ambiguous visual images are fascinating because it is often difficult to imagine seeing them any other way—until something flips within the brain and the alternative perception is revealed. this phenomenon, known as perceptual rivalry, is of great interest to neuroscience. because rivalrous illusions produce changes in perception that are independent of changes in the stimulus itself, they may help to understand how the brain gives rise to conscious experience.

in order to better illustrate the processes behind consciousness in the brain, these researchers are attempting to create an entirely new type of illusion:

"the most familiar illusions involve vision," explains christopher moore, a principal investigator at the mcgovern institute for brain research at mit and an assistant professor in mit's department of brain and cognitive sciences. "but we're interested in discovering general principles of perception, and we wanted to see whether similar illusions can occur in the tactile domain [...]"

in the visual illusion known as the apparent motion quartet, two dots are presented at diagonally opposite corners of an imaginary square. when the pattern alternates between the two diagonals—top left/bottom right followed by top right/bottom left—people perceive the dots as moving back and forth either horizontally or vertically. after a period of time, typically a minute or two, most observers report that the axis of motion appears to flip from vertical to horizontal or vice versa.

to create a tactile version of this illusion, olivia carter, a postdoctoral researcher at harvard university, and talia konkle, a graduate student in moore's mit lab, used a new piezoelectric stimulator device developed by qi wang and vincent hayward at mcgill university. this device, originally designed as a computer braille display, uses a centimeter-square array composed of 60 "tactors" to deliver precisely controlled touch stimuli to the finger tips of volunteer subjects.

when volunteer subjects were given the diagonally alternating stimuli, they perceived them as moving smoothly back and forth—and just as with the visual illusion, the direction of apparent motion flipped back and forth from vertical to horizontal, on average about twice per minute, even though there was no change in the stimulus itself.

this experiment represents a successful translation of an optical illusion into a tactile illusion. while the concept of the tactile (or "touch") illusion is nothing new, this research may be the first example of an optical illusion being adapted for the sense of touch. for this reason, the experiment will reveal much about how the brain perceives stimulus and how perception can change when stimulus remains constant:

real-world objects often stimulate multiple senses simultaneously, and our brains must combine these disparate stimuli into a unified interpretation of the world. the authors used their tactile illusion to explore the interaction between touch and vision. they instructed their subjects to make vertical or horizontal eye movements during the ambiguous touch stimuli. subjects perceived that the direction of tactile motion shifted into alignment with the direction of the eye movements, but only if the head and finger were also aligned. tilting the head sideways 90 degrees produced a shift to the other direction—suggesting that the tactile and visuomotor systems are somehow aligned with respect to the external world.

"we don't yet understand what's happening in the brain during these illusions," says konkle. "but we think this illusion will be a useful new tool to understand more about the similarities between different sensory modalities and how they all work together."

The program is chocked full of ads showing the latest fashions, particularly for women of the 20s.

What better captures the spirit of the Jazz Age than these fabulous pictures?

A Pierce Arrow '36 series, anyone?

I'm headed out to Eastern Long Island now!

Oh yea, and the program also does some perfunctory coverage of the game itself, including the dashing captain P.W. Bunnell on the Yale Fence.

Website of CollectableIvy

Since i'm new and I want to encorage readership I want to make sure everyone stays interested.  I also realize that different people are convinced in different ways.

I present to you a site from Simple to Remember that has proof after proof from many reliable sources (including individuals who got their degrees from Harvard, John Hopkins, and UCLA).  So take your pick.  Read what you like.  And Shabbat Shalom

Tuve mi primer contacto con esta teoría en una clase de estrategía de mi MBA, en ese momento no tenía la respuesta o mejor dicho una opinión en el tema. Un año despúes un estudio publicado por la escuela de negocios de Harvard, a través de la profesora de marketing Anita Elberse me hizo reflexionar sobre la Teoría original.

