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Starry, Starry Night

Posted on June 4, 2011
by Dinesh Dutt

What child is not fascinated by the night sky ? If I ever want to feel a tingling in my spine, all I have to do is look at the night sky, even in this light polluted suburban land. As a teenager, I longed to own a telescope, something that was just not possible in the time and place I lived in. I spent a few nights lying outside in the garden, staring at the sky through a binoculars that had somehow come my way. I tried to decipher the constellations and make out interesting patterns. I didn’t succeed much. A decade or so ago, I was in Australia, on Kangaroo Island. I had gone out at night to see the penguins as they returned to land. The power went off and the whole island was plunged into darkness. The night sky in that darkness is imprinted in my mind. There was a large band of light that seemed to split the sky, the Milky Way. When I got an iPhone, the first app that I bought was Starwalk, an app that helped me make sense of the night sky.

Today morning, I came across this beautiful time-lapse video of the Milky Way, taken by a South Dakota farmer and photographer. I loved it so much, I had to write a brief entry about it. As someone said, we can’t help being struck by the night sky, after all, we’re all made of stardust.


 

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Pointed Observations

Posted on March 26, 2011
by Dinesh Dutt

Maya is intensely curious about people and their interactions. When we go to a restaurant, she can’t stop swiveling around to try and see everybody who’s in the place. People next table are subject to intense scrutiny if they’re engaged in an animated conversation. “She’s your daughter”, Shanthala usually says when this happens. At times, Maya points at the people and asks us what they’re doing or tells us her thoughts on what’s going on or attempts to mimic their conversation. All this of course results in our gently hushing her and trying to get her to not stare at people so much or even point. Pointing is rude, we say, people don’t like being pointed at. She’s even more curious about the denizens closer to her age. If a child is crying, she stops everything she’s doing and stares at the child and the adult(s) involved at the scene. Sometimes, she gets right up in their face as the adults attempt to pacify or admonish the child. She then comes to us and pointing at the child informs us that the child was crying and asks us why. More hushing and more “please don’t point” statements.

At such times, I often wonder, at the origins of the rituals we ask Maya to engage in or desist from. Is the behavior universal or predominantly Western or Indian ? Is it quite old or was it relatively unknown as recently as when I was a child ? What about other animals, do they have similar behaviors ?

Yesterday, I came across an article in one of the blogs that I often follow, ICICI. The article was titled “Human avoidance in pointing: a cultural universal?” The author of the article wondered about the universality of pointing and the reasons for its taboo. He requested fellow anthropologists and other similar practitioners to respond. Reading the responses and the links to the papers that were put out and engaging in a little contemplation on my own provided interesting insights into yet another fascinating aspect of human and animal behavior.

Consider the following experiment. There are two opaque bags and into one, a person places some food. A chimpanzee is shown the two bags and two different things are tried. In one case, the bag with the food is pointed at by a person. In another case, the bag with the food is tilted so that the chimp can see the food. What do you think the chimp does in each case ? In a different experiment, instead of pointing or tilting, one of the experimenters deliberately marked the bag with food with a large X and clumsily dropped the marker into the other bag. Which bag do you think the chimp chose ? Now instead of a chimp, if a toddler is brought in and the experiment is repeated. What do you think the toddler does in each case ?

The chimps picked the right bag when the bag was either tilted or marked (they seemed to note that the dropping of the marker was accidental and ignored that and went for the bag with the X), but they failed to pick the right bag when it was only pointed at. Just to be clear, if one chimp stares at an external location, another chimp can follow the gaze and venture up to the spot targeted by the gaze, even looking back at the other chimp if there is nothing there. In other words, they can “project an imaginary line of sight through invisible space”. But they do not point or follow pointing. It appears that pointing is a human trait. This is fascinating.

