Mind You Research Articles

Geek Player, Love Slayer

GEEK PLAYER, LOVE SLAYER/Steve Almond COMPUTER BOY SWAGGERS over to my cube to help me open this one knucklehead e-mail Phoenix sent me, and within about two seconds, Tm ready to whip offhis khakis and blow him right there. He's leaning over my keyboard with his lousy beautiful sideburns and his Right Guard wafting all over the place, and underneath that this kind of wounded musk that makes my nipples go stiff, and his teeth, which I could fucking eat they look so healthy. I have, mind you, already offered him my seat, but he can't allow that. No-no-no. Don't you move your pretty little self, he tells me, which is when neighbor Brisby starts snarking away, snickety-snark, and I think, for chrissakes, why does this obnoxious creature, this dopey slab of masculine grace, whose name is (try not to laugh) Lance, and whom I have taken to calling Lancelot, Sir Lance-me-a-lot, why does this totally throat-lickable hotty have to be such a shitbrain? So I just sit there smelling him, watching his unreasonably defined triceps pulse and unpulse, noticing the blond hairs on his earlobe, like tiny spears of wheat, and the way his firm little rump tenses up when he gets a system error. The worst part of it is that he keeps going on about how I must be doing something to my machine, how my keystrokes must be pretty vigorous—keystrokes, get it?—and even though I'm kind of impressed by his use of the word "vigorous," there's no way I can flirt back without losing total office cred with Brisby, who's outright laughing at this point. It's not like I have time for this crap anyway; I'm on deadline. Though the worst part is my leched-out imagination, wherein Lancelot is bending me like a bandsaw and this can'tbe happening, this cannot be happening. I cannotbe lusting after the Computer Guy while on deadline. That is too lame for even me. Now Brisby's on the phone with his fiancée, for the twelfth time this hour, and Lancey tells me he's going to have to reboot and suddenly down he goes, under my desk, and I forget to scoot my chair back because I'm too busy staring at his back and counting the individual muscle groups, sort of flow-charting them. Then something rubs against my knee—his wrist I guess—but I've got these jeans on because it's forty fucking degrees in here; the hotter it gets outside, the colder they keep the office. Then, just to balance himself I suppose, Lancey sets his hand on the bridge of my foot and starts in with these little appraising squeezes, like he's fitting me for a pair ofpumps, and I want to tell him, 126 · The Missouri Review Hey, bright boy, there's a whole calf and thigh where that came from! But before I can say anything, he turns and informs me that I'vegot real soul, and I want to barf and run my tongue along the pink canals behind his ears all at once. I can hear Brisby mumbling his I-love-yous and hanging up. Then my screen goes blank, and Lancey rolls back on his haunches just enough to send a ripple under his shirt, and I imagine looping my arms around him, taking the meat of his shoulders Ui my palms, and his front teeth—his goddamn perfect front teeth—biting my clavicle. I know Brisby's going to slag me for the rest of eternity, until death do us part, but it's too late; I'm halfway off my chair in a cartine posture and my knees are trembling. Ahem. You're aU set, Lance tells me. Just turn it on. He's back to hovering over me. You know how to turn it on, don't you? It's not the turning on I'm worried about, I say. It's keeping the hard drive going. Immediately I regret having reduced myself to lurid banter with Computer Boy, who gives me his...

Y2K or Bust

Y2K or Bust

Who killed Gopher? An extensible murder mystery

Everyone knew there had to be an easier way to use the Internet than the Unix shell experience, mind you, but original editions of the Gopher and HyperText Transfer Protocols were painfully trivial hacks that did nothing FTP didn't already handle. So here begins our mysterious tale: why either protocol ever rose to prominence in the first place; and how the fratricidal drama eventually played out. Understanding how HTTP killed Gopher may lead us to the forces that may, in turn, topple HTTP.

Arbeit Macht Frei

Yes I will tell you what I know Not just what I saw What I saw through Remember I am an ignorant man For six years I learned nothing Well, not nothing Reading was the Jewish crime Against the state and Thinking was Against the order Of the universe Once they beat a man He could have been young You could no longer tell The young from the old When they found him reading In French, mind you They beat this man to death One of the guards A stately Viennese Humming waltzes Made a little Joke About the Jewish trinity ? Freud the father Marx the son And Einstein The holy ghost He promised us:

Racing Simulacra?