The Long Tail, editado en 2006 y escrito por Chris Anderson, fundador de Wired, es uno de esos libros que aparecen periódicamente y que pretenden que uno se replantee todo lo que asume como cierto sobre cómo funciona la sociedad. En este caso, el mensaje era que Internet y sus casi ilimitadas opciones estaban reconfigurando la economía y la cultura. Desde Harvard la profesora de Marketing Anita Elberse replantea la teoría.

La teoría de La larga cola, tal como la explica su creador Chris Anderson, sostiene que la sociedad "depende cada vez menos de la concentración en un número relativamente reducido de ?superventas? (productos de consumo y mercados) en la cabeza de la curva de la demanda para pasar a un gran grupo de nichos en la cola". La razón es la abundancia de elecciones fáciles que Internet hace posible. Una tienda de música sólo tiene capacidad para un determinado número de discos. Sin embargo, iTunes, la tienda digital de música de Apple, ofrece enlaces a los millones de canciones que sus servidores pueden almacenar. Así, explica Anderson, "los bienes y servicios destinados a una minoría pueden ser económicamente tan atractivos como los productos de masas". Como consecuencia, a muchos gerentes se les pidió que ajustaran sus planes de negocio conforme a esta teoría.

Desde su publicación, el libro ha gozado de un aura sagrada en Silicon Valley. Los planes de negocio que sólo anticipaban un desempeño comercial modesto de sus productos citaban La larga cola como justificación, dado que aparentemente había probado que la Web tiene cabida para un mercado de otros productos además de los superventas.

Anita Elberse, profesora de marketing de la escuela de negocios de Harvard, pone en duda la teoría aplicando al sector del ocio y la cultura un riguroso análisis estadístico.

Elberse estudió los datos de alquiler de películas en Internet y ventas de música digital y descubrió que los patrones según los que la gente compra en la Web son esencialmente los mismos que cuando compra en tiendas físicas. No sólo quedó en evidencia que los superéxitos son igual de importantes en línea, sino que la información sugiere que la Web está haciendo que su peso aumente, en vez de disminuir.

Anderson respondió en su blog, thelongtail.com, diciendo que gran parte de la diferencia entre su análisis y el de Elberse partía de cómo se medían los superventas y los productos poco exitosos, o "cabeza" y "cola", según la jerga del libro. Aparte de eso, fue generoso en sus elogios al artículo y aseguró estar satisfecho con el riguroso escrutinio que estaba recibiendo la teoría.

Los blogs contribuyeron a difundir la teoría de La larga cola, algo que no es de extrañar si se toma en cuenta que prometía que cualquiera de ellos podía encontrar una audiencia solida. Sin embargo,  los blogs dependen tanto de los superventas como el resto del mundo. Un porcentaje diminuto recibe la mayor cantidad de tráfico y el resto pasa desapercibido, dice Anderson.

Les diría que a esta altura estoy un 50% y 50%, tomaría partes especificas de ambos estudios y generaría una nueva teoría o varias.

Les dejo el Link del articulo Original: Should you invest in the long tail?

A sacar conclusiones:)

Saludos

Aunque esto nunca será justificación, sí que es muy saludable tomar un poco de aire para tener una perspectiva más amplia en estos tiempos en los que la búsqueda del éxito es una obsesión sin precedentes.

Y aún así, algo tendrá el fracaso, algo necesario y útil para que su valor no se deprecie nunca.

¿Máster en Fracaso Total? ¿Postgrado en Decepción Profunda? En fin...siempre habrá cosas que no se aprenden ni en los libros ni en las instituciones...

Y si no que se lo digan a JK Rowling, la autora de Harry Potter. Recientemente cerró el curso académico en la Universidad de Harvard con un discurso sobre la importancia del fracaso y la imaginación.

Merece la pena escucharla o leer el discurso. Me gustó mucho como coloca a la imaginación como un elemento fundamental, no sólo para dar vida a lo que todavía no existe, sino para poder llegar a sentir lo que otros han pasado, han vivido o han sufrido. Y para ello, resalta el periodo de su vida en el que trabajó en Amnistía Internacional. Algo que la marcó profundamente. Algo que va más allá del intelecto.

