One in three breast cancer cases in Western countries could be averted if women ate less and exercised more, cancer experts said today at a breast cancer conference in Barcelona. Although better treatments, early diagnosis and mammograms have slowed the disease, the focus should now shift to diet and physical activity, they said.

"What can be achieved with screening has been achieved. We can't do much more," Carlo La Vecchia, head of epidemiology at the University of Milan, told The Associated Press. "It's time to move onto other things."

Let's take a closer look at the link between exercise and cancer.

We live highly sedentary lives. Only a third of Americans undertake enough regular leisure-time physical activity to derive health benefits - that is, moderate exercise for 30 minutes five times a week or vigorous activity for 20 minutes three times a week. In the UK, only 40% of men and 28% of women reach the recommended level of physical activity.

To a large extent, this is due to the increasing mechanization of our daily lives. Household tasks are largely automated, most journeys are made by car or public transport, many formerly manual jobs in industry or agriculture are increasingly carried out by machines, and active outdoor recreation has largely been replaced by sedentary activities such as television-watching or computer games. Even a five-minute walk to the letter box has been replaced by instant messaging via email and Facebook.

Many of us confuse being "busy" with being "active", as my own experiment in pedometry over the last week has highlighted. (See previous post.) On typical work days, when I spend most of my time at the computer, in meetings or in my car, I'm lucky if I clock up 8,000 steps. Days like these are busy and tiring, but involve very little physical activity.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer estimates that 25% of cancer cases worldwide are due to overweight, obesity and a sedentary lifestyle. According to the U.S. government's Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, individuals engaging in regular aerobic physical activity 3-4 hours a week at moderate or greater levels of intensity have on average a 30% reduction of colon cancer risk and a 20-40% reduction of breast cancer risk compared to those who are sedentary; better still, the more people exercise, the lower their cancer risk, the report states.

Meanwhile, the World Cancer Research Fund notes that exercise protects against colon cancer, probably helps reduce the risk of postmenopausal breast cancer and endometrial cancer and may also lower the risk of lung cancer, pancreatic cancer and pre-menopausal breast cancer.

Various mechanisms link sedentary lifestyles to increased cancer risk. Obesity is the most obvious connection: by moving less (and in some cases, by eating more, or making poor food choices) we risk gaining weight. Extra fat - especially around the waist - can act like a hormone "pump" and raise levels of estrogen and other substances in the blood which increase cancer risk. Being overweight can also cause inflammation, another risk factor for cancer.

Regular exercise meanwhile may boost the immune system, thus increasing our bodies' ability to ward off enemy invaders. One as yet unproven hypothesis is that physical activity may boost the number or function of natural killer cells which may play a role in tumor suppression.

Lastly, by improving colon motility, exercise helps food move through the digestive tract more quickly. This reduces the exposure of the cells lining the digestive tract to potentially cancer-causing substances, thus potentially lowering colon cancer risk.

So the next time we put off physical activity, let's remind ourselves that even relatively small physical efforts can translate into significant health gains.

The Wizard

Daniel Mendelsohn
The New York Review of Books

"Avatar"
a film directed by James Cameron

1.

Two hugely popular "mashups"--homemade videos that humorously juxtapose material from different sources--that are currently making the rounds on the Internet seek to ridicule James Cameron's visually ravishing and ideologically awkward new blockbuster, "Avatar." In one, the portentous voice-over from the trailer for Disney's Oscar-winning animated feature "Pocahontas" (1995) has been seamlessly laid over footage from "Avatar," in which, as in "Pocahontas," a confrontation between dark-skinned native peoples and white-skinned invaders intent on commercial exploitation is leavened by an intercultural love story. "But though their worlds were very different...their destinies were one," the plummy voice of the narrator intones, interrupted by the sound of a Powhatan saying, "These pale visitors are strange to us!"

The other mashup reverses the joke. Here, dialogue from "Avatar"--a futuristic fantasy in which a crippled ex-Marine is given a second chance at life on a strange new world called Pandora, and there falls in love with a native girl, a complication that confuses his allegiances--has been just as seamlessly laid over bits of "Pocahontas." In one, we see an animated image of Captain John Smith's ship after it makes its fateful landing at Jamestown, while we hear the voice of a character in "Avatar"--a tough Marine colonel as he welcomes some new recruits to Pandora--sardonically quoting a bit of movie dialogue that has become an iconic expression of all kinds of cultural displacement. "Ladies and gentlemen," he bellows, "you are not in Kansas anymore!"

The satirical bite of the mashups is directed at what has been seen as the highly derivative, if not outright plagiaristic, nature of "Avatar" 's plot, characters, themes; themes that do, in many ways, seem like sci-fi updatings of the ones you find in "Pocahontas." In the film, the Marine, Jake Sully--a paraplegic wounded in a war in Venezuela--begins as the confused servant of two masters. On the one hand, he is ostensibly assisting in a high-tech experiment in which human subjects, laid out in sarcophagus-like pods loaded with wires that monitor their brain waves, remotely operate laboratory-grown "avatars" of the indigenous anthropoids, nine-foot-tall, cyan-colored, nature-loving forest-dwellers called Na'vi. All this technology is meant to help the well-intentioned scientists to integrate and, ultimately, negotiate with the Na'vi in order to achieve a diplomatic solution to a pesky colonial problem: their local habitation, which takes the form of an enormous tree-hive, happens to sit on top of a rich deposit of a valuable mineral that the humans have come to Pandora to mine.

The problem is that Jake's other master--for whom he is, at first, secretly working, infiltrating the Na'vi with an eye to gathering strategic reconnaissance--is the mercenary army of Marines employed by the mysterious "Company" that's mining the precious mineral. (Anonymous, exploitive corporations are a leitmotif in the movies of this director.) It's clear from the start that both the Company and the Marines are itching to eschew diplomacy for a more violent and permanent solution to the Na'vi problem. The "dramatic arc" of the movie traces Jake's shift in consciousness as he gradually comes to appreciate Na'vi culture, with its deep, organic connection to nature (and--the inevitable romantic subplot--comes to adore a lovely Na'vi princess bearing the Egyptian-sounding name of Neytiri). Eventually, Jake goes over to their side, leading the native people in a climactic, extremely violent uprising against their thuggish oppressors.

So far, it would seem, so politically correct. And yet most of the criticisms that have been leveled at the film since its December premiere have to do with the nature of its politics rather than the originality of its vision. Many critics have lambasted Cameron's film for what they see as the patronizing, if not racist, overtones of its representation of the "primitive" Na'vi; the underlying hypocrisy of an apparent celebration, on the part of a special-effects-laden Hollywood blockbuster, of nature and of an accompanying polemic against technology and corporate greed; and the way it betrays what David Brooks, in a New York Times Op-Ed column, derides as the movie's "White Messiah" complex:

It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.[1]

Criticisms such as Brooks's are not to be dismissed--not least because the ugly complex he identifies is one that has consistently marred Hollywood representations of cultural confrontation from the earliest westerns to the more recent products of a supposedly more enlightened age. (One of the many earnest movies to which "Avatar" has been derisively compared by its detractors is the 1990 Kevin Costner epic "Dances with Wolves," in which a Civil War hero similarly goes native, leading the Indian tribes against his former compatriots.) What's striking is that so many critiques of "Avatar" 's political shortcomings often go out of their way to elide or belittle the movie's overwhelming successes as a work of cinema--its enormous visual power, the thrilling imaginative originality, the excitingly effective use of the 3-D technology that seems bound to change permanently the nature of cinematic experience henceforth--as if to acknowledge how dazzling it is would be an admission of critical weakness.[2]

An extreme example of this is to be found in a searching critique posted by the critic Caleb Crain on his blog:

Of course you don't really believe it. You know objectively that you're watching a series of highly skilled, highly labor-intensive computer simulations. But if you agree to suspend disbelief, then you agree to try to feel that Pandora is a second, improved nature, and that the Na'vi are "digital natives," to repurpose in a literal way a phrase that depends on the same piece of ideological deception.[3]

But our "objective knowledge" about the mechanisms that produce theatrical illusion is beside the point. To witness a critic working so hard not to surrender disbelief--the aim, after all, of drama since its inception--is, in a way, to realize how powerful the mechanisms that seek to produce that surrender really are.

As it happens, the movie that haunts "Avatar"--one that Cameron has often acknowledged as his favorite film--is one that takes the form of a fable about the difference (and sometimes traffic) between fantasy and reality; a movie whose dramatic climax centers on the moment when the protagonist understands that visually overwhelming and indeed politically manipulative illusions can be the product of "highly skilled, highly labor-intensive simulations" (a fact that does not, however, detract from the characters', and our, appreciation of the aesthetic and moral uses and benefits of fantasy, of illusion). That movie is, in fact, the one the Marine colonel quotes: "The Wizard of Oz." Consideration of it is, to my mind, crucial to an understanding not only of the aesthetic aims and dramatic structure of "Avatar" but of a great and disturbing failure that has not been discussed as fervently or as often as its overtly political blind spots have been. This failure is, in certain ways, the culimination of a process that began with the first of Cameron's films, all of which can be seen as avatars of his beloved model, whose themes they continually rework: the scary and often violent confrontation between human and alien civilizations, the dreadful allure of the monstrous, the yearning, by us humans, for transcendence--of the places, the cultures, the very bodies that define us.

2.

Humanity and human life have never held much attraction for Cameron; if anything, you can say that in all his movies there is a yearning to leave the flesh of Homo sapiens behind for something stronger and tougher. The movie that made his name and established him as a major writer-director of blockbuster successes, "The Terminator" (1984), is ostensibly about the poignant conflict between the human race and a race of sentient, human-hating cyborgs--"part man, part machine...fully armored, very tough. But outside it's living human tissue. Flesh, hair, blood...." Its plot, which essentially consists of a number of elaborately staged chase sequences, concerns the attempts by one of these, famously played by Arnold Schwarzenegger--an actor notorious for his fleshly armor as well as for his rather mechanical acting--who returns to the present from a post-apocalyptic future in order to assassinate a woman called Sarah Connor who will, we are told, one day give birth to the man destined to lead a successful human uprising against the cyborgs.

But whatever lip service it pays to the resilience of the human spirit, etc., the film cannot hide its more profound admiration for the resilience of the apparently indestructible cyborg. As the story evolves, this creature loses ever-increasing amounts of its human envelope in various encounters with the woman and her protectors--an eye here, a limb there--and is stripped, eventually, of all human characteristics. By the end, it emerges out of an explosion as a titanium skeleton, hell-bent on pure destruction. (In an interview with The New Yorker that appeared last fall, just before the release of "Avatar," Cameron recalled that the inspiration for the movie, which he says came to him in a dream, was this sole image: "a chrome skeleton emerging out of a fire." Everything else came later.[4])

It would be hard to claim that Cameron--who has managed to wring clanking and false performances from fine actors like Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Billy Zane ("Titanic"), and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio ("The Abyss")--is an actor's director; his films' emotional energy, and certainly their visual interest, lies in their awed appreciation of what machines (and inhuman creatures) can do, from the seemingly unkillable cyborgs of the "Terminator" movies to the unstoppable alien monster queen of "Aliens" to the deep-sea diving capsules and remote-controlled robots featured in "Titanic." The performances that work in his films, significantly, are either those of mediocre actors like Schwarzenegger who actually play machines or good actors playing tight-lipped, emotionally shut-down characters, like Sigourney Weaver in "Aliens" (1986), which Cameron wrote and directed.

"The Terminator" had a dark sense of humor about our relationship to technology, an issue that is at the core, in its way, of "Avatar." In one memorably disturbing scene, a woman can't hear her boyfriend being beaten to death by the Terminator because she's listening to loud pop music with her headphones on; in another, we--and the Terminator--overhear a crucial message on Sarah Connor's answering machine, which greets callers with the sly announcement: "Ha ha, I fooled you, you're talking to a machine. But that's OK, machines need love too." The joke is that they don't--and that's their advantage. It's no accident that, by the end of "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," Cameron's hit 1991 sequel to the original, Sarah Connor has become rather machine-like herself--pointedly, even cruelly suppressing maternal feelings for the child she has borne, strenuously working out, hardening her body, arming herself to the teeth with an eye-popping arsenal of hand- and machine guns.

The fascination with the seeming invincibility of sophisticated mechanical objects, and an accompanying desire to slough off human flesh for metal (and a celebration of flesh so taut it may as well be metal: Cameron's camera loves to linger on the tightly muscled bodies, male and female, of the soldiers so often featured in his violent films), is a recurrent theme in the techno-blockbusters that cemented the director's reputation in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. "Aliens" famously ends with Weaver's character, Ellen Ripley, battling the dragonish alien monster queen after strapping herself into a giant forklift-like machine whose enormous pincers she mechanically controls by maneuvering her own slender arms--a technology that puts the puny human, finally, on a par with her gigantic, razor-toothed, acid-bleeding adversary.

This kind of exaggerated mechanical body gear, which endows people with machine-like strength and power, is a recurrent prop in Cameron's films. It's crucial in "Aliens" and it pops up again in his 1989 submarine fantasy "The Abyss," which imagines an encounter between a deep-sea oil-drilling team and an ethereally beautiful, bioluminescent species of marine aliens. Even in "Titanic" (1997), the clunky "human interest" subplot, about a doomed romance between a feisty Main Line nymphet and a free-spirited artist in third class, cannot compete with the swooning representation of machines: the ship itself, the pumping turbines and purring hydraulics and, later, the awful, methodical disintegration of those mechanical elements--and a lot of glittering modern-day gadgets, too. For the famous disaster sequence is intercut with scenes of present-day dives to the great wreck, during which human operators remotely manipulate treasure-hunting drones by means of sympathetic arm movements.

A violent variation on the same mechanical bodysuits reappears, memorably, in "Avatar," which culminates in a scene of bloody single combat between a Na'vi warrior and the evil Marine colonel, who has strapped himself into one such machine. If anything, the recurrent motif of humans inserting themselves into mechanical contraptions in order to enjoy superhuman powers reaches its fullest, most sophisticated expression in the new movie, whose characters can literally become other, superhuman beings by hooking themselves up to elaborate machines. All this seems to bear out the underlying truth of a joke that Linda Hamilton, the actress who played Sarah Connor in the "Terminator" movies, told about her first, unhappy interactions with the director (whom she later married and divorced): "That man is definitely on the side of the machines."

3.

The awed appreciation for superhuman powers--and an understandable desire by human weaklings to lay claim to them, in times of great duress--that recur in Cameron's work before "Avatar" surely betrays a lingering trace of his formative encounter with "The Wizard of Oz," which so famously shows us a helpless twelve-year-old, set loose in a strange world inhabited by scary monsters and powerful aliens, discovering her own hitherto unknown powers (and learning that certain supposedly supernatural powers are produced by knowing how to maneuver the right gears and levers).

