We suck. Lessons from the American Human Development Report

We rank 42nd for life expectancy, 12th for human development. More people in prison. Crummiest educational system. For example:

BBC NEWS | Americas | US slips down development index

...If the US infant mortality rate were equal to first-ranked Sweden, more than 20,000 babies would survive beyond their first year of life...

Most powerful army though, so we could always conquer Sweden and improve our numbers. Heck, last time I looked my Canadian homeland could probably be taken by the National Guard.

Thank heavens for Russia, we're probably ahead of them.

This is a deep hole. We have a cultural problem here that will take generations to fix.

A part of the fix will be to develop a political system with two respectable alternatives. That means getting the GOP out of power completely so it can reform itself or be replaced by another, healthier, party.

Please stop using videos for documentation. Please.

Explore Google Maps is supposed to let me learn about how to edit location descriptions, add content, etc.

It's all video.

The video for adding a location is very short. It consists entirely of "We're sorry, this video is no longer available".

What's with all the #$!$ video? I admit, a brief screencast can work very well, but these take way too long to load and view. A few words would be much less trouble to prepare and update, more reliable (see above), and it would be much faster and easier to process. Not to mention that words can be indexed (hint for Google - I thought you did search?).

There's a mania now for video display. I haven't seen this noted anywhere, nor have I seen any explanation of why video has taken over. (Yeah, sure, we all think it's the fault of those dang-gummed video games.)

I'm hoping it's a silly fad, and that we'll eventually settle down to a more appropriate mixture of text and screencasts.

The view from 2000 - really, we can stop now

The K Chronicles looks forward from 2000. When you put it all together like that, it's no wonder we're tired. (PS. K did get married and he and his wife have one son.)

Even the jihadi are getting tired.

I can't imagine getting away from the Bush regime. In my bones I feel the US will elect Bush III (aka McCain). If, by a miracle, Obama does win ... well, it will be like awakening from a long nightmare.

Full text search and digital prostheses: new email, new mind

I'm preparing to do an internal corporate presentation on email management in the world of full text search (Windows Search 4.0, specifically).

It's a fun topic. I'll get to revise my Beating Email and GTD with full text search posts for one. More importantly, I get to think about how the purpose of my email has changed.

It used to be I sent email to the person on the To: line, and maybe to a small, carefully selected, group on the CC line.

That's still true, but there's a new recipient for every email -- my future self. The message is an encapsulated bit of knowledge about people, time, subject, body and, sometimes, tags. The subject line describes the message and tasks for my recipients, but it also supports future retrieval and interpretation.

I've been doing this for years now, and I'm getting better at writing for the current and future audiences. I put in a small amount of extra context -- maybe not necessary for the moment, but invaluable for far future interpretation. Every subject line is considered in terms of future selection. "Tomorrow" becomes a specific date, keywords are worked into the description, I clean up mail threads to make them more useful on retrieval, I make subject lines unique. Every month I add a new tweak of one kind or another.

So now my email is still a message, but it's also a post into multi-GB knowledge base. It's becoming a core part of my memory.

That's where the curious bit happens. I said I've been doing this for a while.

It's changing the way my mind works. A lot of what used to reside in my head now lives only in the repository. My head is full of pointers, references, retrieval strategies, tags and fragments, but it's not so solid as it was. When I have the repository I have a far better memory than I've ever had, but when I don't have it I feel partly disabled.

Maybe I'm more susceptible to this than most -- I've always had an associative graph memory rather than a structured hierarchy. I suspect I'm not alone in my increasing reliance on digital prostheses however.

New abilities, but also new dependencies.

Interesting.

PS. Thanks to Jon U for stimulating my thoughts on this topic.

A critique of Congress - and a defense

On the one hand, I thought the 9% approval rating for Congress was absurd. The Democratic Senate has blocked a lot of harm, and started the multi-decade cleanup that may continue if Obama is elected. Since the Dems need some GOP support to get by filibusters and a Bush veto, the scope for action is necessarily limited.

On the other hand, this critique is interesting ...

Congressional Do's and Don't Do's | Britannica Blog

A recent poll of Americans turned up the fact that just nine percent approve of the job the present Congress has been doing...

I consulted the online calendar of the House of Representatives for the day I write this, Friday, July 11, and found that the House was in recess. They’ll be back to work on Monday, they promise, though not until 12:30 in the afternoon. The day before, it seems that the bulk of the day was spent discussing the creation of a new historic trail commemorating something from the Revolutionary War. A bit of time was given over to congratulating NASA for some anniversary, and some more time to something to do with flood insurance. Heady and very patriotic stuff, to be sure.

Over in the Senate, David Vitter – he whose phone number somehow got into the hands of the so-called “D.C. Madame” – and Larry Craig – he of the unfortunate “wide stance” in men’s rooms – are cosponsoring a “Marriage Protection Amendment” to the Constitution. Mere ridicule fails before such gall. I doubt that even that master of political shiv work, Mort Sahl, could have adequately satirized these two buffoons...

... Now, it’s unfair, I know, to criticize on the basis of one day’s record of floor proceedings in the House. There are committee hearings – on major league baseball, for example – and staff work and constituent assistance and such things going on in the background. And fund-raising, Lord knows. My local newspaper carries a report on the recent activities of our congresspersons which can be summarized thus: No sweat.

So let’s go to the tape:

• Health care: Nothing
• Social Security: Nada
• Energy policy: Zip
• Immigration: Bupkes
• Earmarks: You kidding?

It could be argued that we the citizenry are actually better off for congressional inaction. This might well be true but for the fact that inaction now simply leaves in place the bad policies already on the books. Having mandated that gasoline contain a certain proportion of ethanol, for example, certainly counts as a stab at an energy policy, while forbidding the import of cheap sugar-based ethanol in favor of the domestic kind, which drives up the price of corn and myriad other corn-based food and non-food products, counts as reelection-inspired stupid policy.

Know what Congress is really good at? Creating federal crimes...

It's an interesting list of inactive topics. Here's my take at why nothing can happen, and as usual the fault is not Congress. In fact, it's not even all the GOP's fault. The fault lies in us:

• Health care: Dems can't override a Bush veto. So nothing can happen here. Real reform will either increase taxes or redistribute costs among health care consumers, so it can only be done at the start of year one of a 2nd Obama term. (Seriously, real reform is at least that far away. America is not ready for how much this will hurt. The fault is ours.)
  
• Social Security: Social security needs important tweaks, not an overhaul. Health care is the problem. The author has bought into Bush propaganda. Invest in dementia prevention research.
  
• Energy policy: The Bush problem, again. This could improve in year one of a first Obama term.
  
• Immigration: Too close to an election, and we need much more national discussion. This will get addressed after the election, no matter who wins.
• Earmarks: Voters love them. We're the problem, not Congress.
  

Schneier: The Chinese Hacker Explained

[via James Fallows]

One of the disadvantages of time spent with very good science fiction writers is a persistent sense of deja-vu. I feel I read this story in Gibson's Neuromancer 24 years ago [1]:

My Take : Discovery Channel - Bruce Schneier

... These hacker groups seem not to be working for the Chinese government. They don't seem to be coordinated by the Chinese military. They're basically young, male, patriotic Chinese citizens, trying to demonstrate that they're just as good as everyone else. As well as the American networks the media likes to talk about, their targets also include pro-Tibet, pro-Taiwan, Falun Gong and pro-Uyghur sites.

The hackers are in this for two reasons: fame and glory, and an attempt to make a living. The fame and glory comes from their nationalistic goals. Some of these hackers are heroes in China. They're upholding the country's honor against both anti-Chinese forces like the pro-Tibet movement and larger forces like the United States.

And the money comes from several sources. The groups sell owned computers, malware services, and data they steal on the black market. They sell hacker tools and videos to others wanting to play. They even sell T-shirts, hats and other merchandise on their Web sites.

This is not to say that the Chinese military ignores the hacker groups within their country. Certainly the Chinese government knows the leaders of the hacker movement and chooses to look the other way. They probably buy stolen intelligence from these hackers. They probably recruit for their own organizations from this self-selecting pool of experienced hacking experts. They certainly learn from the hackers...

Essential reading. Schneier is a fellow Minnesotan, btw.

Mercifully, these young men don't have Macs.

[1] BTW, as Gibson points out, there are no cell phones in Neuromancer -- or Idoru for that matter. It's very hard to write predictive near future science fiction. Of course in Heinlein's "Citizen of the Galaxy", which was really science fantasy/space opera, computer output is on paper strips ...

Google's development handicap: worldwide support

I get frustrated because of things like Google's broken Outlook synchronization, or their non-existent task/calendar integration, or a dozen other things I'd like to see them do with gCal and, even more, with Google Apps.

What do they do with their time and money?

Well, among other things, they deal with the consequences of a worldwide customer base:

The official update feed from the Google Apps team: Google Calendar adds support for 8 new languages

.... Google Calendar now supports Google Calendar now supports US English, UK English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Russian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Hindi, Indonesian, Korean, Japanese, Thai, Filipino/Tagalog, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Turkish, Hungarian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Latvian, Romanian, Lithuanian, Slovenian and Polish...

Language support is feature 0 for most users (excluding the Dutch, who all speak and write six languages from birth). On the other hand, a port to Chinese doesn't get my Outlook 2003 sync working.

Obviously, Google needs to do this work. A port to Chinese is a thousand times more important in terms of human value and Google's future than fixing Outlook Calendar sync.

It is interesting though, to consider the consequences of having a worldwide support task. It suggests new features will be deployed with increasing care and deliberation - no matter how much development money is available. Software development does not scale linearly with resources, as Microsoft has amply shown. At some point a extra billion dollars buys only a small increment in functional improvement.

I wonder if Google's global burden will open opportunities for less constrained competitors...

The rights of non-man

A mildly incoherent essay appeared in the NYT recently. The topic was the relative rights of different classes of human people, and the extension of some of those rights to non-human people.

First some excerpts that are more coherent than the original, then some history of my own ...

Ideas and Trends - When Human Rights Extend to Nonhumans - NYTimes.com

... the environment committee of the Spanish Parliament last month to grant limited rights to our closest biological relatives, the great apes — chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans.

The committee would bind Spain to the principles of the Great Ape Project, which points to apes’ human qualities, including the ability to feel fear and happiness, create tools, use languages, remember the past and plan the future...

If the bill passes — the news agency Reuters predicts it will — it would become illegal in Spain to kill apes except in self-defense. Torture, including in medical experiments, and arbitrary imprisonment, including for circuses or films, would be forbidden.

The 300 apes in Spanish zoos would not be freed, but better conditions would be mandated...

... Mr. Singer ... left out lesser apes like gibbons because scientific evidence of human qualities is weaker, and he demanded only rights that he felt all humans were usually offered, such as freedom from torture — rather than, say, rights to education or medical care.

... even in democracies, the law accords diminished rights to many humans: children, prisoners, the insane, the senile. Teenagers may not vote, philosophers who slip into dementia may be lashed to their beds, courts can order surgery or force-feeding.

Spain does not envision endowing apes with all rights: to drive, to bear arms and so on. Rather, their status would be akin to that of children.

... Spain’s Catholic bishops attacked the vote as undermining a divine will that placed humans above animals. One said such thinking led to abortion, euthanasia and ethnic cleansing...

If we're still around fifty years from now, this will be an obscure event on a history exam, with the context of "of course this is obvious".

It's a more than mildly interesting question.

Eons ago I wrote an ambitious essay for a philosophy class; I attempted to create a species-neutral mechanism for assigning rights and privileges. Every scheme I came up with, and those I've read since, had uncomfortable consequences. It wasn't merely that one ended up giving lesser rights to my species than to better behaved robots and aliens, the rights of many impaired humans overlapped with not only apes, but also cats, dogs and squirrels.

In a later medical school essay I accepted the inevitable, and wrote that all ethical systems are merely post-hoc explanatory frameworks for enforcing and extending biologically and culturally evolved mores. The species-specific assignment of rights then is not a challenge to reason, it's merely politics.

Still. Many things that were once accepted mores are now despised. Even the homophobia of my youthful culture is passing into the night.

We know the road we're going down. If our civilization survives, sometime in the next century we'll grow our protein from tissue cultures, not from animals.

Franklin quote: new to me

Lessons in Love, by Way of Economics - NYTimes.com: "Ben Franklin summed it up well. In times of stress, the three best things to have are an old dog, an old wife and ready money."

Emily laughed, so maybe it's safe to post.

Unintended consequences: medication co-pays and combination therapy

In the course of a board review program I've been reviewing ten years of medication development ...

Gordon's Notes: Family Medicine Board Review from the AAFP, ABFM and free - with podcasts

... I've long had an information-geek's admiration for the printed version of Monthly Prescribing Reference. Despite its evil ad-funded roots, there's a real genius to the density and layout of the content, refined by generations of customer feedback. It also has the virtue (and sin) of being always topical and exceedingly brief.

So I started my review by reading this cover to cover. Each time I come across a medication that's new to me, or a familiar one that unlocks a domain of forgotten knowledge, I add it to my core med review sheet. This sheet is also an interesting overview of what's changed in medicine over the past decade. There was more activity in the treatment of Parkinson's Disease, for example, than I would have guessed...

Other than observing the desperate attempts to find something Tumor Necrosis Factor inhibitors are good for, I was struck by the explosion of combination meds.

What explains this? Is it patient demand? Is it pharma desperation due to a shrinking development pipeline?

It was Emily who suggested a motivation that could explain the development all by itself.

Medication co-pays.

The most common co-pay schemes strongly incent patients to minimize the number of their chronic prescriptions, with much less incentive to minimize the cost of prescriptions. On the other hand, combination meds are very profitable for pharmaceutical companies.

I suspect the payors who designed co-pay schemes didn't have have these outcomes in mind.

Delaying the inevitable onset of Alzheimer's: exercise is the new best hope

I really didn't believe that exercise had any real effect on the progression of Alzheimer's.

I assumed it was a spurious correlation. Maybe rapidly progressive Alzheimer's has a very early effect on the enjoyment of exercise, for example.

The studies keep coming though. This one, for example:

BBC NEWS | Health | Exercise 'slows down Alzheimer's'

... While there was no relationship between brain size and exercise in people tested who did not have Alzheimer's, Dr Burns said the four-fold difference in those who did was evidence that exercise might help.

He said: 'People with early Alzheimer's disease may be able to preserve their brain function for a longer period of time by exercising regularly and potentially reducing the amount of brain volume lost.

'Evidence shows decreasing brain volume is tied to poorer cognitive performance, so preserving more brain volume may translate into better cognitive performance.'...

Hmmphh. Still not a randomized study, so it's not very persuasive. These associative studies are more wrong than right.

What gives me more hope, are the animal model studies (emphasis mine):

... To directly test the possibility that exercise (in the form of voluntary running) may reduce the cognitive decline and brain pathology that characterizes AD, the study utilized a transgenic mouse model of AD rather than normal mice. The transgenic mice begin to develop AD-like amyloid plaques at around 3 months of age. Initially, young mice (6 weeks or 1 month of age) were placed in cages with or without running wheels for periods of either 1 month or 5 months, respectively. Mice with access to running wheels had the opportunity to exercise any time, while those without the wheels were classified as “sedentary.”

On 6 consecutive days after the exercise phase, the researchers placed each mouse in a Morris water maze to examine how fast it could learn the location of a hidden platform and how long it retained this information ... the mice that used the running wheels for 5 months took less time than the sedentary animals to find the escape platform. The exercised mice acquired maximal performance after only 2 days on the task, while it took more than 4 days for the sedentary mice to reach that same level of performance...

Still voluntary exercise. I'd have preferred they forced the mice to exercise, say a treadmill that dumps the non-runners into water.

So mark me down as cautiously optimistic, though very puzzled about mechanism.

At present I'll grant a 40% probability that exercise will really slow the inevitable [1] onset of Alzheimer's -- presuming the exercise isn't associated with head injury risk. (So my inline skating hobby is not a preventive measure.)

Even at a 40% 'might help' that's a much higher protective probability than anything else I've heard of other than avoiding head injury [2].

Since we really do need to work until 70, we can't be cognitively impaired before then. That means we need to delay the normal dementing process by at least ten years. It's time to dust off that old Nordic Track ...

[1] Live long enough, you get Alzheimer's -- along with vascular dementia. Genetics, head injury and (perhaps) exercise only determine the speed of decline.
[2] I classify the modern enthusiasm for live combat right up there with the 1970s enthusiasm for snorting coke.

iPhone 2.0 development: looks like a death march ...

iPhone 1.0 development must have been insane, but I'm guessing iPhone 2.0 development was a classic development death march.

We can gather that from the things that were left out:

• cut, copy, paste: Apple has now admitted they wanted to put this in, so the omission must have been a desperate decision
• tasks: If they couldn't add tasks, then they were beyond cutting features and deep into slashing organs.
  

More hints from early users (emphasis mine):

Entirely Random Notes On iPhone 2.0 - Inside iPhone Blog: "

... There appear to be crashing bugs with both many third party applications themselves, as well as the OS itself. Prior to updating to 2.0, I can't recall the last time my iPhone reset. I've seen it a half dozen times already so far, however.

Searching in Contacts is nice. However, I find I still generally just scroll for the contact, and the search doesn't look inside each contact, just at the name...

Search only looks at contact names. Wow. It must have been really, really, ugly in Cupertino over the past few months.

I'm feeling sympathy for the iPhone development team. They must be toast.

It's going to take more than a few months to get things patched up. Corporate customers are going to want to hold off on significant deployments until next year.

Britain leads on the post-oil economy - and positive feedback loop on corn prices

Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown is persuaded that we're entering the post-oil world.

The Oil Drum includes his speech and a summary of key points:

The Oil Drum | The post-oil energy economies of the future - by Gordon Brown:

* Expansion of nuclear
* Expansion of renewables, possibly including Severn barrage
* Discussion of solar energy with Mediterranean states
* Tax breaks for energy efficiency measures
* Electric vehicles are placed on the agenda

There's no reference, however, to a Carbon Tax or Carbon permit trading; this is speech about energy, not global climate change.

That's one heck of an omission. We have vast reserves of coal and tar sands to burn; if we switch to electric cars without a massive carbon tax on coal we're slitting our throats.

So this is impressive because of what it says about our energy future, but it's only the easy part of the policy debate.

In a related vein, isn't there a positive feedback loop emerging from the use of corn to produce energy? Biofuel corn is an energy intensive crop with a minimally positive return on energy inputs, so, after other costs are accounted, isn't it as though we're burning 10 barrels or oil to create nine barrels of oil? This can only happen because of twisted bipartisan governmental subsidies, but it means the price of corn will keep spiraling upwards as long as the subsidies last.

At some point the corn biofuel program will then consume the entire economic output of the US. Hmm. Maybe China will support it?

Since we get the government we deserve, what does that say about how bad we Americans have been?

Update 7/16/08: Great comment pointing out that Gordon Brown doesn't need to speak about Carbon credit trading since his listeners know the UK and EU have a fully operational program. I knew that, so this reminds me how tricky it is to interpret international statements -- there's always context I might know but haven't really integrated.

In the Twins, the cops are bike savvy

(via Ride Boldly)

Maybe it's the time on bike patrol, but Twin City police are pretty savvy about bicycles. This is from a press release aimed largely at drivers -- who are recently seeing a lot more bikes on the street.

For example:

Roadguy -- Bikes vs. cars: Here’s what the police say:

....MYTH: Bikes must use the street.
FACT: Cyclists may ride on sidewalks except in business districts or where posted. Studies have shown that it is often safer to ride on the street.

MYTH: Bikes and pedestrians don’t mix.
FACT: It’s easy for cyclists and pedestrians to share trails and sidewalks when everyone is respectful. Cyclists should slow down when passing pedestrians. Bicyclists, be sure to give a polite warning and pass on the left with as much clearance as possible. Pedestrians should stay or move to the right when being passed or use a designated pedestrian path when available...

I didn't realize it was legal in the Twins to ride on the sidewalk. As an adult bicyclist I personally don't do that, but I do prefer that my younger children use the sidewalk. They've learned to stop their bikes and let pedestrians pass, and to be very careful about passing. It's definitely a crowded world compromise.

In terms of "polite warnings" I found, years ago on mixed use trails, that the best option is a soft tinkling bell from about 50 feet away. Go slow, ring a few times, and it seems almost peaceful. Spoken announcements, especially from a male voice, are disturbing to most pedestrians.

The Twins are a great place to live.

Investments: 1999 to 2008. Not quite what we expected.

Back in the 90s we thought of ourselves as conservative investors.

We didn't buy that NASDAQ blarney, when prices went crazy we bought less but held our index funds. We figured we'd earn 7% or so a year over a twenty year period, and maybe we might even retire.

One day. Maybe.

Fidelity still talks about that 7% a year number in their marketing materials. It's good for a bitter laugh, but really the humor is wearing thin.

Here's what the S&P looks like from 1999 to 2008 - an era largely controlled by the GOP.

This Yahoo! Finance Charts graph doesn't show losses due to fees and taxes and gains due to dividends, but it gives the general sense of how the market has done:

Click for a larger view, but you can probably see the story. It's been quite a ride, but on average pretty flatline for about 9 years. That's flatline when you don't consider inflation of course.

The trend is likely to continue downwards for a while, so we'll be looking at a flatline decade.

It used to be assumed that index funds held for at least 10 years were a pretty safe investment, but let's take a look at the longer view, again you can click for a magnified view. (Yahoo Charts are a real gem):

Ok, so things got a bit ... stimulating from about 1980 to 1995. No wonder I grew up thinking a 7% return was reasonable, even allowing for the madness of the late 90s.

Now let's drill down a bit at 1968 to 1978 -- including a gap in Yahoo's data. On this scale it's almost as volatile as 2000-2008, but over that decade things are flat to negative. Since inflation in those days ran at 8-12% the real returns were probably much worse than what we see here even after adjusting for higher dividend payments.

Stocks sucked in the 70s.


So we see that the "stocks are the safest investment" over a decade all depends on which decade you're talking about. Really, the long term safe return period is more over fifty years than ten years. So that means by the time a physician gets real income at age 30, they're already too old to bet on a 50 year outcome.

Our current retirement plans are to take up smoking, hang gliding, base jumping and heroin at age 65.

Thank you GOP. You've sure done wonders for us.