Guest Columnist—I really don't want them to know about my hemorrhoids

By Spyros Andreopoulos

Despite a strong push by the Bush administration for the majority of Americans to have computerized medical records within 10 years, I am not sure I want the attending privacy risks.

I don't believe the hype dished out by our government that the odds of my survival after a heart attack would improve because the emergency-room computer would let the doctor connect to the Internet, type in a password, and within a few clicks, view my medical history and begin treatment. Those who write this fiction have never seen a real emergency room in operation.

I cannot deny the positive benefits for public health in having medical records computerized. They make it easier to track diseases and side-effects of prescribed medications. They can prevent redundant invasive procedures, X-rays, MRI and CT scans and blood tests. Universities, where most clinical trials of new drugs take place, have access to data for research. Billing is more efficient, and bad claims are caught more quickly. If an individual is insured or gets sick in another part of the country, that person's medical history is readily available to another doctor or hospital.
But I am wary at the thought of my medical history floating in cyberspace because we have no system to guarantee protection from hackers, insurers and drug-company marketeers.

I am also concerned because this new development is going ahead without adequate public participation. According to a 2006 survey by Health Industry Insights, a market-research firm, most respondents (70 percent) are unaware of the federal government's initiative to make electronic medical records available.

Another concern is cost. One estimate places it at $250 billion, to be offset by economic benefits of an estimated $700 billion that critics consider over-inflated. But these savings, spread over a decade, would go to the insurance industry, while the actual costs of implementing the system will accrue to doctors and hospitals. The new computerized system at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital in Palo Alto, for example, soon to go online, will cost $150 million.

The deployment of the new technology is also expected to create havoc among physicians with small practices who do not have the know-how, the management staff or capacity to re-engineer their practices according to the wishes of government bureaucrats in the same way as large group practices.

Experts doubt the government will succeed without committing tens of billions of dollars. There is no real sign the Bush administration will provide anything even remotely close to that sum. In Britain, the government's adoption of a similar goal is succeeding because it is driven by a single-payer system funded with an extra $10 billion in government contracts and enforced by mandated computerized standards applying to all hospitals and doctors. Approximately 95 percent of the doctors in the United Kingdom now use computers in their practice, as do most doctors in Sweden and European Union nations compared to a measly 20 percent in the United States.

There was a time when medical records were kept on paper in file cabinets of hospitals and doctors' offices. As electronic records gain ground, insurance companies and HMOs require detailed accounts of patient treatments and expenses to stem health costs. Previously, they asked only for basic information on diagnoses.

The chances for misuse are also greater. Employers could use the information to exclude applicants for employment due to medical history, and insurers to refuse insurance to those who are sick or have genetic predisposition to illness. The pharmaceutical industry is organizing conferences to explore how to "mine" information from electronic records for secondary purposes, including selling services and drugs to patients.

Let's not forget hackers and pranksters. Six years ago, a hacker downloaded thousands of confidential files from the University of Washington in Seattle containing patients' names, health conditions and Social Security numbers.

Polls suggest that 70 percent of Americans fear that there could be more sharing of patients' medical information without their knowledge; computerization could increase rather than decrease medical errors; some people would be reluctant to disclose information to doctors because of worries that it will go into their records, and existing federal protection rules will, in time, be relaxed in the name of efficiency.

Such fears are not without foundation. Last December's issue of Pediatrics reported, for example, that mortality rates for pediatric patients at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh increased to 6.5 percent after the implementation of a computerized physician order-entry system, intended to prevent medication and patient management errors. While this finding does not mean causality and may have an explanation, it has stirred debate publicly and in cyberspace.

In the mid-1990s, Congress passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) to protect patients from privacy violations. The regulations are full of loopholes and Congress may need to tighten the law's provisions. Under HIPPA, health-care providers have the right to process your insurance claims, discuss your case and send data about you to other specialists, respond to requests from public-health authorities, law-enforcement agencies, and your employer if you are injured at work, and send you fundraising materials. While these provisions may appear reasonable, HIPPA also allows health providers to share information with health-care business associates for the purpose of training their personnel. HIPPA gives patients the right to restrict uses of their medical information. Providers or health plans, however, are not obligated to agree to the restrictions if they state so in their privacy notices that patients sign when admitted for treatment. This is why patients must read the fine print carefully before signing.

Dr. David Brailer, appointed by President Bush to coordinate the move to electronic medical records, is a former software company CEO. In his public statements, he acknowledges the mind-boggling complexity of information systems, but with refinements and proper security systems, he believes electronic records can be made to work and be more secure than paper records.

If patient information moves successfully from paper to the computer, as its champions hope, the door to privacy abuses will swing wide open. One suggested solution is to give patients the right to work with the doctors to decide what is included in his or her record. A small step to be sure, but if the law and doctors were to give patients this amount of empowerment and autonomy, the doctor-patient relationship will have come a long way.

Spyros Andreopoulos is director emeritus of the Office of Communication and Public Affairs at Stanford University School of Medicine. Used with permission

And thank you, Spyros.

From: Technology and Privacy / Keeping snoops out of our health files

MORTGAGE SALESMAN 888-555-1234

If you are really pissed off, press 1—One of the really useful technological tools to come along in telecommunications is Caller ID. We started using it about a year ago, and it has made life a lot easier. Even though our house has registered with the Leave-Us-The-Hell-Alone Directory, we still get calls because of loopholes in the law. So by looking at Caller ID and not answering any number that starts with an 8 or is identified as "unknown" we just don't get bothered. Unfortunately, that may not work any more.

This is filed under the rubric that if you give enough people chances to be assholes, at least one of them will take it.

There now are services you (and I don't mean you, gentle reader) can use that mask your telephone calls so people who use Caller ID are fooled into thinking there is a useful, respectable human on the other end. It's called "spoofing," the telephone equivalent of computer spoofing, using a fictitious e-mail address. Some companies sell calling cards; if you use them, the ID shows an entirely fictitious name and number. One company [SpoofCard] lets you change or scramble your voice, really handy for that obscene call you always wanted to make to the little boy or girl next door. Another, SpoofTel, says it is really just a way to guarantee privacy when you make a call. Privacy from whom? For $10 you get 60 minutes of talk. You dial a toll-free number, key in the destination and the number you want Caller ID to show.

According to the Washington Post, the Florida Attorney General, Charlie Crist, has begun an investigation, based largely on news accounts [click headline for AP story]. Interestingly, some of the biggest users of this practice seems to be political consultants who want to send out scurrilous messages without being caught. One Pennsylvania congressman, Tim Murphy, reported thousands of calls were made attacking him and, according to Caller ID, the calls came from his office. They didn't. Law enforcement agencies use it, sometimes illegally, to entice people to pick up their phones, and VoIP (Internet telephony) is particularly vulnerable. The victims of spoofing include Columbia University, which was swamped with callers protesting unwanted calls from university numbers, none of which actually originated from Columbia.

It makes me want to rethink my opposition to capital punishment.

Rat Chip; Or, the Modern Prometheus loves cheese

What do you get when you cross brain cells with a microprocessor? Largely ignored—European researchers have created an interface between mammalian brain cell (neurons) and silicon chips. Think of organic computers or neural prostheses for certain brain lesions. Since the research was done in Europe, part of the European Union's Information Society Technologies program, it has been largely ignored on this side of The Water. Had they done this at M.I.T., it would have made the Times. It's called the NACHIP project, and it crosses the barrier between living creatures and machines.

As the report in IST Results points out [click headline], those potential benefits are years or decades away and would fit into the some-day-man-will-mine-the-ocean-floor school of science writing. But there is a potential short term result: the use of neuron-silicon chips to test the effect of new pharmaceuticals on neurons.