Porque sin imaginación, no hay creación.

Y sin emoción profunda (fracasos, penas, alegrías...), no merece la pena.

Aquí van los vídeos y un enlace donde se puede encontrar la trascripción:

http://harvardmagazine.com/go/jkrowling.html

An NPR story recently referred to a meta-study of happiness and parenting featured in Newsweek magazine (which claimed that parents have 7% less happiness on average) and highlighted research of Florida State University's Robin Simon (sociology) asserting that caring for kids brought greater depression and unhappiness, partly because of the childcaring itself and partly because of shriveled social networks that stemmed from parents staying in more (for the latter finding, Simon cites research by Linsbeth Levin at Duke).

Excerpts from NPR story:

"Dr. Simon: (reporting on parents' self-rated emotions in sample of 13,000 time diary reports): They [parents] definitely experienced more depression. They - people with kids, all parents, that is to say including people with kids who are living at home, young children who are living at home, as well as empty-nest parents, surprisingly, when you combine all kinds of parents in the United States, and ask them, you know, if they experience these serious emotions, what you find is that they report significantly more feelings of depression than people who have never had kids.

MIKE PESCA: [NPR Bryan Project host] Does it correlate to the number of kids, or just having a kid?

Dr. SIMON: Well, we actually didn't look at the number of kids, though I suspect that it does, because other sociological studies have found that the more kids one has the more feelings of depression."

Simon goes on to say that some of this depression stems from the fact that parents are on their own and we don't provide them enough social support and provide enough family-friendly policies for them to reap the full benefits of parenthood, including having access to decent healthcare. And host Mike Pesca describes Dan Gilbert's work (Harvard, psychology) that asserts that parents are happier sleeping and grocery shopping than childrearing.

Simon goes own to admit that the while parents often report lower short-term happiness from parenting, most feel immense life satisfaction and pride from being parents.

Interestingly, this research doesn't accord with careful research of hotshot economist Alan Krueger (at Princeton), whose work I discussed in an earlier blog post. He finds childcare giving as the fifth most pleasurable activity (out of 21 asked), where pleasurability (or their U-index) is the percent of 15-minute segments in which stressed/sadness/pain emotions exceeded happiness. Childcare had the 5th LOWEST U-index score. The Krueger research is preferably methodologically since it controls for respondents' baseline levels of happiness, depression, etc. and thus is able to weed out whether parents, for example, are just more happier people in general. You can read the Krueger study here.

A few good friends from university have been in Rome in the past few weeks, and I've been using them as a wonderful excuse to try the restaurants and bars that colleagues have recommended to me. Between mouthfuls of mozzarella and spaghetti, I've developed a nasty habit of forcing my friends to teach me things that I realize I probably ought to know, but that I never actually learned.

My favourite topics of late have been financial. I've finally come to the realization that while working for "the man" might not be terribly original, it's also not all that offensive an idea, either. So I've started asking questions. I now know (thanks to Alex) that an investment bank is not actually a bank, and I now understand (thanks to Zander) how currency exchanges, futures markets, and trade balances operate. These are things that I sort of understood, but not really.

Is it hard to believe that I graduated from a prestigious American university that sends three-fifths of its graduates to Wall Street without a shred of financial literacy to my name? Not in the least.

In recent years scientists have been investigating the possibility of transplanting healthy stem cells into the muscle of patients in order to replace the lost muscle cells and halt the progression of the disease, but it has proved difficult to identify muscle precursor cells that can both make new muscle cells and persist as a pool of precursor cells in the patient, the latter is an important consideration if repeated transplants are to be avoided since muscle cells wear out and need to be replaced.  A paper published in this weeks issue of the scientific journal Cell by scientists at Harvard University is an important step towards developing a means to screen for the right cells and use them to treat DMD

