India and conflict diamonds

It may not yet be common knowledge that the Indian diaspora has achieved dominance in Belgium's diamond industry.

The Indian diamond community in Antwerp, Belgium has gained control over the trade's main governing body, the Diamond High Council.
Diamond traders from India won five out of the six seats on the board of the Hoge Raa Voor Diamant (HRD), the group that regulates and represents the diamond sector in the rough diamond capital of Antwerp...
Today, Indians control 60 percent of Antwerp's rough and polished diamonds, worth an estimated $36 billion in 2006.

Occasionally, there's a reminder of India's probably link with conflict diamonds.

The murder of an Indian diamond trader in Angola last week and the disappearance of the US$1 million worth of diamonds in his possession has rekindled a three-year-old debate on India's probable link with conflict, or "blood", diamonds.
... Sources say that it would be naive to rule out a possible Indian link to conflict diamonds, since the country is the largest importer of the gemstone, as well as a dominant force in the cutting and polishing of rough diamonds.

Why does this matter? Human suffering aside, a piece from 2003 linked conflict diamonds with terrorist fundraising.

"Diamonds are an extremely highly concentrated form of wealth and they retain their value," said Alex Yearsley from the campaign group Global Witness...
Facing financial difficulties in 1993 following the establishment of operations in Sudan, [al-Qaeda] is said to have bought and sold gems to raise funds.
"Hezbollah (a Shiite Muslim organisation linked to Lebanese activists) fundraised through diamonds. They used the Lebanese diaspora in Western and Central Africa. Israel tried to shut down networks in Sierra Leone," said Mr Yearsley.

Unfortunately, states with porous borders such as Angola are difficult to effectively monitor.

Face recognition will enable a Web 2.0 Panopticon

It appears that a search engine will scan faces on the web. The technology is being deployed by Polar Rose.

In January users will be able to download a plugin for their browser that allows users to enter information about faces they recognise in online images. This data is then sent to a central server allowing anyone looking at an image containing that particular face print to tell who it is. Users can also search the web for more photos containing that face.

Meanwhile, the suspect in a surveillance video that was posted to YouTube by police has apparently turned himself in.

[Hamilton] Police uploaded the video clip to YouTube in early December, hoping it would draw out witnesses. Since the time it was uploaded, the video was reportedly viewed online about 17,000 times...
Investigators believed the jumpy video of people at a concert would get wide exposure among the age group of people who attended the Nov. 16 show...

Police may have expected that the video would also be exposed to the suspect.

The trend of harvesting biometric data from the web continues. The ultimate result is likely to be a Web 2.0, participatory take on the Panopticon, with people eagerly watching each other, enabling monitoring by citizen stalkers as well as authorities. Cellphone cameras and surveillance video cameras will be distributed eyes everywhere.

A radioactive probe?

It's recently been reported that up to 30,000 passengers were being tracked for having flown on three London-Moscow route British Airways planes which may have been involved in the polonium-210 poisoning of Litvinenko. This raises the question of why a radioisotope was used for the attack when a more conventional poison would have sufficed.

Perhaps the attack was also a probe of Western capability to track and/or stop a radiological attack. It's clear that British Airways was not able to intercept the polonium en route.

Middle East proliferation threat without technogy transfer

The Times (UK) recently reported that six Arab states announced plans to acquire nuclear power.

The countries involved were named by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Saudi Arabia. Tunisia and the UAE have also shown interest.
Mark Fitzpatrick, an expert on nuclear proliferation at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said that it was clear that the sudden drive for nuclear expertise was to provide the Arabs with a “security hedge”.

I'm willing to be we likely won't see this as a publicly stated policy, but one reason to check Iran's nuclear ambitions is to keep the Middle East from proliferating.

Perhaps it is already too late. Once a desire to seek nuclear power is officially announced, it would be difficult politically to backtrack. Still, stopping Iran may delay that eventuality, by removing the source of urgency.

Talk of an Iranian baby boom

Recently, Ahmadinejad called for a population boom in Iran:

Mr Ahmadinejad said: “I am against saying that two children are enough. Our country has a lot of capacity. It has the capacity for many children to grow in it. It even has the capacity for 120 million people. Westerners have got problems. Because their population growth is negative, they are worried and fear that if our population increases, we will triumph over them.”

Why the rush to reproduce? Any baby boom initiated now wouldn't be combat-ready until the later 2020s. However, one lesson of Iraq is that occupying and holding onto territory needs manpower. Perhaps it's intended to enable Iranian regional expansion in a generation. If Iran contends that Israel will be wiped off the map, they may seek to fill the gap.

Another scenario is to ensure that Shiite muslims aren't demographically triumphed over by Sunni muslims. It's also worth noting that Iran's replacement rate is below the United States:

Perhaps the biggest surprise, given received notions about the Arab/Muslim expanse, is the recent spread of sub-replacement fertility to parts of the Arab and the Muslim world. Algeria, Tunisia, and Lebanon are now sub-replacement countries, as is Turkey. And there is the remarkable case of Iran, with a current TFR of under 1.9, which is lower than the United States'. Between 1986 and 2000, the country's TFR plummeted from well over 6 to just over 2.

An even longer-term scenario would be the hope of ensuring that Iran has enough population to support retired workers later this century.

Environmentalism in the Third World is weak

In January, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina announced plans to build a pipeline through the Amazon. A recent article claims that China's Three Gorges Dam is viewed positively by an influential South African.

...former South African minister of water affairs and forestry Ronnie Kasrils wrote an article praising the Three Gorges Dam which was published in China’s People’s Daily.

I was unable to locate and confirm said piece in English.

Meanwhile, India was urged to save its tigers from being driven to extinction by poachers. Tigers in the Sariska reserve were wiped out. The remaining tigers could be extinct in a generation. On the Tibetan side, tiger skins were on brazen display.

These data points should be seen as a warning to the West that environmentalism is not a priority in third world countries. It is also evidence that leftist governments are not automatically environmentalists either.

The networked cost of executive pay

A recent bit of research quantified the network cost of the executive pay as well as its impact upon turnover. For instance, one finding:

Arguments have been made that even if a CEO is overpaid, a large company can easily absorb the cost. However, the researchers found that CEO pay has direct consequences for compensation at lower employee levels. That’s because the effects of CEO overpayment cascade – at diminishing degrees – down to subordinates. For example, based on their models, where one CEO was overpaid by 64 percent, individuals in his/her company at Level 2 (COO, CFO, etc.) were overpaid by 26 percent, while individuals at Level 5 (division general managers) were overpaid by 12 percent. The cumulative effect of this systemic overpayment impacts overall organizational performance and shareholder value.

The cascade impact provides financial incentive to drive preferential attachment. The more highly connected one is, the more likely one is to partake of any related overpayment.

The research also found that the perception of unfairness was key to turnover and confirms the common sense notion that employees at the lower levels have limits to the amount of inequality they will tolerate. This phenomenon will no doubt be further quantified in neuroeconomic studies.

Calling for the Mahdi

Tucked away at the bottom of a speech delivered at the United Nations, Iranian President Ahmadinejad made a religious plea for the "perfect human being" to arrive. From the full text:

"I emphatically declare that today's world, more than ever before, longs for just and righteous people with love for all humanity; and above all longs for the perfect righteous human being and the real savior who has been promised to all peoples and who will establish justice, peace and brotherhood on the planet.
"O, Almighty God, all men and women are your creatures and you have ordained their guidance and salvation. Bestow upon humanity that thirsts for justice, the perfect human being promised to all by you, and make us among his followers and among those who strive for his return and his cause."

This appears to be restatement of his expectation of the return of the Mahdi in an earlier speech to the United Nations. Presumably the delegates weren't as surprised this time around.

Bombing and redistricting

It appears Hezbollah and its ally in the recent combat in Lebanon aren't handing out reconstruction money in a fair manner.

Abou Hassan said he hadn't supported Hezbollah or Amal and received no money for his damaged home or his mother's house, which was flattened.
"It's a mafia -- if you don't support Hezbollah or Amal, you get nothing," he bellowed. "America and Iran are fighting their little war in Lebanon, and I don't get a dime for my broken house," he said...

From a military standpoint, it would benefit Hezbollah to rebuild safe houses first, where supplies could be cached in anticipation of the next round of conflict, as well as rewarding supporters.

A consequence of such a policy would also be to discourage non-supporters from staying in affected regions, and that would be reflected in any upcoming polls in Lebanon.

