Category: Technology

This should be an episode of House, M.D.

I went vegetarian in early ’94 (vegan in ’02) for its potential health benefits. The animal rights/ethics implication mattered little, as I was mostly unaware. Health reasons still dominate, but the disturbing callousness with which we disregard animals as sentient beings is enough to keep me vegan on the unlikely chance I falter in my dedication. Consider Exhibit A, the E-Z Catch Chicken Harvester:

I don’t expect any mass abandonment of meat as a food item in my lifetime, but who can watch that and consider it the mark of a civilized society?

Following that line of thought, how does this story read in the animal rights context?:

[Dr. Jennifer] Eddy is one of many doctors to recently rediscover honey as medicine. Abandoned with the advent of antibiotics in the 1940s and subsequently disregarded as folk quackery, a growing set of clinical literature and dozens of glowing anecdotes now recommend it.

Most tantalizingly, honey seems capable of combating the growing scourge of drug-resistant wound infections, especially methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, the infamous flesh-eating strain. These have become alarmingly more common in recent years, with MRSA alone responsible for half of all skin infections treated in U.S. emergency rooms. So-called superbugs cause thousands of deaths and disfigurements every year, and public health officials are alarmed.

Though the practice is uncommon in the United States, honey is successfully used elsewhere on wounds and burns that are unresponsive to other treatments. Some of the most promising results come from Germany’s Bonn University Children’s Hospital, where doctors have used honey to treat wounds in 50 children whose normal healing processes were weakened by chemotherapy.

I’m sure there are vegans who could argue against such a use as animal exploitation; I am not one of them. I don’t think I’m prone to relying on any sort of relativism to justify some things while denouncing others (example), but this is fine with me, if it works. Although there is a price, preventing disability and death is a clear benefit.

For more on honey from a vegan perspective, read this, including its fuzzy (and stringent) indications of how honey might be ethically harvested. For more on MRSA, read this again.

Video link found at Boing Boing

The ethics of vanity

Here’s an excerpt from a presentation (from 2001, I believe) entitled “Rejuvenation of Aging and Photodamaged Skin Utilizing Fibroblast Conditioned Media”:

A newborn baby’s skin produces an abundance of compounds important to healthy young skin, including growth factors antioxidants, soluble collagens, and matrix proteins that confer structure to skin. Over time, environmental stressors like ultra-violet radiation, cigarette smoke, wind and pollution deplete these compounds. Meanwhile, as we age, our bodies gradually lose the ability to effectively produce these elements. So our skin wrinkles, sags and roughens.

This natural mixture of newborn skin compounds is produced by Advanced Tissue Sciences, Inc. to from a pioneering process in the emerging field of tissue engineering that utilizes fibroblast cells from neonatal foreskins to produce human tissue replacements for the treatment of serious burns, wounds and other therapeutic indications. Fibroblasts are the cells responsible for growth and repair of the dermal layer of skin. The patented tissue engineering process stimulates normal human newborn skin fibroblast cells grown in the laboratory to deposit matrix proteins, including collagens, growth factors and antioxidants to form a human dermal tissue structure. In addition to assembly of these components into a tissue, the cells secrete soluble forms of these compounds into the solution (termed media) used to nourish the cells. The resultant fibroblast conditioned media is separated from the cells and tissue to serve as a natural, highly efficacious, ingredient for anti-aging cosmeceuticals. The fibroblast conditioned media contains the array of naturally produced factors which aging skin makes less efficiently and sometimes in smaller quantities.

Advanced Tissue Sciences, Inc. sold its assets in 2003 to SkinMedica in bankruptcy. SkinMedica now has an array of products that include human fibroblast conditioned media. Its site does not indicate specifically that this means “developed from neonatal foreskins,” so I am not making that claim with regard to its products. However, Dr. Patricia Wexler said as much when she appeared on Oprah.

Does anyone else see the ethical quandary this presents? The boy has not consented to unnecessary surgery, yet a healthy portion of his body is amputated. The discarded foreskin is then used by a third party to develop a commercial beauty product¹. Somebody is making money on this, and it’s not the now foreskin-free boy.

