It has been the Western, pro-EU, pro-NATO camp that has trumpeted its supposed devotion to the defense of democracy when discussing the Euromaidan protests of late 2013 and their fallout. What made many skeptical of their claims of being champions of democracy from the beginning was their open support for the use of force to overthrow a democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. It would seem that usurping Yanukovych’s power violated the Ukrainian constitution. What was Yanukovych’s crime in the eyes of the West? Choosing to seek closer economic ties for Ukraine with Russia instead of signing an Association Agreement with the EU.
In the West, those who spoke of the possible inconsistencies of the pro-Euromaidan side were mostly drowned out in major news outlets. Major publications like Time Magazine had been sounding anti-Vladimir Putin alarms long before Euromaidan even took place. The Euromaidan and Russia’s annexation of Crimea sent Western media into what appeared to be nearing full bore panic mode. Perhaps most memorable was The Economist magazine’s over-the-top “Putin’s Inferno” cover. Hackneyed clichés about Putin being a 21st century Adolf Hitler were being used widely. The fact that it was the anti-Russian side that used violent means to overthrow a democratically elected leader, or that the majority of Crimeans were in favor of a reunion with Russia, did not stop the vilification of Putin and his supporters.
More than a year has now passed since the Euromaidan. In addition to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, we’ve seen a bloody civil war break out in eastern Ukraine between the pro-Russian separatists of the east (where Yanukovych had gotten the majority of his electoral support) and the Ukrainian army, taking orders from the newly installed Kiev government. This new government is generally supported by the people of western Ukraine, or at least preferred to the previous government. New elections held in May made Petro Poroshenko the president.
While the Euromaidan, the annexation of Crimea, and the Ukrainian Civil War are all major news stories in their own right, they are also part of a bigger picture geopolitical struggle between Russia and the West that some worry could be as serious as setting the foundation of a third World War. While the anti-Russia, anti-Putin sentiment is still very strong in the West’s ruling class, some notable voices of dissent have been making themselves heard. In a December 20th article in the British newspaper The Daily Mail entitled “Forget ‘evil’ Putin–we are the bloodthirsty warmongers,” English journalist and author Peter Hitchens writes,
“Now I seem surrounded by people who actively want a war with Russia, a war we all might lose. They seem to believe that we are living in a real life Lord Of The Rings, in which Moscow is Mordor and Vladimir Putin is Sauron.”
He goes on to write, “Until a year ago, Ukraine remained non-aligned between the two great European powers. But the EU wanted its land, its 48 million people (such a reservoir of cheap labour!) its Black Sea coast, its coal and its wheat. So first, it spent £300 million (some of it yours) on anti-Russian ‘civil society’ groups in Ukraine. Then EU and Nato politicians broke all the rules of diplomacy and descended on Kiev to take sides with demonstrators who demanded that Ukraine align itself with the EU.”
It is voices like these that are challenging the West’s liberal elite’s claims to be the guardians of democracy. Recent news out of Sweden (an EU member since 1995) will be bound to raise even more questions about the intentions of pro-EU liberals. On Saturday, Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven announced the cancellation of the upcoming elections, in which the Sweden Democrats (a political party) were expected to make large gains. The cancellation came after the “center-left” and “center-right” parties came to a bargain on a budget, and is an obvious effort to isolate the up-and-coming Sweden Democrats. One cannot help but notice that many among the West’s liberal establishment only seem to support democracy when they agree with the voters’ decisions.
How small are Dr. Pedro A. Quinto-Su’s steam engines? Smaller than red blood cells and most bacteria–between one and three millionths of a meter. The significantly strong pistons are powered by a combined process of optical manipulation which bypasses microfabrication and draws strength from simplicity, taking scientists one step closer to the “lab on a chip” miniaturization of everything.
“The piston–a microsphere–is powered by light, which also heats the sphere inducing the vapor microexplosions. Similar to an internal piston combustion engine,” Dr. Pedro Quinto-Su, physics professor at the Universidad Nacional in Mexico, told The Speaker.
“This is the first time that a steam engine has been miniaturized to a length scale of a micrometer,” Quinto-Su told us. “Also, the engine works in an environment dominated by fluctuations (Brownian), since it is immersed in liquid. In the context of optical micromanipulation the report shows that it is possible to have impulsive forces in an optical tweezer, which could extend even more the wide array of applications that use that technique.”
Quinto-Su placed the microscopic piston in historical context.
“In the past, the improved steam engine design of Watt started the industrial revolution and understanding the mechanism initiated modern thermodynamics. Steam engines were the foundation for all the engines that we have today.
“Now steam engines are mainly used for energy conversion in power plants, where steam turbines convert mechanical energy into electricity.”
There has been much interest in miniaturizing heat engines, Quinto-Su explained.
“In the last few decades there has been a trend in trying to miniaturize everything. In science this concept has been called “lab on a chip” and the idea is to have everything that is needed to make an experiment in a small chip. The interest in miniaturized versions of heat engines is that they could be used to do work in very localized volumes. For example, periodically displacing small objects including nanomaterials.”
Quinto-Su explained the challenges to miniaturization past the 1mm scale–the lower limit until the recent invention–and how his steam engine bypassed the previous obstacles.
“The main problem with tiny heat engines is that the efficiency is very poor. A few heat engines have been demonstrated at the micrometer scale with different working mechanisms. However, traditional heat engines that work with the expansion and compression of gas had not reached scales below 1mm, perhaps because most designs involved the assembly of microfabricated moving parts which made it more challenging–in addition to the expected poor efficiency.
