Microsoft protects "open" Office file formats

Microsoft seeks XML-related patents | CNET News.com

Microsoft has applied for patents that could prevent competing applications from processing documents created with the latest version of the software giant's Office program.

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In a complex universe, it is good to have a few reliable certainties.

Microsoft's fortune and power has been based on three things:

1. Control of the trade press in the 1980s and 1990s and of government in the 2000s.
2. Using their operating system control to eliminate competitor applications and turn Office into a revenue stream.
3. Leveraging widespread piracy to ensure their file formats became universal "standards", without making them truly open.

Even before the Bush administration delivered on their promises to end the US vs. Microsoft antitrust legislation, the proposed measures would have failed. Despite pleas from a very few people (ie. me) they never considered removing file format control from Microsoft. That single action was fundamental to restricting Microsoft's practices and improving the quality and creativity of productivity software, but it was almost universally overlooked.

When Microsoft switched to XML for its .NET file formats, a few naive individuals thought they were "opening" their file formats. I was certain they would not do this -- not while there was a ghost of a chance that a desktop Linux was goint to emerge. I didn't know how they were going to keep their formats closed however. I'm not as smart as Microsoft -- patents are the obvious answer.

Did Microsoft plan to appear "open" with their XML file formats (and thereby reduce some antitrust pressure -- though by then the game was over) for a time, even though that was never their intent? I don't know, but they are definitely smarter than I am. I wouldn't put it past them.

Oh well, the Bush administration suggests that we're not really able to sustain a healthy long-term democracy in an age of uncertainty. Maybe we need to follow the Singaporean route, and usher in the Monarchs of Microsoft.

John McCain on the Senate Omnibus Bill

U.S. Senator John McCain onthe Senate Omnibus Spending Bill

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An unsuspected reader (I thought only my mother read this blog) sent me the link to John McCain's senate floor speech on the omnibus spending bill. I tried excerpting from it, but it's quite long and every part of it is worth reading. You can skim it fairly quickly.

The most disturbing aspect of the spending bill is how little coverage it's really gotten. John McCain's staff has done all the work; a lazy journalist need only excerpt a portion of his speech. So why is there no coverage? Brad DeLong wonders what's happened to our press corp:

... I've heard too many reporters tell me that they have to cut the administration and the Republicans a break in their stories or they'll have their access and sources cut off. I've had too many editors tell me that other editors are doubting their own judgment, and in close (and maybe not so close?) calls deciding to give the administration and the Republicans a break because of what the reaction to being "overly critical" will be. We have deep, systematic flaws in our press corps...

PBS | I, Cringely - On Outsourcing

PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column

There are those who argue that the numbers involved are too small to worry about.  What do a few thousand engineering jobs matter?  These people simply don't know how thin the engineering talent is in many companies.  Take 100 programmers out of any software company short of Microsoft or IBM ,and you've crippled some program and maybe the whole company.  And the same is true for most of these other critical industries where big work is typically done by small teams.

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Cringely's thesis is that oursourcing is economically efficient but locally harmful. Most economists would agree. He has a good point about how thin the engineering talent is in most companies.

Other than protectionism, what could the US do?

Two things:

1. Strip benefits from employment, especially healthcare. This is a necessary part of healthcare reform.

2. Merge 401K, Roth IRA, and 529 plans as part of social security reform. Mandate contributions. Below a certain income level the government makes a separate contribution. One draws from the plans when not employed, including when retraining for a new position. There is no such thing as "retirement", merely fully employed and not fully employed. When the funds are exhausted a guaranteed annual income kicks in -- the replacement for "welfare". Shift taxation to consumption and a flat "citizenship" tax, since corporations will inevitably dodge taxes.

Emergent computation -- the thinking world (Nature)

Nature: Do plants act like computers?: Leaves appear to regulate their 'breathing' by conducting simple calculations.

"Plants appear to 'think', according to US researchers, who say that green plants engage in a form of problem-solving computation.

David Peak and co-workers at Utah State University in Logan say that plants may regulate their uptake and loss of gases by 'distributed computation' - a kind of information processing that involves communication between many interacting units.

