Map projections

A sense-of-wonder-inspiring XKCD webcomic inspired a look into the forum there which lead to the discovery of this cool idea for projecting a map of the Earth onto a 2D surface. I highly recommend checking out the gallery that displays many of van Wijk's creations using the method he invented.

A story of salvation

This is a story I have only just heard. It's full of examples of how love and sacrifice, empathy and hard work can be applied in ways that defy expectation, explanation, and make inroads to a better world. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDOrzF7B2Kg

Now that's fast

Time-Critical Social Mobilization

Galen Pickard et al.
Science, 28 October 2011, Pages 509-512

Abstract:
The World Wide Web is commonly seen as a platform that can harness the collective abilities of large numbers of people to accomplish tasks with unprecedented speed, accuracy, and scale. To explore the Web's ability for social mobilization, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held the DARPA Network Challenge, in which competing teams were asked to locate 10 red weather balloons placed at locations around the continental United States. Using a recursive incentive mechanism that both spread information about the task and incentivized individuals to act, our team was able to find all 10 balloons in less than 9 hours, thus winning the Challenge. We analyzed the theoretical and practical properties of this mechanism and compared it with other approaches.

The kind of movie I want to see/make

From: The New York Times

By DENNIS LIM

Published: August 20, 2010

JEAN-LUC GODARD once observed that every fictional film is a documentary of its actors. Jacques Rivette finessed the aphorism, proposing that every film is a documentary of its own making, not only a record for posterity of the people in it but also a window into the culture that produced it.

Anders Edstrom

An image from “The Anchorage,” directed by C. W. Winter and Anders Edstrom, about a woman living in the Stockholm archipelago.

Enlarge This Image

O Som e a Fúria

“Our Beloved Month of August” includes staged and spontaneous moments shot in summer in the Portuguese countryside.

In a very literal sense, all films have documentary aspects: once the camera is turned on, whatever is captured, no matter how staged, contains a trace of reality, an element of chance. The inverse is true as well: no documentary, whatever its claims to objective reportage, is ever devoid of manipulation, since a controlling hand is evident in even the most routine matters of camera placement and shot selection.

While these are truisms, obvious enough to anyone who has given these issues more than passing consideration, they have long been easy to forget in a film culture that conditions us to think of fiction and documentary as distinct forms. One of the most striking developments in recent world cinema is the emergence of films that resist precisely those categories, that could be said to blur or thwart or simply ignore the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, staking out instead a productive liminal zone in between.

One such film, “Our Beloved Month of August,” by the director Miguel Gomes, is at once a musical, a travelogue, a quasi-incestuous family melodrama, an ethnographic portrait of Portuguese folk traditions and an account of its own chaotic production. As he tells it, Mr. Gomes ventured into rural central Portugal a few years ago to make a fictional film against the backdrop of the region’s summer music festivals.

When the shoot ran into trouble, he and his crew began to document the people and places around them, as well as their own difficulties. (Mr. Gomes appears in the film, and his brick of a screenplay is deployed as a sight gag.) The finished film, which runs from Sept. 3 through 11 at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan as part of a Gomes retrospective, is not just unclassifiable, but also unstable from moment to moment: a documentary about the creation of a fiction, which overtakes the proceedings at points only to recede again.

Mr. Gomes breaks down categories in the service of an expansive, kaleidoscopic experience. But hybrid works can also occupy the minimalist end of the spectrum — as with “The Anchorage,” a film by C. W. Winter and Anders Edstrom, which opens Sept. 17, also at Anthology.

Pairing textured cinematography with intricate sound design, it observes a few days in the life of a middle-aged woman on a remote island in the Stockholm archipelago. She walks in the woods and swims in the sea; her daughter visits; a hunter passes by; the weather changes. The woman is played by Ulla Edstrom, Mr. Edstrom’s mother and a part-time resident of that Baltic island. Alert to everyday moments and the subtleties of the natural world, “The Anchorage” is an immersive depiction of a solitary, self-sufficient life, one that the actor to an extent shares with her character.

