Spending More Money Faster Dept: “…(I)f people only bought what they actually needed, the entire American economy would collapse…” On his weblog, Douglas Rushkoff posts a version of a “CBS Sunday Morning” commentary he did just for the shoppers among us.

“…This may look like an average suburban shopping mall to you — but today’s retail environments are selling machines engineered to extract the most money per second from your wallet.

The science of retail design – what the industry calls ‘atmospherics’ – was born by accident in 1956, with the very first shopping mall, “the southdale center” in Minnesota. This realization of an “indoor main street” provided laboratory conditions for the study and influence of shopping behavior…” [more] [thanks, David]

Related: Retailers Pin Holiday Sales Hopes on Last-Minute Customers: “Despite bustling stores and malls during the last weekend before Christmas, retailers remained anxious and uncertain after a hoped-for sales bonanza failed to materialize.

Many storeowners disappointed by consumers’ cautious buying are now looking with some desperation to last-minute shoppers and post-Christmas bargain hunters for some relief in what has been a difficult holiday season. ” Nando Times

I didn’t have a chance to look at last Sunday’s NY Times Magazine then, so I’m just catching up now on this special issue on The Year in Ideas. There are around a hundred of them. Warning: doing justice by this issue could take you a considerable chunk of time.

US Infant Homicide Rates Doubled from 1970-2000: ‘The rate of infant homicides in the US has more than doubled over the last 30 years, according to a new report by Child Trends, a not-for-profit research organization in Washington, DC.

(…)

“Although tragic, the numbers of children who die each year from infant homicide do not indicate that a huge social epidemic is taking place. Nonetheless, the data offer important information that may be useful in trying to reduce the numbers of infants who are victims of homicide each year,” said Brett Brown, director of social research for the organization and a project director of Child Trends DataBank.

Brown explained that, most likely, two factors play a role in the increase in the number of infant homicides. For one, more babies are being born to unwed teens, who are known to be at highest risk for infant homicide, Brown told Reuters Health in an interview.

Secondly, the reporting of infant homicides has become more accurate over the last 30 years, Brown pointed out.’ Yahoo! News

‘Today brings with it some potentially ugly news for Yahoo and Microsoft. America Online has secured a patent for Internet instant messaging services. Filed in September of this year, the patent grants broad ownership rights to the technology, which is used by millions of people to chat quickly and cheaply across the Internet. The implications of this are, of course, legion. “The claim is it’s a system where you have a network; you have a way to monitor who’s on the network,” Gregory Aharonian, publisher of the Internet Patent News Service, told News.com. “If you’re doing something like that, you’re potentially infringing.” ‘ siliconvalley.com

“our favorite geek gifts to give and get this year.” Scientific American

Child Bookworms? Are you struggling to get your video-game-playing kids to read more? New York University suggests these strategies… [more]  HealthScout News

The Return of the Repressed: The Strange Case of Masud Khan

In February 2001 the psychoanalytic world was shaken by a London Review of Books article by Wynne Godley [which I sent around to every colleague I could think of — FmH], visiting scholar at Bard College’s Levi Economics Institute, professor emeritus of applied economics at Cambridge University, and onetime member of H.M. Treasury Panel of Independent Forecasters (the so-called Six Wise Men). “Saving Masud Khan” tells the story of Godley’s lengthy psychoanalysis with Mohammed Masud Raza Khan, the charismatic Anglo-Pakistani who—it was recently revealed—slept with and abused many of his patients. In Godley’s telling, he was essentially tortured by Khan from beginning to end. It was a “long and fruitless battle culminating in a spiral of degradation.”

(…)The professional reaction to Godley’s revelations has been swift and defensive. While it is no secret that equally serious violations of the professional boundary between analyst and patient plague analysis today, there remains the damning fact in his case that many of Khan’s contemporaries—the venerable Winnicott included—knew of his infractions at the time he was committing them but did nothing. “This is like a return to the days of Freud and the earliest psychoanalytic pioneers. Everything is being criticized and re-evaluated here, everything is up for grabs,” says Gregorio Kohon, an animated Argentine émigré and senior member of London’s Institute of Psycho-Analysis who studied with Khan in the early 1970s. “Every family has secrets. And what we are witnessing in the ‘family’ of psychoanalysis is nothing less than ‘the return of the repressed.’” Kohon suggests that the present purging of the tradition may be the first steps of a return to the original promise of psychoanalysis. Boston Review

