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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10930732468158173752014-11-16T17:22:08.712-06:00Fragments of TruthThe Greek expression Πάντα ῥεῖ (panta rhei) - "everything flows" has been attributed to the philosopher Heraclitus, but was probably coined after his time. It does, however, epitomize the essence of his philosophy: We live in a world of change. Our thoughts, our knowledge, our perceptions are in flux. Even boundaries between cultures, the sciences and humanities are fluid - which is why you will encounter different fragments of human creativity in this blog.Sisyphoshttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-18495570815383137192014-10-18T13:38:00.001-05:002014-10-18T13:38:29.608-05:00Does Literary Fiction Challenge Racial Stereotypes?A book is a mirror: if a fool looks in, do not expect an apostle to look out.
 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

Reading literary fiction can be highly pleasurable, but does it also make you a better person? Conventional wisdom and intuition lead us to believe that reading can indeed improve us. However, as the philosopher Emrys Westacott has recently pointed out in his essay for 3Quarksdaily, we may overestimate the capacity of literary fiction to foster moral improvement. A slew of scientific studies have taken on the task of studying the impact of literary fiction on our emotions and thoughts. Some of the recent research has centered on the question of whether literary fiction can increase empathy. In 2013, Bal and Veltkamp published a paper in the journal PLOS One showing that subjects who read excerpts from literary texts scored higher on an empathy scale than those who had read a nonfiction text. This increase in empathy was predominantly found in the participants who felt "transported" (emotionally and cognitively involved) into the literary narrative. Another 2013 study published in the journal Science by Kidd and Castano suggested that reading literary fiction texts increased the ability to understand and relate to the thoughts and emotions of other humans when compared to reading either non-fiction or popular fiction texts.

Scientific assessments of how fiction affects empathy are fraught with difficulties and critics raise many legitimate questions. Do "empathy scales" used in psychology studies truly capture the psychological phenomenon of "empathy"? How long does the effect of reading literary fiction last and does it translate into meaningful shifts in behavior? How does one select appropriate literary fiction texts and control texts, and conduct such studies in a heterogeneous group of participants who probably have very diverse literary tastes? Kidd and Castano, for example, used an excerpt of The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht as a literary fiction text because the book was a finalist for the National Book Award, whereas an excerpt of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn was used as a 'popular fiction' text even though it was long-listed for the prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction.
The study "Changing Race Boundary Perception by Reading Narrative Fiction" led by the psychology researcher Dan Johnson from Washington and Lee University took a somewhat different approach. Instead of assessing global changes in empathy, Johnson and colleagues focused on a more specific question. Could the reading of a fictional narrative change the perception of racial stereotypes?

Johnson and his colleagues chose an excerpt from the novel "Saffron Dreams" by the Pakistani-American author Shaila Abdullah. In this novel, the protagonist is a recently widowed pregnant Muslim woman Arissa whose husband Faizan was working in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 and killed when the building collapsed. The excerpt from the novel provided to the participants in Johnson's research study describes a scene in which Arissa is traveling alone late at night and is attacked by a group of male teenagers. The teenagers mock and threaten her with a knife because of her Muslim head-scarf (hijab), use racial and ethnic slurs as well as make references to the 9/11 attacks. The narrative excerpt does not specifically mention the word Caucasian, but one of the attackers is identified as blond and another one has a swastika tattoo. They do not believe her when she tries to explain that she was also a victim of the 9/11 attacks and instead refer to her as belonging to a "race of murderers".

The researchers used a second text in their experiment, a synopsis of the literary excerpt from Saffron Dreams. This allowed Johnson colleagues to distinguish between the effects of the literary narrative style with its inner monologue and description of emotions versus the effects of the content. Samples of the literary text and the synopsis used by the researchers can be found at the end of this article (scroll down) for those readers who would like to compare their own reactions to the two texts.
The researchers recruited 68 U.S. participants (mean age 36 years, roughly half were female, 81% Caucasian, reporting seven different religious affiliations but none of them were Muslim) and randomly assigned them to the full literary narrative group (33 participants) or the synopsis group (35 participants). After the participants read the texts, they were asked to complete a number of questions about the text and its impact on them. They were also presented with 18 male faces that the researchers had designed with a special software in a manner that they appeared ambiguous in terms of Caucasian or Arab characteristics. For example, the faces combined blue eyes with darker skin tones.

The participants were asked to grade the faces as being:
1) Arab
2) mixed, more Arab than Caucasian
3) mixed, more Caucasian than Arab
4) Caucasian

The participants were also asked to estimate the genetic overlap between Caucasians and Arabs on a scale from 0% to 100%.

Participants in the narrative fiction group were more likely to choose one of the ambiguous options (mixed, more Arab than Caucasian or mixed, more Caucasian than Arab) and less likely to choose the categorical options (Arab or Caucasian) than those who read the synopsis. Even more interesting is the finding that the average percentage of genetic overlap between Caucasians and Arabs estimated by the synopsis group was 33%, whereas it was 57% in the narrative fiction group.

Both of these estimates are way off. The genetic overlap between any one human being and another human being on our planet is approximately 99.9%. Even much of the 0.1% variation in the human genome sequences is not due to 'racial' differences. As pointed out in a Nature Genetics article by Lynn Jorde and Stephen Wooding, approximately 90% of total genetic variation between humans would be present in a collection of individuals from any one continent (Asia, Europe or Africa). Only an additional 10% genetic variation would be found if the collection consisted of a mixture of Europeans, Asians and Africans.

It is surprising that both groups of study participants heavily underestimated the genetic overlap between Arabs and Caucasians, and that simply reading the fictional text changed their views of the human genome. This latter finding is also a red flag that informs us about the poor state of general knowledge of genetics, which appears to be so fragile that views can be swayed by nonscientific literary texts.

This study is the first to systematically test the impact of reading literary fiction on an individual's assessment of race boundaries and genetic similarity. It suggests that fiction can indeed blur the perception of race boundaries and challenge our stereotypes. The text chosen by the researchers is especially well-suited to defy stereotypical views held by the readers. The protagonist's Muslim husband was killed in the 9/11 attacks and she herself is being harassed by non-Muslim thugs. This may challenge assumptions held by some readers that only non-Muslims were the victims of the 9/11 attacks.

The effect of reading the narrative text seemed to have effects on the readers that went far beyond the content matter – the story of a Muslim woman who is showing significant courage while being threatened. The faces shown to the study participants were those of men, and the question of genetic overlap between Caucasians and Arabs was a rather abstract question which had little to do with Arissa's story. Perhaps Arissa's story had a broader effect on the readers. The study did not measure the impact of the narrative on additional stereotypes or assumptions held by the readers such as those regarding other races or sexual orientations, but this is a question that ought to be investigated.
One of the limitations of the study is that it assessed the impact of the story only at a single time-point, immediately after reading the text. Without measuring the effect a few days or weeks later, it is difficult to ascertain whether this was a lasting effect. Another limitation of this study is that it purposefully chose an anti-stereotypical text, but did not test the opposite hypothesis, that some fictional narratives may potentially foster negative stereotypes.

One of my earliest memories of an English-language novel about Muslim characters is the spy novel "The Mahdi" by the British author A.J Quinnell (pen name for Philip Nicholson) written in 1981. The basic plot is that (spoiler alert) US and British intelligence agencies want to manipulate and control the Muslim world by installing a 'Mahdi', the long-awaited spiritual and political leader of Muslims foretold by Muslim tradition. The ridiculous part of the plan is that the puppet leader is accepted by the Muslim world as the true incarnation of the Mahdi because of a green laser beam emanating from a satellite. The beam incinerates a sacrificial animal in front of a crowd of millions of Muslims at the Hajj pilgrimage and convinces them (and the rest of the Muslim world) that God sent this green laser beam as a sign. This novel portrayed Muslims as gullible idiots who would simply accept the divine nature of a green laser beam. One can only wonder what impact reading an excerpt from that novel would have had on the perception of race boundaries by study participants.

The study by Johnson and colleagues is an important contribution to the research of how reading can change our perceptions of race and possibly stereotypes in general. It shows that reading fiction can blur the perception of race boundaries, but it also raises a number of additional questions about how long this effect lasts, how pervasive it is and whether fiction might also have the opposite effect. Hopefully, these questions will be addressed in future research studies.

Image Credit: Saffron Woman by N.M. Rehman (generated from an attribution-free, public domain photograph)

Reference:

Dan R. Johnson , Brandie L. Huffman & Danny M. Jasper (2014)
Changing Race Boundary Perception by Reading Narrative Fiction, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 36:1, 83-90, DOI:10.1080/01973533.2013.856791

Excerpt of the literary fiction sample from "Saffron Dreams" by Shaila Abdullah
 This is just an excerpt from the narrative sample used by the researchers, which was 3,108 words in length (pages 57-64 from the book):

"I got off the northbound No. 2 IRT and found out almost immediately that I was not alone. The late October evening inside the station felt unusually weighty on my senses.
I heard heavy breathing behind me. Angry, smoky, scared. I could tell there were several of them, probably four. Not pros, perhaps in their teens. They walked closer sometimes, and other times the heavy thud of spiked boots on concrete and clanking chains receded into the distance. They walked like boys wanting to be men. They fell short. Why was there no fear in my heart? Probably because there was no more room in my heart for terror. When horror comes face-to-face with you and causes a loved one's death, fear leaves your heart. In its place, merciful God places pain. Throbbing, pulsating, oozing pus, a wound that stays fresh and raw no matter how carefully you treat it. How can you be afraid when you have no one to be fearful for? The safety of your loved ones is what breeds fear in your heart. They are the weak links in your life. Unraveled from them, you are fearless. You can dangle by a thread, hang from the rooftop, bungee jump, skydive, walk a pole, hold your hand over the flame of a candle. Burnt, scalded, crashed, lost, dead, the only loss would be to your own self. Certain things you are not allowed to say or do. Defiant as I am, I say and do them anyway.
And so I traveled with a purse that I held protectively on one side. My hijab covered my head and body as the cool breeze threatened to unveil me. I laughed inwardly as I realized I was more afraid of losing the veil than of being mugged. The funny part of it is, I desperately wanted to lose my hijab when I came to America, but Faizan had stood in my way. For generations, women in his household had worn the veil, although none of them seemed particularly devout. It's just something that was done, no questions asked, no explanations needed. My argument was that we should try to assimilate into the new culture as much as possible, not stand out. Now that he was gone, losing the hijab meant losing a portion of our time together.
It had been just 41 days. My iddat, bereavement period, was over. Technically I was a free woman, not tied to anyone, but what could I do about the skeletons in my closet that wouldn't leave me alone?"
Excerpt of the Synopsis used by the researchers as a comparator:
This is the corresponding excerpt from the synopsis used by the researchers. The full-length synopsis was 491 words long:

"The scene starts with Arissa getting off the subway train. She is being followed. Most commuters have already returned home, so it is not the safest time to be traveling alone. Four people are walking behind her. Initially confused by the lack of fear in her heart, she realizes that it is the consequence of losing someone so close to her. It is ironic that she is wearing her hijab, a Muslim veil. She wanted to get rid of it when she came to America, but her husband, Faizon, insisted she keep it. Following his death, keeping the hijab was a way of keeping some of their time together. It has been 41 days since the attack, and Arissa's iddat, bereavement period, is over. She is a free woman, but cannot put aside her grave feelings of loss."

Note: An earlier version of this article was first published on the 3Quarksdaily blog.

<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Basic+and+Applied+Social+Psychology&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1080%2F01973533.2013.856791&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=Changing+Race+Boundary+Perception+by+Reading+Narrative+Fiction&rft.issn=0197-3533&rft.date=2014&rft.volume=36&rft.issue=1&rft.spage=83&rft.epage=90&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tandfonline.com%2Fdoi%2Fabs%2F10.1080%2F01973533.2013.856791&rft.au=Johnson%2C+D.&rft.au=Huffman%2C+B.&rft.au=Jasper%2C+D.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Psychology%2CSocial+Science%2CCognitive+Psychology%2C+Political+Science%2C+Sociology%2C+Personality%2C+Social+Psychology%2C+Human+Factors%2C+Emotion%2C+Consciousness">Johnson, D., Huffman, B., & Jasper, D. (2014). Changing Race Boundary Perception by Reading Narrative Fiction Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 36 (1), 83-90 DOI: 10.1080/01973533.2013.856791Sisyphoshttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-36239805846853632862014-10-18T13:27:00.002-05:002014-10-18T13:27:44.665-05:00Buddhist Musings in RamadanRamadan is the month of fasting and a time for spiritual growth among Muslims. The traditionalist approach to "spiritual growth" is for Muslims to complement their fasting with performing additional prayers at night and regular reading of the Quran throughout the month. My own approach is somewhat different, I tend to complement my fasting with the reading of writings and scriptures from other philosophies or faith traditions, including atheist and humanist teachings. This year, I decided to study the Dhammapada (in the translation of Gil Fronsdal), one of the most widely read and revered writings in the Buddhist faith.

Buddha Statue from the Takht-i-Bahi monastery in Pakistan

I was inspired to learn more about Buddhism because I was reading the remarkable novel "A Tale for the Time Being" by Ruth Ozeki, who is not only a brilliant author but also an ordained Zen Buddhist priest. The first person narrator in the novel is a 16-year old Japanese girl Nao who is bullied by her classmates. Nao's parents moved from Japan to Silicon Valley but were forced to return to Japan when the Dotcom bubble burst. Nao's father loses his job and the family is forced to live in poverty. The family's poverty and the fact that Nao is seen as an alien "transfer student" lead to her being ostracized at school. But her classmates go even further and begin psychologically and physically torturing her, leaving scars and scabs all over her body.

A photo of the Takht-i-Bahi monastery, the most complete ancient Buddhist monastic center in Pakistan and a UNESCO World heritage site

Nao is invited to spend the summer with her 104-year old great-grandmother Jiko who is a Buddhist nun. In the following scene, Jiko takes a bath with Nao and notices the scars:

"I waited. Old Jiko liked to take her time, and she was really good at it because she'd been practicing for so many years, so as a result, I was always waiting for her, and you'd think that waiting would be annoying for a young person like me, but for some reason I didn't mind. It wasn't like I had anything better to do that summer. I sat there on my little wooden stool, naked and hugging my knees and shivering, not from the cold but in anticipation of the scalding heat of the water, so when, instead, I felt her fingertip touch a small scar in the middle of my back, I was startled. My body stiffened. The light was so dim, how could she see my scars with her bad eyes? I figured she couldn't, but then I felt her finger move across my skin in a pattern, hesitant, pausing here and there to connect the dots."You must be very angry," she said. She spoke so quietly, it was like she was talking to herself, and maybe she was. Or maybe she hadn't said anything at all, and I'd just imagined it. Either way, my throat squeezed shut and I couldn't answer, so I shook my head. I was so ashamed, but at the same time, this enormous feeling of sadness brimmed up inside me, and I had to hold my breath to stop from crying.
She didn't say anything else. She washed me gently, and for the first time I just wanted her to hurry up and finish. After we were done, I got dressed quickly and said good night and left her there. I thought I was going to throw up. I didn't want to go back to my room, so I ran halfway down the mountainside and hid in the bamboo forest until it got dark and the fireflies came out. When Muji rang the big bell at the end of her fire watch to signal the end of the day, I snuck back into the temple and crawled into bed.
The next morning I went looking for old Jiko and found her in her room. She was sitting on the floor with her back to the door, bent over her low table. She was reading. I stood in the doorway and didn't even bother to go in. "Yes," I told her. "I'm angry, so what?"

(excerpted from novel "A Tale for the Time Being" by Ruth Ozeki)

Once Nao is able to speak about her anger to Jiko, Nao's healing process can begin. The story makes frequent references to Buddhist teachings, quoting from Buddhist texts as well as allowing the reader to gradually imbibe important spiritual concepts. To better understand these concepts, I decided to read the Dhammapada.

I first began with the chapter on "Anger" where I was struck by the following verses:

"The one who keeps anger in check as it arises,
 As one would a careening chariot,
I call a charioteer.
 Others are merely rein-holders."

How often do we let our anger chariot determine our paths? I can remember countless times when I have been passively holding the reins but rarely take control of this chariot.
I will just leave you with one more excerpt from the Dhammapada, but I advise you to read it (and, of course, Ozeki's novel!) in its entirety:

From the chapter "The Sage":

"As a solid mass of rock,
 Is not moved by the wind,
So a sage is not moved
 By praise or blame."

***************
Image credit: 1) Buddha statue now housed in Berlin, image by Gryffindor via Wikimedia, 2) Takht-i-Bahi monastery ruins in Northern Pakistan, image by Ziegler175 via Wikimedia.

Sisyphoshttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-33719435983564874952014-10-18T13:13:00.002-05:002014-10-18T13:22:31.257-05:00The Road to Bad Science Is Paved with Obedience and SecrecyWe often laud intellectual diversity of a scientific research group because we hope that the multitude of opinions can help point out flaws and improve the quality of research long before it is finalized and written up as a manuscript. The recent events surrounding the research in one of the world's most famous stem cell research laboratories at Harvard shows us the disastrous effects of suppressing diverse and dissenting opinions.
The infamous "Orlic paper" was a landmark research article published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature in 2001, which showed that stem cells contained in the bone marrow could be converted into functional heart cells. After a heart attack, injections of bone marrow cells reversed much of the heart attack damage by creating new heart cells and restoring heart function. It was called the "Orlic paper" because the first author of the paper was Donald Orlic, but the lead investigator of the study was Piero Anversa, a professor and highly respected scientist at New York Medical College.

#94119222 / gettyimages.com

Anversa had established himself as one of the world's leading experts on the survival and death of heart muscle cells in the 1980s and 1990s, but with the start of the new millennium, Anversa shifted his laboratory's focus towards the emerging field of stem cell biology and its role in cardiovascular regeneration. The Orlic paper was just one of several highly influential stem cell papers to come out of Anversa's lab at the onset of the new millenium. A 2002 Anversa paper in the New England Journal of Medicine – the world's most highly cited academic journal –investigated the hearts of human organ transplant recipients. This study showed that up to 10% of the cells in the transplanted heart were derived from the recipient's own body. The only conceivable explanation was that after a patient received another person's heart, the recipient's own cells began maintaining the health of the transplanted organ. The Orlic paper had shown the regenerative power of bone marrow cells in mouse hearts, but this new paper now offered the more tantalizing suggestion that even human hearts could be regenerated by circulating stem cells in their blood stream.

A 2003 publication in Cell by the Anversa group described another ground-breaking discovery, identifying a reservoir of stem cells contained within the heart itself. This latest coup de force found that the newly uncovered heart stem cell population resembled the bone marrow stem cells because both groups of cells bore the same stem cell protein called c-kit and both were able to make new heart muscle cells. According to Anversa, c-kit cells extracted from a heart could be re-injected back into a heart after a heart attack and regenerate more than half of the damaged heart!

These Anversa papers revolutionized cardiovascular research. Prior to 2001, most cardiovascular researchers believed that the cell turnover in the adult mammalian heart was minimal because soon after birth, heart cells stopped dividing. Some organs or tissues such as the skin contained stem cells which could divide and continuously give rise to new cells as needed. When skin is scraped during a fall from a bike, it only takes a few days for new skin cells to coat the area of injury and heal the wound. Unfortunately, the heart was not one of those self-regenerating organs. The number of heart cells was thought to be more or less fixed in adults. If heart cells were damaged by a heart attack, then the affected area was replaced by rigid scar tissue, not new heart muscle cells. If the area of damage was large, then the heart's pump function was severely compromised and patients developed the chronic and ultimately fatal disease known as "heart failure".

Anversa's work challenged this dogma by putting forward a bold new theory: the adult heart was highly regenerative, its regeneration was driven by c-kit stem cells, which could be isolated and used to treat injured hearts. All one had to do was harness the regenerative potential of c-kit cells in the bone marrow and the heart, and millions of patients all over the world suffering from heart failure might be cured. Not only did Anversa publish a slew of supportive papers in highly prestigious scientific journals to challenge the dogma of the quiescent heart, he also happened to publish them at a unique time in history which maximized their impact.

In the year 2001, there were few innovative treatments available to treat patients with heart failure. The standard approach was to use medications that would delay the progression of heart failure. But even the best medications could not prevent the gradual decline of heart function. Organ transplants were a cure, but transplantable hearts were rare and only a small fraction of heart failure patients would be fortunate enough to receive a new heart. Hopes for a definitive heart failure cure were buoyed when researchers isolated human embryonic stem cells in 1998. This discovery paved the way for using highly pliable embryonic stem cells to create new heart muscle cells, which might one day be used to restore the heart's pump function without resorting to a heart transplant.

The dreams of using embryonic stem cells to regenerate human hearts were soon squashed when the Bush administration banned the generation of new human embryonic stem cells in 2001, citing ethical concerns. These federal regulations and the lobbying of religious and political groups against human embryonic stem cells were a major blow to research on cardiovascular regeneration. Amidst this looming hiatus in cardiovascular regeneration, Anversa's papers appeared and showed that one could steer clear of the ethical controversies surrounding embryonic stem cells by using an adult patient's own stem cells. The Anversa group re-energized the field of cardiovascular stem cell research and cleared the path for the first human stem cell treatments in heart disease.

Instead of having to wait for the US government to reverse its restrictive policy on human embryonic stem cells, one could now initiate clinical trials with adult stem cells, treating heart attack patients with their own cells and without having to worry about an ethical quagmire. Heart failure might soon become a disease of the past. The excitement at all major national and international cardiovascular conferences was palpable whenever the Anversa group, their collaborators or other scientists working on bone marrow and cardiac stem cells presented their dizzyingly successful results. Anversa received numerous accolades for his discoveries and research grants from the NIH (National Institutes of Health) to further develop his research program. He was so successful that some researchers believed Anversa might receive the Nobel Prize for his iconoclastic work which had redefined the regenerative potential of the heart. Many of the world's top universities were vying to recruit Anversa and his group, and he decided to relocate his research group to Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital 2008.

There were naysayers and skeptics who had resisted the adult stem cell euphoria. Some researchers had spent decades studying the heart and found little to no evidence for regeneration in the adult heart. They were having difficulties reconciling their own results with those of the Anversa group. A number of practicing cardiologists who treated heart failure patients were also skeptical because they did not see the near-miraculous regenerative power of the heart in their patients. One Anversa paper went as far as suggesting that the whole heart would completely regenerate itself roughly every 8-9 years, a claim that was at odds with the clinical experience of practicing cardiologists. Other researchers pointed out serious flaws in the Anversa papers. For example, the 2002 paper on stem cells in human heart transplant patients claimed that the hearts were coated with the recipient's regenerative cells, including cells which contained the stem cell marker Sca-1. Within days of the paper's publication, many researchers were puzzled by this finding because Sca-1 was a marker of mouse and rat cells – not human cells! If Anversa's group was finding rat or mouse proteins in human hearts, it was most likely due to an artifact. And if they had mistakenly found rodent cells in human hearts, so these critics surmised, perhaps other aspects of Anversa's research were similarly flawed or riddled with artifacts.

At national and international meetings, one could observe heated debates between members of the Anversa camp and their critics. The critics then decided to change their tactics. Instead of just debating Anversa and commenting about errors in the Anversa papers, they invested substantial funds and efforts to replicate Anversa's findings. One of the most important and rigorous attempts to assess the validity of the Orlic paper was published in 2004, by the research teams of Chuck Murry and Loren Field. Murry and Field found no evidence of bone marrow cells converting into heart muscle cells. This was a major scientific blow to the burgeoning adult stem cell movement, but even this paper could not deter the bone marrow cell champions.

Despite the fact that the refutation of the Orlic paper was published in 2004, the Orlic paper continues to carry the dubious distinction of being one of the most cited papers in the history of stem cell research. At first, Anversa and his colleagues would shrug off their critics' findings or publish refutations of refutations – but over time, an increasing number of research groups all over the world began to realize that many of the central tenets of Anversa's work could not be replicated and the number of critics and skeptics increased. As the signs of irreplicability and other concerns about Anversa's work mounted, Harvard and Brigham and Women's Hospital were forced to initiate an internal investigation which resulted in the retraction of one Anversa paper and an expression of concern about another major paper. Finally, a research group published a paper in May 2014 using mice in which c-kit cells were genetically labeled so that one could track their fate and found that c-kit cells have a minimal – if any – contribution to the formation of new heart cells: a fraction of a percent!

The skeptics who had doubted Anversa's claims all along may now feel vindicated, but this is not the time to gloat. Instead, the discipline of cardiovascular stem cell biology is now undergoing a process of soul-searching. How was it possible that some of the most widely read and cited papers were based on heavily flawed observations and assumptions? Why did it take more than a decade since the first refutation was published in 2004 for scientists to finally accept that the near-magical regenerative power of the heart turned out to be a pipe dream.

One reason for this lag time is pretty straightforward: It takes a tremendous amount of time to refute papers. Funding to conduct the experiments is difficult to obtain because grant funding agencies are not easily convinced to invest in studies replicating existing research. For a refutation to be accepted by the scientific community, it has to be at least as rigorous as the original, but in practice, refutations are subject to even greater scrutiny. Scientists trying to disprove another group's claim may be asked to develop even better research tools and technologies so that their results can be seen as more definitive than those of the original group. Instead of relying on antibodies to identify c-kit cells, the 2014 refutation developed a transgenic mouse in which all c-kit cells could be genetically traced to yield more definitive results - but developing new models and tools can take years.

The scientific peer review process by external researchers is a central pillar of the quality control process in modern scientific research, but one has to be cognizant of its limitations. Peer review of a scientific manuscript is routinely performed by experts for all the major academic journals which publish original scientific results. However, peer review only involves a "review", i.e. a general evaluation of major strengths and flaws, and peer reviewers do not see the original raw data nor are they provided with the resources to replicate the studies and confirm the veracity of the submitted results. Peer reviewers rely on the honor system, assuming that the scientists are submitting accurate representations of their data and that the data has been thoroughly scrutinized and critiqued by all the involved researchers before it is even submitted to a journal for publication. If peer reviewers were asked to actually wade through all the original data generated by the scientists and even perform confirmatory studies, then the peer review of every single manuscript could take years and one would have to find the money to pay for the replication or confirmation experiments conducted by peer reviewers. Publication of experiments would come to a grinding halt because thousands of manuscripts would be stuck in the purgatory of peer review. Relying on the integrity of the scientists submitting the data and their internal review processes may seem naïve, but it has always been the bedrock of scientific peer review. And it is precisely the internal review process which may have gone awry in the Anversa group.

Pygmalion and Glatea by Louis Gauffier (via Wikimedia - Public Domain)

Just like Pygmalion fell in love with Galatea, researchers fall in love with the hypotheses and theories that they have constructed. To minimize the effects of these personal biases, scientists regularly present their results to colleagues within their own groups at internal lab meetings and seminars or at external institutions and conferences long before they submit their data to a peer-reviewed journal. The preliminary presentations are intended to spark discussions, inviting the audience to challenge the veracity of the hypotheses and the data while the work is still in progress. Sometimes fellow group members are truly skeptical of the results, at other times they take on the devil's advocate role to see if they can find holes in their group's own research. The larger a group, the greater the chance that one will find colleagues within a group with dissenting views. This type of feedback is a necessary internal review process which provides valuable insights that can steer the direction of the research.
Considering the size of the Anversa group – consisting of 20, 30 or even more PhD students, postdoctoral fellows and senior scientists – it is puzzling why the discussions among the group members did not already internally challenge their hypotheses and findings, especially in light of the fact that they knew extramural scientists were having difficulties replicating the work.
Retraction Watch is one of the most widely read scientific watchdogs which tracks scientific misconduct and retractions of published scientific papers. Recently, Retraction Watch published the account of an anonymous whistleblower who had worked as a research fellow in Anversa's group and provided some unprecedented insights into the inner workings of the group, which explain why the internal review process had failed:

"I think that most scientists, perhaps with the exception of the most lucky or most dishonest, have personal experience with failure in science—experiments that are unreproducible, hypotheses that are fundamentally incorrect. Generally, we sigh, we alter hypotheses, we develop new methods, we move on. It is the data that should guide the science.
 In the Anversa group, a model with much less intellectual flexibility was applied. The "Hypothesis" was that c-kit (cd117) positive cells in the heart (or bone marrow if you read their earlier studies) were cardiac progenitors that could: 1) repair a scarred heart post-myocardial infarction, and: 2) supply the cells necessary for cardiomyocyte turnover in the normal heart.
 This central theme was that which supplied the lab with upwards of $50 million worth of public funding over a decade, a number which would be much higher if one considers collaborating labs that worked on related subjects.
 In theory, this hypothesis would be elegant in its simplicity and amenable to testing in current model systems. In practice, all data that did not point to the "truth" of the hypothesis were considered wrong, and experiments which would definitively show if this hypothesis was incorrect were never performed (lineage tracing e.g.)."
Discarding data that might have challenged the central hypothesis appears to have been a central principle.

