Have you pre-ordered you copy of The Crossley ID Guide? It is available for pre-order on our web site and from many online retailers.

Earlier Crossley Unplugged videos:

• In the garden, bird baths and plantings
• In the garden, bird feeders
• Where to go birding?

Post your bird IDs from this episode in the comments section below. How many different types of birds do you see in this installment?

Did you read this article in the NY Times, Science Times about Chaser, a collie who now recognizes 1,022 nouns? The article–which bears the wonderful title “Sit. Stay. Parse. Good Girl!”–argues that Chaser’s example might teach us about how humans acquire language, too. In the response below, Louise Barrett, author of the forthcoming book Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds, cautions us to take Chaser’s story with a grain of salt. She argues here (and in her book) that traditional ways of viewing intelligence should be re-evaluated and all may not be as it seems.

My dog, Cassie, is a border collie. Unlike Chaser, the collie who has learned the names of over 1000 toys, Cassie’s vocabulary is rather more limited: all her toys are called ‘scrunchies’—the name of the first toy she was ever given. She consistently fails to learn any other names, and her apparent lack of intellectual ability has led my husband to dub her a ‘borderline collie’. Perhaps Cassie is simply not inclined to learn more and wants to get on with the ‘real’ game of fetch or, more likely, we lack the dedication to teaching shown by John Pilley, Chaser’s owner. Reading about Chaser’s feats, one cannot help be impressed by the feat of teamwork displayed by man and dog, and Chaser’s ability to discriminate between over 1000 different items is truly remarkable. So, why bring human language into it? As one commentator on Nicholas Wade’s piece puts it: “It’s too bad we see in this article the old, reliable tendency to make this finding valuable if it tells us something about how human children learn. How narrow are humans!” Exactly so. Our anthropocentrism, our desire to see ourselves reflected in other animals, is indeed a narrow perspective, and one that, inevitably, results in the diminishing of Chaser’s natural intelligence.

Consider how one of the first questions asked is whether Chaser is showing ‘simply’ a Clever Hans effect, the mere cuing into human body language without true ‘understanding’. The interpretation of the Clever Hans effect as ‘simple’ has always struck me as rather odd. After all, there’s nothing ‘simple’ about it; I find it amazing that another creature—one so different from us in morphology and its manner of engaging with the world—can nevertheless cue into the subtlest aspects of human body tension and breathing patterns, and learn to read them so expertly. Indeed, I find it much more interesting than the idea that Hans could actually count.

Thanks to Pilley’s careful experimental approach, we know that Chaser’s abilities are not the result of such inadvertent cuing, but even if they were, they would still tell us something interesting about the perceptual learning abilities of border collies, abilities we have bred into them and which are clearly exceptional; watching a collie herding sheep, sensitive to the subtle shifts and change in the herd’s response and responding itself to the minimal cues provided by the shepherd, can seem almost magical to our untutored eyes. But, of course, it isn’t magic. It is a form of expert pattern-recognition, a kind of fluid anticipation, as the dog notices the right things and responds at the right moment. It seems a shame that we spend our time attempting to eliminate such effects, wary of the spectre of Clever Hans, and not investigating them in their own right. Living in our human language-heavy world, we often fail to recognize how common and important such body-based practical knowledge is to the successful negotiation of our physical and social environment. We too are expert pattern-recognizers, engaged in a process of moment-by-moment attunement and adjustment to the things and events we encounter as we go about our daily lives; we too are creatures that cue into subtle aspects of movement and mood; we too spend part of every day behaving just like Clever Hans.

