Why Apple killed the most important applications on the Mac: Aperture and iPhoto

A bong smolders in the sanctum sanctorum of 1 Infinity Loop, Cupertino California. It’s early 2013 and Apple’s most powerful billionaires are looking ahead. Billions of dollars are overflowing Apple’s bank accounts…

“We’re screwed. Totally f*cked. Gimme that bong”.

“Yeah. I know. It’s bad. Google is gonna stomp us. Android owns the world. Schools are gonna do Google Apps on Chromebooks. We were wrong about phablets and now the iPad is gonna die. There’s no way we can catch up with Google Docs.”

“Yeah, we’ve all seen the numbers. We get a few good years … then boom - we’re Microsoft. Damn. Gimme that …”

“Sh*t. We gotta do something. Google’s got the numbers and the Net — how can we fight that?”

“We got something. We got the hardware. We gotta take a different angle and hope Samsung slits Google’s throat — because they hate Google even more than they hate us.”

“There’s plan B. Ditch everything where we ain’t making big money. That pro-software sh*t - we make more money in a day’s iPhone sales that we make on a year of Aperture. Nobody makes money on high end stuff any more. And look at our iPhoto sales — sucking wind for years. Ditch it, ditch it all. Hell, dump the Mac. We’ll be all “internet of things”…”

“No.”

“No? Hey you sure you don’t want some of this T ..”

“No”.

“No and Plan B is suicide. We can’t fight Google there. They’ll slaughter us. We gotta go with Plan A. We gotta make stuff that works for the low end and the geeks. We have to do the whole thing and we gotta stop screwing up the software. We screwed up iTunes. iCloud - everything on iCloud. iPhoto — oh, God, we screwed that one so many ways. Podcast.app - took  two years to fix that. iBook — you ever try using that piece of sh*t?. We got money — but we don’t have time. So we get better.”

“Plan A? That’s bad stuff man. We blow that, we’re done.”

“Plan A. And we’re gonna start with stuff we shoulda owned. We’re gonna start with photos. Nobody can manage their photos. People take thousands and lose ‘em all when they drop their phone in the toilet. Photo geeks have thousands in Aperture and they lose ‘em all - no backups.”

“Hah! You think we can do this? We had a great app with iPhoto, but we couldn’t add Library Management because that was an Aperture thing. Then we were five years late with a single iPhoto to Aperture library. We made iPhoto stupider, but we couldn’t make it easy to use. Sh*t we were idiots.”

“Aperture! Hah, that was joke. How many geeks every figured how to use our keyword tree? Even Brainiacs didn’t get that one. Where’d we buy that crap UI from anyway? Looks like something from NeXT.”

“Enough. We do Plan A. We’re gonna make a single application that works with a Phablet or an iMac, one app that scales from kids with phones to camera geeks. Elite and civilian — all of ‘em. We’re gonna burn our bridges — we’re gonna make it official. iPhoto and Aperture are dead.”

“Wow, we’re gonna have a lot of mad customers. But, hell, what are they gonna do? It’s easier to change gender than to move from Aperture to Lightroom — and Adobe ain’t gonna last much longer anyway. There’s no money in pro software, and they got nothing else.”

“So how do we do it? We should be classy. Let folks know we’ll keep the apps going until everything’s set. They’ll be bummed, but we know how to do this right.”

“No.”

“No?! What do you mean no?!”

"We gotta make Google think we’re idiots. We’ll let it slip out through some blogger mac geeks read. We’ll give ‘em nothing. We’ll make it look like we’re pissing off our best customers. Google won’t suspect a thing. Hell, what are they gonna do? Go to Lightroom?!”

“Pass me that bong”.

Beyond America - Google world editions with Google Reader and Google Share

This morning, thinking of Brazil I wrote ...

I just wish I, and we, had a better way to share and understand the fascinating and terrible world that we live in. We see only slices and shards of it. My hope is that even though today's machine translation only works  for very closely related languages (ex: English, French, German) that it will improve dramatically in the next decade. When that time comes Google News (or the future equivalent) may reveal the invisible world. Maybe, one day, even Chicago.

This morning, reading the NYT on my iPhone's NYT.app, I was again annoyed by my inability to easily share my thoughts on what I read there. I want to create Google Reader Shared item notes on my shared item page/feed (and twitter reflection [2]), but that's not a NYT option. [1]. Google News gave me the same feeling a bit later. I wished I could read and share using Reeder.app with superb new "readability" integration.

This afternoon I realized I can take a step now towards all of these objectives.

Most of the NYT articles I'm interested in show up in Google News. Google News has editions for many nations (left). Each Google news edition or section has a unique feed.

