Border crossings: searching random laptops for porn

It seems some custom officials feel obliged to search some laptops for pornography. It's not clear if this is a work mandate or a personal mission. They may or may not have a "profile" to search; it seems that carrying a personal versus corporate laptop may be a red flag. Tom Kyte (via Schneier) tells the story:

The Tom Kyte Blog: Crossing the border...

... The person doing the search - they were afraid of the computer. They did not use one. They did not know what they were looking for. They did not know how to look for it. I felt like giving him POINTERS as we were going through this. I had to bite my tongue and refrain from giving him tips. The reason - the last person on the planet you want to annoy - the customs people at a border crossing. They can really ruin your day if they want to...

Customs officials have unlimited power in their domain, Kyte knows better than to annoy them in any way. I wonder what they do if they find a picture of the 3 yo standing in the tub. Probably seize the laptop at the least.

I suspect they're following some idiotic mandate arising from some incompetent legislative action from the past (GOP) congress. It will take a long time to undo the mountain of stupidity congress belched up between 2000 and 2006.

Cats, Canaries and Homeland security

Legend has it miners of old brought canaries with them. If the canary died the air was tainted. Homeland security must be having a lot of late nights now ... (emphases mine)

Rat Poison Found in Tainted Pet Food | World Latest | Guardian Unlimited

... The substance in the food was identified as aminopterin, a cancer drug that once was used to induce abortions in the United States and is still used to kill rats in some other countries, state Agriculture Commissioner Patrick Hooker said.

The federal government prohibits using aminopterin for killing rodents in the U.S. State officials would not speculate on how the poison got into the pet food, but said no criminal investigations had been launched...

... The Food and Drug Administration has said the investigation into the pet deaths was focused on wheat gluten in the food. The gluten itself would not cause kidney failure, but it could have been contaminated, the FDA said.

Paul Henderson, chief executive of Menu Foods, confirmed Friday that the wheat gluten was purchased from China.

Bob Rosenberg, senior vice president of government affairs for the National Pest Management Association, said it would be unusual for the wheat to be tainted.

``It would make no sense to spray a crop itself with rodenticide,'' Rosenberg said, adding that grain shippers typically put bait stations around the perimeter of their storage facilities.

Scientists at the New York State Animal Health Diagnostic Center at Cornell University and at the New York State Food Laboratory tested three cat food samples provided by the manufacturer and found aminopterin in two of them. The two labs are part of a network created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to keep the nation's animals and food supply safe.

``Any amount of this product is too much in food,'' Hooker said.

Aminopterin is highly toxic in high doses. It inhibits the growth of malignant cells and suppresses the immune system. In dogs and cats, the amount of aminopterin found - 40 parts per million - can cause kidney failure, according to Bruce Akey, director of Cornell's diagnostic center.

``It's there in substantial amounts,'' Akey said.

Donald Smith, dean of Cornell's veterinary school, said he expected the number of pet deaths to increase. ``Based on what we've heard the last couple days, 16 is a low number,'' Smith said.

Aminopterin is no longer marketed as a cancer drug, but is still used in research, said Andre Rosowsky, a chemist with the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

Rosowsky speculated that the substance would not show up in pet food ``unless somebody put it there.''

Henderson said Menu Foods does not believe the food was tampered with because the recalled food came from two different plants, one in Kansas, one in New Jersey. Menu continues to produce food at the two plants.

I'm reading varying reports of how much of Menu Food's gluten is imported from China. Reports range from "some" to "all". Aminopterin is used in China, but not in North America. Another report says that Menu Foods has been looking for a toxin since February, but reference labs couldn't find anything. Even the U of Minnesota vet lab has been consulted, though I don't know when.

When Menu Foods says the "the food" was not tampered with, they mean the poison was introduced by a common ingredient supplier before it reached them.

If this was an industrial accident, then those cats and dogs in dying may yet save thousands and millions of lives by awakening our dysfunctional government. Now that the GOP no longer rules Congress, there's yet a chance the legislature will enact long delayed reforms. If this was a deliberate poisoning ...

Poisoned pets: Chinese gluten, rat poison and lessons for trade and regulation

[The original post was accidentally deleted during a blogging tool test. This is a repost]



The latest hypothesis is that a rat poison got into Chinese gluten:

Menu Foods president says as a pet owner he's angry over poisoned food

... New York state officials had found a toxic chemical used to kill rats and treat cancer in recalled dog and cat food produced by the company.

