THE YEAR IN CULTURE

2010 Anthems: From a Kiss-Off to Jolts of Hope

By JON PARELES

Published: December 16, 2010

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1. ARCADE FIRE “The Suburbs” (Merge). Memories of suburbia, questions of integrity, thoughts on time passing and portents of decline fill the ambivalent anthems on Arcade Fire’s third album. Their misgivings are all subsumed in music that can be punky or (more often) orchestral, with ascendant melodies that stubbornly radiate hope.

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Mirko Ilic

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• ArtsBeat Blog: 2010, In the Rearview Mirror (December 16, 2010)

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Cee Lo Green had a viral hit this summer with the first single from his third solo album, “The Lady Killer.”

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Arcade Fire’s members reflect on suburbia and integrity amid the ascendant melodies on their third album, “The Suburbs.”

2. JANELLE MONÁE “The ArchAndroid” (Wondaland Arts Society/Bad Boy/Atlantic). This sci-fi concept album brims over with Ms. Monáe’s ambitions: singing, rapping, flirting, fighting for change and absorbing — for starters — funk, psychedelia, hip-hop and show tunes. It’s a tour de force; even the misfires are promising.

3. JOANNA NEWSOM “Have One on Me” (Drag City). Ms. Newsom’s rhapsodic, harp-centered songs have grown supple and curvaceous on this two-hour, three-CD album. Her voice is now richer and earthier, and she gives her songs breathing room, making her conundrums newly approachable but no less magical.

4. VAMPIRE WEEKEND “Contra” (XL). A lot goes on behind Vampire Weekend’s relentlessly clever, perky pop tunes. The lyrics, full of carefully deployed proper nouns, simultaneously flaunt and dissect the privileged life, while the production turns manic and kaleidoscopic, hopscotching a world of pop while listeners are distracted by sheer catchiness.

5. SUFJAN STEVENS “The Age of Adz” (Asthmatic Kitty). Electronic blips, drum machines and splotchy distortion are shock treatment for songs that might have been folkier on previous Sufjan Stevens albums. But what starts out feeling invasive turns into part of a more inclusive — and nuttier, and trashier — sound vocabulary, skewing the songs away from preciousness as he sings about love.

6. KING SUNNY ADÉ “Bábá mo Túndé” (Mesa/IndigeDisc). An unassuming concept: to record full-length stage versions of songs. But on the first studio album in a decade by King Sunny Adé, his Nigerian juju music simply flies. The songs are a stream of hand-played percussion, with voices and other instruments popping in strategically, as the production pinpoints every drum stroke and pedal-steel-guitar zing. It’s dizzying dance music that miraculously defies repetition.

7. SADE “Soldier of Love” (Epic). Quiet and plush don’t add up to comfortable on Sade’s first album since 2000. There’s deep desolation in the songs, and an aching, bluesy edge in her voice. Her band willfully ignores whatever passes for fashionable in current R&B, while down below, particularly in the rhythms and bass lines, there’s a strange, intricate undertow.

8. SLEIGH BELLS “Treats” (Mom + Pop Music/NEET). Every song on this album merges a noisy kick in the head with a pop enticement, as blasts of low-fi drums and loud guitar bracket girlish vocals. Each whipsaw only whets the appetite for more.

9. KANYE WEST “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” (Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam). Self-aggrandizing and self-loathing, grandiose and goofy, leaping from stomping drums to cellos to sampled soul to dance-club electronics, “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” is a wildly multifarious inventory of Mr. West’s fixations. These id bulletins may not be timeless, but any obsessive type can relate to them. They add up to the definitive album on the pressures, diversions and payoffs of Internet-era celebrity.

10. DANGER MOUSE AND SPARKLEHORSE “Dark Night of the Soul” (Capitol/Lex/EMI). “Pain” is the first word on “Dark Night of the Soul,” one of the last projects by Mark Linkous, the songwriter who recorded as Sparklehorse, before his suicide in March 2010. His production and songwriting collaboration with Danger Mouse concocted stately, deliberately tarnished roots-rock full of despair and resentment. The guest lead singers — Iggy Pop, Suzanne Vega, Wayne Coyne of Flaming Lips — eerily echoed Mr. Linkous’s own voice.

