Cringely on Egypt

Here's my favourite tech guy opining on the events in Egypt. From Robert X. Cringely's blog I, Cringely:

What’s taking place right now is very similar to the Revolution of 1848 and there was no Internet for that one.

Beginning in France, 1848 saw a social revolution sweep across much of Europe, toppling most governments of the time. Monarchies and ministers alike fell with some like Metternich of Austria having been in power as long as Mubarak has been in Egypt. Yet there was no Twitter in Vienna in 1848. No telephone (that was 30 years away), no telegraph (invented in 1844 but not yet deployed in Central Europe), railroads were just beginning to be built, and even Reuters’ carrier pigeons were a dozen years in the future. All communication other than oratory or theater was written in 1848 and went the slow way, by ship, horse, or foot. And yet, in a single year, nearly the entire continent saw revolutionary change.

The simple explanation for 1848 was that people had been unhappy for a long time and were ready for a change. They were angry and the power brokers of the time like Metternich were old, fat, and too used to power. Doesn’t that sound like much of the Middle East today? These nations have old leaders, rigid bureaucracies, and very young populations that don’t really know what they have to gain or lose, but just want something different.

So Tunisia fell and then maybe Egypt. The King of Jordan fired his cabinet, trying to look like part of the solution, not the problem. It will be interesting to see if that works. And did you read Colonel Gaddafi’s lament for the passing of the Tunisian dictator on his flank? I knew Gaddafi in the 70s and his sentiments weren’t for Tunisia but for himself.

The literal old man of the Middle East is Saudi Arabia, where the royal succession is from brother-to-brother — a system that literally can’t continue with the youngest son of the country’s founder, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, now 67 years old. It will be interesting to see if the cousins are able to work that one out. I have my doubts.

Technology will play a role in all this, of course, but revolutions are conducted by people, not electrons, and even Twitter is just a tool.

It is refreshing to find somebody who has some "perspective" on the events and doesn't get swept on on the razzle-dazzle aspect, the "Internet".

Calls to Arrest and Try Mubarak

The opposition to Mubarak has hardened given the brutal methods Mubarak is using to cling to power. From the UK's Guardian newspaper live blog of events, here are words from ElBaradei, the most likely person to lead Egypt out of the chaos and into democracy:

5.42pm: Jack Shenker has interviewed Mohamed ElBaradei, who has said he is not prepared to negotiate with "killers" but there is "no going back" for the pro-democracy movement. Here's a taste of what he said, there will be more in tomorrow's newpaper:

After today, people are realising just what they're dealing with. Now they're not just talking about the man responsible leaving the country, they're also talking about putting him on trial. If he has an iota of dignity left, he should leave. Mubarak has received a vote of no confidence by the entire Egyptian people.

Our determination not to hold negotiations with the government until Mubarak leaves has only been strengthened today. First of all this is not a negotiation – we the people have legitimate demands and we would like to tell the government what to do. Our freedom is not up for negotiation. Secondly how can you negotiate with a regime that is killing its people?

When I see some of the young people heading on to the streets and then corpses coming back the other way, it makes you cringe that this could be a state [sic]...I will be encouraging people campaigning for change to return to the streets, and I think Friday will be a very big day in that respect. But even if they don't, even if they are repressed and crushed, there is still no going back.

The UK's Cameron has crept toward demanding Mubarak step down. Obama is still "huddled" with his advisors and busy dithering.

Getting the Most out of Wind Power

There is lots of media about the upside of wind power.

But sometimes there is a downside:



From the Watts Up With That? blog:

Arlington, WY – avg annual wind speed of 31mph, gusts above 110mph, seems like a great place for a wind turbine ….right?

Well, maybe not, especially if you have to factor in replacement costs for toppled wind turbines.

Oh... and Wyoming has its own Snowzilla story to tell:

RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE CHEYENNE WY
523 PM MST TUE FEB 01 2011

...RECORD DAILY LOW HIGH SET AT CHEYENNE WYOMING...

A RECORD DAILY LOW HIGH WAS SET TODAY AT CHEYENNE WYOMING. THE OLD
RECORD WAS MINUS 5 SET IN 1899. THE NEW RECORD LOW HIGH IS MINUS 9.

That's a 111 year old record that toppled.

As the blog points out:

Combine cold temperatures that make steel brittle along with gusty winds, and you have a Titanic recipe for disaster. For those that will argue that I’m being unfair to the promise of wind power, I welcome you to provide photos of any power plant in the USA that has been collapsed due to weather. Downed power poles sure, but power sources?

