Benlog

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s web site says he is board-certified doctor (specifically, a surgeon). Indeed, he is, with an active certification due for renewal before February 28th, 2006.

One should note the following facts about this actively certified physician, especially when taking into account Tennessee’s General Rules and Regulations Governing the Practice of Medicine – 0880-2:

• Bill Frist claimed on national television that he didn’t know whether HIV could be transmitted via sweat and tears. The CDC says “Contact with saliva, tears, or sweat has never been shown to result in transmission of HIV.”
• From Washington, Bill Frist diagnosed Floridian Terry Schiavo as “responsive to visual stimuli” using nothing more than a video tape. He later denied this diagnosis once an autopsy showed that she was, in fact, blind. The Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners says:
  

  No person shall engage in the practice of medicine across state lines in this State, hold himself out as qualified to do the same, or use any title, word, or abbreviation to indicate to or induce others to believe that he is licensed to practice medicine across state lines in this State unless he is actually so licensed in accordance with the provisions of this rule.

  […]

  As used in this rule, the practice of medicine across state lines (telemedicine) means […] the rendering of a written or otherwise documented medical opinion concerning diagnosis or treatment of a patient within this State by a physician located outside this State as a result of transmission of individual patient data by electronic or other means from within this State to such physician or his agent

• Bill Frist endorses the teaching of creationism/intelligent design alongside evolution, although intelligent design doesn’t even closely resemble science.

Does the “3 strikes” rule apply to medical certification? It should.

Bill Frist has every right to be a socially conservative politician. He should be able to express his views as freely as any other politician. However, he should not be able to use his medical board certification to push these pseudo-scientific lies. The Tennessee Medical Board (and possibly Harvard Medical School) should intervene, at the very least with censure, possibly with revocation of his medical certification. If they stay silent, they will be responsible for the damage that his ideologically-motivated medical advice will cause. Medical professionals have a responsibility to the public to be as accurate and objective as they possibly can be and, above all, to do no harm.

With this responsibility, there must be accountability. Bill Frist should be stripped of his medical certification.

Below, an FBI report about Guantanamo cited by courageous Senator ChrisDick Durbin. Every freedom-loving American should be outraged and ashamed that this stuff is happening in our name:

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.

Of course, the press and Republicans can’t stop talking about how ChrisDick Durbin “compared US troops to Nazis.” Actually, what ChrisDick Durbin said is:

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime–Pol Pot or others–that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

Does anyone actually disagree with that precise statement? Meaning, when you read the first paragraph, do you think “yeah, this sounds like the America I dream of?”

The point is that these acts of torture are shameful in an absolute sense. It is so incredibly sad that our government’s core argument is that, in the words of Dick Cheney, “these people have been treated far better than they could be expected to have been treated by virtually any other government on the face of the Earth.” Yes, we are better than the North Koreans, phew, that’s a relief.

Blame Durbin all you want for his supposedly excessive comparison, the cold, hard facts remain: we are torturing prisoners at Guantanamo. In the name of freedom, we are torturing people.

We should be ashamed.

UPDATE: and, on a lighter note, I should be ashamed of using the wrong first name: it’s Richard/Dick Durbin, not Chris Durbin. Updated with strikethroughs.

Global warming is real. Science should not be manipulated by partisan hackery. More on this later, but in the meantime, sign up to the Virtual March on Washington to Stop Global Warming.

In a month, I’ll be presenting at Usenix’s Steps to Reducing Unwanted Traffic on the Internet workshop. The paper is “Lightweight Encryption for Email” (PDF), and my co-authors are Susan Hohenberger and Ronald L. Rivest.

At a high-level, we’ve designed (and prototyped) a mechanism for doing public-key signatures and encryption in the context of email, using only existing architecture and, most importantly, without deploying a public-key infrastructure that the user needs to know about. We think our approach will be quite useful in fighthing phishing attacks. The other papers regarding the phishing-specific components of our approach are still in submission. I’ll link to them when they’re ready.

There is a classic French tale about a man eating his bread and cheese, and finding that he finishes the bread before the cheese. “Un peu de pain pour finir mon fromage,” he asks. And later, “un peu de fromage pour finir mon pain.” And later again “un peu de pain pour finir mon fromage….” I’m certain this story exists in just about every culture with the appropriately substituted food type.

