Society – Page 31 – Common Infirmities

Journalist investigated to prove perjury exposed

The BBC pulled a planned exposé of Sun on Sunday journalist Mazher Mahmood, after a last-minute intervention from his lawyers…

I had great difficulty parsing this sentence. On the first go, my grammar module pegged “Sun” as the object of the exposé (but why not “The Sun”?), Sunday as a date — possibly the planned date of broadcast, or when the broadcast was cancelled — and journalist Mazher Mahmood presumably someone involved in the exposé or in announcing the cancellation — but then why did the clause end there? It all could have been made clear if Sun on Sunday had been put in italics.

I am reminded of a section in Steven Pinker’s book Words and Rules (I think he’s the best popular writer on linguistics — alas he tends to embarrass himself when tempted to write on other topics) where he describes “garden path sentences” — sentences that seem ungrammatical because of the way one is first inclined to parse them. The odd thing is that an informational context can make them grammatical, albeit awkward. For example

The horse raced past the barn fell.

Like the horse, the reader stumbles at the end. “Fell” looks like it’s just an excess verb tacked on. But it seems like a perfectly well-formed sentence if it is extended to

The horse raced past the barn fell. The horse walked past the barn proceeded safely.

Billions, schmillions: Immigration edition

The Telegraph writes in big text

New report shows immigration over the Labour government years cost the public purse billions of pounds, while recent migration from inside Europe generated a £4 million surplus.

Then, in the main article, the study found

that recent immigration from Europe – driven by the surge in arrivals from eastern European – gave the economy a £4.4 billion boost…

More billions schmillions.

Wi-fi jumprope

At a recent committee meeting, where the provision of wireless internet access in our college library was discussed, someone raised the question “What does ‘wifi’ mean, anyway?” As it happens, I’d looked into that about a decade ago, when I was brought up short by a bizarre comment in an article the East Bay Express (a generally excellent free weekly in the Berkeley-Oakland area):

In the East Bay, cities such as Concord, Hayward, San Pablo, and Walnut Creek are launching or planning on launching citywide wi-fi, which is short for wireless fidelity.

I’d been a fairly early adopter of wireless internet, having installed it at home in 2003, before it was available in many public places (though I’d first encountered it at the University of Copenhagen, when I attended a conference there in January 2003; at that time my Apple laptop didn’t have any built-in wireless connectivity) but I’d never paid much attention to the term “wifi”, which seemed silly to me. I assumed it was a meaningless back-formation from “hi-fi” — odd in a way, since that term itself was so outdated, and even in my childhood I knew it mainly as a joke, as in the Peanuts strip (which itself was more than a decade old at that point) where Lucy boasts to Charlie Brown that she has a “hi-fi jumprope” — which turned out to be true. But I found it hilarious that some journalists completed the cycle, assuming that if “hi-fi” was short for “high fidelity” and “wi-fi” is analogous to “hi-fi”, then “wi-fi” stands for “wireless fidelity”.

Bayesian theology

I was reading (finally, after seven years in Oxford) Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, and found the following quote from John Henry Newman:

My argument was … that absolute certitude as to the truths of natural theology was the result of an assemblage of concurring and converging probabilities … that probabilities which did not reach to logical certainty might create a mental certitude.

And then what happened?

The linguistic conventions of reporting on trials are sometimes confusing, because of the way reporters are required to appear to suspend judgement until the verdict. The BBC reports

A pensioner has been found guilty of murdering his partner and her daughter after he shot them both dead at his puppy farm in Surrey.

On first reading, I tried to figure out how he could have first murdered them, and then shot them dead…

The force of “overwhelming”

The New Republic has published a film review by Yishai Schwartz under the portentous title “The Edward Snowden Documentary Accidentally Exposes His Lies”. While I generally support — and indeed, am grateful — for what Snowden has done, I am also sensitive to the problems of democratic governance raised by depending on individuals to decide that conscience commands them to break the law. We are certainly treading on procedural thin ice, and our only recourse, despite the commendable wish of Snowden himself, as well as Greenwald, to push personalities into the background, is to think carefully about the motives — and the honesty — of the man who carried out the spying. So in principle I was very interested in what Schwartz has to say.

Right up front Schwartz states what he considers to be the central dishonesty of Snowden’s case:

Throughout this film, as he does elsewhere, Snowden couches his policy disagreements in grandiose terms of democratic theory. But Snowden clearly doesn’t actually give a damn for democratic norms. Transparency and the need for public debate are his battle-cry. But early in the film, he explains that his decision to begin leaking was motivated by his opposition to drone strikes. Snowden is welcome to his opinion on drone strikes, but the program has been the subject of extensive and fierce public debate. This is a debate that, thus far, Snowden’s and his allies have lost. The president’s current drone strikes enjoy overwhelming public support.

“Democratic theory” is a bit ambivalent about where the rights of democratic majorities to annihilate the rights — and, indeed, the lives — of individuals, but the reference to “overwhelming” public support is supposed to bridge that gap. So how overwhelming is that support? Commendably, Schwartz includes a link to his source, a Gallup poll that finds 65% of Americans surveyed support “airstrikes in other countries against suspected terrorists”. Now, just stopping right there for a minute, in my home state of California, 65% support isn’t even enough to pass a local bond measure. So it’s not clear that it should be seen as enough to trump all other arguments about democratic legitimacy.

