Fake graduation rates and other predictable outcomes of no child left behind

Bush's educational program was said to be based on good outcomes in Texas. Of course it wasn't so. Turns out schools in Texas were cooking the books to get better numbers. Strong incentives, like "improve or die" reliably produce this kind of result.

The easiest way to cook the books for a particular school is to get the low performing students to move elsewhere. Then to make the overall district look better, don't invest in tracking where they "move" to. They did that in Texas too.

I'm picking on Texas, but the same thing will happen everywhere that these kinds of incentives are applied. It works for physicians too. If you pay us less for patients who don't keep their blood sugars tuned up, you'll find that those patients will "leave". There must be fifty ways to help a patient leave ...

Today the NYT tells the story for Mississippi, but I'm betting Minnesota and Vermont are playing the same game, albeit with more subtlety ...

States’ Data Obscure How Few Finish High School - New York Times
March 20, 2008l
By SAM DILLON

JACKSON, Miss. — When it comes to high school graduation rates, Mississippi keeps two sets of books.

One team of statisticians working at the state education headquarters here recently calculated the official graduation rate at a respectable 87 percent, which Mississippi reported to Washington. But in another office piled with computer printouts, a second team of number crunchers came up with a different rate: a more sobering 63 percent...

...“We were losing about 13,000 dropouts a year, but publishing reports that said we had graduation rate percentages in the mid-80s,” Mr. Bounds said. “Mathematically, that just doesn’t work out.”

... federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70 percent of the one million American students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later.

California, for example, sends to Washington an official graduation rate of 83 percent but reports an estimated 67 percent on a state Web site.

... New Mexico defined its rate as the percentage of enrolled 12th graders who received a diploma. That method grossly undercounts dropouts by ignoring all students who leave before the 12th grade.

The law also allowed states to establish their own goals for improving graduation rates. Many set them low. Nevada, for instance, pledged to get just 50 percent of its students to graduate on time. And since the law required no annual measures of progress, California proposed that even a one-tenth of 1 percent annual improvement in its graduation rate should suffice.

.. Most troublesome to some experts was the way the No Child law’s mandate to bring students to proficiency on tests, coupled with its lack of a requirement that they graduate, created a perverse incentive to push students to drop out. If low-achieving students leave school early, a school’s performance can rise...

... In Mississippi, the official formula put the graduation rate for the state’s largest district, Jackson Public Schools, at 81 percent. Mr. Bounds, the state schools superintendent, said the true rate was 56 percent.

At Murrah High School, one of eight here, the official graduation rate is 99 percent, even though yearbooks show that half of Murrah’s freshmen disappear before becoming seniors...

The obvious story here is that you get what you pay for. There will always be a way to game the system though, which is why you can't replace professional culture with incentives, just as you can't create a civil society through police action. Obviously both incentives and policing can be pretty important, but they can't replace professional pride and culture or a basic culture of civil behavior.

The less obvious story is that about 30% of Americans don't complete High School.

So I'd like to know why so many don't finish High School, but I'd first like to know what the "optimal" graduation rate should be. That's the question that leads to the most interesting and important discussions.

Toxic heparin: fraud is looking likely

Two weeks ago I wrote: Gordon's Notes: Toxic heparin was fraud, not accident. A comment rightly corrected me -- I'd jumped the gun.

Today, however, it's looking like fraud. Chondroitin sulfate was manufactured in place of heparin, contaminating up to 10% of the nation's supply of a heavily used medication. The Chinese government is denying investigators access to the suspected source of the counterfeited medications...

Heparin Discovery May Point to Chinese Counterfeiting

Federal drug regulators, in announcing Wednesday that the mystery contaminant in heparin was an inexpensive, unapproved ingredient altered to mimic the real thing, moved closer to concluding that Americans might be the latest victims of lethal Chinese drug counterfeiting...

...The contaminant, the regulators said, is a chemically altered form of chondroitin sulfate, a dietary supplement made from animal cartilage that is widely used to treat joint pain...

Federal officials stopped short of saying that the contaminant — constituting as much as 50 percent of the active ingredient in heparin — was counterfeit...

... the authorities left little doubt that they believed that the contaminant was not an unintended byproduct of some manufacturing process.

In its natural state, chondroitin sulfate does not have anticlotting properties. But it mimics heparin when altered to form what is called oversulfated chondroitin sulfate. That is what made it difficult for Baxter International, the manufacturer of the heparin associated with the allergic reactions, to detect the impurity...

