Edwards and Fallows agree - the press is bad. Why?

Fallows agrees with Elizabeth Edwards - the press is the problem.

James Fallows (April 28, 2008) - Most important item in Sunday's NYT

This Sunday's New York Times -- fat, varied, making me wonder how I got anything done on the weekends in America when I routinely had all this to read -- had lots of interesting stuff in it. But the most important item was the op-ed by Elizabeth Edwards called "Bowling 1, Health Care 0."..

...The more heartfelt and bitter complaint is about the way press coverage seems biased not against any particular candidate but against the entire process of politics, in the sense that politics includes the public effort to resolve difficult issues. (Medical care, climate change, banking crises, military priorities, etc.) For twenty years I have heard this from frustrated politicians -- Gary Hart, Newt Gingrich, Jimmy Carter, Dick Gephardt, Bill Clinton, they may not share a lot of views but they are as one in this frustration. What galls all of them is the way that the incentives created by most coverage bring out the very worst in most politicians, and discourage them from even bothering to try the harder, more "responsible" path. No one says that press incentives turn potential Abraham Lincolns into real-world Tom DeLays. But the incentives push in that direction rather than the reverse.

Active politicians rarely dare say this in public, since they know the same reporters and commentators will be there to talk about them tomorrow and the next day and from then on. For reasons personal (health) and political (husband out of the race), Elizabeth Edwards no longer has to hold anything back...

Alas, neither Edwards nor Fallows asked the interesting questions.

Why is the print press* bad? Is it really getting worse?

My suspicion is that the Craisglist-Google driven decline in ad revenues is forcing newspapers to be ever more customer focused -- which means struggling to hold onto the eyeballs their advertisers want.

That means they give their readers what they want.

What does the portion of the public who's willing to read a newspaper want?

The bulk of the readership doesn't want to read about policy, they want to be distracted and entertained. So the newspapers provide them entertaining news about politicians, such as their hair styles, bowling scores, partners, pastors, etc.

Pogo said it long ago - We have met the enemy and he is us. The media is not the problem, the voters are the problem.

It's easy for Elizabeth Edwards and James Fallows to beat up on the press. Heck, they richly deserve a beating. It's a lot harder for them to admit the real problem is the American citizen.

Now that's a hard problem.

* I don't know anything about TV and radio news except NPR, so I'll omit them.

The surprising cost of fly intelligence ...

Science is most fun when it throws up completely bizarre surprises. Like these study results ...

Learning and longevity | Critical thinking | Economist.com

...After repeating the experiment for 30 generations, the offspring of the learned flies were compared with normal flies. The researchers report in a forthcoming edition of Evolution that although learning ability could be bred into a population of fruit flies, it shortened their lives by 15%. When the researchers compared their learned flies to colonies selectively bred to live long lives, they found even greater differences. Whereas learned flies had reduced life spans, the long-lived flies learned less well than even average flies.

The authors suggest that evolving an improved learning ability may require a greater investment in the nervous system which diverts resources away from processes that stave off ageing. However, Dr Kawecki thinks the effect could also be a by-product of greater brain activity increasing the production of reactive oxygen particles, which can increase oxidation in the body and damage health.

No one knows whether the phenomenon holds true for other animals. So biologists, at least, still have a lot to learn...

As far as we can tell, humans are the only technological species that ever lived on planet earth. (See, however, Stephen Baxter's Evolution for a wonderful imaging of a pre-technological sentience.)

We've come along fairly late in the planet's history.

Why did it take so long to produce an extinction-event class species [1]? What was there about intelligence that was so hard?

The flies might be giving us some clues ...

[1] Anyone studying the fossil records will see evidence of worldwide mass extinction beginning early in our evolutionary career. Species that can cause that kind of mass extinction are in a class of their own, albeit a short-lived class.