Racing Simulacra?

Photography in Israel (review)

170 SHOFAR Fall 1998 Vol. 17, No. I Photography in Israel, guest-edited by Yeshayahu Nir. Special issue of History of Photography, Vol. 19, No.3 (pp. 185-276). London: Taylor & Francis, Autumn 1995.1 This thematic issue of a journal edited at Linacre College in Oxford combines a select historical portfolio of Israeli photography with an array of essays approaching the subject from various perspectives. Nir is a professor of visual communication at the Hebrew University. Nir's own opening essay is concerned with Holy Land photographic images from the nineteenth century. In one episode, villagers shown their picture failed to recognize themselves in it, as "a photograph seems to have connoted a ruler or other notable figure, the most likely subjects of any photographs they may have seen" (p. 185), "overshadow[ing] the perception ofthe referential link between a photograph and its subject." Nir contextualizes such patterns of interaction within Western "paternalist and appropriating relationship towards the Orient" (p. 193). Orna and Micha Bar-Am's paper, "The Illustrator E. M. Lilien as Photographer" in the Holy Land, reveals a littleknown side of an artist whose etchings and Jugendstil Biblical illustrations feature prominently in the history of modern Jewish art. Jugendstil and Bible is invariably Lilien. "Lilien's most famous photograph is generally not associated with his name or with his biblical project. It is the image of Zionist leader Theodor Herzlleaning on the balcony of the Drei Konige Hotel in Basel, Switzerland, and gazing over the Rhine" (p. 198). (As an aside: such is the instant recognition this image prompts, that when, recently, the Shas party openly adopted Zionism, a cartoon in the Jerusalem Post glossed the event by placing on the head ofthe leaning Herzl a Charedi wide-brimmed hat. It was a glaring evocation of that photograph, but did you know it was taken by Lilien?) In "Zionist Photography, 1910-41: Constructing a Landscape," Ruth Oren deals with pictures that were mainly published by the Jewish National Fund and the Keren Hayesod. Photography, indeed, is an important tool for overt propaganda, as well as a medium for subtle conceptualizations which assert an idea rhetorically, whether the photographer is aware or not (cf. e.g. the interesting but, in treating his data, unquestionably anti-Israeli essay by Derek Gregory, "Imaginative Geographies," in Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 19, No. 4[1995]: 447-485). The next essay is by Nir's colleague at the Hebrew University, Prof. Erik Cohen: "The Representation ofArabs and Jews on Postcards in Israel." An otherwise interesting subject is unfortunately spoilt by ebullient theory and an ideological ax to grind, by vociferously demonizing anti-Israeli proclamations, and by an academically inexcusable inattention to his data. Counterexamples probably could be found, but the argument is generally weak. He fails to consider, further to the Jewish vs. Arab dichotomy in life IDistributed by Dawson (UK) Ltd., Cannon House, Folkestone, Kent CTl9 5EE, UK. Price as a back issue: £25 or $39.50, plus postage (total: $47.50). Journal ISSN: 0308-7298. Book Reviews .........:;~ 171 and imagery, such intra-Jewish divisions that also feature prominently in national or semi-official or dominant rhetoric (are all ethnic postcards only on Arabs?). Visually, he fmds a pattern, in Israeli postcards, ofhappy sovereign Jews vs. dignified dominated Arabs. Is it really all grins and "Hava Nagilah" in cards depicting the Jewish camp? Is it only Charedi or Oriental Jews who are advertising toothpaste in all postcards? It boils down to his thrust to denounce, in the facial expressions he detects in postcards, the evidence of (and at a time the plot to mask) "a most telling metonymy of the political as well as symbolic domination of Jews over Arabs in contemporary Israel" (p. 210). The relatively quite bland phrase (and mind you: possibly a true insight) quoted here, in its original context is related to a postcard that shows falafel balls in half a pitta, with a small Israeli flag stuck in a ball on the left. Not that the essay is' overly original. It takes a theory on ideologically biased American images ofNative Americans and tries to apply it to the Zionist villain (with all this author's...

Long live the deans!