“The implementation of the reported micrometer-sized piston steam engine is very simple and there is no need for microfabrication, only optical access is required. It needs an optical tweezer setup which is a widely available tool.”
Quinto-Su explained how the project began–as an attempt to combine two methods of microscopic manipulation to create the micro-piston.
“The project started by trying to combine two techniques of optical manipulation of microscopic objects immersed in liquids: optical tweezers and microscopic explosions (cavitation bubbles).”
Quinto-Su explained how small the steam engines were, and put in layman’s’ terms how the various elements of the engines work.
“In the reported engine a spherical microparticle (1 or 3 micrometers in diameter, the largest dimension of a human red blood cell is about 10 micrometers) is periodically displaced by light and microscopic explosions.
“Optical tweezers use a focused laser beam that attracts transparent microscopic objects towards the focused spot. The objects are usually immersed in liquid and they are called colloids, usually these objects are microscopic spheres. Once the microparticles reach the focus of the laser beam they stay trapped in there. This technique exerts very small controlled forces (pico Newtons) in the microscopic objects.
“In contrast, microscopic vapor explosions in liquids exert large impulsive forces in the vicinity where the explosions are created. A vapor explosion creates a rapidly expanding bubble that later collapses (cavitation bubble). The bubble displaces the liquid at a very fast speed which also displaces the objects in the vicinity, exerting impulsive forces several orders of magnitude larger than those of optical tweezers.
“In the reported work, a spherical microparticle that is not completely transparent to the laser beam is placed in an optical tweezer. In this way the sphere is attracted towards the focus of the beam, but at the same time it is heated because it is not transparent to the light. Once the sphere is close to the focus it is heated at a very fast rate and the liquid in contact with the microsphere explodes, pushing the sphere close to the starting position. Then the light forces take over and start attracting the sphere towards the focus repeating the cycle.
“Hence the combination of optical tweezers and vapor explosions resulted in a microparticle (piston) that is periodically attracted towards the focused laser and then is pushed away at a fast speed by microscopic vapor explosions. In a sense it is similar to an internal piston combustion engine.”
Quinto-Su noted that the the microexplosions are not initiated by a spark, but by a sudden temperature increase, similar to a diesel engine.
The power created by the pistons is significant, Quinto-Su explained.
“The average power is about 0.3 pico Watts and the power density is about two orders of magnitude less than that typical of car engines. However the effects at the microscopic scale are significant and could be used to pump small volumes of liquid or exert impulsive forces in nearby objects.”
The micro-pistons can be compared with the effect of transducers when driven at acoustic and ultrasound frequencies.
“Because transducers can be used to induce oscillations in liquid-gas boundaries which produce flow. In this case, the operation of the engine is periodic displacements of the piston and periodic explosions which also produce flow, similar to the effect of transducers.”
Mr. Kanit Na Nakorn, the chief of the Law Reform Commission of Thailand (LRCT), who is also in charge of the Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC), pointed out there will be no amnesty for corruption cases and that the junta should pass this bill to the parliament for approval.
Kanit stated his intention in a press conference Thursday to affirm the important basic rights and equality guarantees as stated in the old constitution and that he would like to add or edit important issues–particularly rules and regulations. Moreover, punishment will be imposed on violators, he added. Nonetheless, human rights, freedom and human equality should be respected, as written in the 2007 constitution.
Reform in political structure needs to follow the procedures laid out in the 2007 constitution. “Only important issues need to be addressed,” he reasserted, with the intention to formulate the country’s major policies, not the government’s or political parties’. However, such policies should be implemented, he added.
He explained further that reconciliation should be established on the ground of truth with consideration for the root cause of a particular problem as a move towards reconciliation. Whereas there should be clear and important conditions applied to the provision of amnesty, and it should not be bestowed upon those guilty of corruption charges, serious criminals, and upon whoever offends the monarch, which could disrupt national peace and order, Kanit asserted.
For the cabinet however, it was the view of the LRCT that the formation of the cabinet should remain unchanged in order to elect the prime minister in favor of the House of Representatives.
As for the judicial sector, the Supreme Court should judge on special legal matters, Kanit said. In addition, the Labour Court should be separated from the Court of Justice while the Military Court would be authorized to pass verdict on militaristic criminal cases only.
Hereby, the commission also stated that the martial law should be exercised only when it deems necessary and be proposed to parliament for approval.
The southern African nation of Zimbabwe has too many elephants to deal with, and has announced plans to begin exporting the overflow to other countries that may be better able to provide for the animals.
The first batch of exported elephants has already been discussed. China bought the largest number of elephants at 27. France is taking between 15 and 20 and the United Arab Emirates 15.
“We have 80,000 elephants against a carrying capacity of 42,000 and this is not sustainable in the long run,” Jerry Gotora, chairman of the Zimbabwe parks and wildlife authority, said of the sales, as reported by AFP. “The exports are carefully controlled by CITES. All those making noise about it are people who do not want Zimbabwe to benefit from its resources.”
Due to the costs associated with protecting elephants from poachers, the government of Zimbabwe relies partially on charities and private companies, but even this help has not prevented hundreds of animals from dying at the hands of poachers.
Zimbabwe is home to one of Africa’s biggest elephant populations since formerly-large Eastern and Central African populations have been decimated by poaching.
The illegal trade in ivory is international. Poachers move across borders with near impunity, associated with government and organized crime.
Ivory sales were banned in 1989 by the international body CITES, but since that time, according to the organization, the ban has been continually weakened, and is today considered to sit at roughly the pre-1989 level.
The report found that Zimbabwean poaching was tied to corruption, which is a different problem from the causes of poaching in less stable areas of Africa where there was not sufficient infrastructure to combat poaching.
