Redefining science: the Justice Department's 'religious rights' unit

The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: The God Racket, From DeMille to DeLay

The Los Angeles Times has uncovered a three-year-old 'religious rights' unit in the Justice Department that investigated a biology professor at Texas Tech because he refused to write letters of recommendation for students who do not accept evolution as 'the central, unifying principle of biology.'

I assume this unit will also protect Scientology in its attacks on psychiatry, and guarantee that Christian Science pre-med students suffer no discrimination in admissions based upon their religious beliefs. If not, I strongly urge the Christian Scientists, Scientologists, and other faiths, cults and variants thereof to bring a class-action discrimination suit against the Justice Department. Science must not discriminate based on its bizarre concepts of testable models and non-consensus reality.

[correction: in the first version a typo meant I wrote "consensus" instead of "non-consensus". Sorry!]

Madness of the Great WAr

t r u t h o u t - Niall Ferguson | Sinking Globalization

This Foreign Affairs article by Niall Ferguson compares today's world to that of 1905. This is not new; it's been a common comparison since 9/11. Even so, Niall does a good job of bringing these comparisons to life.

I've been particularly interested for the past few years in American history from 1885 to 1910. This is a fascinating article.

Creepy logo award: Social Explorer

Social Explorer - About Us

Social Explorer is an organization based in New York City. Our objective is to help Visually Analyze and Understand the Demography of the U.S. through the use of Interactive Maps. Our primary functions include Demographic Data Analysis, Interactive Map Design and Software Development.

One of our main goals is to show demographic change that's occured in the U.S. since 1870 till present. We maintain a collection of interactive maps that visually show some of the available Census Data running back to 1870s.

We have over 60 years of combined experince in data analysis. With Dr. Beveridge at helm, we have produced statistical information and themathic maps to Prudential Financial Services, New York Times, Time Warner, and many other entities.

Then New York Times and National Science Foundation are sponsors, but they need to do something about their logo. The eye in the nation is creepy.

The Puzzle of social cooperation in the East African Plains Ape

Brad DeLong's Website: Large-Scale Social Cooperation in the East African Plains Ape

Of all the puzzles in xenobiology, perhaps the most remarkable is the existence of large-scale (but very imperfect) social cooperation among the East African Plains Ape of Sol III.

There are those among us who would wash the EAPA from its habitat; those who wish to restart this experiment with the most promising canines, or even those frustrating dolphins. And yet, there is an awful fascination to the EAPS, a careening wreck of a creature perched on the very precipice of a barely tolerable culture. This slobbering beast draws our fascination, suspends our wiser judgments and blunts our aesthetic revulsion. Perhaps, in the ultimate analysis, we share some tiny measure of the abundant flaws of the EAPA. From this unspeakable past springs our horrific attraction.

Scientific American to include alternative perspectives

Scientific American Magazine Table of Contents: Current Issue

...In retrospect, this magazines coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one sided...This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science.

Alas, the April issue is not yet on the web site, but it should be available shortly. Yet another defender of the Enlightenment has fallen into the abyss. Will none stand against the forces of Darkness?!

Seriously, beyond the great "balanced cover" and the overly timid spoof (do they really think their readership needed "April Fools Day" as the last 3 words?) this is a good sign that the "guardians of enlightenment" are at least trying to pry one eye open. The phrase "science that scientists say is science" is a fond acknowledgment of the legacy of Dennis Flanagan, creator of the modern Scientific American. Mr. Flanagan is memorialized in the April issue; he died on January 14th, age 86.

I guess I need to subscribe to Sci Am now, as well as the Atlantic. Of course I don't have time to read all this stuff.

Fear, aggression and social intelligence

Experimental domestication of foxes yields clues to cognitive evolution

Fear is the enemy of understanding ...

To better understand how dogs evolved their unusual social cognitive ability, the researchers studied an experimental population of foxes that have been bred in Siberia, Russia, over the last 45 years to exhibit, over generations, increasingly friendly behavior toward humans. After dozens of generations, these foxes now behave toward people much as pet dogs do--they even bark and wag their tails at the sight of a human. Critically, these foxes were not specifically selected during breeding for their social intelligence. However, the current study found that although the foxes were not intentionally selected to be more skillful at solving social problems, they are in fact just as skillful as domestic dogs at reading human social cues. The current study therefore suggests that social intelligence can increase simply as a result of an animal becoming less fearful and aggressive towards potential social partners.

