America the not-so generous?

The New York Times > Opinion > Kristof: Land of Penny Pinchers

...Americans give 15 cents per day per person in official development assistance to poor countries. The average American spends four times that on soft drinks daily.

In 2003, the latest year for which figures are available, we increased such assistance by one-fifth, for President Bush has actually been much better about helping poor countries than President Clinton was. But as a share of our economy, our contribution still left us ranked dead last among 22 top donor countries.

We gave 15 cents for every $100 of national income to poor countries. Denmark gave 84 cents, the Netherlands gave 80 cents, Belgium gave 60 cents, France gave 41 cents, and Greece gave 21 cents (that was the lowest share, beside our own).

It is sometimes said that Americans make up for low official aid with private charitable donations. Nope. By OECD calculations, private donations add 6 cents a day to the official U.S. figure - meaning that we still give only 21 cents a day per person.

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I'd suspected our private donations didn't make up for our limited government donations, but it's good to get the (bad) numbers.

On the other hand ...

The real contributions to eradicating poverty are made through balancing free trade with some measure of support for those dislocated by subsequent changes in economies, and through foreign investment motivated by profit and balanced by some measure of protectective regulation. In that competition America under Bill Clinton, and even under George Bush II, has done relatively well. Since this benefits Americans as well as the impoverished it's an easier sell in some quarters, but since most Americans don't believe it helps them it's also something that's sold silently.

So we should perhaps match France's aid budget (though how much of France's aid is tied aid -- sometimes worse than nothing at all?), but the real battle is fought elsewhere.

Passive smoking and school performance -- causation or correlation?

BBC NEWS | Health | Tobacco smoke dulls child brains

Children exposed to passive smoking are likely to do worse at school than their peers, research suggests.

Exposure to even low levels of tobacco smoke in the home was linked to lower test results for reading and maths.

The greater the exposure, the worse the decline was, the US Children's Environmental Health Center team found among nearly 4,400 children.

The findings support calls to ban smoking in public places, they told Environmental Health Perspectives...

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I was ok until that last paragraph. I think the tobacco merchants ought to be assigned to sell their wares in the heart of Fallujah, but the assertion that this study supports a ban on smoking in public places assumes causation. The study only showed correlation, it wasn't designed to show causation. There's a very strong inverse relationship between IQ and longterm adult smoking, but the evidence suggests that the IQ is primary. Since IQ (the test result that is) is strongly influenced by heredity, and perhaps secondarily by uterine environment, it's hard to imagine this study could really account for those affects.

I'd bet that they've discovered an unsurprising correlation and that cessation of smoking in the home would not increase test scores. (However a better uterine environment due to smoking cessation might make a difference -- but that's not passive exposure. Intrauterine smoking is a direct exposure.)

Edge asks scientists a great question: what do you believe but cannot prove?

The New York Times > Science > God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap

The NYT synopsizes interviews published at Edge.org. The interviews are in answer to the question "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?". I asked Kip Thorne, a Caltech cosmologists, a similar question (except I asked about wildest speculation rather than belief) in 1981 during a symposium. His answer, which I now dimly recall, was that time travel was possible, but not into our universe. That was before such ideas became commonplace.

Here's my synopsis of the NYT article, I omitted the ones I thought were silly, dull, or obvious. Their audience seemed more cautious than the scientists I've known, perhaps because they are also public figures.

Roger Schank
Psychologist and computer scientist; author, "Designing World-Class E-Learning"
I do not believe that people are capable of rational thought when it comes to making decisions in their own lives. People believe they are behaving rationally and have thought things out, of course, but when major decisions are made - who to marry, where to live, what career to pursue, what college to attend, people's minds simply cannot cope with the complexity. When they try to rationally analyze potential options, their unconscious, emotional thoughts take over and make the choice for them.

SO-SO. All conscious action arises from desire/emotion, so at root all choices are non-rational. Pure rationality without desire is probably completely inert. Yeah, complexity overwhelms our limited capacity to analyze problems, but analysis isn't most people's strength to begin with.

Richard Dawkins
Evolutionary biologist, Oxford University; author, "The Ancestor's Tale"
I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all "design" anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

OK. I mostly agree, until he says the universe cannot be designed. Some cosmology models would allow one to configure the staring parameters of an artificial a universe. Of course if we live in a simulation then all bets are off.

Kenneth Ford
Physicist; retired director, American Institute of Physics; author, "The Quantum World"
I believe that microbial life exists elsewhere in our galaxy.
I am not even saying "elsewhere in the universe." If the proposition I believe to be true is to be proved true within a generation or two, I had better limit it to our own galaxy. I will bet on its truth there... Believing in the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy is another matter.

WIMP! Almost everyone believes bacterial life exists elsewhere in the galaxy.

