The Answer is Fourty-Two

Here are the Kindle books I read in 2014:

1. Tom DeMarco: Andronescu's Paradox
2. Gaston Leroux: Le Mystère de la Chambre Jaune
3. Herman Melville: Moby Dick
4. Alexandre Dumas: Le Comte de Monte-Cristo
5. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Return of Sherlock Holmes
6. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
7. Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

They were all free, except the first and the last, so I spent less than $20 altogether, and had the books with me all the time, allowing me to read a couple in parallel when I wanted some variety (the Kindle app on a phablet is really nice for those long lines at the airport).

I just started Walter Isaacson's multi-biography of computer innovators, but it will have to count as a 2015 accomplishment, in part because I dropped it to read HHG2G on a whim, which was fun. And I want to resume reading Peter Saccio's The English Kings (an erudite comparison between the plays of Shakespeare and the actual history of the corresponding kings of England in the 15th and 16th centuries) and Machiavelli's The Prince, this wonderfully cynical political treatise, both of which I set aside for a while.

I also have Jane Eyre loaded up, and, dare I say it, War and Peace. I have no idea whether I will touch them in 2015 or not. I also need to find some Spanish-language classics to help build my vocabulary. Advice is welcome!

Candidat !?!

Je suis candidat aux élections du Conseil Consulaire de la troisième circonscription des Etats-Unis qui comprend le Texas, la Louisiane, l'Oklahoma et l'Arkansas. Je m'explique.

Il s'agit d'un nouveau type d'élections. Nous avons déjà des sénateurs de Français de l'Etranger au nombre de 12, mais ils sont élus globalement et ne peuvent donc consacrer que très peu de temps à chaque circonscription de notre diaspora mondiale. Nous avons aussi des députés qui comme les sénateurs siègent à Paris ; dans le cas du nôtre, Frédéric Lefebvre, parachuté par l'UMP en 2013 après l'invalidation de l'élection de Corinne Narassiguin élue en 2012, ce député ne montre guère le bout de son nez chez nous et ne communique jamais non plus sauf en période de campagne. Son secrétariat a mis six mois à répondre à un message que je lui avais adressé sur Facebook lui demandant (justement...) s'il comptait nous tenir au courant de manière aussi pressante après son élection que pendant sa campagne. CQFD.

Le Conseil Consulaire comprendra dans notre circonscription, où environ 10.000 citoyens français sont immatriulés au Consulat et inscrits sur la liste électorale, 4 conseillers élus à la proportionnelle à un seul tour (avec répartition des sièges suivant la règle de la plus forte moyenne). Le Consul Général devra réunir ces conseillers au moins deux fois par an dans un but purement consultatif, mais ils participeront aussi à l'élection des sénateurs, donc ils pourront avoir une influence sur l'ensemble de la politique française. Ce système étant nouveau et l'influence de ces conseillers dépendant à la fois de la bonne volonté du Consul, du niveau d'activité des élus mêmes, et de l'attention que leur porteront les résidents français des états concernés, son efficacité réelle au niveau régional reste à démontrer. Pourtant, comme «la démocratie ne s'use que quand on ne s'en sert pas» (contrairement aux bonnes piles électriques) il est juste puisqu'un tel système est mis en place de tenter sincèrement de le faire fonctionner.

Pour cela il faut des électeurs, et l'on peut espérer qu'outre la possibilité de voter en ligne, la coïncidence de cette élection consulaire avec l'élection des députés européens le 24 mai incite à voter pour la première certaines personnes venues dans les bureaux de vote pour la seconde. Mais il faut aussi des candidats.

On savait dès février que l'UMP allait présenter une liste, sous l'étiquette de l'Union des Français de l'Etranger (UFE) ainsi que M. Damien Régnard, délégué depuis 2009 à l'Assemblée des Français de l'Etranger (AFE) que le Conseil Consulaire va remplacer, candidat malchanceux aux législatives de 2013 après être entré en dissidence de l'UMP pour s'être vu refuser l'investiture du parti (voir plus haut la référence au parachutage de M. Lefebvre). Il s'est alors constitué un rassemblement de gens de gauche pour présenter à nos concitoyens une alternative à ces listes—une liste que nous avons donc appelée «Pour une alternative à gauche», menée par Fabrice Raud et qui rassemble toutes les tendances de gauche sans être affiliée à un parti politique spécifique.

Alors pourquoi répondre «présent» quand on m'a demandé si je voulais bien me joindre à cet effort ?

Premièrement—et c'est la raison la moins rationnelle ou convaincante—parce que j'ai du mal à dire non quand on me demande de l'aide et que la cause en question m'est sympathique.

Deuxièmement pour une raison quasi-morale, au sens des impératifs catégoriques de Kant : si tout le monde se défilait la notion de démocratie perdrait son sens.

Troisièmement enfin parce qu'il me paraît impossible de laisser élire quatre conseillers représentant tous les forces de la réaction homophobe illustrée par la prétendue «Manif pour tous»—c'est-à-dire en réalité la «Manif contre certains» de 2013—qu'ils ont tous clairement soutenue au point d'aller manifester devant le Consulat comme l'a fait personnellement M. Régnard pour protester contre l'égalité de l'accès au statut du mariage.

Supposons en effet que les quatre élus proviennent tous des listes UFE-UMP et Régnard (cette liste est tellement égocentrique qu'on ne peut l'appeler que comme cela) et que mon mari et moi rencontrions auprès de l'administration française un problème administratif ou juridique pour lequel une assistance de nous nouveaux conseillers soit nécessaire. Quelle confiance puis-je avoir dans la représentation ou le soutien que pourraient m'accorder des conseillers qui se sont battus pour nous renier les droits sur lesquels s'appuierait cette démarche ? Non seulement je n'ai aucune confiance en leur action potentielle mais j'aurais même grand mal à ne pas les soupçonner d'œuvrer, au moins par inaction, pour que le résultat de ma démarche soit conforme à leurs préjugés.

Il est donc indispendable pour que nous soyons tous représentés efficacement et équitablement par ces conseillers, pour que leur action de risque pas d'ignorer ou de bafouer la loi de la République, et pour que notre égalité et notre diversité soient respectées par le Conseil Consulaire de notre circonscription, que le 24 mai—ou par Internet entre le 14 et le 20 inclus—un ou plusieurs candidats de la liste «Pour une alternative à gauche» soient élus. Et c'est donc pour cela que j'ai accepté d'en faire partie et que je vous invite à répondre «présents» à votre tour et à voter pour nous.

An Evening at the Opera

Well, this wasn't the Met or la Scala, but the Austin Lyric Opera. I went to their production of The Magic Flute (one of only three operas they will give this season, the other two being Lucia di Lammermoor and Turandot) at the Long Center in Austin, expecting to be entertained, if not awed by the quality of the performances, and I was pleasantly surprised. This seemed to me to be a solid production, although perhaps one that was more faithful to the playfulness that this work often displays that to the profound philosophical ideas and the actual drama that play in parallel with the facetiousness.

Most of the singers were quite good. An advantage of a younger troupe, without major stars, is that it's nice to have a Pamina (Hanan Alattar) who doesn't look like she should be singing a Walkyrie instead, and a Tamino (Arthur Espiritu) whom said Pamina can credibly fall in love with.

I realize that The Magic Flute is partially a moral tale, and partially a comedy, and so one may take oneself too seriously by critiquing some absence of gravitas at the right moments, but that's what I felt was missing most.

