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January 30 2012

10:35

DARPA-funded hacker’s tiny $50 spy computer hides in offices, drops from drones

Security researcher Brendan O’Connor is building a sensor-equipped surveillance-capable computer that’s so cheap it can be dropped from a drone and sacrificed after one use, with off-the-shelf parts that anyone can buy and assemble for less than $50. The F-BOMB (Falling or Ballistically launched Object that Makes Backdoors), built from just the hardware in a commercially [...]
10:35

Dating in the multiverse

In Nick Payne’s new play, Constellations, universe-crossing lovers repeat a scene over and over with different outcomes in different parallel universes, New Scientist Culture Lab reports.  

January 28 2012

17:30
Play fullscreen
San Diego Opera Spotlight: Salome
Based on Oscar Wilde's dramatic adaptation of the biblical story, Richard Strauss' tale of Salome's disturbing obsession with John the Baptist is brought to life by San Diego Opera. Series: "San Diego Opera Spotlight" [1/2012] [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 21712]
Views: 91
2 ratings
Time: 29:43 More in Education
07:59

Scientists create femtosecond atomic X-ray laser

Lawrence Livermore Lab (LLNL) scientists and international collaborators have created the shortest, purest X-ray laser pulses ever achieved, fulfilling a 45-year-old prediction and ultimately opening the door to new medicines, devices and materials. The researchers aimed radiation from the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), located at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), at a cell [...]
07:59

‘Super Wi-Fi’ blankets first county in US

New Hanover County, North Carolina, recently rolled out “Super Wi-Fi,” operating in the “white spaces” between 50–700Mhz, where previously only television stations were allowed to transmit, reports Technology Review Mim’s Bits blog. This could mean high-speed wireless connections for the county’s residents, and also the potential to connect to Wi-Fi towers that are miles distant [...]
07:59

Gingrich proposes Moon base by 2020

Newt Gingrich has called for a bold, aggressive space program that would establish a permanent base on the Moon by 2020, along with a next-generation propulsion system for taking humans to Mars, and commercial near-Earth activities that include science, tourism, and manufacturing. Transcript of the speech, courtesy of the National Space Society.      
07:59

Biologists discover rotational motion of breast cells, required to avoid malignancy

In a study that holds major implications for breast cancer research and basic cell biology, scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have discovered a rotational motion that plays a critical role in the ability of breast cells to form the spherical structures in the mammary gland known [...]
07:59

First 3D image of cancer-prevention molecule

Cancer Research UK scientists have mapped the first 3D structure of a key protein that protects against the development of cancer. The team at Cancer Research UK’s Beatson Institute for Cancer Research, in Glasgow used X-ray analysis to map the structure of a protein called c-Cbl and showed that it changes shape when it is switched on. [...]
00:32

The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke

The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke
Journalists Kati Marton and David Rohde and historian Gordon M. Goldstein assess the late Richard Holbrooke's legacy in a discussion moderated by Roger Cohen of the New York Times.
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:30:00 -0800
Location: New York, NY, Asia Society, Asia Society
Program and discussion: http://fora.tv/2011/11/28/The_Unquiet_American_Richard_Holbrooke
00:15

Amitav Ghosh and Jonathan Spence

Amitav Ghosh and Jonathan Spence
Novelist Amitav Ghosh and historian Jonathan Spence discuss China and India's relationship over the centuries and the 19th-century Opium Wars, which form the backdrop to Ghosh's new novel, River of Smoke.
Date: Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:00:00 -0700
Location: New York, NY, Asia Society, Asia Society
Program and discussion: http://fora.tv/2011/11/03/Amitav_Ghosh_and_Jonathan_Spence

January 27 2012

18:45

Is Democracy Chinese? An Interview with Journalist Chang Ping

Ian Johnson

This is the fourth in an NYRblog series about the fate of democracy in different parts of the world.

Chang Ping

Chang Ping is one of China’s best-known commentators on contemporary affairs. Chang, whose real name is Zhang Ping, first established himself in the late 1990s in Guangzhou, where his hard-hitting stories exposed scandals and championed freedom of expression. As censorship has tightened in recent years, Chang’s pleas for openness and accountability have put him under pressure. The 43-year-old is currently living with his wife and daughter in Germany at the former country home of the Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll, which has been converted into a refuge for persecuted writers.

