Archive for October, 2009
October 31, 2009 at 12:01 am
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In depicting the emergence of the world’s languages as a curse of gibberish, the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel makes us moderns smile. Yet, considering the headache that 6,000 languages can induce in real life, the story makes a certain sense.
Not long ago, 33 of the FBI’s 12,000 employees spoke Arabic, as did 6 of the 1,000 employees at the American Embassy in Iraq. How can we significantly improve that situation is a good question. It’s hard to learn Arabic, and not only because it’s hard to pick up any new language. Iraqi Arabic is actually one of several “dialects” of Arabic that is as different from the others as one Romance language is from another. Using Iraqi Arabic even in a country as close as Egypt would be like sitting down at a trattoria in Milan and ordering lunch in Portuguese.
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October 30, 2009 at 12:01 am
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As the news business continues to confront fundamental economic challenges, a report, released on Oct. 19, 2009 by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, proposes new steps for maintaining a vibrant, independent press, with special emphasis on local "accountability journalism" that is essential to civic life. The report, "The Reconstruction of American Journalism," was written by Leonard Downie, Jr., former executive editor of The Washington Post, and Michael Schudson, a Journalism School professor. The report was released at an Oct. 20 event at the New York Public Library, hosted by Lee Bollinger, president, Columbia University; Nicholas Lemann, dean, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism; Paul Leclerc, president and CEO, New York Public Library; Julie Sandorf, president, Charles H. Revson Foundation; Clay Shirky, Interactive Telecommunications Program, New York University; and Aryeh Neier, president of the Open Society Institute.
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October 29, 2009 at 12:01 am
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October 28, 2009 at 12:01 am
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Paul Meehl, in one of his last public speeches, memorably noted that most clinical psychologists select their methods like kids
make choices in a candy store: They look around, maybe sample a bit, and choose what they like, whatever feels good to them. For
many of us who initially became clinical psychologists because we were inspired by the scientist-practitioner ideal, Meehl’s
comment was as heartbreaking as it was accurate. It makes particularly compelling the article that follows, ‘‘Current Status
and Future Prospects of Clinical Psychology: Toward a Scientifically
Principled Approach to Mental and Behavioral Health
Care’’ by Baker, McFall, and Shoham. This urgently needed and
long overdue analysis and proposal will be welcomed by those
who grieve the widening gulf between clinical practice and
scientific progress in psychology. And it offers giant but feasible
steps toward reforms that can advance both clinical practice and
relevant psychological science…
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In the late nineteen-sixties, Carolyn Weisz, a four-year-old with long brown hair, was invited into a “game room” at the Bing Nursery School, on the campus of Stanford University. The room was little more than a large closet, containing a desk and a chair. Carolyn was asked to sit down in the chair and pick a treat from a tray of marshmallows, cookies, and pretzel sticks. Carolyn chose the marshmallow. Although she’s now forty-four, Carolyn still has a weakness for those air-puffed balls of corn syrup and gelatine. “I know I shouldn’t like them,” she says. “But they’re just so delicious!” A researcher then made Carolyn an offer: she could either eat one marshmallow right away or, if she was willing to wait while he stepped out for a few minutes, she could have two marshmallows when he returned. He said that if she rang a bell on the desk while he was away he would come running back, and she could eat one marshmallow but would forfeit the second. Then he left the room.
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Every day, individuals make dozens of choices between an alternative with higher overall value and a more tempting but ultimately inferior option. Optimal decision-making requires self-control. We propose two hypotheses about the neurobiology of self-control: (i) Goal-directed decisions have their basis in a common value signal encoded in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), and (ii) exercising self-control involves the modulation of this value signal by dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to monitor brain activity while dieters engaged in real decisions about food consumption. Activity in vmPFC was correlated with goal values regardless of the amount of self-control. It incorporated both taste and health in self-controllers but only taste in non–self-controllers. Activity in DLPFC increased when subjects exercised self-control and correlated with activity in vmPFC.
