The post-reporter era II

When a print-publication decides to go online, it will face a set of problems that is wholly unique and excluded from the set of problems it will have faced before. Keeping in mind that such an organization functions as a manager of reporters, and that those reporters will have already (hopefully) made the transition from offline-only to online-publishing as well, there is bound to be an attrition between how individuals see their stories and how the organization sees what it can do with those stories.

The principal cause of this problem - if that - is the nature of property on the world wide web. The newspaper isn't the only portal on the internet where news is published and consumed, therefore its views on "its news" cannot be monopolistic. A reporter may not be allowed to publish his story with two publications if he works for either publication. This view is especially exacerbated if the two are competitors. On the web, however, who are you competing with?

On the web, news-dissemination may not be the only agenda of those locations where news is still consumed in large quantities. The Hindu or The Times of India keeping their reporters from pushing their agenda on Facebook or Twitter is just laughable: it could easily and well be considered censorship. At the same time, reporters abstain from a free exchange of ideas with the situation on the ground over the social networks because they're afraid someone else might snap up their idea. In other words, Facebook/Twitter have become the battleground where the traditional view of information-ownership meets the emerging view.

The traditional newspaper must disinvest of its belief that news is a matter of money as well as of moral and historical considerations, and start to inculcate that, with the advent of information-management models for whom the "news" is not the most valuable commodity, news is of any value only for its own sake.

Where does this leave the reporter? For example, if a print-publication has promulgated an idea to host its reporters' blogs, who owns the content on the blogs? Does the publication own the content because it has been generated with the publication's resources? Or does the reporter own the content because it would've been created even if not for the publication's resources? There are some who would say that the answers to these questions depends on what is being said.

If it's a matter of opinion, then it may be freely shared. If it's a news report, then it may not be freely shared. If it's an analysis, then it may be dealt with on an ad hoc basis. No; this will not work because, simply put, it removes from the consistency of the reporter's rights and, by extension, his opinions. It removes from the consistency of what the publication thinks "its" news is and what "its" news isn't. Most of all, it defies the purpose of a blog itself - it's not a commercial venture but an informational one. So... now what?

Flout 'em and scout 'em, and scout 'em and flout 'em;
Thought is free.

Stephano, The Tempest, Act 3: Scene II

News for news's sake, that's what. The deviation of the web from the commoditization of news to the commoditization of what presents that news implies a similar deviation for anyone who wants to be part of an enhanced enterprise. Don't try to sell the content of the blogs: don't restrict its supply and hope its value will increase; it won't. Instead, drive traffic through the blogs themselves - pull your followers from Facebook and Twitter - and set up targeted-advertising on the blogs. Note, however, that this is only the commercial perspective.

What about things on the other side of the hypothetical paywall? Well, how much, really, has the other side mattered until now?

A cultured evolution?

Can perceptions arising out of cultural needs override evolutionary goals in the long-run?

For example, in India, the average marriage-age is in the late 20s now. Here, the (popular) tradition is to frown down upon, and even ostracize, those who would engage in premarital sex.

So, after 10,000 years, say, are Indians more likely to have the development of their sexual desires postponed to occur in their late 20s (if they are not exposed to any avenues of sexual expression)?

This question arose as a consequence of a short discussion with some friends on an article that appeared in SciAm: about if (heterosexual) men and women could stay "just friends".

To paraphrase the principal question in the context of the SciAm-featured "study":

1. Would you agree that the statistical implications of gender-sensitive studies will vary from region to region simply because the reasons on the basis of which such relationships can be established vary from one socio-political context to another?


2. Assuming you have agreed to the first question: Would you contend that the underlying biological imperatives can, someday, be overridden altogether in favor of holding up cultural paradigms (or vice versa)?

Is such a thing even possible? (To be clear: I'm not looking for hypotheses and conjectures; if you can link me to papers that support your point of view, that'd be great.)

Plotting a technological history of journalism

Electric telegraph

• July 27, 1866 – SS Great Eastern completes laying of Transatlantic telegraphic cables


• By 1852, miles of American telegraphic wires had grown from 40 in 1846 to 23,000


• In 1849-1869, telegraphic mileage had increased by 108,000 miles

Cost of information transmission fell with its increasing ubiquity as well as instantization of global communication.

• Usefulness of information was preserved through transmission-time, increasing its shelf-life, making production of information a significant task


• Led to a boost in trade as well

Advent of war – especially political turmoil in Europe and the American Civil War – pushed rapid developments in its technology.

These last mentioned events led to establishment of journalism as a recognized profession

• Because it focused finally on locating and defining local information,


• Because transmission of information could now be secured through other means,


• And prompted newspaper establishments to install information-transmission services of their own -


• Leading to proliferation of competition and an emphasis on increase of the quality of reportage

The advent of the electric telegraph, a harbinger of the “small world” phenomenon, did not contribute to the refinement of journalistic genres as much as it helped establish them.

In the same period, rather from 1830 to 1870, significant political events that transpired alongside the evolution of communication, and were revolutionized by it, too, included the rapid urbanization in the USA and Great Britain (as a result of industrialization), the Belgian revolution, the first Opium War, the July revolution, the Don Pacifico affair, and the November uprising.

Other notable events include the laying of the Raleigh-Gaston railroad in North Carolina and advent of the first steam locomotives in England. Essentially, the world was ready to receive its first specialized story-tellers.

Photography

[caption id="attachment_24234" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Picture on the web from mousebilenadam[/caption]

Photography developed from the mid-19^th century onward. While it did not have as drastic an impact as did the electric telegraph, it has instead been undergoing a slew of changes the impetus of which comes from technological advancement. While black-and-white photography was prevalent for quite a while, it was color photography that refocused interested in using the technology to augment story-telling.

• Using photography to tell a story involves a trade-off between neutrality and subjective opinions


• A photographer, in capturing his subject, first identifies the subject such that it encapsulates emotions that he is looking for

Photography establishes a relationship between some knowledge of some reality and prevents interpretations from taking any other shape:

• As such a mode of story-telling, it is a powerful tool only when the right to do so is well-exercised, and there is no given way of determining that absolutely


• Through a lens is a powerful way to capture socio-history, and this preserve it in a columbarium of other such events, creating, in a manner of speaking, something akin to Asimov’s psycho-history


• What is true in the case of photo-journalism is only partly true in the case of print-based story-telling

Photography led to the establishment of perspectives, of the ability of mankind to preserve events as well as their connotations, imbuing new power into large-scale movements and revolutions. Without the ability to visualize connotations, adversarial journalism, and the establishment of the Fourth Estate as it were, may not be as powerful as it currently is because of its ability to provide often unambiguous evidence toward or against arguments.

• A good birthplace of the discussion on photography’s impact on journalism is Susan Sontag’s 1977 book, On Photography.


• Photography also furthered interest in the arts, starting with the contributions of William Talbot.

Television



Although television sets were introduced in the USA in the 1930s, a good definition of its impact came in the famous Wasteland Speech in 1961 by Newton Minow, speaking at a convention of the National Association of Broadcasters.

When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better.

But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials — many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.

It is this space, the “vast wasteland”, upon the occupation of which came journalism and television together to redefine news-delivery.

It is a powerful tool for the promotion of socio-political agendas: this was most effectively demonstrated during the Vietnam War during which, as Michael Mandelbaum wrote in 1982,

... regular exposure to the early realities of battle is thought to have turned the public against the war, forcing the withdrawal of American troops and leaving the way clear for the eventual Communist victory.

This opinion, as expressed by then-president Lyndon Johnson, was also defended by Mandelbaum as a truism in the same work (Print Culture and Video Culture, vol. 111, no. 4, Daedalus, pp. 157-158).

In the entertainment versus informative programming debate, an important contribution was made by Neil Postman in his 1985 work Amusing Ourselves to Death, wherein he warned of the decline in humankind’s ability to communicate and share serious ideas and the role television played in this decline because of its ability to only transfer information, not interaction.

Watch here...