Providing compensation to the circumcised boy would not change my opinion, or ease the violation of routine infant circumcision. That should be obvious. But it does further illustrate how little the rights of infant males are considered in the routine practice of circumcision in America. There is a disconnect when reason does not tell us that using an infant’s foreskin so that adults can pretend that time does not exist is not acceptable.

Note: It makes no difference if the human fibroblast conditioned media is used to treat burn victims instead of those too vain to age. The boy does not lose his right to bodily integrity because someone else suffered burns. Individual rights can’t be trumped by any notion of who “needs” the skin more.

¹ Two human collagen products, CosmoDerm® and CosmoPlast®, contain cells replicated from discarded foreskins.

Congress could be where thinking began

Congratulations are in order to the United States Congress. In a bold move of understanding, it stripped a needless provision from the port security bill it passed over the weekend:

Congress is patting itself on the back for passing the Port Security Act last Saturday. But the day before, a House-Senate conference committee stripped out a provision that would have barred serious felons from working in sensitive dock security jobs. Port security isn’t just about checking the contents of cargo containers, it also means checking the background of the 400,000 workers on our docks.

Felons will not be barred from crucial jobs where a reasonable person not using the wonderfully intuitive powers of deductions granted to our smartest leaders might believe that to be a Bad Idea&#153. But leadership involves understanding the full picture of society, those “unintended consequences,” if you will. When viewed together with this provision of the port security deal, the good senators (Sen. Frist, in particular) understood that we wouldn’t want to exclude a significant portion of American adults.

House and Senate negotiators reached agreement last night on legislation to tighten maritime and port security regulations and, in a last-minute move, added an unrelated measure that seeks to ban Internet gambling.
…

The port security and Internet gambling legislation was approved 409 to 2 in the House and on a voice vote in the Senate early today, as lawmakers rushed to leave Washington for their fall reelection campaigns. Senate Republican and Democratic leaders announced it would be passed by voice vote after the House’s late-night vote.

You see, foresight! The Congress knew that many Americans could now become felons for operating a financial institution that offers customers a service they want violating Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s morality funding drugs and terrorism¹! That’s bad, and they should pay the price, but we still need secure ports. We don’t want no stinkin’ foreigners handling that job.

¹ From the Washington Post’s article:

Proponents of the crackdown said the industry, which is mostly based overseas, provides a front for money laundering, some of it by drug sellers and terrorist groups, while preying on children and gambling addicts. Americans bet an estimated $6 billion per year online, accounting for half the worldwide market, according to analysis by the Congressional Research Service.

Am I going too far out on a limb to request that the reporter investigate this claim rather than accepting spoon-fed horseshit from some political hack? I don’t think so.

Can I steal a MINI if I spend $25,000 on football cards?

I don’t have much to say on Hollywood’s economic assertions about intellectual property piracy, other than to say that I’m sure it’s overstated, it will result in destructive legislation, and it will delay the industry’s entrance into the 21st Century of electronic distribution. In other words, it’s the typical nonsense from a dinosaur. However, this quote countering Hollywood’s nonsense is bogus:

It’s important to remember, however, that even though piracy prevents money from reaching the movie industry, those dollars probably stay in the economy, one intellectual property expert said.

“In other words, let’s say people are forgoing paying for $6 billion in movies by downloading or consuming illegal goods but end up spending that $6 billion on iPods, computers and HDTV sets on which to watch the movies, which leads to $25 billion in job creation in the computer/software/consumer electronics field,” Jason Shultz, staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote in an e-mail.

The net economic effect of piracy is irrelevant to the intellectual property discussion. It does not matter that consumers spend their $350 on an iPod instead of movies. What matters is that $350 is not going to the company that created something of value to the consumer. There are many theories on how best to protect intellectual property and guarantee payment, most of them interesting. But the basic formulation of the problem does not include a community approach to evaluating economic spending. He who takes the risk should reap the reward.

Ewww! Oh my God, you sick little monkey!

Where in the Constitution does it say that the United States government should engage in morality propaganda?

The White House is distributing government-produced, anti-drug videos on YouTube, the trendy Internet service that features clips of wacky, drug-induced behavior and step-by-step instructions for growing marijuana plants.

