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  • Who Was Shakespeare? Could the Author Have Been a Woman? - The Atlantic
    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/who-is-shakespeare-emilia-bassano/588076

    On a spring night in 2018, I stood on a Manhattan sidewalk with friends, reading Shakespeare aloud. We were in line to see an adaptation of Macbeth and had decided to pass the time refreshing our memories of the play’s best lines. I pulled up Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy on my iPhone. “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,” I read, thrilled once again by the incantatory power of the verse. I remembered where I was when I first heard those lines: in my 10th-grade English class, startled out of my adolescent stupor by this woman rebelling magnificently and malevolently against her submissive status. “Make thick my blood, / Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse.” Six months into the #MeToo movement, her fury and frustration felt newly resonant.

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    Pulled back into plays I’d studied in college and graduate school, I found myself mesmerized by Lady Macbeth and her sisters in the Shakespeare canon. Beatrice, in Much Ado About Nothing, raging at the limitations of her sex (“O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace”). Rosalind, in As You Like It, affecting the swagger of masculine confidence to escape those limitations (“We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside, / As many other mannish cowards have / That do outface it with their semblances”). Isabella, in Measure for Measure, fearing no one will believe her word against Angelo’s, rapist though he is (“To whom should I complain? Did I tell this, / Who would believe me?”). Kate, in The Taming of the Shrew, refusing to be silenced by her husband (“My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, / Or else my heart concealing it will break”). Emilia, in one of her last speeches in Othello before Iago kills her, arguing for women’s equality (“Let husbands know / Their wives have sense like them”).
    I was reminded of all the remarkable female friendships, too: Beatrice and Hero’s allegiance; Emilia’s devotion to her mistress, Desdemona; Paulina’s brave loyalty to Hermione in The Winter’s Tale; and plenty more. (“Let’s consult together against this greasy knight,” resolve the merry wives of Windsor, revenging themselves on Falstaff.) These intimate female alliances are fresh inventions—they don’t exist in the literary sources from which many of the plays are drawn. And when the plays lean on historical sources (Plutarch, for instance), they feminize them, portraying legendary male figures through the eyes of mothers, wives, and lovers. “Why was Shakespeare able to see the woman’s position, write entirely as if he were a woman, in a way that none of the other playwrights of the age were able to?” In her book about the plays’ female characters, Tina Packer, the founding artistic director of Shakespeare & Company, asked the question very much on my mind.

    Doubts about whether William Shakespeare (who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 and died in 1616) really wrote the works attributed to him are almost as old as the writing itself. Alternative contenders—Francis Bacon; Christopher Marlowe; and Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, prominent among them—continue to have champions, whose fervor can sometimes border on fanaticism. In response, orthodox Shakespeare scholars have settled into dogmatism of their own. Even to dabble in authorship questions is considered a sign of bad faith, a blinkered failure to countenance genius in a glover’s son. The time had come, I felt, to tug at the blinkers of both camps and reconsider the authorship debate: Had anyone ever proposed that the creator of those extraordinary women might be a woman? Each of the male possibilities requires an elaborate theory to explain his use of another’s name. None of the candidates has succeeded in dethroning the man from Stratford. Yet a simple reason would explain a playwright’s need for a pseudonym in Elizabethan England: being female.
    Who was this woman writing “immortal work” in the same year that Shakespeare’s name first appeared in print?

    Long before Tina Packer marveled at the bard’s uncanny insight, others were no less awed by the empathy that pervades the work. “One would think that he had been Metamorphosed from a Man to a Woman,” wrote Margaret Cavendish, the 17th-century philosopher and playwright. The critic John Ruskin said, “Shakespeare has no heroes—he has only heroines.” A striking number of those heroines refuse to obey rules. At least 10 defy their fathers, bucking betrothals they don’t like to find their own paths to love. Eight disguise themselves as men, outwitting patriarchal controls—more gender-swapping than can be found in the work of any previous English playwright. Six lead armies.

    The prevailing view, however, has been that no women in Renaissance England wrote for the theater, because that was against the rules. Religious verse and translation were deemed suitable female literary pursuits; “closet dramas,” meant only for private reading, were acceptable. The stage was off-limits. Yet scholars have lately established that women were involved in the business of acting companies as patrons, shareholders, suppliers of costumes, and gatherers of entrance fees. What’s more, 80 percent of the plays printed in the 1580s were written anonymously, and that number didn’t fall below 50 percent until the early 1600s. At least one eminent Shakespeare scholar, Phyllis Rackin, of the University of Pennsylvania, challenges the blanket assumption that the commercial drama pouring forth in the period bore no trace of a female hand. So did Virginia Woolf, even as she sighed over the obstacles that would have confronted a female Shakespeare: “Undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned.”

    A tantalizing nudge lies buried in the writings of Gabriel Harvey, a well-known Elizabethan literary critic. In 1593, he referred cryptically to an “excellent Gentlewoman” who had written three sonnets and a comedy. “I dare not Particularise her Description,” he wrote, even as he heaped praise on her.

    All her conceits are illuminate with the light of Reason; all her speeches beautified with the grace of Affability … In her mind there appeareth a certain heavenly Logic; in her tongue & pen a divine Rhetoric … I dare undertake with warrant, whatsoever she writeth must needs remain an immortal work, and will leave, in the activest world, an eternal memory of the silliest vermin that she should vouchsafe to grace with her beautiful and allective style, as ingenious as elegant.

    Who was this woman writing “immortal work” in the same year that Shakespeare’s name first appeared in print, on the poem “Venus and Adonis,” a scandalous parody of masculine seduction tales (in which the woman forces herself on the man)? Harvey’s tribute is extraordinary, yet orthodox Shakespeareans and anti-Stratfordians alike have almost entirely ignored it.

    Until recently, that is, when a few bold outliers began to advance the case that Shakespeare might well have been a woman. One candidate is Mary Sidney, the countess of Pembroke (and beloved sister of the celebrated poet Philip Sidney)—one of the most educated women of her time, a translator and poet, and the doyenne of the Wilton Circle, a literary salon dedicated to galvanizing an English cultural renaissance. Clues beckon, not least that Sidney and her husband were the patrons of one of the first theater companies to perform Shakespeare’s plays. Was Shakespeare’s name useful camouflage, allowing her to publish what she otherwise couldn’t?
    Shakespeare’s life is remarkably well documented—yet no records from his lifetime identify him unequivocally as a writer.

    But the candidate who intrigued me more was a woman as exotic and peripheral as Sidney was pedigreed and prominent. Not long after my Macbeth outing, I learned that Shakespeare’s Globe, in London, had set out to explore this figure’s input to the canon. The theater’s summer 2018 season concluded with a new play, Emilia, about a contemporary of Shakespeare’s named Emilia Bassano. Born in London in 1569 to a family of Venetian immigrants—musicians and instrument-makers who were likely Jewish—she was one of the first women in England to publish a volume of poetry (suitably religious yet startlingly feminist, arguing for women’s “Libertie” and against male oppression). Her existence was unearthed in 1973 by the Oxford historian A. L. Rowse, who speculated that she was Shakespeare’s mistress, the “dark lady” described in the sonnets. In Emilia, the playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm goes a step further: Her Shakespeare is a plagiarist who uses Bassano’s words for Emilia’s famous defense of women in Othello.

    Could Bassano have contributed even more widely and directly? The idea felt like a feminist fantasy about the past—but then, stories about women’s lost and obscured achievements so often have a dreamlike quality, unveiling a history different from the one we’ve learned. Was I getting carried away, reinventing Shakespeare in the image of our age? Or was I seeing past gendered assumptions to the woman who—like Shakespeare’s heroines—had fashioned herself a clever disguise? Perhaps the time was finally ripe for us to see her.

    The ranks of Shakespeare skeptics comprise a kind of literary underworld—a cross-disciplinary array of academics, actors (Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance are perhaps the best known), writers, teachers, lawyers, a few Supreme Court justices (Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, John Paul Stevens). Look further back and you’ll find such illustrious names as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, Helen Keller, and Charlie Chaplin. Their ideas about the authorship of the plays and poems differ, but they concur that Shakespeare is not the man who wrote them.

    Their doubt is rooted in an empirical conundrum. Shakespeare’s life is remarkably well documented, by the standards of the period—yet no records from his lifetime identify him unequivocally as a writer. The more than 70 documents that exist show him as an actor, a shareholder in a theater company, a moneylender, and a property investor. They show that he dodged taxes, was fined for hoarding grain during a shortage, pursued petty lawsuits, and was subject to a restraining order. The profile is remarkably coherent, adding up to a mercenary impresario of the Renaissance entertainment industry. What’s missing is any sign that he wrote.

    From January 1863: Nathaniel Hawthorne considers authorship while visiting Stratford-upon-Avon

    No such void exists for other major writers of the period, as a meticulous scholar named Diana Price has demonstrated. Many left fewer documents than Shakespeare did, but among them are manuscripts, letters, and payment records proving that writing was their profession. For example, court records show payment to Ben Jonson for “those services of his wit & pen.” Desperate to come up with comparable material to round out Shakespeare, scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries forged evidence—later debunked—of a writerly life.

