertiva “a ciência e a tecnologia estão produzindo um estilo de vida artificial e desumanizado”, as posições são menos definidas e a resposta mais recorrente (21,5%) foi “não concordo, nem discordo”. O contexto social revelou aspectos interessantes: os jovens de escolas públicas são menos entusiastas das comodidades oferecidas pela tecnologia. “Não é de estranhar que os que têm menos acesso a ela percebam menos a sua importância em facilitar a vida das pessoas”, nota Polino. Diante das afirmações “contraditórias” de que a ciência está “tirando postos de trabalho” e que “a ciência trará mais chances de trabalho para as gerações futuras” os resultados revelam que mais jovens (37%) têm medo de perder seu emprego por causa da ciência do que são otimistas com o futuro (32%). Segundo os pesquisadores, as respostas seguem o padrão da juventude latino-americana, para quem a “meritocracia” no trabalho é mais mito do que realidade. Quando o meio ambiente entra em cena, tudo piora.
Em face das assertivas “ciência e tecnologia eliminarão a pobreza e a fome do mundo” e “a ciência e a tecnologia são responsáveis pela maior parte dos problemas ambientais”, 3 em cada 10 estudantes não acreditam no poder de “cura” científico e a cifra se repete na certeza de que a ciência está afetando o meio ambiente negativamente. Aqui também as mulheres mostram sua visão: elas são as mais céticas, com 5 em cada 10 rejeitando a capacidade da tecnologia em pôr fim às mazelas globais. No cômputo total, porém, há certo otimismo juvenil: 52% dos adolescentes estão abertos e favoráveis ao que a ciência e a tecnologia possam realizar em nossas sociedades, mostrando que não vigora mais a fé cega e absoluta diante de seus resultados, sendo bem mais moderados e conscientes dos riscos do que os adultos, o que, dizem os pesquisadores, se bem aproveitado pode servir de base a uma cidadania mais crítica e responsável. “Instalar uma usina em Angra sem consultar a sociedade é, hoje, algo impensável. Os jovens pressupõem que exista um sistema que enfatiza a democratização nos processos científicos, o que não implica votar em quem vai ou não para um laboratório”, observa Vogt. “Eles aceitam uma cultura científica que realize uma ligação entre razão e humanidade, entre ciência e sociedade.”
Isso talvez explique um dado curioso descoberto na pesquisa realizada pelo Labjor. Se o caminho do conhecimento científico principal continua a ser a televisão, seguida pela internet, a ficção científica, em livros, filmes, HQs ou games, ganhou um honroso terceiro lugar como fonte de informação sobre ciências para os jovens. “Ao lado da internet, esses meios diferenciados oferecem um grande potencial de atrair jovens para a ciência de forma lúdica e interessante, uma forma estratégica de atingir essa camada da população para a divulgação de assuntos científicos”, nota Vogt. Até porque em vários lugares pesquisados as instituições oficiais são pouco conhecidas ou mesmo ignoradas, assim como os locais onde se pode informar sobre ciência, como museus ou zoológicos. Assim, curiosamente, uma cidade como São Paulo, onde há uma concentração de centros de pesquisa, universidades, e onde o acesso à informação científica é favorecido pela presença de museus e uma oferta midiática rica, mostrou índices de consumo informativo da população abaixo da média.
Veja infográficos:
Evolução dos universitários formados por área do conhecimento; Frequência com que os jovens se informam sobre ciência; O que afasta os jovens da ciência
Chimpanzees Have Police Officers, Too (Science Daily)
Mostly high-ranking males or females intervene in a conflict. (Credit: Claudia Rudolf von Rohr)
ScienceDaily (Mar. 7, 2012) — Chimpanzees are interested in social cohesion and have various strategies to guarantee the stability of their group. Anthropologists now reveal that chimpanzees mediate conflicts between other group members, not for their own direct benefit, but rather to preserve the peace within the group. Their impartial intervention in a conflict — so-called “policing” — can be regarded as an early evolutionary form of moral behavior.
Conflicts are inevitable wherever there is cohabitation. This is no different with our closest relatives, the chimpanzees. Sound conflict management is crucial for group cohesion. Individuals in chimpanzee communities also ensure that there is peace and order in their group. This form of conflict management is called “policing” — the impartial intervention of a third party in a conflict. Until now, this morally motivated behavior in chimpanzees was only ever documented anecdotally.
However, primatologists from the University of Zurich can now confirm that chimpanzees intervene impartially in a conflict to guarantee the stability of their group. They therefore exhibit prosocial behavior based on an interest in community concern.
The more parties to a conflict there are, the more policing there is
The willingness of the arbitrators to intervene impartially is greatest if several quarrelers are involved in a dispute as such conflicts particularly jeopardize group peace. The researchers observed and compared the behavior of four different captive chimpanzee groups. At Walter Zoo in Gossau, they encountered special circumstances: “We were lucky enough to be able to observe a group of chimpanzees into which new females had recently been introduced and in which the ranking of the males was also being redefined. The stability of the group began to waver. This also occurs in the wild,” explains Claudia Rudolf von Rohr, the lead author of the study.
High-ranking arbitrators
Not every chimpanzee makes a suitable arbitrator. It is primarily high-ranking males or females or animals that are highly respected in the group that intervene in a conflict. Otherwise, the arbitrators are unable to end the conflict successfully. As with humans, there are also authorities among chimpanzees. “The interest in community concern that is highly developed in us humans and forms the basis for our moral behavior is deeply rooted. It can also be observed in our closest relatives,” concludes Rudolf von Rohr.
Do neighborhood conditions affect school performance? (The University of Chicago Urban Network)
March 1, 2012
A recent report issued by the Center on Education Policy predicted that 48 percent of US public school students would not meet reading and math standards by 2014, as legally mandated by the decade-old No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The law was originally established to address the comparatively low test scores of low-income students. With the limited success of NCLB, the discussion about school performance has again grabbed the headlines. While social scientists have always been interested in the dynamics behind the low achievement of students living in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods, in recent years researchers have been trying to establish precisely the extent to which neighborhood conditions, net of other factors, influence educational achievement.
Better neighborhoods, higher test scores
Social scientists Jens Ludwig, Helen Ladd, and Greg Duncan used data from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment to investigate the impact of neighborhood environment on educational outcomes. The MTO experiment was conducted in five cities: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Families who volunteered were randomly assigned to different treatment groups. Whereas the experimental group received counseling and vouchers to move into low-poverty neighborhoods, the second group simply received regular Section 8 subsidies without being encouraged to move out of high-poverty areas. A third group functioned as a control group and received no subsidies at all. Using data from the Baltimore site, Ludwig, Ladd, and Duncan found that elementary school students in the experimental group who had moved to better neighborhoods scored about one-quarter of a standard deviation higher in reading and math tests than children in the control group. Robert Sampson, Patrick Sharkey, and Stephen Raudenbush foundsimilar results when they investigated the impact of neighborhood disadvantage on the verbal ability of African American children. Based on intelligence tests administered within the framework of the Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods project, they found that children who live in disadvantaged neighborhoods on average score four points lower than children living in better-off areas—a result that is almost equal to missing a year of schooling.
Better neighborhoods, no improvement?
A more recent analysis of MTO data from all five cities generated very different results. Social scientists Lisa Sanbonmatsu, Jeffrey Kling, Greg Duncan, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunnfound that math as well as reading scores did not significantly improve for children aged between six and twenty. The children were assessed four to six years after they had moved to a low-poverty neighborhood. Sanbonmatsu and her colleagues also revisited the children in the Ludwig Baltimore sample and found that the Baltimore elementary school children did not sustain their educational gains. In the final results of the MTO experiment, published in October 2011, Sanbonmatsu and her colleagues confirmed that there are few significant improvements in test scores ten to fifteen years after children had moved to less disadvantaged neighborhoods. There was no significant difference in achievement between those children who stayed in high-poverty areas and those who had moved away. The researchers suggested that the results may be related to the segregated, low-quality schools the children continued to attend even though they had moved to low-poverty areas.
In a review of neighborhood-effects studies and a reanalysis of the MTO data, sociologistJulia Burdick-Will and her colleagues challenged this null finding. They argued that the results of MTO, the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, and other studies showed that neighborhood effects may work in nonlinear ways. The size of the effect visible may be contingent on other factors, such as exposure to violence or the relative disadvantage of the neighborhood the child lives in. Children who come from very disadvantaged neighborhoods may experience larger neighborhood effects than those living in moderately disadvantaged areas. Consequently, the size of the neighborhood effect depends on the city. In high-poverty areas of Chicago and Baltimore, the MTO data showed an improvement in test scores. In Boston, Los Angeles, and New York, where neighborhoods are comparatively less disadvantaged, the researchers did not find clear test-score improvements.
Cultural factors
Sociologist David Harding argued that neighborhood effects mainly work through cultural pathways. Children living in disadvantaged neighborhoods are exposed to a greater variety of educational choices than their peers in other areas. He suggested that living in a culturally heterogeneous neighborhood has a negative impact on educational achievement. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescence (AddHealth), he showed that inner-city children observe educational behavior ranging from dropping out of high school to graduating from college. This greater variety of educational models seems to be affecting children’s own educational aspirations, by forcing them to decide among too many competing alternatives. Analyzing the same data set in another recent article, Harding also found that high levels of neighborhood violence may have a detrimental effect on high school graduation rates. He found that living in neighborhoods with high rates of violence was associated with significantly lower chances of high school graduation, regardless of family structure, income, and language spoken in the household.
Multigenerational effects
Sharkey and sociologist Felix Elwert have recently argued that neighborhood poverty has a cumulative effect across generations. Relying on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), they showed that children who were raised in poor neighborhoods by parents who had grown up in similarly disadvantaged communities had cognitive ability scores more than half a standard deviation below their peers. The children scored on average 9.27 points lower on the reading test and 8.36 points lower on the problem-solving test than children who were raised in non-poor neighborhoods by parents who had grown up in similarly non-poor areas. Though the authors demonstrated the presence of multigenerational effects through advanced statistical models, they explained that disentangling the precise interactions underlying the complex web of mechanisms at work over generations was impossible.
While researchers try to disentangle the impact of neighborhoods and generational effects on schooling, policy makers are beginning to consider alternatives to NCLB. In September of 2011, President Obama announced that states may now opt out of the program under certain conditions. With schools failing to meet the test score standards of NCLB, the government is rethinking its approach to helping the most disadvantaged students.
