Consumers are their own worst enemies

Coding Horror reviews current thinking about feature/function definition in software and hardware. It's a great review, but he lets consumers (ie. humans, us) off the hook too easily.

The dirty little non-secret of product development is that customers often want features that you believe they won't use, and they don't care about features you believe they'll find essential. Quite often, this is indeed how it turns out. Buyers of complex products are surprisingly poor at figuring out what's important.

Inevitably products are sub-optimal because a percentage of resources has to go towards what sells, as well as to what will produce satisfied customers.

Frustrating, but it's part of the price most of us have to pay. Call it the "judgment tax". Except, that is, Apple. Apple seems to completely disregard what consumers say they want, and instead sells what Apple thinks they really need. And consumers buy it.

How do they do that?!

Update 6/7/07: This was published in the New Yorker 5/28. Must be something in the air.

Journalism, as seen from the inside

DeLong has hoisted an anonymous comment from a practicing journalist to the front page: The Future of Journalism. This is why I like the practice of allowing anonymity in moderated comments -- it's a very well written, frank-sounding and educational comment. It's presumably common wisdom among practicing journalists, but probably little understood outside of the profession.

It does not surprise me that there is no significant correlation between the "excellence" of a newspaper and its economic success. I think the relationship of "excellence" and economic success is surprisingly elastic, unless one subscribes to the mindless tautology of defining "excellence" as "profitable".

I think this comment is debatable though:

... Had newspapers been a little smarter, they would have realized about 1993 or so that it made no sense to put news on the Internet for free and charge exhorbitant prices for their archives; the best model would be to give away the stale stuff for free -- to give people an idea of what they missed -- and charge for what's freshest.

I would not be surprised to learn that archives are a weak source of revenue, but i don't think making them free would make them more appreciated. In the era of blogs the key concepts tend to be captured in commentary anyway. So the question of archives isn't relevant.

So really the only question is whether one can make money, in addition to advertising revenue, by charging for fresh material. I suspect the answer, outside of specialized domains, will be no. Which means there will only be a handful of newspapers left in America when this transition runs its course ...

Global climate change: start here

A starting point for knowledge acquisition:

RealClimate Start here

We've often been asked to provide a one stop link for resources that people can use to get up to speed on the issue of climate change, and so here is a first cut. Unlike our other postings, we'll amend this as we discover or are pointed to new resources. Different people have different needs and so we will group resources according to the level people start at.

See also responses to contrarian arguments. We should all be reading RealClimate. My own thoughts, for what they're worth, follow below.

The classic contrarian positions have been:

1. The earth's climate is not changing beyond the norms of the past 1000 years.
2. Warming is not substantially impacted by human greenhouse gas production.
   

I think both positions have been marginalized, though nature abhores a certainty. The current contrarian positions are:

1. The earth's climate will not warm beyond the norms of the past 150,000 years before we stop using fossil fuels or within a time frame we can make sense of (100 years).
   
2. The net effects of climate warming, from a human perspective, will not be significantly negative.
3. The costs of limiting greenhouse gas emissions are extremely high and any conceivable action at this point will have limited benefits.
4. We should focus limited resources and energies on adaptation rather than amelioration.

These remain the current rationally defensible contrarian positions. It is true that many who hold them are in retreat from less defensible positions, but that's how humans are. The fall of prior contrarian positions does not mean all are incorrect. NASA's current director probably holds to #1 and #2 for example -- even though his beliefs may be perverse they have not been proven false.

My guess is that #3 and #4 are incorrect and that #1 is probably incorrect but, even if correct, would not substantially change the discussion. I suspect we can get near universal agreement that we need to better estimate #2, which means Bush/Congress need to come up with a NASA funding and direction that supports earth surveillance as a core mission.

So from a political perspective we can probably get agreement with rational contrarians that:

1. We need to fully fund earth surveillance and climate research.
2. We need to invest mightily in technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The rational debate is now about the timing and magnitude of economic measures that reduce greenhouse gas emissions through changes in human behavior that may reduce simplistic measures of economic output. In other words, measures that involve perceived sacrifices.

My bias is that upside risks of warming are substantial enough, and the other (political, economic, social, etc) benefits of reducing fossil fuel use are high enough, that we should be putting carbon and gasoline taxes in place that will move the price of gasoline to the $10/gallon mark (2007 dollars) within 10 years. I suspect this will have minimal impact on our economic output and would actually increase our ability to manage economic turbulence, so it would not reduce America's "security" even when that is measured in the most simplistic terms.

