China's price war on Christmas

According to Asia Times:

Some 70% of the world's Christmas ornaments and other paraphernalia now originate in officially atheist mainland China. Tinsel, Santas, mistletoe and artificial trees of every shape and hue are churned out at a relentless pace by thousands of factory workers in Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces...
According to a recent report on globalsources.com, a sourcing information website that specializes in China, the over 1,000 suppliers of Christmas lights in China are releasing "unique designs in diverse colors, styles and effects with greater frequency, to remain competitive amid an intense price war". Laser crystals and holograms are being pressed into use in the unrelenting quest for novelty...
China's Communist Party banned public Christmas celebrations at one point in 1993. But today, rather than being judged as a vehicle for insidious ideological pollution, Christmas is seen by Beijing as an opportunity for encouraging consumer spending.

According to AFP, via Taipei Times:

According to Customs figures, China exported US$1.6 billion worth of Christmas products last year, of which more than half went to the US, including seven artificial trees erected in the White House...
In the US alone, unless your family purchased a natural tree, you would have had a 70 percent chance of celebrating your Christmas with an artificial tree manufactured in Guangdong's Shenzhen City.

Finally, according to The Washington Times:

Imports from China account for 81 percent of all toys sold in the United States, says J. Craig Shearman, vice president for public relations at the National Retail Federation, a trade group in Washington.

It stands to reason that it is in China's best interests to promote the celebration of Christmas worldwide.

Historical footnote

Archeologists have uncovered evidence of a Mesapotamian city destroyed by war aroud 3500 B.C.

"The whole area of our most recent excavation was a war zone," said Clemens Reichel, Research Associate at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Reichel, the American co-director of the Syrian-American Archaeological Expedition to Hamoukar, lead a team that spent October and November at the site. Salam al-Quntar of the Syrian Department of Antiquities and Cambridge University was Syrian co-director. Hamoukar is an ancient site in extreme northeastern Syria near the Iraqi border.
The discovery provides the earliest evidence for large scale organized warfare in the Mesopotamian world, the team said.

Several hundred sling bullets were found in the excavation. The ancient city was then apparently occupied by the invaders.

I can't help wondering how many other fallen cities lie buried in the region.

Integrated nationbuilding

According to The Washington Times:

The Pentagon yesterday announced a landmark change in the use of combat troops, elevating "stability missions" -- commonly called nation-building -- to an equal status with major combat operations.
The evolution in war-planning priorities underscores how the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terror network continue to fundamentally reshape how U.S. military commanders deploy the armed forces.
Not only are U.S. forces becoming more mobile to better counter Islamic terrorists, but the chain of command now will be trained in how to "build" nations by creating indigenous security forces, democratic institutions and free markets...
Among the goals and functions listed in the paper are to rebuild security forces, prisons and judicial systems; "revive or build the private sector"; and "develop representative governmental institutions."

For the sake of pride, they won't openly admit that stability in post-Saddam Iraq did not go according to plan. The country did not self-organize quickly along the lines of a stable democracy.

Still, this was 18 months in the planning. That means Rumsfeld officially initiated the change in mid-2004. Given the timing of the positioning of Rice at the State Department, Wolfowitz at the World Bank, and Goss at the CIA, this all fits within a coherent attempt to reorganize the various organizations to not only ensure stability, but export democracy and free markets.

It would appear that Clinton's wisdom was at least partially correct. While he too was in favor of regime change in Iraq, he was apparently concerned with nationbuilding to ensure stability in a post-Saddam Iraq.

The Clinton administration has been spending the money Congress appropriated to overthrow Saddam Hussein on contractors and consultants while withholding arms from the Iraqi opposition, experts said.
The latest example is a workshop proposed by the Conflict Management Group, a nonprofit offshoot of Harvard Negotiation Project at Harvard Law School. The subcontractor group describes its objective in turbid academic jargon: "To identify, diagnose, and enhance the ability of the Iraqi opposition parties, and the individuals within the parties, to discuss, design, and facilitate intra- and inter-organization dialogue, cooperation, and problem solving."
Translation: Pull Iraqi resistance fighters out of the field, bring them to Harvard, and teach them how to get along.

There's a lot of ambition evident in planning for democracy-in-a-box. Time will tell how effective this effort is.

A fuel depot and a back of the envelope calculation

An apparent accident at the Buncefield fuel depot in the UK has resulted in 180M gallons of fuel capacity being destroyed by fire. Given 42 gallons to the barrel, and assuming 50% capacity offhand, approximately 2.15M barrels of refined fuel was lost. While the authorities are quick to assure that no shortages will result, some slack has been removed from the system.

As a comparison, according to this precis, UK fuel consumption was approximately 1.7M barrels/day in 2001. Thus, a day or two of production was lost.

A culture of conflict

Much was made of the red-blue divide during the recent U.S. election. It's worth taking a look at work done by University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett, who has examined cultural differences in cognition and published a book a few years back.

In another experiment described in the book, Nisbett and colleagues found that Americans respond to contradiction by polarizing their beliefs...

Polarization of the electorate would seem to have been eminently predictable.

The origin of rendition

There were some interesting points made regarding rendition on PBS.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE: For decades, the United States and other countries have used renditions to transport terrorist suspects from the country where they were captured to their home country or to other countries where they can be questioned, held or brought to justice.

The span of decades makes is less credible that the EU is as ignorant of the nature of rendition as they would officially make themselves out to be, implied by the move to for investigative probes into CIA flights.

Another interesting quote from the PBS piece:

REUEL GERECHT: Well, I think it was built upon the close relationships the agency built particularly with Egypt and Jordan in the mid 1980s. I mean, counterterrorism bureaucratically takes off at Langley around 1984-1985. And you have relationships develop.
I think the pivotal moment might be 1995-1996. I mean that's what you usually hear from people who work at Langley, that that's when a rendition came into the form more or less that you know it today.

That means that rendition came into the current form during Clinton's first term. Tenet was appointed deputy director of the CIA in 1995. It appears that elements that make up the current U.S. practice of the War on Terror were in place as early as a decade ago.

Unintended tainting of intelligence

The Pentagon reportedly had a program where it paid to ensure that positive news made it into the media in Iraq.

The Los Angeles Times quoted unidentified officials as saying that some of the stories in Iraqi newspapers were written by U.S. troops and while basically factual, they sometimes give readers a slanted view of what is happening in Iraq.

There's a more subtle problem with such a program. Tampering with the news feed also taints open source intelligence efforts. Emphasis mine.

OSINT is intelligence gained from open -- unrestricted, non-secret --sources, and it's one of the key forms of intelligence, alongside human-source intelligence (HUMINT), signals intelligence (SIGINT), imagery intelligence (IMINT), among others. It is openly available intelligence, and its sources include all manners of journalism, whether broadcast, printed or blogged.

Evidence of abuse by Malaysian police?

It's not an Abu Ghraib, but the purported video, apparently taken using a mobile phone in a Malaysia, features a prisoner, humiliation, forced nakedness, and the Koran. Malaysian authorities are launching an inquiry.

The clip, thought to have been filmed on a mobile phone, appears to show the prisoner and a female police officer.
The officer, who wears a Muslim headscarf, stands in front of the woman, who is forced to strip naked, grasp her ears and squat repeatedly.
It is a punishment common in Malaysian schools and is designed to humiliate, says the BBC's Jonathan Kent in Kuala Lumpur.
The pictures are accompanied by what appears to be a recording of verses from the Koran being recited, although it is unclear if the recording would have been audible to the woman.

On the positive side, at least they apparently had a woman officer present, thus preserving the semblance of gender propriety.

Apparently this is cutting back on their Chinese tourism dollars by almost half compared to 2004, as Chinese tourists have been detered by reports of such abuses.

A number of Chinese women have claimed they were forced to strip in Malaysian police stations while being spied upon.
Malaysian immigration officers have also been accused of profiling young female Chinese visitors as would-be prostitutes.

The price of a morals offensive? It seems plausible that the verses cited constituted a moral lecture. Yet other alleged actions, including robbery, suggest that there's also been a shakedown by corrupt officers.

What makes this doubly uncomfortable for the authorities is that the video emerged after a number of Chinese tourists alleged they had been arrested, forced to strip in front of male police officers and robbed.

White phosphorus versus chemical weapons

Some critics of the USA are claiming that white phosphorus (WP) is a chemical weapon.

Critics claim that the US used chemical weapons in Falluja, on the grounds that it is the toxic properties which cause the harm. The UK's Guardian newspaper for example said: "The US used chemical weapons in Iraq - and then lied about it."

