British Council colludes with China’s censors

Jonathan Mirsky writes in the current New York Review concerning the actions of the organizers of the London Book Fair (16–18 April) in cooperating with the Chinese General Administration to exclude dissident writers, both those still in China and those who have been exiled, from their official presence at the Fair (“Bringing censors to the Book Fair”, NYRB 59.9, 24 May 2012).He is drawing on the work of Nick Cohen at the Observer and also perhaps of Richard Lea at the Guardian.

This is one of those cases where the statements of the people in charge suffice to exhibit their abjectness. In a press release of 21 March, Susie Nicklin of the British Council writes:

The authors taking part in the British Council Cultural programme are internationally recognised as the leading voices writing from China today. Mo Yan, the veteran writer, Han Dong and Li Er, both of whom missed ten years’ schooling during the Cultural Revolution, Annie Baobei who became an internet sensation at the age of 24, Sheng Keyi (published by Penguin China) who writes about new migrations and the metropolis – these authors are writing their best work in contemporary China.

As the British reading public is aware, the situation for writers in China is not the same as it is in the UK.[…]

There was no disagreement with the Chinese government about the final list of British Council writers who regularly appear on well-respected lists of the best novelists and poets in China. These writers live in China and write their books there; other writers have left. The British Council respects both groups and there will be plenty of opportunities for both sets of writers to put their views across in the UK.

“Not the same ”: to show how inadequate—not to say callous—that bland phrase is, I will mention just one case. Yu Jie, author of Wen Jiabao: China's Greatest Actor, after a long campaign of harassment by the state, was abducted and beaten until he was unconscious; his family was placed under house arrest, their phone and internet connections severed; eventually he decided to leave. He is now finishing a book on a fellow dissident, the Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, who has is serving an 11-year jail sentence for having urged an end to one-party government in China (Tania Branigan, “Chinese dissident who fled to US tells of beatings and harassment”, Guardian

Dredge: new frontiers

Some of the largest structures built by humans are invisible or go largely unnoticed. The shorelines around big cities like New York have been almost completely subordinated to the needs and wants of their inhabitants. Dredging plays a large role in the building of artificial boundaries between land and sea. BLDGBLOG, a must-read for anyone interested in architecture, reports on an exhibit by the Dredge Research Collective.

The Dredge Cycle is landscape architecture at a monumental scale, carving the coastlines and waterways of continents according to a mixture of industrial need and unintended consequences. Thus far, dredge has remained the domain of logistics, industry, and engineering, a soft successor to the elevated freeway interchanges and massive dams that captured the infrastructural imagination of the previous century.

For the past year, the Dredge Research Collective have been exploring the choreography of these interconnected sedimentary landscapes, visiting dredged material confinement areas, from Poplar Island in the Chesapeake Bay to Hayden Island in the Columbia River, talking with dredge experts, such as the transnational materials conglomerate TenCate, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Bureau of Land Management, and publishing and lecturing widely on dredge.

Urban Omnibus.

Mammoth, another architecture blog that includes two members of the Collective, defines the Dredge Cycle:

[…] dredging is better understood as a component of a wider network of anthropogenic sedimentary processes which generate a fascinating array of interconnected landscapes. Fluid topographies are restrained by bright orange silt fences; dredging barges continuously empty shipping channels which are promptly re-filled with sediment disturbed by upstream farms and new subdivisions; sensate geotextiles monitor the stability of landscapes they are literally embedded in; hulking geo-tubes lay engorged with dredged sediments in streams on Filipino golf courses and along Mexican beaches and on the coastal dunescape of Virginian spaceports. Silts, sands, and clays flow rapidly between these landscapes in liquid suspension, linking them and re-shaping the earth’s surface. Collectively, the choreography of these landscapes embodies a vastly quickened counterpart to conventionally defined geologic cycles — the Dredge Cycle.

One site, still being planned, where the Dredge Cycle will make itself apparent—in the form of several billion dollars of real estate—is the Lo-Lo Ma project, which could connect Governor’s Island to the southern tip of Manhattan. Core77 explains how it will be done:

How do you grow land, you may be asking? […] The first step, apparently, is to take out-of-commission subway cars, drop them into the river and cover them with landfill.