Any system that tries to draw a line between contributors who are important, substantial, significant, or whatever (authors) and those who are not (people to be acknowledged) is bound to produce not only acrimony but also dissent and confusion. How can we compare the apple of A suggesting the research but doing nothing more, with the orange of B producing the protocol and then moving on, the banana of C collecting and analysing the data, and the mango of D writing up the study? We cannot, but we probably can agree who did what. We might even make E, who runs the institution, hired B, C, and D, and invited A to be visiting professor to guarantee the research. Indeed, I, as an editor and a reader, don't mind you include E as contributor so long as you don't try to deceive me into thinking that he was actively involved in the research. But, squeal those who are unhappy with what seems to be a simple, workable, and transparent system, if we have no authors, how can we decide who will receive academic credit-tenure, promotion, a chair, a fellowship, a Nobel prize, whatever? I don't see the problem. First, the bodies who dole out academic credit need to consider much more than publications; for example, teaching and organisational ability, and leadership skills. Second, when they do consider publications they will want to be clear exactly what the candidates did. If they want a head of department, they might be happy to appoint somebody who has been named in 100 papers in the previous year but whose contribution has been restricted to hiring the researchers and creating a space for them. You would not, however, want to give such a person a Nobel prize. Likewise, you would not want a head of department whose contribution to 20 papers has been restricted to collecting and analysing the data, but such a person might make an excellent research manager. Academic credit will be allocated to individuals much more fairly and meaningfully it is linked not simply to authorship with no indication of what the person did (perhaps nothing) but rather to an identifiable contribution.

Dennett on Qualia and Consciousness: A Critique

IntroductionIt is at least a bit embarrassing, perhaps even scandalous, that debate should still rage over the sheer existence of qualia, but they continue to find able defenders after decades of being attacked as relics of ghostly substances, epiphenomenal non-entities, nomological danglers and the like; the intensity of the current confrontation is captured vividly by Daniel Dennett:What are qualia,exactly?This obstreperous query is dismissed by one author (“only half in jest”) by invoking Louis Armstrong's legendary reply when asked what jazz was: “If you gotta ask, you ain't never gonna get to know.” … If I succeed in my task, this move … will look as quaint and insupportable as a jocular appeal to the ludicrousness of a living thing-a living thing, mind you! -doubting the existence ofelan vital.

Passing for Italian

thenticity. Malone's OG, interestingly, is not one of the usual suspects-not Ice-T, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, or Schoolly D; not Suge Knight; not even Snoop Doggy Dogg. No, the dopest, phattest, most uncompromising voice of hip-hop masculinity turns out to be ... Frank Sinatra. Way before [gangsta rap] there was already king on the hill, Malone effuses, a G with the kind of class that makes person untouchable. ... No matter where he showed up throughout the country, [he] would do anything to blow up the spot-always looking for lamppost so his big band could G off. In Malone's hagiography, Sinatra's music is inseparable from his image, both setting the standard for stylish virility. His tough Jersey accent redefined the American language, Malone writes, plus he used his voice-not gun-and made the girlies stick out them tits like it was holdup! Mind you, this was in the '40s when girls wasn't giving up the coochie. So keen is Malone's infatuation, so awed is he by The Chairman of the Board's magisterial bearing, that he is overcome by racial envy. I've always wanted to be Italian, he rues, ... [I'll have to settle] for being black and cool. Malone is being playfully hyperbolic, but his sentiment is actually in accord with distinct tradition of interethnic identification. One finds the

Manliness and the Political Culture of the Old Northwest, 1790-1860

one deserved a whipping for his impudence in running for office. Cartwright, having no other path than straight through the group of men and not being one to back away from a fight in any case, rode up and challenged the man, telling him, Cartwright is known to be much of a man, and it will take a man to him, mind you. When the hapless fellow protested he could whip any Methodist preacher the Lord ever made, identified himself and dared the man to fulfill his boast. The fellow hastily declined a fight, insisting was lying about his identity, but on election day, satisfied with Cartwright's courage, he voted for the impudent Methodist.1

