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Tree and leaf

The study of living things may shed light on urban planning. And vice versa

Feb 11th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

Alamy

CITIES are often described as being alive. A nice metaphor, but does it mean anything? And, if it does, can town planners and biologists learn from one another? Steven Strogatz, a mathematician at Cornell University, wrote last year that Manhattan and a mouse might just be variations on a single structural theme. His point was that both are, in part, composed of networks for transporting stuff from one place to another. Roads, railways, water and gas mains, sewage1.污物, 垃圾; 污水2下水道(系统)pipes and electricity cables all move things around. So do the blood vessels of animals and the sap-carrying xylem and phloem of plants. How far can the analogy be pushed?

Peter Dodds of the University of Vermont draws a particular analogy between the blood system and a suburban railway network. The commuter-rail system of a city ramifiesv. 分枝; 纵横交错; 分派from the centre. The farther out you go, the sparser稀疏的
it is. By analogy, Dr Dodds predicted, the network of capillaries (the tiny blood vessels that permeate tissues) would not be as dense in large animals (where many of them are far from the centre) as it is in small ones. They, too, branch ultimately from a central source—the heart. Surprisingly, no one had looked for this before, but in a paper published recently in Physical Review Letters Dr Dodds shows that this does indeed turn out to be the case.

Dr Dodds’s calculations overthrow a 70-year-old rule of thumb大拇指规则 which is known as the ¾ law of metabolismn.  【生】新陈代谢, 代谢作用. This suggests energy expenditure费用; 经费; 开支 is proportional to body mass raised to the power of three-quarters. That a mouse expends more energy per gram than an elephant does is well known. But Dr Dodds’s calculations show that metabolic rates must fall off faster than had previously been believed as animals get bigger because less glucose than thought is being transported by the smaller than predicted capillary network. The law needs to be adjusted to something more like two-thirds.

Two other studies published in the same volume similarly overthrow conventional wisdom about plants. Traditionally, biologists have celebrated the trunk, branch and twig system of a tree as no accident. Many mathematical formulas have suggested it is the best, least wasteful way to design a distribution network. But the very end of such a network, the leaf, has a different architecture. Unlike the xylem and phloem, the veins in a leaf cross-link and loop(线、带等绕成的)圈, 环, 线圈. Francis Corson of Rockefeller University in New York used computer models to examine why these loops exist.

From an evolutionary point of view, loops seem inefficient because of the redundancy inherent in a looped network. Dr Corson’s models show, however, that this inefficiency is true only if demand for water and the nutrients it contains is constant. By studying fluctuations in demand he discovered one purpose of the loops: they allow for a more nuanced delivery system. Flows can be rerouted through the network in response to local pressures in the environment, such as different evaporation rates in different parts of a leaf.

Another group of researchers at Rockefeller, led by Marcelo Magnasco, also examined vein-loops in leaves. They found that as well as improving efficiency, they also help to ameliorate v. 改善, 变好, 改良damage. They discovered this by injecting
fluorescent dye荧光染料 into leaves to see if the vein network could distribute the dye to all parts of a leaf that had been damaged. They found the loops are structured in such a way that no matter which piece of a leaf’s supply mechanism is disrupted, there is usually enough capacity in the rest to distribute water and nutrients. “It was very surprising,” Dr Magnasco observes. “The famous theoremsn. 定理, 法则that tell us that the optimal structure is a tree failed in a spectacular fashion.”

The leaf, then, is a resilient distribution network—one whose principles could be applied to, say, electricity grids. Next time your power is cut off because a tree has fallen on the cable, remember that.

Pillar of wisdom

Feb 11th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

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The Rule of Law. By Tom Bingham. Allen Lane; 213 pages; £20. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

TOM BINGHAM holds that what has come to be known as the rule of law is “the nearest we are likely to approach to a universal secular现世的, 尘世的; 世俗的; 非宗教的 religion”. The key word is “universal”. Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor of the exchequer, once described the National Health Service (NHS) as being similarly important to the British, but as Barack Obama’s attempts to reform America’s health-care system demonstrate, the NHS is not the envy of the world. For most people who live under the rule of law its blessings can be clearer and less ambiguous even than those conferred by liberal democracy or free markets.

Uniquely, Lord Bingham has held all three of Britain’s great judicial offices: Master of the Rolls, Lord Chief Justice and Senior Law Lord until his retirement in 2008. In recent times no British jurist n. 法学家, 法律着作家, 法理学者other than Lord Denning has wielded 支配, 行使more influence on the development of the law. In this short but important book, Lord Bingham begins by outlining the historical milestones (from the Magna Carta to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948) that have contributed to understanding what is meant by the rule of law and what he believes are eight essential principles that underpin加基础于...; 加强...的基础 it.

