No calls for organic farming?

Are modern industrial agricultural practices leading to a rise in schizophrenia? A lack of omega-3 fatty acids in the resulting diet is being fingered as a culprit. Oily fish is one fix, but we need to make more progress at sustainable fishing to prevent the depletion of fish stocks.

Invasion? Slim odds, but watch for surprises

Russia continues to sell fighters to China which outperform the F-15. Chen Shui-Bian and Jiang Zemin have a bad dynamic happening, with the former's independence drive clashing with the latter's hard-nosed nationalism. Given this uncertainty, there's a slim but nonzero chance that the annual military (invasion) exercises China has scheduled for the end of the month may mask a genuine attempt. Having their forces deployed forward would minimize the reaction time of any Taiwanese and US defense forces. US air superiority being overwhelming against China may not be a sure thing, potentially limiting the effectiveness of US defenders. As well, China has an unusual window of opportunity in that US land forces are extended elsewhere globally. We'll see if they bite or not.

The USA has run simulated wargames in conjunction with Taiwan, but is keeping quiet about the results. I'm wagering the USA is keeping a close eye on the situation.

Cutting past spin

Remember back in March a piece circulated in the media about virginity pledgers experiencing the same rate of STDs as non-pledgers? Sometimes in contentious issues, it's useful to go to the source to see what's really being said. No offense to blog or op ed types, but pundits making conclusions based on a selective reading of media reports are potentially compounding error upon error. One of the authors of the report, Bearman, has a web page where the relevant paper is available as a PDF under the heading "Rules, Behaviors and Networks that Influence STD Prevention among Adolescents. National STD Prevention Conference, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania." I found the paper there far more insightful than what I gleaned from the he-said, she-said media reporting:

For those who do not like detective stories: Pledgers have STD rates as young adults as high as non-pledgers. More interesting, where the proportion of pledgers in a community is high, STD rates in that community among both pledgers and non-pledgers are high...
What causes STD rates to be high in contexts where there are a lot of pledgers? Simply put, where there are a lot of pledgers, young adults don't get what is going on.
...STD rates are highest when people underestimate their risk of infection... Because pledgers make a public pledge, the sex that they have is more likely to be hidden. It is also more likely to be unsafe. The combination of hidden sex and unsafe sex fuels the absence of knowledge that pledgers and others have about the real risk of STDs.
In this regard, just saying no, without understanding risk or how to protect oneself from risk, turns out to create greater risk and heightened STD acquisition than should be the case.
Pledging does not protect young adults from STDs; in fact, in some contexts it increases their risk and the risk for others.

To use an economics analogy, risky behavior tends to be covert and hidden from potential investors. The resulting cost-benefit analysis is then based on public information, which falsely underreports risk. It's a crooked market. Lack of condom use is not the key problem; it's merely a symptom of a larger systemic problem which neither the left nor the right appears to have caught on to. From an objective results-based perspective, it appears neither the left nor the right has a superior solution, given the compariable long-term STD rates of pledgers and non-pledgers. More creativity is needed here.

Viruses in the war against drugs?

Recently, a virus was used to pass antibodies through the blood-brain barrier to innoculate rats against cocaine. An abusive scenario would be to use this not merely on untreatable addicts but to innoculate the general population against cocaine, forcibly cutting demand down to the last individual. Prisoners have fewer rights; would they be viable candidates for such a preemptive procedure? I wonder how such would play out in countries with poor human rights.

He shall not stray

Gene therapy on meadow voles turned promiscuous males into monogamous mates. How soon before some person or group wants this particular technology to be applied to humans?

No evidence? Get over it already

People should back off on giving the 9/11 commission flak. It should not be a surprise at all that they concluded that they "found no evidence that Saddam Hussein cooperated with al-Qaida terrorists to target the United States". The key point here is demonstrable evidence or cooperation, as opposed to hearsay which may be contaminated with disinfo. It is worth noting that Bush himself said as recently as September last year that "We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the 11 September attacks." Hunches and uncorroborated beliefs, whether they be right or wrong, are not evidence; they are opinion. Bush has reasons for his opinion, but they do not constitute evidence.

