Humans aren't good at oversight

We had lots of nifty rules to guide experimenting in gene alteration in crops. Too bad we didn't actually follow them ...

Lax Oversight Found in Tests of Gene-Altered Crops - New York Times

The Department of Agriculture has failed to regulate field trials of genetically engineered crops adequately, raising the risk of unintended environmental consequences, according to a stinging report issued by the department's own auditor.

The report, issued late last month by the department's Office of Inspector General, found that biotechnology regulators did not always notice violations of their own rules, did not inspect planting sites when they should have and did not assure that the genetically engineered crops were destroyed when the field trial was done...

No surprises here. I'd have been amazed if it were otherwise. Humans aren't good at following boring rules. It takes onerous discipline and great fear to ensure rules are followed at airports, nuclear plants, in the military and in hospitals. There simply wasn't enough terror involved to make sure gene experimenters followed the rules.

We should stop the experiments, determine what rules are needed, and use the lessons of nuclear power to set the rules, the monitoring, and the consequences. Alas, the mega-corps that do this work donate far too much money to various senators to face any such risks.

Genetic data: Are there any so naive as to think laws will matter?

I think most relatively informed observers realize that, once genetic and other health data is collected, digitized and made mobile, there is no law that will keep it out of the hands of governments (and, in the US, corporations). It is simply an irresistible tempation.

If there's anyone so naive as to think otherwise, they ought to consider the story of the Swedish biobank:

Medicine's new central bankers | Economist.com

Similarly, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, which already runs one of the world's oldest university-based biobanks, plans to follow 500,000 Swedes for 30 years to gain new insights into depression, cancer and heart disease...

... The Swedish government, which created one of the world's first national biobanks in 1975—it now has at least a blood sample from all of its citizens—used a loophole to gain access to the biobank a couple of years ago, in order to track down a killer.

It was not, admittedly, a run-of-the-mill murder case. Anna Lindh, Sweden's popular foreign minister, was murdered in September 2003 at a department store. Although Lindh's murder was captured on closed-circuit television, it was ultimately a DNA match from the murder weapon, a knife, that provided the basis on which the leading suspect, Mijailo Mijailovic, a 25-year-old Swedish Serb, was convicted. The DNA sample used to place Mr Mijailovic at the scene came from the country's national biobank, which—unlike many of the research biobanks now being established—is not anonymous.

Mr Mijailovic's conviction was later overturned on the basis that he suffers from a psychiatric disorder, but damage to the claim of confidentiality made by Sweden's biobank was done nevertheless. “This must never happen again,” says Jan-Eric Litton of the Karolinska Institute biobank. “This is not and should not be the purpose of a biobank—the only purpose, and it is my great hope that all nations abide by and clarify this, is to understand disease and find ways to address it in all of its forms. Biobanks are the future—they are a unique opportunity if we manage them correctly.”

“While bioethical and regulatory worries about biobanks abound, lack of agreement on standards could prove to be a more immediate impediment.”

But while limiting the use of biobanks to medical research sounds like a simple solution, grey areas abound. In January, Swedish lawmakers temporarily changed the law to allow access to the biobank in order to identify bodies of Swedish citizens killed in the Asian tsunami. That is arguably a non-medical use, but one that is harder to argue against: the samples were used to identify children, for whom dental records did not exist. As a biobank meeting held in Stockholm last May, and a follow-up meeting in Washington, DC, last month made clear, there is still no agreement about how to keep probing officials citing national security or other serious concerns out of the biobank vaults.

Sweden has strong privacy laws and traditions, but convicting an assassin was sufficient to sweep them away. This was an almost trivial temptation; imagine if the issue were identification of a suspected terrorist treated for smallpox ...

I think the Swedes should have resisted in the Lindh case, but I'd have made the same call in the Tsunami affair. The smallpox terrorist? Well, it depends. I do wish Bush were not in power.

