Today I saw a link to an interview done with bush in Ireland. Noted was the interviewer’s willingness to ask Bush difficult questions. I don’t personally think she was that rough on him, and he roughly just stayed on his talking points and shouted her down when she tried to call him on it. But he mentioned as contrast to the horrible things we’re doing in the world, that we’re also very generous. An example he gave was PEPFAR, his law to help prevent and treat the AIDS epidemic.

I’m currently reading “Confessions of an Economic Hitman” which has made me extremely skeptical of foreign aid. So I thought I would try and find out where that money is going. Publicintegrity.org has some interesting numbers and a dissection of the program. Of course they had to file a freedom of information act request to get the numbers, and one set of the numbers was so badly kept as to be useless. Pretty much exactly what you’d expect.

The big number I was looking for was how much of the money was going to US based companies. Because after all, if we’re going to help poor brown people, let’s at least further subsidize rich white people while we’re at it right?

Here’s the interesting facts: 1. About half of the treatment money is going for antiretroviral drugs, which at the beginning were required to be highly expensive name-brand drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration and provided largely by major American pharmaceutical companies. More recently, some two dozen generic formulations have been approved for PEPFAR use by the FDA. 2. Congress mandated that one-third of the prevention money (about 20 percent of the total appropriated) be earmarked to go to abstinence and fidelity programs. A 2006 Government Accountability Office report concluded that this spending requirement was hurting other programs in the field, such as prevention of mother-to-child transmission. 3. The discussion of condoms is routinely discouraged as a primary prevention approach among youth and cannot even be mentioned to those under age 15 in school programs, even if they are already involved in sexual conduct. Condoms can be addressed in out-of-school settings among youth who engage in high-risk behavior. 4. In general, at least two-thirds of all foreign aid funds never leaves the United States, according to a Congressional Research Service report. The money buys U.S. products, pays for U.S salaries, overhead, benefits packages, travel, American-made vehicles, office expenses, computers and other equipment. USAID awards 87 percent of its consultant dollars to U.S.-based firms.

So, US taxpayers are paying US drug companies artificially high prices (while generics have been approved, there’s only sparse evidence they’re being used) for drugs, and paying christian organizations to spread christian values about sex. Good times.

You can see from the public integrity page how the results are going. Seems that when you de-emphasize condom use, and emphasize abstinence only programs, infection rates go up. go figure.

But either way, you’d be within your rights to question the generosity of largely giving aid dollars to american companies for programs that have a shaky record of effectiveness. To be sure, ARV drug treatment for africans is pretty awesome, and I think that part of the program is a great success, how much PEPFAR is still paying for those drugs might not be, but it sounds like it’s getting there.

However I can’t find solid numbers anywhere for prevention. All I’m looking for are infection rates of the member countries for the years that PEPFAR has been working. Lots of people including the Government Accountability Office aren’t happy with the results, but I can’t find them. The Office of Global AIDs Coordinator’s own report [PDF link] is mysteriously silent about prevention rates, and only reports on prevention of mother to child infections.

But it also shamelessly proclaims they’re using the best evidence based prevention program in the world, despite better success rates from many other countries outlined in the publicintegrity.org study above, and condemnation from multiple groups that condom advocacy has long been proven to work better.

Apparently PEPFAR is undergoing some changes in the current legislative sections that should make the program more effective. I guess we’ll see.

Sidenote: I also thought it was funny that Bush was using people who’s hands were cut off by Saddam as an example of how bad he was. As far as I know, our buddies Saudi Arabia will cut off your hand for simple theft. And the bar for beheading is pretty low too. Yet we’re not storming their borders to stop the injustice are we?

Mario Kart Wii. We’ve all been waiting for it. Does it deliver? eh…

Okay first things first. The wheel. The wheel is fun. It makes it feel like you’re really interacting with the game. This is good times. Unfortunately, it also takes a lot of the precision out of handling, and if you’re like me, you’ll often find yourself sliding the opposite of the way you mean to, and directly into a wall. Not good times. Dumped it after about 10 races.

New stuff: The Bam is the bane of my existence. I hate it. Bikes are cool, wheelies are good times.

