Age and capacity: the strong shall be weak

The NYT has another story on age, diminished capacity and fraud. It's an echo of last year's story of InfoUSA marketing mailing lists of the vulnerable elderly to criminals.

The story is mostly routine. Independent elderly male is easy prey for traditional predators, Realtors, bankers and the like. Yes, as the pool of vulnerable boomers grows, the predator pool thrives as well. We studied these predator-prey models in my simulation classes; what's good for the wolf is good for the less attractive human equivalent.

The new twist is elders litigating for their money back using 'diminished capacity' defenses. Ironically the litigants argue that they should be considered both full capable to make their own decisions, except for the bad decisions they made. This reasoning, of course, is proof of diminished capacity.

The legal argument is arising now because the modern predator pool includes some deep pockets, such as banks and Realtor companies.

The last paragraphs of the NYT article have the most interesting comments:

Shielding Money Clashes With Elders’ Free Will (NYT 12/24/07)

...We know that, statistically, seniors are at enormous risk for fraud,” said A. Kimberley Dayton of the Center for Elder Justice and Policy at the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul. “It’s foolish to ignore that. But there’s also a huge dilemma in determining when someone is just being eccentric, versus someone who is a victim of undue influence.”

Mr. Tomer, as he prepared to join his wife on the dance floor, said that over a lifetime, people like Mr. Pyle were supposed to learn from their mistakes.

“Nowadays, I have a few memory problems — senior moments, I call them — and I know my limitations, what I can and can’t do,” Mr. Tomer said. “Bob was special, but he was susceptible to scam artists, and that was probably as true when he was young as now.

“Life isn’t perfect,” he added. “Even when you’re old.”

Mr. Tomer is the kind of elder buck the wolves prefer to leave for last, but there's no doubt about the reality of age and diminished capacity. That's not to say that the strong become weak when we pass our "peak" of 45 or so; heck with some luck we may be as effective at 60 as we were at 30. Further down the road though, most of us will have the effective judgment of a 16 year old (though the pattern of weakness differs).

That's bad.

So, where is this going to go in the age of fraud, post-50 boomers, and the reality that the strong shall become weak?

I don't know of course, but I'm hoping it will lead to a different (wiser?) understanding of the duty the strong owe the weak. There are a lot of wolves out theres (sorry wolves, you're just such a great metaphor), and diminished capacity, by definition, occurs at every age.

We're only beginning a very important intellectual and philosophical journey.

The end time for Amrican television and the evil genius of Rupert Murdoch

Last October I noticed that my son's generation doesn't seem to care very much about television. Cable, broadcast - it doesn't matter. It's not a big deal for them.

Today there's new affirmation from another direction. In a year or two analog broadcast television will end in the US. For years everyone I've read has assumed this will lead to a huge uproar, since most people don't know it's going away.

Maybe not ....

Rabbit-Ear Users Don’t Know The End (of Analog TV) Is Near

... none of these solutions seemed that attractive to the rabbit-ear set in the survey. Only 14 percent were interested in a converter box, and 19 percent said they would buy pay service. By contrast, 8 percent said they would just watch DVDs or play video games. And 12 percent said they would simply abandon television altogether....

American broadcast television may be going the way of the novel, which is probably cold comfort for professors of literature.

These results must be devastating to the still vast television media empire. They may see their industry go the way of the music business, or the American tobacco industry.

Hmm. Tobacco.

In my childhood there were two universal American addictions. One was television, the other was tobacco. I thought both were eternal.

Forty years later smoking is vanishing from the American landscape, and so is television. On the other hand, smoking is exploding in China (Philip Morris is doing very well, thank you.) So maybe there's a future for television -- in China and India.

Now, who figured this out many years ago? Yeah, Murdoch. He's the guy who twisted his media empire to serve China and buy his way to the future.

I've always thought of Bill Gates as a uniquely "evil" [1] genius, but Murdoch's right up there.

[1] Yeah, that's "evil" in quotes - not Evil. Gates did lots of nasty and probably illegal things as Microsoft CEO, but he's no tobacco executive. For a card carrying geek of a certain age Gates sins are not so much his borderline business practices, but rather that he created a world of persistently mediocre software from which were are only now possibly escaping.

