Saletan and the organ trade

The growing organ trade first came to media attention around 2002 or so. Saletan has the 2006 update. Growth has been exponential ...

The worldwide market in human organs. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine.

...The numbers on the maps add up to thousands. According to the World Health Organization, the annual tally of international kidney transactions alone is about 6,000. The evidence includes reports from brokers and physicians, accounts from Indian villages, surveys of hospitals in Japan, government records in Singapore, and scars in Egyptian slums. In Pakistan, 40 percent of people in some villages are turning up with only one kidney. Charts presented at the meetings show the number of "donations" from unrelated Pakistanis skyrocketing. Two-thirds of the people getting these organs are foreigners. Data from the Philippines show the same thing...

This is about taking life from the weak and giving life to the strong. Here's one more reason why this is not a good idea. Someday the friends and family of those who give up their organs will go looking for revenge ...

The botched security of banks: Schneier ignites a comment storm

Schneier has been too kind to the banks and their increasingly inane security procedures; he's mostly left them alone. Today he finally picks on a misguided credit union, though he should be chewing on Vanguard:

Schneier on Security: Bank Botches Two-Factor Authentication:

... Um, hello? Having a username and a password -- even if they're both secret -- does not count as two factors, two layers, or two of anything. You need to have two different authentication systems: a password and a biometric, a password and a token...

The interesting stuff, however, is in the comments. Schneier hit a nerve, and his audience responds. Some comments claim banks believe their regulators want "two factor authentication" and, in the interests of doing nothing of value, they interpret this as multiple passwords, intermittent security questions, anonymous user IDs, etc. They probably figure they can avert expensive mandates for physical tokens with a load of smoke and mirrors. Their probably right, but the increased complexity and illusory security measures will almost certainly increase consumer losses.

I hope Schneier starts piling on to the banks ...

Corzine didn't wear a seatbelt - does your dog have one?

Corzine didn't wear a seatbelt. It's a characteristic of humans, they confuse power over people with power over physics. Kudos to McDonald for an excellent post, and for the valuable reference to Princess Di the seatbelt-less. In Minnesota Corzine would have gotten a ticket, but New Jersey's mandatory seatbelt law isn't due yet ($20 fine).

I wonder if Corzine will consider appearing in public service messages supporting the new law?

Despite my commie credentials, I have sympathy for the libertarian perspective. I think adults should be allowed to ride a motorcycle without a helmet, or a car without a seatbelt -- as long they then forfeit ownership of their organs in the event of brain death. The benefits to organ recipients will outweigh the costs of care for the seatbelt-less who survive.

BTW, your dog needs a seatbelt too. They need it because they're not sentient decision makers, and because a flying 80 lb dog can break your child's neck. Our dog wears a sled dog harness and appears fond of it; I think she likes the feeling of security it gives her. The harness was used for skijoring back when we had snow, and it works for high speed inline skate action too.

Accusation and injustice: Duke and Lacrosse

The accusation has been shown to be unfounded, and the DA will pay a price for what seems now to have been a politically inspired prosecution. Once again we are reminded of what happens when the law is used to further a political agenda, in this case the reelection campaign of a North Carolina district attorney. Of course, on a vastly larger scale, we are have recently seen how the GOP subverted the law to attack their political opponents, including putting one Wisconsin official in jail.

Will the media also pay a price? There's a long list of people who need to reexamine their readiness to mine this story and sell papers. I checked, and it appears that I'm not among the guilty. I recall thinking that the emotion had far outstripped the available data. The NYT had to pay out for prematurely assigning guilt to a Chinese-American physicist a few years back, I expect there will be some well-deserved payments this time as well.

Apple's OS delay: iLife, iWork, NetInfo, remote control -> it's bad

Mac Geeks are mostly fairly complacent about Apple's five month schedule slip to OS X desktop (vs. OS X TV, OS X iPhone, and OS X video iPod). The most knowledgeable, however, are quietly cautious. Gruber isn't saying this is bad, but my read is that he's starting to worry about Apple's priorities.

