Month: February 2011

You'd think that Andy McCarthy, a formal federal prosecutor, would be capable of explaining to readers at The Corner the actual reasons why some Republicans objected to reauthorizing various Patriot Act provisions. But in this post, he acts as if their opposition was "mindless preening — the kind that makes you wonder if some of the people screaming about 'first principles' understand what the first principles are." Let's look more closely at how McCarthy misleads the uninformed reader. Here is how he explains one controversial provision:

Roving wiretaps can only be used with the approval of a judge, and if you are going to target a terrorist or other foreign agent for electronic surveillance at all, it is downright dumb not to get a roving tap because these guys are sophisticated actors who change their phones a lot to defeat surveillance. If we didn’t have roving taps, investigators would have to go back to court and get a new eavesdropping order every time that happened. For that reason, law-enforcement agents doing run-of-the-mill drug investigations have had roving tap authority for about 30 years.

In order to understand why the provision is actually controversial let's see what The Cato Institute's Julian Sanchez wrote about it:

Roving wiretap authority allows intelligence wiretap orders to follow a target across multiple phone lines or online accounts. Similar authority has been available in criminal investigations since 1986, but Patriot’s roving wiretaps differ from the version available in criminal cases, because the target of an order may be “described” rather than identified. Courts have stressed this requirement for identification of a named target as a feature that enables criminal roving wiretaps to satisfy the “particularity” requirement of the Fourth Amendment. Patriot’s roving taps, by contrast, raise the possibility of “John Doe” warrants that name neither a person nor a specific “place” or facility–disturbingly similar to the “general warrants” the Founders were concerned to prohibit when they crafted the Fourth Amendment. Given the general breadth of FISA surveillance and the broad potential scope of online investigations, John Doe warrants would pose a high risk of “overcollecting” innocent Americans’ communications. Most civil liberties advocates would be fine with making this authority permanent if it were simply modified to match the criminal authority and foreclose the possibility of "John Doe" warrants by requiring either a named individual target or a list of specific facilities to be wiretapped.

In its coverage of intra-Republican disagreements, National Review ought to labor to explain for its readers the crux of the disagreement. McCarthy completely obscures it. And he is a serial offender, doing the same thing in this post. This is particularly egregious because some of the Republicans who raised questions about Patriot reauthorization have given detailed statements articulating various specific concerns.

A reader writes:

I work at the IBM T.J.Watson Research Center (where they are probably not happy about the time I spend on your blog at the office :)  I know personally many of the people who worked on the Watson project (I work on different research projects). Those who question the financial soundness of the IBM investment in Watson are very short-sighted.

First of all, since when is investing in basic science without an immediate payout a bad investment? Don't we want our corporate citizens to invest in basic science? Or it has to be exclusively the role of the government? But then one can just read John Markoff's story about how IBM will announce today all sorts of commercial projects related to the technologies used by Watson.  

And finally, virtually every single academic Computer Science department across the US (and abroad) held Jeopardy viewings for the last three nights, with IBM representatives on hand to answer questions about Watson and to show how cool and exciting is to come work for IBM. Just in recruiting alone, I wager Watson will pay off.

We saw this with Deep Blue (the chess machine) 15 years ago. That was not even closely related to a commercially applicable technology like Watson is, and yet it paid off. We would not have done it again, otherwise.

Madrid, Spain, 11.20 am

Ann Friedman's post on the subject is the best around:

Do reporters like Lara Logan and [Mac McClelland] face greater threats to their safety than male reporters do in similar situations? Yes. But do they also, by dint of their gender, gain greater access to certain sources — and arguably do their job better? Sometimes, yeah. I have a hard time believing that rape survivors in Haiti would have been as open with a male reporter as they were with Mac. Doing everything in our power to ensure the safety of women reporters — and supporting them unequivocally when that safety is threatened or violated — isn’t just important on feminist grounds. It’s important on journalistic grounds, too.

And, of course, it isn't just reporters who face these kinds of dangers.

Reihan Salam says its among our biggest assets:

Manu Joseph has written a fascinating Letter from India describing the pervasiveness of English in India, and the futile efforts by xenophobic nationalists to combat it. His basic argument is that India's failure to embrace English as its true national language has stunted economic progress, particularly for the Dalit population and other marginalized groups that rely on state schools offering instruction in various indigenous regional languages. 