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7500523.stm

In their work (1) Dr. Amy Wagers and her coworkers concentrated on a type of cell known as satellite cells that are closely associated with muscle fibers in mice and humans; by studying the proteins found on the surface of these cells they were able to identify a sub-population they termed skeletal-muscle precursor cells (SMPs)  in mice that could produce muscle cells while maintaining a reserve of precursor cells for future rounds of muscle cell production.  They next needed to evaluate these cells for their ability to do this when transplanted into an animal whose muscles were being damaged due to faulty dystrophin, in order to determine whether their ideas were correct.
They chose to use the mdx mouse model, a mouse which has a defect in the dystrophin gene and displays many of the biochemical and physiological characteristics of DMD. The mdx mouse displays less severe symptoms than humans with DMD, but like humans is characterized by progressive muscle wasting and early death and has been crucial to the development of many of the new therapies for DMD, including gene therapy and novel drugs, that are currently entering clinical trials. Dr. Wager's work found that engraftment of transplanted SMPs into the muscles of  mdx animals lead to the production of new muscle cells to replace lost to DMD, and that the transplants also showed therapeutic value by improving muscle histology and rescuing physiological muscle function i.e. the muscles got stronger.  Analysis of the muscles of mice which received transplanted cells also showed that the second requirement that the transplanted cells should give rise to a pool of cells capable of acting as a source of muscle cells in future was also fulfilled.

This is very promising work, and marks an important milestone in the development of stem cell therapy for DMD.  Before human trials can begin however more work will need to be done to develop methods of isolating and preparing human SMPs for use in clinical trials, and there remains the challenge of how to transplant the cells into all the muscles in the body where they are required.

Cheers

Paul Browne

1) Cerletti M. et al. "Highly Efficient, Functional Engraftment of Skeletal Muscle Stem Cells in Dystrophic Muscles" Cell Vol 134, Pages 37-47 ( 2008)

Was die Intelligenz betrifft, da scheinen sich die Frauen im Mittelfeld am wohlsten zu fühlen, denn nach neusten Untersuchungen befinden sich unter den klügsten und unter den dümmsten Menschen jeweils doppelt soviele Männer wie Frauen. Ob dies nun genetisch bedingt ist oder durch die unterschiedliche Sozialisation und unterschiedliche Förderung begünstigt wird, dass bleibt bei dieser Studie unklar. Für ihren Intelligenztest hatten die Forscher die Kenntnisse und Denkleistungen der Probanden in den Naturwissenschaften und bei Sprachen sowie deren mechanische Fähigkeiten ausgewertet, was natürlich sehr einseitig ist.

Psychologen sind der Meinung, dass den Männern das Streben nach Bildung durch ihre Aufgabe als Ernährer der Familie gesellschaftsbedingt näher liegt als den Frauen, aber ich vermute mal, das dies nicht die richtige Erklärung ist. Diese Interpretation lässt zudem vermuten, dass hier nicht zwischen Intelligenz und Wissen unterschieden wird, was das Ergebnis der Studie zweifelhaft macht.

Zudem muss man wissen, dass vor zwei Jahren der Präsident der Harvard-Universität, Lawrence Summers, durch erhebliche Proteste zum Rücktritt gezwungen wurde, nachdem er erklärt hatte, Männer seien die besseren Wissenschaftler. Vielleicht wollte sich da nur jemand rehabilitieren? :-)

Today we went to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The museum is owned by Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although I live in Massachusetts, I have never visited Harvard before. I kinda liked it, but I felt that this visit wasn’t as interactive as our other field trips. Another downside to the trip was all the walking we did. Honestly, this trip wasn’t the greatest, but at least I got to go to Harvard.

My favorite exhibit wasn’t very big or fancy. In fact, it didn’t really have many artifacts. My favorite exhibit was the part which showed how Native Americans are portrayed in popular culture. I liked this exhibit because everything about it was modern and new, unlike the rest of the museum; the other artifacts date back hundreds and hundreds of years ago. There was an old 1960’s style TV which had been hollowed out and placed in the exhibit. In the TV there was a portable DVD player which played a movie about Native Americans. There was also a brick of some sort with the word “Savages” embossed onto it. The point of this exhibit is to make people aware of how Native Americans feel about their culture being used unjustly without their consent. I think that this exhibit is a great way to make teenagers aware of this problem. Still, this was my favorite part of the museum.

