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viernes, 10 de diciembre de 2010

The 10 Best Books of 2010

HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE
The 10 Best Books of 2010
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Published: December 1, 2010

Published: December 1, 2010

REPRINTS

Fiction

Paper Cuts Blog: Choosing the 10 Best Books of 2010 (December 1, 2010)
100 Notable Books of 2010(December 5, 2010)

Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2010 (November 7, 2010)

Sarah Illenberger

Readers' Comments

Which books were your favorites this year?

FREEDOM
By Jonathan Franzen.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.

The author of “The Corrections” is back, not quite a decade later, with an even richer and deeper work — a vividly realized narrative set during the Bush years, when the creedal legacy of “personal liberties” assumed new and sometimes ominous proportions. Franzen captures this through the tribulations of a Midwestern family, the Berglunds, whose successes, failures and appetite for self-invention reflect the larger story of millennial America.

THE NEW YORKER STORIES
By Ann Beattie.
Scribner, $30.

As these 48 stories published in The New Yorker from 1974 through 2006 demonstrate, Beattie, even as she chronicled and satirized her post-1960s generation, also became its defining voice. She punctures her characters’ pretensions and jadedness with an economy and effortless dialogue that writers have been trying to emulate for three decades, though few, if any, have matched her seamless combination of biting wit and mordant humor, precise irony and consummate cool.

ROOM
By Emma Donoghue.
Little, Brown & Company, $24.99.

Donoghue has created one of the pure triumphs of recent fiction: an ebullient child narrator, held captive with his mother in an 11-by-11-foot room, through whom we encounter the blurry, often complicated space between closeness and autonomy. In a narrative at once delicate and vigorous — rich in psychological, sociological and political meaning — Donoghue reveals how joy and terror often dwell side by side.

SELECTED STORIES
By William Trevor.
Viking, $35.

Gathering work from Trevor’s previous four collections, this volume shows why his deceptively spare fiction has haunted and moved readers for generations. Set mainly in Ireland and England, Trevor’s tales are eloquent even in their silences, documenting the way the present is consumed by the past, the way ancient patterns shape the future. Neither modernist nor antique, his stories are timeless.

A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD
By Jennifer Egan.
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95.

Time is the “goon squad” in this virtuosic rock ’n’ roll novel about a cynical record producer and the people who intersect his world. Ranging across some 40 years and inhabiting 13 different characters, each with his own story and perspective, Egan makes these disparate parts cohere into an artful whole, irradiated by a Proustian feel for loss, regret and the ravages of love.

Nonfiction

APOLLO’S ANGELS: A History of Ballet
By Jennifer Homans.
Random House, $35.

Here is the only truly definitive history of classical ballet. Spanning more than four centuries, from the French Renaissance to American and Soviet stages during the cold war, Homans shows how the art has been central to the social and cultural identity of nations. She meticulously reconstructs entire eras, describing the evolution of ballet technique while coaxing long-lost dances back to life. And she raises a crucial question: In the 21st century, can ballet survive?

CLEOPATRA: A Life
By Stacy Schiff.
Little, Brown & Company, $29.99.

With her signature blend of wit, intelligence and superb prose, Schiff strips away 2,000 years of prejudices and propaganda in her elegant reimagining of the Egyptian queen who, even in her own day, was mythologized and misrepresented.

THE EMPEROR OF ALL MALADIES: A Biography of Cancer
By Siddhartha Mukherjee.
Scribner, $30.

Mukherjee’s magisterial “biography” of the most dreaded of modern afflictions. He excavates the deep history of the “war” on cancer, weaving haunting tales of his own clinical experience with sharp sketches of the sometimes heroic, sometimes misguided scientists who have preceded him in the fight.

FINISHING THE HAT: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes
By Stephen Sondheim.
Alfred A. Knopf, $39.95.

The theater’s pre-eminent living songwriter offers a master class in how to write a musical, covering some of the greatest shows, from “West Side Story” to “Sweeney Todd.” Sondheim’s analysis of his and others’ lyrics is insightful and candid, and his anecdotes are telling and often very funny.

THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
By Isabel Wilkerson.
Random House, $30.