The QWERTY Effect: The Keyboards Are Changing Our Language! (The Atlantic)
MAR 8 2012, 1:30 PM ET
Could the layout of letters on a keyboard be shaping how we feel about certain words?
It’s long been thought that how a word sounds — its very phonemes — can be related in some ways to what that word means. But language is no longer solely oral. Much of our word production happens not in our throats and mouths but on our keyboards. Could that process shape a word’s meaning as well?
That’s the contention of an intriguing new paper by linguists Kyle Jasmin and Daniel Casasanto. They argue that because of the QWERTY keyboard’s asymmetrical shape (more letters on the left than the right), words dominated by right-side letters “acquire more positive valences” — that is to say, they become more likable. Their argument is that because its easier for your fingers to find the correct letters for typing right-side dominated words, the words subtly gain favor in your mind.
As Dave Mosher of Wired explains:
In their first experiment, the researchers analyzed 1,000-word indexes from English, Spanish and Dutch, comparing their perceived positivity with their location on the QWERTY keyboard. The effect was slight but significant: Right-sided words scored more positively than left-sided words.
With newer words, the correlation was stronger. When the researchers analyzed words coined after the QWERTY keyboard’s invention, they found that right-sided words had more positive associations than left-sided words.
In another experiment, 800 typists recruited through Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk service rated whether made-up words felt positive or negative. A QWERTY effect also emerged in those words.
Jasmin cautioned that words’ literal meanings almost certainly outweigh their QWERTY-inflected associations, and said the study only shows a correlation rather than clear cause-and-effect. Also, while a typist’s left- or right-handedness didn’t seem to matter, Jasmin said there’s not yet enough data to be certain.
Jasmin and Casasanto leave open the question whether the effect may also be the result of subtle cultural preferences for things on the right-hand side. Additionally, they say, “There is about a 90 percent chance that the QWERTY inventor was right-handed,” so it’s possible that biases he carried, may have subconsciously place more likable sounds on the right. However, they say, “such implicit associations would be based on the peculiar roles these letters play in English words or sounds. The finding of similar QWERTYeffects across languages suggests that, even if English-based [biases] influenced QWERTY’s design, QWERTY has now ‘infected’ typers of other languages with similar associations.”
How did the KKK lose nearly one-third of its chapters in one year? (Slate)
Ku Klux Kontraction
By Brian Palmer|Posted Thursday, March 8, 2012, at 4:55 PM ET
Members of the Fraternal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan participate in the 11th Annual Nathan Bedford Forrest Birthday march July 11, 2009 in Pulaski, Tenn.Spencer Platt/Getty Images
The number of hate groups in the United States is on the rise, but the Ku Klux Klan is losing chapters, according to data released on Wednesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The number of KKK chapters dropped from 221 to 152 in just one year. Why is the Klan shrinking?
Consolidation and defections. The Klan is not a stable organization. There’s no real national leadership, and chapters are constantly appearing, disappearing, splitting, and merging. In 2010, to take one example, the True Invisible Empire Knights of Pulaski, Tenn., merged with the Traditional American Knights from Potosi, Mo. to form the True Invisible Empire Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. (Note: this link, like others in this article, leads to an extremist website.) Such mergers decrease the number of chapters without necessarily changing membership totals. Not all the Klan’s losses are just on paper, though. Jeremy Parker, who led the Ohio-based Brotherhood of Klans, left the KKK for the Aryan Nations in 2010 and likely took a significant number of members with him. The Brotherhood of Klans was the second-largest Klan association in the country, with 38 chapters.
Membership totals are hard to track, because the Klan doesn’t willingly release member lists. Over the long term, the KKK is clearly contracting, since its rolls have shrunk from millions in the 1920s to between 3,000 and 5,000 today. But no one knows how membership has changed in the last few years.
Klan-watchers, however, suspect that the nation’s oldest domestic terrorist organization is indeed struggling to keep pace with other racist hate groups. Young racists tend to think of the Klan as their grandfathers’ hate group, and of its members as rural, uneducated, and technologically unsophisticated. The Klan doesn’t seem to have used the web and social media as well as its competitors. The group’s failure to effectively deploy technology is a bit of an irony, since one of those newfangled motion pictures, The Birth of a Nation, launched the KKK’s second era in 1915.
The Klan’s history of violence is another challenge to recruitment. The organization will always be associated with the lynching of innocent African-Americans in the 20th century, which puts off more moderate racists.
The KKK is also suffering from a proliferation of competitors. People who wanted to join a white supremacist movement back in the 1920s didn’t have a lot of choices. Today, there are countless options, enabling an extremist to find a group that matches his personal brand of intolerance. The more extreme groups in the burgeoning patriot movement cater to anti-Muslim, homophobic, and xenophobic sentiment, with less animosity toward African-Americans and Jews. Aryan Nations offers a heavy focus on Christian identity. Some groups preach more violence, while others offer a veneer of intellectualism.American Renaissance, for example, caters to “suit-and-tie” racists, offering pseudo-scientific papers on white supremacy. The group even holds conferences at a hotel near Dulles airport in Virginia.
Many young racist activists aren’t bothering to join groups at all anymore, further hampering the Klan’s recruitment efforts. Former KKK Grand Wizard Don Black in 1995 launched the website Stormfront, which enables individuals in the white supremacist movement to share ideas and read news stories reported from a racist perspective. The community-building site, and others like it, lessens the need for racists to socialize at Klan barbecues or introduce their children to Klanta Klaus at the KKK Christmas rally.
Number of U.S. Hate Groups Is Rising, Report Says (N.Y. Times)
By KIM SEVERSON – Published: March 7, 2012
ATLANTA — Fed by antagonism toward President Obama, resentment toward changing racial demographics and the economic rift between rich and poor, the number of so-called hate groups and antigovernment organizations in the nation has continued to grow, according to a report released Wednesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The center, which has kept track of such groups for 30 years, recorded 1,018 hate groups operating last year.
The number of groups whose ideology is organized against specific racial, religious, sexual or other characteristics has risen steadily since 2000, when 602 were identified, the center said. Antigay groups, for example, have risen to 27 from 17 in 2010.
The report also described a “stunning” rise in the number of groups it identifies as part of the so-called patriot and militia movements, whose ideologies include deep distrust of the federal government.
In 2011, the center tracked 1,274 of those groups, up from 824 the year before.
“They represent both a kind of right-wing populist rage and a left-wing populist rage that has gotten all mixed up in anger toward the government,” said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the author of the report.
The center, based in Montgomery, Ala., records only groups that are active, meaning that the groups are registering members, passing out fliers, protesting or showing other signs of activity beyond maintaining a Web site.
The Occupy movement is not on the list because its participants as a collective do not meet the center’s criteria for an extremist group, he said.
One of the groups that was moved from the “patriot” list to the hate group list this year is the Georgia Militia, some of whose members were indicted last year in a failed plot to blow up government buildings and spread poison along Atlanta freeways. They were reclassified because their speech includes anti-Semitism.
The far-right patriot movement gained steam in 1994 after the government used violence to shut down groups at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Tex. It peaked after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and began to fade. Its rise began anew in 2008, after the election of Mr. Obama and the beginning of the recession.
There have been declines in some hate groups, including native extremist groups like the Militiamen, which focused on illegal immigration. Chapters of the Ku Klux Klan fell to 152, from 221.
Among the states with the most active hate groups were California, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey and New York. The federal government does not focus on groups that engage in hate-based speech, but rather monitors paramilitary groups and others that have shown some indication of violence, said Daryl Johnson, a former senior domestic terrorism analyst for the Department of Homeland Security.
The Justice Department does not comment on the center’s annual report, but a spokeswoman said the agency had increased prosecution of hate crimes by 35 percent during the first three years of Mr. Obama’s presidency.
A version of this article appeared in print on March 8, 2012, on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Number of U.S. Hate Groups Is Rising, Report Says.
Could Many Universities Follow Borders Bookstores Into Oblivion? (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
March 7, 2012, 7:44 pm
By Marc Parry
Atlanta — Higher education’s spin on the Silicon Valley garage. That was the vision laid out in September, when the Georgia Institute of Technology announced a new lab for disruptive ideas, the Center for 21st Century Universities. During a visit to Atlanta last week, I checked in to see how things were going, sitting down with Richard A. DeMillo, the center’s director and Georgia Tech’s former dean of computing, and Paul M.A. Baker, the center’s associate director. We talked about challenges and opportunities facing colleges at a time of economic pain and technological change—among them the chance that many universities might follow Borders Bookstores into oblivion.
Q. You recently wrote that universities are “bystanders” at the revolution happening around them, even as they think they’re at the center of it. How so?
Mr. DeMillo: It’s the same idea as the news industry. Local newspapers survived most of the last century on profits from classified ads. And what happened? Craigslist drove profits out of classified ads for local newspapers. If you think that it’s all revolving around you, and you’re going to be able to impose your value system on this train that’s leaving the station, that’s going to lead you to one set of decisions. Think of Carnegie Mellon, with its “Four Courses, Millions of Users” idea [which became the Open Learning Initiative], or Yale with the humanities courses, thinking that what the market really wants is universal access to these four courses at the highest quality. And really what the market is doing is something completely different. The higher-education market is reinventing what a university is, what a course is, what a student is, what the value is. I don’t know why anyone would think that the online revolution is about reproducing the classroom experience.
Q. So what is the revolution about?
Mr. DeMillo: You don’t know where events are going to take higher education. But if you want to be an important institution 20 years from now, you have to position yourself so that you can adapt to whatever those technology changes are. Whenever you have this kind of technological change, where there’s a large incumbency, the incumbents are inherently at a disadvantage. And we’re the incumbents.
Q. What are some of the most important changes happening now?
Mr. DeMillo: What you’re seeing, for example, is technology enabling a single master teacher to reach students on an individualized basis on a scale that is unprecedented. So when Sebastian Thrun offers his Intro to Robotics course and gets 150,000 students—that’s a big deal.
Why is it a big deal? Well, because people who want to learn robotics want to learn from the master. And there’s something about the medium that he uses that makes that connection intimate. It’s not the same kind of connection that you get by pointing a camera at the front of the room and letting someone write on a whiteboard. These guys have figured out how to design a way of explaining the material that connects with people at scale. So Stanford all of a sudden becomes a place with a network of stakeholders that’s several orders of magnitude larger than it was 10 years ago. Every one of those students in India that wants to connect to Stanford now—connect to a mentor—now has a way to connect by bypassing their local institutions. Every institution that can’t offer a robotics course now has a way of offering a robotics course.