...“The base compound, chondroitin sulfate, is very abundant and an inexpensive compound,” said Moheb Nasr, director of the agency’s office of new drug quality and assessment. Chemically modifying it, Mr. Nasr added, “will not be that expensive either.”

The F.D.A. said it had found the contaminated heparin at Changzhou SPL, the Chinese plant that supplies the active ingredient to Baxter...

... Erin Gardiner, a spokeswoman for Baxter, said Wednesday that tests found the supplies were contaminated before they arrived at the Changzhou plant. “The consolidators and workshops handle the crude material, so that is where our focus is turning,” Ms. Gardiner said.

So far, Ms. Gardiner said Baxter’s investigators had been denied access to the consolidators and workshops. “We will continue to seek access.”

Last week, the F.D.A. said it had not yet visited the workshops.

Some heparin producers in China also sell chondroitin sulfate, which can be derived from pig cartilage. Traders and producers say it is far cheaper than heparin, as little as one-twentieth the cost. That could be an enticement for counterfeiters, especially in the wake of a virulent pig virus that swept across China last year, substantially reducing the availability of the starting materials needed to make the active ingredient in heparin.

Contaminated heparin sourced from China has also turned up recently in Germany, where about 80 allergic reactions have been reported. But investigators there have yet to identify the contaminant. F.D.A. officials said their discovery of chemically modified chondroitin sulfate came exactly one year after the discovery that a pet food ingredient shipped from China contained toxic levels of melamine, which was added to make it appear higher in protein. Many pets became ill, and some died.

Around the same time, The Times reported that an unlicensed Chinese chemical plant sold a cheap counterfeit ingredient, diethylene glycol, that was mixed into cold medicine in Panama, killing nearly 120 people and disabling hundreds more.

Diethylene glycol mimics its more expensive chemical cousin, glycerine, a safe ingredient used in medicine, food and toothpaste.

The F.D.A. said its search for answers in the heparin case had been made easier because of the cooperation it had received from China’s State Food and Drug Administration. That was not the case when United States officials inquired last year about the melamine and diethylene glycol.

The agency cited an accord signed in December by the governments of China and the United States as one reason for the cooperation they had received recently, which they said allowed American investigators to quickly begin their investigation of the additive...

So, does anyone really think that we happened to catch the very first instance of massive counterfeit in the American medication supply chain? If so, please contact me about a new financial instrument I've created just for you ...

People I love very much take medications every day. I suspect many of them are sourced from nations that have very weak regulatory and enforcement agencies, and a feeble justice system.*

Reading this article closely, I feel the journalists are quietly building a good case for panic. They are probably wondering what they need to do -- wander the streets banging drums?

Pithed.

PS. Bill Gates gets his medications from the same places we do. So does Warren Buffett. Maybe some people who own Senators will decide the turn up the heat a bit?

* The US now has weak regulation and enforcement, so we should all be very, very nice to our lawyers.

Memories of how badly Bush began ...

Krugman has linked back to an article he wrote five years ago. It reads as well today as it did then.

The part I'm quoting here reminds us how very badly Bush and company began:

Things to Come - New York Times:

...Victory in Iraq won't end the world's distrust of the United States because the Bush administration has made it clear, over and over again, that it doesn't play by the rules. Remember: this administration told Europe to take a hike on global warming, told Russia to take a hike on missile defense, told developing countries to take a hike on trade in lifesaving pharmaceuticals, told Mexico to take a hike on immigration, mortally insulted the Turks and pulled out of the International Criminal Court -- all in just two years...

They were so, so full of themselves. The crew that remains now is less obviously inept, mostly because they seem to be largely invisible. Fundamentally, however, I fear Bush and Cheney have are no more "ept" than when they started out.

The Twin Cities is a great place to live: bike trail plans

I really hope we get one or more of these plans:

River bike trail gains traction in Bloomington:

...Imagine being able to hop on a bike at Fort Snelling and pedal for hours on a quiet trail along the Minnesota River, winding all the way to Le Sueur, 72 miles upriver...

I thought Le Sueur was downriver, but I only live by the Mississippi, I wasn't born here.

This trail would have to get through a really big obstacle -- the old Air Force land south of the MSP airport. That few hundred meters of land has been the bane of bicyclists for eons.

