Eric Hobsbawm: a conversation about Marx, student riots, the new Left, and the Milibands

Eric Hobsbawm, left, in conversation with Tristram Hunt. Photograph: Karen Robinson

As he publishes his latest book, 93-year-old historian Eric Hobsbawm talks communism and coalition with one of Britain's newer breed, Tristram Hunt, now a Labour MP
Share

Tristram Hunt The Observer, Sunday 16 January 2011 larger | smaller Article history

Hampstead Heath, in leafy north London, is proud of its walk-on part in the history of Marxism. It was here, on a Sunday, that Karl Marx would walk his family up Parliament Hill, reciting Shakespeare and Schiller along the way, for an afternoon of picnics and poetry. On a weekday, he would join his friend Friedrich Engels, who lived close by, for a brisk hike around the heath, where the "old Londoners", as they were known, mulled over the Paris Commune, the Second International and the nature of capitalism.

Today, on a side road leading off from the heath, the Marxist ambition remains alive in the house of Eric Hobsbawm. Born in 1917 (in Alexandria, under the British protectorate of Egypt), more than 20 years after both Marx and Engels had died, he knew neither man personally, of course. But talking to Eric in his airy front room, filled with family photos, academic honours and a lifetime of cultural objets, there is an almost tangible sense of connection to the men and their memory.

The last time I interviewed Eric, in 2002, his brilliant autobiography Interesting Times – chronicling a youth in Weimar Germany, a lifetime's love of jazz and his transformation of the study of history in Britain – had appeared to great acclaim. It was also amid another cyclical media attack, in the wake of Martin Amis's anti-Stalin book Koba the Dread, on Eric's membership of the Communist party. The "Marxist professor" of Daily Mail ire did not seek, as he put it, "agreement, approval or sympathy", but, rather, historical understanding for a 20th-century life shaped by the struggle against fascism.

Since then things have changed. The global crisis of capitalism, which has wreaked havoc on the world economy since 2007, has transformed the terms of debate.

Suddenly, Marx's critique of the instability of capitalism has enjoyed a resurgence. "He's back," screamed the Times in the autumn of 2008 as stock markets plunged, banks were summarily nationalised and President Sarkozy of France was photographed leafing through Das Kapital (the surging sales of which pushed it up the German bestseller lists). Even Pope Benedict XVI was moved to praise Marx's "great analytical skill". Marx, the great ogre of the 20th century, had been resuscitated across campuses, branch meetings and editorial offices.

So there seemed no better moment for Eric to bring together his most celebrated essays on Marx into a single volume, together with new material on Marxism in light of the crash. For Hobsbawm, the continual duty to engage with Marx and his multiple legacies (including, in this book, some fine new chapters on the meaning of Gramsci) remains compelling.

But Eric himself has changed. He suffered a nasty fall over Christmas and can no longer escape the physical constraints of his 93 years. But the humour and the hospitality of himself and his wife, Marlene, as well as the intellect, political incisiveness and breadth of vision, remain wonderfully undimmed. With a well-thumbed copy of the Financial Times on the coffee table, Eric moved seamlessly from the outgoing President Lula of Brazil's poll ratings to the ideological difficulties faced by the Communist party in West Bengal to the convulsions in Indonesia following the 1857 global crash. The global sensibility and lack of parochialism, always such a strength of his work, continue to shape his politics and history.

And after one hour of talking Marx, materialism and the continued struggle for human dignity in the face of free-market squalls, you leave Hobsbawm's Hampstead terrace – near the paths where Karl and Friedrich used to stroll – with the sense you have had a blistering tutorial with one of the great minds of the 20th century. And someone determined to keep a critical eye on the 21st.


Tristram Hunt At the heart of this book, is there a sense of vindication? That even if the solutions once offered by Karl Marx might no longer be relevant, he was asking the right questions about the nature of capitalism and that the capitalism that has emerged over the last 20 years was pretty much what Marx was thinking about in the 1840s?


Eric Hobsbawm Yes, there certainly is. The rediscovery of Marx in this period of capitalist crisis is because he predicted far more of the modern world than anyone else in 1848. That is, I think, what has drawn the attention of a number of new observers to his work – paradoxically, first among business people and business commentators rather than the left. I remember noticing this just around the time of the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Communist Manifesto, when not very many plans were being made for celebrating it on the left. I discovered to my amazement that the editors of the [in-flight] magazine of United Airlines said they wanted to have something about the Manifesto. Then, a bit later on, I was having lunch with [financier] George Soros, who asked: "What do you think of Marx?" Even though we don't agree on very much, he said to me: "There's definitely something to this man."


TH Do you get the sense that what people such as Soros partly liked about Marx was the way he describes so brilliantly the energy, iconoclasm and potential of capitalism? That that's the part that attracted the CEOs flying United Airlines?


EH I think that it is globalisation, the fact that he predicted globalisation, as one might say a universal globalisation, including the globalisation of tastes and all the rest of it, that impressed them. But I think the more intelligent ones also saw a theory that allowed for a sort of jagged development of crisis. Because the official theory in that period [the late 1990s] theoretically dismissed the possibility of a crisis.


TH And this was the language of "an end to boom and bust" and going beyond the business cycle?


EH Exactly. What happened from the 1970s on, first in the universities, in Chicago and elsewhere and, eventually, from 1980 with Thatcher and Reagan was, I suppose, a pathological deformation of the free-market principle behind capitalism: the pure market economy and rejection of state and public action that I don't think any economy in the 19th century actually practised, not even the USA. And it was in conflict with, among other things, the way in which capitalism had actually worked in its most successful era, between 1945 and the early 1970s.


TH By "successful", you mean in terms of raising living standards in the postwar years?


EH Successful in that it both made profits and ensured something like a politically stable and socially relatively contented population. It wasn't ideal, but it was, shall we say, capitalism with a human face.


TH And do you think that the renewed interest in Marx was also helped by the end of the Marxist/Leninist states. The Leninist shadow was taken away and you were able to return to the original nature of Marxian writing?


EH With the fall of the Soviet Union, the capitalists stopped being afraid and to that extent both they and we could actually look at the problem in a much more balanced way, less distorted by passion than before. But it was more the instability of this neoliberal globalised economy that I think began to become so noticeable at the end of the century. You see, in a sense, the globalised economy was effectively run by what one might call the global north-west [western Europe and North America] and they pushed forward this ultra-extreme market fundamentalism. Initially, it seemed to work quite well – at least in the old north-west – even though from the start, you could see that at the periphery of the global economy it created earthquakes, big earthquakes. In Latin America, there was a huge financial crisis in the early 1980s. In the early 1990s, in Russia, there was an economic catastrophe. And then towards the end of the century, there was this enormous, almost global, breakdown ranging from Russia to [South] Korea, Indonesia and Argentina. This began to make people think, I feel, that there was a basic instability in the system that they had previously dismissed.

TH There has been some suggestion to say that the crisis we've seen since 2008 in terms of America, Europe and Britain isn't so much a crisis of capitalism, per se, but of the modern west's finance capitalism. Meanwhile, Brazil, Russia, India and China – "Bric" – are growing their economies on increasingly capitalist models at the same time. Or is this simply our turn to suffer the crises they had 10 years ago?


EH The real rise of the Bric countries is something that has happened in the past 10 years, 15 years at most. So to that extent you can say that it was a crisis of capitalism. On the other hand, I think there's a risk in assuming, as neoliberals and free marketeers do, that there's only one type of capitalism. Capitalism is, if you like, a family, with a variety of possibilities, from the state-directed capitalism of France to the free-market of America. It's therefore a mistake to believe that the rise of the Bric countries is simply the same thing as the generalisation of western capitalism. It isn't: the only time they tried to import free-market fundamentalism wholesale was into Russia and there it became an absolutely tragic failure.


TH You raised the issue of the political consequences of the crash. In your book, you drop an insistence on looking at the classic texts of Marx as providing a coherent political programme for today, but where do you think Marxism as a political project goes now?


EH I don't believe that Marx ever had, as it were, a political project. Politically speaking, the specific Marxian programme was that the working class should form itself into a class-conscious body and act politically to gain power. Beyond that, Marx quite deliberately left it vague, because of his dislike of utopian things. Paradoxically, I would even say that the new parties were largely left to improvise, to do what they could do without any effective instructions. What Marx had written about simply amounted to little more than clause IV-style ideas about public ownership, nowhere actually near enough to provide a guidance to parties or ministers. My view is that the main model that 20th-century socialists and communists had in mind was the state-directed war economies of the first world war, which weren't particularly socialist but did provide some kind of guidance on how socialisation might work.

TH Are you not surprised by the failure of either a Marxian or a social democratic left to exploit the crisis of the last few years politically? We sit here some 20 years on from the demise of one of the parties you most admire, the Communist party in Italy. Are you depressed by the left's state at the moment in Europe and beyond?


EH Yes, of course. In fact, one of the things I'm trying to show in the book is that the crisis of Marxism is not only the crisis of the revolutionary branch of Marxism but in the social democratic branch too. The new situation in the new globalised economy eventually killed off not only Marxist-Leninism but also social democratic reformism – which was essentially the working class putting pressure on their nation states. But with globalisation, the capacity of the states to respond to this pressure effectively diminished. And so the left retreated to suggest: "Look, the capitalists are doing all right, all we need to do is let them make as much profit and see that we get our share."

