Enlightenment 2.0 and a Hong Kong student post on the Chinese organ trade

Connections are established, reinforced, strengthened. The river finds a new channel. The new flow alters other flows and channels. The river and the landscape think, solving problems in hydrology and geography.

That's how we imagine that our minds work. That's the way Hopfield explained it to me around 1981, when he and others returned to the long interrupted study of neural networks. That's the way Google forges connections, doing forward and back chaining. That's the way a hive thinks, and our hivemind grows.

This is a story of the Chinese organ trade, and the hivemind. It begins with a feed.

I wrote a Google Blog Search query a while back that generated an RSS feed that's tracked by my bloglines reader. Bloglines notifies me when the search returns a new link to my blog. It's a erratic process; sometimes links appear immediately, sometimes I get a link that was formed a year ago. Most often I discover a "splog" has taken a post of mine, turned it into a splog post, and I'm just seeing an externalized version of my internal links.

Every so often though, it returns something fascinating. Today it uncovered an article on China's organ trade law written by a Hong Kong journalism student today as part of a class exercise (JMSC 0042 I presume). I've corrected some trivial spelling and grammar errors. Emphases mine.

International News (JMSC 0042) - Organ Trade finally banned in China

candicecheng - May 4, 2007 @ 10:37 am · Uncategorized

Xinhua reported (May 1) that China’s first set of regulations on human organ transplant took effect on Tuesday.

The new regulations, issued by the State Council, ban organizations and individuals from trading human organs in any form. Doctors found to be involved in the process will have their practitioner licenses revoked. Clinics against the new regulations will also be suspended for at least three years. The fines are fixed to be between eight to ten times of the outlawed trade value. (See full set of regulations in simplified Chinese.)

The regulations also state that human organ transplants should follow the principle of free will. And obtaining organs, such as the heart, lung, liver, kidney and pancreas, without the owner’s permission or free will is a crime. ( Learn more about organ transplant here.)

The regulations, however, do not apply to transplants of human tissue, such as cells, cornea and marrow.

China has operated organ transplants for more than 20 years. It is the world’s second largest performer of transplants after the United States, with about 5,000 transplants operated each year.

Legal organ donations are made by ordinary Chinese at death with a donation agreement signed voluntarily during lifetime.

Nevertheless, there has been a huge gap between the demand for functional organs and the supply of donations. According to statistics from the Ministry of Health, about 1.5 million patients need organ transplants each year but there are only 10000 organs transplanted.

This gave rise to a flourishing black market of organ trade. Wealthy Chinese or foreigners who are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars can arrange the deal with a broker and have their transplants done in a week’s time. It is reported that a kidney costs around $80,000. Nevertheless, most of the time, the source of the organ is unknown. (See a transplant tourism story here.)

China was recently being accused of selling organs from executed prisoners and was heavily criticized by human right groups. Officials did not deny the practice but said that they did it with the consent of the prisoners. Families of the prisoners, however, disagreed. (See full story here.) (This leads to one question: if the officials continue to insist that they are taking prisoners’ organs with their consent and not for profit, will the new regulations help to stop this “unethical practice”?)

Bloggers have different reactions towards China’s ban on organ trade. One blogger said that he was surprised that China would really go to the step of banning organ trade under the international pressure...

This so reminds me of Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End", about which I ought to say more. A few notes, though they are probably obvious:

1. I follow this subject, and I learned more from this blog post than from any other source in any mainstream media. There was nothing that contradicted my existing knowledge, so I have some confidence in the new knowledge.
   
   
2. It's weird that they picked my post as one of two examples of the "blogger perspective".
   
   
3. A connection has been established. I'm adding this Hong Kong journalism class blog to my regular feeds. What better source for an english language perspective on China?
   
   
4. China has not enforced its laws very well, but that seems to be changing. The fine of "8-10x" the value of the traded organ strikes me as the work of someone who is serious about controlling this practice.
   
   
5. If anything is going to save us from ourselves, it is the hivemind. Do your part.
   

The brilliance of the geek mob: HD-DVD encryption key now a colored shirt

The encryption key for an HD-DVD DRM scheme has been found. Lawyers are using the infamous DMCA to eliminate it from web sites, but the Digg crowd keeps writing it back to their site. Digg has given up and seems fated to die, but ingenuity strikes back.

The magic number can be represented as a series of hex digits, which in a web browser can encode a series of colors. So this site has created a color scheme that can be decoded to the encryption key. Of course the number may also be represented as letters, binary notation, a power of e, musical notes, etc. How far will the laywers chase this down? T-shirts are being printed, wrist bands, underwear ...