The way politics works: a Gail Collins reminder

Gail Collins, who's definitely growing on me, provides a voice of reality in the midst of the endless primary:

Hillary’s Smackdown - New York Times

... Although Obama has seemed way off his game lately, the odds are still really, really good that he’ll get the nomination. The superdelegates are just waiting for him to win something so they can rally. And once the fighting is over, there’s no question that Hillary would rally her supporters behind him. (This is a woman who sat down for a chat with arch-conservative-right-wing-conspirator Richard Mellon Scaife just to wrest an endorsement from his little fringe newspaper in Pittsburgh.) And within a couple of weeks, Bill Clinton would be treating Barack like a surrogate son and forcing him to play golf...

These people are lawyers.

A lawyer is someone who can spend years as a prosecutor, then switch sides with equal zeal. A lawyer is someone who can fight to the death in a courtroom, then go for coffee with the opposing attorney when the trial is done. A lawyer is someone who can rend a surgeon's reputation, then be genuinely puzzled when the surgeon avoids them in the supermarket.

Lawyers are conflict professionals, like salesmen, professional ball players, or genuine military mercenaries. Lots of ranting and screaming and even shooting, but really, it's just part of the job.

Lawyers who are politicians running for the presidency are the consummate conflict professionals.

Neuburg: 15 years of information wrangling

Tidbits turned 18 recently. The celebratory email referenced article series almost as old as Tidbits: TidBITS: Matt Neuburg - Conquer Your Text 1993 to 2006.

The classics are there: Symantec MORE, Inspiration (still sort of living), Acta, In Control, Arrange and WebArranger, (Double) Helix, Prograph, Idea Keeper, Boswell, StickyBrain, Tinderbox, iData Pro, Notebook (both of them), DEVONthink, TAO, Curio, Yojimbo, SlipBox and a few others.

There was terrific software in that collection, some of which is still sold. On the other hand the history is a reminder of the terrible cost of proprietary data formats; many of those apps took user data with them when they expired.

I love this class of software, but I wouldn't personally consider anything with a proprietary file format.

Incenting execs: they're very good at gaming the system

Harvard's Philip Greenspun does a great job describing how EBITDA and other compensation schemes are readily gamed ....

Philip Greenspun’s Weblog Statins, cholesterol, health; fancy employee compensation, EBITDA, and company value:

... Conspiracy of Fools chronicles one of the discussions about EBITDA among Enron senior managers. One guy pointed out to Rebecca Mark, a Harvard Business School graduate star of the company, that EBITDA was meaningless because one could improve EBITDA simply by borrowing money at 10 percent and investing it in T-Bills at 5 percent and that was essentially what Mark was doing. She was borrowing money at X% to purchase businesses that would return no more than (X-4)% in a best-case scenario. This fattened her paycheck, but led the company towards bankruptcy....

.... if you’re on a Board and you decide to compensate a manager with anything other than cash or a long-term stock option, make sure that you’re not granting compensation based on a number that the manager can easily manipulate. Keep in mind that managers are often a lot more clever in doing things that will benefit themselves than things that will benefit the company.

Senior executives in large corporations may not be particularly honest, honorable, or bright -- but they are always good at playing the game. Greenspun's key observation is that only long term share price is difficult to game for a CEO. All other incentive plans will lead to undesireable choices.

Damn, but Hoover was an evil man

Damn Interesting » Operation Pastorius tells us some more lousy things about mid-20th century American justice, but most of all it reminds me how bloody evil J.Edgar Hoover was.

As we inch our way from surveillance state to the next step down (more on that soon), it's ever more important to remember Hoover.

I'd buy a nicely made t-shirt that said: "Remember J. Edgar Hoover. Protect your freedom."

Who's paying for the "Global Climate Scam" billboards?

There's a large billboard near my Saint Paul home advertising "GlobalClimateScam.com".

The url resolves to a typical denialist site -- all bluster and delusion. There's nothing unusual about the whacky website, but I was curious who's paying for the billboard, and what they want.

It turns out that "Minnesota Majority", a local right wing organization, displays the same content and is probably paying for the billboards. I haven't been able to discover where their money is coming from, and why they're suddenly keen to spend it on climate change denial.

Companies that have invested heavily in coal would be the obvious suspects. If we really have hit Peak Oil (I'm deferring judgment until August) then oil companies ought to be buying up coal reserves. The primary challenge to that strategy would be a carbon tax, or the regulatory equivalent. Coal produces so much carbon dioxide that any carbon-tax equivalent could do real damage to a coal-centric investment strategy.

