Neelie Kroes: The New Spokesperson for European Cluelessness

According to a report that appeared this morning on the BBC News Web site, Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission, gave a speech at Cebit in Hannover at which she declared that billions of people around the world do not trust the Internet. There is something chilling and disconcerting about the fact that there are people in high positions of power who take this to be a significant insight. It is a sure sign that those who see themselves as world leaders are just as clueless about history as those who mindlessly evangelize Internet technology.

To the extent that computer networks were originally designed with little thought of oversight and regulation at the network level, the Internet is fundamentally anarchic. When access was limited to institutions with funding connections to the Advance Research Projects Agency at the Department of Defense, there was a top level of oversight to the extent that those who attempted to abuse the network risked being disconnected from it. (On the other hand some of them were hired for their expertise in finding cracks in the walls of security and became pioneers with a technology that, by all rights, should now be much further developed than it actually is.) However, as those who used to haunt Usenet recall full well, with the first opening of a more public access to what is now the Internet came (almost instantaneously) the first effort to use the network as a medium for advertising. This, in turn, led to the development of a major technology that is less concerned with broadcasting the same message over the entire Internet through spam techniques and more interested in harvesting and analyzing data about individual users for the sake of more "targeted" advertising.

From that point of view, while I sympathize with Angela Merkel's indignation at having been hacked by the National Security Agency (NSA), I wish that she had been more aware that NSA was not doing anything to her that Google was not already capable of doing (and probably was doing as part of their advertising business).

The bottom line is that there was never anything built into the Internet that warranted trust, nor has anything particularly effective been retrofitted. In the early days of this site, I liked to compare the Internet to the frontier town of Deadwood, which, at the time, was the focus of a fascinating series on HBO. The Internet is still Deadwood. All that has changed is that the city limits encompass an even larger area.

The Global Pissing Contest

I suppose I should not be surprised that so much of today's half-hour news telecast on BBC World Service Television should have been consumed by the fireworks displays in countries where it is already January 1. Since I live on the West Coast, I am used to being among the last to enter the New Year; and it has never bothered me very much. Perhaps that was because I was in Hawaii on December 31, 1999, meaning that I was among the very last to greet 2000.

This time, however, I was particularly struck by the determination of Dubai to set a world record for number of fireworks released. I suppose I should have accepted this as an inevitable corollary to the fact that setting up the most elaborate Christmas lights on your home has now become the latest reality television competition. It would appear that the ambitions of globalization have, indeed, been fulfilled. It almost seems as if the entire world's population has been reduced to competitive consumerism in that game where "he who dies with the most toys wins." This is absurd enough on its own; but, when we realize how many of those toys provides ways in which to escape reality (as opposed to other objectives for recreation), the absurd degrades further into a condition which an alien culture might classify as pathological.

Happy New Year!

That Pesky Regulation Problem

Larry Downes is a member of the CNET Blog Network. The name of his blog is Politics and Law. However, his biographical statement at the bottom of his posts describes him as “a consultant and author.” It says nothing about his understanding of either political or legal systems in either theory or practice. All we know is that he writes books, the most recent having the title The Laws of Disruption.

His latest post, filed this morning, has the title “Government control of Net is always a bad idea.” Notwithstanding the primary injunction in writing, which is to avoid words like “always,” the post has some good points. However, it is easy to criticize the workings of government these days, whether it involves a local school board trying to make drastic cuts in the face of an unmanageably low budget or the United Nations not being able to progress beyond harsh (but effectively meaningless) words in response to the atrocities in Syria.

The world has changed. The Internet has had a lot to do with how the world has changed; but the underlying axioms of governance have not been keeping up with those changes, primarily because just about every government is heavy with stakeholders whose personal interests would be threatened by any such change. As a result cyberspace is, for all intents and purposes, anarchic.

Now I am sure that there are any number of Internet evangelists ready to cite Henry David Thoreau at the drop of a hat when in Civil Disobedience he quotes a familiar motto:

"That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

The kicker in that quote, however, is the condition “when men are prepared for it.” One only has to examine a quote by Vint Cerf in Downes’ post to appreciate how unprepared those of us who inhabit cyberspace (as well as those still exterior to it) are at the present time:

The greatest strength of the current system of Internet governance is its meritocratic democracy. Anyone who cares can voice ideas and opinions, but the ultimate decisions are governed by broad consensus. It might not always be the most convenient of systems, but it's the fairest, safest, and historically most effective way to ensure that good ideas win out and bad ideas die.

This is, at best, idealistic claptrap with little appreciation for the role of regulation in any social system. Here is how I tried to advocate for regulation in a post of my own a little over a year ago:

Perhaps the best analogy [for the currently inadequate Internet governance] would be Typhoid Mary, back in an age in which health standards for restaurants barely existed.  Hardly any were stipulated;  and, for all practical purposes, none were enforced.  One of the great advances in reform was the recognition of government responsibility for the physical health of its citizens, a responsibility that has been placed in serious jeopardy by current conservative ideologues.  When it comes to “digital health,” the Internet has emerged as a Deadwood-like culture, which not only avoids efforts to discuss issues of government but overtly scorns them.  In such a culture only the brutes survive, and their survival is predicated by their success in preying on those weaker.  Since this is a culture in which neither the brutes nor the weaklings have ever heard of Thomas Hobbes, it is unlikely that conditions will change in the foreseeable future.