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRabb6_Gr2Y?rel=0]

And continued here...

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHd31L6XPEQ?rel=0]

.

Arguing along similar veins in his landmark speech in 1990 at a computer science meeting in Germany, Postman said,

Everything from telegraphy and photography in the 19^th century to the silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the din of information, until matters have reached such proportions today that, for the average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems.

In his conclusion, he blamed television for severing the tie between information and action.

The advent of the television also played a significant role in American feminism.

A case of Kuhn, quasicrystals & communication – Part IV

Dan Shechtman won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2011. This led to an explosion of interest on the subject of QCs and Shechtman’s travails in getting the theory validated.

Numerous publications, from Reuters to The Hindu, published articles and reports. In fact, The Guardian ran an online article giving a blow-by-blow account of how the author, Ian Sample, attempted to contact Shechtman while the events succeeding the announcement of the prize unfolded.

All this attention served as a consummation of the events that started to avalanche in 1982. Today, QCs are synonymous with the interesting possibilities of materials science as much as with perseverance, dedication, humility, and an open mind.

Since the acceptance of the fact of QCs, the Israeli chemist has gone on to win Physics Award of the Friedenberg Fund (1986), the Rothschild Prize in engineering (1990), the Weizmann Science Award (1993), the 1998 Israel Prize for Physics, the prestigious Wolf Prize in Physics (1998), and the EMET Prize in chemistry (2002).

As Pauling’s influence on the scientific community faded with Shechtman’s growing recognition, his death in 1994 did still mark the complete lack of opposition to an idea that had long since gained mainstream acceptance. The swing in Shechtman’s favour, unsurprisingly, began with the observation of QCs and the icosahedral phase in other laboratories around the world.

Interestingly, Indian scientists were among the forerunners in confirming the existence of QCs. As early as in 1985, when the paper published by Shechtman and others in the Physical Review Letters was just a year old, S Ranganathan and Kamanio Chattopadhyay (amongst others), two of India’s preeminent crystallographers, published a paper in Current Science announcing the discovery of materials that exhibited decagonal symmetry. Such materials are two-dimensional QCs with periodicity exhibited in one of those dimensions.

The story of QCs is most important as a post-Second-World-War incidence of a paradigm shift occurring in a field of science easily a few centuries old.

No other discovery has rattled scientists as much in these years, and since the Shechtman-Pauling episode, academic peers have been more receptive of dissonant findings. At the same time, credit must be given to the rapid advancements in technology and human knowledge of statistical techniques: without them, the startling quickness with which each hypothesis can be tested today wouldn’t have been possible.

The analysis of the media representation of the discovery of quasicrystals with respect to Thomas Kuhn’s epistemological contentions in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was an attempt to understand his standpoints by exploring more of what went on in the physical chemistry circles of the 1980s.

While there remains the unresolved discrepancy – whether knowledge is non-accumulative simply because the information founding it has not been available before – Kuhn’s propositions hold in terms of the identification of the anomaly, the mounting of the crisis period, the communication breakdown within scientific circles, the shift from normal science to cutting-edge science, and the eventual acceptance of a new paradigm and the discarding of the old one.

Consequently, it appears that science journalists have indeed taken note of these developments in terms of The Structure. Thus, the book’s influence on science journalism can be held to be persistent, and is definitely evident.

A case of Kuhn, quasicrystals & communication – Part III

The doctrine of incommensurability arises out of the conflict between two paradigms and the faltering of communications between the two adherent factions.

According to Kuhn, scientists are seldom inclined to abandon the paradigm at the first hint of crisis – as elucidated in the previous section – and instead denounce the necessity for a new paradigm. However, these considerations aside, the implications for a scientist who proposes the introduction of a new paradigm, as Shechtman did, are troublesome.

Such a scientist will find himself ostracized by the community of academicians he belongs to because of the anomalous nature of his discovery and, thus, his suddenly questionable credentials. At the same time, because of such ostracism, the large audience required to develop the discovery and attempt to inculcate its nature into the extant paradigm becomes inaccessible.

As a result, there is a communication breakdown between the old faction and the new faction, whereby the former rejects the finding and continues to further the extant paradigm while the latter rejects the paradigm and tries to bring in a new one.

Incommensurability exists only during the time of crisis, when a paradigm shift is foretold. A paradigm shift is called so because there is no continuous evolution from the old paradigm to the new one. As Kuhn puts it (p. 103),

… the reception of a new paradigm often necessitates a redefinition of the corresponding science.

For this reason, what is incommensurable is not only the views of warring scientists but also the new knowledge and the old one. In terms of a finding, the old knowledge could be said to be either incomplete or misguided, whereas the new one could be remedial or revolutionary.

In Shechtman’s case, because icosahedral symmetries were altogether forbidden by the old theory, the new finding was not remedial but revolutionary. Therefore, the new terms that the finding introduced were not translatable in terms of the old one, leading to a more technical form of communication breakdown and the loss of the ability of scientists to predict what could happen next.

A final corollary of the doctrine is that because of the irreconcilable nature of the new and old knowledge, its evolution cannot be held to be continuous, only contiguous. In this sense, knowledge becomes a non-cumulative entity, one that cannot have been accumulated continuously over the centuries, but one that underwent constant redefinition to become what it is today.

As for Dan Shechtman, the question is this: Does the media’s portrayal of the crisis period reflect any incommensurability (be it in terms of knowledge or communication)?

How strong was the paradigm shift?

In describing the difference between “seeing” and “seeing as”, Kuhn speaks about two kinds of incommensurability as far as scientific knowledge is concerned. Elegantly put as “A pendulum is not a falling stone, nor is oxygen dephlogisticated air,” the argument is that when a paradigm shift occurs, the empirical data will remain unchanged even as the relationship between the data changes. In Shechtman’s and Levine’s cases, the discovery of “forbidden” 3D icosahedral point symmetry does not mean that the previous structures are faulty but simply that the new structure is now one of the possibilities.

However, there is some discrepancy regarding how much the two paradigms are really incommensurable. For one, Kuhn’s argument that an old paradigm and a new paradigm will be strongly incommensurable can be disputed: he says that during a paradigm shift, there can be no reinterpretation of the old theory that can transform to being commensurable with the new one.

However, this doesn’t seem to be the case: five-fold axes of symmetry were forbidden by the old theory because they had been shown mathematically to lack translational symmetry, and because the thermodynamics of such a structure did not fall in line with the empirical data corresponding to crystals that were perfectly crystalline or perfectly amorphous.

Therefore, the discovery of QCs established a new set of relationships between the parameters that influenced the formation of one crystal structure over another. At the same time, they did permit a reinterpretation of the old theory because the finding did not refute the old laws – it just introduced an addition.

For Kuhn to be correct a paradigm shift should have occurred that introduced a new relationship between different bits of data; in Shechtman’s case, the data was not available in the first place!

Here, Shechtman can be attributed with making a fantastic discovery and no more. There is no documented evidence to establish that someone observed QC before Shechtman did but interpreted it according to the older paradigm.

In this regard, what is thought to be a paradigm shift can actually be argued to be an enhancement of the old paradigm: no shift need have occurred. However, this was entirely disregarded by science journalists and commentators such as Browne and Eugene Garfield, who regarded the discovery of QCs as simply being anomalous and therefore crisis-prompting, indicating a tendency to be historicist - in keeping with the antirealism argument against scientific realism as put forth by Richard Boyd.

Thus, the comparison to The Structure that held up all this time fails.

There are many reasons why this could have been so, not the least of which is the involvement of Pauling and his influence in postponing the announcement of the discovery (Pauling’s credentials were, at the time, far less questionable than Shechtman’s were).

[caption id="attachment_24299" align="aligncenter" width="229"] Linus Carl Pauling (1901-1994) (Image from Wikipedia)[/caption]

As likely as oobleck

Alan I. Goldman, a professor of physics at the Iowa State University, wrote in the 84^th volume of the American Scientist,

Quasicrystals … are rather like oobleck, a form of precipitation invented by Dr. Seuss. Both the quasicrystals and the oobleck are new and unexpected. Since the discovery of a new class of materials is about as likely as the occurrence of a new form of precipitation, quasicrystals, like oobleck, suffered at first from a credibility problem.