Top Songs

CEE LO GREEN “____ You” (Elektra)

BEST COAST “Boyfriend” (Mexican Summer)

NEIL YOUNG “Rumblin’ ” (Reprise)

EMINEM FEATURING RIHANNA “Love the Way You Lie” (Aftermath/Interscope)

DIE ANTWOORD “Enter the Ninja” (Cherrytree/Interscope)

GALACTIC FEATURING IRMA THOMAS “Heart of Steel” (Epitaph)

YEASAYER “Ambling Alp” (Secretly Canadian)

BRIAN ENO “2 Forms of Anger” (Warp)

MAVIS STAPLES “You Are Not Alone” (Anti-)

STANDARD FARE “Dancing” (Bar/None)

A version of this list appeared in print on December 19, 2010, on page AR20 of the New York edition.

ENDPAPER

Best Ideas of a Decade

Published: December 17, 2010

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The editors asked Tyler Cowen, the economist who helps run the blog Marginal Revolution, to read the previous nine Ideas issues and send us his thoughts on which entries, with the benefit of hindsight, struck him as noteworthy. Do any ideas from this year’s issue look promising? “I recall reading the 2001 issue when it came out,” he says. “And I was hardly bowled over with excitement by thoughts of ‘Populist Editing.’ Now I use Wikipedia almost every day. The 2001 issue noted that, in its selection of items, ‘frivolous ideas are given the same prominence as weighty ones’; that is easiest to do when we still don’t know which are which.”

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Multimedia

Interactive Feature

The 10th Annual Year in Ideas

THE BEST IDEA OF EACH YEAR
2001: “Populist Editing.” Wikipedia has since eclipsed the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Microsoft’s Encarta project, and many of us use it almost every day.

2002: “Early-Detection Revisionism.” We often find extra medical treatment hard toturn down, yet frequently it does us little good or even harm, so sometimes it’s better not to know your condition at all. Prostatecancer is one area in which this idea is having an impact.

2003: “Social Networks.” The New York Times has a Facebook page, a Facebook application and a New York Times News Quiz on Facebook; then there are Facebook’s 500 million users.

2004: “Dumb Robots Are Better.” The days of the Jetsons, and housecleaning robots, are not upon us, so settle for less. Be happy if your robot does anything useful at all.

2005: “Touch Screens That Touch Back.” This pick was ahead of its time, as few people realized that this technology, as seen in the2002 Steven Spielberg movie “Minority Report,” would show up so quickly in the iPhone and the iPad.

2006: “Walk-In Health Care.” We’ll need more of this, as general practitioners are harder to see and emergency-room waits get longer.

2007: “The Best Way to Deflect an Asteroid.” Send satellites with mirrors to reflect the sun, vaporizing one spot on the asteroid, releasing gases and changing its course. If this ever comes in handy, it will be the biggest idea of them all.

2008: “Carbon Penance.” “ . . . a translucent leg band . . . keeps track of your electricity consumption. When it detects, via aspecial power monitor, that electric current levels have exceeded a certain threshold, the wireless device slowly drives six stainless-steel thorns intothe flesh of your leg.” Satire is an idea, too. The slightly more practical anti-global-warming idea from 2008 was to eat kangaroos,since they, unlike cows, do not produce methane gas.

2009: “Music for Monkeys.” We still don’t know which of the ideas from last year will pay off, but the idea of generating music that monkeys enjoy (and humans don’t) was the most fun of the bunch.

THE MOST PRESCIENT PICKS
2001: “Populist Editing” Wikipedia started in January 2001, and the magazine was quick to call its success. By 2007 (“Wikiscanning”), the magazine was writing about Congressional staff members who were editing Wiki pages for the benefit of their bosses.

2001: “The Game That Plays You” The idea of a collectively created fictional world, built out of thousands of interlinked Web pages, is standard for World of Warcraft fans, but it was not well known at the time.