Emphasizing the language-like nature of Chaser’s skills, and whether she understands ‘meaning’, therefore misses the point. We can instead choose to look at things less analytically, with more attention to pattern, much like the way that turning down the sound on a TV show makes us more aware of the gestures and facial expressions that accompany the speech on which our attention usually becomes fixed. We can, in other words, attempt to look at the tasks without labeling the sounds that Chaser hears as ‘nouns’ and ‘verbs’, or ‘proper nouns’ versus ‘common’ ones. And when we do this, we see how Chaser has learned to discriminate the patterning of sounds and objects, on an ever finer level, and how these finely drawn perceptual discriminations of objects have also been discriminated from the patterns of actions that can accompany them, all achieved within the social context of pleasing her owner, and receiving praise and treats. Lacking the fully linguistic scaffold that shapes our view of the world—the way in which, as Andy Clark, the philosopher puts it, language ‘freezes’ our thoughts into objects, creating islands (or icebergs?) of thoughts about thoughts—Chaser may not see the task as we do at all, even though she performs exceptionally well at it. For her it may be another form of pattern-recognition, and not the bizarre human practice of word-learning. Indeed, this is the real lesson of Clever Hans: we shouldn’t assume that Chaser, and other animals in other experiments, sees their tasks as we do, even when their performance is consistent with a human-like interpretation.

John Pilley says he wants to teach Chaser a ‘receptive, rudimentary language’ as a way to help develop communication between people and dogs. Clearly, Chaser will be an apt pupil. But if we want to increase communication between humans and dogs there is another way. Instead of imposing the weird world of human language on dogs by dint of ‘brute repetition’ and daily drills, we could instead learn to read more closely the body-based cues and signals our dogs produce, and exploit the pattern-recognizing skills that we already share. A little less conversation, a little more Clever Hans please.

Kathleen Graber’s second collection The Eternal City: Poems–and Paul Muldoon’s first pick in the revived Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets–has been selected as a National Book Critics Circle Finalist in Poetry, 2010.

The collection was also a finalist for the National Book Awards, so many congratulations to Kathleen Graber and Series Editor Paul Muldoon on this second major nomination!

The winners won’t be announced until March 10th, but until then, you can read the official press release from NBCC’s Critical Mass blog here.

Congratulations to John Willard Milnor, author of the Princeton Published: Characteristic Classes (AM-76), Dynamics in One Complex Variable (AM-160), Introduction to Alebraic K-Theory, Morse Theory (AM-51), Prospects in Mathematics (AM-51), Singular Points of Complex Hypersurfaces (AM-61) and Topology from Differentiable Viewpoint! Milnor won the much deserved 2011 Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement from [...]

This week, in honor of Robert Burns’s birthday (Jan. 25th, 1759), we are giving away the book, The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography by Robert Crawford.

No writer is more charismatic than Robert Burns. Wonderfully readable, The Bard catches Burns’s energy, brilliance, and radicalism as never before. To his international admirers he was a genius, a hero, a warm-hearted friend; yet to the mother of one of his lovers he was a wastrel, to a fellow poet he was “sprung . . . from raking of dung,” and to his political enemies a “traitor.” Drawing on a surprising number of untapped sources–from rediscovered poetry by Burns to manuscript journals, correspondence, and oratory by his contemporaries–this new biography presents the remarkable life, loves, and struggles of the great poet.

“Crawford’s Burns, merrily mixing high and low culture, seems eerily contemporary. He shares with great hip-hop artists a genius for catchy, sexy, and memorable rhymes gloriously liberated from the hegemony of standard English.”–New Yorker

Anyone who LIKES us on Facebook is automatically entered in the giveaway. A winner will be randomly drawn this Friday.

The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography by Robert Crawford

Congratulations to Timothy Gowers, editor of The Princeton Companion to Mathematics, who was recently awarded the Euler Book Prize for 2011 by the Mathematical Association of America. In the Euler Book Prize citation it is noted, “[t]he Committee, in recommending the award, singled out Professor Gowers because of his extraordinary achievement in putting this whole [...]

BOOK FACT: About seventy thousand Indians once owned the eastern half of the area that is now the state of Oklahoma, a territory immensely wealthy in farmland, forest, coal mines, and untapped oil pools.

And Still the Waters Run:
The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes
By Angie Debo
One of Princeton University Press’s Notable Centenary Titles.

