“When a broadcasting executive gets out of bed in the morning, before his foot hits the floor, his thoughts are ratings. ‘What are my ratings?’ Not unlike Wall Street people, who get their—and CEOs, their first thought is the price of their stock,” – Phil Donahue, reflecting on his firing from MSNBC for being too anti-war.
Year: 2013
An Experiment With An Expiration Date? Ctd
Like Fallows, Ezra is afraid to get invested in products that Google might kill. In response, Drum identifies why Google’s failed products are particularly disruptive:
Ever since the birth of the PC, you’ve taken a risk when you buy a new product. If it succeeds, it’ll be around for a long time. If it doesn’t, it will die. Google isn’t breaking any new ground here.
What’s different is that Google’s products are all cloud-based. When Google Reader goes away on July 1, that’s it. It’s gone. If it were an ordinary bit of software that I’d installed on my PC, this wouldn’t be a problem. It would keep on working for years even if it never got another update. I’d need to replace it eventually—because of an OS upgrade or a desire for new features that finally got too strong—but I’d probably have years to work that out.
What Iraq Should Have Taught Us
Marc Lynch notes that Iraq War retrospectives “have almost exclusively been written by Americans, talking about Americans, for Americans.” The problem with this American-centric commentary:
The real story of the American departure is how little it mattered. That’s in part because the United States was never as necessary or wanted as Americans liked to believe. There’s no question that U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, for one, made himself indispensible to Iraqi politics through his tireless and effective diplomatic efforts. But as Charles De Gaulle famously (if apocryphally) said, the graveyards are full of indispensible men. Outside players can marginally affect faraway countries for a short time and through tremendous exertion, but their efforts are always refracted through local politics and rarely last. …
Here’s what we should have taken away from the Iraq withdrawal: The U.S. departure just didn’t change very much, and the United States keeping its troops there longer wouldn’t have made much difference. But such a lesson is incompatible with our deeply ingrained strategic narcissism, and thus will not likely be learned.
A Right To Resell
Earlier this week, SCOTUS ruled that Americans have the right to re-sell books bought abroad. Jerry Brito explains the case:
Supap Kirtsaeng, a student at Cornell who was originally from Thailand, realized that the exact same textbooks that were going for over a hundred dollars in the U.S. were available for peanuts back home. So, he asked his friends and family in Thailand to go to bookstores and buy the textbooks, ship them to him in the U.S., and he sold them on eBay for a profit. These were not pirate or knock-off goods; they were the real deal published by the Asian subsidiary of John Wiley & Sons and stamped “not for resale.”
Wiley sells books more cheaply in Thailand because it engages in market segmentation, a simple kind of price discrimination. In order to maximize profits, Wiley charges different prices to different consumers according to their willingness to pay. And what country or market you’re in serves as a proxy for what you’re willing to pay. This only works, though, if you can make sure that there is no arbitrage, and that’s why Wiley sued Kirtsaeng.
Brito thinks that “the Kirtsaeng decision makes it practically impossible to price discriminate, a practice that tends to make all parties better off” but that SCOTUS made “the right decision because while there’s no right to price-discriminate, there is a right to do with your property as you like.” David Post applauds the decision:
[T]he rule Wiley argued for would have given publishers a substantial incentive to move all of their manufacturing facilities (for books, and CDs, and DVDs and . . .) overseas, because they would only be able to prevent arbitrage, and maintain their price discrimination and market segmentation, with respect to those foreign-manufactured copies. It is hard to believe — impossible, actually — that Congress intended that result.
Should Kids Play With iPads?
Hanna Rosin recently chatted with developers of apps for children:
I decided to ask some of the other developers who were also parents what their domestic ground rules for screen time were. One said only on airplanes and long car rides. Another said Wednesdays and weekends, for half an hour. The most permissive said half an hour a day, which was about my rule at home. At one point I sat with one of the biggest developers of e-book apps for kids, and his family. The toddler was starting to fuss in her high chair, so the mom did what many of us have done at that moment—stuck an iPad in front of her and played a short movie so everyone else could enjoy their lunch. When she saw me watching, she gave me the universal tense look of mothers who feel they are being judged. “At home,” she assured me, “I only let her watch movies in Spanish.”