So I've added a representative sample of Google News English language editions to my Google Reader feeds. Certainly Canada (my birthplace) and the US, but also India (english version) and Southeast Asia. I've grouped them in a single "folder" so I can easily mark the entire collection as read (this is a high volume collection).

I'll be tweaking the set, and sharing from this set.

Of course what I really want is integrated machine translation for Chinese sources, but we're not there yet. Machine translation barely works for closely related languages and it's computationally intensive.

-- fn -

[1] I've tried workarounds such as email to a hidden blog that I follow in Reeder, and sharing from there, but it's too tedious. There might be something I could do using Yahoo! Pipes, but, frankly, I'd forgotten about them.
[2] I'm seriously tired of Twitter's string length limits. It's darkly funny that some consider this a feature.

See also:

• Gordon's Tech: Filtering my Google Reader Share with Yahoo Pipes
• Gordon's Tech: How do I share my Google Reader Shared Items Feed and process it via Yahoo Pipes?
• Gordon's Tech: Social wrestling: Google Reader, Twitterfeed, Blogger and Facebook
• Gordon's Tech: Tweeting Google Reader Shares and Notes via feedburner
• Gordon's Tech: FreeMyFeed - Getting Twitter feed to Google Reader
• Gordon's Notes: How I discover people to follow - on Google Reader
• Gordon's Notes: My Google Reader bundles - November 2011

Google Chinese to English - a rare good result

Google translate is built into Google Reader. That allows me to follow someone who shares both English and Chinese material.

Google's translation of the Chinese content is usually unreadable. Each sentence seems more or less correct, but the sum is incoherent.

Today, however, I came across a post I could read. The sentences were still a bit stilted, but the paragraphs were coherent. Overall it read like a bilingual native Chinese speaker writing in quite good English.

The trick is that the interview was conducted in English, then human translated to Chinese, then Google machine (statistically) translated back to English. The Chinese translation must have preserved quite a bit of the original sentence structure; enough that the reverse translation worked quite well.

Fascinating!

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My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Google translate 2010 - a marker

This is the Feb 2010 Google Translate output from a Chinese language original ...

天涯周立波

... Perpetual motion machine needs rotor, the rotor is Zhao Benshan and Guo Degang. Zhou Libo positioning themselves with the middle-class waiter, while a decorated themselves with the middle class, followed by a run did not forget about Zhao Benshan. Said Zhao Benshan services for farmers, location of China's rural areas. With that, make up an "In fact, I always have great respect for Old Zhao" and then express their hair a period of "cultural pluralism", the Old Zhao has also stepped on, their body position also climbed up. The results we all know that Old Zhao's fans will feel that "feelings were seriously damaged," the rotor to turn up...

Some of it can be understood, other bits read like receptive aphasia word salad. Amusing, but not terribly informative.

I'm keeping this example as a baseline for the translation results of 2011.

Update 3/21/2010: A NYT OpEd by a translator makes light of Google's efforts.

... Google Translate is a statistical machine translation system, which means that it doesn’t try to unpick or understand anything. Instead of taking a sentence to pieces and then rebuilding it in the “target” tongue as the older machine translators do, Google Translate looks for similar sentences in already translated texts somewhere out there on the Web. Having found the most likely existing match through an incredibly clever and speedy statistical reckoning device, Google Translate coughs it up, raw or, if necessary, lightly cooked....

The approach seems to work well for English/French, but it fails miserably for English/Chinese. The sentences translated from Chinese seem individually meaningful, but the paragraphs are nonsensical.

The critic sounds frightened to me -- and he should be. Google translator works quite well for similar languages. On the other hand, they have another great leap to take if they're going to bridge the Chinese to English gulf.

See also: Using Computing Might, Google Improves Translation Tool - NYTimes.com.
--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

We need translation on Google Reader for Mobile!

After a hiatus when Google Reader social was broken, I'm back to following shares and blogs that alternate English with Chinese and other languages.

This would be a killer feature for Google Reader desktop, except that GR desktop has already killed all the feed reader competition. On a bigger scale though, embedded translation is one of the reasons that Google will (sadly) crush Apple and, over the next 20 years, machine translation will transform human civilization.

Yeah, I meant that. I've even added a new GR "label" (post tag) today called "translation".

Problem is Google Reader for Mobile doesn't do translation! Argghh. My non-English feed items (blogs, shares, etc) are unreadable on my iPhone. It's been over a year since GR desktop added translation services, and Mobile is still unilingual.

Sigh. I am 95% sure Google work on this will include the iPhone, and 5% worried it won't. If they do omit the iPhone, I may have to move to the gPhone sooner than I'd expected. That's how big this feature is. The GR Mobile translation story is just one more telling illustration of why Apple will lose its war with Google.

