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Tuesday, November 12, 2002
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I am back in clinic earning my living this week. Should be able to start working again on Human Intelligence Science by Friday. Still shooting for January 2003 completion date. Take a look at SynEARTH today.....
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Canadian Paul Harris writes: The United States claims to be a nation of peace lovers and it has been at peace since the end of the Second World War, except, that is, for their attacks on China (1945-46); Korea (1950-53); Guatemala (1954, 1967-69); Cuba (1959-60); Belgian Congo (1964); Vietnam (1961-73); Cambodia (1969-70); Grenada (1983); Libya (1986); El Salvador (1980-92); Nicaragua (1981-90); Panama (1989); Iraq (1991); Bosnia (1995); Sudan (1998); Yugoslavia (1999); Afghanistan (2001-02); plus a grudge match soon to come in Iraq. Plus "police action" in Columbia regarding drugs (ongoing), an insurrection in Chile (1973), and numerous other covert bombings conducted by, or under the direction of, the CIA. From 1945 to the end of the 20th century, the U.S. attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments and to crush more than 30 populist movements fighting against insufferable regimes. In the process, they bombed about 25 countries, killed several million people, and condemned many millions more to lives of agony, poverty and despair. If this is a nation of peace lovers, then God help us all. (11/11/02) | |
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Howard Rheingold writes: Smart mobs use mobile media and computer networks to organize collective actions, from swarms of techo-savvy youth in urban Asia and Scandinavia to citizen revolts on the streets of Seattle, Manila, and Caracas. Wireless community networks, webloggers, buyers and sellers on eBay are early indicators of smart mobs that will emerge in the coming decade. Communication and computing technologies capable of amplifying human cooperation already appear to be both beneficial and destructive, used by some to support democracy and by others to coordinate terrorist attacks. Already, governments have fallen, subcultures have blossomed, new industries have been born and older industries have launched counterattacks. There are both dangers and opportunities posed by this emerging phenomenon. Smart mob devices, industries, norms, and social consequences are in their earliest stages of development, but they are evolving rapidly. Current political and social conflicts over how smart mob technologies will be designed and regulated pose questions about the way we will all live for decades to come. (11/12/02) | |
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New York Times -- Last month, Dr. Kahneman, a professor at Princeton, was awarded the Nobel in economics science, sharing the prize with Vernon L. Smith of George Mason University. But Dr. Kahneman said the Nobel, which the committee does not award posthumously, belongs equally to Dr. Tversky, who died of cancer in 1996 at 59. "I feel it is a joint prize," Dr. Kahneman, 68, said. "We were twinned for more than a decade." In Jerusalem, where their collaboration began in 1969, the two were inseparable, strolling on the grounds of Hebrew University or sitting at a cafe or drinking instant coffee in their shared office at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and talking, always talking. Later, when Dr. Tversky was teaching at Stanford and Dr. Kahneman at the University of British Columbia, they would call each other several times a day. Every word of their papers, now classics studied by every graduate student in psychology or economics, was debated until "a perfect consensus" was reached. To decide who would appear as first author, they flipped a coin. ... Over more than two decades, working together or with others, Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Tversky elaborated many situations in which such psychological "myopia" influenced people's behavior and offered formal theories to account for them. They established, among other things, that losses loom larger than gains, that first impressions shape subsequent judgments, that vivid examples carry more weight in decision making than more abstract — but more accurate — information. Anyone who read their work, illustrated, as one admirer put it, with "simple examples of irresistible force and clarity," was drawn to their conclusions. Even economists, unused to looking to psychology for instruction, began to take notice, their attention attracted by two papers, one published in 1974 in Science, the other in 1979 in the economics journal Econometrica. Eventually, the psychologists' work provided the undergirding for behavioral economics, the approach developed by Dr. Richard Thaler. (11/12/02) | |
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New York Times Technology — I.B.M. researchers plan to announce on Monday a new approach to building three-dimensional integrated circuits, a technique that may one day be essential in creating faster microprocessors and higher-capacity memory chips. The company plans to detail its results in a technical paper to be presented at the annual International Electron Device Meeting here next month. The advance involves transferring a remarkably thin slice of a circuit onto a glass substrate and transferring it again onto another wafer that contains the bottom half of the circuit. The slice is created by using advanced mechanical grinding and etching processes. One advantage of the technique would be to interconnect separate layers directly at thousands or even hundreds of thousands of points. Computer speeds are currently limited by the bottleneck of getting data on and off individual chips. Increasing the number of connections may sharply increase communication speeds. The researchers were able to create a wafer slice as thin as a half-micron. A typical human hair, by contrast, is 75 to 100 microns wide. The smallest among today's most advanced chips are approximately one-tenth of a micron each. (12/12/02) | |