Cinephiles are by now accustomed to this kind of categorical confusion. The well-regarded Portuguese auteur Pedro Costa, the subject of a recent DVD boxed set by the Criterion Collection, has spent years working in the Lisbon slum of Fontainhas, collaborating with its residents on films that are contemplative, highly stylized reflections of their actual lives.

Another festival regular, Ulrich Seidl of Austria, makes even more provocative use of hybrid forms. His unflinching documentaries, like “Animal Love,” about obsessive pet owners, incorporate staged scenes; his equally discomfiting fictional films use both nonprofessional actors and pungently real locations, which in his latest film, “Import/Export,” include an Internet-pornography sweatshop and a geriatric ward.

The tendency to mingle fiction and nonfiction can also be seen among emerging filmmakers. Pedro González-Rubio’s “Alamar,” a modest art-house hit this summer, is a sensuous record of an idyllic father-son fishing trip in the Mexican Caribbean: the stars are a real-life father and son, and the trip was conceived for the purpose of the film. Oscar Ruiz Navia’s “Crab Trap” is an atmospheric story of a drifter in a coastal Colombian village, invested less in narrative progression than in exploring a physical and psychological landscape. (It will be shown at the Latinbeat series at the Walter Reade Theater next month.)

In “You Are All Captains,” a debut feature shown at Cannes this year, the French-Spanish director Oliver Laxe uses his own experience teaching filmmaking to children in Tangiers, Morocco, to spark a playful rumination on the creative process and his outsider status.

These films are too disparate to amount to a movement, and it’s worth nothing that the underlying impulse is hardly new. The attraction to the real is hard-wired into a medium that began when the Lumière brothers took their camera out into the thick of daily life to make their “actuality films,” of a train entering a station or of workers leaving a factory.

In the 1940s, D. W. Griffith, lamenting the airlessness of studio-bound films, declared, “What’s missing from movies nowadays is the beauty of the moving wind in the trees.” It was an urge to confront reality that inspired Italy’s postwar neo-realists and the cinéma-vérité pioneers of the 1960s.

What’s striking about the present moment is just how widespread the taste for reality is among the major figures in world cinema, from the Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, who is known for a kind of hall-of-mirrors neo-realism, to the recent Palme d’Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul of Thailand, whose films combine surrealism and documentary realism.

Jia Zhangke, the leading Chinese filmmaker of his generation, has worked in fiction and nonfiction, sometimes combining the two and invariably using the metaphorically charged spaces of the new China as ready-made film sets.

For the Argentine director Lisandro Alonso, whose four features have all screened at Cannes, fictional frameworks are mere pretexts to shoot with specific people in specific places: the pampas, the jungles, the frozen wilds of Tierra del Fuego. His first film, “La Libertad” (2000), is based on months of observing a lone woodcutter’s daily routine.

The critic Robert Koehler, writing in Cinema Scope magazine, used the phrase “the cinema of in-betweenness” to describe films like “The Anchorage.” Many of these new hybrid films are in line with the artistic sensibility that the writer David Shields outlined in his recent polemic, “Reality Hunger: A Manifesto,” which deals mainly with literature but also invokes Werner Herzog, the poet laureate of the subjective documentary, and Sacha Baron Cohen, whose spasms of prankster performance art double as documentaries of bigotry.

The notion of a doc-fiction hybrid is so vast that it can encompass any number of permutations. But the most rewarding hybrid films are validations of the creative uncertainty principle. They bespeak if not a love of the world then at least a curiosity about it. They understand that the introduction of fact does not necessarily make fiction more real but possibly more strange. Inventing impure forms to match impure content, they can open up subtly new ways of seeing and thinking about movies. Most of all, they are expressions of what Mr. Alonso surely recognized when he titled his groundbreaking film “La Libertad”: freedom.