I do not disagree with Cerf about the generally democratic nature of the Internet. However, I think he confuses merit with skillful power manipulation. The difference between a republic and a democracy is that the former believes that any form of power should be regulated through a system of checks and balances, and that is why our own Constitution is studied as a model of governance in countries around the world.

This leaves us in a stalemate. Those in the current institutions of government reject change, because it threatens their individual powers. Those, like Cerf, who evangelize the Internet, reject the need to move from democracy to republic for exactly the same reason. The rest of us are stuck in the middle, about as helpless as the entire world was when the United States and the Soviet Union were competing over who could build the most destructive thermonuclear device.

Warning: Simplification May be Hazardous to your Health

Would that some knowledgeable authority could take responsibility for attaching a label similar to the above title to articles that purport to be news!  Consider the headline attached to an article by James Gallagher, Health Reporter for BBC News:

Sex and coffee 'trigger stroke'

As Cole Petrochko nicely demonstrated in a post to MedPage Today Blogs, it is dangerously easy to take the results of a “study” and run wildly with them in all directions.  Petrochko’s piece involved a recent European study that seems to contradict current beliefs about the risks of high salt intake.  Gallagher’s concerns research in the Netherlands concerned with the risk of stroke.

The good news about Gallagher’s report is that he tries to ground it in the nature of stroke itself.  Stroke arises from bleeding on the brain.  This, in turn, tends to arise when the walls of blood vessels weaken.  Such blood vessels are known as aneurysms.  Bleeding on the brain ensues when a brain aneurysm bursts.  There are a variety of reasons why such a burst could occur, one of which is high blood pressure.  Hence, high blood pressure is regarded as a risk factor for stroke.

The Netherlands study basically sweeps by all the links of this causal chain and chooses, instead, to focus of factors that may “induce a sudden and short increase in blood pressure” (in the words of Dr. Monique Vlak, the lead author in the published accounts of the Netherlands results).  What are the risk factors for that blood pressure change?  That is what the Netherlands study actually addresses.

I am not sure what factors were chosen.  However, Gallagher’s report gives a “top eight” list of factors and the percentage of bursts associated with them

1. Coffee 10.6%
2. Vigorous exercise 7.9%
3. Nose blowing 5.4%
4. Sex 4.3%
5. Straining to defecate 3.6%
6. Drinking cola 3.5%
7. Being startled 2.7%
8. Being angry 1.3%

My guess is that these results are consistent with the intuitions many of us have, but do they actually say anything about stroke?

As I see it, we need to go higher up the causal chain, so to speak.  How much do we know about aneurysms?  What are the factors that actually contribute to the weakening of blood vessel walls?  Is that weakening irreversible, or can the strength of a blood vessel be restored like the strength of a muscle?  Consider the hypothesis that vigorous exercise can strengthen blood vessels through a mechanism similar to strengthening muscle.  Wouldn’t it be a misrepresentation to put it on the sort of risk list given in the Netherlands report?

Enquiring minds want to know!

The Dark Side of Keeping up with the News

Dan Whitworth, Technology Reporter for the BBC Radio 1 program Newsbeat, filed a nice little story about the link between the evangelized vision of the Internet as the ultimate source of information and the reality of malware.  It basically accounted for a variety of current techniques by which such malware is being spread through stories that purport to offer new information about the death of Osama bin Laden.  The real punch line, however, came from an interview with Rik Ferguson, Director of Security Research at Trend Micro, who was quoted as saying the following:

The fact that this is related to Osama Bin Laden is almost academic.

Whenever anything newsworthy happens, anything at all, that is taken advantage of by criminals in order to make their attack more interesting, more credible.

In other words the evangelists have seen their vision come to reality.  When a major news story breaks, people turn to the Internet, convinced that they will be better informed more rapidly than they would be through the “old-fashioned” media.  The idea that such a quest for information should entail vulnerability just does not fit into the equation.

Perhaps the best analogy would be Typhoid Mary, back in an age in which health standards for restaurants barely existed.  Hardly any were stipulated;  and, for all practical purposes, none were enforced.  One of the great advances in reform was the recognition of government responsibility for the physical health of its citizens, a responsibility that has been placed in serious jeopardy by current conservative ideologues.  When it comes to “digital health,” the Internet has emerged as a Deadwood-like culture, which not only avoids efforts to discuss issues of government but overtly scorns them.  In such a culture only the brutes survive, and their survival is predicated by their success in preying on those weaker.  Since this is a culture in which neither the brutes nor the weaklings have ever heard of Thomas Hobbes, it is unlikely that conditions will change in the foreseeable future.

The Media under Fire

No reporter was named for this article on the BBC NEWS Web site. Thus, there probably was not a BBC reporter on site at the time of this incident:

Three Chinese reporters attending a police briefing on the success of an anti-gun campaign were accidentally shot, media reports say.

An officer picked up one of the weapons on show - a confiscated home-made gun - but it went off in his hand.

A reporter needed surgery for injuries to his ankle, crotch and chest, after being hit by what appeared to be pebbles fired by the gun.

Two others were slightly injured in the incident in Nanchong, southern China.

There is, however, an eyewitness account (of sorts):

"Journalists from 13 media outlets were led to a hall on the second floor after attending the meeting on the 12th floor,'' one woman called Lin told the newspaper.