Lynn Margulis
Biologist, University of Massachusetts; author, "Symbiosis in Cell Evolution"
That our ability to perceive signals in the environment evolved directly from our bacterial ancestors.

DUH. This one seems too obvious.

David Myers
Psychologist, Hope College; author, "Intuition"
As a Christian monotheist, I start with two unproven axioms:
1. There is a God.
2. It's not me (and it's also not you)...

I enjoyed reading his exposition. Sounds like he could be a quite interesting writer.

Donald Hoffman
Cognitive scientist, University of California, Irvine; author, "Visual Intelligence"
I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Space-time, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being.
The world of our daily experience - the world of tables, chairs, stars and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds - is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm.
Indeed the usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do not. For the point of an interface, such as the Windows interface on a computer, is simplification and ease of use. We click icons because this is quicker and less prone to error than editing megabytes of software or toggling voltages in circuits.
Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific interface, this world of our daily experience, should itself be a radical simplification, selected not for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable pragmatics of survival.
If this is right, if consciousness is fundamental, then we should not be surprised that, despite centuries of effort by the most brilliant of minds, there is as yet no physicalist theory of consciousness, no theory that explains how mindless matter or energy or fields could be, or cause, conscious experience.

OMMMM. On the one hand, he sounds like he had a lot of fun in his undergrad days. On the other hand, this is pretty much what the 'world-is-a-simulation' folks would say, and I find them oddly persuasive.

Nicholas Humphrey
Psychologist, London School of Economics; author,"The Mind Made Flesh"
I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing it? The conjuror is natural selection, and the purpose has been to bolster human self-confidence and self-importance - so as to increase the value we each place on our own and others' lives.

EXCELLENT. I've believed this ever since I did my UMinn Cognitive Science class about 8 years ago.

Salon's 'Ask the Pilot' puts a knife in the Laser Beam Terrorists

Salon.com Technology | Ask the pilot

Listen to Michael, an Airbus A320 pilot for a major U.S. airline (who asks to be kept otherwise anonymous): 'Here we have cleaners and caterers able to board and roam through aircraft with no security screening whatsoever, yet people are worried about laser beams? Our priorities are insane.'...

... Just how upended is the hierarchy of priorities? At most American airports now, passengers and their hand luggage receive only token screening for explosives. Fliers must surrender their metal sharps, yet aren't specifically searched for the most likely and dangerous terrorist weapon of all. Meanwhile, a pilot cannot bring a fork onto his own jet, yet caterers, cleaners and ground staff can step aboard free of scrutiny. It wasn't laser beams or knitting needles that downed two Russian airliners last August. Or Pan Am 103 for that matter, 16 long-forgotten years ago. We're expected to believe saboteurs would spend thousands of dollars on sophisticated lasers when a few cheap ounces of Semtex would be immeasurably more effective?

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This Salon pilot/journalist works hard to keep his scorn under control. He utterly demolishes the whacky idea that terrorists are bothering with laser attacks on airplanes. If they wanted to take down airplanes, Semtex is vastly more effective.

The lasers are coming from the same people that drop rocks of overpasses and cut pages out of library books. In other words, from cowardly scum and brain-dead teenage boys.

Of course in the longer run we do have a problem. Now this bottom-fishing 0.001% of the population gets to play with lasers. What toys will they have in 30 years?

Center for Personalized Education for Physicians

Physician Evaluation Services - Educational Intervention

In response to today’s society where a person’s financial and family responsibilities can change quickly and unexpectedly, career mobility and preparedness is paramount. CPEP’s new program enables physicians to return to clinical practice with the training and support they need to resume their medical career after an extended absence. Physicians are eligible for this program if they were in good standing in the medical community prior to leaving practice.

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Traditionally one could leave practice for some years, then return and resume practice without formal retraining. Colorado no longer allows this, so a reentry market has developed. Good to keep note of this for non-practicing docs like myself.

Orwell uber alles

Ugly Truths About Guantanamo (washingtonpost.com)

Orwell, however, was off by only 20 years. With immense satisfaction, he would have noted the constant abuse of language by the Bush administration -- calling suicidal terrorists "cowards," naming a constriction of civil liberties the Patriot Act and, of course, wringing all meaning from the word "torture." Until just recently when the interpretation of torture was amended, it applied only to the pain like that of "organ failure, impairment of body function, or even death." Anything less, such as, say, shackling detainees to a low chair for hours and hours so that one prisoner pulled out tufts of hair, is something else. We have no word for it, but it is -- or was until recently -- considered perfectly legal.

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The current Orwell Awards focus on "freedom of the press". A noble cause, but not the root of Orwell's concerns. He would perhaps be more concerned about the "corruption of the press", a phenomena now well established in America.

We need a different group than journalists to present a new set of Orwell awards for 2005. I suggest High School english teachers, and I nominate George Bush as the premiere winner.

Tsunami Victims: VISA/MC waive transaction fees?