The point? We shouldn't fool ourselves. If the data is collected it will be used. The rule should be only to collect data that is truly valuable, and to allow citizens to opt out of data collection. (Of course even anonymous data can be used to trace people with a bit of cleverness.) Everyone must understand that this data will be used and abused; if one wishes to avoid that then don't collect the data in the first place.

Incidentally, I have mixed feelings about the interoperability standards for health records. There is something to be said about data being very expensive to access and move ...

A million dollar bribe for Abramoff and DeLay

A million dollar bribe. Wow. Tom DeLay may not be returning to the his former leadership post in the near future ...

The DeLay-Abramoff Money Trail (WaPo)

The U.S. Family Network, a public advocacy group that operated in the 1990s with close ties to Rep. Tom DeLay and claimed to be a nationwide grass-roots organization, was funded almost entirely by corporations linked to embattled lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to tax records and former associates of the group.

During its five-year existence, the U.S. Family Network raised $2.5 million but kept its donor list secret. The list, obtained by The Washington Post, shows that $1 million of its revenue came in a single 1998 check from a now-defunct London law firm whose former partners would not identify the money's origins.

Two former associates of Edwin A. Buckham, the congressman's former chief of staff and the organizer of the U.S. Family Network, said Buckham told them the funds came from Russian oil and gas executives. Abramoff had been working closely with two such Russian energy executives on their Washington agenda, and the lobbyist and Buckham had helped organize a 1997 Moscow visit by DeLay (R-Tex.).

A million dollars is serious bribe money. At least DeLay did not sell himself cheaply ...

The evolution of social darwinism

The Economist's year end issue is a winner. Not only does it have a delicious cover (note the expressions of the last two males in the chain), it also prominently features a review of human evolution. One would think they're getting bored with their pet George.

The story of evolution taught me something (emphases mine):

Evolution | The story of man | Economist.com

...It was [Herbert] Spencer, an early contributor to The Economist, who invented that poisoned phrase, “survival of the fittest”. He originally applied it to the winnowing of firms in the harsh winds of high-Victorian capitalism, but when Darwin's masterwork, “On the Origin of Species”, was published, he quickly saw the parallel with natural selection and transferred his bon mot to the process of evolution. As a result, he became one of the band of philosophers known as social Darwinists. Capitalists all, they took what they thought were the lessons of Darwin's book and applied them to human society. Their hard-hearted conclusion, of which a 17th-century religious puritan might have been proud, was that people got what they deserved—albeit that the criterion of desert was genetic, rather than moral. The fittest not only survived, but prospered. Moreover, the social Darwinists thought that measures to help the poor were wasted, since such people were obviously unfit and thus doomed to sink.

Spencer was the champion of the proto-Calvinist doctrine of Social Darwinism. So it turns out that Calvinism (the weak suffer because they offended God) preceded Social Darwinism (the weak must suffer because that's the way the race gets stronger) preceded Darwin (who was a compassionate man who suffered not a little). Historians of Science love this sort of thing.

Calvinism is again the state religion of Bush's America, and Social Darwinism is again the governmental philosophy (welfare only preserves the weak), but Darwin himself is forbidden. Odd.

How will the meme of social Darwinism next mutate?

A topical review of Quantum Mechanics

Dennis Overbye of the NYT has writen a review of quantum mechanics. It's a good overview, but I think it understates how weird the last 10 years of QM physics have been. It's almost as though he wanted to protect his readers.

I've been personally spooked by the practical use of quantum entanglement in encryption. That's too much like hacking the universal calculator. It feels like we have some big shocks ahead.

Writing to learn: Blogs and and the worldmind

Scott Rosenberg claims learning theory shows most people learn by writing (teaching works for me as well). It is the act of making someone one's own that causes it to stick iin memory. He makes a logical connection to blogging:

Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment

...If this is true -- and, based on my own experience, I believe it is -- then we can view the explosion of writing in weblogs, of millions of people mastering ideas by writing about them, and spinning narratives in order to fix them in memory, as a vast exercise in the pursuit of collective self-knowledge. Yes, of course there are heaps of trivial pursuits, too; they keeps things lively. Only puritans would wish to eliminate them.

