Are we contributing to the delinquency of untenured academic bloggers?

I hope it's widely understood that blogging is an impediment to promotion in every field that values propriety, discipline, and convention, which is basically every field except, perhaps, journalism. The pursuit of tenure is an oft cited example. Tenure is an oddly persistent medieval institution with some similarity to the job stability of senior executives (those who have contracts), 1970s union jobs, and owner-operators (equity holders). The process of acquiring tenure varies depending one's gender and ethnicity, but in general it requires a great deal of work, the successful development of an institutional revenue stream, and adherence to a largely unwritten code of social and political conduct. Activities that do not lead to a revenue stream, such as teaching too well, writing for the public, and, above all, blogging, are considered a sign of an undisciplined and romantic mind that is unlikely to produce a strong ongoing revenue stream.

I think the skepticism about writing, blogging and teaching too well are justified and that they are, indeed, signs of a impractical and naive sensibility. They suggest the candidate is a dreamy idealist who has confused the narrative of the academic quest with the reality of running a grant engine. Shtetl-Optimized is, alas, the most recent example of a young academic learning this lesson the hard way. [4/9/07: I should have read it a bit more closely. It was an alleged April Fools joke. Hmmphh. I hate when that happens. Since I was taken in, I won't attempt to judge the merits of the jest ... Still one might protest it was too plausible to be a top notch effort.]

I feel a bit guilty. As a keen reader of academics who blog, I am necessarily contributing to their vice and their downfall. It reminds me of why I stopped hitchhiking as a young man -- not so much because of the danger I experienced, but because I feared I was encouraging drivers to pick up other hitchhikers I'd met (among whom were a few very unsavory characters).

Perhaps I should restrict my reading to tenured faculty, such as Brad DeLong. On the other hand, I share the vice of these misguided academics and, arguably, their peril. Does that lessen my complicity?

Our fiends the toxoplasma

Carl Zimmer updates us on the diabolical machinations of the mind controlling parasites that infest half of humanity: The Loom : Parasites as Neuropharmacologists. Maybe this explains tiger petting in Thailand.

PS. I do recommend the Thailand travelogue link, which has more than one connection to micro-organisms. I spent most of a year near the old fish market as a feckless youth. There is more continuity than I might have imagined, though I think the writer is over simplifying a wee bit ...

Quantum reality, with the math: Decoherence and Hidden Variables

I've been reading some popular physics books in my latest attempt to figure out how bad reality is looking these days. The answer is, pretty bad -- even worse than your average middle-aged American. So a post on a new blog I'm following caught my eye...

PHYS771 Lecture 11: Decoherence and Hidden Variables

... if you teach an introductory course on quantum mechanics, and the students don't have nightmares for weeks, tear their hair out, wander around with bloodshot eyes, etc., then you probably didn't get the point across. So rather than deny this aspect of quantum mechanics -- rather than cede the field to the hucksters and charlatans, the Deepak Chopras and Brian Josephsons -- shouldn't we map it out ourselves...

...But why should we care about multiple-time probabilities? For me, it has to do with the reliability of memory. The issue is this: does the "past" have any objective meaning? ... Or does the past only "exist" insofar as it's reflected in memories and records in the present?

The latter view is certainly the more natural one in quantum mechanics. But as John Bell pointed out, if we take it seriously, then it would seem difficult to do science! For what could it mean to make a prediction if there's no logical connection between past and future states -- if by the time you finish reading this sentence, you might as well find yourself deep in the Amazon rainforest, with all the memories of your trip there conveniently inserted, and all the memories of sitting at a computer reading quantum computing lecture notes conveniently erased?

... if we accept the usual picture of quantum mechanics, then in a certain sense the situation is far worse: the world (as you experience it) might as well not have existed 10^-43 seconds ago...

... When I was talking before about the fragility of quantum states -- how they're so easy to destroy, so hard to put back together -- you might have been struck by a parallel with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Obviously that's just a coincidence, right? Duhhh, no. The way people think about it today, decoherence is just one more manifestation of the Second Law....

...
At this point the sharp-eyed reader might notice a problem: won't the branches have to collide eventually, when the tree "runs out of room to expand"? The answer is yes. Firstly, if the Hilbert space is finite-dimensional, then obviously the parallel universes can only branch off a finite number times before they start bumping into each other. But even in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space, we need to think of each universe as having some finite "width" (think of Gaussian wavepackets for example), so again we can only have a finite number of splittings.

