Policy Renormed

I note, courtesy of the Chicago Tribune, [Link] that the current (modern) democrat administration has announced plans to reverse the doomsday minutes previous (modern) republican administration’s policy on permitting health care workers to refuse services to patients on moral grounds.

One of the things I do periodically is work with some folks at the medical shuls around Alibam to help them develop models. Lately a lot of these models have to do with disease propagation in human populations. Occasionally, they involve helping build a model to integrate some behavior that has been gathered down at the individual level. Sometimes questions involving ethics and morality arise in relation to how the data are collected, or perhaps how the experiment is posed.

Not too long ago, over a coffee break a group I was working with got into the question of the above policy. I was rather favorably impressed that all – physicians, biologists, and statisticians – agreed that the ethical thing to do was to ignore the policy. I was immediately reminded of the Du Mu’s dictum in Sun Tzu’s collection The Art of War (any translation other than the Clavell!)

“there are certain commands of the sovereign that are to be ignored.”

The consensus was that regardless of one’s moral beliefs and outlook failure to provide health service to an individual based on their differences in morality was a worse and grievous ethical evil. I did remind myself however, that medical students are no longer required to have a divinity degree before they begin their studies. Still the fact that this disobedience had to be debated, even though it was a trivially short and one-sided debate, indicates that this policy does touch at a root of evil in this nation.

“Those who deny liberty to other deserve it not themselves.”

government, policy, ethics, mysticism, superstition

Computer Literacy

How to tell if you are computer literate.

Question: What does the number phrase 07/08/09 indicate?

Multiple Guess Answers:

1. Seventh of July 2009
2. 2009 August Ninth
3. July Eighth 2009
4. Evil Satanic Cult Numerology

1. You are either computer literate or in the military.
2. You are computer literate.
3. You are not computer literate but you can read the expiration date on packaged foodstuffs.
3. You are not computer literate but that is irrelevant since you are also a superstitious Luddite mystic.

Please note this is a substantial improvement from the ’60′s when I first got introduced to computers and there would have been an answer “5. What number phrase?” that indicated the respondent was a user of illegal drugs.

If you answered “all of the above” you are an overeducated generalist and should immediately apply to emigrate to Mars.

Political Humor

(modern) democrat driving rule: vehicles making left hand turns ALWAYS have right-of-way.

Day of Wonders

Evidence mounts that spring has emerged here in Nawth Alibam. We have a cold front reasserting winter’s rights on its way but yesterday and today have had temperatures nicely centered between the solid transition temperature of dihydrogen oxide and the median temperature of the corpus of homo sapiens.

Today is supposed to be a fairly steady progression of a rain symphony, reaching its crescendo somwhere around Gary Cooper. Certainly the introductory parts early this morning were quite relaxing, conducive to slumber in fact.

So on such a dismal day, it seems somewhat natural to find dismal tidings in the news feeds. To start with, there is word that internet service providers are telling the Yankee congress that they are going to have to more strictly manage how bits flow on their infrastructure. [Link] This is apparently a new approach to them yammering about network neutrality. It is also disturbing but not for the reasons obvious.

The difficulty with network neutrality is that it holds that internet users should have unfettered access to the ‘net. That has two aspects: one is not preventing anyone from visiting any web address; the other is assuring the others do not impose restrictions. It is the latter that seems to be disturbing the ISPs.

The first is sticky primarily from the question of whether ISPs are responsible for keeping their customers from committing illegal acts, like anyone visiting a child pornography site or any minor visiting any porn site. In general the justicers have held that the guy who provides the plumbing is not responsible for its contents so long as that content doesn’t come from the pipes. Hence the Roman self destruction is included as liable.

The problem is that if one has some customers who want all of the bandwidth of the pipes, or at least enough so that the other customers can’t use them, who is responsible? And is the ISP providing fraudulent services? In effect, we have moved from what the stuff is in the pipes to how much each person puts in. And takes out.

There is ample precedent for this. I see it every month in my water bill. That bill is linearly related to how much water I bring into my house (past the meter at least,) and how much sewage I send out of the house. The question is whether business oligarchs and their congressional minions are smart enough to get the analogy.

Alternately, a brightness in the gloom is news that a woman in England has obtained a favorable justicer  decision against her former energy provider using harassing tactics in collecting false debt. [Link] Seems the woman changed providers, informed the old provider she was terminating service, and they never bothered to tell their billing department who kept billing her, and bills being unpaid, turned the matter over to bill collection. This is a very standard story of commercial organization ignoring the real world and imposing their tyranny on their members, present and past.

