The Dish

SQUAR, Burma’s first social networking site, was released late last month. Since the government has only recently relaxed censorship policies, the potential of a growing digital user base is substantial:

While only 10 percent of the population is wired, international telecom companies are expected to soon be providing nationwide internet and connections. The Burmese government has said it will issue licenses to two international corporations to provide nationwide wireless coverage. The target is to provide 80 percent coverage by 2015. … Growth in mobile penetration has already soared in the last two years from 10 to 80 percent, and the coming wireless coverage will open up 60 million consumers, who thanks to half a century of isolation, have remained untapped.

SQUAR’s cofounder Rita Nguyen sees a market:

Currently, Burmese people are hungry for consumer stuff. Big brands are entering but the only platform is Facebook. There’s nothing really helping consumers day to day, and digital closes those gaps. I mean, print publishers just got granted licenses to print.

Nguyen explains further:

I came to visit Myanmar early this year after hearing the news that Yangon had the largest BarCamp in the world. After spending a week here, I could see that there was something very special happening. … I knew that the access to Internet connectivity would correct itself with the new foreign carriers coming to the market, but even if Burmese were online, there was really no destination that belonged to them, built for and by them. …

[W]e really took a leap of faith to release [SQUAR] as early as we did. It’s very common in Silicon Valley to develop technology like this. Something very light, called a minimum viable product. The idea is that you have something that is functional so that your customers can use it, feed back and help you refine and build your product.  What I wasn’t sure about is if the Burmese youth would be very forgiving with such a light product since they would not have had a lot of exposure to products built in this manner. We didn’t have photos, profiles and barely even had notifications in. There was a very good chance that people would download it, try it and then abandon it. However, the positive response we have had has been overwhelming! The people of Myanmar have rallied around this, providing hundreds of ideas in thousands of posts in just over a week.

Earlier Dish on Burma here and here.

(Hat tip: Global Voices)

A reader writes:

I just read this recent post, and I was rather offended by John Horgan’s insistence that scientists and engineers only learn facts and do not learn skepticism in their classes. Really? I’m a scientist, and I can tell you that as you learn your craft, you learn how there are gaps in knowledge, how uncertain so many things are, and how you have to critically think about all of the problems that you confront. An introductory and mandatory science class might just focus on the facts, but if it is, it’s a bad course. Seriously, if all you want your non-science students to learn is a list of rote facts, then those students are not being taught anything useful, least of all, science.

Another turns the topic around:

My bet is that STEM students get a lot more in the way of humanities education than humanities students get in the way of science and mathematics education.

How much are history majors taught about the importance of the development of the theories of thermodynamics on the industrial revolution (and vice versa)? How many philosophy students have contemplated the connection between the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, and modern and post-modern thought? Do BAs, MAs or PhDs in the humanities even know who James Clerk Maxwell, Erwin Schrodinger, Paul AM Dirac, Murray Gell-Mann are? If you’re looking for a group in the academy who are cloistered in their own spheres of knowledge and ignorant of the works of others, I don’t think you have to go too far from the English or Art departments at a major university.

How about making sure that pre-law students are well trained in statistics so they can understand how to read and understand a scientific study on the risks of new medications? How about requiring a 14th century German literature major to take a chemistry lecture and lab course for no practical purpose but based on the idea that it’s still good for them to be able to read the periodic table? There is a tremendous amount of scientific illiteracy among people generally. Perhaps the best place to start is among the most educated people in the country, but who probably don’t know the difference between nuclear fusion and frequency modulation.

A few more readers sound off:

I graduated in 1971 with a Bachelors of Engineering from The Cooper Union, a small college with three schools – Art, Architecture and Engineering.  The Schools were distinct, and the Engineering students spent their days in a separate building from the Art and Architecture students, but there was one mandatory course that every sophomore had to take.  It was an interdisciplinary Humanities course that covered the years from 1750 to 1850.  In small classes and in joint lectures we studied art, music, history, exploration, science, medicine, literature, religion, invention – if it occurred in the years from 1750 to 1850, we studied it.

Before our first large lecture I could hear students from each of the schools grumbling that it was a waste of time to learn all this extraneous information – we didn’t have the time for this useless course.  What could Art students learn about science and technology that would help them be better artists?  How could Engineering students use art or music?  But before long we looked forward to each lecture. We were learning that any advance in one area affected society as a whole.  Advances in chemistry led to better paints, advances in building materials changed architectural designs.  Small or large, we learned that life is interconnected.

If I had to list one and only one college course that changed my life, it would be this one.  I’m so very grateful that it was mandatory, and that every sophomore attended the lectures together.    Because artist, architect, engineer,  writer, politician, religious leader, citizen, we each have something to learn from the others.