Traces of aminopterin were found in tests of food suspected of causing kidney failure in cats and dogs, the officials said...

...The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has said the investigation into the pet deaths focused on wheat gluten imported from China. Wheat gluten itself would not cause kidney failure, but a common ingredient could have been contaminated, the FDA said.

These search results are interesting: China aminopterin.



It could be intentional (a form of industrial sabotage, a disgruntled worker, etc) or accidental. Either way, it reminds me of lead contamination in Chinese manufactured holiday lights, and the use of living animal fur in "fake fur" products. It also reminds me of the 1989 contaminated L-tryptophan induced eosinophila-myalgia syndrome "epidemic", thought to have been due to contamination with an industrial product during manufacture of a dietary supplement/alternative medicine.



The common thread in all these cases, and possibly in this one, are the risks of going outside the regulatory and judicial frameworks we are accustomed to. Another theme, of course, is the risk of industrial food -- and what could be more industrial than importing massive amounts of gluten from China? Wouldn't you like to know how the gluten is transported?



In the meantime I haven't been able to switch our mongrel completely off commercial dog food (Eukanaba gluten-free dry - Kateva has canine gluten enteropahthy). Our vet, for example, was quite unenthusiastic. It seems the standards for canine nutrition are hard to meet at the grocery store.



Assuming this is traced to poisoned Chinese gluten, what lessons can we draw? I think it starts with restoring the regulatory framework that, I am reasonably certain, Cheney et al have trashed. We need to take a very hard look at industrialized food for pets and humans alike. Our family now eats "organic" meats and largely "organic" produce, we need to do the same for our dog.



Outside of food, economists need to recognize that "regulatory compliance" and "judicial accountability" is not only a protectionist anti-globalization tactic, it's a legitimate social and public health concern.



Update 3/24/07: Rat Poison Found in Pet Food Linked to 14 Deaths: NY authorities don't know if the aminopterin is really in the gluten, and only some of the gluten was imported from China. They are now explicity saying they haven't ruled out "sabotage". The CDC has been notified. Nobody is talking yet about the all-nighters at the Department of Homeland Security ... (note: I'm just guessing about the Homeland Security part. If I were running it there would be some late nights now.)

Surprise: AAC to CD to AAC produces awful results

I've never done much with Apple's iTunes store, but recently I realized the time had come to stop entirely. What should I do, however, with the 20 or so DRMd tunes that the children or I had collected over the years?



I figured I'd just burn them to a CD and then recode them as AAC. iTunes even creates a "Text CD", which passes the critical metadata to the CD. It took a few minutes, but I did all twenty. Then, as I was cleaning up, I decided to compare the orginal AAC (128 bit) to recycled new AAC (160 bit VBR).



The copy was bloody awful. It was the difference between a CD (or at least a good tape) and AM radio. I don't have any musical talent or abilities whatsoever -- this was not subtle. I knew there'd be some loss of quality, but I didn't expect it to be this bad. I deleted the bunch.



So now I have to choose between buying the CD for the music I own, or looking for pirated copies of key tunes that I've paid for. Hmmm.



One thing is for sure. I have to tell the relatives not to send any more iTunes gift certificates!

Evil

Egregious Moderation: Sahar: The Number

A friend of mine called me to tell me the bad news. Her brother had been kidnapped, and the ransom set at $100,000...

Another terrible story.

Gopher lives

I was at some family medicine computer playground, back when email was still slightly novel and we were teaching our colleagues to use Grateful Med* to retrieve articles. (PubMed still isn't as good.) I think it was around 1991 or 1992, maybe in San Francisco. Paul Kleeberg, an old friend even then, showed me something called "Gopher" from his home state of Minnesota. We browsed the meeting minutes of some Australian city council meeting.

I was stunned. I felt the tidal wave of history crashing down. It made me think differently about the University of Minnesota. Gopher probably has something to do with why I did a health informatics fellowship at the U in 1994 -- though by then Mosaic (on NeXTstep boxes) was on the rise. I'm still in Minnesota, and I even teach at the U a bit. All thanks, in part, to Gopher.

I thought Gopher was completely gone, though a few years back I was giving away a PowerBook 165 and I fired up the Gopher client. I found a few old sites. I figured it would be a great way for hackers and bad guys to communicate -- who would ever know? Gopher, after all, was dead.

Only it wasn't quite ...