Another inheritance from that visually revolutionary work, of course, is Cameron's taste for plots that have to do with encounters between humans and aliens of one sort or another. "Avatar" would seem to be the most obvious manifestation of this particular debt that Cameron owes to his favorite movie. Apart from a number of explicit allusions to "Oz"--the line about not being in Kansas anymore, a corporate stooge's sneering reference to the Na'vi as "blue monkeys," which recalls the blue-tinged flying monkeys of the 1939 movie--the encounter between the human world and the world of the Na'vi is imbued with a sense of thrilled visual amazement that deliberately evokes a similar experience provided by the Hollywood classic. In the latter, Dorothy's life in Kansas was filmed in black and white; only when she awakes in Oz does the film move into dazzling three-strip Technicolor. In "Avatar," Cameron quotes this famous gesture. Jake Sully's world, the world of the humans--the interior of the marine transports and fighters, the hangars and meeting rooms, the labs of the scientists and the offices of the nameless corporation--is filmed in a drably monotonous palette of grays and blues (the latter being a favorite color of this director, who uses it often to represent a bleak future); the world of the Na'vi, in contrast, is one of staggering color and ravishing light.

The colors, apart from the opulent greens of the Na'vis' jungle homeland, tend to be lusciously "feminine" on the flora--violet, mauve, delicate peaches and yellows. They grow stronger on the fauna, a series of brilliantly imagined creatures among which, persuasively, certain morphologies recur. (Crests, say, and hammer-heads.) All, the plants and animals both, share one trait that clearly owes much to Cameron's lifelong passion for marine exploration, and which provides "Avatar" with much of its visual delight: bioluminescence. As the characters tread on plants or trees, the latter light up delicately, for a moment; the ritually important Tree of Souls looks like a weeping willow made of fiber-optic cables. It's a wonderful conceit that had me literally gasping with pleasure the first time I saw the movie.

This visual ravishment--which is the principal experience of the movie and which is, too, enhanced by the surprisingly subtle use of 3-D technology (there are gratifyingly few shots of objects projecting into the audience's field; you just feel that you're sharing the same plane as the creatures in the movie)--is part of a strategy intended to make us admire the Na'vi. Not surprisingly, given all this natural synergy and beauty, the native people, as we are told again and again, enjoy a special bond with all those colorful creatures and, more generally, with the ecosystem (to whom they have given the name Eywa; Cameron, apparently as much a stickler for linguistic as for biological verisimilitude, had his underlings work up a functional Na'vi language).

This, in turn, is part of the film's earnest, apparently anticolonial, anticapitalist, antitechnology message. These creatures, rather sentimentally modeled on popular notions of Native American and African tribes, are presented as being wholly in tune with nature--as preagricultural hunter-gatherers who subsist on the flesh of the animals they kill by means of their remarkable skill at archery. (When they do make a kill, they solemnly apologize to the victims: "All energy is borrowed and one day you have to give it back," Neytiri rather officiously informs the avatar-Jake when he makes his first kill.) They stand, therefore, in stark contrast to the movie's humans (the "sky-people"), with their heavy, rumbling, roaring copters and tractors and immense, belching, grinding mining-machines--the representatives of destructive "technology" who have, we are told, "killed their mother": which is to say, destroyed their own planet.

All this would be well and good enough, in its ecofable, "Pocahontas"-esque way, but for the fact that Cameron is the wrong man to be making a film celebrating the virtues of pre-technological societies. As, indeed, he has no intention of doing here. For as the admiring scientists--led by a chain-smoking, tough-talking woman called Grace Augustine, played by Sigourney Weaver (the chain-smoking is an in-joke: Ripley had the same bad habit)--protest to the trigger-happy Marines, Na'vi civilization is in fact technologically sophisticated: by means of a pistil-tipped appendage, wittily described by Crain as a kind of USB cable, which plugs into similar appendages on both plants and animals, they can commune not only with other creatures but with what constitutes a planet-wide version of a technology with which we today are very preoccupied. "Don't you get it?" an exasperated Dr. Augustine shouts at the corporate and military yahoos who clearly intend to blow all the Na'vi to kingdom come. "It's a network--a global network!"

Dr. Augustine goes on to describe how, by means of the pistil-thing, the Na'vi can upload and download memories, information, and so forth--and can even communicate with their dead. One such upload to Eywa herself, transmitted through the Tree of Souls by Jake's avatar, will, in the end, help lead the Na'vi and their furry friends to victory over the human exploiters. (This, of course, is the "Dances with Wolves" paradigm.)

In its confused treatment of that favorite Cameron preoccupation--the relationship between the natural and the technological worlds--the film, for all its richly imagined and dazzlingly depicted beauties, runs into deep and revealing trouble. As we know by now, Cameron's real attraction, as a writer and a director, has always been for the technologies that turn humans into superhumans. However "primitive" they have seemed to some critics, the Na'vi--with their uniformly superb, sleekly blue-gleaming physiques, their weirdly infallible surefootedness, their organic connector cables, their ability to upload and download consciousness itself--are the ultimate expression of his career-long striving to make flesh mechanical. The problem here is not a patronizingly clichéd representation of an ostensibly primitive people; the problem is the movie's intellectually incoherent portrayal of its fictional heroes as both admirably precivilized and admirably hypercivilized, as atechnological and highly technologized. "Avatar" 's desire to have its anthropological cake and eat it too suggests something deeply unself-aware and disturbingly unresolved within Cameron himself.

And how not? He is, after all, a Hollywood giant who insists on seeing himself as a regular Joe--a man with what he called, in the New Yorker interview, a "blue-collar sensibility"; more to the point, he is a director whose hugely successful mass entertainments cost hundreds of millions of dollars obligingly provided by deep-pocketed corporations--a "company" man, whether he knows it or not. And these shows depend for their effects--none more than Avatar--on the most sophisticated technologies available, even as that director tells himself that the technology that is the sine qua non of his technique isn't as important as people think; that, in fact, what makes "Avatar" special is the "human interest" story, particularly the love story between Jake and Neytiri:

Too much is being said about the technology of this film. Quite frankly, I don't give a rat's ass how a film is made. It's an emotional story. It's a love story. They're not expecting that. The sci-fi/fantasy fans see the trailer and they think, Cool--battles, robots. What you really need to get to is, Oh, it's that [a love story], too.

But of course, when you see "Avatar," what overwhelms you is what the technology accomplishes--not only the battles and robots, to be fair, but all the other marvelous stuff, the often overwhelmingly beautiful images of a place that exists somewhere over the rainbow.

4.

Even beyond the incoherence that mars "Avatar" and hopelessly confuses whatever it thinks its message may be, there is a larger flaw here--one that's connected to Cameron's ambivalence about the relationship between technology and humanity; one that also brings you back, in the end, to "The Wizard of Oz"; one that is less political than ethical.

If it's right to see the movie as the culmination of Cameron's lifelong progress toward embracing a dazzling, superior Otherness--in a word, toward "Oz"--what strikes you, in the end, is how radically it differs, in one significant detail, from its model. Like the 1939 classic, the 2009 film ends with a scene of awakening. By the end, the Na'vi have triumphed but the human Jake, operating his avatar from within his computerized pod, has been fatally hurt. His dying body is brought back to the Tree of Souls where, in a ceremony of the greatest holiness, the consciousness of the human Jake will be transferred, finally and permanently, into his Na'vi avatar. (Technology at its best, surely.) In the closing moments of the film the camera lingers suspensefully on the motionless face of avatar-Jake; suddenly, the large, feline eyes pop open, and then the screen goes black. We leave the theater secure in the knowledge that the rite has been successful, that the avatar Jake will live. (And that there will be sequels.)

This moment of waking is, structurally, a crucial one; at the very beginning of the film, during Jake's introductory voice-over, the crippled man has poignantly described the liberating but ultimately deceptive dreams of flying that he often has: "I start having these dreams of flying...sooner or later, though, you always have to wake up." The final image of the redeemed and healed Jake waking up to his new Na'vi life is clearly meant, then, to be a triumphant rewriting of that sour acknowledgment.

But the implications of this awakening--in a character that Cameron himself described as an unconscious rewriting of "The Wizard of Oz" 's Dorothy ("it was, in some ways, like Dorothy's journey")--are not only different from but opposite to the implications of Dorothy's climactic wakening. When Dorothy wakes up, it's to the drab, black-and-white reality of the gritty Kansas existence with which she had been so dissatisfied at the beginning of her remarkable journey into fantasy, into vibrant color; what she famously learns from that exposure to radical otherness is, in fact, that "there's no place like home." Which is to say, when she wakes up--equipped, to be sure (as she was not before) with all that she has learned from her remarkable odyssey, not the least of which is a strong new awareness of her own human abilities--she wakes up to the realities, and the responsibilities, of the human world she'd temporarily escaped from.

The triumphant conclusion of "Avatar," by contrast, takes the form of a permanent abandonment of the gray world of Homo sapiens--which, as Dorothy learns, may contain its own hidden marvels--for the Technicolor, over-the-rainbow fantasy world into which Jake accidentally strayed. This represents something new in Cameron's work, something you can't help thinking is significant. In the director's films of the 1980s and 1990s, in the "Terminator" films or in "Aliens," in the misbegotten "Abyss" and even, in its way, in "Titanic"--just before the advent of cell phones and iPhones, of reality TV and virtual socializing, and, indeed, of mashups, of this new moment in which each of us can inhabit what you might call a private reality--the encounters with radical otherness or with extremes of violence and disaster always concluded, however awkwardly in some cases, with a moment of quiet, a return to the reassuring familiarity of life as most of us know it.

The message of what is now James Cameron's most popular movie thus far, and the biggest-grossing movie in history--like the message of so much else in mass culture just now--is, by contrast, that "reality" is dispensable altogether; or, at the very least, whatever you care to make of it, provided you have the right gadgets. In this fantasy of a lusciously colorful trip over the rainbow, you don't have to wake up. There's no need for home. Whatever its futuristic setting, and whatever its debt to the past, "Avatar" is very much a movie for our time.

Read more at the New York Review of Books website.

Notes

[1]David Brooks, "The Messiah Complex," The New York Times, January 7, 2010.

[2]A notable exception was the New Yorker review by David Denby, which begins, "Avatar is the most beautiful film I've seen in years." See "Going Native," The New Yorker, January 4, 2010.

[3]Caleb Crain, "Don't Play with That, or You'll Go Blind," his blog post at www.steamthing.com. Crain is more resistant to the film's beauties than I would be, and sees the director as "cynical" instead of unresolved in his treatment of technology and "primitive" cultures, as I see him.

[4]Dana Goodyear, "Man of Extremes: The Return of James Cameron," The New Yorker, October 26, 2009.

More on Avatar

THE NEXT TIME I HEAR a politico or banker or Detroit executive talk about institutions “too big to fail,” I’ll direct them to the 34 percent of Americans who are obese. Last I heard, these big Americans, themselves a kind of cultural institution, were failing en masse, racked by diabetes, asthma, heart trouble, and bound for early death. The human form can only grow so big. Or I could point them to Pig #6707. Conceived in the laboratories of the U.S. Department of Agriculture during the 1990s, Pig #6707’s embryo was genetically altered with a human growth gene to develop a super-pig, bigger and faster-growing and more productive of meat. But the genetic alterations produced a monster, impotent and nearly blind, its legs arthritic, its body crippled, the creature able to stand up and be photographed only with the support of a plywood board. When asked by a reporter why he created the sick pig, the lead researcher said his intent was to make livestock more efficient.

There is, of course, a caution for our species in Pig #6707. When an organism grows beyond its design, nature will determine it to fail—a fact of life, in the strictest sense. Nowhere in evolutionary theory is hypertrophic growth posited as the key to success. What is key is optimum size, what we’d more accurately call right size. All living things have a right size, and historically evolved to that size because it was optimal for survival. So, for example, elephants and giraffes and rhinoceroses, though comparatively huge, are in fact just the right size—their bigness operating as a defense against predators, allowing for greater reach in forage, and much else. The same goes for polar bears and walruses and whales, which require extra tissue volume to retain heat against cold water and long winters. Dinosaurs, as we all know, were likely the biggest creatures to walk the Earth, but bigness didn’t help them meet the challenge of changing conditions. The largest of the dinosaurs disappeared altogether, the smaller ones got even smaller and eventually evolved into birds, while the animals of more moderate size, the marsupials and primitive mammals, found that being small in the first place was a blessing.

On the cellular level, biologists have long understood that large cells, the kind found in cancer, are always unstable and heading for collapse. In physics, too, the principle of right size holds fast. “Atoms of middle weight are stable and inert,” writes Sir George Thomson, the nuclear physicist and Nobel laureate, “but the light as well as the heavy atoms have stores of energy. If one thinks of the heaviest atoms as overgrown empires which are ripe for dissolution and only held together by special efforts . . . one may think, on the other hand, of the lightest of the atoms as individuals which run together naturally for mutual help and readily coalesce to form stable tribes and communities.” As with atoms and empires, so also the stars, which when grown too big will collapse under their own weight in the spectacle of the supernova. So also for animal communities, which rarely aim for bigness. Birds fledge their nests; they don’t keep crowding in. Bees and ants split their colonies when they grow too large, decentralization as instinct. Trees self-prune when laden with too much ice or snow or assailed by wind, dropping limbs to sustain the trunk. Naturalized goldfish in the carp family, kept in an outdoor garden, will only grow to a size proportionate to their pond—unless they are fed (and if fed too much, they grow terribly obese and soon lose the knack for swimming, procreating, and everything else that makes a fish a fish).

Nothing in nature just keeps growing, except where the usual evolutionary constraints are removed from the picture. Isolation from predators, in the example of island gigantism, allowed a host of species to grow to outsize proportions. The elephant bird of Madagascar, the giant gecko of New Zealand, the giant ducks of Hawaii, the giant rabbits of Mediterranean islands, the famed dodo—all were extinguished at astonishing speed after meeting the wily Homo sapiens and his diminutive camp followers (dogs, cats, rats). Without effective competition to keep them fit, the island gigantics were in fact terribly vulnerable when conditions changed.

The United States, it would seem, is suffering its own kind of island gigantism. Bigness is the prejudice of American life, our cultural albatross, the axiom being that when something is big it is automatically better. Why we’ve been saddled with love of bigness as a people perhaps comes down to the matter of geography, the vastness and richness that the landscape offered for the taking from the moment of European settlement. Size was our birthright, our conditioning, the justification for our exceptionalism, bigness our manifest destiny, and for a long time, whole centuries, it worked. The free land and timber and animals to be hunted down and coal and oil and ore to be dug out of the ground made us very wealthy very fast, taught us that growthmania was the norm, the shape of progress, the American way.

Thus, we prefer our Big Macs and our Whoppers, our food portions supersized, our big cars and sprawling cities, our enormous football players (growing bigger every year, the average offensive lineman now topping three hundred pounds), our big breasts and big penises and big houses (up from an average of 1,200 square feet in 1950 to 2,216 square feet today), our big armies with big reach, and, though we complain about it incessantly, big government that spends big money running up big debt (more now than at any other period in our history). That we allow corporations to grow to outrageous size is just another symptom of the disease. Bigness worship permeates every layer of the culture; it is racked into our brains with every turn of the advertising screw; it is a totalizing force.