After taking a lot of notes, Mr. Newhall decided that it was time for lunch. I got one turkey sandwich, an orange, some Fritos, a water bottle, two chocolate chip cookies, and packets of mustard and mayo. But where’s the orange juice? Apparently no one got juice, so we had to make the most out of the water. At least the cookies were good. We walked back to the museum to see the other exhibits. There was an exhibit about the Maya which seemed cool. My cousin Anya is from Guatemala, so she is a Maya. It would be cool to take her to the exhibit when she is older.

After we looked through what seemed like the entire museum, we went to the Museum of Natural History. I saw cool animals and dinosaur bones. I didn’t like the Glass Flowers exhibit. Looking at flowers that aren’t even real is very boring. Plus, one of my classmates said I was ignorant for not knowing that the flowers were made of glass. That really made me mad, and that’s part of the reason why I didn’t like this exhibit. We left the exhibit to go to the gift shop. I wanted to buy a Harvard t-shirt, but they didn’t sell any. The prices seemed unreasonable too. I almost bought one of those pens which have 4 different ink colors, but when I noticed the $3 price tag, I put it back. I didn’t buy anything, which was good because I can always come back with my family. In the end, I had an ok day at Harvard, but it would’ve been a lot better somewhere else.

I had this plan; I would go to Harvard Extension School to get my Master's and to get in with the professors in order to get great recommendations from them.  I want to go to Harvard for my Ph.D.  Today was the day that I decided I would apply for loans and get the ball rolling on all of this.  I have to register for classes in the middle of August and wanted to have the financial aspect squared away with plenty of time to spare.  So I applied for a loan. 

And was rejected. 

Twice. 

Damn.

I'm feeling pretty low right now.  This is my dream.  I am not going to let it slip away because I can't get a loan.  There have to be other options.  There have to be other options.  I just can't come up with any right now.  I need help.  What do I do?  Financial aid isn't an option because I am taking prerequisites and don't qualify until I am admitted to a program.  Asking the parents is not even to be considered.  It won't happen.  Private loans were my only option.  Shit.

I could put this off for another year and hope that my credit will get better and I will be approved for a loan next year.  I don't want to put it off any longer.  I hate not being in school.  I hate only working, I need more.  It looks like I am going to have to take some time to wrap my head around the idea that I won't be returning to school in the fall.  This is going to take awhile...

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International's headquarters in London. There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind. I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares about some of the things I saw, heard and read. And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before. Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places. Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise. And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing.

Before I continue, you probably noticed I haven't posted in a while...sorry. I've been having these late night conversations, I've been working later (meaning I'm tired earlier), and I haven't been at home when I do come back...because I am having fun, probably some sort of divine compensation for school.

"steven: I have to go now, I'm going to go write something in my blog.

xxxxani: you hv a blog? man, you hv no life!"

Anyway, so Harvard has these preorientation programs - one for rock climbing, one for artistic expression, one for international students, and one called Dorm Crew.  Thinking this would be a good opportunity to have some fun before college starts (read: maybe a week before college?), I signed up for Dorm Crew.

Bad idea.

The first image I'm greeted with when I open open the Dorm Crew packet is a picture of a toilet and then various pictures of kids smiling and having fun with brooms and making mustaches with brushes...OH NO, so it's some sort of campus beautification process that bonds people together and in teamster optimism claims to be the "Dorm Crew." Great!

I took my first drive by myself a couple of days ago (usually my mom or a friend is riding with me). The only place I knew how to get to was Meyerland, so I ended up going to Starbucks and ordered a shaken Passion Lemonade and Iced Tea. By myself. The drink was too sour, but the weather was perfect, my windows were down, and I had some music blaring...it felt good, kind of like the strokes of liberation you take when you shave your stubble (oh wait, sorry, I'm a little ahead of some of you guys-and girls- haha).