So, Google, for your user's sake and to encourage Apple to sue for peace sooner, please do get on this.

See also:

• 2009 will be the year of machine translation
• Google reader: now with translation services (Nov 2008!)
• Reading my writing translated
• Joy of the global web -- what's 101 mean?
• Do I make more sense in Greek?
• Gordon's stuff, now in 35 languages

How I discover people to follow - on Google Reader

Buzz has been a great disappointment.

It's not all bad though. Google built a lot of Buzz on the Google Reader Shared Item experiments, and as a side-effect they fixed the long broken social bits of Google Reader.

So now I'm enjoying enlisting new unpaid specialists to sort and manage the world's information flow for me. It's like having my own team of incredibly expensive super-smart uber-analysts -- except I don't pay them anything.

Mwaahh-ha-ha-ha!

Ok, so maybe the evil laughter is a bit much. After all, they're free to follow what I share, and we're all feeding the hivemind. It who laughs last is Skynet, as the saying goes.

How do I use Google reader to enlist my witting info-drones?

I look for the "like" link on posts that I like a lot, but that don't have many other "likes". I then click the "like" link and scan the names and associated metadata, looking for people who are different from me -- different nationality, age, gender, profession, etc. Then I look at their shared items. If they've shared interesting things that are new to me, I follow them. I also add them to my special "x-reader" group which allows them to comment on anything I share (should they decide to follow me, though most will not).

None of this worked reliably a month ago, but it works now.

My "People you follow" section is now becoming my strongest information source. I'm able to follow fewer feeds directly, as I now outsource the processing chore to my fellow minions.

Quite nice, really.

Update 3/2/2010: I'm also again trying Google Readers "show in my language" feature to start following non-English "likes". I believe Google's Translation feature is extremely disruptive and amusingly under appreciated. This is how the really big things often come - quietly in the night. Note that the latest betas of Chrome for Windows now incorporate translation services into the browser. I'm looking forward to an English-Chinese-English view of my posts that will allow me to optimize my English writing for English-Chinese automated translation.
--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Brave new world: China attacks Google

Based on the phrasing and response, it's clear that Google believes this attack was launched by parties working for the government of China. We can also assume that the "relevant US authorities" (FBI) agree with them. I wonder if the targeted companies used software with similar vulnerabilities.

Official Google Blog: A new approach to China

Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident--albeit a significant one--was something quite different.

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors--have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves...

... We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that "we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China."

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.

This may be the end of Google's services in China. We should expect their share price to fall in the morning. Google's "evil score" has now dropped to the lowest possible level for a public corporation.

Update 1/13/10: There's a lot of commentary this morning, including comparisons to how the USSR hobbled itself by shutting out access to world knowledge. I'm wondering if Google's increasingly powerful and ubiquitous machine translation services played a precipitating role. Language has been the cultural equivalent of the Himalayas - preserving China from cultural invasion. I suspect the Chinese government is very concerned about widespread direct unmediated access to English language materials.
--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

The state of social networks: Facebook, Twitter and one other

I’ve interacted with three social network systems. Two get a lot of media attention, but the most interesting one is currently invisible. Here’s how they look to me in December 2009.

Facebook is currently useful, but worrisome. It's useful because it’s been a useful way for me to share family news that (very) close friends may enjoy seeing. Facebook is where I announce that my 12 yo scored a goal in a hockey game, and where my readers would understand that a goal is not always just a goal. Facebook is worrisome because their business model is currently based on exploiting the weakest members of a social graph, and then on selling information and marketing access to the entire graph. It’s remarkable how uninteresting Facebook’s ads are. That’s a bad sign, even thought it says something interesting about the limited predictive value of one's friendships.

Twitter would be more interesting if I had an archaic cell phone with unlimited text messaging, or if I had an interest in the domestic disturbances of celebrities. Twitter’s usage is on the same track as Friendster and MySpace. I don’t think it will last very much longer.

The most interesting social network I know of, however, is one that has very few members, no media coverage, no books, little documentation, no clear strategy, and mysterious privacy and revenue models. This is the Google Reader share and comment graph including the (currently) “like-based” discovery model.

Through the Google Reader (GR) “like” link I’ve identified about six English-language writers around the world who share an interest in topics I want to know about. When I find one who is sharing interesting items I don’t see or know about, I add them to my GR graph. They may choose to follow me or not – that’s not relevant to me. The value is that I can follow what they do.

I add one such meta-feed to my knowledge stream every few weeks. The stream volume does not increase much, because I can in turn drop direct reads of streams my experts cover. Given the uber-geekiness of the GR graph membership the quality of shared items is currently very high, but I don’t see why this approach won’t scale even in the event that the GR graph gets market attention.

