November 2006 Archives

Here's a neat article about finding the mastermind in a social network... who do you have to eliminate to break the whole thing up? Who's got the real power in the group?

Who’s the most important player in a group? Who’s merely peripheral? Data crunchers find out by plotting people as “nodes” on computerized graphs, forming web-like networks. The links between nodes are then weighed and analyzed using matrix algebra and other tools.

And it's not the "hubs" who know everyone, as you might suspect. Social network analysis (SNA) is an emerging part of artificial intelligence, especially as we struggle to dismantle terrorist networks, and this stuff is pretty cutting edge.

Lots of people wonder what fire is made of, so read and find out.

The glow of a flame is somewhat complex. Black-body radiation is emitted from soot, gas, and fuel particles, though the soot particles are too small to behave like perfect blackbodies. There is also photon emission by de-excited atoms and molecules in the gases. Much of the radiation is emitted in the visible and infrared bands. The color depends on temperature for the black-body radiation, and chemical makeup for the emission spectra. The dominant color in a flame changes with temperature. The photo of the forest fire is an excellent example of this variation. Near the ground, where most burning is occurring, it is white, the hottest color possible for organic material in general, or yellow. Above the yellow region, the color changes to orange, which is somewhat cooler, then red, which is cooler still. Above the red region, combustion no longer occurs, and the uncombusted carbon particles are visible as black smoke.

So the flame itself consists of glowing, burning particles that rise due to convection and are called smoke and soot when they cool.

I don't know much about reading the weather because we didn't have much of it in Southern California. However, now that I'm in the middle of a blizzard in Missouri I guess it's time to learn.

Jessica and I were talking yesterday about human nature and the inherent flaws of meritocratic organizations. People want power and recognition for its own sake, and those who tend to rise high within an organization are often hard workers not because they care about the organization or its goals, but because of their lust for power.

I doubt anyone would disagree with that simple observation, which is why our culture frowns on people who derive personal benefits from organizational power. The pastor of a megachurch shouldn't get a "company" limo, and the CEO of a corporation can't use his insider information to profit on the stock market. The salary and benefits paid by an organization should be high enough to align the powerful employees' goals with those of the organization, and most corporate structures are designed that way. However, such a structure was not envisioned when our Constitution was written, and so our legislators are preoccupied with power and prestige because their goals do not align with ours.

It was a solemn pledge, repeated by Democratic leaders and candidates over and over: If elected to the majority in Congress, Democrats would implement all of the recommendations of the bipartisan commission that examined the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But with control of Congress now secured, Democratic leaders have decided for now against implementing the one measure that would affect them most directly: a wholesale reorganization of Congress to improve oversight and funding of the nation's intelligence agencies. ...

It may seem like a minor matter, but members of the commission say Congress's failure to change itself is anything but inconsequential. In 2004, the commission urged Congress to grant the House and Senate intelligence committees the power not only to oversee the nation's intelligence agencies but also to fund them and shape intelligence policy. The intelligence committees' gains would come at the expense of the armed services committees and the appropriations panels' defense subcommittees. Powerful lawmakers on those panels would have to give up prized legislative turf.

But the commission was unequivocal about the need.

"Of all our recommendations, strengthening congressional oversight may be among the most difficult and important," the panel wrote. "So long as oversight is governed by current congressional rules and resolutions, we believe the American people will not get the security they want and need."

I'm certainly not a huge fan of the 9/11 Commission, but this recommendation appears eminently sensible. It's clear that the congresscritters who currently control the intelligence budget aren't eager to keep it because they think they're doing a better job than anyone else could, but rather because it pumps up their portfolio.

To the Sept. 11 commission, the call for congressional overhaul was vital, said former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean (R), the commission's co-chairman. Because intelligence committee membership affords lawmakers access to classified information, only intelligence committee members can develop the expertise to watch over operations properly, he said. But because the panels do not control the budget, intelligence agencies tend to dismiss them.

"The person who controls your budget is the person you listen to," Kean said.