I think what you see happening now with the massive open courses is going to fundamentally change the business models. It’s going to put the notion of value front and center. Why would I want a credential from this university? Why would I want to pay tuition to this university? It really ups the stakes.
Mr. Baker: There used to be something called Borders, you may remember. Think of Borders, the bookstore, “X, Y, Z University,” the bookstore. If you’ve got Amazon as an analogue for these massively open courses, there is still a model where people actually go into bookstores because sometimes they want to touch, or they like hanging out, or there’s other value offered by that. What it means is that the university needs to rethink what it’s doing, how it’s doing it.
And how it innovates in a way of surviving in the face of this. If I can do the Amazon equivalent of this open course, why should I come here? Well, maybe you shouldn’t. And that’s a client that is lost.
Mr. DeMillo: All you have to do is add up the amount of money spent on courses. Just take an introduction to computer science. Add up the amount of money that’s spent nationwide on introductory programming courses. It’s a big number, I’ll bet. What is the value received for that spend? If, in fact, there’s a large student population that can be served by a higher-quality course, what’s the argument for spending all that money on 6,000 introduction to programming courses?
Q. You really think that many universities could go the way of Borders?
Mr. DeMillo: Yeah. Well, you can see it already. We lost, in this university system, four institutions this year.
Mr. Baker: The University System of Georgia merged four institutions into other ones that were geographically within 50 miles. The programs essentially were replicated. And in an environment in which you’ve got reduced resources, you can’t afford to have essentially identical programs 50 miles apart.
Q. So what sort of learning landscape do you think might emerge?
Mr. DeMillo: One thing that you might see is highly tuned curricula, students being able to select from a range of things that they want to learn and a range of mentors that they want to interact with, whether you think of it as hacking degrees or pulling assessments from a menu of different universities. What does that mean for the individual university? It means that a university has to figure out where its true value sits in that landscape.
Mr. Baker: Another thing we’re looking at is development of a value index to try to calculate, to be vulgar, the return on investment. Our idea is to try to figure out ways of determining what constitutes value for a student, based on four or five personas. So for, let’s say, a mom returning at 50 who wants an education—she’s going to value certain things differently than a 17-year-old rocket scientist coming to Tech who wants to get through in three years and knows exactly what she wants to do.
Mr. Demillo: Jeff Selingo wrote a column about this, having one place to go to figure out the economic value of a degree from a university. It’s a great idea, but why focus only on the paycheck as an economic value? There are lots of indicators of value. Do students from this university go to graduate school by a disproportionately large number? Do they get fellowships? Are they people who stay in their profession for a long period of time? You start to build up a picture of what students tell you, of what alumni tell you, was the value of that education. Can we pull these metrics together and then say something interesting about our institution and by extension others?
Q. What other projects is your center working on right now?
Mr. DeMillo: The Khan Academy—small bursts of knowledge that may or may not be included in a curriculum—was a really interesting idea.
Can students generate this kind of material in a way that’s useful for other students? That’s the genesis of our TechBurstcompetition [in which students create short videos that explain a single topic].
It turns out there’s a lot of interest on the part of the students at Georgia Tech in teaching what they know to their peers. The interesting part of the project is the unexpected things that you get. We had a discussion yesterday about mistakes. This is student-generated stuff, so is it right? Not all the time. Which causes great angst on the part of traditionalists, because now we have Georgia Tech TechBurst video that has errors in it. If these were instructional videos that we were marketing, that would be a very big deal. But they’re not. They’re the start of a thread of conversation among students. There’s one on gerrymandering. So it’s a political-science video, it’s cutely produced, but in some sense it’s not exactly right. And so what you would expect is now other students will come along and annotate that video, and say, well, that’s not exactly what gerrymandering is. And you’ll start to see this students-teaching-students peer-tutoring process taking place in real time.
Q. What about the massive open online course Georgia Tech will run in the fall?
Mr. DeMillo: The idea of a massive open course is something that people normally apply to introductory courses. What happens when you look at a massive open advanced seminar? A seminar room with 10,000 students, 50,000 students—what does that even mean? We’ve got some people here that have been blogging for quite a while about advanced topics. In fact, one of the blogs—Godel’s Lost Letter, by Professor Dick Lipton of Georgia Tech, and Ken Regan of the University at Buffalo—is about advanced computer theory, so it’s a very mathematical blog. It’s in the top 0.1 percent of WordPress blogs. A typical day is 5,000 to 10,000 page views. A hot day is 100,000. The question is can we take this blogging format and turn it into an online seminar.
Q. How would that work?
Mr. DeMillo: The blog is essentially an expression of a master teacher’s understanding of a field to people that want to learn about it. We think that there are some very simple layers that can be built under the existing blogging format that can essentially turn it into a massive open online seminar. It’s also a way of conducting scientific research. When you think about what happens in this blog, it celebrates the process of scientific discovery. I’ll just give you one example. Last year about this time some industrial scientist claimed that he had solved one of the outstanding problems in this area. In the normal course of events, the scientist would have written up the paper, would have sent it to a conference. It would have been refereed. Nine months later the paper would have been presented at the conference. People would have talked about it. It would have been written up to submit to a journal. Refereeing would have taken a couple of years for that. Well, the paper got submitted to Lipton’s blog. It just caused a flurry of activity. So thousands and thousands of scientists flocked to this paper, and essentially speeded up the refereeing of the paper, shortening the time from five years to a couple of weeks. It turns out that people came to believe that the claim was not valid, and the paper was incorrect. But what an education for future research students. You get to see the process of scientific discovery in action.
This is an interesting bookend to the idea of a massive open course. Because the people that are thinking about the massive open online courses for introductory material have a set of considerations. Students are at different levels of achievement. Assessment is very important. The credentialing process is dictated by whether or not you want credit. If you go to the other end of the curriculum, and say, well, what happens when we try to do these advanced courses at scale, credentialing is completely different. Assessment is completely different. You can’t rely on the same automation that you could in the introductory courses. Social networks become extremely important if you’re going to do this stuff at scale, because one professor can’t deal with 100,000 readers. He has to have a network of trusted people who would be able to answer questions. The anticipation is that a whole new set of problems would come up with these kinds of courses.
This conversation has been edited and shortened.
Vídeo da Comissão Europeia tem circulação suspensa (Opinião e Notícia)
XENOFOBIA
Peça publicitária mostra Europa atacada por chineses, brasileiros e indianos.
Por Felipe Varne – 8/03/2012
Uma bela mulher (usando o macacão amarelo imortalizado nas telas do cinema por Bruce Lee em O Jogo da Morte, e homenageado por Quentin Tarantino emKill Bill) caminha sozinha por um galpão abandonado. Subitamente ela é ameaçada pela presença de três homens. O primeiro, um ninja com traços orientais. O segundo, um homem de turbante e portando uma ameaçadora espada. O terceiro é um capoeirista acrobático e musculoso. Sem se intimidar, a mulher se concentra, e se multiplica em vários clones que formam um círculo ao redor do trio. As três figuras se tornam menos ameaçadoras, e os clones se sentam em posição de lótus, antes de se transformarem na bandeira da União Europeia.
O final do comercial que promove a expansão da União Europeia termina com a seguinte mensagem: “quanto maiores formos, mais fortes seremos”. A mensagem pode até ser verdadeira, mas o comercial foi retirado do ar às pressas, graças a uma enxurrada de comentários que acusaram a Comunidade Europeia de racismo e xenofobia.
Recebemos muitas mensagens sobre nosso último vídeo, incluindo algumas que se mostraram preocupadas com a mensagem que estava sendo passada.
O vídeo era uma experiência viral, visando atingir por meio de redes sociais e novas mídias, jovens entre 26 e 24 anos, familiarizados com artes marciais e vídeo games. As reações dentro dessa faixa etária foram positivas, assim como as dos grupos de testes nos quais o vídeo foi testado.
O vídeo apresenta personagens típicos do gênero das artes marciais: mestres de kung fu, kalripayattu e capoeira. Tudo começa com uma demonstração de suas habilidades e termina com todos os personagens demonstrando seu respeito mútuo, numa posição de paz e harmonia. O gênero foi escolhido para atrair os jovens e aumentar sua curiosidade a respeito de uma importante política da União Europeia.
O vídeo não tinha intenção alguma de promover o racismo, e nós obviamente lamentamos que ele tenha sido encarado desta maneira. Pedimos desculpas a qualquer um que tenha se ofendido. Por causa da polêmica, decidimos interromper a campanha imediatamente, e retirar o vídeo de circulação.
A mensagem acima é assinada por Stefano Sannino, diretor-geral do programa de expansão da Comissão Europeia. Nos tempos de crise, é natural que a União Europeia queira se fortalecer, e nada mais natural do que vender essa ideia aos jovens. Artes marciais e vídeo games são uma boa forma de atrair essa faixa etária, além de serem uma linguagem universal (algo importante quando o bloco em questão concentra um número gigantesco de idiomas e dialetos).
No entanto, a mensagem de Sannino se não é mentirosa, é, no mínimo, ingênua. Os três mestres, embora sejam muito habilidosos, não estão apenas demonstrando suas habilidades, e sim ameaçando a pobre mulher indefesa. Ou será que há algum outro motivo para que ela se multiplique em dez, formando um círculo ao redor do trio? E não é preciso ser nenhum gênio para ver que os mestres também não são apenas mestres, mas sim um chinês, um indiano e um brasileiro. China, índia e Brasil são integrantes do grupo dos BRICs, os países emergentes da economia mundial, que estão prosperando e crescendo, enquanto a Europa atravessa maus bocados. O quarto país do grupo, a Rússia, não apareceu no vídeo. Para isso existem duas explicações. Ou não foi possível encontrar um mestre de sambo (a mais famosa arte marcial da Rússia) a tempo, ou ironicamente, o país de Putin e Medvedev pode fazer parte dos planos de expansão da União Europeia. Ambas as opções soam absurdas, mas nada é impossível.
A Europa atravessa uma crise criada por ela mesma, e que apenas ela pode resolver. Ao buscar nos países emergentes um bode expiatório, a Comissão Europeia deu o primeiro tiro no pé. E ao apresentar desculpas esfarrapadas e subestimar a inteligência dos espectadores do vídeo, pode ter dado o segundo.
The Importance Of Mistakes (NPR)
February 28, 2012
by ADAM FRANK
Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images. It takes a lot of cabling to make the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Racking Apparatus (OPERA) run at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory (LNGS) in Italy.