    To be sure, Shakespeare’s name can be found linked, during his lifetime, to written works. With Love’s Labour’s Lost, in 1598, it started appearing on the title pages of one-play editions called “quartos.” (Several of the plays attributed to Shakespeare were first published anonymously.) Commentators at the time saluted him by name, praising “Shakespeare’s fine filed phrase” and “honey-tongued Shakespeare.” But such evidence proves attribution, not actual authorship—as even some orthodox Shakespeare scholars grant. “I would love to find a contemporary document that said William Shakespeare was the dramatist of Stratford-upon-Avon written during his lifetime,” Stanley Wells, a professor emeritus at the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute, has said. “That would shut the buggers up!”
    FROM THE ARCHIVES
    October 1991 Atlantic cover

    In 1991, The Atlantic commissioned two pieces from admittedly partisan authors, Irving Matus and Tom Bethell, to examine and debate the argument:
    In Defense of Shakespeare
    The Case for Oxford

    By contrast, more than a few of Shakespeare’s contemporaries are on record suggesting that his name got affixed to work that wasn’t his. In 1591, the dramatist Robert Greene wrote of the practice of “underhand brokery”—of poets who “get some other Batillus to set his name to their verses.” (Batillus was a mediocre Roman poet who claimed some of Virgil’s verses as his own.) The following year, he warned fellow playwrights about an “upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers,” who thinks he is the “onely Shake-scene in a countrey.” Most scholars agree that the “Crow” is Shakespeare, then an actor in his late 20s, and conclude that the new-hatched playwright was starting to irk established figures. Anti-Stratfordians see something else: In Aesop’s fables, the crow was a proud strutter who stole the feathers of others; Horace’s crow, in his epistles, was a plagiarist. Shakespeare was being attacked, they say, not as a budding dramatist, but as a paymaster taking credit for others’ work. “Seeke you better Maisters,” Greene advised, urging his colleagues to cease writing for the Crow.

    Ben Jonson, among others, got in his digs, too. Scholars agree that the character of Sogliardo in Every Man Out of His Humour—a country bumpkin “without brain, wit, anything, indeed, ramping to gentility”—is a parody of Shakespeare, a social climber whose pursuit of a coat of arms was common lore among his circle of actors. In a satirical poem called “On Poet-Ape,” Jonson was likely taking aim at Shakespeare the theater-world wheeler-dealer. This poet-ape, Jonson wrote, “from brokage is become so bold a thief,”

    At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean,
    Buy the reversion of old plays; now grown
    To a little wealth, and credit in the scene,
    He takes up all, makes each man’s wit his own

    What to make of the fact that Jonson changed his tune in the prefatory material that he contributed to the First Folio of plays when it appeared seven years after Shakespeare’s death? Jonson’s praise there did more than attribute the work to Shakespeare. It declared his art unmatched: “He was not of an age, but for all time!” The anti-Stratfordian response is to note the shameless hype at the heart of the Folio project. “Whatever you do, Buy,” the compilers urged in their dedication, intent on a hard sell for a dramatist who, doubters emphasize, was curiously unsung at his death. The Folio’s introductory effusions, they argue, contain double meanings. Jonson tells readers, for example, to find Shakespeare not in his portrait “but his Booke,” seeming to undercut the relation between the man and the work. And near the start of his over-the-top tribute, Jonson riffs on the unreliability of extravagant praise, “which doth ne’er advance / The truth.”

    From September 1904: Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrates Shakespeare

    The authorship puzzles don’t end there. How did the man born in Stratford acquire the wide-ranging knowledge on display in the plays—of the Elizabethan court, as well as of multiple languages, the law, astronomy, music, the military, and foreign lands, especially northern Italian cities? The author’s linguistic brilliance shines in words and sayings imported from foreign vocabularies, but Shakespeare wasn’t educated past the age of 13. Perhaps he traveled, joined the army, worked as a tutor, or all three, scholars have proposed. Yet no proof exists of any of those experiences, despite, as the Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper pointed out in an essay, “the greatest battery of organized research that has ever been directed upon a single person.”
    Emilia Bassano’s life encompassed the breadth of the Shakespeare canon: its low-class references and knowledge of the court; its Italian sources and Jewish allusions; its music and feminism.

    In fact, a document that does exist—Shakespeare’s will—would seem to undercut such hypotheses. A wealthy man when he retired to Stratford, he was meticulous about bequeathing his properties and possessions (his silver, his second-best bed). Yet he left behind not a single book, though the plays draw on hundreds of texts, including some—in Italian and French—that hadn’t yet been translated into English. Nor did he leave any musical instruments, though the plays use at least 300 musical terms and refer to 26 instruments. He remembered three actor-owners in his company, but no one in the literary profession. Strangest of all, he made no mention of manuscripts or writing. Perhaps as startling as the gaps in his will, Shakespeare appears to have neglected his daughters’ education—an incongruity, given the erudition of so many of the playwright’s female characters. One signed with her mark, the other with a signature a scholar has called “painfully formed.”

    “Weak and unconvincing” was Trevor-Roper’s verdict on the case for Shakespeare. My delving left me in agreement, not that the briefs for the male alternatives struck me as compelling either. Steeped in the plays, I felt their author would surely join me in bridling at the Stratfordians’ unquestioning worship at the shrine—their arrogant dismissal of skeptics as mere deluded “buggers,” or worse. (“Is there any more fanatic zealot than the priest-like defender of a challenged creed?” asked Richmond Crinkley, a former director of programs at the Folger Shakespeare Library who was nonetheless sympathetic to the anti-Stratfordian view.) To appreciate how belief blossoms into fact—how readily myths about someone get disseminated as truth—one can’t do better than to read Shakespeare. Just think of how obsessed the work is with mistaken identities, concealed women, forged and anonymous documents—with the error of trusting in outward appearances. What if searchers for the real Shakespeare simply haven’t set their sights on the right pool of candidates?

    Read: An interview with the author of ‘The Shakespeare Wars’

    I met Emilia Bassano’s most ardent champion at Alice’s Tea Cup, which seemed unexpectedly apt: A teahouse on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, it has quotes from Alice in Wonderland scrawled across the walls. (“off with their heads!”) John Hudson, an Englishman in his 60s who pursued a degree at the Shakespeare Institute in a mid-career swerve, had been on the Bassano case for years, he told me. In 2014, he published Shakespeare’s Dark Lady: Amelia Bassano Lanier, the Woman Behind Shakespeare’s Plays? His zeal can sometimes get the better of him, yet he emphasizes that his methods and findings are laid out “for anyone … to refute if they wish.” Like Alice’s rabbit hole, Bassano’s case opened up new and richly disorienting perspectives—on the plays, on the ways we think about genius and gender, and on a fascinating life.

    Hudson first learned of Bassano from A. L. Rowse, who discovered mention of her in the notebooks of an Elizabethan physician and astrologer named Simon Forman. In her teens, she became the mistress of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the master of court entertainment and patron of Shakespeare’s acting company. And that is only the start. Whether or not Bassano was Shakespeare’s lover (scholars now dismiss Rowse’s claim), the discernible contours of her biography supply what the available material about Shakespeare’s life doesn’t: circumstantial evidence of opportunities to acquire an impressive expanse of knowledge.

    Bassano lived, Hudson points out, “an existence on the boundaries of many different social worlds,” encompassing the breadth of the Shakespeare canon: its coarse, low-class references and its intimate knowledge of the court; its Italian sources and its Jewish allusions; its music and its feminism. And her imprint, as Hudson reads the plays, extends over a long period. He notes the many uses of her name, citing several early on—for instance, an Emilia in The Comedy of Errors. (Emilia, the most common female name in the plays alongside Katherine, wasn’t used in the 16th century by any other English playwright.) Titus Andronicus features a character named Bassianus, which was the original Roman name of Bassano del Grappa, her family’s hometown before their move to Venice. Later, in The Merchant of Venice, the romantic hero is a Venetian named Bassanio, an indication that the author perhaps knew of the Bassanos’ connection to Venice. (Bassanio is a spelling of their name in some records.)

    Further on, in Othello, another Emilia appears—Iago’s wife. Her famous speech against abusive husbands, Hudson notes, doesn’t show up until 1623, in the First Folio, included among lines that hadn’t appeared in an earlier version (lines that Stratfordians assume—without any proof—were written before Shakespeare’s death). Bassano was still alive, and by then had known her share of hardship at the hands of men. More to the point, she had already spoken out, in her 1611 book of poetry, against men who “do like vipers deface the wombs wherein they were bred.”

    Prodded by Hudson, you can discern traces of Bassano’s own life trajectory in particular works across the canon. In All’s Well That Ends Well, a lowborn girl lives with a dowager countess and a general named Bertram. When Bassano’s father, Baptista, died in 1576, Emilia, then 7, was taken in by Susan Bertie, the dowager countess of Kent. The countess’s brother, Peregrine Bertie, was—like the fictional Bertram—a celebrated general. In the play, the countess tells how a father “famous … in his profession” left “his sole child … bequeathed to my overlooking. I have those hopes of her good that her education promises.” Bassano received a remarkable humanist education with the countess. In her book of poetry, she praised her guardian as “the Mistris of my youth, / The noble guide of my ungovern’d dayes.”
    Bassano’s life sheds possible light on the plays’ preoccupation with women caught in forced or loveless marriages.