Those people, the appropriators, do not seem to care much, he said. The intelligence budget is a small fraction of the nearly $500 billion overseen by the armed services committees and the appropriations panels' defense subcommittees. Kean said that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), an Armed Services Committee member, told the Sept. 11 commission that if his panel spends 10 minutes considering the intelligence budget, it has been a good year.

Professionally, people are motivated by only a few things: money, power, and prestige. It might make everyone feel warm and fuzzy inside to hope that our legislators are altruistic and only have our best interests at heart, but anyone who watched any campaign ads earlier this month knows that isn't true. Our Constitutional system is designed to reward successful congressmen with reelection -- power and prestige -- but that's a rather blunt instrument when applied every two years.

I'm not sure if there's an effective way to harness the power of money to force our politicians to align their goals more closely with those of the public, short of what many would consider to be outright bribery. Maybe the system we've got is the best possible, but given that it isn't based on capitalistic competitive principles I doubt that's the case.

The American left is riddled with ironic and contradictory beliefs, and Cinnamon Stillwell shines a light through one of the biggest hypocritical holes by detailing recent mob rule on "elite" college campuses. "Liberal" students (who are anything but, which is why I label them "leftist") apparently don't quite understand that the right of free speech is more than just a tool the ACLU uses to persecute Christians.

Conservative speakers have long been the targets of such illiberal treatment. The violent reception given to Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project, an anti-illegal immigration group, at Columbia University in October is a recent example. Gilchrist had been invited to speak by the Columbia University College Republicans, but was prevented from doing so by an unruly mob of students. What could have been mere heckling descended into yelling, screaming, kicking and punching, culminating in the rushing of the stage and Gilchrist being shuttled off by security.

The fact that the rioting students could be heard yelling, "He has no right to speak!" was telling. Apparently, in their minds, neither Gilchrist nor anyone else with whom they disagree has a right to express their viewpoints. In any other setting this would be called exactly what it is -- totalitarianism. But in the untouchable Ivy League world of Columbia, it was chalked up to student activism gone awry. While condemning the incident, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger has yet to apologize to Gilchrist or to conclude the supposed investigation into the affair. In other words, mob rule won the day.

Read the rest of the examples and consider one of the many reasons I decided not to become a professor.

(HT: Instapundit.)

My Hitachi 50UX23K television (ca. 1995) is acting a little funny but it's rather hard to find technical information about products from before the Internet age. There are several companies selling PFD versions of the service manual, but it seemed absurd to pay $10 or more for an unauthorized electronic copy... and I was right! eServiceInfo provides free services manuals and schematics for all sorts of electronics. If you've got something old that you'd like to repair, check there before paying anyone for anything.

The last week has been gorgeous here, thanks to global warming, with average temperatures in the high sixties. Let's see what's in store for St. Louis today and tomorrow....

Crap.

I might just have to order this new book so I can understand my wife.

In The Female Mind, Dr Luan Brizendine says women devote more brain cells to talking than men.

And, if that wasn't enough, the simple act of talking triggers a flood of brain chemicals which give women a rush similar to that felt by heroin addicts when they get a high.

Dr Brizendine, a self-proclaimed feminist, says the differences can be traced back to the womb, where the sex hormone testosterone moulds the developing male brain.

The areas responsible for communication, emotion and memory are all pared back the unborn baby boy.

The result is that boys - and men - chat less than their female counterparts and struggle to express their emotions to the same extent.

"Women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion, while men have a small country road," said Dr Brizendine, who runs a female "mood and hormone" clinic in San Francisco.

There are, however, advantages to being the strong, silent type. Dr Brizendine explains that testosterone also reduces the size of the section of the brain involved in hearing - allowing men to become "deaf" to the most logical of arguments put forward by their wives and girlfriends.

But what the male brain may lack in converstation and emotion, they more than make up with in their ability to think about sex.

Dr Brizendine says the brain's "sex processor" - the areas responsible for sexual thoughts - is twice as big as in men than in women, perhaps explaining why men are stereotyped as having sex on the mind.

Or, to put it another way, men have an international airport for dealing with thoughts about sex, "where women have an airfield nearby that lands small and private planes".

I knew it wasn't my fault, I'm just extremely masculine! Sweet.