It's the same form of maths that is widely thought to regulate how ants forage. The signals that each ant sends out to other ants, by laying down chemical trails for example, enable the ant community as a whole to find the most abundant food sources...."

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More correctly the plants "compute", though the distinction between "thinking" and "computing" is a subtle one, having much to do with what consciousness is (if it exists at all).

The theme of computation as an emergent behavior arising from the interaction of many systems capable of maintaining stateful information is very hot now. E O Wilson popularized this in entomology. The more we look at biology, the more we see computation. I was struck the other day, for example, how a red striped shirt seemed to have a JPEG artifact. Problem is, I was looking at the shirt, not at a compressed digital photo of the shirt. I expect that somewhere in our visual, sensory and perceptual cortices something rather like JPEG compression is occurring.

The next set of articles will be about computation across species (symbiotes, parasites) and ecosystems -- producing emergent behaviors. Does an ecosystem have the processing capability of a rat?

The Gaia cultists must be having a good laugh!

Of course where else do we have lots of connected entities each of which holds stateful information? We have it in economies, and across the Internet. Of course these stateful entities appear to be independently conscious humans, but recent research strongly suggests that emergent computation is occuring. One day perhaps we'll measure the IQ of that emergent entity ... or it will measure ours ... :-).

After Disputes, Congress Passes Spending Plan - McCain's speech

After Disputes, Congress Passes Spending Plan

Congress finally finished last year's spending business on Thursday, sending the president an overdue, $820 billion measure that finances most of the federal government as well as thousands of home-state projects sought by lawmakers.

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By chance I heard a speech John McCain gave on the senate floor as this came up for a vote. The speech was devastating. There have been a lot of bad budgets in the past hundred years, but this one may be among the most vile. It reflects the will of Bush and the extraordinary corruption of our political process. Since most of the congress now sits in safe seats, they are presumably protecting themselves against primary challenges -- or increasing the size of their bribes.

Hearing McCain speak, I wonder if he's considering leaving the party -- maybe for a Vice-Presidential position with Kerry or Clark?

Boston Globe: Senate Republicans hack democrat's files - violation of the DMCA?

Senate panel's GOP staff spied on Democrats, Charlie Savage, Globe Staff, 1/22/2004

WASHINGTON -- Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.

From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.

The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November.

With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the US Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people to date and seized more than half a dozen computers -- including four Judiciary servers, one server from the office of Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and several desktop hard drives.

But the scope of both the intrusions and the likely disclosures is now known to have been far more extensive than the November incident, staffers and others familiar with the investigation say.

The revelation comes as the battle of judicial nominees is reaching a new level of intensity. Last week, President Bush used his recess power to appoint Judge Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, bypassing a Democratic filibuster that blocked a vote on his nomination for a year because of concerns over his civil rights record.

Democrats now claim their private memos formed the basis for a February 2003 column by conservative pundit Robert Novak that revealed plans pushed by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, to filibuster certain judicial nominees. Novak is also at the center of an investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA agent whose husband contradicted a Bush administration claim about Iraqi nuclear programs.

Citing "internal Senate sources," Novak's column described closed-door Democratic meetings about how to handle nominees.

Its details and direct quotes from Democrats -- characterizing former nominee Miguel Estrada as a "stealth right-wing zealot" and describing the GOP agenda as an "assembly line" for right-wing nominees -- are contained in talking points and meeting accounts from the Democratic files now known to have been compromised.

Novak declined to confirm or deny whether his column was based on these files.

"They're welcome to think anything they want," he said. "As has been demonstrated, I don't reveal my sources."

As the extent to which Democratic communications were monitored came into sharper focus, Republicans yesterday offered a new defense. They said that in the summer of 2002, their computer technician informed his Democratic counterpart of the glitch, but Democrats did nothing to fix the problem.

Other staffers, however, denied that the Democrats were told anything about it before November 2003.

The emerging scope of the GOP surveillance of confidential Democratic files represents a major escalation in partisan warfare over judicial appointments. The bitter fight traces back to 1987, when Democrats torpedoed Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court. In the 1990s, Republicans blocked many of President Clinton's nominees. Since President Bush took office, those roles have been reversed.