Helpful hints for public speakers

Speaker-listener neural coupling underlies successful communication

Greg Stephens, Lauren Silbert & Uri Hasson
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 10 August 2010, Pages 14425-14430

Abstract:
Verbal communication is a joint activity; however, speech production and comprehension have primarily been analyzed as independent processes within the boundaries of individual brains. Here, we applied fMRI to record brain activity from both speakers and listeners during natural verbal communication. We used the speaker's spatiotemporal brain activity to model listeners' brain activity and found that the speaker's activity is spatially and temporally coupled with the listener's activity. This coupling vanishes when participants fail to communicate. Moreover, though on average the listener's brain activity mirrors the speaker's activity with a delay, we also find areas that exhibit predictive anticipatory responses. We connected the extent of neural coupling to a quantitative measure of story comprehension and find that the greater the anticipatory speaker-listener coupling, the greater the understanding. We argue that the observed alignment of production- and comprehension-based processes serves as a mechanism by which brains convey information.

Older Adults Finding Ways to Flourish

Health outcomes of Experience Corps®: A high-commitment volunteer program

S.I. Hong & Nancy Morrow-Howell
Social Science & Medicine, July 2010, Pages 414-420

Abstract:
Experience Corps® (EC) is a high-commitment US volunteer program that brings older adults into public elementary schools to improve academic achievement of students. It is viewed as a health promotion program for the older volunteers. We evaluated the effects of the EC program on older adults' health, using a quasi-experimental design. We included volunteers from 17 EC sites across the US. They were pre-tested before beginning their volunteer work and post-tested after two years of service. We compared changes over time between the EC participants (n = 167) and a matched comparison group of people from the US Health and Retirement Study (2004, 2006). We developed the comparison group by using the nearest available Mahalanobis metric matching within calipers combined with the boosted propensity scores of those participating in the EC. We corrected for clustering effects via survey regression analyses with robust standard errors and calculated adjusted post-test means of health outcomes, controlling for all covariates and the boosted propensity score of EC participants. We found that compared to the comparison group, the EC group reported fewer depressive symptoms and functional limitations after two years of participation in the program, and there was a statistical trend toward the EC group reporting less decline in self-rated health. Results of this study add to the evidence supporting high-intensity volunteering as a social model of health promotion for older adults.

Summer jobs in high school

I remember being pretty happy with getting any amount of money per hour when I got my first job at 15. It seems like more people would be employed if it was worth hiring them. The rise of the minimum wage means that the level of work that can be done must be greater which means that people with less skills (e.g. teens) aren't worth paying since they can't contribute an equivalent amount of value to a business as the business is forced to pay them for their work. This results in essentially underemployment mandated by the inflated cost of hiring due to a high minimum wage.

Teen employment, poverty, and the minimum wage: Evidence from Canada

Anindya Sen, Kathleen Rybczynski & Corey Van De Waal
Labour Economics, forthcoming

Abstract:
In May 2007, the U.S. Congress enacted legislation, which increased the Federal minimum hourly wage from $5.15 to $7.25, over a two year time period. This increase to the minimum wage was the first in nearly a decade and was approved with the objective of alleviating poverty among low income households. However, a higher minimum wage may result in more unemployment and poverty. We exploit time-series variation in minimum wages set by Canadian provinces between 1981 and 2004. OLS and IV results suggest that a 10% increase in the minimum wage is significantly correlated with a 3% - 5% drop in teen employment. Further, a 10% rise in the minimum wage is also significantly associated with a 4% - 6% increase in the percentage of families living under Low Income Cut Offs (LICOs). Difference-in-difference estimates from the 1993, 1995, and 1998 waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) support these findings as they suggest that income earned by teens constitutes a non-trivial portion of household income for families beneath Low Income Cut Offs. Therefore, a higher minimum wage may paradoxically result in a significant negative shock to household income among low-income families.