There were many accomplished chemists who thought that QCs were nothing more than as-yet not fully understood crystal structures, and some among them even believed that QCs were an anomalous form of glass.

The most celebrated among those accomplished was Linus Pauling, who died in 1994 after belatedly acknowledging the existence of QCs. It was his infamous remark in 1982 that bought a lot of trouble for Shechtman, who was subsequently asked to leave the research group because he was “bringing disgrace” on its members and the paper he sought to publish was declined by journals.

Perhaps this was because he took immense pride in his works and in his contributions to the field of physical chemistry; otherwise, his “abandonment” of the old paradigm would have come easier – and here, the paradigm that did include an observation of QCs is referred to as old.

In fact, Pauling was so adamant that he proposed a slew of alternate crystal structures that would explain the structure of QCs as well as remain conformant with the old paradigm, with a paper appearing in 1988, long after QCs had become staple knowledge.

Order and periodicity

Insofar as the breakdown in communication is concerned, it seems to have stemmed from the tying-in of order and periodicity: crystallography’s handing of crystalline and amorphous substances had ingrained into the chemist’s psyche the coexistence of structures and repeatability.

Because the crystal structures of QCs were ordered but not periodical, even those who could acknowledge their existence had difficulty believing that QCs “were just as ordered as” crystals were, in the process isolating Shechtman further.

John Cahn, a senior crystallographer at NBS at the time of the fortuitous discovery, was one such person. Like Pauling, Cahn also considered possible alternate explanations before he could agree with Shechtman and ultimately co-author the seminal PRL paper with him.

His contention was that forbidden diffraction patterns – like the one Shechtman had observed – could be recreated by the superposition of multiple allowed but rotated patterns (because of the presence of five-fold symmetry, the angle of rotation could have been 72°).

[caption id="attachment_24300" align="aligncenter" width="500"] A crystal-twinning pattern in a leucite crystal[/caption]

This was explained through a process called twinning, whereby the growth vector of a crystal, during its growth phase, could suddenly change direction without any explanation or prior indication. In fact, Cahn’s exact response was,

Go away, Danny. These are twins and that’s not terribly interesting.

This explanation involving twinning was soon adopted by many of Shechtman’s peers, and he was repeatedly forced to return with results from the diffraction experiment to attempt to convince those who disagreed with the finding. His attempts were all in vain, and he was eventually dismissed from the project group at NBS.

Conclusion

All these events are a reflection of the communication breakdown within the academic community and, for a time, the two sides were essentially Shechtman and all the others.

The media portrayal of this time, however, seems to be completely factual and devoid of deduction or opining because of the involvement of the likes of Pauling and Cahn, who, in a manner of speaking, popularized the incident among media circles: that there was a communication breakdown became ubiquitous fact.

Shechtman himself, after winning the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2011 for the discovery of QCs, admitted that he was isolated for a time before acceptance came his way – after the development of a crisis became known.

At the same time, there is the persisting issue of knowledge as being non-accumulative: as stated earlier, journalists have disregarded the possibility, not unlike many scientists, unfortunately, that the old paradigm did not make way for a new one as much as it became the new one.

That this was not the focus of their interest is not surprising because it is a pedantic viewpoint, one that serves to draw attention to the “paradigm shift” not being "Kuhnian" in nature, after all. Just because journalists and other writers constantly referred to the discovery of QCs as being paradigm-shifting need not mean that a paradigm-shift did occur there.

A case of Kuhn, quasicrystals & communication - Part II

Did science journalists find QCs anomalous? Did they report the crisis period as it happened or as an isolated incident? Whether they did or did not will be indicative of Kuhn’s influence on science journalism as well as a reflection of The Structure’s influence on the scientific community.

In the early days of crystallography, when the arrangements of molecules was thought to be simpler, each one was thought to occupy a point in two-dimensional (2D) space, which were then stacked one on top of another to give rise to the crystal. However, as time passed and imaginative chemists and mathematicians began to participate in the attempts to deduce perfectly the crystal lattice, the idea of a three-dimensional (3D) lattice began to catch on.

At the same time, scientists also found that there were many materials, like some powders, which did not restrict their molecules to any arrangement and instead left them to disperse themselves chaotically. The former were called crystalline, the latter amorphous (“without form”).

All substances, it was agreed, had to be either crystalline – with structure – or amorphous – without it. A more physical definition was adopted from Euclid’s Stoicheia (Elements, c. 300 BC): that the crystal lattice of all crystalline substances had to exhibit translational symmetry and rotational symmetry, and that all amorphous substances couldn’t exhibit either.

An arrangement exhibits translational symmetry if it looks the same after being moved in any direction through a specific distance. Similarly, rotational symmetry is when the arrangement looks the same after being rotated through some angle.)

In an article titled ‘Puzzling Crystals Plunge Scientists Into Uncertainty’ published in The New York Times on July 30, 1985, Pulitzer-prize winning science journalist Malcolm W Browne wrote that “the discovery of a new type of crystal that violates some of the accepted rules has touched off an explosion of conjecture and research…” referring to QCs.

[caption id="attachment_24283" align="aligncenter" width="127"] Malcolm W. Browne[/caption]

Paper a day on the subject

In the article, Browne writes that Shechtman’s finding (though not explicitly credited) has “galvanized microstructure analysts, mathematicians, metallurgists and physicists in at least eight countries.”

This observation points at the discovery’s anomalous nature since, from an empirical point of view, Browne suggests that such a large number of scientists from fields as diverse have not come together to understand anything in recent times. In fact, he goes on to remark that according to one estimate, a paper a day was being published on the subject.

Getting one’s paper published by an academic journal worldwide is important to any scientist because it formally establishes primacy. That is, once a paper has been published by a journal, then the contents of the paper are attributed to the paper’s authors and none else.

Since no two journals will accept the same paper for publication (a kind of double jeopardy), a paper a day implies that distinct solutions were presented each day. Therefore, Browne seems to claim in his article, in the framework of Kuhn’s positions, that scientists were quite excited about the discovery of a phenomenon that violated a longstanding paradigm.

Shechtman’s paper had been published in the prestigious Physical Review Letters, which is in turn published by the American Physical Society from Maryland, USA, in the 20^th issue of its 53^rd volume, 1984 – but not without its share of problems.

Istvan Hargittai, a reputed crystallographer with the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, described a first-hand account of the years 1982 to 1984 in Shechtman’s life in the April 2011 issue of Structural Chemistry. In these accounts, he says that,

Once Shechtman had completed his experiment, he became very lonely as every scientific discoverer does: the discoverer knows something nobody else does.

In Shechtman’s case, however, this loneliness was compounded by two aspects of his discovery that made it difficult for him to communicate with his peers about it. First: To him, it was such an important discovery that he wanted desperately to inquire about its possibilities to those established in the field – and the latter dismissed his claims as specious.

Second: the fact that he couldn’t conclusively explain what he himself had found troubled him, kept him from publishing his results.

At the time, Hargittai was a friend of a British crystallographer named Alan Mackay, from the Birkbeck College in London. Mackay had, a few years earlier, noted the work of mathematician Roger Penrose, who had created a pattern in which pentagons of different sizes were used to tile a 2D space completely (Penrose had derived inspiration from the work of the 16^th century astronomer Johannes Kepler).

In other words, Penrose had produced theoretically a planar version of what Shechtman was looking for, what would help him resolve his personal crisis. Mackay, in turn, had attempted to produce a diffraction pattern simulated on the Penrose tiles, assuming that what was true for 2D-space could be true for 3D-space as well.

[caption id="attachment_24284" align="aligncenter" width="250"] An example of a Penrose tiling[/caption]

By the time Mackay had communicated this development to Hargittai, Shechtman had - unaware of them - already discovered QCs.