However, if WP counts as a chemical weapon, then Iraq was openly in possession of chemical weapons in 2002, thus validating the U.S. administration's claim that Iraq possessed chemical weapons. From a 2004 CIA report on Iraqi WMD:

Hutin Munitions Production and Storage Facility: ISG discovered numerous barrels (over 3,000 gallons) of white phosphorus and munitions assembly lines, which we judge were intended for the production of white phosphorus illumination rounds. This white phosphorus, probably imported and declared by Iraq in 2002, could have been used to produce some nerve agent precursors on a laboratory scale.

It's worth noting that the CIA did not claim the WP located to be a chemical weapon and therefore a "slam dunk". If, however, WP is a chemical weapon, then Saddam was technically in possession of chemical weapons in 2002, thus validating the U.S. adminstration's case for invasion.

On the appeal of political rants

According to recent research, older consumers prefer emotional appeals.

"We find that older adults generally prefer and have better memory for emotional appeals. In contrast, younger adults tend to prefer and have better memory for more rational appeals. However, when time horizon perspectives are manipulated to be short, all participants prefer emotional appeals, regardless of age. Similarly, when time horizon perspectives are manipulated to be long, all prefer rational appeals, regardless of age," explain Patti Williams (UPenn) and Aimee Drolet (UCLA).

An immediate consequence to political marketing: as the Baby Boomers age, expect political messages to shift to a balance of more emotional appeals over rational appeals. Also expect political divisiveness to increase as participants grow increasingly emotional over time as the population distribution greys. Rants will be more popular than reasoned polemics.

Within the hour

This report came in within the hour of my previous post.

Gunmen threw grenades and a land mine exploded near the convoy of Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi, killing at least five bodyguards and wounding several others, an official said...
There were also reports that a remote-controlled bomb was set off alongside the land mine, Americo told The Associated Press shortly after arriving in Kenya's capital, Nairobi, from Mogadishu.
The attacks occurred shortly after Gedi arrived for a visit to the Somali capital -- a stronghold of powerful warlords-turned-Cabinet ministers and Islamic extremists opposed to his divided transitional government.

It would be interesting to see confirmation whether or not that was indeed an IED used instead of a landmine and whether the technology corresponds to the increasingly lethal IEDs that have emerged in Iraq in the past year. Piracy could have been used to fund the purchase of technology from allied groups.

"What we're seeing is an increase in the evolutionary pace of IED (improvised explosive device) design," said Ben Venzke, CEO of IntelCenter, a Washington counterterrorism firm contracted by the U.S. military to study insurgent tactics. "It's increasing at a pace we previously haven't seen."
Insurgent groups are passing around videos and other training aids to teach the most effective bombmaking techniques. "There is definitely a program to share information," said Maj. Dean Wollan, intelligence officer for the U.S. Army's 3rd Brigade Combat Team, operating in this area north of Baghdad...
One captured video shows in three-dimensional animation every component of a roadside bomb, how to build and use it, and where to place it for the biggest impact...
"The concern is that one group gains an effective technology, and it becomes almost Darwinism," said Lt. Col. Shawn Weed, division intelligence officer for the 3rd Infantry Division, which is responsible for Baghdad and surrounding areas. "They'll share that with other groups."

A global network for low-tech proliferation is a possibility if not a reality.

Somalia: failed state and piracy hotspot

Pirates are getting aggressive in Somalia; the most recent example is an attack on a cruise ship.

The pirates were in two small boats and were carrying machine guns and a rocket-propelled grenade when they attempted the attack on Seabourn Cruise Lines' "Spirit" about 5:35 a.m. local time Saturday, Deborah Natansohn, president of the cruise line, told CNNRadio...
"There's some minor damage done to the ship," Rogers said. "There's no water right now, for instance, in some places, and I believe one of the grenades actually went off in one of the cabins, but everyone on board is fine."

Somali piracy has endangered food aid in the region.

The hijacking in June of a ship carrying World Food Programme food aid has drawn international attention to the problem, but piracy represents a risk to any vessel calling at Somali ports, or bypassing the country's long coastline on the voyage between East Africa and the Red Sea...
"There is no central government in Somalia, and no effective law enforcement," [Jayant Abhyankar of the International Maritime Bureau] says.
"This makes it ideal ground for any kind of crime, particularly maritime crime."
Armed men in speed boats often open fire on passing ships, hoping to seize them and get a ransom for the vessels and the crew, the IMB says.
The IMB's Piracy Reporting Centre says that have been 21 incidents since 15 March off the Somali coast. "Stay as far away as possible unless calling at a Somali port", the IMB advises, with 150 nautical miles (280 km) being considered a reasonable distance.
It also says that radio communications, including VHF, should be kept to a minimum near the Somali coast.

As well, al Qaida is apparently engaged in destabilization:

Police in breakaway Somaliland battled al-Qaida suspects armed with assault rifles and hand grenades, capturing five, officials said Friday...

This AP report from 2003 cites an alleged United Nations draft report's conclusions that al Qaida operatives who engaged in the 2002 Kenya attacks trained in Somalia.

The draft report, obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press, details how an al-Qaida cell trained in Mogadishu in November 2001, smuggled surface-to-air missiles from Somalia to Kenya in August 2002, then fled back to Somalia after attacking a Kenyan resort hotel and an Israeli charter aircraft on Nov. 28.

It's possible that piracy is being used as alternative terrorist financing.

Astrology and Intelligent Design

New Scientist reported on the current Intelligent Design trial in the U.S.A. In particular, the testimony of one Intelligent Design (ID) proponent was weak.

Behe said he had come up with his own “broader” definition of a theory, claiming that this more accurately describes the way theories are actually used by scientists. “The word is used a lot more loosely than the NAS defined it,” he says.
Rothschild suggested that Behe’s definition was so loose that astrology would come under this definition as well. He also pointed out that Behe’s definition of theory was almost identical to the NAS’s definition of a hypothesis. Behe agreed with both assertions.

In short, Behe conceded that by strict definition, ID wasn't a scientific theory, so he had to use a more liberal definition of theory in order to be able to label both ID and evolution as theories. That smacks of redefining a square peg to be a circle so it'll fit a round hole in name.

However, I wonder what ID proponents would think of the "science" of Vedic astrology, which is supported by the government of India.

The Commission in its meeting held on 16th June, 2000 considered the proposal for setting up of Departments of Vedic Astrology in Indian Universities and decided that “there is an urgent need to rejuvenate the science of Vedic Astrology in India, to allow this scientific knowledge to reach to the society at large and to provide opportunities to get this important science even exported to the world, the Commission decided to approve ‘in principle’ setting up of few departments of Vedic Astrology in Indian universities. This would provide a exclusive teaching and training in the subject leading to certificate diploma, under-graduate, post-graduate and Ph.D. degrees”.

The link between religion and violence

David Grossman's model of how the resistance to killing is overcome is quite enlightening. Group identification and respect for authority play a role in breaking down any innate psychological resistance to killing. Increasing physical and psychological distance from the victim also helps.

However, that's merely a mechanism for enabling violence. The grand strategy of violence, i.e. "Why are we killing?", generally requires an ethos. Religion is but one of several sources of an answer to why. What does the group represent? What does the authority advocating violence represent? Why are the victims worthy of death? The answers to these questions and the resulting moral clarity can be an enabler for violence.

The jock stereotype is not helping

I recently ran across an article warning that women were outnumbering men in U.S. colleges and the impact thereto. Things seemed reasonable, until I got to the final paragraphs.

For his part, author Gurian says one reason colleges may fail to attract more men is precisely because they are more geared to female learning styles and interests. Colleges that want to compete for the dwindling pool of men should emphasize male interests, such as sports, he says, and offer more male role models.
But meaningful change must take place well before the college years, says Gurian, who acknowledges a personal interest in the subject: He has two daughters. "We all know a boy that's struggling," he says. "If we create a generation of men who aren't getting an education, that's bad for women."

And just what exactly are the jobs that these additional men would get in sports? That's as daft as recommending that colleges appeal to more women by increasing funding for art history majors and basket weavers. Majoring in sports counts as being educated? Here's some news for you, Mr. Gurian: not to most women, it doesn't.

Influenza perspective

It should be noted that "regular" non-pandemic influenza (apparently H3N2) kills tens of thousands each year in the U.S.A. alone as a baseline. From a 2003 CDC press release:

Using new and improved statistical models, CDC scientists estimate that an average of 36,000 people (up from 20,000 in previous estimates) die from influenza-related complications each year in the United States.

