Spolsky tips on travel, gear, phones and so on

Spolsky would be darned annoying if he weren't so generous. Entrepreneur, geek, knows everything ...

Fortunately, he's generous. Here he writes about lessons learned from a promotional tour for his software company - FogBugz. Many of them apply to routine travel (except the first class part). Emphases mine, alas I live in Saint Paul so I cannot escape Northwest.

Joel Spolsky's Travel Survival Guide - Business Travel - Software Demo'ing

1. We waited until September to start the tour. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, September sees 15% fewer air passengers than August. That may seem like a small difference, but thanks to queuing theory, it's actually significant enough to eliminate most of the lines at airports.
   
   
2. We fly first class...
   
   
3. We scheduled most of the travel in the early afternoon, when airports are relatively quiet...
   
   
4. We never booked a flight until we were sure there was at least one later nonstop flight that would get us where we were going..
   
   
5. Oh, and we refused to fly Northwest Airlines (NYSE:NWA), which routinely schedules more flights than they have the ability to operate.

... we didn't have a single delay of more than an hour, and the longest line I waited in was about 10 minutes for security at Seattle airport.

...Here are a few of my tips for good demos:

• Ban PowerPoint...
• ...I try to watch video of myself to learn how to be a better presenter...
• It's OK to tell jokes...
  

...In my carryon luggage:

• My laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad X61s…
  
  
• To get on the Internet wherever I go, I have a Samsung Blackjack phone on AT&T ... supports GSM, so it works abroad, and HSDPA, for high-speed internet access... I wirelessly connect the laptop to the phone using Bluetooth and get high speed Internet access using my phone's unlimited data plan (this is called "tethering").
  
  
• The projector I use is the NEC NP60 (about $1250)...
  
  
• Because the laptop is usually too far away from the projector for a standard VGA cable, I carry these little gizmos called baluns which let me use a standard CAT-5 LAN cable instead of a VGA cable. I've found that a 25 foot LAN cable is plenty, but the baluns let you go much further if you need to.
  
  
• I also carry my own lavaliere microphones with transmitters and receivers (Sennheiser Evolution G2s) ...
  

As checked luggage:

• We had Lands' End Business Outfitters make us up a bunch of piquém polo shirts...
  
  
• We had our printer make up two big professional vertical banners with the FogBugz logo...

Shipped straight to each hotel via UPS ...

• 12-page 4-color brochures for each attendee
• Logo pads and pens for each attendee
• A couple of 25' extension cords, for the projector and the laptop
• A roll of duct tape to tape wires down on the carpet
• A couple of hundred "Hello, my name is…" stickers and sharpies so attendees can socialize before and after the event.

I didn't know you could do that with a Blackjack. Imagine if the iPhone were to support Bluetooth tethering...

There's a lot of advice in one place. I liked the "ship extension cords" -- obvious only in retrospect.

Thanks again Joel!

Music industry sows the wind

In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny: "You realize, of course, this means war" (emphases mine):

Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use - washingtonpost.com

...in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings....

...At the Thomas trial in Minnesota, Sony BMG's chief of litigation, Jennifer Pariser, testified that "when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song." Copying a song you bought is "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy,' " she said...

Meanwhile, in Canada, the music industry proposes to put a rather substantial tax on memory cards -- with an iPod tariff to come.

Fools.

Until now a substantial number of elder geeks (i.e. people with money) have been on the sidelines of the copyright wars. For us the iPod has meant a renewed interest in music, and a steady stream of CD purchases (since we distrust DRM intensely, we don't buy online). We've been on the establishment-friendly side of Pogue's demographic copyright gulf.

But now ... Now the music industry is trying to change the rules of the game.

That's not fair. The Geek Code of Honor requires us to respond by the ancient rule of sheeps and lambs. Some will say the Code obliges us to support the theft of music and video alike, for the criminals have now become the honest outlaw.

The RIAA really shouldn't have crossed this line.

1/2/08: Turns out WaPo got it wrong, but the blogosphere is correcting. It's easy to see why WaPo jumped the gun, the RIAA's legal argument may partly rely on the fact that it has not been shown in US courts that ripping a CD is "fair use". So the RIAA hasn't pulled the trigger yet, but they've pulled back the hammer...