Suprising and puzzling. In 45 years it was possible to breed a very different animal, with far less aggression and fear. That animal had new and powerful capabilities.

I assume a fox generation is about 1.8 years. A human generation is about 10 times as long. So in 450 years could one go from a rather nasty, aggressive, fearful and viscious primate to an interactive, socially intelligent primate? What if the selection were not so perfect, but was rather an 20% advantage with a socially cooperative animal? How long would evolution take to change that primate -- maybe a few thousands years?

Of humans alive today, what percent are throwbacks to another era?

For children with poor social skills, what role does focal "fear management" have in social skills training?

Why so much attention to a family tragedy?

The New York Times > National > Behind Life-and-Death Fight, a Rift That Began Years Ago

Yet another story about the Shiavo family tragedy. Why did this story get so much attention? Other than the length of the debate and the legal ferocity, this was otherwise medically (somewhat) routine. In the early 90s, assuming there was a reasonable family consensus in a patient with this type of condition, it would have been quite routine to discontinue tube feeding. I seem to recall that even in catholic hospitals this not unheard of -- until the Vatican reveresed course in the mid-90s and decided tube feeding was a minimal requirement. (But one could simply wait for pneumonia to set in, and treat that without antibiotics.)

So what made this a big story? Here are my guesses. Maybe it was all of these.

1. Of course the congressional cynicism and political ploys made this a big story. It's not every day our government goes nuts. This amplified the story, but the story was already out there.

2. The drunken sailor effect. There are a bunch of angry white men who won big in a viscious hard fought election. They've pummeled and broken their feeble opponents. We lie whimpering and defeated. Sadly, that gives the victor no pleasure. They wanted a fight. So like a drunken sailor, they're weaving around looking for another battle, another way.

3. The 'use it or lose it' problem. The culture wars built up a largely right wing cultural media machine, which in turn needs more culture wars to keep it fed and energized. In a hyper-developed sophisticated economy these feedback loops are very powerful -- but they were well understood by Randolphy Hearst generations ago. The 'military industrial complex' is a good analogy. This right wing media machine is a fine honed weapon, with nothing left to shoot at. This story gave it something to do.

4. Blood and purity. This is the most intriguing part of the story. I think it may be more cultural and geographic than political. In a chunk of the nation it seems the real issue was that the wishes of a spouse dominated those of a blood kin. This may seem quite obvious to many of us, but it's not all obvious to a large chunk of America. For this group, blood is what matters. They were surprised to discover that the law says differently. This made them angry.

5. Boredom. Iraq is fading from public attention. Afghanistan is long forgotten. The tsunami is all but forgotten. The elections are over. Social security is boring.

6. Demographics. The boomers are starting to run into these situations. We're intensely interested in them.

7. All of the above.

[Update 3/27: On reflection I'll toss in the millenialist aspects of this story. I'm getting the sense that about 10% of the population is looking for evidence of direct divine intervention. For example; Ms. Shiavo speaking -- that would qualify as divine intervention in my book. For this group they see a 'test case' from God. Given that perspective their passion will be, by necessity, enormous.]

Is lossy compressed music "better" than 'real' music?

Inside the MP3 Codec - Masking Effects

I wondered about this questions while flying home, listening to my AAC (MP4) encoded music on my iPod. These are old songs and tunes, yet I seem to hear more than I used to. Certainly neither my ears or my brain are improving; entropy rules. Probably it's simply using better headphones, and and perhaps the experience of listening with more care to more music. My iPod has brought more music to my middle-aged gray days than all the toys of my youth.

And yet ...

Lossy compressed music is fundamentally quite different from non-compressed music. It sounds reasonably similar to the original music because of our brain can't fully detect all the missing elments, and because in some ways the brain "recreates" what isn't heard by the ear. This lossy compression effect is usually considered a necessary evil; an unsatisactory compromise with the storage limitations of current technologies.