I liked Al Gore before he was cool

Al Gore is fashionable nowadays. Fashionable enough that oxygen-wasters like David Brooks work themselves into a frenzy of terror imagining President Gore.

I just want to say that I liked Al Gore even when Maureen Dowd and her ilk mocked him relentlessly. Here he is explaining why he will not, not, not run for President ...

The Passion of Al Gore - Bob Herbert - New York Times

... But while leaving the door to a possible run carefully ajar, he candidly mentioned a couple of personal reasons why he is disinclined to seek the presidency again.

“You know,” he said, “I don’t really think I’m that good at politics, to tell you the truth.” He smiled. “Some people find out important things about themselves early in life. Others take a long time.”

He burst into a loud laugh as he added, “I think I’m breaking through my denial.”

I noted that he had at least been good enough to attract more votes than George W. Bush.

“Well, there was that,” he said, laughing again. “But what politics has become requires a level of tolerance for triviality and artifice and nonsense that I find I have in short supply.”

Mr. Gore is passionate about the issues he is focused on — global warming, the decline of rational discourse in American public life, the damage done to the nation over the past several years. And he has contempt for the notion that such important and complex matters can be seriously addressed in sound-bite sentences or 30-second television ads, which is how presidential campaigns are conducted.

He pressed this point when he talked about Iraq.

“One of the hallmarks of a strategic catastrophe,” he said, “is that it creates a cul-de-sac from which there are no good avenues of easy departure. Taking charge of the war policy and extricating our troops as quickly as possible without making a horrible situation even worse is a little like grabbing a steering wheel in the middle of a skid.”

There is no quick and easy formula, he said. A new leader implementing a new policy on Iraq would have to get a feel for the overall situation. The objective, however, should be clear: “To get our troops out of there as soon as possible while simultaneously observing the moral duty that all of us share — including those of us who opposed this war in the first instance — to remove our troops in a way that doesn’t do further avoidable damage to the people who live there.”

I liked his comments on the strategic, moral, political, economic and social catastrophe of our Bungler in Chief -- aka the occupation of Iraq. I am easily persuaded that there's no simple exit.

Update: My wife suggests we conspire to create a romance between Brooks and Dowd, in the hopes they'll run off together and perhaps go to work for Murdoch's Wall Street Journal. A terrific win for the NYT on every front ...

Kristof reporting from the Chinese-Korean border: many things in a small place

Krugman is the better thinker and arguably the better writer, but Kristof is the better journalist. He deserves to sit at the table with those nameless Africa correspondents who occasionally illuminate the undeserving pages of The Economist. In the midst of a visit to China with his Chinese-born wife, he takes a side-trip to the North Korean border. There he reveals many aspects of a complex situation, here's one excerpt:

Escape From North Korea - New York Times

... China has also increased its punishments for its own citizens who are caught helping North Koreans. The penalty used to be a fine, but now it is jail for a year or two — or for a decade or more if someone smuggles escapees to South Korea.

“Now most Chinese don’t dare help the Koreans,” said one local official who secretly protects a safe house full of North Koreans — and who even stood guard outside as I interviewed them. “But I feel so badly for them. They’re just wretched.”

With the help of incredibly courageous conductors on the modern Underground Railroad, I visited four shelters that together house dozens of North Koreans, and residents of a fifth shelter were brought to my vehicle so that I could talk to them safely. My entire visit was conducted under very tight security to make sure I did not lead police to the safe houses.

The North Koreans I talked to described a society that is increasingly corrupt and disillusioned. One said that even with the latest crackdown, a $400 bribe to guards will win a prisoner’s immediate release. Another estimated that up to 20 percent of North Koreans in her area are disaffected enough that they listen illegally to Chinese broadcasts.

Chinese and South Korean missionaries are also beginning to evangelize secretly in North Korea, a sign of weakening government control. One Chinese Christian I talked to had made four trips into North Korea to evangelize. “If I’d been caught, I don’t think I would have been executed,” she said, “but it wouldn’t have been good.”

