Get away from me, Mr. Zen

by Jason Gots

"Spiritual materialism" is the brilliant term the late Chogyam Trungpa came up with back in the '60s to describe something that often happens to Americans when they start exploring meditation. We are materialists at heart, like it or not, and focused intensely on results. What's the bottom line here? What am I getting out of this? We want a measurable return on our investment of busy time. Just look at the marketing around any of the latest generation of meditation apps or mindfulness programs. They promise a calmer, more focused you. Sustainable energy. Higher productivity.

Trungpa was one of the key leaders of the "first wave" of Buddhism in the west. He taught and was influential in both England and America, and "controversial" because having been brought up as a Tibetan monk, he went through a phase in which he believed he had passed beyond conventional notions of right and wrong. He slept with students and did drugs. To his credit, he stopped teaching for a while, but his acolytes still hung on his every word and action.

But I'm interested here only in "spiritual materialism" - one of his key teachings and the title of one of his most popular books. It's how we turn meditation and mindfulness into an acquisitive lifestyle driven by a desire for new clothes (more relaxed, more spiritual, collarless), new objects (Buddha statues, fancy meditation cushions, 50 different guided meditation apps, and yes, even sometimes books and the information they allow us to acquire about techniques and names for things. Even new friends -- a "sangha" as Buddhists call the spiritual community -- who understand and support our commitment to personal growth unlike all those "negative people" we used to hang out with).

It's subtle and pernicious as hell, how this happens. How we transform something that's supposed to make us more open and balanced into a shiny new prison of things, jargon, and obligations. How a friend calling you up in a moment desperate need becomes a barbarian at the gates of your scheduled meditation hour.

And how slowly but surely we become totally insufferable to everyone except the (equally insufferable) members of our “sangha,” because all we can ever talk about is how great meditation is, how it's changing our life, and how it will change yours, too. To a friend having a nervous breakdown, we might helpfully suggest that they "let go" of their attachment to some idealized form of their marriage. To a colleague complaining about never getting to see his kids because of ridiculous work hours, we might good naturedly point out that our expectations of time are an illusory construct of our consciousness.

"Get the hell away from me, Mr. Zen," this friend or colleague might very well think. And he would be right. All this helpful isn’t a product of enlightenment or spiritual advancement––it’s spiritual materialism as crass as rolling up in a red Ferrari Testarossa blasting “Monster” by Kanye West. 

What is the antidote to "spiritual materialism"? For Western practitioners I think it is to a certain extent unavoidable, at least at first. We are culturally steeped in the doctrines of progress and productivity. We want to GET somewhere.

When I first started meditating and reading Buddhist books a few years back, I was probably looking for an antidote to anxiety, something any regular reader of this blog will have noticed I possess in abundance. I read and attended classes in various traditions including Tibetan Buddhism, Vipassana (Insight) meditation, Zen, and hybrids of Western psychology and Buddhist mindfulness techniques. Along the way, I ended up acquiring a bunch of things I didn't need, from shelves full of books I probably could have borrowed (that little spiritual-materialist thrill of clicking "purchase" on Amazon in the knowledge that some new window on enlightenment will soon appear in your mailbox), to little statuettes, to more malas (meditation beads) than I'd care to admit (I just had to have that one with skulls made of real bone, a tangible reminder of mortality...).

I also began to play one tradition against another, superficially deciding that, say, Zen wasn't for me because it was too enigmatic and anti-progress. Or that Vipassana wasn't "complete" enough because it focuses on breathing meditation and ignores the more elaborate visualization techniques (tantra) you get in Tibetan Buddhism, in which you imagine yourself merging with a deity of compassion, say, or justice. Then again, the Tibetan deities kind of bugged me: were they symbolic, or did these people actually BELIEVE in them? Metaphors, I'm ok with. I can't handle actual deities. On the other hand, Tibetan traditions seemed highly structured and progress oriented -- aiming in the direction of enlightenment. This was good, because I needed momentum. How was I supposed to meditate every day with no motivating outcome? Tibetan Buddhism (I thought) promised to take me, step by step, toward a more expansive, stable, clear-minded, compassionate me. Or not-me.

You probably already know where this story is headed. In spite of my best intentions, I stumbled into spiritual materialism of the worst kind. I bored my infinitely patient wife to tears proselytizing about the benefits of meditation ("your insomnia will VANISH!") and started to think of myself as a Buddhist. I attended classes regularly at Tibet House (U.S. base of the Dalai Lama, co-founded by his friend and disciple Robert Thurman, Uma's dad and a leading professor of Buddhism at Columbia University. He's a great teacher, by the way). I yearned for a personal "spiritual advisor" (expensive) and contemplated spending tons of money we didn't have on weekend retreats or (someday!) a week or even a month-long Meditation Vacation.

Ultimately all of this stuff got so tangled up in my head that I became nauseated with the whole business and dropped it altogether.

Now, almost two years later, I've been meditating again. Just breath meditation. Just 5-10
minutes at a time, sometimes 20. I started reading Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn on a tip from Rick Rubin (zenlike music producer: Beastie Boys, Slayer, Johnny Cash. A genuinely cool guy) in an interview on Tim Ferriss' podcast.

Wherever You Go, There You Are is a great, practical guide to meditation without spiritual materialism. One of the very first things Zinn says is this:

Every time you get a strong impulse to talk about meditation and how wonderful it is, or how hard it is, or what it's doing for you these days, or what it's not, or you want to convince someone else how wonderful it would be for them, just look at it as more thinking and go meditate some more. The impulse will pass and everybody will be better off––especially you. 

If I'm going to meditate, which I guess I am, I don't want to reflect on what possible professional or personal benefits it may be having (more sex! higher salary!). I don't want to trumpet my progress in focusing on the breath or count my "blessings" and the number of "beneficial" acts I've performed today. I agree with Zinn––all that talking is boring as hell and just gets in the way (which raises the question, Mr. Zinn––how exactly do you manage it as a guy who writes books and talks about meditation for a living?). 

I think I'll just go meditate sometimes. Or not. And shut the hell up about it either way.

--

come talk to @jgots on Twitter.

 

Can Psychedelics Be Addictive?

by Derek Beres

Last week I wrote about the potential for religious experiences on psychedelics. This was beyond usage for therapeutic reasons, an area of science that’s rapidly expanding: for example, outside of the examples cited in my article, last week the DEA approved the usage of MDMA for research in treating social anxiety in adults with autism.

One of the selling points of psychedelics is that they are not addiction-forming, like opioids, narcotics, cell phones, and caffeine. In fact, as I wrote, some psychedelics, such as psilocybin and iboga, could possibly help addicts in recovery.

Yet is it true that psychedelics are not addictive? While chemically they might not be pattern-forming in the way your morning (and afternoon, and evening) coffee is, claiming that there are no addicts is hard to swallow. I would argue that an entire American subculture is proving otherwise, tuning out of real social issues while exploiting their own egoistic self-expansion. 

In my previous column I suggested that reduction of anxiety levels, one of the greatest therapeutic benefits of psychedelics, is a gateway for the loosening of the ego and thus a spiritual experience. The problem is that a dependence on such substances to feel this weightlessness develops. Instead of a tool psychedelics become a shackle.

I’ve had over one hundred episodes with psychedelics, including LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, mescaline, peyote, and ayahuasca. The bulk of these, however, came during a fifteen-month period in the mid-nineties. Without divulging too much personal history, roughly three-quarters of my usage occurred during this time.

Having grown up a sober athlete, my introduction to psychedelics introduced me to a previously unimagined universe. In fact, I experimented with almost all of those substances before the first time I got drunk, which didn’t happen until a few months before I turned twenty-one.

Back then I had no idea about the human brain’s novelty bias, the dopamine-releasing system that fires up every time you hear a text ding. Heroin users have told me their first experience was so incredible that the rest of their time was spent chasing that feeling, never again reached. Cigarette smokers have mentioned that mostly it’s just craving, yet every so often one really hits the spot. Anxiety until the fix is fixed.

