In the end, Adam Wheeler, a 24-year-old who conned his way into Harvard and benefited from more than $40,000 (£26,000) in grants and prizes, flew too close to the sun. Not content with having bragged his way into one of the world's most prestigious universities, he felt driven to apply – equally fraudulently – for Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships. The application was a deception too far, and led to the discovery of a string of lies that this week earned Wheeler 10 years on probation and the order to repay Harvard $45,806. He pleaded guilty to all 20 counts against him, including larceny, identity fraud and pretending to hold a degree.

"I'm ashamed and embarrassed by what I've done," he told a Massachusetts court in a voice so quiet it was barely above a whisper. "As much as possible, I want to put this behind me and move forward."

Wheeler's impressive record of deceit began in 2007 when he was expelled from Bowdoin College in Maine for plagiarism. Instead of reflecting on the wrong he had done, he went the other direction, developing a whole new persona and turning lying into an art form.

His successful Harvard application claimed that he had graduated from the elite Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts – in fact he had gone to a state high school in Delaware – and had an impeccable record of academic excellence at MIT. Once having fraudulently gained entry to America's most revered ivory tower, he pursued his fabrications with what prosecutors told the court was compulsive zeal.

As the Harvard Crimson newspaper identified, he created a resume that boasted the authorship of two books and co-authorship of four others, the delivery of lectures in Armenian studies and unblemished grades – all of it hogwash. He also won the $4,000 Hoopes Prize, $2,000 Sargent Prize and an $8,000 Rockefeller research grant, all through plagiarism.

via The Guardian.

When Apple opened a new store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in 2006 it received an unusual complaint. Not the usual New York variety—you’re blocking the view I paid good money for, or you’re gentrifying the neighbourhood I just discovered. No, this new flagship store was criticised by an Islamist website. The steel-and-glass cube, the zealots complained, was meant to invoke the obsidian cube at the Kaaba in Mecca, and insult Islam. The story was ridiculous—it was one extremist website (albeit a big one), and the clever fanatics running it had only seen the cube with a black tarp over it, while it was under construction. A number of New York Muslims stood up to say that they loved the new store. But it isn’t insane to call Apple’s stores Meccas. Beautiful inside and usually outside too, they are temples to devotees of Apple’s gorgeous products. Unlike most gadget-makers, Apple sells more than sleekly designed toys. It sells a way of life and a way of being. Call it Appleism.

Appleism isn’t quite a religion, but it features an almost godlike leader, Steve Jobs. And he even came back from the dead—fired by the board in 1985, he was rehired after a slump in 1997, and revived Apple’s fortunes. Many fans view Apple with devotion: Tony Curtis, who died in October, was buried with his iPhone, like a pharaoh anxious to update his Facebook status from the afterlife.

With any faith, it is fun to focus on the fanatics, but not very illuminating. On a recent trip to the Fifth Avenue store, not many faces fitted the stereotype of Apple partisans as hip, rich, Western youth. There was a man who looked like a diplomat with the United Arab Emirates’ flag on his lapel. A gaggle of teenage boys from Brazil horsed around in Portuguese. A red-haired youngster put down his Good News Bible to play an online game called “Combat Arms”. A middle-aged couple used the Bed, Bath & Beyond website. Apple’s success has transcended the asymmetrical-jeans-and-black-framed-glasses market. It is now a movement for the masses.

via More Intelligent Life.

Google began as a smarter way to find things on the internet; it is now a cloud of services that pervades every aspect of our lives. We google a good restaurant, google reviews of it on other websites, find it on Google Maps, google to check if the train is on time, and Gmail our friends to let them know we might be 15 minutes late.

Increasingly, we may do all of these things on a smartphone powered by Google’s Android operating system. Google makes no actual phones itself. But as it has licensed Android to more and more phonemakers, it is, for a company that makes no gadgets, the biggest competitor to the world’s most successful gadget-maker. Google has taken a big bet on making Googleism something we walk around with too.

It wasn’t always so. Only a year or two ago, Apple and Google were so comfortably different that Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, was able to sit on Apple’s board (from 2006 until 2009). “Steve [Jobs] and I are very close personal friends,” Schmidt said this summer. “I believe he’s the best CEO in the world by any measure.” Their companies could have been a match made in heaven: Apple’s gorgeous devices running Google’s miraculous services. But smartphones proved too attractive for Google to leave the field to others. Android is now the bestselling smartphone system, after passing sales of the iPhone late in 2010. Jobs implied that Google had violated a tacit division of turf, pointing out at a conference in June, “we didn’t go into search” and “we’re not going into search”. Radiating self-belief as usual, he told the same audience that he would not be removing Google searchboxes from Apple’s devices, saying “right now, we have the better product”.