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October 27, 2009 at 12:01 am
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What exactly does it mean to be Ukrainian? A thousand years ago, Ukraine was the heart of the Slavs’ first great civilization, one of the largest kingdoms in Europe. Since the 13th century, parts of Ukraine have been over-run and ruled by Mongols, Poles, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Austrians, Ottoman Turks, Russians, and Soviets. Ukraine finally achieved true independence in 1991. But Ukrainians are just starting to figure out what it means to be Ukrainian. The World’s Jason Margolis spent 10 days in Ukraine and reports on the quest for Ukrainian identity, exploring the nation’s music, politics, history, and humor.
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October 26, 2009 at 12:01 am
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When my husband and I moved from Manhattan to Park Slope, Brooklyn, last year, people would inevitably ask, “So, are you going to cave in and join the Coop?” They meant the Park Slope Food Coop, the largest member-owned and -operated co-op in the country. Something between an earthy-crunchy health food haven and a Soviet-style reeducation camp, the Coop offered great groceries at low prices but required its members to work in the store for the privilege of shopping there. No way were we joining.
But I soon found that Park Slope, a yuppified, leafy neighborhood 20 minutes from downtown Manhattan, was a wasteland when it came to perishables.
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Assessing a young presidency. Barack Obama campaigned as a populist firebrand but governs like a cerebral consensus builder. The founding fathers wouldn't have it any other way.
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In the early 1980s, Nasir Tamara, a young Indonesian scholar, needed money to fund a study of Islam and politics. He went to the Jakarta office of the U.S.-based Ford Foundation to ask for help. He left empty-handed. The United States, he was told, was "not interested in getting into Islam."
The rebuff came from President Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, a U.S. anthropologist who lived in Indonesia for more than a decade. Dunham, who died in 1995, focused on issues of economic development, not matters of faith and politics, sensitive subjects in a country then ruled by a secular-minded autocrat.
"It was not fashionable to 'do Islam' back then," Tamara recalled.
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When a music director takes the helm of a major American orchestra, the inaugural concert should be not just a musical celebration but a statement of artistic mission. The recent debuts of Alan Gilbert at the New York Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel at the Los Angeles Philharmonic both showed how this can be done. Here were two purposeful musicians, the 42-year-old Mr. Gilbert and the 28-year-old Mr. Dudamel, shaking up their institutions, generating excitement in their cities and conducting programs that began with the premieres of significant commissioned works, tokens of fresh offerings and festivals to come.
Concurrently New Yorkers lost an opportunity to assess how James Levine, 66, is doing at the Boston Symphony Orchestra after five years as its music director. We New Yorkers are interested parties, given Mr. Levine’s central role at the Metropolitan Opera for the last 38 years.
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No doubt many saw the recent opening of Dallas’s imposing new performing arts center as a welcome sign of civic confidence during hard times. But it also signaled a closing.
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October 23, 2009 at 12:01 am
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These days, as he pleads with New Jersey voters for a second term as governor, even moments of satisfaction in Jon S. Corzine’s world seem to extract their small humiliations. In early September, for instance, on the day that President Obama delivered his heralded (and controversial) televised pep talk to public-school students, Corzine traveled to Camden, one of the country’s poorest cities, his government-issue black S.U.V. weaving through a postapocalyptic landscape of overgrown fields and shuttered row houses. The neighborhood was celebrating the opening of the sparkling new H. B. Wilson Elementary School, one of 45 new schools that Corzine’s administration has constructed and opened, despite the state’s acute economic troubles, and Corzine, who displays an obvious passion for all things educational, had arrived to bask in the achievement and to join a class of fourth graders in watching President Obama’s speech.
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The Islamic Republic of Iran is a protagonist in two ongoing geopolitical contests—one between Washington and Tehran over strategic dominance in the Middle East and the other among major international and regional players to influence Iran’s strategic orientation. These contests—which constitute “the race for Iran”—will shape the Middle East's strategic trajectory and the structure of international relations in the next quarter century.
