The University of East Anglia mail server was hacked earlier in the week and a string of private correspondences between esteemed climate scientists were published.  In addition to some juicy internecine gossip becoming embarrassingly public, a few of the messages seem to reveal doubts about the evidence for global warming and at least one refers to a statistical “trick” being used to hide lower-than-predicted surface temperatures in recent years.  James Delingpole dubs this “Climategate” and pronounces it “the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming.’”  Andrew Bolt calls it evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory – a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science.  Michelle Malkin terms it “The global warming scandal of the century.”

Andrew Revkin of the NYT — himself a subject of some of the emails in question — summarizes the controversy:

The e-mail messages, attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics, and casual comments — in some cases derisive — about specific people known for their skeptical views. Drafts of scientific papers and a photo collage that portrays climate skeptics on an ice floe were also among the hacked data, some of which dates back 13 years.

In one e-mail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical “trick” in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. In another, a scientist refers to climate skeptics as “idiots.”

Some skeptics asserted Friday that the correspondence revealed an effort to withhold scientific information. “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents.

Some of the correspondence portrays the scientists as feeling under siege by the skeptics’ camp and worried that any stray comment or data glitch could be turned against them.

The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument. However, the documents will undoubtedly raise questions about the quality of research on some specific questions and the actions of some scientists.

In several e-mail exchanges, Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and other scientists discuss gaps in understanding of recent variations in temperature. Skeptic Web sites pointed out one line in particular: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,” Dr. Trenberth wrote.

Ronald Bailey, though, warns, “Before jumping to conclusions, remember that many of us write private emails that we might not want to see publicly distributed.”

Indeed, an unsigned post at the RealClimate blog (which I presume was written by NASA’s  Gavin Schmidt, given parallels with the Revkin story) argues,

Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

Given what I know about academia, research, and science, this strikes me as eminently plausible.

Ed Morrissey sees evidence in the emails that the scientists in question are rejecting data that goes against the prevailing consensus and concludes, “That’s not science; it’s religious belief.”   But producing research findings that conclusively shatters the prevailing wisdom is the gold standard of science.  It’s the stuff of Nobel Prizes and eternal fame.  That’s how the handful of scientists known to every schoolboy (Galileo, Newton, Einstein, etc.) got there.

But one doesn’t want to publish findings claiming to shatter the consensus only to have one’s work revealed as shoddy.  So, scientists having a Eureka! finding are likely to test and test again before going public.  And, sadly for them, they’ll likely find that their novel finding was a not so novel error.

Climate change, while an important topic, is one that I follow only at the periphery.  Frankly, it’s an incredibly specialized field and I lack the time to keep up with the literature, the training to understand it, and the motivation to change either of those facts.   My biases and general impressions on the matter, however, are as follows:

• There’s overwhelming consensus among the experts on this subject

• Conspiracies involving hundreds of people over several decades are next to impossible to pull off

• There’s next to zero incentive to perpetrate this conspiracy on the part of scientists

• There are enormous incentives for people wanting to influence government to leap from the scientific data to grandiose public policy solutions

Because of the above and biases that spring from my academic training and political ideology,

• I tend to believe the vast preponderance of scientists who say the climate is changing and that human technology is a significant variable in said change

• I tend to be skeptical of radical government-mandated fixes

Story links via memeorandum.  Graphic via Green Irene.

Gail Collins proclaims the first ten years of the new millennium “the Decade of Medical Backtracking.”

Somewhere between the reports that Pap smears and tests for prostate cancer aren’t all they were cracked up to be and the news that a high fiber diet doesn’t do anything to prevent cancer, the health establishment began looking decidedly nonomniscient. Then this week, a federal task force reported that most women don’t need annual mammograms. Even more fascinating, they suggested that doctors stop telling their female patients to self-examine their breasts for lumps.

[...]

Every rational American wants qualified experts to keep re-examining current medical practices. The only thing that bothers me about the mammogram report is all the emphasis on the “anxiety” that might follow a false-positive. We live in a time when we are constantly being reminded that a fellow plane passenger might be trying to smuggle explosives in his sneakers. We can manage anxiety.