That worked when part of that share took the form of creating welfare states, but from the 1970s on, this no longer worked and what you had to do then was, in effect, what Blair and Brown did: let them make as much money as possible and hope that enough of it will trickle down to make our people better off.


TH So there was that Faustian bargain that during the good times, if the profits were healthy and investment could be secured for education and health, we didn't ask too many questions?


EH Yes, so long as the standard of living improved.


TH And now with the profits falling away, we are struggling for answers?


EH Now that we're going the other way with western countries, where economic growth is relatively static, even declining, then the question of reforms becomes much more urgent again.


TH Do you see as part of the problem, in terms of the left, the end of a conscious and identifiable mass working class, which was traditionally essential to social democratic politics?


EH Historically, it is true. It was around the working-class parties that social democratic governments and reforms crystallised. These parties were never, or only rarely, completely working class. They were, to some extent, always alliances: alliances with certain kinds of liberal and leftwing intellectuals, with minorities, religious and cultural minorities, possibly many countries with different kinds of working, labouring poor. With the exception of the United States, the working class remained a massive, recognisable bloc for a long time – certainly well into the 1970s. I think the rapidity of deindustrialisation in this country has played hell with not only the size but also, if you like, the consciousness of the working class. And there is no country now in which the pure industrial working class in itself is sufficiently strong.

What is still possible is that the working class forms, as it were, the skeleton of broader movements of social change. A good example of this, on the left, is Brazil, which has a classic case of a late-19th-century Labour party based on an alliance of trade unions, workers, the general poor, intellectuals, ideologists and varying kinds of left [wingers], which has produced a remarkable governing coalition. And you can't say it's an unsuccessful one after eight years of government with an outgoing president on 80% approval ratings. Today, ideologically, I feel most at home in Latin America because it remains the one part of the world where people still talk and conduct their politics in the old language, in the 19th- and 20th-century language of socialism, communism and Marxism.


TH In terms of Marxist parties, something that comes out very strongly in your work is the role of intellectuals. Today, we see enormous excitement on campuses such as yours at Birkbeck, with meetings and rallies. And if we look at the works of Naomi Klein or David Harvey or the performances of Slavoj Zizek, there's real enthusiasm. Are you excited by these public intellectuals of Marxism today?

EH I'm not sure there has been a major shift, but there's no doubt: over the present government cuts there will be a radicalisation of students. That's one thing on the positive side. On the negative side… if you look at the last time of massive radicalisation of students in '68, it didn't amount to all that much. However, as I thought then and still think, it's better to have the young men and women feel that they're on the left than to have the young men and women feel that the only thing to do is to go and get a job at the stock exchange.


TH And do you think men such as Harvey and Zizek play a sort of helpful role in that?

EH I suppose Zizek is rightly described as a performer. He has this element of provocation that is very characteristic and does help to interest people, but I'm not certain that people who are reading Zizek are actually drawn very much nearer rethinking the problems of the left.


TH Let me move from west to east. One of the urgent questions you ask in this book is whether the Chinese Communist party can develop and respond to its new place on the global stage.

EH This is a big mystery. Communism's gone, but one important element of communism remains, certainly in Asia, namely the state Communist party directing society. How does this work? In China, there is, I think, a higher degree of consciousness of the potential instability of the situation. There is probably a tendency to provide more elbow room for a rapidly growing intellectual middle class and educated sectors of the population, which, after all, will be measured in tens, possibly hundreds of millions. It's also true that the Communist party in China appears to be recruiting a largely technocratic leadership.

But how you pull all this stuff together, I don't know. The one thing that I think is possible with this rapid industrialisation is the growth of labour movements, and to what extent the CCP can find room for labour organisations or whether they would regard these as unacceptable, in the way they regarded the Tiananmen Square demonstrations [as unacceptable], is unclear.


TH Let's talk about politics here in Britain, to get your sense of the coalition. It seems to me there's a 1930s air to it in terms of its fiscal orthodoxy, spending cuts, income inequalities, with David Cameron as an almost Stanley Baldwin figure. What is your reading of it?


EH Behind the various cuts being suggested, with the justification of getting rid of the deficit, there clearly seems to be a systematic, ideological demand for deconstructing, semi-privatising, the old arrangements – whether it's the pension system, welfare system, school system or even the health system. These things in most cases were not actually provided for either in the Conservative or the Liberal manifesto and yet, looking at it from the outside, this is a much more radically rightwing government than it looked at first sight.


TH And what do you think the response of the Labour party should be?


EH The Labour party on the whole has not been a very effective opposition since the election, partly because it spent months and months electing its new leader. I think the Labour party should, for one thing, stress much more that for most people in the past 13 years, the period was not one of collapse into chaos but actually one where the situation improved, and particularly in areas such as schools, hospitals and a variety of other cultural achievements – so the idea that somehow or other it all needs to be taken down and ground into the dust is not valid. I think we need to defend what most people think basically needs defending and that is the provision of some form of welfare from the cradle to the grave.


TH You knew Ralph Miliband, as the Miliband family are old friends. What do you think Ralph would have made of the contest between his sons and the outcome of Ed leading the party?


EH Well, as a father, he obviously couldn't help but be rather proud. He would certainly be much to the left of both of his sons. I think that Ralph was really identified for most of his life with dismissing the Labour party and the parliamentary route – and hoping that somehow it would be possible that a proper socialist party could come into being. When Ralph finally got reconciled to the Labour party, it was in the least useful period, namely in the Bennite period when it didn't really do much good. None the less, I think Ralph would certainly have hoped for something much more radical than his sons have so far looked like doing.


TH The title of your new book is How to Change the World. You write, in the final paragraph, that "the supersession of capitalism still sounds plausible to me". Is that hope undimmed and does that keep you working and writing and thinking today?


EH There's no such thing as undimmed hope these days. How to Change the World is an account of what Marxism fundamentally did in the 20th century, partly through the social democratic parties that weren't directly derived from Marx and other parties – Labour parties, workers' parties, and so on – that remain as government and potential government parties everywhere. And second, through the Russian Revolution and all its consequences.

The record of Karl Marx, an unarmed prophet inspiring major changes, is undeniable. I'm quite deliberately not saying that there are any equivalent prospects now. What I'm saying now is that the basic problems of the 21st century would require solutions that neither the pure market, nor pure liberal democracy can adequately deal with. And to that extent, a different combination, a different mix of public and private, of state action and control and freedom would have to be worked out.

What you will call that, I don't know. But it may well no longer be capitalism, certainly not in the sense in which we have known it in this country and the United States.

In this wide-ranging 2002 conversation with Tristram Hunt, Eric Hobsbawm reveals how he continues to believe in a spirit of progress as the surest route for happiness.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

Top 10 Composers: Which 20th-Century Masters Will Make the Cut?

Debussy, Clair de lune.

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

Over the next two weeks Anthony Tommasini is exploring the qualities that make a classical composer great, maybe even the best of all time. Watch videos and vote for your own top 10 here and read previous posts here and share your thoughts in the comments field. Mr. Tommasini’s final list will be posted on Jan. 21.

The 19th century will pose the toughest calls in our whimsical attempt to identify the top 10 classical composers of all time. Think of Chopin, Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt, Brahms, Tchaikovsky. And what about Verdi and Wagner? So let me deal with the 20th century first, see how many slots might still be left, and work backward.

Though Debussy was born in 1862 and died in 1918, this path-breaker has to be considered a 20th-century giant. After some 300 years of pulsating Germanic music, for Debussy to come along and write such hauntingly restrained, ethereal, time-stands-still works was a shock to the system. His thick yet transparent block chords; his harmonies tinged with ancient modal elements; his preference for whole-tone scales that loosened music’s moorings to traditional tonality; his mastery of delicate orchestral colorings and new ways of writing for the piano: all this and more made him the father of modern music. Composers from Stravinsky to Boulez would have been impossible without Debussy’s example.

For the subject of his only complete opera he chose Maeterlinck’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” a groundbreaking work of Symbolist theater from 1893. Debussy’s Impressionist music, full of veiled harmonies, blurry textures and emotional ambiguity, hauntingly taps the subliminal stirrings of this mysterious story of a sullen royal family in a timeless, placeless kingdom. In the Metropolitan Opera’s recent production Simon Rattle, in his Met debut, conducted a stunning account of this unorthodox opera, first performed in 1902. What other 20th-century work continues to sound as radical?

Stravinsky, by the way, though I am still formulating this list, will surely make the cut. One fascinating element of his achievement is that among a very select roster of great composers in history, Stravinsky is the only one to have made his reputation by writing ballet scores, with the possible exception of Tchaikovsky.

Everyone acknowledges the impact of Stravinsky’s Paris ballets, especially that all-time stunner “The Rite of Spring” from 1913. His later work with the choreographer George Balanchine was one of the most important collaborations in the history of the arts. Stravinsky was inspired to write astonishing scores for Balanchine, like “Orpheus” and “Apollo.” But Balanchine found Stravinsky’s music so choreographic that he seized even on pieces like the Violin Concerto and the late, 12-tone Movements for Piano and Orchestra and conscripted them for duty in ballet.