Does the entire library of memories stored throughout our lifetime remain dormant within our minds, and can these memories be restored? New research has led UCLA neurobiologists to conclude that the storage mechanism for memories is actually independent of synaptic change–the mechanism that mediates the expression of memories. Rather, memories are stored in persistent epigenetic changes within the nuclei of neurons, and therefore memories are extremely stable over time and could be restored.
“The idea, long believed by most neuroscientists, that memories are stored in synapses may be incorrect. This implies that the apparent loss of a memory due to synaptic elimination might be reversible. Memories that appear to be lost forever may, in fact, be able to be fully restored,” Dr. David Glanzman, professor of integrative biology, physiology and neurobiology at UCLA and lead author of the study, told The Speaker.
So if the memories remain stored intact, why can’t we access them? The synapses that complete the circuit to the memories are destroyed or eliminated, Glanzman suspects. Glanzman qualified that the problem of memory storage was extremely complex and that he did not possess a complete answer, but he explained how his conception of memory formation was changed by the research.
“At present I believe that memories are formed in the brain by a combination of posttranslational changes—protein phosphorylation, protein dephosphorylation, etc.—gene transcription, protein synthesis and structural changes in neurons. Pretty much everyone in the field of learning and memory also believes this.
Confocal fluorescence micrographs illustrating the structural effects of 5X5HT training, reconsolidation blockade, and chelerythrine treatment
“Where I differ is that I now believe that the storage mechanism for long-term memories is independent from the mechanism that mediates the expression of the memories, which is synaptic change,” Glanzman continued. “The storage mechanism, I believe, is persistent epigenetic changes within the nuclei of neurons. Given this, I think that long-term memories are actually extremely stable; as long as the cell bodies of the neuronal circuit that contains the memory are intact, the memory will persist. The memory can appear to be disrupted, however, by destroying or eliminating the synapses among the neurons in the neuronal circuit that retains the memory. But the apparent elimination of a memory due to synaptic elimination can be reversed and the memory restored. The data in our eLife study support this idea, although they do not explain how this is actually accomplished.”
In their research, the UCLA team studied Aplysia, a marine snail–particularly the way Aplysia learns to fear a memorable source of harm.
The team trained the snail to defend itself by withdrawing to protect its gills from the harm of mild electric shocks. The snail retained the withdrawal response for several days, indicating long term memory of the stimulus.
The team found that the shock caused serotonin to be released in Aplysia’s central nervous system. New synaptic connections grow as a result of the serotonin, according to the team. The formation of memories can be disrupted by interfering with the synthesis of the proteins that contribute to the new synapses.
When a snail was trained on a task but its ability to immediately produce the proteins was inhibited, the animal would not remember the training 24 hours later, the researchers found, but if an animal was trained and protein synthesis was inhibited later–after 24 hours–the animal would retain the memory. Memories once formed last in long-term memory, the team found.
They also performed experiments with neurons in a Petri dish, and found the same results.
Then the team tested memory loss. Again in a Petri dish, they manipulated synaptic growth with a protein synthesis inhibitor and with serotonin. They found that when they stimulated synaptic growth some time after creating a memory, new synapses grew–not the old ones that would have been stimulated if prevailing theories of memory formation were accurate.
The researchers found that the nervous system appears to be able to regenerate lost synaptic connections–reconnecting memories with new synapses.
Does that meant that the entire library of a life’s memories could be dormant and could be restored? Possibly, but not in all cases, according to the study. Glanzman used an example to explain what his research had suggested.
“That is a fascinating question,” said Glanzman.”For example, what about the phenomenon of infantile amnesia, that is, the inability of adults to retrieve episodic memories before the age of 2–4 years? Can those episodic memories from our earliest years be restored? I frankly don’t know, but I suspect that they can be. It is possible that the explanation for infantile amnesia is similar to that of the phenomenon we examined in our study, reconsolidation blockade. There, we found that the apparent elimination of the memory was the result of the reversal of the synaptic growth and, perhaps, of some of the epigenetic changes, such as histone acetylation, that mediated the expression of the memory.
“Notice that some epigenetic changes are intrinsically more stable than others.
“What if infantile amnesia is also a consequence of synaptic loss and reversible epigenetic changes, but that the memory persists as persistent epigenetic changes? Then, just as we were able to restore memory in the snail following its disappearance due to reconsolidation blockade, we might be able to reverse infantile amnesia. Similarly, some memories lost in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease due to the synaptic destruction might be restorable. However, once the cell bodies of the neurons that make up the memory circuit die, I believe the memory is lost forever.”
Before the recent research, memory was believed to be stored in synapses. Glanzman explained the traditional belief and the remaining challenges to the new theory.
“First, until my work is confirmed by others, it is not fair to say that neuroscientists are mistaken in their belief that long-term memory is stored at synapses. The idea that memory is not stored at synapses is going to be met with a great deal of skepticism, as any radical new scientific idea should be.
“Having said that, the idea that memory is stored at synapses grew out of the pioneering work of the Spanish neuroanatomist Ramon y Cajal (who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906). Cajal was one of the first to propose that learning and memory involves the growth of new synaptic connections among neurons in the brain. This idea is now overwhelmingly accepted by neuroscientists. I certainly believe—and scientific research on Aplysia and other animals confirms—that when an animal learns, synapses in its brain (or nervous system, in the case of the snail) physically change; in some instances the result is synaptic growth, whereas in others it is synaptic retraction. (The specific pattern of synaptic change depends on the specific type of learning and the particular part of the brain that mediates the learning.)