I am going out on a limb to say that the real problem with a test that creates a lot of false-positive results is that it leads to a lot of other medical procedures, some involving hospitals. Unless you are genuinely sick, there is no more dangerous place to be hanging around than a hospital.

And let’s not forget the longer-term changes of mind on things like silicon breast implants, artificial sweeteners, and the danger of eating eggs.

Collins is right that we want medical science to constantly challenge prevailing assumptions and give us their best guess as to the truth.  I continue to wonder, however, about the rigors of medical scholarship, which seems to frequently draw wide conclusions based on studies of very small, self-selected samples.

Norm Geras remains baffled at the Twitter phenomenon.  Responding to a column by Nicholas Lezard, Norm asks:

(1) Why would I want to record my daily activities for other people to follow? (2) Why would I want to follow the detailed doings of anyone else over the course of a day, and another day, and another day?

You, of course, wouldn’t.

But that’s not what Twitter is to most of us.  Despite the query “What are you doing now?” on the posting window, most people that I follow are posting links and commentary on matters of interest to me.    Here’s a screencap of my TweetDeck screen at the moment:

Now, I’m not saying that every single posting there contributes to my net wisdom.  But I get more than enough interesting information to be worth 30-60 minutes of my day scanning, re-tweeting, and posting my own bits.

Lezard seems to think Twitter is mostly about what people are having for lunch and the like.  And for all I know, perhaps it is.  Then again, so is “blogging.”  But just as I don’t read blogs that are mostly about people’s cats or the mundane daily activities of their lives, neither do I actively follow those sorts of Twitter accounts.

Television executives have figured out that people watching their shows via TiVo-delay is a good thing.

Against almost every expectation, nearly half of all people watching delayed shows are still slouching on their couches watching messages about movies, cars and beer. According to Nielsen, 46 percent of viewers 18 to 49 years old for all four networks taken together are watching the commercials during playback, up slightly from last year. Why would people pass on the opportunity to skip through to the next chunk of program content?

The most basic reason, according to Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, a media buying firm, is that the behavior that has underpinned television since its invention still persists to a larger degree than expected. “It’s still a passive activity,” he said. And those passive viewers are watching in numbers big enough to turn some hits (“House” on Fox) into even bigger moneymakers, some middling successes (“How I Met Your Mother” on CBS) into healthier profit centers, and some seemingly endangered shows (“Heroes” on NBC) into possible survivors.

Two years ago, in a seismic change from past practice, Nielsen started measuring television consumption by the so-called commercial-plus-three ratings, which measure viewing for the commercials in shows that are watched either live or played back on digital video recorders within three days. This replaced the use of program ratings.

At the time, network executives fiercely resisted the change, fearing that they would never get credit for recorded shows because viewers would skip through all the commercials. But the figures show otherwise. “It’s completely counterintuitive,” said Alan Wurtzel, the president of research for NBC. “But when the facts come in, there they are.”

Almost across the board, the gains for playback are growing. The best preseason estimate for the current season, said David F. Poltrack, the chief research officer for CBS, was about a 1 percent increase from playback over the live program for the networks combined. Instead, many are in the range of 7 to 12 percent, with some shows having increases of more than 20 percent when DVR ratings are added. The four networks together are averaging a 10 percent increase.

There are two major reasons for DVRing a program:  Time shifting and commercial skipping.  Almost all of us do the former whereas not all of us do the latter.  So it’s only logical that the addition of DVR viewers who don’t fast forward through commercials to the live viewers would be a good thing for the networks.

I’m a pretty aggressive commercial skipper.  For that matter, I’ll fast forward through boring segments of shows (notably, non-political segments of “Saturday Night Live” and the non-roundtable portion of “This Week”).  But even I’ll occasionally forget to grab the remote and accidentally sit through a commercial.   Beyond that, I’ll intentionally watch commercials that may be of interest:  promos for movies that look interesting, funny commercials that I haven’t seen, or products that I’m thinking of buying.

