Oxford University Press's Blog, page 653

What 4,000 years of hallucinations have taught us about our brain

Over the past 40 years, many of my students have shared their personal experiences with hallucinogenic drugs. They are typically more fascinated, than frightened, by the experience. About 60 years ago the scientist C.H.W. Horne commented that “It is remarkable that one characteristic which seems to separate man from the allegedly lower animals is a recurring desire to escape from reality.” He was referring to the widespread use of hallucinogens by young people during the middle of the last century. What is even more remarkable, in my opinion, is how long humans have been documenting their use of hallucinogens. Cultures and religious rituals have been developing around the use of hallucinogens probably for as long as humans have been consuming the plants, fungi, and animals that evolved around them.

Imagine that the year is 2000 BCE and you are wandering around a region of the world that would one day be known as Central and South America. You are foraging for something safe to eat and come across a small yellowish mushroom that would one day be called Psilocybe Mexicana. We now realize that this mushroom contains the hallucinogen psilocybin. Indeed, psilocybin is present in about 75 different species of mushrooms, so there was a good chance that someone, one day, would stumble onto a mushroom containing it.

Eating this mushroom produced a stomachache that lasted for about thirty minutes and then something truly mystical occurred. You saw things that you had never seen before, images that could only be due to the intervention of a god (or goddess, depending upon your local traditions). You began sharing your collection of mushrooms with others and everyone marveled at the amazing mystical visual experiences. We now know that ultimately, the use of psilocybin-containing mushrooms became an integral part of common religious practice. The mushroom was revered and given the name Teonanacatl, which means “god’s flesh” or “sacred mushroom.” Using this sacred mushroom became an important milestone in the religious path to the spirit world. Mushroom art, sculptures, and images on stones have been discovered throughout the American Southwest, Central America, and South America. They clearly indicate the important role played by this mushroom in the local religions. When Francisco Hernandez invaded these regions in the 1570s he documented the use of these mushrooms and ultimately added them to his own list of medicinal herbs.

Psilocybe Subaeruginascens. Photo by Curecat. 25 May 2007. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia.

The stone carvings provide some insight into the effects that the mushrooms produced in the minds of these primitive peoples. You can imagine the challenge facing someone 4,000 years ago who wished to represent to others what they experienced while visiting their mushroom-inspired spirit world. What if your only tools for representing this experience were stones and bones? Even today, people find it difficult to describe their personal experiences with hallucinogens. It is interesting to consider whether hallucinogens produced qualitatively different experiences in people living 4,000 years ago as compared to people alive today. In 1928, the scientist Heinrich Kluver interviewed people who had used hallucinogenic mushrooms or other naturally occurring hallucinogens. He discovered that these drugs produce a surprisingly similar consensus of seeing geometric images accompanied by altered feelings. Though colors varied, participants consistently reported brightness intensification. Moreover, the apparent size, geometrical shapes, and symmetry were strikingly similar from person to person.

More recently, a study asked a similar question of 500 participants who reported using LSD or mescaline. Once again, these subjects reported seeing vivid swirling colors, sounds that seem to be associated with specific colors, and an intensification of visual perception. Images tended to pulsate and move toward a center tunnel or away from a bright center.

What neuroscientists have discovered by examining ancient artwork and by interviewing people today who use LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, ibogaine, and a host of other hallucinogens is that the basic visual experience has been highly consistent across the last four millennia. The findings reveal a great deal about how our brain responds to these types of drugs. Overall, under a very diverse set of conditions the human visual system responds with a limited number of form constants. The four consistent geometric images reported following use of these drugs include: (1) a latticework, grating, or honeycomb; (2) a cobweb structure; (3) a tunnel or funnel alley; or (4) a spiral image. Our ancestors included all of these designs in their wall carvings.

The fact these visual images are so consistent across time suggest that the human brain has not changed in the past 4,000 years. The architecture and wiring of the visual cortex were the same 4,000 years ago as it is today. The geometric nature of the hallucinations is due to the pattern of neural connections within the visual cortex. Anyone who has seen a migraine aura has witnessed similar geometric shimmering patterns. Taken together, we can conclude that these hallucinogenic drugs uniformly and consistently produce abnormal activation of cortical neurons leading to spontaneous pattern formation within the visual cortex. Thus, hallucinogens alter how our neurons communicate with each other to process visual information in our brain; the result is something that is both familiar (such as an object of worship) and quite bizarre (such as a distortion of the object’s color or appearance).

These investigations teach us a lot about how our brain functions and provide insight into the nature of the religious world of our ancestors. How truly fantastic!

Featured Image Credit: Blurred Lines by Sebastian Muller. CC0 via Unsplash.

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Dispelling myths about EU law

What are the most common myths surrounding the laws of the European Union? We asked two experts, Phil Syrpis and Catherine Seville, to describe and combat some misconceptions. From the Maastricht Treaty to intellectual property law, here are some of the topics they addressed.

