Later On

Communication among the public seems the best defense against tyranny. Noah Shachtman in the NY Times:

In August, after the suppression of Iran’s pro-democracy protests, officials in Tehran accused Western governments of using online social networks like Twitter and Facebook to help execute a "soft coup." The accusation wasn’t entirely off-base. In Iran and elsewhere, this year showed the growing importance of social networks to U.S. foreign policy.

Long before the protests in Iran started, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees U.S. civilian international broadcasting, had in place software to counter censorship in countries like Iran, so people could better access the blogosphere. And the State Department financially supports agencies that make it easier for Iranians and others to surf the Web. After the protests began, the State Department asked Twitter to reschedule a maintenance outage so the activists could continue to spread the word about their movement.

The United States has long disseminated information to people living under repressive regimes — think of Radio Free Europe. The difference here is that the content of the information isn’t the important thing; the emphasis is on supporting the technical infrastructure and then letting the people decide for themselves what to say. Communication itself erodes despots’ authority. "The very existence of social networks is a net good," says Alec Ross, a senior adviser on innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Outside of Iran, the State Department recently underwrote the establishment of Pakistan’s first mobile-phone-based social network, Humari Awaz ("Our Voice"). More than eight million text messages were sent over it in a little over two weeks. And Ross recently traveled to Mexico with the Twitter chairman Jack Dorsey and other technology executives to help build an electronic system for anonymously reporting drug crimes, which they say they hope will undermine narcotics kingpins.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has written about the efficacy of samizdat in undermining the Soviet Union, sees a similar dynamic at work here. "The freedom of communication and the nature of it," he has said, "is a huge strategic asset for the United States."

Interesting idea described by Clive Thompson:

In 1969, the Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter posited the "Peter Principle": people in a workplace are promoted until they reach their "level of incompetence." This happens, Peter argued, because we wrongly assume that people who are good at their jobs will also be good at jobs that are one rung up on the corporate ladder — so we promote them. But often the new job is so different from the previous job that the employee can’t handle it. Now performing incompetently, the employee stays in place, dragging the efficiency of the firm downward. Eventually the entire economy becomes like the paper company Dunder Mifflin in "The Office" — clogged with incompetence.

Is there any way to avoid this trap? Yes, by promoting people at random. That’s what a trio of Italian scientists discovered this year. They created a computer model of a 160-person corporation and programmed it with Peter Principle-like logic: the best performers were promoted, but they had only a random likelihood of being good at their new jobs. Sure enough, the firm was soon cluttered with incompetents, and its efficiency plunged. But then the researchers tried something different: they reprogrammed the firm so that it promoted people entirely randomly, and the overall efficiency of the firm improved.

They also tried alternately promoting the absolute best and absolute worst performers. That, too, worked out better than promoting on merit. The scientists say these strategies work because they harness "Parrondo’s Paradox," a piece of game theory in which you win by alternating between two losing strategies. "In physics or game theory, this isn’t new," says Andrea Rapisarda, a physicist at the University of Catania in Italy and a co-author of the study, which was recently published in the journal Physica A.

As Rapisarda points out, if you could know for sure that the people being promoted would excel in their new jobs, that would be the best strategy of all. But if you aren’t sure — and in the real world, we rarely are — then random works better.

Interesting idea described by Clay Risen in the NY Times Sunday Magazine section on new ideas:

America has been adding fluoride to its public water supplies for decades, based on overwhelming evidence that even low levels of the substance can significantly reduce tooth decay, with no major side effects. Now research from Japan suggests expanding the list of aqueous additives — namely, to lithium.

Lithium often occurs naturally, in trace amounts, in water supplies, particularly in areas with a high concentration of granite. In The British Journal of Psychiatry earlier this year, the neuropsychiatrist Takeshi Terao and other researchers showed that communities in Japan’s Oita Prefecture with higher levels of naturally occurring lithium in their water supplies had fewer suicides than those with lower levels. The amounts range between 0.7 and 59 micrograms per liter. Lithium in prescription doses (say, 600 to 900 milligrams) helps reduce mood swings in patients with bipolar disorder, but Terao and his colleagues speculate that drinking even small amounts over time has a cumulative effect, building up a resistance to the onset of mood swings in the first place. The researchers note that more work is needed before public-policy makers can consider adding lithium to water supplies. Lithium, after all, can be toxic, and though the levels in the Oita study are too low to have an immediate effect, the element can affect kidney function and cause long-term health problems. "I think we need to be wary of introducing something across the board, because it does take time to work out what the side effects are," says Sophie Corlett, director of external relations at Mind, a British mental-health organization.