"One officer picked up a confiscated pistol and demonstrated it to the journalists.''

Lin said she heard a bang and saw West China City Daily reporter Su Dingwei collapse.

"White smoke was rising in the room and crushed stone-like things were scattered all around,'' she was quoted as saying.

There are any number of accounts of reporters who have come under fire (probably both enemy and "friendly") in the course of war coverage; but this may well be the first account of a reporter who was a victim of "friendly fire" at the hands of a municipal police force.

TIME is Out of Joint

Since I take so much pleasure in irony, there was at least one level in which, after having yesterday read Huffington Post blogger Russell Shaw write about the inevitability of Al Gore being this year's selection for Time magazine's Person of the Year, I could enjoy the Associated Press report that the selection was actually Vladimir Putin. What made the report interesting, of course, was not the selection but the reasoning behind the selection:

The nod went to the Russian leader because of Putin's "extraordinary feat of leadership in taking a country that was in chaos and bringing it stability," said Richard Stengel, Time's managing editor.

This one criterion overlooks many dimensions of Putin, which even Stengel could not ignore:

"He's the new czar of Russia and he's dangerous in the sense that he doesn't care about civil liberties, he doesn't care about free speech," Stengel said.

In other words, as Tom Lehrer put it about Werner von Braun, Putin is "a man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience;" and expedience has worked very well in his favor.

So did Time speak for the rest of us? Did it ever? And, even if did, just what was it saying? Perhaps Gore was rejected for precisely the reasons that Shaw found him so inevitable. He has dedicated both his heart and his mind to getting out the word that the planet is in trouble and enjoining as many people in the world as he can to unite in reversing a dire trend. Putin, on the other hand, is perceived as the fixer. Gore warned about a chaos that is descending upon the entire world. Putin took the chaos that had engulfed Russia and returned stability "by any means necessary." I take this to mean that, at least at Time, solving problems is more important than understanding them, even if it means overlooking some of the less savory steps that lead to the solution.

Media Moguls can Say Stupid Things, Too!

In all fairness to Michael Bloomberg, he was probably speaking as a mayor, rather than the founder of a major successful media corporation, when, in response to the news that Police Detective James Zadroga may have been on drugs during those months when he was doing his job in the contaminated air at the 9/11 "ground zero" site, the current mayor of New York declared that "the science says this was not a hero." Has it ever been the business of science to define the concept of "hero" or characterize the nature of the heroic act? Is Bloomberg so dense that he can reject the social world (which is the only venue in which heroism can be meaningful) in favor of the objective world of science? Apparently, it is again necessary to invoke the spirit of Carl Gustav Jung, who was perceptive enough to recognize that "those heroes of olden time must have led a none too scrupulous life, and indeed not a single myth, Greek or otherwise, claims that they ever did anything else. All that beauty could revel in its existence only because there was as yet no penal code and no guardian of public morals." Whether as mayor or as media mogul, Bloomberg seems to be suffering from a significant case of limited reading matter!

A Narrative Approach to Exposition

Now that Fast Food Nation is available for viewing on Cinemax, it deserves a bit of reflection. After I saw Waking Life, I realized that Richard Linklater had a fascinating knack for taking expository material and presenting it through the narrative text type. Fast Food Nation began as an extended exposition by Eric Schlosser of the fast food industry and all the processing that takes place in order for you to each your cheap-and-quick burger. To the extent that this is about what happens in the meat processing stage of the supply chain, Linklater is following in the honored path of Upton Sinclair, who took the same approach to a narrative account of that same workplace in his novel The Jungle. My high school history teacher told us that President Theodore Roosevelt hit the ceiling when he read Sinclair's novel, and that led to the birth of the regulatory system for food and drugs that we take for granted today. I cannot imagine anyone in the White House hitting the ceiling after reading either Schlosser's book or seeing Linklater's film, but then I cannot imagine anyone in the White House taking any time to examine either the book or the film (and, worse yet, I am not sure I can imagine any of our current contenders for the White House doing anything different). However, what struck me the most about the film was that, from a point of view of "ancestry," it involved more than reminding us that things have not changed very much from the world of The Jungle. By examining the sale of fast food products, as well as their manufacturing, Fast Food Nation owes as much of a conceptual debt to Barbara Garson's The Electronic Sweatshop as it does to The Jungle; and, from the point of view of a dispassionate camera eye that obliges you to look at uncomfortable things, the overall mood of the film is not that different from Mondo Cane. Both of these "ancestors" were also expository; so Linklater's real gift resided in his being able to weave a variety of different narrative threads together into a fabric that covers all the bases of supply chain analysis, the domination of marketing strategy over all other concerns, the corruption of running the whole system off of cheap labor (bringing in another "ancestor," Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed), and the necessity of students and illegal immigrants, without whom the cheap labor strategy would be impossible. What may be most important is that Linklater takes a chillingly low-key approach to delivering his message. This film is clearly agitprop; but it is agitprop at its most effective, because you never see the soapbox on which Linklater stands nor do you feel that he is haranguing you into paying attention. He lets the narrative do all the work, and the narrative does so amazingly effectively, possibly because Schlosser assisted Linklater in developing the screenplay. There is nothing particularly pleasant about this film, and those who are already aware of the nation that fast food consumption has made will not find any surprises. The power is all in the rhetoric, but this is the sort of situation that needs the force of rhetoric behind it.

