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Ross Douthat is such a sensible and honest guy, I really ought to be able to sell him on the idea that contraception can significantly lower the abortion rate.
I pontificate; he demurs. I throw data; he remains unconvinced. I feel like a shingle salesman standing in the rain at the front door of a house that has holes in its roof and 2 inches of water inside. The owner's standing there, listening, his arms folded. How am I not making this sale?
Ross and his Atlantic colleague, Megan McArdle, have persuasively challenged what I used to believe: that birth-control availability was the key to reducing abortions. Three years ago, in a careful analysis, McArdle made a case that "the monetary cost of contraception is, at best, a small contributing factor to unwanted pregnancy in this country." A friend who works in reproductive health has impressed a similar lesson on me from her own research: Use, not access, is the missing ingredient.
The data back her up. So, last Sunday, I conceded the point:
Eight years ago, the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed over 10,000 American women who had abortions. Nearly half said they hadn't used birth control in the month they conceived. When asked why not, 8 percent cited financial problems, and 2 percent said they didn't know where to get it. By comparison, 28 percent said they had thought they wouldn't get pregnant, 26 percent said they hadn't expected to have sex and 23 percent said they had never thought about using birth control, had never gotten around to it or had stopped using it. Ten percent said their partners had objected to it. Three percent said they had thought it would make sex less fun.
This isn't a shortage of pills or condoms. It's a shortage of cultural and personal responsibility. It's a failure to teach, understand, admit or care that unprotected sex can lead to the creation—and the subsequent killing, through abortion—of a developing human being.
Ross listened thoughtfully, as he always does. But he didn't budge:
I remain unconvinced that [Saletan's] preferred method for such reductions—a dramatic new push, whether political or cultural, to expand the use of contraception in the United States—would produce anything like the results that he envisions. Consider, for instance, the idea that the government should dramatically expand eligibility for free contraception through Medicaid. ... [T]he universalization of this program, according to its supporters, might reduce the national abortion rate by somewhere between 1 and 2 percent. That's not nothing, obviously, but it's not a whole lot ...
Whoa, there. That's the old debate: access. What I'm talking about now is the other part of the equation: use. Access is important, but pills and condoms don't work unless people use them.
There's nothing fancy about this idea. I don't have a brilliant program in mind. All I have is process of elimination: If most people in this country, including me, aren't willing to ban abortions (check), and if you can't stop people from having sex (check), and if contraception is the only other way to prevent pregnancy (check), and if providing access to contraception hasn't solved the problem (check), then the remaining factor is human failure to use the contraception. Target that problem. I don't care whether it's through the federal government, states, clinics, schools, churches, or Conan O'Brien. All that matters is sending a forceful message that if you're not prepared to become a parent, you must either avoid vaginal intercourse or use birth control religiously.
If sex-ed programs aren't getting this message across, come up with better sex-ed programs. Or go through churches, doctors, parents, Facebook, Webkinz—whatever. Keep trying until you find something that works.
On this point, I should mention an equally sincere critique from the other side. One of my proposals for getting the message across was that "reproductive-health counselors must speak bluntly to women who are having unprotected sex." (I recommended the same message for men.) Jodi Jacobson, a longtime pro-choice activist and editor at RH Reality Check, says counselors are already doing this:
[W]omen's rights advocates and reproductive health providers have always put these two issues together. It's called "prevention" and it is the core of reproductive health services that include efforts to prevent unintended pregnancies, prevent infections, assist people who wish to get pregnant, offer pre-natal and maternal care, and much more.
What exactly does Mr. Saletan think reproductive health counselors do, but guide people toward protected sex, help them find the methods they need and which will work best for them, and counsel them on correct and consistent use?
Most counseling matches this tone. It's deferential, technical, and service-oriented. I understand the need to gain and hold each patient's confidence. But plainly, the message isn't getting across. This should be obvious from the fact that half the women getting abortions in this country are coming back for their second or third termination.
I've sat and talked with people who staff and supervise clinics. One recounted an internal staff debate over whether a woman who came in for an abortion and wasn't using birth control should be encouraged to use it next time—or whether this was too morally presumptuous. Another described moral differences between American and European clinics. In many European facilities, she explained, if you come back for a repeat abortion, the counselors will demand to know whether you were using birth control and if not, why not.
I admire everyone who works in family planning and reproductive health. But we need to do a better job of getting the message across. One measure of our failure is the national abortion rate. And if you don't accept that as a moral challenge, take it as a political one. Because if you can't do something to dry up the demand for abortions, Ross Douthat and others will be happy to target the supply.
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An idea passes from one person to another to another, changing shape with every transaction. No one controls the outcome. Everyone in the chain knows what the idea means to him, but no one knows how the idea will turn out.
That's the story of PGD so far. I wonder how it ends.
More here.
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More evidence today that we've been dieting backward. Instead of asking whether your plan to eat nothing but couscous, kale, and tofu is strict enough, you should be asking whether it's tasty enough.
In the latest study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, "participants were assigned to and taught about diets that emphasized different contents of carbohydrates, fat, and protein and were given reinforcement for 2 years through group and individual sessions." Result: "The diets were equally successful in promoting clinically meaningful weight loss and the maintenance of weight loss over the course of 2 years."
Why did different diets produce similar results? Not because they're similar on paper, but because they were similarly disobeyed by actual human beings.
Few of the people in the current study strictly adhered to the calorie limits and the composition of their diets, suggesting it is just too difficult to do so ... For example, those assigned to consume 35% of their calories as carbohydrates actually consumed an average of 43%, and groups that were supposed to eat a 20%-fat diet averaged 26%. In the end, many of the participants were eating diets that were more similar than dissimilar.
This study and others "point to behavioral factors rather than macronutrient metabolism as the main influences on weight loss," the authors conclude. "The effect of any particular diet group is minuscule, but the effect of individual behavior is humongous," says lead author Frank Sacks. We had some people losing 50 pounds and some people gaining five pounds."
In short, as Human Nature has argued before, compliance is part of a diet's effectiveness. If you can't stick to a diet, don't just blame yourself. Change the diet. If you can't stand the kale and couscous, stop kidding yourself, and find palatable alternatives.
And when I say palatable, I mean that literally. Diets "tailored to individual patients on the basis of their personal and cultural preferences" may "have the best chance for long-term success," the authors of the new study conclude. According to the Associated Press, Sacks explicitly says the key is to choose a diet that's "tasty." Another researcher, Christopher Gardner of Stanford University, adds, "If one of these approaches is more satiating, where you will not be hungry and have cravings, that is the one that will work for you."