In my previous posts about wiping out AIDS I've asked whether or not it's time to consider drastic measures to curb the disease, and now it sounds like other scientists are asking the same questions.

Within the next 25 years, AIDS is set to join heart disease and stroke as the top three causes of death worldwide, according to a study published online Monday.

When global mortality projections were last calculated a decade ago, researchers had assumed the number of AIDS cases would be declining. Instead, it's on the rise. ...

"It will be increasingly hard to sustain treatment programs unless we can turn off the tap of new HIV infections," said Dr. Richard Hays, professor of epidemiology at London's School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who was not linked to the study. "These AIDS numbers point to a need to do more in prevention."

Simply focusing on treatment or politically uncontroversial prevention methods will not suffice. "You can't put all your eggs in the abstinence basket," said Hays. "We need a menu of strategies for real people," he said, adding that condom distribution as well as new methods, such as a vaccine, are needed.

However, I think Hays is crazy if he really believes that promoting abstinence is "politically uncontroversial". In fact, advocating chastity and marital fidelity is nearly unthinkable for American politicians. Sure, a gesture is made to promote abstinence among teanagers, but even that suggestion is met with fierce hostility from all corners other than the Christian right. The idea that everyone should refrain from sex outside of marriage is anathema to modern American culture, no matter what percentage of us claims to be Christian.

And yet... it's hard to see any other way to stop the spread of AIDS unless a vaccine or cure is developed. Condoms have been pushed as the STD solution for decades, and yet the scourge of AIDS is still spreading like wildfire around the world.

Here's a great article that explores the oncoming intersection between artificial intelligence and human services. An important development, considering that there aren't nearly enough elder-care workers for the aging baby-boomers.

Unfortunately, there's a shortage of people working in nursing homes and caring for old people and the disabled, said Maja Mataric, director of the University of Southern California's Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems. The average stroke victim gets 39 minutes of active exercise a day when six hours a day is needed, she said, so robots can free up the few nurses for more nurturing activities.

Mataric adjusts her robots' personalities to fit the needs of stroke patients -- nurturing buddy or goal-pushing coach.

And in the case of low-functioning autistic children, they actually seem to relate better to robots than humans, Mataric said. "You'll see a child smile that has never smiled before. No one knows why it happens."

The scientists trying to engineer robots to work with humans are learning more than they expected. They have a new appreciation for our own unique abilities.

Said Deb Roy, director of MIT's Cognitive Machines Group: "It's not until you try to build a machine that does the same task (that people do) ... that you realize how incredibly hard it is."

I've said the same thing before. Studying artificial intelligence has given me a real appreciation of just how amazing humans are.

I like this quote:

"We're cheap dates," [Sherry Turkle from MIT] says. "If an entity makes eye contact with you, if an entity reaches toward you in friendship, we believe there is somebody there ... But that doesn't mean that there is. That just means that our Darwinian buttons are being pushed."

Girl jumping on bed falls out window.

A toddler plunged to her death from an eight story-apartment building on Sunday when she fell through an open window while jumping on a bed, authorities said.

Alameda County Coroner's officials identified the girl as 3-year-old Tia Simmons. The girl's mother wasn't in the apartment at the time, authorities said.

Sad. I'll save this for when I have kids.

I've noticed two phenomenon since I moved to the St. Louis area from Los Angeles: there are more churches here, and there are far more billboards advertising churches. These must be related.

Perhaps in Los Angeles churches don't think it's worth advertising because they don't think the ads will have much of an effect. Maybe churches don't think there are many potential attendees who don't already attend. However, in St. Louis a much higher proportion of people attend church, and it seems even more unlikely that there are unreached potential attendees.

Perhaps churches in Los Angeles don't have the money to rent billboards, despite a desire to do so? I doubt it. There are plenty of large churches in Los Angeles with plenty of money.

What seems most likely to me is that churches in St. Louis aren't trying to non-attenders -- the billboards are generally cheesy, and I think Los Angeles churches are right in thinking that billboards wouldn't attract unbelievers. No, the reason that I think St. Louis churches put up billboards is because they're trying to get attenders to switch churches. With so many churches, competition must be fierce for attenders, and they figure the population is dense enough with Christians that billboards are a cost-effective method to convince some to switch their attendance.