It would be logical for these companies, assuming they are blithering idiots, to do everything possible to maximize their coal reserve value -- including climate change deniers.

So if I were a real journalist, I'd be looking for an Exxon connection to Minnesota Majority's new found fascination with climate change. I'd also look to see whether Exxon is putting its money into oil exploration or into coal reserve ownership.

Insanely bad decisions - the Dilbert example - and a wise correction

The primary Dilbert web site has gone to Flash. It doesn't work on Camino or the iPhone, and it's a mess on Firefox 3 (true, that's beta).

I assume Adobe paid United Media to do this.

The move has not been well received. Happily, there's an alternative non-flash link ...

Slashdot | Dilbert Goes Flash, Readers Revolt

... Good thing you can still get your Dilbert fix at http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/ [unitedmedia.com]...

I'll change the link on our family news page to the non-Flash version.

This move deserves a Dilbert cartoon, but I don't think Scott Adams is going to satirize his own syndicate. He's a pretty careful businessman, despite the Dilbert persona.

Update 4/24/2008: United Media now redirects the archive to the Flash page. I sure hope Adobe is having to pay a lot for this! On the other hand Scott Adams has felt our wrath. A "plain" page is pending, and the RSS feed will show the strips chronologically without Flash.

Update 5/2/2008: A good solution, I've updated our news page to use it.

From Scott Adams blog:

.... if you promise to keep it to yourselves, we created a stripped-down Dilbert page with just the comic, some text navigation, and the archive: www.dilbert.com/fast. This alternate site is a minor secret, mentioned only here and in the text footnote to the regular site as “Linux/Unix.”

Lesson: Your data will be public

When you interact with a web page you're often interacting with a database of some sort. The simplest way to do this is to take text the user has submitted, put some SQL around it (standard database language), and the SQL will update the database, or get results back, etc. Some implementations even put the query string, including the SQL, in the URL.

The problem with this approach was discovered in the 1990s. You can write your own SQL in the URL, or, with a bit more work, you could type the SQL into the web field and the database would act on it.

The problem keeps returning, most recently in Oklahoma. Schneier describes the story (with an implied deep sigh), but I most appreciated one of the comments ...

Schneier on Security: Oklahoma Data Leak

... If you take the standard Google query for locating GET/sql servers (see http://www.memestreams.net/users/acidus/blogid10326823/ and further restrict it to .gov domains, several somewhat  sensitive websites from the District of Columbia government show up --- including "Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration --- Suspended and Revoked Licenses", and "Department of Health --- Food Establishment Closures".

It's nice to know a simple Google query can expose vulnerable sites so readily. Another comment mentions a similar problem last year with Germany's security services.

The real lesson here is that all of your data will be public one day. Sooner or later it will leak by one security flaw or another. If they gather it, they will lose it.

If you really don't want data to be public, don't provide it in electronic form. Happily, most data about most of us is so boring it's only of interest to the extremely rare individual who wants to steal our identity, credit card, etc. Oh, wait ...

Network biology and the holographic resilience of biological function - lessons from E. coli

A recent groundbreaking study on the genetics of schizophrenia found a varied pattern of large scale "sledgehammer" (as in whack the genes) mutations in many persons with schizophrenia. These are thought to affect varying stages of brain development.

Curiously, the researchers found the same problems in a minority of the "control" group of "normal" people:

Gordon's Notes: schizophrenia

One in twenty seemingly normal people have big, ugly looking mutations that ought to be messing up their brain development. Yet they seem "normal"...

Now another big study explains this strange normality (emphasis mine) ...

Zimmer - Wired 04.18.08

.... In the latest issue of Nature, scientists reported an experiment in which they wreaked havoc with E. coli's network. They randomly added new links between the transcription factors at the top of the microbe's hierarchy. Now a transcription factor could turn on another one that it never had before. The scientists randomly rewired the network in 598 different ways and then stepped back to see what happened to the bacteria.

You might expect that they all died. After all, if you were to pop open the back of an iPod and start linking its components together in random ways, you'd expect it to crash. But that's not what happened.