I'm also unhappy. It's not just OS X. I expected an Apple replacement for AppleWorks over a year ago. Microsoft still owns the only mass market spreadsheet solution on the Mac [1], and it's tied to buying into their entire suite of file formats. iPhoto hasn't had a major update in over a year, and it needs some serious help (such as importing Libraries). We don't have any adequate remote control solution for the Mac -- that's several years behind Windows. Apple's NetInfo based home and corporate network solutions are a mix of state-of-the-art and vintage 1978 unix. Aperture 1.5 is far slower than it should be, and the best explanations point to weaknesses in OS X data services. We all know the OS X Finder is very weak, and that OS X hasn't not yet equaled MacOS Classic file management. Simple Finder is a farce and OS usability leaves much to be desired. Not to mention the Dock ...

Oh, yes, and Safari. The browser that's stuck in 2004. The range of web sites that Safari supports shrinks every month. Google barely supports Safari; anyone who uses Blogger or Gmail with Firefox or IE can't tolerate Safari on Google. Hmm. Safari barely works on Google? Might as well say it doesn't work at all. There is a far better version of Safari in Apple's labs, but it's waiting on 10.5.

Speaking of core OS X applications, don't users deserve a version of Mail.app that loses massive email repositories less often?

Apple clearly has issues with their computing solutions that go beyond OS X. The saving grace for Apple is that XP is ailing and Vista is about as appealing as a root canal. Even so, there's no room for complacency. They're failing in more than one domain and OS X still has a vast amount of unrealized potential.

[1] Time for me to again test OpenOffice. The last time I tried it wasn't ready for my wife. Happily Nisus Writer Express is quite good.

Update: I almost forgot about Safari and Mail. app.

Warm-blooded Fish?

Ben can't sleep.

Dad, are corals warm or cold blooded?
Wikipedia has a lovely diagram. Coral don't have blood, they have a jelly like diffusion substrate.
Go to sleep Ben.

Dad, are there warm blooded fish?
Slashdot (of all places) says yes - sort of. The North Pacific Salmon Shark is particularly impressive, but many fish have various ways to use heat to improve performance. They don't, however, have the same obligatory temperature constraints we have.
Go to sleep Ben.

This is fun.

Humanzees and the Macaque genome

Carl (Loom) Zimmer reviews the implications of sequencing the Macaque genome: Meet the Monkey Cousins. Wow.

One of the most interesting examples was a few hundred gene sequences associated with disease in Humanzees (Hominid-Chimp hybrids, lately known as Homo sapiens). Genes sequences associated with diseases like PKU are normal in Macaque, the disease in us may represent a reversion to an old gene form in an otherwise updated genomic environment.

Astonishing stuff, and much more to come. I remember the day when it was novel to understand disease in evolutionary terms, back when I asked questions about the evolution of the immune system and professors seemed puzzled by my interest ...

The pernicious affects of taxes and accounting rules: crummy software and cubicle farms

Accounting rules for software capitalization are one of the reasons there's so much crummy software around. The rules favor "waterfall development", an expensive way to produce poor quality software. Incidentally, since waterfall development is very compatible with outsourcing, US tax law and accounting standards facilitate outsourcing software development.

It turns out tax laws also facilitate cubicle farms instead of pleasant work evironments:

Moveable walls - Joel on Software

... We're going to need a much bigger space now: on the order of 15,000 square feet. To build that much office space could cost a couple of million dollars. With the lack of deductability, your bank account goes down by three million dollars. The landlord will pay a fraction of that, but not enough to make it affordable.

There's a loophole. Office furniture can be depreciated much faster than leasehold improvements, over 7 years. So for $20 of office furniture you can deduct about $3 a year: better than nothing. Even better, office furniture is a real asset, so you can lease it. Now you're not out any cash, just a convenient monthly payment, which is 100% deductable.

This is why companies build cubicle farms instead of walls, even though the dollar cost is comparable...

Tax laws subsidize trailer parks in some states, and make them unaffordable in other states. Tax laws are why Tokyo once had rice paddies. The more convoluted the tax code becomes, the more unwanted side-effects occur ...