The primary risk to this model, of course, is that Google will lose interest. I suspect, however, that this experiment will provide Google with interesting ways to explore and classify the world’s information stream – a mission very dear to their revenue model.

Google’s machine translation is improving every month – I’m looking for my first Chinese-language source. That will be interesting.

The GR graph means Google wins and I win. Maybe, if this increases the value of the world’s knowledge stream, we all win.

I like that model.

See also

• Gordon's Notes- Google reader “like” and the shared discovery process
• Gordon's Tech- Google Reader- Experiments with notes, following and sharing
• Gordon's Notes- Google reader micro-blogging and changes to Gordon Notes
• Gordon's Tech- More of me- My Google Reader Shared Item Feed’
• Official Google Reader Blog- Share anything. Anytime. Anywhere

Update: Of course the day I post this is the day it seems to stop working. I am following about 17 people, but nothing happens if I try to add someone new. Google has been doing something funky with sharing permissions; it's possible that when I "follow" someone they have to approve before anything happens. So it's now more of a "request to follow".

Reading my writing translated

I have knacks, but not for language. I still remember a bit of the old country however. Which is why it's neat to try to read a blog post - in French (see the drop down on the right side of this page to translate)

Some of it reads sensibly, other bits less so. Some of the word choices seem exotic.

I expect there's a knack to writing for translation. One would author a post, then do a round trip translation. Identify the parts that, on back translation, don't quite work. Do this a couple of times with your target language. Once the back translation is acceptable, you can be reasonably sure the initial translation works.

This would be fairly easy to automate. I'd like to give it a try if the tools were in place. I'm excited about machine translation, even if it's so far had less of an impact than I'd expected.

See also:

• Google reader: now with translation services

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My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

iPhone trouble: Apple rejects Google Latitude, possibly Google Voice

Apple appears to have rejected a long anticipated native iPhone app from Google -- Google Latitude ..

Daring Fireball Linked List: Google Latitude for iPhone, But Only as a Web App:

... Translation: Apple rejected their native iPhone app...

Google has introduced their Google Voice native app for every phone but ... the iPhone.

The worrisome state of the Palm Pre may have emboldened the darker side of Apple. I'm going to be downplaying my iPhone enthusiasms until we get some clarity about where Apple is going with this.

Update: I've got a fix for Google. The problem with Latitude is that it only updates my position when I use it. I don't have that much use for it, so updates will be infrequent. On the other hand, I use apps like Byline a lot.

So all I need is for Byline to "ping" my location to Google Latitude after startup. That should update me reasonably often. Other apps could do the same thing.

Why would they bother? I'm guessing Latitude will have a business model. Google can share revenue on a per ping basis.

Update 7/31/09: AT&T's Location Finder costs $15/month for a family of five. Guess we know why this one was banned.

Acer netbook aims for $150 (euro)

The $150 batteries-not-included Netbook is very close -- but with batteries ...

Translated from netbooknews.de (google translation)

I announced it several times, now it is certainty... Acer is launching a price war... The A110L is now here in Taipei for the converted 150 euros ... Acer zerschiesst the competition with this ... LowEnd in the margin area (Yup, even when there is already Netbook different categories) and intends to market its own product soak... The 2nd Generation ( Aspire One D150 ) ..  is also expected within a very short time become one of the cheapest Netbook belong...

Google's translation services are imperfectly impressive, but you get the idea. I assume at this price we're talking Linux.

This is happening much faster than I'd anticipated, driven by the desperate desire to survive economic disruption.

The screaming collapse of netbook prices is my number one explanation for Apple's product silence. I assume they're rethinking their OS X product strategy. They may have thought they had more time ...

2009 will be the year of machine translation

Speaking of the singularity, I've subscribed to my first foreign language blog, thanks to Google Reader's integrated machine translation services.

I've read a few predictions for 2009.

Here's mine.

This will be seen as the year that machine translation went mainstream.

The world's IQ is about to go up 10 points.

The press makes much of Apple and Palm's recent twitches, but those companies are dull as dust compared to Google. I don't think we grasp what's happening there.

Salvaging world’s food and medication supply chains and resurrecting the FDA - thank you team Obama

Yesterday was an end to the 14 monster years, the 8 years of dread, the years of environmental decimation, to Rumsfeld and torture and Cheney and …

Damn, it’s a long list.

Good thing Obama has a huge amount of talent to call on ... Gore. Biden. Kerry. Buffet. The Clinton. Obama doesn't come alone, he comes with a superb team and a deep bench.

Somewhere on their to do list is the integrity of the world’s medication and food chain. Fake Heparin, poisonous infant food, poisonous animal feed, counterfeit surgical supplies, toxic toys, -- we've seen 'em all.