There are several great projects listed in the article. As noted in a local paper:

Minneapolis—the nation’s No. 2 cycling city after Portland, Ore., according to the U.S. Census Bureau—Olson is among as many as 3,000 people who commute through the cold months, according to the City of Minneapolis Bicycle Program, a division of the Public Works Department.

When choosing great places to live, I'm a firm advocate of ignoring everything except the bicycle trail network. Trust me on this -- if you just look for great bike trails you won't go wrong.

Obama race speech - abbreviated version

I rarely listen to political speeches -- they bore me. I was able to get through Obama's "race speech" by listening while I edited the prepared text down to what follows below.

Barack Obama : : Change We Can Believe In | Sam Graham-Felsen's Blog: "A More Perfect Union

...Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy..

...The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years...

...words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time...

…I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren....

...I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible....

...it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

... the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam...

...The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS...

... As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years...

...For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews.….. the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community... when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time. ..

...Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.…

... I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black...

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper....

...For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together...

Obama is often accused of pretty sounding speeches with little content. I don't know if that's true -- this is the first speech of his I've paid attention to. I thought this one was meaty enough. It's not bad on audio either, though if I were the speechwriter I'd have added more outreach to Latinos. It's basically a white/black speech.

I hope it works.

I'd really like to see us divert from the usual script the media, and we ourselves, insist on replaying over and over again.

Phishing traps via blog post comments - a newer variant

The other day I allowed a comment a bit like this one to be added to one of my blogs:

Hello. This post is likeable, and your blog is very interesting, congratulations :-). I will add in my blogroll =). If possible gives a last there on my blog, it is about the Smartphone, I hope you enjoy. The address is http://_____.blogspot.com.

The spelling and grammar was a bit better, but the form was similar (I removed part of the URL). I checked the site prior to approving the post and it seemed superficially legitimate.

Today I received two more pending comments, each with slightly different wording and different web topics.

Clearly, I got fooled. I shouldn't have allowed the first comment of this class. I'll have to hunt it down and delete it.

My guess is all the sites referenced in these comments are either compromised legitimate sites or they are trap sites. Maybe all they need is for someone reviewing the posts, like me, to check if the site is legitimate. The recent "breaking" of Google's CAPTCHA technology may be a part of the operation.

I just hope I used a Mac for my original site check, and not my XP machine! XP boxes are so vulnerable they really shouldn't be allowed on the web.

I'll be extra careful going forward.

Update 3/11/2010: I loved this comment I received today ...

So, you aproved one of the comments and received a few similar ones? What's bad about that? You don't have to approve the other ones if you don't want to. I don't see any trap here.

The author's name was linked. It didn't resolve to a person, it resolved to a spam blog (splog) article. It wasn't a direct phishing attack comment, but it was of the same genre of comment spam. In this case the desire is to increase pointers to a fraudulent web site, to do "search engine optimization".

Why do I love this example of comment spam? Because it's a fraudulent comment complaining that I'm dissing fraudulent comments. That's kind of funny.

DNA samples of poorly behaved children

This is as inevitable as the rising sun ...

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters:

... British police want to collect DNA samples from children as young as five who 'exhibit behavior indicating they may become criminals in later life'. A spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers argued that since some schools already take pupils' fingerprints, the collection and permanent storage of DNA samples was the logical next step. And of course, if anyone argues that branding naughty five-year-olds as lifelong criminals will stigmatize them, the proposed solution will be to take samples from all children.'...

More from the original Guardian article:

Primary school children should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life, according to Britain's most senior police forensics expert.

Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said a debate was needed on how far Britain should go in identifying potential offenders, given that some experts believe it is possible to identify future offending traits in children as young as five.

'If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large,' said Pugh. 'You could argue the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won't. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society.'...

Since black American males are over-represented in prisons, a future US version of this UK proposal could use the cord blood of all pigmented children*.

Or maybe we'll just do some SNP profiling of cord blood. People like Craig Venter, who exposed his oppositional-defiant traits when he published his entire DNA sequence, would be definitely entered in the registry. Why, we could probably have locked him up long before he sequenced (a version of) the human genome.

We could brand 'em too, or make them wear some distinctive clothing. That way we'd all be warned of their dangerous nature. We could watch 'em day and night, so the first time they blinked we'd pounce and lock 'em up. Then we'd lock up the siblings, because you just never know.

Or maybe we'll turn aside before we go over the abyss? Nahhhhh.

* Note -- this is what's known as satire. I am not actually in favor of this proposal. Just to be clear.