Finale Version 3.0, Music Notation Software for the Macintosh

The love-hate relationship between Finale and its users that has followed its steep learning curve since version 1.0 was released on September 16, 1988 has taken another evolutionary step with release of version 3.0. Some of the features found in the new version are a somewhat friendlier interface, twenty-eight additional ready-to-use templates (for example, jazz band, woodwind quintet, full orchestra), more one-step functions, ability to open multiple documents at one time, resizable floating palettes, and partial measure selection. The friendly graphic interface of the Macintosh that launched the revolution called desktop publishing just a few short years ago held great promise for a publishable-quality music notation, but few realized how tremendously complicated music notation really is. It is not simply word processing for music, as a few naive computer programmers suggested at the time. Finale was in fact the first program in which one could notate almost anything. The trouble is, or was, the dissonance between the Macintosh interface and the way the unwieldy Finale interface finally developed. At the heart of the concept of the Macintosh interface was the rejection of the DOS concept of modality, i.e., the idea that the same actions have different functions depending on the current mode. Thankfully, microcomputers have now freed us from the days of alt-control-shift F-keys, and replaced those actions, when possible, with pull-down menus. Unfortunately, some software, like that which has evolved for drawing, desktop publishing, and, yes, music notation, is simply too complex to function entirely in a non-modal environment. When we assume that some modality is necessary, it is then crucial that we adopt a consistent model and plain visual clues to function and modality. The consistency of the division between menu-driven and tool-driven functions is so intuitive in a program like MacDraw that one hardly stops to think about the careful consideration behind it. Every tool on the tool palette represents a tool that the user implements with the cursor on the picture, and not, for example, a function that affects a selected region. True, there are some actions, like optionclicking, that seem suspiciously like having to know to hold down the alt key in DOS. However, these are usually just shortcut duplications of functions already represented in the menus. It can be argued that the functions in Finale are simply too numerous and complex to be set into an entirely consistent system as in MacDraw. But in Finale there are tools that enter data, tools that modify data, tools that select data, even tools that consist of other tools. The Finale neophyte is often bewildered by the diversity of function implementations: in the Speedy Note Tool, you must click once on the measure first, but not in the Simple Note Entry Tool; in the page layout tool, you must click once on the page; and to group measures, you must select the New Staff Tool, drag to enclose the staff handles, and then double-click on one of the staves (not over a clef, mind you, and not merely a single click). Fortunately, Finale 3.0 has improved this state of affairs. No longer will the mere action of selecting a tool change the document, and there are no more functions accessed by option-clicking tools. With the New Measures Tool, for example, double-clicking on the tool is now required. This offers some protection, but what is the model here? Why would the user think that double-clicking on these tools in particular would cause these functions to happen? Well, for one reason, because now it tells you so. Instead of eliminating the confusion, the Finale developers have opted to help guide the user through the confusion by means of the bar. When one clicks on the New Measures Tool, for instance, the message bar provides the information that double-clicking will add measures. Another Macintosh constant has been the Edit menu, that is, the idea of selecting items in preparation for applying a function to the selection. …

You in Mind: a preventive mental health television series.

This study of BBC Television's 'You in Mind' series provides preliminary evidence for the benefits of a mass media approach to preventive mental health. The series was seen by a large national audience who appraised it positively. It had a greater impact in the area of understanding problems as opposed to seeing what to do about them, and a greater impact on the viewer's perceptions of the problems of people the viewers knew, as opposed to the problems of the viewers themselves. Measures of intentions to change behaviour, even when corrected for over-reporting, suggest that a significant minority of the audience had changed or intended to change their behaviour as a result of the series. However, no specific pre-post changes in coping or help-seeking were found. These findings are discussed in terms of the potential and limitations of the mass media for mental health promotion.