There was another investigation ongoing at the University of Pennsylvania’s physics department: Dov Levine, pursuing his PhD under the guidance of Paul Steinhardt, had developed a 3D model of the Penrose tiles – again, unaware of Shechtman’s and Mackay’s works.

Thus, it is conspicuous how the anomalous nature of discoveries – which are unprecedented by definition because, otherwise, they would be expected – facilitates a communication-breakdown within the scientific community. In the case of Levine, who was eager to publish his findings, Steinhardt advised caution to avoid the ignominy that might arise out of publishing findings that are not fully explicable.

In the meantime, Shechtman had found an interested listener in Ilan Blech, another crystallographer at NBS. They prepared a paper together to send to the Journal of Applied Physics in 1984 after deciding that it was imperative to get across to as many scientists as possible in the search for an explanation for the structure of QCs.

However, since they had no explanation of their own, the paper had to be buried “under a mountain of information about alloys,” which prompted the Journal to write back saying the paper “would not interest physicists.”


Shechtman and Blech realized that, as a consequence of reporting such a result, they would have to spruce up its presentation. Shechtman invited veteran NBS crystallographer John Cahn, and Cahn in turn invited Denis Gratias, a French crystallographer, to join the team.

Even though Cahn had been sceptical of the possibility of QCs, he had since changed his mind in the last two years, and his presence awarded some credibility to the contents of the paper. After Gratias restructured the mathematics in the paper, it was finally accepted for publication in the Physical Review Letters on November 12, 1984.

[caption id="attachment_24286" align="aligncenter" width="600"] (Clockwise from top-left corner) Danny Shechtman, Istvan Hargittai, Roger Penrose, Paul Steinhardt, and Dov Levine with Steinhardt[/caption]

And by the time Browne’s article appeared a year later, it is safe to assume that at least 50-70 papers on the subject were published in the period. Whether this was a rush to accumulate anomalies or to discredit the finding is immaterial: the threat to the existing paradigm was perceptible and scientists felt the need to do something about it; and Browne’s noting of the same is proof that science journalists noted the need, too.

In fact, how much of an anomaly is a finding that has been accepted for publication? Because after it has been carefully vetted and published, it becomes as good as fact: other scientists can now found their work upon on it, and at the time of publication of their papers, cite the parent paper as authority.

However, it must be noted that there are important exceptions, such as the infamous Fleischmann-Pons experiment in cold fusion in 1989-1990. For these reasons, let it be that a paradigm is considered to have entered a crisis period only after it is established that it cannot be “tweaked” after each discovery and allowed to continue.

Three years of falsifications

Browne, too, seems to conclude that despite a definite discovery having been made three years earlier,

… only recently has experimental evidence overwhelmed the initial skepticism of the scientific community that such a form of matter could exist.

For three years, the community could not allow a discovery to pass, and subjected it repeatedly to tests of falsifications. A similar remark comes from science writer and crystallographer Paul Steinhardt, Levine’s PhD mentor, who, in a paper titled ‘New perspectives on forbidden symmetries, quasicrystals and Penrose tilings’, remarked upon the need for “a new appreciation for the subtleties of crystallographically forbidden symmetries.”

Shechtman’s QCs exhibited rotational symmetry but not a translational one. In other words, they demanded to be placed squarely between crystalline and amorphous substances, sending researchers scurrying for an explanation.

In a period of such turmoil, Browne’s article states that some researchers were willing to consider the arrangement as existing in six-dimensional (6D) hyperspace rather than in 3D space-time.

[caption id="attachment_24285" align="aligncenter" width="420"] A hexeract (or, a geopeton)[/caption]

Now, someone within the community had considered physical hyperspace to be an explanation way back in 1985. Even though mathematical hyperspace as a theory had been around since the days of Bernhard Riemann (Habilitationsschrift, 1854) and Ludwig Schläfli (Theorie der vielfachen Kontinuität, 1852), the notion of physical hyperspatial theory with a correspondence to physical chemistry is still nascent at best.

Therefore, Browne’s suggestion only seems to supplant his narrative of intellectual turbulence, that scientists had stumbled upon a phenomenon so anomalous that it alone was prompting crisis.

Conclusion

Did science journalists find QCs anomalous? Yes, they did. Browne, Hargittai and Steinhardt, amongst others, were quick to identify the anomalous nature of the newly discovered material and point it out through newspaper reports and articles published within the scientific community.

Thomas Kuhn’s position that scientists will attempt to denounce a paradigm-shift-inducing theory before they themselves are forced to shift is reflected in the writers’ accounts of Dan Shechtman in the days leading up to and just after his discovery.

Did they, the journalists, report the crisis period as it happened or as an isolated incident? That they could identify the onset of a crisis as it happened indicates that they did recognize it for what it was. However, it remains to be seen whether these confirmations validate Kuhn’s hypothesis in their entirety.

A case of Kuhn, quasicrystals & communication - Part I

Dan Shechtman’s discovery of quasi-crystals, henceforth abbreviated as QCs, in 1982 was a landmark achievement that invoked a paradigm-shift in the field of physical chemistry.

However, at the time, the discovery faced stiff resistance from the broader scientific community and an eminent chemist of the time. Such things made it harder for Shechtman to prove his findings as being credible, but he persisted and succeeded in doing so.

We know his story today because of its fairly limited coverage in the media, and especially from the comments of his peers, students and friends; its revolutionary characteristic was well reflected in many reports and essays.

Because such publications indicated the onset of a new kind of knowledge, what merits consideration is if the media internalized Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy of science in the way it approached the incident.

Broadly, the question is: Did the media reports reflect Kuhn’s paradigm-shifting hypothesis? Specifically, in the 1980s,

1. Did science journalists find QCs anomalous?


2. Did science journalists identify the crisis period when it happened or was it reported as an isolated incident?


3. Does the media’s portrayal of the crisis period reflect any incommensurability (be it in terms of knowledge or communication)?

Finally: How did science journalism behave when reporting stories from the cutting edge?

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Thomas S. Kuhn’s (July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962, was significantly influential in academic circles as well as the scientific community. It introduced the notion of a paradigm-shift, which has since become a principal when describing the evolution of scientific knowledge.

[caption id="attachment_24261" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Thomas Kuhn, Harvard University, 1949[/caption]

Kuhn defined a paradigm based on two properties:

1. The paradigm must be sufficiently unprecedented to attract researchers to study it, and


2. It must be sufficiently open-ended to allow for growth and debate

By this definition, most of the seminal findings of the greatest thinkers and scientists of the past are paradigmatic. Nicholas Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (1543) and Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) are both prime examples that illustrate what paradigms can be and how they shift perceptions and interests in the subject.

Such paradigms, Kuhn said (p. 25), work with three attributes that are inherent to their conception. The first of the three attributes is the determination of significant fact, whereby facts accrued through observation and experimentation are measured and recorded more accurately.

Even though they are the “pegs” of any literature concerning the paradigm, activities such as their measurement and records are independent of the dictates of the paradigm. Instead, they are, in a colloquial sense, conducted anyway.

Why this is so becomes evident in the second of the three foci: matches of fact with theory. Kuhn claims (p. 26) that this class of activity is rarer in reality, where predictions of the reigning theory are compared to the (significant) facts measured in nature.

Consequently, good agreement between the two would establish the paradigm’s robustness, whereas disagreement would indicate the need for further refinement. In fact, on the same page, Kuhn illustrates the rarity of such agreement by stating

... no more than three such areas are even yet accessible to Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

The third and last focus is on the articulation of theory. In this section, Kuhn posits that the academician conducts experiments to

1. Determine physical constants associated with the paradigm


2. Determine quantitative laws (so as to provide a physical quantification of the paradigm)


3. Determine the applications of the paradigm in various fields

In The Structure, one paradigm replaces another through a process of contention. At first, a reigning paradigm exists that, to an acceptable degree of reasonableness, explains empirical observations. However, in time, as technology improves and researchers find results that don’t quite agree with the reigning paradigm, the results are listed as anomalies.