The two companies have taken entirely different approaches to the mobile war. Apple’s Apple-made devices allow only Apple-approved applications (apps) on the handset. By contrast, now that it has moved into the phone business, Google gives Android away—it does not sell it—to be installed on dozens of phone models made by a host of phonemakers, including Sony, Motorola, Samsung, LG, HTC and others. Android’s code is open, and the phonemakers can tinker with it to suit their needs (though Google tries to maintain a basic set of standards, so that an app built for one Android phone will work on another). And anyone who can create an Android app can get it into Google’s Android Market, the equivalent of the App Store. Apple is gorgeous but far more sealed and controlled. Eric Schmidt talked about the difference in July when he visited The Economist in London. “Google has a completely different world model,” he said. “The Apple view is coherently closed. Ours is the inverse model: the web, openness, all the choices, all the voices. And that experiment is running.”

And so West set out to solve the City. As he points out, this is an intellectual problem with immense practical implications. Urban population growth is the great theme of modern life, one that’s unfolding all across the world, from the factory boomtowns of Southern China to the sprawling favelas of Rio de Janeiro. As a result, for the first time in history, the majority of human beings live in urban areas. (The numbers of city dwellers are far higher in developed countries — the United States, for instance, is 82 percent urbanized.) Furthermore, the pace of urbanization is accelerating as people all over the world flee the countryside and flock to the crowded street.

This relentless urban growth has led to a renewed interest in cities in academia and in government. In February 2009, President Obama established the first White House Office of Urban Affairs, which has been told to develop a “policy agenda for urban America.” Meanwhile, new perspectives have come to the field of urban studies. Macro economists, for instance, have focused on the role of cities in driving gross domestic product and improving living standards, while psychologists have investigated the impact of city life on self-control and short-term memory. Even architects are moving into the area: Rem Koolhaas, for one, has argued that architects have become so obsessed with pretty buildings that they’ve neglected the vital spaces between them.

But West wasn’t satisfied with any of these approaches. He didn’t want to be constrained by the old methods of social science, and he had little patience for the unconstrained speculations of architects. (West considers urban theory to be a field without principles, comparing it to physics before Kepler pioneered the laws of planetary motion in the 17th century.) Instead, West wanted to begin with a blank page, to study cities as if they had never been studied before. He was tired of urban theory — he wanted to invent urban science.

For West, this first meant trying to gather as much urban data as possible. Along with Luis Bettencourt, another theoretical physicist who had abandoned conventional physics, and a team of disparate researchers, West began scouring libraries and government Web sites for relevant statistics. The scientists downloaded huge files from the Census Bureau, learned about the intricacies of German infrastructure and bought a thick and expensive almanac featuring the provincial cities of China. (Unfortunately, the book was in Mandarin.) They looked at a dizzying array of variables, from the total amount of electrical wire in Frankfurt to the number of college graduates in Boise. They amassed stats on gas stations and personal income, flu outbreaks and homicides, coffee shops and the walking speed of pedestrians.

After two years of analysis, West and Bettencourt discovered that all of these urban variables could be described by a few exquisitely simple equations. For example, if they know the population of a metropolitan area in a given country, they can estimate, with approximately 85 percent accuracy, its average income and the dimensions of its sewer system. These are the laws, they say, that automatically emerge whenever people “agglomerate,” cramming themselves into apartment buildings and subway cars. It doesn’t matter if the place is Manhattan or Manhattan, Kan.: the urban patterns remain the same. West isn’t shy about describing the magnitude of this accomplishment. “What we found are the constants that describe every city,” he says. “I can take these laws and make precise predictions about the number of violent crimes and the surface area of roads in a city in Japan with 200,000 people. I don’t know anything about this city or even where it is or its history, but I can tell you all about it. And the reason I can do that is because every city is really the same.” After a pause, as if reflecting on his hyperbole, West adds: “Look, we all know that every city is unique. That’s all we talk about when we talk about cities, those things that make New York different from L.A., or Tokyo different from Albuquerque. But focusing on those differences misses the point. Sure, there are differences, but different from what? We’ve found the what.”

via NYTimes.com.

ON THE evening before All Saints’ Day in 1517, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. In those days a thesis was simply a position one wanted to argue. Luther, an Augustinian friar, asserted that Christians could not buy their way to heaven. Today a doctoral thesis is both an idea and an account of a period of original research. Writing one is the aim of the hundreds of thousands of students who embark on a doctorate of philosophy (PhD) every year. In most countries a PhD is a basic requirement for a career in academia. It is an introduction to the world of independent research—a kind of intellectual masterpiece, created by an apprentice in close collaboration with a supervisor. The requirements to complete one vary enormously between countries, universities and even subjects. Some students will first have to spend two years working on a master’s degree or diploma. Some will receive a stipend; others will pay their own way. Some PhDs involve only research, some require classes and examinations and some require the student to teach undergraduates. A thesis can be dozens of pages in mathematics, or many hundreds in history. As a result, newly minted PhDs can be as young as their early 20s or world-weary forty-somethings.

One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Some describe their work as “slave labour”. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle. “It isn’t graduate school itself that is discouraging,” says one student, who confesses to rather enjoying the hunt for free pizza. “What’s discouraging is realising the end point has been yanked out of reach.”

via The Economist.