Honestly I can’t for the life of my understand why they made some changes though. 1. No multiplayer grand prix. What the f’ing hell? What made grand prix tolerable was that you could have a buddy run interference against the cheating AI so that you could unlock stuff. Now, to unlock new characters or carts, you have to do it alone. This can be incredibly obnoxious as even if you hit every shortcut and run a perfect race in first place the whole time, chances of you eating 4 red shells in a row at the last corner is very high. Again, not good times. Nothing makes me curse like Mario Kart, as Kelli will attest.

While I know that some people love playing random people on the internet, and Mario Kart is okay for that, I hate doing that, mostly because of shitcockery.

What I want to do is play online with my friends, and enjoy all the same love of playing in the same room with them. But it’s a huge pain in the ass to do this.

Anyone used to Xbox live knows how this should work. But no. What we get is 12 character friend strings. I add yours. You would then think your wii would just ask you to accept me as a friend or not. Nope. I have to give you my 12 digit string, then we connect up. uggh.

To see if you’re online, I have to manually connect to WFC. I can’t remain connected to WFC while playing single player, waiting for friends to show up online. So you can’t see if I’m playing Mario Kart right this second. I have to be connected to WFC just sitting there waiting for you to connect to WFC. Lame.

Once we are both connected, we can bust into a VS mode or battle, which is good, except there’s no microphone for us to talk to each other. ugh. Oh yeah, and you have like 4 seconds to choose your character and kart or the Wii will choose one for you, including the choice of manual or automatic slides. Ugh. Super lame.

The really weird, strangely limited multiplayer, and insane rubberband singleplayer make the game hard to love at times. There are still good times to be had though.

Over-all I’d give this guy a 3 star review with hopes that Nintendo will allow a downloadable update to change some of the crappy decisions they’ve made.

I’ve been listening to a lot of NPR over the last year, and I’ve been noticing a shift more and more to the right of politics.

The first thing I noticed was that a lot of stories on politics were being delivered as essentially straight press releases from the whitehouse, with almost no critical review. This seemed out of character for NPR.

And now it seems like every day I’m hearing single expert commentary from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. That just struck me as odd.

So off to teh Google.

Turns out I’m right. NPR has been sourcing far more rightwing “experts” than centrist or left wing.

And in case you’re doubting that the right wing has been winning the war of ideas for a while now, check out the linked study from FAIR, which counts think tank citations for the last 10 years pulling from the Nexis news database. In 2004 there were 15,285 right wing citations, and 4,984 left wing.

I’ve largely been getting my news from the BBC these days, and relying on factcheck.org for reasonable critical reporting, and I’ll be adding fair.org as well.

The state of news in this country is just terrible.

Check out the story about how the pentagon has been providing generals to news programs to provide favorable coverage of the Iraq war. Ahh coordinated propaganda machines. You may ask yourself why you haven’t seen this reported on the news. Here’s some coverage by Salon.

I’m actually sort of surprised that someone already hasn’t done this.

After reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, it’s easy to start thinking of things in Whuffie. I was going through my blog and flickr stats, noting how few hits I get on a daily basis, and thinking my online Whuffie is low.

Then it struck me. There really should be an online whuffie counter that pulls from all the various APIs out there. Your score would be a combination of a crapload of things, but just to get the list started:

1. Flickr views on your photos. Massive wuffie for getting into explore. Number of friends also.
2. Blog views - pulled from the blogger or livejournal or wordpress or moveable type APIs.
3. Pagerank or incoming links to your online assets as tracked through google blog search or technorati or whatever.
4. Number of twitter followers.
5. Number of diggs on your submitted articles or upvotes on reddit, karma on slashdot or whatever the hell they’re using these days.
6. Whatever makes you popular on facebook or myspace these days. I have no effing clue.

all this stuff is muxed together to give you a left and right handed Whuffie score that you can then proudly display where ever you think it matters. Users could then dump wuffie onto each other whenever they felt like it, say if your online wuffie was as lousy as mine.

I’ve plowed through Cory Doctorow’s book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I’ve always thought Doctorow was far too shrill in his screeds against technology companies, but I thought I would give his fiction a shot.

Good:
1. Likable if someone cliched characters
2. over-all decent exploration of the impact of radical technology changes on human life
3. Decent story with decent pacing
4. Setting the story in Disney World is great.