This refusal to immediately induct the findings and modify the paradigm is illustrated by Kuhn as proof toward our expectations clouding our perception of the world.

Instead, researchers hold the position of the paradigm as fixed and immovable, and attempt to check for errors with the experimental/observed data. An example of this is the superluminal neutrinos that were "discovered", rather stumbled upon, at the OPERA experiment in Italy that works with the CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

When the experiment logs from that fateful day, September 23, 2011, were examined, nothing suspicious was found with the experimental setup. However, despite this assurance of the instruments’ stability, the theory (of relativity) that prohibits this result was held superior.

On October 18, then, experimental confirmation was received that the neutrinos could not have traveled faster than light because the theoretically predicted energy signature of a superluminal neutrino did not match with the observed signatures.

As Kuhn says (p. 77):

Though they [scientists] may begin to lose faith and then to consider alternatives, they do not renounce the paradigm that has led them into crisis. They do not, that is, treat anomalies as counterinstances, though in the vocabulary of philosophy of science that is what they are.

However, this state of disagreement is not perpetual because, as Kuhn concedes above, an accumulation of anomalies forces a crisis in the scientific community. During a period of crisis, the paradigm reigns, yes, but is also now and then challenged by alternately conceived paradigms that

1. Are sufficiently unprecedented


2. Are open-ended to provide opportunities for growth


3. Are able to explain those anomalies that threatens the reign of the extant paradigm

The new paradigm imposes a new framework of ideals to contain the same knowledge that dethroned the old paradigm, and because of a new framework, new relations between different bits of information become possible. Therefore, paradigm shifts are periods encompassing rejection and re-adoption as well as restructuring and discovery.

Kuhn ties together here three postulates: incommensurability, scientific communication, and knowledge being non-accumulative. When a new paradigm takes over, there is often a reshuffling of subjects – some are relegated to a different department, some departments are broadened to include more subjects than were there previously, while other subjects are confined to illogicality.

During this phase, some areas of knowledge may no longer be measured with the same standards that have gone before them.

Because of this incommensurability, scientific communication within their community breaks down, but only for the period of the crisis. For one, because of the new framework, some scientific terms change their meaning, and because multiple revolutions have happened in the past, Kuhn assumes the liberty here to conclude that scientific knowledge is non-accumulative. This facet of evolution was first considered by Herbert Butterfield in his The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800. Kuhn, in his work, then drew a comparison to visual gestalt (p. 85).

[caption id="attachment_24262" align="aligncenter" width="360"] The Gestalt principles of visual perception seek to explain why the human mind sees two faces before it can identify the vase in the picture.[/caption]

Just as in politics, when during a time of instability the people turn to conservative ideals to recreate a state of calm, scientists get back to a debate over the fundamentals of science to choose a successor paradigm. This is a gradual process, Kuhn says, that may or may not yield a new paradigm that is completely successful in explaining all the anomalies.

The discovery of QCs

On April 8, 1982, Dan Shechtman, a crystallographer working at the U. S. National Bureau of Standards (NBS), made a discovery that would nothing less than shatter the centuries-old assumptions of physical chemistry. Studying the molecular structure of an alloy of aluminium and manganese using electron diffraction, Shechtman noted an impossible arrangement of the molecules.

In electron diffraction, electrons are used to study extremely small objects, such as atoms and molecules, because the wavelength of electrons – which determines the resolution of the image produced – can be controlled by their electric charge. Photons lack this charge and are therefore unsuitable for high-precision observation at the atomic level.

When accelerated electrons strike the object under study, their wave nature takes over and they form an interference pattern on the observer lens when they are scattered. The device then works backward to reproduce the surface that may have generated the recorded pattern, in the process yielding an image of the surface. On that day in April, this is what Shechtman saw (note: the brightness of each node is only an indication of how far it is from the observer lens).

[caption id="attachment_24266" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The electron-diffraction pattern exposing a quasicrystal's lattice structure (Image from Ars Technica)[/caption]

The diffraction pattern shows the molecules arranged in repeating pentagonal rings. That meant that the crystal exhibited 5-fold symmetry, i.e. an arrangement that was symmetrical about five axes. At the time, molecular arrangements were restricted by the then-36-year old crystallographic restriction theorem, which held that arrangements with only 2-, 3-, 4- and 6-fold symmetries were allowed. In fact, Shechtman had passed his university exams proving that 5-fold symmetries couldn’t exist!


At the time of discovery, Shechtman couldn’t believe his eyes because it was an anomaly. In keeping with tradition, in fact, he proceeded to look for experimental errors. Only after he could find none did he begin to consider reporting the discovery.

[caption id="attachment_24263" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A photograph showing the pages from Shechtman's logbook from the day he made the seemingly anomalous observation. Observe the words "10 Fold???"[/caption]

In the second half of the 20^th century, the field of crystallography was beginning to see some remarkable discoveries, but none of them as unprecedented as that of QCs would turn out to be. This was because of the development of spectroscopy, a subject that studied the interaction of matter and radiation.

Using devices such as X-ray spectrometers and tunneling electron microscopes (TEM), scientists could literally look at a molecule instead of having to determine its form via chemical reactions. In such a period, there was tremendous growth in physical chemistry because of the imaginative mind of one man who would later be called one of the greatest chemists of all time as well as make life difficult for Shechtman: Linus Carl Pauling.

Pauling epitomized the aspect of Kuhn’s philosophy that refused to let an old paradigm die, and therefore posed a significant hindrance to Shechtman’s radical new idea. While Shechtman attempted to present his discovery of QCs as an anomaly that he thought prompted crisis, Pauling infamously declared, “There is no such thing as quasi-crystals, only quasi-scientists.”


Media reportage

The clash between Pauling and Shechtman, rather the “old school” and the “new kid”, created some attrition within universities in the United States and Israel, who with Shechtman was affiliated. While a select group of individuals who were convinced of the veracity of the radical claims set about studying it further, others – perhaps under the weight of Pauling’s credibility – dismissed the work as erroneous and desperate. The most important entity classifiable under the latter was the Journal of Applied Physics, which refused to publish Shechtman’s finding.

In this turmoil, there was a collapse of communication between scientists of the two factions. Unfortunately, the media’s coverage of this incident was limited: a few articles appeared in the mid-1980s in newspapers, magazines and journals; in 1988 when Pauling published his own paper on QCs; in 1999 when Shechtman won the prestigious Wolf Prize in mathematics; and in 2011, when he won the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Despite the low coverage, the media managed to make known the existence of such things as QCs to a wider community as well as to a less-sophisticated one. The rift between Pauling and Shechtman was notable because, apart from reflecting Kuhn’s views, it also brought to light the mental block scientists professed when it came to falsification of their work, and how that prevented science as such from progressing rapidly. Anyway, such speculations are all based in the media’s representation of the events.

de Tocqueville & the news

That the switch from newspapers to digital handheld devices - for the purpose of sourcing all my news - is limited only by my comfort-level with technology is telling of some shortcoming of the print industry.

The changing journalistic scene is a reflection of the way people engage publicly and of how public discourse has changed. Quoting Tocqueville,

A newspaper is an adviser that does not require to be sought.

Believe me, I still do seek out the newspaper to be certain on some matters, but I am also a dying breed. News has changed from page-long pieces to 140-character tweets, but the information we are getting has tripled. As Neil Postman argued in 1990,

Everything from telegraphy and photography in the 19^th century to the silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the din of information, until matters have reached such proportions today that, for the average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems.

There is too much to read and to process. Today, people are quite likely to be discussing news over coffee, especially in light of the fact that almost all information tends to be "newsified".

Tocqueville says in the same piece,

The power of the newspaper press must therefore increase as the social conditions of men become more equal.

My questions are, thus, two-fold. Do we live in a society that is increasingly unequal? Or have we transformed to become so individualistic that a common voice can no longer exist?