“Given this, it is natural to think that new memories will be stored, at least in part, as persistent molecular or structural changes in the synapses that grew as the memories formed. It is this part of the synaptic hypothesis of long-term memory that I disagree with.”
The research is expected to hold new hope for sufferers of Alzheimers. Because in the early stages of the disease, synapses are destroyed–not neurons–those memories still exist and could be regained, Glanzman suspects.
How do cells control their size? What causes them to divide? Contrary to what many biologists have expected, evidence supporting an answer to one of the most fundamental and longstanding problems of biology has been accomplished by UC San Diego researchers. The study surprised even the researchers: a simple quantitative principle explains the phenomena without regard for either of the currently prevailing theories.
“Life is very robust and ‘plastic,’ much more than what biology textbooks tell us. Bacteria probably do not care when they should start replicating their genomes or dividing,” Dr. Suckjoon Jun, assistant professor of physics and molecular biology at the University of California, San Diego and one of the lead authors of the study, told The Speaker.
Dr. Suckjoon Jun
“Simple mathematical principles help us understand fundamental biology, just like in physics.”
How do cells control their size? What causes them to divide?
Biologists had previously posited two possible solutions: either a cell reaches a certain size, at which it divides into two smaller cells; or after a certain time has passed, the cell divides. The two theories have been known as “sizer” and “timer.”
The results surprised the researchers as well: “adder.”
“The results were completely unexpected,” Jun told us.
Rather than either sizer or timer paradigms, cells were found to add a constant volume each generation, regardless of their newborn size.
“This ‘adder’ principle quantitatively explains experimental data at both the population and single-cell levels, including the origin and the hierarchy of variability in the size-control mechanisms and how cells maintain size homeostasis,” the researchers concluded, whereas in past research based on “sizer” and “timer” theories led to difficult-to-verify assumptions or population-averaged data and varied interpretations.
Time and size, while variable in some organisms, do not even factor into the existence of “perfect adders” in the newly found and “extraordinarily simple” quantitative principle of cell-size control.
“It seems most bacteria we have studied so far, and more data is coming out of other labs, appear to be perfect adder,” said Jun. “Some higher organisms, such as yeast, do care about size more than bacteria do. For example, small-born yeast cells add more mass than large-born cells to reach division. That is, how much mass they add since birth is sensitive to how big the baby cell was. Nevertheless, the way they reach the target size, generation after generation, works exactly same as the perfect adders such as bacteria, which is quite nice and surprising.”
The growth of cells follow the growth law, the researchers found, and grow exponentially at a constant rate.
Jun explained the challenge that had stood in the way of understanding this aspect of cell division in the past: “Two biggest obstacles have been (one) dogmas that cells somehow must actively sense space or time to control cell size, and (two) technology that did not exist until recently, which now allows monitoring the growth and division patterns of tens of thousands of individual cells under tightly controlled environment.”
The research team developed a tiny device that isolates individual genetic materials.
The tool allowed the researchers to observe thousands of individual bacterial cells–Gram-negative E. coli and Gram-positive B. subtilis–over hundreds of generations. The researchers manipulated the conditions in which the cells lived. A wide range of tightly controlled steady-state growth conditions were experimented with.
According to the researchers, the new method allowed them to produce statistical samples about a thousand times better than had previosly been available.
“We looked at the growth patterns of the cells very very carefully, and realized that there is something really special about the way the cells control their size,” explained Jun.
“No one has been able to answer this question,” Jun said in their press release, noting that this was even the case for the E. coli bacterium, possibly the most extensively studied organism to date.
The research holds the promise of better informing the fight against cancer, since one of the most important problems in the fight is the process of runaway cell division.
A Tibetan monk self immolated near a police station Tuesday in Tawu, Kham, Tibet, calling for the return of the Dalai Lama, who is considered a criminal separatist in Tibet, and for Tibet to be free of Chinese rule.
Kalsang Yeshe, a man in his late 20s or early 30s, was a monk practicing at Nyitso monastery in the town of Tawu. Prior to the Chinese invasion of Tibet, Nyitso had been a large monastery of around 2,000 monks, but currently only 200 monks practice at the monastery.
The police station near which Kalsang self immolated was recently built near the monastery. Repression of monks and other Tibetans has been particularly severe near Nyitso in recent years, according to Save Tibet.
Reports of the self immolation come by way of exiled Tibetans in India, many of whom cannot return to Tibet for fear of charges under Chinese law for their support of Tibetan autonomy and the Dalai Lama. Communications from within Tibet are rare because such communications are illegal and are severely punished by Chinese authorities.
The self immolation was the third within one week. It is the 136th self immolation within Tibet, and the 142nd known self immolation for the cause of Tibetan freedom.
After the self immolation, armed police removed the body. Locals called for the body to be returned to them in order to preform traditional religious ceremonies.
Kalsang was described by one source who knew him at a monastery in exile as a very hard worker in the cause to protect and preserve Tibetan cultural language and identity.
The share of farmland tended by small farmers is shrinking. The land is changing hands. Although small farms are more productive than large farms and tend to grow food products–they produce 80 percent of the world’s food–they are being swallowed up by large corporate farms that grow high-profit crops for export markets. The land left to the largely food-producing small farms is currently only 24 percent of fertile land, and that number is declining sharply.
“Over the past decades, small farmers have been losing access to land at an incredible speed,” Henk Hobbelink, coordinator of GRAIN, told The Speaker. “If we don’t reverse this trend we will not only have more hungry farmers in the future, but the world as a whole will lose the capacity to feed itself.”