Orphanages and international adoption

Our family lives in Chuck Nelson's former home -- including our three adopted children. We lived across the alley when he was a University of Minnesota professor traveling to Romania for a study that was recently published in Science (emphases mine).

The key feature of the study, and why it's both remarkable and controversial, is that the orphans were randomly assigned to either foster care or institutionalized care.

A report of the results has appeared in today's NYT... [btw. I think there's a significant error in the article, the author has confused foster care with adoption.]

Orphanages Stunt Mental Growth, a Study Finds - New York Times

Psychologists have long believed that growing up in an institution like an orphanage stunts children’s mental development but have never had direct evidence to back it up.

Now they do, from an extraordinary years-long experiment in Romania that compared the effects of foster care with those of institutional child-rearing.

The study, being published on Friday in the journal Science, found that toddlers placed in foster families developed significantly higher I.Q.’s by age 4, on average, than peers who spent those years in an orphanage.

The difference was large — eight points — and the study found that the earlier children joined a foster family, the better they did. Children who moved from institutional care to families after age 2 made few gains on average, though the experience varied from child to child. Both groups, however, had significantly lower I.Q.’s than a comparison group of children raised by their biological families.

... previous attempts to compare institutional and foster care suffered from serious flaws, mainly because no one knew whether children who landed in orphanages were different in unknown ways from those in foster care. Experts said the new study should put to rest any doubts about the harmful effects of institutionalization — and might help speed up adoptions from countries that still allow them...

...In recent years many countries, including Romania, have banned or sharply restricted American families from adopting local children. In other countries, adoption procedures can drag on for many months. In 2006, the latest year for which numbers are available, Americans adopted 20,679 children from abroad, more than half of them from China, Guatemala and Russia.

The authors of the new paper, led by Dr. Charles H. Zeanah Jr. of Tulane and Charles A. Nelson III of Harvard and Children’s Hospital in Boston, approached Romanian officials in the late 1990s about conducting the study. The country had been working to improve conditions at its orphanages, which became infamous in the early 1990s as Dickensian warehouses for abandoned children.

After gaining clearance from the government, the researchers began to track 136 children who had been abandoned at birth. They administered developmental tests to the children, and then randomly assigned them to continue at one of Bucharest’s six large orphanages, or join an adoptive family. [jf: I think this is a NYT error. They would have been randomized to foster care, not an adoptive family. ] The foster families were carefully screened and provided “very high-quality care,” Dr. Nelson said.

On I.Q. tests taken at 54 months, the foster children scored an average of 81, compared to 73 among the children who continued in an institution. The children who moved into foster care at the youngest ages tended to show the most improvement, the researchers found.

The comparison group of youngsters who grew up in their biological families had an average I.Q. of 109 at the same age, found the researchers, who announced their preliminary findings as soon in Romania as they were known....

Many nations dislike international adoption, even when foster care is not affordable and local adoption is not available. Well, if American girls were being adopted in China (maybe one day!) Americans would be pretty hostile to the idea too. The alternative though, is often orphanages. The study suggests that even the best orphanages Rumania can afford are not the equal of foster care; presumably international adoption would produce better outcomes.

The 8 point IQ gap (higher for the younger fostered children) is significant and it suggests a bigger post-natal influence on IQ than I'd have expected. On the other hand the 8 point gap pales next to the 36 point gap between a comparison group of non-orphans and children in orphanages.

Some of that may be related to breast feeding, but one recent study found only a 7 pt impact there related to breast feeding.

Children were not randomized between birth families and orphanages (I don't think that study is going to be done), so we don't know where the 36 point gap comes from.

We can make some guesses however. It is likely that the primary cause of admission to an orphanage in Rumania is extreme poverty in one or both birth parents. There are two strong relationships between poverty and IQ. On the one hand poverty is associated with malnutrition and a marginal intrauterine environment that harms brain development. On the other hand low IQ reduces earning power. IQ is significantly inherited, so children orphaned by poverty have both environmental and genetic risk factors impacting IQ.

Add in the impact of no breastfeeding and I think we can account for a 36 point IQ gap.

My Google profile -- another brick in the wall

I mentioned a few weeks ago that blogger knows me as 113810027503326386174. My friends call me 113. I wonder if Google will ever recycle that identifier, or if I can confidently carve it on the old tombstone.