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The popular distinction between a narrow economic vision for the European Union, and one which also include a social and political dimension, is not one which can be sustained.

There are many involved in the debate on the relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union, who claim to be happy with the idea of the United Kingdom being part of the common (or internal) market, but not the broader Union. They typically want the United Kingdom to be able realise the economic benefits of EU membership, without being saddled with social and political costs. There is some merit to this position; since the coming into force of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, it has become clear that the European Union’s influence stretches beyond the common (or internal) market, and that the European Union can intervene in a range of areas without the need to link its action to the market making endeavor. Many of these areas are contentious—for example the European Union’s role in relation to defence policy.

But what I want to say here, is that many of the most controversial areas of EU action lie squarely within the market arena, which necessarily involves all manner of social and political choices. It is, for example, within the ‘core’ internal market provisions of the Treaty, the accompanying EU level legislation, and the case law of the Court of Justice, that the battle between the free movement rights of service providers and the fundamental right of trade unions to take action to protect the interests of workers is played out; and in which the rights of migrant workers, family members, job seekers and other EU citizens to claim residence rights and social security entitlements are defined. The key point is that the creation and governance of the common (or internal) market inevitably involves the making of a whole host of controversial social and political choices.

—Phil Syrpis, University of Bristol Law School

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I would like to dispel the misconception that the European Union is all about the free movement of physical goods and people. The Digital Single Market is transforming the European Union, and Intellectual Property has a big role to play in that.

The details of the emergence and development of Intellectual Property law in Western Europe are fascinating, and of course IP law has changed very significantly since medieval and pre-modern times. But one striking thing about the view from a distance is that the underlying questions and problems which preoccupied people in the past, have fundamental similarities to those which we are wrestling with today. What should we be protecting? Should hard economic considerations of trade, competition and profit trump niceties such as rewarding and protecting individual inventors and authors? What kind of interest does the general public have in all this? Who should be in charge—a state/government body or an industry/guild body? How do we encourage future creators whilst still protecting the current ones? How much protection is enough protection, and when does is it become too much? Is a regionally harmonized system definitely better than a collection of national systems?

The international questions were huge then and are huge now. Traders are quick to see both the opportunities and challenges of geography in a shrinking world. People want to sell and protect their products beyond their own local market. Treaties to allow cooperation between states soon developed, as international trade became easier and safer. At the moment a new EU initiative, the Unitary Patent is causing much controversy and anxiety. The hope of its promoters is that it will become the preferred option for those patenting in Europe, supplanting the current ‘bundles’ of national patents. But it is hugely ambitious project, with many practical details still to be agreed. It remains to be seen whether it will be a triumph for the EU visionaries, or a victory for the nay-sayers.

There are also big issues in the world of copyright. People love the access that they now have to copyright works—particularly via many tempting routes on the internet. People ask, why should I pay so much for a download when it costs you next-to-nothing to send it to me? From this has flowed the popularity of peer-to-peer sites (illegal and legal), from early sites such as Napster, Kazaa, Grokster and The Pirate Bay onwards.

Technology allows users not just access, but the possibility of interaction with a work. The Hargreaves Report on Digital Opportunity argued (successfully) for a parody exception to UK copyright law, noting that video parody was an everyday activity for many private citizens. An example of homemade parody – Newport State of Mind (based upon the Jay-Z and Alicia Keys song, Empire State of Mind) achieved great success on YouTube in 2010 but resulted in action by EMI to have it removed. So when Cassetteboy’s David Cameron mashup went viral recently, the duo spoke about the change in the law as legitimising what they do. Within the EU these issues are just as live, and the question of whether copyright in the Digital Single Market needs reform is currently being debated in the EU institutions. The strength of feeling can be seen in the fact that a campaign called Copywrong has been started, arguing that copyright’s ‘copywrongs’ should be fixed.

But it is easy to over-simplify these difficult questions, and to generalize about IP on the basis on a couple of uncharacteristic headline examples. This is why it’s important to look back, to see how previous communities have regarded and dealt with these issues—and then make up our own minds about what to do about what we face now.

—Catherine Seville, Newnham College, Cambridge

Image Credit: EU Flags by Jean-Etienne Minh-Duy Poirrier. CC BY SA 2.0 via Flickr.

 

 

 

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How did emerging market multinationals internationalize successfully?

Emerging market multinational enterprises (EM-MNEs) are the new kids on the block. When Forbes magazine first released its list of the world’s largest 2000 companies in 2003, the list was dominated by companies from the USA, Japan, and Britain. In the latest “Global 2000” list, companies from China and other emerging markets feature prominently. In 2014, 674 companies came from Asia, compared with 629 from North America and 506 from Europe. The world’s three biggest public companies and five of the top ten companies are Chinese. How did these EM-MNEs internationalize so successfully?

