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Fake Facebook “Dislike” Button Leads to More Dislike | Discoblog

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Danzig

They only wanted to show their disapproval. Friends eager to counterbalance all those Facebook “Likes” rushed to “Download the official DISLIKE button now” as received in a message. But, sadly, no dislike button was in store. Instead, installing the application provided users with several surveys and left their profiles vulnerable to spammer control. If there was ever a time to unleash their Dislike, this was it.

Yet, as Graham Cluley of the security firm Sophos told the BBC–mentioning a similar ploy that offered Facebookers the chance to see an anaconda vomiting up a hippo–such “survey scam” applications are nothing new:

“Anyone can write a Facebook app–these scams are constantly springing up.”

Perhaps Facebook should take note: Users were willing to sacrifice their security for the mere power to express negative feedback. Or, at least, the mere power to express negative feedback without typing.

Perhaps a compromise is in order? Unfortunately, a new Meh button application seems to need some tweaking. As in the Atlantic Wire:

Turns out, every time you click the “meh” button it registers your vote—allowing an individual user to “meh” something 10,000 times or more. That’s a lot of indifference.

Image: Facebook

Genes and culture: OXTR gene influences social behaviour differently in Americans and Koreans | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Danzig

There are great plays and bad ones, but the playwright’s actual text is only one aspect of a production. The very same words can take on radically different meanings depending on the whims of the director, the abilities of the actors and the setting of the stage. The same is true of our genes and our environments. In cases where genes affect our behaviour, the same stretch of DNA can lead to very different deeds, depending on individual circumstances. Just as a production defines a play, environments and cultures alter the effects of certain genes.

Heejung Kim from the University of California has discovered a great example of this effect by studying a gene called OXTR (or the ‘oxytocin receptor’, in full). The gene creates a docking station for a hormone called oxytocin, which is involved in all sorts of emotions and social behaviours, from trust to sexual arousal to empathy.

Kim looked at a specific version of the OXTR gene, whose carriers are allegedly more social and sensitive. But this link between gene and behaviour depends on culture; it exists among American people, who tend to look for support in troubled times, but not in Korean cultures, where such support is less socially acceptable. Culture sets the stage on which the OXTR gene expresses itself.

OXTR varies from person to person, and the DNA ‘letters’ at particular spots can affect the way we behave. According to previous studies, people with a ‘G’ at one specific site tend to be more sensitive parents, more empathetic and less lonely than those with an ‘A’. But most of these studies have been done with white, Western people who are hardly representative of the world at large – in fact, they’re positively W.E.I.R.D.

To looked outside this “thin and rather unusual slice of humanity”, Kim compared 134 Korean students with 140 American ones, all with comparable splits of age, gender and background. Using a questionnaire, she measured how stressed each volunteer was feeling at that point in their lives, and how they cope with stress. As with previous studies, Kim found that Koreans are less likely than Americans to turn to their social circle for support and they get less out of doing so; they are more concerned about burdening their friends and straining their relationships.

The OXTR gene exerts its influence against the background of these contrasting cultural conventions. Distressed Americans with one or more copies of the G version were more likely to seek emotional support from their friends, compared to those with two copies of the A version. But for the Koreans, the opposite was true – G carriers were less likely to look for support among their peers in times of need (although this particular trend was not statistically significant). In both cases, the G carriers were more sensitive to the social conventions of their own cultures. But the differences between these conventions led to different behaviour.

And in a further example of the influence of the environment, Kim only found this pattern among people who were experiencing a lot of stress. In the low stress group, she found that Americans were indeed more likely to seek emotional support than Koreans, but their OXTR gene had no bearing on their choices.

Of course, Koreans and Americans differ not just in their cultures, but in their genes (including many others beyond OXTR). To account for that, Kim also worked with a small group of 32 Korean-Americans who were born and raised in the US, but were genetically Korean. Kim found that the link between OXTR and emotional support among these volunteers was much closer to the culturally similar Americans than the genetically similar Koreans.

Richard Ebstein, who has worked on OXTR before, says, “Overall, I would say it’s a very interesting finding… These types of studies are needed to help us get a better understanding of how it’s not just nature or nurture but rather the interplay between the two that contributes to how we deal with the social environment.” However, he’s not convinced (and nor am I) that Kim looked at enough people, particularly in the extra experiment with the Korean-Americans. Ebstein wants to see them repeat the results in a much larger group.

Even so, Kim’s results are compelling. They’re also unusual in looking for an interaction between genes and culture. Many studies have looked at how nature and nurture work together but in most cases, the “nurture” bit involves something social that’s either harsh or kind, such as loving or abusive parenting. In one of the most famous examples, people with the ‘low-activity’ version of the MAOA gene tend to be more aggressive than those with the ‘high-activity’ one, but only if they’ve been abused or neglected as children. Kim’s study stands out because it looks as cultural conventions instead, and Ebstein says that it “provides an interesting new avenue for researching gene-environment interactions.”

Kim also hopes that her work will encourage more scientists to investigate the ways in which genes and culture evolve together. She notes that the G version of OXTR is more common among white Americans than Korea. It’s tantalisingly possible that American culture has come to emphasise social support partly because more people have genes that skew them towards social behaviour. So genes constrain culture, while culture creates the stage on which genes exact their influence.

Reference: PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1010830107

More on genes and environment:

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Researchers Use Lasers to Control the Beating of a Heart | 80beats

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Danzig

laser-pacemaker In early 2010, some scientists offered their predictions for the new decade which this blog covered in the post, “Scientists Predict: The 2010s Will Be Freakin’ Awesome–With Lasers.” In what could be an early sign of that sunny prognostication coming true, researchers have announced that they’ve controlled the beating of an embryonic heart with an infrared laser beam. While the work is in its early stages, researchers say this remarkable advance will help them study heart disease and could one day lead to optical pacemakers.