There's also a lot of drama going on, you know the same drama that makes you grimace and groan at the same time - guys who are obsessed, girls who are clueless, and me smack dab in the middle who can't resist to say that's what she said. Maybe it's a preface to college. I don't know. I really don't know what to expect.

And really, I need input on stuff to talk about, so leave comments with your own suggestions - anything at all.

Weighted GPA: 4.3

Unweighted GPA 3.7

SAT: 2140, Math: 780, Reading:670, Writing:690

ACT: 33, Math: 34, Science:34, Reading: 32, English: 32

Advanced Placement Tests:

Biology: 5

Calculus AB: 5

Calculus BC: 5

Chemistry:4

Macroeconomics: 5

Microeconomics: 5

Statistics: 5

US History: 5

Other stuff:

National AP Scholar, National Honor Society, Presidential Service Award, Tennis, Ski-team, Johns Hopkins Pre-College, UChicago Research in the Biological Sciences, Pediatric Rehabilitation Community Service, Red Cross Intern

Research project on the effects of knocking down par-2 and par-3 genes in Caenorhabditis elegans embryos with RNA interference.

Taking multivariable calculus and linear algebra this upcoming year

So there it is... not the greatest profile ever, but certainly gives me a chance some great schools

www.blogger.com

www.tumblr.com

www.wordpress.com

From my day's worth of experience, WordPress is the easiest to use for beginners, while Tumblr is great for the web designer and Blogger is good for the computer programmer/hacker.

You can visit the other blogs at

www.collegeapplicationhell.blogspot.com

www.collegeapplicationhell.tumblr.com

Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol and Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig both accuse progressives of engaging in childish behavior. Lessig's piece is titled 'The immunity hysteria', while Skocpol asks 'Can Progressives Unite, or Will It Be the Same Old Bit-Politics Story?'

The 'liberal potentates' of academia like these two, the donor class, politicians like Tim Roehmer and Jim Webb, and liberal pundits like the New Yorker's David Remnick and the New York Times's Tom Friedman mostly share this perspective. It is the same argument about Federal bailouts, writ large. Privatize the profits of being close to power in the Obama administration, socialize the losses by blaming failures on progressives who clearly have no power or influence over any of the decisions made in the campaign. One of the reasons I find this race so dispiriting is because Obama's campaign is clearly controlled by well-mannered wealthy people who hate partisanship, which is simply cover for disdaining the raucous nature of what is known as democracy.

Enthymeme:

I find this race dispiriting

because

Sen. Obama's campaign is controlled by well-mannered wealthy people who hate partisanship, which is simply cover for disdaining the raucous nature of what is known as democracy.

Assumption: Stoller is not wealthy (relatively, at least compared to the Democratic "donor class"), well mannered (relatively, at least with respect to politics), and he embraces the raucous nature and partisan character of democracy.

What does this suggest about what Stoller calls "the donor class?" Who are they, and how do they perceive themselves? Non-partisan? Trans-partisan? Post-partisan? How do they understand political issues? As operational problems to resolved by technical means? How deeply is this apolitical politics felt? Does it ever get articulated in argument or rationale?

What books do these people read? What writers or thinkers do they follow?

Events suggest that Sen. Obama has brought a lot of new voices into the process, from above among the new elite classes as well as from below.

Back to Stoller:

Don't expect great things from Obama. Don't expect anything, really, except blame when he screws up. It's our fault, since we didn't clap hard enough.

Still, there's the Supreme Court, so I'll probably end up giving and volunteering at some point later. Not now, though, I don't like being lectured by Ivy League wankers who tell me it's my fault when Obama lies to me. That'll have to blow over [...]

Comment: Stoller organizes his theme on a spatial metaphor, the tension between a privileged center and its noisy periphy, with proximity to power to decide the issue. This foregrounds a critical distinction between center-left and center-right. Where Stoller celebrates the possibilities of power and political agency and regrets his lack of proximity to it, we regret that it must exist at all and would seek to limit and constrain it, as explained by Jon Henke in a thenextright.com blog burst titled limited government syllogism.