2002: “S.S.R.I.’s as Performance Enhancers” Think of beta blockers for musicians or anti-social-anxiety drugs for athletes. Millions use them, and they probably lie behind a lot of today’s top performances. This story is still being written, but the evidence favors their effectiveness, and the drugs will only get better.

2002: “Early Detection Revisionism” Excess mammograms, overly zealous prostate treatments and too much back surgery still get press today, as the evidence continues to accumulate that some medical issues are better left alone than overtreated.

2004: “The Drug-Trial Registry” All clinical results from drug trials should be posted online for public inspection, and indeed the world has moved a long way in this direction.

BEST UNDERSTATEMENT
2005: “The Global Savings Glut” “Should the day of reckoning arrive, the task of mitigating the pain is going to fall mainly on Bernanke’s shoulders.” That’s the last sentence of the article, about the United States’ current account deficit.

OVERSOLD
2005: “The Laptop That Will Save the World” Predicting that a $100 laptop would help solve worldwide poverty wasn’t so prescient. The bettercall from 2005 was “Touch Screens That Touch Back”: screens that offer a sensory response when you run your finger along them, asis now the case with the iPad and other such devices.

A FEW IDEAS WE COULD USE MORE OF
2003: “Futures Markets in Everything” Intrade.com is the first place to go on election night for the results; it’s way ahead of the evening news. But how about conditional futures markets, like comparing the price of “2014 G.D.P. if a Republican wins” versus “2014 G.D.P. if Obama is re-elected”? That would show us which candidate the markets thought was better for the economy.

2004: “The Television Blaster” You point it at a loud TV in public, and it shuts the thing down.

2006: “Walk-in Health Care” It is time to consider bringing more of the retail efficiencies of Wal-Mart to our health care sector.

THE BEST ONE-SENTENCE OBSERVATION
“They” — our thumbs — “have suddenly become our most important digit.” That’s from 2003’s “Text Messager’s Thumb,” about the physical toll of text messaging.

THE MOST ‘OFF’ PICKS
2001: “The ‘X-Files’ Conspiracy Trope is Dead” Conspiracy theories seemed in decline, yet now so-called birthers are common, and as of August nearly 20 percent of the U.S. citizenry were willing to claim that Barack Obama was a Muslim, secretly or otherwise.

2001: “American Imperialism, Embraced” American imperialism has hardly remained fashionable, given the widespread skepticism about Iraq and Afghanistan and demands for fiscal austerity.

2005: Can Work Only Once? “Forehead Billboards” A 21-year-old named Andrew Fischer auctioned off the space on his forehead for $37,375 on eBay, thereafter attaching a small temporary tattoo advertising an over-the-counter sleep remedy. The company, SnoreStop, calculates that it received nearly $1 million worth of publicity. And a woman named Kari Smith leased her forehead for a permanent tattooed ad for the online gambling and entertainment venture GoldenPalace.com.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 19, 2010, on page MM62 of the Sunday Magazine.

En este día......

	Sunday, December 19th The 353rd day of 2010. There are 12 days left in the year. Go to a previous date.

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Today's Highlights in History
See a larger version of this front page.		On Dec. 19, 1984, Britain and China signed an accord returning Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty on July 1, 1997. (Go to article.)On Dec. 19, 1906, Leonid Brezhnev,the Soviet statesman who was the leader of the Soviet Union for 18 years, was born. Following his death on Nov. 10, 1982, his obituary appeared in The Times. (Go to obit. |Other Birthdays)
		On December 19, 1863, Harper's Weekly featured a cartoon about a Union drummer boy during the Civil War.  (See the cartoon and read an explanation.)