Now if we can just get our Yankee justicers to do the same. It is a shameful state of affairs that it takes two lawyers to figure out how an organization is falsely harassing an citizen. Or that we permit such one sided power to what amounts to a robot. Aha! Terminator as Corporate Oligarch!

But to restore our faith in organization self interest, we have to laud the Gainsville constabulary down in the Floridas. [Link] Seems that they have repeatedly ticketed an automobile. Nothing amazing there aside from the appearance that the driver parked the car and then discorporated. So over a spate of a half dozen tickets, not a single ticketing officer noticed the presence of a corpse in the vehicle. This certainly points up the accuracy of the motto “to protect and serve.” We just have to question whether what is protected and served is the organization and not its members, or in this case, the citizenry.

However, to show how altruistic some organizations are, we have research from the Max Planck Institut on the biological composition of saliva. [Link] Evidently these guys got inspired by watching all those dental/oral hygiene product commercials – the ones with all the cutesy fuzzy plush toy bacteria figures cunningly rendered by modern computer animation – and set out to measure what kinds and how many. Of some concern, at least for the competency of modern biological science, is that about a third of the bacteria found in their Tellus-wide survey had not been seen/reported previously. So not only are there more bacteria in your mouth than there are mouth cells, a lot of them are strangers.

Lastly, researchers at Bournemouth U – while we are on the subject of mouths – have discovered Homo Erectus footprints dating to 1.5 MYA that clearly indicate those early humans had the same kind of feet we homo sapiens do.[Link] This gives a entirely new range of support to the idea that the development of the human species is energized by the quest for shoes. Now if someone would just explain why we are so bad at it. After all, 1.5 MY and we still cannot build shoes that don’t mess up our feet?Technorati Tags: weather, management, government, capitalism, genetics, biology

Wrinkled Cheese

Thursdays at gym are in many ways the best day of the week. Part of that is that it is the day I complete my weekly exercise cycle and get my five hours in. Part of it is also that the diligence of the teacher taliban is flagging faster than mine so there are fewer arrogant auras polluting the atmosphere. And part of It is that I get to listen to rather different podcasts.

Well, as I was warming up the trainer who opens the facility, Vector Potential, who controls the television remote control like a queen her scepter, flipped the channel over to one of the morning news programs where they were plagiarizing news from the print media. Normally I do not pay much attention to television. What is on is banal and vapid, the news readers generally match the content, and the bogs and teachers squabble like small children over which void they display on the tube. I suspect the latter is why the trainer is a television nazi.

Anyway, the newspaper extractions included a mention of development in England of a small iron designed for the purpose of toasting cheese sandwiches. A photograph of the device being applied to a sandwich held in some model’s hand was displayed. I must admit that my first thought was to wonder what burn ointment tastes like? After all, if one holds a sandwich in one’s hand while applying an appliance whose temperature is well above the boiling point of water to that sandwich, and despite the insulating qualities of the bread, one may expect considerable heat to be transferred to one’s hand in the processing of browning the bread and melting the cheese. Cheese, incidentally, has a relatively high heat capacity. Not as high as many jellies and jams, but higher than, for example, peanut butter. It is definitely high enough to melt the fats in most preserved meats which is why most toasted hoagies and heros are extra greasy. It is also hot enough to partly cook pork, hence burn a human’s hand.

Hence, derivatively, one has to wonder if the iron comes with an insulated glove and how one cleans it of the oils that separate out of the cheese through the bread? Or is that something the English never worry about rather like whether they should be the subjects of tyrants rather than citizens of some real democracy. Or is there such a thing as a real democracy that doesn’t self-destruct in a few years?

I was rather quickly reminded of my experiences as a freshman in college. I went off well equipped by my parents with a small refrigerator – purchased from Sears Roebuck and I am told still working by my younger brother who borrowed the appliance when he went to college and never returned. But we were forbidden hot plates as fire hazards. Upperclassmen jauntily ignored such rules but freshmen had not yet learned about rules that could not be enforced but occasionally, or even better, not at all. This rule was of the former type.

I had also been provided by my parents with an inexpensive iron to dewrinkle my shirts with, but scant instruction. It did not take me very long to realize that college students were not graded on the basis of absence of wrinkles in their shirts and the iron languished for a few weeks until the weather turned cold.