Tsunami Victims: How to Help (washingtonpost.com)

From a WaPo transcript about aiding Tsunami victims:

Los Angeles, Calif. With so many people making spur-of-the-moment donations, I bet that Visa and Mastercard are making a fortune from the fees they charge. Are they going to waive these fees? They should!

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Hmmm. This is an interesting question, one that didn't occur to me. The administrative costs to VISA/MC and AMEX on these types of donations is presumably quite small. It would be good corporate policy for them to donate their fees.

In fact it probably wouldn't be that hard for them to do so. If Americans donate $200 million via credit cards to this cause, fees are less than $5 million. I suspect AMEX/VISA/MC can manage that donation.

Krugman returns: the privatization of social security

The New York Times > Opinion > Krugman: Stopping the Bum's Rush

... we can't have a Social Security crisis without a general fiscal crisis - unless Congress declares that debts to foreign bondholders must be honored, but that promises to older Americans, who have spent most of their working lives paying extra payroll taxes to build up the trust fund, don't count.

Politically, that seems far-fetched. A general fiscal crisis, on the other hand, is a real possibility - but not because of Social Security. In fact, the Bush administration's scaremongering over Social Security is in large part an effort to distract the public from the real fiscal danger.

There are two serious threats to the federal government's solvency over the next couple of decades. One is the fact that the general fund has already plunged deeply into deficit, largely because of President Bush's unprecedented insistence on cutting taxes in the face of a war. The other is the rising cost of Medicare and Medicaid.

As a budget concern, Social Security isn't remotely in the same league. The long-term cost of the Bush tax cuts is five times the budget office's estimate of Social Security's deficit over the next 75 years. The botched prescription drug bill passed in 2003 does more, all by itself, to increase the long-run budget deficit than the projected rise in Social Security expenses.

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The Bush plan only makes sense if one assumes he will also privatize medicare.

American Chechnya -- the Economist's perspective

Economist.com | Iraq

The Economist this week features a grim summary from one or more embedded journalists (the Economist does not provide bylines). It reminds me a bit of the letter home from the WSJ's Iraq journalist, only this one was printed.

It has been well cited in the blogs I read. The news is relentlessly grim throughout Sunni Iraq. Fallujah is described as "demolished", which reminds me a bit of Grozny.

The US is hanging on until the Shias take over and the Kurds split away. After that, presumably, the true civil war begins.

One paragraph stood out for me:

Barely six months ago, Mosul was one of the most tranquil spots in Iraq. Now it is one of the most violent, and least policed. It may be no coincidence that, until last January, around 20,000 American troops were billeted in and around the city and led by a most dynamic commander. With troops urgently required elsewhere, they were replaced by 8,500 soldiers, around 700 of whom were diverted to Fallujah and Bagh.

So with sufficient forces, and extraordinary leadership, it might have been possible to occupy Iraq and hold real elections. Of course the US doesn't have a large enough army to do that, it would take years for us to build an army of occupation, rather than one of invasion, and it would probably require something like a draft.

I've always supposed the real issue with Shinseki's @2001 300,000+ prediction was that it meant, effectively, that we couldn't invade Iraq in the first place. If that's true, it's rather interesting that the print media didn't point this out a few years ago.

Y2K: give thanks to the Geeks who saved your butt

American RadioWorks - The Surprising Legacy of Y2K

... Koskinen points to evidence that the fix was needed. Some computers that didn't get fixed stopped working on New Year's Day. He says some of those glitches would normally have been big news, but since people were expecting the end of the world, they didn't seem like that big a deal. Koskinen was in the Y2K nerve center in Washington, D.C. that night, monitoring systems all over the world. He says the public doesn't realize how many things went wrong.

Koskinen describes the scene as he saw it unfurl. "The low level wind shear detectors at every major airport go out at 7:00 on Friday night, the defense intelligence satellite system goes down, the French intelligence satellite goes down, the Japanese lose the ability to monitor a couple of their nuclear power plants, and come Monday morning, there are thousands of businesses that when you buy something with your credit card charge you every day of the week.

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Yes, the Y2K crisis was real. It's the curse of prevention, whether in medicine or in business, that one never gets credit for a disaster deterred.

So why is it credit card companies tolerate so much fraud?

Faughnan's Notes: CC Fraud Take II

While I work through the 7K of fraudulent charges on my AMEX card, I have the opportunity to think again about how the basic infrastructure of credit card security seems little changed from my experience 7 years ago.

An NPR Morning Edition story fills in the blanks. VISA/MC and AMEX are very, very profitable endeavors. They probably pull in 75 billion every year on interest payments alone; then add atop that 1-2% of most retail transactions. In other words, they have money to burn.