And how they did this little stunt is amazing.

A German microchip company, Infineon, placed 16,384 transistors and hundreds of capacitors on a chip 1 mm square. Then the researchers took rat brain neurons and using special proteins, glued the neurons to the chip. The proteins did more than just glue the neurons; they acted as an interface so electric signals could pass from the neurons to the transistors and back again using ionic channels. The transistors can record the signals, and the capacitors can pass signals to the neurons. They tested it by stimulating the neurons and seeing which ones fired. The most pressing problem now, however, is getting that to happen without frying the neurons, which is what they are working on. The researchers are now preparing a proposal to communicate with the neurons using genes. Isaac Asimov would approve. So might Mary Shelly.

The work is being done at the University of Padua in Italy, the Max-Plank-Institute for Biochemistry in Germany, and the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

[And a hearty thank you to faithful reader CW, who worries that the whole thing is more likely to produce Frankenstein than Steve Austin, and a good point that is too.]

If you look it up you'll get cramps

Well, Glicken says the encyclopedia must be wrong—When I was a lad I served a term as a reporter at a Newark newspaper [you thought I was going to break out in song, didn't you?] learning the trade. I had an editor, Lloyde Seymour Glicken, who specialized in taking young fools like me and turning them into reporters. Many of us did very well in journalism. There even was an alumni association. He was a one-man journalism school and we loved him dearly. One day I used a word in a story that Glicken objected to. I, being a smart ass, immediately ran up to his desk, pushed a dictionary in his face and pointed out I had used the word correctly.

"The dictionary is wrong," Glicken said. End of argument.

Back in December, Nature published a study on the accuracy of encylopedias, mainly concentrating in the upstart Wikopedia, the cooperative web-based reference. It concluded that Wikopedia was surprisingly accurate and pointed out that the hoary Encyclopedia Britannica actually was not a lot better.

Nature's investigation suggests that Britannica's advantage may not be great, at least when it comes to science entries. In the study, entries were chosen from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica on a broad range of scientific disciplines and sent to a relevant expert for peer review. Each reviewer examined the entry on a single subject from the two encyclopaedias; they were not told which article came from which encyclopaedia. A total of 42 usable reviews were returned out of 50 sent out, and were then examined by Nature's news team.

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.

You can imagine the dyspepsia this caused at Brittannica. According to a newspaper in San Antonio, the Britannica folks have fired back with a fairly damning letter to librarians and researchers.

Those reports were wrong... because Nature's research was invalid. As our editors and scholarly advisers have discovered by reviewing the research in depth, almost everything about the Nature's investigation was wrong and misleading. Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles Nature examined were not even in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The study was so poorly carried out and its findings so error-laden that it was completely without merit.

Since educators and librarians have been among Britannica's closest colleagues for many years, I would like to address you personally with an explanation of our findings and tell you the truth about the Nature study.

It goes on with chapter and verse of Nature's apparent screw-ups. Media that covered the initial Nature report, need to revisit the issue, methinks.

If you want to see how bad the Nature story was, click here.

[Glicken, who covered high school sports with uncommon attention when he wasn't being a tutor, died in 1999. He was my first mentor. And the dictionary was not wrong. Lloyde].

You can blame it on your ancestors, none of whom could play the piano—Among the genetic price you pay for being an Ashkenazic Jew is dystonia, a disorder that cramps muscles or causes involuntary movements. It isn't fatal, but it can be a pain in the career. Ask Leon Fleisher, the concert pianist whose career was diverted by the nervous disorder. Until Fleisher regained use of his right hand, he wound up playing mostly one-handed concerti. There are some, believe it or not. Botox apparently cured the camps and he's back playing the usual repetoire with both hands—and very well indeed. We can now guess something about his genealogy he didn't know before.

It turns out, Leon can blame his genes. Judy Siegel in the Jerusalem Post reports that a genetic mutation among a small group of Jews from Belarus in the 17th century is probably the source of Fleisher's problem—and that of other Ashkenazim. They were among the survivors of pogroms at the time and their small number produced a genetic bottleneck. Someone among them had the mutation, LRRK2 G2019S, and because of the circumstances, passed it on to others in the group. In the 18th century, the Jewish population of the area exploded and so did the mutation, the reason why one in four of the Jews who can trace their ancestry to that area, have the gene.

The work was done at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and is based on work at UC San Francisco.

Interestingly, the gene is also found among a group of North African Arabs, further evidence that the Ashkenazim have Middle Eastern origins. They probably moved into Europe after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 C.E., and somebody, gasp, intermarried.

Bill O'Reilly, you stop throwing those peas! UPDATED AGAIN

Is your kid whiny, unpleasant, insecure? Don't fret. He can eventually get a job on Fox News—According to a study in the Journal of Research into Personality [not posted], disagreeable and insecure kids grow up to be conservatives. Confident, self-reliant children grow up to be liberals. But you know all that, right? Back in the 1960s, a husband and wife team, Jack and Jeanne Block at Berkeley began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids to study their personality. Using teachers and assistants, the Blocks surveyed the kids' personalities. Politics never entered the picture.

A few decades later, Block (his wife had since died) went back to the kids and looked at their personalities. The unpleasant and rigid kids turned into rigid young people who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity. And politically, they were conservatives. Confident kids turned out to bright, non-conformists. The girls were extroverts, the young men a little introverted. And both sexes were politically liberal.

Actually, this is not the first time similar research produced similar findings. In 2003, a Stanford researcher, John Jost, concluded that people who are dogmatic, fearful, intolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty, and who crave order, are likely to tend conservative. He got a congressional investigation as a result, no doubt from guys where were really brats when they were babies.

Don't swallow that big round yellow thing, just the pill—One of life's little mysteries is the label on my blood pressure and cholesterol medicine (better living through chemistry) advising me, under no circumstances, to drink grapefruit juice when I take these medicines. Why the hell not?

Actually there is a reason but it's a little weird. In a story in the New York Times, Nicholas Bakalar reports that the reason is a substance in grapefruit that often emphasizes the effects of some medicines. There's a family of enzymes called Cytochrome P-450 [they'll be a pop quiz in the morning], particularly one called CYP 3A4, which changes substances in medicines so they can be less potent or more easily excreted or both. Grapefruit interferes with that process. The story oddly doesn't say what it is in grapefruit that does the deed because no one really knows, but the danger comes in taking a blood pressure drug and having the drug lower your blood pressure dangerously. Statins could lead to a fatal muscle disorder called rhabdomyolysis.

The answer is not to cut back on the medicine, apparently, and swig grapefruit juice. The answer is not to drink the juice. Too bad. Love the stuff.

Oh boy, now I can have viruses just like the rest of you!—One of the least interesting questions floating around since Apple started using Intel microprocessors on its Macs was whether its computers would be able to run Windows, which was designed for Intel chips. The answer is yes. The next question is why would you?

Apple never answered the question when asked if their Macs would run Windows. But a bunch of guys with too much time on their hands raised $13,864 for a contest to see who would be the first to pull off the stunt. The prize was won by two hackers who identified themselves only as "narf2006" and "blanka" [Jesus Lopez, if you want to know] who posted images and video of a Mac running Windows natively, meaning without outside help. It ain't easy, involving reformatting the hard disk and running a separate partition and disk images and all sorts of stuff you don't want to know. Graphics don't work and the operating system isn't particularly adept, but then neither is Windows. Emulators work better.

As to why anyone would want to—except to prove you can do it—the only reason would be to run software not available on Macs, mostly proprietary stuff your company runs. Otherwise, Mac OS-X is vastly superior. Now go get a life!

