The Razor

I was changing classes at the Lakefront campus of Loyola. A television had been wheeled out and stood in a corridor showing the explosion over and over. I haven’t forgotten the loss I felt as an American that day with the reminder that exploration is not without hazard, that the roads we drive and the paths we take without a care today were built with the sweat of men and paid for with their blood.

High Flight – by John Gillespie Magee, Jr

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air….

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

That’s what General James N. Mattis, Joint Forces Commander in Afghanistan has to say about the Microsoft presentation software. The Daily Mail reports that many in the military agree with Mattis. Another general, Brigadier General H.R. McMaster, banned the software while on duty in Iraq, saying “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” he told the New York Times. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

I’ve believed for a long time that another commonly used Microsoft product, Project, a project management tool, is just as bad. The software forces project managers to fit their projects into an artificial paradigm at the core of the software that is created by software engineers. This paradigm is based on the thinking of software engineers instead of project managers but forces the latter to conform the engineer’s idea of what good project management requires instead of the other way around.

Similarly, my examination of electronic health records (EHR or electronic medical records EMR) systems finds that many of the systems are not organically derived from the practice of medicine but are built around accounting or database requirements, with the needs of medical professionals only added later. This creates software that a software engineer or account might feel comfortable with and intuitively understand, but that feels clunky and counter-intuitive to a medical professional.

I keep telling myself that the unwinding of the greatest scientific hoax since Piltdown Man is proof of the power of Science, that no matter how hard conspirators try to hide it, eventually the Truth comes out. As an anthropogenic global warming (AGW) skeptic (not a climate change denier – I don’t deny that climate changes; a basic understanding of natural history is enough to prove that) I’ve been relieved to see reality justify my faith in Science on the topic. But I’m wondering how much damage the AGW alarmists have caused.

We’re not talking about the failures of one man but of rationality itself as an entire generation of intelligent, educated, and hardworking people were fooled into perpetuating what is at heart not a simple mistake but a bald lie. As the supposed scientific evidence for that lie falls one domino after another I’m beginning to wonder where the domino chain will end and how scientists will rebuild the trust squandered by the politicization of their discipline. Those of us who grew up on a steady diet of Isaac Asimov always believed that a world run by scientists would be a better world than we have today, that the banishment of irrationality by those steeped in the tools of logic could lead us into a Golden Age.

What we believers ignored was the dark side of science, the venality of faculty meetings, the anonymous character assassinations in journal refereeing, the naked power present from faculty advisors forcing their graduate students to work on their own pet projects and ignoring the needs of their charges all the way up the food chain to science committees advising presidents and prime ministers. The global warming alarmists have made it impossible for us to ignore the dark side of science, and in so doing all science becomes suspect.

The issue is not that science changes. Science itself is dynamic, and to reflect that change scientists must never forget John Maynard Keynes’s statement to a questioner who claimed his position on monetary policy flip-flopped during the Depression: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Each should strive to keep an open mind, but balance that need with healthy skepticism. When that skepticism is lost, and as in the case of anthropogenic global warming used as a pejorative, scientists debase their own discipline and become no better than the propagandists and politicians they believe themselves better than.

The CIA claimed that Saddam Hussein was building nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The claim was used to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but those weapons were never found. Two years ago the CIA claimed that Iran was not building nuclear weapons. Yet even Iran’s sympathizers in the IAEA say that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program. How can we trust the CIA anymore? Since bad information is worse than no information it would be better for the CIA to be disbanded after its 60 year run and replaced by a more effective intelligence tool.

It’s interesting to note that the CIA’s recent mistakes stem from its increasing politicization (the intelligence leaks that undermined the Bush administration’s foreign policy) just as the global warming alarmists have exchanged the laboratories and lecture halls for UN negotiating tables and Congressional hearings.

The trouble is that we can replace the CIA but it’s nearly impossible to replace the alarmists. We can embarrass them and cause a few resignations here or there but for the most part we’re stuck with them for the foreseeable future. They will just continue to politicize science and people will tune them out just as they tune out other political voices. And in the end when there is truly an emergency that scientists agree on – say a future collision of an asteroid with the earth for example – they will be ignored.

It’s rare these days to see the term “global warming” preceded or followed by the the term “consensus” as if this word alone makes global warming unassailable. Besides being a fallacy the usage of a subjective term “consensus” to describe a scientific hypothesis merely suggests its weak underpinnings. We don’t talk about the consensus of Newtonian physics or the quantum physics consensus. We don’t have to appeal to popularity in order to prove these ideas. We have solid experimental evidence supporting them. Historically science has had numerous agreements on principles and ideas that were later proven wrong. Steady state universe consensus? Wrong. The consensus supporting the geosyncline theory of that explained sea animal fossils on mountain tops? Replaced by plate tectonics.