Today Google maps has added a new profile link using the same identifier:

http://maps.google.com/maps/user?uid=113810027503326386174

The maps profile link shows some maps I've created, and a link to "report this profile". (That seems an ominous invitation to the ill-intentioned).

I've read Google is also adding some collaborative mapping tools, so maybe I'll figure out a way to do something with www.msptrails.org (I've been waiting for Google's promised Wiki add-on to their Google Apps package).

I checked my Picasa web albums, but there's no profile link there -- yet. Maybe next week.

Incidentally, CH did a nice post recently on the identity profusion business. The topic must be in the air. Anyone remember Hailstorm?

Update 9/2/08: Google eventually rolled out the core profile link, a part of their social strategy work. Here's mine - 113810027503326386174.

RealClimate has an excellent summary of the "it's not the CO2, it's the sun" climate change group

We would expect solar output to influence our climate. If the sun goes out, things will likely chill down a wee bit. No surprise.

On the other hand, there's a politically important (re: almost all GOP) group of eccentrics who argue that CO2 isn't really driving global warming; instead the sun is doing it - either directly or through mysterious interactions with the earth's magnetic field. The implication is that there's nothing we can do about global warming, so we shouldn't talk about a carbon tax (or less efficient versions thereof like emissions trading).

RealClimate has an excellent review of the science involved, starting with the honest scientists and them moving quickly downwards ...

RealClimate » Les Chevaliers de l’Ordre de la Terre Plate, Part II: Courtillot's Geomagnetic Excursion

...Work on the influence of solar variability (and on its close cousin, the influence of the Earth's magnetic field) tends to fall into one of three categories. There is the Good, in which careful scientists do their objective best to unravel a complex and probably small (but nonetheless important) signal. As examples of work in this category, I would mention Judith Lean's tireless efforts on relating luminosity to sunspot number, the work of Bard and colleagues on developing isotopic solar proxies like ¹⁰Be, Shindell's work on response to solar ultraviolet variability, and the work of Foukal et al on factors governing solar irradiance variations. I would also include the recent work by Camp and Tung diagnosing the amplitude of the solar cycle in temperature in the "Good" category; that it is an easy paper for greenhouse skeptics to misquote takes away nothing from the quality of the science. In fact, I'd say most work on climate and solar variability falls into the Good category. That's rather nice. In fact, scientists have long recognized the importance of solar variability as one of the factors governing climate (see the very scholarly review of the subject by Bard and Frank, available here at EPSL or here as pdf) An understanding of solar variability needs to be (and is) taken into account in attribution of climate change of the past century, and in attempts to estimate climate sensitivity from recent climate variations. Further, the Little Ice Age demands an explanation, and solar variability at present provides the only viable possibility. (It's less clear that the Medieval Warm period is a sufficiently coherent phenomenon to require an explanation).

Then, there is the Bad, exemplified by two papers by Scaffetta and West that have been discussed on RealClimate here and here...

If the sun were significantly contributing to global warming, by the way, that would logically require us to restrict CO2 emissions ever more radically, since that would be the only part of the equation we could influence.

In a similar vein, critiques of climate models (which appear to have more science behind them) increase our uncertainty margins into a range that includes rapidly catastrophic climate transitions -- such as melting Greenland ice within 15 years instead of 100 years. So these critiques of modeling, which I think are interesting, make restriction of CO2 emissions even more urgent.

It's Reason vs. the GOP again, and we need every RealClimate post we can get.

Daring Fireball demonstrates why journalists are going to get smarter

I don't remember a golden age of journalism, but rumor has it that once upon a time journalists did not merely parrot press releases and insider leaks.

Now journalists are suffering from the twin demons of a defunct business model and a super-powered reader feedback loop. I don't applaud the end of journalism's business model, but I heartily approved of the feedback loop.

A widely read blog like Daring Fireball is to the old-fashioned letters page as a flame thrower is to a match.  That's a massive change, and it has to affect how journalists do their business.

Today DF demonstrates the new world by rending a poorly written "Fast Company" cover article into nanosocopic bits of confetti...

Daring Fireball: Yet Another in the Ongoing Series Wherein I Examine a Piece of Supposedly Serious Apple Analysis From a Major Media Outlet ...