Novelty is what drove me to experimentation. What you experience on psychedelics is so unlike everyday reality it becomes a refuge sheltering you from the ‘real’ world. You have visions; you gain insights. You feel a part of the world as never before. In your solitude you no longer feel lonely. Your brain’s ego centers shut down, you feel a part of everything, everything just feels right—a much better place than the mundane, where so much seems so wrong.

Over the past two decades I’ve watched friends dive deep into the psychedelic waters. I recognize where they are because I had to eventually swim upstream to fight my way out. I’m not advocating against these substances in any way: I still partake, when the time is right, perhaps once a year. It’s the constant craving for more—the novelty—that flung me further and further from where I actually needed to be to become productive and more in control of my life.

This is where a spiritual experience becomes a fundamentalist one. I hear similar verbiage from psychedelics users as from the Christian right and hardline Muslims. This is the way it is. This is what humanity needs to do to survive. This is where we went wrong.

Then comes the added layer of “more” that hardcore yogis also partake in. There’s always a new level being reached. Revelations are constant. Each time the experience is deeper. And each time the ego—the thing supposedly being dissolved—rears its ugly head, stronger, more certain of itself, more demanding in its sacrifices. Of course, the only way to more is to go deeper into the “medicine,” the term most often applied to regular psychedelic use.

The question remains: What is making them sick in the first place? How is substance abuse curing them?

This is where all religions have the potential to become a trap: there’s always another level, there’s always someone/thing higher waiting for you, there needs to be more sacrifice. This motif has been with our species for millennia. While it appears in wildly disparate ways, appear it does. Psychedelic cosmonauts carry this torch as proudly as conservatives and fundamentalists everywhere.

Again, none of this is to dissuade experimentation or research. I for one am happy that the substances that played such an important role in my formative years are being taken seriously as therapeutic tools, and I hope this research bears much fruit in the coming years.

As my friend and colleague Tommy Rosen writes in his book, Recovery 2.0: Move Beyond Addiction and Upgrade Your Life, if the underlying root of addiction is not understood, it will appear in different forms. For him, this meant recovering from cocaine and alcohol only to find himself addicted to gambling and cigarettes. For others ‘recovering’ from religion, this has meant a rigid turnabout to yoga, green juice cleanses, and winsome ideas like the ‘universe’ taking the place of God. 

Rosen writes,

The cost to the individual is intense sadness, existential pain, and in the worst cases, insanity and death. To be caught in addiction of any kind is one of the loneliest experiences you can have. 

This loneliness disappeared during my intense psychedelic stretch. The problem is that when I wasn’t under their influence, it rushed back. Spirituality isn’t defined by what you believe, though, but how you behave around yourself and others. This is hard to understand if you never give yourself time to be by yourself. You fill your world with more: more religion, more prayer, more food, more drugs, more stuff.

And so the double-edged sword. Psychedelics, with so much to offer to our spirit and emotions, can quickly become a crutch helping us avoid the painful revelation of loneliness. The chemistry might be different, but the manifestation remains the same. 

Image: 1000 Words / shutterstock.com

Beauty Queen Wants to Challenge Japanese Perceptions of Race

by Robert Montenegro

Ariana Miyamoto, the biracial woman recently named Miss Universe Japan, is hoping to persuade her country's citizens into broadening their perception of what is authentically Japanese. Miyamoto was the focus of an illuminating piece in last week's New York Times by Tokyo Bureau Chief Martin Fackler:

"Ms. Miyamoto is one of only a tiny handful of 'hafu,' or Japanese of mixed race, to win a major beauty pageant in proudly homogeneous Japan. And she is the first half-black woman ever to do so.

Ms. Miyamoto’s victory wins her the right to represent Japan on the global stage at the international Miss Universe pageant expected in January. She said she hoped that her appearance — and better yet, a victory — would push more Japanese to accept hafu. However, she said, Japan may have a long way to go."

Miyamoto laments that she is treated as foreign by members of the press and public despite the fact she was born and raised in Japan. Fackler notes that the Japanese public tends to be stubborn about its mono-ethnic self-image. The island nation lacks many of the fiery racial tensions of the West because the country is so homogenous. Those who stand out are often belittled or ignored.

Yet the fact Miyamoto and her unique complexion won the beauty contest seems to signal that a portion of the population is ready to expand the perceived characteristics of the Japanese woman. Miyamoto has grasped her opportunity and ignited a campaign to end discrimination. The biracial beauty queen has Japan talking, and that's a start.

Read more at the New York Times

In the video below, everyone's favorite Science Guy, Bill Nye, uses dogs as a focus point for a discussion on the human construct of race:

 

Photo credit: Hot Gossip Italia / Flickr

Introducing Australopithecus Deyiremeda, Your Ancient and Distant Cousin

by Robert Montenegro

If "Australopithecus deyiremeda" had popped up during this week's Scripps National Spelling Bee, who knows if Vanya and Gokul would have walked out of that room with a first place share. Luckily for them, it didn't, probably because 1) Scripps has no love for Linnaean taxonomy, and 2) hardly anyone had heard of it prior to a major announcement this week. 

Australopithecus deyiremeda is a new human ancestor species, though actually it's not new at all. It's old. Way old. 3.3 to 3.5 million years-old. The only thing new about it is our knowledge that it ever existed. Credit for the discovery goes to a curator at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History:

"An international team of scientists, led by Curator of Physical Anthropology Dr. Yohannes Haile-Selassie, has discovered a 3.3 to 3.5 million-year-old new human ancestor species. Upper and lower jaw fossils recovered from the Woranso-Mille area of the Afar region of Ethiopia have been assigned to the new species Australopithecus deyiremeda. This hominin lived alongside the famous “Lucy’s” species, Australopithecus afarensis. The species will be described in the May 28, 2015 issue of the international scientific journal Nature."

Dr. Haile-Selassie explains that there are two reasons why this discovery is so important. First, it's proof that "Lucy" did not walk alone. There was at least one other contemporary species at the same time in the same place. Second, it reveals that there was diversity among early hominid species. Third, that certain traits we associate with later hominids actually developed earlier in the evolutionary cycle. 

While there's likely a lot more to learn about this "new" species, the evidence uncovered by Dr. Haile-Selassie's team is enough to shake up our known understanding of human origins. I've included some additional resources below if you'd like to learn more. And for all your spellers out there, remember that the "y" comes before the "i" in Australopithecus deyiremeda.

Preview the article in Nature

Read more at CMNH

Below, paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson describes "Lucy," the Australopithecus afarensis skeleton he discovered in 1974: 

"Tweeting Potholes" Annoy Local Government Until Repaired

by Robert Montenegro

Citing their irritation with the city's inability to maintain decent roads, a news agency in Panama City recently installed devices in local potholes that automatically tweet complaints to the public works department every time they are driven over. Meet El Hueco Twitero, literally "the tweeting hole," whose Twitter account is currently all the rage in Panama because its complaints are being heard and potholes are disappearing. It's a small coup for crowdsourcing, innovation, and the belief that all you have to do to get what you want is annoy someone with power.

Here's El Hueco tweeting about meeting the mayor:

Finalmente conozco al alcalde @BlandonJose espero me de una mano para que el @MOPdePanama me preste atención https://t.co/wlXeRN5ktg

— El Hueco Twitero (@Elhuecotwitero) May 30, 2015

And here are some tweets from local Panamanians filtering their pothole complaints through the account:

@Elhuecotwitero tremendo crater en la entrada de la calle 11 Rio Abajo y después preguntan porque tantos choques http://pic.twitter.com/XN4CaKRteC

— Jaqueline Gonzalez (@jaquiignz) May 30, 2015

@TReporta @LuisCasis20 mire come esta esta calle Colón, Barriada San Martín sector el progreso @Elhuecotwitero http://pic.twitter.com/JicaBaFENK

— dayra camarena (@dayracamarena) May 29, 2015

Check out the video below to see how it works. Hopefully they'll bring these things to your hometown soon, mostly so you won't have to listen to your cranky uncle ranting about what bad roads are doing to his old Trans-Am. That'd be for the best.