TidBITS: Down the Gopher Hole

... Back in 1991, Gopher sprang out of a University of Minnesota campus information service project aimed at building a 'friendly' method of accessing university documents and services. (The University of Minnesota's sports teams are the Golden Gophers.) In those days, most campuses and corporations maintained their own walled-garden services and access policies, and almost all of them operated in unique and sometimes wildly different manners.

In contrast, Gopher provided a unified, consistent hierarchical interface to access everything. The approach translated well to both text and graphical interfaces, and better still, it offered an easy way to connect a varied set of hosts using simple links. This beat the stuffing out of getting files via FTP, which usually required using a command line. Gopher's method was a large improvement over interacting with library and campus directory systems via Telnet and trying to remember how to compose searches from system to system. Thanks to Gopher, the public resources other servers offered weren't merely accessible - they were usable...

The article mentions GopherVR (remember any VR? I barely remember that one), but not HyperGopher (German I think). Turns out the protocol is kept alive by some contrarian hobbyists, including the author -- a country doctor and part-time hacker. It's a great read for geezer netizens.

* Damn, Grateful Med deserves a Wikipedia entry. I may have to author it if nobody else does!

Kashmir - tourists again

When I was a callow youth (vs. a callow gomer), I wandered not far from Kashmir. I thought in a few years I'd visit the famed lakes, and sleep on a house boat.



Then tourists began losing heads, and that was the end of sane tourism in Kashmir. Now, it's back, though these tourists are quite mad. Maybe I'll get there before I konk...

Spam with real addresses: another revolting development

Blacklists usually have limited value because spammers use bots, fake domains, etc. Lately, however, much of my spam has been coming from real companies and organizations with persistent email addresses. The good news is this spam is trivially easy to blacklist.



On the one tentatcle the legitimization of spam feels like another bit of bad news for our ailing email, but on the other tentacle ever since I figured out how I was making Gmail hate me I've been pleased with its spam filtering. Email is still alive, for now ...

The robotic ape: Morality and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex

Persons with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortext behave more like Mills and less like Kant (emphases mine):

Study Finds Brain Injury Changes Moral Judgment - New York Times

... findings, published online by the journal Nature, confirm the central role of the damaged region — the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is thought to generate social emotions, like compassion.

Previous studies showed that this region was active during moral decision-making, and that damage to it and neighboring areas from severe dementia affected moral judgments. The new study seals the case by demonstrating that a very specific kind of emotion-based judgment is altered when the region is offline. In extreme circumstances, people with the injury will even endorse suffocating an infant if that would save more lives.

“I think it’s very convincing now that there are at least two systems working when we make moral judgments,” said Joshua Greene, a psychologist at Harvard who was not involved in the study. “There’s an emotional system that depends on this specific part of the brain, and another system that performs more utilitarian cost-benefit analyses which in these people is clearly intact.”...

...The new study focused on six patients who had suffered very specific damage to the ventromedial area from an aneurysm or a tumor. ...The area in adults is about the size of a child’s fist.

People with this injury can be lucid, easygoing, talkative and intelligent, but blind to subtle social cues, making them socially awkward. They also have some of the same moral instincts that others do.

... All three groups also strongly rejected doing harm to others in situations that were not a matter of trading one certain death for another. They would not send a daughter to work in the pornography industry to fend off crushing poverty, or kill an infant they felt they could not care for.

But a large difference in the participants’ decisions emerged when there was no switch to flip — when they had to choose between taking direct action to kill or harm someone (pushing him in front of the runaway boxcar, for example) and serving a greater good.

Those with ventromedial injuries were about twice as likely as the other participants to say they would push someone in front of the train (if that was the only option), or to poison someone with AIDS who was bent on infecting others, or suffocate a baby whose crying would reveal to enemy soldiers where the subject and family and friends were hiding...

...The ventromedial area is a primitive part of the cortex that appears to have evolved to help humans and other mammals navigate social interactions. The area has connections to deeper, unconscious regions like the brain stem, which transmit physical sensations of attraction or discomfort; and the amygdala, a gumdrop of neural tissue that registers threats, social and otherwise. The ventromedial area integrates these signals with others from the cortex, including emotional memories, to help generate familiar social reactions.

... This tension between cost-benefit calculations and instinctive emotion in part reflects the brain’s continuing adjustment to the vast social changes that have occurred since the ventromedial area first took shape. The ventromedial area most likely adapted to assist the brain in making snap moral decisions in small kin groups— to spare a valuable group member’s life after a fight, for instance. As human communities became larger and increasingly complex, so did the cortical structures involved in parsing ethical dilemmas. But the more primitive ventromedial area continued to anchor it with emotional insistence an ancient principle: respect for the life of another human being.