Globalization: poisoned pet food in Namibia

So it wasn't just the US market:

allAfrica.com: Namibia: Pet Food Shock - Manufacturers Recall Stocks (Page 1 of 1)

PET owners in South Africa and Namibia are reeling after two major pet-food manufacturers announced that they were recalling products that had caused kidney failure in dogs and cats...

...In South Africa, 19 dogs in Cape Town and Johannesburg that had been fed Vets Choice have been diagnosed with acute kidney failure, according to the news24 website.

... Earlier, the South African subsidiary of Hill's Pet Nutrition recalled a batch of its Prescription Diet m/d Feline dry food after a similar recall in the United States, where hundreds of cats reportedly died from kidney failure after eating contaminated food...

... The US Food and Drug Administration said tests indicated the food was contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine.

Recently, Woolworths in South Africa had to recall all of its dry dog and cat food due to contamination of certain products...

One wonders about human exposure outside of the US. Human kidneys, however, are far tougher than cat or dog kidneys -- we evolved in a hot, dry environment.

Failure to label on-demand reprints: shame on Peachpit

[Update: Peachpit's publisher responded in comments:

I'm the publisher at Peachpit, and I want to thank you for your comments. Your words sting, as they should, but they also inspire us to work harder to find a better solution for Print on Demand reprints. We don't use this reprint solution very often, and most certainly not for any of our image-intensive graphics and design titles. What exacerbates this is that although we try to monitor these reprints carefully, our supplier keeps changing their equipment. We're in the process of trying to find a new solution.

Which means, of course, I feel better about them.]

I'd naively assumed "on-demand reprints" would be an unmitigated good. Just-in-time printing should reduce waste and improve services. Unfortunately, at least one publisher's solution isn't up to the task. Instead of using a high quality PDF to generate reprints that closely resemble the original, Peachpit Press (Visual Quickstart, etc) uses something like a high quality black and white raster (scan) image for prints. That's unfortunate, but the real problem is a failure in product description (from my Amazon review):

Amazon.com: Python (Visual QuickStart Guide): Books: Chris Fehily (Amazon review by me)

Amazon doesn't allow us to rate the quality of an author's work separately from the publisher's presentation. That's unfortunate, because as an introductory guide to Python this is quite a good work.

Unfortunately, as of 3/07, it's also being published by Peachpit Press as an "on-demand reprint". There is nothing in the Amazon product description to tell you about this change, and indeed I'm not sure Amazon has any way of knowing about it. If you bought this book in a bookstore you'd see the "on-demand reprint" icon on the front cover, but Peachpit Press should have changed the description on Amazon. This reflects poorly on Peachpit, a company I've previously had respect for.

Peachpit's "on-demand reprint" technology is crude. The book resembled the sort of high-quality bound photocopies I used to see sold for $1-$2 in "third world" bookstores twenty years ago. It is entirely gray scale (black and white?) with blurry screen shots and irregular contrast.

The effect is quite annoying. It doesn't make the book worthless by any means, but it hurts. The cover price is $22, $14 is probably a fair sale price IF you know that you're getting an "on-demand reprint". If you can get a used copy you might do better, but of course you might end up with a used "on-demand reprint".

Of course, if you read this you now know what you're getting, and you can make an informed decision without any surprises. Which is as it should be.

Peachpit has a warning icon on the cover of the book, but it's insufficiently descriptive. They have not updated the Amazon description at all, the image picture on Amazon doesn't show the 'on-demand' icon. I'd have kept my respect for Peachpit if the Amazon product description included this warning text:

This product is now an on-demand reprint. It is black and white only with variable contrast. Some images and text will be difficult to read.

If they did that then I'd be fine no matter what they charged, because I'd know what I was getting.

If you get one of these on-demand reprints from Amazon, be sure to write a review describing what you're received. That's the best way to provide feedback to the publishers and to Amazon. In the meantime, I'll use Amazon to buy used rather than new books from Peachpit; that will give me slightly better odds of a much higher quality product.