Stravinsky’s works during his lengthy period of Neo-Classicism are still underappreciated. I love that these pieces are, essentially, music about other music. “The Rake’s Progress” is an ingenious, amusing and profound opera on its own terms. It is also Stravinsky’s savvy, admiring musical commentary on Mozart opera. When he finally started writing 12-tone works (adapting the technique to his own ends), even those scores were Neo-Classical in a sense. The 12-tone thing had been around for a while, and the movement was losing steam. So Stravinsky’s 12-tone pieces were like commentaries on the 12-tone phenomenon.

Theorists and composers are still trying to figure out exactly how the elusive harmonic language in Stravinsky’s Neo-Classical scores (like the Symphony in Three Movements and the overlooked Piano Sonata) actually works. His pieces do not give up their secrets easily. The “Symphony of Psalms” for chorus and unconventional orchestra (with no violins and violas but two pianos) is the most gravely beautiful and profound sacred work of the 20th century. Leonard Bernstein once said that the opening chords of the third movement alone, in which the chorus sings a bittersweet, almost resigned setting of the word “Alleluia,” would have ensured Stravinsky’s place in history. That was Bernstein in his exuberant mode, but he had a point.

What’s more, including the Russian-born Stravinsky in my list brings some geographical diversity to the Top 10.

The composer I yearn to include is Benjamin Britten. In many ways, Britten is thriving. At least a half-dozen of his operas have become staples, and his symphonic and chamber works turn up all the time on programs. If there are finer 20th-century works for voice and orchestra than “Les Illuminations” and the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. I don’t know what they are. Still, I am probably in a minority in rating him quite this high. I predict that his stock will rise steadily over the next 50 years. Still, Top 10? Am I going to push out Haydn for Britten?

Among other 20th-century giants, however, I am leaning toward making a place for Bartok. It’s not just that Bartok was a visionary composer with an arresting and original voice. He could write works in a popular vein, like the Concerto for Orchestra, that are still rich with subtle complexities and ingenious strokes and his characteristic propulsive rhythms. Yet he also wrote uncompromisingly modern and experimental pieces, like the six string quartets, pieces he assumed would never catch on with the public. He would be amazed that today his quartets are as essential to the repertory as Beethoven’s.

Bartok’s other pivotal contribution came from his field research into folk music and indigenous musical traditions of Eastern Europe. He was an early ethnomusicologist. The music he encountered fundamentally altered his perceptions as a composer. Sometimes he more or less transcribed the folk music into suitable pieces for the concert hall. But in subtler ways he folded unconventional elements of the indigenous songs, dances and dirges into his own mature style. Even when he is not explicitly borrowing some folk tune, Bartok’s music is run through with the earthy strangeness of Eastern European folk music. His example inspired countless composers, from Lou Harrison to Osvaldo Golijov, to explore folk music and classical traditions from Asia, South America or wherever their backgrounds and interests took them.

Also — and maybe this is where my own concerns come into play — Bartok’s role in forging new pathways for music in the early decades of the 20th century was pivotal. Schoenberg’s analysis that the system of tonality was in crisis was spot on. Yet the solution he proposed, 12-tone music, while an audacious and exhilarating leap, appeared as inevitable — that is, the next step in the evolution — only to Schoenberg and his acolytes.

Bartok showed another way. His arresting harmonic language was an amalgam of tonality, unorthodox scales, atonal wanderings and more. Theorists still haven’t broken down Bartok’s language. But concertgoers, who don’t have such concerns, continue to be swept away by the originality and mystery of his music. A work like the Third String Quartet seems as stunningly modern today as it was in 1927. Yet it is a mainstay of the string quartet repertory.

So whom are we missing? Any votes for Shostakovich? Prokofiev? Messiaen? Ligeti?

Universe captured in mind-boggling detail by Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey release SDSS-III, the most detailed picture of the universe ever made
Share Comments (…) Alok Jha, science correspondent guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 11 January 2011 18.30 GMT larger | smaller Article history

A fragment of Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III (SDSS-III) showing walls and clusters of galaxies visible from the southern hemisphere. Photograph: SDSS-III/PA It is the culmination of a decade spent scanning the night skies and would take half a million high-definition televisions to view at its full resolution. With more than a trillion pixels, this is the most detailed digital picture of the universe ever produced.

It replaces an image that is now over half a century old, created on photographic plates by the Palomar Sky Survey in the 1950s but still used by astronomers today.

By contrast, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's third and final release of data (SDSS-III) was created using a 138-megapixel camera attached to a 2.5 metre telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. It contains 10 times as many objects – such as galaxies, stars and nebulae – as the Palomar survey and scientists hope it will be used for decades to come by astronomers hunting for everything from dark matter to planets orbiting other stars.

"There are half a billion objects detected in this image," said David Weinberg, an astronomer at Ohio State University who worked on the SDSS image. "About a quarter of a billion stars and a quarter of a billion galaxies."

Each pixel contains data in five different colours of light. "That's green, yellow, red, redder than red and bluer than blue. We actually take five different images of each piece of the sky, looking through different filters," said Weinberg.

Each pixel is about one-three-trillionth of the sky, and overall the image covers around a third of it. "The way the telescope works, it takes its images in long stripes so that in one night it will get one big long stripe. That's why there are two big patches that are all filled in and then there are these other stripes coming out of it which are the other places where we extended into other parts of the sky but didn't fill everything in."

Click to expand the picture above. At the bottom is a map of the whole SDSS image, split into the views of the northern and southern hemispheres of our galaxy. At this scale, huge structures such as clusters and walls of galaxies become visible. At the top left, a fraction of the sky visible from the southern hemisphere has been blown up to reveal a spiral-armed galaxy called Messier 33 (M33). This galaxy is 2m light years away from our solar system and is spotted with nurseries where new stars are being created – visible as green dots throughout its arms.

"Those green filaments are hydrogen gas that is being lit up by the hot stars in the middle," said Weinberg. "And there's a lot of blue stars in the image that are all young, hot stars that are formed in this galaxy."

At the top right is a further close-up of one of these star nurseries in M33, called NGC604.

For the brightest million objects in the survey, the SDSS team also measured the full spectra of the light, effectively passing the radiation through a prism and splitting it into different frequencies. This allowed the scientists to measure the distance to the objects, which was then used to infer a 3D map of their distribution.

"The goal is to understand why the expansion of the universe is speeding up – that is the biggest puzzle in cosmology today, because all of our experience is that ... things fall towards each other," said Weinberg. "But, at the scale of the universe, gravity seems to be pushing things apart. In addition, we're monitoring the motions of about 10,000 stars to try to detect them wobbling back and forth to see if they're being orbited by giant planets."

The SDSS data and images were released today at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle. The 138-megapixel imaging camera that was used to take the millions of pictures that make up the latest image is being retired, destined to become part of the permanent collection at the Smithsonian in Washington DC – a recognition of its unique contribution to astronomy.

'Planck' observa el Universo frío

El cielo visto por Planck en el rango de las microondas y, abajo, nuevo mapa de fuentes frías de radiación (fuentes galácticas en azul y extragalácticas, entre ellas las galaxias hasta ahora invisibles, en amarillo).- ESA

Los primeros resultados del satélite desvelan una población invisible de galaxias antiguas
EL PAÍS - Madrid - 11/01/2011

Miles de fuentes de radiación muy frías en el Universo forman el nuevo catálogo hecho con los datos que ha recopilado el satélite europeo Planck. En sus primeros resultados científicos, presentados este martes en París, Planck ha desvelado una población invisible de galaxias envueltas en polvo hace miles de millones de años que formaron estrellas a ritmos mucho más elevados del que vemos en nuestra galaxia actualmente. Las medidas de esta población de galaxias no se habían hecho nunca hasta ahora en las longitudes de onda utilizadas por Planck, entre el infrarrojo y el radio.

El satélite fue lanzado en 2009 para estudiar la formación de las primeras estructuras a gran escala en el Universo, de donde surgieron las galaxias. Estas estructuras son las que rompen la uniformidad de la radiación de fondo de microondas, la que permanece como un eco del Big Bang, ya que se emitió solo 380.000 años después, cuando el Universo ya se estaba enfriando.

Para alcanzar el objetivo, hay que descartar las fuentes muy frías (galaxias en su mayor parte) que se interponen y contaminan las medidas y de ahí el catálogo que se ha presentado ahora. También se ha medido otra fuente de contaminación, la llamada emisión de microondas anómala, un brillo difuso asociado sobre todo a las regiones más densas y ricas en polvo de nuestra galaxia cuyo origen ha sido un misterio durante décadas.

Los datos recogidos por Planck confirman la teoría de que esta niebla local de microondas procede de granos de polvo que giran sobre sí mismos a altísima velocidad debido a colisiones con átomos en movimiento o paquetes de ondas ultravioleta.

