Month: April 2012

The reality of the robot war:

The CIA insists that it has not killed an innocent civilian in Pakistan for well over a year while eliminating hundreds of terrorists. People who know better sneer at this, including Jeffrey Addicott, a former special adviser to the U.S. Army special forces. At best, Addicott wrote, we should expect three innocent deaths for every two "bad guys. In the trade, this is called the ‘Oops’ factor."

Michael Hastings has more on the drone campaign:

[F]or every "high-value" target killed by drones, there's a civilian or other innocent victim who has paid the price. The first major success of drones – the 2002 strike that took out the leader of Al Qaeda in Yemen – also resulted in the death of a U.S. citizen. More recently, a drone strike by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2010 targeted the wrong individual – killing a well-known human rights advocate named Zabet Amanullah who actually supported the U.S.-backed government. The U.S. military, it turned out, had tracked the wrong cellphone for months, mistaking Amanullah for a senior Taliban leader. A year earlier, a drone strike killed Baitullah Mehsud, the head of the Pakistani Taliban, while he was visiting his father-in-law; his wife was vaporized along with him. But the U.S. had already tried four times to assassinate Mehsud with drones, killing dozens of civilians in the failed attempts. One of the missed strikes, according to a human rights group, killed 35 people, including nine civilians, with reports that flying shrapnel killed an eight-year-old boy while he was sleeping. Another blown strike, in June 2009, took out 45 civilians, according to credible press reports."

In one case, probably:

The marriage was ruined, for example, because the partners were so dead to each other erotically that even though their marriage worked really well in other dimensions, as a Platonic marriage, a friendship, and a stable, co-parenting arrangement, the spouses saw no path forward. The lifelong monogamy imperative of marriage that they didn’t want to abandon but couldn’t live with maneuvered them into a box. They couldn’t be married, monogamous, sane, and fully human all at once. So rather than live sexlessly monogamous, they divorced. … The wife wasn’t happier, post-divorce. In that sense, the divorce didn’t “work” any better than the other bad alternatives.

It caused bitterness with the children toward the father, and the wife toward the husband. The husband did enjoy a life that was more of his design and to his taste, but at the cost of his marriage and family. You can conclude that the husband was a bad person in a good institution of (monogamous) marriage. Or you can conclude he was a good person struggling with, if not a “bad” institution, then at least a Procrustean one.

One reason Netanyahu might call elections early:

[I]f President Obama is re-elected and decides to resume his stalled effort to rebuild the peace process, Netanyahu will face pressure from Obama to make concessions during the Israeli campaign. If he makes concessions, he splits his own coalition; if he refuses, and relations with the US worsen as a result, his opponents can argue that Netanyahu’s hard line endangers Israel’s relationship with its most important ally. Running now, when Obama has an election of his own to consider and is eager to avoid a breach with Israel for a variety of reasons, might neutralize the US issue during the race.

Meanwhile, Olmert sounds like the Dish:

“America is not a client state of Israel — maybe the opposite is true,” he said. “Why should we want America to be put in a situation where whatever they do will be interpreted as if they obeyed orders from Jerusalem?”

Oh, and a memo to AIPAC's bullies:

“As a concerned Israeli citizen who lives in the state of Israel with his family and all of his children and grandchildren, I love very much the courage of those who live 10,000 miles away from the state of Israel and are ready that we will make every possible mistake that will cost lives of Israelis.”

But what's fascinating to me is how a center-right Israeli politician is far less hawkish and paranoid than his Jewish American audience.

(Photo: Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert arrives for the beginning of his corruption trail at the Jerusalem District Court on May 31, 2011 in Jerusalem, Israel. By Kobi Gideon-Pool/Getty Images)

Nick Robins-Early digests a recent study about New York City's stop-and-frisk program:

[T]he study shows that out of those stopped only 0.15 per cent resulted in firearms charges. This number stands to directly contradict Commissioner Kelly’s statements that the stops are responsible for the fall in gun crime. Also of note is the fact that out of all ethnicities stopped, white people had the highest chance of having committed a crime, despite being proportionally the least searched.

(Chart from the New York Civil Liberties Union)

A fascinating finding:

To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language. A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.

