Don't Lie to Me...

Absolutely incredible...

I know that President Bush has been criticized for many things but this admission on his part that he has signed orders allowing the NSA to conduct eavesdropping activities on Americans communicating with people overseas is an amazing and horrific admission. ( http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/17/bush.nsa/ ). Such action bypasses The FISA Court, the very body created by Congress to address such matters in a way that balances security with Constitutional protections. That the President believes that such action is justified should frighten every American.

Adding to the problem is the President's record on this matter:

"Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so." President Bush April 20, 2004 9:49 A.M. EDT. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040420-2.html

In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on our nation, I authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. President Bush December 17, 2005. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/20051217.html
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/17/bush.text.ap/

This seems to be a dramatic reversal. If, in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks, the President authorized warrentless interceptions of communications, then he knew on April 20th that a court order was not being required. Still he said such an order was still required on April 20th. Such a contradiction isn't just misleading: it's lying. I'll say that again because it may just be important: The President of the United States has LIED about this matter.

Whether you think that the President should or should not have the power to authorize such NSA action, there remains the overarching problem that he lied to the American people about it. Such dishonesty is not just unbecoming of a leader, it is appaling...

The Relative Cost of Terrorism:

Since 9/11 we have all been told that fighting terrorism is of paramount importance and that we must be willing to make sacrifices to keep America safe. Having said that, I doubt it. It is not clear in any way that the cost of terrorism is one that is extraordinarily high or one that demands extraordinary sacrifice.

America lost some 3000 plus citizens on 9/11 due to terrorist violence. While I think that the loss of any life is horrible, loss of life is something we accept on a daily basis and risk is a part of life. If we were opposed to accepting any optional risk, we would stay at home, hide in our basements, and wear padded clothing. We don't. We balance risks and potential deaths due to risk everyday. With that fact in mind, I will point out that the risk of death due to terrorist violence is still a very small risk compared to other activities that have a risk which we willingly and gladly accept:

Americans accept several thousand deaths EVERY WEEK due to lung cancer caused by cigarette smoking (http://www.lungusa.org/site/pp.asp?c=dvLUK9O0E&b=35427 ).

Americans accept deaths due to automobile accidents ranging from 30 to 40 thousand per year: several thousand per month (http://www.unitedjustice.com/death-statistics.html ).

If these fatality levels were not acceptable, we would see a "War on Smoking" or a "War on Careless Driving". We don't see such activity. That is, we have thousands dead every week from smoking, thousands dead every month due to automobile accidents and we just accept it as part of our way of life. Even if we had a few thousand dead due to a 9/11- type terrorist event each and every year, it still wouldn't rise to the threat-level of these other "acceptable" risks. So then, why change our way of life to address the lesser risk of terrorism if we won't do so to address a multitude of greater risks? If our leaders won't ask smokers to stamp out their butts to save several thousand lives a week, how does it make sense to ask everyone to accept higher costs (truncations of their civil or, human rights) to get a much lower return (less than 2% of that many lives)??

The people claiming that Terrorism is "The" issue of our day aren’t doing very much cost-benefit analysis…
At best, the response to terrorism is illogical. If the goal is to protect American lives, then we should be going after the greatest threats to American lives first and spending should be proportionate to the risk presented. I don't see anyone spending billions of dollars and putting American Marines in harm's way to stop smoking or to erect signs at hazardous railroad crossings. We owe it to ourselves to realize that the scariest threats, the ones which evoke the most visceral responses, are not necessarily the most important and significant ones. I think the current response is being defined by pure knee-jerk reactionism and our national safety should be based on more circumspect thinking and use of resources.

Drug Testing

The other day the Minotaur had a pre-employment drug test. These tests have become a standard for all sorts of employment. The fact that such an invasive process has become a standard in the US is appaling. This is all the more true because they are of dubious value. The doubtful value of drug testing stems from two distinct problems with the drug testing system.

The first problem is the basis for testing in the first place: that somehow drug use has an adverse impact on job performance such that employers have a right to know about usage history prior to employment.