As a parent, I engaged in pointing very early on with Maya. Naming various objects involved pointing. Current research seems to indicate that around their first birthday, infants begin to point to draw an adult’s attention at something that caught their eye. Researchers differentiate between two different ways infants use pointing. Infants point to get something, say “get me that ball daddy”, and they point to direct the adult’s attention at something of interest, say “look at that bird daddy” (I’m not saying they can verbalize bird or ball, of course). Interestingly, autistic kids only engage in the first kind of pointing (called protoimperative i.e. a rudimentary command) and not in the second (called protodeclarative i.e. a rudimentary declaration). Even apes raised by humans can apparently engage in protoimperative pointing but not in protodeclarative pointing. Postdeclarative pointing to achieve joint attention is considered by many to be a key step in infants developing a theory of mind (i.e. the knowledge that people have mental states which can lead to certain behaviors and that other’s may have mental states different from one’s own). As the author of the ICICI blog entry notes, pointing is a trait acquired in humans even before the onset of human language.

If pointing is such a key characteristic, why do we then dissuade its use as we grow older, i.e. why is pointing such a taboo ? There are several reasons given, all slight variations of each other, in my opinion. Pointing is calling attention to or singling a person out for some specific reason and the reason is usually not complimentary. Pointing seems entwined with blaming or accusing in our society. As the Dire Straits song goes, “When you point your finger ‘cuz your plan fell through, You got three more fingers pointing back at you”. And there is of course the well-known term “finger-pointing”. Further, the person pointed at, feels isolated and loses the safety of being invisible in a larger whole. Another possible reason is that pointing implies a dominant-to-subordinate relationship such as in a parent-child case. We point at our children and admonish them to not engage in some behavior. One commenter on the ICICI blog narrates an anecdote from Ecuador where a mother explained that it is dangerous for a child to point because of the evil eye of the person being pointed to. In short, pointing is very threatening.

So is it a universal taboo to not point ? One of the commentators to the ICICI blog article says that based on his work with the Yucatec Maya in Mexico, he doesn’t think they  consider pointing taboo. But that’s about the only evidence I found that the taboo against pointing is not universal.

Pointing gets convoluted to get around the taboo of not pointing. People in Southeast Asia such as Laos and indigenous people in Southern America, Africa and Australia engage in “lower lip pointing“. The Vezo in Madagascar use a fully bent index finger to point at superiors and those they revere including whales. And of course, there is the Judas kiss.

Another fascinating piece of information that I learned is that there is a disorder called heterotopagnosia in which the patient is unable to point at someone else’s body parts. They pointed at their own body part when asked to point at another person’s body part. They had no problem grasping the other person’s body part, they just couldn’t point to it. The Neurocritic blog has more information about this strange malady.

Little did I know when I first started down this path, of the simple act of pointing.

I’m working on my poems and working with
my fingers not my head. Because my fingers

are the farthest stretching things from me.
Look at the tree. Like its longest branch

I touch the evening’s quiet breathing. Sounds

of rain. The crackling heat from other trees.

The tree points everywhere. The branches can’t
reach to their roots though. Growing longer they

grow weaker also. Can’t make use of water.
Rain falls. But I’m working with these farthest stretching

things from me. Along my fingertips bare shoots
of days then years unfurl in the cold air.     – Long Finger Poem by Jin Eun-Young

References:
1. Twelve-month-olds point to share attention and interest, Liszkowski et al, 2004.
2. Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition, Tomasello et al, 2005.

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After the Storms

Posted on March 1, 2011
by Dinesh Dutt

We were socked with two big storms over the past two weeks. On the tail end of the first storm, we celebrated Maya’s birthday for the first time in the US. We hosted the largest party we’ve ever held at our house. Some 20 odd people including kids showed up. Overall, the party was a success I’d like to think.

The next day we went for a hike. The air was crisp and fresh after the almost four days of continuous rain. Maya had been demanding that we take her to climb a hill and so we eventually did. Gray rain clouds still clung to the sky, but co-mingled with snow white clouds and great patches of blue sky. The whole thing was quite atmospheric (pun intended).

After I got the iPhone, I hardly take the regular camera any more. The iPhone does a pretty good job most of the time. It is only in really low light conditions that I have difficulty getting a good picture (the picture is too grainy). I purchased a couple of apps a few months back and that coupled with a free app enhance the photographs taken with an iPhone quite well.