Debo’s classic work tells the tragic story of the spoliation of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole nations at the turn of the last century in what is now the state of Oklahoma. After their earlier forced removal from traditional lands in the southeastern states–culminating in the devastating ‘trail of tears’ march of the Cherokees–these five so-called Civilized Tribes held federal land grants in perpetuity, or “as long as the waters run, as long as the grass grows.” Yet after passage of the Dawes Act in 1887, the land was purchased back from the tribes, whose members were then systematically swindled out of their private parcels.

The publication of Debo’s book fundamentally changed the way historians viewed, and wrote about, American Indian history. Writers from Oliver LaFarge, who characterized it as “a work of art,” to Vine Deloria, Jr., and Larry McMurtry acknowledge debts to Angie Debo. Fifty years after the book’s publication, McMurtry praised Debo’s work in the New York Review of Books: “The reader,” he wrote, “is pulled along by her strength of mind and power of sympathy.”

Because the book’s findings implicated prominent state politicians and supporters of the University of Oklahoma, the university press there was forced to reject the book in …. for fear of libel suits and backlash against the university. Nonetheless, the director of the University of Oklahoma Press at the time, Joseph Brandt, invited Debo to publish her book with Princeton University Press, where he became director in 1938.

We invite you to browse the book in Google Preview:
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/423.html

In a few days the art world will take a leap into uncharted territory with the launch of the VIP Art Fair, the first-ever contemporary art fair available exclusively online from Saturday January 22nd to Sunday January 30th. This unique venture gathers 139 leading galleries from 30 countries in a week-long around-the-clock event in which thousands of artworks from rising talents to established household names will be presented on the Internet for sale to an international set of collectors and curiosity-seekers.

This fair’s launch marks a seminal moment in today’s art economy. For while the Internet has revolutionized how commodities like books, music, airline tickets and clothing are consumed, it is often supposed that art operates in another realm altogether. Steep prices and sanctuary-like exhibition displays have certainly set the market for art distinctly apart from that of ordinary retail goods, and the lavish social rituals of its inhabitants lend the industry an air of preciousness seemingly at odds with the leveling force of hyper-connectivity, social networks – and tweets.

No longer. The fact of the matter is that while computer screens can never replicate the experience of seeing an artwork in the flesh, they don’t always need to either. For as the art world has globalized, the Internet has become a veritable social glue, interconnecting dealers and collectors more profoundly than ever before, and arming them with more information about the artworks at hand than piles of dusty catalogues of old.

The result is that art today is bought site unseen with increasing haste – whether through electronic bids placed at the major auction houses (where around a third of sales are now conducted online), or in the primary trade where dealers presell exhibitions and turnover their inventory through email communications, JPEGs, phone and Skype, often before collectors ever come in contact with the objects, themselves. And while lower priced editions and multiples still account for much art sold online, price points and the quality of goods on offer are on the ascent.

The VIP Art Fair is a natural extension of this changing landscape, offering a sophisticated and technologically-enabled solution for the trade. Images on the site can be zoomed in to reveal incredible depth, visitors can stream HD video artworks and an integrated messaging system sparks the beginnings of conversations in real-time.

The Fair’s ingenuity may also boil down to the fact that it does not aspire to turn art market conventions upside-down, but to thoughtfully reposition some notable characteristics. Over the past decade, the time-limited format of physical art fairs has proven to be a successful model for far-flung galleries to do business with an increasingly international collector base. New work is commissioned, exhibition strategies are crafted months in advance and a frenzied competitive melee ensues to beckon the sale. VIP – an acronym for “Viewing in Private” – draws on the evaporative moment of this model, but streams the fair online to the comfort of one’s choosing. It is a post-bubble, cost-efficient – even green – alternative to a familiar routine.