Wilkerson, a former national correspondent for The Times, has written a masterly and engrossing account of the Great Migration, in which six million African-Americans abandoned the South between 1915 and 1970. The book centers on the journeys of three black migrants, each representing a different decade and a different destination.

Sudamérica unificará las predicciones climáticas

Sudamérica unificará las predicciones climáticas
Cada país está haciendo su propio esfuerzo por predecir el impacto del cambio climático en su territorio a mediano y largo plazo. Pero como el clima no sabe de fronteras geográficas, muchas veces estas mediciones son redundantes.
FUENTE \| El Mercurio	08/11/2010

Chile

Para evitar la innecesaria duplicación de esfuerzos, los directores de los servicios meteorológicos e hidrológicos de Iberoamérica impulsan el desarrollo de centros meteorológicos regionales que concentren los esfuerzos realizados por zonas geográficas comunes.

Es así como para el caso de Sudamérica habría tres: uno para Brasil y parte de la cuenca del Río de la Plata, otro que abarcaría los territorios argentino y chileno y un tercero que abordaría los países andinos. "En Sudamérica somos trece servicios, y tener a cada uno produciendo escenarios climáticos a treinta, cuarenta o cincuenta años de plazo no es un tema menor", explica Myrna Araneda, titular de la Dirección Meteorológica de Chile.

Destaca que la información ayudará a elaborar los informes regionales del Panel Intergubernamental de Cambio Climático, pero también cada país podrá usarla para asesorar a sus autoridades para la elaboración de políticas públicas de adaptación a los efectos del calentamiento global.

NIÑO Y NIÑA

Los centros regionales también permitirán concentrar la predicción estacional del clima para comprender mejor los fenómenos de El Niño y La Niña, con pronósticos a tres meses plazo.

On the Trail of Antarctica’s Geological Secrets

December 7, 2010, 6:24 PM

On the Trail of Antarctica’s Geological Secrets

By JOHN GOODGE

A view of the lower Skelton Glacier, showing the converging flow of ice streams from valley glaciers into large “outlet” glaciers that drain ice through the Transantarctic Mountains.

John GoodgeA view of the lower Skelton Glacier, showing the converging flow of ice streams from valley glaciers into large “outlet” glaciers that drain ice through the Transantarctic Mountains.

John Goodge, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, and Jeff Vervoort, an isotope geochemist from Washington State University, will be writing occasional posts from their research expedition in Antarctica.

Wednesday, Dec. 3

After a few years away, it’s hard to believe I’m back on “the ice” again. It feels natural to be back at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, where I’m organizing my 11th geological research expedition into the Transantarctic Mountains. Our field group has been here almost two weeks already, after traveling through New Zealand, and we’ve been frantic with various training sessions and packing gear into the cargo system here.

The “system,” financed by the National Science Foundation and logistically coordinated by Raytheon Polar Services Corporation, is immense. On the upside, there is a process and a pile of material to tap into; on the other hand, it’s daunting to get all the details checked off our list. Although all the pieces are scattered in the various metal buildings around town, the system actually works well to help us organize food, test radios and tents, prep our gear for air cargo, and schedule flights to outlying camps. Once we leave McMurdo, we’re basically on our own.

John GoodgeOne of the many odd vehicles driving around town in dusty McMurdo.

The McMurdo population is peaking this season around 1,300 people, which is way more than a normal summertime population. As a result, everywhere it’s crowded — dormitories, labs and the galley. “Mactown” has everything from cargo loaders to construction workers, mechanics, science techs, air crews, cooks, janitors and meteorologists. Plus some scientists. The ratio of support staff to scientists is about 5 to1! It creates a lively and diverse but close-knit community. Folks here work hard and play hard, but they really help us get our work done.

We’ve been able to get in a couple of helicopter trips to distant field sites for some preliminary sampling, and now we’re awaiting a flight on a ski-equipped LC-130 Hercules cargo plane to our base camp near the head of Beardmore Glacier. The glacier is about halfway between McMurdo and the South Pole. Unfortunately, the weather has deteriorated both in McMurdo and at our put-in site, so we’re on a delay of three days. Fortunately, the dessert bar in the galley is open for both lunch and dinner.

