The Most Failed State

An interesting article, bringing up to date the status of tragic Somalia. The Most Failed State by Jon Lee Anderson in the December 14th, 2009 edition of the New Yorker. It contains this short passage which highlights the many small mis-steps when communicating across cultures and belief systems.

Sharif said that the international figure he most admired was Nelson Mandela. I remarked that to many people Mandela was a kind of living saint. Sharif looked perplexed. After a back-and-forth with his friend, he said, "The thing is that in Islam we have no saints like that. Just martyrs. But I understand what you mean."

The authority of a book

Every reader has that moment. Books are a whole world of themselves and in which you have invested imaginative conviction. "I read it in . . . " is the clinching argument among your peers. And then one day you come across something in a book, an erroneous fact, a blatant opinon presented as fact, an interpretation in severe contradiction with your own experience, something just not right. From that moment on, your relationship with books is not quite the same. Not necessarily less, just different. One more step on the path of critical thinking.

Prompted by J. Storrs Hall first couple of paragraphs in an otherwise interesting article on climate change, Some Historical Perspective.

READING DOES NOT CAUSE MYOPIA!

For anyone that is both near-sighted and an enthusiastic reader, you cannot have escaped the assumption, made personally or by those around you that heavy reading causes near sightedness. There is an excellent article in the November 7, 2009 edition of New Scientist, Generation Specs by Nora Schultz, which provides an excellent summary of the state of research on myopia. The good news for parents trying to raise readers but concerned about myopia is that reading does not cause myopia: that is an old wives tale.

Despite the many decades-long interest of individuals and governments in figuring why some countries have high incidences of myopia and others low, there has been surprisingly little progress. Recent years have seen more and more light shed on the issue though, and the article is a fascinating tale of the scientific method and eventual progress.

History Disjointed continued

And as if to reinforce the earlier post, I come across this two part article in The Spectator (starting November 7th, 2009, Reaching Through the Iron Curtain by Pavel Stroliov). The accusation and evidence are not quite as dramatic as the article makes it out to be. None-the-less, in the seventies and eighties, most observers that attempted to make out that there was ideological sympathy between western labor and socialist political parties and the Soviet Union and that there was likely to be some level of privileged communication and coordination of policies/actions would have been traduced as a troglodyte unable to understand the differences between these parties.

Yet here we are with archival materials indicating that indeed there were such levels of communication and coordination. So who were the ideological buffoons and who were the poltroons?

First there's the children's house of make-believe

Directive
Robert Frost

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry -
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods' excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone's road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you're lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left's no bigger than a harness gall.
First there's the children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny's
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

None of the Above

A fascinating book review by Malcolm Gladwell in the September 17th, 2007 edition of the New Yorker, None of the Above, of James Flynn's book What is Intelligence?

The article explores the nuances of intelligence, race, social expectations, the malleability of the brain, etc. It's approach and explication of the issues is not dissimilar to Stephen Jay Gould's very excellent Mismeasure of Man.

The conclusions that Gladwell reaches and the observations Flynn makes are congruent with our underlying argument in Growing a Reading Culture, which is that life outcomes are much more driven by values and behaviors rather than inherent IQ differentials existing between individuals or putatively between races.

History disjointed

I don't know if you have ever had this experience. You are at a party in an interesting conversation with a couple of people. You are interrupted to be introduced to somebody and it is a few minutes before you are able to return to the interesting conversation. When you do return, they are talking about the same subject but they are at a completely different point than you would expect. You missed something big. Sometime while you were gone the conversation took a significant turn and you don't know what it was or how it happened.

Growing up and being educated in the early seventies through the early eighties, it seemed that the established party line on spying in the Americas by the Soviet Union was that it did happen but that conservatives in the US grossly exaggerated its extent and that many people such as the Rosenbergs and Hiss were unjustly accused and railroaded. Joseph McCarthy was clearly a hot-headed, mean-spirited, malevolent character and Whittaker Chambers a spineless liar. As a young person, it was my impression that there were several miscarriages of justice and that to some extent it was much ado about nothing.

I couldn't now tell you which particular history books gave me that impression but I am sure it was pretty much your run of the mill textbooks along with what I would term the mainstream media which were my normal sources of general news; The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, US News & World Report, The Herald Tribune.