Update 2011feb02: From the blog Meteorological Musings:

"We Spent Billions on Wind Power... and All I Got Was a Rolling Blackout"

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas said 7,000 megawatts of generating capacity tripped ["tripped" means failed]Tuesday night, leaving the state without enough juice. That’s enough capacity to power about 1.4 million homes. By rotating outages, ERCOT said it prevented total blackouts.

“We have the double whammy of extremely high demand, given the lowest temperatures in 15 years, combined with generation that’s been compromised and is producing less than expected or needed,” said Oncor spokeswoman Catherine Cuellar. Oncor operates power lines in North Texas and facilitated the blackouts for ERCOT.
--- above from the "Dallas Morning News"

The article didn't give a clue as to what generating capability failed, but I can make a pretty good guess: Wind energy.

When the wind is light, the turbine blades do not turn. And, the coldest nights usually occur with snow cover and light winds. The 9pm weather map for the region is below. The red number at upper right is the current temperature and they are well below zero deep into New Mexico and parts of Kansas and Colorado, so regional power use is high. Springfield, CO was already -15°F. Temperatures are in the single digits and teens over most Texas with very light winds in the areas where the turbines are located.

The Great Divergence

Here are some graphs from a post by Paul Krugman looking at how the rich are getting richer while the bottom 99% aren't doing so well.

In a world that is fair, the following graph would show a line that runs at a 45 degree angle, i.e. as the GDP grows (the horizontal axis) the incomes for ordinary people (the vertical axis) grow in proportion, or dollar for dollar. The did up until


Something happened around 1973. That is when the stupidity of a "guns & butter" war in Vietnam caught up with reality. Johnson -- like Bush -- refused to pay for his war. In the early 1970s that led to runaway inflation. The economy sank into "stagflation". It stayed in the doldrums until Reagan came to power to juice it up with a big dose of deficit spending called "Star Wars". Oh... and Reagan started the dismantling of the union movement in the US and began chopping the requirement that the rich participate in society by paying their way in taxes. Reagan's view of society was feudal: the poor had the job of slaving to allow the rich to live a sybaritic lifestyle.

The following graph shows that the median and mean -- two measures of "central tendency" -- began to diverge in the early 1980s as Reagan's tax policies allowed the rich to go on an extended "holiday" from paying their share of government.


The divergence between average and median can be illustrated by the great joke about a bar in Seattle: Twenty guys sitting around groused about times being tough and took a straw poll. Their average income was only $45,000 a year. But in walled Bill Gates. Suddenly everybody brightened up. They realized they were now wealthy men. Their average income had become $20,000,000 each. Wow! Let the good times roll!

In that bar, the median income was $45,000 before and after Bill Gates walked in. But the average jumped after Gates came in because his $4 billion/year income brought everybody up. Averages are deceptive, especially in countries where the Gini index is skewed by a income inequality.

Egypt: Descent into Hell

Well... Obama has gotten what his dithering has made inevitable. Egypt is now falling into a violent mess. Mubarak has tried every gambit he can manage to cling to power. The latest is to unleash "pro Murbarak demonstrators" loose on the anti-Mubarak demonstrators...

From a Sky News report:

Prime Minster David Cameron and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon have used strong language in their condemnation of the violence, calling for President Mubarak to go immediately.

Mr Cameron called the scenes "despicable" and warned: "If it turns out that the regime in any way has been sponsoring or tolerating this violence, that would be completely and utterly unacceptable."

It is utterly obvious to everybody but the politicians that this is yet another maneuver by Mubarak. He truly is despicable.

The longer the West dithers and refuses to cut aid off to Mubarak, the bigger the bloodbath will be. Tragic.

The West stood by as the Chinese Communists crushed the Tiananmen demonstrations. It appears they will do the same yet again. From the Al Jazeera blog:

7:21pm An anti-government protester tells Al Jazeera, "It's a siege mentality. The image that comes to mind is Tiananmen Square." Seconds later, Egyptian TV begins making an announcement repeatedly:

You have to evacuate Tahrir Square immediately. We've got confirmed information that violent groups are heading toward Tahrir Square carrying firebombs and seeking to burn the Square.

These decisions to "not intervene" have terrible consequences. The failure of the democracies to intervene and save Spain from the military revolt by Franco gave Hitler and Mussolini a testing ground and preparation for WWII. It convinced Hitler that the West was "easy pickings" because they wouldn't stand up to violence. The failure to act led directly to WWII. The old saying is "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" but obviously Obama and the other Western leaders are too stupid to realize this. Instead, they will make the same mistakes made in the past.