Y, por último, Planck ha mostrado nuevos detalles de otros actores del escenario cósmico, los cúmulos distantes de galaxias, que muestra como siluetas compactas sobre el fondo cósmico de microondas. El equipo del proyecto ha identificado hasta ahora 189 de estos cúmulos, 20 de los cuales eran desconocidos y han sido confirmados por el observatorio XMM-Newton, también de la ESA . "Estas observaciones las utilizaremos como ladrillos para construir nuestro conocimiento del Universo", dice Nabila Aghanim, del CNRS y la universidad Paris Sud.

"Estos resultados son la punta del iceberg científico", ha dicho David Southwood, director científico de ESA. "Planck está superando las expectativas gracias a la dedicación de todos los involucrados en el proyecto".

El satélite sigue observando el Universo desde su órbita de Lissajous alrededor del segundo punto de Lagrange del sistema Sol-Tierra. Sus próximos datos serán hechos públicos en enero de 2013 y sus responsables esperan que revelen el fondo cósmico de microondas con un detalle inédito.

Time to lose control

Museums have made great strides in adapting to the digital age but they need to go much further
By András Szántó | From Art Basel Miami Beach daily edition, 2 Dec 10
Published online 2 Dec 10



Adobe's Museum of Digital Media is showing work by Tony Oursler for its first exhibition.

Numbers scroll on a screen. Ethereal music fills the air. Cityscapes flash by. New York. Hong Kong. Venice. San Francisco. Streets and skylines are dipped in golden sunlight. But something is different. From the heart of each metropolis arises the same futuristic skyscraper. Its three shimmering towers are locked in a helical embrace. Its milky, undulating forms sprang from the imagination of Italian architect Filippo Innocenti, a Zaha Hadid associate.

Welcome to the Adobe Museum of Digital Media (AMDM). Located nowhere and everywhere, it opened in October on the web (adobemuseum.com). It has a curator, Tom Eccles, and an inaugural exhibition by Tony Oursler. It even has a “personal viewing pod”, a one-eyed fish in a soap bubble that flaps about like a Pixar character. “For the artist’s biography, click the museum directory,” she says, in a vaguely French accent that invokes Simon de Pury’s mellifluous auction chant.



Is this the digital future of the museum? Don’t count on it. The AMDM is a mesmerising virtual ride but it bears little resemblance to how museums are using digital tools, or to what lies ahead once they fully embrace new media.

1.0.

With few exceptions, museums came late to the digital party. Until quite recently, most have used their websites as extended online brochures, limited to practical information and collection highlights. Digitising and sharing the breadth of a museum’s collection is a costly, time-consuming and complicated endeavour (especially for contemporary art, where copyright restrictions are in effect). As for videos, apps, social media and all things wiki—such bells and whistles have only just started popping up on museum sites.

But in fairness, museums are further along on their new-media projects than other kinds of fine-art institutions. And they are more digitally dexterous than most commercial galleries. “The art world is constitutionally reluctant to commit to a real digital presence, whatever the platform,” says Kevin Conley, a former New Yorker writer who created The Exhibitionist mobile app for gallery-goers, “because so much of the value in the art business is based on the control of information.” Meagre budgets and a vogue for minimalist design contribute to a dull uniformity in the promotion of art online.

There are glimpses of promising innovation around the art world, of course. Lehmann Maupin Gallery’s website features elegant videos showcasing artists and exhibitions (lehmannmaupin.com). Jen Bekman’s 20x200 project (20x200.com) has shown that online gallery sales can be successful. Pace Gallery, in addition to its content-rich website and archive, is publishing digital catalogues raisonnés through its Artifex Press (artifexpress.com). Intrepid dealers like Ed Winkleman are well known as bloggers (edwardwinkleman.com). Auction houses are uploading catalogues, videos and viewing tools that help clients examine and bid—some are even tweeting their sales. Art Basel’s 3D smartphone app, launched last June, has solved the vexing problem of finding a gallery booth or a midday sandwich (artbasel.com/go/id/lre). There’s even an online art fair (vipartfair.com), coming in January to a device near you.

Museums are watching these developments closely. They know that they too must conquer new media and respond to the changing habits of their audiences, or risk losing their relevancy. But art museums are, by design, conservative. They are understandably anxious about investing in technology that could become obsolete. And they don’t want to be seen jumping on bandwagons. Mastering the digital future takes time, resources and a willingness to test comfort zones, even for the most open-minded institutions.

2.0.

Despite these obstacles, the most widely recognised museum innovators—MoMA, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, Brooklyn Museum, Tate, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to name a few—have been steadily expanding their digital footprints. Dramatic changes have happened in the past 18 months. Major upgrades are in the works at the Metropolitan Museum and other bellwether institutions. Progress is accelerating.

First, technology is changing the relationship between objects, curators and visitors. The linchpin is collection searching, which has improved by an order of magnitude in recent years. The Victoria and Albert Museum’s jam-packed site (collections.vam.ac.uk), which can search a million objects with the help of an intuitive user interface, is a prime example. (Advances in so-called semantic data, which analyse the kind of complex queries that arise in humanities research, mean that even more sophisticated searches may be around the corner.) Digital tools are letting visitors experience objects in new ways. On the Louvre’s site, visitors can zoom in on masterpieces and tour virtual galleries (louvre.fr). Some museums, including MoMA, now invite visitors to curate their own art selections with an “add to my collection” button. As for that time-honoured delivery mechanism for curatorial research, the catalogue, experts predict a wholesale shift to electronic publishing within five years.

Second, much of this innovation is being spurred by an explosion in usage of mobile media. Museums are developing mobile versions of their websites for smartphones and tablets. They are migrating from Acoustigides to cheaper, more flexible cellphone technology, which they can customise in clever ways. At the Brooklyn Museum visitors can play “gallery tag”, finding works with certain attributes and entering their accession numbers via cellphone to earn points and prizes (brooklynmuseum.org). Not a week passes, of course, without a fanfare about a newly launched museum app. These are still a work in progress. Some have less information than wall labels. But progress and economics are on their side.

Third, museums are venturing beyond traditional curatorial material. Their homepages are beginning to look like magazine sites, with channels for news, streaming content and audience dialogue. Blogs, written by staffers or professionals, routinely attract the most traffic on museum websites. Some institutions are experimenting with user-generated content. The National September 11 Memorial and Museum is collecting pictures and videos from witnesses and victims’ family members (makehistory. national911memorial.org). The V&A is asking for public input on how to crop 140,000 digitised photographs (collections.vam.ac.uk/ crowdsourcing). New distribution platforms, such as ArtBabble, a kind of YouTube for art videos from a consortium of institutions (artbabble.org), are putting museums in the communications business.

Fourth, technology is revitalising museum education. Digital media open up new pathways for exchange between experts and visitors, and are making it possible for members of the public to learn from each other. Digital initiatives can make learning fun. The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s multimedia scavenger hunt, “Ghost of a Chance”, in which players used text messages, email and the web to find hidden objects in the museum, drew 3,000 participants. A few museums are even dipping their toes into online education. MoMA’s education portal lists 20 courses aimed at the general audience, starting at $220, with titles like “The 1960s: Art and Life” (www.moma.org/learn/courses/courses).

Fifth, the web is, of course, a marketing tool par excellence. Social media initiatives are blending education and marketing. An international web event last September called “Ask a Curator” made available experts from 340 museums for online questions (askacurator.com). It generated a lot of new visitors. The Guggenheim Museum’s creative video biennial, “YouTube Play”, a collaboration with YouTube, HP and Intel, attracted a staggering 23,000 submissions this autumn (youtube.com/play). From the Prado’s Google Earth tool, which zooms in from space on the collection’s most iconic paintings (google.com/intl/en/landing/prado), to Jeffrey Deitch’s personal tour of his Los Feliz home (moca.org/audio/blog/?p=988), museums are discovering ingenious ways to build audiences.

Last but not least, technology is transforming professional museum practice. The Museum Dashboard, developed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, takes transparency to a new level by providing real-time information on everything from the size of the endowment to objects slated for deaccessioning (dashboard.imamuseum.org). Some of the least sexy but most significant improvements are happening behind the scenes, where digital tools are helping museums gather data about visitors, manage collections, and keep a handle on budgets and human resources.

3.0.

As they feel their way toward a digital future, museums need to think deeply about what they stand for: what are they willing to sacrifice for the sake of evolution, and where will they draw the line against technological disruption? There are crunchy practical dilemmas to solve: can museums recover the costs of their digital operations? How will they deal with copyright restrictions? What to do about privacy protections or unwanted commercial intrusion?

And there are the intangibles: what is the ideal balance between physical objects and virtual experience? Is the function of technology to turn the museum into more of a community space, or to facilitate encounters of a deeply personal kind? Should museum websites aspire to the frenzied hyper-realism of video games, or should they leave that kind of thing to purveyors of popular entertainment?

Privately, some directors and curators are anxious about unintended consequences. Many older visitors like their museums just as they are. There is something to be said, after all, about the museum as a gadget-free zone—a last bulwark against computerisation. A smartphone is a cool and quick way to find the great blue whale or The Garden of Earthly Delights, but what’s wrong with getting lost in a museum?

In any event, technological change hasn’t seeped yet all the way into museums’ innermost structures and attitudes. When it does, museums will look very different. Digital innovation doesn’t just enable institutions to do old things in new ways. It forces fundamental and often painful realignments. Just look at the news.