Among these are the accessibility of the law, equality before the law法律面前人人平等, the right to a fair trial公正审判, the legal accountability of servants of the state官吏 and so on. Most of Lord Bingham’s eight principles are uncontroversial, although some will feel that, in defining his preference for a “thick” over a “thin” definition of the rule of law, he goes too far by including social injustices, such as a right to education, which he feels “no one living in a free democratic society…should be required to forgo”.

However, it is when he gets to his final point, the requirement that states should regard their obligations under international law as no less forceful than those under national laws, that he really makes his mark出名成功. In a cool, but deadly dissection of the assault on the rule of law that was launched by the so-called “war on terror”, Lord Bingham deals first with the question of whether the allied invasion of Iraq was legal. He has no doubt that it was not. He argues persuasively that neither Security Council resolutions 678 nor 1441 could bear the weight that the British government was forced to place on them when confronted by the failure to obtain a further resolution explicitly authorising the use of force. One cannot help feeling that Tony Blair and Lord Goldsmith might have had a hotter time under examination by Lord Bingham than by the Chilcot panel.

His greatest concern is the way in which the threat of terrorism has been used to justify the encroachmentn. 侵蚀，侵犯
on civil liberties. Lord Bingham takes to task责备某人, 申斥某人governments both in Britain and abroad who subvert颠覆; 推翻; 暗中破坏 the rule of law in the name of security, using Orwellian euphemisms such as control orders (house arrest without trial), extraordinary rendition (kidnapping) and enhanced interrogation techniques (torture). And he quotes Benjamin Franklin with approval: “He who would put security before liberty deserves neither.”

Lord Bingham ends by asking what makes the difference between good and bad government. It is, of course, the rule of law. He concludes: “It remains an ideal, but an ideal worth striving for, in the interests of good government and peace, at home and in the world at large全面地, 详细地, 充分地, 无省略地.”

Mix message

Barack Obama’s advisers lay out some steps to a rebalanced economy. Others are out of his hands

Feb 11th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

Illustration by Jac Depczyk

FEW things have frustrated Washington’s punditocracyn. 权威统治集团
more than the search for “Obamanomics”, a consistent set of principles that underpins Barack Obama’s thinking on the American economy. “We can’t afford another so-called economic ‘expansion’ like the one from the last decade…where prosperity was built on a housing bubble and financial speculation,” Mr Obama declared in his state-of-the-union address last month. Well, OK. But what, then, should the next expansion be like? It usually falls to a president’s Council of Economic Advisers to drape悬挂, 装饰 his pronouncements in respectable economics. Mr Obama’s council attempts to do just that in its annual “Economic Report of the President”, released on February 11th.

In a nutshell简言之, 概括起来, 一言以蔽之, the report argues that it is not enough for the economy to start growing again. Rather, “the composition of spending needs to be reoriented再改方向, 再定方位; 再适应环境.” That means smaller roles for consumption and housing, and bigger roles for saving, investment and exports. The report elegantly reframes much of Mr Obama’s domestic agenda as microeconomic微观经济的 nudges in the direction of this overall macroeconomic宏观经济的, 总体经济的 rebalancing.

In the years leading up导致 to the crisis soaring asset prices, financial innovations and low unemployment all encouraged Americans to spend more and save less. Their saving as a share of disposable income税后所得 fell steadily from around 10% in the early 1980s to around 1%, while home-ownership rates and residential-construction activity both outran levels justified by demography alone. Wealth, credit availability and unemployment have all now reversed.

The report predicts consumption and home-building will be smaller shares of GDP while the personal-saving rate will stabilise v. (使) 稳定 at a higher equilibrium均衡, 均势, 相称, 平均 of between 4% and 7%. Mr Obama is pushing this process along by making retirement-saving plans more readily available and encouraging employers to increase employee contributions. The report does not say so, but the logical result of his financial reforms will be closer scrutiny of lending practices that will deprive marginal borrowers of credit.

In place of consumption and housing, the report says, business investment will expand. Investment since the 2001 recession has been “abnormally low”. Two forces will reverse that.

First, higher personal-saving rates and (more optimistically) a lower federal deficit will hold down long-term interest rates and the cost of capital. Second, the prospective return on investments will be buoyed by “promising technological developments”.

The administration thinks it can intensify the second force by funding more basic research. Private research and development (R&D) is hamstrung减弱...的活动能力 by uncertainty over the fate of an R&D tax credit, which at present must be renewed by Congress each year. Mr Obama proposes making it permanent. The backlogged积累(积压待办事项) Patent and Trademark Office can take up to four years to approve a patent application. Mr Obama has endorsed congressional plans to let it charge more to speed things up. The administration is telling federal agencies to track the results of the research they fund so that money is spent to maximum effect.