All the same, none of these North Koreans thought an uprising was imminent. Indeed, a surprising number of them are so steeped in propaganda that they still insist that “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il is a good man. “The problem is with lower officials, not with Kim Jong-il himself,” claimed one man who has arranged for smugglers to bring his entire family out to freedom in China. (For more on the North Koreans, go to my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.)...

... Those three children are modern reminders of the terrors of Anne Frank. They fear with every footstep outside their door that China will arrest them and send them back to their national torture chamber...

The Anne Frank connection is arguably valid in this case. I was struck by the role of Christian (protestant) evangelism, the persistence of the "Dear Leader" mythos (shades of those who blame our governments fiascos on everyone but Bush), the inevitable* heroic figure guarding the safe house and, of course, the persistent misery of North Korea.

It will be interesting to see if Kristof is able to get a visa next time he tries to visit China.

I suppose I'll have to start reading his blog now.

* I use "inevitable" in an exasperated rather than disparaging way. It's the persistent recurrence of these heroic types, apparently thrown up by some odd mixture of genes and environment, that make it so difficult to retire humanity and try dolphins instead.

Update: Kristof's blog discussion has some superb comments and adds much more background information and complexity. That reminds me, on the way to work I heard a brief NPR snippet on a book bemoaning the destruction of the media "pillars" of society by "amateur culture". That was enough of the "pillars" for me, I hit the "source" button on my car "radio" and switched to an In Our Time podcast.

Advice for saving money

Damon Darlin has another NYT article on "advice to the young". I'm not convinced it makes complete sense. I don't feel we can make reasonable predictions about the world forty years from now, and we know from "happiness studies" that adults rarely regret youthful follies -- they more often regret the chances not take.

It may be the best advice is a middle-road between "party like there's no tomorrow" and "save for your wheelchair lift". My favorite money rule is the "rule of three": Don't buy anything you don't want three times. Spending money is defensible, spending money on stuff you don't need or enjoy is depressing.

Given those caveats, here are some of the more interesting parts of Damon's list (my inline comments):

More Advice Graduates Don’t Want to Hear - New York Times (Damon Darlin)

¶Never pay a real estate agent a 6 percent commission. [jf: The day of the Realtor may, at very long last, be passing. Watch out though, there are other modern equivalents arising in other industries. In general, watch out for the hand in the middle with a conflict of interests.]

¶Buy used things, except maybe used tires. [jf: Amazon is an amazing source for used books and CDs. eBay is a disaster, avoid it at all costs.]

¶Get on the do-not-call list and other do-not-solicit lists so you can’t be tempted. [jf: Never, EVER, donate anything over the phone. Never. You are placing yourself on the "gullible mark" list for a vast industry. If you like the cause, tell them to mail you or request a URL to research.]

¶Watch infomercials for their entertainment value only. [jf: Why are you watching commercial television?!]

¶Know what your credit reports say, but don’t pay for that knowledge: go to www.annualcreditreport.com to get them.

¶Consolidate your cable, phone and Internet service to get the best deal. [jf: Be very careful. Once you're locked-in you are prey. Do this only if you can figure out how to switch out, including losing your phone number, email address, etc.]

¶Resist the lunacy of buying premium products like $2,000-a-pound chocolates. [jf: duh]

¶Lose weight. Carrying extra pounds costs tens of thousands of dollars over a lifetime. [jf: Humans have a very limited ability to control their adult weight. However, see my comments on smoking, below.]

¶Do not use your home as a piggy bank if home prices are flat or going down or if interest rates are rising. [jf: If you could anticipate housing and interest rates you wouldn't need to save money.]

¶Enroll in a 401(k) at work immediately. [jf: Reasonable if there's a good employer match and for most incomes. There's a counter-argument that future tax rates will be so high that 401Ks will turn out to be money-losers. Nobody knows of course, and in any case there will be consumption taxes too.]

¶Postpone buying high-tech products like PCs, digital cameras and high-definition TVs for as long as possible. And then buy after the selling season or buy older technology just as a new technology comes along. [jf: Generally agree, but there are gotchas. I've gone back and forth on this. I think when you consider "cost of ownership" you're probably best to buy a reliable (if you can find one) model of a well established product then keep it for many years.]

¶And, I’m sorry, I’m really serious about this last one: make your own coffee. [jf: Buy the coffee, make your own lunch.]

There's one funny omission. I hope it's accidental, if she reads this she'll kick herself.