According to the whistleblower, Anversa's group did not just discard undesirable data, they actually punished group members who would question the group's hypotheses:

"In essence, to Dr. Anversa all investigators who questioned the hypothesis were "morons," a word he used frequently at lab meetings. For one within the group to dare question the central hypothesis, or the methods used to support it, was a quick ticket to dismissal from your position."
The group also created an environment of strict information hierarchy and secrecy which is antithetical to the spirit of science:

"The day to day operation of the lab was conducted under a severe information embargo. The lab had Piero Anversa at the head with group leaders Annarosa Leri, Jan Kajstura and Marcello Rota immediately supervising experimentation. Below that was a group of around 25 instructors, research fellows, graduate students and technicians. Information flowed one way, which was up, and conversation between working groups was generally discouraged and often forbidden.
 Raw data left one's hands, went to the immediate superior (one of the three named above) and the next time it was seen would be in a manuscript or grant. What happened to that data in the intervening period is unclear.
 A side effect of this information embargo was the limitation of the average worker to determine what was really going on in a research project. It would also effectively limit the ability of an average worker to make allegations regarding specific data/experiments, a requirement for a formal investigation."
This segregation of information is a powerful method to maintain an authoritarian rule and is more typical for terrorist cells or intelligence agencies than for a scientific lab, but it would definitely explain how the Anversa group was able to mass produce numerous irreproducible papers without any major dissent from within the group.
In addition to the secrecy and segregation of information, the group also created an atmosphere of fear to ensure obedience:

"Although individually-tailored stated and unstated threats were present for lab members, the plight of many of us who were international fellows was especially harrowing. Many were technically and educationally underqualified compared to what might be considered average research fellows in the United States. Many also originated in Italy where Dr. Anversa continues to wield considerable influence over biomedical research.
 This combination of being undesirable to many other labs should they leave their position due to lack of experience/training, dependent upon employment for U.S. visa status, and under constant threat of career suicide in your home country should you leave, was enough to make many people play along.
 Even so, I witnessed several people question the findings during their time in the lab. These people and working groups were subsequently fired or resigned. I would like to note that this lab is not unique in this type of exploitative practice, but that does not make it ethically sound and certainly does not create an environment for creative, collaborative, or honest science."
Foreign researchers are particularly dependent on their employment to maintain their visa status and the prospect of being fired from one's job can be terrifying for anyone.
This is an anonymous account of a whistleblower and as such, it is problematic. The use of anonymous sources in science journalism could open the doors for all sorts of unfounded and malicious accusations, which is why the ethics of using anonymous sources was heavily debated at the recent ScienceOnline conference. But the claims of the whistleblower are not made in a vacuum – they have to be evaluated in the context of known facts. The whistleblower's claim that the Anversa group and their collaborators received more than $50 million to study bone marrow cell and c-kit cell regeneration of the heart can be easily verified at the public NIH grant funding RePORTer website. The whistleblower's claim that many of the Anversa group's findings could not be replicated is also a verifiable fact. It may seem unfair to condemn Anversa and his group for creating an atmosphere of secrecy and obedience which undermined the scientific enterprise, caused torment among trainees and wasted millions of dollars of tax payer money simply based on one whistleblower's account. However, if one looks at the entire picture of the amazing rise and decline of the Anversa group's foray into cardiac regeneration, then the whistleblower's description of the atmosphere of secrecy and hierarchy seems very plausible.

The investigation of Harvard into the Anversa group is not open to the public and therefore it is difficult to know whether the university is primarily investigating scientific errors or whether it is also looking into such claims of egregious scientific misconduct and abuse of scientific trainees. It is unlikely that Anversa's group is the only group that might have engaged in such forms of misconduct. Threatening dissenting junior researchers with a loss of employment or visa status may be far more common than we think. The gravity of the problem requires that the NIH – the major funding agency for biomedical research in the US – should look into the prevalence of such practices in research labs and develop safeguards to prevent the abuse of science and scientists.Sisyphoshttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-26522666071522790382014-07-24T10:57:00.003-05:002014-07-24T10:57:57.303-05:00FC Bayern Munich: Too Jewish for the NazisKonrad Heitkamp was taken aback by the extraordinary ordinariness present in the lobby of the Zurich hotel. In November of 1943, life in Zurich seemed unperturbed by the fact that the countries surrounding Switzerland were embroiled in one of the most devastating wars in the history of the world. Heitkamp realized that as the coach of the FC Bayern München soccer team, he was one of the privileged few who could bask in this oasis of normalcy for a few days before he would have to head back home to Munich. He surveyed the lobby and began waving his hand at some of his players standing across the vestibule. Hopefully, the Gestapo men watching him thought of this as an innocuous gesture, a soccer team coach acknowledging the arrival of his players and performing a headcount. But he could not bank on it.

The Gestapo must have known that for the past weeks, Heitkamp and his players were forward to the friendly match against the Swiss national soccer team because it would give them a chance to finally see their friend Kurt Landauer again. Before the team embarked on their trip to Zurich, the Gestapo had ordered all Bayern München players to attend a special "education" session in Gestapo headquarters of Munich. The team was informed that the Gestapo would accompany the team on their brief trip to Switzerland. The Gestapo explicitly forbade the team members to have any contact with German emigrants in Switzerland.

The Nazis were always weary of any potential contacts between Germans and German emigrants who were seen as traitors and collaborators of the Allied forces. But FC Bayern München was a special thorn in the flesh of the Nazi machinery. Nazis routinely referred to FC Bayern München as a "Judenclub" ("Jew Club"), because German Jews had held some of the key leadership positions. The club won its first German national soccer championship in 1932 under the leadership of the Jewish club president Kurt Landauer and the coach Richard Dombi, an Austrian Jew. Only a few months later in January 1933, Hitler came to power and soon all leaders of Jewish origin were forced to give up their leadership positions.

Kurt Landauer was one of the first to resign from the club presidency. He even lost his job as the manager of a Munich newspaper's advertising department, and was only able to find work in a textile shop owned by a Jewish family. In the wake of the anti-semitic pogroms in the night of the 9th November 1938 (Kristallnacht oder Reichspogromnacht), this shop was attacked and devastated. Landauer was arrested and sent to the Dachau concentration camp. After a brief period of internment, he was released and he used this opportunity to emigrate to Switzerland and survived the Holocaust. Most of his siblings were less fortunate and were murdered by the Nazis.

Konrad Heitkamp and his wife Magdalena are about to walk towards their hotel room, when a bellhop appears in front of them and hands Heitkamp a note. It is a message from Kurt Landauer. Heitkamp tries to suppress his excitement , but it is already too late. Before he can even read the note, a man taps him on the shoulder and says "Gestapo. Give me the note. We know who it is from and we absolutely forbid you to have any contact with that man. We are watching you!"

For the remainder of the trip, the Gestapo closely walls off Heitkamp and his players, making it impossible for them to have any contact with Landauer. But the players still manage to embarrass the Nazis and the Gestapo. Immediately after the whistle is blown to start the game, the FC Bayern München players run up to the area of the soccer field in front of Kurt Landauer and greet their former president from afar.

The book "Der FC Bayern und seine Juden: Aufstieg und Zerschlagung einer liberalen Fußballkultur" (FC Bayern and its Jews: The Rise and Destruction of a Liberal Soccer Culture) by the German soccer historian Dietrich Schulze-Marmeling describes the prevalent culture of tolerance at FC Bayern München in the years prior to the Nazi takeover of Germany. Many members, players and leaders of the club were Jewish, but the question of ethnicity or religion was not even a real issue for the club. All that really mattered was whether or not you were a member of the club. Once the Nazis came to power in 1933, they tried to install their henchmen at leadership positions of all institutions, including sport clubs. TSV 1860, the other big Munich soccer club, immediately acquiesced to the new Nazi masters, allowing SA men to take control of the club from 1934 onwards. Players and members of FC Bayern München, on the other hand, staving off Nazi leadership up until 1943. The Nazis were often frustrated by the recalcitrant "Judenclub" which resisted and delayed the implementation of Nazi ordinances.

I have been an FC Bayern München fan all my life. My childhood home in Munich was just a ten minute walk away from the club's headquarters at the Säbener Strasse. It is not difficult to be proud of its achievements. In 2013, the club won every major trophy that it was eligible for - Bundesliga champions, the German soccer federation cup (DFB-Pokal), the European Champions League and the 2013 FIFA Club World Cup – thus underscoring its dominance as the world's best soccer club. But none of these victories made me as proud of my club as finding out about how my club defied anti-semitism and the Nazis.

Image: The headquarters of FC Bayern München in the Säbener Strasse (photo by J. Rehman)

Note: An earlier version of this article was first published on 3Quarksdaily.com.

Reference: Schulze-Marmeling, D. (2011). "Der FC Bayern und seine Juden: Aufstieg und Zerschlagung einer liberalen Fußballkultur". Werkstatt GmbHSisyphoshttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-42301088437093936022014-07-24T10:50:00.001-05:002014-07-24T10:50:09.366-05:00Is Internet-Centrism a Religion?On the evening of March 3 in 1514, Steven is sitting next to Friar Clay in a Nottingham pub, covering his face with his hands.

"I am losing the will to live", Steven sobs, "Death may be sweeter than life in this world of poverty, injustice and war."

"Do not despair, my friend", Clay says, "for the printing press will change everything."

*******

Let us now fast-forward 500 years and re-enact this hypothetical scene with some tiny modifications.

On the evening of March 3 in 2014, Steven is sitting next to TED-Talker Clay in a Nottingham pub, covering his face with his hands.

"I am losing the will to live", Steven sobs, "Death may be sweeter than life in this world of poverty, injustice and war."

"Do not despair, my friend", Clay says, "for the internet will change everything."

*******

Clay's advice in the first scene sounds ludicrous to us because we know that the printing press did not usher in an era of wealth, justice and peace. Being retrospectators, we realize that the printing press revolutionized how we disseminate information, but even the most efficient dissemination tool is just a means and not the ends.

It is more difficult for us to dismiss Clay's advice in the second scene because it echoes the familiar Silicon Valley slogans which inundate us with such persistence that some of us have begun to believe them. Clay's response is an example of what Evgeny Morozov refers to as "Internet-centrism", the unwavering belief that the Internet is not just an information dissemination tool but that it constitutes the path to salvation for humankind. In his book "To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism", Morozov suggests that "Internet-centrism" is taking on religion-like qualities:

"If the public debate is any indication, the finality of "the Internet"— the belief that it's the ultimate technology and the ultimate network— has been widely accepted. It's Silicon Valley's own version of the end of history: just as capitalism-driven liberal democracy in Francis Fukuyama's controversial account remains the only game in town, so does the capitalism-driven "Internet." It, the logic goes, is a precious gift from the gods that humanity should never abandon or tinker with. Thus, while "the Internet" might disrupt everything, it itself should never be disrupted. It's here to stay— and we'd better work around it, discover its real nature, accept its features as given, learn its lessons, and refurbish our world accordingly. If it sounds like a religion, it's because it is."
Morozov does not equate mere internet usage with "Internet-centrism". People routinely use the internet for work or leisure without ascribing mythical powers to it, but it is when the latter occurs that internet usage transforms into "Internet-centrism".

Does Morozov's portrayal of "Internet-centrism" as a religion correspond to our current understanding of religions? "Internet-centrism" does not involve deities, sacred scripture or traditional prayers, but social scientists and scholars of religion do not require deism, scriptures or prayers to categorize a body of beliefs and practices as a religion.

The German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) thought that the feeling of "absolute dependence" ("das schlechthinnige Abhängigkeitsgefühl") was one of the defining characteristics of a religion. In a January 2014 Pew Internet survey, 53% of adult internet users in said that it would be "very hard" to give up the internet, whereas only 38% felt this way in 2006. This does not necessarily meet the Schleiermacher threshold of "absolute dependence" but it indicates a growing perception of dependence among internet users, who are struggling to envision a life without the internet or a life beyond the internet.
Absolute dependence is not unique to religion, therefore it may be more helpful to turn to religion-specific definitions if we want to understand the religionesque characteristics of Internet-centrism. In his classic essay "Religion as a cultural system" (published in "The Interpretation of Cultures"), the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) defined religion as:

" (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, persuasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic."
 Today's Silicon Valley pundits (incidentally a Sanskrit term originally used for learned Hindu scholars well-versed in Vedic scriptures) excel at establishing "powerful, persuasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations" and endowing "conceptions of general order of existence" with an "aura of factuality". Morozov does not specifically reference the Geertz definition of religion, but he provides extensive internet pundit quotes which fit the bill. Here is one such example:

"To be a peer progressive, then, is to live with the conviction that Wikipedia is just the beginning, that we can learn from its success to build new systems that solve problems in education, governance, health, local communities, and countless other regions of human experience."
—Steven Johnson in "Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age"
One problem with abstract definitions of religion is that they do not encompass the practice of religion and its mythical or supernatural aspects, which are often essential parts of most religions. In "The Religious Experience", the religion scholar Ninian Smart (1927-2001) does not provide a handy definition for religions but instead offers six "dimensions" that are present in most major religions: 1) The Ritual Dimension, 2) The Mythological Dimension, 3) The Doctrinal Dimension, 4) The Ethical Dimension, 5) The Social Dimension and 6) The Experiential Dimension.

How do these dimensions of religion apply to Internet-centrism?

1) The Ritual Dimension: The need to continuously seek connectivity by accessing computers or seeking out wireless connectivity, checking emails or social media updates so frequently that this connectivity exceeds one's pragmatic needs could be considered a ritual of Internet-centrism. If one feels the need to check emails and Facebook or Twitter updates every one to two minutes, despite the fact that it is unlikely one would have received a message that required urgent action, it may be an indicator of the important role that this ritual plays in the life of an Internet-centrist. Worshippers of traditional religions feel uncomfortable if they miss out on regular prayers or lose their rosaries that allow them to commune with their God, and it appears that for some humans, the ritual of Internet-connectivity may play a similar role.

2) The Mythological Dimension: There is the physical internet, which consists of billions of physical components such as computers, servers, routers or cables that are connected to each other. Prophets and pundits of Internet-centrism also describe a mythical "Internet" which goes for beyond the physical internet, because it involves mythical narratives about the power of the internet as a higher force that is shaping human destiny. Just like "Scientism" attributes a certain mystique to real-world science, Internet-centrism adorns the physical internet with a similar mythological dimension.
Ideas of "cognitive surplus", crowdsourcing knowledge to improve the human condition, internet-based political revolutions that will put an end to injustice, oppression and poverty and other powerful metaphors are used to describe this poorly defined mythical entity that has little to do with the physical internet. The myth of egalitarianism is commonly perpetuated, yet the internet is anything but egalitarian. Social media hubs have millions of followers and certain corporations or organizations are experts at building filters and algorithms to control the information seen by consumers who have minimal power and control over the flow of information.

3) The Doctrinal Dimension: The doctrine of Internet-centrism is the relentless pursuit of sharedom through the internet. The idea is that the more we share, the more we collaborate and the more transparent we are via the internet, the easier it will be for us humans to conquer the challenges that face us. Challenging this basic doctrine that is promoted by Silicon Valley corporations can be perceived as heretical. It is a remarkable testimony to the proselytizing power of the prophets and pundits in Silicon Valley that people were outraged at the government institution NSA for violating our privacy. There was comparatively little concern about the fact that the primary benefactors of the growing culture of sharedom are the for-profit internet corporations that make money off our willingness to sacrifice our privacy.

4) The Ethical Dimension: In many religions, one is asked to follow aspects of a religious doctrine which have no direct ethical context. For example, seeking salvation by praying alone to a god on a mountain-top does not necessarily require adherence to ethical standards. On the other hand, most religions have developed moral imperatives that govern how adherents of a religion interact with fellow believers or non-believers. In Internet-centrism, the doctrinal dimension is conflated with the ethical dimension. Sharedom is not only a doctrinal imperative, it is also a moral imperative. We are told that sharing and collaborating is an ethical duty.
This may be unique to Internet-centrism since the internet (both in its physical or its mythical form) presupposes the existence of fellow beings with whom one can connect. If a catastrophe wiped out all humans but one, who happened to adhere to a traditional religion, she could still pray to a god (ritual), believe in salvation by a supernatural entity (mythological) and abide by the the religious laws (doctrinal). However, if she were an Internet-centrist, all her rituals, beliefs and doctrines would become meaningless.

5) The Social Dimension: Congregating in groups and social interactions are key for many religions, but Internet-centrism provides more tools than any other ideology, cultural movement or religion for us to interact with others. Whether we engage in this social activity by using social media such as Facebook or Twitter, by reading or writing blog posts, or by playing multi-player games online, Internet-centrism encourages us to fulfill our social needs by using the tools of the internet.

6) The Experiential Dimension: Most religions offer their adherents opportunities for highly personal, spiritual experiences. Internet-centrism avoids any talk of "spirituality", but the idea of a personalized experience is very much a part of Internet-centrism. One of its goals is to provide opportunities for self-actualization. We all may be connected via the internet, but Internet-centrists also want us to believe that this connectivity provides a path for self-actualization. We can modify settings to customize our web browsing experience, we can pick and choose from millions of options of what online courses we want to take, videos we want to watch or music we want to listen to. The sense of connectedness and omnipotentiality is what provides the adherent of Internet-centrism with a feeling of personal empowerment that comes close to a spiritual experience of traditional religions.

When one reviews the definitions by Schleiermacher or Geertz, or the multi-dimensional analysis by Ninian Smart, it does indeed seem that Morozov is right and that Internet-centrism is taking on many religion-like characteristics. There is probably still a big disconnect between the Silicon valley prophets or pundits who proselytize and the vast majority of internet users who primarily act as "consumers" but do not yet buy into the tenets of Internet-centrism. But it is likely that at least in the short-term, Internet-centrism will continue to grow, especially if Internet-centrist ideas are introduced to children in schools and they grow up believing that these ideas are both essential and sufficient for our intellectual and social wellbeing. Perhaps the pundits of Internet-centrism could discuss the future of this emerging religion with adherents of other faiths at a TEDxInterfaith conference.

Image Credits: Photo of Gutenberg Bible (Creative Commons license, via NYC Wanderer at Flickr)Sisyphoshttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-2392673840057908592014-06-16T21:39:00.001-05:002014-06-16T21:43:52.708-05:00Synthetic Biology: Engineering Life To Examine ItTwo scientific papers that were published in the journal Nature in the year 2000 marked the beginning of engineering biological circuits in cells. The paper "Construction of a genetic toggle switch in Escherichia coli" by Timothy Gardner, Charles Cantor and James Collins created a genetic toggle switch by simultaneously introducing an artificial DNA plasmid into a bacterial cell. This DNA plasmid contained two promoters (DNA sequences which regulate the expression of genes) and two repressors (genes that encode for proteins which suppress the expression of genes) as well as a gene encoding for green fluorescent protein that served as a read-out for the system. The repressors used were sensitive to either selected chemicals or temperature. In one of the experiments, the system was turned ON by adding the chemical IPTG (a modified sugar) and nearly all the cells became green fluorescent within five to six hours. Upon raising the temperature to activate the temperature-sensitive repressor, the cells began losing their green fluorescence within an hour and returned to the OFF state. Many labs had used chemical or temperature switches to turn gene expression on in the past, but this paper was the first to assemble multiple genes together and construct a switch which allowed switching cells back and forth between stable ON and OFF states.

The same issue of Nature contained a second land-mark paper which also described the engineering of gene circuits. The researchers Michael Elowitz and Stanislas Leibler describe the generation of an engineered gene oscillator in their article "A synthetic oscillatory network of transcriptional regulators". By introducing three repressor genes which constituted a negative feedback loop and a green fluorescent protein as a marker of the oscillation, the researchers created a molecular clock in bacteria with an oscillation period of roughly 150 minutes. The genes and proteins encoded by the genes were not part of any natural biological clock and none of them would have oscillated if they had been introduced into the bacteria on their own. The beauty of the design lay in the combination of three serially repressing genes and the periodicity of this engineered clock reflected the half-life of the protein encoded by each gene as well as the time it took for the protein to act on the subsequent member of the gene loop.

Both papers described the introduction of plasmids encoding for multiple genes into bacteria but this itself was not novel. In fact, this has been a routine practice since the 1970s for many molecular biology laboratories. The panache of the work lay in the construction of functional biological modules consisting of multiple genes which interacted with each other in a controlled and predictable manner. Since the publication of these two articles, hundreds of scientific papers have been published which describe even more intricate engineered gene circuits. These newer studies take advantage of the large number of molecular tools that have become available to query the genome as well as newer DNA plasmids which encode for novel biosensors and regulators.

Synthetic biology is an area of science devoted to engineering novel biological circuits, devices, systems, genomes or even whole organisms. This rather broad description of what "synthetic biology" encompasses reflects the multidisciplinary nature of this field which integrates ideas derived from biology, engineering, chemistry and mathematical modeling as well as a vast arsenal of experimental tools developed in each of these disciplines. Specific examples of "synthetic biology" include the engineering of microbial organisms that are able to mass produce fuels or other valuable raw materials, synthesizing large chunks of DNA to replace whole chromosomes or even the complete genome in certain cells, assembling synthetic cells or introducing groups of genes into cells so that these genes can form functional circuits by interacting with each other. Synthesis in the context of synthetic biology can signify the engineering of artificial genes or biological systems that do not exist in nature (i.e. synthetic = artificial or unnatural), but synthesis can also stand for integration and composition, a meaning which is closer to the Greek origin of the word. It is this latter aspect of synthetic biology which makes it an attractive area for basic scientists who are trying to understand the complexity of biological organisms. Instead of the traditional molecular biology focus on studying just one single gene and its function, synthetic biology is engineering biological composites that consist of multiple genes and regulatory elements of each gene. This enables scientists to interrogate the interactions of these genes, their regulatory elements and the proteins encoded by the genes with each other. Synthesis serves as a path to analysis.

One goal of synthetic biologists is to create complex circuits in cells to facilitate biocomputing, building biological computers that are as powerful or even more powerful that traditional computers. While such gene circuits and cells that have been engineered have some degree of memory and computing power, they are no match for the comparatively gigantic computing power of even small digital computers. Nevertheless, we have to keep in mind that the field is very young and advances are progressing at a rapid pace.
One of the major recent advances in synthetic biology occurred in 2013 when an MIT research team led by Rahul Sarpeshkar and Timothy Lu at MIT created analog computing circuits in cells.

Most synthetic biology groups that engineer gene circuits in cells to create biological computers have taken their cues from contemporary computer technology. Nearly all of the computers we use are digital computers, which process data using discrete values such as 0's and 1's. Analog data processing on the other hand uses a continuous range of values instead of 0's and 1's. Digital computers have supplanted analog computing in nearly all areas of life because they are easy to program, highly efficient and process analog signals by converting them into digital data. Nature, on the other hand, processes data and information using both analog and digital approaches. Some biological states are indeed discrete, such as heart cells which are electrically depolarized and then repolarized in periodical intervals in order to keep the heart beating. Such discrete states of cells (polarized / depolarized) can be modeled using the ON and OFF states in the biological circuit described earlier. However, many biological processes, such as inflammation, occur on a continuous scale. Cells do not just exist in uninflamed and inflamed states; instead there is a continuum of inflammation from minimal inflammatory activation of cells to massive inflammation. Environmental signals that are critical for cell behavior such as temperature, tension or shear stress occur on a continuous scale and there is little evidence to indicate that cells convert these analog signals into digital data.

Most of the attempts to create synthetic gene circuits and study information processing in cells have been based on a digital computing paradigm. Sarpeshkar and Lu instead wondered whether one could construct analog computation circuits and take advantage of the analog information processing systems that may be intrinsic to cells. The researchers created an analog synthetic gene circuit using only three proteins that regulate gene expression and the fluorescent protein mCherry as a read-out. This synthetic circuit was able to perform additions or ratiometric calculations in which the cumulative fluorescence of the mCherry was either the sum or the ratio of selected chemical input concentrations. Constructing a digital circuit with similar computational power would have required a much larger number of components.

The design of analog gene circuits represents a major turning point in synthetic biology and will likely spark a wave of new research which combines analog and digital computing when trying to engineer biological computers. In our day-to-day lives, analog computers have become more-or-less obsolete. However, the recent call for unconventional computing research by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is seen by some as one indicator of a possible paradigm shift towards re-examining the value of analog computing. If other synthetic biology groups can replicate the work of Sarpeshkar and Lu and construct even more powerful analog or analog-digital hybrid circuits, then the renaissance of analog computing could be driven by biology. It is difficult to make any predictions regarding the construction of biological computing machines which rival or surpass the computing power of contemporary digital computers. What we can say is that synthetic biology is becoming one of the most exciting areas of research that will provide amazing insights into the complexity of biological systems and may provide a path to revolutionize biotechnology.

An earlier version of this article was first published at 3Quarksdaily.

 <span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Nature&rft_id=info%3Apmid%2F23676681&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=Synthetic+analog+computation+in+living+cells.&rft.issn=0028-0836&rft.date=2013&rft.volume=497&rft.issue=7451&rft.spage=619&rft.epage=23&rft.artnum=&rft.au=Daniel+R&rft.au=Rubens+JR&rft.au=Sarpeshkar+R&rft.au=Lu+TK&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Biology%2CComputer+Science+%2F+Engineering%2CBiomedical+Engineering%2C+Bioinformatics%2C+Computational+Biology%2C+Cell+Biology%2C+Biotechnology">Daniel R, Rubens JR, Sarpeshkar R, & Lu TK (2013). Synthetic analog computation in living cells. Nature, 497 (7451), 619-23 PMID: 23676681Sisyphoshttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-90539671762472705152014-06-03T07:36:00.001-05:002014-06-03T07:36:57.519-05:00Sharing Our Sorrow Via FacebookGeteiltes Leid ist halbes Leid ("Shared sorrow is half the sorrow") is a popular German proverb which refers to the importance of sharing bad news and troubling experiences with others. The therapeutic process of sharing takes on many different forms: we may take comfort in the fact that others have experienced similar forms of sorrow, we are often reassured by the empathy and encouragement we receive from friends, and even the mere process of narrating the details of what is troubling us can be beneficial. Finding an attentive audience that is willing to listen to our troubles is not always easy. In a highly mobile, globalized world, some of our best friends may be located thousands of kilometers away, unable to meet face-to-face. The omnipresence of social media networks may provide a solution. We are now able to stay in touch with hundreds of friends and family members, and commiserate with them. But are people as receptive to sorrow shared via Facebook as they are in face-to-face contacts?

A team of researchers headed by Dr. Andrew High at the University of Iowa recently investigated this question and published their findings in the article "Misery rarely gets company: The influence of emotional bandwidth on supportive communication on Facebook". The researchers created three distinct Facebook profiles of a fictitious person named Sara Thomas who had just experienced a break-up. The three profiles were identical in all respects except for how much information was conveyed about the recent (fictitious) break-up. In their article, High and colleagues use the expression "emotional bandwidth" to describe the extent of emotions conveyed in the Facebook profile.
In the low bandwidth scenario, the profile contained the following status update:

"sad and depressed:("

The medium bandwidth profile included a change in relationship status to "single" in the timeline, in addition to the low bandwidth profile update "sad and depressed:(".

Finally, the high emotional bandwidth profile not only contained the updates of the low and medium bandwidth profiles, but also included a picture of a crying woman (the other two profiles had no photo, just the standard Facebook shadow image).

The researchers then surveyed 84 undergraduate students (enrolled in communications courses, average age 20, 53% female) and presented them with screenshots of one of the three profiles.

They asked the students to imagine that the person in the profile was a member of their Facebook network. After reviewing the assigned profile, each student completed a questionnaire asking about their willingness to provide support for Sara Thomas using a 9-point scale (1 = strongly disagree; 9 = strongly agree). The survey contained questions that evaluated the willingness to provide emotional support (e.g. "Express sorrow or regret for her situation") and network support (e.g. "Connect her with people whom she may turn to for help''). In addition to being queried about their willingness to provide distinct forms of support, the students were also asked about their sense of community engendered by Facebook (e.g., "Facebook makes me feel I am a part of a community'') and their preference for online interactions over face-to-face interactions (e.g., "I prefer communicating with other people online rather than face-to-face'').