“What became very clear from our research is that increasingly fertile farmland is being taken over by huge industrial operations that produce commodities for the global market, not food for people,” Hobbelink told us. “Small farmers, who continue to produce most of the food in the world, are being pushed into an ever diminishing share of the world’s farmland.
“This trend has to be reversed if we want to be able to feed a growing population,” he said.
However, many governments and international organizations are offering grossly incorrect or misleading figures, according to GRAIN, such as those announced by representative’s of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) recent “State of Food and Agriculture“–which was dedicated to family farming.
At this year’s inauguration of the International Year of Family Farming, UN FAO Director General Jose Graziano da Silva stated that 70 percent of the world’s farmland was managed by families, echoing previous conclusions by the UN and other world organizations.
The percentage of farm land currently in the hands of small farms (an average of 2.2 hectares) is, according to GRAIN, actually less than 25 percent. Excluding China and India–where about half of all small farms are located–the ratio is less than one-fifth.
Similar findings were in evidence for every region of the world.
For example, in Belarus small farmers produced over 80 percent of fruits, vegetables, potatoes and vegetables with only 17 percent of the land. In Botswana, small farmers produced at least 90 percent of millet, maize and groundnuts with less than eight percent of the land.
“Because rural peoples’ access to land is under attack everywhere. From Honduras to Kenya and from Palestine to the Philippines, people are being dislodged from their farms and villages,” GRAIN found. “Those who resist are being jailed or killed. Widespread agrarian strikes in Colombia, protests by community leaders in Madagascar, nationwide marches by landless folk in India, occupations in Andalusia–the list of actions and struggles goes on and on.”
Eighty percent is also the figure given for the percentage of the world’s hungry people who live in rural areas. Many of these people are farmers or farmworkers.
Hobbelink explained this finding to us by saying that it was the result of small farmers simply not having enough land to produce food, and losing access to land at a rapid rate.
There were six general findings GRAIN found to be most compelling.
First, most of the world’s farms are shrinking. Second, the total of these farms account for less than 25 percent of the world’s farmland. Third, big farms are getting bigger, and small farms and farmers are losing to them. Fourth, despite this, small farms continue to be the world’s biggest food producers. Fifth, overall, small farms are more productive than big farms. Sixth, most small farmers are women.
Particularly surprising to the researchers was that land was becoming increasingly concentrated, despite extensive global agrarian reforms.
A “kind of reverse agrarian reform” is taking place in many countries, according to GRAIN. Most of this is happening through corporate land grabbing in Africa and foreign investment and massive farm expansion in Latin America and Asia.
Besides land concentration, among the forces causing small farms to collapse are population pressure and lack of access to land.
Even in India and Asia farms have been shrinking. In India, the size of the average farm is 50 percent of what it was in the 1970s, and in China farm sizes shrunk 25 percent between 1985 and 2000.
In Africa, where no official statistics for farmland concentration were available to GRAIN, researchers based their conclusions on research papers that indicated small farms were shrinking there as well.
Why small farms produce so much, and why they are losing to big corporate farms, was explained by GRAIN in their report: small farms tend to focus on food production, which is then bought from local markets and eaten. Large farms focus on return on investment, and tend to grow more export commodities such as animal feed, biofuels, and wood products. Thus, big farms, with maximized profits, are able to buy more land to produce high-profit commodities.
“Corporate farms a backed by big money, often from the finance industry, investment firms, etc.,” Hobbelink told us. “They are also able to access and influence political decisions at high level, and in this way often get handed over huge swaths of land at incredible low prices or for free. In the meanwhile, small farmers don’t have access to credit, and are up against agricultural policies that discriminate against them.”
Besides that, however, small farms tend to be more productive than large farms anyway, according to GRAIN. This phenomenon, which has been termed “the productivity paradox” because it seems contrary to what many people are told, is evinced in statistics. In nine EU countries, small farms have at least double the productivity of large farms, and the other countries show only slightly higher productivity for large farms. According to their findings, GRAIN calculated that if large farms in some Central American and African nations were as productive as small farms, national agricultural production would double.
In its findings, GRAIN also pointed out that big farms are less productive even with more resource consumption, the best land, most of the irrigation water, and better credit and technical assistance.
Much of the disparity is also due to differences in labor, GRAIN concluded. Big farms cut labor to maximize profits, and this labor is needed for better production.
“There are multiple factors at play,” Hobbelink told us. “In countries with big population growth, farmers without access to more land are forced to divide their land amongst their children. Expansion of urban areas into farmland, the same for mining, tourism, etc. But perhaps the most important factor is the global expansion of industrial plantation farming encroaching upon areas where small farmers and indigenous peoples live.
“The reason why small farmers still produce the majority of the world’s food is twofold. On one hand–as we show in our report–they are simply more efficient, more productive, than the large industrial plantations. And on the other hand they prioritize their land use towards producing food, while industrial plantations mostly produce commodities that no one can eat, or that need a lot of processing before they end up in our food: soybean, oilpalm, sugarcane, rapeseed, etc.”
“The bottom line is that land is becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of the rich and powerful, not that small farmers are doing well,” GRAIN concluded.
“Today, small farmers feed the world and we need them to continue to do so,” said Hobbelink. “If we don’t reverse the current trend of the corporate takeover of the worlds farmland to produce industrial commodities, they will not be able to do so and we will all lose out.”
Statistically, New York police shoot more often at blacks than at whites–by about 700 percent. But, statistically blacks are armed and shoot at police more often than whites–by over 700 percent, according to national statistics and the NYPD’s annual firearms discharge report. In light of the recent “Black Lives Matter” protests in New York following the decision not to indict white NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo for the death of unarmed black New Yorker Eric Garner, some experts have been dismayed by current popular misunderstandings and misrepresentations, as well as by the creation of what they call a “moral panic” about policing in the US.