Security theater: airport liquid dumps

A wonderful example of what Bruce Schneier calls "security theater". I admit, I hadn't realized how ridiculously stupid the liquid disposal bins are:

The Airport Security Follies - New York Times Blog

...At every concourse checkpoint you’ll see a bin or barrel brimming with contraband containers taken from passengers for having exceeded the volume limit. Now, the assumption has to be that the materials in those containers are potentially hazardous. If not, why were they seized in the first place? But if so, why are they dumped unceremoniously into the trash? They are not quarantined or handed over to the bomb squad; they are simply thrown away. The agency seems to be saying that it knows these things are harmless. But it’s going to steal them anyway, and either you accept it or you don’t fly...

My experience is that airport security people act as though the feds "jumped the shark" with the liquid ban. Security staff do their best to ignore the whole thing.

I've never been asked to pull out liquids when I forget and leave them in my toiletry kit. On the other hand there's a 40% interception rate when I forget and leave my tiny swiss army knife in my backpack. In both cases I think the contraband shows up on the scanner, but security staff are smarter than their political bosses. They've decided to spend their resources sensibly.

Incidentally, my question for the next candidate "debate" is: "will you eliminate the meaningless "orange alert" status?". We might as well go to a "normal" and "red" alert status, where red means it's time to evacuate the airport and ground the airplanes.

Sudden death in frontotemporal dementia - a clue to sudden infant death syndrome?

A friend of mine recently lost a friend and neighbor to Frontotemporal dementia (Picks disease), a particularly loathsome form of dementia (but aren't they all?) with a 50% occurrence risk in children of affected persons.

He mentioned his friend died fairly suddenly. Puzzling, I thought. Why suddenly?

Turns out that's common in FTD:

[Initial symptoms, survival and causes of death in...[Fortschr Neurol Psychiatr. 2007] - PubMed Result: "Causes of death were varied, but pneumonia and sudden unexplained deaths were particularly frequent."

Hmm. Sudden death. Brain disease. Could there be a clue in FTD to the causes of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome?

Well, there are lots of Google hits on the paired terms, though the associations seem coincidental. On the other hand, a Pubmed search combining both terms had no hits (today). So maybe this research is yet to be published ...

Changing world: the Robosoft example

Earlier today I mentioned the impact of globalization on, among other things, American software engineers.

Which brings me to Robosoft Technologies - Management Team. This is a company based in New Udupi, Karnataka, India. Karnataka is the home of Bangalore.

I came across Robosoft because I was curious about who made the Lego Star Wars II game I bought the kids this Christmas. Lego Star Wars II is one of the very few "universal binary" games available for OS X. I figured this had to come from some US based small Mac specialist company.

Wrong.

The game logo mentions "Feral Entertainment" and "Lucas Arts", but the credits say the development work was done by Robosoft.

It turns out that the CEO, Rohith Bhat, did Mac development for some consulting firms. When he went solo, he carved out a niche in Mac software development - based in India. The firm appears to be doing pretty well. Interestingly three of the executives are Bhats and they rather resemble one another.

New world.

A real problem with CO2 controls

This occurred to me some time ago, but now it's made it into the popular press (emphases mine):

FT.com | Clive Crook's blog: Trade and climate

...Suppose the US adopts a cap-and-trade regime for carbon, as promised by Hillary Clinton, or as envisaged by the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act (yes, make this a security issue, why not) currently before Congress. Also suppose that China does nothing to curb its carbon emissions. Then Chinese imports, it will be argued, will have an unfair cost advantage in US markets...

Shame on Crook for not correcting the "unfair cost advantage" error. Trade theory tells us there's no such thing as unfair cost advantage in the naive mercantilist sense. On the other hand, if we were to create a set of carbon tariffs to offset this "cost advantage" then we'd amplify the negative economic effects of necessary carbon emission controls.

The legitimate issue, however, is one of relative socio-economic power. If a President Edwards were to ask Al Gore to lead a US-European world saving CO2 emissions initiative, the US and Europe would sacrifice a certain measure of economic productivity compared to non-compliant nations. That productivity hit translates to a power shift, with all the usual implications.

I think the rich nations will probably have to take the hit and live with it, but we need to recognize it's going to have an effect.

Krugman on globalization: how to manage the losers

Comparative advantage (see also) has been famously described as the one social science proposition that is both true and non-trivial. It's the reason that free trade strongly tends, on average, to be a resilient win-win proposition. I've summarized the thesis as:

... It's not that you can't do the work better than someone else, it's rather that you have better things to do...

The operative constraint here is "on average". A win for America is not necessarily a win for programmers, GPs, or the guys in the parts department. Increasingly the vast majority of the winnings from globalization appear to be going to the top 1%

Krugman last discussed this topic in May of 2007. Now he returns with new data ...