Seeing as how none of the signs I've seen have advertized any Biblical virtues or encouraged spiritual growth, but rather mere "happiness Christianity", it seems that the churches that are deepest into the competition are also the churches with the least real spirituality. Overall, I don't think the billboards speak well of the churches that put them up, especially nonsense like the Methodists' current "If you can wish, you can believe" campaign.

The always brilliant Victor Davis Hanson sheds some light on liberal internationalism. I think his insight into the leftist mind also holds true regarding domestic affairs.

Or is it a deeper malaise that modern liberal internationalism is neither liberal nor international. Lacking any real belief that the United States, now or in its past, has been a continual force for good, the contemporary Left hardly wants the rest of the world to suffer the American malaise of racism, sexism, homophobia, environmental degradation, and consumerism. That self-doubt is buttressed by the idea as well that confrontation is always bad, that evil does not really exist, but is a construct we create for misunderstanding, that the world’s ills are remedied by reason and dialogue.

In essence, the progressive Leftist is often affluent, insulated from the savagery about him by his material largess, and empathizes with those who are antithetical to the very forces that made him free, secure, and prosperous—as a way to assuage the guilt, at very little cost, of his own blessedness.

Then the leftists dupe those who they (generally wrongly) believe they have victimized into joining together to make them victims in truth.

(HT: Instapundit.)

Predicting the weather is hard, and expert climatologists from Al Gore on down made wrong predictions about the 2006 hurricane season.

Al Gore's new movie on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," opens with scenes from Hurricane Katrina slamming into New Orleans. The former vice president says unequivocally that because of global warming, it is all but certain that future hurricanes will be more violent and destructive than those in the past.

Inconvenient or not, the nation's top hurricane scientists are divided on whether it's the truth.

With the official start of hurricane season days away, meteorologists are unanimous that the 2006 tropical storm season, which runs from June 1 through November, is likely to be a doozy. The first tropical storm of this season showered light rain yesterday on Acapulco, a Mexican Pacific resort, but forecasters said the weather could worsen. Tropical storm Aletta was stalled 135 miles from Acapulco, with maximum winds of 45 mph, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami, which said the storm could move toward land today.

The 2004 and 2005 Atlantic hurricane seasons broke many records, and as forecasters predict 15 named storms, nine or 10 making it to hurricane strength and four or five of those major, 2006 is shaping up as another bad one.

But 2006 was the calmest year in a decade.

With cataclysmic predictions that hurricanes would swarm from the tropics like termites, no one thought 2006 would be the most tranquil season in a decade.

I'll worry about global warming over the next century when scientists can make accurate predictions six months into the future.

A sickly disturbing New York Times piece sadly illustrates the price of American weakness. Our supposed "allies" are in fact financing the terrorists in Iraq and around the world. Why do they have the balls for such a move? Because they know the United States will just bend over and take it.

The insurgency in Iraq is now self-sustaining financially, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, connivance by corrupt Islamic charities and other crimes that the Iraqi government and its American patrons have been largely unable to prevent, a classified United States government report has concluded.

The report, obtained by The New York Times, estimates that groups responsible for many insurgent and terrorist attacks are raising $70 million to $200 million a year from illegal activities. It says $25 million to $100 million of that comes from oil smuggling and other criminal activity involving the state-owned oil industry, aided by “corrupt and complicit” Iraqi officials.

As much as $36 million a year comes from ransoms paid for hundreds of kidnap victims, the report says. It estimates that unnamed foreign governments — previously identified by American officials as including France and Italy — paid $30 million in ransom last year.

So our "allies" buy smuggled oil, pay ransoms, and so forth, and their money is then turned around and used to kill Iraqis and Americans. Fantastic. France and Italy -- among others -- apparently need to relearn what it means to get on our bad side. Unfortunately for the world, it looks like America wants to be liked more than we want to be respected. So in the end we get neither... we just get killed.

