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"Did the EPA drop bisphenol A from the list in eight days because of lobbyists? First of all, if the EPA or any government agency reversed a decision like this in eight days it would be a grand miracle on the scale of the Genesis seven day creation myth. Or at least worthy of an Olympic gold medal. Really..."

Post Updated 2/19/10 to include new references.

The EPA, Skewered For First TSCA Action in Decades:

On December 30th, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) posted action plans for four chemicals: phthalates, perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs), polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), and short-chain chlorinated paraffins. (No really! It gets better :-) ) An action plan signals that the EPA intends possible regulation because the chemical poses a hazard. Chemical companies complained bitterly. The EPA also listed two more chemical action plans in the development process, for benzidine dyes/pigments, and bisphenol A. Scientific American commented at the time:

"This is a big deal because it is the first time since TSCA was passed in 1976 that the EPA has made such a move. To date, the agency has only successfully used TSCA to restrict or ban five of the 80,000-plus chemicals on its inventory"

However this week, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel criticized the EPA's December chemical action plans, questioning why bisphenol A wasn't on the top four list: The EPA's "move" was "drawing suspicion", explains the paper:

"the head of the Environmental Protection Agency had been talking tough in one speech after another last fall about the need to protect the public from such chemicals, particularly BPA...but when the agency's list came out Dec. 30, identifying four chemicals that would face stricter labeling and reporting requirements, BPA was not among them..."

Writes MSJ: "Critics say the Dec. 22 meeting might have been why BPA was dropped from the top of the agency's list".

BPA is on the agency's list. But to the Journal-Sentinel's question, why is it not first up in the most recent round of action plans? Did lobbyists pressure OMB/OIRA to change EPA's stance on Dec. 22?

Now, Suddenly, The EPA Turns on A Dime?

The paper cites as the deciding factor a meeting of plastic and chemical lobbyists with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA):

"Eight days after a meeting between chemical industry lobbyists and Obama administration officials, federal regulators put off including bisphenol A on a list of dangerous chemicals that would be subject to stricter regulation"

The Center For Progressive Reform also forwarded the idea that the EPA was influenced to remove BPA from its chemical action plans list in a blog posted January 22:

"on December 22, just before EPA was about to release its first four chemical action plans, activists from American Chemistry Council and representatives of a major BPA producer met with officials at OIRA to plead the case for BPA's safety."

Did the EPA drop bisphenol A from the list in eight days? First of all, if the EPA or any government agency reversed a decision like this in eight days it would be a grand miracle on the scale of the Genesis seven day creation myth. Or at least worthy of an Olympic gold medal. Really.

But, lets look back to last fall, to a much quoted speech given by Lisa Jackson to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. The MSJ quoted the speech in their article. At the time, we wrote in "The EPA Speaks To Me" that Jackson's speech, like the president's sweeping public orations, promised something for everyone:

"The more I read, the more Jackson's speech looked like a veritable public relations jambalaya. She spoke to those committed to wetlands, spotted owls, to asthma sufferers, climate change, to those concerned about coal and gas emissions, to the Clean Air Act, to trash incineration, dioxins, pesticides, green chemistry, research, unions, medical professionals, public health groups, industry, environmentalism, to those who want jobs, fast food packaging, to unborn children, African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos and postal workers, as well as everyone who emails public comments to the EPA or who's concerned about health care or health..."

I commented at the time that her speech was clearly a "marketing tool and conversation generator but not a public policy statement." We could get mad about a lot of things in her speech, I'm sure, if we took it as public policy commitment.

If Only Talking Made Policy

Of course, in that speech Jackson did mention bisphenol A, saying: "Every few weeks, we read about new potential threats: Bisphenol A, or BPA - a chemical that can affect brain development and has been linked to obesity and cancer..." Or, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel sees it: "The first chemical on her list: BPA." But, writes MSJ: "In the end, though, her agency settled on four other chemicals to target first for the action plans." (emphasis ours)

So as MSJ says, it's true, "first" Jackson did mention BPA. Then she said "pthalates", then "dioxins, then "lead" (each once). One of the Journal-Sentinel's sources labeled EPA's stance as "curious". I'm as cynical as anyone, but lets look at Jackson's rhetorical choices.

San Francisco was the first in the nation to attempt action on bisphenol A and phthalates. Jackson was at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club talking to (I guess) some commoners -- not chemists or policy wonks. "Bisphenol A" and "pthalates", "dioxin", and "lead" would be recognizable and appreciated by the crowd. True, she didn't explicitly mention "polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) including the commercial versions of pentabromodiphenyl ether (c-pentaBDE), octabromodiphenyl ether (c-octaBDE), and decabromodiphenyl ether (c-decaBDE)" -- the flame retardants in the first batch of four EPA action plans. But had she, the crowd, eyes glazing over, probably would have slumped into trance instead of thinking the EPA was their friend and ally. Whether you view this as PR or marketing or just common sense, its elementary communication. And as an aside -- why no concern about the EPA's omission of lead or dioxin in the first batch of action plans?

Sept. 29th: EPA Announces Four Chemical "Action Plans". Sept. 30th: Names Chemicals

As for the EPA's choice of which chemicals would be targeted first, on September 29, 2009 , the EPA issued a press release" right after Jackson's speech, announcing its intention to issue four action plans in December:

"The EPA has identified an initial list of chemicals for possible risk management action and anticipates completing and posting an initial set of four action plans in December. It will complete and post additional chemical action plans in four-month intervals thereafter."

On September 30, 2009, the EPA issued another press release, naming the four chemicals of top interest, the same ones that it produced action plans for in December:

"EPA today announced a series of actions on four chemicals raising serious health or environmental concerns...The agency's actions represent its determination to use its authority under the existing Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to the fullest extent possible...In addition to phthalates, the chemicals EPA is addressing today are short-chain chlorinated paraffins, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) and perfluorinated chemicals, including PFOA.

So in a September 30th press release, the EPA named the same four chemicals that were in the December 30, 2009 action plan announcement. Then did the American Chemistry Council (ACC) really sway the EPA's BPA decision in a meeting December 22nd with OMB/OIRA, eight days before the EPA's action plan announcement?

The Chemical Lobby, BPA & The EPA: Economics Factors?

To me, aside from the overly conspiratorial premise of the article, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and CPR valuably point the public's attention to some enviable industry access. The ACC sent five representatives to meet with four OMB,OIRA staff; and SABIC, a Saudi BPA manufacturer, sent two. The ACC apparently sent a letter requesting the meeting dated November 3rd. This is news: If you're a chemical lobby group or a Saudi BPA manufacturer, you can get a meeting with OMB/OIRA in a month and a half.

ACC also submitted a slim bibliography(.pdf) of research sources. The ACC submissions show the industry's dedication to a relentlessly one-sided messaging on chemical safety.

Six of fifteen studies in the bibliography have ACC's Steve Hentges (meeting attendee and ACC lobby spokesperson, who has relentlessly messaged about BPA safety) listed as the senior author (not unbiased). Three industry related studies intend to prove that BPA degrades quickly, which is an important criteria for EPA action plans. At least four other studies with various aims are authored by groups sponsored by plastics, BPA or chemical foundations. It's true, as the MSJ writes, most of the studies authors have industry affiliations. There are hundreds of other studies to choose from which wouldn't bolster the ACC's arguments one tiny little bit. (Although to be fair, the ACC is a chemical lobby group -- not an unbiased journalist, a point I'd hope the EPA recognizes)

But the ACC included one study from Ryan et al published in Toxicological Sciences (Online October, 2009), that is an EPA study conducted by EPA employees. This study concludes that low-dose bisphenol A does not alter puberty, fertility, or anatomy and sexual behavior in rats, compared to the estrogen control. Several groups dispute this study because, for one, the strain of rat is not as sensitive to low-dose estrogen" (.PDF Update 02/19/10). However the study's sponsoring author has disputed their claims (which are longstanding) to Trevor Butterworth of Stats.org, which has been doing PR on behalf of the bisphenol A industry. We previously discussed Stats.org's role in several posts.

If anything might dissuade the EPA from acting on BPA it would be its own studies (which they didn't need the ACC to highlight.) The senior author on the study, L. Earl Gray Jr., also testified before the EPA in 2008, emphasizing that his level of "concern" (an agency measure of potential harm) about bisphenol A exposure was less that his level of concern for phthalates exposure. Industry groups have touted Ryan's and Gray's work. If the Ryan and Gray's study methodology is in question, no activist has been too public about it (Update 02/19/10: A letter in Toxicological Sciences published 02/17/10 explains the problem with rat strain.) Perhaps more media focus should be placed here, on the EPA's own study.

The ACC letter requesting the meeting asks for chemical industry participation in the EPA decision making process (a request that seems rather unnecessary given the easy access industry does have). The letter also asks EPA to "be sensitive to the potential and foreseeable negative effect on the marketplace...the market impact on bisphenol A demonstrates this is a serious and real concern." Of course this is the primary goal of ACC, to urge the EPA not to impact any one of 80,000 chemicals' markets.

The EPA, in contrast, has said that its priority is to "review all chemicals against safety standards that are based solely on considerations of risk - not economics or other factors." (emphasis ours). It will be interesting to see how the EPA decides on bisphenol A, and whether its considerations to "risk" will include industry consideration to economic factors - or not. However just the fact that OMB and EPA were willing to sit with the ACC lobby group shows a willingness to listen to their (always) economic arguments.

The EPA -- Total Pushover?

I don't think I'm particularly naive in these matters, we've been following industry influence on policy for a while, especially BPA, which we've been following since 2005. We've specifically written about EPA apparently backing off of regulation under pressure from OIRA/OMB several times before.

But I'd be surprised if the EPA turned their intentions for BPA around based on this meeting. First, it appears from their press releases that they had already concluded back in September which four chemicals were first up for action plans. The idea that they would be so swayed is practically absurd, given the transparently, almost lazily, self-interested documents submitted by industry. Somehow I have more confidence in this EPA then to think they changed action plans based on those almost disrespectful pleas. But they do, now, have their own scientists saying that BPA isn't as dangerous as phthalates.

Clearly the EPA is not quite committed to regulating BPA as activists want. But it has put $30 million towards EPA research. It's also conducting its own studies. Hundreds of science studies provide evidence that BPA is harmful, but there are enough impacts from EPA decisions on industry that the agency needs to continue its BPA investigation. However, consider dioxins, another chemical the EPA mentioned in its Commonwealth Club speech. Dioxins are proven to be carcinogenic, a far more damning research finding than has to date been applied to BPA, but the EPA is still struggling to contain their use. On BPA, I'd be the first to say that there's enough research, as would many states and communities. But federal policy-making is not science. So is it more than poppycock to suggest that the EPA was singularly pressured by one ACC meeting to change its mind on BPA?

Bisphenol A, Trees on Mars, and Riveting Headlines

Headlines can be deceiving, as well all know. But we often fall for them anyway. "Are Those Trees on Mars?" asked FoxNews and 150 other news outlets last week. So I squinted at the photo, trying to imagine how those could possibly be trees...maybe if a small city like Le Mars, Iowa shipped all the old Christmas trees collected on January 8th to Le Other Mars, instead of chipping them?

A fool I was, but you can't imagine my disappointment when the article attached to the NASA photo explained that there were No Trees On Mars, only dark sand illuminated differently than the surrounding carbon dioxide ice(1) -- (Tricky editors! - 'HA, made you look'). I guess readers' attention was elsewhere last week because closer to home, more subtly, but equally misleading, news headlines announced: The FDA "reverses" its position on bisphenol A (BPA), the FDA "backtracks" on BPA, the FDA advises consumers to "limit exposure" to BPA.

These headlines seemed like real news, since the FDA has for years faiiled to come out with either actions or public statements reflecting the growing research evidence for BPA toxicity. During the Bush administration the glaring gap between the FDA's position and BPA research propelled scientists to publicly criticized the relationship between the FDA and the industries it was supposed to be regulating. Acronym Required wrote about the fraught regulatory environment in the FDA vis-à-vis BPA, in "Scientists Criticize FDA Methods on BPA", in "Conflict of Interest in the FDA?", in "FDA Panel Offers Corrections to BPA Draft", in "Bisphenol A, The FDA, Industry -- Whassup?", and others.

Given the FDA's lackluster BPA regulation history, plus the fact that BPA is almost a household word, the newest headlines on BPA and the FDA attracted everyone's attention. The New York Times listed its story "F.D.A. Concerned About Substance in Food Packaging", as one of the "most e-mailed" articles one day. But underneath the headlines, what did the stories really report?

FDA -- Aging Cheerleader?

Despite the headlines, the FDA announced no "guidelines", and no new news. The LA Times quoted a statement from FDA Deputy Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein under the title "FDA issues BPA guidelines". "For the present", Sharfstein said", the FDA does support the use of baby bottles with BPA.'" (emphasis ours)

So in essence, the FDA has offered the same counsel for years, ever since it started studying BPA. In 1995 for instance, FDA scientists found that BPA migrated from heated plastic containers. The agency remained unalarmed. In 1997 the FDA began pondering how to change regulation to reflect evidence that endocrine disruptors altered physiology at low doses -- but barely flinched.

In 1999 several consumer groups, environmental safety groups, and scientists, petitioned the FDA to ban BPA in plastic baby bottles, because research then showed without a doubt that the chemical could leach out of polycarbonate, and indicated that BPA caused sex organ problems for male babies of exposed pregnant mice. At the time, the FDA deployed Dr. George Pauli to quell rising consumer concerns and Pauli assured families that polycarbonate bottles didn't leach under 'everyday' conditions, only at high temperatures; infant formulas required only mild heating, he said. (Although, alarmingly, parents typically microwaved the bottles.)

Now, over a decade later, despite dozens more studies, the FDA is still equivocating on baby bottles, although bottles present one of the riskiest sources of BPA because of babies' vulnerability to endocrine disruptors during development.

The FDA's statement becomes all the more difficult to swallow when you know that all on their own, without any encouragement from the agency, manufacturers voluntarily pulled polycarbonate bottles for babies and adults off the shelves.

The FDA did manage to bring its assessment -- that there is "some concern" about BPA health risks -- in line with the National Toxicology Program's (NTP) assessment. Although this is no small feat given the FDA's history, the agency didn't do much else, despite delaying this announcement three times.

From the FDA website, here's what the FDA committed to:

• "supporting industry actions" to stop making BPA containing baby bottles
• "faciliting the development" of BPA alternatives for formula cans
• "supporting efforts" to replace BPA in food can linings

Such mealy-mouthed statements give the impression that the FDA has little more persuasive authority than Acronym Required. The agency also said it would work with other agencies like the National Toxicology Program (NTP) in the NIEHS/NIH, and with foreign governments (legislators have aggressively questioned the FDA why it hasn't taken action when the Canada has banned BPA).

What Should Consumers Think?

The FDA is also seeking "external input" on the "science surrounding BPA", and will solicit "further public comment". Acronym Required commented on public comment periods used by agencies before. We wouldn't want to appear cynical in saying you can never have too much "public comment" or assume that the FDA is using the comment period to stall regulatory action. But since the FDA is now working with the National Toxicology Program in the NIH (NTP), it could review the numerous public comments solicited by the NTP during its assessments of the chemical in February, 2006; April, 2007; November, 2007; and April, 2008. (2)

The FDA is also "supporting a shift to a more robust regulatory framework for oversight of BPA". The FDA explains that a 40 year rule limits the FDA's ability to regulate BPA (as a food additive). The FDA can regulate new substances under a 2000 rule, but that doesn't help with BPA. So the agency will "encourage manufacturers to voluntarily submit a food contact notification for their currently marketed uses of BPA-containing materials." This is interesting because for years the FDA has been researching BPA and has declined to regulate the chemical because the agency found the science unconvincing; for some reason it hasn't brought a lot attention to its legal inabilities to regulate.

Does the FDA's latest announcement clarify its previous confusing position? What should consumers do? As my favorite headline, by "Beforeitsnews.com" byline has it: "It's in Your Urine But Is It Safe?".

More to the point, what should citizens do that they haven't done already? They've stopped buying polycarbonate, so much so that manufacturers have pulled bottles off the shelves, they've sued, they've urged local and state ordinances. By all measures, consumers have made the most credible effort to regulate BPA.

The FDA -- Nudging Itself Out of a Job? Drowning Itself In the Bathtub?

Other non-governmental organizations have responded with none of the ambiguity of the FDA. For instance spokespeople from the Breast Cancer Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, Consumers Union, Clean New York, Center for Health Environment & Justice, and others, all urge the FDA to ban the chemical.

Even the National Council of Churches offers a suggestion for the FDA, saying, "As we celebrate the Christmas season, we are reminded of Jesus' commitment to those in poverty. We hope that the FDA will take measures to ensure that canned food is BPA-free through the use of safe alternatives in the future."

The FDA has been researching the chemical for over a decade. Their most recent statement followed delays -- not just three delays, but years of delays. Naturally the FDA, along with the CDC and NIH will support further research, in addition to supporting a new regulatory framework. The research will add to the already substantial body of research showing BPA dangers. And I guess that's how it is. The FDA is obviously hesitant to impact a multi-billion dollar industry, so the research needs to be far more conclusive than, say, if you were putting a potentially profitable pharmaceutical drug on the market.

In the meantime, as the FDA maintains relevancy by "supporting", "facilitating", and "encouraging" -- cities, towns and states across the US will continue to be at the forefront of 'patchwork' BPA regulation, pushing manufacturers to use alternatives.

--------------------------------

¹ From NASA: "At that time, dark sand on the interior of Martian sand dunes became more and more visible as the spring Sun melted the lighter carbon dioxide ice. When occurring near the top of a dune, dark sand may cascade down the dune leaving dark surface streaks -- streaks that might appear at first to be trees standing in front of the lighter regions, but cast no shadows."

² As a side note, the progression of public comments is interesting because it also shows growing awareness of BPA. In 2006 the only public comment was from the American Plastics Council. By 2008 almost 50 individuals and agencies commented.

Checklists?

Atul Gawande's latest book, The Checklist Manifesto, advocates checklists to systemize the complexity of healthcare delivery and reduce medical mistakes. Making the media rounds, Gawande spoke for an hour recently on Democracy Now. He also testified before the President's Council on Science and Technology (PCAST).

Checklists, you ask? Certainly they're not new. Indeed, a few years ago, another physician, Dr. Peter Pronovost presented research showing the utility of checklists to tackle infectious disease in hospitals, and of course they've been used by airlines, oil change places, pizza delivery people, families going shopping, etc. Gawande's rendition appeared in this piece for The New Yorker in 2007. But his book is especially timely, given the current focus on healthcare reform.

The amount of information in medicine is vast -- 68,000 different patient diagnoses, 4,000 different surgeries, thousands of medicines. But despite our knowledge and exorbitant spending, healthcare outcomes in the US are lower than other industrialized countries -- 37th lowest, in fact, and sinking.

The fee for service incentives derail efficient healthcare, for instance by encouraging surgery. There are 230 million surgeries a year, 50 million in the US. Problematically, more surgeries means more surgical complications. The number of surgeries outstrips childbirths in the US, according to Gawande, but with 10-100 times the death rate. As he puts it, "150,000 people who die of complications of surgery, die within thirty days following surgery. And we know at least half are avoidable."

Gawande et al conclude that checklists help reduce mortality and morbidity from surgery and infections. Gawande also says they increase teamwork during procedures, for instance, by empowering nurses to point out missed checklist items. Better teamwork in turn increases success rates.

Checklists are not the complete solution to avoiding deaths, but when Gawande conducted research using checklists in eight hospital centers and 7,688 patients across the globe, the researchers found that deaths decreased by 46%, which, as a percentage looks quite dramatic, but according to their research surgical teams reduced deaths from surgery from 1.5% before the checklist to .8% afterwards. Serious complications fell from 11% to 7% according to the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) last year.

Checklists as Partial Solution

But if the improvements observed by the research teams aren't artifacts, checklist implementation is still not without other issues. Harold Varmus pointed out in the PCAST panel that checklists could impede creative solutions, and noted that investigations into best practices inevitably unveil multiple equally effective ways of solving medical challenges.

As well, according to Gawande, sometimes checklists impede profit. There are strong financial incentives encouraging doctors to do procedures like surgeries. Gawande wrote last summer about the high cost of healthcare in McAllen Texas, where Medicare spends $15,000 per enrollee because entrepreneurial doctors have found ways to profit mightily within the fee for service system. In Boston, although the checklists reduced emergency asthma admissions at Boston Children's Hospital by 80%, asthma admissions were the number one revenue source for the hospital admissions. The surgeon stressed that payment systems need to be adjusted when necessary, checklists won't work on their own. The problem of keeping costs down he told Democracy Now, has not been accomplished by insurance companies.

Checklists: Simple and Cheap, Dumped into a Technology Centric World?

One of Gawande's chief points is that checklists are simple and cheap to implement compared to proposed solutions for healthcare which involve ever more complicated technology that doesn't necessarily scale. As Gawande says: "There are technologies that we've tried to introduce. We've pursued very expensive solutions. But what we've not recognized is that we can pursue an idea like checklists...".

When Gawande presented these views to the President's panel, he ran into some interesting opinions from some in the IT sector who sit on the panel. His low tech solution elicited questions like: "Will physicians accept technology?"

Gawande observed that there "can be a sense of seeing the technology almost as a panacea". Problematically he says, although technology can be beneficial, "we have not really gathered evidence on what the components are that make it a successful implementation versus unsuccessful". Two systems in two different organizations can save lives and money in one institution and be a total failure in another, as was the case with a physicians' order entry system that Brigham Women's successfully implemented, which then failed to deliver cost savings and life saving benefits when implemented at Cedar's Sinai.

No sooner had he said this, when Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO who sits on PCAST, asked him why doctors didn't use technology more. Schmidt tried to get some insight for "the model of healthcare that we'll have five or ten years from now."

"It's pretty clear that we'll have personal health records and you'll have the equivalent of a USB stick or cloud based medical history. You'll show up at the doctor with some set of symptoms. And in my ideal world what would happen is that the doctoor would type the set of symptoms that they see as a doctor and they would be matched against this data that is a repository. And then a knowledge engine would use best practices and all the knowledge of the world to then give the physician some standardized guidance. This is a generalized form of your checklist mechanism. As a computer scientist, this is a platform database problem...And it's also knowledge engineering problem.

We do these very, very well, as a general rule in computer science. And it befuddles me why medicine has not organized itself around this platform opportunity. Do you have an opinion as to why not? Do you have an opinion as to how such a system would evolve so that the doctors would use it, it would standardize practices in the way you described and ultimately lead to presumably debates over healthcare and what the right outcomes are and all the kinds of incentives. If you don't have such a platform you'll never measure it to scale...

There are a lot of assumptions implicit in Schmidt's statements, we won't go through them all here, although some physician/commentators on the internet have already had a field day. Gawande started out responding that the people who make those systems "don't know how the clinical encounter works" -- six problems in 15 minutes per patient, for starters. He ended up more conciliatory towards the idea of computerized checklists. But he emphasized that his checklists involve understanding systems engineering issues involved with ensuring well-functioning teams. That checklists were not simply a challenge of listing as Schmidt put it "all the knowledge in the world".

Gawande also proposed to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology a new "science of health delivery" to study systems innovations, team organization and motivations, and coordinated deployment of healthcare. He even suggested a "National Institutes for Health Systems Innovation" to stand apart from the NIH (although such new agencies are fun to dream up but practically improbable).

Moving Forward on Platforms

For all the issues brought to the fore in "Checklist Manifesto", and for the all the issues at stake in healthcare, and to Gawande's warning about technology panacea's, it was interesting that the panel ended up quickly focusing on healthcare records. It's easy to imagine the temptation to look to health care records as that very panacea. A lot of the failures in medicine are also failures of communication, between the patient and doctor (15 minutes is often generous), between doctors, between facilities. Certainly technology already helps a lot of this, but for all the improvements in medical information technology to date, medical care is still fragmented, expensive, fraught with inconsistency and at times dangerous to the patient. Still, technology is necessarily part of the solution, and building the platform is critical.

So how would a new healthcare IT platform change the current medical system? There's a lot at stake for doctors and for patients. Any major change to the system could rearrange profits. Much of the routine patient care could be accomplished via a computer and a nurse or administrator. Why does a doctor need to charge $200 to tell you to take aspirin and drink fluids? Both Google and Microsoft are positioning themselves well -- it's hard to imagine either not grabbing the opportunity to root itself themselves into healthcare, they have a lot of mouths to feed back on their campuses.

It's troubling that the primary recipient, the patient, isn't very well represented in any of these discussions except by proxy of Google and various university doctors. 'We know what's good for you and we'll tell you what that is.' Everyone is advocating for "the patient", but Google is advocating for itself as well, as is Microsoft. And do university doctors in the upper echelons really experience the same problems with healthcare that your average patient does? That's what you get with 3rd party healthcare payers? The primary customer perhaps is not patients but insurance companies, who will no doubt benefit from the knowledge in more comprehensive databases of patient information.

The challenge perhaps is to improve healthcare (behind the patient's back), to not make it worse (no small feat), and to avoid simply adding another layer of expense and bureaucracy, to the gigantic Dagwood sandwich that is modern healthcare. It would be too easy to add more layers, to the layers and layers that comprise healthcare services, insurance, and companies that administer benefits, each one yielding profits from their slice, who in the end complicate healthcare and add costs for ambiguous ends.

The Chemical Lobby Finds Their Man:

Back when the momentum for banning bisphenol A (BPA) hadn't quite built up to its current fervor, BPA lobbyists used to denigrate everyone who questioned the safety of bisphenol A. Male, female, old, young, it didn't matter, they were 'internet moms' who'd worked themselves into a blind tizzy about bisphenol A, which was 'perfectly safe'.

But things were a little more tense last May for industry leaders who met to discuss a strategy for fighting back against the growing movement to limit consumer exposure to risky levels of BPA. As we quoted the Wall Street Journal in our post back then:

"industry executives huddled for hours Thursday trying to figure out how to tamp down public concerns over the chemical bisphenol A, or BPA. The notes said the executives are particularly concerned about the views of young mothers, who often make purchasing decisions for households and who are most likely to be focused on health concerns."

In addition to crafting clever lines to scare consumers, like "do you want to have access to baby food anymore?", the industry group discussed getting the right spokesman for their cause. A scientist might be difficult they acknowledged, they had reputations to preserve, but a pregnant woman would be "the Holy Grail".

Now it looks like they found their man in a public relations expert named "Joe Householder" -- his real name. This isn't the first challenging public relations assignment for Mr. Householder. He worked with, among others, Enron's law firm, baseball player Roger Clemons, Hillary Clinton, various other politicians, and Public Strategies Inc. Now he's with Purple Strategies Inc., apparently heading a group called "Coalition for Chemical Safety". The Coalition for Chemical Safety works with American Chemical Council (ACC) and other businesses. To date, those businesses are known more for not putting the safety and health of consumers before corporate profits.

So we look skeptically at "The Coalition for Chemical Safety". Indeed, it's described by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) as an BPA astroturfing organization. But it takes different tactics then previous BPA astroturfing campaigns. Mr. Householder and the Coalition for Chemical Safety take a warmer approach to BPA and chemicals, astroturfing-wise, then representatives in the past have.

In step with the times, the everyone_together_at_the_same_table age of Obama rhetoric, as opposed to the more acrimonious Bush era rhetoric, the Coalition is 'educating' consumers about chemicals. Instead of saying bluntly that BPA is safe, the mother in this Coalition sound clip talks about banning BPA in baby bottles, but encourages consumers and public health advocates to always work with the chemical companies (mp3 from EDF). This is the more subtle approach to controlling the public perception of chemicals. And who better to assure "young mothers" making "purchasing decisions for households", than a guy named Joe Householder?

In keeping with this new, more collegial approach to marketing/public relations, Householder has directly engaged Dr. Richard Denison, EDF's sometimes scathing Senior Scientist, in a mano-a-mano on Denison's blog. This is Householder's "purple" strategy, I think, not red, not blue, purple -- get it? That's where we all agree that chemicals are indeed wonderful (they are) and that we love regulation, just the "right" regulation, and "reasonable" regulation. Look out for that.

Mr. Household has invited Dr. Denison to join the Coalition for Chemical Safety, and although Denison hasn't posted a public response, I think with their combined gregariousness and magnetism, it's just a matter of time before they're hanging out together, Richard educating Householder on bisphenol A and Joe sharing public relations tactics and the use of his very apropos name. Isn't that how things get done these days?

Update: 02/14/09 Dr. Denison did continue to engage Joe Householder on the EDF blog. In a February post, Denison continued to ask Householder what his funding sources were, and what PR tactics he had used to get certain sectors so riled up about the Toxic Chemical Safety Act (TCSA):

"What exactly are you telling lawn services and landscaping companies they need to worry about in TSCA reform? And just what tortuous scenario are you weaving to convince police associations that better chemicals management will compromise their safety on the job?"

Denison wants some transparency from Householder. We don't know how/if Householder responded.

Acronym Required has written extensively on BPA science and regulation. We also wrote about individuals hired by industry, the acrimony they stir up, and the possibility of wonderful relationships blossoming between players on either side of the chemical divide in BPA Rhetoric and Reaction

Alberta Tar Sands

Last year we reported that the Alaskan gas pipeline, touted as necessary for American energy independence, would actually be transporting a lot of the gas to Canada's Alberta tar sands", where the gas would fuel oil extraction from bitumen, an energy intensive, elaborate process for getting oil. The oil will eventually help fuel US needs.

Extracting oil from the tar sands is difficult, expensive, and dirty.¹ But as oil becomes scarcer and more expensive, extraction from the tar sands becomes a more economical option. Bitumen production increased from 482,000 barrels in 1995, to 1.3 million barrels a day in 2008, and is expected to reach 2 to 2.9 million barrels a day by 2020.² Extraction operations increased in area to 530km² (205mi²) in 2007.

Now a study from University Alberta released in the online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), finds that the tar sand extraction projects are dirtier than thought.² Previous surveys done by the industry found that the tar sand operations didn't increase downstream levels of polycyclic aromatic compounds (PACs) -- chemicals (some carcinogenic) released both naturally and through mining operations.

Schindler et al independently investigated water pollution from the tar sands. Testing water from the Athabasca River, Lake, Delta and tributaries, their findings contradict previous studies by showing increased PACs. The authors found that the levels of polycyclic aromatic compounds (PACs) are higher downstream of mining activity, and greater in the summer than winter months. They also sampled snowpack, where they found significant particulate deposits.

Currently, the industry monitors itself, and the Alberta government somewhat audits the reports. Schindler observed to the journal Nature ³ what many recognize as problems with industry self-monitoring, it's "sort of like abolishing the police and asking people to pull over if they see they're speeding and report themselves." The PNAS authors recommend that the federal government take over monitoring pollution from the bitumen extraction operations.

Reports of like this are bad news to some Canadians who are worried about impressions and bad publicity around the tar sands, especially with the increased international attention due to Copenhagen. As University of Alberta energy economist Joseph Doucet put it: put it, "God help us if this becomes like baby seals."

-----------------------

¹ To get a sense of it, I recommend Elizabeth Kolbert's article in the New Yorker, "Unconventional Crude."

² Schindler DW et al "Oil sands development contributes polycyclic aromatic compounds to the Athabasca River and it tributaries" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0912050106

³ Jones, N. "Tar sands mining linked to stream pollution" Nature www.nature.com | doi:10.1038/news.2009.1127

When "Effective EPA" is No Longer an Oxymoron?

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized the agency's finding last April that greenhouse gases "(GHGs) endanger public health and welfare. Jackson reminded viewers that the Bush administration EPA had found that greenhouse gases endangered health and welfare, action compelled by the 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, but had "regrettably" stalled on moving forward with the agency's recommendation offering only "excuses" and "delay". Said Jackson: "this administration will not ignore science or the law any longer, nor will we avoid the responsibility we owe to our children and grandchildren."

Having finalized the Endangerment Finding, Jackson announced some first steps:

"Next month, large emitters in the U.S. will begin working with EPA to monitor their emissions. Beginning in 2011, large emitters will - for the first time - submit publicly available information that will allow us to meaningfully track greenhouse gas emissions over time....And starting next spring, large emitting facilities will be required to incorporate the best available methods for controlling greenhouse gas emissions when they plan to construct or expand."

The agency noted that it had no intention of putting burdens on small businesses.

The Indefensible Status Quo and Republicans Think They're Deep Throat(?)

Last weekend we wrote about a group of GOP Republicans who asked the EPA to withdraw the Endangerment Finding because of the CRU emails. We noted their tone of desperation, for instance that they tried to make their case by quoting an infamous, non-sensical UK climate denier. Jackson addressed the skeptics, and noted that the EPA's action was based on decades of research.

"We know that skeptics have and will continue to try to sow doubts about the science. It's no wonder that many people are confused. But raising doubts - even in the face of overwhelming evidence - is a tactic that has been used by defenders of the status quo for years. Those tactics have only served to delay and distract from the real work ahead, namely, growing our clean energy economy and freeing ourselves from foreign oil that endangers our security and our economy."

True to form, last week Representative James Sensenbrenner(R-WI) had said that CRU emails were "evidence of scientific facism". Today, having worn out facism, communism and nazism and Hitler references, EPA letter writer Representative Richard Issa (R-CA) summoned fellow Republican the deceased Richard Nixon for his incoherent campaign. Responding to Jonathan Pershing's (U.S. deputy special envoy for climate change) observation that the emails were inconsequential and the science on climate change was "incredibly robust", Issa declared: "Richard Nixon said that about what Deep Throat had outed about the break-in."

Green Jobs, Pragmatism and Details

Jackson noted that today's action would also assure the American people, scientists, and the world that the EPA is serious, after eight years of inaction, about acting on the challenge of climate change. She hoped that recent EPA action would restore the "credibility and the trust of the American people" by taking an "enduring" and "pragmatic"

"step[s] towards innovation, investment and implementation of technologies that reduce harmful emissions...green jobs, reduced dependence on foreign oil, and a better future for our children."

These are great steps for the EPA, although we recognize the devil is in the details. Just as the work wasn't over once Obama won the election, the work isn't over now that the waiver is finalized.

Progress and Promises on AIDS:

Today, on World AIDS Day 2009, while looking for a statistic, I entered into Google the search: "HIV infections decrease". The sometimes precocious search engine offered an instantaneous correction: "did you mean HIV infections increase" [sic] No, I silently answered, frowning, before I caught myself attempting communication with a search engine. Then I flipped the search to Google News. Google insisted I must mean "increase". So I got the statistic I was looking for and relented to Google's know-it-all suggestion. Indeed although Google was wrong, I understand the reasoning, even if only algorithmic: The first search phrase, "decrease", yielded only 1,940,000 results in .22 seconds, whereas the second, "increase", gave 3,550,000 results in .18 seconds.

Just like the search engine, we brace ourselves for the worst with HIV/AIDS, we're habituated to hearing bad news. As the pandemic continues and effective methods for decreasing HIV infections, increasing treatment, and procuring funding seem at times as elusive as ten years ago, sometimes we need to look up once a year on AIDS day with some real intention just to see the inches gained in the sand we've been trying to get traction in.

Otherwise, even though the number of number of infections has decreased by 17% since 2001, all the World AIDS Days blur together and we're tempted to ask questions. Questions like -- has anything actually changed since the 20th World AIDS Day of 2007, when 61% of HIV infected population were women? Or from 2008 World AIDS Day? Or the first World AIDS Day 22 years ago?

Last year, on the the 21st World AIDS Day, we noted milestones like Bush's PEPFAR funding effort, and Barbara Hogan's appointment as South Africa's Health Minister. However, things change quickly in this area of public health, and this year brought both positive and negative news for PEPFAR and South Africa, two of our areas of interest.

The year started out promisingly, with Obama's inauguration and his pledge to pay even more attention to AIDS, especially for the recently increased national infections. He noted that his strategy would-

"...be based on the best available science and built on the foundation of a strong health care system"....however, he warned, "in the end, this epidemic can't be stopped by government alone, and money alone is not the answer either."

After being sworn in, Obama immediately got rid of the ban on international funding for groups that provided counseling on abortion. Condoms, an essential part of prevention, lost the evil connotation they had during the Bush administration. (The church took up the campaign when Pope Benedict XVI announced falsely in March that condoms would worsen the AIDS crisis). Obama was true to his campaigning words here. Science studies show that condoms are effective, and abstinence programs are not. Studies also show that attention to public health is central to preventing and treating infectious disease. Indeed, healthcare has been a theme of Obama's administration -- albeit to what end, we don't know. The president also recently lifted the HIV/AIDS travel ban, which has ostracized AIDS patients, something that's also been proven to undermine prevention and treatment programs.

Unfortunately, but again true to his word, Obama hasn't provided the leadership people hoped he would, even though government leadership has proven central to any successful HIV prevention and AIDS treatment program. Worse, although Obama the president-elect promised $1 billion per year in PEPFAR funding, the 2010 budget proposal contains only $366 million. The funding shortfalls have effected HIV and AIDS treatment programs, for instance eligible patients in Uganda are being turned away for lack of funds. The president's funding choices earned Obama a scathing D+ from AIDS NGOs.

Change in South Africa

In good news, South Africa's President Zuma has made several promises that show he's wised up from the time in court not long ago, when he defended himself on rape charges and said that a shower would prevent infection by HIV. Last month, Zuma promised that South Africa would vigorously address the national AIDS crisis.

Last May, when Zuma announced the reassignment of Barbara Hogan, whom he replaced with Dr. Aaron Motsoaledi, there was some concern from South Africa's public health community about the assignment, concern the Dr. Motsoaledi was inexperienced, while Hogan's work was widely praised. However public health groups have since welcomed the new minister's straightforward acknowledgments of past mistakes.

We hope South Africa's new realizations -- like that the nation's deaths from AIDS increased more than 100 percent in 11 years -- are not just a rhetorical distancing of the ANC party from former President Thabo Mbeki's and his denialism, but a real commitment to an AIDS program. Optimistically, today Zuma announced the government's intention to treat all babies and pregnant women infected with AIDS.

In other major HIV/AIDS news this year, initial reports of a successful vaccine clinical trial in Thailand brought increased public attention and then consternation to later news of the same trial. The second news release informed the world that when researchers did further analysis of the results they doubted that the benefit was statistically significant. That's the way it goes though, steps forward, and steps back. The work continues tomorrow, and for the next 364 days we'll all work towards a more upbeat World AIDS Day 2010.

Superfreakonomics authors Levitt and Dubner make it out like solving global warming is no more complicated than cooling off on the patio on a hot summer day. First, someone else puts up the umbrella, then they unwind the hose and spray all the kids so they stay cool. This may sound good to you, but it's not logical, despite what the Superfreaks insist. They're appealing to your laziness, your ennui, your fear, and your cynicism, all in the name of books and businesses that you don't hold stock in. Do you but it?

Daily Show Economics

When Steven Levitt appeared on the Daily Show to talk about their new book and the giant umbrellas that could be used to ward off climate change, Jon Stewart apologized for the collective response by scientists to Levitt and Dubner's unscientific treatment of climate change. Not only unscientific, dismissive too: Levitt told the Guardian "We could end this debate and be done with it, and move on to problems that are harder to solve", (hat tip Curious Capitalist).

Stewart commiserated to the criticized Levitt: "I'm sorry you're taking so much shit for it". But Stewart let his Daily Show audience down. For one, "Superfreakonomics" disappointed Freakonomics fans, especially those devoted libertarians and contrarians, who, though often delusional, generally manage at least a modicum of realism about climate change. Daily Show fans were also surprised that Stewart was so sympathetic to Levitt.

But if people were dismayed with The Daily Show's dismissal of climate change, they haven't been paying attention. Stewart isn't always smarter 'than that', if smarter doesn't fit the particular formula-funny he runs. Note how Stewart barely batted an eye when Levitt offered his other offensive assertion, that prostitutes should retain pimps in order to earn more money. It's true, shrugged Levitt, as if nothing can to be done because the invisible hand has sealed womens' fates the world over -- as if he didn't just twist up that statistical interpretation to get people tittering and buying books.

"The heroes turn out to be the pimps", he said. Shrug. "Get rid of the moral part" he insisted, and you have pure unadulterated economics, that's what we're about. Jon jested. Hahaha, heeheehee. Levitt shrugged again. Then the two entertainers moved on to climate change and the irrationality of environmentalists.

When Your Advertisers Are Auto Companies?

And trashing "environmentalists" isn't new territory, either, for Levitt or for Stewart. The Freakonomics blog has argued repeatedly that recycling makes little sense. The Daily Show host has previously criticized actions to lower carbon emissions, for instance "Auto-Neurotic Gas Fixation", May 20, 2009. At the time, Obama had just announced his intention to set new, ambitious CAFE standards for gas mileage. Stewart chastised him for it: "Dude...Obama...don't blow your load on mileage baby, save it for when the Chinese invade."

Stewart said that gas efficient cars, being smaller, put people "in harm's way because they're in a lighter vehicle", that "safety" was a "valid", "reasonable concern". A nod to all the automobile companies that advertise with Comedy Central perhaps? Or ignorance? You decide. We thought that this ancient Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) argument died back in 2007, once people thought through their elementary math and physics and realized that yes, if you run your Prius into a Hummer, you may get hurt, but the more Priuses on the road, and the fewer Hummers, the less likely you will be to run into a Hummer, therefore less likely you'll get hurt. Alas, there we were in the spring of 2009 and Jon Stewart was giving us his schoolboy version of the old auto industry fueled CEI argument.

Coincidentally, at the time -- April/May 2009 -- car sales had recently dropped to their lowest point in thirty years. A flurry of editorials pronounced the danger of small vehicles and so Stewart fit right in with The Wall Street Journal which droned on about about the "lethal effects" of CAFE standards and light vehicles. Lesson? Comedy Central is not always all that "progressive" people - really.

Just When You Thought Superfreak was Finally Gone

So Jon Stewart's accommodation to Levitt's argument isn't a surprise, nor is Superfreakonomics' bid to attract attention by rousing populist appeal. As the sequel to Freakonomics (which admittedly never did it for me), SuperFreakonomics seems to run aground the way many movie sequels do -- Rocky V, Clerks II, Caddyshack II... While maintaining sufficient audiences to grind through talk-shows, stimulate blog chatter, and generate pay-out, the authors deeply disappoint fans.

Here's a collection of about 90 blog links that criticize Chapter 5 of the book. They call the authors on many points, for instance:

• Of distorting the science and misquoting scientists - From an atmospheric scientist (Ken Caldeira) in response to the book's quote - "Carbon dioxide is not the right villain": "I don't believe I said anything remotely like that...we should be outlawing the production of devices that emit carbon dioxide...I do see CO2 as the problem...it's like if you got shot by a bullet and you said, well, it wasn't really the bullet that was the problem, it was just that I happened to have this hole through my body..."

• Of distorting science consensus - From many economists: "it is terribly misleading that the two scientists you quote are BOTH skeptics. What are the odds of that? Probably a billion to one, so my unavoidable conclusion is that you are deliberately trying to cast doubt on the scientific consensus."

• Of presenting facile, improbable solutions to climate change like pumping SO2 into the atmosphere with a giant hose - From scientists: "'..thinking of geoengineering as a substitute for emissions reduction is analogous to saying, 'Now that I've got the seatbelts on, I can just take my hands off the wheel and turn around and talk to people in the back seat.' It's crazy.'"

• Of deceiving the American public - From a congressman: "We have seen a similar effort to hoodwink, defraud, and deceive the American public now to cover up the toxicity to the world environment...I want to note a book...that basically said or asserted we don't have to control CO2..They purported to quote a scientist named Ken Caldeira from Stanford...Which is an absolute deception."

Like the Daily Show, the Superfreakonomics authors have a history of distorting reality.

Stripping Away Moralism and Giving You Freedom: The Ruse

As I wrote above, what Levitt claims, is that he simply "strips away the moralism" - then, all you have is the economics and prostitution, or economics and climate change. Glib. This is not uncommon rhetoric in economics, politics and public policy -- the ultra-rational, just do the math approach. It's used, for instance, to justify radical cost-benefit-analysis, where people argue that you can put a monetary value on everything - the price of one member of an endangered species, the price of the life of an old person, the price of the life of an infant, the price of a chemical to an industry - and otherwise complicated policy decisions fraught with difficult ethical choices can be reduced to simple math. Voilà.

The problem is, when the authors decided to write that prostitutes are better off with pimps then dug up some statistics to support that assertion, they made a moral decision. First Levitt and Dubner had to decide that this particular slant on prostitution was what they wanted to focus on, then they had to cherry pick some "data" to support it. Similarly, as we wrote in an earlier post, deciding that a male mule deer is worth $525.50, whereas a female mule deer is worth $163, while a just plain deer is worth $1, is not a decision without "moralism".

Moral sentiments are part and parcel of human decisions. Numbers and words that appear in print on a piece of paper or screen in front of you came from a formula or process derived by a human, based on that human's views, perceptions, expectations and desired outcomes. It didn't come from some superior amoralistic all-knowing power, intent on providing answers and comfort to confused humans beings -- despite what people may try to convince you.

Ironically, by asking his audience to "strip away the moralism", Levitt is appealing to ethos or pathos, but certainly not logos. He's saying -- be logical like me, I'm being logical. Shrug. But he's dismissing tons and tons of scientific proof of climate change and the need to decrease emissions as pathetic "moral" arguments (ethos), when those scientific studies are actually the logical ones (logos). He's appealing to his audience's laissez-faire tendencies, their desire to do nothing, their habits not to change, their pathos.

The Ploy: Technology will Suffice in Lieu of Action

Then, offering the equivalent of the old, chintzy plastic prize at the bottom of the box of Crackerjacks, he gives the audience something to grasp on to in the impending and threatening flood of unpleasant scientific reality, although again, it's not logical. Levitt insists that there's a simple scientific solution to solve the problem. Of course, there is no technological solution. The authors offer untested pie-in-the-sky idea that many, many scientists find problematic.

But this is what we all want to hear, right? The irrational, busy, lazy or pathetic side of all of all of us wants to be assured that electronic records will solve healthcare failures, that tsunami warning systems will prevent catastrophic losses, that ankle bracelets will prevent recidivism, that massive fences along international borders will prevent terrorism and drug trafficking, and that electronic surveillance will prevent crime. But giant garden hoses suspended up in the sky, are not even in the realm of feasible technical solutions. Yet we're so happy to slough off responsibility that Jon Stewart, although he's a modern icon of cynicism, doesn't even bother to ask questions.

Levitt plays to the audience's sentiments perfectly, first by laughing off science and scientists who present scary ideas as flimsy moralistic hogwash, then by presenting his very own special version of "science". I'm the logical one, he says, but I'm not dorky like a scientist.

His flavor of rhetoric is commonly used by those who oppose scientific evidence because it presents the type of science society likes, that which solves our problems, but is seemingly stress-free, simpler to understand than Tivo, and doesn't require you to have liked high school science. Therefore Superfreakonomics presents magic "technology solutions" in terms your average barbecuing Joe (if there is such a thing) will know and like.

According to them, solving global warming is no more complicated than cooling down on a hot summer day on the patio. First someone else puts up the umbrella to shield you. Then a kindly neighbor unwinds the hose and sprays away, and all the kids stay cool. Sound good? But its not logical. It's doesn't strip away moralism. It doesn't give you freedom. You do have to worry about global warming, you may have to change your lightbulbs. Superfreakonomics appeals not to your logical side but to your laziness, your ennui, your fear, your cynicism, all in the name of books and businesses that you don't hold stock in.

The Solution

This isn't to say that we don't need technology, quite the opposite, technology is imperative to global warming attenuation. But it's not the only effort we need, we need to conserve and to decrease emissions also.

Underlying Superfreaks' argument is the contention that people won't change. And true, people tend to squirm and stall when pressed to adjust, as we noted in "Sea Change or Littoral Disaster", Cars: Buying Cognitive Dissonance", Science Communication, Communicating Climate Change, and Climate Change, Fueling the "Debate", "Curvilinear Thinking on Climate Change", and other posts. But Real Climate's good point is that - people will change with the right incentives. People can work collectively for the better, they don't need a solution to be imposed from nigh. They do have a long history of employing morals as well as logic to solve problems, both are good, both are necessary. And given all that, it may simply be immoral for Superfreak authors to distort the truth of climate change and insist on selling implausible solutions.

Notes:

"Smart Choices and Jiffy Pop"
"Calculating Carbon Emissions"
"Polar Bears at Sea"
"Manufacturing Sugar and Cynicism"
"Scientist Falsified Data, Embezzled Research Funds, and Illegally Bought Human Embryos -- But is Very Popular"
"Corporations, The Working Stiffs, The Rebels"
"Transparency: A Solution for Research Bias or A Refuge for Secrets?"

• Smart Choices and Jiffy Pop: If a rudderless man seeking fame can enthrall a whole nation -- the leader of the free world, at that -- with what Frank Rich referred to as an "supersized Jiffy Pop bag", we could bet that the largest food companies in said nation could easily pass off junk food like Froot Loops cereal as "Smart Choices". And so they did (or do).