A medium-sized shopping mall contains about 400 to 500 thousand square feet.

If this sounds crazy, you should know that New York regularly dumps outdated subway cars into the Atlantic Ocean, simply because they have nowhere else to dispose of them. But instead of trashing the cars, we might very well be able to use them to our benefit, recycling them into the slow expansion of an 88-100 million square foot land mass, a borough they're tentatively calling Lo-Lo Ma.

Source: Urban Omnibus, from Mammoth.

On top of this recycled infrastructure, students at Columbia’s architecture school propose that the sludge now dredged out of waterways around the city be piled to create new land. (I like it that they have already named certain features of the new, as yet nonexistent, borough. Even if Lo-Lo Ma is never built, ‘LLM’ will still refer to that piece of land below Battery Park. A nice test for your favorite theory of reference…)

Another example. The “tourist landscape of the beach” in Delaware (and at other spots along the East Coast) is now an artifact sustained, if not created, by dredging.

This means displacing those thousands of cubic yards of sand from the ocean floor and using massive compressing stations to pump tiny rocks through miles of hulking metal tubes. […] The miles of pressurized metal tubing will certainly be removed before the summer’s vacationers have a chance to take them in. Pumping and compressing stations are only small hiccups in the gaping expanse of the ocean horizon, often unnoticed by winter ocean-goers.

The dredge infrastructure’s impermanence in the oceanfront landscape is central to its work of producing the “natural” beach, an object of consumption for the seasonal tourism within the region. This particular operation, according to the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control’s (DNREC) newsletter, is repairing the beach damage incurred from a 2008 Mother’s Day storm that pockmarked the beach with massive craters and distorted the function and image of the beach as a tourist destination. The storm, a geographic and meteorological event that, in part, could be due to anthropogenic changes in global weather patterns, damaged the beach to the point of putting nearby housing in jeopardy of being engulfed by the high tide. In response, the dredging operation is rebuilding the beach as a protective boundary to the adjacent tourist housing (Chris Mizes, “.dredge”, space within lines 5 Feb 2012).

Source: DNREC Division of Soil and Water Conservation, Shoreline and Waterway Management Section, Coastal Connection 3no3 (Summer 2009).

Unlike architects, philosophers, so far as I can tell, have had very little to say about the immensity of human intervention in natural processes except by implication, when they write in a general way about the relation of humanity to the natural world (needless to say, I welcome references). The scale of projects like Lo-Lo Ma or the Delaware beaches seems to defeat traditional æsthetics, oriented as it is toward artworks on a more modest scale. The industrial landscapes photographed by Edward Burtynsky and others challenge the imagination in the manner that Kant takes to be characteristic of the sublime. But rather than offering us, as the starry heavens above do, a natural counterpoint to the moral law within, these landscapes present us within infernal ideas of its absence. What may have been my first experience of the nonnatural sublime occurred thirty years or so before the picture below was taken, when I was walking near the Marina Towers in Chicago and realized I had no idea where the ground was.

Marina Towers, Chicago (2007). Source: Araceli Arroyo at Flickr.

Texts as pretexts, or: the practitioner’s attitude

Mohan Matthen has been commendably frank in expressing his attitude toward the history of philosophy. But in fact what he has expressed does not pertain to history in particular: it pertains to any source of inspiration. It is what you might call the practitioner’s attitude.

When one reads Julia Annas or Margaret Wilson or Michael Friedman one thinks: Gee that’s really interesting. Could Aristotle or Descartes or Kant really have thought that? […]

And then one thinks: Oh who cares? It’s so interesting that it’s worth tackling on its own. But, no doubt, it gives the question a certain beautiful frisson that Kant could have held it.

[From NewAPPS.] Nothing at all changes if you substitute ‘Susan Wolfe’ or ‘Mohan Matthen’ for ‘Aristotle’ or ‘Descartes’. For me as a practitioner it’s of no especial import to get Aristotle or Mohan right so long as I have arrived at something of interest to me. It may be that a historian has helped me along toward that end. But what matters is that I have been inspired, that I am having interesting thoughts.