At that time there was a complex of six men’s dorms with a single short order grill and fountain in the largest dorm. This place was mobbed evenings, especially on the weekend when the cafeteria was closed, and the hot item was toasted cheese sandwiches. Sadly the wait for a sandwich was about a hour or more on these occasions.

One evening after we had wasted over an hour of study time on queue for sandwiches, one of our number offered a wish that we might make out own sandwiches. This stuck and on Monday between classes I visited the student shop, wrangled some nails and screws, caged some scrap wood from the remnant bin and built a cradle for that iron.

The following weekend we made our usual Saturday morning group march into Tuscaloosa proper to purchase what necessities we needed that could be carried. This time the necessities included a loaf of white bread, a block of process cheese, and a jar of mayo. That evening, instead of marching to a local greasy spoon, we turned the iron over, placed it on the cradle, plugged it in, and set about toasting sandwiches. It is well we invested in more materials than we should need for there were some spectacular failures in the path to our simple dinner, but we got there, and arrived thereby, truly, as college students and incipiently, as scientists.

Unlike our peers who still bought their toasted cheese sandwiches at the grill, and were frightened of lab apparatus like bunsen burners and test tubes, we had made equipment and performed actual practical thermochemical experiments. And survived! And no more were we unsure freshmen waiting to burst into flames but confident freshmen ready to burn fingers and smell nasty odors.

And even better, we did it without a hot plate. After all, irons were not forbidden, just unimaginable to the establishment to be something other than wrinkle removers.

rite of passage, college, independence, maturity

Scant Sense

Management Question: you are a small exercise facility in a rural area that enjoys a limited geographic monopoly. How do you spend your budget?

• Purchase new exercise machines to better serve the diversity of your customer base;
• Fix the (badly) leaking roof;
• Fix the (badly) misbehaving HVAC;
• Expand the size of the facility to better serve the diversity of your customer base and improve safety (now in violation of OSHA and fire code);
• Install an electronic lock system or hire more staff to extend operating hours to better serve the diversity of your customer base;
• Improve communication with your diverse customer base; or
• Buy more televisions.

Ayeh. That’s right. The last one. Buy more televisions.

Aside from the OBVIOUS question of how this improves the health and well being of the customer base, which is, I believe, the mission and function of the organization, there is the matter of how does something so egregious as this obtain?

One has to wonder if this is a matter of medical arrogance or just adherence to the theory that playing classical music at the stockyard makes the animals go to their deaths quietly. Surely it cannot be a case of management that is fundamentally whacked and incompetent.

Technorati Tags: management, medicine, exercise, excellence

An Informed Consumery

The accidental (?) juxtaposition of articles this morning is about consumers. The first, [Link] in the New Yawk Times, is about whether use taxes will be placed on plastic and paper merchandise bags. Several cities are reported to have passed laws or have them shortly coming for a vote.

The first question that emerges here is whether this is a sin tax or not? Certainly the folks who worry about sustainment would claim that anything that depletes the ecosystem is bad, hence a sin. Pragmatists point out that Sol will engulf Tellus in a few million years and that will be a near ultimate depletion event.

From what I understand, a sin is supposed to be something you enjoy but is bad for you, like sex or chocolate. I suppose not having sex, and not reproducing is the ultimate sustainment action since if there are no humans they are not depleting the ecosystem. Of course I have heard very few sustainment folks arguing that overpopulation is a sin and should be penalized – perhaps by an open season on young males?

The point herebeing (how’s that for striking a new word?) is that merchandise bags are not what I would consider to be pleasurable. I don’t enjoy the prices I have to pay for merchandise but I excuse that as a matter of being conditioned on prices in my youth when a hamburger or a gallon of gas were a quarter dollar and a good used car could be had for 2K$. But aside from prices, I really do not like lugging merchandise bags about, especially as their handles are either broken or cut off the circulation in my hands, and once you have them you can’t get rid of them. Why the recyclage corporate oligarchs in Greater Metropolitan Arab don’t want to recycle them. Not enough money in that to pique their social consciousness. They are, after all, good (modern) republicans. Or at least Southron democrats of the post Jacksonian mutation.

So, simply put, what is the enjoyment of merchandise bags that makes them sinful? But more pointed, the second questionis more to the matter. If we are to use cloth bags that we pruchase from a merchant and has his logo affixed, are we committed in some fealtyish form to only shop at his establishment. May one use MalWart bags at the Winn Dixie or the Piggly Wiggly? Without penalty, that is – I should not really like being dragged into the alley by produce department thugs, made to kneel over the dumpster, and my last memory being the thud of a round of ball at the base of my skull?