[caption id="attachment_24257" align="aligncenter" width="306"] Alexis de Tocqueville[/caption]

de Tocqueville addresses the newspaper, and the responsibilities of the Press by extension, in terms of their capacity to unite. In the same chapter, he also draws upon democracy’s tendency to leave individuals “very insignificant and lost amid the crowd”, the the responsibility to homogenize which lies with the newspaper.

While these notions may have coincided in Tocqueville’s times, the landscape of governance has changed vastly. For one, Tocqueville was writing in the 1830s, at a time when democracy itself was as new as the emerging print industry, when its spread and depth were both limited.

For another, for me to able to infer that the power of the newspaper is waning, I am also inferring that the newspaper must exist only on paper, that news cannot be delivered in other forms, and that all peoples must unite themselves under the light of one beacon, not any other. Are we right in thinking this?

So, while the newspaper – as an entity comprising words in ink and ink on paper – may be on the decline economically, the responsibilities of the paper are now in different hands. As for Tocqueville’s cautioning against the individualists, much is to be said.

In the execution of goals democratically, Tocqueville’s faith in which mires his thoughts, there will be opportunities to “wrong the people” by desiring an action that feels right personally. In other words, the French philosopher has not considered the evils of populism in vouching for the newspaper.

Today, however, technology enables so much that things work the other way round. Instead of firing up common beacons, discrete ones, classifiable in terms of social status, culture, financial needs, and personal desires, are lit, and people flock to them.

I concede, there is a barrage of news, but there is also democracy in news! I can finally get what I know I will use the most. Is that wrong? In fact, does it even suggest a conflict in any sense?

I must also concede that Tocqueville was right in championing the cause and function of democratic rule, but that it mandates representation above all else is something not to be forgotten.

In the ongoing version of the discourse between public policy and responsible journalism, individuals have the responsibility to cure more evils than they cause, individuals must hone their own moral framework, and individuals are tasked with interpreting democracy in a way that perpetuates its essence. Is this so bad?

Even if the newspaper has left us, the notion of news hasn’t, not in this “post-reporter era”.

Justice in Gotham City

History

The history of Gotham city is not unlike many American cities’ during British colonial rule. It was founded in 1635 by a Norwegian mercenary and was later taken over by the British, changing hands various times over the years. According to Alan Moore, the famous cartoonist and creator of such titles as Watchmen and V for Vendetta, Gotham city was the place of many mysterious occult rites during the American Revolutionary War (Swamp Thing #53).

A separate history was provided for by Bill Willingham (Shadowpact #5): an evil warlock has slept for 40,000 years under the place where Gotham city is built, with his servant Strega claiming the “dark and often cursed character” of the city was inherited from the warlock’s nature. Going by either story, the city assumes a post-Apocalyptic mood that is also Gothic at the same time, and accords it an ambivalence that invites literary exploitation.

This mood has since been open for modification by writers, more so after the chain of events set off by the villain Ra’as Al Ghul. He introduced a virus called the Clench, impacting the city greatly. Just as it was recuperating from its impact, it was hit by an earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale, prompting the federal government of the United States to cut off Gotham from the mainland because it had no hopes of rehabilitating it. However, respite arrived in the form of assistance from the brilliant billionaire Alexander “Lex” Luthor, Superman’s archenemy.

In this regard, there are many comparisons to be made to Mumbai, which is itself a set of seven islands, is constantly assaulted by terrorists, and often finds support not from the government but from unexpected quarters (but, it must be said, not as unexpected as Luthor). By extension, the residents of Gotham city are also likely to be more resilient and resourceful than the residents of other cities, and possibly quite cynical, too.

Everything about Gotham city is rooted in its mysticism-ridden history, and the fights fought between the region’s native tribes and evil powers. The first signs of modern civilization arise in the 19th century when, after the tribes’ abandonment due to infestation by what they claimed were evil powers, Gotham Town was born as a reputable port.

Around the same period, in 1799, Darius Wayne profited from his labours on the port and started the construction of Wayne Manor, one of the precursors of the city’s cocktail of Gothic, Art Nouveau and Art Deco architectures. The manor itself is what one would call “stately”. It is located toward the northeast of the city, removed from the clamour of urbanism and allowing Batman, or Bruce Wayne – Darius Wayne’s descendent – to plan his adventures in peace.

Exclusivity v. Justice

The isolation of the manor parallels the isolation of Wayne’s personality from that of Batman’s: the former is portrayed as a dilettante indulging in the wealth of his forefathers whereas the latter is portrayed as a vigilante that the city seems to subconsciously need. At the same time, however, it is hard to say what the difference might have been had Wayne Manor been situated inside the city. In this regard, there is a notion of social exclusivity in terms of spaces occupied within the city.

A good case in point for this would be the older part of Gotham, which is situated to the north of the city and generally considered a part of the city itself. Old Gotham is where Crime Alley (which includes the Bowery, the worst neighbourhood in all of Gotham), Arkham Asylum (albeit as an island – visible to the east of a forked New Trigate Bridge), and Amusement Mile (the stalking grounds of the Joker) are located. Therefore, the new city, developing on the principles of reformation and citizen-vigilantism, grew southward and away from its traditional centres of trade, finance, and commerce.

Disregarding the depiction of Gotham’s architecture in the Burton and Nolan movies and the TV series: another of Wayne’s ancestors, Judge Solomon Wayne, was, according to Moore, the inspiration for the city’s unique architecture. Solomon’s intention to reform the city and rebrand it, so to speak, resulting in his commissioning of the young architect Cyrus Pinkney to design and construct the city’s financial centre. Moore’s choice of this explanation coincides perfectly with the period of Gothic Revivalism (around the early 1990s).

[caption id="attachment_23697" align="aligncenter" width="470"] Click to enlarge[/caption]

Growth v. Justice

Justice within a city is not administered in a court of law nor does it arise out of the adherence to rules and ethics. It is a product of many of the city’s provisions, their accessibility, and how well they work together to give rise to a sense of social security and provide a livelihood. For instance, Gotham’s common man could be working a nine-to-five day-job at some company in One Gotham Centre, just down the road from Wayne Tower, living in the suburbs around the Knights Dome Sporting Complex, within swimming distance of Cape Carmine off Old Gotham, and supporting a family of three.

However, this is not social justice. The need for social justice arises when aspirations, income and social liberty don’t coincide: if the nearest amusement park is haunted by a psychopathic serial killer, if a trip to the airport requires a drive through Arkham Asylum, if affordable housing comes at the price of personal security, and, most importantly, if there is the persistent knowledge of the need for a masked vigilante to rely on for a measurable sense of appeal against all the odds – in simple terms. It is as if the city was carefully misplanned: the Gotham city everyman is someone forced to live in a dangerous neighbourhood because of lack of other options for sheltering.

In other words, social justice is a perfect city and, therefore, by definition, can be neither omnipresent nor omnipotent, especially since Gotham city falls under the umbra of laissez faire economics. As a corollary, to understand social justice within a city, we must understand where the city’s priorities lie. How has the city been developing in the last few years? Is economic equality rising or falling? Who within the city has a sense of ease of access when it comes to valuable resources and who doesn’t?

The Metropolis

The problem with studying Gotham city is that it is a city conceived as a negative space to serve as the battleground where the forces of good and evil meet. It has deliberately been envisioned as a child of the industrial revolution entombed within walls of steel and stone, overwhelming those living within it with by the enforcement of a systematic way of life that allows for the exercise of few liberties. This is what effectively paints the picture of Gotham city being a failed one. In fact, this very way of thinking is paralleled in the image of the Metropolis in Blade Runner (1982), whose Modern-expressionism production design was borrowed inefficiently by Barbara Ling for Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever (1995) to imply a wildly whimsical side to the city. Anyway, this is how we understand the need for Batman, and how that need has been and is created.

It begins with the blighting of the police force: the superhero can become a societal fixture only if there is something fundamentally wrong with the one other body that is responsible for keeping crime in check. The Gotham City Police Department (GCPD) was corrupt for a long time, especially under the leadership of Commissioner Gillian Loeb, who had his hands in the pockets of the Falcone, Galante and Maroni crime families amongst others. The social scene inspired by such a network could be compared to the conspiratorial mood in the movie L. A. Confidential (1997).