The embryonic hearts in question came from quail eggs. Each quail embryo was only two or three days old so the heart measured just 2 cubic millimeters in volume; at that stage, the heart is essentially a clump of cells that hasn’t yet developed its four-chambered structure. The pulses of infrared light were delivered by an optical fiber that ended 500 micrometres from the embryo.

Before they switched on the laser, the heart beat once every 1.5 seconds, but firing the laser twice a second quickened the heartbeat to match the laser rate as long as the laser fired…. ”It worked beautifully: the heart rate was in lockstep with the laser pulse rate,” says [study coauthor] Duco Jansen of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. [New Scientist]

Several years ago, a different scientific team showed that laser pulses could set the pace of a cluster of heart cells in a petri dish, but the new study, published in Nature Photonics, marks the first time a laser has set the pace of an entire heart. Lead author Michael Jenkins of Case Western Reserve University says the technique will offer a new way to study heart development.

“We want to know how congenital heart defects form, and how the heart’s rhythms during development affect it later on,” he says. “Having a noninvasive way to modify the heart rate would be useful.” [ScienceNOW]

At the energy level used the laser pulses didn’t appear to damage the cells, but the researchers intend to thoroughly investigate the safety of the process. They’ll also be looking into other details–like how exactly this mechanism works. At the moment, it’s still unclear.

They suggest that it might create a temperature gradient that can stimulate “action potential in excitable tissues,” as was also proposed in earlier work on clusters of cardiomyocytes. [Scientific American]

Image: Salma Shaikhouni

Randi and the X-wing | Bad Astronomy

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Danzig

Over on Randi’s site, they just posted this image of His Skepticalness and a familiar spaceship:

Randi_xwing

When I saw it, my first thought was, "I find your lack of faith… refreshing."

How would you caption this picture?

Where writing is silent | Gene Expression

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Danzig

In my post on Empires of the Word I observed that quite often the written record is silent on many matters which only language or genes tell us must have occurred. The Indo-Aryan character of the dominant language on the island of Sri Lanka seems to be a geographical anomaly in the least, but perhaps most strange of all is the existence of a language and ethnic group of clear Southeast Asian provenance on the island of Madagascar. To my knowledge Arab, Persian and South Asian sources do not record the existence of a prominent Southeast Asian maritime diaspora which spanned the Indian ocean in the years before 1000 A.D., but we know that it did exist. A new paper on the genetics of the island of Comoros fleshes out another piece of the puzzle, Genetic diversity on the Comoros Islands shows early seafaring as major determinant of human biocultural evolution in the Western Indian Ocean:

The Comoros Islands are situated off the coast of East Africa, at the northern entrance of the channel of Mozambique. Contemporary Comoros society displays linguistic, cultural and religious features that are indicators of interactions between African, Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian (SEA) populations. Influences came from the north, brought by the Arab and Persian traders whose maritime routes extended to Madagascar by 700–900 AD. Influences also came from the Far East, with the long-distance colonisation by Austronesian seafarers that reached Madagascar 1500 years ago. Indeed, strong genetic evidence for a SEA, but not a Middle Eastern, contribution has been found on Madagascar, but no genetic trace of either migration has been shown to exist in mainland Africa. Studying genetic diversity on the Comoros Islands could therefore provide new insights into human movement in the Indian Ocean. Here, we describe Y chromosomal and mitochondrial genetic variation in 577 Comorian islanders. We have defined 28 Y chromosomal and 9 mitochondrial lineages. We show the Comoros population to be a genetic mosaic, the result of tripartite gene flow from Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. A distinctive profile of African haplogroups, shared with Madagascar, may be characteristic of coastal sub-Saharan East Africa. Finally, the absence of any maternal contribution from Western Eurasia strongly implicates male-dominated trade and religion as the drivers of gene flow from the North. The Comoros provides a first view of the genetic makeup of coastal East Africa.

In the paper they note that ~6% of the Y chromosomal lineages were Southeast Asian, while ~15% of mtDNA lineages were. That indicates that the Southeast Asian presence on the Indian ocean was a case of folk migration, men, women and children on the move. The data from Madagascar indicate something similar, both male and female lineages show Southeast Asian imprint among the highland Malagasy (I don’t make much of the proportional difference because this is just one sample). In contrast, they show in this paper that there’s a substantial West Eurasian (probably Arab, Indian and Persian) Y chromosomal gene flow into the population of Comoros, but no West Eurasian mtDNA. So in this case you have a clear contrast with that of the Southeast Asian seafarers, the Muslim merchants who settled on the Comoros did not bring their children or womenfolk. It was not a folk migration, but a mercantile network. Because of the nature of the sources, and the cultural influence of the West Asians, we know of their presence from the historical record. In contrast, the arguably more substantial folk migration of Southeast Asian seafarers from Borneo is hidden in the text. They may have been of no concern or beneath mention from the perspective of the Muslim merchant princes, but the fact that they were no longer on the high seas by the time the Portuguese arrive may also indicate that they were driven off by the same Muslim merchant princes in the years after 1000. If the latter is the case the silence may be due to the inclination to forget an unpleasant rivalry.

All this goes to show that history’s reliance on text can mislead and obscure real dynamics. Even social and economic history which attempts to tunnel-down to the level of the populace is still heavily reliant on written records. In the case of seafarers it seems likely that even archaeologists would be unable to detect their movements because of the liminal nature of their settlements. The linguistic and cultural influences in Madagascar and in East Africa indicate a sojourn by Austronesians in that coast, but there is no physical or textual record. There is the “dark history” which we ignore because of current ideological preferences, and then there is the dark history which has fallen outside of our methodological window.

Dienekes has more on this paper.