How do people handle the discovery of their own mistake? Some folks might shrug it off. Some folks might minimize its effect. Some folks might even step in with a lie. Most people, we hope, would admit the mistake. But how often do we expect them to announce it to the world from a hilltop. How often do we expect them to tell us — in the clearest language possible — that they screwed up, providing every detail possible about the nature of the mistake?
That’s exactly what’s required in science. As embarrassing as it might seem to most people, admitting a mistake is really the essence of scientific heroism.
Which brings us, first, to faster-than-light neutrinos and then to climate science.
Last week rumors began to circulate that the (potential) discovery of neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light may get swept into the dustbin of scientific history. The news (rumors really) first circulated via Science Insider.
“According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos’ flight and an electronic card in a computer.”
Oops.
The story goes on to say that once the cable was tightened the Einstein-busting result disappeared. While “sources familiar with the experiment” might not seem enough to start singing funeral dirges, (who was the source, Deep Neutrino?), CERN released its own statement that points in a similar direction. No one can say for sure yet, but it appears that the faster-than-light hoopla is likely to go away.
So what are we to make of this? A loose cable seems pretty lame on the face of it. “Dude, Everybody with a cable box and a 32-inch flat screen knows you got to check the cable!”
There is no doubt that, as mistakes go, researchers running the neutrino experiments would rather have something a bit more sexy to offer if their result was disproven. (How about tiny corrections due to seismic effects?) Still, I’m betting the OPERA experiment had a heck of a lot more cables than your TV so, perhaps, we should be more understanding.
More importantly, no matter how it happens making mistakes is exactly what scientists are supposed to do. “Our whole problem is to make mistakes as fast possible,” John Wheeler once said.
What make science so powerful is not just the admission of mistakes but also the detailing of mistakes. While the OPERA group might now wish they had waited a bit longer to make their announcement, there is no shame in the mistake in-and-of itself. If they step into the spotlight and tell the world what happened, then they deserve to be counted as heroes just as much as if they’d broken Einstein’s theory.
And that is where we can see the connection to climate, evolution and all the other fronts in the ever-expanding war on science. Last week at the AAAS meeting in Vancouver, Nina Fedoroff, a distinguished agricultural scientist and president of that body, made a bold and frightening statement (especially for someone in such a position of authority). Fedoroff told her audience, as The Guardian reported:
“‘We are sliding back into a dark era,’ she said. ‘And there seems little we can do about it. I am profoundly depressed at just how difficult it has become merely to get a realistic conversation started on issues such as climate change or genetically modified organisms.'”
See video: http://bcove.me/ajmi39pd
The spectacle of watching politicians fall over each other to distance themselves from research validated by armies of scientists is more than depressing. Our current understanding of climate, for example, represents the work of thousands of human beings all working to make mistakes as fast possible, all working to root out error as fast as possible. There is no difference between what happens in climate science or evolutionary biology and any other branch of science.
Honest people asking the best of themselves push forward in their own fields. They watch their work and those of their colleagues closely, always looking for mistakes, cracks in reasoning, subtle flaws in logic. When they are found, the process is set in motion: critique, defend, critique, root out. When science deniers trot out the same tired talking points, talking points with no scientific validity, they ignore (or fail to understand) their argument’s lack of credibility.
Eventually, science always finds its mistakes. Eventually we find some kind of truth, unless, of course, mistakes are forced on us from outside of science. That, however, is an error of another kind entirely.
Stadium ban for EU hooligans undermines civil rights (The Limping Messenger blog)
February 3, 2012 by Tjebbe van Tijen
EUROPEAN FOOTBALL STADIUM BAN FOR HOOLIGANS… Ahmed Aboutaleb major of the City of Rotterdam rejoices today the European Parliament initiative for an European level implementation of banning locally convicted football hooligans from all EU stadiums. (1) This law initiative has been long in the making. An earlier document by the Council of the European Union “Resolution of the Council on preventing and restraining football hooliganism through the exchange of experience, exclusion from stadiums and media policy” dates back to the year 1997:
The responsible Ministers invite their national sports associations to examine, in accordance with national law, how stadium exclusions imposed under civil law could also apply to football matches in a European context.
However much I dislike football hooligans this is a juridical precedent which will have far reaching negative consequences for civil rights in general. Not only does it create yet another centrally managed person database that can be accessed by all EU police forces (like data on persons DNA, illegal migrants and so on) it is a further step in constructing a ‘central EU police force’ with all its inherent dangers. Such an EU-wide anti-hooligan law also means multiplied condemnation – for a big part of the European continent – on the basis of a local conviction.
Together with actual proposals (in the Netherlands) for ‘whole sale mass arrests’, not only hooligan “leaders”, but also of their “followers” (‘meeloophooligens’ is the Dutch term), we can be certain that such an extra-national banning and black-listing power, will be abused in ways beyond our imagination. Once such a law and its enforcement has been put into effect, other ‘social distinct groups’ whose behaviour is classified as unruly can get the same routine treatment in the future. The Council of Europe document of 1997 cited above speaks of “preventing and containing of disorder”, so one need not to be surprised when other forms of ”disorder” will be handled in the long run in the same way. For instance, when we take in account the frequent attempts by politicians – defending employers interest – to criminalise strike actions, trade union activists could be databased and blacklisted with the same ‘anti-hooligan routine’.
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(1) It is interesting to note that the ‘hooligan-ban’ proposals in the European Parliament plenary session of February 2. 2012, was part of a bundle of all kind of measures related to sport listed in this order: – Promote sport for girls; – Blacklist hooligans; – Make doping a criminal offence; – Regulate sport agents; -Combine learning and training. The resolution – thus packaged – has been passed with 550 votes in favour, 73 against and 7 abstentions. In the section of hooligans is also this sentence: “MEPs also call on Member States and sports governing bodies to commit to tackling homophobia and racism against athletes.” Something problematic in the sense of ‘civil rights’ has been hidden inside a package of mostly emancipatory proposals.
When It Comes to Accepting Evolution, Gut Feelings Trump Facts (Science Daily)
ScienceDaily (Jan. 19, 2012) — For students to accept the theory of evolution, an intuitive “gut feeling” may be just as important as understanding the facts, according to a new study.
In an analysis of the beliefs of biology teachers, researchers found that a quick intuitive notion of how right an idea feels was a powerful driver of whether or not students accepted evolution — often trumping factors such as knowledge level or religion.
“The whole idea behind acceptance of evolution has been the assumption that if people understood it — if they really knew it — they would see the logic and accept it,” said David Haury, co-author of the new study and associate professor of education at Ohio State University.
“But among all the scientific studies on the matter, the most consistent finding was inconsistency. One study would find a strong relationship between knowledge level and acceptance, and others would find no relationship. Some would find a strong relationship between religious identity and acceptance, and others would find less of a relationship.”
“So our notion was, there is clearly some factor that we’re not looking at,” he continued. “We’re assuming that people accept something or don’t accept it on a completely rational basis. Or, they’re part of a belief community that as a group accept or don’t accept. But the findings just made those simple answers untenable.”
Haury and his colleagues tapped into cognitive science research showing that our brains don’t just process ideas logically — we also rely on how true something feels when judging an idea.
“Research in neuroscience has shown that when there’s a conflict between facts and feeling in the brain, feeling wins,” he says.
The researchers framed a study to determine whether intuitive reasoning could help explain why some people are more accepting of evolution than others. The study, published in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, included 124 pre-service biology teachers at different stages in a standard teacher preparation program at two Korean universities.
First, the students answered a standard set of questions designed to measure their overall acceptance of evolution. These questions probed whether students generally believed in the main concepts and scientific findings that underpin the theory.
Then the students took a test on the specific details of evolutionary science. To show their level of factual knowledge, students answered multiple-choice and free-response questions about processes such as natural selection. To gauge their “gut” feelings about these ideas, students wrote down how certain they felt that their factually correct answers were actually true.
The researchers then analyzed statistical correlations to see whether knowledge level or feeling of certainty best predicted students’ overall acceptance of evolution. They also considered factors such as academic year and religion as potential predictors.
“What we found is that intuitive cognition has a significant impact on what people end up accepting, no matter how much they know,” said Haury. The results show that even students with greater knowledge of evolutionary facts weren’t likelier to accept the theory, unless they also had a strong “gut” feeling about those facts.
When trying to explain the patterns of whether people believe in evolution or not, “the results show that if we consider both feeling and knowledge level, we can explain much more than with knowledge level alone,” said Minsu Ha, lead author on the paper and a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Teaching and Learning.
In particular, the research shows that it may not be accurate to portray religion and science education as competing factors in determining beliefs about evolution. For the subjects of this study, belonging to a religion had almost no additional impact on beliefs about evolution, beyond subjects’ feelings of certainty.
These results also provide a useful way of looking at the perceived conflict between religion and science when it comes to teaching evolution, according to Haury. “Intuitive cognition not only opens a new door to approach the issue,” he said, “it also gives us a way of addressing that issue without directly questioning religious views.”
When choosing a setting for their study, the team found that Korean teacher preparation programs were ideal. “In Korea, people all take the same classes over the same time period and are all about the same age, so it takes out a lot of extraneous factors,” said Haury. “We wouldn’t be able to find a sample group like this in the United States.”
Unlike in the U.S., about half of Koreans do not identify themselves as belonging to any particular religion. But according to Ha, who is from Korea, certain religious groups consider the topic of evolution just as controversial as in the U.S.
To ensure that their results were relevant to U.S. settings, the researchers compared how the Korean students did on the knowledge tests with previous studies of U.S. students. “We found that the both groups were comparable in terms of the overall performance,” said Haury.
For teaching evolution, the researchers suggest using exercises that allow students to become aware of their brains’ dual processing. Knowing that sometimes what their “gut” says is in conflict with what their “head” knows may help students judge ideas on their merits.
“Educationally, we think that’s a place to start,” said Haury. “It’s a concrete way to show them, look — you can be fooled and make a bad decision, because you just can’t deny your gut.”
Ha and Haury collaborated on this study with Ross Nehm, associate professor of education at the Ohio State University. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.
The right’s stupidity spreads, enabled by a too-polite left (Guardian)
Conservativism may be the refuge of the dim. But the room for rightwing ideas is made by those too timid to properly object
by George Monbiot, The Guardian
Self-deprecating, too liberal for their own good, today’s progressives stand back and watch, hands over their mouths, as the social vivisectionists of the right slice up a living society to see if its component parts can survive in isolation. Tied up in knots of reticence and self-doubt, they will not shout stop. Doing so requires an act of interruption, of presumption, for which they no longer possess a vocabulary.