Moreover, with the DVR, I watch far more television than I otherwise would.   I record numerous shows that wouldn’t be appointment viewing “just in case” I have time to watch them.  I also record several shows that are on during hours when my schedule doesn’t allow me to watch television.  And, of course, skipping commercials for products I wasn’t going to buy anyway allows me to view more shows because it’s easier to find a 40-minute window than a 60-minute window.

Individual shows have gained substantially. “House,” second among all shows in its live program rating (to “Grey’s Anatomy” on ABC), became the top show in terms of commercials viewed within three days with a 5.68 rating (about 6.53 million), gaining almost 18 percent. NBC’s comedy “The Office” had one of the single biggest gains — 26 percent from its live program rating — to 3.92 (4.5 million) for its rating including playbacks. The supposedly struggling NBC drama “Heroes” jumped 22 percent, as did another apparently flagging drama, “Fringe” on Fox. And a new ABC drama, the appropriately named “Flash Forward,” looks even more like a hit than it did with its original rating because its rating increased 14 percent with playbacks.

Many serial shows like “Lost” and “Heroes” would be unwatchable as a live show because of annoying and complicated plot twists and an erratic schedule.  But the DVR allows me to get several episodes queued up and watch them in bunches.  (Of course, that doesn’t fit into the 3-day window for the ratings companies.)

One other obvious reason why some shows do better on DVR than live is that the networks often idiotically run their most popular shows against other networks’ most popular shows, forcing live viewers to chose.  DVR viewers can either watch one live and record the other or record both and watch when convenient.

Stephen Green is torn on the issue of net neutrality, with his libertarian side thinking Internet service providers ought to be able to “charge what the traffic will bear” on their equipment while his conservative side preferring to preserve a status quo that works well to an unknown future.

I’m on the same fence but do agree with Mark Cuban that certain types of information might oughta be less privileged than others. Most obviously, things like torrents. To the extent bandwidth is limited, it makes sense to prioritize email and search, things essential for modern life, over movie downloads and other frivolities that threaten to clog the pipes.

The Post Office has charged differing rates and promised different delivery priority for a whole variety of mail for as long as I can remember. 1st Class letters are treated differently than 4th class bulk rate magazines and those willing to pay extra can get expedited service.   I’m not entirely sure why that model couldn’t be applied to the ‘net.

Starting in two weeks, users from countries who don’t use the Latin alphabet will find using the Internet much easier, FT reports.

Latin script’s monopoly in internet domain names will end next month, a development that could usher in a fresh wave of internet usage from Bulgaria to China.

So far, finding web addresses has required some basic familiarity with Latin letters – a deterrent for many, particularly older users. Fully opening cyberspace to scripts ranging from Amharic to Tamil will also give even greater prominence to search engines, say experts. The country designation of addresses – such as .ir for Iran and .kr for South Korea – has always been written in Latin. But at a meeting in Seoul, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a non-profit group that co-ordinates website domains, said it would start from November 16 to take applications for national codes written in Cyrillic, Arabic, Korean and Chinese. Other scripts will follow and the first non-Latin domains will go live in 2010.

“This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and a historic move toward the internationalisation of the internet,” said Rod Beckstrom, Icann’s president. “We just made the internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia.”

About half of the world’s 1.6bn internet users are speakers of languages that do not use Latin script, said Icann. China has the world’s greatest number of internet users, estimated at 340m. “This is a huge and positive change in internet history. This will bring access for more people to get to know the internet without even a basic knowledge of English letters, for example many of our senior citizens,” said Wang Peng, senior project manager at HiChina, the country’s leading internet service provider

Changing two letters such as .cn may appear a small step, but computer experts say many people in China do not know how to switch the keyboard to Latin letters, instead finding websites by following links. Being able to type addresses themselves could take users to more minority interest sites, a factor with important political implications in China.

My initial reaction was that this will really undermine the connectedness of the Web, turning URLs into a Tower of Babel.  But, having never encountered a keyboard problem more significant than wishing there were an easier way to type umlauts, it never occurred to me how much of an inhibition the Latin alphabet was.  Having to switch between keyboard sets and having to recognize long strings of characters in foreign symbols is a rather huge barrier to entry.