Meanwhile the GOP Bush cronies continued to destroy the FDA, the agency that was supposed to protect us from all this.

Fraud in the food and med supply chain has been only one of a non-stop list of disasters falling on pithed America. Ninety percent of Americans still have no idea what's going on; this was one of the many issues that didn't merit campaign attention.

That's over now. No, it's not that Americans have fully woken up. It's that we've dumped the incompetents, and we've engaged the O team.

This TIME story is a reminder of why we need the O team, and why the GOP needs to reform itself. Emphases mine ...

China's Melamine Woes Likely to Get orse – TIME

By Austin Ramzy / Beijing Tuesday, Nov. 04, 2008

First, a tainted product emerges, killing some and sickening many more. Its origin is traced to China, where a combination of greed and negligence allow the danger to slip into the food chain...

...As early as January, infants in China raised on Sanlu brand baby formula began developing kidney problems, and parents raised complaints that were ignored by company and local government officials. When the news finally broke in September, tests found four infants had died and more than 60,000 were sickened from formula tainted with melamine.. Expanded inspections found traces of melamine in milk powder from 22 of the country's 109 producers. The substance also showed up in whole milk and dairy products ranging from White Rabbit candies to chocolate used in sex toys in the U.K.

In late October, the scope of the scandal broadened when Hong Kong authorities announced that eggs imported from the mainland also contained melamine, the result of tainted feed given to chickens. Beijing ordered widespread testing of animal feed, and discovered 3,600 tons of contaminated product. The country's agriculture minister, Sun Zhengcai, called the tainted eggs an isolated problem. And the state press trumpeted news that sauces tainted with toxic chemicals were imported from three Japanese factories.

Change some of the details above and you could have the Chinese Product Safety Scandal of 2007. That round was touched off when the death of more than 100 Panamanians was traced back to cough medicine tainted with dietheylene glycol from China. Then hundreds of pets in North America were killed by eating food made from Chinese raw ingredients, also tainted with melamine. As last year's scandal spread, problems were found with Chinese-produced toys, tires, seafood and toothpaste... ...The Chinese embassy in Washington declared that it was "unacceptable for some to launch groundless smear attacks on China" over food and drug safety problems...

There's even more frightening details in a recent NYT Magazine expose on drug manufacturing in China....

The Safety Gap - Can the F.D.A. Ever Hope to Police Chinese Meds? - NYTimes.com
By GARDINER HARRIS

... China now produces about two-thirds of all aspirin and is poised to become the world’s sole global supplier in the not-too-distant future. But are the Chinese factories safe? Who knows? The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the European Medicines Agency and other competent government regulators rarely, if ever, inspect them...

In China, where thousands of drug manufacturers sell products in the local markets, profit margins are razor thin, and counterfeiting and contamination are common. In 2002, the Pharmaceutical Association, a Chinese trade group, estimated that as much as 8 percent of over-the-counter drugs sold in China are counterfeit.

... China has in recent years exported poisonous toothpaste, deadly dog food, toys made with lead paint and tainted fish. In one infamous example this spring, Chinese manufacturers substituted a cheap fake for the dried pig intestines used to make the drug heparin, which is given to dialysis and surgery patients to prevent blood clotting. As deaths among those taking the drug mounted, the F.D.A. discovered the taint and banned the contaminated drug. In the end, 81 people may have died from allergic reactions, and tens of thousands around the world were exposed to danger. F.D.A. officials admitted that the agency should never have approved the Chinese-made heparin for sale in the United States; the agency, it turned out, had never inspected the Chinese plant making it.

Concerns about Chinese drugs have become so intense that just three weeks ago, the Health and Human Services secretary, Michael O. Leavitt, announced that the F.D.A. would open an office in Beijing by the end of the year and offices in Shanghai and Guangzhou next year. The agency still plans to send inspectors to China from the U.S., but the offices will provide “an infrastructure that will make those people more effective,” Leavitt said at the time of the announcement.

China’s leap to one of the biggest suppliers of pharmaceutical ingredients in the world happened over the last decade, as the Chinese government subsidized the construction of manufacturing plants that have undercut prices everywhere. Generic drug makers in the United States, where price competition is fierce, were the first to seek cheaper drug ingredients in China. Last year, generic drug applications to the F.D.A. listed 1,154 plants providing active pharmaceutical ingredients: 43 percent of them were in China, and another 39 percent were in India. Only 13 percent were in the United States. Branded drug makers, with their fatter profit margins, resisted buying ingredients from China for years, but with their businesses now suffering, even major pharmaceutical companies like AstraZeneca, Bayer, Baxter and Pfizer have announced deals to outsource manufacturing to China.