Theoretically, infecting people with a relatively benign form of H5Nx might firewall a pandemic version by offering up at least partial resistance. The downside would be an increase in deaths due to the normal course in influenza. As well, one would have to ensure no other forms of influenza were present in order to avoid unintended recombination.

Chemokines and kimchee

A seemingly outlandish bit of research from South Korea claims that kimchi may work against bird flu.

I've come up with a potential mechanism. Spicy food promotes inflammation. A recent study demonstrated that inflammation can boost CC chemokine sensitivity in rats.

CCL5 is in fact a CC chemokine. In an earlier post, I noted that CCL5 had potential against influenza.

Thus, spicy food may be amplifying existing immune response mechanisms and give the organism an edge against influenze infection. This is highly speculative, but worth exploring. Being able to upregulate and downregulate chemokine and cytokine production may be key techniques in the future.

No US troop buildup for North korea

Bush once said of North Korea: "All options were on the table." It appears that many options were explored in the past; in particular, the nuclear option.

The U.S. Forces Korea conducted nuclear attack flight drills in 1968 and as recently as June 1991 at Gunsan Air Force Base, a ruling party lawmaker said Tuesday. Choi Sung told a parliamentary audit of the Foreign Ministry he had confirmation from U.S. State and Defense Department papers released under the Freedom of Information Act that large-scale nuclear training exercises were conducted in 1968, from brigade to division levels, in which “all nuclear weapons” were used.
"Between January and June 1991, the eighth Fighter Wing of the Gunsan base participated in surface-to-air and air-to-air atomic warfare flight training,” he added. Based on the documents, he said Sunday that 11 types of nuclear weapons systems were deployed across the country, and 16 USFK bases transported or stored nuclear weapons between 1958 and 1991.

I wonder if this report will keep Kim Jong Il up at night.

Anti-cancer stem cells

Stem cells have been coaxed into forming killer cells to fight cancer.

Researchers generated "natural killer" cells from the human embryonic stem cells. As part of the immune system, natural killer cells normally are present in the blood stream and are play a role in defending the body against infection and against some cancers.

Extrapolating further, in principle we could augment our immune systems via stem cell manipulation.

A possible treatment avenue for influenza?

This recent Washington University School of Medicine press release is intriguing.

Enlisted to help fight viral infections, immune cells called macrophages consume virus-infected cells to stop the spread of the disease in the body. Now researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have uncovered how macrophages keep from succumbing to the infection themselves. Boosting this mechanism may be a way to speed recovery from respiratory infections...
"If the macrophages were to die, the infection would spread further," says senior author Michael J. Holtzman, M.D., the Selma and Herman Seldin Professor of Medicine and director of pulmonary and critical care medicine. "So the macrophages use a protein called CCL5 to ensure that the infection process can be stopped before it goes any further."
Holtzman thinks the information about the role of CCL5 may lead to new methods to hasten recovery from respiratory viral inflections like influenza or the common cold, which at present have no pharmacological cure.

Avian flu: a threat that will not go away

Mass industrialization has contributed to a perfect storm for avian flu to break out?

... industrial chicken operations are growing exponentially thanks to the resettlement of large agribusinesses in search of lower operational costs. Last year in Latin America and the Caribbean, there were over 2.5 billion chickens, nearly 1 billion more than 10 years ago, according to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization. In 2004, according to Worldwatch Institute, Brazil became the world's second-largest poultry producer, just behind the United States.
Such expansion of industrial farming in less developed countries usually is accompanied by poor surveillance and control ...
Poor hygienic conditions in confined animal feeding operations, or factory farms, and their relative proximity to large concentrations of people compound the problem. Factory farms account for more than 40 percent of world meat production, up from 30 percent in 1990, according to the Worldwatch Institute's report, "Happier Meals: Rethinking the Global Meat Industry." Located near urban centers in countries with weak public health, occupational, and environmental standards, those farms "create the perfect environment for the spread of diseases, including outbreaks of avian flu," the institute said.

A precis of the above report can be found on the Worldwatch Institute web site.

A discussion hosted by the Council of Foreign Relations also raises the scenario.

ANTHONY FAUCI: That really is one of the real major problems, is that if you look at what has evolved over the past few years, given the relationship between economies of the countries involved and the relationship between flocks of chickens, the cross-contamination with migratory fowl, and the dependence of individual countries on these chicken flocks, it would have to be almost an economic revolution in the countries to be able to address it in a way that would essentially put a major block in the way of the ultimate progression.
I think the things that people don't understand, and we were just discussing this outside, we may well— in fact, it is highly likely— that we'll get away this year without there being a pandemic flu. But then what people will say is, "Well, OK, we've dodged that bullet. Let's move on to the next problem, whatever the next problem is, and likely not influenza." But the ingredients that have gone into the situation where we are right now, where we have over 100 documented infections, 54-plus deaths, is not going to go away, because the chickens are still infected, the customs and practices of the interaction between fowl, pigs, and humans in these Asian countries is not changing. So that the ingredients that gave us the issue that we have now are going to reappear next year. It may still be H5N1 or it may be H9N2 or it may be something else.
So unless we, as a global effort, get the countries involved to take a look at the conditions in those countries, and how we can alleviate them without destroying the economy of those countries, this problem is not going to go away.

While they are primarily focused on Asia, it is clear that other regions around the globe are potential flash points as well. Also, while H5N1 has captured popular attention, the CFR piece indicates that other influenza variants are also viable threats.

Evaluating credibility

First, a summary of the al Qaida plans allegedly recently intercepted.

The letter of instructions and requests outlines a four-stage plan, according to officials: First, expel American forces from Iraq. Second, establish a caliphate over as much of Iraq as possible. Third, extend the jihad to neighboring countries, with specific reference to Egypt and the Levant — a term that describes Syria and Lebanon. And finally, war against Israel.

The strategic goals are consistent with an extant 1998 fatwa issued by Osama bin Laden, which itself lends credibility to the document. The strategy appears to be viable, though I can't estimate the likelihood of success or failure. Point two would require civil war in Iraq.

"The situation is so tense... a civil war could erupt at any moment although some people would say it is already there," Amr Moussa told BBC radio's Today programme.
"There are a lot of individuals... now playing games with the future of Iraq and there is no clear strategy, there is no clear leadership."
The Arab League, he said, would work to bring Iraq's different religious and ethnic groups together.

State-run eugenics?

I was pointed at this article on Booman Tribune which ranted on about a draft legislation on assisted reproduction in Indiana which would require that the prospective parents, marriage being a requirement, file a "petition for parentage" with an unspecified agency. The piece then proceeds with a feminist trope about this constituting state control of women's bodies.

I took a look at the draft legislation (PDF) and spotted a section which made me question the intent of the draft legislation.

The assessment must follow the normal practice for assessments in a domestic infant adoption procedure and must include the following information:
...
Personal information about each intended parent, including the following:
(A) Family of origin.
(B) Values.
(C) Relationships.
(D) Education.
(E) Employment and income.
(F) Hobbies and talents.
(G) Physical description, including the general health of the individual.
(H) Birth verification.
(I) Personality description, including the strengths and weaknesses of each intended parent.

Hobbies? Talents? Unless the purpose involves eugenics, that makes little sense. It seems to have been copied as boilerplate from adoption considerations.

What is the birth family's racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious background?
...
What is the general physical description of the child's birth parents, siblings, and other close relatives?
...
What are the special skills, abilities, talents, or interests of birth parents and family members?
...
What are the child's special interests, talents, and/or hobbies?

It's rather pointless to preemptively attempt a match of talents and hobbies between prospective parents and a prospective child that hasn't even been conceived. There's nothing to match against. Even cultural and religious considerations aren't relevant, since the child would be immersed in the culture and religion of the parents from early childhood; there's no possibility of culture shock. Blindly treating assisted reproduction as the equivalent of adoption doesn't work.

Furthermore, consideration of the hobbies and talents of prospective donors smacks of state-run eugenics.

Graham and Smith advertised their wares in a highly unglamorous mimeographed catalog. It identified each donor with a color and number, summarized him—"Gifted research biologist at world renowned research center"—and described his personality, manual dexterity, hobbies, athletic achievements, and general health. It also listed standard features such as ethnic ancestry, eye color, skin color, hair color, height, weight, and general appearance.

Religion and family breakup

I've been looking at coverage of the Gallup International Voice of the People 2005 poll and noted an interesting situation with regard to North America when compared to the rest of the world.

Sixty-one percent said a partner or family member has most influenced decisions about their life in the past year.
In Mexico, the figure is 88%. The lowest rating for family influence comes from North America (35%), where people report a wider range of influences, especially religious leaders (12%).