Perhaps it is in the same spirit of liberal constipation that, with the exception of Charlie Brooker, we have been too polite to mention the Canadian study published last month in the journal Psychological Science, which revealed that people with conservative beliefs are likely to be of low intelligence. Paradoxically it was the Daily Mail that brought it to the attention of British readers last week. It feels crude, illiberal to point out that the other side is, on average, more stupid than our own. But this, the study suggests, is not unfounded generalisation but empirical fact.
It is by no means the first such paper. There is plenty of research showing that low general intelligence in childhood predicts greater prejudice towards people of different ethnicity or sexuality in adulthood. Open-mindedness, flexibility, trust in other people: all these require certain cognitive abilities. Understanding and accepting others – particularly “different” others – requires an enhanced capacity for abstract thinking.
But, drawing on a sample size of several thousand, correcting for both education and socioeconomic status, the new study looks embarrassingly robust. Importantly, it shows that prejudice tends not to arise directly from low intelligence but from the conservative ideologies to which people of low intelligence are drawn. Conservative ideology is the “critical pathway” from low intelligence to racism. Those with low cognitive abilities are attracted to “rightwing ideologies that promote coherence and order” and “emphasise the maintenance of the status quo”. Even for someone not yet renowned for liberal reticence, this feels hard to write.
This is not to suggest that all conservatives are stupid. There are some very clever people in government, advising politicians, running thinktanks and writing for newspapers, who have acquired power and influence by promoting rightwing ideologies.
But what we now see among their parties – however intelligent their guiding spirits may be – is the abandonment of any pretence of high-minded conservatism. On both sides of the Atlantic, conservative strategists have discovered that there is no pool so shallow that several million people won’t drown in it. Whether they are promoting the idea that Barack Obama was not born in the US, that man-made climate change is an eco-fascist-communist-anarchist conspiracy, or that the deficit results from the greed of the poor, they now appeal to the basest, stupidest impulses, and find that it does them no harm in the polls.
Don’t take my word for it. Listen to what two former Republican ideologues, David Frum and Mike Lofgren, have been saying. Frum warns that “conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics”. The result is a “shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology” which has “ominous real-world consequences for American society”.
Lofgren complains that “the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital centre today”. The Republican party, with its “prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science” is appealing to what he calls the “low-information voter”, or the “misinformation voter”. While most office holders probably don’t believe the “reactionary and paranoid claptrap” they peddle, “they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base”.
The madness hasn’t gone as far in the UK, but the effects of the Conservative appeal to stupidity are making themselves felt. This week the Guardian reported that recipients of disability benefits, scapegoated by the government as scroungers, blamed for the deficit, now find themselves subject to a new level of hostility and threats from other people.
These are the perfect conditions for a billionaires’ feeding frenzy. Any party elected by misinformed, suggestible voters becomes a vehicle for undisclosed interests. A tax break for the 1% is dressed up as freedom for the 99%. The regulation that prevents big banks and corporations exploiting us becomes an assault on the working man and woman. Those of us who discuss man-made climate change are cast as elitists by people who happily embrace the claims of Lord Monckton, Lord Lawson or thinktanks funded by ExxonMobil or the Koch brothers: now the authentic voices of the working class.
But when I survey this wreckage I wonder who the real idiots are. Confronted with mass discontent, the once-progressive major parties, as Thomas Frank laments in his latest book Pity the Billionaire, triangulate and accommodate, hesitate and prevaricate, muzzled by what he calls “terminal niceness”. They fail to produce a coherent analysis of what has gone wrong and why, or to make an uncluttered case for social justice, redistribution and regulation. The conceptual stupidities of conservatism are matched by the strategic stupidities of liberalism.
Yes, conservatism thrives on low intelligence and poor information. But the liberals in politics on both sides of the Atlantic continue to back off, yielding to the supremacy of the stupid. It’s turkeys all the way down.
Twitter: @georgemonbiot
Climate and the culture war (The Washington Post)
By Michael Gerson, Published: January 16, 2012
The Washington Post
The attempt by Newt Gingrich to cover his tracks on climate change has been one of the shabbier little episodes of the 2012 presidential campaign. His forthcoming sequel to “A Contract with the Earth” was to feature a chapter by Katharine Hayhoe, a young professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas Tech University. Hayhoe is a scientist, an evangelical Christian and a moderate voice warning of climate disruption.
Then conservative media got wind. Rush Limbaugh dismissed Hayhoe as a “climate babe.” An Iowa voter pressed Gingrich on the topic. “That’s not going to be in the book,” he responded. “We told them to kill it.” Hayhoe learned this news just as she was passing under the bus.
A theory about the role of carbon dioxide in climate patterns has joined abortion and gay marriage as a culture war controversy. Climate scientists are attacked as greenshirts and watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside). Skeptics are derided as flat-earthers. Reputations are assaulted and the e-mails of scientists hacked.
A few years ago, the intensity of this argument would have been difficult to predict. In 2005, then-Gov. Mitt Romney joined a regional agreement to limit carbon emissions. In 2007, Gingrich publicly endorsed a cap-and-trade system for carbon.
What explains the recent, bench-clearing climate brawl? A scientific debate has been sucked into a broader national argument about the role of government. Many political liberals have seized on climate disruption as an excuse for policies they supported long before climate science became compelling — greater federal regulation and mandated lifestyle changes. Conservatives have also tended to equate climate science with liberal policies and therefore reject both.
The result is a contest of questioned motives. In the conservative view, the real liberal goal is to undermine free markets and national sovereignty (through international environmental agreements). In the liberal view, the real conservative goal is to conduct a war on science and defend fossil fuel interests. On the margin of each movement, the critique is accurate, supplying partisans with plenty of ammunition.
No cause has been more effectively sabotaged by its political advocates. Climate scientists, in my experience, are generally careful, well-intentioned and confused to be at the center of a global controversy. Investigations of hacked e-mails have revealed evidence of frustration — and perhaps of fudging but not of fraud. It is their political defenders who often discredit their work through hyperbole and arrogance. As environmental writer Michael Shellenberger points out, “The rise in the number of Americans telling pollsters that news of global warming was being exaggerated began virtually concurrently with the release of Al Gore’s movie, ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’”
The resistance of many conservatives to arguments about climate disruption is magnified by class and religion. Tea Party types are predisposed to question self-important elites. Evangelicals have long been suspicious of secular science, which has traditionally been suspicious of religious influence. Among some groups, skepticism about global warming has become a symbol of social identity — the cultural equivalent of a gun rack or an ichthus.
But however interesting this sociology may be, it has nothing to do with the science at issue. Even if all environmentalists were socialists and secularists and insufferable and partisan to the core, it would not alter the reality of the Earth’s temperature.
Since the 1950s, global temperatures have increased about nine-tenths of a degree Celsius — the recent conclusion of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project — which coincides with a large increase in greenhouse gasses produced by humans. This explanation is most consistent with the location of warming in the atmosphere. It best accounts for changing crop zones, declining species, thinning sea ice and rising sea levels. Scientists are not certain about the pace of future warming — estimates range from 2 degrees C to 5 degrees C over the next century. But warming is already proceeding faster than many plants and animals can adapt to.
These facts do not dictate a specific political response. With Japan, Canada and Russia withdrawing from the Kyoto process, the construction of a global regulatory regime for carbon emissions seems unlikely and may have never been possible. The broader use of nuclear power, the preservation of carbon-consuming rain forests and the encouragement of new energy technologies are more promising.
But any rational approach requires some distance between science and ideology. The extraction and burning of dead plant matter is not a moral good — or the proper cause for a culture war.
michaelgerson@washpost.com
The Top 10 Worst Things About Working in a Lab (Science)
By Adam Ruben
January 27, 2012
I have found that, no matter what the context, I will click on nearly any article with a number and a superlative in the title. I don’t really need to know anything about cheeseburgers that I don’t already know, but call an article “The Eight Best Cheeseburgers You’ve Never Heard Of” or “The Five Largest Cheeseburgers That Appeared in Films,” and suddenly I’ve got a bit of required reading to do.
And now, so do you.
Maybe you’re an ordinary person, not a scientist (we call you “Non-scis” behind your backs), and you’ve just clicked here for some light lunchtime reading. But if you’re a scientist, perhaps you can relate as we identify … drumroll please …
The top 10 worst aspects of working in a lab.
- 10. Your non-scientist friends don’t understand what you do.
- Even when talking about their jobs to outsiders, your friends in other professions can summarize their recent accomplishments in understandable ways. For example, they can say, “I built an object,” or “I pleased a client,” or, if your friend works on Wall Street, “I ate a peasant.” But what can you say? “I cured … um, well, I didn’t really cure it, but I discovered … well, ‘discovered’ is too strong a word, so let’s just say I tested … well, the tests are ongoing and are causing new questions to arise, so … yeah. Stop looking at me.” At least you’re doing better than your friends with Ph.D.s in the humanities, who would answer, “I put sheets on my mom’s basement couch.”
- 9. The scientist who is already the most successful gets credit for everything anyone does.
- If you discover something, your principal investigator (PI) gets credit. If you write a paper, your PI gets credit. If you submit a successful grant proposal, your PI gets credit (and money). And what do you get? If you’re lucky, you get to write more papers and grant proposals to bolster your PI’s curriculum vitae.
- 8. Lab equipment is expensive and delicate. And you, you’re not so coordinated. Nope. Not so much.
- Oops! You could pay to replace this one broken piece, or you could hire another postdoc.
- 7. Sometimes experiments fail for a reason. Sometimes experiments fail for no reason.
- As anyone who works in a lab knows, things that work perfectly for months or years can suddenly stop working, offering no explanation for the change. (In this way, lab experiments are like Internet Explorer®.) This abrupt and inexplicable failure changes your work to meta-work, as you stop asking questions about science and start asking questions about the consistency of your technique. You can waste years saying things like, “When I created the sample that worked, I flared my nostril in a weird way. So this week, I’ll try to repeat what I did last week but with more nostrils flarin’!”
- 6. Your schedule is dictated by intangible things.
- Freaking cell lines, needing to be tended on a regular basis regardless of your dinner plans. Freaking galaxies visible only in the middle of the night. If it weren’t for your lab work you’d have such a vivacious social life! Sure. That’s why you have no social life. It’s the lab work.
- 5. Science on television has conditioned you to expect daily or weekly breakthroughs.