And what happens if my bags are too small in volume for the merchandise I have purchased. Obviously if it is less no harm is done other than my wasted effort dragging the bags both ways, but if too much, what happens? Must I select enough items to meet my volumetric constraint and abandon them. And f so, how and where do I abandon them? Or do I have to buy more cloth bags? Or am I charged for plastic or paper bags?

Other matters of great consumer import include research from Southern Methodist and Ohio State U that consumers have difficulty ascribing descriptive names to electronic multifunction devices. [Link] What does one call a combination MP3 player and GPS receiver? An iFound? Or an iLost? The latter seems more appropriately the description of the people who paid for a subscription to the journal the article was published in, which is a sadly misplaced sentiment on my part. After all, there are scientists, reputable ones, who study annelids and nematodes and such, so why not study consumers.

Which begs the obvious question of what is the analogous noise making for consumers to grunting?

Lastly, out of U Central Florida and Erasmus U we have a research on whether the value of things is positively correlated with their price. [Link] The authors advance a well considered and statistically supported conclusion that “it depends.”

Evidently in some cases, some expensive things are more better than equivalent cheap things for the difference in price. But not always. 
Technorati Tags: consumer merchandise ecology humans

Medical Maladventure

I note this morning an article from the Wonk Shul on the Charles that the social engineers embedded (partial) funding and (total) requirement for physicians to adopt Electronic Health Records. I cannot say that I am surprised. Indeed what amazed me was that the (modern) republicans hadn’t already done this in their frenzy of surveillance (“everyone is suspect so let’s spy on them”) and corporation minionry (insurance company to policy holder: “no, you had a test of the same anme six years ago and we don’t care that it was the wrong resolution and things change, we just want a vacuous excuse for denying coverage.”)

I am not quite clear on what the intent of the (modern) democrats is, other than some instrumentality of assuring the same level of medical care to all non-office holders as part of their scheme to reduce the nation to a two class system: aristocrat office holders and serfs.I do have my suspicions about the warts on this whole exercise.

The obvious one that I am not even going to touch here is the security aspect because everyone and his mother’s other son will be belaboring that. I’m not because by the basic definition of seurity this system won’t have any. None. Absent.

The other thing is that this will drive up costs, primarily in the cost of people to take care of the system. If you go to a physician’s office these days a big fraction of the people working there are not doing medial things; they are doing insurance things. And those people are a cost of doing business. Read the wall.

And I have to wonder what kind of quality assurance programs they are going to have for this? One of the annoying things that saves us now from the propagation of errors is paper records since they are localized. Now a simple mistake on a record will be available everywhere and always and probably can never be corrected.

But the thing that worries me most is that we already have problems getting medical care for folks on Medicare because the margins are lower. In effect this is age discrimination but there is either no way or more likely, no benefit, to exposing it. Now things are going to get more intense and this leads to concern that instead of making things better this will really make things worse.

medicine, automation, economics

Sunday Stew

More remnant rebashing.

I note an article [Link] that

despite a lot of gloom and doom projections from market watchers claiming that cheap netbook sales would cannibalize the sales of pricier, more profitable full sized laptops, HP’s CEO recently said that netbooks aren’t to blame for the company’s declining revenues.

This is not at all clear. Another article [Link] that we have previous blogged noted that 0.3 of computer sales in a furrin market were netbooks. So the questions we have to ask include whether netbooks – itty bitty lap tops – are keeping the declining revenues from being even more declining? And how much of the decline is due to the patent ineptitude, probably incompetence, of HP’s executive management. After all, who is it that saddled a netbook with SLED, and then moved on, perhaps false wisely, to Ubuntu just when Open SUSE may have been a better choice.

I recently initiated a flurry of tirade among some folks who are patently corporate IT minions over the problems of managed desktops and how SLED made their jobs feasible. I bit my tongue early (and thumb, taking no chances), noting that slave overseers seldom can be led to enlightenment. Patently the problem, at least in some degree, is that the managed desktop is a self-licking ice cream cone of mediocrity. If you deliberately make people ignorant and dependent, you cannot expect them not to be ignorant and dependent. What you can expect is that one day “the sheep will look up” (John Brunner allusion here!) and ask you why you made them ignorant and dependent? And if you are lucky, not do so on the path to the guillotine.