    As for the celebrated general, Hudson seizes on the possibility that Bassano’s ears, and perhaps eyes, were opened by Peregrine Bertie as well. In 1582, Bertie was named ambassador to Denmark by the queen and sent to the court at Elsinore—the setting of Hamlet. Records show that the trip included state dinners with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whose names appear in the play. Because emissaries from the same two families later visited the English court, the trip isn’t decisive, but another encounter is telling: Bertie met with the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, whose astronomical theories influenced the play. Was Bassano (then just entering her teens) on the trip? Bertie was accompanied by a “whole traine,” but only the names of important gentlemen are recorded. In any case, Hudson argues, she would have heard tales on his return.

    Later, as the mistress of Henry Carey (43 years her senior), Bassano gained access to more than the theater world. Carey, the queen’s cousin, held various legal and military positions. Bassano was “favoured much of her Majesty and of many noblemen,” the physician Forman noted, indicating the kind of extensive aristocratic associations that only vague guesswork can accord to Shakespeare. His company didn’t perform at court until Christmas of 1594, after several of the plays informed by courtly life had already been written. Shakespeare’s history plays, concerned as they are with the interactions of the governing class, presume an insider perspective on aristocratic life. Yet mere court performances wouldn’t have enabled such familiarity, and no trace exists of Shakespeare’s presence in any upper-class household.

    And then, in late 1592, Bassano (now 23) was expelled from court. She was pregnant. Carey gave her money and jewels and, for appearance’s sake, married her off to Alphonso Lanier, a court musician. A few months later, she had a son. Despite the glittering dowry, Lanier must not have been pleased. “Her husband hath dealt hardly with her,” Forman wrote, “and spent and consumed her goods.”

    Bassano was later employed in a noble household, probably as a music tutor, and roughly a decade after that opened a school. Whether she accompanied her male relatives—whose consort of recorder players at the English court lasted 90 years—on their trips back to northern Italy isn’t known. But the family link to the home country offers support for the fine-grained familiarity with the region that (along with in-depth musical knowledge) any plausible candidate for authorship would seem to need—just what scholars have had to strain to establish for Shakespeare. (Perhaps, theories go, he chatted with travelers or consulted books.) In Othello, for example, Iago gives a speech that precisely describes a fresco in Bassano del Grappa—also the location of a shop owned by Giovanni Otello, a likely source of the title character’s name.

    Her Bassano lineage—scholars suggest the family were conversos, converted or hidden Jews presenting as Christians—also helps account for the Jewish references that scholars of the plays have noted. The plea in The Merchant of Venice for the equality and humanity of Jews, a radical departure from typical anti-Semitic portrayals of the period, is well known. “Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?” Shylock asks. “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” A Midsummer Night’s Dream draws from a passage in the Talmud about marriage vows; spoken Hebrew is mixed into the nonsense language of All’s Well That Ends Well.
    Stephen Doyle

    What’s more, the Bassano family’s background suggests a source close to home for the particular interest in dark figures in the sonnets, Othello, and elsewhere. A 1584 document about the arrest of two Bassano men records them as “black”—among Elizabethans, the term could apply to anyone darker than the fair-skinned English, including those with a Mediterranean complexion. (The fellows uttered lines that could come straight from a comic interlude in the plays: “We have as good friends in the court as thou hast and better too … Send us to ward? Thou wert as good kiss our arse.”) In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the noblemen derisively compare Rosaline, the princess’s attendant, to “chimney-sweepers” and “colliers” (coal miners). The king joins in, telling Berowne, who is infatuated with her, “Thy love is black as ebony,” to which the young lord responds, “O wood divine!”

    Bassano’s life sheds possible light, too, on another outsider theme: the plays’ preoccupation with women caught in forced or loveless marriages. Hudson sees her misery reflected in the sonnets, thought to have been written from the early 1590s to the early 1600s. “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, / I all alone beweep my outcast state, /And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, /And look upon myself and curse my fate,” reads sonnet 29. (When Maya Angelou first encountered the poem as a child, she thought Shakespeare must have been a black girl who had been sexually abused: “How else could he know what I know?”) For Shakespeare, those years brought a rise in status: In 1596, he was granted a coat of arms, and by 1597, he was rich enough to buy the second-largest house in Stratford.

    Read: What Maya Angelou meant when she said ‘Shakespeare must be a black girl’

    In what is considered an early or muddled version of The Taming of the Shrew, a man named Alphonso (as was Bassano’s husband) tries to marry off his three daughters, Emilia, Kate, and Philema. Emilia drops out in the later version, and the father is now called Baptista (the name of Bassano’s father). As a portrait of a husband dealing “hardly” with a wife, the play is horrifying. Yet Kate’s speech of submission, with its allusions to the Letters of Paul, is slippery: Even as she exaggeratedly parrots the Christian doctrine of womanly subjection, she is anything but dutifully silent.

    Shakespeare’s women repeatedly subvert such teachings, perhaps most radically in The Winter’s Tale, another drama of male cruelty. There the noblewoman Paulina, scorned by King Leontes as “a most intelligencing bawd” with a “boundless tongue,” bears fierce witness against him (no man dares to) when he wrongly accuses Queen Hermione of adultery and imprisons her. As in so many of the comedies, a more enlightened society emerges in the end because the women’s values triumph.

    I was stunned to realize that the year The Winter’s Tale was likely completed, 1611, was the same year Bassano published her book of poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum. Her writing style bears no obvious resemblance to Shakespeare’s in his plays, though Hudson strains to suggest similarities. The overlap lies in the feminist content. Bassano’s poetry registers as more than conventional religious verse designed to win patronage (she dedicates it to nine women, Mary Sidney included, fashioning a female literary community). Scholars have observed that it reads as a “transgressive” defense of Eve and womankind. Like a cross-dressing Shakespearean heroine, Bassano refuses to play by the rules, heretically reinterpreting scripture. “If Eve did err, it was for knowledge sake,” she writes. Arguing that the crucifixion, a crime committed by men, was a greater crime than Eve’s, she challenges the basis of men’s “tyranny” over women.

    “I always feel something Italian, something Jewish about Shakespeare,” Jorge Luis Borges told The Paris Review in 1966. “Perhaps Englishmen admire him because of that, because it’s so unlike them.” Borges didn’t mention feeling “something female” about the bard, yet that response has never ceased to be part of Shakespeare’s allure—embodiment though he is of the patriarchal authority of the Western canon. What would the revelation of a woman’s hand at work mean, aside from the loss of a prime tourist attraction in Stratford-upon-Avon? Would the effect be a blow to the cultural patriarchy, or the erosion of the canon’s status? Would (male) myths of inexplicable genius take a hit? Would women at last claim their rightful authority as historical and intellectual forces?

    I was curious to take the temperature of the combative authorship debate as women edge their way into it. Over more tea, I tested Hudson’s room for flexibility. Could the plays’ many connections to Bassano be explained by simply assuming the playwright knew her well? “Shakespeare would have had to run to her every few minutes for a musical reference or an Italian pun,” he said. I caught up with Mark Rylance, the actor and former artistic director of the Globe, in the midst of rehearsals for Othello (whose plot, he noted, comes from an Italian text that didn’t exist in English). A latitudinarian doubter—embracing the inquiry, not any single candidate—Rylance has lately observed that the once heretical notion of collaboration between Shakespeare and other writers “is now accepted, pursued and published by leading orthodox scholars.” He told me that “Emilia should be studied by anyone interested in the creation of the plays.” David Scott Kastan, a well-known Shakespeare scholar at Yale, urged further exploration too, though he wasn’t ready to anoint her bard. “What’s clear is that it’s important to know more about her,” he said, and even got playful with pronouns: “The more we know about her and the world she lived in, the more we’ll know about Shakespeare, whoever she was.”
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    In the fall, I joined the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Authorship Trust—a gathering of skeptics at the Globe—feeling excited that gender would be at the top of the agenda. Some eyebrows were raised even in this company, but enthusiasm ran high. “People have been totally frustrated with authorship debates that go nowhere, but that’s because there have been 200 years of bad candidates,” one participant from the University of Toronto exclaimed. “They didn’t want to see women in this,” he reflected. “It’s a tragedy of history.”

    He favored Sidney. Others were eager to learn about Bassano, and with collaboration in mind, I wondered whether the two women had perhaps worked together, or as part of a group. I thought of Bassano’s Salve Deus, in which she writes that men have wrongly taken credit for knowledge: “Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke / From Eve’s faire hand, as from a learned Booke.”

    The night after the meeting, I went to a performance of Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre. I sat enthralled, still listening for the poet in her words, trying to catch her reflection in some forgotten bit of verse. “Give me my robe, put on my crown,” cried the queen, “I have / Immortal longings in me.” There she was, kissing her ladies goodbye, raising the serpent to her breast. “I am fire and air.”

  • Warnings of a Dark Side to A.I. in Health Care - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/science/health-medicine-artificial-intelligence.html

    Similar forms of artificial intelligence are likely to move beyond hospitals into the computer systems used by health care regulators, billing companies and insurance providers. Just as A.I. will help doctors check your eyes, lungs and other organs, it will help insurance providers determine reimbursement payments and policy fees.

    Ideally, such systems would improve the efficiency of the health care system. But they may carry unintended consequences, a group of researchers at Harvard and M.I.T. warns.

    In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Science, the researchers raise the prospect of “adversarial attacks” — manipulations that can change the behavior of A.I. systems using tiny pieces of digital data. By changing a few pixels on a lung scan, for instance, someone could fool an A.I. system into seeing an illness that is not really there, or not seeing one that is.

