… and take a joke way too seriously.

An article in Foreign Policy a couple of days ago made me chuckle and I thought I’d share. The article is about former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani who was recently deposed from his position as the head of the Assembly of Experts of the Leadership in Iran.

The article’s title is “The Shark Stops Swimming”, and it isn’t supposed to be funny-funny. In fact it is a serious attempt at analyzing and anticipating the fall-out from this departure. It’s written by an Barbara Slavin, a US foreign policy expert who has in fact written a book on Iran.

I don’t know who came up with the ‘clever’ title, but the term shark is re-emphasized in the body of the article where the author says “Rafsanjani, 76, is no democrat. Nicknamed “the shark” for his shrewdness.”. I believe in coming up with title, the author or editor’s thought process went like this: Colloquially, in Iran they call this particular politician ‘kooseh’ which means shark in Persian… Shark is an aggressive creature and in North America, it is associated with shrewedness (for example in use of idioms such as ‘sharks of business’). Therefore the nickname must be a euphemism reflecting shark-like personal qualities. What a catchy title for our North American readers!

Now, I don’t dispute the shrewdness part given that Iranian politics, to the extent that I am aware of, can be described as shark-infested waters. And I don’t know the details of the event in discussion, or want to discuss them. I am simply amused by the fact that as far I am aware, the term ‘kooseh’ in Persian refers (1) the animal known as shark in English (2) someone who can’t grow facial hair. As far as I am aware, the colloquial use of the term in this case is a tongue-in-cheek nickname referring to the latter… certainly, a reflection of a personal ‘quality’ but not exactly what the article had in mind.

This isn’t a big deal… as the rest of the article appears to be more or less correct if not particularly informative in that it simply rehashed widely known facts and views. But, it did make me question the extent to which analysts that aren’t embedded in a culture can be relied on for the more subtle analysis of events and attitudes in a given culture.

Learning a general purpose non-web programming language has been on my “todo” list for a while, but it but it has fallen somewhere between “deep sea dive” and “get an eyeball tattoo” (Not for those with weak stomachs… or any kind of stomachs. And DO NOT google image it.). I’m comfortable with most of the web programming languages, though by no means as comfortable as I’d like to be. I’ve written a couple of small scripts for myself in PHP, but I’ve mostly spent time modifying larger scripts– not nearly as satisfying, or accomplished.

So this summer I’m going to be somewhat proactive and invest a little time in learning a non-web general purpose language. Given external time constraints, I don’t really want to touch either C or Java with a ten-foot pole, but after debating between Ruby and Python (and Perl I suppose), I’ve settled on Python. I thought it would be a good choice given my background in PHP, and it might help me brush up some of my skills. I’ve been using Mark Pilgrim’s Dive into Python (diving + programming? double strike. hurr durr derp.) So far I really like the syntax, which I find is much more straightforward and lack of curly braces for blocks. We’ll see how this venture turns out… watch out, Python’s Benevolent Dictator For Life.

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2011/02/the-new-battleground/

The new battleground
How the internet shapes social movement in the face of regulation
By Marzieh Ghiasi
February 17, 2011

Image by Olivia Messer / The McGill Daily

It has become commonplace to describe the web as the Wild West – a place where there are no rules, no regulations, and not much protection. It is therefore no surprise that the web has become a battleground for governments, commercial entities, and users, each fighting to preserve their own interests for the future.

Derek Ruths, an assistant professor of Computer Science at McGill who teaches COMP 189, a course on Computers and Society, explains that forecasting the future of the internet is difficult because these changes will be accompanied by society’s changing ideas and expectations about privacy and regulation.

“Ten years ago people would have thought Facebook, the idea of putting all that information online, was ridiculous. But somehow society has changed,” he said in an interview with The Daily.

The rise of networking sites like Twitter and information warehouses such as Wikileaks has been attributed to civil uprisings that have occurred across the world. The 2009 protests in Moldova were dubbed by the media as that country’s “Twitter Revolution.”
Continue Reading »

In the post-revolution void created in popular music, most Iranians (by which I mean myself) have had to endure years of terrible, terrible electropop music coming out of underground Iran and the Iranian/Persian diaspora. Fortunately, the past couple of years, new social trends are bringing good sounds our way. I found out about Kiosk, a Persian rock/blues jazz band in 2007, from the incredible music video for their song “Eshgh e Sorat” (Love for Speed) which portrays average Iranians running daily affairs in stark contrast to the shiny polished images in other music videos.

