One gene, one gender preference

For Fruit Flies, Gene Shift Tilts Sex Orientation - New York Times

Gender behavior in the fruit fly is specified with a single gene.

"We have shown that a single gene in the fruit fly is sufficient to determine all aspects of the flies' sexual orientation and behavior," said the paper's lead author, Dr. Barry Dickson, senior scientist at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. "It's very surprising.

"What it tells us is that instinctive behaviors can be specified by genetic programs, just like the morphologic development of an organ or a nose."...

...The finding supports scientific evidence accumulating over the past decade that sexual orientation may be innately programmed into the brains of men and women. Equally intriguing, the researchers say, is the possibility that a number of behaviors - hitting back when feeling threatened, fleeing when scared or laughing when amused - may also be programmed into human brains, a product of genetic heritage.

One might think a fly is quite different from a human, but genes that code for things as fundamental as gender preference tend to be highly conserved by evolution. If there's a similar gene in humans it may well have a significant effect on male gender behavior. (Gender preference in female humans is thought to more fluid than in male humans; we may not be the same as the fruit fly.)

The more we learn, the more programmed and machine-like humans seem. The research has been pretty consistent over the past 20 years. When popular books strive to preserve a role for the environment they provide examples that are frail and tend to fall quickly to further research. In contrast genetic control of behavior has held up well. Identical twin studies seemed to preserve more room for the environment, but since then we've learned that there's a large amount of variability in gene expression even among identical twins (esp. female twins).

What will we do with this knowledge? How will it alter our thinking on self-determination, on "merit", on responsibility, on punishment? If modern Republicanism rewards the luck of parental wealth, does not the meritocratic alternative reward the luck of parental genes? (Parental wealth and parental genes, of course, are generally correlated in any event.)

If we come to see all fortune, goodness and badness as merely the expressions of random chance, will we look differently at winners and losers alike? Will we one day return to the marxist doctrine of 'from each according to their means, to each according to their needs'?

Come back in twenty years and let's see.

Coalition casualties in Iraq: tally, details and news

I was thinking this morning of how little I know about what's going on in Iraq. It's a reasonably large, populous, and complex country. A bigger Yugoslavia. With Oil. Occupied too.

I wondered again why nobody seems to have a web site that that provides an english language digest of the editorial and news pages of 6 or so Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite daily newspapers.

The New York Times could do this. Forget about investing in journalists in Baghdad. They're expensive and prone to be kidnapped and murdered. Translate and summarize some Iraqi newspapers instead. Safer and more effective.

Odd.

While looking half-heartedly for such a thing, I came across this: Iraq Coalition Casualties. They have a news summary from the usual suspects (BBC, Guardian, etc) but also a tally of coalition (not Iraqi) casualties. The totals link to details and thus to death notices. They also provide links to similar pages in the "about" page. Somewhere to go when your child next Memorial day asks about soldiers.

iPod battery settlement: $50?

iPodlounge | Apple to offer $50 credit in iPod battery settlement

Maybe. It's not clear this is official yet.

Based on past experience I would not send a working iPod to Apple for a battery replacement. I did that once and it took two replacements and a letter to the MN attorney general to get another working iPod back.

I will, however, happily take the $50 credit. My wife will inherit my current iPod, and I will move to the 30G color version ...

At the moment the settlement site is hard to reach.

Office 12's promised Open XML file format: I'll chew my hat.

InformationWeek > Breaking News > Office 12 To Boost XML Support, Document Security > June 1, 2005

When Office 12 debuts next year, the default 'save-to' file format of the applications will be XML. Or at least a version which Microsoft is calling Microsoft Open XML Formats.

If Office 12 actually uses well documented file formats without intellectual property entanglements that other applications can readily and safely read and write, I'll (at least) chew my hat. File format control is so fundamental to Microsoft's business model this would only make sense if they are planning a radical transformation of their business model.

It does make sense if Microsoft plans to move to a 'rented software' model rather than the current no expiration 'licensed model'. Since I believe they very much want to move to a rented software model this move is not utterly inconceivable. So I'm only promising to chew rather than eat my hat.

BTW, Microsoft promised XML file formats for Office XP, but the implementation ended up being very proprietary and basically useless. This implementation resembles the OpenOffice file design: ascii XML with binary objects embedded in an enclosing zip file. Apple does something quite similar with their Office competitors.

Washing keyboards -- in the dishwasher

You CAN Put Your Keyboard in the Dishwasher

This is an old practice -- clean out a dirty keyboard by washing it. I read of this practice at least 8 years ago, and it's probably older.

Surprisingly it's said to work well for a variety of electronics, but not motors of any kind. Don't rapid-dry the keyboard. Fan drying is fine. Most people don't remove the keys, but older or somewhat loose keys may fall off and should be removed and stored prior to the dishwasher. Some say to avoid soap, but most agree a small amount of standard dishwasher soap works well.

The drying stage can take a few days.

Camera vendors of Brooklyn -- home of the "great deal"

Central Digital, d.b.a. dBuys.com, IBuyDigital.com, IBuyPlasma.com, RealDealShop.com, DigitalMegaStore.com, and CentralDigital.com

Brooklyn is the home of the low cost camera "deal". The companies selling these cameras operate on very low margins, and it turns out they have store fronts to match (and about 7 different names each).

