Fake op-eds

Interesting:

It’s an “open secret of lobbying,” writes Jeffrey Birnbaum. “Public relations firms regularly solicit authors of opinion-page articles, draft the pieces for them and place the articles in publications where they will have the most impact — all for a fee.” Recently, an op-ed criticizing a bill that would reduce credit card fees appeared in Southern newspapers, attributed to Charles Steele Jr., the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The column — which neither Steele nor his office authorized — complains that the bill “would boost the profits of Wal-Mart,” an SCLC sponsor. Steele’s attorney blamed “the K Street public relations shop LMG” for the mix-up. LMG admitted that it had “reached out through its contractors” to send “advocacy materials” to the SCLC and “urged the group to go public with opposition to the bill.” Among LMG’s clients is the Electronic Payments Coalition, a group of credit card and financial companies that opposes the legislation. The SCLC investigated and concluded that “the wrong draft of the op-ed” had been sent to papers. “The correct draft should not have referenced Wal-Mart or Home Depot,” another SCLC sponsor.

Source: Washington Post, July 29, 2008

More on the Antikythera mechanism

It’s a fascinating device that may have built upon (and extended) an earlier device designed by Archimedes. Read the full article. It begins:

Computer reconstruction

An ancient Greek astronomical calculator that showed the positions of the sun, Earth and the moon, and outshined any known device for 1,000 years after it, also kept track of something more mundane: when the next Olympics would take place.

And its design just might have sprung from the skull of the brilliant scientist Archimedes.

Researchers have pried these and a few other fresh secrets from the corroded bronze fragments of the Antikythera mechanism, a clockwork-like assemblage discovered in 1901 by Greek sponge divers off the Greek island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete.

Members of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project (AMRP) and their colleagues used data from high-resolution, 360-degree x-ray scans to decipher markings as small as 0.06 inch (1.7 millimeters) tall on a spiral dial on the rear of the instrument. The five-twist spiral is inscribed with 235 sets of markings believed to indicate the months in a 19-year calendar.

Known as the Metonic calendar, people have used it since Babylonian times to account for the fact that 12 lunar months add up to only 354 days—11 days shy of a solar year. (Gears located behind the dial face would have moved a pointer like the minute hand on a clock to refer a user to particular markings on the dial.)

Writing in Nature, the team was able for the first time to …

Continue reading.

Salad spinners

The LA Times has a good article on the latest crop of salad spinners—particularly useful is the slide show.

Domestic spying update

Blake De Pastino has an update in the Washington Indpendent:

Our sister sites around the country today are continuing their collective investigation into one of the biggest secrets in American law enforcement, so-called “fusion centers,” where state, local and federal agencies collect and analyze information about potential security threats-from legitimate terror risks to activities merely deemed “suspicious.”

This morning at the Colorado Independent, Erin Rosa takes a close look at a fusion center based in a Denver suburb, where intelligence officials work around the clock monitoring such “suspicious activity.” Civil rights advocates told Rosa they fear that the data center could be used to conduct unwarranted spying on Americans exercising their First Amendment rights at next month’s Democratic National Convention.

“It seems like a lot of the purpose around these centers is to accumulate data that can be mined,” one civil-liberties expert said.

You can read more about fusion centers in Colorado, Minnesota and Iowa at the Center for Independent Media sites, with reports from New Mexico and Michigan coming later in the week.

Cat evolution

Interesting:

In a new study published in the online-open access journal PLoS ONE, Per Christiansen at the Zoological Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark, reports the finding that the evolution of skull and mandible shape in sabercats and modern cats were governed by different selective forces, and the two groups evolved very different adaptations to killing. The cat family comprises some of the most specialised carnivores in the history of mammals, all exclusively eating flesh. The cat family consists of two major sub-groups: the feline cats (including all modern species) and the sabertoothed cats (which are all extinct). Skeletons from the two groups look broadly similar, but their skulls are often remarkably different, and suggest that members of the two groups underwent radically different adaptations to predation during the course of evolution.

Sabertoothed cats have been a particularly difficult group to understand because their anatomical features are often radically different from those of modern cats. However, new techniques for anatomical comparison using digital methods have facilitated a more detailed comparison of the anatomy of the entire skull and mandible, and the new results add significantly to our understanding of the evolution of the cat family.