The answer of decoherence theory is that yes, eventually the branches of the multiverse will start interfering with each other -- just like eventually the universe will reach thermal equilibrium. But by that time we'll presumably all be dead....

...

The idea of hidden-variable theories is simple. If we think of quantum mechanics as describing this vast roiling ocean of parallel universes, constantly branching off, merging, and cancelling each other out, then we're now going to stick a little boat in that ocean. We'll think of the boat's position as representing the "real," "actual" state of the universe at a given point in time, and the ocean as just a "field of potentialities" whose role is to buffet the boat around. For historical reasons, the boat's position is called a hidden variable...

.... Thinking about hidden variables seems scientifically fruitful: it led Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen to the EPR experiment, Bell to Bell's Inequality, Kochen and Specker to the Kochen-Specker Theorem, and me to the collision lower bound...

... Hidden-variable theories will give me a perfect vehicle for discussing other issues in quantum foundations -- like nonlocality, contextuality, and the role of time...

Now, you might've heard of a little thing called Bell's Inequality. As it turns out, Bell's Inequality doesn't quite rule out hidden-variable theories satisfying the two axioms above, but a slight strengthening of what Bell proved does the trick.

So what is Bell's Inequality?

...since I'm not a member of the Physics Popularizers' Guild, I'm now going to break that profession's time-honored bylaws, and just tell you the conceptual point directly.

We've got two players, Alice and Bob, and they're playing the following game. Alice flips a fair coin; then, based on the result, she can either raise her hand or not. Bob flips another fair coin; then, based on the result, he can either raise his hand or not. What both players want is that exactly one of them should raise their hand, if and only if both coins landed heads. If that condition is satisfied then they win the game; if it isn't then they lose. (This is a cooperative rather than competitive game.)

Now here's the catch: Alice and Bob are both in sealed rooms (possibly even on different planets), and can't communicate with each other at all while the game is in progress.

The question that interests us is: what is the maximum probability with which Alice and Bob can win the game?

Well, certainly they can win 75% of the time. Why?

Right: they can both just decide never to raise their hands, regardless of how the coins land! In that case, the only way they'll lose is if both of the coins land heads.

Exercise: Prove that this is optimal. In other words, any strategy of Alice and Bob will win at most 75% of the time.

Now for the punchline: suppose that Alice and Bob share the entangled state with Alice holding one half and Bob holding the other half. In that case, there exists a strategy by which they can win the game with probability

To be clear, having the state .... does not let Alice and Bob send messages to each other faster than the speed of light -- nothing does! What it lets them do is to win this particular game more than 75% of the time. Naïvely, we might have thought that would require Alice and Bob to "cheat" by sending each other messages, but that simply isn't true -- they can also cheat by using entanglement!

So that was Bell's Inequality.

... It follows that, if we want it to agree with quantum mechanics, then any hidden-variable theory has to allow "instantaneous communication" between any two points in the universe. Once again, this doesn't mean that quantum mechanics itself allows instantaneous communication (it doesn't), or that we can exploit hidden variables to send messages faster than light (we can't). It only means that, if we choose to describe quantum mechanics using hidden variables, then our description will have to involve instantaneous communication.

... So what we've learned, from Alice and Bob's coin-flipping game, is that any attempt to describe quantum mechanics with hidden variables will necessarily lead to tension with relativity. Again, none of this has any experimental consequences, since it's perfectly possible for hidden-variable theories to violate the "spirit" of relativity while still obeying the "letter." Indeed, hidden-variable fans like to argue that all we're doing is unearthing the repressed marital tensions between relativity and quantum mechanics themselves!

Mixed in with the above reasonable sounding words is some moderately serious math, none of which I could follow. For me the discussion affirmed that the 'hidden variable' interpretations of QM do collide with the spirit of special relativity.

China limits the retail organ trade

I'm surprised the government is taking action; I'd not thought they were really feeling pressured.

China issues human organ transplant rules in attempt to clean up industry - International Herald Tribune

China has published rules governing human organ transplants ...

... The new regulations issued Friday by China's State Council, or Cabinet, include a ban on the sale of human organs for profit and on donations by people under 18, according to the text of the regulations published by the Communist Party newspaper People's Daily.