Against that backdrop, both sides have something to gain and lose from the investigation into the computer files. For Democrats, the scandal highlights GOP dirty tricks that could result in ethics complaints to the Senate and the Washington Bar -- or even criminal charges under computer intrusion laws.

"They had an obligation to tell each of the people whose files they were intruding upon -- assuming it was an accident -- that that was going on so those people could protect themselves," said one Senate staffer. "To keep on getting these files is just beyond the pale."

But for Republicans, the scandal also keeps attention on the memo contents, which demonstrate the influence of liberal interest groups in choosing which nominees Democratic senators would filibuster. Other revelations from the memos include Democrats' race-based characterization of Estrada as "especially dangerous, because . . . he is Latino," which they feared would make him difficult to block from a later promotion to the Supreme Court.

And, at the request of the NAACP, the Democrats delayed any hearings for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals until after it heard a landmark affirmative action case -- though a memo noted that staffers "are a little concerned about the propriety of scheduling hearings based on the resolution of a particular case."

After the contents of those memos were made public in The Wall Street Journal editorial pages and The Washington Times, Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, made a preliminary inquiry and described himself as "mortified that this improper, unethical and simply unacceptable breach of confidential files may have occurred on my watch."

Hatch also confirmed that "at least one current member of the Judiciary Committee staff had improperly accessed at least some of the documents referenced in media reports." He did not name the staffer, who he said was being placed on leave and who sources said has since resigned, although he had apparently already announced plans to return to school later this year.

Officials familiar with the investigation identified that person as a legislative staff assistant whose name was removed from a list of Judiciary Committee staff in the most recent update of a Capitol Hill directory. The staff member's home number has been disconnected and he could not be reached for comment.

Hatch also said that a "former member of the Judiciary staff may have been involved." Many news reports have subsequently identified that person as Manuel Miranda, who formerly worked in the Judiciary Committee office and now is the chief judicial nominee adviser in the Senate majority leader's office. His computer hard drive name was stamped on an e-mail from the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League that was posted along with the Democratic Senate staff communications.

Reached at home, Miranda said he is on paternity leave; Frist's office said he is on leave "pending the results of the investigation" -- he denied that any of the handwritten comments on the memos were by his hand and said he did not distribute the memos to the media. He also argued that the only wrongdoing was on the part of the Democrats -- both for the content of their memos, and for their negligence in placing them where they could be seen.

"There appears to have been no hacking, no stealing, and no violation of any Senate rule," Miranda said. "Stealing assumes a property right and there is no property right to a government document. . . . These documents are not covered under the Senate disclosure rule because they are not official business and, to the extent they were disclosed, they were disclosed inadvertently by negligent [Democratic] staff."

Whether the memos are ultimately deemed to be official business will be a central issue in any criminal case that could result. Unauthorized access of such material could be punishable by up to a year in prison -- or, at the least, sanction under a Senate non-disclosure rule.

The computer glitch dates to 2001, when Democrats took control of the Senate after the defection from the GOP of Senator Jim Jeffords, Independent of Vermont.

A technician hired by the new judiciary chairman, Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, apparently made a mistake that allowed anyone to access newly created accounts on a Judiciary Committee server shared by both parties -- even though the accounts were supposed to restrict access only to those with the right password.

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The Democrat's files were, by default, copyrighted. They were also protected, albeit imperfectly. Bypassing protections on copyrighted materials is a violation of the (vile) Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Congress usually exempts themselves from their own laws, but if they didn't exempt themselves on this one .... The DMCA penalties are very onerous.

Britain's dishonor: guilty by statistics

BBC NEWS | Health | Global experts slam cot death policy

...On Monday, the Court of Appeal cleared Angela Cannings of murdering her two sons.

The judges said the medical evidence that helped convict the 40-year-old woman was unreliable.

The medical evidence they referred to was 'Meadow's law', espoused by prosecution witness Sir Roy Meadow. He maintains that one cot death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder.

At one trial, he said the chances of two infants from one family dying from cot death was one in 73 million.

The UK government has now ordered a review of 258 cases where parents were convicted of killing their children in light of Monday's ruling.

Thousands of other parents who had a child taken away from them on the basis of similar evidence will also have their case re-examined.