UPDATE:  PC World’s Jacqueline Emigh points to some drawbacks, some of which occurred to me but go beyond my technical expertise.

Yet on the other hand, the new names carry risks for new security concerns and general user confusion. Some fear the Web might grow increasingly fragmented into areas easily accessible only to those conversant in local languages.

[...]

How will you be able to type the domain names of international Web sites when your keyboard doesn’t support their character sets? It would be logistically just about impossible for a PC maker to supply a keyboard supporting the Western “ABC” alphabet, along with the disparate character sets used in all of these tongues, for example: Japanese, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic, and the Central and European languages.

[...]

It looks as though we could see the development of a whole new class of Web domains that most people won’t be able to get to easily — even though they might be able to find those Web sites with a search engine.

Certainly language translation services and technology may be the biggest winners with today’s news. I predict both will flourish along with an international land grab for variations of the word “sex” dot-com.

Of the last, there’s not much doubt.

Becks observes, “I suspect many Twitter memes that I find annoying (one letter off movie titles, failed children’s books, etc.) would have been quite hilarious Unfogged threads.”

The post title, “The Medium Is The Message,” is appropriate.  Several Twitter memes  (created by adding a hashtag such as #failedchildrensbooks) of the sort mentioned can be amusing if one is in the mood.  The problem is that one gets a huge stream of them from participating people one is following whether one is in the mood or not.  If the latter, then it becomes clutter — if not spam — impeding one’s efforts to glean the sort of information usually imparted by those one follows.  Conversely, a comment discussion on a one-off blog post can be — and generally is — simply skipped over by those not in the mood and once can easily stop reading once one tires of it.

On a related note, the equivalent phenomenon — the widespread adoption of silly applications — has killed Facebook for me.  Once invitations to participate in zombie wars start to outnumber useful messages from friends and others in my network, it ceases to be worth the time.

Megan McArdle points me to this amusing video about which  Gizmodo’s John Herrmann gushes, “I’ve read the articles, watched the instructional videos, and gotten an invite, but nothing—nothing—has done more to explain to me how this mind-melting Internet Thing works than Pulp Fiction, spectacularly adapted for Google Wave. (Warning: Tarantino language ahead)”

It’s an entertaining illustration but, frankly, not one that makes me pine for an invite.  Yes, Wave would seem to combine several existing tools in a streamlined way.  And it might be extraordinarily useful way of doing certain kinds of collaborative work.  Mostly, though, it looks like a big time-waster.

Peter Suderman and Berin Szoka provide sane, libertarian arguments against the Nanny State regulating the volume of television commercials.  While they both find the longstanding practice where the ads are several decibels higher than the surrounding programming annoying, they nonetheless argue that it’s not a matter where government should intervene.

Says Suderman,

It’s easy enough to turn your TV off (or even live without one, as Szoka does). And if that’s too arduous, there are various technological solutions from companies like Dolby and SRS that help keep TV volumes on a more even keel.

[...]

But the larger problem is the assumption this grows out of — that government’s job is to regulate every minor annoyance out the lives of its citizens. That’s bad for government, because it gives it unnecessary power and distracts it from legitimate government activity. It’s also worse for citizens, who develop an implicit sense that, when problems arise, the way to fix them is to beg Congress, pass a law, wait for new irritations to arise, then wash, rinse, repeat. And  in the end, I think that’s far more grating and obnoxious than a little volume manipulation from advertisers on the idiot box.

Szoka notes that proposed legislation is technically unsound and subject to selective enforcement.  And there’s the issue of freedom:

[T]he bill does embody a recurrent presumption that it’s ok to regulate advertising in ways we wouldn’t accept for the “show” itself (i.e., non-advertising content). Of course, the show could be “commercial” (which, in First Amendment terms, means it would generally get only “intermediate” scrutiny) while the advertisement could be “non-commercial”—such as a political ad. But even if most ads are commercial, so what? If the government is going to protect us from “noisy or strident” commercials, why not all “noisy or strident” programming? Even the most annoying TV ad is probably less annoying than, say, the James Carvilles of the world debating the Glenn Becks of the world. (Of course, users really bothered by noise, but unwilling to give up TV, would probably much rather have a dynamic market for TVs with volume moderating features than rules that dull the din of commercials alone.)

