I think I just found one of the upsides of being in charge of things. We had a group meeting just now. I asked one question, it got answered. Then I asked if anyone had some issues they wanted to raise with the group, and one person did. And nobody else did, so I asked “Does anyone feel like having more meeting right now? [pause] No? Good! Let’s get out of here.”
I feel like I just used my powers for good.
From Anders Sandberg’s blog, warning signs for tomorrow. I can think of a couple of places I’d like to post the “Group Intellect” warning; “Existential Threat” may have to turn into an icon. I may have to sit down and come up with some other useful warning signs. (“Beware of Golem!”)
From Slashdot, an article suggesting that call centers may be using emotion detection software to tell when customers are annoyed. I’m not really sure what they’re doing with this; if they already have a human on-line, humans are much better at detecting annoyance than machines are. If they’re using it to identify “this person is getting pissed, move them up in the voicemail queue,” that seems like one of the worst perverse incentives I’ve seen in a while. It makes me think of Crowley’s antics from Good Omens.
Apparently, as “his frustration rises and his influence ebbs,” our president has been using the word “unacceptable” much more often. The article says:
In speeches, statements and news conferences this year, the president has repeatedly declared a range of problems “unacceptable,” including rising health costs, immigrants who live outside the law, North Korea’s claimed nuclear test, genocide in Sudan and Iran’s nuclear ambitions… Having a president call something “unacceptable” is not the same as having him order U.S. troops into action. But foreign policy experts say the word is one of the strongest any leader can deploy, since it both broadcasts a national position and conveys an implicit threat to take action if his warnings are disregarded.
The article avoids (explicitly) saying:
You use that word a great deal. I do not think it means what you think it means.
From Reuters: Troops battle 10-foot marijuana plants.
One soldier told him later: “Sir, three years ago before I joined the Army, I never thought I’d say ‘That damn marijuana.'”
An article recently published in the Lancet estimates the number of “excess deaths” in Iraq since the invasion at 655,000, of which 601,000 were due to violence and the balance due to disease, etc. Here’s a Washington Post story; here’s one from the BBC. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the original journal article; if someone does and could forward me a copy, I’d be very interested to read it.
[In fact: The BBC and WP stories seem to disagree on numbers a good deal, so I’d really like to see the original paper and figure out what’s going on. The WP numbers more closely match what I’ve heard from other media channels, so I’ll use those below]
There’s “controversy,” of course, because the US administration immediately decried the results as false and the methodology as incorrect — which I would personally find a bit surprising, given that poor methodology doesn’t generally get published in top-tier medical journals. The official death toll is less than 1/10th of that.
But there may be a good reason why those two numbers disagree: the official death toll is probably counting very selective types of deaths, e.g. deaths in which US personnel were directly involved, either as combatants or in cleaning up the mess. It’s an attempt to count deaths which came to the attention of US forces. The Lancet study is measuring something else: they did a random survey of 1,849 households across Iraq and asked people about deaths in their family, asking for (and routinely receiving) death certificates to verify the numbers. Based on this, they computed the overall mortality rate in Iraq in deaths per 1,000 people per year, compared this to the known mortality rate prior to the war, and thus computed the number of people who died above the number you would expect to have died had nothing happened. As a sanity check, they noted that their measurement for excess deaths in the time period immediately following the invasion does match the official number for that period fairly closely. Since US forces were more directly involved in everything that was going on then, those numbers ought to match up.
A number measured by these means is both helpful and not: on the one hand, it tells you that there is some total effect going on (which is why this sort of method is very common in epidemiology) but it doesn’t tell you what caused it. However, the second number is pretty surprising: Of the 655k excess deaths, 601k were from violence, primarily from gunshot wounds. Normally in a post-war region, I would expect excess deaths to come mostly from disease, starvation, and the like; the fact that most of these deaths were violent is pretty unusual. Perhaps it means that medicine is improving.
