(1) When does history begin? It is tempting to reply “In the beginning”, but like many obvious answers, this soon turns out to be unhelpful. As a great Swiss historian once pointed out in another connexion, history is the one subject where you cannot begin at the beginning. If we want to, we can trace the chain of human descent back to the appearance of vertebrates, or even to the photosynthetic cells which lie at the start of life itself. We can go back further still, to almost unimaginable upheavals which formed this planet and even to the origins of the universe. Yet this is not “history”.

(2) Commonsense helps here: history is the story of mankind, of what it has done, suffered or enjoyed. We all know that dogs and cats do not have histories, while human beings do. Even when historians write about a natural process beyond human control, such as the ups and downs of climate, or the spread of disease, they do so only because it helps us to understand why men and women have lived (and died) in some ways rather than others.

(3) This suggests that all we have to do is to identify the moment at which the first human beings step out from the shadows of the remote past. It is not quite as simple as that, though. We have to know what we are looking for first and most attempts to define humanity on the basis of observable characteristics prove in the end arbitrary and cramping, as long arguments about “apemen” and “missing links” have shown. Physiological tests help us to classify data but do not identify what is or is not human. That is a matter of a definition about which disagreement is possible. Some people have suggested that human uniqueness lies in language, yet other primates possess vocal equipment similar to our own; when noises are made with it which are signals, at what point do they become speech? Another famous definition is that man is a tool-maker, but observation has cast doubt on our uniqueness in this aspect, too, long after Dr. Johnson scoffed at Boswell for quoting it to him.

(4) What is surely and identifiably unique about the human species is not its possession of certain faculties or physical characteristics, but what it has done with them—its achievement, or history, in fact. Humanity’s unique achievement is its remarkably intense level of activity and creativity, its cumulative capacity to create change. All animals have ways of living, some complex enough to be called cultures. Human culture alone is progressive: it has been increasingly built by conscious choice and selection within it as well as by accident and natural pressure, by the accumulation of a capital of experience and knowledge which man has exploited. Human history began when the inheritance of genetics and behavior which had until then provided the only way of dominating the environment was first broken through by conscious choice. Of course, human beings have always only been able to make their history within limits. These limits are now very wide indeed, but they were once so narrow that it is impossible to identify the first step which took human evolution away from the determination of nature. We have for a long time only a blurred story, obscure both because the evidence is poor and because we cannot be sure exactly what we are looking for.

(1) In a natural disaster—a hurricane, flood, tornado, volcanic eruption, or other calamity—minutes and even seconds of warning can make the difference between life and death. Because of this, scientists and government officials are working to use the latest technological advances to predict when and where disasters will happen. They are also studying how best to analyze and communicate this information once it is obtained. The goal is to put technology to effective use in saving lives and property when nature unleashes its power with devastating results.

(2) On September 29, 1998, Hurricane Georges made landfall in Biloxi, Mississippi, after devastating Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and several islands of the Caribbean with torrential rains and winds up to 160 km/h (100 mph). Few people lost their lives along the Gulf Coast of the United States, although hundreds died in the Caribbean.

(3) This was a very different outcome from 1900, when a powerful Gulf Coast hurricane made an unexpected direct hit on Galveston, Texas, killing at least 6,000 people. Vastly improved hurricane warnings explain the different circumstances at either end of the 20th century—residents of Galveston had no advance warning that a storm was approaching, while residents of Biloxi had been warned days in advance of Georges’s approach, allowing for extensive safety precautions.

(4) At the same time that people in Biloxi were thankful for the advance warning, some residents of New Orleans, Louisiana, 120 km (75 mi) to the west, were less satisfied. A day before Georges made landfall, forecasters were predicting that the hurricane had a good chance of striking New Orleans. Because much of New Orleans lies below sea level, the city is at risk for flooding. In addition, because New Orleans has a large population in vulnerable locations, emergency management officials must begin evacuations well before a storm strikes. But evacuation costs money: businesses close, tourists leave, and citizens take precautionary measures. The mayor of New Orleans estimated that his city’s preparations for Georges cost more than 50 million. After the full fury of Georges missed New Orleans, some residents questioned the value of the hurricane forecasts in the face of such high costs.