Can Greasy Fingerprints on Smart Phones Give Away Passcodes? | Discoblog

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Danzig

That grease trail you’ve smeared on your smart phone’s touchscreen could give away more than your lightsaber skills or virtual girlfriend’s whims: Would-be smudge attackers, a recent paper argues, could follow your finger oils as a clue to your passcode.

In the paper “Smudge Attacks on Smartphone Touchscreens,” which we first saw on Gizmodo, a team in the computer science department at the University of Pennsylvania tried to pick out grease patterns from Android phones by photographing the phones and enhancing the patterns with photo-editing software. From the paper’s introduction:

“We believe smudge attacks are a threat for three reasons. First, smudges are surprisingly persistent in time. Second, it is surprisingly difficult to incidentally obscure smudges through wiping or pocketing the device. Third and finally, collecting and analyzing oil residue smudges can be done with readily-available equipment such as a camera and a computer.”

android-passcode Though the smudge alone can’t confirm the exact passcode, the study’s authors hint that it may help an attacker rule out possibilities. In the paper, the authors describe the three by three number grid of “contact points” that some earlier Android phones employed for entering passcodes. The team assumed three limitations on smudge patterns using this grid: it must have four or more contact points; it cannot use any contact point more than once; and if there is any contact point between two others on a smudge trail, then it must also be a contact point. They calculate that using just the last of these restrictions, an attacker could reduce the number of possible patterns from 1 million to 389,112 patterns–a way to reduce a phone lockout during hacking.

The study also investigated the best conditions for identifying a smudge pattern. A particularly easy partial pattern to find, the researchers say, appeared when the phone was “dirty prior to password entry,” i.e. after the user had just finished chatting, allowing the phone’s screen to soak up some extra face dirt for finger smudge contrast.

Image: flickr / p_kim

NCBI ROFL: 101 uses for a dead body (mummification optional). | Discoblog

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Danzig

103608130_15a2d20a73_z Cadavers and mummies as therapeutic means

“Sickness befallen onto him, man found that plant and animal derivatives invigorated him. Thereafter, he found a therapeutic benefit in using man as a means of self cure and especially, dead man from violent death. The foam of the skull of cadaver was an excellent antiepileptic as well as blood coming out from a freshly decapitated man. By applying on diseased parts of his body, so as to get rid of inflammation or infection, cadaver’s hands were used against tumors of all kinds. Dead human skin were processed into belts and used therein for helping delivery of parturition women. The mummy must be blackish, foul smelling and hard. Those who were whitish, odorless and powder-like, were unfit for use. Mummy powder applied to the nose would stop nose bleeding. Ambroise Paré (1510-1590) was an adversary of those practices.”

Photo: flickr/Michael Scheltgen

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Happening Now: Spacewalking Astronauts Try to Fix ISS Coolant System | 80beats

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Danzig

This morning, astronauts at the International Space Station are once again venturing outside of the ISS, undertaking the third spacewalk in their attempt to fix the station’s cooling system.

The crew is in no immediate danger, as their backup cooling system is working. However, the ammonia leak in the coolant system caused the astronauts to turn off some experiments and backup systems keep keep the ISS from overheating.

The space station has been working at reduced cooling capacity since the pump first failed on 31 July. The enormous pumps circulate ammonia in heat exchangers outside the station, where water cannot be used because it would freeze [BBC News].

During their first two spacewalks, one of which went on for eight hours, astronauts Douglas Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson removed the leaking old pump. This morning they managed to free the new one from the platform where spare parts are kept. It should take one more spacewalk after today’s to complete the job.

NASA station managers have said the ammonia pump failure has been one of the most challenging repairs for the International Space Station ever attempted. The cooling system is so critical to station operations that a pump repair is one of 14 major failures for which NASA engineers have prepared emergency plans for in advance, they added. There are four spare ammonia pumps on the space station, one of which will be used for this repair. Each pump weighs 780 pounds (353 kg) and is 5 1/2 feet long (1.6 meters) by 4 feet wide (1.2 meters) [Space.com].

Those of you who stayed up late last week to catch the Perseid meteor shower might be wondering whether all those rocks pose a threat to astronauts floating around outside the ISS. But NASA meteor experts say that even with Earth traveling through this haze of comet leftovers, the threat to astronauts is still less than that posed by the space junk orbiting our planet.

Image: NASA (2006 spacewalk)

Disease by coincidence – why we’re caught in the crossfire of a hidden war | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Danzig

If you’re trapped in a building, it’s probably not the best time to start setting fire to things. But this is exactly what some bacteria do when they find themselves in a human; they cause diseases that are potentially fatal but not contagious. Without an escape, they risk going down with their host. This seems like a ludicrous strategy but we’re looking at it from the wrong perspective – our own. In truth, humans often have nothing to do with the diseases that plague us; we’re just collateral damage in an invisible war.

Like all living things, bacteria have to defend themselves against predators like amoebas. Some species do so using resistance genes that turn them from passive victims into aggressive fighters. And by coincidence, these same adaptations make them more virulent (good at causing disease) in human bodies. We’re just caught in the crossfire.

The idea that virulent bacteria have adapted to entirely different problems is called the “coincidental evolution hypothesis”. Sandrine Adiba from Pierre and Marie Curie University found evidence to support it by showing that the typically harmless gut bacterium Escherichia coli can cause disease in mice after it’s exposed to the threat of amoebas.

E.coli is mostly harmless, but some strains can cause severe food poisoning. When it’s not colonising the guts of mammals, it’s found in the soil; in both environments, it’s threatened by roving amoebas, which effectively engulf and digest it. Adiba found that one such predator – an amoeba called Dictyostelium discoideum – was very good at munching its way through harmless strains of E.coli, but a disease-causing strain known as 536 was too much to swallow.