First off, let's eliminate the idea that a history of illegal drug use is an indicator for disrespect for the law that an employer might wish to consider. The testing does nothing to show illegal usage of drugs, only that drugs which are currently illegal in the US have been used. The difference is that the test totally ignores the idea of use of drugs in a legal setting outside of the US which if done inside the US would be illegal: that is, it says nothing about a man's respect for the legality of drug "X" in the US if he uses drug "X" while in Mexico. While it could be argued that an educated person should know of the applicability of drug laws to US persons outside the US, such laws of misfeasance are sufficiently esoteric that we cannot conclude disrespect for the law based on ignorance of it. By way of illustration, how many people know whether or not it is legal to use, while on vacation in Canada, an over-the-counter cough medication purchased in Canada and which contains large amounts of codeine? This isn't the kind of knowledge we can attribute to the reasonable layperson.

Given that, there is the real issue of whether illegal drug use actually impairs performance (Some groups have suggested that some illegal drug use actually improves performance under some conditions. http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/weil1.htm ). If it does lead to detectable impairment of performance, then the performance impairment is detectable in and of itself, and there is no need to have drug use act as an superfluous and imperfect test for something we can observe. On the other hand, if the drug use does not lead to detectable differences in performance, then drug use does not correlate to poor performance and the test is pointless. I would add here that there are some jobs where the performance is sufficiently critical that, by the time poor performance is detected, irreparable harm is done: airline pilots, bus drivers, etc. For these individuals, where malpractice is "life or death", I can see finding proxies like drug use history to predict performance. On the other hand, in the vast majority of jobs, service industry, sales, many kinds of engineering, performance which is impaired is easily detectable prior to any significant harm being done to anyone. In this latter case, why bother testing? Just look at performance: if it is good the first 90 days, keep the employee, if not dismiss them… As such, since the vast majority of jobs allow direct detection in a timely manner, widespread drug use history testing is a pointless, expensive, and invasive exercise which should be discontinued.

A second, and arguably far more important, problem with drug use history testing is the "false positive paradox". If it is true that illegal drug usage is an asocial aberration, then it should follow that it is rare. Unfortunately, testing for rare conditions, even with very accurate tests, leads to very unreliable "positives". To illustrate, imagine an employer with 1000 employees who decides to put them through a drug test. Our employer selects a very good test which is accurate 99% of the time. That is, 99% of the negatives are shown as negative with 1% erroneously positive and 99% of positives are shown as positive with 1% erroneously negative. Reflecting the expected rare nature of illegal drug usage, we will assume that only 1% of the employees are drug users: 10 use drugs. What results should we expect if we neglect statistical variation? We should find that, of the 990 non-drug users, 980 will test negative correctly and 10 will test positive incorrectly. Of the ten drug users, we expect all ten to come back positive. Thus, we have 20 positives as a result and ONLY HALF are correct!! This is NOT a very far-fetched scenario. It illustrates the problem with testing for a rare condition: the positives are VERY often incorrect. The correct way to address this problem is to always retest the positives: two positives in a row would be very reliable indicator. Unfortunately, that isn't how the test is applied in employment testing: if you fail once you're done- you don't get the job. As such, many qualified and clean people are being turned away to the detriment of the employers and the employees.

Drug testing is not only pointless, expensive, and invasive. It is also being applied incorrectly with inefficient results. We would all be better off if the majority of employers began recognizing the low cost-benefit provided by this hack system of drug testing and move away from it.

Free Market is no panecea

"Free Market" is often cited as a guiding light in our social and political processes. Moreover it has gained so much respect that it is hailed as a solution to all sort of problems. While I will certainly agree that capitalism is a much better economic model than is socialism, free market attitudes only apply to a very narrow set of problems and there is a distressing tendency in our politics and media to apply it incorrectly.

Free market attitudes apply very well to transactions between entities where all costs are internal and the market is atomistic.