The Religious Left

I have been wondering about this but Mr. Blow puts some numbers to it (whether those numbers mean anything is another question, polls and Blow's use of them being untrustworthy). It looks like some important decisions might be coming soon to religious leaders on both sides of the political aisle as they find themselves increasingly empowered on the same side of the religious aisle.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/03/opinion/03blow.html

Climate change questions

Global Warming Alarm Based on Faulty Forecasting Procedures: Comments on the United States Department of State's U.S. Climate Action Report 2010

Scott Armstrong, Kesten Green & Willie Soon
University of Pennsylvania Working Paper, May 2010

"The alarming forecasts of dangerous manmade global warming are not the product of proper scientific evidence-based forecasting methods. Furthermore, there have been no validation studies to support a belief that the forecasting procedures used were nevertheless appropriate for the situation. As a consequence, alarming forecasts of global warming are merely the opinions of some scientists and, for a situation as complicated and poorly understood as global climate, such opinions are unlikely to be as accurate as forecasts that global temperatures will remain much the same as they have been over recent years. Using proper forecasting procedures we predict that the global warming alarm will prove false and that government actions in response to the alarm will be shown to have been harmful."

Exploring for new business vs. expanding real customers

Note this for future business organizations:

Balancing Exploration and Exploitation Through Structural Design: The Isolation of Subgroups and Organizational Learning

Christina Fang, Jeho Lee & Melissa Schilling
Organization Science, May-June 2010, Pages 625-642

Abstract:
The classic trade-off between exploration and exploitation in organizational learning has attracted vigorous attention by researchers over the last two decades. Despite this attention, however, the question of how firms can better maintain the balance of exploration and exploitation remains unresolved. Drawing on a wide range of research on population and organization structure, we argue that an organization divided into semi-isolated subgroups may help strike this balance. We simulate such an organization, systematically varying the interaction pattern between individuals to explore how the degree of subgroup isolation and intergroup connectivity influences organizational learning. We also test this model with a range of contingency variables highlighted in the management research. We find that moderate levels of cross-group linking lead to the highest equilibrium performance by enabling superior ideas to diffuse across groups without reducing organizational diversity too quickly. This finding is remarkably resilient to a wide range of variance in factors such as problem complexity, environmental dynamism, and personnel turnover.

The Middle East is in trouble

Obviously. There's a couple articles out there that seem to point to an increase in that trouble as a result of persistently low levels of engagement on the part of the current administration. It seems the lack of superpower oversight results in uncoordinated efforts by lesser powers. Maybe not such a bad thing but it certainly is a change from the norm.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2010/06/barack_obama_israel_iran_and_turkey

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/world/middleeast/09turkey.html

New music

The NYT gives a concert review, highlighting some new pieces. I'm looking forward to checking them out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/arts/music/09league.html

Politics and health

Social Welfare Expenditures in the United States and the Nordic Countries: 1900-2003

Price Fishback
NBER Working Paper, May 2010

Abstract:
The extent of social expenditures in the U.S. and the Nordic Countries is compared in the early 1900s and again in the early 2000s. The common view that America spends much less on social welfare than the Nordic countries does not survive closer inspection when we consider the differences in the structures of social expenditures. The standard comparison examines gross social expenditures. After adjustments for direct and indirect taxes paid, the net social expenditures in the Nordic countries are much closer to American levels. Inclusion of mandatory and private social expenditures raises the American share of GDP devoted to social expenditures to rank among the middle of the Nordic countries. Per capita net public social expenditures in the U.S. rank behind only Sweden. Add in the private spending, and per capita spending in the U.S. is higher than in all of the Nordic countries. Finally, I document the enormous diversity across time and place in public social expenditures in the U.S. in the early 1900s and circa 1990.