Spread across three online exhibition halls (VIP Premier, for established galleries; VIP Focus, for galleries highlighting a single artist’s work; and VIP Emerging for younger galleries showing art that is less than two years old), galleries present between eight to 20 works, and may hold up to 80 in private reserve to share in discretion with interested collectors. The status of these galleries equals that of the leading bricks-and-mortar fairs, an absolute necessity if collectors are to buy from a remove, and one key advantage of the online format is that galleries can present work that they never would have dreamed of showing in the limited space of a physical booth – outdoor sculpture or oversize installations, for instance, that are costly to ship and nearly impossible to install at an ordinary fair.

Access, moreover, is completely free: anybody can register at no charge to see the dealers’ booths and has the ability to select favorites and share their own tours of the Fair with friends. VIP Passholders, meanwhile, can see prices, may interact with dealers and also have access to a VIP Lounge with additional exclusive content (films of artist studios and private collections, newsfeeds and curator-led tours of the Fair).

With the biggest names in the business taking part, multimillion dollar sales are a distinct possibility. But the Fair is not an e-commerce platform (no shopping carts or Pay Pal checkouts): artworks may well be presented for sale, however actual transactions are settled off of it. In this sense the VIP Art Fair, at its core, a testament to the power of aggregation and the ever valuable role of access, relationship-building and quality in a far flung, fast-paced world.

Tomorrow’s art market is an exciting and evolving space. For a snapshot of how it is shaping up, visit http://vipartfair.com.

–by Noah Horowitz, Director of the VIP Art Fair and author of the forthcoming book, ART OF THE DEAL:Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market (pub date February 9, 2011)

It seems Abraham Loeb’s How Did the First Galaxies Form? has made it overseas. For more information about How Did the First Galaxies Form?, including an excerpt, click here.

Happiness today is not just a possibility or an option but a requirement and a duty. To fail to be happy is to fail utterly. Happiness has become a religion–one whose smiley-faced god looks down in rebuke upon everyone who hasn’t yet attained the blessed state of perpetual euphoria. How has a liberating principle of the Enlightenment–the right to pursue happiness–become the unavoidable and burdensome responsibility to be happy? How did we become unhappy about not being happy–and what might we do to escape this predicament? In Perpetual Euphoria, Pascal Bruckner takes up these questions with all his unconventional wit, force, and brilliance, arguing that we might be happier if we simply abandoned our mad pursuit of happiness.

A stimulating and entertaining meditation on the unhappiness at the heart of the modern cult of happiness, Perpetual Euphoria is a book for everyone who has ever bristled at the command to “be happy.”

Pascal Bruckner is the award-winning author of many books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novel Bitter Moon, which was made into a film by Roman Polanski. Bruckner’s nonfiction books include The Tyranny of Guilt (Princeton), The Temptation of Innocence, and The Tears of the White Man (Free Press).

We invite you to read the introduction online:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9269.pdf

Perpetual Euphoria:
On the Duty to Be Happy
By Pascal Bruckner
Translated by Steven Rendall

We are excited to announce that two Princeton books have just won National Jewish Book Awards administered by the Jewish Book Council! The purpose of the award, given annually since 1948, is designed to recognize outstanding books on Jewish topics each year. Awards are given in sixteen different categories, including debut fiction, scholarship, biography and [...]

BOOK FACT: African American fraternal orders waged legal fights to defend their right to exist—fights that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where African Americans ultimately prevailed. Involving some of the lawyers who later went on to work with the NAACP, this struggle won some of the major victories in the quest for equal civil rights in America.

What a Mighty Power We Can Be:
African American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality
By Theda Skocpol, Ariane Liazos, & Marshall Ganz

The authors demonstrate how African American fraternal groups played key roles in the struggle for civil rights and racial integration.

From the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, millions of American men and women participated in fraternal associations–self-selecting brotherhoods and sisterhoods that provided aid to members, enacted group rituals, and engaged in community service. Even more than whites did, African Americans embraced this type of association; indeed, fraternal lodges rivaled churches as centers of black community life in cities, towns, and rural areas alike. Using an unprecedented variety of secondary and primary sources–including old documents, pictures, and ribbon-badges found in eBay auctions–this book tells the story of the most visible African American fraternal associations.

We invite you to read chapter one online:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8267.html