High and colleagues hypothesized that the high emotional bandwidth profiles would elicit greater support from the students. In face-to-face interactions, it is quite common for us to provide greater support to a person – friend or stranger – if we see them overtly crying and therefore the researchers' hypothesis was quite reasonable. To their surprise, the researchers found the opposite. The willingness to provide emotional or network support was significantly lower among students who viewed the high emotional bandwidth profile! For example, average emotional support scores were 7.8 among students who saw Sara entering the "sad and depressed:(" update (low bandwidth) but the scores were only 6.5 among students who also saw the image of Sara crying and updating her relationship status to single (high bandwidth). Interestingly, students who preferred online interactions over face-to-face interactions or those who felt that Facebook created a strong sense of community responded positively to the high bandwidth profile.

There are some important limitations of the study. The students were asked to evaluate whether they would provide support to a fictitious person by imagining that she was part of their Facebook friends network. This is a rather artificial situation because actual supportive Facebook interactions occur among people who know each other. It is not easy to envision support for a fictitious person whose profile one sees for the first time. Furthermore, "emotional bandwidth" is a broad concept and it is difficult to draw general conclusions about "emotional bandwidth" from the limited differences between the three profiles. Increasing the sample size of the study subjects as well as creating a broader continuum of emotional bandwidth differences (e.g. including profiles which include pictures of a fictitious Sara Thomas who is not crying, using other status updates, etc.), and also considering scenarios that are not just related to break-ups (e.g. creating profiles of a fictitious grieving person who has lost a loved one) would be useful for an in-depth analysis of "emotional bandwidth".

The study by High and colleagues is an intriguing and important foray into the cyberpsychology of emotional self-disclosure and supportive communication on Facebook. This study raises important questions about how cyberbehavior differs from real world face-to-face behavior, and the even more interesting question of why these behaviors are different. Online interactions omit the dynamic gestures, nuanced intonations and other cues which play a critical role in determining our face-to-face behavior. When we share emotions via Facebook, our communication partners are often spatially and temporally displaced. This allows us to carefully "edit" what we disclose about ourselves, but it also allows our audience to edit their responses, unlike the comparatively spontaneous responses of a person sitting next to us. Facebook invites us to use the "Share" button, but we need to remember that online "sharing" is a sharing between heavily edited and crafted selves that is very different from traditional forms of "sharing".

********************************

Acknowledgments: An earlier version of this article was first published at 3Quarksdaily. The images from the study profiles were provided by Dr. Andrew High, copyright of the images - Dr. Andrew High.

Reference: Misery rarely gets company: The influence of emotional bandwidth on supportive communication on Facebook, AC High, A Oeldorf-Hirsch, S Bellur, Computers in Human Behavior (2014) 34, 79-88

 <span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Computers+in+Human+Behavior&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1016%2Fj.chb.2014.01.037&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=Misery+rarely+gets+company%3A+The+influence+of+emotional+bandwidth+on+supportive+communication+on+Facebook&rft.issn=07475632&rft.date=2014&rft.volume=34&rft.issue=&rft.spage=79&rft.epage=88&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0747563214000491&rft.au=High%2C+A.&rft.au=Oeldorf-Hirsch%2C+A.&rft.au=Bellur%2C+S.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Computer+Science+%2F+Engineering%2CPsychology%2CSocial+Science%2CAffective+Psychology%2C+Cognitive+Psychology%2C+Emotion%2C+Human+Factors%2C+Industrial%2FOrganizational+Psychology%2C+Personality%2C+Social+Psychology%2C+Sociology%2C+Human-Computer+Interaction%2C+Networks">High, A., Oeldorf-Hirsch, A., & Bellur, S. (2014). Misery rarely gets company: The influence of emotional bandwidth on supportive communication on Facebook Computers in Human Behavior, 34, 79-88 DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2014.01.037Sisyphoshttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-87290008082023585792014-05-30T16:50:00.002-05:002014-05-30T17:00:07.347-05:00Should Doctors 'Google' Their Patients?
Beware of what you share. Employers now routinely utilize internet search engines or social network searches to obtain information about job applicants. A survey of 2,184 hiring managers and human resource professionals conducted by the online employment website CareerBuilder.com revealed that 39% use social networking sites to research job candidates. Of the group who used social networks to evaluate job applicants, 43% found content on a social networking site that caused them to not hire a candidate, whereas only 19% found information that that has caused them to hire a candidate.

The top reasons for rejecting a candidate based on information gleaned from social networking sites were provocative or inappropriate photos/information, including information about the job applicants' history of substance abuse. This should not come as a surprise to job applicants in the US. After all, it is not uncommon for employers to invade the privacy of job applicants by conducting extensive background searches, ranging from the applicant's employment history and credit rating to checking up on any history of lawsuits or run-ins with law enforcement agencies. Some employers also require drug testing of job applicants. The internet and social networking websites merely offer employers an additional array of tools to scrutinize their applicants. But how do we feel about digital sleuthing when it comes to relationship that is very different than the employer-applicant relationship – one which is characterized by profound trust, intimacy and respect, such as the relationship between healthcare providers and their patients?

The Hastings Center Report is a peer-reviewed academic bioethics journal which discusses the ethics of "Googling a Patient" in its most recent issue. It first describes a specific case of a twenty-six year old patient who sees a surgeon and requests a prophylactic mastectomy of both breasts. She says that she does not have breast cancer yet, but that her family is at very high risk for cancer. Her mother, sister, aunts, and a cousin have all had breast cancer; a teenage cousin had ovarian cancer at the age of nineteen; and that her brother was treated for esophageal cancer at the age of fifteen. She also says that she herself has suffered from a form of skin cancer (melanoma) at the age of twenty-five and that she wants to undergo the removal of her breasts without further workup because she wants to avoid developing breast cancer. She says that her prior mammogram had already shown abnormalities and she had been told by another surgeon that she needed the mastectomy.

Such prophylactic mastectomies, i.e. removal of both breasts, are indeed performed if young women are considered to be at very high risk for breast cancer based on their genetic profile and family history. The patient's family history – her mother, sister and aunts being diagnosed with breast cancer – are indicative of a very high risk, but other aspects of the history such as her brother developing esophageal cancer at the age of fifteen are rather unusual. The surgeon confers with the patient's primary care physician prior to performing the mastectomy and is puzzled by the fact that the primary care physician cannot confirm many of the claims made by the patient regarding her prior medical history or her family history. The physicians find no evidence of the patient ever having been diagnosed with a melanoma and they also cannot find documentation of the prior workup. The surgeon then asks a genetic counselor to meet with the patient and help resolve the discrepancies. During the evaluation process, the genetic counselor decides to 'google' the patient.

The genetic counselor finds two Facebook pages that are linked to the patient. One page appears to be a personal profile of the patient, stating that in addition to battling stage four melanoma (a very advanced stage of skin cancer with very low survival rates), she has recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. She also provides a link to a website soliciting donations to attend a summit for young cancer patients. The other Facebook page shows multiple pictures of the patient with a bald head, suggesting that she is undergoing chemotherapy, which is obviously not true according to what the genetic counselor and the surgeon have observed. Once this information is forwarded to the surgeon, he decides to cancel the planned surgery. It is not clear why the patient was intent on having the mastectomy and what she would gain from it, but the obtained information from the Facebook pages and the previously noted discrepancies are reason enough for the surgeon to rebuff the patient's request for the surgery.

Two groups of biomedical ethics experts then weigh in on the case and the broader question of whether or not health care professionals should 'google' patients. The first group of ethics experts feels that uninvited patient 'googling' is generally a bad practice for three main reasons:

It allows healthcare professionals to withdraw from their patients and start relying on online data and information gleaned from social networking sites instead of interacting with the patient and addressing the key issues head-on.

The 'googling' of patients erodes the trust between the healthcare professional and the patient. Patients might feel a sense of betrayal that the healthcare professional "spied" on them.

An internet search or review or social network pages linked to the patient represents an invasion of the privacy of the patient. The patient should have the right to decide what information to disclose and what not to disclose, but by surreptitiously obtaining this information, the healthcare provide circumvents the right to privacy of the patient.

A separate panel of reviewers arrives at a very different conclusion and specifically points to this case as an example where it was imperative to 'google' the patient. As this panel points out, the genetic counselor used a legal method to search the internet and found information on public Facebook profiles after having found many red flags and inconsistencies in the patient's medical history. By finding the information on Facebook, the surgeon and the counselor were able to prevent a self-injurious, deceptive and possibly fraudulent scheme of the patient to go forward. This panel of experts goes as far as saying that it would have actually been irresponsible to not perform the Google search after all the red flags and inconsistencies were identified.
As with all ethical dilemmas, it is difficult to find the correct answer. The first panel brings up good points that the relationship between a healthcare professional and a patient is characterized by trust and respect of privacy, but I tend to agree with the second panel in the case of this patient. It illustrates that the 'googling' was able to avert an unnecessary and irreversible surgery. This was not just an indiscriminate 'googling' or searching of private information on Facebook pages. The action was prompted by very real concerns about contradictory information regarding the patient's medical history. On balance, the benefit of avoiding the unnecessary surgery probably outweighed the risk of harming the trust between the healthcare professional and the patient – one which was already undermined by the patient's deception.

This case is rather unusual because it is probably quite rare that a surgeon or a genetic counselor would find valuable information on a patient by merely searching Google or Facebook for information. The type of information that could be of value to most healthcare providers is not usually disclosed on public sites or social network pages. For example, a cardiologist may be interested in finding out why a patient's cholesterol levels are not decreasing despite being placed on optimal medications and being advised to cut down the dietary intake of cholesterol. The cardiologist may suspect that the patient is not really taking the medications or perhaps eating much more dietary cholesterol than the patient is willing to disclose during the doctor's visits. However, it is unlikely that the patient's Facebook page will chronicle whether or not the patient secretly eats cheese omelets on a daily basis or chooses not to take his cholesterol medications.

On the other hand, other healthcare professionals could find important diagnostic clues when reviewing the Facebook page of a patient. Psychiatrists or psychologists may be able to get a much better sense of a patient's mental health and functioning by reviewing the daily posts and interactions of a patient with friends and family members instead of just having to rely on the brief snapshot when they interview the patient during a 30 minute visit.

The study ""To Google or not to Google: Graduate students' use of the Internet to access personal information about clients." by the psychologists DeLillo and Gale surveyed 854 students enrolled in clinical, counseling, and school psychology doctoral programs in the United States and Canada, asking them how they felt about using Google or social networking websites to learn more about their clients/patients. Interestingly, two-thirds of the psychologists-in-training felt that it was never acceptable or usually not acceptable to use web search engines in order to find additional information about their clients. This feeling was even more pronounced when it came to social networking sites: 76.8% of the students thought that this was never acceptable or usually not acceptable.

However, despite these feelings, 97.8% of the students had searched for at least one client's information using search engines such as Google, whereas 94.4% had searched for at least one client's information using social networking websites. Importantly, 76.8% of the therapists who had conducted the searches for client information on social networking sites also reported that it was either always or usually unacceptable! This suggests a significant dissonance between the ethical perception of the therapists and their actions. Furthermore, more than 80% of the therapists who had conducted the searches said that their clients were aware of the internet and social networking searches they were conducting.

The case study with the patient requesting the mastectomy and the high prevalence of using the internet to perform searches on patients/clients by psychologists highlights the ethical dilemmas that are emerging in our culture of digital sharedom. The internet with its often very public display of individual information may be a powerful tool for certain healthcare professionals, but we also need to develop ethical guidelines for how healthcare professionals should use this tool. For medical procedures and tests, healthcare professionals have to obtain informed consent from their patients, discussing the risks and benefits of the procedure or test. Should healthcare professionals also obtain informed consent from patients before they pry into their social media networks? Or would that defeat the purpose because the patients might change the privacy settings or change the content of their posts, knowing that healthcare professionals might be reviewing them? Should healthcare professionals in specialties such as psychology and psychiatry 'google' all their patients – just like they now ask questions about substance abuse to all patients – or only if there are certain red flags?

The survey of psychologists-in-training highlights the cognitive dissonance that healthcare professionals may experience: They may reject such searches on their clients or patients in the abstract, but they may still choose to perform the searches, probably because they think it will allow them to provide better care for their clients and patient. Instead of relying of idiosyncratic decisions made by professionals, we have to establish the ethical ground-rules for how healthcare professionals can use search engines or social networking sites when obtaining information about individuals. We may have become so accustomed to invasions of our privacy by government agencies and corporations that we sometimes forget that privacy is instrumental in maintaining our individuality. Especially in relationships that are founded on an extraordinary degree of trust, such as those between healthcare professionals and their patients or clients, we need to ensure that this trust is not eroded by the dark side of sharedom.

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Ryan Hunt from CareerBuilder for clarifying the survey results. An earlier version of this article was first published on the 3Quarksdaily blog.

References:

Rebecca Volpe, George Blackall, and Michael Green; and Danny George, Maria Baker, and Gordon Kauffman, "Googling a Patient" Hastings Center Report 43, no. 5 (2013): 14-15.

DiLillo, David; Gale, Emily B. "To Google or not to Google: Graduate students' use of the Internet to access personal information about clients."Training and Education in Professional Psychology, Vol 5(3), Aug 2011, 160-166. doi: 10.1037/a0024441

 <span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=The+Hastings+Center+report&rft_id=info%3Apmid%2F24092585&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=Case+study.+Googling+a+patient.+Commentary.&rft.issn=0093-0334&rft.date=2013&rft.volume=43&rft.issue=5&rft.spage=14&rft.epage=5&rft.artnum=&rft.au=Volpe+R&rft.au=Blackall+G&rft.au=Green+M&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Medicine%2CPhilosophy%2CPsychology%2CResearch+%2F+Scholarship%2CEthics%2C+Ethics%2C+Psychiatry%2C+Social+Psychology%2C+Personality%2C+Human+Factors%2C+Decision-Making">Volpe R, Blackall G, & Green M (2013). Case study. Googling a patient. Commentary. The Hastings Center report, 43 (5), 14-5 PMID: 24092585

 <span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Training+and+Education+in+Professional+Psychology&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1037%2Fa0024441&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=To+Google+or+not+to+Google%3A+Graduate+students%27+use+of+the+Internet+to+access+personal+information+about+clients.&rft.issn=1931-3926&rft.date=2011&rft.volume=5&rft.issue=3&rft.spage=160&rft.epage=166&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Fdoi.apa.org%2Fgetdoi.cfm%3Fdoi%3D10.1037%2Fa0024441&rft.au=DiLillo%2C+D.&rft.au=Gale%2C+E.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Philosophy%2CPsychology%2CSocial+Science%2CResearch+%2F+Scholarship%2CDecision-Making%2C+Ethics%2C+Education%2C+Policy">DiLillo, D., & Gale, E. (2011). To Google or not to Google: Graduate students' use of the Internet to access personal information about clients. Training and Education in Professional Psychology, 5 (3), 160-166 DOI: 10.1037/a0024441Sisyphoshttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-78265675815073482992014-05-28T08:05:00.000-05:002014-05-29T05:45:12.079-05:00Scientism ReloadedThe "Reclaim Scientism" movement is gaining momentum. In his recent book "The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions", the American philosopher Alexander Rosenberg suggests that instead of viewing the word "scientism" as an epithet, atheists should expropriate it and use it as a positive term which describes their worldview. Rosenberg also provides a descriptive explanation of how the term "scientism" is currently used:

Scientism — noun; scientistic — adjective.
Scientism has two related meanings, both of them pejorative. According to one of these meanings, scientism names the improper or mistaken application of scientific methods or findings outside their appropriate domain, especially to questions treated by the humanities. The second meaning is more common: Scientism is the exaggerated confidence in the methods of science as the most (or the only) reliable tools of inquiry, and an equally unfounded belief that at least the most well established of its findings are the only objective truths there are.
Rosenberg's explanation of "scientism" is helpful because it highlights the difference between science and scientism. Science refers to applying scientific methods as tools of inquiry to collect and interpret data, whereas "scientism" refers to cultural and ideological views promoting the primacy or superiority of scientific methods over all other tools of inquiry. Some scientists embrace scientistic views, in part because scientism provides a much-needed counterbalance to aggressive anti-science attitudes that are prevalent on both ends of the political spectrum and among some religious institutions. However, other scientists are concerned about propping up scientism as a bulwark against ideological science-bashing because it smacks of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Science is characterized by healthy skepticism, the dismantling of dogmatic views and a continuous process of introspection and self-criticism. Infusing science with ideological stances concerning the primacy of the scientific method could undermine the power of science which is rooted in its willingness to oppose ideological posturing.

As a scientist who investigates signaling mechanisms and the metabolic activity of stem cells, I am concerned about the rise of some movements that fall under the "scientism" umbrella, because they have the possibility to impede scientific discovery. Scientific progress relies on recognizing the limitations and flaws in existing scientific concepts and refuting scientific views that cannot be adequately explained by newer scientific observations. An exaggerated confidence in the validity of scientific findings could stifle such refutations. For example, some of the most widely cited scientific papers in the field of stem cell biology cannot be replicated, but they have had an enormous detrimental impact on the science and medicine, in part because of an exaggerated faith in the validity of some initial experiments.

I first began studying the use of stem and progenitor cells to enhance cardiovascular repair and regeneration over a decade ago. At that time, many of my colleagues and I were excited about a recent paper published by a group of scientists based at New York Medical College in the high-profile scientific journal Nature in 2001. The paper suggested that injected adult bone marrow stem cells could be successfully converted into functional heart cells and recover heart function after a heart attack by generating new heart tissue. The usage of adult regenerative cells was a very attractive option because it would allow patients to be treated with their own cells and could circumvent the ethical and political controversies associated with embryonic stem cells. This animal study gained even more traction when supportive experimental and human studies were published by other scientists. Then a German research group under the direction of the cardiologist Bodo Strauer published a paper in 2002 which showed that not only could adult human bone marrow cells be safely injected into heart attack patients but that these adult cells even appeared to improve heart function.

The stir caused by these discoveries was not just confined to scientists. The findings were widely reported in the media and I recall numerous discussions with physicians who claimed that cardiovascular disease would soon be a problem of the past, because patients would receive routine bone marrow injections after heart attacks. One colleague even advised me to reconsider my career choices since the usage of bone marrow cells could address most if not all issues in cardiovascular regeneration.

This excitement was somewhat dampened when a refutation of the 2001 Nature paper was published in 2004, also in the journal Nature. A collaborative effort of two US-based stem cell research groups was not able to replicate the findings of the 2001 paper. The scientists were unable to find any significant conversion of adult bone marrow cells into functional heart cells. However, many physicians, scientists and patients had already adopted an unshakable belief in the validity of the bone marrow cell treatments after heart attacks. Hundreds of heart attack patients were being enrolled in clinical trials involving the injection of bone marrow cells. Clinics in Thailand or Mexico began offering bone marrow injections to heart patients from all around the world– for a hefty price, both in terms of monetary payments and in terms of safety because they exposed patients to the risks of invasive injections of bone marrow cells into their hearts.

Despite the fact that the initial clinical studies with small numbers of enrolled patients had shown a beneficial effect of bone marrow cell injections, subsequent trials could not confirm these early successes. It became apparent that even if bone marrow cell injections did exert a therapeutic benefit in heart attack patients, these benefits were rather modest. Scientists increasingly realized that the observed benefits may have been causally unrelated to the small fraction of stem cells contained within the bone marrow. Instead of bone marrow stem cells becoming functional heart cells, some bone marrow cells may have merely released protective proteins which could explain the slight improvement in heart function, without necessarily generating new heart tissue. One of the largest bone marrow cell treatment trials for heart attack patients to date was just recently published in 2013 and showed no evidence of improved heart function following the cell injections.

In hindsight, many of us have wondered why we were not more skeptical of the initial findings. When compared to embryonic stem cells, adult bone marrow stem cells have a very limited ability to differentiate into cell types other than those typically found in the bone marrow. Furthermore, the clinical studies which reported successful treatment of heart attack patients used unpurified bone marrow cells from the patients. The stem cell content of such unpurified preparations is roughly 1% or less, which means that 99% of the injected bone marrow cells were NOT stem cells. For the tiny fraction of bona fide stem cells in the bone marrow to convert into sufficient numbers of beating heart cells and even create new functional heart tissue would have been akin to a miracle.

Critical thinking and healthy skepticism, the scientific peer review processor and even common sense should have alerted us to the problems associated with these claims, but they all failed. Perhaps scientists, physicians and patients were so excited by the prospect of creating new heart tissue that they suspended much-needed skepticism. Exaggerated confidence in the validity of the scientific data published in highly regarded scientific journals may have played an important role. Unintentional cognitive biases of scientists who conducted the experiments and a disregard for alternative explanations could have also contributed to the propagation of ideas that would withstand subsequent testing. Scientific misconduct may also play a role. For example, the cardiologist who conducted the first clinical studies with bone marrow cell infusions in heart attack patients was investigated by his university for scientific misconduct because a review of his work had identified massive errors.

This is just one example to illustrate problems associated with an exaggerated confidence in the validity of scientific findings, a kind of confidence which scientism engenders. Such examples are by no means restricted to stem cell biology. A recent analysis of scientific reproducibility in cancer research claimed that only 11% of published cancer biology papers could be independently validated, and other areas of scientific research may be similarly afflicted by the problem of irreproducibility of published, peer-reviewed scientific papers.
Increasing numbers of scientists are recognizing that current approaches to interpreting and publishing scientific data are severely flawed. Exaggerated confidence in the validity of scientific findings is frequently misplaced and claims that scientific results represent objective truths need to be re-evaluated particularly when a high percentage of experimental results cannot be replicated by fellow scientists. In this particular context, the views of scientists who are trying to learn lessons from the failures of the scientific peer review process are not so different from those of "scientism" critics. However, many scientists, myself included, remain reluctant to use the expression "scientism".

Rosenberg illustrates the problems associated with the word "scientism". Since "scientism" is often used as an epithet, invoking "scientism" may impede constructive discussions about the appropriateness of applying scientific methods. While a question such as "Can issues of morality be answered by scientific experiments?" may be important, introducing the term "scientism" with all its baggage distracts from addressing the question in a rational manner.
The other major issue associated with the term "scientism" is its vagueness. It is difficult to discuss "scientism" if it encompasses a broad range of distinct concepts such as the notion that science has to remain within certain boundaries as well as a criticism of overweening confidence in the validity of scientific findings. I can easily identify with asking for a realistic reappraisal of whether or not scientific results obtained by one laboratory constitute an objective, scientific truth but I am opposed to creating boundary lines that forbid certain forms of scientific inquiry because it might infringe on the domains of the humanities. Instead of the diffuse expression "scientism", I prefer the term "science mystique" to criticize the exaggerated, near-mythical confidence in the infallibility of scientific results.

Rosenberg's view that the expression "scientism" and also the culture of "scientism" should be embraced received a big boost when the scientist Steven Pinker published his polemic essay "Science Is Not Your Enemy: An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians". Like Rosenberg, Pinker wants to rehabilitate the expression "scientism" and use it to indicate a positive, science-affirming worldview. Unfortunately, instead of engaging in a constructive dialogue about the culture of "scientism", Pinker reveals his condescending attitude towards the humanities throughout the essay. His notion of respect for the humanities consists of pointing out how much better off classical philosophers might have been if they had been aware of modern neuroscience.

But Pinker does not comment on the converse proposition: Would scientists be better off if they knew more about philosophy? Pinker goes on to portray scientists as dynamic forward thinkers, while humanities scholars are supposedly weighed down by their intellectual inertia:

"Several university presidents and provosts have lamented to me that when a scientist comes into their office, it's to announce some exciting new research opportunity and demand the resources to pursue it. When a humanities scholar drops by, it's to plead for respect for the way things have always been done."

Pinker glosses over the reproducibility issues in science and reaffirms his faith in the current system of scientific peer review without commenting on the limitations of scientific peer review:

"Scientism, in this good sense, is not the belief that members of the occupational guild called "science" are particularly wise or noble. On the contrary, the defining practices of science, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are explicitly designed to circumvent the errors and sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable."
The philosopher and scientist Massimo Pigliucci wrote an excellent response to Steven Pinker, discussing the flaws inherent in Pinker's polemic and explaining why promoting a culture of scientism or a "science mystique" is not in the interest of science. I also agree with the physicist Sean Carroll who reminds us that we should get rid of the term "scientism"; not because he wants to get rid of a critical evaluation of science, but because he thinks this poorly defined term is not very helpful.

Whether or not we use the word "scientism", it is apparent that the debates between the critics and defenders of the culture of "scientism" are here to stay. It is unlikely that rehabilitating the unhelpful word "scientism" or polemical stances towards the humanities will contribute to this debate in a meaningful manner. The challenge for scientists and non-scientists is to embrace and address the legitimate criticisms of science without promoting the agenda of irrational anti-science bashing.

Note: An earlier version of this article was first published on the 3Quarksdaily blogSisyphoshttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-51798789461980971752014-03-04T11:44:00.001-06:002014-03-04T11:59:12.456-06:00New White House Budget: NIH funding will not be restored to pre-sequester levelsThe Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) recommended that the White House increase the annual NIH budget to $32 billion dollars to help restore US biomedical research funding levels to those of 2003 (link):

The broad program of research supported by NIH is essential for advancing our understanding of basic biological functions, reducing human suffering, and protecting the country against new and re-emerging disease threats. Biomedical research is also a primary source of new innovations in health care and other areas.

Exciting new NIH initiatives are poised to accelerate our progress in the search for cures. It would be tragic if we could not capitalize on the many opportunities before us. The development of a universal vaccine to protect adults and children against both seasonal and pandemic flu and development of gene chips and DNA sequencing technologies that can predict risk for high blood pressure, kidney disease, diabetes, and obesity are just a few of the research breakthroughs that will be delayed if we fail to sustain the investment in NIH.

As a result of our prior investment, we are the world leader in biomedical research. We should not abdicate our competitive edge. Without adequate funding, NIH will have to sacrifice valuable lines of research. The termination of ongoing studies and the diminished availability of grant support will result in the closure of laboratories and the loss of highly skilled jobs. At a time when we are trying to encourage more students to pursue science and engineering studies, talented young scientists are being driven from science by the disruption of their training and lack of career opportunities.

Rising costs of research, the increasing complexity of the scientific enterprise, and a loss of purchasing power at NIH due to flat budgets have made it increasingly competitive for individual investigators to obtain funding. Today, only one in six grant applications will be supported, the lowest rate in NIH history. Increasing the NIH budget to $32.0 billion would provide the agency with an additional $1.36 billion which could restore funding for R01 grants (multiyear awards to investigators for specified projects) back to the level achieved in 2003 and support an additional 1,700 researchers while still providing much needed financial support for other critical areas of the NIH portfolio.
Unfortunately, the released White House budget (PDF) will only provide a minimal increase in annual NIH funding from $29.9 billion to $ 30.2 billion, which is still lower than the pre-sequester $30.6 billion.

It is much lower than what FASEB had suggested and it is going to be increasingly difficult for US biomedical research to sustain its competitive edge. The White House budget also emphasizes neuroscience and Alzheimer's research:

Biomedical research contributes to improving the health of the American people. The Budget includes $30.2 billion for NIH to support research at institutions across the United States, continuing the Administration's commitment to investment in Alzheimer's research and NIH's contribution to the multiagency BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative. The Budget increases funding for innovative, high-risk high-reward research to help spur development of new therapeutics to treat diseases and disorders that affect millions of Americans, such as cancer and Alzheimer's disease. The Budget includes funding for a new advanced research program modeled after the cutting-edge Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program at the Department of Defense. NIH will also implement new policies to improve transparency and reduce administrative costs. The Opportunity, Growth, and Security Initiative includes an additional $970 million for NIH, which would support about 650 additional new grants and further increase funding for the BRAIN and DARPA-inspired initiatives, and invest in other critical priorities.

While this is good news for neuroscientists, the essentially flat NIH budget will force the NIH to cut funding to basic biomedical research in non-neuroscience areas including basic cell biology, molecular biology and biochemistry.

The outlook for US biomedical research remains gloomy.

Sisyphoshttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-84737426917163370402014-02-25T21:39:00.003-06:002014-02-25T21:39:47.514-06:00Composites
"Shorter sentences and simple words!" was the battle cry of all my English teachers. Their comments and corrections of our English-language essays and homework assignments were very predictable. Apparently, they had all sworn allegiance to the same secret Fraternal Order of Syntax Police. I am sure that students of the English language all over the world have heard similar advice from their teachers, but English teachers at German schools excel in their diligent use of linguistic guillotines to chop up sentences and words. The problem is that they have to teach English to students who think, write and breathe in German, the lego of languages.

Lego blocks invite the observer to grab them and build marvelously creative and complex structures. The German language similarly invites its users to construct composite words and composite sentences. A virtually unlimited number of composite nouns can be created in German, begetting new words which consist of two, three or more components with meanings that extend far beyond the sum of their parts. The famous composite German word "Schadenfreude" is now used worldwide to describe the shameful emotion of joy when observing harm befall others. It combines "Schaden" (harm or damage) and "Freude" (joy), and its allure lies in the honest labeling of a guilty pleasure and the inherent tension of combining two seemingly discordant words.

