“Several American and Iraqi officials now regard Bremer’s move to close (a tabloid newspaper run by firebrand Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr) as a profound miscalculation based on poor intelligence and inaccurate assumptions. Foremost among the errors, the officials said, was the lack of a military strategy to deal with Sadr if he chose to fight back, as he did.

‘We punched a big black bear in the eye and got him angry as hell but had no immediate plan to disable him, so of course he struck back in a very vicious way,’ said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who has been serving as a senior adviser to the U.S.-led occupation authority in Baghdad.” The Washington Post analyzes the Iraqi Intifada, and points the finger.

“Why home prices are about to plummet–and take the recovery with them.” —Washington Monthly

Ed Felten at Freedom to Tinker says his theory can explain the impact of filesharing on CD sales despite the seemingly disparate findings of well-publicized studies. The crux of his hypothesis is that the users of filesharing are of two types. ‘Free-riders’ are freeloaders, generally younger and morally unconflicted about downloading music as an alternative to buying CDs. ‘Samplers’ are generally older and, as Felten puts it, “highly engaged with cultural products of all sorts.” They are more ambivalent and morally conflicted about filesharing and use it to, well, sample. Felten can neatly wrap up the conclusions of studies showing that filesharing has a positive, a neutral, and a negative effect on CD sales inside his theory, but then he takes it too far and draws the unwarranted conclusion that “the net effect of filesharing on CD sales is roughly zero, because of a balance between the negative impact of the Free-riders and the positive impact of the Samplers.” Just because a theory with two groups with roughly opposite effects on CD sales accounts for so much does not mean that their effects counterbalance each other. How many fewer CDs would the ‘samplers’ have bought if they had not been filesharing? How many more would the ‘free-riders’ have bought? How many ‘samplers’ are there relative to the number of ‘free-riders’? Can an individual exhibit both freeloading and sampling behaviors? There is an interesting discussion thread in response to the article as well.

“Unburdened by manufacturing and distribution costs, online music was supposed to usher in a new era of inexpensive, easy-to-access music for consumers. In many cases, buying music online is still cheaper than shopping for CDs at retail outlets. But just a year after iTunes debuted with its 99-cent songs and mostly $9.99 albums, that affordable and straightforward pricing structure is already under pressure. All five major music companies are discussing ways to boost the price of single-song downloads on hot releases — to anywhere from $1.25 to as much as $2.49.” —Wired News

Book Review: “What does human nature have to do with ecocriticism? This is the question at the heart of Glen Love’s book, Practical Ecocriticism. For those who aren’t familiar with this wing of academia, ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the environment. Its practitioners explore human attitudes toward the environment as expressed in nature writing (e.g., Thoreau, Leopold, Abbey, Snyder, Dillard, Lopez), literature about the American West, and literary works in general. An academic outgrowth of the environmental movement of the 1960s, this approach differs from mainstream humanism by downplaying the uniqueness and achievements of our species and highlighting our connectedness to the natural world around us. Amazingly, however, ecocriticism is conducted with little or no understanding of biology, cognition, evolution, or behavioral ecology.

Practical Ecocriticism is an attempt to rectify this situation. Aimed at humanities teachers, scholars and students, the book begins with the premise that, “human behavior is not an empty vessel whose only input will be that provided by culture, but is strongly influenced by genetic orientations that underlie and modify, or are modified by, cultural influences”. Love advocates a criticism that is based on “ecological, naturalist, scientifically grounded arguments that recognize human connection with nature and the rest of organic life and acknowledge the biological sciences as not just another cultural construction”. In so saying, Love aligns himself with the Darwinian literary critics (e.g., Carroll, Cooke, Easterlin, Scalise Sugiyama, Storey), who have been making this argument for over a decade now with what an optimist might call mixed results.” —Human Nature Review

“Troops from Rural America Dying at Disproportionate Rate” NPR — All Things Considered

Mapping mental responses to texture could lead to designer foods. “Filling our mouths with fat lights up pleasure centres in the brain, scientists have found, which may help us understand why we cannot get enough of certain foods.” —Nature

“A prominent British psychiatrist recently revived old arguments about the origins of language and the evolution of humans. Tim Crow at Warneford Hospital in Oxford says that reports on ape brain asymmetry are distorted by observer bias. Those criticized point to ‘plenty of evidence’ that general functions and skills have gravitated to one side of the brain or the other in animals from chicks to chimps.

Crow argues that researchers are finding evidence of language precursors in apes because they want to believe in a graduated theory of evolution, rather than the leap proposed by Thomas Huxley, Stephen J. Gould, and others. Crow points to studies that have reanalyzed data and found no support for initial conclusions of asymmetry. He also asserts his support for the model proposed by neuropsychologist Marian Annett in 2002, in which she suggests that a single gene gave rise to language in the brain’s left hemisphere, and brought a shift towards right-handedness.

In 1877, Paul Broca argued that brain asymmetry distinguishes humans from other animals and gives humans the capacity for language. Then scientists started finding evidence of asymmetry in other vertebrates. ‘Many of the lateralized functions of the human are the same as those in animals,’ says Lesley Rogers of the University of New England in Australia, who with Richard Andrew coauthored the 2002 book Comparative Vertebrate Lateralization. ‘Language has a left-hemisphere location in most humans. It might rely on the evolution of some nuance of laterality, but the point is, it was superimposed on other lateralities that were already there.’

Rogers and Andrew offer examples, such as the left-footedness of parrots, the right-hand preference of toads, and the reliance of chicks on the right hemisphere for spatial cognition. Songbirds show strong lateralization for song production. But when it comes to the great apes, Rogers admits, the evidence for handedness is more controversial. Chimps at the Gombe National Park in Tanzania, for instance, showed no evidence of right- or left-hand preference at a population level according to a 1996 study.

Even in humans, says Richard Palmer at the University of Alberta, Canada, nobody really knows why handedness exists or whether it has a genetic basis. ‘The amount that we know with confidence about human handedness is so pitiful it’s almost shocking,’ he says. Indeed, no one has ever demonstrated a causal link between handedness and language.” —The Scientist

“She is deaf and mute. Her family speaks only Trique, an obscure pre-Columbian language that is foreign even to other Mexicans. She communicates with her family in gestures no one else understands.

Illiterate and silent, Juliana lives in isolation made even more profound by her circumstances – traveling with her sister and father in an anonymous stream of undocumented immigrant farmworkers who tend fields across the West.

On a cold day last November, the tiny 24-year-old climbed a rusty chain link fence into a neighbor’s filthy dog pen in Livingston, Calif. Alone, she gave birth to a baby girl.

Then she stuffed several wads of paper tissue in the infant’s mouth.

California authorities arrested her on a charge of felony child endangerment.

‘I would look at her sitting there in court and wonder what was going through her mind,’ said prosecutor Larry Morse II. ‘We can only suppose as to know she understands.’

Imagine living in a world without words. Then imagine getting pregnant, perhaps as a result of rape, giving birth alone, being arrested – and not having the words to explain, or to understand what is happening.” —Monterey Herald