As a start, you should forget about your prejudice. EM-MNEs did not primarily internationalize successfully because they produced cheap goods. Or because they cut corners and flouted environmental standards at home. Or because they received lots of government subsidies. Cheap labour or government subsidies can occasionally help, but they cannot even begin to explain the success of so many EM-MNEs especially those companies that become key global players in their sector and are able to rival North American or European companies in terms of sophistication and technology. Think of China’s Haier in white goods or Brazil’s Embraer in regional passenger aircraft.

In some ways, EM-MNEs are not that different to the Western or Japanese firms that first internationalized in the 20th century. EM-MNEs initially expanded gradually step-by-step, first in countries close to home and then to more distant countries. For example, Nigerian companies first expanded to other West African countries (especially English-speaking and culturally close Ghana) before expanding to more distant countries. In this way, they gradually acquired knowledge about international markets, which gave them the confidence and a better understanding of international business before expanding to more distant markets. Nigerian companies found that they could compete very successfully in Ghana, just as Chinese companies found that they were often in a better position to compete in Malaysia or Indonesia than Western companies.

Bank of China, Zhangshan Square, by Paul Louis. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

But, compared with Western or Japanese firms in the 20th century, EM-MNEs have speeded up their internationalization efforts much more quickly. For example, China’s Haier first expanded to Indonesia, Philippines, and Malaysia. But, within just two years, Haier felt that it had gained enough knowledge about international markets that it decided to expand to a sophisticated distant market – the United States. To give you an idea: the Japanese company Matsushita waited for almost thirty years between the start of international exports and the establishment of an overseas plant. Haier did it in less than ten years. It took Matsushita twelve years from building its first overseas plant to its first acquisition of a foreign company, while Haier achieved the first acquisition after only five years.

Unlike Western or Japanese firms in the 20th century, many EM-MNEs did not wait until they felt that they were competitive enough at home to expand internationally. Many EM-MNEs come from countries that have inadequate legal protection and political uncertainties, as well as technological and infrastructure limitations. They learned how to make more out of less and how to cope better with uncertainty, and they became obsessed about continuous learning. Consequently, many EM-MNEs used their foreign expansion to developed countries as a springboard to acquire critical new resources (e.g. technology, skills or other resources) that they wanted in order to compete more effectively against their global rivals and in order to overcome technological or infrastructure limitations at home.

This international expansion showed incredible ambition on the part of these companies. Haier’s CEO Zhang Ruimin recounted: “We started exporting to developed markets first because if your products are good enough for consumers in Europe and in the US, you will have better products in developing markets”. Haier quickly established research and development centres in the United States and Europe to increase the speed of learning. Zhang Ruimin’s philosophy was simple: “First we observe and digest. Then we imitate. In the end, we understand it well enough to design it independently”.

EM-MNEs have also quickly learned how to apply modern management practices to help their global expansion. We recently conducted research with three Brazilian multinationals and we were surprised to discover that performance management practices within these companies are not based on indigenous Brazilian practices, but rather, are heavily influenced by global best practices. In all three cases we studied, performance management practices were used as a strategic human resource practice to enable the company to evaluate and improve corporate and subsidiaries performance against pre-set objectives that are aligned with its global strategy. An HR Director of a big Brazilian multinational firm explained to us:

“The company as a whole has global systems regardless of cultural differences because that’s the only way to ensure global mobility. It’s difficult to move to another country where you find a different way to manage talent, to manage competencies”.

The ambition and the speed of learning by EM-MNEs are very impressive. North American or European companies can certainly learn a few things from these companies.

Featured image credit: “Shanghai skyline”, by hbieser. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Why do we eat?

At first pass, the answer is obvious—to obtain energy to support our everyday activities and ultimately, to promote our survival. However, many of our modern day food choices suggest another answer, one that actually stands to threaten our health and functioning. Increasingly, the reason we eat has less to do with sustenance and more to do with how certain foods and drinks taste. Moreover, our food choices are influenced by a multitude of other factors including the social situations we find ourselves in, our budgets, our sleep schedules, our stress levels, and the amount of time we have to prepare and eat a meal.

In more primitive times, hunters and gatherers foraged for vegetation and hunted animals to eat. Our ancestors expended energy to obtain foods that were typically not dense with calories, and as a result, their energy expenditure was more closely balanced with their energy consumption. A comparison between the food landscape of our ancestors and our current environment shows changes in the energy balance equation (energy expended vs. energy consumed). Advances in agriculture and modern farming techniques have provided the opportunity to grow massive quantities of food with far less effort than before. On the other side of the equation, there has also been a dramatic change in our food sources. Today, many food items are highly processed combinations of several palatable ingredients and chemicals. The food industry creates and markets food and beverage products that are engineered to be both desirable and inexpensive. In the process, foods such as corn and wheat are transformed from their original form and combined with salt, fat, sugars, and other ingredients to yield the low-cost, high-energy food and beverage items that line grocery store shelves.