The lego-like qualities of German can also be easily applied to how sentences are structured. Commas are a German writer's best friends. A German sentence can contain numerous clauses and sub-clauses, weaving a quilt of truths, tangents and tangential truths, all combined into the serpentine splendor of a single sentence. Readers may not enjoy navigating their way through such verschachtelt sentences, but writers take great pleasure in envisioning a reader who unwraps a sentence as if opening a matryoshka doll only to find that the last word of a mammoth sentence negates its fore-shadowed meaning.

Even though our teachers indulged such playfulness when we wrote in German, they were all the more harsh when it came to our English assignments. They knew that we had a hankering for creating long sentences, so they returned them to us covered in red ink markings, indicative of their syntactic fervor. This obsession with short sentences and words took the joy out of writing in English. German was the language of beauty and poetry, whereas English became the language best suited for efficient communication. By the time I reached my teenage years, I began to lose interest in writing anything in English beyond our mandatory school assignments. I still enjoyed reading books in English, such as the books of Enid Blyton, but I could not fathom how a language of simple sentences and simple words could be used to create works of literary beauty. This false notion fell apart when I first read "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe.

The decision to read "Things Fall Apart" was not completely arbitrary. My earliest memories of this world are those of the years I spent as a child in Igboland. My family moved from Pakistan to Germany when I was one year old, but we soon moved on to Nigeria. Germany was financing the rehabilitation of the electrical power grid that had been destroyed during the Biafra War. My father was one of the electrical engineers sent from Germany to help with the restoration and expansion of the electrical power supply in the South-Eastern part of Nigeria – the region which was home to the Igbo people and which had attempted and failed to secede as the Republic of Biafra.

We first stayed in Enugu, the former capital of the transient Republic of Biafra and then lived in the city of Aba. My memories of the time in Igboland are just sequences of images and scenes, and it is difficult to make sense of all of them: Kind and friendly people, palm trees and mysterious forests, riding a tricycle in elliptical loops, visits to electrical sub-stations. We returned to Germany when I was four years old. I would never live in the Igboland again, but recalling the fragmented memories of those early childhood years has always evoked a sense of comfort and joy in me. When I came across "Things Fall Apart" as a fourteen-year old and learned that it took place in an Igbo village, I knew that I simply had to read it.

I was not prepared for the impact the book would have on me. Great books shake us up, change us in a profound and unpredictable manner, leaving footprints that are etched into the rinds of our soul. "Things Fall Apart" was the first great English language book that I read. I was mesmerized by its language. This book was living proof that one could write a profound and beautiful book in English, using short, simple sentences.

 As the Ibo say: "When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk."
And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion— to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness.
 Living fire begets cold, impotent ash.
A child cannot pay for its mother's milk.
It wasn't just the beautiful language, aphorisms, Igbo proverbs and haunting images that made this book so unique. "Things Fall Apart" contained no heroes. The books that I had read before "Things Fall Apart" usually made it obvious who the hero was. But "Things Fall Apart" was different. Okonkwo was no hero, not even a tragic hero. But he also was no villain. As with so many of the characters in the book, I could see myself in them and yet I was also disgusted by some of the abhorrent acts they committed. I wanted to like Okonkwo, but I could not like a man who participated in the killing of his adopted son or nearly killed his wife in a fit of anger.

Guns fired the last salute and the cannon rent the sky. And then from the center of the delirious fury came a cry of agony and shouts of horror. It was as if a spell had been cast. All was silent. In the center of the crowd a boy lay in a pool of blood. It was the dead man's sixteen-year-old son, who with his brothers and half-brothers had been dancing the traditional farewell to their father. Okonkwo's gun had exploded and a piece of iron had pierced the boy's heart.
Achebe was not judging or mocking his characters, but sharing them with us. He was telling us about how real humans think and behave. As I read the book, I felt that I was being initiated into life. Life would be messy. Most of us would end up being neither true heroes nor true villains but composites of heroism and villainy. If I did not want end up like Okwonkwo, the ultimate non-negotiator, I needed to accept the fact that my life would be a series of negotiations: negotiations between individuals, negotiations between conflicting identities and negotiations between values and cultures. The book described a specific clash of cultures in colonial Africa, but it was easy to apply the same clash to so many other cultures. I tried to envision Okwonkwo as an Indian farmer whose world began to fall apart when Arab armies invaded the Sindh. I imagined Okwonkwo as a Native American, a Roman or a Japanese warrior, each negotiating his way through cultural upheavals. The history of humankind is always that of things falling apart and, importantly, that of rebuilding after the falling apart.

As soon as the day broke, a large crowd of men from Ezeudu's quarter stormed Okonkwo's compound, dressed in garbs of war. They set fire to his houses, demolished his red walls, killed his animals and destroyed his barn. It was the justice of the earth goddess, and they were merely her messengers. They had no hatred in their hearts against Okonkwo. His greatest friend, Obierika, was among them. They were merely cleansing the land which Okonkwo had polluted with the blood of a clansman.
I read "Things Fall Apart" to find my past, but it defined my future. It helped me recognize the beauty of the English language and prepared me for life in a way that no book had ever done before.

Notes: All quotes are from "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe

Image Credits: Stack of "Things Fall Apart" (by Scartol via Wikimedia Commons), Photo of a porcelain insulator with a bullet hole probably from the Biafra war, Photo taken from the Presidential Hotel in Enugu 1973. Sisyphoshttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-10980012717404051482014-02-18T09:52:00.001-06:002014-02-18T09:52:29.285-06:00Haikus and Landays in Science

Summer grass:
 That's all that remains
 Of warriors' dreams.

 --Basho

My favorite scientific experiments are those which resemble a haiku: simple and beautiful with a revelatory twist. This is why the haiku is very well suited for expressing scientific ideas in a poetic form. Contemporary haiku poets do not necessarily abide by the rules of traditional Japanese haiku, such as including a word which implies the season of the poem or the 17 (5-7-5) syllable structure of three verses. Especially when writing in a language other than Japanese, one can easily argue that the original 5-7-5 structure was based on Japanese equivalents of syllables and that there is no need to apply this syllable count to English-language haiku. Even the reference to seasons and nature may not apply to a modern-day English haiku about urban life or, as in my case, science.

Does this mean that contemporary haiku are not subject to any rules? In the introductory essay to an excellent anthology of English-language haiku, "Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years", the poet Billy Collins describes the benefit of retaining some degree of structure while writing a haiku:

Many poets, myself included, stick to the basic form of seventeen syllables, typically arranged in three lines in a 5-7-5 order. This light harness is put on like any formal constraint in poetry so the poet can feel the comfort of its embrace while being pushed by those same limits into unexpected discoveries. Asked where he got his inspiration, Yeats answered, "in looking for the next rhyme word." To follow such rules, whether received as is the case with the sonnet or concocted on the spot, is to feel the form pushing back against one's self-expressive impulses. For the poet, this palpable resistance can be a vital part of the compositional experience. I count syllables not out of any allegiance to tradition but because I want the indifference and inflexibility of a seventeen-syllable limit to balance my self-expressive yearnings. With the form in place, the act of composition becomes a negotiation between one's subjective urges and the rules of order, which in this case could not be simpler or firmer.
The seventeen syllable limit – like any other limit or rule in poetic forms – provides the necessary constraints that channel our boundless creativity to create a finite poem. It is a daunting task to sit down with a pen and paper, and try to write a poem about a certain topic. Our minds and souls are flooded with a paralyzing plethora of images and ideas. But, as Collins suggests, if we are already aware of certain rules, it becomes much easier to start the process of poetic filtering and negotiation.

What is the essence of a haiku? In the same essay, Collins offers a very elegant answer:

Whether they are the counting or the non-counting type, poets are likely to agree that at the heart of the haiku lies something beyond counting, that is, its revelatory effect on the reader, that eye-opening moment of insight that occurs whenever a haiku succeeds in drawing us through the keyhole of its details into the infinite, or to put it more ineffably, into the "Void of the Whole." No one would argue that any tercet that mentions a cloud or a frog qualifies as a real haiku; it would be like calling an eleven-line poem about courtly love a sonnet. A true haiku contains a special uncountable feature, and every serious devotee of the form aims to achieve that with every attempt.
The revelatory surprise, the "Aha moment", is what characterizes a true haiku. I have experimented with the haiku form, trying to capture scientific concepts or the process of scientific discovery. Many poets do not give titles to their haiku, but I feel that the title can be very helpful to create a poetic tension and provide a context that may be difficult to incorporate within the haiku verses. A haiku – like every good poem – should not require explanatory lines by the poet, but I think that one can make some exceptions here in the context of experimenting with haiku.

Scientific images or phrases are not always self-evident, so I include brief annotations for the haiku I have written which may be helpful for people who are not routinely exposed to the scientific research.

Mitochondria
Grainy threads in cells,
powerhouses of life are
harbingers of death

I have been studying mitochondria for a number of years, but I still marvel at the Janus-like role of mitochondria. They are active sites of biosynthesis and produce the universal energy molecule of cells (ATP) thus ensuring the growth and survival of cells. At the same time, mitochondria can initiate a cell's suicide program (apoptosis), forcing a cell to die. You can read about some of our mitochondrial research on lung cancer here.

Pipette
Ceci n'est pas une
pipette, porting microdrops
for my macrodreams

Many of us have spent hours, days and months repetitively pipetting hundreds of samples for PCR reactions, ELISA assays or other tests, and sooner or later most of us wonder about the meaning of these Sisyphean tasks.

Progress
Most hypotheses
in science are tested only
to be rejected

If I received a dollar for every wonderful scientific idea I have had that turned out to be wrong, I would not have to write any more grants to support my lab.

Haiku have become an integral part of English language poetry, but there is another poetic form that may soon be gaining popularity. The journalist and poet Eliza Griswold recently teamed up with the photographer Seamus Murphy, traveled to Afghanistan and collected landays that are commonly composed by Afghani women in their native language Pushto. Landays are a form of folk poetry, couplets consisting of a verse with nine syllables followed by one with thirteen syllables. Griswold worked with native Pushto speakers to translate the landays into English. In her brilliant essay published in the June 2013 issue of Poetry Magazine, Griswold provides us with glimpses into the lives of Afghani women, the hardships that they face on a daily basis. The essay also contains translations of landays, which have become a form of lyrical resistance for Afghani women, allowing them to voice their anger and frustration. Illiterate women compose, share and recite these poems, often anonymously and behind closed doors, in society that marginalizes women. The narratives about Afghani women and the translations of landays, which preserve their characteristic wit and sarcasm, are accompanied by haunting photographs that convey the beauty of war-torn Afghanistan and its people.

Here is a description of landays from Griswold's essay:

A landay has only a few formal properties. Each has twenty-two syllables: nine in the first line, thirteen in the second. The poem ends with the sound "ma" or "na." Sometimes they rhyme, but more often not. In Pashto, they lilt internally from word to word in a kind of two-line lullaby that belies the sharpness of their content, which is distinctive not only for its beauty, bawdiness, and wit, but also for the piercing ability to articulate a common truth about war, separation, homeland, grief, or love. Within these five main tropes, the couplets express a collective fury, a lament, an earthy joke, a love of home, a longing for the end of separation, a call to arms, all of which frustrate any facile image of a Pashtun woman as nothing but a mute ghost beneath a blue burqa.
Examples of landays collected by Griswold:

You sold me to an old man, father.
May God destroy your home, I was your daughter.

I tried to kiss you in secret but you're bald!
Your bare skull thumped against the wall.

I dream I am the president.
When I awake, I am the beggar of the world.

In April of 2014, Griswold and Murphy will also release the book "I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan" which will contain a more comprehensive collection of landays.

Landays have not yet caught on as a poetic form in the English-language, but this landmark work by Griswold might change that. I think that landays might be a great opportunity for scientists to describe their experiences with the scientific enterprise.

My landays revolve around the work and lives of academic scientists:

A-Team
I work alone in the lab each night,
conducting all our experiments for your career.

Tenure Trek
Sirens of tenure captivate us,
chained to hallowed halls of academic freedom.

Glamour
Journals can make or break our careers,
careers can make or break us, we can make or break journals.

These landays attempt to approximate the 9-13 syllable count in the couplets but as with haiku, the nature, structure and themes of landays written in English will likely be different from the original Pushto landays.
It does not really matter what poetic form or structure scientists choose to express themselves, but my personal experience has been that poetry is a wonderful way to share science. Writing haiku or landays about science has forced me to think about what aspects of my scientific work I really treasure. What started as a playful exercise with words has become a journey.

***************
Note: An earlier version of this article was first published on 3quarksdaily.com.

Image Credits: 1) Basho's Flowers (by Adam Shaw via Wikimedia Commons). 2) La trahison des images (by René Magritte via Wikimedia Commons). 3) Micropipettes - public domain image

Sisyphoshttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-6220791922923014482014-02-17T10:03:00.002-06:002014-02-17T10:03:27.275-06:00Science Journalism and the Inner Swine Dog
A search of the PubMed database, which indexes scholarly biomedical articles, reveals that 997,508 articles were published in the year 2011, which amounts to roughly 2,700 articles per day. Since the database does not include all published biomedical research articles, the actual number of published biomedical papers is probably even higher. Most biomedical researchers work in defined research areas, so perhaps only 1% of the published articles may be relevant for their research. As an example, the major focus of my research is the biology of stem cells, so I narrowed down the PubMed search to articles containing the expression "stem cells". I found that 14291 "stem cells" articles were published in 2011, which translates to an average of 39 articles per day (assuming that one reads scientific papers on week-ends and during vacations, which is probably true for most scientists). Many researchers also tend to have two or three areas of interest, which further increases the number of articles one needs to read.

Needless to say, it has become impossible for researchers to read all the articles published in their fields of interest, because if they did that, they would not have any time left to conduct experiments of their own. To avoid drowning in the information overload, researchers have developed multiple strategies how to survive and navigate their way through all this published data. These strategies include relying on recommendations of colleagues, focusing on articles published in high-impact journals, only perusing articles that are directly related to one's own work or only reading articles that have been cited or featured in major review articles, editorials or commentaries. As a stem cell researcher, I can use the above-mentioned strategies to narrow down the stem cell articles that I ought to read to the manageable number of about three or four articles a day. However, scientific innovation in research is fueled by the cross-fertilization of ideas. The most creative ideas are derived from combining seemingly unrelated research questions. Therefore, the challenge for me is to not only stay informed about important developments in my own areas of interest. I also need to know about major developments in other scientific domains such as network theory, botany or neuroscience, because discoveries in such "distant" fields could inspire me to develop innovative approaches in my own work.

In order to keep up with scientific developments outside of my area of expertise, I have begun to rely on high-quality science journalism, which can be found in selected print and online publications or in science blogs. Good science journalists accurately convey complex scientific concepts in simple language, without oversimplifying the actual science. This is easier said than done, because it requires a solid understanding of the science as well as excellent communication skills. Most scientists are not trained to communicate to the general audience and most journalists have had very limited exposure to actual scientific work. To become good science journalists, either scientists have to be trained in the art of communicating results to non-specialists or journalists have to acquire the scientific knowledge pertinent to the topics they want to write about. The training of science journalists requires time, resources and good mentors.

Once they have completed their training and start working as science journalists, they still need adequate time, resources and mentors. When writing about an important new scientific development, good science journalists do not just repeat the information provided by the researchers or contained in the press release of the university where the research was conducted. Instead, science journalists perform the necessary fact-checking to ensure that the provided information is indeed correct. They also consult the scientific literature as well as other scientific experts to place the new development in the context of the existing research. Importantly, science journalists then analyze the new scientific development, separating the actual scientific data from speculation as well as point out limitations and implications of the work.

Science journalists also write for a very broad audience, and this also poses a challenge. Their readership includes members of the general public interested in new scientific findings, politicians and members of the private industry that may base political and economic decisions on scientific findings, patients and physicians that want to stay informed about innovative new treatments and, as mentioned above, scientists that want to know about new scientific research outside of their area of expertise.

Unfortunately, I do not think that it is widely appreciated how important high-quality science journalism is and how much effort it requires. Limited resources, constraints on a journalist's time and the pressure to publish sensationalist articles that exaggerate or oversimplify the science in order to attract a larger readership can compromise the quality of the work. Two recent examples illustrate this: The so-called Jonah Lehrer controversy, where the highly respected and popular science journalist Jonah Lehrer was found to fabricate quotes, plagiarize and oversimplify the research as well as the more recent case where the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun ran a story about the use of induced pluripotent stem cells to treat patients with heart disease, which turned out to be a fraudulent claim of the researcher. The case of Jonah Lehrer was a big shock for me. I had enjoyed reading a number of his articles and blogs that he had written and, at first, it was difficult for me to accept that his work contained so many errors and evidence of misconduct. Boris Kachka has recently written a very profound analysis of the Jonah Lehrer controversy in New York Magazine:

Lehrer was the first of the Millennials to follow his elders into the dubious promised land of the convention hall, where the book, blog, TED talk, and article are merely delivery systems for a core commodity, the Insight.

The Insight is less of an idea than a conceit, a bit of alchemy that transforms minor studies into news, data into magic. Once the Insight is in place—Blink, Nudge, Free, The World Is Flat—the data becomes scaffolding. It can go in the book, along with any caveats, but it's secondary. The purpose is not to substantiate but to enchant.

Kachka's expression "Insight" describes our desire to believe in simple narratives. Any active scientist knows that scientific findings tend to be more complex and difficult to interpret than we anticipated. There are few simple truths or "Insights" in science, even though part of us wants to seek out these elusive simple truths. The metaphor that comes to mind is the German expression "der innere Schweinehund". This literally translates to "the inner swine dog". The expression may evoke the image of a chimeric pig-dog beast created by a mad German scientist in a Hollywood World War II movie, but in Germany this expression is actually used to describe a metaphorical inner creature that wants us to be lazy, seek out convenience and avoid challenges. In my view, scientific work is an ongoing battle with our "inner swine dog". We start experiments with simple hypotheses and models, and we are usually quite pleased with results that confirm these anticipated findings because they allow us to be intellectually lazy. However, good scientists know that more often than not, scientific truths are complex and we need to force ourselves to continuously challenge our own scientific concepts. Usually this involves performing more experiments, analyzing more data and trying to interpret data from many different perspectives. Overcoming the intellectual laziness requires work, but most of us who are passionate about science enjoy these challenges and seek out opportunities to battle against our "inner swine dog" instead of succumbing to a state of perpetual intellectual laziness.

When I read Kachka's description of why Lehrer was able to get away with his fabrications and over-simplifications, I realized that it was probably because Lehrer gave us the narratives we wanted to believe. He provided "Insight" - portraying scientific research in a false shroud of certainty and simplicity. Even though many of us look forward to overcoming intellectual laziness in our own work, we may not be used to challenging our "inner swine dog" when we learn about scientific topics outside of our own areas of expertise. This is precisely why we need good science journalists, who challenge us intellectually by avoiding over-simplifications.

A different but equally instructive case of poor science journalism occurred when the widely circulated Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun reported in early October of 2012 that the Japanese researcher Hisashi Moriguchi had transplanted induced pluripotent stem cells into patients with heart disease. This was quite a sensation, because it would have been the first transplantation of this kind of stem cells into real patients. For those of us in the field of stem cell research, this came as a big surprise and did not sound very believable, because the story suggested that the work had been performed in the United States and most of us knew that obtaining approvals for using such stem cells in clinical studies would have been very challenging. However, it is very likely that many people who were not acquainted with the complexities of using stem cells in patients may have believed the story. Within days, it became apparent that the researcher's claims were fraudulent. He had said that he had conducted the studies at Harvard, but Harvard stated that he was not currently affiliated with them and there was no evidence of any such studies ever being conducted there. His claims of how he derived the cells and in how little time he supposedly performed the experiments were also debunked.

This was not the first incident of scientific fraud in the world of stem cell research and it unfortunately will not be the last. What makes this incident noteworthy is how the newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun responded to their reporting of these fraudulent claims. They removed the original story from their page and issued public apologies for their poor reporting. The English-language version of the newspaper listed the mistakes in an article entitled "iPS REPORTS--WHAT WENT WRONG / Moriguchi reporting left questions unanswered". These problems include inadequate fact-checking regarding the researcher's claims and affiliations by the reporter and lack of consultation with other scientists whether the findings sounded reasonable. Interestingly, the reporter had identified some red flags and concerns:

--Moriguchi had not published any research on animal experiments.
--The reporter had not been able to contact people who could confirm the iPS cell clinical applications.
--Moriguchi's affiliation with Harvard University could not be confirmed online.
--It was possible that different cells, instead of iPS cells, had been effective in the treatments.
--It was odd that what appeared to be major world news was appearing only in the form of a poster at a science conference.
--The reporter wondered if it was really possible that transplant operations using iPS cells had been approved at Harvard.
The reporter sent the e-mail to three others, including another news editor in charge of medical science, on the same day, and the reporter's regular updates on the topic were shared among them.
The science reporter said he felt "at ease" after informing the editors about such dubious points. After receiving explanations from Moriguchi, along with the video clip and other materials, the reporter sought opinions from only one expert and came to believe the doubts had been resolved.

In spite of these red flags, the reporter and the editors decided to run the story. The reporter and the editors gave in to their intellectual laziness and desire of running a sensational story instead of tediously following up on all the red flags. They had a story about a Japanese researcher making a ground-breaking discovery in a very competitive area of stem cell research and this was the story that their readers would probably love. This unprofessional conduct is why the reporter and the editors received reprimands and penalties for their actions. Another article in the newspaper summarizes the punitive measures:

Effective as of next Thursday, The Yomiuri Shimbun will take disciplinary action against the following officials and employees:
--Yoshimitsu Ohashi, senior managing director and managing editor of the company, and Takeshi Mizoguchi, corporate officer and senior deputy managing editor, will each return 30 percent of their remuneration and salary for two months.
--Fumitaka Shibata, a deputy managing editor and editor of the Science News Department, will be replaced and his salary will be reduced.
--Another deputy managing editor in charge of editorial work for the Oct. 11 edition will receive an official reprimand.
--The salaries of two deputy editors of the Science News Department will be cut.
--A reporter in charge of the Oct. 11 series will receive an official reprimand.

I have mixed feelings about these punitive actions. I think it is commendable that the newspaper made apologies without reservations or excuses and listed its mistakes. The reprimands and penalties also highlight that the newspaper takes it science journalism very seriously and recognizes the importance of high professional standards. The penalties were also more severe for its editors than for the reporter, which may reflect the fact that the reporter did consult with the editors and they decided to run the story even though the red flags had been pointed out to them. My concerns arise from the fact that I am not sure punitive actions will solve the problem and they leave a lot of questions unanswered. Did the newspaper evaluate whether the science journalists and editors had been appropriately trained? Did the science journalist have the time and resources to conduct his or her research in a conscientious manner? Importantly, will science journalists be given the appropriate resources and protected from pressures or constraints that encourage unprofessional science journalism? We do not know the answers to these questions, but providing the infrastructure for high quality science journalism is probably going to be more useful than mere punitive actions. We can also hope that media organizations all over the world learn from this incident and recognize the importance of science journalism and put mechanisms in place to ensure that its quality.

Note: Image via Wikimedia Commons/ Norbert Schnitzler: Statue "Mein Innerer Schweinhund" in Bonn. An earlier version of this article was first published on my Next Regeneration blog.
Sisyphoshttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-74099626510246098602014-02-16T12:29:00.000-06:002014-02-16T12:29:12.952-06:00"It Is An Opportunity For Great Joy"I was about 12 years old when I found out that my grandfather was born on 12/12/12. If he were alive, he would be exactly 100 years old today. I found out about his birthday, when he came to stay with us in Munich for an eye surgery. He was a diabetic and had been experiencing deterioration in his vision. At that time, it was very difficult to find an eye surgeon in Pakistan who would be able to perform the surgery. My grandfather spoke many languages, such as Punjabi, Urdu, Persian, English, Arabic and some Sanskrit, but he could not speak German. His visit occurred during my school holidays, so I was designated to be his official translator for the doctor visits and his hospital stay.

On the afternoon before his surgery, we went to the hospital and I was filling out the registration forms, when I asked my grandfather about his birthday and he said 12/12/12. I was quite surprised to find out that he had such a wonderful combination of numbers, when the lady at the registration desk saw the date and asked me whether he was absolutely sure this was the correct date. I translated this for my grandfather and he smiled and said something along the lines of, "It is more or less the correct date. Nobody is exactly sure, but it is definitely very easy to remember". I knew that I was supposed be a translator, but this required a bit more finesse than a straightforward translation. One cannot tell a German civil servant that a date is more or less correct. If we introduced uncertainty at this juncture, who knows what the consequences would be.

 I therefore paraphrased my grandfather's response as, "Yes, it is absolutely correct!"

 She then said, "Eine Schnapszahl!"

 My grandfather wanted me to translate this, and I was again at a loss for words. Schnapszahl literally means Schnapsnumber and is a German expression for repeated digits, such as 33 or 555. The origin of the word probably lies in either the fact that a drunken person may have transient double vision or in a drinking game where one drinks Schnaps after reaching repeated digits when adding up numbers. I was not quite sure how to translate this into Urdu without having to go into the whole background of how German idioms often jokingly refer to alcohol.

 I decided to translate her comment as "What a memorable date", and my grandfather nodded.

 We were then seen by a medical resident who also pointed out the unique birthday. His comment was "Darauf sollten wir einen trinken!", which is another German idiom and translates to "we should all have a drink to celebrate this", but really just means "Hooray!" or "Great!"

 My grandfather wanted to know what the doctor had said and I was again in a quandary. Should I give him accurate translation and explain that this is just another German idiom and is not intended as a cultural insult to a Pakistani Muslim? Or should I just skip the whole alcohol bit? Translation between languages is tough enough, but translating and showing cultural sensitivity was more than I could handle. My Urdu was not very good to begin with, and all I could come up with the rather silly Urdu translation "It is an opportunity for great joy". My grandfather gave me a puzzled look, but did not ask any questions.

 *****

 On the day after my grand-father's eye surgery, the ophthalmologist and the residents came by for morning rounds. They removed his eye-patch, inspected the eye and told me that everything looked great. He just needed a few more days of recovery and would soon be able to go home. After putting the gauze and eye-patch back on, the doctors moved on to the next patient.

 Once the doctors had completed rounds, I made the acquaintance of the head nurse. She seemed to think that the eye ward was her military regiment and was running it like a drill-sergeant. She walked into every room and ordered all the patients to get out of bed and walk to the common area. Only lazy people stayed in bed, she said. The best way to recuperate was to move about.

 I told her that I did not think my grandfather was ready to get up.

"Did any doctor forbid him to get up?"

 "No, not really", I replied.

 "If he has two legs, he can walk to the common room. If not, we will provide a wheelchair."

 "He just had surgery yesterday and needs to rest", I protested and pointed to my grandfather's eye-patch.

 "Yesterday was yesterday and today is today!" was the response from the drill-sergeant.

 This statement did not seem very profound to me and I was waiting for a further explanation, but the drill-sergeant had already moved on, ordering the patients from the neighboring rooms to get up. My grandfather and I did not have much of a choice, so we joined the procession of one-eyed men who looked like retired, frail pirates. They were slowly shuffling out of their rooms towards the common area.

 The common area consisted of chairs and sofas as well as a couple of tables. I sat down in a corner with my grandfather, and we started talking. He told me stories from his life, including vivid descriptions of how he and his friends proudly defied the British colonialists. My grandfather recited poems from the Gulistan of the Persian poet Saadi for me in Persian and translated them into Urdu. He wanted to know about German history and what I was learning at school. He asked me if I knew any poems by Goethe, because the Indian poet Iqbal had been such a great admirer of Goethe's poetry.

 We talked for hours. Like most children, I did not realize how much I enjoyed the conversations. It was only years later when my grandfather passed away that I wished I had taken notes of my conversations with him. All I currently have are fragmented memories of our conversations, but I treasure these few fragments.

 I then pulled out a tiny travel chess set that I had brought along, and we started playing chess. I knew that he had trouble distinguishing some of the pieces because of his eye surgery. I took advantage of his visual disability and won every game. During my conversations with my grandfather and our chess games, I noticed that some of the other men were staring at us. Perhaps they were irritated by having a child around. Maybe they did not like our continuous chatting or perhaps they just did not like us foreign-looking folks. I tried to ignore their stares, but they still made me quite uncomfortable.