Don't smoke. Ok, maybe that's in the same category as "don't smoke crack cocaine" but it's very odd that it didn't make the list. College kids are notorious for smoking, and many won't be able to quit.

Complexity is the enemy of security

There's been such a flurry of patches lately I've given up updating. They come out so quickly there's not time to see which ones are stable and which introduce new problems. I hope we get a quiet week to catch up. In the meantime, I was struck by this statement:

Slashdot | Zero Day Hole In Google Desktop:

... With knowledge of the Google Desktop security model (a combination of one-time tokens, iFrames and JavaScript), hacker Robert Hansen figured out a way to sit between a target launching a Google search query and manipulate the search results to take control of other programs on the desktop. From the article: 'This should drive home the point that deep integration between the desktop and the web is not a good idea, without tremendous thought put into the security model."...

It's very hard to create security within a single architecture. When you create relationships between disparate architectures, such as an XP environment and a web services model, security becomes very difficult. There are too many affordances, too many gaps that can't be filled, too many emergent behaviors....

Mapplets. Street View. Bubble.

More on Google Maps Street View and Mapplets. It's a bit old, but it's good coverage.

This reminds me of the mid-90s, just before the crazy bubble. That was a time of brilliant innovation, which was mostly lost when the market went crazy. By 2000 or so, of course, it had all gone south.

We're there again. The market will go mad again, then it will crash.

Maybe we'll get used to these cycles ...

Twenty-three years to Google's singularity?

I've been whining lately about trying to plot a career that will take me to age 68 even as my brain falls apart. The path usually ends with me greeting shoppers.

That will be somewhere around 2030. The good news is that maybe I won't have to worry about that ...

Norvig on the Google AI:

... There has been some talk about whether Google has a top-secret project aimed at building a thinking machine. Well, I’ll tell you what happened. Larry Page came to me and said “Peter, I’ve been hearing a lot about this Strong AI stuff. Shouldn’t we be doing something in that direction?” So I said, okay. I went back to my desk and logged into our project management software. I had to write some scripts to modify it because it didn’t go far enough into the future. But I modified it so that I could put, “Human-level intelligence” on the row of the planning spreadsheet corresponding to the year 2030."...

I hope Mr. Norvig was being at least partly facetious. I fear he is not. I'd been hoping we'd put this kind of thing off to 2050 or later -- out of range of my personal light cone. 2030 though, that means I don't need to worry about saving for retirement -- because it will be very brief ...

I not as lazy as I thought I was

I rarely feel I'm working hard enough (don't tell my employer), but I may have been choosing the wrong comparisons ...

Time Wasted? Perhaps It’s Well Spent - New York Times

... American workers, on average, spend 45 hours a week at work, but describe 16 of those hours as “unproductive,” according to a study by Microsoft. America Online and Salary.com, in turn, determined that workers actually work a total of three days a week, wasting the other two. And Steve Pavlina, whose Web site (stevepavlina.com) describes him as a “personal development expert” and who keeps incremental logs of how he spends each working day, urging others to do the same, finds that we actually work only about 1.5 hours a day. “The average full-time worker doesn’t even start doing real work until 11:00 a.m.,” he writes, “and begins to wind down around 3:30 p.m.”

The experts disagree on how we are wasting all this time. The AOL survey says time is lost to surfing the Internet (given the source, that is either self-congratulatory or self-incriminating).

The Microsoft survey pointed to worthless meetings. Respondents said they spent 5.6 hours each week in meetings and 71 percent of them thought that those meetings “aren’t productive.”

Searching through clutter is another diversion, says Peggy Duncan, a “personal productivity coach” in Atlanta, who maintains that rifling though messy desks wastes 1.5 hours a day...

... The average professional workweek has expanded steadily over the last 10 years, according to the Center for Work Life Policy, and logging 70-plus hours is now the norm at the top....

... We are wasting time because we are working harder.

“The longer you work, the less efficient you are,” said Bob Kustka, the founder of Fusion Factor, a productivity and time-management consulting firm in Norwell, Mass. He says workers are like athletes in that they are most efficient in concentrated bursts. Elite athletes “play a set of tennis, a down of football or an inning of baseball and have a pause in between,” he says. Working energy, like physical energy, “is best used in spurts where we work hard on a few focused activities and then take a brief respite,” he says...