In 1993, many nations standardized on the Berne Convention of a “life + 50 years” copyright. In 1996, the European Union lengthened its term of copyright for composers to “life + 70 years.” In 1998, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which retroactively extended the length of all copyright by 20 years. One of the stated reasons was to bring the US copyright duration in line with European copyright length for composers. And now, in order to help its poor starving performers, the EU wants to extend its copyright term to be more in line with the US. And by “more in line,” they mean “life + 100 years.”

On the assumption that (100-70) is indeed less than (70-50), sounds to me like someone’s asking for more cheese. It is ludicrous to discuss this issue as if these large media companies wanted anything less than “forever copyright.” Just because they’re asking for it in chunks doesn’t make their end goal any different. And so the question becomes: do we really want to live in a world where there is no public domain? Where ALL content is controlled by the media companies FOREVER? Because there is no doubt that that is what they’re looking for, and our governments are giving it to them.

“Unlimited copyright on the installment plan,” as Lessig puts it.

Alright, everyone is talking about Apple supposedly switching to Intel chips. There’s no doubt that this could be a big deal, if it is what it sounds like. There are potentially far-reaching implications to the processor platform wars, in particular what the future of computing looks like and whether users still control their own machines or are cripled with DRM at every step. Or maybe this means nothing, and it’s just a Mac enthusiast frenzy over an inconsequential decision. We’ll see.

I figured I might as well place my bet. I agree with Daring Fireball, I think the situation will turn out to be something along the lines of Intel offering a PowerPC chip, or Apple having some kind of technology up their sleeves that negates the need to port applications to the x86 platform altogether. I will be very surprised if Apple actually expects developers to recompile their code to the x86 platform.

Of course, Intel offering a PowerPC chip is not exactly trivial, given the engineering challenges and the patents IBM probably holds. On the other hand, if emulation is involved, the business situation is interesting. Microsoft is building the Xbox 360 around an IBM chip, and Intel can’t be super happy about that. Moving one giant step towards having OS X as an alternative for Intel hardware is a strong counter-punch that could scare MS a bit.

Whatever happens, this is fascinating. My bet is that the “Apple switching to Intel” rumor is only half the story, and that the other half is going to be much more interesting.

UPDATE: Looks like I was mostly wrong. Apple is indeed expecting developers to recompile their apps to x86. They claim it will be fairly easy. They have commitments from MS and Adobe to port their apps over. I am quite surprised. However, I suspect that, once again and against all odds, Jobs will pull this off.

In software and, more specifically, data modeling, there is a concept called normalization. The idea of normalization is to determine the dimensions of your data in order to prevent duplication and ease data maintenance in the long run. For example, you might want to categorize your instant messenger buddies into “Work,” “Family,” and “Friends.” How should this data be stored and displayed? The simplest way is a straight-forward table:

Phil, friend
Claire, family
Pierre, family
Oliver, friend
Bob, work
Alice, work

But what happens if you want to change “work” to “colleague?” What if you want to start giving special permissions for all of your “friends” (say, they can IM you after 9pm) that work colleagues shouldn’t have? That’s when you normalize, by taking the concepts of “friend,” “family,” and “work” and storing them (and even displaying them) separately. Your view becomes:

Friends - can contact me after 9pm
  Phil
  Oliver
Family
  Claire
  Pierre
Colleagues
  Bob
  Alice

This reduces data duplication and helps data processing. Concepts are more clearly defined (what exactly do you mean by ‘friend?’), and data is organized and displayed far more clearly. Normalization organizes your data and makes it clearer.

Let’s switch gears completely for a moment.

Creative Commons allows you to license your documents to others under a more permissive regime than default copyright. If you see a CC logo, you know exactly what that means about the content. The same goes for the term “open-source” when it comes to distributing software. There is a very clear definition of what a Creative Commons-licensed document is, of what open-source software means. These concepts are clearly defined.

And I just found out, through Larry’s blog, about a new type of “tag,” the Fair Employment Mark. A company promises, via contract, to adopt the policies of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA, a bill that everyone claims to support but that hasn’t yet passed), and in return, they get to use the Fair Employment logo.

What does this all mean?