As a reader, I am not particularly drawn to the field of spy-stories and as interested as I am in history, I can't say that I have ever particularly paid a lot of attention to the long tangled tale of Soviet spying in the US.

In the past couple of years, though, and not unlike returning to a conversation that has taken a different turn than expected, I have read a number of accounts and book reviews (many based on post-perestroika and glasnost documents from the former Soviet Union) that seem to indicate that in fact most of those that were held to be unjustly charged, the Rosenbergs, Hiss, etc. were in fact exactly guilty as accused. I have seen numbers indicating that the Soviet Union had some hundreds of US citizens divulging information in some capacity or another at different points in time to the Soviet Union.

I am sure there were many instances of false accusations. Joseph McCarthy still seems an entirely unpleasant and unreliable character. At some point, though, it seems as if the balance has shifted and that perhaps, there was more to the story than was acknowledged at the time and that, almost reluctantly, we have had to acknowledge there was merit to many of the accusations. It feels as if the argument has moved from denying that there was extensive spying to arguing that the American spys were not very effective.

This would seem to be a fairly momentous shift but I don't seem to have seen anyone actually pick up the point and acknowledge it. Am I off base? Was I misreading the consensus then? Am I misreading the judment now? All of this is of course, and unfortunately, caught up with the heated rhetoric of culture wars, left versus right, etc. but it would be nice if there were a single, reasonably objective single book out there to which one could turn for a balanced view of the state-of-play then and now. Any ideas?

Worth While

Worth While
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

It is easy enough to be pleasant
When life flows by like a song,
But the man worth while is the one who will smile
When everything goes dead wrong.
For the test of the heart is trouble,
And it always comes with the years,
And the smile that is worth the praises of earth
Is the smile that shines through tears.

It is easy enough to be prudent
When nothing tempts you to stray,
When without or within no voice of sin
Is luring your soul away;
But it's only a negative virtue
Until it is tried by fire,
And the life that is worth the honour on earth
Is the one that resists desire.

By the cynic, the sad, the fallen,
Who had no strength for the strife,
The world's highway is cumbered to-day-
They make up the sum of life;
But the virtue that conquers passion,
And the sorrow that hides in a smile-
It is these that are worth the homage on earth,
For we find them but once in a while.

Viewed from a different angle

There is a brief article in the July 19, 2009 edition of New Scientist, 'Honest Joes' and cheaters unmasked in brain scans.

The first sentence identifies the finding.

Honest people don't have to work at not cheating. They're not even tempted.

The second sentence then identifies how the finding might be used.

That's the conclusion of the first-ever neurobiological study of honesty and cheating, which could someday help develop brain-based tests of truthfulness.

What they do not discuss, and which I think is far more fascinating, is: why do some people never even consider cheating while others appear to reserve it as an option to consider when presented with the opportunity.

There is nothing in the article to indicate it, but I would speculate that this is a product of upbringing; home-training. For some, honesty is a bed-rock behavior. For others, cheating is viewed as a legitimate tactic given the circumstances and objective. It sure would be interesting to understand what is behind these two choices and how individuals arrive at a point where they each unconciously pursue one path or the other.

Interesting

Regrettably, I fell from a tree trunk while crossing a stream on Friday and dislocated my knee. As a consequence, I am immobilized in bed for the next few days. The silver lining is that it gives me the opportunity to catch up on magazine reading from the past few months.

In the July 10, 2009 edition of New Scientist, there is an article, Genes drive IQ more as kids get older by Andy Coghlan. The report is interesting and based on a fairly robust methodology and large numbers of participants but as with anything, it needs to be seen how it weathers.

"People assume the genetic influence goes down with age because the environmental differences between people pile up in life," says Robert Plomin of King's College London. "What we found was quite amazing, and goes in the other direction."

The article is truncated and there is not, that I can found, a full text version available. The original report is abstracted here. However the main point is captured in the accompanying graph.



In our Growing a Reading Culture methodology for increasing the probability that a child will become an enthusiastic and habitual reader, we point out that it can be applied at any point in time but that it has the greatest impact when used from the youngest ages. This article reinforces the importance of establishing the culture and habits of reading in the earliest years, when parents have the greatest opportunity for shaping long term outcomes.