    _ Software developers and regulators must consider such scenarios, as they build and evaluate A.I. technologies in the years to come, the authors argue. The concern is less that hackers might cause patients to be misdiagnosed, although that potential exists. More likely is that doctors, hospitals and other organizations could manipulate the A.I. in billing or insurance software in an effort to maximize the money coming their way. _

    In turn, changing such diagnoses one way or another could readily benefit the insurers and health care agencies that ultimately profit from them. Once A.I. is deeply rooted in the health care system, the researchers argue, business will gradually adopt behavior that brings in the most money.

    The end result could harm patients, Mr. Finlayson said. Changes that doctors make to medical scans or other patient data in an effort to satisfy the A.I. used by insurance companies could end up on a patient’s permanent record and affect decisions down the road.

    Already doctors, hospitals and other organizations sometimes manipulate the software systems that control the billions of dollars moving across the industry. Doctors, for instance, have subtly changed billing codes — for instance, describing a simple X-ray as a more complicated scan — in an effort to boost payouts.

    Hamsa Bastani, an assistant professor at the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania, who has studied the manipulation of health care systems, believes it is a significant problem. “Some of the behavior is unintentional, but not all of it,” she said.

    #Intelligence_Artificielle #Médecine #Manipulation #Economie_santé

  • When the Camera Was a Weapon of Imperialism. (And When It Still Is.)

    I first saw the photograph some years ago, online. Later, I tracked it down to its original source: “In Afric’s Forest and Jungle: Or Six Years Among the Yorubans,” a memoir published in 1899 by the Rev. R.H. Stone. It shows a crowd in what is now Nigeria, but what was then Yorubaland under British colonial influence. The caption below the photograph reads: “A king of Ejayboo. Governor of Lagos on right. For years the rulers of this fierce tribe made the profession of Christianity a capital crime.” This description is familiar in tone from anthropological literature of the period, though the photograph is hard to date precisely. “Ejayboo” is what we would nowadays spell as “Ijebu,” a subgroup of Yoruba. That catches my attention: I am Yoruba and also Ijebu. This picture is a time capsule from a world to which I am connected but had not seen before, a world by colonial encounter.

    By the middle of the 19th century, through treaties and threats of force, the British had wrested control of the coastal city Lagos from its king. They then turned their efforts to improving access to the goods and services in the Yoruba hinterland. The Yoruba were already by that time a populous and diverse ethnic group, full of rivalrous kingdoms large and small, some friendly to the British, others less so.

    Stone, a Virginian sent by the Southern Baptist Convention, lived among them — lived among us — for two spells, in 1859-63 and 1867-69, before, during and after the American Civil War. He had this to say about Yoruba people: “They are reasonable, brave and patriotic, and are capable of a very high degree of intellectual culture.” It is praise, but must be understood in the context of a statement he makes earlier in his book about living “among the barbarous people” of that part of the world. In any case, the Ijebu in the mid-19th century were largely wealthy traders and farmers who did not want to give the British right of way to the interior of the country; only through diplomacy, subterfuge and violence were they finally overcome.

    This photograph was made in the aftermath. The white governor of Lagos — based on the plausible dates, it is probably John Hawley Glover — sits under an enormous umbrella. On one side of him is another high-ranking colonial officer. On the other side is the Ijebu king, or oba, probably the Awujale of the Ijebu kingdom, Oba Ademuyewo Fidipote.

    The oba wears a beaded crown, but the beads have been parted and his face is visible. This is unusual, for the oba is like a god and must be concealed when in public. The beads over his face, with their interplay of light and shadow, are meant to give him a divine aspect. Why is his face visible in this photograph? Some contravention of customary practice has taken place. The dozens of men seated on the ground in front of him are visibly alarmed. Many have turned their bodies away from the oba, and several are positioned toward the camera, not in order to look at the camera but in order to avoid looking at the exposed radiance of their king.

    The invention of the daguerreotype was announced in 1839. By the 1840s, photography had spread like wildfire and become a vital aspect of European colonialism. It played a role in administrative, missionary, scientific and commercial activities. As the Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera put it: “The camera has often been a dire instrument. In Africa, as in most parts of the dispossessed, the camera arrives as part of the colonial paraphernalia, together with the gun and the bible. ...”

    Photography in colonialized societies was not only a dire instrument. Subject peoples often adopted photography for their own uses. There were, for instance, a number of studios in Lagos by the 1880s, where elites could go to pose for portraits. But such positive side effects aside, photography during colonial rule imaged the world in order to study, profit from and own it. The colonial gaze might describe as barbarous both the oba’s beaded crown and his regal right to conceal himself. This was one of the repeated interactions between imperial powers and the populations that they sought to control: The dominant power decided that everything had to be seen and cataloged, a task for which photography was perfectly suited. Under the giant umbrella of colonialism, nothing would be allowed to remain hidden from the imperial authorities.

    Imperialism and colonial photographic practices both flourished in the 19th century, and both extended themselves, with cosmetic adaptations, into the 20th. In 1960, during the horrific French war on Algeria, the French military assigned a young soldier, Marc Garanger, to photograph people in an internment camp in the Kabylia region of Northern Algeria. Thousands of people had been confined in the region under armed guard, and the French military commander had decreed that ID cards were mandatory. A picture of each prisoner was required. Many of the women were forced to remove their veils. These were women who did not wish to be seen, made to sit for photographs that were not for them. (Photography played a different military role in the numerous aerial reconnaissance missions by the French, which resulted in thousands of negatives mapping the region.)

    Garanger’s photographs both record an injustice and occasion it. His alternative, not an easy one, would have been to refuse the order and go to prison. His pictures show us what we ought not to see: Young and old women, their hair free flowing or plaited, one face after the other, in the hundreds. They collectively emanate refusal. The women of Kabylia look through the photographer, certainly not considering him an ally. Their gazes rise from the surface of the photograph, palpably furious.

    When we speak of “shooting” with a camera, we are acknowledging the kinship of photography and violence. The anthropological photographs made in the 19th century under the aegis of colonial powers are related to the images created by contemporary photojournalists, including those who embed with military forces. Embedding is sometimes the only way to get a direct record, no matter how limited, of what is happening in an armed conflict. On occasion such an arrangement leads to images whose directness displeases the authorities, but a more common outcome has been that proximity to an army helps bolster the narrative preferred by the army.

    Still, photographic reportage has the power to quicken the conscience and motivate political commitments. Examples abound of photographs acting as catalysts in the public’s understanding of vital issues, from the images of Bergen-Belsen in 1945 to the photograph of the Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi in 2015. And yet, perhaps even more insistently, on a day-by-day, week-by-week basis, photography implicitly serves the powers that be. To insist that contemporary photographic practice — and I mean to include a majority of the international news coverage in newspapers like this one — is generally made (and published) for the greater good is to misconstrue history, because it leaves out the question of “Good for whom?” Such pictures aren’t for their subjects any more than the photograph in Stone’s book was for the Ijebus and their king.

    Certain images underscore an unbridgeable gap and a never-to-be-toppled hierarchy. When a group of people is judged to be “foreign,” it becomes far more likely that news organizations will run, for the consumption of their audiences, explicit, disturbing photographs of members of that group: starving children or bullet-riddled bodies. Meanwhile, the injury and degradation of those with whom readers perceive a kinship — a judgment often based on racial sympathy and class loyalties — is routinely treated in more circumspect fashion. This has hardly changed since Susan Sontag made the same observation in “Regarding the Pain of Others” (2003), and it has hardly changed because the underlying political relationships between dominant and subject societies have hardly changed.

    Without confronting this inequality, this misconstrual of history, photography will continue to describe itself as one thing (a force for liberation) while obdurately remaining another (an obedient appendage of state power). It will continue to be like the organs of the state that “spread democracy” and change regimes. Even when it appears to go against the state, it will only do so selectively, quaintly, beautifully, piteously, in terms that do not question the right of the state to assert power.

    For how long will these radically unequal societal realities endure? Many affecting photographs have been made during the huge waves of international migration of the past few years. These pictures issue, as usual, from the presumed rights of photographers to depict the suffering of people “out there” for the viewing of those “back home.” But in looking at these images — images of war, of starvation, of capsized boats and exhausted caravans — we must go beyond the usual frames of pity and abjection. Every picture of suffering should elicit a question stronger than “Why is this happening?” The question should be “Why have I allowed this to happen?”

    This is what the scholar Ariella Azoulay calls the “citizenship” of photography, its ability, when practiced thoughtfully, to remind us of our mutual responsibilities. When I look at the bewildering photographs of refugee camps in Richard Mosse’s recent book, “The Castle,” I feel indicted. The imperial underpinnings of Mosse’s project are inescapable: Using military-grade thermal cameras, he makes extremely complex panoramic images (stitched together from hundreds of shots) of landscapes in the Middle East and Europe in which refugees have gathered or have been confined. His pictures echo the surveillance to which these bodies are already subjected. But the thermal imaging renders the images very dark, with the humans showing up as white shapes (almost like a negative). The picture conceals what it reveals. We see people, but they remain hidden.