WHEN LOUIS BRANDEIS WROTE The Curse of Bigness in 1934, he had been a lawyer for many years and, famously, a Supreme Court justice, and much of his work in the courts was busting up bigness. He was particularly concerned about the corporate monopolies that afflicted American life at the turn of the twentieth century. The Curse of Bigness was not a big book, because the arguments were pretty obvious. The great robber baron trusts—in oil, rubber, steel, tobacco, sugar, and railroads (and let’s not forget the Writing Paper Trust, the Woolen Trust, the Upper Leather Trust, the Paper Bag Trust)—had rigged bids, defrauded patentees, crushed labor movements, and could sway prices in any direction regardless of supply or demand. The ur-trust that by 1904 controlled 91 percent of U.S. oil production, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, was found by the Justice Department to have secured its position via “discriminatory practices in favor of the combination by railroad companies; restraint and monopolization by control of pipe lines . . . ; contracts with competitors in restraint of trade; . . . espionage of the business of competitors, the operation of bogus independent companies”—the stratagems as expectable as they were ugly.

The threat that behemoths like Standard Oil posed to the republic, wrote Brandeis, was their concentration of economic power and decision making to the extent that they were effectively a state within the state, operating under their own laws. Many of the trusts were shattered, in a long struggle that Brandeis pioneered. It was his advocacy that helped push into effective action the antitrust mechanisms in government (the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, the Federal Trade Commission), which led to the breakup of Standard Oil and many of its sister monopolies by 1911. “American development can come on the lines on which we seek it, and the ideals which we have can be attained, only if side by side with political democracy comes industrial democracy,” Brandeis wrote. “It is the relatively small man who pre-eminently needs the aid and solicitous care of industry and government. We have, gentlemen, to bear all the time that democratic view in mind.”

But we have not. Today we find ourselves in an unprecedented age of corporate gigantism. This situation is characterized not by the outright monopolies that worried Brandeis, but by the rise of oligopolies, a few very obese firms, the Big Three or Big Six, dominating their sectors while being insulated from failure by the hand of government. Republican and Democratic administrations alike for the last thirty years, spellbound by so-called laissez-faire ideology, abandoned their antitrust duties and watched as the total value of mergers and acquisitions rose to an unprecedented $20 trillion—abetting, in other words, the growth of stupendous privileges in the corporatocracy. At the same time, federal and state governments have done most everything they can to ignore, discourage, and imperil the small man in the world of business.

It’s an old story, and it bears repeating: Government subsidies favor large-scale standardized activity (in farming, manufacturing, retail—the list is long) at the expense of the local, the small, the diverse, the upstart. By 2005, four firms controlled 60 percent of the nation’s grain business. The four largest meatpackers controlled 70 percent of beef supply. In some states, the four largest grocery chains controlled as much as 88 percent of all retail sales. Today, a handful of merged energy companies, the Big Five, dominate the petroleum business, with ExxonMobil, Chevron-Texaco, Conoco-Phillips, BP, and Royal Dutch / Shell proving, in the words of Lord Browne, former chief executive of British Petroleum, that “many of the components of the old Standard Oil [trust have] been brought together.” The pattern of oligopoly holds in banking (Citigroup, Chase, and Bank of America now issuing one out of every two mortgages, two out of every three credit cards), accounting, tobacco, automobiles (the triopoly of GM, Ford, and Chrysler), defense, steel, telecommunications (Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint-Nextel), pharmaceuticals, airlines (Delta, American, United), in every major stage of the food business (even including grain elevator storage), and in the generation, transmission, and local distribution of electricity.

What we’re told is that all this consolidation, this predilection for bigness, always and every time—per the usual knee-jerk size-valuation—brings “synergies,” “economies of scale,” efficiency, innovation. But the opposite is too often the case. To take perhaps the obvious example: The Big Three automakers, which for the last half-century have trumpeted “efficiency” and “innovation” as the bywords to justify their great size, in fact failed over the years to produce automobiles at prices and quality comparable to smaller Japanese automakers like Honda and Nissan, the U.S. oligopoly by the 1980s requiring nearly twice as many engineering hours per new car project, and today taking up to two weeks to change plants for new model assembly while little Honda does it in one night. And all this for products that are more expensive and less advanced than those of the competitors. GM, among all automakers, was routinely the least efficient, the least visionary, its mastodonic bureaucracy trained to crush new ideas in the cradle. “At GM, if you see a snake, the first thing you do is to hire a consultant on snakes,” said Ross Perot during his tenure on GM’s board of directors. “Then you get a committee on snakes, and then you can discuss it for a couple of years. The most likely course of action is—nothing.” One might go so far as to charge that the neglect and recalcitrance of the Big Three in the field of invention, their strangling of innovation, has been a danger to the public and disastrous for the environment. They ignored and sometimes actively suppressed safety innovations (seatbelts, padded dashboards, shatterproof glass), a decision that arguably cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of motorists who otherwise might have survived crashes. They have consistently resisted fuel economy and emissions technologies. They colluded to destroy public transit in cities throughout the nation, with the planned effect of getting more people into cars (which rendered cities, by default, more destructively auto-dependent). They killed the electric car—invented out of their own labs, years before anyone had heard of a Prius (and now, as it happens, they are seeking tax dollars to reinvent it). If the nation is to be efficient in its use of fast-dwindling fossil fuels, innovative in curbing pollution and greenhouse gases—effective at imagining even the possibility of a sustainable future—the Big Three are, and will continue to be, a monstrous hindrance.

But why confine ourselves to automakers? Look at U.S. Steel, the “big sprawling inert giant,” in the words of the company’s own assessment, which survives only by government subsidy and protectionist measures from friends in Congress. The smaller steel companies, the so-called mini-mills operating throughout the U.S., produce at lower cost and with fewer man-hours and better pay for workers. Or look at IBM, where a senior vice-president once described the managerial hierarchy as “a giant pool of peanut butter we have to swim through.” The company was out-invented at every turn of the 1980s, in the dawn of personal computing, by upstart Microsoft, which preyed on the inventions of Apple. (Microsoft today is an oligopolist like no other, with the Windows operating system installed on 95 percent of personal computers worldwide.)

Or consider how giant pharmaceutical firms license scores of products from tiny innovative biotech labs every year, perfect and mass-market the inventions of the little companies, but invent few, if any, new drugs inside their own labs. It has always been thus: the big private research laboratories of the modern age are marked by their creative barrenness, a pattern identified by no less a luminary than the former vice-president of the General Electric Company back in 1953: “Not a single distinctively new electric home appliance has ever been created by one of the giant concerns—not the first washing machine, electric range, dryer . . . razor, lawn mower, freezer, air conditioner, vacuum cleaner, dishwasher, or grill. The record of the giants is one of moving in, buying out, and absorbing after the fact.”

Kodachrome film? Not invented by Eastman Kodak, but by two musicians in a bathroom. The earliest turbojet engines? Blew in from none of the major aircraft firms. The Google search platform now fast becoming—in one of those tasteless ironies we have learned to expect—an internet monopoly? Conceived by two geeks in a dorm room. You don’t paint the Sistine ceiling by committee, though perhaps one day a corporation will try. Creativity, in any case—the radical’s creativity, which is the only kind—is not what the corporation looks for. Rather, it pursues what William Whyte called “the fight against genius.” It looks for Whyte’s “Organization Man,” who seeks protection, safety, succor in bigness, who can be relied on to conform and submit. What it lacks in creativity, of course, the big corporation makes up for in coercion.

THE STANDARD OIL PLAYBOOK, it turns out, is very much alive, because with corporate obesity always comes the institutionalization of unfairness. Economists Walter Adams and James Brock have done more than any contemporary scholars to chronicle the effects on the ground. They find, for example, that the oligopolists in the grain and meat industries drive down prices for family farmers and ranchers, starving the small men out of business. The defense industry, they report, consolidates in the 1990s, and what follows is an explosion in contract fixing and price fraud, with procurement costs skyrocketing at the Pentagon. The oil oligopoly intentionally withholds gasoline supplies from the market in 2001—a “profit-maximizing strategy,” in the words of the Federal Trade Commission—costing Americans billions of dollars in overcharges. The giant airlines tacitly collude to fix prices, always higher and higher, and so do the automakers, while service and quality continue to decline. In the ninety-seven top radio markets, where two broadcasters now control some 80 percent of the spectrum, we hear allegations of censorship, and we stop hearing the music and opinions considered unpalatable by corporate ownership. The power of bigness everywhere corrodes the regulatory instruments of government through the usual means (lobbyists, campaign money, revolving doors, conflicts of interest). And all this is tolerated, which is to say it is not questioned (so much for regulating with a “democratic view in mind”). It can’t be otherwise, when money and influence grows with every aggrandizement of industry, and corruption of the state is only a matter of the size of the checks one can write, the stature of the executives one can place to gorge in the henhouse. American government, write Adams and Brock, “is in constant danger of being transformed into a welfare state for powerful private interests.” The danger has swallowed us whole; we are now living inside its belly.

I think particularly of Goldman Sachs, one of the most powerful players in the banking oligopoly, which for two decades has been a berserker in the marketplace, sowing discord, leading people into shoddy investments and out of their homes, making huge money in the process, all while dictating terms to government and looting the public treasury. Matt Taibbi, in an article in Rolling Stone, recently deconstructed how effective Goldman has been in exploiting its bigness. The achievements in regulatory capture alone are momentous: Bush’s treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, architect of the 2008 bailouts, was a former CEO of Goldman; Robert Rubin, the treasury secretary under Clinton, spent twenty-six years at Goldman; former Goldman director Ed Liddy was placed in charge of the bailout of crumbling insurance goliath AIG (which owed Goldman billions of dollars); the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York were Goldmanites; and on and on.

Taibbi reports that Goldman was among the chief promoters of the tech stock bubble of the 1990s (and profited from the collapse), the real estate bubble of the 2000s (and profited from the collapse), and throughout these debacles it was variously accused of securities fraud, tacit bribery, insider trading. Goldman’s commodities bubble predations in 2008 are perhaps most illustrative of how a bigness complex with tentacular reach touches all Americans. With friends placed on the Commodities Futures Trade Commission, Goldman quietly secured an exemption from a Depression-era federal law, specifically the Commodity Exchange Act of 1936, which limits the number of speculators in the commodities market, stating that if speculation gets too big in those basics of existence—corn, wheat, coal, oil—it’s a risk to society as a whole. Armed with the exemption, Goldman was free to set its traders loose in the commodities markets to balloon oil prices even though oil production was up and consumption was down. Due in part to Goldman’s manipulations, Taibbi writes, the average barrel of oil in the summer of 2008 was traded twenty-seven times before it reached the consumer, and with the parasitic middleman taking his cut through aggressive—often lawless—interference in the laws of the marketplace, we had four-dollar-a-gallon prices that crimped the livelihoods of tens of millions of drivers.

For this good work, the company demanded a bailout, stretching its many arms to twist the necks of these same taxpayers. Goldman executives were brought in to help plan the bailout arrangements, for themselves and other banks, and the $700 billion was dispersed mostly in secret, with little or no oversight. They helped to oversee the AIG bailout, because Goldman’s investments were bound up in AIG, and, as anticipated, when AIG received $85 billion at the direction of ex-Goldmanite Paulson at the Treasury, $13 billion was promptly routed from AIG to Goldman. Goldman then machinated for its own bailout, while Paulson opted to let Goldman’s chief competitor, Lehman Brothers, collapse for the pickings. This had the benefit of allowing Goldman to sop up Lehman’s share of the market, so that Goldman, among the prime perpetrators of excess that led to the crash, now grows even bigger, presumably to go on to further excesses.

What must be understood is that this bailing out of bigness is nothing new. It happened, for example, with Chrysler in 1979—$4 billion was allocated by Congress so the company could continue making stupid decisions and crappy cars—and with Long Term Capital Management in 1998, after the hedge fund invested too much money in too much risk, which is just the model of profligacy required for a company to achieve the coveted status of “too big to fail.” The difference in the recent bailout is only its size, stretching into the hundreds of billions of dollars, saddling generations of Americans with government debt larger than any single generation past had to contend with.

There is no learning curve, only the upward sweep of profits and size and government intervention. Bailing out bigness masterfully incentivizes bigness, because to be big is apparently the ultimate indemnity against the rigors of the marketplace, i.e., against the real world in which you and I are supposed to muck around for a living. And the bigger the losses among the giants, the better—how else can one threaten the “system” and demand a bailout and grow still bigger? The small community and state banks in boring places like North Dakota are holding course just fine in the throes of the “crisis”—they were humble and frugal—as are many smaller banks that operate nationally. But the necessary consequence of bailing out losers like AIG and Goldman Sachs and the other giants is that the small guys, who were modestly surviving, lose business to the subsidized goliaths. The bailouts in their scale have one other big incentivizing consequence: they reframe the mistakes of the private sector as social catastrophes, which makes us all vulnerable by encouraging the socialization of foolishness and greed that would better remain the burden of boardroom executives. The private enterprise economy is revolutionized in the most cynical and ironic fashion, so that unfairness bears down like a jackboot on the small man, while it’s socialism for the rich, the big, the abusive, the powerful, the ones doing the stomping. “Marx, in his innocent, and now obsolete, way thought it would be the workers who would force the pace of socialism,” wrote John Kenneth Galbraith way back in the comparative innocence of 1985. “He must be looking with surprise at the way, in our time, it is the bankers and the big industrialists who lead the march, carry the flag.” And lo, swollen with government money, while the world economy immolated throughout the summer and fall of 2009, Goldman Sachs posted its largest profits ever.

In 1834, Roger B. Taney, who would become chief justice of the Supreme Court, warned about the supersized hostage-taking capacity of big concentrations in business. Listening to the bailout justifications throughout 2009, one could appreciate the fatefulness in Taney’s message. The big interests, he observed, “may now demand the possession of the public money . . . and if these objects are yielded to them from apprehensions of their power, or from the suffering which rapid curtailments on their part are inflicting on the community, what may they next not require? Will submission render such a corporation more forbearing in its course?” Ask Goldman Sachs.

The Founding Fathers were concerned about the problem from day one, though they described the influence and power of bigness in terms of “factions,” those groups of citizens—and now, more problematically, in a way the founders did not foresee, those groups of fake citizens known as corporations—“who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Madison’s solution in the Federalist Papers was to allow a multiplicity of interests that, ideally, would balance each other out, so that no one interest could hold sway. In other words, competition for power among factions—that itself could only function in a decentralized system—was key to keeping all factions free.

The principles of representative democracy and the principles of free-market economics were able to coexist in the small-scale schematic of eighteenth-century America. But the bigness complexes of today require that we sacrifice one or the other. We can refuse to bail out the big companies while letting the economy falter—dragging into penury no small number of Americans—and fail in our oath to caretake the interests of the people. Or we can sacrifice free-market principles and fund the bailouts and let corporate obesity run riot till it crashes power-drunk into another wall—and it will, it always does. “The irony,” says James Brock, “is that we have established a reverse economic Darwinism, where we ensure the survival of the fattest, not the fittest, the biggest, not the best.”