I have been writing about the drug industry for more than a decade, but I have rarely written about a subject that both branded and generic drug makers wanted to discuss less...

The F.D.A. regulates more than $1 trillion worth of consumer goods, which amounts to about 25 cents of every consumer dollar spent in this country. This includes $466 billion in food sales, $275 billion in drugs, $60 billion in cosmetics and $18 billion in vitamin supplements. The agency is responsible for monitoring a third of all imported goods, from eggplant to eyeliner, microwave ovens to monoclonal antibodies, slaughterhouses to cellphones. But with fewer than 500 import inspectors and computer systems so old that repairmen must be called out of retirement to fix them, the agency is increasingly beset by a sense of futility.

Even the F.D.A.’s staunchest defenders now acknowledge that something is terribly wrong. Among them is Peter Barton Hutt, who served as the agency’s general counsel during the Nixon administration and is widely considered the dean of the F.D.A. bar in Washington. I’ve interviewed Hutt dozens of times over the years, and he has always defended the F.D.A. No more. “This is a fundamentally broken agency,” Hutt told me earlier this year, “and it needs to be repaired.”...

... To ensure the safety of imported drugs, the F.D.A. relies almost entirely on its own inspections of foreign plants. This was not much of a problem 30 years ago, when most medical products consumed in the United States were made here and F.D.A. inspectors could drive around to plants in their district. Most of those plants have since moved abroad, and now decades can pass between inspections. Testifying before Congress in April, Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the F.D.A.’s drug center, spoke with rare frankness about the ability of the agency to do its job abroad. “The F.D.A. of the last century is not configured to regulate this century’s globalized pharmaceutical industry,” she testified.

Other current and former F.D.A. officials I talked to echoed Woodcock’s warning. Tim Wells, who was a field investigator and then a compliance officer for 24 years at the F.D.A., now does private audits of drug plants and sees the holes in the agency’s safety net. “A company I recently visited abroad hasn’t been inspected for 10 years,” he told me.

Besides being more frequent, domestic inspections are unannounced and more intense. And when inspectors find dangerous conditions at domestic plants, they generally return promptly to ensure that those conditions get fixed. Not so in foreign plants. In a report released Oct. 22, government auditors reported that between 2002 and 2007, F.D.A. inspectors found dangerous conditions in 15 foreign plants. Only one of those plants was reinspected within two years, the auditors found. In every other case, the agency took foreign managers at their word that promised changes were made.

The record is particularly bad in China. Over the past six years, the F.D.A. has managed to inspect annually an average of just 15 of the 714 Chinese drug plants that export to the United States. At its present pace, the F.D.A. would need more than 50 years to visit all of these Chinese plants. By contrast, the F.D.A. inspects domestic drug plants every 2.7 years...

... When inspectors do go to China, their reports sometimes read like a bureaucratic rendering of Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad.” During a 2001 trip, for example, two F.D.A. inspectors visited a plant that was exporting acetaminophen to the United States. The plant had never been inspected. “The F.D.A. inspection team was met at the hotel in Wenzhou by representatives from Wenzhou No. 3 Pharmaceutical Factory and . . . transported by public ferry and then company vehicle to the manufacturing facility on Dong Tou Island off the coast of Wenzhou,” their report states. “There is no street address or plot number, and the address of the facility is given only by the county and province.”

Once the team arrived in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, the inspectors learned the drug was being manufactured at another plant — one that once had a similar name but had recently changed it. “In fact,” the report continues, “inspection found that there were initially three separate and independent firms operating under the names Wenzhou No. 1 Pharmaceutical Factory, Wenzhou No. 2 Pharmaceutical Factory and Wenzhou No. 3 Pharmaceutical Factory. The location of Wenzhou No. 1 Pharmaceutical Factory was also determined by the F.D.A. inspection team during the visit to Wenzhou, and it was learned that the firm is operating under a new Chinese name; however, the English translation of that name was not available.” So the two inspectors flew back to the United States — at taxpayers’ expense — never having inspected a thing.

The F.D.A.’s apparent inability to keep names straight is no trivial matter. One reason the agency failed to inspect the Changzhou plant that produced deadly heparin, for instance, was that someone mixed up the facility’s name and concluded that the plant had already been inspected. Chinese plant names, a vestige of its once strictly controlled economy, are often very similar, and translations can vary. For instance, there are 57 separate drug master files — the basic F.D.A. record of a plant’s name, location and approved product — with “Shanghai” in the name. Some are obvious repeats, like the ones for “Shanghai No. 6 Pharmaceutical Factory” and “Shanghai Number 6 Pharmaceutical Factory.” But others could be separate plants. Or maybe not. It’s just too hard to tell.