Kevin Drum doesn’t care. He just wants the noise to stop.

[B]laring TV commercials have been an obvious and fixable problem for several decades and no “basic harmony of interests” has yet manifested itself.¹ This suggests to me that it never will unless the industry is pressured into doing it.

[...]

¹A shortcoming, by the way, that’s made worse by the artistic decisions of certain shows.  The worst for me is 24, which I have to crank up in order to hear the hoarse stage whisper that Kiefer Sutherland affects in his Jack Bauer role.  The ads are loud even at the best of times, but they’re really loud when you’ve already turned up the volume just to hear the show itself.

²This is an issue, like the Do Not Call registry, that transcends politics.  I don’t really care whether volume regulations are liberal or conservative or trample the Bill of Rights or whatever.  I just want the noise to stop.  If it takes jackboots to stop it, then so be it.

While I’m naturally in the Suderman-Szoka camp on the issue of Nanny Statism, Drum has persuaded me on this one with the strength of his footnotes.

The fact of the matter is that the federal government has regulated the manner in which television has been broadcast since before we were broadcasting television. (The Radio Commission, the forebear of the FCC, predates television.)  They regulate the spectrum on which broadcasters operate, require a certain amount of “public interest” programming as a condition of licensing, require a certain amount of “truth in advertising,” restrict the use of coarse language and images in over-the-air broadcasts, and otherwise oversee many aspects of what’s shown on television.   Why shouldn’t they set parameters on something that genuinely annoys most of us?

This isn’t a free speech issue. It doesn’t impinge on speech in any way. It merely requires that broadcasters refrain from blaring the ads.

Government already regulates the content of commercial speech, which has long been less protected than political speech.  Indeed, those of us over a certain age can recall the days when those advertising ladies’ undergarments had to use mannequins to demonstrate their wares.  Or that it took the AIDS epidemic to get the FCC to allow advertising for condoms — or, hell, the use of the word “condom.”

Yes, I suppose consumers could invest in sophisticated technology to solve this annoyance.  But why should we have to do that?

“Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.” So begins a column by Jessica Vascellaro in today’s WSJ.

We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don’t need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public “status” on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.

[...]

Years ago, we were frustrated if it took a few days for a letter to arrive. A couple of years ago, we’d complain about a half-hour delay in getting an email. Today, we gripe about it taking an extra few seconds for a text message to go through. In a few months, we may be complaining that our cellphones aren’t automatically able to send messages to friends within a certain distance, letting them know we’re nearby. (A number of services already do this.)

These new services also make communicating more frequent and informal—more like a blog comment or a throwaway aside, rather than a crafted email sent to one person. No need to spend time writing a long email to your half-dozen closest friends about how your vacation went. Now those friends, if they’re interested, can watch it unfold in real time online. Instead of sending a few emails a week to a handful of friends, you can send dozens of messages a day to hundreds of people who know you, or just barely do.

[...]

David Liu, an executive at AOL, calls it replacing the in-box with “a river that continues to flow as you dip into it.”

I’m more “wired” than most, spending an inordinate amount of time blogging, Twittering and the like.   Indeed, I started this blog nearly seven years ago as a substitute for my previous habit of emailing links and clippings, often with brief commentary, back and forth my my friends.  I frequently instant message or direct message people for things that need immediate responses.

But none of it is going to replace email.

A river of information is interesting.  It’s why I finally “stuck” as an active Twitter user after two years of brief flirtations and not “getting” it.  But, even if you’re only following 100 people or so, you’re going to miss most of what’s in the river. And if you’re following 1000 or 2000 people — hardly uncommon — you’re going to miss almost all of it.  Which is perfectly fine if you’re looking for witty commentary, updates on the latest breaking news, which of your acquaintances out and about in Adams Morgan, and the like.