The rules, which take effect May 1, also make it illegal to harvest human organs without permission, and standardize transplant procedures at the limited number of hospitals licensed to perform such operations.

Little information about China's lucrative transplant business is publicly available. Human rights groups have said many organs — including those transplanted into wealthy foreigners — come from executed prisoners who may not have given their permission.

"The regulations show that China is responding to great international concern over organ trade in the country," said Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch, in a telephone interview...

China's state-run Xinhua News Agency said most organs used in transplants come from deceased Chinese citizens who had voluntarily donated. But according to Bequelin, more than 90 percent of organs used in transplants were obtained from judicial executions.

A senior Chinese health official acknowledged last year that a majority of organs were harvested from executed prisoners, but only with their prior consent, according to the state-run China Daily newspaper...

... Health officials say China faces a severe shortage of human organs, estimating that out of 1.5 million people who need transplants in China each year, only about 10,000 operations are carried out.

Voluntary donations remain far below demand in China, partly due to cultural biases against organ removal before burial

I wonder how bad things were getting. As predicted by Niven about 40 years ago, the combination of a low threshold for the death penalty and organ harvesting prior to execution (in China I believe the practice is to harvest first, then "execute") leads to a very steep downhill slope. Even with that combination, however, China is meeting about 0.5% of the organ demand.

One driver for this legislation may be the legitimate concern that rich foreigners will buy up what organs are available, further limiting availability in China.

Theocrats in the justice department

A 34 yo GOP appointed US attorney in the twin cities area was in the news recently. Most of the senior members of the Rachel Paulose's office have requested demotions to avoid working with her. She's a right wing theocrat and friend of the infamous Ms. Goodling, the latest Bush appointee to fall in defense of Karl Rove

A Top Aide to the Attorney General Resigns - New York Times

... Ms. Goodling, 33, was not widely known before her refusal to testify. She is a 1995 graduate of Messiah College in Grantham, Pa., and received her law degree at Regent University in Virginia Beach, according to many Web site postings. Messiah describes itself as “committed to an embracing evangelical spirit,” while Regent was founded by the Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson...

I wonder how widespread the GOP practice of seeding right wing theocrats into justice department positions is ...

Update 4/29/07: There's a thoughtful comment on this post from a Messiah alumn that's worth reading.

Spam: latest innovation - social engineering by consecutive email threads and using process patents as an offensive weapon

Diabolical. Really, any non-geek online doesn't stand much of a chance these days.

The latest innovation in my spam employs an automated incremental social engineering strategy. I received 4 messages over a period of two days from an aol.com address. They went to my junk email account (yahoo.com) but evaded Yahoo's quite good spam filters [Google's filters are also failing recently, must be another new innovation]. They are written to sound like emails sent accidentally to the wrong person, with language and style that's apparently designed to be "appealing"

i'm wondering if you were able to open my card
i didn't realized you called my cell untill my tango class
you won't believe richard called me around 1 pm like nothing happened,
he was asking me if i want to joined him and his friend for dinner
i said i have to prepare my report for trump, and it's true
the man is not all there, i sent him e-mail tonight

The key innovation is that they're progressive and not nonsensical. The early messages are benign, but the later messages include links and images. I imagine the idea is that the recipient is lulled into thinking these are "legitimate" and thus relatively trusted, and eventually responds or interacts with the messages. Then the payload is delivered.

It's easy to imagine how sophisticated these schemes will become.

I've read that spam fighting is now limited by a range of process patents on techniques like 'managed reputation filtering of authenticated sending services'. I wonder if the spammers hold the process patents. It would make sense for a spammer to use process patents to block all possible spam defenses, thereby turning the defective (Bush/Cheney strangled of course) US patent office into an offensive weapon. Rather similar to a pathogen turning an organisms immune system against it.

I expect we'll have to wait for Cheney/Bush to retire before we see any redress.

Pet poison: Congress to hold hearings, implications sinking in

The wider implications of the 2007 pet poisoning story are beginning to sink in. Congress will hold hearings, which will doubtless show that Cheney/Bush have signficantly impaired FDA capabilities. There's a growing recognition that if the toxins really did originate in China (vs. a US based importer/shipper), that thousands of Chinese citizens may have suffered kidney damange. Reports have stopped confusing the death toll in animal testing with the total estimated death and injury toll. Lastly, the broader implications for homeland security and food management are being discussed ...