(5) The differing views on the early warnings for Hurricane Georges illustrate some of the complexities involved in predicting disasters. Disaster prediction is more than just forecasting the future with advanced technology—it is also a process of providing scientific information to the government officials and other decision makers who must respond to those predictions.

(6) In general, the process has three phases. First, there is the challenge of forecasting the event itself. In the case of Georges, scientists worked to predict the future direction and strength of the hurricane days in advance.

(7) A second important challenge is communicating the forecast to decision makers. Because forecasts are always uncertain, a central factor in disaster predictions is communicating this uncertainty. Uncertainty is usually described in terms of odds or probabilities, much like daily weather forecasts. The media plays an important role in communicating predictions and their uncertainty to the public.

(8) The third part of the process is the use of predictive information by decision makers. Even the most accurate information is of little value if the decision maker does not use it appropriately, for example in deciding whether to order an evacuation. If there is a breakdown in any of these three phases of prediction, the result is increased danger and a higher risk of loss of life.

(1) In developing a model of cognition, we must recognize that perception of the external world does not always remain independent of motivation. While progress toward maturity is positively correlated with differentiation between motivation and cognition, tension will, even in the mature adult, militate towards a narrowing of the range of perception. Cognition can be seen as the first step in the sequence events leading from the external stimulus to the behavior of the individual. The child develops from belief that all things are an extension of its own body to the recognition that objects exist independent of his perception. He begins to demonstrate awareness of people and things which are removed from his sensory apparatus and initiates goal-directed behaviors. He may, however, refuse to recognize the existence of barriers to the attainment of his goal, despite the fact that his cognition of these objects has been previously demonstrated.

(2) In primitive beings, goal-directed behavior can be very simply motivated. The presence of an attractive object will cause an infant to reach for it; its removal will result in the cessation of that action. Studies have shown no evidence of the infant’s frustration; rather, it appears that the infant ceases to desire the object when he cannot see it. Further indications are that the infant’s attention to an attractive object increase as a result of its not being in his grasp. In fact, if he holds a toy and another is presented, he is likely to drop the first in order to clutch the second. Often, once he has the one desired in his hands, he loses attention and turns to something else.

(3) In adult life, mere cognition can be similarly motivational, although the visible presence of the opportunity is not required as the instigator of response. The mature adult modifies his reaction by obtaining information, interpreting it, and examining consequences. He formulates a hypothesis and attempts to test it. He searches out implicit relationships, examines all factors, and differentiates among them. Just as the trained artist can separate the value of color, composition, and technique, while taking in and evaluating the whole work, so, too, the mature person brings his cognitive learning strengths to bear in appraising a situation.

(4) Und erstanding that cognition is separate from action, his reactions are only minimally guided from conditioning, and take into consideration anticipatable events.

(5) The impact of the socialization process, particularly that of parental and social group ideology, may reduce cognitively directed behavior. The tension thus produced, as for instance the stress of fear, anger, or extreme emotion, will often be the overriding influence. The evolutionary process of development from body schema through cognitive learning is similarly manifested in the process of language acquisition. Auditing develops first, reading and writing much later on. Not only is this evident in the development of the individual being from infancy on, but also in the development of language for humankind.

(6) Every normal infant has the physiological equipment necessary to produce sound, but the child must first master their use for sucking, biting, and chewing before he can control his equipment for use in producing the sounds of language. The babble and chatter of the infant are precursors to intelligible vocal communication.

(7) From the earlier times, it is clear that language and human thought have been intimately connected. Sending or receiving messages, from primitive warnings of danger to explaining creative or reflective thinking, this aspect of cognitive development is also firmly linked to the needs and aspirations of society.

(1) Scotland Yard’s top fingerprint expert, Detective Chief Superintendent Gerald Lambourne had a request from the British Museum’s Prehistoric Department to focus his magnifying glass on a mystery “somewhat outside my usual beat”.

(2) This was not a question of Whodunit, but Who Was It. The blunt instruments he pored over were the antlers of red deer, dated by radio-carbon examination as being up to 5,000 years old. They were used as mining picks by Neolithic man to hack flints and chalk, and the fingerprints he was looking for were of our remote ancestors who had last wielded them.