When Darfur rebels do not want to be saved

According to a Reuters piece dated July 14, Eritrea opposes UN intervention in Darfur. They're not a disinterested party, as they back the Sudanese Liberation Army, one of two major Darfur rebel groups. Furthermore, in May, Human Rights Watch documented an pattern of increasing attacks by rebels upon humanitarian convoys and aid workers, apparently with the intent of converting vehicles into battlefield platforms.

Given this confluence, it would seem that a major Darfur rebel group would rather that the genocidal conflict continue in Sudan, and that they perceive some gains to be had in the future given the absence of UN intervention. If so, resolving the Darfur conflict will take more than getting the Sudanese government to disarm the Arab Janjawid, many of whom appear to have been incorporated into Sudanese armed forces.

Rearming Hezbollah fast

I previously noted Hezbollah's estimated cost of U$180M for reconstruction, courtesy of Iranian funding. Consider the price of a Katyusha rocket on the black market. From 2001:

The Katyusha costs about $1,000 on the black market," says Tom Romesser, who heads TRW's space and technology division. "You can stop one with a Patriot missile, but you can't keep putting a $1 million weapon against a $1,000 threat."

Even if a Katyusha rocket were to cost $2K on the black market now, a mere U$8M would be sufficient to acquire 4,000 rockets. If even 10% of the U$180M were ultimately diverted to arms purchases (Hezbollah also runs construction companies, and thus can recycle profits), that would amount to quite a few rockets and launchers, allowing Hezbollah to rearm quickly for yet another round of massive rocket fire.

Hezbollah credibility undermined by Iranian forgers?

It's been alleged that Hezbollah is distributing counterfeit US $100 bills to Lebanese families, based on casual analysis of photos of the bills that have been published in the press.

Blaming Hezbollah for the alleged forgery may be premature. Earlier I commented on Iran's financial backing of Hezbollah, funnelling "unlimited" reconstruction money through them instead of the Lebanese government. The money is coming from Iran, which is known to have the equipment to counterfeit supernotes.

At first, investigators thought they originated in Lebanon. Another theory from the 1990s held that Iran produced them on equipment purchased by the Shah two decades earlier and then shipped the bills to Lebanon via Syria.

At this point, I think it's safe to conclude that Iran appears to be the source of supernotes in the Middle East.

Addendum: Even if the money were legitimate, Iran can use aid money to launder arms transfers. Consider the amount of money Hezbollah has claimed that will be required. The amount is in the ballpark of U$180M.

Hizbullah has been handing out $12,000 in cash to families who lost their homes in the Israeli bombing campaign. According to Hizbullah calculations, more than 15,000 housing units were destroyed.

There's nothing to keep money from being fraudulently claimed and funneled to rearm Hezbollah. It's also possible additional money could also be sent under the table to be skimmed and used for arms purchases. There's no chance the parties involved would open up their aid operation to an outside auditor.

Dollar hegemony safe for now

This August 17 piece in The Australian indicates that Gulf countries are recycling petrodollars back into US assets.

The IIF warns that poor capital account data makes it impossible to track capital flows from the region with any precision. But it says "the bulk of the region's surplus is used to finance portfolio investment. We suspect that the bulk of the surpluses are finding their way - one way or another - into the major capital markets, predominantly in the US"...
While some GCC countries have pledged to increase the proportion of their central bank reserves held in euros, these reserves account for only a small proportion of their total foreign assets, most of which are held in investment companies.
"With their fixed currency pegs, there is little incentive for GCC countries to undermine the (US) dollar," the report notes.

Needless to say, this would imply that the petroeuro is not about to take off and demolish US dollar hegemony any time soon. If petrodollars are being invested mostly in US capital markets, then US dollars are precisely the currency they need in order to minimize frictional loss due to currency exchange, while the currency pegs reduce risk due to currency fluctuation. A petroeuro, a petroyuan, or even a petrorupee would only be viable if portfolio investments were to shift significantly to the respective regions. Combined with Asian countries buying US Treasuries, it's a collective global vote of confidence in the dollar, at least for now

This could also be framed as global funding of the US-led War on Terror by both China and US-friendly GCC countries.

Iranian backing of Hezbollah

Iran is funding Hezbollah reconstruction to an unlimited amount. Note that they are funding Hezbollah in particular, not the Lebanese government.

Nehme Y Tohme, a member of Parliament from the anti-Syrian reform bloc and the country's minister for the displaced, said he had been told by Hezbollah officials that when the shooting stopped, Iran would provide Hezbollah with an "unlimited budget" for reconstruction.
In his 'victory speech', Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, offered money for "decent and suitable furniture" and a year's rent on a house to any Lebanese who lost his home in the month-long war. "Completing the victory," he said, "can come with reconstruction."

Completing the victory? I would expect Hezbollah reconstruction crews to integrate ammunition and supply depots and bunkers in any new construction, as such were key to their recent neutralization of Israeli military doctrine. Such funds transfers would also provide a means of laundering money with which Hezbollah could then use to recompose its missile arsenal, no doubt with am aim toward longer-range missiles.

It's also worth recalling Nasrallah's earlier threat:

Hizbullah leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, warned in a taped television speech that rockets would be fired at Tel Aviv if the centre of Beirut was attacked. "If you bomb our capital Beirut, we will bomb the capital of your usurping entity ... We will bomb Tel Aviv," he said.

Such a threat would be lack credibility if he were merely relying on Katyusha rockets and even Fajr-5 missiles, as they lack sufficient range (100 km in the case of the Fajr-5), given that Tel Aviv is approximately 120 km south of the border with Lebanon. This implies Hezbollah possessed the Iranian-made Zilzal-2. This was later confirmed by an Iranian official.

An Iranian MP who helped found the Hezbollah terrorist group has confirmed for the first time that Teheran has equipped it with long-range missiles capable of hitting "any target in Israel"...
"There are countries that have weapons but don't have the courage to use them," said Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur, Iran's former ambassador to Damascus, who holds a government-appointed post as secretary-general to the Palestinian uprising (intifada) conference.
"Hezbollah's arsenal not only includes Katyusha missiles, but also Zelzal-2 missiles, which could hit targets as far as 160 miles (250 km), leaving no spot in Israel unreachable."

Veiled encouragement for Hezbollah to use the Zilzal-2, as well as a connection to Syria. If the claimed range is accurate, this also means that a Tel Aviv strike would be feasible from north of the Litani River.

Harvesting biometric data from the web

A web application comparing oneself to celebrities? Cute, sure. It's hosted off a genealogy site.

The technology got me curious. The application was powered by Cognitec GmbH.

One of their product applications: biometric border control.

The present: gathering biometric data from around the world enables them to refine their face recognition algorithms to handle the variety expressed by the human race.

The future: biometrics combined with genealogy data could be used to assess genetic background on the fly at borders and airports, enabling scans for relatives of suspects.

A nuclear Iran within the decade is possible

Recently, Iran's nuclear negotiator Larenjani announced that Iran would be expanding its enrichment capability.

Iran said it plans to install 3,000 centrifuges at its enrichment plant in Natanz, central Iran, by the last quarter of 2006. Industrial production of enriched uranium in Natanz would require 54,000 centrifuges.

Even if one uses a lower-end estimate of 2-3 work units per centrifuge, that still means 6,000-9,000 work units annually, sufficient to fuel 1-1.5 nuclear weapons. It would do Iran less good to test a nuclear weapon without having another one in reserve; thus having enough fuel for 2-3 weapons would be prudent on their part. This leads to a possible timeline of 2009 for an Iran capable of nuclear attacks.

It is also worth noting that Iran is capable of launching dirty bomb attacks if it is willing to employ reactor-grade uranium.

Al Qaida in a race against Iran?

There is an apparent rift among al Qaida over Hezbollah.

31 July (AKI) - Al-Qaeda representatives in Saudi Arabia are refusing to toe the line with the group's leadership in supporting the Lebanese Shiite group, Hezbollah... "Support for Hezbollah, and its eventual victory would cause enormous problems for our relationship with the people," according to the latest [online] issue of "The Voice of Jihad".
Such views appear sharply at odds with those expressed by al-Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who in an appeal televised by ... al-Jazeera last week, called on Sunni Muslims to help their Shiite brother from Hezbollah fight the Israelis.

Al Qaida is Sunni and hostile to Shiites, as evidenced by Zawahiri's backing of Zarqawi. Hezbollah is Shiite, so Zawahiri's support for them requires some explanation.

Zawahiri may see this as a race against Iran. If Iran gets the bomb, that's a big ace in its hand when it comes to a Sunni-Shia showdown over who gets to control the holy sites. If Israel falls before Iran gets nukes, then the Sunni can maintain a numerical advantage in ensuing sectarian warfare. Thus, support for Hezbollah is tactical and does not contradict al Qaida's overall anti-Shiite strategic stance. If so, al Qaida is under pressure to make things happen before Iran gains military nuclear capability.