It's hard not to wonder what a similar study would find find on adult genetic relatives of children with autism. The study is too small to be persuasive on its own, but it's just another in a flurry of recent research that hammers home the reality that we are our brains, and that we have more in common with science fiction robots than we once fancied. Pull out our emotion chip and we switch to a relatively "cold-blooded" judgment system. Disable that, and you probably get a sociopath. I would wager that a successful sniper has a relatively inactive VPC.

Eventually we'll discard the illogical concept of 'individual responsibility'. I wonder if I'll live long enough to see what will replace it ...

Science and faith in the senate

Emphases mine.

BBC NEWS | Americas | Al Gore makes global warming plea:

...Representative Joe Barton, the leading Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, challenged global warming science as "uneven and evolving".

"You're not just off a little, you're totally wrong," he said of Mr Gore's conclusions that carbon dioxide emissions contribute to global warming....

My understanding is that there's probably a 1/15-1/20 chance that we'll eventually discover that carbon dioxide emissions have been a relatively small contributor to global climate change to date. Even if the 20:1 odds paid off, Mr. Barton, of course, would still be operating on faith, not reason. There is nothing in the data to support his confidence, ergo it must arise from some sort of faith.

Had history played out a little differently, he would be chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Chairman. The thought chills the soul.

How can any reasoning person vote for the modern GOP? The party needs to be rebuilt from top to bottom.

The Homo ergaster Turing test: a mind set in stone

The 8 yo and I were browsing the book companion to the excellent BBC series 'Walking with Cavemen' the other night. I was struck by a commentary on the peculiarity of the eternal stone tool. Modern humans appear to have gone from stone tools to quantum computers in about 30,000 years, but ancient hominids spent millions of years doing exactly the same thing. Even Neandertal seemed to create the same tools year in and year out -- though perhaps with a mechanical precision that modern humans cannot equal.

Paleontologists have tried to image what a mind would be like that showed such limited creativity. They speculate about a highly compartmentalized "intelligence", with nothing like the "general" intelligence we're alleged to have. Something, in other words, like a modern computer.

We can't yet build a non-organic sentient computer (we build millions of the organic variety every day), but we might be able to build one that would "pass" for Homo ergaster. That is, it would past the Turing-egaster test. All it needs then is a bit of evolution ...

PS. The new book costs about $35 or so. At Amazon.com, including shipping, the cost is about $9. Amazon's used book service must be having some impact on new book sales and the used book marketplace. I've not read anything about this though. We ordered a used copy.

Dementia: is it really a disease?

So is Alzheimer's-type dementia really a disease?

Prevalence of Alzheimer’s Rises 10% in 5 Years - New York Times:

... The updated estimates, based on the rising occurrences of the disease with age, not new disease research, were released yesterday by the Alzheimer’s Association, along with a compilation of other information about a progressive brain disease that afflicts 13 percent, or one in eight people 65 and over, and 42 percent of those past 85...

...Mary Mittelman, an Alzheimer’s researcher at New York University, had mixed feelings about disproportionate attention to early onset Alzheimer’s disease. On the one hand, Dr. Mittelman said, these cases are such a small minority that she fears will take focus and resources “from the majority who are much older.” On the other, she said, 'because of the ageism of this society” far too many people still believe dementia to be part of normal aging and attention to this younger group will clarify that it is a 'real disease'.”

When 42% of people over 85 have advanced features of a prolonged process, is this a "real disease" or an aging process? The boundary here is pretty fuzzy. Nobody has the brain or body at 85 that they had at 45, much less 25.

My personal bias is that the "Alzheimer's process" is a "normal" part of aging, right up there with getting weak, flabby, and shorter. What varies, of course, is how fast it progresses, and whether one dies before or after the process becomes disabling (disability also being a fuzzy term -- many persons who we consider "able" at 85 are unable to do the work they did at 45).

The distinction between an aging process and a disease has a practical implication. In general, diseases are treatable, but aging is much harder to stop. If we accpet the model of an Alzheimer's "Process" rather than Alzheimer's Disease, then we can better judge how great our challenge is. We need to do more than arrest a disease, we need to slow the aging process of the human brain. The bright side is that there's been a lot of research lately that suggests that might be possible.

Pet poisoning: 1/6 die in testing?!