“Nobody is in denial here that there is a racial problem in America–however, pining the problem on the police profession, in general, and police officers specifically will lead to an even greater divide and injustice and, furthermore, will weaken and eventually collapse our democracy,” Dr. Maria Maki Haberfeld, professor and chairperson at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told The Speaker.
Dr. Maria Maki Haberfeld
“I have written about this extensively, over the years, and I am beyond depressed with what is happening right now.
“[The] stats seems to be reflective of what is indeed the situation in the country and reflect, to a high degree, what we refer to as the ‘Moral Panic Theory,’ when the general public, fed by the media coverage of some exaggerated and/or misleading accounts, where the impression is that ‘Black lives do not matter’ responds to this mantra without posing for a moment to look at the numbers and realize that black lives indeed do matter to the police departments and police officers around the country, yet they appear not to matter to the black population itself.”
Haberfeld qualified that her comments related to the statistics and the numbers and that she made no judgments specifically about the two most recent cases of Mr. Brown and Mr. Garner. She was, she said, “responding to the moral panic rhetoric that claims that these two incidents are representative of policing in the US.”
“We have around 18,000 police departments in this country and close to 800,000 armed police officers, so statistically speaking you also have something here that doesn’t show a trend of “trigger happy” officers.”
Haberfeld noted that the context in which police shootings take place was also important when considering shooting deaths.
“If somebody threatened to kill their spouse, for example, and was killed by a police officer–then this killing is not something that can be understood from the perspective of sheer number, it was a justified killing, so, I would rather comment about how many unjustified killings were there and still, some will always feel that all the killings by the police are unjustified.”
New York is America’s largest police authority by far, policing over 9 million people with around 35,000 officers.
According to the NYPD’s Annual Firearms Discharge Report, the most recent of which is for 2012, blacks killed by police equates roughly with the incidence of armed blacks encountered by police and with the incidence of blacks shooting at police.
Most of the officers who discharged their firearms were white (53 percent), followed by hispanic (32 percent) and black (12 percent). The 53 percent for whites was roughly on par with their percentage in the department (52 percent). Blacks were slightly
underrepresented–16 percent of staff but only 12 percent of shootings. Hispanics were slightly overrepresented in 2012–26 percent of staff, but 32 percent of shootings.
NYPD records showed that of armed civilians encountered by police in 2012, 75 percent were black. 13 percent were hispanic and 9 percent were white.
Of civilians who fired at police, 79 percent were black, 16 percent were hispanic and 5 percent white.
This marked an increase in armed blacks from 2011 when 56 percent of adversarial conflicts involved am armed black civilian. Armed Hispanics accounted for 30 percent and whites 15 percent in 2011. Of those who actually shot and hit a police officer, 43 percent were black, 36 percent were Hispanic and 21 percent white.
The yearly report also found that blacks were the race most frequently shot at by police, with roughly similar figures.
Of those shot at by police, 69 percent were black, 17 percent Hispanic and 10 percent were white. Sixty-nine percent of those killed by police were black, while Hispanics and whites each made up 12.5 percent of the picture. The report found that of approximately 35,000 uniformed officers employed by the NYPD, who responded to approximately five million calls–250,000 of which involved weapons, 60 officers (or 0.17 percent) intentionally fired their weapon at a civilian. Meanwhile, officers made 26,091 weapons arrests that included 6,000 gun arrests. Over 26,000 of the 26,091 weapons arrests were completed without an officer firing his or her weapon.
“Again statistically speaking this is not a significant number,” commented Haberfeld, “given the fact that many of these shootings were justified because the people who were shot were armed and dangerous.”
Blacks are also more frequently encountered by police answering calls with regards to violent crime. Nationwide, blacks are over 700 percent as likely to commit violent crimes than whites, and when they do, they are almost three times more likely than non-Blacks to use a gun and over twice as likely to use a knife. The victims of violent crimes committed by blacks are usually white (45 percent), which is significantly higher than the victims of violent crimes committed by whites. Only three percent of criminal violence by whites is directed at blacks. In other words, blacks are around 39 times as likely to commit a violent crime against a white person than vice versa.
The trend is a little different when murder is at issue, however. Unlike violent crime in general, homicides are most frequently committed by and against a person of the same race, with black on white being only a few percent more common than white on black homicide.
Recently, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani commented on the recent police shooting deaths in New York and referenced the statistic that, “Ninety-three percent of blacks in America are killed by other blacks. We’re talking about the exception here.”
From 1980 to 2008, 94 percent of black homicide victims were killed by blacks, and 84 percent of white victims were killed by whites.
Statistically. the main killer of blacks when it comes to violent deaths is other blacks. US-wide, around 8,000 blacks were killed every year between 1976 and 2011, and 94 percent of those were killed by other blacks. Of those 8,000 around 2.8 percent were killed by police.
“The overwhelming majority of black victims are killed by black perpetrators and NOT the police,” noted Haberfeld.
In St Louis, which has experienced prolonged demonstrations and riot over the past months in the wake of the shooting death of teenager Michael Brown, just under two percent of the 1,265 murder victims between 2003 and 2012 were attributed to police, while 90 percent of the deaths–1,138 killings–were attributed to black civilians.
Blacks, however, have been found to perceive that police are targeting them based on race. A Pew study last year found that 70 percent of blacks feel that police treat whites better. Thirty-seven percent of whites agreed.