Furthermore, if you read down to the next line, you find that when the targets to be exterminated are referred to as “US citizens living abroad who are suspected terrorists” the support falls to 42%. Not so overwhelming. (Support falls even further when the airstrikes are to occur “in the US”, but since that hasn’t happened, and would conspicuously arouse public debate if it did, it’s probably not all that relevant.) Not to mention that Snowden almost surely did not mean that he was just striking out at random to undermine a government whose drone policies he disapproves of; but rather, that democratic support for policies of targeted killing might be different if the public were aware of the implications of ongoing practices of mass surveillance. Continue reading “The force of “overwhelming””

Default settings, encryption, and privacy

One essay that powerfully shaped my intellect in my impressionable youth was Douglas Hofstadter’s Changes in Default Words and Images, Engendered by Rising Consciousness, that appeared in the November 1982 issue of Scientific American (back when Scientific American was good), and Hofstadter’s associated satire A Person Paper on Purity in Language. Hofstadter’s point is that we are constantly filling in unknown facts about the world with default assumptions that we can’t recognise unless they happen to collide with facts that are discovered later. He illustrates this with the riddle, popular among feminists in the 1970s, that begins with the story of a man driving in a car with his young son. The car runs off the road and hits a tree, and the man is killed instantly. The boy is brought to the hospital, prepped for surgery, and then the surgeon takes one look at him and says “I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son.” As Hofstadter tells it, when this story was told at a party, people were able to conceive of explanations involving metempsychosis quicker than they could come to the notion that the surgeon was a woman. It’s not that they considered it impossible for a woman to be a surgeon. It’s just that you can’t think of a human being without a sex, so it gets filled in with the default sex “male”. (The joke wouldn’t really work today, I imagine. Not only are there so many women surgeons that it’s hard to have a very strong default assumption, but the boy could have two fathers. On the other hand, a “nurse” has a very strong female default, so much so that a male nurse is frequently called a “male nurse”, to avoid confusion.)

Continue reading “Default settings, encryption, and privacy”

Mining rights and intellectual property rights

I was talking recently with an Australian, who expressed outrage that the Australian government allows mining companies to extract valuable resources from state-owned land, almost for free. Now, I have expressed similar sentiments in the past about the comparable US practice. But on reflection, it occurred to me that I couldn’t agree with the claim of another lunch participant that it is a “no-brainer” that the public should be taking a significant portion of the value realised from the resources extracted from public land.

If you think back to the time when US mining laws were first laid out — I think the main US law dates back to 1871 or so — the general view must have been, there are vast territories out there, where valuable minerals are buried, that would be of great use to the general economy, if only we could get them out of the earth. Rather than pay people to go search for them systematically, we offer that anyone who finds some and figures out how to get them to market, can keep the profits from their sale. Continue reading “Mining rights and intellectual property rights”

The CDC misunderstand screening too

Last week I mocked the Spanish health authorities who refused to treat an Ebola-exposed nurse as a probable Ebola case until her fever had crossed the screening threshold of 38 degrees Celsius (or, in the absurdly precise American translation, 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit). Well, apparently the Centers for Disease Control in the US aren’t any better:

Before flying from Cleveland to Dallas on Monday, Vinson called the CDC to report an elevated temperature of 99.5 Fahrenheit. She informed the agency that she was getting on a plane, the official said, and she wasn’t told not to board the aircraft.

The CDC is now considering putting 76 health care workers at Texas Health Presbyterian Dallas hospital on the TSA’s no-fly list, an official familiar with the situation said.

The official also said the CDC is considering lowering the fever threshold that would be considered a possible sign of Ebola. The current threshold is 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

Most disturbing is the fact that they don’t seem capable of combining factors. Would it be so hard to have a rule like, For most people, let’s hold off on the hazmat suits until your fever goes above 38. But if you’ve been cleaning up the vomit of an Ebola patient for the past week, and you have any elevated temperature at all — let’s say 37.2 — it would be a good idea to get you under observation.

One-fifth of a teaspoon

I was brought up short by this odd sentence in a NY Times article on attempts to protect health-care workers treating Ebola patients:

At the peak of illness, an Ebola patient can have 10 billion viral particles in one-fifth of a teaspoon of blood. That compares with 50,000 to 100,000 particles in an untreated H.I.V. patient, and five million to 20 million in someone with untreated hepatitis C.

“One-fifth of a teaspoon” is an odd reference unit. I had to think a moment to realise that the reporter had presumably translated into American from Scientific the sentence

At the peak of illness, an Ebola patient can have 10 billion viral particles in one milliliter of blood.

As I discussed before, the partial conversion to the metric system has left fault lines between and within nations. And the attempt to cover over those cracks mechanically creates odd dissonances. Thus, the 19th century estimate of average human body temperature of 37 degrees Celsius (plus or minus about half a degree) gets turned into the incredibly precise sounding 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. It makes as much sense as saying “28 grams of prevention are worth 454 grams of cure”.

If the reporter had thought about it, she might have translated less mechanically, writing “an Ebola patient can have 50 billion viral particles in a teaspoon of blood”. But that still leaves the weird resonance of “teaspoon of blood”. A millilitre can be water or blood or Martian atmosphere, but when I hear “teaspoon” I subliminally feel like it’s supposed to go in my tea, or cake, or soup. The thing that people like so much about these traditional units is their historical and narrative specificity, their attachment to human-scale measuring activities, but that also makes them awkward for transferring measurements between domains. I could state my height in furlongs, and my weight in grains, but I’ll just confuse people.

Before posting, I just wanted to check that I was right about the size of a teaspoon in milliliters. I asked Google, and received the information “1 Imperial teaspoon =5.91939047 millilitres”. So, first of all, I was surprised to learn — if indeed it is true — that the teaspoon has been standardised to the hundred-billionth of a litre. Second, I found the thought of “the imperial teaspoon” hilarious.