Their fourth album Se Taghtireh (Triple Distilled) came out in 2010… but sadly I missed the Montreal leg of their tour! The band’s rich use of instrumentation in this album makes each song a pleasure to hear. While the music is inspired by Western jazz and blues and the vocals are similar to the lyric-driven French chanson, the bands lyricism in Persian is wonderful and clever and the music retains a uniquely Persian sound in parts. Although to my knowledge they don’t use classic instruments like the santoor, after listening to the album I swore I could hear its brassy sound in some parts– perhaps that was wishful thinking. Kiosk’s music is a departure from classic Persian music and contemporary Persian pop and that is certainly a good thing. They are forgoing nostalgia and reverence in favour of creating innovative fresh music and setting the way for new sounds coming out of the country. Have a listen to their song “Love and Death in the Time of Facebook“. Additionally, the group’s lead singer Arash Sobhani was interviewed by the show Parazit earlier this year (view here at 16:00min).

I donated blood for the first time today in a blood drive by Héma-Québec. I know several people who’ve received blood transfusions that helped save their lives– so I don’t really know why I hadn’t done it before. No wait, I actually know. I wasn’t compelled before but now– its all the vampire shows. Emotionally-tortured trying-to-be-ethical vampires really put a face to blood drives… blood drive PR people should totally jump on that. (Addendum: nevermind, they already have. “Starve a vampire. Donate blood.” Really Red Cross? Really?)

Anyway, the whole process was really straightforward. I had to fill a rather long questionnaire about my health and also time outside the country. They also took my blood pressure and hemoglobin level (apparently if its below <12 g/dl you can't donate blood). All in all it took 30-45 minutes.

I donated about 500ml of blood. While doing so, I was speaking to a guy who was also donating blood and he was like “If you’re super strong you can donate up to 2 liters.” I mustered an uncertain “Uhhh, I don’t know about that…” since the normal adult body contains about 5 liters of blood based on what I could remember from physiology, and even if you’re he-man, I’m pretty sure losing 40% of that can’t be healthy.

Afterwards, I felt slightly dizzy but cookies and some juice which made everything better as they always do. That, in brief, was my adventure for the day. Super-exciting. I know.

Outliers: The Story of Success (2008)
Malcolm Gladwell
309 pages

I read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell way back, but just wanted to briefly write about it. It’s a book that I’ve recommended to anyone who has asked me simply because it is so well-written. Gladwell could write three-hundred pages about dead fish and I’d probably still read it (actually that would be kind of interesting, curious about all the dead animals that have been cropping up– quick someone tell him).

The title of the book is to some degree misleading for anyone who may be seeking a self-help book or an inspirational book (better look at Tony Robbins for that). This book actually counters bootstrapping individualism prevalent in certain societies, notably the United States, by describing how structural elements in society can shape our lives.

The central thesis of the book is that while talent and dedicated practice are necessary for success, early advantage and privileged social standing are what truly make the outliers. The importance of legacy and opportunity for success is not really a new development and has in fact been around since at least 19th the century (some dude named Karl Marx wrote something about it), but what Gladwell does well is break down academic terms for the layman. The book begins very factually, focusing on how the birth months of professional Canadian hockey players gives them a demographic advantage. In the junior leagues players are picked on January-December basis, and players born earlier in the year are physically larger than other players. This means that the physical talent becomes concentrated in those born in between January to March, and creates a feedback loop in which kids born earlier in the year perform better, and consequently encouraged even more, reinforcing and even broadening the performance gap. Gladwell makes a strong case that these types of structural disadvantages can be mitigated if we take a different approach to the selection process.

I believe the strengths of Outliers are also its weaknesses. Gladwell’s background as a journalist enables him to string many stories and anecdotes together to reinforce his central thesis, he also reduces everything to the simplest terms and introduces very few new ideas outside the thesis. This makes the book very clear, concise and truly enjoyable to read. However, in simplifying concepts the book can be quite reductionist at times. In relating all the anecdotes and stories back to the central thesis, many of which don’t have the factual support that the ‘demographic advantage’ story does, the book can at times grasp at straws (the case of the Jewish New York lawyers comes to mind in particular) and suffers from a serious case of confirmation bias.

To conclude, Outliers is an enjoyable book, but by no means groundbreaking or academic. If you’re up for a book on the topic of performance that has been called groundbreaking, check out this 918-page treatise on expertise by Cambridge University (I still haven’t read it yet, need to get a hold of a copy).