BBC 4 Reith Lectures 2007: Sachs and the modern world - by mp3, podcast and rss

The BBC Radio 4 - Reith Lectures 2007, featuring Jonathon Sachs on the challenges of the modern world, have begun. Yes, it's no longer sufficient to avidly follow Melvyn Bragg's weekly Radio 4 program In Our Time, the intellectual-geek must also listen to the current and past Reith Lectures. [1]

This year, the BBC has made the lecture available by download (MP3 - only for one week after each lecture!), Podcast (iTunes) and RSS feed [2] . There's a one-click subscription option for iTunes users that's hidden away [2]. As an experiment I'm now subscribed to the feed via Bloglines and iTunes. Note the feed is for Radio 4 Choice, not for this specific lecture. When I subscribed I received both Lecture 1 (yesterday) and an option to get an program on the Falklands war.

Here are the lectures:

Lecture 1: Bursting at the Seams
Lecture 2: Science for Survival
Lecture 3: The Dethronement of the North Atlantic
Lecture 4: The Extremely Poor and the Extremely Worried
Lecture 5: A New Politics for a New Age

The BBC 4 is a cruel example of globalization at its best and most cruel. Best because there's no comparison between, for example, In Our Time, and anything available on NPR. Cruel, because I used to be a regular NPR listener, and I pretty much ignore them now. We still contribute, but how long will we keep doing that?

---

[1] A modern car radio helps.
[2] Some odd things happen in IE and FF when one clicks on the Podcast link. It's an XML document for the Radio 4 RSS feed, and depending on the browser and browser settings it may display a web page, ask you to add a feed to your feed reader, or tell you you've already subscribed to the feed! (This led me to change my FF settings so FF always displays a feed page rather than auto-subscribes). In addition IE 6 displays a quite different page than FF, only IE shows the explicit one-click subscription to iTunes option:

itpc://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/
downloadtrial/radio4/radio4choice/rss.xml
vs.
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/
downloadtrial/radio4/radio4choice/rss.xml

Such are the joys of the bleeding edge. You may be able to find the feed in iTunes, this worked for me:

1. open itunes
2. under the Advanced menu, select 'Subscribe to Podcast'
3. copy and paste the above itpc url.

Update 6/9/07: The mp3s are no longer available from the BBC, but you may be able to find black market versions online. More honestly, the BBC transcripts are now associated with the lecture links above.

Also, Variety has a profile of Sachs. It's a persuasive picture of an obsessive workaholic, humorless, driven, brilliant, relentless and probably often cruel and ruthless. He doesn't sound like someone you'd want to share a beer, or even a building, with. Perhaps this makes him the right man for the ultimate challenge -- the eradication of extreme poverty.

The strage saga of the scrambled letter not-urban myth

An investigation of a 'friendly spam' email leads to an urban myth that's not a myth, and to a comment on reading disability ...

Be the Best You can Be: Scrambled letters and reading disability, not to mention emergent memes and urban myths

"I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg.
The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsatltteer be in the rghit pclae.
The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?;"

...This text circulated on the internet in September 2003. I first became aware of it when a journalist contacted a my colleague Sian Miller on 16th September, trying to track down the original source...

... I've found a ... page that tracked down the original demonstration of the effect of letter randomisation to Graham Rawlinson. Graham wrote a letter to New Scientist in 1999 (in response to a paper by Saberi & Perrot (Nature, 1999) on the effect of reversing short chunks of speech). You can read the letter here, or in a link to New Scientist, here. In it Graham says:

"This reminds me of my PhD at Nottingham University (1976), which showed that randomising letters in the middle of words had little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. Indeed one rapid reader noticed only four or five errors in an A4 page of muddled text."

It's possible that with the publicity offered by the internet, that Dr. Rawlinson's research might be more widely read in future. For those wanting to cite this in their own research the full reference is:

Rawlinson, G. E. (1976) The significance of letter position in word recognition. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Psychology Department, University of Nottingham, Nottingham UK. (summary here)

So Dr. Rawlinson's unpublished 1976 thesis (31 years ago) has come to worldwide attention as the result of a propagating urban myth that's not a myth, and this story is best illustrated by a chaotic and scrambled web page that further extends the original work across multiple languages and references newer software for generating readable scrambles...