THE 9/11 ATTACKS presented one of those classic moments when bigness failed spectacularly. The $75-billion-and-counting “central intelligence” apparatus, this lumbering giantist peanut-butter bureaucracy, was outsmarted by a dispersed, small-scale, “small-cell” operation of nineteen men armed with box cutters and bad English and funded by a Saudi exile languishing in the mountains of Afghanistan. I got on the phone recently with a sociologist at Yale University named Charles Perrow, who a few years ago wrote a book called The Next Catastrophe, in which he singles out Islamist terrorist networks for their adaptive dexterity, their adroitness in adversity, and for the schooling they offer in the vulnerability of being too big, which is to say too centralized. Terrorist networks “are very reliable,” says Perrow. “They can live largely off the land, can remain dormant for years with no maintenance costs and few costs from unused invested capital, and individual cells are expendable. There are multiple ties between cells, providing redundancy, and taking out any one cell does not endanger the network.”

Islamist terrorists operate, to their credit, Perrow says, by virtue of the same “resiliencies” and “decentralizations” that characterize small-firm networks, those systems of disparate though interrelated companies that most economists would associate with low economic development—because of their smallness—but that in fact do very well while spreading the wealth. Looking at small-firm networks, where each firm had twenty or fewer employees, Perrow found “efficiency, resiliency, reliability, innovativeness and positive social outcomes” in Japan, Taiwan, Italy, across Northern Europe, and, not least, in the Silicon Valley of the United States. Dependency, the chief factor in Perrow’s understanding of how catastrophes past and future can envelop whole societies, was what small-firm networks cut out of the equation. “Dependencies are low because there are multiple sources of suppliers, producers, customers, and distributors,” he writes. “Wealth is decentralized, since it is spread over many units, and thus the economic power of individuals or single units is kept in check while the power of the network is enhanced.”

It echoes what the founders were thinking, though presently such thoughts are considered wholly un-American. The American way in business and government and infrastructure is to systematically increase dependencies and call it “efficiency.” Perrow singles out three areas of dangerous concentration: in energy, in populations, and in economic/political power. In energy, there is not simply the fact that U.S. refining capacity agglomerates just where hurricanes like to hit, but that industrial storage and toxic processing facilities sit one atop the other, some of them prone to explosion, such as the ruptured oil storage tanks in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It’s not just cities too big for the floodplains in which they sprawl, but the fact that they are supplied by electricity grids too centralized and increasingly prone to blackouts like the one that surprised much of the American Northeast in 2003, resultant from a single broken link in the grid. It’s not just that the grids are centralized and so tightly coupled, but that they became this way because energy companies, growing into oligopoloid monoliths, captured and undermined the centralized regulatory agencies of government. In Perrow’s analysis, it all interlinks, cross-pollinates, conduces to perpetuate ever-increasing bigness. The bigger and more complex and more total our systems and institutions become, Perrow is saying, the weaker and more vulnerable they really are.

Anybody who’s been on a camping trip with too many friends can understand Perrow’s thinking. Small groups of people prove to be more cohesive, effective, creative in getting things done. In the 1970s, the English management expert and business scholar Charles Handy put the ideal group size in work environments at “between five and seven” for “best participation, for highest all-round involvement.” Alexander Paul Hare, author of the classic Creativity in Small Groups, showed that groups sized between four and seven were most successful at problem solving, largely because small groups, as Hare observed, are more democratic: egalitarian, mutualist, co-operative, inclusive. Hundreds of studies in factories and workplaces confirm that workers divided into small groups enjoy lower absenteeism, less sickness, higher productivity, greater social interaction, higher morale—most likely because the conditions allow them to engage what is best in being human, to share the meaning and fruits of their labor.

This might have something to do with the evolution of the human brain over the hundred thousand years that man survived by hunting and gathering in small tribes. Cognitive neuroscience suggests that the regions of the brain controlling emotion are hard-wired for a small-group dynamic, that the frontal cortex itself is severely limited in the amount of information it can synthesize on a large scale. Indeed, these same researchers of group dynamics show that a disturbing thing happens as groups expand. Large groups develop quickly into a committee structure, with an executive or leadership that directs and often dominates the decision-making process. Power, in other words, is centralized, hierarchies are built, authority is increasingly top-down, consent is gently coerced or it arrives by default, as members of the group simply stop participating—not speaking, or initiating, or deciding, or acting, their invisibility growing in proportion as the group grows in size. In short, the experience of most members of the big group could accurately be described as one of alienation, powerlessness, meaninglessness.

Needless to say, in our very modern world of enormous institutions, we are daily confronted with this alienating experience, not merely in corporations, banks, automakers—to whom we say, “Yes, too big to fail, and nothing to be done about it!”—but in our most prestigious universities, our proudest labor unions, our staunchest advocates for environmental action and civil rights, our best hospitals, our gigantic corporate organic farms, not to mention the multi-trillion-dollar machine of a welfare government—the social safety nets, the regulatory functions, the housing and healthcare authorities, and all its octopus arms that reach into the lives of citizens. In such environments, people, as Paul Goodman once put it, are reduced to personnel, certainly if they don’t secure a place at the top of the heap or near it, which most do not; they become functionaries, bureaucrats, organizers for the organization, jugglers of abstractions. Goodman, a self-described anarchist, observed in 1963 that “no matter how benevolent the goals, the style of execution is dehumanizing. So long as people are transformed into personnel—management-personnel, labor-personnel, professional-personnel,” and to this Goodman goes on to add sales-personnel, consumer-personnel, client-personnel, voting-personnel, to which we might as well add military-personnel, security-personnel, police-personnel, killing-personnel—“we cannot expect the organization to be internally humanized by their persons, for there are no persons.”

IT WAS E. F. SCHUMACHER WHO, in the 1950s, as the chief economist at the British National Coal Board, came to the quite reasonable—at the time unthinkable—conclusion that energy supply, the coal that England so ravenously was burning up, could not satisfy an ideology of unlimited growth. It was, Schumacher concluded, a suicide pact with Planet Earth. What Schumacher offered instead in the book that made him famous, Small Is Beautiful, is the common-sensical idea that man is small, therefore should think small—that is, think along the lines of human scale.

When in 1955 Schumacher was invited by the government of Burma as an advisor on economic development, he understood at once that the rote econometrics of the West had little to offer the Burmese. Schumacher fell in love with the country, the people, the culture, and it was Buddhism that most impressed him, Buddhism in practice in the little villages, the Buddhism of the Middle Path. The experience was transformative, inspiring him to gestate the notion of a “Buddhist economics,” an “economics as if people mattered.” Instead of demanding that his hosts modernize, he urged the Burmese to hold fast to the middle path, employing energy-light, human-scale technology—what he called “democratic or people’s technology”—to develop the economy on the organic scale of the village. Instead of industrial irrigation super-projects, there would be drip-irrigation and foot-operated treadle pumps (which have worked in Burma to this day). Instead of breakneck urbanization and huge capital investments and centralized planning, the Burmese would do better to decentralize as much as possible, he said, to keep decision-making local for the local production of food and handicrafts to be locally consumed.

Mahatma Gandhi’s development plans for India were much along the same lines. “If we feel the need of machines,” said Gandhi, “we certainly will have them. Every machine that helps every individual has a place, but there should be no place for machines [that] turn the masses into mere machine minders.” What in the intervening years has been the alternative? In China, great leaps forward have poisoned the rivers and the lakes and the fields and the coastal beds, displacing huge populations, concentrating them in the filth of cities as machine minders, impoverishing every rank of traditional society while enriching a very few, for whom tradition is nothing more than an attachment to the nonmaterial.

Of course, among the economists for whom growth was the unquestioned ideology—growth for its own sake, the ideology of the cancer cell—Schumacher was considered a crazy old man, a godforsaken crank. And to that he was said to have replied that a crank is small, safe, cheap, comprehensible, nonviolent, and efficient, a perfect tool of intermediate technology.

Let us be cranks then, though the consensus conspires against us—against the very notion that the small-scale and low-tech may hold the means to a workable future. We can start by downsizing the monster corporations. The antitrust law is there, waiting, a fist in our pockets. Let’s have a third party in politics that might dare to confront bigness—hell, let’s have a second party, given that Republicans and Democrats are at odds only in the perfumes they wear. Let’s have ten or twenty parties. Let’s encourage local production with local labor within easy commuting distances; pay a living wage; restructure land-use patterns to provide easy access to work; grow most of our food close to where it will be consumed. Let’s dream small.

Of course, bigness may still be needed to provide certain goods and services, but the most realistic future for humankind lies in a determined return to the human scale. The transformation will no doubt be costly in the short term, that is, less profitable for Big Ag and Big Oil and Big Coal and all the other bigness complexes, but it will produce vast benefits to social health in the long run. And how shall we quantify that kind of quality? Not in the usual gibberish of national product—the original definition of gross meaning “repellently fat”—or exports and imports, or capital-output ratios, or capitalization, not with the metrics of the idiot savants in the finance industry, who produce nothing one can hold in the hand, nothing of real value in a human-scale economy. Instead of depending on slave labor abroad, we can have jobs at home for the things we need, not the things we are told to want. Instead of processed food, we can have fresh food. Instead of faraway hierarchies, we can have local networks. Instead of militarism, cooperation. Instead of repression, innovation. Instead of homogenous, homegrown.

It goes against every urging in our recent history and our covetous training, and therefore it may only happen when some external force comes into play. Most likely that force will be the limits of Planet Earth, and our fitness will be determined, as it was with the dinosaurs, by our ability to adapt to the new conditions. Or not. We might do well to remember that the laws of nature are bigger than Goldman Sachs or the Big Three or the United States of America. Until then, we will continue to think of our systems as too big to fail, during which time we may end up presiding with a blithe mind over their failure—which, ultimately, will mean our failure.

Synacor/Buffalo, NY


Synacor is a dynamic, fun and exciting company. Jeans and t-shirts are typical office attire, even for the executives. Flexible work hours accommodate employees with special scheduling needs, early risers and those who need a little caffeinated kick-start each morning. Synacor's headquarters are located along Buffalo's waterfront and the Erie Basin Marina. Taking a few minutes to stretch your legs is as easy as walking the 1,000 feet or so to the water. Working from our beautiful lakefront gazebo, makes it easy to spend a little time outside while still being productive. We are looking for great people to join our team and be given the freedom to do the work they were hired to do.

We are seeking an International Engineering Manager who is a high-level technologist that will partner with the International team to manage the development of highly scalable and innovative technologies. They will be responsible for defining the technical architecture of Web applications and managing a team through all stages of development. The ideal Manager has an extensive background working in an international engineering department in a high-volume environment.
Duties and Responsibilities:
• Own the technical design of Web applications and write technical specifications, including information architecture, data design, and technical details
• Build and lead a team of developers, designed and quality assurance staff
• Work with product team to define software products by consulting during specification stage, performing research, developing prototypes or proofs-of-concept, participating in calls and vendor selection activities, and acting as an expert technical contributor.
• Contribute to general development efforts by producing documentation and training materials and conducting training sessions
• Develop and maintain expertise in a wide range of industry technologies including search provider API's, ad delivery mechanisms, and analytics/reporting packages.
• Generate proposals for the Executive team and conduct presentation/training sessions for Synacor staff. Participate in open source initiatives, standards organizations and industry groups
• Work with the development teams to ensure implementation of the product vision
• Provide communication and integration point to other parts of Engineering, IT, and System organization including other architects to identify and address any issues or impact those projects might have on those areas
• Other duties as assigned

What you'll need to bring to the table:
• Has a passion for Internet development
• Relentlessly seeks to expand their knowledge
• Strategic, sensible, and able to see both the forest and the trees
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• Computer science or related degree; or related expertise and experience

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Apply To Job

Thermoset molding company looking for experienced Precision Mold-maker minimum experience 15 years 1st Shift DESCRIPTION: Involved in the design, tooling and repair of new and existing plastic injection molds and components. Set up and operate conventional, special purpose, numerical control (NC) machines, and machining centers to fabricate metallic and nonmetallic parts. Provide technical guidance to machinists and mold maintenance personnel. ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES: - Study blueprints, sketches, drawings, manuals, specifications, or sample part to determine dimensions and tolerances of finished work-piece, sequence of operations, and setup requirements. - Measure, mark, and scribe dimensions and reference points on material or work-piece as guides for subsequent machining. - Select, align, and secure holding fixtures, cutting tools, attachments, accessories and materials on machines such as mills, lathes, jig borers, and grinders. - Calculate and set controls to regulate machining factors such as speed, feed, coolant flow, and depth and angle of cut, or enter commands to retrieve, input or edit computerized machine control media. - Start and observe machine operation to detect malfunctions or out-of-tolerance machining and adjust machine controls or control media as required. - Verify conformance of finished work-piece to specifications. - Set up and operate machine on trial run to verify accuracy of machine settings or programmed control data. - Fit and assemble parts into complete assembly. - Verify dimensions and alignment of assembly. - Install machined replacement parts in mechanisms, machines, equipment, and test operation of unit to ensure functionality and performance. - Develop specifications from general description and draw a sketch of part or product to be fabricated. - Confer with engineers, production personnel, programmers or others to resolve machining or assembly problems. QUALIFICATION REQUIREMENTS: EDUCATION: High School Diploma or equivalent is the minimum requirement for education. Associates degree (A. A.) or equivalent from two-year college or technical school and/or 5 years or more of related experience and/or training is desired. LANGUAGE SKILLS: Ability to read, analyze and interpret prints. Ability to respond to inquiries of Machinists and Mold Maintenance personnel. Ability to effectively communicate with Managers, Engineers Customers and Co-workers. MATHEMATICAL SKILLS: Ability to work with mathematical concepts such as probability and statistical inference, and fundamentals of plane and solid geometry and trigonometry. Ability to apply concepts such as fractions, metric-to-inch conversions and geometric tolerances. REASONING ABILITY: Ability to define problems, collect data, establish facts, and draw valid conclusions. Ability to interpret an extensive variety of technical instructions in mathematical or diagram form and deal with several abstract and concrete variables. CERTIFICATES / LICENSES: Journeyman Tool and Die Maker Certificate is desired but not required. Ability to maintain internal certifications and licenses as required such as powered lifts etc. OTHER SKILLS and ABILITIES: Ability to operate most common tool room equipment such as: mills, radial drills, surface grinders, and various hand tools. The ability to work independently.
Fax resume to 310-608-1564 Telephone 310-608-7488 Ext 11
Or go direct 10 am to 12 noon and 2 pm to 4 pm
20601 Annalee Ave Carson Ca. 90746

“Surely the integrity of our journalists and our scholars are much more important than the need to tell one single version of what has always been a contested story.”
Anak Kancil

“..how would I deal with people who put down other religions without really finding out more about them? Follow Buddha’s teachings of calming the mind and looking at the true nature of things.. Whatever it is, I wish that they are well and happy.”
smile

“Forget Wee Shu Min. Forget Mrs Goh Chok Tong. Forget Ris Low. Rony Tan is the next person who is going to be cyber-lynched. That’s what disempowered Singaporeans with internet connection do any way. Nothing new.”
Sam

“..but what does our anger mean to them?”
Choo Zheng Xi

This week’s roundup and recommended reads after the break.