UPDATE: According to a posting on Slashdot, the hackers' blog

Sure, we all know that Windows can now run on Intel Apple Computers. Alas, the solution does not include drivers, and until now Mac users could still only hope to be able to use every application available to their Windows counterparts. However, with drivers now working 100% on the Mac Mini and drivers for the MacBook Pro only lacking video (which, by the looks of the 2nd link is only days away), Mac users now have a complete and working Windows solution.

UPDATE AGAIN: Meanwhile, Microsoft announced that Vista, the new rewrite of Windows, won't be ready for almost another year, and moved the guy in charge out the door. [Microsoft Office for Windows is also late]. By the time Vista comes out, us Mac folks will be on Leopard, the fifth rewrite of OS-X, and Microsoft will only be four generations behind.

Inhale and save your life--or not.

You can smoke that joint to fight your cancer but don't you dare enjoy yourself--What would the Food and Drug Administration do if scientists could prove that smoking marijuana--or at least taking tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)--could cure cancer? Probably nothing. Mythology and politics trumps science every time in Washington, and that preceded even George W.

Last year, researchers in Britain published a paper asserting that marijuana (or at least the THC) had potential as a cancer treatment. In some people, it mitigates the effects of chemotherapy, dulls pain, and stimulates the appetite (and you might have a nice time). This month the same researchers, at Barts and Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry at London University, published another paper claiming that cannabis kills leukemia cells. It appears to be one in a small collection of papers pointing to possible anti-tumor effects. [Got enough modifiers for you?] The paper was published in Letters in Drug Design & Discovery, which I am sure sits on your desk right now. No? Well, what the hell you think I'm here for. [Doesn't seem to be online yet]

According to a release [click headline] from Queen Mary's:

Now [the researchers], using highly sophisticated microarray technology – allowing them to simultaneously detect changes in more than 25,000 genes in cells treated with THC – have begun to uncover further the existence of crucial processes through which THC can kill cancer cells and potentially promote survival. Further, [they] found that the mechanism of cannabis may be independent of the presence of receptors – proteins found on the surface of cells to which other signalling molecules bind. Binding of molecules to receptors elicits a response in the cell, be it growth or death. The finding that cannabis action may not require the presence of these receptors introduces the possibility that the drug may be used more widely as the cancer cell’s dependence on the cannabis receptor is removed.

I hasten to point out that I have no idea if this paper has real merit, but I think it would be wonderful if it did, in part because it would help fight cancer, of course, and in part to watch the fun in the political world. I also point it out because, as we've discussed before, scientists outside the U.S. are doing interesting and important science that never gets a moment's attention among American science writers or in the media. Someone ought to pay attention.

Apoplectic apologies

Blogger's server (or filer, or something) was down for about 12 hours. And it still is not working well. Much of the business end is missing and the counter is off. We are not amused.

The management

Democracy or incompetence. Choose one--UPDATED OFTEN

Look, we're losing circulation and advertising. The obvious answer is to destroy the product--If you care about journalism, your heart should be breaking about now.

We are all aware by now of the fall of the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain. It is being dismantled, thanks to Wall Street greed and the incredible ineptitude of Knight-Ridder management. The chain was bought by McClatchy, which actually is the best newspaper chain left in America. That would be the good news. The bad news is that McClatchy is selling off 12 of Knight-Ridder papers to fund the purchase, including my old paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer. I was science writer at the Inquirer from 1969 to 1980, the best job I ever had in journalism. In the last 20 years, Knight-Ridder emasculated what was arguably the best newspaper in America to keep the ass-holes on Wall Street happy. (I don’t like using profanity on this blog but I am at a loss to find another word. I’m really pissed!). Tony Ridder [top picture], who drove his family-founded chain into the ground, is reported in the San Jose Mercury News (another KR paper destroyed by his management and now also up for sale) to be distraught. I weep for him.

Background: When I was hired by the Inquirer, Knight Newspapers, owned by the illustrious Knight family, had just bought it from Walter Annenberg, who ran a thoroughly dishonest newspaper. They brought in a man named John McMullen to clean house and turn it into an honest and fearless paper, which he did. The day of my job interview I had to pick my way through a picket line of Philadelphia policemen who were protesting a series of stories on police corruption. McMullen bragged about the number of libel suits he had pending, all but one of which, incidentally, he won. Sounded like my kind of place. I was hired. The Knights eventually merged with the Ridder chain of California, forming KR. Along the way, Gene Roberts [left, bottom], late of the New York Times, was brought in to run the Inky and in a matter of years, turned it into a great newspaper, probably the last great newspaper to emerge in this country. On any given day, we were simply the best. We had national correspondents and foreign bureaus, experts on any subjects (know many papers with an architect writer with a degree from Yale?), budgets that were now the stuff of dreams, and won something like 17 Pulitzers in 15 years. We just ordered champaign at the end of April, figuring it wouldn’t go to waste. The foreign correspondents, who won several of those Pulitzers, were legendary, including one Asian correspondent who allegedly had a pair of teenage female twins as housekeepers. To lure one Pulitzer winner back to Philadelphia from Rome, Roberts promised him he could cover the Phillies for a year. Richard Ben Cramer covered New York City until he went overseas. He covered the invasion of Lebanon by hailing a Tel Aviv taxi. No one else covered LA with the humor and eye of Murray Dubin. Don Bartlett and James Steele won two of those Pulitzers and should have won a third for their pioneering use of computers to analyze data for a story on the criminal justice system. They worked upstairs, were given an almost unlimited budget and were told to report downstairs whenever they had their story, any year they were ready. They were almost pathologically meticulous and never got it wrong. Don Drake, the medical writer, turned in a story or two a year, maybe, always wonderfully written and often heart-rending.

I could go anywhere I wanted to go if I could justify it on journalistic grounds, including the South Pole, and I was the first western reporter allowed into Somalia in a half dozen years to find the last naturally infected smallpox victim. I had editors who included some of the best I’ve ever known. A story I wrote with Susan Stranahan on Three Mile Island (coverage of which won another Pulitzer) was nominated by the University of Maryland as one of the 100 best newspaper stories of the 20th century. We knew while we were there we had the kind of jobs we dreamed of when we went into journalism. And, we were profitable. Sunday circulation topped 1 million.

I left to go to Stanford for various reasons and the Inky kept winning awards. Roberts sent my successor to Africa for several weeks because he thought there might be an interesting story in the endangered white rhinos. There was.

Then the suits in Miami, then KR’s headquarters, started putting the screws on Roberts’ budgets for financial reasons--profit margins weren’t high enough to suit Wall Street analysts. Roberts eventually quit, blaming the corporation for reducing the budget to the point he could no longer do the quality journalism he--and we--felt appropriate, and he just got tired of fighting them constantly. Most of the staff eventually followed. He was the first of several KR editors to quit for the same reason.

A good number of former Inky reporters and editors went on to major positions in journalism, their reputation as one of Roberts' people, assuring them the appropriate respect.

Tony Ridder, known as Darth Vader in his newsrooms, was far more interested in the price of KR stock and fearful of a takeover than he was for the quality of his product, his service to his community, or loyalty to his employees. Like other newspaper corporations, KR was under pressure from Wall Street to keep earning obscene profit margins (20% plus) and, as Roberts pointed out, the suits got together and somehow the answer to falling circulation and advertising was to give the readers less. It would be like General Motors deciding that in order to earn a profit they would take out the back seats of its cars. Budgets were cut, foreign bureaus eliminated, reporters and editors bought off or laid off and the papers are now remnants of their former selves. It, of course, didn’t work and couldn’t work. They teach this shit in business schools?