For art institutions of all stripes, embracing new media will mean “not just a lot of whiz-bang technology, but a rethinking of the relationship with the audience,” says Artsjournal.com founder Douglas McLennan. It means adopting a new approach to information across all departments. A decade ago, a museum’s IT department was a backwater. Today, it belongs next to the director’s office. The notion that technology is less of a tool and more of mindset doesn’t come naturally to experts steeped in object-oriented practice.

The hardest part may be letting go.

Museums have a long history of exercising total command over their content. That’s over. “Museums in the future will still be reliable sources of information, and a curator will continue to be the authority on a particular work of art,” says Rob Stein, chief information officer of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. “But we won’t control the information channels.”

András Szántó is a contributing editor to The Art Newspaper. He will moderate tomorrow’s Art Basel Conversation with Maxwell Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Lauren Cornell, executive director of Rhizome and a curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Peter Reed, senior deputy director for curatorial affairs at the Museum of Modern Art. Convention Center, auditorium next to Gate D, 10-11am

Dennis Hopper's bullet-scarred Warhol screen print on sale

Image of Mao dented with two bullet holes from Hopper's shotgun among memorabilia to be sold by Christie's in New York

Share Comments (…) Mark Brown, arts correspondent guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 5 January 2011 18.27 GMT larger | smaller Article history

Andy Warhol's print of Chairman Mao. Post-bullet marks, the American artist listed Dennis Hopper as a collaborator. Photograph: AP/Christie's We've all been there. It's late, you're at home and you're spooked by one of your works of art – an Andy Warhol screen print of a smiling, smug Chairman Mao – so you pick up a gun and shoot it. One as a warning, the next through his eye.

In truth, only the late actor Dennis Hopper was there and it was the 1970s, a time when he was taking drugs in order to sober up quicker so he could start drinking again. Certainly his friend Warhol didn't mind, cheerfully annotating the two bullet holes.

As a result the work became a Warhol-Hopper collaboration, and it will be sold by Christie's in New York for an estimated £20,000-£30,000 next week, part of a sale of some 300 items of memorabilia and Hopper-owned art that filled his Venice Beach home from floor to ceiling. Many of the items are estimated in the low thousands of dollars and it follows the sale of Hopper's expensive stuff last November when 30 works were sold for a combined total of $12.8m (£8m) including a Jean-Michel Basquiat which went for $5.8m.


Hopper, who died last May aged 74, was a voracious collector from the 1950s onwards – encouraged by the actor Vincent Price – and a friend and patron to many artists as well as being a photographer and painter himself.

A family friend and trustee of Hopper's estate, Alex Hitz, described the Warhol incident. "One night in the shadows, Dennis, out of the corner of his eyes, saw the Mao and he was so spooked by it that he got up and shot at it, twice, putting two bullet holes in it.

"Andy saw it, loved it and annotated those holes," labelling them "warning shot" and "bullet hole".

Also included in the sale is a painted letter from the artist Jean Tinguely, brilliantly illustrated with familiar Tinguely motifs and the message – 'Thank you for the 3-phone calls. I am looking for to be in L.A!' There are also mementos from his films and career – a Waterworld-themed pinball machine anyone? – and numerous posters for movies including Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now, Blue Velvet and Speed.

Most of the art is 20th century, although there is the odd incongruous item. For example, if you want to own Hopper's 300-year-old Italian walnut buffet it will cost someone in the region of $1,000-1,500.

Other lots include a 1955 photograph of Hopper as doe-eyed pretty boy taken by fellow actor Roddy McDowell and a peculiar portrait of Hopper with a vampiric Christopher Walken taken at the Chateau Marmont hotel, LA, by Annie Leibowitz.

The collection is being sold on 11-12 January by Hopper's four children and they are, said Hitz, following their father's wishes.

Computers That See You and Keep Watch Over You

By STEVE LOHR
Hundreds of correctional officers from prisons across America descended last spring on a shuttered penitentiary in West Virginia for annual training exercises.

Some officers played the role of prisoners, acting like gang members and stirring up trouble, including a mock riot. The latest in prison gear got a workout — body armor, shields, riot helmets, smoke bombs, gas masks. And, at this year’s drill, computers that could see the action.

Perched above the prison yard, five cameras tracked the play-acting prisoners, and artificial-intelligence software analyzed the images to recognize faces, gestures and patterns of group behavior. When two groups of inmates moved toward each other, the experimental computer system sent an alert — a text message — to a corrections officer that warned of a potential incident and gave the location.

The computers cannot do anything more than officers who constantly watch surveillance monitors under ideal conditions. But in practice, officers are often distracted. When shifts change, an observation that is worth passing along may be forgotten. But machines do not blink or forget. They are tireless assistants.

The enthusiasm for such systems extends well beyond the nation’s prisons. High-resolution, low-cost cameras are proliferating, found in products like smartphones and laptop computers. The cost of storing images is dropping, and new software algorithms for mining, matching and scrutinizing the flood of visual data are progressing swiftly.

A computer-vision system can watch a hospital room and remind doctors and nurses to wash their hands, or warn of restless patients who are in danger of falling out of bed. It can, through a computer-equipped mirror, read a man’s face to detect his heart rate and other vital signs. It can analyze a woman’s expressions as she watches a movie trailer or shops online, and help marketers tailor their offerings accordingly. Computer vision can also be used at shopping malls, schoolyards, subway platforms, office complexes and stadiums.

All of which could be helpful — or alarming.

“Machines will definitely be able to observe us and understand us better,” said Hartmut Neven, a computer scientist and vision expert at Google. “Where that leads is uncertain.”

Google has been both at the forefront of the technology’s development and a source of the anxiety surrounding it. Its Street View service, which lets Internet users zoom in from above on a particular location, faced privacy complaints. Google will blur out people’s homes at their request.

Google has also introduced an application called Goggles, which allows people to take a picture with a smartphone and search the Internet for matching images. The company’s executives decided to exclude a facial-recognition feature, which they feared might be used to find personal information on people who did not know that they were being photographed.

Despite such qualms, computer vision is moving into the mainstream. With this technological evolution, scientists predict, people will increasingly be surrounded by machines that can not only see but also reason about what they are seeing, in their own limited way.

The uses, noted Frances Scott, an expert in surveillance technologies at the National Institute of Justice, the Justice Department’s research agency, could allow the authorities to spot a terrorist, identify a lost child or locate an Alzheimer’s patient who has wandered off.

The future of law enforcement, national security and military operations will most likely rely on observant machines. A few months ago, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s research arm, awarded the first round of grants in a five-year research program called the Mind’s Eye. Its goal is to develop machines that can recognize, analyze and communicate what they see. Mounted on small robots or drones, these smart machines could replace human scouts. “These things, in a sense, could be team members,” said James Donlon, the program’s manager.

Millions of people now use products that show the progress that has been made in computer vision. In the last two years, the major online photo-sharing services — Picasa by Google, Windows Live Photo Gallery by Microsoft, Flickr by Yahoo and iPhoto by Apple — have all started using face recognition. A user puts a name to a face, and the service finds matches in other photographs. It is a popular tool for finding and organizing pictures.

Kinect, an add-on to Microsoft’s Xbox 360 gaming console, is a striking advance for computer vision in the marketplace. It uses a digital camera and sensors to recognize people and gestures; it also understands voice commands. Players control the computer with waves of the hand, and then move to make their on-screen animated stand-ins — known as avatars — run, jump, swing and dance. Since Kinect was introduced in November, game reviewers have applauded, and sales are surging.

To Microsoft, Kinect is not just a game, but a step toward the future of computing. “It’s a world where technology more fundamentally understands you, so you don’t have to understand it,” said Alex Kipman, an engineer on the team that designed Kinect.

‘Please Wash Your Hands’

A nurse walks into a hospital room while scanning a clipboard. She greets the patient and washes her hands. She checks and records his heart rate and blood pressure, adjusts the intravenous drip, turns him over to look for bed sores, then heads for the door but does not wash her hands again, as protocol requires. “Pardon the interruption,” declares a recorded women’s voice, with a slight British accent. “Please wash your hands.”

Three months ago, Bassett Medical Center in Cooperstown, N.Y., began an experiment with computer vision in a single hospital room. Three small cameras, mounted inconspicuously on the ceiling, monitor movements in Room 542, in a special care unit (a notch below intensive care) where patients are treated for conditions like severe pneumonia, heart attacks and strokes. The cameras track people going in and out of the room as well as the patient’s movements in bed.

The first applications of the system, designed by scientists at General Electric, are immediate reminders and alerts. Doctors and nurses are supposed to wash their hands before and after touching a patient; lapses contribute significantly to hospital-acquired infections, research shows.

The camera over the bed delivers images to software that is programmed to recognize movements that indicate when a patient is in danger of falling out of bed. The system would send an alert to a nearby nurse.

If the results at Bassett prove to be encouraging, more features can be added, like software that analyzes facial expressions for signs of severe pain, the onset of delirium or other hints of distress, said Kunter Akbay, a G.E. scientist.

Hospitals have an incentive to adopt tools that improve patient safety. Medicare and Medicaid are adjusting reimbursement rates to penalize hospitals that do not work to prevent falls and pressure ulcers, and whose doctors and nurses do not wash their hands enough. But it is too early to say whether computer vision, like the system being tried out at Bassett, will prove to be cost-effective.