From the creator of AirShowFan comes a newly up-to-date guide to digital cameras. He explains a lot of the domain-specific vocabulary so that you'll be able to know what you're comparing, and then gives a list of his top 50 digital cameras. A handy resource that I wish I'd had when I was buying a camera (of course, I had Bernardo's personal assistance anyway).

Zefreak2 has sent me this slideshow of The Palm in Dubai and it really looks like an incredible feat of human engineering. It's sad though that all the region's petrodollars go into projects like these rather than into improving the freedom and opportunity of the millions of poor people who live there. Here's the homepage of The Palm Jumeirah project. Yeah, I wouldn't mind owning one of the private islands.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Why not share something you're thankful for in a comment?

Even though this Thanksgiving will probably be one of the most difficult for my family, we really do have a lot to be thankful for. Our escape from Los Angeles went almost flawlessly; my new job is great; our new house is fantastic; and our kitten has likely found a new home. Sure, there are struggles, but we'll get through them with some hard work and a healthy dose of God's grace.

Please be in prayer for my mother-in-law who is in the hospital. The doctors still need to figure out exactly what's wrong with her, but we're optimistic that she'll make a fill recovery.

Also, this is the first Thanksgiving that I haven't spent with my parents, and I miss them. The hardest thing about moving across the country is not getting to see them very often, which probably goes without saying.

If you can't send all the criminals to prison, bring the prison to the criminals.

The NYPD has installed a patrol tower in a Harlem neighborhood in an effort to cut crime in the high-risk neighborhood.

The two-story booth tower, called Sky Watch, gives the officer sitting inside a better vantage point from which to monitor the area. Officers in the booth have access to a spotlight, sensors, and four cameras. The tower is portable and can be moved to the areas that need it most.

A little more money for razor wire and they'll be all set.

Despite all the amazing scientific advances of the past few centuries there is still a heck of a lot that we don't know, especially about ourselves. First up is a really remarkable new study that has completely revolutionized our understanding of genetics.

The discovery has astonished scientists studying the human genome - the genetic recipe of man. Until now it was believed the variation between people was due largely to differences in the sequences of the individual " letters" of the genome.

It now appears much of the variation is explained instead by people having multiple copies of some key genes that make up the human genome.

Until now it was assumed that the human genome, or "book of life", is largely the same for everyone, save for a few spelling differences in some of the words. Instead, the findings suggest that the book contains entire sentences, paragraphs or even whole pages that are repeated any number of times.

The findings mean that instead of humanity being 99.9 per cent identical, as previously believed, we are at least 10 times more different between one another than once thought - which could explain why some people are prone to serious diseases.

One consequence that the article underplays is that this discovery now makes it possible, for the first time, to determine a person's "race" or "ethnicity" based on their DNA. What's more,

Another implication of the finding is that we are more different to our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, than previously assumed from earlier studies. Instead of being 99 per cent similar, we are more likely to be about 96 per cent similar.

Thereby striking another blow against evolution (which will probably go completely unnoticed until the entire edifice crumbles). As I said, there's a lot we don't know, and it's continually surprising how much of what we think we know turns out to be wrong or only partially right. Makes life interesting!

Secondly, some high-definition pictures of animals in the womb.

An unborn elephant, tiny but perfect in every way. A dolphin swimming in the womb, just as it will have to swim in the ocean the moment it is born. An unborn dog panting. Each one amazing and now, thanks to these remarkable pictures, they can be seen for the first time.

Using an array of technology, the images reveal what until now has been a secret - exactly how animals develop in the womb. They were created by the same team who in 2004 showed how human embryos "walk in the womb".

Using a combination of three-dimensional ultrasound scans, computer graphics and tiny cameras, the team were able to show the entire process from conception to birth.

"These kind of images from inside animals have never been seen before," said Jeremy Dear of Pioneer Productions, who made the film.

These sorts of pictures will eventually overcome the ocean of blood money that keeps the abortion industry afloat.

"Animals were trained to sit still near the scanners and we also inserted cameras into the womb via the elephant's rectum-But it has been worth it. It one sequence we follow an elephant developing. When it is finally born, there is not a dry eye in the house.