Preamble

I intended to make this post on the eve of the new decade over a year and half ago, but at the time I opted to make an ode to the decade instead. March 8th, 2011 is the 100th anniversary of the first International Women’s Day– and I thought, what would be more perfect than starting then to write in regular intervals about women who have inspired me (and countless other young women). This entries be posted under the tag: “women who inspire“.

Introduction

One of the earliest memories I have is that of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on a television news programme, and my mother in the background remarking, “look she’s so strong and brilliant—you can be like her”. My mother herself grew up in the violence of the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, where she saw the rights and representation of women erode day by day. So she wanted me, her daughter, to live in a world where there were no frontiers. A world where I was equal, and could aspire and become anything I wanted to be.

In time, however, I realized that world was not a reality. That, in fact, I lived a world deeply divided along the fault lines of gender. A world where women constitute 60% of the world’s poorest, living on less than $1 a day. A world where women make up make up two-thirds of the illiterate, and less than 16% of the world’s parliamentarians. ¹ A world where women produce 60-80 percent of the food supply, receive 10 percent of the income, and own less than 1 percent of the means of production.² A world women are subject to slurs and violence inside and outside their homes, in times of peace and war, by strangers and those close to them. Women’s basic human rights are brought to legislature, their judgement is questioned, and their choices are restricted. And even as gains are made, even as gaps of gender close, society still presents its false dichotomy: To be a woman is to be weak, to be a man is to be strong. But how could this be, when some of the strongest people I’ve known in my life are women?

In the decade I came of age, from a child to a young women, I looked for women who transcended these dichotomies and who could shine a light on my path. Fortunately, I didn’t have to look far. From Manila to Tehran to Montreal—daughters, sisters, mothers, activists, scientists, artists, parliamentarians, teachers, writers… They are everywhere and they are courageous and strong. We are strong.

Sidewalk Lyrics is a must-read collection of memories, thoughts, and commentaries by a 20-something year old anonymous ‘Pedestrian’ in Tehran. As virtue of being written by third culture kid who has in her own words straddled between Iran and Canada, the narrative is accessible to both Iranian and Western readers. Pedestrian’s factual posts are quite comprehensive and informative, and her commentary on sociopolitical issues and currents events in Iran manages to be both beautiful and gut-wrenching. But I particularly like the more personal and reflective posts.

Many of us, I would say in error, believe that our own narratives and experiences are largely representative of those of others. But each unique narrative, like a brushstroke, can at best paint a part of the picture that transcends into common experience. To paraphrase lyrics from Bad Religion: Our lives are parallel, and our suffering is side by side. Pedestrian’s brushstrokes are incredibly rich, poignant and nuanced; and while maintaining strong opinions, for most of the time I’ve read her blog, as evident in this excerpt from one of her entries, she has kept an awareness of the uniqueness of experience — which makes her writing all the more relate-able.

“In some protests, while I was there, physically, bodily, mind and soul … My friend who was on a different street just a few blocks away from me, saw radically different things, a radically different city all together … and we had no way of merging our competing landscapes. As if even being there wasn’t enough to allow you to get a firm grasp of reality; it wasn’t enough to allow you to escape the enigma & ambiguity. We were writing a Book of Laughter and Forgetting, every single day.”

-Source

This past Sunday I took my sister to see The Human Family Tree (2009) presented as part of the Redpath Museum documentary film series. While my sister enjoyed it thoroughly, I was somewhat disappointed. Throughout the movie, I was wondering why it was a complete rehash of a documentary I had seen years earlier called Journey of Man (2003). Even the presenter looked the same. Turns out, it was almost the same documentary, and not surprisingly, the presenter was also the same guy: Spencer Wells, an American geneticist and anthropologist. The Human Family Tree has received glowing reviews on Amazon, and indeed appeared to be promising at first– but in my opinion left much to be desired.

Journey of Man was a rather groundbreaking film back in 2003. The Human Family Tree, however, basically covered the exact same ground that had been covered six years prior adding only nicer graphics and more human narratives. Of course I understand not wanting to make a film based only on new conjectures that may very well prove to be wrong, but it would have been interesting to learn how recent developments in genetics, fossil discoveries, and new paleoclimatic data fit in the bigger picture of early human migration. Not that there is anything wrong with being wrong– had the film been produced a year later, they could have included the rather startling evidence that non-African humans have 1-4% of the genome in common with Neanderthals (instead of insisting that the Neanderthals died out).