The use of an evacuated hospital

On the 2nd, CNN reported on an Israeli raid on a Lebanese hospital being used as a Hezbollah post:

Israel's military released video Wednesday that it said proved a hospital it raided overnight in Lebanon was a Hezbollah headquarters. Hezbollah disputed the account.
Israeli special forces raided the hospital near Baalbeck, snatching five militants and killing 10 others, Israel's army said.
Hezbollah, however, said Israel arrested five civilians who were not members of the Islamic militia.
Israeli video of the scene appeared to show weapons that Israeli soldiers discovered during a search of the hospital...

There's one thing wrong with the Hezbollah denial above: it was apparently contradicted by an earlier Hezbollah claim. From the 1st:

Hezbollah denied the claim, saying “the citizens kidnapped in Baalbek are normal civilians”. A statement broadcast by Hezbollah’s Al Manar television said: “The Resistance announces that it has foiled an Israeli landing operation in Baalbek and denies that the enemy has captured any of its members.”
A Hezbollah spokesman had earlier said that Israeli troops were surrounded after attacking Dar Al Hikmeh Hospital, which is run by the rebel group, about two kilometres southwest of Baalbek.
The spokesman said all patients had been evacuated from the hospital on July 12, when Hezbollah fighters captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid.

If all patients were evacuated weeks ago, what was the hospital being used for?

Fingerprinting the world

The EU is drafting plans to fingerprint all children. From July 30:

Under laws being drawn up behind closed doors by the European Commission's 'Article Six' committee, which is composed of representatives of the European Union's 25 member states, all children will have to attend a finger-printing centre to obtain an EU passport by June 2009 at the latest.

The apparent reason they are not considering requiring prints from children younger than six is biological; children's prints have not fully developed before that age. It's still unclear how far the resulting data will eventually be shared between member countries.

Meanwhile, the US will expand its fingerprinting program to cover all resident aliens. From July 27:

[Over 11 million] legal permanent residents will soon have to be fingerprinted and photographed before reentering the United States by sea or air, in a significant expansion of a long-stalled border security program, officials announced...

At the bottom of the piece, we are warned to expect full ten-finger print databases to deployed in a few years on a global scale.

The Homeland Security system now collects two fingerprints from each person, but officials hope to pilot a 10-print system next year and deploy it in 2008 or 2009. The smaller system cannot tap into an FBI fingerprint database or include enough data to accurately identify individuals in the entire population, Mocny said. The European Union, Britain and Japan now are looking at fingerprint requirements for their border systems.

It follows that, given the scope of the draft EU rules, technical requirements will force them to require the full ten prints from children.

A meaningless debate point on Iraqi WMD

The Washington Times reported on a recent Harris poll which asked American opinions regarding WMD in Iraq:

Half of Americans now say Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the United States invaded the country in 2003 -- up from 36 percent last year, a Harris poll finds. Pollsters deemed the increase both "substantial" and "surprising" in light of persistent press reports to the contrary in recent years.
The survey did not speculate on what caused the shift in opinion, which supports President Bush's original rationale for going to war. Respondents were questioned in early July after the release of a Defense Department intelligence report that revealed coalition forces recovered 500 aging chemical weapons containing mustard or sarin gas nerve agents in Iraq.
"Filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist," said Sen. Rick Santorum, Pennsylvania Republican, during a June 21 press conference detailing the newly declassified information.

All well and fine for scoring debate points on a reductionist question of "WMD or no WMD?", but it has little to do with why the USA went to war.

Senior U.S. intelligence officials said Thursday they have no evidence that Iraq produced chemical weapons after the 1991 Gulf War, despite recent reports from media outlets and Republican lawmakers...
Pentagon officials told NBC News that the munitions are the same kind of ordnance the U.S. military has been gathering in Iraq for the past several years, and "not the WMD we were looking for when we went in this time."

No smoking gun. The pollster thus asked the wrong question. Whether the WMD were pre- or post-Gulf War is important. Being correct on an irrelevant technicality is not. It is flawed logic to conclude that the opinion poll either supports or does not support the U.S. administration rationale to go to war.

Politically partisan cognition as branding

With regard to politically partisan cognition, it's worth comparing emotional investment in commercial branding as a related phenomenon.

We are emotionally attached to the products we use regularly, so much so that we become defensive and tense when they are criticized, says a new study from the September issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. Interestingly, the more committed we are to a product – and thus the more incensed we are by any critique – the more counterarguments we are able to come up with.
"Less loyal individuals more readily agree with the unfavorable information and change their attitudes to be consistent with the new information," write Sekar Raju (University of Buffalo) and H. Rao Unnava (Ohio State University). "More loyal consumers question and argue against the information."

Given that emotional attachment can result in increased counterargumentation, it follows that political partisans would tend to counterargue rather than accept unfavorable information. It is therefore unsurprising that unpleasant facts may be hard for partisans to accept, at least initially.

A Shiite axis in the Middle East

Hezbollah in control in Lebanon, usurping the government.

Already the new fighting has deepened divisions in Lebanon, mostly along sectarian lines. The country's 1.2 million Shiites largely support Hezbollah, while Sunnis, Christians and Druse mostly oppose it.

The Mahdi Army patrols the streets in Iraq.

...the Mahdi Army's image as a defender of Shiites is largely responsible for its revival more than a year after American troops killed hundreds, if not thousands, of the black-clad fighters during two uprisings that al-Sadr led against the coalition in 2004.

The Shiite leadership in Iran goes without saying. Iran has a long history of providing rockets to Hezbollah. Increased lethality IED technology has apparently been transferred from Iran to Iraq.

Three of a kind.

Bomb blasts in India: echoes of al Qaida

As the news rolls in, currently over 160 have died from a series of bomb blasts on India's rail network. It appears the attacks meant to echo al Qaida's previous bombings. Multiple, near-simultaneous blasts. An attack involving transportation infrastructure. The 7th month echoes the London attack; the 11th day echoes the New York and Madrid attacks. It even appears they also targeted the financial sector.

Local reports said the bombs appeared to have targeted first-class compartments, as commuters were returning home from the city's financial district.

Suicide bombing and information processing deficit

Newman has a challenging alternate explanation for psychopathy, one which seems better able to model functional psychopaths.

The dominant scientific model asserts that psychopathic individuals are incapable of fear or other emotions, which in turn makes them indifferent to other people's feelings.
But Newman has a different idea entirely. He believes that psychopathy is essentially a type of learning disability or "informational processing deficit" that makes individuals oblivious to the implications of their actions when focused on tasks that promise instant reward. Being focused on a short-term goal, Newman suggests, makes psychopathic individuals incapable of detecting surrounding cues such as another person's discomfort or fear...
"People think (psychopaths) are just callous and without fear, but there is definitely something more going on," Newman says. "When emotions are their primary focus, we've seen that psychopathic individuals show a normal (emotional) response. But when focused on something else, they become insensitive to emotions entirely."

Given the example of the suicide bomber, it is quite plausible to posit that religious indoctrination, cultural priming, and social pressure could be applied to selectively induce an informational processing deficit, permitting a person to focus on the act of suicide bombing, becoming insensitive to other people's emotions and possibly their own. Idée fixe.

A womb's solution to male sibling rivalry?

A Canadian study reported that boys with more older biological brothers tended to be gay.

Previous research had revealed the more older brothers a boy has, the more likely he is to be gay, but the reason for this phenomenon was unknown...
Professor Anthony Bogaert from Brock University in Ontario, Canada, studied 944 heterosexual and homosexual men with either "biological" brothers, in this case those who share the same mother, or "non-biological" brothers, that is, adopted, step or half siblings.
... the link between the number of older brothers and homosexuality only existed when the siblings shared the same mother.
The amount of time the individual spent being raised with older brothers did not affect their sexual orientation.

One report contained a conservative objection:

Tim Dailey, a senior fellow at the conservative Center for Marriage and Family Studies disagreed...
“If it is indeed genetically based it is difficult to see how it could have survived in the gene pool over a period of time,” Mr. Dailey added.

It takes a bit of imagination. For instance, here's a simple hypothesis to consider: a reduction in sibling rivalry for large broods. A gay brother is less likely to fight a heterosexual brother for access to fertile females. Since males are capable of impregnating many females, there is little penalty for reducing net male fertility.