Compounding the problem is the F.D.A.’s antiquated technology. Its computer systems are so awful that officials have no way of knowing which names, or which plants, are real. To determine which factories need to be inspected, agency investigators must consult two incompatible databases, one of which lists 3,000 foreign drug plants exporting to the United States and the other 6,800. Which number is right? Nobody really knows. Officials have told House investigators that their best guess for the number of foreign drug plants exporting to the United States is 2,967, while the Government Accountability Office recently guessed 3,249. Neither can the agency tell in many cases when the plants were last inspected (or, more important, which have never been inspected), where they are located or what products they make.

The combined ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach receive about 45 percent of all ship-borne trade that comes to the United States, or some 5.2 million containers a year. When I visited one day in May, giant cranes were unloading and loading more than 30 ships, each bearing about 2,500 containers. Some 40 to 50 of those containers — a tiny fraction of the total — were trucked to a gigantic warehouse about a half-mile from the ports. There the F.D.A. and Customs and Border Protection cracked open shipping containers that they considered suspicious and then emptied the containers into a large examination area in front of the bays, arranging the boxes and crates as if they were pathologists lining up organs from an autopsy.

Just about every crate I saw contained some kind of food product. One crate came from Indonesia, and its manifest said it contained products with chicken inside. Indonesia plus chicken suggests avian flu to F.D.A. officials. So they decided to take a look. The crate turned out to contain chicken seasoning, but no actual chicken. Still, the cans were sent off for testing. Deeper into the guts of the container were glass jars of sambal terasi, a hot sauce. They would probably be sent back because the F.D.A. requires makers of low-acid foods in jars or cans to register with the agency.

The labels on high-end olives from Italy were lacking the required nutritional information, so back to Italy they went. Jars of jam made of figs and tangerines indicated they were produced close to Ukraine, so an F.D.A. inspector said that he wanted to sample the product for radioactive fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster...

... This year, 18.2 million shipments of food, devices, cosmetics and drugs are expected to enter more than 300 U.S. ports; the F.D.A. had 454 investigators in 2007 — one and a half per port — to scrutinize them. ...

... the U.S. Justice Department announced that it had opened a criminal investigation of Ranbaxy, the largest Indian drug maker, with $390 million in annual sales in the United States. In a motion filed in federal court in Maryland, the Justice Department accused Ranbaxy of “a pattern of systemic fraudulent conduct,” including filing fabricated drug data to the F.D.A. and using drug ingredients from unapproved and uninspected plants. AIDS drugs purchased by the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief were among the medicines implicated, the Justice Department charged. ..

... Officer James Ng of Customs and Border Protection started the tour by putting a package from China through an X-ray machine. The pictures showed row upon row of vials. “When it looks like this, it’s usually anabolic steroids inside,” Ng said. He opened the box, put on a pair of half-glasses and took out one of the vials, which was filled with a white crystalline powder. “It says it’s testosterone,” Ng said and then handed the vial to von Eschenbach.

“It’s an incredible example,” von Eschenbach said, his eyes bright. “It’s a steroid from China, but the label is written in Spanish.”

Customs seizes any steroids and narcotics they find, but they give other drugs to F.D.A. inspectors, who laboriously fill out handwritten forms and send letters to intended recipients. If the recipient swears that the drugs are for his or her own personal use, the F.D.A. often releases the detained package. It takes an hour or two to process each package, “an obstacle that makes their job functionally impossible,” according to a 2003 Congressional investigation. Thousands of packages can pile up waiting for F.D.A. review, and the agency often releases packages without any investigation for lack of staff.

Even when there are inspectors on the job, they cannot be sure every ingredient in a medicine is safe. The F.D.A. confines nearly all of its regulations and much of its inspection oversight to the active part of most pills, which generally constitutes between 1 percent and 10 percent of a pill’s volume. Much of a pill is fillers, binders, coatings, colorants and lubricants that are almost entirely unregulated.

The syrup in which cough and fever medicines are delivered has figured in at least eight mass poisonings around the world in the past two decades, with three of the four most recent cases originating in China. Hundreds died in Panama in 2006, at least 88 children in Haiti died in 1995 and 1996 and some 30 infants died in India in 1998 — all from toxic syrup. In 1937, 107 people in the United States died because of similar toxic syrup. In fact, it was this incident that led to the creation of the modern F.D.A. But plants making fillers and other nondrug ingredients of pills and syrups are rarely, if ever, inspected by the F.D.A. or any other regulatory agency...

... Unlike reforming Social Security or health insurance generally, fixing the F.D.A. won’t mean allocating enormous sums or necessitate reconceiving the system. It just requires some money and will. There are already legislative changes in the works. Bills now circulating on Capitol Hill would require food, medical- device and drug makers to pay annual registration fees to the F.D.A. Those fees would be used to allow as many inspections of foreign firms as domestic ones.