China probing tainted wheat gluten claim

.... Only 873 tons have been linked to the contaminated pet food in America, raising the possibility that more of the bad product could still be in China or the United States. Xuzhou Anying says the U.S. is its only foreign market.

Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University, said Friday that importing the ingredients for food products from developing countries is becoming "increasingly common."

"This is what globalization is about," said Nestle, who is writing a book about pet food.

While regulators recognize that more and more food is reaching the U.S. from developing countries, Nestle said the Food and Drug Administration is not equipped to sufficiently monitor its quality.

"The FDA is an agency under siege," she said, lacking the funding and manpower to adequately screen imported food, though they are slowly being "reluctantly dragged into it, kicking and screaming."

An FDA spokeswoman, Vash Klein, said the agency did not have time to comment on Friday.

Nestle said that she has always wondered why imported vegetables from Mexico, for example, don't make Americans sick when American tourists traveling in Mexico often get sick from vegetables they eat there. Experts have told her, she said, that Mexican vegetables slated for export to the U.S. are "produced under conditions that are identical to conditions in the U.S."

"But if you think about it for a second, you realize that the FDA isn't going off into the wild to inspect everything," Nestle said, noting that the agency is able to inspect only 2 percent of the goods that cross U.S. borders.

Neal Hooker, a professor of agricultural economics at Ohio State University, said that while the FDA cannot inspect every good that comes into the U.S., it does insist that developing countries meet higher production standards for the goods they intend to send to the U.S.

Hooker said the agency can be fairly effective, despite its infrequent product inspections, because it brings pressure to bear on the system of production and works with foreign governments to ensure compliance.

But government regulations are not the only -- or even the most effective -- means of enforcing high standards. Hooker said the market also offers powerful incentives.

The pet food companies who received tainted ingredients, for instance, "are going to ask for things much more rigorously than a nation can ask for. And they will get them," he said, or they will take their business elsewhere.

Similarly, he said, Mexican vegetable growers may have even higher production standards than U.S. farmers because certain hygienic practices can increase the shelf-life of food, allowing the use of slower -- and cheaper -- shipping methods.

TIME on pet food: last post of the day on this topic

Last one, I promise. This is from TIME.

Unraveling the Pet-Food Mystery | TIME

... critics of the pet food industry point to two factors that may contribute to unsafe food: the centralization of the process for making food and the use of unsanitary material from rendering plants. The recall brought to light that the wheat gluten, which was eventually recalled, came from a single Chinese company but ended up in over 100 brands of pet food. ChemNutra Inc., based in Las Vegas, bought 873 tons of gluten from the Chinese company, farmed it out to three pet food makers and one distributor that services the industry. A highly centralized process may be cheap, but "at that size and scale if something goes wrong it goes wrong big time," says Nestle.

Rendering plants, which boil down dead animal carcasses from slaughterhouses into fats and proteins, sell cheap material that often ends up in pet food. The "meat" in your cat's kibbles could be any kind: there's no law against even using rendered material from cats and dogs in pet food. Plants can mix in anything from road kill to supermarket deli meats, and investigations by KMOV-TV in St. Louis and the Los Angeles Times have suggested that pets killed in animal shelters just might make it into the slop. The Pet Food Institute, whose members create most of the dog and cat food sold in the U.S., told the Times that pets are not allowed in their products. But the FDA has admitted to finding "very, very low levels" of sodium pentobarbital — the chemical used to euthanize animals — in some brands of dog food. Wayne Pacelle, President of the Humane Society of the U.S. said the allegations need more scrutiny. "The pet food industry is not the most transparent of industries and it has been really difficult for the public to obtain information," he says.

What Should You Feed Fido?

Besides staying away from recalled products, pet owners might want to consider using natural food from smaller companies. "I would suggest feeding pets organic instead of commercial dog food from big companies who are focused on filling food at the cheapest price," says Friedrich from PETA. Some pet lovers are bypassing store food altogether, serving up home cooked meals — everything from bone-shaped biscuits to homemade hamburgers. Sales of cookbooks for cats and dogs have increased dramatically, according Nielsen BookScan. But Goldstein of Cornell warns against cooking for your pet. "I would hate for people to stop using commercial pet food, because it's the healthiest diet in the long term for dogs and cats who need multiple vitamins at the proper ratios."