My Appalachia

My Appalachia Robert Connor My Appalachia is not a factor of heritage in my life; I have no ancestral roots there. I am not from Appalachia but, like so many others, am rather an invader, an explorer, a student, a defender, an observer and a portrayer by virtue of having photographed the people, hollows, strip mines, rocky hillsided farms, pearl gray, sagging, tin-roofed barns, giant coal-cleaning plants and the tiny, unincorporated communities that slow you down every couple of miles on secondary roads. Long before I came to Appalachia to live and work, I knew it as a storied region starting with Kentucky as "the Dark and Bloody Ground." For me, Appalachia began with Indians; The Last of the Mohicans had me picturing the forests of Kentucky as a network ofwelltraveled footpaths, bordered by dense forests teeming with wild game and used by the Indians primarily as a hunting area. To imagine it with few permanent settlements made it seem all the more wild, mysterious, primitive, and dangerous. As a consequence, I had a tremendous respect and admiration for those hardy souls who dared penetrate this unmapped wilderness. As a boy, I read everything I could about pioneers. I know now that many of the episodes I read were romanticized. These were hardy pioneers, so I wasn't able to share any physical suffering with them; while they encountered many obstacles, they overcame them. In my fantasies about them I wanted to live that kind of life. I wanted buckskin clothing trimmed with fringe. I wanted to wear moccasins so that I could have supreme stealth, able to feel every little twig underfoot (and therefore not loudly break it for everyone to hear); and, of course, have my trusty hunting knife on my belt, along with my throwing tomahawk. My muzzle-loading flintlock would be exactly as long as Daniel Boone's. Of course, I had no idea how much a muzzle-loading flintlock weighed, but it couldn't be too much because I had read where ole Dan'l could Robert Connor, freelance photographer and editor ofMountain Life & Work in the early 1960s, went to Bluefield, West Virginia, from Berea, and then retired to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. 13 load on the run, while being chased, mind you, by screaming native Americans. And in these fantasies there were no mosquitoes and my thinking never got so far as to consider gong to the bathroom out in the wilderness. As I grew older, my concept of Appalachia expanded to accept the setting ofthe mountain regions, the extensive timbering, the discovering of coal, the penetration of the railroads and the growing exploitation of the region's prime resources: minerals and people. But in spite of a growing population and pockets of industrialization, Appalachia retained its aura of wildness. And there emerged, in my mind's eye, a prototype, characterized as a "mountaineer." He was taciturn, suspicious of strangers, a crack shot with a rifle. He didn't have much learnin', but he had a lot of savvy. He was adept at "folkways" and well versed in "folklore." He knew the healing nostrums that were available in the fields and forests. He liked to hunt and trap; but for some reason I never associated him much with fishing. And, of course, he made moonshine and was constantly at odds with revenooers. He spoke an odd language that scholars said went back to Chaucer, and he played music on the dulcimer and sang songs that had somehow traveled through time and space from the Old Country of his ancestors. I remember seeing Gary Cooper in Sergeant York. Cooper seemed to embody all the characteristics of my mountaineer prototype. And then there was the film The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, a movie that made mountain living more acceptable, more desirable than ever. I remember crying freely when one of the film's characters died, a casualty of feuding families. For years Appalachia retained, for me, a mystique, as a separate realm, peopled by a special breed, either puzzled over or ignored by the outside world; an area visited only by those who wanted to take something from it. It wasn't that...

Author's Bane

Author's Bane Jane Yolen (bio) The old magical swords carried great names to indicate their prime usage: Dragon's Bane, Troll Sticker, Demon Pricker, Squirrel's Bane. Squirrel's Bane? My friend, fantasy writer Steve Brust, put a badly wounded squirrel, who had played in Minneapolis traffic, out of its misery with the thing closest to hand, his fencing sword. Hence Squirrel's Bane. But the weapon which is right now thoroughly sticking and pricking and generally doing damage to writers in this country—and especially children's book writers—is P.C. language: Author's Bane. I actually first came upon this weapon years ago when writing my picture book The Girl Who Loved the Wind. Set in a quasi-Persia by the illustrations, the story tells of the daughter of a rich merchant who is kept innocent of all of the wickedness in the world by her overprotective father. In her garden grew every kind of fair fruit and flower, for so her father willed it. And on her table was every kind of fresh fish and fowl, for so her father ordered. In her room were the finest furnishings. Gay books and happy music, light dancing and bright paintings filled her days. And the servants were instructed always to smile, never to say no, and to be cheerful all through the year. At least, that is how I wrote it. My editor balked at the phrase "gay books," and this was in 1971, mind you! I countered that the book was for five to eight-year-olds, who knew nothing of the just-beginning-to-be-current terminology for homosexuality. And that I was appalled that such a fine editor (my favorite, with whom I eventually did twenty-four books) should want to limit my vocabulary. I even quoted Lewis Carroll: "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all." (Through the Looking Glass, ch. 6) I said that if such things were allowed to occur, we could no longer say Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger, but rather broke it. We could no [End Page 75] longer say "Nipped it in the bud" but rather just "caught it in time." We could no longer say "They got ready to burn the witch, piling the fagots on the fire" but rather "They stuck on more wood." We could no longer teach seventh-graders Emily Dickinson's lovely poem "There is no frigate like a book." And I was right. I still am. The question is, which is to be master—that's all. My editor stood her ground. I—alas—threw up my hands and said, "Then we shall say 'gaily colored books' and get two minorities at once." (Sarcasm is the last refuge of the truly defeated.) And so if you look at the book today, still in print since 1972, you will see the sentence in all its PC glory. I edited a collection of stories recently, 2041; science fiction stories that take place fifty years in the future when all our young readers will be my age and older. The opening story is a powerful indictment of just this sort of thing. It is called "Much Ado about (Censored)" and in it author Connie Willis shows a group of students trying to study a Shakespearean play. When all the censorship groups, from the left and from the right, are done with it, there are two sentences left. Author's Bane, indeed. [End Page 76] Jane Yolen Known as "The Hans Christian Andersen of America," Jane Yolen is the author of over 115 books, most of them for young readers. Her Owl Book won the Caldecott in 1988; The Emperor & the Kite was a Caldecott Honor Book in 1968. She is editor-in-chief of Jane Yolen Books, an imprint of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Copyright © 1992 by Jane Yolen Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