    This technique makes for uncanny images in which distressed people move about like the figures you see in dreams, indistinct but full of ghostly presence. At the Moria camp in Greece, it is snowing. We see a long snaking line of people, waiting. What are they waiting for? For some material handout, probably, for food or blankets or documents. But their waiting represents the deeper waiting of all those who have been confined in the antechamber of humanity. They are waiting to be allowed to be human.

    Mosse’s images, formally striking as they are, are unquestionably part of the language of visual domination. With his political freedom of movement and his expensive technical equipment, he makes meticulous pictures of suffering that end up in exquisite books and in art galleries. He is not the first photographer to aestheticize suffering, nor will he be the last. And yet, by suppressing color, by overwhelming the viewer with detail, by evoking racial horror rather than prettily displaying it and by including in his work philosophical considerations of the scenes he shows — “The Castle” contains essays by Judith Butler, Paul K. Saint-Amour and Mosse himself and a poem by Behrouz Boochani — he does something quite different from most photojournalists. He unsettles the viewer.

    Photography’s future will be much like its past. It will largely continue to illustrate, without condemning, how the powerful dominate the less powerful. It will bring the “news” and continue to support the idea that doing so — collecting the lives of others for the consumption of “us” — is a natural right. But with a project like “The Castle,” I have a little bit of hope that an ethic of self-determination can be restored. I have hope that the refugees of Moria, Athens, Berlin and Belgrade will gain a measure of privacy. The women of Kabylia will cover their faces and return to themselves as they wish to be. The oba’s beaded crown will fall back into place, shadowing his face. Photography writes with light, but not everything wants to be seen. Among the human rights is the right to remain obscure, unseen and dark.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/magazine/when-the-camera-was-a-weapon-of-imperialism-and-when-it-still-is.html

    #photographie #colonialisme #post-colonialisme #impérialisme
    ping @albertocampiphoto @philippe_de_jonckheere

    Reçu via la mailing-list Migreurop avec le commentaire suivant de Emmanuel Blanchard:

    L’auteur fait notamment référence au travail récent de #Richard_Mosse (exposition et ouvrage « The Castle ») dont il fait un compte rendu à la critique et laudatif. Un point de vue qui peut lui-même être critiqué... dans un sens plus critique.
    Pour accéder à quelques images de Richard Mosse :

    https://vimeo.com/302281332


    https://wsimag.com/art/33291-richard-mosse-the-castle
    https://bit.ly/2NglY08

    #réfugiés #asile #migrations #images #image

    The Castle

    Richard Mosse has spent the past few years documenting the ongoing refugee and migration crisis, repurposing military-grade camera technology to confront how governments and societies perceive refugees. His latest book The Castle is a meticulous record of refugee camps located across mass migration routes from the Middle East and Central Asia into the European Union via Turkey. Using a thermal video camera intended for long-range border enforcement, Mosse films the camps from high elevations to draw attention to the ways in which each interrelates with, or is divorced from, adjacent citizen infrastructure. His source footage is then broken down into hundreds of individual frames, which are digitally overlapped in a grid formation to create composite heat maps.

    Truncating time and space, Mosse’s images speak to the lived experience of refugees indefinitely awaiting asylum and trapped in a Byzantine state of limbo. The book is divided into 28 sites, each presenting an annotated sequence of close-up images that fold out into a panoramic heat map. Within this format, Mosse underscores the provisional architecture of the camps and the ways in which each camp is variously marginalised, concealed, regulated, militarized, integrated, and/or dispersed. His images point to the glaring disconnect between the brisk free trade of globalized capitalism and the dehumanizing erosion of international refugee law in European nation-states. Named after Kafka’s 1926 novel, The Castle prompts questions about the ‘visibility’ of refugees and the erosion of their human rights.

    The book comes with a separate book of texts, including a poem by Behrouz Boochani, the journalist, novelist and Iranian refugee currently held by the Australian government in confinement on Manus island, an essay by Paul K. Saint-Amour, associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, an essay by philosopher Judith Butler, and a text by Richard Mosse.


    #livre

  • Justin Sun’s Tron: The past, present and future price analysis
    https://hackernoon.com/https-hackernoon-com-justin-suns-tron-complete-analysis-with-expert-revi

    Source: Google imagesUnderstanding TRONJustin sun’s TRON is a decentralized #blockchain platform that supports high throughput smart contracts that target the Internet, Media and Entertainment markets across the globe. Tron serves as an excellent social media platform, allowing users to freely exchange thoughts, ideas, media without the interference of any middlemen.The Expertise of the team:Source: Inwara’s #ico databaseThis project is led by the CEO, Justin Sun, who previously worked at Ripple as Chief Representative, Advisor and founded Peiwo in 2013, one of the largest live streaming apps in China. His educational background includes the University of Pennsylvania, Peking University, and Hupan University which was created by Jack Ma, Chairman of the Alibaba Group.As per the company (...)

    #ico-review #tron-ico #justin-sun

  • No Shots Fired
    In coercive control, men use guns to threaten, manipulate, and traumatize their intimate partners, without ever pulling a trigger.
    https://www.thetrace.org/2018/09/no-shots-fired

    Abusive partners don’t need a gun to govern their victims, but a gun makes a ruthless tool of intimidation. A husband might keep one on the mantel in the living room, where he and his wife watch TV. A boyfriend might polish his weapon during arguments. While asking his partner where she’s been, a guy might casually remove his coat to reveal a pistol clipped to his belt. “This [phenomenon] is almost exclusively male on female,” says Susan B. Sorenson, PhD, executive director of the Ortner Center on Violence and Abuse in Relationships at the University of Pennsylvania. “When you have a gun, you can control someone without touching them, without even speaking a word.”

    Indeed, a lethal weapon allows an abuser to easily establish a “regime of domination,” as Stark calls it — and in a country with an estimated 270 million firearms, countless women are at risk. One 2016 study found that some 4.5 million women have been coerced or bullied with a gun by an intimate partner. In a separate (as yet unpublished) survey, Tami Sullivan, PhD, the director of Family-Violence Research at Yale, found that 33 percent of women in the Greater New Haven, Connecticut, area who were victims of abuse had also been menaced with a firearm. “And that doesn’t count the implied stuff, like when he cleans the gun in front of them,” says Sullivan.

    While experts recognize coercive control as a legitimate form of domestic abuse, the threat itself can be hard to describe to friends and family, let alone the police. There are no bruises or bullet wounds, and after constant manipulation, a victim may wonder if she’s seeing danger that’s not really there. Or she may become too terrified to act at all.

  • Army, UPENN uncover ways to better predict viral information | U.S. Army Research Laboratory
    https://www.arl.army.mil/www/default.cfm?article=3275

    Neuroscientists at the University of Pennsylvania and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory have forecasted what content will get passed along repeatedly. In an article published in August 2018 in the journal Cerebral Cortex, researchers analyzed the brain responses of 40 people as they read real New York Times health article headlines and abstracts. They found that those who don’t regularly read the news were best able to predict the popularity of those articles among real readers.

    dédicace spéciale à tous les paranoïaques :)

    il y a tellement de choses dans cet article, je ne sais même pas par où commencer…

    #mémétique #armée #manipulation #NYT #recherche #journalisme

    • Un copain me répond : « Intéressant de voir que les gens qui s’intéressent à ce domaine (la santé) ont tous une activation du cortex frontal ventro-médian, comparé aux gens qui s’en foutent un peu mais qui de temps en temps vont se faire accrocher par un titre qui les concerne. Je ne sais pas ce que ça peut être, mais je ne serais pas surpris, comme dans l’exemple donné dans l’image, que ça ait rapport avec quelques chose de fondamental du point de vue évolutif, donc survie, peur, danger, sexe, etc. Au fond, les publicitaires et les gens de com’ savent ça depuis longtemps, mais on le voit là dans un motif général d’activation cérébrale. Pas de quoi fouetter un chat, mais puisque l’armée est en train de perdre du temps avec ça, alors laissons-les faire... »

      #cerveau #USA

  • China Will Always Be Bad at Bioethics – Foreign Policy
    http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/04/13/china-will-always-be-bad-at-bioethics

    It’s no accident that the Chinese government is leading the world in medical advances — and in dangerous ethical lapses.

    (…) the justification of individual sacrifice for the greater good is contrary to any principle-based bioethics framework. When Jesse Gelsinger died at the University of Pennsylvania as the first casualty of gene therapy in 1999, the tragedy halted this type of experimental treatment on humans for several years in the United States, and it still serves as a somber reminder for the medical community. Had the death occurred in China, it would most likely have been either covered up or turned into propaganda depicting Gelsinger as a national martyr.

    le titre est affreux et l’article sans doute biaisé, mais aussi plein de bonnes questions et d’infos

    #santé #médecine #recherche #éthique #Chine #parti_unique

  • Cat Bombs: Maybe The Dumbest Idea Of The Middle Ages?
    http://www.cracked.com/article_25424_cat-bombs-maybe-dumbest-idea-middle-ages.html

    It may look like those animals are wearing jetpacks, but the truth is considerably grimmer. The history of warfare is rich with terrible ideas, but perhaps none are as out-the-gate disastrous as strapping an incendiary device to an enemy house cat and just praying it dutifully runs headlong back to your foe’s fortress.

    Feuerwerkbuch
    Instead of plopping down in front of you and licking its butthole until you’re both swallowed by hellfire.