I wonder how "balanced" those vitamins really need to be - especially for dogs. Goldstein needs to point to some science. In the meantime we're going to go "organic" as a starting point, though it will be a gradual migration. (Gradual because our dog's diet is already gluten free, migration because this has shown how insane the pet food industry is.)

Poisoning 2007: Melanine as a marker, and where the heck did the stuff come from?

More from the NYT. Everyone denies they know anything about any gluten, WalMart's dog biscuits are recalled and Menu Foods extends the timeline that animals may have been injured by another two months ...

22 Brands of Dog Biscuits Are Added to Pet Food Recall - New York Times

... Menu Foods, which last month recalled more than 90 brands of its “cuts and gravy” pet food, said yesterday that it had extended the period of time covered by its recall to include food made after Nov. 8, 2006. The company, based in Ontario, initially recalled only food made from Dec. 3, 2006, to March 6, 2007.

The company also added 20 additional varieties of those brands to the recall list yesterday. Information about the recalled pet food can be found at www.fda.gov/oc/opacom/hottopics/petfood.html.

Menu Foods said it acted after a supplier, ChemNutra of Las Vegas, recalled all wheat gluten it had imported from the Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company of Wangdien, China. ChemNutra said Wednesday that the F.D.A. had found melamine in the gluten. The agency said it was now testing all wheat gluten from China.

The Chinese government said yesterday that no wheat gluten had been exported to the United States or Canada. Xuzhou Anying denied it had ever shipped wheat gluten to either country.

“We are a trading company and don’t manufacture the product,” added Mao Lijun, the company’s general manager. Michael Rogers, director of the Division of Field Investigations for the F.D.A., said records showed that the tainted gluten came from China.

... Melamine, which is also used as a slow-release fertilizer, is generally not known to be toxic. Some theories are that it might act as a marker for another unknown toxin that causes renal failure in pets, Dr. Sundlof said, or that cats and dogs are extremely sensitive to melamine.

“We still have a lot of work to do to understand why melamine is involved, as it is a relatively nontoxic substance,” Dr. Sundlof said. “We are relatively certain that there is a connection here someplace.”

... Dr. Halbur and Grant Maxie of the University of Guelph in Ontario, which is also investigating the cause of the illnesses and deaths, said it would probably take months to determine what made the pets sick.

Tons of gluten apparently just materialized from thin air, contaminated with all kinds of junk. Sounds like the vets suspect the Melanine is just one more contaminant and that the real poison may take months to find.

In the meantime, the whole story gets more appalling.

Update: The NYTs has a f/u article ...
April 6, 2007
China Says It Had Nothing to Do With Tainted Pet Foods
By DAVID BARBOZA

SHANGHAI, April 5 — China said today that it had no record of exporting any agricultural products that could have tainted the pet food that has been linked to the deaths of cats and dogs in the United States.

The government said that wheat gluten — which has been linked to a nationwide pet food recall in the United States — had not been exported from China to the United States or Canada. The government also disputed some reports that the chemical aminopterin, a rat poison, could have entered the American pet food supplies from China. The government said the chemical is not used in rat poison here...

...the Chinese company identified by the Food and Drug Administration as the exporter tied to the tainted pet food ingredient denied today that it was the source.

“We have never exported wheat gluten directly or indirectly to the U.S., Canada or the Netherlands,” said Mao Lijun, the general manager of the Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company, an agricultural products company in the coastal Jiangsu Province.

...ChemNutra, a Las Vegas company that supplies pet food makers, said it imported 792 metric tons of wheat gluten from Xuzhou between Nov. 29 and March 8. The products were then shipped from its Kansas City warehouse to three pet food makers and one distributor of pet food ingredients in the United States and Canada.

The wheat gluten ended up in pet food made for several companies, including Menu Foods of Ontario, Canada and Hill’s Pet Nutrition, a division of Colgate-Palmolive as well as private label pet foods.

But Xuzhou now insists it never shipped the packages.

“Maybe some company bought our product and exported it without our knowledge,” said Mr. Mao, the general manager of Xuzhou Anying.

Earlier today, however, The Associated Press reported that another official working at Xuzhou had acknowledged that the company shipped wheat gluten to the United States...

... Agricultural product and melamine traders here in China said today that the chemical is sometimes used as a fertilizer but that Chinese farmers have turned away from it in recent years because it is considered too costly.

