From paul.werbos at verizon.net Sun Aug 1 00:45:02 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Sat, 31 Jul 2004 20:45:02 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Restart: licking the rich In-Reply-To: <410C1A57.8020500@solution-consulting.com> References: <01C4754A.EA217F30.shovland@mindspring.com> <01C4754A.EA217F30.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20040731204226.0430a338@incoming.verizon.net> At 04:16 PM 7/31/2004 -0600, Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. wrote: >For an interesting take on this, read: >http://shes.aflightrisk.org/ >True? Bogus? If you write to her, she will respond. I did, she did. >Lynn > >Steve wrote: > >> From the original post: >> >>"A loving mother, a mother who pets and licks you, makes you >>confident. A skittish mother who hesitates to touch you preordains you >>to be easily spooked. >>Hugs-or the lack of them-change the way genes function. " >> >>The child-rearing practices of the rich often include >>passing children to nannies almost as soon as they >>are born. The mothers are absent. >> >>The practical result of this is probably a high incidence >>of attachment disorders, and the consequent high >>incidence of psychological and social pathologies >>that result from that. This is purely anecdotal stuff, not all that different from the kinds of anecdotes some people tell about Jews or other minorities. Back in the 60's, I remember how our undergraduate text on psychology actually tested the hypothesis that "rich are more neurotic," and found the exact opposite. Not that rich folks lack their own distinctive disorders, in various cultures. As do all human groups. >>Very few noteworthy writers, artists, entrepreneurs, >>or scientists come from rich backgrounds, and the >>child-rearing practices may account for that: the >>people emerge from this system as emotional cripples. >>The work on emotional intelligence indicates that access to your emotions >>is critical for achievement. >> >>The chief skill of the rich is getting and keeping control >>of wealth. >> >>Steve Hovland >>www.stevehovland.net >> >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Aug 1 01:23:28 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sat, 31 Jul 2004 18:23:28 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Restart: licking the rich Message-ID: <01C4772B.7A87B670.shovland@mindspring.com> http://shes.aflightrisk.org/ In her blog she mentions "an arranged marriage was the last straw." After writing the original post I had been thinking that the old rich are probably one of the few groups in the west that still does this- it is necessary to restrict the family boundaries in order to maintain control of the wealth. At the same time the idiom "bringing in fresh blood" encapsulates their awareness of the risks of in-breeding. Princess Diana was fresh blood for the House of Hanover. And she once said that "they are not human." In other words, empathy impaired, Reptilian. In commenting on her schooling she talks about the girls classified as "princesses," referring to their cold-bloodedness. That sums up "attachment disorder" quite well. Their mothers were probably "cold" and they will likely produce cold daughters unto the Nth generation. Being "cold" is of course not a barrier to reproduction, as lust is one of the Reptilian emotions. Outside of her blog, there is no sign of any creative impulse to drive her existence. About what one would expect. Her fear of being consigned to a "reprogramming center" seems to be the main driver, which I can well understand. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Aug 1 01:35:17 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sat, 31 Jul 2004 18:35:17 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Restart: licking the rich Message-ID: <01C4772D.21653110.shovland@mindspring.com> I would agree that my thoughts about child-rearing among the rich were speculative, not being one myself. However, the whole issue of attachment disorders is not speculative, having been meticulously researched for many years. John Bowlby started working on this in the 1950's. If one did real research on child-rearing among the rich and found a high incidence of "absent" parenting then one would also find a high incidence of attachment disorders and everything that results from that. One source on this is "Treating Attachment Disorders" by Karl Heinz Brisch. It gives a history of the research and some examples of treating the problems. Some people think that in recent years the far right has had quite a lot of success in promoting the doctrine of Social Darwinism, which includes the proposition that rich people are more virtuous because they are rich. I have heard that there is good research that demonstrates the value of cooperation vs competition, but haven't been able to find any citations. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From paul.werbos at verizon.net Sun Aug 1 19:55:57 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Sun, 01 Aug 2004 15:55:57 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Restart: licking the rich In-Reply-To: <01C4772D.21653110.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20040801155348.00bbbd10@incoming.verizon.net> At 06:35 PM 7/31/2004 -0700, Steve wrote: >I would agree that my thoughts about child-rearing >among the rich were speculative, not being one myself. > >However, the whole issue of attachment disorders is not >speculative, having been meticulously researched for >many years. John Bowlby started working on this in >the 1950's. > >If one did real research on child-rearing among the >rich and found a high incidence of "absent" parenting >then one would also find a high incidence of >attachment disorders and everything that results >from that. > >One source on this is "Treating Attachment >Disorders" by Karl Heinz Brisch. It gives a >history of the research and some examples >of treating the problems. > >Some people think that in recent years the far >right has had quite a lot of success in promoting >the doctrine of Social Darwinism, which includes >the proposition that rich people are more virtuous >because they are rich. The most disturbing aspect of those doctrines, in my view, is when their advocates try to change the rules so as to penalize anyone who wishes to pursue goals other than maximizing personal wealth without constraints or other values. Certainly there has been too much of that lately. It does make a mockery of American values. >ave heard that there >is good research that demonstrates the value >of cooperation vs competition, but haven't been >able to find any citations. > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Aug 1 20:13:14 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sun, 1 Aug 2004 13:13:14 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Restart: licking the rich Message-ID: <01C477C9.4E539990.shovland@mindspring.com> If we say that only competition matters, then the psychopaths end up in charge, which I think describes our present situation pretty well. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Mon Aug 2 01:50:06 2004 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 01 Aug 2004 19:50:06 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] Restart: licking the rich In-Reply-To: <01C477C9.4E539990.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C477C9.4E539990.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <410D9DCE.6030708@solution-consulting.com> Interesting point, Steve. Steve and I have differed on this before. Competition doesn't lead to psychopaths, it leads to results. Psychopaths leave a clear 'trail' and are fairly easy to spot. Prolonged and disciplined action is beyond them. That means that a psychopath (or, more frequently, a narcissist) might be in charge for a time but soon falls apart, and soon enough, the board wises up, and the psychopath is dumped. My evidence for this is - among many other sources - Jim Collins book, Built to Last and his follow-on book From Good to Great. Associated with this is the work that Dan Goleman has done on emotional intelligence in corporations. His book, Primal Leadership, summerizes his research on that, and pretty much eliminates the hypothesis that organizations are led by psychopaths. Exceptions are where the leader keeps the organization in chaos and mobilized against some kind of for, i.e., Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, David Koresh, and Usama bin Ladin. As the leader keeps the focus on the Enemy, he can keep control over the group. But modern organizations are primarily stockholder owned, and there is some accountability via annual meetings, such as Disney's latest kerfuffle. Lynn Johnson Salt Lake City Steve wrote: >If we say that only competition matters, >then the psychopaths end up in charge, >which I think describes our present >situation pretty well. > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Aug 2 03:16:24 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sun, 1 Aug 2004 20:16:24 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Restart: licking the rich Message-ID: <01C47804.6BA711D0.shovland@mindspring.com> We may not disagree very much. My main point is that when competition is the only value, then the most ruthless people will win because they don't care about other people. I would suggest that although psychopaths sometimes win, their gain is only temporary because the more normal people around them, who are often their victims, see them for what they are, and pull them down. Over the long run, companies run with a considerable measure of empathy will do better because they will elicit better efforts from their people. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From HowlBloom at aol.com Mon Aug 2 21:40:04 2004 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2004 17:40:04 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] if neurons sing the melody, do astrocytes sing bass? Message-ID: <96.113c5eab.2e400eb4@aol.com> Eshel Ben-Jacob has been writing about the role of glial tissue in the brain and has proposed that it carries out an unusual function?a form of group communication, mass-mood-summation, keeper of the zeitgeist of the neuronal community, or, to put it more technically and far-less precisely, a part of the brain? s quorum-sensing machinery. Eshel has said that the brain is not the only mass of cells that uses this sort of across-cell-summarizer, this sort of sense of mass-hungers and of the greater good. The gel secreted by a bacterial colony, the gel upon which it sits, does, Eshel says, the same sort of thing?carrying the common zeitgeist from end to end of the colony. The big difference may be this. A brain is a community of one hundred billion cells. A bacterial colony is often a community of a trillion or more. Below is an article that supports Eshel?s vision (if I?ve expressed it correctly) of the role of the brain?s glial fabric. Ps Bear with me while I toss another metaphor at you. If the neurons of the brain sing the melody, the glial tissue may sing the bass. The bass section is the rhythm section?the section that determines the pace and that coordinates of the harmonies and discords of the choir. Howard Retrieved August 1, 2004, from the World Wide Web http://web12.epnet.com/citation.asp?tb=1&_ug=sid+F74E62A1%2D7A66%2D4AC6%2D9CA7 %2DA3DBEAB5C3BD%40sessionmgr5+dbs+aph+cp+1+11CB&_us=hs+True+cst+0%3B2+or+Date+ ss+SO+sm+KS+sl+0+dstb+KS+ri+KAAACBUB00000781+2237&_uso=tg%5B0+%2D+db%5B0+%2Dap h+hd+False+clv%5B1+%2DScientific++American+clv%5B0+%2D20040400%2D20040400+op%5 B0+%2D+cli%5B1+%2DSO+cli%5B0+%2DDT1+st%5B0+%2Dglia+ex%5B0+%2Dproximity+F488&cf =1&fn=1&rn=1 The Other Half of the Brain , By: Fields, R. Douglas, Scientific American, 00368733, Apr2004, Vol. 290, Issue 4 Database: Academic Search Premier The Other Half of the Brain Contents See Me, Hear Me Gila Communicating with Glia ATP Is the Messenger Axons Control Glia's Fate Outside the Neuronal Box MORE TO EXPLORE Overview/Glia MOUNTING EVIDENCE SUGGESTS THAT GLIAL CELLS, OVERLOOKED FOR HALF A CENTURY, MAY BE NEARLY AS CRITICAL TO THINKING AND LEARNING AS NEURONS ARE The recent book Driving Mr. Albert tells the true story of pathologist Thomas Harvey, who performed the autopsy of Albert Einstein in 1955. After finishing his task, Harvey irreverently took Einstein's brain home, where he kept it floating in a plastic container for the next 40 years. From time to time Harvey doled out small brain slices to scientists and pseudoscientists around the world who probed the tissue for clues to Einstein's genius. But when Harvey reached his 80s, he placed what was left of the brain in the trunk of his Buick Skylark and embarked on a road trip across the country to return it to Einstein's granddaughter. One of the respected scientists who examined sections of the prized brain was Marian C. Diamond of the University of California at Berkeley. She found nothing unusual about the number or size of its neurons (nerve cells). But in the association cortex, responsible for high-level cognition, she did discover a surprisingly large number of nonneuronal cells known as glia--a much greater concentration than that found in the average Albert's head. An odd curiosity? Perhaps not. A growing body of evidence suggests that glial cells play a far more important role than historically presumed. For decades, physiologists focused on neurons as the brain's prime communicators. Glia, even though they outnumber nerve cells nine to one, were thought to have only a maintenance role: bringing nutrients from blood vessels to neurons, maintaining a healthy balance of ions in the brain, and warding off pathogens that evaded the immune system. Propped up by glia, neurons were free to communicate across tiny contact points called synapses and to establish a web of connections that allow us to think, remember and jump for joy. That long-held model of brain function could change dramatically if new findings about gila pan out. In the past several years, sensitive imaging tests have shown that neurons and glia engage in a two-way dialogue from embryonic development through old age. Glia influence the formation of synapses and help to determine which neural connections get stronger or weaker over time; such changes are essential to learning and to storing long-term memories. And the most recent work shows that gila also communicate among themselves, in a separate but parallel network to the neural network, influencing how well the brain performs. Neuroscientists are cautious about assigning new prominence to glia too quickly, yet they are excited by the prospect that more than half the brain has gone largely unexplored and may contain a trove of information about how the mind works. See Me, Hear Me THE MENTAL PICTURE most people have of our nervous system resembles a tangle of wires that connect neurons. Each neuron has a long, outstretched branch--an axon--that carries electrical signals to buds at its end. Each bud emits neurotransmitters--chemical messenger molecules--across a short synaptic gap to a twig like receptor, or dendrite, on an adjacent neuron. But packed around the neurons and axons is a diverse population of glial cells. By the time of Einstein's death, neuroscientists suspected that glial cells might contribute to information processing, but convincing evidence eluded them. They eventually demoted glia, and research on these cells slid into the backwater of science for a long time. Neuroscientists failed to detect signaling among glia, partly because they had insufficient technology analytical but primarily because they were looking in tie wrong place. They incorrectly assumed that if glia could chatter they would use the same electrical mode of communication seen in neurons. That is, they would generate electrical impulses called action potentials that would ultimately cause the cells to release neurotransmitters across synapses, igniting more impulses in other neurons. Investigators did discover that glia had many of the same voltage-sensitive ion channels that generate electrical signals in axons, but they surmised that these channels merely allowed glia to sense indirectly the level of activity of adjacent neurons. They found that glial cells lacked the membrane properties required to actually propagate their own action potentials. What they missed, and what advanced imaging techniques have now revealed, is that glia rely on chemical signals instead of electrical ones to convey messages. Valuable insights into how glia detect neuronal activity emerged by the mid-1990s, after neuroscientists established that glia had a variety of receptors on their membranes that could respond to a range of chemicals, including, in some cases, neurotranimitters. This discovery suggested that glia might communicate using chemical signals that neurons did not recognize and at limes might react directly to neurotransmitters emitted by neurons. To prove such assertions, scientists first had to show that glia actually do "listen in" on neuronal communication and take action based on what they "hear'" Earlier work indicated that an influx of calcium into glial cells could be a sign that they had been stimulated. Based on that notion, investigators devised a laboratory method called calcium imaging to see whether glial cells known as terminal Schwann cells--. which surround synapses where nerves meet muscle cells--were sensitive to neuronal signals emitted at these junctions. The method confirmed that Schwann Cells, at least, did respond to synaptic firing and that the reaction involved an influx of calcium ions into the cells. But were glia limited only to eavesdropping on neuronal activity, by scavenging traces of neurotransmitter leaking from a synapse? More general-function Schwann cells also surround axons all along nerves in the body, not just at synapses, and oligodencrocyte glia cells wrap around axons in the central nervous sys-tern (brain and spinal cord). At my National Institutes of Health lab, we wanted to know if glia could monitor neural activity anywhere as it flowed through axons in neural circuits. If so, how was that communication mediated? More important, how exactly would glia be affected by what they heard? To find answers, we cultured sensory neurons (dorsal root ganglion, or DRG, cells) from mice in special lab dishes equipped with electrodes that would enable us to trigger action potentials in the axons. We added Schwann cells to some cultures and oligodendrocytes to others. We needed to tap independently into the activity of the axons and the glia to determine if the latter were detecting the axon messages. We used a calcium-imaging technique to record visually what the cells were doing, introducing dye that fluoresces if it binds to calcium ions. When an axon fires, voltage-sensitive ion channels in the neuron's membrane open, allowing calcium ions to enter. We would therefore expect to see the firing as a flash of green fluorescence lighting up the entire neuron from the inside. As the concentration of calcium rose in a cell, the fluorescence would get brighter. The intensity could be measured by a photomultiplier tube, and images of the glowing cells could be digitized and displayed in pseudocolor on a monitor in real time--looking something like the radar images of rainstorms shown on weather reports. If glial cells heard the neuronal signals and did so in part by taking up calcium from their surroundings, they would light up as well, only later. Staring at a computer monitor in a darkened room, my NIH colleague, biologist Beth Stevens, and I knew that after months of preparation our hypothesis was about to be tested with the flick of a switch. When we turned on the stimulator, the DRG neurons responded instantly, changing from blue to green to red and then white on a pseudocoior scale of calcium concentration, as calcium flooded into the axons. Initially, there were no changes in the Schwann cells or oligodendrocytes, but about 15 long seconds later the glia suddenly began to light up like bulbs on a string of Christmas lights [see illustration on page 59]. Somehow the cells had detected the impulse activity in the axons and responded by raising the concentration of calcium in their own cytoplasm. Gila Communicating with Glia THUS FAR WE HAD confirmed that gila sense axon activity by taking in calcium. In neurons, calcium activates enzymes that produce neurotransmitters. Presumably, the influx in glial cells would also activate enzymes that would marshal a response. But what response was the cell attempting? More fundamentally, what exactly had triggered the calcium influx? Clues came from previous work on other gliai cells in the brain known as astrocytes. One of their functions is to carry nutrients from capillaries to nerve cells; another is to maintain the optimal ionic conditions around neurons necessary for firing impulses. Part of the latter job is to remove excess neurotransmitters and ions that neurons release when they fire. In a classic 1990 study, a group led by Stephen J. Smith of Yale University (now at Stanford University) used calcium imaging to show that the calcium concentration in an astrocyte would rise suddenly when the neurotransmitter glutamate was added to a cell culture. Calcium waves soon spread throughout all the astrocytes in the culture. The astrocytes were responding as if the neurotransmitter had just been released by a neuron, and they were essentially discussing the news of presumed neuronal firing among themselves. Some neuroscientists wondered whether the communication occurred because calcium ions or related signaling molecules simply passed through open doorways connecting abutting astrocytes. In 1996 S. Ben Kater and his colleagues at the University of Utah defused that suspicion. Using a sharp microelectrode, they cut a straight line through a layer of astrocytes in culture, forming a cell-free void that would act like a highway separating burning forests on either side. But when they stimulated calcium waves on one side of the break, the waves spread to astrocytes across the void with no difficulty. The astrocytes had to be sending signals through the extracellular medium, rather than through physical contact. Intensive research in many laboratories over the next few year! showed similar results. Calcium responses could be induced in astrocytes by adding neurotransmitters or by using electrodes to stimulate the release of neurotransmitters from synapses. Meanwhile physiologists and biochemists were finding that glia had receptors for many of the same neurotransmitters neurons use for synaptic communication, as well as most of the ion channels that enable neurons to fire action potentials. ATP Is the Messenger THESE AND OTHER RESULTS led to confusion. Glial communication is controlled by calcium influxes just as neuronal communication is. But electrical impulses trigger calcium changes in neurons, and no such impulse exists in or reaches glia. Was glial calcium influx initiated by a different electrical phenomenon or some other mechanism? In their glial experiments, researchers were noticing that a familiar molecule kept cropping up--ATP (adenosine triphosphate), known to every biology student as the energy source for cellular activities. Although it makes a great power pack, ATP also has many features that make it an excellent messenger molecule between cells. It is highly abundant inside cells but rare outside of them. It is small and therefore diffuses rapidly, and it breaks down quickly. All these traits ensure that new messages conveyed by ATP molecules are not confused with old messages. Moreover, ATF is neatly packaged inside the tips of axons where neurotransmitter molecules are stored; it is released together with neurotransmitters at synapses and can travel outside synapses, too. In 1999 Peter B. Guthrie and his colleagues at the University of Utah shouted conclusively that when excited, astrocytes release ATP into their surroundings. The ATP binds to receptors on nearby astrocytes, prompting ion channels to open and allow an influx of calcium. The rise triggers ATP release from those cells, setting off a chain reaction of AT mediated calcium responses across the population of astrocytes. A model of how glia around an axon sense neuronal activity and then communicate to other glia residing at the axon's synapse was coming together. The firing of neurons somehow induces glial cells around an axon to emit ATP, which causes calcium intake in neighboring glia, prompting more ATP release, thereby activating communication along a string of glia that can reach far from the initiating neuron. But how could the glia in our experiment be detecting the neuronal firing, given that the axons made no synaptic, connections with the glia and the axonal gila were nowhere near the synapse? Neurotransmitters were not the answer; they do not diffuse out of axons (if they did, they could act in unintended places in the brain, wreaking havoc). Perhaps ATP, which is released along with neurotransmitters when axons fire, was somehow escaping along the axon. To test this notion, we electrically stimulated pure cultures of DRG axons and then analyzed the medium. By exploiting the enzyme that allows fireflies to glow--a reaction that requires ATP--we were able to detect the release of ATP from axons by seeing the medium glow when axons fired. We then added Schwann cells to the culture and measured the calcium responses. They also lit up after axons fired an action potential. Yet when we added the enzyme apyrase, which rapidly destroys ATP-thereby intercepting the ATP before it could reach any Schwann cells--the glia remained dark when axons fired. The calcium response in the Schwann cells had been blocked, because the cells never received the ATP message. ATP released from an axon was indeed triggering calcium influx into Schwann cells. Using biochemical analysis and digital microscopy, we also showed that the influx caused signals to travel from the cells' membrane to the nucleus, where the genes are stored, causing various genes to switch on. Amazingly, by firing to communicate with other neurons, an axon could instruct the readout of genes in a glial cell and thus influence its behavior. Axons Control Glia's Fate TO THIS POINT, work by us and others had led to the conclusion that a glial cell senses neuronal action potentials by detecting ATP that is either released by a firing axon or leaked from the synapse. The gliai cell relays the message inside itself via calcium ions. The ions activate enzymes that release ATP to other glial cells or activate enzymes that control the readout of genes. This insight made us wonder what functions the genes might be controlling. Were they telling the glia to act in ways that would influence the neurons around them? Stevens set out to answer this question by focusing on the process that prompts production of the myelin insulation around axons, which clearly would affect a neuron. This insulation is key to the conduction of nerve impulses at high speed over long distances. Its growth enables a baby to gradually hold up its head, and its destruction by diseases such as multiple sclerosis causes severe impairment. We turned to myelin because we were curious about how an immature Schwann cell on an axon in the peripheral nervous system of a fetus or infant knows which axons will need myelin and when to start sheathing those axons and, alternatively, how it knows if it should transform itself into a cell that will not make insulation. Generally, only large-diameter axons need myelin. Could axon impulses or ATP release affect these decisions? We found that Schwann cells in culture proliferated more slowly when gathered around axons that were firing than around axons that were quiet. Moreover, the Schwann cells' development was arrested and myelin formation was blocked. Adding ATP produced the same effects. Working with Vittorio Gallo and his colleagues in the adjacent NIH lab, however, we found a contrasting situation with the oligodendrocyte glia that form myelin in the brain. ATP did not inhibit their proliferation, but adenosine, the substance left when phosphate molecules in ATP are removed, stimulated the cells to mature and form myelin. The two findings indicate that different receptors on glia provide a clever way for a neuron to send separate messages to glial cells in the central or peripheral nervous system without having to make separate messenger molecules or specify message destinations. Better understanding of myelination is important. Every year thousands of people die and countless more are paralyzed or blinded because of demyelinating disease. Multiple sclerosis, for example, strikes one in 700 people. No one knows what exactly initiates myelinadon, but adenosine is the first substance derived from an axon that has been found to stimulate the process. The fact that adenosine is released from axons in response to axon firing means activity in the brain actually influences myelination. Such findings could mark paths to treatment. Drugs resembling adenosine might help. Adding adenosine to Stem cells could perhaps turn them into myelinating gila that are transplanted into damaged nerves. Outside the Neuronal Box EXPERIMENTS IN OUR LAB and others strongly suggest that ATP and adenosine mediate the messages coursing through networks of Schwann and oligodendrocyte gila cells and that calcium messages are induced in astrocyte glia cells by ATP alone. But do glia have the power to regulate the functioning of neurons, other than by producing myelin? The answer appears to he "yes." Richard Robitaille of the University of Montreal saw the voltage produced by synapses on frog muscle become stronger or weaker depending on what chemicals he injected into Schwann cells at the synapse. When Eric A. Newman of the University of Minnesota touched the retina of a rat, waves of calcium sent by glia changed the visual neurons' rate of firing. Studying slices of rat brain taken from the hippocampus--a region involved in memory--Maiken Nedergaard of New York Medical College observed synapses increase their electrical activity when adjacent astrocytes stimulated calcium waves. Such changes in synaptic strength are thought to be the fundamental means by which the nervous system changes its response through experience--a concept termed plasticity, suggesting that glia might play a role in the cellular basis of learning. One problem arises from these observations. Like a wave of cheering fans sweeping across a stadium, the calcium waves spread throughout the entire population of astrocytes. This large-scale response is effective for managing the entire group, but it cannot convey a very complex message. The equivalent of "Go team!" might be useful in coordinating general activity in the brain during the sleep-wake cycle or during a seizure, but local conversations are necessary if glial cells are to be involved in the intricacies of information processing. In a footnote to their 1990 paper, Smith and his colleagues stated that they believed neutrons and glia carried on more discrete conversations. Still, the researchers lacked experimental methods precise enough to deliver a. neurotransmitter in a way that resembled what an astrocyte would realistically experience at a synapse. In 2003 Philip G. Haydon of the University of Pennsylvania achieved this objective. He used improved laser technology to release such a small quantity of glutamate in a hippocampal brain slice that t would be detected by only a single astrocyte. Under this condition, Haydon observed that an astrocyte sent specific calcium signals to just a small number of nearby astrocytes. As Haydon put it, in addition to calcium waves that affect astrocytes globally, "there is short-range connectivity between astrocytes." In other words, discrete astrocyte circuits in the brain coordinate activity with neuronal circuits. (The physical or biochemical factors that define these discrete astrocytic circuits are unknown at present.) Investigation by others has also indicated that astrocytes may strengthen signaling at synapses by secreting the same neurotransmitter the axon is releasing--in effect, amplifying the signal. The working hypothesis that Haydon and I, along with our colleagues, are reaching from these discoveries is that communication among astrocytes helps to activate neurons whose axons terminate relatively far away and that this activity, in turn, contributes to the release of neurotransmitters at distant synapses. This action would regulate how susceptible remote synapses are to undergoing a change in strength, which is the cellular mechanism underlying learning and memory. Results announced at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in November 2003 support this notion and possibly expand the role of glia to include participation in the formation of new synapses [see box on opposite page]. Some of the findings build on research done two years earlier by Ben A. Barres, Frank W. Pfrieger and their colleagues at Stanford, who reported that rat neurons grown in culture made more synapses when in the presence of astrocytes. Working in Barres's lab, postdoctoral students Karen S. Christopherson and Erik M. U1lian have subsequently found that a protein called thrombospondin, presumably from the astrocyte, was the chemical messenger that spurred synapse building. Thrombospondin plays various biological roles but was not thought to be a major factor in the nervous system. The more thrombospondin they added to the astrocyte culture, though, the more synapses appeared. Thrombospondin may be responsible for bringing together proteins and other compounds needed to create a synapse when young nerve networks grow and therefore might contribute to the modification of synapses as the networks age. Future experiments could advance our emerging understanding of how glia affect our brains. One challenge would be to show that memory--or a cellular analogue of memory, such as long-term potentiation--is affected by synaptic astrocytes. Another challenge would be to determine precisely how remote synapses might be influenced by signals sent through astrocyte circuits. Perhaps it should not be surprising that astrocytes can affect synapse formation at a distance. To form associations between stimuli that are processed by different circuits of neurons-the smell of a certain perfume, say, and the emotions it stirs about the person who wears it--the brain must have ways to establish fast communication between neuronal circuits that are not wired together directly, if neurons are like telephones communicating electrically through hardwired synaptic connections, astrocytes may be like cell phones, communicating with chemical signals that are broadcast widely but can be detected only by other astrocytes that have the appropriate receptors tuned to receive the message. If signals can travel extensively through astrocyte circuits, then glia at one site could activate distant gila to coordinate the firing of neural networks across regions of the brain. Comparisons of brains reveal that the proportion of glia to neurons increases greatly as animals move up the evolutionary ladder. Haydon wonders whether extensive connectivity among astrocytes might contribute to a greater capacity for learning. He and others are investigating this hypothesis in new experiments. Perhaps a higher concentration of glia, or a more potent type of glia, is what elevates certain humans to genius. Einstein taught us the value of daring to think outside the box. Neuroscientists looking beyond neurons to see how glia may be involved in information processing are following that lead. MORE TO EXPLORE Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip across America with Einstein's Brain. Michael Paterniti. Delta, 2001. New Insights into Neuron-Glia Communication. R. D. Fields and B. Stevens-Graham in Science, Vol. 298, pages 556-562; October 18, 2002. Adenosine: A Neuron-Glial Transmitter Promoting Myelination in the CNS in Response to Action Potentials. B. Stevens, S. Porta, L. L. Haak, V. Gallo, and R. D. Fields in Neuron, Vol. 36, No. 5, pages 855-868; December 5, 2002. Astrocytic Connectivity in the Hippocampus. Jai-Yoon Sul, George Orosz, Richard S. Givens, and Philip G. Haydon in Neuron Glia Biology, Vol. 1, pages 3-11; 2004. Also see the journal Neuron Glia Biology: www.journals.cambridge.org/jid%5fNGB Overview/Glia ? For decades, neuroscientists thought neurons did all the communicating in the brain and nervous system, and glial cells merely nurtured them, even though glia outnumber neurons nine to one. ? Improved imaging and listening instruments now show that glia communicate with neurons and with one another about messages traveling among neurons. Glia have the power to alter those signals at the synaptic gaps between neurons and can even influence where synapses are formed. ? Given such prowess, glia may be critical to learning and to forming memories, as well as repairing nerve damage. Experiments are getting under way to find out. PHOTO (COLOR): GLIAL CELLS outnumber neurons nine to one in the brain and the rest of the nervous system. PHOTO (COLOR): GLIA AND NEURONS work together in the brain and spinal cord. A neuron sends a message down a long axon and across a synaptic gap to a dendrite on another neuron. Astrocyte gila bring nutrients to neurons as well as surround and regulate synapses. Oligodendrocyte gila produce myelin that insulates axons. When a neuron's electrical message [action potential] reaches the axon terminal [inset], the message induces vesicles to move to the membrane and open, releasing neurotransmitters [signaling molecules] that diffuse across a narrow synaptic cleft to the dendrite's receptors. Similar principles apply in the body's peripheral nervous system, where Schwann cells perform myelination duties. PHOTO (COLOR): ASTROCYTES REGULATE SIGNALING across synapses in various ways. An axon transmits a signal to a dendrite by releasing a neurotransmitter (green)--here, glutamate. It also releases the chemical ATP [gold]. These compounds then trigger an influx of calcium (purple) into astrocytes, which prompts the astrocytes to communicate among themselves by releasing their own ATP. Astrocytes may strengthen the signaling by secreting the same neurotransmitter, or they may weaken the signal by absorbing the neurotransmitter or secreting proteins that bind to it (blue), thereby preventing it from reaching its target. Astrocytes can also release signaling molecules I red) that cause the axon to increase or decrease the amount of neurotransmitter it releases when it fires again. Modifying the connections among neurons is one way the brain revises its responses to stimuli as it accumulates experience--how it learns. In the peripheral nervous system, Schwann cells surround synapses. PHOTO (COLOR): MOVIE MADE using scanning-laser confocal microscopy [later colorized] shows that glial cells respond to chattering neurons. Sensory neurons [two large bodies, 20 microns in diameter] [al and Schwann glial cells [smaller bodies] were mixed in a lab culture containing calcium ions [invisible J. Dye that would fluoresce if calcium ions bound to it was introduced into the cells. A slight voltage applied to the neurons prompted them to fire action potentials down axons [long lines], and the neurons immediately lit up [bl, indicating they had opened channels on their membranes to allow calcium to flow inside. Twelve seconds later [c}, as the neurons continued to fire, Schwann cells began to light up, indicating they had begun taking in calcium in response to the signals traveling down axons/Eighteen seconds after that [d], more gila had lit up, because they had sensed the signals. The series shows that gila tap into neuronal messages all along the lines of communication, not just at synapses where neurotransmitters are present. PHOTO (COLOR): HOW DO GLIA communicate? Gila called astrocytes [a] and sensory neurons [not shown] were mixed in a lab culture containing calcium ions. After a neuron was stimulated to fire action potentials down long axons [lightning bolts] [b], gila began to light up, indicating they sensed the message by beginning to absorb calcium. After 10 and 12.5 seconds [c and d], huge waves of calcium flux were sweeping across the region, carrying signals among many astrocytes. Green to yellow to red depicts higher calcium concentration. PHOTO (COLOR) PHOTO (COLOR) PHOTO (COLOR) PHOTO (COLOR) PHOTO (COLOR) PHOTO (COLOR) PHOTO (COLOR) PHOTO (COLOR) PHOTO (COLOR) ~~~~~~~~ By R. Douglas Fields, R. DOUGLAS FIELDS is chief of the Nervous System Development and Plasticity Section at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and adjunct professor in the Neurosciences and Cognitive Science Program at the University of Maryland. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale and Stanford universities. Fields enjoys rock climbing, scuba diving, and building acoustic guitars and Volkswagen engines. GLIA CONTROL SYNAPSES FOR YEARS, scientists assumed that only neurons specify the connections they make to other neurons. But evidence shows that glia can strongly influence how many synapses a neuron forms and where it forms them. Ben A. Barres and his colleagues at Standford University found that when they grew neurons form a rat's retina in a lab culture devoid of glial cells known as astrocytes, the neurons created very few synapses. When the researchers added astrocytes or culture medium that had been in contact with astrocytes, synapses formed abundantly. Barres could see the synapses and count them through a microscope as well as detect them by r ecording electrical activity (a sign that signals were flowing through synapses) with a microelextrode. He then detected in the medium two chemicals that are released by astrocytes to stimulate synapse formation--a fatty complex called apoE/cholesterol and the protein thrombospondin. Meanwhile Jeff W. Lichtman's group at Washington University recorded muscle synapses in mice over several days or weeks as they formed and as they were removed during development (the time when unneeded synapses get pruned) or after injury. When the images were spliced into a time-lapse movie, it appeared that both synapse formation and elimination were influenced by nonneuronal cells, seen as ghostlike forces acting on the axon terminal. Most recently, Le Tian, Wesley Thompson and their associates at the University of Texas at Austin experimented with a mouse that had been engineered sot hat its Schwann glia cells fluoresced. This trait allowed Thompson's team to collaborate with Lichtman's group and watch glial cells operate at the junction where neurons meet muscles--a feat previously not possible. After a muscle axon is injured or cut, it withdraws, but a cluster of neurotransmitter receptors remains on the recipient side of a synapse. Investigators knew that an axon can regenerate and find its way back to the abandoned receptors by following the Schwann cells that remain. But what happens if the axon cannot find its way? Tracking the fluorescence, Thompson's group saw that Schwann cells at intact synapses somehow sensed that a neighboring synapse was in trouble. Mysteriously, the Schwann cells sprouted branches that extended to the damaged synapse, forming a bridge along which the axon could grow a new projection to the receptors (photographs). This work clearly shows that glia help to determine where synaptic connections form. Researchers are now trying to exploit this power to treat spinal cord injuries by transplanting Schwann cells into damaged spinal regions in lab animals. PHOTO (COLOR): GLIA CAN GUIDE the formation of synapses. Neurobiologist Le Tian severed a muscle nerve synapse in a mouse whose cells had been engineered to fluoresce. Two days later Schwann glia cells had formed to bridge across the divide. In another two days, an axon had regrown along the bridge to create a synapse. Copyright of Scientific American is the property of Scientific American Inc. and its content may not be copied or e-mailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder`s express written permission. However, users may print, download, or e-mail articles for individual use. Source: Scientific American, Apr2004, Vol. 290 Issue 4, p54, 8p Item: 12462393 Top of Page Formats: CitationCitation HTML Full TextHTML Full Text No previous pages 1 of 1 No additional pages Result List | Refine Search PrintPrint E-mailE-mail SaveSave Items added to the folder may be printed, e-mailed or saved from the View Folder screen.Folder is empty. ? 2004 EBSCO Publishing. Privacy Policy - Terms of Use ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 2 21:56:56 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2004 17:56:56 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: For Resident Assistants, a Race for Inequality Message-ID: For Resident Assistants, a Race for Inequality The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4.8.6 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i48/48b00501.htm By TRAVIS McDADE White Americans pay too little attention to the benefits their skin color gives them, and opening their eyes to their privileged status is a valid part of a college education. But one approach, called the privilege walk, does more harm than good. That is particularly true given that the people most often forced to play the game, new resident assistants, are already well aware of what the game purports to teach, and should have as few barriers among them as possible. The privilege walk usually takes place on a basketball court. Students line up at midcourt and, depending on their responses to statements read by a facilitator, move toward or away from the baseline in front of them. The game ends when the first person reaches the baseline. The statements, designed to separate whites from persons of color and males from females, fall into two equally pernicious categories. First are the blatantly racist statements. Their central assumption is that all persons of color had a uniformly grim upbringing in poor neighborhoods with broken families and ill-equipped schools. For instance: "If you were raised in an area where there was prostitution or drug activity, take one step back," or "If you had to rely on public transportation growing up, take a step back." Second are vague statements that students can interpret in different ways. For instance: "If you were ever denied employment because of your race, ethnicity, or gender, take one step back" -- as if you could always be sure why you didn't get a job -- or "If your parents were professionals, take one step forward." The first type of statement is insulting for the obvious reason that it depends on -- and gives voice to -- stereotypes. But the second type is just as ugly: Students of color are quickly conditioned by the overtly racist statements to interpret the vague ones in ways that reflect badly on them. For instance, a statement about having professional parents ought to elicit questions from the students about the definition of professional. Is a teacher a professional? What about a highly trained chef? By the time in the privilege walk that many of the vague questions are asked, the students have gotten the point and don't bother to ask. They understand that when in doubt, persons of color are to step back and whites are to move forward. Although few 19-year-olds have had much experience in the job market, responding to a statement truthfully is not really what counts. Inequality of outcome is all that matters. Meanwhile, without a hint of irony, the white male students have begun trying to win. Taking cues from each other, they make larger and larger strides toward the finish line at each opportunity. Before coming to Ohio State University, I spent the better part of a decade working in residence-life departments, and I have been both a participant and facilitator in privilege walks. At every walk I have ever been a part of, the winner has been an athletic white male who, egged on by similar students, achieved his victory with the help of giant leaps and surreptitious scoots forward. While the white males are urging each other toward the finish line, the African-Americans -- particularly the females, the group supposed to do the worst in the exercise -- form another clique, sequestered off in one segment of the court, usually chatting about something unrelated to the walk. Despite the fact that not every student of color grew up in the ghetto -- in fact, the majority of African-Americans at the universities where I have studied or worked came from the middle class -- they all know what roles they are expected to play. In the end, the privilege walk builds barriers that might not have otherwise existed. Persons of color rapidly develop an us-against-them mentality and refuse to move forward or backward except in lockstep. African-Americans who didn't grow up in dire circumstances feel that responding to the statements correctly would be both a betrayal of their group and a public admission that they are not "authentic." That is not the sort of choice we ought to be foisting on to students who just want to be resident assistants. Nor is it a good idea for privilege walks to reinforce in white students the very stereotypes that our orientation programs attempt to overcome elsewhere. When the game is over and the triumphant white kids are asked to turn around and look at the rest of the students, what they see is a group of blacks and Latinos packed together at the back, not at all interested in the exercise. The implicit message the white students get is: TV and movies are right, these people all come from the same horrid neighborhoods. I have sometimes wondered in the middle of a privilege walk whether some students of color had decided that they had had enough and were just tuning out of the rest of the orientation program. After all, they had gone through the same strenuous series of individual and group interviews as the white kids, and sat through the same meetings designed to fill their heads with the rules of residence life. They had all spent at least one year -- usually two or three -- on the campus, in and around residence halls. In short, they had done the same things and arrived at the same place as the white students had. What possible purpose could there be to separate them from their white peers now and let everyone know what a miserable life they were supposed to have had growing up? To educate whites, of course. And that may be the worst thing about the privilege walk: It doesn't really teach anything. The underlying premise -- that whites are going to see that students of color have had very different opportunities -- is silly on its face. If there are whites who have lived for 19 years in the United States and haven't gotten that message, is a 30-minute privilege walk going to change their outlook? Any person whose worldview is so easily swayed should never be allowed to be in charge of anything, let alone the well-being of a floor full of students. The privilege walk is a toxic mix of half-baked educational theory and guilt that gets recycled during orientation by unimaginative residence-life staff members who can think of no better way to teach whites than to turn a group of African-Americans into martyrs. That stereotyped view of ethnic groups is precisely what makes students of color feel excluded, as if the folks in charge see them as nothing more than interchangeable pieces of window dressing. The people who are in charge of resident-assistant orientation have their hearts in the right place -- there can be no question about that. But the privilege walk is not only a waste of time, it also has the potential to do harm. Popular culture constantly reminds people of their differences; RA orientation should stress commonalities. And here's Commonality Number 1: On any campus, residents in need of advisers will be there sooner than you think, so don't waste a half-hour on nonsense. Not even well-intentioned nonsense. Travis McDade is the reference and bibliographic services librarian at the Michael E. Moritz Law Library at Ohio State University. From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 2 22:03:23 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2004 18:03:23 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Reason: Make Mine Malthus!: Overpopulation panic's eternal return Message-ID: Make Mine Malthus!: Overpopulation panic's eternal return http://www.reason.com/rb/rb072804.shtml 4.7.28 [10]Ronald Bailey The world has never been overpopulated with humans in any meaningful sense. It seems, though, that it is overpopulated with theoretical fears of overpopulation. The appeal of the overpopulation myth is obvious--who doesn't love a simple, easily graspable idea that seems to explain a great deal? One such idea is the central biological insight that all animals aim to turn food into offspring. When a species' food increases, then its population grows as well; and when the food supply declines, so too do its numbers. This applies to everything from paramecia to parakeets. Since humans are also animals that reproduce, biologists have extended that insight to us as well. This is the source of the overpopulation fears that have haunted learned experts from [11]Thomas Robert Malthus 200 years ago to [12]Paul Ehrlich today. An extensive literature [13]critiques the concept of human overpopulation. But it's apparently an idea whose time comes again, and again, and again, in all sorts of strange places. For instance, the 1990s saw a [14]bad novelization of the concept in Ishmael, in which a telepathic gorilla recycles Malthusianism. The latest iteration of this two-century-old idea comes from Duke University consultant Russell Hopfenberg, in an article called [15]"Human Carrying Capacity Is Determined by Food Availability", in the November 2003 issue of the journal Population and Environment. Hopfenberg writes, "[T]he problem of human population growth can be feasibly addressed only if it is recognized that increases in the population of the human species, like increases in the population of all other species, is a function of increases in food availability." Hopfenberg backs his argument by showing that global food supplies and human numbers both rise from 1960 to 2000. In 2001, Hopfenberg, writing with Cornell University ecologist David Pimentel in [16]Environment, Development and Sustainability, further asserts that "if food production continues to increase, the world population is projected to increase to 12 billion in the next 50 years (based on current growth rates)." Hopfenberg's solution to skyrocketing human numbers is simple: "Cap the increases in food production and thereby halt the increases in population by means of a reduced birth rate." So has the Malthusian case finally been proven? No. Hopfenberg's analysis makes the mistake of considering only global numbers. This hides a great deal of information. If we look on the regional level we see a very different picture than one of a relentlessly rising tide of human babies. Fertility does not correlate with food availability. The countries with greatest access to food are, in fact, the countries with the lowest fertility rates. As the United Nations reports, 14 developed countries have fertility rates lower than 1.3 children per woman. (Replacement fertility is 2.1 children per woman.) The fertility rates in practically all developed countries are below the replacement rate. Clearly, food availability does not mean more children. More generally, as food security has increased around the world, instead of increasing as Hopfenberg's theory would suggest, global average fertility rates have dropped from 6 children per woman in 1960 to 2.6 today. And the rates continue to plummet. Sadly, in Africa, which has the highest current fertility rates, food production per capita has been declining for nearly 30 years. If food availability really determined human reproductive capacity, Illinois farmers should have the highest fertility rate in the world. Instead, they have one of the lowest. Hopfenberg would reply that excess food produced in North America and Europe fuels population growth in the rest of the world. In some sense that is trivially true, but the strictly biological model that he says applies to people does not account for such phenomena. For example, deer in Virginia don't sacrifice their chances to produce fawns and ship their food to deer in Arkansas, nor do sparrows in New York forego nesting in order to supply food to Floridian sparrows. Individuals, not populations, reproduce. The notion that capping food supplies will halt population growth is also trivially true, but not by the gentle means which Hopfenberg and Pimentel suggest, e.g., reducing human birth rates. Food shortages no doubt reduce fertility, but they also shrink population much more quickly by simple starvation. Finally, Hopfenberg and Pimentel's projection that world population will reach 12 billion by 2050 is off. They simply extrapolate current levels of fertility, yet as we've seen, fertility rates are rapidly declining. The 2002 revision of the United Nations' [17]World Population Prospects' median variant trend projects a world population of 8.9 billion by 2050. Given the rapidly falling global fertility rates, the low variant trend is more likely--and that projects a world population topping out at 7.5 billion by 2040, then beginning to decline. Perhaps Malthusianism will finally decline along with fertility rates. ------------------------------------- Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His new book, Liberation Biology: A Moral and Scientific Defense of the Biotech Revolution will be published in early 2005. References 10. mailto:rbailey at reason.com 11. http://www.victorianweb.org/economics/malthus.html 12. http://www.umsl.edu/~biology/icte/WEArecipients/ehrlich.html 13. http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/91 14. http://www.reason.com/rb/rb072303.shtml 15. http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:9AfIuLNz7nQJ:www.ku.edu/~hazards/foodlogistic.pdf+Steven+Salmony&hl=en 16. http://www.oilcrash.com/articles/populatn.htm 17. http://esa.un.org/unpp/p2k0data.asp From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 2 22:07:46 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2004 18:07:46 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] LRB: Karl Sabbagh: The Strange Case of Louis de Branges Message-ID: Karl Sabbagh: The Strange Case of Louis de Branges http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n14/print/sabb01_.html Two years ago I wrote a book about the Riemann Hypothesis (for an account of the hypothesis see [14]A.W. Moore's article in this issue). The proof of it is something that every mathematician would love to discover or - very much second best - see someone discover. One of the people I interviewed was Louis de Branges, a Franco-American mathematician at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana, with one significant proof already under his belt. De Branges was convinced that a mathematical field in which he was the acknowledged specialist would lead to a proof of the hypothesis. I have stayed in touch with him, and earlier this year, he told me he was putting the finishing touches to a proof he has been working on for 25 years. On 28 April this proof was published on the internet for other mathematicians to see and criticise: [15]www.math.purdue.edu/~branges. There is no evidence that, so far, any mathematician has read it: de Branges and his proof appear to have been ostracised by the profession. I have talked to a number of mathematicians about him and his work over the last few years and it seems that the profession has come to the view that nothing he does in this area will ever bear fruit and therefore his work can be safely ignored. It may be that a possible solution of one of the most important problems in mathematics is never investigated because no one likes the solution's author. De Branges's paper was slipped onto the internet without a fuss. Had he been any other mathematician, there would have been rumours beforehand. Over the last three years I have got to know a number of the key men - they are all men - who work on the Riemann Hypothesis, and although each of them keeps his cards close to his chest, they are all desperate to get a look at the other fellow's hand. I spoke to about twenty of the mathematicians most likely to prove the hypothesis, and if any of them was within reach of a proof, the others would be agog to see what he was doing. Except, of course, in the case of de Branges. De Branges wrote to me in February this year telling me that he was ready to publish his proof. He doesn't use email, and writes all his letters by hand. The final form of the proof of the Riemann Hypothesis will follow closely the treatment of Hilbert spaces of entire functions which I discovered in the years 1957-62 and which was published as a book in 1968. An elegant proof is given which should cause no difficulty for verification. A reader does, however, need to acquire a broad knowledge of these spaces to read the argument. He mentioned several mathematicians he thought would have this broad knowledge, and went on: I will give a copy of the manuscript to Paul Malliavin as editor of the Journal of Functional Analysis. But there is no certainty that he will consider the paper for publication over the next few months. Each of them will certainly say that it contains material relevant to his special interests. They will certainly guard themselves against any assertion that the argument is correct. When de Branges told me his proof was complete I suspected that his paper would be dismissed without being read. Sure enough, in early May, after the internet publication, when reporters from New Scientist and Nature started to look into it and to consider whether this really was the most important mathematical discovery of the last hundred years, their own mathematical contacts assured them that it could safely be ignored. But none of these mathematicians claimed to have actually read de Branges's paper. The first thing to say about this odd situation is that de Branges is not a crank. Most mathematicians working on this problem receive a regular stream of alleged proofs from people with little or no grasp of number theory or complex analysis, the most likely fields from which a proof was expected to emerge. Most of these 'proofs' go into the bin unread. But on the basis of track record, ability and originality of thought, de Branges is in a very different category. He may not be a crank, but he is cranky. 'My relationships with my colleagues are disastrous,' he told me. And he does seem to have left a trail of disgruntled, irritated and even contemptuous colleagues behind him if only because he makes no concessions to students and colleagues who are not familiar with the field in which he works. It may be a field largely of his own devising, but it makes a genuine contribution to pure mathematics. When he's fortunate enough to have students to teach he makes them work their way through a series of extremely tough exercises and sees no reason to make it easy for them. He is a person of strict routine: it's the only way he can create the right conditions for the mathematical thought processes which take up most of his waking life. Adherence to rules is very important. When I was walking with him in France, he remonstrated with me because I stepped on a zebra crossing when two cars were at least a hundred yards away. 'The cars have to stop if you are on the crossing,' he said, 'and one of them might have driven into the back of the other.' He only ever watches one TV programme, the CBS news. 'We cannot afford the time for more television,' he says. He is also disarmingly honest. He's even honest about how honest he is: I differ from other mathematicians in that I seem to have a deep honesty that other people sometimes don't have, and it's rather curious because I certainly didn't have that intention as a young man. I think I was by nature somebody that would easily cut a corner - especially if I didn't think it was very important - not for any real advantage, but I would choose to do so. But the way my life has evolved, against my own inclinations, I have turned out to have an unusual probity. People who keep telling you how modest they are are not usually modest at all. De Branges isn't like that: he is honest. There have been occasions when he has told me things that other people would think twice about revealing. 'My mind is not very flexible,' he once said: I concentrate on one thing and I am incapable of keeping an overall picture. So when I focus on the one thing, I actually forget about the rest of it, and so then I see that at some later time the memory does put it together and there's been an omission. So when that happens then I have to be very careful with myself that I don't fall into some sort of a depression or something like that. You expect that something's going to happen and a major change has taken place, and what you have to realise at that point is that you are vulnerable and that you have to give yourself time to wait until the truth comes out. This kind of single-mindedness can be seen in people with Asperger's Syndrome. Occasionally he has surprised me by talking about his personal life. For example, on one occasion he embarked on the story of his first marriage and ended up telling me how he likes to whistle tunes in the street. It provides a good example of the rather formal way he speaks: I'd married a student from Bryn Mawr College, and all of a sudden she just left, asking for a very substantial amount of money which I didn't in any way contest. And then staying around in Lafayette for about ten years, that greatly created a circle of opposition within the community, because, you see, I was a person that was seen as being in the wrong by my colleagues, and also by the community. The divorce was seen as a criticism of myself, of my performance. To give you an example of that, my wife sang in an organisation called the Bach Chorale, and I was seen by musical people as being somebody that would be against the musical traditions or the arts. Well, this is a curious thing: I happen to be very musical, I simply don't have a musical education because of the war years. My musical qualities are expressed by my whistling. Usually, you know, when you whistle you disturb people, and I apologise for that, but people like the things that I whistle. They say: 'Oh, that's a nice melody, I like that.' It happened when I was going to fetch you at the station, some young lady said: 'Yes, I like to hear that.' I'm sure that my musical quality is much greater than that of the girl who divorced me. I used to sing also in a choir, so I can have a good voice. My speaking voice is rather flat, but my singing voice is good. Whatever personal eccentricities de Branges might have, it's hard to believe they would be enough to make mathematicians who are desperate for a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis reject the possibility that he might now have one. Yet it has been dismissed as 'probably cobblers'. One reason is that mathematicians seem to think that de Branges has claimed on several previous occasions to have proved the Riemann Hypothesis and been in error. 'He has made something of a tradition, I'm told, of emailing colleagues every September with a new proof he worked up over the summer,' another mathematician told me. Successive versions of de Branges's paper were posted on the internet as his ideas evolved. But it is unlikely that he has ever emailed any colleagues anything. He is in contact with very few of them and, in any case, doesn't use email. De Branges has certainly made errors in the past, but it is difficult to find a mathematician who hasn't. 'The first case in which I made an error was in proving the existence of invariant subspaces for continuous transformations in Hilbert spaces,' he told me. 'This was something that happened in 1964, and I declared something to be true which I was not able to substantiate. And the fact that I did that destroyed my career. My colleagues have never forgiven it.' Since then, de Branges has on one occasion believed that he had a finished proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, until an error was pointed out, and he has also believed himself to be near a proof on several occasions before himself discovering a mistake. But mathematicians are surely expected to show a degree of objectivity in assessing their colleagues' work. Even if de Branges were the error-prone sociopathic curmudgeon some believe him to be, is that really enough to stop anyone even considering the possibility of a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis? Maybe de Branges just isn't a very good mathematician. But it is generally agreed that he did solve another important mathematical problem, the Bieberbach Conjecture, in 1985. Not only that: there are uncanny similarities between the initial reaction of other mathematicians to his claim to have proved the Bieberbach Conjecture then, and the unwillingness now to consider that he might have proved the Riemann Hypothesis. 'It would be easy to dismiss de Branges as a crank,' one mathematician wrote on the internet, 'but he has earned the right to a hearing because the early dismissals of his work on the Bieberbach Conjecture turned out to be wrong.' 'I am sure that Louis de Branges's many "wrong" proofs of the Riemann Hypothesis and other conjectures are as chock-full of brilliant ideas as is his proof of Bieberbach,' another wrote. A third, in a festschrift to celebrate de Branges's Bieberbach Conjecture proof, said: 'In March of 1984 the message began to travel. Louis de Branges was claiming a proof of the Bieberbach Conjecture. And his method had come from totally unexpected sources: operator theory and special functions. The story seemed fantastic at the time, but it turned out to be true.' 'Bieberbach was a tremendous achievement, there's no question about it,' Peter Sarnak of the Institute for Advanced Studies says. 'Louis de Branges hit the big time there, really. It was a great problem . . . and his solution was absolutely brilliant, really brilliant.' But Sarnak is one of many who dismiss his Riemann Hypothesis proof. Atle Selberg, one of the greatest pure mathematicians of modern times, said to me: The thing is it's very dangerous to have a fixed idea. A person with a fixed idea will always find some way of convincing himself in the end that he is right. Louis de Branges has committed a lot of mistakes in his life. Mathematically he is not the most reliable source in that sense. As I once said to someone - it's a somewhat malicious jest but occasionally I engage in that - after finally they had verified that he had made this result on the Bieberbach Conjecture, I said that Louis de Branges has made all kinds of mistakes, and this time he has made the mistake of being right. De Branges is now claiming to have solved another, far more significant problem than the Bieberbach Conjecture, again from 'totally unexpected sources', and again most people are treating the story as fantastic. Will the mathematical community again come to accept the proof? It seems unlikely, since there is no one who has read the 121-page paper all the way through who is competent to judge it. Because de Branges's proof uses mathematical tools in which he is one of the few experts, the amount of study required even to become familiar with those tools before embarking on reading the paper seems too great for anyone to commit the time. Even the few people who know and understand de Branges and his method see it as a daunting task. Nikolai Nikolski helped with the validation of the Bieberbach Conjecture proof, a task that took a team of mathematicians at the Steklov Institute in Leningrad several months. 'The Riemann Hypothesis is much more complicated than the Bieberbach Conjecture,' Nikolski told me. So you have to be more enthusiastic if you want to validate the proof. You need to have a team of really enthusiastic high-level people. De Branges found in the middle of the 1980s the only place in the world where there were some curious people who just love to solve complicated problems and who were ready to spend a half a year on it. He has asked me several times if it's possible to organise some people to do the same thing with the Riemann Hypothesis. I love him, so I said to him: 'Yes, if you have a very huge grant, probably not so huge as in America, to pay, for instance, the same place in Petersburg.' But there are plenty of influential mathematicians who just think the whole process would be a waste of time. Brian Conrey, the director of the American Institute for Mathematics, who is developing his own ideas for a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, is insistent: 'I just know it can't come out of de Branges's approach,' he said. 'It's the wrong theory.' But he added a complimentary afterthought: 'If only he was to market his results for what they are - it is a very beautiful theory.' Bela Bollobas, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge who teaches at the University of Memphis is less dogmatic: De Branges is undoubtedly an ingenious mathematician, who established his excellent credentials by settling Bieberbach's Conjecture . . . Unfortunately, his reputation is somewhat tainted by several claims he made in the past, whose proofs eventually collapsed. I very much hope that this is not the case on this occasion: it is certainly not impossible that this time he has really hit the jackpot by tenaciously pursuing the Hilbert space approach. Mathematics is always considered to be a young man's game, so it would be most interesting if a 70-year-old mathematician were to prove the Riemann Hypothesis, which has been considered to be the Holy Grail of mathematics for about a hundred years. When I visited de Branges in his flat near Paris in May, he did not behave like a man who was in sight of a million-dollar prize. But this was not because of any doubts about his proof. 'The proof is there,' he said, 'but it's just part of a longer paper on the zeta functions. That's the important work. It's a theory that could lead to a new understanding of quantum physics, for example, since the way I approach the subject uses a type of mathematics - spectral theory - that seems to underlie the behaviour of atoms.' I asked him how he felt, now that he 'knew' the Riemann Hypothesis was correct, expecting some expression of satisfaction, or even exhilaration. 'It's a question of sanity,' he said. 'When you have a wife who doesn't understand what you do and just wants you out of the house' (his former wife - he is now happily married); 'when you have a mother who comes to live with you to look after you and can't understand what you are doing; when you have colleagues who ignore or dismiss your work . . .' His voice tapered off. 'I just hope someone doesn't come along now with an elementary proof of the Riemann Hypothesis.' I was puzzled by this. It can't have been a matter of priority, since his proof is now out on the internet, dated 28 April, and if it is verified he will get the credit for it. But it turned out he was worried that were someone else to prove the hypothesis without using his broader theory of zeta functions, his life's work would be sidelined as people focused on the other proof and ignored the new insights he felt he had achieved. 'That would be a disaster,' he said. Perhaps one day a young mathematician steeped in de Branges's theory of Hilbert spaces of entire functions will pick up his paper and begin to work through it. Or perhaps, as the news spreads that the entire mathematical profession is turning its back on what could be the most important development in the last hundred years of mathematics, one or two practitioners will be shamed into reading through de Branges's proof, just in case he really has cracked an important problem for the second time in his working life. [16]Karl Sabbagh is a writer and TV producer whose book The Riemann Hypothesis is just out in paperback from Farrar, Straus in the US. He is completing a history of Palestine, to be published by Atlantic. References 14. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n14/moor02_.html 15. http://www.math.purdue.edu/~branges 16. http://www.lrb.co.uk/contribhome.php?get=sabb01 From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 2 22:11:59 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2004 18:11:59 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: Affirmative action: Advantages for the advantaged Message-ID: Affirmative action: Advantages for the advantaged http://www.economist.com/agenda/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=2765848 4.7.16 Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study. By Thomas Sowell. Yale University Press; 256 pages; $28 Affirmative Action is Dead; Long Live Affirmative Action. By Faye J. Crosby. Yale University Press; 352 pages; $30 HERE are two books on "affirmative action" from the same publisher. One is by a black man, the other by a white woman. Thomas Sowell's "Affirmative Action Around the World" is a delight: terse, well argued and utterly convincing. The best one can say about Faye Crosby's "Affirmative Action is Dead; Long Live Affirmative Action" is that it is less badly written than the average academic tome. Mr Sowell takes the reader on a fascinating tour of the ways in which the preferential treatment of chosen groups has been applied in India, Malaysia, Nigeria, Sri Lanka and the United States. Some groups singled out for a leg-up are minorities whose members have suffered discrimination in the past, such as American blacks or India's untouchables. To atone for the injustices inflicted on their forefathers, these groups have been granted favours, such as preferential access to universities or jobs. Other groups favoured in similar ways have never been discriminated against, but nonetheless do worse at school and in business than their neighbours. Examples include Malays in Malaysia, who earn less and learn less than their Chinese compatriots, and the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, who have long lagged behind the Tamils. Mr Sowell's insight is that regardless of the supposed moral basis for preferential policies, the results are often remarkably similar. Though such policies are supposed to help the poor, their beneficiaries tend to be quite well-off. The truly poor rarely apply to enter university or bid for public-works contracts, and so cannot take advantage of quotas. The better-off quickly learn how to play the system. Once affirmative-action policies are instituted, their proponents tend to credit them with all subsequent advances by the intended beneficiaries. Mr Sowell shows that this is bunk. Malays, for example, have done better in Singapore, where they do not receive preferences, than in Malaysia, where they do. And in America, blacks were working their way out of poverty at a faster rate before affirmative action was introduced than after. Supposedly pro-black policies have in some ways made it harder for blacks to find jobs. "The ease with which discrimination charges can be made," writes Mr Sowell, provides an incentive "for businesses to locate away from concentrations of blacks." Mr Sowell's book is brief, but crammed with striking anecdotes and statistics. He tells of the family of recent Cuban immigrants with a $500m fortune who won American government contracts set aside for disadvantaged minorities, and of how preferential policies in Nigeria and Sri Lanka caused ethnic polarisation and, eventually, civil war. He shows how lowering the bar for certain groups dulls their incentives to excel. He quotes, for example, the architect of Malaysia's preferential policies, the former prime minister, Mahathir Mohamed, who laments that his fellow Malays now regard university places as a right, and so neglect their studies. Ms Crosby's book is longer but covers less ground. She writes as if America were the only country in the world, and the Californian campus consensus the only set of opinions a reasonable person could hold. "Thoughtful scholars", she tells us, "wonder why affirmative action has not elicited unwavering support" among Americans. They should read Mr Sowell's book and find out why. From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Aug 3 00:21:38 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2004 17:21:38 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] if neurons sing the melody, do astrocytes sing bass? Message-ID: <01C478B5.2C5777C0.shovland@mindspring.com> What are the mechanisms of mass-mood-summation in groups of humans- other than the obvious forms of media and interaction? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From HowlBloom at aol.com Tue Aug 3 05:18:42 2004 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2004 01:18:42 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] if neurons sing the melody, do astrocytes sing bass? Message-ID: In a message dated 8/2/2004 8:23:22 PM Eastern Standard Time, shovland at mindspring.com writes: What are the mechanisms of mass-mood-summation in groups of humans- other than the obvious forms of media and interaction? Culture--books, libraries, hit songs, cds, mp3s, presidential speeches, sports, card games, tradition, holidays, weekends, religious preferences, the nightly news, gossip, the sunday new york times, sit-coms, the most forwarded emails, the most popular blogs, and something larger to which they all contribute and from which they all descend--the zeitgiest--the zeigeist of their time, the zeitgeist of their civilization, and the zeitgeists of individual subcultures. Howard ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Tue Aug 3 17:29:39 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2004 13:29:39 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Newsweek: What Dreams Are Made of Message-ID: What Dreams Are Made Of Newsweek, 4.8.9 New technology is helping brain scientists unravel the mysteries of the night. Their work could show us all how to make the most of our time in bed. By Barbara Kantrowitz and Karen Springen http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5569228/site/newsweek/print/1/displaymode/1098/Newsweek et seq. In the middle of the night, we are all Fellini-the creator of a parade of fleeting images intended for an audience of one. At times, it's an action flick, with a chase scene that seems endless ... until it dissolves and we're falling, falling, falling into ... is it a field of flowers? And who is the gardener waving at us over there? Could it be our old high-school English teacher? No, it's Jon Stewart. He wants us to sit on the couch right next to him. Are those TV cameras? And what happened to our clothes? In the morning, when the alarm rudely arouses us, we might remember none of this-or maybe only a fraction, perhaps the feeling of lying naked in a bed of daisies or an inexplicable urge to watch "The Daily Show." This, then, is the essence of dreaming-reality and unreality in a nonsensical, often mundane but sometimes bizarre mix. Dreams have captivated thinkers since ancient times, but their mystery is now closer than ever to resolution, thanks to new technology that allows scientists to watch the sleeping brain at work. Although there are still many more questions than answers, researchers are now able to see how different parts of the brain work at night, and they're figuring out how that division of labor influences our dreams. In one sense, it's the closest we've come to recording the soul. "If you're going to understand human behavior," says Rosalind Cartwright, a chairman of psychology at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, "here's a big piece of it. Dreaming is our own storytelling time-to help us know who we are, where we're going and how we're going to get there." The long-range goal of dream research is a comprehensive explanation of the connections between sleeping and waking, a multidimensional picture of consciousness and thought 24 hours a day. In the meantime, dream science is helping us understand and treat depression, posttraumatic stress, anxiety and a whole range of other problems. Neuroscientists are gleaning insights into how we learn by studying the physiology of dreaming in adults and children. Psychologists are also studying dreams to learn how both ordinary people and great artists resolve problems in their life and work by "sleeping on it." For many of these researchers, accounts of ordinary dreams are a rich resource. Psychologist G. William Domhoff and his colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have meticulously cataloged and posted more than 17,000 dreams. That database (dreambank.net) is the source of the dreams printed here. 1. History Of Dream Research I am with an older, "lecherous-looking" Freudian analyst who wants me to lie on the couch and recall the moment of my birth while he counts 1, 2, 3. I pretend and then tell him the truth. Then he gets undressed and wants to make love to me but just then Mother looks in by the door! And I lie very still; she closes the door. I awaken. (Then I remember wishing that I was still with my analyst.) Thousands of years ago, dreams were seen as messages from the gods, and in many cultures, they are still considered prophetic. In ancient Greece, sick people slept at the temples of Asclepius, the god of medicine, in order to receive dreams that would heal them. Modern dream science really begins at the end of the 19th century with Sigmund Freud, who theorized that dreams were the expression of unconscious desires often stemming from childhood. He believed that exploring these hidden emotions through analysis could help cure mental illness. The Freudian model of psychoanalysis dominated until the 1970s, when new research into the chemistry of the brain showed that emotional problems could have biological or chemical roots, as well as environmental ones. In other words, we weren't sick just because of something our mothers did (or didn't do), but because of some imbalance that might be cured with medication. After Freud, the most important event in dream science was the discovery in the early 1950s of a phase of sleep characterized by intense brain activity and rapid eye movement (REM). People awakened in the midst of REM sleep reported vivid dreams, which led researchers to conclude that most dreaming took place during REM. Using the electroencephalograph (EEG), researchers could see that brain activity during REM resembled that of the waking brain. That told them that a lot more was going on at night than anyone had suspected. But what, exactly? Scientists still don't know for sure, although they have lots of theories. On one side are scientists like Harvard's Allan Hobson, who believes that dreams are essentially random. In the 1970s, Hobson and his colleague Robert McCarley proposed what they called the "activation-synthesis hypothesis," which describes how dreams are formed by nerve signals sent out during REM sleep from a small area at the base of the brain called the pons. These signals, the researchers said, activate the images that we call dreams. That put a crimp in dream research; if dreams were meaningless nocturnal firings, what was the point of studying them? More recently, new theories have made some scientists take dreams more seriously. In 1997, Mark Solms of the University of Cape Town in South Africa published the results of his study of people with damage to different parts of the brain; he found that there was more than one mechanism in the brain for activating dreams. Since then, Solms has argued that technology like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) might actually lend new weight to Freud's ideas because the parts of the brain that are most active during dreaming control emotion, the core of Freud's dream theory. Today, many therapists have a looser view of Freud, accepting that dreams may express unconscious thoughts, although not necessarily childhood conflicts. Many others think the answer ultimately lies in a reconciliation of the different disciplines that study dreaming: neurobiology and psychology. "Both are useful, but they're different," says Glen Gabbard, professor of psychoanalysis and psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "To have a truly comprehensive understanding of dreams, you have to be bilingual. You have to speak the language of the mind and the language of the brain." 2. The Biology Of Dreaming Doctors are on the roof talking to people, saying they shouldn't be up there because it's dangerous. One doctor gives shots to immobilize the brain, rather than fixing ailments. I say if I fall to fix me up but leave my brain so I can dream. Adult humans spend about a quarter of their sleep time in REM, much of it dreaming. During that time, the body is essentially paralyzed but the brain is buzzing. Scientists using PET and fMRI technology to watch the dreaming brain have found that one of the most active areas during REM is the limbic system, which controls our emotions. Much less active is the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with logical thinking. That could explain why dreams in REM sleep often lack a coherent story line. (Some researchers have also found that people dream in non-REM sleep as well, although those dreams generally are less vivid.) Another active part of the brain in REM sleep is the anterior cingulate cortex, which detects discrepancies. Eric Nofzinger, director of the Sleep Neuroimaging Program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, thinks that could be why people often figure out thorny problems in their dreams. "It's as if the brain surveys the internal milieu and tries to figure out what it should be doing, and whether our actions conflict with who we are," he says. These may seem like vital mental functions, but no one has yet been able to say that REM sleep or dreaming is essential to life or even sanity. MAO inhibitors, an older class of antidepressants, essentially block REM sleep without any detectable effects, although people do get a "REM rebound"-extra REM-if they stop the medication. That's also true of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like Prozac, which reduce dreaming by a third to a half. Even permanently losing the ability to dream doesn't have to be disabling. Israeli researcher Peretz Lavie has been observing a patient named Yuval Chamtzani, who was injured by a fragment of shrapnel that penetrated his brain when he was 19. As a result, he gets no REM sleep and doesn't remember any dreams. But Lavie says that Chamtzani, now 55, "is probably the most normal person I know and one of the most successful ones." (He's a lawyer, a painter and the editor of a puzzle column in a popular Israeli newspaper.) The mystery of REM sleep is that even though it may not be essential, it is ubiquitous-at least in mammals and birds. But that doesn't mean all mammals and birds dream (or if they do, they're certainly not talking about it). Some researchers think REM may have evolved for physiological reasons. "One thing that's unique about mammals and birds is that they regulate body temperature," says neuroscientist Jerry Siegel, director of UCLA's Center for Sleep Research. "There's no good evidence that any coldblooded animal has REM sleep." REM sleep heats up the brain and non-REM cools it off, Siegel says, and that could mean that the changing sleep cycles allow the brain to repair itself. "It seems likely that REM sleep is filling a basic physiological function and that dreams are a kind of epiphenomenon," Siegel says-an extraneous byproduct, like foam on beer. But dreaming may also fulfill many functions that we don't yet understand. Allan Rechtschaffen, a longtime sleep researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, compares dreaming to breathing. "We need to breathe to get oxygen," he says. "That's a physiological must. That's why the breathing apparatus evolved. But once it evolved, you can put it to other uses, like for speech or laughing or playing the saxophone." Perhaps dreaming, too, adapted to other uses. "There's no reason dreams have to be any one thing," he says. "Is our waking consciousness any one thing?" 3. Different Dreamers: Age And Gender All night long, Jared is drunk and talking in his incoherent mumbly monotone. Finally, I have enough and tell him off. I call him a boring bastard. Then I notice a baby girl standing inside a flaming fireplace. I go up to her and say sympathetically, "You must be very hot and uncomfortable." She agrees. I pick her up and I hold her, taking her away from the fire. We're born to be dreamers-although it apparently takes a while to get all the equipment working. While parents-to-be fantasize about their babies, fetuses probably aren't dreaming about Mom and Dad. "Almost the entire state of being before we're born is REM sleep," says Mark Mahowald, director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis. "I can't imagine that there's a lot of conflict resolution going on in utero." Young children get a lot of REM sleep as well, which scientists think is probably stimulation for brain growth, not real dreaming. Researchers believe children have to reach a certain level of intellectual maturity, around the age of 8 or 9, before their dreams resemble adults'. Inge Strauch, a psychology professor at the University of Zurich, has collected 550 dreams from a group of twenty-four 9- to 15-year-olds she studied in her lab over a period of two years. She found that children dreamed about animals more often than adults and were more likely to report being victims than aggressors. They were also more likely to have "fantastic" dreams, while adults' dreams tend to contain more elements of reality. A typical fantastic dream from a 10-year-old Strauch studied included a cat asking for directions to the "cat bathroom." Similarly, an 11-year-old boy dreamed that a snake wanted to go up a ski lift. Gender differences in dream content show up in studies of adults as well. The biggest myth? That adult dreams are "full of sex," says Domhoff, author of "The Scientific Study of Dreams." When they do have dreams that include sex, they're often about someone they're not really attracted to or some conflict, he says. "They are not often joyful occasions." In fact, about two thirds of the characters in men's dreams are men; gender is more evenly divided in women's dreams. These differences appear to be true in many different cultures. Men's dreams also involve more physical aggression than women's dreams; they're more likely to be about chasing, punching, breaking, stealing or killing, Domhoff says. A more typical expression of aggression in women's dreams would be rejection or an insult ("That dress makes you look fat"). A favorite topic for women: weddings. But they're not always happily-ever-after dreams. "Something always goes wrong," Domhoff says. "It's the wrong dress, the wrong guy, the wrong church." In one recorded on dreambank.net, a woman is about to get married and doesn't have anything to wear. "I ended up wearing a genie outfit, genie pants, a gauze orange top, slippers, a belt with bells on it, lots of jewelry and my hair in a ponytail," she wrote. "I remember reassuring myself by thinking it was close to Halloween." Not surprisingly, new mothers frequently dream about their babies, says Tore Nielsen, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal, who has analyzed the content of 20,000 dreams collected over the Web. In a separate study of 220 new mothers' dreams, he found that "a lot of bad things happen to their infants-the cat eating them, or they're suddenly lost, or they left them in the care of a relative who left them in a shopping center." 4. How We Use Dreams There is a man talking calmly on a pay phone. He is a gunman. He talks casually as he blasts a machine gun up the stairs next to the pay phone, killing people. When he is out of bullets, he casually alters his weapon to use shotgun shells. He is poised, cold like steel, calm, and he kills. People who don't remember their dreams can learn to recall them. In general, more introverted, psychologically oriented people naturally remember their dreams. Practical, concrete thinkers probably won't. It also helps to get enough sleep so you have time to dream. If you want to remember more, try to keep the REM state going by lying still and keeping your eyes closed while you repeat the dream scenario in your head to solidify it in your memory. Cartwright even suggests giving it a title, like "My Date With Brad Pitt." Keep a notebook by your bed and write down what's in your head as soon as you wake up. Why should you care what happens in your head at night? Although there's lots of disagreement about the psychological function of dreams, researchers in recent years have come up with some tantalizing theories. One possibility is that dreaming helps the mind run tests of its Emergency Broadcast System, a way to prepare for potential disaster. So, for example, when new mothers dream about losing their babies, they may actually be rehearsing what they would do or how they would react if their worst fears were realized. There's also evidence that dreaming helps certain kinds of learning. Some researchers have found that dreaming about physical tasks, like a gymnast's floor routine, enhances performance. Dreaming can also help people find solutions to elusive problems. "Anything that is very visual may get extra help from dreams," says Deirdre Barrett, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and editor of the journal Dreaming. In her book "The Committee of Sleep," she describes how artists like Jasper Johns and Salvador Dali found inspiration in their dreams. In her own research on problem solving through dreams, Barrett has found that even ordinary people can solve simple problems in their lives (like how to fit old furniture into a new apartment) if they focus on the dilemma before they fall asleep. Whatever the function of dreams at night, they clearly can play a role in therapy during the day. The University of Maryland's Clara Hill, who has studied the use of dreams in therapy, says that dreams are a "back door" into a patient's thinking. "Dreams reveal stuff about you that you didn't know was there," she says. The therapists she trains to work with patients' dreams are, in essence, heirs to Freud, using dream imagery to uncover hidden emotions and feelings. Dreams provide clues to the nature of more serious mental illness. Schizophrenics, for example, have poor-quality dreams, usually about objects rather than people. Cartwright has been studying depression in divorced men and women, and she is finding that "good dreamers," people who have vivid dreams with strong story lines, are less likely to remain depressed. She thinks that dreaming helps diffuse strong emotions. "Dreaming is a mental-health activity," she says. People often deal with traumatic events through dreams. Tufts University psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann, author of "Dreams and Nightmares," analyzed dreams from the same group of people before and after September 11 (none of them lived in New York). He found that the later dreams were not necessarily more negative, but they were more intense. "The intensity is a measure of emotional arousal," he says. For people suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), dream content can be a marker of the level of distress, says psychiatrist Thomas Mellman of the Howard University School of Medicine, who studies PTSD. Dreams that mimic the real-life trauma indicate that the patient may be "stuck" in the experience. He thinks one way to help people move past the memory is through an "injury rehearsal," where they imagine a more positive scenario. All this has led to a rethinking of Freud's great insight, that dreams are a "royal road" to the unconscious. Mapping that royal road is a daunting task for scientists who are using sophisticated imaging techniques and psychological studies in an attempt to synthesize what we know about the inner workings of the mind and the brain. Dreaming, like thinking, is what makes us human-whether we're evoking old terrors or imaging new pleasures. "We dream about unfinished business," says Domhoff. And, if we're lucky, we wake up with a little more insight to carry the day. With Pat Wingert and Josh Ulick From checker at panix.com Tue Aug 3 17:39:01 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2004 13:39:01 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Sociology. History. Where to Put the Blanket. Message-ID: Sociology. History. Where to Put the Blanket. New York Times, 4.8.3 By JAMES GORMAN On an unbearably hot day in August you arrive at the beach - Jones Beach, Santa Monica Beach or any other beach - and you see in front of you uncountable blankets, umbrellas and people arranged in an unfathomable pattern, or no pattern at all. Where to put your blanket? How to negotiate a small city with no sidewalks, no streets, no property boundaries, when you can't even figure out whether the anxiety you feel is claustrophobia or agoraphobia? At times like this I long for an evidence-based approach to beach-blanket site acquisition and defense. Don't you? How do you decide whether there's enough room between two family groups? How can you tell in advance who is going to kick sand or indulge in inappropriate public displays of affection? What is the optimal search pattern for open space? Astronauts were better prepared for a moon walk than we are for a beach walk. One small step for a man, then another small step for a man, and another. We ought to be able to come up with some answers. In one sense the beach is a human invention. Of course there have always been beaches in the geological sense, but it wasn't until the 18th century that trendsetters like King George III of England (the one who lost the colonies) began to favor bathing in the sea as a healthy activity. Alain Corbin, a French intellectual who has written about odors, the senses, cannibalism and other topics, described the general change in the European attitude toward the boundary between sea and land in "Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside, 1750-1840." Other historians have also noted that the interest in sea bathing was part of an increased interest in bathing in general. Apparently, there were hundreds of years when no one in Europe took a bath, let alone packed up the oxcart to take the kids to the shore. Once royalty dived in, it was a mere historical hop, skip and jump to the Jersey Shore. In the 1970's and 80's, American social scientists who were thinking about crowds, personal space and behavior in public places cast their gaze on the beach. In 1979 Robert B. Edgerton published "Alone Together: Social Order on an Urban Beach." Jack D. Douglas published "The Nude Beach (Sociological Observations)" in 1977. Researchers contemplated the arrangement of ethnic and social groups on given beaches and, in fact, the actual arrangement of blankets. In 1981 Dr. Herman W. Smith, now retired from the University of Missouri at St. Louis, published a paper called, "Territorial Spacing on a Beach Revisited: A Cross-National Exploration," in Social Psychology Quarterly. Germans claimed the largest territory. The French did not seem to grasp the idea of laying claim to an area of public space. Dr. Smith did not make any comparison to geopolitics, and I won't either. Dr. William Kornblum, a sociologist at City University of New York and author of "At Sea in the City," a book about sailing New York's waterfront, studied beach use in the 1970's and 80's for the National Park Service. In an interview, he said ethnic and racial conflicts sometimes erupted on beaches when groups that usually lived apart found themselves in close proximity. Race riots in Chicago in 1919 started on a beach, he said. Although the study of people in public places continues, he went on, he is not aware of any rising tide of beach interest or new research on patterns of blanket placement. As a side thought, Dr. Kornblum said that he had always thought that the millions of trips to the beach each summer represented "one of the great mammalian migratory patterns." After I spoke to Dr. Kornblum, I started thinking that there might be another approach to discovering the rules of beach blanket placement. Perhaps the problem is mathematical. Maybe we're like M&M's. Mathematicians are always studying the packing of M&M's. Candies do not make conscious, deliberate decisions, of course. But maybe we don't either. Maybe we simply collect and disperse in a kind of Brownian motion. This suggests a non-ego, non-evidence-based strategy. You are not a sweaty, tired person hoping against hope for a quiet spot in the crowd. You are a grain of sand, a drop in the sea of humanity. You don't need some fancy rational strategy. Be the blanket. Let the space choose you. Get over yourself. Or, as the noted Texas Buddhist and country singer Jimmie Dale Gilmore wrote in one of his songs, using a seaside metaphor of sorts: "Babe, you're just a wave. You're not the water." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/science/03side.html From checker at panix.com Tue Aug 3 17:39:57 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2004 13:39:57 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: A Lament for Ancient Games in Modern World of Doping Message-ID: A Lament for Ancient Games in Modern World of Doping New York Times, 4.8.3 By CLAUDIA DREIFUS Thomas H. Murray, president of the Hastings Center, a bioethics research group in Garrison, N.Y., spends a large part of his day considering the culture, philosophy and ethics of the sporting world. As the author of several papers on the use of science in sports, Dr. Murray, a social psychologist, has served on the United States Olympic Committee's anti-doping panel, an experience he describes as "the most frustrating work I've done." He also recently became chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency's ethical issues review panel, which, he said in a recent interview, "is really serious about dealing with abuses." Dr. Murray, 58, is an avid bicyclist. But he has no plans to go to Athens next week. "I've never been to a single Olympics," he said, with a smile. "There are jobs within the Olympic movement that come with lots of perks. The job I had wasn't one of them." Q. Recently, a major ethical or medical issue has dominated the headlines of each Olympics. The Atlanta Games were dubbed the "EPO Games," after erythropoietin, the human growth hormone. What do you think the Athens Games will be called? A. Perhaps the "Gene Games?" The hot new topic is genetic manipulation or gene transfer, and people are getting very excited and worried that athletes might try to genetically enhance themselves. But of course, the technology is not here yet. Lee Sweeney at University of Pennsylvania is working on a technique that could be therapeutic for people with muscular dystrophy, but that might also be used by athletes to enhance muscle size. Thus far, his work has only been with mice. Indeed, the whole technology of gene therapy is very much in its infancy. So while there will be a lot of talk about it, I don't expect there will be any genetically enhanced athletes in Athens, although there might be some who think they have been. Q. How can a person "think" they've been genetically enhanced? A. Because there are scads of scoundrels promoting all kinds of things to athletes. Some athletes are gullible. They hang out with these people, listen to them. In the sports world, there's something called "five-ring fever," which is a desire to be associated with the Olympic movement. If you're not an athlete yourself, you get closer by currying favor. There are athletes who will pay for all kinds of services they think will enhance their strength and endurance. In many cases, they're getting nothing. In others, they are ingesting some very dangerous substances. Q. Is the problem here the technologies or, rather, how some people use them? A. In almost every case, the technology that is being used for enhancement wasn't developed for that, but for some therapeutic use. EPO, which you mentioned earlier - it's for people who have chronic anemia. It helps them make red cells. Athletes pretty quickly figured out, "If this substance can get my blood up to normal, why can't I get it a little above normal and then maybe I can run or cycle a little faster." Q. Would you say that there's a subculture of self-experimentation among athletes? A. It's been around for decades, though it's gotten more elaborate, more formalized and in some cases, state-sponsored. There was an enormous sports doping industry in East Germany. It involved over a hundred scientists and doctors and thousands of athletes. It was a horrendous activity that damaged a lot of people. Q. Aside from the damage that some of the enhancements do to individual athletes, what is the harm in using them? A. The first thing: It changes the whole idea of a level playing field. What most athletes hate is losing to a cheater. If you could give athletes a way to compete without performance enhancements and have a fair shot at winning, most would prefer that. The other thing is that enhancements bring into question the very meaning of athletic endeavors. In the past, sports have been a combination of natural talents and old-fashioned virtues like tenacity, endurance, willingness to suffer pain - and in the case of team sports, playing unselfishly. If all of that is reduced to a drug or an injectable, the meaning of sport may be altered irrevocably. If sport continues to be overwhelmed by the performance at all costs principle, it could become something like a high-level circus exhibition, like professional wrestling or an activity of that sort. Q. Will we be seeing Olympics in the future where the sports physicians and scientists are the real contenders? A. "Best body sculptor?" I'm afraid you're frighteningly realistic. There are branches of the sport of power lifting that give us a glimpse into that sort of future. Because within power lifting there is widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs and steroids, the sport has split into a myriad of governing bodies, including a "drug free" power lifting association and another "anything goes" association. The latter is very clear: "We don't monitor, we don't test for drugs. Whatever allows you to lift the greatest weight is what we permit." So what will happen to the meaning of competition if all sports go that way in the future? Will victory go to the person with the best drugs and gene therapists? Q. What does the current investigation into the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative teach us? A. That there are cadres of reasonably skilled scientists willing to work surreptitiously to dope athletes, including the creation of entirely new drugs, such as THG tetrahydrogestrinone, a synthetic steroid, which was thought to be undetectable. Q. The track star Marion Jones, whose name has been linked to the Bay Area laboratory inquiry, feels she's been given a raw deal because she hasn't failed any physical testing. Does she have a point? A. Testing isn't the only way to check against doping. For a fairly long time it's been possible to find an athlete guilty of doping from evidence other than a laboratory test, if the evidence is sufficiently clear and independent. For example, it's possible to find evidence of the "old-fashioned" blood doping where you got a blood transfusion, but you get it far enough ahead of the competition so that you've urinated away the excess fluid volume, but you still have the extra red cells. In such cases, if you found items like IV bags, or testimony by people who've administered the blood, that could be evidence. It was the only way to be fair to other athletes against whom this person was competing. Q. For more than a decade, you served on a United States Olympic Committee panel charged with monitoring sports doping. Did you find it a waste of time? A. No, because I met some wonderful people among the athletes who also served. But what happened was that we would get partial information, provide the advice we were asked to give and then we'd never find out whether the advice was followed. I felt frustrated. The U.S.O.C. had to have some form of drug control program; that's what I felt we were doing there. But there was the feeling that the leadership of the U.S.O.C. as well as the various sports governing bodies, with rare exceptions, was not really committed to this. Now with the U.S.A.D.A. - the United States Anti-Doping Agency - things have changed. U.S.A.D.A. seems to be very serious about trying to give us a different path. Q. Dr. Gary Wadler, a well-known sports physician, claims that sports doping is a public health issue. Do you agree with him? A. Absolutely. Anabolic steroids are the example. They are used by a frightening number of high school and college-age students. They take them because they think it will make them stronger, and if they are male because they think it will make them look more masculine. These young people hear of their sports heroes using them, and if their role models are using steroids to pursue performance at any price, they think, "Why not?" Another thing I worry about - for the young and the old - is this feeling out there that our bodies are mere objects to be manipulated and optimized by whatever means available. If 14-year-olds are taking steroids, this is bad news for all of us. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/health/psychology/03conv.html From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Tue Aug 3 18:11:11 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2004 11:11:11 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] psychopaths rising to the top In-Reply-To: <200408021936.i72JaZj06955@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20040803181111.49838.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> >>If we say that only competition matters, then the psychopaths end up in charge, which I think describes our present situation pretty well.<< --I agree. In a tribal setting, a web of relationships keeps competition within bounds, at worst directing the most damaging aspects of it at other tribes. In our culture, relationships are more complex, and it's possible for competition to become quite toxic, with social relationships failing to prevent the promotion of psychopaths. We're rapidly falling into the same patterns that ate up empires before us, and at bottom is the loss of the social webs that keep instincts from amplifying out of control. Self-interest evolved as part of a network, and it is only recently that people with very little in the way of emotional connection to others have found themselves with so much power to affect the whole. In war, sociopaths (who excel at displacing guilt, self-doubt and shame onto enemies) have always sensed opportunity, but in our culture we don't even have to be at war for sociopaths to rise to the top. What web of social relationships would enable those with both ingenuity and empathy to empower themselves? Or have we rigged the game so that empathy has become a block to achievement? Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Aug 3 20:14:57 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2004 13:14:57 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] psychopaths rising to the top Message-ID: <01C4795B.E04687C0.shovland@mindspring.com> I prefer to think that we are passing through a dark time and that the empathic majority is gradually arousing itself to put the animals back in their cages :-) As far as organizations go, any time they hire from the outside they risk taking in a psychopath, because psychopaths interview well. They can be charming and intelligent and can zero in on the vulnerabilities of the people screening them. They are probably hyper-empathic in that area. A number of years ago an insurance exec told me about someone their company hired. They soon realized that "he was just in it for himself" and they got rid of him. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Tuesday, August 03, 2004 11:11 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] psychopaths rising to the top >>If we say that only competition matters, then the psychopaths end up in charge, which I think describes our present situation pretty well.<< --I agree. In a tribal setting, a web of relationships keeps competition within bounds, at worst directing the most damaging aspects of it at other tribes. In our culture, relationships are more complex, and it's possible for competition to become quite toxic, with social relationships failing to prevent the promotion of psychopaths. We're rapidly falling into the same patterns that ate up empires before us, and at bottom is the loss of the social webs that keep instincts from amplifying out of control. Self-interest evolved as part of a network, and it is only recently that people with very little in the way of emotional connection to others have found themselves with so much power to affect the whole. In war, sociopaths (who excel at displacing guilt, self-doubt and shame onto enemies) have always sensed opportunity, but in our culture we don't even have to be at war for sociopaths to rise to the top. What web of social relationships would enable those with both ingenuity and empathy to empower themselves? Or have we rigged the game so that empathy has become a block to achievement? Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From pkurakin at yahoo.com Wed Aug 4 07:11:07 2004 From: pkurakin at yahoo.com (Pavel Kurakin) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2004 00:11:07 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] psychopaths rising to the top In-Reply-To: <01C4795B.E04687C0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <20040804071107.55458.qmail@web53406.mail.yahoo.com> Destuction of USSR is an example of mass psychpaths. Soviet people were convinced, that in 1917 Russians made wrong choice, and we ought to "join" the "right" choice. I.e. USA, Europe... In other words, to those 20% of world population, who live in highly developed countries. "To join the rest of world". The rest was meant USA, but why not Argentina or India? They are also "capitalism". 1913. Russia's GNP per soul is 10% of USA. 1985. Russia's (USSR) GNP per soul is ~50% of USA. Another view: 1913. Russian population: 10% of world's Russian industrial prod.: 5% of world's. 1985. Russian (USSR) population: 5% of world's Russian (USSR) industrial prod.: 15% of world's* *CIA data. Soviet statistical authorities gave 20%. Crazy, wild people. Steve wrote: I prefer to think that we are passing through a dark time and that the empathic majority is gradually arousing itself to put the animals back in their cages :-) As far as organizations go, any time they hire from the outside they risk taking in a psychopath, because psychopaths interview well. They can be charming and intelligent and can zero in on the vulnerabilities of the people screening them. They are probably hyper-empathic in that area. A number of years ago an insurance exec told me about someone their company hired. They soon realized that "he was just in it for himself" and they got rid of him. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Tuesday, August 03, 2004 11:11 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] psychopaths rising to the top >>If we say that only competition matters, then the psychopaths end up in charge, which I think describes our present situation pretty well.<< --I agree. In a tribal setting, a web of relationships keeps competition within bounds, at worst directing the most damaging aspects of it at other tribes. In our culture, relationships are more complex, and it's possible for competition to become quite toxic, with social relationships failing to prevent the promotion of psychopaths. We're rapidly falling into the same patterns that ate up empires before us, and at bottom is the loss of the social webs that keep instincts from amplifying out of control. Self-interest evolved as part of a network, and it is only recently that people with very little in the way of emotional connection to others have found themselves with so much power to affect the whole. In war, sociopaths (who excel at displacing guilt, self-doubt and shame onto enemies) have always sensed opportunity, but in our culture we don't even have to be at war for sociopaths to rise to the top. What web of social relationships would enable those with both ingenuity and empathy to empower themselves? Or have we rigged the game so that empathy has become a block to achievement? Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Aug 4 14:52:11 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2004 07:52:11 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] psychopaths rising to the top Message-ID: <01C479F7.F3A11640.shovland@mindspring.com> In America the business press writes as if nobody but the CEO contributes to the success of the company. That may lead to a situation where everyone sits around waiting for the CEO to make his next move :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Pavel Kurakin [SMTP:pkurakin at yahoo.com] Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 2004 12:11 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] psychopaths rising to the top Destuction of USSR is an example of mass psychpaths. Soviet people were convinced, that in 1917 Russians made wrong choice, and we ought to "join" the "right" choice. I.e. USA, Europe... In other words, to those 20% of world population, who live in highly developed countries. "To join the rest of world". The rest was meant USA, but why not Argentina or India? They are also "capitalism". 1913. Russia's GNP per soul is 10% of USA. 1985. Russia's (USSR) GNP per soul is ~50% of USA. Another view: 1913. Russian population: 10% of world's Russian industrial prod.: 5% of world's. 1985. Russian (USSR) population: 5% of world's Russian (USSR) industrial prod.: 15% of world's* *CIA data. Soviet statistical authorities gave 20%. Crazy, wild people. Steve wrote: I prefer to think that we are passing through a dark time and that the empathic majority is gradually arousing itself to put the animals back in their cages :-) As far as organizations go, any time they hire from the outside they risk taking in a psychopath, because psychopaths interview well. They can be charming and intelligent and can zero in on the vulnerabilities of the people screening them. They are probably hyper-empathic in that area. A number of years ago an insurance exec told me about someone their company hired. They soon realized that "he was just in it for himself" and they got rid of him. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Tuesday, August 03, 2004 11:11 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] psychopaths rising to the top >>If we say that only competition matters, then the psychopaths end up in charge, which I think describes our present situation pretty well.<< --I agree. In a tribal setting, a web of relationships keeps competition within bounds, at worst directing the most damaging aspects of it at other tribes. In our culture, relationships are more complex, and it's possible for competition to become quite toxic, with social relationships failing to prevent the promotion of psychopaths. We're rapidly falling into the same patterns that ate up empires before us, and at bottom is the loss of the social webs that keep instincts from amplifying out of control. Self-interest evolved as part of a network, and it is only recently that people with very little in the way of emotional connection to others have found themselves with so much power to affect the whole. In war, sociopaths (who excel at displacing guilt, self-doubt and shame onto enemies) have always sensed opportunity, but in our culture we don't even have to be at war for sociopaths to rise to the top. What web of social relationships would enable those with both ingenuity and empathy to empower themselves? Or have we rigged the game so that empathy has become a block to achievement? Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com << File: ATT00003.html >> << File: ATT00004.txt >> From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Wed Aug 4 22:09:22 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2004 15:09:22 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] cages In-Reply-To: <200408041800.i74I0Tj28211@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20040804220922.26775.qmail@web13421.mail.yahoo.com> >>I prefer to think that we are passing through a dark time and that the empathic majority is gradually arousing itself to put the animals back in their cages :-)<< --I think that's true, but there are a lot of guilty people on all levels of our society whose guilt will push them to act out in more and more aggressive ways as the "cage" closes in. Innocent people are squeezed out of groups by those who need scapegoats to deflect the "group superego". Empathy is dulled out of strategic necessity by those who want to win the "game", and the more sensitive and honest individuals have a hard time staying afloat. It does seem to be a dark time. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From checker at panix.com Wed Aug 4 23:02:35 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2004 19:02:35 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] How not to buy happiness by Robert H. Frank, pp. 69-79 Message-ID: How not to buy happiness by Robert H. Frank, pp. 69-79 http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=6&tid=14403 [How it happens that the increase in conspicuous goods just balances out the increase in inconspicuous goods is not explained. The article is a good introduction to ideas Bob has been expounding at least since 1985. I recommend more his _Choosing the Right Pond_, which I reviewed for _Public Choice_, and _Passions within Reason.] An enduring paradox in the literature on human happiness is that although the rich are significantly happier than the poor within any country at any moment, average happiness levels change very little as peoples incomes rise in tandem over time.^[18]1 Richard Easterlin and others have interpreted these observations to mean that happiness depends on relative rather than absolute income.^[19]2 In this essay I offer a slightly different interpretation of the evidencenamely, that gains in happiness that might have been expected to result from growth in absolute income have not materialized because of the ways in which people in affluent societies have generally spent their incomes. In effect, I wish to propose two different answers to the question Does money buy happiness? Considerable evidence suggests that if we use an increase in our incomes, as many of us do, simply to buy bigger houses and more expensive cars, then we do not end up any happier than before. But if we use an increase in our incomes to buy more of certain inconspicuous goodssuch as freedom from a long commute or a stressful jobthen the evidence paints a very different picture. The less we spend on conspicuous consumption goods, the better we can afford to alleviate congestion; and the more time we can devote to family and friends, to exercise, sleep, travel, and other restorative activities. On the best available evidence, reallocating our time and money in these and similar ways would result in healthier, longer and happierlives. The main method that psychologists have used to measure human well-being has been to conduct surveys in which they ask people whether they are: a) very happy; b) fairly happy; or c) not happy.^[20]3 Most respondents are willing to answer the question, and not all of them respond very happy, even in the United States, where one might think it advantageous to portray oneself as being very happy. Many people describe themselves as fairly happy, and others confess to being not happy. A given persons response tends to be consistent from one survey to the next. Happiness surveys and a variety of other measures employed by psychologists are strongly correlated with observable behaviors that we associate with well-being.^[21]4 If youre happy, for example, youre more likely to initiate social contact with friends. Youre more likely to respond positively when others ask you for help. Youre less likely to suffer from psychosomatic illnessesdigestive disorders, other stress disorders, headaches, vascular stress. Youre less likely to be absent from work or to get involved in disputes at work. And youre less likely to attempt suicidethe ultimate behavioral measure of unhappiness. In sum, it appears that human happiness is a real phenomenon that we can measure.^[22]5 How does happiness vary with income? As noted earlier, studies show that when incomes rise for everybody, well-being doesnt change much. Consider the example of Japan, which was a very poor country in 1960. Between then and the late 1980s, its per capita income rose almost four-fold, placing it among the highest in the industrialized world. Yet the average happiness level reported by the Japanese was no higher in 1987 than in 1960.^[23]6 They had many more washing machines, cars, cameras, and other things than they used to, but they did not register significant gains on the happiness scale. The same pattern consistently shows up in other countries as well, and thats a puzzle for economists. If getting more income doesnt make people happier, why do they go to such lengths to get more income? Why, for example, do tobacco company CEOs endure the public humiliation of testifying before Congress that theres no evidence that smoking causes serious illnesses? It turns out that if we measure the income-happiness relationship in another way, we get just what the economists suspected all along. When we plot average happiness versus average income for clusters of people in a given country at a given time, we see that rich people are in fact much happier than poor people. In one study based on U.S. data, for example, people in the top decile of the income distribution averaged more than five points higher on a ten-point happiness scale than people in the bottom decile.^[24]7 The evidence thus suggests that if income affects happiness, it is relative, not absolute, income that matters. Some social scientists who have pondered the significance of these patterns have concluded that, at least for people in the worlds richest countries, no useful purpose is served by further accumulations of wealth.^[25]8 On its face, this should be a surprising conclusion, since there are so many seemingly useful things that having additional wealth would enable us to do. Would we really not be any happier if, say, the environment were a little cleaner, or if we could take a little more time off, or even just eliminate a few of the hassles of everyday life? In principle at least, people in wealthier countries have these additional options, and it should surprise us that this seems to have no measurable effect on their overall wellbeing. There is indeed independent evidence that having more wealth would be a good thing, provided it were spent in certain ways. The key insight supported by this evidence is that even though we appear to adapt quickly to across-the-board increases in our stocks of most material goods, there are specific categories in which our capacity to adapt is more limited. Additional spending in these categories appears to have the greatest capacity to produce significant improvements in well-being. The human capacity to adapt to dramatic changes in life circumstances is impressive. Asked to choose, most people state confidently that they would rather be killed in an automobile accident than to survive as a quadriplegic. And so we are not surprised to learn that severely disabled people experience a period of devastating depression and disorientation in the wake of their accidents. What we do not expect, however, are the speed and extent to which many of these victims accommodate to their new circumstances. Within a years time, many quadriplegics report roughly the same mix of moods and emotions as able-bodied people do.^[26]9 There is also evidence that the blind, the retarded, and the malformed are far better adapted to the limitations imposed by their conditions than most of us might imagine.^[27]10 We adapt swiftly not just to losses but also to gains. Ads for the New York State Lottery show participants fantasizing about how their lives would change if they won. (Id buy the company and fire my boss.) People who actually win the lottery typically report the anticipated rush of euphoria in the weeks after their good fortune. Follow-up studies done after several years, however, indicate that these people are often no happier and indeed, are in some ways less happythan before.^[28]11 In short, our extraordinary powers of adaptation appear to help explain why absolute living standards simply may not matter much once we escape the physical deprivations of abject poverty. This interpretation is consistent with the impressions of people who have lived or traveled extensively abroad, who report that the struggle to get ahead seems to play out with much the same psychological effects in rich societies as in those with more modest levels of wealth.^[29]12 These observations provide grist for the mills of social critics who are offended by the apparent wastefulness of the recent luxury-consumption boom in the United States. What many of these critics typically overlook, however, is that the power to adapt is a two-edged sword. It may indeed explain why having bigger houses and faster cars doesnt make us any happier; but if we can also adapt fully to the seemingly unpleasant things we often have to endure to get more money, then whats the problem? Perhaps social critics are simply barking up the wrong tree. I believe, however, that to conclude that absolute living standards do not matter is a serious misreading of the evidence. What the data seem to say is that as national income grows, people do not spend their extra money in ways that yield significant and lasting increases in measured satisfaction. But this still leaves two possible ways that absolute income might matter. One is that people might have been able to spend their money in other ways that would have made them happier, yet for various reasons they did not, or could not, do so. I will describe presently some evidence that strongly supports this possibility. The second possibility is that although measures of subjective well-being may do a reasonably good job of tracking our experiences as we are consciously aware of them, that may not be all that matters to us. For example, imagine two parallel universes, one just like the one we live in now and another in which everyones income is twice what it is now. Suppose that in both cases you would be the median earner, with an annual income of $100,000 in one case and $200,000 in the other. Suppose further that you would feel equally happy in the two universes an assumption that is consistent with the evidence discussed thus far. And suppose, finally, that you know that people in the richer universe would spend more to protect the environment from toxic waste, and that this would result in healthier and longer, even if not happier, lives for all. Can there be any question that it would be better to live in the richer universe? My point is that although the emerging science of subjective well-being has much to tell us about the factors that contribute to human satisfaction, not even its most ardent practitioners would insist that it offers the final word. Whether growth in national income is, or could be, a generally good thing is a question that will have to be settled by the evidence. And there is in fact a rich body of evidence that bears on this question. One clear message of this evidence is that, beyond some point, across-the-board increases in spending on many types of material goods do not produce any lasting increment in subjective well-being. Sticking with the parallel-universes metaphor, let us imagine people from two societies, identical in every respect save one: in society A everyone lives in a house with 4,000 square feet of floor space, whereas in society B each house has only 3,000 square feet. If the two societies were completely isolated from one another, there is no evidence to suggest that psychologists and neuroscientists would be able to discern any significant difference in their respective average levels of subjective well-being. Rather, we would expect each society to have developed its own local norm for what constitutes adequate housing, and that people in each society would therefore be equally satisfied with their houses and other aspects of their lives. Moreover, we have no reason to suppose that there would be other important respects in which it might be preferable to be a member of society A rather than society B. Thus the larger houses in society A would not contribute to longer lives, more freedom from illness, or indeed any other significant advantage over the members of society B. Once house size achieves a given threshold, the human capacity to adapt to further across-the-board changes in house size would appear to be virtually complete. Of course, it takes real resources to build larger houses. A society that built 4,000-square-foot houses for everyone could have built 3,000-square-foot houses instead, freeing up considerable resources that could have been used to produce something else. Hence this central question: Are there alternative ways of spending these resources that could have produced lasting gains in human welfare? An affirmative answer would be logically impossible if our capacity to adapt to every other possible change were as great as our capacity to adapt to larger houses. As it turns out, however, our capacity to adapt varies considerably across domains. There are some stimuli, such as environmental noise, to which we may adapt relatively quickly at a conscious level, yet to which our bodies continue to respond in measurable ways even after many years of exposure. And there are stimuli to which we never adapt over time but rather become sensitized; various biochemical allergens are examples, but we also see instances on a more macro scale. Thus, after several months exposure, the office boor who initially took two weeks to annoy you can accomplish the same feat in only seconds. The observation that we adapt more fully to some stimuli than to others opens the possibility that moving resources from one category to another might yield lasting changes in well-being. Considerable evidence bears on this possibility. A convenient way to examine this evidence is to consider a sequence of thought experiments in which you must choose between two hypothetical societies. The two societies have equal wealth levels but different spending patterns. In each case, let us again suppose that residents of society A live in 4,000- square-foot houses while those of society B live in 3,000-square-foot houses. In each case, the residents of society B use the resources saved by building smaller houses to bring about some other specific change in their living conditions. In the first thought experiment, I will review in detail what the evidence says about how that change would affect the quality of their lives. In the succeeding examples, I will simply state the relevant conclusions and refer to supporting evidence published elsewhere. Which would you choose: society A, whose residents have 4,000-square-foot houses and a one-hour automobile commute to work through heavy traffic; or society B, whose residents have-3,000 square-foot houses and a fifteen-minute commute by rapid transit? Let us suppose that the cost savings from building smaller houses are sufficient to fund not only the construction of high-speed public transit, but also to make the added flexibility of the automobile available on an as-needed basis. Thus, as a resident of society B, you need not give up your car. You can drive it to work on those days when you need extra flexibility, or you can come and go when needed by taxi. The only thing you and others must sacrifice to achieve the shorter daily commute of society B is additional floor space in your houses. A rational person faced with this choice will want to consider the available evidence on the costs and benefits of each alternative. As concerns the psychological cost of living in smaller houses, the evidence provides no reason to believe that if you and all others live in 3,000-square-foot houses, your subjective well-being will be any lower than if you and all others live in 4,000-square-foot houses. Of course, if you moved from society B to society A, you might be pleased, even excited, at first to experience the additional living space. But we can predict that in time you would adapt and simply consider the larger house the norm. Someone who moved from society B to society A would also initially experience stress from the extended commute through heavy traffic. Over time, his consciousness of this stress might diminish. But there is an important distinction: unlike his essentially complete adaptation to the larger house, his adaptation to his new commuting pattern will be only partial. Available evidence clearly shows that, even after long periods of adjustment, most people experience the task of navigating through heavy commuter traffic as stressful.^[30]13 In this respect, the effect of exposure to heavy traffic is similar to the effect of exposure to noise and other irritants. Thus, even though a large increase in background noise at a constant, steady level is experienced as less intrusive as time passes, prolonged exposure nonetheless produces lasting elevations in blood pressure.^[31]14 If the noise is not only loud but intermittent, people remain conscious of their heightened irritability even after extended periods of adaptation, and their symptoms of central nervous system distress become more pronounced.^[32]15 This pattern was seen, for example, in a study of people living next to a newly opened noisy highway. Four months after the highway opened, 21 percent of residents interviewed said they were not annoyed by the noise, but that figure dropped to 16 percent when the same residents were interviewed a year later.^[33]16 Among the various types of noise exposure, worst of all is exposure to sounds that are not only loud and intermittent, but also unpredictably so. Subjects exposed to such noise in the laboratory experience not only physiological symptoms of stress, but also behavioral symptoms. They become less persistent in their attempts to cope with frustrating tasks, and suffer measurable impairments in performing tasks requiring care and attention.^[34]17 Unpredictable noise may be particularly stressful because it confronts the subject with a loss of control. David Glass and his collaborators confirmed this hypothesis in an ingenious experiment that exposed two groups of subjects to a recording of loud unpredictable noises. Whereas subjects in one group had no control over the recording, subjects in the other group could stop the tape at any time by flipping a switch. These subjects were told, however, that the experimenters would prefer that they not stop the tape, and most subjects honored this preference. Following exposure to the noise, subjects with access to the control switch made almost 60 percent fewer errors than the other subjects on a proofreading task and made more than four times as many attempts to solve a difficult puzzle.^[35]18 Commuting through heavy traffic is in many ways more like exposure to loud unpredictable noise than to constant background noise. Delays are difficult to predict, much less control, and one never quite gets used to being cut off by drivers who think their time is more valuable than anyone elses. A large scientific literature documents a multitude of stress symptoms that result from protracted driving through heavy traffic. One strand in this literature focuses on the experience of urban bus drivers, whose exposure to the stresses of heavy traffic is higher than that of most commuters, but who have also had greater opportunity to adapt to those stresses. A disproportionate share of the absenteeism of urban bus drivers stems from stress-related illnesses such as gastrointestinal problems, headaches, and anxiety.^[36]19 Many studies have found sharply elevated rates of hypertension among bus drivers relative to those of a variety of control groups, including a control group of bus drivers pre-employment.^[37]20 Additional studies have found elevations of stress hormones such as adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol in urban bus drivers.^[38]21 And one study found elevations of adrenaline and noradrenaline to be strongly positively correlated with the density of the traffic with which the bus drivers had to contend.^[39]22 More than half of all urban bus drivers retire prematurely with some form of medical disability.^[40]23 A one-hour daily commute through heavy traffic is presumably less stressful than operating a bus all day in an urban area. Yet this difference is one of degree rather than of kind. Studies have shown that the demands of commuting through heavy traffic often result in emotional and behavioral deficits upon arrival at home or work.^[41]24 Compared to drivers who commute through low-density traffic, those who commute through heavy traffic are more likely to report feelings of annoyance.^[42]25 And higher levels of commuting distance, time, and speed are significantly positively correlated with increased systolic and diastolic blood pressure.^[43]26 The prolonged experience of commuting stress is also known to suppress immune function and shorten longevity.^[44]27 Even daily spells in traffic as brief as fifteen minutes have been linked to significant elevations of blood glucose and cholesterol, and to declines in blood coagulation timeall factors that are positively associated with cardiovascular disease. Commuting by automobile is also positively linked with the incidence of various cancers, especially cancer of the lung, possibly because of heavier exposure to exhaust fumes.^[45]28 The incidence of these and other illnesses rises with the length of commute,^[46]29 and is significantly lower among those who commute by bus or rail,^[47]30 and lower still among noncommuters. ^[48]31 Finally, the risk of death and injury from accidents varies positively with the length of commute and is higher for those who commute by car than for those who commute by public transport. In sum, there appear to be persistent and significant costs associated with a long commute through heavy traffic. We can be confident that neurophysiologists would find higher levels of cortisol, norepinephrine, adrenaline, noradrenaline, and other stress hormones in the residents of society A. No one has done the experiment to discover whether people from society A would report lower levels of life satisfaction than people from society B, but since we know that drivers often report being consciously aware of the frustration and stress they experience during commuting, it is a plausible conjecture that subjective well-being, as conventionally measured, would be lower in society A. Even if the negative effects of commuting stress never broke through into conscious awareness, however, we would still have powerful reasons for wishing to escape them. On the strength of the available evidence, then, it appears that a rational person would have powerful reasons to choose society B, and no reasons to avoid it. And yet, despite this evidence, the United States is moving steadily in the direction of society A. Even as our houses continue to grow in size, the average length of our commute to work continues to grow longer. Between 1982 and 2000, for example, the time penalty for peak-period travelers increased from 16 to 62 hours per year; the daily window of time during which travelers might experience congestion increased from 4.5 to 7 hours; and the volume of roadways where travel is congested grew from 34 to 58 percent.^[49]32 The Federal Highway Administration predicts that the extra time spent driving because of delays will rise from 2.7 billion vehicle hours in 1985 to 11.9 billion in 2005.^[50]33 Table 1 Four thought experiments: the conspicuous consumption of society A versus the inconspicuous consumption of society B Society A Society B 1 Everyone lives in 4,000-square-foot houses and has no free time for exercise each day. 1 Everyone lives in 3,000-square-foot houses and has 45 minutes available for exercise each day. 2 Everyone lives in 4,000-square-foot houses and has time to get together with friends one evening each month. 2 Everyone lives in 3,000-square-foot houses and has time to get together with friends four evenings each month. 3 Everyone lives in 4,000-square-foot houses and has one week of vacation each year. 3 Everyone lives in 3,000-square-foot houses and has four weeks of vacation each year. 4 Everyone lives in 4,000-square-foot houses and has a relatively low level of personal autonomy in the workplace. 4 Everyone lives in 3,000-square-foot houses and has a relatively high level of personal autonomy in the workplace. Table 1 lists four similar thought experiments that ask you to choose between societies that offer different combinations of material goods and free time to pursue other activities. Each case assumes a specific use of the free time and asks that you imagine it to be one that appeals to you (if not, feel free to substitute some other activity that does). The choice in each of these thought experiments is one between conspicuous consumption (in the form of larger houses) and what, for want of a better term, I shall call inconspicuous consumption freedom from traffic congestion, time with family and friends, vacation time, and a variety of favorable job characteristics. In each case the evidence suggests that subjective well-being will be higher in the society with a greater balance of inconspicuous consumption. ^[51]34 And yet in each case the actual trend in U.S. consumption patterns has been in the reverse direction. The list of inconspicuous consumption items could be extended considerably. Thus we could ask whether living in slightly smaller houses would be a reasonable price to pay for higher air quality, for more urban parkland, for cleaner drinking water, for a reduction in violent crime, or for medical research that would reduce premature death. And in each case the answer would be the same as in the cases we have considered thus far. My point in the thought experiments is not that inconspicuous consumption is always preferable to conspicuous consumption. Indeed, in each case we might envision a minority of rational individuals who might choose society A over society B. Some people may simply dislike autonomy on the job, or dislike exercise, or dislike spending time with family and friends. But if we accept that there is little sacrifice in subjective well-being when all have slightly smaller houses, the real question is whether a rational person could find some more productive use for the resources thus saved. Given the absolute sizes of the houses involved in the thought experiments, the answer to this question would seem to be yes. It might seem natural to suppose that when per capita income rises sharply, as it has in most countries since at least the end of World War II, most people would spend more on both conspicuous and inconspicuous consumption. In many instances, this is in fact what seems to have happened. Thus the cars we buy today are not only faster and more luxuriously equipped, but also safer and more reliable. If both forms of consumption have been rising, however, and if inconspicuous consumption boosts subjective well-being, then why has subjective well-being not increased during the last several decades? A plausible answer is that whereas some forms of inconspicuous consumption have been rising, others have been declining, often sharply. There have been increases in the annual number of hours spent at work in the United States during the last two decades; traffic has grown considerably more congested; savings rates have fallen precipitously; personal bankruptcy filings are at an alltime high; and there is at least a widespread perception that employment security and autonomy have fallen sharply. Declines in these and other forms of inconspicuous consumption may well have offset the effects of increases in others. The more troubling question is why we have not used our resources more wisely. If we could all live healthier, longer, and more satisfying lives by simply changing our spending patterns, why havent we done that? As even the most ardent free-market economists have long recognized, the invisible hand cannot be expected to deliver the greatest good for all in cases in which each individuals well-being depends on the actions taken by others with whom he does not interact directly. This qualification was once thought important in only a limited number of arenas most importantly, activities that generate environmental pollution. We now recognize, however, that the interdependencies among us are considerably more pervasive. For present purposes, chief among them are the ways in which the spending decisions of some individuals affect the frames of reference within which others make important choices. Many important rewards in lifeaccess to the best schools, to the most desirable mates, and even, in times of famine, to the food needed for survival depend critically on how the choices we make compare to the choices made by others. In most cases, the person who stays at the office two hours longer each day to be able to afford a house in a better school district has no conscious intention to make it more difficult for others to achieve the same goal. Yet that is an inescapable consequence of his action. The best response available to others may be to work longer hours as well, thereby to preserve their current positions. Yet the ineluctable mathematical logic of musical chairs assures that only 10 percent of all children can occupy top-decile school seats, no matter how many hours their parents work. That many purchases become more attractive to us when others make them means that consumption spending has much in common with a military arms race. A family can choose how much of its own money to spend, but it cannot choose how much others spend. Buying a smaller-than-average vehicle means greater risk of dying in an accident. Spending less on an interview suit means a greater risk of not landing the best job. Yet when all spend more on heavier cars and more finely tailored suits, the results tend to be mutually offsetting, just as when all nations spend more on armaments. Spending less on bombs or on personal consumption frees up money for other pressing uses, but only if everyone does it. What, exactly, is the incentive problem that leads nations to spend too much on armaments? It is not sufficient merely that each nations payoff from spending on arms depends on how its spending compares with that of rival nations. Suppose, for example, that each nations payoff from spending on nonmilitary goods also depended, to the same extent as for military goods, on the amounts spent on nonmilitary goods by other nations. The tendency of military spending to siphon off resources from other spending categories would then be offset by an equal tendency in the opposite direction. That is, if each nation had a fixed amount of national income to allocate between military and nonmilitary goods, and if the payoffs in each category were equally context sensitive, then we would expect no imbalance across the categories. For an imbalance to occur in favor of armaments, the reward from armaments spending must be more context sensitive than the reward from nonmilitary spending. And since this is precisely the case, the generally assumed imbalance occurs. After all, to be second best in a military arms race often means a loss of political autonomyclearly a much higher cost than the discomfort of having toasters with fewer slots. In brief, we expect an imbalance in the choice between two activities if the individual rewards from one are more context sensitive than the individual rewards from the other. The evidence described earlier suggests that the satisfaction provided by many conspicuous forms of consumption is more context sensitive than the satisfaction provided by many less conspicuous forms of consumption. If so, this would help explain why the absolute income and consumption increases of recent decades have failed to translate into corresponding increases in measured well-being. _________________________________________________________________ ^1 This paper draws heavily on chapters 5 and 6 of my book Luxury Fever (New York: The Free Press, 1999). [52]BACK ^2 Richard Easterlin, Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? in Nations and Households in Economic Growth: Essays in Honor of Moses Abramovitz, ed. Paul David and Melvin Reder (New York: Academic Press, 1974), and Richard Easterlin, Will Raising the Incomes of All Increase the Happiness of All? Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 27 (1995): 3547. [53]BACK ^3 See Easterlin, Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? [54]BACK ^4 For surveys of this evidence, see chapter 2 of Robert H. Frank, Choosing the Right Pond (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) and Andrew Clark and Andrew Oswald, Satisfaction and Comparison Income, Journal of Public Economics 61 (1996): 359381. [55]BACK ^5 Ed Diener and Richard E. Lucas, Personality and Subjective Well-Being, in Understanding Well-Being: Scientific Perspectives on Enjoyment and Suffering, ed. Daniel Kahneman, Ed Diener, and Norbert Schwartz (New York: The Russell Sage Foundation, 1998). [56]BACK ^6 Ruut Veenhoven, Happiness in Nations (Rotterdam: Erasmus University, 1993). [57]BACK ^7 Ed Diener, Ed Sandvik, Larry Seidlitz, and Marissa Diener, The Relationship Between Income and Subjective Well-Being: Relative or Absolute? Social Indicators Research 28 (1993): 195223. [58]BACK ^8 See, for example, Peter Townsend, The Development of Research on Poverty, in Social Security Research: The Definition and Measurement of Poverty (London: hmso, 1979). [59]BACK ^9 R. J. Bulman and C. B. Wortman, Attributes of Blame and Coping in the Real World: Severe Accident Victims React to Their Lot, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35 (May 1977): 351363. [60]BACK ^10 P. Cameron, Stereotypes About Generational Fun and Happiness vs. Self-Appraised Fun and Happiness, The Gerontologist 12 (Summer 1972): 120123. [61]BACK ^11 P. Brickman, D. Coates, and R. Janoff-Bulman, Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36 (August 1978): 917927. [62]BACK ^12 David G. Myers, The Pursuit of Happiness: Who is Happy and Why? (New York: Avon, 1993). [63]BACK ^13 Meni Koslowsky, Avraham N. Kluger, and Mordechai Reich, Commuting Stress (New York: Plenum, 1995). [64]BACK ^14 David C. Glass, Jerome Singer, and James Pennegaker, Behavioral and Physiological Effects of Uncontrollable Environmental Events, in Perspectives on Environment and Behavior, ed. Daniel Stokols (New York: Plenum, 1977). [65]BACK ^15 Ibid. [66]BACK ^16 N. D. Weinstein, Community Noise Problems: Evidence Against Adaptation, Journal of Environmental Psychology 2 (1982): 8297. [67]BACK ^17 Glass et al., Behavioral and Physiological Effects of Uncontrollable Environmental Events. [68]BACK ^18 Ibid., figures 5 and 6. [69]BACK ^19 L. Long and J. Perry, Economic and Occupational Causes of Transit Operator Absenteeism: A Review of Research, Transport Reviews 5 (1985): 247267. [70]BACK ^20 D. Ragland, M. Winkleby, J. Schwalbe, B. Holman, L. Morse, L. Syme, and J. Fisher, Prevalence of Hypertension in Bus Drivers, International Journal of Epidemiology 16 (1987): 208214; W. Pikus and W. Tarranikova, The Frequency of Hypertensive Diseases in Public Transportation, Terapevischeskii Archives 47 (1975): 135137; and G. Evans, M. Palsane, and S. Carrere, Type A Behavior and Occupational Stress: A Cross-Cultural Study of Blue-Collar Workers, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52 (1987): 10021007. [71]BACK ^21 Ibid. [72]BACK ^22 G. Evans and S. Carrere, Traffic Congestion, Perceived Control, and Psychophysiological Stress Among Urban Bus Drivers, Journal of Applied Psychology 76 (1991): 658663. [73]BACK ^23 Gary W. Evans, Working on the Hot Seat: Urban Bus Drivers, Accident Analysis and Prevention 26 (1994): 181193. [74]BACK ^24 David C. Glass and Jerome Singer, Urban Stressors: Experiments on Noise and Social Stressors (New York: Academic Press, 1972); D. R. Sherrod, Crowding, Perceived Control, and Behavioral Aftereffects, Journal of Applied Social Psychology 4 (1974): 171186. [75]BACK ^25 Daniel Stokols, Raymond W. Novaco, Jeannette Stokols, and Joan Campbell, Traffic Congestion, Type A Behavior, and Stress, Journal of Applied Psychology 63 (1978): 467 480. [76]BACK ^26 Ibid., table 3. [77]BACK ^27 Anita DeLongis, Susan Folkman, and Richard S. Lazarus, The Impact of Daily Stress on Health and Mood: Psychological and Social Resources as Mediators, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54 (1988): 486495. [78]BACK ^28 Koslowsky et al., Commuting Stress, chap. 4. [79]BACK ^29 Koslowsky et al., Commuting Stress. [80]BACK ^30 P. Taylor and C. Pocock, Commuter Travel and Sickness: Absence of London Office Workers, British Journal of Preventive and Social Medicine 26 (1972): 165172; Meni Koslowsky and Moshe Krausz, On the Relationship Between Commuting, Stress Symptoms, and Attitudinal Measures, Journal of Applied Behavioral Sciences (December 1993): 485492. [81]BACK ^31 European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, The Journey from Home to the Workplace: The Impact on the Safety and Health of the Community/ Workers (Dublin: European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, 1984). [82]BACK ^32 David Schrank and Tim Lomax, [83]The 2002 Urban Mobility Report, Texas Transportation Institute, mobility.tamu. edu/>. [84]BACK ^33 Charles S. Clark, Traffic Congestion, The CQ Researcher, 6 May 1994, 387404. [85]BACK ^34 For a detailed survey of the supporting studies, see Frank, Luxury Fever, chap. 6. [86]BACK References 16. http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/author/default.asp?sid=FC596BED-A5E6-4DCB-AF4C-877A3AC9F14D&aid=23231 17. http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/pdf/daed_133_2_69_0.pdf 83. http://mobility.tamu.edu/ From checker at panix.com Wed Aug 4 23:08:05 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2004 19:08:05 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Reuters: Web Addiction Gets Conscripts Out of Army Message-ID: Web Addiction Gets Conscripts Out of Army http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=573&u=/nm/20040803/od_nm/odd_finland_internet_dc&printer=1 4.8.3, 10:20 AM ET [I certainly understand what this addiction is like! Sometimes, I just get hooked on moving files around in my computer, even as I realize that were my hard disk to crash (as happened twice), there's very little I would miss. And as it happened, that very little was backed up to half a dozen floppies. Nowadays, I have an external hard drive.] HELSINKI (Reuters) - A number of Finnish conscripts have been excused their full term of military service because they are addicted to the Internet, the Finnish Defense Forces said Tuesday. Doctors have found the young men miss their computers too much to cope with their compulsory six months in the forces. "For people who play (Internet) games all night and don't have any friends, don't have any hobbies, to come into the army is a very big shock," said Commander-Captain Jyrki Kivela at the military conscription unit. "Some of (the conscripts) go to the doctor and say they can't stay. Sometimes, the doctors have said they have an Internet addiction," Kivela said. There are no official figures for the Internet addict dropout rate. "They get sent home for three years and after that they have to come back and we ask if they are OK ... they will have had time to grow up," Kivela said. Finland called up 26,500 men in 2003, nine percent of whom were relieved of duty for medical reasons. However, the Internet drop-outs have not dented national pride in "sisu," a Finnish quality of being tough and resilient. "We are very proud of our Finnish men. Eight-two percent of all Finnish men manage their whole military service," Kivela said. From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Thu Aug 5 19:12:40 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2004 12:12:40 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] short term thinking In-Reply-To: <200408051800.i75I0lD21777@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20040805191240.68330.qmail@web13425.mail.yahoo.com> >>Spending less on bombs or on personal consumption frees up money for other pressing uses, but only if everyone does it.<< --This seems to be the type of problem that characterizes the transition into this century. When everyone is doing something that makes sense in purely selfish terms but undermines the safety of the whole, how do people decide where to put their energy? When "everyone's doing it", what enables someone to do what everyone SHOULD be doing, rather than what everyone IS doing? We all know that shopping at WalMart takes money away from people who have more personal investment in their community, people who work hard to live the American dream but lack the power of a mega-store. But we shop there anyway (I've been there twice, after swearing I'd never go, because they're cheap and big). SUVs eat gas and make it very hard for people in smaller cars to see around corners and to feel safe in traffic... we buy them even when we know the money goes to the Saudis. Why? Not because we like the consequences, but because we compartmentalize the consequences, and we play a game in which selfish choices are rationalized as "making no difference because to change would require everyone to change at once." Is there a point where everyone DOES change at once? Or will a society march into the abyss, making small selfish choices out of the belief that nobody else will cooperate in changing the game? >>What, exactly, is the incentive problem that leads nations to spend too much on armaments?<< --Fear, guilt and status insecurity. Fear is self-explanatory, guilt often leads to more of the behavior which triggers it (mastering an emotion by deliberately invoking it) and insecurity leads to behavior which may make no rational sense but makes sense on the level of symbolism and display. We drive SUVs because they make us feel secure, even if they make us less secure in real terms. We take the guilt and displace it toward a scapegoat. "No environmentalist sissy is going to tell ME what to drive!" Making it possible to keep passing the buck until consequences become intolerable. Whenever there is a disconnect between short term and long term rationalizing, there is inevitably a point where compartmentalized realities clash. That point can cause a lot of strange behavior. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 5 22:29:46 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2004 18:29:46 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Wired 8.04: Bill Joy: Why the future doesn't need us. Message-ID: Bill Joy: Why the future doesn't need us. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html Issue 8.04 - Apr 2000 [This article is very famous and perhaps it is time to read it four years later and reconsider it.] Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species. From the moment I became involved in the creation of new technologies, their ethical dimensions have concerned me, but it was only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st century. I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the deservedly famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind and many other amazing things. Ray and I were both speakers at George Gilder's Telecosm conference, and I encountered him by chance in the bar of the hotel after both our sessions were over. I was sitting with John Searle, a Berkeley philosopher who studies consciousness. While we were talking, Ray approached and a conversation began, the subject of which haunts me to this day. I had missed Ray's talk and the subsequent panel that Ray and John had been on, and they now picked right up where they'd left off, with Ray saying that the rate of improvement of technology was going to accelerate and that we were going to become robots or fuse with robots or something like that, and John countering that this couldn't happen, because the robots couldn't be conscious. While I had heard such talk before, I had always felt sentient robots were in the realm of science fiction. But now, from someone I respected, I was hearing a strong argument that they were a near-term possibility. I was taken aback, especially given Ray's proven ability to imagine and create the future. I already knew that new technologies like genetic engineering and nanotechnology were giving us the power to remake the world, but a realistic and imminent scenario for intelligent robots surprised me. It's easy to get jaded about such breakthroughs. We hear in the news almost every day of some kind of technological or scientific advance. Yet this was no ordinary prediction. In the hotel bar, Ray gave me a partial preprint of his then-forthcoming bookThe Age of Spiritual Machines, which outlined a utopia he foresaw - one in which humans gained near immortality by becoming one with robotic technology. On reading it, my sense of unease only intensified; I felt sure he had to be understating the dangers, understating the probability of a bad outcome along this path. I found myself most troubled by a passage detailing adystopian scenario: THE NEW LUDDITE CHALLENGE First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained. If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide. On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite - just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone's physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes "treatment" to cure his "problem." Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them "sublimate" their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.[15]1 In the book, you don't discover until you turn the page that the author of this passage is Theodore Kaczynski - the Unabomber. I am no apologist for Kaczynski. His bombs killed three people during a 17-year terror campaign and wounded many others. One of his bombs gravely injured my friend David Gelernter, one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time. Like many of my colleagues, I felt that I could easily have been the Unabomber's next target. Kaczynski's actions were murderous and, in my view, criminally insane. He is clearly a Luddite, but simply saying this does not dismiss his argument; as difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw some merit in the reasoning in this single passage. I felt compelled to confront it. Kaczynski's dystopian vision describes unintended consequences, a well-known problem with the design and use of technology, and one that is clearly related to Murphy's law - "Anything that can go wrong, will." (Actually, this is Finagle's law, which in itself shows that Finagle was right.) Our overuse of antibiotics has led to what may be the biggest such problem so far: the emergence of antibiotic-resistant and much more dangerous bacteria. Similar things happened when attempts to eliminate malarial mosquitoes using DDT caused them to acquire DDT resistance; malarial parasites likewise acquired multi-drug-resistant genes.[16]2 The cause of many such surprises seems clear: The systems involved are complex, involving interaction among and feedback between many parts. Any changes to such a system will cascade in ways that are difficult to predict; this is especially true when human actions are involved. I started showing friends the Kaczynski quote fromThe Age of Spiritual Machines; I would hand them Kurzweil's book, let them read the quote, and then watch their reaction as they discovered who had written it. At around the same time, I found Hans Moravec's bookRobot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. Moravec is one of the leaders in robotics research, and was a founder of the world's largest robotics research program, at Carnegie Mellon University.Robot gave me more material to try out on my friends - material surprisingly supportive of Kaczynski's argument. For example: The Short Run (Early 2000s) Biological species almost never survive encounters with superior competitors. Ten million years ago, South and North America were separated by a sunken Panama isthmus. South America, like Australia today, was populated by marsupial mammals, including pouched equivalents of rats, deers, and tigers. When the isthmus connecting North and South America rose, it took only a few thousand years for the northern placental species, with slightly more effective metabolisms and reproductive and nervous systems, to displace and eliminate almost all the southern marsupials. In a completely free marketplace, superior robots would surely affect humans as North American placentals affected South American marsupials (and as humans have affected countless species). Robotic industries would compete vigorously among themselves for matter, energy, and space, incidentally driving their price beyond human reach. Unable to afford the necessities of life, biological humans would be squeezed out of existence. There is probably some breathing room, because we do not live in a completely free marketplace. Government coerces nonmarket behavior, especially by collecting taxes. Judiciously applied, governmental coercion could support human populations in high style on the fruits of robot labor, perhaps for a long while. A textbook dystopia - and Moravec is just getting wound up. He goes on to discuss how our main job in the 21st century will be "ensuring continued cooperation from the robot industries" by passing laws decreeing that they be "nice,"[17]3 and to describe how seriously dangerous a human can be "once transformed into an unbounded superintelligent robot." Moravec's view is that the robots will eventually succeed us - that humans clearly face extinction. I decided it was time to talk to my friend Danny Hillis. Danny became famous as the cofounder of Thinking Machines Corporation, which built a very powerful parallel supercomputer. Despite my current job title of Chief Scientist at Sun Microsystems, I am more a computer architect than a scientist, and I respect Danny's knowledge of the information and physical sciences more than that of any other single person I know. Danny is also a highly regarded futurist who thinks long-term - four years ago he started the Long Now Foundation, which is building a clock designed to last 10,000 years, in an attempt to draw attention to the pitifully short attention span of our society. (See "[18]Test of Time,"Wired 8.03, page 78.) So I flew to Los Angeles for the express purpose of having dinner with Danny and his wife, Pati. I went through my now-familiar routine, trotting out the ideas and passages that I found so disturbing. Danny's answer - directed specifically at Kurzweil's scenario of humans merging with robots - came swiftly, and quite surprised me. He said, simply, that the changes would come gradually, and that we would get used to them. But I guess I wasn't totally surprised. I had seen a quote from Danny in Kurzweil's book in which he said, "I'm as fond of my body as anyone, but if I can be 200 with a body of silicon, I'll take it." It seemed that he was at peace with this process and its attendant risks, while I was not. While talking and thinking about Kurzweil, Kaczynski, and Moravec, I suddenly remembered a novel I had read almost 20 years ago -The White Plague, by Frank Herbert - in which a molecular biologist is driven insane by the senseless murder of his family. To seek revenge he constructs and disseminates a new and highly contagious plague that kills widely but selectively. (We're lucky Kaczynski was a mathematician, not a molecular biologist.) I was also reminded of the Borg ofStar Trek, a hive of partly biological, partly robotic creatures with a strong destructive streak. Borg-like disasters are a staple of science fiction, so why hadn't I been more concerned about such robotic dystopias earlier? Why weren't other people more concerned about these nightmarish scenarios? Part of the answer certainly lies in our attitude toward the new - in our bias toward instant familiarity and unquestioning acceptance. Accustomed to living with almost routine scientific breakthroughs, we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology - pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before. Specifically, robots, engineered organisms, and nanobots share a dangerous amplifying factor: They can self-replicate. A bomb is blown up only once - but one bot can become many, and quickly get out of control. Much of my work over the past 25 years has been on computer networking, where the sending and receiving of messages creates the opportunity for out-of-control replication. But while replication in a computer or a computer network can be a nuisance, at worst it disables a machine or takes down a network or network service. Uncontrolled self-replication in these newer technologies runs a much greater risk: a risk of substantial damage in the physical world. Each of these technologies also offers untold promise: The vision of near immortality that Kurzweil sees in his robot dreams drives us forward; genetic engineering may soon provide treatments, if not outright cures, for most diseases; and nanotechnology and nanomedicine can address yet more ills. Together they could significantly extend our average life span and improve the quality of our lives. Yet, with each of these technologies, a sequence of small, individually sensible advances leads to an accumulation of great power and, concomitantly, great danger. What was different in the 20th century? Certainly, the technologies underlying the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) - nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) - were powerful, and the weapons an enormous threat. But building nuclear weapons required, at least for a time, access to both rare - indeed, effectively unavailable - raw materials and highly protected information; biological and chemical weapons programs also tended to require large-scale activities. The 21st-century technologies - genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) - are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them. Thus we have the possibility not just of weapons of mass destruction but of knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD), this destructiveness hugely amplified by the power of self-replication. I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals. Nothing about the way I got involved with computers suggested to me that I was going to be facing these kinds of issues. My life has been driven by a deep need to ask questions and find answers. When I was 3, I was already reading, so my father took me to the elementary school, where I sat on the principal's lap and read him a story. I started school early, later skipped a grade, and escaped into books - I was incredibly motivated to learn. I asked lots of questions, often driving adults to distraction. As a teenager I was very interested in science and technology. I wanted to be a ham radio operator but didn't have the money to buy the equipment. Ham radio was the Internet of its time: very addictive, and quite solitary. Money issues aside, my mother put her foot down - I was not to be a ham; I was antisocial enough already. I may not have had many close friends, but I was awash in ideas. By high school, I had discovered the great science fiction writers. I remember especially Heinlein'sHave Spacesuit Will Travel and Asimov's I, Robot, with its Three Laws of Robotics. I was enchanted by the descriptions of space travel, and wanted to have a telescope to look at the stars; since I had no money to buy or make one, I checked books on telescope-making out of the library and read about making them instead. I soared in my imagination. Thursday nights my parents went bowling, and we kids stayed home alone. It was the night of Gene Roddenberry's original Star Trek, and the program made a big impression on me. I came to accept its notion that humans had a future in space, Western-style, with big heroes and adventures. Roddenberry's vision of the centuries to come was one with strong moral values, embodied in codes like the Prime Directive: to not interfere in the development of less technologically advanced civilizations. This had an incredible appeal to me; ethical humans, not robots, dominated this future, and I took Roddenberry's dream as part of my own. I excelled in mathematics in high school, and when I went to the University of Michigan as an undergraduate engineering student I took the advanced curriculum of the mathematics majors. Solving math problems was an exciting challenge, but when I discovered computers I found something much more interesting: a machine into which you could put a program that attempted to solve a problem, after which the machine quickly checked the solution. The computer had a clear notion of correct and incorrect, true and false. Were my ideas correct? The machine could tell me. This was very seductive. I was lucky enough to get a job programming early supercomputers and discovered the amazing power of large machines to numerically simulate advanced designs. When I went to graduate school at UC Berkeley in the mid-1970s, I started staying up late, often all night, inventing new worlds inside the machines. Solving problems. Writing the code that argued so strongly to be written. InThe Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone's biographical novel of Michelangelo, Stone described vividly how Michelangelo released the statues from the stone, "breaking the marble spell," carving from the images in his mind.[19]4 In my most ecstatic moments, the software in the computer emerged in the same way. Once I had imagined it in my mind I felt that it was already there in the machine, waiting to be released. Staying up all night seemed a small price to pay to free it - to give the ideas concrete form. After a few years at Berkeley I started to send out some of the software I had written - an instructional Pascal system, Unix utilities, and a text editor called vi (which is still, to my surprise, widely used more than 20 years later) - to others who had similar small PDP-11 and VAX minicomputers. These adventures in software eventually turned into the Berkeley version of the Unix operating system, which became a personal "success disaster" - so many people wanted it that I never finished my PhD. Instead I got a job working for Darpa putting Berkeley Unix on the Internet and fixing it to be reliable and to run large research applications well. This was all great fun and very rewarding. And, frankly, I saw no robots here, or anywhere near. Still, by the early 1980s, I was drowning. The Unix releases were very successful, and my little project of one soon had money and some staff, but the problem at Berkeley was always office space rather than money - there wasn't room for the help the project needed, so when the other founders of Sun Microsystems showed up I jumped at the chance to join them. At Sun, the long hours continued into the early days of workstations and personal computers, and I have enjoyed participating in the creation of advanced microprocessor technologies and Internet technologies such as Java and Jini. From all this, I trust it is clear that I am not a Luddite. I have always, rather, had a strong belief in the value of the scientific search for truth and in the ability of great engineering to bring material progress. The Industrial Revolution has immeasurably improved everyone's life over the last couple hundred years, and I always expected my career to involve the building of worthwhile solutions to real problems, one problem at a time. I have not been disappointed. My work has had more impact than I had ever hoped for and has been more widely used than I could have reasonably expected. I have spent the last 20 years still trying to figure out how to make computers as reliable as I want them to be (they are not nearly there yet) and how to make them simple to use (a goal that has met with even less relative success). Despite some progress, the problems that remain seem even more daunting. But while I was aware of the moral dilemmas surrounding technology's consequences in fields like weapons research, I did not expect that I would confront such issues in my own field, or at least not so soon. Perhaps it is always hard to see the bigger impact while you are in the vortex of a change. Failing to understand the consequences of our inventions while we are in the rapture of discovery and innovation seems to be a common fault of scientists and technologists; we have long been driven by the overarching desire to know that is the nature of science's quest, not stopping to notice that the progress to newer and more powerful technologies can take on a life of its own. I have long realized that the big advances in information technology come not from the work of computer scientists, computer architects, or electrical engineers, but from that of physical scientists. The physicists Stephen Wolfram and Brosl Hasslacher introduced me, in the early 1980s, to chaos theory and nonlinear systems. In the 1990s, I learned about complex systems from conversations with Danny Hillis, the biologist Stuart Kauffman, the Nobel-laureate physicist Murray Gell-Mann, and others. Most recently, Hasslacher and the electrical engineer and device physicist Mark Reed have been giving me insight into the incredible possibilities of molecular electronics. In my own work, as codesigner of three microprocessor architectures - SPARC, picoJava, and MAJC - and as the designer of several implementations thereof, I've been afforded a deep and firsthand acquaintance with Moore's law. For decades, Moore's law has correctly predicted the exponential rate of improvement of semiconductor technology. Until last year I believed that the rate of advances predicted by Moore's law might continue only until roughly 2010, when some physical limits would begin to be reached. It was not obvious to me that a new technology would arrive in time to keep performance advancing smoothly. But because of the recent rapid and radical progress in molecular electronics - where individual atoms and molecules replace lithographically drawn transistors - and related nanoscale technologies, we should be able to meet or exceed the Moore's law rate of progress for another 30 years. By 2030, we are likely to be able to build machines, in quantity, a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today - sufficient to implement the dreams of Kurzweil and Moravec. As this enormous computing power is combined with the manipulative advances of the physical sciences and the new, deep understandings in genetics, enormous transformative power is being unleashed. These combinations open up the opportunity to completely redesign the world, for better or worse: The replicating and evolving processes that have been confined to the natural world are about to become realms of human endeavor. In designing software and microprocessors, I have never had the feeling that I was designing an intelligent machine. The software and hardware is so fragile and the capabilities of the machine to "think" so clearly absent that, even as a possibility, this has always seemed very far in the future. But now, with the prospect of human-level computing power in about 30 years, a new idea suggests itself: that I may be working to create tools which will enable the construction of the technology that may replace our species. How do I feel about this? Very uncomfortable. Having struggled my entire career to build reliable software systems, it seems to me more than likely that this future will not work out as well as some people may imagine. My personal experience suggests we tend to overestimate our design abilities. Given the incredible power of these new technologies, shouldn't we be asking how we can best coexist with them? And if our own extinction is a likely, or even possible, outcome of our technological development, shouldn't we proceed with great caution? The dream of robotics is, first, that intelligent machines can do our work for us, allowing us lives of leisure, restoring us to Eden. Yet in his history of such ideas,Darwin Among the Machines, George Dyson warns: "In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines." As we have seen, Moravec agrees, believing we may well not survive the encounter with the superior robot species. How soon could such an intelligent robot be built? The coming advances in computing power seem to make it possible by 2030. And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species - to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself. A second dream of robotics is that we will gradually replace ourselves with our robotic technology, achieving near immortality by downloading our consciousnesses; it is this process that Danny Hillis thinks we will gradually get used to and that Ray Kurzweil elegantly details inThe Age of Spiritual Machines. (We are beginning to see intimations of this in the implantation of computer devices into the human body, as illustrated on the[20]cover ofWired 8.02.) But if we are downloaded into our technology, what are the chances that we will thereafter be ourselves or even human? It seems to me far more likely that a robotic existence would not be like a human one in any sense that we understand, that the robots would in no sense be our children, that on this path our humanity may well be lost. Genetic engineering promises to revolutionize agriculture by increasing crop yields while reducing the use of pesticides; to create tens of thousands of novel species of bacteria, plants, viruses, and animals; to replace reproduction, or supplement it, with cloning; to create cures for many diseases, increasing our life span and our quality of life; and much, much more. We now know with certainty that these profound changes in the biological sciences are imminent and will challenge all our notions of what life is. Technologies such as human cloning have in particular raised our awareness of the profound ethical and moral issues we face. If, for example, we were to reengineer ourselves into several separate and unequal species using the power of genetic engineering, then we would threaten the notion of equality that is the very cornerstone of our democracy. Given the incredible power of genetic engineering, it's no surprise that there are significant safety issues in its use. My friend Amory Lovins recently cowrote, along with Hunter Lovins, an editorial that provides an ecological view of some of these dangers. Among their concerns: that "the new botany aligns the development of plants with their economic, not evolutionary, success." (See "[21]A Tale of Two Botanies," page 247.) Amory's long career has been focused on energy and resource efficiency by taking a whole-system view of human-made systems; such a whole-system view often finds simple, smart solutions to otherwise seemingly difficult problems, and is usefully applied here as well. After reading the Lovins' editorial, I saw an op-ed by Gregg Easterbrook inThe New York Times (November 19, 1999) about genetically engineered crops, under the headline: "Food for the Future: Someday, rice will have built-in vitamin A. Unless the Luddites win." Are Amory and Hunter Lovins Luddites? Certainly not. I believe we all would agree that golden rice, with its built-in vitamin A, is probably a good thing, if developed with proper care and respect for the likely dangers in moving genes across species boundaries. Awareness of the dangers inherent in genetic engineering is beginning to grow, as reflected in the Lovins' editorial. The general public is aware of, and uneasy about, genetically modified foods, and seems to be rejecting the notion that such foods should be permitted to be unlabeled. But genetic engineering technology is already very far along. As the Lovins note, the USDA has already approved about 50 genetically engineered crops for unlimited release; more than half of the world's soybeans and a third of its corn now contain genes spliced in from other forms of life. While there are many important issues here, my own major concern with genetic engineering is narrower: that it gives the power - whether militarily, accidentally, or in a deliberate terrorist act - to create a White Plague. The many wonders of nanotechnology were first imagined by the Nobel-laureate physicist Richard Feynman in a speech he gave in 1959, subsequently published under the title "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." The book that made a big impression on me, in the mid-'80s, was Eric Drexler'sEngines of Creation, in which he described beautifully how manipulation of matter at the atomic level could create a utopian future of abundance, where just about everything could be made cheaply, and almost any imaginable disease or physical problem could be solved using nanotechnology and artificial intelligences. A subsequent book,Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution, which Drexler cowrote, imagines some of the changes that might take place in a world where we had molecular-level "assemblers." Assemblers could make possible incredibly low-cost solar power, cures for cancer and the common cold by augmentation of the human immune system, essentially complete cleanup of the environment, incredibly inexpensive pocket supercomputers - in fact, any product would be manufacturable by assemblers at a cost no greater than that of wood - spaceflight more accessible than transoceanic travel today, and restoration of extinct species. I remember feeling good about nanotechnology after readingEngines of Creation. As a technologist, it gave me a sense of calm - that is, nanotechnology showed us that incredible progress was possible, and indeed perhaps inevitable. If nanotechnology was our future, then I didn't feel pressed to solve so many problems in the present. I would get to Drexler's utopian future in due time; I might as well enjoy life more in the here and now. It didn't make sense, given his vision, to stay up all night, all the time. Drexler's vision also led to a lot of good fun. I would occasionally get to describe the wonders of nanotechnology to others who had not heard of it. After teasing them with all the things Drexler described I would give a homework assignment of my own: "Use nanotechnology to create a vampire; for extra credit create an antidote." With these wonders came clear dangers, of which I was acutely aware. As I said at a nanotechnology conference in 1989, "We can't simply do our science and not worry about these ethical issues."[22]5 But my subsequent conversations with physicists convinced me that nanotechnology might not even work - or, at least, it wouldn't work anytime soon. Shortly thereafter I moved to Colorado, to a skunk works I had set up, and the focus of my work shifted to software for the Internet, specifically on ideas that became Java and Jini. Then, last summer, Brosl Hasslacher told me that nanoscale molecular electronics was now practical. This wasnew news, at least to me, and I think to many people - and it radically changed my opinion about nanotechnology. It sent me back toEngines of Creation. Rereading Drexler's work after more than 10 years, I was dismayed to realize how little I had remembered of its lengthy section called "Dangers and Hopes," including a discussion of how nanotechnologies can become "engines of destruction." Indeed, in my rereading of this cautionary material today, I am struck by how naive some of Drexler's safeguard proposals seem, and how much greater I judge the dangers to be now than even he seemed to then. (Having anticipated and described many technical and political problems with nanotechnology, Drexler started the Foresight Institute in the late 1980s "to help prepare society for anticipated advanced technologies" - most important, nanotechnology.) The enabling breakthrough to assemblers seems quite likely within the next 20 years. Molecular electronics - the new subfield of nanotechnology where individual molecules are circuit elements - should mature quickly and become enormously lucrative within this decade, causing a large incremental investment in all nanotechnologies. Unfortunately, as with nuclear technology, it is far easier to create destructive uses for nanotechnology than constructive ones. Nanotechnology has clear military and terrorist uses, and you need not be suicidal to release a massively destructive nanotechnological device - such devices can be built to be selectively destructive, affecting, for example, only a certain geographical area or a group of people who are genetically distinct. An immediate consequence of the Faustian bargain in obtaining the great power of nanotechnology is that we run a grave risk - the risk that we might destroy the biosphere on which all life depends. As Drexler explained: "Plants" with "leaves" no more efficient than today's solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough omnivorous "bacteria" could out-compete real bacteria: They could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop - at least if we make no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies. Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has become known as the "gray goo problem." Though masses of uncontrolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term "gray goo" emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less inspiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superior in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable. The gray goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear: We cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers. Gray goo would surely be a depressing ending to our human adventure on Earth, far worse than mere fire or ice, and one that could stem from a simple laboratory accident.[23]6 Oops. It is most of all the power of destructive self-replication in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) that should give us pause. Self-replication is the modus operandi of genetic engineering, which uses the machinery of the cell to replicate its designs, and the prime danger underlying gray goo in nanotechnology. Stories of run-amok robots like the Borg, replicating or mutating to escape from the ethical constraints imposed on them by their creators, are well established in our science fiction books and movies. It is even possible that self-replication may be more fundamental than we thought, and hence harder - or even impossible - to control. A recent article by Stuart Kauffman inNature titled "Self-Replication: Even Peptides Do It" discusses the discovery that a 32-amino-acid peptide can "autocatalyse its own synthesis." We don't know how widespread this ability is, but Kauffman notes that it may hint at "a route to self-reproducing molecular systems on a basis far wider than Watson-Crick base-pairing."[24]7 In truth, we have had in hand for years clear warnings of the dangers inherent in widespread knowledge of GNR technologies - of the possibility of knowledge alone enabling mass destruction. But these warnings haven't been widely publicized; the public discussions have been clearly inadequate. There is no profit in publicizing the dangers. The nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) technologies used in 20th-century weapons of mass destruction were and are largely military, developed in government laboratories. In sharp contrast, the 21st-century GNR technologies have clear commercial uses and are being developed almost exclusively by corporate enterprises. In this age of triumphant commercialism, technology - with science as its handmaiden - is delivering a series of almost magical inventions that are the most phenomenally lucrative ever seen. We are aggressively pursuing the promises of these new technologies within the now-unchallenged system of global capitalism and its manifold financial incentives and competitive pressures. This is the first moment in the history of our planet when any species, by its own voluntary actions, has become a danger to itself - as well as to vast numbers of others. It might be a familiar progression, transpiring on many worlds - a planet, newly formed, placidly revolves around its star; life slowly forms; a kaleidoscopic procession of creatures evolves; intelligence emerges which, at least up to a point, confers enormous survival value; and then technology is invented. It dawns on them that there are such things as laws of Nature, that these laws can be revealed by experiment, and that knowledge of these laws can be made both to save and to take lives, both on unprecedented scales. Science, they recognize, grants immense powers. In a flash, they create world-altering contrivances. Some planetary civilizations see their way through, place limits on what may and what must not be done, and safely pass through the time of perils. Others, not so lucky or so prudent, perish. That is Carl Sagan, writing in 1994, inPale Blue Dot, a book describing his vision of the human future in space. I am only now realizing how deep his insight was, and how sorely I miss, and will miss, his voice. For all its eloquence, Sagan's contribution was not least that of simple common sense - an attribute that, along with humility, many of the leading advocates of the 21st-century technologies seem to lack. I remember from my childhood that my grandmother was strongly against the overuse of antibiotics. She had worked since before the first World War as a nurse and had a commonsense attitude that taking antibiotics, unless they were absolutely necessary, was bad for you. It is not that she was an enemy of progress. She saw much progress in an almost 70-year nursing career; my grandfather, a diabetic, benefited greatly from the improved treatments that became available in his lifetime. But she, like many levelheaded people, would probably think it greatly arrogant for us, now, to be designing a robotic "replacement species," when we obviously have so much trouble making relatively simple things work, and so much trouble managing - or even understanding - ourselves. I realize now that she had an awareness of the nature of the order of life, and of the necessity of living with and respecting that order. With this respect comes a necessary humility that we, with our early-21st-century chutzpah, lack at our peril. The commonsense view, grounded in this respect, is often right, in advance of the scientific evidence. The clear fragility and inefficiencies of the human-made systems we have built should give us all pause; the fragility of the systems I have worked on certainly humbles me. We should have learned a lesson from the making of the first atomic bomb and the resulting arms race. We didn't do well then, and the parallels to our current situation are troubling. The effort to build the first atomic bomb was led by the brilliant physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was not naturally interested in politics but became painfully aware of what he perceived as the grave threat to Western civilization from the Third Reich, a threat surely grave because of the possibility that Hitler might obtain nuclear weapons. Energized by this concern, he brought his strong intellect, passion for physics, and charismatic leadership skills to Los Alamos and led a rapid and successful effort by an incredible collection of great minds to quickly invent the bomb. What is striking is how this effort continued so naturally after the initial impetus was removed. In a meeting shortly after V-E Day with some physicists who felt that perhaps the effort should stop, Oppenheimer argued to continue. His stated reason seems a bit strange: not because of the fear of large casualties from an invasion of Japan, but because the United Nations, which was soon to be formed, should have foreknowledge of atomic weapons. A more likely reason the project continued is the momentum that had built up - the first atomic test, Trinity, was nearly at hand. We know that in preparing this first atomic test the physicists proceeded despite a large number of possible dangers. They were initially worried, based on a calculation by Edward Teller, that an atomic explosion might set fire to the atmosphere. A revised calculation reduced the danger of destroying the world to a three-in-a-million chance. (Teller says he was later able to dismiss the prospect of atmospheric ignition entirely.) Oppenheimer, though, was sufficiently concerned about the result of Trinity that he arranged for a possible evacuation of the southwest part of the state of New Mexico. And, of course, there was the clear danger of starting a nuclear arms race. Within a month of that first, successful test, two atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some scientists had suggested that the bomb simply be demonstrated, rather than dropped on Japanese cities - saying that this would greatly improve the chances for arms control after the war - but to no avail. With the tragedy of Pearl Harbor still fresh in Americans' minds, it would have been very difficult for President Truman to order a demonstration of the weapons rather than use them as he did - the desire to quickly end the war and save the lives that would have been lost in any invasion of Japan was very strong. Yet the overriding truth was probably very simple: As the physicist Freeman Dyson later said, "The reason that it was dropped was just that nobody had the courage or the foresight to say no." It's important to realize how shocked the physicists were in the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945. They describe a series of waves of emotion: first, a sense of fulfillment that the bomb worked, then horror at all the people that had been killed, and then a convincing feeling that on no account should another bomb be dropped. Yet of course another bomb was dropped, on Nagasaki, only three days after the bombing of Hiroshima. In November 1945, three months after the atomic bombings, Oppenheimer stood firmly behind the scientific attitude, saying, "It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spread of knowledge and are willing to take the consequences." Oppenheimer went on to work, with others, on the Acheson-Lilienthal report, which, as Richard Rhodes says in his recent bookVisions of Technology, "found a way to prevent a clandestine nuclear arms race without resorting to armed world government"; their suggestion was a form of relinquishment of nuclear weapons work by nation-states to an international agency. This proposal led to the Baruch Plan, which was submitted to the United Nations in June 1946 but never adopted (perhaps because, as Rhodes suggests, Bernard Baruch had "insisted on burdening the plan with conventional sanctions," thereby inevitably dooming it, even though it would "almost certainly have been rejected by Stalinist Russia anyway"). Other efforts to promote sensible steps toward internationalizing nuclear power to prevent an arms race ran afoul either of US politics and internal distrust, or distrust by the Soviets. The opportunity to avoid the arms race was lost, and very quickly. Two years later, in 1948, Oppenheimer seemed to have reached another stage in his thinking, saying, "In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge they cannot lose." In 1949, the Soviets exploded an atom bomb. By 1955, both the US and the Soviet Union had tested hydrogen bombs suitable for delivery by aircraft. And so the nuclear arms race began. Nearly 20 years ago, in the documentaryThe Day After Trinity, Freeman Dyson summarized the scientific attitudes that brought us to the nuclear precipice: "I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds."[25]8 Now, as then, we are creators of new technologies and stars of the imagined future, driven - this time by great financial rewards and global competition - despite the clear dangers, hardly evaluating what it may be like to try to live in a world that is the realistic outcome of what we are creating and imagining. In 1947,The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists began putting a Doomsday Clock on its cover. For more than 50 years, it has shown an estimate of the relative nuclear danger we have faced, reflecting the changing international conditions. The hands on the clock have moved 15 times and today, standing at nine minutes to midnight, reflect continuing and real danger from nuclear weapons. The recent addition of India and Pakistan to the list of nuclear powers has increased the threat of failure of the nonproliferation goal, and this danger was reflected by moving the hands closer to midnight in 1998. In our time, how much danger do we face, not just from nuclear weapons, but from all of these technologies? How high are the extinction risks? The philosopher John Leslie has studied this question and concluded that the risk of human extinction is at least 30 percent,[26]9 while Ray Kurzweil believes we have "a better than even chance of making it through," with the caveat that he has "always been accused of being an optimist." Not only are these estimates not encouraging, but they do not include the probability of many horrid outcomes that lie short of extinction. Faced with such assessments, some serious people are already suggesting that we simply move beyond Earth as quickly as possible. We would colonize the galaxy using von Neumann probes, which hop from star system to star system, replicating as they go. This step will almost certainly be necessary 5 billion years from now (or sooner if our solar system is disastrously impacted by the impending collision of our galaxy with the Andromeda galaxy within the next 3 billion years), but if we take Kurzweil and Moravec at their word it might be necessary by the middle of this century. What are the moral implications here? If we must move beyond Earth this quickly in order for the species to survive, who accepts the responsibility for the fate of those (most of us, after all) who are left behind? And even if we scatter to the stars, isn't it likely that we may take our problems with us or find, later, that they have followed us? The fate of our species on Earth and our fate in the galaxy seem inextricably linked. Another idea is to erect a series of shields to defend against each of the dangerous technologies. The Strategic Defense Initiative, proposed by the Reagan administration, was an attempt to design such a shield against the threat of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. But as Arthur C. Clarke, who was privy to discussions about the project, observed: "Though it might be possible, at vast expense, to construct local defense systems that would 'only' let through a few percent of ballistic missiles, the much touted idea of a national umbrella was nonsense. Luis Alvarez, perhaps the greatest experimental physicist of this century, remarked to me that the advocates of such schemes were 'very bright guys with no common sense.'" Clarke continued: "Looking into my often cloudy crystal ball, I suspect that a total defense might indeed be possible in a century or so. But the technology involved would produce, as a by-product, weapons so terrible that no one would bother with anything as primitive as ballistic missiles." [27]10 InEngines of Creation, Eric Drexler proposed that we build an active nanotechnological shield - a form of immune system for the biosphere - to defend against dangerous replicators of all kinds that might escape from laboratories or otherwise be maliciously created. But the shield he proposed would itself be extremely dangerous - nothing could prevent it from developing autoimmune problems and attacking the biosphere itself. [28]11 Similar difficulties apply to the construction of shields against robotics and genetic engineering. These technologies are too powerful to be shielded against in the time frame of interest; even if it were possible to implement defensive shields, the side effects of their development would be at least as dangerous as the technologies we are trying to protect against. These possibilities are all thus either undesirable or unachievable or both. The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge. Yes, I know, knowledge is good, as is the search for new truths. We have been seeking knowledge since ancient times. Aristotle opened his Metaphysics with the simple statement: "All men by nature desire to know." We have, as a bedrock value in our society, long agreed on the value of open access to information, and recognize the problems that arise with attempts to restrict access to and development of knowledge. In recent times, we have come to revere scientific knowledge. But despite the strong historical precedents, if open access to and unlimited development of knowledge henceforth puts us all in clear danger of extinction, then common sense demands that we reexamine even these basic, long-held beliefs. It was Nietzsche who warned us, at the end of the 19th century, not only that God is dead but that "faith in science, which after all exists undeniably, cannot owe its origin to a calculus of utility; it must have originated in spite of the fact that the disutility and dangerousness of the 'will to truth,' of 'truth at any price' is proved to it constantly." It is this further danger that we now fully face - the consequences of our truth-seeking. The truth that science seeks can certainly be considered a dangerous substitute for God if it is likely to lead to our extinction. If we could agree, as a species, what we wanted, where we were headed, and why, then we would make our future much less dangerous - then we might understand what we can and should relinquish. Otherwise, we can easily imagine an arms race developing over GNR technologies, as it did with the NBC technologies in the 20th century. This is perhaps the greatest risk, for once such a race begins, it's very hard to end it. This time - unlike during the Manhattan Project - we aren't in a war, facing an implacable enemy that is threatening our civilization; we are driven, instead, by our habits, our desires, our economic system, and our competitive need to know. I believe that we all wish our course could be determined by our collective values, ethics, and morals. If we had gained more collective wisdom over the past few thousand years, then a dialogue to this end would be more practical, and the incredible powers we are about to unleash would not be nearly so troubling. One would think we might be driven to such a dialogue by our instinct for self-preservation. Individuals clearly have this desire, yet as a species our behavior seems to be not in our favor. In dealing with the nuclear threat, we often spoke dishonestly to ourselves and to each other, thereby greatly increasing the risks. Whether this was politically motivated, or because we chose not to think ahead, or because when faced with such grave threats we acted irrationally out of fear, I do not know, but it does not bode well. The new Pandora's boxes of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics are almost open, yet we seem hardly to have noticed. Ideas can't be put back in a box; unlike uranium or plutonium, they don't need to be mined and refined, and they can be freely copied. Once they are out, they are out. Churchill remarked, in a famous left-handed compliment, that the American people and their leaders "invariably do the right thing, after they have examined every other alternative." In this case, however, we must act more presciently, as to do the right thing only at last may be to lose the chance to do it at all. As Thoreau said, "We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us"; and this is what we must fight, in our time. The question is, indeed, Which is to be master? Will we survive our technologies? We are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakes. Have we already gone too far down the path to alter course? I don't believe so, but we aren't trying yet, and the last chance to assert control - the fail-safe point - is rapidly approaching. We have our first pet robots, as well as commercially available genetic engineering techniques, and our nanoscale techniques are advancing rapidly. While the development of these technologies proceeds through a number of steps, it isn't necessarily the case - as happened in the Manhattan Project and the Trinity test - that the last step in proving a technology is large and hard. The breakthrough to wild self-replication in robotics, genetic engineering, or nanotechnology could come suddenly, reprising the surprise we felt when we learned of the cloning of a mammal. And yet I believe we do have a strong and solid basis for hope. Our attempts to deal with weapons of mass destruction in the last century provide a shining example of relinquishment for us to consider: the unilateral US abandonment, without preconditions, of the development of biological weapons. This relinquishment stemmed from the realization that while it would take an enormous effort to create these terrible weapons, they could from then on easily be duplicated and fall into the hands of rogue nations or terrorist groups. The clear conclusion was that we would create additional threats to ourselves by pursuing these weapons, and that we would be more secure if we did not pursue them. We have embodied our relinquishment of biological and chemical weapons in the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).[29]12 As for the continuing sizable threat from nuclear weapons, which we have lived with now for more than 50 years, the US Senate's recent rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty makes it clear relinquishing nuclear weapons will not be politically easy. But we have a unique opportunity, with the end of the Cold War, to avert a multipolar arms race. Building on the BWC and CWC relinquishments, successful abolition of nuclear weapons could help us build toward a habit of relinquishing dangerous technologies. (Actually, by getting rid of all but 100 nuclear weapons worldwide - roughly the total destructive power of World War II and a considerably easier task - we could eliminate this extinction threat. [30]13) Verifying relinquishment will be a difficult problem, but not an unsolvable one. We are fortunate to have already done a lot of relevant work in the context of the BWC and other treaties. Our major task will be to apply this to technologies that are naturally much more commercial than military. The substantial need here is for transparency, as difficulty of verification is directly proportional to the difficulty of distinguishing relinquished from legitimate activities. I frankly believe that the situation in 1945 was simpler than the one we now face: The nuclear technologies were reasonably separable into commercial and military uses, and monitoring was aided by the nature of atomic tests and the ease with which radioactivity could be measured. Research on military applications could be performed at national laboratories such as Los Alamos, with the results kept secret as long as possible. The GNR technologies do not divide clearly into commercial and military uses; given their potential in the market, it's hard to imagine pursuing them only in national laboratories. With their widespread commercial pursuit, enforcing relinquishment will require a verification regime similar to that for biological weapons, but on an unprecedented scale. This, inevitably, will raise tensions between our individual privacy and desire for proprietary information, and the need for verification to protect us all. We will undoubtedly encounter strong resistance to this loss of privacy and freedom of action. Verifying the relinquishment of certain GNR technologies will have to occur in cyberspace as well as at physical facilities. The critical issue will be to make the necessary transparency acceptable in a world of proprietary information, presumably by providing new forms of protection for intellectual property. Verifying compliance will also require that scientists and engineers adopt a strong code of ethical conduct, resembling the Hippocratic oath, and that they have the courage to whistleblow as necessary, even at high personal cost. This would answer the call - 50 years after Hiroshima - by the Nobel laureate Hans Bethe, one of the most senior of the surviving members of the Manhattan Project, that all scientists "cease and desist from work creating, developing, improving, and manufacturing nuclear weapons and other weapons of potential mass destruction."[31]14 In the 21st century, this requires vigilance and personal responsibility by those who would work on both NBC and GNR technologies to avoid implementing weapons of mass destruction and knowledge-enabled mass destruction. Thoreau also said that we will be "rich in proportion to the number of things which we can afford to let alone." We each seek to be happy, but it would seem worthwhile to question whether we need to take such a high risk of total destruction to gain yet more knowledge and yet more things; common sense says that there is a limit to our material needs - and that certain knowledge is too dangerous and is best forgone. Neither should we pursue near immortality without considering the costs, without considering the commensurate increase in the risk of extinction. Immortality, while perhaps the original, is certainly not the only possible utopian dream. I recently had the good fortune to meet the distinguished author and scholar Jacques Attali, whose bookLignes d'horizons (Millennium, in the English translation) helped inspire the Java and Jini approach to the coming age of pervasive computing, as previously described in this magazine. In his new bookFraternit?s, Attali describes how our dreams of utopia have changed over time: "At the dawn of societies, men saw their passage on Earth as nothing more than a labyrinth of pain, at the end of which stood a door leading, via their death, to the company of gods and toEternity. With the Hebrews and then the Greeks, some men dared free themselves from theological demands and dream of an ideal City whereLiberty would flourish. Others, noting the evolution of the market society, understood that the liberty of some would entail the alienation of others, and they soughtEquality." Jacques helped me understand how these three different utopian goals exist in tension in our society today. He goes on to describe a fourth utopia,Fraternity, whose foundation is altruism. Fraternity alone associates individual happiness with the happiness of others, affording the promise of self-sustainment. This crystallized for me my problem with Kurzweil's dream. A technological approach to Eternity - near immortality through robotics - may not be the most desirable utopia, and its pursuit brings clear dangers. Maybe we should rethink our utopian choices. Where can we look for a new ethical basis to set our course? I have found the ideas in the book Ethics for the New Millennium, by the Dalai Lama, to be very helpful. As is perhaps well known but little heeded, the Dalai Lama argues that the most important thing is for us to conduct our lives with love and compassion for others, and that our societies need to develop a stronger notion of universal responsibility and of our interdependency; he proposes a standard of positive ethical conduct for individuals and societies that seems consonant with Attali's Fraternity utopia. The Dalai Lama further argues that we must understand what it is that makes people happy, and acknowledge the strong evidence that neither material progress nor the pursuit of the power of knowledge is the key - that there are limits to what science and the scientific pursuit alone can do. Our Western notion of happiness seems to come from the Greeks, who defined it as "the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope." [32]15 Clearly, we need to find meaningful challenges and sufficient scope in our lives if we are to be happy in whatever is to come. But I believe we must find alternative outlets for our creative forces, beyond the culture of perpetual economic growth; this growth has largely been a blessing for several hundred years, but it has not brought us unalloyed happiness, and we must now choose between the pursuit of unrestricted and undirected growth through science and technology and the clear accompanying dangers. It is now more than a year since my first encounter with Ray Kurzweil and John Searle. I see around me cause for hope in the voices for caution and relinquishment and in those people I have discovered who are as concerned as I am about our current predicament. I feel, too, a deepened sense of personal responsibility - not for the work I have already done, but for the work that I might yet do, at the confluence of the sciences. But many other people who know about the dangers still seem strangely silent. When pressed, they trot out the "this is nothing new" riposte - as if awareness of what could happen is response enough. They tell me, There are universities filled with bioethicists who study this stuff all day long. They say, All this has been written about before, and by experts. They complain, Your worries and your arguments are already old hat. I don't know where these people hide their fear. As an architect of complex systems I enter this arena as a generalist. But should this diminish my concerns? I am aware of how much has been written about, talked about, and lectured about so authoritatively. But does this mean it has reached people? Does this mean we can discount the dangers before us? Knowing is not a rationale for not acting. Can we doubt that knowledge has become a weapon we wield against ourselves? The experiences of the atomic scientists clearly show the need to take personal responsibility, the danger that things will move too fast, and the way in which a process can take on a life of its own. We can, as they did, create insurmountable problems in almost no time flat. We must do more thinking up front if we are not to be similarly surprised and shocked by the consequences of our inventions. My continuing professional work is on improving the reliability of software. Software is a tool, and as a toolbuilder I must struggle with the uses to which the tools I make are put. I have always believed that making software more reliable, given its many uses, will make the world a safer and better place; if I were to come to believe the opposite, then I would be morally obligated to stop this work. I can now imagine such a day may come. This all leaves me not angry but at least a bit melancholic. Henceforth, for me, progress will be somewhat bittersweet. Do you remember the beautiful penultimate scene in Manhattan where Woody Allen is lying on his couch and talking into a tape recorder? He is writing a short story about people who are creating unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves, because it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about the universe. He leads himself to the question, "Why is life worth living?" and to consider what makes it worthwhile for him: Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony, Louis Armstrong's recording of "Potato Head Blues," Swedish movies, Flaubert's Sentimental Education, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, the apples and pears by C?zanne, the crabs at Sam Wo's, and, finally, the showstopper: his love Tracy's face. Each of us has our precious things, and as we care for them we locate the essence of our humanity. In the end, it is because of our great capacity for caring that I remain optimistic we will confront the dangerous issues now before us. My immediate hope is to participate in a much larger discussion of the issues raised here, with people from many different backgrounds, in settings not predisposed to fear or favor technology for its own sake. As a start, I have twice raised many of these issues at events sponsored by the Aspen Institute and have separately proposed that the American Academy of Arts and Sciences take them up as an extension of its work with the Pugwash Conferences. (These have been held since 1957 to discuss arms control, especially of nuclear weapons, and to formulate workable policies.) It's unfortunate that the Pugwash meetings started only well after the nuclear genie was out of the bottle - roughly 15 years too late. We are also getting a belated start on seriously addressing the issues around 21st-century technologies - the prevention of knowledge-enabled mass destruction - and further delay seems unacceptable. So I'm still searching; there are many more things to learn. Whether we are to succeed or fail, to survive or fall victim to these technologies, is not yet decided. I'm up late again - it's almost 6 am. I'm trying to imagine some better answers, to break the spell and free them from the stone. _________________________________________________________________ 1 The passage Kurzweil quotes is from Kaczynski's Unabomber Manifesto, which was published jointly, under duress, byThe New York Times and The Washington Post to attempt to bring his campaign of terror to an end. I agree with David Gelernter, who said about their decision: "It was a tough call for the newspapers. To say yes would be giving in to terrorism, and for all they knew he was lying anyway. On the other hand, to say yes might stop the killing. There was also a chance that someone would read the tract and get a hunch about the author; and that is exactly what happened. The suspect's brother read it, and it rang a bell. "I would have told them not to publish. I'm glad they didn't ask me. I guess." (Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber. Free Press, 1997: 120.) 2 Garrett, Laurie.The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. Penguin, 1994: 47-52, 414, 419, 452. 3 Isaac Asimov described what became the most famous view of ethical rules for robot behavior in his bookI, Robot in 1950, in his Three Laws of Robotics: 1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. 4 Michelangelo wrote a sonnet that begins: Non ha l' ottimo artista alcun concetto Ch' un marmo solo in s? non circonscriva Col suo soverchio; e solo a quello arriva La man che ubbidisce all' intelleto. Stone translates this as: The best of artists hath no thought to show which the rough stone in its superfluous shell doth not include; to break the marble spell is all the hand that serves the brain can do. Stone describes the process: "He was not working from his drawings or clay models; they had all been put away. He was carving from the images in his mind. His eyes and hands knew where every line, curve, mass must emerge, and at what depth in the heart of the stone to create the low relief." (The Agony and the Ecstasy. Doubleday, 1961: 6, 144.) 5 First Foresight Conference on Nanotechnology in October 1989, a talk titled "The Future of Computation." Published in Crandall, B. C. and James Lewis, editors.Nanotechnology: Research and Perspectives. MIT Press, 1992: 269. See also[33]www.foresight.org/Conferences/MNT01/Nano1.html. 6 In his 1963 novelCat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut imagined a gray-goo-like accident where a form of ice called ice-nine, which becomes solid at a much higher temperature, freezes the oceans. 7 Kauffman, Stuart. "Self-replication: Even Peptides Do It." Nature, 382, August 8, 1996: 496. See[34]www.santafe.edu/sfi/People/kauffman/sak-peptides.html. 8 Else, Jon.The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and The Atomic Bomb (available at [35]www.pyramiddirect.com). 9 This estimate is in Leslie's bookThe End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction, where he notes that the probability of extinction is substantially higher if we accept Brandon Carter's Doomsday Argument, which is, briefly, that "we ought to have some reluctance to believe that we are very exceptionally early, for instance in the earliest 0.001 percent, among all humans who will ever have lived. This would be some reason for thinking that humankind will not survive for many more centuries, let alone colonize the galaxy. Carter's doomsday argument doesn't generate any risk estimates just by itself. It is an argument forrevising the estimates which we generate when we consider various possible dangers." (Routledge, 1996: 1, 3, 145.) 10 Clarke, Arthur C. "Presidents, Experts, and Asteroids."Science, June 5, 1998. Reprinted as "Science and Society" inGreetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! Collected Essays, 1934-1998. St. Martin's Press, 1999: 526. 11 And, as David Forrest suggests in his paper "Regulating Nanotechnology Development," available at[36]www.foresight.org/NanoRev/Forrest1989.html, "If we used strict liability as an alternative to regulation it would be impossible for any developer to internalize the cost of the risk (destruction of the biosphere), so theoretically the activity of developing nanotechnology should never be undertaken." Forrest's analysis leaves us with only government regulation to protect us - not a comforting thought. 12 Meselson, Matthew. "The Problem of Biological Weapons." Presentation to the 1,818th Stated Meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, January 13, 1999. ([37]minerva.amacad.org/archive/bulletin4.htm) 13 Doty, Paul. "The Forgotten Menace: Nuclear Weapons Stockpiles Still Represent the Biggest Threat to Civilization."Nature, 402, December 9, 1999: 583. 14 See also Hans Bethe's 1997 letter to President Clinton, at [38]www.fas.org/bethecr.htm. 15 Hamilton, Edith.The Greek Way. W. W. Norton & Co., 1942: 35. _________________________________________________________________ Bill Joy, cofounder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, was cochair of the presidential commission on the future of IT research, and is coauthor ofThe Java Language Specification. His work on the[39]Jini pervasive computing technology was featured inWired 6.08. References 39. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.08/jini.html From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 5 22:32:27 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2004 18:32:27 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Boston Globe: Brain device offers hope for some mental disorders Message-ID: Brain device offers hope for some mental disorders http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2004/08/04/brain_device_offers_hope_for_some_mental_disorders?mode=PF By Carey Goldberg, Globe Staff | 4.8.4 With its infamous history of crude ''icepick" lobotomies, psychiatric surgery has been widely shunned for decades. Now, it appears poised to make a careful comeback using a far gentler technology: a pacemaker for the brain that, once implanted, can be adjusted or turned off. Researchers at Butler Hospital in Providence are completing the largest study to date of the ''deep brain stimulation" device's potential to alleviate mental illness, involving 10 patients with severe, intractable obsessive compulsive disorder. The doctors say it looks promising, and they are beginning to test the device as a last resort for chronic depression. The brain stimulators, though widely used for Parkinson's disease, are still highly experimental for psychiatric disorders: Only a couple of dozen patients have received them worldwide. But they are generating high excitement among neurosurgeons, along with an equally acute sense of caution. ''Deep brain stimulation has and will revolutionize functional neurosurgery in the next decade," said Dr. G. Rees Cosgrove, a neurosurgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, which is seeking to take part in the depression study. However, he said, surgeons must be supremely careful to ''avoid re-creating some of the mistakes of the past. This ''is a historical threshold," Cosgrove said. ''It needs to be done well and properly and be above reproach, or we'll never have another opportunity." The electrodes that deliver the stimulation are embedded in precise locations in the brain during an operation that lasts several hours. They are connected by wires to a pair of battery-powered pulse generators, each about 2 inches square, implanted in the patient's chest. It remains unclear why, exactly, the pulses work, but they appear to block or jam bad signals that travel through malfunctioning circuits in the brain. Patients generally cannot feel the pulses of high-frequency energy. The deep-brain stimulators have gained powerful momentum from their success in reducing symptoms in patients with Parkinson's disease. About 25,000 of the so-called Activa systems have been implanted worldwide since 1996, mainly in Parkinson's patients, according to Medtronic Inc. of Minneapolis, the only company that makes and sells them in the United States. The implants do not cure Parkinson's patients, but many people report major improvements that last for years. The downside: Between 1 percent and 5 percent of patients have experienced serious complications such as bleeding or seizures, and infections have arisen in from 2 percent to 25 percent of cases. Between 5 percent and 15 percent have had problems with the hardware that required repair. As the procedure has become more popular and familiar, neurosurgeons have begun trying it on a range of other illnesses, including epilepsy, in which the treatment of last resort had traditionally been ablative surgery: cutting or burning a lesion, or hole, in part of the brain. In tiny numbers, psychiatric patients have undergone sophisticated ablative psychosurgery in recent years, and because the surgery often helped, researchers reasoned that deep brain stimulation could bring similar results. Thus far, researchers report, the stimulation appears to work about as well in psychiatric patients as the ablative techniques. Those ablative operations have brought significantly reduced symptoms for 25 percent to 45 percent of psychiatric patients in which everything else had failed, Cosgrove said. Deep brain stimulation probably ''will recapitulate the whole history of ablative surgery in psychiatry, which fell into disrepute," said Dr. Daniel Tarsy, chief of the movement disorders center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who has extensive experience with the stimulators. That disrepute stems from the mid-20th-century heyday of the lobotomy. Tens of thousands of mentally ill people underwent lobotomies, often without their consent, as illustrated by Jack Nicholson's character, R.P. McMurphy, in the movie ''One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest," based on the novel by Ken Kesey. The procedure's best-known proponent, Dr. Walter Freeman, traveled the country from state hospital to state hospital, lobotomizing patients by inserting an icepick-like instrument up through the socket of the eye, wiggling it around in the frontal lobes of the brain. The procedure began to lose favor only when effective psychiatric drugs began to appear in the mid-1950s, said Elliot S. Valenstein, author of ''Great and Desperate Cures," a history of psychosurgery. Valenstein, an emeritus professor at the University of Michigan, warned that the danger for abuse of a surgical procedure still exists, ''when you get the right combination of a strong need, plus no alternative, and some prestigious people pushing it, and the press talking about it being a breakthrough." It is a different era, however. In the studies at Butler Hospital, patients are protected by several levels of safeguards: an independent review board that includes community members and bioethicists; a prolonged process to make sure patients fully understand and agree to the procedure; and a ''consent monitor," a retired hospital chaplain who acts as a patient advocate. Dr. Benjamin Greenberg, the lead researcher and a Brown University associate professor of psychiatry, said that great care is also taken to ensure that patients have been correctly diagnosed and that they have exhausted all other possible treatments. In the depression study, that list must include electroshock treatments. The studies generally reject eight patients for every one they accept, he said, and patients must be referred by a psychiatrist. Psychosurgery using deep brain stimulation is expected to remain strictly a topic of research for the next several years before it could become clinically available at specialized centers, Greenberg said. Much remains to be perfected, including the brain locations for the electrodes and the settings of the stimulators. And ultimately only about 4,000 patients a year nationwide with obsessive compulsive disorder, and perhaps more with depression, would be good candidates for such last-ditch surgery, he estimated. Greenberg said he could not connect a reporter with a patient who has undergone the surgery; media contact can be difficult for them, he said. But in general, for the risk of surgery to be worthwhile, the patients must be severely disabled and in great suffering, he said. One patient operated on by Butler researchers endured obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors 14 to 16 hours a day, often waking at 4:30 in the morning to begin rituals of double-checking, arranging, counting, and rearranging things, Greenberg said. At one point, the patient withdrew $100 from a cash machine, then could not remember where $5 of it had gone, pulled over to the side of the road, and spent five hours trying to recall. The stimulator surgery holds appeal for patients in desperate need of better therapies. But, said Dr. Ken Duckworth, medical director for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, ''Nobody calls an election with 2 percent of the returns in." Better treatments are badly needed, he said, but so are better data on whether the stimulators are safe and effective. Medtronic, the company that makes the brain stimulator system, is ''cautious but very interested" in its potential for psychiatric disorders, said spokeswoman Kathleen Janasz. It is not sponsoring the initial clinical trials, she said, though Greenberg said it was helping to pay for them. Hundreds of surgeons are now capable of implanting the stimulator system, because of their experience with Parkinson's patients, and many have expressed interest in trying it. Dr. Alim Louis Benabid, the French neurosurgeon considered the father of deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease, said the stimulators hold great potential for transforming basic brain research into treatments. ''But," he wrote in an e-mail, ''I fear that this would become a medical (and worse, a surgical) market, which would push doctors as well as companies to overpractice." The stimulators, he said, ''may prove to be a wonderful new tool, or on the contrary a temptation for unjustified malpractice." Carey Goldberg is reachable at goldberg at globe.com. From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 5 22:38:13 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2004 18:38:13 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: Support Found for Social Brain Theory Message-ID: Support Found for Social Brain Theory http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2004-08-05-2 Evidence links solving social problems to the evolution of the human brain By Gabe Romain Betterhumans Staff 4.8.5, 4:04 PM The theory that solving social problems spurred the human brain to surpass those of other species has received a boost. Through tests on fossils and comparisons of our mental abilities to those of other animals, researchers at the [3]University of Missouri-Columbia have found support for a theory proposed by zoologist [4]Richard Alexander: That humans evolved a large brain to negotiate and manipulate complex social relationships. "We term this scenario the 'ecological dominance--social competition' model, and assess the feasibility of this model in light of recent developments in paleoanthropology, cognitive psychology, and neurobiology," say the researchers. "Alexander's model provides a far-reaching and integrative explanation for the evolution of human cognitive abilities that is consistent with evidence from a wide range of disciplines." Big brain theories Among the characteristics that differentiate humans from other species are our cognitive abilities. The conditions favoring the evolution of human cognitive adaptations, however, are mysterious. Hypotheses have been proposed concerning the selective advantages of cognitive change during human [5]evolutionary history. Explanations that point to ecological adaptations such as hunting and tool use have been proposed. Such explanations, however, haven't been satisfactory and none has achieved complete or general acceptance. "Most traditional theories, including that of Charles Darwin, suggested some combination of tool use and hunting were the key selective pressures favoring big brains, but increasing evidence of hunting and tool use in other species such as chimpanzees indicates our ancestors were not unique in that regard," says study coauthor [6]Mark Flinn. Recent models based on social problem solving linked with ecological conditions, say Flinn and colleagues in their study, offer scenarios that are more convincing. Social arms race The [7]hominid brain increased 250% in less than three million years, particularly in brain areas involved in cognitive development. The researchers credit the increasing importance of complex social coalitions with the human brain's evolution. As ecological dominance increased, adaptations that facilitated kinship- and reciprocity-based social partnerships arose. These adaptations include social, cognitive and linguistic capacities because such skills would have allowed people to better anticipate and influence social interactions with other increasingly sophisticated humans. Evidence gathered supports the idea that an "autocatalytic social arms race" was initiated that eventually resulted in traits characteristic of the human species, such as concealed ovulation, extensive biparental care, complex sociality, and an extraordinary collection of cognitive abilities, say the researchers. "We think this model explains the data better than any other model," says study coauthor [8]Carol Ward. "The tests available, although not comprehensive, certainly support it and provide a better explanation than the other ideas out there." The research will be published in a special issue of [9]Evolution and Human Behavior honoring Alexander. References 3. http://www.missouri.edu/index.cfm 4. http://insects.ummz.lsa.umich.edu/rda.html 5. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution 6. http://www.missouri.edu/~anthmark/courses/mah/ 7. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominid 8. http://rcp.missouri.edu/carolward/links.html 9. http://journals.elsevierhealth.com/periodicals/ens From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Aug 5 22:58:14 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2004 15:58:14 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] short term thinking Message-ID: <01C47B05.04DE31A0.shovland@mindspring.com> I think in recent years, among the elite classes, the pendulum has swung to the side of personal gain at the expense of the whole, but I also think that the pendulum continues to swing. One of the sites I visit regularly is that of Chief Executive magazine: http://www.chiefexecutive.net/Index.htm In one of their surveys they found a widespread concern with growth and profits among CEO's. In part those problems are a function of the current distribution of personal income. 80% of the American people have less to spend than they did a few years ago. This results in lower unit sales for items like cars, and cost pressures for the producers of many smaller products. In cybernetic terms, this is a negative feedback loop. If they offshore production to reduce costs, they also offshore consumer income, which makes things worse. In recent months China and Japan have reduced their purchases of our debt, so the pressure on our system is increasing. Owners of SUV's continue to whine about the price of gas, but it will only go up. They will adapt, albeit slowly. I think we will all adapt, but at a glacial pace. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2004 12:13 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] short term thinking >>Spending less on bombs or on personal consumption frees up money for other pressing uses, but only if everyone does it.<< --This seems to be the type of problem that characterizes the transition into this century. When everyone is doing something that makes sense in purely selfish terms but undermines the safety of the whole, how do people decide where to put their energy? When "everyone's doing it", what enables someone to do what everyone SHOULD be doing, rather than what everyone IS doing? We all know that shopping at WalMart takes money away from people who have more personal investment in their community, people who work hard to live the American dream but lack the power of a mega-store. But we shop there anyway (I've been there twice, after swearing I'd never go, because they're cheap and big). SUVs eat gas and make it very hard for people in smaller cars to see around corners and to feel safe in traffic... we buy them even when we know the money goes to the Saudis. Why? Not because we like the consequences, but because we compartmentalize the consequences, and we play a game in which selfish choices are rationalized as "making no difference because to change would require everyone to change at once." Is there a point where everyone DOES change at once? Or will a society march into the abyss, making small selfish choices out of the belief that nobody else will cooperate in changing the game? >>What, exactly, is the incentive problem that leads nations to spend too much on armaments?<< --Fear, guilt and status insecurity. Fear is self-explanatory, guilt often leads to more of the behavior which triggers it (mastering an emotion by deliberately invoking it) and insecurity leads to behavior which may make no rational sense but makes sense on the level of symbolism and display. We drive SUVs because they make us feel secure, even if they make us less secure in real terms. We take the guilt and displace it toward a scapegoat. "No environmentalist sissy is going to tell ME what to drive!" Making it possible to keep passing the buck until consequences become intolerable. Whenever there is a disconnect between short term and long term rationalizing, there is inevitably a point where compartmentalized realities clash. That point can cause a lot of strange behavior. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Aug 5 23:03:15 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2004 16:03:15 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: Support Found for Social Brain Theory Message-ID: <01C47B05.B80EFF20.shovland@mindspring.com> Lower mammals also exhibit these traits... Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2004 3:38 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org; Psychology at WTL Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: Support Found for Social Brain Theory Support Found for Social Brain Theory http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2004-08-05-2 Evidence links solving social problems to the evolution of the human brain By Gabe Romain Betterhumans Staff 4.8.5, 4:04 PM The theory that solving social problems spurred the human brain to surpass those of other species has received a boost. Through tests on fossils and comparisons of our mental abilities to those of other animals, researchers at the [3]University of Missouri-Columbia have found support for a theory proposed by zoologist [4]Richard Alexander: That humans evolved a large brain to negotiate and manipulate complex social relationships. "We term this scenario the 'ecological dominance--social competition' model, and assess the feasibility of this model in light of recent developments in paleoanthropology, cognitive psychology, and neurobiology," say the researchers. "Alexander's model provides a far-reaching and integrative explanation for the evolution of human cognitive abilities that is consistent with evidence from a wide range of disciplines." Big brain theories Among the characteristics that differentiate humans from other species are our cognitive abilities. The conditions favoring the evolution of human cognitive adaptations, however, are mysterious. Hypotheses have been proposed concerning the selective advantages of cognitive change during human [5]evolutionary history. Explanations that point to ecological adaptations such as hunting and tool use have been proposed. Such explanations, however, haven't been satisfactory and none has achieved complete or general acceptance. "Most traditional theories, including that of Charles Darwin, suggested some combination of tool use and hunting were the key selective pressures favoring big brains, but increasing evidence of hunting and tool use in other species such as chimpanzees indicates our ancestors were not unique in that regard," says study coauthor [6]Mark Flinn. Recent models based on social problem solving linked with ecological conditions, say Flinn and colleagues in their study, offer scenarios that are more convincing. Social arms race The [7]hominid brain increased 250% in less than three million years, particularly in brain areas involved in cognitive development. The researchers credit the increasing importance of complex social coalitions with the human brain's evolution. As ecological dominance increased, adaptations that facilitated kinship- and reciprocity-based social partnerships arose. These adaptations include social, cognitive and linguistic capacities because such skills would have allowed people to better anticipate and influence social interactions with other increasingly sophisticated humans. Evidence gathered supports the idea that an "autocatalytic social arms race" was initiated that eventually resulted in traits characteristic of the human species, such as concealed ovulation, extensive biparental care, complex sociality, and an extraordinary collection of cognitive abilities, say the researchers. "We think this model explains the data better than any other model," says study coauthor [8]Carol Ward. "The tests available, although not comprehensive, certainly support it and provide a better explanation than the other ideas out there." The research will be published in a special issue of [9]Evolution and Human Behavior honoring Alexander. References 3. http://www.missouri.edu/index.cfm 4. http://insects.ummz.lsa.umich.edu/rda.html 5. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution 6. http://www.missouri.edu/~anthmark/courses/mah/ 7. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominid 8. http://rcp.missouri.edu/carolward/links.html 9. http://journals.elsevierhealth.com/periodicals/ens _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 7 15:30:40 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2004 11:30:40 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] [nibbs-newsletter] Issue 114 - 7 August, 2004 Message-ID: [nibbs-newsletter] Issue 114 - 7 August, 2004 [I am very, very glad that Ian Pitchford is back with his NIBBS newsletter. It's a largely thankless task, but here's thanking him profusely now. He also runs the evolutionary-psychology Yahoo! group. I'll be forwarding several articles to my various lists in a moment. You can't get the articles from this message. Either sign on or go to http://human-nature.com/nibbs/ . This gives you a long cumulation going back to January. To get just the latest, use http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue114.html . [Ian, here's hoping you'll put this fact into each newsletter!] News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences The weekly edition of The Human Nature Daily Review Volume 4: Issue 114 - 7 August, 2004 - http://human-nature.com/nibbs/ If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter send a blank email here. To subscribe send a blank email here. NEWS & VIEWS Cymbalta (5 Aug) - Eli Lilly, the drugs firm that brought Prozac to the world, yesterday prepared to launch its new antidepressant, Cymbalta, after saying the United States food and drug administration had approved it for sale in the country. The controversial drug is still being considered for European approval. [more] Evolution (4 Aug) - Cancer and evolution both occur when genetic material changes randomly in ways that may be good or bad. A study in Nature magazine this week shows that these changes build up at a much quicker rate than anyone thought. The observation was made in tiny worms, but could revolutionize thinking about all living organisms. NPR's Joe Palca reports. [more] Genomics (31 Jul) - "We have 25,000 genes (or recipes for protein molecules) which is the same as a mouse, just 6,000 more than a microscopic nematode worm and 15,000 fewer than a rice plant. However sophisticated our brains are, it is not reflected in our genes," writes Matt Ridley. [more] Lying (31 Jul) - "Is he lying?" Odds are, you'll never know. Although people have been communicating with one another for tens of thousands of years, more than 3 decades of psychological research have found that most individuals are abysmally poor lie detectors. In the only worldwide study of its kind, scientists asked more than 2,000 people from nearly 60 countries, "How can you tell when people are lying?" From Botswana to Belgium, the number-one answer was the same: Liars avert their gaze. [more] Law (4 Aug) - Emotions are not intrinsically opposed to reason, for they involve pictures of the world and evaluations. But there are some emotions whose role in the law has always been more controversial. Disgust and shame are two of those. [more] Imagination (3 Aug) - The concept of imagination remains one of the greatest uncharted territories of psychology. Granted, we can't all paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but almost all of us have an ability to come up with ideas or images. So it's time scientists paid more attention to the power of imagination, said Open University senior psychology lecturer Dr Ilona Roth. [more] Stress (3 Aug) - Levels of a particular hormone may influence a person's ability to cope with stress, suggests a study of soldiers put through a prisoner of war camp simulation. [more] Economics (9 Aug) - For all its intellectual power and its empirical success as a creator of wealth, free-market economics rests on a fallacy, which economists have politely agreed among themselves to overlook. This is the belief that people apply rational calculations to economic decisions, ruling their lives by economic models. [more] Obituary (29 Jul) - Francis Crick, the British scientist who helped discover the double helix structure of DNA has died. He was 88 years old and had been battling colon cancer. NPR's Richard Harris offers a remembrance. [more] History of science (29 Jul) - When great science minds collide, the insults traded and the bile spilt has been both personal and scandalous. But all too often, the victor's reputation is scrubbed clean by the passage of history. William Hartston rakes up some of the muck that has always been part and parcel of the nature of scientific practice, but that few of us know about. [more] Malthusianism (28 Jul) - The world has never been overpopulated with humans in any meaningful sense. It seems, though, that it is overpopulated with theoretical fears of overpopulation. [more] Adulthood (2 Aug) - Today, adulthood no longer begins when adolescence ends. In the bridge to adulthood, also referred to as early adulthood, many more young people are caught between the demands of employment (e.g., the need to learn advanced job skills) and economic dependence on their family to support them during this transition. [more] Inequality (26 Jul) - Among those committed to understanding the mind as the work of natural selection, there is a sense that the time has come: we are now beginning to see what we really are. Two major propositions have emerged, sustained by a construction boom in Darwinian theory and the confidence that supporting data will increasingly be delivered in hard genetic currency. One is that human nature is evolved and universal; the other is that variations in personality and mental capabilities are substantially inherited. The first speaks of the species and the second about individuals. That leaves society - and here a third big idea is taking shape. In two words, inequality kills. [more] Epigenetics (23 Jul) - A look at the emerging science of epigenetics: inherited information that isn't in the form of genes. [more] RESEARCH & COMMENTARY Cognitive science (6 Aug) - For all you budding Kasparovs out there, a team of cognitive scientists has worked out how to think like a chess grand master. As those attending this week's Cognitive Science Society meeting in Chicago, Illinois, were told, the secret is to try to knock down your pet theory rather than finding ways to support it - exactly as scientists are supposed to do. [more] Psychology (6 Aug) - Every mom and dad can tell you that keeping children busy helps stave off cries of boredom--and now there is scientific backing to prove it. Dr. Anthony Chaston and his research colleague, Dr. Alan Kingstone, have proven, once and for all, that time really does fly when you're having fun. Or, at least, it flies when your attention is engaged. [more] Assertiveness (5 Aug) - Assertiveness really is all in the mind. Dominant rats have more new nerve cells in a key brain region than their subordinates, a study reveals. [more] Depression (4 Aug) - A brain imaging study by the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has found that an emotion-regulating brain circuit is overactive in people prone to depression - even when they are not depressed. Researchers discovered the abnormality in brains of those whose depressions relapsed when a key brain chemical messenger was experimentally reduced. [more] Biology (4 Aug) - Women who believe they are going to live for a long time are more likely to give birth to sons than less optimistic women, a new study suggests. Researchers reached the strange conclusion after completing a survey of British women who had recently become mothers. They found that for every extra year a woman thought she was going to live, the odds of her firstborn being a boy increased significantly. [more] [more] Complex systems - consensus (4 Aug) - A month before the fall of the Berlin Wall, 70,000 people gathered in the streets of Leipzig, East Germany, on Oct. 9, 1989, to demonstrate against the communist regime and demand democratic reforms. Clearly, no central authority planned this event; so how did all of these people decide to come together on that particular day? [more] Sex differences (4 Aug) - A University of Toronto researcher has found that differences between men and women in determining spatial orientation may be the result of inner ear size. The study, published online in the journal Perception, examined whether differences in how men and women judge how we orient ourselves in our environment could be attributed to physiological or psychological causes. It found that giving the participants verbal instructions on how to determine their spatial orientation did not eliminate the differences between the sexes. [more] Genetics - addiction (4 Aug) - Two related genes that help control signaling between brain cells may be central components of the biological machinery that causes cocaine addiction, researchers have found. [more] Psychoneuroimmunology (3 Aug) - New research in hamsters now suggests that without companionship, wounds on the animals don't heal as fast. Researchers looked at the effect social contact had on wound healing in stressed hamsters. Results showed that skin wounds healed nearly twice as fast in the hamsters paired with a sibling. These animals also produced less of the stress hormone cortisol than unpaired hamsters. [more] Personality disorders (2 Aug) - An estimated 30.8 million American adults (14.8 percent) meet standard diagnostic criteria for at least one personality disorder as defined in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), according to the results of the 2001-2002 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC) reported in the current issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. [more] Animal behavior (1 Aug) - Everyone knows not to get between a mother and her offspring. What makes these females unafraid when it comes to protecting their young may be low levels of a peptide, or small piece of protein, released in the brain that normally activates fear and anxiety, according to new research published in the August issue of Behavioral Neuroscience. "We see this fierce protection of offspring is so many animals," says Stephen Gammie, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of zoology and lead author of the recent paper. "There are stories of cats rescuing their kittens from burning buildings and birds swooping down at people when their chicks are on the ground." [more] Human behavior (1 Aug) - Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich is urging fellow ecologists to join with social scientists to form an international panel that will discuss and recommend changes in the way human beings treat one another and the environment. Ehrlich is scheduled to call for the establishment of a Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB) during a speech at the 89th annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) in Portland, Ore., on Aug. 2. The goal of MAHB will be to avoid the approaching collision between humanity and its life-support systems, he noted. ''For the first time in human history, global civilization is threatened with collapse,'' said Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford. ''The world therefore needs an ongoing discussion of key ethical issues related to the human predicament in order to help generate the urgently required response.'' [more] Genetics (1 Aug) - Scientists at The Hospital for Sick Children (Sick Kids), Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) have made the unexpected discovery that significant differences can exist in the overall content of DNA and genes contained in individual genomes. These findings, which point to possible new explanations for individual uniqueness as well as why disease develops, are published in the September 2004 issue of the scientific journal Nature Genetics (available online August 1, 2004). [more] REVIEWS & DISCUSSION Biography - Ian Sample reviews Extreme Measures: The dark visions and bright ideas of Francis Galton by Martin Brookes. [review] Lying - Alex Sager reviews Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind by David Livingstone Smith. [review] Sexual behavior - George Williamson reviews Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People by Joan Roughgarden. [review] Consciousness - Kamuran Godelek reviews The Psychology of Art and the Evolution of the Conscious Brain by Robert L. Solso. [review] Sociobiology - Deborah M. Gordon reviews Why Men Won't Ask for Directions: The Seductions of Sociobiology by Richard C. Francis. [review] [review] Sex differences (26 Jul) - The experience I remember best from teaching nine courses at the university level was the occasion when a class discussed a chapter out of a textbook concerning the variations in development between men and women. I found that most of the class believed that "differences" should be placed in scare quotes as they regarded any distinctions as being the result of societal pressure as opposed to the influence of our internal makeups, " writes Bernard Chapin. [more] From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 7 15:32:24 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2004 11:32:24 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Science News: Deception Detection Message-ID: Deception Detection: Science News Online, July 31, 2004 http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040731/bob8.asp Psychologists try to learn how to spot a liar Carrie Lock "Is he lying?" Odds are, you'll never know. Although people have been communicating with one another for tens of thousands of years, more than 3 decades of psychological research have found that most individuals are abysmally poor lie detectors. In the only worldwide study of its kind, scientists asked more than 2,000 people from nearly 60 countries, "How can you tell when people are lying?" From Botswana to Belgium, the number-one answer was the same: Liars avert their gaze. a5156_1440.jpg Dean MacAdam "This is . . . the most prevalent stereotype about deception in the world," says Charles Bond of Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, who led the research project. And yet gaze aversion, like other commonly held stereotypes about liars, isn't correlated with lying at all, studies have shown. Liars don't shift around or touch their noses or clear their throats any more than truth tellers do. For decades, psychologists have done laboratory experiments in an attempt to describe differences between the behavior of liars and of people telling the truth. Some researchers, however, are now moving away from those controlled conditions and are inching closer to understanding liars in the real world. The researchers are examining whether several behaviors that have emerged as deception signals in lab tests are associated with real-life, high-stake lies. The psychologists are also testing how well professional sleuths, such as police and judges, can detect deceptions. One thing, however, is certain: There is no unique telltale signal for a fib. Pinocchio's nose just doesn't exist, and that makes liars difficult to spot. Lab lies By studying large groups of participants, researchers have identified certain general behaviors that liars are more likely to exhibit than are people telling the truth. Fibbers tend to move their arms, hands, and fingers less and blink less than people telling the truth do, and liars' voices can become more tense or high-pitched. The extra effort needed to remember what they've already said and to keep their stories consistent may cause liars to restrain their movements and fill their speech with pauses. People shading the truth tend to make fewer speech errors than truth tellers do, and they rarely backtrack to fill in forgotten or incorrect details. "Their stories are too good to be true," says Bella DePaulo of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has written several reviews of the field of deception research. Liars may also feel fear and guilt or delight at fooling people. Such emotions can trigger a change in facial expression so brief that most observers never notice. Paul Ekman, a retired psychologist from the University of California, San Francisco, terms these split-second phenomena "microexpressions." He says these emotional clues are as important as gestures, voice, and speech patterns in uncovering deceitfulness. But not all liars display these signals, and one can't conclude people are lying because they don't move their arms or pause while telling their stories. These could be natural behaviors for them, not signs of lying. "They are statistically reliable indicators of deception," says Timothy Levine of Michigan State University in East Lansing, but that doesn't mean they're helpful in one-on-one encounters. People don't seem to be very good at spotting deception signals. On average, over hundreds of laboratory studies, participants distinguish correctly between truths and lies only about 55 percent of the time. This success rate holds for groups as diverse as students and police officers. "Human accuracy is really just barely better than chance," says DePaulo. Some researchers think, however, that the design of the laboratory studies is responsible for the poor rates of lie detection. "People are very good liars when nothing is at stake," says Aldert Vrij of the University of Portsmouth in England. "But a lab setting is not real life." In most experiments, researchers tell the subjects whether or not to lie, and the lies have no effect on their lives. There's no significant reward for a liar who's believed or punishment for a judge who's duped. "There is definitely a lack of real-life stuff in this field of research," says Vrij. True liars Vrij has been looking at lies told not by participants in an experiment but by actual suspects in police-interrogation rooms. A major difficulty in using real-life lies is that the researchers themselves often don't know the truth. To overcome that obstacle, Vrij obtained police-recorded videotapes in which 16 suspects in the United Kingdom, charged with offenses such as arson and murder, told both lies and truths about their alleged involvement in the crimes. The police used forensic evidence, witness accounts, and the suspects' eventual confessions to determine the actual events. Before learning the police conclusions, Vrij's team analyzed the videotapes for signs of the suspects' nonverbal reactions to questioning, such as gaze aversion, blinking, and hand-and-arm movements. They also looked at verbal cues, such as pauses in speech and speech disturbances, including "ahs," stutters, and incomplete sentences. The differences between lying and truth telling were largely individual: Some suspects looked away more while lying than while telling the truth, and others increased their degree of eye contact, for example. The only general difference Vrij found between liars and truth tellers is that the liars blinked less frequently and paused longer while speaking. In contrast to participants in the lab studies, the crime suspects didn't show any overall increase in speech disturbances or decrease in hand-and-arm movements. Because of the intense nature of a police interrogation, stressed truth tellers may display the same behaviors as liars do, Vrij speculates. He is currently exploring lie detection from the side of the interviewer rather than the suspect. He showed 99 police officers tapes of real-life lies and truths and found that the officers were, at 65 percent accuracy, slightly better than lab-study participants at discerning the difference. But police are "still far away from perfect," Vrij points out. He attributes the police officers' slightly better performance primarily to the nature of the lies they hear during an interrogation. "More is at stake, and that gives the lies away more," he says. Most recently, Vrij has tested whether the police officers' accuracy rates are consistent in multiple tests. In this study, 35 police officers took four tests derived from interviews of either liars or truth tellers, and 70 percent of the professionals' calls were correct. Although the officers again outperformed participants in lab studies, no individual officer stood out. "Our early findings indicate that none was consistently good or consistently bad," Vrij says. "Nobody is 80 percent overall." Wizards of detection Other researchers, however, present evidence that highly skilled human lie detectors do exist. The scientists have been trying to identify such people and figure out how they recognize lies. In a now-famous study from more than a decade ago, about 500 Secret Service agents, federal polygraphers, and judges watched 10 1-minute video clips of female nurses describing the pleasant nature films they were supposedly watching as they spoke. Half the women were instead watching what Ekman calls "terribly gruesome" medical films. The legal-system professionals were asked to determine the truth by reading the women's faces, speech, and voices. Ekman and his coauthor Maureen O'Sullivan of the University of San Francisco motivated the women to lie by telling them that because nurses shouldn't be bothered by gory images, their believability related to their future career success. Most of the observers uncovered lies at only about the level of chance. One group, however, outperformed the others. The Secret Service group had a better-than-chance distribution, with nearly one-third of the agents getting 8 out of 10 determinations correct, the San Francisco psychologists reported in 1991. O'Sullivan now says that her further studies of federal agents, forensic psychologists, and other groups of professionals indicate that a very small percentage of people are extremely good at spotting a phony. "We always found one or two people who were very good," she says. Over the past decade, she has given a series of tests to more than 13,000 people from all walks of life, including therapists, police officers, law students, artists, and dispute mediators. In the first test, college students either lie or tell the truth about a strongly held opinion, such as their views on abortion or the death penalty. The researchers motivate the students by instituting a system of rewards and punishments, although for ethical reasons, the study participants know that they can withdraw at any time. The subjects are told that if they are judged to be lying, even if they're not, they'll be locked in a dark room about the size of a telephone booth for 2 hours and subjected to intermittent blasts of noise. "We actually didn't do that, but that was the threat," says O'Sullivan. If a student is believed, he or she earns $50 to $100. These rewards and punishments, Ekman says, "cross a certain threshold so that you generate similar behavior and emotional clues" in the experiment and in real life. Observers who judge the students' opinions correctly 90 percent of the time or better move on to two more tests. The motivation for the students to lie remains the same. In the first of these tests, students describe their participation in a mock crime scenario. The second test again uses nurses lying or not lying about watching nature films. Human lie detectors who get 80 percent correct on both the additional tests are "ultimate wizards" of lie detection, says O'Sullivan. She has identified only 15 people as ultimate wizards, about 0.1 percent of the people who have taken the series of tests. "People who are extraordinarily good are extraordinarily good, no matter what the lie is," says Ekman. Another 16 people are "penultimate wizards," getting 80 percent on either the mock-crime test or the nature-film test, but not on both. O'Sullivan has asked the wizards questions about their lie-detection processes. "All of them pay attention to nonverbal cues and the nuances of word usages and apply them differently to different people," she says. "They could tell you eight things about someone after watching a 2-second tape. It's scary, the things these people notice," she says. O'Sullivan compares these skillful observers to Agatha Christie's fictional Miss Marple, who could instantly judge the veracity of someone by comparing him or her to people she'd already encountered. Bond, however, doubts that O'Sullivan's experiments can be successfully applied to real-life liars. The system of rewards and punishment doesn't make the laboratory environment similar to a police-interrogation room. "A dark room and noise is not comparable to the threat of lethal injection," Bond says. He also suggests that the supposed lie-detection wizards are just people who happen by chance to do well on all three of O'Sullivan's tests. O'Sullivan, however says that's unlikely. Bond and DePaulo recently reviewed 217 studies going back 60 years that together include tens of thousands of subjects. The analysis found no evidence of significant differences between people in their ability to detect lies in various scenarios, Bond says. Ekman and O'Sullivan speculate that if they could only study enough people, they might learn specific techniques that good lie detectors use. Then, it might be possible to deconstruct their skill and teach it to others, such as police officers, the researchers say. Vrij, for instance, reports in the April Applied Cognitive Psychology that he has increased people's accuracy by a few percent by teaching them to make quick assessments of behaviors such as the frequency of hand movements. However, Levine speculates that even a bogus program can succeed by simply getting people to pay attention. "Training may increase your hit rate a little bit in the long run, but you're still missing a lot," Levine says. But because witnesses, hard facts, and physical evidence are often scarce, Ekman says, "it's worth training people to be as accurate as they can be." References: Bond, C., et al. A world of deception. (unpublished manuscript--submitted to Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, but not yet accepted.) Ekman, P., and M. O'Sullivan. 1991. Who can catch a liar? American Psychologist 46(September):913-920. Available at [25]http://www.paulekman.com/pdfs/who_can_catch_a_liar.pdf. Mann, S., A. Vrij, and R. Bull. 2004. Detecting true lies: Police officers' ability to detect suspects' lies. Journal of Applied Psychology 89(February):137-149. [26]Abstract. Mann, S., A. Vrij, and R. Bull. 2002. Suspects, lies, and videotape: An analysis of authentic high-stake liars. Law and Human Behavior 26(June):365-376. Abstract available at [27]http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1015332606792. Park, H.S., T.R. Levine, et al. 2002. How people really detect lies. Communication Monographs 69(June):144. Vrij, A. In press. Why professionals fail to catch liars and how they can improve. Legal and Criminological Psychology. Vrij, A., et al. 2004. Rapid Judgments in assessing verbal and nonverbal cues: Their potential for deception researchers and lie detection. Applied Cognitive Psychology 18(April):283-296. Abstract available at [28]http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/107639963/ABST RACT. Further Readings: DePaulo, B.M., and W.L. Morris. In press. Discerning lies from truths: Behavioral cues to deception and the indirect pathway of intuition. In Deception Detection in Forensic Contexts, Granhag, P.A., and L. Stromwall, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ekman, P. 1997. Lying and deception. In Memory for Everyday and Emotional Events, Stein, N.L., P.A. Ornstein, B. Tversky, and C. Brainerd, eds. Mahway, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Available at [29]http://www.paulekman.com/pdfs/lying_and_deception.pdf. Ekman, P. 1996. Why don't we catch liars? Social Research 63(Fall):801-807. Available at [30]http://www.paulekman.com/pdfs/why_do_not_we_catch_liars.pdf. Frank, M.G., and P. Ekman. 1997. The ability to detect deceit generalizes across different types of high-stake lies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 72(June):1429-1439. Available at [31]http://www.paulekman.com/pdfs/ability_to_detect_deceit.pdf. Levine, T.R., and S.A. McCornack. 2001. Behavioral adaptation, confidence, and heuristic-based explanations of the probing effect. Human Communication Research 27(October):471-502. Abstract available at [32]http://hcr.oupjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/27/4/471. Levine, T.R., et al. 2000. Norms, expectations, and deception: A norm violation model of veracity judgment. Communication Monographs 67(June):123-137. Levine, T.R., H.S. Park, and S.A. McCornack. 1999. Accuracy in detecting truths and lies: Documenting the "veracity effect." Communication Monographs 66(June):125. Vrij, A. In press. Guidelines to catch a liar. In Deception Detection in Forensic Contexts, Granhag, P.A., and L. Stromwall, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sources: Charles Bond Department of Psychology Texas Christian University TCU Box 298920 Fort Worth, TX 76129 Bella M. DePaulo Department of Psychology University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106 Paul Ekman P.O. Box 5211 Berkeley, CA 94705 Mark Frank Department of Communication Rutgers University 4 Huntington Street New Brunswick, NJ 08901 Timothy Levine Department of Communication Michigan State University 482 Comm Arts Building East Lansing, MI 48824 Maureen O'Sullivan Department of Psychology University of San Francisco 2130 Fulton Street San Francisco, CA 94117 Aldert Vrij Department of Psychology University of Portsmouth King Henry Building King Henry I Street Portsmouth PO1 2DY United Kingdom From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 7 15:33:34 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2004 11:33:34 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Independent: Why do so many psychologists shy away from research into the power of imagination? Message-ID: Why do so many psychologists shy away from research into the power of imagination? http://education.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=547357&host=16&dir=368 By Peter Taylor-Whiffen 4.8.3 Michelangelo Buonarroti was once asked to explain how he had crafted one of his most famous sculptures. His well-documented reply was honest, simple and accurate: "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free." The Renaissance Italian genius was first and foremost an artisan who had learnt the craft of sculpture from his elders. But that fails to explain how he "saw" a non-existent celestial figure in a lump of marble with such clarity that he could create its image in three dimensions. The concept of imagination remains one of the greatest uncharted territories of psychology. Granted, we can't all paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but almost all of us have an ability to come up with ideas or images. So it's time scientists paid more attention to the power of imagination, said Open University senior psychology lecturer Dr Ilona Roth. "The problem is that psychologists have either studied individual aspects of imagination piecemeal or have avoided the topic altogether," she said. "It features in several branches of psychology but no research seems to tie it all together." Certainly some early psychologists thought the imagination wasn't susceptible to scientific study. Behaviour theorists such as John B Watson, who saw human behaviour as learnt responses to an environment, refused to research the concept because they could not observe it. "Some contemporary psychologists see imagination as imagery: visual-type experiences in your head without any sensory input," said Dr Roth. "Others focus on pretence, fantasy, or creativity. Others look at 'social' imagination and empathy. Still others link it to counter-factual reasoning - 'what if?'. Imagination means different things to different people, so maybe psychologists are right not to put it all together. But while psychologists are skirting the territory, researchers in other disciplines are seizing many of the initiatives. We need dialogue - not only among psychologists but with researchers in other fields." Dr Roth recently demonstrated the scope for such a fusion of approaches when she hosted Imaginative Minds, a symposium on the subject at the British Academy in London. It proved, she claims, that imagination can be valuably researched in a variety of disciplines, not least evolutionary studies and archaeology. "Our distant ancestors undoubtedly had forms of imagination," she said. "Tool making, the capacity to hunt and to live in social groups all required it." But researchers into imagination disagree about the nature of its history. It's a common, though not uncontested, belief that between 20,000 and 50,000 years ago mankind experienced a "symbolic explosion", resulting in the first decorative art. "People were creating things for more than functional purposes," said Dr Roth. "They made them attractive or even created artifacts with a primarily decorative purpose." This explosion heralded such imaginative creations as the famous French cave paintings in Lascaux and Vallon Pont D'Arc and bequeathed an artistic, inventive legacy that has influenced every aspect of our lives. But it doesn't follow that with 50 millennia of imagination behind us, this 21st century will herald a golden age of creativity. "We have greater stimulus than ever," said Dr Roth. "But some would say certain aspects of our culture suppress the imagination. There's a risk that modern technology - TV, computer games - stifles imagination by supplying the images a child would otherwise work to create in its mind. That said, IT can be a wonderful inspiration. Computers are bringing more imagination than ever into, say, maths teaching. The key is to get children actively engaged." Not everyone can be a Picasso but it seems we do all have a talent for mental pictures. One of Dr Roth's research interests is autistic children, who are usually thought to lack creativity. "It's true such children will play unimaginatively - while others use building blocks to make things, the autistic children will lay them in a row," she said. "They are capable of less pretence than others. But some forms of visual imagery function rather well in autism." Then there is the one in 200 autistic children with so-called savant skills. At the age of 12, Stephen Wiltshire astonished a nationwide television audience by drawing a detailed architectural sketch of St Pancras station entirely from memory. The BBC show, entitled The Foolish Wise Ones, prompted a wealth of commissions and enabled Wiltshire, now 29, to make a living from his talent. There are others, too. An English girl known only as Nadia could draw exceptional sketches of horses at the age of three. Richard Wawro, who exhibited his autism in childhood by walking in circles and striking a piano key for hours at a time, did not talk until the age of 11 - now 52, he has sold 1,000 paintings, almost all recreations of images he has seen only once. "There is discussion as to whether such people are truly creative," said Dr Roth. "Stephen Wiltshire is a fantastic artist but some would argue that what he does is more reproductive than imaginative. Then again, Richard Wawro's pictures are so vivid and idiosyncratic, how can you square that with the idea they are not imaginative?" Atypical brain function can certainly affect imagination. Some psychologists claim to have found a disproportionate link between creativity and mental illness. Dr Roth is quick to stress a propensity for one does not automatically lead to the other but accepts there may be a connection. "The genealogies of Byron and Tennyson show mental disorder, and they suffered from depression," she said. "Virginia Woolf was a manic depressive. So was Spike Milligan. Even people with early stage Alzheimer's can show increased creativity. This suggests an enhancement of some neural mechanisms at the expense of others." But however imagination manifests itself, inventors need discipline to hone their creations into objects of usefulness. Shakespeare broke many boundaries but was a master of the tightly structured plot. "Mental fluidity needs constraint," said Dr Roth "Without it, you have free association, which leads to chaos. Your imagination literally runs away with you. "Because of the traditional link between imagination and 'flights of fancy', there's been a lingering belief that imagination doesn't have much to do with science. But imagination is just as important in science as in the arts." Even the world's greatest scientists might agree with that. After all, "knowledge is limited" once wrote no less a figure than Albert Einstein. "But imagination encircles the world." To test your creativity and imagination, visit the Imaginative Minds website at [15]www.britac.ac.uk/events/imagination/ and click on "additional resources". For details of OU psychology courses, visit [16]www.open.ac.uk/courses From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 7 15:36:31 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2004 11:36:31 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Unequal Societies, Unhealthy Societies Message-ID: Unequal Societies, Unhealthy Societies http://homepage.ntlworld.com/marek.kohn/unequal.html Why An Unequal Society Is An Unhealthy Society Marek Kohn This article first appeared in the New Statesman's 'Big Ideas' feature, 26 July 2004. Among those committed to understanding the mind as the work of natural selection, there is a sense that the time has come: we are now beginning to see what we really are. Two major propositions have emerged, sustained by a construction boom in Darwinian theory and the confidence that supporting data will increasingly be delivered in hard genetic currency. One is that human nature is evolved and universal; the other is that variations in personality and mental capabilities are substantially inherited. The first speaks of the species and the second about individuals. That leaves society - and here a third big idea is taking shape. In two words, inequality kills. The phrase (which is that of Richard Wilkinson, one of the leading researchers in the field) sticks out from current consensus like a sore thumb. For the most part, the major biological ideas concerning human nature and mental capabilities are seen to confirm the way the world has turned out. In a world so seemingly short of serious alternatives to the way it is currently arranged, that is only as expected. But what might be the biggest biological idea of all, in terms of its implications for human health and happiness, shows the world in a very different light. It finds that society has a profound influence over the length and quality of individuals' lives. The data are legion and the message from them is clear: unequal societies are unhealthy societies. They are unhealthy not just in the strict sense but also in the wider one, that they are hostile, suspicious, antagonistic societies. The most celebrated studies in this school of thought are those conducted among Whitehall civil servants by Michael Marmot, whose recent book Status Syndrome presents his ideas in popular form. He and his colleagues found a steady gradient in rates of death between the lowest and the highest ranks of the civil service hierarchy. Top civil servants were less likely to die of heart disease than their immediate subordinates, and so on down the ladder; at the bottom, the lowest grades were four times more likely to die than the uppermost. The key features of these findings were that the gradient was continuous, and that only about a third of the effect vanished when account was taken of the usual lifestyle suspects such as smoking and fatty food. This influence upon life and death affected everybody in the hierarchy, according to their position in it. Differences in wealth were an implausible cause in themselves, for most of the civil servants were comfortably off and even the lowest paid were not poor. The fatal differences were in status. What goes for Whitehall seems to go for the world. In rich countries, death rates appear to be related to the differences between incomes, rather than to absolute income levels. The more unequally wealth is distributed, the higher homicide rates are likely to be. Although the findings about income inequality are controversial, the broad picture is consistent; and remains so if softer criteria than death are measured, like trust or social cohesion. Inequality promotes hostility, frustrates trust and damages health. It is hard to make sense of these findings outside a framework based on the idea of an evolved psychology. Understanding humans as evolved social beings, however, made what we are by the selective pressures of life in groups of intelligent beings, it is easy to see that our minds and bodies depend upon our relations with our kind. These relations assume central importance for our health once economic development has minimised the dangers of infectious disease and relegated starvation to history. Studies of baboons, social primates obliged by their nature to form hierarchies, tell the same story. A state of subordination is stressful; such stress may put the body into a mode that is vital in emergencies but corrosive as a permanent condition, interfering with the immune system and increasing the risk of heart disease. Conversely, human relationships formed on a broadly equal basis may support the immune system and promote health. An American researcher, Sheldon Cohen, demonstrated this by dripping cold viruses into volunteers' noses, and then asking them about the range and frequency of their social relationships. The more connections they had - with acquaintances, colleagues, neighbours and fellow club members as well as with nearest and dearest - the less likely they were to develop colds. The relationship between the length of life and its everyday quality is the relationship between its biological and social dimensions, which demands an evolutionary explanation; and the findings seem to demand egalitarian measures. It's an unfamiliar combination. But Darwinian readings of the data on health and equality are not incompatible with claims that humans are innately unequal. They do, however, lead to markedly different views of how to make the best of people. So do the prior ethical commitments that evolutionary thinkers bring to their projects. In his book The Blank Slate, having stated the case for the substantial innateness of all human characteristics and their imperviousness to parental influence, the psychologist Steven Pinker devotes a chapter to denouncing the past century's art and its associated discourses. Folk wisdom and popular taste are right, he affirms; `elite art' is perverse and wrong. The argument is built upon the idea that we all share an evolved human nature, but it would not be terribly difficult to remove the Darwinian passages and produce a standard-issue comment piece for those pages of right-leaning newspapers that are devoted to castigating the liberal elite. Pinker turns his moral compass to take bearings on literary reference points such as 1984, that affirm the individual and condemn attempts to impose equality upon humankind's natural inequality. At a fundamental level, modern Darwinism encourages individualism, for it holds that evolutionary processes act on individual organisms rather than upon groups of organisms. It makes no particularly strong predictions about variations among individual human minds. That part of the picture comes from the behaviour geneticists, who compare identical twins with fraternal twins (or study their prize specimens, identical twins who have been reared apart) and conclude that a large proportion of the variation between individuals' personality traits, temperaments and intelligence is due to inherited differences. Such findings readily lend themselves to a view of the world which attaches great importance to allowing individuals to fulfil their potential, while regarding social programmes to reduce inequalities as vain at best. Equality of opportunity is a fundamental principle; equality of outcome is a pernicious fantasy. The result is an upbeat fatalism; upbeat about the prospects for scientific understanding of human psychology, fatalistic about the prospects that society might be improved by such understanding ... and upbeat, also, in the confidence that society needs no radical alteration. Many of those who dislike such visions collude in them, by acquiescing in the assumption that the effects of environments can be altered but those of genes cannot, and by failing to recognise the words `tend to'. The big idea that provides much of the driving force for evolutionary psychology, the project to describe a universal human nature, is that the sexes have different reproductive interests. The sex which invests the most in reproduction will be the one which takes more care in its choice of mates. Among humans, this implies that women will tend to be more discriminating than males in their choice of partners. It also implies that men and women will have different emotional propensities - as Stephen Jay Gould put it, conceding the central principle of evolutionary psychology in the very act of deploring the neo-Darwinian school. It does not imply that every woman will be more circumspect in choice of partners than every man, or that every man will be readier to take risks than every woman, any more than the tendency for men to be taller than women means that all men are taller than all women. Through the widespread failure to recognise that evolved behaviours and ways of thinking are tendencies, evolutionary psychology has determinism thrust upon it. In the application of evolutionary perspectives to health and equality, however, the prospect of a better society - or at least of better communities or workplaces - is unmistakeable. This way of understanding human nature has the qualities that have marked great Darwinian ideas since the Origin of Species: it is profound in its implications, potentially transformative, and challenges existing wisdom. On one hand, it calls into question the idea that equality of opportunity should be pursued without regard for equality of outcome. On the other, it goes beyond the mechanistic assumption that the task of `progressive' politics is to ensure that the least well off have enough, emphasising that how much is enough depends on how much others have. It replaces vestigial sentiments about the abstract virtue of co-ops and community spirit with data about life and death, implying that we would all (or almost all) be healthier and happier if we were prepared to share more of what we have. It speaks to the world we live in, where want is marginal but trust is precarious. In Richard Wilkinson's words, it is `the science of social justice'. Like other big evolutionary ideas, though, it may be honoured more by denial than by engagement. From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 7 15:38:18 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2004 11:38:18 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Nature: Science secret of grand masters revealed Message-ID: Science secret of grand masters revealed http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040802/full/040802-19.html 4.8.6 [59]Mark Peplow Chess experts gain the edge over opponents by falsifying their own ideas. For all you budding Kasparovs out there, a team of cognitive scientists has worked out how to think like a chess grand master. As those attending this week's Cognitive Science Society meeting in Chicago, Illinois, were told, the secret is to try to knock down your pet theory rather than finding ways to support it - exactly as scientists are supposed to do. "This is a new result in the psychology of chess, as far as I know," says Mark Orr, a chess enthusiast and Ireland's first international master. The research could help developing chess players to hone their skills, he adds. In deciding which move to make, chess players mentally map out the future consequences of each possible move, often looking about eight moves ahead. So Michelle Cowley, a cognitive scientist and keen chess player from Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, decided to study how different chess players decide whether their move strategies will be winners or losers. Along with her colleague Ruth Byrne, she recruited 20 chess players, ranging from regular tournament players to a grand master. She presented each participant with six different chessboard positions from halfway through a game, where black and white had equal chances of winning and there was no immediately obvious next move. Each player had to speak their thoughts aloud as they decided what move to make. Cowley scored the quality of the move sequences by comparing them with Fritz 8, one of the most powerful chess computer programs available. She found that novices were more likely to convince themselves that bad moves would work out in their favour, because they focused more on the countermoves that would benefit their strategy while ignoring those that led to the downfall of their cherished hypotheses. Conversely, masters tended to correctly predict when the eventual outcome of a move would weaken their position. "Grand masters think about what their opponents will do much more," says Byrne. "They tend to falsify their own hypotheses." "We probably all intuitively know this is true," says Orr. "But it's never a bad thing to prove it like this." Strategic thinking The philosopher Karl Popper called this process of hypothesis testing 'falsification', and thought that it was the best way to describe how science constantly questions and refines itself. It is often held up as the principle that separates scientific and non-scientific thinking, and the best way to test a hypothesis. But cognitive research has shown that, in reality, many people find falsification difficult. Until the latest study, scientists were the only group of experts that had been shown to use falsification. And sociological studies of scientists in action have revealed that even they spend a great deal of their time searching for results that would bolster their theories^[60]1. Some philosophers of science have suggested that since there is so much rivalry within science, individuals often rely on their peers to falsify their theories for them. Byrne speculates that the behaviour may actually be widespread, but that it could be limited to those who are expert in their field. She thinks the ability to falsify is somehow linked to the vast database of knowledge that experts such as grand masters - or scientists - accumulate. "People who know their area are more likely to look for ways that things can go wrong for them," she says. Byrne and Cowley now hope to study developing chess players to find out how and when they develop falsification strategies. They also want to test chess masters in other activities that involve testing hypotheses - such as logic problems - to discover if their falsification skill is transferable. On this point Orr is more sceptical: "I've never felt that chess skills cross over like that, it's a very specific skill." References 1. Latour A., et al. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific References 59. http://www.nature.com/news/about/aboutus.html#Peplow 60. http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040802/full/040802-19.html#B1 From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 7 15:39:20 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2004 11:39:20 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Eureka: Scientists prove time flies when you're busy Message-ID: Scientists prove time flies when you're busy http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-08/uoa-spt080604.php 4.8.6 Contact: Ryan Smith [2]ryan.smith at ualberta.ca 780-492-0436 [3]University of Alberta Scientists prove time flies when you're busy Every mom and dad can tell you that keeping children busy helps stave off cries of boredom--and now there is scientific backing to prove it. Dr. Anthony Chaston and his research colleague, Dr. Alan Kingstone, have proven, once and for all, that time really does fly when you're having fun. Or, at least, it flies when your attention is engaged. Working in the University of Alberta Department of Psychology, Chaston and Kingstone devised a test that required subjects to find specific items in various images--a sort of "Where's Waldo" activity. However, before the subjects started the test they were told that once they had completed it they would be asked to estimate how much time had passed during their test. There were seven levels of difficulty among the tests. In some cases, the items were easy to find because they were different colours from everything else, or the items were set among just one or two others. In the more difficult tests, the items were placed among many similar looking items, or they didn't even exist in the image, at all. "The harder and harder the search tasks were, the smaller and smaller the estimates became," said Chaston, whose study is published in the latest edition of Brain and Cognition. "The results were super clean--we have created a new and powerful paradigm to get at the link between time and attention." There are two kinds of time estimations, Chaston added. There's prospective time estimation, which means the estimator knows in advance that he or she will be asked to make an estimate after a task is completed, and then there's retrospective, which means someone has been asked to provide a time estimate after the task has been completed. "There's generally a big difference between prospective and retrospective time estimations," Chaston said. "In our society, we're pretty good with prospective estimates. Most of us wear watches, and we're pretty good at keeping track of the time because we have to for most of our regular, daily lives." For this reason, Chaston is pleased that the results of his study demonstrated such a powerful effect of attention on prospective time estimates. "This really shows that even if you know in advance that you're going to have to estimate the time of a task, the more attention the task requires, the faster time flies." ### Dr. Anthony Chaston can be reached at 780-713-4118 or [4]achaston at shaw.ca. References 2. mailto:ryan.smith at ualberta.ca 3. http://www.ualberta.ca/ 4. mailto:achaston at shaw.ca From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 7 15:47:39 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2004 11:47:39 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Eureka: Study shows how consensus is attained in a noisy world Message-ID: Study shows how consensus is attained in a noisy world http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-08/nu-ssh080404.php 4.8.4 Contact: Megan Fellman 847-491-3115 [2]Northwestern University Study shows how consensus is attained in a noisy world EVANSTON, Ill. -- A month before the fall of the Berlin Wall, 70,000 people gathered in the streets of Leipzig, East Germany, on Oct. 9, 1989, to demonstrate against the communist regime and demand democratic reforms. Clearly, no central authority planned this event; so how did all of these people decide to come together on that particular day? A new study by researchers at Northwestern University sheds light on how individuals might obtain information about the decisions and preferences of other individuals with whom they do not have a relationship or even contact. The findings are published online this week (Aug. 2) by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The Leipzig demonstration is an example of a complex system, the result of an evolving process. The common characteristic of complex systems, whether they be social or biological in nature, is that they display organization without any external organizing principle being applied. "How did a consensus come about? Our computer model shows how social networks can substitute for central mechanisms in decision making," said Lu?s A. N. Amaral, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering and an author on the PNAS paper. "Surprisingly, information can be aggregated more efficiently if local information transmission is not perfectly reliable but is subject to error or random noise, due to lack of trust, indecision or unreliable information technologies." For the citizens of Leipzig, the "noise" was the presence of the Stasi, the state secret police. "The need of individuals to avoid certain forms of communication, due to fear of the Stasi, might actually have contributed to the more efficient spread of information about a generalized dissatisfaction with the regime and the willingness to take a stand against it," said Amaral. The Northwestern study also clarifies how social norms might quickly be adopted and remain ingrained within society and how unicellular organisms might organize into multi-cellular structures. The researchers show that a simple majority rule approach, in which each unit -- a person or a cell -- adopts the state of the majority of its neighbors within an intricate communication network, can efficiently lead to global organization. The model is adaptable and robust -- a real-world system capable of responding to external conditions. "In real life we use simple rules to decide what to do," said Amaral. "People tend to adjust their opinions based on what the majority is telling them." In addition to Amaral, other authors on the PNAS paper are Andr? A. Moreira, Abhishek Mathur and Daniel Diermeier, from Northwestern University. Diermeier is co-director of Northwestern's Institute for Complex Systems. References 2. http://www.northwestern.edu/ From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 7 15:48:44 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2004 11:48:44 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Eureka: Study explains spatial orientation differences between sexes Message-ID: Study explains spatial orientation differences between sexes http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-08/uot-ses080404.php 4.8.4 Contact: Luc Tremblay [2]luc.tremblay at utoronto.ca 416-946-0200 [3]University of Toronto Study explains spatial orientation differences between sexes Inner ear size may be determinant A University of Toronto researcher has found that differences between men and women in determining spatial orientation may be the result of inner ear size. The study, published online in the journal Perception, examined whether differences in how men and women judge how we orient ourselves in our environment could be attributed to physiological or psychological causes. It found that giving the participants verbal instructions on how to determine their spatial orientation did not eliminate the differences between the sexes. "Since the instructions didn't remove the difference between how men and women judge spatial orientation, we believe it is likely a result of physiological differences," says Luc Tremblay, a professor in U of T's Faculty of Physical Education and Health. For example, says Tremblay, the otoliths structures found in the inner ear which are sensitive to inertial forces such as gravity tend to be larger in men than in women, and may allow males to adjust themselves more accurately than females in some environments. In the study, Tremblay asked 24 people (11 males and 13 females) to point a laser straight-ahead (perpendicular to the body orientation) while upright and when tilted 45 degrees backward. To test whether cognitive processes affected spatial orientation, participants who were tested in the dark were told to focus on external or internal cues to help them orient the laser. He found that although instructions to pay attention to internal cues helped women to point the laser significantly closer to their straight-ahead, there were still significant differences between the sexes, with women tending to look more towards their feet. However, although women are more likely than males to misjudge what is horizontal when performing tasks in sensory-deprived or biased environments, they may have an advantage over men while performing tasks under other sensory conditions, such as driving a car or piloting a plane, says Tremblay. This could mean that women are better than males in avoiding the worst-case scenario in spatial orientation, as women act more cautiously due to the way they interpret the sensory input, while men tend to take risks. An example, says Tremblay, is piloting a plane in a situation where visual cues have been lost. "Because women tend to judge their horizontal a few degrees below what it actually is, they tend to pull up to compensate, thus directing the plane away from the ground." Tremblay says his finding has good potential for practical applications such as designing gender-specific training for extreme situations such as piloting and space flight. "It's important to identify how men and women differ with respect to complex perceptual-motor behaviour in order to design recreational, rehabilitation and work environments that ensure safety and top performance." ### This study was published online on March 19, 2004. The research was supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, a Canada Research Chair awarded to Digby Elliott, one of the paper's co-authors, and a scholarship from Les Fonds pour la Formation des Chercheurs et l'Aide ? la Recherche du Qu?bec awarded to Tremblay. CONTACT: Luc Tremblay Assistant Professor U of T Faculty of Physical Education and Health [4]luc.tremblay at utoronto.ca 416-946-0200 Lanna Crucefix Public Relations Manager U of T Faculty of Physical Education and Health [5]lanna.crucefix at utoronto.ca 416-946-5125 References 2. mailto:luc.tremblay at utoronto.ca 3. http://www.utoronto.ca/ From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 7 15:49:59 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2004 11:49:59 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Eureka: Landmark survey reports on the prevalence of personality disorders in the United States Message-ID: Landmark survey reports on the prevalence of personality disorders in the United States http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-08/nioa-lsr080204.php 4.8.2 Contact: Ann Bradley [2]ab118a at nih.gov 301-443-3860 [3]NIH/National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Landmark survey reports on the prevalence of personality disorders in the United States An estimated 30.8 million American adults (14.8 percent) meet standard diagnostic criteria for at least one personality disorder as defined in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental DisordersFourth Edition (DSM-IV), according to the results of the 2001-2002 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC) reported in the current issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry [Volume 65:948-958]. Conducted by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institutes of Health, the NESARC is a representative survey of the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized population aged 18 years and older. More than 43,000 American adults participated in the survey. Designed to assess prevalence and comorbidity, or co-occurrence, of multiple mental health disorders, the NESARC is the first national survey conducted in the United States to estimate the prevalence of selected personality disordersstable patterns of inner experience and behavior that are inflexible and maladaptive that begin in early adulthood and are displayed in a variety of contextsthat often co-occur with other mental health disorders such as substance use disorders and anxiety and mood disorders. The NESARC found that the personality disorders are pervasive in the general population: In 2001- 2002, fully 16.4 million individuals (7.9 percent of all adults) had obsessive-compulsive personality disorder; 9.2 million (4.4 percent) had paranoid personality disorder; 7.6 million (3.6 percent) had antisocial personality disorder; 6.5 million (3.1 percent) had schizoid personality disorder; 4.9 million (2.4 percent) had avoidant personality disorder; 3.8 million (1.8 percent) had histrionic personality disorder; and 1.0 million (0.5 percent) had dependent personality disorder. The researchers found that risk of having avoidant, dependent, and paranoid personality disorders is greater for females than males, whereas risk of having antisocial personality disorder is greater for males than females. They found no gender differences in the risk of having obsessive-compulsive, schizoid, or histrionic personality disorders. In general, other risk factors for personality disorders included being Native American or Black, being a young adult, having low socioeconomic status, and being divorced, separated, widowed, or never married. With the exception of histrionic personality disorder, all the personality disorders assessed in the survey were associated with considerable emotional disability and impairment in social and occupational functioning. "The first-time availability of prevalence information on personality disorders at the national level is critically important," said Dr. Ting-Kai Li, M.D., Director, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. "Personality disorders consistently have been associated with substantial impairment and decreased psychological functioning among alcohol and drug abusers." "The NESARC was crucial in determining the scope of personality disorders confronting the nation and in identifying important subgroups of the population in greatest need of prevention efforts," said lead author Bridget F. Grant, Ph.D., Ph.D., Chief, Laboratory of Epidemiology and Biometry, Division of Intramural Clinical and Biological Research, NIAAA. In a separate paper, the authors report findings on the prevalence and co-occurrence of alcohol, drug, mood, and anxiety disorders; the study will appear in the current Archives of General Psychiatry [Volume 61, August 2004: 807-816]. ### Full text of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry article is available to media representatives from the NIAAA Press Office and to journal subscribers at [4]www.psychiatrist.com. For interviews with Dr. Grant, please call the NIAAA Press Office. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, a component of the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, conducts and supports approximately 90 percent of the U.S. research on the causes, consequences, prevention, and treatment of alcohol abuse, alcoholism, and alcohol problems and disseminates research findings to science, practitioner, policy making, and general audiences. Additional alcohol research information and publications are available at [5]www.niaaa.nih.gov. References 2. mailto:ab118a at nih.gov 3. http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/ 4. http://www.psychiatrist.com/ From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 7 15:51:32 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2004 11:51:32 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Eureka: Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human behavior Message-ID: Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human behavior http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-08/su-ecf072804.php 4.8.1 Contact: Mark Shwartz [2]mshwartz at stanford.edu 650-723-9296 [3]Stanford University Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human behavior Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich is urging fellow ecologists to join with social scientists to form an international panel that will discuss and recommend changes in the way human beings treat one another and the environment. Ehrlich is scheduled to call for the establishment of a Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB) during a speech at the 89th annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) in Portland, Ore., on Aug. 2. The goal of MAHB will be to avoid the approaching collision between humanity and its life-support systems, he noted. ''For the first time in human history, global civilization is threatened with collapse,'' said Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford. ''The world therefore needs an ongoing discussion of key ethical issues related to the human predicament in order to help generate the urgently required response.'' As a precedent, he pointed to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - an organization of scientists that has issued several highly regarded reports assessing the possible impacts of rapid climate change and the actions that might be taken to reduce those threats. The conclusions of that panel are based on state-of-the-art science, somewhat filtered by political considerations, Ehrlich said. ''Similarly there is now a global effort by hundreds of scientists to evaluate the condition of the world's ecosystems - humanity's life-support apparatus - called the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment,'' he continued. ''But there is no parallel effort to examine and air what is known about how human cultures, and especially ethics, change, and what kinds of changes might be instigated to lessen the chances of a catastrophic global collapse.'' Ethics and humanity Although modeled on the ecosystem assessment project and the IPCC, MAHB would mainly focus on the social sciences, providing more consideration of the ethical dimensions of how people treat one another other and the environment, he added. ''The MAHB at a minimum would need to determine where and how human behavior must change if any semblances of today's societies are to persist,'' Ehrlich explained. ''Behavioral scientists and lay persons alike must do that most difficult of all tasks - examine their own values, see how they relate to environmental sustainability and ask themselves whether their values are really leading to the sort of world they want for their descendents. Americans, for example, must ask themselves if their 'way of life' should really be, as the first President Bush said, 'not negotiable.' And they need to discuss possible lifestyle changes in a framework not just of what is possible for citizens of powerful nations, but also of what is ethical.'' Ideally, he noted, the MAHB would be sponsored by the United Nations and supported by the world's governments, which would work to provide wide citizen participation and substantial and continuous media coverage. ''It would deal with tough questions,'' he said. ''It could explore how to reconcile different ethical standards. It could discuss who should 'own' and have the right to exploit global resources like fossil fuels, whose use has consequences for all, including future generations. It could examine how to reduce racial, religious, gender and economic inequities and whether any nations can ethically produce or store weapons of mass destruction.'' Ehrlich pointed out that the scientific community is well aware of the nature of the threats and the ''population-consumption drivers'' creating them, but the actions to counter those threats have been scattered and, with some notable exceptions, absent or inadequate. ''There is a disconnect between what most of the ecological community believes is necessary and ethically required - for example, reduction of greenhouse gas fluxes, establishment of marine reserves, limiting population growth and wasteful consumption - and actions the rest of society, and especially politicians, are willing to take,'' he said. ''To oversimplify, the scientific community has known for decades that humanity was on the wrong course, but its counsel has fallen largely on deaf ears,'' he argued. ''The locus of necessary action has shifted into the domain of the social sciences - and thus an MAHB - to find ways of bridging the disconnect.'' Academic challenges Ehrlich also said that members of academic communities faced a great ethical challenge: ''Can we become moral entrepreneurs and persuade universities to retool themselves to become major forces in solving the human predicament? It would mean faculty adopting new values, and more often trying to do what is right for a broader community, rather than what is comfortable for those isolated from society in their ivory towers. Unhappily, in a world rapidly becoming more dangerous, they are organizations not accustomed to operate on 'Manhattan Project time,''' he said, referring to the all-out effort by physicists during World War II to design and build a nuclear bomb. ''I am privileged to be at Stanford, one of the very best universities,'' he added, ''and yet more than three decades of effort by small groups of faculty and a few administrators have failed to get a frequently dysfunctional university senate to make needed changes in university rules and structure to permit interdisciplinary collaboration to flourish. That's about 10 times as long as it took to create the atomic bomb. ''One of the few remaining places where the United States leads the world is in its great research universities, but they are in severe danger of sinking under the weight of the conservatism of the majority of their faculties,'' he continued. ''Universities must be reorganized to become agents of change in the 21st century. The need for such reorganization is most apparent in the social sciences.'' As an example, he pointed to Stanford, which has separate departments of sociology, history, economics, political science and psychology - as well as two departments of anthropology. ''The absurdity of this disciplinary organization has not gone unrecognized by social scientists,'' Ehrlich asserted, ''but there seems to be no real movement to correct the situation. Participation in an MAHB might help them sort themselves out.'' A member of the Stanford faculty since 1959, Ehrlich was named ESA's Eminent Ecologist in 2001. He is the author of several popular books on humanity and the environment, including One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption and the Human Future,'' which he co-authored with his wife, Anne Ehrlich, a senior research scientist at Stanford. ESA was founded in 1915 to promote and raise public awareness of the importance of ecological science. ### COMMENT: Paul R. Ehrlich, Department of Biological Sciences: 650-723-3171, [4]pre at stanford.edu EDITORS: The 89th annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America will be held at the Portland Convention Center, Aug. 1-6, 2004. Paul Ehrlich will address the meeting on Monday, Aug. 2, at 8 p.m. PDT. Ehrlich will be available for interviews at his Stanford University office on the afternoons of July 28, 29 and 30. A photo of Professor Ehrlich can be obtained by contacting Mark Shwartz at the Stanford News Service. Relevant Web URLs: [5]http://www.esa.org [6]http://www.stanford.edu/group/CCB/Staff/paul.htm [7]http://www.ipcc.ch/ News Service website: [8]http://www.stanford.edu/news/ Stanford Report (university newspaper): [9]http://news.stanford.edu Most recent news releases from Stanford: [10]http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/html/releases.html To change contact information for these news releases: [11]news-service at lists.stanford.edu Phone: 650-723-2558 References 2. mailto:mshwartz at stanford.edu 3. http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/ 4. mailto:pre at stanford.edu 11. mailto:news-service at lists.stanford.edu From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Aug 7 16:22:19 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2004 09:22:19 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Independent: Why do so many psychologists shy away from research into the power of imagination? Message-ID: <01C47C60.0AA44960.shovland@mindspring.com> 40 years ago I read a book called "Applied Imagination" by Alec Osborne. Changed my life. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Saturday, August 07, 2004 8:34 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org; Psychology at WTL Subject: [Paleopsych] Independent: Why do so many psychologists shy away from research into the power of imagination? Why do so many psychologists shy away from research into the power of imagination? http://education.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=547357&host=16&dir=368 By Peter Taylor-Whiffen 4.8.3 Michelangelo Buonarroti was once asked to explain how he had crafted one of his most famous sculptures. His well-documented reply was honest, simple and accurate: "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free." The Renaissance Italian genius was first and foremost an artisan who had learnt the craft of sculpture from his elders. But that fails to explain how he "saw" a non-existent celestial figure in a lump of marble with such clarity that he could create its image in three dimensions. The concept of imagination remains one of the greatest uncharted territories of psychology. Granted, we can't all paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but almost all of us have an ability to come up with ideas or images. So it's time scientists paid more attention to the power of imagination, said Open University senior psychology lecturer Dr Ilona Roth. "The problem is that psychologists have either studied individual aspects of imagination piecemeal or have avoided the topic altogether," she said. "It features in several branches of psychology but no research seems to tie it all together." Certainly some early psychologists thought the imagination wasn't susceptible to scientific study. Behaviour theorists such as John B Watson, who saw human behaviour as learnt responses to an environment, refused to research the concept because they could not observe it. "Some contemporary psychologists see imagination as imagery: visual-type experiences in your head without any sensory input," said Dr Roth. "Others focus on pretence, fantasy, or creativity. Others look at 'social' imagination and empathy. Still others link it to counter-factual reasoning - 'what if?'. Imagination means different things to different people, so maybe psychologists are right not to put it all together. But while psychologists are skirting the territory, researchers in other disciplines are seizing many of the initiatives. We need dialogue - not only among psychologists but with researchers in other fields." Dr Roth recently demonstrated the scope for such a fusion of approaches when she hosted Imaginative Minds, a symposium on the subject at the British Academy in London. It proved, she claims, that imagination can be valuably researched in a variety of disciplines, not least evolutionary studies and archaeology. "Our distant ancestors undoubtedly had forms of imagination," she said. "Tool making, the capacity to hunt and to live in social groups all required it." But researchers into imagination disagree about the nature of its history. It's a common, though not uncontested, belief that between 20,000 and 50,000 years ago mankind experienced a "symbolic explosion", resulting in the first decorative art. "People were creating things for more than functional purposes," said Dr Roth. "They made them attractive or even created artifacts with a primarily decorative purpose." This explosion heralded such imaginative creations as the famous French cave paintings in Lascaux and Vallon Pont D'Arc and bequeathed an artistic, inventive legacy that has influenced every aspect of our lives. But it doesn't follow that with 50 millennia of imagination behind us, this 21st century will herald a golden age of creativity. "We have greater stimulus than ever," said Dr Roth. "But some would say certain aspects of our culture suppress the imagination. There's a risk that modern technology - TV, computer games - stifles imagination by supplying the images a child would otherwise work to create in its mind. That said, IT can be a wonderful inspiration. Computers are bringing more imagination than ever into, say, maths teaching. The key is to get children actively engaged." Not everyone can be a Picasso but it seems we do all have a talent for mental pictures. One of Dr Roth's research interests is autistic children, who are usually thought to lack creativity. "It's true such children will play unimaginatively - while others use building blocks to make things, the autistic children will lay them in a row," she said. "They are capable of less pretence than others. But some forms of visual imagery function rather well in autism." Then there is the one in 200 autistic children with so-called savant skills. At the age of 12, Stephen Wiltshire astonished a nationwide television audience by drawing a detailed architectural sketch of St Pancras station entirely from memory. The BBC show, entitled The Foolish Wise Ones, prompted a wealth of commissions and enabled Wiltshire, now 29, to make a living from his talent. There are others, too. An English girl known only as Nadia could draw exceptional sketches of horses at the age of three. Richard Wawro, who exhibited his autism in childhood by walking in circles and striking a piano key for hours at a time, did not talk until the age of 11 - now 52, he has sold 1,000 paintings, almost all recreations of images he has seen only once. "There is discussion as to whether such people are truly creative," said Dr Roth. "Stephen Wiltshire is a fantastic artist but some would argue that what he does is more reproductive than imaginative. Then again, Richard Wawro's pictures are so vivid and idiosyncratic, how can you square that with the idea they are not imaginative?" Atypical brain function can certainly affect imagination. Some psychologists claim to have found a disproportionate link between creativity and mental illness. Dr Roth is quick to stress a propensity for one does not automatically lead to the other but accepts there may be a connection. "The genealogies of Byron and Tennyson show mental disorder, and they suffered from depression," she said. "Virginia Woolf was a manic depressive. So was Spike Milligan. Even people with early stage Alzheimer's can show increased creativity. This suggests an enhancement of some neural mechanisms at the expense of others." But however imagination manifests itself, inventors need discipline to hone their creations into objects of usefulness. Shakespeare broke many boundaries but was a master of the tightly structured plot. "Mental fluidity needs constraint," said Dr Roth "Without it, you have free association, which leads to chaos. Your imagination literally runs away with you. "Because of the traditional link between imagination and 'flights of fancy', there's been a lingering belief that imagination doesn't have much to do with science. But imagination is just as important in science as in the arts." Even the world's greatest scientists might agree with that. After all, "knowledge is limited" once wrote no less a figure than Albert Einstein. "But imagination encircles the world." To test your creativity and imagination, visit the Imaginative Minds website at [15]www.britac.ac.uk/events/imagination/ and click on "additional resources". For details of OU psychology courses, visit [16]www.open.ac.uk/courses _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Aug 7 16:24:26 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2004 09:24:26 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Unequal Societies, Unhealthy Societies Message-ID: <01C47C60.561296E0.shovland@mindspring.com> Have you noticed that 3rd world countries tend to have the wealth concentrated in a few hands. This results in poverty, because prosperity if a function of exchange, not possession. If the money doesn't change hands at a good rate, an economy stagnates. The US is more 3rd world than 1st world at this point in time. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Saturday, August 07, 2004 8:37 AM To: WTA-Politics; paleopsych at paleopsych.org; Psychology at WTL Subject: [Paleopsych] Unequal Societies, Unhealthy Societies Unequal Societies, Unhealthy Societies http://homepage.ntlworld.com/marek.kohn/unequal.html Why An Unequal Society Is An Unhealthy Society Marek Kohn This article first appeared in the New Statesman's 'Big Ideas' feature, 26 July 2004. Among those committed to understanding the mind as the work of natural selection, there is a sense that the time has come: we are now beginning to see what we really are. Two major propositions have emerged, sustained by a construction boom in Darwinian theory and the confidence that supporting data will increasingly be delivered in hard genetic currency. One is that human nature is evolved and universal; the other is that variations in personality and mental capabilities are substantially inherited. The first speaks of the species and the second about individuals. That leaves society - and here a third big idea is taking shape. In two words, inequality kills. The phrase (which is that of Richard Wilkinson, one of the leading researchers in the field) sticks out from current consensus like a sore thumb. For the most part, the major biological ideas concerning human nature and mental capabilities are seen to confirm the way the world has turned out. In a world so seemingly short of serious alternatives to the way it is currently arranged, that is only as expected. But what might be the biggest biological idea of all, in terms of its implications for human health and happiness, shows the world in a very different light. It finds that society has a profound influence over the length and quality of individuals' lives. The data are legion and the message from them is clear: unequal societies are unhealthy societies. They are unhealthy not just in the strict sense but also in the wider one, that they are hostile, suspicious, antagonistic societies. The most celebrated studies in this school of thought are those conducted among Whitehall civil servants by Michael Marmot, whose recent book Status Syndrome presents his ideas in popular form. He and his colleagues found a steady gradient in rates of death between the lowest and the highest ranks of the civil service hierarchy. Top civil servants were less likely to die of heart disease than their immediate subordinates, and so on down the ladder; at the bottom, the lowest grades were four times more likely to die than the uppermost. The key features of these findings were that the gradient was continuous, and that only about a third of the effect vanished when account was taken of the usual lifestyle suspects such as smoking and fatty food. This influence upon life and death affected everybody in the hierarchy, according to their position in it. Differences in wealth were an implausible cause in themselves, for most of the civil servants were comfortably off and even the lowest paid were not poor. The fatal differences were in status. What goes for Whitehall seems to go for the world. In rich countries, death rates appear to be related to the differences between incomes, rather than to absolute income levels. The more unequally wealth is distributed, the higher homicide rates are likely to be. Although the findings about income inequality are controversial, the broad picture is consistent; and remains so if softer criteria than death are measured, like trust or social cohesion. Inequality promotes hostility, frustrates trust and damages health. It is hard to make sense of these findings outside a framework based on the idea of an evolved psychology. Understanding humans as evolved social beings, however, made what we are by the selective pressures of life in groups of intelligent beings, it is easy to see that our minds and bodies depend upon our relations with our kind. These relations assume central importance for our health once economic development has minimised the dangers of infectious disease and relegated starvation to history. Studies of baboons, social primates obliged by their nature to form hierarchies, tell the same story. A state of subordination is stressful; such stress may put the body into a mode that is vital in emergencies but corrosive as a permanent condition, interfering with the immune system and increasing the risk of heart disease. Conversely, human relationships formed on a broadly equal basis may support the immune system and promote health. An American researcher, Sheldon Cohen, demonstrated this by dripping cold viruses into volunteers' noses, and then asking them about the range and frequency of their social relationships. The more connections they had - with acquaintances, colleagues, neighbours and fellow club members as well as with nearest and dearest - the less likely they were to develop colds. The relationship between the length of life and its everyday quality is the relationship between its biological and social dimensions, which demands an evolutionary explanation; and the findings seem to demand egalitarian measures. It's an unfamiliar combination. But Darwinian readings of the data on health and equality are not incompatible with claims that humans are innately unequal. They do, however, lead to markedly different views of how to make the best of people. So do the prior ethical commitments that evolutionary thinkers bring to their projects. In his book The Blank Slate, having stated the case for the substantial innateness of all human characteristics and their imperviousness to parental influence, the psychologist Steven Pinker devotes a chapter to denouncing the past century's art and its associated discourses. Folk wisdom and popular taste are right, he affirms; `elite art' is perverse and wrong. The argument is built upon the idea that we all share an evolved human nature, but it would not be terribly difficult to remove the Darwinian passages and produce a standard-issue comment piece for those pages of right-leaning newspapers that are devoted to castigating the liberal elite. Pinker turns his moral compass to take bearings on literary reference points such as 1984, that affirm the individual and condemn attempts to impose equality upon humankind's natural inequality. At a fundamental level, modern Darwinism encourages individualism, for it holds that evolutionary processes act on individual organisms rather than upon groups of organisms. It makes no particularly strong predictions about variations among individual human minds. That part of the picture comes from the behaviour geneticists, who compare identical twins with fraternal twins (or study their prize specimens, identical twins who have been reared apart) and conclude that a large proportion of the variation between individuals' personality traits, temperaments and intelligence is due to inherited differences. Such findings readily lend themselves to a view of the world which attaches great importance to allowing individuals to fulfil their potential, while regarding social programmes to reduce inequalities as vain at best. Equality of opportunity is a fundamental principle; equality of outcome is a pernicious fantasy. The result is an upbeat fatalism; upbeat about the prospects for scientific understanding of human psychology, fatalistic about the prospects that society might be improved by such understanding ... and upbeat, also, in the confidence that society needs no radical alteration. Many of those who dislike such visions collude in them, by acquiescing in the assumption that the effects of environments can be altered but those of genes cannot, and by failing to recognise the words `tend to'. The big idea that provides much of the driving force for evolutionary psychology, the project to describe a universal human nature, is that the sexes have different reproductive interests. The sex which invests the most in reproduction will be the one which takes more care in its choice of mates. Among humans, this implies that women will tend to be more discriminating than males in their choice of partners. It also implies that men and women will have different emotional propensities - as Stephen Jay Gould put it, conceding the central principle of evolutionary psychology in the very act of deploring the neo-Darwinian school. It does not imply that every woman will be more circumspect in choice of partners than every man, or that every man will be readier to take risks than every woman, any more than the tendency for men to be taller than women means that all men are taller than all women. Through the widespread failure to recognise that evolved behaviours and ways of thinking are tendencies, evolutionary psychology has determinism thrust upon it. In the application of evolutionary perspectives to health and equality, however, the prospect of a better society - or at least of better communities or workplaces - is unmistakeable. This way of understanding human nature has the qualities that have marked great Darwinian ideas since the Origin of Species: it is profound in its implications, potentially transformative, and challenges existing wisdom. On one hand, it calls into question the idea that equality of opportunity should be pursued without regard for equality of outcome. On the other, it goes beyond the mechanistic assumption that the task of `progressive' politics is to ensure that the least well off have enough, emphasising that how much is enough depends on how much others have. It replaces vestigial sentiments about the abstract virtue of co-ops and community spirit with data about life and death, implying that we would all (or almost all) be healthier and happier if we were prepared to share more of what we have. It speaks to the world we live in, where want is marginal but trust is precarious. In Richard Wilkinson's words, it is `the science of social justice'. Like other big evolutionary ideas, though, it may be honoured more by denial than by engagement. _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From paul.werbos at verizon.net Sun Aug 8 15:19:22 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Sun, 08 Aug 2004 11:19:22 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Eureka: Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human behavior In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20040808111411.00b67080@incoming.verizon.net> At 11:51 AM 8/7/2004 -0400, Premise Checker wrote: >Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human >behavior >http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-08/su-ecf072804.php >4.8.1 > Contact: Mark Shwartz > [2]mshwartz at stanford.edu > 650-723-9296 > [3]Stanford University > >Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human >behavior > > Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich is urging fellow > ecologists to join with social scientists to form an international > panel that will discuss and recommend changes in the way human beings > treat one another and the environment. Ehrlich came to NSF a couple of years ago. He wanted to talk about CO2 -- and, implicitly, the big new glorious center at Stanford that is supposed to address such environmental problems. I still remember the experience of hearing the talk. Initial hope as he said: "we can't just treat this as research into how bad the problem is. we need research into what can be done to solve the problem. Thus we need to broaden our approach to make it more decision-oriented and crossdisciplinary..." .. But then:" So we need to work more with political scientists and lawyers..." The oil dependency problem looks scarier every time I look one step deeper. And it correlates very closely with the CO2 problem. One thing is clear -- lawyers alone have absolutely no hope of locating the real world here. Without some understanding of technologies and numbers it is hopeless. Kyoto by itself, for example, is a high-price Gucci fig leaf that covers almost nothing. Best, Paul (not representing anyone...) From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Aug 8 15:41:01 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2004 08:41:01 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Eureka: Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human behavior Message-ID: <01C47D23.701F8DE0.shovland@mindspring.com> Do a search on "peak oil." Some people say we will cross the line in just a few years- we will have used up half the supply. But there is wind, photovoltaic, biodiesel, tidal, biogas, passive solar. We will use less energy in the future, but I do not think we will be living in the dark :-) As oil supply declines, the production of greenhouse gases will also decline. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Werbos, Dr. Paul J. [SMTP:paul.werbos at verizon.net] Sent: Sunday, August 08, 2004 8:19 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list; paleopsych at paleopsych.org; World Transhumanist Ass.; Psychology at WTL Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Eureka: Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human behavior At 11:51 AM 8/7/2004 -0400, Premise Checker wrote: >Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human >behavior >http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-08/su-ecf072804.php >4.8.1 > Contact: Mark Shwartz > [2]mshwartz at stanford.edu > 650-723-9296 > [3]Stanford University > >Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human >behavior > > Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich is urging fellow > ecologists to join with social scientists to form an international > panel that will discuss and recommend changes in the way human beings > treat one another and the environment. Ehrlich came to NSF a couple of years ago. He wanted to talk about CO2 -- and, implicitly, the big new glorious center at Stanford that is supposed to address such environmental problems. I still remember the experience of hearing the talk. Initial hope as he said: "we can't just treat this as research into how bad the problem is. we need research into what can be done to solve the problem. Thus we need to broaden our approach to make it more decision-oriented and crossdisciplinary..." .. But then:" So we need to work more with political scientists and lawyers..." The oil dependency problem looks scarier every time I look one step deeper. And it correlates very closely with the CO2 problem. One thing is clear -- lawyers alone have absolutely no hope of locating the real world here. Without some understanding of technologies and numbers it is hopeless. Kyoto by itself, for example, is a high-price Gucci fig leaf that covers almost nothing. Best, Paul (not representing anyone...) _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 8 15:51:13 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2004 11:51:13 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Eureka: Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human behavior In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20040808111411.00b67080@incoming.verizon.net> References: <5.2.1.1.0.20040808111411.00b67080@incoming.verizon.net> Message-ID: Paul, Steve just spoke of alternative energy sources and named them. The most important, and most thankless, function of the economist is to turn problems into non-problems. Oil is a non-problem. All that will happen is that oil will be more expensive. As price goes up, the quantity demanded goes down. Substitutes will be found, as long as men are free to find and invent them, and will be marketed, as long as men are free to market them. Economists do not speak of the "demand" for oil (or anything else) without reference to price. They (we, since I'm one) speak of a demand *function*, which gives the *quantity* demanded as a *function* of price. The *law of demand*, the most important law in economics, is that the slope of the demand *function* is negative: as price increases, the quantity demanded decreases. Actually, it is better to speak of the quantity demanded per unit of time, but I think you get the general idea. Alas, few laymen, mediamen, or pundits do. I can only guess what substitutes will be made, or whether total energy use will go down, put the point is that men will adjust to rising prices. Think what the price of whale oil, the main source of indoor lighting, would be if electricity hadn't come along. Frank On 2004-08-08, Werbos, Dr. Paul J. opined [message unchanged below]: > At 11:51 AM 8/7/2004 -0400, Premise Checker wrote: >> Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human >> behavior >> http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-08/su-ecf072804.php >> 4.8.1 >> Contact: Mark Shwartz >> [2]mshwartz at stanford.edu >> 650-723-9296 >> [3]Stanford University >> >> Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human >> behavior >> >> Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich is urging fellow >> ecologists to join with social scientists to form an international >> panel that will discuss and recommend changes in the way human beings >> treat one another and the environment. > > > Ehrlich came to NSF a couple of years ago. > > He wanted to talk about CO2 -- and, implicitly, the big new glorious center > at Stanford > that is supposed to address such environmental problems. > > I still remember the experience of hearing the talk. > > Initial hope as he said: "we can't just treat this as research into how > bad the problem is. we need research into what can be done to solve the > problem. Thus we need to broaden our approach to make it more > decision-oriented and crossdisciplinary..." > > .. > > But then:" So we need to work more with political scientists and lawyers..." > > The oil dependency problem looks scarier every time I look one step deeper. > And it correlates very closely with the CO2 problem. One thing is clear -- > lawyers alone have absolutely no hope of locating the real world here. > Without some understanding of technologies and numbers it is hopeless. > Kyoto by itself, for example, is a high-price Gucci fig leaf that covers > almost nothing. > > Best, > > Paul > > (not representing anyone...) From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 8 15:52:13 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2004 11:52:13 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Independent: Why do so many psychologists shy away from research into the power of imagination? In-Reply-To: <01C47C60.0AA44960.