Once engulfed, this hardy strain actually managed to reproduce inside the amoeba, weakening and eventually killing it. And if it can do that in a hungry amoeba, it can do that in a mammal cell; from its point of view, the two environments aren’t that different. Adiba confirmed that by pitting 31 different strains of E.coli against Dictyostelium. She found that those which tend to live in harmony with mammals also succumbed to amoebas, while resistant strains tend to cause disease.

The resistant strains had several genes that allowed them to avoid death by digestion. Some shield E.coli from enzymes called lysozymes that break down the outer walls of their cells. Others allow it to find food, by scavenging iron from within the amoeba’s body. These genes help to foil predators, but they’re also “virulence factors” that allow E.coli to successfully infect mammal cells. In fact, 76% of the resistant strains carry these weapons compared to just 16% of the vulnerable strains.

This was a single case study but it probably reflects a very common trend. Some scientists have suggested that for many bacteria, the ability to resist grazing amoebas came before the ability to cause disease in humans and other mammals. The former skill opened up the door to the latter.

There are many other examples that support this idea. Some E.coli strains wield poisons called Shiga toxins that are bad news for their hosts, but that also ward off a predator called Tetrahymena. When Salmonella enterica, another food poisoning germ, is threatened by amoebas, it ends up with more genetic variation at a part of its genome that affects how virulent it is.

Legionella pneumophila, which causes Legionnaires’ disease, might never even have been able to harm humans at all, were it not for amoebas. Legionella specialises in infecting our immune cells, including the macrophages that vacuum up foreign invaders. This ability to outsmart our defenders may again be coincidental; it’s more likely that the bacterium originally evolved to resist the digestive powers of amoebas, which also suck them up in the same way as macrophages.

And so far, we have just considered predators, which form one small part of the life of a bacterium. Competitors also shape their evolution. Earlier this year, I described how the normally harmless nose bacterium Streptococcus pneumonia becomes infectious when it battles against another species called Haemophilius influenzae. This competitor summons white blood cells to do away with Streptococcus, which can defend itself by producing a thicker coat. But this armour also allows Streptococcus to evade our own immune system, resulting in pneumonia, meningitis and other diseases. As I wrote back then, “many human diseases really have nothing to do with us at all.”

Reference: Adiba, S., Nizak, C., van Baalen, M., Denamur, E., & Depaulis, F. (2010). From Grazing Resistance to Pathogenesis: The Coincidental Evolution of Virulence Factors PLoS ONE, 5 (8) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0011882

More on bacteria:

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FOLLOWUP: X-Rayted calendar | Bad Astronomy

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Danzig

In June, I posted about a pinup calendar where the model was somewhat more naked than naked: in fact, the pictures were all X-rays!

I was fascinated by the implied raciness of the pictures, given that at best all you could see was a hint of curves. The poses themselves were provocative as well, and I wanted to spark a discussion of it.

One thing that should have occurred to me but didn’t was how the pictures themselves were made. Was a model exposed to X-rays? How much were the images enhanced? Were they real at all?

Well, now I know. An article at Radiology Daily gives the lowdown: no models were irradiated in the making of the calendar. The pictures were all CGI, though based on models in Playboy.

The interesting thing about the article, though, is that they do discuss the implied raciness, just as I did:

"Obviously, we didn’t want to expose models to dangerous radiation," [calendar art director] Schlichte said told Financial Times Deutschland. So the artists consulted a few issues of Playboy to determine "what poses look erotic if you’re not actually seeing anything," she said. Then they had a computer generate those poses in skeletal form.
As for "not actually seeing anything," that’s not quite accurate. Schlichte noted, "Anyone taking a close look at Miss April can see two silicon bags floating in front of her thorax."

Ha! I was thinking of using April in my original article, but decided the more obvious breasts (and the more suggestive pose, truth be told) made it a bit too adult for the blog. I chose February, where they’re a bit less ostentatious.

All in all, I think this was an interesting idea, and it certainly did get the conversation going in the comments!

Tip o’ the lead fedora to Babloggee Eric B.

How Do We Change Public Attitudes and Behavior? | The Intersection

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Danzig

In my recent OpEd with Michael Webber, we discuss the energy embedded in food waste–which accounts for at least 2% of the nation’s energy budget. We point out some ways to waste less such as reducing standard portion sizes and providing the right incentives for businesses, but acknowledge that ultimately, it comes down to consumer choices:

Foremost, the public needs to be better educated about proper storage of foods to keep them edible for longer. Shoppers could be supplied with easy-to-digest, accurate information about the proper shelf life of products, so that they are able to plan meals more carefully and end up with less spoilt food at the end of the week.
Another problem is “use by” dates, which are extremely conservative and can encourage consumers to throw away perfectly edible food. Similarly, “sell by” dates are usually meant as guidelines for retailers to ensure they do not keep stock too long, not as guidance to consumers about when the food will spoil. We need to improve the way we label foods.
Initiatives targeted at consumers could also have ripple-out effects: not only will educating people about food waste reduce pressure on their wallets, it would also lead to fewer trips to the store, saving on gasoline and reducing carbon emissions. Most important, it would help to promote a culture that places a higher value on food, energy, and the way their complex relationship affects us all.

But tackling this issue will be very tricky. Consider: Everyday bakeries throw out day old goods, catering companies dump excess meals, supermarkets do away with blemished fruits, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg…

I’ve long been a firm believer in the power of personal choice and am curious to hear your ideas. How might we shift public attitudes to be less wasteful and save energy on a massive scale?

Empires of the Word & anti-Babel | Gene Expression

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Danzig

Languages_of_Europe To the left you see a map of the distribution of languages and language families in Europe. Language is arguably the most salient cultural feature of our species, as well as one of the most obviously biologically embedded. The trait of language is a human universal, to the point where even those without hearing can create their own gestural languages de novo. But the specific nature of language as it is instantiated from region to region varies greatly. Language in the generality is a straightforward utility with which you communicate with your fellow man. But language also separates you from your fellow man.

European nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries was in large part rooted in the idea that language defined the boundaries of a nation. During the Reformation era some German-speaking Roman Catholic priests declaimed the value of the bond of language against that of religion, praising those non-Germans who adhered to the Catholic cause against German speaking heretics (in the specific case the priest was defending Spanish tercios brought in by the Holy Roman Emperor to put down the rebellion of Protestant German princes). In the long centuries between the Reformation and the Enlightenment the idea of a Western Christian Commonwealth slowly melted in the face of the rise of vernacular, but even after the shattering of Western Christianity with the explosion of Reformations the accumulated capital of a unified Christian European elite persisted. Hungarian Protestant students at Oxford could make do with Latin even if they were totally innocent of English (see The Reformation). Newer lingua francas, French and later English, lack the deep unifying power of Latin in part because they are also living vernaculars. They may resemble Latin in some particulars of function, but eliding the differences removes far too much from the equation to be of any use. Linguistic diversity is a fact of our universe, but how it plays out matters a great deal, and has mattered a great deal, over the arc of history.

This is the subject of Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. Nicholas Ostler, the author, tackles an enormous subject here. He acknowledges the Herculean nature of his task in the introduction. And yet he does avoid some of the more intractable controversies within historical linguistics by constraining his subject matter to the period of history. That is, where we have some written records. This means that Ostler does not address the origins of the Indo-European language family, or the more recent expansion of the Bantus. Despite being separated by thousands of years these are both in the domain of pre-history, because we have no written records of proto-Bantu or proto-Indo-European. This does not mean that the book is not ambitious all the same. On the contrary, Empires of the Word takes on the “thicker” and messier tangle which is the association between language and fine-grained historical processes, social, cultural, economic and political. How history has shaped the nature and distribution of languages which we see extant in our world today is a labyrinth with many doors. Ostler doesn’t come close to opening the majority of those doors, but those he selects in Empires of the Word yield a rich number of surprises and insights, though he does not in the end seem to be able to generate a Grand Unified Theory of linguistic diversity and change from the welter of details.

top-20-languages There are two parallel threads throughout Ostler’s narrative: description and prediction. The latter is not prediction as a physicist would predict, rather, it is as a historical scientist might. Taking the data and producing models which can plausibly explain the phenomena we describe. Let’s take a look at the top 20 languages in the world. It seems that there are two primary ways that the speakers of a language can become numerous: rice & empire. Such a generalization is a bit glib, as many Mandarin speakers do not live by the “rice bowl,” but the big picture is that some languages gained adherents through “brute force,” pushing inexorably against the Malthusian possibilities of primary production and reproduction and assimilating smaller groups on the wave of advance of the speakers. The Asian languages on this list fall into that category. In contrast, you have the languages which spread with empire, exploration, and colonialism. English and Spanish are the exemplars of this class. Of the hundreds of millions of English and Spanish speakers a majority can not be accounted for simply by demographic expansion of the home countries. Rather, these languages colonized new lands, and acquired new speakers, rather rapidly over the past 500 years. Turkish is almost certainly in this category, though the transition from Greek, Armenian and Kurdish speech in Anatolia is less clearly understood because of thinner textual records of the process.

Of course the distinction between the two is somewhat artificial. The expansion of Mandarin, let alone the Chinese dialects, was almost certainly a synthesis of demographic expansion & migration, and linguistic assimilation of “barbarians.” Han Chinese are a genetically far less homogeneous than the Koreans or Japanese, in large part because the expansion of Han identity occurred over a diverse group of populations which were resident within China proper 2,000 years ago. Similarly, it seems implausible that the Vietnamese ethnically cleansed all the Malay and Khmer speaking populations along the Annamese coast as they pushed toward the Mekong delta. The genetic data in fact hint to a large scale assimilation of Malay Chams by the Vietnamese. Inversely, the rise of English was partially accompanied by the demographic explosion of British peoples, while Spaniards contributed a great deal genetically to the mestizo populations of the New World. So it is not rice or empire, but rice and empire. Albeit with different weights on a case-by-case basis.

“Rice” really refers to social, cultural and economic forces which bubble up from below and swallow up the numerous islands of linguistic diversity. “Empire” connotes the political and military structure which allows for the trickle down from above of imperial values and mores. But the two are also intimately connected. The Chinese state under the Ching Dynasty saw a rapid rise in population, and that rise was enabled in large part due to political stability. That stability fostered long term projects which increased the land under cultivation as well as public works infrastructure which could distribute grain so as to dampen the effect of local shocks. The Greek historian Polybius attributed the resiliency and strength of the Roman state in to its assimilative capacity, turning barbarians into citizens. The military and political resiliency of the Roman Empire through the Crisis of the Third Century was probably conditioned on the expansion of Romanitas from the the Atlantic to the Black Sea (the military core of the revival drew from the Latin speaking regions south of the Danube in the Balkans).

Just as the Roman Catholic Church is sometimes referred to as “the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire,” so the distribution of modern languages are tells of political, social and economic events of the past. Social and economic forces almost certainly loom large in language family explosions which Ostler did not cover, that of the Bantus, the Polynesians and Indo-Europeans. In the first case it seems that the Bantu peoples brought with them a new mode of production to east and south Africa. This was then a rice expansion, along with some genetic assimilation. The case of the Polynesians is more difficult, but the existence of a similar group in Madagascar, attests to the power of long distance seafaring techniques in scattering obscure peoples. Without the existence of Malagasy, both their genetic and linguistic uniqueness, the written record would not clue us in to the existence of an organized community of long distance seafaring Southeast Asians across the Indian ocean basin. Finally, the Indo-European expansion is more mysterious because it is so much further back in time, but it is also the most significant as nearly half the world’s population speaks an Indo-European language. David Anthony in The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World makes the case that a shift toward nomadic pastoralism enabled by the horse is the critical catalyst for the sweep of this language group from the Atlantic to the Bay of Bengal.