About 95 percent of the rewired bacteria did just fine with their new networks. They went on with their lives, feeding, growing and dividing. Some even performed better than microbes with the original wiring, under some conditions.

The tolerance these bacteria showed reveals something important about how evolution works. Humans can randomly rewire cells, and so can mutations. There's something about gene networks that allow them to thrive despite these mutations, and, in some cases, to even gain an edge in the evolutionary race.

But scientists don't quite know why a network like the one in E. coli can handle this rewiring so well. The source of their strength lies not in a single molecule -- DNA -- but in a complicated web of relationships. The network itself is the mystery for biologists in the 21st century...

This is of a piece with the discovery that DNA control system have complex topological components, my June 2007 essay on evolved circuits. and reading I've done over the past year on bioinformatics (systems biology) and the modeling of interacting protein networks (interactome) (example).

The blueprint for an organism is emergent. It "appears" through the interaction of the storage elements in DNA and DNA associated packaging, but, like a holographic image, it can "appear" even when pieces of the storage structure are absent or reorganized. This is a shared characteristic of evolved systems on every scale, we see hints of this even in evolved mechanical systems such as the freight train pneumatic braking system. Bacteria, of course, are the most "evolved" of all systems -- far more evolved than mere humans.

That's why major "controllers" of brain development can be disrupted, but, in many cases, the brain can still develop -- differently perhaps. In some settings, the differences might even be advantageous.

How will we understand this emergent control system? We will not be able to do perceive it directly. We will need computational systems to discern the emergent controllers, and to be able to relate a network level "control element" to the set of physical manifestations of the abstract control element in real-world DNA.

Sigh. It all looked so simple in the days of 'one gene, one protein' ...

Update 4/19/08: There's an obvious metaphor for the type of emergence we see here. An example that makes the problem transparently obvious for all of us.

Imagine that I want you to meet me by the science museum at 11:30 am. I could use English or French or draw a picture. In any spoken or written language I could use an enormous variety of words and word order and still communicate my meaning.

If we think of "the meaning" in cellular biology as that which arises from interacting protein networks, then by analogy we can understand that many different gene arrangements and even several somewhat different proteins could produce similar protein network interactions.

Marvelous Gail Collins editorial on Bush's greenhouse 2025 goal

Gail Collins channels the spirit of Molly Ivins...

The Fat Bush Theory - New York Times

...Suppose that two years after taking office, George W. Bush discovered that because of the stress of his job, he had gained 40 pounds and was tipping the scales at 220.

The real-world Bush would immediately barricade himself in the White House gym, refusing all human contact or nourishment until the issue was resolved. But imagine that he regarded getting fat as seriously as he regards melting glaciers, rising oceans and drought and starvation around the planet. In that case, he would set a serious, management-type goal — of, say, an 18 percent reduction in the rate at which he was gaining weight, to be reached within the next decade...

Gail reminds us that Bush's 2002 "goal" was a voluntary 18% reduction in the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2012 (we won't achieve this). His 2008 "goal" is a voluntary 100% reduction in the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2025. This "goal" is not to achieved by “raise taxes, duplicate mandates or demand sudden and drastic emissions cuts.”

So Bush's reach goal is that the US stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at an level consistent with the complete melting of Greenland's ice cap. This goal will be achieved by technology alone. (Bush does not rule out tax reductions to support technology development.)

John McCain would be not any better.

The Economist on the food crisis

How many people live on $1 a day?

Food | The silent tsunami | Economist.com

...Roughly a billion people live on $1 a day. If, on a conservative estimate, the cost of their food rises 20% (and in some places, it has risen a lot more), 100m people could be forced back to this level, the common measure of absolute poverty. In some countries, that would undo all the gains in poverty reduction they have made during the past decade of growth...

Did you guess a billion?

In addition to the editorial, the Economist has essays on Bangladeshi and Chinese responses to food concerns. In the past the Economist has criticized China's insistence on food self-sufficiency, but they seem to have forgotten that.

They don't have any answers except the most obvious -- we need a billion in food aid quickly and stop the idiotic biofuel subsidies.