So hobby blogs aren't merely a wasteful pile of vanity; they're also a learning exercise. Alas for me, the learning I may thus be doing has no obvious connection to income.

On a slighly related tangent, however, I do think these blogs are doing something interesting in a different learning domain -- it feels as though blogs are amplifying, filtering, and extending the emergent intelligence of the net. Hence Google's affection for blogs; Google lives off the crude mind of the net. (also Adwords). If the net was a simple entity with a base IQ of 10 a few years ago, perhaps blogs have pushed it to 13 ...

Skynet cannot be far away :-).

Why Apple won't fix AirTunes -- is it the microwave?

I fought a hard battle with Apple's AirTunes (Apple's wireless audio streaming) a few weeks ago.

It was very frustrating. The devils of Digital Rights Management, AirTunes fundamental inadequacy, and the lack of a fast-user-switching compatible tool for remote control of iTunes finally defeated me. SlimDevices and its ilk seemed like far better solutions, and I figured this spring I'd strip out the DRM on the music I paid for and switch to a non-Apple solution. At the moment though, my wife's Nano and some good playlists suffice.

Today I decided spring was too soon. I was streaming some music using AirTunes. A rare event, but I do it on occasion. All was well, until the music vanished. I wondered what was up; then I realized the microwave was running. It's not all that old a model, but it is death to our 802.11b LAN. That's bad for routine web work, but it's fatal for streaming music -- especially the minimally compressed AirTunes stream.

Maybe streaming MP3 or AAC directly, or enabling communication robustness (microwave resistance) would help. Or maybe wireless audio streaming won't really work until we switch to entirely new forms of wireless networking (ultra wideband, etc). If so, then this may explain why Apple has left AirTunes twisting in the wind ... They may have reason to believe it's not fixable.

How to Ship Anything

Joel Sposky is smarter than just about anyone. Sigh. So when he has a problem shipping stuff from his business, he invents a shipping system.

Handy to keep around in case you ever decide to set up a business that ships things: How to Ship Anything - Joel on Software.

The secret of happiness

The secret of happiness is ...

editing.

And the days are getting longer too ...

Update 3/11/09: See also

Happiness is a selective memory (framing effects)
and
Manipulating memory by photo display

Unleashing the NSA: The real story.

I called this on the 19th:

Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report - New York Times

The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

I'm sure most journalists had the same thoughts I had, but of course they actually have to gather evidence. They moved very quickly to put this story together.

This is oddly reassuring -- because it makes sense. The "bypass FISA" story didn't hold water if the NSA was indeed targeting individuals. Echelon-style monitoring of all traffic, however, cannot be approved under existing law. It required an executive order.

The great thing about the Bushies is that they make conspiracy theories real, and whacky delusions almost plausible. The Patriot II debate this January should be quite interesting.

Hard drinks for men who want to get drunk fast

George made the wrong call. A wonderful sendup of It's a Wonderful Life: Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | All hail Pottersville!.

Ideological transformations and the elderly

Salon has an interesting story of ideological transformation. It feels like a classical tale:

Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | The real war on Christmas

...The thing is, though, I know better than to bring up politics with my dad. Ever since he started listening to talk radio for hours out of the day, he's slowly lost his ability to objectively look at the facts and draw his own conclusions. If Rush, Hannity, Dennis Prager or O'Reilly say it, my dad believes it as surely as he believes anything. Thanks to this abdication of rational thinking, both of my parents completely bought into the Swift Boat liars, still believe that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11, and recently decided to move to Montana, which my mother described as 'the real America' to me and my siblings. When Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for governor, my mom's impression of him, having worked with him as a model in the 1960s, mysteriously transformed from 'a steroid-shooting lech' to 'a total gentleman, who was always taking his supplements, which were injected in those days.'

They both ended up voting for Tom McClintock, not because Arnold was so clearly incompetent, but because he wasn't a 'real' enough Republican for them. These are the same people who took me to nuclear-freeze rallies almost every weekend when I was in elementary school. These are the same people who introduced me to the teachings of the Buddha and Gandhi. The same people who smoked pot in front of me, introduced me to Pink Floyd and the Beatles, and taught me to throw a Frisbee when all my peers were learning how to throw a football.