(By the way, if you want to see newspapers being destroyed before your very eyes, you are welcome to watch the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun, both owned by the Tribune Company in Chicago--and both formerly run by Roberts' disciples from the Inquirer--be dismembered. McClatchy is the corporation that proves the common wisdom wrong, incidentally. They have invested in their journalism instead of cutting back, and have had more than 20 years of growing circulation. Alas, they won’t try that at the Inquirer or the Merc.)

Now the Inky and the Mercury News and the St. Paul paper, are up for sale. The chance of white knights rescuing them is slim. There is Gannett, whose business plan demands mediocrity; William Dean Singleton, the anti-Christ of American journalism, and the Newspaper Guild and its supporters, who won’t win because the world doesn’t work that way any more. Good guys lose to greed every time.

An old friend, Laurie Garrett, who reported for Newsday, a Tribune paper, was invited to give a speech before Tribune Co. stockholders after she won a Pulitzer. In her speech, she pointed out that newspapers and journalism are unique businesses. So important are they to the running of a democracy that the Founding Fathers put special protection into the Constitution, a protection that no other field of endeavor enjoys, not lawyers or stock analysts or accountants. If, she told the stockholders, you don’t care about that responsibility, please invest elsewhere. Go buy stock in a shoe company or a computer company, and leave us the hell alone to do our jobs.

No one paid the slightest attention.

Steve Lovelady, one of the editors referred to above, has an interesting take on the business here. Also, nothing I am saying should be taken as a rap against the splendid people at the Inky now, one of whom is a former student of mine. They are in no way inferior in talent or energy to the Roberts era staff. There are just far fewer of them, they are limited in what they can cover, have smaller budgets and are working for howling incompentents, including a management that tries to explain how covering fewer things is good for business. That surely ain't the staff's fault. And yes, I read the paper regularly. David Zucchino, who worked at the Inky for 20 years and is now at the Los Angeles Times, has a good story this morning from the Inquirer newsroom. He points out the paper has 300 fewer reporters than it once had and describes the newsroom as vast but lightly populated. He, of course, should know. He works at another newspaper being run into the ground by nincompoops.

Question for discussion: is it possible that a public corporation cannot run a quality newspaper? The three best papers in the U.S. are still controlled by families. Family papers turned over to corporations (often Gannett or the Tribune Co.), immediately go downhill. Maybe the pressures on public corporations make it impossible for newspapers to function properly.

[The server has been down for several hours. We apologize]

[Photo of Tony Ridder from the San Jose Mercury News; photo of Gene Roberts from PBS]

Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean you haven't been googled--UPDATED

That guy Sergey Brin, he sure breathes heavy--If you are an employee of Microsoft you generally feel aggrieved that everyone buys your product and everyone hates you. You had one thing going for you, you were impervious to it all. No one really threatened the monopoly (and monopoly it is, gang). Just sometimes, in the dark shadows of night, you got to hear a little heavy breathing. If you listened just right, you heard the wind sigh: "Google."

Rumors have circulated for years that sooner or later Google was going to take on Microsoft in its most vulnerable place, application software--mostly Office--on the Internet. Microsoft has never quite gotten used to the Internet; the company always looks surprised when someone swoops in, takes control of an Internet function and swoops out with truck loads of cash. They were caught surprised by Netscape (for all the good that did Netscape). Apple's music hegemony must drive them crazy, and Google is the king of the search engines. Now Google is challenging Microsoft again. On the web. With applications.

What means is that Google may very well be finally taking on Microsoft in a vulnerable place. This shouldn't be over-emphasized, Microsoft only makes about 6% of its profit on Office; most of its money comes from Windows. But the philosophy behind Google is that anything you can do on your computer you can do better on the Internet.

Quietly, Google has purchased a small (four employee) company called Upstartle (isn't that cute?) that sells a program called Writely. Writely is a word processor on the web. You use it through your browser. It's good for collaborative work, particulary on the road. You can even upload Word documents. Since it is on the web, it doesn't matter where you are or what kind of computer you are using. More important, if you are writing as a committee or want to share your work, it doesn't matter where the other folks are or what they are using. And, you store it on the Internet, not your computer, unless you want a copy. Keep it on line and edit it there. You can store it as a pdf file, RTF or OpenDocument. Google already has a mail system, G-mail. Another Google move, long hinted, is something called G-drive. a place to store an almost infinite amount of data. You see the picture. Your computer becomes mostly a device to connect to the Web where you can do whatever you want. The Internet becomes your server.

And, it's all free.

UPDATE--Bill Gates clearly got the message. In a memo to his executives in October, Gates warned that the action was moving to the web and they better get on board the train. He has, however, said that many times before and the huge vessel he captains doesn't turn very quickly. He may have already missed--waiting for another metaphor out there are you?--the boat.

"Chris Gonna Find Ray Charles!"

Where are you buried, Christopher Columbus?--Seville. You asked. And who are you, Christopher Columbus? Stay tuned; we're still working on that.

Exactly who Christopher Columbus was (was he really a Sephardic Jew?) has long been the object of considerable speculation. So too is his burial site, with two cities, Seville and Santo Domingo, both claiming to have Chris's body. Columbus died in May, 1506 and it was generally believed he was buried in Seville. But in 1877, workers uncovered bones in Santo Domingo's cathedral, the Dominican Republic says are his.

A Spanish-led research team took DNA samples from Columbus' son and brother and then sampled the bones in Seville. They matched. The bones in Seville are Columbus'. The authorities in the Dominican Republic haven't permitted DNA sampling. It is conceivable, those bones are real also and poor Chris' skeleton was distributed to both sites.

As to who he was and his origin, the scientists are tracking down everyone they can find who might be related to him and will subject their DNA to analysis to see if they can pinpoint an origin. Stay tuned.

Baby beluga in the deep blue miasma and herbal remedies won't help--UPDATED

Don't call me Ishmael. I can't find a white whale around here--Marine biologists working in Alaska have some chilling news: beluga whales may be endangered. Thirty years ago there were 1,300 in Cook Inlet. Last year, fewer than 280. No one knows why the decline. The gorgeous animals may wind up under federal protection. Such a listing was rejected in 2000 because it looked like overharvesting was the problem and that was fixable. Strict limits were placed on hunting but the population is still in decline. Something else is going on, says Lloyd Lowry at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. It could be human assaults on their habitat, including from oil and gas development, but the cause of the decline simply isn't clear. What's scary, of course, is that any single event, like an oil spill could be the tipping point that dooms the species.

They really have a cure for cancer but the herb growers are suppressing it--Americans spend billions on alternative remedies, highly touted in natural food stores, in magazines, and books. Even the government, thanks to the numbskulls in Congress, is in the act, with Congress forcing the National Institutes of Health to start a center to study and promote the use of these remedies. Enter the law of unintended consequences. One consequence is that some of these remedies are actually getting tested scientifically. To the surprise of many, it turns out none of them seem to work. Last week, two popular arthritis pills, glucosamine and chondroitin were found to be no better than placebos. Last month, saw palmetto, often thought to help prostate problems, was shown to be useless. St. John's wort doesn't treat depression, shark cartilage doesn't help with cancer and echinacea doesn't work for colds.

UPDATE--Oh, and vitamin B doesn't prevent heart attacks.

Do you think it will make a difference to the $20 billion-a-year industry or to the people shelling out the bucks? Certainly not.

Well, at least it isn't blackjack

Will Jennifer Aniston please report to the marketing department—OK. You live in China and you want to research the political situation in Taiwan. You go to the computer, kick up the web browser, and get—nowhere. You've been blocked. The old 404 message. The government has censored the site (with the help of American companies who give lip service to personal freedom). Or, you are sitting in your office and have nothing much to do at the moment and decide to see if you can track down nude pictures of Jennifer Aniston. (You need a new job, by the way). You can't; your employer is filtering such non-business traffic. He even bought software off-the-shelf to let him do it, commercal co-conspirators. In other words, while the World Wide Web was designed specifically to free the intellect and the soul, government and private censorship has interposed.