So enough with the quarrels about this or that magic diet for re-engineering your body's chemistry. Think less about your body and more about the part of you whose compliance determines whether the diet has a shot at working: your mind. Is the kale tasty enough? Is the tofu satiating? If not, leave that diet to the saints, and find one that works for the rest of us sinners.
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Not many guys are brave enough to take on Genghis Khan. But then, Genghis never met Hank Greely. Greely, a law professor at Stanford, does a lot of work in genetics and brain science. And he's tired of hearing the tale about Genghis single-handedly (well, "handedly" might not be the precise term) populating the Eastern world. According to the version I quoted yesterday, "8% of males throughout the former lands of the Mongol empire carry the Y chromosome of Genghis Khan."
Not so fast, says Greely:
Here are the facts, as far as we know them. One Y chromosome haplotype is widespread over areas that the Mongols ruled. Genghis ruled the Mongols and had, at least, the opportunity to father many sons, some of whom had similar opportunities. End of facts.
Maybe that's Genghis's Y chromosome, but, as we have no DNA from Genghis (his tomb was hidden) and no certain knowledge of any of his living direct line male descendants, we don't know what his Y chromosome looked like.
Maybe it's the Y chromosome of Genghis's handsome troubadour, or vicious chief of staff, or someone else. We don't know.
And even if it is Genghis's Y chromosome, it's possible none of those now carrying it descended from him. His brothers, paternal uncles, paternal male cousins, etc., all had the same Y chromosome. In fact, if he came from a clan with a lot of males, it probably helped him become the leader. One of the few actual studies showed that 35% of Mongols have this Y chromosome type—is Genghis the cause or the result of that statistic? Who knows?
Do I think there's a good chance that this is Genghis's Y chromosome? Sure, probably as good a chance as anyone and better than most. But how good is that? Who knows. But it's a good story and so it has spread like flu—in part being spread by genetic genealogy companies that are looking for good stories to use that might help convince people to buy their services.
For a more formal version of Greely's critique, see his chapter, "Genetic Genealogy," in Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, published last year.
Oh, and if you're planning to sue Genghis' estate for your share of the inheritance, don't even think of offering your Y chromosome as evidence. I have a pretty good idea whom the estate will be calling as an expert witness.
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Eight hundred years ago, if you wanted to father a swarm of children, you had to seize power, kill men, and collect a harem of women. That's what Genghis Khan did. "An astonishing 8% of males throughout the former lands of the Mongol empire carry the Y chromosome of Genghis Khan," Nicholas Wade reports in his excellent book Before the Dawn. "This amounts to a total of 16 million men, or about 0.5% of the world's total."
Today, if you want to spread your seed around, it's a lot easier. Just make a deposit at a sperm bank.
Thanks to the Donor Sibling Registry, a nine-year-old organization that helps genetic siblings find one another, it's increasingly possible to find out who's been fathering whom in the world of egg and sperm donation. And even when you can't find out who, you can often find out how many. Human Reproduction has just published a survey of parents connected to the registry. The parents had sought out their kids' donor siblings, i.e., kids conceived from the same donor. And guess what? "In several cases, a considerable number of donor siblings had been traced, with 11% (55) of parents who had found their child's donor siblings finding 10 or more, reaching 55 siblings in one instance."
Fifty-five kids from a single donor. Think about that: You have 54 siblings and don't even know who they are. In a town of 5,000 people, what are the chances that somebody close to you—neighbor, mail carrier, waitress, wife—is secretly a relative? And while that's the extreme case, donor reuse seems to be quite common. If 11 percent of donors are being reused 10 or more times, that's a lot of Genghis Khan action. Think of what that's doing to communities, kids' identities, and even biodiversity.
Tabitha Freeman, one of the study's authors, blames lax regulation:
More than 90 percent of parents included in the study came from the United States, where guidelines regulating the use of sperm or eggs are looser than in Britain, she added. "The study is exposing that some clinics are using the same donor for a lot of families," Freeman said. ... "Guidelines suggest this should not be the case but they are not strictly enforced" in the United States, she added.
Maybe while we're beating up on Nadya Suleman, the octuplets' mom, for bearing 14 children, we should stop to think about all the men who have been fathering carloads of kids without even knowing about it. Apparently, the clinic that impregnated Suleman used her to inflate its IVF success rate because she was a reliable producer. That's the same reason a lot of sperm donors get reused. Even if all these kids can be cared for, is there something unhealthy about pumping out child after child from the DNA of one person? Have we had enough of Genghis Khan?
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As the great houses of journalism contract and collapse, what's happening to our best science writers? Here's one answer: Jeremy Manier, formerly of the Chicago Tribune, has set up a "Science Life" blog at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
If you haven't followed Jeremy's work over the years, treat yourself to a few of his fine pieces. Here's his take on synthetic biology last year. Here's his look at empathy among chimps. And here's his wrenching story about a Christian professor's struggle to reconcile faith with evolution.
In Sunday's blog installment, Jeremy picks a small bone with yours truly. To be precise, a dog bone. Last week, I wrote about the breeding of preferred dog traits using the frozen sperm of a long-dead show poodle. I concluded: "I want to throw up."
One thing I should have learned about bioethics by now: Mention anything close to puking, and you'll remind people of Leon Kass, whose "Wisdom of Repugnance" essay has been reduced by progressives, unfairly, to shorthand for irrational conservatism. I can almost draw the chain of linked neurons for you: vomit, repugnance, Kass, George W. Bush, and back to vomit.
But my own chain of neurons has carried me away. Back to Jeremy. Here's his critique:
In this case repugnance seems more silly than wise. Dog breeders have been using frozen sperm since the 1960s. As bioethical dilemmas go, it's a Brave Old World. Saletan wants to use dog breeding as an analogy for designer babies, but it may be hopelessly flawed for that purpose because it's so familiar. Such comfortable examples are of little help in imagining how awful genetic trait selection in human babies would be.
Hmmm. Well, here's my answer, for what it's worth: I was using a familiar example because that's what we have. In projecting the future, the best we can do, empirically, is to look for a similar practice in the present or past. The existing practice will differ in some ways from what we're imagining. But the similarities may shed some light.
So here's my question to Jeremy: What current practices would be more helpful than dog breeding in projecting/imagining genetic trait selection in humans? Human trait selection is what interests both of us. As to whether canine breeding is the best way to illuminate that future—well, as the saying goes, I've got no dog in that fight.
But I do have some dogs in the fight for the blogosphere. As the old media dissolve or evolve into the new, I'm rooting for great writers like Rob Stein, John Tierney, Rick Weiss, and Carl Zimmer—from whatever perches they can find—to help weave an Internet conversation about science and technology that's as rich and engaging as the best of the Web's political commentary. Add to that list: Jeremy Manier.
