Advances in Alzheimer research

Hope for reversing memory loss

Mice bred to produce defective tau protein develop memory loss. Turning off defective protein production aids memory recovery -- but the brain continues to form neurofibrillary plaques and tangles.

Ashe said the new findings suggest that abnormal forms of the proteins work like poisons. They might be disrupting the function of brain cells early in the disease process, and long before the plaques and tangles appear. The plaques and tangles might, instead, be a defensive mechanism to neutralize the bad proteins, she said.

This has been a recurring idea for some years -- that the "pathologic structures" seen in brains afflicted by the Alzheimer's process are actually attempts to protect the neuron. Dr. Ashe's research has greatly strengthened that hypothesis. Now others will have to validate these results.

Update: Thinking this over, it occurs to me that the plaques and/or tangles would still play a pathologic role if they somehow acted with the tau protein to cause memory loss. Oh well, Dr. Ashe probably has other reasons to suspect they're protective.

The London attack: let's hope it needed an outside expert

Cracking the London Case - Agatha Christie vs. the terrorists. By Tim Naftali

Tim Naftali is the author of Blind Spot: the Secret History of American Counterterrorism. He's not a formal counter-terrorism export, but given the way he writes I wonder if he's had another past life he doesn't talk about. This Salon article, despite the stupid title, is an exceptional summary of how counter-terrorism operations proceed, including how the Lockerbie bombing was solved.

The most interesting part for me, however, was his conclusion:

The challenge now for the British is to determine whether they are hunting a large organization, with direct ties abroad, or a local jihadist gang. There is much debate now about the extent to which al-Qaida has metastasized in reaction to U.S. and allied attacks on Bin Laden's sanctuary in Afghanistan. There is no question that the group has devolved into a looser worldwide confederation. The question is whether it has also become more lethal. The solution to the London case may provide some answers. Counterintuitive as this may seem, it would be comforting to learn that these four suspected bombers relied on outside help. That would indicate that they are part of an army of terrorists, and armies have leadership structures that can be destroyed. If, on the other hand, the London bombings were done by four angry young men with the barest amount of local support, the challenge for Western counterterrorism becomes much greater.

Years ago, when I wrote a mini-book web page post 9/11, the falling cost of havoc was the single most important concept I wanted to communicate. This is the real bottom line. We've always had suicidal religous fanatics (remember Shinto pilots in WW II?). We've always had terrorists. We've always had religious and cultural strife. What's new is that havoc has become affordable. As technology reduces the costs and increases the diversity of weaponry, as communication allows ideas and techniques to be widely disseminated, as the pool of the educated disenfranchised grows, the risks and costs of terrorism rise.

This has implications. I think, for example, that we should be desperately funding research into the nature of paranoid schizophrenia and the sociology of antisocial action. We also need to think about how we'll survive a world in which engineering bio-pathogens becomes a schoolboy's exercise.

Let's hope this event required an outside expert. Let's hope the currently missing Islamic chemistry student wasn't all they needed. Let's hope the day of reckoning is still a few years away.

At last -- the study on how well studies hold up

CNN.com - Research: Third of study results don't hold up - Jul 13, 2005

When I started my practice in rural Michigan 16 years ago Family Physicians were (even then!) being "beat up" for not adopting new research quickly enough. After a few years of practice I experienced quite a few reversals in "best practice" (such as the U turn on Magnesium post-MI).

Back then I proposed doing a study that would take a number of journals from the 1980s and see how well the recommendations held up. I started doing some preliminary work, but my life took other directions. Once it became apparent I wasn't going to do the research myself I talked it up with friends and colleagues. They weren't too impressed.

Which is why I'm so pleased someone has done the work, and confirmed what I'd guessed back then:

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- New research highlights a frustrating fact about science: What was good for you yesterday frequently will turn out to be not so great tomorrow.

The sobering conclusion came in a review of major studies published in three influential medical journals between 1990 and 2003, including 45 highly publicized studies that initially claimed a drug or other treatment worked.

Subsequent research contradicted results of seven studies -- 16 percent -- and reported weaker results for seven others, an additional 16 percent.

That means nearly one-third of the original results did not hold up, according to the report in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Now there's some empiric support for the practice of gnarly old docs who like to wait a few years before implementing the very latest research -- especially when the benefits of a new approach seem relatively modest.

Progress on "supplements" in Europe -- the slow dawn of rationality

BBC NEWS | Health | Vitamin controls backed by Europe

It was always a ridiculous superstition that because something is "natural" it is somehow fundamentally safer, and thus should be treated differently from "synthetic" substances. Tobacco is natural. So is Coca, tetrodotoxin and rabies. Europe fell to this superstition early, and it infected the US in the 1980s thanks to a dim witted senator from Utah.

Maybe this is a sign that superstition has its limits, at least in Europe.