Sarastro was sung by James Moellenhoff, who according to the program hails from Germany and therefore had a very clear diction of the German words, although all the singers did very well with their pronunciation. He was perhaps the most compelling singer, with a forceful bass and an imposing stage presence, aided by the props and the costumes appropriate for his regal character. By contrast, the Queen of the Night (Juliet Petrus) was a little thin-voiced. She was not the looming and ominous presence you expect, and her hair and makeup didn't help -- more commedia dell'arte than it should have been. The opera only gives her two real chances to shine, and her first aria was not convincing. Der Hölle Rache was good, but still did not reach the piercing vengeful screams that the situation calls for. Her third appearance is very brief (the failed attack on the temple) and the staging made this scene appear rushed, giving her no chance to make a last impression.

Papageno was very well done... perhaps more compelling as the comic character than Tamino was as the chivalrous hero, an impression consistent with my earlier comment about lack of gravitas. Another instance of this came after Pamina's suicide attempt. The three spirits have just told her that she will see Tamino again, and that he loves her, and he is going to face death during his initiation rites in order to conquer her. At that point, Pamina and the three spirits act on stage as if she had only heard the first part of the sentence. They sing and dance and jostle each other, Pamina seems positively giddy when you would expect a more complex mix of hope and fear for the well-being of her beloved.

The decor was very sparse -- a series of connected platforms and a set of vertical moving panels bathed in a vague pastel lighting. This was alright for most of the opera, but fell through toward the end. After you have seen at least once how Bergman simulated the walks through fire and water in his superb cinematic rendition (1975), anything that doesn't trick your senses into imagining these elements is disappointing. Here, the gestures made by the priests in their robes to simulate fire or water, and the lack of depth of the stage didn't even imply that the protagonists were being tested in any way. Surely some light or screen effects could have helped save these scenes. Similarly, the Queen's attack and defeat gave no sense of drama.

The supertitles had multiple problems. On the positive side, you can see them even from the first row of the Michael and Susan Dell Hall. Of course you have to look way up, but you can read them. I've heard that this is not the case everywhere. But the timing was off at a couple of incongruous moments. At the end of Pamina's despair aria, the title switched prematurely to the first sentence of the following scene between Tamino and the priests, so it read "O Isis and Osiris, what joy!" while Pamina was still singing of her broken heart. At another point, the titles were too late. And during Papageno's count to his own (half-hearted) suicide attempt, the famous "zwei... zwei und halb... zwei und drei Viertel... drei" was not translated at all. The oddest supertitle moment came earlier, just after Papageno has subdued Monostatos and his slaves thanks to his magical glockenspiel. I still can't decide if the double entendre was intentional or accidental, but some in the audience did chuckle when they read above the stage: "If all men had such bells..."

Speaking about translation, the opera was sung in German but the dialogs were spoken in English. I'm sure this was helpful to the audience, and it wasn't  dramatically jarring (except during the first spoken scene, between Papageno and Tamino, when it surprised and distracted me for a while), but I think I still would have preferred everything to be in German.

In spite of the relative length I gave to the negatives, this was a thoroughly enjoyable performance -- several very solid singers, good staging, a good musical performance, and a great sense of timing in the more comic moments. The fact that the ALO seemed more competent, in this work, during the lighthearted moments than the serious ones will be tested during the other two operas of their season, where comic relief isn't exactly called for.

Stanford Engineering Hero Lecture: Don Knuth

Yesterday, Stanford Prof. emeritus Don Knuth gave one of the "lectures" in the series devoted by Stanford to their "Engineering Heroes." Jim Plummer, Dean of the School of Engineering, rattled off the names of the eight initial Engineering Heroes so quickly that I had to find them later here. They are William Durand, a pioneer in aerodynamics; Fred Terman, who is credited with fostering the emergence of Silicon Valley; Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard; Charles Litton, one of their associates and vacuum tube developer; Ray Dolby, whom we all associate with noise reduction in sound reproduction; Vint Cerf, one of the "fathers of the Internet"; and Don Knuth.

Like Cerf, Knuth was one of my professors at Stanford, and I am deeply indebted to his teaching. He is as close to a Renaissance man as you can get these days: a mathematician and computer scientist who pioneered the analysis of algorithm performance, but also invented many key algorithms for data manipulation; an accomplished player of multiple musical instruments, especially the organ; the developer of the T_EX typesetting language (a derivative, L_AT_EX, is still used today to typeset mathematical texts, including on Wikipedia and Blogger); the author of the famous series of textbooks called "The Art of Computer Programming," which he has promised finishing soon... since Vol. 3 appeared in 1973; and someone who, in the middle of all that, took time off his scientific pursuits to study religious texts.

Knuth used to devote the last lecture of his courses at Stanford to fielding questions from his students. True to form, he decided that his "Engineering Hero lecture" would not be a talk, but a Q&A session. He fielded questions from the packed auditorium on campus, as well as from the Internet audience who were following the event in real time. Dan Boneh, a cryptography expert who teaches at Stanford, was the moderator.

Below are my notes, providing a potentially biased summary of the session. I took the time to research links so that the reader can understand what mathematical or computational problems are mentioned in Knuth's answers. It should be noted that Knuth is often facetious, and will not bother giving a serious or complete answer to a question if he can get away by making a quip about it. He also tends to get off on a tangent frequently, and doesn't always return to the point. You can almost imagine the thoughts colliding in his head faster than he can express them -- nothing much has changed in this respect since I sat in his CS155 course, "Analysis of Algorithms," in 1973.

Q: If you wanted to give an interesting open problem of mathematics or computer science to a smart new student, what would it be?

A: One of the biggest open problems, of course, is P vs. NP. But really, this question is like asking a parent which of their children they love most. (Knuth searched for a specific problem in his own book, fumbled a bit, and gave up).

Q: In the 1790s, the French tried to introduce a decimal time system. How would a computer scientist design a time system?

A: Well, a decimal system could be very convenient, for example you could have birthdays more often.

Q: A lof of computer science students today don't know who you are. Do you think that's really bad?

A: I find it tragic when people don't know who Martin Gardner, who died about a year ago, was. He did a lot to illustrate mathematics in a really interesting way. For me, the important thing is not that they remember me, but that they remember the things I put in my books, and don't reinvent the same things over again.

Q: You developed T_EX when computers were slow and user interfaces were not WYSIWYG. How would you do things differently today?

A: Actually, I wanted to design something that could capture texts in an archival format, something that would endure through technology changes. So I was never interested in changing it to track the evolution of technologies.

Q: I learned Pascal, then C, C++, and Java. After 25 years, I still think it is hard to write software, debug it, etc. Why, and do you think we'll finally some day overcome this?

A: I put a lot of ideas about this in my book "Literate Programming." I think the key is to write programs so that they can be easily understood by humans. But there is no silver bullet. Some techniques will make things better, but programming will still be hard.

Q: What is your opinion of quantum computing? If it ends up working, will it change the notion we have of algorithms?

A: Quite possibly. Quantum computers make some things we consider very hard today much easier. So if this works, I might be able to finish my books much faster.

Q: Your Web site has Frequently Asked Questions, but also Infrequently Asked Questions. Do you know why those questions are infrequently asked?

A: I am not an activist, but I think people should be talking more about some important issues like those. And my points must not have been made strongly enough, because I didn't get any hate mail.
[Note: I think that it may simply be that this page is hidden away and has not been mentioned enough. I just discovered it myself as a result of this question.]

Q: Can you talk about some mistakes you've made?

A: I once wrote a paper about the mistakes I made in T_EX, and there were over 1000. One of them is that I based T_EX on binary units internally, but decimal units externally (in what the user can see). The rounding error that results when someone specifies, for example, a space of 0.1 points, can cause some anomalies to happen.