(3) The antlers were unearthed in July during the British Museum’s five-year-long excavation at Grime’s Graves, near Thetford, Norfolk, a 93-acre site containing more than 600 vertical shafts in the chalk some 40 feet deep. From artifacts found in many parts of Britain it is evident that flint was extensively used by Neolithic man as he slowly learned how to farm land in the period from 3,000 to 1,500 B. C.

(4) Flint was especially used for axe-heads to clear forests for agriculture, and the quality of the flint on the Norfolk site suggests that the miners there were kept busy with many orders.

(5) What excited Mr. G. de G. Sieveking, the museum’s deputy director of the excavations, was the dried mud still sticking to some of them. “Our deduction is that the miners coated the base of the antlers with mud so that they could get a better grip, ” he says. “The exciting possibility was that fingerprints left in this mud might at last identify as individuals as people who have left few relics, who could not read or write, but who may have had much more intelligence than has been supposed in the past.”

(6) Chief Superintendent Lambourne, who four years ago had “assisted” the British Museum by taking the fingerprints of a 4,000-year-old Egyptian mummy, spent two hours last week examining about 50 antlers. On some he found minute marks indicating a human hand—that part of the hand just below the fingers where most pressure would be brought to bear the wielding of a pick.

(7) After 25 years’ specialization in the Yard’s fingerprints department, Chief Superintendent Lambourne knows all about ridge structures—technically known as the “tri-radiate section”.

(8) It was his identification of that part of the hand that helped to incriminate some of the Great Train Robbers. In 1995 he discovered similar handprints on a bloodstained tee-marker on a golf-course where a woman had been brutally murdered. They eventually led to the killer, after 4,065 handprints had been taken.

(9) Chief Superintendent Lamboure has agreed to visit the Norfolk site during further excavations next summer, when it is hoped that further hand-marked antlers will come to light. But he is cautious about the historic significance of his findings.

(10) “Fingerprints and handprints are unique to each individual but they can tell nothing about the age, physical characteristics, even sex of the person who left them,” he says. “Even the fingerprints of a gorilla could be mistaken for those of a man. But if a number of imprinted antlers are recovered from given shafts on this site I could at least determine which antlers were handled by the same man, and from there might be deduced the number of miners employed in a team.”

(11) “As an indication of intelligence I might determine in which way the miners held the antlers and how they wielded them.”

(12) To Mr. Sieveking and his museum colleagues any such findings will be added to their dossier of what might appear to the layman as trivial and unrelated facts but from which might emerge one day an impressive new image of our remote ancestors.

(1) I cry easily. I once burst into tears when the curtain came down on the Kirov Ballets Swan Lake. I still choke up every time I see a film of Roger Bannister breaking the “impossible” four minute mark for the mile. I figure I am moved by witnessing men and women at their best. But they need not be great men and women, doing great things.

(2) Take the night, some years ago, when my wife and I were going to dinner at a friend’s house in New York City, for example. It was sleeting. As we hurried toward the house, with its welcoming light, I noticed a car pulling out from the curb. Just ahead, another car was waiting to back into the parking space—a rare commodity in crowded Manhattan. But before he could do so another car came up from behind, and sneaked into the spot. That’sdirty pool, I thought.

(3) While my wife went ahead into our friend’s house, I stepped into the street to give the guilty driver a piece of my mind. A man in work clothes rolled down the window.

(4) “Hey, ” I said, “this parking space belongs to that guy. ” I gestured toward the man ahead, who was looking back angrily. I thought I was being a good Samaritan, I guess—and I remember that the moment I was feeling pretty manly in my new trench coat.

(5) “Mind your own business!” the driver told me.

(6) “No, ” I said. “You don’t understand. That fellow was waiting to back into this space.”

(7) Things quickly heated up, until finally he leaped out of the car. My God, he was colossal. He grabbed me and bent me back over the hood of his car as if I was a rag doll. The sleet stung my face. I glanced at the other driver, looking for help, but he gunned his engine and hightailed it out of there.

(8) The huge man shook his rock of a fist at me, brushing my lip and cutting the inside of my mouth against my teeth. I tasted blood. I was terrified. He snarled and threatened, and then told me to beat it. Almost in a panic, I scrambled to my friend’s front door. As a former Marine, as a man, I felt utterly humiliated. Seeing that I was shaken, my wife and friends asked me what had happened. All I could bring myself to say was that I had had an argument about a parking space. They had the sensitivity to let it go at that.