Terrorists have families too: suicide bomber reported missing

BBC NEWS | UK | London bomb arrests: At a glance:

It was obvious that the lists of persons reported missing might include the terrorists, but wisely I didn't see this mentioned anywhere. Now it can be said:

1712 The home addresses of three of the four suspects were searched. Material found at one of the six addresses raided has caused police concern. One man has been arrested in West Yorkshire and will be brought to London to be questioned.

1709 All four of the men arrived in London by train on the morning of Thursday 7 July. Personal documents link them to the scenes of some of the explosions, Mr Clark says. One suspect had been reported missing by his family.

1708 Peter Clark, head of the Met's anti-terrorist branch says they were alerted quite early to the activities of four men, three from the West Yorkshire area.

1707 Asst Comm Andy Hayman says police have followed up more than 2,000 calls to an anti-terrorist helpline. They have also studied 2,500 CCTV tapes.

1650 Security sources confirm they believe all four bombers are dead. They suspect the three on the Tube were suicide bombers but are keeping an open mind on whether the bomber who died in the bus bomb meant to kill himself, the BBC's Margaret Gilmore says.

1638 Counter-terrorist officers tell the BBC they believe all four of the bomb suspects are British born. They suspect more than one died in the blasts.

A double tragedy, perhaps, for that family.

Responding to terrorism -- the limits of human nature

BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | UK urges terrorist asset seizure

Humans are bad at prevention; natural selection has not given us the full cognitive architecture needed for anticipatory actions. We do better at this than other animals, but ultimately we run into our fundamental limitations.

There are many actions the EU was to have taken post 9/11 that they did not take, particularly with money laundering. These were requested by every post 9/11 commission and report. The reluctance to act is probably related to the use of those services by powerful individuals in the EU (and US) who are not directly connected to terrorism, but may wish to avoid taxes, leverage campaign donations, benefit from corruption, hide money from divorce lawyers, recycle drug money, etc.

Now that the long anticipated and highly probably London bombings have occurred, we humans may do post-tragedy the things that were needed pre-tragedy:

Among the measures in the EU action plan he wants pushed through are:

* Ensuring all member states can take action nationally to freeze terrorist assets - EU-wide mechanisms cannot currently be used to freeze accounts of EU citizens

* Making it compulsory for wire transfers of money to be accompanied by information about the identity of the sender

* Updating the EU money laundering rules to meet international standards

* Completing the European Commission-sponsored review of EU structures on tackling terrorists' finance

* Introducing a code of conduct to prevent abuse of charities by terrorists.

Sadly, being human, we may also do some things of uncertain risk/benefit ratio as well:

...On Wednesday, Home Secretary Charles Clarke will chair an emergency meeting with his European counterparts on co-operation on counter-terrorism operations.

Mr Clarke wants to force telephone and internet service firms across Europe to keep records of all private telephone calls, text messages and e-mails so they can be passed on to the police if necessary.

How to solve the problem of identity theft and mass credit card fraud

Data Theft: How to Fix the Mess - New York Times

Today merchants and card holder are the victims of identity theft and credit card misuse. The banks do very well thank you; they even make money if the card holder doesn't detect the fraudulent transaction. Merchants don't have the resources to deal with this problem -- only the banks can tackle it. They've had solutions in hand for over a decade, but they cost money to implement -- so nothing happens.

This NYT article outlines the obvious solution, championed by Bruce Schneier. Make fraudulent transactions the bank's problem.

What we need right now is someone in power who can put the burden for this problem right where it belongs: on the financial and other institutions who collect this data. Let's face it: by the time even the most vigilant consumer discovers his information has been used fraudulently, it's already too late. 'When people ask me what can the average person do to stop identity theft, I say, 'nothing,' ' said Bruce Schneier, the chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security. 'This data is held by third parties and they have no impetus to fix it.'

Mr. Schneier, though, has a solution that is positively Proxmirian in its elegance and simplicity. Most of the bills that have been filed in Congress to deal with identity fraud are filled with specific requirements for banks and other institutions: encrypt this; safeguard that; strengthen this firewall.

Mr. Schneier says forget about all that. Instead, do what Congress did in the 1970's - just put the burden on the financial industry. 'If we're ever going to manage the risks and effects of electronic impersonation,' he wrote recently on CNET (and also in his blog), 'we must concentrate on preventing and detecting fraudulent transactions.' And the only way to do that, he added, is by making the financial institutions liable for fraudulent transactions.

'I think business ingenuity is top notch,' Mr. Schneier said in an interview. 'And I think if you make it their problem, they will solve it.'

Indeed. The banks know what to do, if they start losing billions they'll put their fixes off the shelf.

Update 1/23/2008: A comment pointed out that South Korea has implemented the policy Mr. Schneier recommends. Sure enough, Schneier wrote about that in December 2005.