Q: If you were starting as a Ph.D. student today, what area would you go into?

A: I'd probably be most attracted by computer graphics, because I like to use my left and my right brains at the same time.

Q: Do you think we will ever create real artificial intelligence?

A: I am not sure, and if it happens, we may not know it. But regardless of the result, aiming for that goal has been one of the most fruitful generators of ideas and of useful computer science problems.

Q: What are the biggest bottlenecks against improving the quality of life?

A: The eighth and latest volume of my collected papers ("Selected Papers on Fun and Games") is the "dessert issue" -- things I couldn't think of leaving out. I mention this because quality of life is about building a bridge to the other side of the river so we can cross it and go have fun on the other side. But I really don't enjoy the kind of ranking we tend to do, like "what is the most this, what's the best that?"

Q: What is your general approach about solving a tough problem?

A: One of the biggest problems I solved, with several other people, was the "giant component problem" in graph theory. When you randomly connect vertices in a set, the largest connected subgraphs stay small for a while, and then there's this sort of big bang explosion of the size of the largest component. We had to invent a way to look at the time steps in this process differently so we could see what was happening in slow motion, so to speak.
    I tend to train my brain to understand the domain of the problem by taking baby steps during the first weeks.

Q: What do you think about open-access (freely downloadable) texts and journals vs. traditional commercial publications?

A: I like to do control quality myself on my work, but I'm also now thinking of doing e-books. I'm in favor of open-access journals because I don't like it when commercial publishers make money from the free work of the authors and reviewers.

Q: Do you prefer analyzing a problem or solving it?

A: If I can solve it, I certainly feel an adrenaline rush when I succeed. But I can sometimes find the journey more interesting than the destination.

Q: A long time ago, you had said that computer science did not have enough hard scientific results to really qualify as a science. Are we there yet?

A: Yes, we must have passed that point 25 years ago. What happened is someone told me that a science needed to have 500 theorems or more to really be a science. I replied "or 500 interesting algorithms." We've had that many for a while now.

Q: When you write your programs, what language do you use?"

I use CWEB. I write about 5 programs a week, mostly pretty small ones, and that's what I use.

Busy Week-End: "The Magic Flute" and "Ann"

In a rare coincidence, I had found some time ago two attractive performing arts events on this week-end's Austin calendar, and I decided to attend both.

"The Magic Flute" is a ballet by Stephen Mills, based on a compressed version of Mozart's opera. In fact, the score was written specifically for this piece, cutting the length in half and incorporating some of the sung parts into the orchestral suite. This was rather well done — the Queen of the Night's famous airs, for instance, were "sung" rather well by a trumpet.

I wish I could be as positive about the staging and the choreography. Mr. Mills, who spoke with the audience after the performance, said he was inspired to use shadows projected on a backdrop by something he saw at the Biennale in Venice a few years ago. The idea is okay... but leaves you to imagine what he could have done, for example, if Tamino and the dragon had danced their fight, instead of the lame shadow dragon we saw instead. Or if the water and the fire, through which Tamino and Pamina have to pass as their final induction rites, had been dancers in appropriately colored costumes, evoking flames and waves. There were tons of creative ideas that were just reduced to nothing through the limited and repetitive gimmick of this screen projection.

During his interaction with the audience, which he kept disappointingly short, Mr. Mills said that he "wanted to depart from the Egyptian and Masonic settings imagined by Mozart." I didn't think he got away from it at all, and indeed how could he? The story itself, even without any representation of a temple, implies a search for truth and purification, and a set of rites of passage, that clearly represent the Masonic traditions more than those of a traditional church. This is reinforced by the costumes chosen for Sarastro and his priests. As for the Egyptian references, they are, in most productions of the Flute, already limited to the minimum demanded by the libretto ("O Isis und Osiris," etc.) and since this production is voiceless, there wasn't much else to avoid.

But in fact my main criticism of the piece was that the costumes were overdone and did not serve the dancers or the work itself well. Schikaneder's libretto says that Papageno is dressed in the plumage of birds. That's fine for an opera, where the key artistic exploits are going to be first and foremost the singing, and then the music and the acting. In fact, a "busy" costume like Papageno's will be very good if the singer, instead of being a thin young man, is a bit older and corpulent. But this is dance. We're supposed to be fascinated by the movement of human bodies (none of which is going to be old or fat), not by the movement of layers of feathers!

In fact, I was reminded of Trey McIntyre's Peter Pan, created in 2004 for the Houston Ballet, in which I had also found that there was too much emphasis on complicated costumes. Note to choreographers: we are in the 21st century, and your predecessors started showing off the human body, with the minimum amount of costume needed to create visual harmony (and pass whatever decency standard seems currently applicable). There are lots of ways to suggest that Papageno is a birdcatcher, Tamino a prince (and the dragon a dragon, if there had been a tangible one) without covering them in things that hide their movements.

When Mr. Mills explained how the ballet came about, it was clear that he had spent months identifying and working with the people who could create the backdrop shadow effects, and he only started on the ballet five weeks before the first performance. This speaks a lot to the skills of the dancers, but unfortunately it doesn't say much about the choreographer, and I'm afraid it showed in the results. It was entertaining, it felt like a good family evening that would amuse the kids a lot, the orchestra and the score did an excellent job of reminding the people who know the work of all its superb musical moments... but this work seriously needs to be redone by someone in the tradition of the great choreographers of the last decades... a Stephen Morris, for example, or a Paul Taylor.

The next evening, I went to see "Ann," subtitled "An Affectionate Portrait of Ann Richards," a monologue written and played by Holland Taylor, a mostly TV and screen actress (Two and a Half Men, The Truman Show, etc.). At two and a half hours, including a fifteen-minute intermission, this one-woman show is quite a tour de force. Taylor has the accent, the mannerisms, and renders the often acerbic humor of the Governor. She had access to a lot of friends and colleagues of her subject, which gave her tons of materials to work with in order to tell the life, the challenges, the victories, and ultimately the gracious defeats (to two versions of hell: George W. Bush, and cancer) that marked her remarkable life.

The play was actually performed in several other Texas locations before hitting Austin for five sold-out performances in the last few days. It will be heading north later this year — it runs for three weeks in Chicago from Nov. 13 to Dec. 4. If it happens to be playing near you — and I assume that it will be back in Texas some time next year, unless if moves to Broadway or off-Broadway and stays there — don't miss it!

Humor and Dance in the Capital

Washington, D.C., is well-known as a place where important people dance around issues, and sometimes unintentionally provide humor, but this post is about real dance and subtle humor, as seen in a performance of the Paul Taylor Dance Company at the Kennedy Center on Thursday.

All three pieces on tap that night were relatively recent productions (2009-2010) of the prolific choreographer himself. Brief Encounters, the first piece, was notable from the start by its fluidity of movement. The minimalist, stark black costumes (tight-fitting briefs for both sexes, plus bras for the women) and the often bright lighting combined to emphasize the movement and the individual bodies. Some of the frequent visual jokes in Mr. Taylor’s oeuvre were already noticeable, as well as some of the sexual ambiguity he often introduces.