...Except for all the music from any store that sells DRM-free music, like Amazon’s or eMusic’s. Otherwise what’s being argued here is that Apple should support Microsoft’s DRM platform, formerly known as PlaysForSure, recently renamed to “Certified for Windows Vista”, which Microsoft itself doesn’t support in its own Zune players. There’s a lot of stupid packed into the above 13-word sentence...

DF is piling on, but this poor journalist wrote a cover story comprised of an extraordinary set of factually incorrect and incoherent assertions. This kind of thing does deserve the DF flamethrower.

I hope both Fast Company and the misguided author will learn something from the experience. Feedback need not be painless to be valuable.

(BTW, I think one could write an interesting story about Apple's ongoing quality issues and some of their errors-of-arrogance -- like the oddly incompatible iPhone headphone plug. Alas, that one's for another day...)

The scale of the housing bubble: good news for first-time home buyers

Krugman posts a persuasive chart:

Charting the housing bubble - Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog

... the chart shows is that this decade we’ve had a national housing bubble that is somewhat bigger than the bubble in LA in the late 1980s — a bubble that was followed by a 20% drop in nominal home prices, and a 30% fall in real prices. In LA itself, and in a number of other metropolitan areas, the bubble has been on a scale completely unprecedented in modern experience...

I'd have liked to see a third line showing the bubble in a non-coastal market -- Minneapolis - Saint Paul would be a good example. The national line incorporates the coastal effect, so for comparison we need a non-coastal line.

The implications of the chart are a transient (real price) decline of more than 30% on the coasts and roughly a 20% decline in less super-heated areas.

It's a good time to be a first-time home buyer.

The Economist's Science and Technology feed

The Economist has fallen quite a ways since their glory days of the 1990s. I gave up on 'em about a year ago, but even in its dotage I knew I'd miss the Obit page and the science and technology coverage.

Now I can get the whole journal for free by feed. I tried the entire feed briefly, but The Economist uses "too cute" titles that don't give enough clues to the value of the feed. We really need the subtitles rather than the titles.

The really good news is that there are unique feeds for each section.

For example, the Science and technology feed.

Every article is of interest, so the titles don't matter.

Highly recommended.

eBay on the ropes - at long last?

I really don't like eBay or PayPal.

I've never gotten value out of eBay, and both eBay and PayPal were unforgivably slow to address problems with fraud and phishing. I won't go near either one. Instead I use Amazon and/or Craigslist for buying and selling used goods.

For years I thought Google Checkout and Google Base were going to put PayPal and eBay out of business. (I sure drank the Kool-aid on Google Base -- guess I'm not infallible after all.)

Didn't happen. Just another one of life's mysteries, like the continued survival of humanity.

Or maybe it's happening now. The NYT Bits Blog has two noteworthy posts on the topic:

• The Depth of eBay’s Problems 1: Disappointed Buyers
• The Depth of eBay’s Problems 2: Angry Sellers

Good. The sooner these companies go away the sooner Google, Amazon or someone else will provide better solutions.

Geeks at middle-age - we too shall pass

John Halamka, aged 46 today and one of my favorite bloggers, has written a post about the point in every geek's life when they know the road will someday slope downwards ....

Life as a Healthcare CIO: Embracing Innovation:

...My commitment to my staff is that if I ever become the rate limiting step in adoption of new technologies, then it will be time for me to go. In the meantime, bring on the AJAX, the Continuous Data Replication, Host-based Intrusion Protection and all the new acronyms that cross my desk every day. I may not immediately understand every new technology, but I look forward to being a student, learning about the latest innovations, for life...

I'm 48 and I think I know where John H is coming from.

John uses as one of his examples Doris Lessing's Nobel speech, where she characterized the Internet as the highway to intellectual perdition. I didn't comment on her remark because it was a bit sad, but I will defend her a wee bit.

When humans began writing, we enabled the birth of literature. We also stopped being able to recite the Odyssey, and the tradition of memory-based oral epics passed into history. Much was gained, but there was a price. So Lessing may be right that electronic communication will change the nature of the literary narrative, but none of us can know how the future will judge the changes to come.

An optimist named "Jessica" took exception to John's predicting of his future decline, to which I responded (slightly fixed up below):

Jessica, there may exist a human whose mental acumen does not decline with age. I've not met anyone like that however, and I did meet Richard Feynman.

An extreme example may help. I'm a reasonably clever sort, but I don't have the brain power Isaac Newton or even Linus Pauling had. They both declined in their dotage.