  When the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned that it would scrutinize food labels in the "Smart Choices Program", have a look at the ingredients in "smart choice" sugary treats like Cocoa Crispies cereal, the program's leaders suddenly announced they would "suspend" operations. Let Frank Rich judge us smug, but we should award "Smart Choices" companies, along with balloon boy fiasco participants (viewers and all), with hearty back slaps for shamelessness.

  "Smart Choices" had been under heavy fire since its inception, and no one, not even FOX Business News, thought the program was anything but "a cynical way" for food manufacturers to sell products -- "dumb and dumber", as John Stossel put it. The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) called out Kraft for putting the "Smart Choices" logo on its Strawberry Bagel-fuls -- confections chocked full of cream cheese, sugar and red dye. So program's taking a hiatus and getting out of the heat, at least for now.

• Calculating Carbon Emissions: Scientists and policymakers who rely on biofuel carbon emission calculations to set policy have been using figures that underestimate total emissions, according to an article in last week's issue of Science (Searchinger et al. "Fixing a Critical Climate Accounting Error": Vol. 326. no. 5952, pp. 527 - 528). The current estimates ignore "CO2 emitted from tailpipes and smokestacks when bioenergy is being used", and also ignore "changes in emissions from land use when biomass for energy is harvested or grown." The errors will increase deforestation, the authors report, because the resulting incentives favor clearing established forest to plant biomass. Environmental Defense Fund's (EDF's) Chief Scientist Steven P. Hamburg told the Washington Post: "We made an honest mistake within the scientific framing of the debate, and we've got to correct it to make it right". Both the Waxman-Markey and the Kerry-Boxer energy bills include the miscalculation.

  Bioenergy and biomass company representatives loudly disagree with the Science study's conclusions, insisting that biomass is "carbon neutral". But of course we know that that's not true, nothing is carbon neutral -- not cars, not electric buses, not biomass. An "emissions free" electric bus, for instance, is filled with seats and upholstery and metal and paint that produced emissions during manufacturing, assembly, and transport. Emissions accounting is only reliable when it includes all the emissions produced over the full life cycle of the product.

• Polar Bears at Sea: The US Fish and Wildlife Association in the U.S. Department of the Interior proposed to set aside 128 million acres for the polar bear, following a lawsuit by the Center for Biological Diversity, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Greenpeace. Simultaneously, the Minerals Management Service, also in the Department of the Interior, approved oil-company plans for exploratory drilling in the polar bear's habitat in the Beaufort Sea. Brendan Cummings, senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity called The Interior Department "schizophrenic".

  Image Copyright Greenpeace/Daniel Beltrá (via Google Images "labeled for reuse" search).

• Manufacturing Sugar and Cynicism: If you feel sad about the loss of "Smart Choices", rest assured that there's more where that came from. Coke and other food manufacturers have launched the "Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation", which advises people to exercise more in order to balance sugary, fatty food and soda intake. The food industry insists the sugar is not the culprit in the obesity epidemic, lack of exercise is. Acronym Required wrote about this industry strategy against soda critics in 2005.

  Now with governments raising the specter of taxes on sugary drinks, Coca-Cola has introduced its own little "smart choice" -- a smaller can of Coke, containing 90 kilocalories per serving. Coke markets its "portion-control option" as one that will help people "manage their calorie intake while still enjoying the beverages they love". Sort of like like our preferred way of dealing with carbon emissions -- don't lower them, just figure out a way to store them, deny them, or incorrectly calculate them.

• Scientist Falsified Data, Embezzled Research Funds, and Illegally Bought Human Embryos -- But is Very Popular: Hwang Woo-suk was a national hero in Korea after he claimed he had cloned stem cells. Then a long investigation involving co-researchers in the US and Korea found that his lab falsified data -- he had not cloned cell lines, as we noted in "The Emperor Has No Clones". Now, not only has he falsified data, a South Korean court has now found scientist Hwang Woo-suk guilty of embezzling research funds and illegally buying human embryos.

  The Korean government long ago revoked Hwang's title of "Supreme Scientist" and stopped selling Hwang Woo-suk postage stamps. But the fraud-besotted scientist hardly missed a beat. Since the court's last finding of guilt, Hwang Woo-suk published papers and started a research foundation -- Sooam Biotech Research Foundation. As a professor at Sooam put it: "Dr. Hwang has conducted his research tirelessly under terrible conditions." And despite his crimes, Dr. Hwang attracts tremendous public support. Hundreds of "hard-core fans" were waiting outside of court, and "dozens of lawmakers filed petitions asking the court for leniency", according to the Los Angeles Times.

• Corporations, The Working Stiffs and The Rebels: Michael Moore's recent movie "Capitalism: A Love Story" reminded people about Dead Peasant's Insurance, which may be the ultimate indignity to workers in the super-capitalist world. But the workers sometimes find ways harangue corporations. The Guardian looks at the campaign of a 92 year old's "gripe site" against Shell, as well as the Twitter campaign against Trafigura and social media's impact on so-called corporate responsibility.

• Transparency: A Solution for Research "Bias" or A Refuge for Secrets?: Last year we wrote about The Obesity Society's indignation, after Dr. David Allison, on behalf of a restaurant association suing New York City, submitted a legal affidavit criticizing the city's plan to require fast food restaurants to post caloric information for customers.

  To note, before Allison became an advocate for restaurants, he had worked for "the other side", publishing studies which urged government intervention to stem the obesity epidemic. Nevertheless, we thought The Obesity Society's ire somewhat ironic since Allison's CV is public and he's been very transparent about all his affiliations including his industry ones. As we noted:

  "In the 2005 NEJM paper about obesity longevity, nine authors each disclosed zero financial interests or affiliations. Dr. Allison, however, listed 150 organizational affiliations in a three page single spaced PDF, attached to the paper..."

  Apparently not too many people read the .PDF, including The Obesity Society, since the cause of their ire, Allison's consulting (against NYC's public health measures) was nothing new. In the glare of media exposure from a New York Times article and under pressure from The Obesity Society, Allison stepped down from his president-elect position. But he maintains an active career. Last week, the journal Science published a letter from Allison, who advised an "antidote" to "research bias" (Vol. 326. no. 5952, pp. 522 - 523).

  "Bias", is actually a soft label for the real problem of discerning the influence of industry funding on research or policy recommendations. Addressing the ongoing debate in Science about "bias", Allison wrote that the solution is data transparency: "When data are public, no one need take analyses on faith". Allison is attentive to the possibility that industry payment could color expert opinions, but apparently considers himself above the fray: "'I was chosen" - he said last year, "I think of it like a calling. It is a special and sacred profession. Our sacred duty is truth.'"

  The problem -- aside from the sense of "sacred duties" -- is his suggestion that transparency in our data prolific world will assure scrutiny or integrity. Raw data is made into policy by experts, but unanalyzed raw data is fairly meaningless, transparent or not. Experts don't have time. The Obesity Society demonstrated this last year in their apparent oblivion to the record of their president-elect and their surprise when Allison challenged New York City's labeling laws. His resume was very accessible and his conflict of interest statements clearly showed him to be the hired gun he was (for the truth, of course). But the ~2000 experts in the Society who had voted him president only noticed his conflict of interest once it became public concern via the New York Times.

  The error of assuming that transparency is adequately informative is also shown in a recent study of those same New York City labeling laws, now in effect. On behalf of the restaurant association, Allison had insisted that the labeling laws would backfire and cause customers to "gorge themselves". But a recent study showed that the calorie information may not change customers' food habits at all. Not only won't they gorge, they might not cut back on their intake either.

  Transparency for nothing? Beyond Dr. Allison and obesity, this isn't good news for the growing trend in government -- now enthusiastically endorsed by Allison -- to push transparency in lieu of regulatory policy. ¹

¹ The study was published in the October issue of the journal Health Affairs, and I couldn't access the full text. But since this is one of the first studies to analyze this policy, the authors do caution that it's too soon to jump to conclusions, similar studies will shed further light on the behavior associated with the new policy.

• "Beyond Yottabytes" -- The NSA Will Know Who's Been Naughty and Who's Been Nice: The New York Review of Books reports on the government's information quest:

  "As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve," says the report..."the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015."[1] Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named."

  NYRB continues: "Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be--or may one day become--a terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story."

• FedThread: FedThread A newly launched Federal register where you can annotate documents, customize feeds, and search the Federal Register back to 2000. Not to be confused with Threadfed, an embroidery site.

• Health Map: Allows you to see various outbreaks like H1N1, and recalls like salmonella, by geographic area.

• Open Access How-To: SPARC issued a guide for publishers wanting to support open access, along with supply and demand side revenue models.

• Government is an Arm of the Banks: We know that the banks have a phone line to Tim Geithner. But in case you doubted the effect of that on bank behavior, or if you trusted there were no future implications of that relationship for regulation, watch Bill Moyers' show last week with Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur (Ohio-9) and Simon Johnson, the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Don't read the transcript. Watch the show.

• Telecoms are Agencies Within The Government?: The banks aren't the only ones with a disconcertingly close relationship with the White House. Wired reports that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is investigating the influence of telecom lobbying on the Justice Department's coup of winning retroactive immunity for AT&T and others accused of spying on citizens. EFF requested related documents under the Freedom of Information Act and the government refused, arguing that the documents were protected because they were "intra-agency", that is, telecoms were an arm of government.

  Last month U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White reversed that decision, ruling for the EFF that the Justice Department was obligated to release the names of telecom employees who contacted the Justice Department and White House.

• Is Transparency Is Over-rated? Is Lessig The Fifth Column?: Lawrence Lessig used to argue that culture needed to be free. People should be able to mash it up, he said, make what they wanted out of songs and books and writing. He founded Creative Commons, whereby people can use your work for free, with attribution if they feel like it. He started what turned into the Google Books settlement when he legally challenged copyright laws by pursuing the release from copyright of "orphan" books. At the time, he was at Stanfords' Center for the Internet and Society, funded by 2 million dollars from Google.

  Now Lessig is pursuing a different cause while he is at Harvard and on the board of the excellent Sunlight Foundation (biased, maybe, but I have no stakes), which funds projects to make government more transparent. Paradoxically, perhaps, Lessig argues in The New Republic this month that transparency is dangerous because people have short attention spans and mashing up the data will connect money to politicians in seemingly nefarious ways when in fact none may exist. The citizens, simple as they are, will become cynical, and government will fall apart. Something like that. The Sunlight Foundation disagrees. More later.

• Google's Fast Flip: You can browse multiple sites simultaneously. Small print. To note: Google chooses which sites participate.

• States Can Sue Utilities: States had tried to sue utilities for being a "public nuisance", releasing CO2 which creates global warming and the court had ruled against them. Now, as the NYT reports: "a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled that eight states -- California, Connecticut, Iowa, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin -- as well as New York City and three land trusts could proceed with a suit" against American Electric Power, Southern Corporation, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Xcel Energy and Cinergy Corporation, all large coal-burning utilities."

• Economist Changes User Access: The Economist will remove much of the online content for perusal by non-paying subscribers, including the Table of Contents of the print edition - clever. Subscribers will get access to an audio version, archives and all content.

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Image from Wikipedia Commons

Preserving the Brilliance?

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski spoke on net neutrality last month, promising an open and robust internet that would continue to benefit business and individuals, commerce and democracy:

"...we are here because 40 years ago, a bunch of researchers in a lab changed the way computers interact and, as a result, changed the world. We are here because those Internet pioneers had unique insights about the power of open networks to transform lives for the better, and they did something about it. Our work now is to preserve the brilliance of what they contributed to our country and the world."

Freedom to Tinker's David Robinson recently critiqued net neutrality proposals now the works. In addition to the FCC's announcement, Robinson reviewed a legislative proposal by Representative Ed Markey (D-MA).

Promulgating Ambiguity?

Legislation like Markey's could, if written right, solidify the goals of net neutrality more robustly than leaving the process entirely to the FCC. However Robinson writes that as it stands, The Internet Preservation Act of 2009 assumes too much in the way of regulatory authority from the FCC. Secondly it depends on an ill-defined standard of "reasonableness", as reasonableness would be judged by unidentified "interests". For example:

"We are discussing the actions of ISPs, who are generally public companies-- do their interests in profit maximization count as compelling? Shareholders certainly think so. What about their interests in R&D? Or, does the statute mean to single out the public's interest in the general goods outlined in section 12 (a), such as "protect[ing] the open and interconnected nature of broadband networks"?

Robinson calls for clearer language that leaves less ambiguity about what's being proposed. More here.

Update: 9/11/09: Cass Sunstein, subject of the note below, was nominated to the OIRA post. The list of Yeas and Nays from yesterday's vote is here.

• Scientist says Nerds are Happy: The New York Times Sunday op-ed section featured advice from educators to students. Nancy Hopkins wrote:

  "Passion is the mysterious force behind nearly every scientific breakthrough. Perhaps it's because without it you might never be able to tolerate the huge amount of hard work and frustration that scientific discovery entails...For the next four years you will get to poke around the corridors of your college, listen to any lecture you choose, work in a lab...You may be the person who constructs a new biological species, or figures out how to stop global warming, or aging. Maybe you'll discover life on another planet..." More here.

• China Surges Ahead With Solar: Inner Mongolia in China will be the location of the world's largest solar facility. China is working with the US company First Solar. The new solar farm is due for completion in 5 years and will generate 2 gigawatts of energy by 2019. Plans are also in the works in India and the US for other giant solar facilities.

• Awesome Hubble Photos: NASA upgraded the 19 year old Hubble telescope this summer and released photos that showed impressive improvements due to the upgrade. Compare the Omega Centauri starfield from 2002 to a recent one taken after the scientists completed the Hubble renovations. The photo to the left is a from the planetary nebula NGC 6302 -- a dying star in the middle -- also known as the "Butterfly Nebula".

• Phoenicopterus ruber falsus: Madison, Wisconsin has named the pink plastic flamingo the city's bird, in honor of a college prank from 30 years ago which Alderwoman Marsha Rummel said "signifies something that makes us a very special place" and "captured in our imaginations forever." Why worry about endangered species when there's plastic so real politicians lose their minds?

• Constitution Day: Federal law now requires that schools receiving federal funding offer an education day to celebrate the signing of the Constitution. September 17th, which used to be called Citizenship Day, was renamed Constitution Day and the education requirement added to the 2004 Omnibus Spending Act by Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV). Wikipedia suggests that the holiday began as I Am American Day, a May holiday designated by Congress in 1940 after being championed by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Now that newspapers are dying and some Americans are going cuckoo, it seems like a fine time to reinvigorate the holiday. It's a shame that some hosts on certain television networks aren't required to take a refresher course.

• Nudge in Action Despite Opposition to Sunstein: We previously wrote about the preposterous protest of Cass Sunstein's nomination not because of his cost-benefit analysis views (.pdf), but because hunting enthusiasts fear he's too enthusiastic about animal rights. They continue to foam at the mouth oppose his nomination for the same ill-conceived reasons we noted before. But yesterday, despite efforts of Glenn Beck to derail the Obama administration and move the "conversation" to the right towards McCarthyism, Democrats pushed Sunstein's nomination forward.

  Even as opposition foot-dragging continues (an anonymous third Senator has apparently placed another hold on the nomination), Sunstein isn't languishing idle. With more two books published since his nomination, his influence can also be seen in Obama administration policy changes such as the retirement savings plan changes, announced by the President on Labor Day.

• Media Wars: A number of "11th-hour filers" are challenging the Google book deal, including Germany and France. The head of the US copyright office expressed reservations. At a recent Google Books conference, James Love said that Google benefits from people's perception that if Google makes it it must be free and good, and if it were called (I paraphrase) AnyOtherCorporation Book Deal, it would have never progressed this far. People aren't consoled by the Google image as the lovable, do no evil, benevolent adopter of just a small number of orphan books. But was copyright really meant to extend life plus 70 years? In the interest of the public, hopefully they'll settle on the "right" book deal.

• Clues to Potato Blight: Scientists collaborating from 36 institutions across the globe completed sequencing the water mold responsible for late blight and the Irish Great Famine of 1840's-1850's. Phytophthora infestans consumes the plant's leaves and tubers and just as it wiped out potato crops in the 19th century, today the mold causes ~$6.7 billion dollars of damage annually to tomatoes, potatoes and other crops.

  Researchers identified genes that may help the organism evade scientists fight against the costly blight, and also found that about 75% of the genome contained repeat sections of DNA called transposons. Transposons duplicate and jump from one section of the genome to another, where they can disrupt genes and introduce mutations. This could allow the organism to adapt and evolve more quickly and continue to cause havoc in potato crops despite scientists' best efforts to engineer blight resistant crops.

  The part of the genome that contains the transposons also contains genes that code proteins responsible for virulence. Researchers theorize that the instability of this greatly expanded and rapidly changing part of the genome gives P. infestans its lethal power. The sequence data will help scientists understand the mold in order to prevent the destructive blight. Nature published the report: 9 September 2009 | doi:10.1038/nature08358.

Googley Economic Indicators

Lawrence Summers addressed the Peterson Institute for International Economics today, with upbeat comments about the economy. While it had been in "free fall" at the start of the year, he said, with "no apparent limit on how much worse things could get", optimistic statistics were now starting to pour in.

We'll take Summers word that there are positive signs -- other economists agree. Summers lost us though, when he said that the number of people searching on Google for the term "economic depression" has "returned to normal levels". Is this the best statistic he could come up with? I think you could present an alternative theory which said that at the beginning of the year people were curious about what "depression" would feel like, so they Googled it. Now, they know, they don't really need to Google it.

Waking Up From Free Fall: A Recurring Dream

We also note that you would see the same optimistic trend by searching for the term "free fall" (as in economic, not parachuting). Four months ago the expression littered the papers. Now, not so much, perhaps because Summers has eased up on his "free-fall" rhetoric. Summers has been saying the free-fall is over for months:

• April 3, 2009 (Wall Street Journal) Lawrence Summers talked to the Wall Street Journal about the economy, saying that: "this sense of free fall will give way before too long".

• April 9, 2009 (Reuters) Lawrence Summers told the Economic Club of Washington: "I think the sense of a ball falling off the table -- which is what the economy has felt like since the middle of last fall -- I think we can be reasonably confident that that's going to end within the next few months and you will no longer have that sense of free fall".

• April 19, 2009 (Fox News Sunday) Summers told viewers: "You have a sense of a more mixed picture in terms of consumer spending, and "not the kind of free fall that you saw, in part, because the stimulus that the provided in the recovery and reinvestment act is coming into people's paychecks, and that's putting a little more energy into the--into the consumer."

• April 26, 2009 (Washington Times) Lawrence Summers: "But I think that sense of "unremitting free fall that we had a month or two ago is not present today," he said. "That's something we can take some encouragement from."

• May 16, 2009 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. "economy is no longer in free fall" Lawrence Summers, director of the White House National Economic Council, said today in a pre-recorded video shown at a forum in Shanghai.

• June 12, 2009 (Associated Press) In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Summers said the government had acted as necessary to avoid dire outcomes: "While we still have a long way to go, the sense of free-fall that surrounded any reading of economic statistics a few months ago is no longer present"

Of course some economists argued vehemently that the economy never was in "free fall", but that was back in October, 2008. Summers has long been bullish on the effects the economic stimulus package had on halting the "free fall", although economists point out that the stimulus money is only just now starting to filter in now. Summers didn't dwell too much on the abysmal unemployment rate, a less positive economic indicator, in his speech today. Nevertheless, we think Summer's is pulling his weight trying to bolster consumer confidence.

Bisphenol A Rhetoric, Reporting, and Courting Etiquette

Her: Energetic, sparkly eyes, feisty, dedicated to good causes, tenacious, award-winning reporter, not afraid to color outside the lines, plastic interest for the past two years...Him: erudite with a charming accent, young at heart, versatile reporter, enjoys evening sunsets, long walks on the beach, gourmet food, lingering over cappuccino in the morning, handwritten notes...recent plastic interest. Both dedicated to a cause and a mutual interest -- plastic -- bisphenol A (BPA) to be precise. Could Acronym Required be matchmaker? Will amiable dialogue ensue between the two? Or are they doomed by circumstance to animosity?

I got home one day and was kicking back after work, reading mail, when I saw one a message from sender: xxxxxx@journalsentinel.com. It read in total:

"what do you guys know about trevor butterworth?"

a puzzle. a short puzzle.

A message that posed as direct, but was actually vague. Did they want Acronym Required to share some unpublished motherlode of information? Is the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's research department strapped for time? Did the newspaper disable all the shift-keys in the computers to conserve resources, forcing people to write in all lower case?

We've been incidentally covering Butterworth's employer Statistical Assessment Service and Center (Stats.org's)** campaigns since 2000-2001. We couldn't have been writing about BPA industry astroturfing here at AR since 2005 without reading their stuff. We also read Butterworth's non-chemical industry journalism all the time -- he's good writer, prolific. But he's not a exactly a mystery, nor are industry tactics concerning BPA and other chemicals, there's A LOT written on these subjects. So why their question?¹

Reaction and Rhetoric

Later that week, perplexing missive forgotten, I was enjoying a sunset, sipping a glass of Carnivale of Love Shiraz, when, perusing my newsfeed, I noticed that I'm not the only recipient of the Journal Sentinel's messages. In response to Stats.org's big report about bisphenol A toxicity being a media conceit, MJS sent Trevor Butterworth at Stats.org a whole series of pointed questions.

Acchhhh...I was hoping for a BPA summer vacation. You can read Stats.org 27,000 word defense of BPA, which we assume they got paid for -- perhaps by the word, or you can read this post, which is about 2,700 words and mentions their large document. (We're not paid per word.)

Here's the journalists' question #1 to Stats and Butterworth:

1. "According to IRS 990 forms, Stats.org received $100,000 in donations in 2007. That same year, the Sarah Scaife Foundation donated $100,000 to Stats.org. Is Stats.org's funding solely from the Sarah Scaife Foundation?"

We know what the paper wants. Like many before them, they think someone paid Butterworth/Stats.org to write the 27,000 word bisphenol A (BPA) article that criticized reporters in general, and Journal Sentinel's journalism in particular, since the Journal Sentinel did the award-winning BPA series.

In their first question, the JS reporters chose to focus on Stats.org funding rather than refute the article's BPA content (the chemical is safe, journalism is biased, etc). They're questioning financial information that probably comes from Stats.org or CMPA's 2007 IRS 990 disclosures, probably the latest year they had access to. Like their note to Acronym Required, the Journal Sentinel's questions were stunningly direct and a little unclear. The reporters' first question is in 3 parts. They ask about Stats.org's 2007 funding in parts 1 and 2, then skip to the present tense in part 3. This type of questioning works well for Stats.org, because they use such gaps to their rhetorical advantage, and rhetoric, not science, is their game.

Stats answered part 3 first: "Stats is not solely funded by the Sarah Scaife Foundation". Then, probably to show how "transparent" they are, Stats shared some 2008 funding sources that the newspaper didn't ask about: ...$100,000 from the Stuart Family Foundation, $40,000 from Mr. Paul Mongerson, and $70,000 from the Endocrine Society's Hormone Foundation." Is that all of Stats 2008 sources? Who knows? But Stats.org got to write "Endocrine Society" while handily omitting any mention of 2009 funding, which I assume the paper is most interested in since they focus on it later.

In question 3 the Journal Sentinel asks:

3. "Did you receive funding from any other source while working on this story? In other words, were you contracted to do this? Or did the Scaife funds provide the monetary support you needed to complete your report?"

Here the ambiguity is in the "you". Acronym Required assumes MJS's "you" is the same "you" as in question 1 -- the 'you guys' of Stats and/or Butterworth -- whoever is producing the report saying BPA is safe. But the MJS reporters leave it ambiguous enough for Trevor Butterworth to respond with his own interpretation: "I received no funding from any other source other than Stats." The implied question from the Journal Sentinel was: Who paid Stats.org/Butterworth for the report? Butterworth answers with "I", as in I'm just a contract employee for Stats.org therefore don't really know anything about anything. Slick answer.

State of Play

Butterworth answers all the Journal's questions the same way, wordily, repeatably, with careful rhetorical choices, obfuscation, and utter cordiality.

Is there something to be learned here? Sure. Perhaps that one can storm at organizations like Stats with punches and kicks flying, as many people have, again and again. But verbal aikido is the game, Stats.org's raison d'etre, and the direct assault method has routinely landed others in a heap on the floor.

Mr. Butterworth says he wants to "promote dialogue". Does he mean he wants to continue to pretend there's no science showing BPA toxicity? I don't know. But to note, it's a little strange to say you're just out to "promote dialogue", after you've accused a good portion of the news media (Discover, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, USA Today, etc.), journalists in general, and the public who reads the news -- of sloppy, uninformed, biased thinking.

But Stats.org insists it's all in the name of non-partisan, neutral analysis. To prove it, they point out that they've written for "progressive outlets such as the Huffington Post, Salon, and Mother Jones."

Butterworth didn't mention it, but Wonkette, a blog that's not exactly a mule for the chemical industry, met Butterworth and called him charming. So should future would-be hostile reporters at outlets like the Milwaukee JS cozy up to their quarry a little before firing off such blunt questions? Would a friendlier approach help the public relations involved with getting toxic chemicals out of our babies mouths? (So to speak?) This is what the current administration advocates, more or less.

I'm not criticizing the Journal Sentinel's methods, per se -- it's not like they're wide-eyed naifs writing a blog. That said, Trevor Butterworth's not the huge enemy they'd like to make him...some major BPA kingpin. Yes, he criticized the paper's reports and misrepresents BPA science -- but he's doing a job. His wordy response comes after the danger of BPA and the significant lobbying efforts to obscure that danger for over 20 years have been widely revealed. So Butterworth's basically keeping himself off the troublesome unemployment reports at the behest of someone as a last ditch effort to persuade someone that BPA isn't a problem after consumers aware of the problem? I'm not sure he needs to be "revealed."

Acronym Required previously wrote about Stats in "Yotta-Yotta-Yottabytes: Content Makes Kings, Print Dies", and various other posts on BPA, like here and here. Stats, as we've described before, and as reported here by Sourcewatch, claims to be a "non-partisan" think tank, but they are funded by conservative sources and consistently produce reports that fly in the face of science.

So, of course partly tongue in cheek -- why not try to promote dialogue? Journalists say you're supposed to empathize with your subjects -- (Or is that just long-form journalism?) Anyway, we can gain empathy by scanning Trevor Butterworth's site. You can tell he's a nice guy. Look, at pictures. Really, you think I'm getting paid for this? GO LOOK. Read his stuff while your there. First picture (July 13) -- a sunset over an East Coast port. See, he likes sunsets. Bunny rabbits too, I'm sure. How can you not have empathy for someone who likes sunsets and bunny rabbits? Another picture -- an intimate table, a fancy coffee beverage. There's a book and some notes -- written in long hand! It's like the setting for a romantic, General Foods International Coffee commercial. Awwhhhh....

Third picture -- he stands on a beautiful beach, smiling at the camera. Now I'm actually not sure if he likes long walks on beaches or not, because although he is on the beach, the footprints seem to go around in circles. Potentially useful information though isn't it? Note the glasses tucked into the front of his shirt and the hoodie -- says sophisticated, young at heart. Do you think he likes being addressed in letters from the Milwaukee JS that paint him as a petty thief?

This may be an economic match made in heaven too. If the Journal reporters had gotten the Pulitzer, it would be worth $10,000/2 -- 5K. But Butterworth advertises that he has access to a giant sandy beach, with that view, the terrace, the ambiance, a boat maybe? Everyone needs to earn a living.

Butterworth and Stats.org thrive in a specific political, legal and historical milieu, seemingly untouchable with ordinary reporterly methods of inquiry, but operating in a free market. So friendly dialogue can now ensue....He says his site that his email is butterworthy@...

A Gentleman or a Scoundrel?

The tone of the Journal Sentinel's questions -- reproachful, chiding, incriminating - is outwardly unfriendly -- though perhaps not unexpected, given Stats.org's assault. But moreover -- did it work? If the journalists got what they wanted from their pointed questions, Stats.org is so far the only one talking about it. The paper hasn't said a word, while Stats.org posted the whole exchange on their site. Butterworth wrote a pleasant introductory explanation to readers:

"Given the extent of Stats criticism of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's "Chemical Fallout" series on the chemical bisphenol A (BPA), and that the authors of the series have now contacted Stats to inquire about our motivation and funding for taking on this issue, we have decided that transparency and dialogue are best served by posting our responses to the paper's inquiries. Below is the full text of the responses sent to both reporters."

Not defensive mind you, just explaining their noble mission. Of course readers are left contemplating more than a few ironies, not only Butterworth's proposed quest for "dialogue", but also the illusion that "full text" of the responses means "full truth", or "honest answers".

In the 27,000-word article that Stats.org contracted to Butterworth, industry research takes a prominent place. Acronym Required has previously talked about BPA research and the stark differences between the results of industry research (BPA is safe) versus all the other research which shows risks. The writer criticizes journalists "who instinctively see a conflict of interest in industry-funded anything -- and who become even more suspicious when an industry funded study confirms that something is safe..." Butterworth says that it's easy for "journalism to fall into a formulaic response to a scientific controversy: independent research good; industry-funded research bad".

Acronym Required previously cautioned on reflexively vilifying industry research, but in this case, industry research in BPA has methodology problems that make its results very questionable.

Furthermore, if people have suspicions about industry vis a vis BPA, they are warranted. Acronym Required and others have long documented that chemical, plastics, and toy industries have for years funded misleading consumer advertising on bisphenol A, something that states are now also investigating. But Butterworth tells readers that, the "independent vs industry theme", is the "kind of rhetoric" that "has a distinct appeal for journalists".

Of course despite our opening in this post, we truly can see how such Butterworth rhetoric might reduce hardened Stats.org critics to blurting out non-sequiturs in all lower case.

When Size Doesn't Matter and other Truths

In addition to questions and answers, perhaps some results could gleaned from simple research into Stats.org's ample body of pre-existing work. The Journal Sentinel focused its uber-direct approach on Stats.org's funding, as many others do, but there are plenty of questions waiting to be asked of the decade-old canon.

For instance, look more closely at the statistics and science as presented by Stats.org. Just as they interpret questions for a predetermined rhetorical end, they redefine statistics methodology, and science methodology to suit their ends. In this case they insist that BPA data -- decades of it -- is flawed, and those who see safety concerns are misguided.

For example, Stats.org perverts the meaning of "statistics", using it to describe things like their own recent survey of selected toxicologists, which "found that only nine percent of toxicologists rated BPA as a high risk to health, compared to 26 percent who rated sunlight as a high risk and 29 percent who saw a high health risk in aflatoxin..." This reminds us of Trident Gum's "four out of five dentists" survey 30 years ago -- now familiar fodder for children's lessons.

For one more example, Butterworth asserts that only large size studies which can be funded by industry are valid. Not true. This idea was overturned by the National Toxicology Program in their 2008 report.

These are just two examples. Some of Stats.org's other parries could be easily averted, should the BPA "controversy" turn out not be in its final death throes -- quite likely. For instance Stats.org questions the credentials of frequently quoted Frederick Vom Saal, and in turn, the Journal Sentinel attacks the scientists Stats.org chooses to quote as possibly on someone's payroll. However reporters in the future could reach out to scientists beyond Vom Saal, to primary researchers on hundreds of studies that Stats.org criticizes or dismisses.

The "Rhetorical Advantage"

In indicting BPA journalism by the JS, Butterworth writes, "journalism is all about choosing what to report and who to talk to, and selective sourcing can make the innocent seem guilty and the guilty innocent." And that's something he does know about!

When Butterworth responds to the Journal Sentinel's flinty question about how long he has been interested in BPA, and "why" -- he sounds so innocent that angel halos practically hover over the sentences as he thoughtfully traces his survey back to 2006 of "peer-reviewed", "award-winning" reports, and "toxicologists surveyed" who rate BPA safer than some other things.

And we don't doubt Butterworth's account. But he also has spoken about his long-standing interest in how chemical companies defend their markets, a circumstance that adds texture and interest to his story. He told the publication Chemical Week in 2006 that 'the chemical industry has not been effective in promoting its side of the story', when it comes to "alleged health threats" and "educating the public", because "'the rhetorical advantage is always with the groups claiming to work in defense of the public'". As Chemical Week quoted Butterworth:

'"Companies need to develop a public information policy that is proactive in educating the public and tackling the claims of activist groups in real time. Most of the companies are like a deer in the headlights, and traditional PR is useless in dealing with these problems."'

So then we can't help but wonder for whom he speaks when Butterworth asserts now that the public holds an irrational mistrust of chemical company research, which he paints as ignorant superstition. Is he really speaking the name of science and statistics as he claims? Or are his recent reports simply a 'non-traditional PR' on behalf of chemical companies who are otherwise "deer in the headlights" faced with inconvenient science piling up in disturbing ways on BPA?

If people want to ingest plastic I've no qualms with that, free world and all that. If scientists consider the risks irrelevant, well than that's fine, plastic is handy. But if lobby groups are using rhetoric to keep safer products out of the competition, not only is that not good for our health, it's not good for business.

But by all means keep up the friendly dialogue. When Butterworth retires from this calling there are hundreds of others like him eager to take his place at the table overlooking a view of the sea for some non-traditional PR.

--------------

**There's actually a company called STATS which is a sports reporting company at stats.com. To avoid confusion, we'll therefore refer to the organization Butterworth contracts for as Stats.org.

¹ A central theme at Acronym Required is to explore problems in science or policy or medicine that are not necessarily best solved by that forceful economic driver, efficiency. We also don't believe that investigative journalism is well served by cutting corners. Given those conditions, we could have easily ignored the question. (As well, we appreciate journalistic etiquette, and think that if simple etiquette is really that challenging one could easily get help -- Microsoft Word's letter template, for starters, has greeting examples.)

In our experience, people on and off-line; in corporate, government and non-profit sectors; students, retirees, and professionals alike -- respond to gentler information gathering. See see paragraph 6.

• Spies, East and West

  Beijing will recruit 10,000 "internet volunteers" to monitor "harmful" websites and content, according to the city's municipal authority information office, via Financial Times.

  The US too, is expanding a program to recruit spies among first and second generation college students. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the program started as a pilot program, the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program in 2004. Kansas Republican Pat Roberts initiated the program after September 11, 2001 following urging by a University of Kansas anthropology professor. Professor Felix Moos had shopped the program around for years, arguing that the federal government should provide scholarships for people to attend colleges and learn languages, technical skills, culture and anthropology in order to work for the CIA. The Obama administration would keep the identity of the spies-in-training a secret.

  The program has its critics. According to interviews by the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2005, some professors were concerned about the Pat Roberts program and the anonymity of the participants which the government could leverage to essentially spy on professors, as they did during the Cold War. Others argue that the program could instill distrust of all researchers from foreign governments. Still others were concerned about the ethics of mixing spying with academia.

• East is East, Thanks to the West

  In other government spy news, the Wall Street Journal writes that Iran is using technology made by Siemens AG and Nokia Corp. to censor internet communications. The technology allows Iranian authorities to block and filter sites and perform deep packet inspection to monitor individuals and control information. Much of the Iranian system operates through a single node at the Telecommunication Infrastructure Co., part of the government telecom monopoly.

  Iran controls communications any way it can, according to the WSJ, filtering international connections go through a single gateway, blocking users in the country from accessing millions of sites in the last few years, and at times requiring bloggers to obtain licenses from the government.

  Under normal circumstances, all the west's technology helps Iran control the population. And periodically, there are more turbulent times like these, when Iran is "now drilling into what the population is trying to say", Bradley Anstis, director of technical strategy with Marshal8e6 Inc. told the WSJ.....Because if an uprising happens on your dictatorial watch and you don't have the wherewithal to look outside the window, then just -- use Windows?

This We Believe

The world is abuzz about the way Twitter funnels communications out of Iran and for a while even seemed to have tipped the government slightly off balance. We in the west are amazed -- will technology enable Iran to move towards Democracy, people keep asking? At AR we have expressed deep cynicism about this idea in the past. But we also come back to it again and again because it's an irresistibly intoxicating theory and we can't help but fervently seek evidence to prove us wrong.

Technology is addictive to us in the West, we're always after the next coolest thing. Did you get your Plasma TV? Your new iPhone? Yes? Good. Rest assured -- if you feel any twinge of guilt whatsoever -- that standing in line in front of the Mac Store at 7:00AM isn't just some hedonist capitalist folly. It's much more. That slick gizmo which you listen to and speak into and urgently push buttons on is not just some toy, not just better than sex, drugs, Christmas and chemistry all wrapped up in a tiny-shiny irresistible package that fits so nicely in your hand. Your iPhone can change the world. Yes, it can bring peace where there was war, transparency where there was opaqueness, freedom where there were shackles. This we believe. We need technology to be so much more than plastic and tunes and what we ate for lunch today.

Bearing Witness?

But despite our hopes, still, doesn't Iran look like Burma, look like Tiananmen Square? When the fax was the fastest way to get news out of the country no one could stop 2,500 killed and 10,000 wounded in China, students who confronted tanks in peaceful protest and were shot and treaded to death -- an event that's now written out of Chinese history books. In Burma, the regime allowed the monks to march, then brutally put an end to the protests and the filming of the protests. In Iran, news got out via Twitter. A You Tube video showing Neda bleeding in the street shocked and dismayed us deeply and to our core.

But what do we do with this? Believe it enables more freedom, democracy? Or does it make the paranoid more paranoid, the brutal more brutal, the callous more callous, while the rest of us are rendered still just helpless bystanders, onlookers?

Is it progress?

Or is it entertainment?

If you want to imagine horror, you can do something like visit Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia where the skulls gape out at you haunting "why"? You'll be reminded of the massacre of 12,000-16,000 people 30 years ago. In this place, S-21, you can easily become overwhelmed of the tragedy and scale of evil of "government" power run amok. Time and geography soften the blow, though, standing in the prison, and keep the tragedy at arms length. The Cambodian genocide happened long ago in a very different place. It's history we can barely conceive, but for the man in charge of S21 prison, Kaing Guek Eav, aka Duch, who only now, decades later, stands trial -- defiant and apparently proud of his efficient work.

Does the immediacy of photos from Iran change anything?

In the 1970's many Americans were exposed to little more violence than in Starsky and Hutch, or some other TV show. We saw war footage, but didn't learn of Cambodia's true horror until four years after it commenced. In the 80's and 90's, for entertainment, the reality of a goofy cop show was eclipsed by the more palpable, grittier reality of real cops shows, where the cops actually beat down some guy's door and caught the perpetrators. Today, we flee by these shows via the remote, because we can so easily satisfy whatever real violent drama you hanker for via You Tube. Who needs TV crime drama when you have car crashes on demand? They're there on You Tube. Blood and gore and guns and drugs are there too, for our entertainment 24/7.

So how do we feel when we view murders that happened only yesterday, only last hour, only a minute ago? Does Iran's violence in real time make for a better world? Are we less helpless than we were 30 years ago when we wouldn't learn of government atrocities until years after they happened? Does the instant communication help Iranians? Does "bearing witness" help Iranian people? Or is it technology aided rubbernecking about our needs?

Web 2.0 Life Changing and Everyday

Social media reminds us that the web is more than just a tool. Today we get news about Iran from Iranians Twittering the election uprisings, for instance. Web 2.0 gives us a bottom-up way of organizing that's impossible for businesses and governments to ignore, that often leaves them scrambling to control. While social media can be grandly disruptive; however, it's usually life changing in little, seemingly mundane ways, insidious ways that we learn to live with, but that can be disconcerting.

Weddings are big, noteworthy events. Before your wedding, your best friend from high school RSVPs, as does your college roomate, your in-laws and their bridge cabal, and Surprise!!-- thanks mom -- the family who lived next door when you were in 6th grade. You see your next door neighbor's son bumping on the dancefloor with your mother's arm-flailing sister, and think, wow -- all these people under one tent. They mingle together with ties and elegant dresses and claim disconcerting familiarity with your past as they swap stories and pass commentary about you, the weather, and your dearly beloved.

Facebook is the quotidian, Everyday-Martha-Stewart-now-available-at-Target version of your wedding. Your high school best friend "friends" you, as does the nerdy guy from the band step ("Remember me?"), along with your brother's wife's brother, the college pal you don't remember to well from that night, and the co-worker you'd like to think highly of you.

Sure, you can segregate the various cohorts, but do you have the energy to devote to being more efficient at online networking? Go ahead, post to impress, chat casually about the red wine's dusky cherry, book leather and balsam with tobacco overtones that you're drinking in Paris with your svelte new wife. But you are unforgettably someone else too, because your freshman dorm mate has simultaneously posted something about "old pictures he found and thought would be fun" something about "that time we drank too much Bud Lite and crashed the sorority party."

Technology may indeed be reaching revolutionary potential but everyday technology brings strangers into our lives in an intimate and less heady ways. Everyday technology unpredictably changes how we interface with friends and acquaintances, old and new, dead and alive.

Identity Theft 2.0

The internet can save loads of time and money, on greeting cards for instance, but where will we end up? Perhaps in the faces total strangers thanks to image search technology, and I'm not talking about standing on the doorstep of a colleague in a foreign country.

A US family who posted a family Christmas photo on their blog was surprised to learn that a grocery story in Czechoslavakia had downloaded and enlarged the photogenic foursome, pasting them onto a life-size poster advertising his store's delivery service. Gone was the leafy background of the Salt Lake suburb behind the smiling family on the e-greeting card, swapped out with a supermarket-tacky, yellow, green, and red background; Czech writing; and the American family unwittingly beaming about the grocery to Czech shoppers. The shop owner he would have sent a bottle of wine to the family as an apology, but for the high postage. Děkuji!

In another case misappropriated identity, the LA Times reported on a South Korean man who was surprised to learn that a photo he posted on his internet site had been appropriated by a Tokyo television station, altered, and released as the long sought photo elusive son of Jim Jong II. North Korea likes technology when it produces missiles it seems but not photos, since the only photo of the dictator's apparent heir is decades old.

To emphasize the likeness, the Japanese television station superimposed the dictator's eyes on the sunglasses in the photo the South Korean man had posted on his website. Voilà, suddenly a South Korean construction worker became the son of King Jong II.

Piracy, Censorship and Damn Youth

While your image may be appropriated so might your work. Pirated software and copyright infringement is common on the internet, because with a few clicks one person can make another's work his own, without a printing press, without even buying the book. This happens constantly in the digital world, where it was relatively rare in the analog world. Recently, China announced it was requiring censoring software on all computers sold in China. But confusingly, the software they're imposing may actually be authored by an American company then pirated by a Chinese company to be deployed for the policing effort.

While Iranians Twitter away about the uprising, China has said that the oddly named Green Dam Youth Escort censoring software must be installed on all imported computers. ¹ China, intent on "purifying social civilization" seems determined to implement the rule despite protest from its citizens, American software makers, and the company who claims that "Green Dam" contains its sourcecode.

Solid Oak Software says that the Green Dam source code is pirated from its CYBERsitter software, while the software's contracted author, Chinese company Jinhui Computer Systems, says that the similarities in the software exist because all the software blocks the same pornographic web sites.

While the software may be falsely attributed, it also contains major security flaws according to the University of Michigan Department Department of Computer Science and Engineering. The censoring software may allow any website the user visits to take control of the PC running Green Dam (June 18, 2009).

Theft used to be more physical, someone lifting your wallet, or literally breaking into your physical abode. Now code can be stolen and identity compromised. No glass broken, but internet theft is just as personal, and causes just as much anguish, but is silent and easier and more widespread.

Attribution and Authorship

A less frequent occurrence but also more common with digital media than analog, is false attribution. For instance Google Books has now magnanimously shared authorship of several books written by influential economist, political and developmental economist Albert Hirschman.

Adding a your name to the author field of a book was decidedly more difficult in an analog world. But in the 21st century, If your a dead economist, like Joseph Alois Schumpeter, you might roll over one day and find out that an entity called Google utilized 21st century scanning and internet technology to give you authorship of a new book. It's true that Schumpeter, who died in 1950, posthumously authored "History of Economic Analysis". But he did not co-author "Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action", with Albert Hirschman in 1979. Hirschman is the sole author of the book, a collection of essays based on lectures Hirschman was invited to give in memory of Joseph Schumpeter.

Identities and accomplishments confused, lost, and also gained on via technology, every day. Revolutionary?

-----------------------------

¹We've discussed ideas about technology and progressive change before, for instance here. Sometimes it seems that technology truly could bring progressive change, and other times it seems the technology will always eventually be wrested away by the most powerful players, be they corporations or states.

Guns and Money

In Johannesburg, South Africa, supporters of presidential candidate Jacob Zuma celebrated by leaning on horns, blowing whistles and waving flags, after the National Prosecution Authority (NPA) dropped 16 charges against the African National Council (ANC) front-runner. Prosecutors had accused Zuma of taking bribes via Schabir Shaik, his adviser who connived with French arms company Thales International (Thint) to win military arms deals from the state.

Deals with the French company worth several billion dollars were in the works in 1999, when investigators began to look into the details of the transactions. The arms company apparently worked through Zuma's financial adviser Shaik, and recruited Zuma to interfere with the investigation. Zuma, who served as deputy president under Thabo Mbeki, had faced corruption, fraud, racketeering and money-laundering charges.

In 2005, Schabir Shaik was found guilty of corruption and sent to prison to serve several concurrent sentences amounting to 15 years. In 2005 President Thabo Mbeki dismissed deputy president Zuma after the high court found Schaik guilty. The judge in the case noted the "generally corrupt" relationship between Zuma and Shaik. After serving 28 months of his sentence, mostly in private hospitals, Shaik was released on a controversial medical probation last month.

Upon hearing the charges were dropped against Zuma, hundreds of supporters danced and sang to Zuma's theme song, "Bring Me My Machine Gun", an apartheid era rally song.

Who Needs Lawyers?

Zuma's popularity assures broad support for his election April 22, despite his ripe court history, not only on account of the the corruption charges, but also because of a rape trial in 2006. Zuma's comments during the rape trial included the assertion that he had showered to protect himself from contracting AIDS from the woman who accused him of rape, and that he knew that the woman wanted to have sex because of the type of skirt she wore. His comments incensed those who care about public health and women's rights. As deputy president under Mbeki, Zuma served as the head of South Africa's National Aids Council and the Moral Regeneration Movement. Zuma was acquitted of the rape.

People anticipated the charges would be dropped, and now expect Zuma to win the presidential election. But the corruption case hovers in the background uncomfortably. The case dragged on for years before wiretap tapes and transcriptions emerged which seemed to show a politically motivated plot on the part of the investigators. The case against Zuma fell apart on technicality, but the prosecutor pointed out that his decision: "does not affect the substantive merits of the case against [Mr] Zuma". Some people believe the charges will taint the South African democracy, not to mention the presidency of Mr. Zuma.

Thabo Mbeki dismissed Zuma as his deputy president after Shaik was found guilty, and Zuma was never found guilty of corruption charges. Interestingly though, Thabo Mbeki habitually railed against pharmaceutical companies who offered AIDS drugs by accusing them of being "like marauders of the military industrial complex who propagate fear to increase their profits". Of course, while thousands of Mbeki's compatriots died of AIDS, Mbeki denied the viral cause of AIDS and pursued various themes to produce AIDS drugs in Africa. During this time, while Mbeki refused to treat AIDS patients, under his administration billions of dollars of South Africa's wealth was going to foreign weapons manufacturers.

Strong-Arming Countries -- Oil For Planes

In the scheme of things, the bribes that Jacob Zuma accepted were not a big as bribes can get. Starting tonight, Frontline will air a one hour special titled "Black Money", a documentary on international corruption by military corporations. "Black Money" is based on the work of Guardian journalist David Leigh, who has been reporting on BAE corruption across the globe for more than five years. Last year Leigh wrote about BAE bribes to South African, in which BAE pressured the country to buy war planes at inflated prices. Chippy Shaik, the brother of Schabir, worked in the defense department and helped secure the deals.

"Black Money" focuses not so much on South Africa, but on BAE's bribes and the web of relationships between Britain, Saudia Arabia, and the US. BAE devised complex deals to secure £43bn in arms deals with Saudia Arabia. When British investigators at the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) started digging into the deals and Britain's part in them, Saudia Arabia threatened to break off collaborations with Britain against terrorism. Tony Blair's government abruptly curtailed the investigation.

"Black Money" follows the kingpin role of Saudia Prince Bandar bin Sultan, former Saudia ambassador to the US, who benefited handsomely from the bribes. At one point Bandar retorts to the interviewer who probes about the multi-billion dollar deals: "So What?". Filmakers also interviewed former US FBI director Louis Freeh, now a private lawyer and consultant to Prince Bandar also appears "Black Money". He admits that money transfers amounting to $2 billion dollars flowed from BAE in Britain to the US bank accounts of the Saudi prince, but Freeh denies that Bandar accepted bribes. While acknowledging that the complicated deals and payments were set up in part to avoid congressional scrutiny Freeh retorts that the commingling of Saudi accounts is none of the US's business. The narrative and exchanges portrayed in the show "Black Money" add up to no more than "reckless allegations", says Freeh.

