Did you believe that your zodiac sign could influence your driving abilities? Silly as it may seem, some insurance companies actually think so!
(Only, the worst and best signs seem to vary from year to year, so take heart all you Librans and beware all you Leos!)
Intelligent Design (-ers, -ees, -ists, whatever…) , watch out for the competition in the Evolution vs. ID
wars! The Flying Spaghetti Monster is prepared to do battle for His Rightful share of the Pasta.
Last Sunday the Crown Plaza Hotel in the Medical Center area of Houston was demolished through "controlled implosion." Everything went as planned and the local news channels covered the demolition of the presumably "vacant" hotel. A home video has now surfaced which casts doubts on whether the hotel was indeed completely vacant at the time it went down. The angle from which the video was shot seems to show a shadow and a door closing on one of the hotel floors just before the building buckled and crumbled. The Houston police department is now investigating and searching the rubble for human remains to determine if someone had sneaked into the hotel without the knowledge of the demolition crew.
The video that set the investigation rolling is here. It is eerie. Watch the area highlighted by the oval. Do you see a shadow? Do you see a door closing just before the blast?
Chris Mooney of the science blog, Intersection, reports that a category 4 or 5 cyclone is poised to devastate Bangladesh. (Mooney began reporting on the storm long before the US media had published a single story about the impending disaster.) In his estimation, the damage caused by the storm is likely to match Katrina’s devastation. I suspect it will be greater. Bangladesh is a very populous and low lying country which is poor and poorly equipped to handle the aftermath of such a blow. (link to Intersection via Razib)
Cyclone Sidr has made landfall – the CNN report here.
A little over a year ago during the run up to the 2006 elections, Sujatha posted an article detailing the vulnerability of the new e-slate voting system in use for the last few years. The article described how easily the system could be tampered with by introducing malicious programs into the memory card of the machines. Now it appears that one doesn’t need computer savvy hackers to change the results in voting machines. It can be done manually – by election officials.
A front page article in Wednesday’s Houston Chronicle reported that during the special elections held on November 6, 2007, one Houston Harris County election administrator, Johnnie German, was able to access the county’s computer system and add votes to the previously submitted total. German did this before several witnesses and his intentions were fair. Voters in some precincts had received faulty ballots during early voting days. Their e-slates were missing certain referendums and amendmends. Those voters had to use an additional parallel ballot to register their opinions. The mistake was corrected by election day although the early votes on the parallel ballots were not recorded on the main election computer. German wished the final results to correctly reflect the early votes. Instead of counting the ballots separately, he tapped into the main computer by using a series of passwords and an "encryption key" and added the early votes manually. The outcomes of the referendums were not affected by the change and as I said, German did all this before witnesses – his own assistant and two poll observers from both major political parties. This is the first time that the possibility and practice of manually altering the result on an election computer has come to light. (That doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened before.) It has been ascertained in this case that the election official had no partisan agenda. But what if all was not above board and an official did indeed have less than honorable intentions? Now we know that tampering is possible and no witnesses need be present.
Johnnie German admitted he was nervous as he used high-security codes to tap into the Harris County elections computer system last week and change some of the results manually.
The system was in good hands as the votes were counted from the sprawling Nov. 6 contests. German is the county’s respected administrator of elections, and there were witnesses present as he corrected the vote totals on a sales tax referendum for a fire/ambulance district in the Cypress-Fairbanks area of northwest Harris County.
But German’s late-night deed, said by officials to be a first-time event in the six years Harris County has used the eSlate voting system, has rekindled the debate about whether the newest electronic methods for counting votes should be trusted.
What German graphically demonstrated was that with the proper physical and informational access, one person can alter the results of an election in a county of 1.8 million registered voters …..
Shocking observation
The county Web site already showed that all precinct totals had been counted; three sheriff’s deputies who guarded the counting process on the fourth floor of the County Administration Building in downtown Houston had been sent home.
Also in the locked, glass-walled room were Republican Kaufman and John R. Behrman, a computer expert and longtime election observer representing the Democratic Party. He said he considers Kaufman’s staff the most knowledgeable election computer administrators on the continent and does not question their motives.