One indication that they may not, is research from U Chicago that fewer people read open source literature than read closed (for pay) source literature. [Link] I am not at all sure how to think on this although one immediate hypothesis is that since most scientists are academics they somehow don’t consider open source publications socially correct? I could opine that it is a matter of them not being able to find the open source pubs, since most are web only, but that would be unfair exaggeration. Several of my academic colleagues can use a browser, although most of them have not yet been able to understand their students’ explanations of Firefox and Opera. Still, slavish use of Internet Explorer is not too much of a stigma.

But what is confirming is that the vast majority of the citizenry consumerate of the Yankee republic is not only uninterested in reality but possibly incapable of reading research publications. More evidence for human mental neoteny?

This hypothesis is further advanced by findings [Link] that the probability of stroke increases by 0.01 for every fast food restaurant in the dining (?) area. I use dining area advisedly since consuming what is offered at fast food restaurants is more a matter of swilling and polluting than actually eating, mush less dining. But the idea is accurately captured by founding father Benjamin Franklin.

This translates to a stroke per time period per hundred people per fast food restaurant, which for Greater Metropolitan Arab is ~ 6,000 people /100 people x 10 fast food restaurants = 600 strokes per time period. It is not at all clear what that time period is from the reportage, probably suppressed either in the interest of citizens not leading off fast food restaurant owners to the guillotine, or being bought off by those same owners. But the question we have to ask is why do we subsidize this type of danger? Why do we enrich people who harm us? Are we too mentally whacked to continue?
Technorati Tags: management, humans, mental competence, insanity

Evolutionary Complexity

I also ran across this article [Link] on a science fiction (~) web site. The (~) is a shorthand for “sorta”. This derives from my definition that science fiction is fiction about science and thereby it has to be very accurate, especially for things that are generally accepted as not arguable because the data is overwhelming. There are some things folks don’t argue about much but that is because of other constraints, social or economic in many cases.

Anyway, a lot of what is called science fiction these days fails that (admittedly somewhat subjective) criterion. Some of this is acceptable or at least expected. Movies that claim to be science fiction have almost always been VERY INACCURATE but they do it so blatantly and hilariously that they qualify as parody without meaning to. In some arenas the terms “SF” or “SciFi” are used and while I am not completely clear on what these terms do mean, at least in part because there is no clear definitions, they may be different enough to permit the minuscule ponies to coexist with the stercus. Anyway, I visit the site for mining and can freely reject the majority of the latter material while focusing in on the minority of the former.

The article in question falls into that bin. It deals with an article in NATURE as part of the observation of Darwin’s birthday anniversary. The subject, which is a current running through several articles in the issue. deals with the interplay of social and biological mechanisms in the evolution of humans. The thing I find intriguing as I read these articles is an almost complete absence of any discussion of the maths aspects of this. In particular I keep finding my attention span returning to Per Bak’s How Nature Works and his comments about how emergence is an extensive phenomena – in some measure – and how all of these article are jabbering about what amounts to extensive social-biological interaction due to human nature and behavior.

Is this a case of SCP seeing patterns where there are none [Link] or is this a matter of excessive segregation (and hence ignorance) of disciplines? Or are biologists naturally acalculitic?

But I was rather taken in one of the articles [NATURE|Vol 457|12 February 2009, p 780ff]about the universality of some aspects of human society. This is a pet pieve of mine. When I was a student anthropologists still talked about there being widespread and even universal commonalities of different societies. In later years this fell into disfavor, largely it seems because of political correctness, to the point where only absolute individuality was acceptable to discuss or publish. To a physicist who had studied anthropology electively and enjoyed it it seemed as if some insaniity was gripping the discipline and as a result it had not only neutered itself, but plucked out both eyes in false offense.

Now, the biologists seem to be forcing the anthropologists to get their vision, and we may hope their common sense, back. And one of those articles includes in its discourse the subject of “universal religion.” I was particularly taken by a couple of quotes:

 “Supernatural thought is so ubiquitous in part because it is so readily accommodated by human cognitive systems from early childhood,”

 and

“Children seem naturally predisposed to accept the idea that there exist supernatural intentional agents, that the natural world is intentionally designed and purposeful, and that something of human identity is separable from human bodies, allowing for ready belief in some kind of afterlife.”

which would seem to make some connection between fairy tales and religion.

The implication is disturbing, that all humans are imbued with mystical thoughts by the same process that w see monsters under beds, in closets, or in shadows, and delight in stories of fairies and ogres and magic, and only a few attain actual rationality in maturity? Are humans, in the main, intellectually and rationally neotenous?  Or are we perhaps dealing with some other form of emergent behavior?

Technorati Tags: biology, evolution, humans, religion