N.

J.K. Rowling, famed author of the Harry Potter series, recently gave a commencement address at Harvard University. Her speech, entitled The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination was an inspiring look into her life and success.

In her address, Rowling stresses the importance of imagination, not just because imagination was key to her success as an author, but because it is what enables us to create and make progress. As Rowling so poetically puts it:

"Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared...Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places."

The only question is really whether or not we choose to use this faculty that is so uniquely ours—whether or not we choose to do something with it. Every great innovator out there has imagined something different; something better than the status quo, and worked toward making that vision a reality. The folks at Apple imagined a world where mobile computing was contained in a pocket-sized device, Googlers imagine a world where all the world's information is universally accessible and useful, Honda's engineers imagine a world where automobiles emit only pure water, and Kiva imagines a world where any entrepreneur in the world can have access to the funds they need to get their business going. These organizations, and many others out there, are using their employees' collective imaginations to create products, services, and entirely different business models that change the way things are done.

The reality is that we all have the ability to imagine something different and better and innovative—we just have to fuel the fire and keep it burning long enough to make something happen. So, what is it that you imagine for the future? How are you going to get there?

Visit Harvard Magazine for a full transcript, video, and MP3 of Rowling's address, or watch the video (in three parts) below.

(J.K. Rowling's Harvard Commencement Address: Part 1 of 3)

(J.K. Rowling's Harvard Commencement Address: Part 2 of 3)

(J.K. Rowling's Harvard Commencement Address: Part 3 of 3)

Photo by Me.

Capitol Hill interns and staffers make me want to claw my eyes out.  Well, the staffers that give the normal nice staffers a bad reputation make me want to claw my eyes out.  (I have friends who have been staffers and interns and they are totally cool people.)

They justify their meaningless coffee-getting tour-group-leading softball-field-squatting West-Wing-worshiping Happy-Hour-attending existences by pitifully attempting to put others down.

I actually had one of these creatures get in my face the other day about vacating the National Mall because Senators Kennedy and Kerry were coming to their softball game.  Then they yelled at Patrick.  Then they yelled at me again.  Yes, a mere day after Kennedy made his return after his BRAIN TUMOR thing, he's going to come to your congressional softball league game.

Needless to say, neither Kerry nor Kennedy showed their faces on the mall that day. And they didn't need the part of the expansive National Mall I happened to be on.

This is one of the things I will never stop hating about DC.  Like I said, not all interns and staffers are this way, but for those of you who are, for shame!  You give everyone else a bad name!  You're the dried up sticky gum on the bottom of the proverbial shoe that is Capitol Hill politics.  I know being in such close proximity to power can be a strong aphrodisiac, but the only thing you have power over is choosing Splenda or Sweet and Low.

You strut your stuff and brag about things that OTHER people do.  That's right.  Your entire ego is based off of someone else!  Those are not your laurels that you're resting on.

So congratulations irritating Capitol Hill gopher.  This is what your Harvard education has gotten you.  Rule your coffee getting domain with an iron fist!  Tell the crazy constituents that your bosses don't want to deal with to put a sock in it in German!  I mean hell, you minored in it, right?

You're the big man on campus. You're top dog.  You're the bee's knees.  Can't wait to hear what kind of coffee you ended up choosing via your Gtalk Status.

I'm convinced these are also the people who stand left on the escalators in the Metro.

or was it the time
we walked in the park in
autumn sat on a bench beneath
the night acutely aware of our hands and the distance between them?

or was it that Thursday
the first time my lips fell into yours
in the background the treading percussion of Explosions in the Sky?

or was it that Sunday
at circle of hope when I calculated the exact pressure
of your hand on mine to equal the love of God and kept it to myself?

was it in old city
beneath the din of eighties hip hop
when I told my friends I would marry you someday?

was it in spanish
stumbling mispronunciations and incorrect accents
in an attempt better know those who mean the world to you?

was it in harvard yard
dressed as wizards wandering and wondering
where we could find the best butter beer in cambridge?

or was it the summer
we spent unemployed reading and mastering
the NY times crossword puzzle then emerged, merged adjusting our eyes to autumn?

or was it that night
in central PA when you showed me how
to cup both hands to carefully catch these drifting constellations?