In some positions, like John Halamka's, productivity peaks around the mid to late forties. Alas, that's largely because our 'wisdom' (painful experience) and knowledge base offset our degrading neural networks. The balance shifts however, one day all the experience in the world is not enough.

We too shall pass. We can only hope there comes a day when instead of saying 'I'm not interested' we can say 'That's cool, even if I can no longer hope to understand it.'

Now, to (try to) show that my time has not yet come, I will present a slightly macabre idea I had last night while contemplating mortality.

When I stop writing my blogs and updating my web pages, how will my (small) audience know whether I've died, become incapacitated, been abducted by aliens, changed identities, or simply decided to move to a retreat in the vastness of British Columbia?

One answer is something I'll call the "digital death announcement" or "DDA".

The DDA would be an encrypted string that would be extremely likely to be unique. If decrypted by one's public key it would contain one's last words (example: "So long and thanks for all the fish").

Then DDA is, by direction, included in one's formal obituary. (Example: "John Gordon was put down on ____ due to mange. His last words were: 54285-45254-5425-6gsiyt985-34134ng").

The last piece of the puzzle is a bit of Javascript that's run each time one's blog or web page is open. The Javascript uses a standing Google search to look for the DDA.

If the search has a result waiting, then the announcement appears atop the page.

I'll have to put authoring that Javascript on my to-do list ....

Microsoft's exciting new OS update

Microsoft's top-secret Vista update, now publicly revealed as "Windows XP", restores Microsoft's tattered reputation. Coding Sanity has the first review of an excellent upgrade experience ...

Review: Windows XP - Coding Sanity

I have finally decided to take the plunge. Last night I upgraded my Vista desktop machine to Windows XP, and this afternoon I will be doing the same to my laptop...

....Multimedia support on XP is vastly better than on Vista. Whilst content-creators had insisted on all sorts of intrusive features in Vista that made the multimedia experience a living hell for Microsoft users, thankfully with XP Microsoft were able to insist that their customers' needs came ahead of the content creators outdated business model...

....To be honest there is only one conclusion to be made; Microsoft has really outdone themselves in delivering a brand new operating system that really excels in all the areas where Vista was sub-optimal.... Anyone who thinks there are problems in the Microsoft Windows team need only point to this fantastic release and scoff loudly.

I can personally vouch for the similar excellence of the new replacement for Office 2007. Office 2003 is a great upgrade from Office 2007.

Why the US can't separate benefits from employment

A recent post on Ron Paul and the anti-outsourcing movement reminded me of a host of past posts on outsourcing. Unsurprisingly this discussion was most active in the last election cycle. Back in February 2004 I even had something nice to say about Friedman. Emphases changed for this post:

Gordon's Notes: India and outsourcing: Friedman 1, Kristof 0

...Friedman wins this match. Great column. Reich's recommendations are mine as well, except I think wage insurance won't fly. I do think that the 401K and its equivalents need to become life-event rather than age driven, and all benefits need to be unrelated to employment. Employment should be wages, nothing else.

Friedman/Reich point out that outsourcing is a tax deductible business expense. The tax code should NOT be facilitating outsourcing. It shouldn't obstruct it, but neither should it encourage it. That can be changed.

The world needs China and India to be wealthy. These are two sources of extraordinary power and vigor, and the US is acting as a short-circuit between them. If we capture a fraction of that current we can share in the wealth, but we can't do it with our current social support network. We need another solution...

Protectionist measures, including trade and immigration restrictions, can make some jobs last longer than they otherwise would. The price is typically some complex mix of higher product costs, diminished economic productivity, and reduced value. Still, the cost may be worth paying to reduce extreme social disruption, as China's capital controls demonstrated in the Asian financial crisis of the 1990s.

A better approach, however, is to make it less painful to change employment or retrain by separating benefits, like healthcare and retirement savings, from employment. This is a true win-win, with both individual benefits and economic logic.

Except it ain't going to happen. The only serious move in this direction was a fake Bush proposal that turned out to have a poison core.

It hasn't come up since.

Why not?

I don't know the real confluence of special interests that ended the January 2007 discussion, but I can think of one good reason that employers might want to hold onto benefit control -- no matter what they cost.

It makes it very hard to employees to leave and ... do nothing.