Neutral:
1. Short. This seemed like an extended short story, and I would have liked some more fleshing out of the characters and the plot.
2. I don’t think Doctorow either thought out some of the concepts enough, or communicated them well enough in the story. The biggest one is how people change though experience. All of his characters seem to act roughly the same age, or at the same level of maturity. I’d like to think that someone who had 200 years of realtime would act discernibly different from someone who was 20.
3. I think the whole concept of Whuffie is interesting but too briefly explained to hold up the systems he posits in the book. There’s little explained here that would keep the system from degrading into a popularity contest. That sounds like high school. I know this sounds trite, but in America today, we reward ambition above all else. It’s interesting to think about if ambition could be translated into competitive respect and about how a society would learn to game and manipulate an ongoing respect system.

Bad:
1. A few unbelievable character actions. I don’t want to ruin parts of the plot, but some characters engage in some behaviors that aren’t really well supported by their development.
2. Doctorow immediately launches into jargon which he is lazy to explain. This would be okay if he had the prose skill of William Gibson, but he doesn’t. So the reader is left fumbling for the first part of the story.

Great science fiction challenges us. It asks us to see the world in a different way, and to try and derive meaning from juxtapositions of that world and ours. I didn’t find myself doing that with this book. That’s not a terrible thing, but I would have expected that a book which showed people capable of such radically different things would have asked more of me.

Perhaps one of Cory’s thoughts for this book was that people, even when given the ability and technology to literally re-invent themselves, are somehow bound to a petty destiny of territorial struggle and meaningless interpersonal conflict even when the stakes are effectively zero.

The technology discussed in this book has literally staggering implications for what it would mean to be human. Yet Cory doesn’t take us over that point of no-return, where we no longer have a stable and concise definition of what being human actually means. Instead, those technologies seem only to serve as set dressing for more of the same.

Over-all, it was a pleasant read, but I wish Cory had spent more time and pages in developing the concepts and the characters involved.

Undoubtedly, most of you who read my blog have already seen the links to Clay Shirky’s “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus” and here’s the video link.

I avoided it for a little while as I haven’t always been a huge fan of his thinking. But I have to say that this presentation is a very interesting packaging of ideas.

There’s a lot here that goes unsaid, and I’d love to hear more of his thoughts, specifically around the idea of anesthetizing the masses. One of the prevailing assumptions that underlies modern western culture is that people with a surplus of discretionary time tend to do things that undermine social stability.

Just like modern adults use television to babysit our children, so too are we babysat while away from our supervised sessions of production.

This assumption is well illustrated in the attitudes of the TV producer who is both shocked that people would have any free time, and casually dismissed the value of production that is not guided by industry.

I know this is all sounding distinctly Marxist, and I know that’s verboten but it’s all over this presentation.

Shirky’s contention is that there’s a cultural easing-in period where people adjust to dramatic shifts in how we live our lives. In this case, working only 5 day weeks. It’s also his contention that this period is coming to an end, and people are starting to demand and generate ways of not only consuming content, but also producing and sharing it as well.

Now we’re strongly back into Marxist territory here, and the terrifying realm of the proletariat controlling the means of production. This brings with it the terrifying notion of decentralized wealth and power. This should give you some indication of why establishment entities are both dismissive of this movement, and deathly afraid of it.

It’s been demonstrated before that this kind of thing is a slippery slope. It starts as entertainment, but quickly establishes expectations about other human interactions as well. And you quickly start running into all the concerns that you have around wikipedia: authority, expertise, trust, influence. Can we have a highly participatory culture, absent clear hierarchies of trust and expertise which produce meaningful and valuable outputs?

Like Clay says, Wikipedia is a valuable social experiment for exactly that reason.

Clay used a key word in his presentation that I think is at the heart of what’s challenging our established culture. Participation. Not production.

One of the ideas that social conservatives have done a great job of instilling in people is: people who don’t produce (i.e. participate in a structured way toward a profitable end) are harmful to society and must be marginalized, punished or re-educated into returned productivity.

This idea plays off of a very basic social need that all humans have. We feel better doing something when other people are doing it as well. We feel more comfortable with homogenous behavior. When other people make substantially different choices than we do, it activates expensive and uncomfortable brain processes that have to understand and integrate that behavior into your worldview. It’s much less expensive and uncomfortable to simply bash, coerce or educate people to make the same decisions that you’ve made. There’s probably a sociology term for this, but I’ll call it exclusive interaction. We focus on a smaller group of acceptable behaviors and ideas, keep deviation to a minimum, and the burden of education, mediation, and management is relatively small.