Sorry Rony Recants
- The Kent Ridge Common: Video of Pastor making rounds
- The Temasek Review: ISD called up Lighthouse Evangelism Pastor Rony Tan over his remarks about Buddhism
- Chemical Generation Singapore: Sorry No Count, Playground Taunt
- be happy: clearing misconceptions
- Buddhabook: Pastor Rony Tan Demonized Buddhism
- Yamizi: Rony Tan really have his God to thank for!!!
- Kwekings: C’mon, don’t tell me you were surprised..
- ambiguity: Religion-less
- My Singapore News: The revelation of Pastor Rony Tan
- subway secrets: To be fair..
- Sg Truth: Police must act against Pastor Rony Tan
- Diary of A Singaporean Mind: Beware of Active Religious Chauvinism..
- Gahmen: MHA’s Statement In Response To Media Queries On The Lighthouse Evangelism (LE) Videos And Comments Made By Pastor Rony Tan Of Lighthouse Evangelism, 08 February 2010
- The Temasek Review: Pastor Rony Tan visited Phor Kar See temple today to apologize to head of Buddhist Federation Venerable Kwang Sheng
- Random Thoughts Of A Free Thinker: Now that he has apologised..
- Laïcité: Being “sensitive” enough to hide our intolerance
- Singapore Kopi Tok: Pastor Rony Tan
- Simply Gab: Being sensitive to our over-sensitivity
- Sam’s Thoughts: Pastor Rony Tan, religious harmony and capitalism [Recommended]
- Singapore Recalcitrant: The insensitive indiscretion of Senior Paster Rony Tan
- Just a passerby trying to enjoy his journey: Ignorance ignorance ignorance..
- SilentAssassin’s ArchiveRony and the Troll
- The Sun Shines on Singapore: Lighthouse Alight and the Intolerance of Religions
- Infinitely me: Brain Storm: Hamonious Singapore And Numbskulls
- Facebook group: The Moderates Stance [Thanks smokebreak]
- Yeap Chee Seng Weblog: Senior Pastor Rony Tan And Buddhism
- In the Panic Room: Rony Tan’s apology, and why it doesn’t really matter
- The Kent Ridge Common: Should Pastor Rony be punished?
- Gimme Some Truth!: Reactions to Pastor Rory’s Comments
- The Lycan Times: Rony Tan
- covered in his blood: Rony Tan saga and what it means for Christians
- Irreligious: Ignorance is the greatest enemy of Christianity
- Sze Zeng: What does ‘Rony’ show us? [Thanks YKWYA]
- ambiguity: Souls, Not People
- Feed Me To The Fish: Pastor, ChipMonk , Witch Doctor and Bigotry
- The Temasek Review: The Rony Tan fiasco and perceived double standards in the application of Sedition Act
- TOC: Not your ordinary chit-chat session [Recommended]
- Blowin’ In The Wind: Kipling, race and religion
- Irreligious: Why so emotional?
- The Temasek Review: What the Buddha really said before he passed away
- The Kent Ridge Common: NUSBS clears Pastor Rony’s misconceptions

Road to Election
- TOC: The Straits Times thinks only businessmen are Singaporeans
- The Temasek Review: Time for Singapore opposition to come up with a Common Policy Framework
- The Temasek Review: Reform Party urges PAP to embrace need for political reform in Singapore
- Singapore Alternatives: NSP Press Release on New 13th CEC
- TOC: What the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer really says
- Icarus Flew Too High: A Broad Consensus for Democracy in Singapore [Recommended]
- Yours Truly Singapore: Mandate assured … as long as PAP remains incorruptible
- Singaporean Skeptic: Religious demographics of our politicians (minus the cabinet Ministers)
- Seelan Palay’s Blog: SDP’s Chinese New Year Message 2010
- Tan Kin Lian’s Blog: Political Compass
- Bryan Ti Facebook: Dearth of Quality Political Discussion (and Leadership)
- My Singapore News: My Money My Vote

The Economic Strategies Committee Report
- TOC: Do upgrading skills and Workfare help low-wage workers?
- The Temasek Review: Reform Party calls for dismantling of GLC structure in its response to ESC report
- Seelan Palay’s Blog: The SDP’s alternative economic programme Part 2: Getting rich quick
- My sketchbook: Making of the Singapore’s economics strategies
- My Little Corner: Increasing productivity using technology is not straightforward
- The Temasek Review: A Review of recommendations made by the Economic Strategies Committee
- The Temasek Review: Reforming Singapore’s political economy: The big miss by the Economic Strategies Committee [Recommended]
- Sellan Palay’s Blow: The SDP’s alternative economic programme Part 3: A comprehensive set of measures

Housing Singaporeans
- TOC: Public housing flats – Singaporeans come first or foreigners?
- TOC: SERS flats converted to condo for expats
- Singapore Alternatives: HDB Homeless Policy [Recommended]
- TOC: HDB replies: Waiting time for rental flat is now reduced
- Who Moved My Singapore Cheese: Uproar against rental housing is a joke
- Singapore Alternatives: HDB 101
- The Temasek Review: HDB blames Singaporeans for not selecting flats when given the chance
- My Singapore News: High demand for HDB flats due to immigrants
- TOC: The final nail in the “HDB affordability” coffin?
- Yours Truly Singapore: HDB resale prices: Don’t just find a scapegoat
- The Temasek Review: Chua Mui Hoong: rising resale flat prices reflect genuine pent-up demand spurred by high levels of immigration
- lbkp’s Blog:Enuff!
- DE LEVIATHAN @ SG: How To Ensure Affordable Low Cost Housing?
- TOC: ST Forum letter on homeless situation and official reply

Re education
- Kelvin Teo Writes: About time to rethink about our scholar selection mechanisms
- Flying Low: Thoughts about teaching

Strangers in a Strange Land
- Diary of A Singaporean Mind: SM Goh : No U-turn in foreigner policy
- TOC: Conflicting signals from Government over foreign manpower policy
- Singapore Dino: Gan Kim Yong redefines resident’s question instead of answering it
- The Temasek Review: Mark Lee defends himself for employing PRC workers: Difficult to employ locals
- The Temasek Review: Increase in job ads, but are they for Singaporeans or foreigners?
- Open Contours: Grit and Grime: The Migrant Worker in Singapore Cinema

Singaporeans: A Dying Breed
- TOC: Many Singaporeans want to migrate – Why?

Singaporeans are fed, up with progress!
- TOC: The anger of displacement

GIC, Temasek State Fund Investments
- Tattooed Banker: Another bond offering for Temasek
- The Temasek Review: U.S. Prof lambasts Singapore’s “Temasek model” for investing in failing individuals and products
- TradecoHoldco: Breaking News: Temasek sets up its own hedge fund

Healthcare & Healthcare Providers
- The Temasek Review: Malaysian PRs likely the greatest beneficiaries of move to allow use Medisave in 12 Malaysian hospitals and medical centres

Singapore Coloring
- My Very Own Glob: There’s that R-word again

ERPains, Trains & Automobiles
- Singapore’s Land Transport: Another taxi location surcharge… and what we can do about it

Re education
- Singaporean Skeptic: A tale of two prodigies

Lee vs Chee
- Chee Siok Chin’s Blog: Prisoner 00001/2010 [Thanks Seelan]

Daily Discourse
- TOC: The Sedition Act needs revision
- The Temasek Review: Can we trust our journalists to tell the truth? [Recommended]
- Journalism.sg: Ex-NMP Siew Kum Hong upbeat about new media’s role in politics
- Laïcité: Learning about the birds and the bees at 21
- TOC: The Reform Party Welcomes the new US ambassador’s comments
- Diary of A Singaporean Mind: Apathetic Generation
- The Temasek Review: Exposure – The Element of Change for Singapore and Singaporeans
- Seelan Palay’s Blog: Let’s Talk with local poet Ng Yi-Sheng
- The Grand Moofti Speaks: Freedom of speech and religion – Singapore style
- Sam’s thoughts: “Natural” bias
- I’m getting personal: It is a marathon
- Mathia Lee: Income Inequality In Singapore
- Barnyard Chorus: Degrees of information
- TOC: Statutory rape law – a paternalistic anachronism
- TOC: Making right choices in Singapore: From Adelman to Asian values [Recommended]
- The Temasek Review: Only 6.1 per cent of workers attending SPUR got a pay raise after undergoing skills upgrading
- The Temasek Review: No updates about YPAP Eric How case from police after three weeks
- mrbrown: A supermarket loses trolleys: Why is this even freakin’ news?
- My sketchbook: The $100 deterrent

Life, the universe and everything
- The Long and Winding Road: A fascination with flying machines: some alternative views of the Airshow
- My Very Own Glob: Singapore’s Oskar Schindler
- Dee Kay Dot As Gee: iPad appears at the Grammy Award
- The Long and Winding Road: The roads less travelled..
- Open Contours: The Circus of the Fantastic
- Subba’s Serendipitous moments: Google puts Buzz in the Gmail
- My Little Corner: Hip Hop Lion Dance!
- The Useless Tree: More on Confucianism and Modernity
- The Long and Winding Road: 1974, a year of football madness
- Singaporean Skeptic: The power of imagination
- Asterpix Interactive Video: All Indian Food

Now Showing
- Vinyarb: Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief

Infoblogaramous
- Singaporeans for Democracy: Directions for SFD in 2010

Road to Election
- TOC: The Straits Times thinks only businessmen are Singaporeans
- The Temasek Review: Time for Singapore opposition to come up with a Common Policy Framework
- The Temasek Review: Reform Party urges PAP to embrace need for political reform in Singapore
- Singapore Alternatives: NSP Press Release on New 13th CEC

The Economic Strategies Committee Report
- TOC: Do upgrading skills and Workfare help low-wage workers?
- The Temasek Review: Reform Party calls for dismantling of GLC structure in its response to ESC report
- Seelan Palay’s Blog: The SDP’s alternative economic programme Part 2: Getting rich quick
- My sketchbook: Making of the Singapore’s economics strategies

Housing: Homeless in Singapore
- TOC: Public housing flats – Singaporeans come first or foreigners?
- TOC: SERS flats converted to condo for expats
- Singapore Alternatives: HDB Homeless Policy

Re education
- Kelvin Teo Writes: About time to rethink about our scholar selection mechanisms
- Flying Low: Thoughts about teaching

Strangers in a Strange Land
- Diary of A Singaporean Mind: SM Goh : No U-turn in foreigner policy

Religion
- The Kent Ridge Common: Video of Pastor making rounds

Daily Discourse
- TOC: The Sedition Act needs revision
- The Temasek Review: Can we trust our journalists to tell the truth?
- Journalism.sg: Ex-NMP Siew Kum Hong upbeat about new media’s role in politics
- Laïcité: Learning about the birds and the bees at 21
- TOC: The Reform Party Welcomes the new US ambassador’s comments
- Diary of A Singaporean Mind: Apathetic Generation
- The Temasek Review: Exposure – The Element of Change for Singapore and Singaporeans
- Seelan Palay’s Blog: Let’s Talk with local poet Ng Yi-Sheng

Life, the universe and everything
- The Long and Winding Road: A fascination with flying machines: some alternative views of the Airshow

Infoblogaramous
- Singaporeans for Democracy: Directions for SFD in 2010

Selected News Stories [Thanks Gerald Ho]
- NY Daily News: She’s just a fame-hungry Bridezilla, says David Tutera about the Melissa Chin lawsuit
- Taipei Times: A tale of two city-states
- The Star: Hitting the brakes on foreign force
- Asia Sentinel: Singapore Pulls the Welcome Mat for Foreign Workers
- BBC: The web makes the personal political
- San Francisco Chronicle: A reality check on autism and vaccines
- NYTimes: Out With the Ox, in With the Tiger
- NYTimes: Better Loving Through Chemistry
- China Daily: In defense of pajamas

It's not uncommon to find Dekker-like idioms in modern concurrent programs. On platforms with weaker memory models -- say where a store followed by a load in program order can be reordered by the architecture to appear as a load and then a store in the effective memory order (sometimes called the "visibility order") -- programs must use barrier instructions to enforce memory ordering to implement Dekker correctly. For the purposes of discussion and assuming a relatively common system model we'll define memory order as the order of operations as they appear at the interface between the processor and the first-level coherent cache. Examples of barriers are MFENCE on x86 and MEMBAR #storeload on SPARC. In addition, x86 and SPARC TSO memory models allow only one variety of architectural reordering, the store-then-load form noted above. (For simplicity we'll restrict the discussion to TSO-like memory consistency models). On some platforms barriers introduce significant local latency. Perversely, we sometimes find that atomic instructions which have barrier semantics (are barrier-equivalent) are faster than the purpose-defined barrier instructions. A simplistic barrier implementation might simply quiesce the pipeline and wait for the store buffer to drain. To allay a common misconception it's worth pointing out that barriers -- sometimes called fences -- are typically implemented as processor-local operations and don't cause any distinguished action on the bus or interconnect and instead simply instruct the processor to ensure that prior stores become visible before subsequent loads (subsequent and prior refer to the barrier in program order). Crucially, at least with current x86 and SPARC implementations, barriers don't force anything to occur off-processor. That also means they don't impede or impair scalability. There's no fundamental reason, however, why barriers should be so slow. The processor implementation is free to speculate over the barrier, for instance, as long as stores in the speculative episode are not made visible and loads in the episode are tracked for coherence. And in fact on at least one processor, barrier instructions effectively have 0 latency.

Returning to the Dekker idiom, threads T1 and T2 might coordinate as follows: T1 might execute (ST A; barrier; LD B) and T2 executes (ST B; barrier; LD A), and in particular we refer to this pattern as the Dekker duality. As a concrete example, we coordinate thread state transitions in the HotSpot JVM via a similar protocol, where T1 is a Java thread (mutator) executing the reentry path from a JNI call, T2 has the role of the VM thread coordinating a stop-the-world safepoint, A is a variable that indicates T1's thread state (executing outside the JVM on a JNI call, or executing inside the managed runtime), and B indicates if a stop-the-world safepoint is pending. Critically, if T1 is running on a JNI call and attempts to return back into the managed environment while a safepoint is executing, we need to stall T1 at the point of ingress, as the VM expects that Java threads will not access the heap during a safepoint. (Among other uses, Safepoints are employed for certain types of garbage collection operations, for instance where we don't want the collector and the Java threads accessing the heap simultaneously). For the purposes of illustration I'm showing just a single mutator thread T1 and a single VM thread T2, but in practice the mechanism is much more general. T1's path, above, is likely to execute much more often than T2's, as JNI calls could be expected to occur more frequently than safepoints. As such, to improve performance we'd like to elide the barrier instruction from T1's path. Asymmetric Dekker Synchronization is a family of related mechanisms that allow us to safely remove the barrier from T1 while shifting the responsibility of dealing with T1's potential reorderings to T2. We call it asymmetric because to be profitable T1's path needs to run much more frequently than T2's. We then call T1's path the fast-path and T2's the slow-path. (This mechanism can enabled and disabled by way of the -XX:+/-UseMembar switch).

