Author Archive for audreyl

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Seventh International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Published on July 19, 2011 in Conference and Newsletter. 0 Comments Tags: , .

25-28 June 2012
Universidad Abat Oliba CEU, Barcelona, Spain
www.SocialSciencesConference.com

Call for Papers

If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation
begins with submission of a paper proposal. For information on proposals,
presentation types, and other options, see:
http://thesocialsciences.com/conference-2012/call-for-papers/

To submit a proposal see:
http://thesocialsciences.com/conference-2012/call-for-papers/

Please note that if your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.

Registration

Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of
the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register
at any time. For registration options or to register for the 2011
Social Sciences Conference, see:
http://thesocialsciences.com/conference-2012/register/.

Themes

The Dawn of Politics

Published on July 19, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Adam Kirsch, City Journal

It’s possible that Francis Fukuyama does not take unmixed pleasure in his fame as the author of The End of History and the Last Man. Ever since Fukuyama published that book in 1992—indeed, ever since he published the article on which it was based in The National Interest in 1989—he has been shadowed by the phrase “the end of history.” Since then, he has written five more books on big, complex subjects, ranging from the decline of trust in American society to the future of genetic engineering, and he has participated in countless policy debates. Yet on the cover of his new book, The Origins of Political Order, he once again is identified as “the author of The End of History and the Last Man.”

Will this book—a 500-page survey of the growth of states “from prehuman times to the French Revolution,” with a promised second volume taking the story up to the present—finally be the one to emancipate Fukuyama from the end of history? The question is justified not simply by the size, scope, and ambition of the project but, above all, by its emphasis on origins. If the end of the Cold War represented the end of history, Fukuyama’s new book starts over at the beginning, with the emergence of the first states out of kin-based tribes more than 4,000 years ago. In the introduction, Fukuyama explains that his purpose in The Origins of Political Order is to offer a new theory of political development, to supersede the one that his mentor Samuel Huntington advanced in his 1968 study Political Order in Changing Societies.

To Read More…

Quasirandom Ramblings

Published on July 18, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Brian Hays, American Scientist

In the early 1990s Spassimir Paskov, then a graduate student at Columbia University, began analyzing an exotic financial instrument called a collateralized mortgage obligation, or CMO, issued by the investment bank Goldman Sachs. The aim was to estimate the current value of the CMO, based on the potential future cash flow from thousands of 30-year mortgages. This task wasn’t just a matter of applying the standard formula for compound interest. Many home mortgages are paid off early when the home is sold or refinanced; some loans go into default; interest rates rise and fall. Thus the present value of a 30-year CMO depends on 360 uncertain and interdependent monthly cash flows. The task amounts to evaluating an integral in 360-dimensional space.

There was no hope of finding an exact solution. Paskov and his adviser, Joseph Traub, decided to try a somewhat obscure approximation technique called the quasi–Monte Carlo method. An ordinary Monte Carlo evaluation takes random samples from the set of all possible solutions. The quasi variant does a different kind of sampling—not quite random but not quite regular either. Paskov and Traub found that some of their quasi–Monte Carlo programs worked far better and faster than the traditional technique. Their discovery would allow a banker or investor to assess the value of a CMO with just a few minutes of computation, instead of several hours.

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Why We Care

Published on June 22, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Kelly Amis, 3 Quarks Daily

Michelle Alexander’s New York Times op-ed “In Prison Reform, Money Trumps Civil Rights” is a powerful and depressing assessment of why more Americans are suddenly waking up to our nation’s status as the world’s most prolific jailor (while the U.S. represents just 5% of the world’s population, we account for 25% of the incarcerated).

Alexander explains that while decades of social justice advocacy made scant progress towards eliminating the policies that land inordinate numbers of especially black and Hispanic U.S. citizens behind bars, today’s economic crisis is rousing unprecedented calls for prison reform. In other words, suddenly the price tag for maintaining a prison system bursting-at-the-seams with minority inmates is not worth the price tag.