I cannot say exactly
when
only
somewhere
between my hands and yours
between sunset and sunrise
between the top and bottom step
between the mountains and the atlantic
between jersey and philly
between te amo and mahal kita
between the upbeat and downbeat
between the first and last page of this notebook
between one thousand and one days ago and today

I fell in love with you.

and even to partially properly articulate this
it will take my entire life
an infinite number of pages
and perfectly placed kisses
(which is part of my plan)

but something tells me
nothing will match
the simple eloquence
of your hand
in mine
some evening
fifty summers from tonight.

Too hot to be outside? Tired of playing video games? Here's your weekend reading, from Africa to Peru, to the Philippines, to Iceland & even Fiji. Enjoy!

Gold Rush Spells Doom to Yaeda

Just a few weeks after the Arabian hunting firm officially pulled out of Yaeda, a new monster is reported to have moved into the vast valley and intends to unleash even worse destruction.

The vast untamed land had since creation been home to a number of indigenous tribes among them the rapidly shrinking population of the Hadza (Singular Hadzabe) bush people.

When a Disastrous Regime Continues

The devastating cyclone Nargis that struck southern Burma two months ago, has revealed to the world that it was even less disastrous than its military regime, which can ignore its own people in urgent needs and even could prevent and restrict relief from international communities for the hundred thousand victims of the disaster with the apprehension that it might create an atmosphere for another people's uprising in the country.

More than 100 Arrested

LIMA – More than 100 people were arrested Wednesday at the start of a nationwide general strike in Peru over the rising cost of living and other grievances, the National Police chief said.

Support for the strike, which has been declared illegal by the Labor Ministry, has been more widespread in the interior, where a 48-hour agrarian protest is being carried out and demonstrations are being staged in a dozen regions to press for the redress of local grievances.

Protesters say that García's free-market economic model has failed to bring the benefits of a recent economic boom to the large number of low-income Peruvians.

Maguindanao, RP Fall Behind Key Indicators for Education

Achieving universal primary education is one of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that the Philippines has committed itself to achieve by 2015. In its midterm progress report on the MDGs that was released last year, however, the government conceded that this was one of the goals it was unlikely to meet seven years from now.

The Polar Bear Express

So how are those beasts of the Arctic getting there? They are known to unwittingly hitch a ride from nearby Greenland on chunks of sea ice that drift to Iceland’s northern coast. There are over 600 documented cases of polar bears dropping by for a visit, and already this year two bears have made it to Iceland.

Our Future in Obama's World Must be to Solve Putnam's Problem

IT became a shibboleth of sociological truisms after the 20th century’s Second World War that every society in the world benefits by being racially, ethnically, culturally diverse. Multiculturalism, multiracialism are seen as societal barometers of progress and strength. No society has embodied this truism more than the United States.

That was then. At the dawn of this 21st century, new research by Harvard political scientist, Robert Putnam, seemingly challenges this shibboleth. Putnam’s work and findings are based on interviews with almost 30,000 of his fellow Americans. Through their confessions and admissions, Putnam found that ‘the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects’. Indeed, ‘in the most diverse communities, neighbours trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings’. According to one report, Putnam’s study is ‘the largest ever on civic engagement in America’ and the outcome that ‘virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings’ has certainly unsettled the orthodoxies of integrationism, multiracialism and multiculturalism that have so long been taken for granted as evidenced in metaphors of ‘the melting pot’ and the ‘salad bowl’ and so on.

The Chester French guys went to Harvard. The This is Ivy League guys didn't...but their band name INSINUATES that they might have so it still totally counts.

"She Loves Everybody" - Chester French

"London Bridges" - This is Ivy League