The result is even more impressive when charted graphically. North America is the sole region dragging the world average down with regard to family influence and also the region in which religious leaders had the most influence. Based on correlation, the rise of individualism and the breakdown of family influence have led to increased religiosity.

Europe is, by comparison, secular, and family has a strong influence on individual decisions; judging from the chart, it's approximately 63% in comparison to North America's 35%.

Cheap Predator knockoff or not?

Pakistan recently announced that it destroyed an al-Qaida base. Tucked in there was this little pertinent snippet.

The commander in charge of the operation said sophisticated equipment had been seized, including a small, Chinese-made remote controlled drone, which he said had been used by the militants to spy on army movements and positions in the area... An officer from the Signal Corps said the drone, believed to be the first of its kind found in Pakistan, was equipped with a sophisticated, wide-angle camera.

The version of the article out of Pakistan further says:

“The terrorists used the RPV (remotely-piloted vehicle) to check the position of security forces and attack them,” the general said, adding that the drone was capable of carrying weapons. A military officer from the army’s Signal Corps said the vehicle had a sophisticated, wide-angle camera to take pictures of targets on the ground.

Offhand, that description of the drone sounds like a clone of the USAF RQ-1 Predator UAV, but it doesn't look like one. Picture below copied from the Pakistani source without permission for the purposes of analysis.

Instead, it appears to be a repurposed remote-controlled hobby aircraft. If it was indeed used by militants, they didn't even bother camouflaging it, leaving it a bright, obvious yellow.

Seeking a mechanism for social selection

Continuing this line of inquiry, is it possible that these alleles hitched a ride with Nefertiti and Charlemagne? Consider the article "The Royal We" in the May 2002 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, mirrored here.

In a 1999 paper titled "Recent Common Ancestors of All Present-Day Individuals," [Joseph] Chang showed how to reconcile the potentially huge number of our ancestors with the quantities of people who actually lived in the past. His model is a mathematical proof that relies on such abstractions as Poisson distributions and Markov chains, but it can readily be applied to the real world. Under the conditions laid out in his paper, the most recent common ancestor of every European today (except for recent immigrants to the Continent) was someone who lived in Europe in the surprisingly recent past—only about 600 years ago...
[Mark] Humphrys's Web page suggests that over many generations mating patterns may be much more random than expected. Social mobility accounts for part of the mixing—what Voltaire called the slippered feet going down the stairs as the hobnailed boots ascend them.

Yet social mobility isn't random per se. There is abundant evidence that the distribution of wealth in a society follows a power law distribution. Combine that with the easily established fact that wealth has long been a criterion in mate selection. It's quite plausible that gene flow would be influenced in a manner analogous to that of scale-free networks.

Scale-free gene spread?

I'd blogged recently about this recent research. I've since run across more recent articles which clarify the opinion of the researchers.

From http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9258970/:

For the microcephalin gene, the variation arose about 37,000 years ago, about the time period when art, music and tool-making were emerging, Lahn said. For ASPM, the variation arose about 5,800 years ago, roughly correlating with the development of written language, spread of agriculture and development of cities, he said.

From http://www.forbes.com/lifestyle/health/feeds/hscout/2005/09/08/hscout527858.html:

Lahn and his colleagues believe that, over time, human behavioral and cultural developments might go hand in hand with this type of genetic selection. The microcephalin mutation's first appearance coincided with the beginnings of man's development of art, music, religious practices, and complex tool-making techniques, the researchers point out. Similarly, the launch of the ASPM mutations occurred with the spread of agriculture, urban settlements, and the first record of written language.

The spread of the genes may also have followed the equivalent of preferential attachment in scale-free networks. The rise of human settlement would have increased the choices available with regard to mate selection; we do not pick our mates randomly. A power-law expansion may have given rise to early spread of the particular gene variants. If the social selection is strong enough, perhaps there doesn't need to be an actual advantage conferred by these particular alleles; they may be simply hitching a ride on a process of socially-induced evolution.

What if it doesn't code for intelligence?

There are some interesting results in studies of the genetics of the human brain. In particular, the population distribution of particular Microcephalin and ASPM gene variants raises an interesting problem.

First, the researchers sequenced the Microcephalin gene...
[One particular] distinctive mutation is now in the brains of about 70% of humans, and half of this group carry completely identical versions of the gene. The data suggests the mutation arose recently and spread quickly through the human species due to a selection pressure, rather than accumulating random changes through neutral genetic drift.
Analysing variation in the gene suggests the new Microcephalin variant arose between 60,000 and 14,000 years ago, with 37,000 years ago being the team's best estimate. The new mutation is also much more common among people from Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas than those from sub-Saharan Africa.
The team also sequenced the ASPM gene from the same original sample and again, among dozens of variants, found a defining mutation that alters the protein the gene codes for. Estimates are that the new variant of ASPM first appeared in humans somewhere between 14,000 and 500 years ago, with the best guess that it first arose 5,800 years ago. It is ... present in about a quarter of people alive today, and is more common in Europe and the Middle East than the rest of the world...
"The evidence for selection is compelling," says population geneticist Rasmus Nielsen of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Yet it remains unclear yet how these genes work in healthy people. Many researchers doubt there is any mechanism by which nature could be selecting for greater intelligence today, because they believe culture has effectively blocked the action that natural selection might have on our brains.
Lahn and his colleagues are now testing whether the new gene variants provide any cognitive advantage. Natural selection could have favoured bigger brains, faster thinking, different personalities, or lower susceptibility to neurological diseases, Lahn says. Or the effects might be counter-intuitive. "It could be advantageous to be dumber," Lahn says. "I highly doubt it, but it's possible."

What if the genes together code for increased social religiosity? The distribution and timing is in line with the rise and spread of monotheism. Old Testament accounts of genocidal tribal warfare suggest a social mechanism by which gene variants could have been spread aggressively in an expansionist manner. Cultural selection as an accelerated mechanism of natural selection.

Overzealous car technology

Toyota has developed a computer system which will nag the driver into paying attention to the road. There's one bit which I find disturbing.

The system flashes a light on the dashboard display and beeps when the eyes start to wander. If the driver still doesn't respond, brakes kick in, Toyota said Tuesday.

Surprising the driver by kicking in the brakes sounds like a recipe for accident creation rather than prevention.

National embarassment

According to this CNN report, Homeland Security has no clue what FEMA was doing.

Defending the U.S. government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued Saturday that government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur...
Last week, Michael Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told CNN his agency had recently planned for a Category 5 hurricane hitting New Orleans.
Speaking to "Larry King Live" on August 31, in the wake of Katrina, Brown said, "That Category 4 hurricane caused the same kind of damage that we anticipated. So we planned for it two years ago. Last year, we exercised it. And unfortunately this year, we're implementing it."

Clearly, it was a mistake to roll FEMA into Homeland Security. The latter was so fixated on terrorist scenarios that it overspecialized, neglecting non-terrorist disaster scenarios.

When the Louisiana state authorities appealed for medical aid from FEMA, the first delivery they received was a shipment of drugs and equipment for use in the event of a chemical weapon attack.

Preparedness also means agility, being able to adapt quickly to new and expected scenarios. This did not happen.

Pulling together

Tucked away in a piece about the Jerk-O-Meter was this research result:

The most remarkable thing was that we could correlate people’s behavior and proximity—who they spent time with—who were their friends. So we could do an almost perfect prediction of who were their friends. And the number of friends you had in a work group, friends defined by people you spend time with [outside work] was an almost perfect predictor of how productive the work group was. I find that fascinating. If you go to the management school here (at MIT) it’s all about leadership. The one thing you won’t hear about is, encouraging people to have friends and creating an environment that fosters that sort of social support.

Perhaps national-building efforts could take a cue from this. It's not enough to have effective leadership and stable institutions. How does one build up social networks? How does one weave social fabrics? Building and maintaining stability in the form of intangible social infrastructure is key.

Extrapolating further, a decapitation attack upon an authoritarian regime won't result in a stable society if the key thing which held it together was fear. There have to be positive motivations for societal cohesion.

Chemical alternatives to sleep

DARPA partly funded research into ampakines to combat the effects of sleep deprivation.

The drug, currently known as CX717, is designed to act on a type of chemical receptor that is involved in cell-to-cell communication involving the neurotransmitter glutamate...
[The monkeys] were then deprived of sleep for between 30 and 36 hours - which the researchers say is equivalent to humans going for 72 hours without sleep.
The animals were tested again, and fared worse on all the tests.
But after being sleep-deprived once more and re-tested after being given the drug, their performance was restored to normal levels.