On this date in:
1732	Benjamin Franklin began publishing "Poor Richard's Almanac."
1776	Thomas Paine published his first "American Crisis" essay, writing: "These are the times that try men's souls."
1777	Gen. George Washington led his army of about 11,000 men to Valley Forge, Pa., to camp for the winter.
1843	Charles Dickens' Yuletide tale, "A Christmas Carol," was first published in Britain.
1907	A coal mine explosion in Jacobs Creek, Pa., killed 239 workers.
1946	War broke out in Indochina as troops under Ho Chi Minh launched widespread attacks against the French.
1972	Apollo 17 splashed down in the Pacific, ending the Apollo program of manned lunar landings.
1974	Nelson A. Rockefeller was sworn in as vice president, replacing Gerald R. Ford, who became president when Richard M. Nixon resigned.
1986	The Soviet Union announced it had freed dissident Andrei Sakharov from internal exile and pardoned his wife, Yelena Bonner.
1997	"Titanic," the second highest-grossing movie of all time, opened in American theaters.
1998	President Bill Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives for perjury and obstruction of justice. (He was later acquitted by the Senate.)
2000	The U.N. Security Council voted to impose broad sanctions on Afghanistan's Taliban rulers unless they closed terrorist training camps and surrendered U.S. embassy bombing suspect Osama bin Laden.
2003	Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi agreed to halt his nation's drive to develop nuclear and chemical weapons.
2005	Afghanistan's first democratically elected parliament in more than three decades convened.

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Current Birthdays

Jake Gyllenhaal turns 30years old today.

AP Photo/Evan Agostini Actor Jake Gyllenhaal turns 30 years old today.

77 Cicely Tyson Actress 76 Al Kaline Baseball Hall of Famer 69 Maurice White R&B musician (Earth, Wind and Fire) 67 James Jones Former national security adviser 67 Elaine Joyce Actress 66 Richard E. Leakey Palaeontologist 66 Alvin Lee Rock singer (Ten Years After) 66 Tim Reid Actor ("WKRP in Cincinnati") 55 Rob Portman Former White House budget director 53 Kevin McHale Basketball Hall of Famer 50 Mike Lookinland Actor ("The Brady Bunch") 47 Jennifer Beals Actress 46 Randall McDaniel Football Hall of Famer 43 Criss Angel Magician 41 Kristy Swanson Actress 39 Amy Locane Actress 38 Alyssa Milano Actress ("Charmed," "Who's the Boss?") 38 Warren Sapp Football player 25 Lady Sovereign Rapper

Historic Birthdays
Leonid Brezhnev
12/19/1906 - 11/10/1982 Russian statesman  (Go to obit.)
80	Charles-Julien Brianchon 12/19/1783 - 4/29/1864 French mathematician
55	Edwin Stanton 12/19/1814 - 12/24/1869 American Secretary of War under President Lincoln
78	A.A. Michelson 12/19/1852 - 5/9/1931 German-born American physicist
83	Barry Byrne 12/19/1883 - 12/17/1967 American architect
74	Fritz Reiner 12/19/1888 - 11/15/1963 Hungarian-born American conductor
80	Sir Ralph Richardson 12/19/1902 - 10/10/1983 English actor
92	George Davis Snell 12/19/1903 - 6/6/1996 American geneticist and Nobel Prize winner
75	Jean Genet 12/19/1910 - 4/15/1986 French novelist
47	Edith Piaf 12/19/1915 - 10/11/1963 French singer and actress

Go to a previous date.

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SOURCE: The Associated Press
Front Page Image Provided by UMI

Inteligencia colectiva (3 enlaces, 6 video-recomendaciones de la semana)

El caparazón: Inteligencia colectiva (3 enlaces, 6 video-recomendaciones de la semana)

