I am … unhindered by talent

w00t! There’s a group pushing for a presidential science debate focused on the many scientific issues that face us nationally and worldwide. Their call:

Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role scientific innovation plays in spurring economic growth and competitiveness, we call for a public debate in which the U.S. presidential candidates share their views on the issues of The Environment, Health and Medicine, and Science and Technology Policy.

I’m all signed up, and definitely encourage others to visit ScienceDebate2008.com and do the same. I seriously doubt there is a single major issue these days that doesn’t have a significant technological or scientific component. Yet there’s precious little discussion of science in our political dialogue, and candidates regularly display an ignorance of science that is at best extremely worrying.

To be honest, I have doubts about this happening, at least right away, but we’ve got to start demanding this sort of accountability on science and technology. Every journey begins with a single step web site…

Oh, and they really need a badge that people like me can include in posts and sidebars and such. Anyone want to make one?

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Alert! One of our eagle-eyed readers (Lambo) pointed out in the comments that the details of this chart are almost certainly broken, and that the PCRM may not be quite the upstanding source that we might have hoped for. I think the larger point probably still holds, but this graph needs to be taken with more salt than is dietarily good for you. See the comments for more.

We are what we eat, and (all too often) we eat what’s cheap, and what’s cheap is what we subsidize.

Or, turning the thing around…

We subsidize unhealthy, environmentally irresponsible foods, so it’s hardly a surprise that, as a nation, we eat tons of the stuff.

To cleanse your pallet, I’ll leave you with a delicious organic mushroom from River Nene Farms…

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Technology publishing magnate Tom O’Reilly apparently gets loads of questions and comments from confused fans of Bill O’Reilly. Awfully nice of him to share some of their more charming idiosyncratic behaviors!

clipped from radar.oreilly.com

Meanwhile, we get some real humdingers showing how out of touch with reality some of the O’Reilly Factor fans are.

I have read in The Onion newpaper, that Bush has cut off diplomatic relations with Congress. I found this to be unbelievable and I thought it would be illegal! Can you check it out and see if it is true? How can you run a government and not talk to the Congress??

Not only can Bill O’Reilly’s fans not distinguish between a technology publisher and a right wing pundit, they can’t tell that the Onion is a satire! Or else they are just trying to yank his chain. (But someone smart enough to do that would know that oreilly.com is not theoreillyfactor.com.)

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When Republican candidates are reduced to this sort of nonsense, you know there’s trouble afoot. Man, I want a president endorsed by Chuck Norris. And the reference to Huckabee’s hunting experience right after the border protection point was just plain creepy.

Apparently this is the only campaign ad this guy is gonna run.

shudder…

Thanks (I think?) to Marc Andreessen for the pointer.

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To quote the photographer:

This is the Perris, Ca, 215 northbound south of perris blvd during the morning commute. This would normally be a bright time of the day, but this morning, traffic was a little stop and go due to the smoke from the local fires here in southern california.

A little understated, perhaps?

As awful as all this was, I have to wonder if this is what it will take to get people to take climate change seriously. Unfortunately even people who realize that we have a major problem on our hands are often overwhelmed by the thing, and tend to add it to the long list of Bad Things That Mostly Affect Someone Else (AIDS in Africa, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, even Shrub’s fiasco in Iraq) and change the channel.

This is particularly sad because climate change is one of those things that Americans can do something about quite directly. It’s pretty hard for me to make a major difference in a lot of situations (although that’s no excuse for not trying), but climate change is all about my behavior. I can drive less (or not at all). I can replace incandescent bulbs with CFs and turn them off when I leave the room. I can turn down the thermostat. I can support alternative energy programs. I can purchase carbon offsets. I can avoid buying produce that flew half way around the world. I can reduce, reuse, recycle. And if even some of the rest of you do the same, we make a significant difference. We probably won’t solve the problem by ourselves, but we can start the ball rolling, proving that there is support for change at the consumer (and voter) level.

It’s arguably one of the best examples of where “Think Globally, Act Locally” can really make a profound difference.

Unfortunately important things like not driving and skipping the raspberries flown in from remote lands comes at a personal inconvenience. This requires will which, sadly, is typically driven by fear. So maybe we need a few scares like this (along with tragedies like Katrina) to generate the kind of immediacy and fear necessary to get us out of our single-occupant SUVs.

Best hope we turn things around before the tragedy comes to your home, though.

Thanks to TonyGman for the great photo.