Market forces and female infanticide

Recently, it was reported that a scarcity of women in India has resulted in wife rental:

According to reports, prompted by a shortage of eligible single women, some poverty-stricken husbands in western India have gone to the extent of renting out their wives to other men on a monthly rate.
The local newspaper the Times of India reports that one man allowed his farm laborer wife, and mother of two, to stay with her boss for 8,000 rupees (175 dollars) a month. Many poor families and middlemen have also cashed in on the shortage of women by selling off their daughters to men in Gujarat, one of India's wealthiest states.

I wonder how long before girls are considered a long-term investment. With regard to societal change, perhaps this ongoing scarcity will result in the end of the traditional dowry that made daughters an economic liability instead of an asset.

Suicide bombing as motivated cognition

According to University of Toronto sociology professor Robert Brym, revenge motivates suicide bombers.

Contrary to what most academic research has shown, says Brym, "revenge and retaliation seem to be the principal animus driving this suicide bombing campaign. We see this when we examine when attacks occur, what people say about why they're taking place and when we look at the actual costs and benefits gained."
Brym and his research team created a database of collective violence events that occurred during the second intifada, the term generally used to describe the Palestinian uprising against Israel that began in the fall of 2000. The team collected data on 138 attacks from existing databases, Hebrew and Arabic newspapers and the New York Times. They then mined the database for 128 variables, examining individual motives, organizational rationales and events that led up to each attack...
By examining statements made by bombers, their families or representatives from organizations they claimed to be working for, the authors found that attacks were not generally governed by a strategic logic, as is often believed to be the case, but were motivated by a desire for revenge. By examining events that preceded each specific attack, they found that particular Israeli actions such as killings prompted most attacks. "For the most part," they write, bombers "gave up their lives to avenge the killing of a close relative, as retribution for specific attacks against the Palestinian people or as payback for perceived attacks against Islam."
Even at the organizational level -- when attacks were organized by groups like Hamas -- where strategic concerns might be assumed to be more common, six out of ten rationales focused on avenging specific Israeli actions...
This suicide bombing campaign simply isn't working in the sense that the Palestinians are not realizing any strategic gains as a result, says Brym. On the other side of the conflict, he says, "Israeli acts of oppression are also counter-productive...
"From a utilitarian point of view, the conflict is irrational. It doesn't bring about intended results for either side. The idea of laying blame on one side or the other doesn't get us very far, analytically speaking. Unless it's understood as an interaction, it can't be understood fully -- or resolved."

I blogged in 2004 on research indicating that suicide bombers are not insane, but motivated by revenge. Given that humans appear to have a neurological mechanism that rewards a desire for revenge, the next operational question I'd like answered is what specifically triggers revenge. What cultures and contexts promote the expression of revenge?

Jessica Stern makes an interesting comment with regard to anger and humiliation:

One way to summarize the distinction that helps us understand Al Qaeda is to say that bin Laden's objectives are really expressive, not instrumental. Those groups that have set instrumental objectives are not going to carry out catastrophic attacks, because such attacks will never achieve those objectives, whereas groups that are expressing anger can continuously change their mission statement. If you have a broad one, based on rage, one day you can say that it's to force U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia. The next it can be about Iraqi children. The third day it can be about the Palestinians. That's a way to appeal to a much wider public.
Another thing about expressive terrorism is that it enables cynical leaders to attract youth who feel humiliated, culturally or personally.

Further research into terrorism and motivated cognition would appear to be a promising avenue. On a side note, consider how motivated reasoning may apply to the rationalization of terrorist acts. In other paradigms, religious correctness may be another validity metric used in evaluating what acts are permissible and what are not.

In an influential review, Ziva Kunda (1990) summarized several decades of research supporting the role of motivation in cognitive processes such as decision-making and attitude change. She claimed that motivation has been shown to affect reasoning in a number of paradigms, including cognitive dissonance reduction, beliefs about others on whom one's own outcomes depend, and evaluation of scientific evidence related to one's own outcomes. Her analysis of this research led further to the conclusion that motivated reasoning is only possible when the individual is able to generate apparently reasonable justifications for the motivated belief; this happens, however, outside of the person's conscious awareness. This is achieved via bias in accessing, constructing, and evaluating beliefs.

Were the alleged Canadian terrorists too stupid to take a hint?

According to the Toronto Star, the alleged terrorists were stupid.

Their so-called training camp turns out to have been a swath of bush near Washago, where their activities — shooting off firearms and playing paintball — were so obvious and so irritating that local residents immediately called police.
Serious terrorists ... base their operations in remote areas where no one will bother them. These suspects, it is alleged, simply trespassed on someone's farm and, when the owner told them to leave, gave him lip.

Consider the report that RCMP engages in disruptive tactics to deter and forestall terrorist acts.

The RCMP has quietly broken up at least a dozen terrorist groups in the past two years, according to documents obtained by The Globe and Mail...
Disruptive tactics -- sometimes as simple as letting targets know they are under close surveillance -- are used to prevent a terrorist attack when the police do not have enough evidence to lay criminal charges, the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service say.

Perhaps their operation was permitted to go as far as they did because they weren't an uncontrollable threat (as evidenced by the successful sting operation), and the likelihood that they were too stupid to take a hint to stop.

The Pentagon and the "long war"

Back in February, the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review of 2005 spoke of a long war:

The document, known by its acronym, QDR, opens with the words: "The US is engaged in what will be a long war."

It's not of their choosing. Al Qaida strategists beat them to it. According to this analysis by Michael Scheuer:

Al-Qaeda believes that it and its allies can only defeat the United States in a "long war", one that allows the Islamists to capitalize on their extraordinary patience, as well as on their enemies' lack thereof. Before his death in a firefight with Saudi security forces, the leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Abu Hajar Abd al-Aziz al-Muqrin, wrote extensively about how al-Qaeda believed the military fight against the US and its allies would unfold. He envisioned a point at which the mujahideen would have to develop semi-conventional forces. He identified this period as the "Decisive Stage" [1].

The piece cited is dated February 2, 2004, approximately two years before the release of the latest QDR.

Al-Muqrin's ideas were hardly original on this point. Mao penned similar thoughts decades earlier.

Mao is considered to be the primary influence in guerrilla warfare. He recognizes the importance of the people in the success of the war. Well organized guerrilla units are encouraged by him to take the initiative, applying hit-and-run tactics, fighting in the enemy rear and establishing bases for popular support and for spreading their influence. He warned that guerrilla warfare is protracted and becomes conventional only as it approaches success.

The school of hard knocks and conspiracy theory

A study out of the University of Leicester points to a mechanism by which citizens of authoritarian governments may be more prone to conspiracy theory. According to the study:

People who have suffered life's hard knocks while growing up tend to be more gullible than those who have been more sheltered, startling new findings from the University of Leicester reveal.
A six-month study in the University's School of Psychology found that rather than 'toughening up' individuals, adverse experiences in childhood and adolescence meant that these people were vulnerable to being mislead.
The research analysing results from 60 participants suggest that such people could, for example, be more open to suggestion in police interrogations or to be influenced by the media or advertising campaigns.

A reaction to the lack of trust developed in one's opinions could be a hyperfocus on eliminating internal inconsistency.

Conspiracy theories rely upon a particular narrative form that prioritizes internal consistency and coherence over perfect correspondence to some referential, observable truth. Since they do not operate according to a scientific method, dictums of falsifiability by external verification (a la Karl Popper) do not apply. Instead, conspiracy theories can only be disproved through the demonstration of their logical inconsistency or through the elaboration of a further conspiracy theory that encompasses the original.
... as Evans-Pritchard showed for Azande witchcraft accusations, conspiracy theories do not question the fact that trees fall and that people are killed; they speculate only on why that particular tree fell or why this particular village was massacred. Indeed, the conspiracy genre presupposes and even fetishizes highly "modern" categories of causality and agency. It searches incessantly for causal chains linking the actions of intentional agents. It denies structural indeterminacy and inscrutability. As such, the conspiracy genre represents a completely modern phenomenon with a hypertrophied, rather than atrophied, rational structure.

A path to understanding and reconciliation?

A Harvard neuroimaging study of prejudice has singled out regions which appear to be used in gauging similarity and difference, contributing to the mechanism for discerning social in-groups and out-groups.

The researchers found that the ventral mPFC region was, indeed, more engaged when subjects considered the target person like them, and the dorsal mPFC region was more engaged while considering the target unlike them.
The researchers also gave the subjects a set of questions designed to reveal how similar to or different from the target people the students considered themselves. The researchers found that the more similar the subjects considered themselves to either target, the greater the response in the ventral mPFC. Conversely, the more dissimilar they considered themselves from the target person, the greater the activity in the dorsal mPFC...
"Without a self-referential basis for mentalizing about outgroup members, perceivers may rely heavily on precomputed judgments--such as stereotypes--to make mental state inferences about very dissimilar others.
"This view suggests that a critical strategy for reducing prejudice may be to breach the arbitrary boundaries based on social group membership by focusing instead on the shared similarity between oneself and outgroup members," concluded Mitchell and his colleagues.