Read more at Digital Synopsis

Below, economist Larry Summers explains why it's important to invest in infrastructure... before the ground crumbles beneath our feet.

Photo credit: stocksolutions / Shutterstock

What to Take Away From Silk Road Founder Ross Ulbricht's Life Sentence

by Robert Montenegro

U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest has sentenced Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht to life in prison, a more severe sentence than even the prosecution had requested. From 2011 to 2013, Ulbricht established and oversaw the notorious website dubbed by authorities as the most extensive black market on the internet. That site, the aforementioned Silk Road, enabled thousands of vendors to exchange hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of illegal goods and services. Reaping in a commission for each transaction, Ulbricht made tens of millions of dollars in the process. The gravy train wrecked in October 2013 when he was arrested in San Francisco.

Upon reading the sentence, Judge Forrest explained she was making an example of the 31-year-old Ulbricht to send a message to others like him. The Wall Street Journal's Nicole Hong sums it up well:

"Ultimately she gave Mr. Ulbricht the harshest punishment allowed under the law, saying Silk Road was 'an assault on the public health of our communities' by making it easy for people around the world to buy illegal drugs. In a passionate speech, she detailed the ways drug addiction can tear families apart.

'What you did with Silk Road was terribly destructive to our social fabric,' said Judge Forrest, who also ordered Mr. Ulbricht to forfeit about $183 million."

It can be argued that Forrest may have been throwing her weight around with the sentence, deriding Ulbricht for his outlaw ambitions and explaining her decision came about because Ulbricht believed he could "flout the law." Ulbricht's official defense fund -- FreeRoss.org -- cites the potential impact of the case on internet freedom and privacy. Ulbricht's conviction, they argue, will lead to bad laws that will restrict online activity and squeeze 4th amendment protections. There's a bit of slippery slope, strawman thinking there -- unsurprisingly, considering the situation -- but there ought to be concern with regard to just how much liability the verdict hands down on Ulbricht for his actions. "This case is bigger than one man," they say, and they're right.

This isn't to argue that Ulbricht isn't a lousy guy because he almost certainly is. The court documents clearly paint a picture of an unrepentant man who sought to protect his illegal empire by "violent means, including soliciting the murder-for-hire of several individuals he believed posed a threat to that enterprise." Andy Greenberg of Wired details how these particular details led to Forrest's decision:

"With those attempted murders as context, Forrest was merciless in her assessment of Ulbricht’s seeming multiple personalities: the altruistic and admirable young man described in the letters sent to her as evidence of his character, versus the callous drug lord she saw in his actions."

Ulbricht's lawyers are expected to appeal the decision. Life in prison is a tough pill to swallow; plenty of folks on the web believe it's more than Ulbricht deserves. But perhaps what Forrest wanted to communicate in her verdict is that it's time for the images we envision when we think of kingpins and criminal juggernauts -- the Tony Sopranos, Don Corleones, Whitey Bulgers -- to erode so that digital bosses like Ross Ulbricht can sidle alongside. 

Read more at Wired and the Wall Street Journal

Check out the official court documents here.

Photo above: Ross Ulbricht's collection of fake driver's licenses, collected upon his arrest in 2013.

Below: Remember SOPA? In a video from three years ago, IT entrepreneur Brad Burnham offers a reasonable assessment of online privacy: Sometimes it's more a matter of gaining access than malintent:

What Apple Taught Me About the Future of Aging

by Joseph F. Coughlin

New technology will surely improve the lives of older adults. However, there is a secondary effect of today’s technological innovation – it raises our expectations for life tomorrow. Technology is teaching baby boomers and every generation that follows to expect more and better in older age.

Recently I was on a flight from Los Angeles to Boston. My MacBook was showing signs of one too many trips and presentations. Sitting at 37,000 feet I took advantage of the onboard WIFI. After the beverage cart clinked by and dodging a near hard drive death experience of a soda being passed over my keyboard, I clicked on to begin shopping for my laptop to be. I wondered if I could buy more memory and thought I would wait until I was home or in the store – but an Apple online chat assistant was available. While potato chips, and bags of what pass for cookies, were being handed out over my head, I thought, why not? I clicked and engaged the courteous assistant. The exchange went on for about five minutes. I got answers to my questions and we concluded our online geek chat with the same pleasantries I might have experienced at the mall. My Apple online shopping cart was complete and right in front me – given the configuration of most airline seats my screen displaying my choice was even closer to my face than usual. I decided to finish. Pulling out my credit card I purchased the most important tool of my trade, and second most expensive and regularly used product (after my car), speeding along at 500 mph five miles above Nebraska.

I am not a tech Luddite. WIFI onboard is not novel nor is shopping while otherwise bored. What occurred to me after my Apple receipt appeared in my email (still somewhere over Nebraska) is that expectations are taught and learned. Our experiences in one area of our life translate into expectations in other domains. What will our tech experiences in younger age mean for expectations in our later years when we are managing issues that are far more critical than ensuring that the right memory and hard drive are configured in our laptop?

The next generation of “old” are being taught that there is an ‘app’ for nearly everything. 

Consider caregiving – systems that simply notify an adult child after mom has have fallen and that emergency response are on the way is likely to be considered too little, too late. Even proactive services that can detect changes in her walk or eating patterns had better provide seamless, easy, 24/7 access to her status as easily as a music download from the cloud.

Retirement planning and financial management services that only offer an automated decision tree with an algorithm driven risk calculator for the “average” person my age will be far from adequate. The next generation financial services consumer will expect online speed, excellence and mobility – AND easy access to real humans with the smarts and empathy to listen to questions and provide the complexity of response an older client believes they deserve.

Expectations for medical care will be no different. The wearables revolution provides nearly unlimited data. Future older adults will expect those data to translate into better and comprehensive healthcare. More than simply managing chronic diseases or managing medications, tech-enabled older consumers will expect healthcare to be ubiquitous, 24/7 and focused on wellbeing not just sickness. 

Transportation for those no longer willing, or able, to drive will not see a van as an adequate alternative. Transit services that require reserving a ride hours, days, and, in some regions, weeks in advance will not be acceptable. The next wave of older adults will be the Uber generation – and they will expect Uber, Lyft, taxis and public transportation to provide seamless service on demand.

The new old will not be as polite or accepting as their parents. Apple and other firms have taught them not to be patient and to expect that better is coming with the next upgrade. For business, government and NGOs, real innovation will be exciting and delighting the older consumer, not simply responding with what is “needed”. No, boomers, X'ers and Millennials who expect an ‘app’ for everything will expect “it” - whatever it is - to be faster, better, cheaper and have a certain cool factor even after they are long past cool at 37,000 feet up or on the ground.

 

Image by Shutterstock

 

When Good Laws Go Bad: How One Professor is Experiencing McCarthyism in the 21st Century

by Robert Montenegro

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Do you remember a few months ago when we posted the following video featuring Slavoj Žižek about the totalitarianism of the modern political correctness movement?

It's a relatively long watch so I'll offer a brief summary. Žižek's main point is that totalitarianism differs from authoritarianism in that the latter is more of a "do what I say or else" system while the former is tinged with notes of "I know better than you what you really want." His thoughts are based in Lacanian theory, built on the idea that social rules are being enforced by an imagined "Big Other" whom we strive not to offend. It's out of fear that the public acquiesces to the bondage of totalitarianism. It's also out of fear (plus systemic ignorance) that the public acquiesces to political correctness. Thus, political correctness and totalitarianism: odd bedfellows who are getting more and more comfortable with each other each passing day.

If you have doubts about Žižek's theory, allow me to point you to the following tweet from Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis:

Read about the professor (me) brought up on Title IX charges over an essay. My Title IX Inquisition https://t.co/7arRrbuUv6 via @chronicle

— laura kipnis (@laurakipnis) May 29, 2015

It's a long read but worth every second you spend poring over it. Kipnis is in hot water at the moment over an essay she wrote questioning the university's role in policing sexual politics on campus. To make a long (but important) story short, students that disagreed with her essay have exploited a perversion of Title IX to lodge a complaint against Kipnis that has resulted in a lengthy, opaque, and expensive investigation which violates all sorts of academic and first amendment freedoms. 