Wait for the same movie to be made of a human baby. The whole debate on abortion is undergoing a sea-change as our scientific knowledge of what goes on in the womb advances. Those of our children who survive will likely live in a world that recognizes abortion as the barbarity it is.

Update:

I like James Taranto's take on the in utero pictures:

The unborn elephant, shown at the link, is quite something to see. By contrast, as we all know from reading the newspapers, there is no such thing as an unborn human being. We develop by a little-understood process in which a clump of cells, similar to a tumor or a fingernail, miraculously becomes a baby at the moment the entire clump is exposed to air.

That humans and animals come into the world in such radically different ways pretty much demolishes the notion that we are the product of Darwinian evolution, doesn't it?

As was inevitable, OJ's hypothetical confessional has been cancelled... reaffirming the tiny bit of respect I still have for the American people. The Associated Press doesn't seem to understand the real issue, however.

After a firestorm of criticism, News. Corp. said Monday that it has canceled the O.J. Simpson book and TV special "If I Did It."

"I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project," said Rupert Murdoch, News Corp. chairman. "We are sorry for any pain that this has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson." ...

For the publishing industry, the cancellation of "If I Did It" was an astonishing end to a story like no other. Numerous books have been withdrawn over the years because of possible plagiarism, most recently Kaavya Viswanathan's "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life," but a book's removal simply for objectionable content is virtually unheard of.

The problem isn't the content, it's that people shouldn't profit from evil, either their own or others'. There have been a slashillion books about OJ's murders that probably had far more content than this book would have had, and they weren't objectionable because OJ didn't create them to profit off his evil.

If I know anything about Judith Regan, the would-be publisher will shop the manuscript around at other companies now that her boss has axed the project.

I waver between favoring legalization of most drugs and not, but there's no question that the current War on Drugs is horribly harmful to our country and our erstwhile allies in whose countries the drugs are manufactured. Mostly-harmless people are harassed by law enforcement agencies and often thrown in jail for longer terms than rapists, and for what? Are drugs less of a problem now than they were 100 years ago when they were legal?

The latest outrage touches the War on Drugs tangentially and also involves an issue Clayton Cramer and Randy Balko have taken the lead on vocally denouncing: no-knock SWAT raids on drug suspects that needlessly endanger everyone involved.

The set-up, from Mr. Balko: Cheryl Lynn Noel is gunned down in her home by police officers after marijuana seeds are found in her trash cans.

The facts of the case are awful: A Baltimore SWAT team conducted a 4:30am raid on the Noel family home after finding marijuana seeds and "trace" amounts of cocaine in the family's outdoor trash can. After battering down the door, they deployed a flashbang grenade, then rushed up the steps to the bedroom of Cheryl and Charles Noel.

Cheryl Noel's stepdaughter had been murdered several years earlier, and her son had recently been jumped by thugs on his way home. So the family had a legal, registered handgun in the home, and Noel had reason to be frightened. When a SWAT officer kicked open the bedroom door, Noel sat up in bed with the gun, apparently pointed downward, not at the officer. The officer, who was wearing a helmet, mask, shield, and bulletproof vest, and who came in behind a bulletproof ballistic shield, fired twice. Noel slumped over, and the gun slipped out of her hand. The officer then walked over to her and ordered her to move further away from the gun. She couldn't, of course. When she didn't, he shot her a third time, essentially from point-blank range.

The punchline? The police officer who shot Noel has been given a Silver Star.

On January 21, 2005, Officer Carlos Artson saved himself and his fellow officers from being shot. Officer Artson was confronted by a woman pointed a loaded handgun at him, during the service of a high risk, "no knock" search warrant for an ongoing narcotics investigation.

It's quite possible that Noel was pointing the gun at the officer and not at the ground, but what the heck were the police doing in her home unannounced at all? I'm a huge supporter of the police, but it's utterly insane that they can burst into your home and kill you because they found some seeds while they were rooting through your trash. Even if the police in this case acted entirely properly according to their procedures, the laws need to be changed to prevent them from being put into this kind of position.