Thus, although food is essential for life, not all foods are created equal. Eating excess quantities of certain foods can actually harm health rather than sustaining life and promoting well-being. Overeating and obesity are on the rise, not only in the United States but around the world. Despite warnings of the physical health risks associated with increased body weight, the plethora of diet books and programs available, and the stigma associated with excess weight, many people find it difficult to achieve and maintain a healthy body weight. This prompts a close consideration of the factors involved in promoting weight gain or thwarting weight loss. In this discussion, it is impossible to avoid the fact that the pleasurable aspects of foods are powerful motivators of our choices.

The basic biology underlying food intake is closely linked to pleasure. Since food is necessary for survival, eating, especially when hungry, is inherently reinforcing. However, eating can be reinforcing even when it is not driven by a calorie deficit. This is why we continue to eat certain foods past the point of satiation, and consume foods like cupcakes and candy that are highly palatable yet not necessarily satiating. Unfortunately, our natural inclination to consume these types of foods collides with the many influences in our modern food environment to ultimately encourage the overconsumption of palatable foods.

Image Credit: “Burgers and Fries from In and Out Burger” by m01229. CC BY NC 2.0 via Flickr.

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The ideology of counter-terrorism

An effective counter-terrorism policy requires the identification of domestic or international threats to a government, its civil society, and its institutions. Enemies of the state can be internal or external. Communist regimes of the twentieth century, for example, focused on internal enemies. State security forces arrested dissidents, class enemies, and members of ethnic or nationalist groups deemed threatening to the Party, imprisoning them and securing “confessions” of their sins against the regime. In contrast, modern US counter-terrorism policy developed in reaction to an external enemy – militant anarchism.

In the late nineteenth century, an extremist ideology threatened Western society. Militant anarchists bombed financial houses, government buildings, and fashionable “bourgeois” cafes. In coordinated and lone-wolf attacks, men claiming an allegiance to anarchist principles assassinated the president of France (June 1894), the prime minister of Spain (August 1897), the empress of Austria-Hungary (September 1898), and the king of Italy (July 1900).

Major news outlets carried sensationalized stories of bomb-throwing anarchists, while mainstream writers from Fyodor Dostoyevsky to Joseph Conrad and Henry James penned novellas on the subject. European officials feared that the intellectual justification given to violent acts against the state, known as “propaganda by deed,” would motivate both social revolutionaries and the socially discontent.

American policymakers viewed anarchist terrorism as a European phenomenon. They believed that militant anarchism was a foreign and revolutionary doctrine disseminated by European immigrants living in urban centers and publishing radical newspapers. Both American and European officials believed that the “subversive” press radicalized their domestic populations.

Threat perception shaped government response. Continental European policymakers viewed anarchist terrorism as a domestic threat that required a transnational security system backed by international treaties. United States Congressmen viewed anarchist terrorism as a foreign threat that necessitated stricter immigration legislation. The law remained unchanged, however, until a self-proclaimed anarchist named Leon Czolgosz assassinated President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY. McKinley’s murder shattered Americans’ complacency that their institutions protected them from political violence in the name of regime change.

In 1903, US officials turned to immigration law to institute America’s first counter-terrorism policy. The Immigration Act of 1903, better known as the Anarchist Exclusion Act, prohibited alien anarchists from entering the United States and allowed for their deportation any time within three years of arrival. Immigration inspectors were given law enforcement powers to police the borders and ports of entry.

No mention was made that Czolgosz was a first-generation American citizen of Eastern European ancestry. Self-radicalized, alienated, and on the fringes of society, Czolgosz’s embrace of an extremist ideology in the hopes of acceptance in a community resonates today as one of the major dangers facing Western governments: homegrown terrorism.

“Our Statue of Liberty – she can stand it” by Charles Taylor, c. 1886, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The Obama administration has made combating “extremist ideologies that radicalize, recruit or incite to violence” a major part of US counter-terrorism policy. A month after the Charlie Hebdo attack in France, the White House hosted a summit in February 2015 on Countering Violent Extremism. President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry declared that the greatest threats came from (a) “domestic terrorists and homegrown violent extremists in the United States” and (b) “terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIL.”

With the rise of foreign terrorist fighters traveling to Syria and Iraq, and potentially returning to Europe and the United States, along with social media’s ability to reach and recruit at home, the distinction between external and internal threats is further eroding. The fear that US citizens will carry out terrorist attacks has added to the debate over domestic surveillance and the National Security Agency’s data collection programs.