But one could hypothesize that the overall experience might in some way be "superior". With the 'unheard sounds' removed, can the brain better focus on the fundamental sounds? Could the process of 'filling the gaps' be in some way 'pleasant' for the brain, a mild excercise that is stimulating and agreeable?

It's easy to imagine all kinds of interesting experiments with different compression levels, different music, functional neurocognitive imaging, etc. I hope to read about these soon ...

It would be funny if it turned out that part of the appeal of the iPod is that people like lossless encoded music better than the 'real' thing.

Hope for Blogger?

Blogger Status Feb 18th

Blogger is now updating their status pages and they seem to be managing their problems more methodically. The situation is dire for those of us with a thousand or more postings. If the Blogger router assigns us to a troubled server we're dead in the water:

...What we are seeing is that individual application servers will trend toward 100% CPU usage over time - simply, the appservers get pegged and users on those servers encounter paralyzingly slow load times ...

Users with more than 500 posts are also being severely hampered at this time. We believe this is due to an improper use of system resources when users of such blogs either access the Edit Posts page or attempt to publish. We will be testing a potential fix to this problem over the next couple days and hope to push it to production early next week. Because of the extent of the change, we need to fully assess the impact on the service before deployment.

This last fix sounds potentially promising. I'll keep my digits overlapped.

Orcinus on hate groups, racial purity, and the role of the 'people like us'

Orcinus - Succubs

Orcinus connects the Red Lake shootings to a wide range of American hate groups, and references an exceptionally horrid 1985 murder. I'm unsure how strong the connections are, but it's a remarkable set of stories.

The harshness of mortal life - hidden refugees from North Korea

The New York Times > International > Asia Pacific > Glimpse of World Shatters North Koreans' Illusions

Howard French writes of two girls hiding in a Chinese border town.

Sitting on a bare floor in a chilly one-room apartment, Lee Hae Jon and her younger sister, Hae Sun, struggled recently for words to describe their lives since they clandestinely made their way here from North Korea five years ago. Their mother married a Chinese man and disappeared from their lives without a trace. Since then, a Chinese widow of Korean descent has taken the girls into her apartment and kept them clothed and fed. But for five years, the teenage sisters have not dared to go outside in daylight for fear of being sent back to their country, or worse, trafficked as young brides or prostitutes in this booming Chinese border city.

The sisters try to teach themselves Chinese, using a couple of old textbooks and repeating phrases from television, which they watch endlessly. A crude Hula-Hoop is their only source of exercise, and each knock on the door their only excitement. They never know whether it is help from their caretaker's friends or the police coming to arrest them.

'We have no friends, and no future, nothing at all, really,' said the soft-spoken older sister, Hae Jon, 17. 'But if we stay here, at least we have enough to eat. In our country, we could go for days without eating.'

Within months, according to an underground network of people who help support the sisters, Hae Jon may be alone. Hae Sun, a shy girl of 13, is dying of kidney cancer and is not permitted to be flown out of the country for advanced care.

The problem of pain. I don't buy Lewis answers.

Blowback - the sour fruits of an unwanted victory

When Frist and DeLay convened their emergency meeting of congress, the dems ran for the hills. The Schiavo bill passed. Bush flew in from Texas, the only vacation he's ever left for any cause, and signed the bill.

I thought the Dems were being cowardly, but in retrospect, whether they planned it or not, this was a brilliant Judo move. The polling data on the public response is so intensely negative, even among Bush supporters, that Rove must have known how this would go. The only plausible explanation for Frist and DeLay's action is that Rove never intended to win. He didn't expect the Dems to turn tail; he figured the Senate (at least) would defeat the bill. Then Ms. Shiavo would die and the ongoing moral fervor would give DeLay cover to dodge his impending conviction.

Instead, the bill passed. A personal tragedy became a constitutional issue. So negative has the response been, that a recent ABC news story has convinced activist groups like MoveOn to play politics themselves. I think this is a mistake, the dems should stay out of this one entirely. The MoveOn petition letter, however, has some noteworthy comments:

... a memo intended only for Republican Senators—uncovered by ABC News—reveals Republicans' true concern: "The pro-life base will be excited...this is a great political issue...this is a tough issue for Democrats." This story also takes the heat off Tom DeLay, who is facing a number of serious ethics charges and legal scandals...