Racism is ubiquitous - the Japanese experience

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Japan racism 'deep and profound'

In Japan it's legal to have store signs that say "Japanese Only", by which I think they first mean "no Koreans" and secondarily no Euros. (Africans are probably too shocking to contemplate.) Many Japanese are still explicitly ethnocentric and racist.

So, for that matter, are the Quebecois. Also the Chinese and the Koreans. And umm, oh yes, the rest of us. What's a bit different about Japanese racism is that it's relatively widely accepted and institutionalized in both religious and political life. Such honesty is unusual for a wealthy nation.

The US has traveled some distance since our days of explicit, santioned racism -- not so long ago. It's been an irregular course and it's sure to reverse; since 9/11 racism has probably grown here. We're still very racist, but we're less honest about it. I think, in this case, dishonesty is good. The first step towards changing a behavior is to make it shameful, something that ought to be hidden.

Progress can occur. One day humans may even be civilized; perhaps in two or three hundred years.

The Rove/Plame story: why did Time try to silence the memo?

Matt Cooper's Source - Newsweek National News - MSNBC.com

Newsweek gets a copy of a Time magazine memo that Time's corporate parents wanted suppressed. The memo implicates Karl Rove in the Plame scandal.

NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of the e-mail that Cooper sent his bureau chief after speaking to Rove. (The e-mail was authenticated by a source intimately familiar with Time's editorial handling of the Wilson story, but who has asked not to be identified because of the magazine's corporate decision not to disclose its contents.)

Presumably a Time magazine journalist, infuriated at this corporate cover-up, leaked the email.

So why did Time-Warner want to hide the memo? Which corporate mogul made that decision? What was the anticipated payoff? The story has developed an interesting new angle.

Diabetes and coffee

BBC NEWS | Health | Row over coffee advice for diabetics

The BBC did a great job of covering this story; most of the media did their usual miserable health care work. It's no wonder the BBC's news sites are displacing traditional print media.

Researchers from the Dutch national Institute for Public Health and the Environment in Bilthoven, Netherlands, asked over 17,000 how much coffee they drank each day.

Those who drank seven or more cups of coffee a day-were 50% less likely to develop type-2 diabetes compared with those who drank two cups a day or less.

The association was still seen when factors such as smoking, alcohol consumption and body mass were taken into account...

... This study backs up previous research which showed that when people increased their coffee consumption for 14 days, their blood glucose levels were reduced, but substituting regular coffee for decaffeinated coffee for 20 days did not affect glucose levels.

I bet this 50% reduction effect doesn't hold up. Seven cups is a lot -- that's getting into my range. Maybe they actually showed a continuous decline in incidence with coffee dose, but if it were a discontinuous effect then I'd be extremely skeptical.

They claim they controlled for body mass, but all the mega-coffee drinkers I can think of are relatively slender types. I suspect what they did was isolate a group of adults with ADD traits who manage that predisposition by using a legal and safe stimulant -- coffee. This group is notoriously fidgety and restless, and hence prone to a lower average lifelong body mass. Even if they controlled for present body mass, I'd wonder if they missed a difference earlier in life.

That doesn't mean there isn't some substance of interest in the coffee bean related to insulin activity, but I bet the effect is much less than a 50% reduction in onset of DM II.

So why doesn't al Qaeda attack the US directly?

Will America be the next terror target? / London attack shows al Qaeda's strategy

Post 9/11 it's fair to say that most people expected quite a few al Qaeda attacks on the US (though immediately post-Afghanistan some analysts thought al Qaeda was in very bad shape). John Arquilla is professor of defense analysis at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. He discounts the theory that al Qaeda by reviewing their records of successful attacks, and he concludes that al Qaeda has strategically chosen to focus on Iraq and abroad:

So it seems that the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which many of us opposed beforehand, have become both our Achilles' heel and the single most important reason al Qaeda has chosen not to resume its terror campaign in America. Iraq provides our principal enemy with a place to fight us directly and a reason to mount an indirect campaign against our allies.

Some might now say that this makes our presence in Iraq worthwhile. As the president has put it, "We fight the terrorists in Iraq so that we do not have to face them at home."

Perhaps. Yet for a small fraction of what our involvement in Iraq has cost us in blood and treasure, we could have shored up our homeland defenses and made it well-nigh impossible for the terrorists to attack America again.

The rerouting of an even tinier fraction of these vast resources in support of a proactive campaign by small teams of special forces hunter networks would keep the terrorists perpetually on the run, unable even to think about coming back here or about striking elsewhere.

But we're still in Iraq, and we'll be there for years to come. Oddly, this probably means few, if any, attacks will be attempted on American territory. It also means there will be more Madrids and Londons. This should remind us that, in a war fought for all that we call civilization, feeling more assured about our own safety is hardly a sign that victory is near.