Chang’s travails began in 2001, when he was removed as news director of Southern Weekend, then a daring weekly that had won readers across the country. He became deputy editor of Southern Metropolis Weekly, but was removed in 2008, and subsequently banned from print, after publishing an editorial questioning government censorship of that year’s Tibetan uprising. One year ago, he was finally fired by the newspaper, with an editor saying his work was “inappropriate.” Last March, Chang joined a newly launched Hong Kong-based magazine, iSun Affairs, as chief editor but was denied a visa and has not been allowed into the former British colony.


Ian Johnson: You grew up in the 1970s; did you experience anything of the Cultural Revolution?

Chang Ping: My father was a low-level official in our hometown in Xichong County (in rural Sichuan) and got caught up in the factionalism of the Cultural Revolution. When I was young I attended an elementary school that was located on the side of the road. If you entered or left the village you passed it. I remember one day he was standing outside the window looking in at me. That afternoon I went home and said to my mother: “Dad was very strange. Dad was outside the school window staring at me.” My mother started crying and said, “Dad has gone and we don’t know if he’ll ever return again.” He had fled to a neighboring county to escape violence. We couldn’t visit him but we would get letters from him and my mother would read them to us. I was about eight years old.

Soon after this, reform and opening up started. We studied the Four Modernizations (a project to develop the fields of agriculture, industry, defense, and research and development) and were told that they would be realized by 2000. We wrote so many essays about how to achieve the Four Modernizations. I remember very clearly in 1984, at the 35th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, how the students at Peking University said “Hello Xiaoping!” to Deng Xiaoping when he drove by at a rally. It was on the radio and I was really moved. I thought: China has got such hope, such a bright future.

So you thought everything was great. You heard about the developments in Beijing and were excited.

Yes and I was doing well in school too. When you’re personally successful, you tend to think that things are going well. You’re optimistic. I thought things were going well but in some ways I was an angry youth. There’s no contradiction there. You believe, but you want to improve things. During the 1986 student movement, people like Liu Binyan, Fang Lizhi, and Wang Ruowang criticized the party and Deng Xiaoping. I remember hearing about it on the radio and felt in my heart that they were heroes.

At the time I loved literature. In the 1980s, literature was at a peak. I subscribed to a lot of magazines like Harvest and People’s Literature. I remember reading Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum and thinking, Wow, someone can write like that. I remember vividly that I was sitting outside and was so moved by that story. I didn’t quite understand everything but was influenced by it. Also Yu Hua’s short stories, for example. But you know that at that time I was still a complete believer. The books I wanted to read the most were the original works of Marx and Engels. I wanted to learn German to read them.

I went to college in 1987. Until then I’d been reading the classics of world literature, and contemporary Chinese fiction. But then at Sichuan University (in Chengdu) I read a series of books called Moving Toward the Future (走向未来丛书). It was an edited series introducing the great thinkers in other fields. This was a start for me and afterwards I read a lot of western literature, philosophy, and history. The series was really influential in the 1980s and if you look at the editorial staff, they all suffered after June 4 (the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre). I guess from today’s point of view you’d say they had intellectual property rights problems—they just translated or cribbed from foreign publications. But for us it opened a world of psychology, sociology, and literature. One book I have to mention is A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. We’d just read these books so fast and share them. Everyone was fascinated by Western philosophy especially. It didn’t matter what your major was, you were interested in Western philosophy, like Heidegger or Sartre.

How did you experience June 4? In Chengdu, you were quite far away from Beijing, the center of it.

A lot was going on in Chengdu. We had protests all the time. People came from Beijing with news and we’d put them up in our dorm rooms and share their information. There were dialogues and demands to negotiate with the government. I helped organize protests.

But I didn’t really join the main student protest committee. Ever since high school I made one of Confucius’s sayings my motto: “The superior man is dignified, but does not wrangle. He is sociable but not a partisan.” So I did not want to join any movement. In high school I was in the Communist Youth League and wanted to leave. They said, you can’t leave; there is no mechanism to leave. But I didn’t join the party. I didn’t want to be a member of anything, so in 1989 I wasn’t in the student committees. Still, I organized protests and was seen as a leader. I got arrested after June 4. However, during the protests many students had been on a hunger strike and I had opposed that. For that I think they let me out of jail earlier. I think some students opposed me for opposing the hunger strike but that was my view: a hunger strike was pointless. I thought it was good to propagate democracy in factories and in the countryside.