My first-cut thought after reading the piece was that the dominance of English is an enormous asset for the U.S. and the other Anglophone countries, and it doesn't seem to be fading even as the relative economic power of the U.S. erodes. We often talk about the "exorbitant privilege" of the dollar's role as the international reserve currency, but we can think of the English language as something akin to Facebook: a powerful platform on which we can build a slew of cultural and economic applications, and it's a platform that we know better than almost anyone else.

Anand Gopal reports on the strikes in Egypt:

[M]any of the strikes assert political and economic demands simultaneously, in part because the CEOs of many firms are tied to the Mubarak regime. And with a few exceptions, such as steel magnate and National Democratic Party kingpin Ahmed Ezz, those CEOs are still in positions of power.

Ken Jennings relives his battle with the machine:

[U]nlike us, Watson cannot be intimidated. It never gets cocky or discouraged. It plays its game coldly, implacably, always offering a perfectly timed buzz when it's confident about an answer. … During my 2004 Jeopardy! streak, I was accustomed to mowing down players already demoralized at having to play a long-standing winner like me. But against Watson I felt like the underdog, and as a result I started out too aggressively, blowing high-dollar-value questions on the decade in which the first crossword puzzle appeared (the 1910s) and the handicap of Olympic gymnast George Eyser (he was missing his left leg). 

American Spectator's John R. Guardiano distances himself from anti-Muslim conservatives and reminds us that "we can say with near certainty that the thugs who violently abused and violated Logan were anti-protesters sent into the streets by Mubarak":

[She was] saved by a group of Egyptian women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers. In short, this attack was not the offspring of the “new Egypt”; it was the rabid reaction of the “old Egypt.” And these were not “Muslims” who did this (chapter 5, verse 2 of the Qur'an says: “do not let your hatred of a people incite you to aggression”). These were barbarians.

A reader writes:

There is a Facebook page for Egyptians to condemn the attack on Lara Logan. It stands as a firm rebuke to the likes of Debbie Schlussel and Pam Geller who would use this brutal assault as an opportunity to foster blind hatred.  I found myself in tears as I read some of the comments posted to the wall.

A reader writes:

Another way to think of the cost-benefit equation with winning Jeopardy is the comparative energy consumption of the people versus Watson. Several terabytes of storage, thousands of parallel computing cores and several cooling units that make up Watson compared to a human that consumes several thousand calories per day. I'm sure even the Watson stage avatar by itself consumes more energy than the two human contestants.

Here is a behind-the-scenes look at Watson's innards. Another writes:

I watched the PBS documentary on Watson last week and what struck me most was just how close we are to a Star Trek ship’s computer. 

Being a fan of The Next Generation, I loved watching Beverly Crusher go back and forth with her sickbay computer to diagnose a medical issue.  You could see flashes of inspiration in Beverly’s eyes as the computer made connections that she had no way of making because it was tapping into to resources and databases her human mind could never store internally (or never even know about).  But the “ta-da” moment came from Beverly as she connected the dots herself, and then bounced her logic off the computer to make sure it was sound, sometimes going several rounds before working it all out.  Watson seems very close to being able to fulfill that kind of promise.

The documentary touched on a possible new type of “big picture” researcher.  A scientist or doctor that uses a Watson-type interface to make connections across various fields of research; connections that specialists might never make because of their narrower focus.  As long as a person is trained on how to ask the questions, the Computer can pull answers from all available sources and suggest multiple related items that might never have been considered before.

The potential is extraordinary, right?

Ursula Lindsey puts Lara Logan's sexual assault in context:

A survey released in 2008 by the Center for Women's Rights found that 83 percent of Egyptian women and 98 percent of foreign women had experienced harassment. Still, many here remain in denial about the extent of sexual violence and the very nature of harassment. Until recently, there was no word in Arabic for it—with people instead using the much lighter terms mu’aksa ("flirting, teasing").

And many women remain uncomfortable discussing sexual harassment or assault because they fear they will be stigmatized or blamed for it. When I reported on the subject a few years back, some men I interviewed said only girls who dress provocatively get harassed; other denied flatly that harassment takes place at all.

Resorting to the police has been largely useless; they are often accused of harassment themselves.