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I suspect many of our readers will already have seen something about this, but just in case it hasn’t gotten a lot of U.S. press, Chancellor Alistair Darling (a very high ranking member of the British government) announced today in the House of Commons that 2 discs (CDs or DVDs - I’m not sure) were lost that contained highly confidential information for 25 Million Individuals. This data included names, dates of birth, insurance numbers, and (in some cases) bank account details — essentially all the toys you’d need to execute identity theft and fraud on a massive scale. The kind of stuff that an organized crime outfit would probably pay mucho top dollar for.

And the data was unencrypted.

Yup.

Unencrypted.

Makes you want to cry.

(In fairness, the discs were “password protected”, but no one seems clear on what that actually means. Given that most password systems for discs and files are child’s play to get through, without solid encryption on the other end “password protected” doesn’t offer much comfort.)

Unfortunately, as several of the talking heads pointed out, this is at some level inevitable as governments, corporations, and educational institutions move to larger and more centralized databases. Consider, for example, last year’s leak of the search histories of half a million AOL users.

The U of M at least tries to take these things seriously, but they don’t always get the stick by the right end. There’s a lot of noise, for example, about whether faculty like myself should be able to hold confidential student data (including things like homework grades) on our office computers or (far worse) on laptops or home computers. This is partly a security concern (stolen laptops are always a risk, who knows how well I’ve configured and updated my computers), and partly a data protection concern (how often do I actually backup my data). If they seriously go down this road, however, then one consequence is that all this grade data for the entire University is in one place. At the moment, if my computer gets lost or destroyed or stolen, there’s not much exposure. It would be painful and unpleasant for me and several dozen students, but the ripples would stop pretty quickly. If all that data is centralized, however, then the risk is arguably much greater, especially if it’s not managed well.

In reality, I’m not their real problem. I just don’t have access (and rightly so) to enough data to mess up very many people’s lives. There are admin and support staff, however, that have access to enormous amounts of sensitive information. Are they able to burn a couple of DVDs full of the stuff? Probably (but hopefully not easily). Are they trained on why that would be a really dumb idea? I think so.

But then I would have thought that staff at Revenue and Customs over here would have had that sort of training.

And apparently I would have been wrong.

Thanks to the fine folks at MonkeyRiverTown for the great photo.

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These (American) ladies recently won an international bridge competition in Shanghai, and displayed their little sign when receiving their prize. The sign was prompted by questions from players from other countries:

“What we were trying to say, not to Americans but to our friends from other countries, was that we understand that they are questioning and critical of what our country is doing these days, and we want you to know that we, too, are critical,” Ms. Greenberg said, stressing that she was speaking for herself and not her six teammates.

Anyone who’s traveled much (or simply interacted much with folks from other parts of the world) in recent years, will recognize the situation. Many U.S. government policies including, but not limited to the Iraq fiasco, are broadly condemned worldwide. In my experience, however, most folks are clever enough to distinguish between the government and its people (something many Americans appear to struggle with), so one of the first things they often ask about is where you stand on the war. The faculty and graduate students at the University ask me. Sub-Evil’s schoolmates ask him. I’m hardly surprised that it came up around the coffee pots and meal tables at an international bridge tournament.

Apparently, however, there are those who believe that it’s unacceptable for these people to publicly separate themselves from the current administration. The women didn’t make any sort of policy statement and criticize any particular actions. All they did is self-identify as being in the near (or actual - depends on the election) majority of voters that didn’t tick the Shurb box on the day. Yet the United States Bridge Federation has chosen to void their bowels and enter the full court press on these players:

[The sanction] calls for a one-year suspension from federation events, including the World Bridge Olympiad next year in Beijing; a one-year probation after that suspension; 200 hours of community service “that furthers the interests of organized bridge”; and an apology drafted by the federation’s lawyer.

It would also require them to write a statement telling “who broached the idea of displaying the sign, when the idea was adopted, etc.”

Alan Falk, a lawyer for the federation, wrote the four team members on Nov. 6, “I am instructed to press for greater sanction against anyone who rejects this compromise offer.”

Hey, we even have some classic “We’ll reward you for folding early and turning against your friends”. Charming, really. Participating in the international circuit is a key component of the income for some of these ladies, so this is serious business, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s hard for them to stand up to this level of pressure. I hope they can get some really good lawyers and smack the crap out of these small-minded dweebs. I’d not be surprised (or blame them), however, if they try to find a quick way out of this with minimal damage.