The Intolerability of Freedom? Don’t Set the People Free: “Theodore Dalrymple says that many poor souls need institutions, but the ideologues and cost-cutters insist on giving them autonomy…

Spare a thought, then, for those poor souls this Christmas who will try desperately to insinuate themselves into hospital, in order that they should not be alone during the festive period; upon whom our society places a burden that they cannot bear, for lack of real charity and in the name of a crude ideology. Our giant apparatus of welfare, to which we devote an ever increasing proportion of our income, is — to adapt, slightly, a well-known phrase from an official report — institutionalised callousness.” Spectator

Related (?) ‘The Rehab Don’t Work‘: Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick, my favorite medical iconoclast from the UK, reflects:

The key shift signalled by the promotion of ‘detox and rehab’ is away from a ‘law and order’ approach to the drug problem towards a new therapeutic strategy, emphasising education, treatment and support. (It is not surprising that Keith Hellawell, the drug tsar, had to go: New Labour’s crusade against drugs needs a social worker or a counsellor, not a policeman, as its symbolic head.) ‘Detox and rehab’ now go together like ‘rum and coke’, but what do they mean?

(…) ‘Many people who oppose the ‘war on drugs’ say that the ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ is ‘treatment’. This is baloney. Addiction treatment is a scam.’ (11)

The phrase ‘treatment works’ is repeated like a mantra in the government’s ‘Updated Drug Strategy’. Everybody in the world of drug policy is desperate to believe that it is true. Indeed it is supported by evidence from research that is either carried out directly by government agencies (such as the National Treatment Outcomes Research Study) or commissioned by them. But are such studies reliable? Here the British authorities might learn from the (vast) experience of the USA in this field.

Research on the efficacy of treatment programmes for problems of addiction in the USA follows a now-familiar pattern. This begins when promoters of a new scheme or programme claim dramatic successes (often accompanied by media and celebrity endorsements). Early studies, often influenced by the enthusiasm of the promoters and the zeal of those they have cured, tend to confirm impressive results. Later, when the publicity had died down and independent researchers take a more dispassionate view of the outcomes of treatment over a longer period, the extravagant claims cannot be sustained. sp!ked

“A substantial chunk of that collection is on view at the Metropolitan Museum in a show titled “The Written Image: Japanese Calligraphy and Painting From the Sylvan Barnet and William Burto Collection.” It’s installed in the museum’s Japanese galleries, and it’s wonderful.

Calligraphy has long been the most revered of art forms in China, and in the sixth century A.D. Chinese Buddhist monks carrying sacred books called sutras brought it to Japan. Eager to have their own copies of sutras, the Japanese learned Chinese and adopted its script as their own, engendering a love of the written word — the word as an expressive, information-rich image — that continues today.

The show is really about that love. It begins with a copy of an eighth-century sutra taken directly from Chinese prototypes. Clarity and accuracy were its primary goals, and its script is as crisp and regular as a printed typeface. But already a subtle sensuousity graces the calligraphic endeavor: the writing paper in this case is impregnated with specks of aromatic wood.” NY Times

And so the Shortest Day came and the Year died,

And everywhere down the centuries of that snow white world

came people

Singing, Dancing

To drive the Dark away.

They lighted candles in the winter trees

They hung their homes with evergreens

They burned beseeching fires, all night long

To keep the Year alive

And when the new Year’s sunshine blazed awake, they shouted

Reveling!

Through all the frosty ages, you can hear them

Echoing behind us.

Listen.

All the long echos sing the same delight

this Shortest Day

As promise wakens in the sleeping land

They carol, feast, give thanks, and dearly love their friends,

And hope for peace.

And so do we, here, now

This year and every year: Welcome Yule!

All: Welcome Yule!

— Susan Cooper, “The Shortest Day”

A POX On You: A tiny galaxy is born: “New detailed images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope show a “late-blooming” galaxy, a small, distorted system of gas and stars that still appears to be in the process of development, even though most of its galactic cousins are believed to have started forming billions of years ago. Evidence of the galaxy’s youthfulness can be seen in the burst of newborn stars and its disturbed shape. This evidence indicates that the galaxy, called POX 186, formed when two smaller clumps of gas and stars collided less than 100 million years ago (a relatively recent event in the universe’s 13-billion-year history), triggering more star formation. Most large galaxies, such as our Milky Way, are thought to have formed the bulk of their stars billions of years ago.” STScI

N.C. rep. admits to “segregationist feelings”:

Responding to Sen. Trent Lott’s recent comments, Rep. Cass Ballenger told a newspaper he has had “segregationist feelings” himself after conflicts with a black colleague. Friday morning, he went on local radio to say it was a stupid comment to make.