The Asymmetric Dekker Synchronization document mentioned above enumerates a number of ways in which we might allow T1 and T2 to coordinate while still removing the barrier from T1's hot path, including signals, cross-calls (inter-processor interrupts), page-protection mechanisms, etc. On windows T2 might simply invoke the FlushProcessWriteBuffers facility, which seems to precisely match our needs. (Some time ago I filed an RFE -- request-for-enhancement -- for Solaris to provide a similar facility). Still, we're always looking for better ways to implement our asymmetric protocol, which almost brings us to QPI quiescence, but first we need some historical background.

Long ago Intel implemented atomics with a global bus lock. It was called the #LOCK signal and driven by the LOCK: prefix on instructions, thus the names we have today. Bus locking was conceptually simple as most multiprocess Intel systems used a common front-side bus (FSB) between the processor and memory. Unrelated atomic operations, however, could impair overall performance as #LOCK had to quiesce the bus. The old FSB was a split-transaction request-response bus, and allowed multiple requests in-flight at a given time, so to assert #LOCK too often could rob the system of performance. Bus locking also supported atomics that spanned 2 cache lines. Intel subsequently switched to so-called cache-locking, where atomic read-modify-write instructions were implemented directly in the local cache of the processor executing the atomic, avoiding the need to lock the shared bus. From the perspective of the bus such atomic operations are no different than a store. (All SPARC systems that I know of use cache-locking). Cache-locking was a good step forward as atomics now scale ideally if there's no sharing of the underlying cache lines. Despite that, Intel preserved bus locking to handle the exotic legacy case of atomics that span cache lines (split atomics), which, by definition, are misaligned accesses. For this odd case the best solution was to simply resort to bus locking so the two lines underlying the operand could be accessed atomically. Note that Intel and AMD appear to frown up such behavior in their reference manuals, but the processors still support it for legacy reasons, at least as of today.

With the advent of QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) Intel eliminated the common FSB and switched to a topology more akin to AMD's hypertransport. Nehalem is the first
processor to use QPI. But even with QPI the architects needed a way to support those legacy split atomics. To that end, QPI has the ability of quiesce the whole system to allow the split atomic to execute. It appears that QPI quiescence also drains the pipes and forces at least of the equivalent of barrier semantics over the whole system. That is, split atomics may serve as a way to force a system wide "remote" barrier.

Additional remarks

• 
  

• Beware, it's not clear that QPI quiescence is actually safe and provides true quiescence. Empirical tests with a program designed to stress the -UseMembar facility and inspired by a simple hunch about the QPI implementation suggest so, but absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence --we might yet find Karl Popper's black swan.
  

• At best, QPI quiescence should be considered an academic curiosity and should never be used in production code. I'm sure processor vendors would be loath to endorse such stunts because it could ultimately limit their latitude in future bus designs. QPI quiescence is simply an implementation artifact and not an architecturally defined or guaranteed trait. Even if the facility were somehow blessed I doubt vendors would want to expose it by means of split atomics so perhaps a new instruction might be called for. (Put another way, there are two issues, should the facility be provided, and if so how to expose it to programmers). So for the moment QPI quiescence is only good for prototyping what *might* be accomplished with a hypothetical instruction.
  

• It's possible such mechanism might be applicable to certain forms of RCU (read-copy-update).
  

• Dmitriy V'jukov recently posted some timing results for FlushProcessWriteBuffers. It's pretty efficient on his system. I hope to be able to run similar benchmarks to measure the cost of QPI quiescence in the near future, at which point I'll post the results here. (Dmitriy is also the author of the relacy race detector which I recommend). It's worth noting that implementations of facilities such as FlushProcessWriteBuffers can be made very efficient. For example the implementation might be able to avoid a cross-call to a processor if it's known that no thread in the process is executing on that processor, using the knowledge that context switches are serializing events.
  
  
  Some extremely preliminary data shows that QPI quiescence by way of a split atomic incurs a local penalty of about 4800 cycles on an i7-920, and the degree of impact on the progress of other processors is very much a function of the miss rate of those processors.
  

• I mentioned the idea of QPI quiescence to Dmitriy, who in turn pointed point out a relevant article on QPI in Dr. Dobbs. The "Locks" section is particularly interesting. As Dmitry noted, if it's possible to use quiescence for hot-plugging then it's not unreasonable to think that both the bus and processors are completely quiesced with no pending stores languishing in store buffers, which is precisely the behavior in which we're interested.
  

• Is there a working analog to QPI quiescence on AMD's coherent hypertransport? This is left as an exercise for the curious reader.
  

• Can QPI quiescence lead to a break-down of performance isolation in virtual machines running on the same physical system? (That's pretty easy to test even in the absence of virtual machines, with a simple multithreaded program or a few single-threaded processes).
  

Related reading

• 
  

• For another example of the Dekker duality in the HotSpot JVM and further discussion about the challenges of weak memory models
  refer to a previous blog entry about a long-standing bug in the park-unpark subsystem.
  

• Biased locking, which is used in the HotSpot JVM, is a mechanism that attempts to the reduce the impact of high-latency atomic instructions. Interestingly, as processor vendors make improvements in the latency of such instructions there may come a time in the near future when biased locking is no longer profitable, at least on some platforms.
  

• US07644409
  

Have you ever opened a simple little ASCII text file to see it inexplicably displayed as onegiantunbrokenline?

Opening the file in a different, smarter text editor results in the file displayed properly in multiple paragraphs.

The answer to this puzzle lies in our old friend, invisible characters that we can't see but that are totally not out to get us. Well, except when they are.

The invisible problem characters in this case are newlines.

Did you ever wonder what was at the end of your lines? As a programmer, I knew there were end of line characters, but I honestly never thought much about them. They just … worked. But newlines aren't a universally accepted standard; they are different depending who you ask, and what platform they happen to be computing on:

DOS / Windows	CR LF	\r\n	0x0D 0x0A
Mac (early)	CR	\r	0x0D
Unix	LF	\n	0x0A

The Carriage Return (CR) and Line Feed (LF) terms derive from manual typewriters, and old printers based on typewriter-like mechanisms (typically referred to as "Daisywheel" printers).

On a typewriter, pressing Line Feed causes the carriage roller to push up one line -- without changing the position of the carriage itself -- while the Carriage Return lever slides the carriage back to the beginning of the line. In all honesty, I'm not quite old enough to have used electric typewriters, so I have a dim recollection, at best, of the entire process. The distinction between CR and LF does seem kind of pointless -- why would you want to move to the beginning of a line without also advancing to the next line? This is another analog artifact, as Wikipedia explains:

On printers, teletypes, and computer terminals that were not capable of displaying graphics, the carriage return was used without moving to the next line to allow characters to be placed on top of existing characters to produce character graphics, underlines, and crossed out text.

So far we've got:

• Confusing terms based on archaic hardware that is no longer in use, and is confounding to new users who have no point of reference for said terms;
• Completely arbitrary platform "standards" for what is exactly the same function.

Pretty much business as usual in computing. If you're curious, as I was, about the historical basis for these decisions, Wikipedia delivers all the newline trivia you could possibly want, and more:

The sequence CR+LF was in common use on many early computer systems that had adopted teletype machines, typically an ASR33, as a console device, because this sequence was required to position those printers at the start of a new line. On these systems, text was often routinely composed to be compatible with these printers, since the concept of device drivers hiding such hardware details from the application was not yet well developed; applications had to talk directly to the teletype machine and follow its conventions. The separation of the two functions concealed the fact that the print head could not return from the far right to the beginning of the next line in one-character time. That is why the sequence was always sent with the CR first. In fact, it was often necessary to send extra characters (extraneous CRs or NULs, which are ignored) to give the print head time to move to the left margin. Even after teletypes were replaced by computer terminals with higher baud rates, many operating systems still supported automatic sending of these fill characters, for compatibility with cheaper terminals that required multiple character times to scroll the display.

CP/M's use of CR+LF made sense for using computer terminals via serial lines. MS-DOS adopted CP/M's CR+LF, and this convention was inherited by Windows.

This exciting difference in how newlines work means you can expect to see one of three (or more, as we'll find out later) newline characters in those "simple" ASCII text files.

If you're fortunate, you'll pick a fairly intelligent editor that can detect and properly display the line endings of whatever text files you open. If you're less fortunate, you'll see onegiantunbrokenline, or a bunch of extra ^M characters in the file.

Even worse, it's possible to mix all three of these line endings in the same file. Innocently copy and paste a comment or code snippet from a file with a different set of line endings, then save it. Bam, you've got a file with multiple line endings. That you can't see. I've accidentally done it myself. (Note that this depends on your choice of text editor; some will auto-normalize line endings to match the current file's settings upon paste.)

This is complicated by the fact that some editors, even editors that should know better, like Visual Studio, have no mode that shows end of line markers. That's why, when attempting to open a file that has multiple line endings, Visual Studio will politely ask you if it can normalize the file to one set of line endings.

This Visual Studio dialog presents the following five (!) possible set of line endings for the file:

1. Windows (CR LF)
2. Macintosh (CR)
3. Unix (LF)
4. Unicode Line Separator (LS)
5. Unicode Paragraph Separator (PS)

The last two are new to me. I'm not sure under what circumstances you would want those Unicode newline markers.

Even if you rule out unicode and stick to old-school ASCII, like most Facebook relationships … it's complicated. I find it fascinating that the mundane ASCII newline has so much ancient computing lore behind it, and that it still regularly bites us in unexpected places.

If you work with text files in any capacity -- and what programmer doesn't -- you should know that not all newlines are created equally. the Great Newline Schism is something you need to be aware of. Make sure your tools can show you not just those pesky invisible white space characters, but line endings as well.

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A global leader in packaging systems and packaging products has an exceptional opportunity for Electro-Mechanical Design Engineer in our Glenview location.

This role will focus on developing machines from concept to production. The Electro-Mechanical Design Engineer will design machines and specify components for high speed machines and handling systems, initiate concept designs based on customer feedback, communicate those designs to other team members, and develop and manage those designs to completion.

Qualifications include:
• 3-15 years stable work experience designing automated electro-mechanical machinery
• A high degree of mechanical and electrical aptitude
• The ideal candidate would be a highly creative designer and problem solver as well as a master troubleshooter, familiar with mechanisms, motors, controls, clutches, brakes, gearing, tooling and assembly methods.
• Experience with manufacturing methods and equipment, including machining tools and practices, materials, heat treating, die castings, sand castings, investment castings, sheet metal, powdered metal and plastics processing
• Experience with PLC controls and programming (Siemens S7 a plus) and fractional horsepower AC and DC motor controls
• B.S. in Engineering or equivalent
• Fluency in 3D CAD (SolidWorks a plus)
• Excellent communication, interpersonal and team building skills
• Must be legally authorized to work in the United States for any employer
• Knowledge of CE requirements a plus
• Ability to travel up to 20%

This position is a temporary position.

Please submit your application online at:

http://itw.balancetrak.com/GB01111001

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer
Recognizing and Valuing a Diverse Workforce
An EOE M/F/V/D

Interoperability Happens - Java/J2EE

Here we go again—another year, another set of predictions revisited and offered up for the next 12 months. And maybe, if I'm feeling really ambitious, I'll take that shot I thought about last year and try predicting for the decade. Without further ado, I'll go back and revisit, unedited, my predictions for 2009 ("THEN"), and pontificate on those subjects for 2010 before adding any new material/topics. Just for convenience, here's a link back to last years' predictions.

Last year's predictions went something like this (complete with basketball-scoring):