They are, of course, the same people. I would bet they are both very directed towards groupthink and tribalism. At one time that meant smoking pot in front of children [1], today it means taking O'Reilly as their guru. I would wonder too if both are desperately seeking simplicity, a trend that grows with age and the sadly normal senescence of the human brain (our brains are in bad shape by the time we hit retirement age).

Is there anything new here? It's tempting to think of Rush and O'Reilly as new, but the hate mongers of the 1930s to 1950s did quite well with the same radio Rush and O'Reilly use. Imitation and the urge to emulate dominant tribe members is quintessentially human. Alas, senescence has always been with us. So, no, this is not new.

[1] Many of us, of course, drink wine in front of children. I suppose it's not so much the substance as the intent of its use; I still suspect his parents were demonstrating the judgment flaws that later led them to Bush. Of course by writing this article about his family, their son has demonstrated a similar lack of wisdom.

Sixty years of peace

David Brin quotes from a quoting from a Democratic Leadership Council Report:

Contrary Brin: Some Good News... for a change...

...Between 1000 A.D. and 1945, the longest period of uninterrupted peace among great powers was the 51-year stretch between the battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the Austro-Prussian war of 1866. Europe's present peaceful stretch hit 60 last spring and shows no signs of strain...

India. China. One day, Africa. Fantastic hope. Immense risk.

It feels as though we live on the tipping point, though other generations have felt the same way.

The NSA unleashed: widening suspicion that the NSA was doing broad data intercepts

I've added a few update links to my posting:Gordon's Notes: Unleashing the NSA: What's the real story?. More than a few mainstream journalists appear to have come to the same conclusion. It doesn't make sense that Bush would bypass the courts to do something they were already routinely approving. He had to be doing something the courts wouldn't have approved without new legislation. The most likely explanation is massive data and voice monitoring, extending the historic Echelon project into the US.

We should put a 'BCC. NSA' at the end of every email :-).

Beyond Dover: legal costs, tort changes and wealth for lawyers

In theory, since the Dover Decision will not be appealed to a higher court; it is only a precedent for Pennsylvania. Some speculate the legal costs will deter future creationist efforts to alter science curricula [1], but I suspect the battle has only just begun (emphases mine):

Schools Nationwide Study Impact of Evolution Ruling - New York Times

... The Dover school district is now liable for the legal fees incurred by the plaintiffs - which plaintiffs lawyers say could exceed $1 million. The plaintiffs were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, as wells as lawyers with Pepper Hamilton, a private firm.

Eric J. Rothschild, a Pepper Hamilton lawyer, said in a news conference after the ruling that holding the Dover board to a financial penalty would convey to other school districts that "board members can't act like they did with impunity." But Mr. Rothschild said the fees were still being totaled, and he left open the possibility that the lawyers might go after individual board members who voted for the intelligent design policy to pay the legal costs....

The next thing we'll see is that the GOP will put legislation in place to provide tort immunity for those who challenge the science curriculum. That legislation will then be challenged in the Supreme Court, which may well then find it to be unconstitutional.

The religious right will simultaneously use this defeat to claim that liberals and "the elite" (i.e. Jews and intellectuals) are launching a war on "Faith" (ie. fundamentalist christianity), with a particular emphasis on the financial implications of the Dover defeat. They will use a distored version of the judgment, and the usual appeals to tribalism and fear, to raise hundreds of millions to finance further assaults across the public school system.

If I were a lawyer with an interest in this domain, I'd be buying new office space. In the meantime, school board elections should get a lot more attention from everyone.

[1] Note to the usual dolts -- the judge has no problem with incluuding ID/creationism in philosophy, history, social science, and/or religious studies curriccula. Neither do I. Indeed I recommend it. Of course one will need to include Hindu (population), and Animist (first Americans) perspectives as well as biblical ones.