Not to worry. Censoring the web is a lot harder than it looks. And to make it even harder, a number of folks have devised ways of slipping by the censors. Bless them. The best site may be Boing Boing's Guide to Defeating Censorware. Click here. Reporters Without Borders has technical suggestions. You can trick Google into doing forbidden things and some RSS readers can slip around filters as well, apparently. There's also software called Circumventor, which you can download for free on a server. There are lots of others ways of screwing the screwers, and a world of people who get just as steamed as you do willing to help. Happy to be of service.

I found that Jennifer Aniston picture are at.....what?....help!....I'm melting......

Decline of Western Civilization—Part V Fly With Me, or All We Like Sheep

In case of sudden decompression, you are on the wrong plane—Before we resume our usual kvetching, a rant. I have just spent 16 hours on an airline I will not name (Northwest) and this rant is not caused by any ill-treatment. Indeed, the flights were quite average. That’s what the rant is about.

I am old enough to remember when flying was fun or at least a special event you looked forward to. Many people even dressed up for a flight. The seats were comfortable, the prices reasonable, they fed you, later on they showed you a movie. You would call the airline for reservations and a human would answer the phone. The flight attendants (we called them stewardesses) were usually handsome young women. Drinks came in glasses, you ate with silverware on dishes, even in coach.

It was regulated by the government. Airlines couldn’t even jigger their tuna sandwiches without permission from the Civil Aeronautics Board. Then, of course, came deregulation and in 1985 tuna sandwiches became the least of our worries.

My flights to and from Californian this weekend were smooth, packed, cheap and unpleasant. They were unpleasant because I was jammed in a seat with not enough room to cross my legs, next to a guy who was territorial about the arm rest, in a packed plane with three flight attendants, at least one of whom had so little to do (there wasn’t anything to serve) she was reading a book in the galley. The airlines (Northwest particularly) have reduced travel to Greyhounds with wings. That’s fine for a 50-minute trip to Albany. It is not fine for five hours in a plane, sitting in seats 31-inches apart, with nothing to eat but crap ($3 a bag). Boarding was handled by one person who had to check the tickets and handle the desk for people who had problems at the same time. We boarded slower than we had to and the people with problems weren’t well served. Northwest, alone among major airlines, doesn’t even show bad movies. I treasured my iPod.

I was once a loyal supporter of what’s called the legacy carriers, you know, American, Delta, United, Northwest. I once even owned stock in Delta, so impressed was I with their service. Now they are in bankruptcy, arguably the worst-run major corporation in America with the possible exception of GM. I have frequent flier miles on several legacies and about 7 years ago, was one of United’s super fliers. Not any more. Last summer, my family did California on one of those new low-cost airlines, Frontier, with leather seats, leg room, satellite television entertainment, people who answer telephones and are not totally freaked out about losing their jobs. Still no damned meal, of course. At least they tried.

Some of this, of course is not the airlines’ fault. They are not the reason getting through the airports have become hell. Blame the 9/11 bastards for that. Nor are they responsible for the price of fuel, although most of the planes most of them fly are at least 10 years old and not the most efficient things on wings. But the rest of it is.

Two points to this rant then I’ll let you go. One, deregulation is over-rated. The airlines may have been more expensive, but they were better run and the customers were better served before the CAB was disbanded. You could fly from Philadelphia to San Francisco without having to stop in Dallas to save money. Fares were based on mileage. The longer the flight, the more it cost. Duh! It isn’t a political thing either; Jimmy Carter was president then. It’s economic philosophy. Not every human endeavor is better served by unregulated capitalism. Health care is another example. And those of you who think deregulation keeps down prices are invited to start paying my electric bill in July when the regulated price caps are removed in Maryland.

Second, if you are an airline and you are filling virtually every one of your seats, and you have cut service to the point where your customers hate you, and you are losing billions, is it possible you are still doing something wrong? Do you need an MBA to figure out you need to raise the price of your service? Can’t, you say? People won’t buy your service if they can get it cheaper elsewhere? How about providing something extra for the money, like good service and good food and enough people on the plane to service the customers properly? I'd gladly pay more. How about employees that have not just been screwed for the sixth time this month? You are in a service industry, schucks. We have to deal with your employees; you know, the ones you just stole the pensions from? How about, well, getting regulated again?

Come back for our next rant when we will discuss truly obnoxious characters who get insufficient attention: obese people in coach.

Back to business.

On the road again....

Your humble servant is on the road again—California this time—and won't be back till Tuesday. Join me again then.

Faces falling off, skulls unearthed and Mormons to the rescue--UPDATED

Is that just a pimple on your nose or is your face going to fall off?—The flesh-eating bug is loose and getting more dangerous. Once restricted to hospitals, Staphylococcus aureaus has spread to places like schools, gyms, stadiums and your home. We reported on it before, now the Los Angeles Times, in a pretty gory story, has taken up the subject. The lede is a woman who thought she was bitten by a spider and the tiny wound turned into an absolute horror. The staph infection was once controlled by the antibiotic methicillin, but widespread use of that drug has produced a resistent strain of the bug (MRSA), and what it does ain't pretty. Moreover, there is no good substitute treatment. As the Times points out, not enough people are paying attention, in part because there is no requirement that these infections be reported to the CDC. There are estimates that five years go, there were 120,000 cases and it has undoubtedly grown worse since then. About 1% of us carry the resistent-strain around in our noses. Players on the St. Louis Rams got it, drug users in San Francisco get it regularly, Hillary Swank got it in a Brooklyn GM while training for Million Dollar Baby. Pay attention baby.

UPDATE: From the Associated Press Thursday.

North Carolina health officials are investigating the death of a woman who died last week of a flesh-eating bacteria three days after accidentally jamming her hand in a wheelchair while working at a nursing home. Nursing assistant Sharron Bishop, 44, died Feb. 27. A doctor said a rare flesh-eating bacteria may have entered her body through a thumb injury and she turned from healthy to fatally ill.

We're not in Kansas any more, Toto. Thank God we're in Utah—Kansas remains the Know-Nothing State. Even Utah has more sense. In a move that surprised some, the Utah House of Representatives shot down a bill that would have challenged Darwin in the state's public schools. The vote wasn't even close, 46-28, and this in a legislature made up largely of Mormons. Stephen H. Urquhart, the majority whip, said he didn't think God had an argument with science. The bill, called the Origins of Life Bill, would have required teachers to issue a disclaimer saying that not all scientists agree with evolution, which is largely nonsense, and that the state doesn't endorse evolution, which apparently isn't true either. The bill was gutted and then demolished. No more Utah jokes. For a while.

Get me the head of Nicolaus Copernicus—It's over there. Maybe. Archeologists, working in Frombork, Poland, may have found Nick's skull. It turns out that Copernicus, who died in 1543, was buried near Frombork, but no one knows where. Recently, the Washington Post reported, archeologists digging beneath the cathedral there found a skull of a man about 70 with a broken nose. Copernicus died at about the age 70 and had a crooked nose. Reconstruction of the head from the skull shows a man who looked something like the portraits of Copernicus. Testing DNA from the skull with living survivors would solve the uncertainty, but Copernicus had no children. Instead, the archeologists are going to hunt for the skeleton of his uncle, the former bishop of Warmia, who also is buried around there someplace. Copernicus' book, positing that the Earth traveled around the sun, not the opposite, was banned by the Catholic Church until 1835 and no one from Kansas was involved.

Oh, the dude whose picture is on top? Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin. You wanted a face falling off?

Finally, a politician with sense

I don't think they should reproduce either—From the Akron Beacon Journal

"If an Ohio lawmaker's proposal becomes state law, Republicans would be barred from being adoptive parents.