Antisocial Technology

Perhaps the best way to explain the opposition between the United Nations and the United States with respect to the current environmental crisis is in terms of attitude toward technology and growth. This, at any rate, is how I read the attempt by David Jackson, of USA Today, to summarize the current state of affairs:

"There are two different visions about how you make progress," said David Doniger, policy director for the climate center at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Doniger said Bush's encouragement of voluntary efforts simply won't work. A global treaty with "real limits," he added, would actually force businesses to pursue the kinds of cleaner energy-producing technologies that the president talks about. "If you just call for pledges, you don't get any real changes," he said.

Over the years, Bush and his aides have said that hard-and-fast restrictions would cripple economic growth. In 2006, Bush told an audience that the Kyoto treaty would have been "a lousy deal for America," leading to "massive layoffs and economic destruction."

The United Nations approach to a global treaty basically requires trans-national commitment to a new regime of regulation; and that concept of regulation just does not sit will with our President (or, probably, with most of his supporters). Thus the United States would rather frame the issue in terms of economic growth, presenting the "Clear Skies & Global Change Initiatives" to encourage the development of new technologies that will "solve" environmental problems like global warming. We probably should not be coming down too hard on the President for taking such a position, since ours is a culture that has been seeking a technology fix for every problem for quite some time (at least all the way back to Benjamin Franklin).

However, where this once may been one of our more admirable national traits, it may now be turning into a global hazard; and, for those of us who have been following the DigitalLife conference in New York this week, that hazard may well impact more than the environment. It may involved tampering with the very social fabric through which we engage with each other, often with little regard for what the consequences may be. Let me focus on one example reported by Associated Press Business Writer Mark Jewell:

A new device by iRobot Corp. resembles the company's disc-shaped Roomba vacuum cleaner but has a webcam bulging from the top.

It's designed to enable parents on a business trip to feel they're almost at home. For example, a parent could remotely send the wheeled robot into a bedroom, where the children could open a book in front of the robot's camera. The parent could then read the story aloud and watch and hear the kids' reactions. The family could also converse.

The robot can be controlled from within the home or remotely, using a Web connection to a home wireless network. The user can operate the robot with either a joystick or a computer installed with iRobot-supplied software.

Color digital video streams only one way, meaning a traveling parent could see the kids but not vice versa. Up to 10 parties can have PIN-number access to the gadget, allowing distant relatives or friends to keep in touch, as well as immediate family.

This item was part of a longer article entitled "Robots take on social tasks;" and it should remind us that any pursuit of new technologies cannot ignore the history of what we have tried (not always successfully) to learn about the nature of those social tasks. In this case a good place to begin would be by reviewing the history of Harry Harlow, which, fortunately, Lauren Slater did for the Boston Globe, about three-and-a-half years ago. He is best known for running a series of experiments with monkeys that could teach us about the nature of parenting. Here is Slater's summary of the experiment for which Harlow is best known:

Rhesus macaque monkeys share roughly 94 percent of their genetic heritage with humans. But Harlow felt no kinship with his test subjects. "The only thing I care about is whether a monkey will turn out a property I can publish," he said. "I don't have any love for them. I never have. I don't really like animals. I despise cats. I hate dogs. How could you love monkeys?"

Harlow's experiment required wire cutters, cardboard cones, hot coils, steel nails, and soft cloth. He used the wire cutters to fashion a wire mother, its torso patterned with small squares, a single inflexible breast "on the ventral front." Affixed to this breast, a steel nipple pierced with a tiny hole through which the monkey milk could flow.

Then Harlow fashioned a soft surrogate, a cardboard cone bunted in a terry cloth towel. He wrote, "The result was a mother, soft, warm, and tender, a mother with infinite patience, a mother available 24 hours a day . . .. It is our opinion that we engineered a very superior monkey mother, although this position is not held universally by monkey fathers."

First Harlow took a group of newborn rhesus macaque babies and put them in a cage with the two surrogate mothers: the wire mother full of food, the cloth mother with an empty breast and a sweet smile. After the initial trauma, something amazing started to happen. Within days, the baby macaques transferred their affections from the real mother, who was no longer available, to the cloth surrogate.

The cloth mother, however, had no milk, so when the youngsters were hungry, they would dart over to the chicken-wire mother and then run back to the safety of the soft towel. Harlow graphed the mean amount of time the monkeys spent nursing versus cuddling. The disparity in favor of cuddling, he wrote, was "so great as to suggest that the primary function of nursing . . . is that of insuring frequent and intimate body contact of the infant with the mother."

Harlow was establishing that love grows from touch, not taste, which is why, when the mother's milk dries up, the child continues to love her. The child then takes this love, the memory of it, and recasts it outward, so that every interaction is a replay and a revision of this early touch. "Certainly," writes Harlow, "man cannot live by milk alone."

For a long time psychology classes tended to treat the above summary as a closed story on an experiment, results, and lessons learned. However, the narrative of the real world does not close off quite so nicely. It turns out that the monkeys that participated in Harlow's experiments experienced side effects that did not appear until after they had grown:

When he [Harlow] took the grown-up cloth-mothered monkeys out to play and mate, they were violently antisocial. Some began to display autistic-like behavior. A New York Times reporter came out to Madison to do a follow-up and Harlow led him to his lab, where a troop of rocking, head-banging macaques sat in cages, chewing off their fingers. "I admit it," said Harlow. "I have made a mistake."