A glacial moraine along the side of the Boomerang Range. Reached by helicopter, Mark Fanning is scanning the clasts for signs of old basement rocks.

John GoodgeA glacial moraine along the side of the Boomerang Range. Mark Fanning, who arrived by helicopter, is scanning the clasts for signs of old basement rocks.

While we wait, there’s time to review our project goals. Our main objective is to sample material from rock outcrop and glacial deposits that can help build a better picture of the continent hidden beneath the polar ice cap of Antarctica. Because about 98 percent of Antarctica is ice-covered, we see little of its geology. Good rock exposure can be found in coastal areas and in the Transantarctic Mountains, but otherwise we are left to come up with clever ways to probe at the geology under the ice.

A satellite-based radiometer image mosaic showing surface features of Antarctica. The white line outlines the general area of East Antarctica where there is no rock exposure.

NOAAA satellite-based radiometer image mosaic showing surface features of Antarctica. The white line outlines the general area of East Antarctica where there is no rock exposure.

We can extrapolate the geology from nearby continents that were once joined with Antarctica — Australia, India and Africa. We have also used geophysical tools to help us “see through” the ice to the underlying rock with varying magnetic and gravity properties. In this project, our team will be sampling granitic rocks exposed in the mountains and glacial boulders stranded in the ice next to the mountains that have been scraped off of the East Antarctic continent.

Granites are produced by the melting of existing crust. In this case, the melts formed as a result of subduction of an ancient Pacific oceanic plate beneath Antarctica, like in the Andes or Japan today. Granites made in this way give us geochemical tracers of the rocks that were melted, and that we cannot see at the surface.

An ice thickness map of Antarctica, in which warmer colors are thicker ice and cooler colors are thinner ice. Heavy black lines are divides separating the ice cap into sectors of different flow toward the coast (shown by the thin lines). Ice in East Antarctica runs up against the high-standing Transantarctic Mountains, which have relief of up to 14,000 feet.

BEDMAPAn ice thickness map of Antarctica, in which warmer colors are thicker ice and cooler colors are thinner ice. Heavy black lines are divides separating the ice cap into sectors of different flow toward the coast (shown by the thin lines). Ice in East Antarctica runs up against the high-standing Transantarctic Mountains, which have relief of up to 14,000 feet. (Click on the map for a larger version.)

The East Antarctic ice sheet is a huge lens of ice with an average thickness of over 8,000 feet. In places it is over 12,000 feet thick! There is so much ice covering eastern Antarctica that parts of the continent below are depressed below sea level. As the ice in this lens spreads laterally, it erodes rock of the continent below and carries this debris to the edge of Antarctica. Where the ice flows up against the Transantarctic Mountains, it carries these rocks along with it, and the ice ablates by wind erosion, leaving behind a lag of rock clasts. Glacial boulders transported from the interior of the continent by ice flow thus represent pieces of the hidden Antarctic crust that were eroded by glaciers flowing from the spreading ice sheet. Rock samples we collect from glacial moraines can give us geochemical clues about what is otherwise hidden by the ice cap.

Once home, the group will use a variety of instruments in the lab to learn what the rock compositions are, how old they are, where within the earth they formed, and the conditions they experienced in terms of pressure and temperature. Because the group will be sampling over an area greater than 1,500 kilometers long, we can use patterns in the samples to build a better picture of what the Antarctic continent looks like.

To do this, I’ve enlisted several newcomers to Antarctica. They include Jeff Vervoort, an isotope geochemist from Washington State University, Mark Fanning, a U-Pb geochronologist from Australian National University, and Tanya Dreyer, a new Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota-Duluth who comes from Cape Town, South Africa. Our field party is rounded out by Dylan Taylor, a mountain guide based in Boulder, Colo., who is integral to planning the field program and getting us safely around the actively glaciated terrain.