Three Dubious Memories went one step further (so to speak) in that direction. In it, a love triangle is seen in turn from the perspective of each of the three participants. In each of the first three “memories” in question, a couple is lovingly minding its own business when a jealous third intrudes. A fight ensues. The contrast between the three recollections creates humor in itself: the Man in Blue remembers finding the Woman in Red and the Man in Green together, whereupon he beats up Green, and takes Red away. Laughter ensues when the second scene unfolds, and one realizes that Green remembers that he found Blue and Red together, beat up Blue, and took the girl. The third permutation brings an uncommon symmetry, as Red comes up on the two men frolicking together, goes from shock to anger, slaps them both and stomps away. The rest of the company forms a sort of Greek chorus that punctuates the storytelling. I can’t tell if it was the explicit allusion to a same-sex relationship that scared away the two ladies seated next to me, but they didn’t return after the second intermission.

The final piece, Also Playing, was a joyous romp made up of 15 short vaudeville acts danced with a faked incompetence that was sometimes reminiscent of the Trockadero Ballet. Of course, pretending to dance badly takes great mastery, even if the audience may have been laughing too hard most of the time to notice.

Stanford Leading Matters (the end): Lecture on Stem Cells

Stanford Leading Matters (the end): Lecture on Stem Cells

Please read the Preamble of the previous post to understand the context of this article. As always, I encourage comments and responses. Remember that you can find and listen to the actual lecture on Stanford on iTunes.

"Stem Cells and the Promise of New Cancer Therapies" by Dr. Henry Weissman

A stem cell has a unique property, which is that when it divides, one of the two resulting cells is also a stem cell. Dr. Weissman took pains, at this point and several times later in his lecture, to debunk the myth that a stem cell can produce any tissue. He said that there are several types of stem cells (blood-forming, bone-forming, muscle-forming, etc.) and that they are not interchangeable at all.

Blood-forming stem cells can be obtained in three ways:

• from the bone marrow
• from "mobilized blood": you can give someone a drug that flushes stem cells into the bloodstream for just a few hours; during that time you can collect as many stem cells as you would normally get from as many as 100 bone marrow taps.
• from umbilical cord blood — but again, people who propose "cures" derived from this source for all sorts of ailments are charlatans.

California has a law (Prop. 71, adopted in 2005) that allows a university to perform clinical trials of treatments that a company might not want to fund. This is what the Stem Cell Research Center at Stanford does.

The speaker described the potential to help fight blood-related and brain-related diseases with stem cells. However, there is a complex interaction between graft rejection mechanisms and stem-cell transplants. You need to circumvent the rejection mechanism to successfully implant foreign stem cells into a person.

Moving to the importance of this research for cancer, Weissman said that when a chemotherapy drug kills ordinary tumor cells but not the tumor stem cells (TSCs), the cancer will regenerate. Leukemia cells carry a CD47 protein that serves as a "don't eat me" signal to macrophages that would otherwise eliminate them. Therefore, antibodies targeted at CD47 seem promising, but so far experiments have only been conducted in the form of xenografts from humans to mice. In those experiments, the antibodies have arrested the development of the cancer cells transplanted into the mice.

In conclusion, Dr. Weissman pointed out that this research has a lot of implications because of the passionate opinions for or against the use of fetal stem cells. He did not shy from the controversy.

An audience member asked about potential solutions that could come from transplants from mice to humans. Dr. Weissman said that unfortunately, mice have about 150 viruses they live with, but which could potentially cause leukemia in humans. There are current efforts to raise virus-free pigs, because their hearts are about the same size as human hearts, so they would be suitable for transplants.

In answer to another question, the speaker said that his research center is performing clinical trials in the UK because patients are covered by a single national health insurance system. In the U.S., he would have to negotiate about the coverage with a number of private insurance companies, and after some of them deny coverage, the remaining sample population for the trials would be small.

Feel free to comment on these last three posts — either about the subject matter or about the usefulness of these notes.

Stanford Leading Matters, continued: Lecture on Innovation

Please read the Preamble of the previous post to understand the context of this article. As always, I encourage comments and responses. Remember that you can find and listen to the actual lecture on Stanford on iTunes.

"Harnessing Collective Wisdom" by Hayagreeva Rao, Professor of Organizations at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

"Darwin's ideas of variations and selection apply to how the C-suite handles innovation."

Key questions about innovation in an enterprise: how do we encourage ideas without creating clutter? And how do we select some ideas, therefore kill some of them, without discouraging people from continuing to submit?

A study by McKinsey found that the way many companies measure innovation is flawed. Metrics and measures and useless without a good system of idea generation, which requires creative people and a positive climate, which in turn is created by good leadership.

In most companies, when you ask people what hinders innovation, you get two very different answers depending whom you ask:

• people at the top think that there aren't enough ideas generated by people below
• people in the trenches say that it is the top echelons of the company that act as a bottleneck

There needs to be a climate of confidence, trust and fun, enabling people to share their ideas and to try new things.

A good predictor of an organization's ability to innovate is how it handles failure. You have to:

1. reward people for trying hard enough that they will fail a certain percentage of the time;
2. make sure that failures are recognized quickly and that projects are stopped when they have failed, freeing resources to pursue others.

Peter Kim, head of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., used to tell people: "if you kill a project, I will give you stock options." At another company, the CEO frequently visits employees and hands them a business card, the back of which looks like a Monopoly "Get out of jail" card. Then he says: "Try something new! If it fails, give your boss this card, and I promise you won't get in trouble." At Amazon, Jeff Bezos gives a monthly award to an employee who did, without asking for permission, something that improved customer satisfaction.

Rite Solutions, a Rhode Island company, has created an internal stock market for ideas, called "Mutual Fun" (a pun on "mutual fund"). This virtual stock market trades cost reduction ideas ("savings bonds"), mildly aggressive ideas ("Bow Jones") and far-out innovations ("SPAZDAQ"). Once this market determines what are the most popular ideas, actual funds are allocated to them. Ideas are never killed by a corporate review board -- they are by the community when the corresponding shares don't sell. This approach also circumvents a common flaw of management review processes: senior managers tend to mostly empathize with people who are a lot like them.

At the end of his talk, Rao was asked about Open Innovation. He said that one size doesn't fit all. "You may not use the same incentives or the same rules with different actors."

Stanford Lecture on Energy

Preamble

In the last six months, I attended two instances of a series of events entitled "Stanford Leading Matters." This is a touring half-day conference that is going through 28 cities, mostly in the U.S. but with some foreign locations too. The purpose is to re-acquaint university alumni with the challenges that Stanford University is addressing. Of course, as a by-product of this goodwill, the university hopes to successfully appeal to their generosity and raise more money for the "Stanford Challenge," a $10 billion fundraiser.

Leading Matters was a rather stellar production, complete with making the meeting hall look like a scale model of the university's inner quad — sandstone arches and all. At every stop, Stanford University President John Hennessy spoke of the university's vision, which is no less than helping solve the world's toughest challenges; incredibly gifted and involved students provided their views in a panel moderated by Hennessy; professors gave lectures on important issues in today's world; and very good food could be sampled.

The 28th and last stop on this tour will be in Portland, Ore., at the end of May 2011. Because I was at a conference in Boston the week immediately preceding the Leading Matters event there, in late September 2010, I added a day to my trip and went. There were about 550 Stanford alumni, spouses and sometimes their college-bound children in attendance. Then, when Leading Matters stopped in Houston a month ago in January, I went again — in part because the faculty lectures and the student panel involved different people each time, therefore it wasn't a complete repetition.

What I am proposing to do in three successive blog posts is to give a summary of the lectures I personally attended (they can all be found and downloaded for free at "Stanford on iTunes" but some readers will appreciate a more personal touch).

Fixing the Energy System — Why Is It So Hard?" by Prof. James Sweeney

Sweeney is the Director of the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford, thus named because it was founded thanks to a $30 million donation by Jay Precourt.