• THEN: "Cloud" will become the next "ESB" or "SOA", in that it will be something that everybody will talk about, but few will understand and even fewer will do anything with. (Considering the widespread disparity in the definition of the term, this seems like a no-brainer.) NOW: Oh, yeah. Straight up. I get two points for this one. Does anyone have a working definition of "cloud" that applies to all of the major vendors' implementations? Ted, 2; Wrongness, 0.
• THEN: Interest in Scala will continue to rise, as will the number of detractors who point out that Scala is too hard to learn. NOW: Two points for this one, too. Not a hard one, mind you, but one of those "pass-and-shoot" jumpers from twelve feet out. James Strachan even tweeted about this earlier today, pointing out this comparison. As more Java developers who think of themselves as smart people try to pick up Scala and fail, the numbers of sour grapes responses like "Scala's too complex, and who needs that functional stuff anyway?" will continue to rise in 2010. Ted, 4; Wrongness, 0.
• THEN: Interest in F# will continue to rise, as will the number of detractors who point out that F# is too hard to learn. (Hey, the two really are cousins, and the fortunes of one will serve as a pretty good indication of the fortunes of the other, and both really seem to be on the same arc right now.) NOW: Interestingly enough, I haven't heard as many F# detractors as Scala detractors, possibly because I think F# hasn't really reached the masses of .NET developers the way that Scala has managed to find its way in front of Java developers. I think that'll change mighty quickly in 2010, though, once VS 2010 hits the streets. Ted, 4; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: Interest in all kinds of functional languages will continue to rise, and more than one person will take a hint from Bob "crazybob" Lee and liken functional programming to AOP, for good and for ill. People who took classes on Haskell in college will find themselves reaching for their old college textbooks again. NOW: Yep, I'm claiming two points on this one, if only because a bunch of Haskell books shipped this year, and they'll be the last to do so for about five years after this. (By the way, does anybody still remember aspects?) But I'm going the opposite way with this one now; yes, there's Haskell, and yes, there's Erlang, and yes, there's a lot of other functional languages out there, but who cares? They're hard to learn, they don't always translate well to other languages, and developers want languages that work on the platform they use on a daily basis, and that means F# and Scala or Clojure, or its simply not an option. Ted 6; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: The iPhone is going to be hailed as "the enterprise development platform of the future", and companies will be rolling out apps to it. Look for Quicken iPhone edition, PowerPoint and/or Keynote iPhone edition, along with connectors to hook the iPhone up to a presentation device, and (I'll bet) a World of Warcraft iPhone client (legit or otherwise). iPhone is the new hotness in the mobile space, and people will flock to it madly. NOW: Two more points, but let's be honest—this was a fast-break layup, no work required on my part. Ted 8; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: Another Oslo CTP will come out, and it will bear only a superficial resemblance to the one that came out in October at PDC. Betting on Oslo right now is a fools' bet, not because of any inherent weakness in the technology, but just because it's way too early in the cycle to be thinking about for anything vaguely resembling production code. NOW: If you've worked at all with Oslo, you might argue with me, but I'm still taking my two points. The two CTPs were pretty different in a number of ways. Ted 10; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: The IronPython and IronRuby teams will find some serious versioning issues as they try to manage the DLR versioning story between themselves and the CLR as a whole. An initial hack will result, which will be codified into a standard practice when .NET 4.0 ships. Then the next release of IPy or IRb will have to try and slip around its restrictions in 2010/2011. By 2012, IPy and IRb will have to be shipping as part of Visual Studio just to put the releases back into lockstep with one another (and the rest of the .NET universe). NOW: Pressure is still building. Let's see what happens by the time VS 2010 ships, and then see what the IPy/IRb teams start to do to adjust to the versioning issues that arise. Ted 8; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: The death of JSR-277 will spark an uprising among the two leading groups hoping to foist it off on the Java community--OSGi and Maven--while the rest of the Java world will breathe a huge sigh of relief and look to see what "modularity" means in Java 7. Some of the alpha geeks in Java will start using--if not building--JDK 7 builds just to get a heads-up on its impact, and be quietly surprised and, I dare say, perhaps even pleased. NOW: Ah, Ted, you really should never underestimate the community's willingness to take a bad idea, strip all the goodness out of it, and then cycle it back into the mix as something completely different yet somehow just as dangerous and crazy. I give you Project Jigsaw. Ted 10; Wrongness 2;
• THEN: The invokedynamic JSR will leapfrog in importance to the top of the list. NOW: The invokedynamic JSR begat interest in other languages on the JVM. The interest in other languages on the JVM begat the need to start thinking about how to support them in the Java libraries. The need to start thinking about supporting those languages begat a "Holy sh*t moment" somewhere inside Sun and led them to (re-)propose closures for JDK 7. And in local sports news, Ted notched up two more points on the scoreboard. Ted 12; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: Another Windows 7 CTP will come out, and it will spawn huge media interest that will eventually be remembered as Microsoft promises, that will eventually be remembered as Microsoft guarantees, that will eventually be remembered as Microsoft FUD and "promising much, delivering little". Microsoft ain't always at fault for the inflated expectations people have--sometimes, yes, perhaps even a lot of times, but not always. NOW: And then, just when the game started to turn into a runaway, airballs started to fly. The Windows7 release shipped, and contrary to what I expected, the general response to it was pretty warm. Yes, there were a few issues that emerged, but overall the media liked it, the masses liked it, and Microsoft seemed to have dodged a bullet. Ted 12; Wrongness 5.
• THEN: Apple will begin to legally threaten the clone market again, except this time somebody's going to get the DOJ involved. (Yes, this is the iPhone/iTunes prediction from last year, carrying over. I still expect this to happen.) NOW: What clones? The only people trying to clone Macs are those who are building Hackintosh machines, and Apple can't sue them so long as they're using licensed copies of Mac OS X (as far as I know). Which has never stopped them from trying, mind you, and I still think Steve has some part of his brain whispering to him at night, calculating all the hardware sales lost to Hackintosh netbooks out there. But in any event, that's another shot missed. Ted 12; Wrongness 7.
• THEN: Alpha-geek developers will start creating their own languages (even if they're obscure or bizarre ones like Shakespeare or Ook#) just to have that listed on their resume as the DSL/custom language buzz continues to build. NOW: I give you Ioke. If I'd extended this to include outdated CPU interpreters, I'd have made that three-pointer from half-court instead of just the top of the key. Ted 14; Wrongness 7.
• THEN: Roy Fielding will officially disown most of the "REST"ful authors and software packages available. Nobody will care--or worse, somebody looking to make a name for themselves will proclaim that Roy "doesn't really understand REST". And they'll be right--Roy doesn't understand what they consider to be REST, and the fact that he created the term will be of no importance anymore. Being "REST"ful will equate to "I did it myself!", complete with expectations of a gold star and a lollipop. NOW: Does anybody in the REST community care what Roy Fielding wrote way back when? I keep seeing "REST"ful systems that seem to have designers who've never heard of Roy, or his thesis. Roy hasn't officially disowned them, but damn if he doesn't seem close to it. Still.... No points. Ted 14; Wrongness 9.
• THEN: The Parrot guys will make at least one more minor point release. Nobody will notice or care, except for a few doggedly stubborn Perl hackers. They will find themselves having nightmares of previous lives carrying around OS/2 books and Amiga paraphernalia. Perl 6 will celebrate it's seventh... or is it eighth?... anniversary of being announced, and nobody will notice. NOW: Does anybody still follow Perl 6 development? Has the spec even been written yet? Google on "Perl 6 release", and you get varying reports: "It'll ship 'when it's ready'", "There are no such dates because this isn't a commericially-backed effort", and "Spring 2010". Swish—nothin' but net. Ted 16; Wrongness 9.
• THEN: The debate around "Scrum Certification" will rise to a fever pitch as short-sighted money-tight companies start looking for reasons to cut costs and either buy into agile at a superficial level and watch it fail, or start looking to cut the agilists from their company in order to replace them with cheaper labor. NOW: Agile has become another adjective meaning "best practices", and as such, has essentially lost its meaning. Just ask Scott Bellware. Ted 18; Wrongness 9.
• THEN: Adobe will continue to make Flex and AIR look more like C# and the CLR even as Microsoft tries to make Silverlight look more like Flash and AIR. Web designers will now get to experience the same fun that back-end web developers have enjoyed for near-on a decade, as shops begin to artificially partition themselves up as either "Flash" shops or "Silverlight" shops. NOW: Not sure how to score this one—I haven't seen the explicit partitioning happen yet, but the two environments definitely still seem to be looking to start tromping on each others' turf, particularly when we look at the rapid releases coming from the Silverlight team. Ted 16; Wrongness 11.
• THEN: Gartner will still come knocking, looking to hire me for outrageous sums of money to do nothing but blog and wax prophetic. NOW: Still no job offers. Damn. Ah, well. Ted 16; Wrongness 13.

A close game. Could've gone either way. *shrug* Ah, well. It was silly to try and score it in basketball metaphor, anyway—that's the last time I watch ESPN before writing this.

For 2010, I predict....

• ... I will offer 3- and 4-day training classes on F# and Scala, among other things. OK, that's not fair—yes, I have the materials, I just need to work out locations and times. Contact me if you're interested in a private class, by the way.
• ... I will publish two books, one on F# and one on Scala. OK, OK, another plug. Or, rather, more of a resolution. One will be the "Professional F#" I'm doing for Wiley/Wrox, the other isn't yet finalized. But it'll either be published through a publisher, or self-published, by JavaOne 2010.
• ... DSLs will either "succeed" this year, or begin the short slide into the dustbin of obscure programming ideas. Domain-specific language advocates have to put up some kind of strawman for developers to learn from and poke at, or the whole concept will just fade away. Martin's book will help, if it ships this year, but even that might not be enough to generate interest if it doesn't have some kind of large-scale applicability in it. Patterns and refactoring and enterprise containers all had a huge advantage in that developers could see pretty easily what the problem was they solved; DSLs haven't made that clear yet.
• ... functional languages will start to see a backlash. I hate to say it, but "getting" the functional mindset is hard, and there's precious few resources that are making it easy for mainstream (read: O-O) developers make that adjustment, far fewer than there was during the procedural-to-object shift. If the functional community doesn't want to become mainstream, then mainstream developers will find ways to take functional's most compelling gateway use-case (parallel/concurrent programming) and find a way to "git 'er done" in the traditional O-O approach, probably through software transactional memory, and functional languages like Haskell and Erlang will be relegated to the "What Might Have Been" of computer science history. Not sure what I mean? Try this: walk into a functional language forum, and ask what a monad is. Nobody yet has been able to produce an answer that doesn't involve math theory, or that does involve a practical domain-object-based example. In fact, nobody has really said why (or if) monads are even still useful. Or catamorphisms. Or any of the other dime-store words that the functional community likes to toss around.
• ... Visual Studio 2010 will ship on time, and be one of the buggiest and/or slowest releases in its history. I hate to make this prediction, because I really don't want to be right, but there's just so much happening in the Visual Studio refactoring effort that it makes me incredibly nervous. Widespread adoption of VS2010 will wait until SP1 at the earliest. In fact....
• ... Visual Studio 2010 SP 1 will ship within three months of the final product. Microsoft knows that people wait until SP 1 to think about upgrading, so they'll just plan for an eager SP 1 release, and hope that managers will be too hung over from the New Year (still) to notice that the necessary shakeout time hasn't happened.
• ... Apple will ship a tablet with multi-touch on it, and it will flop horribly. Not sure why I think this, but I just don't think the multi-touch paradigm that Apple has cooked up for the iPhone will carry over to a tablet/laptop device. That won't stop them from shipping it, and it won't stop Apple fan-boiz from buying it, but that's about where the interest will end.
• ... JDK 7 closures will be debated for a few weeks, then become a fait accompli as the Java community shrugs its collective shoulders. Frankly, I think the Java community has exhausted its interest in debating new language features for Java. Recent college grads and open-source groups with an axe to grind will continue to try and make an issue out of this, but I think the overall Java community just... doesn't... care. They just want to see JDK 7 ship someday.
• ... Scala either "pops" in 2010, or begins to fall apart. By "pops", I mean reaches a critical mass of developers interested in using it, enough to convince somebody to create a company around it, a la G2One.
• ... Oracle is going to make a serious "cloud" play, probably by offering an Oracle-hosted version of Azure or AppEngine. Oracle loves the enterprise space too much, and derives too much money from it, to not at least appear to have some kind of offering here. Now that they own Java, they'll marry it up against OpenSolaris, the Oracle database, and throw the whole thing into a series of server centers all over the continent, and call it "Oracle 12c" (c for Cloud, of course) or something.
• ... Spring development will slow to a crawl and start to take a left turn toward cloud ideas. VMWare bought SpringSource for a reason, and I believe it's entirely centered around VMWare's movement into the cloud space—they want to be more than "just" a virtualization tool. Spring + Groovy makes a compelling development stack, particularly if VMWare does some interesting hooks-n-hacks to make Spring a virtualization environment in its own right somehow. But from a practical perspective, any community-driven development against Spring is all but basically dead. The source may be downloadable later, like the VMWare Player code is, but making contributions back? Fuhgeddabowdit.
• ... the explosion of e-book readers brings the Kindle 2009 edition way down to size. The era of the e-book reader is here, and honestly, while I'm glad I have a Kindle, I'm expecting that I'll be dusting it off a shelf in a few years. Kinda like I do with my iPods from a few years ago.
• ... "social networking" becomes the "Web 2.0" of 2010. In other words, using the term will basically identify you as a tech wannabe and clearly out of touch with the bleeding edge.
• ... Facebook becomes a developer platform requirement. I don't pretend to know anything about Facebook—I'm not even on it, which amazes my family to no end—but clearly Facebook is one of those mechanisms by which people reach each other, and before long, it'll start showing up as a developer requirement for companies looking to hire. If you're looking to build out your resume to make yourself attractive to companies in 2010, mad Facebook skillz might not be a bad investment.
• ... Nintendo releases an open SDK for building games for its next-gen DS-based device. With the spectacular success of games on the iPhone, Nintendo clearly must see that they're missing a huge opportunity every day developers can't write games for the Nintendo DS that are easily downloadable to the device for playing. Nintendo is not stupid—if they don't open up the SDK and promote "casual" games like those on the iPhone and those that can now be downloaded to the Zune or the XBox, they risk being marginalized out of existence.

And for the next decade, I predict....

• ... colleges and unversities will begin issuing e-book reader devices to students. It's a helluvalot cheaper than issuing laptops or netbooks, and besides....
• ... netbooks and e-book readers will merge before the decade is out. Let's be honest—if the e-book reader could do email and browse the web, you have almost the perfect paperback-sized mobile device. As for the credit-card sized mobile device....
• ... mobile phones will all but disappear as they turn into what PDAs tried to be. "The iPhone makes calls? Really? You mean Voice-over-IP, right? No, wait, over cell signal? It can do that? Wow, there's really an app for everything, isn't there?"
• ... wireless formats will skyrocket in importance all around the office and home. Combine the iPhone's Bluetooth (or something similar yet lower-power-consuming) with an equally-capable (Bluetooth or otherwise) projector, and suddenly many executives can leave their netbook or laptop at home for a business presentation. Throw in the Whispersync-aware e-book reader/netbook-thing, and now most executives have absolutely zero reason to carry anything but their e-book/netbook and their phone/PDA. The day somebody figures out an easy way to combine Bluetooth with PayPal on the iPhone or Android phone, we will have more or less made pocket change irrelevant. And believe me, that day will happen before the end of the decade.
• ... either Android or Windows Mobile will gain some serious market share against the iPhone the day they figure out how to support an open and unrestricted AppStore-like app acquisition model. Let's be honest, the attraction of iTunes and AppStore is that I can see an "Oh, cool!" app on a buddy's iPhone, and have it on mine less than 30 seconds later. If Android or WinMo can figure out how to offer that same kind of experience without the draconian AppStore policies to go with it, they'll start making up lost ground on iPhone in a hurry.
• ... Apple becomes the DOJ target of the decade. Microsoft was it in the 2000's, and Apple's stunning rising success is going to put it squarely in the sights of monopolist accusations before long. Coupled with the unfortunate health distractions that Steve Jobs has to deal with, Apple's going to get hammered pretty hard by the end of the decade, but it will have mastered enough market share and mindshare to weather it as Microsoft has.
• ... Google becomes the next Microsoft. It won't be anything the founders do, but Google will do "something evil", and it will be loudly and screechingly pointed out by all of Google's corporate opponents, and the star will have fallen.
• ... Microsoft finds its way again. Microsoft, as a company, has lost its way. This is a company that's not used to losing, and like Bill Belichick's Patriots, they will find ways to adapt and adjust to the changed circumstances of their position to find a way to win again. What that'll be, I have no idea, but historically, the last decade notwithstanding, betting against Microsoft has historically been a bad idea. My gut tells me they'll figure something new to get that mojo back.
• ... a politician will make himself or herself famous by standing up to the TSA. The scene will play out like this: during a Congressional hearing on airline security, after some nut/terrorist tries to blow up another plane through nitroglycerine-soaked underwear, the TSA director will suggest all passengers should fly naked in order to preserve safety, the congressman/woman will stare open-mouthed at this suggestion, proclaim, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" and immediately get a standing ovation and never have to worry about re-election again. Folks, if we want to prevent any chance of loss of life from a terrorist act on an airplane, we have to prevent passengers from getting on them. Otherwise, just accept that it might happen, do a reasonable job of preventing it from happening, and let private insurance start offering flight insurance against the possibility to reassure the paranoid.

See you all next year.

---

Enterprise consulting, mentoring or instruction. Java, C++, .NET or XML services. 1-day or multi-day workshops available. Contact me for details.