The report argues that as personal savings rise and the federal deficit declines, America’s appetite for foreign savings will shrink. The current-account deficit, which topped 6% of GDP in 2006, will narrow in the long run to between 1% and 2% of GDP, where it stood in the mid-1990s. Aiding this shift is a boost to exports that the report predicts will be a natural consequence as other countries, especially in Asia, rebalance their own economies towards greater consumption and investment.

In his state-of-the-union address Mr Obama called for a doubling of exports in five years. Achieving that is a stretch but the report nonetheless argues that the Export-Import Bank, which Mr Obama wants to increase its financing for smaller exporters, can help. More boldly, the report and Mr Obama’s speech suggest that the president has set aside his ambivalence about free trade and may soon take up stalled free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama. The report also argues that a more progressive tax system, expanded health care and worker retraining are better ways to respond to the inevitable disruptions trade brings than protectionism. (Some of this is contrived: increased health-care coverage may well soften the sting of jobs lost to freer trade, but that is not why Mr Obama is pursuing it.)

The mercy of others

Laudable值得称赞的; 值得赞美的 as most of these microeconomic moves are, rebalancing depends crucially on two macroeconomic levers Mr Obama either cannot or will not touch: interest rates and the dollar. The council’s report frankly acknowledges that by draining national saving, the federal deficit, which will hit a record 10.6% of GDP this year, will hinder rebalancing. Yet it argues that tackling the deficit should wait until the “Federal Reserve…has the tools to counteract” the fallout. That will not be for a while yet. The report says that even with interest rates at zero, monetary policy remains “unusually tight” because negative rates would be more appropriate. Put less diplomatically, this means unless the Fed drags its feet on raising rates, fiscal contraction risks choking the economy. But that is a decision for the Fed, not Mr Obama.

A weaker dollar is also critical to rebalancing growth. Indeed, its decline to date correlates almost perfectly with the drop in the non-oil trade deficit since 2006, according to Martin Baily and Robert Lawrence, two economists at the Brookings Institution and Harvard University respectively. This is not, however, something America, as the world’s biggest debtor and the custodian of its reserve currency, can be seen to encourage. Nor is it solely America’s choice to make. The dollar is also captive to other countries’ exchange-rate policies and saving habits. As a result the “Economic Report of the President” is largely silent on the currency. Mr Obama seems to understand that the economy needs to rebalance. Whether it does may be out of his hands.

Out from the ashes

Recent sales of contemporary art reveal a vibrant yet capricious rebound

Feb 17th 2010 | From The Economist online

The contemporary art business has bounced back faster than many expected, but the market still lacks the coherent drive of the boom.一句话点名主旨 Whereas evening sales in 2007 had the exhilaration of a Formula One race, last week's contemporary sales at Sotheby's, Christie's and Phillips had a rambling不着边际的 (谈话), 漫无限制的, (思想等)散漫的 feel, as if bidders were driving cross country in a wide range of vehicles.

Sotheby's

Sotheby's kicked off the week with an evening sale on February 10th that brought in £54.1m ($84.5m), the second-highest total for a February contemporary auction and three times more than last year's paltry没有价值的; 微不足道的 £17.9m. Of the 79 lots on offer, more than half came from the highly credible but hithertoadv.  迄今; 到目前为止uncommercial collection of Gerhard and Anna Lenz, who have concentrated on a branch of apocalypticallyadj. 预示灾祸的，启示的 minimal art called “Zero”. The artworks, which Sotheby's catalogue associated with “a grey emptiness... a cultural cemetery墓地, 公墓 and a knowledge vacuum”, were not what you'd normally think of as surefireadj. 一定成功的 auction lots. Nevertheless, most of them were met with enthusiastic bidding and 19 works achieved record prices. Sotheby's European chairman of contemporary art, Cheyenne Westphal, explained that buyers “took great comfort in the time, care and consideration invested by Mr and Mrs Lenz in assembling such a coherent group.”

One historic lot was a rare set of three paintings by Roman Opalka, who has conceived想到； 想象
his oeuvre n. 全部作品 since 1965 as a single continuous work in which he paints white numbers in order from one to infinity on consecutive连续的， 依顺序的, mostly grey canvases; each new painting starts the numbers where he last left off (see slideshow below). The “1-∞” paintings were initially offered as three separate lots, but the artist intervened after hearing about the sale and requested they be sold as a triptych. The buyer of the Opalkas told The Economist that the “marriage value” of the three works was worth the £713,250 he paid. “Opalka is one of the great artists of the conceptual era,” he said. “Three consecutive paintings tell the story of the incredible beauty that comes out of this intense labour.”