He stated that there are three drivers for a public energy policy:

• Global climate change
• National security
• Economics

Concerning the first one, the world releases about 30 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide each year. To address CO₂ emissions, we should focus on three things:

• "decarbonizing" the generation of electricity
• reducing the use of oil in transportation
• improving how we use electricity

"Energy efficiency" means the economically efficient improvement of energy use — i.e., something that we can be willing to do not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because it will save money.

The possible improvements in the production or use of energy fall into several categories, in terms of their feasibility:

• those for which technology advances are needed
• those for which the technology exists but is currently too expensive
• those that require new regulations
• those against which there are no obstacles, other than our behavioral inertia

Why are some of the energy cost reduction opportunities not being pursued? Sweeney gave several examples:

• Owners or rental property have no incentive to make improvements, for example in insulation: they cost money, but do not allow them to charge more in rent.
• Consumers are not receiving enough information to understand their electricity usage; for example, a cable TV decoder/DVR box uses 45W when it is on, and almost the same when it is off.

The Google Power Meter is a free energy monitoring tool for households. It checks your pattern of electricity consumption, and reports the results a day later. However, apart from the fact that either your utility company must be part of the program (and only a few companies are), or you must install a monitoring device otherwise, Sweeney said that this tool "requires too much analysis by people, and feedback should be more immediate" if we are to obtain real changes in consumer behavior.

Electric utility companies, of course, do not have incentives to reduce consumption. Usually it is the opposite (although he should have mentioned that an increase in peak consumption may cost a utility more than they can recover, because they may need to bring online their most inefficient plants, the one they would otherwise keep shut off, in order to meet the demand). Instead, we should find ways to decouple volume from profit, which California has done through regulation and financial incentives.

For businesses, there should be software packages for energy use management, just like there is to manage and optimize other company resources (people, equipment, etc.). "What you don't measure, you can't manage."

After the speaker ended his talk, someone in the audience, who worked at the Department of Energy for ten years, suggested that there is a rift between blue (Democrat-leaning) and red (Republican-leaning) states: people in red states are opposed to energy management measures because these sound anti-business. Sweeney replied that he did not see this issue as a clear-cut Democrat-vs.-Republican attitude, but he also admitted that as a Republican he could be biased about it.

Men and Near-Men of the Year

Wow... nothing posted since May 27. It would seem that my life got super-exciting since then and took me away from the keyboard. In fact, all that happened was that I was quite busy with consulting work from August to early November, and that we got a puppy in July. Other that that, it's the usual reason: procrastination. And perhaps a lack of something really exciting or infuriating to write about.

I received the TIME Magazine "Person of the Year" edition (and yes, I wrote "Men" in this post's title because I'm only going to talk about men here) and I was thinking of the meaning of some of the choices.

I've already heard the Luddites say that it was preposterous to bestow such a high honor on Mark Zuckerberg, but I think the point is that regardless of his actual personal qualities or limitations (disclosure: I have not seen The Social Network) the phenomenon that he and his company created is of great importance. I consult and write professionally about the importance of social media in the enterprise, and about the fact that companies that try to create an internal social network fail to realize that their employees want to be connected to a mix of colleagues and non-colleagues. Since Facebook and LinkedIn are the primary places that meet this need, they will not become faithful to an internal-only site. My latest paper on this, "If You Build It, They Won't Come" will be published by the Cutter Consortium after the turn of the year.

Now don't take me wrong: I'm interested in this enough that next time I walk by Antonio's Nut House, which is a couple of blocks from where I lived in Palo Alto in 1985-88 and 1993-2000, I may drop in to see if Mr. Zuckerberg is there (he may have to change his unofficial headquarters now that TIME has disclosed this habit), because I would absolutely not mind an autograph. It would be a change from my usual ballet dancers and violinists... OK, violinist. But Facebook (and LinkedIn) are now much bigger phenomena than any boy genius, and will probably not depend on their respective founders to continue (the usual counter-example to this is Stevc Jobs, of course).

The Chilean miners, los trenta y tres, almost made it. Some of them were truly heroic, others were well inspired to follow their leaders' advice. They are important not so much as 33 individual men, but because it showed how a country and the victims could take charge of a rescue operation that some thought was doomed from the start. The "Heckuva job, Brownie" exclamation was a gross sign of incompetence at all levels in the U.S. in 2005. Next time there is a Katrina-like catastrophe in this country, I hope we ask some of these miners, and perhaps the President of Chile and his cabinet, to come here and coordinate the rescue, since they know a thing or two about actually succeeding at a rescue.

And now, the man whose near-designation may be controversial, but who deserves some discussion: Julian Assange. Once again, here is a person who seems to have some deep flaws, and who is alleged to be a repeat sex offender; but regardless of his personality, he is the visible face of a movement to expose diplomatic secrets. I am quite perturbed, frankly, by the attitude of governments and banks toward the Wikileaks organization and even toward Assange himself. First, it has not been proven that Wikileaks participants procured any information illegally. The people who gave them the information may have violated their terms of employment by various governments, so go after them if you have legal standing, but don't blame the messenger.

Secondly, I find the diplomatic niceties tiresome. We all know that foreign dignitaries, be it Karzai, Merkel, or Sarkozy, are not angels. I find it refreshing to hear about the incompetence of the first, the imperiousness of the second, and the vanity of the third. Instead of suing someone for revealing this, the U.S. diplomats should say "oops" and move on, and the big shots who have been described in unflattering terms should look at what they can do to govern more competently or more humbly.

Thirdly, and the TIME article on Assange points it clearly, the financial institutions clearly acquiesced to apply punitive measures to Wikileaks as soon as Ms. Clinton's organization cleared its powerful throat. Paypal suspended processing payments because of "illegal activity" even though it is an allegation that has not been proven. Visa and Mastercard stopped too, even though they still let the Ku Klux Klan have accounts with them. And a Swiss bank has frozen Mr. Assange's account because he is not a permanent resident of Switzerland -- a rule they constantly overlook in other cases. This is just spineless capitulation and, until and unless an actual illegal action has been proven, a sad day for freedom of speech.

Even the fact that he was arrested in London just after the outcry from the U.S. government seems rather suspicious. I can imagine the debates at Scotland Yard: "if we arrest him now, we'll be called lackeys of the U.S. If we don't arrest him, we may be derelict in our duty. Oh, what to do, what to do? Here's an idea: let's arrest him and then free him up on bail. Let's see how this plays out."

So this Person of the Year issue is more interesting than the usual crop. I was especially glad that the designation didn't go to some Tea Party politician, because I doubt that we will remember them much in a few years, and it would have been another U.S.-centric story. Instead, in all the cases I mentioned (Zuckerberg, the miners, and Assange) we have people whose actions have inspired or disturbed the entire world, and who evoke in us some fundamental values that are not only American: connectedness, the love of life, and the right to know what our governments would like to hide.

Another Houston Ballet evening

Woohoo, I got another autographed program cover. Ian Casady (at left) danced the role of Pecos Bill in Pecos by Stanton Welch, and I got him to sign the program bearing his photograph in that role. I say "role" because the piece was more theatrical than anything else, an impression Ian agreed with.

That piece closed a program that started with Ballo della Regina by Balanchine, which pleased one of my companions, since she learned classical ballet for eight years, but was too old-fashioned for me. And as fun as Pecos Bill was, I far preferred the middle part of the program, Sandpaper Ballet, a very abstract piece by Mark Morris, set to Leroy Anderson's music, including such whimsical pieces as Sleigh Ride, the Typewriter, and others.