Trouble With Trade - New York Times

... contrary to what people sometimes assert, economic theory says that free trade normally makes a country richer, but it doesn’t say that it’s normally good for everyone. Still, when the effects of third-world exports on U.S. wages first became an issue in the 1990s, a number of economists — myself included — looked at the data and concluded that any negative effects on U.S. wages were modest.

The trouble now is that these effects may no longer be as modest as they were, because imports of manufactured goods from the third world have grown dramatically — from just 2.5 percent of G.D.P. in 1990 to 6 percent in 2006...

... Those who think that globalization is always and everywhere a bad thing are wrong. On the contrary, keeping world markets relatively open is crucial to the hopes of billions of people...

... It’s often claimed that limits on trade benefit only a small number of Americans, while hurting the vast majority. That’s still true of things like the import quota on sugar. But when it comes to manufactured goods, it’s at least arguable that the reverse is true. The highly educated workers who clearly benefit from growing trade with third-world economies are a minority, greatly outnumbered by those who probably lose....

...For the sake of the world as a whole, I hope that we respond to the trouble with trade not by shutting trade down, but by doing things like strengthening the social safety net. But those who are worried about trade have a point, and deserve some respect.

Krugman has been more specific in the past about strengthening the social safety net. Obvious ideas include:

• universal health care
• separate benefits from employment
• intelligent retraining programs
• rethinking the meaning of disability in a post-industrial society
  

Krugman is a gem. One of the reasons I gave up reading Greg Mankiw is that his ideological blinders prevent him from considering the impact of trade on less competitive workers. Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong don't have that problem.

Update 12/28: Today's Cringely column is sadly relevant.

Unsolved murders: 1982 Tylenol and 2001 Anthrax

The Tylenol murders of 1982 involved tampering with containers in the Chicago area.

... As the tampered bottles came from different factories, and the seven deaths had all occurred in the Chicago area, the possibility of sabotage during production was ruled out. Instead, the culprit was believed to have entered various supermarkets and drug stores over a period of weeks, pilfered packages of Tylenol from the shelves, adulterated their contents with solid cyanide compound at another location, and then replaced the bottles. In addition to the five bottles which led to the victims' deaths, three other tampered bottles were discovered....

There was no known communication from the murderer, so it didn't qualify as a terrorist attack. The killer was never caught, he (or she) might be alive today.

In 2001, seven days after the 9/11 attacks, another murderer sent anthrax contaminated letters from a mailbox in Princeton New Jersey. Again, wikipedia is the place to go for an update (something traditional media can't do):

2001 anthrax attacks - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States, also known as Amerithrax from its FBI case name, occurred over the course of several weeks beginning on September 18, 2001. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to several news media offices and two Democratic U.S. Senators, killing five people and infecting 17 others...

...As of 2007, the anthrax investigation seems to have gone cold.[25][26] Authorities have traveled to six different continents, interviewed more than 9,100 people, conducted 67 searches and have issued over 6,000 subpoenas. The number of FBI agents assigned to the case is 17. The number of postal inspectors investigating the case is ten.[27] There are no reports that the investigators have identified the lab used to make the anthrax powders.

The failed Tylenol investigation is a discouraging precedent for the anthrax investigators.

We've mostly forgotten the anthrax attacks, and we've completely forgotten the Tylenol murders. Except, of course, for the survivors, the friends and families of the victims, Wikipedia contributors, and the investigators (do they contribute to the Wikipedia articles?).

The Tylenol murders led to some packaging changes; but I don't think they had a major impact on the American psyche.

The Anthrax murders, however, had a huge impact. Coming after 9/11 they were a part of the package that led to the invasion of Iraq (remember Saddam's mobile bioweapon facilities -- that turned out to be nothing at all?) . I suspect the direct attack on the Senate played a role in the powers the Senate freely granted Bush. If the Anthrax attack had not occurred, Bush's wartime status might have had a built-in renewal requirement.

Sadly, the vast impact of the Anthrax attack probably pleases the murderer.

Maybe forgetting is not the wisest thing to do. Maybe we should try to learn some lessons. How ought we to have responded? Why was such a high impact attack never replicated by a terrorist organization? Did the Senate lose its collective mind because of personal involvement? How could we prevent that happening again?

It would be marvelous to catch the killers of 1982 and 2001. Failing that, the best revenge would be to learn from our mistakes. We learned from the 1982 attacks, but I don't think we've learned enough from the 2001 murders.