However, experts in Europe and the United States believe Britain's approach to investigating sudden infant death is wrong.

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Your child dies of SIDS, so now you're on the firing line. A second child dies, so now you're guilty. Talk about grading on the curve! I suspect many of those parents were absolutely innocent - even if many or most were guilty. Those people, innocent of crime and cursed by tragedy, then lost their surviving children or went to prison. Those double victimes may say this is as bad as the American system of executing people without just process. Shame on Britain for tolerating this law; one wonders what other similar procedures have been followed. They're almost as low as we are -- ok, not that low.

Poverty in America - NYT Magazine

A Poor Cousin of the Middle Class

Poverty is a peculiar, insidious thing, not just one problem but a constellation of problems: not just inadequate wages but also inadequate education, not just dead-end jobs but also limited abilities, not just insufficient savings but also unwise spending, not just the lack of health insurance but also the lack of healthy households. The villains are not just exploitative employers but also incapable employees, not just overworked teachers but also defeated and unruly pupils, not just bureaucrats who cheat the poor but also the poor who cheat themselves.

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The difference between the Raptors (Republicans) and the Losers (liberals/democrats) is how we consider the "unfit", those who've lost out in a culture of aggressive natural selection. The religious Raptor might say that they have done something to displease God, the secular Raptor that the unfit do not deserve sympathy.

The Loser would say that we need another answer; that a reasonably comfortable life with a hope of happiness should be available to everyone; not luxury, but some happiness, comfort, and security.

U.S. School Segregation Now at '69 Level (washingtonpost.com)

U.S. School Segregation Now at '69 Level (washingtonpost.com)

Half a century after the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of American education, schools are almost as segregated as they were when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, according to a report released today by Harvard University researchers.

The study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project, shows that progress toward school desegregation peaked in the late 1980s as courts concluded that the goals of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education had largely been achieved. Over the past 15 years, the trend has been in the opposite direction, and most white students now have "little contact" with minority students in many areas of the country, according to the report.

"We are celebrating a victory over segregation at a time when schools across the nation are becoming increasingly segregated," noted the report, which was issued on the eve of the holiday celebrating King's birthday.

Triggered by a civil rights case in Topeka, Kan., the Brown decision marked the start of three decades of intensive efforts by the federal government to integrate public schools, first through court orders that opened white schools to minority students and later through busing. Its most dramatic impact was in southern states, where the percentage of blacks attending predominantly white schools increased from zero in 1954 to 43 percent in 1988.

By 2001, according to the Harvard data, the figure had fallen to 30 percent, or about the level in 1969, the year after King's assassination.

"We are losing many of the gains of desegregation," said Harvard professor Gary Orfield, the primary author of the report. "We are not back to where we were before Brown, but we are back to when King was assassinated."

The Harvard study suggests that Hispanic students are even more segregated than African American students, while Asian Americans are the most integrated ethnic group in the country. The increase in Latino segregation has been particularly marked in western states, where more than 80 percent of Latinos attend predominantly minority schools, compared with 42 percent in 1968.

Despite the national trend toward resegregation, there are significant differences among states and regions, Orfield said. Maryland is one of the most "rapidly resegregating states" in the country, he said, partly because of the phasing out of court-ordered busing in Prince George's and Baltimore counties and partly because of migration patterns.

The District of Columbia has long been one of the most segregated school districts in the nation, a trend accentuated in recent years by the exodus of white middle-class families.

The most segregated states for black students are New York and Illinois; the most integrated are Kentucky and Washington. For Latinos, the most segregated states are New York and California; the most integrated states are Wyoming and Ohio. Virginia ranks somewhere in the middle for both African Americans and Hispanics.

According to Orfield and other researchers, the resegregation trend picked up momentum as a result of a 1991 Supreme Court decision that authorized a return to neighborhood schools instead of busing, even if such a step would lead to segregation. The consequences were particularly dramatic in school districts such as Prince George's County's that were declared "unitary" by the courts, meaning that they had made a good-faith effort at integration.

According to the Harvard data, the average black student in Prince George's County attends schools with 12 percent fewer white students than a decade ago. In Charlotte, black exposure to white students has dropped by 16 percent, and in DeKalb County, Ga., it has declined by 72 percent.