To that end presumably whatever works is licit, so long as it is not morally objectionable. I could just as well as have consulted tea leaves. I am, so far as inspiration is concerned, a pure egoist, a solipsist even, since it hardly matters whether I have listened to you or merely dreamt of listening to you.

The attitude of the practitioner ought not to be given any weight, therefore, to in judging the worth of history. It is too indiscriminate. The practitioner is indifferent to anything that fails to inspire interesting thoughts, and will value anything that does, whatever its intrinsic worth.

The doddering Hans effect

Another well-worn example bites the dust? You remember that famous study in which the participants, if primed with words connoting agedness, walked more slowly when leaving the lab.

A new study by the Belgian team of Stéphane Doyen, Olivier Klein, Cora-Lise Pichon, and Axel Cleeremans not only failed to replicate the effect, but also appeared to show that the effect observed in the original study was owing to the experimenters’ expectations.

Experimenters’ expectations seem to provide a favorable context to the behavioral expression of the prime. Obviously, this interpretation remains tentative, as we do not know how this process operates. However, it is likely that [experimenter-subjects] who expect their participants to walk slower behave differently than those who expect their participants to walk faster and that such behavioral cues are picked up by participants.

Key findings:

• The setup was one that included not only the usual subjects being primed or not with a scrambled-sentence task, but also other “experimenter-subjects” whose task it was to time the usual subjects’ passage down the hall as they left the lab. Doyen et al “were indeed able to obtain the priming effect on walking speed for both subjective and objective timings. Crucially, however, this was only possible by manipulating [experimenter-subjects’] expectations in such a way that they would expect primed participants to walk slower”.
• Subjective timings (with a stopwatch) yielded errors when experimenter-subjects were told that subjects would be primed to walk faster as well as when they were told that subjects would be primed to walk slower. But objective timings yielded an effect only when the priming was for walking more slowly; no effect was observed when the priming and the experimenter--subjects’ expectations were at odds.

The authors agree that unconscious behavioral priming appears to be well established,

in line with our result it seems that these methods need to be taken as an object of research per se before using it can be considered as an established phenomenon.

It’s worth noting that Doyen et al do not report any awareness on the subjects’ part of having been cued by the experimenter-subjects, even though there was some awareness (as revealed by a forced-choice test) of the priming (not as priming, but as a salient feature of the stimulus).

• Anonymous. (2012) “Behavioral priming paradigm needs update”. Medical Xpress 18 Jan 2012.
• J. A. Bargh, M. Chen, L. Burrows. (1996) “Automaticity of social behavior: direct effects of trait construct and stereotype-activation on action”. Journal of personal & social psychology 71.2:230-44. See also Bargh and Chartrand, “The unbearable automaticity of being”, American Psychologist, 54.7 (1999) 462-479, available here.
• S. Doyen, O. Klein, C.-L. Pichon, A Cleeremans. (2012) “Behavioral priming: it's all in the mind, but whose mind?” PLoS ONE 7.1: e29081. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0029081

Lynxes and lumps

I’ve been reading Robert Batterman’s Devil in the details, a book that packs a lot of punch in a relatively few pages. Among its themes is that of the universality of certain mathematical models. Universality is “the slightly pretentious way in which physicists denote identical behaviour in different systems” (Berry 1987:185, quoted in Batterman 13).

That requires some unpacking. Two systems exhibit “identical” behavior if that behavior can, under suitable redescription, be seen to instantiate the same mathematical system (I use the imprecise word ‘system’ rather than a more precise term because what is instantiated need not be, for example, the graph of a single equation). They are different if, as in the case of Berry’s own examples, they have different shapes, or if, as in some cases discussed by Batterman, they are made of different stuffs. We will see yet another sort of difference below.

Let me start instead with something simple: the directed graph or digraph. Family trees and citation networks instantiate that structure: draw an arrow from x to y if x is a progenitor of y or if y is cited by x. More interestingly, so-called “scale-free” networks, though arising in different real-world situations (different in the sense of being realized on quite different scales by quite different sorts of process), obey the same statistics (for example, the number of arrows entering a node—think of links to a site—obeys a power-law distribution): the probability of a node’s having n entering links is inversely proportional to some small power n k of n. Many nodes will have only a few entering links, and a very few will have many.