Harlow's admission was good news, but he did not necessarily see any mistakes in his underlying methodology. Rather, he saw the mistake as an opportunity to formulate and explore new hypotheses, no more concerned about long-range side effects than he was with his first round of experiments.

This brings us back to the present. The "long view" of Harlow's biography should serve as a cautionary tale to the sorts of visions now being promoted by iRobot, if not the entire vision of DigitalLife, let alone a world-view that sees environmental crisis as a little more than an opportunity to investigate hypotheses and promote the technologies that emerge from experimental results. In the case of the iRobot, we may find ourselves cultivating a new population grounded in norms of autistic behavior; where the environment is concerned, we are faced with the prospect of repeating history with consequences that will be anything but farcical, whatever Marx' assessment of the human condition may have been.

Consequences in China

Perhaps the Chinese finally are beginning to recognize that consequences matter. While I have not been particularly optimistic about the progress that China has been making in dealing with the problems of hazardous foods and manufactured goods, they at least have come around to recognizing that their public face cannot hide behind veils of denial. It may be possible that the Olympic Committee played a role in this recognition with their threat of cancelling certain events if the air quality was not improved. This brings us to today's dispatch from Beijing by Jamil Anderlini reporting for the Financial Times. It turns out that the Chinese are finally coming around to recognize that the Three Gorges Dam, one of the greatest efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, may, itself, be an environmental disaster:

China’s Three Gorges dam threatens to become an environmental catastrophe if the government does not act quickly, senior Chinese officials have warned in an unusual public nod to the massive project’s ecological impact.

The comments, carried in state media on Wednesday, mark a rare Chinese admission that dire predictions of ecological destruction from international experts and domestic opponents of the world’s largest dam are coming true.

Landslides, silting, and erosion above the dam are creating environmental and safety hazards that cannot be ignored, Wang Xiaofeng, director of the State Council Three Gorges Construction Committee, was quoted as saying. “We cannot exchange environmental destruction for short-term economic gain,” he said.

In all fairness Mr. Anderlini then suggests that there may be a political side to this admission of the problem:

The unusual criticism of such a symbolic project could be politically motivated in the lead-up to the 17th Communist Party Congress, a five-yearly event in which senior officials jockey for power before the top ranks of the party are decided.

In his published remarks, Mr Wang quoted Premier Wen telling China’s cabinet recently that “the environmental cost is the most pressing of the serious problems facing the Three Gorges project.”

The dam was the brainchild of Mao Zedong but construction began under the government of former President Jiang Zemin, who still exercises residual influence in the current government even three years after he relinquished his last official post.

Former Premier Li Peng, the man widely believed to be responsible for sending in troops to quell the 1989 Tiananmen Square student movement, is the official most closely associated with the Three Gorges project.

In other words, whether or not, as is the case with addiction, recognition is the first step to rehabilitation, it can also be the first step to cleaning up a political house. This would be unfortunate, because it would then distract attention from the environmental impact of the dam, which is a serious problem requiring serious attention. Furthermore, since the dam itself was supposed to address the problem of air pollution, this means that the threat of the Olympic Committee still hangs over China's head, with the possibility of resolution more remote than had previously been anticipated.

Now I suppose there are plenty of idealists who would argue that the impact of this problem has now escalated to a global level and should be addressed by (at least) the industrialized nations, acting in concert under the leadership of the United Nations. However, given that the President of the United States chose to ignore a discussion on the environment that took place at the beginning of this week, we would probably be more likely to bet against the idealists. Furthermore, it would probably be unfair to lay all of the blame on our President. Ours is a country of self-determination; and we want to keep it that way. To a great extent China is trying to deal with its problems in that same spirit of self-determination. At least they have now come to a point where they can admit that this approach is not working, but it remains to be seen how they will seek out to design and implement more effective solutions.

The Story may have been Bogus, but the Buns are still Bad!

Warren McCulloch used to be fond of saying, particularly in the heat of a passionate argument, "Don't bite my finger, look where I'm pointing." This may be a motto worth remembering as we discover that the contaminated Chinese bun story may still be with us. The finger-biting, in this case, surrounded the revelation that a news report about steamed buns sold by street vendors in China that were actually made from cardboard was actually bogus. However, a Reuters dispatch from Beijing this morning revealed that the finger was pointing at a serious problem that has still not been satisfactorily resolved:

An outbreak of food poisoning has put 260 kindergarten children in hospital in China, the offending meal most likely a breakfast of buns and porridge, Xinhua news agency said on Friday.

Most had recovered from Wednesday's poisoning at the kindergarten in Wuwei in the remote northwestern province of Gansu, but 16 were still seriously ill.

Food poisoning is a frequent problem at Chinese schools, especially in rural areas, where lax official supervision encourages canteen contractors to cut costs at the expense of proper hygiene and food safety.

What is most disconcerting about this report is how unsurprising it is. As readers we are well beyond waiting for the other shoe to drop, or perhaps the metaphor might be better captured by the shoes of a centipede! Last week I suggested that Chinese strategic planning had to bite the bullet and navigate a course between "the Scylla of capitalism and the Charybdis of self-serving ideology;" but current conditions seem to indicate that they are more likely to run afoul of both hazards at the same time!