I won’t prattle on about the remaining details since this will be an inevitable failure. Any third-grader high on his big brother’s weed could figure that out. More absurd is this:

“If just one teen sees this and decides illegal drug use is not the path for them, it will be a success,” said Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

This program is “free”, since the Office of National Drug Control Policy is only placing previously produced videos on YouTube. Gotcha. But no man hours were spent in the organization of this project? No man hours were needed to design the YouTube goodness? How much did we spend previously to put us in a position to save “just one teen”? Free is not free. It’s not provided in the Constitution, either, but I’ll just stick with the notion that propaganda is not free.

Recall that this is not the first time in recent memory that a government official has set the “just one teen” standard for any and all government intrusion. Now I’m giddy with anticipation (without the help of marijuana!) for future campaign slogans stating something like “If just one teen is saved from terrorism by program X, it will be a success.”

I’ll stick with blackjack

Really? People are getting worked up oer this device?:

Professional gamblers are rushing to buy £1,000 devices that they believe will enable them to win millions of pounds in casinos when the gambling industry is deregulated next year.

Hundreds of the roulette-cheating machines – which consist of a small digital time recorder, a concealed computer and a hidden earpiece – were tested at a government laboratory in 2004 after a gang suspected of using them won £1.3m at the Ritz casino in London.

After the research, which was never made public but has been seen by the Guardian, the government’s gambling watchdog admitted to industry insiders that the technology can offer punters an edge when playing roulette in a casino, and the advantage can be “considerable”.

Again, really? This is a big deal? Obviously the casinos will boot anyone they deem to be winning in excess, but wouldn’t it be easier to disrupt this scheme by not allowing betting after the dealer spins the wheel? I don’t know gambling law, especially in the U.K., but if betting after the spin is required, I’d work to change the laws if I owned a casino. Aside from banning the device, of course. Which seems to be the case in most places that allow gambling:

But rather than ban the devices, which are outlawed in many jurisdictions across the world, the Gambling Commission will require casinos to police themselves. Phill Brear, the commission’s director of operations, admits predictive softwares can work but suggested it might be possible to prosecute someone using them under a new Gambling Act offence of cheating.

Or more to the point, wouldn’t casinos just work to counter this by repairing or replacing their roulette wheels?

The government’s national weights and measures laboratory investigated the technique. It is thought the cheats first identify a “biased” wheel, where the ball appears to commonly drop in roughly the same zone. They also look for signs on the wheel of a “manageable scatter”, which means that when the ball strikes a certain number, it will usually fall into a neighbouring pocket. The unpublished report concluded: “On a wheel with a definite bias and a manageable scatter, a prediction device of this nature, when operated by a ‘skilled’ roulette player, could obtain an advantage when used in a casino.”

I wouldn’t sound the alarm for casinos going bankrupt just yet. They’ll adapt and the majority of people dropping £1,000 on one of these gadgets will find themselves more than £1,000 poorer. Such is life in a casino.

Source: Boing Boing

Seattle Factoids

For anyone thinking of visiting Seattle, here are a few tidbits of knowledge I picked up:

  1. Mighty O donuts makes the greatest vegan donuts doughnuts the planet has ever known. In eight days, Danielle and I inhaled 2½ dozen doughnuts. Granted, I consumed more, but they were good. Like crack, even. Every time we were in our hotel room, they called our name. So. Good.
  2. The locals refer to the city as the People’s Republic of Seattle. I don’t know if this is meant affectionately, but you can imagine I’d never live there. It’s a wonderful place to visit, though.
  3. The common perception that it rains a lot is a myth. I lugged a rain jacket and umbrella across this continent based on this lie. Don’t believe it. We encountered zero drops of rain on our vacation, including more than five days spent in Seattle.
  4. I’ve never been to San Francisco, but I imagine it feels like Seattle. I’d never ridden on roads that slope at an 88° angle before, but now I know what it’s like.
  5. Not Seattle-specific, but taught by the aforementioned hills, I can report that the Saturn Vue is possibly the worst car ever designed. How can an automatic transmission require two feet to operate the pedals to avoid slamming into cars behind you? (Side note: The hills weren’t really 88° angles. The engineers at Saturn inspired that bit of exaggeration.)
  6. As a DC resident I was susceptible to Seattle’s hatred of jaywalking. I obeyed all the signals to avoid the $55 ticket, which police will apparently issue at 7am Sunday morning on an empty road.
  7. Mount Rainier is big.