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How are humans and unmanned vehicles getting along in our experimental robot proxy war in Pakistan? Pretty well. Yesterday's New York Times revealed more about collaborations between U.S. drones and Pakistani ground forces. A few highlights:
1. Pakistanis on the ground are spotting targets for the drones.
"The intelligence sharing has really improved in the past few months," said Talat Masood, a retired army general. ... Intelligence from Pakistani informants has been used to bolster the accuracy of missile strikes from remotely piloted Predator and Reaper aircraft against the militants in the tribal areas, officials from both countries say. More than 30 attacks by the aircraft have been conducted since last August, most of them after President Zardari took office in September. A senior American military official said that 9 of 20 senior Qaeda and Taliban commanders in Pakistan had been killed by those strikes.
2. The drones are tracking targets for Pakistanis on the ground.
The C.I.A. helped [Pakistani] commandos track the Saudi militant linked to Al Qaeda, Zabi al-Taifi, for more than a week before the Pakistani forces surrounded his safe house in the Khyber Agency. The Pakistanis seized him, along with seven Pakistani and Afghan insurgents, in a dawn raid on Jan. 22, with a remotely piloted C.I.A. plane hovering overhead and personnel from the C.I.A. and Pakistan's main spy service closely monitoring the mission, a senior Pakistani officer involved in the operation said.
3. Pakistan is tracking the drones. Its agents know their whereabouts in real time.
In addition, a small team of Pakistani air defense controllers working in the United States Embassy in Islamabad ensures that Pakistani F-16 fighter-bombers conducting missions against militants in the tribal areas do not mistakenly hit remotely piloted American aircraft flying in the same area or a small number of C.I.A. operatives on the ground, a second senior Pakistani officer said.
4. Reliance on drones is protecting American but not Pakistani troops. This is the chief strategic problem exposed by the war. We can hit the enemy from an unmanned aerial vehicle with impunity. But the enemy can retaliate against our ally on the ground, thereby putting pressure on the alliance. According to the Times, "Pakistani Army officers say the American strikes draw retaliation against Pakistani troops in the tribal areas, whose convoys and bases are bombed or attacked with rockets after each United States missile strike."
Human Nature's interest in the Pakistan conflict is all about its experimental lessons in unmanned warfare. Toward that end, two of the key factors to watch are 1) the ability of manned and unmanned forces to work together and 2) the enemy's ability to punish manned forces for damage inflicted by unmanned forces. We'll keep watching both.
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Hey, President Obama! I have a family-values agenda for you.
Well, it isn't really mine. It's the ideas of a lot of other people who have worked on abortion, birth control, sex education, marriage, and gay rights a lot longer than I have. These ideas are good for the country, and they suit you. All I've done is wrap them up in a package. It's in Sunday's New York Times. Take it.
Basically, it's a framework for making tangible progress on moral issues. As you know, these issues tend to be incendiary, toxic, and impervious to compromise. You don't need them. But they need you. They need your pragmatism. The philosophy you sketched in your inaugural address—an era of responsibility guided by old moral truths—works just as well for social issues as it does for economics.
That's the starting point. Just be yourself: old-fashioned about values but practical about solutions. Stick to those two principles, and good ideas will fall into place, forming a moral agenda that's right for our times.
None of these ideas are mine. On birth control and sex education, they come from places such as the Hewlett Foundation, the Brookings Institution, and the National Campaign To Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. On abortion reduction, you can find them at Third Way and Democrats for Life, along with commendable initiatives from Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America. On gay marriage, the thinkers to read are Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch.
I can't promise that all of these ideas will work out politically. If you lead on abortion reduction through contraception, most Catholics and even most Americans who think of themselves as pro-life will go with you. But the Vatican, the bishops, and the hierarchies of the major pro-life groups will fight you tooth and nail. If you lead on gay marriage, you'll be excoriated. Politically, Rauch's proposal to offer marriage by another name makes more sense. I'm just drawing a rough map of the way forward. How we get there is up to you.
There's my pitch. I hope it's helpful.
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As economies around the world continue to shrink, how many people will start thinking about selling their bodies?
Two years ago, the global market in human flesh looked like a humanitarian issue. It was a problem for those poor people in developing countries, not for us. But global capitalism doesn't care what color your skin is, as long as you've got some to sell and you need the cash. And, increasingly, people need the cash.
The idea starts with superficial rentals. Last month, according to the New York Times,
FeelUnique.com, an online beauty products store, paid 10 men and women to apply temporary tattoos with the company's Web address on their eyelids and then wink at strangers. Chosen randomly from more than 6,000 who applied online, participants were paid 100 pounds (about $149) to wink at people 1,000 times, or 10 pence a wink, an allusion to pay-per-view Web advertising.
Harmless, right? So let's move around to the back of the head. Thirty people have hired themselves out to Air New Zealand as "cranial billboards," the Times reports. "For shaving their noggins and displaying the ad copy for two weeks in November, they received either a round-trip ticket to New Zealand (worth about $1,200) or $777 in cash."
A bit tacky, but who are we to judge? They need the money. And if people are willing to wear temporary tattoos for pay, why not permanent ones?
Since 2005, Dunlop Tires has hired tattoo artists to work at its booth at the annual Specialty Equipment Market Association show in Las Vegas, geared to motorists who modify cars. Volunteers who agree to be permanently tattooed—either with Dunlop's logo or its trademarked tire tread—while onlookers gawk receive a set of tires worth $500 to $1,000, said Jim Davis, a Dunlop spokesman. About 200 people have been tattooed so far.
If it's OK to sell permanent advertising on your skin, it's hard to see why we outlaw temporary prostitution, especially in view of current financial pressures:
Signs of the economic free fall have cropped up in many of Nevada's 25 or so legal brothels. The Mustang Ranch, for example, has a steady stream of customers, but the number of women vying for work has soared.
Should women who resort to this line of work in other states continue to be arrested? Do you have some other employment opportunity to offer them?
And if extra cash to women who need it is a good thing, what about the increasing use of undeveloped countries as testing grounds for drugs not yet approved in the West? According to an article in the New England Journal Medicine, "Pharmaceutical and device companies can realize substantial cost savings by conducting trials in developing countries, so they are increasingly moving phase 2 and phase 3 trials to places such as India and South America." In these countries,
There may be a relative lack of understanding of both the investigational nature of therapeutic products and the use of placebo groups. In some places, financial compensation for research participation may exceed participants' annual wages, and participation in a clinical trial may provide the only access to care for persons with the condition under study. Standards of health care in developing countries may also allow ethically problematic study designs or trials that would not be allowed in wealthier countries. In one study, only 56% of the 670 researchers surveyed in developing countries reported that their research had been reviewed by a local institutional review board or health ministry. In another study, 90% of published clinical trials conducted in China in 2004 did not report ethical review of the protocol and only 18% adequately discussed informed consent.