Though the Indo-European case is likely an ancient one Empires of the Word actually begins its story earlier. Ostler’s in depth knowledge of ancient Near Eastern linguistic history is frankly mind-blowing, and is arguably the most insightful and novel spin on the topic I’ve ever encountered. The extent of detailed and subtle grasp of the facts is awe inspiring. I did not know, for example, that the Elamites of southwest Iran once had their own writing system, which they eventually abandoned for Akkadian cuneiform. Ostler recounts the life-after-death which Sumerian experienced for over 1,000 years because of the nature of cuneiform itself, which was fitted to the Sumerian language, a linguistic isolate with no known relatives. For the last thousand years of cuneiform it was written in Akkadian, the first great Semitic language in the world, later to be succeeded by Aramaic, Punic, Hebrew, and Arabic. Parallel to the waxing and waning of these antique Semitic languages was the ebb and flow of ancient Egyptian, with its own peculiar form of writing.

One aspect of these ancient societies and their languages is the almost cold-blooded torpidity with which change occurred. Sumerian persisted as a liturgical language in what became Babylonia down to the Roman and Parthian period, 3,000 years of written history. The social-political entity which we term ancient Egypt arguably spanned 2,500 years, up until the final Persian conquest. Egyptian culture in a sense that the Pharaohs would recognize persisted for another 1,000 years, until the closure of the Temple of Philae under the orders of the Christian Emperor Justinian in the 6th century. This cut the last link with the literature and religion of ancient Egypt. Consider that the time between our own era and that of Jesus Christ is equivalent to that between the rise of the Egyptian polity and its decline in the late Bronze Age. Though there are certainly similarities between Paul of Tarsus and a modern Western man, a great many disruptions have broken chains of cultural continuity.

There may be one exception to this, and that is another language which arose just as Egypt went into decline, and that is Chinese. Classical Chinese in its written form remained relatively static between the ancient period of the first dynasties, and the early 20th century. This continuity is telling insofar as Western scholars never had to “discover” the history of the Chinese, they had always remembered it. The continuity of language, culture values, and political and ethnic identity, dovetailed together so that despite the reality that the architecture of China is ephemeral, its stories are not. In contrast, much of the literary corpus of the ancient Western world comes down to us only because of three intense periods of copying: the Carolingian Renaissance, 10th century translations in the Byzantine Empire, and the Abbasid translation project in the 9th century. The history of the societies before Greece was perceived only obliquely through the Bible and the classical authors. Modern archaeology and linguistics eventually unlocked the secrets of both hieroglyphics and cuneiform, but the reality that we did not know of the significance of the Hittites in the ancient world attests to the poverty of knowledge which lack of cultural continuity imposes (the great disruption between the Indus civilization and pre-Maurya India means that the script of the former remains lost to us).

The distribution and continuity of dead languages also is a signpost for that other aspect of human culture which is very powerful and ubiquitous: religion. Today most of the Latin spoken is “Church Latin,” and that is because of the languages sacred role within the Roman Catholic Church. Though Hebrew is the spoken language of the secular state of Israel thanks to a modern revival, for nearly 2,500 years it was a language of religion only, as the Jews adopted the languages of the people amongst whom they lived, Aramaic, Greek, Persian, Arabic, Latin, German, etc. The ancient languages of the Near East, Coptic from ancient Egyptian, and Syriac from Aramaic, persist as liturgical languages. It seems that so long as the gods do not die in the minds of believers the tongues of the ancients persist down the ages. So next to the language of rice and empire, you have languages of the gods.

As I indicated above Empires of the Word is rather thin on robust generalizations. But one point which the author mentions repeatedly is that the rise and fall of languages of great expanse and utility is the norm, not the exception. In particular, Nicholas Ostler takes time out to emphasize that languages which spread via trade often do not have long term staying power. Portuguese, Aramaic, Punic and Sogdian would fall into this category (the later success of Portuguese was a matter of rice and empire in Brazil). It seems that mercantile communities are too ephemeral, that successive historical shocks inevitably result in their decline when there isn’t a peasant demographic reservoir or imperial power which imposes it by fiat. Even those languages which eventually spread beyond traders and gain cultural and political cachet may fall from grace. Greek is the best case of this. It was the dominant language of the Roman East, and spoken as far as modern Pakistan, and studied in Dark Age Ireland. By the early modern period it was a strange and foreign language in the West, and with the rise of Islam in the east it lost its cultural glamor, and even those Christians in Arab lands who were Melkite, Greek Orthodox who adhered to the theological position of Constantinople, became Arab in speech and identity (in greater Syria the Greek Orthodox have been instrumental in the formulation of Arab nationalism).

And yet to some extent one must be cautious about over-reading the recession of Greek in the face of Arabic after the rise of Islam. Ostler repeats the conventional wisdom that the predominant vernacular in the Roman East was never Greek, but rather Semitic dialects descended from Aramaic. This is manifest in the fact that the Oriental Orthodox churches do not use Greek in their liturgy, but forms of Syriac. Their root is in an alternative intellectual tradition from that of the Greek Church. The transition to Arabic was then predominantly from a closely related Semitic language, not from Greek. One of the theses to explain the spread of Arabic across North Africa, but not into Persia, is that Arabic found it easier to replace other members of the Afro-Asiatic language family. I can accept that people can intuitively perceive differences of language family without a deep knowledge of said languages. In Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World it is recounted that an ambassador to the court of the Hapsburg Emperor in Vienna communicated to the Sultan that apparently the locals spoke a dialect of Persian! Persian and German are of course both Indo-European languages, and set next to Turkish they may sound vaguely similar.