Wow. I'm not as bad as I thought I was. It helps that I like my work, and circumstances limit me to a 50 hour week. My colleagues know not to invite me to pointless meetings, and the meetings I do attend are (really) educational or productive. If I could fit in 70 hours for my employer I would be wasting a lot more of the week, particularly given the effects of travel and sleep deprivation.

The 70 plus hour weeks I've seen over the years have been substantially social and recreational -- though the difficulties of modern air travel are making them nastier. The people who do it seem to enjoy the distraction from everyday life, but I don't think the time is well spent. The 70 hour crew are always sleep deprived and a bit manic, and they spend a lot of time recovering from their own mistaken decisions. A few people can be productive for 70 hours, but mostly it's counter-productive.

Evolution by Stephen Baxter - my late review

I read Stephen Baxter's Evolution over a year ago. It was a chance discovery at the local library; I got rather more than I'd expected. I was a bit stunned after I finished it, but the story stayed with me. Life flew by though, and the book was long returned. I couldn't remember who wrote it, and Google was, oddly, no help at all. Apparently the book was not as famous as it deserved to be -- I couldn't find it amongst the chaos.

Today I again came across it in the library. I resolved to write an Amazon review of what was clearly an undeservedly neglected book. To my surprise I found 60 reviews ahead of me and a all-but-five star rating, with reviewers deploring the five star limit. I am hopeful that book is now being rediscovered. Despite the crowd, I added my review (reissued here):

Amazon.com: Reviews for Evolution: Books: Stephen Baxter

... I'm pleased to see that Baxter's book has earned such high ratings. It's little known, but it's one of the most remarkable books of the past decade. It deserves to be read.

It's not a comforting book, which is perhaps why it's not a best seller. On the other hand it's entertaining, even to the very end of the end. It's profoundly educational, without being didactic. If you read this book carefully, you'll understand natural selection and evolution in a new and deep way. If I were teaching an undergraduate class in introductory biology I'd make this a required text.

Like all of Baxter's books it's also a rich source of ideas. Do you think there's only been one self-aware, sentient, animal in all of evolutionary history? Baxter will make you wonder about that. In retrospect, it seems rather unlikely that we're the first to think about past, future and fate -- though we are probably the first and last to drain the earth of fossil fuels. He deals with that too.

Memorable. Educational. Disturbing. Hardly an inviting description, but it is very readable, quite entertaining, and certainly unforgettable. You can read some escapist fiction (escape from what?!) and feel you're being scholarly as well...

21st century deception and the evolution of the emergent mind

I had two (or is it one?) idiosyncratic talents as a wastrel youth. I had a knack for great boondoggles, and I could, upon a cursory book reading, write a persuasive this-is-connected-to-that high school English essay.

This is one of those connectionist essays. I'm going to claim that many of the themes of this blog, such as

• brain and mind, emergence, enlightenment 2.0, and the intelligence of the mass
• politics, war and the GOP's (many) con jobs
  
• globalization, libertarianism's limits and the the death of the toaster. Not to mention melamine
  
• natural selection in organisms and economics
• the duty the strong owe the weak
• spam and reputation management
• future shock, drm and privacy as a luxury
  

are fundamentally related to the quintessential human activity - the detection and execution of fraud and deception [1]. Quintessential, because it is likely that deceiving and detecting deception played a central role in the evolution of human mind and culture.

My hunch is that each transformation of the human landscape, either by technology or culture, opens new avenues for fraud and deception. I suspect, for example, that if we looked closely we'd find that widespread adoption of printing and reading led to a vast array of newly effective cons and schemes. Print must have been very persuasive in those days; anything that was printed would bypass the fraud detection measures of the pre-print era.

We live now in another golden age of fraud. It's not just the obvious spam driven stock manipulation, the raging identity theft, Hilary's friends at InfoUSA, or even fake gluten, medications, glycerine, and surgical supplies. It's also the vast array of extremely unreliable consumer goods that are so cheap they've eliminated the alternatives, incidentally creating a deceptive inflation picture.

There's a bright side - I hope. We're overwhelmed at the moment, but our children will grow up in this world. They will spot the Bush/Rove cons their parents missed, they will resurrect the concept of a brand reputation and push the fakes back into dark alleys, they'll recognize the limits of "caveat emptor" and resurrect the FDA. Best of all, just as deception detection upgraded brains tends of thousands of years ago, so too will "social" deception detection raise our emergent IQ. Maybe just in time to respond to Sachs call for a new enlightenment.