But Behrman said he was shocked when he saw German use a series of passwords and an "encryption key" — a series of numbers on a nail file-size computer memory storage device — to reach a computer program that said "Adjustment."
"A hundred percent of precincts reporting, and everything had been distributed to the press," he said. "Then and only then did I see how they were going to do this, and frankly I never thought it was possible.
"Basically it turns out, without regard to any ballots that have been cast, you can enter arbitrary numbers in there and report them out in such a way that, unless you go back to these giant (computer) logs and interpret the logs, you wouldn’t know it has been done."
Karl Zimmer, author of the science blog The Loom, has an article in the Science Times section of the NY Times about animal behavior in a crowd – swarms, herds, schools and gaggles. Does this shed light on human swarming instincts? Do we also play follow-the-leader when it comes to our religious, political and cultural choices?
If you have ever observed ants marching in and out of a nest, you might have been reminded of a highway buzzing with traffic. To Iain D. Couzin, such a comparison is a cruel insult — to the ants.
Americans spend a 3.7 billion hours a year in congested traffic. But you will never see ants stuck in gridlock.
Army ants, which Dr. Couzin has spent much time observing in Panama, are particularly good at moving in swarms. If they have to travel over a depression in the ground, they erect bridges so that they can proceed as quickly as possible.
“They build the bridges with their living bodies,” said Dr. Couzin, a mathematical biologist at Princeton University and the University of Oxford. “They build them up if they’re required, and they dissolve if they’re not being used.”
The reason may be that the ants have had a lot more time to adapt to living in big groups. “We haven’t evolved in the societies we currently live in,” Dr. Couzin said.
By studying army ants — as well as birds, fish, locusts and other swarming animals — Dr. Couzin and his colleagues are starting to discover simple rules that allow swarms to work so well. Those rules allow thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism.
Despite my ignorance of most of Norman Mailer’s writing and my muted distaste for his caricature of a public (and evidently private) persona, I was saddened to learn today (via Ruchira) of his passing. It signifies more than a loss of an individual writer of great merit, but of a type of literary author, albeit a mythical type. His life and his writing were intertwined in ways most writers’ are not, despite their devotion to their craft. At least, that’s how he chose to market his books: as embodiments not just of his creative energies, but of nearly all of his energies. As Louis Menand put it in yesterday’s post to the New Yorker, "Beginning with his comeback book, Advertisements for Myself, in 1959, he bled his life and his personality into his writing."
I read only the Oswald book and Harlot’s Ghost, not much of a sample of Mailer’s entire output, although the latter weighed in at 1300 pages. Menand mentions that Mailer thought it was one of his two favorites of his own books, "great literary pyramids that no one visits any longer." The other favorite was Ancient Evenings, which remains somewhere on my list of books eventually to get around to reading. Christopher Hitchens, whose self-serving reminiscences appeared today on Slate, deems Harlot’s Ghost Mailer’s masterpiece. So perhaps my sample is as good as two of his books’ll get you.
If in fact, as Mailer lamented, few visit Harlot’s Ghost any longer, then that too is a pity. I recall consuming it with uncharacteristic efficiency. I cringed at some of Mailer’s periods, but mostly reveled in his celebration of gin and mockery of the CIA, and enjoyed his depictions of personal and professional self-deception. To this day, I have recommended it when the opportunity arose. It is some consolation that now a few more readers will enlist.
Given that Gov.Sonny Perdue of Georgia is at his wit’s end with the current drought parching the state, he has finally decided to resort to invoking supernatural assistance.
Heather Teilhet, his
spokeswoman, said the governor began talking about wanting to host a
service to pray for rain on his way back from Washington D.C. last
week. He was in D.C. meeting with federal officials and the governors
of Alabama and Florida to discuss the region’s water crisis.
Perdue, whose son is a Baptist preacher, has had similar prayer services in the past.
The news report and the cartoon. Which one of the two perpetrators deserves to be charged with a crime?