So, the standards overseas are lower, and the people recruited to test the drugs have fewer choices. But isn't that how capitalism works? Aren't these people getting value in exchange for supplying their bodies at lower cost? As Ezekiel Emanuel, chairman of bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, puts it: "More places outside the United States are participating in research—is that a bad thing?"
And what about the sale of human eggs, sperm, and surrogacy? Driven by the recession, women are lining up to sell their eggs and rent out their wombs. It's fully legal. Do you want to stop them or their clients? Do you think you can?
If it's OK to sell your eggs and skin—and to rent out your body for pregnancy or drug testing—why not let people sell expendable organs? Thanks to the progress and spread of transplant technology, every healthy person with two good kidneys or a splittable liver now has a fungible asset. Earlier this month, for instance, the Asahi Shimbun reported:
Amid the serious shortage of available organs in Japan, a nonprofit organization admitted to helping 17 Japanese receive transplants in China even after Beijing banned such operations for foreigners in 2007. A deputy chief of the NPO [said] the group paid doctors in China, in addition to treatment costs, for the kidney and liver transplants there. ... Cases have already emerged of Japanese traveling to Southeast Asia for new organs.
I'm not saying all of these practices are acceptable or unacceptable. Some are more worrisome than others. But they're all happening, and they're all being driven by money. And as the recession takes away the external assets of more and more people, we're going to face increasingly difficult questions about letting them sell what's left.
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The picture, taken from directly overhead, shows an airfield in Pakistan. It looks like a video frame from one of the American killer drones that have been hunting Taliban and al-Qaida fighters there. But that can't be: The drones are right there in the frame, sitting on the ground. So who took the picture?
A plain old commercial satellite, apparently. The image was freely available on Google Earth until Wednesday ...
More here.
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Is flying airplanes too dangerous to be left to humans?
That's one possibility emerging from for last week's passenger jet crash in Buffalo, N.Y. So far, the investigation has found no mechanical or autopilot failure. To the contrary, a reconstruction based on flight-recorder data indicates that the crew may have caused the crash by mismanaging or overriding the autopilot. Here are the theories in play as of this morning.
Theory 1: Take the controls away from the machine. The argument here is that difficult conditions require human attention and judgment. "The pilot did not disengage the autopilot after encountering what was noted to be ‘significant ice'—disregarding recommendations from the [National Transportation Safety Board] and his own airline," the Associated Press reports. Accordingly, the NTSB will study "whether the recommendation should be a requirement."
Theory 2: Teach the humans how to read and collaborate with the machine's intentions. This is the scenario we looked at yesterday: that the plane's crew misunderstood what the autopilot was doing and why, and that this misunderstanding caused the crash. Today's Wall Street Journal adds more evidence to this scenario:
The safety board, among other issues, is looking into why [the airline's] training programs apparently stop short of allowing pilots in simulators to feel the stick-pusher activate. ... The device is intended to automatically prevent the plane from going into a stall by pointing the nose down to regain speed. Safety experts worry that unless pilots understand and feel what happens when the stick-pusher goes into action in a simulator, they may not react properly when it activates during an in-flight emergency. In 2004, a [same-company] commuter jet went out of control at a high altitude, both its engines shut down, and it ultimately crashed, killing both pilots. Among other mistakes, the pilots fought the stick-pusher. ... [T]he board specifically called for a blue-ribbon panel of experts to examine ways to make pilots more familiar and comfortable with the operation of stick-pusher systems.
Theory 3: Take the controls away from the humans. This is a more radical version of Theory 2. On this view, human pilots shouldn't be trusted to override the machine's superior judgment. To prevent such intervention, we can engineer flight controls to let a computer override the pilot. Today's New York Times explains how:
The crash last week could renew a debate about how much authority the crew should have over an airplane. In fly-by-wire aircraft—in which the crew's control is through a computer rather than a direct mechanical link to flight control surfaces—one manufacturer, Airbus, interposes computer logic between the human and the machine. If the pilot's manipulation of the controls is too severe, the computer will specify a more moderate path.
Yesterday, going on Theory 2, I implied that the remedy for what happened in Buffalo might be to upgrade autopilots so that humans, at the speed of conversation, could query the machine's reasons for acting. But maybe that's the long-term remedy. Maybe the short-term remedy is to give the machine the final say.
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Horrifying update posted this afternoon by the New York Times, following up last night's report by the Wall Street Journal:
A re-creation of the last moments of the plane that crashed in Buffalo Thursday night, based on data from the "black boxes," shows that the crew may have overreacted to an automatic system that was trying to protect the aircraft from flying too slowly and crashing from an aerodynamic stall. ... investigators have developed a theory that after the automatic system pointed down the nose of the plane to generate speed, the crew may have overreacted by yanking back on the yoke and pointing the nose too high ...
The plane, Continental Connection Flight 3407, from Newark to Buffalo, was flying on auto-pilot. ... [W]hen the "stick-pusher," which takes control of the plane and points the nose down, activated and the autopilot kicked off, the crew tried to increase power. Apparently there was not enough altitude or time to recover control, however. The stick-pusher may have activated at a speed higher than normal because it added a margin of safety to account for icing conditions, investigators say.
In other words, the human crew misunderstood what the autopilot was doing and why, and this misunderstanding caused the crash. If the autopilot had been a human being, a five-second conversation could have resolved the misunderstanding. But autopilots can't talk. They're designed to perform calculations and adjust the plane without humans having to understand their reasons.
If this theory of the crash turns out to be true, it'll go down in history as a tragic flaw in early generations of artificial intelligence, at the cost of 50 lives.
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Yesterday we talked about the emergence of embryo screening for eye, hair, and skin color. Scientists are becoming proficient at identifying the relevant genes. A Los Angeles clinic is advertising the service and says customers are beginning to line up.
When the screening starts for real, what will it look like? Would we really select babies based on such superficial criteria?
It's impossible to predict the course of such a revolution with certainty. But we know that 10 percent of couples who seek genetic counseling say they'd screen for traits such as height and athleticism if they could. And we have a loose precedent that illuminates our propensity to tinker with aesthetic traits: dog breeding.