    That’s precisely the tactic offered by the author of the 16th-century German manuscript Feuerwerkbuch (Firework Book), who optimistically assumed a cat will sit still long enough to allow you to attach a flaming bag of doom to its back. German artillery specialist Franz Helm described such a tactic in 1530 (translation via The University of Pennsylvania):

    If you would like to get at a town or castle, seek to obtain a cat from that place. And bind the sack to the back of the cat, ignite it, let it glow well, and thereafter let the cat go, so it runs to the nearest castle or town, and out of fear it thinks to hide itself where it ends up in barn hay or straw it will be ignited.


    Feuerwerkbuch
    Pictured: the second-worst concept dreamed up by German military minds.

    As you can see from the illustration, bird bombs were also suggested. It’s unclear whether anybody ever attempted this uniquely depressing form of warfare, but we’d like to think that someone willing to engage in such animal cruelty was rewarded with a cat who, upon being armed with fire, immediately freaked out and ran down the closest tunic.

  • The doctor responsible for gene therapy’s greatest setback is sounding a new alarm - MIT Technology Review
    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610141/the-doctor-responsible-for-gene-therapys-greatest-setback-is-sound

    James Wilson of the University of Pennsylvania reported this week that monkeys and pigs given super-high doses of gene therapy died or suffered disturbing behavioral changes.

    “What is remarkable is we have not seen it before,” says Wilson. “We were surprised but shouldn’t have been. If you push the dose of anything high enough, you are going to see toxicity.”

    The warning comes amidst a scramble by three companies—Sarepta Therapeutics, Pfizer, and Solid Biosciences—to be the first to use the technique to cure muscular dystrophy. That disease strikes young boys, destroys their muscles, and kills them by their 20s.

    To attack the disease, researchers replace patients’ damaged copies of a gene called dystrophin by introducing viral particles that carry a correct copy. Reaching the countless muscle cells in a boy’s body requires extremely high doses of these particles—400 trillion or more per pound of body weight.

    R. Jude Samulski, who studies viral gene therapy at the University of North Carolina and is involved with Pfizer’s project, says that because Wilson’s viruses were slightly different from those being used in trials, it is not known whether his findings apply to the studies under way.

    However, Samulski says the mixture of scientific ambition, technological advances, desperate patients, and potential financial windfalls could be combustible.

    “It would be very naïve for our community to assume we won’t have toxic effects,” he says. “People get comfortable, saying, ‘Hey, let’s do it—there is nothing lose.’ Well, it’s out there waiting. But when it’s going to happen, why it’s going to happen—nobody knows.“

    #Médecine #Gene_therapy #Thérapie_génique #Néolibéralisme

  • Student Life at the First Medical College for Women - Atlas Obscura
    https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/student-life-worlds-first-medical-school-for-women-feminism-health

    n early November 1869, Anna Broomall, a student at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP), was passed a note. It had made the rounds among her male counterparts at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School before a clinical lecture at Pennsylvania Hospital. For the first time, WMCP students were to attend this lecture, which was an essential, hands-on experience for medical students. The message on the slip of paper was significant enough that Broomall kept it for more than 50 years: “Go tomorrow to the hospital to see the She Doctors!”

    On Saturday, November 6, Broomall recalled, she arrived at the lecture along with 19 other young women. What happened next became known as the “Jeering Incident.”

    “When we turned up at the clinic, in what was then the new amphitheater, pandemonium broke loose,” Broomall said in a later interview. “The students rushed in pell-mell, stood up in the seats, hooted, called us names and threw spitballs, trying in vain to dislodge us.” Joanne Murray, Historian and Director at the Drexel University Legacy Center Archives and Special Collections, describes another account: “The men greeted the women students with yells, hisses, caterwauling, mock applause, offensive remarks on personal appearance, etc.”

    The incident caught the attention of the press. “Newspaper articles about this incident nearly uniformly condemned the men for ‘ungentlemanly’ behavior,” says Murray. The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin called for expulsions and arrests of men who continued to harass the students in the streets. The public reproach wasn’t universal, however. A very different view came from a letter to the editor of the New Republic newspaper: “Who is this shameless herd of sexless beings who dishonor the garb of ladies?”

  • What Will Really Happen if the FCC Abandons Net Neutrality ?
    http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/net-neutrality-debate

    Article intéressant parce qu’il donne la parole aux opposants à la neutralité. Mais à trop vouloir jouer au centre, on finit par prendre le point de vue des dominants.

    Supporters often link net neutrality to free speech and unfettered, equal access to the internet. They also want stricter rules to curb the conduct of ISPs. “Removal of the net neutrality rules could entirely take down the internet as a free and open source of information,” said Jennifer Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland, on the Knowledge@Wharton show on SiriusXM channel 111. “It’s going to be more corporate control over the content we see … potentially not just favoring things that benefit [ISPs] financially but favoring them politically.”

    But critics say that too much regulation dampens innovation and investments in the internet, which has thrived for decades without formal net neutrality rules. For example, net neutrality would tamp down on innovations such as T-Mobile’s “Binge On” service, which lets customers stream video from Netflix, YouTube, Hulu and other sites without counting it against their data buckets, said Christopher Yoo, professor of law, communication and computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania, on the radio show. Moreover, the order brings back the FTC as the antitrust enforcer of ISP behavior, protecting consumer interests and banning deceptive business practices. (Listen to a podcast of the radio show featuring Yoo and Golbeck using the player above.)

    As providers of information services, ISPs were much more lightly regulated than telecommunications services — such as the old Ma Bell. However, the FCC did adopt policies to preserve free internet access and usage and curb abuses. In 2004, FCC Chairman Michael Powell under President George W. Bush set out four principles of internet freedom: the freedom to access lawful content, use applications, attach personal devices to the network and obtain service plan information.

    In 2010, under Obama’s first FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski, the agency’s Open Internet Order adopted anti-blocking and anti-discrimination rules after finding out that Comcast throttled BitTorrent, a bandwidth-intensive, peer-to-peer site where users shared files of TV shows, movies or other content. Faulhaber says Comcast made the mistake of “targeting a particular upstream company. That you can’t do. If you want to control traffic, you have to do it in a much less discriminatory way.”

    But the 2010 order, which also required ISPs to disclose their network management practices, performance and commercial terms, was vacated by a federal court in 2014 after Verizon sued the FCC. The court said the FCC did not have the authority to act because ISPs are not regulated like common telephone carriers.

    This ruling led to the 2015 order by Wheeler that reclassified ISPs like landline phone companies, giving the agency the power to regulate many things, including prices set by broadband providers, although this was set aside. The order also specified the no-blocking and no-discrimination of traffic, and banned paid prioritization, which would give faster internet lanes to companies that pay for it. And it crafted internet conduct standards that ISPs must follow. Last year, an appellate court upheld this order.

    The current proposal by Pai rolls back Wheeler’s order, and more. It classifies ISPs back under information services. It allows paid prioritization. It also punts the policing of any ISP blocking and discriminatory behavior to the FTC to be investigated on a case-by-case basis. It dismantles Wheeler’s internet conduct standards because they are “vague and expansive.” But the proposed order does adopt transparency rules, requiring ISPs to disclose information about their practices to the FCC and the public.

    For ISPs, the issue is not so much net neutrality as it is about Title II. “All of the major ISPs like Comcast and AT&T are on the record saying that they support the idea of net neutrality, but they just oppose the legal classification of broadband as a regulated telecommunications service,” Werbach says. “I wouldn’t expect to see any dramatic changes in the companies’ practices near term. They’re going to wait and see how this all plays out, and they’re also not going to do something that will provoke significant backlash and pressure for more regulation.”

    During her radio show appearance, Golbeck noted that the danger of fast lanes is that smaller websites that cannot afford to pay the ISP could be left behind. Research shows that “even delays of less than a second in serving up content [will make people] bail from your site and go someplace else.” Conversely, she said, if ISPs speed up access to popular sites like Amazon and Netflix because they pay, “it inhibits the ability for other new startup sites to compete.”

    #Neutralité_internet

  • ‘The Position of Women in Science Has Changed for the Better’, but ‘Is Still Far From Ideal’ · Global Voices
    https://globalvoices.org/2017/10/12/the-position-of-women-in-science-has-changed-for-the-better-but-is-sti

    As part of a two-pronged series of interviews with medical researchers based in Africa (read the first part here), Global Voices reached out to Dr. Shilpa Iyer, who is currently working in Zambia.

    Iyer grew up in Pune, India, where she obtained her bachelor’s and masters degrees in zoology and molecular biology, respectively. She then moved to the US and obtained her PhD in microbiology from the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Yale University with a Fogarty Global health research fellowship to conduct research in Lusaka, Zambia.

    #sciences #femmes #discriminations #inégalités

  • What is the alt right? A linguistic data analysis of 3 billion Reddit comments shows a disparate group that is quickly uniting — Quartz
    https://qz.com/1056319/what-is-the-alt-right-a-linguistic-data-analysis-of-3-billion-reddit-comments-sh

    We’re witnessing the radicalization of young white men through the medium of frog memes. In order to see it, all you need to do is look at the words coming out of their mouths. The alt-right isn’t yet united, but it soon will be.