While it can be used that way, email isn’t, at its core, a mass communications platform.  It’s a means of direct communication with another person asynchronously.  If I need to let my wife know I’m running late, send my deputy an attachment for posting on the company website, send my folks the latest pictures of the baby, or any number of things that I actually need another person to read — not just have available to them if they happen to be wading in my river at a given moment — there’s no good substitute for email.

Twitter direct messaging is great if you can say what you need in 160 characters, including spaces, and the person’s following you on Twitter; otherwise, not so much. Texting is rather intrusive and, since it tends to set off audible alarms and cost the recipient money, borderline rude.  Instant messaging is also generally annoying, as it demands a person’s attention NOW rather than when they want to take the time to read messages.  Ditto telephoning, which I now reserve almost exclusively for extended conversations with friends and family a long distance away, quick bursts for when I can’t wait for email, or certain types of business transactions.

I haven’t yet used Google’s Wave, which may streamline the current flow of the river and avoid some of the fallbacks of the email alternatives.  The way we’ll use email will continue to evolve, too, much as I’ll now send someone to a blog post or an online photo album.  But we’ll always need something like email:  a direct, asynchronous means of sending infinitely variable types of information to specific people.

Update (Alex Knapp): Reading the above, I would just note that this is one in a string of articles over the past few years about the death of email, the death of voicemail, the death of the telephone, etc. These pieces tend to have one thing in common: they are written by tech journalists who, in their day to day business, are sifting through the constant stream of information on the Internet. You will note that they are almost never written by people with jobs outside of that industry, because everyone else with an office job gets more email and voicemail and phone calls than they can handle without investing in any one of the number of time management programs like Getting Things Done, etc. Speaking for myself, if email is dead, why do I get 100+ of them a day? And why are they communications that really can’t be handled any other way? If the phone is dead, why do I spend so much time on it getting work done?

Before proclaiming the death of a particular type of communication, it would be nice if journalists of this ilk actually did some, you know, reporting from a regular office and not just their laptop at home.

Walter Mossberg says Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows 7, is good enough to help erase memories of the Vista fiasco. Not only is it “the best version of Windows Microsoft has produced” and “a boost to productivity and a pleasure to use” but it’s every bit as good as Apple’s Snow Leopard.

Windows 7 introduces real advances in organizing your programs and files, arranging your taskbar and desktop, and quickly viewing and launching the page or document you want, when you want it. It also has cool built-in touch-screen features.

It removes a lot of clutter. And it mostly banishes Vista’s main flaws—sluggishness; incompatibility with third-party software and hardware; heavy hardware requirements; and constant, annoying security warnings.

It’s a little expensive — $120 for the version most home users would want — but probably worth it if it truly delivers a much better user experience. After all, most of us spend several hours a day in front of a computer.

One small problem: Upgrading from Windows XP, the version most of us are using because Vista was so awful, is next to impossible.

They’ll have to wipe out their hard disks after backing up their files elsewhere, then install Windows 7, then restore their personal files, then re-install all their programs from the original CDs or downloaded installer files. Then, they have to install all the patches and upgrades to those programs from over the years.

Microsoft includes an Easy Transfer wizard to help with this, but it moves only personal files, not programs. This painful XP upgrade process is one of the worst things about Windows 7 and will likely drive many XP owners to either stick with what they’ve got or wait and buy a new one.

For years, Apple produced better software but ran it’s business stupidly. Windows shrewdly undercut them on price, marketing, and openness to third party software making its products so ubiquitous that it wasn’t worth it for most of us to buy Apple. In recent years, though, Microsoft seems to have lost its business acumen as well. Whether it’s because Bill Gates and Paul Allen have moved on to other endeavors, satisfaction with the status quo, or the constraints that various anti-trust suits have put around their old model, they’ve made it much harder to justify buying their products.