The first one is called Pro HDR. It simplifies the technique of taking HDR pictures. HDR (high dynamic range) is a technique whereby you combine two photos taken with different exposures to obtain a single photo that uniformly lights all the subjects. For example, if you’re shooting against the sun, the foreground is quite dark while the background is quite well lit. If you place the focus on making the foreground bright in such a condition, the background is too bright, a complete washout. But our eye can see both the background and the foreground quite well. To affect the same illusion, a HDR image is one that is created by combining two such images, one with the foreground dark and the background correctly lit and another with the foreground properly lit and the background a complete washout, to produce a single image that has a high dynamic range of illumination.

Pro HDR is one of the several HDR programs available for the iPhone. I picked it up on sale and because it was one of the higher rated HDR apps. With it I’ve captured several gorgeous pictures. Here is one taken on the hike with Maya up Rancho San Antonio County Park. Compare it with a similar photo taken without the HDR program.

Here is another good looking picture taken with the HDR program.

Notice the ghost at the far left, caused by an object that moved between the two differently exposed pictures.

Another program that I purchased is called 360 Panorama. This allows you to shoot panoramic pictures quite easily with an iPhone. When I had gone to my sister’s graduation, I was impressed by a camera that my cousin had, the Sony Nex 5. He just pressed the shutter and fired away as he swung the camera in an arc across the auditorium. The camera automatically composed a panorama out of these pictures. Compare that to the panorama mode in most cameras that I had seen till then with the panorama stitch assist mode. A few days later I ran into the 360 Panorama app which does pretty much what the Nex did, except that it ran on my iPhone and cost $1.99 (yes, less than $2).

Here is a panoramic picture taken with this program.

As you can see, the picture is not that great because of the poor light conditions. I’ve come to realize that the more professional cameras are more forgiving of adverse light conditions and poor photographers while the cheaper ones or like the one with the iPhone produce great pictures under a limited range of lighting conditions.

Hardly had the first storm abated than the second storm hit. This one came with far greater expectations than the first. A cold front from Alaska was bringing brrrr! temperatures. Snow was expected, snow so rarely seen in this part of the world. The excitement built up so much that a website called  IsItSnowingInSFYet.com sprang up. The local paper carried the headlines:
“‘Coldest storm of season’ hits Bay Area; snowball fights in San Jose
still possible”.

Sure enough, the temperatures dropped to record busting lows. Oakland and San Francisco Airport had their lowest temperatures recorded for the month (34 and 35 degrees Farenheit, I know nothing Arctic, but hey, this is Silicon Valley). Nearby Mountain View and San Francisco had temperatures that tied with the existing record. But no snow came. The local paper this time said: “The much-ballyhooed Great Blizzard of 2011 was more like the Great Fizzle.”

But catching a break in the rain on a slow work day, I went for a trot on Friday morning. It was quite cold, but after a mile or so, I had warmed up enough to not notice it. I wanted to see Stevens Creek in spate.

The creek was a roar compared to its usual silent flow. In places where the path descended to the level of the creek, the creek looked like it’d overflow. The creek was a rich, chocolate milkshake brown, frothing white as it tumbled over rocks and sudden changes in gradient.

The second picture above is another image shot with the HDR app.

As I ran down the trail, my mind raced over some news that I had been browsing in the past few days. The East Coast of the US had been hit with one of the worst storms in its recorded history, Australia had suffered devastating floods. I remembered that my friend at the non-profit that I work with had titled an essay on how weather is affected by global warming as: “How the 100 Year Flood Became An Annual Event”. If that sounds too dramatic, NYT blogged back in 2007 that:
“Floods that happen every 100 years could come as often as every 10 years by the end of this century, Long Island lobsters will disappear and New York apples will be just a memory if nothing is done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists.“

2010 tied with 2005 as the warmest year in recorded history (since record keeping began in 1887). The weather all of last year was quite irregular. So what, you say ? Here is a chart put out by the BBC on world food prices:

According to the article, titled “Q&A: Why food prices and fuel costs are going up“:
“… in 2010, severe weather in some of the world’s biggest food exporting countries damaged supplies.

That has helped to push food prices almost 20% higher than a year earlier, according to the FAO. (The 2010 figure was slightly below the annual measure  for 2008 as a whole.)

Flooding hit the planting season in Canada, and destroyed crops of wheat and sugar cane in Australia.