We need to a bit more creativity here ...

The infamous fake-Springsteen Vista video: we think it's kind of sweet

An internal Microsoft sales team mock rock video was leaked to the net, to general mockery and derision.

I've seen it 1.5 times, including a full sitting with my wife.

We think it's sweetly silly, though it's just musical enough to be disturbing. My toes almost started tapping, even as my teeth ached. The critics seem to think this was a serious marketing video, but they need a bit of sympathy for the Devil. It's obviously 50% self-mockery and 50% fun.

I wonder what Springsteen thought of it. The man has a sense of humor, but ...

Of course true geeks all want Microsoft to fail badly enough to crack their monopoly, but I really don't see that happening. They've got more cash than ever, they'll fix the worst parts of Vista, eventually the hardware will catch up, and Vista is far more virus resistant than XP. Unfortunately brighter days lie ahead for the sales team.

Do the sheep dogs think they are sheep?

My best explanation for the inexplicable survival of the east african plains ape is that the shepherds are keeping us around. (For mutton or for wool? The Bible is silent on that distinction.)

Shepherds, of course, make use of sheep dogs, which falsely think of themselves as more sheep than wolf.

I thought of that as I described John Halamka for a lecture I'm giving on technology for health record interoperability. From my graphic:

• "John D. Halamka, MD, MS, is Chief Information Officer of the CareGroup Health System, Chief Information Officer and Dean for Technology at Harvard Medical School, Chairman of the New England Health Electronic Data Interchange Network (NEHEN), CEO of MA-SHARE (the Regional Health Information Organization), Chair of the US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP), and a practicing Emergency Physician"
• sleeps 4-6 hours a night
• wears an RFID chip in his shoulder
• climbs ice-covered cliff faces to relax
• flies 400,000 miles a year
• tries to be nice

Sounds like a sheep dog to me. I'm sure he thinks of himself as human though.

PS. I realized after posting that I should clarify that I'm a major Halamka fan and read everything he writes. It's actually kind of nice to have "the bar" set so high that I can relinquish any competitive aspirations.

Proud to be a geek: stackoverlow.com

At moments like this, I feel an undeserved and irrational pride in being of tribe geek:

stackoverflow.com - Joel on Software

Jeff Atwood and I ...  build a programming Q&A site that's free. Free to ask questions, free to answer questions, free to read, free to index, built with plain old HTML, no fake rot13 text on the home page, no scammy google-cloaking tactics, no salespeople, no JavaScript windows dropping down in front of the answer asking for $12.95 to go away. You can register if you want to collect karma and win valuable flair that will appear next to your name, but otherwise, it's just free...

... Every week, Jeff and I talk by phone (he's in California, I'm in New York), and we're going to record those phone calls and throw them up on the web for you to listen in on, and call it a podcast. We have a lot of trouble keeping on topic, so the podcast may be interesting to you even if you don't want to hear about stackoverflow.com. The first episode is up right now. Eventually I imagine we'll figure out this newfangled "RSS" technology and you'll be able to actually subscribe and get fresh episodes delivered into your ears automatically. All in good time.

Jeff's Announcement

PS I'm still CEO of Fog Creek full time. StackOverflow.com is a joint venture between Fog Creek and Jeff Atwood. He's the full time CEO which means he's calling the shots. I'm sort of a consultant on this one.

From Jeff's description we see how inspiring 'experts-exchange' has been ...

Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.

I've followed Joel Spolsky's blog on business and software for several years, and Jeff Atwood's blog for over a year. They're both great writers and teachers with the geek compulsion to advance the world -- as well as their part of the world.

It's the bit about advancing the world that marks the noble geek. Karma counts. Fairness matters. You get and you give.

These two have millions of readers. By virtue of their considerable reputations earned through their writing, they may be able to make this work.

If it does work that will say something interesting about the power of the geek tribe, and of reputations developed entirely online.

Joel has a full-time job, but Jeff has only recently quit his programming job to work on independent projects. I wish him and stackoverlfow.com every success. At the moment the site is entirely audio oriented, so the best way to follow its development will be to subscribe to Jeff's blog.