A Volcano and a Goat

I flew to Paris almost two weeks ago. My plane left Houston five and a half hours late, and arrived in Paris seven hours late. The cause of course, was the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, whose name I can't resist writing since I can spell it without looking it up anymore.

Yesterday morning, I took a train from Paris to Poitiers, where I changed to another train from Poitiers to Angoulême, in order to have lunch with an ex-colleague of mine. The second train, which was coming from Brussels, arrived five minutes late in Poitiers, but then stopped for 20 minutes in the middle of nowhere and arrived in Angoulême 27 minutes late. No, there wasn't an ash cloud along the track: the train ahead of us had hit a goat that was standing on the tracks. Goat against TGV: no contest here. Still, it's probably a good thing that the trains on that section go at about 125 mph (200 kph), not their usual 185 mph (300 kph).

When I was told about the reason for the train delay, I found it rather funny that while a mighty volcano can cause thousands of flights to be canceled and 200,000 passengers to be stranded for days, a humble goat, in the wrong place at the wrong time, can create a smaller commotion, delaying over 1,000 people (between the two trains, assuming it didn't cause an even worse ripple effect) by half an hour.

Newsworthiness or Prejudice?

I posted a first version of this article last week in French. After the situation evolved, and considering my international readers (yes, all two of you), here is an updated version in English.

When I received the e-mail notifying me of the publication of the newsletter of the French Consulate in Houston, Le Trait d'Union (the title means "The Hyphen," but the French phrase evokes the sense of "connection" better than the English word, and therefore implies that it is a means to connect the local French community), I was surprised that one of its articles was entitled Portrait of Annise Parker, First Homosexual Woman in the Houston City Hall.

Upon reading the content, it was clear that while it stated her history, competence, and summed up her campaign, the newly elected mayor's sexual orientation was indeed a key aspect for the author. The article was certainly positive in its tone, but I tended to dismiss this as rather insignificant, because how else was an official publication of a foreign government going to talk about the mayor of its host city anyway? But the tabloid title rubbed me the wrong way.

I then discovered that the newsletter contained no link to respond to the editor, which made me feel like the Consulate only cared about one-way communication, a very "regal" French way of doing things (the French actually use the word régalien to refer to things that authorities do in a way that is reminiscent of the omnipotent kings).

So I composed my very critical (surprise!) response to the Consulate as an open letter, which I posted here and was reflected in my Facebook status. A local French friend saw this, and sent me the contact information for the Consulate's press service, to which I sent the same message in an e-mail. I very quickly got an e-mail back from an official, containing a personal response from the Consul General, Mr. Grandjouan, and I had a nice phone discussion with the gentleman who had relayed the response.

The gist of the reply was that many publications has focused on the new mayor's orientation; that she was very open about being a lesbian; and that it was important to mention this because people tend to have a false image of all Texans as very conservative people. Therefore, the argument went, the article was trying to point out how positive and progressive her election was.

While I acknowledge that there was probably no actual prejudice at work here, and I appreciate the communication effort and the personal attention the Consul gave to my criticism, I still think that the focus on "first gay woman in City Hall" in the title was inappropriate. It would have been fine to talk in the article about the "conservatism" issue. For example, the writer could have written that Ms. Parker has long served the local community as an openly gay woman, that her sexual orientation was not an issue in the campaign (until a last-minute desperate maneuver by her opponent), and that her victory demonstrates that Houstonians are not as socially conservative as people tend to depict Texans in general. This would have been fine in the body of the piece — but you can't claim that something is a non-issue... then try to grab the reader's attention by making it an issue worthy of the headline.

It is also a little ironic that a French publication refers to the sexuality of the Houston mayor in a headline in 2010, given that in 2001 Paris elected a mayor whose homosexuality was public knowledge since 1998. It almost sounded like the author of the article on Ms. Parker had not heard of Mr. Delanoë.

More generally, this reminded me of the general debate about invisibility vs. recognition in the LGBT community. Some people might point out that we are in general trying to be recognized for our presence, contributions, and need of equality. But equality precisely implies that our sexual orientation should not be newsworthy — it is its still-rampant denial that should be.

Of course, what is and should be much more important to the French representatives in Houston, and was completely omitted from the article, is this: in the current climate of a still lingering recession, what will the new mayor do to control its impact on her city? And incidentally, how can the strong French community in Houston, including all the French who work in the Oil & Gas industry, be involved in a mutually beneficial manner in the economic workings of this city?

Apollo, Hush, and Fancy Free

After a bit of a dry spell, I went to the Houston Ballet tonight and saw three good pieces. And since the season's Playbill has Connor Walsh on the cover, about whom I wrote before ("Arts and Politics, part II" on February 23, 2008, and "Icing on the Cake" on November 7 of the same year), I came back with a little prize besides having seen a great performance:

All three pieces had the common quality of combining great choreographers with great musicians. Apollo is by George Balanchine, on music by Stravinsky. However, composed in 1928, this is both relatively early Stravinsky and very early Balanchine. Interestingly, this means the score is more classical — not sense-jarring and almost cacophonous like the Rite of Spring — while the choreography is more modern than what Balanchine became known for later, even though it is based on Greek mythology. At least I was positively surprised.

Hush is by Christopher Bruce, who also choreographed Swang Song, the piece danced by Mr. Walsh that I commented on in my post two years ago. The dancing, while inventive, did not strike me as particularly extraordinary, but the accompaniment by Bobby McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma, with McFerrin's amazing ability to make his voice sounds like various sorts of musical instruments, added an extra dimension.

Fancy Free is a fascinating piece, not only because of its inherent qualities, but because it was premiered in 1944, and one might have almost found it sacrilegious to feature sailors on leave while WW II was still going on. But the other interesting aspect is that while it is a very traditional "boys chase girls" story, the guys try to win the girls by demonstrating their not-very-macho footsteps, there are gestures that hint at the traditional semi-funny, semi-homophobic jokes that guys can make about each other... and then both the music and the dance were composed by two of the biggest closet queens in New York's so-very-gay artistic world, Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein!

I got my autograph in the Wortham Center's Green Room after the performance, and had time to chat a little with Mr. Walsh. I complimented him on giving a very complex dimension to his character in Fancy Free: especially during the duo dance with one of the girls, his sailor had at times the cocksure attitude you would expect of a slightly drunk sailor on leave in New York; at times, the hesitancy and shyness of a corn-fed boy who doesn't know what to do in a new world; and finally, a big grin on his face that says "I can't believe what's happening to me!" He said, in different words, that there was indeed a conscious attempt to layer several personality aspects onto the character, and he seemed genuinely pleased to be told that it had come across successfully.

Unholy Mix

A few months ago, I joined a LinkedIn group of small business owners in the "Houston Bay Area" — which means the area between Houston and Galveston, including places like Pearland, Clearlake, and the rest of the area around NASA's Johnson Space Center. I'm not based in that specific suburbia, but it's only a 25-mile drive from my Houston location to NASA, which depending on the time of the day can take between 30 minutes and infinity. As a fledgling independent consultant with existing connections in Houston, I figured the networking could be useful.

The group leader soon started organizing in-person meetings at a Mexican cantina near NASA. After missing the first opportunities, I went to a happy hour in January. My initial impressions were cautiously favorable: while many people were in unrelated fields (construction, real estate, insurance) there were a few members doing IT work. They were not directly competing with me, so there seemed to be good cross-selling opportunities. There were also contract personnel agencies, and while they typically deal with clerical and accounting positions, I thought they might occasionally need to find a part-time IT expert for a client, which I could do for a few days, even if it was "filler work" at a lower rate than usual. Business cards were exchanged, and I went to a second time for a luncheon meeting in February. I volunteered to give a not-too-geeky talk about IT trends at the March 11 lunch, a proposal which was accepted with very positive feedback.