In addition, drought and fires devastated harvests of wheat and other grains in Russia and the surrounding region during the summer, prompting Russia to ban exports.

As a result, wheat production is expected to be lower this year than in the last two years, according to US government estimates.”

Meanwhile, in the US, we voted Tea Party led Republicans to power and what have they started ? Attacking EPA and climate change regulations that they claim hurts business. Yahoo had an article titled “Congress Begins Assault on EPA’s Climate Change Regulations“. In Montana, there’s talk of passing a bill that would declare that global warming is good for business! Discover, the popular US-based science magazine, said that the number 4 science story of 2010 was: “Climate Science Wins a Round, But the Campaign Goes Poorly“. This was after the so-called climategate scandal, in which some conservative hackers hacked into University of East Anglia and retrieved more than 1000 emails that they said showed how scientists were distorting the evidence and that there was no scientific consensus on global warming. There was no evidence of distorting evidence, of course, but that didn’t help the cause, especially in the US. Pew Research found that the percentage of Americans who believe that human activity is causing global warming fell sharply to 34% in 2010 from 50% in 2006. Only 13% of conservatives believe human activity as the cause for global warming.

As I ran, I wondered how we would come together on such a divisive issue. The US especially is so deeply anti-science and anti-global warming that I find it alarming. Even friends who seem to accept the problem, do little to change their lives to act in a way that reduces their carbon footprint. Of course, I’m no saint when it comes to reacting to global warming either. I may do a little, but there is not as much integrity or depth to my responses.

Last year, Time magazine carried an article titled: “Climate-Change Strategy: Be Afraid — but Only a Little”. The article said that research by two Berkeley psychologists showed that: “when people are shown scientific evidence or news stories on climate change that emphasize the most negative aspects of warming — extinguished species, melting ice caps, serial natural disasters — they are actually more likely to dismiss or deny what they’re seeing. Far from scaring people into taking action on climate change, such messages seem to scare them straight into denial. … The results, Willer and Feinberg wrote, “demonstrate how dire messages warning of the severity of global warming and its presumed dangers can backfire … by contradicting individuals’ deeply held beliefs that the world is fundamentally just.” (WEIRD warning alert, of course).

I think like recycling and driving less, some minimal actions that can help the cause is how we shop for food. Buy local produce. Avoid purchasing goods that have been produced and shipped from across the country or worse, from across the world. If you have farmers’ markets, shop there, especially if you can afford it. Run the heater a little less in the house. Do these really help or are they only feel good actions ? I think that once we decide to factor carbon footprint and sustainability into our decisions, even just a little, there is a potential to affect a larger change. I also hear Gandhi’s quotes, “Be the change you want to see in the world” and “My life is my message”.

I finished my run in good time and my legs felt good. I was glad for the lull in the work schedule and the rain that I could go for a run. My mind harked back to the Derrick Jensen quote that I have written about: “We are really fucked. Life is still really good.”

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Another Bias in Social Psychology

Posted on February 10, 2011
by Dinesh Dutt

The top article in yesterday’s NYT list of popular articles was one titled “Social Scientist Sees Bias Within“. After last year’s WEIRD paper, I was curious what new bias had been uncovered. The scientist referred to in the title is Jonathan Haidt, another psychologist with fascinating perspectives and ideas (I’ve written about his work before). The bias is the almost complete lack of political conservatives (American conservatives, more precisely) in the field of social psychology (social psychology is the study of relations between people and groups).

Haidt’s talk is quite fascinating and he’s an excellent communicator. He has recently been working on the biological and cultural underpinnings of our morality. He says that morality binds and blinds. The blinding happens as a consequence of holding certain ideas as sacred, ideas that cannot be questioned or attacked. This is no different than a religion. Science and the pursuit of truth cannot but be harmed when this happens. In such an environment, certain hypotheses can never be formulated because they question the unquestionable. As a consequence, the field is stuck in a rut, unable to develop a more predictable representation of reality.