(9) I sat stunned. Perhaps half an hour later, the doorbell rang. My blood ran cold. For some reason I was sure that the bruiser had returned for me. My hostess got up to answer it, but I stopped her. I felt morally bound to answer it myself.

(10) I walked down the hallway with dread. Yet I knew I had to face up to my fear. I opened the door. There he stood, towering. Behind him, the sleet came down harder than ever.

(11) “I came back to apologize, ” he said in a low voice. “When I got home, I said to myself, what right I have to do that? I’m ashamed of myself. All I can tell you is that the Brooklyn Navy Yard is closing. I’ve worked there for years. And today I got laid off. I’m not myself. I hope you’ll accept my apology.”

(12) I often remember that big man. I think of the effort and courage it took for him to come back to apologize. He was man at last.

(13) And I remember that after I closed the door, my eyes blurred, as I stood in the hallway for a few moments alone.

(1) Although the distribution of recorded music went digital with the introduction of the compact disc in the early 1980s, technology has had a large impact on the way music is made and recorded as well. At the most basic level, the invention of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), a language enabling computers and sound synthesizers to talk to each other, has given individual musicians powerful tools with which to make music.

(2) “The MIDI enabled basement musicians to gain power which had been available only in expensive recording studios,” one expert observed. “It enables synthesis of sounds that have never existed before, and storage and subsequent simultaneous replay and mixing of multiple sound tracks. Using a moderately powerful desktop computer running a music composition program and a ’500 synthesizer’, any musically literate person can write—and play—a string quartet in an afternoon.”

(3) Whereas many musicians use computers as a tool in composing or producing music, Tod Machover uses computers to design the instruments and environments that produce his music. As a professor of music and media at the MIT Media Lab, Machover has pioneered hyperinstruments: hybrids of computers and musical instruments that allow users to create sounds simply by raising their hands, pointing with a “virtual baton”, or moving their entire body in a “sensor chair”.

(4) Similar work on a “virtual orchestra” is being done by Geoffrey Wright, head of the computer music program at Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, Maryland. Wright uses conductors’ batons that emit infrared light beams to generate data about the speed and direction of the batons, data that can then be translated by computers into instructions for a synthesizer to produce music.

(5) In Machover’s best-known musical work, Brain Opera (1996), 125 people interact with each other and a group of hyperinstruments to produce sounds that can be blended into a musical performance. The final opera is assembled from these sound fragments, material contributed by people on the Web, and Machover’s own music. Machover says he is motivated to give people “an active, directly participatory relationship with music.”

(6) More recently, Machover helped design the Meteorite Museum, a remarkable underground museum that opened in June 1998 in Essen, Germany. Visitors approach the museum through a glass atrium, open an enormous door, enter a cave, and then descend by ramps into various multimedia rooms. Machover composed the music and designed many of the interactions for these rooms. In the Transflow Room, the undulating walls are covered with 100 rubber pads shaped like diamonds. “By hitting the pads you can make and shape a sound and images in the room. Brain Opera was an ensemble of individual instruments, while the Transflow Room is a single instrument played by 40 people. The room blends the reactions and images of the group.”

(7) Machover’s projects at MIT include Music Toys and Toys of Tomorrow, which are creating devices that he hopes will eventually make a Toy Symphony possible. Machover describes one of the toys as an embroidered ball the size of a small pumpkin with ridges on the outside and miniature speakers inside. “We’ve recently figured out how to send digital information through fabric or thread,” he said. “So the basic idea is to squeeze the ball and where you squeeze and where you place your fingers will affect the sound produced. You can also change the pitch to high or low, or harmonize with other balls.”

(8) Computer music has a long way to go before it wins mass acceptance, however. Martin Goldsmith, host of National Public Radio’s Performance Today, explains why: “I think that a reason a great moving piece of computer music hasn’t been written yet is that—in this instance—the technology stands between the creator and the receptor and prevents a real human connection, ” Goldsmith said. “All that would change in an instant if a very accomplished composer—a Steve Reich or John Corigliano or Henryk Gorecki—were to write a great piece of computer music, but so far that hasn’t happened. Nobody has really stepped forward to make a wide range of listeners say, ’Wow, what a terrific instrument that computer is for making music!’”

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