- Have you ever had a breakthrough in the lab? Yeah, me neither. Sure, I’ve had successful experiments, which usually means that the controls worked and no one was injured. But a real, eureka, run-down-the-hallway-carrying-a-printout, burst-into-a-room-full-of-military-personnel-and-call-the-President-even-though-it’s-three-in-the-morning breakthrough? Not yet. Unless you count the programmable coffee maker that, after much cajoling, made decent coffee at the appropriate time. Maybe I should publish that.
- 4. Your work is dangerous.
- People say their jobs are killing them, but you work with things that could actually kill you — things like caustic chemicals, infectious agents, highly electrified instruments, and angry PIs.
CREDIT: Hal Mayforth
- 3. Labs are not conducive to sex.
- Unless you work in a sex lab, which may or may not be a real thing, it’s unlikely you can convince anyone to crawl under your lab bench with you (“Just ignore the discarded pipette tips, baby”) and, as protein biophysicists say, put their zinc fingers in your leucine zipper. But hey, prove me wrong, people.
- 2. You have to dress like a scientist.
- When I worked at an amusement park, I had to wear a purple polo shirt tucked into khaki shorts with giant white sneakers, so I suppose things could be worse. But some of our (scientists’) uniform choices are pretty unflattering. Disposable shoe covers look like you stepped in two shower caps. Safety goggles trap humidity as though you’re cultivating a rainforest on your face. And white lab coats with collars and lapels make men look like nerds and women look like men who look like nerds.
- 1. You can feel time creeping inexorably toward your own death.
- If you think I’m being melodramatic, you were obviously never a grad student or postdoc. As a grad student or postdoc, you spend longer than you’ve planned working on something less interesting than you’d believed, all while earning less money than you assumed reasonable with an endpoint that’s less tangible and less probable than you thought possible.
If this was the kind of article with a “Comments” section, you’d scroll there and see people berating the spoiled scientist for complaining about his work when there are far worse jobs in the world. You’d also see anonymous nastiness, blatant ignorance, and a rant about Ron Paul.
Luckily, there is no “Comments” section (thanks, Science!), so I can preemptively tell you that yes, I know there are worse jobs than “scientist” — “baby thrower,” for example, or “cow exploder.” But this is Science, so if you want to read about the top 10 worst aspects of being a cow exploder, go borrow a copy of Cow Exploder Digest. And wash your hands after reading it.
And yes, I know that there are great aspects of working in a lab as well. You get to work with your hands. You experience the beauty of a well-designed experiment. You can even ask questions about the universe and, occasionally, answer them. But since these last points were neither in list format nor preceded by an overreaching superlative, I’ll understand if you’ve already stopped reading.
Adam Ruben, Ph.D., is a practicing scientist and the author of Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School.
Entrevista con el antropólogo estadunidense James Scott: Los movimientos autónomos causan miedo a los movimientos sociales formales y al Estado (Desinformémonos)
“Los grandes cambios radicales no han sucedido como producto de una legislación o elecciones; han sucedido en las calles, en levantamientos que amenazan con salirse de control”.
ENTREVISTA DE MARINA DEMETRIADOU, ATZÉLBI HERNÁNDEZ E ISABEL SANGINÉS
Ciudad de México. James Scott es profesor de Ciencias Políticas y Antropología en la Universidad de Yale y director de estudios agrarios en la misma institución.
Su trabajo se ha centrado en la manera que la gente de abajo se opone a la dominación. En diversos libros como “Economía moral del campesino: subsistencia y rebelión en Asia suroriental” “Armas del débil: formas diarias de resistencia campesina” y “Los dominados y el arte de la resistencia”, Scott teoriza sobre la manera en que el pueblo resiste a la autoridad y trata de describir las interacciones entre dominados y opresores.
En la siguiente entrevista con Desinformémonos, el investigador y antropólogo habla sobre la forma en que las experiencias autónomas pueden funcionar alejadas del Estado y sobre el impacto que pueden tener a mediano y largo plazo los movimientos sociales que surgen espontáneamente y que no tienen jerarquía.
¿Cómo los movimientos y experiencias autónomas pueden ocupar espacios del Estado- nación?
Históricamente los movimientos sociales han pedido cosas concretas al Estado. Empiezan con la idea de que el Estado es algo dado.
Los movimientos autónomos deben ver cómo hacer para crear espacios autogestionados, como centros sociales de capacitación y de educación, que no sean una imitación del Estado. Y esto incluye también a las ocupaciones.
Un movimiento autónomo debe crear lo más posible, dentro de un espacio que esté fuera del Estado para poder crear algo distinto. Esto no es fácil, pero sólo pedir cosas al Estado, de acuerdo con sus leyes y sus reglas, no es estar creando autonomía.
La mayoría de los movimientos sociales en la historia han creado estructuras que son parecidas al Estado, son jerárquicas. Tienen un nombre, una organización, eligen representantes y copian la estructura del Estado. Son pequeños Estados.
Hablando de mi propio país, los Estados Unidos, creo que cada movimiento progresivo y radical que ha tenido éxito, ha sido producto de irrupciones masivas, no organizadas, que no llegan de los movimientos sociales existentes. Como los movimientos por los derechos civiles y por el voto de las mujeres que surgieron de manera espontánea, fuera de movimientos sociales organizados.
Estos movimientos radicales no tienen jerarquía, así que el Estado no tiene con quién hablar (negociar). No hay liderazgos. Son movimientos populares sin estructura jerárquica, así que no los pueden cooptar.
La paradoja de la democracia es que – supuestamente – debe crear un sistema para hacer posibles cambios sociales a gran escala, sin violencia y sin irrupciones, mediante un proceso legal en el que se eligen personas; pero el hecho es que los grandes cambios radicales no han sucedido como producto de una legislación o elecciones, sino que han sucedido en las calles, en levantamientos que amenazan con salirse de control y en los que las élites estaban asustadas, aterrorizadas y tomaron cartas en el asunto rápidamente para poder apagar la revuelta.
¿Qué experiencias organizativas comunitarias han logrado hacer cambios alternativos y radicales alejados de la estructura de Estado?
El autor uruguayo Raúl Zibechi habla de muchos ejemplos de movimientos autónomos en América Latina que, de acuerdo con él, han logrado organizarse alternativamente; Zibechi habla de comunidades de base que han construido interrelaciones con otras comunidades y que después pueden movilizarse juntas en movimientos sociales más grandes.
Otro ejemplo se ha dado en Estados Unidos. Se trata de Occupy Wall Street, un movimiento espontáneo, que empezó con 200 ó 300 personas, y luego mucha gente de Cleveland, San Francisco y muchas ciudades más comenzaron a imitarlos; ésta es la clase de cosas que nadie podía haber predicho, nadie puede organizar estas revueltas, pero cuando suceden se debe saber tomar ventaja de la situación. Estas cosas nacen de forma espontáneas y nadie de nosotros sabe qué forma tomarán; pero después, el rol de los movimientos sociales deberá ser ayudar a estas ocupaciones espontáneas a logar un calendario.
El hecho es que aunque haya capacidad para la movilización autónoma local y ésta sea el punto central de las resistencias, no importa tanto hasta qué punto estos grupos logren o no sus objetivos inmediatas, pues lo realmente importante es que están creando redes que son un muy valioso recurso para la movilización popular.
Si surgen ocupaciones espontáneas, hay que aprovechar la capacidad de los movimientos autónomos locales de crear redes sociales.
¿Qué impacto pueden tener en el largo plazo los movimientos espontáneos que no tienen organización, ni planeación, y que no se acercan al Estado ni lo golpean directamente?
Los movimientos sociales organizados y jerarquizados, la mayoría de los que conocemos, fueron creados por la base del levantamiento popular, pero estas organizaciones no crearon nada por sí mismas en términos de cambios en el Estado; sin embargo, todos los movimientos sociales formales, que son pequeños Estados, están aterrorizados también por las revueltas de los de abajo, así que si quieres cambiar un movimiento, hay que amenazarlo desde abajo, desde los movimientos espontáneos. Los movimientos autónomos causan mucho miedo a los movimientos sociales formales y al Estado.
Strange History: Mass Hysteria Through the Years (Discovery)
Analysis by Benjamin Radford
Mon Feb 6, 2012 05:28 PM ET
The news media has been abuzz recently about a seemingly mysterious illness that has nearly two dozen students at LeRoy High School in western New York twitching and convulsing uncontrollably.
Most doctors and experts believe that the students are suffering from mass sociogenic illness, also known as mass hysteria. In these cases, psychological symptoms manifest as physical conditions.
Sociologist Robert Bartholomew, author of several books on mass hysteria including The Martians Have Landed: A History of Media-Driven Panics and Hoaxes, explained to Discovery News that “there are two main types of contagious conversion disorder. The most common in Western countries is triggered by extreme, sudden stress; usually a bad smell. Symptoms typically include dizziness, headaches, fainting and over-breathing, and resolve within about a day.”
In contrast, Bartholomew said, “The LeRoy students are experiencing the rarer, more serious type affecting muscle motor function and commonly involves twitching, shaking, facial tics, difficulty communicating and trance states. Symptoms appear slowly over weeks or months under exposure to longstanding stress, and typically take weeks or months to subside.”
Mass hysteria cases are more common than people realize and have been reported all over the world for centuries. Here’s a look at some famous — and bizarre — cases of mass hysteria in history.
The Mad Gasser of Mattoon
Many cases of mass hysteria are spawned by reports of strange or mysterious odors. One of the most famous cases occurred in 1944 when residents of Mattoon, Ill., reported that a “mad gasser” was loose in the small town.
It began with one woman named Aline Kearney, who smelled something odd outside her window. Soon she said her throat and lips were burning, and she began to panic when she felt her legs becoming paralyzed. She called police, and her symptoms soon subsided. Her husband, upon returning home later, reported glimpsing a shadowy figure lurking nearby. The “gas attack” (as it was assumed to be) on Mrs. Kearney was not only the gossip of the neighborhood but also reported in the local newspaper, and soon others in the small town reported odd odors and experiencing short-lived symptoms such as breathlessness, nausea, headache, dizziness and weakness. No “mad gasser” was ever found, and no trace of the mysterious gas was detected.
The French Meowing Nuns
Before 1900 many reports of mass hysteria occurred within the context of religious institutions. European convents in particular were often the settings for outbreaks. In one case the symptoms manifested in strange collective behavior; a source from 1844 reported that “a nun, in a very large convent in France, began to meow like a cat; shortly afterwards other nuns also meowed.