Some of these vendors make money by cheating their customers. Others make their money on bundled accessories. I had a good personal experience with iBuyDigital, and, by comparison to their peers, they have a palatial store front (link above).

(iBuyDigital did pester me to buy some higher margin accessories, but that's only fair. I only used them once however. My other purchases have been at more traditional venues and Amazon.)

Making a threat threatening: six strategies for business

HBS Working Knowledge: Strategy: Six Steps for Making Your Threat Credible

Did you know there are entire journals dedicated to Negotiation? This is taken from an article by Deepak Malhotra (Harvard Business School). The tactics only work, however, if the opponent is clever enough to recognize them. I don't think that's always true. It's possible to be too clever ...

Israeli hackers use trojan software to spy on rival companies: Neuromancer lives

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israeli firms 'ran vast spy ring'

Neuromancer was not the first science fiction novel to describe a world of corporate hackers spying upon one another's software -- but it was the best of this genre. I hope someone interviews William Gibson for his commentary on this historic story. Historic because the events described will soon be so commonplace...

Police in Israel say they have uncovered a huge industrial spying ring which used computer viruses to probe the systems of many major companies.

At least 15 Israeli firms have been implicated in the espionage plot, with 18 people arrested in Israel and two more held by British police.

Among those under suspicion are major Israeli telecoms and media companies.

Police say the companies used a "Trojan horse" computer virus written by an Israeli to hack into rivals' systems.

Interpol and the authorities in Britain, Germany and the US are already involved in investigating the espionage, which Israeli police fear may involve major international companies.

Imagine the situation in Russia and China.

The last remaining shards of the media squeak up.

Washington Post: Assault On the Media

The barbarians have leveled the house and set fire to the fields. They advance on a loan scribe deep in the rubble. It gradually dawns on him that there's a war on, and maybe he should "fight back".

...I resisted writing about this subject precisely because I do not want anyone to confuse my own views with Newsweek's or The Post's.

I write about it now because of the new reports and because I fear that too many people in traditional journalism are becoming dangerously defensive in the face of a brilliantly conceived conservative attack on the independent media.

Conservative academics have long attacked "postmodernist" philosophies for questioning whether "truth" exists at all and claiming that what we take as "truths" are merely "narratives" woven around some ideological predisposition. Today's conservative activists have become the new postmodernists. They shift attention away from the truth or falsity of specific facts and allegations -- and move the discussion to the motives of the journalists and media organizations putting them forward. Just a modest number of failures can be used to discredit an entire enterprise.

Logic, rationality, empiricism. That's so Enlightenment. Bush is either pre-Enlightenment or post-modernist or both. BTW, I don't think he would have much of a problem with that assertion. Bush famously remarked that the "jury is still out on natural selection". He's no rationalist.

The ultimate iMac accessory: an air conditioner

Faughnan's Tech: iMac essential: a thermal monitoring program

Let's assume Apple has fixed the power supply and the fans in the new (last month's) 2nd generation G5 iMac. They still have one huge problem -- IBM's CPU. In contrast to Intel, who invested wisely and heavily to destroy power-efficient competitive CPUs with their own excellent solution, IBM and AMD have followed the hot road.

So I don't think Apple has solved the G5 iMac's heat dissipation problem.

So if you want a G5 iMac, what else do you need? A well air conditioned room with an external fan pushing cool room air into the iMac's air intake. This kind of defeats the purpose of a quiet machine, but at least the room will be comfortable. One could compromise by running the iMac in its low speed setting and allowing the room temperature to rise a bit. A high quality large low speed external fan could even be fairly quiet.

My guess is that the combination of an internal thermal monitoring system, judicious use of external drives to reduce internal drive heating, lower performance settings, room air conditioning and a quiet external fan, all taken together, will allow one to use a 2nd generation G5 iMac for at least 2-3 years. When you need power for video editing, crank the external cooling and let the machine rip.

Yes, Apple has a problem.

Smithsonian Museum of Natural History to screen the Discovery Institute's anti-evolution propaganda

Smithsonian to Screen a Movie That Makes a Case Against Evolution - New York Times

Reading the article one is left with two possible conclusions:

1. There's been significant incompetence at the museum.
2. This was an informed decision. That implies either non-scientific leadership or profound political cynicism.

This is another substantial victory for the Discovery Institute (largely funded, btw, but far right proponents of christian government) and a significant defeat for american science. We are continuing to lose ground. It may yet be reversed, by Monday morning the office of the museum's director will be getting some interesting phone calls.

Happiness is a selective memory - manipulating memory for good and for profit

EconLog, Framing Effects and Memory, Bryan Caplan: Library of Economics and Liberty

A central assumption of much of my research is that people can choose their own beliefs. There are many possible mechanisms, but Vrij's discussion suggests yet another. If you want to believe something, just describe the relevant event to yourself using appropriately loaded language. Your memory does the rest.

Conversely, if you want to prevent your desires from affecting your beliefs, use measured language to describe it to yourself. Otherwise, you're burying a time capsule of deception for yourself to dig up at a later date.