This social need can also be fed by a participation society which is what Clay is talking about here. Participation societies (inclusive interaction) demand that people have an extended tolerance for what acceptable behaviors and ideas are. As a result you end up with a wider variety of products that issue forth from those behaviors and ideas. But that wider variety makes it much harder to educate, mediate, and manage people, thus the conservative argument that society will break down, chaos will ensue, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria… etc, etc.

Fundamental to the social conservative argument is that people have a limited tolerance for individual differences, that cannot be increased even if you educate or legislate it. This limited tolerance will inevitably lead to conflict. So the best thing to prevent conflict is to homogenize behaviors and ideas and get everyone behind them.

But, people being the wiley and diverse creatures that they are, will always have some portion of their brainpan winging away on thoughts and driving behaviors that are deviant to accepted norms. In unsupervised moments, we need ways of suppressing or sublimating thoughts and urges that fall outside those norms. Therefore: Alcohol, TV, religion etc.

The fundamental change that we’re assuming is happening when we say that participation culture is emerging, is that society is becoming more liberal.

Now this is an interesting thing. There’s a constant pendulum that has swung back and forth between conservative and liberal throughout the history of human civilizations, though most noticeably in societies we would consider “free”.

As the rules tighten up, enough “mainstream” people start falling to the fringe, start to push back, and we become more liberal. As this happens, more and more “deviant” people gain status and power and social order becomes more difficult to sustain and things have to tighten up again. This is a huge simplification, but I think it’s relatively accurate.

What makes this interesting is that this liberalization cycle comes along with tremendous tools for connecting and communicating directly with large numbers of other people across the world. It also comes with “means of production” that are so close to free, that almost anyone in the western world has access to them.

This is another way of saying that our ability to marginalize those ideas and behaviors that fall outside the mainstream is drastically reduced.

By controlling production, and structuring the free time of our populous with ideas and behaviors that we control, we maintain a rough semblance of order.

When we loose the ability to structure free time, and in large part have lost control of production, it makes it much harder to maintain a smaller set of ideas and behaviors, and this can lead to the other side of the technological blade which we’re already starting to see which is largely manifested in loss of privacy.

Cameras are going up everywhere. The government is reading your e-mail and listening to your calls (no it’s not just foreign nationals). Technology is in the works to detect lies in a 100% reliable way using fMRIs. When society feels its grip slipping it finds a way to clench its fist.

So while I agree that participatory culture is here to stay in the near and mid-term, and it has broad social and cultural implications. I am mightily afeard of what the next sweep of conservatism will have to do to reign this all in. In large part, that response will be dictated by our ability to moderate and manage a larger set of ideas and channel them into constructive behaviors. And while we have drastically increased our ability to generate and disseminate ideas, I’m not sure that we’ve gotten any better at the business of preventing larger sets of ideas from generating conflict and disorder.

Saturday March 15th 2008 I bought a Scan Gauge II and began an unhealthy obsession with gas milage.

I had been considering the device for many months, but was a little put off by the price. After a bonus check from work, I decided it was time. While I was driving around doing some errands, I called Linear Logic, which is right down the road from me in Mesa, AZ. Though they were closed on Saturday, Ron, the owner was there, and offered to hang out to sell me one.

I zoomed over, and Ron sat me down in their conference room while he filled out the order sheet. We talked for about 30 minutes about hypermiling and getting crazy milage out of his Prius. This is clearly a guy who loves what he does.

Setup
The device requires a little set-up and calibration, that while no big deal for the average geek, would make anyone not technically inclined pretty crazy. The device itself is clearly designed by an engineer. While it’s highly functional, it’s pretty obtuse in navigation of its features. Your mom can use it, but she can’t install it and set it up.

Two measurements that you’re immediately interested in are instant MPG and current trip average MPG. the first is a predefined gauge, and the second requires a little setup. Once done however, those two readings will change how you drive, even if you don’t want to go crazy trying to hypermile.

Driving
If you’ve read that Wikipedia article, you’ll have noted that relatively large gains in average MPG are attainable through some pretty simple changes in driving habits. Unfortunately without having instantaneous feedback it’s hard to tell what works and what doesn’t.

While it’s nice that congress has passed laws demanding cars that are more efficient, they could have a much larger impact passing laws that demand realtime MPG readouts on all cars. Seeing yourself get 7 MPG makes you change your habits quickly.

I wanted to show you some cool numbers for demonstrating how much I’ve improved my milage, but after the first year of owning my car, I just stopped caring. Now that gas is above $3 and doesn’t look like it’s going down again any time soon, I started to care again. I’d guess I was averaging 34MPG.