At last all the nuns meowed together every day at a certain time for several hours together.” The meowing went on until neighbors complained and soldiers were called, threatening to whip the nuns until they stopped meowing. During this era, belief in possession (such as by animals or demons, for example) was common, and cats in particular were suspected of being in league with Satan. These outbreaks of animal-like noises and behaviors usually lasted anywhere from a few days to a few months, though some came and went over the course of years.
The Pokémon Panic
A strange and seemingly inexplicable outbreak of bizarre behavior struck Japan in mid-December 1997, when thousands of Japanese schoolchildren experienced frightening seizures after watching an episode of the popular cartoon “Pokémon.” Intense flashes of light during the show triggered relatively harmless and brief seizures, nausea, and headaches. Doctors diagnosed some of the children with a rare, pre-existing condition called photosensitive epilepsy, in which bright flashing lights used in the cartoon can trigger the symptoms.
But experts were unable to explain what had happened to the remaining thousands of other children who reported symptoms; the vast majority of them did not have photosensitive epilepsy. Finally, the mystery was solved in 2001, when it was discovered that the symptoms found in most children were caused by mass hysteria, triggered by the initial wave of epileptic seizures.
The McMinnville School Poison Gas Episode
Nearly 200 students and teachers were hospitalized during a mysterious outbreak of illness at Warren County High School in McMinnville, Tenn., in November 1998. A local newspaper, the Southern Standard, ran the headline “Students Poisoned: Mysterious Fumes Sicken Almost 100 at High School.” It began when a teacher reported smelling a gasoline-like odor in her classroom that made her sick. A few of her students then also became sick, and the school was closed for testing.
No contamination was found, nor any medical or environmental cause for the symptoms, which included headache, dizziness, nausea and drowsiness. Following a clean bill of health, the school reopened, and soon a second cluster of students fell ill and closed down the school a second time. All recovered from the attack.
As these cases show, the LeRoy high school incident is only one of many strange episodes of mass sociogenic illness — and there will be more.
Índios X Pastores – Reportagem da Rede Bandeirantes
“O pior fascismo é o fascismo do bem. Os fascistas do bem amam por ódio.” Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, pelo Twitter, em 05/02/2012.
Environment agency becomes crunch issue in Rio talks (Agence France-Presse)
By Richard Ingham (AFP) – 05.Feb.2012
PARIS — The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) is emerging as a hot issue in preparations for June’s Rio conference, styled as a once-in-a-generation chance to restore a sick planet to good health.
The US is fighting a proposal, backed according to France by least 100 countries, for transforming UNEP from a poorly noticed, second-string unit into a planetary super-agency.
Environmentalists have long complained that Nairobi-based UNEP, set up in 1972 as an office of the UN and with a membership of only 58 nations, lacks clout to deal with the globe’s worsening ills.
These range from climate change, water stress and over-fishing to species loss, deforestation and ozone-layer depletion.
But the environmental mess also coincides with the crisis of capitalism, which greens say is blind to the cost for Nature in its relentless quest for growth.
The fateful intertwining of these problems points to a unique chance of a solution at the June 20-22 “Rio+20” conference, they argue.
With possibly scores of leaders in attendance, the 20-year follow-up to the famous Earth Summit has the declared aim of making growth both greener and sustainable.
“The new capitalism which emerges from the crisis has to be environmental, or it won’t be new,” French Ecology Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet said on Tuesday.
The key vehicle would be UNEP, which according to the vaguely-worded French proposal would be changed into the World Environment Organisation.
It would become the UN’s 16th “specialised” agency alongside the World Health Organisation (WHO), Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and so on.
To the outsider, this may sound at best like a bit of terminological tinkering — at worst, just another bureaucracy-breeding machine.
Experts, though, say status change could be surprisingly far-reaching.
Specialised UN agencies have high degrees of autonomy, enabling them to set agendas, frame international norms, stir up interest in dormant issues and sometimes poke their noses into areas of national sovereignty.
At its most ambitious, a World Environment Organisation would embrace not just the member-states which fund it but also business, green and social groups, becoming a very loud voice indeed.
It could intrude into sensitive areas such as trans-border use of water resources, fishery quotas and habitat use — and even monitor environmental standards for trade in goods and services.
According to Kosciusko-Morizet’s ministry, more than 30 European countries back the French proposal, along with 54 countries in Africa, plus Thailand, Malaysia, Nepal, Chile, Uruguay and others.
But in a US presidential election year where green issues — especially foreign ones — are easily trumped by domestic politics, Washington has set down a marker.
“We do not believe that international efforts on the environment and sustainable development would be improved by creating a new specialised agency on the environment,” a State Department official told AFP.
“We prefer to work towards a strengthened role for UNEP, as well as better coordination across the UN system in integrating environment into development, and in working towards sustainable development.”
Canada, like the US, says it prefers a smarter, better-connected UNEP.
Tensions over this are now emerging at preparatory talks on the “zero draft,” a document that will be finessed into June’s all-important summit communique.
“The Americans have come out guns blazing,” said Farooq Ullah, head of policy and advocacy at a London-based NGO called Stakeholder Forum.
“The risk, of course, is not necessarily that they would veto it (a super-UNEP) but that they would pull out their funding for it. A big part of UNEP’s funding comes from the Americans, so it would be a major blow,” he stressed.
Could the dispute rip Rio apart? Or could it doom it to dismal compromise, as many view the outcome of 2009 Copenhagen climate summit?
“The biggest risk with these things that have a lot of interest is that if you push too far too quickly and it becomes too contentious, it will just be negotiated out,” warned Ullah.
Lucien Chabason of a French thinktank, the Institute of Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI), said the outcome did not have to be dramatic.
“One can imagine a mixture of the two ideas, in which Rio adopts a position in principle to beef up UNEP and launch a negotiation process,” he said.
Copyright © 2012 AFP. All rights reserved.
Preview of “Owners of the Water”
Farmers in Mozambique trying to adapt farming to climate change (PRI.org)
Published 29 January, 2012 11:15:00 Living on Earth
Rui Alberto Campira hoes the soil. He’s part of a group of farmers who received a grant from Save the Children to grow cash crops. (Photo by Rowan Moore Gerety.)
As the rain and water in Mozambique becomes less predictable and less suited to subsistence farming, aid groups and the local government are trying to help some change the way they farm so they’re not so paralyzed by a flood or a drought. But there’s a lot of work to do.
Over the past two decades, Mozambique has suffered more than its fair share of weather disasters.
The east African nation has seen more devastating cyclones, droughts and floods than any country on the continent. Farmers in Mozambique have been particularly hard hit. This year alone, torrential rains in the mountains sent flood waters onto fields below, submerging tens of thousands of acres of crops.
And now, farmers are in the midst of another rainy season, which started in December.
Officials at Mozambique’s National Institute for Disaster Management have to prepare for rescue operations this time of year. Figueredo de Araujo, the institute’s information manager, said the emergency operations center is equipped with rescue boats as well as warehouses with various goods for humanitarian assistance: maize flour, tents, tarps, boots and rain coats among them.
Caia, where Mozambique’s main highway crosses the Zambezi river, sits in the middle of a vast, flat, floodplain that is home to nearly a million people. In 2000, the area was hit by the worst flooding in memory. The floods killed 700 people, displaced 100,000, and cost Mozambique a 1.5 percent loss in GDP through destruction of crops.
To Belem Monteiro, the emergency center’s director, much of Mozambique’s misfortune is a matter of geography.
“The fact that we have a problem is not news to us: given its location, Mozambique could only be vulnerable to these changes in climate,” Monteiro said.
Nearly 80 percent of Mozambican families are subsistence farmers, relying on rain-fed agriculture to produce their food. After the 2000 floods, farmers near the Zambezi River repeatedly lost their homes and crops.
“In the past, it happened every five years, now we have annual emergencies, which shows that the situation has changed,” Monteiro said.
But that’s presented a major challenge for the disaster management institute, which was conceived to intervene during freak emergencies, but has been forced to evolve to a permanent mission.
Some 30 miles from Caia, a resettlement zone called Tchetcha Um is home to some 5,000 families who were moved to higher ground. The organization Save the Children has partnered with the government in a program promoting livelihood resilience, diversifying their income sources, said Clemente Lourenço, a project officer for the group.
Farmer Rui Alberto Campira received a grant from Save the Children in 2009, which enabled he and 11 other farmers to built a 5-acre farm where they can grow crops for both consumption at home and sale at the local market. Campira says the soil is great for cash crops.
“It’s good. Especially for tomatoes. Tomatoes, onions, cabbage, collard greens. That’s what we usually plant here. There we only plant maize. Maize and sweet potatoes,” Campira said of his former home.
The land he’s farming now will also flood during the rainy season, but the irrigation system the grant enabled him to install allows him to farm during the dry season, when cash crops would typically die.
About 55 associations like Campira’s have formed in Caia district, not just growing cash crops, but trading in fish, beans, and clothing, and using animal traction to plow fields. Save the Children funds about 4500 farmers across three provinces.
Joao Novage is raising seven goats, as part of another association. The grant originally bought 40 goats that have in turn born another 20.
“When I see that I have 12 or 13 goats, I’ll take four and sell them to buy school supplies and clothes for my children. Children are our wealth. They’ll bring a better future for us,” Novage said.
Though the projects have been wildly successful, everyone admits they serve an insignificant portion of the population at this point. It remains to be seen if they can be expanded to make a measurable difference in the unger and poverty around this portion of east Africa.
Colombia prosecutors question ‘shaman rain payment’ (BBC)
18 January 2012 Last updated at 16:49 GMT
By Arturo Wallace
BBC Mundo, Bogota
The tournament, won by Brazil, was held across Colombia with the final in Bogota
Colombian prosecutors are investigating why organisers paid a “shaman” $2,000 (£1,400) to keep rain away from the closing ceremony of the Fifa U-20 World Cup held in the country last year.
The inquiry was launched after cost overruns totalling $1m came to light.
But the focus of their questions is a 64-year-old man who says he uses dowsing to stave off or attract rain.
The event’s organisers defended their decision to use him, noting that the final event was indeed rain-free.
The “rain-stopper” in question, Jorge Elias Gonzalez, has been dubbed a “shaman” or medicine man by the Colombian media.
A dark joke doing the rounds in the capital, Bogota, asks why the shaman was not also hired to minimise the impact of the last rainy season, which killed 477 people and affected some 2.6 million Colombians.
Yet more cynical voices have said that, given the corruption allegations involving the Bogota authorities in recent years, Mr Gonzalez should be praised as the only contractor to deliver what he promised.