The Economist: a semblance of clever

I think CT nails the modern Economist magazine:

Crooked Timber - Are you smart enough to enjoy the Economist?

....The Economist succeeds in part by delivering a particular party line that accords well with the prejudices of many of its readers (Friedman quotes an acquaintance as saying that he loves the ‘unpredictability’ of the Economist which is quite odd; by the time I gave up on it, I could tell nine times out of ten what the magazine was going to say on a topic by looking at what the topic was). But it also serves as a kind of aspirational good. The Economist flatters readers who aren’t quite intelligent enough to realize how shallow it is into thinking that they are more intelligent than they are because they read it....

It wasn't always this way. Fifteen years ago The Economist was a great "newspaper", but over the past decade it has become dull. I imagine a group of dedicated UK journalists swamped by one dimensional invaders from the Wall Street Journal, but I don't know what really happened.

I no long subscribe, but I do follow a few select feeds. The obits are almost always very good. Science and Technology, The Arts, and Africa have their moments. They still have some fantastic Africa journalists; few other media sources have any kind of Africa coverage at all. This week's coverage of the Lhasa riots reminds us that they still have some brave journalists in the field. Alas, most of the magazine is a better written and more pompous version of Time.

Like CT, I can understand why Tom Friedman would be a fan of the modern Economist.

Ever wonder where childhood memories go?

You'd think an 8 yo would remember events from age four pretty well -- but they don't.

Those four year old events might as well have occurred forty years ago.

Maybe this is why ...

Scientific American: Mind the Alzheimer's Switch

... neuroscientists at the Buck Institute in California made a startling discovery—young brains may experience memory loss due to the same mechanism responsible for Alzheimer's, but this memory loss could give young brains the ability to rewire. They say all brains may have a forward-reverse switch for making and breaking memories, but in certain older brains this switch can go awry, leading to Alzheimer's.

A protein called APP could control the switch. The researchers previously found they could stop Alzheimer's in mice by preventing APP from being cut in two. Recently they found that YOUNG brains have ten times more cut APP than the diseased brains of Alzheimer's patients—and you'd think that was a bad thing. But this isn't detrimental to young brains because they are constantly rewiring to make new neural connections—so some broken memories along the way don't hurt.

It's one of the lesser sorrows of parenting -- much of what one treasures as a parent is forgotten to the child. I'd long suspected it was due to brain rewiring occurring during childhood. Now the evidence is emerging.

Pet food poison and pithed America

We all know frogs will jump out of a beaker of slowly warming water -- long before it boils.

If they've been "pithed" however, they'll just lie there. Pithed frogs don't hop.

Americans have been pithed. Fifteen years ago any of the melamine/cyanuric acid pet food poisoning, Heparin contamination, surveillance society or a dozen similar stories would have resulted in general excitement and even regulatory action.

Now, we just give 'em a stunned look and move on. Maybe it's all we can do. After 12 years of GOP rule (8 of Bush, 4 where the GOP held the House and Senate) we're kind of crushed.

So I really shouldn't be quoting this SF Chronicle article telling us nothing has changed in the pet food world (emphases mine):

The Pet Food Recall: One Year Later, Has Anything Changed?

A year ago, Canada's Menu Foods announced it was recalling more than 60 million containers of dog and cat food sold in the United States. Although the name Menu Foods wasn't familiar to pet owners, the recalled cans and pouches bore the labels of dozens of the most familiar and trusted brands in the marketplace.

In the end, more than 1,000 brands of pet food were recalled over a period of about four months, and two chemicals, melamine and cyanuric acid, were blamed for kidney failure that killed thousands and sickened tens of thousands of pets from what came to be called melamine-associated renal failure....

...I didn't guess when I began covering this story with Gina Spadafori at Pet Connection that it would turn into the largest consumer recall in history, trigger an international trade scandal, launch congressional hearings, spur proposed legislation on food safety and get both American and Chinese businesses owners indicted. I couldn't have foreseen that the incident would put a spotlight on Chinese imports which would eventually reveal lead in children's toys and toxins in toothpaste, and prompt the recent recall of the drug heparin.

But it's equally hard to believe that after all that, the answer to the question "Could it happen again?" is probably "Yes."

The reason for that is simple: None of the changes that might prevent a repeat of last year's pet food recall have been implemented. There have been no improved inspections of pet food plants, no comprehensive overhaul of the patchwork of state, federal and industry manufacturing standards and regulations, no increased transparency and accountability — not even something as simple as printing the name and contact information of the actual manufacturer on pet food labels — and no revisions to pet food labeling laws. The Food and Drug Administration still does not have the authority to issue mandatory recalls.