 On the next day, we went through the same procedure. Morning rounds, drill sergeant ordering everyone to the common area, conversations with my grandfather and our chess games. The stares of the other patients were now really bothering me. I was wondering whether I should walk up to one of the men and ask him whether they had a problem with me and my grandfather. Before I could muster the courage, one of the men got up and walked towards us. I was a bit worried, not knowing what the man was going to do or say to us.

"Can you ask your grandfather, if I can borrow you?"

 "Borrow me?", I asked, taken aback.

 "He gets to tell you all these stories and play chess with you for hours and hours, and I also want to have someone to talk to."

 Once he had said that, another patient who was silently observing us chimed in and said that he would like to know if he could "borrow" me for a game of chess. I felt really stupid. The other patients who had been staring at me and my grandfather were not at all racist or angry towards us, they were simply envious of the fact that my grandfather had someone who would listen to him.

 I tried to translate this for my grandfather, but I did not know how to translate "borrow". My grandfather smiled and understood immediately what the men wanted, and told me that I should talk to as many of the patients as possible. He told me that the opportunity to listen to others was a mutual blessing, both for the narrator as well as the listener.

 On that day and the next few days that my grandfather spent in the hospital, I spoke to many of the men and listened to their stories about their lives, their health, their work and even stories about World War 2 and life in post-war Germany. I also remember how I agreed to play chess, but when I pulled out my puny little travel chess set, my opponent laughed and brought a huge chess set from a cupboard in the common area. He beat me and so did my grandfather who then also played chess with me on this giant-size chess board which obliterated the visual advantage that my travel set had offered.

 ***********

 Since that time I spent with my grandfather and the other patients on the eye ward, I have associated medicine with narration. All humans want to be narrators, but many have difficulties finding listeners. Illness is often a time of vulnerability and loneliness. Narrating stories during this time of vulnerability is a way to connect to fellow human beings, which helps overcome the loneliness. The listeners can be family members, friends or even strangers. Unfortunately, many people who are ill do not have access to family members or friends who are willing to listen. This is the reason why healthcare professionals such as nurses or physicians can serve a very important role. We listen to patients so that we can obtain clues about their health, searching for symptoms that can lead to a diagnosis. However, sometimes the process of listening itself can be therapeutic in the sense that it provides comfort to the patient.

 Even though I mostly work as a cell biologist, I still devote some time to the practice of medicine. What I like about being a physician is the opportunity to listen to patients or their family members. I prescribe all the necessary medications and tests according to the cardiology guidelines, but I have noticed that my listening to the patients and giving them an opportunity to narrate their story provides an immediate relief.

 It is an indeed an "an opportunity for great joy", when the patient experiences the joy of having an audience and the healthcare provider experiences the joy of connecting with the patient. I have often wondered whether there is any good surrogate for listening to the patient. Medicine is moving towards reducing face-to-face time between healthcare providers and patients in order to cut costs or maximize profits. The telemedicine approach in which patients are assessed by physicians who are in other geographic locations is gaining ground. Patients now often fill out checklists about their history instead of narrating it to the physicians or nurses. All of these developments are reducing the opportunity for the narrator-listener interaction between patients and healthcare providers. However, social networks, blogs and online discussion groups may provide patients the opportunities to narrate their stories (those directly related to their health as well as other stories) and find an audience. I personally prefer the old-fashioned style of narration. The listener can give instant feedback and the facial expressions and subtle nuances can help reassure the narrator. The key is to respect the narrative process in medicine and to help the patients find ways to narrate their stories in a manner that they are comfortable with.

Note: An earlier version of this article was first published on the Next Regeneration blog.Sisyphoshttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-57490472659947644742014-02-16T10:03:00.000-06:002014-02-16T10:03:40.933-06:00'The Epichorus': Creative Heretics Build Bridges Between FaithsWhen we hear the word religion, we often associate it with violence or conflict. The reason for this is that religion is frequently used as a means to ostracize or demean fellow humans and to justify violence. Political and socioeconomic causes of conflicts are also sometimes masked by invoking religious differences. This turns religion into a handy tool to promote certain agendas and perpetuate conflicts without addressing the underlying political and socioeconomic problems.

To address this abuse of religion, spiritual leaders and visionaries try to organize interfaith events. The hope is that when people of different religious backgrounds meet each other, they will engage in a dialogue. This should in turn allow them to recognize the similarities between their faith traditions and move past perceived differences. Such a fruitful interfaith dialogue could circumvent the abuse of religion as a tool for promoting conflicts. However, the problem with such interfaith events is that they do not necessarily result in a true dialogue. During many of the interfaith events that I have attended, people of different faiths politely present ideas, traditions or doctrines from their respective religions and engage in a discussion. Instead of this encounter becoming a transforming dialogue, participants sometimes end up merely "performing" monologues for each other.

 One reason for the absence of true dialogue may be the inertia that prevents us from leaving our comfort zone. Few of us like to question the religious paradigms or doctrines that we grow up with. True dialogue is a spiritual and intellectual adventure. It is an exploration or journey that requires courage and openness, because it might challenge the religious dogmas that we like to cling to for the sake of convenience.

 I recently came across what is a beautiful form of true interfaith dialogue: the music of the band the Epichorus. Rabbinical student Zach Fredman and Muslim singer Alsarah co-founded the band and their musical love-child is the wonderful album One Bead. In this album, Zach, Alsarah and the other members of the band combine Jewish and Sudanese-Arab musical traditions to create music that transcends the boundaries of culture or religion. The lyrics of the songs are mostly drawn from the Jewish tradition, such as the "Song of Songs" (Song of Solomon) from the Old Testament, but the album also includes the traditional Sudanese love song "Nanaa Al Genina" (The Mint Garden).

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 The common theme of the One Bead songs is love, the emotion that is at the core of our human existence and spirituality. Listening to the music, one feels a profound sense of harmony that exists between the various cultural and religious traditions that are part of the Epichorus. The lyrics for two of the songs are taken from the "Song of Songs" and this reminded me of something that the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote. He composed a cycle of poems called "West-östlicher Diwan" (or "West-Eastern Divan" in English). Goethe wrote these poems to represent a fusion between Eastern and Western traditions. He also wrote essays in which he elaborated on his poems and one of his comments specifically refers to the Old Testament "Song of Songs", of which he says, "...als dem Zartesten und Unnachahmlichsten, was uns von Ausdruck leidenschaftlicher, anmutiger Liebe zugekommen," which translates into English as: "...it is the most tender and unique expression of passionate and graceful love that has been given to us."

 I asked Zach how he chose the name the Epichorus for their band and he said that it was a reference to Epikoros (or Apikoros), which is a term used in the Jewish tradition to describe outsiders or heretics. The members of the Epichorus are indeed outsiders in the sense that they have the courage to look beyond the boundaries of their religious traditions and have sought out a creative dialogue with people outside of their faith traditions. They are also "heretics" in the original Greek sense of the word, describing people who "make choices." They chose to embark on a creative adventure and found that they could engage in an authentic dialogue by creating beautiful songs together.

 The music of the Epichorus is an excellent example of how creating culture together can promote true interfaith dialogue. Hopefully, we will hear more songs from the Epichorus, but I also hope that other artists, musicians or poets will be inspired by them and seek out their own creative paths to foster dialogue between faiths.

Note: An earlier version of this article was first published in the Huffington Post.Sisyphoshttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-61253357199970616792014-02-16T09:52:00.000-06:002014-02-16T09:52:09.523-06:00"Occidentophobia": The Elephant in the RoomScapegoating Muslims has become a convenient tool for promoting a far right political agenda. A Center for American Progress (CAP) report carefully outlined anti-Muslim fear-mongering in the United States, with the long-term hope that, by exposing the roots of anti-Muslim hostility, strategies can be developed to overcome such prejudice. However, relatively little attention is paid to "Occidentophobia," or more appropriately (since, like 'Islamophobia," it does not constitute a true "phobia") anti-Western sentiments among Muslims.

An international Pew Research Center report, with the innocuous title "Muslim-Western Tensions Persist," discussed the extent of Muslim anti-Western prejudice. The report summarized the results of a survey of Western stereotypes of Muslims living in predominantly Muslim countries such as Indonesia, Egypt and Pakistan. A median of 68 percent of the Muslim respondents associated "selfish" with Westerners, while only a median of 35 percent of non-Muslims living in countries such as Great Britain, the United States or Germany associated "selfish" with Muslims. One could conceivably attribute anti-Western hostility to the fact that Muslims living in predominantly Muslim countries may not have come into personal contact with Westerners. After all, this Pew survey report did not provide data about the attitudes of Muslims living in the West. However, an earlier Pew Research Center report released in 2006 titled "The Great Divide: How Muslims and Westerners View Each Other" also surveyed Muslims living in European countries and offered a fairly bleak picture of the anti-Western prejudice among European Muslims. Muslims in Britain had an especially negative response, as 69 percent of those surveyed attributed three or more negative traits such as "greedy," "selfish," "arrogant" or "immoral" to Westerners. This antagonistic attitude was in sharp contrast to the comparatively positive views of the non-Muslim general public in Britain, of whom only 30 percent attributed three or more negative traits to Muslims.

 The "selfish" or "greedy" traits attributed by Muslims in Britain to Westerners are especially noteworthy, since the majority of the top-ranking ranking countries in terms of charitable behavior, as measured by the World Giving Index of the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF), happen to be countries that are typically associated with "Western culture," such as Australia, Canada, Switzerland, USA or Great Britain. According to the CAF, people living in Western countries appear to be far more likely to donate money or volunteer their time than those living in predominantly Muslim countries. This even holds true for relatively wealthy Muslim countries such as the UAE or Saudi Arabia, which came in at ranks 50 and 86 for charitable behavior, whereas Great Britain achieved an international rank of 8. These facts therefore raise questions about the seeming mis-perception of Western culture. Is the Muslim anti-Western prejudice due to ignorance, or is it the consequence of a very selective view of Western society? Is such anti-Western prejudice perhaps fueled by organizations with a political or ideological agenda, similar to those that promote anti-Muslim prejudice as uncovered by the Center for American Progress? Does anti-Western prejudice of Muslims living in the West manifest itself differently in Europe and in North America?

 Western Muslims frequently emphasize the rich cultural heritage and diversity of Islam as a means to combat anti-Muslim prejudice. At interfaith or intercultural events, Western Muslims discuss poems of the philosopher-poet Rumi and depict the vast array of cultural traditions in the Muslim world, ranging from Indian and Pakistani Qawwali music to Moroccan cuisine. For many non-Muslim Westerners, the abstract entities "Muslim" or "Islam" that were previously associated with fear are thus transformed into vibrant human encounters and allows them to move beyond their prejudice.

 However, when I discuss the concept of Western culture with Western Muslims, I often find that their perception of Western culture does not include the same desirable standard of openness. "The West" is regularly seen as some combination of loss of moral values, imperialism and drone attacks -- a description reminiscent of the Star Trek Borg species that assimilates into and then destroys other cultures. Many struggle with recognizing their own "Western" identity and few seem to associate "the West" with its grand cultural heritage, which reaches far back to Plato's The Republic but also includes Baroque music, Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique," and the environmental movement. Even though many Western Muslims that I have met encountered Western culture and history during their grade school and university education, these encounters appear to be frequently tinged with an unnecessary denigration of Western culture. Allowing Muslims in Europe and North America to appreciate the rich mosaic and diversity that comprises "Western" culture might be an important step towards overcoming anti-Western prejudice.

 In addition to these anecdotal experiences, analytical studies such as the one conducted by the Center for American Progress are also necessary to help uncover the extent and roots of anti-Western prejudice among Muslims living in the West. The efforts to understand and combat anti-Muslim prejudice need to be accompanied by equal efforts to understand and combat anti-Western prejudice. The discussions about Muslim anti-Western prejudice and hostility are currently often confined to far right organizations in Europe and North America and are thus coupled with a specific agenda to malign Muslims using outrageous assertions and exaggerations. The analysis of Muslim anti-Western hostility deserves more serious scrutiny. Muslim anti-Western prejudice is sometimes treated like an elephant in the room that is ignored, even by liberal-progressive organizations and movements. It would be a fallacy to believe that prejudice and hostilities between Muslims and non-Muslims can be resolved by just asking non-Muslims to show more tolerance and understanding, without demanding reciprocity from Muslims.

 An earlier version of this article was published on the Guernica blog.Sisyphoshttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-34502307694398694382014-02-13T14:10:00.000-06:002014-02-13T14:10:07.909-06:00Creativity in Older Adults: Learning Digital Photography Improves Cognitive Function
The unprecedented increase in the mean life expectancy during the past centuries and a concomitant drop in the birth rate has resulted in a major demographic shift in most parts of the world. The proportion of fellow humans older than 65 years of age is higher than at any time before in our history. This trend of generalized population ageing will likely continue in developed as well as in developing countries. Population ageing has sadly also given rise to ageism, prejudice against the elderly. In 1950, more than 20% of citizens aged 65 years or older participate used to participate in the labor workforce of the developed world. The percentage now has dropped to below 10%. If the value of a human being is primarily based on their economic productivity – as is so commonly done in societies driven by neoliberal capitalist values – it is easy to see why prejudices against senior citizens are on the rise. They are viewed as non-productive members of society who do not contribute to the economic growth and instead represent an economic burden because they sap up valuable dollars required to treat chronic illnesses associated with old age.

In "Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America", the scholar and cultural critic Margaret Morganroth Gullette ties the rise of ageism to unfettered capitalism:

There are larger social forces at work that might make everyone, male or female, white or nonwhite, wary of the future. Under American capitalism, with productivity so fetishized, retirement from paid work can move you into the ranks of the "unproductive" who are bleeding society. One vile interpretation of longevity (that more people living longer produces intolerable medical expense) makes the long-lived a national threat, and another (that very long-lived people lack adequate quality of life) is a direct attack on the progress narratives of those who expect to live to a good old age. Self-esteem in later life, the oxygen of selfhood, is likely to be asphyxiated by the spreading hostile rhetoric about the unnecessary and expendable costs of "aging America".
Instead of recognizing the value of the creative potential, wisdom and experiences that senior citizens can share with their respective communities, we are treating them as if they were merely a financial liability. The rise of neo-liberalism and the monetization of our lives are not unique to the United States and it is likely that such capitalist values are also fueling ageism in other parts of the world. Watching this growing disdain for senior citizens is especially painful for those of us who grew up inspired by our elders and who have respected their intellect and guidance they can offer.

In her book, Gullette also explores the cultural dimension of cognitive decline that occurs with aging and how it contributes to ageism. As our minds age, most of us will experience some degree of cognitive decline such as memory loss, deceleration in our ability to learn or process information. In certain disease states such as Alzheimer's dementia or vascular dementia (usually due to strokes or 'mini-strokes'), the degree of cognitive impairment can be quite severe. However, as Gullete points out, the dichotomy between dementia and non-dementia is often an oversimplification. Cognitive impairment with aging represents a broad continuum. Not every form of dementia is severe and not every cognitive impairment – whether or not it is directly associated with a diagnosis of dementia – is global. Episodic memory loss in an aging person does not necessarily mean that the person has lost his or her ability to play a musical instrument or write a poem. However, in a climate of ageism, labels such as "dementia" or "cognitive impairment" are sometimes used as a convenient excuse to marginalize and ignore aged fellow humans.

Perhaps I am simply getting older or maybe some of my academic colleagues have placed me on the marketing lists of cognitive impairment snake oil salesmen. My junk mail folder used to be full of emails promising hours of sexual pleasure if I purchased herbal Viagra equivalents. However, in the past months I have received a number of junk emails trying to sell nutritional supplements which can supposedly boost my memory and cognitive skills and restore the intellectual vigor of my youth. As much as I would like strengthen my cognitive skills by popping a few pills, there is no scientific data that supports the efficacy of such treatments. A recent article by Naqvi and colleagues reviewed randomized controlled trials– the 'gold standard' for testing the efficacy of medical treatments – did not find any definitive scientific data that vitamin supplements or herbs such as Ginkgo can improve cognitive function in the elderly. The emerging consensus is that based on the currently available data, there are two basic interventions which are best suited for improving cognitive function or preventing cognitive decline in older adults: regular physical activity and cognitive training.

Cognitive training is a rather broad approach and can range from enrolling older adults in formal education classes to teaching participants exercises that enhance specific cognitive skills such as improving short-term memory. One of the key issues with studies which investigate the impact of cognitive training in older adults has been the difficulty of narrowing down what aspect of the training is actually beneficial. Is it merely being enrolled in a structured activity or is it the challenging nature of the program which improves cognitive skills? Does it matter what type of education the participants are receiving? The lack of appropriate control groups in some studies has made it difficult to interpret the results.

The recent study "The Impact of Sustained Engagement on Cognitive Function in Older Adults: The Synapse Project" published in the journal Psychological Science by the psychology researcher Denise Park and her colleagues at the University of Texas at Dallas is an example of an extremely well-designed study which attempts to tease out the benefits of participating in a structured activity versus receiving formal education and acquiring new skills. The researchers assigned subjects with a mean age of 72 years (259 participants were enrolled, but only 221 subjects completed the whole study) to participate in 14-week program in one of five intervention groups: 1) learning digital photography, 2) learning how to make quilts, 3) learning both digital photography and quilting (half of the time spent in each program), 4) a "social condition" in which the members participated in a social club involving activities such as cooking, playing games, watching movies, reminiscing, going on regular field trips but without the acquisition of any specific new skills or 5) a "placebo condition" in which participants were provided with documentaries, informative magazines, word games and puzzles, classical-music CDs and asked to perform and log at least 15 hours a week of such activities. None of the participants carried a diagnosis of dementia and they were novices to the areas of digital photography or quilting. Upon subsequent review of the activities in each of the five intervention groups, it turned out that each group spent an average of about 16-18 hours per week in the aforementioned activities, without any significant difference between the groups. Lastly, a sixth group of participants was not enrolled in any specific program but merely asked to keep a log of their activities and used as a no-intervention control.

When the researchers assessed the cognitive skills of the participants after the 14-week period, the type of activity they had been enrolled in had a significant impact on their cognition. For example, the participants in the photography class had a much greater degree of improvement in their episodic memory and their visuospatial processing than the placebo condition. On the other hand, cognitive processing speed of the participants increased most in the dual condition group (photography and quilting) as well as the social condition. The general trend was that the groups which placed the highest cognitive demands on the participants and also challenged them to be creative (acquiring digital photography skills, learning to make quilts) showed the greatest improvements.

However, there are key limitations of the study. Since only 221 participants were divided across six groups, each individual group was fairly small. Repeating this study with a larger sample would increase the statistical power of the study and provide more definitive results. Furthermore, the cognitive assessments were performed soon after completion of the 14-week programs. Would the photography group show sustained memory benefits even a year after completion of the 14-week program? Would the participants continue to be engaged in digital photography long after completion of the respective courses?

Despite these limitations, there is an important take-home message of this study: Cognitive skills in older adults can indeed be improved, especially if they are exposed to an unfamiliar terrain and asked to actively acquire new cognitive skills. Merely watching educational documentaries or completing puzzles ("placebo condition") is not enough. This research will likely spark many future studies which will help define the specific mechanisms of how acquiring new skills leads to improved memory function and also studies that perhaps individualize cognitive training. Some older adults may benefit most from learning digital photography, others might benefit from acquiring science skills or participating in creative writing workshops. This research also gives us hope as to how we can break the vicious cycle of ageism in which older citizens are marginalized because of cognitive decline, but this marginalization itself further accelerates their decline. By providing opportunities to channel their creativity, we can improve their cognitive function and ensure that they remain engaged in the community.

There are many examples of people who have defied the odds and broken the glass ceiling of ageism. I felt a special sense of pride when I saw my uncle Jamil's name on the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize shortlist for his book The Wandering Falcon: He was nominated for a 'debut' novel at the age of 78. It is true that the inter-connected tales of the "The Wandering Falcon" were inspired by his work and life in the tribal areas of the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands when he was starting out as a young civil servant and that he completed the first manuscript drafts of these stories in the 1970s. But these stories remained unpublished, squirreled away and biding their time until they would eventually be published nearly four decades later. They would have withered away in this cocooned state, if it hadn't been for his younger brother Javed, who prodded the long-retired Jamil, convincing him to dig up, rework and submit those fascinating tales for publication. Fortunately, my uncle found a literary agent and publisher who were not deterred by his advanced age and recognized the immense value of his writing.

When we help older adults tap into their creative potential, we can engender a new culture of respect for the creativity and intellect of our elders.

Further Reading:

Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. Agewise: Fighting the new ageism in America. University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Naqvi, Raza et al "Preventing cognitive decline in healthy older adults" CMAJ July 9, 2013 185:881-885.doi: 10.1503/cmaj.121448

Park, Denise C et al "The Impact of Sustained Engagement on Cognitive Function in Older Adults", published online on Nov 8, 2013 in Psychological Science doi:10.1177/0956797613499592

Note: An earlier version of this article was first published on 3quarksdaily.com.

 <span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Psychological+science&rft_id=info%3Apmid%2F24214244&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=The+impact+of+sustained+engagement+on+cognitive+function+in+older+adults%3A+the+synapse+project.&rft.issn=0956-7976&rft.date=2014&rft.volume=25&rft.issue=1&rft.spage=103&rft.epage=12&rft.artnum=&rft.au=Park+DC&rft.au=Lodi-Smith+J&rft.au=Drew+L&rft.au=Haber+S&rft.au=Hebrank+A&rft.au=Bischof+GN&rft.au=Aamodt+W&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Medicine%2CPsychology%2CSocial+Science%2CHealth%2CNeuroscience%2CCognitive+Psychology%2C+Human+Factors%2C+Intelligence%2C+Learning%2C+Social+Psychology%2C+Sociology%2C+Economics%2C+Aging%2C+Neurology%2C+Psychiatry%2C+Cognitive+Neuroscience">Park DC, Lodi-Smith J, Drew L, Haber S, Hebrank A, Bischof GN, & Aamodt W (2014). The impact of sustained engagement on cognitive function in older adults: the synapse project. Psychological science, 25 (1), 103-12 PMID: 24214244Sisyphoshttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-2691385406730612832014-02-12T12:45:00.000-06:002014-02-12T12:45:10.675-06:00Three Seconds: Poems, Cubes and the BrainA child drops a chocolate chip cookie on the floor, immediately picks it up, looks quizzically at a parental eye-witness and proceeds to munch on it after receiving an approving nod. This is one of the versions of the "three second rule", which suggests that food can be safely consumed if it has had less than three seconds contact with the floor. There is really no scientific basis for this legend, because noxious chemicals or microbial flora do not bide their time, counting "One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand,…" before they latch on to a chocolate chip cookie. Food will likely accumulate more bacteria, the longer it is in contact with the floor, but I am not aware of any rigorous scientific study that has measured the impact of food-floor intercourse on a second-to-second basis and identified three seconds as a critical temporal threshold. Basketball connoisseurs occasionally argue about a very different version of the "three second rule", and the Urban Dictionary provides us with yet another set of definitions for the "three second rule", such as the time after which one loses a vacated seat in a public setting. I was not aware of any of these "three second rule" versions until I moved to the USA, but I had come across the elusive "three seconds" time interval in a rather different context when I worked at the Institute of Medical Psychology in Munich: Stimuli or signals that occur within an interval of up to three seconds are processed and integrated by our brain into a "subjective present".

I joined the Institute of Medical Psychology at the University of Munich as a research student in 1992 primarily because of my mentor Till Roenneberg. His intellect, charm and infectious enthusiasm were simply irresistible. I scrapped all my plans to work on HIV, cancer or cardiovascular disease and instead began researching the internal clock of marine algae in Till's laboratory – in an Institute of Medical Psychology. Within weeks of working at the institute, I realized how fortunate I was. Ernst Pöppel, one of Germany's leading neuroscientists and the director of the institute, had created a multidisciplinary research heaven. Ernst assembled a team of remarkably diverse researchers who studied neurobiology, psychology, linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, endocrinology, cell physiology, marine biology, computer science, ecology – all on the same floor. Since I left the institute nearly 20 years ago, I have worked in many academic departments at various institutions, each claiming to value multidisciplinary studies, but I have never again encountered any place that has been able to successfully integrate natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities in the same way as the Munich institute.

The central, unifying theme of the institute was time. Not physical time, but biological and psychological time. How does our brain perceive physical time? What is the structure of perceived time? What regulates biological oscillations in humans, animals and even algae? Can environmental cues modify temporal perception? The close proximity of so many disciplines made for fascinating coffee-break discussions, forcing us to re-evaluate our own research findings in the light of the discoveries made in neighboring labs and inspired us to become more creative in our experimental design.

Some of the most interesting discussions I remember revolved around the concept of the subjective present, i.e. the question of what it is that we perceive as the "now". Our brain continuously receives input from our senses, such as images we see, sounds we hear or sensations of touch. For our brain to process these stimuli appropriately, it creates a temporal structure so that it can tell apart preceding stimuli from subsequent stimuli. But the brain not only assigns a temporal order to the stimuli, it also integrates them and conveys to us a sense of the subjective past and the subjective present. We often use vague phrases such as "living in the moment" and we all have a sense of what is the "now", but we do not always realize what time intervals we are referring to. If we just saw an image or heard a musical note one second ago, physical time would clearly place them in "the past". Decades of research performed by Ernst Pöppel and his colleagues at the institute, as well as several other laboratories around the world, suggest that our brain integrates our subjective temporal reality in chunks of approximately three second duration.

Temporal order can be assessed in a rather straightforward experimental manner. Research subjects can be provided sequential auditory clicks, one to each ear. If the clicks are one second apart, nearly all participants can correctly identify whether or not the click in the right ear came before the one in the left ear. It turns out that this holds true even if the clicks are only 100 milliseconds (0.1 seconds) apart. The threshold for being able to correctly assign a temporal order to such brief stimuli lies around 30 milliseconds for young adults (up to 25 years old) and 60 milliseconds for older adults.

Temporal integration of stimuli, on the other hand, cannot be directly measured through experiments. It is not possible to ask research subjects "Are these two stimuli part of your now?" and expect a definitive answer, because everyone has a different concept and definition of what constitutes "now". Therefore, researchers such as Ernst Pöppel have had to resort to indirect assessments of temporal integration, and ascertain what interval of time is grasped as a perceptual unit by our brain. An excellent summary of the work can be found in the paper "A hierarchical model of temporal perception". Instead of reviewing the hundreds of experiments that have lead researchers to derive the three-second interval, I will just review two studies which I believe are among the most interesting.

In one of the studies, Pöppel partnered up with the American poet Frederick Turner. Turner and Pöppel recorded and measured hundreds of Latin, Greek, English, Chinese, Japanese, French and German poems, analyzing the length of each LINE. They used the expression LINE to describe a "fundamental unit of metered poetry". In many cases, a standard verse or line in a poem did indeed fit the Turner-Pöppel definition of a LINE, but they used the more generic LINE for their analysis because not all languages or orthographic traditions write or print a LINE in a separate space as is common in English or German poems. If a long line in a poem was divided by a caesura into two sections, Turner and Pöppel considered this to be two LINES.

The basic idea behind this analysis was that each unit of a poem (LINE) conveys one integrated idea or thought, and that the reader experiences each LINE as a "now" moment while reading the poem. Turner and Pöppel published their results in the classic essay "The Neural Lyre: Poetic Meter, the Brain, and Time" for which they also received the Levinson Prize in 1983. Their findings were quite remarkable. The peak duration of LINES in poems was between 2.5 seconds and 3.5 seconds, independent of what language the poems were written in. For example, 73% of German poems had a LINE duration between 2 and 3 seconds. Here are some their other specific findings:

Japanese
Epic meter (a seven-syllable line followed by a five-syllable one) (average) 3.25 secs.
Waka (average) 2.75 secs.
Tanka (recited much faster than the epic, as 3 LINES of 5, 12, and 14 syllables) (average) 2.70 secs.
Chinese
Four-syllable line 2.20 secs.
Five-syllable line 3.00 secs.
Seven-syllable line 3.80 secs.
English
Pentameter 3.30 secs.
Seven-syllable trochaic line 2.50 secs.
Stanzas using different line lengths 3.00 secs., 3.10 secs.
Ballad meter (octosyllabic) 2.40 secs.
Poets all around the world did not conspire to write three-second LINES. It is more likely that our brain may be attuned to processing poetic information in 3 second chunks and that poets are subconsciously aware of this. This was not a controlled, rigorous scientific study, but the results are nevertheless fascinating, not only because they points towards the three second interval that neuroscientists have established in recent decades for temporal integration in the brain, but also because they suggest that the rules for metered poetry may be universal. I strongly advise everyone to read the now classic essay by Turner and Pöppel, to then try reading aloud their own favorite poems and see if the LINES indeed approximate three seconds.