Has globalization and unfettered money exchange made the the world as callous as "So What?" and as compromising as Louis Freeh? Corruption is a globalized problem, with some of the biggest victims being the poorest countries, like Bangladesh. Of course all citizens of all countries pay for privileges of the lawless few at the top. The US is perhaps not as corrupt as Saudia Arabia nor is poor as South Africa. But while Africa and Europe and the Middle East and Asia see plenty of corruption, the US has its fair share of nefarious deals and Seawolf-like contracts made in the name of business by self-interested companies, lobbyists and politicians. Even now, as the Obama administration announces the military budget and certain key legislators obstruct the administration's goals to protect their states' prized military contracts, it would be remiss not to acknowledge that the US has its own solid brand of backroom dealmaking and military procurement malfeasance -- not to mention a faltering healthcare system.

This post was divided into separate posts 10-07-09. Those posts are linked below.

• "Pecking the Red Dot: Herring Gull Myth or Fiction?"
• "Dinofuzz: More Dinosaurs Flew"
• "Galbraith on John Law and the Mississippi Bubble"
• "Exxon Valdez Species Fall-Out in Prince William Sound"
• "Online Media and Copyright"

10-07 reposted as single post from Notes 03-26

Slick

Although it's been twenty years since images of oil-drenched birds (~250,000 initially killed) filled our newspapers after the huge Prince William Sound spill, the damage remains.

The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council recently reported on the status of some species in the Sound. Ten species are "recovering, ten are considered "recovered", and two, the Pacific Herring and Pigeon Guillemots, are "not recovering". The fate of many more species is unknown. We last wrote about the Exxon Valdez spill when we looked at the stated reasons the Supreme Court decided to lower the damages in the case to $500 million.

16,000 gallons of oil continues to seep out into the ecosystem bit by bit during rains. To address the ongoing pollution, the US Government and the State of Alaska sent Exxon-Mobil a demand for $92 million dollars to fund the joint-federal restoration plan in 2006, but then President George Bush and Governor Sarah Palin didn't press the company to pay up. The Public Employees for Environmental Safety (PEER) and Professor Rick Steiner from the University of Alaska have written the Obama administration and the Attorney General of Alaska asking them to act to collect Exxon-Mobil's debt.

Reposted as single post 10-7. Already posted in Notes 03-26

When Banks Will Be Banks

As background for current events, authors write and publishers publish, eager to meet the demands for new knowledge. Name the event -- 9-11, terrorism, the Chinese economy, global warming, one banking crisis or another -- each motivates its own little publishing industry. The financial crisis got people thinking about recessions, depressions, credit default swaps, mortgages, and financial markets, and now you can read any number of best sellers, "The Subprime Solution..", and "The New Paradigm for Financial Markets..", "The Trillion Dollar Meltdown..","The Forgotten Man", "The Ascent of Money..", "The Return of Depression Economics.." -- more titles everyday. These new books are intriguing and fun, and hopefully help the floundering publishing industry keep its head above water.

But really, when it comes to banking, you don't have to buy a new book, you can just as well read an older one such as John Galbraith's 1975 "Money: Whence it Came and Where it Went". The book works its way from the Mississippi Bubble to the Bank of England, through the history of the American monetary system up until 1971, with plenty of applicable insights. Many people have heard of the Mississippi Bubble and its architect, John Law, but I especially like Galbraith's telling.

John Law moved to France in 1716, fleeing a murder charge after dominating a duel in England. Law had inherited a fortune and won even more as a gambler. In France, Law set up a bank and began to issue guaranteed notes, something that France appreciated. The country found Law's entrepreneurial effort a great solution to its fiscal insolvency, having gone broke under the reign of Louis XXVI. With Law's notes, which he instituted in lieu of gold, which was the standard at the time, France paid its bills and Law's bank flourished. His bank issued more and more notes issued.

Law then decided to issue notes for a land bank in what was the large land mass of Louisiana. Rumor had it that America's southern swamps were filled with gold. Buoyed by the fame his bank brought him, Law also turned his efforts to economic and social reform. He lobbied to get rid of tolls and tariffs and rallied the clergy to give unused land to peasants.

Wrote Galbraith (28):

"The miracle of money creation by a bank, as John Law showed in 1719, could stimulate industry and trade, gave almost everyone a warm feeling of well-being. Parisians had never felt more prosperous than in that wonderful year."

Law's economic plan began to unravel along with this first bank, when one day one of his note-holders decided they wanted their gold. They cashed in their notes. Then others cashed theirs. Then more and more people got nervous about whether the bank had enough gold to meet all its obligations.

To restore confidence, the government recruited slum-dwellers to march through the streets of Paris with picks and shovels, as if gold really had been found in Mississippi and France was dispatching miners to ships which would sail to America and cart gold home. No sooner were folks were paraded to the docks, however, then they were found back at home in the ghettos, and people got wise to the ruse. The giant scheme caved, leaving note-holders with nothing but songs and bitter ditties to sing. As Galbraith writes (p28):

"...Here, in the briefest form, was framed the problem that was to occupy men of financial genius or cupidity for the next two centuries: How to have the wonder without the reckoning?"

Some people think this version of Law's story is to harsh, and modern bibliographies are much more flattering to John Law's legacy then John Galbraith. Calling Law a forward thinking economist, Antoin E. Murphy wrote in a recent book, "John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker". Murphy cautioned against leaping to judgment: "just as Napoleon cannot be judged by his defeat at Waterloo, so also the theory and policy of Law should not be judged by the financial crash of 1720." See?-- Napoleon historians would no doubt dispute that comparison too.

Galbraith was a Keynesian, and it's not clear that his opinion of John Law, which fit with his opinion of bankers in general, would have been changed by the recent, more favorable bibliographical accounts. Here's his 1970's impression of the banker community (p302):

"[I]n money matters as in diplomacy, a nicely conformist nature, a good tailor and the ability to articulate the currently fashionable financial cliche have usually been better for personal success than an inquiring mind....failure is often a more rewarding personal strategy than success."

His judgement derived from the belief, simply, that economic and monetary systems can be well managed.

"There is reluctance in our time to attribute great consequences to human inadequacy -- to what, in a semantically less cautious era, was called stupidity. We wish to believe that deeper social forces control all human action....But we had better be aware that inadequacy --- obtuseness combined with inertness --- is a problem..."

How would he have felt about the current crop of bankers (p303)?

"It will be no easier in the future than in the past for layman or the lay politician to distinguish between the adequate individual and the others. But there is not difficulty whatever in distinguishing between success and failure. Henceforth it should be the simple rule in all economic and monetary matters that anyone who has to explain failure has failed. We should be kind to those whose performance has been poor. But we must never be so gracious as to keep them in office."

He would most likely not have been any more charitable to those who architected our current economic mess, then he was to the bankers of his day. There's no substitute for his insights though.

The Demise of the P-I, or Happily Alive for Forty Extra Years and Counting?

A string of recent newspaper closings has precipitated another flurry of worry and pontification about changes in media and reporting. The outpourings have come in waves, and now papers in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, San Francisco, San Diego, and Chicago threaten to shut down their presses. The closing of the 150 year old Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Denver's Rocky Mountain News print editions last week motivated the latest phase of hand-wringing.

Yes, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (P-I), is 150 years old, but it's a shame more people don't mention the events surrounding the paper's demise. Should we really think of it as a demise? Or simply a change in format? The P-I hasn't been quite right for some time. By 1981 the paper had been posting losses for the previous 12 years. That year the P-I penned a joint operating agreement (JOA) with the competing city paper, the Seattle Times. Management structured the agreement under the anti-trust exemptions set up by the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970. The goal of the act was to keep to more than one editorial board in cities where one paper might have made more economic sense given the costs of printing and circulation.

Under the Times/P-I JOA agreement, the P-I was the morning paper, and the Seattle Times the evening paper. The Times stopped printing its morning edition and the Sunday paper carried a joint masthead. The business and operations of both papers -- printing, circulation and business functions -- were performed by the Seattle Times.

Opposition to the JOA was fierce, and included P-I employees, advertisers, readers and other local publishers who for two years challenged the proposed JOA in courts. In 1983 the Supreme Court refused to hear the case and the JOA between the Seattle Times and the Seattle P-I went through. But the animosity between the papers was famous and no one should be too surprised at the closing of the P-I given the combination of economic downturn, turmoil in publishing, and the paper's already disadvantaged place in the city's newspaper hierarchy.

We could look at the P-I's switch to the internet in another way, cold-hearted as it may seem: The P-I managed to stay afloat despite being less than whole since 1969 -- 40 whole years. Denver's Rocky Mountain News operated under a similar agreement with its sister city paper before it also closed last week. Both papers will continue to publish on-line.

Many factors converge around the unfortunate swoon of the newspaper industry, including a decrease in readers and print advertising, a bad economy, and greedy owners who took over papers determined to profit mightily. Cuts and bad news coverage on the part of newspapers accelerated the downward slide, as did competition from online media. Will the economics of newspapers, which has been in flux for the last half a century finally motivate new models of investigative reporting? Or will entrenched newspaper publishers stall progress by laying the blame for their failings squarely on online media?

Fact or Fallacy? Bloggers Who Hate the Mainstream Media and the MSM Who Hate Them Back

This perennial conflict, of online media "versus" newspapers, was perhaps precipitated by internet denizens, who threw plenty of taunts to the mainstream media. I've always loved newspapers and magazines like Scientific American and am still unable to accept my Blackberry as quite the right vehicle for always getting the news, so I've felt the ire of my paperless friends. I've even shied away from gatherings like the YearlyKos Convention (now Netroots), where the scorn for print media was so great that this newspaper reader feared being caught with traces of newsprint on my fingers and hauled out to a dark alley by savage commenters who would mete out some bitter end. My print media sentiments are nothing but sentimental hogwash to some, and those people sure aren't shy about letting people know their opinions.

Print media in turn, reacted to online media with various degrees of denial and acceptance that differed for different papers. On September 20, 2005, for instance, the Financial Times ran an article about an expat named "Hemlock", who blogged from Singapore. The entire article, "Hemlock, 'the obnoxious expat' BLOGGING" talked about the blog, but the closest FT got to mentioning where you might find "Hemlock's" site was this sentence: "His website's location on the geocities network..." No URL. Where, why? Clueless or purposefully obtuse?

A year later, the FT became more inflammatory and its writers began expressing scorn and derision for blogs -- perhaps fear masquerading as bravado. In 2006, the paper ran a series of articles with titles like "The Fallacy That Bloggers Have Replaced Real News Hounds." (March 22, 2006.)

One 4,445 word magazine article laid it all out in its title: "Time for the Last Post: The Evangelists Say That Blogging - Instant, Democratic and Cheap - is About to Finish Off Newspapers and Make a lot of People Rich. They're Wrong. Most Blogs are Boring, Overblown and Don't Make a Penny." (Yes, that was the title). If it was on HuffPo it would have been 70 pixels high. In his February 18th article, Trevor Butterworth panned blogs and the "revolution" (his quotes) they rode in on: "...[W]e must ask whether we are being sold a naked emperor." The reason the blogging "revolution" seemed to be thriving, he said, was because it was uniquely American:

"In many respects, the American media in all their stuffy isolation brought the bloggers upon themselves... In contrast to the British and European media, which had their origins in the Enlightenment and the belief that journalism was a forum for debate and argument - even philosophy, according to David Hume - the American press is a 19th century creation animated by the pursuit of fact."

"Blogging - if you will forgive the cartoon philosophising - brought the European Enlightenment to the US. Each blogger was his, or her, own printing press, spontaneously exercising their freedom to criticise. Which is great. But along the way, opinion became the new pornography on the internet."

As it is, books like Burns's, not blogs or newspapers, often provide superior accounts -- more detailed, contextual, and accurate. Eric Burns provides details of American journalism history in his book "Infamous Scribblers", and the detailed facts refute Butterworth's version.

The "Enlightened" European Broadsides

In the 1600's London broadsides issued the same sort of sensationalism that dominates todays news, complete with titles like "Sir Walter Raleigh His Lamentations!", and "No Natural Mother But Monster." The predecessor to broadcast journalism in those days came from "running patterers, who would run through London streets yelling news. The patterers would take opposite positions on street corners, each yelling their news louder than the other guy's. Not quite the enlightenment that Mr. Butterworth recounts is it? This is how newspapers in Europe started.

The earliest American paper printed was called Publick Occurrences, and was published in Boston. Benjamin Harris, a publisher who had been jailed in London for printing seditious news, abandoned his newspaper and sailed to the other side of the pond, where he started Publick Occurrences in 1690. The paper printed stories about hangings and rapes and other eye-catching drama. One tale recounted by Burns was an "international" story of a French King who "used to lie with" his son's wife. And, in a sort of predecessor to blogs, the Englishman's Publick Occurrences ran for three pages with the fourth page blank so readers could add comments and their own stories before passing it on. Enlightening?

While Burns documents the ignoble history of journalism, he also points out that the Federalist Papers were first published in the New York Independent Journal. Thomas Paine, John Adams, John Dickinson, and John Peter Zenger, also published in American newspapers.

Based then, on some false premises, Butterworth concludes:

"Which brings us to the spectre haunting the blogosphere - tedium. If the pornography of opinion doesn't leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium."

Having perused the offerings on British news stands, I opine that British papers even today remain far from enlightening, yet at the same time you can't deny the bits of truth in Butterworth's assessment. But to put his take in proper perspective, consider that Trevor Butterworth is a researcher at Stats.org, a controversial organization that promotes so anti-science opinions, which is funded by conservatives (and well as advised (with all due respect) by dead people (RIP)). Stats.org apparently doesn't necessarily always get its facts straight and definitely sides with (or some say shills for) industry on issues like bisphenol A, alcohol advertising, and global warming. More to the point, however, Stats.org now has its own blog and Butterworth also contributes to the Huffington Post. So perhaps since his diatribe, he's come round on the blogging "revolution"?

Mediating the Blogging/MSM Landscape

More internet savvy than the Financial Times, the San Francisco Chronicle published about 45 articles covering blogs and bloggers back in 2005-2006. For the most part the articles tracked the rising blog phenomena, with only sporadic jabs at the medium. One editorial, on March 13, 2005, astutely titled "It's not Whether Blogger's are Journalists, it's Which Are", concluded:

"To flatly say "no" [they're not journalists] leaves out a universe of those who find news, challenge our thinking and otherwise breathe oxygen into the democracy -- in itself a pretty good definition of journalism...It's a big tent. Why shouldn't there be room for bloggers?"

Dick Rogers point seemed as wise 4 years ago as it does today. Blogs come in all shapes and colors. Journalists are far more accepting of blogs then 4 years ago -- they quote blogs and cue off blogs for story ideas. But many in mainstream media can't let go of the idea that MSM is superior and that online media should conform. Mark Morford, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote last week:

"The truth remains: You pick up the Times, the Post, the Chron -- or read their online products -- you immediately have an anchor, some credibility and authority, not to mention a sense of place and context. In whatever you read, you know there has been, at minimum, some real editorial oversight and integrity of product borne of trained, experienced editors and writers who, believe it or not, still value accuracy and truth above all else."

Morford presents an idealistic view of the present state of newspapers. Mainstream media may have fine intentions, great journalists and editors, some fantastic articles, and a few worthy publications. But just as often you get misinformation, meaningless or misleading press releases posing as news. Just as often the end product falls far from the rosy goal. All of this motivates bloggers to blog.

It's not simply a case of one side and the other. Robert Scheer, who worked for the Los Angeles Times for almost thirty years, talked to Democracy Now last week about his impression of the traditional news media in a larger conversation about the AIG bailout. He refuted the idea of a golden era when everything in print was good, pointing out that the regulatory changes that led to the current financial tsunami went uncovered for decades by the business sections of papers:

...The good old days were not so good for mainstream journalism, and certainly not when it came to covering business stories....Much of the reporting was done by press releases.

...I saw very few mainstream reporters there. There was no critical reporting of those stories. They basically went along with what the lobbyists want. Bank of America and the other banks spent $300 million that year getting the legislation--their license to steal, in effect--and it was not covered. The Telecommunications Act was not covered.

... [B]usiness reporting has been a scandal. Why? Because the same people who own the newspapers benefit from the tax breaks, benefit from the loopholes. They're on the other side. I mean, General Electric, which is in trouble, after all, owns NBC. So these are not pristine owners. There are some exceptions of some families that have tried to do a good job, but in the main, the people running media in America, who own it, benefit and want the kind of deregulation of the whole business community that has brought us to our knees.

One could take exception to Butterworth, of Morford, or Rogers or Scheer, depending on your point of view, but they all have one point in common. Who will pay for the hard work that's behind the scenes of reporting, as newspapers disappear? One hundred visits to an FDA panel meeting may bore a reporter to distraction, but the small details reported from each FDA hearing make history. Not all news warrants 70 pixel font. Does that make it less worthy of reporting?

But why constrain the argument to the birds in hand? Why make it just about bloggers and newspapers? Why do we jump so quickly to conclude that today's state of online media represents the final model, then proceed to criticize it as though this were a true give? Bloggers will accept criticism for many things, but maybe the current online paradigm, typos and all, is only an intermittent solution to the many shortfalls of mainstream media.

Content is King For Some -- The Aggregators?

Just as Rogers did 4 years ago, Conde Nast's, Portfolio questions the finger pointing between mainstream and online media. The blog quotes Time magazine, who asked of Arianna Huffington, in a somewhat complementary but snarky article about the Huffington Post: Would she be able to continue networking successfully with print media while "killing their business?" Was she bucking for a lawsuit Time quoted one commentator?

Maybe HuffPo isn't to blame here, suggests Conde Nast. Just as Craigslist wasn't to blame for downfall of newspaper advertising, Rogers says, "Huffpo, Craigslist, Craigslist, Huffpo -- can't we all just agree to blame Google?" I think he has a point, the greatest aggregator is Google. Aggregators are great for a blurb and a link. But most online aggregators live for advertising and ever more advertising. Is there an obvious endpoint?

• If you're the Huffington Post with 3,000 bloggers, 6,000 is better -- and free content from the New York Times and everywhere else would be better still. Why link if you can get away with posting the whole article? (HuffPo links, others post the whole article)
• If you're a pharmaceutical company there's little cost to data mining research if journals are free like PLoS, so won't you keep demanding more data, cheaper.
• If you're a publishing company of any sort, more content means more money.
• If you're Google, all the world's webpages might be fine, but expanding the index to include all the world's books is even better. Including all the world's health information produces still more profit.

One can't deny that search technology is great and that we each benefit a small amount. But the people who are pushing for more free content are those who stand to benefit disproportionately to any individual's expected benefit. On the other hand, we wouldn't blame Google for replacing desktop computing with better accessibility to the "World Wide Web", or blame Microsoft for the end of punchcards and mainframes. Open source science publishing means free science news, so why complain?

Perhaps this well worn logic resonates, but should we examine more closely what we lose with "free"? First, we all pay. Users pay in ways some may never know. They pay for "Search" by viewing advertising and by yielding unknown amounts of privacy.

In a world of penny payments via advertising, based on the dying model of newspapers, what do content providers get?¹ Why does the idea that "content yearns to be free", apply to the millions who produce content, when content makes kings of those who aggregate enough of it? Is this really the democratic model? Some claim, yes. Others say transparent government and companies would provide the data that newsrooms used to collect, leaving journalists to less mundane tasks. Theoretically, yes, that would work, and we're all holding out breath.

Today, rather than pushing new models in an industry that's still very much in flux, many of us are embracing the current flawed model built on the newspaper's own advertising model. On the web, successive aggregators each gain a little more profit then the content feeder below them. CondeNast makes some money. HuffPo makes a little of of CN's content, then Google makes so much more advertising revenue off HuffPo and CN.

If the road ahead continues to be corporate expansion at all costs, will this model stimulate the same monopolistic behavior which took down newspapers and banks? Can't we do better? Why enable those who can snap their fingers and data-mine yotta-yotta-yottabytes² of information for patent-worthy or publishable tidbits to enrich themselves, when their wealth accumulates so disproportionately to the actual producers of the data? Is this yet another pyramid scheme?

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¹ The New York Times sent out take-down notices to some blogs who were reposting NYT content last week.

² A yottabyte (YB) is one septillion (one long scale quadrillion or 1024) bytes. According to Wikipedia, all the computer hard drives in the world does not amount to even one zettabyte.

Acronym Required has written previously on open-source and open-access publishing, and on print media and its decline. To be continued.

Outrage. Yawn.

59% of Americans who answered a Gallup Poll said they were "Outraged", by the AIG bonuses. This compared to 26% who were "Bothered" and 11% who were "Not Particularly Bothered". What? No "No opinion" choice? In this case, had my executive bonus ennui ebbed to the point where I actually picked up the phone when Gallup called, I could only have rallied if "No Opinion" had been presented as an option.

Outrage: Are you as fatigued from outrage as I am? If you look for "outrage" on Google Trends, which tracks keywords across the newspapers like PerthNow, the Rhinelander Daily News, and the North Wales Chronicle, you'll find that the steady state "news reference volume" of "outrage" has increased gradually since 2004. This means nothing, but despite the lack of any empirical data, my opinion is that outrage has been overdone lately. Bailout outrage, and Madoff outrage, and TARP outrage, and crooked mortgage lender outrage, now Obama's "outrage" at the bonuses. Phheww. Sell outrage someplace else, we're all stocked up here.

In September Barack Obama accused John McCain of using "lies" and "phony outrage" in reference to Obama's ill-received "lipstick on a pig comment." Now Obama's being accused of his own phony outrage.

Being that I'm bored to death of the outrage, I thought I'd return the favor and highlight some of the details of the blueberry research that we talked about in our last post. Conservatives and liberals alike zeroed in on the pork in the Omnibus Spending Bill, like the 209,000 dollar blueberry grant to Georgia.

Blueberries! Research! History! Yay!

Blueberry farming is important to Georgia, since it has a "farm gate value of $59.4 million in 2005" and production with an "economic impact of $97.4 million". The history of blueberry cultivation is told by two University of Georgia scientists in a paper posted at the International Society for Horticultural Science (ISHS). We'll highlight some of the content here.

The early history of cultivated blueberries is most well known in Florida. In the 20th century a logger in Florida who had been transplanting plants from the wild and cultivating blueberries on his farm, met up with a marketing guy, "a Yankee", and together they sold blueberry plants to other communities in Florida. "Most plants sold were transplanted from the wild without regard to fruit quality. Some of the plants sold were not even [the prized] rabbiteye blueberries but species that don't produce commercial quality fruit." However enough higher quality plants were sold to qualify as a "blueberry boom". According to a history of blueberries told by the Georgia scientists, the boom then collapsed for multiple reasons:

"due to variable fruit quality, competition from new plantings of northern highbush in northern states, poor horticultural practices, and the depression (Mowry and Camp, 1928; Horan, 1965).

A statement in a 1926 Florida bulletin summed up the nursery stock situation: 'A great deal of promiscuous experimenting will doubtless be done before the business of handling stock for this fruit will be standardized as has been done for the great stable fruits of the day' (Coville, 1926).'"

Despite the collapse of the early industry Florida scientists managed to establish some strains that worked well for the region. From the early 1900's, when there were no viable options for commercial berries, you just gathered what you could in the woods, science and research made commercial blueberry farming not only possible, but a thriving industry and livelihood for many.

Tobacco's Out. Blueberries are In

"The position was filled by Dr. Tom Brightwell, who received his initial blueberry training under the famous Mr.Stanley Johnston of Michigan State University. In the fall of 1945, the Alapaha Blueberry Research Farm was established in a section of the flatwoods district just 25 miles east of Tifton. This has proven to be one of the great decisions made by Dr. Brightwell...."

"It is of great compliment to the character of Dr. Brightwell that he stayed focused on breeding blueberries in a state where no industry existed at the time. Numerous attempts were made to entice him to switch to some 'important' crop."

"Starting in 1950 the cultivar releases began with 'Callaway' and 'Coastal', which were a large improvement over the wild types, but did not have commercial shipping quality."

Around 1970, citizens in Bacon Co. Georgia sought help from the Rural Development Center of the University of Georgia to grow blueberries as a cash crop. The US Surgeon General had targeted cigarette smoking as a risk to health, and tobacco farmers saw the future demise of their livelihoods. Science continued to improved blueberry farming in Georgia and the authors conclude"

"It appears that Georgia has a bright future in blueberry production. The foundation of the industry laid down by so many scientists and growers over the past 60 years has opened this door."

Blueberries don't grow on trees, I guess you could cornily say, it's research and science success that puts them in your energy bar.

Congress Takes on Bisphenol A

The US House and Senate introduced bills last week that would ban bisphenol A (BPA) in all food and beverage containers. The proposed bills are the latest federal legislation to try to curb the used of BPA, even as production of the chemical continues to increase worldwide.

Studies conducted by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) have found that bisphenol A is found in 92.6% of people tested. For years consumers assumed that the chemical was benign. However BPA has now been shown through hundreds of science studies to be linked to prostate and breast cancer, obesity, neurological problems including behavioral problems in children, precocious puberty, altered sperm counts, immune disorders and other problems.

For a long time, even though more and more studies showed the dangers of BPA, legislation was nowhere to be found. Now legislative efforts are starting to gain traction following increasing public awarenes and outcry on bisphenol A. In 2005 Acronym Required reported on the first bisphenol A legislation out of California, introduced by Wilma Chan, that proposed a limit to bisphenol A in childrens products. "Plastic Bottles- Protecting Your Baby, by the ACC", focused on the industry's use of misinformation about baby bottles to protect their plastics and bisphenol A market. Reporting on San Francisco's attempt to clamp down on the use of BPA in baby bottles and children's products, we wrote: "It will be interesting to watch the progress of this legislative attempt to control use of this chemical". The California legislation was swiftly defeated under industry threats.

In the four years since, the accumulation of science research attracted public attention then propelled citizen action, which in turn motivated city, state and federal legislatures to pay heed. Not coincidentally, the companies who we chronicled vehemently denying the dangers of BPA, now "voluntarily" discontinue some of their controversial uses for the chemical. Not all lobbies are so agreeable however. The Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association (JPMA), which currently owns the site www.babybottle.org that we took exception to 4 years ago, still runs under a banner of blatant lies "PLASTIC BABY BOTTLES ARE SAFE. Convenient. Tested. Trusted."

Taking a Stand on the Precautionary Principle?

Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) sponsored the Senate bill S. 593, which Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) co-sponsored. Said Feinstein when introducing the bill:

"I strongly believe that the time has come to utilize a precautionary standard in all food and beverages with respect to chemical additives. If you do not know for certain the chemical is benign, it should not be used. Bisphenol A, known commonly as BPA, is one such example. It is used in consumer products all around us: plastic containers that store food, compact discs, water bottles, canned soups and other canned foods, even baby bottles. More than 100 studies suggest that BPA exposure at very low doses is linked to a variety of health problems..."

America consumers should not be "guinea pigs", Feinstein said. The bill would ban Bisphenol A from all food and drink containers, effective 180 days from enactment. The chemical is ubiquitous, found in pipes, baby bottles, infant formula cans, dental sealants, and car parts. But the Environmental Working Group commissioned research showing that half of the cans they tested had detectable levels of BPA that would not only expose adult consumers to levels of BPA considered dangerous, but could expose unborn children whose mothers eat canned food to up 200 times safe levels. Therefore a bill that targets the use of bisphenol A in food containers would help keep the chemical out of humans.

Feinstein's legislation would allow companies to petition for renewable waivers by claiming that it was "technologically impossible to replace BPA in that time frame", an interesting and potentially problematic criteria.

The language Senator Feinstein used in her statement is interesting for other reasons too. "Precautionary Standard" is similar to "Precautionary Principle", which is a sort of loaded term, one that industry and free trade organizations detest. The presumed head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) (in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the Executive Office of the President), Cass Sunstein -- unofficially nominated but at large (maybe somewhere in the bowels of OIRA) -- has periodically taken a strong stand against the Precautionary Principle. (For instance read the paper "Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle", the book of the same tittle, papers or the related less conciliatory CATO article on the subject. Some of these same ideas which are propagated throughout his writing including in "Nudge"). If Congress goes forward with the legislation, will it bring the US stance on chemicals closer to the European one? Will the "Precautionary Standard" edge its way into policy or become more mainstream?

Whatever the outcome, if you were to take a stand on the unfortunately named but potent and historically interesting Precautionary Principle, would the chemical bisphenol A, which has been thoroughly researched, be the chemical you'd choose? (It's not clear whether Feinstein is doing this or whether this is just convenient, casual wording.) Acronym Required has written about the disconnect between the hundreds of studies showing potential dangers of the chemical, legislative action, media coverage, and stalling action by lobbyists, in Phthalates and Bisphenol A: Media and Politics".

The research on bisphenol A does not leave very much doubt as to the dangers of this chemical. So then is this "precaution"? Or even "caution"? Or is it legislation that is very late in to the scene, slowed by chemical companies and their intense lobbying, which makes it simply "reactionary". Not to dredge up an overused cliche here, but is this that different from warnings on cigarette boxes, decades after the first health studies came out? I'm not answering, just asking.

Making this a joint congressional action, Congressman Edward Markey (D-MA) introduced the companion bisphenol A legislation in the House. Markey's bill will be known as "Ban Poisonous Additives Act of 2009".

Senator Feinstein also helped write a 2008 amendment to the Consumer Product Safety Commission which banned the sale of phthalate containing products to children under seven. California passed a similar law in 2007.

Communities Take On Bisphenol A and Companies Suddenly Choose Science

As we mentioned above, Acronym Required previously chronicled San Francisco's failed efforts to ban bisphenol A legislation. The San Francisco City Council members deleted language that would have restricted the use of bisphenol A in certain infant and children's products when sued by plastic manufacturers. We also wrote on Chicago's city legislation and Canada's, and Canadian communities' bans. Since then, more communities have taken on bisphenol A, and Suffolk County" is the latest to institute a ban on the chemical. While manufacturers can afford to take one city to court, if multiple states and cities are introducing legislation, the balance of power changes. Steve Hentges, the prolific American Chemical Council spokesman and author of editorials proclaiming BPA's safety must be spinning (as in 360s) trying to keep up.

American manufacturers are expert at stalling legislation. But at some point, they too, glance over their shoulders an realize that legislation and negative public opinion is bearing down on them. Six companies, Playtex Products, Gerber, Evenflow, Avent America, Dr. Brown's and Disney First Years said they would stop the sale of plastic polycarbonate baby bottles in the USA, in response to action by Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal, and the attorneys general in Delaware and New Jersey.

In other company responses to public outcry, Sunoco wrote a letter to investors saying that they would stop selling bisphenol A to companies that can't assure that BPA won't be used in food and water products for children under 3. Sunoco noted they couldn't assure that bisphenol A was safe. Sunoco's action, though rather anemic, was in response to investor actions and queries to the company. Interviewed by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Tom McCaney, associate director for corporate responsibility at the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia, a group of about 600 nuns who petitioned Sunoco on BPA: "We thought this was a really bold step, especially for a company that's a member of the American Chemistry Council." Bold indeed. Not the adjective I would choose perhaps, since Sunoco's not guaranteeing anything, but a "smart" business move? Sure.

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This is a continuation of our last post "The Galt Gestalt". Not that Ayn Rand hasn't been memorialized enough. Quite the opposite. Companies like the demolition contractor at the World Trade Towers site proudly name themselves John Galt this or Fountainhead that. Companies also name themselves after John Galt or Howard Roark, and at least one architectural design firm in Minneapolis named a imaginary "Howard Roark" as a senior partner of the firm (in charge of marketing). Thousands of books and hundreds of institutes all over the world celebrate her ideas -- among them the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, the Ayn Rand Institute, Ayn Rand Society, RebirthofReason.com, Liberty Institute, AtlasShrugged.com, The Atlas Society, The Objectivist Center, Objectivsm 101, Objectivism Reference Center, ObjectivistAcademiccenter.org, AynRandInstitute.ca -- to name a few.

With all that, who needs more Ayn Rand verbiage? Well, the recent outpouring of Randism would never suffer for more "balance". The gushing accolades over "Atlas Shrugged" at FOX News and cable news channels -- by announcers who Americanize Rand's name to "Ann" instead of "Ayn" rhymes with "all mine", or "swine" -- as Rand would say, could use another look.

In our last post we talked about modern day Ayn Rand acolytes -- those who didn't have the opportunity to write books with her like Alan Greenspan, but who still forward her ideas and writing. True, we read her books -- in high school -- as fiction -- so we are as surprised as anyone that full grown adults actually say that Rand's half a century old books foresaw America's current economic state. In our last post we reviewed the movie "The Fountainhead", with its fallible characters Howard Roark and Dominique, set among quarries and "modern" 1940's buildings -- all his "creations". We challenged Rand's portrayal of Roark as a "creator" and questioned how such daft writing by could be misinterpreted for 2009 economic wisdom. We observed that Rand's coterie of admirers pick and choose the parts of her philosophy they like and disregard the bits that don't fit their political agenda -- like her intolerance of mixing religion with politics.

Some executives say that "The Fountainhead" is their favorite work. Yet in "The Fountainhead" Howard Roark blows up buildings with explosives then defends his crimes by telling a jury some fantastic gobbledygook about great "creators" who stood up to all the men. Each individual scientist or inventor, he intones

"lived for himself. And only by living for himself was he able to achieve the things which are the glory of mankind. Such is the nature of achievement..."

How can a novel where the demi-god Howard Roark dynamites buildings be seen as a blueprint for America, by a nation that claims to revile the tactic of blowing up buildings? There's some irony to the fact that former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, who is a respected as a professor and Chicago community service leader, is labeled a "terrorist", while fictional Howard Roark is revered by Ayers' same detractors as a "hero".

Everyone, including us, capably cherry-picks their evidence, and just as Rand's most fervent admirers cherry-pick her ideas, she cherry-picked her evidence, her ideals, and her followers, scorning even those who most fervently embraced her ideas. She dismissed libertarians as "a random collection of emotional hippies-of-the-right who seek to play at politics without philosophy." But still, they loved her, just as Howard Roark pined for Dominique in the quarry in the "The Fountainhead" and made statutes in her image when she married other men.

Why the enduring adoration? Why are sales of "Atlas Shrugged" still booming, aside from the fact that it's impressively thick but vapidly light read -- a delirious combination of Harlequin romance and "For Dummies" -- perfect airplane reading?

Americans Testy About The Flimsy Enterprising Spirit Myth

Is it the myth of the rugged individual? Historically, the US had some very hardy Americans, Teddy Roosevelt, for instance. But the US and its corporate economy hasn't been a wunderkind of noble individualists recently. In 1984, Roger Rosenblatt wrote about this strange phenomenon, asking in Time magazine's ("The Rugged Individual Rides Again"): "Why the pretense--why the evident pleasure--in seeing the country as a collection of loners?"

Now, twenty-five years later, the myth may be less intact but politicians still pimp it. It has served the GOP well since Ronald Reagan rode in with "Morning in America." Reagan came up in Hollywood at the same time as Ayn Rand, and seemed to be acting out his part as the rugged individualist, with his ranch, the his far-away look and his mythical powers -- "Tear down this wall!"

Two decades later GW Bush didn't ride horses around a ranch like Reagan but he acquired that dried out piece of land in Texas, and he would gamely pull on gloves -- Ironclad Icon Series Extreme Duty^TM gloves no doubt -- over soft hands and hack at brush and joke to the rolling cameras. The American male image is very particular, you see, and can't be properly projected from the decks of a Kennebunkport yacht.

If the whole American rugged individualism was seen as "hypocritical" by the mainstream magazine Time, over two decades ago, and was even more far-fetched as played out by GW Bush. Then when Bobby Jindal took a stab at the iconic myth the other day the whole premise jumped the shark. Talking about how he went down to the docks after Hurricane Katrina and saved some people threatened by bureaucracy Jindal deadpanned:

"Harry just told the boaters to ignore the bureaucrats and go start rescuing people. There is a lesson in this experience: The strength of America is not found in our government. It is found in the compassionate hearts and the enterprising spirit of our citizens."

It took mere hours, if not minutes, for people to uncloak Jindal's lies. You see, for Americans "enterprising spirit" has been exploited and tested and now it's seriously testy.

Interestingly though, while everyone attacked the Katrina survivors part of Jindal's story because Jindal wasn't on the scene, the larger myths that his tale served stayed preposterously intact. First, despite his claim, there is no bureaucracy in the US that holds up enterprising spirit. There is bureaucracy without a doubt, and some of it may encroach on certain individuals. But it largely enables business and corporate benefits, and occasionally, like with the Clean Air regulations, protects individuals. As well, needless to say, Jindal is not the rugged leader leading all the rugged individuals, that's his fantasy world.

Rugged Individual or a cog in the Machine

We're a long time from the Cold War era in which Rand became a political fixture. Nevertheless the rugged individual myth is one that the American people are less willing to tear down. The myth matters because GDP and production and fairly docile citizens who go to work matter. If you drive off to your job in your SUV everyday, thinking how "rugged" you are, you might get through eight hours in a cubicle without cracking up. Politicians push the conceit since its certainly an easier populist sell than all the proceeding political-economic models -- monarchy, colonialism, feudalism, slavery, etc. But the myth is outdated.

A global economy needs global leaders, and individuals who work together. Today, the enemy is certainly not "the collective", although that might have been a believable enemy for someone who immigrated from the Soviet Union half a century ago. Nor is the enemy "the government", which has secured property laws, patent law, corporate law, free trade, privatization, and an entire infrastructure to the service of capitalism and private enterprise. There is no salient enemy.

Of course that is not what we hear from media because there would be no television news if not for enemies and wars, and if the market did not first go up, then come down, and if there were not Democrats who opposed Republicans and Republicans who opposed Democrats. How could we go to all our boring jobs day after day if we did not have network news to break things up, with their histrionics, their drama, and their enemies? This breaks the boredom and it helps us feel whole and human even as so much of what humans do is totally dehumanizing. But lets separate entertainment from information and policy.

Prophets on Profits, Work, Nature

I previously described how Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal, like many Rand fans, thought the fiction of "Atlas Shrugged" was "eerily similar" to today's events.

If you too, think Rand was predicting the events of today half a century ago, than read more carefully to see how many predictions she made that were plumb wrong. Shift your gaze or tilt your head differently and Ayn Rand can seem like any cheap novelist. Sure, her books advocate capitalism. But her ideas were bounded by her experience, that is, Bolshevik history and the Cold War. Some people see Lenin in her work. You can even see Marx, whose philosophy Rand opposes. Both Karl Marx and Rand ruminated on the higher purpose that humans sought through fighting nature with labor. Compare Marx to Howard Roark in "The Fountainhead".

• Karl Marx said: "He [man] opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces. in order to appropriate Nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants."

• Howard Roark said: "The creator's concern is the conquest of nature".

Sixty years ago humans were still ensconced in what we would dub today "a war on nature", and indeed their life hung in balance everyday as they farmed and fished, although their fate was not as precarious as their pioneer ancestors. But now in the 21st century, when humans have decimated so many species and environs, how can people doubt we have the upper hand? In fact, our domination is so complete that the poles are literally collapsing back on us. Paradoxically, nature still challenges, but global warming is our Frankenstein, and the fight is against ourselves. The reality is vastly different than what Rand and Marx knew. We don't need individuals who feel compelled to prove their worth in big highway cruisers.

Marx and Rand shared other constructs. Marx had his class struggle. Today the internet swirls with talk about "Going Galt", the folly that professional workers should walk off the job if the tax rate increases.

• Karl Marx, writing on how bees build intricate hives noted, "...what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own..."
• Howard Roark said: "Throughout the centuries, there were men who took first steps down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision...His truth was his only motive. His work was his only goal. His creation...gave form to his truth. I am an architect.

If there is a class struggle, its not against the government, which is printing money to save large corporations as we speak. Most Americans work for these corporations, and even if they're a self-employed electrician their income is completely entwined with the banks. There are few "creations" to speak of unless the making of financial instruments count, and as we've learned, cowboys in finance do real harm. It is not the government that got us to this place.

Ayn Rand and CEOs -- She Completes Them

While economics departments don't include Rand in their curricula, everyone outside of academia acknowledges how much Ayn Rand influences politicians and businessmen. Apparently it doesn't matter to her fans that "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead" are cheap potboilers. In a 2007 article, the New York Times interviewed John A. Allison, CEO of BB&T, one of the largest banks in the US, who said of "Atlas Shrugged".

"I know from talking to a lot of Fortune 500 C.E.O.'s that 'Atlas Shrugged' has had a significant effect on their business decisions...It offers something other books don't: the principles that apply to business and to life in general. I would call it complete."

And there I was thinking all that math I learned in economics and business classes was so important, when all I needed to read was an overly thick Harlequin romance?

In January, 2009, the Times reported that BB&T profit fell 26% in the 4th quarter of 2008, and so the bank accepted $3.1 billion in government money". Poof? Just like that? Rand out the window? To hell with "principles"? Mr. Allison can you comment? Should we shelve Rand next to Marx, now that it's 2009?

The American Image Dilemma

Worshipping the individual and the market may be what business leaders say they like to hear, however, it doesn't make Rand's ideas successful policy. A few years ago Americans strongly believed in their rugged individualism, as they flipped houses and extracted equity and took out big mortgages from aggrandizing lenders. Now they're feeling a little chastised and mad. Americans are caught up in the throes of a financial behemoth of their collective making, generated by private banking and enterprises they don't understand. But they'd probably like to feel like rugged individuals again.

Although "rugged individualism" is evidently music to emasculated workers ears, it's hard to buy. The USA is, after all, a country where 30% of the people are obese. Rugged doesn't usually come in size 3X stretchy pants. As well, Rand preached "reason" not religion, but 50% of the people believe in the Creator, not the "creator", and will tell you that humans roamed the earth with dinosaurs 6000 years ago. In 2009 a political party that tries to lead by encouraging this level of intellectual rigor from its citizens doesn't bode well for the nation of "knowledge workers".

But the GOP seems unable to become anything else. The party seems superglued to the rugged individual image and in it's service, they've forwarded the most unlikely series of messengers, Joe the Plumber, Bobby Jindal, Michael Steele, Sarah Palin. Nice try, attempting to be the party for "one-armed midgets" and the party of rugged individualists a la Reagan? Seriously Republicans, America -- the individualists, the midgets, and everyone else -- deserves a more up to date and congruous image.

Of course in the frightening series of public relations debacles by the GOP and their media, Rand actually plays a tiny role. The rugged pioneering individualist myth is a strained fictional construct. But unfortunately, Rand fans and some in the GOP do have one winning strategy, which is to promote the facile idea that far, far less government is better (except military and police). It's a winning strategy because the US (and every other state) will never have no regulation. Government regulation is what ensures "free markets". Therefore Ayn Rand fans have a permanent platform.

Like the unlikely longevity of the myth of the rugged individualist, now it's painfully obvious that deregulation is not the answer. But it's child's play for Randians to argue that George W. Bush was no Ayn Rand, and we need still less regulation. When we examine the notion however, it's clear that this too is part and parcel of old plot lines from outdated fiction. Mid-century may be fine for furniture, if orange plastic chairs and aqua blue polyester are your thing, but it doesn't work for economic policy.

The Rand Rage

Everyone's reading Ayn Rand. Have you noticed? The other day the Freakonomics blog wrote about a "recession icon of sorts emerges, wrapped in a Snuggie, puffing on a pipe -- and now with a copy of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged on his lap." Back in January, Stephen Moore fantasized in the Wall Street Journal:

If only "Atlas" were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I'm confident that we'd get out of the current financial mess a lot faster.

Sure enough, two months later, look! As books sales went up, the stock market rose, purportedly because Citi's living richly again. Is it Rand? Another sucker rally? Moore explained his rationale for the Ayn Rand reading assignment: "Some years ago when I worked at the libertarian Cato Institute, we used to label any new hire who had not yet read "Atlas Shrugged" a 'virgin.'"**

The Movie is Better

I 'd last read "Atlas Shrugged" (1942) and "The Fountainhead" (1957) one summer in high school and found Rand entertaining. I wasn't an conservative, ideologically precocious teenager. I'd probably just finished up the Hardy Boys series and I wasn't submitting essays to her namesake institute's high school writing contests, -- I read Rand as pure fiction.

My recent dilemma was how to refresh my adult mind on Rand's ideas without adding another 1000+ page book to my staggering reading list. Sure, I could have skipped the book and read the reviews. But then I would have risked misinformation, like those who regurgitate PJ O'Rourke's interpretation of "The Wealth of Nations" thinking they're reading the real thing.

I reasoned that I could reread the "The Fountainhead" faster. It's a fraction of the size of "Atlas Shrugged" and although its written a decade earlier, it's laden with the same notions. I then stumbled upon "The Fountainhead", the movie -- even better. At 113 minutes, you save days of reading, and you can multitask while you watch, because it's pablum for simpletons.

Eerily Similar?

Beyond efficiency, there's another reason to watch the movie. When you read, your mind puts you in the story. You're standing at the quarry described in "The Fountainhead" (1949) in your 2009 shoes and 2009 hairstyle, with your 2009 global attitudes and 2009 cultural disposition and intelligence. You end up thinking what readers of Atlas Shrugged think these days -- Wow! Atlas Shrugged is just like 2009 -- wasn't Rand clever? You're perhaps predispositioned to the same specious comparisons that Stephen Moore made in his WSJ article:

"In one chapter of the book, an entrepreneur invents a new miracle metal -- stronger but lighter than steel. The government immediately appropriates the invention in "the public good." The politicians demand that the metal inventor come to Washington and sign over ownership of his invention or lose everything."

This, Moore says, is "eerily similar" to the banks' dealings with Paulson last year when they "signed a document handing over percentages of their future profits to the government". Really? No, actually it worked the other way. The government gave the banks the public's money, and the government isn't likely to gain much from those banks.

Consider many other examples that throw doubt on Moore's conclusion, for instance scientific research. Like many federal institutions, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), funds research at public universities and eventually those advances get transferred to private industry, which can develop, patent, and profit from research paid for by government. Arpanet, developed by the Department of Defense, is now the internet and quite lucrative for businesses. As Rand once said:

"When you look for the source of an historic idea, you must consider philosophic essentials, not the superficial statements or errors that people may offer you. Even the most well-meaning men can misidentify the intellectual roots of their own attitudes."

You can avoid this type of historical misinterpretation by watching "The Fountainhead" yourself. Rand wrote the script and was heavily involved in the editing so you should have an authentic experience.

Homeland Terrorism and Bodice Rippng

As you watch the movie you can ask yourself: Despite what Moore and others say, is this a story we want to claim as influential to our economic foundation? --Alan Greenspan was an acolyte? Is it weird that US Congressmen present "Atlas Shrugged" to departing staff? Is the USA circa 1957 relevant to the USA circa 2009?

The female protagonist of the "The Fountainhead" (1949), "Dominique", rides up on her high white horse while Howard Roark mans his drill in the quarry, all testosterone and biceps and brawn and pride. Sparks fly from the dysfunctional male/female tension typical of Harlequin romances. Like any bodice ripping potboiler-romance paperback, Dominique and Roark are each other's quarry -- but Rand goes the extra mile and sets the story in a quarry too.

Roark is an outcast architect who chooses manual mining labor rather than sacrifice his ideals as an architect who designs aesthetically unpopular buildings. In one scene Roark lets a fellow architect take credit for his drawings. Then Roark finds out the builder altered his plan, gets mad and dynamites the entire complex. So the 2009 message is...teamwork is for sissies?

How about when Roarke throws the high falutin' Dominique to the ground in violent, mad lust? 2009? Or when Roark stands up in front of the jury after his dynamiting spree and delivers his big speech on the superiority of "creators". Roark says of himself and his hero "creators" :

"The great creators -- the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors -- stood alone against the men of their time. Every new thought was opposed; every new invention was denounced....He held his truth above all things and against all men. He went ahead whether others agreed with him or not, with his integrity as his only banner. He served nothing and no one. He lived for himself. And only by living for himself was he able to achieve the things which are the glory of mankind. Such is the nature of achievement..."

Roark is not so much noble creator, as he is a one man Weather Underground". His narcissistic speech does nothing to explain how anyone benefits from rampant vandalism, how misrepresentation of authorship is good business, or how societies would sustain themselves with such rampant selfishness. In reality, we would lock this man up as a felon. But alas, in the movie, the jury acquits him.

Harlequin Potboilers Founded our Global Economy

Just as Adam Smith proponents rarely mention the "Theory of Moral Sentiments", politicians who adopt Ayn Rand's ideas selectively pick points that they find useful and reject other significant sections of her philosophy, hailing her wisdom only when it supports their agendas.