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The foreign ministries of Turkey, Armenia and Switzerland (the latter having mediated in talks between the former two) reported on 31 August that two protocols envisaging the establishment of Turkish-Armenian relations and the opening of the border between the two countries had been developed. In turn, on 28 September, the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan promised that diplomatic relations between Turkey and Armenia would be established on 10 October. Although Turkish diplomacy is likely to succeed in this task, chances for a full normalisation of relations are low. The risk
of the internal situation in Armenia becoming destabilised, resistance from nationalist circles in Turkey and staunch opposition from Azerbaijan,
the unresolved conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh and the ambiguous stance Russia has taken will all impede the normalisation of bilateral relations.
The process of normalising Turkish-Armenian relations which has been observed over the past year…
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The posts and comments have been flying fast and furious over the issue of Kiva specifically and the issues of transparency and donors demands for illusion. For those who haven’t been able to keep up, I thought it would be helpful to provide a mostly comprehensive guide to the various posts. I’ll try to keep it updated when/if more is added. If I’ve missed anything, please add it in the comments.
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What do you think about investment sites like Kiva? Everyone says putting your money there is more efficient than giving to charity. But I don't like that the site arranges loans for the poor that can charge around 30 percent interest. Am I actually helping alleviate poverty this way?
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October 21, 2009 at 12:00 am
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One year after Wall Street melted down, the Washington Post looks at the impact of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, exploring how that trauma continues to shape America even as the economy shows early signs of recovery.
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A monument to the financial crisis is rising amid this city's thicket of skyscrapers: a gleaming, glass-walled trophy tower that was intended as a fitting headquarters for Wachovia's national banking empire. It will open instead as the headquarters of a regional power company. Wachovia, unable to survive a run of bad decisions, was swallowed by San Francisco-based Wells Fargo during the depths of the crisis last year.
Few American cities prospered more over the past two decades than Charlotte, its growth propelled and gilded by Wachovia and its crosstown rival, Bank of America. Executives shoehorned gaudy mansions into old neighborhoods around downtown. Workers poured into vast subdivisions on the city's ever-expanding periphery. With coffers overflowing, giddy public officials spent tax dollars on a manmade river for whitewater rafting.
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"We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency — the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] — who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country's key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. "They were totally opposed to it," Born says. "That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?" In The Warning, veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk unearths the hidden history of the nation's worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the center of it all he finds Brooksley Born, who speaks for the first time on television about her failed campaign to regulate the secretive, multitrillion-dollar derivatives market whose crash helped trigger the financial collapse in the fall of 2008.
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Generación Y es un Blog inspirado en gente como yo, con nombres que comienzan o contienen una "i griega". Nacidos en la Cuba de los años 70s y los 80s, marcados por las escuelas al campo, los muñequitos rusos, las salidas ilegales y la frustración. Así que invito especialmente a Yanisleidi, Yoandri, Yusimí, Yuniesky y otros que arrastran sus "i griegas" a que me lean y me escriban.
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After Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, this month proposed prohibiting the National Science Foundation from “wasting any federal research funding on political science projects,” political scientists rallied in opposition, pointing out that one of this year’s Nobel winners had been a frequent recipient of the very program now under attack. Yet even some of the most vehement critics of the Coburn proposal acknowledge that political scientists themselves vigorously debate the field’s direction, what sort of questions it pursues, even how useful the research is. Much of the political science work financed by the National Science Foundation is both rigorous and valuable, said Jeffrey C. Isaac, a professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, where one new winner of the Nobel in economic science, the political scientist Elinor Ostrom, teaches. “But we’re kidding ourselves if we think this research typically has the obvious public…
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With its clay houses, makeshift kiosks, and roads dotted with potholes, Katagan is a typical Tajik village.
A large group of local residents has gathered in the Rakhimovs' shady yard teeming with plants, flowers, and fruit trees.