Nevertheless, Terao and his team contend that the lithium levels in their study are low enough not to cause significant side effects, and that in any case the benefits outweigh the risks. In a follow-up paper, they even posited that adding lithium to drinking water could "potentially offer an easy, cheap and substantial strategy for worldwide suicide prevention." But Corlett remains wary. "Mass inoculations of one sort or another always seem to be the easy answer, but we shouldn’t assume that’s the case," she says — especially because "lithium isn’t a very friendly drug."

I’ve been using the LastPass Chrome extension—the Chrome equivalent of Roboform Pro, which fills forms, remembers passwords, and so on. LastPass is free, which is nice, and the more I use it, the more I like it. One thing it has that Roboform lacks is "auto-fill": when you go to a site that presents a login requirement, if "auto-fill" has been checked for that site, LastPass will immediately fill the login form and submit it. Very nice.

And this morning I discovered the import function and imported around 600 of my Roboform site records. Extremely cool.

Here’s a review of LastPass by Download Squad’s Lee Mathews, which includes where to get it.

I use OneNote for various things, but never in depth. I was thinking that it would be a great platform to use to organize and track my little projects, so I fired it up this morning and in the process discovered the rich variety of OneNote templates. I’m still using Google Chrome, and I found I did have to use the IE Tab add-on to download the templates of interest—and man, do they have a lot of them!

Student notebook
Wedding planner notebook
Residential move-planner notebook
Office Enterprise 2007 training notebook
House hunting notebook
Personal records notebook
Home improvement journal
School notebook
Research notebook
Legal trial notebook
Green living ideas notebook
Landscape planner notebook
Work notebook
Project management notebook
Shared notebook for reference materials
Legal client notebook
Shared notebook for a group project
Clients notebook
Legal practice notebook
Professional services notebook

I was staying in my study so this could be installed:

Now to go cook some things.

Lots more info here. But first, the video:

In talking about the shoes the other night with TYD, I realized that MBT shoes really are a specialized, single-purpose show. They are designed and intended for straight-ahead walking. They’re not suited for running, nor are they "cross trainers", such as you might use for general workouts, playing squash or racquetball or tennis or basketball—any sport where you run and change direction quickly. The instability that makes them so pleasant for walking and standing works against them when running or changing direction quickly. So take note of their limitations. (The limitations don’t affect me: I don’t run, play basketball or racquet sports, etc.)

Excellent explanation by Glenn Greenwald, who closes his column with this:

As always happens whenever there is a judicial decision that undermines the Right’s political interests, there are going to be hordes of right-wing polemicists marching forth to denounce this ruling as "judicial activism."  They’re already starting.  These are people won’t bother to read a single word or case about "bills of attainder," but overnight, they’re self-proclaimed legal scholars on this Constitutional prohibition and are in a position to criticize the Judge’s ruling as legally erroneous.  Of course, the only thing they really know is that they hate ACORN and therefore dislike the outcome of this case.  In other words, they’re denouncing the decision for reasons having nothing to do with law and everything to do with their own political beliefs and outcome preferences — i.e., they’re advocating, as usual, for the consummate act of outcome-based "judicial activism" which they endlessly claim to oppose.

Steve Benen takes a look at what’s in the act and what’s missing.

The door is mostly open as the old stove is removed and the opening adjusted (I hear the sounds of a power saw) for the new stove. Megs is safely shut inside the bedroom. I was wondering whether she was at the door, sniffing at the crack under the door and trying to get out, or asleep on top of my pyjamas on the bed. The Wife opines that Megs is in the very back of the closet, hiding behind anything that’s there—and by now asleep.