One of my favorite writers, Amy Harmon of the New York Times, explained two years ago why we should study dog breeding before plunging into trait selection in humans:
Free of most of the ethical concerns—and practical difficulties—associated with the practice of eugenics in humans, dog breeders are seizing on new genetic research to exert dominion over the canine gene pool. Companies with names like Vetgen and Healthgene have begun offering dozens of DNA tests to tailor the way dogs look, improve their health and, perhaps soon, enhance their athletic performance. But as dog breeders apply scientific precision to their age-old art, they find that the quest for genetic perfection comes with unforeseen consequences. And with DNA tests on their way for humans, the lessons of intervening in the nature of dogs may ultimately bear as much on us as on our best friends. "We're on the verge of a real radical shift in the way we apply genetics in our society," said Mark Neff, associate director of the veterinary genetics laboratory at the University of California, Davis. "It's better to be first confronted with some of these issues when they concern our pets than when they concern us."
So dog breeding offers cautionary lessons about what trait selection does to its targets. Does it also offer cautionary lessons about what trait selection does to its perpetrators?
Three years ago, I thought so. I argued that dogs were the world's longest self-serving, ecologically reckless genetic experiment, perpetrated by the world's first genetically engineering species: us. So here we are, three years later, turning the experiment on ourselves. What does dog breeding tell us about the culture of aesthetic eugenics?
As it happens, we got a good look at that culture last week, when the Westminster Kennel Club held its annual dog show. The Times' Katie Thomas used the occasion to examine the increasingly efficient practice of breeding dogs from frozen semen. "In 2006, the most recent year for which data is available, frozen semen was used to conceive 760 litters of [American Kennel Club]-approved puppies," she reported. Among other things, "[f]rozen semen has been used for decades by breeders who want to inject a dash of nostalgia into a litter of puppies." The owner of a canine semen bank explained, "One of the reasons people like to use frozen semen is to be able to dip back into a gene pool for a more classic look."
That's what the breeder of one of this year's winners at the dog show did: He made the dog using 25-year-old frozen sperm from a previous champion named Snapper. The breeder "said he had long lamented the decline of pizazz in modern-day poodles, the trademark ‘poodly temperament' that gives them such stage presence in the ring," Thomas reported. "He wondered if Snapper's genes would do the trick and create an exciting show dog."
The good news: The Frankenstein experiment worked. The poodle brought its long-dead sire's "sashay," "balance," and "fluid movement" back to life. It won the show.
The bad news: I want to throw up.
That's what aesthetic trait selection in humans will do to us. It will make our bodies prettier—and our souls uglier.
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Is the era of designer babies finally upon us?
Every week, it seems, we're told that this discovery or that technology might lead to "designer babies." I've heard this so many times that I've stopped taking it seriously. Genetic engineering always turns out to be more complicated than expected, and our latest technology always turns out to be less capable than advertised.
But now trait selection seems to be coming into view for real.
More here.
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The boss of the Pakistani Taliban likes to train his fighters at a big house in the mountainous region near Afghanistan. Or perhaps I should say, he used to. Reuters has called the house "fortress-like." If U.S. troops had tried to storm it, the militants inside might have repelled or killed them. But the Americans never showed up in person. Instead, on Saturday, they sent an unmanned aerial vehicle, which fired a missile into the compound, killing around 30 enemy insurgents. So much for fortresses.
Then, today, American drones struck another Pakistani Taliban hideout. The initial casualty count at the second compound is even higher. And that's before all the bodies are pulled from the rubble.
Even by the lowest casualty estimates, these are the two most lethal strikes of the monthslong robot proxy war we've been waging in Pakistan. For those of you keeping score, the number of drone strikes since July is now running into the 30s, and the body count has passed 250, including eight or more senior al-Qaida officers.
The military advantage of sending drones instead of soldiers is that we can blow away fortresses and adversaries while keeping our troops out of harm's way. But there's a political advantage, too: If we don't set foot on Pakistani soil, Pakistan's government doesn't have to explain to its people why it's tolerating an American occupation.
That's why the official U.S. and Pakistani response to reporters' questions about the massacre at the Taliban compound is silence. The CIA, which operates our Predator drones in Pakistan, isn't talking. Neither is our embassy in Islamabad. Neither is the Pakistani government. Nothing to see here, folks. No American boots on the ground. Move along.
But—oops!—it turns out that we do have people on the ground in Pakistan. And they're managing the drones. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., spilled the beans at a Senate hearing on Thursday. Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times explains what happened:
Feinstein expressed surprise over Pakistani opposition to the campaign of Predator-launched CIA missile strikes against Islamic extremist targets along Pakistan's northwestern border. "As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base," she said. ... [F]ormer U.S. intelligence officials ... confirmed that Feinstein's account was accurate. ... As chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Feinstein is privy to classified details of U.S. counter-terrorism efforts.
It didn't take long for Feinstein's slip to hit the Pakistani press. And it was news to most Pakistanis, who, like the rest of us, have assumed all along that the drones flew over the border from Afghanistan.
Predators may be unmanned, but they're hardly unsupervised. In addition to being remotely piloted, they're locally prepped and serviced. In military parlance, they're unmanned "systems," and the systems include on-site crews. If the Predators are operating from a base in Pakistan, then we have personnel at that base to tend and help launch them.
Who are these personnel? Miller reports that in recent years, the CIA "has deployed as many as 200 people" to Pakistan, working "alongside other U.S. operatives who specialize in electronic communications and spy satellites." If the CIA operates the Predators and the Predators take off from Pakistan, then ... well, it's pretty obvious. And this defeats much of the political advantage of using drones in the first place. It puts our forces squarely on Pakistani soil.
Why the agency bases its drones in Pakistan instead of just flying them over the border from Afghanistan baffles me. But a senator blurting out this secret at a public hearing? That doesn't surprise me at all. Unmanned vehicles are getting smarter and less error-prone all the time, but human beings are as fallible and foolish as ever. Maybe now that we've learned how to keep pilots out of harm's way, we can do the same for politicians.
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Humans are getting bigger.
Not taller or stronger, sorry. Just fatter. We're gaining weight and taking up more space. And that means the entire industry of things designed to fit, hold, transport, and dispose of us has to upsize. Starting with toilets.
Agence France Presse has the latest from Australia:
The standard strength of toilet seats is slated to triple, after the national safety watchdog Standards Australia found the maximum unsupported weight capacity of 45 kilogrammes was not enough. Toilet seats will soon have to pass flex and rigidity tests at 150 kilogrammes—"a precautionary measure to accommodate the increasing size of humans," a Standards spokeswoman said.
If your toilet was designed in the era of smaller humans and breaks under the stress of the new normal weight, don't fret. We can get you to the hospital, thanks to bigger emergency vehicles.
The Royal Flying Doctors, Australia's iconic outback air ambulance, is the latest service to supersize, announcing last month that it was seeking larger aircraft to cope with heavier patients. ... The planes will join a fleet of "mega lift" road ambulances already in use in New South Wales. ... More than 1,500 patients have been transported by the special ambulances since 2002, and the number is growing. ...