So you’re a pragmatist?

Actually, many people think I’m more of an idealist. I still think China needs democracy, that it needs to change. I really oppose several arguments [that are commonly made] about why China can’t have democracy, such as the argument that China is unique—that Chinese people need to wait because their “quality” [a Chinese term, suzhi, that implies everything from educational level to manners] isn’t high enough and other ridiculous things like that. Some people said that democracy wasn’t part of Chinese culture, and then Taiwan became democratic. Then they said that Taiwan was a special case. Now look at Wukan. They had their own elections. People say it’s special, but in fact Wukan is really typically Chinese. It’s a Chinese town but they organized everything. So what argument are you left with? If Wukan can have democracy so can other parts of China.

I’m not saying that China should have western-style democracy. In fact, there’s not a single western model. What do they mean? Germany didn’t copy America and America didn’t copy Britain. The issue isn’t copying. It’s do you or don’t you want democracy? Of course democracy has a lot of problems but it’s a way forward.

Since the 1980s, Chinese have been pragmatic. The question since the Cultural Revolution has been: can it work? This was Deng Xiaoping’s biggest influence on Chinese people. They ask if it’ll work or not. Now China has the world’s second-largest economy and could overtake the US. So in terms of market economics it’s been successful and I support this. What we lack is justice. There is no justice in the current system. It’s a practical issue. We need justice. Democracy is a way to bring justice. This is why democracy is necessary.

The government doesn’t discuss rule of law much anymore. It’s become more and more a hooligan way of ruling. They just arrest people and throw them in jail or mental asylums. So the past decade has seen a hooliganization of the political system. Many of the old virtues are destroyed by this. The virtues of humanism, responsibilities of the government—the bottom line is things are disappearing. That’s why we’ve had these terrible events of recent years, like Yue Yue.

Yue Yue is the little girl who was run over by a van and no one stopped to help her. One recourse to this perceived spiritual vacuum has been that people are getting more and more interested in religion.

Many are interested in it. Scholars hope that this will help develop more virtues in society or provide some moral guidelines. There is a spiritual vacuum. I really respect religion, but I believe in the special importance of democracy, civic spirit, and freedom in politics, society, and culture for solving the spiritual crisis.

What about your new magazine?

It’s run by iSun Cable Television from Hong Kong. Right now we’re a new media organization. We offer on iPad, Android and are planning a Kindle version too. You can also get copies as a pdf. But we are going to print too. We have a staff of twenty. We have 6,000 subscribers on iPad, mostly on the mainland. We also have more than 10,000 who get it as an email. We’ve been able to report on taboo topics in China, such as [jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner] Liu Xiaobo, press controls, and the trend of independent candidates running for office.

Obviously the authorities knew about the project before it started. You haven’t been able to get a visa since you applied last March and Reporters Without Borders sent an open letter to Donald Tsang, chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

According to the Hong Kong authorities’ own rules they should have answered my application within a month, but they haven’t approved or rejected the application. It’s already been nine months, so this is why people are talking about influence from the mainland.

The magazine was one of the first to cover several recent key political events, like the Wukan uprising. You have had by far the most comprehensive coverage of it. But you also have much on culture. Over the past year cultural figures in China have become embroiled in politics. How do you see the role of people like the artist Ai Weiwei?

The original work of the popular and famous artists was all political—many of them were influenced by people like Andy Warhol. They dealt with issues in society. But after a while when they sold so much that they became super rich and didn’t care much for social issues. To be honest, they just repeated themselves a lot. I have respect for Ai Weiwei because he is concerned with society. He is involved and engaged. It’s not his fault that he’s become more and more popular in the West. It’s the same with Liu Xiaobo or Vaclav Havel. This criticism isn’t fair.

What about the writer Han Han’s recent blogposts arguing that democracy may not be well suited to Chinese people? This seems to echo some of the other critics who say that China isn’t read for democracy.

He mentions that people have a “low quality” and that democracy could become a problem because it could lead to violence. This is a view the government has propagated for a long time. It’s like saying you can’t practice swimming until you can swim and you can’t swim because you can’t practice. Also, the arguments aren’t new. Many were made publicly last year, around the time of the centenary of the 1911 revolution.