Note that an inability to comprehend the cognition of the other person lends itself to the fallback use of prejudice. Extending this, then prejudice may also be overcome by improving the ability to model how the other person thinks, thus enabling self-referential cognition.

This model seems to fit that of the experience of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. From a article on the book Overcoming Apartheid:

Whether or not the TRC succeeded in its mission has been an issue of intense debate, but Gibson is the first to provide rigorous scientific evidence documenting precisely how the truth and reconciliation process made critical contributions to the nation's healing process. For example, responses to his survey provide compelling testimony that the TRC succeeded in getting its version of the truth about the country's apartheid past accepted by all types of South Africans.
"The most important lesson promulgated by the TRC is that both sides in the struggle over apartheid did horrible things," claims Gibson. "If one accepts shared blamed, one might come to see the struggle over apartheid as one of "pretty good" good against "pretty bad" bad, not as absolute good versus infinite evil. Because all sides did horrible things during the struggle, all sides were compromised to some degree. It then becomes easier to accept the complaints of one's enemies about abuses they experienced under the apartheid system."
In fact, Gibson's survey shows that South Africans who embrace the TRC view of the nation's apartheid past are more reconciled with their fellow South Africans.

Building a shared consensus history assisted in sharing similarity. That may have been key to permitting each side to better understand the other, and thus engage the ventral mPFC.

Headbashing statistics

In a recent article in New Scientist, there was a curious statistical inconsistency:

From 4000 to 3200 BC, Britons had a 1 in 14 chance of being bashed on the head, and a 1 in 50 chance of dying from their injuries...
Schulting and Wysocki have so far identified and studied the remains of about 350 skulls, mostly from southern England. The pair found healed depressed fractures in 4 to 5 per cent of the skulls, and unhealed injuries in about 2 per cent - suggesting the person died from their wounds, or at some point in the attack.

That should be approximately a 28% chance of dying from their injuries from or soon after the attack. The 1 in 50 statement implies a far lower lethality than is evidenced.

Girls academically faster than boys

When it comes to completing work of moderate difficulty, women are more efficient than men.

In a study involving over 8,000 males and females ranging in age from 2 to 90 from the across the United States, Vanderbilt University researchers Stephen Camarata and Richard Woodcock discovered that females have a significant advantage over males on timed tests and tasks. Camarata and Woodcock found the differences were particularly significant among pre-teens and teens.
"We found very minor differences in overall intelligence. But if you look at the ability of someone to perform well in a timed situation, females have a big advantage," Camarata said.

Perhaps it is not surprising that there is currently a gender performance gap in schools, given that homework loads have been increasing over time.

When researchers from the University of Michigan compared the amount of homework assigned in 1981 to the amount assigned in 1997, they were astonished. Although minimal changes occurred on the high school level, the amount of homework assigned to kids from six to nine almost tripled during that time! Assigned homework increased from about 44 minutes a week to more than two hours a week. Homework for kids aged nine to 11 increased from about two hours and 50 minutes to more than three and a half hours per week.

It would seem that boys can't keep up.

As women march forward, more boys seem to be falling by the wayside, McCorkell says. Not only do national statistics forecast a continued decline in the percentage of males on college campuses, but the drops are seen in all races, income groups and fields of study, says policy analyst Thomas Mortenson, publisher of the influential Postsecondary Education Opportunity newsletter in Oskaloosa, Iowa. Since 1995, he has been tracking — and sounding the alarm about — the dwindling presence of men in colleges.

It would appear that this trend may reflect underlying gender superiority in completing academic tasks in a timely manner.

Osama Bin Laden wants war in Sudan

In a recent audio tape, Osama bin Laden exhorted his followers to wage war upon the West in Sudan.

Not satisfied with all these intrigues and crimes, America moved on to stir up more strife. One of the areas of gravest strife was western Sudan, where some differences among the tribesmen were used to trigger a ferocious war among them that consumes everything in its way, in preparation for sending Crusader forces to occupy the region and steal its oil under the cover of maintaining security there. It is a continuous Zionist-Crusader war against the Muslims.
In this respect, I urge the mujahidin and their supporters in general, and in Sudan and the surrounding areas, including the Arabian Peninsula, in particular, to prepare all that which is necessary to fight a long-term war against the Crusader thieves in western Sudan. Our aim is clear: that is, defending Islam, its people, and land, and not defending the Khartoum government, although there could be common interests between us. Our differences with it are great...
I urge the mujahidin to acquaint themselves with the territory and tribes of the province of Darfur and the areas surrounding it. It has been said that the people who know a certain territory can conquer it, and that those who do not know a certain territory are conquered by it.

This flies in the face of the fact that the U.S. forced Western oil companies out of Sudan, an action inconsistent with the purported goal of stealing Sudan's oil wealth.

Once the United States could threaten rogue states with barring American, and with pressure, other western countries’ oil companies from exploration and production in those countries. This is precisely what happened in Sudan in the 1980s and 1990s, with Canada the last western country shamed out of the sector. Yet China and Malaysia quickly filled the vacuum.

Currently, the biggest importer of Sudanese oil is China.

Over recent years, China's state-owned firms have become active participants in Sudan's oil development. In 2000, the Khartoum government awarded a consortium led by the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) a concession in the Melut basin east of the River Nile... The Chinese firm is the largest shareholder in the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company which dominates the country's production...
Already, China is the largest importer of Sudanese oil and Beijing hopes to keep it this way.

It's clear that Bin Laden wants to bait Western leaders into sending United Nations forces into Sudan, and open up another battle front against the West. However, it's also clear that China has no interest in allowing such to happen, as that would endanger their oil supply. It seems that Bin Laden has not factored the Chinese response, whatever that might eventually be, into his plans.

It seems that the U.S. apparently has been aware of the risks of sending U.N. troops with regard to providing fuel for anti-Western propaganda, and thus has instead been backing peacekeeping efforts by the African Union as a proxy.

The United States welcomes the African Union’s April 28 [2005] decision to increase the size of its Darfur peacekeeping force. The current 3,320 African Union troops will expand to more than 7,700. The United States supports the African Union’s consultations with NATO on potential logistical assistance, and calls on all African Union member states to provide additional forces to Darfur quickly.
We view the African Union as playing a central role in resolving the crisis in Darfur ... The United States has already contributed more that $95 million to support the African Union mission so far, and looks forward to supporting the expanded mission. The United States will continue to work with the African Union and the rest of the international community to support efforts to resolve the crisis in Darfur.

Accordingly, I don't expect Western military forces in the form of U.N. peacekeepers to enter Sudan any time soon.

A perfect storm for U.S. gasoline prices?

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, exurb growth continues, with the middle class fleeing in search of more affordable housing. Along with this trend is an increase in commuting distance, and thus gasoline expenses. As I noted earlier, exurbs have been a growing base for the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, the rapidity of MTBE being banned and the apparent switchover to ethanol as a substitute is leading to potential temporary ethanol shortages as infrastructure and supply strains to meet the sudden rise in demand, a trend which can only increase gasoline prices.

The coming hurricane season is expected to be active, though not to the same degree as 2005. It is reasonable to posit some risk to oil extraction and refining due to hurricanes this season.

According to a recent FOX poll, "the top reason for those saying it feels like the economy is getting worse is gas prices". Given the ongoing geopolitical uncertainty over oil supply from Iran and Nigeria, this 2006 election issue is not likely to go away any time soon.

On the rise of the metrosexual

A recent study found that wealthier women want more attractive men.

Fhionna Moore and colleagues at the University of St Andrews, UK, analysed questionnaires from 1851 heterosexual women between the ages of 18 and 35. They found that as a woman's level of "resource control" increases - in other words as they become more financially independent - so does their preference for physical attractiveness in potential partners.

It seems plausible to posit that the increasing financial independence of women in the West is a driver behind the trend of the metrosexual.

In his seminal essay [published in 1994], Simpson described the effect of consumerism and media proliferation, particularly the men’s style press, on traditional masculinity. The metrosexual, he says, is an urban male of any sexual orientation who has a strong aesthetic sense and spends a great deal of time and money on his appearance and lifestyle.

This is consistent with a more informal 2004 report in the Daily Telegraph.