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Red Flags Weekly -- Every year, 12 million children in the Third World, under the age of five, die of diseases related to malnutrition. This pandemic of hunger and starvation is unmatched since the Black Death coursed through Europe in the 14th century. How many of us in the comfortable developed world know this? How many care? How many of us are concerned only with our own existential needs and ignore the hopeless realities of daily death and life in distant countries? ... The tragedy of this catastrophe of child death is the fact that all of this is preventable. In the 1998 UNICEF report, entitled, " Focus On Nutrition," Kofi Annan, the UN’s Secretary-General, sadly noted that, "Malnutrition contributes to more than half of the nearly 12 million under-five deaths in developing countries each year. Malnourished children often suffer the loss of precious mental capacities. And they fall ill more often. If they survive, they may grow up with lasting mental or physical disabilities." The report also notes that "that malnourished children are more likely to die as a result of a common childhood disease than those who are adequately nourished...the development later in life of chronic conditions like coronary heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure are causes for concern." (11/12/02) | |
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Red Flags Weekly -- There is not much that radicals and multinational companies agree on, but the desperate need for drugs for those suffering from AIDS is an exception. Left-wing radicals may argue that drugs should be made available without cost to victims, or that patents should be waived to allow production by generic manufacturers, but by and large, they strongly support the ‘drugs into bodies’ philosophy. ...Those on the left apparently cannot conceive that they may be unwitting pawns in a huge game; that HIV/AIDS theories, tests and drugs are based on questionable science and fostered by the intense greed that directs the higher echelons of medicine. Battling pharmaceutical companies for quicker or cheaper access to drugs is just a diversion from the real issues of drug effectiveness and toxicity. Drug companies can reduce prices and still make a profit. They cannot significantly improve the effectiveness and safety of an approved drug nearly as easily. ... However, analysis of AZT research by Duesberg and by the "Perth Group" of scientists, indicates that the triphosphorylation of AZT, necessary for incorporation into growing DNA chains, simply does not occur to any significant extent. This means that AZT cannot have any beneficial effect, but it may still have detrimental effects, particularly on mitochondria, the energy management organelles of all living cells. It would now be considered malpractice to give a high dose AZT (as was done in the late 1980s). Yet AZT, with all its published carcinogenic, mutagenic and teratogenic potential, is still the major drug prescribed to pregnant women to prevent HIV transmission to their infants. AZT has a long list of published side effects, including anemia and destruction of bone marrow (critical components of the immune system). This is the panacea that drug companies and radical activists alike are trying to bring to poverty stricken, malnourished mothers in the Third World, many of whom are already anemic due to malnutrition or parasitic infections, such as hookworm. Where are these mothers going to go when they need a blood transfusion, or worse yet, become transfusion dependent? Where do they go for their Procrit (a blood booster that is advertised in just about every AIDS journal "for AZT-treated, HIV-infected patients with anemia")? ... I can respect the opinions of people who study both sides of HIV/AIDS and conclude that AIDS drugs, while far from perfect, are the lesser evil. But too many left- wing radicals appear in knee-jerk fashion to see access to all medicines as a critical factor for the development of socialized medicine, and completely close their eyes to the limitations of the drug-centric approach to AIDS. (11/12/02) | |
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New York Times -- Rice farmers like John Kerksieck are on the brink of draining one of Arkansas' biggest aquifers dry. That alone is troublesome, in a state that gets almost 50 inches of rain a year. But even more confounding — since these Southern farmers will not be the last to find themselves in such a pickle — is the question of what to do about it. Most of the farmers want the government to send them replacement water from the White River. The Army Corps of Engineers and the state support a plan to spend more than $200 million in federal money on the project, or about $300,000 a farmer. It is time, they say, for the government to do in other states what has long been done in the West — provide irrigation water to farmers who have no other resort. But others are concerned about the precedent such a project would set. If the government rewards farmers who use up their water here, they say, what is to stop others from doing the same? ... Farmers here in Arkansas' Grand Prairie, one of the country's richest rice-growing areas, see it differently. "We really don't have a water problem," said Mr. Kerksieck, 42, in hunting garb in anticipation of the duck season, which rivals rice farming as the Grand Prairie's main preoccupation. Like many here, he traces his lineage to the farmers who arrived in the early 1900's, starting a century of pumping from the aquifer at rates that could not be sustained. "There's plenty of water in the river," Mr. Kerksieck said. "They've just got to let us divert it." ... "We see groundwater depletion in Arkansas being a major problem, and one that involves the national interest, and really the only federal agency with the expertise and ability to deal with it is the corps," Earl T. Smith, chief of the Arkansas commission's water resources management division, said. Under the corps' current plan, about 2 percent of water from the White River would be diverted for farm use, a project that would include pumping stations, canals and reservoirs. The plan, which the corps said would save the aquifer by reducing pumping to sustainable levels, has passed an environmental review, but faces opposition from outdoor and environmental groups like the Arkansas Wildlife Federation. The groups contend that lower river flows could alter the habitats of certain fish and migratory birds, including ducks. (11/12/02) | |
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5:29:09 AM 
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© TrustMark
2002
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
12/3/2002; 8:09:13 AM.
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