My guess is that I won’t bother with Windows 7 until and unless we get new machines at the office. I’m certainly not willing to go through such a radical installation routine to test out a new operating system when the existing one more-or-less suits my needs. Let alone do so on two PCs and a notebook. Especially when I’d still have XP at work, forcing me to have two different workflows.

UPDATE:   My summary that Mossberg finds Windows 7 “every bit as good as Apple’s Snow Leopard” elides some subtle distinctions.  Here’s what he says in full:

In recent years, I, like many other reviewers, have argued that Apple’s Mac OS X operating system is much better than Windows. That’s no longer true. I still give the Mac OS a slight edge because it has a much easier and cheaper upgrade path; more built-in software programs; and far less vulnerability to viruses and other malicious software, which are overwhelmingly built to run on Windows.

Now, however, it’s much more of a toss-up between the two rivals. Windows 7 beats the Mac OS in some areas, such as better previews and navigation right from the taskbar, easier organization of open windows on the desktop and touch-screen capabilities. So Apple will have to scramble now that the gift of a flawed Vista has been replaced with a reliable, elegant version of Windows.

So, he slightly prefers Snow Leopard but thinks they’re in the same league and Windows has some advantages.

A new study finds that living to 100  will soon be commonplace:

If current life expectancy trends continue, more than half of babies born in rich nations since 2000 will live to 100 years of age, and they’ll have less disability than elderly people in previous generations.  That’s the conclusion of researchers who found that increases in life expectancy evident in rich nations since 1840 show no signs of slowing.

“The linear increase in record life expectancy for more than 165 years does not suggest a looming limit to human lifespan. If life expectancy were approaching a limit, some deceleration of progress would probably occur. Continued progress in the longest living populations suggests that we are not close to a limit, and further rise in life expectancy seems likely,” Kaare Christensen, of the Danish Aging Research Center at the University of Southern Denmark, and colleagues wrote. Their study appears online Oct. 1 in The Lancet.

During the 20th century, huge increases in life expectancy (30 years or more) occurred in developed nations. Even if health conditions don’t improve, 75 percent of babies born in rich nations since 2000 can expect to live to 75, the researchers concluded.

Their analysis of data from more than 30 developed countries revealed that death rates among people older than 80 are still falling. In 1950, the likelihood of survival from age 80 to 90 was 15 percent to 16 percent for women and 12 percent for men, compared with 37 percent and 25 percent, respectively, in 2002.

I actually think this projection is too conservative, in that advances in medical science at increasing faster than before.  Improvements in trauma care, for example, have been extraordinary and the spread of extraordinary emergency response even to remote areas should prevent countless needless deaths.

And then there are improvements in safety engineering and consciousness.  Kids wear helmets and pads to undertake even routine activities like riding a bicycle, which would have been unthinkable a generation ago.  And we keep kids in car seats until they’re roughly 30 years old now, providing protection from crashes previously known only to Richard Petty.

There’s talk of living to 150, which seems fantastical now but may be closer to the mark than the more pessimistic 75/75 total.

The combination of a busy day at the office and a slow news day on the domestic policy front have rather limited my blogging today.   Norman Geras knows the feeling:

If you’re a blogger and you’re honest, then you’ll admit to the fact that you’re often looking for connections. ‘Connections?’ you ask. Connections. On a day – like many days, after you’ve been going a while – when there ain’t no tempting subjects, you look about for, among other things, some unusual connection – from which you might get an idea, in which there is an interesting conceptual difficulty, to which an argument can be attached. Some connections, however, seem rather more unlikely than others, and I’m bound to say I wouldn’t have expected this one.

The link leads to a piece in The Australian about a study showing that pre-match sex improves athletic performance, a finding that both confounds traditional coaching wisdom and provokes adolescent reactions from many interviewed for the story.

Similarly,  Courtney Knapp points me to a Mirror report on a study finding that “eating a piece of cake makes you more productive.”

Hey, it’s science.

Having run advertising-supported websites myself for several years, I’m appreciative of the need to run ads and get reader clickthroughs. And the mass media is struggling to figure out a sustainable business model. But some of the ads are getting to be too much. Take this one at The Hill:

No, not the banner ad on the top.  Or the 300×300 atop the right sidebar.   Or even the 300×300 stuck in the middle of the top content.  No, I’m talking about the pop-over ad that actually covers the article text.