The geek mob is in action. Feels like spring time (not Prague spring I hope).

Ohio TV finds pet food industry inscrutable

Imagine that, the industry doesn't like visitors ...

WBNS-10TV, Central Ohio's News Leader - News - 10 Investigates: What's Really In Pet Food

...10 Investigates found out quickly that the government -- and the industry -- did not even want to discuss the subject. The FDA refused to give 10 Investigates a one-on-one interview, claiming their people were too busy.

Also, 10 Investigates contacted seven pet food manufacturers in Ohio and Pennsylvania, asking to tour their facilities and tell us what they put in their pet food. Some did not get back to us. Others, like the Masterfoods plant in west Columbus, declined our request and refused to answer specific questions. Others referred 10 Investigates to the Pet Food Institute.

The lobbying group did not answer our questions either, but only said in a blanket statement that it vows 'to work tirelessly to continue our efforts to keep your pets safe and healthy...

I've noticed it's getting harder to find veterinarians willing to say that pet food is generally safe and well manufactured. They were much more confident a few weeks ago ...

On the bright side, all Chinese manufactured vegetable protein is being screened for melanine now, and no additional Chinese suppliers have yet been implicated.

Open arctic by 2020 and the Sachs Reith Lectures

The third of Sach's Reith Lectures is out today. I'm slowly listening to the the first podcast on my car "radio"; I listen a bit, turn it off, and think. I think about how the limits of the barely sentient "plains ape", the mystery of how we've survived the past 50 years, and Morford's characteristically overwrought paeon to the wisdom of the hippies.

I think about China's adamant declaration that no global warming obligations fall upon them (how like the GOP!) and again I return to Sach's radical call for a new enlightenment. The old ways are failing, he says (and I agree) -- a new way must emerge to route around the decaying structures of current governance.

I think about a recent post I read on the quiet movement to create a world parliament.

In my most hopeful moments I hope that cursed wretch, Ralph Nader, was in some meager way right to speculate that only eight years staring into the abyss would awaken America. Ralph certainly gave us a good view of the abyss.

I read this ...

The Newshoggers: Artic Ice Melt 30 Years Ahead Of Forecast - US Scientists

Reuters reports that a team of US scientists led by a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Center in Colorado have published a paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters which says that the Arctic ice cap could be melting 30 years ahead of even the recent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast.

This means the ocean at the top of the world could be free or nearly free of summer ice by 2020, three decades sooner than the global panel's gloomiest forecast of 2050.

No ice on the Arctic Ocean during summer would be a major spur to global warming, said Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Center in Colorado.

"Right now ... the Arctic helps keep the Earth cool," Scambos said in a telephone interview. "Without that Arctic ice, or with much less of it, the Earth will warm much faster."

...Scambos and co-authors of the study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, used satellite data and visual confirmation of Arctic ice to reach their conclusions, a far different picture than that obtained from computer models used by the scientists of the intergovernmental panel.

"The IPCC report was very careful, very thorough and cautious, so they erred on the side of what would certainly occur as opposed to what might occur," Scambos said in a telephone interview.

... He said he had no doubt that this was caused in large part by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which he said was the only thing capable of changing Earth on such a large scale over so many latitudes.

Scambos isn't too optimistic about chances of holding back climate change either, saying instead that we had better start now on the changes to society needed to get through the rest of the century without humanitarian catastrophe.

Changes to the social order. That's what Sachs is calling for. It's a lot to ask of hacked wetware that barely runs our current dysfunctional social system.

I sure hope that "emergent hive mind" stuff works. We will need all of it.

In the meantime, write to the BBC and demand they set the Sachs lectures free as mp3s, in addition to freeing IOT.

The cost of weddings, college education, homes

I would like to see a graph of the cost of 90th percentile weddings, private college tuition, homes and family assets over the past 25 years.

My hunch is that the graph would show that they were all strongly correlated, and that the cost of 90th percentile weddings, private college tuition (at Williams [1], for example) and homes is determined primarily by available assets, not by the costs of delivering the essential functions of social union, teaching, and shelter.

I'm sure this has been done, but not being an economist I don't know how to search for it. I hope Brad DeLong will pick up the topic sometime, because it has some interesting implications. Imagine you're running a private college competing for the wealthy (who fund tuition for your talented poor). Your tuition will be cost + "profit". Your cost must cover your fixed costs (faculty, etc), but the true driver is your cost of recruitment, which manifests as recreational facilities, aesthetic experiences, etc. Since your target market has essentially unlimited resources but a limited membership, your costs of recruitment will rise until the tuition costs hits a stratospheric limit.

