Reading Publishers First

Department of Education officials violated conflict of interest rules when awarding grants to states under President Bush’s billion-dollar reading initiative, and steered contracts to favored textbook publishers, the department’s inspector general said yesterday.

In a searing report that concludes the first in a series of investigations into complaints of political favoritism in the reading initiative, known as Reading First, the report said officials improperly selected the members of review panels that awarded large grants to states, often failing to detect conflicts of interest. The money was used to buy reading textbooks and curriculum for public schools nationwide.

States have received more than $4.8 billion in Reading First grants during the Bush administration, and a recent survey by an independent group, the Center on Education Policy, reported that many state officials consider the intiative to be highly effective in raising reading achievement. But the report describes a tangled process in which some states had to apply for grants as many as six times before receiving approval, with department officials scheming to stack panels with experts tied to favored publishers.

From the NY Times.

Remains of US WW1 soldier identified

For the first time, a Pentagon group charged with finding and identifying U.S. war dead from foreign battlefields has identified the remains of a soldier killed in World War I, officials said Friday.

Army Pvt. Francis Lupo, of Cincinnati, Ohio, was killed on July 21, 1918, during an attack on German forces near Soissons, France. His remains were discovered by a French archaeologist in 2003 and identified by scientists from the Pentagon's Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory.

Lupo is to be buried on Tuesday at Arlington National Cemetery.

Full story here.

Blotto in the museum

A DRUNKEN guest at a high-profile party held in Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum sparked a 3am security scare after falling asleep in the toilets.

The man snoozed unnoticed for around three hours and everyone else had left before the boozy guest woke up in the locked museum ... triggering the alarm system. . .

The incident left the reveller red-faced but it has also raised serious concerns about security at the museum, home to priceless paintings and artefacts.

Full story here.

New archeological exhibit in Jerusalem

And predictably, Reuters focuses on the utterly unjustified Arab reaction -- without bothering to point out that the Islamic authorities they quote are blatantly guilty of precisely the offenses of which they so loudly (and so falsely) accuse the Israeli archeological establishment:

Israel has opened to the public an underground archaeological exhibit near Jerusalem's most sensitive shrine, drawing fire from Palestinians who say the project endangers the foundations of the holy site. . .

The "Chain of Generations Center" took over 10 years to construct and recently opened its doors to visitors for the first time. Among the attractions is a Jewish ritual bath dating to the 1st century which was discovered during building work.

The site runs parallel to Judaism's holiest site, the Western Wall, in the Israeli-annexed Old City of Jerusalem. Palestinians have long opposed Israeli excavations in the area, asserting it could weaken al-Haram al-Sharif's foundations. . .

The Waqf, the Islamic Trust in Jerusalem administering al-Haram al-Sharif, voiced opposition to the new exhibit.

"These excavations are illegal," Waqf director Adnan Husseini told Reuters. "They are doing these things through power and force."

This is particularly rich, given the Waqf's own history of archeological destruction on and under the Temple Mount, as well as undermining of its structures. As is, the new center is "near", but still at a significant remove:

Banner said the whole site, including [the] ritual bath, did not run under al-Haram al-Sharif or endanger the shrine.

"We have not done any work in the direction of the Temple Mount," he said. "No damage can be caused as the site is at least 20 to 30 meters (65 to 95 feet) from the Western Wall."

Coelophysis: charges dismissed

Coelophysis, a carnivore that lived more than 200 million years ago, has often been presented in books and museum exhibits as a cannibal.

The view is based on Coelophysis fossils that have preserved stomach contents interpreted as being the chewed up remains of its own kind.

But now a re-examination has suggested those contents may be crocodile, a Royal Society journal reports.

Full story here.

Update on Lebanon sites

Not great news, but could so easily have been a lot worse:

Three UNESCO World Heritage sites in Lebanon, including some of the Middle East's most significant ancient ruins, are in urgent need of repairs after a month of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, the U.N. agency said Monday.

In one case, frescos in a Roman-era tomb in Tyre were shaken to the ground when a building 500 feet away was bombed, said U.N. experts, who visited Lebanon and reported on their findings. Some of the paintings were destroyed.

In the ancient Phoenician city of Byblos, ruins were stained by an oil spill. In Baalbek, another Phoenician city which has some of the finest examples of imperial Roman architecture temples may have suffered structural damage, the experts said.

``Although it was not directly hit and did not suffer any major visible damage, cracks in the stone were probably widened by the shaking caused by nearby bombings,'' said Mounir Bouchenaki, who headed the mission.

From the Guardian.

MTA in parvo

All week, a man with a microphone has walked the subway platforms to collect the clattering of the rivets and the whistling horns, the distortion in the loudspeaker, the hush in the compressor’s song and the dying of the brake like some wounded thing.

"Clattering of the rivets"!? Does this hack even know what a rivet is?

Even in that racket, some find value. The recordings are the chief selling point of a new reproduction of a subway train by the Lionel model train company made under a license from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for completion by year’s end.

Other companies have made models before, but this one pays unparalleled attention to sonic detail, recreating the subterranean soundscape in elaborate hi-fi to win the favor of collectors and self-styled train geeks, keepers of a nostalgic anachronism to rank alongside comic books and baseball cards.

From today's NY Times. Neil Young -- yes, that Neil Young -- is involved. I wonder if the setup will be sophisticated enough to emit a deafening squeal every time the trains go around a sharp corner.

Juvenile Australopithecus fossil find

The 3.3-million-year-old fossilised remains of a human-like child have been unearthed in Ethiopia's Dikika region.