"Most schools in this country are overwhelmingly black or overwhelmingly white," said Elise Boddie, head of the education department of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., which litigates civil rights cases. "We have still not committed ourselves as a country to the mandate of Brown versus Board of Education. If these trends are not reversed, we could easily find ourselves back to 1954."

The report said that a massive migration of black and Latino families toward the suburbs is producing "hundreds of new segregated and unequal schools and frustrating the dream of middle-class minority families for access to the most competitive schools." It predicted that the suburbs soon could be threatened with the problems of "ghettoization" that have already affected big urban areas.

Such a development, the report warned, would bring the nation closer to the "nightmare" of "two school systems" and "two housing markets" mentioned by King in one of his last public appearances.

"There have been considerable gains in some areas, such as the number of [minority] students attending college," said John Jackson, education director for the NAACP. "But you still find many school districts across the country that are segregated and unequal. The implications are the same as in the '50s: Minority students in high poverty areas are not getting a quality education.

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The law of unintended consequences. For integration to have worked we would have had to put vast amounts of money into the educational system; more than equalizing funding even as schools merged. We didn't do that.

Faced with a relative decrease in perceived quality of education and fears of increased risk to their children, middle class Euros (anglos, whites) left the cities and wealth Euros enrolled children in private schools. The urban public school system came to resemble the unequal and underfunded Black public schools of the the 1960s.

I don't think preserving busing would have changed things. And I don't think we're getting closer to the "nightmare" of two systems, I think we're already there.

In the meanwhile Euros will be a minority majority soon; we already are in California. So the equation will change again.

I don't know what would have worked for America. If I didn't distrust Republicans so intensely and deeply I'd try vouchers -- but the vouchers would never be adequately funded by this administration -- and special needs children would be abandoned to the wolves.

Give away the software, sell the hardware

New Economy: Can Hardware Rise Above Software?

... For Microsoft, the issue transcends online music. The foundation of Microsoft's power and leverage in the computing industry is based almost entirely on a set of software sockets known as application programmers' interfaces, or A.P.I.'s. It is those A.P.I.'s that other software publishers must adapt to in writing programs for use on Windows machines. By controlling the shape of the sockets, and what can fit into them, Microsoft has a powerful advantage against its competitors.

The Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit in the 1990's was about Silicon Valley's quarrel with Microsoft over control of the A.P.I.'s. During the trial in 1998, Apple's lead software designer, Avi Tevanian, described his company's efforts to persuade PC makers to bundle Apple's QuickTime media software with their machines and how Microsoft demanded that Apple 'knife the baby' - in other words, drop the QuickTime bundling effort.

Now, with the new Apple-Hewlett alliance, Mr. Jobs finally has a QuickTime bundling arrangement. The program, which allows for the playing of video clips on a PC, will be a standard feature of every Hewlett-Packard computer. So will another Apple software technology, Rendezvous, which is an A.P.I. designed to let the computer identify and create links to any printer, camera, music player or other digital device without complicated configuration procedures on the user's part.

Simply put, Mr. Jobs has managed to inject Apple's DNA into the PC world, meaning that it will be increasingly easy for his company to offer PC users any kind of iPod-style device - whether for music or other media - the company may create in the future.

Don't be surprised, in other words, if Mr. Jobs and Apple have many razors in the works.

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Markoff knows, though he didn't say so, that Apple has always made money off hardware. Apple has long given away software (bundled with machines) while controlling what hardware would work with the software. So the iPod is only the continuation of an old business model. What's more novel is Apple's move towards software leasing (.Mac) -- something Microsoft longs to do.

IBM is bundling Linux with its non-PC hardware, so it's been giving away the (free) software and selling hardware for a while.

He's partially right about Quicktime. Yes, HP is bundling. But just as important is that iTunes, freely downloaded by millions, is a trojan horse for QuickTime. That's the bigger bundling. The Rendezvous observation is very important.

Microsoft completely controls the software industry -- with the exception of Linux which has a much smaller revenue stream. The analogy is an organism that totally occupies and ecological niche. Eventually organisms that can't compete move into another niche. Given Microsoft's power the mutations required are considerable -- software costs plummet by a rock. Eventually Microsoft is competing against "free" (not free of course, just that the costs are concealed.)