A second approach to glean into the inner workings of temporal integration process in our brain is the use of perceptual reversal experiments, such as those performed with the Necker cube. This cube is a 2-D line drawing, which our brain perceives as a cube – or actually two distinct cubes. Most people who stare at the drawing for a while will notice that their mind creates two distinct cube representations. Once the mind perceives the two different cubes, it becomes very difficult to cling to just one cube representation. Our brain starts flip-flopping between the two cubes; even when we try our best to just hang on to one of the cube representations in our mind. Interestingly, the average duration that it takes for our mind to automatically shift from one cube representation to the other one approximates three seconds.

Nicole von Steinbüchel, a colleague of Ernst Pöppel at the Institute of Medical Psychology, asked a fascinating question. If the oscillatory perceptual shift between the two cube representations is indeed indicative of the "subjective present" and the temporal integration capacity, would brain injury affect the oscillation? She studied patients who had brain lesions (usually due to a stroke) in either the left or right hemisphere of the brain. She and her team of researchers were able to show that while healthy participants reported a three second interval between the automatic shifting of the cube representations in their brain, the average shift time was four seconds in patients with brain damage in the left brain hemisphere and up to six seconds if the damage had occurred in a certain part of the right brain hemisphere. Nicole von Steinbüchel's research demonstrates the clinical relevance of studying temporal integration, but it also suggests that the brain may have designated areas which specialize in creating a temporal structure.

The analysis of poetry and the Necker cube experiments are just two examples of cognitive studies indicating that our brain uses three second intervals to process information and generate the experience of the "now" or the "subjective present". Taken alone, none of these studies are a conclusive proof that our brain uses three second intervals, but one cannot help but notice a remarkable convergence of data pointing towards a cognitive three second rule.

References:
Frederick Turner and Ernst Pöppel (1983) "The Neural Lyre: Poetic Meter, the Brain, and Time" Poetry 142(5): 277-309.

Ernst Pöppel (1997) "A hierarchical model of temporal perception" Trends in Cognitive Sciences 1(2): 56-61.

Nicole von Steinbüchel (1998) "Temporal ranges of central nervous processing: clinical evidence" Experimental Brain Research 123 (1-2): 220-233.

Note: An earlier version of this article was first published on 3quarksdaily.com.

 <span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Experimental+brain+research&rft_id=info%3Apmid%2F9835412&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=Temporal+ranges+of+central+nervous+processing%3A+clinical+evidence.&rft.issn=0014-4819&rft.date=1998&rft.volume=123&rft.issue=1-2&rft.spage=220&rft.epage=33&rft.artnum=&rft.au=von+Steinb%C3%BCchel+N&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Psychology%2CSocial+Science%2CNeuroscience%2CAffective+Psychology%2C+Cognitive+Psychology%2C+Consciousness%2C+Emotion%2C+Human+Factors%2C+Language%2C+Learning%2C+Sensation+and+Perception%2C+Linguistics%2C+Behavioral+Neuroscience%2C+Cognitive+Neuroscience">von Steinbüchel N (1998). Temporal ranges of central nervous processing: clinical evidence. Experimental brain research, 123 (1-2), 220-33 PMID: 9835412Sisyphoshttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-19600984506364028492014-02-12T07:00:00.000-06:002014-02-18T07:36:22.986-06:00'Islamophobia' is Not a PhobiaThe expression "Islamophobia" to describe anti-Muslim hostility in Europe and North America is becoming increasingly common. Even though the use of this expression is still not quite as trendy as a Lady Gaga song, one can already find numerous books, articles and websites that expound on the phenomenon of "Islamophobia". The views on "Islamophobia" are quite diverse, ranging from people on one end of the spectrum who do not believe that there is any significant anti-Muslim hostility in Europe and North America and no need for the term "Islamophobia", to those on the other end of the spectrum who frequently invoke the term "Islamophobia" to describe perceived hostility towards Muslims or Islam.

 During the last few months at least three books on the topic of "Islamophobia" have been published by academics and scholars: Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims by Stephen Sheehi, Islamophobia by Chris Allen and Islamophobia: The Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century edited by John L. Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin. These books discuss a variety of topics related to the phenomenon of "Islamophobia", such as its various manifestations in politics and the mass media, its historical roots and development, the overlap of "Islamophobia" with racism and how "Islamophobia" relates to colonialism and imperialism. The actual definition of "Islamophobia" is not discussed in much detail. Most of these books use the term "Islamophobia" to describe various types of fear, prejudice, discrimination or hostility directed against Islam and Muslims, in part basing this vague definition of "Islamophobia" on the 1997 report of the Runnymede Trust in the U.K., which was one of the first documents to use the actual expression "Islamophobia". Chris Allen's book devotes one whole chapter to develop a new definition for "Islamophobia", but even the proposed new definition of "Islamophobia" remains understandably vague, since the numerous manifestations of prejudice cannot be easily captured in a short definition.

 While so many examples of what constitutes "Islamophobia" are presented, little effort is devoted to clarifying what does not constitute "Islamophobia". As the widespread usage of the expression "Islamophobia" is increasing, the danger of a vague and broad definition becomes apparent. Without a reasonable effort to delineate what is and what is not "Islamophobia", this term could be easily used to stigmatize or suppress legitimate criticisms of Muslim society, culture or theology. Not every rejected mosque building permit is necessarily a form of anti-Muslim discrimination, not every criticism of Muslim society, culture or religion is necessarily a manifestation of an "Islamophobic agenda". Academic scholars that use the expression "Islamophobia" are likely aware of the need to use this term in a narrow sense, so that it refers to true prejudice or hostility towards Muslims and is not abused to suppress legitimate critical views of Muslim society, culture or theology. However, for the expression "Islamophobia" (or any other expression that describes anti-Muslim prejudice and hostility) to be used in a meaningful manner by the wider public, there is a need to clearly formulate what does not constitute "Islamophobia".

 In addition to the vagueness of the "Islamophobia" expression, another troubling aspect of this neologism is the fact that it invokes the psychiatric concept of "phobia". Phobias fall under the category of anxiety disorders and describe pathological fears; while many know the term from the infamous expression "arachnophobia" (pathological fear of spiders), many different types of phobias have been observed in patients. The standard manual of the American Psychiatric Association is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV-TR) and refers to "Specific Phobia" as a,

"Marked and persistent fear that is excessive or unreasonable, cued by the presence or anticipation of a specific object or situation (e.g., flying, heights, animals, receiving an injection, seeing blood)."
There are additional criteria that characterize a phobia, but I find the following one extremely interesting: "The person recognizes that the fear is excessive or unreasonable for discussing the term."

This is quite important since not every fear is automatically a "phobia"; the psychiatric term "phobia" is reserved for cases when the fear is excessive or unreasonable. If the patient does not recognize the fear as excessive or unreasonable, it becomes very difficult to actually prove that the fear is indeed excessive and unreasonable and thus the term "phobia" is not applicable. When neologisms with the word "phobia" are formed, this requirement should be considered. I myself use the term "porkophobia" to describe my own ridiculous and unreasonable dislike of pig products that by far exceeds any religious prescriptions. My understanding is that most people who are accused of having "Islamophobia" do not really think that their fears are excessive and unreasonable. Therefore, anti-Muslim fears, hostility or prejudice do not really constitute a "phobia" in the psychiatric sense and thus the use of the neologism "Islamophobia" may need to be re-evaluated.

 Lastly, I have encountered multiple Muslims who have likened present-day "Islamophobia" in Europe and North America to Anti-Semitism. My obvious response is that this is an absurd comparison since European Anti-Semitism resulted in the murder of millions of Jews in concentration camps and death camps during the Holocaust while no such camps were ever built to murder Muslims. The counter-response I have then gotten is that present-day "Islamophobia" may be similar to the pre-Holocaust Anti-Semitism in Europe. However, even this comparison contains a number of key flaws. A thoughtful analysis of this comparison can be found in Matti Bunzl's book "Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe", which points out that there are some parallels between "Islamophobia" and Anti-Semitism in Europe, such as the fact that the far-right political parties have traditionally used Anti-Semitism as a means of creating a unified base of voters, but that these far-right parties are now replacing Anti-Semitism with anti-Muslim hostility to achieve that same goal. However, Bunzl goes on to show how different the roots and development of Anti-Semitism and "Islamophobia" are. Importantly, he suggests that Anti-Semitism developed as a form of racial hatred of Jews in the 19th century, but that it had been preceded by centuries of Jewish persecution by Christians on religious grounds. On the other hand, Bunzl proposes that present-day "Islamophobia" is neither a true theological hostility nor a racial hatred like Anti-Semitism, but instead represents a perceived clash of civilizations.

 In conclusion, the increasingly common usage of the expression "Islamophobia" requires a thoughtful and clear definition of what does and does not constitute anti-Muslim prejudice and hostility, a re-evaluation of whether "Islamophobia" is truly the most appropriate term to describe such perceived anti-Muslim prejudice and hostility and an avoidance of inappropriate blanket comparisons between anti-Muslim hostility and Anti-Semitism.

Note: An earlier version of this article was first published in the Huffington PostSisyphoshttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-73594489459404294902014-02-11T15:13:00.000-06:002014-02-16T12:08:12.175-06:00Enduring Sharedom

"The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution."
 —Hannah Arendt

The revelations by the whistleblower Edward Snowden that the NSA (National Security Agency) is engaged in mass surveillance of private online communications between individuals by obtaining data from "internet corporations" such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft as part of a covert program called PRISM have resulted in widespread outrage and shock. The outrage is understandable, because such forms of surveillance constitute a major invasion of our privacy. The shock, on the other hand, is somewhat puzzling. In the past years, the Obama administration has repeatedly demonstrated that it is willing to continue or even expand the surveillance policies of the Bush government. The PATRIOT Act was renewed in 2011 under Obama and government intrusion into our personal lives is justified under the mantle of "national security". We chuckle at the absurdity of obediently removing our shoes at airport security checkpoints and at the irony of having to place Hobbit-size toothpaste tubes into transparent bags for a government that seems to have little respect for transparency. Non-US-citizens who reside in or travel to the United States know that they can be detained by US authorities, but even US citizens who are critical of their government, such as the MacArthur Genius grantee Laura Poitras, are hassled by American authorities. Did anyone really believe that the Obama administration with its devastating track record of murdering hundreds of civilians - including many children – in drone attacks would have moral qualms about using the NSA to spy on individual citizens?

The Stasi analogy

One of the obvious analogies drawn in the aftermath of Snowden's assertions is the comparison between the NSA and the "Stasi", the abbreviated nickname for the "Ministerium für Staatssicherheit" (Department of State Security) in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR or DDR). Articles referring to the "United Stasi of America" or the "Modern Day Stasi-State" make references to the massive surveillance apparatus of the East German Stasi, which monitored all forms of communications between citizens of East Germany, from wire-tapping apartments, offices, phones and secretly reading letters. The Stasi "perfected" the invasion of personal spaces – as exemplified in the Oscar-winning movie "The Lives of Others". It is tempting to think of today's NSA monitoring of emails, Facebook posts or other social media interactions as a high-tech version of the Stasi legacy. A movie director may already be working on a screenplay for a movie about Snowden and the NSA called "The Bytes of Others". However, there are some key differences between the surveillance conducted by the Stasi and the PRISM surveillance program of the NSA. The Stasi was a state-run organization which was responsible for amassing the data and creating profiles of the monitored citizens. It did not just rely on regular Stasi employees, but heavily relied on so called IMs – "inoffizielle Mitarbeiter" or "informelle Mitarbeiter" - informal informants. These informal informants were East German citizens who met with designated Stasi officers, reporting on the opinions and actions of their friends, colleagues and relatives and at times aiding the Stasi in promoting state propaganda. In the case of the PRISM program, the amassing of data is conducted by private "internet corporations" such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft, who then share some of the data with the state. Furthermore, instead of having to rely on informal informants like the Stasi, "internet corporations" simply rely on the users themselves who readily divulge their demographic information, opinions and interests to the corporations.

Corporate erosion of our privacy

It seems strange that the outrage ensuing after the PRISM revelations is primarily directed at the US government and the NSA, but not at the corporations which are invading our privacy. Criticisms of the role that private corporations have played in the PRISM program primarily focus on the fact that these corporations divulged the information to the government, but seem to ignore the fact that corporations such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft continuously invade our privacy and use our data for their own marketing goals or share it with their clients. Centuries of persecution and oppression by governments - monarchs, dictators or democratically elected governments - have sensitized us to privacy invasion by governments, but we seem to have a rather laissez-faire attitude when it comes to corporate invasion of our privacy. In fact, we associate the expressions "corporate espionage" or "corporate surveillance" with corporations spying on each other but not necessarily with them spying on us. If we had found out the US Postal Service kept track of how many letters we send to certain recipients, perhaps even scanned our personal letters for certain keywords and then used this information for its own marketing purposes or sold it to interested parties, most of us would have considered this an egregious violation of our privacy. Yet we know that "internet corporations" such as Google and Facebook routinely practice this form of privacy invasion. In our neoliberal world of unfettered capitalism, the state is increasingly answering to corporate interests while ignoring the concerns of citizens. We have to ask ourselves whether such an eviscerated state is the only threat to our civil liberties, or whether we need be more sensitive to violations of our privacy and liberties by private corporations.

Long before the leak of the PRISM documents, critics such as Evgeny Morozov in "The Net Delusion", Rebecca MacKinnon in "Consent of the Networked" or Robert McChesney in "Digital Disconnect" warned us about the invasion of rivacy by "internet corporations" which are collecting information about us. We do not have to pay to use Google and Facebook, but the reason why these for-profit corporations offer us "free" services is because they use and market the information we unwittingly provide them. This type of information-gathering is probably legal, because when we sign up for accounts, most of us agree to their terms and conditions. Even if new laws or regulations are enacted after the PRISM scandal to limit surveillance, it is likely they will only pertain to how government agencies manage information on individuals or how corporations convey such information to government agencies, but it is unlikely that new laws will limit the information gathering for corporate benefits.

Why is it that we tend to be so lenient towards "internet corporations"? One reason may be the mythopoesis surrounding the "internet". Instead of viewing Silicon Valley executives of "internet corporations" as capitalists who sell our privacy for profit, we envision them as benevolent, entrepreneurial hipsters who eat organic quinoa salads and donate some portion of their profits to philanthropic causes. Some of us may buy into the myth of the egalitarian nature of the "internet". The "internet" is not egalitarian, especially not when it comes to the sharing and marketing of information by corporations. For example, there is a fundamental asymmetry when Facebook collects data on its users but does not feel compelled to reveal exactly how it uses the information. Jeff Jarvis, a vocal supporter of "internet corporations" has already expressed concern that users may start questioning their blind trust in the "internet" as a consequence of the PRISM revelations, skillfully avoiding a discussion of corporate privacy invasion. This strategy of placing all the blame for privacy violations on the government may be the best strategy for corporations. Google's attempt to challenge the US government, asking for permission to disclose any data requests from the NSA, enables Google to portray itself as a knight in shining armor and evade the far more uncomfortable discussion of corporate uses and abuses of amassed data.

Culture of sharedom

Evgeny Morozov's recent book "To Save Everything Click Here" provides an excellent insight into the mythos of the "internet". The physical internet consists of computers, routers and servers that are connected to each other, whereas the mythical "internet" is a cultural icon to which god-like powers are ascribed. Morozov refers to this ideology as "internet-centrism". The ideology of "solutionism", a term borrowed from the world of architecture and urban planning, refers to:

…an unhealthy preoccupation with sexy, monumental, and narrow-minded solutions— the kind of stuff that wows audiences at TED Conferences— to problems that are extremely complex, fluid, and contentious.
"Solutionism" and "internet-centrism" can act in concert, creating a virtuous cycle in which the mythical "internet" is seen as a means to provide the ultimate solutions to the problems of humankind. This view of the "internet" and the afore-mentioned neoliberal awe of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs all may contribute to why privacy invasions by internet corporations are forgiven or ignored.
One additional cultural phenomenon that has allowed "internet corporations" to erode our privacy is that of sharedom, the incessant and growing desire to share our opinions and details of our personal lives with a broad audience. Just like "solutionism" or neoliberalism, sharedom is not a product of the "internet", but it has become a major fuel for the mythical "internet". Sharedom is just another word for nothing left to hide. Reality television, for example, is a manifestation of sharedom. The MTV reality TV show "The Real World" was first broadcast in 1992 when the "internet" was still in its embryonic stage. Millions of viewers could watch minute details of the lives of strangers living in a house together. One may view reality TV as a form of mass exhibitionism and mass voyeurism, but as Mark Greif has pointed out, one of the key aspects of reality TV was that it allowed viewers to "judge" the people they were observing. While reality TV only allowed a small group of people – selected from thousands of applicants – to "share" their lives with a broad audience, the "internet" gradually enabled everyone with an online connection to share their lives. We started living in transparent cages - Massive Open Online Cages (MOOCs) - and the "internet" permitted the audience to give instant feedback by passing online "judgments", such as leaving comments on social media posts or blog posts. This culture of sharedom was an unexpected bounty for "internet corporations", because it not only made us less cautious about our privacy but also supplied them with massive amounts of free personal data that could be marketed.

Privacy trade-offs

We often hear about the trade-off between privacy and security and the need for an optimal balance, which maximizes the privacy of the individual while maintaining the security of our society. This sounds like a reasonable argument, but it ignores the fact that this is not the only privacy trade-off. Corporations are interested in maximizing their profits and since individual data is a marketable commodity, their interest is to find a balance between maximal profit and maintaining some degree of privacy for users that makes them feel comfortable enough to share personal data that can be marketed. In addition to this trade-off between profits and privacy, the culture of sharedom also creates the trade-off between publicity and privacy. Jill Lepore has recently discussed the challenges of this trade-off in an essay in the New Yorker:

In the twentieth century, the golden age of public relations, publicity, meaning the attention of the press, came to be something that many private citizens sought out and even paid for. This has led, in our own time, to the paradox of an American culture obsessed, at once, with being seen and with being hidden, a world in which the only thing more cherished than privacy is publicity. In this world, we chronicle our lives on Facebook while demanding the latest and best form of privacy protection—ciphers of numbers and letters—so that no one can violate the selves we have so entirely contrived to expose.
Another form of trade-off is that of convenience versus privacy. Using a website such as Amazon to purchase products offers a lot of convenience: It remembers which products we have previously bought, it offers targeted recommendations for new or related products that may be of interest based on our profile, and it even remembers which products we recently browsed. The more we use Amazon, the more accurate their profile of our interests becomes, as evidenced by the accuracy of Amazon's recommendations for new purchases. All we have to offer Amazon in exchange for this convenience is a window into the privacy of our soul.
I remember coming across the expression "Faustian bargain" to describe how we exchange our privacy for the sake of convenience. When Goethe's Faust agreed to serve the devil Mephistopheles in the after-life, he was rewarded with youth and a beautiful lover. We may not approve of Faust's choice, but his deal at least merits some consideration. We currently sacrifice our privacy for the benefit of corporate profits and in exchange receive free shipping, targeted ads and coupons. No youth, no lovers. Our deal does not even rise to the level of a "Faustian bargain".

Silent Listeners

The recent study "Silent Listeners: The Evolution of Privacy and Disclosure on Facebook" conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University monitored the public disclosure (information visible to all) and private disclosure (information visible to Facebook friends) of personal data by more than 5,000 Facebook users during the time period 2005-2011. The researchers identified two opposing trends. Over time, Facebook users divulged less and less personal information such as birthdates, favorite books or political information to the public. On the other hand, the researchers also noticed a trend of revealing more personal information to Facebook friends. Apparently, there was a growing awareness of how public disclosures can compromise privacy, but users were also emboldened to reveal more personal information when they deemed their audience to be trustworthy. As the researchers correctly pointed out, these "private disclosures" are always available to Facebook itself, third-party apps and to advertisers, referred to as "silent listeners" by the researchers. This is a key point when it comes to privacy settings on social media websites. Users are able to control how much information is displayed to other individuals and future laws and regulations may protect users by curtailing disclosures to government agencies, but information disclosures to the company that provides the service itself and its corporate clients are often beyond our control.
The poll "Teens, Social Media and Privacy" conducted by the Pew Research Center confirmed this lack of concern about third-party access to personal data in a group of 632 teenagers. Overall, 60% of teenagers said that they were either not at all concerned or not too concerned about third-party access (such as advertisers or third-party apps) to their personal information. Only 9% were very concerned about it. Individual comments made by teenagers in a Pew focus group further underscore this cavalier attitude towards corporate access to personal data:

Male (age 16): "It's mostly just bands and musicians that I 'like' [on Facebook], but also different companies that I 'like', whether they're clothing or mostly skateboarding companies. I can see what they're up to, whether they're posting videos or new products... [because] a lot of times you don't hear about it as fast, because I don't feel the need to Google every company that I want to keep up with every day. So with the news feed, it's all right there, and you know exactly."
Male (age 13): "I usually just hit allow on everything [when I get a new app]. Because I feel like it would get more features. And a lot of people allow it, so it's not like they're going to single out my stuff. I don't really feel worried about it."
Value of privacy

The revelations about how the government is using surveillance data obtained by "internet corporations" should prompt a broad debate of how we value privacy, especially because it is difficult to affix a price-tag on this intangible non-commodity. This debate will hopefully lead to greater transparency in regards to how governments access and handle personal information. However, it is important to also raise awareness of the potential abuse of personal information by private corporations. If we truly value our privacy, we need to develop methods that restrict government and corporate access to our personal data. In the process we will have to unravel our myths surrounding internet-centrism, solutionism and sharedom.

Image Credits: Automated envelope sealer used by the Stasi to close opened letters after review of the letter contents (image by Appaloosa - Wikimedia Commons), a Stasi surveillance post (image by Lokilech - Wikimedia Commons)

Note: An earlier version of this article was first published on 3quarksdaily.com

  <span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Journal+of+Privacy+and+Confidentiality&rft_id=info%3A%2F&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=Silent+Listeners%3A+The+Evolution+of+Privacy+and+Disclosure+on+Facebook&rft.issn=&rft.date=2012&rft.volume=&rft.issue=&rft.spage=&rft.epage=&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Frepository.cmu.edu%2Fcgi%2Fviewcontent.cgi%3Farticle%3D1098%26context%3Djpc&rft.au=Fred+Stutzman&rft.au=Ralph+Grossy&rft.au=Alessandro+Acquistiz&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Computer+Science+%2F+Engineering%2CPsychology%2CSocial+Science%2CSociology%2C+Social+Psychology%2C+Industrial%2FOrganizational+Psychology%2C+Human+Factors%2C+Human-Computer+Interaction%2C+Networks%2C+Cognitive+Psychology">Fred Stutzman, Ralph Grossy, & Alessandro Acquistiz (2012). Silent Listeners: The Evolution of Privacy and Disclosure on Facebook Journal of Privacy and ConfidentialitySisyphoshttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-91664527474563068972014-02-10T18:49:00.001-06:002014-02-10T18:52:11.428-06:00The Folly of Perpetual VictimhoodI grew up in a culture of guilt. One of the defining characteristics of post-war Germany was the "Vergangenheitsbewältigung", a monstrous German word that describes the attempts to come to terms with the horrors of Nazi-Germany and World War II. How could Germans have abandoned all sense of humanity and decency? Why had millions of German actively or passively engaged in the mass murder of millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, socialists and so many other minorities?

This Vergangenheitsbewältigung resulted in a deep-rooted sense of collective shame and guilt, one which transcended the generation which had lived through the war and even engulfed Germans born after the war and Germans with immigrant backgrounds, whose families obviously had no historic link to the atrocious crimes committed in Nazi Germany. We did not feel blameworthy in the sense of having to answer for the Nazi crimes, but we did feel that the burden of history had foisted a responsibility on us. We felt that it was our responsibility to be continuously vigilant, watching for any signs or symptoms indicating a recurrence of right-wing extremism, anti-Semitism, fascism, racism, militarism, nationalism, discrimination or other characteristics of Nazi Germany.

Our obsession with collective introspection at times became so excessive that it paralyzed us, such as when we developed a general paranoia of expressing any form of German patriotism, because it might set us on a path to Nazism. Many Germans also had near-hysterical responses to any discussions about genetic engineering, because it evoked haunting memories of Nazi eugenics. But despite these irrational excesses, I think that we Germans greatly benefited from our post-war soul-searching which helped us build a mostly peaceful country – no small feat, considering our past.

Roughly one decade ago, "mirror neurons" were among the hottest items in neuroscience research. These neurons in the brain of an individual were thought to fire upon observing behaviors in other individuals: When I see someone eating a delicious piece of chocolate, my mirror neurons fire and help create a proxy sensation or awareness in my brain that mirror the observed behavior so that I might have some sense of eating the chocolate myself. If this were true, mirror neurons would play a central role in generating a sense of empathy. Newer scientific research has questioned whether "mirror neurons" truly exist, but there is little doubt that our brain has some neurobiological substrate that enables empathy, even if it does not consist of the exact same set of anatomically defined neurons as has been previously suspected. I therefore still like to use the "mirror neurons" metaphor, because it aptly evokes the image of a neurobiological mirror in our mind. I would like to extend that mirror metaphor and also propose that our mind might contain "guilt neurons", which fire when we observe some degree of resemblance between ourselves and perpetrators of crimes.

Part of being immersed in the post-war German tradition of collective guilt and soul-searching is that it endowed me with ultra-sensitive hypothetical "guilt neurons". When I hear about a tragedy or crime, I not only feel the natural empathy with the victims, but in a reflex-like manner ask the question whether I bear some degree of responsibility – not blame – for this tragedy and crime and how to best work towards preventing it in the future. This "guilt neuron" activity is strongest when I sense that the perpetrator is a member of an in-group that I also belong to, such as crimes being committed by fathers or husbands, by Germans, by scientists or physicians, by Muslims, by people with a South Asian heritage and so forth.

When Anders Breivik in Norway committed his mass murder in 2011, I felt a very deep sadness, because I could really empathize with the victims and their families. He killed teenagers and young adults attending a youth camp of the Social Democratic party. His victims could have been my children, and a couple of decades ago, I might have attended a similar youth camp in Germany. My guilt neurons were silent – I did not feel much of a responsibility because I had little to nothing in common with the perpetrator. He despised everything that I supported – diversity, feminism, progressive-liberal thought and the environmental movement. But I felt that there were people who ought to have felt some degree of responsibility. His manifesto quoted extensively from far-right bloggers and authors in the United States and in Europe, who seemed to have shared his world-views.

Does this mean that everyone promoting anti-immigrant or far-right views in Europe and the US should have been blamed for the deeds this mass killer? Of course not! They did not directly provide him with the weapons and they did not ask him to murder the social democratic youth – but shouldn't one take some responsibility for promoting hateful messages that denigrated immigrants, Muslims and citizens with progressive-liberal thoughts? The responses of the far-right politicians and authors who might have unwittingly influenced Breivik were quite disappointing. Instead of undergoing an introspective analysis, the far right just issued perfunctory condemnations, stating that they would never have endorsed the murders. The politicians and far right bloggers continued to engage in their hateful rhetoric, even tried to seize the opportunity to portray themselves as unfairly maligned victims. The Breivik acts of terror did not seem to have activated the "guilt neurons" of the far right.

The week following the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15, 2013 was a very sad week for me. Boston is one of my most favorite cities in the world. It is the first US city that I ever visited. I spent many months there when I was a student in the 1990s. Boston eased me into American culture by cushioning the culture shock that Europeans experience when they first visit the US, mostly because it reminded me a lot of my home town Munich, famously known as the "Weltstadt mit Herz" ("city of the world with a heart)". Like Munich, Boston is wonderfully suited for long city walks. The Bostonians were extremely hospitable and friendly. I remember seeing beautiful sunsets in Boston, spending hours in the wonderful bookstores in Cambridge and Boston and being thrilled by the plethora of universities and their libraries in the Boston area, which seemed like an endless treasure trove of knowledge. I was thus devastated when I saw the tragedy of the bombings unfold – more or less live on the Internet and on Twitter revealing painful descriptions of victims who had lost their limbs at a marathon. I was haunted by the image of the young boy Martin Richard holding up a sign which said "No more hurting people" in 2012 – only to be murdered in the subsequent year at the Boston Marathon bombings. The idea of this beautiful city, normally bustling with activity and creativity, being forced into a lockdown because of some psychopathic killers was heartbreaking.