Self-referential on many levels.

Romney: not possible

In order to win the GOP primaries Mitt Romney has to convince Christian conservatives that he's reversed many of his longstanding opinions. He also, incidentally, has to publicly renounce his religion and be born again as a Baptist ... (emphases mine)

The Presidency’s Mormon Moment - New York Times
April 9, 2007
By KENNETH WOODWARDKenneth Woodward, a contributing editor at Newsweek, is writing a book about American religion since 1950.

... Any journalist who has covered the church knows that Mormons speak one way among themselves, another among outsiders. This is not duplicity but a consequence of the very different meanings Mormon doctrine attaches to words it shares with historic Christianity.

For example, Mormons speak of God, but they refer to a being who was once a man of “flesh and bone,” like us. They speak of salvation, but to them that means admittance to a “celestial kingdom” where a worthy couple can eventually become “gods” themselves. The Heavenly Father of whom they speak is married to a Heavenly Mother. And when they emphasize the importance of the family, they may be referring to their belief that marriage in a Mormon temple binds families together for all eternity.

... handlers should be aware that Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals know Mormon doctrine better than most other Americans do — if only because they study Mormonism in order to rebut its claims...

Not to mention the nature of Mormon angels, or the apocalyptic battles of ancient high tech Amerindians ...

Mormonism is no odder or less respectable than many other well established faiths such as Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Bahai, Christianity, Shintoism, etc. It's arguably less odd than Scientology, an even younger faith that's not as far along the path to the conventional. Even so, I've not read any discussions of comparative religion that put Mormonism in the same ballpark as mainstream Christianity. I suspect if you held their feet to the fire, most scholars would put Mormonism somewhere "between" Islam and Hinduism, though culturally Mormons are very similar to conservative Christian Americans.

The catch for Romney is that the religious conservative heart of the GOP takes theology very seriously. I'm willing to bet they're already muttering about the "Romney antichrist".

So Romney is not a real contender for the GOP primary, and it's too late for him to switch parties. Giuliani? Huh? These people thought Clinton had behavioral issues? No way. McCain? Finished.

So it's none of the above. The press needs to look to the next set of candidates. Too bad, really. Romney would be easy to beat, and the country desperately needs to send the GOP to the badlands for a major rebuilding effort ...

Update 4/27/07: Hitchens cruel but familiar summary of early Mormon history. Romney doesn't have a chance.

NYT: genetics of gender behavior, the gendered brain, and the evolution of the intellect

Masked by a bland headline, Nicholas Wade covers some very interesting developments in brain evolution and the gendered brain. Several of these are new to me, particularly the accumulation of brain-related genes on the X chromosome. That may have implications for the allegedly rapid increase in "autism" (whatever that is):

Pas de Deux of Sexuality Is Written in the Genes - New York Times
April 10, 2007
By NICHOLAS WADE

... In the womb, the body of a developing fetus is female by default and becomes male if the male-determining gene known as SRY is present. This dominant gene, the Y chromosome’s proudest and almost only possession...

In puberty, the reproductive systems are primed for action by the brain... probably the brain monitors internal signals as to whether the body is ready to reproduce and external cues as to whether circumstances are propitious for yielding to desire.

... It is a misconception that the differences between men’s and women’s brains are small or erratic or found only in a few extreme cases, Dr. Larry Cahill of the University of California, Irvine, wrote last year in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Widespread regions of the cortex, the brain’s outer layer that performs much of its higher-level processing, are thicker in women. The hippocampus, where initial memories are formed, occupies a larger fraction of the female brain.

Techniques for imaging the brain have begun to show that men and women use their brains in different ways even when doing the same thing. In the case of the amygdala, a pair of organs that helps prioritize memories according to their emotional strength, women use the left amygdala for this purpose but men tend to use the right...

... Dr. Bailey said. “I’m not even sure females have a sexual orientation. But they have sexual preferences. Women are very picky, and most choose to have sex with men.”

...Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, argues that three primary brain systems have evolved to direct reproductive behavior. One is the sex drive that motivates people to seek partners. A second is a program for romantic attraction that makes people fixate on specific partners. Third is a mechanism for long-term attachment that induces people to stay together long enough to complete their parental duties.