Mirror, Mirror

Daniel J. McDuff, a graduate student, stood in front of a mirror at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. After 20 seconds or so, a figure — 65, the number of times his heart was beating per minute — appeared at the mirror’s bottom. Behind the two-way mirror was a Web camera, which fed images of Mr. McDuff to a computer whose software could track the blood flow in his face.

The software separates the video images into three channels — for the basic colors red, green and blue. Changes to the colors and to movements made by tiny contractions and expansions in blood vessels in the face are, of course, not apparent to the human eye, but the computer can see them.

“Your heart-rate signal is in your face,” said Ming-zher Poh, an M.I.T. graduate student. Other vital signs, including breathing rate, blood-oxygen level and blood pressure, should leave similar color and movement clues.

The pulse-measuring project, described in research published in May by Mr. Poh, Mr. McDuff and Rosalind W. Picard, a professor at the lab, is just the beginning, Mr. Poh said. Computer vision and clever software, he said, make it possible to monitor humans’ vital signs at a digital glance. Daily measurements can be analyzed to reveal that, for example, a person’s risk of heart trouble is rising. “This can happen, and in the future it will be in mirrors,” he said.

Faces can yield all sorts of information to watchful computers, and the M.I.T. students’ adviser, Dr. Picard, is a pioneer in the field, especially in the use of computing to measure and communicate emotions. For years, she and a research scientist at the university, Rana el-Kaliouby, have applied facial-expression analysis software to help young people with autism better recognize the emotional signals from others that they have such a hard time understanding.

The two women are the co-founders of Affectiva, a company in Waltham, Mass., that is beginning to market its facial-expression analysis software to manufacturers of consumer products, retailers, marketers and movie studios. Its mission is to mine consumers’ emotional responses to improve the designs and marketing campaigns of products.

John Ross, chief executive of Shopper Sciences, a marketing research company that is part of the Interpublic Group, said Affectiva’s technology promises to give marketers an impartial reading of the sequence of emotions that leads to a purchase, in a way that focus groups and customer surveys cannot. “You can see and analyze how people are reacting in real time, not what they are saying later, when they are often trying to be polite,” he said. The technology, he added, is more scientific and less costly than having humans look at store surveillance videos, which some retailers do.

The facial-analysis software, Mr. Ross said, could be used in store kiosks or with Webcams. Shopper Sciences, he said, is testing Affectiva’s software with a major retailer and an online dating service, neither of which he would name. The dating service, he said, was analyzing users’ expressions in search of “trigger words” in personal profiles that people found appealing or off-putting.

Watching the Watchers

Maria Sonin, 33, an office worker in Waltham, Mass., sat in front of a notebook computer looking at a movie trailer while Affectiva’s software, through the PC’s Webcam, calibrated her reaction. The trailer was for “Little Fockers,” starring Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller, which opened just before Christmas. The software measured her reactions by tracking movements on a couple of dozen points on her face — mostly along the eyes, eyebrows, nose and the perimeter of her lips.

To the human eye, Ms. Sonin appeared to be amused. The software agreed, said Dr. Kaliouby, though it used a finer-grained analysis, like recording that her smiles were symmetrical (signaling amusement, not embarrassment) and not smirks. The software, Ms. Kaliouby said, allows for continuous, objective measurement of viewers’ response to media, and in the future will do so in large numbers on the Web.

Ms. Sonin, an unpaid volunteer, said later that she did not think about being recorded by the Webcam. “It wasn’t as if it was a big camera in front of you,” she said.

Christopher Hamilton, a technical director of visual effects, has used specialized software to analyze facial expressions and recreate them on the screen. The films he has worked on include “King Kong,” “Charlotte’s Web” and “The Matrix Revolutions.” Using facial-expression analysis technology to gauge the reaction of viewers, who agree to be watched, may well become a valuable tool for movie makers, said Mr. Hamilton, who is not involved with Affectiva.

Today, sampling audience reaction before a movie is released typically means gathering a couple of hundred people at a preview screening. The audience members then answer questions and fill out surveys. Yet viewers, marketing experts say, are often inarticulate and imprecise about their emotional reactions.

The software “makes it possible to measure audience response with a scene-by-scene granularity that the current survey-and-questionnaire approach cannot,” Mr. Hamilton said. A director, he added, could find out, for example, that although audience members liked a movie over all, they did not like two or three scenes. Or he could learn that a particular character did not inspire the intended emotional response.

Emotion-sensing software, Mr. Hamilton said, might become part of the entertainment experience — especially as more people watch movies and programs on Internet-connected televisions, computers and portable devices. Viewers could share their emotional responses with friends using recommendation systems based on what scene — say, the protagonists’ dancing or a car chase — delivered the biggest emotional jolt.

Affectiva, Dr. Picard said, intends to offer its technology as “opt-in only,” meaning consumers have to be notified and have to agree to be watched online or in stores. Affectiva, she added, has turned down companies, which she declined to name, that wanted to use its software without notifying customers.

Darker Possibilities

Dr. Picard enunciates a principled stance, but one that could become problematic in other hands.

The challenge arises from the prospect of the rapid spread of less-expensive yet powerful computer-vision technologies.

At work or school, the technology opens the door to a computerized supervisor that is always watching. Are you paying attention, goofing off or daydreaming? In stores and shopping malls, smart surveillance could bring behavioral tracking into the physical world.

More subtle could be the effect of a person knowing that he is being watched — and how that awareness changes his thinking and actions. It could be beneficial: a person thinks twice and a crime goes uncommitted. But might it also lead to a society that is less spontaneous, less creative, less innovative?

“With every technology, there is a dark side,” said Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth. “Sometimes you can predict it, but often you can’t.”

A decade ago, he noted, no one predicted that cellphones and text messaging would lead to traffic accidents caused by distracted drivers. And, he said, it was difficult to foresee that the rise of Facebook and Twitter and personal blogs would become troves of data to be collected and exploited in tracking people’s online behavior.

Often, a technology that is benign in one setting can cause harm in a different context. Google confronted that problem this year with its face-recognition software. In its Picasa photo-storing and sharing service, face recognition helps people find and organize pictures of family and friends.

But the company took a different approach with Goggles, which lets a person snap a photograph with a smartphone, setting off an Internet search. Take a picture of the Eiffel Tower and links to Web pages with background information and articles about it appear on the phone’s screen. Take a picture of a wine bottle and up come links to reviews of that vintage.

Google could have put face recognition into the Goggles application; indeed, many users have asked for it. But Google decided against it because smartphones can be used to take pictures of individuals without their knowledge, and a face match could retrieve all kinds of personal information — name, occupation, address, workplace.

“It was just too sensitive, and we didn’t want to go there,” said Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google. “You want to avoid enabling stalker behavior.”

Bhutan's endangered temple art treasures

A 17th-century paintings of the Lama Lhakhang in Trongsa dzong.

Reclusive kingdom located between India and China has asked for advice on preserving masterworks from the 16th-19th centuries

Dalya Alberge The Observer, Sunday 2 January 2011 larger | smaller Article history

British art experts have been given unique access to the hidden heritage of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, including spectacular 16th- to 19th- century wall paintings from its 2,000 temples and monasteries.

Specialists from the Courtauld Institute have been amazed by the exquisite quality and technical sophistication of paintings that were largely unknown and unrecorded in the west. Professor David Park, from the Courtauld, said: "The wall paintings are absolutely stunning. Some of the earlier examples, especially, are extraordinary."

His colleague, Stephen Rickerby, said: "We were astonished by the rich, jewel-like quality of some of the paintings in such remote settings. It was quite unexpected." He described their technique as unrivalled in the west and spoke of being overawed by the miniaturist detail, achieved through a unique layering of colours and coatings. The subtlety and sophistication of facial expressions and flowers were "staggering". Despite their intricacy, some of the paintings are huge, extending across hundreds of square metres.

Bhutan, a kingdom of 700,000 people with a Tibetan Buddhist heritage, is one of the world's most insular countries. Its temples and monasteries are in rugged mountain terrain where, in some areas, horses, mules and yaks are the most common modes of transport. One hermitage is perched 3,400m up a mountain and is so inaccessible that even mules cannot reach it. Rickerby climbed for two hours to reach it. Once in the hermitage, he was taken aback by the early 18th-century paintings on its inner walls.

Access to the sites was granted as part of a three-year research collaboration between the Courtauld and the Bhutan department of culture, through funding from an anonymous US benefactor. The last stage of fieldwork and scientific analysis has just ended.

The project marks a further stage in opening up Bhutan, which was almost completely cut off from the rest of the world for centuries. The kingdom, landlocked between India and China and which calls itself the Land of the Thunder Dragon, started to allow tourism only in the 1970s. Even today few westerners know the country. Trekking is not allowed in the sacred mountains, where the country's former king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, decreed that "gross national happiness" was more important than the economic advancement of its inhabitants.

The spectacular paintings seen by the British experts decorate the walls of 17th-century temples in dzongs, or Tibetan-style fortresses, the most important of which includes the Tamshing Monastery.