That's three days. It's been reported that soldiers used modafinil in recent combat; reports indicate that drug also provides an effective period of three days, perhaps longer.

...sold by Pennsylvania drugmaker Cephalon under the name Provigil, the compound can keep users up for two or three days at a stretch, with negligible side effects and little risk of addiction. ...although the Pentagon won't comment, several news outlets reported that coalition troops were taking it during the drive to Baghdad earlier this year.

I wonder if some regimen combining modafinil and CX717 would have a synergystic effect, breaking well past the barrier of a week without sleep. Civilians as well as the military could benefit from the capability, as well as abuse it.

Bypassing ethnic profiling

What does it mean when a Spanish train bombing subject is arrested in Serbia?

The suspect, identified as Abdelmajid Bouchar, a 22-year-old Moroccan who allegedly fled a suburban Madrid apartment shortly before alleged ringleaders in the attack blew themselves up inside that home to avoid arrest, three weeks after the massacre.
Bouchar had been living in Belgrade under an assumed name and a fake Iraqi passport, the ministry said in a statement. There was also an international arrest warrant for him.

Could he have been in contact with a sleeper cell or recruiting in Bosnia? The U.S. Treasury Department notes that al Qaida once funded mujahideen in Bosnia:

In 1993, Batterjee incorporated BIF in the United States, where it also provided financial and operational support to mujahideen fighters worldwide, including members of al Qaida in Afghanistan, the Sudan, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Chechnya. At one point, UBL confirmed to an associate that BIF was one of the non-governmental organizations providing funds to al Qaida.

Such sleepers would likely be indistinguishable from Western Europeans, enabling them to bypass ethnic profiling.

The body as battlefield

There is an immunological arms race happening within our bodies. Bacteria launch defenses in response to antibacterial peptides:

University of Washington (UW) and McGill University researchers have revealed a molecular mechanism whereby bacteria can recognize tiny antimicrobial peptide molecules, then respond by becoming more virulent.
...the same molecules that the body sends out to help destroy salmonella inadvertently launch bacterial defenses. It is as if missiles armed, rather than demolished, the target. The body's antimicrobial peptides bind to an enzyme, PhoQ, that acts as a watchtower and interceptor near the surface of bacteria cell membranes. The peptide binding activates PhoQ, which sets off a cascade of signals. The signals turn on a large set of bacterial genes. Some of genes are responsible for products that fortify the bacterial cell surface and protect the bacteria from being killed.

The human body in turn mobilizes responses to bacterial RNA:

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have published the first study to test the role of RNA chemical modifications on immunity. They have demonstrated that RNA from bacteria stimulates immune cells to orchestrate destruction of invading pathogens. Most RNA from human cells is recognized as being self and does not stimulate an immune response to the same extent as invading bacteria or viruses. The researchers hypothesize that if this self-recognition fails, then autoimmune diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus could result.

This implies two obvious approaches for nanotech-enhanced bioweapons: enhance bacterial virulence and cripple the body's response to bacterial RNA. Similarly, nanotech-enhanced biodefenses might defeat bacterial virulence mechanisms and enhance the body's capacity to recognize and defend against bacterial proteins.

Anger and control

CMU researchers found that recollections of anger or fear could bias a person's outlook with regard to the likelihood of future attacks and coping with terrorism.

Each time, they created experiences that accentuated one of the multiple emotions that the attacks evoked: fear, anger or sadness. One year out, the respondents' emotional reactions to the attacks continued to predict their perception of the risk of terrorism: Those who had their fear heightened were more pessimistic about the likelihood of future attacks and coping with the risk of terrorism, while those who had their anger heightened were more optimistic.

The use of anger or fear seems analogous to a fight or flight response. Interestingly, sadness was neutral in impact.

Anger is sometimes adaptive, sometimes not:

Anger is probably beneficial in this context because it increases people's sense of control, comments Lerner, who also has looked at this aspect of the phenomenon...
"At the same time anger effectively provides a sense of certainty and prepares people for action," she says, "it also simplifies their judgment processes and leaves them prone to bias."

This illusion of control (it is, after all, contextual whether or not the sense of control is validated) has potential psychological benefits. Cf. this 1996 press release on optimistic bias in children:

Capps has found that normal healthy children have an optimistic bias in believing they will be protected from harm that others encounter. They think they have all kinds of control over negative events in life, rating themselves as less likely to be affected by danger than the "typical kid," she said.
"It's important for parents to provide this illusory faith," said Capps. "It gives an extra buffer against fear, anxiety and depression."

Anger can thus be a psychologically adaptive means of coping with lack of control, altering one's perception. However, that benefit is distinct from how adaptive it is with regard to more objectively bettering one's situation.

Exercise craze

So far this month, there was Peace Shield 2005, held in the Ukraine region; armed forces from Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United States participated in scenarios based on Iraq.

Taiwan held an exercise which staged the repulsion of an attack from mainland China.

China and Russia are holding Peace Mission 2005 near Vladivostok, staging the amphibious invasion of an imaginary country.

Meanwhile, Japan hosted the annual JASEX military exercise near Okinawa, demonstrating U.S. capability in the reigion.

Also, Singapore hosted Operation Deep Sabre; Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, the U.K., and the U.S. participated in exercises simulating the interception of ships carrying WMD.

Shocks through the system

Kenya appears to have become a chokepoint for oil in East Africa. Due to delays and protests over new rules over duties, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Congo and northern Tanzania may face fuel shortages, which consequent impacts upon their economies.

Perhaps it's little wonder that Tanzania has agreed to Angola's proposal for a modest hydroelectric power study to by completed by 2008, which could lead to a Chinese-built dam by 2017.

Zimbabewe appears to be undergoing an inflation spiral triggered by sharp price hikes, as the price of oil is state-regulated.

The International Energy Agency notes that Africa and Asia are highly vulnerable to a rise in the price of oil:

The economies of oil-importing developing countries in Asia and Africa would suffer most from higher oil prices because their economies are more dependent on imported oil. In addition, energy-intensive manufacturing generally accounts for a larger share of their GDP and energy is used less efficiently. On average, oil-importing developing countries use more than twice as much oil to produce one unit of economic output as do developed countries.

The rise in oil prices may negate the impact of G8 debt relief.

It is also little wonder that China and India are looking to Africa for oil:

China has more recently become a player in the energy field on the west coast of Africa, which is the largest producer of oil on the continent. West Africa provides the United States with 15 per cent of oil imports and this is projected to grow to as much as 20-25% over the coming decade. Nigeria and Angola are the main producers and China has become active in both countries. Angola represents how China puts its assets together to build its presence. In connection with its bid to win rights to exploration of a bloc, China offered Angola a $2 billion soft loan as part of a longer term aid package. China won the bid, and - as an indication that China is not the only new player on the continent - the closest competitor was India.

DNA ancestry testing increasingly used in law enforcement

Last year, I noted that British police used DNA to narrow down the racial ancestry of an unknown sex offender.

American police are not only using DNA-determined ancestry to narrow down suspects, but also to determine the racial ancestry of murder victims.

The child, dubbed "Precious Doe" by local residents, appeared to be black. But new DNA tests that can determine a person's heritage indicated she was of mixed ancestry — about 40% white. That meant she almost certainly had a white grandparent.
This year, a tip led police to an Oklahoma woman who had not reported her young daughter's disappearance. When the woman was found to have both a black and a white parent, police moved in. Further DNA tests determined that the woman, Michelle Johnson, was the girl's mother. Johnson and her husband, Harrell Johnson, the victim's stepfather, have been charged in the slaying...
In 2004, police in Charlottesville, Va., used ancestry testing to confirm the race of a suspect in six unsolved rapes that began in 1997. Police had been criticized for seeking DNA samples from local black men based on victims' descriptions of the assailant. The testing indicated that he indeed was of Sub-Saharan African descent.
Ancestry testing also has been used on a female skeleton that was found in the snow near Mammoth Lake, Calif., in May 2003. The slain woman initially was misidentified as southeast Asian, based on witnesses' descriptions of a woman seen in the area. DNAPrint Genomics found she actually was a Native American, a finding confirmed by analyses of her diet and bone composition and further DNA tests.

Looking back further, there was a Louisiana case in 2003. A serial killer's ancestry was apparently successfully profiled.

Setting aside the issue of just what is really being measured when racial proportion is claimed, overreliance on this technology may create new vulnerabilities. It's possible that juries may underestimate the potential for error:

But some defense lawyers say CSI and similar shows make jurors rely too heavily on scientific findings and unwilling to accept that those findings can be compromised by human or technical errors.