Rand, a Russian immigrant, thought America's founders had made a big mistake in the Declaration of Independence by saying that men were "endowed 'by their Creator' with certain unalienable rights." So she had Roark redefine "creator", banish the big "C", and make each individual his own "creator", little "c".

In 2009 at least 50% of the population believes in the Creator, big "C". Rand was intolerant of this, and of Reagan and the "New Right", who she criticized for mixing religion with politics. She predicted dire consequences for Reagan's embrace of religion in his campaign:

"[R]eligious zeal is merely a variant of irrationalism and the demand for self-sacrifice--and therefore it has to lead to the same result in practice: dictatorship... While claiming to be the defenders of Americanism, their distinctive political agenda is statism....."

"[C]hildren, we are told, should be indoctrinated with state-mandated religion at school. For instance, biology texts should be rewritten under government tutelage to present the Book of Genesis as a scientific theory on par with or even superior to the theory of evolution..."

"What we are seeing is the medievalism of the Puritans all over again, but without their excuse of ignorance....The New Right is not the voice of Americanism. It is the voice of thought control attempting to take over in this country and pervert and undo the actual American revolution....."

Those who see all the parallels between "Atlas Shrugged" and today's banking aren't saying anything about Rand's predictions for teaching religion in schools, a practice that GW Bush was strategically equivocal about and that conservatives continue to embrace.

Helping is Futile and Other Anomalies

During the Cold War, the US fought Communism and Socialism, so it seems natural that her writing was popular with politicians and citizens. Marginalized conservatives half a century ago naturally embraced her virulent opposition to Communism, since it fit into the narrative they were building. Now the Randian movement (and conservatives) drudge up other enemies. One such enemy is altruism.

The Simpsons satirized Ayn Rand in "A Streetcar Named Marge" -- where one poster in the "Ayn Rand School for Tots" declares "Helping Is Futile". It's no joke.

When the Asian Tsunami wiped out over 200,000 people across Asia, the Ayn Rand Institute urged western governments not to give aid. Ayn Rand criticized altruism because she predicted in was a slippery slope to Communism.

"the New Right is leading us, admittedly or not, to the same end as its liberal opponents. By virtue of the movement's essential premises, it is supporting and abetting the triumph of statism in this country--and, therefore, of Communism in the world at large."

Ayn Rand ranted about the "New Right" movement that ascended into politics with Reagan, and charged that by accepting of the "New Deal", the Marshall Plan and social programs they were destroying the USA.

Twaddle to Live By?

By the end of the movie I realized my high school memory of Rand was too complimentary. I'm not movie critic, but "The Fountainhead" would dissuade most of delusions that Rand has anything to offer 2009. Do we really need to recruit "high-priced twaddle" to support modern day economics or policy?

At first we thought that since "The Fountainhead" was old, the age might be clouding our opinion. But while her book was popular in its day it also had voracious critics, and the movie met with a lot of the same criticism. A 1949 New York Times review had only scathing words for the movie: "[A] more curious lot of high-priced twaddle we haven't seen for a long, long time"...."Loaded with specious situations"...."wordy, involved and pretentious"...."not the most brilliant demonstration of logic in pictorial form". The author thought Roark's "creations" were abominable: "his work, from what we see of it, is trash".

If you read PJ ORourke instead of "Wealth of Nations" to understand history, or Crichton instead of the IPCC climate change report report to understand science, you might also subscribe to Rand's philosophies and urge that for today's economy. But pundits and admirers of Rand's fiction sweep under a giant rug all the anachronisms and flaws of "objectivism".

Historians with Atlas Shrugged in their hands would convince you Americans are individualists and historical winners. They would trace a history that connects today to yesterday, wealth to happiness, to Reagan to Rand and the glorious defeat of Communism, to the Invisible Hand and to Jesus Christ himself. But these are gauzy, fatuous connections, built around tawdry tales like "The Fountainhead".

So why is everyone touting Rand? Perhaps so they can drive by all the food lines and spit on people with a clear conscious? Who knows. But if major constituencies in America turn now to embrace Rand's half-century old "philosophy", should we worry?

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**Then what? (Rand's fictional women were routinely flung to the ground by her male heros and defiled or deflowered -- Ahhh, the good 'ole days?)

Trendy Science?

Often, science seems under attack. On one hand, we know there will always be politicians who attack science like volcano monitoring, simply because they can. But don't you just wish politicians would change? How? Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, a biology student who applied to medical school, doesn't get the bulk of his campaign funding from individual geologists from the Northwest. And given the opportunity to run for president on a right leaning platform, how much influence will Rocks for Jocks really have?

The most alarming outcome of these political ploys, these self-serving displays of idiocy, is how the 'freaky science meme' courses through the population, gathering speed and strength. True, many people simply believe what they believe. But politicians who are derogatory towards science foster an atmosphere that's indulgent of general distrust for scientists. Creationists start crawling out of the woodwork. Then before you know it pedigree dog owners on the Upper West Side are openly discussing the *evil dognappers* who want to steal their precious pooches to supply "the burgeoning industry that is--collecting dogs and giving them to laboratories for experiments.".

We always wish the reporters would ask the "Marilyn Pasekoff[s] (Hogan, German shepherd)" who they find "walking in Riverside Park", just one more question, that is: "Describe an experiment you imagine occurring in these 'laboratories' with these pedigree dogs." Right? Blankets thrown over Pomeranians and Great Danes when researchers sneak them through the back doors of Columbia University and New York University before hoisting them up on the lab bench in the dark of night?

The good news, perhaps a mild antidote to such nonsense, is how the Obama administration continues to follow through with campaign promises -- to fund science, to end the ban on embryonic stem cell research, to address global warming and healthcare. Nothing like eight years of GW Bush administration anti-logic, anti-science leadership to give scientists a very heightened appreciation for an administration that seems to understand how important it is to make science and technology just slightly more relevant again.

Test Tube Confidence

And in a global economy this is a global endeavor. Following in President Obama's footsteps, Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced last week that he wanted to properly fund science and technology and assure a future where the financial sector is the servant of industry, and never its master. Bold.

(But what will replace manufacturing?) Students protested Brown's speech at Oxford, referencing the global meltdown and job losses at local car plants.

One women in his audience commented on the new focus on science -- '"don't mention the Economics-word, let's talk about mixing chemicals in a test tube - at least that works."' Cynical as she was, to scientists coming out of the great drought of political support, even this is a refreshing change in populist rhetoric. Science "works"? You think? I'll put that in my back pocket!

Border Envy

However not all is well, naturally. Canadian scientists are concerned about their flat or decreasing national science budgets. The Ottawa Citizen reports that the three granting councils which fund most academic research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, have been asked to cut $148 million from their budgets over the next three years.

The government cuts occur despite protest by industry and academic scientists who worry about the nation's science and technology standing (as well as their own careers). Funding levels have remained flat or decreased under the conservative government and Canadian scientists now worry that talent will move across the border to the US and better funding. Ironically, the Canadians now cite US wisdom in prioritizing science.

Science, Now Rich Enough to Be Taken Hostage

Finally, one last change that illustrates a certain new-found importance for science. Admittedly, this is again, a case of squeezing lemonade out of lemons. Obama administration science advisory nominations, John Holdren for the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Jane Lubchenco for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are are seen by certain politicians as appropriate targets for political blackmail. That's pathetic. That's rich. Scientists sigh. Oh, the danger of being important.

So with the focus on science, not only in the US but in the UK too, are we dreaming to imagine a time when science attains greater respect and citizens reject anti-science stances? As the New York Times reported in February, The Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology (SIBC) announced that it would hold its 2011 meeting in Salt Lake City, instead of New Orleans, because of the law Governor Jindal signed last summer allowing teachers to use "supplemental textbooks" to "help students critique and review scientific theories".

The laws framer's insisted they had no subversive religious agenda, but the forthright group "Catholic Exchange" announced when the bill passed: "Bobby Jindal Signs Law Allowing Intelligent Design in Louisiana Schools". Louisiana was one of several states to pass legislation during the Bush administration allowing schools to teach of alternative (creationist) views. Framed as "the controversy", these new curriculum changes pander to right wing voters. Will these voters and politicians continue their anti-science fervor as Obama government recognizes science and science regains its footing? We can hope not.

Originally posted under the title: "Peanut Crimes The FDA and You"

When the FDA Fails, Have Your Day In Court?

FDA Scientists are desperate to get the word out that the medical devices section of the FDA is dysfunctional. A couple of weeks ago 9 FDA scientists who work in the device division wrote a letter to Barack Obama in an effort to bring problems with device testing to his attention. The scientists had first written to former FDA Commisioner von Eschenbach, then to members of the House and Senate, then to the president's transition team before addressing Obama in an effort to get their complaints heard.

The scientists maintain that the FDA has put them under criminal investigation as retribution for their public demands that the agency change how it regulates devices. The current methods for testing Class III devices are outdated, so devices like pacemakers and replacement heart valves can enter the market without adequate testing. An urgent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) also found device testing inadequate in an investigation it published this January.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported last year on a case where several hundred patients filed a suit against Medtronic for injuries suffered from faulty implanted heart valve replacement devices. A cracked lead in certain Sprint Fidelis models caused strong intermittent shocks to the heart, which apparently felt to the patient like getting kicked in the chest by a horse. One 68 year old woman interviewed by the Tribune said in one hour she was shocked 54 times. The Medtronic device received FDA approval as a Class III device.

The suit brought by the hundreds of patients with faulty Medtronic valve replacement with cracked leads was dismissed by a US District Court in St. Paul Minneapolis, who based his decision on a Supreme Court case that protected medical device makers from product liability cases after the products had been through FDA review. The Supreme Court ruling was for a different Medtronic product, the balloon catheter.

FDA Meets With Industry: 113, FDA Meets With Consumers: 5 -- Who Wins?

While regulation can hamper markets, inadequate regulation leads to dangers for citizens that also, in the end, hamper markets. Baseball with no rules would no longer a fun game that millions of fans pay exorbitant amounts of money to watch. From the Harper's Index, January, 2009:

"Number of times FDA officials met with consumer and patient groups as they revised drug-review policy in 2006: 5. Number of times FDA officials met with industry representatives: 113." (Source: FDA)

Perhaps the FDA met with business because of logistics, or because they were there, or perhaps because companies have more money than a 68 year old women with heart problems. Many would probably like to get rid of government so that companies (or as PJ O'Rourke would have it, community organizations) could save their lobby money and put it right back into shareholder's pockets the economy.

But we too will grow old and just might need such a device to continue on with our lives (in order to continue contributing to the economic well-being of our country). Then who should we trust so as not to get kicked in the chest by a horse 50 times an hour? The system that will revamp the FDA? Or the system that advocates handing all oversight to "independent" contractors hired by the companies selling the products? Your choice.

Judd Gregg withdrew his name from consideration as Secretary of the US Department of Commerce yesterday. Early in his career, when CATO was pushing the idea and it was trendy, Gregg suggested that the department should be eliminated. This fact got some progressives apoplectic when Obama nominated him, although Gregg had been very supportive of certain parts of Commerce, like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Gregg's NOAA sponsorship paid off for New Hampshire, but many Republicans, would abolish NOAA, along with the parts of Commerce that oversee trade, the census, and programs to benefit minority businesses. ¹ The Financial Times noted today:

"The New Hampshire Republicans would have spared himself and Barack Obama...had the measure succeeded. Instead, the commerce department survived and, with it, the job of commerce secretary"¹

Paradoxically, if Commerce had been eliminated, Barack Obama would have been spared Gregg's waffling, but CATO, would-be killer of the Department of Commerce, would be in a pickle. Where would it turn to the get evidence it uses in arguments before Congress for unregulated free trade?

Even considering that Obama has said he is open to doing away with ineffective parts of government, and some arguments that the Department of Commerce is mostly heavy on http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0209/18836.html">partisan perks, it's clear that the appointment was never a good fit. Really, if you need to take the centennial census away from the guy you nominated to the department that oversees the census? Not exactly ISO 9000 level of trust.

But does Gregg's sudden realization that he doesn't want what he asked for, that he's not willing to endure a spot on the team of rivals, bode ill for Obama's "bipartisanship"? Well, the team of rivals is perhaps overrated, apparently "Chase and Seward and Cameron and Stanton were in fact a crew of venomous enemies, all of whom underestimated their leader." Who needs "rivals" when you have bloggers, anyway?

Gregg was apparently pressured by his party. Obama will not cease working across the aisle, said his administration. But Congress? Republicans? GOP strategists eat bipartisanship rhetoric up like the monsters on Rampage World Tour.

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¹ The photo was taken by NOAA. It shows Judd Gregg's wife signing the keel of a newly built NOAA ship in 2004. The ship was named by high school students as part of a program to engage students with scientific studies. The ship was named after Henry Bryant Bigelow, an oceanographer who worked as a researcher, instructor and professor of zoology at Harvard from 1906 to 1962, and who founded Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1931. The former Senator Trent Lott (R-MS), Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), and Senator Thad Cochran (R-MS) were thanked at the "traditional keel laying ceremony".

The Politics of Problem Solving in the US. One: Know Your Audience

Michael Moore's 2007 film Sicko was familiar to me even before I watched it last night, because the media dissected all parts of the film with yeahs or boos when it opened two years ago. Moore's concise editorial on the US health care system didn't muddle his point about the superiority of nationalized health care by dwelling on gray areas or discussing exceptions or contradictions. It was a simple tale, US health care: bad; Canada, Cuba, Britain, France health care: good. Criticism about Moore's lack of journalistic rigor was fair, but I found the film surprisingly refreshing.

We've been living an unfolding disaster, whereby politicians meander down the middle of the road, hopping to one side or the other as dangerous objects from the other side veer too close. Always on the path to the next election, they can never stray too far from the middle. Progressive public relations 2009 dictates that you deliver uplifting rhetoric, then when your actions fail to bring the change you promise, you must call everything a giant success anyway. Journalist, activist or politician, you win support and earn money by appealing to all sides and botoxing a cheerful smile on your face.

The Democrats didn't bemoan the cuts after the House and Senate reached agreement on the stimulus package. The bill lost education and state aid, but the centrist crafters beamed on the podium. Susan Collins, Senator from Maine, toed her own Republican party line when announcing the final package of $789 TRILLION dollars. "It is a fiscally responsible number", she said brightly, without choking, sputtering, or falling backwards in a recoil effect from the force of the lie.

While politicians need to wag this way, there's none of this middle of the road stuff for Moore and his "Dog Eat Dog Films". US health care is rotten to the core, and Moore says so, pulling no stops and corralling the most unlikely players -- Cuba, Britain, and sick 9-11 workers -- to play their parts.

Moore focuses on the high profit US insurance industry and the managed care system. He tells real, scary accounts of insurance denials for services that led to the illnesses or deaths of patients. The story appealed to his select audience, but of course the problem is more complicated than greedy insurance companies. Moores' nationalization solution necessarily cuts out all the complications and idiosyncrasies implicit to delivering health care in a 21st centure US. So he was rightly criticized.

Two: Isolate the "Problem" and Develop a "Simple" Solution

But criticize away, every solution proposed for every complicated problem simplifies, whether Barack Obama proposes the solution, or Michael Moore does. When we look to solve complicated system failures, we tend to herd ourselves towards solutions that fall within the bounds of the current broken system. The solution of nationalized medicine for the healthcare problem isn't necessarily simple but Moore makes it look as simple and straightforward as an Old West movie gunfight.

Moore tried to sell a simple solution by making it look easy. Politicians, for lack of imagination, political will and guts, craft simplistic solutions. As it turns out, often the solutions involve technology, which has universal appeal and people don't know how hard it is.

What was the cause of the economic meltdown? It was people who bought mortgages that they didn't understand, like ARM's that ballooned. This caused massive foreclosures. I'll label this the "stupid homeowner" theory of economic meltdown. How do we dust our hands of this problem? Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler come to the rescue in "Human Frailty Caused This Crisis", published by the Financial Times:

Regulators therefore need to help people manage complexity and resist temptation.... Regulators can reduce the chances of a future meltdown by making it easier to understand financial products....Fine-print disclosure should be supplemented by machine-readable files enabling third-party websites to translate hidden details of the terms.

A preposterous solution to the financial crisis.

Here's a different example, this time the media comes up with the solution. Why is the US health care system flagging? According to USA Today and ABC News, it's because of illegal immigrants. The audience tested "solution" is so self-evident that it needs no explanation. Of course the "problem" is simply not true.

Three: Shut Down Any Solution that Disturbs the Current Paradigm.

Watch no less than five CNBC commentators taking on Nouriel Roubini and Tassim Taleb, trying to force them into making economic turnaround predictions. When Bill Gates comes to listen to you at Davos, chirps one commentator, isn't that "a data point" that indicates imminent economic recovery? Roubini and Taleb persevere through this ridiculousness, counseling how we must change the banks, the compensation, the culture, and everyone running it, "that class of people" who "failed and will fail again". The five person news team clamors noisily for investment advice. The five don't and won't get it, maybe since they're actually still all employed to prattle on like this. They tell the economists that they're there as a sideshow -- Roubini and Taleb have entered the mental ward that is this CNBC show.

The problems plaguing health care are as complex as fixing finance and the solutions offered are also simplistic. For health care, Obama drives towards electronic records. There's something to this, to having all the patients records in one place and accessible, no one can deny that, and we certainly support it. But technology is not the solution, it's another layer of abstraction on top of a broken system, a pay for service (not for health), for profit, high throughput scheme that focuses on "managing" patients, privatizing care, cutting costs, and improving efficiency. This focus on efficiency may work for churning out auto parts, but you can't care for humans via an assembly line.

When It's Not About Technology

Electronic records will help doctors and patients but most of all it will help the current winners, the insurance companies and for-profit entities that stand between to doctors and the patients. Doctors who currently have electronic record systems complain that they're not give time to respond to email, to enter records or to speak with patients, never mind diagnose them. Electronic records will certainly help "manage" costs. But "managing" costs and the endless drive to "efficiency" is what brought the system to its knees in the first place. The focus is wrong and the system is broken.

The New York Times had an interesting account this week by a patient who fared very differently than Michael Moore's sick, helpless lambs. Jay Neugeboren tells the story of how he was given a clean bill of health by his doctors and cardiologist. But shortness of breath and a burning pain in his back motivated him to call on some friends who were doctors. One of them recommended he go to the hospital, where he got an electrocardiogram which showed three arteries totally blocked, and one 90% blocked. Now, ten years after his quintuple bipass surgery, he's doing fine. Neugeboren emphasizes how lucky he was. His clinical profile -- lipid panel, blood pressure, weight, diet, exercise, lifestyle -- was excellent. Without his friends who took the time to listen to his problems, he said, no test or technology predicted how close to death he was. ¹

One caveat to the author's story is this: "I had no conventional risk factors or symptoms", he writes in the NYT. However in an excerpt listed on Amazon, he says: "My father, who died of emphysema at the age of seventy-two, had had a heart attack when he was fifty-nine, but he never exercised, had been overweight, and had smoked three packs of Chesterfields a day throughout his adult life." His father had a heart attack at the same age he did. Which suggests that he did have a conventional risk factor, genetic predisposition. But the author doesn't write that. Apparently he thought his lifestyle would trump genetics, and apparently his doctor thought so too. In his case it didn't. Disease is not necessarily predictable, for patients or doctors.

Because disease is not predictable, and because on so many levels we don't understand health, we need doctors to spend time with patients, to be detectives, first to sort through the patient history, then to decide what that history demands. Is the patient understating the problem or a hypochondriac. Technology shortens time with patients, but who does that benefit? Technology will give more information, but it will most reliably improve statistics with which insurance companies place bets about patient's health and improve their bottom line.

But it's not the solution to the health care crisis, if the crisis is one about poor care -- which it is. Technology seems like a nuts and bolts solution to many people but is as ephemeral as the placebo offered to a villager who sees a doctor for the first time and wants a token to feel better.

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¹ Neugeboren wrote a book about his experience.

Grapevine of Worry

Lucy Kellaway wrote in the Financial Times a couple of days ago that her own "mild fearfulness" about the economy had ballooned to hyperventilating paranoia after she spent time surfing the web and opening e-mail.

"Through blogs, websites and e-mails the world's economic ills are fed to us on a drip all day long. It is not just that we hear about bad things faster, we hear about more of them and in a more immediate way. My worries become yours, and yours become mine."

Since I don't "sit over my computer all day and feed my anxiety", I disagree. I don't succumb to bad news, rather I cheer myself when Obama talks about limiting publicly financed executive pay, or when the head of the Bureau of Land Management puts a hold on the drilling leases near national parks auctioned off by the Bush administration. In dire moments, I distract myself with unicorn chasers and happy news. Don't you? I walk away from the computer at will. I turn it off.

Back To Math Class You Go

But lets move beyond my anecdotal evidence. Lucy Kellaway speaks, as always, slightly tongue in cheek, but other news stories might convince you that the internet truly does harbor inescapable and vile corruption that needs to be caged. Take for instance, the New York Times piece yesterday about MySpace and their campaign to purge registered sex predator names from their site. According to the NYT, MySpace turned over 90,000 names to Attorney General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Attorney General Roy Cooper of North Carolina.

Officials are pressuring social networking sites to adopt more stringent safety standards to assure children's safety. This is a welcome but confusingly priority since a report by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, commissioned by 49 state attorneys general found that bullying online was a far more serious problem than sexual solicitation. Nevertheless, Attorney General Blumenthal said in a recent statement:

"Almost 100,000 convicted sex offenders mixing with children on MySpace -- shown by our subpoena -- is absolutely appalling and totally unacceptable...for every one of them, there may be hundreds of others using false names and ages."

I'm all for blocking names. But lets sort through his math. 90,000 names, times "hundreds" of "others". We'll interpret his "hundreds" conservatively, let's say 300-- although perhaps the Attorney General meant 900. So 90,000 * 300 = 27,000,000 sex offenders on MySpace? Maybe up to 81,000,000? The population of the US is ~303,824,640. So on the conservative side, Blumenthal tells us that 1 in 10 US sex offender citizens trolls MySpace. YIKES!

The Times reports later in the story that there are 700,000 sex offenders in the US. The paper doesn't worry with the math discrepancy. Instead they quote John A. Phillips, "chief executive of Aristotle, a company that supplies identity and age verification technologies for companies like the New York State Lottery, breweries and film studios", who is trying to sell his software to Myspace, and so piles on: '"this is just the tip of the iceberg on MySpace".

So, fear for the little children. Fear for the investor class, homeowners, and retirement fund enrollees. Who else?

Fear For the Suggestible, the Unvaccinated

If 1/1000 to 4/1000 registered YouTube users rate vaccination videos with 1 to 5 stars, adding comments like, "your video is stupid, and your a dumbass that's what my mom thinks", should we use this "data" to propagate concern that YouTube feeds the public irrational and dangerous opinions about vaccinations? A year ago the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a study that did exactly that.

In December 2007, University of Toronto researchers announced a "first-ever study of its kind". The investigators selected YouTube videos relating to immunizations or vaccinations, and concluded that much of the video content "contradicts the best scientific evidence". The public health community should find this "very concerning", they wrote. The press pounced on this announcement like a starved puppy tossed a Porterhouse steak. Articles titled "YouTube Full Of One-Sided Anti-Vaccination Videos", littered the news.

The authors selected and watched 153 videos. 73 (48%) had so called "positive" messages (in favor of immunization) , 49 videos (32%) had so called "negative" messages, and 31 videos (20%) had so called "ambiguous" messages. The study concluded:

• 1) "negative videos were more likely to be rated by viewers"
• 2) negative videos were more likely to "receive more views"
• 3) negative videos "received a higher mean star rating".

The authors then generated their dire warnings.

Garbage In...

When JAMA published the study I spent some time looking at their data, which I'll briefly highlight here. Unfortunately, it was impossible to repeat the study. Obviously, time had elapsed between authors' video viewing and publication, but also the authors' described their methodology fleetingly: "On February 20, 2007, we searched YouTube (www.youtube.com) using the keywords vaccination and immunization." Straight-forward and repeatable? Hardly. Different permutations of the keywords and Boolean operators yielded anywhere from 63 to 1300 videos, when we copied their methodology. This result may not seem important, but such unreliability prompted us to look at the validity of the study's conclusions.

The authors found that "negative videos were more likely to be rated by viewers." Of 73 "positive" videos, 46 had a rating. Out of 49 "negative" videos, 42 had a rating. But you have to wonder how meaningful a metric like "number of ratings" or "likely to rate" is. Looking at the raw data a different way, you would also learn that more people rate "positive" videos.

We multiplyied 73 "positive" videos by the study's "mean number of positive" video views - 181, which gives 13,213 views. Yet there were only 37 viewer ratings. Multiplying 49 "negative" videos by the mean, 520 views per video, gives 25,480 viewers -- but only only 36 ratings. So yes, there were "more views" of "negative" than "positive" videos, and more negative videos were rated. But also the data showed that an individual is more likely to rate a "positive" video (.28% of viewers rated), than the "negative" video (.14% of viewers rated). Why? Do more people watch "positive" videos to the end? Who knows.

There were other confounding questions unanswered by the study. How long had the videos been posted? Does rating a video actually signal a change in attitude? Behavior? Anything? How many people rate videos -- only registered users can rate videos, so do registered YouTube users represent the vaccinating public? Is a "negative" Gardasil video a "bad" public health message, given the uncertainty about the pros and cons of that vaccine? Moreover, can tabulating viewer ratings translate to anything meaningful? Especially when only ~1-2 in 1000 viewers rates a video?

...Garbage Out

The authors also tallied the YouTube star ratings and concluded that "negative" videos received higher ratings. But in a 1-5 star rating system such as YouTube's, what do we learn from reports that the mean "positive" video rating was 3.5, with 1.5 standard deviations (SD), whereas the mean "negative" video rating was 4.4 with .9 SD?

Does running statistics on shaky data make it more meaningful? According to analyses of 5-Star Rating Systems there are plenty of other problems with drawing many conclusions from ratings. Individual ratings tend to be either very low, or very high (1 or 5), in a bimodal distribution. Problematically, an average score of 3 or 4 might only describe "conflicting opinions". As it turns out, averaging most 5 star ratings gives a mean 3-4 star rating.

Another bias of 5 star rating systems is upward-bias from "fans". For instance, when we looked at available videos in December, 2007, in a video from "House MD", the TV program, a doctor very sarcastically scorns a woman for not vaccinating her child. This ("positive") video got rated very highly (4+ stars). But tans will rate a show highly no matter what the public health message. Problematically, then, the JAMA study uses these crude ratings to make some serious public health claims about the dangers of YouTube.

In December 2007 we did our own little mini-study on YouTube to confirm the JAMA data showing that only 1-5 of every 1000 viewers rated these videos (true). Ironically, at the time, the most popular YouTube video about vaccination was a "positive" one put out by a pharmaceutical company, which only showed up in some searches. This corporate video got almost 800,000 views, more than 10 times the 69,000 total views of the 153 videos the authors studied, far surpassing all the "negative" videos.

The pharmaceutical company was advertising a video contest for homemade videos about getting a flu shot with a $500 prize. The video got negative reviews, but some comments reflected people's annoyance that the contest had ended or they hadn't won. The House MD video was the second most popular video.

Barbarians on the Net

This idea that the internet will tear down society one way or another by undermining civility, by cultivating irrational fear, spreading disease, crime, or irrational behavior is not new, and in fact reflects various bricks and mortar versions of the same fear-mongering. See for instance, The Coming Anarchy, by Robert D. Kaplan and similar titles. In reality, nation-states quite adeptly control the internet, as they do their roadways, waterways, and airspace.

Despite the constant threat of unreasonableness and anarchy, it is reason that often trumps unreasonable cacophony on the internet, the opposite of what people predict. Would Obama have been elected without the internet? Would the Palin candidacy have met the same fate without TV's internet availability to the hordes who watched Couric and Fey?

The internet has its problems, but I suspect its vagaries offend most people when the internet disrupts the power assumptions they hold dear. One can find all the nastiness, the worry, the fear, and the bizarre opinions of the internet on the streets. In reality, predators pass kids everyday on the street, as anonymously as on the the net.

The internet provides only an illusion of anonymity for ne're-do-wells and oafs, just as your house with its fence and well surveyed lot and planted trees provides an illusion of safety to you. Do those in privileged positions avoid the awfulness of the cement ghetto more easily than they elude the unsettling and unwanted spam in their AM inbox, and thus be more offended by the internet?

Power brokers of course become threatened by the internet. Record companies, the networks, and politicians, and pharmaceutical companies -- they've all had run-ins with the internet. Professors object to "RateMyProfessor", as it mucks up the power structure. But it's certainly helps the public forum.

One needs to exam the data behind assertions that the internet is dangerous. Corporations have far more power on the internet than so called fringe groups -- to advertise, to astroturf, to datamine, and to collect personal information, although they may claim that's not so. The pro-vaccination video put out by the pharmaceutical company, even by the very dubious standards put forth in the JAMA study, was more "influential" then all the rest of the videos on YouTube combined.

Authors, consultants, the media, have always tried to pin down and characterize internet communication trends, but their calculations and predictions often miss because they are only a static snapshot of the evolving internet at a point in time. John Perry Barlow predicted the World Wide Web without a government (1996); consultants predicted internet "content was king" (1997); Cass Sunstein dreamed up regulatory schemes so that the polarizing internet wouldn't destroy democracy (2001); and print journalists talked about how doomed blogging was (2004). They misunderstood the adaptability of the internet as a communication tool and underestimated how individuals, corporations, and governments would continue to shape it to further their own personal wish lists. One day anti-vaccination videos seem prevalent, the next, pharmaceuticals have usurped YouTube just fine thank-you.

The film critic Robert Ebert is right, newspapers can be great to read, (all five of them) they also tend towards banal, narrow-minded, wrong, and biased, so we better get used to the excellent, disparate, positive as well as very negative flux of the internet.

GOP to The Base? Wait! Come Back! We'll Talk About Sex!

If you managed to avoid cynicism in the first week of the administration, the congressional tussling over the stimulus plan might convince you that politics today is just what politics was before January 20th. No change.

The Republicans especially, seem intent on pushing the economy further into the tank while riling their party's baser instincts. Evidently at their wit's end trying to get their hand back in the till, the GOP engrosses itself in reinvigorating the lowest common denominator of civilian interests while Rome burns -- so to speak.

As Obama's team nudges Limbaugh towards the edge, the radio host's marbles spilling all over like codeine pills from some drug-addled alley dweller's puffy hands, the fine leaders of the GOP seem to be assuming his mantle. Smart move?

68 Pages of Science Management Challenges and the Honorable Senator Wants to Talk About Porn?

I was at first dubious about accusations that the GOP was baiting Democrats on funding for birth control and STD prevention in the stimulus bill. Oh please, I thought, reading this:

"Prompted by Drudge and Limbaugh, the Republicans are lurching around like less-cool, less-serious Beavis & Butthead knockoffs, snickering at the mere mention of birth control...say[ing] "STDs" and "contraceptives" on television and thus making the bill appear silly, salacious and borderline immoral."

I don't know whether STD funding belongs in the plan. But I am becoming convinced that some representatives in the GOP have a weird preoccupation with sex and derailing science. Today Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) announced he would try to halt $3 billion dollars worth of funds to the National Science Foundation (NSF) because of a 'porn scandal'. As he put it when announcing the six incidents of viewing porn reported by the NSF:

"The semiannual report raises real questions about how the National Science Foundation manages its resources, and Congress ought to demand a full accounting before it gives the agency another $3 billion in the stimulus bill"

Grassley, in a disingenuous interview with FOX News, reported that he was launching an inquiry and demanding "all documents" related to the NSF's findings so he could get to the bottom of the horrible scandal. On cue, the internet went wild with "ugghh" and "gross", and jokes about scientists who like sex, and "Go Grassley!" -- so intrepid -- protecting our interests like that.

OK. I'm a person who happens to be most intolerant of all aspects of the porn industry. I am also, like everyone else on earth, against government waste. I've approvingly covered Senator Grassley's efforts on other issues, lobbying, bisphenol A, etc. But c'mon, wake up.

Here's the full NSF 68 page semi-annual report to Congress from last year, with 3 pages of revelations about 6 cases of computer abuse involving porn during work hours.

The Senator is Launching an Inquiry? Getting More Details?

The only reason that the Senator got his hands on the apparent GOP treasure trove in the first place is that NSF is compelled by law to print for public consumption every last detail of its management oversight audits. This is good governance meant to expose waste. What private company sends you a biannual report that includes each sex scandal they're investigating? OK. So abiding by the governance standards set out in this law, the NSF wrote in great detail about:

"six cases of viewing, downloading, saving, and/or sharing pornographic images and videos, and one case of extensive participation in pornographic chat websites and the concomitant significant waste of official time."

This last, the most egregious case, was a "senior official" who has since been fired or left the agency. I assume the person has a problem. Like a prescription drug addiction. The report is very clear about the official's sacking, and the fact that "the agency has now installed filtering software" and is implementing further policy changes. I'm not saying $50,000 isn't a lot of waste, but are there some other priorities the GOP needs to focus on?

To me Grassley's interview with FOX, when he claims he doesn't know what the agency is doing or what happened to the individual, seems like nothing more than a gratuitous exchange about sex, with science as the scapegoat.

As far as I can tell there's nothing left for Grassley to "inquire about" or "investigate", unless he has some lurid agenda of his own. More details? All the documents? Who's the sick puppy here?

Studies Find that 25% of Employees with Computer Access Download Pornography. Audit Finds 6 Cases for Over 1000 NSF Employees

Six offenses found and thoroughly delineated. The NSF has over 1000 employees. To be fair, the report emphasized that the search was limited in scope. But these results are far from surprising. If anything the small numbers are unusual given the incidence of workplace computer misuse, especially in large companies.

Porn site hits are highest during office hours, according to M.J. McMahon, a company that tracks the adult video industry. You can read all about the widespread problem of pornography viewing and activities in the workplace. Ask Microsoft, ask IBM, ask financial companies, ask any company. They keep it low profile, for obvious reasons. The NSF is compelled by law to air it all publicly.

A Nielsen Online survey in October, 2008 found that 25% of employees who use the Internet visit porn sites during the workday. Perhaps fewer are purposeful, but various surveys have found similarly alarming results. Workplace computer misuse is persistent and increasing. It's quite awful but it has nothing to do with the NSF, with scientists, or reviving the economy.

Stay Focused People -- Change, America, Economy, Jobs...

Perhaps Chuck Grassley, with his affiliations to prayer breakfasts and the Family Research Council, with his stellar right to life credentials, has some agenda with sex. Perhaps science also falls conveniently in his sights, for reasons beyond me. I do know its a popular pairing, but a cheap shot.

Not long ago, in , we wrote about the Republican's insistence on taking pops at science:

The Inauguration

Many wept. Some for Obama, some for a lifetime of waiting; some because they'd miss Bush, still others because they'd thought Bush would never leave. Even Bush himself brushed tears from his face as he hopped up the helicopter steps. (The loss of power must be a blow.)

Who wasn't somehow moved by the reality of new presidential leadership? Less often now, my stomach churns before I check the news. I'm slowly deprogramming my habit of bracing for the next stunner, the next mendacious policy announcement, the next hair-raising revelation from the White House. I'll admit, in the past couple of weeks I've even lapsed into moments of (naive) hope.

• Hope for inclusiveness, triggered by small, many would think irrelevant episodes. Like when Pete Seeger showed up at the preinaugural concert to sing an Arlo Guthrie song with his grandson and Bruce Springsteen. Seeger may be an ever popular folk hero now as he approaches 90 years, with a new album and glowing biographical movie. But it wasn't always like this. He was blacklisted and banned from radio in the 1950's and 1960's on account of his "subversiveness".

  In the early 1960's Seeger refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on First Amendment grounds, a decision which through him into economic hard times and patriotic hot water. But before that he had performed for US military chiefs in Theodore Roosevelt's White House. His father administered music programs as part of FDR's New Deal.

  Patriotism is so subjective isn't it?

• Hope derived from the crowds at the inauguration, good-natured people of cultural, racial and political diversity. Hope for religious tolerance. In his inaugural address Obama described a "nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and non-believers". How observant. According to a Pew Center report, about 16% of Americans identify as non-believers, but not one member of Congress does. It was surprising recognition for what a Beliefnet writer calls the "untouchables".

• Words that warmed my heart on a chilly day, Obama promising in his speech to "restore science to its rightful place". Indeed, on the first couple of days of his administration Obama overruled the ban on international funding for organizations that provided contraceptives, overturning Bush's ruling which overturned Clinton's policy. Obama also promised to revive stem cell funding.

  Bravo for science awareness!

Dashing Hope

Obama's first moves gave us plenty to be optimistic about. But as Mark Slouka wrote in this month's Harper's:

"It would be churlish to quibble.

Still, let's."

Slouka points out that Obama won in a perfect storm of economic disaster and Republican failure, that Obama was an exceptionally talented and articulate candidate. Given all this he still only got 53% of the vote. What about the others Slouka asks, those who thought Palin would be a fine Vice President, or who couldn't discern any difference between the candidates therefore didn't vote? Slouka worries about American citizens' choices and what he sees as an overwhelming contentment with ignorance.

"When one of us writes a book explaining that our offspring are bored and disruptive in class because they have an indigo "vibrational aura" that means they are a gifted race sent to this planet to change our consciousness with the help of guides from a higher world, half a million of us rush to the bookstores to lay our money down."

We're doomed, he concludes.

I'm not quite so cynical. But the barriers to "change" look high. Not to be a wet sock, but should stem cell policy changes and international funding for organizations that inform people about birth control options assure us that science is in its "rightful place"? Of course not. From these quick executive changes, we're convinced only that politics determines the place of these science policies.

True, nothing can happen overnight. More policy changes are in the works. Obama is set to increase NIH biomedical funding. He ordered the Department of Transportation to get to work completing emissions standards. He's told the EPA to review California's request for a waiver. But we have a long way to go to meet the President's promises on the environm ent and science.

Tunnel Vision

Will it happen in time? If the citizens cannot to be trusted, than we should look to their leaders. While the Republicans argue about every aspect of the stimulus bill, the economy sinks further. And if politicians seem unbearable, what about the corporations groveling about, looking for their next hand-out, planning their next party, all the while complaining how they can't possibly improve their product, honor a warranty, concede a dollar, accept a regulation.

Will we emerge from this tunnel in time? Or are Americans indeed doomed? While carmakers argue that technology doesn't allow them to raise emissions standards, a Chinese engineer, one year out of college, cooly introduced a new electric car from Chinese automaker BYD (Build Your Dreams) at a recent autoshow. The car? "A $20,000 plug-in hybrid that can go 60 miles before the gas engine kicks in, or the e6, an all-electric crossover that cruises 250 miles on a single charge."

According to The Atlantic the BYD car was parked next to the $500,000 Maybachs, the Lamborghinis, Maseratis, and Bentleys. Taking in the expensive American cars draped with bejeweled women, the Chinese engineer noted: "Those beautiful vehicles are for the very handsome men, those high in society. They're not for the everyday man."

Will Congress please slap its cheeks to alert itself to the dire straits of the situation and start working for us, the everyday man?

The unraveling of the financial economy shocked many who predicted endless prosperous times for unregulated capitalism in its zenith. Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin scratched their heads with airs of befuddlement. However others weren't surprised. Some Chinese now recall how they compared derivatives to mirror images of mirror images of mirror images of a book as far back as 1999 (and perhaps amassed U.S. treasuries in anticipation.)

I'm sure you've heard the one about the word "crisis" in Mandarin being the same as the word for "danger" plus "opportunity"? It's a myth about the Chinese language that persists, famously forwarded by presidents like JFK in 1959. Ancient Eastern philosophy didn't predict today's New Age affirmations. But yet people from all sides of the political spectrum insist that crisis brings opportunity, brings change. True?

In August, the Financial Times wrote an article titled "Fannie and Freddie crisis is Paulson's big moment". According to the FT, US Treasury Secretary would "make use of the virtually unlimited powers he was given by Congress" to avert further disaster. Paulson et al. eventually architected a solution and after some finagling the banks got cash infusions, but the efforts failed to jumpstart or even stabilize the economy. Last week Paulson talked to FT about his lack of power, and what turned out to be his not so "big moment". The FT headlines tell his spin on the protracted tale:

• On December 30th:"Paulson rues shortage of firepower as battle raged".
• December 31st: "US lacked the tools to tackle crisis, says Paulson".
• January 1st and 2nd FT: "Paulson says crisis sown by imbalance" (version I), and version II: "Paulson says excess led to crisis". ¹

Often what looks like the silver bullet, the gold ring from a distance, is really tarnished nickel once you gallop into close range on your plastic merry-go-round horse. The first bailout round of $700 billion got grabbed up quickly, but still, banks don't lend, job losses accumulate and the economy sputters. Whose opportunity was this crisis? Who spews forth these dubious little ditties?

Sure, some cash rich people are traipsing around the suburbs cash in hand looking good deals, including Chinese tourists who set out of house hunting tours in Los Angeles. A few of the most cash rich institutions (the top four are: Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and the Bank of China, ICBC and China Construction Bank) But as time goes on, more and more people people lose confidence in capitalism, monetary policy, even macroeconomics.

Paulson's plan didn't do the trick and there was no great "defining moment" for him, rather an ongoing crisis. Barack Obama warned yesterday that the financial crisis demands more government cash, which will further deepen the country's debt, accruing years and years of trillion dollar deficits. Grim.

Change In Crisis

But if opportunities look sparse don't crises still present openings for change? So they say. For some, like George Soros it's the end of a certain fundamentalist capitalism. For others, like the Cato Institute, it's a time to pursue greater deregulation. Cato blames government intervention for the crisis, saying government precipitated ruin by pursuing a bastardized version of laissez-faire economics.

Even scientists see an opening with the financial crisis. For Bruce Alberts, the Editor-In-Chief of Science the "financial meltdown", brings the hope for recognition of the "centrality of science and engineering for successful modern societies", and promise of a "new sense of reality". Everyone hopes for change.

Same, Same?

We're skeptical. Not of change necessarily. After the Asian Tsunami they built a warning system. After denying global warming for decades, the world woke up. After eight years of the Bush administration the world's a different place. Change happens.

But some thirty percent of the population approves of the job Bush is doing. And people who forecast or promise change are often plain wrong. After 9-11 we heard about "the end of the age of irony". After the Berlin Wall fell we listened to the folks at the US Department of State and scholars like Samuel Huntington (RIP) predict a "new" era, when tribal and religious strife would threaten the relevancy of states and a "clash of civilizations" would dominate politics.

We can't predict precisely what might change, or whether the future government and it's financial policies it will benefit more people than current policies, or less. But we should be alert to our own fatal collective tendency for hopeful thinking. Now is the time to speak up for change, about science, about laissez-faire, and most of all, about the evolving new government.

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¹ And is he engaged in a little what psychologists interviewed by the NYT called "ego protecting?"

• USA Loves BPA

  The FDA, pressed to change its safety assessment of bisphenol A (BPA), announced this week that it needed to investigate the safety of BPA some more. It refused to defer to science on BPA, rather offered up this stalling device. Laura Tarantino, the director of the FDA's Office of Food Additive Safety said "I can't tell you when we will finalize this," she said. "There is a lot of work." Clearly the Bush administration wasn't going to besmirch its environmental record by ruling against BPA.

  Acronym Required has been following BPA in the USA for a few years. Hundreds of studies suggest BPA has negative health consequences.

• New's York's Soda Tax

  The state of New York will raise $404 million by taxing sugary sodas with an "obesity tax". The state is looking not only to raise money, but to help stem the obesity epidemic in a state where 1 in 4 citizens is considered obese by CDC standards. Although the state's obesity incidence increased by 14% since 1995, New York's obesity rates are actually lower than the national average of 1 in 3. The American Beverage Associaton decried the tax on "hard-working families", warning robotically that the new law could cost jobs.

  Acronym Required has written on the politics of the obesity epidemic, for instance in Childhood Obesity, The American Way"

• Stevia -- Safe says the FDA?

  The FDA cleared the used of a stevia extract for sodas this week, giving the substance a "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS) designation. Pepsi and Coke eagerly awaited clearance of rebaudioside A (rebiana), a compound from Stevia rebaudiana. Pepsi will start selling SoBe Lifewater nationwide next year. Coke will market rebiana sweetened Sprite Green. Coke will also begin sweetening its Odwalla fruit drinks with stevia. This has some scientists concerned.¹

  The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is opposed to the FDA approval because the safety profile for the chemical is worrisome. Rebaudioside A is a steviol glycoside which is 40 to 300 times sweeter than sucrose. A review study by UCLA scientists notes that Rebaudioside A and its gut intermediary steviol are potentially mutagenic (PDF). Noting that the data on the chemical is sparse and conflicting, the study authors recommended:

  "the FDA should require carcinogenicity and toxicology studies in rats and in mice before accepting rebaudioside A as a GRAS substance or approving it as a food additive. Ideally, all those studies would be conducted by an independent party, such as the National Toxicology Program of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences."

  Consider the FDA's different regulatory approach with BPA. Over one hundred studies show deleterious effects of bisphenol A on behavior and health, yet the agency says it needs to do more research. But with rebaudioside A, there are a few conflicting and/or disturbing studies. Yet the FDA doesn't need more research. In "Phthalates and Bisphenol A: Media and Politics" we wrote:

  "If bisphenol A were a therapeutic drug going to market, instead of a chemical with an established global market, and there were 700 studies (LA Times) showing hormone effector effects in animals, but also "two dozen" human studies showing the same responses in humans -- therefore if bisphenol A, the hypothetical drug, had passed through the equivalent of Phase I safety, Phase II efficacy and was well into Phase III trials -- the stock of a certain pharmaceutical company would be skyrocketing based on the evidence. Financial analysts would be jumping up and down in their Aeron chairs predicting sales of the next blockbuster drug....But bisphenol-A is not a drug..."

  Rebaudioside A is not a drug but a sweetener that will bring in profits when kids slurp it down in their Odwalla fruit smoothies. So no holds barred by the FDA! CSPI calls the FDA's move premature and a parting gift by Bush to the soda companies.

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"Carbonated Water, caramel color, phosphoric acid, aspartame, potassium benzoate (preserves freshness), caffeine, natural flavor, acesulfame potassium, citric acid, calcium disodium EDTA (to protect flavor), Panax ginseng extract, phenylketonurics: contains phenylalamine"

I'm sure you could do more harm by adding rebaudioside A, but this isn't the most healthy assortment of ingredients to begin with. And I'm curious what "unfresh" carbonated Water, caramel color, phosphoric acid, and aspartame tastes like?

The Emperor

Obama is making infrastructure and energy a central goal of his administration. Therefore people were heartened when they heard that Obama will nominate Steven Chu, Nobel Laureate in Physics and Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (not to be confused with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) to head of the Department of Energy. Chu has led LBL since 2004. He's a Nobel Laureate who has formed collaborations in the LBL, the Joint BioEnergy Institute, the Energy Biosciences Institute with Heliosgovernment, industry and universities to forward technological solutions to alternative and renewable energies.

Environmentalists like how Chu sounds because he says things like: "If I were emperor of the world, I would put the pedal to the floor on energy efficiency and conservation for the next decade", as he told Reuters last year. Business likes him because they know that the Energy Biosciences Institute was funded by British Petroleum -- Chu works with industry, of course.

Almost everyone is thrilled that Obama will nominate Chu for this position, and he gets fantastic ratings for his accomplishments to date. Of course there are always naysayers, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, representing business. Said William Kovacs, vice president of the organization:

"What you've got are people who are committed to moving forward with regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, which we believe is a huge mistake"...If we're embarking on a new infrastructure program that's going to involve building a lot of roads and bridges, the last thing we want to do is hold it up with CO2 regulations."

There's more than some gobbledygook here, but at least one aspect of his argument, that the economy is too fragile for "green initiatives" is a common kneejerk fallacy of "pro-business" camps. In today's Financial Times, for instance, Phillip Stevens wrote:

"The EU leaders have set a target of cutting greenhouse emissions in the EU by 20 per cent by 2020. They have pledged to increase energy efficiency by 20 per cent and to draw 20 per cent of energy from renewable sources...All this seemed challenging, but possible at a time of prosperity. The voters would surely accept a degree of pain to safeguard the future for their children and grandchildren. Industry had the cash (or cheap credit lines from the banks) to adjust...[but] no longer."

This is course a myth, a common one. People like Joseph Romm have long dispelled these assertions, but business persists. Mr. Chu addressed this himself in an interview last September, when he said: "if you went to an energy-efficient economy, you will kill the economy. That is just demonstrably not true." In fact it's the opposite. Businesses can become more cost efficient by becoming more energy efficient. Changing light bulbs in schools is just a start.

Mr. Chu will not be emperor, but part of Obama's climate team. The Department of Energy focuses on nuclear weapons disposal of nuclear waste and basic science. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) carries tremendous influence on emissions and health through its administration of the Clean Air Act, for instance -- or as we're accustomed with the Bush administration, by eviscerating the Clean Air Act.