Its wall paintings are among the earliest in Bhutan, and are intimately associated with one of the most revered figures in Bhutanese Buddhism, the saint Pema Lingpa. The paintings can be dated precisely to his time at Tamshing, between 1501 and 1506, and they include his portrait. "The paintings are immensely important," said Rickerby.

Another site boasting a rich selection of paintings is the Tango Monastery, dedicated to Tenzin Rabgye, a 17th-century spiritual ruler and poet whose personal chamber was painted with rich pigments and gold by the finest artists, probably of Tibetan, Newari (people from the Kathmandu valley) and Bhutanese origin. A long-held oral tradition records that the figures in the paintings cried when Tenzin Rabgye died.

Although the paintings are largely sacred in subject and are restricted to religious worship, the Bhutanese have looked to the Courtauld's expertise to ensure the paintings' preservation for posterity. Some of the buildings in which they have survived have been damaged over the centuries by fires and floods. In a harsh natural environment, gradual deterioration takes its toll on the susceptible materials that constitute the paintings.

The Courtauld study will lead to an understanding of how the art deteriorates and how it can be preserved. "An alarming number of Buddhist wall paintings in India and Tibet have been irreversibly damaged by well-meaning but disastrous cleaning," said Rickerby. "Bhutan's isolationist past protected its cultural heritage from such dangers, but the opening up of the country means that such risks cannot now be ignored."

He and a colleague will publish a report next year as a benchmark for the future study and conservation. Until now, no one had a clear idea of how many paintings existed, let alone their condition, date or significance. Rickerby said: "Their significance and quality deserve far wider recognition."

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

Missing in action? The young journalist in at the birth of a movement

Making it up as he went along: Roger Fry and, right, H.M. Bateman's 1910 mocking cartoon "Post-Impressions of the Post-Impressionists" from The Bystander magazine

A century ago, an exhibition in London gave us the term post-impressionism. But who prompted Roger Fry to name it?
By Martin Bailey | From issue 219, December 2010
Published online 15 Dec 10 (News)


LONDON. “Post-impressionism” was a British invention, even if its artists worked mainly in France. A hundred years on, it still remains a mystery who helped art historian and artist Roger Fry devise the term. We can offer a few clues, and invite our readers to help solve the puzzle.

“Manet and the Post-Impressionists”, a show mounted by Fry, opened at London’s Grafton Galleries on 8 November 1910. For the first time a significant number of works by Van Gogh and Gauguin were shown in London.

The exhibition caused a sensation. The majority of critics and the public derided the paintings, but some fell in love with modern art. Referring to the show’s impact over the following weeks, Virginia Woolf later famously wrote that “on or about December 1910, human character changed”. Britain was finally succumbing to the wave of modernism that had been sweeping across Europe.

The irony is that Fry was only invited at the last minute to fill a gap in the programme of the Grafton Galleries. The story of the title only emerged in 1945, when exhibition secretary Desmond MacCarthy recalled: “What was the exhibition to be called? … Roger [Fry] and I and a young journalist who was to help us with publicity met to consider this, and it was at that meeting that a word which is now safely embedded in the English language—‘post-im­pressionism’—was invented. Roger first suggested various terms like ‘expressionism’, which aimed at distinguishing these artists from the impressionists; but the journalist wouldn’t have that or any other of his alternatives. At last Roger, losing patience, said: ‘Oh, let’s just call them the post-impressionists; at any rate, they came after the impressionists.’”

So who was the journalist who acted as the catalyst at the birth of “post-impressionism”? He was young, presumably in his 20s (and was almost certainly male).

The journalist might have been a critic who published a review, but there were a relatively small number of favourable pieces, notably by Lewis Hind, Holbrook Jackson and Frank Rutter, who were all in their 30s or 40s. Rutter used the term in an article on 14 October 1910, but aged 34 he was not really young.

Another possibility is that the “journalist” could have also been a general assistant at the Grafton Galleries. The Van Gogh Museum archive has a handwritten letter from someone working under Fry, which appears to be signed “F. Wolston” (although the signature is not entirely clear). Nothing further is known about him, but could he have been the person who “helped with publicity”?

What comes as a surprise is that the journalist never went on to write about his own role, considering the historic importance which the exhibition later assumed. This suggests that he might have been killed in the first world war, which broke out less than four years later.

The exhibition generated over 50 reviews, and 25,000 visitors flocked to the Grafton Galleries, an astonishing number for a commercial space. Whoever masterminded publicity for “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

And still they come…

One hundred years on, the post-impressionists continue to pull in the crowds. This year in London the two most popular shows, in terms of visitor numbers, look set to be “The Real Van Gogh: the Artist and his Letters” at the Royal Academy (23 January-18 April) and “Gauguin: Maker of Myth” at Tate Modern (30 September-16 January 2011). Van Gogh had 411,000, and although Gauguin has six more weeks to run it is likely to end up with well over 350,000. It may be a close-run race.

El fotógrafo del tiempo

Jean-Luc Mylayne expone en el palacio de Cristal su visión de la naturaleza
ISABEL LAFONT - Madrid - 29/12/2010

Si hubiera que clasificar las fotografías de Jean-Luc Maylayne (Marquise, 1946) según el tiempo que tardaron en obtenerse, ocuparía sin duda el final de una escala que tendría su punto de partida en el fotoperiodismo. Lo suyo es la contemplación, la paciencia del cazador que espera en su puesto el paso de una pieza. Maylayne puede observar durante meses los hábitos de un gorrión, un estornino o un carbonero a la espera de la luz, el encuadre y el enfoque perfecto. Así ha elaborado unas 500 fotografías a lo largo de 32 años. Son copias únicas en color, de gran formato y, hasta el 4 de abril, el palacio de Velázquez (más conocido como palacio de Cristal) acoge una muestra de las mismas, en la primera retrospectiva de este artista que se presenta en España.

"Son fotografías que no tienen nada que ver con el instante decisivo del que hablaba Cartier-Bresson", explicaba Manuel Borja-Villel, director del Museo Reina Sofía -responsable de este espacio expositivo-, durante la presente la presentación de esta muestra. "Son imágenes en las que hay algo de verdadero y algo de construido, de artificial. Hay un tiempo humano y un tiempo geológico porque la naturaleza está presente, no una visión romántica de la misma, sino una visión basada en el silencio", añadía Borja-Villel. Maylayne no pretende documentar la naturaleza que observa, a pesar de que los títulos de sus imágenes recojan un número de inventario seguido del tiempo que tardó en tomarlas. "La totalidad de la obra está muy comprometida con la metafísica y hay que prestar a esto tanta atención como a los detalles concretos", ha explicado la subdirectora del Museo Reina Sofía. Lynne Cooke. Maylayne no fotografía una naturaleza salvaje, sino espacios como ranchos o granjas de Francia o Estados Unidos en los que existe un diálogo entre seres humanos y animales. "El artista no solo diseña el espacio, sino la puesta en escena: siempre sabe dónde va a estar el pájaro en la imagen", señala Cooke. Pero, como subraya el escritor y crítico de arte Javier Montes, autor de uno de los textos que figuran en el catálogo de la exposición, "ni siquiera son los pájaros el asunto principal de su trabajo, hasta cierto punto funcionan como pretexto de un subtexto denso y complejo de conceptos relacionados con la mecánica de la percepción visual, espacial y temporal. Al final, de ellos acaba por desprenderse todo un sistema filosófico". Todo un cuerpo de reflexiones sobre asuntos como el ciclo de vida y muerte, el desgaste de los recursos naturales o la interdependencia del hombre y la naturaleza.

El Abogado del Estado niega que los padres tengan el monopolio sobre la educación y las virtudes cívicas

Llega al Constitucional el primer recurso contra Educación para la Ciudadanía
JULIO M. LÁZARO | Madrid 28/12/2010

La Abogacía del Estado se ha opuesto al recurso de inconstitucionalidad formulado por los padres de una niña contra la obligación de cursar la asignatura de Educación para la Ciudadanía, en el primer recurso que llega al Constitucional en esa materia. El Tribunal de Justicia de Castilla-León les reconoció su derecho a los padres en una sentencia que después anuló el Tribunal Supremo.

El abogado del Estado señala que los padres no están legitimados para recurrir todos los reales decretos sobre la asignatura en educación primaria, secundaria y universitaria, porque el recurso inicial se formuló cuando la niña estaba en segundo de ESO, y por tanto, no pueden pretender que se declare nulo el de educación primaria, que su hija había terminado hace tiempo; ni tampoco el de bachillerato, porque su hija no iba a cursarlo. En consecuencia, los padres no están legitimados para impugnar ninguno de los tres reales decretos.

Sobre el fondo del asunto, el Abogado del Estado alega que hoy la objeción recae sobre Educación para la Ciudadanía , "pero mañana podría objetarse Ciencias de la Naturaleza porque se explica la teoría del evolución, incompatible con la letra del relato bíblico de la creación".

Según el representante del Estado, la objeción de conciencia se funda en la libertad ideológica y religiosa y es admitida excepcionalmente respecto de un deber concreto. Eso fue lo que hizo el constituyente, al reconocerlo respecto al deber de prestar el servicio militar obligatorio. Después la doctrina constitucional reconoció excepcionalmente la objeción del médico respecto a su participación en la práctica del aborto, pero "nada de eso tiene que ver con la exención de asistir a clase de una materia obligatoria" por no entenderla neutral ideológicamente sus objetivos, contenidos y criterios de evaluación.