Errors could arise from causes as simple as samples being switched.

Nanotech weapons of the future

This tiny excerpt in Jane's hints that nanotech could be used to increase the potency of chemical weapons by permitting them to selectively target organs.

Almost 80% of the article is reserved for subscribers. Let's see what a bit of scanning of open sources on the net can reveal about the likely content, shall we?

A January piece in Technology Review points to the use of nanometals to create superthermites via nanoaluminum and iron oxide; such nanoenergtics promises thermobaric cave-busting thermobaric weapons much more powerful than the vaunted "Daisy Cutter" or MOAB. Not that portable thermobarics couldn't be used for urban ops or cave assaults.

Nanotech could possibly enable compact nuclear detonators, making briefcase nukes capable of taking down a building a reality. A Jane's expert is quoted as saying that the United States, Germany, and Russia were funding research in that direction.

This 2004 piece in The Bulletin warns that carbon nanotubes could conceivably be used to enhance toxin delivery in bioweapons, even enabling them to bypass immune defenses acquired by vaccination, as well as making more durable bioweapons. Nonlethal anti-materials nanotech is also mentioned, though such weaponry was conceptualized at least as far back as 1994.

The United States is currently leading in nanotech investment, though China claimed to be third after Japan for nanotech patents in 2003.

It's not all bad. Nanotech is also being developed for defensive purposes against biological and chemical weapons.

Potential blowback for Iran?

Recently, Rumsfeld chided Iran for providing support to Iraqi insurgents:

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Tuesday that weapons recently confiscated in Iraq were "clearly, unambiguously from Iran" and admonished Tehran for allowing the explosives to cross the border...
"What you do know of certain knowledge is the Iranians did not stop it from coming in," he said.
Rumsfeld said the weapons create problems for the Iraqi government, coalition forces and the international community.
"And ultimately, it's a problem for Iran," he added.

Meanwhile, this report suggests that Iran may be facing the threat of Sunni insurgency, but has soft-pedalled it:

On 13 July, the Dubai-based Al-Arabiyah television station broadcast segments of a videotape that purportedly showed the execution of Shahab Mansuri, an Iranian security official. The hitherto unknown group, calling itself God's Soldiers of the Sunni Mujahedin, captured the official sometime in mid-June, releasing a video of the hostage on 20 June. In this video, the group demanded the release of its jailed members by the Iranian authorities within three weeks or receive the "hostage's head as a gift to the elected president [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad]", Al-Arabiya reported.

It would appear that disruption of the U.S.-led stabilization effort may be coming at a price for Iran.

Here's a worst case scenario. Iran is known to have biological and chemical weapons programs, has a nuclear power program, is suspected of having a nuclear weapons program, and has uranium on native soil. If a Sunni uprising overthrow were to overthrow the Shia government, it's possible that al Qaida and friends would gain ready access to WMD.

Global warming and the limits of linear projection

While the debate over global warming continues in the U.S.A., it appears several other countries are weighing the threat posed by climate change in the near term:

Chinese planners have been concerned since 2003 that climate change may hamper construction and stability of the Qinghai-Tibet railway, partially built over permafrost. More recently, a Chinese climatologist warned that safety of the railyay may be compromised by 2050 given current trends; i.e. assuming a linear continuation of the trend

Russian researchers have observed that large areas of frozen peat bog in Siberia are melting, threatening to release a massive amount of methane, a greenhouse gas. Such a release may have a nonlinear impact, accelerating global warming.

Linearity may not be an accurate model of what is yet to come.

Vat-grown meat

Scientists are proposing that current techniques could be extended to enable meat to be grown in a lab.

"In the long term, this is a very feasible idea," said Jason Matheny of the University of Maryland, part of the team whose research has been published in the Tissue Engineering journal.

Some possible advantages:

• cruelty-free meat
• mercury-free fish
• meat from endangered species could be cultured for sale
• beef tissue free from BSE
• a reduction in methane, a greenhouse gas, from animal farming
• a reduction in cattle ranching, leading to less pressure on the Amazon rainforest

Given global overfishing, perhaps laboratory-grown fish will be inevitable.

Not for our kind of people?

This article in the Post-Gazette struck me:

Staff Sgt. Jason Rivera, 26, a Marine recruiter in Pittsburgh, went to the home of a high school student who had expressed interest in joining the Marine Reserve to talk to his parents.
It was a large home in a well-to-do suburb north of the city. Two American flags adorned the yard. The prospect's mom greeted him wearing an American flag T-shirt.
"I want you to know we support you," she gushed.
Rivera soon reached the limits of her support.
"Military service isn't for our son. It isn't for our kind of people," she told him.

Who then is it for? According to this piece in the U.S. Army War College's periodical, Parameters, demographics may have an answer:

In the civilian sector, the United States and the countries of Western Europe have had to rely on immigrants, some of them illegal, to supply needed younger-age labor when domestic birthrates would not have done so. And the same may again have to be the case in military recruitment, with the past indeed filled with numerous illustrative examples.

As fewer Americans step up to the plate, it's possible we may see an American Foreign Legion.

Cheaper DNA sequencing

New DNA sequencing tech has reduced the cost of sequencing the human genome from $20M (USD) to $2.2M. The long term goal is to get it down to $1K. One order of magnitude down, three more to go.

The ultimate aim is individualized prevention and treatment, but I can't help wondering what the potential is for individually tailored pathogens to be engineered. Ethnic bioweapons might be crude compared to the potential of weapons that target a tribe or clan.

Mind you, a tribal bioweapon might be thwarted by cuckoldry, as geneological parentage won't always correspond to biological parentage on the paternal side.

The Liverpool team found that rates of cases where a father was not the biological father of his child ranged from 1% in some studies to as much as 30%.
Experts have generally agreed that the rate is below 10%, with a 4% rate meaning that about one in 25 could be affected.

Video game assisted suicide?

Recently there has been some media fuss over a South Korean man who died after 50 hours of playing video games. How soon the media has forgotten that in 2002, another South Korean man died after 80 hours of playing video games.

Perhaps this should be classified as suicide by video game: "in South Korea was 18.1 out of every 100,000 South Koreans died by suicide in 2002".

Mecca is already being destroyed

There has recently been some controversy over Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo's answer to the hypothetical question of how the U.S. should respond to multiple nuclear strikes by Islamic terrorists upon U.S. cities:

"Well, what if you said something like — if this happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites," Tancredo answered.
"You're talking about bombing Mecca," Campbell said.
"Yeah," Tancredo responded.

It may come as a surprise to learn that historical Mecca is already being destroyed by fundamentalist Islamists. Mathaba News carried this report originally published in the Independent Online:

Historic Mecca, the cradle of Islam, is being buried in an unprecedented onslaught by religious zealots.
Almost all of the rich and multi-layered history of the holy city is gone. The Washington-based Gulf Institute estimates that 95 per cent of millennium-old buildings have been demolished in the past two decades...
A Saudi architect, Sami Angawi, who is an acknowledged specialist on the region's Islamic architecture, told The Independent that the final farewell to Mecca is imminent: "What we are witnessing are the last days of Mecca and Medina."
According to Dr Angawi - who has dedicated his life to preserving Islam's two holiest cities - as few as 20 structures are left that date back to the lifetime of the Prophet 1,400 years ago and those that remain could be bulldozed at any time. "This is the end of history in Mecca and Medina and the end of their future..."
The motive behind the destruction is the Wahhabists' fanatical fear that places of historical and religious interest could give rise to idolatry or polytheism, the worship of multiple and potentially equal gods.

It appears that holy sites aren't revered by the Wahhabis in the same manner as that of Western Christians.

Why biology matters

A few weeks ago, it was reported that the overuse of the antiviral amantadine to combat bird flu in China has likely rendered amantadine useless for humans, leaving us with one less defense against a possible virulent avian flu. All remaining current options are more expensive. It also appears that Vietnam and Thailand may have abused amantadine as well.

On a worrisome note, it's been observed that a a mutation underlying genetic resistance to a chemical may also confer an advantage against hosts rather than being a disadvantage. A current understanding of genetics among decision-makers is increasingly vital to preventing blowback.

India and oil security

India is jumping into the race to secure oil supplies. Cf. India Daily piece from January 16:

India is on a big spree of buying oil and Gas assets all over the world. From Ecuador to UK to Myanmar, India is in the process of buying whatever assets it can get hold of.
Ecuador's energy minister said on Saturday he wanted India's Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) and Canada's EnCana Corp to speed up negotiations for the sale of Ecuadorian oil and gas assets. ONGC has bid for EnCana's oil and gas assets in Ecuador as a part of its bid to acquire stakes in petroleum projects abroad to meet the energy needs of India's rapidly growing economy.