Today, with more financial independence, women are less concerned about the financial prospects of their potential mate, and, indeed, are becoming more masculine in the way they think about partners – they focus more on their appearance and how sexually compatible and pleasing to be with a potential mate will be.
Women reach their sexual peak a decade or two after men do, so it makes sense for a woman to date a man who is substantially younger. In addition, women generally look after themselves better than men do, so, increasingly, they are in better shape than men of a similar age. Some women will tend to view men as trophies or accessories who can make them look better in the eyes of other women.

The metrosexual is therefore a prime candidate for trophy husband.

Iran and global energy insecurity

Some in Congress were uneasy about the nuclear deal with India. Rice had to spell it out for them:

"Diversifying India's energy sector will help it to meet its ever increasing needs and more importantly, ease its reliance on hydrocarbons and unstable sources like Iran. This is good for the United States," she said in testimony to the House committee.

Translation: allowing India to go nuclear helps the U.S. isolate Iran. Like it or not, India's energy security needs are constraining U.S. foreign policy.

India's Oil Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar said on March 10 the U.S. Ambassador, David Mulford, met him to express concern about India's plan to import gas from Iran through a pipeline.
``We have noted what U.S. concerns are,'' Aiyar said. ``I think the U.S. is well aware of our energy requirements. So far we are sensitive to each other's requirements.''

There's also, China's reliance upon Iranian oil.

... the success of any UN action against Iran hinges on Beijing's support, as it is one of five permanent members of the UN Security Council with veto-yielding power. And China ... just happens to be searching for new energy reserves to drive its booming economy.
Iranian Petroleum Minister Bijan Zandaneh told China Business Weekly recently that Tehran wants China to replace Japan as the biggest importer of its oil and gas. "Japan is our No 1 energy importer due to historical reasons, but we would like to give preference to exports to China,"

The current multipolarity of the current geopolitical tango over Iran demonstrates a limit of influence afforded by U.S. military dominance. Globalization has meant that economic dominance does not provide unilateral power, as mutual economic interdependency means that it is at best difficult to prevent shocks in one economy from spilling over into other economies. This is not all negative. This interdependency has also meant that it was in the interest many countries to supply the U.S. with refined oil products after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005.

A group of 26 countries, including the United States, yesterday agreed to release oil, gasoline or other petroleum products from their emergency reserves in an attempt to bring down soaring prices and avert domestic shortages.

Still, this complicates dealings with Iran. A cutoff of Iranian oil supply or an Iranian blockade of the Persian Gulf (denying passage to other countries' oil transport vessels) would impact Europe, India, and China, forcing them to go elsewhere on the global energy market to meet domestic demand. The resulting economic impact upon the U.S. would be quickly felt. The recent Oil Shockwave simulation, though targeting different scenarios (publicly, at least), has negative implications for the situation with Iran.

The underlying situation dramatized in the exercise -- and accepted by most energy analysts -- is that tolerances are so tight between supply and demand, that even small disruptions in the delivery of oil and natural gas can cause cascades of unpleasant developments.
The war game contemplated that when oil prices spiked and the Cabinet met to consider its options, it realized it had almost no clout to influence events.

Newspeak on Newspeak?

The first paragraph on this anti-cloning site has an unfortunate error.

The term "therapeutic cloning" is an example of "newspeak," the art defined in H.G. Wells's 1984 as obscuring or reversing the truth through the manipulation of words. The term "therapeutic cloning" was first popularized by the British government as a means of reassuring the public that they would be protected from clones walking the streets by a ban on "reproductive cloning," while experimental "therapeutic" cloning could proceed.

1984 was written by George Orwell; given the site's hostility to human-animal chimeras, they probably got their reference confused and/or conflated with H.G. Wells' The Isle of Dr. Moreau. Regardless, this error obscures the truth of authorship.

Shifting consumption and Canadian reserves

I've commented in the past about India and China with regard to global oil supply. Today, I ran across an interesting statistic with regard to global consumption of oil:

"The center of gravity in world oil is shifting," said Daniel Yergin, the chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and an author of "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power," a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of oil.
"Last year, Asia consumed more oil than North America," Yergin said. He predicts an oil-supply shift, too, as Africa, Russia and former Soviet republics compete with the Middle East to fill the growing demand for oil.

Given the rising economies and consumptions of India and China, it is likely that in a few decades the USA will have less control over the price of oil, as it is outbid on the market. Furthermore, ongoing modernization of their militaries will provide the capacity to challenge the USA for access to oil and natural resources, should push come to shove in a few decades time.

I have to take issue with a detail glossed over in a later passage in the cited article:

For now, the United States remains well-positioned, at least when it comes to energy supplies. The proven reserves in the Middle East make it the expected primary global supplier of crude oil. Iraq, where the United States has forcefully established a beachhead, has proven oil reserves of between 78 billion and 112 billion barrels.

This neglects the status of Canada's oil reserves, dominated by oil sands; Canada's estimated reserves are larger than Iraq's estimated reserves by a factor of 22.

The worlds largest oil reserve is not lying under Saudi Arabian deserts or under the sea, it is clinging to grains of sand in the Canadian boreal forest of Northern Alberta. Between 1.7 [trillion] and 2.5 [trillion] barrels of crude oil, 300 [billion] of which are expected to be recoverable, are spread like topsoil across thousands of sq. km of Alberta forest and tundra.

The blogosphere and fundamental attribution error

Recently released reporter Carroll renounced her coerced video statements.

''During my last night of captivity, my captors forced me to participate in a propaganda video..."
''They told me they would let me go if I cooperated. I was living in a threatening environment, under their control, and wanted to go home alive. I agreed."
[Carroll's] statements in a recent video -- in which she praised her captors and spoke out against the American military presence in Iraq -- do not reflect her personal views, she said...
Those statements had set off a torrent of criticism on talk radio and among bloggers on the Internet. Some suggested Carroll was suffering from Stockholm syndrome, where captives begin to identify with their kidnappers. Some contributors to blogs suggested her kidnapping was staged to provide propaganda for the insurgents, and called her no better than her captors. One blogger said Carroll should be charged with treason upon her return, and some alleged she was indicative of a media biased against the war.

These critics in particular are judging Carroll's statements from a dispositional standpoint, preferring to conclude that she was acting upon her own volition, rather than acting under duress. It appears that these particularly critical bloggers were evincing fundamental attribution error.

In attribution theory, the fundamental attribution error (sometimes referred to as the actor-observer bias, correspondence bias or overattribution effect) is the tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional, or personality-based, explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior. In other words, people tend to have a default assumption that what a person does is based more on what "kind" of person he is, rather than the social and environmental forces at work on that person. This default assumption leads to people sometimes making erroneous explanations for behavior. This general bias to over-emphasizing dispositional explanations for behavior at the expense of situational explanations is much less likely to occur when people evaluate their own behavior.

This behavior on the part of some bloggers was not surprising. In fact, we should expect conservative bloggers to evince fundamental attribution bias more often, as people who are prone to fundamental attribution bias would tend to come to conclusions which fall in line with conservative stances on social issues. This phenomenon is well-known to psychologists. In fact, an explanation of why psychologists seem more liberal can be found in this passage in a column titled A Line on Life: Errors in Explaining Behavior – Why Psychologists Are So "Liberal" by David A. Gershaw, Ph.D.

... psychologists are more aware of the biases of attribution, so they are more likely to be aware of situational factors. This view makes us seem more liberal. As a nation, we are greatly concerned with reducing crime. If we see criminal acts as dispositional – as do most conservatives – we will emphasize stiffer penalties and more prisons. If we emphasize situational factors – as more liberals do – we will promote improving conditions for disadvantaged children to prevent them from becoming criminals.

In line with expectations from psychology, the most critical bloggers advocated stiff penalties in the form of charges of treason.

The Pentagon and the Kyoto Protocol

According to a recent UPI press report, the Pentagon will cut greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent by 2010.

A Defense Department memo from November 2005 outlined energy management goals for the military, which included reducing energy consumption in facilities by 2 percent per year, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from facilities 30 percent by 2010.

Compare that with the Kyoto Protocol targets for 2010.

According to United Nations calculations, the protocol's targets represent a 30 percent reduction from the currently projected emissions by industrialized countries in the year 2010 under "business as usual" scenarios with no emissions cuts.

Islam's stop-loss program

Recently, it was reported that a former Muslim and convert to Christianity faces death in Afghanistan under sharia law.