US counter-terrorism has changed significantly since 1903 when the federal government relied on the Bureau of Immigration to protect the nation. In the early 1900s, the United States lacked a national police force, meaning that investigations of alleged anarchists already inside the United States fell to municipal police, a skeleton crew of Secret Service agents in the Treasury Department, or were outsourced to private security firms like the Pinkerton Detective Agency.

A plethora of federal government agencies are involved in counter-terrorism today with operating expenses in the billions. Since the September 11, 2001 attacks and the enactment of the Patriot Act, the US government has possessed the legal tools to spy on its own citizens.

Studies of terrorist organizations, their structure and leaders, motivations, operating budgets, and violent ideologies have long overshadowed examinations of counter-terrorism strategies. Scholarship on government or multilateral responses to terrorism are far and few between.

But counter-terrorism policies have their own ideologies. Looking back to previous periods of terrorist violence and seeing how European responses differed from those of the United States should raise questions about contemporary approaches:

How does threat perception, national culture, government structure (e.g. Congress in the United States and Parliament in the United Kingdom), and legal traditions (common law, civil law, religious law) shape governments’ responses to terrorism? What worked or didn’t work in the past?

Lastly, are US policymakers focused on the right threats?

Here, history has another lesson. While anarchist assassinations and stories of spectacular bombings captivated the Western imagination in the 1890s, it was a bullet fired by a militant nationalist that brought Europe to its knees in June 1914 and sparked world war.

Heading image: Statue of Liberty by Melwyn DSouza. CC0 via Pixabay.

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From Galileo to Rosetta

For some people, the recent images of the Rosetta space program have been slightly disappointing. We expected to see the nucleus of the Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet as a brilliantly shining body. Instead, images from Rosetta are dominated by the extremely dark aspect of the comet nucleus – as black as an enormous lump of coal – contrary to the idea of a bright celestial body, with the phantasmagorical appearance of its tail.

Fig 1. The surface of the Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet photographed by the Rosetta mission. Credit: Lander search, 13 December 2014. Public domain via ESA.

Galileo Galilei would be among those who would not share this sense of disappointment. He knew full well that, under certain conditions, an intrinsically dark body can be perceived as an intensely brilliant object (and vice versa). His particular aptitude for seeing beyond the immediacy of sensory perceptions emerged in the course of a harsh dispute with the German Jesuit, Christoph Scheiner. This dispute exploded in 1611, shortly after Galileo’s first telescopic observations, and concerned the nature of sunspots, the apparently dark feature of the sun’s surface. Their existence seemed to demolish the ancient dogmas defining the perfection and immutability of celestial bodies.

Scheiner considered it unlikely that there would be such spots on a body as luminous as the sun, but that, if there were, they would be far darker than any ever observed on the Moon. For Galileo on the other hand, sun spots will not only be less dark than the dark spots on the Moon, but will be no less bright than the most luminous parts of the Moon. In his opinion, the Jesuit was wrong because he compared the two visual objects under very different conditions: the spots against the brilliant disk of the Sun, and the Moon against the dark background of the nocturnal sky. The error stemmed from the mechanisms of vision that cause the perceived brightness of a visual target to depend upon the intensity of the region surrounding it. An example of this can be seen in Fig. 2, where the grey square appears to vary in shade in the presence of a black or white background.

Fig.2. a simple contrast effect of modern psychophysics, whereby the same grey square appears brighter or darker as a consequence of the background surrounding it. Credit: Marco Piccolino

Galileo was well aware that in order to establish a “psychophysically” correct comparison, visual objects should be observed against backgrounds of similar physical intensity. There were, however, obvious difficulties in comparing the body of the Moon and the spots of the Sun under similar conditions. Indeed, when the Moon comes near to the Sun it becomes invisible  for astronomical reasons, because it will receive the sun light on the surface not looking to the Earth (and thus  becomes a new Moon). As a solution, Galileo conducted a thought experiment. He first considered Venus, the brightest planet in the night sky, and more brilliant than the Moon. In twilight, Venus only becomes visible when it is positioned far from the sun. This happens because the field surrounding the sun is no less brilliant than Venus. In a similar way, Galileo argued, the full Moon would become invisible if one could put the moon nearer the Sun, because it would be positioned in a field no less shining and clear than its own face.

Having established through Venus a comparison between the Moon and the brilliant area around the Sun, Galileo compared the brightness of this area with the sunspots. He referred to telescopic observations indicating that the black spots were not darker than the area surrounding the Sun. He argued that, if this was true, and if the full Moon becomes invisible in brightness of the same ambiance, then by necessary consequence, the sunspots cannot be less bright than the brightest parts of the Moon.

The essence of Galileo’s reasoning can be made clear by comparing two telescopic images of the Sun; the first one aimed at visualizing the brilliant zone surrounding the sun’s disk; the second one designated to visualize the sun spots.