My guess is there's a significant fraction of the US workforce that, if they had affordable guaranteed healthcare coverage, would stop working. Some would take early retirement. Some would go back to school. Some would take six months off and try something different.

Not everyone would want to do this, or could afford to do it. Those that would, however, would be disproportionately upper middle class, confident, and adventurous.

That's one hell of an expensive group to lose. It would be a hard hit for economic productivity, and in the near term there would be a sharp fall in economic productivity. Recession. Big time.

Sure, in the long run it might lead to increased economic productivity, and it could lead to increased happiness -- though happiness tends to be genetically determined except at the margins.

In the short term though, increased freedom could be very bad for business -- and for the global economy.

We're going to be in the employer-based benefits ankle chains for years to come ...

PS. I do note that we haven't done anything in the past four years to reduce the tax incentives that promote outsourcing of software development. I wonder why that is ...

Ron Paul explained: pseudo-libertarian populism and geek subculture

I hadn't been paying much attention to Ron Paul, but an article on the Ron Paul spam bot caught my fancy.

What, I wondered, would account for his popularity with a slice of American geekdom?

Hmm.

After about 15 seconds of idle speculation I decided the secret sauce would have to be some sort of pseudo-libertarian populism. It would use libertarian language, but it would also offer something that would have a very specific benefit to the software community. It would have to promise better wages by limiting the use of inexpensive foreign workers.

This is from Ron Paul's campaign web site...

Ron Paul 2008 › Issues › Border Security and Immigration Reform

As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Dr. Paul tirelessly works for limited constitutional government, low taxes, free markets, and a return to sound monetary policies...

• Physically secure our borders and coastlines...
• Enforce visa rules. Immigration officials must track visa holders and deport anyone who overstays their visa or otherwise violates U.S. law. This is especially important when we recall that a number of 9/11 terrorists had expired visas.
• No amnesty...
• End birthright citizenship...
  

Yeah, I aced this one. The unionized assembly workers of 1970s Detroit would sympathize.

It wasn't hard to figure out. We have a group of relatively young men who know they're talented and among the strong, but they also know they're falling behind. They assume true capitalism would guarantee a fair competition (they don't understand local minima traps), so we clearly don't have true capitalism. The current system must be some perversion of the ideal, and thus it's unfair.

Since one obvious way these men are falling behind is through competition with inexpensive foreign labor, then that must be part of the perversion.

Hence they're easy to capture by a combination of libertarian language and anti-immigration populism. So they fall for Ron Paul.

I sympathize. I'd dearly like to see us outsource our CEOs and replace our GOP senators with more talented foreigners. As a former primary care physician I also saw primary care being outsourced to low cost foreign immigrants, so I have a (mild) degree of emotional as well as cognitive sympathy.

I'd sympathize more if this group would express solidarity with the former blue collar workers of Detroit, but that's asking a lot.

There's oil in this well. We can expect the GOP to unify behind a stronger anti-immigration stance to try to capture some of that Ron Paul magic.

The irony is that I think the upper end of the IT-outsourcing trend has run into a brick wall. We're going to see the high-end IT skill market strengthen, though more mechanical work will probably continue to move overseas, albeit at a slower pace.

In any event, could immigration and, inevitably, trade restrictions really help IT workers? They might. The traditional US auto industry is slowly dying, but if not for controls on Japanese imports GM would have died ten years ago and we wouldn't have Toyota plants in the US. We don't manufacture computers in the US now, but if Congress hadn't blocked Japanese imports in the 1980s Panasonic would have crushed the nascent US PC market. (Nobody remembers now that Japanese PC clones were far superior and cheaper than US desktops before Representatives took sledge hammers to Japanese clones).

So trade and immigration restrictions don't change the way things go, but they can delay the process long enough for people to shift their educational programs and their work direction. The trick is to realize that whenever Congress restricts trade or immigration the end is about ten years away -- though I think IT prospects aren't quite as dim as those for primary care physicians or auto workers.

The Chinese zombie computer industry

HTWW has a nice summary of the active Chinese market in zombie computers ...

How the World Works: Globalization

"In China, the going rate for a flesh chicken is anywhere from 0.1 to 10 renminbi. (10 renminbi equals 1.34 dollars.) A flesh chicken is what we in the West call a zombie computer -- a compromised machine that does the bidding of someone other than the legitimate owner. In Mandarin, according to a fascinating new report on the world of Chinese malware, the words 'chicken' and 'machine' sound similar, thus the pun.