"As I understand it, any Title IX charge that’s filed has to be investigated, which effectively empowers anyone on campus to individually decide, and expand, what Title IX covers. Anyone with a grudge, a political agenda, or a desire for attention can quite easily leverage the system.  And there are a lot of grudges these days. The reality is that the more colleges devote themselves to creating 'safe spaces' — that new watchword — for students, the more dangerous those campuses become for professors. It’s astounding how aggressive students’ assertions of vulnerability have gotten in the past few years. Emotional discomfort is regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated."

This reminds me of a terrific piece on trigger warnings by my colleague Steven Mazie, published on this site a few weeks ago. His thesis echoes Kipnis' lamentations about perceived vulnerabilities and, frankly, intellectual spinelessness:

"Students should expect to be challenged — intellectually, personally, emotionally — in a liberal-arts classroom that is worth its salt. They should feel free to speak their minds in class, and this sense of a “safe space” is indeed what professors have a responsibility to cultivate. Not a space free of ideas that may be offensive (to one, some, or many), but a space where everyone can feel comfortable exploring a rich text together with civility and respect."

There are several root causes to this mess we find ourselves in. First, Kipnis explains that the outcry over campus sexual assaults -- an important cause that needed to be addressed -- has unfortunately begat a sort of neo-McCarthyism through which any Abigail Williams can exploit the system to damage political enemies. This is because of the second root cause: Title IX, enacted by Congress in 1972 as a means to combat sex discrimination in education, has mutated beyond its initial purpose. Here's Kipnis again:

"Over time, court rulings established sexual harassment and assault as forms of discrimination, and in 2011 the U.S. Department of Education advised colleges to 'take immediate and effective steps to end sexual harassment and sexual violence.' Since then, colleges have been scrambling to show that they’re doing everything they can to comply..."

Any college which receives federal funding has to be in compliance with Title IX. That's all fine and dandy when the standards to which compliance must be maintained are transparent. That is not the case here. Kipnis' article reads like a bureaucratic black comedy penned by Mike Judge replete with red tape, paperwork, and plenty of billable hours. It's The Crucible meets Catch-22.

The most notable root cause of this current state of affairs is the continuing evolution of universities away from intellectual purposes. Colleges are being run more like corporations than bastions of higher learning. Getting a diploma is more important than gaining knowledge. Students are treated more like customers than as pupils. This then means professors are being treated less like academic sages and more like the help. And that's going to students' heads. 

Here's Kipnis again:

"What’s being lost, along with job security, is the liberty to publish ideas that might go against the grain or to take on risky subjects in the first place. With students increasingly regarded as customers and consumer satisfaction paramount, it’s imperative to avoid creating potential classroom friction with unpopular ideas if you’re on a renewable contract and wish to stay employed. Self-censorship naturally prevails. But even those with tenure fear getting caught up in some horrendous disciplinary process with ad hoc rules and outcomes; pretty much everyone now self-censors accordingly...

You can mock academic culture all you want, and I’ve done a fair amount of it myself, but I also believe that unconstrained intellectual debate — once the ideal of university life, now on life support — is essential to a functioning democratic society. And that should concern us all."

Beyond these concerns, Kipnis also feels betrayed by those who launch assaults on intellectual freedom under the banner of feminism. It is, as Jezebel's Natasha Vargas-Cooper calls it, feminism devouring itself:

"I also find it beyond depressing to witness young women on campuses — including aspiring intellectuals! — trying to induce university powers to shield them from the umbrages of life and calling it feminism."

Kipnis is still waiting to hear the results of her inquisition. In all likelihood the spurious charges will be dropped and things will ostensibly go back to normal. But there is no normal after this. The political correctness sharks will almost certainly smell blood in the water. The push will continue to declaw higher education to prevent it from ever offending the tender sensibilities of full-grown adults. Those who voice discontent will be threatened with a blackball. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

That's what's most troublesome here. These folks think they're in the right, that they're balancing progress on their shoulders as they march forward. But as Žižek explained above, those who champion p.c. extremism do more to harm social harmony than help it. 

Photo credit: Stefan Redel / Shutterstock

Google's Project Jacquard: Wearable Technology For Normal People

by Robert Montenegro

Does anybody in Silicon Valley ever sleep? It seems that as soon as one company finishes delivering a keynote about some mind-blowing new innovation, the microphone gets passed to the next major player who goes on to introduce their own futuristic game changer. Seriously, take a nap, folks. Give the microphone a break.

Today's major announcement comes from Google, who at their I/O keynote today revealed a new vision for wearable technology that won't make you feel lame to wear. The effort consists of two separate-but-related ventures: Project Jacquard, with an assist from Project Soli. Together, they form a new innovation involving special fabrics woven with conductive yarns and motion sensors. Google is turning your favorite blue hoodie into a remote control:

Fortune's Stacey Higginbotham has the scoop on Jacquard's capabilities:

"The result of the combined projects is a fabric that acts as a touch screen of sorts. Different ways of stroking the fabric allow could someday allow a user to turn on lights, make a phone call or do any number of tasks programmed for that patch of fabric. Levi Strauss & Co. has signed a partnership with Google to try to exploit the technology. Project Jacquard is a combination of two technologies—weaving conductive threads into a piece of cloth and creating a package of electronics that work with the conductive threads to read the information they convey and turn it into something a computer can understand."

As Higginbotham notes, hi-tech clothing items aren't exactly a groundbreaking innovation. Jacquard is plenty impressive because tech fabric is innately impressive, but it's the inclusion of Soli that's the big kicker here. Soli relies on radar technology to detect hand movements and translate them into digital commands. This promotes interactivity, where previous tech fabrics have typically been about diagnostics. 

Over at TNW News, Nate Swanner explains how, unlike the technology in most smart devices, Project Jacquard allows for freedom of form. If you want an item that acts like an iPhone, you're going to have to buy an iPhone. If you want to to harness Jacquard technology, you can do so in nearly any type of fabric: jeans, jackets, shoes, etc. Plus, you're not at all limited in size or scope:

"Your entire coat sleeve could be interactive, or just part of the pattern on it. If you wore a coat with repetitive squares, one could be receptive to touch. If that square pattern were instead stars, one or more of the stars could end up as your touch interface."

As you can imagine, every tech site on the web has a story about Jacquard right now. The piece at VentureBeat, authored by Mark Sullivan, boasts the headline "With Google’s Jacquard, wearable technology may have just grown up." While I take offense to almost any headline featuring the word "just" when outside the context of justice, it's difficult not to agree with Sullivan or whomever it is that writes his headlines. That's because wearable technology has until now mostly been about novelty. It's like CGI in overbearing action movies; the focus has too long been on loudness and noticeability. That's why Sullivan hits the nail on the head here:

"Jacquard is exciting because it pushes the technology and fashion worlds closer together than any past development in wearables. Hopefully the designers and artists that use the technology will do some inspired things, and that they remember that technology is just a tool and that it should stay out of the way most of the time."

Although most of us are excited for the futurist promises of now to become the vivid realities of tomorrow, none of us actually want to walk around looking like Griff Tannen or C-3PO. For wearable technologies to become ubiquitous they first need to become innocuous, or at least mostly subdued. Hitting that point in technology and design means we'll have seen wearables "grow up." Thus, our mysterious headline writer may very well be on to something.

For more on Project Jacquard we encourage you to check out Google's official site.

Below, Singularity University's Vivek Wadhwa details the tech innovations he's most interested in -- including some exciting new wearables:

Do We Need To Rescue Rationality?

by Jag Bhalla

The word “rational” needs rescue and realignment. Or we’ll fail evolution’s “negative telos” test. As Tom Stoppard’s play The Hard Problem shows, a key rational parable is widely misinterpreted.