"State Sen. Robert Hagan sent out e-mails to fellow lawmakers late Wednesday night, stating that he intends to "introduce legislation in the near future that would ban households with one or more Republican voters from adopting children or acting as foster parents." The e-mail ended with a request for co-sponsorship.

"On Thursday, the Youngstown Democrat said he had not yet found a co-sponsor.

"Hagan said his "tongue was planted firmly in cheek" when he drafted the proposed legislation. However, Hagan said that the point he is trying to make is nonetheless very serious.

"Hagan said his legislation was written in response to a bill introduced in the Ohio House this month by state Rep. Ron Hood, R-Ashville, that is aimed at prohibiting gay adoption....

"To further lampoon Hood's bill, Hagan wrote in his mock proposal that "credible research" shows that adopted children raised in Republican households are more at risk for developing "emotional problems, social stigmas, inflated egos, and alarming lack of tolerance for others they deem different than themselves and an air of overconfidence to mask their insecurities."

[Thank you, Carol]

I'd rather catch a cold—UPDATED

We're gonna spray for prostate cancer so unzip—You read it here first!

Here's an intriguing one: researchers have discovered a virus in some cancerous prostates. They make it clear they have established no link between the virus and the disease, but it's enough to make other scientists go "hmmm." The work, done at the University of California, San Francisco, and the Cleveland Clinic, found a virus in cancerous prostates of men with a certain genetic defect. Until now, that virus, XMRV, was found only in mice. The form of prostate cancer involved is familial, which accounts for only about 9% of all prostate cancers.

The idea that some cancers have a viral cause, or that viruses at least play a part in cancer, is well-established. Some liver and cervical cancers are caused by viruses and there may be a viral component—along with environment and genetics—in breast, stomach and other forms of cancer. That latter may be the case here. And, the idea that a virus may play a part in prostate cancer, isn’t new. In 2004, researchers at the University of Michigan found DNA from the BK virus in prostate cancer cells. No one knows what that means either.

The virus, related to retroviruses known as xenotropic murine leukemia, is somehow transmitted by the genes and has been passed on for thousands of years. Xeotropic means it can pass from species to species, but while there are examples of it passing from mice to other animals, there is no record of it doing so to humans. Testing prostate cells of 20 patients who had two copies of the mutated genes turned up 8 of them with the virus. Since the gene is part of the immune system, men with the mutated gene make less of an enzyme that helps kill viruses. This virus got through. It's not likely the virus came from mice. And, since it was found in just one of 66 other patients, presumably without the genetic mutation, there might be a link between the virus and genetics in causing cancer.

Another puzzle is that the virus is not found in the cancer cells, but in the stroma, the surrounding, non-cancerous tissue. Nor is every cell involved.

The research was reported Thursday at a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in San Francisco.

Oh, and while we're at it, earlier this month the folks at UCSF released a study showing that the folk remedy saw palmetto had absolutely no effect on enlarged prostates. As the owner of one, I am displeased.

Did you know the Mafia had an MBA program?

You want to live, sweetie, that will cost you 100 grand, but it's up to you—Everyone knows the drug companies are pirates but it's still shocking when the eye-patch comes off. Meet Genentech. And ImClone Systems.

The main excuse for the high price of drugs in the U.S. is the claim that the profits go to research and if they didn't charge huge amounts, no one could afford to discover new drugs.There are several problems with that argument. One, why should U.S. consumers pay for research so the companies can sell their drugs to the rest of the world? We pay exorbitant prices so the French can get the drugs cheap? Second, they still do research in countries with price controls, apparently not deterred by the lower profits. Third, and most important, that's bullshit. They spend most of that money on promotion. Watched any television lately? Whatever.

Now Genentech has decided, for a change, to be honest. They have a drug called Avastin, widely used to treat colon cancer. Experts say it is very good, so bravo to them. But now it seems Avastin can also be used for breast and lung cancer treatment, but at double the dose. Genentech plans to price it so it will cost$100,000 a year for the drug in those cases. Even patients with insurance may be getting screwed; those without insurance are simply can die now. But Genentech and it's parent, Roche, aren't justifying the price by the usual crap of the cost of research. Here's the response: "As we look at Avastin and Herceptin [a similar drug] pricing, right now the health economics hold up, and therefore I don't see any reason to be touching them," said William M. Burns, the chief executive of Roche's pharmaceutical division and a member of Genentech's board. "The pressure on society to use strong and good products is there." In other words, if you want to live, you come up with the money.

Meanwhile, Imclone Systems has a drug even more expensive, Erbitux.

How bad is it? According to column in the Washington Post by Robert Wittes, a cancer specialist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering:

The average wholesale price (AWP, or the average price charged to hospitals and physician practices) of a month of treatment for a normal-size adult is roughly $4,800 for Avastin and $12,000 for Erbitux. Since most colorectal-cancer patients for whom these drugs are medically appropriate receive them not singly but in combination with other chemotherapeutics, the monthly AWP is more like $11,000 for combinations including Avastin and $16,000 for Erbitux. Providers pass these costs on to patients, along with charges that cover the costs of pharmacy and dispensing. Courses of treatment generally last several months, but they can be much longer for patients who respond favorably. In other words, the cumulative cost of treatment can be astronomical.

The immorality of this is obvious. In some parts of the world, they burn down buildings because someone published a cartoon they don't like. In this country, we don't even burn down buildings when people are extorting us at the moment of death.

They used to hang pirates.

I will now go and wash my hands. Even typing this makes me feel dirty.

The Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion and Dorothy, you are in a world of troulble

[Bill Maher via Crooks & Liars]

We will skip the Mormon cartoons

Listen, if you want to chat, Moses is that guy feeding his camel over there by the tree—Here’s an interesting little problem. What if people invented time machines and could go back into the past, let’s say to the reign of Ramses II, and discovered that the Hebrew slaves were only a couple of thousand in number and they fled into the desert under the leadership of a guy named Moses. The Pharoah, figuring that a few thousand slaves weren’t worth bothering about, lets them go. End of story. If you are Jewish you just had a cornerstone of your faith undermined by science. Or, maybe they go back to Jerusalem in during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius and found that a carpenter in Nazareth named Jesus had indeed been executed outside of Jerusalem, but his body was thrown into a common ditch grave and never seen again. If you are Christian, you’ve got a problem.

It has happened to the Mormons. Mark Twain once described the Book of Mormon as “chloroform in print.” I thought the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was living proof that if you put together 200 mediocre singers you just got a loud mediocre chorus. Whatever. One of the main precepts of the book is that North American Indians were descendent from one of the lost tribes of Israel and came to this continent in 600 B.C. They built a civilization here, but split into two warring factions. By 385, one group, the idol-worshiping Lamanites, defeated the God-fearing Nephites, and they were the ancestors of the Indians. It's one reason the Mormons have gone to great lengths to convert the Indians—to bring them back into the God-fearing fold.

Along comes DNA testing and it turns out the Indians came from Asia with no sign whatsoever they ever set foot in the Middle East. That’s a whoops. The Mormons, like conservative Christians and Orthodox Jews, take their holy book as literally true—every word. Since the Church of Latter Day Saints has converted millions of Indians based on the premise they were the people described in the book, this is a major problem. Mormonism, indeed, one of the fastest growing religions in the world, gets much of its new strength from those regions where the Indians live. At least one missionary has quit, no longer capable of believing in what he was doing. It is not known how many others may have.

Much of the DNA work comes from something of an apostate, Simon G. Southerton, a molecular biologist and former Mormon bishop in Australia. Southerton notes that DNA testing of Jews throughout the world shows a strong common Middle Eastern origin. No one doubts their origin. But when he tested the indigenous people of the Americas, including maternal DNA lines from 7,300 Indians from 175 tribes, he came up with no sign of Middle Eastern origin. They came from eastern and central Asia.

