Monday, June 23, 2003

Reality is a Shared Hallucination Howard Bloom writes: The artificial construction of reality was to play a key role in the new form of global intelligence which would soon emerge among human beings. If the group brain's "psyche" were a beach with shifting dunes and hollows, individual perception would be that beach's grains of sand. However this image has a hidden snag - pure individual perception does not exist. A central rule of large-scale organization goes like this: the greater the spryness of a massive enterprise, the more internal communication it takes to support the teamwork of the parts. For example, in all but the simplest plants and animals only 5% of DNA is dedicated to DNA's "real job," manufacturing proteins. The remaining 95% is preoccupied with organization and administration, supervising the maintenance of bodily procedures, or even merely interpreting the corporate rule book "printed" in a string of genes. In an effective learning machine, the connections between internal elements far outnumber windows to the outside world. Take the cerebral cortex, roughly 80% of whose nerves connect with each other, not with sensory input from the eyes or ears. No wonder in human society individuals spend most of their time communicating with each other, not exploring beasts and plants which could make an untraditional dish. This cabling for "bureaucratic maintenance" has a far greater impact on what we "see" and "hear" than most psychological researchers suspect. For it puts us in the hands of a conformity enforcer whose power and subtlety are almost beyond belief. (06/23/03) Desertification Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought on 17 June 2003: Every year, vast patches of the Earth turn barren and unproductive, the consequence of drought and poor land management. This process - known as desertification - has far reaching costs to humanity, United Nations Secretary Kofi Annan said today, and poses "an ever increasing global threat." In a message marking World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought, Annan warned that increasing land degradation is threatening food production and triggering humanitarian and economic crises. "Because the poor often farm degraded land that is increasingly unable to meet their needs, desertification is both a cause and a consequence of poverty," Annan said. "Fighting desertification must, therefore, be an integral part of our wider efforts to eradicate poverty and ensure long term food security." Drought and desertification threaten the livelihood of more than 1.2 billion people in some 110 countries, with 135 million around the world at risk of being displaced. (06/23/03) Harvesting the Knowledge of the Human Genome New York Times: Science -- In an unusual collaboration prompted by a $100 million donation, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will establish a research institute intended to apply knowledge of the human genome to the practice of medicine. The new institute will be named for Eli Broad, a Los Angeles financial executive, and his wife, Edythe, who are donating the $100 million over 10 years. The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute will be run by Eric S. Lander, a leader of the public consortium that decoded the human genome and a faculty member at M.I.T. and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. The Whitehead Institute, which like Harvard and M.I.T. is in Cambridge, Mass., is also a founder of the Broad Institute. "This is a great day for our universities, for this city, for science and eventually for human health," Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, said yesterday at a news conference in Cambridge at which he shared the podium with M.I.T.'s president, Charles M. Vest, and the Whitehead director, Susan Lindquist. Dr. Summers said the Broad Institute's greatest resource would be "the scientific talent of the founding institutions on which it will be able to draw." The institute will try to determine the molecular causes of disease by systematically examining genes and proteins. That could lead to new ways to prevent and diagnose illnesses and to treat their causes rather than just their symptoms, as many medicines now do. (06/23/03) A Conversation with Cristián Samper New York Times: Science -- As a boy, Cristián Samper rambled through the tropical forests of his native Colombia, marveling at the diversity that surrounded him. Not content to view the flora and fauna only in the abstract, he began what was to become a lifelong obsession and vocation, cataloging the diversity and assembling it into collections that forcefully argue for its preservation. Now, at 37, Dr. Samper has just entered his third month overseeing one of the world's largest collections, the National Museum of Natural History and its 125 million specimens. As director of the museum, the second-most visited of the Smithsonian centers (after the National Air and Space Museum), he is host to six million visitors a year. (06/23/03) Arizona Wildfires Rage CNN National -- The Arizona wildfire that has torched thousands of acres will likely char "tens of thousands of acres" before firefighters bring it under control, fire officials warned Saturday. Firefighters said they had hoped the scorched terrain left by last year's fires would give them an advantage. But Larry Humphrey, manager at the scene, said gusty winds and treacherous topography will complicate the fight. Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano toured the fire-stricken region Saturday. "I have a pretty big vocabulary. [But] I don't have a vocabulary big enough or accurate enough to describe what it is like to see the fire, to see the flames from the air, to be told that this morning when the flames were on top of one of the ridges they were taller than the towers on the top of the ridges," she said. "This is a big fire." Officials estimated Saturday evening that the fire -- which had charred 6,300 acres -- was only 5 percent contained. (06/23/03) The Hard Edge of American Values The Atlantic Monthly: An Interview -- In "Supremacy by Stealth," his cover story for the July/August Atlantic, Robert D. Kaplan states simply that we have gotten ourselves into the business of empire. (He leaves it to others to debate the necessity or morality of such a move.) Concentrating on empire's practical side, he asks, How do we manage this world? In order to answer that question, Kaplan has spent much of his time over the past several years traveling with the U.S. military, observing the implementation of American power on a day to day basis by Special Forces troops who work on the ground in countries around the globe. Based partly on these extensive travels, Kaplan has come up with a list of "Rules for Managing the World": 1. Produce More Joppolos, 2. Stay on the Move, 3. Emulate Second-Century Rome, 4. Use the Military to Promote Democracy, 5. Be Light and Lethal, 6. Bring Back the Old Rules, 7. Remember the Philippines, 8. The Mission is Everything, 9. Fight on Every Front, and 10. Speak Victorian, Think Pagan. In essence, these rules are an articulation of power on a global scale. (06/23/03) Perrier with a dash of Arsenic New York Times: Environment -- A federal appeals court today upheld the Environmental Protection Agency's stricter requirements for acceptable levels of arsenic in drinking water. The agency standard of 10 parts per billion, the equivalent of one teaspoon per 1.3 million gallons of water, substantially reduced the previously acceptable level of 50 parts per billion. The standard, scheduled to go into effect in 2006, was challenged in a lawsuit by the State of Nebraska and the City of Alliance, Neb., which argued that regulating drinking water was a state responsibility and that the agency had exceeded its authority. A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously rejected that view. Judge A. Raymond Randolph, writing for the panel, said the plaintiffs failed to show that the requirements ran afoul of the Constitution. The arsenic standard was defended by the Justice Department and the Natural Resources Defense Council, a conservation group, which called the panel's decision "a big victory for public health." The level of 10 parts per billion was proposed by the Clinton administration in January 2001, but blocked by the Bush administration later that year. Some Democrats said the president had been insensitive to public health. Mr. Bush reversed course in October 2001, after determining that it met cost-benefit tests, and adopted the standard. (06/23/03) Xolair (omalizumab) for Treatment of Asthma CNN Health -- Patients with serious asthma caused by allergies are getting a new weapon to block the attacks, with approval of the drug Xolair by the Food and Drug Administration. ... "This is radically new, it's not another antihistamine or another inhaler," said Dr. Bob Lanier of the University of North Texas Health Science Center, who led research on the drug for its three developers: Genentech Inc., Tanox Inc. and Novartis Pharmaceuticals. "It's the first of a new breed of bioengineered drugs that get to the root of the disease rather than just the symptoms," he said. In one study, Xolair cut by one-third to one-half the number of asthma attacks suffered by patients whose disease isn't controlled by today's standard treatments. Many dramatically cut back or even eliminated inhaled steroids and other asthma medications. But the FDA said its scrutiny of all studies of Xolair suggests it will help only about 15 percent of patients avoid an asthma attack. ... Some 17 million Americans have asthma, a chronic respiratory disease that causes recurring episodes of breathlessness, wheezing, chest tightness and coughing. Many patients require daily medication to control symptoms and prevent attacks. Every year, asthma kills 5,000 people and is responsible for nearly 2 million emergency room visits.  (06/23/03) 5:24:37 AM

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