The big picture:

In the researchers’ view, our rational mind seems to take charge when we’re using a less-familiar language. "Even when people fully comprehend the meaning of taboo words, reprimands, expressions of love, and advertising slogans, they react to them less emotionally in a foreign language," they note. "This reduction in emotional response might … allow people to rely more on analytic processes when they make decisions."

A new study's disturbing findings:

(i) juries formed from all-white jury pools convict black defendants significantly (16 percentage points) more often than white defendants, and (ii) this gap in conviction rates is entirely eliminated when the jury pool includes at least one black member. The impact of jury race is much greater than what a simple correlation of the race of the seated jury and conviction rates would suggest. These findings imply that the application of justice is highly uneven and raise obvious concerns about the fairness of trials in jurisdictions with a small proportion of blacks in the jury pool.

Patrick Bayer, senior author of the study, puts the findings in context:

Our Sixth Amendment right to a trial by a fair and impartial jury of our peers is a bedrock of the criminal justice system in the U.S., and yet, despite the importance of that right, there’s been very little systematic analysis of how the composition of juries actually affects trial outcomes, how the rules that we have in place for selecting juries impact those outcomes… Simply put, the luck of the draw on the racial composition of the jury pool has a lot to do with whether someone is convicted and that raises obvious concerns about the fairness of our criminal justice system.

Adam Serwer wants more information on all-white juries vs all-white jury pools:

[Other studies] like this one from the Equal Justice Initiative, suggest that in some areas of the country prosecutors go out of their way to strike black jurors during the selection process. 

Is varied:

Touching has been found to increase the fraction of single women in a nightclub who will accept an invitation to dance, the number of people agreeing to sign a petition, the chances that a college student will risk embarrassment by volunteering to go to the blackboard in a statistics class, the proportion of busy passersby in a mall willing to take ten minutes to fill out a survey form, the percentage of shoppers in a supermarket who purchase food they had sampled, and the odds that a bystander who had just provided someone with directions will help him pick up a bunch of computer disks he drops.

Ed Yong hopes we will eventually be able to fix genetic disorders in the womb:

Every year, millions of people are born with debilitating genetic disorders, a result of inheriting just one faulty gene from their parents. They may have been dealt a dud genetic hand, but they do not have to stick with it. With the power of modern genetics, scientists are developing ways of editing these genetic errors and reversing the course of many hard-to-treat diseases. These gene therapies exploit the abilities of viruses – biological machines that are already superb at penetrating cells and importing genes. By removing their ability to reproduce, and loading them with the genes of our choice, we can transform viruses from causes of disease into vectors for cures.

More on in-utero engineering here.

(Photo: Nineteen-week-old fetal bone development is seen in VAM Design Center of Budapest on April 2, 2012 during an exhibition of "Bodies2". This unique exhibit is a display of several authentic human specimens, including whole bodies, individual organs and transparent body slices preserved through a special process called plastination. By Attila Kisbenedek/AFP/Getty Images.)

Dan Ariely compares the pharmaceutical industry to finance:

[O]n average, it takes about 10-15 years and hundreds of millions of dollars for a drug to make it from the lab to the pharmacy. … In stark contrast, we have the financial industry. In this domain, no one needs to prove the safety or effectiveness of financial products such as derivatives and mortgage-backed securities. This is because we make two major assumptions about such products based on economic theory: we presume first that they have sound internal logic and second, that the market will correct problems and mistakes if something goes awry with one of these new inventions.

A survey of the science:

Decades of studies with frosted lenses, magnetic coils or scent deprivation show they use pretty much every clue available. The most difficult one for us to comprehend may be the earth’s magnetic field.

Birds see it, but what it looks like to them, nobody knows. Work by Roswitha and Wolfgang Wiltschko in Germany, among others, suggests that this sense relies on quantum mechanics—that is, birds detect something happening in the eye at a subatomic level. Light striking the retina seems to stimulate chemical reactions that produce pairs of molecules with electrons that are "entangled," meaning they share certain quantum properties. One of those properties, called "spin," is affected by a magnetic field. That effect could tell the bird which way is north.

The above image is from an installation called "Suspended Together," by Saudi Arabian artist Manal Al Dowayan. Kawlture explains:

[E]ach dove carries on its body a permission document that allows a Saudi woman to travel. Notwithstanding their circumstances, all Saudi women are required to have this document, issued by their appointed male guardian.