The DNA evidence isn’t the only problem with the Book of Mormon. It is full of anachronisms, such as the fact the Indians never domesticated farm animals and the Book of Mormon has them living on farms, and despite millions of dollars in research, Mormons have found not a single bit of archeological evidence to support the ancient civilization theme.

Church leaders have dismissed the acknowledgment of the scientific evidence “heresy,” of course. And outsiders like me might think such a blow might at least put a crack in the faith. But probably not. As one professor, quoted in the Los Angeles Times noted: “This may look like the crushing blow to Mormonism from the outside, but religion ultimately does not rest on scientific evidence, but on mystical experiences. There are different ways of looking at the truth.” Mormons have barraged the web with responses, including some totally discounting the DNA evidence. Search Google for “Mormon” and “DNA’ and you’ll see how effective they have been. They have also launched a major attack on Southerton. Southerton has fired back.

But since Mormon leaders insist the book can’t be wrong, they seem to have a conundrum. They claim the book can’t be proven or disproved by science. But of course, it has.

Cheney's got a gun

THE HUNTER, by Ogden Nash

The hunter crouches in his blind
'neath camouflage of every kind
and conjures up a quacking noise
to lend allure to his decoys.

This grown-up man, with luck and pluck,
is hoping to out-wit: A DUCK!!

[Thank you, Larry]

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water—Part II

Maybe if we threw them a lawyer, they’d calm down—Australia seems to be to be an odd place for people to live. Most of their reptiles are very venomous, they have a common spider that can kill you, and half the stuff swimming in the oceans around it will either eat you, poison you, or give you a really, really bad day with a sting. Having good beer is no excuse.

Don’t try swimming there too soon. About 100 sharks (species unknown) have been holding a shark orgy—actually a feeding frenzy—off the tourist-heavy Gold Coast of Queensland, forcing the authorities to close the beaches. [also click headline] The sharks appear to be getting very excited about bait fish in the area. I’m not sure what “bait fish” are in this context, but apparently the sharks know. According to one authority, when sharks are in a frenzy, they just close their eyes and chomp. You could be what they chomp on so the beaches are closed. One guy, simply wading, got hit, fortunately for him, by a small shark who apparently wasn't doing well in the frenzy. Last month a Brisbane woman was killed by a bull shark.

Actually, sharks are in the news a lot this week. According to report from the University of Florida shark attacks are declining for an interesting reason: some people being attacked fight back. According to George Burgess at the International Shark Attack File, there were 58 shark attacks worldwide in 2005, down from 65 the year before. Fatalities fell from 7 to 4. Most of the victims are surfers. Some of the decline is due to the decline in the population of sharks, and some is because growing numbers of people are bright enough to avoid shark-infested waters, but Burgess says meeting a shark attack with aggression actually works and may account for some of the decrease, although the numbers involved can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. The sharks are interested in lunch, not a fight. Most sharks respect size and power. The best punch? One in the nose. In other words: an in-your-face defense. One surfer in Oregon was attacked by a great white and popped it on the nose. The great big, fierce old shark retreated.

“That gentleman did precisely what he should do under those circumstances,” Burgess said. “A person who is under attack should act aggressively toward the shark and not follow the advice given to women who are having their purses snatched in New York City, which is to lie on the ground, play dead and give up the purse.”

The decline represents a five-year trend, the researchers say.

And the sharks their worst public relations agent this week with the sad death of Peter Benchley, who died at the age of 65. Benchley wrote Jaws, which gave sharks a bad name for a generation. Maybe the Australian sharks are celebrating. What do you expect. They are sharks. Benchley's book, of course, was premised on the notion that you don't fight back. You scream and die.

[Photo: copyright Steve Drogin]

Spy vs. Spy, or how to beat wire taps

Are your phones being tapped? Do you hear heavy breathing when you send e-mail? Is Incurious George listening in while you discuss male menopause with you neighbor? —Cheer up fella. You can fight wire taps.

According to Seucrity and Privacy Journal, you can screw ‘em. Or rather some of them. There actually are ways to make tapping your phone difficult or impossible. One presumes the terrorists already know this so why not us folks? The research comes from the University of Pennsylvania, including Micah Sherr, Eric Cronin, Sandy Clark, and Matt Blaze, and all the information is public.

The most obvious form of wire tapping is a direct electrical connection to your phone line, literally, a tap. Law enforcement officers would use a small device called loop extender or dial-up slave which sends any audio on the line to the cops’ line, re-encodes the signals and performs level equalization. Equipment at the law enforcement agency turns on when you dial the phone, records the number and decodes the conversation. That’s not used very much any more, it’s analog, easy to beat and clumsy. Most tappers use CALEA taps. That is done at the phone company, which (presumably only when a court order permits) intercepts the subject’s conversations and sends it to the law enforcement agency. The cops (which means, one presumes, the FBI, NSA, CIA and everyone else) has one line that records the number and another that records the conversation. The phone company just throws some switches.

The direct tap is fairly easy to recognize, the researchers say. First, you might just see it. More important, the tapping changes the nature of the transmission characteristics and that can be detected with off-the-shelf equipment. Some folks may want to hack the phone company.

CALEA taps are another story. (Encrypting telephone messages so they can’t be deciphered is hard to do and the equipment hard to find.) One way to beat CALEA is to use a call-forwarding service. Flood your lines with irrelevant calls forwarded to another number and while the authorities are trying to wade through that, make the call you want. The Penn researches say it works. There also are ways of faking phone numbers.

The weakness in CALEA is something called the C tone, which tells the phone line that the phone is idle. When the C tone stops it cues the eavesdroppers that you are making a call. The C tone consists of two frequencies. So, go generate your own. There are phones that have a C tone button you just press and the tone is played, turning off the tappers. You can also generate same from equipment purchased on E-Bay or Radio Shack. Generate a tone loud enough to turn off the tap but low enough to carry on a conversation. They'll never know you called. There is even software you can download that will do it.

The researchers point out that law enforcement agencies have gone to great lengths to mitigate these decoy activities, but hint broadly, they may not be as good at it as they think.

E-mail is even easier to block. Any number of commercially available programs can encrypt messages enough to give the NSA conniptions. They can be broken but only with great effort. It’s also possible to generate phony packets in internet transmissions to confusion listeners. You send out two messages, one the eavesdroppers can play with while you carry one the real communication. See here.

Presumably, all the world’s bad guys know about this stuff. They are not idiots. It’s only we innocent folks that are kept in the dark.

[Cartoon—DC Comics]

Chesley Bonestell meets PhotoShop

It can't be your father's hybrid. I killed the program—UPDATED

If we put a hybrid engine in your Hummer do you think people would stop making obscene gestures?—Do you recall all those wonderful urban legends about how the tire industry suppressed tires that would run 100 miles without replacement, how oil companies killed the development of engine oils that won’t wear out or how the government rejected a car with very clean, efficient technology? Well, one of them is true.

A hybrid car technology was developed by an inventor named Victor Wouk in the 1970s and a bureaucrat with the Environmental Protection Agency killed it. I’m not making this up.