1. Spike (a character representing “all the science that’s taught”) says to Hilary (a scientist who prays) that “altruism is always self-interest,” and “Darwin doesn’t do sentimental.”

2. Real-life scientist David Sloan Wilson disagrees. Wilson tells Stoppard (here) that Spike is wrong. Doing good can be rational and “altruism and morality” are explainable by evolution, and its games.

3. Darwin believed sentiments had evolutionary roles: “social instincts … naturally lead to the golden rule”; anyone lacking social instincts was an “unnatural monster.” Indeed “Darwin was no Darwinian”.

4. Hilary and Spike discuss game theory and its celebrated Prisoner’s Dilemma: a two-player game with two options, cooperate or defect, and payoffs ranked Temptation > Reward > Punishment > Sucker. If the players cooperate, both get Reward. If only one defects, he gets Temptation, the other gets Sucker. If both defect, both get Punishment.

5. Spike’s conventional view says the other player “rationally” tempted, will defect. So you should “rationally” defect also. But this “rationality” guarantees poor results. Hilary posits other motives: Player A loves Player B, so sacrificing has a sentimental logic.

6. Evolution is smarter than Spike’s “rationalists.” Hilary’s and Darwin’s sentimental logic can beat selfishness. For example: Christians would beat “rationalists” in Prisoner’s Dilemmas. Like any Golden Ruled players, they’d cooperate. When we call foreseeably worse strategies “rational,” something’s broken.

7. Hillary says “You can’t get an ought out of an is. Morality is not science.” She’s wrong. Some oughts are necessary for any is, to survive. Life needs no “telos” (grand purpose) to have a kind of “negative telos.” Nature and logic eliminate behaviors that damage what they depend on. This unnamed principle (needism?) governs evolution.

8. Game theory provides “behavioral telescopes” to scientifically study moral rules. Humans, being social and self-deficient, can’t thrive without rules. Certain rules work better. These long-term patterns are objectively assessable. Evolution is itself a game theorist, testing “endless forms [and strategies] most beautiful.”

9. In Prisoner's Dilemmas Jewish norms beat Christian ones. Its best strategy, Tit-For-Tat (use the other player’s last move on them) beats Christian “turning the other cheek,” which is exploitable (as Machiavelli and Nietzsche complained). But Old Testament “an eye for an eye” becomes Tit-For-Tat, if forgiveness follows punishment. Divine or not, forgiveness can be adaptive.

10. A “Golden Punishment Rule” enables sustainable cooperation by preventing profitable cheating. Punishment must equal or exceed ill-gotten gains. That’s why Wilson is wrong to say “selfishness beats altruism within groups.” Social punishment (moral sanction) exerts selective pressures on within-group strategies as powerfully as any predator.

11. Our survival games are much easier than Prisoner’s Dilemmas. Only fools play with known bad cooperators (see Boehm’s Moral Origins).

The stage is set for us to rescue “rationality.” We ought never to call “rational” self-maximization that’s foreseeably collectively self-destructive (ineconomics, or politics). Only “relational rationality” really makes sense.

 

Illustration by Julia Suits, The New Yorker Cartoonist & author of The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions.

 

You Can Reduce Prejudice, Racial and Gender Biases, While You Sleep

by Monica Joshi

Prejudice, racism and sexism tend to lurk in our unconscious minds despite our best efforts to be more tolerant. Even if our society deeply values egalitarianism, we are still influenced by racial or gender biases. That doesn't mean we can't change our views. Newly published research shows that not only can these biases be changed, but that we can use the simplest, most natural possible process to do it: sleep.

This new technique, developed by researchers at Northwestern University and University of Texas-Austin, allows anti-bias training to filter into our unconscious assumptions while we sleep. Their experiment featured 40 participants of the Northwestern University community who began by taking two versions of the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The participants were all white and between the ages of 18 to 30. As the IAT can test the associative strength between a concept and a stereotype, it was a useful way to measure the participants' baseline implicit social biases.

The participants were required to take two versions of the test – one that looked at gender bias and another that looked at racial bias. Once the researchers had quantified each subject's implicit biases, the participants had to go through counter-stereotype training. This training was meant to reduce preexisting stereotypes by showing pictures of faces paired with words that countered a stereotype. For example, female faces were paired with words like math and science, or black faces with words like cheer, honour, and smile.  The researchers thereby targeted gender and racial stereotypes and biases.

During the research session, the researchers simultaneously played sound cues that became associated with these picture-word pairings. If the participant made a 'correct' response to a counter-bias stimuli pair, e.g. associating female faces with science words, then they heard a particular sound cue, which would later be replayed during their 90-minute nap.

When the participants awoke from their naps, they were tested for their levels of bias using the IAT. If a participant heard a sound cue associated with the counter gender bias training while they slept, then when they retook the IAT, they were far less likely to use stereotypes about (e.g.) women not being good at science.  According to the researchers, the biases were reduced by at least 50 percent relative to the pre-sleep bias levels.

At a one-week follow-up test, the sleep intervention was still effective. The effects of the sleep-intervention seem to be both long-lasting and promising. This is a very unexpected result of the study, as one-time intervention can quickly decay after people return to their normal lives.

Further research using a larger control group to test for similar biases in other parts of the world and not just attendees of a university could be very beneficial in understanding whether this could be a universal solution. It would also be interesting to see further research done to delve into the implicit biases that people hold within their own race or gender and whether these can be treated via sleep-therapy. In the future, it might also be useful to see if similar techniques can be used to reduce other biases such as a stigma towards disability, religion or even political preference.

This research is important and could lead us in the direction of treatment of our unconscious prejudices. As Heidi Halvorson has pointed out, the prejudices that we hold are hard to shake as they are deeply ingrained in our brains. 

 

New Images of Pluto From New Horizons Gradually Reveal More Detail

by Robert Montenegro

If you're a fan of the TV forensics trope in which Gary Sinise or whoever urges the aloof computer geek to "ENHANCE" a pixelated image, then the continuing saga of NASA's Pluto re-education is sure to fascinate.

As you probably know, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is hurtling through space toward the dwarf planet, sending back illuminating new images of the cryptic sphere. Before its journey, this photo used to be the best shot we had of Pluto and its celestial associates: Charon, Nix, and Hydra. Happily for astronomers and other, less-professional space lovers, New Horizons' most recent dispatches include photos which have already augmented our understanding of Pluto's surface geography.

From NASA:

"A technique called image deconvolution sharpens the raw, unprocessed pictures beamed back to Earth. In the April images, New Horizons scientists determined that Pluto has broad surface markings – some bright, some dark – including a bright area at one pole that may be a polar cap. The newer imagery released here shows finer details. Deconvolution can occasionally produce spurious details, so the finest details in these images will need confirmation from images to be made from closer range in coming weeks."

Not bad for photos taken from 50 million miles (77 million kilometers) away. It's hard enough for me to snap a decent picture on my cell phone camera without getting a thumb in the way. NASA scientists cite the visual evidence of the ice caps, plus variations of surface details when observed from different angles, to support hypotheses that Pluto's surface geology is more varied than initially supposed.

Bob King of Universe Today offers a strong assessment of these new images, as well as clues us in on what to expect moving forward:

"Watch for dramatic improvements in the images as New Horizons speeds toward its target, covering 750,000 miles per day until closest approach on July 14. By late June, they’ll have four times the resolution; during the flyby that will improve to 5,000 times. The spacecraft is currently 2.95 billion miles from Earth. Light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, requires 8 hours and 47 minutes – the length of a typical work day – to make the long round trip."