The Chief Administrator

Not everyone is applauding Obama's choice for EPA head , Lisa P. Jackson. She has won accolades for diplomacy and her handling of various New Jersey environmental problems. However Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) wrote a scathing review (some say unfair and uninformed) of her tenure as the Commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

PEER even went so far as to say she was worse than former New Jersey governor Christie Whitman. Ms. "your air is safe" Whitman not only launched New Jersey's path to fiscal insolvency, her state environmental policies weren't necessarily "environmental". Interesting how the "Garden State", known affectionately as the "Armpit of the Nation", or "What exit?", holds such a reservoir of EPA administrators.

Jackson has opposed the EPA's recent handling of California's bid to waive Clean Air to act its own program. She also said, "When it comes to the auto industry, the E.P.A. apparently is the Emissions Permissions Agency."

The Czar

Obama picked Carol Browner, Clinton's former EPA head, to be Climate Czar, to coordinate all the agencies involved with climate policy, such as the the EPA, DOE, the DOT, the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

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Acronym Required writes frequently on the EPA. We've also written on effective, versus ineffective government agencies in articles like

From Taiwan: BPA "Potentially Toxic"

Taiwan is considering listing bisphenol A (BPA) as a "potentially toxic substance". Companies that used BPA would be required to notify the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of Taiwan. Taiwan is one of the primary manufacturers of BPA in the world. ¹ The country produced 635 megatons of BPA in 2005, compared to about 2260 megatons produced in the US during the same year. Japan, Western Europe, Korea and South American also manufacture large quantities of BPA. (Chemical Week, October, 2005.)

From Canada: CBC's "Disappearing Male"

The Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) recently aired a program on bisphenol A called "The Disappearing Male", available here and at CBC. The program broached a subject that hasn't been discussed too much in the media, the effect of certain chemicals on male sexual development, both in humans and other species.

The report reviews the effects of plastics on health and environment according to scientists who have long sought to bring attention to the deleterious effects of endocrine disruptors. The film also reports on a Canadian town called Aamjiwnaang Canada, that sits by a toxic chemical plant, where girl babies outnumber boy babies by about 2:1.

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¹ We previously looked at the response of politicians to citizens' safety concerns in terms of the economics of bisphenol A in Canada and the US.

² The film also provides a brief demo on mouth pipetting.

The New England Journal of Medicine reported yesterday in two on-line publications, that a malaria vaccine in clinical trials called RTS,S passed a round of tests. If further trials prove successful, the vaccine would help protect against Plasmodium falciparum

Obama Change? Like Island Time?

When the Obama team signaled this week they would not follow through on their campaign promise to impose a windfall tax on oil profits, people wondered whether "Obama Change" was "change" only in some warped sense of the word -- like being on "Island Time" -- elusive, non-committal, eventual, perhaps. After all, he did say back in the day:

"I'll make oil companies like Exxon pay a tax on their windfall profits, and we'll use the money to help families pay for their skyrocketing energy costs and other bills."

That was June, 2008. So what was that campaign promise about? Easing the worries of families who were broke? Was it Obama's fleeting response to an audience who disapproved of oil companies getting super-rich while the economy flagged? Was it just an empty promise? Or perhaps now with oil prices so low windfall taxes wouldn't suffice to help individual energy bills. Did the president-elect's threat influence the price of oil? Perhaps oil executives lowered prices in order to dip below the radar a bit.

It's hard to know who's being more wily, Obama or oil companies. But before we can spend too much time wondering why the president-elect changed his mind on windfall taxes, Barack Obama gives us more promises. We reported a couple of weeks ago on Obama's address to the Governors' Global Climate Summit about his administration's intentions to act on climate change and invest in "500 million new green jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced."

In Obama's address to the nation yesterday, he re-presented the idea of the "National Infrastructure Reinvestment", which he also pushed during his campaign.

Highways, Information Super Highways, Technology, more Technology

On energy, Obama's promising to produce jobs by making buildings more energy-efficient. As he put it:

"We need to upgrade our federal buildings by replacing old heating systems and installing efficient light bulbs. That won't just save you, the American taxpayer, billions of dollars each year. It will put people back to work."

"Installing efficient light bulbs." When Obama ran for president interviewers would ask him what he did to save energy and light bulbs and the exchanges became a bit of a joke. Here was his take on changing lightbulbs::

"...Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, ''I'm talking about personal. What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I f---ing changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'."

When Barbara Walter's asked Obama about the light bulbs a couple of weeks ago, they both laughed -- a shared joke. But now he's launching his "collective" light bulb plan? Obama is also promising a "sweeping effort" to modernize schools -- to make them energy efficient also.

Additionally Obama promises his administration will invest in infrastructure, new highways and bridges. And not only tarmac highways but information super-highways too. Saturday Obama also mentioned technology to solve healthcare problems -- by networking hospitals, increasing broadband penetration so everyone is on the internet, and increasing student access to computers.

Infrastructure without the B-Word?

Obama is following through with his campaign plan to launch a 21st century "New Deal" and says such an investment hasn't been made since the Eisenhower days. As a Senator, Obama co-sponsored the National Infrastructure Bank Act of 2007" introduced by Senator Christorpher Dodd (D-CT) in August 2007. The idea is to establish banks to fund the a subset of the projects Obama spoke of yesterday. When Obama campaigned last summer on "rebuilding America", he also talked about a bank, as well as promising to withdraw support from Iraq to fund infrastructure.

As everyone knows, Iraq is a bit in limbo -- and where's the bank? Where's the follow through on banks? Or is it all a joke?

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Acronym Required wrote on infrastructure and the Minnesota Bridge collapse in "Guano Takes the Bridge, Pigeons Take the Fall". We wrote about infrastructure and the levees in "FEMA and Disaster Preparedness", "Disaster Preparedness - Can We?", and "Levees - Our Blunder". We're fascinated with technological salves for problems.

Some recent news:

• Plastic Bombastic In Everything You See -- In Your Soup, In Your Turkey Dinner, Even In Your Tea:

  Like the San Francisco Chronicle before them, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal recently sent some plastic products to the lab for independent testing. In 2006, the Chronicle reported the bisphenol A and phthalate lab analysis results for a couple of dozen toys it had tested at an independent lab.The Chronicle's lab found that toys like a rubber duck, a Baby Einstein rattle, and a Goldberger doll had high levels of phthalates or BPA.

  The Milwaukee Sentinel sent products labeled "microwave safe" to a lab to see if the plastic products leached BPA. They did. The American Chemical Council denied the results of this study (and hundreds of others), saying there's no research whatsoever that shows anything bad about BPA.

• Plastic Classics:

  900,000 pounds of Lean Cuisine frozen chicken dinners will be recalled by Nestle Prepared Foods Co. because customers found chunks of blue plastic in Cafe Classics Pesto Chicken with Bow Tie Pasta, Spa Cuisine Chicken Mediterranean and Dinnertime Selects Chicken Tuscan. A USDA spokesperson warned that "a piece of plastic could cut your mouth, it could scratch your throat."

  Consumers are left to speculate about what happened as they toss their TV Dinners and pull into the Old Spaghetti Factory. Did someone on the assembly line pull the blue dye lever instead of the green one that gives that authentic look to the oregano and basil flecks? Nestle traced the plastic to one mean Lean Cuisine facility but hasn't divulged what piece of machinery dissassembled into their cuisine.

• Melamine and Me:

  While the US lambasts China for a regulatory system that allows melamine into the food chain, the New York Times reports that melamine is all around us in products made in the US, cleaning products, plywood, plastics, ink and paint all contain melamine. However yes, the author concedes, "[t]o be sure, in China some food manufacturers deliberately added melamine to products to increase profits."

• FDA in China: "An Ant Standing Against a Flood":

  That's what one company executive told the Washington Post in response to news that the FDA is opening offices in three cities in China to more closely oversee some of the regulation functions. The agency will post thirteen inspectors to the country this week.

• There's Research...Then There's "Research":

  The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia surveyed 51 economic forecasters who unanimously conclude that the United States is in a recession. The gloom and doom predicted by economists however, isn't matched with by stock analysts research according to a report by Thomson Reuters Starmine.

  US analysts rated 48.6% of the stocks they cover as "buy", compared to 49% last year. Only 6.7% of US analyst ratings were sell, the lowest of all countries surveyed, and the rest -- about 45% were "neutral" or "hold." According to the Financial Times article which reported on the overly "rosy" predictions, William Herkelrath, StarMine's US sell-side specialist said: "'the use of the word 'neutral' here really does mean: 'stay away.'"

YAY!

It's a new day.

"...His triumph was decisive and sweeping, because he saw what is wrong with this country: the utter failure of government to protect its citizens. He offered a government that does not try to solve every problem but will do those things beyond the power of individual citizens: to regulate the economy fairly, keep the air clean and the food safe, ensure that the sick have access to health care, and educate children to compete in a globalized world..." (NYT)¹

Yes, there's work to do. Yes, it will be difficult. But today we recognize how much America's just accomplished.

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¹Obama won despite warnings about possible GOP ballot fraud stemming from information dribbling out of the Ohio trial concerning 2004 Ohio ballot fraud. In the latest episode, Michael Connell, a consultant whose firm has been accused of computer manipulation, denied knowing anything about GOP rigging the 2004 Ohio election results. Connell works for Randy Cole. Cole owns 15 companies that work simultaneously on GOP election campaigns (Bush/Cheney 2000/2004, McCain 2008, many others), anti-Abortion groups and churches, GOP mass mailings, government contracts, etc. Stephen Spoonamore, a key witness in the trial brings the allegations, explains in a multi-part series starting here.

When Sarah Palin took a rhetorical whack at a research grant worth $211,000 last week scientists angrily reacted to her characterization of research as "pork". Palin's tip came from CAGW, who in 1997 raised funds to rid the taxpayer of science research expense and "target agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Environmental Protection Agency". The group enjoys a collaborative relationship with John McCain and was also the source of McCain's comments on grizzly ecology research and planetarium equipment. Why does olive fly research rate special attention from CAGW? Who is CAGW? Does any of this matter if McCain isn't elected?

Science Jokes for Dummies

As Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin put it: "Sometimes these dollars they go to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not!" The audience snickered. Palin's fruit fly joke continued the comedic run that McCain began with his "grizzly bear DNA" comment and his "overhead projector" joke. They could author a book.

It's theater, some say, arguing that McCain always talks like this but doesn't vote against the measures. Case in point, Adler Planetarium's equipment grant got rejected, but McCain keeps it as a talking point. But the fact is, the GOP campaign team relegates science to political joke fodder used to misinform the masses, which doesn't endear them to Acronym Required as we previously commented. Will electing Obama put an end to this silliness?

Entomology Etymology

The "fruit fly", as every science blogger pointed out -- (and, on a positive note, so did tons of non-science bloggers, writers, and reporters) -- refers to the Drosophila melanogaster, an important model organism that scientists have employed to further research in such things as human development, disease and genetics. Scientists reacted ferociously to Palin's fruit fly research talk.

However Palin was actually referring to the olive fruit fly. The olive fruit fly which is indigenous to the Mediterranean and an invasive species of California arrived on California soil in the late 1990's. The fly poses an economic threat to California's olive crops. Olive trees are usually protected from olive fruit fly with insecticides, but from their research, scientists now know of at least six natural predators to the olive fruit fly.

The research station in France gives US based researchers a chance to study the fly in its native territory, where scientists have been dealing with the pest for years. Their research is beneficial because it will explore ways that these predators could be used as an alternative or extension of insecticides. Insecticides are a thriving part of the chemical industry however, so not all lobbyists will appreciate this new research.

Confusingly, some scientists interrupted the anger about Palin's attack to explain that Drosophila melanogaster, wasn't really a "fruit fly". The labeling confusion probably occurred sometime in the early 20th century or maybe with Aristotle, and "fruit fly" is the part of scientists' and lay persons' vernacular. Even the staid Entomological Society of America calls them "fruit flies". The real point was that Palin was referring to the olive fruit fly (Bactrocera oleae) -- a tephritid -- not THE "fruit fly".

Of course Palin supporters swarmed all over the fruit fly labeling mix-up and went on about how scientists didn't do their research, totally missing the fact that scientists really do call the ubiquitous Drosophila melanogaster "fruit fly". Acronym Required doesn't want to diminish the importance of accuracy, but in this case the label is superfluous to the larger crime of denigrating science for fun. ¹

Plus de hits, Plus de fun

Does the story just contain certain poll-tested key words -- "fruit fly", "French", "California" that Palin can throw out to elicit an audience reaction? Or shall we go out on a limb and try to guess who's is behind it the attack? Unfortunately scientists don't have comedy prank team at a radio station like CKOI ("Plus de hits, Plus de fun") at our disposal. ².

Clearly the French olive industry isn't behind the lobbying. Despite the fact that Palin said we "loved" the French, CAGW and McCain campaign aren't enamoured. The bottom line is we don't know who is behind the attack.

The olive fruit fly funding story originated with Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), an organization that started by J. Peter Grace, heir to founder of the W.R. Grace & Co, the chemical company. W.R. Grace & Co. is famous for polluting and environmental damage (as well as not paying taxes). Jonathan Harr chronicled one of W.R. Grace's pollution debacles in the memorable book "A Civil Action". President Reagan initially appointed Peter Grace to an internal government agency aimed at decreasing the role of government. This government agency which morped into CAGW. CAGW has in the past attacked teenage alcohol education, science education programs and lots and lots of science research. The goal of the organization was initially to target "meritless" science research by government agencies.

So if you're trying to figure out why CAGW opposes $200,000K for olive fly research, you'd probably be on the wrong track. CAGW and their catchy anti-government hotline --1-800-BE ANGRY -- receives corporate donations in turn for their targeted lobbying efforts. CAGW funding comes from many companies, including Merrill Lynch & Company Foundation, Exxon Corporation (now ExxonMobil), Ingersoll-Rand Company, Johnson & Johnson F.M. Kirby Foundation, Philip Morris, RJR Nabisco (now part of the Altria Group) Sears Roebuck & Company, John Deere Foundation, Eaton Charitable Fund, Columbia/HCA Foundation.

Shooting Down Science, Contract by Contract

Among the thousands of campaigns CAGW runs, only occasionally does the media uncover or even pay attention to the source of funding. CAGW was behind a Northrup Grumman case and Microsoft's funded lobbying and astroturfing in the anti-open source.

Bill Adair of the St. Petersburg Times's did a great investigative stories on CAGW in April, 2006. In "For Price, Watchdog Will be an Advocate", Adler described how $100,000 from the Mexican avocado growers motivated a public relations effort against the California Avocado Commission's resistance against the import of Mexican avocados.

In another case, Public Citizen revealed that CAGW worked with PhRMA, a lobbying group for the pharmaceutical industry, to scuttle efforts for a government health care plan. However thousands of CAGW campaigns, and their donors remain unknown. A St. Petersburg Times article in December, 2006 described how the group's tax exempt status hides their defacto corporate lobbying role. The IRS code allows them to keep from the public records of who funds them (which is tax deductible) and other important details.

But you can get the gist of the game reading Adair's account. In "When Tobacco Needed a Voice, CAGW Spoke up and Profited" the St. Petersburg Times described how the tobacco industry donated at least $245,000 to CAGW to target movement put the FDA in charge of regulating tobacco.

CAGW and Tobacco

For years, CAGW worked with the tobacco industry. In 1997, the group lobbied the Tobacco Institute for $25,000 for the production of a publication called "Weird Science." The goal of CAGW, according to internal Tobacco Institute documents was to:

"...'expose federally "taxpayer-funded research projects that have little or no scientific merit.' The group will target agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Environmental Protection Agency. In addition to researching agency spending, the publication will look at the issue of risk-assessment."

The Tobacco Institute memo recommended giving CAGW $5,000, instead of $25,000, because in the "wide array" of subjects CAGW proposed, "our story could get lost in the mix." You can find anti-regulatory rhetoric about tobacco and alcohol on CAGW's website.

McCain, Swindle, CAGW....

Earlier this year, Democrats, labor unions and concerned Americans criticized McCain for snubbing Boeing (headquartered in Chicago) by awarding a $40 billion contract to Northrup Grumman and European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company EADS. McCain struck back at his Democratic critics through CAGW.

CAGW has worked very closely with John McCain since at least 1990, when they collaborated to initiate a presidential line item veto. From all accounts its been a fruitful collaboration. Orson Swindle, a fellow Vietnam veteran, works for both CAGW and the McCain campaign.

Defining Cynicism.

In their annual 1995 "Pig Book Summary", the CAGW nominated Senator Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, as one of the 14 worst offenders their so-called "Oinkers", for securing a $400,000 grant through the EPA to study algal blooms in Hawaii. Senator Byrd, also called out that year by CAGW, commented on the report: "It is old propaganda. It is a yawn and a boar." (an intentional mispelling) It may be a bore, but it's a persistent one. CAGW has only increased it's influence in the last 13 years, working hand in hand with John McCain, as well as some illustrious lobbyists.

A senate report by Senator Charles E. Grassley (R-IA), condemned Citizens Against Government Waste. Grassley singled out 5 tax exempt groups who

"who violated their tax exempt status 'by laundering payments and then disbursing funds at Mr. Abramoff's direction; taking payments in exchange for writing newspaper columns or press releases that put Mr. Abramoff's clients in a favorable light.."

The Washington Post wrote about the incident: "The e-mails show a pattern of CAGW producing public relations materials favorable to Mr. Abramoff's clients."

CAGW denied the charges and left the room when things got hot. Then when Senator Steven's (R-AK) was found guilty of accepting $250,000 in bribes last week, Citizens Against Government Waste sent out a press release that read: "The Stevens trial will go down in history alongside the trials of lobbyists Jack Abramoff...as just another sad, but not surprising spectacle of corruption and cynicism in the nation's capital."

Does It Matter?

John McCain mentioned "Citizens Against Government Waste" in each of the three presidential debates. In return, the group's political action committee called McCain a "taxpayer hero" in TV ads airing in Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. CCAGW, a PAC associated with CAGW ran TV ads for a presidential candidate.

But if John McCain isn't elected does it matter? Clearly I'm not going to say no. In our last post we quoted Studs Terkel, who once said, "given the facts and an opportunity to act, the body politic generally does the right thing." But as Winston Churchill once said: "Americans will always do the right thing... after they've exhausted all the alternatives." If Congress doesn't ensure that the people can get the facts, then we have no chance of ever doing "the right thing".

Acronym Required agrees that not all science research is beneficial -- for the economy, for science, or for education. Furthermore, who could malign CAGW's ostensible mission? As people have said before us, who does support government waste? And while earmarks may be an expeditious route to funding, should we all pay for that? But if CAGW's projects are motivated by donors, who's to say which of the group's targets is fair game and which are solely contract political targets?

On its face, why is $200,000 fruit fly research so outrageous? You know that Goldman Sachs set aside $6.85 billion for this year's employee bonuses right? According to CAGW, the downside of the bank bailout was that it would "draw socialist vampires to Washington for decades to come."

CAGW has been around since the 1980's and their work will continue unless we change the laws and demand greater transparency. There's been only occasional chatter about discontinuing the veiled lobbying, despite the wisdom of Senator Byrd and others that "it is old propaganda." At the root of the McCain campaign's choice to play enfant terrible to scientists and science, there's a very popular ideology at work that will not die with an incoming Obama administration.

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¹ Palin's naivete about the latter bit her later when she didn't recognize the Canadian comedy team's faux President Sarkozy, with his faux Fraauunch accent -- even when he asked Palin to take him up hunting by helicopter: "I just love killing those animals. Hmm-hmm. Take away a life, that is so fun." "Kill two birds with one stone", she responded gamely. Palin exclaimed to "Sarkovy" "we love [the French]!".

Book Search, More, Better

Google recently reached a settlement with the Author's Guild and the Association of American Publishers, which will pave the way for digitization of copyrighted books for on-line use. The authors and publishers brought suits against Google in 2005, accusing the company of copyright infringement. Google wanted to digitize books for internet perusal, but the publishers had their own opinion of that: "They keep talking about doing this because it is going to be good for the world. That has never been a principle in law. They 'do no evil' except they are stealing people's property."

Google paid $125 million to settle the suit, which will cover legal fees and fund the Book Rights Registry, to be modeled after the music industry's copyright clearing house ASCAP. Google will structure a deal to put thousands of digitized books on the web. Readers will be able to access books or buy a digitized copy and publishers and authors will get some percentage of the customer fees.

Newspapers Stop Printing

Print is steadily moving on-line. The Christian Science Monitor announced yesterday that it will soon (just about) cease printing:

"in April 2009 the daily print edition of The Christian Science Monitor will shift to a 24/7 daily Web publication. This will be combined with the launch of an attractive new weekly print publication that looks behind the headlines..."

The continued cuts to newspapers is not always seen as a good thing. Some papers aren't ready to give up their print editions (with much more lucrative advertising than on-line). Instead they cut staff. Noted one commenter:

New Jersey, a petri dish of corruption, will have to make do with 40 percent fewer reporters at The Star-Ledger, one of the few remaining cops on the beat. The Los Angeles Times, which toils under Hollywood's nose, has one movie reviewer left on staff.

As everyone knows, this won't be too good for many blogs and on-line media outlets either.

And Textbooks?

The textbook publishing industry should be next to change models and offer more open content. Congress recently passed a law that helps keep textbook prices transparent to students, professors and colleges. Six states have similar laws.

In the past couple of years the textbook and learning divisions of several publishing companies have changed hands, including Houghton Mifflin in the US to Riverdeep, Thomson Learning, Worters Kewer's educational arm, and Reed Elsevier's Harcourt Education. The companies weren't adept at changing their business strategy to meet the increasingly web savvy customer base, and alternative on-line options were increasing. Although five textbook publishers have now launched CourseSmart to offer online textbooks cheaper, it's not clear that this is a burgeoning enterprise.

In addition to the "traditional" textbook model, the Christian Science Monitor mentioned in a recent article a couple of "radical" textbook alternatives. One, Connexions (cnx.org), is a project of Rice University. Connexions offers Creative Commons licensed learning tools that are "non-linear modules" authored by independent authors and hosted on their site. The Connexions philosophy is based on their contention that the traditional textbook "system is broken." California State University has a site called Merlot, which I can't say I understand after spending, well, not very much time browsing through. There's also Wikibooks, and of course many professors simply write their own books from lecture notes.

Subcommittee to FDA: Room For Improvement

The FDA subcommittee reviewing the FDA's August 2008 draft report has released its first recommendations(PDF) on the draft BPA report. The subcommittee brought lots of suggestions for improvement.

They wrote that the draft did not adequately provide scientific support for their method of choosing which studies to include: "Specifically, the Subcommittee does not agree that the large number of non-GLP studies should be excluded from use in the safety assessment."

The subcommittee also questioned the use of "no observed adverse effect level" (NOAEL) standard the FDA employed to determine the safety of exposure. The panel pointed out that so many studies show effects in neurobehavioral development, prostate gland, mammary gland and puberty in females, that it seems BPA must bind to gonadal hormone receptors during development. The panel said this suggests safe exposures "at least an order of magnitude below the 5 mg/kg/bw/day NOAEL identified in the draft assessment." The panel authors suggest several alternative ways to measure dose response that would model findings across the many studies that the FDA excluded in its draft.

The subcommittee offered additional point by point criticism and noted that the studies cleared by the NTP's Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction (CERHR) indicate that the FDA standard should be "substantially below (i.e., at least one or more orders of magnitude lower than) the 5 mg/kg bw/day level selected in the draft FDA assessment."

Living Through Chemistry -- U. Michigan and Dow

The FDA panel released their draft at an opportune time. Philbert was under increasing pressure about his role on the panel given appearances of conflict of interest. Acronym Required wrote a couple of weeks ago on Philbert's directorship of the University of Michigan SPH Risk Science and Analysis program, founded and heavily contributed to by Charles Gelman, a retired manufacturer and tireless critic of chemical regulation. Had the subcommittee's report dared reach the opposite conclusion than the pressure would have increased.

Following our post Martin Philbert wrote a letter to the editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel protesting the paper's allegations that his work would be influenced by the donations he accepted from Gelman: "This simply is not true", he said.

To illustrate his point he described in his letter the $15 million dollar grant the Risk Science Center took from Dow Chemical for a dioxin study. Philbert told how, given the grant, his colleagues "still found that people living near the Dow plant had higher levels of dioxins in their bodies."

However, nobody should find Philbert's assurance about his work for Dow Chemical comforting since Dow manufactures bisphenol A and takes political action to protect its market when necessary. For instance at (http://dowaction.com/grassroots/notice-description.tcl?newsletter_id=30665022), you can read Dow's letter thanking their employees for their "Best in Class", 31.5% "grassroots" effort in defeating California SB 1713 Bisphenol-A Ban.

The University of Michigan task in the Dow study was to measure blood dioxin levels of home-owners in different geographic areas -- not to investigate health affects. In that sense the dioxin study is not an analogous situation to the BPA panel. But even if were comparable, the University of Michigan results got Dow off the hook in a way, by finding that the variation in dioxin levels was due to things like age and body mass index (BMI), not levels of dioxins in the air or soil.

Media, politicians, citizens and scientists criticized the study because Dow had long been under pressure from the EPA to clean up dioxin contamination ¹ and the study was seen as a stalling technique. The EPA had this to say in one memo: "the study was initiated at the request of Dow in order to downplay the risks of exposure to dioxin contaminated soils." The EPA went on to say:

"public presentations of the preliminary results have emphasized how little effect living on contaminated soils has one an individual's dioxin blood level. This emphasis has resulted in numerous media stories, an understanding by some members of the public, that remediation of dioxin contamination is unnecessary."

The BPA memo on the FDA draft will no doubt assure the doubters in the public that Philbert's panel has their best interests in mind. ² If not, Philbert warns that he will "think long and hard" before taking time to "perform this kind of public service".

Stay on your toes...

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¹ Burnham, D. "1965. Memo Show Dow's Anxiety on Dioxin.", NYT 1983)

² Perhaps Dow's BPA economy is not at stake in Michigan? John Dingell (D-MI), bulldog for the auto-industry, has also taken on BPA.

BPA: Trade Globally, Regulate Slowly

Today there are hundreds bisphenol A studies, with a growing body of evidence showing connections between low-dose exposure to the chemical and harm, especially during perinatal development. Some of the reported effects of BPA are so commonly known that recent headlines for Asian, Indian and UK papers reported on Canada's new ban: "Canada to Ban 'Gender-Bend' Baby Bottles".

But chemistry and plastics companies keep up the relentless marketing. They've been aggressive for years, for instance here's the American Plastics Council in 1999, (APC, now part of the American Chemical Council (ACC)) ordering:

"Consumer Reports has committed a serious error alleging dangers from the use of polycarbonate plastic baby bottles, based on an apparent lack of understanding of toxicology or safety and risk assessment. Because of the misleading and needlessly frightening statements made in the Consumer Reports article, the American Plastics Council has requested that the publication issue an immediate retraction."

In addition to orders, press releases, letters to editors, and scientific studies, the American Chemistry Council (ACC) owned a corral of internet domains where they posted reassuring consumer information on topics like the safety of plastic baby bottles. Sites such as the ACC's www.babybottle.org assured parents via scripted Q&A's like "Ask the Doctor", that plastic bottles were the absolutely safe. Explicit notice about the site's ACC affiliation was missing, as such, the messages were pretty convincing.

Just last week the Polycarbonate/BPA Global Group issued a press release saying they'd just reviewed the weight of the BPA evidence. The research, from Gradient Corporation in Massachusetts, and a convened panel on the matter, found BPA harmless. The same scientists sat on this panel that sat on preceding panels -- in 2004 at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, and in 2006 by the Gradient Corporation. They reached the same conclusion every year, despite the flood of recent research on BPA. Two more studies indicating derogatory effects on fetal neural development were included in the October issue of Environmental Research in its feature "A Plastic World".

The lead panel member and author of the Gradient paper is Dr. Lorenz Rhomberg. Acronym Required last caught up with Rhomberg when he was working for the American Plastics Council (APC) writing letters to editors of California papers. Our 2006 post covered the failure of California legislators to get AB 319 through appropriations. AB 319 would have banned phthalates and bisphenol A in the state, but got killed following the intense lobbying by the ACC and American Plastics Council (APC). California came back with a different version later, and Rhomberg now works for a private research lab in Boston.

Does the ACC own the FDA on BPA?

Recently the public has increased their response and even outrage over the extent of the deceptions by chemical companies and their lobbies. Congress has beefed up its scrutiny of the BPA regulation, and scientists continue to spend time and money responding to the flood of industry research. The current focus is how much the chemical industry seems to influence the FDA. The FDA issued a decision in August, 2008 saying basically that BPA was safe, weighing its decision on two industry studies. The FDA's decision conflicted with statements of concern from other agencies and scientists.

We previously wrote about the investigation of the FDA's actions by the U.S. House of Representatives and Committee on Energy and Commerce, chaired by John D. Dingell (D-MI), and its Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. On October 15th, the Committee wrote to a letter to FDA Commissioner von Eschenbach, questioning the appointment of the FDA BPA advisory panel chair Martin Philbert and concerning his possible conflicts of interest. Philbert's panel was to review the April, 2008 decision of the FDA which deemed BPA safe.

In that same letter the Representative Dingell requested "all records of communication between the FDA and ICF Consulting relating to their BPA work for the agency." As Dingell and Bart Stupak (D - MI) wrote:

"summary assessments of BPA were created for FDA's BPA panel by ICF Consulting, a private contractor that has done prior work for BPA manufacturers, and whose board members have ties to BPA manufacturers."

Acronym Required found supporting documents for the FDA draft here on the FDA site. Among them you can find the ICF consulting product as well as the neurobehavioural review contracted by ACC to the company Exponent¹, along with various other reviews and communications about BPA research.

Markey To FDA: Are Americans Not Worthy Of Canada's Standards?

In other action from the legislature, Congressman Ed Markey wrote a letter to the FDA Thursday asking if the FDA analyzed the same studies that the Canadian government's did, and if so why it hadn't decided differently on BPA than its North American neighbor?²

"Does the FDA consider a different level of risk acceptable for American consumers including infants, than the Canadian government is willing to accept for its consumers? If so what is the difference in risk assumption and why is the difference appropriate?"

Markey wrote that he was concerned that Americans, "including our most vulnerable infant populations", were being exposed to unsafe doses of bisphenol A. Senator Grassley (R-IA) also asked the BPA to answer questions about the criteria it used for its decision.

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² Acronym Required wrote on the different economic and political climates of the two countries and their BPA policies in "The Politics of Everyday Bisphenol A".

Charles Gelman, retired from Gelman Sciences, now donates his wealth through the Gelman Educational Foundation. Gelman is a vocal critic of chemical regulation and supporter of free-market organizations that fight regulation. The foundation gave a 5 million dollar gift to the University of Michigan School of Public Health Risk Science and Communication Center, which Gelman has called his "legacy". That center is directed by the head of the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) panel which will review the safety of bisphenol A (BPA). Will the decision of the FDA committee be compromised?

Canada just announced its plan to place BPA on its toxic or hazardous chemical list, which will give the government unprecedented authority to ban the sale of bisphenol A containing polycarbonate baby bottles and to demand bisphenol-A-free packaging from baby formula makers.

The US lags behind Canada in the regulation of bisphenol A for a number of reasons, like the different politics and economics of BPA in each country; therefore the US moves ahead on regulating BPA more slowly, in a sort of two step forward, one step back pattern.

Last week, the Attorneys General from Connecticut, Delaware, and New Jersey asked 11 manufacturers of baby bottles and infant formula to stop using bisphenol A. Yet the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) steadfastly maintains that Bisphenol A poses little risk for humans. The agency contends that the estrogen related chemical is not dangerous in the doses the FDA predicts people will ingest, despite research showing otherwise.

In the FDA's last review, issued last April, the agency used industry sponsored studies to make its decision. People tend to jump to conclusions about the validity of industry data, using a study's funding source as a proxy for trustworthiness rather than examining the data. But their correct to be concerned about industry research in the case of BPA because hundreds of government and university studies show very different, more alarming results.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee plans to interview FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach to question him about the agency's procedure for rating the safety of BPA. While the first FDA results are under congressional investigation, a second committee chaired by Martin Philbert was also set up to review the first FDA decision.

Last week, in the continuing saga of bisphenol A policy, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel revealed that the University of Michigan center that Martin Philbert heads received a $5 million dollar gift coincident to his appointment to the FDA BPA review committee. (The FDA would not be the first government agency to have a conflict of interest on BPA, recently an NIH subcommittee studying BPA was also found to have controversial links to industry.)

The donation was given to the University of Michigan's School of Public Health (SPH) Center for Risk Science and Communication by Charles Gelman, a retired manufacturer with strong views on regulation and chemical safety. The Sentinel reports that Gelman told them in an interview that bisphenol A was perfectly safe, despite the opinions of - in his words - "mothers' groups and others who don't know the science." According to the Sentinel's report, Gelman passed his opinions about bisphenol A on to Philbert, who claims to have refused to discuss the issue with his benefactor. Philbert's conflict of interest statement for the FDA did not list the donation.

Industry Secret: Can't Beat the Law? Make The Law.

Acronym Required dug around a little more. Charles Gelman is a well known figure in Michigan. He made his fortune founding and running Gelman Sciences, a maker of plastic filtration devices. For several decades the company polluted groundwater and aquifers in Michigan with 1,4-dioxane, (PDF!) listed in California as a known cancer causing chemical. The pollution was discovered in wells near the plant in the mid-eighties and the state's Department of Natural Resources (DNR) rated the Gelman Sciences site the second worst industrial waste site in the state. The DNR then took regulatory steps to ensure that the company cleaned up the waste. In response, Charles Gelman launched an offensive that included everything from suing one of its main customers, Dow Chemical for 'falsely advertising' that it stewarded its chemicals "cradle to grave" (dismissed in court); to staging a boisterous parade through town with local business leaders when the DNR was scheduled to meet.

While settling homeowners lawsuits against the company, Gelman Sciences staged an epic fight with the state documented extensively by the local media. The company commissioned its own $50,000 study from the University of Michigan to show that other commercial products also contained the chemical. Gelman Sciences installed their own copier at the DNR while it tried to dredge up evidence against the state. The company also ran smear campaigns against people and non-profits involved with any actions against the company. Several years into the battle, the company had spent more on lawsuits against the state than it would if it had cleaned up its pollution, according to a September, 1991 article in Corporate Detroit (Waldsmith, L.,The revenge of Charles Gelman.; Gelman Sciences' legal battle with the Department of Natural Resources).

Then Gelman began pouring efforts into public policy, as he told the Corporate Detroit reporter:

"One thing I've learned is that business has some responsibility to participate in drafting legislation and being active in the legislative process, rather than paying no attention to it at all. That's the way bad laws are written."

Charles Gelman has stuck to his belief that he was wrongly accused, in his experience with the state set a course for his future actions. In 1994 while criticizing the state's lack of science knowledge, Charles Gelman told a state hearing on natural resources that 1,4-dioxane is not harmful, and no scientific evidence proved it was. When Charles Gelman's Foundation gave the $5 million dollar gift to the university last summer, Gelman noted that his gift was driven by his experience with the state on 1,4-dioxane.

I have Five Million Dollars. Would you Like some Job Security?

In gifting his millions to the university center, according to announcements the University published, Gelman noted that chemicals are complicated, and "our vision is to help inform industry, government and the public about how to properly assess the benefits and hazards posed by technology (and chemicals in particular) in our society." His wife Rita added that they were particularly interested in assessing the risks versus benefits of chemicals.

The gift establishes an endowed professorship for the UMRSC Director (Philbert is now the acting director), and will pay for two new faculty, scholarship support for students, and the Risk Science Master's in Public Health curriculum.

The gift from Gelman Education Foundation to the Risk Center certainly wasn't an out of the blue. The U. Michigan risk center was originally established with a $2.9 million dollar grant from the Gelmans, which David Garabrant, the director at the time called, "the foundation upon which the center will be built". The Gelmans also make frequent smaller (hundred thousand dollar) donations. According to Gelman, the center is his "important legacy", something that "will make a difference" as the Gelmans noted when they gave the initial 2.9 million dollar grant.

It would be a quandary. If you were a professor, in times when grants are tight, and someone offered to give you that amount of money what would you do? Perhaps you'd open the center too, while promising as they do on your home page that your work "adheres to the highest standards of academic and professional integrity", and secure your employment security. Would the money change your politics? Even a little? One can suspect that a five million dollar donation might sway a recipient, but there's no real proof. Furthermore, it's not clear what sort of FDA opinion the $5 million dollars to the center could buy. But wary caution or distrust seems warranted in this case.

Spreading the Wealth Around

Gelman's education foundation gives hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly to various religious, education, medical and political organizations. Aside from the Risk Center, his science and political donations are a nominal slice of the pie, a thousand dollars here or there which amounts to a nod to a cause or ideology. But do these donations portend an agenda that belies a neutral mission for the Risk Center? Gelman's only political donations are predictable neoconservative organizations dedicated to free-market proliferation and opposed to regulation. These are the organizations listed on the Gelman Foundation's 2007 990:¹

• The CATO institute
• The Competitive Enterprise Institute
• CFACT
• The Heartland Institute
• George Mason's Tyler Cowen, who runs the Mercatus Foundation, the Center for Public Choice, and the James Buchanon Center for Political Economy.
• The Mackinaw Center for Public Policy
• The Manhattan Institute for Public Policy
• Reason Foundation
• American Counsel on Science and Health
• The Science & Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) (Fred Singer's Global Warming Skeptism organization)
• Capital Research Center
• The Independent Institute

Incidentally, FDAreview.org is also a project of the Independent Institute. FDAreview.org advocates that "FDA control over drugs and devices has large and overlooked cost that almost certainly exceed the benefits." FDAreview.org "favors adult freedom and hence the repeal of all forms of premarket approval."

Gelman is clear about his mission to fund the Risk Science and Communication and as he says, to provide the Risk Center with contacts that will help its mission. When Gelman gave the originating grant to the center he referred to Gelman Science's protracted fight with the state's Department of Natural Resources "a case in public confusion", which would have benefited from the center's 'neutral' science.

But is an organization really "neutral" towards public policy if one person with a very clear agenda establishes it, funds the director, the professors, the students and the post-docs, and provides the contacts to help define the mission? If you're a professor doing science and didn't share Gelman's strong ideological stance, could you endure the pressure? Would Gelman endow with his legacy an organization that didn't share his views? What say does the founding funder have in the backgrounds of the professors whom he funds?

Congress is asking whether this donation will sway the the FDA's bisphenol A committee chair. Members of the Energy and Commerce committee plan to investigate the donation, and House Appropriations agriculture subcommittee members are calling on Philbert to recuse himself from the committee. If Philbert remains on the FDA committee, and then goes on to OK BPA, can that decision be trusted by US citizens? Can the University of Michigan's School of Public Health Risk Science and Communication be trusted?

¹ Acronym Required has previously written about a number of these organizations and you can find more information at Sourcewatch, ExxonSecrets.org and other websites.

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Acronym Required has written numerous articles on BPA, starting with the 2005 article "Plastic Bottles: Protecting Your Baby, by the ACC"

You watch me and I watch you and the government watches us and we watch the government. If everyone is in on the surveillance then the cameras all around us shouldn't make us paranoid right? Citizens can access the images as well as government, and through all this benevolent spying, we'll decrease crime and preserve liberty. Life will be good in a "transparent society", better than in the old fashioned privacy days, in fact some thought think this "transparency" was is the only way liberty would be preserved. Although I'm simplifying a bit, David Brin's article and book about his "Transparent Society" received laudatory attention when it was published ten years ago.

Even a couple of years ago, before cell phones with cameras were ubiquitous and before governments accelerated post-9-11 surveillance was still under wraps "technoprogressive" critics continued to argue the pros (often) and cons (sometimes) of the "transparent society". A couple of years ago the corner cameras didn't have quite the omnipresence they now have in the UK and it was easier to imagine what the technology could be before the technology was in our midst, fully realized.

I was a "Transparent Society" critic for many reasons which could be summed up by saying I thought the ideas naively utopian. However I marveled how the technology Brin predicted became commonplace and how cell-phone cameras, for one, offer citizens ready opportunities to document events. But no matter how many times people update their Facebook, despite how many times technology companies market their newest freedom enhancing device, citizens don't usually get the upper hand in the information arbitrage, regardless of the medium of exchange. One of the most compelling recent criticisms of the "transparent society" was written by Bruce Schneier last March in his column "Security Matters", published by Wired. He criticized the idea that "mutual disclosure" could stop the inevitable erosion of privacy via technology:

"...it doesn't work, because it ignores the crucial dissimilarity of power. You cannot evaluate the value of privacy and disclosure unless you account for the relative power levels of the discloser and the disclosee."

This seems more obvious now than it did in March, more obvious in March, 2008 than few years ago. Brin's ideas now seem as facile as John Perry Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Barlow's 1996 piece told governments to stay out of Cyberspace, which he declared a "civilization" and promised a "more humane and fair than the world your governments have made."

Each year's technology evolutions make those original manifestos seem in hindsight, more nostagic, even quaint. China now monitors and archives Skype messages. Ah, but I don't live in China you say. Then for you the New York Times writes today about the newest book by James Bamford "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra- Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America". The author's third book on the NSA focuses on "the agency's growing partnership with private companies to tap into the fiber-optic cables that now carry most telephone and Internet traffic." As he documents in the book, ABC reported that the NSA had been recently eavesdropping on ordinary citizens abroad.

What are citizens to do if it ends up they can't hold a candle to the state's spying? Get creative. Via BoingBoing, we're led to Open Rights Group's (ORG) 4 X 5 meter collage of photos of surveillance "ephemera" all over the UK. The group collected photos capturing what they call "UK's wholesale transformation into the surveillance society/database state". ORG then arranged the photos into a "Big-Brother-esque photo of Gordon Brown looking over Parliament Square against a background of barbed wire, handcuffs and double helice."

The (new) US government also has some ideas up its' sleeves. Like the so called "Google government" proposed by Obama in 2006 or Palin in 2008. Will that correct the imbalance of power by making more information available to citizens? Ease our minds?

Knowledge Sharing, Not Like Preschool

Google just launched "Knol" -- as in knowledge -- their long-discussed, potential Wikipedia competitor. Google has previously tried applications with similar features but technology has progressed in ways that may improve Knol's chances over other "flops" like "Answers". A main difference between Knol and Wikipedia, and one that Google infers makes Knol special is that each "authoritative article" will be written by someone with knowledge. First the somebodies were "experts", but apparently now anybody can simply verify who they are and write a "knol", sharing their knowledge, opinions, whatever. Then the author can choose to allow others to edit or not. If not, then people are left simply comment.

This streamlines control for Knol contributors, compared to Wikipedia, but transfers messiness to the reader. Content creation will be easier for contributors, and much harder for a general reader searching for a concise framing of issues around a topic, especially if there's disagreement. Interactive mechanisms in Wikipedia, by contrast, force people with disparate views to work together and collaborate on articles. Look for instance at the entry and discussion page for the Wikipedia entry for String Theory, an interesting example of Wikipedia's transparent and deliberate process.

Wikipedia's different approach forces collaboration and debate amongst those who care - whether or not they have particular academic pedigree. This lowers the bar to authors inclined to do research. "Experts" can always edit later. When everyone's collaborating there's may be no identified expert, but that doesn't mean expert information isn't produced.

Knol also makes a strange move in many articles of returning to pre-World-Wide-Web footnotes rather than in-text links, which for some reason reminds us of Michael Crichton's "Footnotes are real." statement at the beginning of "State of Fear". Ideally (in my opinion) readers should be able to access and judge "footnotes" easily and independently to verify the source, context and appropriateness to the argument. Unlinkable footnotes from an antiquated time before the Internet frustrates this inquiry. Wikipedia links within the text to other Wikipedia articles (sometimes helpful, sometimes annoying) then includes linkable footnotes to outside sources at the bottom of the page.

Knol also suffers from inconsistent presentation. At this point using Wikipedia is like landing in a foreign country with a Lonely Planet or a Rough Guide, whereas Knol is like arriving with a sheath of unbound scrolls somebody dug out of their attic and passed to you on the plane. Sure you know who penned it on account of the embossed paper, but there's no order, no index, and no familiar "Dangers and Annoyances" section.

When Everyone is an Expert

Will experts make information better? There's a full range of opinions about Wikipedia's accuracy, with the general conclusion being that it's pretty good, even when compared with commercial offerings like Britannica. Not to say Wikipedia is perfect. I followed their coverage of certain chemicals like bisphenol-A for years without ever linking to the article, because the information wasn't consistently accurate, errors were sporadically introduced, and the page frequently included industry marketing. But the same drawback applies to Sourcewatch and other wikis. It's hard to see how Knol will resolve this.

Reliance on experts and credentials harmonizes well with a "Googly" worldview, although Google has backed off its original "expert" theme and now it say Knol can replace blogging. Or any web page? Everyone's an expert! We suspect that Knol will find it hard to avoid the irksome pollution of the uninformed, yet opinionated crowd that plagues Yahoo! answers. The Yahoo! attempt at a crowd-sourcing approach doesn't work because it's a larger proportion of relatively uninformed readers determine an answer's rating.

At this stage it appears Google will attempt to work around this potential morass via some kind of ranking mechanism tied to credentials, but it's unclear how this will play out. Google's offer of payment infers that there will be some financial reward. If that doesn't pan out will real "experts" choose to use their time seeing patients for a few hundred dollars an hour instead of Adcents?

In Wikipedia, no one is a verified expert, in Knol everyone is a verified expert. Which room would you rather be in?

Grabbing at The Gold Ring: The Third Page

Google said last December: "We believe that many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy enough to do that." Really? You don't need to wade too far into the web to see that there's not exactly a barrier to entry.

It's no secret why Google would consider launching a competitor to Wikipedia. It's safe to say that Knol isn't just retaliation for Wikia's recently launched open source search engine (Steve Ballmer's not running the show). Wikipedia is a huge site with no advertising revenue for Google. Google is the main driver of traffic to Wikipedia. Wikipedia ranked ( #3 of outbound referrals from Google in 2007. Wikipedia doesn't run ads, so all clicks from Google to Wikipedia bring nothing back to Google.

Regardless of the stated intent: sending more researchers to Knol will bring guaranteed revenue to Google, compared with guaranteed zero revenue from a similar referral to Wikipedia. It must have been a painful reality all these years for Google to have been sending away such a large proportion of its searchers to a non-revenue generating website like Wikipedia. (Next Craigslist?).

But Knol seems as much a competitor to Wikipedia as the Mayo Clinic site and many other sites, sort of like Google's standalone web. Similarly, stores like REI or Whole Foods or Walgreens, etc., that start out selling other product brands, come around to calculate that they can make more money branding their own products. Then there's Blackbird, Microsoft's standalone web aborted when browser technology made corralling users to your site seem silly.

Besides signaling quality with proxies such as "expert" status and footnotes, it's unclear that Google's really aiming for quality. There's no motivation for Google to limit the number of authors, or pages -- in fact more pages, more money.The more hemorrhoid experts there are the more "100% Cure Hemorrhoids" ads Google can sell. Is Google really motivated to ridding the web of Wikipedia's "anal retentive authors" who get waylaid asserting that Wikipedia "is not some shock website", disagreeing with those who insist that the "disgusting" photos of hemorrhoids need to be included on behalf of need-to-no medical students?

Google warns against using Knol for advertising, but how does Google intend to take the commercial out of capitalism? If one writes an article on the dangers of silicone breast implants, as we found out, Google serves up "NYC MD, Dr. Slice and Stuff, Millions of Implants Every Week, 212-...Call Today!!". How will Knol change this? There's a tremendous amount of content that doesn't have an easy target product. Moreover how will a reader decide whether a medical doctor or a salesman selling water filtration devices is being "authoritative" or writing an infomercial? What will differentiate Knol? Perhaps all the different opinions can be gathered on a Google metapage, then a reader can click through all the pages to find what suits him. Click; ads, click; ads, click; ads, click; ads.

Content is King

The big Internet slogan used to be "Content is King". Before the effective advertising that Google introduced though, it was an empty, not royal, premise. Search became the focus, but clearly the "third page", as some call it, is still the prize. (The first page being the web query page, the second, the results page, and the third the clicked destination page.) Combining infinite pages with Google's control of search presents an ideal opportunity for a publicly traded growth-hungry advertising+search company. Google can choose to tinker the search algorithm to favor it's own pages and shepherd searchers to Knol content, which some suspect it's already doing.

Thin content is the immediate obstacle for Knol, but there's a simple economic answer. Google believes that sharing ad revenue with content creators will help jumpstart Knol's repository and motivate Wikipedia authors to move to Knol. How? At one end of the spectrum is probably some archetypal Wikipedia contributor who might not be motivated by money, and there will be people honored by the opportunity (random academics and doctors) or who see it as a way of advertising their practice. However I suspect that many profiteers will also engage in some fast and furious cut and paste knowledge transfer from Wikipedia to Knol pages. Given the permissive Wikipedia licensing scheme, such acts will likely be legal and permissible. Although of dubious integrity, they'll bring economic benefit to Google, an outcome I'm sure Google anticipates. Today, for Google, this natural business move, hopefully Knol won't go the way of Orkut.