Ballenger, a North Carolina Republican, had said in Friday’s Charlotte Observer that former Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., so provoked him that “I must admit I had segregationist feelings.”

“If I had to listen to her, I probably would have developed a little bit of a segregationist feeling,” Ballenger told the Observer. “But I think everybody can look at my life and what I’ve done and say that’s not true.

“I mean, she was such a bitch,” he said. Associated Press [via Salon]

Life after: “Bill Frist, the likely new Senate majority leader, is hailed as a moderate, but he’s an antiabortion hard-liner who votes much like Trent Lott.” —Michelle Goldberg in Salon

:

“Few senators have a worse voting record on civil rights than Trent Lott — but Bill Frist is one of them,” the National Organization for Women’s Kim Gandy said in a press release. “Frist has voted against sex education, international family planning, emergency contraception (the morning-after pill), affirmative action, hate crimes legislation and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. This is the man who is supposed to save face for the GOP in the Senate? Think again.”

Also: Leadership in Recapturing Senate Pushed Frist Into Spotlight: “Until 1989, Bill Frist had never voted. Until Thursday, he had expressed no interest in being Senate majority leader. Now he will lead the United States Senate.” NY Times

And: a broader warning from Paul Krugman: Gotta Have Faith:

I’d like to think that the furor over Trent Lott’s nostalgia for Jim Crow, hidden in plain sight for years, would serve as a signal to ask about other uncomfortable truths hidden in plain sight. But I suspect that it won’t, that we’ll soon go back to worrying about politicians’ haircuts.

And then, years from now, when it becomes clear that much public policy has been driven by a hard-line fundamentalist agenda, people will say, “But nobody told us.” NY Times

‘The Bush administration is planning to propose requiring Internet service providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its users.

The proposal is part of a final version of a report, “The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace,” set for release early next year, according to several people who have been briefed on the report. It is a component of the effort to increase national security after the Sept. 11 attacks.’ New York Times

“Researchers around the world were stunned. A promising young graduate student, Dmitri Sklyarov, came to the United States to deliver his insights about weaknesses in a commercial product to a well-known computing conference. A few hours after his presentation, he was in jail.

I don’t want to belabor this case because it has already been aired in the press a great deal, particularly since last Tuesday’s startling ruling in favor of the Sklyarov’s employer, ElcomSoft, by a jury that was clearly repulsed by the idea of punishing people who make software with legitimate uses.

But Sklyarov and ElcomSoft start off this article because his arrest marked a milestone in modern life—a fulfillment of the old prediction that computer hackers used to utter as a joke: “Write a program, go to jail.” It’s still scandalous that Sklyarov spent time in jail for his non-crime.

(…) Civil libertarians and analysts in the computer field have long expected legal tensions about computer and Internet use to come to a head, but they expected it to happen over something overtly political: transmission of censored content, or software that could compromise computer security, or something related to cryptography. (Computer cryptography expert Phil Zimmermann was under investigation by the FBI for a while, but he was never indicted.)

Why copyright? Why did this obscure branch of “intellectual property,” this private concern of entertainment and software firms, become the most pressing public policy area of the computer field? ”

Five Technically Legal Signs for Your Library.

‘On the 11th of November a young lady named Anneli in Sweden wrote me a fan letter. The address she wrote on the front of the envelope was “The author Neil Gaiman. Lives in a big house of uncertain location in Minnesota USA”. On the 20th of November the United States Postal Service delivered that letter to me, care of DreamHaven Books, 912 W Lake St, Minneapolis MN 55408. And I picked it up the other night from DreamHaven when I got home from the UK.

Which means

1) The US Postal service (or, more probably, somebody working for it) is a lot smarter than I ever gave it credit for,

and

2) Sometimes very unlikely things happen.

And please, don’t try this at home. If you have something to send, then send it to DreamHaven at the above address.’