...The New York Times talked to David Davenport of the Hoover Institute, a conservative research organization, who said, "When a case like this has been heard by 19 judges in six courts and it's been appealed to the Supreme Court three times, the process has worked even if it hasn't given the result that the social conservatives want. For Congress to step in really is a violation of federalism."

..."It's disturbing that doctors who would never venture a comment about the health of anybody from a homemade video are sitting on the floor of Congress making declarations," said Art Caplan, chairman of the Department of Medical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Medicine. "My own impression, from a distance, is that they've subverted what they know to be good medicine for the aim of achieving a political goal."

...And reporters are now raising questions about a right-to-die law Bush signed as Texas governor, contradicting his position in the Schiavo case. Just last week, the law was applied for the first time, allowing doctors to remove a critically ill infant from life support against his mother's wishes. According to the Houston Chronicle, this marks the first time in American history that courts allowed a pediatric patient to die against the wishes of their parent.[7] As the Knight Ridder News service reports:

..."The mother down in Texas must be reading the Schiavo case and scratching her head," said Dr. Howard Brody, the director of Michigan State University's Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences. "This does appear to be a contradiction." Brody said that, in taking up the Schiavo case, Bush and Congress had shattered a body of bioethics law and practice."

Despite my quoting of the some noteworthy comments (I can't resist either) I still think the Dems should lay low and let the Republicans roast in their juices. This is political madness and a sign of the deep sickness at the heart of the Republican party. Let that be seen for what it is.

Why Wolfowitz?

Crooked Timber Wolfowitz for the World Bank!

I won't even try to comment on whether Wolfowitz is a good choice for the World Bank leadership. The Economist said NO, Crooked Timber makes a backhanded case for 'maybe not so bad'.

More interesting, is why someone would want to take a Pentagon #2 and have them lead the World Bank. Imagine that the decision maker (Cheney? Rove? Rumsfeld? Bush? Rice?) thought Wolfowitz was trustworthy, loyal and competent. Perhaps they thought like this:

1. The primary military threat to the US in the next 20 years comes from decaying states and non-state actors.
2. The US will deploy all of its military power against emergent threats, but this strategy will not succeed. There are too many threats and the cost of havoc will keep falling.
3. The US must drain the swamp by encouraging global wealth and prosperity.
4. The World Bank must become an agent of US defensive strategy - it must drain the swamp.
5. The World Bank is a now a military-strategic engine, hence it should be run by a Military/political strategist. Unfortunately Karl Rove is not available. Hence Wolfowitz.

If this is the thinking of Cheney/Bush/Rove/Rumsfeld/Rice then the World Bank will take on its old mission with new intensity.

I would approve (I'm sure Bush would be impressed by that!). Of course this is probably all my wishful thinking ...

Wasted money: school smoking education programs. So what about drugs?

The New York Times > Health > Vital Signs: Prevention: When the Smoke Doesn't Clear

schools around the country offer a wide variety of programs to keep students from smoking, but a new study suggests that they all have one thing in common: they don't work.

A meta-analysis of various trials show school anti-smoking programs are probably a waste of money. I suspect, based on this result, the same will be true of anti-drug programs.

Increasing the cost of smoking does work.

Time to try something else.

Mendel's head is spinning

Plants Fix Genes With Copies From Ancestors (washingtonpost.com)Plants can restore from backup systems.

Then, in a move akin to choosing their parents, plants can apparently retrieve selected bits of code from that archive and use them to overwrite the genes they have inherited directly. The process could offer survival advantages to plants suddenly burdened with new mutations or facing environmental threats for which the older genes were better adapted.

Eons ago I wondered if biological systems would somewhere implement algorithmic compression programs resembling lzw compression. This is weirder.

I'm not sure it's totally unanticipated, I think I saw a star trek episode along those lines once (Picard is devolving towards some kind of lemur ...). Nonetheless, it's rather astounding. Gregor Mendel would really be amazed.