By the time Commissioner James Gordon took over after Loeb’s successor Jack Grogan, the GCPD was overridden with lawlessness. Because of such a poor tradition, public authorities who should have been present to assuage the suffering of the historically discriminated were instead present to exacerbate, and profit from, the discrimination. Seeing that the GCPD couldn’t be cleaned from the inside, Gordon enlisted the skills of Batman, a veritable outsider, a deus ex machina.

Once the cleansing was complete, the city could formally begin on its path of reformation. Here is where the question of economic equality arises: when weeding out criminals, did the police department assume a rehabilitative approach or a retributive one? If the movies and TV series based on the comic may be trusted, then retribution was the order of the day, perhaps born out of an urgent need to do away with everything that has plagued the city and start anew.

At the same time, retribution also implies that enforcers of the law – and Batman – were willing to show no patience toward how the city itself was creating many criminals. This lack of patience is also reflected in many of the urban development projects undertaken by the city’s planning commission, especially such ill-conceived ones as the Underground Highway, as if the officials decided that desperate measures were necessary. (The ultimately-abandoned Underground Highway later went on to become the hideout of Killer Croc, apart from becoming the home for many of the city’s homeless – an indication that the forces of corruption at work were creating poverty.)

Conclusion

It can be deduced from all these threads that Gotham city is not simply a product of its history, which continues to influence the way outsiders think of it, but also its inability to cope with what it is fast becoming: a kennel for superheroes to flourish in. There are many decisions at work in the city that collude to create injustice in many forms, and the most significant ones are geographic exclusivity, a retributive mindset in the ranks of the executive, restriction on the exercising of social liberties based on past mistakes, and the presence of Batman himself.

The post-reporter era

One of the foundation stones of journalism is the process of reporting. That there is a messenger working the gap between an event and a story provides for news to exist and exist with myriad nuances attached to it. There are ethical and moral issues, technical considerations, writing styles, and presentation formats to perfect. The entire news-publishing industry is centered on the activities of reporters and streamlining them.

What the reporter requires the most is... well, a few things. The first is a domain of events, from which he picks issues to talk about. The second is a domain of stories, into which he publishes his reports. The third is a platform using which he may incentivize this process for himself, and acquire the tools with which he may publish his stories efficiently and effectively. The last entity is more commonly understood in the form of a publishing house.

The reason I've broken the working of a reporter into these categories is to understand what makes a reporter at all. Today, a reporter is most commonly understood in terms of an individual who is employed with a publishing house and publishes stories for them. Ideally, however, everyone is a reporter: simply the creation of knowledge by people based on experiences around them should be qualification enough. This calls into question the role of a publishing house: is it a platform working with which reporters may function efficiently, or is it an employer of reporters?

If it's an employer of reporters, then any publishing house wouldn't have to worry about where the course of journalism is going to take the organization itself. Reporters will have to change the way they work - how they spot issues, evolving writing styles to suit their audiences, so forth - but the publishing house will retain ownership of the reporters themselves. As long as it's not a platform which individuals use to function as reporters, things are going to be fine.



Now, let's move to the post-reporter era, where everyone is a reporter (of course, that's an idealized image, but even so). In this world, a reporter is not someone who works for a publishing house - that aspect of the word's meaning is left behind in the age of the publishing house. In this world, a reporter is someone who works simply as a messenger between the domains of events and stories, where the role of the publishing house as the owner of reportage is absent.

The nature of such a world throws light on the valuation of information. When multiple reporters cover different events and return to HQ to file their stories, the house decides which stories make the cut and which don't on the basis of a set of parameters. In other words, the house creates and assigns a particular value to each story, and then compares the values of different stories to determine their destiny.

In the post-reporter era, which is likely to be occupied by channels of individual presentation - ranging from word-of-mouth to full-scale websites - houses that thrive today on the valuation of information and the importance the houses' readers place on it  will steadily fade out. What exists will be an all-encompassing form of what is known as citizen journalism (CJ) today. Houses take to CJ because of the mutually beneficial relationship available therein: the CJ gets the coverage and the advantage of the issue pursued no longer being under wraps; the reporter gets a story that has both civic/criminal and human-interest angles to it.

However, when the CJ voids the relationship by refusing the intervention of a publishing/broadcasting house, and chooses to take his story straight to the people through a channel he finds effective enough, the house-level valuation of stories is replaced by a democratic institution that may or may not be guided by a paternalistic attitude.

Therefore, if a particular house has to survive into the post-reporter era, it must discard issue-valuation as an engine and instead rely on some other entity, such as one represented by a parameter whose efficiency is a maximizable quantity. This can be conceived as a fourth domain which, upon maximization, becomes the superset of which the three domains are subsets.

A counter-productive entity in this situation is that of property, which is accrued in great quantities by a high-achieving house in the present but which delays the onset of change in the future. Even when the house starts to experience slightly rougher weather, its first move will be to pump in more money, thereby offsetting change by some time. Only when the amount of property invested in delaying change is considerable will the house start to consider other alternatives, by which time other competing organizations will have moved into the future.

In the image of Vinci

Drawings of the elements of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector in the style of Leonardo da Vinci

[gallery link="file" columns="4" orderby="rand"]

Lord of the Rings Day

Et Earello Endorenna utulien
Sinome maruvan ar Hildinyar tenn' Ambar-metta!
Out of the Great Sea to Middle-earth I am come,
And my heirs, unto the ending of the World!

Thus spoke Aragorn son of Arathorn, of House Telcontar, at the end of the War of the Ring. On this day, the 25th of March (3019, T.A.), the allied Host was surrounded by the forces of Sauron upon the Slagg-hills, even as Frodo and Sam destroyed the One Ring in Barad Dur and brought about the fall of the Dark Lord, one of the Maiar of Aule, and with him, the last of the kin of Morgoth Bauglir was gone. The War of the Ring, however, ended only with the Battle of Bywater, wherein Saruman was slain by Grima Wormtongue.



Celebrate today by reading any one of Tolkien's ambitious works, be it the three-volume Lord of the Rings epic fantasy novel, its prequel The Hobbit, or the all-encompassing sequel The Silmarillion. Many do complain about the vast numbers of characters in Tolkien's works, but give it some time. Read slowly, enjoy the descriptions of the fantasy realm of Tolkien's World, revel in the scenery, culture, myths and lore of the six races, and his characters will more than come to life.

The Outsider

The notion of space as identity is not new. Cultural identity, more than anything else, is signified by one’s sense of space and the kind of that space available at one’s location of habitation. However, as the amount of space available is reduced, there are two consequences: we end up sharing space with someone else or partake of someone else’s space, and our association with the space changes to reflect the loss or gain of space.

For instance, having a small room to myself can impart a sense of coziness, and give rise to a definite topology of privacy and freedom. I know where my computer is, where my window is, where my bed is, how I need to position myself to be most comfortable whilst using any of them. Most of all, however, I am familiar with the spatial resources I can use and how.

In this regard, spaces are like words of a language. If a person is feeling a particular emotion but does not know the word that encapsulates the idea of that emotion, then the sentiment’s articulation is impossible. Without articulation, understanding remains incomplete. Similarly, without access to a certain kind of space, the actions encapsulated by the utilization of that space remain non-existent.

Overall, such arguments are applicable directly to physical locations. Visiting a spacious coffee shop evokes a sense of peace and placidity: I can have my coffee in silence, perhaps in accompaniment with light conversation with a friend if he’s present, and I can think with the promise of limited interruptions. Now, assume that one such spacious coffee shop has 20 visitors at a particular point, and then reduce the amount of space available by about half. Suddenly, the sense of placidity is lost, but that’s obvious because space-sharing can only mean the loss of individual freedom.