Haidt says that social psychology has come to be dominated by political progressives. When he does a show of hands at the talk, out of an audience of about 1000 or so, 80-90% openly state that they’re liberal while only three people say that they’re politically conservative. Haidt says that when it comes to studies such as those involving differences due to race or gender, the ideas held sacred by the political progressives prevents a full exploration of the problem. He illustrates the danger in this by pointing out three examples, one of which is the consequences of the infamous Moynihan Report.

When Patrick Moynihan, the then Assistant Secretary of Labor to Lyndon Johnson and a political liberal, published a report about a study of the African-American family that concluded: “that the structure of family life in the black community constituted a ‘tangle of pathology…capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world,’ and that ‘at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.” The political firestorm that erupted prevented any honest discussion of this real problem at a time when it could’ve made a huge difference, according to Haidt. Even though Moynihan’s intent was to help the black man, the outcry over the words and the conclusion about the black family, prevented any real work, and as a consequence, what he prophesied in the report about the black family came to pass.

Haidt also talks of how the current climate creates a hostile environment for politically conservative social psychology students. One such student wrote to him: “Given what I’ve read of the literature, I am certain any research I conducted in political psychology would provide contrary findings and, therefore, go unpublished. Although I think I could make a substantial contribution to the knowledge base, and would be excited to do so, I will not.”

Haidt’s talk is titled “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Psychology” and can be listened to in complete, with the slides, online.

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The Way To Eat Now

Posted on February 3, 2011
by Dinesh Dutt

On Monday morning, I woke to the news that the US government agencies USDA and HHS had released their latest dietary guidelines. The emphasis this time seemed to be about reducing our salt intake. On average, Americans consume 3,500 mg of sodium every day. The new guidelines recommend reducing this to at least 2,300 mg per day for the not-at-risk population (at risk of diabetes, high blood pressure, children etc.) and 1,500 mg per day for the at-risk population.

So, how bad are we Americans in our eating ? I liked this graphic from the report.

The USDA and HHS put out these guidelines every five years. This year’s report has been praised for their bluntness compared to the complicated and less accessible reports of the past (not that most of us even read these reports, including the current USDA Secretary, Tom Vilsack, who said that he has never read the report till he got this job). For example, on page 66, they explicitly advocate reducing the amount of pizza and warn that many foods that are labelled “Whole Grain” or “100% Wheat” may not be whole grain at all. One applauded that they explicitly said “fill half your plate with fruits and vegetables” instead of the more vague “eat more vegetables”.

The Unhealthy Ecosystem

Another graphic that I liked from the report is this:

While we may quibble over the size of the individual factor compared to the rest of the factors, the ecosystem we live in is a major contributor to the unhealthy lifestyle that we’re a part of.

By now, many of us know that they cannot just put out scientifically sound advice without facing the wrath of the food industry. I first found out about this via Michael Pollan, a lucid writer and a leading journalist probing behind the malaise of our contemporary eating culture and the unhealthy practices of the American food industry and their effects. In an illuminating and insightful article titled “Unhappy Meals” back in 2007, he wrote the following about a defining moment in the advent of our current eating fad:

“No single event marked the shift from eating food to eating nutrients, though in retrospect a little-noticed political dust-up in Washington in 1977 seems to have helped propel American food culture down this dimly lighted path. Responding to an alarming increase in chronic diseases linked to diet — including heart disease, cancer and diabetes — a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, headed by George McGovern, held hearings on the problem and prepared what by all rights should have been an uncontroversial document called “Dietary Goals for the United States.” The committee learned that while rates of coronary heart disease had soared in America since World War II, other cultures that consumed traditional diets based largely on plants had strikingly low rates of chronic disease. Epidemiologists also had observed that in America during the war years, when meat and dairy products were strictly rationed, the rate of heart disease temporarily plummeted.

Naïvely putting two and two together, the committee drafted a straightforward set of dietary guidelines calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products. Within weeks a firestorm, emanating from the red-meat and dairy industries, engulfed the committee, and Senator McGovern (who had a great many cattle ranchers among his South Dakota constituents) was forced to beat a retreat. The committee’s recommendations were hastily rewritten. Plain talk about food — the committee had advised Americans to actually “reduce consumption of meat” — was replaced by artful compromise: “Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake.”