Steve Benen of Political Animal:

A group of right-wing House members, including Reps. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), Steve King (R-Iowa), and Sue Myrick (R-N.C.), hosted a press stunt in front of the Supreme Court yesterday. They argued that the American system of justice is too weak to try and convict terrorist suspects. That the American system of justice has already tried and convicted hundreds of terrorist suspects was an inconvenient, unaddressed detail.

But as Evan McMorris-Santoro noted, the real entertainment of the event was the quality of the reasoning.

[Trent Franks] said that a federal trial would give the suspects "a megaphone to speak to the planet," which he said "only hastens the danger" of, literally, a nuclear terrorist attack.

When a reporter pointed out that federal trials aren’t televised, perhaps making the "megaphone" a little less likely, Republicans said there were other ways for terror suspects to peddle their propaganda from a U.S. courtroom — for example, sketch artists.

"What we’ve seen happen is artists draw pictures and this will be written up and there will be defense attorneys taking the global stage," King said. "We are in an electronic era where they Internet and all these other media that we have will create a real time look at what’s going on in New York."

Sketch artists? We can’t charge terrorist suspects and put them on trial because a sketch artist might draw a picture of a suspect in a courtroom, which in turn undermines our national security interests and "hastens the danger" of a nuclear attack?

Someone please remind me why the conventional wisdom is that conservatives are more credible on national security issues.

When will the military learn that killing lots of civilians tends to turn the population against the US and creates more people with a burning desire for revenge? Never, I expect. John Cole this morning at Balloon Juice:

Truly informative spot on PRI’s The World this afternoon about the ongoing drone warfare in Afghanistan and Pakistan featuring Wired magazines Noah Shachtman. Here is a link to the PRI piece, here is a link to Wired magazine’s coverage, and here is the interview itself (.mp3) in case you have problems reaching it. Money quote in the interview (about 4 mins in):

“There are certainly very different rules that apply in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Afghanistan, the air strikes have got to be very tightly constrained. You really can’t drop a bomb in Afghanistan without layers and layers and layers of approval and you have to be very careful about civilian casualties. In Pakistan, if the media reports are at all correct, you’re having two-three-four dozen people get killed at a time in these drone attacks, and let me tell you, they are not all terrorists or militants. There’s gotta be some civilians involved when you’re getting that many people killed at once. So there’s a very different feel to the air war in Pakistan and they don’t seem to be taking the kind of care that they do in Afghanistan.”

The reason I tell you this is because of this report:

A senior U.S. counterterrorism official has confirmed the identity of a top Al Qaeda operative killed in Pakistan on Friday.

The U.S. official told Fox News that the operative is Saleh al-Somali, the network’s external operations chief for plots outside Afghanistan and Pakistan.

A U.S. government official said early Friday that an American drone strike killed an Al Qaeda operative in western Pakistan. The official did not identify the target of the attack. Meanwhile, intelligence officials confirm that the pace of attacks by such unmanned aircraft has increased during the Obama administration.

While you hear all the anchors giddily report Saleh’s demise, remember what Shachtman said about the outcome of our drone policy- dead civilians. I’m just not sure that killing a few people in leadership is worth radicalizing the entire Pakistani public, which is what I suspect is happening when you are killing dozens of civilians at a time. We have near riots in the US when we try to discuss providing health care coverage for everyone in the country. Can you imagine the reaction if every couple of days we lost twenty people to a foreign air strike?

*** Update ***

Here is a thought experiment for you. How many Israeli citizens were killed by rocket attacks before Israel could no longer tolerate it and launched the brutal Gaza incursion at the beginning of the year?

Take a guess.

John Cole has a particularly good set of posts this morning. Here’s one:

A kiss on the lip with tongue to Mitch Daniels from the Washington Post’s Steve Pearlstein:

The good Mitch, by contrast, is a principled but practical conservative who respects the intelligence of voters and would rather get something done than score political points. Daniels is a genuine fiscal conservative who took a $600 million state budget deficit and turned it into a $1 billion surplus but managed to do so without cutting spending for education and even increased funding for child welfare services. He pushed hard to lower property taxes but didn’t hesitate to propose temporary hikes in income and sales taxes to keep the state in the black. He privatized the state’s toll road and then used the $4 billion proceeds to launch a major public works investment program.