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Inteligencia colectiva (3 enlaces, 6 video-recomendaciones de la semana) Posted: 19 Dec 2010 03:51 AM PST Llegamos esta semana con Bonus Track, después del disgusto que nos ha dado Times con esto de no atreverse a aceptar la votación popular y nombrar a Julian Assange, mensajero de la libertad, persona del año. Cobardía, supongo… el año que viene será  Por mi humilde parte, sabiendo que me debo a mis lectores/as y sin presiones mediante, os dejo las 9 recomendaciones de la semana, como siempre con mayoría de videopropuestas, esta vez 6. He dejado también una nueva sección en la barra lateral con los últimos vídeos subidos al canal en Youtube de El caparazón. Hasta muy, muy pronto. Remezcla, Tablets y Realidad aumentada 3 tendencias a la vez en el vídeo de Black Eyed Peas, las dos primeras, Tablets, realidad aumentada, en concreto, en el minuto 2:15. Tablets, Realidad aumentada y remezcla. ¿O deberíamos ampliar, en la sociedad llamada postdigital, el concepto de remezcla a la mezcla de bits y átomos también?  Quizás no sea tan nuevo…. el tema, revival de los 80, me ha hecho recordar ciertas postales, carteles postmodernistas, típicos/as de finales de los 90 en los que la fotografía se mezclaba con la ilustración. Una vez más la tecnología sirviendo a tendencias, mejorándolas: Chavales, dudas sobre Tic y niños/as: Preparamos varias cosas, entre ellas este blog de preguntas y respuestas. De momento somos tres expertos pero seremos más… Informaremos a su debido tiempo  El bloc de gencat. Generalitat de Catalunya » Predicciones 2011 sobre Administración y redes sociales: Preparo largo post sobre previsiones propio pero sirva como avance en el ámbito de las administraciones públicas el post colectivo que publicaba el blog de la Generalitat de Catalunya recientemente, sobre Administración pública y redes sociales,  con mi participación. También participo en la entrevista que me hacía, entre clase y clase,  José Antonio Latorre, Jefe del Servicio de Formación de la Diputación de Alicante, esta vez sobre Web 2.0 y formación. Flipboard o el placer de leer feeds: Sí, me han hablado tanto ya de Flipboard, aplicación del año, que tenía que ver este vídeo que nos deja Antonio: YouTube – Introducing Word Lens: Más realida aumentada, capaz de leer carteles, de indentificar las formas de los objetos y reconocerlos e incluso de traducir textos, como véis en el vídeo. Espectacular…. Realidad aumentada y educación: Ya lo introduje hace meses en el ebook monográfico de educación y web 3.0 que elaboraba, aunque costaba encontrar ejemplos. Es también una de las tendencias que identificaba junto a los expertos que participamos en el Informe Horizon internacional 2011 (aquí lo tendremos en un tiempo). Empiezan a surgir cursos y a proliferar artículos y aplicaciones de RA en este ámbito. El vídeo explica muy bien su adecuación: Epic Docs Animation: Como muestra de que las ganas son lo importante, de que la creatividad no tiene más límites que los que mentes cerradas puedan imponer, una animación creada en exclusiva en Google Docs…. espectacular  Por último, sabida la íntima relación entre la afición a los ordenadores y los gatos, os dejo con estossignos de que tu gato compite por tu atención con Internet que resultarán tan familiares a los que conviven con tan evolucionados seres  . La siguiente es la primera imagen de la serie que encontraréis en el enlace.

La variabilidad en Núcleo Accumbens media la actividad relacionada con la edad de de tomar riesgos financieros subóptimos

La variabilidad en Núcleo Accumbens media la actividad relacionada con la edad de de tomar riesgos financieros subóptimos Como la esperanza de la vida humana sigue aumentando, las decisiones financieras de inversionistas envejecidos pueden tener un impacto creciente en la economía mundial. En este estudio, hemos examinado las diferencias de edad en las decisiones financieras en la vida adulta mediante la combinación de técnicas de neuroimagen funcional con una tarea de inversión financiera dinámica. Durante la tarea, los adultos mayores hicieron más opciones subóptimas que los adultos jóvenes la hora de elegir los activos de riesgo. Este efecto relacionado con la edad se vio mediada por una medida neural de variabilidad temporal en la actividad del núcleo accumbens. Estos resultados revelan un nuevo mecanismo neural que el envejecimiento puede afectar la elección racional financiera. Variability in Nucleus Accumbens Activity Mediates Age-Related Suboptimal Financial Risk Taking Gregory R. Samanez-Larkin, Camelia M. Kuhnen, Daniel J. Yoo, and Brian Knutson Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-2130, and Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208-2001 The Journal of Neuroscience, January 27, 2010, 30(4):1426-1434; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4902-09.2010 As human life expectancy continues to rise, financial decisions of aging investors may have an increasing impact on the global economy. In this study, we examined age differences in financial decisions across the adult life span by combining functional neuroimaging with a dynamic financial investment task. During the task, older adults made more suboptimal choices than younger adults when choosing risky assets. This age-related effect was mediated by a neural measure of temporal variability in nucleus accumbens activity. These findings reveal a novel neural mechanism by which aging may disrupt rational financial choice Puede leer este artí­culo en PDF