Where the market is highly concentrated, the atomistic assumption does not apply and monopolistic (or monopsonistic) inefficiencies appear. For this reason we have Antitrust laws in the US to help prevent unacceptable levels of market concentration. Of course, the level of concentration which constitutes "unacceptable" is a very gray area and any concentration produces some level of inefficiency. Having said that, we have many markets in the US in which a high level of concentration exists and is allowed to continue to exist. One example of this can be seen in the record and movie industry. AOL has done an excellent job of demonstrating that a CD or DVD can be produced with media written on it and distributed widely and so cheaply that it behaves as junk mail: they give them away for free and I find a few of them a month in my mailbox… Having said that, it is obvious that cost to produce a CD/DVD is very low and some sources estimate it as less than a dollar. http://www.2near.com/edge/editorials/mp3.html. At the same time, to buy a music or movie CD/DVD costs $16 to $25. Even assuming that a particular artist gets as much two dollars per copy as royalties (which would be an incredibly high amount in the industry http://www.mbsolutions.com/biz/Info24.html), and that the store tacks on a few dollars as overhead, we are still left with the fact that the record companies are taking the lion's share. Why is there no "race to the bottom"? Why aren't we seeing competition to drive down the price of the and CD/DVD market? Whatever your answer to that question is, there remains the fact that the market is NOT behaving as a atomistic free market. We tolerate such markets in the US but whether we are considering media like CD/DVD, or phone service, or credit cards, or automobiles, such concentrated markets are common and atomistic free market assumptions only apply as an approximation and yield undesirable inefficiencies.

Where significant externalities apply to a transaction, free market attitudes also do not yield efficient solutions. A common example is use of fossil fuels for power. Whether the application is automobile power or power supplied to an electrical utility grid, fossil fuels create external costs not reflected in the costs born by the parties to the transaction. That is, generation of waste products require clean up costs. The individuals who decide on use of fossil fuels and spew the resultant wastes into the air and let them blow away do NOT bear the costs of clean up and so such cost are not part or their decision. Whatever that cost is, and whether it is great or small, it is external to the individual decision to use a fossil fuel for power and creates inefficient solutions where the sole guide is the free market.

My point is that free market solutions are NOT always applicable and we should be questioning any assumption that free market is the best guide in any given circumstances. To illustrate, do we want the free market to determine:
The cost of cocaine being sold in middle schools;
What the acceptable blood alcohol level of a driver should be;
Whether a given retarded person should be sterilized;
The speed at which people should drive in school zones;
How much pot commercial airline pilots should smoke on duty;
Whether your neighborhood is the right place for a casino, nuclear plant, or toxic waste dump;
The cost of the service of prostitutes across the street from a church;
Whether a given invalid should be "unplugged" from life support;
Whether a given woman should have an abortion…???
This list could go on and on but I have yet to find one person who will claim that such issues are appropriate for the free market to determine. Given that, there are myriad areas where the economics of the situation are not a desirable guide. We should be asking "Why is free market the right guide?" in ALL situations instead of just accepting it a priori.

Eldred v. Ashcroft

M-I-C… See? We got Mickey's copyright extended!
K-E-Y… Why? Because we're greedy!
M-O-U… You? Who cares about you??

The constitutional mandate for US law which provides copyright protection is intended to encourage the sciences. That is, to help promulgate information in society.

The logic is that, if we don't protect an author's work, then there will be no incentive to publish and society will never receive the benefit of the publication. Since publication is the means by which information is promulgated in society, we need to encourage it. The assumption here is that without financial incentive there is no incentive. While this assumption is not always true since many works are disseminated for reasons other than financial gain (religious texts, educational broadcasting, etc.), it is an excellent generalization. So, we protect an author's work to provide a financial incentive for him/her to enrich the information to which society has access.

On the other hand, this protection of an author's work is limited (a time limited monopoly) because there is sufficient financial reward by a limited monopoly to encourage publication, any further protection doesn't provided a benefit to society so society has no motive to provide it. The term of protection has recently been extended from the author's life plus 50 years to the author's life plus 70 years. One well known expert on this matter has observed that such a term can conceivably restrict a work for 150 years in the case of a 16 year old boy who writes a popular novel and then lives to be 96. Of course, the time value of money causes makes any extension on the copyright term to provide a diminishing marginal return on the incentive to create. That is, the first ten years of the copyright terms provide more present value than do the next ten or the ten after that, etc. I won't do the math for you but, assuming 4% inflation, each 20 year extension is only worth about 45% of the previous twenty years in present day dollars. The result is that increasing the copyright term from 50 years to 70 years increases the expected return to the creator by less than 9% and increasing it from 130 years to 150 years increases the expected return to the creator by about one third of one percent!!