Antarctica is bigger than the United States and Europe combined, but its geology is very poorly known. Why do we care about the geology of the Antarctic continent? Part of it is basic scientific curiosity, because we know from limited outcrop that parts of East Antarctica are as old as 3.8 billion years. It can tell us about the long evolution of continental crust formation as the earth had undergone chemical differentiation. Antarctica was a key piece in Pangea, Gondwana and Rodinia (huge supercontinents formed by the assembly of many of today’s familiar continents at roughly 250, 500 and 1,000 million years ago), and knowing more about its geologic architecture can help to refine the picture of global paleogeography as far back as 1 billion years ago. Lastly, because the polar ice cap and glaciers in Antarctica are critical to understanding past climate and ongoing processes of climate change, knowing more about the substrate for the earth’s largest ice cap and reservoir of fresh water will help to determine the stability and future fate of the ice sheet in the face of ongoing warming.

Anthropology a Science? Statement Deepens a Rift

By NICHOLAS WADE

Published: December 9, 2010

REPRINTS

Anthropologists have been thrown into turmoil about the nature and future of their profession after a decision by the American Anthropological Association at its recent annual meeting to strip the word “science” from a statement of its long-range plan.

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The decision has reopened a long-simmering tension between researchers in science-based anthropological disciplines — including archaeologists, physical anthropologists and some cultural anthropologists — and members of the profession who study race, ethnicity and gender and see themselves as advocates for native peoples or human rights.

During the last 10 years the two factions have been through a phase of bitter tribal warfare after the more politically active group attacked work on the Yanomamo people of Venezuela and Brazil by Napoleon Chagnon, a science-oriented anthropologist, and James Neel, a medical geneticist who died in 2000. With the wounds of this conflict still fresh, many science-based anthropologists were dismayed to learn last month that the long-range plan of the association would no longer be to advance anthropology as a science but rather to focus on “public understanding.”

Until now, the association’s long-range plan was “to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects.” The executive board revised this last month to say, “The purposes of the association shall be to advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects.” This is followed by a list of anthropological subdisciplines that includes political research.

The word “science” has been excised from two other places in the revised statement.

The association’s president, Virginia Dominguez of the University of Illinois, said in an e-mail that the word had been dropped because the board sought to include anthropologists who do not locate their work within the sciences, as well as those who do. She said the new statement could be modified if the board received any good suggestions for doing so.

The new long-range plan differs from the association’s “statement of purpose,” which remains unchanged, Dr. Dominguez said. That statement still describes anthropology as a science.

Peter Peregrine, president of the Society for Anthropological Sciences, an affiliate of the American Anthropological Association, wrote in an e-mail to members that the proposed changes would undermine American anthropology, and he urged members to make their views known.

Dr. Peregrine, who is at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, said in an interview that the dropping of the references to science “just blows the top off” the tensions between the two factions. “Even if the board goes back to the old wording, the cat’s out of the bag and is running around clawing up the furniture,” he said.

He attributed what he viewed as an attack on science to two influences within anthropology. One is that of so-called critical anthropologists, who see anthropology as an arm of colonialism and therefore something that should be done away with. The other is the postmodernist critique of the authority of science. “Much of this is like creationism in that it is based on the rejection of rational argument and thought,” he said.

Dr. Dominguez denied that critical anthropologists or postmodernist thinking had influenced the new statement. She said in an e-mail that she was aware that science-oriented anthropologists had from time to time expressed worry about and disapproval of their nonscientific colleagues. “Marginalization is never a welcome experience,” she said.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 10, 2010, on page A16 of the New York edition.

For First-Timer, an Icy Challenge

December 8, 2010, 7:01 PM

For First-Timer, an Icy Challenge

By JEFF VERVOORT

The wonders of Antarctica: a moraine in the foreground and a large nunatak behind it.

Jeff VervoortThe wonders of Antarctica: a moraine in the foreground and a large nunatak, or exposed element of a ridge or peak within an ice field, behind it.

Jeff Vervoort, left, an associate professor in radiogenic isotope geochemistry at Washington State University, and John Goodge, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, will be writing occasional posts from their research expedition in Antarctica.

It is probably impossible to prepare yourself before getting here for what to expect from this large ice-covered continent at the bottom of the world. Like many other people, I have seen pictures and videos of Antarctica. I am also familiar with different scientific aspects of Antarctica’s oceans, climate and geology, and I had talked about this trip extensively with John Goodge, the leader of the current expedition, before coming down here. But nothing completely prepares you for this place.