Tellingly, both Mitches like to talk about the Department of Motor Vehicles. The Washington Mitch conjures the image of long lines and uncaring bureaucrats and asks, cynically, whether you want folks like that determining your medical care. The Indiana Mitch, by contrast, rolled up his sleeves and transformed his DMV into an efficient, consumer-friendly operation.

Pearlstein spends a bit of the time comparing Daniels to Mitch McConnell, who if you remember, had a closer than expected race last election.

But the real problem is this- Daniels is concerned with good governance because he actually has to govern. He is accountable for his actions. Republicans in the House and Senate aren’t, and they couldn’t care less about governance, let alone good governance. Anything that goes wrong, they will just blame on Obama and the Democrats. Hell, they spent the first few months of this year blaming the DOW on Obama, a tactic that got dropped as soon as the DOW recovered.

Add to it that if Daniels were running in a house seat, the idiot teabaggers would probably work to oust him because he did raise taxes. As one of the wingnuts admitted yesterday, even St. Ronnie of Reagan would not pass the purity test these days. Add to it the completely rigged House seats where only the most extreme candidates on either side stand a chance, where screaming “You lie” in a join session of Congress gets you millions in campaign funds, and you whittle away any and all Republicans concerned with governance.

Add to that a Senate held hostage by ridiculous rules that a small group of corporate whores “moderates” exploit to funnel money to their states and to shake down the lobbyists, and you end up with what we have now. When the Republicans get back in power one day, it will be back to business as usual- tax cuts and praising Jesus. They won’t be led by a group of good government conservatives, and this is even assuming Pearlstein is even right about Daniels.

The comments on this post are quite good. Take a look.

I’ve been involved in a lengthy discussion with a gun-rights advocate, and part of the discussion centers on something that I thought was beyond dispute. Apparently not, since he’s disputing it. It may be an argument over semantics, but in this formulation I’ll try to avoid that issue.

Consider the total pool of American gun-owners. Remove from consideration those who are obligated to own a gun by the nature of their job (military, police, state and Federal criminal investigation officers, and the like). We’re interested only in purely voluntary gun ownership. For maximum clarity, remove from consideration also those who own only rifles used for hunting. Consider, say, the subset that owns one or more handguns, which generally are considered defensive weapons (e.g., repelling a home invasion).

My statement was that those who own handguns are, on average, more fearful than a matched set of Americans (same race, religion, socio-economic standing, and the like) who do not own handguns.

That seemed obvious to me: why own a defensive handgun if you don’t fear some sort of home invasion or other attack? But my partner in the discussion comes down hard on simply “being prepared.” He brought up the idea of owning a fire extinguisher (which I do, BTW: it sits in the open, close to the kitchen stove). Does that mean that the owner fears fire?

Well, yes. Certainly in my case. The whole reason I have the extinguisher is that I fear what would happen with a kitchen fire (the most likely source of fire in this apartment).

The obvious solution is to pick a reasonably sized random sample (say 1,024) from each pool and administer some psychological tests to each sample and compare the results. Has that been done?

My partner also views fear as an emotion (which it certainly can be). But it’s also a mindset in which the person may not be aware of active fear at the moment, but is responding to a lower level of fear that makes having firearms in the house seem like a good idea. For another example of a fear not expressed as an emotion, take the case of someone leaving a movie late at night and considering a walk home through a dicey neighborhood. That person might take a cab to avoid the walk—s/he is acting on a fear but probably did not feel that fear as an emotion.

Of course, carrying a concealed weapon is quite dangerous and raises the odds that you will be shot.

One overriding question is whether it is legitimate to infer an emotion or mindset from a person’s actions. I think it’s is obviously legitimate: we do it all the time, with intimates and with strangers. Sometimes we’re wrong, but with practice we’re mostly right. Possibly this is because humans are social animals and, like all social animals, are very good at picking up cues from others.

So: do you think that handgun owners are, on average, more fearful than those in similar circumstances who do not own handguns? (We’re talking averages here, not specific individual cases—for example, in some circumstances a gun non-owner might be very fearful and sleep with a baseball bat next to the bed, but will not or cannot buy a gun.)

Interesting article via Kafeneio. Let me know if you try it.