They also said melamine was used in a wide variety of manufactured goods all over the country, everything from DVD’s to plastic forks and knives, and was widespread in areas where wheat production is strong...

Poisoning 2007: ChemNutra, Anying, and it keeps getting worse

This was the first article I've seen describing the Chinese company alleged to have sold poisonous gluten to Menu Foods and others (emphases mine). It also contains the first reference to the role of ChemNutra, a US importer.

Tainted pet food may be sold in China - Pet Health - MSNBC.com

... The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last week blocked wheat gluten imports from the Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co. in the eastern Chinese city of Xuzhou, saying they contained melamine, a chemical found in plastics and pesticides.

Anying produces and exports more than 10,000 tons of wheat gluten a year, according to its Web site, but only 873 tons were linked to tainted U.S. pet food, raising the possibility that more of the contaminated product could still be on the market in China, or abroad.

Li Cui, director of Anying's foreign exports, told The Associated Press on Thursday the United States is the company's only overseas market for wheat gluten, although it wasn't clear if the company had more than one customer in the U.S.

... An official at the Chinese Ministry of Health, who refused to give his name, said the case was not an issue for the ministry and directed questions to the Ministry of Agriculture. An official there, who also refused to give his name, told The Associated Press to stop calling...

Both ministries also did not respond to faxed questions on whether they had concerns about tainted gluten in China.

The tainted wheat gluten underscores China's dismal food-safety record. Mass food poisoning cases are common in the country, many blamed on cooks who disregard hygiene rules or mistakenly use industrial chemicals instead of salt and other ingredients.

Last year, seven companies were punished for using banned Sudan dye to color egg yolks red. In 2004, at least 12 infants died from malnutrition after drinking formula with little or no nutritional value in eastern China's Anhui province.

Other recent cases include 30 high school and primary students who became sick this week after eating beef soup at a small restaurant in Zhejiang province in eastern China.

Last month, 57 people were hospitalized in Zhejiang after eating food laced with rat poison, while nearly 400 people were hospitalized with possible food poisoning after a wedding banquet in Yunnan province in southern China.

ChemNutra Inc., the Las Vegas-based company that imported the wheat gluten and shipped it to companies that make pet foods, said Tuesday that Xuzhou Anying had never reported the presence of melamine in the content analysis it provided.

Earlier this week, another official at the Chinese company said the gluten was not manufactured by Xuzhou Anying, but was bought from companies in neighboring provinces.

Melamine is used to make plastic kitchenware, glues, countertops, fabrics, fertilizers and flame retardants. It also is both a contaminant and byproduct of several pesticides, including cyromazine, according to the Environmental Protection Agency...

ChemNutra? I couldn't make that one up. Talk about factory food.

We're importing manufactured food of uncertain providence from a country that can't even begin to regulate food safety for their own citizens? An industrial product that even the alleged manufacturer can't say where they got it from? This is lunacy. (I imagine Japanese steak fans felt the same way about US beef imports after our mad cow outbreaks ...).

Update: The Toronto Star adds this footnote:

Menu Foods said Thursday that ChemNutra Inc. was the former supplier of its wheat gluten. Based in Las Vegas, it no longer supplies Menu Foods. ChemNutra imported the wheat gluten from a company the FDA has identified as Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co. in Wangdien, China. Records from Menu Foods show that products from ChemNutra were first used on Nov. 8 and last used on March 6.

The story of the GOP's Pharma benefit bill (Medicare D) oozes out ...

Congratulations to 60 Minutes for covering a topic the GOP would love to forget ... Emphases mine.

Under The Influence, 60 Minutes' Steve Kroft Reports On Drug Lobbyists' Role in Passing Bill That Keeps Drug Prices High - CBS News

NEW YORK, April 1, 2007

... One reason those profits have exceeded Wall Street expectations is the Medicare prescription drug bill. It was passed three-and-a-half years ago, but as 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft reports, its effects are still reverberating through the halls of Congress, providing a window into how the lobby works.

... It certainly wasn't ugly for the drug lobby which invested more than $10 million in campaign contributions during the last election and has been a source of lucrative employment opportunities for congressmen when they leave office.