Hmm. I thought he made sense until he wrote "well-nigh impossible for the terrorists to attack America again". Only a police state to shame 1984 would make terrorist attacks truly impossible. Special forces hunter networks sounds more interesting, though he doesn't provide nearly enough detail about how that would work.

The UK went without an effective attack for years -- but al Qaeda was trying very hard. UK police and security forces were said to have stopped at least six serious attempts in the past five years. The post-911 "peace" in the US may be a combination of post-Afghanistan disruption of al Qaeda, reduction of their leadership and technical ingenuity, relative strategic deemphasis by al Qaeda, effective action by US security forces, distance from Eurasia, and a relatively small and loyal US Islamic community. It's a statisical phenomena in other words; it could persist or change at any time.

Are there any rational conservatives left? The Evolution Test

The New Republic Online: Evolutionary War

Brilliant. The best test for Reason among the right wing is the Evolution test. Ben Adler interviews 15 "commentators". In general they fail the test miserably, and they reveal a strong Christian-America predisposition.

Let's flog those insipid journalists until this test is applied to every politicican running for office anywhere.

How to sell a map and create a retail web site

This is a very clever business web site. Kudos to this Colorado business. They sell trail maps and books for outdoor activity. All very well, but what's clever is their combination of service and marketing. For example, the Minnesota Bicycle Trails Reference Map costs $5.00 or so. The site lists every trail on the map with supplemental information. So how does this help them sell the map? Each trail profile is followed by links to the maps and/or books that reference the trail. No mapping information is included.

So they combine value delivered for free with marketing, and intelligently link the products to the marketing. They also have an affiliate program for others who wish to set up store fronts.

This is the way web marketing and advertising ought to be done. Why can't others figure this out, darn it?!

Thinking about science in America, and the Catholic Church

I've been thinking more about science in America, and Pope Benedict's fracture of an unofficial truce between the Church and Science: Gordon's Notes: Another victory for the Discovery Institute: The Catholic church church attacks the enlightenment.

Science in America is being strongly challenged and occasionally defeated. That may not be entirely bad for science. Scientists tend to be politically flacid; it's long past time they woke up. Even if rationalists really do lose in this country, moreover, it's unlikely India, China and Europe will join a flight to superstition. It might not be an entirely bad thing to have another nation (or nations) lead for a while. A bit of economic and political decline might temper American arrogance and add a bit of wisdom.

As for the Catholic church, on reflection the truce of Vatican II was a false pause in a long conflict with science. One of the strongest logical outcomes of natural selection and our emerging understanding of consciousness is that there's nothing inevitable about the emergence of humans, or about human nature, or even about sentience. (I've a hunch that sentience is an almost inevitable byproduct of a longlived complex ecosystem -- but that's only a guess, there's no way today to test that hypothesis.)

The evitability of Man is a hard pill for the church to swallow; a God that finds humans to be a delightful byproduct of His creation rather than the Purpose thereof is a bit off-putting for traditionalists. (Frankly I can't believe the "delightful" part myself, but I'm not God.)

With this announcement the Catholic church is shifting to a traditionalist position, reversing the post-Vatican II agenda and firmly aligning itself with American Protestant fundamentalists -- just as it did when Catholic bishops came out against John Kerry. This is a very big deal for the Church. There will be consequences within the church.

The Jesuits must quite miserable.

Another victory for the Discovery Institute: The Catholic church church attacks the enlightenment

Leading Cardinal Redefines Church's View on Evolution - New York Times

I must doff my cap to the Discovery Institute. Not since the dark ages has reason, science, and enlightenment had such an effective and implacable foe (update: ok, so maybe Stalin/Lysenko, Mao, and a few hundred others were even more effective in their time). In the Benedict era the Discovery Institute has brought the Catholic church into their fold.

An influential cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, which has long been regarded as an ally of the theory of evolution, is now suggesting that belief in evolution as accepted by science today may be incompatible with Catholic faith.

The cardinal, Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna, a theologian who is close to Pope Benedict XVI, staked out his position in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on Thursday, writing, "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not...

...Mark Ryland, a vice president of the [Discovery] institute, said in an interview that he had urged the cardinal to write the essay. Both Mr. Ryland and Cardinal Schönborn said that an essay in May in The Times about the compatibility of religion and evolutionary theory by Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, suggested to them that it was time to clarify the church's position on evolution.

The cardinal's essay, a direct response to Dr. Krauss's article, was submitted to The Times by a Virginia public relations firm, Creative Response Concepts, which also represents the Discovery Institute.

I would have opposed George Bush's election for his opposition to reason alone; I consider the Discovery Institute's progress a side effect of Bush's election. GWB has often declared himself as ingorant of science in general, and opposed to biology and climate science in particular.