El abogado del Estado añade que en las anteriores instancias no se debatió un punto importante, como es la posible colisión entre la libertad ideológica de los padres objetores y la de su hija alumna. La libertad de creencias asiste a los menores de edad en su derecho a no compartir las convicciones de los padres o a no sufrir sus actos de proselitismo, de manera que la libertad ideológica del menor no puede quedar abandonada lo que puedan decidir quiénes tiene atribuida su guarda y custodia o su patria potestad.

Ante la administración educativa sólo consta la objeción posición del padre, pero no consta la de la menor, por lo que "no sabemos a ciencia cierta si la menor comparte o rechaza esas convicciones de los padres". El tribunal superior rechazó recibir el pleito a prueba, cuando "tan indicado estaba oír a la alumna". Una colisión entre la libertad ideológica de la hija y el derecho de los padres probablemente tendría que ser resuelto a favor de la alumna, por lo que parece difícil otorgar a los padres el amparo que piden cuando se ha desconsiderado así la libertad ideológica de la menor".

Frente a los recurrentes, que sostienen que la asignatura se asienta en el "relativismo moral", el representante del Estado afirma que "la democracia no tiene que pedir perdón por ser un régimen esencialmente relativista, sanamente relativista". "La concepción filosófica que presupone la democracia es el relativismo", dice el abogado del Estado, "que no es más que el otro nombre de su connatural pluralismo ideológico".

Y respecto al argumento de que se puede acabar denigrando como "prejuicio homófobo" las concepciones que defienden el matrimonio heterosexual, el Estado replica que "no cabe confundir el repudio de la discriminación por motivos de orientación sexual con la recomendación de prácticas homosexuales".

En cuanto a la negación por los padres recurrentes de que el Estado pueda constituirse en educador de las virtudes cívicas o formador de la afectividad y los sentimientos, el abogado del Estado señala que el artículo 27.3 de la Constitución no establece el monopolio de los padres sobre la educación o las virtudes cívicas, y también la escuela debe contribuir a ello. Este artículo señala que "los poderes públicos garantizan el derecho que asiste a los padres para que sus hijos reciban la formación religiosa y moral que esté de acuerdo con sus propias convicciones". El representante del Estado concluye pidiendo al Tribunal Constitucional que inadmita el recurso, y subsidiariamente, que lo desestime.

In Pursuit of a Mind Map, Slice by Slice

TEAM LEADER Dr. Jeff Lichtman, with a 3-D image of a section of mouse brain and a magnified section of a dendrite (red), in his office at Harvard

By ASHLEE VANCE
CAMBRIDGE, Mass — Dr. Jeff Lichtman likes his brains sliced thin — very, very thin.

Dr. Lichtman and his team of researchers at Harvard have built some unusual contraptions that carve off slivers of mouse brains as part of a quest to understand how the mind works. Their goal is to run slice after minuscule slice under a powerful electron microscope, develop detailed pictures of the brain’s complex wiring and then stitch the images back together. In short, they want to build a full map of the mind.

The field, at a very nascent stage, is called connectomics, and the neuroscientists pursuing it compare their work to early efforts in genetics. What they are doing, these scientists say, is akin to trying to crack the human genome — only this time around, they want to find how memories, personality traits and skills are stored.

They want to find a connectome, or the mental makeup of a person.

“You are born with your genes, and they don’t change afterward,” said H. Sebastian Seung, a professor of computational neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is working on the computer side of connectomics. “The connectome is a product of your genes and your experiences. It’s where nature meets nurture.”

The task is arduous and years from fruition, and even the biggest zealots acknowledge that their work may not pay off. But connectomics has gotten some meaningful financing: In September, the National Institutes of Health handed out $40 million in grants to researchers at Harvard, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Minnesota and the University of California, Los Angeles, to pursue connectomics. Together, their research efforts comprise the Human Connectome Project.

Since the 1970s, researchers have only had one connectome to play with — that of a worm with a measly 300 neurons. Now they are trying a mouse brain, with its 100 million neurons. So far the notion of creating a human-scale connectome — which would illuminate all of the connections among more than 100 billion neurons and unravel the millions of miles of wires in the brain — has proved too daunting.

The task at hand is somewhat similar to trying to untangle a bowl of spaghetti. Each individual spaghetti strand may touch tens of other strands as it weaves in a contorted fashion through the bowl. In this case, the researchers want to do the equivalent of seeing where all the strands connect at the atom level.

And because the brain’s wiring is so densely packed, building a connectome stands as one of the most formidable data collection efforts ever concocted. About one petabyte of computer memory will be needed to store the images needed to form a picture of a one-millimeter cube of mouse brain, the scientists say. By comparison, it takes Facebook about one petabyte of data storage space to hold 40 billion photos.

“The world is not yet ready for the million-petabyte data set the human brain would be,” Dr. Lichtman said. “But it will be.”

Neuroscientists say that a connectome could give them myriad insights about the brain’s function and prove particularly useful in the exploration of mental illness. For the first time, researchers and doctors might be able to determine how someone was wired — quite literally — and compare that picture with “regular” brains. Surgeons armed with a connectome might also be able to make more calculated cuts in the brain.

“The connectome project is going to show where all the white matter — all the connecting fibers — are,” said Stanley Klein, a professor of optometry and vision science at the University of California, Berkeley. “The whole goal in something like a surgery for epilepsy is to delicately slice out some of the white matter without removing any cortex.”

Dr. Klein says he has “zero question” that this type of surgery could benefit from developing a connectome.

Other scientists doubt that the results will match the effort. The comparisons to the genome prove haunting, and critics suggest that the connectome fans are wasting valuable research dollars and setting themselves up for a huge letdown.

“There are people that argue we still just don’t know enough about the brain to know where to look for insights,” said Bradley Voytek, a researcher at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. “They also contend that there is no possible way you can build a full connectome in any realistic time frame.”

What’s more, even if the researchers succeed, they will only produce a static picture of a brain frozen in time, rather than something that shows how a brain responds to different types of stimuli.

Scientists around the world, including Stephen J. Smith, a neuroscience professor at Stanford, and Gerald M. Rubin, a researcher with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, have pushed past the naysayers and developed varying techniques for mapping the brains and nervous systems of human as well as other creatures.

“There are some people who say, ‘Maybe you don’t need this information, and given the expense of it, maybe you should put it off,’ ” said Dr. Lichtman, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard. “It’s a fair controversy.”

Harvard recruited Dr. Lichtman to push the connectome quest to its limits by tackling an entire mouse brain at the finest scale and allowed him to set up his own connectome research laboratory, staffed with four other people.

In the basement quarters that house Lichtman Lab, the researchers go to work anesthetizing mice, slicing open their rib cages and using the animals’ circulatory systems to spread concoctions that preserve the flesh and tune it for the electron microscope. Now and again, a researcher will reach into a box of mouse food pellets littered around the lab for sustenance during the tedious work.

“They’re not too bad,” said Bobby Kasthuri, one of the researchers.

With the body prepared, the slicing can begin.

Machines built by Kenneth J. Hayworth, another one of the researchers, can sheer off slices of a mouse brain just 29.4 nanometers thin using a diamond knife blade. To provide a sense of the accomplishment, the researchers liken the cutting to shaving off the entire surface of a football field at a thickness of one-hundredth of an inch.

Mr. Hayworth devised techniques for floating the brain slivers across a tiny puddle of water where surface tension carries them to a clear plastic tape. The tape backing adds some sturdiness to the slivers and makes it possible to place scores of them on a silicon wafer that then goes under the electron microscope.

At Lichtman Lab, the researchers are marching across a mouse brain in linear fashion, gathering the slices, imaging them and then putting the puzzle back together. Once assembled by a computer, the images of the brain are beautiful.

Dr. Lichtman and his colleagues give individual brain cells unique colors, making it easier to follow the wiring of a single neuron’s extensive axon and dendrite branches. The microscopes and computers they use can twist and turn these psychedelic images and zoom in and out at will.

It takes about three days for the researchers to carve 7,000 sections of a mouse’s cerebral cortex.

“The cutting is easy,” Dr. Lichtman said. “The big time sink is imaging.”

Dr. Lichtman estimates it will be several years before they can contemplate a connectome of a mouse brain, but there are some technological advances on the horizon that could cut that time significantly. Needless to say, a human brain would be far more complex and time-consuming.

“Hopefully, we are returning with a burst of new energy to the question of how the brain is wired up,” said Gary S. Lynch, a well-known brain researcher at the University of California, Irvine. “Lacking a blueprint, we’re never going to get anywhere on the most profound and fun questions that drew everyone to neuroscience in the first place: what is thought, consciousness?”

A connectome would provide a far more detailed look at the brain’s inner workings than current techniques that measure blood flow in certain regions. The researchers contend that it would literally show how people are wired and illuminate differences in the brains of people with mental illness.

As Mr. Kasthuri, the Harvard researcher, put it: “It will either be a great success story or a massive cautionary tale.”