Russell Hoban Reads Russell Hoban: Children's Books

Russell Hoban Reads Russell Hoban: Children's Books San Diego State University, Oct. 18, 1990 Alida Allison (bio) What I want to do is come at you from several places at once. The emphasis is on my writing for children. It is not separate from my other writing, and, really, children don't live in a world that is separate from the grown-up world. It's just one world and my writing is just one way of writing. And some of it is within a child's frame of reference and some of it isn't. But all of it, and especially the children's writing, has to come from as deep a place in me as there is to write from. Before I start, I want to show you the Mouse and His Child in what has become a little ritual, so you can see what got me started in novel writing. [Hoban unwraps and winds up the clockwork toy after which he named his first novel, placing it on a table for the audience of around 400 to watch. There are Ooohs and Aaahs as the tiny toy father circles, applause as he lifts his little son, and laughter as the two wind down and stop. Hoban smiles and carefully re wraps the toy.] I want to tell you something about how I work and how I get the story for a book together. I will be talking to you about The Mouse and His Child, but I want to begin with a lion because my first novel, so-called for grown ups, was The Lion of Boaz Jachin and Jachin Boat, and the lead-up to that is perhaps a better example of the kind of thing that gets me started than the mouse and his child, so I'm going to read to you from it. But first I'll tell you something about it. In Westport, Connecticut in 1968, I bought a book on Mesopotamian art, a big thick square book—I could hardly lift it up. And in this book there were wonderful clear photographs of sandstone carvings of a relief of a lion hunt in King Ashurbanipal's north palace at Ninevah. The photographs were remarkable because the sculptor was quite gifted, and his observation was accurate and strong and full of vitality. The human [End Page 96] beings in this animal hunt—the huntsman, the men on the horses and leading horses, the men on top of the lion cages, and the men in the chariots—all of the people looked like nothing. The people were conventionalized and stereotyped and they all looked pretty much the same. The upper-class people had very fancy curled beards and hair and they were totally boring, but each of the lions was an individual tragic portrait very carefully observed. The sculptor had obviously looked at lions being hunted and being wounded and dying, and he had cared about the lions. He carved them with great force and with great artistry and I thought about it and thought about it, and mind you, this was only the book—I hadn't yet seen the real thing. The real thing was in the British Museum, far away. So I began to think about these lions. I read up on some Mesopotamian myth and got a little bit of material about what happens after death in that society about the netherworld of Cor and Ereshnigal and Nergal and the boatman who takes people across the river. Then I began to develop some mythology of my own to account for the feeling for the lions that was developing in me. [Hoban then reads from some of his "made-up mythology" about the lion hunt of the king and the dying lions and the observant sculptor. Since the material has not yet been published, it will not be reproduced here.] I wanted to start with that because I guess I want to stress that writing anything is a serious business that requires close attention and requires fidelity. As to fidelity, I'll read you a couple of lines from The Medusa Frequency [his 1987 novel] in which a not...