Mubarak cares not a whit for humanity or history. He only wants power. He is willing to crush and destroy everything to keep in power... at the age of 82!

6:12pm Al Jazeera reporting that the Egyptian museum was fire bombed and the army is now trying to put out the fire.

Priceless bits of the past that survived for 4000 years are being lost because of one vile dictator. Incredible.

The Divergence in the US Economy

The rich are partying. The poor are in distress. That's the essence of Robert Reich's latest post on his blog. Here is the key bit:

Put your ear to the ground and you can almost hear the bulls stampeding. The Dow closed above 12,000 Tuesday for the first time since June 2008. The Dow is up 4 percent this year after increasing 11 percent in 2010. The Standard & Poor 500 is also up 4 percent this year, and the Nasdaq index, up 3.7 percent.

“The U.S. economy is back!” says a prominent Wall Streeter. Not quite.

Corporate earnings remain strong (better-than-expected reports from UPS and Pfizer fueled Tuesday’s rally). The Fed’s continuing slush pump of money into the financial system is also lifting the animal spirits of Wall Street. Traders like nothing more than speculating with almost-free money. And tumult in the Middle East is pushing more foreign money into the relatively safe and reliable American equities market.

It’s simply wonderful, especially if you’re among the richest 1 percent of Americans who own more than half of all the shares of stock traded on Wall Street. Hey, you might feel chipper even if you’re among the next richest 9 percent, who own 40 percent.

But most Americans own a tiny sliver of the stock market, even including stocks in their 401(k) plans.

What do most Americans own? To the extent they have any significant assets at all, it’s their homes.

And the really big story – in terms of the lives of most Americans, and the effects on the US economy — isn’t Wall Street’s bull market. It’s Main Street’s bear housing market.

According to the Wall Street Journal’s latest quarterly survey of housing-market conditions, home prices continue to drop. They’ve dropped in all of the 28 major metropolitan areas, compared to a year earlier. And remember how awful things were in the housing market a year ago! In fact, the size of the year-to-year price declines is larger than the previous quarter’s in all but three of the markets surveyed.

...

So don’t be fooled. The financial economy isn’t the real economy. The American economy isn’t back. While Wall Street’s bull market is making America’s rich even richer, most Americans continue to be mired in a housing crisis that’s worsening — and in which the Wall Street banks seem blissfully disinterested, and the Administration incapable of stemming.

If you want to understand why this divergence is such a tragedy for the US, you should read Robert Reich's Aftershock or, if you want a more lurid and graphic account that emphasizes criminality and not just economics, read Matt Taibbi's Griftopia.

Autism

I worked with a guy who had Asperger syndrome. He was brilliant but strange. He never looked you in the eye and he had no social skills. Sadly his company was always nearly broke despite his brilliance because he couldn't find people to surround himself with the necessary skills.

I've been interested in autism since the early 1970s when I reviewed a book on it that claimed it was caused by a "refrigerator mom". Thankfully that era is long gone.

Here's a bit from a nice piece about current research at Stanford from the alumni magazine:

[Autism is] a disorder that affects 1 in every 110 kids. (The rate is 1 in 70 for boys and 1 in 315 for girls.)

Autism is a spectrum of disorders that share three core features—language deficits, social deficits, and repetitive interests and movements. On one end of the spectrum are people with Asperger's syndrome, who are socially awkward but who often have above-average intelligence. Dolmetsch's son has this diagnosis: He was late to speak and when he did speak, he talked in a stilted and peculiar way—more like a little adult than a child; and he has problems socializing. The most serious autism cases involve severe mental disabilities (about 40 percent of children with autism have IQs below 70) and behavioral problems. Between these two extremes, children may have normal intelligence but pronounced language and social impairments.

This is fascinating because it uses identical twins -- the gold standard for separating genetic versus environment -- who show different traits:

J.C. Flores, '87, has 15-year-old identical twins with autism. Lomasi can speak, but she avoids talking and gives mostly one-word answers. Marielle can say only a few words and has no functional communication system. "They're sweet and they like to hang around people," Flores says. "But they don't really feel the need to communicate. They don't see why you have to." ...

Studies of twins have shown that autism has a large genetic component, but it's not all genes. Identical twins have the same DNA, but sometimes only one twin gets autism. In other cases, as with Flores's daughters, Lomasi and Marielle, the severity of the disorder differs. The genetics are also complex. Different genes may be involved in different people; and, in any given individual, the disease may arise from changes in one gene, changes in several genes, or a combination of genetic and environmental factors. (Though no specific environmental triggers have been identified, researchers are testing everything from exposure to heavy metals and pesticides to TV watching.) Tackling this complexity requires large studies.