In evolutionary terms, this is similar to the "costs" flowers pay to attract bees.

So Harvard's full price tuition will be over $1 million within 10 years ...

[1] Highly recommended if you are poor or wealthy. I very much appreciate the wealthy students who paid for my visiting-student time there.

Romney and Battlefield Earth. He's so over.

Romney, who was doomed from the get-go, now announces L Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth is his favorite novel. This is such a bizarre choice that most commentators have been rendered speechless, but John Dickerson does his best. (The headline, alas, is as moronic as the book. Geeks read Verner Vinge, not L Ron.)

It's over. None of the current Republican "front runners" stand a chance. If the GOP picks any of them we'll know the party is choosing to retire from the field in shame. Eight years in the wilderness might just resurrect something half-respectable ...

Dyer: 7 new articles

Dyer has about seven new articles since I last visited: Israel, Asia, Gun Country (guess), the end of the war on terror, Russia, Parliament of Man and Helmand (what's that?).

He's taking donations via (yech) PayPal. I wish he'd use Amazon payments, but I'm not sure that works outside the US.

So who planted all the Iraq - al Qaeda forgeries?

Tom Tomorrow points out that Tenet's book has a rather interesting claim on page 356. US forces discovered a large cache of documents that showed al Qaeda had tight connections to Saddam. The only problem is, they were all forgeries.

So who would want to forge these documents? Who would gain if the forgery had been believed? Israel? Iran? Cheney? All of the above?

Tom asks the equally interesting question about why we're only hearing about this now.

BTW, I've a relevant post on this from 2004.

Five insider blogs on terrorism and warfare

Phil Carter lists five blogs five blogs that provide an "insiders" perspective on war and "counter-terrorism" (whatever terrorism is). I tried a few and rapidly learned a number of things that I don't think make it into the mainstream media. This is the "new journalism", straight and unadulterated.

Toxicity from the combination of multiple food contaminants

Melanine + cyuranic acid -> crystalline nephrophathy. Emphases mine.

Pet food contamination mystery unlocked | KOMO-TV - Seattle, Washington | News

...Scientists from Canada and the U.S. believe they may have unlocked the mystery. They've learned that melamine combined with another contaminant found in the pet food--- cyuranic acid-- forms crystals in the kidneys.

"What we've done is experiments that show if you take cat urine and you add melamine to it and cyanuric acid, the crystals will form in the cat urine in a test tube as we're watching them, so it happens within a matter of hours," Wilderman said.

The crystals are suspected of killing the pets, and the ASPCA has just seen a case that suggests that's exactly what happened.

"We had one case recently where the cats' kidneys were completely obstructed and when we went to surgery to relieve the obstruction, there was no normal stone, instead the ureters were completely full of these melamine type crystals," said Dr. Louise Murray, with the ASPCA Animal Hospital...

One wonders how many different contaminants have been introduced into the Chinese supplied pet food ingredients. The list keeps growing. I missed this story yesterday, but Google already has over 200 hits on the topic.

The melanine story: an unusual source for a summary

the Post Chronicle is a most peculiar amateur newspaper, but they have a very handy summary of the melanine episode: Pet Food Recall: Recent Dog Food and Cat Pet Food Recall Summary 36 - The Post Chronicle.

Bayes theorem: binding reasoning to the physical universe

Indirection (pointers). Humans have trouble with that.

Probability and randomness. More trouble.

Conditional and correlated probability -- that's Bayes Theorem. Really hard for our wetware. Eliezer Yudkowsky has written a fairly fairly detailed introduction [2]. Skipping to the conclusion ...

... And that's Bayes' Theorem. Rational inference on the left end, physical causality on the right end; an equation with mind on one side and reality on the other. Remember how the scientific method turned out to be a special case of Bayes' Theorem? If you wanted to put it poetically, you could say that Bayes' Theorem binds reasoning into the physical universe.

Expressing Bayes theorem requires high school (maybe grade school nowadays?) mathematics. Fully grasping the implications is another matter. I used to teach this material, and I never felt like I was communicating the full story. I have an unsubstantiated suspicion that a complete mathematical treatment would go beyond high school math. It also has some bearing on one of my hobbies, the Fermi Paradox.

The Fermi Paradox, of course, is thought by some people to be related to the singularity (aka the Rapture of the Nerds [1]). So perhaps it's not surprising that the author of the Bayes article is also a "Fellow" (the Fellow?) of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and is doing some writing with Nick Bostrum, who's also proposed yet another solution to the Fermi Paradox.