Alsoft - DiskWarrior - when OS X goes really bad

Alsoft - DiskWarrior

Mad Cow: Casting light in dark places

PCRM >> News and Media Center >> Health News Release Archive

Farmers routinely feed animal remains, blood, and manure—particularly chicken feces—to cattle. Although the USDA prohibits the feeding of ruminant (e.g., cows, sheep, and goats) remains to ruminants, this rule is poorly enforced and does not preclude many other risky practices, including the feeding of blood, manure, and nonruminants (e.g., chickens, pigs, etc.) to cows. Cattle remains are also fed to chickens, whose wastes are then fed back to cows. PCRM recommends a ban on all these practices.

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Those rapid fire cracking sounds you hear are the sounds of "straws breaking backs" across the nation.

The Mad Cow incident is causing some light to be cast into some very dark places. These practices have been revealed in a few books and articles, but mostly we've chosen not to know. Now we know, and even the most fervent Republican doesn't trust this administration to keep our food safe.

Coincidentally, our closest Burger King just closed.

If organic coops were publicly traded, their share prices would be going mad. At the prices that middle class folk will soon be paying for meat we'll be eating a lot less of it. On the other hand, poor people will soon have be able to eat very inexpensive steak -- if they choose.

Globalization and the Export of American Labor: Outsourcing non-IT knowledge work -- now it's the lawyers

Neal St. Anthony, Star Tribune, On business: Outsourcing hits legal services

First it was the apparel workers -- the working class -- who saw their $10-an-hour jobs go overseas.

More recently, the United States has started to export to India the $35,000-a-year customer-service center jobs from the likes of American Express Financial Advisors and $50,000 technical-support positions from IBM and ADC Telecommunications to India and elsewhere where educated, English-speaking workers are hired for a tenth of the cost to communicate with U.S. customers by phone and over the Internet.

Now, six-figure lawyers and legal support staffs are starting to sweat.

At West, the Eagan-based legal-publishing unit of Canada's Thomson Corp., there's a buzz over a small test office in Bombay, India, where Indian lawyers may one day interpret and synthesize U.S. court decisions for subscribers of Westlaw, the online legal network relied upon by thousands of practicing U.S. attorneys.

To date, this work has been the growing province of a group of 150-plus editor-lawyers in Eagan and elsewhere who review court decisions, synopsize them and write "headnotes" for each point of law. This work is then keyed into Westlaw's league-leading database, enabling lawyers to quickly review and cite decisions and other relevant case law in West's venerable classification system.

So far, just a few months into the quiet Indian pilot-office experience, the half-dozen or so Indian lawyers have been doing online interpretation and legal-classification of "unpublished decisions" of U.S. state and lower courts that are not considered big deals -- or "precedential" in legal parlance.

West editor-lawyers, who make up to $100,000 per year, continue to do the "published opinion" work and are editing the work of the Indian lawyers.

The Indian lawyers are trained in British Common Law, different than U.S. law. But they've been brought into West for in-house training, and more through West trainers in Bombay.

Their work so far has been good, and has the West editors "terrified" that the pilot program will blow into a wholesale operation, which would displace lawyers in Eagan and elsewhere making five or more times the Indian lawyers.

Kyle Christensen, a spokesman for the 6,000-employee West unit in Eagan, said the Eagan workforce has been expanded in recent years to accommodate case analysis and headnoting for Westlaw.

And, as part of its expansion to start giving the same treatment to unpublished opinion, West opened the Bombay office to "assess potential improvement in the product and how we might better use outside resources," Christensen said.

"None of the work, to this point, that has been completed in India has made it into any of our publications. It's a test. It's possible that some of the low-end support could work out. The analysis, headnoting, detailed classification will remain in Eagan." he said.

Referring to the Indian office, Christensen said: "They're not actually providing analysis. They're doing some review of how to assign key numbers to administrative law decisions. And they're doing some training on writing headnotes for unpublished decisions."

The West spokesman is quick to add that dozens of West lawyers also work in Minnesota to interpret the legal decisions of British, Spanish, Greek and other courts for lawyers in those countries.