    #text-mining #trolls #alt-right #Trump #reddit

  • When scientists become ’data parasites,’ everybody wins
    https://massivesci.com//articles/when-scientists-become-data-parasites-alison-gilchrist

    As the term may suggest, these scientists are sometimes discredited because they did not do any of the work involved in producing or paying for the original studies. To combat that stigma, there are people who are celebrating these scientists for using publicly available data in new ways. Casey Greene, a computational biologist at the University of Pennsylvania, started the Research Parasite Awards in 2016. He gives these awards to people who conduct rigorous secondary analysis on data shared by other researchers.

    For example, one of the award winners in 2016 was Dr. Erick Turner, from the Oregon Health & Science University. Turner studied the published results of FDA-registered clinical trials for antidepressants, and discovered a significant publication bias.

    #data #recherche

  • This Man’s Immune System Got a Cancer-killing Update - Facts So Romantic
    http://nautil.us/blog/this-mans-immune-system-got-a-cancer_killing-update

    William Ludwig was almost dead when he became Patient Number One in a radical new cancer treatment, one that’s just won the endorsement of F.D.A. advisors.Photograph by sebastianosecondi / ShutterstockWilliam Ludwig was a 64-year-old retired corrections officer living in Bridgeton, New Jersey, in 2010, when he received a near-hopeless cancer prognosis. The Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania had run out of chemotherapeutic options, and Ludwig was disqualified from most clinical trials since he had three cancers at once—leukemia, lymphoma, and squamous cell skin cancer. In a later interview, the scientist Carl June described Ludwig’s condition as “Almost dead.” Alison Loren, an oncologist at Penn, had been taking care of Ludwig for five painful years. If chemotherapy is (...)

    • By #2080, without dramatic reductions in emissions, southern Europe will be in permanent extreme drought, much worse than the American dust bowl ever was.

      (...)

      Malaria, for instance, thrives in hotter regions not just because the mosquitoes that carry it do, too, but because for every degree increase in temperature, the parasite reproduces ten times faster. Which is one reason that the World Bank estimates that by #2050, 5.2 billion people will be reckoning with it.

      on peut l’ajouter aux compilations :
      https://seenthis.net/messages/524060
      https://seenthis.net/messages/499739

      #effondrement #collapsologie #catastrophe #fin_du_monde #it_has_begun #Anthropocène #capitalocène

    • The Power and Peril of “Climate Disaster Porn” | New Republic
      https://newrepublic.com/article/143788/power-peril-climate-disaster-porn

      The article has generated significant controversy, and not just from the usual denier crowd. “I am not a fan of this sort of doomist framing,” Michael Mann, a climate scientist who often warns of the potentially devastating impacts of global warming, wrote in a lengthy Facebook post. “It is important to be up front about the risks of unmitigated climate change, and I frequently criticize those who understate the risks. But there is also a danger in overstating the science in a way that presents the problem as unsolvable, and feeds a sense of doom, inevitability and hopelessness.” In a Medium post, Daniel Aldana Cohen, an assistant sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who works on climate politics, called the piece “climate disaster porn.”

    • Scientists explain what New York Magazine article on “The Uninhabitable Earth” gets wrong
      https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/scientists-explain-what-new-york-magazine-article-on-the-uninhabita

      I am sympathetic to the author’s efforts to raise awareness about such [high-end] scenarios, including impacts that are not always well discussed, and agree that we [scientists] tend to focus too much on median outcomes. Nevertheless, I think the article would have gained from a more explicit acknowledgement that this particular focus is the goal of the article, as well as a from an explicit discussion (even if only qualitative) of the probabilities associated with these scenarios. Absent that, I am afraid the article, as such, feels misleading, or at least confusing for the general public.

    • Réchauffement climatique : attention, planète en danger !
      https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/revue-de-presse-internationale/rechauffement-climatique-attention-planete-en-danger

      Malheureusement, l’enquête du NEW YORK MAGAZINE n’est pas la seule à pointer le danger qui menace aujourd’hui notre planète. Selon une analyse publiée, cette fois-ci, dans la revue NATURE, et intitulée « 2020 : le point de bascule », l’humanité n’aurait plus que trois ans pour sauvegarder le climat terrestre. Si les émissions de gaz à effet de serre continuent à augmenter après 2020, ou même à rester stables, alors les objectifs de température fixés à Paris seront inaccessibles.

      Et comme si tout cela ne suffisait pas, une autre étude fait, elle aussi, la Une de très nombreux quotidiens depuis quelques jours. Là encore, l’avertissement résonne de manière effrayante : Il y est écrit que nous sommes entrés dans l’ère de « l’anéantissement biologique ». Publiée lundi dans la revue scientifique PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, cette étude réalisée par des chercheurs mexicains et américains dresse un constat sans appel : selon elle, la disparition des espèces vertébrées dans les dernières décennies est telle, qu’elle s’apparente à une extinction de masse, un « anéantissement biologique ». Evidemment, « ce terme serait alarmiste si nous n’avions pas les données », se justifie aussitôt l’un des chercheurs dans les colonnes de THE ATLANTIC. L’étude montre, en particulier, que l’ensemble des 177 espèces de mammifères étudiées ont perdu au moins 30 % de leur territoire entre 1900 et 2015 et que plus de 40 % d’entre elles ont connu une forte baisse de population. Mais surtout, elle met l’accent sur le fait que des espèces qui ne sont pas considérées comme en danger voient, elles aussi, leur population diminuer.

    • La revue de presse de Thomas Cluzel sur France Culture cite d’autres papiers déjà cités ici :

      Three years to safeguard our climate
      Christiana Figueres, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Gail Whiteman, Johan Rockström, Anthony Hobley& Stefan Rahmstorf
      Nature 546:593–595, le 29 juin 2017

      et

      Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines
      Gerardo Ceballosa, Paul R. Ehrlich and Rodolfo Dirzo
      PNAS, le 5 juillet 2017

      et le papier original de David Wallace-Wells dans le New York Magazine a aussi donné lieu à cet autre article en français en juillet dernier :

      Changement climatique : les 8 apocalypses à venir
      Vincent Lucchese, Usbek & Rica, Juillet 2017
      https://seenthis.net/messages/624916

      1. La grande submersion, la grande extinction
      2. Une chaleur mortelle
      3. La famine mondiale
      4. Les pestes climatiques
      5. L’air irrespirable
      6. La guerre perpétuelle
      7. L’effondrement économique permanent
      8. Les océans empoisonnés

  • Global publishing giant wins $15 million damages against researcher for sharing publicly-funded knowledge | Privacy Online News
    https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2017/06/global-publishing-giant-wins-15-million-damages-researcher-sh

    The court awarded $15 million damages to the scientific publisher on the basis of 100 articles published by #Elsevier that had been made available without permission on Sci-Hub and a similar site called LibGen. At the time of writing, Sci-Hub claims to hold 62 million scientific research papers – probably a majority of all those ever published – most of which are unauthorized copies. According to a report in the scientific journal Science last year, it is Elsevier which is most affected by #Sci-Hub’s activities:

    #libgen

  • Rediscovering WWII’s female ’computers’ - CNN.com
    http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/02/08/women.rosies.math

    Computer, at that point, was a job title, not a machine. Long before the sisters were businesswomen, community activists, mothers or grandmothers, they were recruited by the U.S. military to do ballistics research. They worked six days a week, sometimes pulling double or triple shifts, along with dozens of other women.

    The weapons trajectories they calculated were passed out to soldiers in the field and bombardiers in the air. Some of their colleagues went on to program the earliest of general-purpose computers, the ENIAC.

    It wasn’t factory work, but they were “Rosies” nonetheless, filling jobs that men would’ve taken if they hadn’t been at war or wrapped up in other military research.

    Le film
    https://sites.temple.edu/topsecretrosies/project-background
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE4Tf4JVl-E

    #femmes #computer #rosies #scientifiques #mathématique

  • Aux États-Unis, les chercheurs protègent les #données climatiques contre les menaces de l’équipe Trump
    https://reporterre.net/Aux-Etats-Unis-les-chercheurs-protegent-les-donnees-climatiques-contre-l

    La première chose à comprendre, c’est que tous les matériaux disponibles sur #Internet sont vulnérables par nature. Les liens hypertextes vers des études scientifiques peuvent facilement être brisés. C’est un phénomène très documenté. Cette #instabilité naturelle est renforcée dans un environnement #politique où les #climatosceptiques s’assurent que le changement climatique est présenté comme un sujet ouvert au débat.
    Scott Pruitt, qui est en train d’être auditionné au Congrès [pour diriger l’Agence états-unienne de protection de l’environnement, l’EPA], ne croit pas au changement climatique. Cet ex-procureur général de l’Oklahoma est connu pour avoir défendu les industriels gaziers et pétroliers adeptes de la fracturation hydraulique, au lieu d’avoir réglementé cette pratique qui cause des niveaux sans précédent de microtremblements de terre. Donc, nous avons toutes les chances de croire que les données contenues sur le site #web de l’EPA seront encore plus vulnérables.
    Mais l’EPA est juste un exemple. Il y a de multiples agences publiques et ministères dont les données sur le #climat sont menacées. En décembre, l’équipe de transition de Trump voulait que le ministre sortant de l’Énergie lui fournisse une liste de noms des personnes ayant travaillé sur l’Accord de Paris. Heureusement, il a dit non et a même autorisé les membres de son ministère à utiliser les réseaux sociaux comme ils le souhaitent, sans être punis.