While I understand one can’t possibly delve into scientific intricacies in a 90 minute film, the Multiple Dispersal Model and the exact mechanisms and time-line of early human migration remain subjects of intense debate between archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, geneticists, and others. When I watch a scientific documentary, I appreciate a look at different views, or at the very least a mention of existing debates in the field– this doesn’t detract, but rather adds to the merit of the work being described. The film’s discussion of genetics was also incredibly vague and simplistic, some of the “fluff” could have been cut to provide a more satisfying overview for those of us who are interested in the nitty-gritty, without alienating the rest of the audience.

Towards the end, The Human Family Tree was as subtle as a jackhammer in conveying its overarching message, that is: we all come from Africa, color is skin deep, we’re all the same. Kum ba yah. In the movie they introduced New Yorkers of many different ethnicities from one street, all interested in learning about their ancestral heritage. Their narrative was wonderfully constructed at first (I remarked to my sister “This is cute!”), but after a while, the human factor overwhelmed the flow of the film and detracted from what should have been the focus– the science. Modern human populations, specially highly mixed populations, aren’t really representative of the isolated ancient populations the rest of the film was referring to. I think a much more nuanced way to approach this would have been to, based on genetic markers markers, trace and display the various ancestries of the individuals. But then the film wasn’t really going for nuanced.

Speaking of nuances, back when I watched Journey of Man I cringed at some of the dialogue and the interviews which were, for the lack of a better word, patronizing towards indigenous populations. Spencer Wells would march to an indigenous person (in particular the Navajo), and inform them that they migrated to their land from elsewhere (in the case of the Navajo, East Asia). The indigenous person would refute him with a “No, we’ve been here for all of history…” and Wells would appear startled… just shocked.

In The Human Family Tree, Wells interviewed the urban New Yorkers who, in contrast to interviewees in the previous film, were enthusiastic to recover a “lost” part of their background. But the subtext to this is that these populations have not faced the existential crisis that indigenous groups such as native populations in the Americas have faced. So it is rather understandable that a person who considers a land their ancestral home, a person to whom a land is an ancestral home, would be rather resistant to the line, “Native? We came from somewhere else, but you came from somewhere else too.” The issue here is not really sugar-coating science in favour of being politically correct, or hiding scientific truths to avert hurt feelings. It’s more about what is being said, who is doing the telling, to whom, and why. At the end of the day the scientific method is not in itself inherently political, but the questions we ask, the conclusions we draw, and how these conclusions are presented are always embedded in a socio-political context.

Despite my criticisms, I still think that the films are worth seeing given that so many others have enjoyed them (including my family), and they are indeed far better and more accurate than many other made-for-TV documentaries. I should add too that a scientist-in-training who tries to keep up on recent literature on the subject, I might not have been the target audience for these particular films. On the bright side, through reviews of this film I found out about The Incredible Human Journey (2009), a five-episode documentary series on the same subject by the BBC– if the BBC Pride & Prejudice miniseries was any indication, this will be quite comprehensive and awesome. I just need some extra time.

While researching the works of Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield I found a rather moving tribute by him to William Osler, aptly titled “Hero Worship”. By moving tribute, I mean fangirling over an extraordinary physician, writer, etc. which leads me to wonder if Dr. Penfield were alive, would he want my Sir William Osler: A ‘Stach Through History desktop wallpaper? Sadly this delightful article is not under public domain but can be found in the Archives of Internal Medicine for those who have institutional access.

Sir William Osler devoted his mind to medical education, to the study of clinical problems and to the lore of medical history. In all those fields he was a distinguished leader, and yet it is not altogether because of these qualities of the intellect that Osler Societies have sprung up in so many parts of the English-speaking world, chiefly composed of students or of young physicians. The unique quality of this man had to do with the “heart.”

I would have you see him, through the eyes of the previously quoted undergraduate, as “the least sentimental, the most helpful, most lovable,” teacher of medicine. He belongs to medical students of all time, as Lincoln belongs to common men everywhere, a man who grew to be what he was by dint of hard work, and in whose footsteps any under-graduate may dare to “hope and dream” that he may follow.

Penfield, W. (1949). “Hero Worship.” Archives of Internal Medicine 84(1): 104-109.