Eldred v. Ashcroft was a case in which the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed the power of Congress to extend the term of copyright protection. In 1998, Disney sought additional protection from Congress to keep Mickey Mouse, who debuted in 1928, from entering the public domain in 2003. Congress responded with the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) which extended protection from life plus 50 years to life plus 70 years. This effectively tacked on 20 years to Disney's copyright on Mickey Mouse.

While there are some people who will respond that such action is OK since "Disney owns Mickey", I argue that the public got robbed. Walt Disney saw sufficient reward in publicly releasing "Steamboat Willy" back in 1928. In return, the public gave him his due, a life plus 50 year monopoly on Mickey. Why now should we pony up more protection? I argue the public is being asked to give more protection and is getting absolutely nothing in return. Adding to the irony here is that Disney forged a media empire on the back of public domain media. Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, most of the music in Fantasia, etc. are all Disney staples and were all used FREE because the original creations were all part of the public domain such that Disney, or anyone else, could use them as they saw fit. Disney took from the public domain to make these beloved works and is now trying to avoid its obligations to contribute to the public domain.

CTEA was a crock and the public should be angry about the disregard it shows for the public good.

Global Warming II

The Weatherman entered the Iron Labyrinth in order to comment on the post "Global Warming". His comment is as follows:

Sorry... I don't buy it! "Predictions of global warming are based on computer climate modeling, a branch of science still in its infancy. The empirical evidence actual measurements of Earth's temperature shows no man-made warming trend. Indeed, over the past two decades, when CO2 levels have been at their highest, global average temperatures have actually cooled slightly." http://sitewave.net/pproject/s33p36.htm
Sure CO2 levels are increasing at this time. But for the last 300 years or so, they have been lower than usual and are increasing with the general warming trend since "The Little Ice Age". Human activity may certainly be adding to the CO2 increase, but there is also no actual evidence that this increase is causing any "warming effect". In fact, recent carbon dioxide rises have shown a tendency to follow rather than lead global temperature increases.

I do not agree with the two fundamental points of the criticism leveled by the Weatherman…

The comment that "Predictions of global warming are based on computer climate modeling, a branch of science still in its infancy" is dubious but not directly relevant since the reasoning in my original blog are not based on any climate modeling but rather on the known data on CO2. That is, I reason that since CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and since levels are rising, that the hypothesis that the global climate is warming follows. On the other hand, it is true that the RESULTS to be anticipated from global warming are sometimes predicted using computer modeling. These results include a global retreat of ice, decreasing salinity in high latitude oceans and seas, and slowing of the Gulf stream. All of these effects have been predicted by computer models and current trends are showing these models to be reliable. Examples of the first prediction, global retreat of ice can be seen in the Arctic where the Northwest Passage is now open for part of the year (http://www.carc.org/whatsnew/writings/amitchell.html), in Africa where the Furtwangler ice wall on Kilimanjaro has undergone a massive retreat in recent years (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2337023.stm), and in the Antarctic where glaciers are moving at an unprecidentedly high rate and the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed in 2002 (http://nsidc.org/iceshelves/larsenb2002/). There other easy to find sites which show observations of other predicted effects of warming.

The comment that "empirical evidence actual measurements of Earth's temperature shows no man-made warming trend. Indeed, over the past two decades, when CO2 levels have been at their highest, global average temperatures have actually cooled slightly" is not credible because it is based on some really sloppy data. The data, taken from The Petition Project at http://sitewave.net/pproject/s33p36.htm, shows a graph, their Fig. 5, which is taken from data by J. K. Angell at, http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/temp/angell/angell.html. While Angell's original data is credible, the graphs by the Petition Project are so poorly designed that conclusions based them alone are suspect at best and bogus at worst. The Petition Project's Figure 5 looks like one of those puzzles entitled, "What's wrong with this picture?" First and foremost, the given trendline has no R-squared value associated with it and no prediction interval shown. Without those fit criteria, the conclusion made by the Weatherman, that "global average temperatures have actually cooled slightly" is unsupported. Further, the line in Figure 5 uses a sub-set of Angell's data without giving a reason for discounting the other data in the set. That is, for some reason, Figure 5 only fits a line using data from 1978 to present, not the full set of data from 1958 to present. Since a line fitted to all of the data available (1958 to present ) would yield a positively sloped trendline rather than a negative one, and since the conclusion drawn is based entirely on the trendline slope, it is difficult to see why one should credit the data from Figure 5 at all. Further, The Petition Project's data in other associated graphs are subject to similar criticisms. By way of comparison, I took the full range of Angell's data from 1958 to 2004 based on Annual surface conditions and found that a fitted trendline has a POSITIVE slope (m=0.0162), that R-squared is 0.58 and that the 95% prediction interval does NOT contain ANY lines of negative slope… That is, a graph based on the relevant data as published by Angell contradict the Weatherman's conclusion that "global average temperatures have actually cooled slightly". The data supports the conclusion that we can be at least 95% certain that global average temperatures are rising: exactly what one would expect as CO2 levels rise.