By their pinched reactions, these parents illuminated for me the neurosis of our age: as technology becomes ubiquitous in our lives, American parents are becoming more, not less, wary of what it might be doing to their children. Technological competence and sophistication have not, for parents, translated into comfort and ease. They have merely created yet another sphere that parents feel they have to navigate in exactly the right way.
Worse Than Hiroshima? Ctd
Many readers voice their skepticism:
Having watched that video I was strongly impacted by the imagery and claims of higher rates of birth defects, especially the claim that the levels are 14 times that of those that were observed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. So I decided to look for estimates on what those levels would be, and found that the level hadn’t changed in those Japanese cities. Here’s the link I found, which includes sources in scientific literature. I’m a bit baffled why Democracy Now would relate these.
The soldier’s story could have been true though, as a heavy metal uranium is very toxic, especially to the kidneys. He might have inhaled a lot of it. (Full disclosure: I work as a research scientist in nuclear fusion computations.)
Another:
Seriously, whenever you see the name Dahr Jamail, you need to be very skeptical of the assertions that follow. Briefly, Jamail has blamed depleted uranium for health problems without any evidence at all. But it’s not hard to find actual research linking birth defects in Fallujah to the more prosaic but plenty nasty elements lead and mercury. “Uranium” and “Hiroshima” probably get more pageviews than plain old lead, but I would think that these recent victims of our past warfare would be better served by accurate reporting than by an anti-nuclear ideologue’s sensationalism.
Another wonders:
Is there really an increase in birth defects, or just an increase in reporting?
Do Iraquis traditionally just kill babies with birth defects, as is true in many parts of the world, but have recently publicized the defects for some reason? What mechanism of action is proposed to explain these effects?
There is natural uranium virtually everywhere; it’s one of the three NORM materials (Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials) that occur in rocks and soil worldwide, a product of the earth being formed of material produced in a supernova explosion more than 4.5 billion years ago. Everyone is exposed to it every day, more so in certain locations than in others. Depleted uranium (DU) is actually only very slightly radioactive; the uranium decay products (which are themselves much more radioactive than the uranium itself) have been removed in the uranium mining/production/enrichment process and only slowly grow back in.
If there are birth defects occurring at 14 times the rates observed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then it’s not because the DU is radioactive – folks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were truly HEAVILY exposed to radiation. If Fallujah itself has a high rate of birth defects, which has not been established, then why? Why not other sites where DU munitions are tested? For example, are there high rates of birth defects in the communities surrounding Fort Irwin, California, or other areas where DU munitions are commonly tested in the continental US? How have the “tracers” who linked the putative increase in birth defects to DU, eliminated chemical contamination from other sources as the cause of the birth defects?
If birth defects are indeed caused by DU, perhaps it’s because of the chemical action of uranium somehow interfering with development (rather than due to radiation, which truly is not an issue with DU). In which case, testing on mice or other mammals would show up that effect quickly. The only way to learn anything in medicine is by randomized, double-blind testing. I’m not proposing testing on people, of course, but on animal surrogates. Why isn’t Democracy Now advocating for such testing? Could it be that their “issue” is really anti-war activism, rather than concern for the Iraqui citizenry?
It’s possible to be anti-war without being unscientific. Of course, agitprop is more effective than reason; quoting Mark Twain, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
The Smart Watch Cometh
Brian Ries is the proud owner of a Pebble:
Soon these little things will be everywhere. Both Apple and Samsung are reported to be working on their own mass-market smartwatches to hit the market later this year, and Pebble’s CEO has been mum when asked if Apple’s CEO has approached him about an acquisition. But for now, just 40,000 Pebbles have been produced, a limited run that means I’ve yet to see another “Pebbler” in the wild. …
The device itself is a fascinating, mind-opening extension of the smartphone. You wouldn’t know the inconvenience of reading your text messages on the phone retrieved from your pocket until they pop up seamlessly on the device sitting coolly on your wrist. But you wouldn’t know you had a dumbwatch until a guy on the Internet asks for some money to create something smarter, either.