Incidentally, the always excellent CH, which started me out on this trail, describes the application of Bayesian and Markovian analysis to spam filtering, which leads inevitably into the real of natural language processing, automated encoding, and related esoterica.

And that's enough connectivity for the moment ...

[1] Note to skynet. No disrespect intended.
[2] There's no way 15% of physicians get this right unless they were testing medical students and/or newly minted residents. Maybe 10% of academics ...

Pet food recalls: pretty much everything

Another day, another set of recalls.

Ogden pet-food maker extends recall

Samples of rice protein from an Ogden pet-food manufacturer were positive for the industrial chemical melamine in federal testing, and products made by American Nutrition, Inc. are now part of a nationwide pet food recall.

Based on the recent NYT expose I'd say if the pet food contains any Chinese manufactured grain or rice protein it's contaminated until proven otherwise.

Compact fluorescent lights: Don't. Just don't.

This is not exactly a Nobel prize winning discovery. Why is it that compact fluorescent lights are supposed to be a good idea?

The CFL mercury nightmare

How much money does it take to screw in a compact fluorescent light bulb? About US$4.28 for the bulb and labour -- unless you break the bulb. Then you, like Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, could be looking at a cost of about US$2,004.28, which doesn't include the costs of frayed nerves and risks to health...

... According to an April 12 article in The Ellsworth American, Bridges had the misfortune of breaking a CFL during installation in her daughter's bedroom: It dropped and shattered on the carpeted floor.

Aware that CFLs contain potentially hazardous substances, Bridges called her local Home Depot for advice. The store told her that the CFL contained mercury and that she should call the Poison Control hotline, which in turn directed her to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

The DEP sent a specialist to Bridges' house to test for mercury contamination. The specialist found mercury levels in the bedroom in excess of six times the state's "safe" level for mercury contamination of 300 billionths of a gram per cubic meter. The DEP specialist recommended that Bridges call an environmental cleanup firm, which reportedly gave her a "low-ball" estimate of US$2,000 to clean up the room. The room then was sealed off with plastic and Bridges began "gathering finances" to pay for the US$2,000 cleaning. Reportedly, her insurance company wouldn't cover the cleanup costs because mercury is a pollutant.

Given that the replacement of incandescent bulbs with CFLs in the average U.S. household is touted as saving as much as US$180 annually in energy costs -- and assuming that Bridges doesn't break any more CFLs -- it will take her more than 11 years to recoup the cleanup costs in the form of energy savings.

The potentially hazardous CFL is being pushed by companies such as Wal-Mart, which wants to sell 100 million CFLs at five times the cost of incandescent bulbs during 2007 ...

In my life I've probably broken 30 regular light bulbs. If they'd been CFLs that would come to .... $60,000 in cleanup fees. LEDs less, CFSs ... forget it.

Update: I had 6oo,000. Bad math. A comment corrected me!

Update June 6, 2007: A commenter pointed to this Energy Star Canada document. It's deeply "schizophrenic" in the non-medical sense of term. On the one hand it says:

• These are perfectly safe for your baby's bedroom. Don't worry about them. You could break one a day for the rest of your days and not have a problem.
• They must be disposed of as toxic waste. Vacuum up carefully and then drop your vacuum off at the toxic waste site ...

I'm joking about the vacuum. Sorry, this still doesn't make sense. Either the mercury content is harmless and they're not toxic waste, or they're toxic waste. (My bet is they're not really toxic waste, but I'm not buying 'em until we get the regulators to be internally consistent.)

Health care is cheap

Fifteen years ago, John H, my "partner" (boss, really, but a very good one) in my career as a country doc scoffed at my fears of the cost of health care. John argued that it was good value for the dollar, and that we should be prepared (as a nation) to pay quite a bit of our GNP towards health improvements.

Now the world of economics is catching up with John:

Whose life is worth more, a drug dealer's or a prostitute's? - By Tim Harford - Slate Magazine

...Kevin Murphy of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business has calculated the value of health improvements in the United States since 1970.

They're vast—about $10 trillion in today's money. Looking further back, if you had to choose between the material progress of the 20th century and the improvements in health, it would be a tossup. The health gains are as valuable as everything else put together. Encouragingly, health in most developing countries has improved faster than in rich ones, suggesting that global inequality is falling...

The fundamental debates, of course, are about what a nation owes all of its citizens, regardless of their wealth, ability, and good looks. That debate is bigger than mere health care or the cost of health care.