Thanks to 21st Century Citizen for the pointer. They source to the NYTimes, which is where they (and I) got the photo.

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Great - it looks like the networks are parceling out speaking time in the debates according to candidate’s poll standings, adding yet another layer of “The rich get richer” to American politics. I’m going to go to bed and cry and leave you to learn more on your own:

• Political text analysis: The Times counts debate words
• Democratic Debate: Analyzing the Details
• The cynical take on the debate speaking times
• Debate Time Follow-up: The CNN debate

The “Greatest Democracy On Earth” (or whatever we call ourselves these days) needs to have elections based on good information and honest debate and discussion. That doesn’t happen if we only pretend to give voice to all the candidates.

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I doubt this will be news to many, but it’s a really cool idea and worth the plug. The One Laptop Per Child program is making that crucial leap from great concept to spiffy, shipping technology. These are designed to be used by groups of kids in the developing world, but the project’s viziers had the clever idea of allowing folks in the U.S. and Canada to buy one of these first units under their Give One Get One program. You pay $400, and $200 goes to sending you a wondrous new XO laptop, while the other $200 is a tax deductible donation that puts one of these gems in the hand of a child in the developing world. This is only for a limited time, however: November 12 and November 26

As Michael Tiemann points out, however, if you’re gonna get one, you really should consider getting two. These things are designed to form little ad hoc wireless networks whenever they’re near other XO laptops, and lots of the software assumes the existence of other XO laptops more than it assumes access to the full force of the internet (which so much traditional software now assumes). So you, your kids, and whoever you’re showing off your new toy to will be much more impressed if you have two of them to play with.

I’ve had some people ask if we were planning to buy one. Unfortunately (a) we can’t buy one from the UK in a straight-forward way and (b) we’re pretty tight for cash with partial salary and the damn exchange rate. So the answer is no, for now, but not for lack of wanting to. My guess, however, is that this short window of opportunity is a nice marketing scheme to bring in some cash fast, and that down the road they’ll open things up more broadly on a similar scheme. And why not? It raises their profile, and the “Give one, get one” scheme puts more in the hands of the target group of kids.

Cleverly, KK has proposed that UMM’s CSci discipline buy four of them for students and faculty to do projects on. I think that’s a great idea for a lot of reasons, only one of which is that there will be some waiting for me to play with when we get home :-).

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I just discovered The Gapminder, a very cool visualization tool created by Hans Rosling and others. It gives you the ability to visualize changes in a variety of socio-economic indicators across both space and time, with particularly effective use of simple animations across the time dimension.

It’s really cool to play with, and there are a lot of things you can change that aren’t immediately obvious (I found the short demo in the on-line help quite helpful). You can certainly learn a lot by goofing around with it (as well as generate a lot of meaningless visual noise). The screenshot above is from a plot of life expectancy vs. per capita income over time (the default plot you get when you start it up). I had to watch it a few times to sift out some trends, but after getting past the obvious “generally, more money means longer life” I realized that lots of blue bubbles (i.e., African countries) were “falling” out of the cloud at the end like particulates settling out of a liquid. This indicates that their life expectancy has plummeted in the last few years, which is obviously not the right direction. Why? Almost certainly the continuing AIDS crisis in large parts of Africa, and visualizations like this make it painfully (literally) obvious that this must be cause for serious concern.

In the graph above, I’ve highlighted Botswana,which shows a particularly depressing case. Both their life expectancy and per capita incomes were moving in a happy direction until the early 90’s when, despite continued gains in per capita income (which I’d like to know more about), their life expectancy flew the wrong direction.

Take a second to think about the enormous human suffering a change like that implies.

Thanks to John Hawks for the pointer. Hawks points out that the use of circles of different areas probably isn’t a great way to visualize quantitative differences (a general point Tufte raised years ago), but Rosling’s going for quick impact rather than quantitative precision:

So far, we have had a major hit with two target groups: children under 12 and heads of state. What they have in common is that you have only 5 to 10 seconds to impress them.

(You just have to love the reality that you need the same tools to communicate with little kids and world leaders. Maybe we should just put the little kids in charge? They might have more empathy.)

One thing that really annoyed me when I wrote this post was the fact that you can’t easily embed these graphs in a web page. I don’t think I’d really appreciated how used I’d grown to being able to embed images, video, maps, slideshows, and the like in blog posts. I think embedding has become absolutely key to the success and mass propagation on the web, and people designing new tools (or updating existing ones) better keep that in mind.

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