Former senators Dennis Deconcini, D-Ariz., and Steve Symms, R-Idaho, and former congressmen like Tom Downey, D-N.Y.; Vic Fazio, D-Calif.; Bill Paxon, R-N.Y., and former House Minority Leader Robert Michel, R-Ill., all registered as lobbyists for the drug industry and worked on the prescription drug bill.

"I can tell you that when the bill passed, there were better than 1,000 pharmaceutical lobbyists working on this," says Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich.

Dingell has been in Congress for 52 years and is the new chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee which shares jurisdiction over Medicare. He says the bill would not have passed without the efforts of the drug lobby.

"There is probably a lotta truth in it that the bill was stacked in their benefit. And it's probably also true that it was written by their lobbyists," he says.

... Why was the drug lobby was so interested in this bill and what did it have to gain? Ron Pollack the executive director of Families USA, a nonpartisan health care watchdog group, says it all boiled down to a key provision in the legislation.

It prohibited Medicare and the federal government from using its vast purchasing power to negotiate lower prices directly from the drug companies.

... Before the vote, Congress was told the program would cost a whopping $395 billion over the first 10 years. In fact, Medicare officials already knew it was going to cost a lot more.

Burton said he and others were misled.

"Within two weeks after the bill was passed, everybody knew it was gonna cost well over $500 billion," he says. "And many members of the Congress [who] had voted for it said, 'I would never have voted for it had I known that.' "

Medicare Chief Actuary Richard Foster later told Congress that he revised the cost estimate to $534 before the vote, but was told to withhold the new numbers if he wanted to keep his job.

During a Congressional hearing, Foster stated: "It struck me there was a political basis for making that decision. I considered that inappropriate and, in fact, unethical."

Foster said the person who told him to withhold Congress from getting the revised estimates was Medicare boss Tom Scully.

Scully was the administration's lead negotiator on the prescription drug bill, and at the time was also negotiating a job for himself with a high-powered Washington law firm, where he became a lobbyist with the pharmaceutical industry.

"He was negotiating for his job at the same time that the Medicare legislation was being considered. He wound up taking this job 10 days after the president signed this legislation," says Pollack.

It is but one example of the incestuous relationship between Congress and the industry, and just one of the reasons the pharmaceutical lobby almost never loses a political battle that affects its bottom line.

Former Congressman Billy Tauzin, who helped push the prescription drug bill through the House, didn't disagree.

Has the bill been good for the drug industry?

"It's been good for the patients whom the drug industry represents …" Tauzin says. "In terms of profits — [for the drug companies] and volumes, yes."

... Why has this lobby been so successful? The former congressman says he believes it's because they stood for the right things.

If Tauzin sounds a lot like a lobbyist for the drug industry, that's because now he is.

Just a few months after the prescription drug bill passed, Tauzin began discussions with the pharmaceutical industry to become its chief lobbyist in Washington. He says it was one of several lucrative offers he's received just before he got some very bad news.

... In fairness to Tauzin and former Medicare chief Tom Scully, they weren't the only public officials involved with the prescription drug bill who later went to work for the pharmaceutical industry.

Just before the vote, Tauzin cited the people who had been most helpful in getting it passed. Among them:

John McManus, the staff director of the Ways and Means subcommittee on Health. Within a few months, he left Congress and started his own lobbying firm. Among his new clients was PhRMA, Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Merck.

Linda Fishman, from the majority side of the Finance Committee, left to become a lobbyist with the drug manufacturer Amgen.

Pat Morrisey, chief of staff of the Energy and Commerce Committee, took a job lobbying for drug companies Novartis and Hoffman-La Roche.

Jeremy Allen went to Johnson and Johnson.

Kathleen Weldon went to lobby for Biogen, a Bio-tech company.

Jim Barnette left to lobby for Hoffman-La Roche.

In all, at least 15 congressional staffers, congressmen and federal officials left to go to work for the pharmaceutical industry, whose profits were increased by several billion dollars.

... In January, one of the first things the new Democratic House of Representatives did was to make it mandatory for Medicare to negotiate lower prices with the drug companies.

A similar measure faces stiff opposition in the Senate, where the drug lobby is spending millions of dollars to defeat it. The president has already announced that if the bill passes, he will veto it.

The mainstream media did a terrible job of describing what was going on at the time, with the exception, of course, of people like Paul Krugman. Politicians who claim they were "misled" about the costs are joshing us -- they knew the price tag they were given was a cover story.