And if you don't make it to the hospital in time, we'll take care of your corpse,
with the standard coffin size growing from 18 inches (46 centimetres) across the shoulder to 20 inches. Most coffin-makers now stocked a range right up to 32 inches—once considered a "custom order," said [the director of the Australian Funeral Directors Association]. Crematoriums were upgrading their ovens to expand door widths closer to 100 centimetres (40 inches) and gone were the days of a "standard" grave, he said.
So, if you failed to burn off some of that extra fat when you were alive, no worries. We'll burn it off after you're dead. Or we'll put you in an extra-wide burial plot with a matching headstone to help future paleontologists reconstruct the era of wide-body humans.
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If you're looking for a safe industry to invest or earn a living in during the recession, maybe you should think more about sex. No, I'm not suggesting a career in porn or prostitution. I'm talking about condoms. Charisse Jones has the update in USA Today:
While car purchases plummeted and designer clothes mostly stayed on the racks, sales of condoms in the U.S. rose 5% in the fourth quarter of 2008, and 6% in January vs. the same time periods the previous year, The Nielsen Co. reports.
Why are condoms up while the rest of the economy goes flaccid? Theory No. 1 is that the sex drive is immune to bad times. No offense, but I'm not buying. See, for example, this November story from the Los Angeles Times about the economy whacking the sex trade:
Signs of the economic free fall have cropped up in many of Nevada's 25 or so legal brothels. ... This summer, the Shady Lady gave $50 gas cards to those who spent $300. The Moonlite Bunny Ranch offered extras to customers paying with their economic stimulus checks. ... Donna's Ranch has seen its business plummet nearly 20%. More than three-quarters of its customers are long-haul truckers, and high fuel and food prices have drained them of "play money," owner Geoff Arnold says.
Theory No. 2 is that it's cheaper to stay home than to go out. Jones reports:
The sales bump squares solidly with one of the nation's most common trends during any recession: nesting. ... "If people don't have the money to go out to a fancy dinner or are looking to cut back, Trojan gives them some real affordable ways to stay in and make some great memories together," says Jim Daniels, vice president of marketing for Trojan, the nation's No. 1 condom maker.
That makes sense: Make love, not reservations. Instead of buying your date dinner and hoping for sex, skip the dinner part and go straight to the main event.
Then there's theory No. 3: controlling the family payroll. "Condoms make for a relatively inexpensive form of birth control at a time many cash-strapped families are hesitant to grow," Jones observes. "Contraception may also be more popular during a time when families are stretching dollars and want to avoid having more mouths to feed."
I'm rooting for theory No. 3. I'd like to think that when times are tough, people become increasingly rational and careful about limiting their financial commitments, especially when the welfare of existing children is at stake. But the part about condoms being a "relatively inexpensive form of birth control" worries me. Including a barrier method is generally a good idea. But if people are cutting back on more foolproof contraception and relying entirely on condoms, there's always a risk that one screw-up will lead to pregnancy. And if you're really strapped, that's an economic and moral cost too great to risk.
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Is pot worse than booze?
This AP story about the Michael Phelps brouhaha caught my eye yesterday. The Marijuana Policy Project is organizing a boycott of Kellogg's for dumping Phelps over his pot use. I'm tempted to join it.
Last summer, just after Phelps won eight gold medals in Beijing, Kellogg's announced, "HE'S GR-R-R-EIGHT! U.S. OLYMPIAN MICHAEL PHELPS TO BE FEATURED ON PACKAGES OF KELLOGG'S FROSTED FLAKES AND KELLOGG'S CORN FLAKES CEREAL." The company's vice president for global promotions gushed, "Michael embodies the values behind our Frosted Flakes Earn Your Stripes program. He knows that winning is not just about the glory that comes with gold medals, but about good sportsmanship, working hard and being your best."
Then, two weeks ago, Phelps got caught smoking marijuana at a party. Kellogg's promptly dumped him. "Michael's most recent behavior is not consistent with the image of Kellogg," the company declared.
Not consistent? The real inconsistency, MPP's Bruce Mirken argued in an AlterNet commentary, was in the company's treatment of marijuana and alcohol. "In 2004, Phelps pleaded guilty to drunken driving," Mirken pointed out. "But apparently that offense—just as illegal, and which actually could have resulted in someone being hurt or killed—was not an issue for Kellogg's." Mirken continued:
[M]arijuana is far safer than alcohol. Alcohol is more addictive. According to the Institute of Medicine, 15 percent of those who ever drink become dependent on alcohol. The figure for marijuana is just 9 percent. ... Alcohol is massively more toxic. Every year, people die from alcohol overdoses. ... And the chronic effects of heavy alcohol use—e.g. liver damage—kill thousands upon thousands more. There has never been a medically documented marijuana overdose. ... And unlike marijuana, alcohol tends to make users reckless, aggressive and violent. A review in the journal Addictive Behaviors explained, "Alcohol is clearly the drug with the most evidence to support a direct intoxication-violence relationship."
The man has a point, doesn't he? Isn't tobacco worse than pot? And isn't alcohol in some ways as bad as tobacco?
Here's the sign-up page for the Kellogg's boycott. Personally, I plan to salute the company's morals by sitting down with a bowl of Special K, floating in Jim Beam.
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The companies that brought you tracking devices for stolen cars and lost animals have found a new market: tracking human beings.
Radio tracking devices, as Philip Shishkin notes in the Wall Street Journal, were initially placed on endangered animals. More recently, LoJack has installed them in more than 7 million vehicles to foil theft. Some 2,000 to 3,000 police departments have receivers to pick up signals from the devices. Why not extend that network to track people?
In fact, two companies have already put radio monitors on 18,000 people with Alzheimer's or brain injuries. Now LoJack is joining the market in a big way. Yesterday, the company announced a "diversification strategy" to "track and rescue people at risk of wandering, including those with Alzheimer's, autism, Down syndrome and dementia."
The Alzheimer's market looks pretty lucrative. LoJack anticipates up to 16 million Alzheimer's patients by 2050, most of whom wander away at some point. But the company also notes that "autism, which is the fastest growing developmental disability that now afflicts one in every 150 babies born, can also cause children to wander." In fact, LoJack aims to address the whole range of potential wanderers. According to CEO Ronald Waters, "This offering is a natural extension of LoJack's family of products and services and takes our solutions beyond ‘getting the bad guys' off the streets to now protecting those afflicted with cognitive disorders."
Who's going to have the receivers to track all these people? "Law enforcement/public safety agencies," says Lojack. And who's going to buy the devices and put them on the people who will wear them? You can't expect a cognitively disordered person to take that kind of initiative herself. As an Illinois sheriff points out to Shishkin, "The people who need the technology are often too embarrassed to ask for it."