In other parts of the world networks of flesh chickens are put to use generating spam for penis enlargement pills or, as another equally riveting new report tells us, pro-Ron Paul propaganda. But in China, the main goal in gaining control of user machines is to capture the passwords and usernames that allow access to online game worlds or the virtual currency employed in China's hugely popular QQ instant messaging network. (Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.)...

Readers of Neuromancer knew about this almost 25 years ago.

I suspect the Chinese government considers these kinds of activities as a relatively harmless way to use the restless energy of millions of excess males.

The low cost of a zombie computer is reassuring. The price tells us there is such a vast pool of vulnerable machines that there's no need to invest in much more costly OS X attacks.

I'd like to see a futures market in Zombie machines; a price rise would give us advanced warning of an upmarket threat.

PS. The link to a securenet analysis of the Ron Paul botnet spam is well worth following. The coordinating host machine lived in US based co-location facility and was described as "well known" to botnet researchers. See my next post ...

Human evolution: a pillar falls

I wish "paradigm shift" were not so overused, because it's so well suited to the news that human evolution has accelerated since we developed agriculture and dense settled populations.

The idea that human evolution had stopped once we "conquered nature" was firmly accepted, outside of the x-men, throughout my formative years in the late 70s and early 80s. By the 1980s sociobiology, later rebranded as evolutionary psychology, assumed many modern dispositions reflected frozen adaptations to ancient hunter-gatherer life. Even in the 90s, when I did my cognitive science, everyone assumed that that the human species had changed little since "cro-magnon" woman (the term is obsolete).

Wrong.

The change shouldn't come as a surprise to readers of this blog. Of course I didn't invent any of this (except maybe the concept of evolutionary disorders of the mind). I'm a longtime reader of bloggers like John Hawks - who authored one of the papers in the news. Sure, Hawks claims he was keeping quiet about the topic while his paper waited to be released, but he's been dropping hints for years. Anyone reading Hawks, or knowing what it means to have such a massive population, could see this was coming.

That's the way these things happen. Twenty years from now popular books will claim radical papers swept away stodgy beliefs, but in fact the fortress had been falling for some time.

Still, we shouldn't understate the historic transition. Sure, now it seems so obvious that population density and culture would create vast new niches for variation to fill, but we used to think evolution operated over vast time scales. We didn't understand how fast a species can change.

So, in what ways are we different from the humans of 50,000 years ago? I'd recommend reading John Hawks and following his suggested links. In my reading thus far I've seen mention of far greater variation in skin and eye color, dietary adaptations, changes in teeth, smaller size (for a time, but now bigger), smaller brain (!) for a time, but now ?.

I've not read much yet about how different our brains are from those of pre-industrial humans, but I've posted previously about papers suggesting adaptations enabling reading and other language skills.

We'll be digesting the implications of this for a while. Yes, race as a clinically or biologically significant idea has returned ...

... the new work indicates that variations tend to differ between races, and that these became more, not less, pronounced.

“Human races are evolving away from each other,” said Henry Harpending, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah, who led the study.

“Genes are evolving fast in Europe, Asia and Africa, but almost all of these are unique to their continent of origin. We are getting less alike, not merging into a single, mixed humanity.

“Our study denies the widely held assumption that modern humans appeared 40,000 years ago, have not changed since and that we are all pretty much the same. We aren’t the same as people even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago.”

The research is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If the trend towards increasing genetic diversity were to continue, it could lead ultimately to the development of different species. Most scientists, however, think this is now highly unlikely.

"Most scientists" ... A few years ago it would have been every scientist. Still, classic speciation is unlikely ...

... The research identified evolutionary currents only in past times. In the modern era, greater movement and gene flow between the continents has probably slowed or even reversed patterns of increasing genetic difference, making the evolution of separate human species virtually impossible.

On the other hand these days geek neo-Liberals feel like a different species from theocratic social conservatives. There may be more than one way for a sentient animal to speciate.

Well, I'm off to catch up on the Hawks links. It's a big day for science, though I imagine it must be a bit rough on the fundies.

Update 12/16/07: Hawks quote (via Marginal Revolution):

We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals...