...Of Cabbages and Kings

Patent Troll Forgets Pearl Harbor

2011-06-14T14:53:00.000-04:00

Just sitting here, quietly leaching off the genius of others--After the attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese admiral famously said that all Japan had done was “awaken a sleeping giant.”

The same may bersaid of a patent holding company named Lodsys, which has triggered a war with Apple and its developers. At stake is a threat to innovation for Apple’s mobile operating system and hugely profitable App Store crashing. Google also has been threatened, and Microsoft could be next.

Lodsys may have made a second mistake: it let lawyers make decisions instead of just giving advice. Now it is a war it cannot afford to lose and the giants stirreth.

Lodsys is the kind of company the technology industry loathes. Labelling them patent trolls. They invent nothing, innovate nothing and make all their profit from license fees for patents royalties or the result of law suits.

On Friday, the 13^th of last month, Lodsys sent Fedex letters to more than a dozen developers for Apple’s IOS, demanding royalties on a patent it owned for what are called APIs, the software that lets you upgrade or pay for software on your iPhone. They demanded 0.575 percent of sales going back to 2009 and future sales to 2023, when the patent expires.

The patent in question, No 7222078, “Methods and systems for gathering information from units of a commodity,” was invented by Massachusetts inventor Daniel H. Abelow in 2003 who sold it a year later to Intellectual Ventures, a Seattle holding company started by former Microsoft executives.

IV promised, when it was formed, it would not sue developers over patents because, after all, that would stifle competition. According to Julie Samuels of the Electronics Frontier Foundation, they have already broken that promise at least once. More intriguingly, they apparently set up “stand-alone” companies that do sue developers. Lodsys is believed to be one.

Apple, Google and Microsoft purchased blanket licenses for the patent with VI, and Apple insisted that all its developers use the API to post applications for the mobile operating system. The patent has since been sold twice, finally to Lodsys. Think mortgages.

Two weeks after hitting Apple developers, several Android developers received similar letters.

The developers screamed at Apple to protect them, even threatening a boycott.

“If Lodsys is successful, a wave of others, smelling blood in the water, will converge in a feeding frenzy of half-point licensing fees,” said developer Mike Lee, who organized the boycott. “Every week developers will have to deal with new players starting ventures on their backs…. Innovation will stagnate, and the whole industry would probably move to Europe, where patent law is not insane.”

Moreover, there’s the question of what lawyers call burden, which also could discourage companies from working for Apple or Google.

Samuels said responsible developers go to a lawyer and ask them to make sure they weren’t violating someone’s patent, a freedom to operate opinion. That lawyer would probably does not bother to look at technologies Apple supplied assuming Apple did its homework. Now the greater burden and cost is on the developers’ backs.

On May 23, Apple’s prodigious legal staff, given little choice, responded something like the Judean People’s Liberation Front in Monty Python’s “Life of Bryan” --a long letter protesting Lodsys’s actions. It was, to be fair, a cease-and-desist letter to Lodsys, claiming the blanket license covered the developers.

To everyone’s surprise, Lodsys, who seemed genuinely offended at a being called a “troll” and was being drowned in vituperative emails and blog comments (including death threats), found itself in a position were it could not back down. It said in its blog if it did not pursue the matter it would lose all its legal rights, its raison d’être.

So they started suing developers.

(This is not an isolated case. A company called Macrosolve is notorious in the industry for suing first and then writing letters. They have targeted not only Apple but Blackberry and Android apps in a board patent that covers all Internet forms.)

What happened to Lodsys next is different. The little guys fought back, or at least one did. ForeSee Results, a company that sells software for Web surveys went to court in Chicago asking for a declaratory judgement invalidating Lodsys’s four patents.

Mike Wokasch, a patent lawyer in Madison, WI, said invalidating patents is tough but ForeSee’s action has another aspect to it. “What ForeSee Results is doing is essentially entering into patent litigation. It has the same potential costs as you might expect with one huge advantage: it’s not in East Texas.”

East Texas is where law suits against large corporations go to die.

Then Apple jumped back in, this time for real, also asking for a declaratory judgement invalidatiing the patents in Texas.

Lodsys then went ballistic, filing the suits it threatened in the letter, whereapon several other companies, who rely on the developers, including The New York Times Co. also filed suits challenging the patents.

Patent trolls exist because they know fighting them is a lot more expensive then simply paying them off. Most developers are single guys or a small company that really can't afford to fight back. it can cost upwards to $1 million to fight a patent suit.

Now they are up against companies that can take that money out of the petty cash drawer and if they lose, they are toast.

The upshot is that a lot of lawyers will have a lot of billable hours. Remember Pearl Harbor.

Whatever happened to the Wired City?

2011-04-28T18:03:00.000-04:00

OMG, We're stuck with Comcast--Ten years ago, more than 200 municipalities in America dreamed of the Wired City where you could get broadband internet service anywhere, inthe libraries, schools, on a park bench, sitting in your car. Parking meters would be wired, as would police and ambulances and firetrucks. Ten years later very few municipal WiFi services exist.

The Wired City was a dream and it would bring the internet to even those who could not afford it. Best of all, you didn’t have to deal with Verizon or Comcast, which alone would be reason to celebrate. And cities wouldn’t have to go through the expense of digging ditches or stringing cables to each building or home.

The dream ran into economics and politics. Mostly, however, it ran into a simple technologic problem. You can’t wire a city with WiFi. Wrong technology.

The dream was glorious, and cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, and even technology savvy San Francisco, fell for it. Philly and several other cities even found a corporate ally, Earthlink, and hot spots were even begun. But two or three years later, the plans were abandoned. Earthlink ran like hell and the cities acknowledged it wasn’t going to work. By last March, when the Federal Communication Commission released Connecting American, the National Broadband Plan, WiFi was mentioned on only a few pages. We had moved on.

If you wanted WiFi, you probably needed to head to a Starbucks. You can do a building, an office, an airport, even a campus. You cannot do a city.

One of the first problems was predictable. The cable companies, especially Time-Warner and Comcast went berserk, complaining of unfair competition. They often had monopolies in cities and were not happy about having to give up any shadow of the space to someone who would operate as a non-profit. They lobbied states to ban municipality owned systems and succeeded in many. The battle now is still being battled in North Carolina.

But the technology was its own worse enemy.

What you send from a transmitter doesn’t always match what you get at the receiver. Free-space propagation means that a signal strength degrades inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the two. Even if nothing interferes, the signal will degrade.
The interference in a city is massive. Every wall, car, piece of furniture, tree, window that comes between the transmitter and receiver will reflect, diffract and scatter the signal. So does every other radio signal.
WiFi is limited to two broadcast bands and they have to share the space with other electronic devices. Since none of these devices have to be licensed, anyone can turn one on and screw up a WiFi network.
The FCC limits power to 1 watt, not nearly powerful enough to overcome the obstacles.
The signal frequencies are too high. The lower the frequency the better a system’s ability to cope with interference.WiFi operates at 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz; FM radio, which can penetrate walls and cars, operates between 30 MHz-300 MHz.
All the above means you have to have a lot of installations and someone has to install them, climbing on trees and poles, negotiating with landlords, drilling holes, running cables in interiors.

Actually, there are technologies that would work, including 3G and 4G telephony. That won’t help laptops equipped with WiFi or other computers, so that remedy is not terribly useful.

For now, the Wired City will have to be limited to specific areas. And some of us still have to tray to get a live human being at Comcast or Verizon.

“Your call is important to us. Now sit there and wait.”

Climate change, forest fires, and cultural collateral damage

2011-01-06T11:56:00.000-05:00

Carmel Forest in better days

The price of climate change isn’t just high temperatures and rising seas. It is cultural, political, economic and philosophical. Climate change has collateral damage.

In December, the worst forest fire in Israel’s history destroyed 12,000 acres (4,800 hectares) of forest. The fire did not just destroy trees; it destroyed one of the philosophical underpinnings of the Jewish state, costs millions of dollars, dozens of lives and could even contribute to bringing down a government.

The fires should not have been a surprise. In 2001, Israeli scientists predicted that the changing climate would eventually lead to heat waves, drought, a change in rain patterns and eventually forest fires. All that turned out to be true. Guy Pe’er, a co-author of Israeli’s National Report on Climate Change, said what happened in Carmel was “a taste of the future.”

The fire roared through the mountains in the northern part of the country, south of the port city of Haifa, an area about 1,500 feet (500 meters) above sea level, which draws thousands of tourists because of its exceptional beauty in a region more famous for desert. Something like 5 million trees were destroyed. Forty-three people died, many of them burned to death in a trapped bus.

In the report almost a decade ago, Pe’er and others said that if temperatures in the area rose by as little as 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7) Fahrenheit, the desert would expand northwards by several hundred miles. But at the rate temperatures were rising, the temperatures would be higher than that by century’s end. This would essentially put an end to Israel’s Mediterranean climate.

This year, the rains did not come. Carmel suffered from eight months of drought and unusually high temperatures, hovering around 96 degrees Fahrenheit (30 C). It was prime forest fire weather. And Israel was totally unprepared.

Getty Images

Some background puts this into perspective. It’s not just the trees.

Israel is perhaps the only country in the world that has more trees now than it did in the beginning of the 20^th century. Trees became the symbol of the Zionist movement, reclaiming the land from the desert and the neglect of millennia. Many Jewish homes in the diaspora had little blue boxes sent by the Jewish National Fund, an organization devoted to planting trees in the Holy Land. When you had loose change, you put in the blue box. Stores in Jewish neighborhoods stocked the boxes as well. Children who went through the rite of passage of the bar or bat mitzvah often received planted trees as presents. (My family probably has a couple of dozen plantings in our name). It was a legitimate wedding gift. Millions of trees were planted, turning northern Israel green. The forests were lines of mostly pines, exceptional only in where they were, how many of them there were and how they got there. For the area they were extraordinary, and there were so many of them they actually changed the local climate.

Unfortunately, the JNF never invested any of that gift money in forest fire fighting equipment and the country itself discovered to its dismay it also had neglected fire emergencies under the theory that most of the buildings in Israel are made of stone and hence not fire prone. The fire burned itself out more than it was put out, and a country famous for sending aid to other countries suffering from natural disasters had to ask for help for itself. Even the Palestinians chipped in with engines.

The unpreparedness could cost the Interior Minister his job and the poor response of the government did little good to the precarious government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Meanwhile, the JNF is trying to collect funds to plant more trees and is running into opposition from contributors who are unhappy about what they did with the money they had, and scientists who believe the best way to restore the Carmel forests is to leave them the hell alone and let nature rebuild them. Nature is likely to do a better job.

Except for the changing climate, that is,which could make the forests of Carmel just a brief moment of verdure in the long history of that sere and benighted region.

Pizzly bears vs. grolar bears. Oh my!

2010-12-02T15:16:00.000-05:00

There's only room for one of us bears in this town--One of nature’s great environmental battles, between two of the fiercest predators on the planet, may be playing out in the arctic, and one of those predators, the polar bear, could be the loser. As sea ice melts, the bears, which rely on the ice for hunting habitats, are moving south. As the climate warms, the grizzly is moving north. They are inevitably going to meet and will compete for survival. According to researchers at UCLA, the polar bears are likely to lose. Or, maybe not.

The UCLA researchers took an unusual approach. They constructed three-dimensional computer models of the skulls of polar bears and grizzlies, and simulated the process of biting. They wanted to see how hard the two species bite and how thick are their skulls. According to Graham Slater, a post-doc in ecology and evolutionary biology and the lead researcher at UCLA in the article published in PLoS ONE, a publication of the Public Library of Science, the two species can bite equally hard, but the polar bear’s skull “is a much weaker structure.”

This is crucial, he says, because that makes the polar bear less adaptable to the more plant-rich diet they will find as they move away from the sea.

"Chewing a lot of vegetables takes quite a lot of force to grind up," Slater said. "Grizzly bears are well suited to eating these kinds of food, but the polar bear is not well suited for it. The grizzly has a much more efficient skull for eating these kinds of foods,” he said. He did not add that in any fight, the grizzly would have an advantage if it goes for the head. But is that scenario real? Few dispute that polar bears are in trouble. Of the 19 populations of polar bears, only one is growing. Five are in decline, three appear stable and there is insufficient data on seven, most of the latter in Russia. Not only are the bears having trouble hunting—their main dish is seal—but some are drowning as they try to move from one piece of ice to another. They are strong swimmers but distances are growing and more bears are being seen in the high seas, threatened by wind and waves, parts of the ocean they would normally avoid. Fewer bears survive each year and there is fear some colonies—or all of them—will become extinct.

There has been a move to put them on the endangered species list. Skeptics point out—correctly—that there is not an overwhelming amount of data upon which to draw conclusions. Scientists in the north, and the people who live with the bears have a somewhat different view of the animals than do people in say Washington or Los Angeles.

Grizzlies now have been spotted in Manitoba, where they have not been seen in years. Grizzlies have even been seen on the ice in the far north of Canada. The two species are meeting and there have been at least two reports of a hybrid bear (one parent a polar, the other a grizzly), and in one case, a second generation hybrid, meaning they can reproduce. That is a nightmare animal if ever there is one. (Will we call them “pizzly bears” or “grolar bears?” ) In fact, polar bears descended from brown bears, around 150,000 years ago. That date is important because about 44,000 years ago there was a warm period and the polar bears apparently adapted and survived.

People who are suspicious of the extinction warnings think that is a good reason to calm down about the fate of the beautiful animals. Can the bears adapt again? We will see, won't we.

Einstein, Relativity and the Wingnuts

2010-08-30T17:39:00.001-04:00

"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits." Albert Einstein -First it was evolution, then global climate change. Now it’s the Theory of Relativity and it’s iconic formula, E=mc2.

Conservative bloggers are attacking Einstein’s theories as a “liberal conspiracy,”claiming they are controversial outside of “liberal universities.” Puzzled physicists, who consider relativity to be a seminal discovery of their science, seem as unsure how to react as did biologists when first confronted with modern creationists.

While relativity has always had rejectionists--mostly anti-Semites—the new dispute draws the denial into the realm of American politics, where it doesn’t belong.

The debate became public when a conservative website, Conservapedia, posted a definition of relativity making the charge it was part of an ideological plot, and then added a list of counter examples it claims disprove the theories. The postings were picked up by the liberal blog TPMuckraker and went, in the jargon of the internet, “viral.”

Conservapedia was created by Andrew Schlafly, the 49-year-old lawyer son of Phyllis Schlafly, the antiabortion activist. He studied engineering physics from Princeton and law at Harvard, and founded Conservapedia three years ago because he felt Wikipedia, the dominant online encyclopedia and one of the most visited websites in the world, had a liberal, anti-Christian, anti-American bias. Among other things, it accepts evolution as a fact and will occasionally use British spelling.

(Schlafly did not respond to repeated attempts to interview him for this article).

Einstein, a notorious liberal, would be amused but hardly surprised.

Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton defined modern physics in 1666, with his laws of motion and energy and his description of how the planets circle the sun. His universe was beautiful, rational, deterministic. His laws still dominate how we think about the mechanics of the world. In 1905, the 26-year-old Einstein, working as a patent clerk (even brilliant physicists need a day job) in Bern, had a very good year. He published four papers, any one of which would have made him famous, but the first cinched it: the Special Theory of Relativity. The famous formula is in that paper: energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Energy, the mass of an object, and the speed of light, all seemingly disparate attributes are entwined. The mass of any object can be converted into energy, as the world subsequently found out to its horror.

Ten years later, he added gravity to space and time in the General Theory of Relativity. Every time you feel heavier when an elevator you are riding in accelerates upward or lighter going down, you are feeling effects described in the General Theory.

The theories were radical for their time. They did not contradict Newton as much as they complemented Newton. Einstein had pulled off a rare thing in science, what the historian-physicist Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm shift. There aren’t many in the history of science, and as Kuhn wrote, one sure initial reaction was disbelief, which is certainly how Einstein’s papers were first greeted.

In 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington, observing the stars around the sun during a solar eclipse. The light from the stars was deflected as it passed by the sun just as Einstein predicted. It made Einstein world famous.

(Asked what would he think if Eddington came up with a different answer, Einstein replied, “Then I would feel sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct anyway.”)

For most of the 20th century, scientists fanned out around the world to test the predictions inferred from relativity. Many--perhaps most--hoped they would be the ones to disprove Einstein. Unlike evolution, which takes millions of years to well, evolve, relativity can be proven in laboratories within minutes, and has. Einstein’s theories have been verified going back now nearly 100 years.

“There is no controversy,” says historian and physicist Michael Riordan, adjunct professor of physics at the University of California Santa Cruz. “The theory isn’t wrong, it’s incomplete and has refinements that might or might not be true.”

Andrew Schlafly

A second paradigm shift overtook Einstein, the theories of quantum mechanics, a concept Einstein never accepted. Quantum mechanics, created by a slew of physicists led by the Dane Niels Bohr, did to Einstein what Einstein did to Newton--complemented his theories. Like relativity, quantum mechanics also has passed every test.

No serious physicist doubts relativity or quantum mechanics any more than any serious biologist doubts evolution.

Which brings us to Andrew Schlafly.

Schlafly is obvious very bright. He was accepted at both Princeton and Harvard Law. He is obviously very well educated. He graduated both after a distinguished academic career.

That creates a puzzle: how could someone as bright and as well-educated produce web entries so perfectly inane.

Schlafly’s main argument appears to confuse relativity, an abstraction in physics, with relativism, a philosophical argument having nothing to do with physics. He believes that accepting relativity leads to moral and religious relativism, which is like saying growing apples leads to giraffes.

What seems to have triggered it was a 1989 Harvard Law Review article, now all over the internet, written by liberal law professor Lawrence Tribe, using relativity as a metaphor for understanding constitutional law. Tribe thanked Barack Obama in the footnotes (which isn’t surprising since Obama was then editor of the Review), hence it must be a liberal conspiracy.

Some of the statements in his relativity entries (I haven’t bothered to look at other pages) makes me wonder if he is underestimating his readership or whether he is pandering to them, knowing what he is writing is nonsense but they’ll never figure that out because he is feeding their prejudices.

For instance, Schlafly claims that “virtually no one who is taught and believes relativity continues to read the Bible,” but doesn’t say how he knows that. Has he polled them all? Are there any data to support that?” No one as educated as Schlafly can write that with a straight face. I was taught relativity and read the Bible every Saturday morning. A world famous astrophysicist in our synagogue also believes in relativity and reads the Bible. I can match Schlafly’s anecdotes with mine, and none of them prove anything. As a trained engineer from Princeton, he knows better.

He also uses examples from the Christian Bible as evidence the theories are wrong, which of course is religion, not science.

Perhaps there is something else going on.

After the physics community learned to accept Einstein’s theories, attacks continued from less reputable sources, anti-Semites, apparently upset that a Jew was credited with producing something that important. They called it “Jewish science.” Nazis proposed that Germans should do better and came up with an alternative construct, totally incoherent, called Deutsche Physik. German science didn’t recover until after World War 2.

While there is no overt anti-Semitism in the Conservapedia, the entries on relativity echo the old arguments. For instance, Schlafly writes: “The theory... is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.”

Forget for a moment that he is assuming everyone who believes in relativity is a liberal. Greg Gbur, assistant professor of physics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte points out in his blog Skulls in the Stars that if you “replace ‘liberals’ with ‘Jews’ in [that] sentence, the words might well have been written by a Nazi circa 1930s-era Germany.”

The attacks on Einstein, overtly anti-Semitic or otherwise, take two forms, and Schlafly repeats them both: that Einstein plagiarized the theory and that the theory is is known to be wrong.

All scientists base their work on that of their predecessors, “standing on the shoulders of giants,” as Newton put it. Deniers point to the work of Jules Henri Poincaré, and Hendrik Lorentz which preceded Einstein’s publication by several years. These men were superb physicists (Lorentz won a Nobel Prize) and had thought about relativity, but neither made the huge leap in imagination Einstein did, although Poincaré came close and probably did influence him.

Another claim is that the theories originated with Einstein’s first wife, the Serbian physics student, Mileva Marik. She may well have served as a sounding board, but there exists no serious evidence she made any substantive contribution. Einstein biographer Ronald Clarke wrote that Einstein didn’t think her bright enough to understand what he was working on. She was an Einstein in name only.

No scientist has had his life probed by more respected biographers and historians than Einstein, and none of them have discovered any proof that the credit for relativity is misplaced.

To prove that the theories wrong, Schlafly provides a list of about two dozen “counterexamples.” The list changes regularly so you can’t come up with a solid numberr. Some are irrelevant, confusing relativity with quantum physics; some misinterpret the science, and many are demonstrably completely wrong.

Schlafly claims that “The lack of useful devices developed based on any insights provided by the theory; no lives have been saved or helped, and the theory has not led to other useful theories and may have interfered with scientific progress.”

The sound you hear is jaws dropping.

First of all, just because nothing useful came out of the discovery of a law of nature doesn’t make the discovery wrong. Everything does not have to have a practical application. But his premise is erroneous.

Everyone who has had a PET scan in a hospital, many who have undergone radiation therapy for cancer or turned on a particle accelerator has used Special Relativity, says Riordan. If you have a GPS navigation system in your car, Einstein is guiding you. If your electricity comes from a nuclear power station, Einstein is lighting your home. That E=mc2 is wrong surely would have surprised the physicists at the Manhattan Project who used it to destroy two cities, not to mention the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki..

The GPS issue is interesting. Schlafly says a Navy research office denied the GPS satellites made use of relativity and that there is nothing about the satellites relevant to Einstein. The navy office he quotes said no such thing and scientists who programmed the satellites had to program relativity into the four clocks in each satellite or the satellites would be useless. Every physicist knows this, and I know at least one of the physicists who actually did the programming. Can Schlafly, with his Princeton engineering really degree not?

GPS satellite

Perhaps the most bizarre of Schlafly’s counterarguments involves what Einstein called “spooky action from a distance” which Schlafly uses to disprove relativity. He uses Jesus to back him up.

Start with the premise (I do) that quantum physics makes no sense at all. Einstein would agree with that sentiment. One of the foundations of relativity is that there is a cosmic speed limit--nothing can move faster than the speed of light.

In a thought experiment with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, published in 1935, he postulated that if you took a molecule containing two atoms, you could describe the two atoms with one formula. They shared twin attributes, a wave function. If you then separated the two atoms, they would still share the same wave function so that if you altered one, the other would reflect the change instantaneously even if it was now across the galaxy.

Nothing, Einstein wrote in his relativity papers, could go faster than the speed of light, so of course this is impossible. This isn’t as funny as Schrödinger’s Cat, but nonetheless proved, so Einstein believed, that quantum mechanics was nothing but solipsism.

But quantum physicists can prove that actually happens, something they call “entanglement.” Forty years after Einstein died, the French physicist Alain Aspect used a pair of entangled photons he created with lasers and proved that a change in one instantaneously changed other, speed of light be damned.

Other experiments have verified Aspect’s work. No one has the remotest idea how that works. As is usual, however, Shlafly uses that as evidence relativity is wrong. Einstein, who thought relativity was right, used it to show quantum mechanics was wrong. In fact, it proves neither. Just because we don’t understand something doesn’t make it wrong; it just makes it mysterious. And quantum mechanics doesn’t contradict relativity, it adds to it. We are just not sure how.

Which brings us to Jesus.

Shlafly quotes John 4:46-54, where Jesus, fresh from turning wine into water, cures a child in a remote geographic location. Schlafly never explains in detail (one gets the feeling he just wanted a Biblical reference to please his audience) but the book says it happened instantly, which would defy Einstein. But we doesn’t know how fast the cure happened since the kid was elsewhere and more important, if Jesus is who Schlafly thinks he is, why can’t he perform miracles? Miracles are acts that defy the law of nature.

And what the hell does that have to do with science?

Here’s where Schlafly’s rhetorical technique comes to play.

Gbur says that Schlafly uses a technique known in rhetoric as the “Gish Gallup” (named for a creationist debater who employed it), which can be defined as throw as much crap out there as possible and give the appearance you know what you are talking about and take the chance no one has the energy to dig through it all. Schlafly piles statement after statement, footnote after footnote. and even stacks impressive mathematical formulas with jargon. Some of the references refer to himself and some have nothing to do with the argument, and few deal with outside sources.

Physicists have mixed feelings about how to react. Several refused to comment for this story because they did not want to give Schlafly credibility. But Clifford Will, professor of physics at Washington University, in an email from Paris, wrote:

“The internet world is full of kooks and crackpots who put out all kinds of drivel. It is pointless to attempt to refute these people with evidence, because they don't believe in evidence.

“…People may not like relativity, but the experimental and observational evidence that supports it is so overwhelming that it is a now fact of the universe,” he wrote.

Einstein himself, who got the first word above, gets the last word:

“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

On the Ice, Watching it Melt--As Soon as the Bears Leave

2010-06-18T17:10:00.001-04:00

Barrow, Alaska--Hut 171 reeks. There has been another “septic tank” incident, common in Barrow because septic tanks have to be drained regularly and that requires both competence and luck and sometimes one or the other runs out. The tank and the toilet in hut 171 backed up for whatever reason. The mess has been cleaned up, but the aroma lingers. Where else would you put four graduate students and a non-productive journalist?

We are at the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium (BASC), the Iñupiat corporation-run science center that does research in the Artic Ocean coast in the U.S., and along with the Inupiat in Siberia, in Russia. We are several hundred miles above the Arctic Circle, 1,200 miles from the North Pole, most of it ice-covered Arctic Ocean. We have come to measure that ice. When you do science in Alaska, you often wind up in places like this--if you are lucky.

Barrow’s airport is likely the only one in the world named after victims of an air crash who were trying to land there: Wiley Post and Will Rogers, who were killed in 1935. When you fly in you are likely to come in an Alaska Airlines 737-400 Combi, unique to Alaska. The front half is cargo (no windows) and the back half, passengers, usually Eskimos or oil field workers coming or going to Prudoe Bay east of the town. A bulkhead separates the two sections. The oil workers get off at Deadhorse, the airport nearest the oil fields. The Eskimos continue on the 20 minute flight to Post-Rogers. From there many travel to their villages and settlements on snow machines or all terrain vehicles. (ATVs).

Barrow sits on the Arctic coast where the part of the Arctic Ocean called the Chukchi Sea meets the Beaufort. It has several distinctions besides really terrible weather. It is one of the two or three northernmost communities in the world, or at least northernmost communities with more than 2,000 people. It is the largest Eskimo settlement in the world, Eskimos not inclined toward settlements, and is called Ukpeagvik in Inupiak. Barrow is part of the North Slope Borough (county), the largest municipality in the world (86,000 acres with only 8,000 people, most of whom live in or around Barrow). Sixty-five percent of the population is Iñupiat Eskimo. While winter temperatures don’t actually get as cold as they get in Fairbanks, 500 miles south, the position, between the two parts of the Arctic Ocean produces fierce winds which can drive the wind-chill numbers down to 90 degrees below zero (“negative 90” to Alaskans), where any exposed skin freezes almost instantly.

Barrow is surrounded on three sides by ocean and, to the south, flat tundra. There probably isn’t a tree within 300 miles. Most of the year, the ground is covered with snow and, combined with the frozen water at the shore, the predominant colors are white and grey. You cannot tell where ground ends and water begins. In the brief summer, everything turns to and is covered by mud and the predominant color changes to brown. In mid-November, the sun goes down for three months. In mid-June it goes up for three months. That doesn’t mean it is always either dark or light; in both seasons much of the time is in a weird twilight, but winter darkness can help account for a high suicide and alcoholism rate. Barrow can be very depressing.

Permafrost underlies all of Barrow, the reason all buildings are on stilts. If you built a house directly on the ground, heat from the house would melt the permafrost and the house would sink, sag, or tilt. That’s happening in Fairbanks. Utilities in the older section of town are in heated tunnels, with all the liquids constantly in motion to keep them from freezing. The tubes are called “utilidors,” as in utility corridors. Some are elevated, and square wooden tubes on stilts cross over the ground and streets. In the newer parts of town, sewage and water are stored in outdoor tanks. The sewage, hopefully, is removed daily before it freezes. Sometimes the honey-pot men are new to the job and instead of sucking the sewage out, they blast it back into the houses, which is likely what happened in Hut 171. Water is also replenished, hopefully, on a daily basis. Most of the homes are heated with natural gas from the nearby North Slope gas fields, an advantage over most Alaskan rural communities that have to rely on stored diesel fuel in the winter.

The schools in Alaska tend to be better funded than schools elsewhere, the result of oil revenues, and the ones in Barrow are no exception. They serve as community centers as well as schools. The local high school has a swimming pool open to the community, and thanks the gift of a woman in Florida, the Barrow Whalers, the high school football team, plays football on an artificial turf field, which has to be plowed before every practice or game. Alcoholic beverages are banned, as is the case in many Eskimo communities, but it is smuggled in regularly. A Barrow policeman told me that there were several dozen police in Barrow but if they managed to stop the smuggling of alcoholic beverages, they would only need three or four. Sober Inupiats are a peaceful lot. Marijuana is abundant as it is in all of Alaska, most of it home-grown indoors where federal authorities are unlikely to find it. Local police, as elsewhere, have better things to do with their time.

Most of the population still depends on subsistence hunting to get through the year, even those men with steady jobs. It is part of the culture.

Nothing comes easy in Barrow. Like most of the towns and villages in rural Alaska (which is almost all of Alaska), there are no roads in or out of town. Indeed, Juneau, the state capital, is the only capital in America inaccessible by road. Hence, everything in Barrow that does not come from fish or marine mammals in the sea is shipped in, either by barge in the summer, or by air the rest of the time; everything from cars ($3,000 for shipping in C-130s) to cans of soup ($2.65 for Campbell’s condensed in the native-owned small supermarket). Eating out is expensive, and there are not many choices.

There are occasional land excursions into Barrow, however, one of the most dangerous journeys on the planet. A single road links Fairbanks to the oil fields, the Haul Road, technically known as the Dalton Highway. It is a two-lane, mostly gravel road used to haul equipment and supplies to Prudhoe Bay--when it is open, which is not often outside of the brief summer. When winter sets in, trucks and cars already at Prudhoe Bay, operating in convoy, will drive to Barrow. Part of the ride is on the snow-covered beach, but much of it is an ice highway over the frozen Beaufort Sea. This is not done very often, and as the climate warms, it becomes even more dangerous.

Then there are the bears. Barrow lives with polar bears. Almost no one leaves town unarmed; the bears come up to the beach in town and have even wandered into the faux-suburbs and have to be chased, usually with rifle fire. Sometimes the locals have to kill one that gets too close to people, which is perfectly legal. The bears are as dangerous as they are beautiful. On a previous visit, a guide described how a bear recently pursued his justifiably hysterical wife into the house. He chased the bear, firing shots over its head. The bears usually congregate on the snow north of town just beyond end of the road, where the Eskimos butcher the bowhead whales they harvest. The bears will spend months picking the bones clean. They will also wander down the beach into town, which is lined with houses. Visitors are warned--seriously--to watch out for the bears whenever they go near the beach. If you see one, you are instructed to walk slowly away--never, ever run.

Climate change in Barrow has so far affected the dead more than the living. The Eskimo cemetery at Barrow Point (the northern-most place on the North American mainland) now has been moved twice as the burial site is regularly flooded. The families of the deceased and buried have had to dig up their ancestors and rebury them anew, only to have to do it again when the new burial site flooded again. They will likely have to repeat the process a few more times. But the threat to the living and their children, is real. The culture and survival of the Iñupiat--and the bears--depends on the ice.

“We are the hyperboreans,” says one Inupiat elder. “We live on the ice and snow. If we don’t have the ice and snow, who are we?”

Measuring the ice is what Hajo Eicken does.

Eicken, a sea-ice geophysicist at UAF’s Geophysical Institute is part of an international project to measure the recession of sea ice in the Arctic. The term “recession” implies--correctly--that no one doubts the sea ice is receding. Aerial photos, pictures from space and measurements on the ground proved this was the case 30 years ago. There now is less sea ice than at any time in the records. How much it is receding and how, is what the international project is measuring. Eicken, a tall, thin, bearded associate professor, born and educated in northernmost Germany, is a frequent visitor to Barrow and BASC usually with his graduate students. He has three in tow this time and the goal, as usual, is to go out onto the frozen sea and plant instruments that measure both the ice and the snow on top of the ice through the season. The data is then compared to data from previous years to watch the trend. He uses what he measures to see the effects the recession has on the local, coastal environment and, in macro, the earth’s climate.

Ice plays a disproportionate role in running the Earth’s climate. It restricts the amount of energy exchanged between the ocean and the atmosphere and reduces the amount of heat suppled to the water. Ice and snow reflect the sun’s radiation, a characteristic scientists call albedo. Open water is dark and absorbs the heat. The ice and snow actually keeps the polar regions cool by reflecting sunlight, moderating global climate. When this function is damaged, the balance is tipped. Sea ice also helps keep the conveyer belt of ocean currents moving world-wide. Sea ice is essentially salt free. The salt is pushed beneath the ice as it forms. The water directly under sea ice is hence saltier than the rest of the ocean. Salt water also becomes denser as it gets colder (unlike fresh water--see floating ice bergs). Because it is heavier, the water in the Arctic sinks and the cold, heavier water flows south, toward the equator, and is replaced by warmer, lighter water coming up from the south. If that pattern is disrupted--say by a reduction in sea ice--the current system in the world’s oceans also are disrupted, completely unhinging the climate balance on the planet. If you saw the movie The Day After Tomorrow, that is the premise for a fictional end of civilization. The movie was totally ridiculous in its conclusions, but the premise was real. Melting sea ice in the Arctic can dramatically alter the climate in the rest of the world.

The ice has been shrinking for the last 20-40 years and there is nothing in the modern records to match it. Temperatures in the Arctic are the warmest they have been in 2,000 years. The thickets and oldest ice is melting a particularly bad sign. The retreat in 2007 set all records. In the ten days from August 1, 2008 until August 10, 390,000 square miles of ice disappeared. Not only is there less ice in the summer, but less ice is growing back in the winter. In the late 1980s and 1990s, changing wind patters from the north pushed thick sea ice from the Arctic Ocean into the North Atlantic, where it melted. The thinner ice that formed to replace it melts more readily in the summer, opening up the sea to increasing amounts of radiated heat. That melts more ice and energizes the cycle. Models, taken very seriously by scientists, predict an Arctic Ocean free of ice in the summer by 2040 or 2050. Now think of what that might do to ocean currents and to the weather.

It is not just in Alaska, of course. In Greenland 553 billion tons of ice melted from the Greenland ice sheet, all of it entering the Atlantic. Some 965,300 square miles of annual ice--the stuff that builds during the winter and melts in the summer--has disappeared, an area one and a half times the area of Alaska, a 50 decrease between 2007 and 2008. That now is an area of open, dark water that until recently reflected heat and is now absorbing it. The ice has half the volume of only four years ago. The legendary Northwest Passage over Canada and the Northern Sea route over Russian, once the dreams of explorers for centuries, is now open part of the year. Roald Amundson barely was able to navigate through the ice and islands of the passage to get to the Pacific in the summer of 1903. Now the passage looks like it may become a common shipping lane. This has huge geopolitical ramifications.

Once, the effects were limited to local phenomenon, such as bears and the Eskimos. Now scientists believe that the drought in the American west and the increased precipitation in parts of Europe are linked to what is happening to the ice off Barrow and the rest of the Arctic. For example, according to the University of Colorado Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, the reduction in sea ice in the Arctic Ocean reduces the severity of cold fronts that drop into the American and Canadian west. That reduces snowfall, which contributes to the drought. Agriculture and the ski industries were the first businesses to feel the effects.

BASC is the center for research in the area and has all the facilities of a modern research center, most of it coming from the wealthy Inupiat corporation. Getting funding from the National Science Foundation was sometimes problematic so BASC is cheefully independent, although it does get some NSF funds. Most of the visiting researchers are housed in quonsut huts, mostly left over from when the facilities were run by the U.S. Navy, or in cottages, like 171. Our hut had four bedrooms, a full kitchen and bathroom--and on this visit--a bad smell. Fortunately, BASC shares a large H-shaped building with Ilisagvik Community College, also Inupiat-run, which has a decent cafeteria. Alaska is the most-wired state in the U.S., and the facilities in Barrow are hooked by satellite to the Internet. The satellite dishes are pointed horizontally because of the high latitude but the facilities and all the homes in Barrow have Internet and television. Researchers at BASC are plugged in.

Eicken has six hours of daylight in which to work when he arrives in Barrow in March. Three weeks earlier, he would have had none. The sun didn’t rise until January 23, after two months hiding. Along with an armed Inupiat guard (you don’t leave Barrow without one), we leave shortly after 10:30 a.m. on three snow machines. Two of them are pulling long wooden sleds filled with gear. I stand on the back of one of the sleds, instructed to lean against any tilt to help keep the sled upright, which turns out to be the least of my worries. This position, the most exposed, is traditional for newcomers, particularly the non-productive kind. The wind-chill is negative 40. We are going to plant instruments on the ice.

What does a modern Arctic explorer wear to work? The secrets to keeping warm in temperatures cold enough to alter the molecular structure of steel (minus 20, by the way) is layers and wool.After serious consultation, I am wearing two-layered woolen thermal underwear, flannel padded jeans and Carhartt canvas and fleece snow pants, a quilted woolen shirt, a polyester liner and a Siberian-made parka, certified to negative 40. The boots are Canadian-made Sorels, also certified to 40 below, with woolen socks. Note all the wool. Cotton can kill you here because loses the ability to keep you warm once it gets wet and perspiration makes it wet. Wool does not. No artificial fabric is as good. I have a woolen balaclava and a wool and polyester neck warmer. I have three layers of gloves and an extra set hung on a cord around my neck I can plunge my hands into if they get cold. Everyone else is dressed more or less the same. Most of us have ski goggles. One serious problem: once you put the mask on--and you will put the mask on because the skin freezes at those temperatures--eye glasses fog up and the moisture instantly freezes, rendering you effectively blind. No one has yet invented a solution to that problem so you are faced with a choices of skipping the glasses, or wearing them and looking at the world through a sheet of ice. Contact lenses are the only way to go. I have none.

And speaking of problems: what does the modern explorer (male) do if he has to make a pee? If you are a male explorer over the age of 50, this is not an inconsequential consideration. The answer usually given is to turn your back to the wind and work as fast as you can. This is not easy with four layers, two zippers, and gloves. The real answer is not to worry: The air is so dry it sucks moisture out of your body and you will go all day without peeing. I found that to be true.

Defecation is out of the question.

The other thing I learned is that to do anything with your hands you almost always have to take your gloves off (mittens actually because they are more efficient in keeping your hands warm) and in that cold, it hurts quickly. Your hands are not just cold, they produce pain, an intense burning sensation followed by numbness. A few minutes in the mittens--if they are good enough mittens--will fix that, but a few minutes later, off they come again because you have to fiddle with something else, usually involving clothing. And finally, despite zippers, clasps and Velcro, the cold will find any opening between garments, including some you never suspected you had. As soon as we started bouncing over the ice I had the feeling someone had stuck a cold knife up my sleeve. I chased down the opening and snapped it shut with Velcro.

The expedition followed the road east, toward Barrow Point, running on the snow that covered the Chukchi beach. Just parallel to the end of the road, we came to a halt. Four polar bears were at the dump about 200 yards before us, a female, two cubs and what the guard thought was a young male. Perhaps the stupidest thing any sentient creature can do is get near a mother polar bear with her cubs. Bears also don’t like large groups of humans on noisy machines and were taking their time searching for snacks. (“I’m a polar bear and I’ll move when I damned well please.”) They were between us and the sea ice so we waited until they moved on, about 10 minutes. When they finally sauntered off, we resumed the trip, finally curving off the beach onto the sea. My instructions were to not only try to keep the sled upright but to turn my face away from the direction we were traveling if the wind got too bad. With the balaclava, the goggles and the parka collar, not a lot of wind got to my face and it was not unbearable. I needed to see where we were going to anticipate the bumps. I was told to keep my knees flexed to absorb the shocks and I did it successfully all but once. I wasn’t paying attention for one bump and felt the shock particularly in the place where my spine meets my neck. Eicken, who was driving the snow machine pulling my sled, could see obstacles and bumps and slowed when the ice got particularly ragged. The ice is rarely flat or smooth. There are occasional cracks, but mostly there are pressure ridges caused by the motion of the ice, in part reacting to tidal pressure and waves. Hunks, blocks and ridges glistening in the sunlight, their shadows a grey blue, were tumbled across the ice. This was “fast ice,” meaning it was fast to the coastline. The life of this ice is crucial to understanding climate changes. On top of the ice was several months’ accumulation of bone-dry snow. Snowball fights are impossible here; the snow will not form balls. It was not clear when we passed from the snow covering the beach and the snow covering the ice and water.

Eicken located the site he wanted using GPS positioning. It was a relatively flat section of ice with a pressure ridge about four feet high a couple of hundred yards to the north. The bear guard put up a tent with a gas heater, and Eicken’s team began unloading the equipment and setting up their stations.

Essentially, the UAF team was studying three things: the thickness and temperature of the snow, the thickness of the ice below the snow, and the depth of the water beneath the ice. They were setting up automatic stations that would transmit readings back to Barrow and would be able to track the data from the Internet back in Fairbanks until “melt” in the end of May. The equipment was powered by two car batteries, which like all batteries, suffer in the cold. They transmitted their condition back to shore and someone from BASC would go out and recharge or replaced them when they waned.

The main instrument was erected on a scaffold-like structure with cables leading to holes in the ice, the instruments inserted in holes bored into the ice. The cables were protected by metal coverings because Arctic foxes love to play with scientific equipment, particularly if electricity is involved. Electricity turns them on. “If we come back tomorrow, we will probably find a fox turd on the box,” one of the grad students said. Another student walked along the pressure ridge with an instrument measuring snow depth. Occasionally, a breeze would pick up and you would understand just how truly awful it could be. Soon our faces were entirely covered with frost, our eye lashes froze, and ice hung from our eyebrows. We were lucky it wasn’t much worse.

The ice was about three feet thick over twenty-two feet of Chukchi Sea water. About six inches of snow covered the ice. The snow was weird. The sound you made walking on it was a metallic hollow sound, not what you want to hear when you are standing over twenty-two feet of really cold water. We eventually got all the instruments in (I was of no use). Eicken decided to go back before the students finished the last of the instruments and I rode back on the backseat of his snow machine. I quickly decided that if I was going to die on the ice, it would be on this ride. We flew. We bounced. We tilted. We roared. I held on to two handholds behind me until I lost all feelings in the hands. I could see through my goggles (I gave up on the glasses early on) and tried to anticipate when I needed to hold on for dear life or when I just needed to keep attached to the machine. Moreover, earlier I had been in the warm-up tent adjusting my clothing and brushed my right arm against the gas heater. This melted the outer layer of my Russian parka. I didn’t notice. When I got on the snowmobile I began to stream Siberian goose feathers behind. We eventually got back to BASC and I ran into the warm equipment room, still leaving a trail of feathers. The arm was patched with duct tape, which true Alaskans will tell you, is what really holds Alaska civilization together.

The next morning we found out that a bear had knocked over the equipment and the UAF team had to go out again.

All this was when the weather was relatively good. In April, one of the graduate students was caught in a white-out which was potentially life-threatening. He had to wait until the wind died down and the powdery snow was blown away to go out again.

Eicken’s measurements are crucial to understanding what is happening in Alaska and why it affects what will happen to the rest of the world because of it.

Ice melts, Greenland pops up

2010-05-20T15:16:00.000-04:00

I wonder if you can hear it groan—Ice is heavy and one of the results of massive glaciers is that the sheer weight of the ice suppresses the land. Melt the ice and the land springs up. That is happening so fast in Greenland, Iceland and northern Norway that scientists from the University of Miami say they can actually see the land rise.

Every one knows it was happening. You can see it in some of the valleys of Alaska. Measuring the rise, however, is hard to do,. Seasonal changes, for instance, screw up the numbers. Additionally, whole sections of North America are still rebounding from the last ice age. The Miami researchers are using high precision satellite imaging from the GPS satellites, to measure the changes in the height of the landmass under northern glaciers. What makes the study, published in Nature Geoscience, unique is that they are measuring the rate of change. That rate has increased dramatically in the last 10 years, almost instantaneously in the way geologists measure time.

It’s true all over the North Atlantic region, wrote Yan Jiang and the team. In some cases the land is going up nearly an inch a year and by 2025 it could be twice as fast. Timothy Dixon, co-author, said: “What's surprising, and a bit worrisome, is that the ice is melting so fast that we can actually see the land uplift in response."

Abusing the placebo effect

2010-01-24T14:24:00.002-05:00

Take two pills and drink plenty of liquids, or you can use the pills to sweeten your coffee. Homeopathy has been around since 1796, the result of a false syllogism by one Samuel Hannemann, and it is very big in my neighborhood. A local private school’s house physician is a homeopath. Fortunately, the year my daughter went to that school she did not get sick so I didn’t have to explain to anyone why he was getting nowhere near her.

Homeopahty is the notion that symptoms of a disease can be cured by administering extremely small amounts of a substance that will produce the same symptoms in a healthy person, the “law of similars.” Two centuries of scientific study have failed to show the slightest evidence it actually works.

The fine British science writer David Bradley found an interesting letter in a rather obscure British medical journal, Trends in Pharmacological Sciences, suggesting that homeopath even fails as a placebo instigator.

What’s wrong with giving a patient a placebo? The letter, written by Edzard Ernst at the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth, argues there are two kinds of professionals who prescribe homeopathic remedies. One, the people who actually believe it works. They give it to patients and patients get better. They get better, of course because in most cases, when you are sick your body just gets better if you leave it alone, and because of the placebo effect. Ernst argues those practitioners are simply unethical.

The other kind prescribes homeopathic remedies because of the placebo effect. What does it matter how the patient gets well as long as the patient gets well. I'll give you this pill, you think it will make you better, and often it will. The logic, Ernst writes, is “ethically flawed.”

It would, almost by definition, involve deceiving patients. If we tell our patients that a homeopathic remedy is devoid of specific therapeutic effects, we cannot expect them to respond with clinical improvement. To generate a positive response, we must maximise expectations — and this can only be achieved by using deception. Not telling the truth undermines trust and is unethical. What follows is simple: the prescription of homeopathic medicines is in conflict with fundamental principles of medical ethics.

More important, of course, is that the patient might use the homeopathic remedy instead of getting scientifically based treatment, something I see around here. In the case of a life-threatening disorder, that is serious stuff. For instance, the UK organization of homeopaths has been advertising they have been successfully treating flu for two centuries. They have not.

The main argument against homeopathic remedies as useful placebos is that a physician can make use of the placebo effect without actually administering a placebo. Just tell the patient this antibiotic is an absolute wonder drug, it always works, and you have given the patient real medicine and added the benefit of a placebo. Giving homeopathic compounds may produce the placebo effect but does absolutely nothing else--except provide income for the practitioner.

By the way, Bradley has calculated that the effects of a homeopathic compound actually working--he uses a compound with less than one molecule of sulfur--is 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1 against.

The Tides of Newtok

2010-01-12T14:25:00.001-05:00

The post office at Newtok, AK. Mail comes by air several times a week. Zip code 99559.

If it costs $100 million to move 400 Eskimos, what will it cost to move Miami?--Joseph Patrick, 64, believes in retrospect, the villagers knew something was wrong back in the 1950s right after the Yup'ik moved into the new site, but it wasn’t until twenty years later they realized their world was turning upside down. Patrick is one of the Newtok elders, and if you travel to the village, the community insists you speak to them for they hold the wisdom of the place. They remember back in the day, before Newtok was doomed.

Until the 1950s, this community was located on higher ground, a place called Old Kealavic, about ten miles from the current location, where they lived in sod dwellings, half buried in the tundra. The students in the Old Kealavic community traveled to Bethel, St. Mary’s, Sitka or Anchorage for education, but in 1958, the Bureau of Indian Affairs decided that all Alaskan natives needed schools. Most of Alaska’s Eskimos and Indians found themselves settled into villages, usually beyond the state’s road system, villages built around their schools. These Yup’ik were moved from Old Kealavic to a new site. They called the new settlement Newtok. [The word Eskimo is not a pejorative in Alaska as it is in Canada and Greenland, where Inuit is preferred.]

The two men sat in a lounge in a newest Newtok school while the school’s young principle, Grant Kashatok, translated from the Yup’ik. The river then was frozen farther out, they said, and the mouth of the river, where it spilled into the sea, was colder then. Gradually it became shallower, the water became warmer and eventually the shoreline began moving further out. That means they soon found they had to travel farther to fish and hunt. Every year, it seemed, it got worse.

“We don’t have an ocean to go down to when we go hunting now,” Michael John, 71, said.
While the sea was retreating, the river was coming closer, and the permafrost beneath the town (permafrost that underlies most of Alaska) was melting right under them. They decided a decade ago, it was time to look for a place to move the settlement again.

A group of elders explored the area around the village to see if they could find a place. They preferred “old sites,” places where the Yup'ik had lived before to see if they could return, but the old sites were sinking too.

The elders had no trouble finding the sites. Because of erosion, the old bodies in the cemeteries were exposed on the surface.

☀

Access to most of the villages of the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta in western Alaska is through Bethel, a frontier town of 7,000 on the Kuskokwim River. It is a bustling if cluttered port town, the economic base for the huge delta region. The area’s hospital is here, so is the administrative center for the native corporations. Hunters and fishers use it as a base--the delta is rich in wildlife, although part of it is a wildlife preserve. Mostly Bethel is a victim of its location.

Bethel has six miles of paved road that connect to nothing. The cars have no place to go once they get to Bethel by air or barge and never get to exceed fifty miles an hour.1 Like all Alaskan communities, including parts of Anchorage and Fairbanks, the custom of dumping your junk on the lawns or in the driveways prevails. I was told the reason Alaskans rarely throw anything out is that it is so expensive to bring in and because you never know when you need a spare part. Also, there is no real place to put it. Central dumps are not universally supported, in part because the ground is usually frozen. The result is an Arctic Appalachian culture, with old cars, couches, refrigerators, snowmobiles, animal skins and bones everywhere, particularly in front or back yards.

While Bethel is served by Alaska Airlines 737s from Anchorage, flights to the villages are organized by two competing bush airlines using single-engine planes. Airport security at Bethel is a throwback to the pre-9/11 days and even ticketing is informal. The pilot meets you at the doorway, collects your ticket, escorts you to the plane, helps load the baggage (you have to tell him your weight) and helps you into the aircraft. No one gets searched.

One day in May, one of my students, Amy Chaussé, and I flew across the tundra through snow squalls at between 400 and 700 feet, a thrilling, smooth and beautiful ride in a Cessna 208. Like most bush planes, the Cessna had half its sixteen seats removed for freight, the planes being the only way of getting mail and goods to the villages until the river ice melts, which doesn’t happen until late May, early June. I got to sit in the copilot’s seat. While some of the thousands of lakes and ponds were still frozen, the tundra grass was visible everywhere with only a hem of snow in pockets and in the shallow ridges. Now and again, the ground would be obscured by another squall, but the air stayed smooth. Occasionally an airstrip and a few houses would appear, another village, and ninety-four miles from Bethel, the village of Newtok. Flying in Alaska is statistically the most dangerous aviation in the world, but this flight was a joy.

Newtok sits on the north bank of the Ninglick River, one of the countless tributaries of the mighty Yukon, one of the world’s great rivers, which runs 2,000 miles from western Canada, up through interior Alaska, past the Arctic Circle and down toward the Bering Sea, eventually spreading like a coral fan across the vast tundra. There is no one mouth to the Yukon, but hundreds of outlets through the arteries and veins of the delta and the Ninglick is one. A second tributary, the Kealavik (also called the Newtok) once ran on the east side of the town, but years ago, it cut a new path, a shortcut to the Ninglick, bypassing the village.

The weather at Newtok is not awful by interior Alaskan standards, with maximum highs in the summer at fifty-six to sixty degrees Fahrenheit, and lows in the winter at eighteen to nineteen above zero. It has gotten as warm as eighty and as cold as negative thirty-five, but those are the extremes. Newtok gets better than two feet of snow every year. Freeze-up begins in early November on the rivers, late November on the Bering Sea, fifteen miles away. The ice on the river can be six to eight feet thick. Breakup is in May. The permafrost is not uniform, which accounts for the little puddles and ponds in the tundra, but at its thickest, it can go 600 feet down.

In Yup’ik tradition, houses should be round, but in Newtok the only thing round is the light blue tank holding the diesel fuel for the generators. The shacks sit on stilts to keep them off the permafrost. Electric cables run everywhere. Wooden planks serve as walkways. There being no vehicles except snow machines and ATVs, there is no need for streets.

The people of Newtok are members of the Central Alaskan Yup’ik group who populate the central coast of Western Alaska, across the sea from their cousins in Siberia. The Yup’ik have been there for about 2,000 years, and the Newtok Yup’ik share a heritage with Yup'ik on Nelson Island across the river. Collectively, they are known as Qaluyaarmiut, the dip net people, for the way they fish. Eskimos are generally collected as language groups, not tribes, and the Yup’ik are the largest, about 20,000 souls. Their first contact with Europeans was in the 1840s, when a Russian explorer, Lt. Lavrenty Zagoskin, of the Russian America Company, came through while surveying the delta. An occasional missionary visited and converted a few Yup’iks from their animist religion since, but they were something of a moving target, nomadic most of the year. The Eskimos spent spring and summer at hunting camps following the caribou and marine mammals, and then collected in settlements to pass the winter. As late as the 1960s, they would pack their belongings on dogsleds and gather at the banks of the Ninglick. They survived then--and to less extent now--harvesting fish and mammals from the sea, particularly seals and walruses. Like most natives, they gave up dogsleds decades ago in favor of gas-driven ATVs and snow machines.

Most Yup’ik in the community that became Newtok were almost completely isolated from the rest of the world until the 1920s, in part because the nearest road is eighty miles away. Then Alaska formed the Territorial Guard (now the Alaska National Guard) and men from the community began to see more of the outside world and the isolation ended.

The exact population depends on who you ask. Officially the census says are 353 people in Newtok, but the locals say there are about a hundred more. In the spring of 2008, the number was listed by authorities at 467. According to the 2000 census, there were eighty-seven housing units with four buildings empty. There are fewer buildings now. Except for young school teachers brought in from outside, the population is entirely Yup'ik. More than half the population was not in the workforce at the time of the census, and the median household income was $32,188. Things have not changed much since. There is a health clinic--sometimes staffed by a nurse--but for anything serious people are flown to Bethel or Anchorage. Drinking water comes from a nearby lake and goes into a water treatment plant. In the winter, melted ice provides the water. There is no sewage system; Newtok is a “honey bucket” community.

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At least 180 Eskimo villages now are threatened by climate change and six of them--Shishmaref, Shaktoolik, Unalakleet, Koyukuk, Kivalina and Newtok--have only a few more years to live. In some cases, the Army Corps of Engineers has recommended Dutch-style sea walls to keep the villages from being washed away. In the case of three towns, Newtok, Kivalina and Shishmaref, the only salvation is to pick them up and move them. That is stunningly expensive and the political will to produce the money is not there. No one believes they will be the only towns that will confront this conundrum. Things are going to get much worse.

Alaska as more than 30,000 miles of coastline, and 80 percent of its population lives on the coast. The sea is rising, the storms are howling. Shishmaref and Kivalina, are getting blown away. Last year the 300 residents of Kivalina had to be evacuated because of an impending storm. Authorities were afraid the wind would knock over the diesel fuel tank and spread toxic liquid over the settlement. Newtok is victimized by both erosion and melting permafrost and living there has become untenable.

The troubles of Newtok can be seen on the wooden planking, which was fairly flat and straight when it was laid down but now dips and weaves between the buildings. By May, the predominant feature of the village is mud as the top level of soil, only inches thin above the permafrost and frozen through the winter, melts. One result of mud, the poverty and the culture, is filth. The sole exception is the new school, built in modular form ten years ago, the center of Newtok’s universe. It could be plopped in any upper-class suburban American community and be appreciated. Thanks to oil and gas royalties, many of the newer schools in Alaska are physically exceptional, often beautiful and usually well-equipped. Newtok's school is no exception, a haven in the mire. It also is jammed. In a town of around 400, there are 120 children in the school, from kindergarten to twelfth grade, all sharing the same facilities.

The school library (the only library in the village) is tiny, and the book selection odd: a great deal of fantasy and science fiction, sports books, a few classics, and several complete collections of Harry Potter. Even the shelving is idiosyncratic, with the Ultimate Baseball Book (a sport absolutely impossible to play on tundra) next to Using Maps and Globes and The Mystery of Stonehenge; a biography of every professional sports team sits next to books on teenage suicide (not irrelevant in village communities), and a history of the Crow Indians next to Robert Ballard’s book on the Titanic. Almost all the books are in English. The Yup'ik have a written language, designed for them by Moravian missionaries from Pennsylvania in the nineteenth century, but it is clumsy and archaic and in the 1960s, Irene Reed at the University of Alaska designed the newer, more modern one used now. Some of the books in the school library have the Moravian script on one side, the Reed script on the other because many of the older people predate Dr. Reed. As in most Alaskan villages, the children were forbidden to speak their native language in school but that changed years ago. The first two years of school are in Yup’ik (and the teachers Eskimo) and then they switch to English.

Like most Alaskan villages, Newtok and its school are well-connected by satellite to the rest of the world. Satellite dishes connect computers in the tribal office and the school to the Internet, and the village’s administrative offices are computerized. One schoolroom contains several dozen white Apple Macbooks.

In the schools, children are encouraged to learn a trade such as plumbing, carpentry or an electrical vocation in hopes of bringing the skill and knowledge back to the village. The school is likely the largest employer in Newtok.

Many of the people have phone service and many of the homes get a cable connection to the satellite feeds. If you ask the Newtok inhabitants what they do in their spare time, they will tell you they watch movies.

Heidi Post, a non-Eskimo school teacher from Michigan, in Newtok for the last two years, thought Newtok was “gross” and “disgusting” when she came for the first time, she told Amy Chaussé. But she stayed and is now part of the community, engaged to a young Yup’ik man. Her initial reaction is hardly unreasonable. Skinned fish hang from wooden posts on top of shack homes, floors are smeared with blood and guts from baby seals that are cut up in the middle of the small dwellings. She would try to teach her students about sanitation and cleanliness but was informed that they don’t get sick. She’s a kasaq (pronounced gussuk) which means white person, and only kasaqs get sick, she was told. That is patently untrue. Indeed, Alaska is the only state requiring children to get hepatitis B vaccine before they can enter school because of disease in honey bucket homes and towns. For all practical purposes, the Eskimo villages of America’s Alaska are the Third World. The villagers have high rates of lung and skin infections, largely because there are no sewage systems. While 99.4 percent of American homes have indoor plumbing, only two-thirds of the Alaskan villages do. It costs as much as $50,000 to add plumbing to a house because the pipes can’t be easily buried in the permafrost--yet--and even in oil-rich Alaska, that’s expensive. Moreover, the pipes are prone to freeze. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), children in these villages were hospitalized for pneumonia eleven times as often as the national average.

Children socialize in front of the school. The rate of gastrointestinal disease was not much higher, however, because there is access to clean drinking water; it was the water used to wash that carried pathogens. The school principal reminds the children to wipe their feet before they enter their own homes and urge their parents to occasionally mop the floor of their homes with bleach. Post says they don’t bother because the next day the women are preparing food again, which often involves dismembering a marine mammal.

Although there is no normal plumbing in Newtok, the faucets in the school produce water. You are told not to drink it because of E-coli, and there are water distilleries by every fountain and sink in the school. The toilets flush and the showers drain, with everything flowing to the main open sewer lagoon a few hundred feet from the school. The lagoon is largely contained by permafrost, which is, of course, melting. You can’t flush toilet paper because it will clog up the pipes. In many Eskimo communities, soiled toilet paper is put in plastic bags and thrown out with the rest of the garbage, a habit some of the people take with them if they move into the cities. The lagoon is where the village’s waste is dumped. Post says there is a huge dump for garbage that is burned a few times in the summer when it is dry but the villager’s do not go out there often, which is evident from trash from soda cans and diapers littered in the muck.
The sidewalks of NewtokThere is a central laundry facility.

The lights stay on in the school 24/7 so the pipes do not freeze and if the generator turns off it may not come on again. The school acts as hotel for visitors. For a small fee, you camp out on mattresses on the floor. Just call in advance. There is a full kitchen and food can be obtained from either of two small stores.

Post describes how the children love the school because it is so clean and she will sometimes “threaten” disobedient children with sending them home.

The school has a large budget to transport its sport teams to neighboring villages, usually by plane or by snow machines. Moving around is easier in the winter when everything is frozen solid and you can use ice roads. Traveling to other towns is how young people meet, date and get married. Post says relationships between young people within the town are discouraged. The elders will intervene if they witness a couple getting too close, she said. The elders will pull the young ones aside and tell them “No, you are brother and sister and must not date.” Post explains that “brother and sister” isn’t literal but in the Yup’ik sense, meaning the entire village is one big family (and they are most likely all blood related). Sociologists who have studied the Eskimo communities don’t believe a word of it. The winters are very long and very dark and there is not very much to do. The men of the village take turns being police, and occasionally, an Alaska State Trooper will fly in, but mostly it is a safe, peaceful town.

Post is fond of the children of Newtok and loves her job. Eskimo children, boys and girls, are irresistible, black eyes and hair and honey-colored skin, round faces that seem most natural when grinning. They are decidedly not shy around strangers. It was impossible for Chaussé or me to move anywhere in Newtok without a cloud of children surrounding us. Chaussé bought candy, which made us particularly welcome, but the children wouldn’t think of begging. They were simply enjoying having company.

The school season just ended when Chaussé and I visited, and Post was off for the summer, returning to her mother’s home with her Yup’ik fiance, George Charles. She wore an ivory carved ring on her finger. She will soon become part of the one big family in Newtok.

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The river keeps eating away at the land, creeping closer and closer to the buildings. Newtok is below sea level. The ice that normally protected the village from storms is melting, and the storms have been far more savage than the village elders remember, with winds sometimes reaching hurricane velocity.

The community center is the one building in Newtok that most reflects the village’s plight. It’s popular with teenagers and older people who play bingo at night, but the floor is buckled and wavy as the permafrost beneath it melts. During spring, you will see the locals scooping out water while playing their game. There is no playground for young kids, only the school gym. There isn’t a safe place to put a playground because the equipment will just sink in the thawing permafrost, so the youngest kids play in the gym and out in front of the school, a few yards from the sewer lagoon. The wooden houses have to be lifted or adjusted regularly to compensate for the softening ground. The community center will not get fixed.

According to Orson Smith of the University of Alaska Anchorage, the erosion at Newtok is the result of storm surges, usually caused by the wind. The winds do not have to be particularly strong, just persistent and blowing over long lengths of ocean, something called “fetch.” That wind also blows waves against the shore, in Newtok’s case, from both rivers. The convergence of the Ninglick and the Kealavik made matters worse, changing the angle of the tides. The angle of the wind is important: obviously it has to be blowing toward the land, and of course, the closer to the perpendicular, the worst the effect on the coastline. Normally, sediment is carried away from the shoreline in the winter, and the shoreline gets to rebuild in the calmer summer when the process is reversed. Because of the climate changes, however, that rebuilding does not come close to replacing what the winter washes away in coastal Alaska, Smith says. In many areas, the storms clobber the edge of frozen ground, which resists the battering, and the waves undercut cliffs and bluffs. Buildings are toppling in Shishamef as the low cliffs collapse. When permafrost melts, the land subsides, making it an easier target for the waves.

Like for much of Alaska, good data are nonexistent or ambiguous so no one knows exactly how high the water gets when the area floods, only that it has gotten much worse in the last ten years. It now floods regularly twice a year. In 2005, Newtok was completely inundated. The more erosion, the easier it is for storm surges to hit the town.

The easiest way to avoid this tidal disaster is to get out of its way, which is what the people of Newtok would love to do.

The plight of the village reached a crisis stage when the barge landing on the Ninglick was declared unsafe and Newtok could no longer get summer supplies up the river from the Bering Sea--including diesel fuel to run the generators. Now everything must be flown in and that’s expensive.

“We got suspended from Northland Services [the barge company] because we lost our barge landing,” says Stanley Tom, who has risen to be the community organizer of Newtok. “No landing whatsoever…. It eroded away. It was a solid foundation and the barge companies cannot land. This is tundra, permafrost and it’s just going to sink down. If you leave material on the beach and if there is a south wind, it’s going to erode away and fall off.”

Fortunately for Newtok, they have Tom, forty-seven, father of nine (with a grandson and adopted niece living with him). He is a master at public relations and working the bureaucracy, and almost everyone in Alaska agrees that Newtok is likely to be one of the first town moved--if any town gets moved--and it will be Tom’s victory. “I have sleepless nights,” he says. “After the work, I’m like thinking. I really want my village to have a good clean village.”

Besides running his family’s small general store, Tom is the town’s administrator. He has acquired an astounding collection of documents in his battle, some outgoing to state and federal officials, and some incoming from the same. They cram filing cabinets and computer disks in his offices.

He is not a native to Newtok. He was born in the nearby village of Tununak, but his family traveled between the two villages, and he finally settled in Newtok as a teenager. He was named mayor at the age of twenty-four and has been reasonably in control of the village since then, even after the elders dissolved the village government and decided to govern by traditional rules.

Everyone agrees that Newtok is lost. Tom says that creates two issues. One, where the town should go, and two, and the more difficult question, is who is going to pay for the move. The first question has probably been answered; the second question isn’t close to an answer because no one wants to pay for it.

At first, the elders could not agree among six possible sites. That got whittled down to three by authorities but Tom and the villagers selected a fourth, nine miles away and across the river on Nelson Island. The site has the advantage of being on the south bank of the river, away from the thrust of the erosion. The new village will be called Mertarvik. Other Yup’ik who already live on the island don’t object to their neighbors moving closer.

The state Department of Transportation, is building a barge landing near Mertarvik, Tom says. All the other sites were too rocky and too high. The fact they can put the landing there is a de facto concession for the location, he says. The reconnaissance for the new runway has been completed and a well for water has been drilled.

“We are moving. There is no way of stopping us,” he says. “This winter they are going to bring in equipment to build roads near a quarry so they can test the rocks.”

© Text and photos [except for the Yup''ik girl] by Joel N. Shurkin, 2009. All rights reserved.
© Photo of Yup'ik girl by Amy Chassé, 2009. All rights reserved.

BREAKING NEWS--Apple car will be called the iMO

2008-12-15T16:01:00.006-05:00

What would happen if Steve Jobs took over a car company?--It might be called the iMo.

One of the things Congress might consider if it agrees to help bail out the Big Three automakers is that at least one of them be run by Apple’s Steve Jobs.

I wish that was my idea, but it isn’t. Robert X. Cringely, the pseudonym for one of the best technology writers in the business (I’ll never reveal who he is. Never!) came up with the idea in his PBS column here, and it is beautiful to behold. The name iMo, is a bit of imagination from a British designer who is now in a lot of trouble.

Cringely’s point is that the car companies are stuck in the past and shackled with conventional wisdom. No one ever accused Steve Jobs of either. If Jobs transformed say GM the same way he transformed Apple, it would be a whole new paradigm.

And if you want to know more about it, click here. More below

When Jobs returned to Apple from exile in 1997, the company was a basket case, even worse than General Motors. Michael Dell, of the eponymous computer company, suggested the only rational thing Jobs could do was liquidate Apple and return the money to the stockholders. Now, Apple is vastly more valuable than Dell, has transformed the modern world with products that everyone else, including Dell, is working very hard and unsuccessfully, to imitate. (Any websites out there breathlessly anticipating the next Dell product?) Think of what the iPod has done to music (Apple now is the world’s largest distributor of music now), and the iPhone to mobile devices (the second best-selling mobile phone in the world and every company is trying to imitate it). The reason Windows sucks and is actually losing market shares mainly is because it is a feeble imitation of Mac OS-X and has been for years. Apple is debt free and has enough cash in the bank to buy all three car companies with change left over. Buying Dell would come out of petty cash.

Here’s what Cringely and I think Jobs would do:

Eliminate brands--the American car companies compete not only with each other and with the foreign brands, but themselves. Why have all those brands? GM eliminated the Oldsmobile (but added Saturn), and Chrysler cut the Plymouth, but Cringely thinks more slashing is necessary. I own a Mercury Mariner Hybrid (excellent car, by the way) but it is identical to the Ford Escape Hybrid except for the grill. Why do this? Know anyone who owns a Pontiac? Jobs understood that you need to simplify your product line. Identify your best customers (in Apple’s case, the graphics and creative people) and aim right at them.
Eliminate losers--Jobs eliminated products that didn’t make money. Sounds simple, but explain why GM still sells Hummers? Indeed, it is the biggest SUV and the smallest cars, Cringely says, that make the least profit. (The big SUVs were hilariously profitable until oil soared to $100 a barrel). Why try to make a car for everyone? Leave the little cars to Kia and Hundai. Concentrate.
Forget the notion there is an eternal conflict between product people and financial people. Cringely points out that the best proof that you can have that there are people who do both well, and companies that do both well, is Steve Jobs and Apple.
Bank on new technologies--Detroit works on the basis that what went into a car and what made a car run for the last 100 years is still the best way of doing things. Think of gasoline and the internal combustion engine. Jobs has been superb at identifying new technologies and riding them to the bank. Pick one, any one. Hybrid? Electric? Hydrogen? Mice on a treadmill? Chose one and run with it.
Emphasize radical design--If Apple is famous for anything it is design. You either buy into the aesthetic or you don’t, but enough people like me do to sell lots of products. Jobs would make cars that reflected that attitude--radical, beautiful, intuitive. You can look at a desk from afar and tell if the computer on it is an Apple or a HP or Dell imitation of an Apple. You would see a Jobs’ company’s car a block away.
Don’t sell the cars people want; sell cars you convince people they want--Everyone loved the Sony Walkman until Apple came out with the iPod and convinced people they really, really wanted one. Everyone loves the Blackberry so Apple came out with the iPhone and convinced enough people that’s what they wanted. Detroit's excuse has always been it is selling Americans the cars they want. Big mistake. Eight or so years ago, Jobs eliminated floppy disk drives from Apples. Everyone said that was a mistake. Comuters need floppy drives. Jobs convinced customers they didn't need them at all and now no new compuers have floppy drives. Make them want the cars you sell. And lastly:
Don’t make cars--Cringely thinks Jobs would get his car company out of the manufacturing business and outsource that function. Apple no longer makes its own computers; companies in China and Taiwan build them. Cringely thinks Jobs would announce that his car company design and market cars, not build them. Then he would open the manufacturing for bidding. He’d close all his plants, fire all his workers (Cringely thinks that you get tumult when you lay off only a percentage of workers; things are more peaceful if everyone goes--I demur). It would have several advantages, including having a company far more flexible and facile and well as cutting costs. Close the plants and outsource.

And the iMO? It is the whimsical work of British designer Anthony Jannerelly, who will undoubtedly hear from Apple's lawyers in the next day or two. Wired has a story here.

We'll get to lower back pain and sex later.

2008-12-10T16:23:00.005-05:00

Just take the damned pill and shut up—As we’ve discussed, the three things physicians know the least about are sex, nutrition and lower back pain Today we are going to talk about nutrition--again.

In the last decade, nutrition experts and the media have been swept away with antioxidants, like C and vitamin E. I’ve written about them. They are supposed to prevent coronary heart disease and various forms of cancer. Or not. “Not” is back in vogue. Keep in mind that next year everybody will probably have changed their minds again.

A study in the new issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association concludes that vitamins C and E do not reduce the risk of prostate cancer or any other cancer for that matter. The study, out of Harvard and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, was put out on early release by JAMA because of the results and has stellar credentials. The subjects were members of the Physicians’ Health Study II, a most reputable source, and was randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled factorial trial. Factorial means high math. This kind of study is the gold standard for science, as the cliché goes. But maybe not.

The physicians, all 14,641 men, 50 years or older, were chosen randomly and either took 400 IU of vitamin E, the standard dose, every other day, and 500 mg of vitamin C every day, or a placebo. The study lasted 8 years.

In the end, there were 1008 confirmed cases of prostate cancer and 1943 total cancers. Vitamin E had no statistical effect on the incidence of prostate cancer or total cancers. Neither did C. Nor was there an effect statistically on colorectal, lung or other site-specific cancers.

In this large, long-term trial of male physicians, neither vitamin E nor C supplementation reduced the risk of prostate or total cancer [the study authors write] These data provide no support for the use of these supplements for the prevention of cancer in middle-aged and older men.

In another study in the same issue, selenium also is useless. Earlier studies showed both were effective.

Well, hold on. The problem with these kinds of studies is the group of subjects. For one thing, the physicians in the study were very well nourished, perhaps more so than many other men. They certainly would be more conscious of health than most, making them different than your average guy, with a whole different life style.

We don’t know what else they ate or what other nutrients they took that might have also had an effect. Whether that changed the results we cannot know. The best news is that there was no apparent harm. Additionally, it is likely that these men had regular PSA tests, more so than non-physicians, which may have skewed the sample, although I don't know if that would effect the results.

Interestingly, the JAMA articles come with a third, an editorial, casting some shadows on prostate studies, so I'm not the only skeptic in the crowd. The editorial does conclude that physicians shouldn't recommend vitamins E or C to patients to prevent prostate cancer.

I have no idea what to tell you. I take 400 IUs of E and 500 mgs of C every day and I’m not dead yet.

The Age of Edison is Over

2008-12-05T11:41:00.005-05:00

Turn on the light so I can see this record label, please--The inventions of Thomas Edison, which became the hallmarks of 20th century civilization, are dead, dying, substantially altered, or doomed. The new century will be something else: the Post Edison Age. It is hard to imagine one man who had more influence.

The phonograph record was replaced by analog tape 30 years ago, and then digital disks, and even they are now being replaced by digital Internet downloads, which give purer sound, can be copied without loss and can last forever. The incandescent light bulb will be an anachronism in five years, falling to the compact fluorescent bulbs which use less power and last much longer. The power grid had grown in ways Edison could not have anticipated. The motion picture--images on celluloid film projected on a screen--is gradually being replaced by digital recording and projection, which gives a clearer picture without deterioration and allows for easier digital effects and better sound. And everyone is working on ways to substitute the current alkaline batteries with more efficient ones. Even the electric chair is passé.

Within 10 years, we will be using almost nothing that came from Wizard of Menlo Park. His time has just passed.

Edison was not a scientist and never pretended to be one. His most famous contribution to science, the Edison Effect, which anticipated the discovery of electrons 15 years later, was an accidental discovery and Edison left it to physicists to explain it. (In 1882, one of his assistants, William Hammer, discovered that when he turned on the filaments in an experiment light bulb, there was a blue glow around the positive pole and its shadow on the negative--we now know it was electrons moving from one to the other).

Edison did not invent the telegraph, of course, but his first inventions materially improved them, making it possible to send two messages at once, something Samuel Morse and the European co-inventors couldn’t do, and making it easier for someone hearing disabled, as Edison was, to read telegraph messages. Edison was so successful, he gave up a career as a telegrapher to be a full-time inventor.

While experimenting with underwater cables, he found that electrical resistance and the conductivity of carbon varied with pressure, a major theoretical discovery that allowed Edison to come up with carbon pressure relays to replace magnetic ones, improving Bell’s telephone network.

He produced the first electric printer for the telegraph, and in 1877, the phonograph, a matter of serendipity. (Edison was bright enough to appreciate accidents and thought nothing of reversing course to explore something). He was trying to find a way to record telegraph messages and found that using a stylus-tipped carbon transmitter on wax-lined paper, he could get a rough approximation of sound if you moved the paper. The vibrations left a path on the paper. He switched to tin foil instead of paper and wrapped it on a spinning cylinder. It took 10 years of refinement, but soon there was one in almost every home and Edison became world-famous. (The first recoding was Edison reciting “Mary Had A Little Lamb.” That would eventually replaced with hip-hop.)

In the 1870s, Edison bragged he could produce an electric light bulb, and with the backing of J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts, began work in Menlo Park, south of Newark. It proved more difficult than he anticipated and while he was failing, he built a practical generator that became the basis for the electric power grid, first installed in London in 1882. In October, 1879, he produced the first bulb using a carbon filament and he could demonstrate it to backers two months later. The steamship Columbia installed the first samples and became the first structure to use an electric lighting system. The first office building plugged in January 1881 in New York.

In 1888, using the concept of a zoetrope, a peek-in device that gave the illusion of motion to pictures flashed at a regular speed, Edison developed first the Kinetoscope, which vastly improved the zoetrope, and created the world’s first motion picture company in West Orange, N.J., to produce something to see on his new viewer. He then adapted a projector invented by Thomas Armat, which he called the Vitascope, and which became the first theatrical movie projector. He later found a way to synchronize the phonograph to the Vitascope and added sound to motion pictures.

Most homes lacked electricity and Edison wanted a power source for phonographs. That also was harder than he thought until (1912) Henry Ford, a friend, asked him to develop a battery Ford could put in his cars to crank up the starter. Ford produced research funds. Out of Edison's lab came the alkaline storage battery.

Edison acquired 389 patents for the electric light and power grid, 195 patents for the phonograph, 150 for the telegraph, 141 for the storage battery, and 34 for telephone inventions. His company became General Electric and he was, for a while, the main stockholder.

The electric chair? Edison’s power plants produced direct current and Edison believed the future rested in DC, not on the alternating current (AC) advocated by Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse. He thought AC was dangerous and to prove it, he helped develop the electric chair, which used AC to kill its guests. He lost that battle.

Now the digital world has replaced some of his inventions and we have moved on. But the 20th century was Edison’s. All hail!

The Night of the Living Bots

2008-12-02T14:54:00.004-05:00

Walk this way, master--It couldn’t last. The forces of virtue and honor--i.e., the guys who spend their time battling spam--had an all-to-brief victory last month. They managed to take down one of the leading spigots of spam, a boulevard of the botnets. Spam levels all over the world dropped by perhaps as much as 65%. It was a victory for the folks at the Security Fix column of the Washington Post, who managed to nail one of the worst offenders.

Botnets are networks of bots. For those of you still mired in the 20th century, a bot is a zombie that turns your computer into its slave. I knew that would be of help. It is a piece of malicious software that takes over your computer when you are not looking and sends out malware to the Internet, including spam, worms and Trojan Horses. [You do realize that 30 years ago that sentence would nave been totally incomprehensible]. There you are, working diligently and honorably while your computer is spewing out spam to the network and you probably don't notice, although it may get a little slow on Explorer. The largest botnets enslave millions of computers around the world, the reason why there has been so much concern in your inbox for you penis size (even if you don't have one), your pharmaceutical needs, and business transactions with the daughter of some Nigerian dictator.

Contrary to urban legends, botnets can take over Macs, but this is rare and requires the intercession of Windows servers. Same for Linux. Windows computers are the culprits.

Early in November, spam fighters shut down Mc Colo of San Jose, Calif,, one of the most notorious spam service providers, the result of a Post investigation. The result was instantaneous: according to Betanews.com, the net quieted down immediately. Among those botnets turned off when the plug was pulled were two of the most evil, Asprox and Rustock. Mc Colo also had the distinction of being one of the last American ISP providers doing spam.

No one in the zombie-watching business was sanguine. They knew the botnet folks would find a way around the break, probably by moving offshore to Eastern Europe, places like Estonia. Sure enough, late last week, spam traffic increased noticeably. Asprox and Rustock are back. Traffic levels haven’t reached pre-Mc Colo levels yet because the biggest of the botnets, something called Srizbi, hasn’t found a home. It has been the dominant force for the dark side since February, shooting out a Trojan horse. But no one doubts it is coming. It sucks in users by offering nude pictures of movie stars. Open the mail and your machine is theirs. I am as fond of Salma Hayek as the next man but even I am bright enough not to open mail from people I don’t know. And there aren’t any Windows machines around here.

In the meantime, I am Sandra Deloutrage, the widow of the late Nigerian President Murry Deloutrage. My husband left me $45 million in a bank in Croatia and I need your assistance in retrieving the money. You could buy a bridge...

I have run out of excuses--THE BLOG IS BACK

2008-11-21T14:45:00.005-05:00

As I was saying before I was interrupted by real life--I am happy to report ...Of Cabbages and Kings is returning. I have run out of excuses for not posting and since I am, as we say in the writing business, between contracts, I certainly have the time. So, just to catch up with what the hell is going on outside of politics:

Mommy, there is a hairy elephant in the banana trees-- Michael Critchton died a week too soon. He missed a letter in Nature reporting that an international team of scientists had decoded about 80% of the genetic code of the wooly mammoth. It's not that they are close to actually reconstructing one of the creatures, but it is an interesting step in that direction. They tested the hair of two animals who lived about 20,000 years ago and whose bodies were preserved in permafrost. In combination, think they have identified 70% of the genome of the mammoth. Wooly mammoths are closer to contemporary elephants than humans are to chimps, so instead of some day trying to reconstruct a mammoth from mammoth DNA, the quickest route to recreating the beast may be to use elephant DNA and add genes that are unique to the mammoth. Now they just have to sequence elephants.

But that was a virtual penis, dear--Let's say a woman catches her husband screwing another woman. She gets appropriately pissed, throws him out of the house and often files for divorce. Now, however the world has changed. People go to places like Second Life as avatars of varying fictionality [sic]. What would a woman do if she found her husband's avatar shtupping the avatar of another woman? Is that adultry? Virtual adultry? This is going to be hard to follow but we'll try.

Two Brits, Amy Taylor (28, a.k.a. "Laura Skye" in tight cowboy garb) and David Pollard (40, a.k.a. "David Barmy," suave and goateed), who actually met on line and moved in together, had avatars on Second Life. One day Taylor discovered Pollard having virtual sex with a virtual prostitute on line. She ended the relationship between "Skye" and "Barmy" on Second Life but kept living with him in the real world.

To test him, she hired a virtual private eye to try and seduce "Barmy" and he passed the test. So Taylor and Pollard actually got married both on Second Life and in what passes for reality. But it didn't last. She caught him on line having a deep and intimate discussion with an American avatar and divorced him, both on Second Life and in the real world. She told the Guardian: "It may have started on-line but it existed entirely in the real world and it hurts just as much," she said. "His was the ultimate betrayal. He had been lying to me." Pollard insists his avatar and the other avatar were just friends.

Aren't you glad I'm back?

"I'm mad as hell and won't take it any more!"

2008-11-05T11:47:00.003-05:00

OK, we're not moving to Canada--In the wonderful Paddy Cheyefsky film "Network," there is a scene in which Americans slam open their windows and shout the above. They are mad as hell and they won't take it any more. That's what happened yesterday. It was a total rejection of Bush, Cheney and the neocons. It was a rejection of the Republican party and a repudiation of the conservative movement. This allegedly "right of center" country just had a tectonic shift to the left. And about damned time.

OK, how did all that polling turn out? All the polls predicted an Obama victory but a lot of them were really off. Obama won 52-46, a six point victory that many, but not all of the pollsters got right. Some, like Zogby (Reuters), Gallup, CBS-New York Times, and ABC-Washington Post, were wrong, giving Obama far more of a margin than he actually got. Pollster.com, which I used a lot, got Obama's percentage right but got McCain's wrong by 2, which is pretty close. Nate Silver and Fivethirtyeight, got it right on the money. (Zogby sent out a nasty little note criticizing Silver and his background in SABR baseball statitics after Silver criticized one of Zogby's weirder results. Silver got his revenge). The poll that got it right on the money was the Rasmussen. Both academic polls, Pollyvote and Princeton were correct. So, polling works even in strange elections.

I spent yesterday in Harrisburg, PA as a canvasser for Obama. I can tell you first hand how he won.

Every voter in Harrisburg had been canvassed and everyone who showed an interest in voting for Obama has been listed on a computer printout. I did canvassing. That means we went to every one of those people to make sure they had voted or were going to. We were the second shift, meaning they had already been canvassed once during the day. Most people were not home, of course. But there would be a third shift to get them at supper time. If they said they tried to vote but had trouble, we had a number to call to straighten it out. If they said they needed a ride, I had a number to call and a car would show up within an hour to take them to the polling place. (They had more volunteer drivers than there were people needing a ride). We went floor to floor in a senior citizens home, knocking on doors. So every potential Obama voter in Harrisburg was visited three times today and had no excuses for not showing up to vote. Several times Obama canvassers crossed each other on the street. The African-Americans we visited were particularly jolly and they damned well voted.

I ended the day in an Irish bar with my partner with a pumpkin beer.

Free at last! Free at last! Almost--UPDATED

2008-11-03T10:06:00.004-05:00

[UPDATE: The final polls have merged at something of a consensus. Obama by 6]

If anyone asks, I've been a shoe salesman all this time--Either Barack Obama will win the presidency tomorrow or American journalism and public opinion research (political division) will awake Wednesday with all their credibility destroyed. If that happens, both deserve it.

If John McCain actually wins, every political pollster would have been wrong, and every political reporter who based his or her stories on those polls (and they shouldn't for other reasons we can go into later) would have been wrong and and there is no reason to believe those idiots again.

I don't think that is going to happen. With voting one day away (except for the one-third of American voters who have already voted) here is how things stand--if the polls are right:

Every poll, tracking and daily, has Obama ahead by margins ranging from 4 to 13 points. How could that be? All use different techniques to draw their samples and do the actual polling (humans on the telephone vs. computers on the telephone), but more importantly, all use different methods of deciding who is going to vote and who has already voted. Some call cell phones, some don't. So, some of the polls will be wrong, we know that. Polling in these matters usually come within 2 points of reality. If your poll predicts a guy will win by 4 and he wins by 2.6, most pollsters would think it was a normal year. If you come in with 13 and the margin is 4, you have screwed up. As usual, the tracking polls and the daily polls have converged and agree, and some of the polls coming in Monday morning seem to be heading toward Obama +6, which is on the edge of a landslide. These include a few surveys that tend to have a Republican tilt.

I should point out that most experts believe that it doesn't matter which polls are correct: if Obama has anything between a 3 and a 13 point lead, he wins. That plurality will bring the state votes along with it.

The internet sites that average and aggregate the polling, often using statistical manipulations, all seem to agree that Obama will win by 5-6 points and with better than 300 electoral college votes.

(One interesting note, Pollster.com has a story on how Obama gets around a 4 point jump if pollsters get to cells phones).

At this stage, the national poll numbers and the state-by-state poll numbers are in tune. If one goes up, the other does as well. There is no sign whatsover that McCain has tightened either the national or state polling in any substantial manner, certainly not enough to overcome a 5-6 deficit in one day. That doesn't happen. This campaign was essentially over after the second debate and the collapse of the economy. The numbers haven't changed materially since.

We all know how Harry Truman beat Thomas Dewey in 1948 despite predictions from pollsters he would not. The fault then (and in New Hampshire this year) was that they stopped polling too early and missed a late surge. That is not happening this time; pollsters are out in the field as you read this and I'll update it later today when those polls come in. And it is hard to imagine a late surge that would overcome a 5 point deficit. These are not predictions, but with 24 hours or so left, they might as well be.

Some folks, often in economics departments, will stick their necks out and make predictions and most of those sites think Obama will win by 6-7 points, with electoral college votes around 350.

What to watch for? If Obama wins Virginia and/or North Carolina by anything resembling a healthy margin (and those polls close early eastern time), the cake is baked. Go to sleep. If he loses those, bring out your sleeping bags and switch from decaf--it will be, in the words of Bette Davis, "a bumpy ride."

Unless all these polls, everything we know about public opinion surveys, all the bright pundits and reporters are flat wrong. Then, remember, I was always a shoe salesman.

j

Those of you with fingernails left

2008-10-31T11:33:00.004-04:00

All right children, gather around--Last weekend before this goddam thing ends. I will have to clear off half the aps on my iPhone, which blurts at me any time something happens in the campaign, and that is sick, sick I tell you.

So, with four days left here's what's cooking on the polls. As I reported earlier, polling usually tightens in the last week of a campaign and that seemed to be happening, at least with the national polls, but that trend is now halted. The general consensus is that Obama is ahead by around 6 points, meaning McCain has to gain more than a point a day to catch up and that pretty much can't be done. Obama retains a strong lead in the states. He has all the Kerry states and is walking off with not a few Bush 2004 states. McCain has zero Kerry states and is now even having to defend himself in Arizona.

The P0llster (Ralph Blumenthal and company out of the University of Wisconsin) aggregate has Obama up by 5.5 points with 311 electoral votes, which actually is on the conservative side. The Gallup tracking poll of likely voters (the one modified for the best estimate of who will vote this year--more about that below) has Obama up by 8, with 353 votes (270 wins). RealClearPolitics, something of the gold standard in aggregating polls, has The One up by 6 and 311 EVs. Fivethirtyeight.com gives Obama a 96.3% chance of winning, has him ahead by 5.6 points and 346 EVs. Nate Silver's estmate is that the odds on an Obama landslide are 36% and Obama doesn't have to win Pennsylvania if he gets Virginia and Nevada. Hotline's poll in the National Journal has That One up by 7; Pollyvote (Wharton) at 5.6, Princeton up by 8 and TalkingPoint'sMemo.com, 6.3. A new poll from CBS and the New York Times has Obama up by 11 but that is an outlier.

A word of warning. What is screwing up consistency are two things: one, in some states voting has already begun and in a few states like Colorado and New Mexico, a substantial percentage of the ballots have already been cast. This makes exit polls on election day problematic, I think. The good news is that Obama seems to be highly favored by earlier voters as near as anyone can tell. It does take a bit of precision away. Two, if the young folks show up as they have promised to do (but history tells us they might not) Obama will have a tsunami. If they don't, this could be a whole different race. Selecting who is likely to vote is the hardest part of polling and this year it is harder than usual. Gallup, for instance, has two polls: one with a sample of people who actually voted in 2004 and one including people who did not but say they will this time. The latter has Obama doing better. Some polls use 2004 as a benchmark; many do not. They vary.

Oh, and by he way. All the polls now show that the greatest drag on McCain isn't George Bush; it's Sarah Palin. Most Americans think she is unqualified for the job. Imagine that.

In short, looking good. If McCain does win, American journalism and political polling will never recover.

I can't wait till this is over.

What to watch for in the polls--forget precision

2008-10-23T10:24:00.003-04:00

With the national polls running from Obama+1 to Obama +14, what the hell are we to make of it?--If you are profoundly, and in my case, pathetically, addicted to the polls, you might be confused by all of this. Me too. But here are some tips on what you can expect in the next week-and-a-half.

1. In most--not all--presidential elections, the polls showed a tightening of the race in the last few weeks or days. People change their minds or chicken out or drop out. This has not happened yet. John McCain seemed to be making some gains last week, but that has been offset by a reversal this week. The polling aggregators, the guys who take all the polls and do things with the numbers, all seem to agree that Obama leads by about 6 points and that hasn't changed much in the last few weeks. The lead is pretty steady. If you look at the charts, particularly from politico.com, and turn the sensitivity down (use the tool button), you will see the true vector--which is fairly flat.

2. The lagtime between the national popularity polls and the state polls shrinks. Now there is about a two day delay: if one of the candidates moves in the national polls, it is reflected in state polls two days or so later. As we get closer to the election, that gap closes. The state polls are still reflecting McCain's uptick a few days ago. And of course, as I mentioned before, ignore the day-to-day changes. They are likely statistical noise.

3. In the days before the election, the polls will begin to converge toward one number. The outliers will move toward that number, meeting the other polls at whatever number it is going to be on election day. Add a grain of salt: Polling ends a day or so before the election and will miss very late shifts in the electorate. That's what happened in the Democratic primary in New Hampshire; the polls missed a late move for Hillary Clinton. That could happen in the national race but is not likely. If Obama really is 6 points ahead, that won't change between Sunday and Tuesday barring a terrorist attack or something.

4. All the statisticians who are projecting the winner (including those who claim they are not making predictions) are predicting an Obama blow-out, again by 6 or 7 points, fairly historic.

5. They could all be full of shit. The ghost of Thomas Dewey will not be exorcised for a long time.

On the other hand.....

2008-10-22T15:35:00.002-04:00

OK, make up your goddam minds--Just to give you heartburn, within 24 hours after the posting below, two polls came in with Obama and McClain in a statistical tie. The range now runs from +1 to +14.

Aaargh!

Very very softly. It's over.

2008-10-21T16:32:00.004-04:00

The Phillies are in the World Series, Obama is winning the election. There may be a God--The Pew Research Center, one of the most trusted polling establishments, this afternoon reported that Barack Obama was 14 points ahead of John McCain in the national race. If that is correct, Obama is about to blow this thing open with two weeks to go.

In fairness, that Pew poll is an outlier, higher than any other poll, some of which have it down as close as 2 (another outlier). The general consensus before Pew published was Obama by around 6, still a handsome number. Remember, the record is 8.5 points, Bill Clinton over Bob Dole. Fourteen is a bit much.

In the last few days there were signs that the race was tightening the way races always tighten at the end, but that tightening (think sphincter) levelled off the last day or so and the Pew poll (which incidentally had a very large number of respondents, almost 3,000), is either a blip in the polling statistics or the beginning of a blowout.

Polls are not predictors; they are snapshots. But there are statistical ways of projecting one of those snapshots out to the end. Several good sites do that. Here's what some of them say.

Pollyvote out of the Wharton School, has Obama ahead by 6. This uses a statistical package plus input from political experts and all kinds of razzamataz I won't even try to understand. It has a repution for accuracy.
Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight.com, which uses something like baseball's sabermetrics, gives the chances of an Obama victory at 92.5%. The chances of a landslide are 33.43% and Obama is most likely to win 344 electoral votes and the Democrats to wind up with 56 Senate seats.
The Princeton Election Consortium has Obama winning 362 electoral votes.
Real Clear Politics, the standard most journalists use, has Obama up by 6.9 points
Gallup tracking has an 11 lead.
Pollster.com has Obama up by 6.1. You can see the EV chart to the right.

Now, very quietly so the evil spirits don't hear us--no candidate as far behind as John McCain is at this stage of an election, has ever come back to win. Shshsh.

Is that a chasm I see before me?

2008-10-10T12:16:00.003-04:00

No wonder they are getting pissed out there--The national tracking polls are now showing a widening for Barack Obama. The Shurkin number (I made that up) went from 5.4 to 6.2 in the last few days. That is the average of three best mathematical averaging websites, Pollster.com, Realclearpolitics.com, and Fivethirtyeight.com, all of which are non-partisan. In other words, I average the averagers. Pollster, which is very well respected, has Obama ahead by 7.4. The Gallup Poll, which is included in all the averaging and is something of the gold standard in these matters, has him ahead by 11.

Fivethirtyeight has the odds of Obama winning at better than 9-1 in 95 out of 100 campaigns. Nate Silver, who runs it, expects Obama to gain during the weekend. He thinks it is clear that everytime there is a debate, Obama's numbers grow. Still one more debate out there, gang. National Journal, also well-respected and non-partisan, did a survey of Republican leaders and found that 8 out of 10 expect an Obama victory in November. The Journal is one of the first to use the "L" word, as in "landslide."

But Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post, suggests things are still not set in concrete, what he calls a contrarian view. Besides the Bradley Effect, which we'll discuss in some detail next week, he suggests that too many Obama supporters think this is a slam dunk and won't show up to vote. I don't think so. Too many are really pissed off.

And speaking of pissed off, the crowds at the McCain-Palin events are really getting scary and John McCain and Sarah Palin are stoking them on. McCain stands to lose twice on November 4. He will probably lose the election; he will definately lose his honor. It is certainly, as Politico describes it, a party in panic.

Do keep in mind, this isn't a popularity contest and while the tracking polls are interesting, we elect Presidents by the states. Pollster has Obama winning 320 electoral votes (see graph to the right). The average winning vote in modern history is 402.6, so he is behind in that regard at the moment.

[That's an AP photo up top]

Margins of non-error

2008-10-08T14:27:00.003-04:00

That was a ceiling you just bumped into--Two things have happened in the polling today. Barack Obama may have hit a ceiling and is leveling off, and John McCain has gained in several polls. Panic not.

The range in polls now runs from a slim 1 point margin (Hotline Poll) to 11 points in the Gallup tracking poll. The Hotline poll showed a major shift in one day toward McCain (better than 10%), but as I've mentioned before, you can't get too excited about one-day movements. Often it is just noise. Wait a day or so and it will even out.

Some things to remember:

No candidate, none, has won with better than an 8.51 point margin. That was Bill Clinton's blow-away in 1996. See Chris Bower's piece here. This means that there is a rational ceiling to how large a margin Obama can achieve. Bower says that a landslide is anything between 5 and 8. Obama is there now.
Several of the sites I've mentioned here average polls, meaning they take the numbers from multiple polls and either just average them out or apply some kind of mathematical formula involving square roots or something, and the size of the sample, to come up with a number that reflects all the polls. Bower points out that historically, those aggregates are 2 points off, meaning any margin of 2 points or less is not a lead. As long as the number stays above 2 points, a candidate is a winner. Realclearpolitics.com has Obama at +5.1. Pollster.com (right) has +5.8. Fivethirtyeight.com has it at 5.4. The Shurkin average is therefore is 5.42.
Most of Obama's increase is relatively new and relatively new adherents are not particularly solid and could move again, so nothing is in concrete.
Gamblers sometimes know things. The odds of Obama winning the election are 7-3 on Intratrade. Nate Silver, who uses an algorithm based on polls at Fivethirtyeight has it at 9-1.
The Polyvote, a mathematical model out of the Wharton School, has Obama ahead by 4.4 points and it accurately predicted the last election. This works well as long as all the polls aren't wrong in the same direction.

Three factors could screw up all the polls.

Cell phones--a growing number of people now only have cell phones (no land line) and pollsters either have trouble getting to them or don't even try. No one knows how that skews the results, but it tends to reduce the number of young people in the universe, in this case to Obama's detriment.
The Bradley Effect--no one knows how many people are lying to pollsters about voting for a black man. As I reported earlier, a Stanford study guesses at 6 points, giving McCain an unknown advantage
New voters--The Obama campaign has enrolled a huge number of new voters--mostly young, mostly Obama supporters--and it is likely the polls are missing many of them.

The best guess is that all of the above may cancel it all out. We shall see.

Polling pollsters about polls, or why I have a stomach ache

2008-10-07T10:39:00.004-04:00

Let's see, we're ahead 3 points, 6 points, 11 points. Make up your goddam mind--You may have noticed I have added a thingy to the blog, the Pollster.com electoral college map. It will change as Pollster.com changes, and it just changed yesterday to reflect new state polls.

(State polls lag behind the national tracking polls because there are a lot fewer of them. Just remember, it is the states that vote for president, not a popularity contest. Anyone remember President Gore?)

The poll numbers remain all over the place. They only thing they agree on is that Barack Obama is ahead in the national poll and if the election were held today, in the electoral college. The numbers vary, from Zogby's 3 points (they poll for Reuters) to Daily Kos' 11. Both polls are, to me, outliers. One is too low and not notoriously accurate, the other is for a liberal website. That doesn't mean it is slanted or dishonest but it is an outlier, the most optimistic if you are an Obama person. I tend to discount them both, leaving us with a bunch of polls having him 6-8 points up. Historically, it is very difficult for a candidate with John McCain's numbers to come back in 28 days, but this race is unpredictable.

[The Hotline poll has them down to 2 points this morning, a peculiar tightening] I find that odd, since that poll has been peculiarly conservative and hardly moved at all for a week or two.]

The McCain faction has launched the most egregiously dishonorable campaign in my memory, now subtly playing the race card. The good news to me is that the Obama people, having learned their lessons from the Kerry campaign, are fighting back instantly. They obviously had an ad on McCain's participation in the Keating Five scandal sitting in the closet just waiting for the opportunity to turn it loose. So much for the high-minded campaign we were promised.

Okay, where do you go for accurate, non-partisan polling and political information. We've already discussed often my affection for Mark Blumenthal's Pollster.com.
It's his map to the right. He also writes for the National Journal. A commenter (not the spam guy) has mentioned fivethirtyeight.com and I agree completely. (The number comes from the total of electoral college votes).

For balanced political coverage, I recommend two sites, Politico.com and Realclearpolitics.com. Politico.com is interesting for another reason. It is not your normal guy sitting around in his underwear blog (like this one), but has grown into a respected journalism outlet, one of the largest and best on the Internet. It is the new wave in journalism and worth monitoring.

Now, for the best biased--to the left, of course--sources of information. My favorite remains the Huffington Post. Slightly more centered is Josh Marshall's talkingpointsmemo.com. It was Marshall's site that uncovered the firing of the nine U.S. prosecutors, forcing the mainstream media to follow. It is the only website to win a Polk Award, I believe.

For right wing sites, you are on your own. My stomach won't bear it.

Excuse me Capt. Queeg. Can you stop making that noise

2008-10-06T16:43:00.005-04:00

John is having a bad day--OK, more on the election. Since I am obsessed with it I might as well quit trying to write about anything else. The Alaska proposal is off to my agent and I can indulge my obsession.

An interesting column in the Des Moines Register's website hints at what many have begun to suspect: Sen. John McCain is losing it. Not just losing the election; losing it. McCain was at a meet-the-editor conference at the Register last week, normal campaign stuff, and anyone watching could see something was wrong. His body language, the way he held his face, his petulent anwers to what were clearly pertinent questions. At least one editor at the meeting had a similar reaction and suggests that McCain may be too unstable to be President. See here. For video, go here.

McCain is losing. McCain is pissed off. Running around like a headless chicken during the Congressional battle for the bailout bill isn't leadership, it's hysteria.

Current polling is not likely to change his mood. Tracking polls, all completed after the vice presidentail debate, shows Barack Obama's lead expanding and he is now approaching double digits.

Explanation: tracking polls should be called rolling polls and are done on a daily basis, accumulating three days worth of data. That means, for instance, they will poll on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Then they poll on Sunday and drop the data from Thursday. On Monday, they drop the Friday data. All the polls out today have the three days since the Biden-Palin debate. The data are clear, Alaska's dingbat governor did McCain very little good with the general electorate.

All this is reflected in the state polls and some of the numbers are astonishing. Minnesota was listed as a close contest--until last week. Obama now is ahead by as much as 11 or 18, depending on which poll you watch. North Carolina was always considered a solid Republican state. Now it is a toss-up; Obama now leads slightly and in one poll has reached the 50% mark. He now leads in Virginia--Virginia, for God's sake--by double digits in one poll. McCain has already given up in Michigan, which is interesting in itself.

Political campaigns are like chess matches in many ways. When you are losing, you often sacrifice pieces to protect the king. What McCain did in Michigan is sacrifice a piece (a bishop or a knight in this case) to protect the campaign. The difference is that in chess, you don't announce it ahead of time.

In the next posting I'll produce a list of the best places to poll watch on the internet. You already know one, www.pollster.com. There are others I'll pass on.

So who is Capt. Queeg? Movie fans?

Roman Hruska meets Sarah Palin

2008-10-02T11:51:00.006-04:00

"Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos."--Sen. Roman Hruska, R. Nebraska, on defending the appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court of a mediocrity.

OK, we're back. Been busy. Ramping up again.

The polls are all over the place as usual, but the unmistakable trend is toward Barak Obama. The polls have him ahead in the national count by anywhere from 4 to 11 points. More importantly, this is spreading to the states, particularly the most important states. He is ahead in places he was not expected to be ahead, like Virginia and Colorado.

The bounce the Republicans got from their convention is gone and Sarah Palin is now a drag on the ticket. She has succeeded in scaring the hell out of increasing numbers of people and has become a national joke. I'm a little sorry for her: she has no business playing in this league. John McCain, who is really getting cranky these days and is busy channeling Herbert Hoover, shouldn't have picked her and she shouldn't have accepted. She is pushing independents away faster than she gained them at the convention.

On the polls: Even Rasmussen, which has been the most tilted toward McCain, now has Obama ahead by 7, Associated Press, 7, New York Times/CBS at 9, Gallup at 4. The most conservative of the polls, Diageo/Hotline, is at 5, and the most liberal, the poll run on Daily Kos, 11.

What makes this particularly interesting is that voters tend to solidify around October. It is rare for a campaign to roar from behind (or blow it) when one candidate has a large lead over the other by October. Most people have made up their minds. The numbers also are interesting for another reason: the Bradley Effect. That is the phenomenon in which voters will tell pollsters they have no problem voting for a black guy, go into the booth and vote for the white guy. They lie so they won't sound racist to the interviewer. No one knows (although we are about to find out) how much the effect skews polling, but the best numbers I've found say it is about 6%. In other words. He will need more than a 6% advantage over McCain to win. He is now at or above that number in the polls.

What seems to be happening is that the voters have clicked into place. There is also the potential for a landslide in the state voting, although making any predictions in this race is really odd behavior.

Nonetheless, here is one: John McCain will throw another Hail Mary, something dramatic to get himself into back into the conversation and change the subject. Every day the economy is the overarching news story is a day he loses support. I don't know what it will be, but he clearly knows he is losing, is pissed off, and frantic. Watch for a pass. And, whatever it is, it probably won't work. His last two, Sarah Palin and parachuting into the Wall Street bailout blew up in his face.

Some odds and ends:

The only place you can see Russia from Alaska is on Little Diomede Island in the Bering Sea. About 150 Eskimos live there; Sarah Palin has never visited. As CNN reported, Big Diomede Island, which is Russia, is four miles away and is highly visible. Except for those 150 people (many of whom never heard of Palin) you cannot see Russia from Alaska.
Palin said Alaska is a microcosm of America, which makes her able to undertand "Joe Sixpack." Alaska is not a microcosm of America. Alaskans describe their state as the only foreign country that still likes Americans--but not too much. It is an idiosyncratic, totally weird place. I happen to love it in part because it is not like the rest of America.
Sarah Palin is who Roman Hruska might have had in mind.

Polling is no longer operative

2008-09-09T10:54:00.003-04:00

Start paying attention next week and bring aspirin--The item on polling I wrote last week is no longer operative. The McCain campaign is now enjoying a convention "bump" that has them ahead in at least one poll and tied in most of the rest. These bumps, normal in campaigns, usually fade out in about three or four days so it won't be until the weekend we'll see how things are going. Again, pay little attention to tracking polls.

The worrisome thing, however, is that McCain is catching up in the electoral college vote and is now almost tied with Obama. Obama also seems to be losing--at least temporarily--some women's votes and the edge on the economy. I can't imagine why, but them are the numbers. These polls are based on state-by-state polling and are less likely to reflect the bump, I think. The Republicans have taken the momentum and are now running the campaign. Obama is in a knife fight and doesn't seem to have brought a knife.

The best look at all these polls remains pollster.com and politico.com

I think Canada might be a nice place to live.

Nattering nabobs strike again

2008-09-04T13:51:00.005-04:00

Will the media stand up or fold?--Yes, a serious column on a serious subject. In the last week since John McCain named Sarah Palin as his vice presidential candidate, several things have happened.

As McCain clearly did not research her properly, there are a few minor problems. Hoping, perhaps she would fly under the radar, she has instead turned into a mine field. Everytime someone takes a step something blows up.
Since she is an unknown, the media has taken over its traditional role of doing the vetting for the citizenry. Who is this person? Why is she qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency? (Why did he just that cliche?).
The Republicans are furious. They have launched a major attack on the media--including from the governor herself--and the question is, will the media fold or continue to do their rightful business.

Several days ago, Campbell Brown (left) on CNN did an interview with a McCain flack and asked really pertinent questions. When he gave bullshit answers, she kept pressing. No, she pointed out, as governor of Alaska, Palin did not make the decision to send the Alaska National Guard to Iraq and she had nothing to do with equipping them. She asked for a single instance in which Palin acted in a way that would demonstrate foreign relations experience. He repeated the bullshit. (Alaska does border on Canada. So does Minnesota) As a result, McCain reneged on an interview with Larry King. Even being interviewed by the softball champion of America wouldn't do because Brown was too aggressive.

No she wasn't. She was doing her job. What made it stand out is that it was so rare. If I owned CNN I would have sent her flowers.

British journalists are always amazed at what pussies American reporters are, how deferential thay are to subjects, even including the President. They don't treat their power structure with the same deference and can't imagine why we do.

I don't know the answer, but the Republican are trying to intimidate the media into backing off. So far, it isn't working.

Absolutely irresistable.

2008-09-03T14:25:00.003-04:00

[Isn't Photoshop a scream?]

Why you should be paying absolutely no attention to the political polls

2008-08-12T09:57:00.005-04:00

My God, he lost four-tenths of a point among left-handed ventriloquists in the Ozarks. Do something!--The misuse and misunderstanding of polls continues unabated, the result of a combination of intellectual laziness by reporters and the shrinking resources at most media outlets.

Let's get a few things straight:

Barack Obama should be wiping out John McCain in what everyone agrees is going to be a Democratic romp. Why he is not doing so is the grist for hours of conversation on the cable networks and thumb-suckers in the regular press. After all, the national polls and the tracking polls are showing him five points or less ahead of McCain in the polls. One even has them statistically tied.

Reality check:

First and foremost, the national polls are irrelevant garbage. Did everyone forget 2001? The guy who won the most votes did not become President. It's easy to blame the Supreme Court for interfering (unconstitutionally, I might add) but as every middle school civics student knows, the Presidential election is made by the Electoral College and goes state by state. That Obama is only three or five points ahead nationally means nothing. The question is, how is he doing state by state? According to the reliable state polls, he is doing just fine and is well ahead in electoral college votes, sufficient to in the election (284 to 157--see Pollster.com here. You need 274 to become president). Throw in the third party candidates and Obama does even better. [The Wall Street Journal has McCain ahead of Obama but still shy of the 275]. Forget the national polls folks. Garbage.

Second, a great deal of time is spent on the daily fluctuation in the polls. He's up one day. He's down one day. What's happening? Nothing. That's another misreading of how these things work. Tracking polls (which make daily surveys) always vary from day to day. It is largely a function of who you call. You call different people every day and so you are going to get different answers. Some of the fluctuation is just noise. You also get a halo effect: 24 hours after an event the polls reflect what people are thinking about the event, but it usually disappears in a few days. It also is demonstrably true that most people aren't paying much attention yet, so when the pollster calls they give an answer off the top of their heads, based on minimal information. They may very well change their minds when they plug in after Labor Day. The value in the polls is to watch them over a longer time, weeks or a month or two. Then, the trends tell you something. I would also point out this has not been a very good year for pollsters.

Third, it's a very close election. Not necessarily. Say Obama is five points ahead on election day. Five points, again depending on the state votes, could be an electoral college landslide. Indeed a number of experts looking at current polling data suggests that's what's going to happen. Again--and read slowly--national polling data is irrelevant, can be misleading, and tells you very little of value in an election campaign.

Do some reporting folks.

While I'm on the subject, a few asides.

Will somebody tell Hillary Clinton she lost? Please. She and Bill simply haven't gotten it clear in their heads Obama won and they should either support him without hesitation or go away for a while. She lost. He won. Yet they won't go away and the cable news people are now spending days discussing it. She lost. Really. When you are done telling them, tell the media. She was still dominating cable news shows months after she lost.
Clinton supporters were duped into thinking the race was close to the end. She lost in March but no one had to guts to say so. There was virtually no chance she could recover and take the nomination unless she provoked an uprising at the convention, which she may yet do.
Demanding that Obama supporters help her with her campaign debt or else, amounts to political extortion for which there should be an impolite two-word response. Much of that debt was accumulated after it was clear she lost.
If the old John McCain (well, he is old--I mean the John McCain of 2000) were still running, Obama would be in real trouble. Fortuantely, a fake McCain is running.
Any sympathy I would have for Elizabeth Edwards is diminished dramatically by the fact she knew John was screwing around and still went out on the campaign trail touting family values. She knew it was a fraud at the time and still acted as an enabler. I would be the last one to throw stones in matters of this nature but I am not running for President and if I were it would not be on my moral perfections.
Imagine what it would be like if Edwards won the nomination and now this came out.
Jack Shafer of Slate suggests that the media mostly ignore the conventions since they really aren't news and haven't been in decades. We know who won months before the convention and except for an occasional blip, nothing really happens. I agree. They are infomercials for the party and except for the acceptance speech (which in the case of Obama should be well worth watching) and a brief dip into the party platform, there is no real news. I'd send one or two reporters at the most if I ran a newspaper, and I would let C-Span cover the convention if I ran a television network, and cover it on the evening news if anything else happens

Just some thoughts.

A Lamentation on the Media--Part II

2008-08-08T11:20:00.005-04:00

The village idiots buy a printing press and a camera--Whatever the values the stock market and public companies provide the economy of this country, they have become the enemy of good journalism. Wall Street a generation ago stopped being a place where people invested in the economy and became Las Vegas East, the place you went to gamble. The gamblers on Wall Street just dress better. The gamblers--or investors as they like to call themselves--want instant gratification. They want to know what every company thinks it is going to do quarter by quarter. If quarterly earnings of a company do not meet expectations, the price of the stock goes down, never mind if the expectations were wrong. If quarterly income does not grow, the price of the stock goes down. If the price of the stock goes down, the board of trustees of that company are under great pressure to do something quickly.

The days of grey-haired old ladies making blue chip investments for the future are long gone. Now they are replaced by sleek men and women in Prada and Gucci who stare at computer screens and adjust investments by the second based on what they think the other people in Prada and Gucci are doing at that moment. They have created their own reality, totally separate from the one the rest of us live in. The market is often run by stock analysts who--you will have to trust me on this--have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. When I was the science writer in the public relations office at Stanford University I would run a stupid-question-of-the-week contest. There was no prize given, just snide comments. Invariably, they came from stock analysts. And industry analysts were only slightly more informed. Thomas Carlysle called economics the "dismal science." He was half right.

In broadcasting, Paley, Sarnoff and Goldenson got old and died. When Paley could not bring himself to name a successor--and hoping to avoid a takeover by a conglomerate--he sold CBS to Leonard Tisch, one of the great bottom feeders of Wall Street. Tisch did not see CBS News as a debt he owed society. He saw it as a money sink. It had all those people and all those bureaus living on expense accounts. Some operations, such as London, were huge. Tisch pulled the plug, driving down costs and driving up the value of his stock. Having milked it for what profit he could gain--lots, by the way, some $2 billion--he sold it to Viacom, a conglomerate that also ran movie studios and had no tradition in journalism.

NBC was sold to General Electric, one of the best and tightest run companies in America. They took their culture into Rockefeller Center and burned and slashed. ABC went to an upstart newspaper chain called Cap Cities, a totally incompetent operation that soon merged with Walt Disney Co.

Newspapers went through the same thing. In some cases, families that operated the newspapers or the chains, multiplied exponentially as each generation grew up. Eventually, most of the stock holders found their holdings diluted, had no interest in the newspaper business, and cashed in at the first opportunity. That's what happened to the de Young family in San Francisco who owned the San Francisco Chronicle. It's what eventually happened to the Bancrofts, who sold the Wall Street Journal to--gasp--Murdoch. Some of the families were dysfunctional and sold because they couldn't stand each other. That's what happened to the Binghams in Louisville . The Courier-Journal was sold to Gannett, death to any quality newspaper. Then there is Shurkin's Law of Genetic Regression: any family-owned company will eventually pass to a mediocrity by the third generation. That's what happened to the Mercury News and the Ridder family. (We worry about the Sulzbergers, now in the fourth generation. The Grahams are on the fourth generation, now run by the great granddaughter of the original owner and she is doing splendidly.)

The network news operations, once the prime source for news in America, have lost a million viewers a year for the last 25 years. Newspaper circulation has been shrinking for the last 20 years, and those in the media are stumped in trying to figure out what the Internet and the new media will bring.

Then there is technology. One of the staples of the electronic world is Moore’s Law, coined by Gordon Moore, one of the inventors of the microprocessor. Moore said that the contents of a microprocessor double every 18 months. The analog to that is that electronic capabilities change every 18 months and so too the businesses based on that technology. No one can predict what will happen two years from now and a lot of smart people have gone bust betting one way or the other. The people running the media have no clue what to do or where it is all heading--and neither do I.

There have been several results of all this. International coverage is practically non-existent in America and the quality of journalism--both print--and broadcast has deteriorated dramatically.

In the case of foreign coverage, I have mentioned the newspapers that have closed bureaus. Most newspapers run very few foreign stories. They have been told by consultants that Americans are not interested and the only way to survive in the news business is to go "local, local, local." There is not a shred of evidence to support that notion, which goes back at least 30 years. Would you like the names of newspapers that tried it and no longer exist? Start with the Philadelphia Bulletin, once one of America’s great newspapers and the largest afternoon paper in the country. It listened to a consultant and was out of business in 18 months. Even the Times and the Post have reduced the number of their foreign bureaus. Only four newspapers have foreign desks. The networks are worse. They have closed half their foreign bureaus and now buy most of their visuals from outside sources over which they have no control and have no ability to monitor for accuracy or bias. Someone sits in London and narrates the video from somewhere else. It's called “packaging” and you can tell it's happening when the narration signs off with a dateline that doesn't match the locale--as in a story about a railroad strike in France narrated by a guy in London. Virtually the entire southern hemisphere goes unreported. Whole continents. There is not a single American reporter in the second largest city in the world--Sao Paolo, Brazil, and very few in the largest, Seoul, or the third largest, Mumbai. Oh, and by the way, did you know there is a country between Alaska and the Lower Forty Eight? Not one single American newspaper or network has a resident reporter in Canada. The Washington Post pulled out last year.

This gives rise to what is known as parachute journalism. Something happens in the world and you immediately dispatch a reporter from somewhere else. He or she lands at the scene--that's the parachute part--and within hours is sending back stories based on what can only be superficial and incomplete information. They have no sources. They have to rely on not necessarily-reliable locals. They don’t speak the language and they only show up when something happens. You never hear about anything before it happen, one of the criteria of quality journalism. Compare this to a resident reporter who speaks the language, has the background and the sources. Who are you going to trust? Who is cheaper?

How much of the shock and amazement that followed 9-11 was the result of the ignorance of what was going on in the rest of the world, fostered by the inattention of the corporate-owned media?

Another effect is that most of the American media is now controlled by half a dozen companies. This can have dramatic effects.

In January 2002, a train carrying toxic materials, went off the rails in Minot, North Dakota. There were six commercial radio stations in Minot and one was designated as the emergency carrier, the one the police call when they need to warn people of things like--well, toxic spills from train wrecks. Small problem. All six stations in Minot were owned by the same company, Clear Channel, and no one answered the phone when police called. Like most Clear Channel stations, the station is actually a robot. The music and the announcers were someplace else--probably Los Angeles--and the operation was totally automated. The warning never went out. Clear Channel, incidentally, insists there was someone manning the stations, but he was busy. One person died.

It wasn't just the emergency warning. All six of the Minot commercial stations share exactly one reporter who does all the news the six stations run. His appearance at a story is so rare other reporters once gave him a standing ovation when he showed up.

This would have been impossible under the old federal rules, but beginning with the Reagan administration, those rules were changed. Now, one company can own all the stations in town. Deregulation. Capitalism.

The best way to describe what has happened to newspapers is to describe the story of my old paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the people who ran the place.
The Inquirer is the third oldest newspaper in America, founded in 1829. It had various owners until the Annenberg family sold it to Knight Newspapers in 1969. The Knights, John and James, were newspaper people of the first order who ran fine regional newspapers in Akron, Miami, Detroit and Charlotte. They brought in a man named John McMullan to clear out the Annenberg stench. When I went for a job interview with McMullan, I had to walk through a picket line of Philadelphia police who were protesting a series on police corruption. The reporter who did the story had been sent secretly to California to protect his life. McMullan started the interview by telling me how many libel suits he had already collected. (He won all but one, by the way.) How could I resist? In 1972, the Knights brought in Eugene Roberts (left), an editor of the New York Times, as executive editor. They decided they need a national flagship and Robert's mandate was to build a great newspaper no matter what it cost. He did. Eighteen Pulitzer Prizes in 15 years. Every April we just routinely ordered champaign. And that was only one prize. We won everything that moved. I almost retired the space writers award.

The Inky--probably the last great newspaper to grow in America--was the best newspaper in the country on any given day. It hired the cream of the crop from the best journalism schools and raided newspapers from around the country, including the photo editor of the Los Angeles Times, who brought half his staff (mostly talented, beautiful young women) to Philadelphia with him. Besides the bureaus Roberts opened, we were gloriously staffed. We had an architect writer--a man with a degree in architecture from Yale. We had two film critics and two music writers--including one full time classical music writer who was himself a concert pianist. We had a full-color Sunday magazine with a staff of three, a full-time book editor with his own section. I had an extensive travel budget. I went to the Antarctic. Two series I did morphed into books. One of them, on the eradication of smallpox, took me to India for several weeks where I worked alongside vaccinators in the villages of Uttar Pradesh--and to Somalia to interview the last smallpox victim. In between, I stopped in Egypt to do a Sunday magazine piece on a University of Pennsylvania archeology dig in Karnak. Hey, local story! We were criticized for covering Pakistan better than we covered Upper Darby and that was true, but people read us.

While bigger papers had bigger staffs, we sometimes had the best people. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978, the New York Times had a dozen people on the scene. But we had Richard Ben Cramer. Guess who won the Pulitzer for covering the war. Our reporter in LA, Murray Dubin, wrote the funniest, most perceptive pieces about that city this side of Joan Didion. We had Steve Seplow in Moscow, Jane Eisen in London, Larry Eichel in Rome, and Rod Nordland in Bankgok. Our forte was investigative reporting and had half a dozen full-time investigative journalists, including the team of Don Barlett and James Steele, arguably the best investigative reporters of the 20th century. They would produce a series, oh every other year or so. Two Pulitzers. It was a glorious ride. And it was profitable. Sunday circulation was more than a million, the third largest in the country. Daily circulation was three-quarters of a million and with all the perceived luxuries, the paper never lost money. Profit margins were in the low teens. It drove the competition, the Philadelphia Bulletin, out of business.

Five years after buying the Inquirer, Knight Newspapers merged with Ridder Publications and the Ridder family gained control. The law of biological regression to the mean was working and the third generation was in charge. And Wall Street was now operating in the new model. The accountants in Miami, corporate headquarters, insisted that Roberts was spending too much money and needed to work with a smaller budget. He made cuts. They were not satisfied and kept pressing him for more cuts. He eventually spent more of his time fighting with corporate managers over budgets than running the newspaper. They tried to force him to expand into the suburbs and leave the rest of the world to the big guys. He quit, unwilling to cope.
The accountants began emasculating the paper as he walked out the door.

By then, most of us had left, sure we knew the end was coming. Two departures are interesting. John Carroll, one of the managing editors, was eventually hired by the Times-Mirror Co., the owner of the LA Times, to run the Baltimore Sun, which it now owned. He was eventually promoted to vice president and went to LA to run the Times. In 2000, the Times Mirror Co. was bought by the Tribune Co., owners of the Chicago Tribune, and Carroll began to suffer the same fate as Gene Roberts, insistence that he cut the seemingly bloated budget at the Times. He cut where he could. They kept coming back for more. He cut more but began to feel that the cuts were approaching the point where the Times could no longer maintain its high quality. Finally, he quit, refusing to cut any more. He was replaced by Dean Baquet who would eventually quit the Times for the same reason. So did his successor. (I might add that the editor of Knight-Ridder’s Mercury-News quit as well because of budget cutbacks he opposed.)

When he went to Baltimore, Carroll brought with him a reporter and editor from the Inquirer, Bill Marimow, a two-time Pulitzer winner. When Carroll went to Los Angeles, Marimow took over the Sun. In a few years, he too began to feel the pressure from the Chicago executives. One day he refused to make any more cuts on grounds the quality of the paper would be permanently damaged and was fired.

Their stock was tanking and Wall Street investors, many of them fund managers, insisted on extreme cost cutting and higher profit margins to goose the stock. When Carroll quit the LA Times, the paper was earning 22% on investment, an astonishing figure. But the price of the stock just wasn't high enough to suit Wall Street. The Sun also was earning a substantial profits when Marimow was fired. During the battle at the LA Times, Frontline, the PBS program, interviewed one of the fund managers pressuring the Tribune to cut costs. He objected to the fact the Times was still manning a dozen foreign bureaus. Why bother? he asked. They are expensive. Why should the Los Angeles Times be a national newspaper? People in LA can get the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times if they wanted foreign news. So, as far as he was concerned, the people in the second largest city in America should rely on New York newspapers for their foreign news so he could make another buck.

Oh, and Knight Ridder. It no longer exists. A fund manager pressured the CEO, Tony Ridder (known as Darth Vader in his newsrooms) to sell, and rather than resist or fight back, he did. The papers went to McClatchy, who sold off the ones with union contracts. The Philadelphia Inquirer is now locally owned, locally centered, and the editor is--tah day--Bill Marimow. Circulation is a fraction of its former self and reporters are lucky to cross the Delaware River to do a story.

The Mercury-News now is owned by Dean Singleton, who owns all the newspapers around San Francisco. He has cut the staff in half and is out-sourcing his copy desk to a facility across the Bay, absolutely guaranteeing that the paper will print mistakes. There is no good reason to read the Mercury-News and the people are reacting accordingly.

But the Tribune Co. still could not satisfy the fund managers and finally sold out to a real estate developer named Sam Zell with no knowledge of journalism. Zell acquired huge debt with his purchase. When last heard from Zell was telling his large Washington bureau it was too large and no one really wants to read all that foreign crap.

I think it is fair to say that all of the models of corporate ownership of the news media have failed, many of the companies involved no longer exist, and still we Americans remain among the most ignorant people in the world.

All this is muddled by the Internet and the inability of anyone to predict how the technology will play out or how to make money on it. But lost in the muddle is the quality of American journalism. Someone has to provide the content.

Faced with declining circulation and losing customers, Roberts once said, the geniuses who own newspaper companies got together and decided the answer was to give their customers less. I liken it to General Motors producing cars without back seats to save costs. Do they really teach that stuff in business school?

Next week: What can be done about it? Beats me.

Pausch succombs victorious

2008-07-25T14:46:00.003-04:00

Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon University professor, who gave a remarkable series of lectures on life under threat of death, died yesterday. I wrote about it here. Pausch, who had pancreatic cancer, shared his remarkable view of life in his "last lecture" and a book. I will let him speak for himself.

He is back! Oh, he is back!

2008-07-22T17:06:00.002-04:00

Safely returned from the Bush, we are up and running again. Enjoy.

In answer to your first question: it was a wonderful year in Alaska.

Second question: 56 degrees below zero.

Your humble servant.

A Lamentation on the Media--Part I

2008-07-22T11:04:00.004-04:00

"The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people,
the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it
left to me to decide whether we should have a government without
newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should
not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

--Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787.

I regret to inform you all that Mr. J is probably spinning in his grave about now. All is not well.

Jefferson’s notion, of course, was that a free and open press is absolutely essential in a democracy. If the press was not free, the people could have no idea what the government was doing for them or to them. With a free press, the people would know and would be able to fix the flaws, correct the mistakes, and--one hopes--elect people to office who would do the right things. The people could protect themselves from the government--the whole purpose of the American Revolution.

Mr. J was right and--despite all its flaws and abuses and ethical challenges--the free press in America has generally served the people well. In the modern time, two reporters for the Washington Post were able to actually bring down a president, the only presidential resignation in history. It was a free press that published the Pentagon Papers, stood up to government attack and won its freedom in the Supreme Court. It was the free press that described the morass of the Vietnam War and is doing the same in Iraq. It was a free press in the last few years that has told us about American troops misbehaving at a prison in Iraq, of high government officials lying about the reasons for a war-- and the horror and tragedy of the greatest attack on America since Pearl Harbor and the assault on the Constitution that ensued. It was the fury of television reporters in New Orleans that first descried the total failure of government in the face of the worst natural disaster in American history. Corrupt members of Congress have gone to jail because of a free press--an attorney general was fired because of a free press--the government was caught eavesdropping on American citizens without a warrant--and we know of people arrested and kept in jail without charges because of a free press. Jefferson--who was, by the way, a constant target of unscrupulous editors in his time--should be pleased, yes? No.

The American press no longer is as free as it once was--not because some despot has sent police into newsrooms, not because stories have to go through censorship, or reporters and editors have to be licensed. None of that has happened. The press is less free because of rampant capitalism.

I would like to make the argument that it is difficult if not impossible for a publicly traded company to do first class journalism. It can be done, but it requires either publishers with astonishing courage or at least a corporate structure that protects them from the pressures of Wall Street. Those publishers are now a seriously endangered species.

It is no accident that as long as 10 years ago, the four best newspapers in America were family owned or controlled. The Los Angeles Times was controlled by the Chandler family--the Washington Post by the Grahams--the New York Times by the Sulzbergers--and the Wall Street Journal by the Bancrofts. Then the LA Times was sold to the Tribune Co., and most recently, the Journal went to the News Corp. In the same time, the Sulzburgers are having to fight off pressure from investors. They want to alter the corporate structure so regular stock holders could have more of a say in running America’s premier newspaper, God forbid. The Grahams know they could be next.

In the same time, one of the country's best newspaper chains, Knight Ridder, for whom I once worked, no longer exists, the result of capitulation by the family that controlled it to pressures from outside investors. CNN, founded by Ted Turner and once a premier world-wide news source, is now owned by Time-Warner and devotes weeks covering celebrity trials and trying to compete with Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, a useless task. CBS, once the “Tiffany Network,” the home of the sainted Edward R. Murrow and the legendary “Murrow’s Boys," was owned by Viacom, and was spun off two years ago, but its once premier news operation is a ghost of itself. At one time it was thinking of outsourcing it’s Iraq coverage to CNN. It spent about $15 million a year to hire Katy Couric, who has failed to bring in the viewers. The idea of spending that money on news coverage--say a few more reporters and producers or a bureau or two--never occurred to management. NBC is owned by the same people who probably made the light bulbs in this room and the people at ABC may get their paychecks with Mickey Mouse’s picture on it. Literally.

In the weeks preceding 9/11, American television networks were covering the murder of a Congressional intern in Washington. While hundreds of thousands of people were being murdered in Rwanda, the networks were covering the O.J. Simpson trial.

The U.S. is now in a war it might not have been in if the media had done its job properly. Some of the faults in the months before the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with media ownership, but the structure they operate under surely contributed.

Going private

Let me add here, that family or private ownership of a newspaper is hardly a guarantee of quality journalism. Indeed, many of the worst newspapers in America were--and some still are--family-owned or owned by individuals who had more interest in power than in democracy. Before Knight Newspapers took over the Philadelphia Inquirer it was owned by Walter Annenberg. The paper was so corrupt its main investigative reporter went to jail for extortion. And there was William Randolph Hearst. While the most prestigious prize in journalism is named for Joseph Pulitzer, his newspapers were a scandal when he ran them. He invented "yellow journalism." While the LA Times reached greatness under Otis Chandler, through most of the history of that family’s ownership, the newspaper was a disgrace. There is Richard Mellon Scaife, an arch conservative--pun intended--whose Pittsburgh newspaper constantly printed stories accusing Bill and Hillary Clinton of murdering Vincent Foster. Then there is William Dean Singleton,who once famously said: "If I had the choice between pleasing 1,000 journalists or one banker, I would choose the banker. No question.” He has, repeatedly.

Yet there were families who took Jefferson’s challenge--and it turns out it was a challenge--seriously. There were the Abels in Baltimore, the Knights in Akron, the early generations of the Bancrofts in New York, the Binghams in Louisville, the Taylors in Boston, the Belos in Dallas. I grew up reading the Newark Evening News in New Jersey, one of America’s great regional newspapers, owned by the Scudder family. Nothing happened in northern New Jersey that was not covered by a News staff reporter or stringer: not a town council meeting, board of education meeting or high school basketball game. You were not dead unless you were pronounced so on their obituary pages. It also was the first job for some of America's best-known journalists, including Richard Reeves. The Scudders now work for Singleton. Now we have newspapers that don't even staff their state capitols. Virtually no television station does.

The networks were also personally run for most of their history. David Sarnoff created and ran the National Broadcasting Co., at least in part to sell radio and televisions sets, but he ran it independently. William Paley created CBS, and it was under Paley that CBS News became the greatest source of broadcast journalism in American history. And later, Leonard Goldenson ran ABC after it spun off from NBC. It was the old ABC that created "Nightline;" it was the Disney version that tried to kill it.

All three men, who ran both the radio and television networks, saw news not as a profit center but as a source of enormous prestige. While Murrow and his reports on CBS sometimes drove Paley crazy --especially when Murrow took on Joseph McCarthy--the eminence Murrow brought to CBS was immeasurable and had to contribute mightily to the bottom line. It was Murrow's radio broadcasts from London during the Blitz--Murrow with a microphone on rooftops as the bombs fell--that prepared America for entry into the war. It was Murrow's "CBS Reports" on television that first made America aware of the plight of migrant workers.

The network heads had the idea--supported in law by federal legislation--that the airwaves were owned by the public and that by broadcasting on the public airwaves, they owed the public a service. Running first class news operations were how they repaid that service. How quaint that must appear now. Their news operations were well-funded, sometimes to ridiculous lengths. Being a foreign correspondent for CBS in the 70s and 80s must have been a glorious way to go through life. Criticism that these enterprises were full of waste was undoubtedly correct. They were the ladies and gentlemen of the press and lived accordingly.

They also were experts on the areas they covered, often knew the language, read the newspapers, watched local television, knew everyone they needed to know, followed trends and could anticipate events, all the things you want great journalists to do. And many of them were great journalists. It is not clear that any of those operations actually lost money.

They covered the world. The networks had foreign bureaus or stringers in virtually every major city and on every populated continent.

The world disappears

Then things changed. In the mid-90s, some correspondents in Europe and the Middle East began hearing about an organization called Al Quiada and a man named Ossama Ben Laden. Most had trouble getting anyone in the U.S. to run their stories. Tom Fenton of CBS in London tells of having set up what would have been the first interview with Ben Laden in the mid 1990s, and getting no support from his producers in New York. He gave up. It wasn't an exciting story and--since the end of the Cold War--Americans, he was told, didn't care about foreign news.

Newspapers too covered the world, an old tradition going back to the 18th century. Not just the metropolitan giants like the two Times’ and the Post. Many of the regional newspapers also had reporters overseas. Many had superb coverage, including the Baltimore Sun, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Boston Globe. The Sun even owned a home in London for its resident correspondent and sent some of America’s most distinguished journalists overseas. It was the second American newspaper, after the New York Times, to staff Moscow. Their best reporters were rotated as a perk for being good, so the coverage was excellent. They did it because it seemed like their responsibility and it leant marketable prestige. Quaint huh?

Sometimes they also did it to serve the local readership. The number of Irish-Americans in Boston seemed to mandate that the Globe have a reporter in Dublin so they did. The large Jewish populations in the Northeast encouraged papers in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore to staff Jerusalem. They did. The San Jose Mercury News, in the heart of Silicon Valley, staffed Tokyo, Mexico City, and because of the large number of Vietnamese in the area, even Ho Chi Minh City. All sent back stories of special interest to their readership.

The Philadelphia Inquirer--when it was in its glory days in the 70s--had bureaus in London, Jerusalem, Bangkok, Tokyo, Moscow and Rome. The bureaus were staffed by the Inquirer’s best reporters and we won two Pulitzers for foreign coverage. It also had bureaus in Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles. If anything important or interesting happened anywhere in the world, a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter was there within a day. Readers in what was then America's fourth largest city had a team of first rate journalists reporting and writing especially for them. Today the Inquirer scarcely covers the Philadelphia suburbs. Might I add the circulation back when it covered the world was 30% higher than it is now?

That was then. The only newspapers with foreign bureaus now are the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. All except the Journal are cutting back. The Journal has the largest contingent by far. The Globe--which ironically is owned by the New York Times--has closed all its foreign bureaus, even Dublin. The Mercury News and the Inquirer have done the same. The Sun has folded its foreign service. (As a digression, I would point out that the Sun’s reporter in Johannesburg was one of the few American reporters in all of Africa,. The readers in one of America's great port cities are the poorer, deprived of news that may be important to them, and one of the country's largest minority populations is further cut off from its heritage. And the Sun's circulation keeps shrinking and management wonders why).

I should add that one of the last remaining independent newspaper chains, McClatchy, operates an excellent foreign service but they are the exception to the rule. And sometimes, really bad family-owned newspapers can be turned around. The Newhouse's New Orleans Times-Picayune and Portland Oregonian are two examples. The Times-Picayune's efforts during Hurricane Katrina are the stuff of legend.

What happened? At the risk of sounding like someone out of a Steinbeck novel, the answer is Wall Street--and, of course, technology. Come back in a few days and read on.

Hillary Clinton and Deus ex Machina--UPDATED

2008-05-24T14:44:00.006-04:00

Just hanging around to see what happens. You mind?--In ancient Greek drama, when a playwright could not figure a way out of his plot, he resorted to a trick. One of the gods would descend on the stage, lowered by a crane, and intervene, rescuing the hero--and the playwright. It was called deus ex machina, god from a machine.

Apparently, it works in politics as well. In an eye-popping statement, Hillary Clinton justified her staying in the race, because, well, you never know what might happen. Bobby Kennedy, she pointed out, was assassinated in June.

“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right?” Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said to the editorial board of the Sioux Falls Argus Leader in South Dakota. “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”

When it was clear within hours that she had really stepped in it, she came out with a classic Washington passive-apology. If anyone was offended, I'm sorry. IF. Actually, everyone was offended or should have been and the right response should have been, "oh, dear, I really screwed up. I'm tired and wasn't thinking and said something terrible and I'm sorry." Instead, the moral equivalent of "I didn't inhale."

The problem with the latter is that, while obviously all three candidates are tired and need a rest badly, she has said it before, using the word "assassinate" to a Time magazine editor in March and using the reference without the word repeatedly since. One would forgive the error if it was the o

nly time it happened, but it wasn't. The excuse given by subdued supporters was that it was only an historic reference. She could have used any number of other historic references.

Now no sane person believes she is rooting for Barack Obama to get killed. But the great unspoken--unspoken by the usually voluble chattering class--is the great fear that exactly that would happen. Obama received Secret Service protection well before any other candidate, the moment the death threats began, and the fear that some lunatic, threatened by the ascension of a black man to the candidacy of a major American political party, would take matters into his or her own hands, pervades the campaign. Every reporter covering him is aware of it. For someone as politically savvy as she is to discuss it as a reason for staying in the race is more than peculiar.

She is staying in the race, in part, because she is hoping for deus ex machina. She is hoping Obama will say something really stupid, or that something really awful, like the Rev. Wright controversy, will pop up to convince the super delegates he is not a tenable candidate, or.... Well, someone said something stupid.

One has the sad vision of Willy Mays in a Mets uniform, a once great player, now reluctant to admit his time has passed, holding on to the shadow of what he once was and humiliating himself in public. Her time has now passed. In the words of the late, great Oliver Cromwell: "In the name of God, go!"

------

Poblano, the anonymous statistician whose predictions on the primaries, based entirely on demographics, have been remarkably accurate--more accurate than the polls, has figured out what would have happened if Michigan had a real primary, following the rules. The answer is that Obama would have won by 4 points. Clinton better not push Michigan too far.

Overall, we project that Obama would have carried Michigan by a narrow margin -- about 4.0 percentage points or 80,000 votes. After accounting for delegates awarded at the statewide level, we project him to win 65 Michigan delegates to Clinton's 63. Certainly, there is some margin for error in these calculations, and Clinton could certainly have won the state herself. But it would undoubtedly have been very close. Interestingly, if you take the average of the winning margins in Indiana (Clinton by 1.2 points), Ohio (Clinton by 8.7) and Wisconsin (Obama by 17.3), you come up with an average of Obama by 2.5 points, which is very close to our estimate.

What do pundits do when they are in a room alone?

2008-05-10T14:20:00.004-04:00

They wack off--It's the political season and as a news junkie I simply cannot stay still any longer.

I don't really know what the pundits on cable TV or who write for newspapers do when they are alone and I wouldn't presume to ask. I do know what they do in public. They jerk off. They buy all sorts of things they should know better than to purchase. For instance:

The Clinton camp is trying to persuade super delegates that since Hillary Clinton does better in swing states than Barrack Obama, she would make a better candidate in November. Garbage.

These votes are for the Democratic primary, not the general election and the people who don't vote for him in the primary are very likely to vote for him in November when the opposition is John McCain (who is sounding more and more like a throwback to the 19th century than a candidate of the 21st). One election has little or nothing to do with the other.
It is a long way in politics from May to November (isn't there a song in that?) and what is true now may not be true next Wednesday, not to mention five months from now.

Second, she says that all the tracking polls show her a better candidate against McCain. See above, about the time span. But everyone who knows anything about politics and polling know these polls are meaningless, have always been meaningless and will continue to be meaningless. They tell you nothing you need to know because while they may be a great snapshot of time today, they tell you absolutely nothing about next Wednesday. Since everyone in politics knows that, why are the Clinton people not challenged when the spew it on the pundit shows. Garbage in, garbage out.

And while we're talking about polls, I've mentioned how badly pollsters have done in this campaign, with the Zogby poll consistently distinguishing itself for missing. Mark Blumenthal, one of my favorite sources (Pollster.com) had a piece in the National Journal about an anonymous blogger who called North Carolina and Indiana right on the money without doing a poll and by ignoring the polls that were done. The blogger, who calls him or herself Poblano, went to the demographics, finding an unalterable pattern on how segments of the population vote and predicting the results from that. We all know that Obama's strength is in African-Americans, the young and the better educated; Clinton's strength is in working class whites and seniors. The blogger saw a pattern on how they voted and presumed that pattern would last despite all the Rev. Wrights and sniper attacks. He was exactly right in Indiana, which all the pollsters missed, and nearer to the mark in North Carolina. Even Blumenthal's poll of polls was less accurate.

The point--besides the fact you need to ignore polls in primary elections and the media wastes a lot of money that would be better spent on actually reporting news--is that this is an entirely different kind of race. People who will vote for Obama will still vote for him no matter what; and the Clinton supporters feel the same. The demographic patterns stood unshakable despite outside events. This is true for the primaries and may or may not be true in the general election. We don't know and everyone being paid great money on television to discuss the matter doesn't know either.

Not original but: Think of Sen. Clinton as the Black Knight in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." He picks a fight, slashing with his right arm. When that arm is cut off, he attacks with the left. When the left arm is hacked off, he kicks with his right leg and when that is removed he kicks with his left. Finally he is armless and legless and when Arthur declines to continue, he threatens to "bite your legs off.")

Whack on.

All right, where the hell is he now?

2008-04-09T20:19:00.002-04:00

He is still in Alaska, closing up the academic year. He also is editing a website on children's health for George Washington University and working on a book proposal on climate change in the Arctic. He is busy as hell and this blog, unfortunately, has suffered inattention. It will continue to suffer same until mid-July when he is back in Baltimore and has the time. There may be an odd posting or two, but come back in the summer.

He thanks you.

Your humble servant.

And the password for your dirty pictures is...

2008-02-15T15:54:00.004-05:00

Watch my lips. I use a password so no one else can see what’s on my computer--I have often wondered about this: What happens if a cop or a judge orders you to give them the password for your computer? Do you have to give it to them? After all, you encrypted the damned thing so other people wouldn’t see what’s on it. A Canadian named Sebastien Boucher is in just such a jam in Vermont.

Boucher, who lives in Vermont, crossed the border into the U.S. with his father. Customs agents inspected his laptop computer and found child pornography on it. He was arrested and could face as much as 20 years in prison on the child pornography charge. But after his arrest, they tried to access the files again and found them blocked by Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), an excellent encryption program that requires a password. They asked him for the password and he refused. Can he be forced to give it up?

Boucher said he frequently downloads adult pornography, making him one of, oh about 20 million people. He says sometimes he accidentally gets a child pornography site and when he sees it, he deletes it.

Now the fun starts.

A grand jury ordered him to give up the password. A federal magistrate quashed the order. See, he can’t be required to give up the password because that would violate his Fifth Amendment Rights on self-incrimination. Warrants won’t work because a password is not a physical thing like a container or a house. It exists only in his mind, the magistrate wrote. You can’t issue a warrant on the brain. The feds could turn the computer over to the computer boffins at say the FBI or NSA but the only thing they can do is run an automated guessing program and that could take decades to bust.

The government, of course, has appealed. Good luck to Mr. Boucher.

Programs like PGP (I’ve used it) base the encryption on a program that generates random numbers. Every time you encrypt something, the program issues a password based on that number that can be used to decrypt the fiel. You need to know the number to unlock the encryption. Many programs, including probably the browser you are reading this on, have encryption although programs like PGP are for hiding specific items or disks and virtually unbreakable. Many businesses use it, and even intelligence groups hide files with PGP.

For years, security experts have worried that someone (probably the buffoons in Congress) would require the software to include a “backdoor” to encryption programs so that the government or law enforcement agencies, could break them quickly. This was especially true after 9/11 although there is no evidence 9/11 had anything to do with encrypted messages. There were wild rumors after Microsoft released Vista that it came with a backdoor, and after the government issued new encryption standards, the web was alive with rumors the NSA had slipped a backdoor into the code. The rumor was reinforced by the fact the standards were sloppy and what would you expect from our government? Both rumors appear at this time to be erroneous.

So far, it appears, there are no backdoors yet, and the law so far is on Boucher’s side. If I encrypt something I have absolutely no obligation to reveal the password. So far.

Pollsters blow another one--big time

2008-01-27T20:13:00.000-05:00

I know we're laying off reporters and editors but we gotta spend hundreds of thousands on these polls--Here, again, is another unreported story. Same one. The pre-election polls in South Carolina were flat out wrong. Every one of them. It was, believe it or not, an even worse performance than New Hampshire. So far the polls have been wrong in every single primary or caucus. Bet you didn't know that.

[The Washington Post wins the award for being the first to pick up on this, the Sunday before Super Tuesday. Click here.] And you won't want to miss Opus here.

But they predicted the winner in South Carolina, you say. Indeed they did. And they got the victory margin so wrong as to make their results uncredible. Some polls even missed Barak Obama's rout by almost 20 points. They were clearly clueless. If you are a serious pollster, that's an erroneous result even if you got Obama winning. Once again, taking polls for a primary is fraught with danger. Why the media relies on them is an interesting question.

(The exit polling, to the contrary, was excellent. You knew it was going to be a blow-out when CNN announced the winner within seconds of the polls closing. When I was doing polling for the Philadelphia Inquirer, we usually knew the winner by late afternoon from exit polling and had the story all written and ready to go for the second edition as soon as voting ended. For CNN to go that fast meant someone had run away with the vote--as indeed happened.)

For a good technical explanation of just how wrong the polls were in South Carolina, see Pollster.com here, and Mark Blumenthal here. They screwed up big-time. And again, why does anyone pay attention to this train wreck? When they call the winner wrong, as they did in New Hampshire, that is big news. If the get the winner right but blow the results, everyone ignores the fact they were doing junk science.

The answer says more about journalism than about polling. Reporters are fascinated by the competition, the horse race, and have been widely criticized for it. In part, it is because a political campaign is a horse race, but that doesn't excuse the emphasis. People do want to know who is ahead and who isn't. If you didn't have polling you couldn't tell because anything else would be anecdotal. But, as we have seen, even having the polls doesn't really tell you much useful. Even when they work they are a snapshot of a moment in time and nothing more. Stuff happens. To carry it out more than a day in advance is to misuse polling and even one day can be hazardous to your health as New Hampshire proved.

Part of it is simple laziness. It is easier to report a poll result than to report the issues and analyze what the voters are thinking. Just ask a pollster and there is your lede. It's a lot easier than breaking down somone's health care plan and discussing that. Reporters on the trail will blame their editors back in their offices for forcing them to emphasize the polls, and that may be true in many cases. Also, there you are out on an expense account and you really need to justify all that money they are spending on you so you have to file every day even if you have nothing to report. And, you don't want to get lost back in the office so you are very anxious to make sure you have a story in the paper or on the air every day even if there really is nothing new to report. Been there; done that. But just how many times do the polls have to screw up before you see the danger in that and find something else to do?

Primaries are famous for being hard to poll because it is notoriously difficult to predict who is going to show up. This year it is particularly difficult because the Democrats are revved up (thank you George Bush) and are turning out in huge numbers, far more than the pollsters are anticipating. That makes this year even more difficult for a pollster to handle.

They should be ignored. The media should drop them and invest in reporters, who might actually get the story. Or not.

Oh, John McCain and Mitt Romney are now in a dead heat in Florida. That's what the polls say. That's what the media is reporting. Why, for heaven's sakes.

And now the customary political blather:

Barak Obama is the most inspirational political candidate since Jack Kennedy. I hope he is well -protected.
Hillary Clinton is probably the only Democratic candidate who can lose to a Republican this year, particularly if that Republican is John McCain.
Hillary needs to tell Bill to shut up.
If the Clintons don't get off the race card, a lot of African-Americans are going to stay home next November and we could get another Republican in the White House.
Mitt Romney is still evil.

Butt forward with talking heads--STILL BLOGGING

2008-01-07T14:06:00.000-05:00

I am a pundit on television. See how important I am--Two important defeats have gone unmarked in last week's Iowa primary and notice should be taken. It happened again in New Hampshire, although this time it was so bad everyone noticed. The polls picked the right winner in Michigan but got the margin of victory wrong.

With amazement and glee:

The polls in all states, with only one exception in Iowa, were absolutely wrong and predictably so.
The pundits, with no exceptions, were absolutely wrong in both states and predictably so.

Every poll the night before the Iowa caucuses, except the one in the Des Moines Register, showed a tight race, with Hillary Clinton the most likely winner. As we all know, Barack Obama won by 8 percent, a substantial victory. All the polls in New Hampshire were flat wrong, predicting Obama by double digits. He lost by 2 percent. I said the failures were predictable because it is exceptionally difficult to predict caucuses and not much easier predicting primaries. The key is measuring who is likely to show up. In both states, more people voted than the pollsters thought would vote. And the two populations differed: In Iowa, women went for Obama; in New Hampshire they went for Clinton. Go figure.

After Iowa, the "experts" were talking about Hillary dropping out. Even her own campaign believed it and the in-fighting and panic in her campaign team was loud and open. They were wrong too.

What happened?

Caucuses require time, effort and mental energy and not everyone is likely to spend any of the above unless they really, really care. Pollsters have always had problems formulating questions that accurately predict who they will be. In the case of Iowa last week, they failed. Far more people showed up than the pollsters had thought might and they went for Obama. In New Hampshire, the opposite was true: the newcomers went for Clinton.

The exception in Iowa was the Register poll, run by Ann Selzer, who got it right on the mark.

Mark Blumenthal, who runs the indispensable Pollster.com, says it was not blind luck. Selzer had a system in place that worked and she stuck too it. (She runs her own company and works on contract to the newspaper). When her poll showed Obama winning handily, she was attacked by the campaigns of other candidates and by other pollsters. She stuck to her guns. Other polls, Zogby in particular was wildly wrong. It had Clinton winning with a fair margin. Polls were wrong four years ago as well. Makes you wonder why media that are busy laying off reporters for financial reasons will still spend a fortune on polls that are often wrong.

Here's Blumenthal's take on New Hampshire. The best explanation is that the polls stopped too soon--they did not pick up the last-minute arrival of Mrs. Clinton's sisters. He also challenges Zogby to defend his claim he spotted the Clinton trend but had to stop polling too early.

The pundits are another problem, Rant alert!

They live in Washington, which may be the capital of the United States but isn't like the real

America at all, and they assume knowledge they do not have, like what those of us outside the beltway are thinking or live like. They run in herds. It's not just the politicians; the journalists are just as bad. If I owned a newspaper I would not let any of my reporters stay in the Washington bureau for more than five years. After that, they get intellectually corrupted. The press in the case of this campaign has been wrong repeated and infuriatingly, yet they blabber on.

Remember when Hillary Clinton was inevitable? Remember when John McCain was dead? Isn't Huckabee a character in a Twain novel? Nobody can win without having more money than anyone else? Obama was dead. Then Clinton was dead. I could go on. When Selzer's poll in Iowa came out, the chattering class jumped on it as contrary to the common wisdom. It had to be wrong. Even the reporters traveling in the state with the candidates missed an emotional surge that played itself out Thursday in Iowa and then they overestimated the surge in New Hampshire. They are clueless.

New Hampshire should have been another case. Primaries also are difficult to poll, and the talking heads still don't know what they are talking about. Some of them gave up only reluctantly. As the race in New Hampshire continued to be remarkably close and as it looked like Clinton might actually win, the pundits were incredulous. At PBS, David Brooks, the conservative columnist of the New York Times kept saying "the numbers don't add up." This can't be real, he said. Oh really? He finally conceded around midnight.

There is one more factor, perhaps. Obama is black. That did not seem to matter in Iowa but it is possible--and I don't know if it happened--that voters lied to pollsters in New Hampshire about their willingness to vote for a black. The race card. I have no idea if that happened.

And, again, if you want to know what's really going on with the polls, see Blumenthal here.

Several political asides that have nothing to do with science:

Obama's victory speech, though it went on too long, was a classic in American political history. He changed my mind. It apparently was less impressive to some in New Hampshire.
The Republicans are really in bad shape when all they can produce is John McCain and the Seven Dwarfs.
Mitt Romney is evil. Fortunately, the more people know him, the less likely they are to like him. He has already lost twice and keeps going because he has no character, and that's scary.

The picture above, by the way, is pollster John Zogby, probably not explaining why he charges so much money for his polls and gets them wrong.

And cute animals taste good too

2007-12-04T18:10:00.001-05:00

BARROW, ALASKA—It is the law of the cute. If an animal is cute—at least when it is very young—it has a popularity that may not be justified when it grows up but people get very protective. And if it grows up to be a very beautiful creature, all bets are off. Consider the polar bear.

In recent months environmentalists and government officials have been warning that the the bears—certainly among the cutest of cubs and the most gloriously beautiful adults—are endangered by global warming. The ice they use to live on is melting and they may not be able to hunt. The Sunday Times of London reported as long ago as 2005 that bears were drowning because they had to swim longer distances than usual. The Washington Post reported a study in 2004 by the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, that predicted that the bears may become extinct by the end of the century, mostly because of drowning or starving to death. USGS reported in the New York Times that two-thirds of the world’s polar bears could be gone by mid-century. Practically every environmental group has issued press releases lamenting the impending extinction of what is an unarguably beautiful creature even if it is one of the most dangerous animals in the world. They could be gone entirely from Alaska.

Not everyone is convinced, including scientists up here in the Alaskan Arctic, where no one leaves town unarmed because of the bears. Daniel Lum, an Iñupiat guide had to chase a bear away from his semi-hysterical wife two weeks ago after the bear came exploring their Barrow home. Lum never lets any of his clients out of his SUV on the ice unless he has his rifle with him, and that’s not for effect. Anyone going near the beach is warned to watch for bears. People live with them and respect them here.

But Glenn Sheehan;, executive director of the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium (BARC), an Iñupiat-funded research center, says lamenting for the bears may be a tad premature. Along with most things in Arctic science, the baseline data needed to draw conclusions is missing. Also, Sheehan, an anthropologist, says the lamentation is coming mostly from biologists who know very little about ice and the bears’ relationship to it.

Sheehan does not doubt for a moment that climate change is real. Virtually no one in Alaska does. And he is worried that Washington—a long way from Barrow—will try to “save” the bears by dumping on the native people who live with them.

“I live here;,” says Sheehan, who is not Iñupiat. “Most of my friends here were born and raised here and they know that it’s much easier for people to regulate them than it is to regulate themselves. Polar bear survival aside, what’s the most likely result of putting polar bears—as opposed to any one of a thousand species that you’d find in Arizona or Pennsylvania that are potentially endangered by climate change—on the endangered list? The most likely result is: George Bush or Hillary or whoever succeeds [Bush] is going to say, well polar bears are endangered by climate change. I’m going to tell those Chinese, you cut it back from 3 to 2 coal plants a week? He’s going to go to Cincinnati and say, polar bears are threatened. Turn in your SUVs? I don’t think so. They’re going to go to the oil industry and say, polar bears are threatened so stop providing energy to our country? No.”

What they are going to do, he says, is put restrictions on the people in the Arctic to stop driving their ATVs on the beach or some other fairly ridiculous thing, affecting on their culture and their lives. Yet there is nothing the native people of the Arctic are doing that endangers the bears; they are helping them survive.

Without baseline data it is impossible to take real actions to save the bears—if indeed they are endangered. The science being used to alarm the public is spurious, he says. When you ask the biologists pertinent questions, you get weak answers: “Have you modeled the different types of sea ice? Do you know precisely what sea ice is most important to the bears? The answer is no. Is most of the sea ice that’s disappearing, that’s making most of the headlines and somehow being linked to the endangerment of bears, have anything to do with the survival of the bears? They don’t have a clue.”

Maybe the ice change has actually been good for the bears, he suggests. For instance, there are more grey whales coming to the American Arctic now that there is more water to swim in. And the more grey whales, the more orcas. When orcas and grey whales get together there are more whale carcasses around because the orcas rip out the tongues of the whales (it is an orca delicacy) and leave the rest of the animal, which bears love.

“A couple of years ago” he said, “the ice went out but it didn’t notify the bears--went out overnight and stranded 129 bears here. It went too far for them to swim if they didn’t have to. They were here for a long time. A grey whale washed up at Point Barrow and they were just all over that. They were the dirtiest looking bears. They were happy. They would eat. They’d sleep. They’d eat.” That could be a model for the bears adapting.

They can sit around waiting for home delivery.

He also points out that there have been two or three warming periods in the Arctic in the past and all the evidence indicates that the bears survived without any interference from politicians.

Maybe they ate them. Probably not. Politicians must taste terrible.

Healthful life with round corners

2007-11-07T19:33:00.000-05:00

I'll have a pastrami on rye, chips and a Diet Coke, for medicinal reasons, of course--Federal scientists have found that moderately overweight people live longer than the obese or the scrawny, or even the normal. Now we're talking serious research.

People who have something to hang on to are much less likely to die from Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease and while they are more likely than others to die of cancer, diabetes or heart disease, the increased rate does not make up for the benefits of not dying from the other stuff. You may be assured that this conclusion, published in JAMA, does not go uncontested from the weight police. It also flies in the face of conventional wisdom, bless it. The research came from the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute.

"It's just rubbish," said Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health to the Washington Post. "It's just ludicrous to say there is no increased risk of mortality from being overweight. . . . From a health standpoint, it's definitely undesirable to be overweight."

“I believe the data,” said Dr. Elizabeth Barrett-Connor, a professor of family and preventive medicine at the University of California, San Diego to the New York Times. A body mass index of 25 to 30, the so-called overweight range, “may be optimal,” she said.

People come in different weight classifications: normal, underweight, overweight and obese. Absolutely no one thinks obese is a good thing, either for health or aesthetics. The fight is over the other three. As Gina Kolata points out in the Times, a woman five-feet-four, would be normal at 130 lbs, underweight at 107, overweight at 150 and obese at 180. It’s the overweight category we’re talking about here.

Studies in mice, for instance, report that being seriously underweight, eating a near starvation diet, is linked [how I hate that word] to increased life span. There are no data supporting that notion in humans. The assumption has long been that the less you weigh the longer you will live. What the new research now shows is that—duh—things are more complicated than that.

Several years ago, Katherine M. Flegal, a senior research scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, reported that the common wisdom may not have been correct. "It's not a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all situation, where excess weight just increases your mortality risk for any and all causes of death,” she said. Her study caused a major eruption in the blood pressure of most other scientists. The fat hit the fire, so to speak. The new work supports and expands on her study.

The analysis is based on the best cause-of-death data that federal scientists collected between 1971 and 2004 from the records of 2.3 million adults.

Being overweight but not obese was associated only with excess mortality from diabetes and kidney disease -- not from cancer or heart disease. There were fewer instances of death from tuberculosis, emphysema, pneumonia, Alzheimer's disease and injuries.

I am old enough to have learned certain rules of life. (Borrowing from Nelson Algren, the three most important are: "Never play poker with a man called Doc; never eat at a place called Mom's, and never, ever, no matter what else you do in life, go to bed with someone who has more troubles than you do.")

The fourth is "all things in moderation. Especially moderation."

Excuse me. It's dinner time.

The ghosts of Cold Spring Harbor

2007-10-25T19:39:00.000-04:00

Dr. Watson meet Dr. Shockley—James Watson, he of Watson & Crick, the double-helix guys, apparently never heard of William Shockley. Biologists don’t hang around with physicists much. Watson, 79, caused an uproar and got fired from his job, for saying almost exactly the same thing Bill Shockley said 40 years ago and will likely meet a similar end. Coincidences abound.

Watson, who actually is fairly famous for stupid, poorly considered statements, told the Times of London last week that there really was no point in worrying about the people of Africa because there were limits to how much help you can give them. They are not as bright as white folks. When the world went “huh,” he apologized, saying “there is no scientific basis for such a belief,” which of course raises the question of why he said it in the first place. He got fired from his plush job as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which he served as president until 2003. All kinds of speaking engagements were canceled and he is now something of a pariah in science. He is triggering a debate on whether scientists should be shunned or silenced because what they say is not socially acceptable--or is even silly.

Those who do not study history and all that crap. Forty years ago, Bill Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, said essentially the same thing. Blacks repeatedly score 15 points lower than whites in IQ tests and therefore, as a whole (not individually) were less bright than whites. Moreover, he said, there was little point with welfare programs since they wouldn’t work. Sounds familiar?

[Your humble servant, is, of course, Shockley's biographer. For more on Shockley, you are all invited to purchase Broken Genius, The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age, which by coincidence, comes out in paperback next January. I would like to thank Dr. Watson for the news hook].

Shockley also agreed that the statement had little scientific support beyond the IQ tests, but spent the rest of his life trying to get the scientific establishment to study the matter and see if he was right. They, of course, had no intention of doing any such thing, and in a classic instance of scientists behaving badly, went after Shockley, destroying his career. He was shunned and the establishment did its best to silence him. He died in 1979 at the same age Watson is now, alone and in disgrace. The same thing is likely to happen to Watson.

Shockley was a firm believer in the inheritance of attributes such as intelligence (nature) and ran up against an establishment that believed that intelligence was more a matter of environment (nurture). We now think it is both, but Shockley was far more right than the scientists of his time were willing to concede. Except for the race aspect, he actually won. It was when Shockley got into race, he lost the argument.

IQ tests measure one aspect of what we call intelligence. The tests were invented at Stanford by Lewis Terman [your humble servant also is his biographer. See Terman’s Kids. Do you note a pattern here?] They do not measure creativity, attention, motivation, talent, aspects of reasoning. Shockley even took Terman’s tests twice to see if he would qualify for Terman’s study of the gifted and failed twice. He was one of the smartest men of the 20th century and won a Nobel Prize but did not score dramatically on IQ tests. (The physicist Luis Alvarez also failed to qualify). Yet he used these tests as the basis for his racial profiling. Intelligence is much too complicated for testing or even definitions, and in one aspect, at least, Shockley was not as intelligent as even he thought.

The establishment at the time first attacked Shockley on grounds he was a physicist and didn’t know squat about biology (something they certainly can’t say about Watson, who headed the American efforts in the Human Genome Project), but Shockley learned what he needed to learn and could do statistics better than they could. So they carried the attack to the personal, behaving disgracefully. Shockley, however, was a terrible debater, a seriously unpleasant person, and he lost the argument.

Missing in much of the press coverage is another coincidence. Shockley was a eugenicist, the notion that smarter, better people, need to out-reproduce the less smart, less better people. Much of the work in eugenics in the first half of the 20th century was done at—wait for it—Cold Spring Harbor. The lab has happily moved well beyond that difficult time of its history, but the coincidence is notable.

Watson, if he pays attention, will learn from this that the best thing he can do now is shut up. He likely won’t.

That's Jane Austen swinging from that tree! Darcy, quick, drop the banana!

2007-10-09T19:02:00.000-04:00

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single baboon in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife"--We are not nearly as far removed from our evolutionary cousins as we like to think. Nick Wade's story in the New York Times on the work of Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth of the University of Pennsylvania is a case in point. The two, husband and wife, study baboons in Botswana and they tape the behavior of their subjects. The results, as Wade points out, is that baboons think. Slowly, perhaps, but we who allow ourselves to be governed from Washington have no right to feel smug.

The biologists set up tests for the baboons and actually taping what looks awfully like intellect. One male baboon has the hots for a female but she is being serviced by the alpha male. Suddenly, he hears the sound of another female nearby ("If you can't screw the one you love, love the one you screw?") and you can watch him think it out. "Hmmm. The boss is busy and we have this opportunity nearby, maybe I can knock off a quickie before he returns and...." Unfortunately for him, when he goes to find her, he finds a loudspeaker playing a recording of the second female's flirtatious call. Bad biologists! But the point is made.

The two suggest that there are pointed similarities between baboons and the women in 19th century English society. "Stay loyal to your relatives (though perhaps at a distance, if they are an impediment), but also try to ingratiate yourself with members of high-ranking families," they say. Sounds like the Bennet family, doesn't it? Female status is passed from mother to daughter and female society stays constant, while the males change regularly as new upstarts upset the reigning alpha male. They sort of move into Netherfield Park, put all the females into a tizzy, and walk off with the best-looking of the higher rank. Like the women in Jane Austen novels, the female baboons who do best are the ones with the best social skills.

I'm sorry, but is that vagina a Versace?--Speaking of females with social skills, I write this very carefully. The medical establishment in Britain is in a bit of a tizzy about the newest fad: cosmetic vaginal surgery. The number of procedures to reduce the size of vaginas has doubled in six years. Women claim they are having problems wearing tight clothing, ride a bike, show up in bathing suits or take communal showers and want surgeons to do something about it. It is called genitoplasty or labial reduction. The authors of a story in the British Medical Journal said they did a Google search of labial reduction and found 490,000 results. (I got 92,400). Most were ads for clinics in Britain and the U.S. that did the surgery. The Brits have been treated to television and magazines pieces on "designer vaginas." Can we expect knock-offs from China? No. It will be a sign of my maturity that I will drop the subject without the usual bad taste humor it so richly deserves. Aren't you proud?

Who are you going to believe, that printer or your lying eyes?--Everyone has had it happen. Your printer software proclaims you are out of ink (aren't you glad I moved from vaginas?) and you toss the cartridge out and put in a new one. If you suspect that you are somehow getting screwed, you may be right. A study from German suggests that in at least half the time, the software is lying--it isn't out. A German research company,TÜV Rheinland looked at all brands and both single-ink and multi-ink cartridges. Results did vary. Epson (which financed the study) was the most honest (told the truth 80% of the time) and Kodak the worst (told the truth 64%). Sometimes the printer said it was out of ink when there was still enough for hundreds of pages. Sometimes a multi-ink cartridge reported itself empty when only one of the inks was out. You are better off with cartridges with the inks in separate tubes, so that you can replace the one running low and not have to pay for the ones still in sufficient supply. Sometimes, the problem is just that if you don't use the printer for a while, the ink dries. If you are waiting for answer to how to solve the problem, I can't help you. They have us by the short hairs.

Vaginal statue photography by Dan Heller

Life is a crap shoot--existentialist alert!

2007-09-20T19:23:00.000-04:00

All right, get out your hankies--If you were a college professor and you had a chance to give one last lecture before you died, what would you say?

At a number of colleges, professors have been asked to imagine what their last words would be and the results are no doubt fascinating and a great exercise. But for one of them, the exercise was not academic.

Randy Pausch, a well-known computer scientist at Carnegie-Mellon, has pancreatic cancer and will be dead in a few months. It was his last lecture. He is 46 and a father of three young children.

Jeff Zaslow, who writes “Moving On” for the Wall Street Journal, has a story about Pausch’s lecture today. It’s one of those only subscribers can read but I can tell you about it. If you have a subscription, click here. There is video of the lecture at the Carnegie Mellon website you will not want to miss. You also want to visit his web site to get more details on his illness. Click on his name above.

Pausch, the author of Alice, software that allows just about anyone to do 3-D animation on a computer, appears in remarkable health now that his chemotherapy is done. He said he feels wonderful and did push-ups on the stage floor to prove it. He lifts weights and rides a bicycle an hour every day That he has the most lethal form of cancer seems particularly ironic.

Four hundred people, all of whom knew the circumstances, came to hear the lecture. Pausch assured them he was not in denial. He knows he is dying. He even showed his CT scans with 10 tumors on his liver. The cancer had metastasized. If the audience expected him to be morose, he said, “I’m sorry to disappoint you.” And if you want to feel sorry for him, he said, you have to drop and do push ups first.

So what did he say as his last lecture:

Rejections in life, he said, are brick walls put there as a test. “They let us prove how badly we want things.” He also learned from a mentor that if “you wait long enough...people will surprise and impress you. If you are pissed off at someone,” he said, you haven’t waited long enough.
He got great pleasure, he said, from helping his students. He described requiring his students to create video games without sex and violence. “You’d be surprised how many 19-year-old boys run out of ideas when you take those possibilities away,” he said.
When he was a kid, he said, he had four goals in life: to win a giant stuffed animal at carnivals, design Disney rides, write an article for the World Book encyclopedia and fly in zero-gravity. He has done every one. He had all the stuffed animals he won brought into the lecture hall and gave them away to the audience.
Now he is facing death. “Like Moses, I get to see the Promised Land, but I don’t get to step foot on it. That’s OK. I will live on in Alice.” The program has had more than a million downloads.
He also admitted to a deathbed conversion, he told the audience. “I just bought a Macintosh.”

The lecture was taped so his children, 5, 2 and 1, can see it when they grow up. At the end he had a cake brought out for his wife, Jai [above] whose birthday was the day before. They kissed and everyone sang “Happy Birthday” and cried.

“This was for my kids,” he said finally. And everyone, I suspect, fell apart. Be my guest.

Google captured by space aliens!

2007-09-14T15:38:00.000-04:00

Instead of Google Earth why don't we just call the Earth Google and be done with it--The folks at Google, who buy up everything they can find on earth, are slowly pushing their way into space. With more money than Croesus (or almost Bill Gates), the company has posted $30 million out of its petty cash drawer to stir somebody into putting robots on the moon. The company will give $20 million to the first group that lands a privately funded robotic rover on the lunar surface. The requirement is that it must rove at least 500 meters and send back images. A second prize of $5 million, plus a $5 million bonus will be added for additional tasks.

You better hurry. The prize goes down by half if no one does it by 2012, and the reward ends in 2014. Google even hired an astronaut, Ed Lu, to run the project.

The prize is in association with the X PRIZE Foundation (which gave a reward to Burt Rutan for being the first to launch a privately owned manned aircraft into suborbital space twice) and is welcome here. I covered the space program and the manned lunar expeditions, and never dreamed then that humanity would retreat from the moon and lose its vision of exploration. We haven't been there in 34 years. We prefer to spend our money on wars. I would rather we actually sent people up there, but at least we'd be doing something.

For Google, incidentally, this is not the first time they are dealing with space. They struck a jaw-dropping $1.3 million deal with NASA recently so they could park their corporate jets at NASA's Moffett Field in Mt. View, near their campus. The company gets to park three planes at Moffett, including the Boeing 767-200 the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, use as their corporate jet (talk about the road to excess!) and in return, NASA gets to put whatever instrumentation it wants on the planes. The other two planes are more modest Gulfstreams. NASA has already done an experiment on a meteor shower from one of the Gulfstreams. The deal is great for Brin and Page: Moffett is four miles from Google headquarters and the poor dears don't have to drive to San Jose or San Francisco like mere mortal CEOs to get on their plane. What the hell they are doing with a 767, I have no idea. A bowling alley in the air? Swimming pools would weigh too much.

NASA said it thinks the deal is neat. Besides flying experiments on Google planes, the money helps defray the cost of operating Moffett, which is adjacent to the Ames Research Center. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, that's a picture of their little investment up above.

Google's approach to buying things is admirable, by the way. They seem to look around for things that might be interesting and just buy them and figure out what to do with them later. I use a telephone service called Grand Central. I have one telephone number and it will ring on any phone I tell it it to. You dial the number (a Maryland area code because I normally live in Baltimore) and it will ring on my cell phone wherever it is, and my home and office phones, even here in Alaska. It does voice mail, contacts you by e-mail if there is a voice mail in your box, let's you listen to it on the web, and even call the number back. Amazingly, it is so far free. Google, of course, bought it up within months of its start up. It is still in beta, for heaven's sakes. It had potential; they have the cash. It's at grandcentral.com, and I love it. Google's record is such that I doubt they will screw it up.

Usually, when a company gets that big, you learn to hate it. See Microsoft. For some reason, I can't bring myself to hate them yet. They are simply cool. Rich, but cool.

The immortal berry--or not

2007-09-04T19:19:00.000-04:00

Everything causes cancer in rats; everything cures cancer in rats--That used to be the motto of this blog and maybe I'll bring it back. As we have discussed, medical researchers only pretend to know anything about nutrition and part of the problem has to do with science writers. Here is the latest on what will and what will not make you immortal, all reported in the press. If you are confused it is only because you are paying attention--and many science writers aren’t.

Antioxidants, show no sign of being beneficial in preventing heart attacks or sudden death in high risk women. This, of course, despite the fact that scientific papers by the scores and scientific articles by the hundreds (and yes, I’ve written a few myself) exclaim how wonderful antioxidants are, especially for heart disease. “Antioxidants scavenge free radicals and limit the damage they can cause," says a paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine. "Diets high in fruit and vegetable intake, and thus rich in such antioxidants, have been associated with reduced rates of coronary heart disease and stroke. Vitamins C and E and beta carotene are potential mediators of the apparent protective effect of a plant-based diet on cardiovascular disease." Except there is no evidence in this study, which made use of more than 8,000 women over almost 10 years. Nada.
Studies showing that vitamin E has no effect on heart disease may have failed because the researchers didn’t test the right dosage, according to a study at Vanderbilt. In fact, the scientists said, no study has yet established what the right dosage is for vitamin E. They found that if they gave very high doses of E, 3200 IUs per day, far more than the minimum recommended dosage, for 16 weeks, they could finally get the vitamin to impressively suppress free radicals. The Duke people found that it required a minimum of 1600 IU per day to make a mark on oxidative stress. None of the published studies used that much.
Remember cranberries? A new study shows that it may improve chemotherapy for ovarian cancer. Rutgers and Brown scientists found that cancer cells showed increased efficiency of platinum chemotherapy in patients who were resistant to those drugs. The cells became six times more sensitized to the platinum. The main researcher involved said it was “exciting” to see this--until someone proves it isn’t so and that’s before someone proves it is so again.
Since cranberries are red, does it make sense to think the color has something to do with the health benefits. Why of course. Ohio State researchers claim that the rich colors in berriesl, fruits and vegetables, may be powerful colon cancer fighters. At an American Cancer Society meeting, they said anthocyanins, the compound that produces the color, cut the growth of human cancer cells--in rats. Slightly altering the anthocyanin molecules increased the potency. The compound was extracted frrom grapes, radishes, purple corn, chokeberries, bilberries, purple carrots and elderberries.
Oh, and grapefruit is now linked to breast cancer.

Are you confused? Maybe science writers need to exercise a bit more discretion in publishing these stories. I can’t account for science journals.

See that potato sack? See that river?

2007-08-26T21:11:00.001-04:00

Oh Macavity? Hey you! Stupid, over here!--I'm going to write something now that will get me in a world of trouble. People are really going to yell at me because I am about to attack one of their most cherished beliefs. Boy, I'm in for it now.

Cats are about a smart as door knobs. They are genuinely stupid animals.

Cats are so stupid that cat lovers (who are truly weird) can anthropomorphise all kinds of attributes into their cats and feel sure they are seeing truth. T. S. Eliot wrote Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (used by Andrew Lloyd Weber for his show Cats) posited that the reason you get no reaction when you call a cat by its name is that you don't really know its name. It is a mystery that cats keep to themselves. In fact, they don't respond to their names because they are much too dumb. Dogs get it almost instantly, and if a dog changes owner (say through a dog pound) and acquires a new name, it learns that almost instantly and without regret. Whatever. So now I'm Fido. Cats have no sense of humor, no sense of shame, no loyalty. They understand almost no human language. They are stupid animals. There, I said it.

What triggered this treacherous scree was a study from the University of Alberta, Canada, on what cats remember and how, published in Current Biology. They tested the cats by tripping them up while they had to go over hurdles. Cats remember things physically, not visually, it turns out. They will remember bumping into something and avoid it in the future but won't remember it is there if they just see it. And they only remembered the obstacle for 10 minutes. The researchers said they found the same thing with dogs and horses, but that doesn't harm my thesis that dogs are a lot smarter than cats. (Editors note: I've had four cats. I think the only thing cats remember is who fed them last.)

Remember the song, "Memory," from Cats? Forget it.

While we're on the subject, researchers on the Big Island of Hawaii report that the slopes of Mauna Kea are infested with thousands of feral cats, posing a threat to the wildlife, particularly birds, on the mountain and could become a threat to humans. The cats have been there for years, probably descendants of house cats gone free. They are a potential threat to humans not because they are going to jump up and bite your neck, but because they carry diseases, including toxoplasmosis. They also have feline versions of HIV and leukemia. They wander between 6,500 and 9,000 feet, and eat birds they can find, including some that are endangered. If they come down from that height and mix with domestic cats, the diseases could spread to people. Any attempt to hunt down the little buggers would, of course, trigger a violent reaction from cat people.

[Picture above, of course, is Bill the Cat from Bloom County. I miss him.]

Flashed any good books lately?

2007-08-19T18:12:00.000-04:00

OK, we can talk to girls or we can decode flashing lights. Duh!--Silicon Valley, where I lived for 20 years, is a seriously weird place, filled with seriously strange people, and I enjoyed it very much. Once in a while, a story pops up that explains everything. Or not.

Last year, the city of San Jose, the capital of the valley, ran a Digital Art festival. You can work that out for yourself, but one of the displays was four glowing amber discs on top of the Adobe building (as in Adobe Acrobat). The lights were flashing a semaphore signal. The discs would light in sequences that never appeared to repeat, clearly a code. But for what?

Enter two classic geeks, Bob Mayo and Mark Snesrud. They had time on their hands and engineers cannot resist puzzles. Both were taking a seminar on “communication skills,” which means learning how to pick up girls. (I am not making any of this up. One of the features of Silicon Valley that intrigued me is that given the choice between deciphering a good piece of code and getting laid, the code wins every time. Keep reading.)

The two guys could see the disks spinning from a bar they frequented. They noted that each disk changed every 7.2 seconds. But what the hell was it trying to say? Geeks never read manuals, so first Mayo, who lost his job at Hewlett-Packard and apparently had a load of free time, photographed hours’ worth of spinning disks from a nearby parking garage to record the pattern. They then considered setting up a radio receiver to pick up electromagnetic transmissions from the disks. Then they found out that if they just went to the project’s website, they would have saved themselves the trouble. The website had the sequences.

First they tried to match the semaphore signals to ASCI code, the language most computers use to code text. They discovered that certain patterns matched passages from James Joyce’s Ulysses. [It’s not clear which of them knew enough of Joyce to figure that out but apparently at least one had a liberal arts education, or could use Google].

Then, spending months using pattern recognition software, they found certain odd words ["Dominus" and "calumet," to name two], which they then Googled, only to discover that all came from the same source: Thomas Pynchon’s novel, The Crying of Lot 49. The semaphore signals from the Abobe tower were the text of the 1966 novel, which is set in the Valley and is about code. The disks took months to go through the 800 paragraphs.

The artist who designed the work, Ben Rubin, was pleased the mystery was solved.
What did the two get for all that work? The admiration of their peers. It’s the Valley, after all.

If you want to know the details, click here, and thanks to John Murrell at Siliconvalley.com

Oh yeah. Snesrud now has a girl friend.

It's Sgt. Preston of the Yukon! On King!--RANT UPDATED

2007-08-03T09:52:00.000-04:00

He died of frozen nose hairs, sniff—As most of you know, I begin a eight month tour of duty with the journalism department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks this month, and in fact, leave in a week’s time. Consequently, this blog will be down for the next two or three weeks while I gather my mucklucks, cariboo parka and cans of jellied moose nose. I’ll be back the end of the month with a new, revived blog. This will be my cure for cabin fever. Everybody needs an adventure. The alternative at my age is to walk around on the grass hitting little white balls into holes with a stick, a sport designed for the village idiots of Scotland a century go.

In the meantime, I leave you with these quick thoughts:

Minnesota bridge is falling down, falling down--Why is the presence of Laura Bush and later her inept husband at the bridge collapse in Minneapolis news? He didn't show up when one of America's largest cities was being destroyed. To be fair, there isn't much he can do about the bridge except make sure there is funding, which he has; it really isn't even his fault that the bridge went down, and the reasons for the destruction of America's infrastructure seem beyond most politicians anyhow. But why is his presence, an obvious photo op, news? It is an attitude of the news media, particularly the press corps in Washington that everything a president does is important. It isn't.
And yes, the small death toll is wonderful and amazing and it does make you wonder about all the reports on CNN and Fox and elsewhere about a "major catastrophe." In the news business I thought you wait until you get actual facts before you draw conclusions. But what do I know.
Nomination for the Darwin Prize—Why am I supposed to be sympathetic to 23 Christian Korean missionaries who volunteered to go to Afghanistan, a dangerous and fervently Moslem country? You can still despise the Taliban who captured them and are still using the missionaries as hostages (and killed two) and hope they return to Korea safely and don’t reproduce.
And while we are on the subject, if you spend $1.25 for bottled water, most of which comes from a public source, you should consider not reproducing either. Or, you have too much money on your hands. Pepsi admits that's where Aquafina comes from, a tap, and so do most of the other non-spring water products. And why do you think spring water is cleaner or tastes better than public water? Most American cities (New York's is world famous for its quality) have superb water supplies, and if there are still too much chemicals for you, you can always filter it. To spend $1.25 for something in a plastic bottle is insane. (My wife refills a plastic bottle with splendid City of Baltimore water through a Britta filter, completely reasonable. And virtually free. And you?)
Suggestion for Constitutional change—American democracy has worked pretty damned well for more than 200 years, but it doesn’t any more. It’s time to consider a parliamentary system so that when you get an administration that has behaved the way this one has, and a Congress as corrupt as this one, you can vote the bastards out. Oh, and why do Karl Rove and Dick Cheney still have security clearances? I'm not alone in this: historian Robert Dallik has a suggestion in the Washington Post of how to get rid of a president who has failed miserably and lost all hope of redemption. He would have a presidential recall process added to the constitution.
Suggestion for cruel but not unusual punishment—Airline executives should be required to spend at least 4 hours a week in their own coach sections, in a middle seat, except for those airlines that fly the Atlantic in 757. Those executives should spend 10 hours flying to Vilnius every week. They should be required to bring their own food and sit next to either a fat person or a screaming baby. And every other week, they should have their flights canceled and have to spend overnight in Cleveland waiting for another flight.
Requirement for an antacid—Rupert Murdoch owning the Wall Street Journal. He has vulgarized everything he touches (and then sells them) and now he has his hands on one of the three best newspapers in America. No good can come of this.

We have become a docile and passive people, capable of putting up with any outrage without much of a protest or revolt. Been to an airport lately? Heard of anyone going bankrupt to pay medical bills or dying because a clerk at an insurance company won't let them have the treatment they need? Don't mind a government tapping your telephone without your knowledge and without a court order? Have schools so bad you have to home-school your kids to keep them safe? We should not be putting up with this stuff folks. Lost your pension? Had to take salary cuts while the guys running your company are pulling in millions? Still getting only two weeks' vacation time? Why are you sitting there?

Arise!

Whew. I feel much better. Next time from Fairbanks.

j

Later we'll discuss sex and lower back pain

2007-07-26T15:12:00.000-04:00

A breakthrough would be when you link intelligence to science writing--When I taught science writing I forbade the students from using the word breakthrough, mostly on grounds there are in fact very few real breakthroughs in science. The discovery of the helical structure of DNA is a breakthrough. The discovery of penicillin is a breakthrough. Breakthroughs come about four or five times a century. And the word is greatly overused by journalists who are trying to make their stories seem more important than they are, or by scientists doing likewise.

I’d like to add another word: link. The word link should be banned in all stories about nutrition, to be sure. What is linked today, isn’t linked tomorrow and even if there is a correlation that does not prove causation, so, so what? Journals are filled with stories linking something we eat to either something that will make us ill or to a cure or a prevention of whatever that was. And if you wait a year or two, someone will come up with the opposite results. Have some recent examples.

Vitamin C prevents or treat colds, or then, maybe it doesn't—Few substances have been studied more and the results are mixed. The general conclusion was that data were lacking to support the notion vitamin C prevents colds, but there was solid evidence it shortened their duration. Not now, at any rate. Sort of.

In a study published in the Cochrane Library, a meta-analysis of 30 published studies involving 11,350 people who took at least 200 milligrams of vitamin C daily, researchers reported that the substance did nothing to lower the risk of the common cold. There was a slight reduction in the duration and severity of cold symptoms compared to a placebo, but it was not statistically significant. There was no reason to take vitamin C daily, a Finnish researcher said, unless—here comes the almost part—you are exposed to short periods of extreme physical stress, like running around in sub-arctic temperatures. Vitamin C showed a slight benefit in that case. Note this was a meta-analysis, which I’m beginning to think is a procedure that is at the root of this problem. Meta-analysis are studies of studies, statistically measuring whether a bunch of studies prove anything. Statistically speaking, of course.

Diet sodas are better for you than the corn syrup kind—Wrong, you silly person. You’ve been reading too much of the medical literature. It turns out drinking as little as one soda can a day, diet or regular, is “associated” (that’s another word, a synonym for “linked”) with a 48% increased risk of metabolic syndrome, a precursor to heart disease and diabetes. Everyone agrees drinking the regular kind (corn syrup, which long ago replaced sugar) was linked to ill results but everyone thought diet soda was safe. The results, published in the journal Circulation, were puzzling even to the guys at Boston University to who did the study. They think it isn’t anything in the soda, just that it is sweet and hence, it changes dietary patterns toward sweetness, leading to obesity etc. This wasn’t a meta-analysis, but part of the Framingham study, which is much better. People who (like me) slugged down a Diet Coke a day also had a 31% chance of becoming obese; a 30% chance of having a larger waist line (like me), a 25% chance of developing high blood triglycerides or high blood sugar, and a greater risk of having too little of the good cholesterol. The soda industry pointed out, in this case accurately, that soda is 99%+ water and it was not likely anything in the rest could have that huge an effect. The study didn’t count all the other things these people did in their lives that could lead to the increases; the increase could easily have been coincidental to the diet soda.

But wait, there’s more.

Grapefruit is not good for you—All that vitamin C and stuff? Forgetaboutit. A study of 50,000 post-menopausal women found that eating as little as one quarter of a grapefruit daily raised the risk of breast cancer 30%. According to the British Journal of Cancer, the grapefruit inceased the levels of estrogen, which increased the risk. The problem with this study is that it relied on voluntary questionnaires, the least reliable source of data. And the objections above pertain here just as well.

Think we’re through?

Lycopene in tomatoes prevents cancer—Lycopene in tomatoes is not necessarily good for you. The Food and Drug Administration did a meta-analysis (here we go again) and found that lycopene, an anti-oxidant thought beneficial in preventing cancer (especially prostate cancer), doesn’t. Or, more precisely, the evidence is not statistically compelling. There is no evidence anything in tomatoes prevents cancer, the FDA reported, studying scores of tests that said there was. I had tomatoes for lunch.

But….

Organic tomatoes are better for you than non-organic tomatoes—Yes. Really. We agree on something. A study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (I have a copy by the bed for leisure reading) says that organic tomatoes have a higher percent of flavonoids, antioxidants “linked” to preventing heart disease and cancer. The study is one of the first to substantiate claims that organic vegetables have an advantage over the factory-farmed stuff. They certainly taste better. The researchers, at UC Davis, think organic vegetables are better because of the availability of nitrogen in the soil.

Are you confused, dear reader? I would like to suggest a tomato and cheese pizza and a good cold glass of beer for lunch. Maybe a little popcorn. Might I recommend the couch? We can’t live forever.

Damn, I'm hungry.

You are unbuttoned, you must be from Apple

2007-07-25T10:25:00.000-04:00

You're going to have to file down those fingers, pal--A few weeks ago, during the iPhone hype season, I did a brief discourse on the aesthetics of Apple and how its industrial design philosophy is dramatically different from other companies, one of the reasons the company stirs such passion. This came in the context of the new cell phone which had only an on/off button. Everything else required that you press icons on the screen. Apple's Jonathan Ive (Apple's chief designer) and Steve Jobs design from form to function. Sometimes, it turns out, that's good news; sometimes it isn't.

For instance: One of the more serious criticisms of the iPhone is that you can't replace the battery. You have to ship your iPhone to Apple. They send you a loaner while they remove your old battery, put in a new one, and then ship your phone back to you--a drag. But people who have taken the iPhone apart have figured out why: the battery setup is the result of the exterior design of the iPhone. In order to make the iPhone look like it does, as slim and sleek, they had to use a battery that was not easily replaced. Any other company would have sent the design back to the shop and told them to design around a replaceable battery. Not Jobs and Ive. They sent it back to find a battery that fit the case. So the user crashes into the design. The iPod has the same issue--a battery that you can't replace yourself--for the same reason. It would screw up the design.

However, another criticism was the lack of keyboard. You could not have the iPhone look like an iPhone with a button keyboard like the Blackberry. In this case, the user wins. Unless you have really, really tiny fingers, pressing icons on a screen is vastly more efficient than trying to press teeny buttons with big fingers. And it would look just as awful as a Blackberry.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting (and free on the web) take on all this. Steve Jobs hates buttons. He has minimized the buttons on every product Apple designed during his tenures, starting with the original Mac, which didn't even have arrow keys. The MacBook I'm using now has one-third fewer buttons that a similar HP or Dell laptop. The iPod has no buttons, the iPhone only one, and the mouse I'm using has one, not three. The Journal points out that Jobs doesn't even have buttons on his black shirts. (One presumes he uses a zipper on his jeans). According to the Journal, the main criteria for getting along in Apple's design department is not to add keys to a product unless there is a compelling reason, and there aren't any. Can't you see that discussion going on at the Dell design shop? Does Dell have a design shop?

Mercy from the media

2007-07-23T15:50:00.000-04:00

Pssst, little girl. If you get in my car I can tell you the ending of Harry Potter--I bet I'm not the only one who has noticed that all of the major newspapers have put off major reviewing the last Harry Potter book, apparently to give everyone a reasonable chance to finish it before giving away the ending. Good on them. You can't review the book or the series without discussing how it ends. Elizabeth Hand at the Washington Post does have an interesting review on the book in which she gives away some of the plot but not the ending. Maybe it's a review; it's hard to tell on the web. She says she wept reading it. If you want to go into the book without foreknowledge you probably would want to avoid clicking there.

I would love to be the director of the final movie just for the Battle of Hogwarts scene, which if done right might be one of the greatest battle scenes in movie history. The attack of the house elves did me in. Presumably, the major thoughtful reviews ("what does it all mean?") will come next week when most people have finished. I thank the editors one and all.

The Baltimore Sun has a story preceded by a warning not to read further if you don't know the ending and right below the warning is a sentence that would seem to give it all away. In fact, it doesn't, but shame on them.

Isn't it cool? Eight million of us have a secret.

I shut off my computer Friday night and went off to the bookstore to get my copy at midnight and started reading when I got home. I finished at 7 p.m. Sunday. I did not see the internet and tried to minimize social contact as much as possible. And I'm supposed to be an adult. I understand attendance out my synagogue was down. I can guess what some of them were doing.

It is the best book in the series and J.K. Rowling clearly clearly had this all laid out in advance. My wife heard me cheering once (it was the elves, Carol). It's no children's book. It's great fantasy, up with Tolkien and Lewis and Donaldson (bet you never heard of him. Stephen by name--see Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever).

Back to the real world shortly.

Oh gosh, frustrated telemarketers and pollister. What is this world coming to.

2007-07-19T15:09:00.001-04:00

Of course we can talk now; I'm at a funeral and everyone is nice and quiet so I can hear you--Some day, someone will kill someone for interrupting a movie or a concert or a conversation--or a funeral--with a cell phone call. And when it happens, the prosecution would be hard-pressed to find a jury that would convict him.

Nonetheless, cell phones are a growing influence on life and not since Alexander Graham Bell summoned "Mr. Watson" from the next room, has there been such a great change in telephony (isn't that a great word?).

While cell phones in other countries work much better and are more useful than what we use here in the great American empire, even here, they are changing life. One of the best resources for knowing how is, believe it or not, the Centers for Disease Control. See here.

The latest of the National Health Interview Survey (I won't ask what this has to do with health) shows a staggering change in how we do things because of the little darlings. For instance:

At least 12.8 % of American households no longer have landlines but did have at least one cell phone.
At least 11.8% of individuals live in households with only cell phones, including 11.6% of all children.

Those figures have been steadily rising since 2003, and they are likely to continue to grow.
Here's more:

The population group with the most reliance on cell phones are adults living with unrelated roommates (54%)
Renters are more likely (26.4%) to rip out their land lines than property owners.
People under 30 are more likely to have cellphone-only homes. Half of all wireless-only were under 30.
The older the people in the household, the less likely they are to give up their land lines.
Men were more likely to go cellphone only than women (13.1%-10.5%), and the poor were more likely than the non-poor.
Southern adults (14%)were more likely to rely on cell phones only than northerners (8.6%).
Hispanics (15.3%) are more likely to go cellphone only.

There are a number of ramifications of this trend worth mentioning. One is the generational thing: an entire generation is moving from conventional telephones, which is not good news for the traditional telephone companies. Telephone marketers (phooey) and pollsters are screwed because there is no directory of cell phones. Mike Himowitz of the Baltimore Sun points out that this is because American phone companies charge you for both incoming and outgoing calls so there is considerable pressure not to create a directory. If your caller ID sees a number she doesn't recognize, she just won't pick it up. In Europe, the caller pays. There also is a federal law against random digit dialing of cell phones which is a serious handicap.

The effect on pollsters is particularly interesting considering what the CDC study found. As one generation weans itself away from land lines, that generation is more difficult to poll and some political experts think this showed up in polling in the last presidential election, giving John Kerry lower poll numbers during the campaign than he should have had. Since you can now take telephone numbers with you (I'll be using a Maryland number in Alaska), it becomes more difficult for a pollster to figure out where he has called. Hispanics become under represented. The people in these telephone categories are different enough to produce an 2% divergence between cellphone only respondents and those with land-lines, not enough to render current polling problematic, but enough to scare the hell out of people doing polls.

How come that trout that swam by is already cooked?

2007-07-17T17:17:00.000-04:00

If you eat that salami sandwich and go back into the ocean you will get struck by lightning! --When I was a kid, my mother would drive me crazy when we were down the shore (that's a Jerseyism). She insisted that I had to wait a half hour after lunch before going back into the water. You'd get cramps if you didn't wait, she said. I did not want to wait. Everyone was told that, and it became a factoid (original meaning of the word: a small factually incorrect statement that is repeated so often it is believed to be true). It isn't true. You don't get cramps if you go back into the water within a half hour.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to get my daughter and her friend from the local swimming pool. There were thunderstorms in the area and of course they cleared the pool. Sounds reasonable. This is a universally held safety measure--clearing pools in thunderstorms--but I can't actually remember a single instance of reading about someone getting killed when lightning hit a swimming pool. I have a vague recollection of someone zapped while swimming in the ocean, but not a pool. With too much time I my hands, I did a bit of research. I still haven't found a case of someone dying from a lightning strike to a swimming pool, indoor or outdoor. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen or that you should stay in the pool when thunder booms about you, but it must be a really rare occurrence. Moreover, I have yet to find a single database containing information on people killed in pools by lightning.

In one survey, data from 1990-1994, showed 51,835 people died in swimming pools for unspecified reasons, almost all, I would think drowning. Thirteen hundred died in wading pools. Not one death was recorded specifically from lightning strikes. One survey of indoor pools made by a professional organization reported not a single database included deaths from lightning in indoor pools, which also are supposed to be cleared in thunderstorms. Standing in an open field seems to be the most dangerous thing you can do in a storm (27% of deaths) and of course there's golf (5%), another reason not to play the silly game. Eight percent of deaths were water related, but that included boating and fishing as well as swimming. The swimming component was not broken down, but I'll bet most of those people were in metal boats. (The most dangerous state, by the way, is Florida, another reason not to live in that awful place).

I am fully aware that if everyone got out of pools during storms, there wouldn't be any instances on Google or Yahoo. But this is a species in which thousands of people "tough it out" in hurricanes, build houses on flood plains and believe in creation science. Surely some idiots stay in swimming pools when the sky opens up.

You get sentences like: "Nearly 100 Americans die from lightning strikes each year, and a high percentage of these deaths occur in summer when people are swimming and participating in other water sports." I bet some of them were also barbecuing, playing golf or up on the roof fixing the antenna.

All the experts agree you should evacuate the pool at the first sign of lightning. I just wonder if the risk isn't greatly exaggerated. If you know of any incidence of death by bolt in a pool, pass it on and I'll post it.

Now my favorite lightning story of the year, A man named Hailu Kidane Marian was roaming the streets of Hialeah, Florida, selling religious books when he was struck by lightning out of a clear blue sky. When paramedics arrived he was not breathing and his heart had stopped beating, and he was essentially dead. They revived him, however, and he is in critical condition at a local hospital. "He's unconscious, he's in a coma," the head of the religious group said. "It's difficult what happened, you now, but what can we do? Things happen in life, but we still believe in God."

I would.

[Thank you, Gayle]

Mr. Gates are you in that closet? Is that a cell phone playing the Grateful Dead?

2007-06-26T11:00:00.000-04:00

No officer, we're camping out here because I really want to buy a $500 cell phone. Really. I'm not making this up!--Friday is the day, people. i can’t wait Actually, i can wait.

As most of you may have gathered by now, I am one of the founding fathers of the Church of Apple. I’ve used Macs since they first came out in 1982 and I’m on my seventh or eighth by now. In fact, except for a year at Johns Hopkins, whose second-rate IT department was trying to squelch the use of every Mac on campus (Macs threatened their jobs because they did not need an IT person to set up, never got viruses and rarely broke down), I have never used a Windows computer and wouldn’t know what to do with one if I had it. (This is being written on a two-year old iMac, one of four Macs in our house).

Friday, is of course, iPhone day. That’s the day Apple and its accidental partner, AT&T begin selling the device that probably sets the world record for hype. No one does hype better than Apple. Whether no one builds a telephone as well as Apple remains to be seen. This had better be really, really good. If it is, Apple will have revolutionized yet another industry.

But some thoughts on aesthetics: I have learned that the Church of Apple divides the world into two kinds of people—those who love great design and will pay for it, and those who don’t understand that concept. Apple products, almost without exception, are the best-designed industrial products of the last half century. Nothing comes close. Jonathan Ive, the British-born designer and perhaps the greatest industrial designer since Raymond Loewy in the 1950s, gets a lot of the credit, but so too does Steve Jobs. It is Jobs’ conviction, that design follows function not the other way around, that makes Apple products so beautiful and useful. If you send messages on a Blackberry, punching out numbers with your thumb on minuscule keys, you understand. You are doing that not because it is the most efficient way of typing on a small device but because that's the keyboard the engineers attached to it and you must conform. That's function following design. Even Apple’s failures, such as the Cube, have been gorgeous, even if the public couldn’t grok them. As to those of us of the Church; you either buy into Jobs’ aesthetic and love Ive's implementation, or you don’t, and there is no in-between.

(I would point out that Apple may be the only large company in America that does no--as in zero, nada, zip--consumer research. No polls, no focus groups. We design them the way we think you ought to want them and you can either buy them or call Hewlett-Packard).

That aesthetic makes me a little crazy: I love gadgets, as my wife will attest. If it has buttons and lights, I want it, and the more buttons and lights the more I want it. I am about to buy a car with so much electronics, it will take me a week to figure out what button to press to turn on the radio (or I can bring in my 13-year-old daughter, who will have it down in about 10 minutes). Yet Apple’s aesthetic runs directly contrary to this. The Mac PowerBook has the fewest buttons of any laptop and nothing lights up, and while you can buy keyboards with lots of buttons and lights for your Mac, they come with the bare minimum because the machine works better that way. Your basic Dell laptop was designed by an engineer for people ostensibly like me; the PowerBook was designed by a designer. Big difference. And I am devoted to the latter. Weird. By the way, anyone know the person in charge of design for Dell? I thought not.