(The L.A. Times link via Joe)
Last year I reported the details of a convoluted "charitable scheme" designed by the Bush family to benefit one of their own at the expense of public funds. A.B. readers may have been among the first in the blogosphere to learn this, since the story broke in Houston and the Houston Independent School District’s funds were involved. Acting under the protective umbrella of his mother’s dubious charity, the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and his brother’s educational initiative of No Child Left Behind, presidential sibling Neil Bush managed to strike lucrative deals with schools in Texas, Florida and Nevada to sell educational software marketed by his failing company Ignite! Learning. When the details of this cozy deal became public, questions were raised about the mechanism by which the contract was awarded to Ignite! and the effectiveness of the software as an educational tool. After a critical report in the Houston Chronicle, the Bush family mounted a spirited defense of their actions which included an outraged letter to the editor by Neil Bush, the beneficiary of his family’s influence and ingenuity. (See my post for details)
Well, now fueled by complaints of a citizens’ group (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington), an investigation by the US Department of Education is under way to determine if the expenditure of federal funds to purchase the much touted Cow (Curriculum on Wheels) marketed by Ignite! benefited school children or if the procurement served as a cash cow for George Bush’s brother. (The full story here)
(Cow by Ignite!)
WASHINGTON, Nov. 6 — The inspector general of the Department of Education has said he will examine whether federal money was inappropriately used by three states to buy educational products from a company owned by Neil Bush, the president’s brother.
John P. Higgins Jr., the inspector general, said he would review the matter after a group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, detailed at least $1 million in spending from the No Child Left Behind program by school districts in Texas, Florida and Nevada to buy products made by Mr. Bush’s company, Ignite Learning of Austin, Tex. Mr. Higgins stated his plans in a letter to the group sent last week.
Members of the group and other critics in Texas contend that school districts are buying Ignite’s signature product, the Curriculum on Wheels, because of political considerations. The product, they said, does not meet standards for financing under the No Child Left Behind Act, which allocates federal money to help students raise their achievement levels, particularly in elementary school reading.
Ignite, founded by Neil Bush in 1999, includes as investors his parents, former President George H. W. Bush and his wife, Barbara. Company officials say that about 100 school districts use the Curriculum on Wheels, known as the Cow, which is a portable classroom with software to teach middle-school social studies, science and math. The units cost about $3,800 each and require about $1,000 a year in maintenance.
Ken Leonard, the vice president and chief financial officer at Ignite, said the company had no way of knowing if districts were using federal money to buy its products. Ignite’s Web site advises potential clients that it is appropriate to make purchases with No Child Left Behind dollars, as well as federal money for poor and disadvantaged children and special education students.
“We have absolutely no influence or control over decisions our individual customers make about how they choose to purchase our products,” Mr. Leonard said, adding that Ignite sold its products in “an ethical, straightforward manner.”
The citizens’ group obtained documents through a Freedom of Information Act request showing that the Katy Independent School District west of Houston used $250,000 in state and federal Hurricane Katrina relief money last year to buy the Curriculum on Wheels.
The district’s director of special education, Fred Shafer, supported the purchases, telling other officials that “all the kids love the Cow, and it really meets the needs of the students with disabilities,” according to an internal e-mail message obtained by the citizens’ group. Mr. Shafer did not return calls for comment.
Jay Spuck, a former curriculum director for the district, has criticized spending on the Ignite product, saying: “It’s not helping kids at all. It’s not helping teachers. The only way Neil has gotten in is by his name.”
Much of the product’s success in Texas dates from a March 2006 donation by Barbara Bush, who gave eight units to schools attended by large numbers of hurricane evacuees. Neil Bush followed up with an e-mail message telling the district that “in order for the schools to keep the Cows in subsequent years they will have to pay an annual fee of $1,000,” according to documents obtained by the citizens group.
Melanie Sloan, executive director of the group, referring to No Child Left Behind, said: “A constant principle of N.C.L.B. is that children must be taught using scientifically proven methods. Ignite’s Cows simply don’t meet N.C.L.B. standards. This suggests that the real reason N.C.L.B. funds are expended on Ignite is because the founder and C.E.O. is the president’s brother.”