It means that when you go to Magnatune or Flickr, you know something about these companies immediately from their use of Creative Commons licenses. When you find a software vendor like JBoss, you know immediately that their software is available with source code. And, eventually, when the Fair Employment mark is adopted, you’ll know something right away about the company that displays the logo.

Each concept is individually well defined, branded, and publicized. An organization can simply reference these concepts, and immediately you know something about that organization. The older behemoth had to advertise in every possible medium with catchy tunes and slogans to create a single, unique brand. Today, a small group can immediately create a “corporate image” by picking and choosing the existing, normalized concepts by which they abide, and voila, instant, composite branding.

This seems quite powerful, especially for small businesses and non-profits. And, of course, it comes with the same big complication as software normalization: weak compliance with normalized concepts reduces the overall value of the system. The success of such a system is dependent on strictly-defined concepts. That’s why “CC”, “open-source” and hopefully “FE” will work. That’s also why TrustE, ISO9000, and the like mean almost nothing in practice.

The French have said No. Officially, the referendum was about the EU Constitution. But the exit polls show that, while the majority of “Yes” votes answered that question indeed, the majority of “No” votes answered a totally different question regarding approval of the current government’s domestic policies.

When the Bush administration first talked tough on Iraq (2002), I wondered if (and hoped that) it was a bluff. An attempt to scare Iraq into accepting weapons inspectors back into the country to ensure they were not developing WMDs. When the weapons inspectors were allowed back in but the escalation of words continued, it became clear that it was no bluff at all. I won’t judge (in this post) whether the war was a good decision or not. Let’s just say the escalation might have been a darn good bluff, but it turned out to be much more than that.

So now the Bush administration is quietly developing “small” nuclear weapons. The softly-stated purpose is to attack Al Qaeda bunkers, as well Iran and North Korea’s nuclear weapon developments. Again, this may be a terrific bluff. If I were Kim Jung Il, I would seriously consider the possibility that Bush might use such weapons against North Korea. I might be forced back to the negotiation table. This could be a fantastic bluff.

But I don’t think it is. I think the Bush administration actually believes it will use these weapons. There’s talk of how these weapons will cause minimal casualties. They’re smart bombs after all. They’re small (as in, only 2/3 the detonation power of Hiroshima.) And they’ll only pollute 100 square kilometers with radiation, no big deal. Plus, we’re only going to use 5 or 6 against each target nation. This is not a bluff. This is a justification for actual use.

So let’s just clarify something. In the black and white world of “you’re either with us or against us,” there is no such thing as a small nuclear bomb. If we use a nuclear bomb, no matter how small or smart, then there’s no stopping any nation or group using a nuclear bomb against us. What will the argument be? You can’t develop and use large nuclear weapons, because we only use small ones? Or, better yet, does that imply that we’re okay with other nations developing similarly small nuclear bombs?

We’re afraid of other nations using nuclear bombs against us, but we’re seriously considering dropping a few ourselves? At what point do we finally take a look in the mirror and ask ourselves if maybe, just maybe, we’re hurting more than we’re helping. At what point do we stop this pseudo-patriotic BS of refusing to question our administration’s decisions. This is absolutely insane.

The Kansas Board of Education is redefining science. According to them, evolution is a hotly contested theory among scientists. Other theories, like creationism (now marketed as intelligent design), should be taught alongside evolution, they claim.

One wonders about the obvious contradiction of (1) stating the intelligent design is a science and (2) redefining the term science itself, all in one swoop. But the problem, of course, is much more profound. The thing about evolution is not just that it’s an accepted theory, one that has developed strongly supported answers to the harshest critics, like how could an eye evolve? The fact of the matter is, that evolution explains so much, it is at the heart of all modern biology.

Over the past year, I’ve been taking classes at the Harvard Medical School to get back into genetics, a subject that’s always fascinated me. My last academic experience with biology was in 1998, as an MIT undergraduate minoring in the field, before the completion of the Human Genome Project. The amount of progress made since then is, in every way, enormous. We — and by we, I mean we, humans and scientists — now know the entire human genome sequence, and we’ve characterized a large portion of the genes that make it up. We’ve sequenced more than 20 other organisms. We’re working on understanding the genetic evolution of dog breeds.