We can rewrite you

I ran across this disturbing piece regarding false memory implantation.

"We can easily distort memories for the details of an event that you did experience," says Loftus. "And we can also go so far as to plant entirely false memories - we call them rich false memories because they are so detailed and so big."
...On average, studies show that around a third of those subjected to the "misinformation effect" wholly or partially adopt a false memory, but it seems to depend on both the person and the memory.

Unscrupulous advertisers would find value in harnessing this effect.

There's a lot more to the interaction of memory and stress in the piece. I also read about research that found interrogation impaired recognition of interrogators by the victims.

They studied over 500 soldiers, sailors and pilots at "survival schools" - three mock POW camps run by the US military, who partly funded the study. The subjects, whose mean age was 25, were being trained to withstand the mental and physical stresses of capture.
After 48 hours without food or sleep, they were subjected to intense interrogation. Half of the subjects were physically threatened, and this caused them to show all the signs of intense physiological stress - very high heart rate and levels of adrenalin and cortisol, combined with plummeting sex hormones.
Twenty-four hours after release from the camp, the subjects were asked to identify their interrogators...
The performance of all groups was abysmal. Only 30 per cent could find the right person in a line-up, 34 per cent from a photo-spread and 49 per cent from sequential photos - though the clothing cue boosted correct identification to 66 per cent. Thirty people got the gender wrong, and those subjected to physical threats were the worst at recognising their interrogator.

Memory can be fragile, and thus complicate investigations.

Putting a greenhouse gas into the ground

According to the results of a study, we should be putting carbon back into the ground in order to ensure food security. Combined with a need to sequester carbon to avoid global warming, this seems to be a win-win proposition. While not a solution in of itself, it would buy time and improve crop productivity.

Cutting to the core of human nature

I came across this book review on Being Indian, a book by Pavan K. Varma. The review alone seems uncompromisingly candid:

The stereotypes in which foreigners see Indians and the self-image that Indians project about themselves are both inaccurate. Indians are considered democratic, spiritual, tolerant, peaceful etc. But Varma's value-neutral reappraisal throws up surprising conclusions that can be embarrassing. Indians respect the powerful and will collude with them for personal gain. They are extremely hierarchical, bending before superiors and subjugating inferiors. They have never been "other-worldly" and hanker for material prosperity. Spiritualism is "mostly a means to harness divine support for power and [s]elf". (p 7) Morality is a theoretical construct abjured as impractical in real life. Indians also sanction violence when convinced of numerical strength and surety of victory. Varma's thesis is that some uncomplimentary facets of Indians are actually assets that make them resilient, tough and successful.

Having read the review in full, I couldn't help reflecting that these aspects Varma identifies are far from unique to India and in fact found in many if not most cultures around the world. Such realism is therefore worth keeping in mind when considering the psychology of the people of any country or culture.

Who's next?

So CIA Director Tenet is out. Resigned for personal reasons. While Deputy John McLachalan will be acting in top CIA post until it is formally filled, I'm willing to say odds are that Florida Republican Porter Goss will get the spot. He's being floated as a candidate.

Keeping score

Iran is still playing coy about its enriched uranium manufacturing capabilities. It's brinkmanship. They're pushing the UN and the USA to see how much they can get away with. I therefore conclude that the lesson of Iraq was not a deterrent as US forces are effectively locked in place, fully extended, unable to redeploy rapidly, and thus incapable of exerting pressure in coercive diplomacy. Therefore, the US isn't deemed a credible threat.

Judging from the recent attack on foreign oil workers in Saudi Arabia, al Qaida is apparently playing a careful game of targeted oil infrastructure by killing non-Muslim Westerners while at the same time avoiding targeting the Saudi royal family or the refineries themselves in order to avoid the consolidation of opinion against them. The fact that three militants escaped three rings of security to freedom is troubling. Did someone on the inside give them information on how to get out? One source reported that a European was beheaded, his head hurled out a window. I'd hate to see that be verified as a trend, as it would mean they're copycats in an ugly way; in an earlier attack in Khobar, the body of an Westerner was dragged through the streets behind a car, perhaps in imitation of the desecration of contractors' bodies in Fallujah.