It is the scale of everything here that overwhelms you — the massive ice sheets, the ice-carved terrain, the sea and shelf ice, the mountains, the weather and even the scale of infrastructure in place to support human activities. I have spent many summers in Alaska and have been throughout the mountains of the western United States and on several other continents as well. All of these places are impressive in their own way, but nothing matches the scale of what you see in Antarctica. This is an awe-inspiring place.

Jeff VervoortThe runway on the sea ice in front of McMurdo Station.

JOHN GOODGE AND JEFF VERVOORT

On the Trail of Antarctica’s Geological Secrets

I have been working on projects with John over the past few years. My expertise in this work is in applying radiogenic isotopes both to determine the ages of rocks and also as isotopic fingerprints that provide clues about the origin of these rocks. All of this work with John has related one way or another to Antarctica. So when John asked me early this year to join his field party in the Transantarctic Mountains, I said yes with little hesitation.

The scale and extremes of Antarctica provide enormous challenges to scientific research (in our case “doing geology”) down here. First, a vast majority of the continent — and all of the older part of Antarctica we are trying to understand — is covered by immense ice sheets and is inaccessible to direct sampling. Second, our field sites are hundreds of miles from the nearest fixed base. All access from McMurdo is by helicopter, plane or (when at one of our remote sites) snowmobile. This requires enormous infrastructure to enable us to get to our remote camps and to move us to the different locations where we will do our research. And third, once in the field the extreme environmental conditions make doing hands-on work challenging, to say the least.

A map showing the Transantarctic Mountains, our field sites (in blue) and our base and remote camps.

Our approach in addressing the first challenge — trying to understand what is buried under thousands of feet of ice at the core of the Antarctic continent — is to sample rocks eroded and carried along by the enormous ice sheets that cover a majority of it. These ice sheets flow into, around and over the peaks of the Transantarctic Mountains on their way to the sea. Where they do so, there are places where loss of ice from the glaciers (mostly by sublimation enabled by abundant sunshine and persistent winds coming off the polar plateau) outpaces growth of new ice. In places where this process is extreme, the rocks carried by the glaciers may be exposed at the surface in bare “blue ice” or left in glacial deposits known as moraines.

The challenge is to find areas where, first, this process occurs, and second, where the long-carried glacial material can be distinguished from the material derived locally from the rocks of the Transantarctic Mountains. In this way, our job is similar to that of the groups that each year scour the blue ice near the edge of the polar plateau looking for meteorites. But instead of looking for material that has landed on top of the ice cap and been carried for great distances, we are looking for material sourced from below, scoured by the base of the ice sheet.

Jeff VervoortA nunatak on the edge of the polar plateau with a moraine of glacial sediment trailing down one side.

John and his colleagues took this approach a few years ago in the central Transantarctic Mountains. Now we are attempting to extend our sampling along a greater length (over 1,500 kilometers) of the Transantarctic Mountains to obtain a larger view of the buried Antarctic continent. Our attempts this week working in the northern part of the mountains have not yet been terribly successful. We had identified several attractive targets by satellite imagery and existing maps to the northwest and southwest of McMurdo. The clasts, or fragments, at these sites, however, have proved to be locally derived, and very few of the clasts appear to be from the older (“basement”) part of the Antarctic continent, which we are most interested in.

Jeff VervoortJohn Goodge examining clasts in a moraine of the Warren Range.

Further trips to look at more sites within a day’s reach of McMurdo have been thwarted by bad weather and cancellation of planned helicopter trips. Now our efforts will be directed southward in the area around 85 degrees south. The United States Antarctic Program has established a seasonal base camp (CTAM, for Central Transantarctic Mountains) near the Beardmore Glacier and near the edge of the polar plateau. We will be setting out two remote tent camps north and south of CTAM. With luck, our next post will be from CTAM after getting firsthand experience with the next challenge of work in Antarctica — transportation — and the impressive infrastructure in place to meet that challenge.

I did get a good taste of doing field work in Antarctica on our last two helicopter trips. Both trips took us over astonishing terrain and into some extraordinary field sites. Both days on the ground were filled, on the one hand, with wonderment about and awe of the physical setting, and on the other, with having to deal with cold temperatures and biting winds, which are constant companions in these places. This is going to be an incredible journey.