There also seems to be agreement that our regulatory agencies can’t rely on China to police its own factories.

More inspectors will certainly help, but even regular inspections of Chinese plants cannot ensure safety. Inspectors can be hoodwinked; tests can be fooled. “No matter how many F.D.A. inspections they do,” says Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, “our safety is still at risk if the pressure continues to cut costs.” Brown has introduced a bill to require labels disclosing the source country of key drug ingredients. Some lawmakers have gone as far as to suggest a ban on all drugs made with Chinese ingredients, but China has become such a crucial supplier that a ban would lead to the collapse of the U.S. health care system. And our dependence is only growing: when PricewaterhouseCoopers cited the best place for pharmaceutical outsourcing in the world in an October report to drug companies, its pick was China...

If you're not scared, you're not paying attention.

Bush and the GOP descendants of the Gingrich invasion destroyed the FDA.

Destroyed it, because, of course, the libertarian market deity is supposed to solve these problems.

It's been a damned long 14 years.

Now we have Team O. Their mission is to ...

1. Find someone with deep pockets and resources along the supply chain who can be assigned legal responsibility. Let them be reimbursed appropriately.
2. We need a to be able to enter the NDC code for any drug in an FDA web site and get a full report on where the ingredients come from. Few consumers will ever do this, but the lawyers will love it and it will introduce supply chain transparency.
3. We need China to be strong, happy, and prosperous. We also need safe medications. If that means our inspectors live in Chinese plants (and get rich for their hardships), then we put tariffs on the production of those plants to pay for the inspectors.

There are good people at the FDA. A sane leader will find much support.

Do I make more sense in Greek?

I've added a Google translation widget to the side of my blog page:

Gordon's Tech: Gordon's stuff, now in 35 languages

... As if English weren't bad enough, my less unpopular blogs now feature a translation widget. If you try it you can see me in, say, Chinese.

The widget uses Google's statistically based machine translation. It was pretty easy to ...

This is how we amuse ourselves on the cusp of the Singularity. Instead of watching "All in the Family" while the kids are settling, we hack personalized versions of pangalactic search engines and embed panlingual translators into our hobby blogs.

Ben takes a while to fall asleep, so I should have time yet to turn my iPhone into a digital radio.

This is more fun than TV, really.

Joy of the global web -- what's 101 mean?

A reader of a 2006 post of mine on "Wiki 101" asked what the "101" means.

It's a wonderful question. I answered ...

Blogger: Gordon's Tech - Post a Comment

In North American universities there's a convention that introductory courses are assigned a course number of '101'.

I've never thought about why that's so, and why all schools in the US and Canada follow this rule.

So 'Wiki 101' means 'introductory course in Wiki'...

I'm guessing the question came from an international reader.

Google is investing a lot in integrated machine language translation software. Over time we'll get more more of these questions, and I'll be asking the same sort of questions when I read blogs from other languages.

I love this stuff.

The IQ of an ecosystem and other questions of emergence

What is "the IQ of an pond ecosystem"? How clever is Gaia? What kind of desires does a corporation have, as distinct from its stakeholders, owners and managers? These are emergence questions. Once upon a time they were posed in the domain of "Cybernetics", then later in systems theory and the study of complex systems. It's a Santa Fe kind of question and a favorite science fiction theme (explored in great depth by some writers of the past decade). I probably first came upon it reading Analog in my misspent youth. Ecology, game theory, and especially Economics have been the most established homes for studying emergent systems.

I don't know of a shared concept set for discussing these questions, though I'm sure there are many specialist languages. I think of an "emergent" space as quite different from the domain in which we experience and reason, though the two will obviously meet. Looking "down" into the micro our cells, hormones, ionic equilibria, fingers and consciousness clearly interact, but we are not all that conscious of our bladder lining and it's presumably quite unaware of us.

So what does a corporation "see" in economics space? I imagine a world of protozoans and worms, interacting in some n-dimensional world. The corporation has a "will" to live, and solves problems in its "space", to some extent distinct from the prosaic reality [1] in which we live.

So how smart is the American electorate in its "space"? I imagine something almost human, but with a 60-80 IQ. A wide but shallow thinker with vast knowledge but little imagination. It It learns slowly and unlearns slowly; it's fearful, sulky, and sullen with intermittent sunshine.

If we can raise the effective emotional and analytic "IQ" of the abstract entities living in our planet's "political space" from 80 to 120 we might survive the next 60 years. Here's hoping that better communication, connection, search, retrieval, storage and translation technologies will improve the de facto neural net of our political creatures!

[1] I'm being ironic of course. Reality is looking inadequately prosaic.