(Pakistani lawyer being arrested by plainclothes police :AP photo)
Those who are following the turmoil in Pakistan know that General Musharraf is in all sorts of trouble. He has a vipers’ nest of Al Qaida, Taliban and their sympathizers on the western border. The US government has been paying the "friendly" government of Pakistan mega bucks to catch them. Musharraf and his army have obliged spottily and reluctantly on that front. Occasionally they even make peace with the people they are supposed to nab. But with his political future becoming uncertain and the fire of extremism blazing in his own backyard, Musharraf has decided to crack down on the really "dangerous" elements of Pakistani society – its lawyers, journalists and human rights activists. In prosperous nations, members of these professions are frequently dismissed as greedy, opportunistic, windbags and kooks. But in other parts of the world where democracy and political freedom are fragile commodities, these reviled professionals often provide the front and rear guard defense against totalitarianism.
In my more than two years of blogging and commenting on blogs, I have been accused of ranting just twice – both times on someone else’s blog. I am sure many more of my commentaries have qualified as rants – just that no one has said so. Ranting, in my book is not necessarily a bad thing if the ranter is focused on the issue and is ticked off. Once before I was amused and impressed enough by a third party rant to attach it to one of my own. Last night Keith Olbermann of MSNBC let it rip with a rant about torture, Bush, Judge Mukasey and Daniel Levin that is worth publishing.
An excerpt:
It is a fact startling in its cynical simplicity and it requires cynical and simple words to be properly expressed: The presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.
All the petulancy, all the childish threats, all the blank-stare stupidity; all the invocations of World War III, all the sophistic questions about which terrorist attacks we wanted him not to stop, all the phony secrets; all the claims of executive privilege, all the stumbling tap-dancing of his nominees, all the verbal flatulence of his apologists…
"Waterboarding is torture," Daniel Levin was to write. Daniel Levin was no theorist and no protester. He was no troublemaking politician. He was no table-pounding commentator. Daniel Levin was an astonishingly patriotic American and a brave man.
Brave not just with words or with stances, even in a dark time when that kind of bravery can usually be scared or bought off.
Charged, as you heard in the story from ABC News last Friday, with assessing the relative legality of the various nightmares in the Pandora’s box that is the Orwell-worthy euphemism "Enhanced Interrogation," Mr. Levin decided that the simplest, and the most honest, way to evaluate them … was to have them enacted upon himself.
Daniel Levin took himself to a military base and let himself be waterboarded. Mr. Bush, ever done anything that personally courageous? ….
Waterboarding, he said, is torture. Legally, it is torture! Practically, it is torture! Ethically, it is torture! And he wrote it down.
Wrote it down somewhere, where it could be contrasted with the words of this country’s 43rd president: "The United States of America … does not torture."
Made you into a liar, Mr. Bush.
Made you into, if anybody had the guts to pursue it, a criminal, Mr. Bush.
Apropos of our discussion of the continuing relevance of the Regeneration Through Violence last week, Susan Faludi is blogging at TPM this week about her new book The Terror Dream. Its thesis? The irrational militarism of the American response to 9/11 is symptomatic of a long-standing cultural narrative in which Anglo frontier people responded to deadly Native-American attacks and kidnappings by lionizing strong, violent men and meek, domestic women. Her first post is worth a read…
Having had a chance to catch up on this week’s AB debate about "Jewgenics," and the tendency by Charles Murray, Jon Entine, and certain other social scientists to over-inflate the importance of IQ testing, I wanted to chime in.
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell — not a college degree among them. And I think the example of these monomaniacal tech entrepreneurs, who each started at a very good college with similarly "ranked" students, is a good example of the gross reductiveness of IQ as a meaningful measure of a person’s worth, which seems to be the implicit agenda of "Jewgenic," or let’s face it, eugenic thinking. Part of succeeding in business is social skills — being able to relate to people, whether through positive reinforcement, or striking fear into the hearts of your employees (I’m thinking of Jobs here), or in some other way that allows you to achieve goals. And then there is the process of generating those goals — like Gates, Jobs, or Dell you have to imagine products that don’t currently exist, and that people will either want or need. Then you have to engage in a different sort of thinking — strategic business thinking — to achieve those goals.