On Friday morning, I heard the news that the perpetrators had been identified; two Muslim immigrants with Chechen origins. They were brothers, the older one - 26 year old Tamerlan Tsarnaev - had been killed in a shoot-out. The younger one - 19 year old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev - had not yet been captured and an ongoing manhunt was still paralyzing the city of Boston. There were vague reports of "Islamist connections" of the older brother based on his alleged Youtube video playlists. The younger brother was a college student at the University of Massachusetts and had a Twitter account with the handle @J_tsar, from which he had sent his last tweet on April 17, two days after the Boston Marathon bombing. His last tweet was a re-tweet of the conservative Muslim cleric, Mufti Ismail Menk: "Attitude can take away your beauty no matter how good looking you are or it could enhance your beauty, making you adorable." Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's last self-authored tweet was "I'm a stress free kind of guy", one day after the bombing – both tweets seem rather cynical in the context of someone who had helped inflict so much suffering. His Twitter feed of the past months was a combination of mindless blather, evoking the traditional cliché of the banality of evil, but it also contained a number of tweets which indicated that he saw himself as a Muslim, even quipping about how Muslims at his mosque thought he was a convert to Islam instead of being born a Muslim.

The specific motives of the two brothers were not yet known when the news broke. Did they murder and maim their fellow citizens because they felt it was consistent with or even mandated by their view of Islam? Was it a political statement regarding the war in Chechnya and they just happened to choose innocent civilian targets in Boston because it was easier than planting bombs in Chechnya or Russia? Were they psychopaths seeking notoriety and infamy without any specific religious or political goals? Were they aided by a terrorist organization or acting as individuals?

Multiple Muslim organizations and prominent Muslims strongly condemned the Boston Marathon bombings, expressed their condolences for the victims and made it very clear that such acts of terror were inconsistent with Islam. Muslim organizations routinely issue such statements when Muslims commit acts of terror, but the question remains whether such statements are enough. Since I possess overactive German guilt neurons, I feel that as members of the Muslim community in the US, we have a deeper responsibility to undertake an introspective analysis and explore why US Muslims engage in forms of violence. Some might argue that there is no need for such introspection, since we do not yet whether the motives of the Tsarnaev brothers were in any way linked to Islam. Even apart from the Tsarnaev brothers' motives, US Muslims need to understand that there is an unfortunately high level of tolerating suicide bombings or violence against civilians. A Pew survey conducted in 2011 revealed that 13% of US Muslims thought suicide bombings or violence against civilian targets could be justified to defend Islam (rarely justified: 5%; sometimes justified: 7%; often justified: 1%). The Pew survey compared the results to those obtained from surveying Muslims in Pakistan, of whom only 7% felt that such violence could be justified in the name of Islam. Sadly, this degree of acceptance of suicide bombings or violence against civilians among US Muslims has not budged since 2007. This suggests that there is a disconnect between US Muslim organizations (which categorically condemn all attacks against civilians) and the US Muslim community.

Even though the 13% represent a small minority within the larger US Muslim community, they might be the ones who are most likely to be radicalized and it is thus important to understand what motivates them to endorse suicide bombings and violence against civilians. One hypothesis that can be explored is whether the Muslim self-perception of collective victimhood may contribute to their willingness to endorse violence. During the past 15 years that I have lived in the US, I have noticed that in Friday sermons (khutbahs), discussions, lectures, articles and books, American Muslims often perceive themselves as collective victims. Khutbahs routinely end with prayers for people in need, but in my experience, there is a rather one-sided portrayal of the global Muslim community as victims - khateebs (khateeb = person who gives the Muslim Friday sermon or khutbah) frequently mention the plight of Muslims who are oppressed and persecuted in regions such as Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir or more recently, Burma. However, there is little mention of prayers for victims in situations where Muslims are the primary perpetrators, such as is the case when Sunni Muslims murder Shia or Ahmadiyya in Pakistan, or when they kill or persecute Christians, Jews or atheists. The buzzword "Islamophobia", which is not really a phobia in the psychiatric sense, is frequently used to depict Muslims as victims. There are many cases of anti-Muslim hate speech and discrimination, but the haphazard use of "Islamophobia" to bludgeon legitimate criticisms of Muslims or Islam is rendering this term useless. An exaggerated "Islamophobia" view of the world also perpetuates the one-sided portrayal of Muslims as victims instead of promoting a more balanced view, one which would also include some discussion of anti-Western hostility that is found among Muslims ("Occidentophobia", incidentally is also not a true "phobia").

Is there any evidence that such a sense of collective victimhood could affect one's moral judgment? A remarkable study conducted by the social psychologists Michael Wohl and Nyla Branscombe lends credence to this idea. In a paper entitled "Remembering historical victimization: Collective guilt for current ingroup transgressions" published 2008 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Wohl and Branscombe examined the acceptance of Israeli acts of violence against Palestinians by Jewish Canadians. Using a web-based questionnaire, they surveyed Jewish Canadians in two different conditions, one which included showing the participants a website that reminded them of the Holocaust and the suffering of Jews and one condition in which participants just saw a neutral website. Importantly, participants who were reminded of the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust (prior to answering the questions) experienced significantly less guilt about Israeli actions against Palestinians.

In a different set of experiments, Wohl and Branscombe then asked Americans how they felt about the harm inflicted by American troops on Iraqis. The American participants felt far less guilt regarding the American attacks, when the participants were reminded of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Interestingly, they also felt less guilt about the Iraq war when they were reminded of the Pearl Harbor attack. This suggested that it was not a causal link between September 11, 2001 and Iraq that had made them endorse American violence, but merely the sense of collective victimization - independent of whether the perpetrators were the Japanese military or Muslim terrorists.

Considering these data, it might be important to study whether Muslims who are continuously reminded of historical or ongoing collective victimization - being victims of "Islamophobia" or of military actions in Palestine, Kashmir or Chechnya - could promote a justification for violent acts, quite similar to the participants studied by Wohl and Branscombe. Conversely, a more balanced and realistic view of history and current affairs which would depict Muslims as both, victims and perpetrators might lower the likelihood of Muslims endorsing violence.

On the Friday after the Boston Marathon bombings, prior to heading to the Friday sermon, I wondered whether the newly disclosed information that the bombers were US based Muslims would help promote a process of soul searching in the American Muslim community. Unfortunately, the twitter feed of one of the most popular English-language Muslim blogs, MuslimMatters.org, known for its überconservative or right-wing ideas, did not suggest that this would occur. Some of its tweets and re-tweets on Friday morning suggested an all-too-familiar reaction of American Muslims. The religion of the Tsarnaev brothers was supposedly not relevant and had no bearing on the attacks; "only the perpetrator is responsible for the crime"; "If it wasn't you, then don't feel guilty. Do not take the burden of others upon your shoulders when they are wrongfully placed there"; and there were tweets about how Muslims might need to be vigilant about potential "Islamophobic" backlashes: "Please contact your local CAIR chapter if you experience any type of violence as a result of the tragedy in Boston: cair.com."

The idea that somehow "only the perpetrator is responsible for the crime" is puzzling since we routinely look at context of a crime. When Adam Lanza went on a shooting rampage, murdering children and terrorizing an elementary school, American society did not just respond with "only the perpetrator is responsible for the crime". There was an extensive effort made to re-evaluate gun laws and the mental healthcare system, and there was a general shift in the public opinion on gun control. It may be important to clarify the difference between "blame" and "responsibility". As a society, we should take responsibility to help each other and care for each other, and when we fail to do so, there is no shame in taking responsibility for that failure. That does not necessarily mean that we are all to "blame" for the acts committed by the Tsarnaev brothers or by Adam Lanza. Also, there is no need to expect that only Muslims have a responsibility to act in response to the Tsarnaev crimes. One should explore all the factors that resulted in the tragedy, such as failures of law enforcement to detect the planned plot, addressing how they accessed the weapons and training that enabled them to commit their crimes or whether there had been warning signs that could have alerted family members, friends and colleagues. Muslim soul-searching is just part of the greater soul-searching process that involves society-at-large in response to the tragedy.

As I headed towards our Friday khutbah in Chicago, I wondered whether the khateeb would broach this difficult subject. The first part of the khutbah was about Moses and David, and how these two prophets should be our role models because they exemplified steadfastness in their faith, gratitude and prayer, thanking God even under most difficult circumstances. The second part of the khutbah specifically addressed the Boston bombings. The khateeb strongly condemned the terror attacks, and said that Muslims are never allowed to kill innocent civilians. He then explained the horrors of the Chechnyan war and how Muslims suffered at the hands of the Soviet and Russian military. However, instead of an analysis and introspection addressing how we could help reduce the recurrence of such acts, the khateeb indicated that he wanted to mention one other event in this context. He said that after the Boston attacks, an interfaith service had been planned and that the initially proposed Muslim representative had been vetoed by some members of the Boston community.

The objection to this particular choice stemmed from the suggested imam's alleged ties to Islamist groups. A different Muslim representative was then chosen for the Interfaith service. Our khateeb then made a rather bizarre statement in a defiant tone and said that Muslims should choose their own leaders instead of allowing "Zionists" to make decisions for the Muslim community! Rather than look in the mirror and think about potential reasons for why some US Muslims justify violence with religion, Muslims were again being portrayed as victims of alleged "Zionists". The promising first part of the khutbah had focused on Moses and David and emphasized the shared Abrahamic traditions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity, but the same khutbah ended with the spreading of unnecessary conspiracy theories and regurgitating the image of the victimized Muslims. I left the khutbah with a heavy heart.

In the subsequent days, I observed how Muslims attempted to downplay the Muslim connection of the Tsarnaev brothers but I also saw how right-wing, anti-Muslim American groups began asking for massive profiling of Muslims merely based on their faith or ethnicity. We need to move beyond the two extremes - the one-sided portrayal by anti-Muslim hate-mongers of Muslims as purely evil perpetrators and the equally one-sided portrayal of Muslims as perpetual victims. We can then achieve a balanced and honest view of the role of Muslims in American society with a realistic and equitable distribution of responsibilities and expectations.

As with most unfathomable crimes, there are probably many factors that come together, there is no one single all-explanatory cause. The vast majority of supporters of far-right ideology do not go on shooting rampages like the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik did. The vast majority of homes containing an arsenal of guns do not give rise to child murderers such as Adam Lanza. The vast majority of Muslims who watch Islamist Youtube videos do not commit terrorist attacks. In all of these cases, we have to carefully analyze the risk factors that lead to the tragedies and work together to reduce the risk of recurrences. I do not want to live in a libertarian heaven with dormant "guilt neurons", where everyone is exclusively responsible for their own actions and where we can expediently shrug off any responsibility for the suffering of fellow humans or for the crimes committed by others. The strength of a society depends on the willingness of its members to engage in introspection and shoulder responsibilities.

Image Credit: 1) Boston Sunset (Foto by walknboston via Flickr) 2) "La Reprodution Interdite" (Painting by René Margritte, Photo by Ronald Rugenbrink via Flickr)

Note: A brief excerpt of this article was first published in German as "Die Ewigen Opfer" on the blog of the German Progressive Muslim Forum Muslima Aktiv. An earlier version of this article was first published on the 3quarksdaily.com.Sisyphoshttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-82284884872282111732014-02-08T09:22:00.003-06:002014-02-08T09:22:50.060-06:00Curating Creativity"For every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency."
 Jorge Luis Borges, "Library of Babel"

The British-Australian art curator Nick Waterlow was tragically murdered on November 9, 2009 in the Sydney suburb of Randwick. His untimely death shocked the Australian art community, not only because of the gruesome nature of his death – Waterlow was stabbed alongside his daughter by his mentally ill son – but also because his death represented a major blow to the burgeoning Australian art community. He was a highly regarded art curator, who had served as a director of the Sydney Biennale and international art exhibitions and was also an art ambassador who brought together artists and audiences from all over the world.

After his untimely death, his partner Juliet Darling discovered some notes that Waterlow had jotted down shortly before his untimely death to characterize what defines and motivates a good art curator and he gave them the eerily prescient title "A Curator's Last Will and Testament":

1. Passion
2. An eye of discernment
3. An empty vessel
4. An ability to be uncertain
5. Belief in the necessity of art and artists
6. A medium— bringing a passionate and informed understanding of works of art to an audience in ways that will stimulate, inspire, question
7. Making possible the altering of perception.
Waterlow's notes help dismantle the cliché of stuffy old curators walking around in museums who ensure that their collections remain unblemished and instead portray the curator as a passionate person who is motivated by a desire to inspire artists and audiences alike.

The Evolving Roles of Curators

The traditional role of the curator was closely related to the Latin origins of the word, "curare" refers to "to take care of", "to nurse" or "to look after". Curators of museums or art collections were primarily in charge of preserving, overseeing, archiving and cataloging the artifacts that were placed under their guardianship. As outlined in "Thinking Contemporary Curating" by Terry Smith, the latter half of 20th century witnessed the emergence of new roles for art curators, both private curators and those formally employed as curators by museum or art collections. Curators not only organized art exhibitions but were given an increasing degree of freedom in terms of choosing the artists and themes of the exhibitions and creating innovative opportunities for artists to interact with their audiences. The art exhibition itself became a form of art, a collage of art assembled by the curators in a unique manner.

Curatorial roles can be broadly divided into three domains:

1) Custodial – perhaps most in line with traditional curating in which the curator primarily maintains or preserves art collections
2) Navigatory – a role which has traditionally focused on archiving and cataloging pieces of art so that audiences can readily access art
3) Discerning – the responsibility of a curator to decide which artists and themes to include and feature, using the "eye of discernment" described by Nick Waterlow

Creativity and Curating

The diverse roles of curators are characterized by an inherent tension. Curators are charged with conserving and maintaining art (and by extension, culture) in their custodial roles, but they also seek out new forms of art and experiment with novel ways to exhibit art in their electoral roles. Terry Smith's "Thinking Contemporary Curating" shows how the boundaries between curator and artist are becoming blurry, because exhibiting art itself requires an artistic and creative effort. Others feel that the curators or exhibition makers need to be conscious of their primary role as facilitators and that they should not "compete" with the artists whose works they are exhibiting. This raises the question of whether the process of curating art is actually creative.
It is difficult to find a universal and generally accepted definition of what constitutes creativity because it is such a subjective concept, but the definition provided by Jonathan Plucker and colleagues in their paper "Why Isn't Creativity More Important to Educational Psychologists? Potentials, Pitfalls, and Future Directions in Creativity Research" is an excellent starting point:

"Creativity is the interaction among aptitude, process, and environment by which an individual or group produces a perceptible product that is both novel and useful as defined within a social context."
Using this definition, assembling an art exhibition is indeed creative – it generates a "perceptible product" which is both novel and useful to the audiences that attend the exhibition as well as to the artists who are being provided new opportunities to showcase their work. The aptitude, process and environment that go into the assembly and design of an art exhibition differ among all curators, so that each art exhibition reflects the creative signature of a unique curator.

Ubiquity of Curators

The formal title "curator" is commonly used for art curators or museum curators, but curatorial activity – in its custodial, navigatory and discerning roles – is not limited to these professions. Librarians, for example, have routinely acted as curators of books. Their traditional focus has been directed towards their custodial and navigatory roles, cataloging and preserving books, and helping readers navigate through the vast jungle of published books.

Unlike the key role that art curators play in organizing art exhibitions, librarians are not the primary organizers of author readings, book fairs or other literary events, which are instead primarily organized by literary magazines, literary agents, publishers or independent bookstores. It remains to be seen whether the literary world will also witness the emergence of librarians as curators of such literary events, similar to what has occurred in the art world. Our local public library occasionally organizes a "Big Read" event for which librarians select a specific book and recommend that the whole community read the book. The librarians then lead book discussions with members of the community and also offer additional reading materials that relate to the selected book. Such events do not have the magnitude of an art exhibition, but they are innovative means by which librarians interact with the community and inspire readers.

One of the most significant curatorial contributions in German literary history was the collection of fairy-tales and folk-tales by the Brothers Grimm (Brüder Grimm or Gebrüder Grimm), Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Readers may not always realize how much intellectual effort went into assembling the fairy-tales, many of which co-existed in various permutations depending on the region of where the respective tales were being narrated. I own a copy of the German language edition of the "Children's and Household Tales" (Kinder- und Hausmärchen) which contains all their original annotations. These annotations allow the reader to peek behind the scenes and see the breadth of their curatorial efforts, especially their "eye of discernment". For example, the version of Snow-White that the Brothers Grimm chose for their final edition contains the infamous scene in which the evil Queen asks her mirror, "Mirror, Mirror on the wall, Who is the prettiest in all the land?" She naturally expects the mirror to say that the Queen is the prettiest, because she just finished feasting on what she presumed were Snow-White's liver and lungs and is convinced that Snow-White is dead. According to the notes of the Brothers Grimm, there was a different version of the Snow-White tale in which the Queen does not ask a mirror, but instead asks Snow-White's talking pet dog, which is cowering under a bench after Snow-White's disappearance and happens to be called "Spiegel" (German for "Mirror")! I am eternally grateful for the curatorial efforts of the Brothers Grimm because I love the symbolism of the Queen speaking to a mirror and because I do not have to agonize over understanding why Snow-White named her pet dog "Mirror" or expect a Disneyesque movie with the title "Woof Woof" instead of "Mirror Mirror".

Internet Curators

The internet is now providing us access to an unprecedented and overwhelming amount of information. Every year, millions of articles, blog posts, images and videos are being published online. Older texts, images and videos that were previously published in more traditional formats are also being made available for online consumption. The book "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood" by James Gleick is quite correct in using expressions such as "information glut" or "deluge" to describe how we are drowning in information. Gleick also aptly uses the allegory of the "Library of Babel", a brilliant short story written by Jorge Luis Borges about an imaginary library consisting of hexagonal rooms that is finite in size but contains an unfathomably large number of books, all possible permutations of sequences of letters. Most of these books are pure gibberish, because they are random sequences of letters, but amidst billions of such books, one is bound to find at least a handful with some coherent phrases. Borges' story also mentions a mythical "Book-Man", a god-like librarian who has seen the ultimate cipher to the library, a book which is the compendium of all other books. Borges originally wrote the story in 1941, long before the internet era, but the phrase "For every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency" rings even more true today when we think of the information available on the web.

This overwhelming and disorienting torrent of digital information has given rise to a new group of curators, internet or web curators, who primarily focus on the navigatory and discerning roles of curatorship. Curatorial websites or blogs such as 3quarksdaily, Brainpickings or Longreads comb through mountains of online information and try to select a handful of links to articles, essays, poems, short stories, videos, images or books which they deem to be the most interesting, provocative or inspiring for their readers. They disseminate these links to their readers and followers by posting excerpts or quotes on their respective websites or by using social media networks such as Twitter. The custodial role of preserving online information is not really the focus of internet curators; instead, internet curators are primarily engaged in navigatory and discerning roles. In addition to the emergence of professional internet curatorship through such websites or blogs, a number of individuals have also begun to function as volunteer internet curators and help manage digital information.

Analogous to art curatorship, internet curatorship also requires a significant creative effort. Each internet curator uses individual criteria to create their own collage of information and themes they focus on. Even when internet curators have thematic overlaps, they may still decide to feature or disseminate very different types of information, because the individuals engaged in curatorship have very distinct tastes and subjective curatorial criteria. One curator's chaff is another curator's wheat.

Formal Education and Training in Internet Curation

There are no formal training programs that train people to become internet curators. Most popular internet curators usually have a broad range of interests ranging from the humanities, arts and sciences to literature and politics. They use their own experience and expertise in these areas to help them select the best links that they then pass on to their readers or followers. Some internet curators are open to suggestions from their readers, thus crowd-sourcing their curatorial activity, others routinely browse selected websites or social media feeds of individuals which they deem to be the most interesting, others may plug in their favorite words to scour the web for intriguing new articles.

Internet curation will become even more important in the next decades as the amount of information we amass will likely continue to grow exponentially. Not just individuals, but even corporations and governments will need internet curators who can sift through information and distilling it down to manageable levels, without losing critical content. In light of this anticipated need for internet curators, one should ask the question whether it is time to envision formal training programs that help prepare people for future jobs as internet curators. Internet curation is both an art and a science – the art of the curatorial process is to creatively assemble information in a manner that attracts and inspires readers while the science of internet curation involves using search algorithms that do not just rely on subjective and arbitrary criteria but systematically interrogate vast amounts of information that are now globally available. A Bachelor's or Master's degree program in Internet Curation could conceivably train students in the art and science of internet curation.

Q-Credit

In scientific manuscripts, it is common for scientists to cite the preceding work of colleagues. Other colleagues who provide valuable tools, such as plasmids for molecular biology experiments, are cited in the "Acknowledgements" section of a manuscript. Colleagues whose input substantially contributed to the manuscript or the scientific work are included as co-authors. Current academic etiquette does not necessarily acknowledge the curatorial efforts of scientists who may have nudged their colleagues into a certain research direction by forwarding an important paper that they might have otherwise ignored.

Especially in world in which meaningful information is becoming one of our most valuable commodities, it might be time to start acknowledging the flux of information that shapes our thinking and our creativity. We are beginning to recognize the importance of people who are links in the information chain and help separate out meaningful information from the "senseless cacophony". Perhaps we should therefore also acknowledge all the sources of information, not only those who generated it but also those who manage the information or guide us towards the information. Such a curatorial credit or Q-credit could be added to the end of an article. It would not only acknowledge the intellectual efforts of the information curators, but it could also serve as a curation map which would inspire readers to look at the individual elements in the information chain. The readers would be able to consult the nodes or elements that were part of the information chain (instead of just relying on lone cited references) and choose to take alternate curation paths.

I will try to illustrate a Q-credit using the example of Abbas Raza who pointed me towards a 3quarksdaily discussion of "Orientalism" and an essay by the philosopher Akeel Bilgrami. Even though I had previously read Edward Said's book "Orientalism", the profound insights in Bilgrami's essay made me re-read Edward Said's book. The Q-credit could be acknowledged as follows:

Q-Credit: Abbas Raza --> The 2008 3Quarksdaily Forum on Occidentalism --> "Occidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on Enlightenment and Enchantment" by Akeel Bilgrami published 2008 on 3Quarksdaily.com and 2006 in Critical Inquiry --> Bilgrami identifies five broad themes in Edward Said's Orientalism

The acknowledgement of information flux is already part of the Twitter netiquette. The German theologian Barbara Mack uses her Twitter handle @faraway67 to curate important new articles about history, science, music, photography, linguistics and literature. She sees the role of web curators similar to that of music conductors, who do not compose original pieces of music but instead enable the access of an audience to the original creative work. She says that "web curation is a relatively new field of dealing with information and good curation is an act of creativity which requires dedication and a keen sense for content." She agrees that curators should indeed be given credit, "not only out of courtesy but to acknowledge their efforts of taking upon the challenge of bringing the vast information the web provides into a handy form for their followers to enjoy."

Twitter curators such as Barbara Mack use abbreviations such as h/t (hat-tip) or RT (retweet) followed by a Twitter handle to acknowledge their sources. Contemporary Twitter netiquette suggests that if curated links of use to followers, these should acknowledge the curators' efforts before tweeting them on.

One challenge that is intrinsic to Twitter (but may in an analogous fashion apply to other social media networks as well) is that each tweet can only contain 140 characters, which presently makes it very difficult to acknowledge the comprehensive curatorial information flux. If I decide to tweet on an interesting article about the philosophy of science, which I found in the Twitter feed of person X, the space limitations may make it impossible for me to give credit to all the preceding members of the information chain which had directed X's attention to that specific article. The Q-credit system may thus be best suited for acknowledgements at the end of blog posts or articles, but not for social media messaging with strict space limitations.

The Future of Internet Curation

The area of internet curation is still in its infancy and it is very difficult to predict how it will evolve. Managing online information will become increasingly important. Even though such managerial roles may not necessarily carry the title "internet curator", there is little doubt that managing online information in a meaningful manner is one of the biggest challenges that we will face in the 21st century. I am quite optimistic that we will be able to address this challenge, but the first hurdle is to recognize it.

Image Credit: The Librarian by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593)

Note: An earlier version of this article was first published on 3quarksdaily.com

Selected Q-Credits:

 1. "The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity" (2010) by James C. Kaufman and Robert J. Sternberg --> Chapter 3 "Assessment of Creativity" by Jonathan A. Plucker and Matthew C. Makel --> "Why Isn't Creativity More Important to Educational Psychologists? Potentials, Pitfalls, and Future Directions in Creativity Research" (2004) by Jonathan A. Plucker et al. in EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGIST, 39(2), 83–96
 2. "Thinking Contemporary Curating" (2012) by Terry Smith --> Information about Nick Waterlow and still image from "A Curator's Last Will and Testament"
 3. Book review of "The Information" at Brainpickings --> "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood" (2011) by James Gleick --> "Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges as an allegory for the information glutSisyphoshttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-64043078950452752752014-02-08T09:17:00.001-06:002014-02-08T09:23:03.204-06:00Philosophical MoodsNietzschean, Heideggerian, fascist, anarchist, libertarian, brilliant genius, blabbering nutjob - these and many other labels have probably been used to describe Peter Sloterdijk, who is one of Germany's most widely known contemporary philosophers. He has achieved a rock-star status in the echelons of contemporary German thinkers, perhaps because none is more apt than Sloterdijk at fulfilling the true purpose of a public intellectual: inculcating his audience with an insatiable desire to think. His fans adore him; his critics are maddened by him. Few, if any, experience indifference when they encounter the provocateur Sloterdijk.

Sloterdijk achieved fame in Germany after publishing his masterpiece "Kritik der zynischen Vernunft" (English translation: "Critique of Cynical Reason") in 1983, but his hosting of the regular late-night talk show "Das Philosophische Quartett" on the major German TV network ZDF for ten years turned him into a cultural icon and a household name. I realize that it might seem strange to non-Germans that philosophers instead of comedians can host TV talk shows, however Sloterdijk would probably be the first to agree that there isn't much of a difference between a true comedian and a true philosopher. Not only do we Germans have TV philosophers, we even enjoy the TV gossip and cockfights that they indulge in. When the ZDF network decided to get rid of Sloterdijk and replace him with the younger, more handsome and less thoughtful philosopher Richard David Precht, they start engaging in reciprocal mockery and name-calling.

Unfortunately, Sloterdijk is not quite so well-known in the English-speaking world and this may in part be due to the fact that much of his oeuvre has only recently been translated into the English language. It is no easy feat to translate his writings, in part because his playful mastery of German words is one of his signatures. Sloterdijk is a wonderful story-teller who weaves in beautiful images and puns into his narration, many of which are unique to the German language. His story-telling also makes it difficult to understand some of his texts in the original German. One may be enthralled by his stories, but after reading a whole chapter or book, it is quite difficult to condense it into a handy "message" or "point". Sloterdijk is a professional digressor, going off on tangents that are entertaining and exciting, but at times quite frustrating. He shares his brilliant insights on a broad range of topics ranging from metaphysics to politics with his readers, but he also offers practical advice on how we can change our lives as well as bizarre and pompous statements.

One of his more recent books is called "Philosophische Temperamente: Von Platon bis Foucault", which can be translated as "Philosophical Temperaments: From Plato to Foucault" and is now also available in an English translation. In the 1990s, Sloterdijk assembled a collection of texts and excerpts by 19 philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Bruno, Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Foucault) which he felt ought to be studied. Sloterdijk was convinced that the best way to truly approach a philosopher was to read the primary texts instead of relying on secondary sources. He also wrote short prefaces for the 19 volumes, each containing 400-500 pages of texts by one philosopher. The prefaces were intended to serve as brief introductions, enticing the readers to delve into the main volume. These prefaces were not academic-style summaries of the lives or works of the philosophers, they were verbal portraits painted by Sloterdijk. They were subjective impressions of their philosophical moods and temperaments, which explains why the collection of these 19 prefaces was released under the title "Philosophical Temperaments".

As with so many portraits, they reveal more about the painter than the subject of the portrait. "Philosophische Temperamente" allows us to take a peek into Sloterdijk's own temperaments. These portraits are stand-alone essays, but what is most striking is that despite their brevity, they are packed with provocative insights. The whole book has only 144 pages and only few of them are longer than seven pages. Even in these tiny portraits, Sloterdijk manages to digress, using a few core ideas of the philosopher as a starting point and then drawing parallels to our lives today. But it is precisely these kinds of digressions and parallels that remind us why these dusty classic of philosophy continue to be relevant for our lives.

This past decade has seen the rise of the TED-talk mentality. The idea of providing a forum for innovative thinkers to share their ideas with rich conference attendees, as well as the not-so-rich general public via a free internet broadcast has become a hot fad. Now that we are inundated with thousands of TED-talks and TED-copycats, many of us have developed TED-fatigue. The expression "TEDtalking" may soon become a new form of insult, referring to the watering down and oversimplifying of complex ideas, the sharing of touching and life-changing personal stories or exuding excessive positivity which fills the audience with vacuous joy and earns a heartfelt applause. I always thought of Sloterdijk as the prototypical anti-TEDtalker, because his writings do not attempt to leave the reader in a happy and cozy place. Sloterdijk likes to challenge us, evoking intellectual unease and restlessness in our minds and invites us to disagree. His essays and books with all their digressions tend to be so long, that I thought it was inconceivable for him to condense them into a 15 minute TED time slot. Sloterdijk does not offer any convenient prefab take-home messages or TED-style smug happiness.