Update: This post reminded me of one I wrote in 2003 about the Bush-Cheney smallpox fraud. That con job wouldn't have worked nearly as well but for the anthrax attacks.

Science fiction: the meme of universal cooperation

One of the classic science fiction answers to the Fermi Paradox is that any advanced technological civilization would decide that competitors are just too risky to tolerate.

So they would inevitably seed the galaxy with self-replicating machines designed to strange rivals "in the cradle".

This was the same line of argument given for preemptive nuclear attacks on Russia before it acquired the capacity to retaliate. More recently the argument is used to justify preemptive attacks on Iran.

It's easy to imagine an six-headed alien version of Dick Cheney arguing for the annihilation of the earth. After all, the planet Earth contains Dick Cheney!

But, in the spirit of the Solstice celebrations, we might ask whether a competitive rival strategy might emerge...

Even in simple game theory exercises, the 'initial friendship, then return as given' strategy can win. In a more complex universe, might one imagine a winning strategy of reciprocal alliance building?

What would be the characteristics of entities, large and small, that are able to build stable, growing, alliances and collaborations with very different entities and cultures? Tolerant, forgiving, compassionate, curious, patient, "turn the other cheek", "do unto others ...", etc.

Iain Banks trod some of this ground in The Culture novels. I've recently come across another variant. During my recent holiday time I managed to read a series a friend had sent, which I reviewed for Amazon ...

Amazon.com: Divergence: Books: Tony Ballantyne

... Ballantyne adroitly recycles a good range of science fiction, tossing in a one or two new ideas that I'd had on my private list of science fiction novelty. (So they're not original to me after all, Ballantyne thought of them too.)

So, a good read but nothing remarkable -- except for the last book.

In Divergence Ballantyne, who volunteers with special needs adults, is the very first science fiction writer to make "handicapped" adults first class characters. Indeed disability and fairness are revealed in the last book as core themes of the entire series (though I wonder if he knew how it would end)...

In addition to an almost unique role for disabled persons in his novel, Ballantyne also explores the idea of an aggressively cooperative culture, and they way they enforce their values of collaboration and fairness upon the universe.

So, Banks and Ballantyne (Banks is the better writer btw) have both touched on this meme. I wonder who else has covered it.

An encouraging thought as one contemplates the stars. Sadly it doesn't fit that well with the FP problem ...

Happy Solstice: A quiet revolution in human knowledge

This is a revolution.

ATA : Public Access Mandate Made Law

...President Bush has signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency.

The provision directs the NIH to change its existing Public Access Policy, implemented as a voluntary measure in 2005, so that participation is required for agency-funded investigators. Researchers will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal...

I wonder if Bush knew what he signed. The open access provision would have been buried deeply in the bill.

Thank you Betsy Humphreys and the National Library of Medicine team that has worked for this end.

Thank you Alliance for Taxpayer Access. That's a diabolically clever name, anyone reading it assumes it's a group of rightwingnuts rather than a covert commie coop devoted to making knowledge freely available to all ...

A diverse and growing alliance of organizations representing taxpayers, patients, physicians, researchers, and institutions that support open public access to taxpayer-funded research...

I'd also like to thank the biomedical publishing industry. This could never have happened without the transformation of a cottage industry into short-sighted publicly traded corporations dedicated to maximizing near term revenue. Publishers pushed journal subscription and archive access prices to stratospheric levels, knowing their subscribers had no real options. It was a great short term strategy ...

This is a good day for the world.

Update 4/9/10: Three years later open access continues to expand internationally, and the US may make another big leap forward.

Obama attacks: haven't even begun

Astoundingly, the Obama campaign has apparently been claiming their candidate has been fully attacked and inspected ...

Talking Points Memo | You're Kidding Me, Right?

...Then there's the collective assault that constitutes modern press 'scrutiny', especially for a Democrat who generally has to deal with the tag team of the national political press and the regrettably much more able and ruthless GOP oppo research cadre, which has an established feeding operation mainlined to most national political reporters.

It ain't fair; it ain't right; but it's the reality. And if he thinks he's already gotten that, well ... what's he been smoking?

Any serious candidate running for the Dems is better than McCain, and the rest of the GOP slate ranks below Kucinich. On the other hand, Obama is delusional if he think he's been attacked. If he gets the nomination he might lead the Dems to defeat -- unless he gets a reality dose soon.

The GOP hounds must be snorting through their drool at the thought that Obama has been attacked. He hasn't even been brushed, and if we don't see some serious attacks soon he'll be torn apart when the real race begins.

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.