About a week before my talk, as I was putting the finishing touches to my presentation, I got e-mails telling me that a couple of new posts had been added to the group's discussion board. I went to the site, and discovered a message from a pastor, asking the rest of us something about how we would answer God if he met us at the "pearly gates" and asked us some question I have now forgotten. The second post, by the group's manager, Mary Sullivan, was to re-emphasize the pastor's message and tell us to re-read it and think about it. And then there was a third message, by another member who said that yes, he had re-read the question, and would still be able to answer God in the affirmative.

At that point, I wrote a polite but a bit "challenging" message, saying that while I respected everyone's beliefs, this discussion had nothing to do with the purpose of the group, and that it should be taken offline. I remarked that I was aware that some Christians tend to assume, in this very religious country, that everyone else is one too, and that it is okay to mix religion and work. However, I pursued, this is not okay because people from other religions, or with no religion at all, would feel discriminated against, and at any rate this was the "Houston Bay Area LinkedIn Group," not the "Houston Bay Area Christian LinkedIn Group."

At this point, Mary Sullivan replied that she wasn't going to change the direction of the group (which she did not restate, which was convenient since she would have been hard pressed to find any mention of a religious focus or assumption in the group's mission statement). She stated that my remarks indicated that I was intolerant of Christians. She informed me that she had asked the pastor who has posted the initial note to open the next meetings with a prayer; and that, since she did not want me to feel "uncomfortable" at that point, she had already secured an alternate speaker to replace me on March 11.

I sent a quick reply, where I remained polite but pointed out her hypocrisy (she had cancelled my talk, so who was being intolerant of whom?) and immediately thereafter I left the LinkedIn group, as it seemed the most appropriate course of action to avoid further confrontation and move on to more productive things.

As far as I am concerned, the incident is closed. I actually hope their group falters because I think it is a disservice to its members to have hijacked it for a hidden religious agenda. It was dishonest to create the group and invite people in the first place without clearing stating the assumption that members were Christians who wanted to discuss their business in the context of their faith (or vice versa). It may seem mean-spirited to wish them failure, but my point is that the sooner the group makes itself irrelevant, which may or may not happen given that this is Texas after all, another group can be formed to fill the void — one that will be unrelated to the practice of any specific religion and will serve its stated business networking purposes directly and honestly. If such a group gets formed at some point, I am certainly interested in joining it.

Oh, and my slides on "IT Trends" are ready, and will remain current for a little while!

I have an amazing friend

Well, okay, before you all explode in recriminations, I have lots of amazing friends.

But today I want to talk about one of them specifically. We are both on the board of Stanford Pride, and he is a third-year medical student at Columbia University in New York. His name is Bryan McColgan.

Bryan finds the time, even on days when he spent many hours in the pediatrics department or in the emergency room, to share his life as a medical student, and the important things he is learning, with anyone who cares. He does this on Twitter (his feed) a few times each day, and he also has a video log on Blogspot (here).

I'm almost addicted to his tweets, because they make me realize how complicated medicine is, how intimately connected it is to our society and civilization (e.g., his posts about how parents who look up symptoms on the Internet bring their children to the emergency room convinced that they have an extra rare serious disease, or the way overweight teenagers are victimized by their peers instead of getting encouragement), but also because on a personal basis I am discovering that Bryan is an exceptional individual.

He spent several months in Zimbabwe a couple of years ago, and has developed a deep appreciation and compassion for the plight of people who suffer from bad health care, malnutrition, and a criminally negligent, incompetent and/or corrupt government. And he so much wants to help, that I'm sure he'd go back to Africa in a heartbeat when he finishes his studies... except for the slight problem that he will be at least a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt from the cost of his medical studies. When you watch his videos and read his tweets, you really feel the goodness of this guy coming at you through the screen, and the next minute you're laughing when he tells you how cool it is when urologists blast kidney stones with lasers as if they were zapping aliens in a video game!

Anyway, instead of me continuing, you just need to do yourself a favor and read his tweets or watch his video clips. I guarantee you'll learn something, and one of them will be how immensely talented and generous some people can be.

Speechful People

I went to see Tim Miller perform his monologue "Lay of the Land" at the Vortex Theatre in Austin on January 29. After the performance, I bought him a glass of red wine, to make sure he would recognize me, since that was my excuse to introduce myself last time he had performed here, and was a prelude to a faithful-if-distant Facebook acquaintance with him.

Tim was of course surrounded by admirers, but he kept introducing me to them as "my friend Claude" so that gave me an excuse to hang around for a while. Two of the people who were talking to him, Melissa and Kile ("legally it's Kyle, but in life I spell it Kile, it's my one act of rebellion," he told a judge at the tournament I will talk about later), are part of the UT Speech program, which is not in the Drama department as one might suspect, but in the Communications department. Kile talked about work done with high-school students, for which Tim's monologues were one of the sources, which I found fascinating given how much "in your face" Tim's work can be.

So I asked Kile and Melissa more about the UT Speech program, because I really had no idea what this whole subculture is (since then, I've mentioned this to a couple of people, who both said "oh yes, I used to do this when I was in college"). They said that there is a whole schedule of contests between colleges in different cities, and that in the fall in particular, they are at some event in Houston almost every week-end. They advised me to look at the program's Web site. I then e-mailed the team's director, Randy Cox, to ask if there was a schedule of upcoming events. He said the season was essentially over, but that there was a contest at Texas A&M during the week-end of February 6-7. Since I was planning to drive from Austin to Houston on the 7^th anyway, I decided to make a detour through College Station and see what this was all about.

I ended up attending two of the finals, and was fascinated by this world that was unknown to me until then. The one thing I still do not understand is why these speech tournaments take place in basement rooms and are not made into public events, which might attract donations and at least publicity.

Imagine a bunch of college kids (mostly young men, although there were a few women, and there was some good diversity in terms of ethnic origins), wearing suits and ties, carrying small vinyl binders the size of a book. This makes the men at least look like preachers! The little black book contains the script or story from which they perform, although they have almost totally memorized their texts, so they only refer to the book on rare occasions to jog their memory, or use its opening and closing for dramatic effect. At least this is what they do during the "prose" events, which are basically readings of short texts (composed from key passages of longer works) with some interpretive acting thrown in, and the "duo interpretation" events, in which a couple, usually a mixed-gender one, blends multiple texts into a story they act together.

I often listen to Public Radio International's Selected Shorts while driving between Austin and Houston. During this captivating program, great actors read short stories on stage. The college speech contest was better in several ways: first, I could see the students in front of me, a few feet away; second, they put a lot more passion and dramatization in their reading that is done in a program like Selected Shorts; and third, this was as good as going to a performance at a playhouse... but free.

The typical way these interpretive readings are done follows a specific routine: the performer (or performers, in the case of the Duo event) read a first paragraph of the story, setting the stage and whetting the viewer's appetite. Then they close their book rather ostentatiously, implying that they are now departing from the text, and give a short introduction to the work and its meaning; they conclude that part by stating the title and author. Then they re-open their book (mostly for effect, to indicate that they are going back to the text) and resume where they left off after the interest-provoking opening.

There are other types of events -- one is about persuasive speaking (convincing the listener of a point), another about talking about a subject with minimal preparation, another about giving an entertaining after-dinner talk.

I took some notes about the six stories that were competing in the Prose finals. Today, I used those notes to research the authors and titles of the works (I found four out of six -- thank you Google) because I hate to mention works of art without attribution. I hope these terse notes will give an idea of the depth and variety of the contestants' sources. A common point is that these are texts that carry a lot of emotional weight, a lot of passion, and this allows the performer to express himself of herself very strongly -- again, contrasting with a "normal" reading.

Nathan: in Brian de Leeuw's novel "In This Way I Was Saved," a boy develops a complicated, controlling, and ultimately insane relationship with another boy, and several years later, in college, kills his friend rather than losing control over him.

Brendan: in Joe Meno's "The Boy Detective Fails," Billy tries to make sense of his sister's suicide, the one case he is not able to solve, but ends up in psychiatric care, unable to cope with the reality.

Kyle/Kile: a man literally gives up his right arm for his girlfriend -- a metaphor about commitment, sacrifice and resentment. Creepy but very effectively performed.

Amanda: in Laura van den Berg's story "Where We Must Be," Jane, a failed actress and mother of Jimmy who will soon die from a lethal disease, takes (and then loses) a job impersonating Bigfoot at a local amusement part, providing a comical counterpoint to a poignant story.

Colin: Richard McCann's essay "The Resurrectionist" explores the complicated feelings someone has toward the donor of the liver he received as a transplant.

Jeremy: after his mother dies, a man sorts the contents of her attic and finds nude photos of her that his father had (unsuccessfully) submitted to Playboy Magazine for their centerfold.

Most of the duo interpretation texts had something to do with exposing prejudices, racial or ethnic. This again gave the students an opportunity to do some great acting around the texts they had chosen. The audience often laughed... and then paused when the next sentences in the text made us realize that perhaps we had laughed at something that should have made us upset, or laughed because of a preconceived idea we had about people from a certain background.

Overall, this was eye-opening... and a good incentive to find out more such events in the future and attend them.

The Planets

Saturday is named after Saturn, the greek Chronos, the god of time. That's the day (two days ago) when I went to see the performance of Gustav Holst's The Planets at the Houston Symphony, which promised a movie montage of high-definition pictures from space telescopes, projected above the orchestra, to illustrate the subject matter.

For a while, I didn't think I was going to make it. After consulting with my newly-moved-to-Houston friends David and Brenda to gauge their interest, I called to get three tickets, expecting that it would be fairly easy as usual, and was told that there were only single obstructed-view tickets left for all three remaining performances. So we gave up on the idea of going together on Sunday, but by Saturday evening I resolved to try my old Boston trick. I dusted off my cardboard sign that reads "Looking to Buy ONE Ticket," the one that got me into multiple performances at the ICA on the waterfront there, and went to Jones Hall.

I should have known it was my lucky day when I managed to parallel-park in a space between two cars that was, I swear (I measured it) 4" (10 cm) longer than my car. Of course, strictly speaking, that's pretty impossible. But not to an ex-Paris driver, and not considering the elasticity of car bumpers and of tires: you can (gently) touch the car behind, push a little, then move forward, touch the car ahead, push a little... and pretty soon you're in. Still, you have to get exactly the right angle, and the planets must have been with me.

The very nice usher at Jones Hall told me, within a minute of my taking position in front of the entrance, that there was no way she could let me stand there with my sign. But she said not to worry, she was sure she could do something for me. And sure enough, ten minutes later, she had secured a ticket that someone turned in because someone in their party couldn't come, and she gave it to me! So not only did I get a seat, but it was free. And I even had time left to munch on the tiny overpriced cheese-and-fruit plate sold by the Jones Hall concessionaire. The seat was at the rightmost end of an orchestra row, and the view was in fact slightly obstructed by the underside of the boxes, but barely -- just a little sliver missing at the top of the projection screen, and an excellent view of the stage.

The concert started with the Scherzo fantastique by Stravinsky, whom I tolerate reasonably well. It was followed by Timbres, espace, mouvement (la nuit étoilée) by Dutilleux, and that was much harder for me. But the Holst suite made it up. It was only the second time I heard the entire suite (classical radio stations usually just play the most famous movement, the fourth one, Jupiter - Bringer of Jollity), the first time also being live. I was wondering whether the projection of the film would add to or detract from the musical experience, and I am satisfied that it was an excellent addition. Duncan Copp's movie, using NASA footage from various interplanetary probes as well as CGI, is visually stunning. That is also got the Symphony to give several sold-out performances is very comforting, given how difficult it usually is for classical orchestras to balance their budget and to attract a younger-than-70 audience.

And my car didn't have any more scratches when I retrieved it than it had before — it just took another dozen or so back-and-forth maneuvers to extract it from its parking spot.

Addiction: Conflict Between Brain Circuits

This was the title of a lecture given today at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston. I heard about on National Public Radio a few weeks ago, made a note to visit the Web site, registered and drove down from Houston to Galveston today to attend. In case you don't know why I have such a keen interest in the science of addiction, my November 10, 2009 post will explain it.

Dr. Nora Volkow, the speaker is the Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Quoting from her biography:

"Dr. Volkow's work has been instrumental in demonstrating that drug addiction is a disease of the human brain. As a research psychiatrist and scientist, Dr. Volkow pioneered the use of brain imaging to investigate the toxic effects of drugs and their addictive properties. Her studies have documented changes in the dopamine system affecting the actions of frontal brain regions involved with motivation, drive, and pleasure and the decline of brain dopamine function with age."

Of course, I couldn't resist taking some notes. This is just a sampling of all the interesting things that were said.

• After someone takes either food or amphetamines, you can see the same increase if dopamine in the nucleus accumbens. But drugs don't have the same satiating effects as food.
• Experiments can be conducted on humans using methylphenidate, which mimics the effects of cocaine. It also blocks the re-uptake of dopamine, causing the receptors to be flooded with the stuff. The "high" effect can be reported by the subject, and happens only if the substance is administered intravenously; if it is taken orally, it gets into the brain much more slowly and you see no effect at all, even allowing for a much longer period of time. So the dynamic aspect of drug administration is key.
• Different drugs have different clearance rates, and the "high" seems related to the rate of change of dopamine concentration, not to the absolute level. So if the level of dopamine goes up rapidly, then decays very slowly, the "high" does not persist, but starts dropping quickly as soon as the dopamine level has reached its maximum.
• Her imaging techniques allow her to study the effects of drugs on separate brain functions located in different places: the executive function (decision-making); inhibitory control (which allows a non-alcoholic to decide not to have one more drink, but is evidently damaged in the alcoholic); motivation and drive; memory and learning.
• Tests on animals who have been trained to push a lever to self-administer a drug have shown that causing the overexpression of dopamine D2 receptors causes the rats to lower their usage. As the substance injected to cause this overexpression wears off, over a period of 10 days or so, drug self-administration progressively returns to its previous level.
  
• Changes in dopamine receptors in the striatum correlate with changes in glucose metabolism in specific other parts of the brain, such as the orbital frontal cortex, which are also the effects observed in obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Another similarity between OCD and addiction is that when the reinforcement ceases (e.g., a lab rat is no longer given food when he is pressing the lever he had associated with this reward, or an addict no longer gets pleasure from his drug), he/it is still compulsively practicing the behavior.
• In the non-addicted brain, the ability to control actions is decreased by disruptions, such as anger, that affect the prefrontal cortex. That's why, when you just heard that your flight is canceled, you're more likely to go ahead and have that chocolate chip cookie that you had resisted earlier.