A Plague on Both Their Houses

Matthew Garrahan has filed a useful report for the Financial Times on the "sharp increase in the number of safety-related toy recalls by Mattel and other toy manufacturers." The point that Mr. Garrahan wishes to make is that this is not simply a problem of Chinese manufacturing processes. Rather, if one just looks at the numbers, the problem has more to do with flawed design, rather than manufacturing problems:

More than 1m toys were recalled because of concerns about lead paint. However, Mattel has also recalled some 18m toys containing small magnets that could prove harmful if swallowed.

He then reinforces his point by citing an academic study:

Professor Paul Beamish, from the Richard Ivey School of Business, and Hari Bapuji, at the University of Manitoba, analysed 550 toy recalls made in the US since 1988 and found that more than 75 per cent were due to problems that could be attributed to design flaws. Only about 10 per cent related to manufacturing defects.

It goes without saying that, at least when you go "by the book," every stage of a production cycle has its own review process. Manufacturing is generally reviewed by the statistical techniques of quality control, and it is not hard to get up to speed on the problems of statistical sampling and the interpretation of the sample data. The only real questions that should be addressed by Mattel are where the review takes place (at the site of manufacturing is preferable for a variety of reasons) and by whom. Design review, on the other hand, is far less systematic. When I worked for Fuji Xerox at the time when everyone was deep-ending on "knowledge sharing," they were experimenting with an interesting approach to design review in which everyone in the production cycle had the opportunity to contribute, going all the way to service technicians who had to worry about how easy it would be to diagnose problems and replace parts.

Since I no longer work for Fuji Xerox, I do not know whether or not their experiment led to a more general adoption of such an extensive review process. However, a comment from Professor Beamish leads me to believe that Mattel would dismiss such an approach as being too time-consuming:

There are a lot of companies going to market very quickly with toys. It’s highly competitive and sometimes when there is too much emphasis on speed and low cost, things can get sacrificed, whether that’s product safety or product quality.

Once upon a time we were taught that competition was good for the consumer, performing the dual functions of driving quality up and driving prices down. Professor Beamish's observation seems to indicate that, at least in the toy business, this lesson is now a myth (if it was ever true in any business in the first place). Following the trend of objectifying the subject, the customer is nothing more than the source of some data points, fed into some impersonal process driven by an optimization algorithm. This is how it was when Ford was manufacturing its Pinto whose gas tank positioning made for a high risk of explosion on impact. That was forty years ago. These days we have more data points; but the processes of review and decision seem to be just as short-sighted, if not more so.

Why McDonald's?

The latest McDonald's to open in Berlin is attracting more attention than usual. John Ward, in his SPIEGEL ONLINE report, explains why:

This is the first McDonald's in Berlin's Kreuzberg neighborhood, and expectations were high that the denizens of the famously left-wing district would act to resist the incursion of the Golden Arches. There was a time here when protesters would throw excrement-filled care packages and plastic bags of paint into fine-dining establishments in the neighborhood, until someone decided to outdo the others by lobbing a hand grenade into one expensive restaurant in the early 1990s.

But that wasn't the scene Friday -- far from it. There were reportedly a few protesters in attendance in the morning, but by noon they were gone.

One possible explanation might be that economic resistance would have more impact than physical protest. However, one paragraph from Mr. Ward's report makes one wonder if the Kreuzberg community will deal with McDonald's by shunning it:

Nadine R., a 23-year-old student running to get to class, admitted between slurps of her beverage that she was happy to have a fast-food place across from her school. "I usually like to eat something healthier," she said. "But you get so little time in your break. It's just so much easier to come here," she added, as a friend dragged her away.

This is the same story we hear in the United States: convenience trumps health, whatever the longer-term consequences may be. Given the pressures of life, whether as a student or as a worker, one can at least understand, if not sympathize with, Nadine's decision. So it is likely to be that McDonald's will become a fact of life in yet another community that knows, in its heart, that it would be better off without it.

A "Perfect Storm" of Hazards from China?

The day before China's Health Minister made the embarrassing statement that being conscientious about the safety of foods and manufactured products could, itself, be a "sickness," Victoria Ho issued a report on CNET News.com about a survey of malware conducted by the antivirus company Sophos. Here is the basic substance of her report:

According to a report released Monday by antivirus company Sophos, China--including Hong Kong--hosted 44.8 percent of the world's infected sites in August. The U.S. ranked a distant second, hosting 20.8 percent of sites that contain malicious code.

The number of infected Web pages has also grown. Sophos said it detected an average of 5,000 new infected pages each day in the month of August.

The company warned that simply staying clear of sites hosted in the top three countries of China, the U.S. and Russia is not an effective method of avoiding malware.

"Hackers are hijacking Web sites around the world to make them point to malware on sites based in China, the U.S. and Russia," Carole Theriault, Sophos senior security consultant, said in a statement.

Sophos also warned about a sharp rise in spam pointing people to these infected sites. Malicious senders, in an attempt to bypass attachment virus scanners, are using messages that direct people to Web sites with malicious code. Computers get infected when people click on the links in the e-mail message.

"Most malware writers...are using spam and the Web to infect users," Theriault said. "Criminals are hard at work trying to slip past filters at the corporate gateway."