There's no question that these devices save lives. Without them, some people will wander off, get lost, and die. And if your family can't track you, they might resort to keeping you indoors so you don't wander. But "cognitive disorders" can also become an expanding rationale for putting more and more people under constant police surveillance. In the spirit of mutual tracking, let's keep an eye on it.
Slate V: Beware Everlasting Jellyfish!
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Italy's Terri Schiavo is dead.
Actually, she's not Italy's Terri Schiavo. And that's the lesson of her politicized death.
Like Schiavo, Eluana Englaro had been in a persistent vegetative state for many years. Like Schiavo, she had a custodian in her family who wanted to remove her feeding tube on the grounds that she wouldn't have wanted it. And the Vatican got into it and Italian politicians got into it, with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi alternating roles as George W. Bush and Tom DeLay. In Englaro's final hours, the country's conservative administration was trying to overrule the courts, and the Senate was in emergency session to consider legislation to force reinsertion of her feeding tube. Sound familiar?
In many ways, it's like the Schiavo case. And in some ways, it resembles the death of DeLay's own father. But in important ways, the three cases are different. That's why DeLay treated his father's situation very differently from Schiavo's. And it's why we can't judge the Englaro case just from what we know about the Schiavo case. And it's why people like Bush and DeLay and Berlusconi should keep their moralizing mitts off cases like these. You can't do justice to such complex family tragedies with a moral cookie cutter.
When Schiavo's husband wanted to pull her feeding tube, pro-lifers said her parents were better guardians and judges of her will. But when Englaro's father wanted to pull her tube, he was denounced as an unfit custodian. If you're banning the removal of feeding tubes, you can't really take account of anything else: what the husband wants, what the parents want, or what the patient herself has said. These are just details that vary from one case to another. If they get in the way, ignore them. Schiavo's life, Englaro's life, your life, my life—these things don't matter. All that matters is "life."
One more thing about the Englaro case: According to the New York Times, "Over the weekend, some Italians began using YouTube to post their own living wills."
I checked YouTube for living wills in English this morning and didn't see anything in the first couple of pages. But I wouldn't be surprised if they start showing up. And when they do, I wonder how the truly hard-core pro-lifers—those who don't believe in living wills (which, by the way, presently include the Italian legal system)—will explain them away. If you don't want to be dragged through your country's courts and legislature like Schiavo or Englaro, this might be a good time to post 30 seconds of video saying so.
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Maybe Rodriguez never doped until the testing program began, and he was caught the first time he tried it. Maybe he was tipped just that one time and just as an innocent favor. Maybe it's pure coincidence that he chose Primobolan. Maybe the state of the art hasn't advanced, and every player on steroids is being caught. Maybe no other lists of failed test results have been destroyed, concealed, or legally suppressed.
And if you believe that, I've got a $275 million slugger to sell you.
More here.
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The other day, I was reading about a new procedure in which a kidney was extracted for transplant through the donor's vagina. And it got me thinking: If kidney donors deserve special surgical benefits—which is what doctors argued in this case—then what other benefits should they be offered? How about free medical care? How about cash?
The Johns Hopkins doctors who performed last week's vaginal kidney delivery describe several special benefits. "An organ donor, in particular, is most deserving of a scar-free, minimally invasive and pain-free procedure," says one Hopkins surgeon. The natural-orifice procedure supplies these benefits. According to Dr. Robert Montgomery, head of the Hopkins transplant division, "Removing the kidney through a natural opening should hasten the patient's recovery and provide a better cosmetic result."
The doctors see these benefits not just as a special reward but as an inducement. "This approach could have a tremendous impact on people's willingness to donate," argues Montgomery. The shorter recovery time "greatly reduces the inconvenience of donating and we're hoping that will encourage more people to donate."
I've written before about the horrors of the international black market in organs from living donors. Federal law goes further, banning the provision of any "valuable consideration" in exchange for an organ. But the law adds that this term doesn't apply to "the expenses of travel, housing, and lost wages incurred by the donor."
So it's OK to compensate donors for lost income opportunities. And it's OK to make sure that they, of all people, get the most pain-free procedure with the best "cosmetic result." What else?
Sally Satel, a friend of mine and a frequent Slate contributor, points out that other countries have taken further steps. In When Altruism Isn't Enough: The Case for Compensating Kidney Donors, she reports that last year, "the Dutch health minister directed health insurers to reduce annual fees by 10 percent for registered organ donors."
Sounds good, right? If you do a good deed for your fellows, don't you deserve a reward? You're supplying a medical benefit to the community. Doesn't the community owe you, at a minimum, a discount on your health insurance?
And why stop at 10 percent? Satel notes that Saudi Arabia's Cabinet recently "passed a law to compensate unrelated living donors with lifelong medical care."
Still onboard? Let's keep going. Satel proposes to amend the definition of "valuable consideration" in U.S. law so that states can offer "incentives" for organs. The incentives, she explains,
could take many forms, perhaps as simple as an offer of lifelong Medicare coverage or a credit on the federal income tax. States could, perhaps, implement their own creative incentive ideas, such as the utilization of tuition vouchers, state income tax credit, loan forgiveness, or contributions to retirement accounts.
After all, lifelong medical care, which we've already agreed is appropriate, is a quantifiable benefit. What if the reward you really need isn't medical? What if you need a college education or a professional degree? What if you're struggling with your student loans or your mortgage? Can't we do something for you?
Don't worry. We're not talking about cash. Under most of the proposals outlined by various authors in Satel's book, benefits would be "in-kind," with "a months-long cooling-off period prior to surgery" so that nobody rushes to donate out of financial desperation. The value of the incentives might range from $15,000 to $40,000. And according to surgeon David Cronin and economist Julio Elias, there would be one further payoff:
A smoothly functioning pilot period of in-kind rewards might, however, allow the public to adjust to the very idea of compensation so that actual payment became more socially acceptable over time ...
That's a good bet. Satel opposes cash payments, and a bill awaiting introduction in Congress, the Organ Donor Clarification and Anti-Trafficking Law of 2009, would reassert the ban on cash transactions (in fact, it would increase penalties for them) even as it legalized state-provided in-kind incentives. The question is whether such legal distinctions would hold firm in the face of the increasing social acceptability of compensation.
So here's the dilemma: If we maintain the ban on "valuable consideration," Americans with sufficient wealth will keep going abroad to buy organs from living donors on the black market. Those without sufficient wealth will wait for freely donated organs, and some will die waiting. On the other hand, if we relax the ban, we might get used to the idea of compensation and end up buying and selling organs legally.
Which is worse?
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Good news: You can now get a kidney from a vagina.
More here.