Modern cats appear to have quite different-looking skulls depending on their size, and small cats appear all to have rather abbreviated, tall and domed crania, whereas the skulls in large cats, such as lions, tigers, or leopards, are much more elongated and rectangular. Previously these criteria have been used to divide the modern cats into two distinct sub-groups, the small and large cats, which were inferred to differ in terms of evolutionary anatomy. However, no such sub-groups exist, and the actual shape of the skull shows a gradual transition from the smallest to the largest species.

The most powerful evolutionary selective driving factor behind skull shape in modern cats appears to have been…

Maybe home schooling is not such a good idea…

Take a look:

It often seems that certain aspects of our personalities are influenced by events that occurred in our childhoods. A recent study by Dr. Akaysha Tang’s research team from the University of New Mexico Psychology Department (http://atlab.unm.edu) and collaborators at Rockefeller University examined how early life experience influences social skills and ability to handle stressful situations using a rat model. The study will be published on July 30th in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE. In this study, Dr. Tang and colleagues examined whether rats that experienced greater novelty by spending three minutes a day away from their familiar home environment during infancy had a greater ability to compete against other rats for exclusive access to chocolate reward compared to their siblings that stayed in the home environment during infancy. They found that novelty-exposed rats were able to “beat out” their competitors more often than their home-staying siblings. They also found that across repeated sessions of competition, novelty-exposed rats decreased their release of stress hormones into the bloodstream, suggesting that they adapted faster to the stressful situation.

These findings were made among rats that were 24 months of age—considered old age for a rat. Perhaps most remarkably, the differences in early experience were induced by approximately 60 minutes of cumulative differential treatment carried out during the first 3 weeks of life. This means that very brief exposures to a novel environment during infancy can have a life-long influence on social competitive ability and the stress response.

The power of the netroots

Matt Stoller has an extremely interesting post, which begins:

Back in May, we did a fundraiser for OpenLeft, and 210 of you sent us a total of $11,198.  I think it’s time you get a report of where we’ve put some of that cash, and even some context stacking us against superlobbyists so you can (partially) judge the value.

Because of the money you put in, every Senate Democratic challenger signed off on net neutrality.

Here’s how you helped this happen.  When you put money into this site, we used it to hire a researcher, Karl Blumenthal.  Karl’s awesome, and he’s dug up info on more than just the telecom guys (we’ll be coming out with cool info soon on various groups).  It took a few weeks for us to figure out how to integrate research into our operation, but eventually, we got there.  Karl was dogged about finding and following up on these statements, and generally helping to organize the campaign.

Now, here’s why this is important.  Telecom companies have a ‘friendly incumbent policy’, which means they will give to incumbents as a matter of routine.  Usually, this is a very risk-averse strategy, since incumbents tend to win.  In environments like this one, however, it’s a very risky strategy, because they are funding the people that are likely to lose and setting themselves up for retribution.  Now, usually this isn’t that big a deal, they can just throw fundraisers for the (new) incumbents they tried to defeat immediately after those people get to DC, to pay off campaign debts or help them with reelection in two or six years.  And once that starts, our leverage is gone.

In other words, the moment we have to get Democratic members on our side is now, when they see no reason to care what the telecoms say and every reason to care about what we think.  And so your funding, and our ability to hire Karl, meant that we could do the extra work to organize these candidates.  They are now on the record, and the telecoms will probably be stuck with a bunch of stubborn incoming members who associate getting elected with supporting internet freedom explicitly against telecom interests.  And the FCC was watching what we did on this site, and the commissioners, who are politicians in their own right, got that their vote on Comcast traffic shaping this week could have adverse or beneficial consequences.

In other words, we helped pretty much end the first stage of the net neutrality fight.  Was it us alone?  Of course not.  But the work we did generated press and validation from influentials all over the place, from Wired to TPM to Larry Lessig to Broadband Census to Digg.  The telecom guys are terrified; the US Telecom Assocation even pulled a blog post attacking me (here it is cached, here’s the empty space on their site).

The work you funded got immediate support and validation from FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, Speaker Pelosi, Google’s Alan Davidson, Senator Byron Dorgan, Tim Wu, and Writer’s Guild President Patric Verrone, among many others.  And the FCC is now poised to make significant decisions on the future of the internet and media secure in the knowledge that we are paying attention.