Since the margin of the Weatherman's comment relies on the above arguments, and since I do not find his above arguments credible, I will not address the margin of the comment.

I invite further commentary.

Global Warming

Maybe it shouldn't surprise me that there are still people that doubt the effect that human activity is having on the atmosphere and the global mean temperature as a result, but it does. One of my colleagues remarked about a snow storm last year, "So! Do you still believe in global warming?" Her argument was just silly, if there were blizzards all over the planet at the same time, maybe not, but snow in Ohio in December is not evidence contrary to global warming. There is not only plenty of evidence for the presence of Anthropogenic (man created) warming but the facts are actually pretty simple once one settles on which data are reliable.

Reasonable people can agree that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas. "Carbon dioxide, ... causes between 9-26% [of the greenhouse effect on Earth]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas.

Further, no one should doubt that the atmospheric CO2 levels are rising and have been for decades. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen from about 280 parts per million in 1800 to 380 parts per million today. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000A751A-F39F-10F6-B39F83414B7F0000.

Two of the largest CO2 emission sources include volcanic and anthropogenic. Volcanic activity now releases about 130 to 230 teragrams (145 million to 255 million short tons) of carbon dioxide each year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic#Gas_emissions. Another source, Gerlach, estimated a total global release of 3-4 x 10E12 mol/yr from volcanoes. http://volcano.und.edu/vwdocs/Gases/man.html. At 44.01 g/mol, this estimate yields an expected output of 132-176 teragrams annually.

On the other hand, anthropogenic source estimates are much higher. From 1850 to 2000, 282 PgC were released by combustion of fossil fuels. http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/pns/faq.html. Note that is 1880 teragrams per year and does NOT include the oxygen components of the CO2 and thus is a VERY conservative estimate. This is also conservative because it only includes fossil fuel consumption and not cement production (a large contributor) or other man-made sources. Even so, this estimate is an order of magnitude greater than volcanic sources combined. Another estimate comes from the National Energy Information Center. http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb1119.html. They estimate a total annual output of CO2, from energy consumption alone, as larger than 22,000 million metric tons. Since a metric ton is a megagram, this is equivalent to 22 million gigagrams or 22,000 teragrams of CO2 annually!! This is TWO orders of magnitude greater than volcanic sources combined.

So, since human and volcanic sources are the greatest emitters and since human sources are at least one order of magnitude larger, human are the single largest source of CO2 emissions. This should come as no surprise: human fossil fuel consumption actually makes CO2. All volcanoes do is release stored CO2 dissolved in the molten rock. There is no such thing a coal-powered volcano… If you've been listening to some clown on the radio telling you something like "one volcanic eruption releases more CO2 than all human sources combined over decades", then you were lied to. Reconsider your sources.

Reasonable people know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that rising levels will increase trapped heat on Earth, that trapped heat increases global temperature, and that CO2 levels are rising. As such, it should come as no surprise to anyone that Earth is warming on a global level. The next question is, what is the cause of rising CO2 levels, since Anthropogenic sources are the largest contribution to CO2 emissions, it follows that humans are causing the rise, and, consequently, that we are causing global warming.

We need to get our collective heads out of our collective rears and take responsibility for the results of our actions. If the Earth warms, climate changes. CO2 is the largest single human-controllable variable in the global warming equation. Since we are not prepared for the disruption caused by climate change, we need to work to slow (or stop) our CO2 output and reverse the damage we are doing.