Romantic love, which in its intense early stage “can last 12-18 months,” is a universal human phenomenon, Dr. Fisher wrote last year in The Proceedings of the Royal Society, and is likely to be a built-in feature of the brain...

... The best evidence for a long-term attachment process in mammals comes from studies of voles, a small mouselike rodent. A hormone called vasopressin, which is active in the brain, leads some voles to stay pair-bonded for life. People possess the same hormone, suggesting a similar mechanism could be at work in humans, though this has yet to be proved.

... since gay men have about one-fifth as many children as straight men, any gene favoring homosexuality should quickly disappear from the population.

Such genes could be retained if gay men were unusually effective protectors of their nephews and nieces, helping genes just like theirs get into future generations. But gay men make no better uncles than straight men, according to a study by Dr. Bailey. So that leaves the possibility that being gay is a byproduct of a gene that persists because it enhances fertility in other family members. Some studies have found that gay men have more relatives than straight men, particularly on their mother’s side...

... A somewhat more straightforward clue to the origin of homosexuality is the fraternal birth order effect. Two Canadian researchers, Ray Blanchard and Anthony F. Bogaert, have shown that having older brothers substantially increases the chances that a man will be gay. Older sisters don’t count, nor does it matter whether the brothers are in the house when the boy is reared.

The finding suggests that male homosexuality in these cases is caused by some event in the womb, such as “a maternal immune response to succeeding male pregnancies,” Dr. Bogaert wrote last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...

The fraternal birth order effect is quite substantial. Some 15 percent of gay men can attribute their homosexuality to it, based on the assumption that 1 percent to 4 percent of men are gay, and each additional older brother increases the odds of same-sex attraction by 33 percent...

...A significant recent advance in understanding the basis of sexuality and desire has been the discovery that genes may have a direct effect on the sexual differentiation of the brain... Arthur Arnold of the University of California, Los Angeles, has found that male and female neurons behave somewhat differently when kept in laboratory glassware. And last year Eric Vilain, also of U.C.L.A., made the surprising finding that the SRY gene is active in certain cells of the brain, at least in mice. Its brain role is quite different from its testosterone-related activities, and women’s neurons presumably perform that role by other means.

... an unusually large number of brain-related genes are situated on the X chromosome. The sudden emergence of the X and Y chromosomes in brain function has caught the attention of evolutionary biologists. Since men have only one X chromosome, natural selection can speedily promote any advantageous mutation that arises in one of the X’s genes. So if those picky women should be looking for smartness in prospective male partners, that might explain why so many brain-related genes ended up on the X.

“It’s popular among male academics to say that females preferred smarter guys,” Dr. Arnold said. “Such genes will be quickly selected in males because new beneficial mutations will be quickly apparent.”

Several profound consequences follow from the fact that men have only one copy of the many X-related brain genes and women two. One is that many neurological diseases are more common in men because women are unlikely to suffer mutations in both copies of a gene.

Another is that men, as a group, “will have more variable brain phenotypes,” Dr. Arnold writes, because women’s second copy of every gene dampens the effects of mutations that arise in the other.

Greater male variance means that although average IQ is identical in men and women, there are fewer average men and more at both extremes. Women’s care in selecting mates, combined with the fast selection made possible by men’s lack of backup copies of X-related genes, may have driven the divergence between male and female brains. The same factors could explain, some researchers believe, why the human brain has tripled in volume over just the last 2.5 million years...

Again one wonders how insect-like humans are. Does a mother's womb select for homosexual behavior in younger sons because they will do a better job defending her as she and her children age? In addition to the obvious example of the "queen bee" there's the precedent of the convict fish, who's young may forage for the adult.

On the subject of male/female differences, I recall that when I did my women's studies courses in the 1970s, there was a powerful meme that the differences between male and female were culturally conditioned and relatively small. That idea has been in decline ever since, and reached its nadir a few years back when it seemed that male humans were more like male chimps than like female humans (since then we've decided that chimps and humans are less alike than once thought). It is remarkable that males and females can communicate at all!