Recently, ONGC has been pricing PetroKazakhstan.

Oil and Natural Gas Corp. (ONGC) has held initial talks to acquire PetroKazakhstan Inc., a Canadian firm with operations in central Asia, an official at the Indian company said.
State-run ONGC is also negotiating stakes in two Caspian oil exploration blocks in Kazakhstan, he said...
Indian firms, led by ONGC, have acquired stakes in oil and gas ventures in many countries including a 25 percent stake sold by Canada's Talisman Energy Inc. in Sudan's Greater Nile Project.

Coincidentally, Talisman Energy, PetroKazakhstan, and EnCana are all based in Canada.

In principle, the competition between China and India for oil assets should raise any resulting sale prices.

Opportunistic attack timing?

Perhaps it was perceived that the G8 summit would draw spare security resources away from London's infrastructure, thus providing an opportunity for attack.

It is still too early to say whether suicide attacks were involved or not, but it's worth keeping in mind that premature detonation in the past has taken out would-be bombers in the UK. In 1996, a member of the IRA died from his own bomb as it exploded while he was riding a bus. He was certainly no suicide bomber.

Also, there were no suicide bombers in the Madrid attack. Although three suspects apparently blew themselves up when cornered afterward, they were not in a hurry to die otherwise, as one suspect escaped the explosion.

A few thoughts on the recent attacks in London

If the attacks are indeed due to al Qaida and they are being strategic about it, then they should avoid direct attacks on U.S. soil in order to prevent a rally of support for U.S. troops in Iraq. Attacking the U.K. and Spain makes sense as part of an effort to demoralize U.S. allies in Iraq and provoke isolation of the U.S.A.

It may be a coincidence, but 2005 is numerologically equivalent to 7. Thus, 7-7-2005 becomes 7-7-7. Perhaps the chosen date was passed along via a coded phrase along the lines of "the luckiest day of the attack", hiding the numerological interpretation within what would appear to be merely a metaphor.

Going out on a limb, perhaps there was deliberate irony in attacking upon what would normally be a very auspicious day.

Early candidate application for NCC simulation

The Blue Brain Project cites one figure for the number of neurons in an NCC as being over 60,000.

It's worth noting that the experiment in which rat brain neurons spontaneously learned to fly a virtual F-22 required only 25,000 neurons.

Structure to the human brain, scale-free and otherwise

From the Blue Brain Project's page on the Neocortical Column (NCC):

The Neocortical Column (NCC) marks the quantum leap from reptiles to mammals and therefore constitutes the birth of mammalian intelligence and the emergence of human cognitive capabilities. The neocortex is the brain region that allows mammals to adapt so efficiently to a rapidly changing world.
The NCC is considered to be the smallest network of neurons that act as a functional unit exhibiting some of the most complex functions of the brain - the NCC is the elementary building block of the mammalian brain.
The NCC was such a highly successful circuit design, that it was repeatedly duplicated to become almost 80% of the human brain (millions of columns were added). In humans, the duplication continued at such a pace that the neocortex started folding in on itself to make more space for newly added columns, thus forming the highly convoluted human brain. (see The Brain: Our Universe Within).

It seems the ultimate ambition is for NCC function to be abstracted away, with the resulting simulation of human neural structure assembled in a scale-free manner. Cf. the abstract of a relatively recent paper titled "Scale-free brain functional networks":

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is used to extract functional networks connecting correlated human brain sites. Analysis of the resulting networks in different tasks shows that: (a) the distribution of functional connections, and the probability of finding a link vs. distance are both scale-free, (b) the characteristic path length is small and comparable with those of equivalent random networks, and (c) the clustering coefficient is orders of magnitude larger than those of equivalent random networks. All these properties, typical of scale-free small world networks, reflect important functional information about brain states.

Possible blowback from European overfishing in West African waters

According to a piece in National Geographic News on November 11, 2004, researchers suggested that the EU's appetite for West African seafood may be leading to an increased reliance on bush meat.

Researchers say dwindling fish stocks due to trawling by foreign fishing fleets is a key cause of the increase in the "bush meat" trade in Ghana.
The study, published tomorrow in the journal Science, claims to be the first to provide strong evidence of a link between local fish supply and bush-meat hunting...
Lead author Justin Brashares, assistant professor of ecosystems science at the University of California, Berkeley, says it's likely that other West African countries are similarly affected.
"If people aren't able to get their protein from fish, they'll turn elsewhere for food and economic survival," he said. "Unfortunately the impacts on wild game resources are not sustainable."

A press release from the WWF in 2003

The bush meat trade itself appears linked with recent outbreaks of ebola in west central Africa and the rise of new HIV strains in Cameroon which are not detected by current tests.

Thus, the European appetite for fish may be contributing to an increased rate of disease outbreaks. Not is Europe insulated. Bush meat is making its way back to the UK; other European countries are likely similarly affected.

Given current trends, I would expect overfishing to continue.

West Africa has a large indigenous fishing effort trawling its waters but it is the activities of EU-subsidised and other foreign fleets that have been criticised by conservation groups for accelerating the decline of fish stocks in the region...
The Science study notes that the European Union maintains the largest foreign presence off the coast of West Africa, with EU fish catches increasing 20-fold from 1950 to 2001, and financial subsidies jumping from $6m in 1981 to more than $350m in 2001.

Why are they afraid to say stagflation?

U.S. lawmakers seem eager to get China to revalue the yuan upward. This bit of commentary by Greenspan et al is subtle in that it is timid to press home the conclusion.

Greenspan poured cold water on the idea that a revaluation will shrink a record bilateral deficit with China that hit $162 billion last year. It will mean that suppliers will turn to other countries like Malaysia or Thailand...

"So essentially what we will find is we are importing from a different area but we'll be importing the same goods," Greenspan said. "The effect will be a rise in domestic prices in the United States and as a consequence of that..."

Private-sector analysts have suggested that a possible impact is higher U.S. interest rates if, as a result of a yuan revaluation, China buys fewer U.S. Treasury securities than it now must do in order to keep the yuan pegged to the dollar.

In short, Greenspan predicts inflation. Other analysts predict a rise in US interest rates to compensate for a drop in demand for U.S. Treasuries. The ongoing U.S. budget deficits require that debt be sold, so there won't be a drop in the supply of U.S. Treasuries. In short, it adds up to stagflation.

Red team advantage, or not?

At first this seems simple: if you want to be victorious, wear red.

Of 441 bouts, reds won 242 and in all four sports reds triumphed in more contests. And the red advantage was higher in close encounters: 62 per cent of red-garbed competitors won these. But in pushover contests there were similar numbers of red and blue winners. "If you're rubbish, a red shirt won't stop you from losing," Barton says.

However, it's not clear to me that they were able to rule out alternative hypotheses, such as blue relaxing an opponent and helping them win, or a combination of the two posited effects. Merely cutting out red won't eliminate the bias if other colors have an effect.

More oppressive than Gwen Stefani

I've seen a few blogs complaining of Gwen Stefani's use of asian woman as being demeaning by perpetuating stereotypes in the West.

Gwen Stefani has hired four geisha-like Japanese women to hawk her new Asian-inspired accessories line... Despite their all(sic) being fluent in English, she has stipulated in their contracts that they must only speak Japanese.

This past week, I ran across this piece regarding social conservatives in Japan.

In an effort to reinforce national family values in Japan, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is pushing to rewrite Article 24 of the island nation's constitution -- the legal crux of women's rights in post-World War II Japan.

The LDP says the move is necessary to stem a tide of individualism that's corrupting family and community values. As Masahiro Morioka, an LDP member in the House of Representatives, said in a report on Article 24, "The constitution must ensure that protecting family is the foundation of securing the nation."

The tone is pretty familiar here. A key difference is that they're promoting traditional Japanese values instead of traditional Christian values. Individualism is the enemy, rather than secularism. My intuition informs me that individualism is also a code word for Western values; thus, they consider Western values to be corrupting. They're certainly freaked out at the low birth rate for Japanese women; traditional marriage there is unattractive to modern career women.

Normally, married Japanese women have not only to look after their own parents during old age, but also to care for their parents-in-law. When it comes to raising kids, "they can't expect much cooperation from their partner" because of the long work hours required at many Japanese corporations and because of established gender roles that assume that the woman does the child-rearing...