The sentiment that police target blacks has been given voice recently by US President Barack Obama and other politicians and public figures. This month, Obama said that blacks’ distrust of police was “rooted in realities” and that the black reaction to the verdict was “an understandable reaction.” The sheer numbers of black deaths was highlighted by liberal black professor and author Marc Lamont Hill in a recent debate, who stated, “Every 28 hours. Every 28 hours, Larry. Larry, every 28 hours. According to the MXGM study, a black person is killed by law enforcement, vigilantes or security…”
Haberfeld stated that she did not feel that numbers would provide the whole picture, however.
“In general, I believe that police work cannot be simply understood by the analysis of sheer numbers.”
“As to what I think the public needs to understand about policing? Well, first and foremost the fact that police organizations are political entities that operate based on what the local, state or federal politicians mandate them to do. I can assure you that no police chief or commissioner comes up with his/her own operational priorities, without having them approved or, to begin with, designed by the politicians–a Mayor for the local, municipal forces, Governor for the State Police and the President for the Federal law enforcement agencies.
“So, if certain groups within the public feel that there is something profoundly wrong with the way police agencies operate then they should direct their anger at the politicians and demand their resignation or change of whatever it is they feel that is wrong, be it recruitment, selection, training, supervision and discipline of police officers.”
A 19-year-old Tibetan woman has become the 135th Tibetan to self immolate in protest of Chinese rule and policies. The woman, known as Tseypey, self immolated and chanted prayers as she burned.
She died on the scene, reportedly, and her body was removed by police. Internet access in the area has been restricted and phone lines blocked, reportedly.
Tseypey self immolated in the center of a town in Ngaba, Amdo, Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Monday, as reported by Save Tibet.
The woman hailed from Meruma township. She was the fourth of six children, and was described as “well-behaved, honest and gentle” by monks living in exile in Dharamsala, India.
She had worked as a herder with her family, who have since been taken away by police. It is not known whether the parents are currently detained, but Tibetans have been charged as accessories under Chinese law in the past when relatives and associates have self immolated.
Tseypey was the 135th Tibetan to self immolate within the country in protest of repressive and abusive Chinese policies. She is the third to self immolate this month.
[Video warning. This video is graphic and depicts the remains of a burned human body.]
Language facilitates the global flow of ideas, and elite languages in global communications are those that are both literate and online, according to new research that has mapped information flows across languages. Certain languages have been found to be much more powerful than others, because they are more and better connected within the communications networks of the world, while others are relatively weaker. Some smaller languages are stronger than languages spoken by much larger groups of people however, due to political and other reasons.
“The global influence of a language is determined by its connections to other languages, not by its number of speakers or their economic power, as these connections make possible the global transfer of ideas,” MIT’s Shahar Ronen, first author of the study, told The Speaker.
Shahar Ronen
Ronen explained how some language speakers–those who speak central languages–have a disproportionate amount of power and responsibility because their communications are “tacitly shaping the way in which distant cultures see each other,” while other language groups are handicapping themselves with policies that restrict or disconnect people from global communications networks (GLNs).
“Think about it this way: if the English-speaking world did not care about the 2014 events in Ukraine, the rest of the world would have a very hard time learning about it as well.”
“A government that disconnects its people from the internet–e.g., as China does with its Great Firewall–hamstrings its ability to gain global influence,” said Ronen. “Governments concerned with boosting international soft power should invest in translating more documents and encourage more people to tweet in their national language. Contemporary China and Russia produce very few international thought leaders, and leave little legacy for future generations.”
The study generated maps of connections between communications media–including 30 years worth of book translations in 150 countries, 550 million Tweets in 73 languages, and multiple language editions of Wikipedia pages.
“We mapped three global language networks from three sources: Twitter, Wikipedia and book translations,” Ronen explained. “These sources are by no means representative of the world’s population; rather, they represent the elites that generate and propagate ideas around the world.”
The team found that the more central a given language was to the network, the more famous its speakers were predicted to be–more so than other factors such as population and wealth.
Centrality was based on both strength and number of connections, the team found. The three GLNs identified by the team centered on English as a global hub. That hub is connected to secondary hubs–Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Chinese and Russian.
“For example, it is easy for an idea conceived by a Spaniard to reach an Englishman through bilingual speakers of English and Spanish,” said Ronen. “An idea conceived by a Vietnamese speaker, however, might only reach a Mapudungun speaker in south-central Chile through a circuitous path that connects bilingual speakers of Vietnamese and English, English and Spanish, and Spanish and Mapudungun.”
Many of the world’s people are to a degree left out of the global conversation–those who do not communicate in an elite language–and these people face profound limitations. This extends to both languages that are not spoken by relatively large amounts of people and languages are spoken by significant populations but that are limited for other reasons, Ronen said.
“The truly disenfranchised, at least as global communication is concerned, are those whose language don’t even show up on our network. That said, speakers of languages such as Chinese or Arabic, both a with low centrality given their number of speakers, are disadvantaged as well, as they are less likely to be exposed to the latest and greatest ideas in their fields and well not be able to communicate theirs globally. Consider a researcher who speaks only Chinese who will not be exposed to work by her peers abroad, or a CEO who speaks only Arabic.”
Ronen highlighted the importance of learning more than one language–particularly top elite languages.
“Learning a new language opens up a new part of the world for the learner and broadens his/her perspective. Achieving reasonable fluency in English is one of the best investments an individual in any country and any occupation can make. If you already speak English, learning another language is still valuable. If you have a specific goal such as doing business in a certain country, learning that country’s language will be highly beneficial.
“If you’re looking for a language that can open new opportunities for you in general, our study can inform you which languages to consider–Spanish or French are great options. From a global point of view, more multilinguals mean more and stronger connections between languages, which in turn facilitate the global flow of ideas.