So I am an optimist, after all. True, the glass is half empty. True, the contents are poisoned. Nonetheless, we will live to quaff again ...

[1] I need to here credit my 1994 UMN cognitive science professor - Paul Johnson. I thought harder and read more in his class than any other in far too many years of education. Dr. Johnson's research focuses on the cognitive science aspects of deception.

The great eye sees all

Google is expanding on Amazon's imaging effort, using specially equipped vehicles to capture images of streets and homes. These now extend the reach of Google's sat maps. Sometimes the images reveal too much.

It is likely that at least one picture somewhere shows a man stepping through an open door while a spouse is away. It's only beginning. We've been seeing experimental gigapexel images for years -- a single image allows one to zoom from a cityscape to a window sill. Soon we'll have multiple 10-100 gpix images of cityscapes to compliment .1 gpix images of streets. [3]

We all know that job interviews and even business meetings start with Google searches, which is why my blog is lightly pseudonymous -- though in fact Google's backchaining logic exposes the relationship between the blog and my "true name" [1]. I can run, but I can't hide. [2]

Privacy is a luxury good now. It is available only to the rich and the lost. We have returned to the village from whence we came.

[1] Copyright Amazon.com
[2] On the one hand, I won't get any job offers from the GOP. On the other hand, I'm really quite a harmless sort so I enjoy the somewhat stunned looks I get at some business partner meetings.
[3] They are time slices of course, but they capture a lot instances across one time slice.

The toothpaste? In the US. Of course.

I am neither shocked, nor astounded, to discover that poisonous Chinese toothpaste does not list the poison when sold in the US. I'm sure that omission is coincidental. Credit to the FDA this time, they began running tests after diethylene glycol was found as a listed ingredient in Panama:

Toxic Toothpaste Made in China Is Found in U.S. - New York Times

... Agency officials said they found toothpaste containing a small amount of diethylene glycol, a sweet, syrupy poison, at a Dollar Plus retail store in Miami, sold under the brand name ShiR Fresh Mint Fluoride Paste. The F.D.A. also identified nine other brands of Chinese toothpaste that contain diethylene glycol, some with concentrations of 3 percent to 4 percent.

Previously, only a few brands had been identified by health officials around the world as containing diethylene glycol and all of them listed the chemical on the label.

But diethylene glycol was not listed on the label of the toothpaste found in the Miami store. Its presence was detected only because the F.D.A. began testing imported Chinese toothpaste last month. That precaution was prompted by the discovery in Latin America of tens of thousands of tubes of tainted toothpaste made in China.

Over the years, counterfeiters have found it profitable to substitute diethylene glycol for its chemical cousin, glycerin, which is usually more expensive. Glycerin is a safe additive commonly found in food, drugs and household products. In toothpaste, glycerin is used as a thickening agent.

Chinese regulators said Thursday that their investigation of toothpaste manufacturers there had found they had done nothing wrong. Chinese officials also said that while small amounts of diethylene glycol could be safely used in toothpaste, new controls would be imposed on its use in toothpaste.

The F.D.A. said diethylene glycol in any amount was not suitable for use in toothpaste.

Allegedly it's a "legal" ingredient in China (don't swallow your toothpaste kids), that might explain why the ingredient was on the label in Lation America. They probably ran out of room to list it in the US.

American lawyers, please start your engines.

A reasonable article on the science of slowing aging

Most of the popular literature on slowing senescence tends to extravagant predictions. By comparison, this brief 5/6/07 NYT article is quite modest. If everything works today's 30 year olds might get another 10 years, and today's 10 year olds might get more.

I also like the description of the aging brain, though I think they're being optimistic about the relationship between disability in your 70s and forgetting your keys in your 40s. Emphases mine.

Baby Boomer - Aging - Longevity - Dementia - New York Times

May 6, 2007

Participants: Lenny GUARENTE, PH.D.: Novartis professor of biology at M.I.T. and author of “Ageless Quest: One Scientist’s Search for Genes That Prolong Youth.”; Robert N. BUTLER, M.D.: Founding director of the National Institute on Aging, a founder of the Alzheimer’s Disease Association and winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for “Why Survive? Being Old in America.” He heads the International Longevity Center.; SARA DAVIDSON: Author, most recently, of “Leap! What Will We Do With the Rest of Our Lives?”