And about the pronunciation? Knol is apparently not pronounced like "knoll", although knoll is a synonym for "mound", and the original definition for "mound" (archaic), was "to enclose or fortify with a fence or a ridge of earth." As apropos as that may seem, knol is apparently pronounced "knowl-", rhymes with wall.

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Disclaimer: Acronym Required often links to Wikipedia.

Acronym Required previously wrote on the Britannica, Wikipedia dispute in Who Controls Information"

The MPG Illusion -- Needing Math?

Now that gas is almost $5.00 per gallon many people seem to be more than a little worried, if not about global warming than simply about the price of gas. Of course some lobbyists and commentators continue their efforts to preserve status quo, whole hog energy use that exacerbates global warming. These efforts ultimately undermine independence from foreign oil and adaptation of measures that would stem to pace of global warming. In "Communicating Climate Change", last year I wrote:

"If we've moved beyond the climate change "debate", however, as I argue we have, we've only entered another stage. I'm not sure what to call it, but it if we appropriated something like the familiar five stages of dealing with catastrophe- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, then maybe people have moved on to some sort of denial/bargaining phase. People get ideas about how we can buy our way out, with some carbon credits, some alternative energy, or some prizes. Again, this is procrastination. If buying our way out doesn't work, at least we've bought some time."

Science published an article the other day in their Policy Forum section from a couple of Duke business professors. "The MPG Illusion" (June 20th) argued that people misunderstand the miles per gallon (mpg) standard. The authors ask the question, if you had a choice of upgrading one of two cars with a car with a better MPG rating which would you replace? Unlike Europe, where the mileage standard is expressed in liters per 100 kilometer, in the US, miles per gallon (mpg) refers to the distance a gallon of gas will achieve in a vehicle: 1000 gallons per 10,000 miles equals 10mpg. Not very many people understand that, according to their poll.

Increases in mileage are calculated so that 30% better gas mileage means 23% less gas used. 30% greater "mpg" means greater distance per gallon of gas, instead of traveling 100 miles you would now be able to travel 130 miles, so 100%/1.3 = 76.9, 23% less fuel. Most people assume the relationship between miles driven and gas consumed is linear, but its actually curvilinear. From there, the authors argue that small upgrades, say from a "10 mpg" rated car to a "20 mpg" car, may save the consumer more on gas than upgrading from 25mpg to 50mpg.

Their goal was to see whether people ranked choices in mathematically correct ways and so they structured their question carefully. But if their point is to illustrate that the standard is deceiving, as they say in the video, why do they need to publish an article in Science, and perambulate through all the math and graphs?

Promoting a clearer standard isn't their only goal. They open their Science piece criticizing a NYT columnist who questioned the sense of giving an IRS hybrid car tax break to people who buy "a hybrid Dodge Durango that gets 14 miles per gallon instead of 12 thanks to its second, electric power source."

But doesn't the NYT author have a point? Why would the government offer a credit? The authors acknowledge this: "The basic argument is correct: The environment would benefit most if all consumers purchased highly efficient cars that get 40 MPG, not 14, and incentives should be tied to achieving such efficiency." This hat tip to clear thinking is only 27 words of their Science article, versus 1708 words explaining calculations that in effect justify why upgrading from a 1978 Cadillac or your grandpa's farm tractor to an SUV is a choice that consumers should feel good about. While the question is carefully constructed around consumer choices about two cars driven equally and yields a conclusion showing that consumers don't understand mpg math, why this question?

In effect, the authors' piece would be brilliant in a Dodge Durango or Ford ad to boost those double digit sales drops. But back to the New York Times article. Why wouldn't a person upgrade from a 10mpg car to a 50mpg car? A 10 mpg car would use 1000 gallons per 10,000 miles, and a 50mpg would use 200 gallons per 10,000 miles. 800 fewer gallons of gas. That much less pollution. $5,000 of gas, versus $1,000. Why can't we shoot for that?

Consumers are making exactly these choices. Ford sold 55% fewer SUV's last month, and 40% fewer pick-ups then in the previous year. In our last post we quoted from the NYT article, America, Asleep at the Spigot", in which Congressman Dingell (D-MI) [correction, 11/07/08], told the NYT" "He likes it sitting in his driveway, he likes it big, he likes it safe". It seems that "He" is changing "His" mind about "Big" and "Safe", when faced with $150 per fill-up. "He" is choosing a Prius instead of a pick-up.

Global Warming: Too Much Evidence

There's a direct correlation between energy cost and use, just as there's a direct correlation between increased cigarette taxes, and decreased smoking. Lobbyists routinely argue the opposite in order to justify low taxes and minimal regulation. But the fact that car owners are switching to more efficient cars is a market coup for global warming as well as free-market advocates. This should please all of us who support liberal economic policies, as well as "let the market" commentators. But paradoxically, some of columnists are still stuck with in their delusional refrains from 2005.

A Wall Street Journal blogger now claims there's too much evidence on global warming, so much that it's not believable (WSJ July 1, 2008, "Global Warming as Mass Neurosis"). "What isn't evidence of global warming?" he asks. My favorite! For years it was, "there is not enough evidence". And now, simply invert the sentence to arrive at your next phase of denial. Last year when you pulled his string he said "Not Enough Evidence!!!" and alarms rang -- Whooop! Whooop! Whooop! This year they retooled, so yank the cord to hear, "Too Much Evidence!!! Whooop! Whooop! Whooop! American Girl could immortalize his likeness as the Denier Doll from the historical series "When Carbon was King" or "When the Air was Breathable". Of course next he instructs: "[s]o let's stop fussing about the interpretation of ice core samples from the South Pole". He will no doubt shuffle around in these arguments until the water's licking up around his ankles.

He insists that global warming is either a socialist, religious, or psychological affront to our way of life by those who believe that prosperity is corrupt. Last year we wrote in "Climate Change: Fueling the "Debate", "if you're crazy-dizzy snapping your head around to follow first the one side, than the other, simply follow the money for the truth." Perhaps our columnist hasn't invested in any emerging energy markets.

Sanity and Samsø

As last year and the year before, available at our fingertips, along with the woulda-coulda-shoulda crowd and the bloviators, is the full range of serious and interesting discussions. Consumers are making changes around global warming not only by buying Priuses, but by using alternative energy sources or cutting back their energy use.

In the New Yorker this month, Elizabeth Kobert wrote a great article called "The Island in The Wind". The first part of the article was about the residents of Samsø an island in Denmark that progressed from consuming enough oil and electricity to provide energy for 4,300 people, to generating enough renewable energy through wind turbines and other sources to produce energy for the whole island and sell some back to the grid. The island accomplished this with a combination of initiative, work, leadership and community investment, but with no initial motivating monetary reward.

While generating their own energy however, the islanders didn't reduce their consumption. For that part of the story Kolbert goes to Switzerland, where the 2,000-Watt Society aims to motivate people to reduce energy consumption to 2,000 Watts per person with only 500 Watts consumed from non-renewable sources. Scandinavians consume 6,000 Watts per year per person, and US citizens consume ~15,000 Watts per year per person, so the 2,000 Watt goal gives some populations room to grow while others should strive to cut back on energy use.

When we wrote "Sea Change or Littoral Disaster" in 2006 it seemed like we'd never turn a corner. We wrote "We need no more evidence. We have decades of studies indicating that our lives will change, but its easier to wait for another headline and hope a miracle intervenes, if nothing else than in the guise of government action." Times are decidedly more optimistic. Of course there the same gradient of action, inaction, denial, and procrastination, but when I reflect on the general attitudes of the past couple of years I'm amazed at all the change happening in 2008.

Last year we wrote in "Green Spirit", about the wave of environmental sentiment sweeping the US. The New Yorker had captured the mood in a cartoon depicting one plant executive asking another whether they could dye the smoke from the stacks green.

The most unlikely corporations were hopping all over themselves to play green. BP had just launched two sites, The Green Curve, and A Little Better Gas Station, complete with games like "Gas Mania" and kid friendly distractions. The BP sites are no longer standalone so not quite so much fun, but have been incorporated into bp.com in all their original kelly green and neon yellow glory.

These sites come and go, and of course now other companies have launched a new crop of green spirit. First up is Chevron's www.willyoujoinus.com. "Will you join us" is a collaboration between The Economist, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS, and the oil company. The site tells us that "the demand for energy becomes greater, and every day it becomes harder to find". Driving home the point, a global oil consumption ticker spins through millions of barrels consumed during your site visit. The homepage asks viewers to "join the discussion". I suppose it would be impertinent to ask them to put a profits ticker underneath the consumption ticker -- "finding energy" is research and capital intensive.

The current discussion topic is "Global Food Prices & Energy Supplies, Finding a Balance". Fortunately, it's not all gloom and doom, you can "Play Energyville" too.

It's better than astrology and all the rage. Genetic testing offered as a gamut of services, under marketing rubrics along the lines of "Discover Your True Self!" Some of this discovery is whimsical, for instance, the company 23andMe offers visitors to their website graphics and insight on the percentage of people in their company prone to wet ear wax, not flaky, determined by a dominant allele. Some tests are more diagnostic, claiming to promote health. Salugen touts the fantastic slogan "DNA Customized Nutrition" and offers vitamins with their DNA testing. The Genelex website says DNA testing can be used to fine tune the dose of prescription drugs used for treatment of diseases like depression, cancer and epilepsy. Its a burgeoning, unexplored, market. How will it evolve?

A couple of weeks ago, the California Department of Public Health sent cease-and-desist notices to 13 gene testing services, warning the companies not to offer tests to California consumers. New York state took similar action last November, sending notices to 31 companies. The California notice references a state code that makes it "unlawful for any person to own, operate, maintain, direct, or engage in the business of operating a clinical laboratory, as defined this chapter, unless she or she possesses a valid clinical laboratory licensed issued by the department." The department also objects to tests being ordered without a physician. Some companies have stopped selling services to customers in these states but others continue their business, undaunted, claiming that what they're offering is not subject to the states' rules.

The companies are doing more than selling to consumers though. In addition to offering genetic screens for curiosity or personal health, companies are moving to use the collected data to advance research. 23andMe is collaborating with the Parkinson's Institute to provide information from its customers to help understand that disease. This is in line with some of the company's long term goals, according to the San Francisco Chronicle:

"If 23andMe eventually succeeds in hosting large-scale communities of members with various illnesses, it can become a conduit for pharmaceutical companies that would pay the company to relay their offers to participate in clinical trials [co-founder Linda Avey] said."

Google and Microsoft are also in the process of setting up systems to gather large data sets from patients, a move that may help accelerate understanding of diseases. But there are many unanswered questions about the use and usefulness of the data.

Some say that federal regulation is so scarce and the barrier of entry so low that the direct to consumer industry invites fraudulent players. Others ask what such predictive tests can really predict? One woman interviewed by the journal Nature (453: 570-571) said her test results showed a 34% chance of becoming obese, compared to the average female her age who had 32% chance. Some researchers and public policy advocates ask whether the tests are a waste of money.

Even if the tests are predictive, will they encourage people to change their habits, or is that wishful thinking? Most people know that obesity increases your risk of heart attack, diabetes, cancer, etc. But despite straightforward evidence provided by daily surveillance in low cost mirrors, the western population suffers an epidemic of obesity not stanched by the most accessible information. Will more tests convince people to exercise and eat their vegetables?

Like many health conditions, obesity is not solely determined by genes. But while everyone acknowledges the influence of environment on disease probability, the extent of the influence is unknown. The same caveat applies to genetic influences. Huntington's disease is one disease largely determined by genetics, while autism and many others vary as to the genetic influence. Yet the proliferation of these companies encourages public perception that genetics is extraordinarily predictive of health outcomes.This can be problematic for individual consumers who could be misled about the importance of the data. The implications of incomplete information in the form of genomic data could also problematic when companies start collecting data for analysis.

Some genetic testing companies claim that the information they're providing to consumers is not diagnostic, only informational, they market the information as empowering to the consumer. But companies' collective enthusiasm for getting their hands on the forthcoming data belies their claims that the tests are solely for their customers' curiosity. The value of this information is far greater to the company that amasses collections of individual data than it is to any one individual. And once a company has data that represents recurring revenue potential, how is that information not just as fluid and salable as names, telephone numbers and addresses?

What are the implications of this? On the lighter side, imagine being besieged with junk mail about summer diet camps because at age nine, it's revealed that you show a propensity for Type II diabetes based on your mother's profile. Or imagine you pay to query your risk of arthritis and agree to have this data used by certain parties (identifying information stripped, of course). But then your emails begin to feature ads for joint balms or extra absorbent Q-tips. Can't imagine it?

The World of Silver Spoons and Golden Specks and All that Disinfects

Did you know that a Hong Kong company makes "Antibacterial Table Ware" that can "prevent people from the following diseases: duodenitis caused by spirillums, virosis hepatitis, dysentery caused by salmonella and food poisoning caused by golden staphylococcus"? Such wishful thinking is common in the product claims featured at the Project For Emerging Nanotechnologies' inventory of available nanotechnologies. (PEN is a collaboration of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Pew Charitable Trusts.) "Antibacterial Table Ware's" antimicrobial power stems from the "nano silver coating" but the technology has some fine print limitations. During holiday dinner when you're sitting at the table laden with such utensils you would need to urge your mom to "please dawdle", as she ladles the gravy and potatoes onto your plate, so as to give the "Antimicrobial Table Ware" enough time to "kill the attached bacteria and microbial [sic] in ten minutes". (emphasis mine)

The company also makes hairdressing tools that "protect people" from diseases they would (never but for horrendous circumstances) pick up at the beauty parlor, "hairdressing-related infections such as trachoma, conjunctivitis, virosis hepatitis, dermatitis and AIDS." Nanotechnology claims by companies in the US tend to be slightly more responsible, but the precociously labeled products available as imports litter the internet, while regulation and oversight lags behind prolific headfirst investment in the new technologies.

In real life, nanotechnology is not as fantastical as some marketing boasts but is very impressive. Products incorporate elements that are 1-100 nanometers in length -- a nano being a billionth of a meter, and scientists can change the structure of an element in the lab to give it unique properties. So although Carbon nanotubules can be found in nature, in soot for example, one of the most common carbon nanotubules is produced when scientists vaporize carbon between two carbon electrodes. When you think of carbon you'd probably consider the soft form of it -- graphite, or the very hard form -- diamond; however, from carbon nanotubules, scientists now construct materials that are both very light and incredibly strong -- perhaps a hundred times stronger than steel. Carbon nanontubules are used to make electronic brushes used in engines and for future applications in optics, electronics and material science, .

Silver is a proven anti-microbial -- the FDA recently approved silver coated breathing tubes used in ventilators, that may help reduce the risk of pneumonia in hospital settings. Researchers use nanotechnology for drug development and are advancing sophisticated technology to accomplish feats such as delivering drugs to a specific location in the body or building scaffolding for the regeneration of bone, nerves and other body parts. Nanotechnology offers promising advances for almost every field, medicine is just one example. However before much of this promising research yields viable products, nanotechnology will also be relentlessly hyped for selling more mundane items with dubious benefits such as "antimicrobial" socks and refrigerators.

Gilded Age

Nanotechnology products tout anti-bacterial, anti-reflective or stain resistance properties, many of which are not yet proven. Just as flatware marketing preposterously proposes to protect you from infections like Hepatitis A, hundreds of other products collectively promise to erect a magical nanotechnology barrier, a personal missile shield between you and the millions of germs that threaten you.

When you're done sipping your silver nanoparticle preserved soup from your special silver spoon you might want to brush your teeth with "cutting edge toothpaste which innovative nanotechnology is applied", made from "pure nano-sized gold that is highly effective in disinfecting the bacteria in your mouth". And if that company went out of business (likely), you can find some Korean made silver nanotechnology toothpaste that will serve the purpose. The PEN inventory lists hundreds of products with these sorts of thrilling if unsettling properties.

More concerning than blatant labeling for the benefits of nanotechnology however, is the empty labeling from companies which choose not to advertise their nanotechnology because of federal regulations. For instance, the "FresherLonger Miracle Food Storage" containers used to be marketed as "infused with silver nanoparticles that will keep soups, sauces, meats and vegetables "fresher three or even four times longer". Now the same product doesn't mention the silver nanotechnology, only the "airtight silicone-gasket locking system" which helps "retard spoilage". The change in product literature was made to avoid the EPA's regulation of products claiming to be pesticides -- antimicrobials are considered by the EPA to be pesticides.

$50 billion dollars worth of goods incorporating nanotechnology were sold last year, and nanotechnology is entering the consumer marketplace at the rate of 3-4 products a week according to the Project on Emerging Technologies (PEN). There are over 600 consumer products currently on the market, everything from utensils to washing machines to teddy bears, camera lenses, make-up, hearing aids, suntan lotion,clothing, and waterless car washes.

NanoNannies?

Beyond the veracity of labeling, is consuming particles that can't even be seen under a microscope floating around in your body safe? One skin care product called "DNA Skin Optimizer" notes that "Nano technology was chosen because it makes it possible to place the sensitive ingredients in the form of tiny crystals directly into the cell nucleus" -- which, were it true, is certainly not a comforting prospect. Scientists don't know if how nanoparticles accumulate in the body and what interactions and effects they might have, since there are very few studies on the safety of these products.

Last week, however, Nature Nanotechnology published a pilot study suggesting that the safety of carbon nanotubes warrants further investigation. (Poland et al. "Carbon nanotubes introduced into the abdominal cavity of mice show asbestos-like pathogenicity in a pilot study"; doi:10.1038/nnano.2008.111) The researchers subjected the meseothelial lining of the body cavity of mice to carbon nanotubules of varying lengths. Like asbestos, the long fiber carbon nanotubules created an inflammatory response in the mesothelium and scarring, while shorter fibers did not, which indicates (at least) that people who work with carbon nanotubules in manufacturing might be at risk for the same types of problems seen with asbestos exposure.

The environmental risks of this new technology explosion are also unknown but disconcerting. Last month researchers from Arizona State University did some experiments on silver ion containing socks that were marketed for their ability to cut down on foot odor. The researchers washed several brands of socks, and the silver washed out of the socks at various rates. The study motivated concern that the inevitable increase and indiscriminate use of nanotechnology would cast silver into streams and run-off causing environmental damage and endangering the health of species that live in and depend on streams and rivers. Products like Samsung's EPA approved washing machine releases silver ions into every load of wash, a gimmick Samsung calls: "Silver Wash that sterilizes your clothes".

Nanotechnology has broad funding support from Congress and research in this area is flourishing. However scientists and some consumer groups are worried that there are too many unknowns about nanotechnology's safety and that more research should be aimed at investigating the potential hazards. Scientists from industry, environmental groups and academia acknowledge that not only are we producing products with unknown risks without regulation, but that the lack of regulation may cause consumers to become skittish about nanotechnology.

Earlier this month a group of consumer groups recently petitioned the EPA to take a stronger stance on nanotechnology, specifically on products that market silver as a pesticide (antimicrobial). Congress is currently considering legislation on nanotechnology but legislators pared funding for studies on the health and environmental risks of the technology.

ConocoPhillips and BP have submitted a plan to build a gas pipeline through Alaska. Tony Hayward, BP's chief executive told the Financial Times Wednesday: "This project is vital for North American energy consumers and for the future of the Alaska oil and gas industry". Robin West, chairman of PFC Energy, told FT: "This is a critical project linking vast gas reserves with markets that are going to need that gas". But will the gas ever make it to the lower 48 states?

The Financial Times reported that most of the 4bn cubic feet of natural gas per day will go to the Alberta tar sands, where it will be used to fuel the extraction of bitumen from which synthetic oil will be produced. Natural gas is needed for the energy intensive process of getting oil from the gummy viscous asphalt substance contained in the sands.

Extraction from the vast Alberta sands is energy intensive and expensive, but since oil is scarce and the price per barrel has gone up, more companies find the investment worthwhile. Saudi Arabia's oil reserves are considered the largest in the world, the Alberta tar sands are the second largest. They cover a large area 50,000 square miles, about the size of Florida -- or Nepal, North Korea, Malawi, Greece or Tibet. 40 companies involved with 143 projects currently work to extract the bitumen. The main sites are at Athabasca, Cold Lake, and Peace River. Scientists expect the sands to yield over a trillion barrels of oil.

Elizabeth Kolbert wrote about the Alberta tar sands endeavor last November in a New Yorker article, "Unconventional Crude: Canada's synthetic -fuels boom", and described the difficult process of extracting the viscous bitumen. Bitumen close to the surface can be mined then extracted from the sand. First the surface vegetation and soil is removed to access the sands. Then tons of sand are removed via open pit mining and transported to an extraction plant. The the sand is the soaked and agitated with hot water so the bitumen can be siphoned off. Since bitumen is only about 10% of the sand by volume, the multi-step process is necessary.

This extraction is simple compared to those used to extract oil from greater depths. Most of the bitumen containing sands are deep beneath the surface 100-250 feet down, in which case the extraction becomes even more complicated. Since the mid-1800's engineers have been trying to find efficient methods for extracting the oil. At one point engineers hatched a plan with government to detonate atom bombs beneath the surface to release the oil. The scheme was part of Project Plowshare, which sought to utilize atomic bombs for peaceful purposes. Scientists proposed "earthmoving" for all kinds of activities, including oil and gas extraction, canal building, etc.. One test came in the form of Project Gasbuggy, which used nuclear energy in the form of an atomic bomb to release natural gas in New Mexico. A Time magazine article from 1967 described the experiment as experienced by invitees of the government and gas company which sponsored project:

"..the earth jolted underfoot and a dull, distant boom was heard, followed by a second, more gentle, rolling shock. Someone shouted: "We did it! We did it!" Hand shakes were exchanged all around. The U.S. had successfully set off the first nuclear explosion sponsored jointly by the Government and industry."

A marker designates the Gasbuggy Project site, where no digging is currently allowed -- Atomictourist.com has more details.The USSR also did work in the peacetime use of atomic bombs for oil and gas excavation and apparently worked to extract bitumen from sands like Alberta's. Project Plowshare eventually got dropped when enthusiasm for nuclear "earthmoving" waned.

The methods used today aren't quite as extreme, for instance the two main in-situ processes employed are Cyclic Steam Stimulation (CSS), and Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD). These both heat the sand mixture which makes the bitumen less viscous, more like molasses, which will flow. Kolbert describes SAGD:

"Typically, two horizontal wells are drilled into the sands, one above the other. High-pressure steam is injected into the top well; eventually, the tar sands grow hot enough-- nearly four hundred degrees-- that bitumen begins to flow into the bottom well."

All of the current methods of bitumen extraction are energy intensive. SAGD uses the equivalent of 1 barrel out of 3 extracted from the sand pits. The process is laborious and energy intensive, and currently fueled by natural gas. Kolbert notes that by 2012 the tar sand extractions will require "2 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day, or enough to heat all the homes in Canada". Therefore the pipeline, as the Financial Times reports .

The extraction process uses significantly more energy than what is consumed in drilling for oil, in fact carbon emissions produced are 50% higher per barrel of oil consumed. People question how such an energy intensive project can go forward when the overall goal is to lower global emissions. As well, other problems, such as environmental destruction from the mining, ground water pollution and air pollution also dog the project. Despite the environmental concern and pockets of resistance however, oil prices are so high that politicians support the investment and its outcomes, both positive (more oil) and controversial.

For the current project, Conoco bid with BP, reports the paper, because BP's reputation is fairly damaged in Alaska after several large spills. Previous to this new bid, Conoco had submitted a bid in response to the state's Alaska Gasline Inducement Act (AGIA), however the state approved only one company's bid: TransCanada's. As a next step, BP/Conoco will fund an "open season", seeking companies to commit to transporting the gas, before asking Congress for regulatory approval for the project.

Charlie Rose concluded a thirteen part series on science earlier this week, with another interesting episode, "The Imperative of Science". Sharing his table were Paul Nurse, who shared the Nobel Prize of Physiology or Medicine in 2001 and is currently President of Rockefeller University; Bruce Alberts, a biochemist, author of texts like the definitive Molecular Biology of the Cell, former two time president of the National Academy of Sciences and Editor-in-chief of the journal Science; Lisa Randall, Harvard particle physicist and author; physicist Shirley Ann Jackson who is the President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; and Harold Varmus, who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, headed the NIH through a heady science period and is now the president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The focus was the importance of science and it naturally was an interesting, convivial, and lively, if general, discussion.

The group said that the US has become complacent about its long time position as a world leader in science. Increased global competition in science demands decisive action if the country is to maintain its status. The participants emphasized the need for better science education. Alberts brought up primary and secondary education, and they all discussed the importance of improving college curricula. They stressed that learning about the scientific process and experimentation should be made a central part of liberal arts education, and that all students, not just those who show great promise to be scientists, should learn and experiment at science.

Thinking scientifically is not only important to understanding science, these leaders pointed out, but to processing any complex problem. The goal is to resist "the dogma of talk radio" and to be an active participant in democracy. (They ran with the 'science is democracy' idea)

They all agreed when one scientist compared science to a frog sitting in the pot of water as the heat gets turned up. According to the allegory a frog that sits in cold water will stay and perish when the temperature is raised (by some demented frog torturer). When I heard this I applied the critical thinking and research skills that only scientific training can hone, and learned that the frog tale is an urban myth. The good news is that apparently frogs save themselves rather than fatally habituating to hot water -- though to be honest, mine is second hand information. Apart from urban myths, the urgency for science in America is real, as is the human tendency to disastrously ignore problems like global that creep up on us. It's not all about science.

The group discussed various ways to reinvigorate American science as was done with focus and enterprise after Sputnik. Perhaps a problem like global warming could rouse national science spirit, they said. (Coincidentally, Al Gore applied the same frog allegory to global warming in he movie "An Inconvenient Truth")

The scientists expressed nervous concern that our leaders be able to "connect the dots". A president needs to lead the nation to an understanding of science's central place in society and needs to focus attention on fundamentals like education and funding in order to assure both the nation's preeminence in science and increased public understanding of science. Politicians need to support science in a broad cross-disciplinary way, they said. The goal should not be to tackle a series of individual problems but to recognize the commonalities across disciplines and build a foundation upon which science progress thrives with long-term bipartisan support.

Rose asked whether there was enough interest in science among voters to warrant a presidential science debate, adding ""voters are there if you can get on the right side of it". The scientists expressed incredulity that there weren't already strong public science platforms, and supported a debate to reassure Democrat and Republican voters of candidates' commitments to national competitiveness via science.

Here's the link to watch/listen to the video its entirety.

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When Merck's AIDS vaccine candidate failed in clinical trials, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) called a summit. The drug candidate did not reduce HIV infections, in fact the adenovirus based vaccine seemed to increase the risk of infections.

The meeting of scientists on March 25th in Washington focussed on the future of HIV/AIDS research in light of the fallout of Merck vaccine trials. Scientists including Anthony Fauci, who heads the NIAID, agree that funding needs to be redirected towards a broader research agenda and ideas beyond drug development and vaccines. Science last week noted that the decision about whether to proceed with the large NIH clinical trial planned for its HIV vaccine is still pending. ("Review of Vaccine Failure Prompts a Return to Basics" DOI: 10.1126/science.320.5872.30)

Nature also reported on the summit last week, pointing out that these clinical AIDS trials went forward not necessarily based on the strength of the science -- one of the vaccine candidates had a unimpressive track record -- but because programs needed to "show the public that progress is being made, thereby justifying the millions of dollars from philanthropists and taxpayers". ("Broken Promises" doi:10.1038/452503a).

The Nature editorial offers analysis of this HIV-AIDS vaccine experience, noting that ambitious commitments made in a flush funding environment in the early part of this decade short-changed basic research. These choices to heavily fund drug development are regarded less forgivingly in light of the trial failures and the budget shortfalls of recent years, according to the journal. Nature warns other fields, for instance stem-cell research, autism, and Parkinson's disease, are repeating these same mistakes.

The business approach comes with a high stakes mentality and ample, vigorous marketing that can ratchet up expectations both within the organization, the field and the public arena. The business-oriented nature of many philanthropic organizations influences the focus on development and can distort public expectations. But investors can and do influence the direction of an entire field. When a field becomes dominated by a few foundations it can gather tremendous productive momentum, but it can also stampede so hard down a particular path with such strong momentum in a particular direction. If that direction proves to be less fruitful than hoped research cannot turn around on a dime.

Each high-funded disease has its own idiosyncratic pitfalls, but behind the good works and fine intentions of charities, but the science research rarely responds to pressure, unlike many entrepreneurial ventures. When scientists request research funding, the results don't always yield answers as quickly as businesses might hope -- research is the mythical man myth on steroids. Some people investing in biotech and international public health come from businesses very unlike public health with its vagaries of not only politics and human behavior, but biology.

In today's fast paced communications and computing climate, intense focus on "results" is inherent to our culture. Expectations carry over from the successful and extraordinarily speedy progress of the genome sequencing. Scientists and politicians built hopes during that time that drug development and an accelerated understanding of human disease would follow. It has, but did we expect more? TV drug advertising gives the impression that scientists are developing a pill for every insignificant hangnail, when many of these drugs aren't new, just the subjects of new marketing campaigns. Meanwhile tougher diseases and conditions remain elusive.

High profile funding can influence the research environment and lead to a very public dead end. In the larger picture, despite the wisdom that should be accruing from these experiences, politicians, technology leaders, and pundits sometimes wax-on about technology's potential to produce solutions not only for specific diseases but for extremely complicated social problems such as global warming and healthcare. But while science research may yield pharmaceuticals and oil extraction techniques but one cannot look to science or technology to solve the healthcare crisis in the United States. Science and technology contextualize these problems and are integral in our lives but despite heady declarations, they are not central to the solutions.

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Acronym Required has written previously about these subjects, AIDS and research directions, and vaccines. Here are a couple of our vaccine articles:

Vaccinations -- Why Worry?
Polio Vaccinations - The end of a scourge?
Group B Strep Vaccine Development
Vaccine Development For Infectious Diseases

Flipping a Nation

The press, scientists, and commentators were instinctively indignant yet unsurprised by the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) new ozone rules, which of course came out below science and public health recommendations. The agency changed the ozone levels from 84 parts per billion (ppb) to 75 ppb. Scientists agree that 60-70 ppb are necessary to decrease deaths and smog levels dangerous to children, the elderly, and those with asthma and respiratory disease.

Of course industry and the Bush administration weighed in on the matter, killing a secondary standard that EPA staff had recommended. The EPA's secondary standard would have allowed agency discretion to set temporary standards in the event of certain conditions like weather, for instance in to protect vegetation and wildlife from ozone exposure during growing seasons.

Considering the urgency of the situation, the EPA issued a flaccid ruling, but naturally held a full-court press conference to give agency heads the opportunity to beat their brave, intrepid, heroic chests. There, administrator Stephen Johnson spoke of standard as, "the most health-protective eight-hour ozone decision in the nation's history".

A New York Times editorial wrote:

"The big surprise was Mr. Johnson's proposal to rewrite the Clean Air Act to allow regulators to take costs into account when setting air quality standards. Since this would permanently devalue the role of science while strengthening the hand of industry, the proposal has no chance of success in a Democratic Congress."

What? The Bush administration whittles away government regulation? It marches "forward", privatizing various common assets like air, natural resources, forests and health that the administration acts like it inherited for the America public? Shocking. You the spin we hear about the redistribution of national resources as a principled, constitutionally sound, economically ideal (market driven) thing to do is -- well, spin? Surprise, surprise.

We can count the ways that our government ignores science in its decisions -- astute observers attend to this problem. The EPA itself attempts to gut the Clean Air Act at every opportunity, for instance after Hurricane Katrina (pdf!). But to the NYT editor's point, is Johnson's cost/benefit proposal outlandish? Not a chance of passing?

The EPA Saves "Living" Things: Documents

Johnson called the Clean Air Act a "living document" that needed to be "refurbished", "overhaul[ed] and enhance[ed]", "modernize[d] and upgrade[d]". There's really nothing to complain about on the face to this statement. Johnson announced his four "principles" for a Clean Air Act, including, to"allow decision-makers to consider benefits, costs, risk tradeoffs, and feasibility in making decisions about how to clean the air." The Clean Air Act was not "a relic to be displayed in the Smithsonian", he said.

The Times editor pointed out that Johnson's proposal would "cut to the very heart of the Clean Air Act", which was written to protect science from special interests by mandating rule-making based on health, not economic costs.

As we have witnessed, when the first hint of pollution regulation arises, any energy company worth its salt begins wailing about "technology not being available", about the exorbitant cost of the proposal, and about all the risks of complying when there is such scientific "uncertainty". Companies did just this when they held the nation in a decades long trance while they chanted about global warming uncertainty. Recognizing hints of recent history in his statement, and knowing how Johnson's incredulous suggestion could easily put estimates about cost and feasibility squarely in industry's park to the detriment of clean anything, we should become alarmed, perhaps leap into action and phone all our legislators.

However the NYT editor's tone sought to sooth us by calling Johnson's pronouncement a "revelatory moment", one that signaled the administration's "cry of frustration at being largely unsuccessful in undoing three decades of environmental law". Like the wolf frustrated in mid-hunt? One last guttural, spine chilling howl before giving up its prey -- and the fawn darts into a thicket of brambles just in the nick of time, a small defiant flick of its white tail?

Can we argue so optimistically, as the NYT editor did, that the Bush administration attempts have been "largely unsuccessful"? Knowing that standards should be set according to science can we be assured that, "the proposal has no chance of success in a Democratic Congress"? We love this view, can we share the optimism?

Ozone Decisions, Sunset Regulations and the Doyenne of Death

In Johnson's ozone ruling he said he followed the letter of the law and ignored "costs, net benefits and implementation challenges of more stringent standards", as required by the Act. Despite his words, scientists say that his new 75ppb standard was in deference to industry. Rogene Henderson, who chairs the Clean Air Science Advisory Committee, told Platts Energy: "I think [Johnson] is responding to the pressure of the industrial groups about the cost".

The idea that agencies need to consider the costs of clean water and air rulings on "small business" seems intuitive. But it can be manipulated to leave small businesses susceptible to lobby manipulation by groups like the National Coalition of Petroleum Retailers, who may officially represent "small business", but whose aims may appeal most strongly to huge business. In another example, look at San Francisco's attempt to limit bisphenol A, and the immediate lawsuit which of course included BPA manufacturers, but also listed as parties to the suit local toy stores.

Various White House meeting records also indicate influence on the EPA from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and its Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). A series of memos between Susan Dudley, the OIRA administrator, and the EPA, detail the Administration's influence in crafting the rule (available online www.regulations.gov). Over a couple of exchanges, the EPA refused to back down on the secondary standard. Then administrator Dudley issued a 'President-says-so' order March 12th: "The President has concluded that, consistent with Administration policy, added protection [Orwellian doublespeak?] should be afforded...by strengthening [more OD?] the secondary ozone standard and setting the secondary standard identical to the new primary standard..." Thus, the EPA was over-ruled.

Before Susan Dudley was chosen by Bush to head the OIRA, she distinguished herself by attacking what she saw as over-regulation, and she decried the diminished role of the OIRA and OMB in overseeing the regulations that agencies enacted. In the 1990's she roundly criticized the effect of a Clinton executive order, which shifted regulation out from under executive control to science agencies like the EPA. Dudley said the OIRA and OMB under Clinton had been made impotent and she urgently advocated for cost benefit analysis, especially for ozone and particulate matter rules. She chafed at how OIRA had lost its standing as the "watchdog for social welfare". (Regulation, Fall, 1997) As Reagan and H.W. Bush did before him, the current Bush administration has now spent the last 8 years pulling authority back into the executive branch. Dudley's interests are clearly aligned the administration's.

When Bush considered Susan Dudley to run OIRA, according the the Washington Post in 2006, "'Frank O'Donnell of Clean Air Watch called Dudley 'a true anti-regulatory zealot' who 'makes John Graham (previous OIRA head and Mercatus executive) look like Ralph Nader.'" In 2006 Public Citizen and OMB Watch published a report about Susan Dudley on the eve of her appointment to the OIRA, titled "The Cost Is Too High: How Susan Dudley Threatens Public Protections". The two groups argued against Dudley's appointment to the OIRA -- because her approach to regulation, they argue, was laden with "extreme-antiregulatory ideology". Public Citizen and OMB Watch went on to detail her background at the neoliberal Mercatus Center and her dedication to "embedding cost considerations in all laws that authorize agencies to protect the public, including...'safety first' laws" (like Clean Air Act).¹

Of course cost/benefit calculations involve valuing health, the environment, and quality of life. When considering the cost/benefits of smog then, here's a question: what's an acceptable threshold for the number kids who are forced to stay inside on high ozone days to prevent asthma attacks? Thousands? Millions? Particular cost-of-death calculations are often seemingly arbitrary, and long-term injury or morbidity that may or may not truncate a life are treated in an even more speculative way by CBA. Moreover, the end, what does this say about how the US values its citizens, its children?

At the other end of the age spectrum, according to the OMBWatch/Public Citizen report "Dudley has supported a senior death discount that counts the lives of seniors for less than the lives of the young". While this may be standard actuarial practice, pollution is more dangerous to the elderly, which make her calculations seem savage. For the prospects of regulations protecting our welfare the report pulls no punches in painting Dudley as the doyenne of death.

What Happens in "The Catbird Seat"

The report's authors also point out that not all "costs" have the same moral and ethical value. With the government's "regulatory budgeting", they say, "industry can knowingly expose the public to grave harms, enjoy the financial benefits of failing to take the steps necessary to protect the public, and then use compliance costs -- the costs of finally doing the right thing -- as a shield against being forced to comply with new protective standards."

Then there is Dudley's advocacy for sunset regulation, which 'imposes automatic extinction to regulatory policies then puts agencies in the position of having to justify regulations'. As we can see from global warming, environmental damage accrues with indecision. By the time a piece of the Antarctic the size of seven Manhattan's drops off, well, too little has been done too late. Decades go by with corporations lobbying for quarter to quarter profits, as the ice melts.

Finally, as Public Citizen notes: "Dudley would impose "regulatory budgets": fictional budgets of industry compliance costs, with a cap. Once an agency like the EPA hits its cap, it would be forced to stop promulgating any new protective standards, no matter how great the need."

As part of its regulatory oversight OIRA invites industry to suggest changes to federal rules. The Washington Post reported that shortly into President Bush's first term, when the OMB asked for public input on which regulations should be revised or killed, Mercatus submitted 44 of the 71 proposals that the OMB received. OMB approved 15 of them according to the National Journal.

In 2002, this number increased significantly. 267 regulations were targeted, 80 from business associated organizations and a couple dozen from Mercatus. As a result, in 2001 and 2002 the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act were changed by proposals that benefited industry sponsors like BP Amoco, ExxonMobil and Koch Industries and other Mercatus donors.² The Public Citizen/OMB Watch analysis predicted that when Dudley headed the OMB she "will sit in the catbird seat, overseeing the entire executive regulatory process...able to slow, stall, weaken regulatory proposals" to the detriment of public health and the environment.

Ozone Rulings and Regulatory Agencies

Bush worked around the nervousness surrounding Dudley's nomination by appointing her during Congress's recess. Dudley then immediately began to reclaim more ground for the OIRA. Specific to the smog ruling we opened with, Dudley had long advocated against smog regulations on behalf of industry. In 1997 testimony before the Senate Committee on Environmental and Public Works on the Subcommittee on Clean Air, Wetlands, Private Property and Nuclear Safety she argued incorrectly as the Vice President of "Economists Incorporated" that smog was beneficial because it protected individuals from ultraviolet radiation. In the same presentation she asserted preposterously that since research showed that asthma rates were associated with poverty, a smog ruling would have the "perverse effect" of costing communities money, which would in turn increase poverty and asthma. While she now works for government and on behalf of citizens instead of industry, she employs the same line of thinking.

The OMB for its part has the EPA in its sights for what it deems as engaging in misguided rule-making based on unreasonable scientific uncertainty and high costs. In the 2007 annual report to Congress The Costs and Benefits of Federal Regulations, OMB criticized the EPA for its determinations of the health effects of particulate matter: "the degree of uncertainty in benefit estimates for clean air rules is large. In addition, the wide range of benefits estimates for particle control does not capture the full extent of scientific uncertainty."

The authors single out six EPA rules on drinking water which they say cost state, local, and tribal governments or the private sector "over the threshold" of one hundred million dollars annually. The Clinton/Bush II Executive Order 12866, and Bush's two recent amendments, strengthened the OMB/OIRA's authority over the agencies, including putting executive appointed regulatory policy positions into each (decreasingly) independent agency.

Of course this OMB analysis doesn't expound on the enumerable benefits of clean drinking water free of cleaning agents, disinfectants or arsenic. And why one hundred million dollars? Some Senator's houses cost nearly that much. And this is a drop in the bucket compared to the Iraq war, which cost $341.4 million per day and has some mighty uncertain benefits.

The 2007 OMB costs and benefits report grounds its analysis in the philosophy that economically well-off countries have strong property rights and minimal regulation. The draft document veers often to pure right-wing citing the Heritage Foundation for information and absurdly saying that Communism was the result of excessive regulation gone awry.

No More Neighborhood Wimp

In an issue of Regulation in 1997 Dudley wrote before she was administrator about a previous OIRA administrator who had bragged that OIRA was the "biggest kid on the block", so other agencies had to respond to its agenda. She complained that the OIRA under Clinton was the neighborhood wimp. So although Dudley's perch at OIRA may be short-term, she had been preparing her tenure for decades and when nominated by Bush strode in to the post with a clear agenda.³

Johnson's proposal to rewrite the Clean Air Act is not out of left field, rather something urged for decades by industry, various government agencies, congressman and lobby groups. Furthermore, it's no more surprising then his smog ruling, if more appalling, since the changes he speaks of have been in the works for years and in fact progress towards the goals he articulated is well underway.

Health and the Environment: The Public's Standing

You'd think Johnson wouldn't even mention to Congress rewriting the Clean Air Act, given the spotlight on the EPA's recent record on the environment and the vocal admonition of members like Senator Boxer (D-CA). But Congress, though recently vocal against the EPA's refusal to move on environmental laws, has at times acquiesced eagerly to business deregulation and cost benefit guided rulemaking. Thus the current ease and confidence of Dudley in thwarting the goals of the EPA. Congress of course touts progress on all fronts, business, environment, and health, but business generally comes out the biggest winner.

Our intent is not to focus entirely on Susan Dudley, anymore than it is to focus on Stephen Johnson, or George W. Bush. They're all accomplices to a larger agenda which seems outmoded and outdated, that needs to be "overhauled" and "modernized". We are not in competition with Soviet ideology, capitalism is not merely ascendant, it's dominant -- so arguments in last year's OMB report to Congress about regulations on Clean Air and Water being nigh to Communism are absurd.

We live in a time when kids can't play outdoors because of smog, when business pollutes with abandon then screams about a rule that mildly asks, please don't pour oil into streams. We live in a time when the UN warns monthly about climate change and rising seas. This is the state of our nation today. This administration's decades old way of thinking deserves only to be encased in Plexiglas in a museum.

We live in a time when business calls the shots in Congress, in the White House and in the Judiciary, and we should all wake up to that truth. Yet voters still respond to "red phone" imagery with a knowing nod of utter naivete. There is no threat bigger than ourselves -- we are the traitorous monsters in our midst.

When the phone rings -- red, blue, yellow or green -- in the White House, in your Congressperson's office, or at the court house, it's not some nameless international threat, but an American industry whose TV advertisements you hum to and whose brand you endorse, and the person on the other end is calling to murmur in the lawmaker's ear about less regulation. One hand of the caller is slipping dollars into the decision-maker's pockets while the other waves fanatically to citizens about the economic doom of Clean Air and Clean Water, about the unemployment that will follow, and balance sheets that will run red. That's what happens when the red phone rings in the White House in 2008. Let's get real.

So what will elected representatives do for Clean Air? What they always do? Should the world have faith that Congress will protect Clean Air and Water? Sure, as long as somehow business benefits. But citizens have a choice, and always a voice, so we'll veer positive here. The NYT editor's right. The US evolves. Congress will see Johnson's clumsy marionette arms and legs being yanked by OIRA, his mouth voicing the agreed upon words from the decades old script. And your Congressman will answer the phone when citizens call, skip the form letter reply, and renounce Johnson's quest to rewrite Clean Air considering such things as costs, feasibility, and trade-offs.

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¹The report details how during seven years in the 1990's, Koch Industries (a petrochemical company) was found by the EPA to have spilled 3 million gallons of oil (300 unstopped leaks) into waterways in 6 states, and was fined $30 million dollars as a civil penalty (Koch founded Mercatus and is its largest contributor).

² Incidentally, Mercatus donors included Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan Chase, NYSE, Fanny Mae, and Freddie Mac. A quarter of the proposals the Mercatus submitted to OIRA in 2001 and 2002 were for financial services deregulation.

³Executive orders and congressional laws paved the way, for instance in the 1990's, rules such as the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act (1995), the Government Performance and Results Act (1993), and the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act (SBREFA) (1996), all addressed regulatory and reporting costs without expanding definitions of benefits. SBREFA, for example, spares businesses from what could be burdensome regulatory costs. Bush's latest rules significantly strengthen the clout of the agency.

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Acronym Required wrote previously about the EPA, the environment, and public policy.

Sequoia Systems sent Princeton professor Ed Felten an e-mail, warning that if Felten's lab proceeded to analyze the security and/or hackability of Sequoia's voting machines, the company would consider its intellectual property infringed. The move followed disturbing reports about Sequoia voting machines in New Jersey, for instance that 10,000 voting machines were uncertified by the state, that February primary officials noted irregularities in the vote records, and that Princeton professor Andrew Appel bought a few Sequoia machines at a state auction site and managed to program them to misappropriate votes.

The Sequoia Systems' letter warns that the company "retained counsel to stop any infringement of our intellectual properties, including any non-compliant analysis". Felten produced a demo last year showing how to hack a Diebold machine in one minute, and recently published a paper on the Diebold machines' vulnerabilities.

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Acronym Required also mentioned voting machines in this post.

Microhoo, Forward to the Future

Microsoft's Chief Technology Officer Ray Ozzie talked at a Las Vegas technology conference recently about the company's plans to build a "seamless mesh" computing infrastructure, inclusive of online applications and mobile devices. Microsoft is of course looking to extend its reach and in keeping with this goal aggressively proposes to merge with Yahoo. In public relations efforts focused on its Yahoo offer the company spins out comforting nuggets of merger wisdom. Ozzie told the Financial Times Monday: "'Technology companies, if they dive in and just smash things together for smashing them together's sake, it's reckless, it's just simply reckless.'" ("Microsoft in No Rush to Merge Yahoo Technology.") The message for investors, employers and customers is that Microsoft understands the risks of large mergers.

Meanwhile, as Mr. Ozzie spews sage adages about the heedless smashing together of things, Microsoft contends with product fallout from its latest operating system. In "They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know", the New York Times describes Vista's incompatibility problems and quotes three top executives who make disparaging on-the-record remarks. Granted they don't sling zingers worthy of Democratic presidential campaign staff, but one Microsoft executive who bought a "Vista Capable" PC, then thrashed through reckoning with its limited functionality told the Times: "I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine."

According to the story, many users refuse to upgrade and instead run XP because of Vista's reputation for various issues like: "[t]he graphics chip that couldn't handle Vista's whizzy special effects. The long delays as it loaded. The applications that ran at slower speeds. The printers, scanners and other hardware peripherals, which work dandily with XP, that lacked the necessary software, the drivers, to work well with Vista." All these problems after multiple launch delays. Is Vista a "smashed together" product?

Trash From The Past

If Vista had been launched at another time in history, like after any one of its proceeding operating systems -- MS-DOS, Windows 1.0, 2.0, 286, 386, 3.0, or Windows for Workgroups 3.1 or 3.11, for instance, these users might be duly appreciative. Today's new operating systems are comparatively customer friendly. Mind you today's customers have every right to complain heartily -- but lets get some perspective from the systems of yore.

Once operating systems didn't come bundled on PCs and setting them up took hours. This was often a collaborative group effort, as individuals all over the world, through trials and tribulation, would acquire tricks for easing the process then share their expertise on websites or via newgroups. Here's how one set of instructions for installing Windows for Workgroups 3.11, circa 1995, touted the new operating system from the Redmond company: "WFWG 3.11 is a real product with a real manual and Microsoft support. If there is a problem installing it, then there are many other sources of information available for troubleshooting the problem." Hard to overemphasize the importance of other sources back then.