Still, West's Indian office is a toehold in what once was considered an all-American business, immune from the foreign competitors that took manufacturing, and now services jobs, overseas.

The American Lawyer reported recently that General Electric and other U.S. behemoths are starting to use low-cost Indian lawyers to supplant some of the work formerly done by outside U.S. law firms.

A vice president of the Chicago-based outsourcing firm Mindcrest, which has an Indian subsidiary that handles legal work, told the American Lawyer that business is booming for basic research and low-rung work usually done by paralegals and junior lawyers for U.S. corporations and law firms.

Moreover, Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass., the market research firm, predicts that by 2015, more than 489,000 U.S. lawyer jobs -- about 8 percent of the total, will shift to lower-cost countries.

Ironically, a Twin Cities personnel recruiter says the trend will grow because corporations and senior partners at law firms will have a financial incentive to farm out the less-costly boilerplate work now done by junior people.

Ron Kreps, the managing partner of the Minneapolis office of Fulbright & Jaworski, said: "West provides a great service, you bet they do. We can't just rely on a West editor and keynotes, but yes, they get you started. And it's very important that the keynotes are accurate.

"I don't care where the people sit who write them, but I do care that they know U.S. common law and the trends in the U.S. And that's different than British common law. The bigger question is: Can professional services be done offshore? That's the question a lot of professions are worried about."

Globalization, long the nightmare of displaced Minnesota taconite miners, electronics assemblers and North Carolina textile workers, takes on a different wrinkle when it starts to claim not just the job of Jane Lunchpail, but also threatens the jobs of those who were banking on country club memberships.

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Fascinating, an understated and very well written summary. Not surprising; I've been predicting this one for a couple of years. Nice to have confirmation though.

The synthesis and extension of existing "content" (industry term for this type of knowledge) has no regulatory barriers. It requires intellect and domain knowledge, it requires an ability to read but not speak or write English, it does not require physical presence. If the domain knowledge is costly in the US, but substantially less costly overseas, the work will move very quickly. In other words, the barrriers to migration of work in this instance are very low and the incentives are high.

I know of one corporation in the medical content domain who's essentially outsourcing some of their content management and development to a (relatively) "low wage" nation. (In this case English speaking and highly industrialized, but physician wages in many nations are a fraction of US physician wages. The same thing is true for lawyers.)

I think this globalization, which does put my own job at risk, is a great thing for the world. Insofar as we are a part of this world, it's a great thing for us. The challenge for a great leader is to find a way mitigate the great hurt it will do to many people in the US. Injuring the career prospects of lawyers is likely to lead to more change than unemploying blue collar workers and IT professionals. Lawyers are close to politicians, and politicians have the power. The danger is a stupid protectionist response, one that will harm us and the world. The other choice, however, is far too novel for our current administration to consider. One can only pray that a miracle occurs and Bush is displaced from power this year.

Gore on Bush: Orwellian language

NYT, Herbert: Masters of Deception

...Amid cheers, he [Gore] made it clear that the broad interests of the American public are consistently betrayed by the policies and practices of President Bush and his administration. 'They devise their policies with as much secrecy as possible,' he said, 'and in close cooperation with the most powerful special interests that have a monetary stake in what happens. In each case, the public interest is not only ignored, but actively undermined. In each case, they devote considerable attention to a clever strategy of deception that appears designed to prevent the American people from discerning what it is they are actually doing.

'Indeed, they often use Orwellian language to disguise their true purposes. For example, a policy that opens national forests to destructive logging of old-growth trees is labeled Healthy Forest Initiative. A policy that vastly increases the amount of pollution that can be dumped into the air is called the Clear Skies Initiative.

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Orwellian language has been a strong feature of the Republican party since Gingrich. Stalinists and Nazis were past masters of the art; it's important for any power structure where self deception is critical.

Krugman compares the Bush administration to Nixon. I think Bush is a curious blend of Nixon and Reagan; a fascinating combination of a sharp mind, extraordinary discipline, unbounded arrogance, and a total lack of curiousity about the world.