This thesis is plausible to me, and I have long held to it in regards to Arabic’s replacement of Aramaic. I have been told by a friend who is familiar with both languages (in addition to Hebrew) that they are rather close, and if not intelligible close enough to make language acquisition much easier. But Ostler extends the argument much further, suggesting that genetic affinity also explains the replacement of Egyptian and Berber dialects in North Africa. These are Afro-Asiatic languages, but they are not Semitic. I assume linguists do perceive similarities of character which can connect these languages, but what features span the Afro-Asiatic languages which would make language acquisition easier even at this remove of relationship? The Afro-Asiatic theory for the spread of Arabic is somewhat convenient in that it does explain the data well: Arabic has spread widely only in regions of other Afro-Asiatic languages, the exception being in Spain. And in Spain the Mozarab dialect had a stabilized existence with the Romance language of the rural areas, which eventually came back in the form of Castilian, Portuguese, etc. What Nicholas Ostler seems to be proposing is that the world of language acquisition is not flat. This is clearly true for closely related languages, but I think the thesis needs to be explored for distantly related languages from the same family. Does a native speaker of Marathi have a leg up on a Hungarian when it comes to learning Gaelic? I remain skeptical of the affirmative in that case.

So Empires of the Word outlines some broad generalizations of how languages grow, which seem born out by the record of history, and offers some more speculative theories about the importance of the cultural terrain upon which languages can flow and spread. But the narrative also lingers long on the future of the current lingua franca of our age, English. Nicholas Ostler does nothing to dismiss the omnipresence of English at the commanding heights of international culture. He reports for example that in 1994 50% of international telephone calls were between English speakers. 45% were between English speakers and those who were not English speakers! That means only 5% of international calls in 1994 were cases where people neither spoke English as their native language. I suspect that the numbers have changed a bit since then, but if that study is correct then it points to the awesome international spread of the English language. But Nicholas Ostler does not think that it will last, and his rationale seems to be the record of history, where such universal languages always fall. His next book, The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel outlines his thesis in detail.

And yet contra Ostler I have to suggest that perhaps this time it’s different. I do not believe that English in a unified form will dominate all. Already there has been considerable dialect drift. But the past 200 years are qualitatively different from what has come before, and there is already a revolution in communication technology. It may be that in the future languages do not crystallize as a function of geography, but perhaps more as a function of class and occupation. It does seem historically that trade lingua francas have been ephemeral in impact, and English, the language of McWorld, is the language of capital. But the modern world is much more dependent on flows of capital and commerce than the pre-modern world, the Sogdians and Portuguese were primarily vectors for high value luxury goods. Pre-modern capitalism had the air of a parlor game between the high and mighty, and was quite often in bad odor among rentier elites themselves. It is with reason that I observed above that the pace of cultural change in the past was less than what it is today. Positive feedback loops may be much more powerful than they once were, so that a “Globish” derived from English may quickly sweep away all comers, before it diversifies again.

But really I should wait for Ostler’s new book. The arguments I make here may be addressed, or I may misunderstood what I gleaned from Empires of the Word. It is as I said a story with rich and vibrant detail, much of which I glossed over, or did not address. For that Ostler’s tale is worth the time it takes to complete it. But there is I must say a lack of theoretical punch and heft. Perhaps this is just a function of the subject domain, which has too much complexity to distill down to any model of elegance or tractability. But I suspect a more rigorous analytical framework could squeeze some juice out of the enormous pile of detail which Nicholas Ostler has at his disposal. Perhaps he should read Replicated Typo.

Image Credit: Wikimedia, Ethnologue

Open Thread – August 16th, 2010 | Gene Expression

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Danzig

The usual. If it’s off topic, etc., leave it here.

China is #2 | Gene Expression

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Danzig

China Passes Japan as Second-Largest Economy:

After three decades of spectacular growth, China passed Japan in the second quarter to become the world’s second-largest economy behind the United States, according to government figures released early Monday.
The milestone, though anticipated for some time, is the most striking evidence yet that China’s ascendance is for real and that the rest of the world will have to reckon with a new economic superpower.
The recognition came early Monday, when Tokyo said that Japan’s economy was valued at about $1.28 trillion in the second quarter, slightly below China’s $1.33 trillion. Japan’s economy grew 0.4 percent in the quarter, Tokyo said, substantially less than forecast. That weakness suggests that China’s economy will race past Japan’s for the full year.

Lots of prose. Here’s another way to explore relationships, via Google Data Explorer.

Search for LAUNCH:Health Innovators

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Danzig

We’ve been super busy planning our next LAUNCH sustainability forum. The topic for our second forum is “sustaining human life.” LAUNCH is our incubator program that searches for visionaries, whose world-class ideas, technologies or programs show great promise for making tangible impacts on society. At each LAUNCH forum, ten innovators and 40 thought leaders come together to address these sustainability challenges.

Often health isn’t considered a sustainability challenge, but think about it. What good is sustaining air quality, clean water supplies, and renewable energy sources if humans aren’t here to enjoy it? What happens if we’re not around to tell the story of humanity?

Sustaining quality of life for the human race is the ultimate challenge.

Human health is an important part of NASA’s portfolio. We strap human explorers (otherwise known as medical test subjects) to incendiary devices (otherwise known as rockets) and blast them outside our protective atmosphere.

Keeping astronauts healthy and safe = CRITICAL mission requirement.

Right now, our astronauts live off planet Earth for missions that last half a year. How the human body reacts to changes in gravity, radiation, and even psychological isolation, mirrors health issues faced by the rest of us who never leave the planet. For instance, we’ve learned the value of daily exercise in keeping bones strong during space missions — just like the need for exercise at home.