Today I had the chance to visit Musée des Hospitalières de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal located on Avenue des Pins Ouest between Avenue du Parc and Rue Saint-Urbain. I’d passed by the complex many times in the past couple of years since I lived right around the corner, but I’d never actually visited the museum.

Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal (Source)

“Hôtel-dieu” means “hostel of God” and is an old term in French for hospitals. The term refers to the origin and history of French hospitals as religious institutions and Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal is no different. It is the oldest hospital in Montreal, founded in 1642 by Jeanne Mance. There is actually a street called Rue Jeanne-Mance and I’d always assumed it bore the name of one of Catholic saints, as many streets in Montreal do. So it was news for me to find out (1) Jeanne Mance was a lady (2) and wasn’t a religious figure.

Jeanne Mance, founder of
Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal
*Click image for full view
(source)

Jeanne Mance was a laywoman born to a bourgeois family in France. When she came to New France, with an endowment from a French benefactress Angélique Bullion, she founded Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal. The hospital was staffed by nuns from the order of Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph (RHSJ) which had been founded six years prior.

Today part of the old hospital has been converted to a museum that sits in two parts. The first floor is the entrance, the second contains artifacts and documents describing the founding of the hospital and the nuns’ convent, and the third displays artifacts from the hospital.

I found the second floor particularly interesting because I had a chance to speak with a guide, a kind old lady who described for me in detail the nuns’ lives from the 1600s onward. It was obvious that the nuns in the convent led solitary and cloistered lives and one might wonder, as I did, what the appeal would be. As my guide recounted, young women were compelled to join the order for many different reasons, but there existed some common narratives in their experiences. Up to mid-19th century, families in New France were encouraged to have large families in order to keep the settlements going strong. Many women who joined the religious orders came from large families where they were the first children, and were expected to be responsible for many younger children. Understandably, after the experience, some young women found life as laywoman unappealing.

Large families also meant that many families were very poor and could not afford an education for the children. For young women, joining the order meant receiving support from a spiritual family and an education. In spirit of sisterhood, nuns would teach each other to write, work with numbers, and skills that would be more difficult for laywomen to acquire. One of the documents in the museum described a 13-year old who had joined the order and had later gone on to become a very successful mother superior. While it might seem unreasonable that a 13-year old could understand or be capable of making such a decision, the chances of a young woman being able to accomplish much outside this context were very small. Also at that time, women were considered to be subjugated to their husbands and devoid of their own identity and person-hood after they married. The nuns, however, were able to retain authority within society and commanded respect for their accomplishments. So while the nuns may have been cloistered from society, in some ways they were much more present and able to contribute to society than laywomen.

Not all nuns were in convents, however, and some orders were actually completely immersed in society. There were orders to help the blind, to help orphans, to help those with leprosy and in general help the needy when no one else was. In Montreal, the convent and the hospital were separate. However, as my guide described the nuns at Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal lived a kind of a double life reflective of their motto “silence and charity”. In the convent they dealt with religious duties, while in the hospital they worked as nurses, tending to the needs of the sick and helping their families cope.

Hôtel-Dieu infirmary (Source)

The medical artifacts on the third floor are quite interesting and make up a large part of the 20,000 artifacts that the museum has preserved. These included instruments such as early microscopes (with intact slides!), glass syringes, wooden wheelchairs, and pictures of the hospital. Aside from the historical medical equiptment, I enjoyed looking at pictures of the nurses, noticing their transformation through the years. Up to 1935 the nurses in Hôtel-Dieu wore head-covering similar to coifs. Apparently, the coif with an extended veil in the back sometimes got in the way so they changed their nuns’ coifs to nursing caps. For most of Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal’s history only nuns were allowed to be nurses in the infirmary; however, after 1901 they began to train laynurses. These young women would train and work at the hospital alongside the nuns and stay with the nuns for a small fee.

In 1970s, following Quebec’s Révolution tranquille (Quiet Revolution), all the hospitals in Quebec were transferred to the government to be run by the secular apparatus. Therefore, while the Hôtel-Dieu hospital exists as a teaching hospital for Université de Montréal, the nurses are no longer associated with any religious orders. What remains of Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal’s 300-year history is the museum and the nuns who live in another part of the complex. Today they run an affordable hostel for families of patients in CHUM/MUHC hospitals who need to stay in the city to accompany their sick family member. The nuns no longer live in a convent, separate from society, and they no longer wear habits but normal clothes. They can only be identified by the pins they wear as part of the order Sisters of St. Joseph (RSJ).