If you weren't blessed with a CD-Rom, you'd do the installation by floppy, and so for Windows for Workgroups you'd get your pile of installation floppy discs and settle down at your computer for some fun. Four steps in, the guide offered some advice on the part, "add network protocol"

"With a bit of luck, the TCP/IP-32 protocol will be in the list. If not, then it is an "Unlisted or Updated Protocol" which is the first choice. Unfortunately, even if the TCP/IP protocol is listed, WFWG generally doesn't really know where to find it. It may invent a plausible but incorrect directory...No matter what choice is made, be prepared to fill in a dialog box with the letter and directory where the Microsoft TCP/IP distribution directory is found. Once the files are located, WFWG will copy them into the WFWG system and will add the protocol to the list in the Network Drivers and Network Setup panels. Back out by clicking the various OK buttons."

That's how it went, not mind-boggling, but tedious. If the installation was successful it was a great moment, but you'd keep that pile of floppies close at hand because who knew? If soon after you tried to install some software in an order that the operating system found offensive or if the computer for no apparent reason ceased to function in a predictable way, often your only recourse was to "reinstall". Vista is a system with today's problems, as all Microsoft operating systems have had age appropriate glitches for perpetual cutting edge user demanded technologies.

Crash To the Past

Vista problems were accompanied by a less than straight-forward marketing scheme with confusing (some say deceptive) advertising. In order to market Vista to lower end computers, the NYT says, Microsoft changed the label on new PC's. from the definitive "Vista Ready", which it wasn't, to the more wishy-washy "Vista Capable", a dubious distinction that many customers assumed meant "able", but actually meant "unable", and "incapable" of running any version of Vista except the scaled down one called "Home Basic", missing many of Vista's advertised features. There's the catch.

The judge in the lawsuit against Microsoft granted the case class-action status, so the plaintiffs who bought a PC labeled "Windows Vista Capable" could seek compensation for the company's deceptive marketing aimed at increasing demand. Microsoft appealed the class-action status, saying since customers had "different information" they weren't all in the same class, and because, "[c]ontinued proceedings here would cost Microsoft a substantial sum of money for discovery and divert key personnel from full-time tasks." But doesn't Microsoft systematically buck for court proceedings in lieu of nicer, profit-curtailing behavior? What better use of key personnel then?

They DOS Protest Too Much

Sure, some key personnel -- top executives -- spend time complaining to the New York Times about Vista. The paper quoted Microsoft VP Mike Nash saying "I personally got burned", which is interesting because VP's usually don't get "burned" on operating systems they (buy?) at steep employee discounts, especially when they have a stake in the company's rising stock. But still, when your executives go on the record with such admissions it can't be good -- or can it? Since key personnel are unlikely to join the class action suit, maybe their playing the we're all in it together card?

Some key personnel also make soothing sounds about the future and Microhoo, and some more stay busy shaking off the past and a chaffed EU, which seethes over MS refusals to share code and play nice. Last month the EU fined Microsoft 1.3 billion Euros for interoperability issues. The company has 3 months to pay off the fine which increases daily as the value of the dollar sinks.

Some complained that the fine was staggering, but to keep this in perspective -- Microsoft is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. No company likes piles of cash to whither away but this relatively small fine is also an important piece of the business model, balanced by profits rendered from the same strategies that peeved the EU. Yes, Microsoft has promised to be less secretive and more open in the future but it will no doubt will appeal the decision.

The company may express yearning to be free on the internet and in mobile devices, but its bread and butter is embedded in its desktop products -- its software, its browser and its operating system -- mainframe as that may seem. Steve Balmer commented that the fines were for past issues now behind the company. But the company's profit is in proprietary systems and maintaining market share by shutting down competition. So what to expect? Naturally, Microsoft will continue to conduct business "competitively", as usual.It will build impressive backwards compatible software and strategize about how to squeeze profit out of some of Yahoo's services. To do this still more "key personnel" will be the large teams of razor-teethed lawyers, ready, no doubt, for many court bouts. Brussel's just initiated two new antitrust investigations against the Microsoft.

You're so Sad, We're So Happy

Antidepressants have taken a beating over the past couple of years with a steady stream of difficult news, some of it contradictory -- about studies biased by doctors interests, potential dangers of the drugs for children, limited effectiveness as a result of selective reporting, and patients struggling to withdraw from the drugs. Regardless of the news, many patients critically depend on antidepressants and pharmaceutical companies invest heavily in their development.

Last week Wyeth announced the approval of Pristiq, an antidepressant they're marketing to succeed Effexor XR. Effexor was the first of the serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs), followed by Eli Lilly's Cymbalta. Wyeth won FDA approval for the drug's use as an antidepressant and is hoping to get the drug approved for menopause. This is a savvy move. With the HRTs in decline because of cancer risks Pristiq is the first drug to be marketed as a non-hormonal option for menopause "symptoms".

Eating Your Own Dog Food?

Some doctors question whether "Pristiq", a metabolite of Effexor, is an improvement over any of the drugs currently on the market. Regardless of doubts, the drug is a lithe marketing confection, starting with the name, "Pristiq", which summons to mind "pristine", as in, that is the cleanest most crystal clear pristine lake you've ever seen, and "mystique", as in, wow, he/she has that certain je ne sais quois -- mystique. Ergo "Pristiq". Just saying it makes you want to hop out of the chair, dress well, smile brightly, finish a report, wrap up a business meeting, or throw a dinner party -- tonight, for 50 friends.

With Effexor coming off patent, Wyeth is happy to have Pristiq in the wings. As Gino Germano, Wyeth's president of pharmaceuticals told the New York Times, doctors and patients need to have options. The Times' print edition featured a photo of the beaming Germano, perhaps elated over the FDA approval news and definitely projecting a certain unique Pristiq mystique. Some analysts predict $1.5 billion in sales by 2012.

William Kristol says that "Democrats Should Read Kipling". He bases his recommendation on George Orwell's 1942 essay, "Rudyard Kipling". Kristol responds to the House Democrats' hesitation to sign-off on the Foreign Intelligence Security Act (FISA), by taking a ludicrously bold position and advancing Orwell in support of the surveillance act.

He suggests that Orwell and Kipling would have approved the Bush administration's unfettered surveillance mission -- although more realistic reaction to the juxtaposition of Orwell and the Bush administration might be apoplectic brain stem activity -- 1984!1984! 1984!".

Kristol trots out the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Attorney General, a former federal judge, the director of national intelligence, and a retired Vice Admiral, who he says approve of surveillance. But the titles are identical to previous casts of discredited characters -- the ones who slam-dunked the US into Iraq, couldn't remember the facts and never meant to mislead Congress. And they're here to warn us blandly that "surveillance abilities are important to our national security"? Republican, Democrats and citizens agree. That's not the issue.

In Sunday's Los Angeles Times, Andrew P. Napolitano, a former New Jersey Superior Court judge and FOX commentator, wrote in "The Invasion of America", that since 1978, the government has been allowed 99% of its FISA applications. The current provisions would allow unfettered surveillance of phone or e-mail conversations if one of the people was a foreigner. He said:

"Those who believe the Constitution means what it says should tremble at every effort to weaken any of its protections. The Constitution protects all "persons" and all "people" implicated by government behavior....If we lower constitutional protections for foreigners and their American correspondents, for whom will we lower them next?"

FISA was approved by the Senate and the House continues its debate. To address the controversy, Kristol tracked down Orwell's essay on Kipling (a response to T.S. Eliot's essay) "in a used-book store -- in the Milwaukee airport, of all places". Fortunately for readers, they need not venture to a used-book store in Milwaukee as our intrepid columnist did, they can read Orwell's essay on the internet ("the World Wide Web", as it were).

Orwell observed that Kipling was often used for "quotations parroted to and fro without any attempt to look up their context or discover their meaning." Indeed, that seems to be Orwell's own plight as well. Kristol clips sentences from Orwell's essay to cobble together his threadbare argument: Democrats should support FISA because the Republican party has been in power so long that only they understand how to rule the country.

Kristol gets off to a rough start using Orwell's oft-quoted comment that Kipling's writing was '''morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting'''. He brazenly edits Orwell's sentence, which actually read: "jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting" (emphasis mine). Kristol says Democrats should be more like Kipling, who -- and he carefully selects another snippet of text -- "at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like".

So does Kristol intend to suggest that Democrats toady the administration with "jingo imperialism" like an early 20th century children's story writer -- or dare we suggest, like some columnists at the New York Times? Should Democrats kowtow to those who like to "think of themselves as the governing party "(emphasis mine)? Or are those in the "ruling power" the "jingo imperialists"? Quoting the sentence out of context as he does, Kristol leaves plenty of room for readers' interpretations, but distorts rather than elucidates Orwell on Kipling, (via T.S. Eliot, the impetus for Orwell's essay).

Kipling can't be scissored and dressed up like a little paper doll in patriotic neoliberal red white and blue trousers. Kipling was not some caricature scribe, but a paradoxical and contradictory writer whose views of England and its empire changed over time.

Edmund Wilson, Sara Suleri, W.H. Auden, Salman Rusdie, Edward Said, TS Eliot, and many more have studied Kipling's contradictions, nationalism, imperialism and racist attitudes. One biographer, David Gilmour wrote in "The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, of "his early role as apostle of the empire, the embodiment of imperial aspiration, and his later one as the prophet of national decline." Kristol lauded Kipling for "identif[ying] himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition." But this was not Kipling, who often wrote from the perspective of the non-rulers.

Christopher Hitchens wrote a review of Gilmour's political biography in the June, 2002 issue of The Atlantic, called "A Man of Permanent Contradictions". Hitchens characterized Kipling as a deft marketeer: "his entire success as a bard derived from the ability to shift between Low and High Church, so to speak." Hitchens quotes Kipling's poem "If", which seems to recognize of the need for political versatility:

In keeping with Kipling's literary fate of being widely adapted by all parties, the poem was a favorite of "José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of Spanish fascism, and of President Woodrow Wilson. It was apparently written in honor of Leander Starr Jameson, a British colonial pirate who led an aggressive raid into Boer territory, precipitating the horrible South African war", Hitchens points out. I suppose its a complementary tradition then, that Kristol adopt Kipling as a neoliberal mascot.

But jingo imperialist he may have been, Kipling also embodied a stoicism and sense of military duty that's unfamiliar to much of the ruling elite today. When his son was denied commission into the army, Kipling pulled strings so he could enlist. As Hitchens writes:

"Ultimately, Kipling's two greatest literary and emotional attainments - the ability to evoke childhood and the capacity to ennoble imperialism - contradicted themselves too flatly and painfully, and culminated in the shattering sacrifice of his beloved son, John, on the Western Front in 1915. This was enough inner contradiction for several lifetimes."²

For all the variably scathing and favorable analysis, the pondering, questioning, loathing and admiration, Kipling remains enigmatic. He celebrated the empire, but foresaw its decline. Writes Hitchens; "To those born or brought up in England after 1914, let alone 1945, the sense of a waning day is part of the assumed historical outcome. It was Kipling's achievement to have sounded this sad, admonishing note during the imperial midday, and to have conveyed the premonition among his hearers that dusk was nearer than they had thought." The poem "Recessional", as quoted by Hitchens, warns of the Empire's demise:

Orwell wrote that while Kipling celebrated empire, he chaffed at its failings, saying: "He could not foresee, therefore, that the same motives which brought the Empire into existence would end by destroying it...The modern totalitarians know what they are doing, and the nineteenth-century English did not know what they were doing."

Kristol blurs Orwell's meanings and Kipling's complexities and contradictions. He grasps at Kipling's legacy and crafts a familiar Republican myth for loyalists. Ever the party scribe, Kristol draws Democrats as "refined people who snigger at the sometimes inept and ungraceful ways of the Republicans". Adept himself at fiction, Kristol charges that Democrats, once they controlled the Congress, "ensured that [Bush] couldn't turn those failures [in Iraq] around." This brand of subterfuge masking as patriotism is not Kipling's, nor should any of us continue to embrace it.

Perhaps Kristol attempts to reach beyond 1980's history, the worn cowboy hat and stirrups of the Reagan figurehead, but the plot is the same. Whose nightmare/dream is this? I'm not drawing any parallels between the US and British empires -- an analogy that would be as perilous as Kristol's -- but it's no longer morning in America.

Kristol attempts to sketch, a lovable and omniscient administration, a clan of sometimes bumbling but honest and well meaning folks, bible loving people just like you and me, who know what's best for us and happened upon power by the love of God (and the Supreme Court). They do not exist. What Kristol hails is a cold, organized machine with profiteering corporate intentions for Iraq and frighteningly little regard for the Constitution, you or me.

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¹ Here is the full text of Orwell's book about Big Brother, "1984".

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Acronym Required previously wrote on immunity for telecoms, and FISA. We also wrote on Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and mongooses.

In Elizabeth Kolbert's book, "Field Notes from a Catastrophe" she reported on global warming as it affected communities throughout the world. Her clear descriptions of global warming cut through denialist's claims, which at the time were still effectively muddying public understanding of climate change. She first published the book as a three part series in the New Yorker in 2005. She was not upbeat in her conclusions: "It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we're now in the process of doing"

In a more recent New Yorker, December 24/31 issue, Kolbert reported on Al Gore's Nobel Prize acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. In his address, Gore acknowledged that we're doing good work but face an uphill battle in tackling climate change:

"today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun."

Gore did not end on that note, but elaborated his call to arms. Kolbert however, used Gore's statement of the current problem, from which he launched the rest of his speech, as her article's final paragraph.

Therefore, with Kolbert's take on the somber piece of Gore's message in mind, I was even more affected by the full page Nissan Maxima ad that followed her article two pages later (19mpg city/24mpg highway). Then a couple of pages after that was the four page Chrysler insert presenting some "celebs" who were taking their 3 kids on a road trip to see the Griffith Light Show. Chrysler says its Town & Country minivan "knows how to let the good times roll". (16mpg city/23mpg highway). The article on Gore was preceded by the two page Lexis LS ad (16 mpg city/24 mpg highway).

The prominent message, therefore, which yields hundreds of thousands of dollars for the New Yorker, is about shiny new cars. Pages of car ads that fail to mention a whit about MPG ratings or emissions. So readers may indeed read Kolbert's fine print about Gore's speech and about how critical it is for the US to act on global warming. This is the challenge that many agree is the world's most pressing. But automobile manufacturer's don't even feign public attention to the challenge in their expensive glossy pages. And why would the New Yorker turn down the cash, I suppose?

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Acronym Required has written previously on the environment and and consumer advertising, for instance: Cars: Buying Cognitive Dissonance".

There seems to be a new trend among sports retailers. Many large chains are discontinuing the sale of polycarbonate bottles. These popular drink bottles contain bisphenol A, an endocrine disruptor. Nalgene bottles, made by Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., are ubiquitous among athletes, and the company has successfully cultivated a new market for its colored plastic bottles to augment its labware market. However as awareness about the health risks of bisphenol A containing polycarbonate spreads, it makes sense that the bottles would lose favor among sports enthusiasts who comprise some of the most health conscious and environmentally aware consumers.

Last week, Canada's Mountain Equipment Co-Op (MEC), announced that it would discontinue the sale of polycarbonate bottles including Nalgene bottles. MEC is sports co-op started in Vancouver, similar in theory to Seatle's REI (Recreational Equipment Inc.). The company has followed the bisphenol A research for three years, a MEC spokesperson said, and will continue to follow the research. For now, however, they won't be selling the bottles.

Today, Lululemon, another Canadian retailer specializing in workout gear, announced that it plans to stop selling the polycarbonate bottles in January. Lululemon is an international retail chain with stores in the US, Australia, and Japan. The company last gained attention when it denied a New York Times investigation which found that the company's seaweed fiber yoga clothes didn't have seaweed in them.

Patagonia, the North American sports retailer, also does not sell polycarbonate bottles, but instead sells metal drink containers.

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Acronym Required has been following various aspects of the bisphenol A story for a few years.

Yahoo In China

This week, Yahoo settled a lawsuit brought against the company by two Chinese citizens and their families. The lawsuit accused Yahoo of aiding and abetting torture under the Alien Tort Claims Act and the Torture Victims Protection Act. Yahoo had been giving Chinese authorities the names of dissidents who were then arrested, tried, and imprisoned -- guilty of using Yahoo services for pro-democracy activity. Two of these citizens, now in prison with ten year sentences, attracted the attention of the global community. In September, 2002, Yahoo turned over account information of Wang Xiaoning, who was charged by China of "inciting subversion" (creating a publication that advocated "a multiparty political system, separation of powers, and general elections"). Later Yahoo turned over information for Shi Tao, who China accused of transmitting "state secrets" (information about China's plans for handling the anniversary of Tiannamen square).

Yahoo defended its actions, saying it was bound to Chinese law. Furthermore, the questions had no place in American courts, they said, since Yahoo had: "no control over the sovereign Government of the People's Republic of China, the laws it passes and the manner in which it enforces its laws."

Yahoo In France

This is very different from what Yahoo said in a case in the French courts in 2000, when they claimed that they were an American company not subject to the laws of France. In that case Mark Knobel, a Paris resident, had found a cache of Nazi mementos being sold on Yahoo auction sites. Knobel asked Yahoo to remove the merchandise, a request that AOL had honored in a similar situation two years earlier. The company founders, Jerry Yang and David Filo were busy celebrating the dot com era. Their company namesake, "Yahoo", is one is who is "rude unsophisticated and brash", and the stock price was close to $500 a share.¹ Yahoo refused to remove the Nazi items.

"'It is very difficult to do business if you have to wake up every day and say 'OK, whose laws do I follow?', said Heather Killen, a Yahoo vice president, "We have many countries and many laws and just one Internet"'

While different than their China claim, their train of thought was apt. The Internet in 1990 was a new place, a proper noun -- like Atlantis or Shamhala. Internet businesses were much closer to the manifesto issuing 1990's, when some of the Internet's first users fostered ideas about Cyberspace, the democratic, borderless social space over which sovereign governments could not lord. In the midst of e-commerce proliferation, many inside and outside of the technology grappled with the question of whether nation-states would take a lesser role.

However, French lawyers in 2000 didn't buy Yahoo's argument. French laws applied to radio and television, why would they not apply to the internet? Judge Jean-Jacques Gomez ordered Yahoo to make the Nazi paraphernalia inaccessible via the French internet. Yahoo then tried to argue that they couldn't technologically remove Nazi merchandise on sites hosted in the United States for the sake of the French. It was impossible -- how could you tell where the user was geographically located?

The court drew in expert witnesses who demonstrated that this assertion was false. Yahoo at the time was serving up French ads to French users from sites the company had mirrored in Switzerland. Yahoo's actions weren't protected under the laws of a sovereign US. In 2001 after more protracted dispute and non-compliance with the court requests, Yahoo removed Nazi merchandise.

In the Chinese case, as in the French case, Yahoo was cagey. They first testified to Congress that they had no idea of the fates that befell the Chinese whose names the company had turned over to the government. But a translated copy of the Chinese authority's warrant turned up on the internet. Congress held another hearing, and the committee's title indicated the tone the meeting would take: "Yahoo! Inc.'s Provision of False Information to Congress.". House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos (D-CA) (very active himself fighting crimes against humanity), subjected Yahoo's CEO and council to scathing rebuke, and demanded that Yang apologize to the families of imprisoned men. Shortly thereafter, a cowed Yahoo settled with the families.

Yahoo et al: Stateless to Stateful to....?

In 1990 when international discourse circled the question of whether states were relevant, Yahoo based its defense in France on the sentiment they weren't. In July, 2002, Yahoo entered China's business world with stock trading at $9.71, humbler than the 2000 highs. Yahoo was one of 300 companies to sign a document issued by the Chinese government, "Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry". The companies agreed to follow various Chinese dictates aimed at cracking down on the internet's potential to democratically inform and enlighten, to question the government. The Chinese surveillance and censorship society blossomed. Few people in the business hungry US found these companies' stances disagreeable. Human Rights Watch was one who did fear the worst, warning in August 2002, that Yahoo "risks complicity in rights abuses". "If it implements the pledge, Yahoo! will become an agent of Chinese law enforcement."

Today, the US dithers about whether waterboarding is torture or not, revels in its own abundant state secrets, and wiretaps to its heart's content, covering its actions with the sinister haze of terroristic threats and legal immunity. Contractors in Iraq have upon occasion raped, killed and pillaged -- but there's always profit. The US leaps to do business with countries led by borderline or full-fledged tyrants who spout various "nationalist" ideas. Despite the current milieu, taking the moral high ground is worthwhile every now and again. Talking about "spread of democracy" serves certain ends. There are instances when the chimes of a declarative moral stance resonate with a public eager for seemingly anachronistic sentimentalities, like when a Senate committee member lambasted Yahoo during the hearings: "morally you are pygmies".

In the article "Yahoo Isn't the Only Villain", the Los Angeles Times points out that the entire Chinese national firewall, espionage program and internet surveillance system is built and supported with U.S. technology. Cisco built the firewall and supplies other technology. Skype (Ebay) scans instant messages,Google's search filters offensive ideas, and Microsoft, Dell and H.P. also participate. Many of these companies aren't new to the game, IBM supplied the technology for the efficient Nazi state too.

The head of the Chinese company, China Security and Surveillance, who also serves as the technology director of the ministry of public security that runs Project Golden Shield. The company recently incorporated as a US publicly traded company to encourage western investment. China Security and Surveillance financed itself with loans and private placements with 17 US institutional investors. China Public Security Technology and other companies have done the same thing.

The New York Times reported that the Chinese security industry was valued at $500 million in 2003 and is predicted to be 43 $billion by 2010. Finance message boards such as Yahoo's buzz with anticipation. Tom Lantos is leading the charge to set up guidelines for US companies working in China. If accomplished, it will be a feat -- businesses busily hack away at the effort.

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¹In the book, "Who Controls the Internet, Illusions of a Borderless World," Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu describe Yahoo's challenge to France's control of the internet back in 2000. They trace the history that led to the French legal battle and the position that Yahoo subsequently took with China.

The site Collegehumor.com does a skit of the un-aired pilot for the Fox Show 24, back in 1994.

Microsoft Comes out Swinging

Microsoft announced this week that open source software infringes on 235 of its patents. The company is cagey about which patents and what the detailed infringements are. It does say that the Linux kernel infringes 42 patents, and that Linux's user interface (UI) infringes on 65 patents -- some very proprietary button placement no doubt, and very precious look and feel.

If they revealed more of the details, the software in question could be changed, and/or people would refute their charges. Instead, in an atmosphere of heightened awareness about frivolous patents, they're careful to avoid an SCO-like courtroom reckoning. Instead, reminiscent of the RIAA, the company is shrewdly using the media to brandish the specter of lawsuits over the growing open source community.

Microsoft paid Novell a few hundred million dollars for "coupons", which Microsoft can then sell to customers for Linux subscriptions. Novell, arguably eviscerated by Microsoft in the past, heaved itself back into a negotiating position with its SUSE Linux. Microsoft, for its part, has increasing found its expensive, proprietary, patch-needy software challenged by Linux. The deal was no doubt an attempt to stem the growing number of businesses abandoning its platform and opting for Linux.

There's a article on Microsoft's position, with some history on Linux, licensing, the legal claims, and open source in this Fortune article. The deal exploited loopholes in the GPL license which governs Linux distribution. Novell and Microsoft agreed not to sue each other's customers for patent infringement. The marketing collaboration may have been primary for Novell, and Microsoft was most likely also motivated to set a precedent. However, as Fortune noted, the deal naturally received scathing reviews from some small companies and open source purists.

"In free-software circles...the Microsoft-Novell entente was met with apoplectic rage. Novell's most eminent Linux developer quit in protest. Stallman [and his Free Software Foundation], of course, denounced it. Not only did it make a mockery of free-software principles, but it threatened the community's common-defense strategy."

Apparently companies such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, AIG, and members of the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL), approved the collaboration, which also got Linus Torvalds' blessing.

Ghosts of Big Blue

What's Microsoft up to? Some people have suggested that the Vista rollout wasn't as successful as Microsoft had hoped and that Microsoft is desperate. Microsoft sometimes misses the boat, and when they do they generally try anything they can to get back in the game anyway they can. They were famously late to the Internet party, but they now brag about Word's new html capabilities. They might be able to symbolically improve the 2003 edition of Word simply by adding the word "blog" to the dictionary. The 2003 version suggested that when I typed "blog", what I really meant "bog", or "bloc", or "blot", or "blob" or "blow" (in that order). As in, gee, we're really bogged down with Vista, let's form a bloc against Linux, let's obliterate it. Open source? We don't hear you, we don't hear you -- let's blot it out! Let's turn Linux customers to trembling blobs. Wow, this open source "movement's" tougher than we thought; this really blows.

Microsoft fails to surprise, since it has a track record of using strong-arm tactics, but open-source is not Netscape. Open source has growing support, both from organizations and individuals. Sun's Jonathan Schwartz, in a little Sun manifesto, did suggest pithily the Microsoft needs to wise up and "innovate, not litigate". He notes:

"You would be wise to listen to the customers you're threatening to sue - they can leave you, especially if you give them motivation. Remember, they wouldn't be motivated unless your products were somehow missing the mark."

Open source, he said, "is not a genie any litigator I know can put back in a bottle."

However it will most likely be a protracted battle. According to the Fortune article, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, AIG Technologies, HSBC, Wal-Mart, Dell and Reed Elsevier have bought coupons. These clients are naturally tremendously risk adverse and this may seem like a good option for them and their customers, rather than have Microsoft forever dangling hints of law suits around them. But importantly, these companies also depend on patent protection. They probably recognize open source as a common foe. Indeed some of them, like Reed Elsevier, are fighting their own, similar, open access battles.

Sciences International Inc.: Health and the Environment

It reads like the classic story of the fox guarding the hen house. Sciences International Inc., (SII), a small company with clients like the American Chemistry Council, Dupont, WR Grace, and Exxon Mobil, also ran the Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction (CERHR), a project in the NIH's toxicology program (NTP) charged with deciding which environmental toxins pose health risks to reproduction and the development of unborn children.

Science International wrote a report last year on bisphenol A's (BPA) safety, which came to the attention of the public and congress when the Environmental Working Group (EWG) alleged that the conclusions were biased towards industry research studies in a Feb. 28th letter to the NIH hiring director.

Reproductive health and development, like children's health, is always a lightening rod for public attention, and increasingly, so is bisphenol A. Science International's review of the literature on bisphenol A caused enough concern among scientists, members of congress, and public health official that in the ensuing brouhaha, the NIH's National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) terminated Science International's $5.24 million contract running CERHR. After the termination, Herman Gibb, the president of the approximately ten person company insisted to the Washington Post, "I don't ever believe in my heart of hearts there was a conflict of interest".

When the story made headlines last month it seemed to confirm our worst fears. NIEHS accepted a contract apparently written by Science's International to run CERHR. SII failed to list its conflicts of interest, an arrangement that seemed ripe for abuse. Acronym Required looked into the details of the story and they do little to allay those concerns. SII worked for the FDA, the NIH, and CERHR. SII also worked for chemical companies. Could SII have systematically watered down environmental safeguard regulations over the past decade to suit it's corporate clients? The Science International incident reveals the potential pitfalls of blending government and industry work, both for companies like SII and for public health and welfare.

Science International's Bisphenol A Study

Bisphenol A binds to estrogen receptors and can cause deleterious health effects such as decreased sperm count, enlarged prostate, cancers, diabetes, early puberty, and immunological and developmental effects. It can cause problems at very small doses, and it's ubiquitous, found in everything from dental resins to household products like canned food, plastic food containers, and baby bottles. Today 95% of the population carries detectable levels of the chemical in their blood and hundreds of scientific research reports indicate BPA's toxicity to humans.

According to scientists who study bisphenol A, Science International's first draft report on the health effects of BPA was biased. The report concluded the opposite of what hundreds of government funded BPA studies conclude. A survey of the research on bisphenol A effects shows that 92% over 100 (109/119) government studies on BPA found adverse health effects, whereas all 11 industry funded studies found that BPA caused no adverse health effects. Scientists critical of the Science's International report said that the review panel favored industry results while ignoring unreliable industry results base on unscientific methodologies like lab protocols that used no controls.The EWG also questioned whether SI's principal scientist could neutrally evaluate the dangers of bisphenol A (BPA) since he had worked with Dow Chemical and the European Chemical Industry Council -- entities with business interests in BPA.

Sciences International wrote the meta-study of the research studies, then chose the panel who reviewed their work. While SII said that the final conclusions as to the hazards of bisphenol A during reproduction and development were the panel's, when Acronym Required looked at the panel's edits of Science International's first draft they were stylistic, not scientific.

A New GovBiz Model?

Can a company consult to the chemistry industry and also evaluate the safety of that industry's products -- without bias? Can we trust government, industry partnerships to evaluate science when their contractual agreements cede the very principles we use to ensure integrity in research and in business, like peer review, conflict of interest statements, and competitive bidding processes? An older CERHR website described the partnership between SI and the CERHR:

"Under the direction of Michael Shelby, Ph.D., Director, CERHR at NIEHS, scientific and support staff at NIEHS and Sciences International, Inc. operate the Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction (CERHR). The Principal Investigator, Anthony Scialli, M.D., leads the scientific and support staff at Sciences International, Inc."

In addition to the BPA report, SII also produced reports profiling the safety of many other chemicals during their contract with CERHR. Sciences International consulted for 10 years with the FDA and the EPA, and worked with corporate clients like GE, Union Carbide, Hoechst Celanese, Otsuka Chemical, Cytek Industries, a plethora of law firms, and industry groups such as the American Chemical Council, Synthetic Organic Chemical, the Acrylonitrile Group, and the American Petroleum Institute. The EWG wrote in one letter to the director of the National Toxicology Program (NTP), about the "ethical concerns surrounding this contractor that involve apparent financial ties with the chemical industry..." Indeed, when we perused SI's older websites, they emphasized their prowess at influencing regulatory outcomes:

"Nowhere is Sciences' exposure assessment experience more evident than in EPA's new Clean Air Act residual risk program...[]...EPA generally applied, for the first time, this guidance in a recent residual risk case study of the secondary lead smelting industry. That guidance, or some variation of it, will be used to address residual risks for all remaining industrial categories with MACT standards. Working for a coalition of seven major trade associations (Chemical Manufacturers Association, American Petroleum Institute, American Coke and Coal Chemicals Institute, American Iron and Steel Institute, National Mining Association, American Forest and Paper Association, and Association of International Automobile Manufacturers), Sciences prepared detailed comments on the case study approach and results, and presented a report on March 1, 2000, to EPA's Science Advisory Board (SAB). The ensuing SAB draft meeting report clearly showed that Sciences' comments played a major role in their analysis, which included a recommendation to revise the case study and return it to the SAB for a second review.

Sciences also developed a vastly improved exposure and risk assessment method for evaluating coke oven residual risks and recently gathered residual risk data on the gasoline distribution industry for the American Petroleum Institute. Sciences' staff includes an ex-EPA manager who led for six years the hazardous air pollutant regulatory efforts for the Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards (OAQPS). In that position, he managed the initial development of the Human Exposure Model and was a member of the group that wrote the Agency's initial exposure and risk assessment guidelines. Earlier, he conceived of and managed the original 4-year study of the organic chemical manufacturing industry that ultimately formed the basis of the Hazardous Organic NESHAP (HON), he also..."

Naive marketing hype, or conflict of interest? If boasting to chemical companies about your company's power to have its way with government is inherently wrong, then for years Sciences International promiscuously flouted the rule in marketing material on their public website. Clearly, SII had strong ties to the chemical industry. But was it some especially insidious arrangement, a punishable offense? Or is this just how the U.S. government works?

Many companies who contract with the government also work for business clients who gain honest efficiencies and insights from consultants' familiarity with government rules and ruminations. In general, we wouldn't be shocked to find private contractors running public agencies, because privatization is a goal of recent governments -- both Democrat and Republican.

The increasingly fuzzy demarcations between private and public entities constitute contracts in Iraq, New Orleans, U.S. National Parks and atmospheric weather monitoring operations. Overall, companies who mix business relationships with government work fare well these days. The Homeland Security Index, for instance, which includes SII's parent company Tetra Tech, rose 5.3% last quarter, whereas the S&P 500 posted -.86%, the DJIA; -1.70%, and Nasdaq; -1.57%. Are these corporate/public relationships the new normal, or something else, given that SII was summarily fired?

The Etiquette of Serving Two Masters

In one of two good pieces Nature wrote on the subject a couple of weeks ago, ("Regulators pull contract for chemical review" 446;958-959, Apr. 26), the author noted, "there's a legal grey area" that contractors navigate in dealing with clients. Nature makes a point. If you find SII's client mix disturbing, then the client list of most law firms or consulting companies might also disturb you. How are consulting companies supposed to separate the clients? Nature quoted one toxicologist who pointed out that the rules are unclear, even for companies like Sciences International, he said, who (as Nature summarized) "try to segregate industrial and government work to limit conflicts".

Contrary to what the consultant assumed, however, and perhaps leading to to its undoing, Science's International did not convincingly "segregate" it's constituencies. Here are some excerpts from their 2005 site.

"...EPA estimated very high cancer risks in one assessment of a regulated industry. Sciences developed a much more accurate exposure model and also reassessed the cancer unit risk estimate using much more recent worker epidemiology data and biologically-based modeling approaches, originally developed by Sciences' experts. Sciences' revised study showed that actual risk estimates were two to three orders of magnitude lower than EPA's earlier conservative estimates...."

"Sciences has unique experience in assessing health risks due to inhaled air toxicants. Sciences' experts were selected by the EPA, as sole source contractors, to work on the underlying methodology by which the EPA develops its safe levels of exposure to chemicals by the inhalation route..."

"...Through a contract with the EPA, Sciences carried out the quality assurance and validation of BMDS, making several critical recommendations that influenced its development. ...[]...Sciences is also currently involved in a similar effort for EPA's recently developed Categorical Regression (CatReg) software...[]...A 5-person Sciences International team is writing the EPA Benchmark Dose Guidelines. With all these considerations in mind, we are in an excellent position to apply the BMDS and CatReg methods to particular substances that would benefit from these approaches."

"[Sciences International scientists]...have applied a biologically-based model approach to coke oven emissions for the industry and derived an alternative cancer potency factor which has been accepted by the EPA. We believe that our ability to utilize accurate dosimetry and pharmacodynamic models in tandem in risk assessments provides unique opportunities to the chemical industry."

SII's statements seem clearly intended to sway a corporate audience. SII clearly tries to establish itself as an ally to the chemical industry, "working on underlying methodogies", a company who changed EPA estimates "two to three orders of magnitude lower", who made "critical recommendations" that "influenced" standards, and created "unique opportunities [for] the chemical industry". Under their "sole contractor" status, SI and its government clients had perhaps short-circuited the bidding process. EWG highlighted portions of a 1999 a letter from SI to RJ Reynolds, where the company wrote:

"Our experience in supporting these government agencies in the advancement of science gives Science a unique credibility to negotiate with regulators of behalf of our private sector clients, to speak authoritatively in the scientific community, and to be accepted in legal proceedings and by the public."

According to Sciences International's own self-promotion, it had broad influence in many agencies, which benefited chemical companies. But without knowledge about the specific science behind SI's marketing, it's difficult to discern what changes they made. It would require a research team to analyze whether those changes were indeed detrimental to health -- whether they are a sleight on behalf of industry, or whether SI simply refined the EPA's less accurate or outdated measurement techniques. Maybe the government standards for indoor and outdoor air, water, etc., did benefit from adjustments based on SI's expertise.

Toxic Puffery

Many big companies in Science International's position keep a more sanctified public front, a website splashed with value concoctions of their love for children, concern for animals and stewardship of the great outdoors. Naively or greedily, Sciences International tossed discretion to the wind and instead promoted their business, aggressively emphasizing the their influential role in government and their willingness to leverage that value proposition for corporate clients.

SII redesigned their website a couple of years ago, and seemingly came to its corporate senses, including a more publicly agreeable photo collage of children and trees, and a client list scrubbed of corporate entities. The new site brags less about the company's experience drafting "more accurate" measurements of exposure assessment and dose-response for the EPA. But sometimes information on the internet doesn't die as cleanly as people might wish. Occasionally ghosts of past lurk about to startle the unsuspecting with a bump in the night, a startling reminder of pasts long since banquished. SII's old website revealed SII's habit of not separating clients. The entire business model, in fact, leveraged conflicts of interest.

"...Sciences' methods development work is often sponsored by public agencies, such as the U.S. EPA, while applications work is most often for the private sector where agents of particular concern need to be addressed. Sciences' knowledge of the acceptable regulatory methods and practices can facilitate ultimate acceptance of these analyses for the private sector."

Dr. Gibb insisted that in cases where SI's government work with one chemical coincided with corporate work, consultants on one contract had no knowledge of what their cohorts were doing on another. How shall we interpret that? On one hand, consulting can be like that. On the other, this was a ten person company. The president doesn't know what people are working on? He complained to the journal Nature that the NIEHS action was unfair "with a capital U". Perhaps so, but then it would probably be fair to say that for whatever their intents and purposes, SI's record just happened to look fishy with a capital F.

Despite the challenge of sorting out what the company was really up to, SII's work is fraught with appearances of conflict of interest. As EWG pointed out, the NIH was remiss not to look at Sciences International's website years earlier. Even a half-hearted glance would have hinted at a slew of conflicts.

According to the Los Angeles Times, in response to NIH inquiries about their duel roles, Sciences International acknowledged that they had prepared Federal health reviews for styrene, ethylene glycol, and soy formula, while working for a styrene trade group, the American Chemistry Council, and the United Soybean Board. However, the president, Herman Gibb, told the Washington Post that he had only learned "last month", because of the NIH's information request request, that the company had worked for the chemical trade companies while simultaneously working to ascertain safe levels for those chemicals.

(Read the continuation of this story, starting with "Vanity Press and Educating the Layperson", in the next post)

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Acronym Required previously wrote about bisphenol A in the following articles:

Plastic Bottles- Protecting Your Baby, by the ACC (July, 2005)

Bisphenol-A and Phthalates Bill in California (January, 2006)

San Francisco Bans Bisphenol A, Phthalates (July, 2006)

San Francisco phthalates & Bisphenol A Ban (November, 2006)

To escape global warming you need to buy a new car. The automobile industry reminds me of this every day. In reality when I drive my "old" fuel efficient car, I end up on the highway, snagged in traffic with thousands of other cars. But all the car advertisements insist that if I would only buy a shiny brand new Ford or Chevy or Dodge, I wouldn't be stuck in that traffic jam. I'd be driving on the open road, in the mountains or the desert, not a car in sight, no smog, only the sunset baking the auburn canyons and the glint of sun off the new wax -- just me, the car, nature, (and my sunglasses).

Really, I seldom drive because I don't need to. I love to walk and I actually enjoy public transportation, with all its jostling and smooshing together of humanity. It's also a pragmatic choice, this "alternative" transportation. There's a lot of traffic congestion in my neighborhood, which at peak hours, involves mostly high-strung, work-ready parents dropping their kids off at school. Their idling SUVs jam the intersections for blocks. Each parent in turn deposits their child at school, with the lunch, and the homework projects, the gym bag, and the well-wishes. This inch-worming, stop and go and stop traffic wildly irritates the workmen and FedEx drivers. How and they deliver goods and services on time? People become frustrated and irritable and resort to crazy maneuvers and horn-blowing. So for me, it's often faster, cheaper and more relaxing to take the bus.

Sometimes when I'm out for a walk or run, I have to pass this restless line of SUVs and trucks and I try to hold my breath like I'm swimming under water until I get past the idling vehicles and short-tempered drivers, the restless children, and the impatient truck driver who wants to swerve around the whole line of cars and get through the intersection but then at the last minute -- can't. When I finally pass all the carbon monoxide emitting vehicles I eagerly gulp whatever air ends up in that space.

I should worry about the quality of that breath, I'm sure. How well am I oxygenating my lungs as an uncommon pedestrian in a sea of cars? In order to be a good citizen in a time of global warming, Time Magazine says you should live in the city. But if I were to take this advice to heart, would I become a naive martyr for the cause? Cities are polluted, and if I walk or take public transportation don't I make myself even more vulnerable to everyone else's choices to drive?

Plus, the new-car ads constantly tug at me, telling me to ignore reality and instead envision cars as a sort of personal utopia. Leggy models have long since been replaced by the rest of nature, and now I have confidence that if I buy any Infiniti, or Volvo, or Saab, the new vehicle will swiftly transport me from the smoggy present to a pristine, otherworldly mountain road. There I will switchback along, zooming past snowbanks and negotiating slick spots with the surest of handling, surrounded by the freshest air, forever warm and safe in the arms of mother nature.

Marketing with animals is effective marketing, and automobile marketers don't shy away from piling on animals as well as nature. Infiniti ads once featured woodpeckers that flew into the car to peck at the wood on the console. I'm not sure what happened to the birds, but I remind myself that it's not only the Queen of England, with her privilege and idle time, her Landrover and a vast territory of heaths and heathers, who can see a fourteen-point buck in the countryside. There's nothing to stop me from doing the same. I can purchase a new Subaru from my local dealer any day of the week and crash through beautiful forests in four wheel drive comfort. Then, according to one Subaru ad, a deer will emerge magically from the forest, stand next to my windshield and gaze at me appreciatively, the two of us, bonded by nature and my new car.

With all the marketing talk of blue skies, I'm always convinced that there's a very very environmentally hospitable, economical car just around the bend. I turn each magazine page expectantly, hoping to see this dream car of mine.

You would think my dream car would materialize, they've been "working" on it for decades. The time is ripe. News articles are suddenly unanimous, definitive and grim about global warming. Newpapers and online news shows feature photos of cars, bumper to bumper, in cities obscured by brown smog, with people on scooters wearing gas masks, sometimes coughing. But the automobile industry still natters away with the very same antithetical vision -- large gas-guzzling vehicles zooming silently through pristine, untouched nature. And how did they get that Jeep to the top of that precious precipitous canyon, so much cliff and sky, without a trace of car noise or exhaust?

At some point perhaps, we can be swayed, along with the auto industry, to conjure up any vision, no matter how absurd. To wit, you can place you and your imaginary new car into a scene from "An Inconvenient Truth" without a trace of remorse or irony. A recent magazine ad did this very thing, featuring an Aston Martin Roadster parked in front of a glacier, similar to Grey Glacier and Lago Grey, bits of ice floating by the car. (You can see the ad in this PDF. )

Of course the Aston Martins is the classic luxury car-- sporty, fast, and expensive; you would need to pay to realize this dream. The flagship "Vanquish" model lists for $255,000. It gets about 11mpg in the city and 17mpg in the country, but notably has outstanding horsepower and reaches speeds of 165 to 225 hundred miles per hour. All the better to blow by glaciers with. Naturally, for that price you have your choice of leather seat color, from among hundreds of nature's finest shades, including Falcon Grey, Kestrel Tan, Quail Grey, Red Fox, Sandstorm, Shark Blue, Bison Brown. I think their "Arctic Blue" succinctly complements the glacier theme. By immersing yourself in such dissonance, carbon credits would be a distant afterthought.

We know better than to think that the Vanquish is melting earth's glaciers, and to be honest, given the chance by some benevolent spendthrift, we'd probably be all too happy to take the Roadster for a spin. But while emissions soar, fuel economy standards remain the same, decade after decade. The auto industries fights tooth and nail for the right pollute, and we the people of habit collude with polluters by resisting change. The automobile industry, like an aging Faulknerian belle, forever insists on miring us in their beloved automobile myths. But there must be some breaking point. The further they attempt to pull us into the wilderness, the greater our cognitive dissonance. Then at some point we'll collectively snap and insist on change, insist on a new reality for transportation.

EPA v. Massachusetts

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Monday, in Massachusetts v. EPA, that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is obligated to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Twelve states, along with public health and environmental groups, had sued the EPA for failing to protect citizens against emissions. The case wended its way to the highest court after the EPA denied the appeal of the states asking it to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

The EPA had argued that it wasn't authorized to pass mandatory regulations under the act, and that no causal link between greenhouse gases and emissions was proven. The agency also said that such regulation would be a "piecemeal", therefore would conflict with "the President's comprehensive approach".

Interestingly, the EPA relied in part on the court's opinions in a tobacco case, Brown v. Williamson. In that case the Supreme Court ruled that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could not regulate cigarette smoke. The EPA noted in its arguments that in the tobacco case the court had considered "tobacco['s] unique political history" and the tobacco industry's "significant portion of the America economy". Climate change also has "political history", said the EPA. The agency reasoned that if it were to act on carbon dioxide and other emissions, that would alter Congress' intent for the Clean Air Act to regulate "local" pollution, and would force the EPA to apply the act to a very "global" problem. This, the EPA said, would have even greater economic and political repercussions than had the FDA been forced to regulate tobacco.

The court's majority opinion heartily rejected these arguments. The opinion recounted some of the science and political history of climate change and emissions, and compared this to tobacco's history, clearly outlining the strong differences between congressional intent and action in the two cases.

The EPA also reasoned that even if it did have agency in this case, the only way to control greenhouse gases would be to regulate fuel efficiency, which was the Department of Transportation's (DOT) purview. The court rejected this rational, noting that the EPA "has been charged with protecting the publics 'health' and 'welfare'", whereas "DOT sets mileage standards". The EPA couldn't "shirk its environmental responsibilities", said the court, by claiming some confusing inter-agency overlap.

The agency stated that it was following the Clean Air Act's allowance for it's best "judgment", and that given existing scientific uncertainty on climate change, it would be best in the EPA not take action. It also said that greenhouse gases weren't "air pollutants". The court said that such a stand was "arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with the law". Added the court, the "laundry list" of excuses of why the EPA couldn't respond, unbacked by any scientific reasoning, was inadequate excuse for inaction. The court ordered the EPA to find whether greenhouse gases endangered public health.

In the April 2, 2007 White House Press Briefing following the decision, acting Press Secretary Dana Perino asserted that the Bush administration has "long said that greenhouse gases are contributing to a warming planet and that human generated carbon dioxide is a large contributor..." But then she refuted the court, stating that the Bush administration policies have been successfully (and comprehensively) enacted via Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, even though in fact combined fuel efficiency of the US car and light truck fleet has decreased since 1986. The Press Secretary also argued incorrectly, that increasing fuel efficiency would cause safety issues, which is oft-tried, but tired and false reasoning.

The minority court opinion argued that though global warming was real and problematic, the "redress of grievances of the sort at issue" was best left to the executive and legislative branches. (though, given that the Clean Air Act is Congresses current solution, one that the executive branch has blatantly flouted, this seems questionable). The minority disputed the state of Massachusetts' (plaintiff) standing, and also argued that the plaintiffs didn't convincingly show an injury due to "global warming". Furthermore the minority opinion said, it wasn't clear that the injury (loss of coastal land) was redressable with the Clean Air Act.

Bush responded to the decision by saying that any action must not hurt the economy. The U.S. couldn't do something when China was doing nothing, he noted puerilely.

EDF v. Duke Energy

The Supreme Court also ruled 9-0 in favor of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) in EDF v. Duke Energy. The court ruled that the company needs to follow the rules of the Clean Air Act when refurbishing old coal plants.

Clean air proponents welcome the rulings.

Last year, as avian bird flu H5N1 skipped around the world decimating bird populations and fatally infecting clusters of humans, governments near and far felt increasingly threatened by the possibility of a influenza pandemic. Tension and mistrust increased among countries at a time when full cooperation among them was essential to public health.

Countries promised $1.9 billion to a United Nations avian flu program but had yet to fulfill their pledges. The World Health Organization (WHO) established a repository for virus information from member countries at the Influenza Sequence Database (ISD) at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in 2004, but the agency had a spotty history trying to deal effectively with infectious disease and was accused of beholden to the "gang of fifteen" labs given access to the data. The World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) and the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) also committed to sharing data, but like the WHO, answered to their member states and could do little to compel countries to share resources. Private labs, the CDC, and individual countries like Russia, and China, had all been withholding data and biological samples, sometimes because of poor international relations, concern about intellectual property rights, or concern about credit for their contributions.

In response to the fragmentation in the research community, scientists, politicians and public health officials fulminated, concerned that hording virus and sequence samples would hobble effective responses to outbreaks. In February of 2006, Italian influenza scientist Ilaria Capua called on fellow scientists to promptly deposit their sequence data into gene banks."'Most of us are paid to protect human and animal health,' she said, 'If publishing one more paper becomes more important, we have our priorities messed up.'" ( Science 3 March 2006: Vol. 311. no. 5765, p. 1224)

By August she and about 70 influenza research allies, along with international consultant Peter Bogner, announced the establishment of a new, more open and collaborative system. Capua, Bogner, David Lipman, Nancy Cox and the others submitted a letter to the journal Nature announcing the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID), a more collaborative and egalitarian effort to collect and share data in the scientific community.

The project is now set up and expected to begin accepting sequence data. Last week Science wrote that the database will live at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) in Geneva. According to the article, access to the database will be free to people who register and accept the terms of use. Those who submit data have 6 months to take submit patents and scientific publications before their data becomes publicly available.