... LENNY GUARENTE: The research that I’m involved in is not about extending life after people are infirm. I don’t think of life span as the gold standard. The gold standard is health span. All the indicators from the laboratory are that the genes we’re studying and the kinds of drugs we would be developing would extend health span. If you can extend health span, and you also happen to extend life span, so be it. That’s a side benefit...

... The genes we study counteract aging. First we studied yeast cells, and it took us eight years to identify a gene called SIR2, which protects the cells from damage during the aging process. Then we did a similar experiment in a more complex critter, the roundworm, and what was remarkable is, we identified the same gene. That told us that this type of gene is performing an antiaging function broadly in nature.

Do humans have this gene?

GUARENTE: There’s one gene in our genome, SIRT1, that would be a dead ringer for this one — the technical term is ortholog — but we also have six other genes that have a related sequence to this. They’re called sirtuins, and they’re all going to play a role, but I think the dead ringer is undoubtedly the most important based on experiments that have been done.

... We think the sirtuin genes are there to recognize lack of food or other stressful situations and to spring into action to create a physiology that will promote longevity. The evolutionary value is that in times of stress — food scarcity, for example — this gene would slow down the aging process and keep you alive longer, so that when times are better, you could reproduce. ..

... In our lifetimes, could this happen?

GUARENTE: I think one can expect perhaps another decade of robust health...

... How close are we to such a drug being available?

GUARENTE: Ten, maybe 15 years. I think the drugs that aim at sirtuins, for example, will be tested initially for a particular disease, say, diabetes. And it will turn out that the drugs have broader benefits than one initially imagined.

What about resveratrol? There has been a lot of publicity about this substance that’s found in red wine. Does it do the same thing as calorie restriction?

GUARENTE: It’s a natural product, made by plants, and recently one of my former postdoctoral students, David Sinclair, found that resveratrol can regulate the activity of SIRT1.

Do you take resveratrol?

GUARENTE: No, partly because neutraceuticals are not regulated by the F.D.A. If I was sure of the quality control, I would consider it, but I’m still not certain I would do it, because you may have to take a lot — one or two grams a day.

What intrigues me is that I read that if fruit flies are fed resveratrol, they live longer and can eat all they want...

... BUTLER: .. we don’t even have the means to evaluate or measure whether a substance prolongs life. We have yet to create biomarkers that would measure, short of death, actual changes in the body that reflect aging...

... BUTLER: There are many types of dementia, which result from different causes. The most common is Alzheimer’s, which is characterized by neurofibrillary tangles — misshaped proteins — and plaques. The second most common is multi-infarct dementia, which is the result of small, repeated strokes. Scientists who are studying Alzheimer’s have differentiated three categories for research purposes. The first is what’s called age-associated memory impairment. These are the kinds of things ordinary people are going through: forgetfulness, not remembering why you’ve walked into a room or where you put the paper you were just holding in your hand. If you’re in this category, we have no data that suggest you’re necessarily on your way to Alzheimer’s.

The second category is mild cognitive impairment — getting confused on the street, not remembering you’re supposed to have coins when you get on a bus. At that point, the conversion rate to the third — full-blown Alzheimer’s — sadly, is very high. After three years, about half the people will not be able to take care of themselves, but the conversion is not total. Some people plateau and seem to go on for a long time.

How do you know when to be concerned?

BUTLER: One of the rules we use as clinicians is: if you forget your keys, that’s not so terrible, but if you forget what a key is for, that becomes serious...

... BUTLER: I’m afraid there’s a lot of romance in the literature suggesting that we can stop Alzheimer’s disease by cognitive exercises...

... There’s a distinction between advancing life expectancy and breaking the genetic barrier. Every species has a predetermined genetic life span. Certain fish live about a year. Some turtles live 200 years. Humans have about 110, 120 years at the outside of their genetic life span. We’re talking about increasing healthy years within that life span.

But wait you say -- what about us boomers feeling the steel jaws closing? Ask not for whom the bell tolls ... I do think there's hope that we'll delay our cognitive disability by a few years.

BTW, bravo to Butler for breaking the happy illusion that crossword puzzles are going to slow dementia development. It's such a sweet idea, but it's silly.

del.icio.us tags: dementia, aging, senescence, SIR2, resveratrol