And, no, you can’t simply close it.  No, that would be bad enough. Instead you have to hover over it, find the close button, and chase the close button around.  Oh, and the ad still doesn’t close!

Given that there are millions of sites online that provide news content, I’m guessing that I won’t be going back here.  If they report something interesting, I’m sure someone will pass it on elsewhere.

Wired reports that studies show that “enhanced interrogation”, far from being a reliable source of information, can actually make someone less of an intelligence asset because the stress involved changes the biochemistry of the brain:

“There is a vast literature on the effects of extreme stress on motivation, mood and memory, using both animals and humans,” writes Shane O’Mara, a stress researcher at Ireland’s Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience. “These techniques cause severe, repeated and prolonged stress, which compromises brain tissue supporting memory and executive function.”

[...]

A report published by the Intelligence Science Board in 2007 found that no research existed to support the use of enhanced interrogation. And O’Mara’s review, published Monday in Trends in Cognitive Science, describes a wealth of science that supports ending the practice.

O’Mara derides the belief that extreme stress produces reliable memory as “folk neurobiology” that “is utterly unsupported by scientific evidence.” The hippocampus and prefrontal cortex — the brain’s centers of memory processing, storage and retrieval — are profoundly altered by stress hormones. Keep the stress up long enough, and it will “result in compromised cognitive function and even tissue loss,” warping the minds that interrogators want to read.

What’s more, tortured suspects might not even realize when they’re lying. Frontal lobe damage can produce false memories: As torture is maintained for weeks or months or years, suspects may incorporate their captors’ allegations into their own version of reality.

What’s frustrating about the torture debate to me is that all of the professionals who are experts in the field are routinely ignored by the pro-”enhanced interrogation” side of the debate. Just so we’re clear, in addition to the biochemical evidence above, here’s a few posts and articles that we’ve seen over the past few months:

• We’ve seen that an Air Force officer with counterterrorism experience and experience interrogating al-Qaeda members opposes enhanced interrogation on the grounds that it doesn’t gather effective intelligence.

• We’ve had military psychologists who work on the SERE program, which trains soldiers to resist “enhanced interrogation,” claim that the use of same on detainees to be counterproductive.

• We’ve seen an FBI counterintelligence agent who specialize in counterterrorism and also had experience interrogating al-Qaeda members find no evidence of the effectiveness of “enhanced interrogation.”

• We’ve seen another FBI counterintelligence agent explain that the use of “enhanced interrogation” makes it much harder to recruit reliable intelligence assets.

• We’ve seen a Marine Corps interrogator point out the uselessness of such techniques even if there’s a “ticking time bomb” scenario.

Against this, we mostly have the claims of Dick Cheney who says that the 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report demonstrates that the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” enabled the United States to gain significant amounts of intelligence, particularly from the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Muhammed. The problem is, of course, is that this claim doesn’t survive scrutiny. Most of Cheney’s claims involve intelligence that was already known prior to KSMs capture, or organizational information that was obtained from KSM’s computer and paper files–not his actual interrogation. Indeed, most of what KSM said under “enhanced interrogation” was useless. It wasn’t until it stopped and the traditional American methods of interrogation employed instead that he actually provided anything of value.

The pro-”enhanced interrogation” side of the house loves to throw out hypotheticals and vague claims that these techniques are valuable, but the evidence doesn’t bear this claim out. These techniques do not provide any signficant or usable intelligence; they make useless people who might be turned into valuable intelligence assets, as noted above; they provide a powerful rallying cry for the recruitment of people into our enemies’ cause; they make it less likely that our enemies will surrender to our troops, which exposes them to unnecessary risk of harm; they make it more likely that our soldiers, when captured, will be tortured; they make it harder to recruit counterintelligence assets; they force us to waste time and resources in following false leads and finally, they undermine the moral authority of the United States.

What’s the upside?

(cross-posted to Heretical Ideas)