Memory was considered the greatest faculty of mind before the invention of printing. Greek philosophers, Roman lawyers and Medieval European priests practiced the art by storing memories within mentally constructed architecture and objects. Recently, a study has found that rooms may be just how memory is stored.
“Each place–or room in your house–is represented by a unique map or memory and because we have so many different maps we can remember many similar places without mixing then up,” Dr. Charlotte Alme, PhD student Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience/Centre for Neural Computation Medical Technical Research Centre at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and lead researcher on the study, told The Speaker.
Dr. Charlotte Alme
“[W]e just published a paper where we see that rats–and most likely humans–have a map for each individual place, and this is why the method of loci works.”
“Episodic memory is characterized by an apparently astronomical storage capacity,” the reserachers framed their study, commenting on the thousands of new experiences that are encoded in the mind every day. These memories are thought to be stored on neural network properties of the hippocampus.
Alme provided some basic context for understanding the work.
“Memories are thought to be stored in physical networks of neurons that are connected to each other. Memories consist of many sensory pieces of information that are associated–when our brain encodes a personal experience, something in common is: what happened where and when.
“The connections between the neurons involved in encoding an experience are modified and strengthened in order to make a memory for that event. This means that when we years later smell an odor for example, we can remember the whole episode just by getting a cue–the odor–presented.
“We know now that the hippocampus is involved in formation of episodic–autobiographical–and spatial memories, in both humans and rats. The hippocampus is an evolutionarily very old part of the brain, conserved across mammals. Accordingly, we can investigate the spatial component of memory in rats and at the same time figure out how our memory system works. We have known for a long time that there are place specific cells in the hippocampus.
Experimental setup and procedure and photographs of all 11 rooms
“The place cells that are active in restricted areas of an environment are also reactivated if a rat–or a human–experiences a previously known location–the place cell fires at the exact same location meaning that a memory for that particular place is formed. When a rat is placed in a different room, the place cell changes its firing location and that tells us that the rat knows it is in a different room.”
The current research, Alme said, was a matter of conducting a test to validate one of two possible theories.
“We wondered, what happens if we introduce many very similar rooms to a rat while we look at the firing response of the place cells. Will we see a generalization over all–or some–of the environments so that many place cells fire at the same location across all the rooms? Alternatively, the rat will create unique maps for each location and thus be able to separate between many and very similar experiences. Indeed, we observed the latter scenario because we can combine the 11 rooms in 55 ways to compare the rooms with each other, and when none of the room representations or memories overlap, this tells us that we have an enormously large storage capacity for memories in the brain.
In the research, the team found a complete lack of any overlap between spacial maps despite exposing the animals to a range of rooms with similar sensory features, which means that CA3 place cells may well form unique spacial representations for every single environment.
Method of Loci figure and place cell maps that we actually recorded from the rats to show that each room is represented by its own map
“We recorded from on average 50 neurons in each rat and the rat hippocampus consist of hundreds of thousands of cells, in other words we can create and store very many memories throughout our lifetime.”
The team did not in their research find evidence to make detailed guesses about the bounds of memory capacity in CA3.
The work has important implications for the traditionally practiced arts of memory. Throughout history, people accross cultures have developed and trained themselves in nmemonic arts that are based on mentally constructing physical architecture and objects. For example, Romans would search through a mental apartment until they found a piece of legislation, and Medeival monks would memorize sermons by organizing important aspects of those sermons as mental objects stored appropriately in mental architecture.
“The findings of our paper also help to explain how the ancient Method of Loci works. Because we are extremely good at remembering places and because we are very visual creatures, this combination can be utilized when you want to remember something.
Alme explained how this can work.
“Associate what you want to remember to a place that you know well, e.g. your own house. Your own house consists of several rooms, or loci. Create a mental path through your house and in each room you connect or associate what you want to remember with something you place in that room. When you have made all the associations, you can recall or remember everything by taking a mental walk through your house again.
“For example as this cartoon shows: in the kitchen there are chilies flying in the air, the country to remember is Chile. Next to the kitchen, in the dining room your friend Tina is very angry–Argentina. In the living room there is a seal playing bras, Brazil. Up the staircase there is a Globus with a red band around equator–Ecuador. In the attic Columbus is lying on a bed watching TV–Columbia.
“You create your own associations, the stranger the associations the easier they are to remember!”
The research has pushed forward our understanding of how memories are stored in place cells in the hippocampal area CA3. It had not been known whether the cells maintain independence when the number of memorized environments is increased.
The report, “Place cells in the hippocampus: Eleven maps for eleven rooms,” was completed by Charlotte B. Alme, Chenglin Miao, Karel Jezek, Alessandro Treves, Edvard I. Moser, and May-Britt Moser, a join-team of researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s (NTNU) Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and Centre for Neural Computation along with colleagues from the Czech Republic and Italy, and was published on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) website.
Images: the work of the researchers, Nature Reviews, the Palace Project
NYPD records showed that of armed civilians encountered by police in 2012, 75 percent were black. 13 percent were hispanic and 9 percent were white.
Of civilians who fired at police, 79 percent were black, 16 percent were hispanic and 5 percent white.
The report found that of approximately 35,000 uniformed officers employed by the NYPD, who responded to approximately five million calls–250,000 of which involved weapons, 60 officers (or 0.17 percent) intentionally fired their weapon at a civilian. Meanwhile, officers made 26,091 weapons arrests that included 6,000 gun arrests. Over 26,000 of the 26,091 weapons arrests were completed without an officer firing his or her weapon.
“You create your own associations, the stranger the associations the easier they are to remember!”