I noticed that a DoD spokesman said “it would be difficult for the U.S. to precisely determine the number of civilian deaths in Iraq as a result of insurgent activity.” This is an attempt to emphasize that people aren’t dying because US forces are killing them, but as a result of the insurgents, which we consider our enemies. This is true but misses the point; on the one hand, nobody was accusing the US forces of killing 655kpeople, and on the other hand, the simple presence of these insurgent forces is a direct consequence of the US invasion. In fact, the relatively low number of non-combat deaths may speak well of US activity on the ground; the absence of the other two of the Four Horsemen bespeaks some good work on keeping food and medicine flowing in a war-torn country. But the high number of overall deaths is directly
attributable to the fact that the US invaded Iraq, and the upper political command has no cover from that.
Edit: I got a copy. It looks like the WP numbers are correct; the 100k number that the BBC cites is the number from previous studies, which this paper means to update. Similarly the number of households surveyed is in fact 1849, not “under 1000.” I’ll read the paper in more detail tonight and update if there’s something interesting in it.
For once, have some good news. It looks like Katrina was a wake-up call for one group that realized it had a lot to lose from climate change: the insurance industry. And because insurance companies are very big, they have direct influence over the polluters at the same time that they’re exposed to risk from the polluters screwing up. (If they were smaller and more specialized, that wouldn’t be the case — an insurer just of power plants wouldn’t be nearly as worried about flood risks as a general insurer) So apparently, they’re starting to do things about it.
I see this as really promising: It’s a case where being very big gives a company a much broader perspective on consequences. (It reminds me of some recent articles comparing HMO’s to the VA. Since the VA is stuck with people for their whole lives, in essence, it makes them think a lot more about preventive care, general quality-of-life, and so on, rather than on short-term solutions whose long-term costs they can remove by dumping patients. Sometimes, a company being big can be a very good thing for the world.)
The president just released a new national space policy. This was all done pianissimo; apparently it hasn’t been posted on the White House’s website, or even on NASA’s, but only on the Office of Science & Technology Policy. The policy itself is highlighting things like the right of safe passage of US spacecraft, that nothing should be allowed to interfere with such, and that “freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power.”
Incidentally, there have been vague rumors recently that China has been field-testing some new anti-satellite weaponry by pointing it at US satellites. I will just guess that this is no coincidence, and that you’re seeing some geopolitics in action here.
Also: The directive for civil space exploration says that NASA’s mandate is to “advance fundamental scientific knowledge of our Earth system, solar system, and universe.” The part about Earth was removed in an earlier version, and apparently got reinstated. (This has to do with whether NASA should research climate — n.b. the GISS-E group that does the current gold standard climate modelling is partially based out of NASA)
For those of you who somehow haven’t heard, Rep. Mark Foley, R-FL, recently resigned his seat after he was caught trying to seduce teenaged boys. There’s a scandal brewing because apparently the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, knew about this and tried to cover it up. (And much of the Republican leadership as well)
Watching people try to spin this is just fascinating. First Foley checked himself into alcoholism treatment at an undisclosed location. He then revealed (via his attornies) that he had been abused as a child by a priest. (The relevance of this is dubious, but I suppose it’s meant to explain why he’s doing this and how he’s really a victim?) Then he revealed that he’s gay, which was apparently no secret within DC. (So we now have the spin of “blame the priests, blame the alcoholism — which is a disease, he’s getting treated for it, don’t worry — blame the fact that he’s gay and not really one of us”)
But apparently, that wasn’t odd enough. So over the past few days of news coverage, Fox News decided to take a slightly different tack:
They repeatedly started referring to him as a Democrat. Typo? Nope, they have it written out in full, too, and apparently are running analysis of it:
(More links from , including vid clips)
I know that some news outlets have been fairly liberal with stating that “the President’s policy has always been X,” even in the presence of old tape archives showing them saying the opposite. (Ari Fleischer got into some particular trouble for this towards the end of his tenure, but never anything serious) But this is really going a little far, no?
(Hi, Trotsky. Hi, Yezhov. You’ve got company.)
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 