Hi, Gaurav Sharma here, I’m a developer with the Information Security Tools (IST) team. In today’s post I’ll concentrate on the topic of Impersonation in WCF. 

• Impersonation
  • By definition, Impersonation is the act of assuming a different identity on a temporary basis so that a different security context or set of credentials can be used to access a resource
  • There was no support for role based security in legacy technologies like C++. So, impersonation was adopted by developers to bridge this gap.
  • When service uses Impersonation, it can assume identity of the client, primarily for the purpose of verifying clients authorization
  • It is highly recommended to avoid impersonation for authorization and use Trusted Subsystem Pattern across implementation layers
• Programmatic Impersonation

  •    1: class SampleService : ISampleContract
    

       2: {
    

       3:    public void MyMethod( )
    

       4:    {
    

       5:       WindowsImpersonationContext impersonationContextObj = null;
    

       6:       impersonationContextObj = ServiceSecurityContext.Current.WindowsIdentity.Impersonate();
    

       7:       try
    

       8:       {
    

       9:          // Operation performed here will be under client's identity
    

      10:       }
    

      11:       finally
    

      12:       {
    

      13:          impersonationContextObj.Undo();
    

      14:       }
    

      15:    }
    

      16: }
    

  • WindowsIdentity class provides a method Impersonate() which the service can call to impersonate client
  • Impersonate() returns an object of type WindowsImpersonationContext which contains a reference to service’s previous identity
  • Type WindowsImpersonationContext  provides Undo() method which the service calls to revert it’s old identity.
  • Dispose() method also does the same. This allows us to write above code more elegantly with USING statement 
• Declaratively Impersonation
  • OperationBehavior attribute provides Impersonation property. Impersonation property refers to an enum of type ImpersonationOption
  • ImpersonationOption enumeration provides following options:
    1. Not Allowed – This is default value. WCF will not automatically impersonate but we can do it programmatically
    2. Allowed – Automatically impersonate caller if windows authentication is used and revert back once method returns
    3. Required – Throws exception when windows authentication is not used. All calls will be auto impersonated.

     1: class SampleService : ISampleContract
  

     2: {
  

     3:    [OperationBehavior(Impersonation = ImpersonationOption.Allowed)]
  

     4:    public void SampleServiceOperation( )
  

     5:    {
  

     6:       // if windows authentication is used then
  

     7:       // operations performed here will ne under
  

     8:       // client's identity
  

     9:    }
  

    10: }
  

• Restricting Impersonation
  • WCF allows clients to decide to what degree the service can get and use client’s identity
  • WindowsClientCredential class provides AllowedImpersonationLevel enumeration which is defined as follows;

As a common design recommendation, the further from the client, the less significant its identity should be. In a layered architecture, each layer should run underneath its own identity, authenticate its direct callers, and implicitly trust its calling layer to authenticate its original callers.

Impersonation works directly opposite of this design guideline. Using impersonation also hinders scalability because several resources are allocated per identity. With impersonation, you will need as many resources as clients, and you will not be able to benefit from resource pooling mechanisms. Impersonation also makes resources administration complex. Also, if you rely on impersonation, it prohibits usage of non windows authentication mechanisms. If you do choose to use impersonation, use it carefully and only as a last resort when there is no other and better design approach.

Please feel free to email me with any questions you might have related to this topic. I’ll try to answer your queries to best of my knowledge. My email id is gauravsh@microsoft.com.

Happy Coding!

Gaurav Sharma (gauravsh@microsoft.com)
Microsoft Information Security Tools (IST) Team
Software Developer Engineer

A friend turned me on to a piece in yesterday's New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/science/22angi.html) that purported to advance a case against the perceived moral superiority of people who consume plants instead of animals. Natalie Angier's "Sorry Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too" argued that meat-eaters should not "cede the entire moral penthouse" to herbivorous humans because"[p]lants [like animals] are lively and seek to keep it that way".

(Note: Ms. Angier specifically insisted that she was serious, that this "is not meant as a trite argument or chuckled aside". So I'm taking her word for it and responding as if the article wasn't intended to be mere column filler. I'd ask that my readers bear this in mind before they write in and claim that vegetarianism has made me both iron and irony deficient.)

Ms. Angier proceeded to describe some of the surprising ways that plants help to ensure their own survival. As someone who loves learning about the natural world, I am endlessly fascinated with the clever self-preservative tricks that Earth's organisms have devised. In plants, these range from resource foraging (e.g., growth oriented toward brightly-lit and nutritive soils) to chemical warfare (e.g., releasing irritants to ward off nibbling predatory insects). Plants are certainly far more complex and worthy of examination than many people think -- and than most biology curricula demand, my own undergraduate program included. It's always nice to see plants get their brief moments in the sun.

But from these descriptions of how plants deal with the sometimes nasty vicissitudes of their lives, Ms. Angier extrapolates a fairly ridiculous conclusion: that vegetarians cannot (on the basis of their diets) claim to be living any more ethically than their carnivorous neighbours. Why? Because plants, like animals, "fight to survive".

Well, of course they do. Survival and reproduction are the two core biological imperatives, the literal sine quibus non (‘without which, nothing') of all species. Life, to the extent that it can truly be said to be purposeful, has an overarching ‘goal' of ensuring more life. Evolutionary mechanisms thus ensure that survival and defense mechanisms are emergent properties of species. In that sense all living things, including plants, should ‘like' or ‘want' to live and reproduce. (Using mental metaphors to describe non-humans is fraught with intellectual peril, which is why I put these and similar terms in scare quotes.)

But by that definitional logic, so too do Ebola viruses, cancers, and liver flukes ‘like' to live and reproduce. Indeed, they're all quite frighteningly good at it -- weakening and ultimately killing their hosts as they successfully multiply. So, Ms. Angier, shall we be truly ethical, let life take an absolutely natural course, and shut down our hospitals? This is a clearly silly conclusion.

To live, we humans must consume some form of nutritive biomass; rocks and sunlight just won't cut it. We can agree that all plants and animals have the ‘goal' of survival. We can agree that by eating them, humans generally frustrate that goal -- fictional creatures like Schmoos (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shmoo) and Ameglian Major Cows (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1nxaQhsaaw) notwithstanding. And we can agree that we do not yet have the needed technology to circumvent this problem. (The food replicators of Star Trek could do the trick nicely; alas, they remain the stuff of fiction.)

So shall we vegetarians fall upon our forks? Are we doomed to learn the mystical secrets of breatharians (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inedia) or else waste away, starving but self-satisfied?

Plants, it is true, are laden with features -- like thorns, trichomes, and toxins -- that reduce the chances they will be targeted by herbivores or parasites. This features likely evolved primarily for protective value rather than, say, for sturdiness or as accidental metabolic byproducts. Recent evidence even suggests that some plant species can recognize genetic kin in their surroundings and may even behave ‘altruistically'. For example, plants might show slower growth in the presence of close relatives, implying a possible sharing of available soil and water resources (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/11/plant-family-values/).

So can plants detect tissue damage and respond to environmental threats? Almost certainly. Can they feel fear and pain in a way that we can comprehend? Almost certainly not. The best evidence we have at present concerning plant anatomy and physiology would imply that they could not -- even in principle -- have psychological experiences comparable to animal species. Plants have no discernable brains or other nervous tissues. Stimulus response cannot be equated to "feelings" or "consciousness".

But if plants can feel pain, it actually makes the argument against meat-eating even stronger. Why? Simple: if you trace down the food chain for almost any animal species, the base of the food pyramid is going to be made composed of plant material. Up to 90% of biomass energy gets lost each time we move up a link in the chain. If grass feels pain, and you eat two pounds of beef (which required, let's say, 15 agonized pounds of digested grass to produce), then you've indirectly caused needless extra suffering.

Ms. Angier also ignores the fact that some plants actually count on being consumed -- in whole or in part -- for their unique life cycle mechanisms to occur. For example, many plants grow berries and seeds with the ‘intent' that these be eaten and later deposited at some new growing location. (And in a fresh pile of fertilizer, no less!) I am hard-pressed to think of any non-parasitic animal that does the same.
In summation, to Ms. Angier and her ideological supporters, if you think that you'll ever see the same kind of terror in the eyes of an uprooted Idaho potato as you will in those of a slaughtered Jersey cow, I would respectfully suggest that you're kidding yourself. If you want to eat meat, do it. But don't try to argue for moral equivalence with absurd tu quoque arguments.

 

To my colleagues and constant readers here at PT... Thank you for your engaging comments over the past months. Whether or not you've agreed with what I've written, I hope that my little corner of the blogosphere has merited an occasional glance and prompted some critical thought. I have sincerely appreciated the positive feedback and tried to learn from the constructive criticism. I look forward to conveying cutting-edge cognitive comestibles to chew on come 2010.

Have a safe and happy holiday season!!

 

 

Extra Credit Section

If I listen closely, I can almost hear the wheels of cognitive dissonance spinning out there. Many readers who were previously salivating in anticipation of this weekend's impending ham or turkey feast are now simply frothing. So, let me peremptorily address some of your most probable responses:

"Eating meat is pleasurable -- more than its alternatives, certainly. Therefore, I choose to do it."

This is a childish argument from hedonic consequence. My wife -- a happy meat eater -- thinks that childish is too strong a word, but I disagree. Replace "Eating meat" with "Unprotected sex" (or, perhaps, "Punching preachy vegetarians in the face") and you can quickly see why.

Most schools of hedonic ethics require that you consider the costs of your actions, not just the benefits.  Indeed, Epicurus, a major philosophical father of this line of ethical thought, clearly insisted in his Letter to Menoeceus that the good life is obtained through careful reflection about behavioural choices, not "the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table".

(By the way, in case you're wondering: I actually quite enjoy the taste of meat. Before I became a vegetarian, I was one of those people who relished eating almost any species that crossed my path. I ate all manner of fish, fowl, mammals, crustaceans, and insects. I regularly miss the taste of bacon double cheeseburgers, eel sashimi, Cajun-blackened flounder, pepperoni pizza, my father's Chicken Kiev, venison sausage, and countless other delicacies. Once the technology is safe, common and affordable, I look forward to guiltlessly enjoying an in vitro steak. Until then, my tastebuds must take a back seat to my cerebrum.)

 

"Meat tastes good to us -- better than meat alternatives, certainly. We have an omnivorous dentition pattern that includes teeth specialized for meat eating. Meat contains essential nutrients (e.g., iron and some amino acids) that are inconvenient to obtain from vegetarian diets. This all proves that we evolved to eat meat. Therefore, a vegetarian diet is unnatural."

More sophisticated; still faulty. Evidence uncovered by anatomists (e.g., skeletal and gastrointestinal structures) and archeologists (e.g., primitive hunting and fishing tools) clearly suggest that the human diet has traditionally included meats and anything else that we've found to be edible. Biologically, we appear to be built for opportunistic omnivory.

But so what? As even our most ardent evolutionary psychologists here at PT would concede, what characterized or benefited our early human ancestors cannot be used as solely sufficient grounds to justify current practices. This is what is often called the appeal to nature.

According to some anthropological evidence, cannibalism was also prevalent among early humans. One can easily imagine its advantages during times of famine (as a source of food), mourning (as a way to ritualistically honour the dead), and warfare (as a way to scare off potential attackers). Certainly, the same teeth we use to tuck into a cow's leg would be just as effective on a human's. (Maybe even more effective -- our skin isn't nearly as thick as a cow's.) Why not revert to this ‘natural' practice as well?

Getting your iron and amino acids from drugstore supplements, like I mostly do, is unquestionably an unnatural act. But so too is writing e-mail, working in an air-conditioned office, flying through the air at supersonic speeds... all common practices in our modern world. Cultural evolution outpaces biological evolution, and for very good reasons. Changing dietary practice to fit current scientific and moral theory is a predictable and desirable aspect of such cultural evolutions.

 

"Animals do not have a sophisticated sense of their own mortality (or that of their conspecifics). Therefore they cannot be said to truly suffer, because they cannot comprehend what it is that they are losing."

The premise here may be quite faulty. The fact is that we do not really know what animals know about their own mortality. Animals certainly behave as if they desire to live -- eating and drinking regularly, avoiding painful stimuli, hiding and escaping from known predators, etc.

Are these behaviours "mere instincts"? If so, some argue, we can comfortably treat animals like useful living machines -- as products to be consumed.  Unfortunately, we humans have not figured out a clever and conclusive way to find out for sure. For one thing, we tend to use human standards (e.g., ritualized burial) to judge the behaviour of other animals. For another, the history of comparative psychology is fraught with retractions:

"Only humans can fashion and strategically use tools... Oops, guess not. Chimps and ravens, huh?

But, of course, only humans act altruistically... Oops, wrong again. Ground squirrels and termites, you say?

Surely only humans are capable of understanding symbolic language and number lines... What? Chimps? AGAIN?!

Well, it's quite obvious that only humans are capable of self-recognition. What? Dolphins?!?

That's it, I quit."

The line between Homo sapiens and the rest of the animal world blurs and shifts as our tools of inquiry improve. To me, it is not a grand leap to suggest that animals do things in order to preserve life and avoid death, and not a much grander leap beyond that to suggest that they avoid death because they are aware of its finality.

But I may be wrong. Let's say I am, and let's assume the original premise is true -- that animals are truly unaware of their mortality. The same could be said for some humans, such as newborns and the comatose; this is commonly referred in moral philosophy as the argument from marginal cases.

So, if you favor this argument, then practice what you preach.  Go take a big bite out of Baby New Year and get back to me.

 

"On average, you have to eat many more plants (e.g., grapes) than animals (e.g., cows) to obtain the same amount of food value. If all life is objectively worth the same amount, then meat-eating involves less overall killing and therefore is more ethical."

I personally make no claim that all life is worth the same. Indeed, I find it difficult to see how such a concept of worth could be objectively measured in the first place. And one could pretty handily argue the math involved here. (See my previous "food chain" example.)

But this is certainly an interesting position and not unheard of in world philosophy. For example, Jainism, a dharmic religion, is predicated on the idea that all living things are ensouled. The Jain philosophy advocates non-violence toward all living organisms, and involves dietary practices that extend well beyond common vegetarianism. Strict Jains refuse to eat any food obtained through violent means. So, onions are out -- harvesting root foods causes unnecessary deaths of healthy plants.

Yet even their rigorous behavioural code has some glaring loopholes. For example, Jains commonly boil water and then cooled it to a comfortable drinking temperature, thus doing "violence" to millions of ensouled microorganisms that would have otherwise lived a contented life within their guts. (The guts of the Jains, of course, would suddenly become far less contented.)

It is common knowledge that microorganisms react to environmental stressors with complex electrochemical signals and escape movements. As you read this millions of bacteria are living a content existence upon your skin, and will remain relatively undisturbed in their colonies until you next scour your body with hot water and soap.

I wonder if Natalie Angier will shed a tear for those little ones while washing up before sitting down to her crispy Christmas duck. After all, if she's scrubbing correctly, she'll be committing microbial genocide on an absolutely staggering scale!