At the same time, each person becomes more aware of the other’s actions and posture: what he’s doing and what she’s saying matter more because of the probability that we’ll have to partake of the consequences. As the amount of “personal” space that is available is pushed to zero – i.e., if the room is crowded – then the probability of partaking in consequences approaches its degenerate form: the enforcement of participation. Now, I have to do what the guy next to me is doing. If he’s dancing, I dance; if he’s singing, I sing; if he’s drinking, I drink.

As a two-person system, this makes no sense, but in a room full of people, behaviours become immediately transferrable. And if someone remains in a position to subsidize one behaviour more than the rest, then that someone comes into a position to sponsor (and sustain) addiction.

If such an establishment becomes an active part of a certain way of life – and also fosters a sense of community – then it acts like a hub of social networking. The evolution into a hub happens quickly because of the way they operate: unlike advertisements, which are hinged upon the effectiveness of their influence on perceptions, the hubs are in a position to actively modify those perceptions according to some other need. By facilitating behavioural transactions, space-sharing becomes more tolerable because, for one, I’m influenced by the guy next to me and therefore make him more willing to share his space, and for another, I influence him in return and in the process acclimatize myself to his company.

By extension, the more a space gets crowded, the more moral looseness (in a conservative sense) becomes practicable. However, at the same time, the refusal to participate in the activities engendered by such a space leaves one out of the larger loop of things. Extant behavioural patterns become lost to the outsider, leaving him socially awkward and engaging with a significantly different way of life, the significance having arisen out of the persistence of the older/unmodified way of life.

The Holocaust is never so stark as through the words of another.

"The basic motivation [of the Holocaust] was purely ideological, rooted in an illusionary world of Nazi imagination, where an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world was opposed to a parallel Aryan quest. No genocide to date had been based so completely on myths, -on hallucinations, on abstract, non-pragmatic ideology – which was then executed by very rational, pragmatic means."

Yehuda Bauer

"The National Socialist killing of the Jews was unique in that never before had a state with the authority of its responsible leader decided and announced that a specific human group, including its aged, its women and its children and infants, would be killed as quickly as possible, and then carried through this resolution using every possible means of state power."

Eberhard Jackel

"I remember one set of twins in particular: Guido and Ina, aged about four. One day, Mengele took them away. When they returned, they were in a terrible state: they had been sewn together, back to back, like Siamese twins. Their wounds were infected and oozing pus. They screamed day and night. Then their parents – I remember the mother's name was Stella – managed to get some morphine and they killed the children in order to end their suffering."

Vera Alexander, Jewish inmate at Auschwitz

"If one emphasizes the indisputably important connection in isolation, one should not then force a connection with Hitler's weltanschauung [worldview], which was in no ways original itself, in order to deprive from it the existence of Auschwitz…Thoughts about the extermination of the Jews had long been current, and not only for Hitler and his satraps. Many of these found their way to the NSDAP from the Deutschvölkisch Schutz-und Trutzbund [German Racial Union for Protection and Defiance], which itself had been called into life by the Pan-German Union."

Hans Mommsen

"Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows – at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example – as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews."

Adolf Hitler

"The Germans came, the police, and they started banging houses: "Raus, raus, raus, Juden raus." ... [O]ne baby started to cry ... The other baby started crying. So the mother urinated in her hand and gave the baby a drink to keep quiet ... [When the police had gone], I told the mothers to come out. And one baby was dead ... from fear, the mother [had] choked her own baby."

Abraham Malik, Kovno ghetto

"The action, first scheduled as a training exercise was carried out under real-life conditions (ernstfallmässig) in the village itself. Strangers, especially partisans could not be found. The screening of the population, however resulted in 13 Jews, 27 Jewish women and 11 Jewish children, of which 13 Jews and 19 Jewish women were shot in co-operation with the Security Service."

War diary, Battalion 322

"I saw them do the killing. At 5:00 p.m. they gave the command, "Fill in the pits." Screams and groans were coming from the pits. Suddenly I saw my neighbor Ruderman rise from under the soil ... His eyes were bloody and he was screaming: "Finish me off!" ... A murdered woman lay at my feet. A boy of five years crawled out from under her body and began to scream desperately. "Mommy!" That was all I saw, since I fell unconscious."

Survivor, Einsatzgruppen

"There was a place called the ramp where the trains with the Jews were coming in. They were coming in day and night, and sometimes one per day and sometimes five per day ... Constantly, people from the heart of Europe were disappearing, and they were arriving to the same place with the same ignorance of the fate of the previous transport. And the people in this mass ... I knew that within a couple of hours ... ninety percent would be gassed."

Rudolf Vrba, worker, Auschwitz

Surrendering & Salvaging

Before you begin: The following story is meant only to elucidate a point being made in this post; any events detailed therein do NOT correspond to real events. No content here is meant to misinform or mislead the reader.

There was once a woman, a poor woman, whose husband had left her when their first child was born, and she was forced to give up the child for adoption as she had no means of supporting it after a few years and no intention of condemning the child to a fate similar to hers. The child, now adopted by an affluent family, grows up to become a healthy young man. Then, his birth-mother, now left begging by the sidewalks of the large city, spots him on the road one afternoon and begins to follow him, asking him for alms. He does not know who the old woman is, never having been old enough to be expected to remember anything at all before his new home. The woman, suddenly overcome with a surge of pleasure at having seen her son again, tells him the truth. He does not believe her, but has his doubts allayed by his adopted parents once he gets home. The next time he sets out, he wishes not to meet the old woman again because she forsook him when she should have not - at the same time forgetting that he wouldn't have been who he was if not for the surrender.

There is a strong analogy between this story and our daily lives. The old woman, impoverished and bereaved of any means to support herself in a fast-changing world with her antediluvian tools, is the culture we often find lacking in so many people when we talk of the decadence in India: the westernization brought on by globalization and liberalization of economies to survive in a world where the rules are set only by Big Brother.

The young child given up for adoption so early in life are the youngsters born today, living today, the very same people that our previous generations tout as the face of the future. Our culture as such is imposed on us by our parents and those who nurture us, teach us and care for us as we grow up; it may not seem necessary since it is definitely not innate, but the need to belong is, and so we seek to be native and "one" with some group of people. It is strongly tied in with our identity. However, when the culture seems lacking in some prime aspect that WE need to survive today, albeit succeed, it not only surrenders us to another culture but we also proactively seek out an alternative - if a restaurant I enter does not have the soup I eagerly seek, the manager will have no reason to force me to stay, and I will have no reason to remain, either. Neither is to blame but there is a resulting dissonance.

The affluent family is the second culture - the one that is equipped with those rights and liberties to exempt ourselves from unreasonable duties, duties that could hamper us, hinder us, in our quest for success in a world that no longer moves by the hours but the fractions of a second. It has to be conceded that there are many unreasonable expectations made of a youngster that do not so much as acknowledge the nature of the changing times, leaving one to decide whether one is prepared to lead a penitentiary life or, on quite the other hand, break free of the shackles and emerge free. Penance is a sin against practicality and freedom is a sin against faith. Which road is a child to take but the one that is available immediately, the one that provides the next morsel of food? If survival necessitates a change of sides, then so be it.

The old woman did not want to condemn, the young man did not want to come to naught, the affluent family did nothing to be held culpable for, but there innumerable grudges, favors waiting to be returned and a gratitude expression system that seems to be going haywire. Where are we in all of this? Rather, how are we in all of this?

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="240" caption="What does it mean to be Indian?"][/caption]

If and when you want to endorse a revolution in your country, your state, your city or your village, then ask yourself this: how is it fair to expect all those born on this land to embrace their natively endowed gifts when the gifts themselves, inadvertently, forsake their receiver in the long run?

What is to be righted is the culture itself - even though it may not have wronged at all in expecting obedience in an age such as this, it must change in order to survive, or it must make peace with its senility and forgive defectors. A non-resident Indian (NRI) cannot be expected to listen to your calls; he will ask you how you expect him to be a hero when the rewards of heroism were dwarfed completely by the penalties for foolishness. That is, undeniably, an unfair expectation I myself have had innumerable times.