Another:

I’m a older chemical engineer (I graduated in 1970).  My school (Ohio University) required Humanities credits to graduate.  I found them valuable, but not in the way you’d think.  What I learned from them was that to get a good grade, I needed to listen, and then respond in a way that was “appropriate” for that professor – not what necessarily what I thought.  You can’t do that in a math or chemistry class.  It actually gave me better skills when relating to others in the workplace, as opposed to the Sheldon Cooper (Big Bang Theory) model of interaction.  I can’t remember crap from that Film Appreciation class I took, other than I never did really comprehend why it was so important to appreciate the lighting and camera angles from Dracula.  Got a good grade though …

Dan Colman highlights the above clip from a Cold War-era Armed Forces Information Film, pairing it with his commentary on an Army-produced guide to finding the Communists in our midsts:

Some Communists were out in the open; however, others “worked more silently.” So how to find those hidden communists? Not to worry, the US military had that covered. In 1955, the U.S. First Army Headquarters prepared a manual called How to Spot a Communist. Later published in popular American magazines, the propaganda piece warned readers, “there is no fool-proof system in spotting a Communist.” … And yet the pamphlet adds, letting readers breathe a sigh of relief, “there are, fortunately, indications that may give him away. These indications are often subtle but always present, for the Communist, by reason of his “faith” must act and talk along certain lines.” In short, you’ll know a Communist not by how he walks, but how he talks.

He excerpts the following passage from the pamphlet on deciphering Communist writing, which he describes as asking citizens “to become literary critics for the sake of national security”:

While a preference for long sentences is common to most Communist writing, a distinct vocabulary provides the more easily recognized feature of the “Communist Language.” Even a superficial reading of an article written by a Communist or a conversation with one will probably reveal the use of some of the following expressions: integrative thinking, vanguard, comrade, hootenanny, chauvinism, book-burning, syncretistic faith, bourgeois-nationalism, jingoism, colonialism, hooliganism, ruling class, progressive, demagogy, dialectical, witch-hunt, reactionary, exploitation, oppressive, materialist.

This list, selected at random, could be extended almost indefinitely. While all of the above expressions are part of the English language, their use by Communists is infinitely more frequent than by the general public…

David Sessions rants against a literary trend:

If you’re an American man of letters of the sort that currently gets called upon by places like The New Republic and The New York Review of Books to diagnose European philosophers, you have a fairly easy job laid out for you. Step one: Read the book, preferably with no prior familiarity with the philosopher’s work, influences, or academic milieu. Step two: search the text, as well as any biographical resources you can find, for any indication that the philosopher has/had radical political commitments or might have ever made comments about Hitler or communist regimes that are difficult to understand at first glance. If so, you’ve already got the main theme for your review. Step three: do your best to come up with a few paragraphs of summary of the philosopher’s biography and general outlook before transitioning into your main disquisition about whether or not they have apologized for ever having radical ideas and, if not, cluck disappointedly about their lack of intellectual responsibility. If you’re feeling a little bold, insinuate that they are anti-Semitic. For good measure, throw in a few concluding bromides about the temptations and risks of being an intellectual.

Why it matters:

While I understand the entertainment value of a withering takedown, I will never understand the desire to finger-wag ideas off the stage before the fight can even begin. One doesn’t have to be at all radical to respect and welcome a good-faith conflict between ideas, and to believe that engaging even the ones that creep you out can’t help but improve your own. (As Stephen Metcalf put it responding to the Romano travesty, “I never thought the answer to illiberalism was more illiberalism.”)

The notion that “responsible politics” have to be protected from dangerous intellectuals is itself an ideological danger, one that risks excusing the enormous, ongoing, and entirely preventable crimes of our political system. It’s precisely this unquestionable ideology of inevitability and givenness that people like Badiou and Žižek are attempting to unsettle, and the reason I suspect they inspire such anti-intellectual reaction.

David Masciotra evokes the complex politics of John Mellencamp, a man of the left shaped by small-town life in Indiana:

John Mellencamp is not a Republican. He is a self-avowed liberal—but his is a community-based leftism that distrusts bureaucracy and hates paternalism, yet believes in social assistance for the poor, sick, and hungry, the widows and orphans that the Bible identifies. Mellencamp inhabits common ground with libertarians on social issues, and he is a consistent opponent of war and foreign intervention, but he does not believe that an unfettered free market will solve every social problem.

He has watched the corporate conquest of family farms and sings about it on the angry lament, “Rain on the Scarecrow.” He has witnessed how after decades of politicians relegating poverty relief to an inefficient welfare state or indifferent corporate state, poor men, women, and children have become collateral damage, and he sings about it on the heartbreaking “Jackie Brown,” the story of a desperately impoverished man who commits suicide.

He has seen the wreckage that a market-driven, money-obsessed, and materially measured culture has piled up in place of the small communities he cherishes, and he measures the damage in “Ghost Towns Along the Highway.” The mode of American life that prioritizes mobility above all and instructs the young to conduct themselves in a constant search for the next big thing has created generations whose “love keeps on moving to the nearest faraway place.” In “The West End,” he sings of a dying neighborhood and in a powerful turn of phrase manages to capture and condemn decades of destructive policies from big government and big business: “It sure has changed here since I was a kid / It’s worse now / Look what progress did.”