A brief postscript: Whenever we post about things like this there's always a small contingent of folks who bellyache loudly about the pointlessness of sending spacecrafts out millions and millions of miles to send back pixelated images. Below, Bill Nye the Science Guy gives a great explanation for why this all matters:

You Can Tell A Lot About Your Dog Just By Listening

by Dustin Petzold

Anyone who's ever owned a dog knows that inevitable moment when, out for a walk, you're stopped by a stranger who wants to make friends with your pet. "What breed is it?," they ask. "How old? Boy or girl?" A new study suggests that true dog lovers might be able to skip this question-and-answer process altogether if they just keep their ears open. The tonal qualities of a dog's bark provide evidence of its age, gender, breed, and more, just like human voices make it easy to picture that stranger we're talking to over the phone.

Computer-science researchers have collaborated with veterinary students to determine whether various characteristics of a dog can be reliably identified through its bark. Eight dogs of different breeds were placed in different situations while their "speech" was analyzed. The dogs were studied while placed in the following scenarios: tied to a tree, playing with a ball, defending their master from simulated aggression, receiving food, meeting a stranger, and preparing to go outside with their master. 

Using the collected data, researchers were able to correctly identify a dog's gender over 85 percent of the time, and age (classified into the categories young, adult, and old) over 80 percent of the time. Other characteristics were tougher to pin down; researchers identified the breed correctly just 67 percent of the time, and selected the correct scenario with just 55 percent accuracy.

While this may seem like nothing more than frivolous fun, it has important applications for those who study animal behavior. Similar techniques could be used to measure levels of aggression and emotion in dogs. While it seems like a bit much for prospective dog owners to put their potential adoptees through this type of analysis (as enjoyable as it might be for the humans involved), this technology could help us determine which dogs are ideal for roles in service and therapy. Additionally, there are many disputes and misconceptions about whether certain dogs are too aggressive to be kept as pets. These questions could be addressed through further research and analysis.

Visit ScienceDaily for more 

 

Pop Music Lyrics Average a 3rd Grade Reading Level

by Orion Jones

Last time we were talking about pop lyrics, Beyonce had just lost the Grammy for best album to Beck and Kanye had interrupted yet another acceptance speech. Facebook was posting a side-by-side comparison of the nominees' lyrics (although that's just one measure of best album, as the The Guardian pointed out, ultimately giving the nod to Queen Bey).

The simplicity of Beyonce's lyrics is not unique. In fact, a great many of our most popular songs are written at just a third grade reading level. That's the conclusion reached by an analysis of 225 songs that spent at least 3 weeks at the top of the Billboard charts over the last ten years.

The analysis used the Readability Index to rank songs according to the complexity and diversity of their lyrics. At present, this post has a reading level of just above seventh grade, so despite my grad school pedigree, I'm apparently more at home with middle schoolers.

Perhaps more surprisingly when it came to song lyrics, Country music pulled the other genres to above a third grade level, averaging a 3.3 reading level while Pop and Rock tied at 2.9 and R&B/Hip-Hop ranked lowest at a grade level of 2.6.

In 2007, Rock and R&B/Hip-Hop both plunged with the help of songs like “Buy U a Drank” by T-Pain (which just made it above a 1st grade reading level) and “I Don’t Wanna Stop” by Ozzy Osbourne (a more respectable 1.6 average grade level).

Maybe it was the financial crash of 2007 that made T-Pain and friends need a drank? Then again, maybe not. Since 2005, the intelligence level of lyrics has steadily declined, moving from a high of about 3.5 in 2006 to its present low of about 2.7.

When five-time Grammy-winning artist Mary Chapin Carpenter stopped by DSN, she explained the danger in branding country music, or artists generally from the south, as being less sophisticated. 

Would You Pass This Test in Kantian Ethics?

by Steven Mazie

The biggest news item of the week was the exposure of a mind-bogglingly huge, 24-year-long corruption scandal at FIFA, the international governing body for soccer. Executives at FIFA, it seems, have been taking bribes from marketing firms and then handing out contracts to televise games. The kickbacks have lined FIFA officials’ pockets to the tune of $150 million, and they date all the way back to 1991. “Two generations of soccer officials,” the Justice Department announced on Thursday, “abused their positions of trust for personal gain, frequently through an alliance with unscrupulous sports marketing executives who shut out competitors and kept highly lucrative contracts for themselves through the systematic payment of bribes and kickbacks.”

It’s an ugly picture. But this is only the most recent and most brazen example of corruption in the world of sports. Sustained, thorough law-breaking and immorality are nothing new, but rarely are we treated to such a startling example of seemingly decent people in positions of power behaving very, very badly.

This gives us the chance to ask anew why people do such stupid and terrible things. (By the way, your ethical conundrum is coming up in just three more paragraphs.) We’re not talking now about ideologically or religiously motivated violence. The topic of the day is ordinary, run-of-the-mill immorality that is unmotivated by anything but personal greed and lust for money and power: doing something wrong for profit. When the first executive at FIFA thought, “Hey, I could stand to make some money for myself here. I think I’ll shake down the cable company for some extra cash in exchange for letting them broadcast soccer games,” he wasn’t acting or thinking ethically. And he was assuming he would get away with it—which he did quite nicely for over two decades.

All this corruption has reminded me of one of my favorite passages in Kant’s ethical writings. It concerns bad behavior on a somewhat smaller scale and comes in an essay called “On the Common Saying: ‘This May Be True in Theory But it Does Not Apply in Practice.' " In this text, Kant refutes skeptics who say his moral and political theories are vain exercises in abstraction with no practical relevance in the real world. Not so, the 18th-century philosopher responds. Theory and practice are intimately interwoven. Any “practice” worth its name—he uses the Latin word “praxis,” the term that inspired me when I named this blog—is bound up with principles, and those principles are deduced from theory.

Kant takes particular aim at the objection that ethical considerations “vanish completely when it comes to action, when they are supposed to apply to desires and intentions.” On the contrary, Kant writes, the principle of acting morally for the sake of duty (rather than calculating which course of action is potentially more profitable) is “incomparably simpler, clearer, and more natural and easily comprehensible to everyone than any motive derived from...happiness.”

He uses an example that would make a FIFA executive blush:

Let us take...the case of someone who has under his trust an endowment the owner of which is deceased, while the heirs are ignorant of and could never discover its existence. Let us also suppose that the trustee of this deposit, through no fault of his own, has at this very time suffered a complete collapse in his financial circumstances, and has around him a miserable family of wife and children, oppressed by want, and knows that he could at once relieve this distress if he appropriated the pledge entrusted to him. He is also benevolent and philanthropic, while the heirs are rich, uncharitable, thoroughly extravagant and luxurious, so that it would make little difference if the aforesaid addition to their property were thrown into the sea.

It’s clear what a corrupt soccer official would do: he would pocket his friend’s cash and never speak of the sin again. But what would you do? Kant fashions the example to make it easy for you to rationalize taking the money: no one will ever find out; the heirs to the fortune are rich arses; your family genuinely needs the money. But wait:

If this case is explained even to a child of around eight or nine years old, and it is asked whether it might be permissible under the circumstances to devote the deposit to one’s own use, the reply will undoubtedly be negative. Whoever we ask will merely answer, without further ado, that it is wrong.

“Nothing,” Kant writes, “can be clearer than this.” And of course Kant (along with his eight-year-old sidekick) is right. To take the money entrusted to you by your friend and to fail to deliver it to its rightful owners is wrong. It just is. It is stealing, case closed. Plus you will be a bad friend to a dead man.

But if you continue pondering what to do after realizing the immorality of doing anything but sending along the money to its rightful owners, Kant explains, you’ll be getting into rather uncertain territory. You may or may not receive a reward for delivering the sum. You may or may not arouse the suspicion of neighbors or legal authorities who wonder how you’re suddenly eating better and buying new shoes for your kids. Speculating on the consequences is exactly what Kant says you should never do when deliberating morally. The “possible results” of your choice “are highly uncertain.” But to ask what duty requires is to avoid all “confusion.” You just do it.

It’s a very good thing that the Justice Department finally caught on and caught up to the FIFA criminals. An enforcement and punishment mechanism on the other end of a series of wrongful acts is a necessity, given the deeply flawed state of the human being. But reading Kant this week makes me think it’s perhaps equally important to erect intellectual roadblocks to such depraved selfishness in advance. Halting more immorality before it occurs might be possible with better moral education. As Kant writes, though men may struggle “with countless evils of existence and even with their most seductive temptations,” they can “overcome” them. “We may rightly assume,” he adds, “that men can do so.”