The resulting interest convergence (in which formerly “tough on crime” policymakers are joining forces with social rights activists) may result in positive policy change, but I can’t help wondering if change will last if it’s not grounded in enlightened agreement about what is fair and just…and even “American”?

To Read More…

Shame and Honor Increase cooperation

Published on June 6, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From Physorg.com

Honour and shame work equally well in encouraging social cooperation, according to a new study by researchers at the University of British Columbia and the Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology.Published today in Biology Letters, the study reported on the results of a series of experiments with 180 first-year UBC students (see below for experiment details.)

The research team shows that the threat of shame and promise of honour each increased cooperation by as much as 50 per cent, providing insights into potential future strategies for tackling global issues such as overfishing and climate change.

“Shame and honour might evoke images of The Scarlet Letter or The Three Musketeers, but as tactics to drive social cooperation, they are increasingly important in the digital age of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, where acts of shame and honour are being shared and propagated with unprecedented speed,” says lead author Jennifer Jacquet, a postdoctoral fellow in UBC’s Fisheries Centre and the Dept. of Mathematics.

Jacquet says shame and honour are increasingly used to affect policy and cultural change. For example, to deter tax evasion, many U.S. states recently implementing policies to post names of tax delinquents online. Large-scale conservation programs use honour to encourage corporate and public involvement, such as labels that signal to consumers that products are sustainable, including Vancouver’s Ocean Wise seafood program. The new study is part of a series to establish a scientific foundation that informs future strategies to encourage cooperation on global issues.

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2011 Social Sciences Conference Culinary Tour Now Available

Published on May 23, 2011 in Headline. 0 Comments

French Quarter Culinary History and Tasting Tour

This walking and tasting tour of the French Quarter will immerse you in the history of New Orleans and how its unique cuisine evolved. We tour select historic restaurants and discuss their culinary contributions – including the two oldest (Antoine’s and Tujague’s, established in 1840 and 1856, respectively).

Visitors will learn to appreciate the differences between Creole and Cajun cuisine, and will hear of the varied ethnic influences that contribute to New Orleans cuisine.

The samples listed are a general guide, but are subject to change from tour to tour, but typically include:

  • Seafood Gumbo
  • Red Beans & Rice
  • Beef Brisket with Creole Sauce
  • Pralines
  • Muffulettas
  • Gelato
  • Turtle Soup
  • Shrimp Remoulade

In addition to the tastings, the tour also passes such notable landmarks as St. Louis Cathedral and Jackson Square in the historic French Quarter, home to beautiful architecture and fascinating history.

Come join us as we walk, talk and taste our way through the rich culinary history of New Orleans.

To Reserve Your Tickets Please Visit the Social Sciences Conference Web-Site

Is Growth Incomplete without Social Progress?

Published on May 23, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Ejaz Ghani, Project Syndicate

The geography of poverty and social deprivation has changed dramatically over the last two decades. More than 70% of the world’s poor now live in middle-income countries. This pattern, likely to continue into the next decade, raises important questions. Have poverty reduction and human development kept up with income growth? Is growth incomplete without social progress and gender-inclusiveness?

Consider South Asia, where the poverty rate fell from 60% in 1981 to 40% in 2005 – not fast enough, given population growth, to reduce the total number of poor people. In fact, the number of poor people (defined as those living on less than $1.25 per capita per day at 2005 purchasing power parity) in South Asia increased from 549 million in 1981 to 595 million in 2005, and from 420 million to 455 million in India, where almost three-quarters of the region’s poor reside.

In other words, while South Asia’s economies have not underperformed on poverty reduction, merely matching global trends may not be enough for the region with the world’s largest concentration of poor people.

India has experienced slower income growth than has China, which partly explains its higher poverty rate. But a country’s poverty rate also depends on the degree of income inequality – a reduction in which makes growth more pro-poor – and inequality in China has, in fact, increased more rapidly than in India. So a rising tide really can lift all boats, with growth trumping inequality when it comes to poverty reduction.