Politics and health in eight European countries: A comparative study of mortality decline under social democracies and right-wing governments

Jose Tapia Granados
Social Science & Medicine, forthcoming

Abstract:
Recent publications have argued that the welfare state is an important determinant of population health, and that social democracy in office and higher levels of health expenditure promote health progress. In the period 1950-2000, Greece, Portugal, and Spain were the poorest market economies in Europe, with a fragmented system of welfare provision, and many years of military or authoritarian right-wing regimes. In contrast, the five Nordic countries were the richest market economies in Europe, governed mostly by center or center-left coalitions often including the social democratic parties, and having a generous and universal welfare state. In spite of the socioeconomic and political differences, and a large gap between the five Nordic and the three southern nations in levels of health in 1950, population health indicators converged among these eight countries. Mean decadal gains in longevity of Portugal and Spain between 1950 and 2000 were almost three times greater than gains in Denmark, and about twice as great as those in Iceland, Norway and Sweden during the same period. All this raises serious doubts regarding the hypothesis that the political regime, the political party in office, the level of health care spending, and the type of welfare state exert major influences on population health. Either these factors are not major determinants of mortality decline, or their impact on population health in Nordic countries was more than offset by other health-promoting factors present in Southern Europe.

The Kimbell Art Museum in Forth Worth, TX

A few years ago, those of us in Allendale visited this museum. I remember being very impressed by the building itself but, not knowing it was by Kahn, didn't pay as much attention as I could have. This article, about a new addition to the Kimbell by Renzo Piano, moved me to want to go back and see it all again. The pieces in the museum were wonderful and I'd love to take them in again (a couple Rothkos were particularly moving). But having great architecture to see would certainly add to the experience.

The sea change in politics over the last century

This is quoted from a blog which, in turn, was quoted by an NYT columnist. I'm going to check out that blogger though. Perhaps Mr. Jonathan Bernstein has more tidbits to share outside of the article quoted here:

"There is something different about contemporary parties than older parties, which is that national element. If I had to generalize -- and as with all generalizations, there are numerous exceptions -- what I'd say is this. In the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, local parties were able to control their nominations. Over the course of the twentieth century, and probably bottoming out sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, those parties lost control of nominations to candidates, who formed their own personal organizations...at the extremes, parties were relatively empty labels that independent candidates battled over. Over the last thirty or forty years, however, parties have evolved, developing strong national components that never existed in previous strong-party eras, and once again parties generally control their nominations. I certainly don't see anything in any of the cases this year (not just Sestak and Paul, but also Rubio, and the NY-23 special, and others) that seem to be about parties losing control over their own nominations, as opposed to party groups battling over those nominations.

Of course, no matter how strong parties get, as long as they are permeable and not strictly hierarchical they will still feature internal clashes, which will often play out in nomination fights. To the extent that independent candidates are also strong, they will sometimes clash with party choices. Really, I think that's the best way of looking at Arlen Specter. He obviously wasn't a creature of the Democratic Party establishment; he was, in many ways, a great example of the strong, independent candidates of an earlier era in American politics. The political system can still produce such creatures, but we're in a more partisan era now, and if it symbolizes anything, the demise of Arlen Specter is probably best seen as a sign of the strength of the new parties."

Apropos of nothing

Just happened upon this wikipedia article about Paul Robeson who, it turns out, was an athlete, singer, actor and political activist and very prominent in each of those fields, thanks largely to being an incredible genius (he was fluent in at least 12 languages, for instance. And in the College Football Hall of Fame). He was also the son of an escaped slave who became a minister. And under constant surveillance for years thanks to his support of socialism and his ties to the USSR before and during the Cold War. Quite a remarkable story.

Centrism

I find myself in Ben's political camp as described by David Brooks.

The Tel Dan stele

I had never heard of this but this is a piece of an Aramean monument that corroborates in some detail the story of David's descendants told in 2 Kings. I'm pretty impressed.

College/high school

These students are completing two years of college while attending a public high school in New York http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/opinion/18herbert.html?th&emc=th

Animated movie at Cannes

Ebert talked about this film in his online journal (he's so excited to be at Cannes). He mentions something in that piece that struck me: animation has the power to convey aging very well. A drawn character can age believably over time in ways that a child, adolescent, and adult actor, heavily made-up for youthful and aged portions of a film. What else can animation do better than live action?