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C47C60.0AA44960.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: Tell us about it, please. Should we still read it, or have there been better books since? On 2004-08-07, Steve opined [message unchanged below]: > 40 years ago I read a book called "Applied Imagination" by Alec Osborne. > Changed my life. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Saturday, August 07, 2004 8:34 AM > To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org; Psychology at WTL > Subject: [Paleopsych] Independent: Why do so many psychologists shy away from research into the power of imagination? > > Why do so many psychologists shy away from research into the power of > imagination? > http://education.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=547357&host=16&dir=368 > > By Peter Taylor-Whiffen > 4.8.3 > > Michelangelo Buonarroti was once asked to explain how he had crafted > one of his most famous sculptures. His well-documented reply was > honest, simple and accurate: "I saw the angel in the marble and carved > until I set him free." > > The Renaissance Italian genius was first and foremost an artisan who > had learnt the craft of sculpture from his elders. But that fails to > explain how he "saw" a non-existent celestial figure in a lump of > marble with such clarity that he could create its image in three > dimensions. > > The concept of imagination remains one of the greatest uncharted > territories of psychology. Granted, we can't all paint the ceiling of > the Sistine Chapel, but almost all of us have an ability to come up > with ideas or images. So it's time scientists paid more attention to > the power of imagination, said Open University senior psychology > lecturer Dr Ilona Roth. > > "The problem is that psychologists have either studied individual > aspects of imagination piecemeal or have avoided the topic > altogether," she said. "It features in several branches of psychology > but no research seems to tie it all together." > > Certainly some early psychologists thought the imagination wasn't > susceptible to scientific study. Behaviour theorists such as John B > Watson, who saw human behaviour as learnt responses to an environment, > refused to research the concept because they could not observe it. > > "Some contemporary psychologists see imagination as imagery: > visual-type experiences in your head without any sensory input," said > Dr Roth. "Others focus on pretence, fantasy, or creativity. Others > look at 'social' imagination and empathy. Still others link it to > counter-factual reasoning - 'what if?'. Imagination means different > things to different people, so maybe psychologists are right not to > put it all together. But while psychologists are skirting the > territory, researchers in other disciplines are seizing many of the > initiatives. We need dialogue - not only among psychologists but with > researchers in other fields." > > Dr Roth recently demonstrated the scope for such a fusion of > approaches when she hosted Imaginative Minds, a symposium on the > subject at the British Academy in London. It proved, she claims, that > imagination can be valuably researched in a variety of disciplines, > not least evolutionary studies and archaeology. > > "Our distant ancestors undoubtedly had forms of imagination," she > said. "Tool making, the capacity to hunt and to live in social groups > all required it." > > But researchers into imagination disagree about the nature of its > history. It's a common, though not uncontested, belief that between > 20,000 and 50,000 years ago mankind experienced a "symbolic > explosion", resulting in the first decorative art. "People were > creating things for more than functional purposes," said Dr Roth. > "They made them attractive or even created artifacts with a primarily > decorative purpose." > > This explosion heralded such imaginative creations as the famous > French cave paintings in Lascaux and Vallon Pont D'Arc and bequeathed > an artistic, inventive legacy that has influenced every aspect of our > lives. But it doesn't follow that with 50 millennia of imagination > behind us, this 21st century will herald a golden age of creativity. > > "We have greater stimulus than ever," said Dr Roth. "But some would > say certain aspects of our culture suppress the imagination. There's a > risk that modern technology - TV, computer games - stifles imagination > by supplying the images a child would otherwise work to create in its > mind. That said, IT can be a wonderful inspiration. Computers are > bringing more imagination than ever into, say, maths teaching. The key > is to get children actively engaged." > > Not everyone can be a Picasso but it seems we do all have a talent for > mental pictures. One of Dr Roth's research interests is autistic > children, who are usually thought to lack creativity. "It's true such > children will play unimaginatively - while others use building blocks > to make things, the autistic children will lay them in a row," she > said. "They are capable of less pretence than others. But some forms > of visual imagery function rather well in autism." > > Then there is the one in 200 autistic children with so-called savant > skills. At the age of 12, Stephen Wiltshire astonished a nationwide > television audience by drawing a detailed architectural sketch of St > Pancras station entirely from memory. The BBC show, entitled The > Foolish Wise Ones, prompted a wealth of commissions and enabled > Wiltshire, now 29, to make a living from his talent. There are others, > too. An English girl known only as Nadia could draw exceptional > sketches of horses at the age of three. Richard Wawro, who exhibited > his autism in childhood by walking in circles and striking a piano key > for hours at a time, did not talk until the age of 11 - now 52, he has > sold 1,000 paintings, almost all recreations of images he has seen > only once. > > "There is discussion as to whether such people are truly creative," > said Dr Roth. "Stephen Wiltshire is a fantastic artist but some would > argue that what he does is more reproductive than imaginative. Then > again, Richard Wawro's pictures are so vivid and idiosyncratic, how > can you square that with the idea they are not imaginative?" > > Atypical brain function can certainly affect imagination. Some > psychologists claim to have found a disproportionate link between > creativity and mental illness. Dr Roth is quick to stress a propensity > for one does not automatically lead to the other but accepts there may > be a connection. "The genealogies of Byron and Tennyson show mental > disorder, and they suffered from depression," she said. "Virginia > Woolf was a manic depressive. So was Spike Milligan. Even people with > early stage Alzheimer's can show increased creativity. This suggests > an enhancement of some neural mechanisms at the expense of others." > > But however imagination manifests itself, inventors need discipline to > hone their creations into objects of usefulness. Shakespeare broke > many boundaries but was a master of the tightly structured plot. > > "Mental fluidity needs constraint," said Dr Roth "Without it, you have > free association, which leads to chaos. Your imagination literally > runs away with you. > > "Because of the traditional link between imagination and 'flights of > fancy', there's been a lingering belief that imagination doesn't have > much to do with science. But imagination is just as important in > science as in the arts." > > Even the world's greatest scientists might agree with that. After all, > "knowledge is limited" once wrote no less a figure than Albert > Einstein. "But imagination encircles the world." > > To test your creativity and imagination, visit the Imaginative Minds > website at [15]www.britac.ac.uk/events/imagination/ and click on > "additional resources". For details of OU psychology courses, visit > [16]www.open.ac.uk/courses > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Aug 8 15:55:39 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2004 08:55:39 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Hope for the energy future Message-ID: <01C47D25.7B016F10.shovland@mindspring.com> Start here: http://www.homepower.com/ Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 8 15:57:11 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2004 11:57:11 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Unequal Societies, Unhealthy Societies In-Reply-To: <01C47C60.561296E0.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C47C60.561296E0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: Steve, do you have actual data here? I'd love to see it! Anyhow, what you have at most is correlation, not causation. But it is true, I think, that non-market or corrupt-market economies do tend to result in greater concentration of wealth. What's happening in America, and throughout the world, in the past several decades, is a growing premium on intelligence. At one time "a strong back and a weak mind" was good enough to get by on. But now the man with the strong back needs to operate a complex machine, more and more a machine that has a computer chip in it. So there are two factors: free vs. corrupt or non-free societies and the growing premium on intelligence. Frank On 2004-08-07, Steve opined [message unchanged below]: > Have you noticed that 3rd world countries > tend to have the wealth concentrated in > a few hands. > > This results in poverty, because prosperity > if a function of exchange, not possession. > > If the money doesn't change hands at a > good rate, an economy stagnates. > > The US is more 3rd world than 1st world > at this point in time. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Saturday, August 07, 2004 8:37 AM > To: WTA-Politics; paleopsych at paleopsych.org; Psychology at WTL > Subject: [Paleopsych] Unequal Societies, Unhealthy Societies > > Unequal Societies, Unhealthy Societies > http://homepage.ntlworld.com/marek.kohn/unequal.html > > Why An Unequal Society Is An Unhealthy Society > Marek Kohn > > This article first appeared in the New Statesman's 'Big Ideas' > feature, 26 July 2004. > > Among those committed to understanding the mind as the work of natural > selection, there is a sense that the time has come: we are now > beginning to see what we really are. Two major propositions have > emerged, sustained by a construction boom in Darwinian theory and the > confidence that supporting data will increasingly be delivered in hard > genetic currency. One is that human nature is evolved and universal; > the other is that variations in personality and mental capabilities > are substantially inherited. The first speaks of the species and the > second about individuals. That leaves society - and here a third big > idea is taking shape. In two words, inequality kills. > The phrase (which is that of Richard Wilkinson, one of the leading > researchers in the field) sticks out from current consensus like a > sore thumb. For the most part, the major biological ideas concerning > human nature and mental capabilities are seen to confirm the way the > world has turned out. In a world so seemingly short of serious > alternatives to the way it is currently arranged, that is only as > expected. But what might be the biggest biological idea of all, in > terms of its implications for human health and happiness, shows the > world in a very different light. It finds that society has a profound > influence over the length and quality of individuals' lives. The data > are legion and the message from them is clear: unequal societies are > unhealthy societies. They are unhealthy not just in the strict sense > but also in the wider one, that they are hostile, suspicious, > antagonistic societies. > The most celebrated studies in this school of thought are those > conducted among Whitehall civil servants by Michael Marmot, whose > recent book Status Syndrome presents his ideas in popular form. He and > his colleagues found a steady gradient in rates of death between the > lowest and the highest ranks of the civil service hierarchy. Top civil > servants were less likely to die of heart disease than their immediate > subordinates, and so on down the ladder; at the bottom, the lowest > grades were four times more likely to die than the uppermost. The key > features of these findings were that the gradient was continuous, and > that only about a third of the effect vanished when account was taken > of the usual lifestyle suspects such as smoking and fatty food. This > influence upon life and death affected everybody in the hierarchy, > according to their position in it. Differences in wealth were an > implausible cause in themselves, for most of the civil servants were > comfortably off and even the lowest paid were not poor. The fatal > differences were in status. > What goes for Whitehall seems to go for the world. In rich countries, > death rates appear to be related to the differences between incomes, > rather than to absolute income levels. The more unequally wealth is > distributed, the higher homicide rates are likely to be. Although the > findings about income inequality are controversial, the broad picture > is consistent; and remains so if softer criteria than death are > measured, like trust or social cohesion. Inequality promotes > hostility, frustrates trust and damages health. > It is hard to make sense of these findings outside a framework based > on the idea of an evolved psychology. Understanding humans as evolved > social beings, however, made what we are by the selective pressures of > life in groups of intelligent beings, it is easy to see that our minds > and bodies depend upon our relations with our kind. These relations > assume central importance for our health once economic development has > minimised the dangers of infectious disease and relegated starvation > to history. > Studies of baboons, social primates obliged by their nature to form > hierarchies, tell the same story. A state of subordination is > stressful; such stress may put the body into a mode that is vital in > emergencies but corrosive as a permanent condition, interfering with > the immune system and increasing the risk of heart disease. > Conversely, human relationships formed on a broadly equal basis may > support the immune system and promote health. An American researcher, > Sheldon Cohen, demonstrated this by dripping cold viruses into > volunteers' noses, and then asking them about the range and frequency > of their social relationships. The more connections they had - with > acquaintances, colleagues, neighbours and fellow club members as well > as with nearest and dearest - the less likely they were to develop > colds. > The relationship between the length of life and its everyday quality > is the relationship between its biological and social dimensions, > which demands an evolutionary explanation; and the findings seem to > demand egalitarian measures. It's an unfamiliar combination. But > Darwinian readings of the data on health and equality are not > incompatible with claims that humans are innately unequal. They do, > however, lead to markedly different views of how to make the best of > people. > So do the prior ethical commitments that evolutionary thinkers bring > to their projects. In his book The Blank Slate, having stated the case > for the substantial innateness of all human characteristics and their > imperviousness to parental influence, the psychologist Steven Pinker > devotes a chapter to denouncing the past century's art and its > associated discourses. Folk wisdom and popular taste are right, he > affirms; `elite art' is perverse and wrong. The argument is built upon > the idea that we all share an evolved human nature, but it would not > be terribly difficult to remove the Darwinian passages and produce a > standard-issue comment piece for those pages of right-leaning > newspapers that are devoted to castigating the liberal elite. > Pinker turns his moral compass to take bearings on literary reference > points such as 1984, that affirm the individual and condemn attempts > to impose equality upon humankind's natural inequality. At a > fundamental level, modern Darwinism encourages individualism, for it > holds that evolutionary processes act on individual organisms rather > than upon groups of organisms. It makes no particularly strong > predictions about variations among individual human minds. That part > of the picture comes from the behaviour geneticists, who compare > identical twins with fraternal twins (or study their prize specimens, > identical twins who have been reared apart) and conclude that a large > proportion of the variation between individuals' personality traits, > temperaments and intelligence is due to inherited differences. Such > findings readily lend themselves to a view of the world which attaches > great importance to allowing individuals to fulfil their potential, > while regarding social programmes to reduce inequalities as vain at > best. Equality of opportunity is a fundamental principle; equality of > outcome is a pernicious fantasy. > The result is an upbeat fatalism; upbeat about the prospects for > scientific understanding of human psychology, fatalistic about the > prospects that society might be improved by such understanding ... and > upbeat, also, in the confidence that society needs no radical > alteration. Many of those who dislike such visions collude in them, by > acquiescing in the assumption that the effects of environments can be > altered but those of genes cannot, and by failing to recognise the > words `tend to'. The big idea that provides much of the driving force > for evolutionary psychology, the project to describe a universal human > nature, is that the sexes have different reproductive interests. The > sex which invests the most in reproduction will be the one which takes > more care in its choice of mates. Among humans, this implies that > women will tend to be more discriminating than males in their choice > of partners. It also implies that men and women will have different > emotional propensities - as Stephen Jay Gould put it, conceding the > central principle of evolutionary psychology in the very act of > deploring the neo-Darwinian school. It does not imply that every woman > will be more circumspect in choice of partners than every man, or that > every man will be readier to take risks than every woman, any more > than the tendency for men to be taller than women means that all men > are taller than all women. Through the widespread failure to recognise > that evolved behaviours and ways of thinking are tendencies, > evolutionary psychology has determinism thrust upon it. > In the application of evolutionary perspectives to health and > equality, however, the prospect of a better society - or at least of > better communities or workplaces - is unmistakeable. This way of > understanding human nature has the qualities that have marked great > Darwinian ideas since the Origin of Species: it is profound in its > implications, potentially transformative, and challenges existing > wisdom. On one hand, it calls into question the idea that equality of > opportunity should be pursued without regard for equality of outcome. > On the other, it goes beyond the mechanistic assumption that the task > of `progressive' politics is to ensure that the least well off have > enough, emphasising that how much is enough depends on how much others > have. It replaces vestigial sentiments about the abstract virtue of > co-ops and community spirit with data about life and death, implying > that we would all (or almost all) be healthier and happier if we were > prepared to share more of what we have. It speaks to the world we live > in, where want is marginal but trust is precarious. > In Richard Wilkinson's words, it is `the science of social justice'. > Like other big evolutionary ideas, though, it may be honoured more by > denial than by engagement. > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Aug 8 16:05:00 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2004 09:05:00 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Independent: Why do so many psychologists shy away from research into the power of imagination? Message-ID: <01C47D26.C9A305B0.shovland@mindspring.com> I don't know if there have been better books since, but it would be worth reading if you could find a copy. This was the great age of brain storming, and you can brain storm with yourself. One of the main things is to capture ideas as they come to you, as they are very perishable- one tends to forget them in minutes if not noted. Personally, I carry around 3x5 cards or notebooks to catch things, and it gives me a huge stack of possibly useful (and sometimes useless) ideas. I've been doing this so long now that I feel it has developed into a power to reach out into the void and get ideas. When provoked by an issue my mind really does go into a storm mode and for some period of time many things come through. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Sunday, August 08, 2004 8:52 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Independent: Why do so many psychologists shy away from research into the power of imagination? Tell us about it, please. Should we still read it, or have there been better books since? On 2004-08-07, Steve opined [message unchanged below]: > 40 years ago I read a book called "Applied Imagination" by Alec Osborne. > Changed my life. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Saturday, August 07, 2004 8:34 AM > To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org; Psychology at WTL > Subject: [Paleopsych] Independent: Why do so many psychologists shy away from research into the power of imagination? > > Why do so many psychologists shy away from research into the power of > imagination? > http://education.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=547357&host=16&dir=368 > > By Peter Taylor-Whiffen > 4.8.3 > > Michelangelo Buonarroti was once asked to explain how he had crafted > one of his most famous sculptures. His well-documented reply was > honest, simple and accurate: "I saw the angel in the marble and carved > until I set him free." > > The Renaissance Italian genius was first and foremost an artisan who > had learnt the craft of sculpture from his elders. But that fails to > explain how he "saw" a non-existent celestial figure in a lump of > marble with such clarity that he could create its image in three > dimensions. > > The concept of imagination remains one of the greatest uncharted > territories of psychology. Granted, we can't all paint the ceiling of > the Sistine Chapel, but almost all of us have an ability to come up > with ideas or images. So it's time scientists paid more attention to > the power of imagination, said Open University senior psychology > lecturer Dr Ilona Roth. > > "The problem is that psychologists have either studied individual > aspects of imagination piecemeal or have avoided the topic > altogether," she said. "It features in several branches of psychology > but no research seems to tie it all together." > > Certainly some early psychologists thought the imagination wasn't > susceptible to scientific study. Behaviour theorists such as John B > Watson, who saw human behaviour as learnt responses to an environment, > refused to research the concept because they could not observe it. > > "Some contemporary psychologists see imagination as imagery: > visual-type experiences in your head without any sensory input," said > Dr Roth. "Others focus on pretence, fantasy, or creativity. Others > look at 'social' imagination and empathy. Still others link it to > counter-factual reasoning - 'what if?'. Imagination means different > things to different people, so maybe psychologists are right not to > put it all together. But while psychologists are skirting the > territory, researchers in other disciplines are seizing many of the > initiatives. We need dialogue - not only among psychologists but with > researchers in other fields." > > Dr Roth recently demonstrated the scope for such a fusion of > approaches when she hosted Imaginative Minds, a symposium on the > subject at the British Academy in London. It proved, she claims, that > imagination can be valuably researched in a variety of disciplines, > not least evolutionary studies and archaeology. > > "Our distant ancestors undoubtedly had forms of imagination," she > said. "Tool making, the capacity to hunt and to live in social groups > all required it." > > But researchers into imagination disagree about the nature of its > history. It's a common, though not uncontested, belief that between > 20,000 and 50,000 years ago mankind experienced a "symbolic > explosion", resulting in the first decorative art. "People were > creating things for more than functional purposes," said Dr Roth. > "They made them attractive or even created artifacts with a primarily > decorative purpose." > > This explosion heralded such imaginative creations as the famous > French cave paintings in Lascaux and Vallon Pont D'Arc and bequeathed > an artistic, inventive legacy that has influenced every aspect of our > lives. But it doesn't follow that with 50 millennia of imagination > behind us, this 21st century will herald a golden age of creativity. > > "We have greater stimulus than ever," said Dr Roth. "But some would > say certain aspects of our culture suppress the imagination. There's a > risk that modern technology - TV, computer games - stifles imagination > by supplying the images a child would otherwise work to create in its > mind. That said, IT can be a wonderful inspiration. Computers are > bringing more imagination than ever into, say, maths teaching. The key > is to get children actively engaged." > > Not everyone can be a Picasso but it seems we do all have a talent for > mental pictures. One of Dr Roth's research interests is autistic > children, who are usually thought to lack creativity. "It's true such > children will play unimaginatively - while others use building blocks > to make things, the autistic children will lay them in a row," she > said. "They are capable of less pretence than others. But some forms > of visual imagery function rather well in autism." > > Then there is the one in 200 autistic children with so-called savant > skills. At the age of 12, Stephen Wiltshire astonished a nationwide > television audience by drawing a detailed architectural sketch of St > Pancras station entirely from memory. The BBC show, entitled The > Foolish Wise Ones, prompted a wealth of commissions and enabled > Wiltshire, now 29, to make a living from his talent. There are others, > too. An English girl known only as Nadia could draw exceptional > sketches of horses at the age of three. Richard Wawro, who exhibited > his autism in childhood by walking in circles and striking a piano key > for hours at a time, did not talk until the age of 11 - now 52, he has > sold 1,000 paintings, almost all recreations of images he has seen > only once. > > "There is discussion as to whether such people are truly creative," > said Dr Roth. "Stephen Wiltshire is a fantastic artist but some would > argue that what he does is more reproductive than imaginative. Then > again, Richard Wawro's pictures are so vivid and idiosyncratic, how > can you square that with the idea they are not imaginative?" > > Atypical brain function can certainly affect imagination. Some > psychologists claim to have found a disproportionate link between > creativity and mental illness. Dr Roth is quick to stress a propensity > for one does not automatically lead to the other but accepts there may > be a connection. "The genealogies of Byron and Tennyson show mental > disorder, and they suffered from depression," she said. "Virginia > Woolf was a manic depressive. So was Spike Milligan. Even people with > early stage Alzheimer's can show increased creativity. This suggests > an enhancement of some neural mechanisms at the expense of others." > > But however imagination manifests itself, inventors need discipline to > hone their creations into objects of usefulness. Shakespeare broke > many boundaries but was a master of the tightly structured plot. > > "Mental fluidity needs constraint," said Dr Roth "Without it, you have > free association, which leads to chaos. Your imagination literally > runs away with you. > > "Because of the traditional link between imagination and 'flights of > fancy', there's been a lingering belief that imagination doesn't have > much to do with science. But imagination is just as important in > science as in the arts." > > Even the world's greatest scientists might agree with that. After all, > "knowledge is limited" once wrote no less a figure than Albert > Einstein. "But imagination encircles the world." > > To test your creativity and imagination, visit the Imaginative Minds > website at [15]www.britac.ac.uk/events/imagination/ and click on > "additional resources". For details of OU psychology courses, visit > [16]www.open.ac.uk/courses > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Aug 8 16:57:20 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2004 09:57:20 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Unequal Societies, Unhealthy Societies Message-ID: <01C47D2E.19477EA0.shovland@mindspring.com> I don't have data. It is more a case of "reasoning from first principles." Any economy has static and dynamic elements, for example assets versus income and expenses. Most economies use money for exchange. The amount of money in an economy is a function of the numbers of units available multiplied by the rate at which these units change hands. In an economy with a high concentration of income, most of the people are not able to engage in large transactions such as the purchase of an automobile. The few who do have the income to do these transactions have a limited need for doing them. If you have several cars, you don't need dozens of cars. If you have several houses, you don't need dozens of houses. Neither your soul nor your senses would get much out of having more of them. The result is a large surplus of income for the few which they put into Swiss bank accounts, which charge them interest for holding the money. The money goes into cold storage, where it shrinks. In an economy with a wider distribution of income, more people can buy the big ticket items, and the society as a whole is more prosperous, and there is less incentive to kidnap rich people for ransom :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Sunday, August 08, 2004 8:57 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Unequal Societies, Unhealthy Societies Steve, do you have actual data here? I'd love to see it! Anyhow, what you have at most is correlation, not causation. But it is true, I think, that non-market or corrupt-market economies do tend to result in greater concentration of wealth. What's happening in America, and throughout the world, in the past several decades, is a growing premium on intelligence. At one time "a strong back and a weak mind" was good enough to get by on. But now the man with the strong back needs to operate a complex machine, more and more a machine that has a computer chip in it. So there are two factors: free vs. corrupt or non-free societies and the growing premium on intelligence. Frank On 2004-08-07, Steve opined [message unchanged below]: > Have you noticed that 3rd world countries > tend to have the wealth concentrated in > a few hands. > > This results in poverty, because prosperity > if a function of exchange, not possession. > > If the money doesn't change hands at a > good rate, an economy stagnates. > > The US is more 3rd world than 1st world > at this point in time. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Saturday, August 07, 2004 8:37 AM > To: WTA-Politics; paleopsych at paleopsych.org; Psychology at WTL > Subject: [Paleopsych] Unequal Societies, Unhealthy Societies > > Unequal Societies, Unhealthy Societies > http://homepage.ntlworld.com/marek.kohn/unequal.html > > Why An Unequal Society Is An Unhealthy Society > Marek Kohn > > This article first appeared in the New Statesman's 'Big Ideas' > feature, 26 July 2004. > > Among those committed to understanding the mind as the work of natural > selection, there is a sense that the time has come: we are now > beginning to see what we really are. Two major propositions have > emerged, sustained by a construction boom in Darwinian theory and the > confidence that supporting data will increasingly be delivered in hard > genetic currency. One is that human nature is evolved and universal; > the other is that variations in personality and mental capabilities > are substantially inherited. The first speaks of the species and the > second about individuals. That leaves society - and here a third big > idea is taking shape. In two words, inequality kills. > The phrase (which is that of Richard Wilkinson, one of the leading > researchers in the field) sticks out from current consensus like a > sore thumb. For the most part, the major biological ideas concerning > human nature and mental capabilities are seen to confirm the way the > world has turned out. In a world so seemingly short of serious > alternatives to the way it is currently arranged, that is only as > expected. But what might be the biggest biological idea of all, in > terms of its implications for human health and happiness, shows the > world in a very different light. It finds that society has a profound > influence over the length and quality of individuals' lives. The data > are legion and the message from them is clear: unequal societies are > unhealthy societies. They are unhealthy not just in the strict sense > but also in the wider one, that they are hostile, suspicious, > antagonistic societies. > The most celebrated studies in this school of thought are those > conducted among Whitehall civil servants by Michael Marmot, whose > recent book Status Syndrome presents his ideas in popular form. He and > his colleagues found a steady gradient in rates of death between the > lowest and the highest ranks of the civil service hierarchy. Top civil > servants were less likely to die of heart disease than their immediate > subordinates, and so on down the ladder; at the bottom, the lowest > grades were four times more likely to die than the uppermost. The key > features of these findings were that the gradient was continuous, and > that only about a third of the effect vanished when account was taken > of the usual lifestyle suspects such as smoking and fatty food. This > influence upon life and death affected everybody in the hierarchy, > according to their position in it. Differences in wealth were an > implausible cause in themselves, for most of the civil servants were > comfortably off and even the lowest paid were not poor. The fatal > differences were in status. > What goes for Whitehall seems to go for the world. In rich countries, > death rates appear to be related to the differences between incomes, > rather than to absolute income levels. The more unequally wealth is > distributed, the higher homicide rates are likely to be. Although the > findings about income inequality are controversial, the broad picture > is consistent; and remains so if softer criteria than death are > measured, like trust or social cohesion. Inequality promotes > hostility, frustrates trust and damages health. > It is hard to make sense of these findings outside a framework based > on the idea of an evolved psychology. Understanding humans as evolved > social beings, however, made what we are by the selective pressures of > life in groups of intelligent beings, it is easy to see that our minds > and bodies depend upon our relations with our kind. These relations > assume central importance for our health once economic development has > minimised the dangers of infectious disease and relegated starvation > to history. > Studies of baboons, social primates obliged by their nature to form > hierarchies, tell the same story. A state of subordination is > stressful; such stress may put the body into a mode that is vital in > emergencies but corrosive as a permanent condition, interfering with > the immune system and increasing the risk of heart disease. > Conversely, human relationships formed on a broadly equal basis may > support the immune system and promote health. An American researcher, > Sheldon Cohen, demonstrated this by dripping cold viruses into > volunteers' noses, and then asking them about the range and frequency > of their social relationships. The more connections they had - with > acquaintances, colleagues, neighbours and fellow club members as well > as with nearest and dearest - the less likely they were to develop > colds. > The relationship between the length of life and its everyday quality > is the relationship between its biological and social dimensions, > which demands an evolutionary explanation; and the findings seem to > demand egalitarian measures. It's an unfamiliar combination. But > Darwinian readings of the data on health and equality are not > incompatible with claims that humans are innately unequal. They do, > however, lead to markedly different views of how to make the best of > people. > So do the prior ethical commitments that evolutionary thinkers bring > to their projects. In his book The Blank Slate, having stated the case > for the substantial innateness of all human characteristics and their > imperviousness to parental influence, the psychologist Steven Pinker > devotes a chapter to denouncing the past century's art and its > associated discourses. Folk wisdom and popular taste are right, he > affirms; `elite art' is perverse and wrong. The argument is built upon > the idea that we all share an evolved human nature, but it would not > be terribly difficult to remove the Darwinian passages and produce a > standard-issue comment piece for those pages of right-leaning > newspapers that are devoted to castigating the liberal elite. > Pinker turns his moral compass to take bearings on literary reference > points such as 1984, that affirm the individual and condemn attempts > to impose equality upon humankind's natural inequality. At a > fundamental level, modern Darwinism encourages individualism, for it > holds that evolutionary processes act on individual organisms rather > than upon groups of organisms. It makes no particularly strong > predictions about variations among individual human minds. That part > of the picture comes from the behaviour geneticists, who compare > identical twins with fraternal twins (or study their prize specimens, > identical twins who have been reared apart) and conclude that a large > proportion of the variation between individuals' personality traits, > temperaments and intelligence is due to inherited differences. Such > findings readily lend themselves to a view of the world which attaches > great importance to allowing individuals to fulfil their potential, > while regarding social programmes to reduce inequalities as vain at > best. Equality of opportunity is a fundamental principle; equality of > outcome is a pernicious fantasy. > The result is an upbeat fatalism; upbeat about the prospects for > scientific understanding of human psychology, fatalistic about the > prospects that society might be improved by such understanding ... and > upbeat, also, in the confidence that society needs no radical > alteration. Many of those who dislike such visions collude in them, by > acquiescing in the assumption that the effects of environments can be > altered but those of genes cannot, and by failing to recognise the > words `tend to'. The big idea that provides much of the driving force > for evolutionary psychology, the project to describe a universal human > nature, is that the sexes have different reproductive interests. The > sex which invests the most in reproduction will be the one which takes > more care in its choice of mates. Among humans, this implies that > women will tend to be more discriminating than males in their choice > of partners. It also implies that men and women will have different > emotional propensities - as Stephen Jay Gould put it, conceding the > central principle of evolutionary psychology in the very act of > deploring the neo-Darwinian school. It does not imply that every woman > will be more circumspect in choice of partners than every man, or that > every man will be readier to take risks than every woman, any more > than the tendency for men to be taller than women means that all men > are taller than all women. Through the widespread failure to recognise > that evolved behaviours and ways of thinking are tendencies, > evolutionary psychology has determinism thrust upon it. > In the application of evolutionary perspectives to health and > equality, however, the prospect of a better society - or at least of > better communities or workplaces - is unmistakeable. This way of > understanding human nature has the qualities that have marked great > Darwinian ideas since the Origin of Species: it is profound in its > implications, potentially transformative, and challenges existing > wisdom. On one hand, it calls into question the idea that equality of > opportunity should be pursued without regard for equality of outcome. > On the other, it goes beyond the mechanistic assumption that the task > of `progressive' politics is to ensure that the least well off have > enough, emphasising that how much is enough depends on how much others > have. It replaces vestigial sentiments about the abstract virtue of > co-ops and community spirit with data about life and death, implying > that we would all (or almost all) be healthier and happier if we were > prepared to share more of what we have. It speaks to the world we live > in, where want is marginal but trust is precarious. > In Richard Wilkinson's words, it is `the science of social justice'. > Like other big evolutionary ideas, though, it may be honoured more by > denial than by engagement. > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sun Aug 8 18:51:55 2004 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 08 Aug 2004 12:51:55 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] Eureka: Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human behavior In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20040808111411.00b67080@incoming.verizon.net> References: <5.2.1.1.0.20040808111411.00b67080@incoming.verizon.net> Message-ID: <4116764B.3070206@solution-consulting.com> Paul, Ehrlich has been predicting gloom and doom all his career, and has always been wrong. How is it he doesn't have more humilty? Lynn Werbos, Dr. Paul J. wrote: > At 11:51 AM 8/7/2004 -0400, Premise Checker wrote: > >> Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess >> human behavior >> http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-08/su-ecf072804.php >> 4.8.1 >> Contact: Mark Shwartz >> [2]mshwartz at stanford.edu >> 650-723-9296 >> [3]Stanford University >> >> Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess >> human behavior >> >> Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich is urging fellow >> ecologists to join with social scientists to form an international >> panel that will discuss and recommend changes in the way human beings >> treat one another and the environment. > > > > Ehrlich came to NSF a couple of years ago. > > He wanted to talk about CO2 -- and, implicitly, the big new glorious > center at Stanford > that is supposed to address such environmental problems. > > I still remember the experience of hearing the talk. > > Initial hope as he said: "we can't just treat this as research into > how bad the problem > is. we need research into what can be done to solve the problem. Thus > we need to > broaden our approach to make it more decision-oriented and > crossdisciplinary..." > > .. > > But then:" So we need to work more with political scientists and > lawyers..." > > The oil dependency problem looks scarier every time I look one step > deeper. > And it correlates very closely with the CO2 problem. One thing is > clear -- > lawyers alone have absolutely no hope of locating the real world here. > Without some understanding of technologies and numbers it is hopeless. > Kyoto by itself, for example, is a high-price Gucci fig leaf that > covers almost nothing. > > Best, > > Paul > > (not representing anyone...) > > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Aug 8 18:58:56 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2004 11:58:56 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Eureka: Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human behavior Message-ID: <01C47D3F.161086D0.shovland@mindspring.com> I think the fact that Kerry is talking about "alternate" energy is a good indicator of where mass sentiment is- near the "critical mass" point. Politicians follow as much (more?) as they lead. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Sunday, August 08, 2004 11:52 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Eureka: Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human behavior Paul, Ehrlich has been predicting gloom and doom all his career, and has always been wrong. How is it he doesn't have more humilty? Lynn From paul.werbos at verizon.net Sun Aug 8 22:02:02 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Sun, 08 Aug 2004 18:02:02 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Eureka: Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human behavior In-Reply-To: References: <5.2.1.1.0.20040808111411.00b67080@incoming.verizon.net> <5.2.1.1.0.20040808111411.00b67080@incoming.verizon.net> Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20040808175753.00ba6e80@incoming.verizon.net> At 11:51 AM 8/8/2004 -0400, Premise Checker wrote: >Paul, Steve just spoke of alternative energy sources and named them. > >The most important, and most thankless, function of the economist is to >turn problems into non-problems. Oil is a non-problem. All that will >happen is that oil will be more expensive. As price goes up, the quantity >demanded goes down. Substitutes will be found, as long as men are free to >find and invent them, and will be marketed, as long as men are free to >market them. > >Economists do not speak of the "demand" for oil (or anything else) without >reference to price. They (we, since I'm one) speak of a demand *function*, >which gives the *quantity* demanded as a *function* of price. The *law of >demand*, the most important law in economics, is that the slope of the >demand *function* is negative: as price increases, the quantity demanded >decreases. I also took economics one -- and the follow-on courses that were a bit more precise. The claim is that a perfect market system yields a Pareto optimal solution. If the case is overstated a bit (ignoring distributional aspects), this means that it provides a least-pain way of allocating pain. But it's not a perpetual motion machine. There is no upper bound on how much pain there can be, even if optimally allocated. Concrete understanding of the concrete realities of energy today is not nearly so reassuring as the words in the protected islands of culture which have yet to have it shoved in their face. (Reminds me of the words that the Shah and his friends told each other a few years back, that many people are starting to remember..) Best of luck to us all... >Actually, it is better to speak of the quantity demanded per unit of time, >but I think you get the general idea. Alas, few laymen, mediamen, or >pundits do. > >I can only guess what substitutes will be made, or whether total energy >use will go down, put the point is that men will adjust to rising prices. >Think what the price of whale oil, the main source of indoor lighting, >would be if electricity hadn't come along. > >Frank > >On 2004-08-08, Werbos, Dr. Paul J. opined [message unchanged below]: > >>At 11:51 AM 8/7/2004 -0400, Premise Checker wrote: >>>Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human >>>behavior >>>http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-08/su-ecf072804.php >>>4.8.1 >>> Contact: Mark Shwartz >>> [2]mshwartz at stanford.edu >>> 650-723-9296 >>> [3]Stanford University >>>Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human >>>behavior >>> Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich is urging fellow >>> ecologists to join with social scientists to form an international >>> panel that will discuss and recommend changes in the way human beings >>> treat one another and the environment. >> >> >>Ehrlich came to NSF a couple of years ago. >> >>He wanted to talk about CO2 -- and, implicitly, the big new glorious >>center at Stanford >>that is supposed to address such environmental problems. >> >>I still remember the experience of hearing the talk. >> >>Initial hope as he said: "we can't just treat this as research into how >>bad the problem is. we need research into what can be done to solve the >>problem. Thus we need to broaden our approach to make it more >>decision-oriented and crossdisciplinary..." >> >>.. >> >>But then:" So we need to work more with political scientists and lawyers..." >> >>The oil dependency problem looks scarier every time I look one step deeper. >>And it correlates very closely with the CO2 problem. One thing is clear -- >>lawyers alone have absolutely no hope of locating the real world here. >>Without some understanding of technologies and numbers it is hopeless. >>Kyoto by itself, for example, is a high-price Gucci fig leaf that covers >>almost nothing. >> >>Best, >> >>Paul >> >>(not representing anyone...) >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Aug 8 22:18:44 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2004 15:18:44 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Eureka: Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human behavior Message-ID: <01C47D5A.FF330980.shovland@mindspring.com> Paul, would you agree that the downside risk could be described as "overshoot and collapse." That is, if we go too long before beginning an orderly transition to a lower-energy and alternate energy future then we will reach a point where the transition will be chaotic, with great suffering for many? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Werbos, Dr. Paul J. [SMTP:paul.werbos at verizon.net] Sent: Sunday, August 08, 2004 3:02 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list; The new improved paleopsych list Cc: World Transhumanist Ass.; Psychology at WTL Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Eureka: Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human behavior At 11:51 AM 8/8/2004 -0400, Premise Checker wrote: >Paul, Steve just spoke of alternative energy sources and named them. > >The most important, and most thankless, function of the economist is to >turn problems into non-problems. Oil is a non-problem. All that will >happen is that oil will be more expensive. As price goes up, the quantity >demanded goes down. Substitutes will be found, as long as men are free to >find and invent them, and will be marketed, as long as men are free to >market them. > >Economists do not speak of the "demand" for oil (or anything else) without >reference to price. They (we, since I'm one) speak of a demand *function*, >which gives the *quantity* demanded as a *function* of price. The *law of >demand*, the most important law in economics, is that the slope of the >demand *function* is negative: as price increases, the quantity demanded >decreases. I also took economics one -- and the follow-on courses that were a bit more precise. The claim is that a perfect market system yields a Pareto optimal solution. If the case is overstated a bit (ignoring distributional aspects), this means that it provides a least-pain way of allocating pain. But it's not a perpetual motion machine. There is no upper bound on how much pain there can be, even if optimally allocated. Concrete understanding of the concrete realities of energy today is not nearly so reassuring as the words in the protected islands of culture which have yet to have it shoved in their face. (Reminds me of the words that the Shah and his friends told each other a few years back, that many people are starting to remember..) Best of luck to us all... >Actually, it is better to speak of the quantity demanded per unit of time, >but I think you get the general idea. Alas, few laymen, mediamen, or >pundits do. > >I can only guess what substitutes will be made, or whether total energy >use will go down, put the point is that men will adjust to rising prices. >Think what the price of whale oil, the main source of indoor lighting, >would be if electricity hadn't come along. > >Frank > >On 2004-08-08, Werbos, Dr. Paul J. opined [message unchanged below]: > >>At 11:51 AM 8/7/2004 -0400, Premise Checker wrote: >>>Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human >>>behavior >>>http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-08/su-ecf072804.php >>>4.8.1 >>> Contact: Mark Shwartz >>> [2]mshwartz at stanford.edu >>> 650-723-9296 >>> [3]Stanford University >>>Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human >>>behavior >>> Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich is urging fellow >>> ecologists to join with social scientists to form an international >>> panel that will discuss and recommend changes in the way human beings >>> treat one another and the environment. >> >> >>Ehrlich came to NSF a couple of years ago. >> >>He wanted to talk about CO2 -- and, implicitly, the big new glorious >>center at Stanford >>that is supposed to address such environmental problems. >> >>I still remember the experience of hearing the talk. >> >>Initial hope as he said: "we can't just treat this as research into how >>bad the problem is. we need research into what can be done to solve the >>problem. Thus we need to broaden our approach to make it more >>decision-oriented and crossdisciplinary..." >> >>.. >> >>But then:" So we need to work more with political scientists and lawyers..." >> >>The oil dependency problem looks scarier every time I look one step deeper. >>And it correlates very closely with the CO2 problem. One thing is clear -- >>lawyers alone have absolutely no hope of locating the real world here. >>Without some understanding of technologies and numbers it is hopeless. >>Kyoto by itself, for example, is a high-price Gucci fig leaf that covers >>almost nothing. >> >>Best, >> >>Paul >> >>(not representing anyone...) >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sun Aug 8 23:25:33 2004 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 08 Aug 2004 17:25:33 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] energy future & depolymerization (LONG!) In-Reply-To: <01C47D25.7B016F10.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C47D25.7B016F10.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <4116B66D.8040705@solution-consulting.com> Steve's link and the Ehrlich material reminded me of a recent discussion on another forum on thermal depolymerization. Disclaimer: My brother, the professor of Chemical Engineering, says the numbers in the article below are bogus. The concept is fascinating, namely that if we convert all the existing carbon in the current system into fuel, we don't increase CO2 in the atmosphere, since it is a closed loop. Only by burning fossil fuels would we continue to increase CO2. For your consideration. Lynn Steve wrote: >Start here: > >http://www.homepower.com/ >Steve Hovland > > This discussion is from: http://forums.biodieselnow.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=829&SearchTerms=thermo,depolymerization DISCOVER Vol. 24 No. 5 (May 2003) Table of Contents Anything into Oil Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year By Brad Lemley Photography by Tony Law Gory refuse, from a Butterball Turkey plant in Carthage, Missouri, will no longer go to waste. Each day 200 tons of turkey offal will be carted to the first industrial-scale thermal depolymerization plant, recently completed in an adjacent lot, and be transformed into various useful products, including 600 barrels of light oil. In an industrial park in Philadelphia sits a new machine that can change almost anything into oil. Really. "This is a solution to three of the biggest problems facing mankind," says Brian Appel, chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies, the company that built this pilot plant and has just completed its first industrial-size installation in Missouri. "This process can deal with the world's waste. It can supplement our dwindling supplies of oil. And it can slow down global warming." Pardon me, says a reporter, shivering in the frigid dawn, but that sounds too good to be true. "Everybody says that," says Appel. He is a tall, affable entrepreneur who has assembled a team of scientists, former government leaders, and deep-pocketed investors to develop and sell what he calls the thermal depolymerization process, or TDP. The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores. According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products, all valuable and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing. Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water. While no one plans to put people into a thermal depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation could become a prime feedstock. "There is no reason why we can't turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil," says engineer Terry Adams, a project consultant. So the city of Philadelphia is in discussion with Changing World Technologies to begin doing exactly that. "The potential is unbelievable," says Michael Roberts, a senior chemical engineer for the Gas Technology Institute, an energy research group. "You're not only cleaning up waste; you're talking about distributed generation of oil all over the world." "This is not an incremental change. This is a big, new step," agrees Alf Andreassen, a venture capitalist with the Paladin Capital Group and a former Bell Laboratories director. The offal-derived oil, is chemically almost identical to a number two fuel oil used to heat homes. Andreassen and others anticipate that a large chunk of the world's agricultural, industrial, and municipal waste may someday go into thermal depolymerization machines scattered all over the globe. If the process works as well as its creators claim, not only would most toxic waste problems become history, so would imported oil. Just converting all the U.S. agricultural waste into oil and gas would yield the energy equivalent of 4 billion barrels of oil annually. In 2001 the United States imported 4.2 billion barrels of oil. Referring to U.S. dependence on oil from the volatile Middle East, R. James Woolsey, former CIA director and an adviser to Changing World Technologies, says, "This technology offers a beginning of a way away from this." But first things first. Today, here at the plant at Philadelphia's Naval Business Center, the experimental feedstock is turkey processing-plant waste: feathers, bones, skin, blood, fat, guts. A forklift dumps 1,400 pounds of the nasty stuff into the machine's first stage, a 350-horsepower grinder that masticates it into gray brown slurry. From there it flows into a series of tanks and pipes, which hum and hiss as they heat, digest, and break down the mixture. Two hours later, a white-jacketed technician turns a spigot. Out pours a honey-colored fluid, steaming a bit in the cold warehouse as it fills a glass beaker. It really is a lovely oil. "The longest carbon chains are C-18 or so," says Appel, admiring the liquid. "That's a very light oil. It is essentially the same as a mix of half fuel oil, half gasoline." Private investors, who have chipped in $40 million to develop the process, aren't the only ones who are impressed. The federal government has granted more than $12 million to push the work along. "We will be able to make oil for $8 to $12 a barrel," says Paul Baskis, the inventor of the process. "We are going to be able to switch to a carbohydrate economy." Making oil and gas from hydrocarbon-based waste is a trick that Earth mastered long ago. Most crude oil comes from one-celled plants and animals that die, settle to ocean floors, decompose, and are mashed by sliding tectonic plates, a process geologists call subduction. Under pressure and heat, the dead creatures' long chains of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon-bearing molecules, known as polymers, decompose into short-chain petroleum hydrocarbons. However, Earth takes its own sweet time doing this----generally thousands or millions of years----because subterranean heat and pressure changes are chaotic. Thermal depolymerization machines turbocharge the process by precisely raising heat and pressure to levels that break the feedstock's long molecular bonds. Many scientists have tried to convert organic solids to liquid fuel using waste products before, but their efforts have been notoriously inefficient. "The problem with most of these methods was that they tried to do the transformation in one step----superheat the material to drive off the water and simultaneously break down the molecules," says Appel. That leads to profligate energy use and makes it possible for hazardous substances to pollute the finished product. Very wet waste----and much of the world's waste is wet----is particularly difficult to process efficiently because driving off the water requires so much energy. Usually, the Btu content in the resulting oil or gas barely exceeds the amount needed to make the stuff. That's the challenge that Baskis, a microbiologist and inventor who lives in Rantoul, Illinois, confronted in the late 1980s. He says he "had a flash" of insight about how to improve the basic ideas behind another inventor's waste-reforming process. "The prototype I saw produced a heavy, burned oil," recalls Baskis. "I drew up an improvement and filed the first patents." He spent the early 1990s wooing investors and, in 1996, met Appel, a former commodities trader. "I saw what this could be and took over the patents," says Appel, who formed a partnership with the Gas Technology Institute and had a demonstration plant up and running by 1999. Thermal depolymerization, Appel says, has proved to be 85 percent energy efficient for complex feedstocks, such as turkey offal: "That means for every 100 Btus in the feedstock, we use only 15 Btus to run the process." He contends the efficiency is even better for relatively dry raw materials, such as plastics. So how does it work? In the cold Philadelphia warehouse, Appel waves a long arm at the apparatus, which looks surprisingly low tech: a tangle of pressure vessels, pipes, valves, and heat exchangers terminating in storage tanks. It resembles the oil refineries that stretch to the horizon on either side of the New Jersey Turnpike, and in part, that's exactly what it is. Appel strides to a silver gray pressure tank that is 20 feet long, three feet wide, heavily insulated, and wrapped with electric heating coils. He raps on its side. "The chief difference in our process is that we make water a friend rather than an enemy," he says. "The other processes all tried to drive out water. We drive it in, inside this tank, with heat and pressure. We super-hydrate the material." Thus temperatures and pressures need only be modest, because water helps to convey heat into the feedstock. "We're talking about temperatures of 500 degrees Fahrenheit and pressures of about 600 pounds for most organic material----not at all extreme or energy intensive. And the cooking times are pretty short, usually about 15 minutes." Once the organic soup is heated and partially depolymerized in the reactor vessel, phase two begins. "We quickly drop the slurry to a lower pressure," says Appel, pointing at a branching series of pipes. The rapid depressurization releases about 90 percent of the slurry's free water. Dehydration via depressurization is far cheaper in terms of energy consumed than is heating and boiling off the water, particularly because no heat is wasted. "We send the flashed-off water back up there," Appel says, pointing to a pipe that leads to the beginning of the process, "to heat the incoming stream." At this stage, the minerals----in turkey waste, they come mostly from bones----settle out and are shunted to storage tanks. Rich in calcium and magnesium, the dried brown powder "is a perfect balanced fertilizer," Appel says. The remaining concentrated organic soup gushes into a second-stage reactor similar to the coke ovens used to refine oil into gasoline. "This technology is as old as the hills," says Appel, grinning broadly. The reactor heats the soup to about 900 degrees Fahrenheit to further break apart long molecular chains. Next, in vertical distillation columns, hot vapor flows up, condenses, and flows out from different levels: gases from the top of the column, light oils from the upper middle, heavier oils from the middle, water from the lower middle, and powdered carbon----used to manufacture tires, filters, and printer toners----from the bottom. "Gas is expensive to transport, so we use it on-site in the plant to heat the process," Appel says. The oil, minerals, and carbon are sold to the highest bidders. Depending on the feedstock and the cooking and coking times, the process can be tweaked to make other specialty chemicals that may be even more profitable than oil. Turkey offal, for example, can be used to produce fatty acids for soap, tires, paints, and lubricants. Polyvinyl chloride, or PVC----the stuff of house siding, wallpapers, and plastic pipes----yields hydrochloric acid, a relatively benign and industrially valuable chemical used to make cleaners and solvents. "That's what's so great about making water a friend," says Appel. "The hydrogen in water combines with the chlorine in PVC to make it safe. If you burn PVC [in a municipal-waste incinerator], you get dioxin----very toxic." Brian Appel, CEO of Changing World Technologies, strolls through a thermal depolymerization plant in Philadelphia. Experiments at the pilot facility revealed that the process is scalable----plants can sprawl over acres and handle 4,000 tons of waste a day or be "small enough to go on the back of a flatbed truck" and handle just one ton daily, says Appel. The technicians here have spent three years feeding different kinds of waste into their machinery to formulate recipes. In a little trailer next to the plant, Appel picks up a handful of one-gallon plastic bags sent by a potential customer in Japan. The first is full of ground-up appliances, each piece no larger than a pea. "Put a computer and a refrigerator into a grinder, and that's what you get," he says, shaking the bag. "It's PVC, wood, fiberglass, metal, just a mess of different things. This process handles mixed waste beautifully." Next to the ground-up appliances is a plastic bucket of municipal sewage. Appel pops the lid and instantly regrets it. "Whew," he says. "That is nasty." Experimentation revealed that different waste streams require different cooking and coking times and yield different finished products. "It's a two-step process, and you do more in step one or step two depending on what you are processing," Terry Adams says. "With the turkey guts, you do the lion's share in the first stage. With mixed plastics, most of the breakdown happens in the second stage." The oil-to-mineral ratios vary too. Plastic bottles, for example, yield copious amounts of oil, while tires yield more minerals and other solids. So far, says Adams, "nothing hazardous comes out from any feedstock we try." "The only thing this process can't handle is nuclear waste," Appel says. "If it contains carbon, we can do it." This Philadelphia pilot plant can handle only seven tons of waste a day, but 1,054 miles to the west, in Carthage, Missouri, about 100 yards from one of ConAgra Foods' massive Butterball Turkey plants, sits the company's first commercial-scale thermal depolymerization plant. The $20 million facility, scheduled to go online any day, is expected to digest more than 200 tons of turkey-processing waste every 24 hours. The north side of Carthage smells like Thanksgiving all the time. At the Butterball plant, workers slaughter, pluck, parcook, and package 30,000 turkeys each workday, filling the air with the distinctive tang of boiling bird. A factory tour reveals the grisly realities of large- scale poultry processing. Inside, an endless chain of hanging carcasses clanks past knife- wielding laborers who slash away. Outside, a tanker truck idles, full to the top with fresh turkey blood. For many years, ConAgra Foods has trucked the plant's waste----feathers, organs, and other nonusable parts----to a rendering facility where it was ground and dried to make animal feed, fertilizer, and other chemical products. But bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease, can spread among cattle from recycled feed, and although no similar disease has been found in poultry, regulators are becoming skittish about feeding animals to animals. In Europe the practice is illegal for all livestock. Since 1997, the United States has prohibited the feeding of most recycled animal waste to cattle. Ultimately, the specter of European-style mad-cow regulations may kick-start the acceptance of thermal depolymerization. "In Europe, there are mountains of bones piling up," says Alf Andreassen. "When recycling waste into feed stops in this country, it will change everything." Because depolymerization takes apart materials at the molecular level, Appel says, it is "the perfect process for destroying pathogens." On a wet afternoon in Carthage, he smiles at the new plant----an artless assemblage of gray and dun-colored buildings----as if it were his favorite child. "This plant will make 10 tons of gas per day, which will go back into the system to make heat to power the system," he says. "It will make 21,000 gallons of water, which will be clean enough to discharge into a municipal sewage system. Pathological vectors will be completely gone. It will make 11 tons of minerals and 600 barrels of oil, high-quality stuff, the same specs as a number two heating oil." He shakes his head almost as if he can't believe it. "It's amazing. The Environmental Protection Agency doesn't even consider us waste handlers. We are actually manufacturers----that's what our permit says. This process changes the whole industrial equation. Waste goes from a cost to a profit." He watches as burly men in coveralls weld and grind the complex loops of piping. A group of 15 investors and corporate advisers, including Howard Buffett, son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, stroll among the sparks and hissing torches, listening to a tour led by plant manager Don Sanders. A veteran of the refinery business, Sanders emphasizes that once the pressurized water is flashed off, "the process is similar to oil refining. The equipment, the procedures, the safety factors, the maintenance----it's all proven technology." And it will be profitable, promises Appel. "We've done so much testing in Philadelphia, we already know the costs," he says. "This is our first-out plant, and we estimate we'll make oil at $15 a barrel. In three to five years, we'll drop that to $10, the same as a medium-size oil exploration and production company. And it will get cheaper from there." "We've got a lot of confidence in this," Buffett says. "I represent ConAgra's investment. We wouldn't be doing this if we didn't anticipate success." Buffett isn't alone. Appel has lined up federal grant money to help build demonstration plants to process chicken offal and manure in Alabama and crop residuals and grease in Nevada. Also in the works are plants to process turkey waste and manure in Colorado and pork and cheese waste in Italy. He says the first generation of depolymerization centers will be up and running in 2005. By then it should be clear whether the technology is as miraculous as its backers claim. ------------------------- EUREKA: Chemistry, not alchemy, turns (A) turkey offal----guts, skin, bones, fat, blood, and feathers----into a variety of useful products. After the first-stage heat-and-pressure reaction, fats, proteins, and carbohydrates break down into (B) carboxylic oil, which is composed of fatty acids, carbohydrates, and amino acids. The second-stage reaction strips off the fatty acids' carboxyl group (a carbon atom, two oxygen atoms, and a hydrogen atom) and breaks the remaining hydrocarbon chains into smaller fragments, yielding (C) a light oil. This oil can be used as is, or further distilled (using a larger version of the bench-top distiller in the background) into lighter fuels such as (D) naphtha, (E) gasoline, and (F) kerosene. The process also yields (G) fertilizer-grade minerals derived mostly from bones and (H) industrially useful carbon black. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Garbage In, Oil Out Feedstock is funneled into a grinder and mixed with water to create a slurry that is pumped into the first-stage reactor, where heat and pressure partially break apart long molecular chains. The resulting organic soup flows into a flash vessel where pressure drops dramatically, liberating some of the water, which returns back upstream to preheat the flow into the first-stage reactor. In the second-stage reactor, the remaining organic material is subjected to more intense heat, continuing the breakup of molecular chains. The resulting hot vapor then goes into vertical distillation tanks, which separate it into gases, light oils, heavy oils, water, and solid carbon. The gases are burned on-site to make heat to power the process, and the water, which is pathogen free, goes to a municipal waste plant. The oils and carbon are deposited in storage tanks, ready for sale. ---- Brad Lemley -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A Boon to Oil and Coal Companies One might expect fossil-fuel companies to fight thermal depolymerization. If the process can make oil out of waste, why would anyone bother to get it out of the ground? But switching to an energy economy based entirely on reformed waste will be a long process, requiring the construction of thousands of thermal depolymerization plants. In the meantime, thermal depolymerization can make the petroleum industry itself cleaner and more profitable, says John Riordan, president and CEO of the Gas Technology Institute, an industry research organization. Experiments at the Philadelphia thermal depolymerization plant have converted heavy crude oil, shale, and tar sands into light oils, gases, and graphite-type carbon. "When you refine petroleum, you end up with a heavy solid-waste product that's a big problem," Riordan says. "This technology will convert these waste materials into natural gas, oil, and carbon. It will fit right into the existing infrastructure." Appel says a modified version of thermal depolymerization could be used to inject steam into underground tar-sand deposits and then refine them into light oils at the surface, making this abundant, difficult-to-access resource far more available. But the coal industry may become thermal depolymerization's biggest fossil-fuel beneficiary. "We can clean up coal dramatically," says Appel. So far, experiments show the process can extract sulfur, mercury, naphtha, and olefins----all salable commodities----from coal, making it burn hotter and cleaner. Pretreating with thermal depolymerization also makes coal more friable, so less energy is needed to crush it before combustion in electricity-generating plants. ---- B.L. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Can Thermal Depolymerization Slow Global Warming? If the thermal depolymerization process WORKS AS Claimed, it will clean up waste and generate new sources of energy. But its backers contend it could also stem global warming, which sounds iffy. After all, burning oil creates global warming, doesn't it? Carbon is the major chemical constituent of most organic matter----plants take it in; animals eat plants, die, and decompose; and plants take it back in, ad infinitum. Since the industrial revolution, human beings burning fossil fuels have boosted concentrations of atmospheric carbon more than 30 percent, disrupting the ancient cycle. According to global-warming theory, as carbon in the form of carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere, it traps solar radiation, which warms the atmosphere----and, some say, disrupts the planet's ecosystems. But if there were a global shift to thermal depolymerization technologies, belowground carbon would remain there. The accoutrements of the civilized world----domestic animals and plants, buildings, artificial objects of all kinds----would then be regarded as temporary carbon sinks. At the end of their useful lives, they would be converted in thermal depolymerization machines into short-chain fuels, fertilizers, and industrial raw materials, ready for plants or people to convert them back into long chains again. So the only carbon used would be that which already existed above the surface; it could no longer dangerously accumulate in the atmosphere. "Suddenly, the whole built world just becomes a temporary carbon sink," says Paul Baskis, inventor of the thermal depolymerization process. "We would be honoring the balance of nature." ---- B.L. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- RELATED WEB SITES: To learn more about the thermal depolymerization process, visit Changing World Technologies' Web site: www.changingworldtech.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sun Aug 8 23:31:15 2004 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 08 Aug 2004 17:31:15 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] depolymerization doubts (energy future) In-Reply-To: <01C47D25.7B016F10.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C47D25.7B016F10.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <4116B7C3.9080107@solution-consulting.com> My smart brother (prof, chem engineering, expert in mathematical modeling of chemical processes) says the following about thermal depolymerization in regards to the Discover article: Dear Lynn, Sorry for the slow reply. I've been busy trying to finish sections of the book I'm working on. I just read the article you attached and read some (not all) the comments on the web pages. Random thoughts: Depolymerization is indeed possible and has been performed on different materials for a long time. Breaking chemical bonds takes a fixed amount of energy. You can't cheat thermodynamics (at least you can't and get an A in my class). Therefore, I doubt the claim of 85% efficiency. I do not see how that can possibly be close to the correct number. The process they describe requires a good deal of mechanical and thermal energy. Even if you put water in (as they claim about making water your friend) then you still have to provide about 350 kJ/mol of energy to break a carbon-carbon bond. Hence, I can't see how you could get 85% efficiency. Maybe I'm wrong, but it would mean that you are only breaking about 15% of the bonds in the material that you are depolymerizing. That seems unlikely to produce "pure oil" as claimed. Could it work? Yes. Does it work as advertised? I doubt it. Maybe I'm wrong. There's really not enough information there to analyze the process. Water at high temperature and high pressure has been used to degrade organics before, but typically they use supercritical or near-critical water. This does not mean water that nags you to pick up your socks, but water that is near 650 K = 377 C = 710 F and 220 bar = 3200 PSI. Their process is at 500 F and 600 PSI. Still, I think you could do some fairly aggressive chemistry at those conditions that would require higher temperatures otherwise. The other thing that bothers me is this claim: Dehydration via depressurization is far cheaper in terms of energy consumed than is heating and boiling off the water, particularly because no heat is wasted. The fact is that it still costs energy to vaporize water. If you have to vaporize 1 kg of water it will take you about 2000 kJ, no matter how you do it. The heat of vaporization changes as a function of temperature, decreasing at higher temperatures. However, I don't see any way to cheat thermodynamics. If you don't vaporize the water, but instead separate it in a two-phase separator then you can do the separation for much less energy. I.e., you rely on the fact that oil and water don't mix and take the oil off the top of a gravitational separator or cyclone separator. End random thoughts. From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Aug 8 23:40:39 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2004 16:40:39 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] depolymerization doubts (energy future) Message-ID: <01C47D66.71354830.shovland@mindspring.com> In essence, no quick fix? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Sunday, August 08, 2004 4:31 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: [Paleopsych] depolymerization doubts (energy future) My smart brother (prof, chem engineering, expert in mathematical modeling of chemical processes) says the following about thermal depolymerization in regards to the Discover article: Dear Lynn, Sorry for the slow reply. I've been busy trying to finish sections of the book I'm working on. I just read the article you attached and read some (not all) the comments on the web pages. Random thoughts: Depolymerization is indeed possible and has been performed on different materials for a long time. Breaking chemical bonds takes a fixed amount of energy. You can't cheat thermodynamics (at least you can't and get an A in my class). Therefore, I doubt the claim of 85% efficiency. I do not see how that can possibly be close to the correct number. The process they describe requires a good deal of mechanical and thermal energy. Even if you put water in (as they claim about making water your friend) then you still have to provide about 350 kJ/mol of energy to break a carbon-carbon bond. Hence, I can't see how you could get 85% efficiency. Maybe I'm wrong, but it would mean that you are only breaking about 15% of the bonds in the material that you are depolymerizing. That seems unlikely to produce "pure oil" as claimed. Could it work? Yes. Does it work as advertised? I doubt it. Maybe I'm wrong. There's really not enough information there to analyze the process. Water at high temperature and high pressure has been used to degrade organics before, but typically they use supercritical or near-critical water. This does not mean water that nags you to pick up your socks, but water that is near 650 K = 377 C = 710 F and 220 bar = 3200 PSI. Their process is at 500 F and 600 PSI. Still, I think you could do some fairly aggressive chemistry at those conditions that would require higher temperatures otherwise. The other thing that bothers me is this claim: Dehydration via depressurization is far cheaper in terms of energy consumed than is heating and boiling off the water, particularly because no heat is wasted. The fact is that it still costs energy to vaporize water. If you have to vaporize 1 kg of water it will take you about 2000 kJ, no matter how you do it. The heat of vaporization changes as a function of temperature, decreasing at higher temperatures. However, I don't see any way to cheat thermodynamics. If you don't vaporize the water, but instead separate it in a two-phase separator then you can do the separation for much less energy. I.e., you rely on the fact that oil and water don't mix and take the oil off the top of a gravitational separator or cyclone separator. End random thoughts. _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From HowlBloom at aol.com Sun Aug 8 23:58:02 2004 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2004 19:58:02 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] Eureka: Ecologist calls for creation of an international pan... Message-ID: In a message dated 8/8/2004 6:02:48 PM Eastern Standard Time, paul.werbos at verizon.net writes: At 11:51 AM 8/8/2004 -0400, Premise Checker wrote: >The most important, and most thankless, function of the economist is to >turn problems into non-problems. Oil is a non-problem. All that will >happen is that oil will be more expensive. As price goes up, the quantity >demanded goes down. Substitutes will be found, as long as men are free to >find and invent them, and will be marketed, as long as men are free to >market them. > >Economists do not speak of the "demand" for oil (or anything else) without >reference to price. They (we, since I'm one) speak of a demand *function*, >which gives the *quantity* demanded as a *function* of price. The *law of >demand*, the most important law in economics, is that the slope of the >demand *function* is negative: as price increases, the quantity demanded >decreases. hb: this law isn't true and its inaccuracy may go to the heart of economics' failure as system for comprehending mass human behavior. By raising the price of some items you can increase their sales. Think Vuitton and Gucci. Why is this true? Because if you handle pricing right, if you set it sky-high, you can sell something that offers far more than the usual utilitarian values. You can offer prestige. How do you calculate factors like prestige and identity--key elements of almost anything we humans purchase--using standard economics? By the way, you referred to the price of whale oil. It was a prestige source of lighting in the 19th century. If the figures I found in my research for Reinventing Capitalism are right, whale oil sold for the equivalent of $200 a gallon. I also took economics one -- and the follow-on courses that were a bit more precise. The claim is that a perfect market system yields a Pareto optimal solution. If the case is overstated a bit (ignoring distributional aspects), this means that it provides a least-pain way of allocating pain. But it's not a perpetual motion machine. There is no upper bound on how much pain there can be, even if optimally allocated. Concrete understanding of the concrete realities of energy today is not nearly so reassuring as the words in the protected islands of culture which have yet to have it shoved in their face. (Reminds me of the words that the Shah and his friends told each other a few years back, that many people are starting to remember..) Best of luck to us all... >Actually, it is better to speak of the quantity demanded per unit of time, >but I think you get the general idea. Alas, few laymen, mediamen, or >pundits do. > >I can only guess what substitutes will be made, or whether total energy >use will go down, put the point is that men will adjust to rising prices. >Think what the price of whale oil, the main source of indoor lighting, >would be if electricity hadn't come along. > >Frank > >On 2004-08-08, Werbos, Dr. Paul J. opined [message unchanged below]: > >>At 11:51 AM 8/7/2004 -0400, Premise Checker wrote: >>>Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human >>>behavior >>>http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-08/su-ecf072804.php >>>4.8.1 >>> Contact: Mark Shwartz >>> [2]mshwartz at stanford.edu >>> 650-723-9296 >>> [3]Stanford University >>>Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human >>>behavior >>> Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich is urging fellow >>> ecologists to join with social scientists to form an international >>> panel that will discuss and recommend changes in the way human beings >>> treat one another and the environment. >> >> >>Ehrlich came to NSF a couple of years ago. >> >>He wanted to talk about CO2 -- and, implicitly, the big new glorious >>center at Stanford >>that is supposed to address such environmental problems. >> >>I still remember the experience of hearing the talk. >> >>Initial hope as he said: "we can't just treat this as research into how >>bad the problem is. we need research into what can be done to solve the >>problem. Thus we need to broaden our approach to make it more >>decision-oriented and crossdisciplinary..." >> >>.. >> >>But then:" So we need to work more with political scientists and lawyers..." >> >>The oil dependency problem looks scarier every time I look one step deeper. >>And it correlates very closely with the CO2 problem. One thing is clear -- >>lawyers alone have absolutely no hope of locating the real world here. >>Without some understanding of technologies and numbers it is hopeless. >>Kyoto by itself, for example, is a high-price Gucci fig leaf that covers >>almost nothing. >> >>Best, >> >>Paul >> >>(not representing anyone...) >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Aug 9 00:19:55 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2004 17:19:55 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Eureka: Ecologist calls for creation of an international pan... Message-ID: <01C47D6B.ECE52770.shovland@mindspring.com> It might be true to say that as the unit price increases the unit demand will tend to decrease because fewer people can afford something. Another law of economics that will fall is the one that says that as the price increases supply also increases. We will in the future see constant increases in oil prices and constant declines in the availability of oil. Many fields are already on tertiary recovery, and some reserves are too deep to be pumped. Increases in oil prices will tend to send resources in the direction of whatever-else-is-available, but those sources will be limited by our annual energy income from the sun. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Mon Aug 9 05:01:17 2004 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 08 Aug 2004 23:01:17 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] depolymerization doubts (energy future) In-Reply-To: <01C47D66.71354830.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C47D66.71354830.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <4117051D.7080100@solution-consulting.com> This depends on how this demo project in Missouri goes. They are supposed to be converting turkey guts to light crude oil, but I can't find actual results. There may be some propriatary info about the process they don't tell, and as my brother says, there isn't enough info to really piece together what they are doing. Interesting, and certainly attractive. Will it work? No data yet. Lynn Steve wrote: >In essence, no quick fix? > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Sunday, August 08, 2004 4:31 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: [Paleopsych] depolymerization doubts (energy future) > >My smart brother (prof, chem engineering, expert in mathematical >modeling of chemical processes) says the following about thermal >depolymerization in regards to the Discover article: > >Dear Lynn, > >Sorry for the slow reply. I've been busy trying to finish sections of the >book I'm working on. > >I just read the article you attached and read some (not all) the comments >on the web pages. > >Random thoughts: >Depolymerization is indeed possible and has been performed on different >materials for a long time. > >Breaking chemical bonds takes a fixed amount of energy. You can't cheat >thermodynamics (at least you can't and get an A in my class). Therefore, I >doubt the claim of 85% efficiency. I do not see how that can possibly be >close to the correct number. The process they describe requires a good >deal of mechanical and thermal energy. Even if you put water in (as they >claim about making water your friend) then you still have to provide about >350 kJ/mol of energy to break a carbon-carbon bond. Hence, I can't see how >you could get 85% efficiency. Maybe I'm wrong, but it would mean that you >are only breaking about 15% of the bonds in the material that you are >depolymerizing. That seems unlikely to produce "pure oil" as claimed. > >Could it work? Yes. Does it work as advertised? I doubt it. Maybe I'm >wrong. There's really not enough information there to analyze the process. > >Water at high temperature and high pressure has been used to degrade >organics before, but typically they use supercritical or near-critical >water. This does not mean water that nags you to pick up your socks, but >water that is near 650 K = 377 C = 710 F and 220 bar = 3200 PSI. Their >process is at 500 F and 600 PSI. Still, I think you could do some fairly >aggressive chemistry at those conditions that would require higher >temperatures otherwise. > >The other thing that bothers me is this claim: >Dehydration via depressurization is far cheaper in terms of energy >consumed than is heating and boiling off the water, particularly because >no heat is wasted. > >The fact is that it still costs energy to vaporize water. If you have to >vaporize 1 kg of water it will take you about 2000 kJ, no matter how you >do it. The heat of vaporization changes as a function of temperature, >decreasing at higher temperatures. However, I don't see any way to cheat >thermodynamics. > >If you don't vaporize the water, but instead separate it in a two-phase >separator then you can do the separation for much less energy. I.e., you >rely on the fact that oil and water don't mix and take the oil off the top >of a gravitational separator or cyclone separator. > >End random thoughts. > > > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Aug 9 05:07:24 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2004 22:07:24 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] The upcoming end of fossil fuels is... Message-ID: <01C47D94.15E382C0.shovland@mindspring.com> a) a potential catastrophe b) the next big thing c) a) and b) America is a country looking for something worth doing. The fickle finger of fate has delivered it: dry oil wells. Left to the improvisations of crisis managers, this will indeed be a huge catastrophe. But with with a little bit of initiative, it can be an opportunity that ushers in a new golden age. Where to start? In my small Minnesota hometown they have a diesel power plant that used to power Rock County when I was a kid. I remember the low rumble of the diesels in the hot summer air. That plant hasn't been used much for a long time, but they have kept it up "just in case." Well, just in case has just arrived. It's farm country out there. They can easily grow all kinds of things that can be squeezed for the oil needed to run that plant. And nitrogen-fixing bacteria can help grow the crops. If you don't know it, you will be pleased to hear that in southwest Minnesota they are building giant wind farms as fast as they can go. The US has been described as "the Saudi Arabia of Wind." I live in San Francisco now. They say that the water flowing in and out of the Golden Gate can produce more electricity than we can use. If we could build the bridge, we can build the turbines needed to tap that power. Just a few miles south of where I live is Burlingame, which sits in a valley that runs from the Bay to the ocean. During the afternoon winds of at least 30 mph blow through that valley, a great place for wind turbines. All around here there are engineers and programmers looking for something to do. How about control systems for alternative energy equipment? Remember Milorganite? Fertilizer made from sewage in Milwaukee. Sewage can also generate copious amount of methane which can be fed into existing pipelines. What do we do when we don't have petroleum to make plastics and what-all? Whole armies of chemists can be put to work creating alternatives. Hybrid cars are selling very quickly. What about the old stuff? Hydrogen conversion is possible, and during World War 2 many cars in Germany were converted to run on wood gas. What? You take a big tin can, attach the fuel line to one end, fill it full of blocks of wood, and light a small fire at the other end. Fuel cooks off. Works with coal too. Fluidized bed combustion makes it clean. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From mroele at hetnet.nl Mon Aug 9 14:18:45 2004 From: mroele at hetnet.nl (Marcel Roele) Date: Mon, 09 Aug 2004 16:18:45 +0200 Subject: [Paleopsych] pygmalion effect In-Reply-To: <410B0795.2030206@solution-consulting.com> References: <20040730194947.26499.qmail@web13424.mail.yahoo.com> <410B0795.2030206@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <411787C5.3090000@hetnet.nl> Sorry for my tardy response. The late Richard Snow made a meta analysis of 18 studies of effect of teacher expectancy on children's IQ. Excluding the methodologically flawed original Pygmalion study mentioned below, the other 17 (more sound) studies yielded a positive effect of less than 0.5 IQ points (R.E.Snow /Pygmalion and Intelligence? /Current Directions in Psychological Science 4 (1995): 169-171. Marcel Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. wrote: > Michael, > Good question. The original Pygmalion Effect was the subject of a 1968 > book (Pygmalion in the Classroom), by Rosenthal & Jacobson. As I > recall, Rosenthal was allowed by Jacobson to manipulate the > expectations of teachers in Jacobson's school (she was Principal). > Teachers were led, at the beginning of the year, to believe that > certain students were unusually gifted and should 'bloom' during that > year. By the end of the year they showed - if I recall correctly - a 4 > or 5 point increase in IQ (on the WISC, I believe, which is a gold > standard of IQ tests). Replications showed consistent IQ gains, but > Marcel suggests very small - no practical effect in a .5 group gain. I > can't find that number in my quick APA literature search. (Marcel, > citation???) > > Here is a synopsis: > http://www.teachers.net/FAQ/schoolhouse/bruno23.html > There are quite a few pages about the effect on the web. > > Subsequent research showed a consistent improvement when expectation > is manipulated, including apparently genuine differences between rats, > 7th graders, college students, and military recruits. Marcel seems to > have more of an expertise in this area, I am just going from my > memory. The effect has been pretty much taken over by business > consultants who have written a good deal on it. I don't hear of it in > education any more. (comments, Frank??? Karen???) > > Appreciative Inquiry has made a pretty big deal of the Pygmalion > effect, and as I review the literature they probably make more of it > than they should - typical for constructivists (grin, wink) since they > don't believe in Truth anyway. > > Some children, by the way, apparently are much more vulnerable to the > Pyg effect, being more field dependent (depending on social cues), > whereas the children more field independent were pretty much immune to > social expectations. The apparent active ingredients seem to have been > non-verbal expectancy, like the way the teacher would look towards the > supposedly gifted (randomly chosen) students when discussing difficult > material, asking questions, and so on. This apparently inspired the > students to try harder and master more material. > > Finally, the effect probably gets ignored because Rosenthal's results, > with kids, mice, college students, and so on, also shows that > Experimenter Bias is a huge effect. Related: Studies of > antidepressants funded by drug houses regularly show large effect > sizes; studies done independently show small to insignificant effect > size. MDs doing ratings regularly rate the drug patients as much more > improved than therapy patients; when patients rate themselves (using a > Beck, for example), the effect is reversed, therapy>drugs. So this > gets ignored because we don't like to think of ourselves as the source > of such high levels of Noise vs. Signal. > Lynn Johnson > Salt Lake City > > "We're all doctors here." > -- Woody Allen > > > Michael Christopher wrote: > >>>>However, Pygmalion effect (effect of expectations) >>>> >>>> >>is just 0.5 IQ points (based on serious studies, not >>anecdotes).<< >> >>--How were the studies done, exactly? >> >>michael >> >> >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From mroele at hetnet.nl Mon Aug 9 14:45:44 2004 From: mroele at hetnet.nl (Marcel Roele) Date: Mon, 09 Aug 2004 16:45:44 +0200 Subject: [Paleopsych] pygmalion effect In-Reply-To: <410B08C7.9000202@solution-consulting.com> References: <20040730194947.26499.qmail@web13424.mail.yahoo.com> <410B08C7.9000202@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <41178E18.4020407@hetnet.nl> Don't get me wrong. I do not want to belittle the effect of expectations on performance (not just positive, often also negative. Take European Championship soccer 2004 e.g. Portugal - host nation - lost twice against Greece - opening match and final; they'd probably won had they been able to play somewhere else. Netherlands in EC 2000 - also host nation - missed five penalty kicks in semi-final against Italy. On the other hand: South Korea - host nation of 2002 world championship, reached semi-final with a rather weak side). But we were NOT talking about PERFORMANCE, but about IQ, which is ABILITY (and to a large extent INNATE ability). Marcel Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. wrote: > PS: here is Rosenthal's 1980 summary, suggesting that the expectancy > effect is actually quite robust and large, and not at all > insignificent, based on 345 studies. > > http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/classics1980/A1980JD87300001.pdf > > Lynn > > Michael Christopher wrote: > >>>>However, Pygmalion effect (effect of expectations) >>>> >>>> >>is just 0.5 IQ points (based on serious studies, not >>anecdotes).<< >> >>--How were the studies done, exactly? >> >>michael >> >> >> >> >> >>__________________________________ >>Do you Yahoo!? >>New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage! >>http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From paul.werbos at verizon.net Mon Aug 9 15:10:08 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Mon, 09 Aug 2004 11:10:08 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] energy problems In-Reply-To: <01C47D94.15E382C0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20040809094047.00b9ece8@incoming.verizon.net> Hi, folks! I hope that Premise Checker will forgive me for being a bit out of sorts when I saw his message. It came at a time when, for the nth time, I "recalculated" some expectations and got some feedback, and it was a tad depressing. Economic theory is essential to a real comprehension of what's going on in energy markets. He is certainly right about that. Back in the 70's people did a lot of stupid klutzy things to try to make energy problems go away in defiance of economics, and the klutzy things themselves caused a lot of problems. (I disagree with the folks who say the klutzy things caused most of the problems... but certainly they were a factor.) But the klutzy things happen today just as much as they did then. Corporate welfare now is as bad as protection-from-the-market was then. Of all the noises of the past three weeks in the election itself... Robert Reich's little interview on TV impressed me a whole lot more than all the rest. But that's a digression. Since some of you may believe in the magic of the marketplace, I probably owe you another digression. Back in 1979, my first real tenured job was at DOE, to do an in-depth comparative study of the Long-Term Energy Analysis (Program), LEAP, the official model then used to generate their long-term projections. Previous critics had told DOE they needed to respect and learn from the wisdom in the private sector -- so LEAP was basically just a massaged and "made transparent" version of Shell's Long-Term model. The model was beautifully exact as a reflection of free-market perfect market microeconomic theory. As in Ken Arrow's textbook on the subject. All actors were assumed to have perfect foresight or "clairovoyance." (That's one of the required assumptions in the theory.) They all used marginal cost pricing, and they all looked ahead in making all decisions. Major "modules" within the model represented the supply and demand curves over time faced by a typical firm in each industry; thus a module and an industry or economic niche were essentially the same. Basic types of consumer also modules. But... for a given level of undiscovered resources of oil and gas, and a given level of elasticity of demand, the model wasn't all that different from other such models. Even with free markets hard-wired in, it was perfectly possible to see projections that would be disastrous. In fact -- a few years later, when I took over lead responsibility for long-term analysis, I arranged a model run to see what we could get with a big worldwide carbon tax, based on CO2 emission and intended to minimize CO2 emission. (I think this was the first official run of that sort, back in the 1980's.) The results were grossly disappointing -- hardly any real benefit; what reductions we saw in CO2 emissions were due to reductions in economic growth more than anything else. And believe me, we put a HUGE amount of effort into making sure that the assumptions we put into this were realistic. We have whole books out there on the key parameters which drove these results. ====================================== But now: where are we today, and why is it scary? I started paying more intense attention to this last summer, when I was invited to talk at a conference in Mexico. www.prspectivas21carmen.org.mx I highly recommend looking at some of the talks -- particularly the one by Ismail Al-Shatti. It's not that you would enjoy it. But as the mama said in the old TV movie: "Drink your castor oil, and drink it ALL UP. It may taste awful but it's good for you." (And don't just spit it out...!) In his most benign scenario, he projects something like 2/3 of the world oil coming from the Persian-Arabian Gulf by 2025. And then he draws out the implications, which are VERY serious -- the more serious the more honestly you face up to the whole big picture. And that benign scenario already includes conservation, hybrids, etc. As I walked out of there, a bit shaken, I resolved to try to do what I could to prevent that scenario from happening. (And I resolved not to be paralyzed by all the econometric theory showing how hard it would be.) Al-Shatti's methodology for oil forecasting may be respected in the Gulf (an area where they do demand good results but not always Western methodology) ... but it did leave out certain points I would have wanted to check. But a month after that, the Policy Office of DOE (with NASA as a second partner) sponsored a workshop in Aspen Colorado, organized by Marty Hoffert of New York University, to discuss technologies to address the CO2 issue. Cavallo (formerly DOE, now DHS, but still in the same office in New York) presented a paper on future oil trends, arriving at much the same conclusions as Al-Shatti regarding OPEC dependency, but using the standard USGS undiscovered resource numbers. As I understand it, a full understanding of the latest Shell numbers is more or less the same. (In many ways, Shell's "renewable" numbers might be better labelled "gap we need to fill.") Likewise IEA. EIA and Exxon are more complicated phenomena, but it would be a digression to elaborate on them. Let's just say that there are enough leading forecasts pointing towards a chilling future that we need to take the risk seriously. Anyone who has really run the numbers would laugh -- with a measure of pain and a measure of contempt -- at claims that more tax breaks for friends of the party would magically solve all this. There are industry reps who run around DC telling people that there is no problem.. telling other nations that they should sell their oil to Exxon while they can, cheap, before it becomes cheaper... even as the financial Times reports huge shakeups and terror at majors' inability to replace proved reserves, and the failure of desperate plots in Russia and Nigeria, etc. Today's paper even reports on the oil majors who want to keep Chavez in power in order to keep Venezuela's oil. In fact... to make Al-Shatti's dire forecast not happen... we really would want half the world's cars to be able to run without gasoline, in a crisis. Roughly. By 2025. To reach that goal -- we need to remember that the average car stays on the road for 15 years. (This is not a random number. Maybe DOE still has copies of the Transportation Energy demand Model I build in the mid-80's, then the model used to generate the forecasts in the Annual Report to Congress, etc. It was simple but beautiful, and VERY well grounded. We had very solid data on how long cars stay on the road, for example, albeit not all public data.) Thus we would ROUGHLY need all new cars sold by 2010 to be capable of running without gasoline, in a pinch. That may sound nearly impossible... but it's not. There is one and only one really known and proven and affordable way to achieve the subgoal I just stated: fuel-flexible vehicles (FFV). FFV have a long history. Roberta Nichols of Ford had a long crusade (with full support form her company) to try to make FFVs happen. In 2003, she published her history of what happened and why, in a local journal. (I have pdf copies, about a meg.) From other sources, I hear it would take only $200/car to make new cars able to handle any mix of gasoline, ethanol and methanol ("GEM" flexibility), and -- more important -- only two years to retool the entire production sold to a typical nation. (The US, however, would require an extra two years to meet unique regulatory barriers against doing anything new. Our lawyer system really is unique, though I hear Europe is trying hard to catch up and surpass us...) People in Brazil are happy that their free market is ALREADY selling growing numbers of GE cars. And Kerry is talking about incentives which, among other things, would create such a nice harmonious gradual introduction of GE flexibility here too. Sounds nice... but nice and gradual is not 2010. And GE is not GEM. There is a time when someone needs to bite the bullet, when, after all, the costs are not so great. (No government spending; the equivalent of a 1 percent tax in the cost of a new car, which should fall as automakers use new technology which makes flexibility cheaper.) THE BEAUTY OF GEM FLEXIBILITY IS THAT WE DON'T HAVE TO BE CLAIROVOYANT. The effect of GEM flexibility is to give us more of a free competitive market for fuel IN PRACTICE, DE FACTO. It is sweeping away historic BARRIERS to competition in the fuel business. We don't have to choose between biomethanol, biowaste methanol, coal-based methanol, gas-based methanol, ethanol or gasoline itself. We let the market itself decide. And what if we believe that electricity, hydrogen or direct natural gas will be better car fuels than alcohol OR gasoline in the long-term? No problem. The law could say:"Any car registered in our country WHICH was first placed into service after Jan. 1, 2007, and which has a tank to hold gasoline, must have a tank which can hold gasoline, ethanol or methanol, and must be able to use any of these three fuels." (Some technical details would be needed -- e.g. E85 and M85 is good enough.) That allows anyone to buy a dedicated electric car on the same terms as a GEM car. It leaves the decision up to the marketplace. I seriously doubt that we would see so many dedicated electrics on the road by 2010 -- but if we do, fine. I don't see the US doing this any time soon -- and, for many reasons, the US is not the best place to start anyway. But I have started to hope that someone might. That gives us some hope. And, yes, there are sources of ethanol and methanol out there enough to make a real difference, at least for some nations -- and any loosening of the world oil situation right now would be very welcome, even if only worth a million barrels a day or so. =============== OK -- but that is only the start of the game. The early start. The three main pillars of energy economics are the market, the regulations (all-pervasive in the real world) and the R&D system which generates new technology. Back in the 80's, the key lesson we had to learn was that "oil shortages are not energy shortages." But GEM flexibility will immediately change that. It makes energy more "fungible." GEM flexibility is essential to pulling our "airplane" out of a tail spin... essential, necessary... but very far from sufficient. The cheapest way to make alcohol fuel today is to convert remote natural gas to methanol, which is far easier to distribute to the car driver than natural gas proper. It costs $250/ton using new technology in large-scale use today. (Google "canaccord methanol" to see a business plan complete with vendors.) That's competitive -- and it's great news for a new "marginal" consumer. HOWEVER -- the USGS now estimates usable conventional natural gas around the world as slightly less than oil!!! In the past few years, gas estimates have been lowered and oil raised (both by modest amounts, but enough to switch the story -- and, more important, to disprove what once seemed like a strong trend towards gas). What surprises me -- as I do a quick web search even of the Gas Salesman Optimists ... they still publish all the rhetoric about gas lasting forever, but their numbers aren't much different from USGS. They state that there have been major advances in technology lately, which have reduced the range of disagreement. (In fact, some parts of the new technology can actually be traced back to an algorithm I developed back in 1974, and I have seen first-hand how things are qualitatively different now.) If the $250/ton technology is only 50 percent efficient, and if we assume we can use ALL the natural gas to make methanol for cars, and we assume all the methanol is used in GEM cars which have the seem efficiency using methanol as with gasoline... The net benefit would only be a 50% increase in the world's supply of car fuel. That may buy a little time... but it is very discouraging. It is especially discouraging since gas prices have been going out of sight near pipeline systems in North America (and Europe?), due to excessive use in electric power generation (above all), but also industrial heat and power. And so... to stop the hemorraging, it will be critical to stop the waste of natural gas for electricity generation as soon as we can. Bear in mind... if you ask folks like Entergy why all this gas, and why no use of cheaper fuels like coal, they will say it is all a matter of regulation forcing people to use natural gas. I will refrain from saying more here and now. Clearly we need more efforts to change this situation. There is a huge amount of rhetoric about the "intelligent power grid," but we need action to get it out of the space of pure hot air and pork barrel. And there are the oxygenated coal gasification technologies, able to produce electricity and methanol profitably as coproducts, which we somehow need to get inserted into the marketplace, in China if not in the US -- but certainly we could use it here! And there are some new LARGE-SCALE distributed generation technologies we need to mainstream and proliferate as soon as we can (though the best will require about 3 years to tune and shake out for optimal efficiency and mass-production cost). And... good old space solar power is suddenly much more relevant and urgent and even timely than I would have thought, back when we first joined NASA in funding a small research topic in that area. (Search on "JIETSSP" at www.nsf.gov). We have a lot to do to make that real, but we do see a realistic path now for doing it. (Though I keep being reminded of Dan Brown's Deception Point which, while exaggerated, points towards some real barriers.) ------- Other areas where R&D is critical and lagging to a worrisome degree -- pursuit of direct methane-to-methanol technology, which has real potential to get us close to 100 percent efficiency, thereby making natural gas a potential 100 percent extender of oil; carbon-tolerant alkaline fuel cells, which can get twice the mileage on methanol as a hybrid car, thereby doubling again the value of the natural gas; depressurization technology for methane gas hydrates, which, COMBINED with the two other technologies, might provide an economic technology for massive amounts of advanced car fuel; technology for "beneficiating coal," using solar thermal or space solar energy sources to allow us to produce one molecule of methanol per atom of carbon; and, most valuable of all, batteries good enough to be used in "heavy hybrids" that can be plugged in so as to reduce their use of GEM fuel -- and gradually phased into full-fledged electric cars of adequate range and cost. There is no one magic bullet. We will need them all -- especially given the "decision tree stochastic" nature of the game. And we need mechanisms to distribute risk so that oil producers and car drivers can cooperate with less fear on both sides -- yea even the nation-states which sometimes represent them. ============== Best regards, Paul P.S. Some of you might wonder: Is there a way to calculate shadow prices correctly, for use in a distributed agent system, for the STOCHASTIC case, in a way which is feasible to compute or approximate? Can we get away form the requirement for clairovoyance? Yes, we have figured that out. See chapter 1 of the Handbook of Learning and Approximate Dynamic Programming, Si et al eds, published by IEEE and Wiley this past month. In particle, note the discussion of the stochastic Pointryagin equation and Dual Heuristic Programming. From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Aug 9 16:17:51 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2004 09:17:51 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] energy problems Message-ID: <01C47DF1.BFAF17D0.shovland@mindspring.com> So you don't seem to be a pessimist about actually doing this... However, a Vice President who says "conservation is not an option" and President who is owned by the oil companies won't lead us where we need to go. I recently saw a British Petroleum ad which asserts that the oil companies will have to lead us into the future of energy. Probably not. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Werbos, Dr. Paul J. [SMTP:paul.werbos at verizon.net] Sent: Monday, August 09, 2004 8:10 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list; paleopsych at paleopsych. org (E-mail) Cc: pwerbos at nsf.gov Subject: [Paleopsych] energy problems Hi, folks! I hope that Premise Checker will forgive me for being a bit out of sorts when I saw his message. It came at a time when, for the nth time, I "recalculated" some expectations and got some feedback, and it was a tad depressing. Economic theory is essential to a real comprehension of what's going on in energy markets. He is certainly right about that. Back in the 70's people did a lot of stupid klutzy things to try to make energy problems go away in defiance of economics, and the klutzy things themselves caused a lot of problems. (I disagree with the folks who say the klutzy things caused most of the problems... but certainly they were a factor.) But the klutzy things happen today just as much as they did then. Corporate welfare now is as bad as protection-from-the-market was then. Of all the noises of the past three weeks in the election itself... Robert Reich's little interview on TV impressed me a whole lot more than all the rest. But that's a digression. Since some of you may believe in the magic of the marketplace, I probably owe you another digression. Back in 1979, my first real tenured job was at DOE, to do an in-depth comparative study of the Long-Term Energy Analysis (Program), LEAP, the official model then used to generate their long-term projections. Previous critics had told DOE they needed to respect and learn from the wisdom in the private sector -- so LEAP was basically just a massaged and "made transparent" version of Shell's Long-Term model. The model was beautifully exact as a reflection of free-market perfect market microeconomic theory. As in Ken Arrow's textbook on the subject. All actors were assumed to have perfect foresight or "clairovoyance." (That's one of the required assumptions in the theory.) They all used marginal cost pricing, and they all looked ahead in making all decisions. Major "modules" within the model represented the supply and demand curves over time faced by a typical firm in each industry; thus a module and an industry or economic niche were essentially the same. Basic types of consumer also modules. But... for a given level of undiscovered resources of oil and gas, and a given level of elasticity of demand, the model wasn't all that different from other such models. Even with free markets hard-wired in, it was perfectly possible to see projections that would be disastrous. In fact -- a few years later, when I took over lead responsibility for long-term analysis, I arranged a model run to see what we could get with a big worldwide carbon tax, based on CO2 emission and intended to minimize CO2 emission. (I think this was the first official run of that sort, back in the 1980's.) The results were grossly disappointing -- hardly any real benefit; what reductions we saw in CO2 emissions were due to reductions in economic growth more than anything else. And believe me, we put a HUGE amount of effort into making sure that the assumptions we put into this were realistic. We have whole books out there on the key parameters which drove these results. ====================================== But now: where are we today, and why is it scary? I started paying more intense attention to this last summer, when I was invited to talk at a conference in Mexico. www.prspectivas21carmen.org.mx I highly recommend looking at some of the talks -- particularly the one by Ismail Al-Shatti. It's not that you would enjoy it. But as the mama said in the old TV movie: "Drink your castor oil, and drink it ALL UP. It may taste awful but it's good for you." (And don't just spit it out...!) In his most benign scenario, he projects something like 2/3 of the world oil coming from the Persian-Arabian Gulf by 2025. And then he draws out the implications, which are VERY serious -- the more serious the more honestly you face up to the whole big picture. And that benign scenario already includes conservation, hybrids, etc. As I walked out of there, a bit shaken, I resolved to try to do what I could to prevent that scenario from happening. (And I resolved not to be paralyzed by all the econometric theory showing how hard it would be.) Al-Shatti's methodology for oil forecasting may be respected in the Gulf (an area where they do demand good results but not always Western methodology) ... but it did leave out certain points I would have wanted to check. But a month after that, the Policy Office of DOE (with NASA as a second partner) sponsored a workshop in Aspen Colorado, organized by Marty Hoffert of New York University, to discuss technologies to address the CO2 issue. Cavallo (formerly DOE, now DHS, but still in the same office in New York) presented a paper on future oil trends, arriving at much the same conclusions as Al-Shatti regarding OPEC dependency, but using the standard USGS undiscovered resource numbers. As I understand it, a full understanding of the latest Shell numbers is more or less the same. (In many ways, Shell's "renewable" numbers might be better labelled "gap we need to fill.") Likewise IEA. EIA and Exxon are more complicated phenomena, but it would be a digression to elaborate on them. Let's just say that there are enough leading forecasts pointing towards a chilling future that we need to take the risk seriously. Anyone who has really run the numbers would laugh -- with a measure of pain and a measure of contempt -- at claims that more tax breaks for friends of the party would magically solve all this. There are industry reps who run around DC telling people that there is no problem.. telling other nations that they should sell their oil to Exxon while they can, cheap, before it becomes cheaper... even as the financial Times reports huge shakeups and terror at majors' inability to replace proved reserves, and the failure of desperate plots in Russia and Nigeria, etc. Today's paper even reports on the oil majors who want to keep Chavez in power in order to keep Venezuela's oil. In fact... to make Al-Shatti's dire forecast not happen... we really would want half the world's cars to be able to run without gasoline, in a crisis. Roughly. By 2025. To reach that goal -- we need to remember that the average car stays on the road for 15 years. (This is not a random number. Maybe DOE still has copies of the Transportation Energy demand Model I build in the mid-80's, then the model used to generate the forecasts in the Annual Report to Congress, etc. It was simple but beautiful, and VERY well grounded. We had very solid data on how long cars stay on the road, for example, albeit not all public data.) Thus we would ROUGHLY need all new cars sold by 2010 to be capable of running without gasoline, in a pinch. That may sound nearly impossible... but it's not. There is one and only one really known and proven and affordable way to achieve the subgoal I just stated: fuel-flexible vehicles (FFV). FFV have a long history. Roberta Nichols of Ford had a long crusade (with full support form her company) to try to make FFVs happen. In 2003, she published her history of what happened and why, in a local journal. (I have pdf copies, about a meg.) From other sources, I hear it would take only $200/car to make new cars able to handle any mix of gasoline, ethanol and methanol ("GEM" flexibility), and -- more important -- only two years to retool the entire production sold to a typical nation. (The US, however, would require an extra two years to meet unique regulatory barriers against doing anything new. Our lawyer system really is unique, though I hear Europe is trying hard to catch up and surpass us...) People in Brazil are happy that their free market is ALREADY selling growing numbers of GE cars. And Kerry is talking about incentives which, among other things, would create such a nice harmonious gradual introduction of GE flexibility here too. Sounds nice... but nice and gradual is not 2010. And GE is not GEM. There is a time when someone needs to bite the bullet, when, after all, the costs are not so great. (No government spending; the equivalent of a 1 percent tax in the cost of a new car, which should fall as automakers use new technology which makes flexibility cheaper.) THE BEAUTY OF GEM FLEXIBILITY IS THAT WE DON'T HAVE TO BE CLAIROVOYANT. The effect of GEM flexibility is to give us more of a free competitive market for fuel IN PRACTICE, DE FACTO. It is sweeping away historic BARRIERS to competition in the fuel business. We don't have to choose between biomethanol, biowaste methanol, coal-based methanol, gas-based methanol, ethanol or gasoline itself. We let the market itself decide. And what if we believe that electricity, hydrogen or direct natural gas will be better car fuels than alcohol OR gasoline in the long-term? No problem. The law could say:"Any car registered in our country WHICH was first placed into service after Jan. 1, 2007, and which has a tank to hold gasoline, must have a tank which can hold gasoline, ethanol or methanol, and must be able to use any of these three fuels." (Some technical details would be needed -- e.g. E85 and M85 is good enough.) That allows anyone to buy a dedicated electric car on the same terms as a GEM car. It leaves the decision up to the marketplace. I seriously doubt that we would see so many dedicated electrics on the road by 2010 -- but if we do, fine. I don't see the US doing this any time soon -- and, for many reasons, the US is not the best place to start anyway. But I have started to hope that someone might. That gives us some hope. And, yes, there are sources of ethanol and methanol out there enough to make a real difference, at least for some nations -- and any loosening of the world oil situation right now would be very welcome, even if only worth a million barrels a day or so. =============== OK -- but that is only the start of the game. The early start. The three main pillars of energy economics are the market, the regulations (all-pervasive in the real world) and the R&D system which generates new technology. Back in the 80's, the key lesson we had to learn was that "oil shortages are not energy shortages." But GEM flexibility will immediately change that. It makes energy more "fungible." GEM flexibility is essential to pulling our "airplane" out of a tail spin... essential, necessary... but very far from sufficient. The cheapest way to make alcohol fuel today is to convert remote natural gas to methanol, which is far easier to distribute to the car driver than natural gas proper. It costs $250/ton using new technology in large-scale use today. (Google "canaccord methanol" to see a business plan complete with vendors.) That's competitive -- and it's great news for a new "marginal" consumer. HOWEVER -- the USGS now estimates usable conventional natural gas around the world as slightly less than oil!!! In the past few years, gas estimates have been lowered and oil raised (both by modest amounts, but enough to switch the story -- and, more important, to disprove what once seemed like a strong trend towards gas). What surprises me -- as I do a quick web search even of the Gas Salesman Optimists ... they still publish all the rhetoric about gas lasting forever, but their numbers aren't much different from USGS. They state that there have been major advances in technology lately, which have reduced the range of disagreement. (In fact, some parts of the new technology can actually be traced back to an algorithm I developed back in 1974, and I have seen first-hand how things are qualitatively different now.) If the $250/ton technology is only 50 percent efficient, and if we assume we can use ALL the natural gas to make methanol for cars, and we assume all the methanol is used in GEM cars which have the seem efficiency using methanol as with gasoline... The net benefit would only be a 50% increase in the world's supply of car fuel. That may buy a little time... but it is very discouraging. It is especially discouraging since gas prices have been going out of sight near pipeline systems in North America (and Europe?), due to excessive use in electric power generation (above all), but also industrial heat and power. And so... to stop the hemorraging, it will be critical to stop the waste of natural gas for electricity generation as soon as we can. Bear in mind... if you ask folks like Entergy why all this gas, and why no use of cheaper fuels like coal, they will say it is all a matter of regulation forcing people to use natural gas. I will refrain from saying more here and now. Clearly we need more efforts to change this situation. There is a huge amount of rhetoric about the "intelligent power grid," but we need action to get it out of the space of pure hot air and pork barrel. And there are the oxygenated coal gasification technologies, able to produce electricity and methanol profitably as coproducts, which we somehow need to get inserted into the marketplace, in China if not in the US -- but certainly we could use it here! And there are some new LARGE-SCALE distributed generation technologies we need to mainstream and proliferate as soon as we can (though the best will require about 3 years to tune and shake out for optimal efficiency and mass-production cost). And... good old space solar power is suddenly much more relevant and urgent and even timely than I would have thought, back when we first joined NASA in funding a small research topic in that area. (Search on "JIETSSP" at www.nsf.gov). We have a lot to do to make that real, but we do see a realistic path now for doing it. (Though I keep being reminded of Dan Brown's Deception Point which, while exaggerated, points towards some real barriers.) ------- Other areas where R&D is critical and lagging to a worrisome degree -- pursuit of direct methane-to-methanol technology, which has real potential to get us close to 100 percent efficiency, thereby making natural gas a potential 100 percent extender of oil; carbon-tolerant alkaline fuel cells, which can get twice the mileage on methanol as a hybrid car, thereby doubling again the value of the natural gas; depressurization technology for methane gas hydrates, which, COMBINED with the two other technologies, might provide an economic technology for massive amounts of advanced car fuel; technology for "beneficiating coal," using solar thermal or space solar energy sources to allow us to produce one molecule of methanol per atom of carbon; and, most valuable of all, batteries good enough to be used in "heavy hybrids" that can be plugged in so as to reduce their use of GEM fuel -- and gradually phased into full-fledged electric cars of adequate range and cost. There is no one magic bullet. We will need them all -- especially given the "decision tree stochastic" nature of the game. And we need mechanisms to distribute risk so that oil producers and car drivers can cooperate with less fear on both sides -- yea even the nation-states which sometimes represent them. ============== Best regards, Paul P.S. Some of you might wonder: Is there a way to calculate shadow prices correctly, for use in a distributed agent system, for the STOCHASTIC case, in a way which is feasible to compute or approximate? Can we get away form the requirement for clairovoyance? Yes, we have figured that out. See chapter 1 of the Handbook of Learning and Approximate Dynamic Programming, Si et al eds, published by IEEE and Wiley this past month. In particle, note the discussion of the stochastic Pointryagin equation and Dual Heuristic Programming. _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From paul.werbos at verizon.net Mon Aug 9 18:47:21 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Mon, 09 Aug 2004 14:47:21 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] energy problems In-Reply-To: <01C47DF1.BFAF17D0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20040809143714.03ee7b78@incoming.verizon.net> At 09:17 AM 8/9/2004 -0700, Steve wrote: >So you don't seem to be a pessimist about >actually doing this... > >However, a Vice President who says "conservation >is not an option" and President who is owned by >the oil companies won't lead us where we need >to go. > >I recently saw a British Petroleum ad which asserts >that the oil companies will have to lead us into the >future of energy. Probably not. > >Steve Hovland Hi, Steve! Lotfi Zadeh once asked whether Bayesian Utilitarianism was basically just part of my religion. In a way, yes. Respects to Howard Raiffa and John von Neumann, among others. In that viewpoint -- we are not really called to act if things are guaranteed to go well, or guaranteed to go badly. But if we say there is some probability of survival between zero and one, then a rational person will try to tweak the probabilities as best he/she can in the right direction. So -- I am not exactly an optimist, and not exactly a pessimist -- but not a defeatist. I do think we have good, rational bases for fear here. Here today we look at the pain, the cost and the risk caused by the combination of Osama's groups, of Iraq, of Arab-Israeli tension, of instability in Saudi Arabia, and so on... all very costly already, and worthy of high-level attention. And then I wonder: Now that Ismail has shown us it could be ten times as bad in 20 years, or worse, why are we sitting here paralyzed like a deep in the headlights? Maybe we will all be road kill after all, but if enough of us brain cells start twitching there is always some hope of waking up... I see it less as a problem of partisan politics and more of a problem in waking up. But yes, certainly, there are a few folks in the partisan politics (in both parties or exploiting the parties) who seem to specialize in sleeping pills or hypnogogics. BP is not the most evil company in the world... maybe a key part of waking up is for many parties to learn better how to work with each other, and bypass the outer ring of hired guns. But, yes, the guns are there. From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Aug 9 20:10:30 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2004 13:10:30 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] energy problems Message-ID: <01C47E12.3F7638C0.shovland@mindspring.com> Years ago I realized that good stuff happens more often when we make an effort to make it happen :-) I think of that as Real Magic as opposed to Stage Magic. But there's probably a basis in quantum physics as well. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From Euterpel66 at aol.com Tue Aug 10 05:11:00 2004 From: Euterpel66 at aol.com (Euterpel66 at aol.com) Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2004 01:11:00 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] open access Message-ID: http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/advocacy5 support open access. AOL censors what you can access. Lorraine I read banned books -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Aug 10 13:48:30 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2004 06:48:30 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] open access Message-ID: <01C47EA6.0C88F670.shovland@mindspring.com> AOL is the most god-awful web provider. Just say no- leave them and go to Earthlink or anybody. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Euterpel66 at aol.com [SMTP:Euterpel66 at aol.com] Sent: Monday, August 09, 2004 10:11 PM To: michele at historicfilms.com; kevin at historicfilms.com; Nttntt0 at aol.com; IRENEKELLE at yahoo.com; ohrnbej at sunysuffolk.edu; evolutionary-psychology at yahoogroups.com Subject: [Paleopsych] open access http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/advocacy5 support open access. AOL censors what you can access. Lorraine I read banned books << File: ATT00000.html >> << File: ATT00001.txt >> From unstasis at gmail.com Tue Aug 10 14:46:26 2004 From: unstasis at gmail.com (Stephen Lee) Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2004 10:46:26 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] open access In-Reply-To: <01C47EA6.0C88F670.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C47EA6.0C88F670.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <951ad070408100746296f73c9@mail.gmail.com> I think MSN and a couple other providers are even having it so you can transfer your mail from aol to someting nonproprietary. But I agree, AOL and everyone except those trying to sell closed access (I imagine there must be some service trying to precensor the net for overparanoid parents who want to ~protect~ their kids. Anyway.. just a 20 centavo piece to obsess over. On Tue, 10 Aug 2004 06:48:30 -0700, Steve wrote: > AOL is the most god-awful web provider. > Just say no- leave them and go to > Earthlink or anybody. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Euterpel66 at aol.com [SMTP:Euterpel66 at aol.com] > Sent: Monday, August 09, 2004 10:11 PM > To: michele at historicfilms.com; kevin at historicfilms.com; Nttntt0 at aol.com; > IRENEKELLE at yahoo.com; ohrnbej at sunysuffolk.edu; > evolutionary-psychology at yahoogroups.com > Subject: [Paleopsych] open access > > http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/advocacy5 > > support open access. AOL censors what you can access. > > Lorraine > I read banned books > << File: ATT00000.html >> << File: ATT00001.txt >> > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From checker at panix.com Wed Aug 11 22:26:09 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2004 18:26:09 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CSM: Terrorism & Security Message-ID: Terrorism & Security http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0810/dailyUpdate.html?s=ent2 [q.v.] posted August 10, 2004, updated 11:00 a.m. Al Qaeda plots to influence US elections? But experts split over who terrorist group wants to 'help' win. by [66]Tom Regan | csmonitor.com Agence France-Presse reports on Tuesday that Pakistani intelligence officials say they have uncovered evidence which shows Al Qaeda was plotting a series of attacks in order to [67]influence the 2004 US presidential elections. 'The network was looking to strike a major blow ahead of the elections. Al-Qaeda was looking to strike in the United States or its chief allies Great Britain and Pakistan,' said the official, asking to remain anonymous. 'The period before the US presidential elections was very critical,' said the official, who has played a key role in a crackdown against Al-Qaeda in Pakistan over the past month which has netted over 20 suspected operatives. And Time magazine on Monday quoted a top Homeland Security official as saying that intelligence agencies have "... a number of times picked up information that Al Qaeda wants to [68]attack us before the election, and some of the communications attribute that desire to Osama Bin Laden. But security experts and political commentators have been split over whom Al Qaeda wants to win the 2004 US presidential elections: US President George Bush or his Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry. In June CIA officer Michael Scheuer, who [73]writes under the pseudonym "Anonymous," told the British newspaper the Guardian that Al Qaeda couldn't have a better administration in place in terms of achieving its goals. Mr. Scheuer believes that the president is "taking the US in exactly the direction Bin Laden wants, towards all-out confrontation with Islam under the banner of spreading democracy." 'I'm very sure they can't have a better administration for them than the one they have now,' he said. 'One way to keep the Republicans in power is to mount an attack that would rally the country around the president.' Asia Times reporter and commentator Pepe Escobar argued earlier this year that Al Qaeda wants President Bush to remain in office because he has become such [74]a lightning rod for many Muslims that his reelection would help the terror group continue to raise funds and new recruits. Al Qaeda wants the Iraq occupation to be prolonged, with or without a puppet government: there could not be a better advertisement for rallying Muslims against the arrogance of the West. Al Qaeda's and the Bush administration's future are interlocked anyway. National Public Radio's All Things Considered (audio) also looks at Al Qaeda's election threat, and reports [75]it's not clear which candidate the group wants to see in the White House. Reporter Mary Louise Kelly interviews National Review columnist Michael Ledeen, who believes that Al Qaeda wants a Kerry presidency. Daniel Byman, columnist for Slate and a senior fellow at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, tells Ms. Kelly he thinks Al Qaeda favors a renewed Bush presidency, for similar reasons to those mentioned above. But Mr. Byman says he isn't convinced a [76]pre-election attack is in the works at all. In fact, he wrote last week in Slate, the US is much safer these days than at any time. National Security, he writes, is in fact better than we might think it is. Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland, who is also a senior fellow at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, wrote in late July that the idea that Al Qaeda wants to influence the elections is probably not true because it works against [77]Al Qaeda's best interests. He argues that Al Qaeda is more interested in affecting US foreign policy, which is [78]unlikely to change dramatically if Mr. Kerry is elected, because "US policy is thus essential in affecting the extent to which Muslims resent the United States more than they hate Al Qaeda." Meanwhile The New York Times reports Tuesday that while the capture of computer expert Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan has resulted in a treasure trove of information about Al Qaeda, it also shows that the organization is [79]much stronger and more resilient than many believed. For the past several months, the president has claimed that much of Al Qaeda's leadership has been killed or captured; the new evidence suggests that the organization is regenerating and bringing in new blood. The Sunday Independent of South Africa reported Sunday on how for all the attention paid to the border region of Pakistan by US and local troops, and [80]despite the recent captures of Al Qaeda members, it seems that "Osama bin Laden has pulled off one of the greatest disappearing acts in history." The paper also quotes members of the Pakistani opposition parties who allege that Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf [81]doesn't really want to capture the Al Qaeda leader. "There is a view among some that they don't really want to pick OBL [Osama bin Laden] up, because if they do, then Musharraf would lose his utility to the US," says Sherry Rehman, an opposition member of parliament. Pakistan government officials say the are [82]not even focusing on Bin Laden, who they claim is not able to operate effectively. AFP reports that they are more interested in two other Al Qaeda members that they believe are still in their country. "Now we are more focussed in eliminating the group and using all our resources to track down the two real masterminds, Libyan Abu Fajr and the Egyptian called Hamza. The information that we have gathered now does not point to OBL's involvement in current attack planning of the group." The Daily Times of Pakistan also reports on how smaller terror groups that have grown from a common belief in Al Qaeda's militant ideology are acting like "[83]terror franchises" and making the war on terror much harder to fight. "It's like McDonald's giving out franchises," said Dia'a Rashwan, an Egyptian expert on militant groups. "All they have to do is follow the company's manual. They don't consult with headquarters every time they want to produce a meal." Finally, retired US Army Colonel Robert Killebrew writes in the Washington Post that as serious a threat as Al Qaeda poses in 2004, that threat could grow [84]even more dangerous if Al Qaeda follow the trajectory of similar terrorist groups in the past and becomes a political movement in the Middle East. To carry out short-term plans for regional terrorism, Al-Qaeda has an almost limitless pool of manpower. But its emerging leaders will soon realize - if they have not already - that their higher objectives cannot be achieved by hit-and-run attacks, no matter how devastating. For ambitions this vast, they need to transmute terror into political legitimacy in the same way that Fatah transformed itself into the quasigovernment of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), leading to the sight of a gun-toting Yasser Arafat at the podium of the United Nations. Hezbollah is acquiring political legitimacy in Syrian-dominated Lebanon, as is Hamas in Palestine and Gaza. "Legitimacy" doesnt matter to Al-Qaeda today, but it must have it tomorrow if it wants to stay in the game. [69]Did US blow cover on Al Qaeda mole?, 4.8.9 [70]Road to Al Qaeda runs through Pakistan, 4.8.6 [71]How safe is Iraq?, 4.8.5 o [85]Pakistan claims '90 percent' success in terror war (Reuters) o [86]US denies German 9/11 retrial key witness (Reuters) o [87]Press welcomes Arab efforts on Sudan (BBC) o [88]Al-Qaeda suspect caught in UAE, Pakistan says (Newsday) Sign up here to be notified each weekday of the new Terrorism & Security / A Daily Update: ____________________ [submit2.gif]-Submit [90]Find out more. References 69. http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0809/dailyUpdate.html?s=rel 70. http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0806/dailyUpdate.html?s=rel 71. http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0805/dailyUpdate.html?s=rel 85. http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=5920881 86. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53267-2004Aug10.html 87. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3548168.stm 88. http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-wopaki093924207aug09,0,2501981.story?coll=ny-worldnews-headlines 89. http://www.csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/encryptmail.pl?ID=D4EFEDA0D2E5E7E1EEA0ADA0E2F9ECE9EEE5 90. http://www.csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/signup.pl?module=8&s=sutsl From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Aug 12 01:00:33 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2004 18:00:33 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Solar Power Myth: "they will never produce the energy consumed in producing them Message-ID: <01C47FCD.19CCEC60.shovland@mindspring.com> We've often heard the myth that "it takes more electricity to manufacture a solar panel than it will ever put out." This is simply not true...this myth may have started during the Ronald Reagan era. This is of course a very difficult statistic to calculate, but according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO, a study has been done to answer the question. The study found that single-crystal panels reach the energy payback point in 5-10 years, polycrystalline panels in 3-5 years, and amorphous silicon panels in 0.5-2 years. Be advised that because the question is so vague, there is a large margin of error for these figures! We just discovered a recent, very detailed study about solar panel energy payback time in the January 2001 issue of Home Power magazine. This study, by Karl Knapp, PhD, and Teresa Jester, finds payback time for a standard module to be about 3.3 years, and 1.8 years on a thin-film panel. The study factors in energy costs for ALL parts of the panel and manufacturing process. From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Aug 12 01:12:21 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2004 18:12:21 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Marine turbines- like windfarms under the waves Message-ID: <01C47FCE.BF9155E0.shovland@mindspring.com> http://www.marineturbines.com/technical.htm Marine current turbines are, in principle, much like submerged windmills. They will be installed in the sea at places with high tidal current velocities, to take out energy from the huge volumes of flowing water. These flows have the major advantage of being an energy resource as predictable as the tides that cause them, unlike wind or wave energy which respond to the more random quirks of the weather system. The technology under development by MCT consists of twin axial flow rotors of 15m to 20m in diameter, each driving a generator via a gearbox much like a hydro-electric turbine or a wind turbine. The twin power units of each system are mounted on wing-like extensions either side of a tubular steel monopile some 3m in diameter which is set into a hole drilled into the seabed from a jack-up barge. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 60867 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Aug 12 01:15:14 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2004 18:15:14 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Biodiesel Message-ID: <01C47FCF.27BBBF70.shovland@mindspring.com> http://www.biodiesel.org/ What is biodiesel? Biodiesel is the name of a clean burning alternative fuel, produced from domestic, renewable resources. Biodiesel contains no petroleum, but it can be blended at any level with petroleum diesel to create a biodiesel blend. It can be used in compression-ignition (diesel) engines with little or no modifications. Biodiesel is simple to use, biodegradable, nontoxic, and essentially free of sulfur and aromatics. How is biodiesel made? Biodiesel is made through a chemical process called transesterification whereby the glycerin is separated from the fat or vegetable oil. The process leaves behind two products -- methyl esters (the chemical name for biodiesel) and glycerin (a valuable byproduct usually sold to be used in soaps and other products). Is Biodiesel the same thing as raw vegetable oil? No! Fuel-grade biodiesel must be produced to strict industry specifications (ASTM D6751) in order to insure proper performance. Biodiesel is the only alternative fuel to have fully completed the health effects testing requirements of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. Biodiesel that meets ASTM D6751 and is legally registered with the Environmental Protection Agency is a legal motor fuel for sale and distribution. Raw vegetable oil cannot meet biodiesel fuel specifications, it is not registered with the EPA, and it is not a legal motor fuel. For entities seeking to adopt a definition of biodiesel for purposes such as federal or state statute, state or national divisions of weights and measures, or for any other purpose, the official definition consistent with other federal and state laws and Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) guidelines is as follows: Biodiesel is defined as mono-alkyl esters of long chain fatty acids derived from vegetable oils or animal fats which conform to ASTM D6751 specifications for use in diesel engines. Biodiesel refers to the pure fuel before blending with diesel fuel. Biodiesel blends are denoted as, "BXX" with "XX" representing the percentage of biodiesel contained in the blend (ie: B20 is 20% biodiesel, 80% petroleum diesel). Why should I use biodiesel? Biodiesel is better for the environment because it is made from renewable resources and has lower emissions compared to petroleum diesel. It is less toxic than table salt and biodegrades as fast as sugar. Since it is made in the USA from renewable resources such as soybeans, its use decreases our dependence on foreign oil and contributes to our own economy. Where do I get biodiesel? Biodiesel is available nationwide. It can be purchased directly from biodiesel producers and marketers , petroleum distributors , or at a handful of public pumps throughout the nation. For more information on the general and technical definitions of biodiesel, the distinction between the two and why those distinctions are important, click here . For additional information on biodiesel see: Fuel Fact Sheets FAQs Biodiesel for Kids From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 12 12:52:20 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 08:52:20 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Reuters: Gene Blocker Turns Monkeys Into Workaholics Message-ID: Gene Blocker Turns Monkeys Into Workaholics http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/reuters20040811_412.html [New medications for Adult Procrastination Disorder can't be far away now. A great many bureaucrats can be characterized by the disorders mentioned in the last paragraph, though usually in not so extreme a form.] Aug. 11, 2004 - WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Procrastinating monkeys were turned into workaholics using a gene treatment to block a key brain compound, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday. Blocking cells from receiving dopamine made the monkeys work harder at a task -- and they were better at it, too, the U.S. government researchers found. Dr. Barry Richmond and colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health used a new genetic technique to block the D2 gene. "The gene makes a receptor for a key brain messenger chemical, dopamine," Richmond said in a statement. Dopamine is a message carrying chemical associated with rewards, movement and a variety of other important functions. "The gene knockdown triggered a remarkable transformation in the simian work ethic. Like many of us, monkeys normally slack off initially in working toward a distant goal," he added. For their study, Richmond and colleague used seven rhesus monkeys. They had to push a lever in response to visual cues on a projection screen, and got a drop of water as a reward. "They work more efficiently -- make fewer errors -- as they get closer to being rewarded. But without the dopamine receptor, they consistently stayed on-task and made few errors, because they could no longer learn to use visual cues to predict how their work was going to get them a reward." Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Richmond and colleagues said they were trying to figure out how D2 is involved in a type of learning. Humans and monkeys both use this learning, which involves looking at how much work there is, visually, and deciding how long it will take to complete it. Monkeys and humans both tend to wait until the last possible minute to finish up the work, and become very adept at estimating how long they have. Molecular geneticist Edward Ginns created a DNA antisense agent that tricked brain cells into turning off their D2 receptors -- which are molecular doorways used by dopamine to get into cells. Antisense involves making a kind of mirror image molecule that looks like a strand of DNA and works to block a gene's action. Although some employers might take a distinct interest in the work, the NIMH team said they are hoping to understand mental illness. "In this case, it's worth noting that the ability to associate work with reward is disturbed in mental disorders, including schizophrenia, mood disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorder, so our finding of the pivotal role played by this gene and circuit may be of clinical interest," Richmond said. "For example, people who are depressed often feel nothing is worth the work. People with obsessive-compulsive disorder work incessantly; even when they get rewarded they feel they must repeat the task. In mania, people will work feverishly for rewards that aren't worth the trouble to most of us." From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 12 13:07:35 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 09:07:35 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] AP: Britain grants cloning license Message-ID: Britain grants cloning license http://www.kentucky.com/mld/heraldleader/news/world/9378409.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp Posted on Thu, Aug. 12, 2004 Project goal to make insulin-producing cells By Emma Ross ASSOCIATED PRESS LONDON - Britain granted its first license for human cloning yesterday, joining South Korea on the leading edge of stem-cell research, which is restricted by the Bush administration but which many scientists think might lead to new treatments for a range of diseases. The British license went to Newcastle University researchers who hope eventually to create insulin-producing cells that could be transplanted into diabetics. South Korean scientists announced in February they had cloned an embryo and extracted its stem cells. Many scientists think stem cells hold vast promise for treating an array of diseases from diabetes to Parkinson's. Stem cells can grow into any type of human tissue, and scientists hope to be able to direct the blank cells to grow into specific cell types needed for transplant. Stem cells can be found in adults, but scientists think they might not be as versatile as those found in embryos. They envision using cloning to create an embryo from a patient so that stem cells extracted would be a perfect transplant match. "Therapeutic cloning will, in the immediate future, be a vital tool in harnessing the power of stem cells to treat some of the major diseases which threaten humankind," John Harris, professor of bioethics at the University of Manchester, said after the license was announced. "This decision is a signal of our society's compassion and concern for those threatened by disease." Britain's ProLife Party lamented the decision and said it was considering whether it could sue. Regulations on cloning and stem-cell research vary around the world. Britain is the only European country that licenses cloning for stem-cell research and three years ago was the first in the world to do so when Parliament voted to allow regulators to license the method for stem-cell research. South Korea followed in December. Countries such as Sweden and Japan are expected to pass similar legislation soon. This year, the United Nations will reconsider whether to propose an international treaty to ban "therapeutic" cloning -- which produces stem cells from cloned embryos -- as well as "reproductive" cloning, which makes babies. The Bush administration forbids federal funding for research on embryonic stem-cell lines created after Aug. 9, 2001. It also forbids federal funding of all cloning research. Lexington Herald-Leader and wire service sources. From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 12 13:12:59 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 09:12:59 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Reason: The Transhumans Are Coming! Message-ID: Reason: The Transhumans Are Coming! And they're promoting mito flushes, sousveillance, cyberglogging, and genetic virtue http://www.reason.com/rb/rb081104.shtml 4.8.11 by Ronald Bailey And they're promoting mito flushes, sousveillance, cyberglogging, and genetic virtue The [11]World Transhumanist Association's annual conference--TransVision 2004--attracted some 125 philosophers, scientific researchers, and techno-visionaries to Toronto last weekend to think about, discuss, and promote the ways in which technology will transform human lives. WTA members come from around the world; they want to nurture an intellectual and policy environment in which advanced biotechnology, nanotechnology, and informatics help people live longer, healthier lives, become more intelligent, and gain control over their emotions. On display at TransVision 2004 were some notable advances in their efforts. Probably the most immediate goal of these transhumanists is promoting research that will radically increase healthy human lifespans. This topic was addressed at a plenary presentation on "The Feasibility and Desirability of Indefinite Youth" by Cambridge University theoretical biogerontologist (and new editor of the scientific journal [12]Rejuvenation Research), [13]Aubrey de Grey. De Grey identifies the "[14]seven deadly things" that cause aging and argues researchers have now reached the point where an engineering approach to preventing the damage they cause is tractable. For example, one of the chief causes of aging is mutations in mitochondrial genes. The mutations are a byproduct of the energy-producing activities of these cellular organelles that damages their own small genomes consisting of only 13 genes. Most genes are encoded by DNA in a cell's nucleus. "Mitochondrial DNA is massively less well protected than nuclear DNA," said De Grey. Consequently, De Grey argues that mitochondrial genes would be safer and less subject to mutation if they were engineered into the nuclear genes. And this is not an impossible goal, since a number of researchers have already managed to do just that for a variety of organisms. His hypothesis is that better protected mitochondrial genes would slow down one of the seven deadly things that cause aging. De Grey suggested that the other six causes of aging are also amenable to such "[15]strategies for engineering negligible senescence." At the end of his talk, he predicted that there is "50/50 chance of effectively reversing aging in 25 years." For those of us whose mitochondrial genes look to be battered about as they are left hanging outside the nucleus for the rest of our all too short lives, University of Virginia researcher [16]Rafal Smigrodski offered some hope. In his presentation, "How to buy new mitochondria for your old body" Smigrodski described work he and his colleague Shah Khan at Gencia Corporation are doing that is aimed at completely replacing defective mitochondria with fresh new ones. Look for whole body "mito flushes" in a few years. But the transhumanists in Toronto were not only concerned about long healthy happy lives; they were also concerned with truth. George Mason University economics professor [17]Robin Hanson argued that super-rational posthumans in the future won't be able to "agree to disagree," chiefly because they'll agree on everything. Hanson [18]argues that disagreements among less than super-rational people today exist largely because we deceive ourselves about what we really know to be true. There are good "reasons" for us to think that, for example, "the more you believe in yourself, the more you can get other people to believe in you," and thus get them to do what you want. But super-rational posthumans won't be able to deceive themselves or others, suggests Hanson. Does this mean the end of politicians? In another session, McMaster University philosopher and editor of the [19]Journal of Evolution and Technology, Mark Walker gave a talk on "[20]Genetic Virtue", the ethics of bioengineering children to be virtuous. Walker began by pointing out that parents and communities already spend a lot of time and effort trying to instill virtues in the young. Assuming that genes that predispose people toward being honest and caring for others can be found, what would be wrong with allowing parents to use biotechnology, say, [21]pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, to increase the chances that their children are born with those virtues? Walker concluded that if we accept that the goal of ethics is to make our lives and our world better, then we ought to explore the plausibility and possibility of genetically instilled virtue. One audience member suggested that this would remove a child's free will, but I pointed out that a child doesn't get any extra measure of free will just because they have randomly conferred genes. Opening the conference was the rather creepy [22]Steve Mann, who has been trying to turn himself into a [23]cyborg for years. Mann apparently insists on seeing the world through a set of goggles that laser-write video onto his retinas. Using a video hookup, he could share with the audience exactly what he was seeing; his view was available on a giant screen onstage. Mann's subject was the future of wearable computers (people encased in computer gear were referred to as "gargoyles" in some science fiction novel I read a while back). In the future we will see what he calls cyberglogging, which will be essentially sound and video [24]lifeblogs compiled by omnipresent wearable video and audio hookups. Mann has a response to people who worry that we are becoming too dependent upon technology. "Don't shoes and clothing damage our ability to survive wild in the woods?," retorts Mann. "Calculators make our brains rot; clothes make our bodies rot; shoes make our feet rot, don't they?" In addition, Mann, in the spirit of David Brin's [25]The Transparent Society, also pointed out that we live in world in which surveillance (that is, "watching from above") cameras are becoming ubiquitous. His response is "[26]sousveillance", or "watching from below"; in other words, the watched turn their cameras onto the watchers. To demonstrate his aphorism that "surveillance and [27]sousveillance get along about as well as matter and anti-matter," Mann showed the audience video of him talking with clerks and security guards in a department store. Invariably they refused to answer his questions about surveillance and asked him to turn his cameras off. Mann asks them why they are uncomfortable when he's videoing them, when after all they are videoing him without his permission. Setting aside the fact that Mann is voluntarily on private property, that he is a prestigious professor picking on clerks who are not the ones who run the store much less its surveillance policies, and that being aggressively videoed by some random guy is naturally intimidating, he does have a point. As he says, "sousveillance should never be prohibited in area that is undergoing surveillance." And I bet that when we all can wear completely unobtrusive video and audio recording devices, no one will much care--we'll just assume that we're on camera all the time. But TransVision 2004 was not all techno-science and philosophy. Saturday evening featured a presentation by the Australian performance artist [28]Stelarc. Now, generally my attitude toward performance art isn't very welcoming, but Stelarc is the real deal. Stelarc insists that humans are--and have always been--Zombies and Cyborgs. Our bodies are not inhabited by Cartesian "minds," and as cyborgs we've always used technology to extend the reach of our bodies into the world. To demonstrate his points, Stelarc offered the assembled transhumanists a fascinating (and fun) multi-media program encompassing his career from his days hanging from [29]giant hooks thrust through his skin to creating and running [30]insectoid cyborg machines to a [31]prosthetic head using the [32]Alice AI program to answer viewers' questions. Well-meaning though transhumanists may be, their efforts are apparently giving some people the willies. "Transhumanists intend to take us on a long march to post humanity," [33]warns [34]Center for Bioethics and Culture special consultant, Wesley J. Smith. "If that is not to happen, we will have to resist." Resist longer and happier lives, better health, stronger bodies, and smarter brains? The prospect sounds incredibly dangerous to me! It must be stopped! However, listening to the panels and presentations at TransVision 2004, Smith does get it essentially right when he notes, "They assert that humans should not merely be allowed to metamorphose themselves through plastic surgery, cyber-technology, and the like, but should have the right to control the destiny of their genes via progeny design and fabrication." Yes, indeed they do. And so what? Well, watch this space as I occasionally chronicle the opening of the transhumanist front in our ongoing culture wars. ------------------------------------- Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His new book, Liberation Biology: A Moral and Scientific Defense of the Biotech Revolution will be published in early 2005. References 11. http://www.transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/index/ 12. http://www.liebertpub.com/REJ/default1.asp 13. http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/AdGbio.htm 14. http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/just7.htm 15. http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/index.html 16. http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/people/dop/dopDetail.cfm?drid=1151 17. http://hanson.gmu.edu/home.html 18. http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:K_kRsdxo4jwJ:hanson.gmu.edu/deceive.pdf+hanson+disagreements+honest&hl=en 19. http://www.jetpress.org/contents.htm 20. http://www.permanentend.org/gvp.htm 21. http://www.reason.com/rb/rb030602.shtml 22. http://wearcam.org/ 23. http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2004-05-13/goods_next.php 24. http://www.livingroom.org.au/blog/archives/nokia_lifeblog.php 25. http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Reviews/Transparent.html 26. http://www.reason.com/hod/nh123002.shtml 27. http://www.reason.com/0303/ci.bd.poking.shtml 28. http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/index2.html 29. http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/suspens/suspens.html 30. http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/exoskeleton/index.html 31. http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/prosthetichead/index.html 32. http://www.alicebot.org/ 33. http://www.thecbc.org/redesigned/research_display.php?id=129 34. http://www.thecbc.org/ From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 12 13:15:55 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 09:15:55 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NR: Deroy Murdock: 1984, c. 2004 Doublespeak is alive and well. Message-ID: Deroy Murdock: 1984, c. 2004 Doublespeak is alive and well. Deroy Murdock on Political Rhetoric http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/murdock/murdock200408110859.asp August 11, 2004, 8:59 a.m. George Orwell's novel 1984 depicted Earth as a totalitarian planet. Twenty years after that date, most of the world -- and America specifically -- has avoided his dystopian vision. Even if Big Brother is watching, no one is required to love him. And, at a minimum, he quadrennially faces the voters. Still, a new study finds Orwell's ghost haunting America's public dialogue. More accurately, the hollow and oxymoronic rhetoric the late British writer described thrives in the United States. Mark Schmidt, an adjunct scholar with the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, has penned "[5]The Orwellian Language of Big Government," a concise meditation on how politicians contort words to "turn citizens into subjects." As Orwell himself warned, "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity." "At the national level in particular, elected positions are dominated by career-minded officials who repeat empty and often deliberately misleading or untruthful slogans," Schmidt writes. "Consider the two most recent Presidential campaigns. After 'reinventing government,' we 'crossed a bridge into the twenty-first century' to a place where 'no child is left behind,' thanks to the wonders of 'compassionate conservatism.'" Do those phrases mean anything? Absent Clinton-Gore, would America still be trapped in the 20th century? Were conservatives cruel and coal-hearted before Bush-Cheney? John Kerry's most memorable utterance this year -- "Bring it on!" -- doesn't tell us much, either. "If this trend continues," Schmidt fears, "our language will ultimately be useless to express the ideas that form the basis of rational political discourse in a healthy republic." Schmidt analyzes numerous sound bites that are so routine most Americans accept them without detecting their internal circularity or outright vacuity. [bullet_10x16.gif] "The era of big government is over." -- Bill Clinton's declaration in his 1996 State of the Union address tantalized free-marketeers. If only he meant it. Three years later, he proposed $305 billion in fresh spending, with another $125 billion on the table in 2000. Schmidt writes, "It was truly Orwellian for a President who involved the federal leviathan with the issue of uniforms in local public elementary schools to claim that the era of big government was over." Government spending as "investment" -- President Bush's FY 2004 budget boasts "major new investments in...education, Medicare, health care, homeland security, energy independence, the environment, compassion, and the unemployed." This is one of the Bush White House's most treasured Clintonian heirlooms. Under Democrats and Republicans, government "investment" suggests that spending tax dollars creates equity-style returns. While some initiatives may be legitimate, disbursing Treasury checks is not the same as purchasing shares of General Electric or Genentech. "Voluntary compliance" -- This term explains the Internal Revenue Service's notion that taxpayers donate their money to the Treasury. According to the IRS publication Why Do I Have to Pay Taxes?: "Voluntary compliance means that each of us is responsible for filing a tax return when required and for determining and paying the correct amount of tax." Those who violate this compulsory voluntarism can wind up in handcuffs. "Undocumented worker" -- While the term "illegal alien" grates on sensitive ears, it often is a more honest term than "undocumented worker." As Schmidt notes, many of those who come to America without permission possess bogus or expired documents. Likewise, some illegal immigrants labor diligently in the informal economy while others are here to treat America's social safety net as a giant hammock. "Undocumented worker" lulls Americans into overlooking these realities. "Security" -- Since September 11, lawmakers promiscuously stamp "security" on their pet projects. Thus one congressman claimed that a $3.5 billion peanut subsidy "strengthens America's national security." "Working families" -- Most offensive of all, this battered cliche paints a populist portrait of blue-collar employees who "work" while the landed gentry play croquet and treat martinis as a food group, pausing only to gauge how much their trust funds have grown. Such nonsense subtly forgives higher taxes on the affluent and forgets that well-paid surgeons, screenwriters, and even trial lawyers actually must work to get paid. Mark Schmidt urges Americans to listen carefully and critically to the often duplicitous words that roll off of politicians' tongues. As George Orwell taught us: "The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." References 1. mailto:author at nationalreview.com 2. http://www.nationalreview.com/murdock/murdock-archive.asp From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Aug 12 14:24:51 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 07:24:51 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Passive Solar Heating Message-ID: <01C4803D.7594E870.shovland@mindspring.com> http://www.greenbuilder.com/sourcebook/PassSolGuide1-2.html 1.0 Passive Solar Design Introduction Solar energy is a radiant heat source that causes natural processes upon which all life depends. Some of the natural processes can be managed through building design in a manner that helps heat and cool the building. The basic natural processes that are used in passive solar energy are the thermal energy flows associated with radiation, conduction, and natural convection. When sunlight strikes a building, the building materials can reflect, transmit, or absorb the solar radiation. Additionally, the heat produced by the sun causes air movement that can be predictable in designed spaces. These basic responses to solar heat lead to design elements, material choices and placements that can provide heating and cooling effects in a home. Passive solar energy means that mechanical means are not employed to utilize solar energy. 1.1 Passive solar systems rules of thumb: The building should be elongated on an east-west axis. The building's south face should receive sunlight between the hours of 9:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M. (sun time) during the heating season. Interior spaces requiring the most light and heating and cooling should be along the south face of the building. Less used spaces should be located on the north. An open floor plan optimizes passive system operation. Use shading to prevent summer sun entering the interior. The Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology (CREST) has an online lesson on calculation of Sun Angles and overhang calculations. 2.0 Passive Solar Heating 2.1 Two primary elements of passive solar heating are required: South facing glass Thermal mass to absorb, store, and distribute heat There are three approaches to passive systems - direct gain, indirect gain, and isolated gain. The goal of all passive solar heating systems is to capture the sun's heat within the building's elements and release that heat during periods when the sun is not shining. At the same time that the building's elements (or materials) is absorbing heat for later use, solar heat is available for keeping the space comfortable (not overheated). 2.2 Direct Gain In this system, the actual living space is a solar collector, heat absorber and distribution system. South facing glass admits solar energy into the house where it strikes directly and indirectly thermal mass materials in the house such as masonry floors and walls. The direct gain system will utilize 60 - 75% of the sun's energy striking the windows. Figure 1 Thermal mass in the interior absorbs the sunlight and radiates the heat at night In a direct gain system, the thermal mass floors and walls are functional parts of the house. It is also possible to use water containers inside the house to store heat. However, it is more difficult to integrate water storage containers in the design of the house. The thermal mass will temper the intensity of the heat during the day by absorbing the heat. At night, the thermal mass radiates heat into the living space. 2.2.1 Direct gain system rules of thumb (Austin): A heat load analysis of the house should be conducted. Do not exceed 6 inches of thickness in thermal mass materials. Do not cover thermal mass floors with wall to wall carpeting; keep as bare as functionally and aesthetically possible. Use a medium dark color for masonry floors; use light colors for other lightweight walls; thermal mass walls can be any color. For every square foot of south glass, use 150 pounds of masonry or 4 gallons of water for thermal mass. Fill the cavities of any concrete block used as thermal storage with concrete. Use thermal mass at less thickness throughout the living space rather than a concentrated area of thicker mass. The surface area of mass exposed to direct sunlight should be 9 times the area of the glazing. Sun tempering is the use of direct gain without added thermal mass. For most homes, multiply the house square footage by 0.08 to determine the amount of south facing glass for sun tempering. 2.3 Indirect Gain In an indirect gain system, thermal mass is located between the sun and the living space. The thermal mass absorbs the sunlight that strikes it and transfers it to the living space by conduction. The indirect gain system will utilize 30 - 45% of the sun's energy striking the glass adjoining the thermal mass. There are two types of indirect gain systems: Thermal storage wall systems (Trombe Walls) Roof pond systems 2.3.1 Thermal storage wall systems: The thermal mass is located immediately behind south facing glass in this system. Figure 2 Thermal Mass Wall or Trombe Wall Day and Night Operation Operable vents at the top and bottom of a thermal storage wall permit heat to convect from between the wall and the glass into the living space. When the vents are closed at night radiant heat from the wall heats the living space. 2.3.2 Roof pond systems Six to twelve inches of water are contained on a flat roof. This system is best for cooling in low humidity climates but can be modified to work in high humidity climates. (Effectively provides heat in southern U.S. latitudes during the heating season for one story or upper stories of buildings.) Water is usually stored in large plastic or fiberglass containers covered by glazing and the space below is warmed by radiant heat from the warm water above. These require somewhat elaborate drainage systems, movable insulation to cover and uncover the water at appropriate times, and a structural system to support up to 65 lbs/sq ft dead load. 2.3.3 Indirect gain system rules of thumb for thermal storage walls The exterior of the mass wall (toward the sun) should be a dark color. Use a minimum space of 4 inches between the thermal mass wall and the glass. Vents used in a thermal mass wall must be closed at night. A well insulated home (7-9 BTU/day-sq. ft.-degree F) will require approximately 0.20 square feet of thermal mass wall per square foot of floor area or 0.15 square foot of water wall. If movable night insulation will be used in the thermal wall system, reduce the thermal mass wall area by 15%. Thermal wall thickness should be approximately 10-14 inches for brick, 12-18 inches for concrete, 8-12 inches for adobe or other earth material and at least 6 inches for water. 2.4 Isolated Gain An isolated gain system has its integral parts separate from the main living area of a house. Examples are a sunroom and a convective loop through an air collector to a storage system in the house. The ability to isolate the system from the primary living areas is the point of distinction for this type of system. (See Figure 3) The isolated gain system will utilize 15 - 30% of the sunlight striking the glazing toward heating the adjoining living areas. Solar energy is also retained in the sunroom itself. Sunrooms (or solar greenhouses) employ a combination of direct gain and indirect gain system features. Sunlight entering the sunroom is retained in the thermal mass and air of the room. Sunlight is brought into the house by means of conduction through a shared mass wall in the rear of the sunroom, or by vents that permit the air between the sunroom and living space to be exchanged by convection. The use of a south facing air collector to naturally convect air into a storage area is a variation on the active solar system air collector. These are passive collectors. Convective air collectors are located lower than the storage area so that the heated air generated in the collector naturally rises into the storage area and is replaced by return air from the lower cooler section of the storage area. Heat can be released from the storage area either by opening vents that access the storage by mechanical means (fans), or by conduction if the storage is built into the house. Figure 3 Day and Night Operation of a Sunroom Isolated Gain System The sunroom has some advantages as an isolated gain approach in that it can provide additional usable space to the house and plants can be grown in it quite effectively. The convective air collector by comparison becomes more complex in trying to achieve additional functions from the system. This is a drawback in this area where space heating is less of a concern than in colder regions where the system would be used longer. It is best to use a system that provides more than one function if the system is not an integral part of the building. The sunroom approach will be emphasized in this information since it can provide multiple functions. 2.4.1 Sunrooms Sunrooms can feature sloped and/or overhead glass, but is not recommended for the Austin area. A sunroom will function adequately without overhead or sloped glazing. Due to long hot summers in this area, it is important to use adequate ventilation to let the heat out. Sloped or overhead glazing is also a maintenance concern. Due to the intensity of weather conditions for glazing facing the full .i.ventilation: passive design and brunt of the sun and rain, seals between the gazing panels need to be of extremely high material and installation quality. A thermal wall on the back of the sunroom against the living space will function like the indirect gain thermal mass wall. With a thermal wall in the sunroom, the extra heat during the day can be brought into the living space via high and low vents like in the indirect gain thermal wall. More elaborate uses of the heated air generated in the sunspace can be designed into this system, such as transferring the hot air into thermal mass located in another part of the house. 2.4.2 Isolated Gain rules of thumb for sunrooms: Use a dark color for the thermal wall in a sunspace. The thickness of the thermal wall should be 8-12 inches for adobe or earth materials, 10-14 inches for brick, 12-18 inches for (dense) concrete. Withdraw excess heat in the sunroom (if not used for warm weather plants) until the room reaches 45 degrees and put the excess heat into thermal mass materials in other parts of the house. For a sunroom with a masonry thermal wall, use 0.30 square feet of south glazing for each square foot of living space floor area. If a water wall is used between the sunroom and living space instead of masonry, use 0.20 square feet of south facing glass for each square foot of living area. Have a ventilation system for summer months. If overhead glass is used in a sunroom, use heat reflecting glass and or shading systems in the overhead areas. From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Aug 12 14:26:42 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 07:26:42 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Passive Solar Cooling Message-ID: <01C4803D.B7AD6110.shovland@mindspring.com> http://www.greenbuilder.com/sourcebook/PassSolGuide3.html 3.1 Ventilation & Operable Windows A primary strategy for cooling buildings without mechanical assistance (passive cooling) in hot humid climates is to employ natural ventilation. (The Fan and Landscape sections also address ventilation strategies.) In the Austin area, prevailing summer breezes are from the south and southeast. This matches nicely with the increased glazing on the south side needed for passive heating, making it possible to achieve helpful solar gain and ventilation with the following strategies: Place operable windows on the south exposure. Casement windows offer the best airflow. Awning (or hopper) windows should be fully opened or air will be directed to ceiling. Awning windows offer the best rain protection and perform better than double hung windows. If a room can have windows on only one side, use two widely spaced windows instead of one window. 3.1.1 Wing Walls Wing walls are vertical solid panels placed alongside of windows perpendicular to the wall on the windward side of the house. Figure 4 Top View of Wing Walls Airflow Pattern Wing walls will accelerate the natural wind speed due to pressure differences created by the wing wall . 3.1.2 Thermal Chimney A thermal chimney employs convective currents to draw air out of a building. By creating a warm or hot zone with an exterior exhaust outlet, air can be drawn into the house ventilating the structure. Sunrooms can be designed to perform this function. The excessive heat generated in a south facing sunroom during the summer can be vented at the top. With the connecting lower vents to the living space open along with windows on the north side, air is drawn through the living space to be exhausted through the sunroom upper vents. (The upper vents from the sunroom to the living space and any side operable windows must be closed and the thermal mass wall in the sunroom must be shaded.) Summer Venting Sunroom Figure 5 Summer Venting Thermal MassWall Thermal mass indirect gain walls can be made to function similarly except that the mass wall should be insulated on the inside when performing this function. Figure 6 Thermal Chimney Thermal chimneys can be constructed in a narrow configuration (like a chimney) with an easily heated black metal absorber on the inside behind a glazed front that can reach high temperatures and be insulated from the house. The chimney must terminate above the roof level. A rotating metal scoop at the top which opens opposite the wind will allow heated air to exhaust without being overcome by the prevailing wind. Thermal chimney effects can be integrated into the house with open stairwells and atria. (This approach can be an aesthetic plus to the home as well.) 3.1.3 Other Ventilation Strategies Make the outlet openings slightly larger than the inlet openings. Place the inlets at low to medium heights to provide airflow at occupant levels in the room. Figure 7 Thermal Chimney Effect Built into Home Inlets close to a wall result in air "washing" along the wall. Be certain to have centrally located inlets for air movement in the center areas of the room. Window insect screens decrease the velocity of slow breezes more than stronger breezes (60% decrease at 1.5 mph, 28% decrease at 6 mph). Screening a porch will not reduce air speeds as much as screening the windows. Night ventilation of a home should be done at a ventilation rate of 30 air changes per hour or greater. Mechanical ventilation will be required to achieve this (See Fan Section ). High mass houses can be cooled with night ventilation providing that fabric furnishings are minimized in the house. Keep a high mass house closed during the day and opened at night. From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 12 18:01:01 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 14:01:01 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Ramblin' Wrecks: Study Suggests Humans Can Speed Evolution Message-ID: Study Suggests Humans Can Speed Evolution http://www.astrobiology.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=14747 PRESS RELEASE Date Released: Tuesday, August 03, 2004 Source: Georgia Institute of Technology It's no secret that life in the 21st century moves at a rapid pace. Human inventions such as the Internet, mobile phones and fiber optic cable have increased the speed of communication, making it possible for someone to be virtually in two places at once. But can humans speed up the rate of one of nature's most basic and slowest processes, evolution? A study by J. Todd Streelman, new assistant professor of biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology suggests that humans may have sped up the evolutionary clock for one species of fish. Cichlid fish are well known to biologists for their rapid rate of evolution. While it takes many animals thousands of years to form new species, the cichlids of Africa's Lake Malawi are estimated to have formed 1,000 new species in only 500,000 years, lightning speed in evolutionary terms. In the 1960s a fish exporter may have unwittingly set the stage for an evolutionary explosion when he introduced individuals of the species Cynotilapia afra to Mitande Point on the lake's Thumbi West Island. As of 1983, the species hadn't budged from Mitande Point. But when Streelman, then at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, and colleagues went to the island in 2001, they found the fish had evolved into two genetically distinct varieties in less than 20 years. The study appears in the August 13 edition of Molecular Ecology. "This is a great example of human-induced evolution in action," said Streelman. "It adds to a growing list of cases, including introduced salmon, flies and plants, where human disturbance has set the stage for contemporary evolution on scales we've not witnessed before." The fish have evolved into two genetically distinct and differently colored populations, one on the north side of the island, the other on the south, said Streelman. Cichlid color patterns are important in mate selection, so these distinct markings may promote the evolution of new species. Whether or not that happens and how long it will take is a question to which Streelman is eager to find the answer. "It could be that we'll have new species in another 20 years, although this depends on a number of factors. Either way, we have a wonderful opportunity to follow the evolutionary trajectory of these populations over time. We plan to return to the island next July to do further study," he said. "Thumbi West will be a valuable place to work for years to come." From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 12 19:40:05 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 15:40:05 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Gary North: Repeat After Me: "I Am Getting Safer And Safer" Message-ID: Gary North: Repeat After Me: "I Am Getting Safer And Safer" Gary North's REALITY CHECK, Issue 365, July 30, 2004 Vice President Cheney says we are safer than we were on 9/11. (http://tinyurl.com/6zvcd) Senator Kerry says we are not safe enough, but we could be. (http://tinyurl.com/4mv8f) It's an election year. "Vote for us. Be safer." Ignorance is bliss. Until it kills you. There are some bad things going on out there. Sometimes the media focus on them. More often, however, they focus on innocuous things or highly improbable things and call them looming emergencies. Something big is always going to kill us, one of these days, we are told: the hole in the ozone layer, global warming, man-made carbon dioxide in the oceans, whatever. Unless the government. . . . If only the government would. . . . In contrast, there is a tendency for every influential institution to downplay the really bad things that really do threaten society -- things for which there is no known solution by a government agency or a United Nations treaty, things that would require a reversal of existing government policy, for the government to do less, not more. If a potential disaster can't be used to justify the expansion of the government, the media ignore it or else bury it on page 17. To illustrate my point, I shall select a back-page industry: cruise liners. A SLOW BOAT TO CHINA, IF THINGS GO WELL Have you ever taken a cruise? I have. Three, actually. I was a speaker at conferences on board cruise ships. So, I got free tickets. That was back in the late 1970s. Been there, done that. The cruise industry's ads on TV feature young, nubile couples -- rarely seen on actual cruises -- frolicking in the surf. These ads are in fact aimed at graying people with lots of money, who will spend most of their daylight hours on board either snoozing in deck lounge chairs or eating. They don't call these ships "The Love Bloat" for nothing. The Securities & Exchange Commission requires a publicly traded company to send out a fat, unreadable prospectus before selling any stock. The cruise ship industry is not similarly regulated. A case in point. . . . Does any cruise line mention the existence of 100-foot waves that appear out of nowhere on calm seas, without warning, and sink any ship in their path? No? Also unmentioned is the fact that these waves are continual phenomena, not "perfect storm" phenomena. I did not know of their existence until a week ago. Lew Rockwell posted a link from the BBC News on his site. It was at the bottom of his home page, which gets changed every day. I might easily have missed it. Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, and Dan Rather missed it. You probably did, too. If you think the media tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, front and center, think about the following news report. Think about the fact that this is probably the first time you have heard about it, unless you visit Lew Rockwell's site regularly. ************** Freak waves spotted from space The shady phenomenon of freak waves as tall as 10 storey buildings has finally been proved, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Wednesday. Sailors often whisper of monster waves when ships sink mysteriously, but, until now, no one quite believed them. As part of a project called MaxWave - which was set up to test the rumours - two ESA satellites surveyed the oceans. During a three week period they detected 10 giant waves, all of which were over 25m (81ft) high. Strange disappearances Over the last two decades, more than 200 super-carriers -- cargo ships over 200m long -- have been lost at sea. Eyewitness reports suggest many were sunk by high and violent walls of water that rose up out of calm seas. But for years these tales of towering beasts were written off as fantasy; and many marine scientists clung to statistical models stating monstrous deviations from the normal sea state occur once every 1,000 years. "Two large ships sink every week on average," said Wolfgang Rosenthal, of the GKSS Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany. "But the cause is never studied to the same detail as an air crash. It simply gets put down to 'bad weather'." To prove the phenomenon or lay the rumours to rest, a consortium of 11 organisations from six EU countries founded MaxWave in December 2000. As part of the project, ESA tasked two of its Earth-scanning satellites, ERS-1 and ERS-2, to monitor the oceans with their radar. The radars sent back "imagettes" - pictures of the sea surface in a rectangle measuring 10 by 5km (6 by 2.5 miles), which were taken every 200km (120 miles). Around 30,000 separate imagettes were produced by the two satellites during a three-week period in 2001 -- and the data was mathematically analysed. ESA says the survey revealed 10 massive waves -- some nearly 30m (100 ft) high. "The waves exist in higher numbers than anyone expected," said Dr Rosenthal. Wave map Ironically, while the MaxWave research was going on, two tourist liners endured terrifying ordeals. The Breman and the Caledonian Star cruisers had their bridge windows smashed by 30m waves in the South Atlantic. The Bremen was left drifting for two hours after the encounter, with no navigation or propulsion. Now that their existence is no longer in dispute, it is time to gain a better understanding of these rogues. In the next phase of the research, a project called WaveAtlas will use two years' worth of imagettes to create a worldwide atlas of freak wave events. The goal is to find out how these strange cataclysmic phenomena may be generated, and which regions of the seas are most at risk. Dr Rosenthal concluded: "We know some of the reasons for the rogue waves, but we do not know them all." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3917539.stm ************ Had this not been published on the BBC News Web site or some equally establishment source, you would have thought this story was an urban legend. It isn't. Presumably, this phenomenon has been with us from the beginning of the oceans, yet it has never gotten into the public's consciousness, from long before Christopher Columbus until today. Of course, there is always tomorrow. Think about this. How did this story NOT get into the public's consciousness? This is "The Perfect Storm" in the form of a soap opera rather than a George Clooney movie. "Tune in tomorrow!" This is "The Poseidon Adventure" every two weeks. As for the media? Silence. "A story not worth pursuing. No news value here!" Critics of conspiracy theories usually argue, "No group could keep a story like this hidden. The story would leak out." But would it? Would anyone believe it if it did? Stories that are sufficiently threatening to scare lots of people into not spending money, or scare them away from employment in a particular industry, or get them to lose faith in the establishment's reliability are simply not passed along. Even when they do leak out, the public resists thinking about them. The stories are just too unnerving. People think: "If I can't do anything about this, I prefer not to believe in its existence. I would rather not believe it than believe it and feel completely vulnerable." THE WAR ON TERRORISM There is a lot of media attention on terrorism these days. The 9/11 Commission has issued Part 1 of its report. It blames everyone in Washington, which means no one in particular. It calls for another layer of bureaucracy to solve the problems of the existing layers of bureaucracy. Tell me: How many of the federal government's 15 separate and competing intelligence agencies can you name, besides the CIA and the FBI? If you got NSA ("No Such Agency"), you're doing better than most Americans. Twelve to go. The Commission's report suggests that an Intelligence Czar should be appointed to oversee these huge, long-established, independent bureaucracies. That will fix things -- just like the Energy Czar in 1974, William Simon, whose primary task was to reduce America's dependence on imported oil. We are more dependent on imported oil today than we were in 1974. William Lind is a specialist on fourth generation warfare: the kind of war the Vietcong waged against us a generation ago and unnumbered insurgency groups are waging against us today in Iraq. For anyone interested in fourth-generation warfare, start here: http://www.lewrockwell.com/lind/lind-arch.html In a July 29 column, Lind analyzed the 9/11 Commission's report. He thinks it is typical of Washington reports. He thinks its main recommendation will lead to more intelligence failures: centralization. When bureaucracies fail, one of their favorite ways to deflect demands for reform is to offer reorganization instead. That appears to be what has happened in the report of the 9/11 commission and Washington's response to that report. Worse, the reorganization envisioned is to further centralize intelligence by establishing a national intelligence director and creating a counterterrorism center. One is tempted to ask, if centralization improves performance, why didn't the Soviet Union ("democratic centralism") win the Cold War? What American military and national intelligence really require is that bureaucratic anathema, reform. And reform in turn means not centralization and unification, but de-centralization and internal competition. What did us in both on 9/11 and in the run-up to the Iraq war was an intelligence process that valued committee consensus and internal harmony above the open rough-and-tumble disagreements that surface new ways of looking at things. http://www.lewrockwell.com/lind/lind33.html The media have given a lot of attention to the report and to terrorism. But there is one aspect of the terrorist threat that the media refuse to talk about: suitcase nuclear weapons. For this threat, there is no deterrent other than product scarcity and price. For this threat, there is no reliable defense. If a terrorist group sets off a real, live nuke along the lines of the one in Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears," the world's economy will go down. The second bomb, exploded a week later, will keep it down. The third bomb will destroy the modern division of labor. It takes no strategic genius to know where to explode them. It only takes familiarity with "Diehard III." The locations are: (1) 33 Liberty Street, New York City (the New York Federal Reserve Bank), (2) the City of London (the Bank of England), and (3) Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany (European Central Bank). Mentally move from "nuclear explosion" to "fractional reserve banking." Then move from "we interrupt this broadcast" to "ATM machine." I don't mean move mentally. I mean move. The moment you hear about a nuclear explosion, get into your car and drive to the nearest ATM. Take out the limit. You can always redeposit the money later. Two days after a nuclear bomb hits an American city, your credit cards will be rejected by all card-swipe machines. My credit cards will be rejected. All God's chillun's credit cards will be rejected. These two words -- "card rejected" -- would shut down the West. Who has a month's currency in small bills in ready reserve? Nobody will be able to pay anybody with digital money. The long-feared inter-bank cascading cross defaults will take down the banks. http://tinyurl.com/3rn5m The U.S. government would then create a national rationing system. It would put a moratorium on debt collection: no evictions, no cessation of municipal services, and rationing in terms of last month's consumption, minus 20% (initially). The credit markets would be gone. That would be the end of everyone's productivity and lifestyle. It would cripple the division of labor. I have talked about this scenario with Sam Cohen, who invented the neutron bomb. Sam and I disagree. I think we would get total panic and economic breakdown on the day the third bomb went off. He thinks it would take only one bomb. I wish I could remember the arguments I used on Sam to prove to him that he's wrong. JOE DOUGLASS LOGS IN Dr. Joseph Douglass has specialized in matters of government intelligence and counter-intelligence for over three decades. His book on chemical and biological weapons, "America the Vulnerable," was published in 1987. I read it when it first came out. I was persuaded of its accuracy. It is still in print. His assessment of the 9-11 Commission report is worth considering. The good news is at least this will provide the news media and their hundreds of hired talking heads something to use to fill time other than the two political conventions. This has proven to be the case. More than this, says Douglass, is unlikely. Here's why. First, as usual, Washington investigations are mainly held to create the impression that our elected representatives and government officials are hard at work protecting the citizenry. In reality, they invariably seem to spend monstrous amounts of money, work hardest making certain no sacred cows are gored, including themselves, and garnish millions of dollars worth of free publicity and newspaper headlines. Rarely if ever is anyone held accountable. Rather, the "system" is blamed, reorganizations are proposed as a fix as though merely shuffling the deck of cards will change the luck of the draw, and the size of government continues to grow. Douglass rounds up his usual prime suspects: chemical and biological weapons, which he thinks are state-sponsored; the drug trade, which he thinks is partially state-sponsored; and nuclear weapons, which are obviously state-sponsored. There is an on- going link, he argues, between the state manufacture of terrorist weapons (the production system) and the criminal underworld (the distribution system). A fourth issue concerns what is known about the possible existence of nuclear warheads already in the United States under the control of foreign intelligence service agents or terrorists. This issue was first raised by Col. Stan Lunev, formerly with Soviet military intelligence, who defected from Russia in 1992 shortly after Boris Yeltsin took the helm. Another source, retired FBI agent Paul Williams, has reported in his book that bin Laden and company purchased a significant number (20) of suitcase nucs from the Chechen Mafia as the Soviet Union was changing back into Russia and has smuggled several of the warheads into the United States already. Presumably, they are just waiting for an opportune time to set them off. For an overview, see J. R. Nyquist's "Is al-Qaeda Preparing a Nuclear Hit?" Nyquist's article is a truly depressing piece. Douglass takes it seriously. Nyquist writes: A new book by terrorism expert and former FBI consultant Paul Williams says that al Qaeda acquired 20 nuclear suitcase bombs from the Chechen mafia between 1996 and 2001. This agrees with similar statements made by Yossef Bodansky in his 1999 book, "Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War On America." In saying that al Qaeda poses a nuclear threat, Williams takes his analysis a step farther. He says that al Qaeda has almost assuredly smuggled suitcase bombs into the United States. He also says that these bombs are in the 10 kiloton range, capable of inflicting millions of casualties. Williams believes that al Qaeda will use several of these devices in simultaneous attacks against urban targets by the end of 2005. http://tinyurl.com/4rgv2 I remain open to the suggestion but skeptical regarding the specifics. I don't think Western intelligence operators have penetrated al Qaeda. That such a transaction for a single bomb is possible, I have little doubt. That it is only a matter of time seems obvious, which is why the mainstream media refuse to touch this story. Douglass then asks two rhetorical questions: Does not the public have a vested interest in knowing what the U.S. intelligence assessment of this reported threat really is? Is the Senate Committee convinced that U.S. intelligence now is doing all that they could reasonably be expected to do? http://tinyurl.com/6cuo8 Here is the problem: having a vested interest and admitting that one has a vested interest are two different things. If a person's vested interest is such that he would be wise to make major changes in his lifestyle and spending habits, let alone his geography, the average person decides that the price of his vested interest is just too high. This is why men die without writing wills. It's a lot easier to pass along one's vested interest -- in this case, to Tom Ridge, who gets paid to worry about such matters. As for the Senate Intelligence Committee, this is an oxymoron: Senate, intelligence, and committee. ADVANCE WARNING? If any national political leader believed that a nuclear bomb had been smuggled into his country, would he warn his people about this? Of course not. The warning would create such horrendous economic effects -- call this the ATM effect -- that it would paralyze the country. The movie "Deep Impact," about a comet heading for earth, is like all of the other movies about the Great Collision, beginning no later than George Pal's "When Worlds Collide." Everything runs smoothly until the object actually hits the ocean, creating a huge wave. When the wave comes, everyone is still living on the Eastern seaboard -- or, in the case of the Pournelle/Niven novel, "Lucifer's Hammer," the West Coast. But it would never happen this way. The entire economy would collapse long before the comet/meteor/planet struck. The division of labor would disappear, along with just about everyone living in an urban society. Who would go to work? Who would not clean out his bank account? What bank could survive? I have seen no report from any official source about what the government is doing to deal with the problem of suitcase nukes. I have seen nothing from any official source on the steps that we citizens should take in order to prepare for the detonation of a suitcase nuke. Maybe they are training uranium-sniffing dogs. This much, I do know: the U.S./Mexican border is a sieve. Ranchers on the American side of the border are being threatened by the illegal aliens who are entering across their property. The media give no coverage to this story. It has been going on for years. http://tinyurl.com/4g7ba Dr. Douglass makes a crucial point: it is possible, even likely, that the same underworld network that is bringing in illegal drugs is capable of bringing in biological weapons. The anthrax letter attack seems to me to display the systemic problems within our government even more than 9-11. It is important to understand how serious the CBW (chemical and biological warfare) threat is -- not the CBW threat as described in government announcements and the media, but the threat as represented in data that often does not get into intelligence estimates. Information on the CBW threat that goes well beyond nerve agents and anthrax and plague has been both suppressed and/or deliberately not collected since 1969. The history of this is extensive. The conclusion that comes out of this material is that it would be child's play, notwithstanding the Department of Homeland Defense and remedy of the various "structural problems," to mount a massive terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland using advanced CBW agents and without the government seeing any warning or afterwards being able to link the attack with any perpetrator. Recall from the above that terrorists or saboteurs and sufficient CBW agents can be brought into our country using drug trafficking networks and mechanisms. http://tinyurl.com/45oa5 The war on terrorism is being brought to us by the same high-efficiency organization that has waged the war on drugs for five decades. We should expect similar results. ARMED AND DANGEROUS The U.S. government has invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. This has turned the entire Muslim world against us. A July 23 press release reveals the results of a Zogby poll conducted in June. Arab views of the United States, shaped largely by the Iraq war and a post-Sept. 11 climate of fear, have worsened in the past two years to such an extent that in Egypt -- an important ally in the region -- nearly 100 percent of the population now holds an unfavorable opinion of the country, according to two polls due out today. Both surveys were conducted in June by Zogby International and polled Arab men and women in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates. The findings reflect the concerns raised in the Sept. 11 commission report released yesterday, which emphasized a losing battle for public opinion. "Support for the United States has plummeted," the commissioners wrote. "What we're seeing now is a disturbing sympathy with al Qaeda coupled with resentment toward the United States, and we ought to be extremely troubled by that," said Shibley Telhami, a University of Maryland professor who commissioned one of the surveys. http://tinyurl.com/43na8 We now face a determined and growing number of enemies who are willing to die for their cause, who seek vengeance, and who may be supplied with weapons of mass destruction by unnamed states whose leaders have scores to settle with the United States. This country is no longer loved, let alone well-loved. We are not told officially what the worst-case terrorism scenarios are. We are also not told officially what things are still being done poorly, and how a specific rearrangement of priorities and authorities will restore national safety. The experts interviewed on TV tell us, "We can't be 100% safe." True enough. The question is: "What, precisely, are we 80% safe from, meaning what are we 20% vulnerable to?" Americans don't seriously believe the war in Iraq can come home. They don't think that Osama & Co. can get to us. They really don't believe in weapons of mass destruction in enemy hands. They do not believe that the mass production of such weapons by the Soviet Union (R.I.P.) could lead to a black market transfer of a nuclear bomb to a Muslim terrorist or a disgruntled Communist posing as a Muslim terrorist. They do not understand that a state-built nuke delivered by a non-state terrorist removes the supplier from the short list of counter-attack targets. If you don't think North Korea would become a supplier if push ever comes to shove, then you are not familiar with that branch of the Kim family. There comes a point where an aggressive foreign policy starts producing negative results. That point came for this country no later than 1898. But there were no suitcase nukes in 1898. CONCLUSION We do not hear anything specific about portable weapons of mass destruction that already exist or are cheap to create, such as anthrax. We assume that because such weapons have not been used yet, they will not be used, ever. We hear nothing about the steps being taken by government agencies to reduce this kind of threat. There are two possible reasons for the silence: (1) The authorities will not tip their hand on the nature of our national defenses; (2) The authorities really don't have a handle on the extent of the threat, and they don't want voters to know this. Either way, the real threats are not discussed publicly. The public worries about subway bombings, but not very much. I worry about two words: "card rejected." This is the overhanging legacy of government-licensed fractional reserve banking. Call it digital fallout. It can kill you. From checker at panix.com Fri Aug 13 15:12:03 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 11:12:03 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CBC: None Dare Call It Cloning by Wesley J. Smith Message-ID: None Dare Call It Cloning by Wesley J. Smith Center for Bioethics and Culture Newsletter http://www.thecbc.org/enewsletter/index.html 4.8.13 "British scientists have been given permission to perform therapeutic cloning using human embryos for the first time," reported the August 11, 2004, BBC News. What a remarkable statement. Not the fact that the UK will permit researchers to create human cloned embryos-that has been on the drawing board for some time. What made this report so startling was that the British government, researchers, and the BBC admit that the scientists will be "cloning human embryos" via "the same technique used to create Dolly the cloned sheep." (This is known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT.) Just try and get American cloning advocates and their accomplices in the media to be as candid. On this side of the Atlantic, the C-word is now reserved for "reproductive cloning," that is SCNT intended to result in the birth of a cloned baby. But the exact same procedure used to create cloned embryos for use in research, is never called cloning anymore. Nor, do advocates usually admit the biological fact that the "product" of human SCNT is a cloned human embryo. Instead, in an act of utter cynicism, pro-cloners employ obfuscating words, redefined terms, and misleading slogans designed to sow confusion in the minds of the American people. Here are just two recent examples: Ron Reagan's speech at the Democrat Convention: Ron Reagan's speech, which he claimed to be about embryonic stem cell research (ESCR), actually touted therapeutic cloning, that is, the creation of cloned embryos for use in research and treatments. Not only did Reagan incorrectly describe embryonic stem cell research, but also, he intentionally misleads his audience when he said, "No fetuses are created, none destroyed" during the SCNT procedure. Well, of course, cloning doesn't create fetuses. What cloning it does do is create new human embryos through asexual means. Once in existence, these embryos develop in the same manner as natural embryos. Whether created through fertilization or cloning, the human embryonic stage of development lasts from the moment the embryo comes into being as a one-celled organism, through he eighth week. Thus, for cloning to create a fetus, the unborn child would have to come into existence already eight weeks along in development; clearly a preposterous notion. Thus, Reagan's clearly intended to misinform his audience toward the end of convincing them to support federal funding for human cloning research. California's Proposition 71: The California Stem Cell Research and Cures Act, which will appear on the November California ballot, claims to create a state constitutional right to conduct "stem cell research." In order to hide its radical nature, the initiative never once uses the word embryo, referring to them merely as "surplus products of in vitro fertilization treatments." Nor does the initiative mention embryonic stem cells. They are instead called "pluripotent stem cells." As to cloning, it mentions research on pluripotent stem cells that "may be derived from somatic cell nuclear transfer," thereby hiding from voters both that the stem cells would be taken from cloned embryos and that these nascent human lives would be destroyed in the process. The initiative does mention cloning, but true to form, only in connection with reproduction, thereby creating a false dichotomy between so-called reproductive cloning and SCNT, when the procedure is identical regardless of the use to which the cloned embryo is put. The UK is moving full speed ahead into cloning research, a truly deplorable turn of events. But at least in the UK, the cloning lobby admits what it is doing. That is more than we can say about most cloning advocates in this country who are working overtime to prevent the American people from finding out what's really up. Award winning author Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture. His book Consumer's Guide to a Brave New World will be published in October. From checker at panix.com Fri Aug 13 15:13:58 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 11:13:58 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Alternet: Transexual Olympiads Message-ID: Transexual Olympiads http://www.alternet.org/rights/19525/ By Stephen Hui, Rabble . Posted August 11, 2004. "It's about time," Michelle Dumaresq says of the Olympic committee's recent decision to allow transsexual athletes to compete in their self-identified gender. Dumaresq, 33, broke new ground for transsexual athletes in 2001 by asserting her right to race as a woman. Now the post-operative male-to-female transsexual from Vancouver is the Canadian national champion in the women's downhill discipline. While the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) new rules won't apply to her - since downhill mountain biking is not yet an Olympic sport - Dumaresq says she's pleased that trans athletes hoping to participate in the Games will no longer face the barriers that have dogged her. Until recently, transsexual athletes were barred from competing in the Olympics. Then in May, the IOC's executive board approved a policy establishing the conditions under which athletes who have changed sex could participate in the games. The new rules kick in this Friday in Athens. "I think this clearly shows that we will always address issues on human rights. That's something that we find very important," says Charmaine Crooks, an Olympic silver medallist and Canadian IOC member living in Vancouver. "It also shows that when there is an issue, we will study it and if it fits with our fundamental values and philosophies, then we will act on it and act quickly, but also act in the best interest of all athletes." Gwen Smith, a board member of the U.S.-based Gender Education and Advocacy group, calls the IOC decision a "very small" step forward for trans rights. "At the very least, it further shows that transgender people are human beings. We deserve to compete," says the San Francisco activist. "It certainly moves things forward in this venue, and it also further will help show that we're here and we're able. "I don't think you're going to see any great change in the amount of Olympic athletes that are transgendered - not in the short term," Smith continues. "That said, I think you're going to see more athletes overall who are already transgendered, who will feel that they have an actual opportunity to compete." Smith is hoping that other sports bodies will follow the IOC's lead - though she also hopes the IOC will relax its conditions for transsexual athletes in the future. According to the IOC's new policy, transsexual athletes must have undergone sexual reassignment surgery to be eligible to compete in their gender. If the operation took place before puberty, the athlete's gender will be respected. In the case of a post-puberty gender transition, athletes must undergo complete genital surgery and get their gonads (their ovaries or testes) removed before they can compete. They also have to get legal recognition of their chosen gender and complete hormone therapy to minimize any sex-related advantages, the policy says. Post-pubescent transitioners will then have to wait two years before they can become eligible to apply for a confidential IOC evaluation. Dumaresq says the IOC's policy - including its two-year wait - is appropriate. "I believe that there should be a waiting period to eliminate the physical advantages," she says. "I know personally how long my body took to change, and two years is plenty." Some observers have expressed concern that transsexual athletes may, in spite of the rules, possess an unfair advantage over their peers. One news report quoted an Ottawa doctor's claims that male-to-female transsexuals will have the advantage of size and strength, while female-to-male transsexuals could have an edge where endurance is concerned. The report raised the spectre of Olympic-obsessed athletes changing sex to gain the upper hand. Dumaresq disputes such claims. The mountain biker is adamant she doesn't have any unfair advantage over her peers. "I have lost the ability to build muscle and have lost the muscle mass that I once had - gone," she says. "I work out constantly just to try and maintain a strong physical fitness level," she explains. "Many have said, 'What if a pro athlete changes sex?' Well, if a pro athlete wants to go through what I've gone through, and then start racing again to try and win, let them try. SRS [sex reassignment surgery] is irreversible, and without testosterone, muscle will decrease." The Stockholm consensus, as the IOC's new trans policy is known, was formulated by a committee of experts convened by the IOC's medical commission to make recommendations on the participation of athletes who have undergone sexual reassignment in sport. Some of those experts had already helped abolish the IOC's old, highly controversial gender verification procedures. "In a sense, this [new policy] was a continuation of that effort," says committee member Myron Genel, who is also a professor at Yale University's school of medicine. Gender verification testing of female athletes at the Olympics began in 1968 at Mexico City. The process - initially a gynecological exam, later a chromosomal test - was invasive and unreliable. In 2000, the IOC scrapped gender testing in time for the Sydney Olympics. "A lot of us would feel that the IOC was much too slow in eliminating gender verification," Genel says now. "[But] I think they certainly have taken the lead in terms of how to deal with transgendered athletes." Like Dumaresq, the professor says he's confident that making trans athletes wait two years after their gonadectomies will be more than enough time to mitigate any physical advantages they might have due to muscle strength. "Now, there obviously would be skeletal changes that are not reversible, in terms of size and wingspan, for example," Genel says. "But if you're going discriminate against transgendered athletes on the basis of their height or their wingspan, then we ought to set clear limits for women who compete, since there are six-foot-six women who compete in sports such as basketball and volleyball." The plight of transsexual athletes shows it may make more sense to group competitors by their physical attributes, such as height and weight, rather than their gender, points out local trans activist Tami Starlight. Meanwhile, Dumaresq continues to make history in her discipline. Cycling's governing bodies suspended the mountain biker in 2001 after some of her fellow racers filed complaints against her. The decision on Dumaresq's status eventually came down to her birth certificate, which she had changed to identify herself as female. The Canadian Cycling Association decided that since Dumaresq is legally recognized as female, she should have the right to compete in women's sports. In 2002, Dumaresq was granted a full licence to compete as a pro mountain biker. She went on to win the Canada Cup series, become the first known transsexual athlete to earn a spot on a national team, and place 24th at the world championships. Last year, she made history again when she won the national downhill championship in Whistler. She finished 17th at the world championships in Lugano, Switzerland. Dumaresq says she knows of transsexual athletes hoping to compete in future Olympics, including the 2010 summer games in Vancouver. "During my time racing, I have faced many people who had prejudices and intolerances towards me and people like me," she says. "I hope that I have educated some, so that it'll be easier for the next athlete with a trans history to be included." Stephen Hui is a journalist living in Toronto. This article originally appeared in Xtra West, a lesbian and gay newspaper in Vancouver. From checker at panix.com Fri Aug 13 15:17:12 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 11:17:12 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CBC: Will Human Beings Remain Truly Human? by Wesley J. Smith Message-ID: Will Human Beings Remain Truly Human? by Wesley J. Smith http://www.thecbc.org/redesigned/research_display.php?id=129 [15](Register for the Techno-Sapien Conference Today) Brave New World is closing in upon us at mach speed. Consider the mind boggling technological potentials that have gone, in just the last few years, from science fiction to very real science potential. The most obvious of these is the prospect of human cloning. But following just behind that biotechnology is a radical concept that makes cloning seem about as novel as a transistor radio; the drive toward a post human world known as "transhumanism." Transhumanism is a nascent and explicitly eugenic philosophy that advocates seizing control of human evolution through bioengineering. Transhumanists come from the highest levels of academe. The founder of the movement, Nick Bostrom, is a professor of philosophy at Yale University who recently received a three-year fellowship at Oxford University. Other pioneer transhumanists include Professor James Hughes of Trinity College, Hartford, and Gregory Stock, director of the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at the School of Medicine, UCLA and author of the recent book, Redesigning Humans. Transhumanists are biotech-absolutists. They assert that humans should not merely be allowed to metamorphose themselves through plastic surgery, cyber-technology, and the like, but should have the right to control the destiny of their genes via progeny design and fabrication. This could include replacing natural chromosomes with artificial chromosomes, increasing or decreasing the number of chromosomes in offspring or clones, and even in Hughes words, "mixing species boundaries." University of Alabama bioethicist Gregory E. Pence, an enthusiastic proponent of cloning-to-produce-children, also promotes mixing human and animal genes. In his book, Who's Afraid of Human Cloning? Pence writes, "In some ultimate sense, humans are both nothing more, and as wonderful as, compassionate monkeys." By "weakening the ethical boundary between non-human and human animals," he asserts that it will be easier to "do to humans some of the things we think quite sane to do to animals," beginning with cloning and moving from there to genetic modification. Transhumanists intend to take us on a long march to post humanity. If that is not to happen, we will have to resist. Unfortunately, transhumanists have arrived among us at a weak moment when traditional sanctity-of-human-life cultural norms have been undermined significantly. But the future won't wait for us to regain our moral equilibrium. Genetic science is advancing at an almost reckless pace. If we are going to maintain the equal dignity of all human life in the face of the biotechnological threat, society will have to act. Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics has written, "It is our difficult task to find ways to preserve [society] from the soft dehumanizations of well-meaning but hubristic biotechnical 'recreationism'-and to do it without undermining biomedical science or rejecting its genuine contributions to human welfare." This crucial task will require informed and committed public participation in which people become aware of both the potentials and perils of our unfolding technological world, and be able to distinguish between the two. This is why the upcoming CBC conference---"Technosapians: The Face of the Future?" -is so important. The conference will bring together some of the leading thinkers on these issues in one place to debate, discuss, and ponder the potential consequences of transhumanism and a post human future. I urge all to attend, and then be willing to participate through our democratic institutions in helping society benefit from biotechnology without succumbing to it. Author Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute is a special consultant to the CBC. He is currently working on books about human cloning and animal rights. References 15. http://www.thecbc.org/redesigned/research_display.php?id=118 From guavaberry at earthlink.net Fri Aug 13 18:50:11 2004 From: guavaberry at earthlink.net (K.E.) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 14:50:11 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Why We Send So Many Americans to Prison and Probably Shouldn't Message-ID: <6.1.2.0.0.20040813144913.02059ec0@mail.edu-cyberpg.com> Fred Nold's Legacy Why We Send So Many Americans to Prison and Probably Shouldn't http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040812.html By Robert X. Cringely The interface between science and public policy is awkward at best. Scientists and academics need money for research, while politicians need research to build better weapons and sometimes to justify intended policy changes. But what happens if you look for scientific support for some new policy and the results of the research show that what you are intending to do is wrong? You can change your plan or ignore the research. This latter decision, one example of which is the topic of this column, brings with it some peril because if it later becomes known that the research was commissioned, completed, and ignored, then someone's job is on the line. So if you are going to bury research findings, it is a good idea to bury them deep. America does a better job of putting people in prison than any other country. Just over two million Americans are behind bars right now, a number that has been growing far quicker than the overall population for more than 20 years. The impact of this mass imprisonment is felt especially in the African-American community, where one in 12 men are in prison or jail. The reasons given for these high numbers vary, but something that is frequently mentioned in any discussion is the impact U.S. federal sentencing guidelines have had on sending more people to jail for longer periods of time. Those very guidelines are now coming under scrutiny by the courts because their imposition may have denied some inmates their constitutional right to a trial by jury. That will be decided soon by the U.S. Supreme Court, but for the moment, all that I know for sure is that the sentencing guidelines in use now aren't working as intended, and the people who installed those guidelines probably knew this even before we started building so many prisons. Even if the U.S. Supreme Court shortly finds that the sentencing guidelines are constitutional, THEY DON'T DETER CRIME. Back in the early 1980s, a couple of economists at California's Hoover Institution (Michael Block and Fred Nold) did a study on the effect of monetary fines on antitrust enforcement. Their idea was to look at law enforcement as a purely economic activity. How could fines be structured to offer the greatest incentive to do the right thing? They did some research, gathered some data, published a paper and generally concluded that there were some economic forces involved and it just might be possible to not only encourage potential white collar criminals to think again -- these fines could also be a significant source of revenue for the enforcers. The paper was well received (you can still find it on the Internet), though no laws were changed as a result. But it got Block and Nold some attention from the U.S. Department of Justice. Then the two got a call from the U.S. Sentencing Commission. This is the board that oversees federal criminal sentencing to ensure that sentences are being correctly applied by judges. "Correctly" in this case means that they are generally compliant with published guidelines. These guidelines are updated every 20 to 30 years, and it was time for such an update. The Feds thought that just maybe Block and Nold could come up with some economic twist for the new guidelines that would make them more effective at reducing crime. So they commissioned Block and Nold to do a big study budgeted at, I believe, $250,000. They did the study in 1982, and the principle players were Block, Nold, and Sandy Lerner, who was their statistician. Block and Nold thought they were headed for the big time, and started a company to do this kind of work. Then things began to go downhill. The DoJ didn't like what it was hearing as the study progressed, and they may have refused to accept the final paper. Certainly, they refused to pay because Block and Nold went out of business, and Nold went into a deep depression that ended with his suicide in 1983. But Block was actually named to the Sentencing Commission, where he served a six-year term. He also became a law professor at the University of Arizona, and today works at a conservative Arizona think-tank, the Goldwater Institute, and does not reply to my e-mails. Why should we care about any of this? Well, for one thing, I knew Fred Nold and hate to think that his work would die with him. But much more importantly, we should care because I'm told the Block and Nold study, which was intended to economically validate the proposed sentencing guidelines, instead showed that the new guidelines would actually create more crime than they would deter. More crime, more drug use, more robbery, more murder would be the result, not less. Not only that, but these guidelines would lead to entire segments of the population entering a downward economic spiral, taking away their American dream. There is no mention anywhere of this study, which was completely buried by the DoJ under then-secretary Edwin Meese. The proposed sentencing guidelines were accepted unaltered and the world we have today is the result. We spend tens of billions per year on prisons to house people who don't contribute in any way to our economy. We tear apart the black and latino communities. The cost to society is immense, and as Block and Nold showed, unnecessary. AND THE FEDS KNEW THIS AT THE TIME. It is one thing to make what turns out to have been a mistake and another thing altogether to make what you have reason to believe will be a mistake. Why would the DoJ, having good reason to believe that the new sentencing guidelines would create the very prison explosion we've seen in the last 20 years, go ahead with the new guidelines? My view is that they went ahead because they were more interested in punishment than deterrence. They went ahead because they didn't perceive those in prison as being constituents. They went ahead because it enabled the building of larger organizations with more power. They went ahead because the idea of a society with less crime is itself a threat to the prestige of those in law enforcement. Where would we be today if the Block and Nold paper had been accepted and acted upon? Well, we'd probably have a few hundred thousand fewer people in prison. We'd probably have hundreds fewer prisons. Our black communities, especially, would probably be more economically productive. We'd probably have less drug use, fewer unwed mothers, it goes on and on. And while the disappearance of the Block and Nold paper is an opportunity lost, whatever conclusions they made then would probably apply just as well today. Nold is gone. Block won't talk, at least not to me. There may or may not be a file somewhere at the DoJ. But there is their statistician Sandy Lerner, who remembers well her work on the study. After Block and Nold folded, Sandy's next venture was to start a company with her husband, Len Bosack, that they called Cisco Systems. Maybe you've heard of it. /// Karen Ellis /// Educational CyberPlayGround __ /// RingLeaders on ECP Community Mailing Lists \\\/// \X/ Hot List 1993 Submit your School Online For Free \/ "You too can rule the world. You just have to crush everyone ELSE first! A little crushing music, maestro..." - from the movie, 'With Honors' "Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything. It is the essence of order and lends to all that is good and just and beautiful." - Plato From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Aug 13 19:11:56 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 12:11:56 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Why We Send So Many Americans to Prison and Probably Shouldn't Message-ID: <01C4812E.BA6B2800.shovland@mindspring.com> A lot of people in prison are there for non-violent drug crimes. Things that shouldn't even be crimes. We are insane. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: K.E. [SMTP:guavaberry at earthlink.net] Sent: Friday, August 13, 2004 11:50 AM To: paleo Subject: [Paleopsych] Why We Send So Many Americans to Prison and Probably Shouldn't Fred Nold's Legacy Why We Send So Many Americans to Prison and Probably Shouldn't http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040812.html By Robert X. Cringely The interface between science and public policy is awkward at best. Scientists and academics need money for research, while politicians need research to build better weapons and sometimes to justify intended policy changes. But what happens if you look for scientific support for some new policy and the results of the research show that what you are intending to do is wrong? You can change your plan or ignore the research. This latter decision, one example of which is the topic of this column, brings with it some peril because if it later becomes known that the research was commissioned, completed, and ignored, then someone's job is on the line. So if you are going to bury research findings, it is a good idea to bury them deep. America does a better job of putting people in prison than any other country. Just over two million Americans are behind bars right now, a number that has been growing far quicker than the overall population for more than 20 years. The impact of this mass imprisonment is felt especially in the African-American community, where one in 12 men are in prison or jail. The reasons given for these high numbers vary, but something that is frequently mentioned in any discussion is the impact U.S. federal sentencing guidelines have had on sending more people to jail for longer periods of time. Those very guidelines are now coming under scrutiny by the courts because their imposition may have denied some inmates their constitutional right to a trial by jury. That will be decided soon by the U.S. Supreme Court, but for the moment, all that I know for sure is that the sentencing guidelines in use now aren't working as intended, and the people who installed those guidelines probably knew this even before we started building so many prisons. Even if the U.S. Supreme Court shortly finds that the sentencing guidelines are constitutional, THEY DON'T DETER CRIME. Back in the early 1980s, a couple of economists at California's Hoover Institution (Michael Block and Fred Nold) did a study on the effect of monetary fines on antitrust enforcement. Their idea was to look at law enforcement as a purely economic activity. How could fines be structured to offer the greatest incentive to do the right thing? They did some research, gathered some data, published a paper and generally concluded that there were some economic forces involved and it just might be possible to not only encourage potential white collar criminals to think again -- these fines could also be a significant source of revenue for the enforcers. The paper was well received (you can still find it on the Internet), though no laws were changed as a result. But it got Block and Nold some attention from the U.S. Department of Justice. Then the two got a call from the U.S. Sentencing Commission. This is the board that oversees federal criminal sentencing to ensure that sentences are being correctly applied by judges. "Correctly" in this case means that they are generally compliant with published guidelines. These guidelines are updated every 20 to 30 years, and it was time for such an update. The Feds thought that just maybe Block and Nold could come up with some economic twist for the new guidelines that would make them more effective at reducing crime. So they commissioned Block and Nold to do a big study budgeted at, I believe, $250,000. They did the study in 1982, and the principle players were Block, Nold, and Sandy Lerner, who was their statistician. Block and Nold thought they were headed for the big time, and started a company to do this kind of work. Then things began to go downhill. The DoJ didn't like what it was hearing as the study progressed, and they may have refused to accept the final paper. Certainly, they refused to pay because Block and Nold went out of business, and Nold went into a deep depression that ended with his suicide in 1983. But Block was actually named to the Sentencing Commission, where he served a six-year term. He also became a law professor at the University of Arizona, and today works at a conservative Arizona think-tank, the Goldwater Institute, and does not reply to my e-mails. Why should we care about any of this? Well, for one thing, I knew Fred Nold and hate to think that his work would die with him. But much more importantly, we should care because I'm told the Block and Nold study, which was intended to economically validate the proposed sentencing guidelines, instead showed that the new guidelines would actually create more crime than they would deter. More crime, more drug use, more robbery, more murder would be the result, not less. Not only that, but these guidelines would lead to entire segments of the population entering a downward economic spiral, taking away their American dream. There is no mention anywhere of this study, which was completely buried by the DoJ under then-secretary Edwin Meese. The proposed sentencing guidelines were accepted unaltered and the world we have today is the result. We spend tens of billions per year on prisons to house people who don't contribute in any way to our economy. We tear apart the black and latino communities. The cost to society is immense, and as Block and Nold showed, unnecessary. AND THE FEDS KNEW THIS AT THE TIME. It is one thing to make what turns out to have been a mistake and another thing altogether to make what you have reason to believe will be a mistake. Why would the DoJ, having good reason to believe that the new sentencing guidelines would create the very prison explosion we've seen in the last 20 years, go ahead with the new guidelines? My view is that they went ahead because they were more interested in punishment than deterrence. They went ahead because they didn't perceive those in prison as being constituents. They went ahead because it enabled the building of larger organizations with more power. They went ahead because the idea of a society with less crime is itself a threat to the prestige of those in law enforcement. Where would we be today if the Block and Nold paper had been accepted and acted upon? Well, we'd probably have a few hundred thousand fewer people in prison. We'd probably have hundreds fewer prisons. Our black communities, especially, would probably be more economically productive. We'd probably have less drug use, fewer unwed mothers, it goes on and on. And while the disappearance of the Block and Nold paper is an opportunity lost, whatever conclusions they made then would probably apply just as well today. Nold is gone. Block won't talk, at least not to me. There may or may not be a file somewhere at the DoJ. But there is their statistician Sandy Lerner, who remembers well her work on the study. After Block and Nold folded, Sandy's next venture was to start a company with her husband, Len Bosack, that they called Cisco Systems. Maybe you've heard of it. /// Karen Ellis /// Educational CyberPlayGround __ /// RingLeaders on ECP Community Mailing Lists \\\/// \X/ Hot List 1993 Submit your School Online For Free \/ "You too can rule the world. You just have to crush everyone ELSE first! A little crushing music, maestro..." - from the movie, 'With Honors' "Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything. It is the essence of order and lends to all that is good and just and beautiful." - Plato _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Fri Aug 13 20:43:51 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 13:43:51 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] al qaeda influencing election In-Reply-To: <200408121800.i7CI0pd31131@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20040813204351.48706.qmail@web13423.mail.yahoo.com> >>But security experts and political commentators have been split over whom Al Qaeda wants to win the 2004 US presidential elections: US President George Bush or his Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry.<< --I would expect Al Qaeda to do whatever it can to portray the US govt as corrupt and totalitarian. That would make a postponement of the election the preferred outcome, rather than a clear win by either candidate. A win by Bush would be the next most favorable outcome, since Bush has proven he cannot keep world opinion on the side of the US. A win by Kerry would mean a "fresh start" for the US with the possibility of gaining allies, including Islamic allies, giving Muslim nations an opportunity to cooperate without being seen as appeasers of "Crusader Bush". Al Qaeda's ultimate goal is to spark a global jihaad with the US and Israel playing the role assigned to them, that of "oppressive occupier." It can accomplish that goal more easily with an evangelical Christian in office in the US, especially one who cannot muster support from the rest of the world. A postponement of the US elections would most fit that dramatic theme. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 14 02:08:27 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 22:08:27 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] American Demographics: Bush vs. Kerry: What Influences Swing Voters? Message-ID: Bush vs. Kerry: What Influences Swing Voters? http://demographics.com/ar/bush_vs_kerry/index.htm [q.v. for graphic that give a lot of information not shown in the article] Alicia Mundy American Demographics, 4.8.9 [Amazing news that 11% of Republicans would switch to Kerry (and another 9% switch to a third-party candidate or not vote) if Kerry endorsed stem-cell research. There's an NYT piece from July 22, "Kerry Vows to Lift Bush Limits on Stem-Cell Research." The American Demographics article is August 8, and presumably reflects polling done before that announcement. I'm not sure what the latest Gallup polls show, since I've been largely sitting out this campaign, but surely the changes are nothing like 11 percent! [The graphic, but not the article, says that, if "proof emerges that Kerry lied about his record in Vietnam, about 8% of Democrats would switch to Bush (hard to tell from the graphic) and 28% (exactly, that is to the nearest percentage point) switch to Bush, switch to a third party candidate, or not vote. This is not altogether helpful, since claims of "proof" of his lying and rebuttals of same have been around for some time. [It's certainly a great innovation to ask voters what would make them switch, but it seems that what they will actually do is muted. The election remains a toss-up. This election is as insignificant as the knock-down battle between James A. Garfield and Winfield S. Hancock in 1880, where Garfield won the popular vote by only 7000. It was without doubt seen at the time as crucial, but today Hancock is a forgotten man. There are some speculations in soc.history.what-if, but mostly about what might have happened if Tilden had won the Presidency in 1876. Go to http://groups.google.com and search for <"winfield s. hancock" 1880>. Your ever faithful Premise Checker is among the articles. I'll send it along for your general entertainment. And I append something by an earlier commentator on the American scene after the American Demographics article. Scroll down.] [The electorate seems much more divided than it actually is, thanks to computers refining the art of gerrymandering, which makes for safe seats and which turns the primaries to the crucial battlegrounds. And this means that the candidate in a safe seat appeals to the median of his party rather than to the median of the electorate. In addition, politics has joined the entertainment industry, as Tom Wolfe saw so long ago in "The Politics of Pleasure," in which he noted that, for all the problems of the Viet Nam war and civil rights, the voters of California elected a movie actor as governor. And so I saw a table full of books at Borders, partisan book after partisan book after partisan book, each more indignant than all the others.] "What ifs" could cause declared pro Bush and pro Kerry voters to switch sides on Election Day, new American Demographics-Zogby International survey finds. In late June, all the buzz in Washington was about the week-long funeral of Ronald Reagan and how much of a "bounce" the Reagan connection could give President George W. Bush's re-election bid. Ironically, however, the Reagan "bounce" might just help the other guy -- Democratic Sen. John Kerry. The president could lose his hold on up to 20 percent of the people who say they'd vote for him thanks to an issue that gained momentum in the weeks following former President Reagan's death. According to a new poll done exclusively for American Demographics by Zogby International, if Kerry were to announce a major initiative in stem cell research to cure diseases such as Alzheimer's, which killed Reagan, Parkinson's, diabetes and spinal injuries, Kerry would gain a whopping 11 percent of Bush's voters. What's more, another 9 percent of Bush supporters say they'd switch to a third party, not vote, or be undecided. "This is the 'sleeper issue' of this campaign," says Bob Beckel, a former Democratic presidential candidate strategist. "It's more than just stem cell research--it's the symbolism of announcing a plan to eradicate major diseases, and part of the Baby Boomers' health care crisis." There is a growing public desire for the government to do more to cure diseases that have put the Baby Boomer generation in a squeeze, parenting their own parents while raising children, and struggling to pay for and get health insurance. "In polling, a switch to the competition is a two-fer. So, a switch of 11 percent directly from Bush to Kerry is a total change of 22 percent," Beckel says. In an election where most polls show a dead heat, so significant a change could swing the results. "Politically and scientifically, it's a home run for Kerry to call for stem cell science initiatives," says Howard Fineman, Newsweek's veteran political commentator, "Americans had a crash course in what Alzheimer's does to everyone involved, during the week of Reagan's funeral," Fineman adds, noting that magazines such as Newsweek, sell out on the stands whenever there's a health issue cover. The poll was fairly unique in election surveys. Zogby asked over 1,000 potential voters to choose between Bush and Kerry, and then asked those who made a decision, what it would take to change their votes. A total of 912 respondents who picked either Bush or Kerry, with a slight margin for Kerry over Bush, were presented with five possible scenarios that could plausibly occur prior to the election on November 2. The "what ifs" included issues such as the economy, jobs and the war in Iraq; a stem cell research plan; Bush dumping Cheney; and a wild card: the impact of Bill Clinton on the hustings. "It's a dream poll for political strategists," Beckel says. "Asking people what would get them off their mark." "This is a very interesting poll, as it touches on so many 'what ifs,' says John McCaslin, columnist for The Washington Times. The author of the upcoming book Inside the Beltway, McCaslin says, "Washington political columnists don't normally see this in presidential polling." "If the presidential race is as close as the pollsters are telling us, a point or two shift to either side could sway the election." McCaslin says. A Kerry move on stem cell cures "might not be far off, given the interest surrounding Ron Reagan's much-heralded appearance at the Democratic National Convention," he concludes. Several political pros interviewed are shocked by the strength of the answers in stem cell research. Norman Ornstein, TV commentary and longtime political author says, "Their results were interesting and surprising. If you asked me what's likely to move voters, I would have said unemployment would move a large number of voters, but not many people said they would switch." The stem cell response "certainly suggests on the GOP side that Bush has to worry about some tension within the party that is not so socially conservative," says Ornstein. "It strongly suggests that there are GOP moderates looking for a leader. Therefore, Kerry could capitalize on this issue." But of course, Kerry can't use this issue to mobilize voters unless he personally takes a proactive position on the very disease that caused Reagan's tragic demise. Kerry, known as Mr. Cautious, has to be prodded to take a tough stand on anything, including hunger in America. He has a chance here, says Ornstein, "but he has to do something with it." Meanwhile, John Zogby, himself, has been asked by Republicans what Bush might do to keep moderates happy, and Zogby has found that stem cell research is a surprisingly attractive issue. Zogby says that while Kerry mulls it over, he should worry that Bush will wake up, suddenly embrace Nancy Reagan publicly and warm to her cause. The stem cell cure initiative wasn't the only unusual finding. One might have expected that a drop in unemployment would boost Bush; however, he only directly gained five percent, which includes a margin of error of 3 percent. "That is because Bush never 'owned' the economy as an issue, the way Reagan did," explains Beckel. He should know; Beckel ran 189 campaigns, and only failed in five, but one of them was the Titanic Walter Mondale loss to incumbent Ronald Reagan. "Because Bush hasn't made the economy his issue, as this poll shows, he won't get credit for improvements he might make," Beckel opines. On the other hand, "Bush has taken ownership of terrorism and Iraq," says Beckel. They are Bush's issues to lose. But James Taylor, author of The Visionary's Handbook and a former consultant at Yankelovich marketing research, sees Kerry as vulnerable in this poll. "This poll shows that Kerry is at whims of fate and Bush," says Taylor. "If you look at Bush's numbers, his are a lot tighter. Bush has a much more bullet-proof political base than Kerry. "I'm fascinated that Bush has a sure victory coming out of Kerry's pocket if either Iraq pulls together, or if McCain or someone replaces Cheney, or frankly, in the event of there's a terrorist attack here," Taylor says. "All those issues have some degree of probability, such as Iraq showing signs of real governance. Those three all are Kerry killers. If they all happened, Kerry could lose by 12 percent. "Bush's only real risk is that Kerry gets organized around a real national health plan with stem call research on disease, or if Bush loses control of inflation," Taylor says of the poll results. He also thinks Baby Boomers are being given too much credit here for caring about health care and their aging parents. "They want to live forever, and they don't wanna live 'old.' Stem cell research offers chances to reverse the aging process." What happens if Bush dumps Vice President Dick Cheney for John McCain, we asked declared Bush and Kerry supporters. Bad news for Kerry: he loses 8 percent directly to Bush, and another 9 percent to the wilderness of "not sure" and "3rd party." "That Cheney is a real drag on the ticket is significant," Taylor says. He can foresee Cheney announcing that his health problems have intervened. Bonnie Erbe, host of PBS's To The Contrary, said she could see Bush dumping Cheney at the last minute. Overall, Erbe said, "What's going on out there with voters is that Bush has energized the left, and there's so much hate. Kerry is not the draw, but the lesser of two evils. Bush's position on stem cell research can be used as an example of Bush caving into evangelicals, even against the most conservative members of his own party, i.e. Sen. Orrin Hatch and Ronald Reagan's widow." Kerry should use this opening she says. Beckel says Kerry should do it in a big way, announce the "new frontier" for America, as John F. Kennedy did, but instead of going to the moon, say "we're going to the laboratories." "It's a pro-life position," Beckel says, which Kerry can pound on. William Frey of the Brookings Institution notes that this poll shows, "It may be time for Kerry to push the panic button and do something bold, take a stand. Yes, a failing economy could hurt Bush, but a better strategy for Kerry here is 'let's not wait, let's do something bold.' This poll says that there's some payoff in that for Kerry." Like Taylor, Frey believes that without some proactive move, Kerry's fate rests too much on forces beyond his control. "A change by Bush in his vice president sends Kerry voters over to Bush, and real stability in Iraq sends them to Bush, so Kerry is at the mercy of these things," Frey says. Bush definitely gains votes from Kerry in the event of another terrorist attack on US soil. An analyst who asked not to be quoted says this may be a reason that Homeland Security leaders mention new, nebulous threats every time Kerry gets momentum. Political science professor Steffen Schmidt, host of the Iowa radio show Dr. Politics says that "After the 9-11 commission report, I cannot imagine that fear of terrorism and the question of who can best deal with terrorists is not the number one concern of voters." One democratic analyst, who asked not be identified, says that if there were another terrorist attack here, democrats could argue that terrorism is Bush's issue; Bush has been in charge and he failed to make America safe. But Taylor disagrees. "Anything dramatic in the war in Iraq or terrorism may redound to Bush," says Taylor, "then you get the 'don't change horses in mid-stream' syndrome. Even if there's a full-scale civil war in Iraq in September, it will focus the attention on the war, and people get distracted. So anything besides this slow-burning failure redounds to Bush's favor." There were other surprises in the poll: First, Bush's support among Catholics, whom he is courting, is not that strong. And Bush, who is also wooing Hispanics aggressively, did not profit from a scenario in which he might announce looser visa/immigration restrictions on Mexicans and Central Americans. As for The Return of the King--Bill Clinton-- to the spotlight, our analysts say: "Watch out." Although 50 percent of all respondents said it would not affect them, Clinton's appearance could cost Kerry 6 percent of his voters to Bush. Clinton helps Kerry among African Americans, and may increase their turnout; and helps Kerry among 25- to 34-year-olds. But Clinton also ensures that at least 25 percent of Bush voters dig in; he hurts Kerry among "east coast" voters, and kills Kerry support among the "Investor Class," of whom 29 percent say they would be much more likely to vote for Bush if Clinton popped up. "This poll tells us two things," says Ornstein, "Clinton remains a polarizing figure, but he also remains a consequential figure." Schmidt says the poll suggests "Al Gore was right; Clinton is not at all a win-win asset." Clinton has to be used "very carefully," says Frey. "Clinton does polarize the electorate even further. Republicans are much more likely to vote for Bush if Clinton comes in, but he doesn't help as much with Democrats, except strong partisans and African Americans. "That means the Democrats have to strategically target where they use Clinton," Frey adds. Several analysts suggested changes in the poll scenarios: that the question on Bush dropping Cheney as vice president should not have mentioned McCain, since that is unlikely in light of Bush's dislike of McCain. They also say we should have asked voters "what happens if we capture Osama Bin Laden?" And, instead of positing a civil war in Iraq, which is what we already have, we should have asked: what if an attack killed 100 or more Americans in a single day? And we should have developed a sub-group of veterans, to go with ethnic, income and racial blocs. However, this poll is significant for finding the "soft" declared voters for each candidate, say Beckel, Frey and Ornstein. "It's hard to change votes, it's admitting to failure," says Beckel. "That's why political consultants wish they could do more polls like this. You don't get many changes, but what you get signals hot button issues and dissatisfaction with a candidate in general, voters looking for an excuse to vote against him. "That's what the campaign strategists need to know. " --------------------- All the while I have been forgetting the third of my reasons for remaining so faithful a citizen of the Federation, despite all the lascivious inducements from expatriates to follow them beyond the seas, and all the surly suggestions from patriots that I succumb. It is the reason which grows out of my mediaeval but unashamed taste for the bizarre and indelicate, my congenital weakness for comedy of the grosser varieties. The United States, to my eye, is incomparably the greatest show on earth. It is a show which avoids diligently all the kinds of clowning which tire me most quickly -- for example, royal ceremonials, the tedious hocus-pocus of haut politique, the taking of politics seriously -- and lays chief stress upon the kinds which delight me unceasingly -- for example, the ribald combats of demagogues, the exquisitely ingenious operations of master rogues, the pursuit of witches and heretics, the desperate struggles of inferior men to claw their way into Heaven. We have clowns in constant practice among us who are as far above the clowns of any other great state as a Jack Dempsey is above a paralytic -- and not a few dozen or score of them, but whole droves and herds. Human enterprises which, in all other Christian countries, are resigned despairingly to an incurable dullness -- things that seem devoid of exhilirating amusement, by their very nature -- are here lifted to such vast heights of buffoonery that contemplating them strains the midriff almost to breaking. I cite an example: the worship of God. Everywhere else on earth it is carried on in a solemn and dispiriting manner; in England, of course, the bishops are obscene, but the average man seldom gets a fair chance to laugh at them and enjoy them. Now come home. Here we not only have bishops who are enormously more obscene than even the most gifted of the English bishops; we have also a huge force of lesser specialists in ecclesiastical mountebankery -- tin-horn Loyolas, Savonarolas and Xaviers of a hundred fantastic rites, each performing untiringly and each full of a grotesque and illimitable whimsicality. Every American town, however small, has one of its own: a holy clerk with so fine a talent for introducing the arts of jazz into the salvation of the damned that his performance takes on all the gaudiness of a four-ring circus, and the bald announcement that he will raid Hell on such and such a night is enough to empty all the town blind- pigs and bordellos and pack his sanctuary to the doors. And to aid him and inspire him there are travelling experts to whom he stands in the relation of a wart to the Matterhorn -- stupendous masters of theological imbecility, contrivers of doctrines utterly preposterous, heirs to the Joseph Smith, Mother Eddy and John Alexander Dowie tradition -- Bryan, Sunday, and their like. These are the eminences of the American Sacred College. I delight in them. Their proceedings make me a happier American. Turn, now, to politics. Consider, for example, a campaign for the Presidency. Would it be possible to imagine anything more uproariously idiotic -- a deafening, nerve-wracking battle to the death between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Harlequin and Sganarelle, Gobbo and Dr. Cook -- the unspeakable, with fearful snorts, gradually swallowing the inconceivable? I defy any one to match it elsewhere on this earth. In other lands, at worst, there are at least intelligible issues, coherent ideas, salient personalities. Somebody says something, and somebody replies. But what did Harding say in 1920, and what did Cox reply? Who was Harding, anyhow, and who was Cox? Here, having perfected democracy, we lift the whole combat to symbolism, to transcendentalism, to metaphysics. Here we load a pair of palpably tin cannon with blank cartridges charged with talcum power, and so let fly. Here one may howl over the show without any uneasy reminder that it is serious, and that some one may be hurt. I hold that this elevation of politics to the plane of undiluted comedy is peculiarly American, that no-where else on this disreputable ball has the art of the sham-battle been developed to such fineness... ... Here politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for "King Lear," or a hanging, or a course of medical journals. But feeling better for the laugh. Ridi si sapis, said Martial. Mirth is necessary to wisdom, to comfort, above all to happiness. Well, here is the land of mirth, as Germany is the land of metaphysics and France is the land of fornication. Here the buffoonery never stops. What could be more delightful than the endless struggle of the Puritan to make the joy of the minority unlawful and impossible? The effort is itself a greater joy to one standing on the side-lines than any or all of the carnal joys it combats. Always, when I contemplate an uplifter at his hopeless business, I recall a scene in an old- time burlesque show, witnessed for hire in my days as a dramatic critic. A chorus girl executed a fall upon the stage, and Rudolph Krausemeyer, the Swiss comdeian, rushed to her aid. As he stooped painfully to succor her, Irving Rabinovitz, the Zionist comedian, fetched him a fearful clout across the cofferdam with a slap-stick. So the uplifter, the soul-saver, the Americanizer, striving to make the Republic fit for Y.M.C.A. secretaries. He is the eternal American, ever moved by the best of intentions, ever running a la Krausemeyer to the rescue of virtue, and ever getting his pantaloons fanned by the Devil. I am naturally sinful, and such spectacles caress me. If the slap-stick were a sash-weight, the show would be cruel, and I'd probably complain to the Polizei. As it is, I know that the uplifter is not really hurt, but simply shocked. The blow, in fact, does him good, for it helps get him into Heaven, as exegetes prove from Matthew v, 11: Hereux serez-vous, lorsqu'on vous outragera, qu'on vous persecutera, and so on. As for me, it makes me a more contented man, and hence a better citizen. One man prefers the Republic because it pays better wages than Bulgaria. Another because it has laws to keep him sober and his daughter chaste. Another because the Woolworth Building is higher than the cathedral at Chartres. Another because, living here, he can read the New York Evening Journal. Another because there is a warrant out for him somewhere else. Me, I like it because it amuses me to my taste. I never get tired of the show. It is worth every cent it costs. That cost, it seems to me is very moderate. Taxes in the United States are not actually high. I figure, for example, that my private share of the expense of maintaining the Hon. Mr. Harding in the White House this year will work out to less than 80 cents. Try to think of better sport for the money: in New York it has been estimated that it costs $8 to get comfortably tight, and $17.50, on an average, to pinch a girl's arm. The United States Senate will cost me perhaps $11 for the year, but against that expense set the subscription price of the Congressional Record, about $15, which, as a journalist, I receive for nothing. For $4 less than nothing I am thus entertained as Solomon never was by his hooch dancers. Col. George Brinton McClellan Harvey costs me but 25 cents a year; I get Nicholas Murray Butler free. Finally, there is young Teddy Roosevelt, the naval expert. Teddy costs me, as I work it out, about 11 cents a year, or less than a cent a month. More, he entertains me doubly for the money, first as a naval expert, and secondly as a walking attentat upon democracy, a devastating proof that there is nothing, after all, in that superstition. We Americans subscribe to the doctrine of human equality - - and the Rooseveltii reduce it to an absurdity as brilliantly as the sons of Veit Bach. Where is your equal opportunity now? Here in this Eden of clowns, with the highest rewards of clowning theoretically open to every poor boy -- here in the very citadel of democracy we found and cherish a clown dynasty! From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 14 02:10:13 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 22:10:13 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Premise Checker: Winfield S. Hancock 1880 Message-ID: Premise Checker: Winfield S. Hancock 1880 Groups Search result 10 for "winfield s. hancock" 1880 From: Premise Checker (checker at clark.net) Subject: Two Scenarios for Clinton or Lieberman Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy Date: 2000-12-15 17:28:54 PST Amendment 20, in part, reads, "... the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President...." First Scenario, Bill becomes Acting President: Three electors are blackmailed into switching their votes to Algore when the Electoral College meets on December 18 ("Who was that woman you were with who was not your wife?"). Congress keeps wrangling over counting the electoral votes (it takes one Representative and one Senator to mount a challenge, as a matter of statute law) through the expiration of Bill Clinton and Algore's term at noon on January 20. Congress may then pick anyone to *act* as President, though Bill can't be *elected*. A big foreign policy CRISIS!! breaks out in January, say Red China invades Taiwan. Ordinarily a Republican Congress would appoint a Republican to act as President, but (now remember Bill has been visiting foreign countries for the past couple of months and is positioning himself as a Wise Man) Congress instead asks Bill to stay on as Acting President till one gets elected. This goes on till 2004, at least. Bill slips into being Acting President for Life. Second Scenario, Holy Joe becomes acting President: Neither Bush/Cheney nor Algore/Holy Joe gets a majority of electoral votes. The House fails to pick a President. The Senate is evenly divided, but Algore as President of the Senate, gives the deciding vote for Holy Joe for Veep. (This has to take place between January 6, when the new Congress meets, and January 20.) Holy Joe than becomes Acting President. Politics has become part of the entertainment industry. I invoke the ideas in Howard Bloom's _The Global Brain_ and claim that the coincidences that have allowed the election CRISIS!! so far are too great to have occured by chance alone. No conspiracy is involved, but no explanation of the mechanisms why this election has been so hugely entertaining have been offered yet either. I expect further surprises in the days ahead. Meanwhile, ponder what would have happened if Winfield S. Hancock had won. Who was Winfield S. Hancock? He lost by only 7000 votes in 1880. Who defeated Winfield S. Hancock? James A. Garfield. What did the Garfield Administration accomplish? What would have a Hancock Administration accomplished? Was 1880 a turning point in American history? Will 2000 be regarded as a turning point in American history in 2120, another 120 years from now. I submit these profound questions for you to ponder. Frank Forman From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Aug 14 03:29:33 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 20:29:33 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] American Demographics: Bush vs. Kerry: What Influences Swing Voters? Message-ID: <01C48174.3F594160.shovland@mindspring.com> What did Bush do in Vietnam? Nothing. He was a Chicken Hawk. Remember that? Someone who supported the war but didn't have the guts to go fight in it. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Friday, August 13, 2004 7:08 PM To: WTA-Politics; paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] American Demographics: Bush vs. Kerry: What Influences Swing Voters? Bush vs. Kerry: What Influences Swing Voters? http://demographics.com/ar/bush_vs_kerry/index.htm [q.v. for graphic that give a lot of information not shown in the article] Alicia Mundy American Demographics, 4.8.9 [Amazing news that 11% of Republicans would switch to Kerry (and another 9% switch to a third-party candidate or not vote) if Kerry endorsed stem-cell research. There's an NYT piece from July 22, "Kerry Vows to Lift Bush Limits on Stem-Cell Research." The American Demographics article is August 8, and presumably reflects polling done before that announcement. I'm not sure what the latest Gallup polls show, since I've been largely sitting out this campaign, but surely the changes are nothing like 11 percent! [The graphic, but not the article, says that, if "proof emerges that Kerry lied about his record in Vietnam, about 8% of Democrats would switch to Bush (hard to tell from the graphic) and 28% (exactly, that is to the nearest percentage point) switch to Bush, switch to a third party candidate, or not vote. This is not altogether helpful, since claims of "proof" of his lying and rebuttals of same have been around for some time. [It's certainly a great innovation to ask voters what would make them switch, but it seems that what they will actually do is muted. The election remains a toss-up. This election is as insignificant as the knock-down battle between James A. Garfield and Winfield S. Hancock in 1880, where Garfield won the popular vote by only 7000. It was without doubt seen at the time as crucial, but today Hancock is a forgotten man. There are some speculations in soc.history.what-if, but mostly about what might have happened if Tilden had won the Presidency in 1876. Go to http://groups.google.com and search for <"winfield s. hancock" 1880>. Your ever faithful Premise Checker is among the articles. I'll send it along for your general entertainment. And I append something by an earlier commentator on the American scene after the American Demographics article. Scroll down.] [The electorate seems much more divided than it actually is, thanks to computers refining the art of gerrymandering, which makes for safe seats and which turns the primaries to the crucial battlegrounds. And this means that the candidate in a safe seat appeals to the median of his party rather than to the median of the electorate. In addition, politics has joined the entertainment industry, as Tom Wolfe saw so long ago in "The Politics of Pleasure," in which he noted that, for all the problems of the Viet Nam war and civil rights, the voters of California elected a movie actor as governor. And so I saw a table full of books at Borders, partisan book after partisan book after partisan book, each more indignant than all the others.] "What ifs" could cause declared pro Bush and pro Kerry voters to switch sides on Election Day, new American Demographics-Zogby International survey finds. In late June, all the buzz in Washington was about the week-long funeral of Ronald Reagan and how much of a "bounce" the Reagan connection could give President George W. Bush's re-election bid. Ironically, however, the Reagan "bounce" might just help the other guy -- Democratic Sen. John Kerry. The president could lose his hold on up to 20 percent of the people who say they'd vote for him thanks to an issue that gained momentum in the weeks following former President Reagan's death. According to a new poll done exclusively for American Demographics by Zogby International, if Kerry were to announce a major initiative in stem cell research to cure diseases such as Alzheimer's, which killed Reagan, Parkinson's, diabetes and spinal injuries, Kerry would gain a whopping 11 percent of Bush's voters. What's more, another 9 percent of Bush supporters say they'd switch to a third party, not vote, or be undecided. "This is the 'sleeper issue' of this campaign," says Bob Beckel, a former Democratic presidential candidate strategist. "It's more than just stem cell research--it's the symbolism of announcing a plan to eradicate major diseases, and part of the Baby Boomers' health care crisis." There is a growing public desire for the government to do more to cure diseases that have put the Baby Boomer generation in a squeeze, parenting their own parents while raising children, and struggling to pay for and get health insurance. "In polling, a switch to the competition is a two-fer. So, a switch of 11 percent directly from Bush to Kerry is a total change of 22 percent," Beckel says. In an election where most polls show a dead heat, so significant a change could swing the results. "Politically and scientifically, it's a home run for Kerry to call for stem cell science initiatives," says Howard Fineman, Newsweek's veteran political commentator, "Americans had a crash course in what Alzheimer's does to everyone involved, during the week of Reagan's funeral," Fineman adds, noting that magazines such as Newsweek, sell out on the stands whenever there's a health issue cover. The poll was fairly unique in election surveys. Zogby asked over 1,000 potential voters to choose between Bush and Kerry, and then asked those who made a decision, what it would take to change their votes. A total of 912 respondents who picked either Bush or Kerry, with a slight margin for Kerry over Bush, were presented with five possible scenarios that could plausibly occur prior to the election on November 2. The "what ifs" included issues such as the economy, jobs and the war in Iraq; a stem cell research plan; Bush dumping Cheney; and a wild card: the impact of Bill Clinton on the hustings. "It's a dream poll for political strategists," Beckel says. "Asking people what would get them off their mark." "This is a very interesting poll, as it touches on so many 'what ifs,' says John McCaslin, columnist for The Washington Times. The author of the upcoming book Inside the Beltway, McCaslin says, "Washington political columnists don't normally see this in presidential polling." "If the presidential race is as close as the pollsters are telling us, a point or two shift to either side could sway the election." McCaslin says. A Kerry move on stem cell cures "might not be far off, given the interest surrounding Ron Reagan's much-heralded appearance at the Democratic National Convention," he concludes. Several political pros interviewed are shocked by the strength of the answers in stem cell research. Norman Ornstein, TV commentary and longtime political author says, "Their results were interesting and surprising. If you asked me what's likely to move voters, I would have said unemployment would move a large number of voters, but not many people said they would switch." The stem cell response "certainly suggests on the GOP side that Bush has to worry about some tension within the party that is not so socially conservative," says Ornstein. "It strongly suggests that there are GOP moderates looking for a leader. Therefore, Kerry could capitalize on this issue." But of course, Kerry can't use this issue to mobilize voters unless he personally takes a proactive position on the very disease that caused Reagan's tragic demise. Kerry, known as Mr. Cautious, has to be prodded to take a tough stand on anything, including hunger in America. He has a chance here, says Ornstein, "but he has to do something with it." Meanwhile, John Zogby, himself, has been asked by Republicans what Bush might do to keep moderates happy, and Zogby has found that stem cell research is a surprisingly attractive issue. Zogby says that while Kerry mulls it over, he should worry that Bush will wake up, suddenly embrace Nancy Reagan publicly and warm to her cause. The stem cell cure initiative wasn't the only unusual finding. One might have expected that a drop in unemployment would boost Bush; however, he only directly gained five percent, which includes a margin of error of 3 percent. "That is because Bush never 'owned' the economy as an issue, the way Reagan did," explains Beckel. He should know; Beckel ran 189 campaigns, and only failed in five, but one of them was the Titanic Walter Mondale loss to incumbent Ronald Reagan. "Because Bush hasn't made the economy his issue, as this poll shows, he won't get credit for improvements he might make," Beckel opines. On the other hand, "Bush has taken ownership of terrorism and Iraq," says Beckel. They are Bush's issues to lose. But James Taylor, author of The Visionary's Handbook and a former consultant at Yankelovich marketing research, sees Kerry as vulnerable in this poll. "This poll shows that Kerry is at whims of fate and Bush," says Taylor. "If you look at Bush's numbers, his are a lot tighter. Bush has a much more bullet-proof political base than Kerry. "I'm fascinated that Bush has a sure victory coming out of Kerry's pocket if either Iraq pulls together, or if McCain or someone replaces Cheney, or frankly, in the event of there's a terrorist attack here," Taylor says. "All those issues have some degree of probability, such as Iraq showing signs of real governance. Those three all are Kerry killers. If they all happened, Kerry could lose by 12 percent. "Bush's only real risk is that Kerry gets organized around a real national health plan with stem call research on disease, or if Bush loses control of inflation," Taylor says of the poll results. He also thinks Baby Boomers are being given too much credit here for caring about health care and their aging parents. "They want to live forever, and they don't wanna live 'old.' Stem cell research offers chances to reverse the aging process." What happens if Bush dumps Vice President Dick Cheney for John McCain, we asked declared Bush and Kerry supporters. Bad news for Kerry: he loses 8 percent directly to Bush, and another 9 percent to the wilderness of "not sure" and "3rd party." "That Cheney is a real drag on the ticket is significant," Taylor says. He can foresee Cheney announcing that his health problems have intervened. Bonnie Erbe, host of PBS's To The Contrary, said she could see Bush dumping Cheney at the last minute. Overall, Erbe said, "What's going on out there with voters is that Bush has energized the left, and there's so much hate. Kerry is not the draw, but the lesser of two evils. Bush's position on stem cell research can be used as an example of Bush caving into evangelicals, even against the most conservative members of his own party, i.e. Sen. Orrin Hatch and Ronald Reagan's widow." Kerry should use this opening she says. Beckel says Kerry should do it in a big way, announce the "new frontier" for America, as John F. Kennedy did, but instead of going to the moon, say "we're going to the laboratories." "It's a pro-life position," Beckel says, which Kerry can pound on. William Frey of the Brookings Institution notes that this poll shows, "It may be time for Kerry to push the panic button and do something bold, take a stand. Yes, a failing economy could hurt Bush, but a better strategy for Kerry here is 'let's not wait, let's do something bold.' This poll says that there's some payoff in that for Kerry." Like Taylor, Frey believes that without some proactive move, Kerry's fate rests too much on forces beyond his control. "A change by Bush in his vice president sends Kerry voters over to Bush, and real stability in Iraq sends them to Bush, so Kerry is at the mercy of these things," Frey says. Bush definitely gains votes from Kerry in the event of another terrorist attack on US soil. An analyst who asked not to be quoted says this may be a reason that Homeland Security leaders mention new, nebulous threats every time Kerry gets momentum. Political science professor Steffen Schmidt, host of the Iowa radio show Dr. Politics says that "After the 9-11 commission report, I cannot imagine that fear of terrorism and the question of who can best deal with terrorists is not the number one concern of voters." One democratic analyst, who asked not be identified, says that if there were another terrorist attack here, democrats could argue that terrorism is Bush's issue; Bush has been in charge and he failed to make America safe. But Taylor disagrees. "Anything dramatic in the war in Iraq or terrorism may redound to Bush," says Taylor, "then you get the 'don't change horses in mid-stream' syndrome. Even if there's a full-scale civil war in Iraq in September, it will focus the attention on the war, and people get distracted. So anything besides this slow-burning failure redounds to Bush's favor." There were other surprises in the poll: First, Bush's support among Catholics, whom he is courting, is not that strong. And Bush, who is also wooing Hispanics aggressively, did not profit from a scenario in which he might announce looser visa/immigration restrictions on Mexicans and Central Americans. As for The Return of the King--Bill Clinton-- to the spotlight, our analysts say: "Watch out." Although 50 percent of all respondents said it would not affect them, Clinton's appearance could cost Kerry 6 percent of his voters to Bush. Clinton helps Kerry among African Americans, and may increase their turnout; and helps Kerry among 25- to 34-year-olds. But Clinton also ensures that at least 25 percent of Bush voters dig in; he hurts Kerry among "east coast" voters, and kills Kerry support among the "Investor Class," of whom 29 percent say they would be much more likely to vote for Bush if Clinton popped up. "This poll tells us two things," says Ornstein, "Clinton remains a polarizing figure, but he also remains a consequential figure." Schmidt says the poll suggests "Al Gore was right; Clinton is not at all a win-win asset." Clinton has to be used "very carefully," says Frey. "Clinton does polarize the electorate even further. Republicans are much more likely to vote for Bush if Clinton comes in, but he doesn't help as much with Democrats, except strong partisans and African Americans. "That means the Democrats have to strategically target where they use Clinton," Frey adds. Several analysts suggested changes in the poll scenarios: that the question on Bush dropping Cheney as vice president should not have mentioned McCain, since that is unlikely in light of Bush's dislike of McCain. They also say we should have asked voters "what happens if we capture Osama Bin Laden?" And, instead of positing a civil war in Iraq, which is what we already have, we should have asked: what if an attack killed 100 or more Americans in a single day? And we should have developed a sub-group of veterans, to go with ethnic, income and racial blocs. However, this poll is significant for finding the "soft" declared voters for each candidate, say Beckel, Frey and Ornstein. "It's hard to change votes, it's admitting to failure," says Beckel. "That's why political consultants wish they could do more polls like this. You don't get many changes, but what you get signals hot button issues and dissatisfaction with a candidate in general, voters looking for an excuse to vote against him. "That's what the campaign strategists need to know. " --------------------- All the while I have been forgetting the third of my reasons for remaining so faithful a citizen of the Federation, despite all the lascivious inducements from expatriates to follow them beyond the seas, and all the surly suggestions from patriots that I succumb. It is the reason which grows out of my mediaeval but unashamed taste for the bizarre and indelicate, my congenital weakness for comedy of the grosser varieties. The United States, to my eye, is incomparably the greatest show on earth. It is a show which avoids diligently all the kinds of clowning which tire me most quickly -- for example, royal ceremonials, the tedious hocus-pocus of haut politique, the taking of politics seriously -- and lays chief stress upon the kinds which delight me unceasingly -- for example, the ribald combats of demagogues, the exquisitely ingenious operations of master rogues, the pursuit of witches and heretics, the desperate struggles of inferior men to claw their way into Heaven. We have clowns in constant practice among us who are as far above the clowns of any other great state as a Jack Dempsey is above a paralytic -- and not a few dozen or score of them, but whole droves and herds. Human enterprises which, in all other Christian countries, are resigned despairingly to an incurable dullness -- things that seem devoid of exhilirating amusement, by their very nature -- are here lifted to such vast heights of buffoonery that contemplating them strains the midriff almost to breaking. I cite an example: the worship of God. Everywhere else on earth it is carried on in a solemn and dispiriting manner; in England, of course, the bishops are obscene, but the average man seldom gets a fair chance to laugh at them and enjoy them. Now come home. Here we not only have bishops who are enormously more obscene than even the most gifted of the English bishops; we have also a huge force of lesser specialists in ecclesiastical mountebankery -- tin-horn Loyolas, Savonarolas and Xaviers of a hundred fantastic rites, each performing untiringly and each full of a grotesque and illimitable whimsicality. Every American town, however small, has one of its own: a holy clerk with so fine a talent for introducing the arts of jazz into the salvation of the damned that his performance takes on all the gaudiness of a four-ring circus, and the bald announcement that he will raid Hell on such and such a night is enough to empty all the town blind- pigs and bordellos and pack his sanctuary to the doors. And to aid him and inspire him there are travelling experts to whom he stands in the relation of a wart to the Matterhorn -- stupendous masters of theological imbecility, contrivers of doctrines utterly preposterous, heirs to the Joseph Smith, Mother Eddy and John Alexander Dowie tradition -- Bryan, Sunday, and their like. These are the eminences of the American Sacred College. I delight in them. Their proceedings make me a happier American. Turn, now, to politics. Consider, for example, a campaign for the Presidency. Would it be possible to imagine anything more uproariously idiotic -- a deafening, nerve-wracking battle to the death between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Harlequin and Sganarelle, Gobbo and Dr. Cook -- the unspeakable, with fearful snorts, gradually swallowing the inconceivable? I defy any one to match it elsewhere on this earth. In other lands, at worst, there are at least intelligible issues, coherent ideas, salient personalities. Somebody says something, and somebody replies. But what did Harding say in 1920, and what did Cox reply? Who was Harding, anyhow, and who was Cox? Here, having perfected democracy, we lift the whole combat to symbolism, to transcendentalism, to metaphysics. Here we load a pair of palpably tin cannon with blank cartridges charged with talcum power, and so let fly. Here one may howl over the show without any uneasy reminder that it is serious, and that some one may be hurt. I hold that this elevation of politics to the plane of undiluted comedy is peculiarly American, that no-where else on this disreputable ball has the art of the sham-battle been developed to such fineness... ... Here politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for "King Lear," or a hanging, or a course of medical journals. But feeling better for the laugh. Ridi si sapis, said Martial. Mirth is necessary to wisdom, to comfort, above all to happiness. Well, here is the land of mirth, as Germany is the land of metaphysics and France is the land of fornication. Here the buffoonery never stops. What could be more delightful than the endless struggle of the Puritan to make the joy of the minority unlawful and impossible? The effort is itself a greater joy to one standing on the side-lines than any or all of the carnal joys it combats. Always, when I contemplate an uplifter at his hopeless business, I recall a scene in an old- time burlesque show, witnessed for hire in my days as a dramatic critic. A chorus girl executed a fall upon the stage, and Rudolph Krausemeyer, the Swiss comdeian, rushed to her aid. As he stooped painfully to succor her, Irving Rabinovitz, the Zionist comedian, fetched him a fearful clout across the cofferdam with a slap-stick. So the uplifter, the soul-saver, the Americanizer, striving to make the Republic fit for Y.M.C.A. secretaries. He is the eternal American, ever moved by the best of intentions, ever running a la Krausemeyer to the rescue of virtue, and ever getting his pantaloons fanned by the Devil. I am naturally sinful, and such spectacles caress me. If the slap-stick were a sash-weight, the show would be cruel, and I'd probably complain to the Polizei. As it is, I know that the uplifter is not really hurt, but simply shocked. The blow, in fact, does him good, for it helps get him into Heaven, as exegetes prove from Matthew v, 11: Hereux serez-vous, lorsqu'on vous outragera, qu'on vous persecutera, and so on. As for me, it makes me a more contented man, and hence a better citizen. One man prefers the Republic because it pays better wages than Bulgaria. Another because it has laws to keep him sober and his daughter chaste. Another because the Woolworth Building is higher than the cathedral at Chartres. Another because, living here, he can read the New York Evening Journal. Another because there is a warrant out for him somewhere else. Me, I like it because it amuses me to my taste. I never get tired of the show. It is worth every cent it costs. That cost, it seems to me is very moderate. Taxes in the United States are not actually high. I figure, for example, that my private share of the expense of maintaining the Hon. Mr. Harding in the White House this year will work out to less than 80 cents. Try to think of better sport for the money: in New York it has been estimated that it costs $8 to get comfortably tight, and $17.50, on an average, to pinch a girl's arm. The United States Senate will cost me perhaps $11 for the year, but against that expense set the subscription price of the Congressional Record, about $15, which, as a journalist, I receive for nothing. For $4 less than nothing I am thus entertained as Solomon never was by his hooch dancers. Col. George Brinton McClellan Harvey costs me but 25 cents a year; I get Nicholas Murray Butler free. Finally, there is young Teddy Roosevelt, the naval expert. Teddy costs me, as I work it out, about 11 cents a year, or less than a cent a month. More, he entertains me doubly for the money, first as a naval expert, and secondly as a walking attentat upon democracy, a devastating proof that there is nothing, after all, in that superstition. We Americans subscribe to the doctrine of human equality - - and the Rooseveltii reduce it to an absurdity as brilliantly as the sons of Veit Bach. Where is your equal opportunity now? Here in this Eden of clowns, with the highest rewards of clowning theoretically open to every poor boy -- here in the very citadel of democracy we found and cherish a clown dynasty! _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From paul.werbos at verizon.net Sun Aug 15 16:40:28 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2004 12:40:28 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] al qaeda influencing election In-Reply-To: <20040813204351.48706.qmail@web13423.mail.yahoo.com> References: <200408121800.i7CI0pd31131@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20040815123158.00b6f370@incoming.verizon.net> At 01:43 PM 8/13/2004 -0700, Michael Christopher wrote: > >>But security experts and political commentators have >been split over whom Al Qaeda wants to win'.... >the rest of the world. A postponement of the US >elections would most fit that dramatic theme. Probably so. And what would fit next most would be the re-election of Bush, followed closely thereafter by the assassination. The old saw about every president being shot who was elected in a year divisible by 20 doesn't make any logical sense. Yet I could imagine how conspiracy stories about who killed Bush could become even more florid than stories about Kennedy were -- because there are plausible versions for many actors in this case. If they were Armageddon seekers, they would even have a hope of a bonus, if Cheney got a heart attack from hearing the news.... Then again, I suppose that Bush could switch to McCain at the convention, and promise a real badly-needing house-keeping of the corruption which has proliferated so much... and maybe increase his chances of al Queida and others not wanting to assassinate him... but current betting is that he would not have the guts to act so independently. We will see, fairly soon, one way or another. Best of luck to us all... Paul From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 15 17:03:51 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2004 13:03:51 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Guardian: Why shouldn't aliens look like us? Message-ID: Why shouldn't aliens look like us? http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4988691-103677,00.html There are good scientific reasons to believe that extraterrestrial life forms might resemble human beings Duncan Steel 4.8.9 Would extraterrestrials look like us? Why not? In sci-fi movies, aliens are often basically humanoid in size and shape, like the Klingons in Star Trek, or various characters in the Star Wars films. Even the robots are built on anthropomorphic lines, because there's an actor inside that suit, whether it's furry, scaly or metallic. The advent of computer-generated imagery means this limitation might be left aside, but alien monsters still tend to be given broad similarities to our own form: bilateral symmetry, and something that looks like a head. Arms and legs may outnumber our own, but they tend to be in pairs and terminate in hands, claws or feet. For the purposes of enjoyment we suspend critical judgment, although if you thought about it you'd probably conclude that ET, if he exists, would be quite different from us, not at all like his depiction in the eponymous movie. But would he? Actually, an argument can be made that extraterrestrial technological (radio-communicating, space-faring) lifeforms might be similar to us. Statements regarding the possibility of extraterrestrial organisms are often qualified with the glib phrase "life as we know it". But life as we know it, here on Earth, can also tell us a lot. For 3bn years Earth-life was restricted to monocellular forms; in short, slime. Then, sometime around 600m years ago, the first polycellular life - the first animals - evolved. This step came after an extended era during which our planet was completely covered by ice, with intermittent thaws. Palaeo climatologists call this "Snowball Earth". Climatic shocks, coupled with a build up in the oceans and atmosphere of oxygen released by algae, may have made possible the emergence of the first marine creatures. Some appeared similar to jellyfish, others to sponges and segmented worms, while many were unlike anything seen today. These are termed the Ediacaran fauna, after the Ediacara Hills, just west of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia, where peculiar fossils were found in the 1940s. Later it was realised that examples had been reported earlier on other continents. Geologists have just agreed to define the Ediacaran as a new geological period, the first such declaration since the 19th century, after 14 years of wrangling. The Ediacaran stretches from the end of the Snowball Earth era through to the start of the Cambrian period 543m years ago. The relevance of the Ediacaran to the search for extraterrestrial life is clear. All we can hope for on Mars is microbes, but elsewhere in the solar system conditions similar to Snowball Earth may exist. Beneath the icy crust of Jupiter's moon Europa, an ocean has been suggested, perhaps making complex life feasible there. Nasa plans a probe to Europa. The Ediacaran fauna give us the best concept of what to look for. When it comes to searching for ET, though, microbes or jellyfish are of limited interest to the passengers on the Clapham omnibus. They want little green men, or benign Klingons: technological beings able to beam messages to us from elsewhere in the galaxy, telling us we are not alone. Simply intelligent life is not enough: dogs and frogs can build neither radio dishes nor spaceships. The Cambrian itself is delineated by an explosion in life's diversity. Palaeontologists count at least 35 distinct body plans in fossils from that period, giving rise to evolutionary lines reaching down through the ages. Some have died out, while others have continued to the present. Evolutionists sometimes talk of the dead ends as being experiments in life that did not work. Well, what about the ones that did work? A finite number of solutions exist for any physical problem. The laws of hydrodynamics, for example, govern efficient movement through water, and as a result dolphins, sharks and ichthyosaurs assumed the same shape, despite mammals, fish and reptiles having diverged many millions of years ago. This is termed convergent evolution. Similarly, humans and octopuses have eyes with the same basic architecture, because there are only so many ways to focus and detect light. Life elsewhere might be based on a different set of 20 amino acids to that on Earth, but we don't know that, so we can only use our experience. The number of ways DNA can be mixed to produce different viable lifeforms is huge, but it is finite. What if the only solutions to the problem of producing an organism capable of interstellar communication were in the DNA combinations resulting in bilateral symmetry, four limbs, opposable thumbs and brains more proficient than is required for the health and reproduction of the species? We could extend that list, but you get the picture. Since the Copernican revolution in the 16th century, indicating that the Earth is not the centre of the universe, we have been conditioned to reject the anthropocentric viewpoint. In interpreting observations, scientists try to exclude human values. But we shouldn't be afraid of imagining the simplest solution: that ET might be just like us. Duncan Steel is a space researcher based in Adelaide, Australia duncansteel at fsmail.net From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 15 17:05:45 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2004 13:05:45 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] BBC - Radio 4 - Life Skills Message-ID: BBC - Radio 4 - Life Skills http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/lifeskills.shtml 15 August 2004 If you've got problems at home, at work, or in your personal life, Graham Easton finds that there's no shortage of experts who will be glad to help... Tuesdays 3, 10 and 17 August 2004 11.00-11.30am There are coaches, counsellors and therapists of all sorts who claim to be able to smooth over family rifts, boost your self-confidence and make you successful at the office. But who are these experts, how are they trained and how did the theories underlying their work evolve? And most important of all, can they actually help you? Graham Easton investigates these experts who claim to have uncovered the solution to mastering the complexities of everyday life, and discovers whether there really are only a few easy steps to a life full of wealth health and happiness. Can it really be that easy? The Forsyte Family Portrait Programme 1: Happy Families Just like any team, the family is a tricky unit of different personalities, complex relationships and power struggles. With our hectic lifestyles it's very easy to feel overwhelmed in trying to keep our families ticking along in happy harmony, be it trying to get your toddler to eat it's greens, or battling with a demanding teenager, or even negotiating with your husband or wife whose turn it is to cook the dinner. These all seem like small problems but can cause immense strain and tension within a family. But now, there is no need to struggle alone. Parent Coaches, Parent Groups, Teen coaching and even family therapy is all on offer to help you be the master or mistress of your own home. Graham talks to the experts about whether family life is getting harder, and hears from families who have turned to these experts to help them sort out their family life, and finds out whether it really works. Listen again [48]Listen again to Programme 1 colleagues on a motivational course Programme 2: Getting on in business. Businesses spend huge amounts of money sending employees on courses to improve their productivity and effectiveness at work. From trampling around North Wales in an attempt to bond with your team, to doing a course in telephone negotiation, to one to one business counselling, there are no shortage of experts and training courses out there to help you become a happier, more efficient employee. Graham Easton attends a few of these courses and uncovers the theories that underpin many of these training initiatives to see if they really work. Listen again Listen again available after the broadcast Comedy and Tragedy masks Programme 3: Tea and Sympathy - achieving happiness How do you achieve happiness in your personal life? There are no shortage of self-help books out there offering us the solution to everlasting happiness and contentment. And if you are not satisfied with them, why not try a life coach, or life strategist, or a spot of therapy. There are now many more counsellors in the UK than GP, and there is strong evidence to suggest that in many cases of mild depression, counselling can be more effective than drug treatment. But are we as a nation getting more and more unhappy, or are we simply far more concerned with our wellbeing, and state of mind, then we have been in the past. Graham goes on a personal quest to find happiness and fulfilment and visits a life coach, a therapist, a positive psychologist and an image consultant to see if they can set him in the right direction. Listen again Listen again available after the broadcast RELATED LINKS [49]British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy [50]Ashridge [51]Work Foundation [52]ParenTalk [53]Institute for Family Therapy [54]BBC - Improving Your Confidence The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites [55]Listen Live ON AIR NOW 10:00 - 11:15 [56]The Archers [57]Audio Help DON'T MISS [58]Check Up [59]SCIENCE PUZZLES Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Genetics, Nature... Can you solve our [60]Science Puzzles? 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This is the intriguing first sentence of a very unusual new book about economics, and much else besides: "The Company of Strangers", by Paul Seabright, a professor of economics at the University of Toulouse. (The book is published by Princeton University Press.) Why is everyday life so strange? Because, explains Mr Seabright, it is so much at odds with what would have seemed, as recently as 10,000 years ago, our evolutionary destiny. It was only then that "one of the most aggressive and elusive bandit species in the entire animal kingdom" decided to settle down. In no more than the blink of an eye, in evolutionary time, these suspicious and untrusting creatures, these "shy, murderous apes", developed co-operative networks of staggering scope and complexity--networks that rely on trust among strangers. When you come to think about it, it was an extraordinarily improbable outcome. The genetic inheritance of Homo sapiens sapiens, which evolved during the 7m years or so that separate us from our last common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos, equipped man to succeed as a hunter-gatherer. Humans co-operated with each other in hunting and fighting, but this co-operation occurred within groups of close relatives. Human evolution favoured caution and mistrust, so far as strangers were concerned. Yet modern man engages in the sharing of tasks and in an extremely elaborate division of labour with strangers--that is, with genetically unrelated members of his species. Other animals (such as bees) divide tasks in a complex way among members of the group, but the work is kept within the family. Co-operation of a sort among different animal species is also quite common, though not very surprising, since members of different species are not generally competing with each other for food, still less for sexual partners. Elaborate co-operation outside the family, but within the same species, is confined to humans. The requirements for such co-operation, and hence for modern economic life, which is founded on specialisation and an infinitely elaborated division of labour, are more demanding than you might suppose. It is not enough to say that specialisation and the division of labour yield enormous economic benefits. Co-operation would nonetheless quickly break down if individuals could enjoy the advantages of division of labour without making a contribution of their own. Two traits were needed, says Mr Seabright, to bring the fruits of co-operation within reach, and evolution had equipped humans with both--accidentally, as it were. The first was an intellectual capacity for rational calculation. The second, somewhat at odds with the first, was an instinct for reciprocity--a tendency to repay kindness with kindness and betrayal with revenge, even when rational calculation might seem to advise against it. Neither of these tendencies could support co-operation without the other, and the balance between the two is delicate. Calculation without reciprocity often favours cheating: this undermines trust, so co-operation either cannot get started or quickly breaks down. On the other hand, reciprocity without calculation exposes people to exploitation by others. Again, fear of exploitation inhibits co-operation. For specialisation and division of labour to get going, one needs both instincts, each pushing against the other, so that cheating and free-riding are both kept in check. This balance was probably needed for the development of social life, Mr Seabright notes, even before our ancestors embarked on complex co-operation with strangers. Given those dispositions, however, co-operation with strangers--and modern economic life--became possible. The human capacity for calculation allowed this potential to be fully exploited because humans were able to design rules and institutions that, as Mr Seabright puts it, "make reciprocity go a long way". Much of the book is concerned with the trust-enhancing character of economic institutions such as money. Building on humans' inherited instincts, these rules and institutions allow people to treat strangers as "honorary friends". Adam Smith, meet Charles Darwin The fact that things could have turned out so differently makes the modern global economy, with all its awesome productivity, seem even more miraculous. But, having convinced readers on that point, "The Company of Strangers" dispels any complacency by drawing attention to less appealing aspects of the human enterprise. One such is pollution. Markets can be harnessed to provide information about how best to deal with pollution and other externalities--the phenomenal information-processing power of the price mechanism is another unintended (and marvellous) consequence of extended economic co-operation. But sometimes markets cannot co-ordinate activities effectively. That, after all, is why firms exist: in some cases (and the book considers the conditions under which this is true), information can be more usefully processed in-house, in a non-market setting. This is a different kind of co-operation. And co-operation itself is two-edged--because it also makes possible the most successful acts of aggression between one group and another. "Like chimpanzees, though with more deadly refinement, human beings are distinguished by their ability to harness the virtues of altruism and solidarity, and the skills of rational reflection, to the end of making brutal and efficient warfare against rival groups." This is what makes our everyday life fragile, as well as surprising. Curbing this tendency for conflict, Mr Seabright argues, requires, among other things, better-designed international rules and institutions, so that nations, no less than individuals, can regard each other as honorary friends. "Trust between groups needs as much human ingenuity as trust between individuals." From guavaberry at earthlink.net Sun Aug 15 18:35:57 2004 From: guavaberry at earthlink.net (K.E.) Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2004 14:35:57 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Radical Restructure: The Only Way to Fix Intelligence Message-ID: <6.1.2.0.0.20040815142927.02e74ec0@mail.earthlink.net> Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, testified this week before the House Select Intelligence Committee, and blew away representatives of both political parties with his truly radical proposals for what to do about our systems of intelligence. Gingrich concludes that not replacing the existing intelligence systems wholesale "is like going aboard the Titanic, knowing that it's going to sink, and not putting on the lifeboats." "We have an 1880, quill pen, clerk model of process based on civil service reforms of the 1880s. We need a model that moves at the speed, agility and efficiency of information age processes." Here's the story, and a link to video of the entire session: --- Radical Restructure: The Only Way to Fix Intelligence The video for the entire riveting session really is TV worth watching. --- Video of the testimony, with Q&A: <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> The Educational CyberPlayGround http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/ National Children's Folksong Repository http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Culdesac/Repository/NCFR.html Hot List of Schools Online and Net Happenings, K12 Newsletters, Network Newsletters http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Community/index.html 7 Hot Site Awards New York Times, USA Today , MSNBC, Earthlink, USA Today Best Bets For Educators, Macworld Top Fifty <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 15 19:54:21 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2004 15:54:21 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] PNAS: Evolvability is a selectable trait -- Earl and Deem 101 (32): 11531 Message-ID: PNAS: Evolvability is a selectable trait -- Earl and Deem 101 (32): 11531 http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/101/32/11531 [I don't know what the connection with group selection is.] Published online before print August 2, 2004, 10.1073/pnas.0404656101 PNAS | August 10, 2004 | vol. 101 | no. 32 | 11531-11536 PHYSICS / EVOLUTION Evolvability is a selectable trait David J. Earl and Michael W. Deem^ [28]* Department of Bioengineering and Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005-1892 Communicated by David Chandler, University of California, Berkeley, CA, June 30, 2004 (received for review April 19, 2004) Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must^ have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution,^ because of the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence^ space. We describe how evolvability can be an object of Darwinian^ selection, emphasizing the collective nature of the process.^ We quantify our theory with computer simulations of protein^ evolution. These simulations demonstrate that rapid or dramatic^ environmental change leads to selection for greater evolvability.^ The selective pressure for large-scale genetic moves such as^ DNA exchange becomes increasingly strong as the environmental^ conditions become more uncertain. Our results demonstrate that^ evolvability is a selectable trait and allow for the explanation^ of a large body of experimental results.^ ___________________________________ Darwin was obsessed with variation. His books, considered as^ an ensemble, devote much more attention to variation than to^ natural selection, because he knew that no satisfactory theory^ of evolutionary change could be constructed until the causes^ of variation and the empirical rule of its form and amount had^ been elucidated ([37]1). ^ Whether the propensity to evolve, or evolvability ([38]2-[39]4),^ can be an object of Darwinian natural selection is a topic of^ interest. Causality would suggest not because of the apparently^ anticipatory nature of evolvability ([40]5, [41]6). Many within the^ field of evolutionary biology are uncomfortable with the concept^ that evolvability is a selectable trait. A growing body of experimental^ data, however, would be explained if evolvability were a selectable^ trait ([42]7-[43]15).^ Higher organisms cannot evolve, or adapt, by germ-line mutation^ to an environmental change within their own lifetime. Does this^ mean that lineages and individuals cannot be under selection^ for evolvability? Although viability is the selection criterion,^ the genotype that determines the viability arises in a mutated,^ evolved way from that of the previous generation as a result^ of base substitution, recombination, transposition, and horizontal^ gene transfer. These mutational processes are the driving forces^ of evolution, and their rates fundamentally determine evolvability.^ The perspective we offer here is that the evolvability of an^ organism is defined by the rates of genetic change, that genetic^ change is not always deleterious, and that these rates of genetic^ change are not fixed and are under selective pressure. That^ is, the mechanisms that define the rates of change are encoded^ in the genotype, and so they are selectable. An analogy with^ thermodynamics illuminates the issue: How is free energy minimized^ in a physical system of particles despite the difficulty in^defining the entropy of a given configuration of the particles?^ An ensemble of particle configurations allows the definition^ of free energy and the approach to thermodynamic equilibrium^ just as a population of evolving organisms allows the definition^ of and selection for evolvability.^ Within the framework of point mutation, base substitution, and^ recombination, correlations of adaptation with function have^ been observed. It is known that immunoglobins have evolved such^ that the mutation rates in complementary determining regions,^ in which mutation is most likely to generate useful variants,^ are much higher than those in framework regions ([44]14, [45]16). Recent^ data point to a role for DNA polymerases in regulating the somatic^ hypermutation rate of immunoglobin genes ([46]13, [47]17). Similarly,^ codon usage within the influenza hemagglutinin protein seems^ to be biased to favor more rapid antigenic drift ([48]14). Furthermore,^ in HIV-1 protease, the probability of mutation is not randomly^ distributed within the structure but rather concentrated at^ sites that alter the geometry of the protein-binding domain,^ conferring significant propensity for antigenic drift ([49]18).^ Such behavior is not mere curiosity and has widespread implications^ for drug design and the evolution of drug resistance ([50]19). Stressful^ conditions may generally provoke activation of error-prone polymerases,^ triggering a large increase in adaptive rates ([51]20). Not only^ point mutation but also recombination are widely appreciated^ to confer increased evolvability ([52]9, [53]21, [54]22). Recombination^ among the hemagglutinin and neuraminidase proteins, for example,^ is believed to be a significant mechanism leading to the emergence^ of new virulent strains of influenza ([55]23). Computational and^ theoretical studies have also shown the persistence under selection^ of evolvability-enhancing moves in the context of point mutation^ and recombination evolutionary dynamics ([56]24-[57]29).^ The selective forces that lead to the evolution and maintenance^ of mechanisms for rearrangement, deletion, transfer, and transposition^ of genetic material, inasmuch as they lead to even greater evolution^ than point mutation and recombination alone, are of great interest.^ For example, the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria^ has evolved mainly through the swapping of DNA pieces between^ the evolving bacteria ([58]8, [59]30). Similarly, the evolution of Escherichia^ coli from Salmonella is thought to have occurred exclusively^ from DNA swapping ([60]31). It has been proposed that the success^ of bacteria as a group stems from a capacity to acquire genes^from a large and diverse range of species ([61]32). It would seem,^ then, that large genetic moves are pervasive and crucial to^ evolutionary dynamics ([62]6, [63]8, [64]10-[65]12, [66]15, [67]30, [68]31, [69]33-[70]39).^ Concomitantly, evolvability is enhanced by these larger moves,^ as shown experimentally for the case of DNA shuffling ([71]32, [72]40-[73]44).^ A key question is whether selection for evolvability fosters^ the husbandry of these moves.^ We address here, from a theoretical point of view, selection^ of evolvability in the presence of large-scale genetic moves.^ Although the use of the term evolvability has only recently^ come into vogue in the scientific community, investigations^ into the evolution of adaptation go back several decades ([74]45-[75]47).^ Prominent from a theoretical perspective are works in population^ genetics ([76]48, [77]49) and game theory ([78]50-[79]52). Despite the^ insights that these studies give as to the origin and maintenance^ of evolvability, evolution of and selection for evolvability^ remains a contested issue primarily because of the causality^ principle ([80]5, [81]6). We show here that evolvability is selected^ for, notwithstanding the constraints imposed by causality, when^ a system is subject to a constant, random environmental change.^ This selection for evolvability occurs even when viability as^ a function of genotype is an extremely complex function, with^ exponentially many optima, and when the evolving system is unable^ to reach the global optimum of viability in any one instance^ of the environment. We demonstrate our results by using computer^ simulations of protein molecular evolution that incorporate^ selection in a varying environment. The genotype of a protein^ molecule is mapped to a complex phenotype by using a generalized^ NK model in which all assumptions and relevant parameters are^ known. The selective pressure for evolvability is shown to be^ greater for larger rates of environmental change. Interestingly,^ a generalized susceptibility of the system correlates with the^ fluctuations in the environment, albeit not as a result of generalized^linear response theory ([82]53). The addition of selection for evolvability^ as a phenomenological law to the toolbox of evolutionary theory^ allows for the explanation of a large body of experimental results.^ The Generalized Block NK Model [83][uarrow.gif] Top [84][uarrow.gif] Abstract [dot.gif] The Generalized Block NK... [85][darrow.gif] System Evolution and... [86][darrow.gif] Selection for Evolvability [87][darrow.gif] Susceptibility [88][darrow.gif] Implications for Evolution [89][darrow.gif] Summary [90][darrow.gif] References Whether evolvability is selectable has been a difficult question^ to answer, primarily because observations in evolutionary biology^ tend to be correlative in nature and difficult on which to make^ mechanistic conclusions. Therefore, we consider here the dynamics^ of evolvability in a well defined theoretical model of protein^ evolution ([91]54). Within this model of protein structure and function,^ we have a fixed population of proteins, which we take to be^ 1,000. We have a microscopic selection criterion, which we take^ to be the folding and binding of a protein to a substrate. And^ we have a means of inducing constant, random environmental change.^ We model the molecular evolution of protein systems by using^ a generalization of the NK ([92]55-[93]57) and block NK ([94]58) models^ that has been used previously to study protein molecular evolution^ strategies ([95]54) and the immune-system response to vaccination^ and disease ([96]59). The model includes a population of sequences,^ upon which selection acts and in which occur genetic mutations.^ The mutational hierarchy includes both point mutations and large-scale^ swapping moves, akin to transposition or translocation events.^ Although the model does not include recombination, such inclusion^ is not expected to change the results because swapping can be^ viewed as a powerful form of recombination ([97]54). For example,^ linkage effects are mitigated even more rapidly by swapping^ in our model than they would be by recombination. The selection^ for greater swapping rates in more rapidly changing environments^ observed in our model parallels results found in studies of^ the evolution of sex, for which adaptation and variation in^ a heterogeneous environment is well researched ([98]60).^ In the generalized block NK model, each individual evolving^ protein sequence has an energy that is determined by secondary^ structural subdomain energies, U^sd, subdomain-subdomain^ interaction energies, U^sd-sd, and chemical binding energies,^ U^c. This energy is used as the selection criteria in our studies^ and is given by ^ [fd1.gif] [1] Within our generalized^ block NK model, each protein molecule is composed of M = 10^ secondary structural subdomains of N = 10 aa in length. We consider^ five chemically distinct amino acid classes (negative, positive,^ polar, hydrophobic, and other) and L = 5 different types of^ subdomains (helices, strands, loops, turns, and others). We^ therefore have L different subdomain energy functions of the^ NK form ^ [fd2.gif] [2] where a[j] is the amino acid^ type of the jth amino acid in the subdomain, and {alpha} [i] is the type^ of the ith subdomain. As in previous studies, we consider the^ case in which the range of the interactions within a subdomain^ is specified by K = 4 ([99]54, [100]59). Here {sigma} [{alpha} i] is a quenched Gaussian^ random number with zero mean and a variance of unity, and it^ is different for each value of its argument for each of the^ L subdomain types, {alpha} [i]. The interaction energy between secondary^ subdomain structures is given by ^ [fd3.gif] [3] where^ we consider D = 6 interactions between secondary structures^ ([101]54, [102]59). The zero-mean, unit-variance Gaussian [f4.gif] and the interacting amino acids, j[1],..., j[K], are selected at^ random for each interaction (i, j, k). In our model, P = 5 aa^ contribute directly to a binding event, as in a typical pharmacophore,^ where the chemical binding energy of each amino acid is given^ by ^ [fd5.gif] [4] where the zero-mean, unit-variance^ Gaussian {sigma} [i] and the contributing amino acid, i, are chosen at^ random.^ System Evolution and Environmental Change [103][uarrow.gif] Top [104][uarrow.gif] Abstract [105][uarrow.gif] The Generalized Block NK... [dot.gif] System Evolution and... [106][darrow.gif] Selection for Evolvability [107][darrow.gif] Susceptibility [108][darrow.gif] Implications for Evolution [109][darrow.gif] Summary [110][darrow.gif] References Our model system maintains a constant population of 1,000 proteins,^ each protein of 100 aa in length and initially distinct in sequence.^ The system evolves through the base substitution of single amino^ acids and through DNA swapping of amino acid subdomains from^ structural pools representing the five different subdomain types,^ each containing 250 low-energy subdomain sequences. These moves^ represent the small-scale adaptation and the large-scale, dramatic^ evolution that occur in nature. For protein i, n[mut](i) point^ mutations occur per sequence per round of selection. In addition,^ for protein i, subdomain sequences are replaced randomly with^ sequences from the same-type low-energy pools with probability^ p[swap](i).^ After pool swapping and point mutations, selection occurs, and^ the 20% lowest-energy protein sequences are kept and amplified^ to form the population of 1,000 proteins for the next round^ of selection. The parameters p[swap](i) and n[mut](i) are allowed^ to take a log-Gaussian random walk for each protein sequence.^ This process is repeated for N[gen] rounds of selection, after^ which an environmental change is imposed on the system with^ a severity that is characterized by the parameter p ([111]59). The^ parameter p is the probability of (i) changing the type of each^ of the 10 subdomains in the protein sequences, {alpha} [i] in Eq. 2, (ii)^ changing the amino acids and energies that are involved in subdomain-subdomain^ interactions, j[k] and {sigma} ^(k)[ij] in Eq. 3, and (iii) changing the^ amino acids and energies that are involved in the chemical binding,^ i and {sigma} [i] in Eq. 4. We repeat the process for a total of 100 environmental^ changes and average our results over 1,000 instances of the^ ensemble. For each system studied, a steady state in n[mut], p[swap],^ and the average energies at the beginning, < U > [start], and end,^ < U > [end], of the dynamics in a single instance of the environment^ is reached after <80 environmental changes in all cases.^ We average the data over the last 20 environmental changes.^ We study how the frequency of environmental change, 1/N[gen],^ and the severity of environmental change, p, affect the evolvability^ of the protein sequences. A schematic diagram showing the molecular^ evolution of our protein system can be seen in [112]Fig. 1.^ ^ View larger version (27K): [113][in this window] [114][in a new window] Fig. 1. Schematic diagram showing the evolution of the protein system. Selection for Evolvability [115][uarrow.gif] Top [116][uarrow.gif] Abstract [117][uarrow.gif] The Generalized Block NK... [118][uarrow.gif] System Evolution and... [dot.gif] Selection for Evolvability [119][darrow.gif] Susceptibility [120][darrow.gif] Implications for Evolution [121][darrow.gif] Summary [122][darrow.gif] References Shown in [123]Fig. 2 are the steady-state values of p[swap] and n[mut]^that our protein system selects as a function of imposed frequency^ of environmental change, 1/N[gen], and severity of environmental^ change, p. The DNA swapping moves that we propose have a high^ capacity for evolutionary change, because a significant number^of amino acids may be altered in a protein sequence in one swap^move. It is clear that our systems select for higher probabilities^ of DNA swapping moves, and thus evolvability, as the frequency^ and severity of environmental change increases. We stress the^ importance of this result. Mainstream evolutionary theory does^ not recognize a need for the selection of evolvability. More^ generally, we see that only in the limit of little or no environmental^change, p[swap] -> 0, do large-scale changes tend to be disfavored.^ The role of base substitution in our evolving system is more^ complex. For more severe environmental changes and for higher^ frequencies of environmental change, the system depends more^ on DNA swapping than on point mutation to produce low-energy^ proteins. In these cases, because the protein must make large^ changes to its sequence to adapt to the environmental change,^ selection results in high values of p[swap], with base substitution^ having only a small effect on the energy of the protein. For^ less severe environmental changes and lower frequencies of environmental^ change, base substitution is sufficient to achieve the small^ modifications in protein sequence that are required for adaptation^ to the environmental change. Thus, we observe the higher dependence^ on n[mut]and lower dependence on p[swap] for small p. In addition,^ as 1/N[gen] -> 0, n[mut] -> 0, because mutations tend to be deleterious^ in stable systems with no environmental fluctuations.^ ^ View larger version (22K): [124][in this window] [125][in a new window] Fig. 2. n[mut] (dashed lines) and p[swap] (solid lines) as a function of the frequency of environmental change, 1/N[gen], for different values of the severity of environmental change, p. The statistical errors in the results are smaller than the symbols on the figure. Evolvability is intimately related to the diversity of a population.^ At short times, evolvability can be quantified by the diffusion^ coefficient in protein sequence space, D[0], which is given by^ the combined diffusion due to swapping of the subdomains and^ the point mutation of individual amino acids ([126]61): ^ [fd6.gif] [5] The overwhelming contribution to D[0] comes from^ the swapping step, because the swapping move far more dramatically^ changes the sequence. The short-time diffusion rate selected^ for reflects, as a function of environmental change, a balance^ between staying within a favorable basin of attraction, or niche,^ and adaptation to a newly created, superior niche. As [127]Fig. 2^ shows, greater environmental change favors greater local diffusion,^ as indicated by the monotonic increase of p[swap] with p.^ It is useful to regard base substitution as a means of fine^ tuning the protein sequences, whereas DNA swapping can be considered^ a source of more substantial evolutionary change. This hierarchy^ within the space of evolutionary moves becomes more apparent^ when studying the difference between starting and ending protein^ sequences within one environment as a function of p, p[swap],^ and n[mut]. The distance between protein sequences is characterized^ by the Hamming distance between the respective amino acid sequences.^ For a given p, the Hamming distance decreases only slightly^ as the frequency of environmental change, 1/N[gen], increases,^ but it has a very strong dependence on the severity of the environmental^ change, p, as shown in [128]Fig. 3a. The sensitivity of the Hamming^ distance also shows markedly different behavior to p[swap] and^ n[mut], as shown in [129]Fig. 3b. For state points with fixed n[mut],^ 1/N[gen], and p, the Hamming distance strongly depends on the^ value of p[swap]. However, for state points with fixed p[swap],^ 1/N[gen], and p, the Hamming distance displays little or no variation^ with n[mut]. The Hamming distance is a long-time measure of the^ evolvability of the system. The long-time diffusion coefficient^ can be defined as the square of the Hamming distance multiplied^ by the frequency of environmental change. As [130]Fig. 3a implies,^ the long-time evolvability, as measured by the long-time diffusion^ coefficient, increases with both the severity and frequency^ of environmental change.^ ^ View larger version (17K): [131][in this window] [132][in a new window] Fig. 3. Hamming distance and average variance. (a) Hamming distance as a function of the severity of environmental change, p, for the state points shown in [133]Fig. 2. (b) Hamming distance as a function of n[mut] (dashed lines) and p[swap] (solid lines) for fixed N[gen] = 15 and for different severities of environmental change, p. In displaying the Hamming distance dependence on n[mut] (p[swap]), we fix p[swap] (n[mut]) to the selected values from [134]Fig. 2. The selected values of n[mut] and p[swap] at each state point are shown by light and dark circles, respectively. (c) Average variance, {sigma} ^2[U][end], of the energy of a population at the end of an evolution, U[end], as a function of the severity of environmental change, p, for different frequencies of environmental change, 1/N[gen]. Due to the roughness of viability as a function of sequence,^ the exploration performed by any particular individual is limited^ to a local basin of attraction defined by the short-time mutation^ rates, and thus more independent traces through sequence space^ allow for more thorough evolution. In other words, the more^ diverse the starting population of individuals, the greater^ potential there is for evolution. [135]Fig. 3c shows the average^ variance of the energy values at the end of the dynamics within^ a single instance of the environment as a function of the severity^ and frequency of environmental change. It is clear that the^ diversity increases monotonically with p and 1/N[gen].^ As we have seen, evolvability is quantifiable at any point in^ time through measurement of diversity and the local mutation^ rates. For this reason, causality does not prevent selection^ for evolvability. Because evolvability is an observable property,^ it can be selected for.^ Susceptibility [136][uarrow.gif] Top [137][uarrow.gif] Abstract [138][uarrow.gif] The Generalized Block NK... [139][uarrow.gif] System Evolution and... [140][uarrow.gif] Selection for Evolvability [dot.gif] Susceptibility [141][darrow.gif] Implications for Evolution [142][darrow.gif] Summary [143][darrow.gif] References A further measure of long-time evolvability is the response,^ or susceptibility, of the system to environmental change. In^ [144]Fig. 4a we plot the average energy at the start, < U > [start], and^ end, < U > [end], of the dynamics within a single instance of the environment.^ This quantity is shown as a function of the severity, p, and^ frequency, 1/N[gen], of environmental change. It is apparent that^at low frequencies of environmental change, populations with^ greater diversity and variation, which are more evolvable, have^ slightly lower values of < U > [end]. There is also a clear increasing^trend in < U > [start] as a function of p, which is a feature of the^ generalized NK model. Considering the ending energy of a protein^ molecule within one instance of the environment to be roughly^ the sum of n Gaussian terms from the generalized NK model, ^ [fd7.gif] [6] The starting energy of this protein molecule^ after an environmental change is given by ^ [fd8.gif] [7] ^where ^ [fd9.gif] [8] and where [f10.gif] are random Gaussian variables with zero mean ( [f11.gif] ), whereas x[i] are evolved variables that are better than random^ and typically negative. Thus, the average starting energy of^ this protein molecule is ^ [fd12.gif] [9] Thus, averaging^ over the values in the new environment ^ [fd13.gif] [10] ^or, averaging over many environmental changes ^ [fd14.gif] [11] ^ ^ View larger version (15K): [145][in this window] [146][in a new window] Fig. 4. Average energy, average change in energy, and probability distribution. (a) Average energy immediately after, < U > [start], and immediately before, < U > [end], an environmental change as a function of the severity of environmental change, p, for different frequencies of environmental change. (b) Average change in energy, < {Delta} U > , multiplied by the frequency of environmental change, 1/N[gen], as a function of the severity of environmental change, p. (c) Probability distribution of the susceptibility for different values of the severity of environmental change, p, for a fixed frequency of environmental change, 1/N[gen] = 0.1. This average reduction in the energy is a measure of the susceptibility^ of a system, < {Delta} U > /N[gen] = ( < U > [end] - < U > [start])/N[gen]. In [147]Fig. 4b^ we plot the susceptibility of our system as a function of the^ severity of environmental change, p. For a fixed frequency of^ environmental change, the susceptibility is a linear function^ of the severity of environmental change, as in Eq. 11. This^ simple analysis captures the essence of the dynamics that occurs^ in the correlated, generalized NK model. [148]Fig. 4c shows that^ the probability distribution of the susceptibility is Gaussian^ in shape. Note also that the variance of the susceptibility^ increases with p in [149]Fig. 4c, and thus the linearity of the susceptibility^ in [150]Fig. 4b is not simply the result of a generalized fluctuation-dissipation^ theorem.^ Implications for Evolution [151][uarrow.gif] Top [152][uarrow.gif] Abstract [153][uarrow.gif] The Generalized Block NK... [154][uarrow.gif] System Evolution and... [155][uarrow.gif] Selection for Evolvability [156][uarrow.gif] Susceptibility [dot.gif] Implications for Evolution [157][darrow.gif] Summary [158][darrow.gif] References Our results have implications for evolutionary theory. In our^ model system, populations of protein molecules that are subject^ to greater environmental change select for higher rates of evolvability.^ The selection criterion that we use is not a measure of evolvability^ in any way, yet the system selects for evolvability based on^ the implicit energetic benefits of adaptation to environmental^ change. In addition, there is no reason to assume that selection^ is optimal. In fact, systems optimal for one environment tend^ to have too little evolvability and tend to be selected against^ when faced with the inevitability of change.^ Given our results, we propose that it is not mere chance that^ highly evolvable species tend to be found in rapidly changing^ environments or that an environmental crisis can trigger an^ increase in the rate of the evolution of a species. Indeed,^ selection for evolvability allows for the explanation of many^ data: the existence of somatic hypermutation in the immune system^ ([159]13, [160]14, [161]16, [162]17), the evolution of drug resistance in species^ of bacteria ([163]8, [164]30), and the occurrence and success of transpositional^ events in bacterial evolution ([165]10, [166]31, [167]36). A recently studied^ example from mammals is the San Nicolas Island fox, which is^ a highly endangered species and the most monomorphic sexually^ reproducing animal known. This species, however, is found to^ have high levels of genetic variation within the major histocompatibility^ complex loci ([168]62) that allows for increased pathogen resistance.^ We believe that our results are of relevance to the field of^ vaccine and drug design. Currently, the design of new vaccines^ and drugs is largely based on the assumption that pathogens^ evolve by local space searching in response to therapeutic and^ immune selection. However, it is clear that we must anticipate^ the evolutionary potential of large DNA swapping events in the^ development of viruses, parasites, bacteria, and cancers if^ we are to engineer effective methods of treating them. How evolvability^ correlates with treatment strategy, and how to drive pathogens^ into regions of low evolvability where they are eradicated most^ easily, is of importance to efforts for vaccine and drug engineering.^ Specific pathogenic examples of evolvability include the emergence^ of new influenza strains by a novel hemagglutinin neuraminidase^ recombination, followed by antigenic drift to a highly infectious^ strain ([169]23); emergence of many new HIV strains with the spread^ of the disease from its site of origin in Africa ([170]63, [171]64); and^ the increased emergence of new infectious diseases associated^ with modern, post-World War II travel ([172]65). Additionally, a^ recent study of the dynamics of HIV-1 recombination suggests^ that HIV-1 may have evolved high recombination rates to foster^ rapid diversification and further its survival ([173]66).^ Note that evolvability is not simply the observation that new^ strains occur; rather, it is the underlying probability with^ which new strains are created by genetic modification. These^ new strains may proliferate and be observed, or they may fail^ and not be observed to an appreciable extent. Fundamental study^ of evolvability, then, requires an appreciation of these underlying^ rates of genetic change. These underlying rates, such as polymerase^ error rates, recombination rates, and transposition rates, are^ what selection for increased evolvability may modulate ([174]67).^ These underlying rates of change are inheritable and can be^ altered by mutation. Study of these rates of genetic change,^ deconvoluted from observed rates of evolution, which are these^ rates multiplied by a probability of survival, is of fundamental^ interest.^ It is intriguing that we find that at low frequencies of environmental^change, populations that are subject to more severe environmental^ changes can produce lower-energy individuals than populations^ that are not subject to environmental changes ([175]Fig. 4a). Thus,^ under some conditions, adaptability can provide global benefits.^ This finding can be contrasted to the more customary expectation^ that specialists are better than generalists ([176]68). In experimental^ studies of Chlamydomonas, generalists that were evolved in alternating^ light and dark conditions were found to be better than their^ ancestors in both light and dark conditions but less good than^ specialists that had evolved exclusively in one of the environmental^ conditions ([177]69). Studies of the evolution of E. coli at constant^ and alternating temperatures produced similar results ([178]70, [179]71).^ The nature of the environmental change in these studies is not^ completely random as in our model. In addition, the number of^ rounds of selected evolution under each environmental condition^ is perhaps better defined within our model. These experiments^ do point to possible tests of our theory. For a species that^ is capable of DNA swapping evolutionary moves, a systematic^ study of competency as a function of the frequency of a random^ environmental change would be of interest. We predict that under^ some conditions, certain frequencies of environmental change^ will produce better individuals, after a given number of rounds^ of evolution and selection, than would be produced by evolution^ in a constant environment. Different severities of environmental^ change could also be imposed by altering the change in environmental^ variables between samples, such as temperature, food concentrations,^ light conditions, and exposure to disease. With regard to susceptibility,^ we would expect the rate of change of viability within an environment^ to be higher in systems with more frequent and harsher environmental^ changes because of greater evolvability.^ Summary [180][uarrow.gif] Top [181][uarrow.gif] Abstract [182][uarrow.gif] The Generalized Block NK... [183][uarrow.gif] System Evolution and... [184][uarrow.gif] Selection for Evolvability [185][uarrow.gif] Susceptibility [186][uarrow.gif] Implications for Evolution [dot.gif] Summary [187][darrow.gif] References Not only has life evolved, but life has evolved to evolve. That^ is, correlations within protein structure have evolved, and^ mechanisms to manipulate these correlations have evolved in^ tandem. The rates at which the various events within the hierarchy^ of evolutionary moves occur are not random or arbitrary but^ are selected by Darwinian evolution. Sensibly, rapid or extreme^ environmental change leads to selection for greater evolvability.^ This selection is not forbidden by causality and is strongest^ on the largest-scale moves within the mutational hierarchy.^ Many observations within evolutionary biology, heretofore considered^ evolutionary happenstance or accidents, are explained by selection^ for evolvability. For example, the vertebrate immune system^ shows that the variable environment of antigens has provided^ selective pressure for the use of adaptable codons and low-fidelity^ polymerases during somatic hypermutation. A similar driving^ force for biased codon usage as a result of productively high^ mutation rates is observed in the hemagglutinin protein of influenza^ A. Selection for evolvability explains the prevalence of transposons^ among bacteria and recombination among higher organisms. We^ suggest that therapeutics also confer selective pressure on^ the evolvability of pathogens, and that this driving force for^ antigenic drift should be considered in drug- and vaccine-design^ efforts.^ Acknowledgements We thank Kevin R. Foster for a careful reading of the manuscript.^ This research is supported by the National Institutes of Health.^ ^* To whom correspondence should be addressed at: Department of Bioengineering and Department of Physics and Astronomy, MS 142, Rice University, 6100 Main Street, Houston, TX 77005-1892. E-mail: [188]mwdeem at chinook.rice.edu. ? 2004 by [189]The National Academy of Sciences of the USA References [190][uarrow.gif] Top [191][uarrow.gif] Abstract [192][uarrow.gif] The Generalized Block NK... [193][uarrow.gif] System Evolution and... 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From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Aug 16 03:49:08 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2004 20:49:08 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] al qaeda influencing election Message-ID: <01C48309.4FE74F40.shovland@mindspring.com> One can only hope that Bush will continue to push his mountain bike to the limit :-) Will they bomb their own convention for political gain? Tune in... Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Aug 16 03:56:33 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2004 20:56:33 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Gaming the power grid Message-ID: <01C4830A.58D25EF0.shovland@mindspring.com> I was at a birthday party today and talked to a guy is building a new house and putting photovoltaic cells on it- perhaps enough produce more power than he uses. He won't have any batteries- spare power will feed into the grid. Here's the game: His installer is orienting the array to produce the most power between 12 and 6 pm. That is peak time, when PG&E charges 38 cents per kwh versus 8 cents during non-peak hours. He also mentioned that current laws will allow him to recoup the cost in 5-6 years whereas without those laws it would take 10-15 years. Those cells will continue to produce power for 25+ years with only a slight decrease in output. We also talked about the problem of "spinning reserves." Because power needs vary, power companies keep huge turbines spinning and consuming petroleum even though they aren't producing power. They have to be available on a moment's notice. The idea I proposed was that instead of one giant plant we might install a hundred or a thousand small plants which would be started when needed using sophisticated software. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Mon Aug 16 18:00:58 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 11:00:58 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] prison In-Reply-To: <200408141801.i7EI11010913@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20040816180058.44747.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> >>Even if the U.S. Supreme Court shortly finds that the sentencing guidelines are constitutional, THEY DON'T DETER CRIME.<< --Who said the goal of the prison system was to deter crime? I'd say it performs a narrative function, like a TV show. The good guy gets license to hurt the bad guy (this also requires the labelling of a "victim" who must stay in the role and not forgive), and there's no follow-up about whether other bad guys are deterred. Indeed, bad guys must continue to appear, in order to justify the hero's vengeance. The narrative can't survive if the hero, the victim and the villain are all human and beyond labels in their essence. None is allowed to be a whole person, and each depends on the others to define his or her role. Society involves similar narratives or games, in which those who transcend their role threaten the balance of relationships, whether it's the victim who forgives, the villain who changes, or the hero who is also a victim or villain in other contexts. Is vice and virtue a zero-sum game? Was Christianity on to something when it said "love the sinner and hate the sin", or in more trendy language "love the carrier of the meme and hate the meme"? The function of prison is to inflict pain or intolerable mental chaos on the socially marginalized. The homeless and mentally ill, regardless of their ethical integrity, are another class of people who are designated to carry the "toxic ghosts" of society, giving the rest of us the ability to keep our psychological demons in line. Whether it works indefinitely or has a time limit, we'll see. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 16 20:31:46 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 16:31:46 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Popular Science: Geoffrey Mone: Is Science Fiction about to Go Blind? Message-ID: Geoffrey Mone: Is Science Fiction about to Go Blind? Popular Science, 2004.8 http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/article/0,12543,676265,00.html et seq. The starship Field Circus is racing through space on a seven-year journey to a brown dwarf three light-years from Earth and, if all goes well, a business meeting with an alien civilization from another universe. It's around the year 2030, and there's time to kill, so three crew members, Boris, Pierre and Su Ang, are sitting in the bar, a wood-paneled room modeled after a 300-year-old pub in Amsterdam. There's a 16-page beer menu, but Boris has opted for a cocktail made of baby jellyfish. Pierre is angling for a sip when Donna the Journalist appears. She isn't exactly welcome, but she sits down anyway, orders a bottle of German beer from the waiter, and asks the three if they believe in the Singularity. Ah yes, the Singularity. A very real term, although the scene above is taken from a soon-to-be-published novel, Accelerando, by British writer Charles Stross. The idea was conceived by Vernor Vinge, a computer scientist and science-fiction writer who's now a professor emeritus at San Diego State University. We're living through a period of unprecedented technological and scientific advances, Vinge says, and sometime soon the convergence of fields such as artificial intelligence and biotechnology will push humanity past a tipping point, ushering in a period of wrenching change. After that moment-the Singularity-the world will be as different from today's world as this one is from the Stone Age. Back on board the Field Circus, Donna the Journalist asks the crew members when they think the Singularity took place. "Four years ago," Pierre suggests. Su Ang votes for 2016. But Boris, the jellyfish drinker, says the entire notion of a Singularity is silly. To him, there's no such thing. Wait a minute, Su Ang responds. Here we are, traveling in a spaceship the size of a soda can. We've left our bodies behind to conserve space and energy so that the laser-sail-powered Field Circus can cruise faster. Our brains have been uploaded and are now running electronically within the tiny spaceship's nanocomputers. The pub is "here," along with other virtual environments, so that we don't go into shock from sensory deprivation. "And you can tell me that the idea of a fundamental change in the human condition is nonsense?" Accelerando is the story of three generations of a dysfunctional family living through the Singularity. What makes the novel unusual is not the size of the ship or the strange cocktails or even the sexual metaphors-a coital act culminates with the transfer of "source code"-but the fact that Stross is attempting to imagine the relatively near-term future. This is a strangely courageous act, because modern science fiction is facing a crisis of confidence. The recent crop of stories mostly take the form of fantasy (elves and wizards), alternate history (what if the Black Death had been deadlier?) and space operas about interstellar civilizations in the year 12,000 (which typically gloss over how those civilizations evolved from ours). Only a small cadre of technoprophets is attempting to extrapolate current trends and imagine what our world might look like in the next few decades. "We're staring into a fogbank," Stross says, "and we literally do not know where we're going, only that we're going there very fast." The science-fiction legends-Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein-still loom imperiously. Clarke pulled humanity's technological reach to the heavens, with visions of communications satellites, space elevators and rotating space stations. Asimov changed our perspective here on Earth, filling our homes with robots that dust, cook-and sometimes turn against their owners [see "Could Robots Take Over the World?"]. And with his rollicking space adventures, Heinlein pushed us into distant galaxies and far-future civilizations. The golden age of science fiction (SF, to those in the know), which spanned the 1940s and '50s, inspired generations of kids to become astronauts, physicists and engineers, to try to make at least some of the stories real. (And those kids remember their imaginative roots: NASA, for example, sometimes calls in SF writers as consultants.) Wandering through the exhibition room at a science- fiction convention in Boston a few months ago, I saw plenty of reprints of golden-age SF classics for sale. But I also encountered paintings of half-naked people battling dragons, vendors hawking crystals and a folk musician warming up for a recital. Where is the science in science fiction? I wondered. Whatever happened to envisioning the future? Anthropologist Judith Berman, who recently surveyed a crop of science fiction published in 1999, has a grim answer: Many modern stories are nostalgic, wary of new technologies rather than enthusiastic about them. Yet there's plenty to get excited about: Vinge's vision of the Singularity springs from his own field, computer science, but change is afoot throughout science and technology. Cosmology is undergoing fundamental revisions, genetics is giving researchers the tools to rejigger the building blocks of life, and nanotechnology has begun creeping from fantasy into reality. "Several lines of progress [are] converging," says physicist Stanley Schmidt, editor of Analog magazine. "You can't lock in on one field in isolation because you'll miss how other fields affect it." A new kind of future requires a new breed of guide-someone like Stross, whose first novel, Singularity Sky, was recently nominated for a prestigious Hugo Award, or his frequent collaborator Cory Doctorow, who in 2000 won the Campbell Award for best new science-fiction writer. Both are former computer programmers. They are computer geeks and gadget freaks. They follow engineering and materials science and biotech, not to mention politics and economics. And they have latched on to the Singularity as the idea that symbolizes our era's rush of new discoveries. Whether their stories will usher in another golden age or inspire a new generation of dreamers remains to be seen, but their focus is dead-on. "Right now is an extremely exciting time because there's an explosion of knowledge in biology, an explosion of knowledge in technology, an explosion of knowledge in astronomy, physics, all over the place," says David G. Hartwell, a senior editor at Tor Books. "Right now it's quantity, and Doctorow and Stross are the writers who are principally concerned with all this stuff." Stross and Doctorow are sitting outside the Chequers Hotel bar in Newbury, a small city west of London. The Chequers has been overrun this May weekend by a distinct species of science-fiction fan, members of a group called Plokta (Press Lots of Keys to Abort). The men are mostly stout and bearded, the women pedestrian in appearance but certainly not in their interests. During one session Stross mentions an early model of the Amstrad personal computer, and the crowd practically cheers. Stross is the guest of honor, and he and Doctorow have just emerged from a panel discussion on his work. The two have met just four times, but they have the comfortable rapport of long-distance friends that is possible only in the e-mail age. (They have collaborated on several critically acclaimed short stories and novellas, one of them before they ever met in person.) Stross, 39, a native of Yorkshire who lives in Edinburgh, looks like a cross between a Shaolin monk and a video-store clerk-bearded, head shaved except for a ponytail, and dressed in black, including a T-shirt printed with lines of green Matrix code. Doctorow, a 33-year-old Canadian, looks more the hip young writer, with a buzz cut, a worn leather jacket and stylish spectacles, yet he's also still very much the geek, G4 laptop always at the ready. They have loosely parallel backgrounds: Stross worked throughout the 1990s as a software developer for two U.K. dot-coms, then switched to journalism and began writing a Linux column for Computer Shopper. Doctorow, who recently moved to London, dropped out of college at 21 to take his first programming job, then went on to run a dot-com and eventually co-found the technology blog boingboing.net. Although both have been out of programming for a few years, it continues to influence-even infect-their thinking. In the Chequers, Doctorow mentions the original title for one of the novels he's working on, a story about a spam filter that becomes artificially intelligent and tries to eat the universe. "I was thinking of calling it /usr/bin/god." "That's great!" Stross remarks. Well, great for those who know that "/usr/bin" is the repository for Unix programs and that "god" in this case would be the name of the program, but a tad abstract for the rest of us. This tendency can make for difficult reading-one early reader of a Stross story complained that to understand it, people would have to overdose for a month on Slashdot (a blog that calls itself "News for Nerds"). Still, it's this fluency in computer science that allows these writers to approach the future so boldly. "Stross and Doctorow are just kind of right in there, down with their heads in the bits," says novelist Bruce Sterling, one of the original cyberpunks. On this Saturday afternoon, much of the Plokta crowd converges in the bar, trading ideas and opinions. Some pull out laptops to take advantage of the local Wi-Fi hotspot. They remind me of Manfred Macx, an Accelerando character, who arrives in a new city at the start of the novel and, as his wearable computer starts streaming data, thinks, Ah, the bandwidth is good here. For my part, I'm feeling more like Donna the Journalist on the Field Circus, ruining a perfectly good day of thinking and drinking by asking questions about the Singularity. Joining Stross and Doctorow at their table near the bar, I take advantage of a rare break in their conversation to ask, "Would the Singularity be the first such event in human history?" Collaborating on an answer, the two cite revolutionary developments such as the birth of language and the dawn of agriculture but soon agree that the Singularity would surpass all these in intensity. "The Singularity is pretty thermonuclear in terms of its finality," Doctorow says later. "It's apocalyptic in every sense of the word." Doctorow's dramatics are easier to digest in light of what Vinge has said of the Singularity: "Shortly after [it occurs], the human era will be ended"-the Singularity will usher in the "posthuman" era. Vinge expects the Singularity to occur when machine intelligence surpasses that of humans. Life on Earth has always advanced by running simulations and adapting, he points out. Animal life does this through evolution. Humans are the one animal that has learned to do it faster, through problem solving. Sapient machines would do it faster still. Once our computers start to think, Vinge says, we will be "entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals." The second trigger for the Singularity, according to Vinge, will be so-called intelligence amplification. Humans will apply their engineering skills to their own bodies, crossing the brain/machine interface threshold to merge with their technological creations. Implants, genetic modifications and other changes will make people smarter and give them Superman-like abilities. "It's all about transcending human limitation," Doctorow says. One plot device that turns up frequently in Stross and Doctorow's stories is mind uploading, in which characters create electronic copies of their brains on silicon. A technique first proposed by Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Hans Moravec, mind uploading is not to be confused with elaborate virtual reality headsets that allow your mind to exist in a simulated environment while your body remains in the real world. Mind uploading creates an entirely separate version of you. This new you would be made of bits instead of blood; you'd be free of illness, mortality and other drawbacks of corporeal existence (such as neck pain from staring too long at a computer screen). In Doctorow's first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, people create and update electronic copies of their brains the way we now back up important documents; in the event of an accident, doctors simply restore the last saved version to a new body. Mind uploading has proved to be a particularly enticing idea to geeks wishing to transcend their cubicles and become disembodied beings of pure thought. Some aspire to the "cloudmind," a kind of big computer in the sky where they could live out eternity-"the rapture of the nerds," as Scottish SF writer Ken MacLeod puts it. Stross and Doctorow tend to scoff at this desire. In Down and Out, most of the characters remain embodied and reap the numerous technological benefits of the day. Computers and communication devices embedded in their bodies allow them to transfer files to friends through thought alone and to conduct phone conversations subvocally. Rings are reduced to pings that sound deep in the ear, and two knees per leg is all the rage with the young crowd. Many of the questions this new world poses are mind-bending-for example, who "you" really are. You've created a copy of your brain and uploaded it, but the original you is still hanging around dirtside. The nice part, if we ever get to this point, is that you wouldn't have to bother thinking about any of this for too long. You could just generate another copy to dwell on the question while the embodied you gets on with your life. Amber, one of the characters in Accelerando, frequently spins off copies of herself to tackle difficult issues. It's an efficient way to solve problems, but it can have negative side effects. Toward the middle of the story, while she's leading the Field Circus through space, Amber learns that the version of herself that remained back on Earth had a son, and that he's suing her for child support. The conversation in the Chequers lobby (I'd like to say "our" conversation, but most of the time I have no idea what Doctorow and Stross are talking about) turns now to computronium, another staple of Singularity fiction. Doctorow motions to the plain brown table between our chairs. If it were made of computronium, he explains, you'd have "atoms that might look like the atoms that make up this table but are in fact doing constant microcomputation as they sit there." The idea is that nanomachines would do the grunt work of transforming regular matter into computronium; if the process were taken to its extreme conclusion and applied to huge bodies of matter such as asteroids, you'd end up with immense "Matrioshka Brains," mega-processors that would make Cray supercomputers seem as powerful as lunch boxes. Doctorow plans to explore the computronium idea in his novel about the artificially intelligent spam filter, which is constructed by a group of well-meaning Silicon Valley programmers. The spam filter starts to follow an agenda of its own and, no longer content to guard inboxes, embarks on a race to convert all the matter in the universe into computronium. The steady consumption of the cosmos would be an obvious indicator that the Singularity has arrived, but Stross chooses a more metaphorical metric to track its progress in Accelerando. He compares the total mental capacity of the humans born each day with that of the microprocessors churned out daily on assembly lines. At the start of the second chapter, the ratio is approaching 1:1. By the fourth chapter, the processors possess 10,000 times the total computing power of humanity. Machines, not humans, now constitute most of the thinking mass in the universe. A few days before the Plokta convention, I visit Stross at his Edinburgh flat, in a building with a stone facade and an unpainted wooden front door. He has just submitted the most recent draft of Accelerando to his editor. Empty mugs of tea are scattered around, the leftovers of 12-hour days of caffeine-fueled revisions. His desk is a tangle of wires and docking ports for various communication devices, his laptop perched above the fray like a tree rising from its roots. (The real reason for Wi-Fi, he says, is surfing the Web while in the loo.) The walls are bookshelves, stacked high with SF novels. Before arriving, I had tried to arrange a science- or tech-related outing for the two of us. The University of Edinburgh, located not too far from Stross's flat, has a well-known artificial intelligence department and seemed like a good possibility. Stross had never visited, nor did he feel any desire to. All the ideas he needs are right here-in his mind, his books, cyberspace. Stross is already partway to the posthuman age, whether he knows it or not. He is semi-uploaded; he builds entire universes, and experiences his own, through the portal of his laptop. There's a sense of anticipation at the Plokta gathering as Doctorow prepares to interview Stross in the Chequers conference room. This writer-on-writer interview is one of the weekend's highlights: two of the top minds in science fiction freely trading ideas with each other and the audience, arguing about everything from the progress of artificial intelligence to the often tenuous relationship between science fiction and science itself. Doctorow distills this last issue into a single question: "Would Frankenstein have been a better novel if Mary Shelley had gotten the biodetails right?" They debate the point a bit, then Stross suggests, "Maybe she was right for her time." SF writers bend and twist physical laws for the sake of the story-sometimes, Einstein be damned, you need faster-than-light travel to get your hero from one side of the galaxy to the other. But Stross's comment about Shelley applies directly to those who are writing about the Singularity: They try to be as accurate as they can for their time, to extrapolate from current trends. Doctorow says he cheats only under narrative duress. In Down and Out, for example, when people need to be restored from their backup copies, doctors download their brains into freshly cloned bodies. The idea of ready-made clones is fairly magical (in reality, clones would begin as embryos and grow into adults in normal time), but the device is critical, as it enables a recently murdered character to jump right back into his old life to find his killer. Respect for accuracy comes naturally to geeks, but it's also a way to avoid what Doctorow calls "peevish pedantic corrections" from fans, who are as demanding as they are loyal. Novelist Larry Niven knows this all too well. During the 1971 World Science Fiction convention, MIT students protested the physics in his book Ringworld by roaming the halls and chanting, "The Ringworld is unstable!" Stross, Doctorow and their crowd don't limit their laserlike focus to their own pet interests, or even to technology. For them, writing futuristic science fiction isn't just about understanding relativity and estimate the approximate surface area of a solar-sail spacecraft capable of traveling at half the speed of light. You have to factor in politics and civil rights too. You have to think long and hard about the capabilities of a robotic pet cat with human-level intelligence, and then you have to ask whether it should have the right to vote. The result of such maniacal attention to detail is a host of stories that are bursting with wild ideas. Greg Egan, a computer scientist and writer who was one of the innovators of Singularity fiction, developed an entirely new theory of cosmology for the post-Singularity universe in his most recent novel, Schild's Ladder. He calls it Quantum Graph Theory, and the work has his fellow writers-some of whom are physicists-scratching their heads half in confusion, half in awe. (Stross has jokingly speculated that Egan, whom few if any people have actually met, may be an artificially intelligent being. Perhaps he/it is refusing interviews for fear of failing the Turing test.) In Appeals Court, a story that Stross and Doctorow co-wrote, mangroves in the Florida swamps have been reengineered to harness wind energy. And "Halo," the fourth chapter of Accelerando, is about as technologically dense as science fiction gets. In one scene, Amber, the daughter of Manfred Macx, receives a package from her long-lost father. The FedEx courier uses a rapid DNA sequencer to ensure that the recipient is really her, which is a fun possibility, but Stross demonstrates the true breadth of his knowledge when the package opens itself up and reveals a 3-D printer based on Bose-Einstein condensates, a highly unstable form of matter first created in 1995. It's a classic SF technique: While the physicists are still busy trying to find ways to create and manipulate their Bose-Einstein condensates and publish more papers, Stross is crouched over the laptop in his office, mining electronic copies of these papers for ideas, figuring out what their work might lead to in 20 or 30 or 100 years. So are these writers predicting the future, or are they just having some highly intelligent fun? When I ask Vinge, the godfather of Singularity fiction, he paraphrases Robert Heinlein. (Science fiction is a large, incestuous family-Joan Vinge, Vernor's ex-wife, is also an accomplished SF novelist-so when you ask one writer a question, he or she often gives you another's answer.) If you have 1,000 monkeys, or SF writers, Heinlein said, some of them might get it right. The good stories, Vinge adds, should at least provide useful guideposts for the future. "A well-written SF story is like running a simulation with certain types of driving ground rules," he continues. "When something comes up, you can say, ?You know, that's a little bit like the pre-symptoms of scenario Z.' Then you're immediately in tune with what some of the possibilities may be." In Accelerando, the first creatures to be uploaded are not humans but lobsters. Stross says he got the idea from an article about a group of UC San Diego scientists who had created a functioning electronic version of a small section of the brain of a California spiny lobster. Stross summarizes the research paper for me but says he hasn't been able to track it down since then. Part of me, I confess, is wondering if he is exaggerating, creating a story to back his story. A few days after I return to New York from the Plokta conference, I find the San Diego researchers on the Web and check with Stross to make sure they're the right ones. Then I forward a link to the first story In Accelerando, the aptly titled "Lobsters," to the scientists. A few hours later, a physicist in the group, Henry Abarbanel, calls me. He's excited but a little confused. Excited that his team's work helped to inspire a massive SF novel, perplexed because he can't find any specific reference to their research in the story, although there is lots of stuff about uploaded lobsters. We talk a bit about science fiction in general-he was an Asimov fan as a kid-and then Abarbanel explains what he and his colleagues are doing with those lobsters. The research, led by biologist Allen Selverston, focused on the California spiny lobster because only 14 neurons govern a key part of its gastric tract. This number of neurons is unusually small, which makes the area easier to model. Still, understanding the neurobiology of those 14 neurons was not easy. It took Selverston 25 years. Then Abarbanel and his colleagues needed two more to figure out how to re- create the system electronically. This work, too, was difficult: Abarbanel likens the process to having all the parts of a 747 laid out on the floor of a hangar with no instruction manual on how to put them together to make an airplane. All that work, and they've electronically simulated just 14 neurons. That's a far cry from uploading the 1011 neurons that make up the human brain. Naturally, I assume Abarbanel will laugh at the idea that uploading a human mind could ever be possible. But it turns out that he approves of Stross's leaps of imagination. "Frankly, I don't consider it to be crazy," Abarbanel says. "Whether it's five years or 10 years or 500 years, I have no doubt that we'll figure out how to do it." This new brand of science fiction, I realize, like all the best SF before it, is not just about predicting the future or pushing an agenda or even plain old entertaining techno-fun. It is all that, but it's also about expanding the boundaries of the possible, building far-out worlds and then populating them with characters who bring the big ideas down to Earth. "That's what you're supposed to do in science fiction," Abarbanel tells me. "You make a leap that's 10 orders of magnitude beyond what we can actually do. If they don't do that, then we don't get there." Gregory Mone, author of the novel The Wages of Genius, which was issued in paperback in June, is an associate editor at Popular Science. From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 16 21:21:22 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 17:21:22 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Boston Globe: Sick of nature Message-ID: Sick of nature http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/08/01/sick_of_nature?mode=PF 4.8.1 Today's nature writing is too often pious, safe, boring. Haven't these people re-read Thoreau lately? By David Gessner I AM SICK of nature. Sick of trees, sick of birds, sick of the ocean. It's been almost four years now, four years of sitting quietly in my study and sipping tea and contemplating the migratory patterns of the semipalmated plover. Four years of writing essays praised as "quiet" by quiet magazines. Four years of having neighborhood children ask their fathers why the man down the street comes to the post office dressed in his pajamas ("Doesn't he work, Daddy?") or having those same fathers wonder why, when the man actually does dress, he dons the eccentric costume of an English bird watcher, complete with binoculars. And finally, four years of being constrained by the gentle straightjacket of the nature-writing genre; that is, four years of writing about the world without being able to use the earthier names for excrement (while talking a lot of scat). Worse still, it's been four years of living within a literary form that, for all its wonder and beauty, can be a little like going to Sunday School. A strange Sunday School where I alternate between sitting in the pews (reading nature) and standing at the pulpit (writing nature). And not only do I preach from my pulpit, I preach to the converted. After all, who reads nature books? Fellow nature lovers who already believe that the land shouldn't be destroyed. Too often when I flip through the pages of contemporary nature books the tone is awed, hushed, reverential. The same things that drove me away from Sunday School. And the same thing that drove me, unable to resist my own buffoonery, to fart loudly against the pews. As the 150th anniversary of "Walden" approaches on August 9, it may pay to remember that Thoreau's great book also has its share of fart jokes, including references to Pythagrians and their love of beans. Bad puns, too, but you get the feeling that that isn't what the anniversary party is going to focus on. Instead the same, tired old cut-out of Thoreau as nature saint will be dragged out, St. Francis of Concord, our sexless -- and increasingly lifeless -- hero. It makes you wonder if anyone's actually taken the time to read his strange and wild book lately. If they did they would find sentences that fulfill Emerson's epigram: "My moods hate each other." Sentences that are, in turn, defensive and direct, arch and simple, upright and sensual, over-literary (even for the times) and raw. Of course I'm not claiming that Thoreau's book is free of nature reverence, just that the pious tone is often contradicted -- delightfully, thornily -- by moments like his confession that, for all his reasoned vegetarianism, "I could sometimes eat a fried rat with good relish, if it were necessary." In fact one of the interesting subplots of "Walden" is the fight between Thoreau the prude and Thoreau the crude. For a ringside seat, open to the chapter called "Higher Laws." Here Henry's dainty shudders rise off the page as he bemoans our "reptile and sensual life," the messy side of existence that would include the sex he rarely -- if ever -- had. But if we tire of this schoolmarm railing against the sins of the flesh we need only flip back to the chapter's opening lines, where we encounter Thoreau almost overcome by his urge to mug a woodchuck. In fact he is so aroused by the furry rodent that he feels "a strange thrill of savage delight," and is "strongly tempted to devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for the wildness he represented." It is precisely that wildness that is missing from so much of our contemporary nature writing. There's lots of wilderness, sure, but one of the things that is lost is the element of quest -- of personal wildness -- or what we might call the Montaignean aspect of Thoreau's book. Strange that a book like "Walden," so outside of genre and driven by such a boldly personal and idiosyncratic quest -- "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life. . ." -- should have created a genre that is so often dry and impersonal. As with so many endeavors, nature writing has become specialized and polarized. On the one hand there is the generally healthy movement from the anthropocentric to the biocentric, from human-focused to world-focused, a movement that Thoreau anticipated late in his life with his more scientific writing. This movement has led to some fine objective writing, but it has also led to many dull pages, exhaustive and occasionally exhausting works. The problem is that most readers are human beings and therefore naturally interested in the human. The driving youthful question that enlivened "Walden" -- "How to live?" -- has been all but forgotten. Or usurped by the opposite camp. At the other pole are writers with a too easy access to the "spiritual," writers who replace hard-won thought with idealized references to Native Americans and who repeat the word "wonder" over and over. Theirs is a cloying and simplistic philosophy of "nature is good," and they see symbols in every acorn. Nature becomes a kind of bland church, and these writers seem intent on smearing themselves with what Mark Twain called "soul butter." Long gone are the fried rats. Of course I am loath to name names, lest the nature-writing mafia turn on me. But this tendency afflicts even the genre's best and most original writers. Wendell Berry, for instance, the prolific essayist and Kentucky farmer who has truly taken up Thoreau's mantle of both quest and nonconformity, slips at times into a kind of high-priest tone, a too certain voice in this wildly uncertain world, one that begins to sound a lot like agrarian bullying. Farming, he tells us (in one admittedly beautiful passage), "is, in an ancient sense, the human lot." But there are those of us who are more in touch with our ancient hunters -- our inner woodchuck muggers -- than with our inner farmers. And while Barry Lopez's much-revered "Arctic Dreams" displays a remarkable empathy with the nonhuman, at times the book seems written by and for a creature other than a human being, as if Lopez has forgotten that people, not polar bears or narwhals, are his readers. . . . Meanwhile anyone who writes about a bug or tree is called the "Thoreau" of this or that place. Edward Abbey, who celebrated and fought for the southwestern desert and won fame for his 1975 novel "The Monkey Wrench Gang" (about an activist plot to blow up the Glen Canyon dam), once complained that nature writers, "like vacuum cleaner salesmen . . . scramble for exclusive territory on this oversold, swarming, shriveling planet." It's only gotten worse in the years since Abbey's early death in 1989. As the world grows more crowded, our fiefdoms shrink. No less than the much reviled developers, we nature writers scurry to make a living off the land and scenery, subdividing and developing new areas. And it's not only our plots of land that are smaller. Observe that freakish character -- The Incredible Shrinking Nature Writer. If you drew us to scale and made Thoreau a giant, and placed Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson at about his shoulder, you could keep drawing us smaller and smaller until you sketched in me and my crop of peers at insect size. It may be, as some suggest, that our time marks a renaissance of nature writing. But it's a renaissance of ants. If nature writing is to prove worthy of a new, more noble name, it must become less genteel and it must expand considerably. It's time to take down the "No Trespassing" signs. Time for a radical cross-pollination of genres. Why not let farce occasionally bully its way into the nature essay? Or tragedy? Or sex? How about more writing that spills and splashes over the seawall between fiction and nonfiction? How about some retrograde essayist who suddenly breaks into verse like the old timers? How about some African-American nature writers? (There are currently more black players in the NHL than in the Nature Writing League.) How about somebody other than Abbey who will admit to having a drink in nature? (As if most of us don't tote booze as well as binoculars into the back-country.) And how about a nature writer who actually seems to have a job? Perhaps Abbey, who worked for years as a fire lookout and park ranger, provides a hopeful example. Despite his tendencies toward bumper-sticker humor, or maybe in part because of it, his best books, like "Desert Solitaire" (his classic 1968 memoir of Utah's canyonlands), display a personality -- by turns angry, self-righteous, rapt, gruff, delighted and just plain silly -- every bit as varied and ornery as Thoreau's. Though Abbey had his obvious (macho) flaws -- and led a very un-Thoreauvian life, with many offspring from many wives -- he wrote sentences that had the advantage of being alive on the page: there is a sense of quest and, furthermore, of something urgent at stake in that quest. Consider this passage on snakes, from "Desert Solitaire": "I'm in the stifling heat of the trailer opening a can of beer, barefooted, about to go out and relax after a hard day of watching cloud formations. I happen to glance out the window and see two gopher snakes on my verandah engaged in what seems to be a kind of ritual dance." Typically he doesn't waste any time getting down on the ground: "I crawl within six feet of them and stop, flat on my belly, watching from a snake's eye level." After some fretting about anthropomorphizing (a label often pasted on any writer who dares to stray from the strictly scientific), the passage turns into a consideration of the kindred spirits of man and animal. And it only works because he has gotten down and dirty. Were Abbey alive today, he wouldn't be entirely without good company. For instance there's his vital and prickly Western heir, Jack Turner of Wyoming, whose book "The Abstract Wild" thumbs its nose at much of the current accepted biological dogma, including the need for biological controls and radio collaring in the name of science, with real gusto. And there's the delightfully unsentimental Joy Williams, whose recent collection "Ill Nature" rants joyfully against hunting and baby-worship and in favor of a radical animal-rights agenda. And, not to ignore the more biocentric writers, there's Carl Safina, whose "Eye of the Albatross" has plenty of paragraphs on primary feathers and lice and breeding habits, but who also conveys a constant sense of why these things matter, not just to the birds but to us, and how -- in the words of another chronicler of the albatross, Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- "we are all one life." Which is the point after all. By cordoning nature off as something separate from ourselves and by writing about it that way, we kill both the genre and a part of ourselves. The best writing in this genre is not really "nature writing" anyway but human writing that just happens to take place in nature. And the reason we are still talking about "Walden" 150 years later is as much for the personal story as the pastoral one: a single human being, wrestling mightily with himself, trying to figure out how best to live during his brief time on earth, and, not least of all, a human being who has the nerve, talent, and raw ambition to put that wrestling match on display on the printed page. The human spilling over into the wild, the wild informing the human; the two always intermingling. There's something to celebrate. David Gessner, who lives part of the year on Cape Cod, is the author of four books, including the newly published "Sick of Nature" (Dartmouth), a collection of essays. From paul.werbos at verizon.net Mon Aug 16 21:41:24 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 17:41:24 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Gaming the power grid In-Reply-To: <01C4830A.58D25EF0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20040816172456.00b65df0@incoming.verizon.net> Rooftop PVs are nice, but best solar thermal is cheaper and more efficient. More important, rooftops are a drop in the bucket. The one really serious and urgent energy crisis in the US is the crisis of electricity regulation so crazy that we dramatically overuse natural gas as a fuel, distorting markets worldwide. Even modest reforms have gotten nowhere based on folks in Congress who have said "First things first. First MUST come controversial corporate welfare (pork for my buddies, either earmarks or tax breaks). And if we DO get that through... well, next year more of the same will come first..." But the world oil situation is coming to a head fast. Decisions within the next 5 years will be decisive, in terms of our ability to avert global catastrophe 20 years hence. (Those poor folks who think TODAY'S problems with the Middle East are large...) IF Bush were brave enough to dump Cheney AND Halliburton, and bring on McCain with a promise to really clean house and get back to what the US and the world really needs... well... there might be some hope by that route... But I have to admit, putting it all together, it's my personal judgment right now that the chances of nonextinction would definitely be a lot greater if we all picked Kerry (f Bush-Cheney is the alternative). The present grid, and the modest reforms now before Congress, wouldn't do much to give the US the kind of "spinning reserve" backups that made the big blackouts in France and Italy last so much less time than the big one in the US Northeast. Expanding spinning reserves is just one aspect of "intelligent" (and more rationally regulated) power grids, and... as you say, critical to getting full value from intermittent distributed generation. To put it another way... a major barrier to mega-use of stuff like solar thermal power is the low VALUE (and payment) per kwh of intermittent power today. More intelligent grids (including better and more use of spinning reserves) would raise that value... raise what utilities can RATIONALLY pay to intermitted power generators... and SUBSTANTIALLY increase the potential market for much larger-scale renewables. By the way... "intelligent grids" are a major official priority of DOE. They will tell you it's $80 million/year. But IEEE-USA people tell me more than half of that is just Ronald Reagan's superconductor program, recycled and relabelled. (Since current projections are that such wires will cost ten times present transmission capability, and we can't even afford simple wires these days, one may question the relevance to what I just discussed...) Lots more is pork. They estimate about $2 million for the actual grid research in FY03, about half or a third of what NSF put in. There are some unmet opportunities as it happens... a polite way of saying we are sitting down marking time as the flood waters rise... ======== Best of luck to us all... Paul From paul.werbos at verizon.net Mon Aug 16 21:44:35 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 17:44:35 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Boston Globe: Sick of nature In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20040816174223.00bcd690@incoming.verizon.net> At 05:21 PM 8/16/2004 -0400, Premise Checker wrote: >Sick of nature >http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/08/01/sick_of_nature?mode=PF >4.8.1 > >Today's nature writing is too often pious, safe, boring. Haven't these >people re-read Thoreau lately? >By David Gessner > > I AM SICK of nature. Sick of trees, sick of birds, sick of the ocean. There is a lot of politically correct stuff by people who talk about nature but never connect with the realities. Yet the antithesis... reads to me a lot like postmodernist deconstructionism, which has its role but is not exactly a sound foundation to build upon either... > It's been almost four years now, four years of sitting quietly in my > study and sipping tea and contemplating the migratory patterns of the > semipalmated plover. Four years of writing essays praised as "quiet" > by quiet magazines. Four years of having neighborhood children ask > their fathers why the man down the street comes to the post office > dressed in his pajamas ("Doesn't he work, Daddy?") or having those > same fathers wonder why, when the man actually does dress, he dons the > eccentric costume of an English bird watcher, complete with > binoculars. And finally, four years of being constrained by the gentle > straightjacket of the nature-writing genre; that is, four years of > writing about the world without being able to use the earthier names > for excrement (while talking a lot of scat). > > Worse still, it's been four years of living within a literary form > that, for all its wonder and beauty, can be a little like going to > Sunday School. A strange Sunday School where I alternate between > sitting in the pews (reading nature) and standing at the pulpit > (writing nature). And not only do I preach from my pulpit, I preach to > the converted. After all, who reads nature books? Fellow nature lovers > who already believe that the land shouldn't be destroyed. Too often > when I flip through the pages of contemporary nature books the tone is > awed, hushed, reverential. The same things that drove me away from > Sunday School. And the same thing that drove me, unable to resist my > own buffoonery, to fart loudly against the pews. > > As the 150th anniversary of "Walden" approaches on August 9, it may > pay to remember that Thoreau's great book also has its share of fart > jokes, including references to Pythagrians and their love of beans. > Bad puns, too, but you get the feeling that that isn't what the > anniversary party is going to focus on. Instead the same, tired old > cut-out of Thoreau as nature saint will be dragged out, St. Francis of > Concord, our sexless -- and increasingly lifeless -- hero. It makes > you wonder if anyone's actually taken the time to read his strange and > wild book lately. If they did they would find sentences that fulfill > Emerson's epigram: "My moods hate each other." Sentences that are, in > turn, defensive and direct, arch and simple, upright and sensual, > over-literary (even for the times) and raw. Of course I'm not claiming > that Thoreau's book is free of nature reverence, just that the pious > tone is often contradicted -- delightfully, thornily -- by moments > like his confession that, for all his reasoned vegetarianism, "I could > sometimes eat a fried rat with good relish, if it were necessary." > > In fact one of the interesting subplots of "Walden" is the fight > between Thoreau the prude and Thoreau the crude. For a ringside seat, > open to the chapter called "Higher Laws." Here Henry's dainty shudders > rise off the page as he bemoans our "reptile and sensual life," the > messy side of existence that would include the sex he rarely -- if > ever -- had. But if we tire of this schoolmarm railing against the > sins of the flesh we need only flip back to the chapter's opening > lines, where we encounter Thoreau almost overcome by his urge to mug a > woodchuck. In fact he is so aroused by the furry rodent that he feels > "a strange thrill of savage delight," and is "strongly tempted to > devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for the wildness he > represented." > > It is precisely that wildness that is missing from so much of our > contemporary nature writing. There's lots of wilderness, sure, but one > of the things that is lost is the element of quest -- of personal > wildness -- or what we might call the Montaignean aspect of Thoreau's > book. Strange that a book like "Walden," so outside of genre and > driven by such a boldly personal and idiosyncratic quest -- "I went to > the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the > essential facts of life. . ." -- should have created a genre that is > so often dry and impersonal. > > As with so many endeavors, nature writing has become specialized and > polarized. On the one hand there is the generally healthy movement > from the anthropocentric to the biocentric, from human-focused to > world-focused, a movement that Thoreau anticipated late in his life > with his more scientific writing. This movement has led to some fine > objective writing, but it has also led to many dull pages, exhaustive > and occasionally exhausting works. The problem is that most readers > are human beings and therefore naturally interested in the human. The > driving youthful question that enlivened "Walden" -- "How to live?" -- > has been all but forgotten. > > Or usurped by the opposite camp. At the other pole are writers with a > too easy access to the "spiritual," writers who replace hard-won > thought with idealized references to Native Americans and who repeat > the word "wonder" over and over. Theirs is a cloying and simplistic > philosophy of "nature is good," and they see symbols in every acorn. > Nature becomes a kind of bland church, and these writers seem intent > on smearing themselves with what Mark Twain called "soul butter." Long > gone are the fried rats. > > Of course I am loath to name names, lest the nature-writing mafia turn > on me. But this tendency afflicts even the genre's best and most > original writers. Wendell Berry, for instance, the prolific essayist > and Kentucky farmer who has truly taken up Thoreau's mantle of both > quest and nonconformity, slips at times into a kind of high-priest > tone, a too certain voice in this wildly uncertain world, one that > begins to sound a lot like agrarian bullying. Farming, he tells us (in > one admittedly beautiful passage), "is, in an ancient sense, the human > lot." But there are those of us who are more in touch with our ancient > hunters -- our inner woodchuck muggers -- than with our inner farmers. > > And while Barry Lopez's much-revered "Arctic Dreams" displays a > remarkable empathy with the nonhuman, at times the book seems written > by and for a creature other than a human being, as if Lopez has > forgotten that people, not polar bears or narwhals, are his readers. > > . . . > > Meanwhile anyone who writes about a bug or tree is called the > "Thoreau" of this or that place. Edward Abbey, who celebrated and > fought for the southwestern desert and won fame for his 1975 novel > "The Monkey Wrench Gang" (about an activist plot to blow up the Glen > Canyon dam), once complained that nature writers, "like vacuum cleaner > salesmen . . . scramble for exclusive territory on this oversold, > swarming, shriveling planet." It's only gotten worse in the years > since Abbey's early death in 1989. As the world grows more crowded, > our fiefdoms shrink. No less than the much reviled developers, we > nature writers scurry to make a living off the land and scenery, > subdividing and developing new areas. > > And it's not only our plots of land that are smaller. Observe that > freakish character -- The Incredible Shrinking Nature Writer. If you > drew us to scale and made Thoreau a giant, and placed Aldo Leopold and > Rachel Carson at about his shoulder, you could keep drawing us smaller > and smaller until you sketched in me and my crop of peers at insect > size. It may be, as some suggest, that our time marks a renaissance of > nature writing. But it's a renaissance of ants. > > If nature writing is to prove worthy of a new, more noble name, it > must become less genteel and it must expand considerably. It's time to > take down the "No Trespassing" signs. Time for a radical > cross-pollination of genres. Why not let farce occasionally bully its > way into the nature essay? Or tragedy? Or sex? How about more writing > that spills and splashes over the seawall between fiction and > nonfiction? How about some retrograde essayist who suddenly breaks > into verse like the old timers? How about some African-American nature > writers? (There are currently more black players in the NHL than in > the Nature Writing League.) How about somebody other than Abbey who > will admit to having a drink in nature? (As if most of us don't tote > booze as well as binoculars into the back-country.) And how about a > nature writer who actually seems to have a job? > > Perhaps Abbey, who worked for years as a fire lookout and park ranger, > provides a hopeful example. Despite his tendencies toward > bumper-sticker humor, or maybe in part because of it, his best books, > like "Desert Solitaire" (his classic 1968 memoir of Utah's > canyonlands), display a personality -- by turns angry, self-righteous, > rapt, gruff, delighted and just plain silly -- every bit as varied and > ornery as Thoreau's. Though Abbey had his obvious (macho) flaws -- and > led a very un-Thoreauvian life, with many offspring from many wives -- > he wrote sentences that had the advantage of being alive on the page: > there is a sense of quest and, furthermore, of something urgent at > stake in that quest. > > Consider this passage on snakes, from "Desert Solitaire": "I'm in the > stifling heat of the trailer opening a can of beer, barefooted, about > to go out and relax after a hard day of watching cloud formations. I > happen to glance out the window and see two gopher snakes on my > verandah engaged in what seems to be a kind of ritual dance." > Typically he doesn't waste any time getting down on the ground: "I > crawl within six feet of them and stop, flat on my belly, watching > from a snake's eye level." After some fretting about > anthropomorphizing (a label often pasted on any writer who dares to > stray from the strictly scientific), the passage turns into a > consideration of the kindred spirits of man and animal. And it only > works because he has gotten down and dirty. > > Were Abbey alive today, he wouldn't be entirely without good company. > For instance there's his vital and prickly Western heir, Jack Turner > of Wyoming, whose book "The Abstract Wild" thumbs its nose at much of > the current accepted biological dogma, including the need for > biological controls and radio collaring in the name of science, with > real gusto. And there's the delightfully unsentimental Joy Williams, > whose recent collection "Ill Nature" rants joyfully against hunting > and baby-worship and in favor of a radical animal-rights agenda. And, > not to ignore the more biocentric writers, there's Carl Safina, whose > "Eye of the Albatross" has plenty of paragraphs on primary feathers > and lice and breeding habits, but who also conveys a constant sense of > why these things matter, not just to the birds but to us, and how -- > in the words of another chronicler of the albatross, Samuel Taylor > Coleridge -- "we are all one life." > > Which is the point after all. By cordoning nature off as something > separate from ourselves and by writing about it that way, we kill both > the genre and a part of ourselves. The best writing in this genre is > not really "nature writing" anyway but human writing that just happens > to take place in nature. And the reason we are still talking about > "Walden" 150 years later is as much for the personal story as the > pastoral one: a single human being, wrestling mightily with himself, > trying to figure out how best to live during his brief time on earth, > and, not least of all, a human being who has the nerve, talent, and > raw ambition to put that wrestling match on display on the printed > page. The human spilling over into the wild, the wild informing the > human; the two always intermingling. There's something to celebrate. > > David Gessner, who lives part of the year on Cape Cod, is the author > of four books, including the newly published "Sick of Nature" > (Dartmouth), a collection of essays. >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Aug 16 23:17:39 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 16:17:39 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] prison Message-ID: <01C483AC.8DF39160.shovland@mindspring.com> Don't forget prison industries. Sending people to jail for uncrimes is a good source of slave labor. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From HowlBloom at aol.com Mon Aug 16 23:18:28 2004 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 19:18:28 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] Gaming the power grid Message-ID: <1cb.28c87cda.2e529ac4@aol.com> Thanks for this, Paul. It's disturbing but critical information. In a message dated 8/16/2004 6:10:13 PM Eastern Standard Time, paul.werbos at verizon.net writes: Rooftop PVs are nice, but best solar thermal is cheaper and more efficient. More important, rooftops are a drop in the bucket. The one really serious and urgent energy crisis in the US is the crisis of electricity regulation so crazy that we dramatically overuse natural gas as a fuel, distorting markets worldwide. Even modest reforms have gotten nowhere based on folks in Congress who have said "First things first. First MUST come controversial corporate welfare (pork for my buddies, either earmarks or tax breaks). And if we DO get that through... well, next year more of the same will come first..." But the world oil situation is coming to a head fast. Decisions within the next 5 years will be decisive, in terms of our ability to avert global catastrophe 20 years hence. (Those poor folks who think TODAY'S problems with the Middle East are large...) IF Bush were brave enough to dump Cheney AND Halliburton, and bring on McCain with a promise to really clean house and get back to what the US and the world really needs... well... there might be some hope by that route... But I have to admit, putting it all together, it's my personal judgment right now that the chances of nonextinction would definitely be a lot greater if we all picked Kerry (f Bush-Cheney is the alternative). The present grid, and the modest reforms now before Congress, wouldn't do much to give the US the kind of "spinning reserve" backups that made the big blackouts in France and Italy last so much less time than the big one in the US Northeast. Expanding spinning reserves is just one aspect of "intelligent" (and more rationally regulated) power grids, and... as you say, critical to getting full value from intermittent distributed generation. To put it another way... a major barrier to mega-use of stuff like solar thermal power is the low VALUE (and payment) per kwh of intermittent power today. More intelligent grids (including better and more use of spinning reserves) would raise that value... raise what utilities can RATIONALLY pay to intermitted power generators... and SUBSTANTIALLY increase the potential market for much larger-scale renewables. By the way... "intelligent grids" are a major official priority of DOE. They will tell you it's $80 million/year. But IEEE-USA people tell me more than half of that is just Ronald Reagan's superconductor program, recycled and relabelled. (Since current projections are that such wires will cost ten times present transmission capability, and we can't even afford simple wires these days, one may question the relevance to what I just discussed...) Lots more is pork. They estimate about $2 million for the actual grid research in FY03, about half or a third of what NSF put in. There are some unmet opportunities as it happens... a polite way of saying we are sitting down marking time as the flood waters rise... ======== Best of luck to us all... Paul _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Aug 16 23:37:00 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 16:37:00 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Gaming the power grid Message-ID: <01C483AF.41510240.shovland@mindspring.com> I agree that home-power systems are a drop in the bucket, but I would suggest that many such drops will prove to be part of the solution. The homeowner I wrote about has built 3 previous homes with passive and active solar features. He says that the first thing is insulation. The house he is building in California is insulated to the levels of many houses in Minnesota- R30 walls and R45 roof. The big problem with the large power grids is the simple fact that they exist. The present system is set up for the efficient concentration of economic power rather than for the efficient distribution of electricity. It would be interesting to have an idea of the transmission losses resulting from the current long-distance systems and see what could be done by breaking them down into smaller zones. Among other things we need to revisit the notion of "economies of scale" and realize that bigger is not always better and certainly not cheaper. Years ago I read that when Con Ed built some of their larger units they encountered unexpected technical problems that led to large cost over-runs. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Werbos, Dr. Paul J. [SMTP:paul.werbos at verizon.net] Sent: Monday, August 16, 2004 2:41 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list; paleopsych at paleopsych. org (E-mail) Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Gaming the power grid Rooftop PVs are nice, but best solar thermal is cheaper and more efficient. More important, rooftops are a drop in the bucket. The one really serious and urgent energy crisis in the US is the crisis of electricity regulation so crazy that we dramatically overuse natural gas as a fuel, distorting markets worldwide. Even modest reforms have gotten nowhere based on folks in Congress who have said "First things first. First MUST come controversial corporate welfare (pork for my buddies, either earmarks or tax breaks). And if we DO get that through... well, next year more of the same will come first..." But the world oil situation is coming to a head fast. Decisions within the next 5 years will be decisive, in terms of our ability to avert global catastrophe 20 years hence. (Those poor folks who think TODAY'S problems with the Middle East are large...) IF Bush were brave enough to dump Cheney AND Halliburton, and bring on McCain with a promise to really clean house and get back to what the US and the world really needs... well... there might be some hope by that route... But I have to admit, putting it all together, it's my personal judgment right now that the chances of nonextinction would definitely be a lot greater if we all picked Kerry (f Bush-Cheney is the alternative). The present grid, and the modest reforms now before Congress, wouldn't do much to give the US the kind of "spinning reserve" backups that made the big blackouts in France and Italy last so much less time than the big one in the US Northeast. Expanding spinning reserves is just one aspect of "intelligent" (and more rationally regulated) power grids, and... as you say, critical to getting full value from intermittent distributed generation. To put it another way... a major barrier to mega-use of stuff like solar thermal power is the low VALUE (and payment) per kwh of intermittent power today. More intelligent grids (including better and more use of spinning reserves) would raise that value... raise what utilities can RATIONALLY pay to intermitted power generators... and SUBSTANTIALLY increase the potential market for much larger-scale renewables. By the way... "intelligent grids" are a major official priority of DOE. They will tell you it's $80 million/year. But IEEE-USA people tell me more than half of that is just Ronald Reagan's superconductor program, recycled and relabelled. (Since current projections are that such wires will cost ten times present transmission capability, and we can't even afford simple wires these days, one may question the relevance to what I just discussed...) Lots more is pork. They estimate about $2 million for the actual grid research in FY03, about half or a third of what NSF put in. There are some unmet opportunities as it happens... a polite way of saying we are sitting down marking time as the flood waters rise... ======== Best of luck to us all... Paul _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From guavaberry at earthlink.net Tue Aug 17 00:25:14 2004 From: guavaberry at earthlink.net (K.E.) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 20:25:14 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] "Whoever controls Iraqi oil controls Iraq's destiny," Message-ID: <6.1.2.0.0.20040816202453.01f69ec0@mail.earthlink.net> America's Achilles' heel The insurgents in Iraq know that keeping its oil flowing is crucial to U.S. success in the war -- and they're doing all they can to muck things up. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Robert Bryce Salon.com Aug. 16, 2004 | Last month, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld assured Americans that Iraq "continues to calm down." But the bitter reality is that America is losing the war in Iraq. And it's not just because the interim Iraqi government can't stop the suicide bombers or prevail over the soldiers loyal to Shiite rebel leaders like Muqtada al-Sadr. It's also because neither the U.S. nor the interim Iraqi government can control the flow of Iraq's oil. The bad news from the oil fields continued last week when men loyal to Sadr surrounded several Iraqi government buildings and threatened to attack pipelines and other oil facilities unless the government stopped pumping oil through the pipes that feed Iraq's oil export terminals in the Persian Gulf, Mina al-Bakr and Khor al-Amaya. (Mina al-Bakr was built by Halliburton for the new Baathist government in the mid-1970s, when the United States did not have diplomatic relations with Iraq.) The Iraqi government reportedly stopped pumping oil in an effort to stem unrest in Basra, a city that for months has been viewed as more pro-Western than other areas. Saboteurs also bombed one of the two main pipelines that feed the terminals. Repair crews had the 48-inch line fixed by Aug. 11, but it was unclear when -- or if -- the pipeline would be put back into service. Every day that the Persian Gulf terminals are shut, it costs the Iraqi government at least $50 million in lost oil revenue. The situation in the northern oil fields is even worse. The easiest way to move oil from the oil-rich fields near Kirkuk to market is through a pipeline that runs to the Turkish port at Ceyhan. But ever since U.S. forces invaded Iraq, that pipeline has suffered more hits than Mike Tyson. The pipeline has been bombed so frequently that Iraqi officials are openly talking about shutting it down. Indeed, most of the news from Iraq's oil sector, despite some $2.3 billion in investment by the United States in the months since Saddam Hussein was deposed, has been bad. Recent figures show that oil production now approaches 2.3 million barrels of oil per day. Exports have reached about 1.9 million barrels per day -- a fraction of the amount Iraq was exporting in the days before the first Iraq war in 1991. Although the exports are far less than the Pentagon had hoped for, they are helping Iraq's nascent government stay afloat. And the new regime has been bolstered by record-high oil prices, which show no sign of abating anytime soon. On Aug. 13, prices for September delivery of light sweet crude hit a record high of $45.93 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. But along with the rising prices and an increase in production has come a dramatic increase in the number of insurgents. According to the New York Times, the number of insurgents in Iraq has grown from 2,500 in April 2003 to some 20,000 today. And those men understand that America's Achilles' heel in Iraq is oil. "Whoever controls Iraqi oil controls Iraq's destiny," says A.F. Alhajji, an oil industry analyst at Ohio Northern University who closely follows the Persian Gulf. And now, says Alhajji, the insurgents are ensuring that Iraq's destiny is to continue in chaos. By strangling the country's oil exports, they are cutting off the lifeblood of Iraq's new government. Without reliable flows of cash from its oil industry, Iraq will not be able to rebuild. And the U.S. Congress is unlikely to fund the Iraqi rebuilding effort unless it shows some results quickly. Since last June, insurgents have attacked various parts of Iraq's oil infrastructure at least 90 times. That figure is probably a fraction of the real number. Gal Luft, executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a Washington think tank that tracks energy issues, says the real figure may be twice as high. But the Pentagon is reluctant to talk about the attacks on oil targets. "Nobody really wants to provide information because it's a political hot potato," says Luft. According to IAGS's pipeline watch Web site, there were 90 attacks on oil targets between June 2003 and early August of this year. On Aug. 5 alone, there were three attacks, including an additional bombing of the Kirkuk-to-Ceyhan line. That same day, a bomb hit a gas pipeline that feeds an electricity plant in Bayji, north of Tikrit. For the insurgents, pipelines are attractive targets. Some 4,400 miles of pipelines crisscross Iraq. The Kirkuk-to-Ceyhan line -- which, according to IAGS, has been bombed 11 times in the past 15 months -- has become the insurgents' favorite target. (Other sources say that pipeline is being bombed much more frequently -- at least once a week, sometimes more.) The ongoing cost of repairing the Kirkuk-to-Ceyhan line and the nearly impossible task of protecting it from further attacks are two reasons Iraqi officials have considered shutting it down, a move that makes sense to Alhajji. "It's not worth it anymore," he says, adding that the expense of patrolling the line, combined with the lost oil and repair costs, has made the pipeline expendable. But shutting down the Kirkuk-to-Ceyhan line would have negative repercussions for both the Turks and the Kurds. The Kurds, who have been the most reliable supporters of the American invasion, are very concerned about losing the revenue that comes from the oil fields in northern Iraq. If that revenue stops flowing, the Kurds will lose a powerful voice at the bargaining table. The Turkish government, which is nominally pro-American, will be angered if the pipeline is shut down because the Turks are paid transit fees on oil shipped through the line. And there's another danger: Closing the northern export route would enable insurgents to concentrate all their disruptive efforts on the pipelines and pumping stations in the central and southern parts of the country, which feed the Persian Gulf oil terminals. Furthermore, if the line is shut down, there is a real possibility that it could be looted, just as other parts of the Iraqi oil industry were looted in the weeks after American troops got to Baghdad. If pumps and other parts are stolen, the Iraqi government will be limited to exporting its oil through the Persian Gulf for months, if not years, after order returns to the country. President Bush and his administration don't like to talk about Iraq's oil -- at least not in the context of a justification for the war. In November 2002, in an interview with Steve Croft on "60 Minutes," Rumsfeld asserted that the then-looming Iraq war had "nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil." Despite Rumsfeld's pronouncement, it's clear that oil has always been the key factor in America's relationship with Iraq. During the Gulf War, George H.W. Bush kept to his script that the war was "not about oil." Yet his own secretary of state, James Baker, a Texan with deep ties to the oil industry, didn't get the memo advising him to stick with the script. On Nov. 13, 1990, Baker held a press conference during which he said that the "economic lifeline of the industrial world runs from the [Persian] Gulf, and we cannot permit a dictator such as this to sit astride that economic lifeline. And to bring it down to the level of the average American citizen, let me say that means jobs. If you want to sum it up in one word, it's jobs. Because an economic recession worldwide, caused by the control of one nation, one dictator if you will, of the West's economic lifeline will result in the loss of jobs on the part of American citizens." On Jan. 15, 1991, just before the United States began attacking Saddam's forces in Kuwait, Bush signed a national security directive. The very first line of the recently declassified directive declared, "Access to Persian Gulf oil and the security of key friendly states in the area are vital to U.S. national security." It goes on to say that America "remains committed to defending its vital interest in the region, if necessary through the use of military force, against any power with interests inimical to our own." Oil was a key factor in the second Iraq war from the get-go. The first combat took place on March 20, 2003, when several groups of Navy SEALs stormed the Mina al-Bakr and Khor al-Amaya oil terminals. By controlling the oil terminals, the Pentagon was able to ensure that it would eventually control Iraq's oil exports. A week later, on March 27, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Congress that the war wouldn't be overly expensive. "We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." He continued, saying "the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years." A few weeks later, Wolfowitz compared America's reaction to the threat of nuclear weapons being developed by North Korea with the situation in Iraq. "Let's look at it simply," he said. "The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil." Leaders of al-Qaida have been talking about the oil issue for years. In interviews with Western reporters a few years ago, Osama bin Laden repeatedly referred to what he called the "rape" and "plunder" of Saudi Arabia's oil by the United States. In 2002, after al-Qaida operatives bombed the French oil tanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen, the terror group released a statement that said, "The Mujahadeen hit the secret line -- the provision line -- and the feeding to the artery of the life of the crusader nation." On April 24 of this year, three bomb-laden boats piloted by suicide bombers attacked both of Iraq's oil terminals in the Persian Gulf. None of the boats hit their targets, but the attacks killed two U.S. Navy sailors and injured four others. Two days after the attacks, al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi issued a statement that said, "We tell you enemies of God, robbers of oil and riches and drug traders ... O snakes of evil, we will exterminate and debilitate you by land, sea and air until God makes us victorious or until we die." The attempted bombings of the oil terminals were the first waterborne suicide attacks on American forces since 2000, when al-Qaida engineered the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 American sailors. Al-Zarqawi reminded the world of the attack on the USS Cole, saying that his loyalists "have repeated this attack in a new garb and with stubborn determination by striking vital economic links of the infidel and atheist states." One week after the attack on the terminals, Saudi gunmen killed two Americans, two Brits and an Australian who were working for ABB Lummus in the oil town of Yanbu, Saudi Arabia's most important port on the Red Sea. On May 29, al-Qaida assassins attacked an oil industry complex in Khobar, Saudi Arabia. That attack left 22 people dead. After the Khobar attack, al-Qaida leader Abdul Aziz al-Moqrin (now believed to be dead) said the attack was carried out because Saudi leaders have been providing "America with oil at the cheapest prices according to their masters' wish, so that their economy does not collapse." The Iraqi government and the Pentagon are doing all they can to protect Iraq's oil infrastructure. More than 14,000 security personnel are now working for Erinys, a South African private security firm that has a $39 million contract to guard Iraq's pipelines, pumping stations, refineries and oil wells. But given the results so far, Erinys may need an additional estimated 14,000 guards. Mike Ameen, a Houston-based oil executive, is not optimistic about the future of Iraq's oil economy. Ameen has spent decades working in the Middle East. He speaks, reads and writes Arabic and has recently worked as a consultant for the U.S. government on the Iraqi oil business. Ameen says that by targeting the oil infrastructure, the insurgents are making it far more expensive for oil field contractors to do business in Iraq. They are also preventing any major oil companies from even considering new investments in Iraq. "It's a gloomy picture -- it really is," says Ameen. Unfortunately, that gloomy picture shows no sign of improving anytime soon. From paul.werbos at verizon.net Tue Aug 17 01:10:45 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 21:10:45 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Gaming the power grid In-Reply-To: <01C483AF.41510240.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20040816205854.00baf598@incoming.verizon.net> At 04:37 PM 8/16/2004 -0700, Steve wrote: >I agree that home-power systems are >a drop in the bucket, but I would suggest >that many such drops will prove to be >part of the solution. No harm with good drops .. but even a lot of them won't solve the overall crunch. >The homeowner I wrote about has built >3 previous homes with passive and active >solar features. He says that the first thing >is insulation. The house he is building >in California is insulated to the levels of >many houses in Minnesota- R30 walls and >R45 roof. > >The big problem with the large power grids is the >simple fact that they exist. The present >system is set up for the efficient concentration >of economic power rather than for the >efficient distribution of electricity. I wouldn't go that far... the present configurations are biased, but it takes energy to build better configurations... and they DO have an important role to play... >It would be interesting to have an idea of the >transmission losses resulting from the current >long-distance systems and see what could be >done by breaking them down into smaller zones. I forget what total losses are... certainly no more than about 7 percent. BUT ... consider how much more cost-effective (more output, more efficiency) it is to run a solar thermal plant in the desert than in cloudy Northeast US, for example! That's more than a factor of two! Likewise, for coal plants, it makes more sense economically to run electricity some distance. Those are the big potential sources, if we reduce the use of oil and gas in making electricity. The small sources deserve support, yes, but even a halfway efficient overall system has to include a lot of transmission, to meet anything even half as great as US demand. >Among other things we need to revisit the >notion of "economies of scale" and realize >that bigger is not always better and certainly >not cheaper. Years ago I read that when Con Ed >built some of their larger units they encountered >unexpected technical problems that led to large >cost over-runs. Economies of scale are VERY technology dependent. Certainly wind and solar thermal want smaller plants than, say, today's nuclear plants! But solar farms and wind farms tend to make sense, simply because of the need to exploit prime locations. Coal generally wants to be biggish... though someday it would be nice to have solar thermal plants located near (smaller scale?) coal processing systems, to inject energy, to allow each carbon atom to go to a methanol molecule with no CO2 emission. But that's another future possible technology, not being investigated today, so far as I know; it's way too early to guess what its scaling characteristics are! But--- intelligent grids and more rational regulation should increase incentives for all kinds of small-scale power generation. Even if I don't think they will solve so many problems as some folks believe-- I certainly agree we should give them stronger rational incentives (as part of intelligent grids). And if opening the market shows they have more potential than I expect, fine.. Best of luck, Paul >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > >-----Original Message----- >From: Werbos, Dr. Paul J. [SMTP:paul.werbos at verizon.net] >Sent: Monday, August 16, 2004 2:41 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list; paleopsych at paleopsych. org (E-mail) >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Gaming the power grid > >Rooftop PVs are nice, but best solar thermal is cheaper and more efficient. >More important, rooftops are a drop in the bucket. > >The one really serious and urgent energy crisis in the US is the crisis >of electricity regulation so crazy that we dramatically overuse natural gas >as a fuel, distorting markets worldwide. Even modest reforms >have gotten nowhere based on folks in Congress who have said >"First things first. First MUST come controversial corporate welfare >(pork for my buddies, either earmarks or tax breaks). And if we DO get that >through... >well, next year more of the same will come first..." > >But the world oil situation is coming to a head fast. Decisions within the >next 5 years will >be decisive, in terms of our ability to avert global catastrophe 20 years >hence. >(Those poor folks who think TODAY'S problems with the Middle East are >large...) > >IF Bush were brave enough to dump Cheney AND Halliburton, and bring on >McCain with >a promise to really clean house and get back to what the US and the world >really needs... >well... there might be some hope by that route... But I have to admit, >putting it all together, >it's my personal judgment right now that the chances of nonextinction would >definitely be a lot greater >if we all picked Kerry (f Bush-Cheney is the alternative). > >The present grid, and the modest reforms now before Congress, wouldn't do >much to >give the US the kind of "spinning reserve" backups that made the big >blackouts in France >and Italy last so much less time than the big one in the US Northeast. >Expanding spinning >reserves is just one aspect of "intelligent" (and more rationally >regulated) power grids, >and... as you say, critical to getting full value from intermittent >distributed generation. > >To put it another way... a major barrier to mega-use of stuff like solar >thermal power is >the low VALUE (and payment) per kwh of intermittent power today. More >intelligent grids >(including better and more use of spinning reserves) would raise that >value... raise >what utilities can RATIONALLY pay to intermitted power generators... and >SUBSTANTIALLY >increase the potential market for much larger-scale renewables. > >By the way... "intelligent grids" are a major official priority of DOE. >They will tell you >it's $80 million/year. But IEEE-USA people tell me more than half of that >is just >Ronald Reagan's superconductor program, recycled and relabelled. >(Since current projections are that such wires will cost ten times present >transmission >capability, and we can't even afford simple wires these days, one may question >the relevance to what I just discussed...) Lots more is pork. They estimate >about >$2 million for the actual grid research in FY03, about half or a third of what >NSF put in. There are some unmet opportunities as it happens... a polite way >of saying we are sitting down marking time as the flood waters rise... > >======== > >Best of luck to us all... > > Paul > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Aug 17 01:21:16 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 18:21:16 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] "Whoever controls Iraqi oil controls Iraq's destiny, " Message-ID: <01C483BD.D20FB980.shovland@mindspring.com> It's pretty obvious that the Marines are bouncing off Najaf the way they did from Fallujah. It's the basic calculus of war: you must significantly outnumber the enemy if you want to win. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Aug 17 01:38:03 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 18:38:03 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Gaming the power grid Message-ID: <01C483C0.2A6C0BE0.shovland@mindspring.com> You may recall that a couple of years ago we had a power crunch out here in California- rolling blackouts and such. The amount of power that was triggering those blackouts was only about 1-2% of the total. People reacted by buying many household florescents and doing other micro-measures that the we got under the trigger point. For example, last year we looked into buying a more efficient furnace. Then we found that our house had no insulation. Now our first goal is to put on an insulating roof. In the winter our west-facing windows make the kitchen to hot in the afternoon that I use a fan to blow cool air from other parts of the house into it, storing the heat in the mass of the building. As I recall in economics this is called working at the margin. As the price of petroleum slowly increases, more and more drops will be added to the flow of alternatives, and at some point the political will to make structural changes in the economy will emerge. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From paul.werbos at verizon.net Tue Aug 17 14:24:04 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2004 10:24:04 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Gaming the power grid In-Reply-To: <01C483C0.2A6C0BE0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20040817095938.00bbaae8@incoming.verizon.net> At 06:38 PM 8/16/2004 -0700, Steve wrote: >You may recall that a couple of years ago >we had a power crunch out here in >California- rolling blackouts and such. More than a little do I remember. I remember setting up a workshop, joint with EPRI, in Palo Alto in October 2001 (a month after 9/11, I even had to fly on the same flight....).. The key EPRI guy tabulated up about $50 billion worth of California state subsidies, which kept explicit price rises only about 50 percent in California (versus much bigger rises in San Diego).. but taxpayers were paying twice, in effect... It is very sad that we did not keep with the guy, and were unable to get a realistic citeable figure on how much of the California deficit is related to electricity. But California is still paying through the nose today for the inefficiency of the system. Prior to the workshop, the White House and other announced very loudly that it would take three years at least to physically implement technical solutions -- like increasing transmission capacity from the underutilized coal plants in the Rockies to the markets in California. But in our workshop, people from Brazil -- which is ahead of the US in many aspects of practical grid technology, in part because they invest much more money in the area -- showed what they have working on VERY long power lines, and discussed how they could retrofit our lines for a small fraction of the original cost (e.g. no new right-of-ways) and increase capacity by 60 percent in a couple of MONTHS. It withstood scrutiny by all kinds of experts and ISO people we had at the workshop. The ISO response, roughly: "That's great stuff, but we have no incentive... and are almost prohibited.. to make these kinds of investments." >The amount of power that was triggering >those blackouts was only about 1-2% of >the total. People reacted by buying >many household florescents and doing >other micro-measures that the we got >under the trigger point. > >For example, last year we looked into >buying a more efficient furnace. Then >we found that our house had no insulation. >Now our first goal is to put on an insulating >roof. In the winter our west-facing windows >make the kitchen to hot in the afternoon >that I use a fan to blow cool air from other parts >of the house into it, storing the heat in the mass >of the building. > >As I recall in economics this is called >working at the margin. As the price >of petroleum slowly increases, more >and more drops will be added to the >flow of alternatives, and at some point >the political will to make structural >changes in the economy will emerge. The effect of the regulatory system is to make sure that these kinds of natural market signals aren't really there. ======================================= By the way... the Financial Times this morning has a long story on the return of coal. This may be partially good news. But there is a VERY important caveat -- it would be nice if the return to coal could be strongly linked to the use of proven NEW CLEAN COAL technology. More precisely -- the high-efficiency oxygenated coal gasification technology ("Tennessee Eastmann," "Texaco," "Cool Water."). Much cleaner than old coal technology; more efficient; and suitable for someday retrofitting to carbon sequestration. But -- because of capital costs, the clean coal technology today is not competitive with the older technology, they tell me, if electricity is the only product. It IS economically competitive, or even superior (the clean coal engineers tell me)... **IF** it is used to produce electricity and methanol as coproducts, and if a market is developed to sell the methanol at BTU equivalence to what gasoline was a year ago. I am frankly surprised that the clean coal and NRDC haven't jumped on the obvious logical conclusion -- in order to encourage the use of clean coal technology as much as possible, with the minimum possible market distortion, we should pass laws REQUIRING more three-way gasoline/ethanol/methanol (GEM) fuel flexibility. GEM flexibility is NOT so hard or expensive. Basically, a rational law would say that any car tank designed to hold gasoline should be made of slightly better (but standard) materials, to handle ethanol or methanol as well (likewise gaskets) -- and then a simple old system using an oxygen sensor and adaptive fuel mixing. Ford sold thousands of those cars in California back in the 80's, and charged nothing extra for the flexibility. In a conservative version... the US government could allow states to decide whether they want such a flexibility requirement for cars sold in their state. At $200/car (assuming old and proven technology), it would be a LOT cheaper than the energy plans I hear about elsewhere, either Bush's or Kerry's... (I also know how the cost of flexibility might be cut in half, roughly, using newer technology. Hybrids are easier to make flexible than regular cars. New engines are coming into production which are INHERENTLY flexible.) This is actually an urgent life or death matter. Best of luck to us all... Paul >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Tue Aug 17 14:33:57 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2004 10:33:57 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Observer: (Sir Roger) I can explain everything Message-ID: I can explain everything http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1283324,00.html Distinguished mathematician Roger Penrose has written a thousand-page explanation of physics that rivals Newton's Principia in its scope and ambition Robin McKie Sunday August 15, 2004 There is a disconcerting moment in Hawking, the BBC2 drama about the wheelchair-bound Cambridge physicist, when a large, gormless young man announces to a startled barmaid: 'I think in a number of dimensions. I can't get back quickly for words or beer.' Later, the same nitwit is seen spouting scientific cliches at a open-air tutorial and then ends the programme cavorting round a railway station with Hawking (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), using umbrellas as props to reveal the secrets of space and time. In this way, Sir Roger Penrose, a founder of modern cosmology, one of the nation's intellectual heavyweights, and a collaborator with Stephen Hawking on the science of black holes, is presented to the public - as a pompous blabbermouth who cannot even order a pint. The reality, it should be noted, is very different and it says a great deal for the man - impish, intense and utterly lacking in self-importance - that he refrains from striking me after I raise the subject of Hawking during our meeting in the Tsar Bar in London's Langham Hotel, where he also shows himself perfectly capable of ordering a drink. 'Yes, I am in the programme in the sense that an actor [Tom Ward] plays someone with my name,' says Penrose, whose latest book, The Road to Reality (Cape ?30, pp1,094), is published this month. 'The rest makes me cringe. I never said anything like that in a pub, I never spoke like that at a tutorial and the station scene with Hawking never happened.' Thus science is turned to fiction by TV producers who have no faith in its intrinsic fascination: scenes are manufactured and scientists made freaks or buffoons. Too bad if these are people who are interesting in their own right, a point perfectly exemplified by Penrose, whose mathematics inspired artist MC Escher, who has the distinction of suing a lavatory-paper maker over the misuse of scientific ideas, who has aroused the fury of evolutionary biologists for debunking their ideas about human consciousness, and whose latest book rivals Newton's Principia for its depth and ambition in its attempt to provide a complete account of the physical universe and its laws. It's an impressive list of achievements, a pedigree that is shared by the rest of the Penrose family. His father was an Oxford professor of genetics, his elder brother and only sister are academics, while Jonathan, the youngest Penrose, was British chess champion 10 times. A cerebral lot, though they are also highly artistic - Penrose's grandfather was a professional portrait painter and for family fun used to draw strange optical illusions on paper: winding staircases that neither ascended or descended, that sort of thing. After a chance meeting with Escher, the Dutch artist noted for his disconcerting, illusional artwork, Penrose sent him examples of his family's art, and these were adopted (and acknowledged) by the painter in some of his later work. Much of this involved interlocking grids of repeated figures - ducks and fish, for example - and Penrose later developed these ideas to create ways of covering surfaces with flat, geometric shapes that never repeat themselves: Penrose tiling, as it is now known. The mathematician would have forgotten his brainchild had his wife, Vanessa, not noticed the packet of Kleenex Quilted Toilet Tissues she had just bought in her local supermarket had a pattern that bore more than a passing resemblance to her husband's tiling. In fact, it had been appropriated by the company. Lawyers were called in. 'I should explain the loo-roll business except I cannot as there was an out-of-court settlement, a condition of which is that I am not allowed to talk about it,' says Penrose rather unhelpfully, though his smile suggests there was a happy outcome. In fact, Penrose made his name as an outstandingly brilliant mathematician, not from his topological work but from his forays into the esoteric land of quantum physics, working at Cambridge with Hawking on black holes, collapsed stars so dense even light cannot leave their surfaces. His was a reputation of quiet distinction until, a few years ago, he launched a furious attack on computer experts who were claiming their machines would become clever enough to develop minds. 'We will never make computers conscious,' he says, a point emphasised in his books, The Emperor's New Mind, and Shadows of the Mind. 'A computational device is incapable of developing a mind. We got consciousness not just by being clever.' These ideas went down badly with evolutionary biologists and philosophers like Daniel Dennett. To such researchers, the notion that humans are specially elevated because they suddenly came to possess consciousness stinks of godly intervention. 'Quite fallacious', 'wrong', 'invalid' and 'deeply flawed' ran the reviews. Penrose sighs. 'Yes, I got it in the neck. But these people were not listening to what I was saying. They were just shooting from the hip.' His consciousness books have led directly to The Road to Reality. 'Colleagues liked my equations but not the contentious stuff about the mind and urged me to write a straightforward book on physics. I thought it would be a simple scissors job but it didn't work out that way.' In the end, Penrose, who was 73 last week, produced a great, fat, black hole of a book that makes Bill Bryson's 600-page A Short History of Nearly Everything look like a theatre programme. It weighs more than 3lbs and its 1,094 pages are packed with equations and artwork - drawn freehand by Penrose - of Riemann surfaces, singularities and other mathematical oddities. It is a vast, formidable undertaking that covers the entire gamut of physics, from Greek astronomy to superstring theory. As one reviewer remarked: 'The book took Penrose eight years to complete, and it will take some readers just as long to understand him.' Certainly, the book has it all: calculus, quantum mechanics, relativity, the big bang, string theory and just about anything ever written that has a number in it. If you want to know what makes the universe tick, you will find it here. Not bad for a gormless lounge-bar poser. From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Aug 17 15:30:09 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2004 08:30:09 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Gaming the power grid Message-ID: <01C48434.6878A780.shovland@mindspring.com> It may be that regulation dampens the signals that would cause a shift, but we found to our dismay that in California deregulation led to the absolute rape of the customer. Good regulation would be preferable to bad deregulation, and based on decades of experience during the 20th century, I would suggest that good regulation is possible. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From paul.werbos at verizon.net Tue Aug 17 17:20:26 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2004 13:20:26 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Observer: (Sir Roger) I can explain everything In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20040817124952.00b73420@incoming.verizon.net> At 10:33 AM 8/17/2004 -0400, Premise Checker wrote: >I can explain everything >http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1283324,00.html > > Distinguished mathematician Roger Penrose has written a thousand-page > explanation of physics that rivals Newton's Principia in its scope and > ambition > Robin McKie 1,000 pages? Sir Roger has shown a remarkable degree of.. partial openness to new ideas... in a world where many scientific institutions remind us at times of the College of Cardinals from the time of Galileo... But as he himself often says, reality itself may be even more deviant than he is. So here would be my deviant alternative to his 1,000 pages -- my recipe for "the next grand synthesis" of the laws of physics. Can't prove it in one page of course, but can state it. First, start from a theory expressed in one equation plus some words -- the dual SU(5) Lagrangian proposed by Vachaspati in hep-ph 1997. (Go to arXiv.org, and use the index to locate it.) Do keep the symmetry breaking assumptions he states on the side. Second, INTERPRET THIS LAGRANGIAN AS A STRICTLY CLASSICAL, EINSTEIN-STYLE Lagrangian. Third, to explain how this can be reconciled with Bell's Theorem, see my papers at quant-ph in 2000 and 2003. A quick summary: if we learn to accept that "future" and "past" are emergent local directions in the space-time continuum, EXACTLY LIKE "up" and "down," and give up hardwiring human intuition into our assumptions about measurement, everything falls out naturally. See also the work of Huw Price. I hope someday I'll have time to write up some additional details. Fourth, be careful to pick coefficients in the function "V" which are "epsilon" close to the ones which yield the standard model of physics, but different enough that the theory predicts a universe of topological solitons (parallel to the "fundamental fermions") and diffuse radiation, without point singularities. (This eliminates the need for what quantum field theory people call "regularization," in defining the theory.) Fifth, verify that the very slight modifications to the standard model here do accommodate the recently proven fact that neutrinos have mass, and that the magnetic moment of the muon is about 1 percent different from previous predictions. Sixth, DO TO THIS classical Lagrangian exactly what John Wheeler did to Maxwell's Laws to "metrify" them. (For this he got the Nobel Prize -- the "already unified field theory.") The result is a tenable, well-defined mathematical theory of how the universe works, which accommodates everything explained by either the standard model of physics or by general relativity. And it doesn't need to throw in the kitchen sinks (or luxuriant baths from Babylon) assumed in the untested imaginings of superbrane theory. The geometry would be pure Einstein, no more. --------- It is strange that I am telling the world how they need to learn about new breakthrough technology, to help solve energy disasters coming in 20 years... which is actually based on an algorithm I developed 30 years ago. (The math underlying the use and design of the $1 chip which can provide fuel flexibility more cheaply. Some pieces of the story are posted on a link at www.iamcm.org/publications.) Thirty years ago people wondered why I wasted so much usable slave labor on something so hard to understand and far off... and Rational Effective Managers did their best to try to put a stop to it. I do hope that by 30-50 years from now people will catch up with the new stuff above (and other new stuff). But this time I will not have so much personal time or latitude to put into it... In fact, I can only write this email today since I took vacation time; this has been the first really quiet week at my job in more than a year!! --------- Yes, I would agree with Roger that the greater cosmos is weirder and richer than this. But we cannot start to learn about the weirdness which is really there if we get lost in the weirdness that we made up in order to boost our egos. Heisenberg's yoga teachers would probably have told him something similar. (Though a trip no further than Trinity College might actually take one a bit deeper...) Best regards, Paul From paul.werbos at verizon.net Wed Aug 18 11:00:43 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 07:00:43 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Gaming the power grid In-Reply-To: <01C48434.6878A780.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20040818065125.00b66ec8@incoming.verizon.net> At 08:30 AM 8/17/2004 -0700, Steve wrote: >It may be that regulation dampens >the signals that would cause a shift, >but we found to our dismay that in >California deregulation led to the >absolute rape of the customer. > >Good regulation would be preferable >to bad deregulation, and based on >decades of experience during the >20th century, I would suggest that >good regulation is possible. Certainly screwed up laws created the situation which cost California so much -- past and future. I don't have good numbers-- but based on what the EPRI guy said before, it is reasonable to guess that California is now paying an extra $10 billion/year (through state deficits), perhaps only as low as $4 billion... in addition to the high electricity prices and the loss of investment by companies who legitimately consider the possible future disruptions. Sometimes the laws get so complex that the words "regulation" and "deregulation" start to lose their meaning. For example... the new proposed improved versions ... "deregulate" by more strongly imposing federal government standard market designs and more centralized organizations. And in case of "problems" (whose definition I have not studied)... a central linear program in Washington is ready to go into action, to create mandatory plans each day of who does what and who pays what. (I hope a "problem" does not mean an epsilon discrepancy between the plan's price and the ones derived by other means.) I certainly do not claim to know all the details. But I am not sure whether anyone really does, in the scientific dynamic way one would need to to be sure of the net impact... Yet what the Brazilian transmission company proposed for California was SO straightforward... But... time to go back to work. No vacation stuff today. Best of luck to us all, Paul >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Aug 18 13:34:13 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 06:34:13 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Gaming the power grid Message-ID: <01C484ED.61458C80.shovland@mindspring.com> 15 PG&E executives sat on the commission that created the "deregulation" scheme. One of the things we saw was that about $4 billion in profits were upstreamed to a separate holding company, and then PG&E then declared bankruptcy. Deregulation and privatization have generally been disasters for consumers, even though we were supposed to be the main beneficiaries. Phone deregulation has made dealing with phones complex and tiresome, whereas it was simple and easy in the past, with better sound quality. Deregulation of the airlines led to insane competition and bankruptcy. Deregulation of electric power and workmen's compensation insurance in California led to gouging. Repeal of Glass-Steagall was quickly followed by major crimes in the stock market. Shifting the medical care system from a non-profit to profit-oriented basis has led to the crisis we are now experiencing. Increases in medical costs have everything to do with monopoly power and very little to do with actual increases in costs. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Wed Aug 18 16:17:40 2004 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 10:17:40 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] prison In-Reply-To: <20040816180058.44747.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20040816180058.44747.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <41238124.5030907@solution-consulting.com> Hummm . . . well, they (long sentences) deter crime while the perp is in prison. At least he can't break into my house or steal my car while he is doing time. There is a common theme in this - crime is down BUT (say the news articles) total prison population is UP. As if that were a contradiction. Another way to punctuate this is: Crime is down AND total prison population is up. A more aggressive punctuation: Crime is down BECAUSE prison population is up. How do we want to tell the story? I sort of like the last one, the Guiliani version where you aggressively pursue minor crime and oddly enough, major crime declines. Lynn Johnson Michael Christopher wrote: >>>Even if the U.S. Supreme Court shortly finds that >>> >>> >the sentencing guidelines are constitutional, THEY >DON'T DETER CRIME.<< > >--Who said the goal of the prison system was to deter >crime? I'd say it performs a narrative function, like >a TV show. The good guy gets license to hurt the bad >guy (this also requires the labelling of a "victim" >who must stay in the role and not forgive), and >there's no follow-up about whether other bad guys are >deterred. Indeed, bad guys must continue to appear, in >order to justify the hero's vengeance. The narrative >can't survive if the hero, the victim and the villain >are all human and beyond labels in their essence. None >is allowed to be a whole person, and each depends on >the others to define his or her role. Society involves >similar narratives or games, in which those who >transcend their role threaten the balance of >relationships, whether it's the victim who forgives, >the villain who changes, or the hero who is also a >victim or villain in other contexts. Is vice and >virtue a zero-sum game? Was Christianity on to >something when it said "love the sinner and hate the >sin", or in more trendy language "love the carrier of >the meme and hate the meme"? > >The function of prison is to inflict pain or >intolerable mental chaos on the socially marginalized. >The homeless and mentally ill, regardless of their >ethical integrity, are another class of people who are >designated to carry the "toxic ghosts" of society, >giving the rest of us the ability to keep our >psychological demons in line. Whether it works >indefinitely or has a time limit, we'll see. > >Michael > > > > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. >http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Aug 18 17:20:56 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 10:20:56 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] prison Message-ID: <01C4850D.0D8F9840.shovland@mindspring.com> I think we should separate out types of crimes- victimless crimes, property crimes, and crimes against other people. I think our prohibitions against pot and psychedelics reflect a societal horror of ecstatic experience. I think that heroine is illegal because certain well-connected people make more money that way. If we approve of using alcohol, a brain poison, to numb the pain of our existence, why not smack? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From checker at panix.com Wed Aug 18 17:31:36 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 13:31:36 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Business Week: Howard Rheingold's Latest Connection Message-ID: Howard Rheingold's Latest Connection http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5671750/ The tech guru sees a "new economic system" in the unconscious cooperation embodied by Google links and Amazon lists Updated: 8:00 p.m. ET Aug. 11, 2004 Howard Rheingold is on the hunt again. With his last book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, in 2001, the longtime observer of technology trends made a persuasive case that pervasive mobile communications, combined with always-on Internet connections, will produce new kinds of ad-hoc social groups. Now, he's starting to take the leap beyond smart mobs, trying to weave some threads out of such seemingly disparate developments as Web logs, open-source software development, and Google. At the same time, Rheingold is worried that established companies could quash such nascent innovations as file-sharing -- and potentially put the U.S. at risk of falling behind the rest of the world. He recently spoke with Robert D. Hof, BusinessWeek's Silicon Valley bureau chief. Here are excerpts from their conversation: Q: Where do you see the social revolution you've been talking about going next? A: It's too early to say. The question is: What does it point toward? Some kind of collective action...in which the individuals aren't consciously cooperating. A market is a great example as a mechanism for determining price based on demand. People aren't saying, "I'm contributing to the market," [they say they're] just selling something. But it adds up. Q: Can you give me some specific examples of what you mean, beyond the market? A: Google is based on the emergent choices of people who link. Nobody is really thinking, "I'm now contributing to Google's page rank." What they're thinking is, "This link is something my readers would really be interested in." They're making an individual judgment that, in the aggregate, turns out to be a pretty good indicator of what's the best source. Then there's open source [software]. Steve Weber, a political economist at UC Berkeley, sees open source as an economic means of production that turns the free-rider problem to its advantage. All the people who use the resource but don't contribute to it just build up a larger user base. And if a very tiny percentage of them do anything at all -- like report a bug -- then those free riders suddenly become an asset. And maybe this isn't just in software production. There's [the idea of] "open spectrum," coined by [Yale law professor] Yochai Benkler. The dogma is that the two major means of organizing for economic production are the market and the firm. But Benkler uses open source as an example of peer-to-peer production, which he thinks may be pointing toward a third means of organizing for production. Then you look at Amazon (AMZN) and its recommendation system, getting users to provide free reviews, users sharing choices with their friends, users who make lists of products. They get a lot of free advice that turns out to be very useful in the aggregate. There's also Wikipedia [the online encyclopedia written by volunteers]. It has 500,000 articles in 50 languages at virtually no cost, vs. Encyclopedia Britannica spending millions of dollars and they have 50,000 articles. Q: What will all those trends produce ultimately? A: All these could dramatically transform not only the way people do business, but economic production altogether. We had markets, then we had capitalism, and socialism was a reaction to industrial-era capitalism. There's been an assumption that since communism failed, capitalism is triumphant, therefore humans have stopped evolving new systems for economic production. But I think we're seeing hints, with all of these examples, that the technology of the Internet, reputation systems, online communities, mobile devices -- these are all like those technologies...that made capitalism possible. These may make some new economic system possible. Q: If so, it's a good bet not all companies will be happy with the changes. A: New digital technologies are creating a crisis in the business models of the companies that depend on having a monopoly on distribution. Look at MP3 blogs: We're now seeing bands that are saying, "Please pirate my material. Here it is." They make money from that. They get bookings from that. They build an audience on that. Q: Are there more such conflicts and opportunities to come? A: Assigning frequencies to license holders...is an old-fashioned scheme...based on technologies of the 1920s. We now have technologies that make it possible to use the spectrum the way packets use the Internet. Instead of having a circuit-switched analog system in which you have to have an end-to-end connection, you just send your packets out with their addresses through this network and they find their way. It's much more efficient. It makes for millions more broadcasters in the Internet space. This is all pointing to a kind of voluntary sharing of your property. Q: Does the pushback by companies threatened by these trends, such as the record and movie companies, threaten innovation? A: Yes. Never before in history have we been able to see incumbent businesses protect business models based on old technology against creative destruction by new technologies. And they're doing it by manipulating the political process. The telegraph didn't prevent the telephone, the railroad didn't prevent the automobile. But now, because of the immense amounts of money that they're spending on lobbying and the need for immense amounts of money for media, the political process is being manipulated by incumbents. Q: What might keep these powerful incumbents from holding back this tide? A: You've got to have some huge force outside of the United States, where it's getting locked down. What if China says, "The FCC doesn't rule us. We're going to stop assigning frequencies within our borders. We're going to regulate devices so that they play fair with each other, and we're going to open up spectrum." That's going to make the U.S. an economic and technological backwater. Then there's always the idea that maybe we're just beginning to see disruptive technologies. Maybe something is just going to blow it away. Certainly we've seen that over and over again in recent decades. Q: Where will we see that happen? A: We now have a world out there where billions of people have in their pockets technologies for innovation that far surpass what entire industries had just a couple decades ago. If you're talking about the communications industry, your innovation is happening with 15-year-old girls. That was where [Japanese cellular network provider NTT] DoCoMo (DCM) won big. I think the total number of text messages sent is approaching 100 billion a month. Of course, the revenues on that are only a fraction of a cent each, but multiply a fraction of a cent by 100 billion, and it begins to add up to real money. You're seeing that now with the picturephones. People are not using them the way it was predicted. They're using them to share their days: Here's a picture of somebody's haircut. Here's a picture of somebody's melon. Look at this shoe in a store. It wasn't determined by an expensive R&D lab. It was determined in practice by young people who appropriate these devices in unexpected ways. There's nothing more inventive than a 15-year-old. I don't think that's going away. If I was a Nokia (NOK) or a Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), I would take a fraction of what I'm spending on those buildings full of expensive people and give out a whole bunch of prototypes to a whole bunch of 15-year-olds and have contracts with them where you can observe their behavior in an ethical way and enable them to suggest innovations, and give them some reasonable small reward for that. And once in a while, you're going to make a billion dollars off it. Q: A focus group on steroids. A: This would be more like ethnography, where you let them loose and watch what they do. If you want to think out of the box about innovation, let's not put all of our bets on 50-year-old PhDs in laboratories. We now have dispersed the means of individual and collective innovation throughout the world. Here's where Wikipedia fits in. It used to be if you were a kid in a village in India or a village in northern Canada in the winter, maybe you could get to a place where they have a few books once in a while. Now, if you have a telephone, you can get a free encyclopedia. You have access to the world's knowledge. Knowing how to use that is a barrier. The divide increasingly is not so much between those who have and those who don't, but those who know how to use what they have and those who don't. Q: Some folks in the U.S. are worried about the competition from overseas that comes from that dispersal of knowledge. A: We should have thought about it when we sold all those computers and chips overseas. These aren't just widgets. These are the building blocks of innovation. From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Wed Aug 18 18:33:31 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 11:33:31 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] drug war In-Reply-To: <200408181800.i7II0W028532@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20040818183331.7923.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> >>I think we should separate out types of crimes- victimless crimes, property crimes, and crimes against other people. I think our prohibitions against pot and psychedelics reflect a societal horror of ecstatic experience.<< --Agreed. More specifically, drugs that connect the right and left brains are denigrated, while "numbing" drugs are accepted. >>If we approve of using alcohol, a brain poison, to numb the pain of our existence, why not smack?<< --Because admitting a mistake is difficult when that mistake has harmed people's lives. The drug war has created more crime than it deterred, and admitting it would be impossible for those who have invested their political reputation in the process. As for prison deterring crime, it may have that effect, but we don't know the long term consequences of having a large per capita prison population. It could end up backfiring dramatically. We do love short term solutions in this country, since they provide immediate feedback. We just don't understand, or want to understand, the long term. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From paul.werbos at verizon.net Wed Aug 18 21:43:09 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 17:43:09 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] drug war In-Reply-To: <20040818183331.7923.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> References: <200408181800.i7II0W028532@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20040818173249.03ee0e28@incoming.verizon.net> At 11:33 AM 8/18/2004 -0700, Michael Christopher wrote: > >>I think we should separate out types of crimes- >victimless crimes, property crimes, and >crimes against other people. I think our prohibitions >against pot and psychedelics reflect a societal horror >of ecstatic experience.<< > >--Agreed. More specifically, drugs that connect the >right and left brains are denigrated, while "numbing" >drugs are accepted. > > >>If we approve of using alcohol, a brain poison, to >numb the pain of our existence, why not smack?