It's the usual story about how influence is bought in Washington, only on a bigger scale than most. It's partly old style corruption, and partly funding and supporting politicians that tend to agree with the buyer's position (which tends to make for fairly dumb politicians).

I believe there's some merit to pharma position, but I have little doubt that in an open and honest political discussion they'd have lost the battle. As it was, they and their shareholders (me included) won big. There was bipartisan corruption (as usual), but the GOP had control and was by far the most guilty party. Kudos to Pelosi for fighting back once the GOP fell, though I doubt the Senate will right this wrong. The Tom Scully story is truly noteworthy ...

Cheney/Bush and torture - now it's sensory deprivation

I wonder what they expect to get out of the prisoners now ...

BBC NEWS | Americas | Guantanamo conditions 'worsening': "

... The report, published on Thursday, said about 300 detainees are now being held at a new facility - known as Camp 5, Camp 6 and Camp Echo - comparable to 'super-max' high security units in the US.

The group said the facility had 'created even harsher and apparently more permanent conditions of extreme isolation and sensory deprivation'.

It said the detainees were reportedly confined to windowless cells for 22 hours a day, only allowed to exercise at night and could go for days without seeing daylight...

Smells like revenge.

Jobs predicts the death of audio DRM within a year

A cursory examination of my DRM posts would show that, until the end of 2006, I didn't expect audio DRM to fall so quickly. It appears in retrospect to have been a rotted tree, ready to collapse.

If Jobs is correct in his prediction, this means the effective end of audio DRM within the year ...

AppleInsider | Jobs talks new iTunes functions, DRM and video, iPod storage [transcript]

...Q: You mentioned that 2.5 of 5 million [songs in your iTunes] catalog will be DRM-free by the end of the year. That's presumably not just EMI Records by the end of the year.
A: That's correct. That's our estimate. That's EMI content plus other content from other labels.
Q: And the second part of my question is: What do you think this will have an impact on the iPod-iTunes relationship in terms of now being able to buy your music on any player and not just on iPod?
A: Well again, you've been able to play all sorts of music on iPod forever. iPods have played MP3s forever. So the only music that has been in question is music you buy off the iTunes store. Now again, you can burn a CD and read that CD back in and it takes off the DRM. So you could then play it on anything else. We compete based on having what we we think is the best music store and based on what we think is having the best music players. And if customers agree with us, we are going to do well. If they don't, well we're going to get a message back that we have to work harder...

Jobs tries to imply this isn't that big a deal since consumers could always burn a CD then re-encode the music. In reality anyone who's tried this will tell you the quality is similar to AM radio.

I suspect the non-DRMd files will have, embedded within them, an encrypted and non-removable identifier that can be tracked back to the purchaser's credit card records. I'm surprised nobody has asked about that. It's what I'd do if I were Apple. (Update 5/3/07: and that's what they did, but the one you can see isn't even encrypted. I'm sure there's an encrypted tag as well.)

I'm fine with the price increase, I'll upgrade the DRMd music I like. This will make me significantly more likely to use the iTunes store.

BTW, DRM on TV and video isn't dead yet. I'm not so sure it will die. What killed audio DRM for me was that it severely impaired my ability to listen to music and audio while working or driving. I can't multitask video inputs, so I am much less impacted by DRM on video. I do buy DRMd TV shows and movies for the kids to watch while traveling ...

The return of VRML? Google 3D warehouse

Remember VRML? Virtual Reality Markup Language was an SGML-like standard for describing 3 dimensional objects and their relationships. I thought of that when I read of an OS X application that uses objects from Google's 3D Warehouse.

I haven't followed the sketch-up story very closely, but the emergence of applications that draw from an open (?) worldwide library of 3 D shapes got my attention. An interesting development!

Christianity and data: Not promising

Dyer reads the sociology literature ...

Dyer: Religion and Good Behavior

... the numbers don't lie: the more religious a [Christian] country is, the worse people behave in their private lives. Thank God they didn't do a survey on the correlation between strong religious belief and war.

Well, of course Dyer knows numbers lie all the time. Still, there does not appear to be any empirical support for the theory that religion leads to better behavior, even when that behavior is defined in Christian terms (turn the other cheek, help the poor, etc). Dyer suspects they're finding correlation rather than causation and I tend to agree, but one cannot rule out that Christianity causes bad behavior.