The rapidity of brain volume increases is presumably similar to the florid changes seen in animal phenotyptes that play a role in mating. As a male non-academic, however, I've not noticed displays of academic expertise attracting as many females as, say, wealth, good looks, or charm...

The author doesn't mention that the average male brain is substantially larger than the female brain, so it's been a puzzle that women, on the whole, are smarter than men. (The gap among children is breathtaking.) A thicker cortex for women helps explain that. Studies of the effects of menopause on cortical thickness must be coming soon ...

As for the autism connection? I tend to lean towards the thinking that the recent prevalence increase (past 10 years) is mostly reclassification of what was once called 'mental retardation' but that that there's also a component of what, over a period of a thousand or so years, might turn out, in retrospect, to be another instance of the ongoing and difficult adaptation of the human brain ...

Iraq: an exit strategy proposal

Fred Kaplan, in Slate, summarizes two similar proposals for an Iraq exit strategy. He prefaces his discussion by stating that Cheney/Bush are a lost cause and that this strategy, tragically, must wait for the next administration - approximately 650 days from now (I need to find a countdown button for my blog). Emphases mine ...

Two new proposals for exiting Iraq. - By Fred Kaplan - Slate Magazine

... Simon and Cole agree that the United States' main goals, at this point, should be to limit the effects of the civil war (which is already well in progress) and to keep the conflagration from spreading across the region.

It may seem paradoxical at first glance, but the best way to accomplish both goals may be to declare that we are leaving—that we're doing so on a timetable to be negotiated with the Iraqi government and in tandem with a separate, broader negotiation to end the civil war, but we are getting out...

...Cole further recommends holding new provincial elections so that the elected Sunni Arab representatives could stand in for guerrilla groups in the national talks, as Sinn Fein did in Northern Ireland.

However, both Simon and Cole emphasize, this step must be linked to active engagement with all of Iraq's neighbors. Cole lays out a scenario in which the United States and Britain work with the United Nations or the Organization of the Islamic Conference on this task, citing as a model the Bonn conference of December 2001 that helped install a unity government in Afghanistan. He envisions the Iraqi government arranging formal security commitments with the foreign ministers of Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. He also suggests inviting Saudi Arabia to reprise the role it played in brokering an end to the Lebanese civil war in 1989, noting the credibility that King Abdullah has with the Sunni Arabs—though he notes, in that case, the Iranians will have to play a similar role in helping to shut down the Shiite militias, especially Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi army.

Under this scheme, the United States would negotiate a phased withdrawal in tandem with these political settlements. Simon notes that some U.S. troops should stay—to secure Baghdad International Airport, the Green Zone, and access routes in between. He also urges a stepped-up U.S. military presence elsewhere in the Persian Gulf. Cole is not in favor of a total U.S. pullout, either. (Nor, it should be noted, are the House or Senate Democrats, who, in their bills, provide continued funding for troops involved in counterterrorism, training Iraqi security forces, and protecting U.S. personnel.)..

... If the next president puts something like these plans in motion, will they amount to anything? Neither Simon nor Cole is naive on this score. Both admit their proposals are gambles. For my own part, I doubt that the Iranians have a deep interest in a stable Iraq and wonder, with trepidation, what price they'd demand in exchange for helping to build one...

I'll be looking for Phil Carter's response to Kaplan's summary and I'd very much like to read a Dyer response. Dyer, I think, is more optimistic than Kaplan about Iran's interest in a stable (albeit weak and vulnerable) Iraq. I read Kaplan as signing on, reluctantly, to the plan.

Of course all of this is an implicit statement that Iraq is another Vietnam. We should be so lucky -- Vietnam is a trading partner, reasonably good neighbor to Thailand, and non-terroristic de facto ally of the US. If the US failure in Iraq turns out as well as the US failure in Vietnam then Bush will be ranked as only among the three worst presidents in US history.

I think the model here is the British departure from Northern Ireland -- in which the EU played an important role (so, alas, did 9/11. That day the IRA knew the end had come for them.). If Phil goes for it then it will have my vote too ...