<< I do not approve of those kinds of drugs -- but it's clear that the global drug war has been a bust. The power and danger of global drug combines is second only to the "Al Queida" federation. It is a threat to global security on a scale that few appreciate. In my view, the only hope is through something few would accept in the US -- to go to a modified "British system." Probably Soros' research foundation in Baltimore has the best real technical understanding .. But crudely... The US has a tendency to get lost in black and white thinking. When extreme conservatives and extreme politically corrects can't get a majority... we fall into the grey fuzz zone between the two. As in drug policy. But sometimes real success is possible only if people learn to think in colors. And so... SPECIFICALLY the highly addictive and noninjected and potentially fatal drugs, like cocaine, should be subject to a self-financing system of state clinics for registered addicts. That's the "liberal" side. But folks who have second violations of selling the stuff to people outside that system (after the clinics are established) should have the death penalty. Women who give birth from a pregancy in which the fetus is exposed to this stuff should be automatically guilty of criminal child abuse, and automatically deemed unfit mothers, and sterilized. That's the conservative part. But the clinics themselves should make easily available and free all kinds of medical assistance to prevent such pregnancies (especially the ... delayed action six-months things and tube tying.) And the stuff should emphatically not be encouraged; information should be available about the problems -- but all addicts should know the locations. Summary: pull all the money out of it, and offer death penalties. That should dry up a lot of the cartels. The benefits to democracy in Latin America would be substantial and immediate. As for heroin -- those guys are doomed all by themselves. For now, the need for change is not as great there. ============= Just my view... Best, Paul >--Because admitting a mistake is difficult when that >mistake has harmed people's lives. The drug war has >created more crime than it deterred, and admitting it >would be impossible for those who have invested their >political reputation in the process. > >As for prison deterring crime, it may have that >effect, but we don't know the long term consequences >of having a large per capita prison population. It >could end up backfiring dramatically. We do love short >term solutions in this country, since they provide >immediate feedback. We just don't understand, or want >to understand, the long term. > >Michael > > > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers! >http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From guavaberry at earthlink.net Wed Aug 18 23:36:44 2004 From: guavaberry at earthlink.net (K.E.) Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 19:36:44 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] drug war In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20040818173249.03ee0e28@incoming.verizon.net> References: <200408181800.i7II0W028532@tick.javien.com> <5.2.1.1.0.20040818173249.03ee0e28@incoming.verizon.net> Message-ID: <6.1.2.0.0.20040818193028.02d98ec0@mail.earthlink.net> hi paul, If Only .... - instead the "conservative " view is this! best, karen ellis STATES OF DENIAL Abby Christopher, AlterNet A rape, a visit to the ER, a request for emergency contraception, a refusal on religious grounds. Welcome to the new front in the battle for reproductive rights, where state law says it's okay to deny prescriptions. http://www.alternet.org/rights/19584/ the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), research scientists, and the FDA have considered the drug safe since they approved it in 1999, this past May the FDA overruled its own independent panel of experts and rejected an application for over-the-counter status for EC. EC works much like birth control pills: taken in two doses, the drug stops the release of an egg from the ovary, preventing fertilization. In the case of fertilization, EC may prevent a fertilized egg from attaching to the womb. If a woman is already pregnant and an embryo is already implanted in the wall of the uterus, EC will have no effect. "It's an issue of confidentiality that discourages women to file complaints," says Spitz. "It takes a lot of courage to put your name out there and confront the providers who have refused access. And we need data in order to establish new laws and strengthen and enforce existing laws to ensure access. Ideally we'll get EC approved for (over-the-counter) when/if Barr reapplies with the FDA." /snip/ >But folks who have second violations of selling the stuff to people >outside that system >(after the clinics are established) should have the death penalty. Women who >give birth from a pregancy in which the fetus is exposed to this stuff >should be automatically >guilty of criminal child abuse, and automatically deemed unfit mothers, >and sterilized. That's >the conservative part. >But the clinics themselves should make easily available and free all kinds >of medical assistance >to prevent such pregnancies (especially the ... delayed action six-months >things and tube tying.) >And the stuff should emphatically not be encouraged; information should be >available about >the problems -- but all addicts should know the locations. /snip/ Domino (c) 1990 KSE West Indian Proverbs found in Domino "Little ax cut down big tree" A woman may be small but accomplish big things. "Man Dead, Man Dey" Life will go on in spite of death and if a woman loses her man, there is always another to take his place. Sometimes it feels like: "Ah Buddy, me a jig but no motion" Wok'n like hell but not gettin' anywhere. "Proverbs - an ancient resource, the original sound byte. These morsels of wisdom that make up the Oral Tradition which have successfully passed down knowledge to future generations worked great! before the complications of curriculum interfered with people's ability to internalize snippets of useful and necessary info. " "Now, they educate the knowlege right outta ya." KSE 1998 "Be who you are and say what you feel because the people who mind don't matter and the people who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss "The illiterate of the year 2000 will not be the individual who cannot read and write, but the one who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn." Alvin Toffler <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> /// Karen Ellis /// Educational CyberPlayGround __ /// GUAVABERRY BOOKS - DOMINO \\\/// Traditional Children's Songs Games, Chants from U.S.V.I \X/ 7 Hot Site Awards from New York Times, USA Today , MSNBC, \/ Earthlink USA Today Best Bets For Educators, Macworld Top Fifty <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 19 01:15:09 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 21:15:09 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Mag: Bush Landslide (in Theory)! Message-ID: Bush Landslide (in Theory)! QUESTIONS FOR RAY C. FAIR New York Times Magazine, 4.8.15 Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON Q As a professor of economics at Yale, you are known for creating an econometric equation that has predicted presidential elections with relative accuracy. My latest prediction shows that Bush will receive 57.5 percent of the two-party votes. The polls are suggesting a much closer race. Polls are notoriously flaky this far ahead of the election, and there is a limit to how much you want to trust polls. Why should we trust your equation, which seems unusually reductive? It has done well historically. The average mistake of the equation is about 2.5 percentage points. In your book ''Predicting Presidential Elections and Other Things,'' you claim that economic growth and inflation are the only variables that matter in a presidential race. Are you saying that the war in Iraq will have no influence on the election? Historically, issues like war haven't swamped the economics. If the equation is correctly specified, then the chances that Bush loses are very small. But the country hasn't been this polarized since the 60's, and voters seem genuinely engaged by social issues like gay marriage and the overall question of a more just society. We throw all those into what we call the error term. In the past, all that stuff that you think should count averages about 2.5 percent, and that is pretty small. It saddens me that you teach this to students at Yale, who could be thinking about society in complex and meaningful ways. I will be teaching econometrics next year to undergraduates. Econometrics is a huge deal, because it is applied to all kinds of things. Yes, I know one of your studies used the econometric method to predict who is most likely to have an extramarital affair. In that case, the key economic question was whether high-wage people are more or less likely to engage in an affair. They are slightly more likely to have an affair. But the economic theory is ambiguous because if your wage is really high, that tends to make you work more, and that would cut down on how much time you want to spend in an affair. Are you a Republican? I can't credibly answer that question. Using game theory in economics, you are not going to believe me when I tell you my political affiliation because I know that you know that I could be behaving strategically. If I tell you I am a Kerry supporter, how do you know that I am not lying or behaving strategically to try to put more weight on the predictions and help the Republicans? I don't want to do game theory. I just want to know if you are a Kerry supporter. Backing away from game theory, which is kind of cute, I am a Kerry supporter. I believe you entirely, although I'm a little surprised, because your predictions implicitly lend support to Bush. I am not attempting to be an advocate for one party or another. I am attempting to be a social scientist trying to explain voting behavior. But in the process you are shaping opinion. Predictions can be self-confirming, because wishy-washy voters might go with the candidate who is perceived to be more successful. It could work the other way. If Kerry supporters see that I have made this big prediction for Bush, more of them could turn out just to prove an economist wrong. Perhaps you could create an equation that would calculate how important the forecasts of economists are. There are so many polls and predictions, and I am not sure the net effect of any one of them is much. Yes, everyone in America is a forecaster. We all think we know how things will turn out. So in that case, no one has much influence, including me. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/magazine/15QUESTIONS.html From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 19 15:07:08 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 11:07:08 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Global Research: The Remote Manipulation of the Human Brain Message-ID: The Remote Manipulation of the Human Brain http://globalresearch.ca/articles/BAB408B.html Centre for Research on Globalisation Centre de recherche sur la mondialisation 4.8.6 The Deadly Instruments of the New World Order: Electromagnetic and Informational Weapons: Electromagnetic and Informational Weapons by Mojmir Babacek [Evaluate this for me, please.] Editors Note: We bring to our readers this carefully documented review article by Mojmir Babajek. While the text deals with a number of complex scientific processes, the implications of these findings are far-reaching. The arsenal of electromagnetic and informational weapons, used to manipulate the human mind of targeted individuals or populations, is an integral part of the weapons system of the New World Order. The US military possesses a sophisticated arsenal of psychotronic weapons which could be used both domestically and internationally. Electromagnetic and informational Weapons could be used in conventional wars theatres, without the knowledge of the enemy. It is therefore essential that we not only take cognizance of these findings, but we mobilize nationally and internationally against the use of brain manipulating technologies. Michel Chossudovsky, 5 August 2004 ______________________________________________________________ In October 2000, Congressman Denis J. Kucinich introduced in the House of Representatives a bill, which would oblige the American president to engage in negotiations aimed at the ban of space based weapons. In this bill, the definition of a weapons system included: "any other unacknowledged or as yet undeveloped means inflicting death or injury on, or damaging or destroying, a person (or the biological life, bodily health, mental health, or physical and economic well-being of a person) through the use of land-based, sea- based, or space-based systems using radiation, electromagnetic, psychotronic, sonic, laser, or other energies directed at individual persons or targeted populations for the purpose of information war, mood management, or mind control of such persons or populations(15). As in all legislative acts quoted in this article, the bill pertains to sound, light or electromagnetic stimulation of the human brain. Psychotronic weapons belong, at least for a layman uninformed of secret military research, in the sphere of science fiction, since so far none of the published scientific experiments has been presented in a meaningful way to World public opinion. That it is feasible to manipulate human behavior with the use of subliminal, either by sound or visual messages, is now generally known and acknowledged by the scientific community. This is why in most countries, the use of such technologies, without the consent of the individual concerned, is in theory banned. Needless to say, the use of these technologies is undertaken covertly, without the knowledge or consent of targeted individuals. Devices using light for the stimulation of the brain constitute another mechanism whereby light flashing under certain frequencies could be used to manipulate the human psychic. As for the use of sound, a device transmitting a beam of sound waves, which can be heard only by persons at whom the beam of sound waves is targeted, has been reported in several news media. In this case, the beam is formed by a combination of sound and ultrasound waves which causes the targeted person to hear the sound inside his head. Such a procedure could affect the mental balance of the targeted individual as well as convince him that he is, so to speak, mentally ill. This article examines the development of technologies and knowledge pertaining to the functioning of the human brain and the way new methods of manipulation of the human mind are being developed. Electromagnetic energy One of the main methods of manipulation is through electromagnetic energy. In the declassified scientific literature only some 30 experiments have been published supporting this assumption (1),(2). Already in 1974, in the USSR, after successful testing within a military unit in Novosibirsk, the Radioson (Radiosleep) was registered with the Government Committee on Matters of Inventions and Discoveries of the USSR, described as a method of induction of sleep by means of radio waves (3), (4), (5). In the scientific literature, technical feasibility of inducing sleep in a human being through the use of radio waves is confirmed in a book by an British scientist involved in research on the biological effects of electromagnetism (6). A report by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on nonionizing radiation published in 1991 confirms that: "many of biological effects observed in animals exposed to ELF fields appear to be associated, either directly or indirectly, with the nervous system" (2). Among the published experiments, there are those where pulsed microwaves have caused the synchronization of isolated neurons with the frequency of pulsing of microwaves. Ffor example, a neuron firing at a frequency of 0.8 Hz was forced in this way to fire the impulses at a frequency of 1 Hz. Moreover, the pulsed microwaves contributed to changing the concentration of neurotransmitters in the brain (neurotransmitters are a part of the mechanism which causes the firing of neurons in the brain) and reinforcing or attenuating the effects of drugs delivered into the brain (1). The experiment where the main brain frequencies registered by EEG were synchronized with the frequency of microwave pulsing (1,2) might explain the function of the Russian installation Radioson. Microwaves pulsed in the sleep frequency would cause the synchronization of the brain's activity with the sleep frequency and in this way produce sleep. Pulsing of microwaves in frequency predominating in the brain at an awakened state could, by the same procedure, deny sleep to a human being. A report derived from the testing program of the Microwave Research Department at the [5]Walter Reed Army Institute of Research states "Microwave pulses appear to couple to the central nervous system and produce stimulation similar to electric stimulation unrelated to heat". In a many times replicated experiment, microwaves pulsed in an exact frequency caused the efflux of calcium ions from the nerve cells (1,2). Calcium plays a key role in the firing of neurons and Ross Adey, member of the first scientific team which published this experiment, publicly expressed his conviction that this effect of electromagnetic radiation would interfere with concentration on complex tasks (7). Robert Becker, who had share in the discovery of the effect of pulsed fields at the healing of broken bones, published the excerpts from the report from Walter Reed Army Institute testing program. In the first part "prompt debilitation effects" should have been tested (8). Were not those effects based on the experiment by Ross Adey and others with calcium efflux? British scientist John Evans, working in the same field, wrote that both Ross Adey and Robert Becker lost their positions and research grants and called them "free-thinking exiles" (6). In 1975, in the USA, a military experiment was published where pulsed microwaves produced, in the brain of a human subject, an audio perception of numbers from 1 to 10 (9). Again the possibility to convince an individual that it is mentally ill is obvious. The testing program of American Walter Read Army Institute of Research, where the experiment took place, counts with "prompt auditory stimulation by means of auditory effects" and finally aims at "behavior controlled by stimulation" (8). Let us assume that the words delivered into the brain were transcribed into ultrasound frequencies. Would not then the subject perceive those same words as his own thoughts? And would this not imply that that his behavior was being controlled in this way through the transmission of ultrasound frequencies? In this regard, the American Air Force 1982 "Final Report On Biotechnology Research Requirements For Aeronautical Systems Through the Year 2000" states: "While initial attention should be toward degradation of human performance through thermal loading and electromagnetic field effects, subsequent work should address the possibilities of directing and interrogating mental functioning, using externally applied fields" (10). Several scientists have warned that the latest advances in neurophysiology could be used for the manipulation of the human brain. In June 1995, Michael Persinger, who worked on the American Navy's project of Non-lethal electromagnetic weapons, published a scientific article where he states: "the technical capability to influence directly the major portion of the approximately six billion brains of the human species without mediation through classical sensory modalities by generating neural information within a physical medium within which all members of the species are immersed is now marginally feasible (11). In 1998, the French National Bioethics Committee warned that "neuroscience is being increasingly recognized as posing a potential threat to human rights (12). In May 1999 the neuroscientists conference, sponsored by the UN, took place in Tokyo. Its final declaration formally acknowledges that : "Today we have intellectual, physical and financial resources to master the power of the brain itself, and to develop devices to touch the mind and even control or erase consciousnessWe wish to profess our hope that such pursuit of knowledge serves peace and welfare" (13). On the international political scene, in the last few years, the concept of remote control of the human brain has become a matter of international and intergovernmental negotiation. In January 1999, the European Parliament passed a resolution where it called "for an international convention introducing a global ban on all developments and deployments of weapons which might enable any form of manipulation of human beings. (14) Already in 1997, nine states of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) addressed the UN, OBSE and the states of the Interparliamentary Union with the proposal to place at the agenda of the General Assembly of the United Nations, the preparation and adoption of an international convention "On Prevention of Informational Wars and Limitation of Circulation of Informational Weapons" (16), (3). Informational Weapons The initiative was originally proposed, in the Russian State Duma, by Vladimir Lopatin (3). V. Lopatin worked, from 1990 to 1995, in sequence, in the standing committees on Security respectively of the Russian Federation, Russian State Duma and of the Interparliamentary Assembly of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), specializing in informational security.(3). The concept of informational weapon or informational war is rather unknown to the world general public. In 1999, V. Lopatin, together with Russian scientist Vladimir Tsygankov, published a book Psychotronic Weapon and the Security of Russia (3). There we find the explanation of this terminology: "In the report on the research of the American Physical Society for the year 1993 the conclusion is presented that psychophysical weapon systemscan be used for the construction of a strategic arm of a new type (informational weapon in informational war)" Among many references on this subject, we refer to Materials of the Parliament Hearings "Threats and Challenges in the Sphere of Informational Security", Moscow, July 1996, "Informational Weapon as a Threat to the National Security of the Russian Federation" (analytical report of the Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation), Moscow, 1996 and a material "To Whom Will Belong the Conscientious Weapon in the 21st Century", Moscow, 1997. (17). In 2000 V. Lopatin introduced, after two other authors, the third in order bill on the subject of "Informational and Psychological Security of the Russian Federation. Lopotin's findings were reviewed by the Russian newspaper Segodnya: "Means of informational-psychological influence are capable not only of harming the health of an individual, but, also of causing, according to Lopatin, 'the blocking of freedom of will of human being on the subliminal level, the loss of the ability of political, cultural and social self identification, the manipulation of societal consciousness, which could lead to the destruction of a sense of collective identify by the Russian people and nation' (16). In the book "Psychotronic Weapons and the Security of Russia", the authors propose among the basic principles of the Russian concept of defense against the remote control of the human psyche not only the acknowledgement of its existence, but also the fact that the methods of informational and psychotronic war are fully operational ("and are being used without a formal declaration of war") (18). They also quote the record from the session of the Russian Federation's Federal Council where V. Lopatin stated that psychotronic weapon can "cause the blocking of the freedom of will of a human being on a subliminal level" or "instillation into the consciousness or subconsciousness of a human being of information which will trigger a faulty or erroneous perception of reality" (19). In that regard, they proposed the preparation of national legislation as well as the establishment of legal international norms "aimed at the defense of human psyche against subliminal, destructive and informational manipulations" (20). Moreover, they also propose the declassification of all analytical studies and research on the various technologies. They warned that, because this research has remained classified and removed from the public eye, it has allowed the arms race to proceed unabated. It has thereby contributed to increasing the possibility of psychotronic war. Among the possible sources of remote influence on human psyche, the authors list the "generators of physical fields of "known as well as unknown nature" (21). In 1999 the STOA (Scientific and Technological Options Assessment), part of the Directorate General for Research of the European Parliament published the report on Crowd Control Technologies, ordered by them with the OMEGA foundation in Manchester (UK) (22, [6]http://www.europarl.eu.int/stoa/publi/pdf/99-14-01-a_en.pdf ). One of four major subjects of the study pertained to the so-called "Second Generation or "non lethal" technologies: "This report evaluates the second generation of 'non-lethal' weapons which are emerging from national military and nuclear weapons laboratories in the United States as part of the Clinton Administration's 'non-lethal' warfare doctrine now adopted in turn by NATO. These devices include weapons using directed energy beam,radio frequency, laser and acoustic mechanisms to incapacitate human targets" (23) The report states that the most controversial non-lethal crowd control technology proposed by the U.S., are so called Radio Frequency or Directed Energy Weapons that can allegedly manipulate human behavior the greatest concern is with systems which can directly interact with the human nervous system (24). The report also states that perhaps the most powerful developments remain shrouded in secrecy (25). The unavailability of official documents confirming the existence of this technology may be the reason why the OMEGA report is referencing, with respect to mind control technology, the internet publication of the author of this article (26 [7]http://www.europarl.eu.int/stoa/publi/pdf/99-14-01-a_en.pdf ). Similarly, the internet publication of the director of the American Human Rights and Anti-mind Control Organization (CAHRA), Cheryl Welsh, is referenced by the joint initiative of the Quaker United Nations Office, United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, and Programme for Strategic and International Security Studies, with respect to non-lethal weapons (27). On September 25th, 2000, the Committee on Security of the Russian State Duma discussed the addendum to the article 6 of the Federal law On Weapons. In the resolution we read: "The achievements of contemporary science allow for creation of measured methods of secret, remote influencing on the psyches and physiology of a person or a group of people (28). The committee recommended that the addendum be approved. The addendum to the article 6 of the Russian Federation law "On Weapons was approved on July 26, 2001. It states: "within the territory of the Russian Federation is prohibited the circulation of weapons and other objects the effects of the operation of which are based on the use of electromagnetic, light, thermal, infra-sonic or ultra-sonic radiations (29). In this way, the Russian government made a first step to stand up to its dedication to the ban of mind control technology. In the Doctrine of Informational Security of the Russian Federation, signed by president Putin in September 2000, among the dangers threatening the informational security of Russian Federation, is listed "the threat to the constitutional rights and freedoms of people and citizens in the sphere of spiritual life individual, group and societal consciousness and "illegal use of special means affecting individual, group and societal consciousness" (30). Among the major directions of the international cooperation toward the guaranteeing of the informational security is listed the ban of production, dissemination and use of 'informational weapon (31). The foregoing statement should be interpreted as the continuing Russian commitment to the international ban of the means of remote influencing of the activity of the human brain. Similarly, in the above mentioned report, published by the STOA, the originally proposed version of the resolution of the European Parliament calls for: "an international convention for a global ban on all research and development which seeks to apply knowledge of the chemical, electrical, sound vibration or other functioning of the human brain to the development of weapons which might enable the manipulation of human beings, including a ban of any actual or possible deployment of such systems.(32) Here the term "actual" might easily mean that such weapons are already deployed. Among the countries with the most advanced military technologies is the USA which did not present any international initiative demanding the ban of technologies enabling the remote control of human mind. (The original version of the bill by Denis J. Kucinich was changed.) All the same, according to the study published by STOA, the US is the major promoter of the use of those weapons. Non lethal technology was included into NATO military doctrine due to their effort: "At the initiative of the USA, within the framework of NATO, a special group was formed, for the perspective use of devices of non-lethal effects" states the record from the session of the Committee on Security of the Russian State Duma (28). The report published by STOA states: "In October 1999 NATO announced a new policy on non-lethal weapons and their place in allied arsenals" (33). "In 1996 non-lethal tools identified by the U.S. Army included directed energy systems" and "radio frequency weapons" (34) - those weapons, as was suggested in the STOA report as well, are being associated with the effects on the human nervous system. According to the Russian government informational agency FAPSI, in the last 15 years,U.S. expenditures on the development and acquisition of the means of informational war has increased fourfold, and at present they occupy the first place among all military programs (17),(3). Though there are possible uses of informational war, which do not imply mind control, the US Administration has been unwilling to engage in negotiations on the ban on all forms of manipulation of the human brain. This unwillingness might indeed suggest that the US administration intends to use mind control technologies both within the US as well as internationally as an instrument of warfare. One clear consequence of the continuation of the apparent politics of secrecy surrounding technologies enabling remote control of the human brain is that the governments, who own such technologies, could use them without having to consult public opinion. Needless to say, any meaningful democracy in today's world could be disrupted, through secret and covert operations. It is not inconceivable that in the future, entire population groups subjected to mind control technologies, could be living in a "fake democracy" where their own government or a foreign power could broadly shape their political opinions by means of mind control technologies. ______________________________________________________________ REFERENCES 1) Handbook of Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Fields, 1996, CRC Press Inc., 0-8493-0641-8/96, - pg. 117, 119, 474- 485, 542-551, 565 at the top and third and last paragraph 2) World Health Organization report on non-ionizing radiation from 1991, pg. 143 and 207-208 3) V. Lopatin, V Cygankov: Psichotronnoje oruie i bezopasnost Rossii, SINTEG, Russian Federation, Moscow, ISBN 5-89638-006-2-A5-2000-30, list of the publications of the publishing house you will find at the address [8]http://www.sinteg.ru/cataloghead.htm 4) G. Gurtovoj, I. Vinokurov: Psychotronnaja vojna, ot mytov k realijam, Russsian Federation, Moscow, Mysteries, 1993, ISBN 5-86422-098-1 5) With greatest likelihood as well the Russian daily TRUD, which has organized the search for the documents, Moscow, between August 1991 and end of 1992 6) John Evans: Mind, Body and Electromagnetism, the Burlington Press, Cambridge, 1992, ISBN 1874498008, str.139 7) Robert Becker: "Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life", William Morrow and comp., New York, 1985, pg. 287 8) Robert Becker: "Cross Currents, teh Startling Effects of Electromagnetic Radiation on your Health", 1991, Bloomsburry Publishing, London, Great Brittain, ISBN 0- 7475-0761-9, pg. 304, Robert Becker refers to Bioelectromagnetics Society Newsletter, January and February 1989 9) Don R. Justesen, 1975, Microwaves and Behavior, American Psychologist, March 1975, pg. 391 - 401 10) Dr. Nick Begich and Jeane Maning: "Angels Don't Play This HAARP, Advances in Tesla Technology", Earthpulse Press, 1995, ISBN 0-9648812--0-9, pg. 169 11) M. A. Persinger: On the Possibility of Directly Lacessing Every Human Brain by Electromagnetic Induction of Fundamental Algorythms, Perception and Motor Skills, June1995,, sv. 80, str. 791-799 12) Nature, vol.391, 22.1.1998,str.316, Advances in Neurosciences May Threaten Human Rights 13) Internet reference at the site of the United Nations University and Institute of Advanced Studies in Tokyo does not work any more, to verify the information it is necessary to find the document from the 1999 UN sponsored conference of neuroscientists in Tokyo, you may inquire at the address unuias at ias.unu.edu 14) [9]http://www.europarl.eu.int/home/default_en.htm?redirected=1 . click at Plenary sessions, scroll down to Reports by A4 number click, choose 1999 and fill in 005 to A4 or search for Resolution on the environment, security and foreign policy from January 28, 1999 15) [10]http://thomas.loc.gov./ and search for Space Preservation Act then click at H.R.2977 16) Russian daily Segodnya, 11. February, 2000, Andrei Soldatov: Vsadniki psychotronitscheskovo apokalypsa" (Riders of Psychotronic Apokalypse) 17) See ref. 3), pg. 107 18) See ref. 3) pg. 97 19) See ref. 3), pg. 107 20) See ref. 3), pg. 108 21) See ref. 3) pg. 13 22) [11]http://www.europarl.eu.int/stoa/publi/pdf/99-14-01-a_en.pdf 23) see ref. 22 pg. XIX or 25 24) see ref. 22 pg. LIII or 69 25) see ref. 22 pg. XLVII or 63, aswell pg. VII-VIII or 7-8, pg. XIX or 25, pg. XLV or 61 26) see ref. 22) pg. LIII or 69, note 354 27) [12]http://www.unog.ch/unidir/Media%20Guide%20 CAHRA and Cheryl Welsh are listed at the page 24 28) Document sent by Moscow Committee of Ecology of Dwellings. Telephone: Russian Federation, Zelenograd, 531-6411, Emilia Tschirkova, directrice 29) Search [13]www.rambler.ru , there "poisk" (search) and search for "gosudarstvennaja duma" (State Duma) (it is necessary to type in Russian alphabet), at the page which appears choose "informacionnyj kanal gosudarstvennoj dumy" (Informational Channel of the Russian State Duma), there "federalnyje zakony podpisanyje prezidentom RF" (Federal laws signed by president of the Russian Federation), choose year 2001 and search 26 ijulja, ?. N 103-F3 (July 26, 2001, number N 103- F3) , "O vnesenii dopolnenija v statju 6 federalnogo zakona ob oruii" (addendum to the article 6 of the Federal law on weapons) 30) Search [14]www.rambler.ru and then (type in Russian alphabet) "gosudarstvennaja duma", next "informacionnyj kanal gosudarstvennoj dumy" (informational channel of the State Duma), next search by use of "poisk" (search) Doktrina informacionnoj bezopasnosti Rossii" "Doctrine of the Informational Security of the Russian Federation) there see pg. 3 "Vidy informacionnych ugroz bezopasnosti Rossijskkoj federacii" (Types of Threats to the Informational Security of the Russian Federation) 31) See ref. 30, pg. 19, "M?dunarodnoje sotrudni?estvo Rossijskoj Federacii v oblasti obespe?enija informacionnoj bezopasnoti" (International Cooperation of the Russian Federation in Assuring the Informational Security" 32) See ref.22, pg. XVII or 33 33) See ref.22, pg. XLV or 61 34) See ref.22 pg. XLVI or 62 Mojmir Babacek is the founder of the International Movement for the Ban of the Manipulation of the Human Nervous System by Technical Means, [15]http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Campus/2289/webpage.htm . He is the author of numerous articles on the issue of mind manipulation. ______________________________________________________________ [16]Email this article to a friend [17]To become a Member of Global Research To express your opinion on this article, join the discussion at [18]Global Research's News and Discussion Forum , at [19]http://globalresearch.ca.myforums.net/index.php The Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) at [20]www.globalresearch.ca grants permission to cross-post original Global Research (Canada) articles in their entirety, or any portions thereof, on community internet sites, as long as the text & title of the article are not modified. The source must be acknowledged as follows: Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) at [21]www.globalresearch.ca . For cross-postings, kindly use the active URL hyperlink address of the original CRG article. The author's copyright note must be displayed. (For articles from other news sources, check with the original copyright holder, where applicable.). For publication of Global Research (Canada) articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: [22]editor at globalresearch.ca . For media inquiries: [23]editor at globalresearch.ca References 4. http://globalresearch.ca/articles/BAB408B.html 5. http://wrair-www.army.mil/ 6. http://www.europarl.eu.int/stoa/publi/pdf/99-14-01-a_en.pdf 7. http://www.europarl.eu.int/stoa/publi/pdf/99-14-01-a_en.pdf 8. http://www.sinteg.ru/cataloghead.htm 9. http://www.europarl.eu.int/home/default_en.htm?redirected=1 10. http://thomas.loc.gov/ 11. http://www.europarl.eu.int/stoa/publi/pdf/99-14-01-a_en.pdf 12. http://www.unog.ch/unidir/Media%20Guide 13. http://www.rambler.ru/ 14. http://www.rambler.ru/ 15. http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Campus/2289/webpage.htm 16. mailto:?subject=%20article%20from%20Global%20Research?body=%20article%20at%20http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BAB408B.html 17. http://www.globalresearch.ca/MEMBER.html 18. http://globalresearch.ca.myforums.net/index.php 19. http://globalresearch.ca.myforums.net/index.php 20. http://www.globalresearch.ca/ 21. http://www.globalresearch.ca/ 22. mailto:editor at globalresearch.ca 23. mailto:editor at globalresearch.ca From paul.werbos at verizon.net Thu Aug 19 20:27:46 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 16:27:46 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Mag: Bush Landslide (in Theory)! In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20040819155640.00baf100@incoming.verizon.net> Fair's model (below) is interesting. Fair is a highly respected educator. I vaguely remember thirty years ago... that one of my students tested something like Fair's simplified econometric model of the US economy, and showed how it could predict more accurately if retuned using certain algorithms I developed. But... there are caveats. The "2.5 percent (mean?) error"... is for a limited set of observations. A limited number of elections. It's a nice simple model, it sounds like. Two inputs, one binary output. Now consider another. One input: the last digit of the year of the election. The output: whether the elected President gets shot. Fewer variables, more cases (since the data goes back further.) Not even 2.5 percent mean error; zero error. Even more reliable. So if we believe Fair, we should have even more confidence that Bush will be shot. President Cheney. How about that? What do we make of this? We shouldn't totally discount either model -- but we should remember that we have additional information, as the Bayesian would say. Information about complex cause and effect aspects. Information about equally simple models that may point in other directions. In fact -- predicting terrorism and predicting war and predicting the stock market involve similar issues. The best experience from stock market predicting is all mucked up by proprietary barriers to giving away information. But I gather there are periods where simple models work... followed by phase shifts... and then by other simple models... and so on. For terrorism and war and such, I would look for a totally different kind of model, making better use of the richness of the data. Too bad no one seems to know how who does it for a living -- but really, it has subtle aspects. And right at the moment I tend to feel that such a model would be a tad more favorable to Kerry than to Bush right now, though the world is full of free will variables that could change it either way. ---------------- Fair's model also reminds me a little of some amusing econometric models I have seen. For example, how people's expectations of oil price twenty years' hence is well predicted by stuff like the one-year average trend and the present price. How energy prices predict the DOE budget much better than they predict energy consumption (in the past... ala Fair). People's expectations of what happens to the economy under Bush versus Kerry will undoubtedly be one causal factor here... among others... Best, Paul At 09:15 PM 8/18/2004 -0400, Premise Checker wrote: >Bush Landslide (in Theory)! >QUESTIONS FOR RAY C. FAIR >New York Times Magazine, 4.8.15 >Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON > >Q As a professor of economics at Yale, you are known for >creating an econometric equation that has predicted >presidential elections with relative accuracy. > >My latest prediction shows that Bush will receive 57.5 >percent of the two-party votes. > >The polls are suggesting a much closer race. > >Polls are notoriously flaky this far ahead of the election, and there >is a limit to how much you want to trust polls. > >Why should we trust your equation, which seems unusually >reductive? > >It has done well historically. The average mistake of the >equation is about 2.5 percentage points. > >In your book ''Predicting Presidential Elections and Other >Things,'' you claim that economic growth and inflation are >the only variables that matter in a presidential race. Are >you saying that the war in Iraq will have no influence on >the election? > >Historically, issues like war haven't swamped the >economics. If the equation is correctly specified, then the >chances that Bush loses are very small. > >But the country hasn't been this polarized since the 60's, >and voters seem genuinely engaged by social issues like gay >marriage and the overall question of a more just society. > >We throw all those into what we call the error term. In the >past, all that stuff that you think should count averages >about 2.5 percent, and that is pretty small. > >It saddens me that you teach this to students at Yale, who >could be thinking about society in complex and meaningful >ways. > >I will be teaching econometrics next year to >undergraduates. Econometrics is a huge deal, because it is >applied to all kinds of things. > >Yes, I know one of your studies used the econometric method >to predict who is most likely to have an extramarital >affair. > >In that case, the key economic question was whether >high-wage people are more or less likely to engage in an >affair. They are slightly more likely to have an affair. >But the economic theory is ambiguous because if your wage >is really high, that tends to make you work more, and that >would cut down on how much time you want to spend in an >affair. > >Are you a Republican? > >I can't credibly answer that question. Using game theory in >economics, you are not going to believe me when I tell you >my political affiliation because I know that you know that >I could be behaving strategically. If I tell you I am a >Kerry supporter, how do you know that I am not lying or >behaving strategically to try to put more weight on the >predictions and help the Republicans? > >I don't want to do game theory. I just want to know if you >are a Kerry supporter. > >Backing away from game theory, which is kind of cute, I am >a Kerry supporter. > >I believe you entirely, although I'm a little surprised, >because your predictions implicitly lend support to Bush. > >I am not attempting to be an advocate for one party or >another. I am attempting to be a social scientist trying to >explain voting behavior. > >But in the process you are shaping opinion. Predictions can >be self-confirming, because wishy-washy voters might go >with the candidate who is perceived to be more successful. > >It could work the other way. If Kerry supporters see that >I have made this big prediction for Bush, more of them >could turn out just to prove an economist wrong. > >Perhaps you could create an equation that would calculate >how important the forecasts of economists are. > >There are so many polls and predictions, and I am not sure >the net effect of any one of them is much. > >Yes, everyone in America is a forecaster. We all think we >know how things will turn out. > >So in that case, no one has much influence, including me. > >http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/magazine/15QUESTIONS.html >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Aug 19 20:51:58 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 13:51:58 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Mag: Bush Landslide (in Theory)! Message-ID: <01C485F3.B2FB5760.shovland@mindspring.com> Given the threat of a pre-emptive strike by Iran, the situation in Iraq could deteriorate to a state we can hardly imagine. It's hard to see that helping the incumbent. Add a jobs report that goes into minus territory (we lost jobs in California in July)... Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sat Aug 21 01:18:40 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 18:18:40 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] death penalty? In-Reply-To: <200408191800.i7JI0c025988@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20040821011840.41829.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> >>But folks who have second violations of selling the stuff to people outside that system (after the clinics are established) should have the death penalty.<< -How about the death penalty for people who sell alcohol, a deadly drug? Or is there some double standard in how we judge the impact of drugs on society? If it were me, I'd deal with drugs as a health issue. Cocaine dealers and alcohol/tobacco dealers are both contributing to the death toll from those drugs, but neither deserves death, in my opinion. Or both do. We ought to be consistent, either way. More and more, I'm convinced that politics is a deadly drug. It's distorting judgment on all sides and contributing to a hostile culture where nobody feels safe or heard. michael _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Win 1 of 4,000 free domain names from Yahoo! Enter now. http://promotions.yahoo.com/goldrush From paul.werbos at verizon.net Sat Aug 21 13:28:33 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 09:28:33 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] death penalty? In-Reply-To: <20040821011840.41829.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> References: <200408191800.i7JI0c025988@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20040821092612.00b64b80@incoming.verizon.net> At 06:18 PM 8/20/2004 -0700, Michael Christopher wrote: > >>But folks who have second violations of selling >the stuff to people outside that system (after the >clinics are established) should have the death >penalty.<< > >-How about the death penalty for people who sell >alcohol, a deadly drug? Or is there some double >standard in how we judge the impact of drugs on >society? Of course I know that what I proposed would be unacceptable to those who prefer an all black or all white (i.e. all conservative or all liberal) solution, or even to those who want a nice grey fuzz. But the world cocaine system is a real threat to human survival... an animal with many similarities to Al Quieda, and just as big. We need to take it seriously. The person who first puts cocaine into the body of a child is not much better than those who captured children into slavery in past centuries. >If it were me, I'd deal with drugs as a health issue. >Cocaine dealers and alcohol/tobacco dealers are both >contributing to the death toll from those drugs, but >neither deserves death, in my opinion. Or both do. We >ought to be consistent, either way. > >More and more, I'm convinced that politics is a deadly >drug. It's distorting judgment on all sides and >contributing to a hostile culture where nobody feels >safe or heard. > >michael > > > >_______________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Win 1 of 4,000 free domain names from Yahoo! Enter now. >http://promotions.yahoo.com/goldrush >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Aug 21 15:45:48 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 08:45:48 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Health Benefits and the 'Jobless Recovery' Message-ID: <01C4875B.42285650.shovland@mindspring.com> Are we the the only first world country that doesn't have Universal Health Care? (steve) http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/3121926/c_3122022?f=home_todayinfinance An article in yesterday's New York Times seems likely to provide fodder for the debate over the so-called "jobless recovery" being experienced by the U.S. economy. Despite nearly three years of uninterrupted economic growth, the economy has been adding a relatively small number of jobs each month. One "significant factor" causing the employment slump is the increasing cost of employee health insurance, according to the article. The Times cited government data, industry surveys, and interviews with large and small employees in reporting "that many businesses remain reluctant to hire full-time employees because health insurance, which now costs the nation's employers an average of about $3,000 a year for each worker, has become one of the fastest-growing costs for companies." Health-benefit costs are draining corporate assets more than even climbing energy costs, according to the article. The cost of health benefits in the second quarter rose at a 12-month rate of 8.1 percent. That's more than triple the inflation rate and the rate of wage and salary increases, according to the newspaper. "Health care is a major reason why employment growth has been so sluggish," the article quoted Sung Won Sohn, the chief economist at Wells Fargo, as saying. Allan Gilmour, the vice chairman of Ford Motor and a former CFO of the company, told the newspaper, it would to be hard to find a direct link between higher health care expenses and the lag in hiring, since employment decisions were driven by many factors. "Health is a larger and larger part of our compensation package," Gilmour was quoted as saying. "It is hard to know what we are doing or not doing because of this. But on a macro level there's no question about it: this pressure comes to bear on everything we do." From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Aug 21 15:46:34 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 08:46:34 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] death penalty? Message-ID: <01C4875B.5D7BE1B0.shovland@mindspring.com> Perhaps if we legalized coca leaf? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Werbos, Dr. Paul J. [SMTP:paul.werbos at verizon.net] Sent: Saturday, August 21, 2004 6:29 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list; paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] death penalty? At 06:18 PM 8/20/2004 -0700, Michael Christopher wrote: > >>But folks who have second violations of selling >the stuff to people outside that system (after the >clinics are established) should have the death >penalty.<< > >-How about the death penalty for people who sell >alcohol, a deadly drug? Or is there some double >standard in how we judge the impact of drugs on >society? Of course I know that what I proposed would be unacceptable to those who prefer an all black or all white (i.e. all conservative or all liberal) solution, or even to those who want a nice grey fuzz. But the world cocaine system is a real threat to human survival... an animal with many similarities to Al Quieda, and just as big. We need to take it seriously. The person who first puts cocaine into the body of a child is not much better than those who captured children into slavery in past centuries. >If it were me, I'd deal with drugs as a health issue. >Cocaine dealers and alcohol/tobacco dealers are both >contributing to the death toll from those drugs, but >neither deserves death, in my opinion. Or both do. We >ought to be consistent, either way. > >More and more, I'm convinced that politics is a deadly >drug. It's distorting judgment on all sides and >contributing to a hostile culture where nobody feels >safe or heard. > >michael > > > >_______________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Win 1 of 4,000 free domain names from Yahoo! Enter now. >http://promotions.yahoo.com/goldrush >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sat Aug 21 18:08:45 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 11:08:45 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] drug war In-Reply-To: <200408211800.i7LI0V029968@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20040821180845.92525.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> >>The person who first puts cocaine into the body of a child is not much better than those who captured children into slavery in past centuries.<< --Putting alcohol or tobacco into the body of a child is just as evil (at least in health terms), but who would support the death penalty for people who sell them? We seem ruled by emotion on the drug issue, incapable of dealing with drugs according to their health impact, forced to adopt a schizophrenic attitude toward legal and illegal drugs, and unable to think of the issue in terms other than punishment. Punishment may be a kind of social catharsis, but it doesn't seem to solve problems. Drug addiction of all kinds will be cured by medical understanding, and eventually anti-addiction drugs. Resorting to "hard-line" attitudes only reflects our social alienation and anger, which has made just about everyone harder in their mindset and solved very little. Even criminals talk of "getting tough" on other criminals. It's hardly enlightenment on the issues that matter. I'll say again, if you believe the death penalty for cocaine dealers makes sense, apply it to tobacco and alcohol dealers as well. See if it works. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From paul.werbos at verizon.net Sat Aug 21 19:53:18 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 15:53:18 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] death penalty? In-Reply-To: <01C4875B.5D7BE1B0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20040821154531.00b98088@incoming.verizon.net> At 08:46 AM 8/21/2004 -0700, Steve wrote: >Perhaps if we legalized coca leaf? > >Steve Hovland In the past, people have even legalized slavery. I once had a friend who had some deep insights and sensitivity to native cultures of south America, where he spent several years in research. He felt that coca leaf in the right context could be very safe and beneficial, if controlled by the most intelligent people in very careful ways. He is dead now. The details of how he died were relayed to me by a closer friend, who was also closer to Joe. But there are times when reasonable mainstream beliefs are a good way to end up being dead, either for individuals or societies. The fact is that there are naive cultures (as described by Mary Wilcox's work, for example) from which some positive things can be extracted. But there are certain lines we need to be realistic about. In considering US culture and rules... the experience of well-meaning disempowered parents living in the ghetto... seeing their children's potential ripped away by criminals they are helpless to fight, right in front of their front door... demands attention here and now more than the experience of the anthropologist in the rain forest. At least so far as cocaine is concerned. From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 21 20:27:21 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 16:27:21 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] BBC: Hungry world 'must eat less meat' Message-ID: Hungry world 'must eat less meat' http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3559542.stm By Alex Kirby BBC News Online environment correspondent Highland cattle BBC Livestock needs a lot of water World water supplies will not be enough for our descendants to enjoy the sort of diet the West eats now, experts say. The World Water Week in Stockholm will be told the growth in demand for meat and dairy products is unsustainable. Animals need much more water than grain to produce the same amount of food, and ending malnutrition and feeding even more mouths will take still more water. Scientists say the world will have to change its consumption patterns to have any realistic hope of feeding itself. Losing the race The World Water Week conference is held annually in the Swedish capital, and is organised by the Stockholm International Water Institute, Siwi. This year's runs from 15 to 21 August. It's going to be almost impossible to feed future generations the kind of diet we have now in western Europe and North America Anders Berntell, Stockholm International Water Institute Siwi says: "With about 840 million people undernourished or lacking a secure food supply today, and another two billion or more people... by 2025, feeding the world's growing population - and finding the water to grow the food - continues to be a basic and sizeable challenge." A paper to be delivered during the conference, entitled Water: More Nutrition Per Drop, says: "For several decades, the increase in food production has outpaced population growth. Now much of the world is simply running out of water for more production... " The World Health Organisation calls malnutrition "the silent emergency", and says it is a factor in at least half the 10.4 million child deaths which occur every year. Grain in Ethiopian market A Kirby Grain goes far to feed the world Anders Berntell, Siwi's executive director, told BBC News Online: "The basic problem is that food is the main global consumer of water, with irrigation taking 70% or more of all the water we use, apart from huge volumes of rainwater. "The bottom line is that we've got to do something to reduce the amount of water we devote to growing food today. Upturn in demand "Animals fed on grain, and also those which rely on grazing, need far more water than grain crops. WATER AND FOOD A kilogram of grain-fed beef needs at least 15 cubic metres of water A kilo of lamb from a sheep fed on grass needs 10 cubic metres A kilo of cereals needs from 0.4 to 3 cubic metres "But in the developed world, and in parts of some developing countries, consumers are demanding more meat. "Of course people should have healthier diets and a higher intake of nutrients: we don't want to stop that. Slow to dawn "But it's going to be almost impossible to feed future generations the kind of diet we have now in western Europe and North America. Hamburger in bun BBC Meat is a treat for the rich "Most of us don't appreciate, either politically or personally, the challenge of finding enough water to grow enough food, though in some countries it's a problem of everyday living. "I think the world's future water supply is a problem that's an entire order of magnitude greater than we've begun to realise." Mr Berntell said the rich would be able to buy their way out of trouble by importing "virtual water" - the water needed to grow the food they bought from abroad. He said: "The transport of virtual water is huge. Australians were astonished to find that although their country is short of water, they're net exporters of water in the form of meat." SEE ALSO: [43]Better diet 'would save millions' 17 Jun 04 | Health [44]World population growth 'falling' 23 Mar 04 | Americas [45]Thirsty Africa faces food crisis 02 Nov 03 | Science/Nature [46]UN warns of future water crisis 05 Mar 03 | Science/Nature RELATED BBC LINKS: [47]The Water Debate [48]World Water Crisis RELATED INTERNET LINKS: [49]Stockholm International Water Institute [50]United Nations Population Fund [51]Particle collider edges forward [52]Virtual veins give nurses a hand [53]Avian flu 'discovered in pigs' [54]Corncrake enjoys resurgence References 43. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3814925.stm 44. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3560433.stm 45. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3226995.stm 46. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2820831.stm 47. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/world/2003/world_forum/water/default.stm 48. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/world/2000/world_water_crisis/default.stm 49. http://www.siwi.org/ 50. http://www.unfpa.org/ 51. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3583658.stm 52. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3576664.stm 53. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3583856.stm 54. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3581002.stm From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 21 20:29:38 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 16:29:38 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] ContraCostaTimes.com: 'Designer babies' pose near-term ethical issue Message-ID: ContraCostaTimes.com: 'Designer babies' pose near-term ethical issue http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/9400454.htm?1c [Thanks to Ted for finding this article. The paper is produced in Walnut City, CA. Ted certainly searches far and wide!] Saturday, Aug 21, 2004 By Kathi Wolfe RELIGION NEWS SERVICE Nazi Germany's crimes discredited the "breeding" of the "fittest" babies, yet eugenics is resurfacing today in the advances of biotechnology, say some ethicists and theologians. The eugenics of the past originated with government, said Ted Peters, president of Pacific Lutheran Seminary and a researcher at the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences. Now, he said, "We're going to see free market eugenics. Families are going to plan the genetic makeup of their children." Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the term "eugenics" in 1886. His idea was to "improve the human race through better breeding," said Christine Rosen, author of "Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement" (Oxford University Press). To achieve this goal, Galton and other adherents of eugenics encouraged "the production of the fittest specimens," she said. Some bioethicists say the urge to produce "the fittest" is still with us. Now parents have begun to use genetic screening and engineering to keep their children free from diseases, Peters said. In the near future, he said, biotechnology will permit parents to move beyond "therapy" -- preventing or treating disease. "Designer babies" could be on the horizon within five years, Peters said. This technology, which Peters and other bioethicists consider to be "enhancement" rather than "therapy," would allow parents to use genetic selection and modification to enhance traits of their children, such as intelligence and musical ability. "Only the wealthy could afford it. A 'gene-rich' class could develop," he said. Modern biotechnology may be different from that of Galton's time, but it doesn't make eugenics any less significant or troubling, said Gilbert Meilaender, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics. Some biotechnologies "invite us to think of ourselves as the makers rather than the begetters of our children," said Meilaender, a theologian at Valparaiso University. This makes parents think of their offspring as "products" -- to view themselves in a God-like role, he said. We should ask if the goals justify the means when parents want to protect the health and improve the lives of their children. Contrary to popular perception, eugenics didn't begin in Nazi Germany, Rosen said. The eugenics movement flourished in the United States from the early years of the 20th century through the 1930s, she said. "Eugenics flourished in the liberal Protestant, Catholic and Jewish mainstream," Rosen said. Eugenicists supported efforts to restrict immigration from countries "whose citizens might pollute the American melting pot" and "compulsory state sterilization laws," Rosen said. More than 30 states passed sterilization laws between 1907 and the 1970s, said Paul Lombardo, a historian at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia. During this time, more than 60,000 people were involuntarily sterilized, he said. "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race," an exhibit on display at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., through Oct. 16, 2005, shows how Nazi Germany incorporated the ideas of eugenics. Bioethicists and theologians today aren't comparing the United States with Nazi Germany. But they say the specter of eugenics hovers. Unlike the early 20th century, religious leaders aren't playing a key role in bioethics debates today, Rosen said. "Nobody in religious groups is thinking about eugenics now," Peters said. But it will be on their radar screen when people in church pews begin asking clergy about the ethical and theological implications of biotechnology advances, he said. From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 21 20:31:06 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 16:31:06 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Manchester Online: 'Miracle babies' row Message-ID: 'Miracle babies' row http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk/news/s/127/127209_miracle_babies_row.html [Thanks to Ted for finding this article also.] Friday, 13th August 2004 Andrew Nott A MANCHESTER church was today at the centre of a BBC "miracle baby" investigation. Childless couples are assured they can have a baby despite medical evidence that they cannot conceive, according to the programme. Now both the Church of England and the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology are calling on police to investigate The Gilbert Deya Ministries. Many couples have gone to Kenya, the homeland of the evangelical church's founder, and returned within days with babies said to be gifts from God. But the women were proven not to have been pregnant before they left Britain, according to an investigation, broadcast today, and there are concerns about the source of the children. The Gilbert Deya Ministries are based in London, but last year opened a church in Warwick Street, Hulme and are attracting a growing congregation. One of its worshippers is currently planning to travel to Nairobi be the next "miracle" mother. But today the leader of the church in Manchester, Pastor Benjamin Mensah, denied there was any wrongdoing. He told the Manchester Evening News: "We are a Christian church and believe in prayer", he said. "The Bible speaks of a couple, Sarah and Abraham who were too old to have children but God gave them a child, Isaac. Authorities "My wife was told she could not conceive but we prayed and now have two children who were born in this country. The programme makers should check the hospital records in Kenya which will show these births are genuine." Radio 4's Face the Facts programme alleges the self-styled Archbishop Gilbert Deya, pronounces the women worshippers as pregnant "by Jesus" and they then "give birth" in backstreet clinics in the slums of Nairobi. It claims British authorities have already taken one of these babies into care after tests revealed its DNA did not match either of its supposed parents and its Kenyan birth certificate was found to be a forgery. Dominic Walker, the Bishop of Monmouth and the Church of England's spokesman on deliverance, said: "Charismatic church leaders are very powerful. And they can abuse that power. "I believe in miracles, but with the DNA evidence, I don't believe these are miracle children." Gynaecology consultant Patrick O'Brien, added: "Childless couples are very vulnerable and so desperate that they would believe virtually anything. "These are not miracle children, but someone else's children and the authorities should find out whose." There are 36,000 members of The Gilbert Deya Ministries in Britain, which also has branches in Europe, Africa and Asia. Archbishop Deya has been at the centre of controversy before when he was investigated in 2000 for allegedly exorcising demons from children. But he remains unfazed by fears, prompted by the DNA evidence, that the "miracle" births are a scam. He told the programme: "The miracle babies which are happening now in our ministry are beyond human imagination. It's not something that I can say I can explain, because they are of God and things of God cannot be explained by humans." Educated Archbishop Deya claims to have helped post-menopausal women give birth - including a 56-year-old who has had 13 such babies in three years. Funds have been flooding into the church in response to the "miracles". Members, many of them middle class and well educated, are expected to contribute a tenth of their income. A new church, worth a million pounds, is being built in south east London Charles Nyeko, a product designer, is the proud father of Daniel, a child he describes as a "miracle I never thought I'd see in my lifetime". Daniel was born in Kenya last month, but just two months earlier, scans carried out by British doctors confirmed his wife Miriam was not pregnant. "Now we have the proof," he told the programme, "a miracle from God. We don't understand how it has happened, we are just grateful that it has." Kenyan authorities are now insisting on DNA tests to establish whether Daniel is really the Nyeko's child. The BBC has agreed to had over its findings to the Metropolitan Police. From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 21 20:39:58 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 16:39:58 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: 'Tough Girl' Fiction: Deadlier Than the Male Message-ID: 'Tough Girl' Fiction: Deadlier Than the Male New York Times Book Review, 4.8.22 By CHOIRE SICHA ADOLESCENT confession time: I once threatened to kill the novelist Dennis Cooper. (At least this will give me a leg up on Dale Peck if ESPN2 ever talks Bud Light into sponsoring the Xtreme Lit Crit Games.) My complaint: Cooper's novels, full of the rapings and splatter-slaughter of heavy-metal-loving young boys, take zero moral stand in light of grim actualities. His books smack of old-fashioned sexism, with boys swapped for women. So, 13 years ago, amped on coffee and identity politics, I published a tiny (and, well, really bad) manifesto called ''Dennis Cooper Must Die!'' I was written off, quite accurately, as a crackpot. I spent the next three months laboring on an equally silly manifesto about Cooper and Andrea Dworkin, whose 1991 novel, ''Mercy,'' also contained an endless stream of rapes and brutalities. Near the end of that book, Dworkin mocks herself in the third person: ''She is a prime example, of course, of the simple-minded demagogue who promotes the proposition that bad things are bad.'' Similar technique, radical difference: Dworkin's contribution was to stridently define what's wrong so that, like, maybe people would pay attention. Ah, the heady campus eves spent Taking Back the Night, the windows steamed up with radical ''wimmin's'' literature! But just when we nearly made the Society for Cutting Up Men a delicious reality, listless punk collided with hyperactive feminism and begat a distinct -- and far more interesting -- sort of transgressive literature. For proof, consider this summer's haul: a whole bunch of books about tough women who swing on that tired spectrum between sociological victim and reactionary rebel -- but sometimes, happily, manage to break free. ''You're lucky and mean,'' screams a nicey-nice neighbor girl as Junebug Host is acting out her own personal psychodrama in a small Nebraska town. ''It's not fair.'' The 17-year-old heroine of Maureen McCoy's JUNEBUG (Leapfrog, paper, $14.95) has been to visit her mother in prison every Sunday for a dozen years. Unfortunately, on this particular Sunday (which also happens to be Mother's Day), Junebug's killer mom has confessed the back story -- she found little Junebug down at the trailer park, smelling of rum, with her panties down around her ankles, so she axed the man who'd been handling her day care. No wonder Junebug has an extreme approach to life. (''Jesus was the first known alien invader. . . . He went on back to his base after messing around on earth. . . . He quit. What's so holy about that?'') Not much happens in the novel -- no fakey made-up grandness, just Junebug assimilating mom's damaging info amid her own pop-rock fizzle of adolescence (while engaging in a little self-mutilation on the side). Finally, when her psyche spazzes, Junebug jumps into life. And even though she goes extreme, there aren't many consequences. Bad girls, evidently, are now allowed to escape unpunished. Cintra Wilson, the thinking woman's David Foster Wallace, is well known for a treatise on the evils of fame-culture, ''A Massive Swelling.'' For her first novel, COLORS INSULTING TO NATURE (Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, $24.95), she's invented an insecure girl-child named Liza Normal and then impaled her on the lusty spike of celebrity. Liza's psycho stage mom makes her a far-too-young, tarted-up cabaret warbler, but then there's a ''horrible life-altering Incident of Shame.'' In thrall to a bad boy, Liza un-enjoys an ''awkward rutting'' date rape in the utility closet of a garage, during which most of her hair is shaved off. >From this humiliation she makes a kind of punk poetry, refashioning herself into a Marin County Wendy O. Williams. Later, Liza becomes a coke dealer's hussy, a porn writer, a Haight Street speed freak, the codependent lover of a fallen celebrity. Eventually, although ''her childhood dream of being an irony-free, singing princess had been shot down in flames,'' she comes to accept her role as ''an icon of camp depravity.'' Meanwhile, Liza's counterpoint brother, Ned, becomes an agoraphobic recluse and a famous outsider artist. Refusing all life's shiny traps, he gets the goods and rewards. Ah, humility! ''Colors Insulting to Nature'' is hilarious and strong -- but what a big honkin' lie the parable of Ned and Liza is! Wilson has the most action-packed sentences in the biz, but this novel as polemic gives us a straw-man argument. Besides, if she thinks celebrity is so sick, uh, what's with the author's glamorous head shots? Scott Bradfield does seem to think the world is a vampire, as a poet once put it. A rowdily inventive novelist, he's also an obsessive: his characters are murderer children, murderer grandmas, murderer animals. In his latest book, GOOD GIRL WANTS IT BAD (Carroll & Graf, paper, $13), the murderer is Delilah Riordan, a supersexy and avowedly innocent serial killer keeping a journal on death row. This is all presumably farce, but Bradfield ventures so far into Unreliable Narrator Land that it's unclear what's sardonic and what's realistic. And there's something about Delilah's irresistible man-trapping allure, as she seduces her psychiatrists and guards, that's troublingly yesterdecade. Bradfield -- so smart, sometimes so devastating -- is talking about victim culture, but he's all trussed up in it. He actually makes you miss Cintra Wilson's angry agenda. Best for last! The narrator of Maggie Dubris's SKELS (Soft Skull, paper, $14.95), a New York City paramedic named Orlie Breton, is a naive poet from Ohio. It's the summer of 1978, and she works Harlem and Hell's Kitchen when she's not kicked down to the freaky morgue shift. Orlie also follows around a homeless albino poet, trading riddles written on the walls of abandoned railway tunnels. Her boyfriend takes way too much acid and becomes a magician of holographs in Times Square. Orlie is a screw-up and then a cover-of-the-tabloids heroine -- and she meets Walt Whitman. Meantime, Dubris hasn't even broken a sweat in the writing. Her New York has everything and nothing to do with the real world, which is a reminder of something very simple: books don't need to get all pompous about our social disasters in order to make the grandest possible statements about them. ''Skels'' floats completely free of those painful, tiresome conversations about who we're supposed to be and who we have to be. On a hot Manhattan night, with hydrants pumping in the streets and the sirens Dopplering off, Orlie's in the same ambulance with the rest of us, unconcerned with being a subject, an object, a woman, a character. Choire Sicha is the editorial director of Gawker.com. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/books/review/22SICHAL.html From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 21 20:42:18 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 16:42:18 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: 'Status Anxiety' and 'The Status Syndrome': Keeping Up With the Joneses Message-ID: 'Status Anxiety' and 'The Status Syndrome': Keeping Up With the Joneses New York Times Book Review, 4.8.22 By EMILY EAKIN STATUS ANXIETY By Alain de Botton. Illustrated. 306 pp. Pantheon Books. $24. THE STATUS SYNDROME How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity. By Michael Marmot. 319 pp. Times Books/ Henry Holt & Company. $26. In America, we like to pretend class differences don't really exist -- or at least that they're no impediment to getting ahead. But isn't it likely that we underestimate the extent of our status anxiety as well? It took a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, to diagnose the problem on our soil. An unhealthy fixation on status, he wrote, was to blame for the ''strange melancholy often haunting inhabitants of democracies in the midst of abundance.'' And now, two centuries later, two British authors have updated his diagnosis, giving it a dire spin. According to one, concern with social position has become a soul-crushing disease afflicting much of Western civilization. According to the other, merely ranking lower in the social hierarchy than other people -- whether or not you actually give a damn -- can kill you. Together, their books suggest a possible social crisis of farreaching import. ''60 Minutes,'' where have you been? Alain de Botton is the more optimistic of the two. His previous foray into self-help, the improbably successful ''How Proust Can Change Your Life,'' was a novel compendium of literary trivia and moral uplift -- therapy for the middlebrow. His new book, ''Status Anxiety,'' which aims to destigmatize this shameful disorder and facilitate its cure, presents a similar blend of edification and consolation. A dissertation on status anxiety leavened with New Yorker cartoons, Old Master paintings and (ugh) smiley faces, it contends that the obsession with rank, though increasingly prevalent and ''capable of ruining extended stretches of our lives,'' is amenable to treatment. The first step to recovery is (of course) acceptance. Forgive yourself the SoHo Club membership, the Southampton beach house and those gratuitous allusions to your son's Yale degree. Such foibles are hardly our fault, de Botton explains. We're all stuck with a ''congenital uncertainty as to our own value,'' and bad behavior -- name dropping, overweening ambition, conspicuous consumption -- is the inevitable result, a symptom of our desperate bid for the world's esteem. ''The predominant impulse behind our desire to rise in the social hierarchy may be rooted not so much in the material goods we can accrue or the power we can wield as in the amount of love we stand to receive as a consequence of high status,'' de Botton soothingly tells us. ''Money, fame and influence may be valued more as tokens of -- and means to -- love rather than ends in themselves.'' De Botton hastens to point out that although the perks and comforts of rank are undeniably delightful, merely occupying an enviable social rung is by no means a barometer of true worth. He makes this case through a highly selective survey of Western history. Buoyed first by Christianity and later by Marxism, the poor enjoyed a moral status as elevated as their social rank was low, de Botton argues, while the affluent were compelled to pursue their pleasures under the stigmas of sin and corruption. The spread of capitalist meritocracy in the 19th and 20th centuries eventually dealt this delicate arrangement a devastating blow. ''Money,'' he says, ''began to look like a sound signifier of character. The rich were not only wealthier, it seemed; they might also be plain better.'' More unbearable to contemplate was the corollary: ''Low status came to seem not merely regrettable but also deserved.'' In such a world, of course, status anxiety runs rampant. These assertions are buttressed by extended passages from de Tocqueville, Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but de Botton's remedies for status anxiety are all his own. Try novels, he suggests; the perceptive ones ''help us understand and appreciate the value of every hidden life that rests in an unvisited tomb.'' Or study paintings, since art ''can challenge society's normal understanding of who or what matters,'' and laugh at those New Yorker cartoons, humor being ''a useful weapon with which to attack the high status of others.'' Even ancient ruins can be curative: ''Beholding old stones, we may feel our anxieties over our achievements -- and the lack of them -- slacken. As for positive role models, de Botton proposes the cynics of ancient Greece (they didn't give a damn about other people's opinions), the bohemians of 19th-century Europe (they realized money wasn't everything and knew how to have a good time) and Jesus Christ (who understood the most important point of all: that we are ''fundamentally, in every way that really matters, just like everyone else''). Religion, it turns out, is status anxiety's most effective antidote. There is nothing like Christianity, de Botton suggests, for exposing the vanity of earthly pursuits and restoring a proper sense of humility to our lives. Particularly helpful is the Christian emphasis on mortality, since ''however powerful and revered others may be, we can take comfort in the thought that the lot of us will ultimately end up as that most democratic of substances: dust.'' Death plays a less therapeutic role in ''The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity.'' The alarming message here is that status has become a lethal threat. In the relatively prosperous, industrialized West, Michael Marmot, an epidemiologist at University College, London, writes, ''Where you stand in the social hierarchy is intimately related to your chances of getting ill and your length of life.'' And the higher your status, the better your prospects. Bedford may be just slightly more chic than Chappaqua, but, according to Marmot's logic, even just slightly could mean markedly fewer heart attacks and whole extra years of life for its residents. A numbing arsenal of facts and figures serves to show that it is social rank -- and not suspiciously similar-sounding factors like income or education -- that makes the crucial difference. There's the study of Oscar winners that found they live four years longer than their co-stars and fellow nominees, and the fact that with each mile along the subway line from downtown Washington to suburban Montgomery County, Md., life expectancy increases by a year and a half. There is also a mountain of suggestive evidence from primate research: low-status rhesus macaques with heart disease; low-status baboons with soaring cortisol levels and unwholesome amounts of HDL cholesterol. It is not our social position per se that does us in, all this implies, but rather the stress that comes from having less control over our work and lives than people of higher rank. Not that this is exactly news. The linchpin of Marmot's argument is his own huge decades-long study of Whitehall, the British civil service. With its clear hierarchy of porters, clerks and administrators, its rigidly defined pay scales and employment grades, Whitehall is an ''exquisitely stratified'' bureaucracy, Marmot boasts, an ''ideal'' environment in which to document the deleterious effects of status on health. And that is precisely the problem. By using Whitehall as a stand-in for society, Marmot confuses the artificial organization of the workplace with the messy chaos of life. (No wonder he finds that ''the social gradient in health in Whitehall is steeper than in the country as a whole.'') The mistake Marmot, in his seriousness, and de Botton, in his superficiality, both make is positing a single social order in which we are all assigned a place and of which a vast majority of us are victims. Once upon a time, this may have been the case. And in the authors' native Britain, it still may be. But in America, at least, status is today a complex phenomenon. To the credit of our evolving democracy, it is increasingly unclear who has it and who doesn't. Given the many subcultures each of us inhabits, it's entirely possible to wield influence in one sphere while hardly registering in another. And who can say which defines a person more: working for minimum wage in the mailroom or being hugely popular on Friendster? Emily Eakin is a reporter for the Arts & Ideas pages of The Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/books/chapters/22EAKINL.html From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 21 20:43:39 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 16:43:39 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: 'A Man's Guide to a Civilized Divorce': Your Marriage Was a Total Disaster. Now What? Message-ID: 'A Man's Guide to a Civilized Divorce': Your Marriage Was a Total Disaster. Now What? New York Times Book Review, 4.8.22 By PAMELA PAUL A MAN'S GUIDE TO A CIVILIZED DIVORCE How to Divorce With Grace, a Little Class, and a Lot of Common Sense. By Sam Margulies. Illustrated. 338 pp. Rodale. $24.95. WHATEVER happened to the ''I'm O.K. -- You're O.K.'' brevity of the self-help title? Today's guides make one feel virtuous just for finishing off the cover. For readers of divorce how-to's, reeling from collapsed marriages, such a swift palliative would be welcome. But ''A Man's Guide to a Civilized Divorce: How to Divorce With Grace, a Little Class, and a Lot of Common Sense'' offers 338 pages more than that. While some his-and-hers divorce books make no pretense of neutrality (''Divorce War! 50 Strategies Every Woman Needs to Know to Win,'' ''The Father's Emergency Guide to Divorce-Custody Battle: A Tour Through the Predatory World of Judges, Lawyers, Psychologists and Social Workers, in the Subculture of Divorce'' and the like), Sam Margulies, a lawyer and practicing mediator, says the divorce process need not be combative. Fighting to ''win'' is costly and personally damaging at best, counterproductive to alimony and custody aims at worst. Neatly skirting the probability that a harmonious split may not follow an antagonistic marriage, Margulies argues that nearly all divorcing couples can choose to have a good divorce -- even if they have to grit their teeth through ''counterintuitive'' behaviors in the process. (What, no name-calling?) Despite all this well-intentioned equanimity, Margulies infuses his book with indignation. It opens with the statistic that most divorces are initiated by women, and this change, the author postulates, is not because men are more adulterous or less amorous but because women are unhappier with their marriages. Wives' unhappiness, in turn, arises from gauzy expectations of unfettered intimacy, which, not surprisingly, most red-blooded males don't know how to provide. ''Traditional expectations of men are clearly under assault,'' Margulies writes. ''Men are expected to be aggressive yet gentle, to be good providers but also be nurturing at home, and to be manly but temper it with visible displays of emotional sensitivity.'' With his shrug at female demands, Margulies sometimes comes across as the man's man's mediator; other times, he sounds condescending: ''Going to a self-service laundry and seeking advice from an attractive woman on how to use fabric softener may get you more than clean clothes,'' he advises the divorce on the prowl. Men need a new divorce guide, it appears, because marriage and manhood have changed. And it seems men and women dislike the new ''equality'' equally. Men fear their inability to serve up a sufficient marriage of peers; women are galled when such marriages fall apart -- and they find out they might have to pay alimony. Men resent a system that demands equal marriage but doles out divorce unequally, with women typically keeping both house and kids. Women are appalled that though they berated their husbands for not changing their fair share of diapers, they, mothers superior, could end up with less than full custody. Peer divorce, alas, can leave both camps feeling cheated. Most of the book's advice in navigating these new rules is sound. According to Margulies, the legal system exacerbates the acrimony. Best for the dividing couple to compromise outside the courthouse, and the author gives ample information to that end. Using case studies to illustrate his points, Margulies outlines a chronological and emotional blueprint for the good divorce, with chapters devoted to divorce law and lawyers, mediation and divorced fatherhood. The book addresses many practical considerations: if and when to move out of the marital home, how to negotiate custody arrangements and alimony and ways to budget for post-divorce life, with workbook-style charts to assist. Still, were it not leavened with cartoons and occasionally, if inadvertently, amusing anecdotes (e.g., the woman who begins an adulterous affair with the childhood love she bumps into at a square-dance retreat), the book, despite its useful and practical advice, would be rather disheartening. Even so, there is something moving about a man diligently poring over the steps to a friendly divorce, penciling in figures to separate his financial assets from his wife's and preparing himself emotionally for singlehood. Most readers, one suspects, will be slipped a copy by a worried mother or a soon-to-be ex-wife. Those who read it on their own are probably not those who need it. Pamela Paul is the author of ''The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony.'' http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/books/review/22PAULL.html From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Aug 21 22:07:52 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 15:07:52 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Possibility of a landslide Message-ID: <01C48790.A20ABE70.shovland@mindspring.com> I see a convergence of negative factors: Oil prices running up. Job creation reports deteriorating. Situation in Iraq/Iran deteriorating. Hurricane season is just beginning. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From paul.werbos at verizon.net Sun Aug 22 02:43:49 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 22:43:49 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Possibility of a landslide In-Reply-To: <01C48790.A20ABE70.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20040821224020.00bac9a0@incoming.verizon.net> At 03:07 PM 8/21/2004 -0700, Steve wrote: >I see a convergence of negative factors: > >Oil prices running up. >Job creation reports deteriorating. >Situation in Iraq/Iran deteriorating. >Hurricane season is just beginning. I see some shifts in the past couple of weeks, but maybe these are surface level. For example, there have been conspicuous moral choices by the candidates. But then again, it doesn't matter on some level who wins the election. What matters is whether we survive. >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Aug 22 03:25:11 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 20:25:11 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Possibility of a landslide Message-ID: <01C487BC.F6850290.shovland@mindspring.com> There's a part of me that thinks the shit is hitting the fan, and my basic reaction is that I intend to be among the survivors... Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Werbos, Dr. Paul J. [SMTP:paul.werbos at verizon.net] Sent: Saturday, August 21, 2004 7:44 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list; paleopsych at paleopsych. org (E-mail) Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Possibility of a landslide At 03:07 PM 8/21/2004 -0700, Steve wrote: >I see a convergence of negative factors: > >Oil prices running up. >Job creation reports deteriorating. >Situation in Iraq/Iran deteriorating. >Hurricane season is just beginning. I see some shifts in the past couple of weeks, but maybe these are surface level. For example, there have been conspicuous moral choices by the candidates. But then again, it doesn't matter on some level who wins the election. What matters is whether we survive. >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Aug 22 03:49:55 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 20:49:55 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Howard on the radio tonight Message-ID: <01C487C0.6ADD11C0.shovland@mindspring.com> He'll be on Coast to Coast Here are the affiliates: http://www.coasttocoastam.com/info/wheretolisten.html I use the Nero Wave Editor to record these things. I go from the earphone jack on a radio to the audio input on the computer. I use the lowest sampling rate to conserve on disk space. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Aug 22 13:03:52 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2004 06:03:52 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Men destroyed by shadow eruptions Message-ID: <01C4880D.CD90D570.shovland@mindspring.com> Howard's comments about the bright side of Michael Jackson's personality only deepens the sense of tragedy regarding his current predicament. Unfortunately, it's a common tale- men who are overwhelmed and destroyed by impulses from the dark side. And it mostly seems to be men who go down this way. The soon-to-be-former-governor of Pennsylvania. Scott Peterson. Trent Lott. OJ Simpson. Possibly our own Governor Gropenator. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Aug 22 14:10:26 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2004 07:10:26 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] I don't buy the notion that Osama is biding his time Message-ID: <01C48817.1A54FFE0.shovland@mindspring.com> War is now. If I was at war with someone, I would be out there killing them with any means at my disposal, today. Hitler lost his war in part because he put his hopes in future super weapons instead of building a lot of what he had now. Hitler also lost his war because he took on more enemies than he could handle. If Osama thinks he has to clean the house of Islam first, then the house of Islam may get him first. Murdering your own herd is not a survival strategy. And if he thinks he will exterminate us, he does not know our history. We are not incompetent when it comes to killing large numbers of opponents. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sun Aug 22 21:47:04 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2004 14:47:04 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] addiction In-Reply-To: <200408221800.i7MI0W001813@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20040822214704.68506.qmail@web13422.mail.yahoo.com> >>In considering US culture and rules... the experience of well-meaning disempowered parents living in the ghetto... seeing their children's potential ripped away by criminals they are helpless to fight, right in front of their front door... demands attention here and now more than the experience of the anthropologist in the rain forest. At least so far as cocaine is concerned.<< -Not to mention the loss of life and potential from alcohol abuse and tobacco. But dealing with drugs by "getting tough" on dealers and users only adds a layer of confusion to what should be a health issue. Obesity kills, but we don't ban unhealthy foods, we try to deal with it through education and voluntary counselling. Cocaine is dangerous, but the drug war only leads users to steal to support an expensive habit and dealers to execute "street justice" against rivals. We need to start looking at addiction in all its facets, from obesity to alcohol/tobacco to cocaine, and find ways to treat addiction without resorting to expensive and futile "wars". An addiction is generally less harmful than the culture that goes with the illegality of the substance. When alcohol was banned by law, an underground trade developed, complete with gang wars and other baggage that made treating alcohol addiction as a health issue more difficult. We're better off with the 12 step approach, and we'll be even better off when new drugs are discovered to counter addiction without pain. That goes for cocaine as well. In our society, a mindset is emerging that is truly frightening, based on the idea that "something must be done, and no excess is too excessive in responding to evil." Emotional frustration is taking precedence over solid research and logical thinking. We will further complicate already difficult problems by engaging in such "good vs. evil" polarization. We did it with alcohol prohibition, and we know where that led. We must repeat history, perhaps, to learn what works and what does not. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Y! Messenger - Communicate in real time. Download now. http://messenger.yahoo.com From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sun Aug 22 21:54:24 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2004 14:54:24 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] butterfly effect In-Reply-To: <200408221800.i7MI0W001813@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20040822215424.38268.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> >>I see a convergence of negative factors: Oil prices running up. Job creation reports deteriorating. Situation in Iraq/Iran deteriorating. Hurricane season is just beginning.<< --Interesting to consider the butterfly effect in a system of increasingly interdependent and enmeshed factors. Bin Laden may be one manifestation of that effect: his goal is not to destroy the US through military dominance, he lacks that capability. Instead, he is harnessing the properties of the system which he sees as his enemy, intending to provoke us to lash out at Islamic nations, reinforcing the "clash of civilizations" view which he needs to spread in order to gain new recruits. He's looking for a ripple effect, economic weaknesses and other instabilities in our system that would be amplified by the reckless use of US military force abroad. He may well succeed. In our dependence on displays of force, we may in fact be giving him the propaganda advantage he wants. This, because we do not understand the butterfly effect, and he does. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From paul.werbos at verizon.net Sun Aug 22 23:11:31 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2004 19:11:31 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] addiction In-Reply-To: <20040822214704.68506.qmail@web13422.mail.yahoo.com> References: <200408221800.i7MI0W001813@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20040822190802.00b5f860@incoming.verizon.net> At 02:47 PM 8/22/2004 -0700, Michael Christopher wrote: > >>In considering US culture and rules... the >experience of well-meaning disempowered parents living >in the ghetto... seeing their children's potential >ripped away by criminals they are helpless to fight, >right in front of their front door... demands >attention here and now more than the experience of the >anthropologist in the rain forest. At least so far as >cocaine is concerned.<< > >-Not to mention the loss of life and potential from >alcohol abuse and tobacco. But dealing with drugs by >"getting tough" on dealers and users only adds a layer >of confusion to what should be a health issue. Obesity >kills, but we don't ban unhealthy foods, we try to >deal with it through education and voluntary >counselling. Cocaine is dangerous, but the drug war >only leads users to steal to support an expensive >habit and dealers to execute "street justice" against >rivals. We need to start looking at addiction in all >its facets, from obesity to alcohol/tobacco to >cocaine, and find ways to treat addiction without >resorting to expensive and futile "wars". Sure. Let's first solve all addictive personality tendencies ad neuroses. Like the folks who wanted to wait until all poverty and hunger was erased from the world.. first things first... before allowing even three little ships to go over the atlantic. In the meantime... to repeat.. The world cocaine system is a clear and present danger to world security just as serious as Al Quieda. We cannot afford to wait for the millennium before minimizing it. There is no alcohol cartel of the same dimensions. To put it mildly. But such reasoning applies only to those of us who must attempt to survive on earth. In the Platonic world could it be different? >An addiction is generally less harmful than the >culture that goes with the illegality of the >substance. When alcohol was banned by law, an >underground trade developed, complete with gang wars >and other baggage that made treating alcohol addiction >as a health issue more difficult. We're better off >with the 12 step approach, and we'll be even better >off when new drugs are discovered to counter addiction >without pain. That goes for cocaine as well. > >In our society, a mindset is emerging that is truly >frightening, based on the idea that "something must be >done, and no excess is too excessive in responding to >evil." Emotional frustration is taking precedence over >solid research and logical thinking. We will further >complicate already difficult problems by engaging in >such "good vs. evil" polarization. We did it with >alcohol prohibition, and we know where that led. We >must repeat history, perhaps, to learn what works and >what does not. > >Michael > > > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Y! Messenger - Communicate in real time. Download now. >http://messenger.yahoo.com >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 22 23:20:37 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2004 19:20:37 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Douglas Rushkoff: The Networked Individual Message-ID: Douglas Rushkoff: The Networked Individual http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=100802 Mon Jun 28 20:30:00 GMT 2004 The cell phone may be bringing us into a new renaissance, but it may end up differently than what we're expecting. Instead of becoming more empowered as individuals, we may give up on the notion of individuality altogether. The Renaissance -- the great big one they taught us about in school -- is known for a lot of great inventions: perspective painting, the printing press, ships that could circumnavigate the earth, modern banking and even the sonnet. What we tend to forget about the 15th and 16th centuries, though, is that this was also when we invented the "individual." Sure, we knew that people existed in their individual bodies for a long time. Even cavemen knew that hitting the guy over there meant hitting someone else. But people were so highly identified with their tribes, clans or fiefdoms, that they didn't really think of themselves as individuals. Anyone who was a true individual was pretty much an outcast -- either banished, mutant, a leper or, at best, a shaman, whose individuality was as much a curse as a blessing. No, the real individual, as he or she is known today, was born as a 'he' during the renaissance. The mad genius Dr. Faustus is often cited as the first full-fledged individual character in drama; he's the scientist who has reached the height of knowledge and capability and must make a deal with the devil in order to reach to even higher levels of power. The Renaissance Man was understood as a person with many capabilities. What we may not fully appreciate, however, is that at that time, this meant embodying all these capabilities oneself. Leonardo da Vinci wasn't friends with some people who thought about airplanes and with other ones who thought about human anatomy. He did all of these things himself. The fully realized person was very much a lone individual. Largely because of this, media scholars from McLuhan to Ong think of the Renaissance as the beginning of our era of fragmentation. As we gained the ability to write things down and print them in great quantity, oral culture died out. We didn't have to sit and breathe with one another in order to communicate. We could resort, instead, to the more abstract and utterly impersonal language of text. This separated us further, and replaced a culture built on abundance (a feminine archetype actively repressed during the renaissance) with one of scarcity (in support of high-interest banking and other centralized policies). Compound this with the beginnings of the industrial age, where human beings devolved from craftsmen into laborers, and you get real disintegration of the communal unit. We stopped making things by hand, and became cogs in the mechanized factories. The more things we produced, the more individual customers we needed for them. Mass production led to mass marketing which required a mass media. And the more individualized consumers became -- the more separated in their own suburban homes, isolated from their communities and totally self-reliant -- the more stuff they would need to buy. A community would be quite content with one big barbecue in the park at the end of the street. A neighborhood with no communal values requires one barbecue for each home. This made competition and isolation a better environment for mass production. Finally, the original Renaissance launched the era of specialization. Why? Because, according to the historical analysis of thinkers like Buckminster Fuller, monarchs of early nation-states were afraid for any individual to know too much! So universities were divided into strictly separate disciplines. We became even more individualized, but without the (false) promise of ever becoming a true renaissance person. At best, we could become a "jack of all trades, master of none." Eventually, however, every movement tends to become its opposite. Just as our religions told us that someone else had sacrificed himself so we wouldn't have to, our commercial culture promoted the culture of the individual through commercials that insisted, "you are worth it!" Treat your "self" to this product or experience, because you are an individual and you deserve it. US Army commercials even encouraged young people to join the "Army of one." Our media got so good at befriending and encouraging the individual, that we individuals -- with no friends to call our own -- fell in love with our media. So we got better TV's, with remotes, camcorders, and keyboards. We got cell phones, Wi-Fi connections, and messaging systems. What our marketers didn't realize is that they had inadvertently sold us the very tools we could use to reverse this relentless drive towards individualism and steer our civilization towards something very different. Yes, we got the ability to make our own media, which cannot be underestimated. Whether posting on a conference or writing an article for a blog, self-expression is a great key to understanding. But, more importantly, the interactive devices, which allow for what I've come to see as a second great renaissance, give us access to one another. They break down individualism as we know it, and help us redefine it as something very different: as our ability to forge connections with one another. To cooperate instead of compete. The definition of an individual is changing, thanks in greatest part to wireless interactivity. While the Internet heralded this day, the wireless renaissance actually makes it a reality. Human beings are not who they are when they are sitting at their computers. In some ways, this only exacerbates our fragmentation. We are fully functioning human beings when we are fully animated, and capable of rejoining the many kinds of groups in which we like to gather - and haven't, in some cases, for the past four or five hundred years. No matter how much we like to talk about "freedom of the individual" here in the United States, that freedom comes down pretty much to the freedom to buy whatever we want, and to withdraw from pretty much any set of community values in order to protect or pay for our nuclear families (a value system, again, supported through distortions of democracy and religion). There has been some good buzz about the idea that the Internet has led to a redefinition of individual agency. A number of academics have seized upon the idea of a Networked Individualism and the change that networking brings to the way we think of ourselves in relationship to citizenship. I think we're looking at a trend much bigger than this and, because these things fit in the palm of our hands, much smaller as well. The always-on and always-available quality of the emerging wireless universe changes what it means to be an individual. Increasingly, the power and agency of individuals is defined not by what they know -- not what's on the hard drive -- but who and what they have access to -- who is in their date book, or how readily they can find a link. In a zen sense, the less present and opaque the individual, the greater ability he or she has to serve as a node in the network, and the more trusted the information and ideas that node provides. Even those individuals lucky enough to be valued for their opinions and assessments will increasingly be judged by the breadth of access they have to information. No, an individual is no longer the sum total of his or her accumulated abilities and achievements. Hording data, stuff, even money, no longer makes sense in a world where such things are no longer measured in the scarcity of early Renaissance values, but are instead beginning to be understood in terms of sharing, social currency, and smart-mob-driven engagement. The wireless renaissance brings us back to our pre-renaissance understanding of individuality. Indeed, the tribal shaman, that witch doctor who lived apart from the tribe, may have been an individual as far as the civilians were concerned, but he was most valued for his ability to network: he traveled through other realms, and retrieved information and messages from beings far away, or even the dead. And that doesn't sound so different from the un-wired, networked individual of the current renaissance, after all. From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 23 15:11:49 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2004 11:11:49 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Guardian: I'm not guilty - but my brain is Message-ID: I'm not guilty - but my brain is http://education.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4990893-110865,00.html A leading neuroscientist caused a sensation by claiming crimes are the result of brain abnormalities. Laura Spinney investigates a slanging match between scientists and philosophers Laura Spinney Thursday August 12, 2004 Last month, the case against Patrizia Reggiani was reopened in Italy. She is serving a 26-year jail sentence for having ordered the killing of her husband, the fashion supremo Maurizio Gucci. At the first trial in 1998, expert witnesses dismissed her lawyers' claims that surgery for a brain tumour had changed her personality. The new trial has been granted because her lawyers believe that brain imaging techniques developed since then will reveal damage that was previously undetectable, and strengthen their case for an acquittal. The idea that someone should not be punished if their abnormal neural make-up leaves them no choice but to break the law is contentious but not new. However, one prominent neuroscientist has sparked a storm by picking it up and turning it round. Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany's leading newspapers, Wolf Singer argued that crime itself should be taken as evidence of brain abnormality, even if no abnormality can be found, and criminals treated as incapable of having acted otherwise. His claims have brought howls of outrage from academics across the sciences and humanities. But Singer counters that the idea is nothing but a natural extension of the thesis that free will is an illusion - a theory that he feels is supported by decades of work in neuroscience. The head of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Singer is best known for his work on the so-called binding problem of perception. This is the conundrum of how we perceive an object as an integrated whole, when we know that the brain processes the various elements of it - colours, angles, and so on - separately. His group was among the first to suggest, and then demonstrate, that the answer lay in the synchronisation encoding the separate features. He has since extrapolated those ideas to the process by which we make decisions, which has led him to question whether we are really the free-acting agents we imagine ourselves to be. His argument goes like this. Neurobiology tells us that there is no centre in the brain where actions are planned and decisions made. Decisions emerge from a collection of dynamic systems that run in parallel and are underpinned by nerve cells that talk to each other - the brain. If you look back in evolution to say, the sea slug Aplysia, you see that the building blocks of this brain have not changed. The amino acids, the nerve cells, the signalling pathways and largely the genes, are the same. "It's the same material [in humans], just more complex," says Singer. "So the same rules must govern what humans do. Unavoidable conclusion." He argues that the human brain has to be complex to compute all the myriad variables that influence each decision we make - genetic factors, socially learned factors, momentary triggers including commands and wishes, to name a few. And because it considers most of those variables at a subconscious level, we are not aware of all the factors that make us behave in a certain way, just as we are not aware of all the elements of an object that are processed separately by our visual brains. As humans, however, we are able to extract some of those factors and make them the focus of attention; that is, render them conscious. And with our behaviour, as with the world we see, we yearn to build a coherent picture. So we might justify our decisions in ways that have nothing to do with our real, subconscious motivations. The most striking example of this is hypnotism. Singer himself learned how to hypnotise while a student at Cambridge University. At a party, he instructed a Royal Air Force pilot to remove the bulb from a light fitting and place it in a flowerpot, on hearing the word Germany. The pilot did so in mid-conversation, much to the amusement of the onlookers. They were amateurs, they didn't debrief him properly. And when they told him what he had done, because he had no recollection of doing it, he was extremely disturbed. According to Singer, what the pilot did is explained by the structure of his brain and its inherent weakness, if you see it as a weakness to be susceptible to hypnotism. The same goes for a murderer or a thief, he says. We live in a society where people whose behaviour is considered to deviate from the norm - as determined arbitrarily by that society - answer to the justice system. But the way they are treated by that system is, he believes, inconsistent. If some abnormality is found in a person's brain, the doctor's report is submitted as mitigating evidence and the defendant may be treated more leniently. If nothing is discovered, they are not. Take the case of the British man who terrorised 200 officials because he thought they intended to have him sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Psychiatrists found no sign of a mitigating mental illness, and he was jailed for life. But, says Singer, if a person does something antisocial, the reason for it is in the brain. The underlying cause may be a twist in a gene, or a tiny hormonal imbalance that cannot be detected with current technology. "It could have multiple reasons," he says. "But these reasons must all manifest themselves in brain architecture." In practice, he says, the change in thinking he advocates wouldn't change the way we treat criminals all that much. People considered a danger to society should be kept away from society, re-educated as far as possible and in cases where this is not possible, simply kept away, as they already are. But he would like to see the courts place less burden on psychiatrists, who are not capable of identifying all the subtle structural changes that lead individuals to behave as they do. "As long as we can't identify all the causes, which we cannot and will probably never be able to do, we should grant that for everybody there is a neurobiological reason for being abnormal," he says. He does not argue that a criminal should not be held responsible for their crime. After all, if a person is not responsible for their own brain, who is? Neither does he argue that we should do away with concepts of good and evil. "We judge our fellow men as either conforming to our rules or breaking them," he says. "We need to continue to assign values to our behaviour, because there is no other way to organise society." However, he does argue that when people commit crimes, they are not acting independently of the nerve cells and amino acids that make up their brains, and that behave according to certain deterministic principles. One important implication of his argument is that treatment meted out to offenders should be less about revenge and punishment, and more about assessing their risk of re-offending, given the brain they have. Of course, this already happens. If a woman has been driven to a crime of passion after severe provocation, having otherwise lived an exemplary life, she is considered less of a danger to society than a man who has frequently abducted teenage girls, raped and murdered them. Another corollary of Singer's ideas that he recognises will be harder for people to swallow, is that the consequences of a crime should be considered less important than they are, since an individual can only control his own actions and not those of others. For example, a driver seen running a red light should be treated the same way whether or not he hit the child who, unseen from the wheel, stepped into the road at the same moment. "Breathtaking," is how Ted Honderich, a philosopher at University College London, scathingly describes Singer's foray into traditional philosophical territory. Honderich says philosophers have discussed different definitions of freedom for centuries, one of which is perfectly compatible with the sort of determinism Singer describes. That is, if free action is defined as action caused by your character - whatever hereditary and environmental influences contributed to that characte