Source: J. Lamping, R. Rao. “The hyperbolic browser: a focus+context technique for visualizing large hierarchies”. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing 7 (1996) 33–55, fig. 14. See also here.

“Une trace impérissable de ces fugitives mélodies”

The earliest known recording of the human voice from which intelligible sound has been recovered was made by the French scientist Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville on 9 April 1860—seventeen years before Edison’s first phonograph recording. It is a bit of “Au clair de la lune”.

On 20 April another recording, longer and with better fidelity, was made. Earlier recordings exist, but for lack of calibration they have not been converted. Scott calibrated his later recordings with a tuning fork of known pitch.

The recovery was carried out by First Sounds, a group devoted to preserving, recovering, and publishing old recordings.

Below is a sketch from Scott’s patent application (“brevet d’invention”), dated 25 Mar 1857.

A piece of their mind

Addendum: Republished from NewAPPS. See there the informative comment by John Protevi on the substance of Balko’s column—the fallibility of drug-sniffing dogs (and their trainers), and the resulting miscarriages of justice.

My late cat Mr. H came to be very good at knowing when I was finished playing a piece on the piano. I have recordings in which, a second or two after the piano stops, Mr. H’s characteristic yowl supplies a coda. One might almost think he had a grasp of musical form, but I’m quite sure that his grasp was rather of my habits than of anything to do with music. He had likely picked up something in my posture that correlated with finishing a piece, something distinctive enough that he was rarely deceived by pauses during a piece.

I was reminded of this in reading first a column by Radley Balko on police dogs and then some extracts from a book cited by Balko, Alexandra Horowitz’s Inside of a dog (the title alludes to a Groucho Marx joke, in case you’re wondering). Horowitz describes experiments in which domestic canines, when humans are present, tend to do much worse than their wild cousins.

Tested on their ability to, say, get a bit of food in a well-closed container, wolves keep trying and trying, and if the test is not rigged they eventually succeed through trial and error. Dogs, by contrast, tend to go at the container only until it appears that it won’t easily be opened. Then they look at any person in the room and begin a variety of attention-getting and solicitation behaviors until the person relents and helps them get into the box (180).

Anyone who has a dog or cat will recognize the phenomenon. Are dogs, then, dumber than wolves? Horowitz doesn’t think so.

On Schliesser on Glymour

This is a slightly amended version of a comment on one of Eric Schliesser’s responses to Clark Glymour’s opinions concerning philosophy.

How can you use “philosophical background to write insightfully and importantly about public policy” if there’s no background? I take it that the background is either (i) traditional ethics, including the “theoretical ethics” that is being consigned to the trash, or (ii) some formal-philosophical alternative. If (i), the proposal to save public policy ethics is incoherent when accompanied by a proposal to consign traditional ethics to oblivion. That leaves (ii). Is anyone actually doing public policy ethics in a formal way?

I think you’re right that there must be a supposition to the effect, not that truth-seeking entails liberal politics, but that there will be a consensus on that point among genuine philosophers, on the basis of which public policy ethics can be carried on by “formal” means, i.e. by means that themselves make no ethical presuppositions.

The justification of that consensus can only be a mystery from the standpoint of genuine philosophers themselves. How is it that agents who value, and therefore seek, truth should regard themselves as bound by (other) liberal values?

On that point there has been discussion, hasn’t there? —an “open society”, I take it, is supposed to be optimal for science, etc. It’s not clear to me why the argument has to be a priori, by the way. What bars appeal to general facts about nature and human nature?

Even if one waives the issue you raise, and grants that (i) there is a consensus and (ii) that consensus is liberal (both of which facts will be, as I said, mysteriously ungrounded, by which I don’t mean that there would be no natural scientific explanation of them, but that there would be no rational justification of it, for surely no-one thinks that ”Darwin makes right“), nevertheless what we agree on is not, so to speak, lying out in the open like the constitution of a state (and just mentioning consitutions suggests that even if they did, their interpretation would still be contentious). The route to an explicit version of the agreed-upon principles and from them to policy would require something other than “logic, mathematics and the theory and practice of computation”.