Today we have a Reuters report, filed from Beijing, which indicates that these physical and virtual dangers may be combining into a sort of "virtual storm" of hazards within the scene provided by the annual Moon Festival, celebrated by the consumption of the special sweet moon-cake pastries. In the physical world there are the findings of the food safety bureau in Guangdong to the effect that, in the words of the Reuters story, "only 85 percent of 80 batches of mooncake filling tested met quality standards." In this context the conclusion of the report inspired as little confidence as the recent official statement from the Health Minister. Here is more of today's Reuters text:

Despite finding excessive traces of intestinal bacteria, preservatives and high acidity levels, the authority said consumers could "rest assured" -- 98.1 percent of the finished product on supermarket shelves met standards.

However, almost as an addition of insult to injury, the "contamination" of the Festival itself has also taken over the virtual world:

China has warned Internet users to be wary of downloading virus-infected mooncake greeting cards ahead of the traditional Mid-Autumn Festival after a wave of Internet worms hit hard-drives last year.

Is this just one of those coincidences that usually account for actual perfect-storm situations; or is it the latest set of symptoms of a more systemic malady? Having tried to situate this story in a context-setting "scene," that scene should also account for today's China Daily report (whose results are available through Al Jazeera English) of the widening income gap in China. In this report the gap being examined is between rural and urban Chinese. However, it is likely that the gap is further enhanced by those rural Chinese who are so financially strapped that the succumb to the lure of urban prosperity, only to find that they have traded one state of poverty for another (which may be even greater). As we begin the aggregate all of these symptoms and acknowledge the magnitude of the collection (not to mention its unpleasant consequences), that recent rant against capitalism from Osama bin Laden should induce a chilling resonance.

However, this should not be taken as a call for either rant or revolution. After all, the last attempt to revolt against capitalism now as a sort of tired been-there-done-that feel to it, probably because all that came out of it was a replacement of the Ruling Classes of capitalists with the Ruling Classes of opportunistic ideologues. Rather, we should recognize that we are in a situation that demands what I have called "crisis-driven strategic planning." This means that we need not only to invoke what I have cited as the Neustadt-May fundamental questions of crisis management but also but also to think critically about the very nature of rationality that we apply to addressing those questions. This is no easy matter; and I have previously invoked Andy Grove's observation that it requires a lot of "intellectual ergs" (observing also that such a commitment requires a matching commitment of personal will). To return to the nautical metaphor, we are like Odysseus, in that we cannot avoid a course that leads us to both the Scylla of capitalism and the Charybdis of self-serving ideology; so we have no choice but to negotiate a path that avoids both hazards. To opt out of the choice is to elect to succumb to at least one of the hazards (if not both of them).

Deadly Chutzpah

Unless I am mistaken, it was back in the Nineties that the government of Indonesia decided that, because they had so little land and because pretty much all of that land was being put to use, they would construct a nuclear power station in the crater of a dormant (not extinct) volcano. At the time this seemed like the ultimate what-were-they-thinking act of stupidity; and just about every industrialized nation responded with its characteristic nationalist stamp of derision. However, as we get more and more background on the Crandall Canyon mine catastrophe, we have to ask just who came up with the bright idea of drilling a deep mine into a seismically active formation in the first place. The only really substantive difference is that the mine puts fewer lives at risk than a nuclear reactor would, but both acts of thoughtlessness are in the same league. This has not received a lot of coverage; but, now that there has been a second cave-in at Crandall Canyon, Associated Press writer Paul Foy has had the good sense to acquire some seismological background.

It turns out that there is a technical term for what caused these cave-ins. It is called a "mountain bump." Foy describes it as the phenomenon "in which shifting ground forces chunks of rock from the walls." Since that rock bears much of the structural weight of the mine passages, dislodging any of it jeopardizes the structural integrity of the entire passage. None of this is beyond the scope of Geology 101, nor is the fact that the mountain formations in Utah are still "young" enough to be seismically active (not unlike the fault lines through California). So trying to dig a network of mine tunnels into such a formation is essentially an act of chutzpah against nature (defying the earth to hold still or else, so to speak); and sending miners into that network compounds the chutzpah by setting the authority of the mine owner above those forces of nature.

So, following the usual path of analysis, what are the consequences to date of these acts of chutzpah? As of August 6 six men were trapped more than three miles into the network, and rescue workers still have not located them. Then, last night at 6:39 PM local time, a second "mountain bump" induced a second cave-in, which killed three of the rescue workers and injured at least six others. Sometimes the substance of the Chutzpah of the Week award turns out to be little more than a loud public raspberry, but this week's award should be presented as a Badge of Shame to the owner of the Crandall Canyon mine.

Moving a Corporate Scam to the Public Sector

This week's act of chutzpah falls under the category of making an outrageous decision in opposition to strong contrary evidence. In this case the evidence concerns trading in carbon emissions, also know as carbon credits and carbon offsets. The evidence that this was more of a scheme to protect polluting industries than a serious step towards cleaning up a polluted atmosphere has been accumulating for some time, but the hardest data were reported by the BBC last month with only the weakest of refutations. In the face of this evidence, the outrageous decision has come from our Forest Service, according to Claudia Lauer, Staff Writer for the Los Angeles Times:

For years, companies have been allowed to compensate for greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing "carbon offsets" — vouchers for investment in alternative energy sources, tree-planting and other projects that can mitigate global warming.