Whatever the Menu Foods contaminant is, it is so lethal that it killed 7/45 animals in testing:

San Jose Mercury News - Pet food recall has owners searching for answers

... Menu Foods told the Food and Drug Administration it received the first complaints of kidney failure and deaths from pet owners Feb. 20. It began new tests Feb. 27 in which 40 to 50 dogs and cats were fed its product. During those tests seven animals died, according to the FDA's top veterinarian, Stephen F. Sundlof. The contamination appeared more deadly to cats than to dogs, he said, although the mix of species tests was not immediately known....

Other articles have added a bit more detail. The animals became ill about 5-6 days post-exposure and the chief suspect is contamination of a gluten based thickening agent at a Kansas plan..

FDA has sent inspectors to company plants in New Jersey and Kansas. Most complaints stem from products made at the latter factory, though both received shipments of wheat gluten, identified as a likely source of contamination, from the same supplier, said Stephen F. Sundlof, the FDA's chief veterinarian. The ingredient is a protein source used to thicken the pet food gravy. The FDA is screening pet food samples for substances known to be toxic to the kidneys, like toxins produced by molds.

It's impressive how little we are hearing about the testing. We're going to beef and rice at our house until we know more -- and our dog is on a dry fish based Gluten free diet (yeah, she has canine sprue - happily gluten free diets are easy for dogs). In theory we should be pretty safe, but to put it mildly we have zero trust at the moment.

Update: A Kansas source has more information. If the source is the Kansas plant, the Kansas City Star may be the best information source. This article says the contamination was detected incidentally in taste tests of an experimental product, the company wasn't looking for problems ...

... Menu Foods, according to one veterinary toxicologist, was working on some experimental products when it did some testing, and found that the food sickened or killed some animals. The company reportedly traced the problem back several weeks to when they started using a new wheat component in their foods. The company immediately stopped using that new wheat source, which it used in high concentration in the experimental food. To be safe they recalled every other brand that might contain the new wheat, even in tiny quantities.

I wonder if it will be aflatoxin again ...

The surgeon gene

FuturePundit: Sleep Gene Determines Performance Of Sleep Deprived. I bet most surgeons have the short version of the gene.

Flatland and the 248 dimensions of time

In the 19th century two dimensional world of Flatland the hero infers the existence of dimensions beyond those of his god-like 3 dimensional correspondent. He would be willing to image a 248 dimensional creature:

Is this the fabric of the universe? | Science News | Connected | Telegraph

Mathematicians have successfully scaled their equivalent of Mount Everest. Today they unveil the answer to a problem that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

At the most basic level, the calculation is an arcane investigation of symmetry – in this case of an object that is 57 dimensional...

... What makes this group of symmetries so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8. I find it rather extraordinary that of all the symmetries that mathematician’s have discovered, it is this exotic exceptional object that Nature has used to build the fabric of the universe...

... Today’s feat rests on the drive by mathematicians to study symmetries in higher dimensions. E8 is the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional. E8 itself is 248-dimensional...

....The ways that E8 manifests itself as a symmetry group are called representations. The goal is to describe all the possible representations of E8. These representations are extremely complicated, but mathematicians describe them in terms of basic building blocks. The new result is a complete list of these building blocks for the representations of E8, and a precise description of the relations between them, all encoded in a matrix, or grid, with 453,060 rows and columns. There are 205,263,363,600 entries in all, each a mathematical expression called a polynomial.

..."This is an impressive achievement," said Hermann Nicolai, Director of the Albert Einstein Institute in Potsdam, Germany. "While mathematicians have known for a long time about the beauty and the uniqueness of E8, we physicists have come to appreciate its exceptional role only more recently - yet, in our attempts to unify gravity with the other fundamental forces into a consistent theory of quantum gravity, we now encounter it at almost every corner...

I'd love to hear an explanation of how E8 might relate to non-local action and the seemingly bizarre nature of time. Are meaning-free instantaneous communications between entangled photons instances of higher dimensional structures protruding into 4 space? Is there really only one dimension of time, or is it simply that meaning can't exist in the others?

Oh, and did those last two sentences of mine make any sense at all?

It's a thin line between being an amateur commentator on math and physics and being a complete loon! :-)

Update: Another article explained that E8 has merely 57 dimensions, but 248 symmetric rotations. Whatever that means. Mathematics left the scope of mere mortals well over a hundred years ago, it's not surprising that non-specialists should struggle with this announcement.