Shariah law states that any Muslim who rejects Islam should be sentenced to death, according to Ahmad Fahim Hakim, deputy chairman of the state-sponsored Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. Repeated attempts to impose a jail sentence were barred.
The prosecutor, Abdul Wasi, said he had offered to drop the charges if Mr Rahman converted back to Islam, but he refused. "He would have been forgiven if he changed back. But he said he was a Christian and would always remain one," Mr Wasi said. "We are Muslims and becoming a Christian is against our laws. He must get the death penalty."

In this short article, Mr. Sayyid Muhammad Rizvi explains that apostasy is deemed treason and thus punishable by death.

In Islam, the concept of treason is not limited to political and military affairs, it also has a spiritual and cultural dimension to it. In the Islamic order of sacredness, Allãh, then the Prophet and then the Qur'ãn occupy the highest positions. Tawhid, nubuwwa, and qiyãma form the constitution of Islam. Just as upholding and protecting the constitution of a country is sign of patriotism, and undermining it is a form of treason-in the same way open rejection of the fundamental beliefs of Islam by a Muslim is an act of treason.

Thus, executing apostates is deemed an act in defense of Muslim society. From a game theoretic standpoint, imposing the death penalty for apostasy serves to minimize the number of adherents defecting from the religion via deterrence. Thus, the policy acts to maximize the number of adherents.

The analogy that is drawn to nationalism, patriotism, and thus treason is illuminating with regard to underlying psychology justifying the policy. This 2004 brain-imaging study on revenge seems applicable.

The findings, reported in today's issue of the journal Science, may partly explain a behavior known as altruistic punishment: Why do we reprimand people who have abused our trust or broken other social rules, even when we get no direct practical benefits in return?
"A person who has been cheated is [left] in a bad situation—with bad feelings," said study co-author Ernst Fehr, director of the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. "The person would feel even worse if the cheater does not get her or his just punishment." [...]
Fehr and his colleagues suggest that the feeling of satisfaction people get from meting out altruistic punishment may be the glue that keeps societies together.
"Theory and experimental evidence shows that cooperation among strangers is greatly enhanced by altruistic punishment," Fehr said. "Cooperation among strangers breaks down in experiments if altruistic punishment is ruled out. Cooperation flourishes if punishment of defectors is possible."

Thus, the apostate individual is punished on this earth (rather than in any afterlife) in order to maintain social order. This implies acceptance of a communal value that the individual is less important than society at large, a value in conflict with individualism.

How sexist views of women lead to lower birth rates

The international edition of Newsweek had an article which finds that the EU undervalues its women in the workplace.

According to a paper published by the International Labor Organization this past June, women account for 45 percent of high-level decision makers in America, including legislators, senior officials and managers across all types of businesses. In the U.K., women hold 33 percent of those jobs. In Sweden—supposedly the very model of global gender equality—they hold 29 percent.
Germany comes in at just under 27 percent, and Italian women hold a pathetic 18 percent of power jobs. These sad statistics say as much about Europe's labor markets, lingering welfare-state policies and corporate leadership as they do about its attitudes toward women. It's not that European women are stuck in the house. (After all, 57 percent of women in the EU 15 work, less than the U.S. rate of 65 percent, but not dramatically so.)

Are these women a victim of a combination of traditional attitudes and social policies which are aimed at and failing to counter a below replacement birth rate? The above article further claims:

Europe is killing its women with ... cushy welfare policies that were created to help them. By offering women extremely long work leaves after children, then pushing them to take the full complement via tax policies that discourage a second income, coupled with subsidies that serve to keep them at home, Europe is essentially squandering its female talent. Not only do women get off track for long periods, many simply never get back on. Nor have European corporations adapted to changing times. Few offer the flextime that makes it easier for women to both work and manage their families. Instead, women tend to get shuffled into part-time work, which is less respected and poorly paid.

And yet, women aren't being sufficiently discouraged from work that they opt to raise families instead. Instead, they are being discouraged on both work and family fronts. From The Economist:

The list of explanations for why German fertility has not rebounded is long. Michael Teitelbaum, a demographer at the Sloan Foundation in New York ticks them off: poor child care; unusually extended higher education; inflexible labour laws; high youth unemployment; and non-economic or cultural factors...
If women postpone their first child past their mid-30s, it may be too late to have a second even if they want one (the average age of first births in most of Europe is now 30). If everyone does the same, one child becomes the norm: a one-child policy by example rather than coercion, as it were. And if women wait to start a family until they are established at work, they may end up postponing children longer than they might otherwise have chosen.

Keeping women in lower positions at work, presumably for fear they will leave work to raise families, means they end up putting off having families due to difficulties in getting their careers established.

When long memories become a liability

It appears that judgmental views can distort memory.

Viewing a person as dishonest or immoral can distort memory, a Cornell study suggests. So much so, that when we attempt to recall that person's behavior, it seems to be worse than it really was.
"In other words, our study shows that morally blaming a person can distort memory for the severity of his or her crime or misbehavior," said David Pizarro, assistant professor of psychology at Cornell.

The obvious result is that this leads to a self-reinforcing cycle, as memory may be distorted to reinforce existing judgmental biases. Similarly, I would not be surprised if viewing a person as honest or moral results also in polarizing distortions in a partisan manner.

Distorion of memory combined with the tendency of partisan ideologues to ignore problematic facts leads to the obvious conclusion that partisans are further at risk of creating flawed cognitive realities due to biased recall.

Social networking for terrorists

It was inevitable that al Qaida would attempt to recruit on social network sites.

Al-Qaeda sympathizers are using Orkut, a popular, worldwide Internet service owned by Google, to rally support for Osama bin Laden, share videos and Web links promoting terrorism and recruit non-Arabic-speaking Westerners, according to terrorism experts and a survey of the sites.

One goal is obvious: outreach to English-speakers. Al Qaida has long wanted to recruit Caucasians in order to bypass ethnic profiling.

Roche told the court how he traveled to Afghanistan in March 2000 where he met al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, underwent explosives training, and agreed to identify U-S and Jewish targets in Australia for the terrorist network.
Roche carried out surveillance on the Israeli Embassy in Canberra and tried unsuccessfully to recruit Caucasian Muslims into a terror cell.

The first piece doesn't mention some obvious reasons besides free speech that such terrorist recruitment efforts are left to function. Having such sites in plain sight permits Western authorities to determine recruiting information flows and tactics. Videos posted on the web could be analyzed for forensic clues to the location and identity of terrorists. As well, it opens up the potential, given international cooperation, to track the recruitment network across cyberspace. Besides, if they weren't out in the open, they'd be on the net using hacked sites.

Port security past

In 2003, North Korea was the one to fear. Via GlobalSecurity.org:

Democratic Senators Fritz Hollings (South Carolina), Charles Schumer (New York) and Patty Murray (Washington) issued a press release March 6 urging the Bush administration to immediately boost security at U.S. border crossings and ports because of the threat posed by North Korean nuclear processing.
The release states that "as reports of North Korea's new ability to produce, and possibly sell, nuclear materials to terrorists have come to light," more resources must be provided to prevent these materials from entering the United States for use in terrorist activities.
"Failing to secure our ports from attack could result in a catastrophic attack on our economy and, ultimately, on the health of our nation," Hollings, the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said in the release.
The release states the Bush administration is "hampering congressional efforts to protect our seaports from attack" by refusing to adequately fund measures such as the Port and Maritime Security Act, which was signed into law December 2002.

Securing the US port may be irrelevant to such a scenario. According to this Customs & Border Protection Today article from 2003, terrorists could simply detonate a nuclear device while moored port, entirely bypassing homeland defenses.

...terrorists planning to trigger a nuclear device hidden in a sea container don't have to guarantee the container makes it through a U.S. port to be certain of its destructive effects; if one of these devices explodes, it can do just as much damage from the deck of a ship temporarily moored outside one of our ports or moving slowing along the U.S. coast. A "dirty bomb" doesn't have to make it all the way into a department store in LA to deliver its murderous payload. Five miles offshore, or anchored for a few hours outside the port of San Diego-it's still a perfect opportunity for terrorists to detonate a radioactive device and establish a "kill zone" extending hundreds of miles inland.

Although U.S. lawmakers seem fixated on homeland defenses, it's obvious that U.S. port security must begin overseas. Waiting until it gets near shore is too late.

Capturing more of the oil wealth

This piece from last year in Middle East Economic Survey explains a prime motivator in the now controversial ports deal.

Tightness is evident not only in the refining sector but also in the shipping sector. Last year, freight rates surged to levels not seen before in history. Seaborne trade increased by more than 7% last year while average vessel utilization surged to 92%. Longer transport distances, especially due to the world’s growing thirst for lighter grades, led to the increase. Due to high tanker scrapping as a result of stringent EU and International Maritime Organization rules, new additions are unlikely to keep pace with demand...
Rates for product freight are also likely to remain buoyant. The refined product market is becoming global with arbitrage possibilities rising...