Let's say they put a system in place that made fraud much more difficult. All the solutions I know of would make online purchases somewhat more difficult -- OR they would open the door to non-credit card alternatives. Either way, I bet it would cost the card industry billions. If an alternative to credit cards emerged, it could cost the card industry tens of billions of dollars every year.

Even today, that's a lot of money.

Far better to lose a few billion to fraudulent transactions every year. Since they probably only lose less than a hundred million dollars a year, credit card fraud will be a growth industry for years to come. If the only factor were economic, I'd guess fraud could be more than 10 times as common as it is now, meaning each year most of us would see some fraudulent activity on our statements.

A series of amateur photos of the incoming tsunami

Tsunami

In this series of photos, the victims are casually watching the incoming waves. Until it sweeps them away many seem unaware of the danger. Looking at the pictures I can imagine why. The Tsunami does not seem so high or great a wave; what cannot be seen is the immense "width" (volume) of water and the exceptional velocity of it. It is the volume (mass) of water times the square of the velocity that does the terrible damage.

Most misleading news coverage: a nominee

Reuters AlertNet - Study shows no one knows which diets work best

Wow, a new standard for most misleading news coverage and title. The study was of the commercial dietary companies, it wasn't a study of medical/dietician diets. They found, shockingly (not), that the commercial diet companies had no real evidence to back their claims of exceptional efficacy. Weight Watchers did better than the commercial competition.

Reuters isn't the only ridiculous headline, Google News had many examples.

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Update 1/12/05: I finally read the original JAMA article. Wow, the media coverage was even worse than I thought.

This was really an ambitious study. They looked at the Atkins (low carb) vs. Zone vs. Ornish (low fat) vs. standard (Weight Watchers) diets. They actively intervened for two months then followed up a year later. Subjects didn't get to pick their diet of choice -- they were randomly assigned.

The result was they all the dieters did dismally. In fact, they did worse than the dismal results one usually gets from diet studies. We don't know why -- was it something about how they were recruited? Was it related to all those lost to follow-up? Was it because people do better when they get to pick their own diets?

The main conclusion was the low card (Atkins) diets don't work any better than any other diet. Low carb seems to work a bit better at the 2 month mark (perhaps, as my friend Jim Horn noted, because it's so much work to prepare the food people eat less) but then people stop complying.

There's an increasing suspicion that obesity, once established, is not a treatable condition. Yeah, in theory it's reversible, and sure some lose weight for years (almost always due to serious exercise increases with some moderate food limitation), but we actually have better treatments for most of the leukemic disorders than we have for obesity.

We know obesity can be prevented. Among wealthy societies there are some settings with more obesity, some with less. Activity is the key variable. We also know than in an infotech centric, sit down, fly around society in which most persons can easily afford vast amounts of food, that we are heading for a plague of obesity that may break our healthcare budget.

We need serious new drugs, and the drug companies are investing billions (trillions) looking for this grail. (Billions for antiobesity drugs, a trifle for new antibiotics -- it's a bad story.) At least half of humanity will take these drugs for their entire lives -- or until we genetically modify humans so we eat less.

PS. Is the situation really so hopeless? Yes. In theory we could do many things to encourage and facilitate physical activity in all domains of our society. Sure. In practice this is the social equivalent of an individual actually sticking with a diet. Theoretically possible, but practically implausible -- especially in the current political climate where riding a bicycle is a sign of communist/terrorist sympathies.

The stagnant information architecture of the web: ten years of stasis

Reviving Advanced Hypertext (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

...In 1995, I listed fifteen hypertext features that were missing from Web browsers. None of these ideas have been implemented in the ten years since, except for Firefox's search box and Internet Explorer's search sidebar.

Is there any hope that the next decade will bring more progress? I think so. For one, most of the ideas mentioned here are rich sources of user interface patents, which offer a sustainable competitive advantage. (I invented at least five potential patents while writing this article, but didn't bother filing because I'm not in the business of suing infringers; a big company could rack up the patents if so inclined.)

The last ten years were a black hole: much attention was focused on doomed attempts at making the Web more like television. Hopefully, the next decade will focus instead on empowering users and giving us the features we need to master a worldwide information space.

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I don't think these are Nielsen's ideas -- Berners-Lee wanted bidirectional links & collaboration from day one. On the other hand, I have Nielsen's book and he did a good job of summarizing the state of the art back in 1995. There's been zero progress since then. (I remember Hyper-G, a Gopher derivative .. for example. Jon Udell has also written about this.)

He's absolutely right that the information infrastructure of the web has stagnated, but that was inevitable once Microsoft took monopolistic control of the browser. Perhaps Firefox, Google and Amazon will lead us out of the darkness.

Disasters: World Vision's list of myths

World Vision: "Top 10 Myths of Disaster Relief -- Aid Groups Address Public Stereotypes About Overseas Disasters"

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I don't often link to conservative religious sites, but this is a commonsense list. Bottom line -- just send money. I like CARE.ORG.