But he influences a lot of people so his bringing it up is interesting. It shows how restricted China’s political system is. I think that what we’re seeing is the loss of hope by a lot of people in change taking place, so they’re making excuses about why it can’t happen. The decline in morals has lead to an increase in violence—violence against opponents, protesters, and others—not because we’re having a revolution but because we are not.

16:48

Creativity takes teamwork

Kelley Swain, contributor

Illustration-by-Mark-Baldwin-Jan-12.jpg(Image: Mark Baldwin, Artistic Director of Rambert Dance Company

"Creativity is a precious thing, but sometimes we are too precious, too emotional, about it," announced Geraint Wiggins, professor of computational creativity at Queen Mary University in London, UK, to a packed room at the British Academy, the home of the UK’s national academy for social sciences.

Wiggins’s was the opening address to the first of three multi-disciplinary discussions on "The Creative Process", which will explore what creativity in science might look like, and whether there is a benefit to scientist-artist exchange.

The first discussion brought together scientists Wiggins, who is a composer alongside his scientific career, and Nicky Clayton, who researches animal behaviour at the University of Cambridge and is also a dancer, along with Alison Prendiville, director of the Centre for Competitive Creative Design.

Steering clear of the murky waters around definitions of ‘creativity,’ ‘inspiration,’ and even ‘instinct’, the panel dived right in to challenging stereotypes. Turning on its head the common conception of scientific deduction as rote and uninspired, Wiggins declared that "deduction is imagination backwards, à la Sherlock Holmes", raising a murmur of approval from the packed room. But what is the best route to tap into inspiration?

Wiggins looked at the solitary creative. Einstein, Newton, Kekulé, and Young were scientists who experienced moments of inspiration while working alone, he argued, which led to the great discoveries of the theories of relativity, gravity, the structure of benzene, and the wave-particle duality of light.

Prendiville and Clayton, on the other hand, painted a more collaborative view of the creative process. In her own work, Prendiville marries design and technology. Bringing the two together provides "many creative opportunities because they are so different", she says. When she was asked to design a new piece of medical equipment for full-body scans, for example, Prendiville sent students into a hospital to emotionally map the patient’s experience. By asking: "How might the day-to-day use of medical scans influence the design process of the equipment itself?" Prendiville’s method redefined the values of medical equipment design to focus on the person in centre stage: the patient.

Beyond her role at Cambridge University's department of experimental psychology, Clayton works as scientist in residence at Rambert Dance Company. Discussing her collaborations with choreographer Mark Baldwin on pieces interpreting change in evolutionary biology, the importance of play, and expression of sexual desire, she emphasised the importance of talking ideas over, letting thoughts "brew", and "relying heavily on intuition - if it smells or feels right."

Clayton and Baldwin’s collaboration serves as a way to interpret scientific ideas in new ways, a process that itself can spark inspiration. Collaborations, especially across disciplines, are beneficial for creativity, the panel concluded. As the session’s chair, John Sloboda, a researcher in the psychology of music at London’s Royal Holloway University, summed it up: creativity is largely a "social process", though, he added, it benefits from ”a bit of tension”.

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16:06
14:40
Play fullscreen
Big Thinking: The Power of Nanoscience
Hear from young nano-scientists who are doing research on developing new energy sources and materials that will help answer the question -- "what will power our civilization as oil supplies dwindle?" Series: "Science at the Theater" [2/2012] [Science] [Show ID: 21567]
Views: 0
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Time: 01:28:20 More in Education
10:14

Go with the flow system

Bob Holmes, contributor

bejan_zane-design_in_nature-home_175.jpgIn Design in Nature by Adrian Bejan and J. Peder Zane a new theory of nature is mooted, but is the idea stretched beyond its reach?

NEW fundamental laws don't pop up every day in science. Yet that's exactly what Adrian Bejan claims to have discovered: a basic principle of nature, overlooked until now, that governs the evolution of everything from river basins to athletic performance and human culture.

Bejan, a mechanical engineer at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has been writing about his so-called "constructal law" in the technical literature for over a decade. Design in Nature, co-written with journalist J. Peder Zane, is his attempt to bring his big idea to a general audience.