The spectacular closing ceremony in Bogota’s El Campin stadium on 20 August last year remained dry – a stark contrast with the opening event in Barranquilla a month earlier that was drenched.
Ana Marta de Pizarro, the anthropologist and theatre director who was in charge of the ceremony, used this argument to defend the hiring of a rain stopper.
“Had it rained, the event would not have taken place. It didn’t rain on the ceremony, it was successful and I would use him again if I needed to,” she said.
And Ms Pizarro also said Mr Gonzalez had been hired in the past to ensure Bogota’s International Theatre Festival was rain-free.
In an interview with a local radio station on Wednesday, Mr Gonzalez also said he was also hired to keep the rain away from the swearing-in ceremony of President Juan Manuel Santos.
This has, as yet, neither been confirmed nor denied by the president’s office.
Respect
Prosecutors are adamant that Mr Gonzalez’s contract will be investigated.
The procurement law requires efficiency and professionalism in all service providers paid for by public funds “and that doesn’t include shamans”, a statement from the local comptroller’s office said.
“We’ll ask him to explain in which circumstances, how and where he can stop rain,” said the deputy prosecutor, Juan Carlos Forero.
The debate has also drawn in those who want to make sure no public funds are used to pay for any sort of religious rites, and those who want the traditions of indigenous Colombians to be treated with more respect.
In a bizarre twist to the dispute, Mr Gonzalez has always insisted that he is not a shaman.
“I’m not indigenous, so don’t call me a shaman, for I don’t even know what that is. Nor am I a wizard,” he told a local newspaper several years ago.
Mr Gonzalez has said that he can stop or attract rain using dowsing, although he also prays.
Anthropologist Mauricio Pardo believes that by describing him as a shaman, the Colombian media might end up belittling an important indigenous tradition.
“And those traditions deserve to be respected. Even our constitution demands so,” he told BBC Mundo.
Into the mind of a Neanderthal (New Scientist)
18 January 2012
Magazine issue 2847
Neanderthals shared about 99.84 per cent of their DNA with us (Image: Action Press/Rex Features)
What would have made them laugh? Or cry? Did they love home more than we do? Meet the real Neanderthals
A NEANDERTHAL walks into a bar and says… well, not a lot, probably. Certainly he or she could never have delivered a full-blown joke of the type modern humans would recognise because a joke hinges on surprise juxtapositions of unexpected or impossible events. Cognitively, it requires quite an advanced theory of mind to put oneself in the position of one or more of the actors in that joke – and enough working memory (the ability to actively hold information in your mind and use it in various ways).
So does that mean our Neanderthal had no sense of humour? No: humans also recognise the physical humour used to mitigate painful episodes – tripping, hitting our heads and so on – which does not depend on language or symbols. So while we could have sat down with Neanderthals and enjoyed the slapstick of The Three Stooges or Lee Evans, the verbal complexities of Twelfth Night would have been lost on them.
Humour is just one aspect of Neanderthal life we have been plotting for some years in our mission to make sense of their cognitive life. So what was it like to be a Neanderthal? Did they feel the same way we do? Did they fall in love? Have a bad day? Palaeoanthropologists now know a great deal about these ice-age Europeans who flourished between 200,000 and 30,000 years ago. We know, for example, that Neanderthals shared about 99.84 per cent of their DNA with us, and that we and they evolved separately for several hundred thousand years. We also know Neanderthal brains were a bit larger than ours and were shaped a bit differently. And we know where they lived, what they ate and how they got it.
Skeletal evidence shows that Neanderthal men, women and children led very strenuous lives, preoccupied with hunting large mammals. They often made tactical use of terrain features to gain as much advantage as possible, but administered the coup de grace with thrusting spears. Based on their choice of stone for tools, we know they almost never travelled outside small home territories that were rarely over 1000 square kilometres.
The Neanderthal style of hunting often resulted in injuries, and the victims were often nursed back to health by others. But few would have survived serious lower body injuries, since individuals who could not walk might well have been abandoned. It looks as if Neanderthals had well-developed way-finding and tactical abilities, and empathy for group members, but also that they made pragmatic decisions when necessary.
Looking closely at the choices Neanderthals made when they manufactured and used tools shows that they organised their technical activities much as artisans, such as blacksmiths, organise their production. Like blacksmiths, they relied on “expert” cognition, a form of observational learning and practice acquired through apprenticeship that relies heavily on long-term procedural memory.
The only obvious difference between Neanderthal technical thinking and ours lay in innovation. Although Neanderthals invented the practice of hafting stone points onto spears, this was one of very few innovations over several hundred thousand years. Active invention relies on thinking by analogy and a good amount of working memory, implying they may have had a reduced capacity in these respects. Neanderthals may have relied more heavily than we do on well-learned procedures of expert cognition.
As for the neighbourhood, the size and distribution of archaeological sites shows that Neanderthals spent their lives mostly in small groups of five to 10 individuals. Several such groups would come together briefly after especially successful hunts, suggesting that Neanderthals also belonged to larger communities but that they seldom made contact with people outside those groupings.
Many Neanderthal sites have rare pieces of high-quality stone from more distant sources (more than 100 kilometres), but not enough to indicate trade or even regular contact with other communities. A more likely scenario is that an adolescent boy or girl carried the material with them when they attached themselves to a new community. The small size of Neanderthal territories would have made some form of “marrying out” essential.
We can also assume that Neanderthals had some form of marriage because pair-bonding between men and women, and joint provisioning for their offspring, had been a feature of hominin social life for over a million years. They also protected corpses by covering them with rocks or placing them in shallow pits, suggesting the kinds of intimate, embodied social and cognitive interaction typical of our own family life.
But the Neanderthals’ short lifespan – few lived past 35 – meant that other features of our more recent social past were absent: elders, for example, were rare. And they almost certainly lacked the cognitive abilities for dealing with strangers that evolved in modern humans, who lived in larger groups numbering in the scores and belonged to larger communities in the hundreds or more. They also established and maintained contacts with distant groups.
One cognitive ability that evolved in modern humans as a result was the “cheater detection” ability described by evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Another was an ability to judge the value of one commodity in terms of another, what anthropologist Alan Page Fiske at the University of California, Los Angeles, calls the “market pricing” ability. Both are key reasoning skills that evolved to allow interaction with acquaintances and strangers, neither of which was a regular feature of Neanderthal home life.
There are good circumstantial reasons for thinking that Neanderthals had language, with words and some kind of syntax; some of their technology and hunting tactics would have been difficult to learn and execute without it. Moreover, Neanderthal brains had a well-developed Broca’s area, and their DNA includes the FOXP2 gene carried by modern humans, which is involved in speech production. Unfortunately, none of this reveals anything specific about Neanderthal language. It could have been very or only slightly different, we just don’t know.
Having any sort of language could also have exposed Neanderthals to problems modern humans face, such as schizophrenia, says one theory which puts the disease down to coordination problems between the brain’s left and right hemispheres.
But while Neanderthals would have had a variety of personality types, just as we do, their way of life would have selected for an average profile quite different from ours. Jo or Joe Neanderthal would have been pragmatic, capable of leaving group members behind if necessary, and stoical, to deal with frequent injuries and lengthy convalescence. He or she had to be risk tolerant for hunting large beasts close up; they needed sympathy and empathy in their care of the injured and dead; and yet were neophobic, dogmatic and xenophobic.
So we could have recognised and interacted with Neanderthals, but we would have noticed these significant cognitive differences. They would have been better at well-learned, expert cognition than modern humans, but not as good at the development of novel solutions. They were adept at intimate, small-scale social cognition, but lacked the cognitive tools to interact with acquaintances and strangers, including the extensive use of symbols.
In the final count, when Neanderthals and modern humans found themselves competing across the European landscape 30,000 years ago, those cognitive differences may well have been decisive in seeing off the Neanderthals.
Profile
Thomas Wynn is a professor of anthropology and Frederick L. Coolidge is a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. For the past decade they have worked on the evolution of cognition. Their new book is How to Think Like a Neandertal (Oxford University Press, 2012)
Communicating Climate Science: A Little “Song & Dance” Can’t Hurt (Climate Central)
Published: December 8th, 2011 in Climate
Source: KQED Climate Watch
By Craig Miller, KQED Climate Watch
I’ll be candid here: When teamed up with climate modeler Ben Santer and economist Larry Goulder behind the microphone, his rendition of “Teach Your Children” could use a little work. The rest of Richard Alley’s work speaks eloquently to his talent for making sense of climate science for the rest of us.
Earth scientist Richard Alley’s engaging style has won him an award for climate communicators.
This week, in a ceremony at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Alley, a professor of geosciences at Penn State University, was given the first Stephen H. Schneider Award for his work in breaking down climate science and getting the word out to the public and policymakers in digestible form.
Alley’s book Earth: The Operators’ Manual, was made into a PBS documentary in which Alley takes viewers on a personal journey through the climate landscape. The program aired in April on KQED and is now available online. He also demonstrates his lively teaching style inthis video explaining climate swings:
Alley told event host Greg Dalton that it’s important that the climate discussion “start with the science.”
“We need to show people all the pieces,” says Alley, “And doing that without saying ‘It’s gonna happen, you’re doomed,’ is a challenge.” Alley likes to use a driving analogy for weighing climate policy. He says that even though there are long odds against being in an accident each time we get behind the wheel, most of us still buy car insurance.
Asked to grade climate coverage by the mainstream media, Alley said we “could do better.”
“Intelligent people who get their science from the media tend to see a lot of argument because the media loves to show that,” he said. “And there is a lot of argument,” he added. “It’s just that what the public is seeing are not the interesting arguments. CO2 as a greenhouse gas is not an interesting argument,” said Alley, as that’s been settled. He says better to ask “What is the best way forward?”
Alley, who is a Christian, says people of faith should embrace, rather than reject climate science. “It’s a Golden Rule issue,” he said.
His biggest personal concern on the climate front: sea level rise.
The event might’ve been lost amid the 20,000 scientists attending the American Geophysical Union conference (#AGU11) in San Francisco, but the room, outfitted for a recorded broadcast, was nearly standing-room only. That’s probably because the award commemorates the life and work of outspoken Stanford climatologist Steve Schneider, whose sudden death last year still has climate science circles reeling.
Schneider was a great communicator himself, which comes through in this engaging tribute produced by Stephen Thompson for the Commonwealth Club.
This article originally appeared on KQED Climate Watch, a Climate Central content partner.
Uma (in)certa antropologia 
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