Now you know.

Hokies thank you for free WiFi

This story is a few months old, but since I visited Blacksburg last week, I learned about it now. The facts:

The New River Valley will soon be more connected than ever as Blacksburg Transit goes wireless with a pilot program offering Internet service aboard select buses.

The new service, created as the result of a partnership between Citizens Telephone Cooperative, based in Floyd, and Blacksburg Transit, has already begun wireless Internet service aboard a single bus, but plans are in the works to add six more by the end of May. “We’re still testing, but we should have them all done by the end of the month,” said Tim Witten, manager of BT Access.

“We’re doing it as a pilot program. We’re deploying this to see how it works, and hope it would be a really attractive part of our service, and serve as an example to the rest of Virginia,” Witten said.

That’s fancy enough, but I don’t imagine students clamored for this service. Although my experience is eight-plus years old, I’m confident that local travel patterns among Virginia Tech students haven’t changed that much. Most users aren’t on the bus long enough to scan for the wireless network and connect, much less to check the status of their fantasy football. Those students who are on the bus long enough and want to download the latest Paris Hilton song should pay for it themselves.

The program is being paid for by a series of grants from the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation and the federal government, thus restricting the number of buses that will receive wireless service.

Because it’s some tech nerd’s vision of cool does not mean it’s a public good. Should I also point out that Blacksburg Transit does not intend to test the program on specific routes? That the routes could change daily? I’m sure that will inspire riders to bring their laptops on a regular basis. Hopefully this flawed premise will help the program fail. As long as it’s in place, when the Hokies take the field and the leaves change colors this fall, you should stop by Blacksburg and surf the free wireless you’re providing.

………….

(General hat tip to Kip for the basic structure of this post.)

Cross-country network of dollars communication

Since politicians have already shown their economic ignorance through copious central planning, the unintended consequences caused by advances in communications technology will surely surprise them. I’m not surprised:

Rural phone-service subsidies are so bloated and inefficient that providing wireless or satellite phones is cheaper, an economic analysis prepared for a senior citizen advocacy group suggested yesterday.

Taxes to support the universal service fund, which is intended to pay for higher costs of serving rural areas, are growing so fast as to force some low-income people to drop phone service, said Thomas Hazlett, a George Mason University economist who prepared the analysis for the Seniors Coalition.

“It’s perverse when shifting tax money around for the universal service fund results in more people leaving the network than joining it,” said Hazlett.

Why I should subsidize those who choose to live in rural areas is a question I will never accept. Since it’s not up to me, I worked around it (and other similar questions of fees and taxes) years ago when I abandoned traditional phone service¹ almost five years ago. Now I use a combination of cellular and VoIP. I’ve never missed the land line, and I’ve definitely never missed the higher costs. I changed because I assessed my needs and made the decision that new technology satisfied my communication needs. No politician could know that.

More importantly, how much faster would rural customers have received phone service if politicians had let the free-market sort out customer requirements? Of course, that question is merely interesting because of the multiple interest groups involved. Each group wants it own special consideration, which only makes the tax structure confusing and the collection process more bureaucratic. For example:

Universal service subsidies have become so widespread that rural phone companies on average collect only 27 percent of their revenue from customer payments, Hazlett found. Even so, many rural customers are opting to drop traditional wired service to go wireless because “it’s cheaper, and they like the mobility,” he said.
…

Many rural carriers receive subsidies that exceed $1,000 a year per customer, with some subsidies topping $10,000 a year per customer, Hazlett said.

There will be no incentive to innovate in that atmosphere. Why bother, when the government will take from those living in cities and give through subsidies to those who don’t. There is no sense in this, other than politics. But politics rarely makes for good economics. It’s time to cut the apron strings and let each customer bear the cost of his choices.

¹ I have a land line today, but it’s the minimum service and is used only to provide communications for my home’s security system. Fees or not, I want emergency services contacted when necessary. I don’t think that gives politicians an open invitation to tax me for the economic inequality-du-jour.