I blogged a sports drink recipe quite a while back, and here are two more recipes:

WebMD’s rehydration drink recipe:

Diarrhea and vomiting can cause your body to lose large amounts of water, nutrients, and essential minerals called electrolytes. This happens faster and is more serious in babies, young children, and older adults.

Rehydration drinks, (such as Pedialyte, Lytren, or Rehydrate) and sports drinks (such as Gatorade or Powerade) replace fluids and electrolytes. Plain water doesn’t provide necessary nutrients or electrolytes and may not be absorbed with diarrhea. Note : Rehydration drinks, such as Pedialyte, are designed for children. Adult rehydration drinks and sports drinks should not be used for babies and young children.

Rehydration drinks don’t make diarrhea or vomiting go away faster, but they can prevent serious dehydration from developing.

You can make an inexpensive rehydration drink at home. But do not give this homemade drink to children younger than 12 .

Measure all ingredients precisely. Small variations can make the drink less effective or even harmful. Mix the following:

• 1 quart (950 mL) water
• ½ teaspoon (2.5 g) baking soda
• ½ teaspoon (2.5 g) table salt
• ¼ teaspoon (1.25 g) salt substitute (potassium-based), such as Lite Salt or Morton Salt Substitute
• 2 tablespoons (30 g) sugar

You probably can make the drink slightly more appealing by adding a dash of food coloring.

And at the NY Times, Tara Parker-Pope has a blog post on whether sports drinks are good for kids. In the course of the post, she includes this recipe:

Sports drink recipe from “Nancy Clark’s Sports Nutrition Guidebook”

1/4 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup orange juice
1/4 cup hot water
2 tablespoons lemon juice
3 1/2 cups cold water

In a quart pitcher, dissolve the sugar and salt in the hot water. Add the remaining ingredients and the cold water. The drink contains about 50 calories and 110 mg of sodium per 8 ounces, approximately the same as for most sports drinks.

Thanks to TYD for pointing out this article by Patrick Goldstein in the LA Times:

The MPAA has embarrassed itself an untold number of times over the years for its prudish attitude toward sex and its wildly permissive attitude toward violence. But what’s it’s done to Nancy Meyers’ upcoming comedy, "It’s Complicated," is perhaps the ratings board’s biggest boneheaded move yet.

According to a story by my colleague, Steven Zeitchik, the MPAA has given Meyers’ fluffy comedy about a middle-aged love triangle an R rating because Meryl Streep and Steve Martin’s (who star in the film along with Alec Baldwin) characters are seen sharing a joint while on a date.

The problem, according to people involved with the board’s hearing on the issue, isn’t that the actors are seen smoking pot — it’s that the scene "features pot-smoking with no bad consequences." Apparently, everything would’ve been fine if only the characters had been killed in a gory car crash because their reflexes were slightly impaired after sharing the joint, which surely would’ve served as a stern warning to kids not to ever touch the evil weed.

In other words, you can score a tidy amount of pot at hundreds of marijuana clinics across Los Angeles, but if you take a puff on a joint in a Hollywood movie, you immediately get walloped with an R rating, whether you’re a gangsta rapper like Snoop Dogg or a genial white-haired Oscar host like Steve Martin.

It’s another outrageous example of the lunatic priorities of the MPAA, which claims to serve the interests of parents but actually dances to its crazy drummer, happily handing out PG-13 ratings to unbelievably violent movies like "Terminator: Salvation" while whipping out the R rating at the first sign of a few naked breasts or, God forbid, an unsheathed penis. In Rob Marshall’s upcoming film, "Nine," Daniel Day-Lewis smokes non stop through the entire film, but since it’s only cancer-causing tobacco, the MPAA had no problems giving the film a PG-13 rating. That’s a travesty. If you’re going to restrict kids from seeing a movie because of pot smoking, you certainly should apply similar standards to heedless cigarette smoking.

The R rating for "It’s Complicated," which hits theaters Christmas Day, is especially ludicrous. It would be one thing if we saw Kristen Stewart smoking weed in "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," since the movie is right in the sweet spot for teens and tweeners. But if the MPAA is really sticking up for families everywhere, it hardly seems to be a parental concern that impressionable kids are going to be flocking to see a romantic comedy featuring actors who are — in the case of Streep and Martin — even older than some of their grandparents…

Continue reading.