Fig. 3. On the left, a visualisation of the sun’s corona obtained during a total sun eclipse, compared to the image on the right, aimed at visualising the sunspots. Both pictures were obtained with dark filters, but the filtering was stronger with the image at the right. A comparison between the two images shows that sunspots are more brilliant than the field surrounding the solar disk, although this is still much more luminous than the sky in daytime. Credits: left image: Total Solar Eclipse  by Luc Viatour CC-BY-SA-3.0 o, via Wikimedia Commons. Right image: Huge sunspot group by SOHO (ESA & NASA). Public Domain via SOHO.

The physical brilliancy of the dark sunspots is only one example of Galileo’s ability to see beyond immediate appearances. Another important discovery concerned the interpretation of the dim light that can be perceived on the dark body of the Moon. Galileo correctly attributed this light to the sunlight reflected from the Earth to the Moon, a subject worthy of its own blog. It is with these and other observations that Galileo initiated a long series of discoveries, which led, a few months ago, to a small robotic lander leaving its mother aircraft and eventually grasping (with some hesitation) the surface of the Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet.

Featured image: Lander search, 13 December 2014, by ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team, public domain via ESA.

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My Mandolin & I

The first time I held a mandolin was at a rehearsal for Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. In the second act, the Don is trying to seduce the maid Zerlina by singing a serenade under her mistress’ window (the canzonetta “Deh, vieni alla finestra”). The conductor asked me to play the mandolin accompaniment to the serenade, while our Don Giovanni mimed strumming a stringless instrument onstage. The mandolin part is often played by one of the violinists because the mandolin and the violin are tuned the same way. I’d never tried an instrument with plucked strings before. Its double courses – two identically tuned strings at each pitch – and its frets were challenging at first, as was learning to hold a pick instead of a bow, but with a little practice I was able to pull it off. I loved it and eventually got a mandolin of my own.

Opera is not the only place you’ll find a mandolin, though. Far from it. Mandolins turn up in all kinds of places – folk musics in a number of parts of the world, bluegrass, rock, jazz, blues, and more. To accommodate many styles, mandolins come in many shapes and sizes in both acoustic and electric forms. Italian folk music tends to be played on a bowlback mandolin that resembles a lute. Bluegrass is usually played on an F-style that looks a little like a tiny electric guitar. American folk is often played on an A-style, which is flat backed like the F-style, but teardrop shaped like the Italian style. They also come in different sizes – there are mandolins tuned like violas, cellos and basses that sometimes play together in a mandolin orchestra. You can see examples of the different styles in this video from Carnegie Hall where Israeli mandolinist Avi Avital takes a tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection of mandolins.

To celebrate the mandolin, our instrument of the month, I’ve put together a playlist that showcases some of my favorite players and tunes and should give you a taste of the versatility of the instrument.

Image Credit: A “Hauser” mandolin from Germany. Photo by Underpraha. CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 

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Celebrating 50 years of the German Copyright Act at ALAI

As the native city of composer Ludwig van Beethoven, Bonn seems to be an appropriate location for a meeting of the International Literary and Artistic Association (ALAI); a society dedicated to protecting the interests of creative individuals. ALAI has roots in the 19th century, when in 1878 the French writer Victor Hugo founded the society in order to promote recognition of the legal protection of authors for their intellectual work. Today, the main focus of ALAI is hosting congresses dedicated to analysing current copyright laws and issues.

From the 18th to the 20th of June, Bonn is set to host the 2015 ALAI International Congress. The venue was chosen to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Germany Copyright Act, which in 1965 took an unprecedented approach to copyright legislation, and established law based on collective remuneration systems for right holders. This approach to copyright law has proven its sustained utility in the modern digital age.

The congress programme runs over two days. On Thursday 18th June, discussion will focus on how to further improve the current system to ensure that copyright will act not to hamper development, but to promote it. On Friday 19th June, the discussion will be centred on the latest business models, and different types of use will be analysed to identify the challenges these pose for both law makers and legal practitioners.

Bonn Minster, by Matthias Zepper. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

Saturday 20th June offers the chance to join a post-congress tour, which will take delegates to the famous Brühl Palaces, Augustusburg and Falkenlust, with their extensive gardens and park grounds. The palaces are protected as UNESCO World Heritage sites. Following this will be a tour of the city of Brühl.

For those who would rather remain in Bonn itself, there will be plenty to explore in the city. Here is a selection of the city’s highlights that are not to be missed:

• The Bonn Minster is a Roman Catholic Church in the city, and is one of Germany’s oldest churches, having been built between the 11th and 13th centuries.

• Poppelsdorf Palace is an impressive Baroque building in the Poppelsdorf district of Bonn, and is now part of the University of Bonn.

• August-Macke-Haus is a museum opened in 1991, dedicated to the expressionist painter August Macke. It is located in Macke’s former home, where he lived from 1911 to 1914.

