Friday, February 13, 2009
The oldest remains of Homo sapiens have been dated at about 160,000
years. Hunter gatherers, they could talk, but we have no way of knowing
what they said. It would be 150,000 years before the invention of
writing. We have changed little from the earliest Homo sapiens and almost
not at all since the birth of civilization; instead, we changed the
world. That may explain why barely half the population believes we
evolved over time as opposed to being created in our present form.
This morning I fed "polygraph" into the search engine on the WN archives
http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/search.html and got 42 hits going back to
1988. I said back then that, "the polygraph can't tell a lie from the sex
act," which is still literally true. Other countries also have liars and
machines that lie about liars. Today in Science there is a news story by
Adrian Cho involving a 2007 paper in The International Journal of Speech,
Language and the Law, about a voice-analysis technique used by local
governments in the UK to weed out welfare cheats. Two Swedish
phoneticians reported the machine lies. If I was on welfare, I would be
stressed whether I lied or not. The Israeli maker of the voice analyzer
threatened to sue the journal, which obligingly yanked the paper.
You will recall that the most infamous double agent, Aldrich Ames, passed
dozens of polygraph tests. Since then the agency has refined its lie
detection methods. The new technology is called "waterboarding" and is
said to take stress to the limit. Unfortunately, the quality of
intelligence from the CIA remains a national disaster. Yesterday, Leon
Panetta the former Democratic Congressman and White House Chief of Staff
under Bill Clinton was confirmed by the Senate to head the CIA. Concerns
were raised about his lack of intelligence experience. Is that a
problem? Just give Panetta a big broom.
On Thursday, three special masters demolished arguments that childhood
vaccines, MMR in particular, cause autism. Brian Deer reported in the
Sunday Times of London that Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the British physician
who set off the vaccine panic, "manipulated and altered data" (also known
as "lying") in a 1998 Lancet paper. The scientific case has been
eloquently made by Paul A. Offit, Autism's False Prophets, (Columbia
University Press, 2008), who donated all royalties to autism research.
The Miami-Dade School Board banned "A Visit to Cuba," a book for children
4 to 8, depicting the life of children in Cuba. The complaint is that the
book did not reflect the "political indoctrination" of Cuban children. Is
that anything like reciting a Pledge of Allegiance and celebrating
Lincoln's Birthday? The ACLU sued on the grounds that the ban violates
the First Amendment; a Federal Appeals Court sided with the School Board.
An editorial in the NY Times his morning says, "The Supreme Court should
not let this ruling stand." I would add that it's time to rethink our
Cuba policy.
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