Techno-hegemony , and: Created in Japan: From Imitators to World Class Innovators , and: The Formation of Science in Japan: Building a Research Tradition (review)

176 SAISREVIEW in the world order (the latter being a particularly difficult task). Unfortunately, in explaining the various approaches towards maintaining international order, Von Vorys insists on taking the reader through a tour of world history. An extremely interesting tour, mind you, but do we really need to know how the Ch'in dynasty (221-209 B.C.) forged Chinese solidarity or that Alexander the Great "was a mamma's boy, somewhat like Churchill and FDR"? More important, however, is the completely surprising list of recommendations that Von Vorys comes up with for promoting constructive change in the Third World—specifically, for addressing ethnic tensions in Africa and Asia. He finishes the list with the admirable suggestion that the U.S. alter the substantive and geographic biases of its foreign aid program—less military aid and less of it to the Middle East. But he begins the list with the advice to maintain our covert operations capability and to build a global rapid deployment force! What ethnic conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa could possibly warrant the lives of thousands of America's youth? And whatever happened to the simple idea of boosting local Third World economies through trade liberalization measures? Does the description quirkily provocative make sense now? Von Vorys' writing style is brash and clever, and a selective reading ofAmerican National Interest will uncover a solid logical analysis ofthat most vexing of foreign policy tasks: basing policy on national interests. The subtitle had left this reviewer hoping to find some discussion of the dilemmas involved in matching virtue with power—dilemmas evident in the attempt to promote a consistent human rights policy, for example. Alas, there was little discussion of them. But Von Vorys is right to begin his preface with the statement: "What this country needs...is a great debate on foreign policy." In its unusual way, American National Interest adds to that debate. Techno-hegemony: By Taizo Yakushiji. Tokyo: Shuokoronsha, 1989. 267pp. 620 yen. (in Japanese) Created in Japan: From Imitators to World Class Innovators. By Sheridan M. Tatsuno. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. 295pp. $21.95. The Formation ofScience in Japan: Building a Research Tradition. By James R. Bartholomew. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. 371pp. $36.00. Reviewed by Takuya Tasso, M.A. Candidate, SAIS. The origins of Japan's successful development of advanced technology is an attractive and common research theme for scholars concerned with economic competition between countries and about economic development. Some emphasize the ability of the Japanese to imitate Western science and technology while others focus on the original culture and traditions of Japanese society as possessing a delicate sensibility and penchant for invention. This debate between BOOK REVIEWS 177 the imitator-school and the creator-school is interesting to many people. Three new authors have joined the fray to present their own versions of these theories. Taizo Yakushiji's Techno-hegemony is a bold attempt to establish a general theory of national technological development. Sheridan Tatsuno's Created in Japan focuses on Japanese innovation, providing a new concept of creativity. Finally, James Bartholomew's The Formation of Science in Japan describes Japan's Westernization in terms of social change and technological development. The key to technological achievement seems to be the combination of vigorous imitation and originality based on factors inherent to the culture and traditions of Japan. Yakushiji has a B.A. degree in engineering from Keio University in Japan and a Ph.D. degree in international relations from MIT. He presents a general theory for national technological success, postulating that the international dynamics of "technological emulation" are the main cause of hegemony-transfer between major powers in modern history. According to him, techno-hegemons like the United Kingdom and the United States, which have succeeded in "technological emulation," grafted their inherent "something different" onto imported technology. For example, the British improved upon French technology for producing silk fabrics and the Low Countries' methods for making woolen fabric by utilizing know-how developed from the British cotton textile industry. As a second example, he cites the American development of a conveyor belt mass-production system, emulated from French and German automobile technology. Yakushiji argues that efficient imitation is essential for...

Working Papers: On the Job with Studs Terkel

Most English teachers do not read much. My wife, who is a novelist, discussed this dark secret recently when she was invited to speak to a group of my colleagues about contemporary literature. Many of the writers and works she alluded to drew more blanks than they might have at a similar conference of arbitrageurs or traffic control managers. She has seen me at my desk, virtually mulched from the sunlight by piles of ungraded papers, so she knows what we're up against, but the question remains: Who is reading, if not the transmitters of literature to the next generation? Why, then, in this tight reading economy, do I devote such disproportionate time to reading books of interviews? (Mind you, nothing supplants fiction for me, but interviews run a respectable, if distant, second.) One of my earliest forays into this genre came with my discovery of the Paris Review's Writers at Work series, a wonderfully rich exploration of writers' work styles and philosophies that by now has stretched over several decades and many volumes. Reading these volumes even inspired me to conduct a series of similar interviews about work styles with a group of prominent scientists.