Image credit: Shutterstock.com

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Scientists Are Creating Biodegradable Computer Chips

by Monica Joshi

Reduce, reuse, recycle. A mantra that we've been hearing since we were wee little younglings. Environmentally friendly solutions are the new designer handbags, but more useful. Keeping with the trend to reduce waste and make production of electronic devices more sustainable, researchers have developed a semiconductor chip made almost entirely out of wood.

With consumer electronics usually made from oil-based plastics and other potentially harmful chemicals, the team hopes that by creating these chips they can alleviate some of the waste problems associated with non-biodegradable materials. The paper published in Nature Communications explains that the support layer found in all computer chips can be replaced by cellulose nanofibril (CNF), a biodegradable material made from trees.

Zhengiang Ma, one of the authors of the paper, explained that:

“The majority of material in a chip is support. We only use less than a couple of micrometers for everything else. Now the chips are so safe you can put them in the forest and fungus will degrade it. They become as safe as fertilizer.”

The researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been researching sustainable nanomaterial for over 5 years. When they finally reached at wood, they had to break it down and assess its durability and flexibility in nano parts. After breaking it down to even smaller units than the fibers used in paper production, they were able to produce strong, flexible and transparent cellulose nanofibril paper. Using wood in electronics, however, is not easy. Getting the material smooth enough and stopping it from expanding are vital to the success of the design, as wood is a hydroscopic material and can expand by absorbing moisture from the air.

Zhiyong Cai, lead author of the study, explained:

“With an epoxy coating on the surface of the CNF, we solved both the surface smoothness and the moisture barrier.”

In other words, covering the material in a thin layer of glue allowed them to get around the problem of moisture absorption and expansion. While the biodegradability of these materials will have a positive impact on the environment, the researchers hope that the flexibility of the technology can lead to widespread adoption.

With new wireless technologies being continuously introduced into the marketplace each year, this new research is extremely valuable in keeping up with our consumer habits. There are currently more mobile devices in the world then there are people and the number just keeps on increasing. This number doesn't include the amount of devices that are consistently being poured into our landfills each year. As the average person upgrades their cell phone every 18 months, it's likely that there are about 130 million devices being discarded per year in the US alone. This number also doesn't include devices such as tablets, laptops, computers and stand-alone music devices such as iPods.

While more than 70 percent of these devices can be reused, only 14 – 17 percent of them are actually recycled annually. The environmental costs are continuing to mount. This new research, if adopted by the electronics industry, can make great strides in creating more sustainable products by reducing the reliance on the toxic material gallium arsenide that is currently used in many products.

Wanted: 430,000-Year-Old Murder Suspect

by Dustin Petzold

One of the biggest misconceptions about American life, and the world at large, is that crime rates are at all-time highs. In fact, they've been falling for decades, even if many people still long for the alleged safety and security of the olden days. Those same people might be surprised to learn that even in the really, really olden days of about 430,000 BCE, early humans showed the capacity for deliberate violence.

Scientists at Binghamton University have analyzed fatal wounds on a 430,000-year-old skull, and believe that they have uncovered one of the oldest murder cases known to man. The skeletal remains in question were found at an archaeological site in Spain, where at least 28 other skeletons were also discovered.

"Evidence for interpersonal violence in the human fossil record is relatively scarce, and this would appear to represent the coldest cold case on record," said Binghamton University anthropologist Rolf Quam. The skull uncovered by Quam and his team has two large cracks above the left eye, which analysts determined were made by the same object. Since it would have been highly unlikely for an object to accidentally strike the same individual multiple times, researchers believe the wounds were a product of "lethal interpersonal aggression." Additionally, the dozens of other skeletons found at the site are thought to be evidence of a mass burial.

"This is really good evidence for an intentional role for humans in the accumulation of bodies at the bottom of this pit, and suggests the hominins from this time period were already engaging in complex cognitive behaviors," continued Quam.   

Our stereotypes of early humans and "cavemen" are all about aggressive, brutish behavior, but this paradoxical discovery complicates that idea. Sure, early humans were violent, but that violence seems to have been accompanied by cognitive skill. And one has to wonder whether these early humans simply wanted to dispose of the dead in one place, or were engaging in a primitive religious ritual. 

While it may be impossible to get to the bottom of this ancient mystery, we can take comfort in knowing that the culprit will very likely never kill again.

Visit ScienceDaily for more

 

Researchers Say We're Jumpier At Night, But Not Because It's Dark

by Natalie Shoemaker

The night is dark and full of terrors, or so our brains would have us think. At night, I often leave a trail of lights in my wake, turning them off on my return trip. But while I don't suffer from a debilitating phobia, there are those out there that do.

BPS writes on a recent study done by Yadan Li and her colleagues to figure out how darkness and nighttime influences some to fear the evening hours.

The researchers write:

“Nighttime fear is a phenomenon in which people feel more afraid of threats at night. Despite the vast amount of psychological research on nighttime fear, previous researchers have not accurately distinguished between 'night' and 'darkness', both of which play important roles in nighttime fear.”

The study consisted of 128 young women. Researchers asked them to look at neutral pictures (e.g. nature scenes), scary pictures (e.g. spiders; a person being attacked), and listen to scary sounds (e.g. screams) and neutral sounds (e.g. bird song) while they sat in a windowless cubicle.

However, some women were asked to complete these tasks during different times of day and with different lighting within the cubicle. There were four groups in total: some completed the tasks during the day in a well-lit room, others during the day were the only light was from the glow of the computer monitor, and some completed the task at night in a well-lit room while others were in a dark room.

The results revealed something quite interesting. Based on the women's self-evaluations and measurements of the their heart-rates and perspiration levels showed that the nighttime groups were far more jumpy—no matter the lighting.

The researchers write in their paper on plans for future study:

"[T]his study is merely a first step in understanding the underlying mechanisms involved in fear-related information processing and has implications for the underlying psychopathology of relevant phobias and anxiety disorders [such as nighttime panic attacks]."

Read more at BPS.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

A Show About Nothing: Richard Tuttle’s Mindfulness Masterpieces

by Bob Duggan

More than 20 years ago, the sitcom Seinfeld went “meta” and joked that it was “a show about nothing.” But 20 years before George Costanza’s epiphany, artist Richard Tuttle was staging shows about nothing featuring works such as Wire Piece (detail shown above)—a piece of florist wire nailed at either end to a wall marked with a penciled line. But, as Jerry concludes, there’s “something” in that “nothing.” A new retrospective of Tuttle’s art at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, PA, Both/And: Richard Tuttle Print and Cloth, dives into the depths, and widths, of this difficultly philosophical, yet compellingly simple artist who takes the everyday nothings of line, paper, and cloth to create extraordinary statements about the need to be mindful of the artful world all around us.

In many ways, Tuttle’s career begins and flows directly from his first Wire Pieces of 1972.  After the excesses of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Minimalism offered a quieter, gentler, post-politicized ‘60s alternative. Inspired by friend Agnes Martin, Tuttle sprung onto the bigger art stages with Wire Pieces. Although he’d been working in a Minimalist style since the mid-1960s, something about Wire Pieces and other early 1970s work drew the attention (and disdain) of critics. Curator Marcia Tucker infamously lost her job for staging (and standing by) a controversial 1975 survey of Tuttle’s art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. (Two years later, Tucker founded The New Museum precisely to showcase new, challenging art such as Tuttle’s.)

It’s easy, too easy to stroll mindlessly past Tuttle’s Wire Pieces. You might not even notice them at all—a series of thin wires popping out parabolically to cast shadows on the wall that mix and mingle with lines drawn in pencil.  It’s only when you stop and look and allow the multimedia multidimensionality of the pieces to register that you recognize the interplay of lines drawn, shaped, and shadowed. Tuttle installs a new set of Wire Pieces for each location, including this new show, ensuring uniqueness to place and moment. The Wire Pieces hang parabolically not just in the geometric sense of the word, but also in the allegorical sense.  Each is a half-drawn, half-sculpted parable teaching the viewer to pay attention to the little things, the fragile “nothings” that speak volumes to those receptive to the lesson.