Grabbing a larger share of the profits from shipping and refining means that OPEC would be better able to weather a downturn in the price of oil, should the price fall to more fundamental levels as indicated by the lower price of sour, heavy crudes.

Uncertainty over Iran's ambitions

Forget 700 centrifuges. Try 1500 centrifuges instead. Via Reuters:

Diplomats pointed out that Iran planned to start installing 3,000 centrifuges later this year. About 1,500 centrifuges running optimally and nonstop for a year could yield enough highly enriched uranium for an atomic bomb, nuclear scientists say.
''Their insistence on R&D seems to encompass the 3,000 centrifuges, so this was no basis for compromise as far as we could see," said one EU3 diplomat.

Assuming Iran's claim of 6 work units per centrifuge is sustainable for 1,500 units, sufficient material for a nuclear bomb could be obtained in approximately months. Factor in time to assemble the centrifuges and weaponize the result, and a timeline of a nuclear weapon by 2009-2010 is feasible.

Iran could in principle be underreporting, as it does them little good internationally to claim higher numbers than they hope to achieve. Consider their recent claim:

"When we were negotiating with the Europeans in Tehran, we were still installing some of the equipment at the Isfahan site. There was plenty of work to be done to complete the site and finish the work there. In reality, by creating a tame situation, we could finish Isfahan," said Hassan Rowhani, who headed talks with Britain, France and Germany until last year.
The speech [by Mr. Rowhani to the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution], which lays out Iran's policy of nuclear deception in unprecedented detail, was published in an Iranian journal that circulates among the nation's ruling elite.

Still unfilled

China recently announced that construction of their strategic petroleum reserve depots could be completed by 2007-2008. They apparently have not yet started filling them, understandable given the current price of crude oil. The 33 million barrel facility at Zhenzhai in Ningbo is completed; an earlier report claimed it was on track to be completed last August.

The remaining depots are in Aoshan in Zhejiang, Huangdao in Shandong and Dalian in Liaoning. Total capacity would be 101.9 million barrels upon completion.

Not coincidentally, the filling of these tasks is unlikely to begin before 2007, when global refining capacity improves due to refining projects under way being finished. From last year:

Key Asian refinery projects that would help ease a shortage of global capacity this year have run into delays as Indian and Chinese firms facing steep losses on domestic sales see little incentive to rush plans. India’s new Essar Oil refinery has been pushed back again, while a major new crude unit at PetroChina’s Dalian plant will likely run at reduced rates into next year after a late-2005 start, a Reuters survey of expansion plans shows... More modest slippage in other projects has also pushed new capacity toward the end of this year, or from 2006 into 2007, keeping traders on edge over when the global refining industry will be able to restore a supply cushion to tight markets.

It's all in the work units

ArmsControlWonk discusses estimates that Iran is years away from the nuclear bomb. The calculations raise questions about how estimates are made. Regardless, we shall proceed with some of his cited numbers.

Overall, Iran is probably a little less than a decade away from developing a nuclear weapon...
Each of Iran’s centrifuges has an output between 2-3 SWU/year...
Iran probably only has about 700 centrifuges, as well as components for another 1,000 or so...
So, the real question, however, is how quickly Iran could assemble and operate 1,500 centrifuges in a crash program to make enough HEU for one bomb (say 15-20 kg).

It seems key to such estimates as to how efficient Iran's centrifuge technology is. The estimate of 2-3 SWU/year appears to be low. By contrast, the Wisconsin Project estimates a higher SWU, as well as noting that there may be smaller enrichment facilities in existence besides Natanz.

Rather than the Iranian estimate of about six or seven separative work units (SWU) per centrifuge per year, the IAEA estimated that the throughput of Iran's centrifuges could be as high as 12 to 14 SWU per machine per year, according to the media report.

Taking low end of the Iranian estimate, that would result in half the production time required for a crash nuclear program. With the lower bound IAEA estimate, that would result in a quarter of the time. SWU efficiency is key. Why are the estimates so high?

GlobalSecurity has further numbers for comparison.

A single centrifuge might produce about 30 grams of HEU per year, about the equivalent of five Separative Work Unit (SWU). As as a general rule of thumb, a cascade of 850 to 1,000 centrifuges, each 1.5 meters long, operating continuously at 400 m/sec, would be able to produce about 20-25 kilograms of HEU in a year, enough for one weapon. One such bomb would require about 6,000 SWU.
With current technology, a single gas centrifuge is capable of about 4 separative work unit [SWU] annually, while advanced gas centrifuge machines can operate at a level of up to perhaps 40 SWUs annually.

The higher Iranian and IAEA estimates, assuming they are sound, indicate that Iran's centrifuge technology is more advanced than the single gas centrifuge, due to cascading. Assuming an estimated 700 assembled centrifuges are kept operational at the level of performance claimed by Iran, with the spares being used to replace worn parts, they would be able to produce 4,200 SWU per year, yielding enough material for a single weapon in approximately 1.5 years. IAEA estimates would result in this time being reduced to under 9 months. Weaponization would take longer.

Business deals as psychological operations

Bush recently warned that blocking the DP World ports takeover deal would send a "terrible message".

"I think it sends a terrible signal to friends around the world that it's OK for a company from one country to manage the port, but not a country that plays by the rules and has got a good track record from another part of the world can't manage the port," Bush said.

Al Jazeera's article takes the view that Americans’ rejection of Dubai-U.S. Ports deal is racist.

Opposing handing over the ports management to the UAE will only send a message to the people of the UAE and the Arab world that “they will always be considered by the U.S. as terror suspects.”

Based on Jessica Stern's article, I conclude that the West has to weigh the impact of humiliation in public business dealings.

Several possible root causes [of terrorism] have been identified... I've been interviewing terrorists around the world over the past five years. Those I interviewed cite many reasons for choosing a life of holy war, and I came to despair of identifying a single root cause of terrorism. But the variable that came up most frequently was ... perceived humiliation. Humiliation emerged at every level of the terrorist groups I studied — leaders and followers.
The "New World Order" is a source of humiliation for Muslims. And for the youth of Islam, it is better to carry arms and defend their religion with pride and dignity than to submit to this humiliation. Part of the mission of jihad is to restore Muslims' pride in the face of humiliation. Violence, in other words, restores the dignity of humiliated youth. Its target audience is not necessarily the victims and their sympathizers, but the perpetrators and their sympathizers. Violence is a way to strengthen support for the organization and the movement it represents.

The depth of perceived humilation is evident in the recent furor over cartoons depicting Mohammed.

Desert watch

In this recent report on Friday's failed militant attack on Saudi oil facilities, there was an interesting, almost parenthetical comment regarding security measures.

Friday's assault suggested the militants were adopting the tactics of insurgents in neighboring Iraq, who have repeatedly targeted the oil industry. The Saudis have installed image-recognition devices along their desert border with Iraq to prevent miliants from crossing.

I presume that the image-recognition devices are equipped with infrared in order to detect night crossing attempts.

Neighborhood watch

China may move into mass biometric scanning, as it has recently approved a multi-camera face recognition system

The invention, developed by Su Guangda, an Electronic Engineering Department professor with Beijing-based Tsinghua University, has been approved by a panel of experts from the Ministry of Public Security...
Excelling at capturing moving facial images and featuring a multi-camera technology to lower the error for mismatching, the system will be used in public places, such as airports, post offices, customs entrances and even residential communities, in the near future...
"It has a superior advantage compared with fingerprint identification because the country doesn't have a fingerprint database for the general public," said Su.

Residential communities?

Ports of concern

Congress is up in arms over the acquisition of six US port operations by a Dubai company, fearing homeland security could be compromised.

Lawmakers are upset that [Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation], which runs 100 ports in 19 countries, is being purchased by [Dubai Ports] World with the approval of the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a 12-member panel chaired by Treasury Secretary John Snow and comprised of members of the departments of State, Defense, Justice, Commerce and Homeland Security.
P&O currently runs commercial operations in the ports of New York, New Jersey, New Orleans, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Miami.

I can't help wondering if they've even caught wind of a planned spaceport in the UAE.

The commercial spaceport would be based in Ras Al-Khaimah near the southern end of the Persian Gulf, and the UAE government has made an initial investment of $30 million, the Arlington, Virginia-based company [Space Adventures] said in a statement...
The agreement between Space Adventures and the Texas-based venture capital firm Prodea would help finance suborbital vehicles being designed and built by the Russian aerospace firm Myasishchev Design Bureau.