• The Kunstmuseum Bonn or Bonn Museum of Modern Art is an art museum, which often holds temporary exhibitions in addition to its own collection which is focused on Rhenish Expressionism and post-war German art.

• For some fresh country air, consider exploring the Rheinhöhenweg Trail, which is a popular hiking trail on the mountains of the Rhine Valley. It leads from the Lower Rhine in Bonn passing the Loreley up to the Upper Rhine.

If you are attending the conference, keep an eye out for the Oxford University Press stall, where we will have a wide selection of our law books on display. Our books will be available for purchase at a special conference discount of 20% off.

For updates from the congress, follow us @OUPCommLaw on Twitter.

We look forward to seeing you in Bonn!

Featured image: “Morning has broken”, by Matthias Zepper. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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Using web search data to study elections: Q&A with Alex Street

Social scientists made important contributions towards improving the conduct and administration of elections. A paper recently published in Political Analysis continues that tradition, and introduces the use of web search data to the study of public administration and public policy.

This paper, written by Alex Street, Thomas A. Murray, John Blitzer, and Rajan S. Patel, is titled “Estimating Voter Registration Deadline Effects with Web Search Data”, and it was recently published as an open access paper in Political Analysis. The authors use web searches for “voter registration” just before, and just after registration deadlines for the 2012 US presidential elections, to gauge questions about, and interest in, voter registration. As the authors note in their paper’s abstract, “Combining web search data with evidence on the timing of registration for 80 million Americans, we model the relationship between search and registration. Extrapolating this relationship to the post-deadline period, we estimate that an additional 3-4 million Americans would have registered in time to vote, if deadlines had been extended to Election Day.”

This paper is important for two reasons.

First, on the particular question of pre-election registration deadlines and voter participation, they introduce and test an innovative new way to model the potential effects of pre-election registration deadlines on voter turnout. This has long been an important question for social scientists, ranging from the 1980 book, Who Votes?, by Raymond E. Wolfinger and Steven J. Rosenstone to the recent 2013 book by Jan E. Leighley and Jonathan Nagler, Who Votes Now? work in this field has typically relied upon post-election voter surveys, and some recent studies published in Political Analysis have begun to ask methodological questions about this long-used approach for studying the turnout implications of pre-election voter registration deadlines (Glynn and Quinn 2011, Keele and Minozzi 2013).

Second, this paper demonstrates the importance of web search data as a tool for social scientific research. There have been only a few studies so far that have used web search data, and this paper establishes the rationale for using this data to study important social science problems as well as validating their use. I anticipate that we will see an increasing use of web search data in the near future, as other researchers realize the potential uses for this new type of data. Recently I sent a series of questions about this paper to the lead author, Alex Street. Below are the questions, and his answers.

“Keyboard” by Life-Of-Pix. CC0 via Pixabay.

One of the central contributions of your paper is your use of data from Google searches. How does the search data that you used differ from the publicly available Google Trends data?

The Trends site allows anyone to study how the frequency of web queries such as “register to vote” varies across time and space. The data reach back to 2004 and are available for many countries and, increasingly, for smaller areas such as states or cities. The actual number of queries on a given topic is sensitive, since it can reveal how Google algorithms work, which might allow people to manipulate search results. So the data made available on the Trends site are normalized, relative to the total number of queries in a given location and time period. The Trends site focuses on popular searches. In our case, “register to vote” was not always among the most popular searches, especially in less populous states in the period several months before the election. In order to include the small states, we used internal Google data rather than the Trends data for this paper, though the numbers we used are very similar to what is publicly available.

What are the primary benefits of using Google search data, what can you learn from these data that you cannot learn otherwise? And what are the weakness of these data?

One huge advantage is that the Google data are user-generated. Social scientists often rely on surveys. But surveys are expensive and thus tend to be quite limited in size, which is a problem for comparisons across time and space. Perhaps even more important, when researchers decide the questions to ask, we risk imposing our own agenda, rather than following the interests of the public. Web search data allow us to observe people following their own interests. For example, one long-standing worry about democracy is that most people don’t know much about politics. Surveys have allowed us to confirm that. But there are also plenty of people who do manage to learn about politics. As scholars we still have a lot to learn about how people go about acquiring political information, on the (relatively rare) occasions when they do so. Usergenerated web search data provide new opportunities for us to study what people are interested in, and how events, laws or contextual factors shape their interests.

One big limitation for researchers is that a private company holds the original data. Google is cautious about what they make publicly available, because they worry about manipulation of search results or violating the privacy of their users. We were lucky to be able to access internal Google data for this paper, so that we could cover all 50 states. The Google authors summarized data from their archives, and made the aggregated data available to the other authors. The aggregated data were the basis of our analysis, and we also posted those data with the journal so that others can check our results. But not everyone has this kind of opportunity. This issue is much wider than our paper. As Gary King has pointed out, one of the open questions about “big data” in the social sciences is whether researchers can set up a framework for working with the governments and companies that hold almost all of the original data. For that to happen, we will have to allay concerns over privacy and commercial interests.