(Above: Pebble’s 2012 Kickstarter video, which raised over $10 million.)
The Hues Of Attraction
Adam Alter explores the importance of colors in online dating profiles:
Several years ago, Andrew Elliot, a professor at the University of Rochester, and his colleagues began by asking heterosexual male undergraduates to spend five seconds looking at the photo of a young female stranger, and to rate her attractiveness on a scale ranging from 1 (not at all attractive) to 9 (extremely attractive). All of the undergrads saw the same woman wearing the same clothes—but the experimenters randomly changed the color of the thick border that framed the photo, alternating among white, red, blue, and green. …
Across five experiments, the results were always the same.
The male undergrads who rated the photo bordered in red, found the woman more attractive, were more interested in asking her on a date, and willing to spend more money during the date. The researchers were also careful to show that the effect was specifically tied to sexual interest. They showed, for example, that when heterosexual women rated the attractiveness of the same female stranger, they weren’t swayed by the border’s color. In addition, men didn’t believe the red-bordered woman was more likable, kind, or intelligent—only that she was more attractive and sexually appealing.
The View From Your Window
“Waiting for Obama at the entrance to Ramallah, with springtime and distant village mosque,” 10 am.
Truthiness Serum
Judge William Sylvester recently ruled that if Aurora mass-shooter James Holmes wants to plead insanity, he has to undergo narcoanalysis, “in which defendants are injected with drugs to lower their inhibitions and presumably be more willing to tell the truth about their alleged crimes under questioning by prosecutors.” Vaughan Bell delves into the history of the dubious practice:
This was born in the 1920s where the gynaecologist Robert House noticed that women who were given scopolamine to ease the birth process seemed to go into a ‘twilight state’ and were more pliant and talkative. House decided to test this on criminals and went about putting prisoners under the influence of the drug while interviewing them as a way of ‘determining innocence or guilt’. Encouraged by some initial, albeit later recanted, confessions House began to claim that it should be used routinely in police investigations.
This probably would have died a death as a dubious medical curiosity had Time magazine not run an article in their 1923 edition entitled “The Truth-Compeller” about House’s theory – making him and the ‘truth drug’ idea national stars. These approaches became militarised: firstly as ‘narcoanalysis’ was used to treat traumatised soldiers in the World War Two, and secondly as it was taken up by the CIA in the Cold War as a method for interrogation and became a centrepiece of the secret Project MKUltra.
Bell’s conclusion:
There is no evidence that ‘narcoanalysis’ actually helps in any way, shape or form, and at moderate to high doses, some of the drugs may actually impede memory or make it more likely that the person misremembers. I suspect that the actual result of the bizarre ruling in the ‘Colorado shooter’ case will just be that psychiatrists will be able to give a potentially psychotic suspect a simple anti-anxiety drug without the resulting evidence being challenged.
Update from a reader:
The order from the Colorado Court does not state that James Holmes will be given a truth serum; it states “It shall also be permissible to conduct a narcoanalytic interview of you with such drugs as are medically appropriate”. See item #13 here (pdf) . This part of the judge’s order simply quotes verbatim Colorado Statute 16-8-106(3)(b). The judge and the statute leave it up to the physicians to determine what drugs are “medically appropriate”. I think the mainstream media, including Time magazine, which you cited as your source, has sensationalized this order and read something into it that it does not say. If in fact the physicians do decide that it would be medically appropriate to administer a “truth serum” (and I doubt they will), they will still have to be justify to the court that their procedure meets the Daubert Test of being reliable and accepted by the scientific community.
The Dish 