Supermom and retirement home duty is a pretty heavy load.

Surprise revisited

It has come to my attention that in April, Jim Dunnigan wrote a piece warning that China is apparently planning an OOTB (out of the blue) attack on Taiwan. Nice to know my speculation last year wasn't far off the mark.

He followed up recently with a piece in May detailing the strategic importance of some oft ignored islands between China and Taiwan.

The lesser of energy evils?

James Locklove, originator of the Gaia Hypothesis, has riled environmentalists by claiming nuclear power is the only green solution capable of fending off global warming.

Meanwhile, the EU has two top priorities in energy research, aimed at cutting carbon emissions to keep up with the Kyoto Protocol: clean coal technologies, and underground sequestering of carbon dioxide from power plants.

Now that oil is becoming a liability, coal and nuclear are rising to the fore due to economic pressures. Alternative energy apparently isn't ramping up quickly enough to meet the expected need nor stave off global warming.

On a related note, last month China announced that it intends to build 40 new nuclear power plants by 2020. Currently, coal provides most of China's energy needs.

Culture war, RIAA-style

There's been a recent push to get college students used to the idea of paying for music, whether it be per tune or on a subscription basis. This paragraph says why.

"If kids build a habit to not pay for media, that is a habit that will persist maybe for their entire lives," said William Raduchel, chief executive at Herndon, Virginia-based Ruckus Network and a former executive at AOL Time Warner.

Enculturating consumer behavior early and often.

In short, lawsuits as a punitive measure only go so far. Their strategy has adapted to incorporate the positive element of encouraging the desired behavior.

Why debate never seems to resolve much

This APA Monitor article on intuition may offer up some insight:

In an article in this month's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 88, No. 3), the team presents its finding that people buy into the first-instinct myth because it feels worse to change a correct answer to an incorrect one than to stick with an original incorrect answer. And that feeling makes changing right answers to wrong more memorable than a wrong-to-right change and therefore seemingly more probable.

The end result of this cognitive bias is that people will tend to stick with bad initial judgments due to an aversion to making bad secondary judgments.

Reconstructing the administration

Now that Paul Wolfowitz has been tapped for World Bank head, the strategy of the U.S. administration is becoming clear. With Condoleeza Rice at the helm of the State Department, the U.S. administration now has a policy lock on two major organizations which have traditionally engaged in nation-building activities. Since it became evident that the U.S. military is not well-suited to nation-building, they apparently looked for existing organizations which could be folded into a coherent multi-department effort. Such nation-building will also serve U.S. strategic economic interests.

For example, there is an element of competition with two nascent economic engines in Asia. Referring to http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/bwi-wto/wbank/2004/1012easttimor.htm:

As Anne Carlin from the Bank Information Center points out in a recent report on IFI activity in Afghanistan, IFIs such as the World Bank have moved into nation building as a ‘new line of business’ to offset the reduced demand of large borrowers such as India and China. Timor’s Bank-managed trust fund system has been replicated in Afghanistan and was recently proposed in Iraq. All of these developments strengthen the claim that the World Bank and other IFIs are the de-facto managers of the ‘developing’ world.
The Bank’s CEP in Timor epitomizes the contradictions of the new trend in nation building on the quick.

The shift was tracked in the piece at http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/01/05/study_urges_bigger_role_for_state_dept/:

A senior advisory board to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is recommending a significant expansion of the State Department to cope with the diplomatic challenges of nation-building efforts that cannot be met by the Pentagon.
The new study by the Defense Science Board also takes indirect aim at the Bush administration's preparations for postwar Iraq, saying that achieving political success following military victory requires ''effective planning and preparation in the years before the outbreak of hostilities."

The U.S. efforts to assists tsunami victims was also part of this coherent policy, and has already paid off, at least in the short term, with reduced anti-American sentiment in Indonesia. Cf. http://cippad.usc.edu/ai/tsunami/tsunami_news.cfm:

According to a recent poll carried out by the Indonesian pollster Lembaga Survei Indonesia, Indonesians' backing for Osama bin Laden dropped from 58% in 2003 to 23% today. The poll also found out that 65% of Indonesians view the United States more favorably in the aftermath of the country's military logistic support and millions of dollars in private and government aid for tsunami-hit Indonesia. The poll included 1,200 adults in Indonesia, and it was commissioned by Terror Free Tomorrow, which is a U.S.-based non-profit organization that seeks to defeat global terrorism by undermining the support base that empowers extremists. (Source: Reuters, March 4, 2005).

Now that the fuss has died down

According to a piece originally published on December 28, 2004 in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Democrats lost 97 of the 100 fastest growing counties in the USA. Suburban voting power.

The 100 U.S. counties that grew the fastest from April 2000 to July 2003 cumulatively grew by 16 percent, according to the Los Angeles Times analysis. Their Republicanism also is growing. In last month's election, they provided Bush with a 1.72 million vote advantage over Kerry, almost four times the margin they gave Bob Dole eight years ago, according to the Times.

This apparent New York Times piece from November 10, 2002 predicted this demographic shift.

These exurbs are booming. Before 1980, says Robert Lang, a demographer at Virginia Tech, only a quarter of all office space was in the suburbs. But about 70 percent of the office space created in the 1990's was in suburbia, and now 42 percent of all offices are located there. You have a tribe of people who don't live in cities, or commute to cities, or have any contact with urban life. Mesa, Ariz., another quintessential exurb east of Phoenix, already has more people than St. Louis. Extrapolate out a few years, and some of these sprawling suburbs will have political clout equal to Chicago's.

Forget the reductionist Red-Blue dichotomy. In the case of a nearly evenly divided electorate, every major demographic segment becomes a potential swing vote.

This piece originally in The Financial Times on November 4, 2004 also points to the exurbs as a key future battleground:

... the greatest hope for each party's future lies less in the Old America of the Great Plains and industrial mid west, but in the fast-growing Sunbelt states of the south-east and west. Since the elder Bush was elected president in 1988, 27 electoral college votes have shifted to these states and they now account for 59 per cent of national growth in eligible voters since the last presidential election.
At first blush, Sunbelt state growth appears to be fuelled primarily by younger Republican constituencies: white middle-class families along with affluent retirees. These newcomer suburbanites should welcome the Republicans' conservative economic pitch of tax-cuts, school vouchers and the like. By joining home-grown, conservative constituencies of the religious right, it is not hard to see why most of the south and much of the non-coastal west will continue leaning Republican.

Where is US inflation?

My position is that Wal-Mart holds the clue. From a December 2003 piece in Fast Company:

Wal-Mart wields its power [as buyer] for just one purpose: to bring the lowest possible prices to its customers... Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas.

Now overseas firms are also facing the brunt of this pricing pressure. Since the USA still functions in many ways as buyer of last resort, this same principle applies to the US economy as a whole. In any area where suppliers cannot find an alternative buying in a timely manner, they will compromise in order to sell to the USA. Though one might expect the decline of the US dollar to have prompted more inflation, the impact of Wal-Mart and cash-strapped US companies has been synergistic in demanding lower pricing as the US dollar has fallen. In an efficient just-in-time supply chain, inventory left to build up is an additional cost. Foreign suppliers with nowhere else to go are faced with the disruptive option of stockpiling and producing less while still having to pay out accounts receivables, or accepting a reduced price and sustaining cash flow. Inflation is thus kept at bay in areas where suppliers cannot find alternative buyers.

The resulting profit squeeze then puts a premium on efficiency and productivity in order to remain profitable. The efficiency of Wal-Mart is even welcomed in China for such a transformational effect, as it puts pressure to reduce waste due to corruption. From a December 20, 2004 article in Newsweek:

Wal-Mart buys so many Chinese-made products that if it were a country, it would be China's sixth largest export market (after Germany) and its eighth largest trade partner. The company's iron-fisted price and performance demands on suppliers are changing the way China does business... China, more than most nations, welcomes the disruptive impact of Wal-Mart's business model... Chinese suppliers say Wal-Mart is already having a transformative effect on everything from supply chains, to distribution networks, to customer service. ...the spread of Wal-Mart stores is raising efficiency standards for a growing number of Chinese suppliers... Government officials see Wal-Mart as a good way to accelerate China's transition from state planning to free markets and to "bring the country's economy into the 21st century," says Li Fei, a retail-marketing professor at Tsinghua University.

Wal-Mart and other US buyers are thus acting in concert to check inflation. Of course, this approach has not limited the price of oil or gold where there are viable alternative buyers; in those particular cases, it has been the euro which has been the price limiter rather than the US dollar.