A 44-year-old woman who doesn't experience fear has led to the discovery of where that fright factor lives in the human brain. Researchers put out their best foot to try to scare the patient, who they refer to as "SM" in their write-up in the most recent issue of the journal Current Biology. Haunted houses, where monsters tried to evoke an avoidance reaction, instead evoked curiosity; spiders and snakes didn't do the trick; and a battery of scary film clips entertained SM.

The patient has a rare condition called Urbach–Wiethe disease that has destroyed her amygdala, the almond-shaped structure located deep in the brain. Over the past 50 years studies have shown the amygdala plays a central role in generating fear responses in various animals from rats to monkeys.

The new study involving SM is the first to confirm that brain region is also responsible for experiencing fear in humans. "This is the first study to systematically investigate the experience or feeling of fear in humans with amygdala damage," lead author Justin Feinstein told LiveScience.

The finding, the researchers say, could lead to treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in soldiers and others. "My hope is to expand on this work and search for psychotherapy treatments that selectively target and dampen down hyperactivity in the amygdala of patients with PTSD," said Feinstein, who is a doctoral student studying clinical neuropsychology at the University of Iowa.

Over the past year, Feinstein has been treating PTSD in veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, seeing first-hand the effects.

"Their lives are marred by fear, and they are oftentimes unable to even leave their home due to the ever-present feeling of danger," Feinstein said. In contrast, SM is immune to this stress. "Traumatic events leave no emotional imprint on her brain," he said.

via LiveScience.

This year's winter solstice — an event that will occur next Tuesday — will coincide with a full lunar eclipse in a union that hasn't been seen in 456 years. The celestial eccentricity holds special significance for spiritualities that tap into the energy of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year and a time that is associated with the rebirth of the sun.

"It's a ritual of transformation from darkness into light," says Nicole Cooper, a high priestess at Toronto's Wiccan Church of Canada. "It's the idea that when things seem really bleak, (it) is often our biggest opportunity for personal transformation.

"The idea that the sun and the moon are almost at their darkest at this point in time really only further goes to hammer that home."

Cooper said Wiccans also see great significance in the unique coupling of the masculine energy of the sun and the feminine energy of the moon — transformative energies that she plans to incorporate into the church's winter-solstice rituals.

Since the last time an eclipse and the winter solstice happened simultaneously was just under five centuries years ago, Cooper said she wasn't familiar with any superstitions or mythologies associated with it.

Instead, she said, they can only be interpreted personally.

"Wiccans don't think of things as being good or evil — they just are. Our experience of them makes them positive or negative for us."

via the Montreal Gazette.

The shakiness of the reductive position might be more immediately apparent to anyone with even a spotty exposure (like mine) to Jewish religious music and its folk cousin, klezmer. Despite its characteristic minor tonality, this music encompasses a vast range of human emotion. How could it not? It has to cover everything from prayers for the dead to adoration of the deity. The clinching example of minor-key mirth-compatibility just might be that jolt of delirious energy familiar to anyone who's attended a Jewish wedding ... or a baseball game: "Hava Nagila"—a Prozac sundae, ethnic folk music's answer to the umbrella drink.

Other good examples, anyone? We can compile and post here the definitive, crowd-sourced list. Better yet, if there are any musicians out there with too much time on their hands, I invite you to perform your own "Eleanor Rigby" tests: Keep the melody—alter anything else (lyrics, tempo, orchestration) at will to produce a non-sad result. Polka and zydeco settings seem especially promising to me. Email us your musical rebuttals, and we'll upload them here.

The complementary principle in tonal determinism—major key songs are "upbeat"—seems even flimsier than its minor key counterpart. Two extremely sad major key songs immediately occur to me—Charlie Rich's abject confession of failure and despair, "Feel Like Going Home," and "Boulder to Birmingham," in which a depleted Emmylou Harris seeks relief from her apathy and emotional isolation following the death of Gram Parsons by trying to commune directly with him.

The myriad exceptions to the "sad minor third" rule illustrate a perhaps banal but basic truth about music: It's irreducibly emergent. All its elements act reciprocally, and their infinitely variable interplay produces a correspondingly variable range of emotions. Obviously, if every chord came out of its original factory packaging charged with its own specific, predictable emotional valence, we wouldn't have much need for composers or musicians. Musical composition would be reduced to translation, instead of creation, and pretty much anybody could do it. Literal-minded cognitive psych professors could write music.

In a less reductive intellectual climate it might not need saying, but the emotions evoked by music can't be simply reduced to correlative harmonic or melodic intervals, and sad songs can't be reduced to intrinsically sad building blocks. "Eleanor Rigby" isn't sad because it's constructed of sad chords built from sad intervals—any more than Albert Einstein was a genius because his brain was wired with uniquely smart neurons.

If a cognitive psychologist tries to tell you the minor third interval is intrinsically, universally "sad," it's not true. If, on the other hand, she says that, well, in the right musical setting and cultural context it can help evoke an ultimately elusive range of sad or mysteriously unresolved emotions—then it's not exactly new.

via The Atlantic.