Most of us closely involved in this story find all that hard to understand. "In this age of potential bio-terror and random cross-species crossover horrors like the avian flu, this is incomprehensible," said Pet Connection editor Gina Spadafori. "Our animals are the canaries in the coal mine, and as bad as the death toll was in our pets, it could have been much, much worse, in both animal and human populations. So why is there still not a national veterinary reporting system for a nationwide emergence of disease that is not only killing animals but could also potentially already be in or emerging in the human population? And why are we still unable to inspect all but the tiniest percentage of imported foods?"...

...The adulteration of protein concentrates with melamine and cyanuric acid was found to be both longstanding and widespread in China, so it seemed unlikely something like this hadn't happened before.

And in fact, it had. The Journal of Veterinary Investigative Diagnosis recently reported that melamine and cyanuric acid contamination was responsible for the deaths of thousands of pets in 2004.

Researchers working with tissue samples from animals who died in the U.S. recall compared them to samples from pets who died in a number of Asian regions including the Philippines, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong. Those deaths led to a recall of Pedigree dog foods and Whiskas cat foods, and were blamed on mycotoxin contamination. But the study found that both groups of pets had the unmistakable crystals and damage in the kidneys caused by melamine and cyanuric acid.

While there's no evidence any other mycotoxin-attributed food recalls, pet or human, were misidentified, it does put the pet food recall squarely in the big picture of this country's broken food safety system.

A fix for that broken system may be coming, even if it's a bit slow. The FDA recently announced a meeting where it will discuss changes in the regulation of pet food ingredients, processing and labeling with representatives from the pet food industry, government agencies, veterinary medical associations, animal health organizations and pet food manufacturers at that meeting. One group not on that list is pet owners, but they have asked to hear from us. Comments should be made on docket number 2007n-0487 at www.regulations.gov/. [jf: I tried this. I don't think the site is accepting comments yet on this item. I'd recommend an email to your Senator or Representative instead.]

"The recalls exposed deep problems with food safety regulation in China as well as in the United States, and I see many signs of efforts to do something about them," said Nestle. "Lasting improvements won't happen overnight, and they won't happen at all unless people who care about these issues keep pressuring the industry and the FDA to do what they say they will do."

Did you catch the implication that we ought to be reexamining other "mycotoxin" or "fungal" related food poisoning episodes to see which were the result of fraud?

I'm sympathetic to the stunned -- I'm about half-pithed myself. It takes a lot of energy to put pressure on the FDA in the best of times, but this is Bush's FDA -- neutered, broken, led by people opposed to their own mission.

If we put McCain into the White House we deserve to eat Melamine and lead for breakfast.

How old is this retiring pastor?

I really don't know what "Obama's Pastor Wright" said, but I gather it wasn't very nice. In reading Obama's response though, I had only one thought.

How old is this retiring pastor?

When people start saying odd things inconsistent with past behavior, it's worth remembering that dementia is an exceedingly common disorder.

It's official. We live in a surveillance state.

Not a police state, not yet. Surveillance state is a good term.

INTEL DUMP - NSLs and the National Surveillance State

I agree with Yale law professor Jack Balkin -- we live today in a national surveillance state. This article in the Washington Post detailing the FBI's use of "national security letters" (NSLs) tells an important part of that story. According to the Post:...

....For reasons of convenience, expediency, secrecy and efficiency, federal law enforcement has increasingly turned towards surveillance and investigative methods which do not require ex ante review or approval by an Article III court...

...If you still think you've got a reasonable expectation of privacy in your daily life -- check again. The exceptions very nearly swallow the rule today.

Is this a problem? Depends on your perspective. What worries me here is the slow bureaucratic expansion of power -- like the ever-expanding Blob of movie fame. The FBI and intelligence community may need administrative tools like this. Ultimately, we may decide it's in our interest to allow law enforcement the use of these tools -- whether for targeting suspected terrorists, drug dealers, organized crime figures, or even Client No. 9. But that's got to be a public debate, and it's got to be a debate held by accountable officials, not agency officials behind closed doors. We have a stake in this policy, and we should get a say.

It's been a long transition. I think technologic progression alone would have brought us to this point by 2013 even if 9/11 had not occurred, but terrorism accelerated the timetable.