Last summer, people welcomed the initial announcement of GISAID and had high hopes for the collaborative approach. Yet some scientists are reserving their opinions until they know the exact terms of the agreement, still undisclosed. Others are openly skeptical of Bogner's motives, and wonder out loud why a media privatization mogel who is better known in skiing and sailing circles would pursue such a venture. For his part, he says he understands the issues scientists have with data rights from working with musicians. According to collaborators he has infused energy and financial backing to the project, and according to Science, might help bring future corporate funding .

Will sharing data help the frayed international relations? Emily Fitri of the Jakarta Post wrote her perception of the country's untenable situation in an article this week. Its unclear how well this represents the government's position in the wake of its agreement with Baxter. In summary she thought Indonesia and poor countries should be incensed for being used as "petri-dishes". While Indonesia struggled with geographical and informational challenges to containing bird flu she said, wealthier countries take cultures to study and make vaccines without offering assurance that whatever resulting remedy will shared with the country for an affordable cost. Indonesia has a right to be angry she says:

"There is a local saying cacing pun marah ketika diinjak, literally translated as even a worm gets upset when stepped upon. This must seriously be pondered upon by those with greater power to review their initial righteous intentions of creating a better world."

Indonesia said earlier this week that it would share data as soon as it is promised affordable vaccines. Perhaps GISAID will help promote the cooperation that is needed but it seems like a daunting challenge. Whatever relations are in place before a pandemic will be further tested in a crisis. Russia is in the midst of trying to control recent H5N1 outbreaks among birds in 8 villages around Moscow. The Moscow Times reported on the situation this week:

"A sign reading "Quarantine" welcomed a steady stream of vehicles passing through the checkpoint. The vehicles slowed down to drive over disinfectant-soaked sawdust intended to clean their tires. The traffic policemen took turns standing out in the icy wind and stopping drivers, ordering some to open the trunks of their cars and show their documents in a temporary cabin nearby."

The country is trying to vaccinate all birds and control the outbreak. One could imagine this scenario anywhere in the world. Some Russians interviewed for the Moscow Times article said that the control methods were arbitrary and that drivers circumvented the blockades by driving through surrounding villages. Others said it was a lot of hoopla for nothing. One veterinary worker who the Moscow Times interviewed commented: "Two chickens die and all this blows up. It's ridiculous."

Scientists agree that international cooperation is necessary to prevent infection and develop vaccines, and in the case of contagious human infection, to contain the disease and distribute medicines. Hopefully GISAID's accomplishment in meeting its six on-line month goal will reinforce the hope it engendered last August and help promote cooperation that citizens of the world are dependent on -- granted, a tall order.

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We also wrote about Avian Flu in these articles: Avian Flu v. Everyday Plagues, "Hopes For Avian Flu Vaccine"; "Modeling Epidemics", and "Avian Flu in China- Increasing Resistance", "Avian Flu Updates", and Avian Flu Pandemic -- Officials Save The Date"

The Perfect Storm, Corporate IT vs. Determined Employee

Kaiser Permanente employee Justen Deal noticed few months ago that the custom implementation of the health care provider's Epic Systems records management system, dubbed "HealthConnect", was costing billions of dollars but was plagued by persistent problems that effected health care delivery. In addition, the employee projected future operating expenses and expected revenues and asserted that Kaiser faced a $7 billion dollar deficit in the next couple of years. He wrote some letters to individuals in charge of corporate oversight, to the board, and to various internal parties who he thought should be concerned. They said they'd investigate his concerns, they warned him not to talk to the board, they said he was mistaken, and at times claimed they didn't understand his complaints. He sent more evidence. Finally Kaiser lawyers said they investigated his complaints and said they were all baseless. Not satisfied, he sent letters to several California state agencies. All of these communications are now posted at his site called www.fixkp.org, and make for very interesting reading. Finally he sent a letter to over 50,000 employees, again listing his concerns.

In response, the CEO of Kaiser, George Halvorson, wrote a letter of his own to all 151,000 employees refuting Justen Deal's allegations. "The person who wrote the e-mail is a young man relatively new to KP whose job involves publications...", he starts out. "Overall, the e-mail was an unfortunate combination of partial facts, old data, incomplete data, "conspiracy" thinking, and naivete´.", he ends. He addresses the complaints. Responding to Justen's comments about his replacement of the board right after he was hired at Kaiser, he says, "I suspect he hasn't evaluated very many Boards."

He dismisses Justen's questions about an audit of his position at a previous employer, a Minnesota managed healthcare organization called Health Partners. The Minnesota Attorney General's Office's audit was "critical" his $5.5 million dollar compensation package when he left and his financial oversight as the CEO. But Halvorson said the 'routine' audit cleared him: "no actions, no citations, no regulation violations and no mandatory results of any kind."

Justen Deal also criticized the CIO of Kaiser for simultaneously serving as a director of a company hired as a consultant for Kaiser, while he was employed at Kaiser. Halvorson's letter declared that the CIO "was not, in fact, a principal or Board member of the "Tanning" company when they did our systems evaluation work. However, "J. Clifford Dodd", the CIO of Kaiser, was indeed at Kaiser when he hired Tanning Technologies, a consulting company that lists him as director "John C. Dodd", at least according to Tanning's own SEC filing in 2002.

Mr. Halvorson also addressed the technical problems implementing Epic Solutions system that Deal outlined: "KP HealthConnect issues are both inaccurate and wrong". The HealthConnect system is working well, he said. However a ComputerWorld author wrote an article titled "Problems abound for Kaiser e-health records management system: An internal report details hundreds of technical issues and outages", which details a few of the hundreds of problems listed in the 722 page internal report on the system's issues and outages. The system has been down for hours at a time causing various critical disruptions within the Kaiser healthcare system:

• "On May 10, a power outage that lasted for 37 hours and 9 minutes affected multiple facilities [causing pharmacy and tracking problems]..If a patient were transferred during this time they would need to track their location manually [and]....users are reporting that multiple patients are showing in the wrong beds"
• March 26, for 3 hours and 51 minutes, "users in multiple locations..were unable to access patient info or update patient info"
• April 10 for 1 hours and 23 minutes, drug information is not population for nurses, pharmacists, and technicians in one office and they "cannot see patient updates for new [drug] orders or changes in meds, such as stopping orders..."
• "On June 7, for 6 hours and 34 minutes, labs were unable to collect data, run tests and provide test results."
• "On Oct. 10, for 3 hours and 24 minutes, doctors and nurses in several facilities were unable to retrieve critical medical information to treat patients."

These were only a few of the issues. IT is tough business, especially for critical systems in healthcare and banking. Clearly, this is a massive system subject to significant challenges. Kaiser Permanente has 151,000 employees, 37 medical centers, 12,000 physicians, 8.6 million members and $31 billion in operating revenue. The plan to get the system up and running in three years was ambitious. So someone like Justen, who is not accustomed to the thorny business of IT would be rightly shocked at the messiness of it all. That the system was supposedly written in "MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System) -- a health care programming language originally developed in the 1960s", may or may not be relevant, but the software had certainly never been scaled to this size organization. Various sources report different issues, architecture, planning, personnel and management failures.

Throughout his communications, Justen Deal expressed concern about a projected $7 billion dollar deficit that Kaiser was facing. Halvorson said in his letter, "The memo leads off with a mention of our financial future. Interestingly, that's the one area where the e-mail may have done us all a service". Halvorson says he warned about the looming deficits in internal memos. The projected deficit was news to the San Francisco Chronicle, which published a story about Deal's email and the impending deficit titled: "Kaiser: Critical need to cut rising costs $7 billion in losses if no action taken, HMO report says". Halvorson told the Chronicle that Kaiser has started cutting costs -- that wouldn't affect patient care.

Many, many of the details of this story are unknown. In the end, similar to Katrina, if there's a massive hurricane brewing off the coast, then FEMA's assurances that they're prepared and everything is fine will only subdue the masses until the storm hits. Kaiser will hopefully get the system up and running -- and if so it will be a feat. In the meantime, the turmoil is very real. The CTO, Cliff Dodd, resigned the day after Deal sent his mass email. Kaiser denies that the Chief Technology Officer's resignation is at all related to Justen's allegations.

Business and the Web 2.0 Generation?

On one hand Justen Deal believes he's preventing another Enron, which is arguably an idealistic or grandiose idea. Its easy to imagine that he was infected by disgruntled IT employees whose project was canned in the decision to license Epic. It's easy to argue that he's young and naive, which is the tack that Kaiser took in their correspondence. However, while anyone can make these points, a reading of the letters on the www.fixkp.org website shows that the organization handled him abysmally. One letter written by outside counsel addresses just one of his complaints by curtly listing about 30 other organizations using the Epic System, followed by: "Do you have any concerns that you can list with us about the decision-making process used by these providers to select Epic?".

It was clearly a fishing expedition and Deal quickly questioned why the lawyer, who Kaiser used to defend itself against wrongful termination suits, was fielding operations questions addressed to the board. He writes back in a letter posted on his site that his opinions of Kaiser's Epic selection processes are "irrelevant" and that engineering documents addressed this. Obviously he couldn't answer her question about other organizations' decisions, he said. He did offer information about the relative sizes of some of the organizations she listed. Some had several hundred members, compared to Kaiser's 8.6 million, others had several hundred doctors, compared to Kaiser's 13,000, doctors, etc.. In this view then, the system wasn't proven to scale or architected to an organization the size of Kaiser.

Clearly, his opinions of the system aren't isolated, since outages have caused turmoil across the organization. A recent article in Harvard Business Review talks about different IT implementations including enterprise systems that impose process changes at all levels of the organization. The author gives the example of another health care organization that failed:

"In 2002, a Boston-based hospital set up an IT system that replaced handwritten prescriptions with online orders. ...Even though studies had demonstrated that the system would reduce medication errors, physicians bitterly resisted. They complained that the computer-based process was slower and less convenient than paper-based ordering and that the built-in error checking didn't work. They protested so strongly that the hospital was able to roll out the system in only a few departments. Today, most of the doctors continue to write prescriptions on paper and fax them to the hospital's pharmacy..."

It wasn't the only Healthcare IT project to fail. On a larger scale, Britain's 2002 healthcare initiative evidently wasted $24 billion, and apparently two Members of Parliament say the project is "sleepwalking toward disaster." The author of the Harvard Business Review article says, "In fact, the biggest mistake business leaders make is to underestimate resistance when they impose changes in the ways people work." He quotes a CIO, who said '"I can make a project fail, but I can't make it succeed. For that, I need my [non-IT] business colleagues."' Successful system implementations need to broad support at all levels. This may be even more important in the future.

Deal was definitely a thorn in Kaiser's side, someone who was young, unintimidated, and apparently not yet appropriately practical (or cynical, depending on your view). Kaiser's tactics, aimed at quieting him, seemed to have the opposite effect. The internet gave easy public access to SEC statements, newspaper articles, attorney generals' audits. He dug deeper, found more evidence, wrote precise, articulate letters, and did not back down. He thought he had important insight that was being ignored. In a way, Kaiser executives underestimated both technology and Mr. Deal.

Twenty somethings virtually grew up with the internet. Deal's identity is available at his blog, and anywhere else on the internet, which is typical to many people his age, who for better or worse, have markedly different attitudes about privacy then previous generations. The attitude that information, personal, corporate or otherwise is free and accessible, flies in the face of a certain corporate theology in which information is coveted and hoarded, and top down management restricts open exchange especially between personnel levels. In this age, is this an effective way to manage? Is it an effective structure with which to implement an enterprise wide system? The corporation's attitude about information clashed with today's information accessibility.

Is Justen Deal and Kaiser an isolated event or a new trend? Either way, it could be a wake up call for organizations. But whether Kaiser is contemplating this, or as we speak rewriting the employee handbook rules and toiling over their public relations effort, remains to be seen.

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Acronym Required has written other articles about management issues here.

Pilot Fatigue

The Wall Street Journal published a piece in last Saturday's edition, called "Pilot-Fatigue Test Lands JetBlue In Hot Water", describing how U.S. carrier JetBlue Airways tested pilot fatigue in an illicit experiment a year and a half ago, unbeknownst to passengers. The airline recruited pilots to spend more time at the controls than the strict eight hour limit set by the FAA. The Wall Street Journal quoted David Stempler, president of Air Travelers Association, an advocacy group for travelers who said, "passengers would be shocked that this was going on."

Would they? 439 million people flew on scheduled domestic and international flights on U.S. airlines during the first seven months of 2006, according to a Bureau of Transportation Statistics press release in October, 2006. But public demand for information about airline safety seems tepid and the issue is barely covered by the media. Individuals don't seem to know or care how fatigue leading to pilot error translates to a personal fatality risk. Or perhaps they know full well and choose to accept the risk.

In the Wall Street Journal's rundown of the JetBlue story, the airline worked with Mark Rosekind, an alertness researcher and ubiquitous airline consultant whose company markets a product called "Alertness Metrics Technology (AMT)" --an actigraph and personal digital assistant (PDA). A group of volunteer JetBlue pilots flew ten or more hours a day and the devices helped the pilots record their 24-hr sleep/wake patterns and physiological information.

According to the article, word got out that JetBlue was scheduling pilots on longer shifts. The pilots union complained to the Federal Aviation Administration ( FAA). If the FAA allowed JetBlue to flout the rules, than arguably union affiliated airlines would be compelled to compete with JetBlue's cost saving measures.

Pilot fatigue is influenced by a host of factors, including age, fitness, and individual physiology. One pilot error can and has caused hundreds of deaths. Current FAA regulations impose an eight-hour limit for a pilot's flight time during a 24-hour period, and the pilot must have eight continuous hours of rest in the preceding 24-hour. They limit continuous duty to 16 hours. Pilots increasingly report that they fly longer hours with shorter breaks, that scheduling is chaotic and asynchronous, and that flight delays cause longer work days. Studies indicate the extent of the problem:

"in a 4-year study of regional airlines that ended in 1998, 88 percent of the crew members indicated fatigue was a common occurrence, and 92 percent reported fatigue as a moderate-to-serious safety issue".

The FAA rules have not been changed significantly since the 1940's. During one House of Representatives hearing on pilot fatigue Vernon S. Ellingstad, Director of Research and Engineering, National Transportation Safety Board complained:

"the Department of Transportation has spent over 20 million taxpayer dollars to research operator fatigue, but little has been done to apply the knowledge gained from this research."

The FAA readily points out that it was forced to drop changes it proposed in 1995 because of years of disagreement, complaints, congressional hearings and lawsuits among invested parties.

JetBlue - In Hot Water?

In the meantime, the FAA is not enforcing the rules effectively. JetBlue seems to have designed its own regulatory guidance by increasing pilot flying times during this experiment. The Wall Street Journal account seems incomplete if not spurious. "It has been nearly 18 months since [JetBlue's] novel experiment", they say.

However, on January 24, 2006, 9 months ago, the Washington Post wrote about JetBlue's plan. The story, "Poor Behavior, Fatigue Led to '04 Plane Crash; Proper Procedures Not Followed", focused on the crash of a corporate jet in 2004 that investigators attributed to fatigue¹. In the last couple of paragraphs it talked about JetBlue's pilot scheduling. Duane Woerth, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, claimed that even as investigators found fatigue fatal in that crash, JetBlue was trying to get around the eight-hour limit on pilots' flying hours:

'"I am most concerned -- no, paranoid -- about the pressure for profits and productivity that JetBlue and others are trying to get even more hours in a single duty day,' Woerth said. He claimed that JetBlue, whose pilots are not union members, was trying to get around the eight-hour limit on pilots' flying hours."

In response, the JetBlue spokesperson, according to the paper, "said the airline received a temporary exemption in May allowing some of its pilots to fly more than the limit as part of a study on pilot fatigue", and that the airline was not trying to 'squeeze the most out of crew time for the carrier.'

Last Saturday's paper said that JetBlue claimed it got the OK for the experiment from the regional New York office and that FAA headquarters had no idea the experiment was being carried out. But on Janary 21, 2006, three days before the Washington Post report, JetBlue wrote its own press release about the experiment. That press release, "JetBlue Plans Innovative Alertness Management Safety Program.", which has since been removed from the airline's site, didn't mention the FAA regulations or that its pilots were flying longer hours then the FAA allowed. But it did announce the experiment and describe aspects of it, albeit sugarcoated with marketing:

"This program will help us reduce risks associated with fatigue," said Dave Barger, JetBlue's President and COO. "Safety has always been our top priority and, with our collaboration with Alertness Solutions, we will be able to make the safe skies even safer."

On January 24, 2006, the FAA also put out a press report. Taken in context with JetBlue's press release and the Washington Post report, its hard not to see the FAA's press release as a response to JetBlue's announcement, the pilots union reaction to the airline's press release, and the fact that the news had dribbled out to the press -- although the Washington Post was the only paper to report the story. The FAA press release noted that its rules "have evolved along with advances in commercial air travel". It seemed to speak directly to the JetBlue experiment:

"The FAA is confident that, overall, the airline industry complies with the FAA's current rules....The current rules are fundamentally sound but the FAA remains open to any new research or data on fatigue that would assist the agency with developing a new proposal."

In summary, the information the Washington Post reported January 24, 2006, was available in a JetBlue press release January 21st. The FAA said on January 24th that they were open to new research. But, the Wall Street Journal article last Saturday reports that when FAA headquarters found out about JetBlue's experiment they were incensed. They were "red-faced", and a "high-ranking FAA policy maker" said "'We don't allow experiments with passengers on board, period.'" But if they only found out about the experiment in January, and were surprised, why did they say at the time they were "open to any new research on fatigue"? Is JetBlue really in "hot water"? The Wall Street Journal reports:

"...the FAA reprimanded JetBlue, ordered it to clarify procedures as well as flight manuals and Mr. Ballough personally chastised management. But the agency closed its investigation without imposing any monetary fines on the carrier, adding that it was not 'an effort to squeeze the most out of crew time for the carrier'. Since then, FAA officials say headquarters has ordered closer scrutiny by inspectors of all JetBlue. But the agency closed its investigation without imposing any monetary fines on the carrier. " [emphasis ours]

If the FAA was so incensed why didn't they fine JetBlue? Why did their January press release note that they welcomed research? Why are they welcoming research when according to all parties, they don't act on the abundance of research that exists? There are several possibilities.

When Airlines are Nimble and the FAA is Not

The airline industry responds rapidly to the expanding and changing market by outsourcing maintenance, flying fuller flights, establishing low-cost carriers, and cutting costs wherever feasible. However an audit of the FAA's oversight of the changing industry by the U.S. Department of Transportation inspector general in June, 2005, indicated that the agency can't keep up with the rapid changes.

Five major airlines studied in the audit "retired 664 aircraft, stored 166, closed 42 maintenance facilities, cut 9,920 pilot jobs and 12,873 mechanic jobs", in a couple of years after 9-11. Yet FAA could not adjust its operations to the changing profile of the industry, in part because of personnel shortages. Much of the report focused on the agency's failure to properly oversee maintenance operations². The audit also noted that there were more incidents and accidents when airlines were in bankruptcy and because of "prolonged psychological stress and fatigue that pilots had experienced as a result of major pay cuts and flying extra hours to make up for the loss of pay". The audit recommended that the FAA increase its vigilance commensurate with the gravity of these circumstances and adjust its inspection regime for better oversight of the rapidly expanding low-cost carriers, JetBlue and others.

While the results of excessive fatigue can be catastrophic, public and legislative attention focuses elsewhere unless there is a fatal accident. At a congressional hearing following the crash of an American Airlines flight, when attention to the problem piqued, a US Department of Transportation official expressed his frustration:

"The Safety Board's first aviation recommendation related to human fatigue was issued in May 1972, more than a quarter of a century ago, and it asked the FAA to revise FAR 135 to provide adequate flight and duty time limitations. Twenty-seven years later, we are still examining the issue of fatigue, this time in the accident involving American Airlines Flight 1420 that crashed on landing on June 1st in Little Rock, killing 13 people...

It's a complicated problem and the solution is not straight-forward. But in a bureaucratic agency like the FAA this lack of pressure can lead to dangerous complacency in the public, regulators and legislators.

Flouting the FAA -- Or Not?

The Wall Street Journal article noted that JetBlue "says it never intended to mislead anyone at the FAA, and the JetBlue spokeswoman chalked the situation up to 'a miscommunication.'" However the same sort of miscommunication happened with American Airlines several years ago.

Following the crash of an American Airlines flight in Little Rock, Arkansas that investigators blamed on fatigue, the FAA issued a warning to all airlines that it would increase enforcement of crew rest rules. American Airlines asked for an extension of the December, 1999 extension, as did most major airlines, according to a story in the Dallas Morning News -- "Pilots feel pushed despite rest rules". (May 12, 2002)

The FAA did not grant American Airlines extension request and followed up, as it warned it would, with an audit of the airlines practices. It found 825 infractions of the rest rules between December 1999 and May 2000. However when the FAA cited the airline for not complying with the rest rules, not hiring extra pilots to cover shifts, and ignoring the FAA's request, a spokesperson for American Airlines said "The [FAA's] Southwest Region knew what we were doing."

Because of the ambiguity of the deal struck between the local office and American Airlines, the company wasn't fined, despite ample evidence of each of the 825 infractions, admissions from the pilots, and no evidence of any agreement between the airline and the regional office. The FAA ended up citing the airline for 38 violations which occurred in two weeks following the FAA's audit. It fined the airline $285,000 for violations of crew rest rules.

As reported by the Dallas Morning News, "had the FAA chosen to fine American the maximum amount, those violations could have cost the airline more than $9 million." Even after being fined American Airlines continued its practices by suggesting that pilots lower their altitude on flights from Dallas to Honolulu in order to the shorten flights. However the plan rarely worked, so airline crews continued to fly long days in violation of the FAA rules. (New York Times, August, 2001)

At the time of the bungled American Airlines audit, the FAA also audited Delta Airlines' pilot rest practices. Delta didn't have records of rest in its computers and, according to the same news Dallas Morning News report "Delta was unwilling or unable to provide historical detail", therefore it wasn't cited by the FAA.

Fatal Errors-- Cost Benefit Analysis

Fatigue errors can be deadly, but major airplane crashes are fairly rare. In a congressional hearing on pilot rest requirements, the issue of cost-benefit analysis was broached by one Congressman:

Representative Defazio: [Oregon] How do we calculate benefit in preventing one crash which kills 1 or 200 people; what is that worth? What value are we currently putting on life? You always have a value. I am just curious what it is today.

Margaret Gilligan (Deputy Associate Administrator for Regulation and Certification of the Federal Aviation Administration): I believe the number that is still used by the Department is on the order of $2.7 million. There are econometric models that we apply for that analysis....

As a multi-billion dollar operation, the airline industry needs to adapt business practices that benefit the bottom line. But if JetBlue can fly pilots for longer hours and call it "research", don't all airlines need to do the same in order to remain competitive? As long as the perception remains that it's safe to fly, it appears that disobeying the FAA, even chalking up 825 infractions in six months, doesn't carry significant consequences. While American Airlines doesn't seem like the best bet, according to fatality statistics at Airsafe.com, the airline, for whatever reason, seems to attract a disproportionate number of terrorist threats, probably not due to fatigue.

While its easy to say, after an airline accident, that the passengers would have probably not minded being a little late, passengers often don't necessarily prioritize the same way when their delayed to their important 9:00 meeting in Manhattan. Catastrophe is still rare in aviation, even though the risks are continuous and growing. So when passengers don't question the issue of pilot fatigue they explicitly or implicitly agree to share the economic cost-benefit with the airlines. They either intuitively comprehend and accept the risks, or they don't know the risks therefore don't complain.

The FAA seems to know and understand the risks. It also has the technological knowledge to make the changes, even as, oddly, it calls for research. The question is, does the agency fail to change because the public pressure isn't high enough? Because management practices are so disfunctional that it can't? Or is the FAA so feeble or beholden to the airlines that it repeatedly allows companies to dictate which rules they follow and which ones they ignore, fails to fine airlines for infractions, and bows to pressure when it does initiate change?

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¹ According to the post crash analysis, the Corporate Airlines Flight 5966 (which connected with American Airlines) met its demise as the two person flight team were "joking and cursing at one another" at the end of their 14 hour day, while "ignor[ing] guidance about when and at what speed to descend the plane". The National Transportation Safety Board Report (NTSB), which carried out the analysis and listened to the tapes before the crash, recommended that the FAA update its pilot work-rest rules.

² The agency didn't have enough inspectors, and failed to complete an average of 26% (United 42%, Delta 40%, American 27%, Northwest (18%), US Airways 15%) of its inspections of five major carriers. In "identified risk areas", the inspectors failed to complete on average 55% of the inspections, and rarely inspected maintenance operations at night (1-3% of the total inspections).

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Acronym Required wrote Crash Tests For Dummies", also about the airline industry. We periodically cover other US government agencies such as FEMA and the FDA.

"Computers write news", is the headline under the left "Briefing" column on the front page of the Financial Times today. The front page teaser says "Thomson Financial, the business data group, has found a way to replace human beings in the newsroom and is using computers to write some of its reports. Page 3"

We can see how this might work. Your average financial story might very simply be composed of a noun (company name or sector), + a verb describing movement in space, + a number, and a few articles. For example: "Dow Industrials Climb 7.84 points to Extend Rally","...a slide in oil prices", "...futures contracts fell 2.5%", "...shares jumped 2%", "...the industrials have risen nearly 247 points" ...oil has plunged off 5.8% to a two-month low". Add a few adjectives like, "cloudy" "troubled", "psychological", "important", or "sunny", and you have the makings of a juicy investment news story if there ever was one.

But we can only speculate. There is no story about about computers writing news on page 3. Indeed, these new details might be hidden away somewhere in the paper, but we couldn't find them in today's FT. We know computers are already capable of generating "news", so what are those computers up to?

The movie Who Killed The Electric Car", follows the rise and fall of General Motor's electric car, the EV1. The car was introduced in response to California's Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) legislation of 1990, which demanded that a percentage of all vehicles sold in California be zero emissions: 2% of all vehicles sold in 1998, 10% of those sold in 2003. GM responded to the challenge by producing the EV1, which it leased to customers from 1996-1999.

The movie recounts how the EV1 was a sporty, efficient, clean, and cheap car to drive; no oil changes, no mufflers, little maintenance, and no gas. The car won over its drivers. Who Killed the Electric Car featured an eclectic group of enthusiastic celebrities, Phillis Diller, Tom Hanks, and Mel Gibson, as well as a plethora of charming "ordinary" people-- all dedicated EV1 drivers who spoke passionately about the EV1. Yet the car no longer exists. Why?

At the same time that GM was producing the popular car, it was also working to squelch interest in its product and undermine the ZEV mandate. As one critic of GM's tepid EV1 marketing campaign noted, 'anyone knows how to sell a car, you just drape a beautiful woman over it.' However the EV1 TV ads ran counter-intuitive to this observation, and to all other bright, shiny, slick, vroom-vroom car advertisements. The ads seemed inspired by those eerie black and white public service ads run by anti-drug or recent anti-smoking campaigns. While the anti-smoking ads aim to scare the bejezus out of anyone thinking of kicking back and lighting up a smoke, the EV1 ads were equally ominous. It's no surprise that they didn't entice buyers.

Of course some people, like GM itself, and an author in the Wall Street Journal today, say that "the movie looks for conspiracies" ("The Electric Car Gets Some Muscle"). But really, the movie proves its point and there is a surprising amount of documentation on the web that supports the movie's conspiracy theory. The underwhelming marketing campaign was only one part of the company's effort to erode the vehicle's success. GM was slow to deliver vehicles to the waiting customers, never produced enough cars to meet demand, and was deceptive as it sealed the fate of its car. The company ultimately sued California over the ZEV mandate, and thus gutted the legal incentive to produce the cars.

However the demise of the car wasn't only the fault of GM. The movie systematically lays out the role of the oil companies, auto dealers, government and consumers in the denouement of EV1. The movie films events during the end leasing period in the early 2000's, to document the assertion. Cars were recalled despite a healthy demand, aggressive offers by the leaseholders to buy the cars were rejected, and petitions that lobbied the company to continue the EV1 program were eschewed. The movie shows the cars covertly trucked to a remote Arizona proving ground, crushed, and shredded. In one memorable clip, a helicopter flying over the inaccessible Arizona locale films the methodically crushed cars, as a GM spokesperson talks about how all the cars will be usefully repurposed. The death of the product by the collaborating parties was successful.

The movie makes a strong case that corporations and government rid the marketplace of a car that threatened the oil, auto parts and car industries. It also takes proponents of the hydrogen fuel cell like Arnold Schwarzenegger and the California Air Resources Board to task for promoting technology that is widely considered an impractical alternative to gas powered vehicles. Although the movie doesn't delve into other alternative energy sources like biofuels, it emphasizes that electric vehicles are solution that is available today. Yet, since we haven't run out of oil quite yet, there are trillions of dollars at stake in the push to continue selling the gasoline powered cars that fuel many powerful and entrenched industries. Following this logic, if hydrogen technology were infeasible for decades, which is most likely the case, it doesn't threaten future oil profits -- therefore it's the perfect "alternative".

GM's product has met its unfortunate fate, and it seems that the effort to suppress the story is ongoing. The EV1 was on view at the Smithsonian, in a GM sponsored hall, but has been replaced with "a high tech SUV". The timing of the replacement coincided oddly with the release of the movie.

Despite the demise of the EV1, there is a lot of interest in electric vehicles. Of course, there's the $75,000-$100,000 Tesla, which is out of reach for many people, but in addition to that and other upcoming products, a number of businesses are converting existing products to electrical powered vehicles. One of many lists of resources on the internet is here. "Who Killed the Electric Car" is a captivating story, and although it reinforces any cynicism one might have about how capitalism can trample beneficial innovative technology, it has also reinvigorated public interest and understanding of the electric car. The one small aberration in the movie was a quote at the very end, by an inventor, that in the end technology prevails. Coming in the final part of the movie, the quote seemed to be the antithesis of the conclusion the movie had so carefully constructed. Wasn't it so clear that politics (and profits) often trump technology?

The New York Times has an article on misdiagnosis in medicine. Doctors misdiagnosis patient conditions 20% of the time, the article says, because there are no incentives for doctors tied to correct versus incorrect diagnoses. One doctor quoted in the NYT article notes that "doctors don't go down with their planes."

The article points to products like Isabel Healthcare's disease diagnosis software that can help doctors to identify diseases. It is especially useful for conditions that are rarely seen in clinics -- many doctors see the same symptoms and diseases over and over again. The company was started by a businessman whose young daughter was in the hospital for months with Group A Streptococcus that causes symptoms of necrotizing fascitis and toxic shock syndrome. Orginally diagnosed with chicken pox, "only when her organs began shutting down did her doctors realize that she had a potentially fatal flesh-eating infection". (Group A strep is actually a well-recognized secondary infection associated with varicella).

According to the Wall Street Journal only 2% of doctors use software to help them diagnosis illness, sometimes because hospitals won't pay for it, others because medicine is considered "an art". This comment seems more applicable appropriate to a different era. It has become less of an "art" and more of an assembly-line in the U.S., where doctors are forced through insurance incentives (low paying office reimbursements) to see as many patients as possible in a day. Yet if software would benefit patients hospitals also balk at spending $80,000 or so to aquire the licenses.

There aren't tremendous repercussions to this business decision. Malpractice lawsuits tend to occupy the news and high settlements are headlined as though they are common, but it is not malpractice insurance that's driving up the cost of medicine. Regardless, significant action has been taken to limit insurance liability, which provides more (perhaps indirect) incentive for doctors to focus on things other than double checking their work. One trend in care is doctors who treat patients on the condition that they sign away their rights to trial jury. Medical malpractice caps, common in some states, were recently re-introduced in congress to limit "non-economic damages".

The NYT article suggests that doctors are motivated to process patients, order tests and prescribe medicine, and that legislative action is needed to change the priorities in medical care: "For a politician looking to make the often-bloodless debate over health care come alive, this is a huge opportunity.". I'm not sure politicians like Clinton, who have gone that route and been defeated to cries of that "there is 'no healthcare crisis'" would agree. More intuitively, the article asks why patients continue to pay for "wasted procedures and pointless drugs". Because that's business and patients aren't yet poised to protest?

We're quite accustomed to lying. Some may feign shock - as they did when a slump-faced, shifty-eyed, quivery-lipped Frey confessed to Oprah, the arbiter of truth, that his book was a pack of lies. It seemed like more genuine disbelief when the stem-cell myth slowly unraveled and the legacy of Hwang did a landslide shift from "supreme scientist" to he who would have had a street named after him, could have had a museum named after him, or would have been forever revered by his countrymen. Really, all this shock can't be more than an act. Maybe all jurors should be chosen from Oprah audiences; but lets be honest about the pretend "surprise" of it all. The routine deceptions are no more surprising than Groundhog Day (the movie). With all the Enrons and WorldComs and Katrinas and Iraqs, isn't it just the same day all over again?

Cut to Bush's State of the Union address. People recoiled at his proclamation about banning any sort of cloning research, "human cloning in all its forms; creating or implanting embryos for experiments; creating human-animal hybrids; and buying, selling or patenting human embryos". It has been widely pointed out that animal-human chimeras are a not so very scary part of health research. What Bush proposes also pertains to infertility treatments used by thousands of couples today to have families. People speculate about what he really means.

On energy, Bush said we were "addicted to oil" and that we would reduce our dependence on mid-east oil by 75% -- "through technology". There were arguments about this out of the gate -- the reductions weren't realistic or feasible and only 20% percent of our oil comes from the mid-east anyway. Indeed, say Bush's aides according to the Philadelphia Inquirer today, the President did not mean any of this literally. "This was purely an example", Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said.

So is the cloning rhetoric also just an "example"? If the administration knows what they say, perhaps they don't really mean it? Outside of the most obvious (and at the moment unfeasible) human cloning and therapeutic cloning "examples" that Bush wants banned, there are some technologies that are essential for the scientifically advanced, humane, non-isolationist nation he promotes. Unfortunately, since the administration has already gone to great lengths to curtail stem cell-like researh, indications are that they will be invigorated by their new court appointees and will continue down this path.

While the intention is certainly there, it seems ideologically distorted. The stated impetus of "a hopeful society...that recognizes the matchless value of every life", rings false. As a small example, why say "no cloning", then merrily "clone" these troops for speech props in this Photoshop picture. Isn't that disrespectful?

The good thing about Groundhog Day (the date) is that one way or another you know that the season or term or trend or silliness will eventually end.

Technology promises that once fatal medical conditions are now surmountable. Patients with once incurable conditions will live, and even when the condition is only manageable, through technology, therapy, and familial support, they can often live rich meaningful lives. The outcomes far exceed what we used to expect.

The article "In a Stroke Patient, Doctor Sees Power Of Brain to Recover", in yesterday's Wall Street Journal describes how some of these medical techniques are changing patient paradigms. Thomas Burton's article centers on a young doctor who suffered a series of strokes and sank into a coma. A couple of weeks into the patient's coma, his family moved him from one hospital, where they perceived he was destined to doom, to another.

The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) recently released the responses to questionaires sent to some of the world's largest companies about their carbon dioxide emissions. Increasingly, investors are more likely to consider potential regulatory risks in their investment portfolios and companies are more incited to take steps to manage potential climate risks. According to the executive summary "the cost of carbon may erode annual income by as much as 45%, depending on carbon prices, compliance periods and individual circumstances".

The project is a collaborative effort by a group of 95 institutional investors who control 21 trillion dollars in assets. The questionaire was sent to the FT500 ("Financial Times 500"), the largest global companies by market capitalization. The total emissions reported was 2,994,834,887 metric tons of C02e, which represents about 13% of anthropogenic global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG).

In its third year, the CDP has attracted greater company participation as a result of the increased attention to global warming, the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) as well as other imminent agreements. The first year 35 investors participated with $4.5 trillion dollars in assets and less than 50% of the companies questioned participated. This year over 71% of the companies participated.

The report drew a lot of data from a fairly simple questionaire but reading through the individual company responses is revealing. For many companies, as would be expected, this a marketing opportunity as much as an emissions survey. With a rapt group of investors the questionaire becomes an opportunity for corporations to expound not only on their efforts and conscientiousness around global warming but also their products. For example GM takes the opportunity to write that "in the U.S GM offers the largest number and proportion of fuel-efficient cars and trucks on a model-to-model comparison basis."

Some companies finessed their answers, particularly to the question that asks for a specific calculation of total carbon emissions. Mitsubishi Japan, explains that their company:

"..is a trading and investment company (sogo shosha) active in virtually every industry, including energy, metals, machinery, chemicals, food and general merchandise - although it is not a manufacturing company. Given the complexity of our business operations, our answer to this question [what are the total emissions for your company?] is therefore limited to the office activities of our head office in Tokyo and MCUK in London."

It is also obvious from the responses and this report's interpretation that responsibility is motivated by government regulations and market conditions. In all the sectors some companies were clearly ahead of the game in anticipating how global change could effect their business and taking steps to reduce their exposure.

Gas is more expensive in Europe - so accordingly cars are more fuel efficient. Many companies provided data if it was already required by another government agency, or answered that they would be motivated to take further actions when the business climate was ripe for that or when law required.

In keeping with impressions gleaned from a quick reading of the questionaires, the report reveals that although over 90% of the companies that responded thought that climate change posed commercial risks and/or opportunities to their business, only "51% implemented emission reduction programs; only 45% had established emission reduction targets."

However since 71% of the companies responded, those who "Declined to Participate" stick out from the list. Some of these "non-participants" are: Apple Computers, Best Buy US, Capital One US, Clorox US, Direct TV, Electronic Arts, Fannie Mae, Fedex, Fox Entertainment, Gannett, Harley-Davidson, Morgan-Stanley, Prudential, Symantec, Time-Warner, Walmart US.

As well some companies chose not to respond. "No Response" was indicated by AT&T Wireless Service/Cingular, Accenture, Aflac, Allstate, Amazon, Al Rahji Banking & Investment Corp Saudi Arabia, American Express, Amgen, Berkshire Hathaway, Bridgestone, Carnival, Cendant, China Mobil, Charles Schwab, Clear Channel, General Dynamics, Home Depot, Genentech, Oil & Natural Gas India, St. There are more. The report notes that some companies who didn't respond:

"despite CDP signatories holding more that 20% of their outstanding shares...in an era when the capital markets increasingly value disclosure and climate change is quickly rising up the agendas of major pension funds...the lack of responsiveness to the CDP information request does not reflect well on these firms..."

Overall, despite the worthy and wordy intentions, only 13% of companies that provided data in CDP2 (2004) and CDP3 (2005) actually reduced emissions, but importantly, this investor group and others are paying attention. The report as well as the individual companies responses are very interesting and the growing response rate to these questions is welcome.

Two recent articles; "Hacker Hunters", a recent front page Business Week article, and "Black Market in Stolen Credit Card Data Thrives on Internet", a New York Times article published today, focus on internet trafficking of stolen credit card data. Vivid descriptions of the fast paced lucrative on-line market for stolen credit card data vie for consumers fear. The articles detail some of the data collection tactics of burgeoning networks of multi-national credit thieves. On-line transactions of the moonlighting crooks are revealed - a shadowy international network deals in stolen data using the internet for transactions that are often tracked to servers hosted in places like Russia, where criminals evade authorities easily.

The Business Week article recounts the previous efforts of "Operation Firewall", an elaborate sleuthing collaboration by the Secret Service and Justice Department that successfully uncovered the inner workings and leaders of a New Jersey based credit theft ring last fall and led to the arrest of 28 suspects and provided enough evidence to arrest many more.

The tone of both articles is foreboding; gangs of sophisticated technologists. Slick. Elusive. Evil. The authors warn that although "Operation Firewall" was a success, future Firewall-like operations are less likely to succeed because the thieves are growing ever more sophisticated and daring. Meanwhile, cybersecurity forces are underfunded and undermined by weak institutional support in foreign countries. The articles spin a riveting account of the "hacker hunters" as they struggle to out-wit the ever audacious technical prowess of the thieves. The internet plays an ominous role by amplifying the cunning of the perpetrators. It is a feckless, fenceless Wild-West of lawlessness. With its dangerous anonymity, the internet provides the masks that the men will don before galloping down from the hills of Russia, or China, or Bulgaria, swooping in on the gentle townsfolk and destroying the very fabric of our oh-so-civilized civilization, ruthlessly compromising our commerce and banking systems.

"Hacker hunters" are using sophisticated technology but resort to traditional anti-crime methods in this battle:

"..they're marshaling their forces and using gumshoe tactics to fight back -- infiltrating hacker groups, monitoring their chatter on underground networks, and when they can, busting the baddies [sic] before they do any more damage."

The cloak and dagger accounts can divert attention from the issue of how so much of the data in the recent compromises has entered the illegal market. Here are some recent data losses:

• CitiFinancial's 3.9 million customer records were lost off the back of the truck on the way to a data processing center in Allen, Texas.
• Choicepoint "accidentally sold" data on 145,000 consumers to thieves.
• Wachovia Bank's and Bank of America's customer financial records were stolen by bank employees and sold.
• Ameritrade Holding Corporation lost a backup computer tape with 200,000 customers data.
• Time Warner Inc. said Social Security numbers and other employee data were lost off a truck on the way to Iron Mountain Inc., a data storage company.
• University of California applicant data, unencrypted, was lost when a laptop was stolen from an unlocked room on campus.
• Lexis-Nexis reported that someone had gained access to personal information...somehow...the data had - "fallen into the hands of thieves."
• A recent heist of 4 million records from a CardSystems Solutions occured because credit card numbers, identifiers, and security codes were not only left in a database, they were unencrypted; infractions of data storage protocols.

In each of these cases, the losses occurred because of cavalier and reckless behavior on the part of individuals, companies or organizations that were entrusted with personal data. Human error was responsible, not high tech shenanigans. In some cases, the public was assured that the "employee was fired", in other cases the employees were kept on because there were no rules to enforce data safety. If an organization can't be trusted to purge data, or to encrypt data as required, or to keep it on a truck as it travels about town, can we possibly be assuaged by incredible assurances that the data will still 'probably be safe' when its compromised ?

While our system of numeric identifiers and pin numbers has perhaps outlived it's usefulness, until a better system is operable, people and companies who process and "safekeep" data need to be held accountable to some standards. If data didn't fall off trucks, gumshoes wouldn't be so critical.

Genetically modified plants (and GMO's- genetically modified organisms) have long been controversial. Scientists use molecular biology to modify the genomes of plants in order to make them more hardy -- to give them resistance to pests or fungi for instance. Plasmids are developed and used to insert a desired resistance gene into the plant. When researchers attempt (sometimes it doesn't work) to insert fungicide or pesticide genes into plants via the plasmids, they add an antibiotic ("Ampicillin") gene on the plasmid along with the pest resistance genes. The Ampicillin gene is commonly used as a marker in these types of experiments because it allows scientists to identify the plants in which the experiment worked -- the plants that carry the desired gene.

However not only is the use of pest or fungus resistance genes controversial, the use of Ampicillin in the environment is also controversial because it potentially increases the risk of widespread antibiotic resistance. Some scientists defend the practice and argue that Ampicillin is no longer a relevant antibiotic for livestock and humans because it is now so prevalent in the intestinal flora of "untreated" humans and livestock. However other scientists disagree with this stance, and argue that the antibiotic should not be further dispersed in the environment via transgenic crops. They argue that Ampicillin is still effective against some species and that the antibiotic's effectiveness depends on conserving its use for therapy. Policy advocates and governments also disagree, with various parties taking different positions.

Europe and the U.K. (as well as Africa and Asia) have always been more squeamish than the U.S. about transgenic crops. The European Food Safety Authority has advised EU governments that Ampicillin containing strains should only be used in test fields. Other agencies and NGO's concur that Ampicillin should not be commonly used especially in the food system. Yet the journal Nature (subscription) uncovered a case of alarming and perhaps inadvertent Ampicillin carrying GMO seed propagation in its recent report: "Stray Seeds had Antibiotic-Resistance Genes" (Colin Macilwain: 434, p.548 March 31, 2005).

For the past 4 years the Swiss firm Syngenta sold corn seed that contained a gene that codes for antibiotic (Ampicillin) resistance. One strain of maize (Bt10) that contained the Ampicillin gene was sold instead of another (Bt11). Bt10 had originally been a control strain to show the lack of the Ampicillin gene in Bt11. "Hundreds of tonnes" of the seed were planted and farmed by American and European farmers from 2001-2004, years before the error was apparently noticed, the investigation reported.

The issue hasn't been resolved. In a June 2nd editorial; "Don't rely on Uncle Sam" (Nature 434, p. 807), the journal notes the lax regulatory agency response. Nature analyzed the responsibilities of three U.S. agencies who would be responsible for discovering and correcting the error. Why didn't the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), catch error for four years? Each had a media ready excuse:

• The FDA reasoned that since the intended pesticide gene was not a food safety issue, they weren't responsible.
• The USDA claimed that its "system was working"...despite the fact that it never caught the transgression. They gave a bureaucratic shrug (actually Nature suggested that it might have been more corporate dismissal) and fined the company $375,000. A very very soft slap on the wrist?
• The EPA claimed that it was short on resources, which prompted Nature to quote The Onion's satirical take, that the EPA had renamed itself "The Agency" -- since the "Environment" part of its title didn’t seem appropriate for its role of "not protecting anything"

In addition to collective shirking on the part of the U.S., Nature also commented on the rather limp European reaction. Back in April 2004, the European Food Safety Association (EFSA), published a directive on the use of antibiotic resistance marker genes in genetically modified plants, decreeing that genetically modified plants intended for food or feed should avoid genes that "confer resistance to antibiotics of clinical importance..." The authors at Nature wonder why European regulators haven't seemed to address Syngenta's 4 year oversight. After all, the editors reasoned, the company is a European one (even if Switzerland is not really in the EU). The Nature editorial concluded - "Thankfully, on this occasion we're not dealing with a threat to public health."

Most recently, in Nature's June 2, 2005 issue (435, 561: Correspondance), UK Scientist Gundula Azeez of the Soil Association responded to this Nature editorial:

"We are concerned by the suggestion, in your Editorial "Don't rely on Uncle Sam", that the US Food and Drug Administration does not consider the presence of the ampicillin-resistance gene in Syngenta's unapproved variety of genetically modified Bt10 maize to represent a safety problem.."

That's not exactly what the original editorial said, although government agencies across the board certainly did seem to support this opinion. The letter to Nature author takes a stance:

"This is not the view of the UK government's scientific advisers... The risk of horizontal gene transfer from genetically modified organisms genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is not a theoretical one."

The author cites a study that showed that the plasmids can survive certain conditions and go on to transform bacteria. He adds that not enough research has been done on the potential effects for horizontal gene transfer, as issue that pertains not only to Ampicillin resistance genes but to the toxin resistance genes in GMO's as well. The author also criticized the U.S. agencies' "case-by-case" approval mechanism for transgenic crops, saying that overall the technology hasn't been adequately researched.

While we can't comment on EU agencies' impetus, but the lack of vigorous U.S. response is not accidental. The U.S. has always supported and promoted the use of transgenic crops since the day when vice president Dan Quayle, in the name of business competitiveness, declared that GMO's and non-GMO's were the same.

Will there be more research and will it bridge the EU/US divide? For the U.S., it seems that when doing research would potentially protect public health would interrupt industry's speed in selling products research is eschewed. However when research could potentially show the detrimental affects of industry to public health and the environment, then the call is interminably for more research. Interestingly, while Europe and the U.S. continue to squabble over policies and science results; the potential effected customers are millions of farmers and consumers across the globe.

The Financial Times reports that US hotel telecommunication revenue dropped 50.3% between 2000 and 2003. Long distance revenue fell by 59.3% while local revenue fell by 26.2%. Revenue from internet and fax access rose by 9.1%. Profits on hotel phone surcharges during the 1990's were as much as 50%. Dramatic, but not surprising.

The Birmingham News ran this article about Doug Gillett, an editor with the University of Alabama's creative services department who had been posting "voluminous, partisan, well-informed, sometimes funny, and sometimes strident" commentary on the Internet for the past year -- "more than 800 words of commentary, pictures and links to articles on his own blog and contributed almost 700 words to the running arguments on Politics 101."

In his case, Gillett ran afoul of a state law that prohibited "state, county or city funds, property or time, for any political activities." Most companies and institutions have similar policies about Internet and facilities use.

That said, there can be great benefit to the insitution for blogs that cover work-related topics, both for public-sector and private institutions, and many blogs do this well. It's a tricky area, and the lines of demarcation between the individual and the institution are not always clear.

The major suggestions include these technical enhancements:

...information retrieval software to isolate relevant data, text categorization software to organize public comments, applications to create digital juries to link citizens and rule compliance wizards to guide the rule-writing process. Workshop participants also suggested the use of improved data mining capabilities to give rule writers more information and aid plain language translators in rule drafting.