What were the origins of this research project? How did you and your co-authors get the idea to use web search data to study election administration?

This paper is the result of brotherly collaboration. Three of the authors are related by marriage. We were inspired by the work of the fourth author, who helped set up a system for using Google searches to provide real-time measures of the spread of flu epidemics. We wanted to learn more about how Google searches are related to other behavior, such as voting. Eventually we hit on the idea of not just correlating web searches with voter registration numbers, but also using post-deadline web searches to make counterfactual predictions about the effects of early voter registration deadlines.

What are other applications for the Google search and Google Trends data and the methodology you use in your paper, especially in political science and public policy, other than to election administration?

I expect scholars to exploit variation across time and space. The sheer volume of the underlying search data means that we can study daily changes in public interests across regions, states or cities. For instance, Cindy Kam and colleagues have used Google Trends data to assess the importance of perceived candidate viability, by tracking how web search volume changes as candidates rise or fall in the polls. Another opportunity is to measure how information-seeking changes, across administrative borders or deadlines. If we see a sudden change at the border or after the deadline, that can help us understand how policies affect the information environment. Even broader, we may be able to study big social changes in unprecedented detail. For example, we could study migration on a weekly or daily scale by tracking the spread of new words or languages across countries, states or cities. Social scientists are still getting used to the availability of this kind of data, but I am excited to see where our imagination takes us.

Image Credit: “Google” by Simon. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Bamboo Universe

Early summer in London is heralded by the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. This year, the winner of the Best Fresh Garden was the Dark Matter Garden, an extraordinary design by Howard Miller. Dark matter is invisible and thought to constitute much of the universe, but can only be observed through the distortion of light rays, an effect represented in the garden by a lattice of bent steel rods and lines of bamboo, swaying in the wind.

It seems appropriate that bamboo should be associated with unseen forces. We still do not fully understand bamboo, in particular the phenomenon that A. B. Freeman-Mitford, writing in 1896, described as ‘the suicidal mystery of the flower of the Bamboos’: the synchronous blooming, fruiting and death of certain species of bamboo, across the world, in cycles of anything from 15 to 120 years. Freeman-Mitford, whose book The Bamboo Garden was responsible for popularising bamboo in Britain, writes that it would seem “fated that some mystery should enshroud everything connected with these plants. Their very name is as great a puzzle to etymologists as the different species are a riddle to botanists”.

To unpack the etymological puzzle, Freeman-Mitford appealed, as so many writers and readers would, to the encyclopaedic glossary of British India; Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell’s Hobson-Jobson (1886). According to Yule, the word ‘bamboo’ is “one of the commonest in Anglo-Indian daily use, and thoroughly naturalised in English”, but ‘of exceedingly obscure origin’. The word may have entered English via Portuguese, from Kannada, Malay, or Javanese. It may have an onomatopoeic source in the popping sound of burning bamboo.

Yule’s article on ‘Bamboo’ demonstrates many of the distinctive qualities of the glossary: learned, digressive and quirky. The discussion skips from the relation of the Kannada word to the Sanskrit, via the misnomer ‘bamboo cane’ as applied to walking sticks, to the streets of suburban London: “some 30-35 years ago there existed along the high road between Putney Station and West Hill a garden fence of bamboos of considerable extent.” The idiosyncratic personal tone even creeps into the illustrative quotations that accompany the article. To demonstrate the multifarious uses of bamboo, Yule cites his own in Narrative of the Mission to Ava (1855):

When I speak of bamboo huts, I mean to say that post and walls, wall-plates and rafters, floor and thatch and the withes that bind them, are all of bamboo. In fact it might almost be said that among the Indo-Chinese nations the staff of life is a Bamboo. Scaffolding and ladders, landing-jetties, fishing apparatus, irrigation-wheels and scoops, oars, masts and yards, spears and arrows, hats and helmets, bow, bow-string and quiver, oil cans, water-stoups and cooking-pots, pipe-sticks, conduits, clothes-boxes, pan boxes, dinner trays, pickles, preserves, and melodious musical instruments, torches, footballs, cordage, bellows, mats, paper, these are but a few of the articles that are made from the bamboo.

Yule’s endless list at once enacts the plant’s limitless versatility and sketches out the cultural, social and domestic framework of Southeast Asian life.

Yule’s sense of bamboo as the staff of life is strangely prescient. Stressing its phenomenal growth rate and multiple uses, modern advocates of bamboo see it as a sustainable replacement for timber. In its range, plenitude and continuing relevance, Yule’s article on bamboo reveals some of the pleasures of reading Hobson-Jobson. In the process of looking up a word, you always discover more than you expect.

Featured image: Bamboo bridge by suman. CC0 via Pixabay.

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