To think it was only a few years ago that pundits scoffed at claims of widespread domestic surveillance. Nobody's scoffing now.

Will Americans actually demand a public debate? I doubt it. We're a future shocked culture -- dazed, numb and pithed; hit by too much too fast. We're going to live with this.

We're all Singaporeans now.

Sheldon Brown - one of the original riders of the web

My old, long neglected web page on bike touring included a section on bike reference links. Surprisingly most of the links still work, including my link to Sheldon Brown's eclectic bicycle site.

I revisited the site tonight. It's very 1994 -- HTML 2.0 tables with links to his personal interests -- including my home province and his personal pages. It's only on the Harris Cyclery page though, that we learn Sheldon Brown died on February 3rd, 2008.

He kept a personal journal. There's an entry for the last day of his life:

... I've finally made up my mind, I'll be voting for Obama in the primary on Tuesday. When you live in Massachusetts, the primary is the only presidential vote that matters--if a Democrat can't carry Massachusetts in the final, there's no hope!

I'm still a big fan of Clinton, and would still be on the fence, except that my daughter is very strongly for Obama and has been working for him, which is enough to tip the balance for me...

The Times of London, has an extensive and affectionate obituary. He died of a heart attack after two years of progressive multiple sclerosis.

I hope one of his many fans will be archiving his pages and writings.

No more spouses at the press conference

I thought Gail Collins had the very best comment on the Spitzer story:

Unwelcome Surprises - New York Times

...Memo to future disgraced politicians: The nation has discussed this at length, and we do not want to see any more stricken spouses at the press conference. Not even if she volunteers...

If the politicians walks the plank alone, we'll consider forgiveness. Bring a spouse and forgiveness is off the table.

The only other comment I'd make on the Spitzer case is the young woman involved seems confused, lost, and vulnerable. That's not surprising given her employment. It's the only other part of the story worth any attention.

Mass disability and Great Depression 2.0

Wired magazine's front page claimed recently that "free" was the new cheap. That would be consistent with Robert Reich's latest "Great Depression" post (aka, GD 2.0. Emphases mine):

Robert Reich's Blog: Are We Heading Toward Depression (Part 3)?

American consumers are coming to the end of their ropes and don't have the buying power they need to absorb the goods and services the U.S. economy is capable of producing. This is likely to mean fewer jobs, which will force Americans to pull in their belts even tighter, leading to still fewer jobs – the classic recipe for recession. That recession may turn into a full-fledged Depression if fiscal and monetary policies can't make up for consumers' lack of buying power. And there's reason to worry they cannot because consumers are in a permanent bind. They're deep in debt, their homes are losing value, and their paychecks are shrinking...

...We're reaping the whirlwind of many years during which Americans have spent beyond their means and most of the benefits of an expanding economy have gone to a relatively small group at the very top. Adjusted for inflation, the median wage is below where it was in 1999. The nation's median hourly wage is barely higher than it was thirty-five years ago. The income of a man in his 30s is now 12 percent below that of a man his age three decades ago. The rich, meanwhile, can't keep the economy going on their own because they devote a smaller percentage of their earnings to buying things than the rest of us: After all, they're rich, and they already have most of what they want. Instead of buying, they're more likely to invest their earnings wherever around the world they can get the highest return...

... Go back to the years just before the Great Depression and you see the same pattern. As I've noted before, Marriner S. Eccles, who served as Franklin D. Roosevelt's Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1934 to 1948, noted this in his memoir "Beckoning Frontiers":

"As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery. Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped."...

There's so much opportunity for productivity driven growth in China, India, and even Africa that we ought to be able to dodge a GD 2.0, or even a Japanese-style 1990s depression. Of course if we really are entering Peak Oil territory, this is not a great time to have a markedly sub-optimal spending capacity distribution across America.

My take? I believe that about 20% of adult Americans aged 25 to 65 are effectively disabled in our current globalized post-industrial economy. I believe this number will rise as our population ages. I believe this is the fundamental problem, along with network effects, driving modern wealth concentration.

Over time the economy will change to develop niches for unused capacity (servant economy?), but the transition need not be comfortable. In the meantime technological shocks, such as ubiquitous robotics, may induce new disruptions to a non-equilibrium economic structure -- risking extensive economic breakdown.

Even if we avoid GD 2.0 this time around, we need to rethink our economics and social models.

Update 4/4/2010: Changed the title of this post - the original was kind of meaningless.