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Two weeks ago, when Israel was pounding Gaza, we looked at technical options for blocking or detecting the tunnels Hamas uses to smuggle arms from Egypt. The list ranged from walls to moats to sensors to periodic bombing. The idea was to offer Israel ways to cut off the flow of weapons without having to continue its military campaign.
Israel then halted its invasion, based on a memorandum of understanding in which the United States pledged, among other things, to "provide logistical and technical assistance and to train and equip regional security forces in counter-smuggling tactics." It was pretty obvious who the "regional security forces" were, given that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was already in Egypt.
So what's happened since then? Who's doing what about the tunnels? And can a tunnel, of all things, bring peace to the Middle East?
For now, Israel is still bombing the Gaza tunnels. On Sunday, Israel hit six of them, ostensibly retaliating for rockets launched from Gaza. Here's a photo of one bombed site, taken yesterday. It gives you a rough idea of how much—and how little—damage was inflicted.
The most interesting thing about the bombing is Israel's efforts to avoid killing anyone in or around the tunnels. According to the AP, "Palestinians said residents near the Egypt-Gaza border received calls after nightfall Sunday from the Israeli military advising them to leave" before the tunnel bombings. The recorded message said: "Everybody who is near any place used for terror or weapon storage facility or tunnels, should evacuate the area immediately." Then Israeli planes sent sonic booms through the area, alerting tunnel workers, who proceeded to get out before the planes dropped their bombs. "No casualties were reported from any of the bombings," says the AP.
Will bombing solve the tunnel problem? No. Last week, the commander of Israel's air force admitted, "If we hit them today, they'll open again tomorrow and they'll be dug in the future, too." The Israeli military thinks weapons shipments to Gaza should be intercepted at sea or in the Egyptian desert before they get to the tunnels. But U.S. envoy George Mitchell says the best way to close the tunnels might be to open Gaza's borders above ground: "To be successful in preventing the illicit traffic of arms into Gaza, there must be a mechanism to allow the flow of legal goods."
Mitchell is right. Opening the borders won't stop Hamas from seeking weapons. But it'll ease the economic necessity that currently drives Gazans of all persuasions to dig and maintain underground channels to Egypt. Then we can isolate and target those who work for Hamas and its arms network.
That's where technology comes in. The United States and Egypt, apparently spurred by a U.S. financial-aid requirement and the Jan. 16 agreement with Israel, are trying some of the high-tech options we discussed a couple of weeks ago. Reuters says Egypt began "installing cameras and motion sensors" along its Gaza border on Jan. 29, assisted by "joint U.S., French and German expertise." The system, designed to detect tunnel excavation, is being networked by cables that will run "from south of Rafah to the Mediterranean coast." AP has a more explicit report. Citing an Egyptian official, it says U.S. Army engineers are installing ground-penetrating radar.
I'll be surprised if that works. As we explained last month, ground-penetrating radar can't see below 50 feet of earth, and the Egypt-to-Gaza tunnels run deeper than that. That's why GPR lost its deterrent value along the U.S.-Mexico border. In fact, the New York Times reported yesterday,
Despite huge enforcement actions on both sides of the Southwest border, the Mexican marijuana trade is more robust—and brazen—than ever, law enforcement officials say. Mexican drug cartels routinely transported industrial-size loads of marijuana in 2008, excavating new tunnels and adopting tactics like ramp-assisted smuggling to get their cargoes across undetected.
In Gaza, tunnels have proved so effective and resilient that Israel is becoming infatuated with them. Yesterday, Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak, the guy in charge of bombing them, proposed to connect Gaza to the West Bank via—you guessed it—an underground corridor. "The preferred way to do it would be to dig a tunnel that would be under Israeli sovereignty, but under totally free and unobstructed use by Palestinians," Barak explained. He even has a specific route in mind.
Why run the corridor underground? To avoid disturbing or threatening the surface. Israelis and Palestinians could cross paths without seeing one another. Palestine would be connected without bisecting Israel. That's what's really emerging from the tunnel industry: a three-dimensional way of thinking about land. You build your walls and station your soldiers above ground; we go down 60 feet and dig past you. We demand access to the West Bank; you tell us we can't go through Israel, but we can go under it. In a region where land is scarce and fiercely contested, the third dimension, the one beneath our feet, was bound to become part of the problem. Maybe it can be part of the solution.
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We cover a lot of fancy technology in this blog. But sometimes the most ingenious and far-reaching gadgetry is the least fancy.
A few recent cases: First we looked at incubators made from car parts. Then we learned about ugly standardized glasses you can adjust to your eyesight with a pump. In both cases, engineers are improving life in the developing world by using cheap, available materials instead of cutting-edge technology. But why stop with external devices? Why not extend the low-tech, high-utility revolution into the human body?
That's what Thailand's Prostheses Foundation is doing for thousands of Thais who have lost their legs to land mines, diabetes, and birth defects. "In 17 years, the foundation says it has given away more than 30,000 legs," Agence France Presse reports. In the United States, prosthetic legs cost $10,000 to $50,000 or more. So how can the Prostheses Foundation afford to give them away?
Answer:
It is the recycled materials that make the project workable, Thamrongrat [the foundation's vice chairman] said, as they they keep costs down and allow the foundation to make and distribute more legs. The foundation asks people to donate materials that can be used in the limbs, such as beer cans and aluminum pots. A prosthetic for below the knee costs the foundation 1,000 baht (about 28 dollars) to make, Thamrongrat said. It would cost the government 10,000 baht to build a similar one.
Example:
Twelve-year-old Matoha Dosare was born with no right leg, but thanks to recycled soft drink cans and some old stockings, he now has a new limb and new-found independence. ... Matoha has had three new legs fitted in the last two years, with the metal in the joints coming from the donated bottle caps and tins. The nylon from the stockings is used in the sculpting process to help form the legs.
Three prosthetic legs in two years? That sounds bad. The downside of getting a leg made from soda cans is that aluminum doesn't last as long as steel. But if the upside is a 90 percent cut in production cost, the kid comes out ahead, because he can get those three legs for one-third the cost of a government-issued prosthesis. And since he's growing, each new leg can be adjusted to his increasing size.
But here's the really interesting twist:
One prosthetic offered is the "farmer's leg," which uses more steel and ends in a stump with tire treads on the bottom rather than a false foot. This was created because farmers complained the foot got stuck in the mud. ...
The prosthetic extension designed to mimic a human foot did what feet sometimes do: It got stuck. So the leg makers replaced it with an extension designed for performance in mud. They made a foot more like a tire. In fact, they made a foot from a tire. It lacks the mobility of a healthy human foot. But for farming in Thailand, it has a better shape.
Who said the era of re-engineering the human body has to be expensive?