The female Australopithecus afarensis bones are from the same species as an adult skeleton found in 1974 which was nicknamed "Lucy". . .

The skeleton was first identified in 2000, locked inside a block of sandstone. It has taken five years of painstaking work to free the bones.

From the BBC.

Super color vision

A tetrachromat is a woman who can see four distinct ranges of color, instead of the three that most of us live with. . .

It may be impossible for us trichromats to imagine what a four-color world would look like. But mathematics alone suggests the difference would be astounding, said Jay Neitz, a renowned color vision researcher at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Each of the three standard color-detecting cones in the retina -- blue, green and red -- can pick up about 100 different gradations of color, Dr. Neitz estimated. But the brain can combine those variations exponentially, he said, so that the average person can distinguish about 1 million different hues.

A true tetrachromat has another type of cone in between the red and green -- somewhere in the orange range -- and its 100 shades theoretically would allow her to see 100 million different colors.

Read the rest here, spotted via Mirabilis.

More detail on the underlying physiology and genetics here; this is not a new story, so there is quite a bit of material online for further reading (a selection here and here).

"Epicenter of marine biodiversity "

Discoveries of hugely diverse fish and coral species in the Indonesian archipelago have amazed researchers.

The Bird's Head region in Papua may be the most biologically diverse in all the oceans, say scientists from Conservation International (CI).

Among 50 species believed to be new are bottom-dwelling "walking" sharks and "flasher" wrasse, which feature colourful male courting displays. . .

"Five years ago we ran our first expedition to Raja Ampat [islands off the Bird's Head], and this revealed what we felt to be the epicentre of marine biodiversity on the planet," said Mark Erdmann, a CI scientist on the project.

From the BBC.

The Pope's line in the sand, continued

The newswires are reporting that Pope Benedict has now offered a personal apology (BBC lede: "Pope Benedict XVI has apologised in person for causing offence to Muslims in a speech in Bavaria last week."), though it would be more accurate to say that he expressed regret that offense was taken (full text here) -- quite another matter, and in no way a retraction. Benedict's line in the sand remains.

An interesting take here:

As a sharp scholar and theologian, it is not possible to think that the Holy Father did not take into account that his choice of quote would not provoke an uproar in a world like ours, in this very global village, where every little word, especially by a prominent leader, is scrutinised, its resonance amplified, its meaning extrapolated and distorted by the mass media.

For the aforementioned anonymous Turkish public figure, the Pope’s choice of quote was a deliberate litmus test ahead of his crucial trip to Turkey, the first Muslim (and secular) state he is scheduled (perhaps) to visit. And the Turkish government fell for it by siding with the defenders of the Islamist camp and its profound religious identity.

Turkey threw itself head first in the media war; Turkish politicians didn’t pull any punches. In so doing though they lost a golden opportunity to demonstrate that their country was “truly” committed to the separation of state and religion, to democracy and against ideological fanaticism and political radicalism.

Certainly Benedict's skepticism about Turkey has been no secret, as he was quite vocal in opposing Turkish acceptance into the EU, citing cultural incompatibility. Nor would I blithely assume that Benedict "spoke like a professor and forgot that he had since become Pope" (per the Swiss Interior Minister Pascal Couchepin, in Benedict's defense). As already noted, even without the flashpoint "Schlechtes und Inhumanes" quote, Benedict's address draws lines, not blurs them. It is an unapologetic defense of the western Judaeo-Christian tradition, and to the Muslim world an open challenge.

This has led many to pine for the days of John Paul II. One might as well pine for the days before 9/11. To build bridges, one had better have a clear understanding of the divides they are to span.

ADDENDUM: Perhaps we need more leaders to speak like professors, especially since academics are not exactly in the best position to resist violent intimidation. Professor Adel Theodor Khoury, the editor of the edition of Manuel II Palaeologos cited by Benedict, has recently been quoted as wishing the Pope had done a bit more in his address to clarify the difference between Manuel's opinions and his own. But would this really have changed the Muslim reaction? As Khoury also notes about Manuel, "Er redet so, wie alle Menschen im Mittelalter geredet haben" ("that was the way he spoke, as everyone in the Middle Ages spoke").

Given that it is also the way many Muslim teachers still speak about Christians and Jews, maybe Benedict felt a bit of balance was in order. Americans often find fault with their fellow citizens for lack of historical perspective, but what happens when two groups face off, both acutely aware of their respective pasts? For anyone sharing that awareness -- alas, not including most journalists or their editors -- Benedict's barb was only tit for tat of the most restrained kind. And though most commentators have focused on Benedict's condemnation of conversion by force as a condemnation of violent jihad, he surely must equally have been thinking of the recent forced conversion of the Fox News reporters taken hostage -- and the subsequent failure of Muslim leaders to condemn or disavow the act.

Secret artist man

Banksy does LA, and the NY Times is on the story. You may recall Banksy's various pranks over the years, including sneaking some of his own works into major New York City museums last year -- most not being noticed by museum guards or officials for some time. Now he has an exhibition up in Los Angeles, though he still hasn't broken anonymity.

As a metaphor for problems that people are uncomfortable talking about, “the elephant in the room” is not the most original.

But then, few people actually put the elephant in the room, paint it red and adorn it with gold fleurs-de-lis to match the brocade wallpaper, and then dare viewers not to talk about it.

Meanwhile, a handout at the show reads:

“1.7 billion people have no access to clean drinking water. 20 billion people live below the poverty line. Every day hundreds of people are made to feel physically sick by morons at art shows telling them how bad the world is but never actually doing something about it. Anybody want a free glass of wine?”