I'm amazed at the progress in identification and understanding "the disease", but research is nowhere near understanding what causes "it":

One of the biggest challenges is that autism is not one thing: It's a catchall diagnosis that likely includes a host of biologically distinct disorders. Though children with autism share a set of symptoms, these symptoms are quite varied and may have many, diverse biological origins. "Autism is incredibly heterogeneous. We've been lumping everyone together under this name autism, and unfortunately it makes it very difficult to study the biological features when we are treating multiple groups as one," says Sophia Colamarino, '90, vice president of research for Autism Speaks—a science and advocacy group—and consulting associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral science. To get a toehold into the biology, researchers will need to identify unique subgroups of autism, she says. Researchers across the globe are defining subgroups based on genes, molecular pathways, or signatures in the brain and blood.

Another impediment: access to the brain. Scientists can slice cancer cells out of a tumor and study them directly, but they can't just scoop cells out of the brain. Stanford is on the forefront of solving this problem...

This bit about the advances in genetic understanding is fascinating:

In the past decade, geneticists have discovered a handful of genes that when mutated or missing can cause autism. Though rare, these genes have given scientists some of their best clues about the disease's biological underpinnings. "I think it's very exciting, even if it's rare cases. We can at least get a better understanding of one piece of the puzzle and then we can branch out from there," Hallmayer says. For example, several of these genes are involved in communication between neurons. In a 2010 paper in Nature, Hallmayer and his colleagues from the Autism Genome Project greatly expanded this list of genes—reporting hundreds of rare genetic events that may be involved in autism.

It's long been known that about 5 percent of autistic kids have a chromosomal abnormality that can be seen under a microscope —part of a chromosome is missing, duplicated or in the wrong place. Because these changes affect a large number of genes, the children often have many problems in addition to autism. What wasn't known until recently is that we all have slight imperfections in our chromosomes—small regions of DNA that are duplicated or deleted. When these stretches of DNA contain genes, people can end up with one or three copies of the genes instead of the standard two. Technological advances have made it possible to detect these "copy-number variants," or CNVs. And it turns out they're important in autism and some psychiatric disorders. For example, a region of chromosome 16—containing about 25 genes, some involved in brain function and development—is deleted or duplicated in 1 to 2 percent of people with autism (and some with schizophrenia). Scientists are beginning to study these patients as an autism subgroup. ...

They identified disruptions in hundreds of genes that occurred only in autism cases, never in controls. Not all of the genes will turn out to be relevant to autism, but the ones that are could explain maybe 10 to 15 percent of cases, Hallmayer says.

This article is full of bits of information, hints about various things that cause autism. It is quite complex. There are lots of possibilities. It is easy to agree that this is a "spectrum" disorder because there are so many different areas where an autistic brain differs from a normal brain. This bit is surprising:

It's long been known that children with autism have larger-than-normal brains early in their development. Hardan has refined this observation, showing that some (but not all) children with autism have an increase in the thickness of the cortex —the part of the brain responsible for complex functions such as language and social behavior—that disappears as they grow. It might be possible to link this back to genetics, says Hardan, who frequently collaborates with Hallmayer. We know some of the genes that contribute to cortical thickness, he says.

Hardan is exploring new brain imaging technologies that offer an unprecedented level of detail. For example, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) shows the individual axons (the elongated parts of neurons) that connect different parts of the brain. And MRI spectroscopy measures the levels of specific chemicals in various parts of the brain. DTI studies from several universities suggest that autistic children have abnormal long-distance brain connections, an observation that dovetails with Dolmetsch's studies in neurons. Using MRI spectroscopy, Hardan also has detected specific chemical imbalances in the brains of children with autism. He's looking for treatments that can normalize these imbalances.

Hardan's team is involved in about 15 different clinical studies. Whenever possible, he tries to link treatment responses to changes in brain images and to a subgroup of people with autism.

I expect as neuroscience becomes more advanced there will be more splitting and the autistic spectrum will hive off new diseases. Unfortunately, because of ignorance, the disease is "diagnosed" by symptoms. But that really is backwards. If you understand the mechanism then you can identify the disease. Multiple diseases can confuse you by appearing to be one disease.

One researcher that I've followed for years is Simon Baron-Cohen at the Autistic Research Centre in the UK. He may be the modern equivalent of the "refrigerator mom" diagnostician. But I do like his "extreme male brain" approach to understanding autism.