My last tank averaged 39MPG with a mix of city and highway driving. On my current tank with trips over 15 miles I have consistently averaged over 50MPG. Most of the gains can be attributed to “Pulse and Glide” driving where you bring the car up to speed, then take it out of gear and coast. Some people turn the engine off while doing this, which can make a big difference, but I’m unwilling to loose power brakes and steering.

Short trips on a cold engine will nuke your over-all average though. It’s really hard to get a cold engine to give up the MPG.

There are a couple of big things that kill efficiency on “economy” cars. Aerodynamics, and idling engines. All modern cars should turn off the engine when the car is at a stop, and restart automatically when needed like hybrids. I suspect this alone would save a ton of gas and pollution. Aerodynamics is probably more difficult, as aerodynamic cars tend to be pretty ugly.

Overall, the scangauge is a worthwhile purchase. One things of note though: When temperatures rise, the LCD goes dead black. This was really surprising considering this is from a company based in Mesa.

For those not aware, I posted a few new pics to Flickr.

Check them out at your leisure.

I’ve been sorely tempted to buy a refurbished HP Z3100 lately which would allow me to print some awesomely huge pictures. But I’m fighting it.

Having been raised in a religious family, and a religious community, I was always struck by the profound cognitive dissonance that exists between what Jesus says and what most Christians actually practice.

I’ve also long felt that modern American Christianity is much more a social movement than it is a spiritual one. As my friend Steve often says, it would be more accurate to call it American Civil Religion than Christianity.

Brad Hicks does a good job of examining the transformation that happened during the 60s that tied Christianity to the Republican party in a combined struggle to overcome Socialism across the globe. It’s a partnership that ultimately made Christianity resemble Satanism much more than anything Christ practiced or advocated.

Give his articles a read:

Christians in the Hand of an Angry God Part 1
Christians in the Hand of an Angry God Part 2
Christians in the Hand of an Angry God Part 3
Christians in the Hand of an Angry God Part 4
Christians in the Hand of an Angry God Part 5

Anyone confused about why modern Christians seem so little like Christ really should read those.

Now if Brad Hicks doesn’t seem like a reputable source for this kind of discussion, I encourage you to check out Greg Boyd who is the pastor at Woodland Hills Church. He wrote a book called “Myth of a Christian Nation” which, while not talking specifically about the deal made in the 60s, does talk about how heavily polluted by politics Christianity has become.

Greg’s general message is that Christians are specifically called to support people with love rather than dominate them and dictate behavior through rules. He contends that America had never been a Christian nation and we shouldn’t strive to make it one, because legislating beliefs was never something Christ himself endorsed.

The sermons that served as the basis for his book are available from this website. Because of their wacky formatting, I’m going to link to the MP3s in their correct order.

1. Taking America Back for God
2. The Difference Between Two Kingdoms
3. Abortion: A Kingdom of God Approach
4. Is the Church the Guardian of Social Morality
5. Be Thou My Vision
6. In, But Not of the World

There are more sermons available on the site, but these are the big ones that convey the main point.

I’ve listened to all of them, and I think he’s pretty much right on. While I don’t share his Christian beliefs, I do share his observations on what Christians are called to do by their own belief system, and how terribly off course they’ve gotten.

I’ve finally gotten around to updating my wordpress install, and I’m going whole hog with SVN checkout. Everything went extremely smoothly aside from a weird configuration file issue. Used instructions here. Now that I’m above 2.3 I’m also going to start using tags. This is coolness.

I’ve also started using markdown. Not for any real reason, but just because it seems like the geeky thing to do.

I’ve updated my markup macros in Marsedit to reflect markdown syntax. Knowing that Jaikut probably has a google alert set up on Marsedit and his name, I’ll just put in a feature request here for him to include the option to switch the feature between markdown, texttile, html or whatever else the kids are using these days.

I’ve also gotten with the times and switched on the Wordpress stats plugin. I tried to get Popularity Contest to work, but I got no love. Not that I tried all that hard though.

Aside: I love the Decemberists, “The Crane Wife” It’s just teh awesome.

Update:
I had to replace the plugin I was using for my asides category. I chose this one, which seems to work reasonably well. But for some strange reason, despite supposedly having support for it, it won’t render my asides with markdown which makes me sad. So now I have to figure something else out.