A subtle change in emphasis, you might say, but a world of difference just the same. First, the stark message to “eat less” of a particular food has been deep-sixed; don’t look for it ever again in any official U.S. dietary pronouncement. Second, notice how distinctions between entities as different as fish and beef and chicken have collapsed; those three venerable foods, each representing an entirely different taxonomic class, are now lumped together as delivery systems for a single nutrient. Notice too how the new language exonerates the foods themselves; now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless — and politically unconnected — substance that may or may not lurk in them called “saturated fat.”

The linguistic capitulation did nothing to rescue McGovern from his blunder; the very next election, in 1980, the beef lobby helped rusticate the three-term senator, sending an unmistakable warning to anyone who would challenge the American diet, and in particular the big chunk of animal protein sitting in the middle of its plate. Henceforth, government dietary guidelines would shun plain talk about whole foods, each of which has its trade association on Capitol Hill, and would instead arrive clothed in scientific euphemism and speaking of nutrients, entities that few Americans really understood but that lack powerful lobbies in Washington. This was precisely the tack taken by the National Academy of Sciences when it issued its landmark report on diet and cancer in 1982. Organized nutrient by nutrient in a way guaranteed to offend no food group, it codified the official new dietary language. Industry and media followed suit, and terms like polyunsaturated, cholesterol, monounsaturated, carbohydrate, fiber, polyphenols, amino acids and carotenes soon colonized much of the cultural space previously occupied by the tangible substance formerly known as food. The Age of Nutritionism had arrived.”

And this emphasis on nutrients hasn’t vanished. As Marion Nestle, a professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at NYU notes in her blog:
“They still talk about foods (fruits, vegetables, seafood, beans, nuts) when they say “eat more.”  But they switch to nutrient euphemisms  (sodium, solid fats and added sugars) when they mean “eat less.” They say, for example: “limit the consumption of foods that contain refined grains, especially refined grain foods that contain solid fats, added sugars, and sodium.” This requires translation: eat less meat, cake, cookies, sodas, juice drinks, and salty snacks.”

In a column on NYT, Mark Bittman provides some other suggestions to change the ecosystem, suggestions such as reducing government subsidies on processed food (what!, I didn’t know we subsidised the manufacture of processed food), subsidising sustainable meat production and farming, taxing unhealthy foods and their advertisements, and enforcing truthful labelling of food products. One of the interesting ideas he lists is the breakup of the USDA and a greater empowerment of FDA. He writes:
“Currently, the U.S.D.A. counts among its missions both expanding markets for agricultural products (like corn and soy!) and providing nutrition education.  These goals are at odds with each other; you can’t sell garbage while telling people not to eat it, and we need an agency devoted to encouraging sane  eating.”

And The Reactions From The Food Industry

The reactions from the food industry has been predictable. The US Beverage Association has lashed out against the report:
“To suggest that Americans ‘drink water instead of sugary drinks’ fails to be grounded in the totality of the science,” Dr. Maureen Storey, senior VP for science policy for the ABA, told just-drinks. “If consumers are seeking ways to reduce caloric intake, our industry provides myriad no-and low-calorie and smaller-portion beverage options, in addition to bottled water. While many consumers may enjoy tap or bottled water, beverages with no- and low-calorie sweeteners are more appealing to others and may in fact help people lose weight or maintain a healthy weight,” Storey added. “This is a position supported by health organisations including the American Dietetic Association.”

And the American Salt Institute calls the report “Drastic, Simplistic and Unrealistic”.

But they don’t need to worry. With the emphasis on sodium, I see a future filled with “reduced sodium” versions of products, much like the “carb free” or “sugar free” versions that now hound us. One more choice. And by the way, does “reduced sodium” automatically include reduced sugar or will we have all sorts of combinations of products to choose from. And if you think this is just a spoof, here is what the report in NYT had to say:
“David S. Smith, a vice president at Campbell Soup who oversees research and development, said his company was offering reduced-sodium versions of hundreds of its products, in some cases replacing regular salt with smaller amounts of sea salt.”

Other References:

  • Washington Post has an interesting slideshow on the history of the guidelines, specifically the main graphics used to illustrate the recommendations.
  • Marion Nestle’s blog post on the nutrition euphemisms in the report that require translations into actual food for practice.
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