The more we understand our minds, the more ephemeral and contextual we appear to be. Belief is particularly fluid. This adds new dimensions to classic books describing mass movements.

My approach to creating a selectively-false and happy set of memories is a large collection of family photos that cycle across our array of computer displays. These leverage the principle of selective reinforcement of memory -- given two proximate events, unbalanced reinforcement of one will decrease retrieval of the second. It as though as one memory grows it usurps the foundation of its "neighbor" memories. In this experiment the happy photos selectively blur away all other events.

Truth is fundamentally overrated in our current universe.

PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) may work the other way. By constantly reinforcing very negative memories all good memories seem to be subsumed. This is why some therapies for PTSD have been hypothesized to be potentially counter-productive. I think that PTSD research is now focusing on "selective destruction" of memory and reinforcement or implanting of more positive memories.

Memory therapy, involving the selective implantation of false memories for the the benefit of the patient, will be an increasingly interesting subject over the next twenty years. Particulary if it is done without the informed consent of the patient. Of course, some would say advertisers have done this for years.

Speaking of memory, I thought I wrote on this topic some time ago, but my searches aren't turning anything up. Maybe I did that in an alternate time slice :-).

Gender imbalance in China: the contribution of Hepatitis B infection

The Search for 100 Million Missing Women - An economics detective story. By Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt

Fascinating. There are two fascinating claims here that seem reasonably persuasive:

1. Hepatitis B infection biases live births to male infants. (Hep B infection is very common in some areas of China and used to be very common in Taiwan -- until they began immunizing newborns to prevent perinatal infection.)
2. This phenomena accounts for a significant portion of China's gender bias (too few women -- the other explanations are selective neglect of liveborn girls and selective abortion, the old explanation of 'stopping after the first boy' doesn't work).

Economics and public health are meeting in increasingly interesting ways.

Signs of the end times? Or just new times ...

First - Crooked Timber: I think I’m going to be sick: The Economist’s new venture is:

...an inspirational lifestyle magazine which instead of helping readers make decisions in their professional life, helps them do the same in their personal life”...

... Take white-collar boxing – the latest stress reliever for Wall Street and City elite. Tired of punching a bag at the gym, they have now moved on to punching each other in front of a paying audience. ...

... If smacking around your colleagues doesn’t sound appealing, how about brushing up on your space travel tips so you can be first in line to book your space flight?

... Other articles include the latest on gadgets, health innovations, luxury items and how to order your own bespoke car.

and ...

The April 22, 2005 business section of a "local" paper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, printed the compensation rankings for the CEOs of publicly traded Minnesota companies (the numbers are in millions of dollars, they don't distinguish between CEO-founders and CEO's hired into a mature company):

1. William McGuire, UnitedHealth Group: 125
2. Robert Ulrich, Target: 40
3. Jerry Grundhofer, US Bancorp: 39
4. Steve Sanger, General Mills: 18
5. Randall Hogan, Pentair: 10
6. Joel Ronning, Digital River: 8.6
7. James McNerney, 3M: 8.5
8. Kendrick Melrose, Toro: 8.1
9. Richard Rompala, Valspar: 7.8
10. Arthur Collins, Medtronic: 6.7

and

• the Wall Street Journal has a front page essay on America's rigid class structures
• the New York Times runs an entire series on the same topic
• Cohen and DeLong write in The Atlantic about globalization and class upheaval in near-future America. The primary thesis? There will be vastly more money and wealth going to multinational companies, but it will not go to workers exposed to the income pressures of globalization. Where it will end up settling (deflation, shareholders, senior management) is unclear and may depend on social factors such as corruption.
  

There's more, but the above provides a decent overview. We are an aging society, so we may respond to these circumstances with less social upheaval than we would have 80 years ago. All the same, I do expect a green/socialist party to emerge in America in 2012, rather to the shock of pundits everywhere. (I'm a middle-of-the-road Clinton Democrat myself btw, but I'm old too :-).

Search engines I use now

At the pretty wired (ok, it was in Minnesota) .com startup I worked for in the 90s I was the first to discover and use Google. Alta Vista, my old favorite, had been in decline and Yahoo was still pretty much a directory/indexing company (for manual indices, I then preferred the Encyclopedia Britannica's site!).

Google was the clear winner from the start. It's been a Google world ever since.

There are rumblings, though, of rebellion. Googe's indexing engines are slow to hit many pages, especially Gooogle's own blogs. Yahoo seems to hit the pages Google misses. And, as Phil Bradley notes, there are many special purpose alternatives.

Here are a few I've lately found useful - or at least interesting:

Mindset (Yahoo): Yahoo search biased to commercial or non-commercial
http://mindset.research.yahoo.com

Grokker: visual results
http://www.grokker.com

Brainboost: just facts
http://www.brainbost.com

Google Scholar: academia
http://scholar.google.com

Google Portal: Google + Gmail + Google History search
http://www.google.com/ig

Froogle and Pricescan: Shopping, also Amazon for the best overall user reviews.

Google Print: search full text of books
(added 5/28, thanks to a reference from Phil Bradley's blog)
http://print.google.com/