Moreover, income growth has contributed to improved education. Adult literacy rates in South Asia match the global norm. But education outcomes lag behind when it comes to secondary and tertiary education, which are becoming increasingly necessary to thrive in today’s world.

To Read More…

Do You Believe In Free Will? Maybe You Should, Even If You Don’t

Published on May 20, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Maria Konnikov,  big think

Is free will real, or is just one of our happy illusions? As it turns out, the answer might not matter as much as our belief in the answer does. A recent study showed that, when people’s belief in free will was experimentally reduced, pre-conscious motor preparation, or that activity that precedes action, in the brain was delayed by more than one second relative to those who believed in free will – an eternity in brain time.

Finding free will in the brain

For over fifty years, almost all the way up to his death in 2007, Benjamin Libet studied the neural correlates of consciousness. While the philosophical conclusions that have been drawn from his work remain contentious—and some would say highly problematic—he did make some fascinating discoveries about the human brain that have remained central to the study of conscious awareness.

First, he observed the existence of something called the readiness potential, or RP, in the brain, up to 550ms prior to the initiation of action. In other words, our brains are prepared to act over half a second before we actually act. So far, not so terribly surprising – as long as we are aware of planning an action. Of course, our brain needs time to prepare. That makes a whole lot of sense.

However, the more striking finding was that this RP preceded conscious awareness of the intention to act: Libet’s subjects became aware of their action intention 350-400ms after the RP had started. Or, to put it differently, our brains seem to initiate an action before we are even aware of wanting to make it.

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Cry Havoc! And Let Slip the Maths of War

Published on May 16, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From The Economist

In 1948 Lewis Fry Richardson, a British scientist, published what was probably the first rigorous analysis of the statistics of war. Richardson had spent seven years gathering data on the wars waged in the century or so prior to his study. There were almost 300 of them. The list runs from conflicts that claimed a thousand or so lives to the devastation of the two world wars. But when he plotted his results, he found that these diverse events fell into a regular pattern. It was as if the chaos of war seemed to comply with some hitherto unknown law of nature.

At first glance the pattern seems obvious. Richardson found that wars with low death tolls far outnumber high-fatality conflicts. But that obvious observation conceals a precise mathematical description: the link between the severity and frequency of conflicts follows a smooth curve, known as a power law. One consequence is that extreme events such as the world wars do not appear to be anomalies. They are simply what should be expected to occur occasionally, given the frequency with which conflicts take place.

The results have fascinated mathematicians and military strategists ever since. They have also been replicated many times. But they have not had much impact on the conduct of actual wars. As a result, there is a certain “so what” quality to Richardson’s results. It is one thing to show that a pattern exists, another to do something useful with it.

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2011: What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody’s Cognitive Toolkit?

Published on May 16, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Daniel Kahneman, Edge

“Nothing In Life Is As Important As You Think It Is, While You Are Thinking About It”

Education is an important determinant of income — one of the most important — but it is less important than most people think. If everyone had the same education, the inequality of income would be reduced by less than 10%. When you focus on education you neglect the myriad other factors that determine income. The differences of income among people who have the same education are huge.

Income is an important determinant of people’s satisfaction with their lives, but it is far less important than most people think. If everyone had the same income, the differences among people in life satisfaction would be reduced by less than 5%.

Income is even less important as a determinant of emotional happiness. Winning the lottery is a happy event, but the elation does not last. On average, individuals with high income are in a better mood than people with lower income, but the difference is about 1/3 as large as most people expect. When you think of rich and poor people, your thoughts are inevitably focused on circumstances in which their income is important. But happiness depends on other factors more than it depends on income.

Paraplegics are often unhappy, but they are not unhappy all the time because they spend most of the time experiencing and thinking about other things than their disability. When we think of what it is like to be a paraplegic, or blind, or a lottery winner, or a resident of California we focus on the distinctive aspects of each of these conditions. The mismatch in the allocation of attention between thinking about a life condition and actually living it is the cause of the focusing illusion.

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