Now the idea is spreading to individuals, with the Forest Service's announcement Wednesday that it will be the first federal agency to offer personal carbon offsets through an initiative called the Carbon Capital Fund.

"We came up with the idea because everyone is looking at what they can do in terms of climate change," said Bill Possiel, president of the National Forest Foundation, a nonprofit partner of the Forest Service. "The money goes to a restricted fund for projects on national forests."

Trees and forests are "carbon sinks," Possiel said, because they draw carbon dioxide — the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming — out of the atmosphere and store it for long periods of time.

The Forest Service, an agency within the Agriculture Department, estimates that the 155 forests it oversees absorb 10% to 15% of the nation's carbon emissions and that planting through the new initiative will increase that amount.

Under the program, individuals can use a "carbon calculator" at http://www.carboncapitalfund.org to figure out the size of their carbon footprint. Then, they can buy offsets at $6 per metric ton of carbon dioxide. An average family of four is responsible for 19 to 30 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, so the offsets would cost $114 to $180.

"People have an opportunity to contribute to the health, diversity and productivity of the nation's forests not only by countering climate change, but also by replanting forests for the benefit of future generations," Forest Service chief Gail Kimbell said in announcing the initiative.

As to any contrary evidence, Possiel claims it is refuted by the "ground truth" of the computer models they are using. Furthermore, verifications based on those models will be managed by an unnamed third party. All in all the operative noun for all this still appears to be "scheme;" so the Chutzpah of the Week award goes to the Forest Service for sending out a dog that could never hunt in the first place.

Workers of China, Unite!

Apparently in today's China the Communist Manifesto gets about as much respect as Rodney Dangerfield, at least according to a recent dispatch from Reuters:

Chinese migrant construction laborers are overworked, feel isolated from urban society and mostly lack basic insurance, state media reported on Monday, citing a survey.

The report comes after China's rubber-stamp parliament passed a labor law giving greater protection to workers' rights. It also follows a brick kiln slave labor scandal which prompted nationwide outrage.

Some 53 percent of migrant workers lacked an official contract and only 17 percent of workers with contracts understood their content, the China Daily said, citing a poll of 5,000 workers in several major cities by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think-tank, and Beijing's Tsinghua University.

Only 31 percent of polled workers regularly received their full salary on time, while nearly two-thirds lacked disability insurance, the paper said.

China's breakneck industrialization has resulted in a rash of maimings, poisonings and deaths among workers who are often poorly trained and overworked.

Of China's 120 million migrant workers flooding the country's booming eastern cities, one in three worked in construction, the paper said, citing China's labour watchdog, the All China Federation of Trade Unions.

Labour rights groups regularly accuse China of not doing enough to protect workers -- most from impoverished rural areas who have moved to China's booming eastern cities to find work -- from unscrupulous employers who flout work safety rules and withhold salaries.

Parliament last month passed a new labour law giving greater protection to workers' rights in the wake of the national furor over the use of kidnapped children and slave labour in brickworks in the northern province of Shanxi.

One has to look back on those old rants by Nikita Khrushchev and wonder just who ended up burying whom!

Carbon Credits Take it on the Chin (again)

This month began with a report that Julian O' Halloran prepared BBC File On 4 on the failure of the Emission Trading Scheme, the specific "economic machinery" behind the carbon credit for the European Union. O' Halloran got Ian Pearson, Minister for Climate Change, to admit that the first phase of this scheme had not delivered on its promises; but Pearson hung tough on his conviction that "Phase Two will be a big, big improvement." Phase Two is supposed to run from 2008 to 2012, and now the World Wildlife Fund is ready to declare it a bust "because of the potential for very heavy use of imported credits." In other words we are right back where we were at the beginning of the month with O' Halloran's description of the Scheme as "essentially a permit to pollute." This is the sort of plan that smells of either the economic bubble that O' Halloran declared it to be or a confidence game (or both). Somehow, calling the whole thing a "scheme" gives it just the right connotation!

The "Permit to Pollute"

Last month in his analysis for the BBC of the report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the mitigation of climate change, Richard Black point out that there may be too much reliance on the economic machinery of a carbon credit market that overlooks how much of this market remains unregulated and the risk of the entire market turning into an economic bubble. Almost exactly a month later Julian O' Halloran prepared a report for BBC File On 4 on the failure of the Emission Trading Scheme, the specific "economic machinery" behind the carbon credit for the European Union. Calling the carbon credit itself "essentially a permit to pollute," he demonstrates how the specific EU plan has led to three undesirable consequences:

1. Consumer electricity bills have increased.
2. Power companies are enjoying windfall profits.
3. The anticipated result of a reduction in greenhouse gases has not been achieved; in fact figures seem to indicate "that CO2 emissions across the EU also rose by between 1 and 1.5% over the last two years."

The "official response" came from Ian Pearson, Minister for Climate Change:

If you are saying to me it hasn't achieved a massive amount so far when it comes to CO2 reductions, well I agree with you and I think Phase Two will be a big, big improvement...and a key instrument in helping us all to achieve our carbon reduction targets across Europe.

The question that O' Halloran is raising, however, is whether or not we can afford to wait for "Phase Two," particularly in a context of free market economics that places the prosperity of specific business interests over the well-being of the plainet and its population.