Both/And: Richard Tuttle Print and Cloth is a retrospective of retrospectives—plus. It bundles together “both” Richard Tuttle: I Don’t Know. The Weave of Textile Language (originally at Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 2014) and Richard Tuttle: A Print Retrospective (originally at Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Maine, also in 2014) “and” new prints and the international premiere of new kimono work by Tuttle. Summed together, this retrospective of retrospectives stretches across five decades from the mid-1960s to 2015, almost as long as Tuttle’s relationship with the Fabric Workshop and Museum itself, a collaboration that began in 1978 shortly after the FWM’s founding. Paradoxically, the result is maximum minimalism—the most “nothing” you can find in one place, which oddly adds up to a whole new way of seeing Tuttle, art itself, and the world.

Standing around Ten Kinds of Memory and Memory Itself (1973) at the press preview, Magnus af Petersens, curator of the Whitechapel Gallery Tuttle show, recounted Tuttle’s remark that this careful arrangement of lengths of string on the gallery floor was like a Zen garden, something to be attended and contemplated. Tuttle forces you to attend—be mindful of—everything in the gallery. Just when you focus on the walls, he uses the floor. Just when you focus on the larger pieces, you overlook the tiny, 3-inch-long, 3^rd Rope Piece—art smaller than the numbered wall sign directing you to it. Just when you attune yourself to the tiny and simple, Tuttle gives you the complex Systems that overload your senses with texture, color, and shape and reset your receptors. Every time you think you have Tuttle’s world mapped out, he sends you (in the aptly titled pieces) Looking for the Map once more in vain.

Tuttle’s not an easy artist for the uninitiated (or often more so, the jaded initiate) to embrace. The wide range of visual dynamics—big and small, plain and colorful, here, there, and everywhere—can be disorienting until you appreciate that the individual pieces don’t matter as much as the cumulative effect of making you more mindful of how you are looking.  It’s just a length of string until you focus your attention and imagination on it.  The texture of cloth, the weave of paper, or the way ink becomes part of a print pass by us daily on the assembly line of our lives, until Tuttle disassembles the machinery of modern existence long enough for us to look, learn, and live again.

Walking through Both/And: Richard Tuttle Print and Cloth, I kept thinking of the books of Matthew B. Crawford, both Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Beyond Your Head. Crawford sees the modern disconnect with material things in favor of virtual ones as the primary barrier to actualizing the self. Richard Tuttle reconnects us with the material world by calling us to tend the “Zen garden” all around us made of cloth, paper, line, color, and shadow. When life seems like “nothing,” artists such as Richard Tuttle take that “nothing” and magically transform it into “something.” If you want to venture into the world beyond your head, Both/And: Richard Tuttle Print and Cloth is a good place to start.

[Image: Richard Tuttle. Wire Piece (detail), 1972. Florist wire, nails, and graphite. Dimensions vary with installation. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by author.]

[Many thanks to the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA, for providing me with press materials related to and an invitation to the press preview for the exhibition Both/And: Richard Tuttle Print and Cloth.]

[Please follow me on Twitter (@BobDPictureThis) and Facebook (Art Blog By Bob) for more art news and views.]

Teenage Girls Receive Conflicting Messages About Career Choices From the Media

After FIFA Messes with US World Cup Bid, FBI Hits Back

by Orion Jones

As Americans, we only care about soccer so much. But we do care about hosting the world's most popular sporting tournament — a lot.

There is little doubt that laws against corruption and bribery have been violated by the international soccer organization FIFA. One of professional sports' worst kept secrets is that FIFA executives regularly accepted cash in exchange for television and merchandizing rights to international soccer matches.

The Justice Department's own legal briefs, unsealed after the FBI arrested several FIFA officials yesterday in Switzerland's high-end resort Baur au Lac, document a 24-year history of shady financial dealings amounting to $150 million.

It was when FIFA awarded the 2022 World Cup to Qatar — a country that could reach 140 degrees Fahrenheit during match play — red flags went up in the American legal system. Of course the US was also competing to host the World Cup in 2022, and Bill Clinton personally campaigned on America's behalf.

There was some symbolic justice when the FBI moved against FIFA members at the Baur au Lac, the same hotel where Bill Clinton allegedly smashed a mirror after losing the 2022 bid to Qatar. It seems that donating money to the Clinton Foundation was not apology enough for FIFA or the Qatar hosting committee.

Beyond sports fandom, lives are often at stake in where World Cup games are hosted. The British newspaper The Guardian, for example, estimates that nearly 1,000 workers died in Qatar between 2012 and 2013 while constructing soccer stadiums for the games. This obviously would not have happened in the United States.

ABC news reports that bribes were also made on behalf of venues in the United States, not for the World Cup but for the Copa América which determines South America's soccer champion.

Allocating finite legal resources to enforce laws is always a difficult matter, but when it comes to getting pushed around, the US won't have it, and that's probably a good thing. If only other countries, particularly in Europe where football fandom rules, would stand up for their fans in a similar way.

Having Difficulty Getting a Word in Edgewise?

by Kathleen Kelley Reardon

Conversation involves taking turns.  The challenge comes from the fact that we don’t follow the same pace in taking turns.  Something as seemingly simple as taking turns in talk involves a number of subtle signals, indicating that one person has finished -- or is nearly finished -- and so another person’s turn may begin.  How long each of us waits or pauses between turns is affected by our culture, family patterns, ethnicity, the social context and other factors.  So, is it any wonder that most of us, at times, find it difficult to edge into conversations?

Today, I was speaking with a speech pathologist about the special challenges people with Parkinson’s disease face when conversing.  Their voices are often considerably reduced in volume.  An effort to join or keep up in conversation can become so difficult and complex that it may seem better to just stop trying – to especially avoid social situations with groups of people or highly animated talkers. 

You needn’t suffer from Parkinson’s disease to have problems joining a conversation and occasionally holding the floor.  If you’re a woman in a primarily male environment, that can pose challenges, as can conversing with those who consider themselves superior in status or intelligence and therefore entitled to talk more. 

Conversations enable us to convey our thoughts and ideas.  That alone is important enough for us to participate.  But conversations also are the building blocks of relationships.  We signal through speech our status among others, whether we’re interesting people, our level of rapport, and a host of other relational clues that help others determine (usually quite beyond our notice) who we are.  In this sense, being able to get into a conversation, hold others’ attention, contribute effectively and then hand the turn to another person are all important to having good relationships.

If getting a word in edgewise is a problem for you -- just when you want to shout, “Will you ever shut up?” or “Hey, you idiot.  It’s my turn!” consider using some of the following phrases to enter or rejoin a conversation.  At the right volume, they’ll signal to people that you have something to say.  Unless you’ve already been monopolizing the talk, these polite yet assertive phrases are likely to be heeded by others – perhaps even those who are uninterested in what you say or just too rude to listen.  Select one or two of these phrases to try out this week:

I was just thinking when you said that ...

Yes. I agree, but....

You know what....

About what you just said...

Let me add a thought here...

On a related note/subject/topic...

You know, I think that’s true, but...

There’s another way to look at that...

We should also consider...

What you just said just reminded me of something...

Gestures, like slightly raising your hand to show you want to talk, are important.  It’s also useful to watch how people around you enter conversations and then adapt those entry cues to fit your particular style.

Coupled with gestures that gain attention -- and ones that hold it during your pauses -- the phrases above and others suited to your own style can reduce the frustration most of us feel when no one seems to be listening.  It’s far better to push open the gate than to let it close because you haven’t practiced such skills and learned the extent of personal determination to exert.

 

Kathleen also blogs here.

 

Photo:  nchisft/Shutterstock.com