They are bidding farewell to Umed Rakhimov, who is heading Russia to work on a construction site.
It's not the first time the 28-year-old is leaving Katagan. Like an estimated 1 million Tajiks, he has been forced by rampant poverty and unemployment to seek better fortunes in Russia. It is with a heavy heart that Umed leaves his family behind, especially his wife and 1-year-old daughter.
His mother, Firuza, is in a somber mood as well. "I will be sad. We've just married him off," she says. "I don't know what awaits him there, and his wife is also worried whether he'll find a job. That's the way things are here, we live and worry."
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Over the past few years, we’ve gotten to know our president as a lot of different things: campaigner, lawyer, father, basketballer. But what if Obama’s first and truest calling—his desire to write—explains more about him than anything else? Robert Draper recounts the untold story of the first man since Teddy Roosevelt to serve as author in chief.
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October 20, 2009 at 12:01 am
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Over the past year, there has been much talk about the future of traditional news organizations. While the Internet has made disseminating, discussing, and riffing on news much less costly, the reporting of news—the bringing of new facts to bear on a story—remains very expensive, and it’s not clear that a financial model still exists to support it. Faced with evaporating advertising revenues, the Tribune Company (owner of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times) filed for bankruptcy in late 2008, followed by the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s parent, and the Journal Register Company, which at the time owned twenty daily papers and 159 non-daily papers in the northeast. In January, the New York Times negotiated a $250 million loan—at unfavorable terms—from the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú in order to shore up its cash flow.
The question being hashed out on journalism blogs and over power lunches at Michael’s is how much this matters.
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October 18, 2009 at 12:00 am
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Founded in 1994, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History promotes the study and love of American history. The Institute serves teachers, students, scholars, and the general public. It helps create history-centered schools, organizes seminars and programs for educators, produces print and electronic publications and traveling exhibitions, sponsors lectures by eminent historians, and administers a History Teacher of the Year Award in every state through its partnership with Preserve America. The Institute also awards the Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and George Washington Book Prizes, and offers fellowships for scholars to work in the Gilder Lehrman Collection.
The Institute maintains this website to serve as a portal for American history on the Web; to offer high-quality educational material for teachers, students, historians, and the public; and to provide up-to-date information about the Institute's programs and activities.
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For a commuter rushing to catch a train, a minute can mean the difference between dinner with the family and leftovers in the microwave. What most passengers do not realize is that their minute is already there.
Every commuter train that departs from New York City — about 900 a day — leaves a minute later than scheduled. If the timetable says 8:14, the train will actually leave at 8:15. The 12:48 is really the 12:49.
In other words, if you think you have only a minute to get that train — well, relax. You have two.
The phantom minute, in place for decades and published only in private timetables for employees, is meant as a grace period for stragglers who need the extra time to scramble off the platform and onto the train. “If everyone knows they get an extra minute, they’re going to lollygag,” explained Marjorie Anders, a spokeswoman for the Metro-North Railroad. Told of this article, Ms. Anders laughed. “Don’t blow our cover!” she said.
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Members of the Maldives' Cabinet donned scuba gear and used hand signals Saturday at an underwater meeting staged to highlight the threat of global warming to the lowest-lying nation on earth.
President Mohammed Nasheed and 13 other government officials submerged and took their seats at a table on the sea floor — 20 feet (6 meters) below the surface of a lagoon off Girifushi, an island usually used for military training. With a backdrop of coral, the meeting was a bid to draw attention to fears that rising sea levels caused by the melting of polar ice caps could swamp this Indian Ocean archipelago within a century. Its islands average 7 feet (2.1 meters) above sea level. ''What we are trying to make people realize is that the Maldives is a frontline state. This is not merely an issue for the Maldives but for the world,'' Nasheed said. As bubbles floated up from their face masks, the president, vice president, Cabinet secretary and 11 ministers signed a document calling on all…
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