A 1961 “Fire” painting by Yves Klein entitled “F 88”, which features voids in the shape of naked women, was the most expensive lot of the Lenz consignment, reaching £3.3m. It was bought by a Swiss collector sitting in the room, who also acquired Klein’s “MG 25” for £1.7m and Lucio Fontana's copper relief, “Concetto Spaziale, New York 26”, for £3.1m (see slideshow). Loic Gouzer, a contemporary art specialist at Sotheby's, enthused v. 热狂, 使热心, “Owning a Klein is like owning a fragment of another planet.”

No contemporary evening sale is complete these days without a Peter Doig. Sotheby's offered “Saint Anton (Flat Light)”, a large-scale snowy mountainscape, consigned by James Van Damme, who had acquired the painting from the Victoria Miro Gallery for £12,000 in 1996. The lot sold for £2.84m to an anonymous telephone bidder. When asked why he was selling, Mr Van Damme admitted that he was keen to buy a Trinidadian summer scene by the artist, adding that “Sotheby's did an amazing job convincing me to sell.” Many were surprised, including Mr Van Damme, when Mr Doig's “Concrete Cabin West Side” (see slideshow), from an earlier, more art-historically relevant series, sold for less—£2.1m—at Christie's the following night. Rumour has it that Roman Abramovich psyched out吓坏 装疯 逃避 the competition; no one wants to bid against him.

On February 11th Christie's sold 90% of their 51 lots, bringing in a total of £39.1m—a nice step up from the £8.4m raised in the equivalent 相等的, 相当的 sale last year. Lot 1 raised an eyebrow使别人人惊讶，引人侧目或不满or two: Matthew Day Jackson's 2007 depiction of Richard Buckminster Fuller in psychedelic glasses (see slideshow) soared over its high estimate of £40,000 to sell for £601,250 to Laurence Graff, a diamond dealer, sitting in the front row. Mr Graff had not heard of the young artist until he received Christie's catalogue, but he was “knocked out” when he saw the work up close. “I'm a jeweller. I know about execution and that painting is flawless,” said Mr Graff. “I didn't care what I paid.” Mr Graff went on to purchase a large red “Dollar Sign” painting by Andy Warhol and also the cover lot: Yves Klein's “Anthropométrie (ANT 5)”, a wood panel on which a woman's figure is outlined in the artist’s signature blue pigment, created as part of a series of six just before the artist's death at age 34 in 1962 (see slideshow).

Other triumphant lots included Klein's “Relief Eponge Or (RE 47II)”, which sold for £5.9m, the highest price of the week; Martin Kippenberger's “Fliegender Tanga (Flying Tanga)”, an early five-canvas extravaganza, which fetched vt. 取来，获得£2.6m, the second-highest price ever paid for the artist at auction; and Alighiero Boetti's “Onomino”, a red pen “Biro” work from 1973, which achieved a record £1m for Boetti. As Francis Outred, the director of Christie's postwar and contemporary art department in Europe, saw it, “We've seen growth in the market when we're supposed to have been in recession. The prices of European postwar artists are catching up with their American counterparts.”

Following these sales was one at Phillips de Pury & Company on Friday night. At the end of the week, one needs some entertainment, and Simon de Pury, a flamboyant艳丽的, 灿烂的 auctioneer with a rogue歹徒, 流氓 sense of humour, always accommodates. He hammered out £6.1m worth of art, mostly by younger artists selling for under £100,000. The top lots all sold for over £500,000—including two Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings, a Donald Judd wall sculpture, an exquisite精致的, 高雅的 little Gerhard Richter, “Abstrakes Bild”, and a fabulously adv. 难以置信地perverse George Condo painting called “Father and Son” (see slideshow). Back in 2008 Phillips was thought to be in a precarious financial state, and in 2009 the company weathered some shaky sales, so it was good to see a sell-through rate of 86% by lot, 92% by value. After the sale, Henry Allsopp, who went from being a private dealer to a senior specialist at Phillips just a month ago, said earnestly, “I think the market wants a third auction house—a cooler place where contemporary art is the core business.”

comment:

Yeah when times goes down for business, the best choice keeping the value of money is to buy some art works. But i wonder if all the works are equivalent to the price they were sold, in my sense, which i think some other factors just exaggerate the real value of the piece work. So let us focus on what we have experienced in the essay, what we got is that the bouncing back market really turns on our dealers faith in the future, but don't slide on the other tinny issue that market still lacks the coherent drive of boom, in a nutshell, the future is more bluring than what we expect.