After reading "Philosophische Temperamente", I have begun to reconsider my views on Sloterdijk and TED-talks. In these 19 mini-essays, Sloterdijk gives TED-talks without TEDtalking. His TED stands for "Tease Entertain Disagree" and instead of the traditional TED motto of "Ideas worth spreading", Sloterdijk presents us with "Ideas worth critiquing". Perhaps the organizers and presenters at TED-conferences could learn something from Sloterdijk's style.

Each mini-essay is a teaser which could potentially ignite discussions, not only about a specific philosopher, but also about the role of philosophy itself. The portrait of Augustine, arguably the least flattering of all portraits in the book, suggests that he infused Western thought with a sense of debasing anti-humanist "masochism", the idea that humankind is worthless, were it not for the grace of God. This idea thus directly connects Augustine to contemporary debates revolving around the role of religion, which do not only apply to Augustine or Christianity, but to all religions. Similarly, all other portraits also offer similarly provocative statements.

Here are translations of a few short excerpts from the book:

Plato
The chapter on Plato is the longest in Sloterdijk's book, but it discusses far more than just Plato, ranging from the purpose of philosophy to the ills of contemporary fundamentalism.

"Der Fundamentalismus, der heute weltweit aus dem Mißtrauen gegen die Modernität entspringt, kann immer nur Hilfskonstruktion für Hilflose liefern; er erzeugt nur Scheinsicherheiten ohne Weiterwissen; auf lange Sicht ruiniert er die befallenen Gesellschaften durch die Drogen der falschen Gewißheit."
"The world-wide phenomenon of fundamentalism which in today's world is rooted in a distrust of modernity can only serve as futile aides for the helpless; it generates pseudo-certainties without the desire for further knowledge; in the long run it ruins the afflicted societies with the addictive drug of false certainty."

Schopenhauer
The portrait of Schopenhauer introduces him as the pioneering thinker who quit the "Church of Reason" ("Vernunftkirche").

"Von Schopenhauer könnte der Satz stammen: Nur die Verzweiflung kann uns noch retten; er hatte freilich nicht von Verzweiflung, sondern von Verzicht gesprochen. Verzicht ist für die Modernen das schwierigste Wort der Welt."
"Schopenhauer might have uttered the phrase: Only desperation can save us. Yet he did not speak of despair, but of renunciation. Renunciation is the most difficult word for the modern world."
Marx
This passage from the chapter on Marx includes a fascinating statement about contemporary media:

"Telekommunikation läßt sich von Televampyrismus immer schwerer unterscheiden. Fernseher und Fernsauger schöpfen aus einer verflüssigten Welt, die kaum noch weiß, was widerstandsfähiges oder eigenes Leben wäre."
"It is becoming difficult to distinguish between telecommunication and televampirism. Television and Telesuction draw from a liquefied world that hardly knows the concept of an independent or resistant life."
It is difficult to translate Sloterdijk's neologism "Fernsauger", which literally means "tele-sucker" or "tele-suction device". In the original German, it is a beautiful play on the words Fernseher (television or tele-viewer) and the German word for a vacuum cleaner ("Staubsauger" , literally a "dust-sucker").

Sartre

 "Was Sartre angeht, so blieb er zeitlebens seiner Weise, die bodenlose Freiheit zu leben, treu. Für ihn war das Nichts der Subjektivität kein herabziehender Abgrund, sondern eine heraufsprudelnde Quelle, ein Überschuß an Verneinungskraft gegen alles Umschließende."
 "As for Sartre, he remained true to leading a life of boundless freedom. For him, the void of subjectivity was not an abyss that pulls us down. Instead, it was a spring, gushing upwards and resisting all forms of enclosure."
This particular Sloterdijk book is one of the most accessible introductions to Sloterdijk's thinking and offers the reader many reasons for why we should continue to study classic Western philosophers.

Note: An earlier version of this article was first published on 3quarksdaily.com.

Image Credits: German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (by Rainer Lück via Wikimedia Commons), "Mood Rings" (by G.H. Holt Photography via Flickr)Sisyphoshttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-84232132755966832852014-02-07T08:30:00.001-06:002014-05-15T16:38:41.882-05:00The Science MystiqueMany of my German high school teachers were intellectual remnants of the "68er" movement. They had either been part of the 1968 anti-authoritarian and left-wing student protests in Germany or they had been deeply influenced by them. The movement gradually fizzled out and the students took on seemingly bourgeois jobs in the 1970s as civil servants, bank accountants or high school teachers, but their muted revolutionary spirit remained on the whole intact. Some high school teachers used the flexibility of the German high school curriculum to infuse us with the revolutionary ideals of the 68ers. For example, instead of delving into Charles Dickens in our English classes, we read excerpts of the book "The Feminine Mystique" written by the American feminist Betty Friedan.

Our high school level discussion of the book barely scratched the surface of the complex issues related to women's rights and their portrayal by the media, but it introduced me to the concept of a "mystique". The book pointed out that seemingly positive labels such as "nurturing" were being used to propagate an image of the ideal woman, who could fulfill her life's goals by being a subservient and loving housewife or mother. She might have superior managerial skills, but they were best suited to run a household and not a company, and she would need to be protected from the aggressive male-dominated business world. Many women bought into this mystique, precisely because it had elements of praise built into it, without realizing how limiting it was to be placed on a pedestal. Even though the feminine mystique has largely been eroded in Europe and North America, I continue to encounter women who cling on to this mystique, particularly among Muslim women in North America who are prone to emphasize how they feel that gender segregation and restrictive dress codes for women are a form of "elevation" and honor. They claim these social and personal barriers make them feel unique and precious.

Friedan's book also made me realize that we were surrounded by so many other similarly captivating mystiques. The oriental mystique was dismantled by Edward Said in his book "Orientalism", and I have to admit that I myself was transiently trapped in this mystique. Being one of the few visibly "oriental" individuals among my peers in Germany, I liked the idea of being viewed as exotic, intuitive and emotional. After I started medical school, I learned about the "doctor mystique", which was already on its deathbed. Doctors had previously been seen as infallible saviors who devoted all their time to heroically saving lives and whose actions did not need to be questioned. There is a German expression for doctors which is nowadays predominantly used in an ironic sense: "Halbgötter in Weiß" – Demigods in White. Through persistent education, books, magazine and newspaper articles, TV shows and movies, many of these mystiques have been gradually demolished.

It has become common knowledge that women can be successful as ambitious CEOs or as brilliant engineers. We now know that "Orientals" do not just indulge their intuitive mysticism but can become analytical mathematicians. People readily accept the fact that doctors are human, they make mistakes and their medical decisions can be influenced by pharmaceutical marketing or by spurious squabbles with colleagues. One of my favorite TV shows was the American medical comedy Scrubs, which gave a surprisingly accurate portrayal of what it meant to work in a hospital. It was obviously fictional and contained many exaggerations to increase its comedic impact, but I could relate to many of the core themes presented in the show. The daily frustrations of being a physician-in-training or a senior attending physician, the fact that physicians make mistakes, the petty fights among physicians that can negatively impact their patients, the immense stress of having to deal with patients who cannot be helped, financial incentives for performing unnecessary medical procedures, physicians and nurses with substance abuse problems – these were all challenges that either I or my friends and colleagues had experienced.

One lone TV show such as Scrubs cannot be credited for taking down the "doctor mystique", but it did provide a vehicle for us physicians to talk about the "dark side of medicine". Speaking about flawed clinical decision-making and how personal emotions can affect our interactions with patients is not easy for physicians, because this form of introspection can lead to paralyzing guilt. All physicians know they make mistakes, and even though we ourselves do not buy into the "doctor mystique", we may still feel the burden of having live up to it. I remember how I used to discuss some of the Scrubs episodes with other physicians and these light-hearted conversations about funny scenes in the TV show sometimes led to deeper discussions about our own personal experiences and the challenges we faced in our profession.

Being placed on a pedestal is a form of confinement. Dismantling mystiques not only liberates the individuals who are being mystified, but it can also benefit society as a whole. In the case of the doctor mystique, patients are now more likely to question the decisions of physicians, thus forcing doctors to explain why they are prescribing certain medications or expensive procedures. The internet enables patients to obtain information about their illnesses and treatment options. Instead of blindly following doctors' orders, they want to engage their doctor in a discussion and become an integral part of the decision-making process.

The recognition that gifts, free dinners and honoraria paid by pharmaceutical companies strongly influence what medications doctors prescribe has led to the establishment of important new rules at universities and academic journals to curb this influence. Many medical schools now strongly restrict interactions between pharmaceutical company representatives and physicians-in-training. Academic journals and presentations at universities or medical conferences require a complete disclosure of all potential financial relationships that could impact the objectivity of the presented data. Some physicians may find these regulations cumbersome and long for the "mystique" days when their intentions were not under such scrutiny, but many of us think that these changes are making us better physicians and improving medical care.

As I watch many of these mystiques crumble, one mystique continues to persist: The Science Mystique. As with other mystiques, it consists of a collage of falsely idealized and idolized notions of what science constitutes. This mystique has many different manifestations, such as the firm belief that reported scientific findings are absolutely true beyond any doubt, scientific results obtained today are likely to remain true for all eternity and scientific research will be able to definitively solve all the major problems facing humankind. This science mystique is often paired with an over-simplified and reductionist view of science. Some popular science books, press releases or newspaper articles refer to scientists having discovered the gene or the molecule that is responsible for highly complex phenomena, such as cancer or philosophical constructs such as morality. When discussing a recent paper on wound healing, I came across an intriguing comment in a public comment thread: "When I read an article related to science it puts me in the mindset of perfection and credibility". This is just one anecdotal comment, but I think that it captures the Science Mystique of people who place science on a pedestal of perfection.

As flattering as it may be, few scientists see science as encapsulating perfection. Even though I am a physician, most of my time is devoted to working as a cell biologist. My laboratory currently studies the biology of stem cells and the role of mitochondrial metabolism in stem cells. In the rather antiquated division of science into "hard" and "soft" sciences, where physics is considered a "hard" science and psychology or sociology are considered "soft" sciences, my field of work would be considered a middle-of-the-road, "firm" science. As cell biologists, we are able to conduct well-defined experiments, falsify hypotheses and directly test cause-effect relationships. Nevertheless, my experience with scientific results is that they are far from perfect and most good scientific work usually raises more questions than it provides answers. We scientists are motivated by our passion for exploration, and we know that even when we are able to successfully obtain definitive results, these findings usually point out even greater deficiencies and uncertainties in our knowledge. Stuart Firestein's wonderful book "Ignorance: How It Drives Science" is a sincere and eloquent testimony to the key role of ignorance in scientific work. A thoughtful "I do not know the answer to this" uttered by a scientist is typically seen as a sign of scientific maturity, because it shows humility of the scientist and indicates a potential new direction for scientific research. On the other hand, when a scientist proudly proclaims to have found the most important gene or having defined themost important pathway for a certain biological process, it frequently indicates a lack of understanding of the complexity of the matter at hand.

One key problem of science is the issue of reproducibility. Psychology is currently undergoing a soul-searching process because many questions have been raised about why published scientific findings have such poor reproducibility when other psychologists perform the same experiments. One might attribute this to the "soft" nature of psychology, because it deals with variables such as emotions that are difficult to quantify and with heterogeneous humans as their test subjects. However, even pre-clinical cancer research on cancer cells and animal models of tumors is plagued by problems of reproducibility. In my work as a stem cell biologist, I have also encountered reproducibility issues when my laboratory has attempted to replicate published scientific findings. My experience in recent years has been that roughly only half of the published findings in stem cell biology can be reproduced when we attempt to conduct experiments according to the scientific methods and protocols of the published paper.

This anecdotal estimate of 50% reproducibility is not a comprehensive analysis. Researchers only attempt to replicate findings which are highly relevant to their work and which are published in a select group of scientific journals. If we tried to replicate every single paper in the field of stem cell biology, the success rate might be even lower. On the other hand, we devote a limited amount of time and resources to replicating results, because there is no funding available for replication experiments. It is possible that if we devoted enough time and resources to replicate a published study, tinkering with the different methods, trying out different batches of stem cells and reagents, we might have a higher likelihood of being able to replicate the results. Since negative studies are difficult to publish, these failed attempts at replication are buried and the published papers that cannot be replicated are rarely retracted. When scientists meet at conferences, they often informally share their respective experiences regarding their attempts to replicate research findings. These casual exchanges can be very helpful, because they help us ensure that we do not waste resources to build new scientific work on the shaky foundations of scientific papers that cannot be replicated.

In addition to knowing that a significant proportion of published scientific findings cannot be replicated, scientists are also aware of the fact that scientific knowledge is dynamic. Technologies used to acquire scientific data are continuously changing and the new scientific data amassed during any single year by far outpaces the capacity of scientists to fully understand and analyze it. Most scientists are currently struggling to keep up with the new scientific knowledge in their own field, let alone put it in context with the existing literature. As I have previously pointed out, more than 30-40 scientific papers are published on average on any given day in the field of stem cell biology. This overwhelming wealth of scientific information inevitably leads to a short half-life of scientific knowledge, as Samuel Arbesman has expressed in his book "The Half-Life of Facts". What is considered a scientific fact today may be obsolete within five years. The books by Firestein and Arbesman are shining examples among the plethora of recent popular science books, because they explain why scientific knowledge is so ephemeral and yet so important. Hopefully, these books will help deconstruct the Science Mystique.

One aspect of science that receives comparatively little attention in popular science discussions is the human factor. Scientific experiments are conducted by scientists who have human failings, and thus scientific fallibility is entwined with human fallibility. Some degree of limited scientific replicability is intrinsic to the subject matter itself. Researchers use many different chemicals and biological reagents for their experiments, and even if they are obtained from the same manufacturer, there is no guarantee that their potency will be the same over time. At other times, researchers may make unintentional mistakes in interpreting their data or may unknowingly use contaminated samples. One can hardly blame scientists for heterogeneity of their tested samples or for making honest errors. However, there are far more egregious errors made by scientists that can have a major impact on how science is conducted. There are cases of outright fraud, where researchers just manufacture non-existent data, but these tend to be rare. When colleagues and scientific journals or organizations become aware of these cases of fraud, published papers are retracted and scientists face punitive measures. Such overt fraud tends to be unusual, and of the hundred or more scientific colleagues who I have personally worked with, I do not know of any one that has committed such fraud. However, what occurs far more frequently than overt fraud is the gentle fudging of scientific data, consciously or subconsciously, so that desired scientific results are obtained. Experimental outliers might be excluded using questionable justifications, especially if excluding them helps direct the data in the desired direction. Like most humans, scientists also have biases and would like to interpret their data in a manner that fits with their existing concepts and ideas.

Human fallibility not only affects how scientists interpret and present their data, but can also have a far-reaching impact on which scientific projects receive research funding or the publication of scientific results. When manuscripts are submitted to scientific journals or when grant proposal are submitted to funding agencies, they usually undergo a review by a panel of scientists who work in the same field and can ultimately decide whether or not a paper should be published or a grant funded. One would hope that these decisions are primarily based on the scientific merit of the manuscripts or the grant proposals, but anyone who has been involved in these forms of peer review knows that, unfortunately, personal connections or personal grudges can often be decisive factors.

Lack of scientific replicability, knowing about the uncertainties that come with new scientific knowledge, fraud and fudging, biases during peer review – these are all just some of the reasons why scientists rarely believe in the mystique of science. When I discuss this with acquaintances who are non-scientists, they sometimes ask me how I can love science if I have encountered these "ugly" aspects of science. My response is that I love science despite this "ugliness", and perhaps even because of its "ugliness". The fact that scientific knowledge is dynamic and ephemeral, the fact that we do not need to feel embarrassed about our ignorance and uncertainties, the fact that science is conducted by humans and is infused with human failings, these are all reasons to love science. When I think of science, I am reminded of the painting "Basket of Fruit" by Caravaggio, which is a still-life of a fruit bowl, but unlike older still-life paintings of fruit, it showed discolored and decaying leaves and fruit. The beauty and ingenuity of Caravaggio's painting lies in its ability to show fruit how it really is, not the idealized fruit baskets that other painters would so often depict.

The challenge that we scientists face is to share our love for science despite its imperfections with those around us who do not actively work in the field of science. I remember speaking to a colleague of mine in the context of a wonderful spoof of a Lady Gaga song called "Bad Project". We both agreed that the spoof was spot on, showing frustrations of a PhD student not being able to get experiments to work, having to base experiments on poorly documented lab note books and the tedious nature of scientific work. My colleague was concerned that if such spoofs ridiculing laboratory work became too common, it would embolden the American anti-science movement that is already very strong. Anyone who closely follows American science politics knows that creationists and global-warming deniers are constantly looking for opportunities to find flaws in scientific studies and that they use occasional errors as opportunities to suggest that well-established and replicated scientific results or theories should be discarded.

My response to these concerns is that it is our job as scientists to convince fellow citizens how important science is, despite its limitations and flaws. The uncertainties and limitations of scientific knowledge are not weaknesses, but strengths of the scientific approach, highlighting why it is so well-suited to help us understand our world. Enabling a false mystique of science being definitive and perfect is not going to benefit science or society in the long run. Instead, recognizing our failings and limitations in science and openly discussing them with our fellow citizens is going to help us improve how we conduct science. Anyone who carefully looks at Caravaggio's "imperfect" painting can see its beauty and still fall in love with it. I hope that we scientists will be able to share the Caravaggio view of science with the general public.

Acknowledgement: An earlier version of this article was first published on 3quarksdaily.com.

Image Credits: Painting Basket of Fruit by Caravaggio via Wikimedia CommonsSisyphoshttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1093073246815817375.post-36601735051730544742014-02-07T08:21:00.000-06:002014-02-07T08:24:53.532-06:00A Parched Future: Global Land and Water Grabbing
"This is the bond of water. We know the rites. A man's flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe." Frank Herbert - Dune

Land grabbing refers to the large-scale acquisition of comparatively inexpensive agricultural land in foreign countries by foreign governments or corporations. In most cases, the acquired land is located in under-developed countries in Africa, Asia or South America, while the grabbers are investment funds based in Europe, North America and the Middle East. The acquisition can take the form of an outright purchase or a long-term-lease, ranging from 25 to 99 years, that gives the grabbing entity extensive control over the acquired land. Proponents of such large-scale acquisitions have criticized the term "land grabbing' because it carries the stigma of illegitimacy and conjures up images of colonialism or other forms of unethical land acquisitions that were so common in the not so distant past. They point out that land acquisitions by foreign investors are made in accordance with the local laws and that the investments could create jobs and development opportunities in impoverished countries. However, recent reports suggest that these land acquisitions are indeed "land grabs". NGOs and not-for profit organizations such as GRAIN, TNI and Oxfam have documented the disastrous consequences of large-scale land acquisitions for the local communities. More often than not, the promised jobs are not created and families that were farming the land for generations are evicted from their ancestral land and lose their livelihood. The money provided to the government by the investors frequently disappears into the coffers of corrupt officials while the evicted farmers receive little or no compensation.

One aspect of land grabbing that has received comparatively little attention is the fact that land grabbing is invariably linked to water grabbing. When the newly acquired land is used for growing crops, it requires some combination of rainwater (referred to as "green water") and irrigation from freshwater resources (referred to as "blue water"). The amount of required blue water depends on the rainfall in the grabbed land. For example, land that is grabbed in a country with heavy rainfalls, such as Indonesia, may require very little irrigation and tapping of its blue water resources. The link between land grabbing and water grabbing is very obvious in the case of Saudi Arabia, which used to be a major exporter of wheat in the 1990s, when there were few concerns about the country's water resources. The kingdom provided water at minimal costs to its heavily subsidized farmers, thus resulting in a very inefficient usage of the water. Instead of the global average of using 1,000 tons of water per ton of wheat, Saudi farmers used 3,000 and 6,000 tons of water. Fred Pearce describes the depletion of the Saudi water resources in his book The Land Grabbers:

Saudis thought they had water to waste because, beneath the Arabian sands, lay one of the world's largest underground reservoirs of water. In the late 1970s, when pumping started, the pores of the sandstone rocks contained around 400 million acre-feet of water, enough to fill Lake Erie. The water had percolated underground during the last ice age, when Arabia was wet. So it was not being replaced. It was fossil water— and like Saudi oil, once it is gone it will be gone for good. And that time is now coming. In recent years, the Saudis have been pumping up the underground reserves of water at a rate of 16 million acre-feet a year. Hydrologists estimate that only a fifth of the reserve remains, and it could be gone before the decade is out.
Saudi Arabia responded to this depletion of its water resources by deciding to gradually phase out all wheat production. Instead of growing wheat in Saudi Arabia, it would import wheat from African farmlands that were leased and operated by Saudi investors. This way, the kingdom could conserve its own water resources while using African water resources for the production of the wheat that would be consumed by Saudis.

The recent study "Global land and water grabbing" published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2013) by Maria Rulli and colleagues examined how land grabbing leads to water grabbing and can deplete the water resources of a country. The basic idea is that when the grabbed land is irrigated, the use of freshwater resources reduces the availability of irrigation water for neighboring farmland areas, i.e. the areas that have not been grabbed. This in turn can cause widespread water stress and affect the ability of other farmers to grow crops, ultimately leading to poverty and social unrest. Land grabbing is often shrouded in secrecy since local governments do not want to be perceived as selling off valuable land to foreigners, but some details regarding the size of the land grab are eventually made public. The associated water needs of the investors that grab the land are even less clear and very little is publicly divulged about how the land grabbing will affect the water availability for other farmers. In the case of Sudan, for example, grabbed land is often located on the fertile banks of the Blue Nile and while large-scale commercial farmland is expanding as part of the foreign investments, local farmers are losing access to land and water and gradually becoming dependent on food aid, even though Sudan is a major exporter of food produced by the large-scale farms.

Using the global land grabbing database of GRAIN and the Land Matrix Database, Rulli and colleagues analyzed the extent of land-grabbing and identify the Democratic Republic of Congo (8.05 million hectares), Indonesia (7.14 million hectares), Philippines (5.17 million hectares), Sudan (4.69 million hectares) and Australia (4.65 million hectares) as the five countries in which the most area of land has been grabbed by foreign investors. The total amount of grabbed land in these five countries is 29.7 million hectares, and accounts for nearly 63% of global land grabbing. To put this in perspective, the size of the United Kingdom is 24.4 million hectares.

The researchers calculated the amount of rainfall (green water) on the grabbed land, which is the minimum amount of water that would be grabbed with the acquisition of the land. However, since the grabbed land is also used for agriculture and many crops require additional freshwater irrigation (blue water), the researchers also determined a range of predicted blue water grabbing for land irrigation. For the low end of the blue water grabbing range, the researchers assumed that the land would be irrigated in the same fashion as other agricultural land in the country. On the higher end of the range, the researchers also calculated how much blue water would be grabbed, if the investors irrigated the land in a manner to maximize the agricultural production of the land. This is not an unreasonable assumption, since foreign investors probably do have the financial resources to maximally irrigate the acquired land in a manner that maximizes the return on their investment.

Rulli and colleagues estimated that global land grabbing is associated with the grabbing of 308 billion m3 of green water (i.e. rain water) and an additional grabbing of blue water that can range from 11 billion m3 (current irrigation practices) to 146 billion m3 (maximal irrigation) per year. Again, to put these numbers in perspective, the average daily household consumption of water in the United Kingdom is 150 liters (0.15 m3) per person. This results in a total annual household consumption of 3.5 billion m3 (0.15 m3 X 365 days X 63,181,775 UK population) of water in the UK. Therefore, the total household water consumption in the UK is a fraction of what would be the predicted blue water usage of the grabbed land, even if one were to use very conservative estimates of required irrigation.

The researchers then also list the top 25 countries in which the investors are based that engage in land and water grabbing. They find that about "60% of the total grabbed water is appropriated, through land grabbing, by the United States, United Arab Emirates, India, United Kingdom, Egypt, China, and Israel". The researchers gloss over the fact that in many cases, land and associated water resources are grabbed by foreign investment groups and not by foreign governments. Just because certain investment funds are based in Singapore, UK or the United Arab Emirates does not mean that these countries are "appropriating" the land or water. In fact, many investment groups that are involved in land grabbing may have multinational investors or investors whose nationality is not disclosed. Nevertheless, there are probably cases in which land and water grabbing are not merely conducted as a form of private investment, but might involve foreign governments. One such example is the above-mentioned case of Saudi Arabia, in which the Saudi government actively encouraged and helped Saudi investors to acquire agricultural land in Africa. While perusing the list of the top 25 countries in which land and water grabbing investors are based, one cannot help but notice that the list contains a number of Middle Eastern countries that are themselves experiencing severe water stress and scarcity, such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates or Israel. Transferring their water burden to Africa by acquiring agricultural land would allow them to preserve their own water resources and may indeed by of strategic value to these countries. However, the precise degree of government involvement in these investment decisions often remains unclear.

The paper by Rulli and colleagues is an important reminder of how land grabbing and water grabbing are entwined and that land grabbing could potentially deplete valuable water resources from under-developed countries, especially in Africa, which accounts for more than half of the globally grabbed land. Even villagers that continue to own and farm their own land adjacent to the large-scale farms on grabbed lands could be affected by new forms of water stress, especially if the foreign investors decide to maximally irrigate the acquired land. There are some key limitations to the study, such as the lack of distinction between private foreign investors or foreign governments that are engaged in land grabbing and the fact that all the calculations of blue water grabbing are based on very broad estimates without solid data on how much blue water is actually consumed by the grabbed lands. These numbers may be very difficult to obtain, but should be the focus of future studies in this area.

After reading this study, I have become far more aware of ongoing land and water grabbing. Excessive commodification of our lives was already criticized by Karl Polanyi in 1944 and now that water is also becoming a "fictitious commodity", we have to be extremely watchful of its consequences. The extent of land grabbing that has already taken place is quite extensive. An interactive map based on the GRAIN database allows us to visualize the areas in the world that are most affected by land grabbing since 2006 as well as where the foreign investors are located. The map shows that in recent years, Pakistan has emerged as one of the prime targets of land grabbing in Asia, while Sudan, South Sudan, Tanzania and Ethiopia are major targets of recent land grabbing in Africa. The world economic crisis and the recent food price crisis will likely increase the degree of land grabbing and associated water grabbing. The targets of land grabbing are often countries with fragile economies, widespread poverty and significant malnourishment.

As a global society, we have to ensure that people living in these countries do not suffer as a consequence of land grabbing deals. The recent "Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security" released by the FAO are an important step in the right direction, because they attempt to provide food security for all, even when large-scale land acquisitions occur. However, they do not specify water access and they are, as the title reveals, "voluntary". It is not clear who will abide by them. Therefore, we also need a complementary approach in which clients of land grabbing investment funds ask the fund managers to abide by the FAO guidelines and that they maximally ensure food security and water access for the general population in grabbed lands. One specific example is that of the American retirement fund TIAA-CREF (Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association – College Retirement Equities Fund) which is one of the leading retirement providers for people who work in education, research and medicine. Investment in agriculture and land grabbing appears to be a priority for TIAA-CREF, but American educators or academics that use TIAA-CREF as their retirement fund could use their leverage to ensure socially conscientious investments. Even though land and water grabbing are becoming a major concern, the growing awareness of the problem may also result in solutions that limit the negative impact of land and water grabbing.

Image Credits: Wikimedia - Drought by Tomas Castelazo / Wikimedia - The Union of Earth and Water by Rubens

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<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Proceedings+of+the+National+Academy+of+Sciences+of+the+United+States+of+America&rft_id=info%3Apmid%2F23284174&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=Global+land+and+water+grabbing.&rft.issn=0027-8424&rft.date=2013&rft.volume=110&rft.issue=3&rft.spage=892&rft.epage=7&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pnas.org%2Fcontent%2Fearly%2F2013%2F01%2F02%2F1213163110&rft.au=Rulli+MC&rft.au=Saviori+A&rft.au=D%27Odorico+P&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Geosciences%2CSocial+Science%2CEcology+%2F+Conservation%2CBiogeosciences%2C+Climate+Science%2C+Sustainability%2C+Ecology%2C+Public+Policy%2C+Environment%2C+Energy%2C+Conservation%2C+Agriculture%2C+Sustainability%2C+Economics%2C+Geography%2C+Sociology%2C+Political+Science">Rulli MC, Saviori A, & D'Odorico P (2013). Global land and water grabbing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110 (3), 892-7 PMID: 23284174Sisyphoshttp://email@example.com