As Anna and Ruchira both point out, there really are different kinds of skills and intelligences — someone who makes a great brain surgeon might make a lousy nurse, even within the same hospital. Someone who makes a great law professor might make a lousy teacher. Someone who makes a great entrepreneur might make a lousy editor, chemist, cop, husband, or therapist.
This mad struggle to force everyone into the same empirical straitjacket is an insult to human multifariousness, and is a particularly insidious manifestation of the American tendency to reductive empiricism (everyone’s got a number — just look ’em up with the College Board, or whatever faux scholarly organization Charles Murray happens to be signed up with this week). As Adam Gopnik dryly observed in the more trivial case of Robert Parker assigning two-digit point values to each of the world’s wines: it’s as if a man had made love to a hundred women and then assigned each one a numeric value. It’s not that the number tells you nothing, it’s that it’s grossly inadequate to the task of fully describing the phenomena it purports to evaluate.
What is objectionable about the endless obsessing about IQ, and even more so about the heritable qualities of a Jewish "race" (quite deliberately placed in quotation marks because this is an inherently pseudo-scientific category), is the need to mystify the status quo. According to eugenic thinking, we are merely blindly carrying out the imperatives of genes, rather than manifesting an interplay between genes, historical accident (for example, the invention of steel, or the lack of immunity of Native-Americans to small pox and other infectious diseases), cultural factors such as Jewish-American mothers of the 1930s or systemic racism against African-Americans, and the billions of contingent choices made daily by the teeming masses of the world.
And lastly, on the subject of moral choice, freedom does matter. There is certainly a strong case to be made that moral freedom is an illusion, but it does feel real. SAT scores, MBTE or IQ tests or other empirical measures can lead to educated guesses about the choices people make, but they can’t reliably predict them. That’s why some people become accountants, some people ballerinas, some MBAs, some cabaret singers — even if they all graduated from the same good college for which their SAT said they were qualified. And that’s what makes observing the human menagerie interesting, rather than akin to reading the U.S. Census.
(P.S. Emerson’s somewhat sinister but compelling essay "Fate" — which acknowledges the power of statistical analysis of human behavior while nevertheless recognizing that moral freedom is still part of the picture, is worth a read). http://www.rwe.org/works/Conduct_1_Fate.htm
Congratulations, Brian. Best of luck in your goal of establishing the University of Chicago as one of the top centers of law and philosophy.
Thank you, Chuck Schumer, for reminding all of us just how completely and pathetically useless Democrats are. Schumer will vote in favor of Judge Mukasey’s appointment as Attorney General because Mukasey assured Schumer that, were the Senate to pass a law banning a certain interrogation technique (i.e., waterboarding, which Mukasey conveniently can’t decide is torture even though it’s the classic example of precisely that), the President would not have the authority under the Bush Administration’s "Commander-in-Chief trumps everything" theory to disregard such a law. Of course, Congress has already done so. And a law expressly forbidding waterboarding isn’t going to get passed, but even if it did, it’s obvious what would happen next: Interrogators would be told that no, they can’t use water to simulate drowning, but nothing forbids them from using orange juice.
James Frey’s (arguably) overfictionalized memoir — remember the big scandal about how millions of readers were defrauded because it was a great big lie? Only 1700 people asked for refunds. Maybe Oprah will switch sides again.
It’s apparently straight-up military rule in Pakistan: General Musharraf has suspended Pakistan’s constitution and fired multiple judges on its supreme court for choosing to follow the law rather than his demands. Musharraf argues that this is justified by a state of 9/11, I mean, a state of emergency. So in comparison, it’s totally no big deal that President Bush has argued for unchecked presidential/CIC authority based on a permanent war on nightmares I mean terror, or that Rudy Giuliani is, as the Onion correctly satirized, running for President of 9/11 (or as Biden explained, "There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence — a noun, a verb, and 9/11.")
And don’t forget to change your clocks!
Accidental Blogger 