That’s what you funded.

Who did we beat in this fight?  Well, for starters, Tommy Boggs, the superlobbyist and his firm, which has billed a quarter of a billion dollars in the last decade for their services.  That’s a pretty good return on our investment, $10k versus the millions the telecoms have thrown at destroying the internet.  And the best part?  They are afraid.

Continue reading.

Alliteration aids all recall

Good to know, though of course poetry in general has long been used as a memory aid—think of the Iliad and the Odyssey, for example, or the sagas of northern Europe, or Beowulf: all part of oral traditions that used poetry.

From nursery rhymes to Shakespearian sonnets, alliterations have always been an important aspect of poetry whether as an interesting aesthetic touch or just as something fun to read. But a recent study suggests that this literary technique is useful not only for poetry but also for memory. In several experiments, researchers R. Brooke Lea of Macalester College, David N. Rapp of Northwestern University, Andrew Elfenbein and Russell Swinburne Romine of University of Minnesota and Aaron D. Mitchel of the Pennsylvania State University had participants read works of poetry and prose with alliterative sentences to show the importance of repetitive consonants on memory.

Previous studies have shown that alliteration can act as a better tool for memory than both imagery and meaning, however the reason for this has never been established. In their experiments the researchers hoped to demonstrate that alliterations retrieve similar sounding words and phrases from a person’s memory, making it a useful tool for poetry comprehension and memorization.

In one experiment, …

Skills-based education

Suppose your job is to prepare people for adult life, and your part of the curriculum is devoted to imparting skills. Which skills are most important for your charges to learn?

One answer, of course, is the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music), but perhaps that’s a bit esoteric.

Communication skills are obvious: skill in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. These (except for the last) are frequently taught.

What else? Dustin Wax has an interesting list, to which I would add  (besides reading and listening):

1. Negotiating skills
2. Foreign language skill (at least one)
3. Planning skills (PERT, for example—as a *planning* technique, before work starts)
4. People management/leadership skills (communication, evaluation, training, organizing, assigning effectively)
5. Drawing (not in the sense of portraits or scenes from nature, but in the ability to make freehand graphs, diagrams, floor plans, and the like—see the book Thinking With A Pencil.)
6. Creative thinking, rather different from critical thinking and definitely a skill that can be taught. See, for example, Edward De Bono’s CoRT program.
7. Body awareness/movement skills—we are often judged on how we hold ourselves and how we move, and so movements skills should be learned (through dance, martial arts, or the like)
8. Touch typing—certainly today a high level of keyboarding skill is important.
9. Observational skills—people can be taught to observe better: we all see, but (as Sherlock Holmes pointed out), few observe. (Cf. the difference between hearing and listening.) See (observe?) this post. And this post, too, might be of interest: how to describe a person.
10. Etiquette skills—grace and courtesy in social contacts is vital knowledge, and it is best studied and learned rather than faked. Awkwardness and uncertainty are thus avoided, and everyone feels better—especially yourself, since you know what you’re doing and how to do it.

And in decision-making, I would include long-term after-the-fact evaluation of decisions.

Relevant books:

Negotiation: Getting to Yes
Decision-making: Decision Traps and/or Winning Decisions
People management: Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

But we’re not out of it yet

I haven’t written about the recent revelations in the DOJ scandal. But there’s a point I haven’t seen made, which should be noted.

As we all know, the Bush administration essentially brushed aside all notion of due process. It locked up and tortured people it said were “enemy combatants”; it engaged in warrantless wiretapping; and so on.

We weren’t supposed to worry our pretty little heads about this, because we were supposed to take it as a given that these were people we could trust not to abuse their power.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department was interviewing job candidates, and asking,

What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?

In other words, there was a combination of power without oversight and a deeply creepy cult of personality (which was obvious long before we got the latest specifics.)

I think we were lucky to get out of this with democracy more or less intact.

Drinking and metabolic syndrome

Note the limits on safe drinking:

Those who drink in excess of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines (i.e., men who usually drink more than two drinks per day or women who usually drink more than one drink per day) or those who binge drink are at increased risk for the metabolic syndrome, according to a new study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM). The metabolic syndrome consists of a series of risk factors and conditions that are strongly related to cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in the United States. These conditions include obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes.