Atentamente Anestesiología y Medicina del Dolor www.anestesia-dolor.org

Descubren dónde se ocultan células que se escapan a la quimioterapia

Descubren dónde se ocultan células que se escapan a la quimioterapia

30 OCTUBRE 2010 1 COMENTARIO

Foto: AP

Los resultados del estudio, que abre una vía de estudio para evitar la recurrencia del cáncer, se publican en la revista ‘Cell’. Dentro del timo, las células cancerígenas están sumergidas en factores de crecimiento que las protegen de los efectos de los fármacos. Estas células son probablemente el origen de los tumores recurrentes.

Los investigadores planean comenzar en ratones pronto las pruebas que interfieren con uno de estos factores protectores. Estos fármacos se desarrollaron originalmente para tratar la artritis y ahora están en ensayos clínicos para este uso. Un fármaco de este tipo, utilizado en combinación con la terapia tradicional, podría eliminar las células tumorales residuales y evitar las recaídas.

Según explica Michael Hemann, responsable del estudio, “una terapia anticancerígena de éxito necesita incluir un componente que elimine las células tumorales así como un componente que bloquee las señales de prosupervivencia. Las terapias actuales contra el cáncer fallan en dirigirse a esta respuesta de supervivencia”. En su estudio los investigadores trataron a ratones con linfoma con doxorubicina, un fármaco utilizado para tratar una amplia variedad de cánceres, incluyendo los de la sangre.

Descubrieron que durante el tratamiento, las células que cubren los vasos sanguíneos liberan citoquinas, pequeñas proteínas que influyen en las respuestas inmunes y el desarrollo celular. Aunque se desconoce el mecanismo exacto, los investigadores creen que los daños en el ADN inducidos por la quimioterapia provocan que las células de los vasos sanguíneos lancen una respuesta de estrés que suele proteger a las células progenitoras, las células inmaduras que pueden convertirse en diferentes tipos de células de la sangre. Esta respuesta de estrés incluye la liberación de citoquinas como la interleuquina-6, que promueve la supervivencia celular.

“En respuesta al estrés ambiental, la respuesta física es proteger a las células privilegiadas de esa área, como por ejemplo las células progenitoras. Estos mecanismos son asimilados por las células tumorales, en respuesta a las terapias del cáncer de primera línea que utilizamos”, explica Hemann.

El descubrimiento supone la primera vez que los científicos han observado una señal protectora evocada por la quimioterapia en el área alrededor del tumor, conocido como microambiente tumoral. “Es completamente inesperado que los fármacos promuevan una respuesta de supervivencia. El impacto de los factores de supervivencia locales suele no considerarse cuando se administra la quimioterapia, menos aún que pueda inducir señales de pro-supervivencia”, añade el investigador.

Aunque debe comprobarse aún si los resultados se pueden trasladar a los humanos, el descubrimiento sugiere varias posibles dianas farmacológicas, incluyendo la IL-6 y una proteína llamada Bcl2, que se activa mediante IL-6 y dice a las células que deben mantenerse vivas. A pesar de que los investigadores observaron este efecto protector sólo en el timo, creen que deberían existir otras áreas protegidas donde las células tumorales se ‘ocultan’, como la médula ósea.

El descubrimiento podría ayudar a explicar por qué los tumores que se han extendido a otras partes del organismo antes de su detección son más resistentes a la quimioterapia, ya que podrían haber asimilado algún sistema de protección de las citoquinas para ayudarles a sobrevivir a los efectos de los fármacos.