A cultural revolution in the making?

What must it have been like to be the first person to be taught to use a fork, or the party official who received Margaret Thatcher's application for membership? Nowadays it is every Sunday news hack's job to spot the incipient revolution or the first stirrings of a new trend. Claims come by the dozen, but wave upon wave beaches itself and is forgotten. In that sense K W M Fulford's Moral Theory and Medical Practice could just be the latest book on medical :/ ethics: but I think it is much more than that. I shall stick my neck out. When it comes to thinking about the purpose and practice of medicine, Dr Fulford has something really new to say and a potentially revolutionary approach. Mind you, it takes some getting at; but even if I've missed some of the subtleties I hope this is the shape of things to come.

One man’s quest for plant constituents of therapeutic value

I feel most honored to be selected the Distinquished Economic Botanist for 1989. I am well aware of those who have been chosen before me, many of whom I know personally and hold in great respect, and thus feel proud to have my name included on this roster of Distinquished Economic Botanists. While I feel honored to be selected for your award, I feel very humble about it for I know that many of you sitting in the audience are more worthy of such an award than I. I am reminded of the story of the man invited to give a talk in Texas. Soon after the man got into his talk, he noticed a Texan in the front row take a gun out of a holster and examine the bullet cylinder. The speaker stopped his talk and said to the Texan, "Sir, I can stop this talk anytime you want me to; you only need to let me know when you want me to stop." The Texan said, "You go right ahead and talk as long as you desire. You are a guest here and we want to treat you well. The guy I want to see is the person who invited you here." So, If you are wondering why I was chosen for this award, the guys you are looking for are, I suspect, some of my friends from the University of Illinois. I have titled this talk, "One Man's Quest for Plant Constituents of Therapeutic Value." It could have been titled "One Man's Frustration in Seeking Plant Constituents of Therapeutic Value." It could also be titled "Through the Years," for to some extent it gives a perspective on the development of some aspects of research in pharmacognosy. It is my story along with some undergraduate students, my graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and a few colleagues with whom I collaborated through the years. It begins in academic year 1946-1947 when I was in the junior class of the University of Kansas School of Pharmacy. I carried out a study in competition for the Kilmer Prize, an award given to an undergraduate student in pharmacy judged to have done the most significant research problem in pharmacognosy for the year. At that time the flavonoid glycoside named rutin was popular for treatment of capillary fragility. The major source at that time was the aboveground portion of the buckwheat plant, Fagopyrum esculentum. There was a need for a better source of the glycoside so, for my research problem, I set about trying to find a better source of rutin in plants growing in Kansas. I examined a large number of plants that had a yellow or yellowish-orange color in some plant part; I even investigated wheat straw. The best source of rutin I could find was in several species of goldenrod, Solidago. However, this was not a better source than F. esculentum. Mind you, in 1947 it was considerably more difficult to identify a plant constitutent than it is today for NMR and mass spectra were not known in those days. Our school did not have an I.R. spectrophotometer, nor did I have access to one. Chromatography was not used at that time either. The only way I

Linking Payment for Care to Informed Consent

To the Editor.— I concur with Dr Faden 1 that a mechanism that claims to protect patients' rights, but does so by fortuitously also saving money, not for the patient mind you, but for the said protector, is gravely suspect as to its true motivation. While in principle it makes sense simply to deny payment for an unwanted service, I can only shudder when I envision the results of a consistent application of Mr Kapp's 2 proposal. Can you imagine the insane and unconscionable delays and confusion in an emergency department in which the physician, the staff, and the clerical personnel are concerned, foremost, with obtaining legally foolproof documentation (that is, not just legally valid, but that provides legally provable evidence of the patient's consent) rather than with providing what is clinically the best intervention? It is illogical that Mr Kapp is unwilling to suspect that clinicians may fake such