Serial killers and bees

Interesting:

Scientists from Queen Mary, University of London are helping to perfect a technique used to catch serial killers, by testing it on bumblebees. Geographic profiling (GP) is a technique used by police forces around the world to help them prioritise lists of suspects in investigations of serial crimes. It uses the sites of a serial killer’s crimes to predict where the killer is most likely to live.

Dr Nigel Raine, and Dr Steve Le Comber, from Queen Mary’s School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, along with Kim Rossmo, the former detective who invented the technique, have used this criminology technique to look at patterns of foraging in bees.

Writing in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface the team found that by observing bees foraging in the lab, combined with computer model simulations, they could use GP to distinguish between different types of foraging behaviour. The work was funded by the Wellcome Trust, BBSRC and EPSRC.*

GP relies on two things; the fact that most serial crimes happen close to the killer’s home; and that the killer’s home is surrounded by a ‘buffer zone’ – an area where the opportunity to commit a crime is comparatively low. These two parameters allow criminologists to create a geoprofile, which shows the areas where the killer is most likely to live. The more accurate the GP model – the more precise the geoprofile and the quicker the police can track down the killer.

How Chile is dealing with its own history of government torture

At some point the US is going to have to deal with what it’s done over the past eight years. Certainly this Congress is not going to deal with it—for one thing, many members are implicated in the decisions and acquiescence that allowed the program of indefinite detention (on no charges) and torture to be established and operated. Many not directly implicated never spoke out against what was happening. But at some point, the facts must be dealt with. Right now some are saying, “Let’s pardon everyone, forget it happened, and move on,” but of course those who say that are the not the victims, who have a right to be heard and acknowledged.

Chile had a similar problem, though worse than what the US has done: Under the US-backed Pinochet regime, tens of thousands were tortured and thousands were murdered. The country now is facing that time. Jack Chang of McClatchy reports:

LONQUEN, Chile — This quiet town nestled in the hills of central Chile has a horrifying history.

In 1978, in a stone oven on the town’s outskirts, the Roman Catholic Church found the bodies of 11 poor farmers and four youths who were executed by Chile’s military dictatorship. Police had accused the victims of being leftist subversives and arrested them five years earlier, but no charges were ever filed.

After the 15 bodies were discovered, government agents buried them in a common grave, and the site’s landlord blew up the oven. However, the oven’s ruins, which now are next door to a gated community, have become a memorial for hundreds of people who come every year to honor the victims.

“They sing and pray here, crowds of them,” said Eliana Gonzalez, who with her husband runs an almond farm near the oven’s ruins. “I think a lot about what happened there. As a mother, I’m pained by everything that’s happened.”

As Chile and other countries wrestle with whether it’s better to exhume their dark pasts or to leave them buried and try to move on, the current, elected government of President Michelle Bachelet, who herself was detained and tortured by the Pinochet regime, has moved to make that black period in Chile’s history part of the country’s national heritage.

Official estimates have found that the U.S.-backed regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, which ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990, carried out the political executions or disappearances of nearly 3,200 people in its campaign to root out opposition leaders and left-wing dissidents. Tens of thousands more were tortured but survived.

Fear of one’s mortality

Very interesting post on how people respond when reminded that they will one day die. As one approaches the age of three score and ten, thoughts about mortality naturally recur more frequently than in those of age (say) 16. My own tendency in to remember that we’re all in this together and none of us will make it out alive, so it’s better to treat others gently: they, too, are on a journey that often seems too short. Another thought, of course, is why on earth did I accumulate all this stuff?

Penhaligon’s Endymion

Another shaving cream morning, today with Endymion. I haven’t used that shaving cream in quite a while, perhaps because it comes in a tube instead of a tub. But that’s really no problem: just squirt a bit atop a brush—the Rooney Style 3 Small Super this morning—and lather up. Very nice lather, and with the Edwin Jagger Georgian holding the Treet Platinum blade, a very smooth and comfortable shave. I used Rituals Skincare pre-shave oil for the oil pass, and Pinaud’s Clubman aftershave. Now to clean up for the cleaning ladies.