“A white-collar worker from Minnesota hacks two sites that published messages extolling recent terrorist attacks linked to al-Qaida. But he may have unwittingly botched the FBI’s ongoing surveillance operation.” Wired

The Music of Data Networks — “Listen carefully to the sound of the network, and you will hear the difference between congestion and the seamless flow of data.

So says a music professor who has applied his ear for subtle changes in pitch to the problem of delayed or dropped data on the Internet.” NY Times

World War 3 Report

monitors the global War on Terrorism and its implications for human rights, democracy and ecology. We scan the world media and Internet with a critical eye for distortions and propaganda. Our only loyalty is to the truth.

Every week, we cover the top stories in the War on Terrorism, as well as important stories overlooked by the mass media. Everything we report is sourced, and we endeavor to fact-check and probe deeper when something smells funny–whether it comes from the New York Times or a fringe web site. We annotate with historical, cultural and political context when it is relevant and overlooked by our source.

“Does my country really understand that this is World War III? And if this attack was the Pearl Harbor of World War III, it means there is a long, long war ahead.”

— Thomas Friedman, NY Times, 9-14-2001

When, in February, Rumsfeld was forced to abandon a then-recently-announced plan for an Office of Strategic Initiatives for the express purpose of providing disinformation to shape foreign public sentiment about the US, something seemed fishy about how quickly it all went away. Did we think the menacing shadows would clear out of our bedroom just because we rolled over and mumbled something half-intelligible before settling back down to sleep? I mean, when the government announces its intention to create an agency with the express purpose of lying to the world, you’re going to believe them when they tell you they’ve disbanded it? Here it is again, it would seem, without the name. NY Times In fact, in a November 18 press briefing in which he also comments on the scandalous Poindexter Total Information Awareness project, Rumsfeld said:

“And then there was the office of strategic influence. You may recall that. And “oh my goodness gracious isn’t that terrible, Henny Penny the sky is going to fall.” I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing fine I’ll give you the corpse. There’s the name. You can have the name, but I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have.”

Did you get that? The quote is in the first paragraph of the briefing transcript, but read the whole thing to get a sense of the audacity, the disdain for the niceties of the Constitution and public opinion, and the infantile grandiosity of the man appointed to fight our wars for us. There’s also this little exchange, admittedly out of context:

“Q: We are not making the Public comfortable here.

Rumsfeld: If I haven’t answered that I don’t have control of the English language.”

He said it, I didn’t, but it certainly raises the question, now that you mention it. To judge from these somewhat extemporaneous remarks, it would seem the man’s thinking is somewhat confused, imprecise and vague, when he isn’t behind a veil of carefully pre-scripted spin.

And here is what appears to be an unclassified version of the “classified” Directive 3600.1 for propaganda operations against US allies. [via cryptome]

More on the extent to which disingenuousness and deception are core instruments of current policy abroad. “Advertising maven Charlotte Beers is trying to sell the U.S. to the Muslim world, but nobody’s buying it.” Salon What do you expect when the State Department undersecretary for public diplomacy is a former Madison Ave. maven?

as body search arrives in cultural minefield of Afghan frontier.” Independent UK

“A cunning statistical study has exposed scientists as sloppy reporters. When they write up their work and cite other people’s papers, most do not bother to read the original.” Change a few words of this New Scientist piece and might we be talking about webloggers as well?

The Rittenhouse Review suggests we might focus some attention on some Republican senators who might be inclined to put distance between themselves and Lott. “In the event that Sen. Lott declines to resign or even to apologize for having heaped praise upon the 50-year-old, thoroughly discredited, and unconscionably heinous agenda of the 100-year-old, quasi-corpse known as Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), the refusal of Sens. Chafee, McCain, Snowe, and Specter to abandon the oh-so-cleverly-subtle racist enterprise that is today’s Republican Party will speak volumes, not only about American politics today, but about political power generally and the morality and character of these particular senators.” Addendum: Later that day, RR notes, Arlen Spector, who never fails to disappoint, stated, “His comment was an inadvertent slip, and his apology should end the discussion.”

Groceteria.net: “a site on the subject of supermarket history and architecture, roughly covering the period from the 1920s to the 1970s. It is not a site about current supermarket issues and locations, except in historical perspective, and it is not connected with nor owned by any supermarket chain, past or present.”

My friend Duncan used to theorize that the price of a can of tuna could be used as the basic measure of any given city’s cost of living. He was right. You can learn an awful lot about a place by visiting its supermarkets.