The extraordinarily rapid selection and evolution of the human brain

Evolution of Gene Related to Brain - Nicholas Wade -NYT

A gene that helps determine the size of the human brain has been under intense Darwinian pressure in the last few million years, changing its structure 15 times since humans and chimps separated from their common ancestor, biologists have found.

The gene came to light two years ago, when a disrupted form of it was identified as the cause of microcephaly, a disease in which people are born with an abnormally small cerebral cortex...

The gene, known as the ASPM gene, has been under steady selective pressure throughout the evolution of the great apes, a group that includes orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and humans, Dr. Lahn and colleagues say in an article being published today in the journal Human Molecular Genetics. By contrast, the versions of the gene possessed by monkeys, dogs, cats and cows show no particular sign of being under selective pressure.

The progressive change in the architecture of the ASPM protein over the last 18 million years is correlated with a steady increase in the size of the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain responsible for higher cognitive function, during the ape and human lineage. Evolution has been particularly intense in the five million years since humans split from chimpanzees.

"There has been a sweep every 300,000 to 400,000 years, with the last sweep occurring between 200,000 and 500,000 years ago," Dr. Lahn said, referring to a genetic change so advantageous that it sweeps through a population, endowing everyone with the same improved version of a gene.

But since the last sweep, the gene seems to have been kept stable by what geneticists call purifying selection, the removal of any change that makes a significant difference to the gene's protein product, according to an independent study by Dr. Jianzhi Zhang, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan. Dr. Zhang's report was published last month in the journal Genetics.

Early hominids like Australopithecus africanus, which lived some three million years ago, had a brain that weighed about 420 grams (15 ounces); modern human brains range from 1,350 to 1,450 grams, an increase that Dr. Zhang calls "one of the most rapid morphological changes in evolution." The brain of a typical patient with microcephaly is the same weight as that of an australopithecus, Dr. Zhang noted, as if disruption of the gene negated three million years of development.

Disruption of the ASPM gene was identified as a cause of microcephaly two years ago by Dr. Geoffrey Woods, a British pediatrician, and Dr. Christopher Walsh, a neurogeneticist at the Harvard Medical School. Their finding instantly caught the interest of evolutionary geneticists.

At least five other genes, yet to be identified, can cause microcephaly when disrupted by a mutation, so ASPM is not the only determinant of human brain size. But given what is now known about its evolutionary history, it does seem to be an important one. It acts during fetal development to prescribe the number of cells in the future cerebral cortex.

Most human genes exist as families of similar members, formed when one gene gets accidentally duplicated one or several times. The ASPM gene is "almost unique," Dr. Walsh wrote by e-mail, because in all known animal genomes, it has resisted the usual duplication events and been maintained as a single copy. Single-copy genes can cause serious disease if disrupted by mutation. But their advantage, in terms of evolution, is that "you only have to edit them once to create a lasting change," Dr. Walsh said.

Evidently, the ASPM gene has been heavily edited, but with an apparently fortunate result.

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This is breathtaking work, and it fits in well with a series of articles I've posted about over the past few months. Comparative DNA analysis shows very extensive changes in many genetic determinants of brain morphology and cognitive functions -- all of which appears to have slowed or stopped in the past 150,000 years. We are freshly made.

We don't know what those selection pressures were, but it's commonly assumed that they are due to human interactions, both competitive and cooperative. We've had no significant predators for some time. What was the first mutation that set us down the road that chimpanzees did NOT follow?! It is the fascinating difference, something that causes us to enter into a building pattern of cognitive development. (Science Fiction fans will recognize the "altered evolution" theme of a myriad of good and bad science fiction stories.)

Our "newness" also suggests that cognition may be frail and fragile, with many "new'" genes that may lack redundancy. This is a single copy gene! I suspect cognitive defects (schizophrenia, learning disorders, pervasive developmental delay/autism, etc) are FAR more common in humans than in any other animal. Our cognition is frail.

Can we estimate the capabilities of an Australopithecus from studying persons afflicted with microcephaly?

This research also points the way to the next shocking scandal -- enhanced chimpanzees. I am sure some research in the next 10 years will create a chimpanzee with an enhanced brain -- if they haven't already done so. Let me be among the first to insist on their civil rights.