Bejan's thesis is based on flow systems. In his eyes they cover almost everything: rivers (and trees, too) are flow systems for the water that courses through them; human commerce is a flow system for moving goods around the planet; universities and culture are flow systems for ideas. And his constructal law is simple: flows tend to get better - faster and longer - with time.

The flow of water in a river delta arranges itself into main channels that branch into about four subsidiary channels, which branch again into about four smaller channels and so on, because this arrangement gives the greatest flow rate. Similarly, when a tree branches, the total cross-sectional area of the daughter limbs is equal to that of the parent trunk, giving unimpeded flow of water. Nature doesn't just seek the path of least resistance, Bejan says, it constructs it. The result is not randomness, but design: real rivers and trees look much the way an engineer would draw them. Better yet, we can predict how they'll change in the future: to allow faster, better flow.

So far, so good, although if you want to see detailed proofs you will need to dig into the literature, Bejan and Zane skimp on the nitty-gritty. The constructal law is an interesting idea, and even the light version presented here brings a useful new perspective to ubiquitous natural phenomena. But Bejan is not content to wade in these safe shallows. In pursuit of a theory of everything, he overreaches himself.

Animal life, he claims, is a flow system for moving mass around the planet - and the constructal law says that animals should evolve to move farther, faster. As a result, evolution should go from swimming to running, which is quicker and requires less energy, and thence to flying, which is quicker yet. "This is why animal locomotion first emerged in the oceans, spread onto land, and later rose into the air and not the other way around," he says, in what surely ranks as one of the most bizarre sentences ever written about the evolution of animals. And then he goes one better: eyes and brains, he says, help animals move better and the constructal law, therefore, explains why animals with vision and cognition arose after animals without vision and cognition, not vice versa. Do we really need an explanation of why the earliest animals weren't sharp-eyed, brainy, winged creatures?

Then we're off to the world of human civilisation. The flow of people across the landscape is enhanced by a river-like system of footpaths, side roads and main roads, and our transportation systems have certainly evolved towards farther, faster flows. And just as there are fewer highways than footpaths, Bejan argues that to speed the flow of ideas, there should be just a few great universities - the highways of ideas - and lots of mediocre ones. Maybe so, but I am not convinced.

The book is full of this stuff. The constructal law, Bejan claims, can explain why there are few trees in the desert, why the best sprinters are black, the best swimmers white, and why we prefer paintings that are half again as wide as they are high. Most of these ideas are interesting, and some might even be true. But Bejan comes across as someone who, having invented a hammer, sees everything as a nail. In this case, it's the reader's ability to believe Bejan's ideas that takes a battering.

Book Information:
Design in Nature
by Adrian Bejan and J. Peder Zane
Published by: Doubleday
$27.95

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January 26 2012

23:53

Chemists create artificial cell membrane

Chemists have taken an important step in making artificial life forms from scratch, creating self-assembling cell membranes, the structural envelopes that contain and support the reactions required for life and make a living organism from non-living molecules. Although Dr. Craig Venter recently announced the creation of the “first synthetic living cell,” only its genome was [...]
23:53

A 3D image of an individual protein

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientists have created detailed models of a single protein using electron microscopic images. Scientists routinely create models of proteins using X-ray diffraction, nuclear magnetic resonance, and conventional cryo-electron microscope (cryoEM) imaging. But these models require computer “averaging” of data from analysis of thousands, or even millions of like molecules, [...]
23:53

Why 3D printing will go the way of virtual reality

The notion that 3-D printing will on any reasonable time scale become a “mature” technology that can reproduce all the goods on which we rely is to engage in a complete denial of the complexities of modern manufacturing, unless you’d like everything made out of plastic, says  Mim’s Bits blog.
23:53

Google announces privacy changes across products; users can’t opt out

Google will soon know far more about who you are and what you do on the Web: it plans to follow the activities of users across nearly all of its ubiquitous sites, including YouTube, Gmail and its search engine. Consumers who are logged into Google services won’t be able to opt out of the changes, [...]
23:53

AI will eventually drive healthcare, but not anytime soon

A merging of artificial intelligence and healthcare is tougher than many realize because of the search space problem (complexity) and the good data (validity) problem. “Eventually, people will get better care from AI,” says medical AI programmer Fred Trotter. “For now, we should keep the algorithms focused on the data that we know is good [...]
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