According to hybridcars.com, Victor Wouk was an engineer who once worked on the Manhattan Project. Along with a partner, Charles Rosen, he came up with the design in the late 1960s for a car driven by a combination of gas and electric motors. He was convinced that electric cars, the technology that seemed to be something of a fad at the time, would never be economical, but a hybrid would work. He tried to sell the idea to the auto industry, but no one would give him the time of day. Meanwhile, Congress had just passed the Clean Air Act, which required automakers to reduce emissions by 90%. Wouk was tipped off about a virtually unknown program, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Car Incentive Program (FCCIP), which was set up to meet that goal. The inventor of a car that hit the mark set by the Clean Air Act would get a $300,000 development contract. Wouk and Rosen formed a company, Petro-Electric Motors, Ltd, and after a year’s work, submitted their application and won the contract along with several other companies. They didn’t know it at the time, but they had just run into a man named Eric Stork, head of EPA’s Mobile Source Air Pollution Control Program, who didn’t believe anyone could produce such a car, and thought the FCCIP was a pain in the ass. He had too many more important things to do.

Now they had to build a test car. The other companies winning the competition soon dropped out, having failed to meet the requirements, leaving Petro-Electric, the only one proposing a hybrid. Rosen and Wouk visited car dealers, looking for the right frame to put their technology in and settled on a 1972 Buick Skylark. They modified the Skylark and notified Stork they were ready for the FCCIP test. Stork refused and threatened to kill the whole program. He was too busy being a “regulator,” he said.

Now, Victor Wouk had a brother named Herman, who by now was a fairly famous writer. Victor, with Herman’s assistance, petitioned the National Science Foundation for help. The foundation called a meeting with Rosen, the Wouks and Stork. Victor Wouk gave details of what they had accomplished and the foundation begged Stork to test it. He reluctantly agreed, probably with his fingers crossed behind his back, and he promised to promote the technology if the car passed the test. An EPA engineer, however, tipped off Wouk that Stork was going to reject the car no matter what it did. The car passed. A month later, Stork sent Wouk a letter listing 75 reasons why he would not approve the next phase of support. Wouk’s Skylark did cut emissions and did use less fuel but he just didn’t like the idea. And he was very busy. Letters flew for years, but Stork would not relent.

Stork, now retired explained: “On the dynamometer, it was rigged to run only on the batteries. That’s why the emissions were so good. It’s just not a very practical technology for automotive. That’s why it’s going nowhere. It certainly wasn’t [going anywhere] then. Even today, it’s marginal.” [Note: there are more than 400,000 hybrid cars on American roads at the moment, most of them use exactly that technology, and one sitting in my driveway.] Petro-Electric soon ran out of money, and Wouk, pissed and depressed gave up. Gas was cheap in those days, the auto industry was doing fine and no one gave a damn.

UPDATE—Hybrid cars won three of the eight top positions in IntelliChoice.com's best overall value of the year award for new cars. The Best Car Value for cars under $23,000 went to the hybrid Toyota Prius, while both SUV categories -- under $28,000 and over $28,000 -- went to the Ford Escape Hybrid two-wheel drive and Toyota Highlander Hybrid two-wheel drive, respectively. Ford uses Toyota's technology.

Wouk published 100 technical papers on hybrid technology and remained an advocate. He eventually bought a white Prius and there is no record of him driving by Stork’s house giving him the finger.

Wouk, who never smoked in his life, died of lymphoma and lung cancer in May of last year. It is possible air pollution contributed to his death.

For an interview with Victor Wouk, click here.

Google scales evil

Well, at least you can see the flowers behind the tank—For those of you wondering what it’s like to search the web in a country that tries to censor it—with the help of the companies running the search engines—the San Francisco Chronicle can help. Google, as you know, employing its motto, don’t be evil unless profits are involved, has agreed to let the Chinese government dictate what is shown on Google searches. The Chron tried it out. If you put in the word “Tiananmen” (as in Square) into Google’s image search page from Google.cn, the Chinese page, you get a lovely picture of the square with birds and tourists and huge buildings in a peaceful setting. If you do the same search on Google.com, the U.S. version, you get tanks rolling through the square suppressing student demonstrators, a couple hundred of whom were apparently suppressed to death. The Chinese government denies the rioting ever took place despite the fact it was seen on television around the world—remember that remarkable man facing down a tank? Now Google has accepted the Chinese version of history.

Google, of course, is not alone. Microsoft and Yahoo also agreed, but Microsoft and Yahoo don’t pretend to rise above naked capitalism; Google does. In order to get licenses to operate in China, they agree to block sites the government wants blocked, like “Falun Gong” or “independent Tibet.”

(There is, however, a sly way around the censorship: misspell the search. For instance, if you misspell Tiananmen, you get the tanks on Google.cn, or you will until the word gets back to Beijing. And word searches will sometimes get you to a page Google hasn’t blocked—yet. At least that’s true if you access it from here. It’s not clear if the firewalls in China block them.)

Sometimes a site isn’t blocked, but altered. Search for “Tibet independence” on Google.cn and you get the Dalai Lama being urged to give up Tibet; do it on outside sites and you get Tibet independence pages. And, Google insists, if someone reaches a censored page Google tells them it was censored.

Google says it took all this seriously and that internal discussion within the company lasted a year. They decided the lessor evil was to do it this way instead of simply dropping out of China's gigantic market altogether. Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO told the Davos Conference: “We concluded that although we weren’t wild about the restrictions, it was even worse to not try to serve those users at all. We actually did an evil scale and decided not to serve at all was worse evil,” he said.

I wonder if you can copyright an evil scale. That might be profitable.

Really calm frogs at the computer

You’ll notice that the water taps read “hot,” “cold” and “Xanax”—Did you ever wonder what happens to all those prescription drugs you take after your body is done with them? You know, after you pee and poop them out? Well, according the latest technology, you drink it back in—and everything that everyone else is taking. It winds up in the water aquifer. The Los Angeles Times reports that traces of prescription drugs have been found in the drinking water aquifer under the San Gabriel Valley. It gets there from a sewage treatment plant via recycled stuff transported into a creek that feeds the aquifer. The water meets all government standards, in part because the standards don’t account for the presence of the drugs. The latest technology, however, can spot it all. To be sure, drinking a good cold glass of fresh water won’t give you a jolt of Viagra; we’re talking a few drops in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. But along with the Viagra you will find antibiotics, anti-psychotics, birth control pills and tranquilizers—whatever you and your neighbors are taking. Is this dangerous? Who knows. But in places where sewage treatment is less vigorous than LA, drinking water could be liquid drug stores. The effect on animals may be worse. Scientists have found frogs on Prozac, insects with anti-seizure drugs, and androgynous fish altered by birth control pills.

Staying smug even with Intel inside—A logical question arises with the introduction of the first Apple computers with Intel microprocessors inside: will we Mac users' computers slide into the unbridled chaos enjoyed by the vast masses using Windows on Intel machines? No. Not yet, anyway. Macs have been safer for two good reasons: one, there are far fewer of them so they remain under the radar of the malicious class, and two, it is much harder to hack a Mac than a Windows machine. Both reasons remain: while Apple’s market share has begun to rise, it is still small enough to make it easy to ignore—you get much more bang for the buck crashing Windows computers—and, the presence of Intel microprocessors won’t make a technical difference. The vulnerability of Wintel computers is in Windows, not Intel. The weak link is the program. The present version is sloppily written and the new one coming out next year shows no sign of being a major advance. The program isn’t even out yet and there are already viruses that work on it. The new Intel Macs will still be using the Unix-based Mac OS-X, which is much tighter, more secure and much harder to break into. If Apple continues to gain market share, that might draw some attention from the bad guys, but they will have to work much harder to get anything to work. For a good technical look at why it will be so hard, click here. The fact remains, there are still no viruses or spyware that work on Macs and the new computers won’t be any more vulnerable. There are vulnerabilities in the Mac system, 33 reported in the last year alone. But Apple is much faster than Microsoft getting security patches out, and there is still that market share. Ah, but what happens if you run Windows on the Intel Macs, which apparently is possible? No one knows. But why would you want to do that in the first place?