  • CRISPR gene-editing tested in a person for the first time
    http://www.nature.com/news/crispr-gene-editing-tested-in-a-person-for-the-first-time-1.20988

    A Chinese group has become the first to inject a person with cells that contain genes edited using the revolutionary #CRISPR–Cas9 technique.

    On 28 October, a team led by oncologist Lu You at Sichuan University in Chengdu delivered the modified cells into a patient with aggressive lung cancer as part of a clinical trial at the West China Hospital, also in Chengdu.

    Earlier clinical trials using cells edited with a different technique have excited clinicians. The introduction of CRISPR, which is simpler and more efficient than other techniques, will probably accelerate the race to get gene-edited cells into the clinic across the world [...].

    [...]

    The researchers removed immune cells from the recipient’s blood and then disabled a gene in them using CRISPR–Cas9, which combines a DNA-cutting enzyme with a molecular guide that can be programmed to tell the enzyme precisely where to cut. The disabled gene codes for the protein PD-1, which normally puts the brakes on a cell’s immune response: cancers take advantage of that function to proliferate.

    Lu’s team then cultured the edited cells, increasing their number, and injected them back into the patient, who has metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer. The hope is that, without PD-1, the edited cells will attack and defeat the cancer.

    #biologie #gènes #ADN

  • There Are No True Rebels - Issue 41: Selection
    http://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/there-are-no-true-rebels

    The notion that our choices are driven by our own personal thoughts and opinions seems so obvious that it’s not even worth mentioning,” Jonah Berger writes in the opening of his 2016 book, Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces That Shape Behavior. “Except that it’s wrong.” Berger, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, has made a specialty of researching why we make the decisions we do. In his first book, the best-selling Contagious: Why Things Catch On, Berger, 36, explored the hows and whys of ideas and products that go viral. This time around, he looks more deeply at the ways our choices are impacted by the messenger.In Berger’s view, we are not as smart as we might think.Clockwise from top left: Wikipedia, Scott Olson/Getty Images, SAUL (...)

  • New Study Shows Reading Harry Potter Lowers Americans’ Opinions of Donald Trump
    https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/new-study-shows-reading-harry-potter-lowers-americans%E2%80%99-opinions-d

    Harry may not be a full-on patronus against the Republican presidential nominee’s appeal, but reading Potter stories does appear to be a shield charm against Trump’s message.

    A new study to be published in a special 2016 election issue of PS: Political Science and Politics finds that reading Harry Potter books leads Americans to take a lower opinion of Donald Trump. In fact, the more books the participants read, the greater the effect.

    Even when controlling for party identification, gender, education level, age, evangelical self-identification, and social dominance orientation — all factors known to predict Americans’ attitudes toward Donald Trump — the Harry Potter effect remained.

    The study, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Donald?,” was written by Professor Diana Mutz, the Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Political Science and Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

  • First #CRISPR clinical trial gets green light from US panel : Nature News & Comment
    http://www.nature.com/news/first-crispr-clinical-trial-gets-green-light-from-us-panel-1.20137

    CRISPR, the genome-editing technology that has taken biomedical science by storm, is finally nearing human trials.

    On 21 June, an advisory committee at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) approved a proposal to use CRISPR–Cas9 to help augment #cancer therapies that rely on enlisting a patient’s T cells, a type of immune cell.

    Cell therapies [for cancer] are so promising but the majority of people who get these therapies have a disease that relapses,” says study leader Edward Stadtmauer, a physician at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Gene editing could improve such treatments and eliminate some of their vulnerabilities to cancer and the body’s immune system, he says.
    […]
    The researchers will remove T cells from 18 patients with several types of cancers and perform three CRISPR edits on them. One edit will insert a gene for a protein engineered to detect cancer cells and instruct the T cells to target them, and a second edit removes a natural T-cell protein that could interfere with this process. The third is defensive: it will remove the gene for a protein that identifies the T cells as immune cells and prevent the cancer cells from disabling them. The researchers will then infuse the edited cells back into the patient.

  • #Silicon_army : le président de #Google devient (officiellement) conseiller pour le Pentagone
    http://www.lefigaro.fr/secteur/high-tech/2016/03/03/32001-20160303ARTFIG00203-le-president-de-google-devient-conseiller-pour-le

    Le ministère américain de la Défense embauche chez Google. Eric Schmidt, président de la holding Alphabet, qui englobe le moteur de recherche, va en effet prendre la direction d’un nouveau comité de conseil du Pentagone en matière d’innovation technologique. Il sera à la tête d’une douzaine de personnes et conseillera l’armée sur des domaines « très connus de la Silicon Valley » (…)

    Le département de la Défense a aussi annoncé mercredi le concours « Piratez le Pentagone », qui offre une récompense pécuniaire à ceux qui parviendront à trouver des failles sur les pages Internet de l’entité.

    Le communiqué : http://www.defense.gov/News-Article-View/Article/684366/pentagon-to-establish-defense-innovation-advisory-board

    L’an dernier, le « Wall Street Journal » révélait qu’Eric Schmidt et Larry Page, co-fondateur de Google, s’étaient rendus à la Maison Blanche plus de 200 fois depuis que Barack Obama avait été élu.

    http://www.lesechos.fr/tech-medias/hightech/021739515432-google-se-rapproche-encore-un-peu-plus-du-gouvernement-america

    Résumé en deux tweets :

    • A propos du concours de hackers : bug bounty et pentesting
      http://www.atlantico.fr/decryptage/quand-pentagone-recrute-directeur-google-et-offre-services-hackers-pour-pi

      Le Pentagone organise ce que l’on appelle un “Bug Bounty” : cela consiste à inviter des hackers à identifier des failles de sécurité dans ses technologies, et à les récompenser quand ils en découvrent. Plus la faille trouvée est critique, plus la récompense est élevée. C’est une pratique assez courante chez les géants des technologies aux Etats-Unis, initiée par Netscape dès 1995.

      Aujourd’hui, la plupart des grands de la Silicon Valley pratiquent le Bug Bounty afin de sécuriser leurs technologies : Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Paypal, IBM, eBay… Mais des entreprises hors du cadre strict des technologies s’y mettent également, tel United Airlines ou General Motors.

      Cette approche de la détection de faille de sécurité connait un boom aux Etats-Unis depuis quelques années, car elle se révèle être un complément indispensable à l’approche traditionnelle, le pentesting, qui consiste à mobiliser un ou deux experts durant quelques semaines en leur confiant la mission de découvrir ces même failles. Avec un Bug Bounty, on peut attirer bien plus de monde, et par là même des compétences et des approches bien plus variées, reflétant la diversité que l’on peut trouver du coté des attaquants. Qui plus est, un Bug Bounty peut être ouvert de façon indéfinie, offrant une attention permanente, là où elle n’était que ponctuelle auparavant avec la précédente approche, le pentesting. Enfin, c’est une approche bien plus rationnelle en termes de ROI : plutôt que d’acheter du temps de recherche d’un ou deux experts, on achète directement auprès des experts le résultat de cette recherche.

      Le fait que le Pentagone organise son propre Bug Bounty est en quelque sorte la validation ultime de cette approche de la sécurité informatique, qui fait appel à la foule sur le mode du crowdsourcing et de l’“économie collaborative”. 

      Aux Etats-Unis, c’est une pratique courante, et l’arrivée du Pentagone n’est que l’aboutissement d’un mouvement entammé depuis des années par tous les géants des technologies, alors qu’en Europe, cette approche de la sécurité informatique est apparue plus récemment. Deux plateformes de Bug Bounty on été lancées cette année en France : Yogosha et BountyFactory.

      Cf. http://seenthis.net/messages/433852
      http://seenthis.net/messages/442383
      http://seenthis.net/messages/447649

    • Increasingly eclectic Pentagon innovation board adds Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jeff Bezos
      https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/07/26/increasingly-eclectic-pentagon-innovation-board-adds-neil-degrasse-t

      The board now includes 15 members and is at full size. Other members named Tuesday include Jennifer Pahlka, the founder and executive director of Code for America; Milo Medin, Google’s vice president for access services, broadband and fiber network; Instagram chief executive Marne Levine; J. Michael McQuade, United Technologies’s senior vice president for science and technology. Adam Grant, an organizational psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School; Richard Murray, a bioengineering professor at the California Institute of Technology; Cass Sunstein, a legal scholar at Harvard; Danny Hillis, co-founder of Applied Inventions; and Eric Lander, the founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, whose focus includes biomedical and genomic research.

      Carter announced in June that he had named retired Navy Adm. William McRaven, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Aspen Institute chief executive Walter Isaacson to the board.

  • 70 years ago, six Philly women became the world’s first digital computer programmers
    http://www.phillyvoice.com/70-years-ago-six-philly-women-eniac-digital-computer-programmers

    In 1945, the U.S. Army recruited six women working as computers at the University of Pennsylvania to work full-time on a secret government project. For the next year, they used their creativity, tenacity and solid backgrounds in mathematics to become the original programmers of the world’s first electronic general-purpose computer, called ENIAC.

    “These women were hired pretty much to set this machine up, but it turns out that no one knew how to program. There were no ’programmers’ at that time, and the only thing that existed for this machine were the schematics,” said Mitch Marcus, the RCA Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. “These six women found out what it took to run this computer — and they really did incredible things.”


    Programmers Betty Jean Jennings, left, and Fran Bilas operate ENIAC’s main control panel at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.