Supermarkets are one of the most important and overlooked elements of American life. I’m fascinated by them, and my road trips always include visits to the local chains, from Winn-Dixie in the south to Giant in Baltimore, from Cub Foods and Rainbow in Minneapolis to Kohl’s in Wisconsin. Harris Teeter, Alpha Beta, Piggly Wiggly, and the “holy trinity” of Safeway, Kroger, and A&P: I’ve done more than my share…

I’m really picky about my supermarkets. By this, I don’t mean that I shop in the newest, sleekest stores with the most fabulous produce departments. On the contrary, I’m more drawn to smaller and older stores which are perpetually in danger of being either closed or “upgraded”.

Declare Your Town a Civil Liberties Safe Zone: “Bill of Rights Defense Committees are forming in cities and towns across the country, declaring the USA Patriot Act null and void within their borders.” Utne Reader

“The Defense Department, arguing that an increasingly popular form of wireless Internet access could interfere with military radar, is seeking new limits on the technology, which is seen as a rare bright spot for the communications industry.” NY Times

Designing a robot that can sense human emotion

Forget the robot child in the movie “AI.” Vanderbilt researchers Nilanjan Sarkar and Craig Smith have a less romantic but more practical idea in mind.

“We are not trying to give a robot emotions. We are trying to make robots that are sensitive to our emotions,” says Smith, associate professor of psychology and human development.

Their vision, which is to create a kind of robot Friday, a personal assistant who can accurately sense the moods of its human bosses and respond appropriately, is described in the article, “Online Stress Detection using Psychophysiological Signals for Implicit Human-Robot Cooperation.” The article, which appears in the Dec. issue of the journal Robotica, also reports the initial steps that they have taken to make their vision a reality. EurekAlert!

The abstract is here:

Robots are expected to be pervasive in the society in a not too distant future where they will work extensively as assistants of humans in various activities. With this in view, a novel affect-sensitive architecture for human-robot cooperation is presented in this paper where the robot is expected to recognize human psychological states. As a demonstration, an online heart rate variability analysis to infer the mental stress of a human engaged in a task is presented. This technique involves real-time heart rate monitoring, signal processing using both Fourier Transforrn and Wavelet Transform, and inferring the stress condition based on the level of activation of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems using fuzzy logic. Results from human subject trials are presented to validate the presented methodology. This stress detection technique is expected to be useful in the future human-robot cooperation activities, where the robot will recognize human stress and respond appropriately.

“You are asked to participate in a voluntary research study conducted by Daniel M.T. Fessler, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, from the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. You are a possible participant in this study if you are at least 18 years of age.

The purpose of the study is to explore the roles played by different parts of the body in people’s conceptions of themselves.

If you volunteer to participate in this study, we would ask you to complete a survey. You would be asked to indicate a) how important various parts of your body are for your identity or sense of self, and b) how much you are aware of , or sense, various parts of your body. The total length of time for completion of the survey is approximately 3 minutes.”

“Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don’t tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist- I really believe he is Antichrist- I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my ‘faithful slave,’ as you call yourself! But how do you do? I see I have frightened you- sit down and tell me all the news.”

It was in July, 1805, and the speaker was the well-known Anna Pavlovna Scherer, maid of honor and favorite of the Empress Marya Fedorovna. With these words she greeted Prince Vasili Kuragin, a man of high rank and importance, who was the first to arrive at her reception. Anna Pavlovna had had a cough for some days. She was, as she said, suffering from la grippe; grippe being then a new word in St. Petersburg, used only by the elite.

All her invitations without exception, written in French, and delivered by a scarlet-liveried footman that morning, ran as follows:

“If you have nothing better to do, Count [or Prince], and if the prospect of spending an evening with a poor invalid is not too terrible, I shall be very charmed to see you tonight between 7 and 10- Annette Scherer.”

So starts Tolstoy’s agony and ecstasy, which is available on the web here. It debuted 165 years ago today.

Guitarist With Lovin’ Spoonful Dies at 57: “Zal Yanovsky, whose distinctive guitar playing and ebullient personality helped make the Lovin’ Spoonful one of the most popular rock groups of the late 1960’s, died on Friday at his home outside Kingston, Ontario. He was 57.” NY Times Only the Youngbloods could hold a candle to them for good-timey infectivity. Time to get out my Best of the Spoonful CD…