So, the iPhone. Apple got rid of the keyboard. In fact, the iPhone has only one actual button, the thing you turn it one with. You get to send messages--indeed, you implement every function--with a touch screen, using gorgeous icons larger than the mechanical buttons on your Blackberry and its ilk. There have already been complaints, but the complaints are misconceived: The touch-screen isn’t an accidental mistake; it’s the whole point. It's the Jobs-Ive aesthetic at work. In the words of Henry David Thoreau, "simplicity, simplicity, simplicity." (If Thoreau really believed that, of course, he wouldn't have repeated himself twice.)

Do you really need one device that does everything but blow your nose, even if elegantly? Is Apple producing a high tech version of the dinner theater, which serves dinners, produces shows and does neither very well? We'll see. I'd bet on them.

The problem Apple faces is that its hype machine is so good, that every single flaw, real or perceived in the iPhone, will be used to slam the device and the company. Apple raised the bar too high. But we of the Church are not concerned. If the iPhone comes close to doing what it is supposed to do, it will revolutionize cell phones the way iTunes and the iPod revolutionized the music industry and the Mac revolutionized computers. Don’t believe the latter? Microsoft Windows and its new iteration, Vista, are fairly inexact copies of Mac OS-X, about one and a half-generations behind, soon to be two-and-a-half when Leopard appears in October. Stuff you are now doing on Vista, presuming you've managed to load it, we've been doing for almost three years, and more safely.

By the way, many have wondered how Apple gets away with the hype. The reason is simple: most journalists, writers and creative people use Macs. I was at a conference last year of Knight Fellows at Stanford. Most of the people there brought laptops. I did not see a single Windows PC.

Three years ago, I thought it would be nice to buy Apple stock. It was down in the 20s somewhere. I did some research and one thing that kept popping up was the adage from stock brokers and experts that you should never invest on emotion. I listened to the experts. I forgot that if they were so fucking smart, they wouldn’t have to work for a living as stock brokers and experts.

If the iPhone stumbles a bit, Apple’s very high-flying stock will fall considerably because people stopped actually investing years ago and Wall Street is just legalized gambling. But not to worry. The aesthetic will win out. Will I buy one? I wish. $500, I do not have. I wish I could afford the stock.

So I wont' be camped out in front of the Towson Apple store. I'll wait until I win the lottery.

If you want to see how wacky this is, see the armed guards and secret flights here.

The Corn Mafia and your arteries

2007-06-24T22:14:00.000-04:00

Have some madeira, my dear, he sang in a voice loud and clear. At least it doesn't have high fructose corn syrup--My wife has run a campaign for years on processed foods, particularly drinks, sweetened with high fructose corn syrup, essentially barring it from the house as much as possible. That means most drinks, and it ain’t easy. The stuff has crept into food you would not expect. I was initially skeptical, but no more.

Years ago, food manufacturers stopped using sugar to sweeten foods and beverages because they could get fructose cheaper. They could get fructose cheaper because of the Corn Mafia that has essentially run rampant through Congress. Consumption of fructose-bearing drinks has increased 135 percent in the last 40 years. Few commodities are as heavily subsidized as corn, and few Americans suck from the federal teat as deeply as corporate corn farmers. See ethanol, for an example. Another result of our swimming in high fructose corn syrup is the obese American. Another, it turns out, is heart disease.

Fructose-sweetened drinks are more likely to provoke development of fatty artery deposits than sugar, according to a new study at UC Davis. Kimber Stanhope and colleagues compared the results of drinking fructose-laced drinks with glucose in overweight and obese adults for 10 weeks. The subjects ate an otherwise balanced diet. The only difference was what was in the drinks they drank. (The sample was small, about 30 people--I’m being vague because results have not yet been published). After nine weeks, those drinking fructose had an increase in the bad cholesterol, LDL, and triglyceride (blood fat) levels increased after only two weeks. Those drinking drinks with sugar had the reverse effect.

The results will be presented next week at the American Diabetes Association meeting in Chicago.

There have been years of study on just how bad fructose is for you. See here, for instance . It is especially damaging to people with diabetes, which is becoming one of America’s most common deadly diseases. One scientist was able to show that the rate of diabetes in America correlated with the wave of corn syrup on the market in 1970.

Don’t expect any help from Washington, of course. They sold out years ago. Meanwhile, Carol keeps reading cans and bottles. She’s right.

More, you want more!

2007-06-21T15:38:00.000-04:00

Chlöe, I understand our nose is running but would you mind bending your head out over the keyboard while I'm doing the Power Point?—I’m a tad late with this story—NPR had it yesterday. But it is not getting nearly enough attention. And I have a story to tell.

Merill Lynch, the world’s largest stock brokerage, cut its sick day allowance for its employees from 40 days to three. If you take more than three, they can dock your pay. If you take more than six you get a warning; more than nine and they can your ass. This in a company whose three top executives are making a total of more than $100 million and earned record profits last year. The limit isn’t mandatory—managers have the ability to bend the rules, but those are the rules. Boss doesn’t like you, don’t get the flu.

Any rule this stupid can only come from one source: personnel (sorry, Human Resources).

The reason given, of course, is productivity and profit. They apparently aren’t making enough. That this is happening in the U.S. shouldn’t surprise anyone. We are the only country in the industrialized world that thinks two weeks vacations is humane. (At the risk of sounding like my Communist grandmother, the correct way of phrasing that is to say this is the only country in the world where the workers find that acceptable). In fairness to Merrill Lynch, they give three weeks.

Here is how the procedure can now work out: You are an employee and you get the flu. You are flat on your back for three days. If you say out the fourth, it could cost you a day’s pay unless your supervisor is a mensch. Stay out the rest of the week and you are pushing the limit and losing money. So, you get out of bed and go to work, where you cannot perform up to healthy standards and run a real risk of infecting others in the office who then take days off for work. In other words, the ruling has two obvious effects. It not only does not improve productivity, it makes Merrill Lynch’s offices more dangerous for staff and visitors. Good work.

God help you if you get cancer.

Now the story. I once had a friend who worked for an oil company in Philadelphia (I, of course won’t mention the name of the company. On the other hand, there is only one oil company in Philadelphia but far be it for me...). They had really brilliant executive who was at retirement age and who didn’t think disappearing to a golf course was how he wanted to spend the rest of his life so he asked for something to do at the company. They said they had a real good one for him. The company had grown significantly in recent years and was being bogged down by bureaucracy. Paper work. Red tape Massive inefficiencies. Find out how that happened. He did. He discovered that there was an obvious and clear link between the explosion of paperwork and the year when the Personnel Department changed its name to Human Resources. You are welcome to make of that what you will.

Here’s the Merrill Lynch memo. Notice it applies to office drones, not the guys making the millions. Workers of the world—you deserve it.

Attendance Guidelines (Effective May 14, 2007) A good attendance record and demonstrated reliability is one attribute of successful performance and is expected of all employees. These guidelines are in place to enable managers to address and foster improvement when an attendance problem has been demonstrated.
Each day an employee misses work is considered an absence. Employees are considered absent when they miss one-third or more of a workday.

It is the employee's responsibility to contact their manager within one hour of their scheduled start time to report any absence, and failure to do so may result in disciplinary action. Absence without notice for two consecutive days is grounds for termination of employment.

An absence is recorded as excused under this policy only if it is a) a pre-approved vacation or an approved personal day; b) an approved leave of absence under Merrill Lynch policy; or, c) an absence covered by any applicable federal or state law. (See Leave of Absence Policies.)

Outlined below are suggested guidelines for managers to address absences based upon the employee's work schedule. Management may accelerate the action steps described in these guidelines when patterns of attendance problems have been identified (including, but not limited to, repeated absences the day before and/or after a holiday or weekend; unacceptable level of absences over time with no demonstrated improvement; absences surrounding vacation).

Employee Status: Full Time
Absences in a 12-month Period /Action
Up to 3 days/Acceptable attendance: No action.

4 to 6 days/Questionable attendance: Manager/employee discussion or written communication from manager to employee stressing importance of good attendance; reviewing impact on performance; and describing future consequences including termination of employment. Non-payment may result.

7 to 8 days/Poor attendance: Written communication from manager to employee reviewing impact on performance and warning that failure to improve will result in immediate termination of employment. Non-payment should result.

9 to 10 days/Unacceptable attendance: Resulting in termination of employment.

Computers of the living dead—UPDATED IMPORTANTLY

2007-06-15T15:39:00.000-04:00

The FBI celebrates a zombie jamboree--About a million of you are about to be contacted by the FBI. No, you haven't done anything wrong, but your computer has been really, really bad. You can't much blame it; truth be told, it was taken over by zombies. You may know them as bots.

According to the FBI, the bots are "a growing threat to national security." This should be taken with several grains of salt since everything is a "a growing threat to national security" to the FBI, and because we all know how wonderfully competent the agency is. We might also mention that the FBI uses computer technology from the 1970s. Their department is run by Alberto Gonzales. Nevermind....

Bots, or zombies, are malicious programs that usually ride in as an e-mail attachment or on a web page. They essentially take over your computer. In most cases, you have no idea what your computer is doing when you aren't on it; in fact, you have no idea what it is doing when you are on it unless you know where to look. The evil doers (bot-herders) hook your computer up to other computers whose souls have been stolen into a zombie network (bot-nets) and use the network to transmit spam, spread spyware, or hide illegal content, including pornography or pirated movies, or databases they don't want anyone else to find. You could be sitting there like a good citizen, minding your own business, while your computer is grinding out thousands of messages from Nigeria promising unheard-of wealth, or Viagra from Bosnia. The bot-nets could involve tens of thousands of computers. In a program called Operation Bot Roast (well, someone there has a sense of humor), the FBI has been able to identify 1 million computers that have been compromised. Several of the evil doers have been arrested, including Alan Soloway, one of the kings of spam, who sent his bots or zombies off to dispatch millions of pieces of spam. Some of these guys establish their bot-nets and sell them to the highest bidder.

If you find you are infected, the FBI says, don't call them. They can't help. You can get software to save your machine or hire a professional.

How do you know your computer is a zombie? It may slow down for reasons not clear, something like loosing weight for unexplained reasons can hint you have a cancer. Your mail may contain lots of messages in the "sent" basket, that you didn't send. You may also get rude messages insisting you are sending spam when you are good and honorable person who wouldn't dream of such a thing.

How can you prevent it, you may ask? First and foremost, never open an attachment in your mail unless you know who sent it and what is in it. Chuck it in the trash basket. The chances of you losing something important are minimal. If you have a firewall, keep it on. If you have anti-virus software, keep it up to date. Install anti-spyware software. Keep your operating system current. Turn your computer off at night.

Or, (God, he's SO smug) get a Mac and stop worrying about all that crap. There has never been a single incident of a Mac being taken over.

UPDATE: Want to know how it's done? Read this from John Murrell's Good Morning Silicon Valley:

Making the rounds now is an e-mail bearing the subject line "Microsoft Security Bulletin MS07-0065" that describes a new vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook and provides a link to a patch. Don't click it. Instead of being directed to a Microsoft site, your computer will be steered to a compromised server where it will be vigorously encouraged to enlist in a zombie army.

"Security bulletins from Microsoft describing vulnerabilities in their software are a common occurrence, and so its not a surprise to see hackers adopting this kind of disguise in their attempt to infect Windows PCs," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for security outfit Sophos. "The irony is that as awareness of computer security issues has risen, and the need for patching against vulnerabilities, so social engineering tricks which pose as critical software fixes are likely to succeed in conning the public. By using people's real names, the Microsoft logo, and legitimate-sounding wording, the hackers are attempting to fool more people into stepping blindly into their bear-trap."

Just remember -- Microsoft never sends security alerts or patches by e-mail.
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Stone washed genes

2007-06-14T14:00:00.000-04:00

Do not get rid of the junk in the attic. It's evolution--Life just turns out to be more complicated every day and don’t look for genetics to figure it out just yet. The common concept is that genes are strung like beads on a string (pearls for some of us) and that the individual, discrete genes are what makes us. Not so.

Rick Weiss in the Washington Post went through a whole bunch of papers published in the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (Encode), which among other things suggested that the $3 billion Human Genome Project produced a cartoon of the human genome. Weiss’ survey indicates that there is growing awareness that the individual genes is not just a biological code; they are elements in a complex operating system. It is what happens between and among the genes that counts. Many genes overlap and share stretches of code. The system would be totally chaotic but a switching system has evolved to make sense and order out of the instructions contained in the genes. Diseases like cancer are probably not errors in genes but errors in the DNA between them, which should disturb those in molecular medicine who have been aiming their attention on the genes, especially in their attempts at producing targeting medicines.

Another new concept concerns the so-called junk genes, the 95% of genes that did not appear to do much. When you think about it, that notion is silly. Evolution doesn’t waste 95% of anything. Now it appears that those junk genes are anything but. In fact some researchers have found that many creatures share their junk genes, meaning they are probably crucial for life and even the billion of years of evolution has failed to alter them.

“Oh my gosh,” one scientists told Weiss. “This is really complicated.” Yup. That’s us.

Encode, incidentally, is an interesting project. The goal is to find out whether it is worth the time to go deeply into each section of the human genome. For 3-1/2 years, scientists explored 1% of the genome as deeply as they could to see if this idea would be fruitful. The answer is a resounding yes, if for no other reason than to discover the misconceptions in the common wisdom. Of particular interest are those genes that do not appear to produce proteins. What are they doing hanging around?

Speaking of DNA, we reported earlier that James Watson, he of the Double Helix, had chickened out to having his DNA sequenced. He changed his mind, apparently. He donated some of his illustrious DNA to Baylor in 2003 but then decided he did not want it published because of privacy concerns and because his children might find out things about their own genetics they might not want to know. Now he agreed to have it published, or at least almost all of it. One spot shows a predisposition to cancer and Watson has survived skin cancer. He is not going to find out about Alzheimer's’ however, or have it published. He had a grandmother with the disease and that gives him a one in four chance, he says, and he simply doesn’t want to know. On the other hand, he’s 79 and probably would know by now.

Jersey girls and onion rings--UPDATED

2007-06-12T15:31:00.000-04:00

Maybe Paris Hilton was the next one through the door--Never one to let a cultural phenomenon go unanswered (and coming from North Jersey, which gives me a particular insight into all of this) I feel obliged to comment on the last episode of the Sopranos. I loved it, and the more I think about it, the more I loved it.

It's a bit like Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey. You get to put in your own explanation and it is just as right as everyone else's. I, of course, would be happy to explain that movie to anyone needing an explanation. Just think Nietzsche. Here, we have something else going, but it still can be defined as art.

To be actually serious for a moment, I think that episode will wind up in every film class in the world as a lesson in how to build inexorable tension with absolutely nothing actually happening. Nothing happened. The family met for dinner at a restaurant and Tony ordered onion rings. People came and went. (The only sour note was Meadow's inability to park her car properly--every Jersey girl knows how to parallel park). And I'm sure when the unpleasant guy at the counter went into the bathroom everyone thought immediately of Godfather, which is, of course, the reason David Chase sent him there. Even the songs on the jukebox seemed to have some ominous meaning, even if they really didn't. And it ran 5 minutes late, just to build the tension. I kept looking at my watch. My God, he has only two minutes left to do something.

Want to know what happened? At least four times in the last minute of the program, Tony looked up and every time the camera showed what Tony saw. We see what he sees. So when Meadow walked into the restaurant, Tony looked up and then the screen went blank. Obviously we see blank because Tony saw blank. He obviously got whacked.

Works for me.

UPDATE: And apparently, I'm not alone. See here.

j

What would Jesus do? You don't mean.....

2007-06-07T17:10:00.000-04:00

Let’s pray together but would you take your pants down first?—It sounds just wonderful. Premarital sex is wrong, it’s a sin. Don’t do it. Evangelicals even throw virginity proms so the kids can publicly take vows of chastity. Kids coming from Catholic parochial schools have it drummed into their heads. Orthodox Jews tell their children not to do it, and the very Orthodox arrange it so that it is virtually impossible. All of this would be of just passing interest (I wasn’t the only non-Catholic teenager to discover that girls from parochial schools were pushovers) except that current government policy in combating AIDS, poverty, and under-age mothers has been taken over by Christianists who insist that this policy concentrate exclusively on abstinence. They also battle, often successfully, against sex education in schools. The fact that this strategy doesn’t work--or worse--doesn’t register. Why should it? Science is not part of their world.

In fact, abstinence pledges work for only a minority of kids and then often for not very long. Sociologist Mark Regnerus at the University of Texas, did a study on just how seriously these pressures work, and like everyone else who has studied the issue, his answer to the question in his book, Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers is: it depends. Mostly, it doesn’t work at all.

Much of the publicity has been on the failure among evangelicals to make it work. Evangelical teens actually are more likely to loose their virginity before marriage than are Catholics and mainstream Protestants. Indeed, they tend to lose it at an earlier age (16.3 years) than the others (16.7). And they tend to do it with more partners than the other kids. (Regnerus points out there is a problem with definitions. Many who list themselves as evangelicals may belong to an evangelical church but that doesn’t mean they buy the program. Also they tend to be of the lower economic class, which makes them more likely to have sex, and many are African-Americans, who really tilt the statistics.) Promising, often in public, to refrain from sex doesn’t help much. On average, studies show that the kids taking the vows keep the promise for about 18 months and then jumped into the sack with someone or got a rear seat dirty.

Worse, the young evangelicals in the study were more ignorant of sexual matters than their peers and tended to get knocked up at a greater rate, so a good argument could be made that their parents did them no favors. There also is the difference between religiosity and religion. Kids who were profoundly religious (about 16 %), as opposed to the ones walking around with religion on their sleeves, were likely to keep their promises and refrain. Those going through the motions will quickly lapse. Working against the abstinence model is the overly sexual nature of modern American society. You’d have to cloister kids (as very Orthodox Jews do) to keep them even partially immune.

Perhaps those writing our government policies might want to reconsider. Nah, won't happen.

So, where does a guy go to get laid, you may ask? Regnerus's data would recommend staying away from Asian girls who go to church; you are probably wasting your time with Mormons (but not, I assure you, fallen Mormons), so you ought to find himself a nice Catholic or mainline Protestant girl. Jewish girls are less amenable to rolls in the sack, although Regnerus (and others) point out they are more likely to enjoy it when they do it. Until, as Woody Allen points out, you marry them.

The rear end above belongs to the actress Lindsey Lohan, who, to the best of anyone's knowledge, has made no such pledge.

There are reasons why some animals eat their young

2007-06-05T17:17:00.001-04:00

Oh darling. Oh sweetheart. Get out of bed. MOVE YOUR ASS! Sweetie.--OK, here's the picture. My daughter and I have moved to Fairbanks and she has begun school. It is now mid-winter in interior Alaska. It is 6:30 in the morning, it is pitch dark and going to stay pitch dark for all but an hour or two. The temperature has fallen to minus 40. I think there is ice fog brewing. I have to get a 14-year-old girl up for school.

Good luck, you may say, and good luck I will need. But, I have a legitimate complaint that the parents of every teenager shares, even those who are smart enough to avoid the sub-Arctic. Teenagers are not morning creatures. Schools that start early in the morning are doing them no favor and making hard for the schools to fulfill their tasks. Even scientists say so. Here. Here. And here, among other places.

Study after study has shown that teenagers who get more sleep because school start later in the day, do better than those who do not. Their growing, changing bodies need sleep a lot more than do the teachers. In this case its biology not behavioral psychology that needs to be paid attention to.

One study published by the American Thoracic Society of 280 high school students found that most are not getting enough sleep and that more sleep would produce better grades. The kids went to Harriton High outside of Philadelphia and the study was done by the University of Pennsylvania's Richard Schwab, who has a personal stake in the findings: his daughter was one of the subjects. He noted--he couldn't help it, I promise you--how bloody hard it is to get her up in the morning. Since teens gradually change their internal clocks to stay up later, many of these kids were not getting to sleep until 1 or 2 in the morning and getting 6-1/2 to 7 hours of sleep and sometimes less. They need more. Notice how late they sleep on weekends.

But high schools usually start even earlier than elementary schools for some reason. My daughter's new school in Fairbanks, starts a half hour earlier than the day school she goes to in Baltimore. Why? It should be the reverse.

Mary Carskadon at Brown found the same thing. She found that teenagers are out of it in the morning, simply unplugged. No kidding! By studying teen saliva (now there's a thought) she found that melatonin (the sleep-inducing hormone) levels rise later at night for teenagers than they do for adults or children and stays higher throughout the morning. Sleep deprivation affects mood, performance, attention, behavior and learning, according to Stephen Sheldon at Northwestern.

And it makes them real sweet too, doesn't it?

They race horses, don't they?

2007-05-19T16:56:00.000-04:00

There's a guy peeing in my azaleas--Before catching up on the news of the world--it's going to hell in a hand basket--I might describe to the gentle readers the circumstances under which this is being written. We live in Baltimore, a block and a half away from Pimlico race track, and today, the third Saturday in May, is Preakness day, the running of the second of the Triple Crown horse races. I don't much care about horse racing, although one of the joys of living here is occasionally getting to see these most graceful animals practice in the mornings. I don't know a thing about horses and wish I knew more, but these thoroughbreds are spectacularly beautiful.

Anyway, for most of the year, the fact anything is happening at Pimlico is irrelevant to life even a block and a half away. But on this day, it takes over the place. You should know we are in the Mt. Washington section in north Baltimore, one of the remaining great neighborhoods in this old somewhat benighted city. It is a neighborhood of old homes (ours is more than 100 years old), old trees, children and some of the lushest vegetation you are likely to come across in the temperate zone. Maryland is where southern foliage meets northern foliage and we get the best of both--gorgeous springs and awesome autumns, and the place is seriously green. I mean green. The city also is known for its azaleas and although they usually all come out together and are gone by now, they are staggered this year because of the weird weather, and so many of the bushes are still in bloom.

Into this lovely place one day comes 100,000 people, some of whom are coming to see the race, many of whom are coming because it is an EVENT, and most of whom because the infield is home to one of the best parties in America. By 8 o'clock in the morning, the cars start parking on the streets (many of my neighbors convert their lawns to parking lots for $25-50 a shot and make hundreds today) and African-American kids from nearby collect every stray supermarket shopping cart and for $5 will tote your beer coolers to the racetrack. Some kids, my daughter and her friends included, set up lemonade and candy stands to service the visitors, and the church down the street has a huge barbecue going. The relative quiet is shattered by low-flying planes toting advertising banners and at least once a Preakness, an Air Force stealth bomber will blast the sky overhead in a publicity stunt.

It also is the largest single collection of drunks (many of them beautiful women) I've ever seen and when the race is over, they all pour out of the track and try to find their cars, pee in the bushes and, happily, buy lemonade and refuse the change. The place, of course, is a wreck by nightfall, but surprisingly, Baltimore City moves in and by Tuesday you would never know anything odd took place. There rarely is trouble and we've not had anything broken or stolen.

We can go up the street and watch the race through a fence, but for the Preakness itself, odd as it sounds, we watch it on television. We can see it better.

I'm on my front porch, my favorite place in the world, watching the people go by, admiring my fuchsias, and writing. It is sunny and quite lovely.

And now for the world...

I'm here captain. I just went into the bushes to pee in this guy's azaleas--As we reported here earlier, the ashes of James Doohan, Scotty in "Star Trek," were blasted into space in April and the capsul containing old Scotty returned to earth somewhere in New Mexico--"somewhere" because no one could find them. Everyone on the S.S. Enterprise can now relax: They found the capsul, and that containing the ashes of astronaut Gordon Cooper. They will be given to their families with a plaque.

Oh God, not Barbra Steisand!--One of my favorite "South Parks" is when the town is attacked by the giant ego of Barbra Streisand, a weapon of mass destruction if ever I heard of one. The kids save the place. I bring this up because a gentle reader pointed out something I didn't know. Earlier this month I posted an item about what happened when Digg.com posted the encryption code used by anti-pirate software to protect DVDs. They got threatened by lawyers. They pulled the item only to find that their readers were in revolt over the censorship and told the lawyers to shove it The code popped up in hundreds of thousands of sites and even wound up on a t-shirt.

My gentle reader pointed out this is called the Streisand Effect.

In 2003, an environmental activist Kenneth Adelman posted a series of aerial photos of Streisand's Malibu beach house on his web (see above). She sued him for $50 million, which of course, he didn't have. The purpose of the law suit was to get him to remove the house picture, censorship by law suit. Until news of the suit, no one paid much attention to his site; after he was sued, more than a million went to look. The suit was thrown out and the pictures distributed all over the world, having, obviously, the opposite effect Streisand's lawyers intended.

The old rules no longer apply. Says one crisis manager, now you actually have to go and talk like a decent human to a site owner. That doesn't always work, of course, but launching lawyers on them has the opposite effect--the Streisand effect.

Why is that person sticking their fingers up my ass? Oh, she's looking for vitamins-I have mentioned here before that I believe the three things medical science knows the least about are sex, nutrition and lower back pain. Now let's talk nutrition--and how the press covers it.

Researchers at the National Cancer Institute reported last week that men who take multivitamins are more likely to die from prostate cancer than those who do not. As reported in the NCI Journal, the government scientists tracked 300,000 men, about a third of whom took multivitamins, 5 percent took lots of vitamins. Within five years, 10,241 had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, 1,476 of them had advanced cancer and 179 died of it. Heavy user of multivitamins were almost twice as likely to die as those who didn't take any. (The scientists reported that there was no evidence the pills increased your chances of getting cancer of the prostate, only that if you got it, you were more likely to die of it.)

Here we go again. I do not know if multivitamins are good for you or bad for you. I do take them. But I do know that for years we have been hearing about how vitamins prevent diseases including cancer and now there appears to be a reversal. Suddenly vitamin E, which has been touted as being able to prevent cancers and heart disease, is now responsible for causing them; antioxidants like vitamin C which have been reported to do all kinds of good things are found not to do a thing at all, and now we get the evils of multivitamins.

Stick around for a couple of years and we'll get the reverse again. They truly don't know what they are talking about and misuse statistical correlations. My favorite example is the time some researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that college students who smoke marijuana heavily were more likely to wind up in student health with psychosis than those who do not. They studied 12 students. The point is that if they tested to see how many of those 12 were breast-fed as infants, or were born on streets with maple trees, or read comic books, they might have found the same correlation. At least this study had a larger sample.

Not a single journalist I know of listed all the studies that show the alleged benefits of vitamins, studies this one contradicts. Even the veteran Judy Foreman wrote she was throwing out some of the vitamins because of the new studies. She should know better.

The motto of this blog used to be: "Everything causes cancer in mice. Everything cures cancer in mice." Keep that in mind too.

I am happy to report that the lady with her fingers up my ass (actually, a urologist at Johns Hopkins) found my prostate to be smooth and sturdy and enlarged if somewhat under-utilized. I have found another thing that won't kill me this year. I keep popping vitamins.

"I can't do that, Jim. Someone stole my trailer hitch."

2007-05-10T20:09:00.000-04:00

The perfect woman has reflective lips—Here's one you won't see around much, but what are friends for. A study just published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports that people who have oral sex with more than five others in their lives have a greater chance of getting throat cancer. They also have a better chance of getting a date, but that's another story. In research at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (and I'm delighted to know that goes on in this city), the suspect is the human papilloma virus (HPV), which also pops up in other orifices when used for pleasure. The suspicion makes sense because it is already established that HPV helps trigger oropharyngeal squamous-carcinoma, an extremely unpleasant form of cancer. The Hopkins folks used 200 patients with that cancer and 100 controls in the hospital-based study. They tested blood and saliva samples and measured the samples against lifestyle variables, including sex habits. Must have been a helluva questionnaire. Those who had oral sex with six or more other people were 3.4 times as likely to have the throat cancer. That's not all they found:

Those who had 26 or more vaginal-sex partners during their lifetime had a wonderful time but also had 3.1 times more likely to have the throat cancer.
Those who had a really uproariously life had even more likelihood of the disease as the threat increased with the acts.
Oropharyngeal cancer was most linked to HPV type 16. Cigarettes and booze did not see to alter the result.

That gal of legend who could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch probably ought to be more careful. Dang.
[Thank you, Charles]

The rocket goes up, who cares where it comes down; it's not my department, ask Wernher von Braun—Poor Scotty. It isn't that the anti-matter warp field failed again and he had just one hour to save the ship and crew. The rocket worked beautifully. It's just that no one knows where it came down.

The rocket carrying the ashes of James Doohan, Scotty in the original Star Trek is lost. It was shot to the edge of space along with the ashes of astronaut Gordon Cooper on April 29. The capsule crashed down somewhere in New Mexico. Unfortunately, no one can find it. It's lost in mountainous terrain, hard to reach, according to a spokeswoman for Space Services Inc., which ran the "memorial spaceflight." And the weather is crappy. Eighteen other people's remains, besides Doohan and Cooper are on the capsule. The company charges $495, so even you can afford a trip to space and to get lost in the woods.