How we use technology to monitor and address health issues in the extreme environment of space has direct applications for use by communities living in remote locations on Earth — in developing countries or isolated regions.

Someday, we’ll leave this planet for longer periods. We’ll travel around the universe. We’ll set up colonies on other planetary surfaces. We already monitor maternal health concerns, with so many females in the astronaut corps. At some point, we’ll concern ourselves with child health — once they’re born on long-duration missions. Yes, it will happen.

The real question is: when.

Fun Fact: I’ve been part of a long-term health study for the last 25 years. I’m a “control subject” for female astronauts.

LAUNCH: Health will be held in conjunction with the STS-133 Space Shuttle launch down at the Kennedy Space Center. We’ve been working closely with our founding partners USAID, State Department and NIKE, and our forum partnersVestergaard Frandsen and IDEO, to develop criteria to select the LAUNCH: Health innovations.

We posted the LAUNCH: Health call for innovators on InnoCentive as an ideation challenge. We’ll have the challenge open for 30 days. Your solutions can be social, policy or technology innovations that have potential for disruptive impact — in a positive way, of course. You will need to sign up as an InnoCentive Solver to post your solution.

Social Change: Personally, I think TOMS Shoes, as a business concept, is an amazing example of social innovation. For every pair of TOMS shoes purchased, a second pair is donated to a child. The simple act of wearing shoes prevents cuts that expose children to tetanus, as well as diseases like human hookworm and podoconiosis. My daughter Steph and all her friends wear TOMS, and request TOMS for birthdays and holiday gifts. They believe wearing TOMS makes a statement that they care about making the world better, one pair of shoes at a time.

TOMS One for One business model succeeded in:

creating awareness among those of us who have closets full of shoes,
changing attitudes, and
inspiring action.

In fact, TOMS birthed a movement. You can show your support by participating in “One Day Without Shoes” on April 5, 2011. Brilliant!

Aren’t you inspired? So, what do you have up your sleeve that you’re willing to share? Do you have what it takes to make a positive difference in world health? Get creative. I dare you.

Save the WORLD: one innovation at a time!

For more information about our previous water sustainability forum, visit: LAUNCH.org. (We’re busy updating the website to reflect LAUNCH: Health.)

Crosspost on GovLoop and Beth Beck’s Blog.

Loop A Ammonia Pump Replaced on ISS In Third EVA

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Danzig

NASA ISS On-Orbit Status 16 August 2010

"Stage EVA-17 by FE-4 Doug Wheelock & FE-2 Tracy Caldwell-Dyson was completed successfully in 7hr 20min, fully accomplishing its objective of installing the spare ETCS (External Thermal Control System) Loop A PM (Pump Module) plus additional tasks. The PM has been checked out and is functioning nominally. Loop A will be fully in service later this week. This was the third contingency spacewalk to replace the Loop A ammonia pump."

NASA IT Summit Day 1

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Danzig

"NASA's first Information Technology (IT) Summit will bring together government and industry leaders to explore the outer reaches of information technology. The summit, which takes place August 16-18 at the Gaylord National Harbor in Maryland, will gather 750 participants and more than 100 expert presenters with themes on collaboration, social networking, innovation, infrastructure, operations and IT security and privacy."

Information, agenda, and live webstream. You can follow the summit tweets via the hash tag #nasait on Twitter Search.

Keith's note: So far the meeting has gone well. The event was very well organized and ran like clockwork. That said, some curious things emerged rather quickly as I observed the sessions and the audience. First of all, the 1,190 registered attendees are overwhelmingly white males aged 40-60. Second, although half of the audience was, at any given time, fiddling with their cellphones (and a few with laptops), only a dozen or so attendees were actually Twittering from/about the meeting. Given the discussion about future trends, social media, and new populations of stakeholders (audiences) this was rather troubling.

Also, unless someone else signed in on the media list, I was the only media representative in attendance. I assume that is what prompted Charlie Bolden to give me a shout out from the podium ("Is Keith here?"). Also, other than IT manager Brian Dunbar and photographer Bill Ingalls, I saw no one else from PAO in attendance. Nor did I see any education and outreach or social media staff from the mission directorates.

Sites share music, drawings and bad photos – Indianapolis Star

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Danzig

Sites share music, drawings and bad photos
Indianapolis Star
Story, A21 7. http://badyearbookphotos.com: This website is exactly what it purports to be: A place to upload and gawk at bad, awkward, oddly blurry and ...

and more »

Scientists successfully use human stem cells to treat Parkinson’s in rodents

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Danzig

Researchers have successfully used human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to treat rodents afflicted with Parkinson's Disease (PD). The research, conducted at the Buck Institute for Age Research, validates a scalable protocol that the same group had previously developed. It may eventually be used to manufacture the type of neurons needed to treat the disease and paves the way for the use of iPSC's in various biomedical applications.

Researchers in the lab used human iPSCs that were derived from skin and blood cells and coaxed them to become dopamine-producing neurons. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter produced in the mid-brain that facilitates many critical functions, including motor skills. Patients with PD lack sufficient dopamine; the disease is a progressive, incurable neurodegenerative disorder that affects 1.5 million Americans and results in tremor, slowness of movement and rigidity.

"The studies are very encouraging for potential cell therapies for Parkinson's disease," said Alan Trounson, Ph.D., the President of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. "The researchers showed they could produce quantities of dopaminergic neurons necessary to improve the behavior of a rodent model of PD. We look forward to further work that could bring closer a new treatment for such a debilitating disease."

Source.

Dilbert and the Turing test

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Danzig

It's funny cuz it's true; I think we all know people who would "fail" the Turing test 😉

Click image to enlarge.

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