Science isn’t about perfection. The people who believed that the stars and planets moved through ether weren’t fools or bad scientists. Their work advanced Science until it reached a point where a new idea explained the universe better than existing ones; in the case of the ether theory, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. It’s not as important to be right than it is to be methodical and skeptical of one’s evidence and results. This is a basic tenet of science that today’s climate scientists have lost. These people should be stripped of the term “scientist” to protect the reputation of scientists who don’t fall victim to fads.

Like many people I have been messing around with social networking on Facebook. It’s kind of fun finding out what your old friends have been doing, and keeping in contact with current friends is much easier through built in messaging and chat programs. But I’m beginning to wonder what the limits of the technology are, and whether we’re already having our faces pushed into them.

Facebook is like masturbation. It feels good while you’re doing it, but it leaves you feeling empty afterward. Most of the chatter is inane. Does anyone really care what I’m thinking most of the time? Hell, I don’t care about what I’m thinking most of the time so why would anyone else? The applications are time wasters, and the quizzes make those found in Cosmo look like GRE, LSAT and MCAT prep questions by comparison. Join a group or become a fan of something and your inbox will never be the same. You’ve just allowed a tide of spam to wash into your inbox that sends your crackberry vibrating like a sex toy in a porn movie.

If you’re looking for meaningful conversation, good luck. The level of discourse seems to be inversely proportional to the weight of the subject. Mention the weather or clothing and people will respond with footnoted and well-considered treatises. Say something about politics or religion and the comments become shallower than Britney Spears’s gene pool.

It encourages shallow commentary by the 420 character (85 word) post limit. That’s 3x longer than Twitter’s 140 character limit and makes Twitter look two dimensional by comparison. Still, that limit is too short when we have something interesting to say, and too long when we don’t.

There’s a reason why we lose contact with old friends: we’ve changed and so have they. I believe it’s a conceit on our part to expect that we still have something meaningful to say beyond reminiscing about the past. Relationships have natural lifespans; some last decades while others last only days or weeks. Most fall somewhere in between, but Facebook doesn’t recognize this. It assumes that everyone we met and befriended in our lives is exactly the way they were when we met them, and worse, that we haven’t changed either.

For most of its history, Science has always made room for amateurs or non-science professionals. However the 20th Century pushed these scientists to the edges in favor of professional chemists, physicists and biologists using advanced tools at large well-funded laboratories, leading the authors of a 1996 paper to write “Modern science can no longer be done by gifted amateurs with a magnifying glass, copper wires, and jars filled with alcohol.” Writer, teacher and amateur scientist Forest M. Mimms III has published numerous scientific articles in publications like Science and Nature and disagrees, “The term amateur can have a pejorative ring. But in science it retains the meaning of its French root amour, love, for amateurs do science because it’s what they love to do. Without remuneration or reward, enthusiastic amateurs survey birds, tag butterflies, measure sunlight, and study transient solar eclipse phenomena. Others count sunspots, discover comets, monitor variable stars, and invent instruments.”

More importantly is a deep understanding and appreciation of the Scientific Method and its application in our daily lives. One doesn’t have to have beakers boiling away in their basement to apply the method to everyday problems. Science is a powerful tool; one could argue it’s the most powerful tool ever invented.

Skepticism plays an integral role in Science. In a sense it begins with the null hypothesis that attempts to prove the claim under investigation is not true until proven otherwise. The purpose of the null hypothesis is to weed out biased results.

One could say that it’s easier for an amateur scientist to be mislead by the media. In response, the amateur scientist could state that working alone she is less likely to be mislead by group think and the unwillingness to voice a contrary opinion in the corporate setting. How easy is it for a scientist to disagree with the opinions of his peers or his superiors? In a professional setting one exchanges autonomy in exchange for support: a paycheck, equipment, peers. How easy is it for a scientist to disagree in this environment? Go back even further. How difficult is it to dissent in college or graduate school when from your advisors decide whether you advance in your field or not?

The amateur scientist has the freedom to think and dissent if necessary, whereas the professional scientist has been indoctrinated throughout his entire career to accept the validity of a theory on faith. Express disagreement at any step along the way and forget tenure, hiring or the next promotion.

That’s why I find the emails stolen from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia troubling. These emails show a clear pattern of intellectual character assassination against anyone who is skeptical of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory. Instead of a healthy clash of ideas supported by evidence we have “scientists” acting more like medieval inquisitors to prevent the publication of arguments and evidence that question the current scientific orthodoxy. I

The emails support what global warming skeptics have said all along – that theories and evidence that undermined AGW were being buried, hidden and in some cases outright destroyed in order to shore up AGW. In an exchange between Professor Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit, and professor Michael E. Mann at Pennsylvania State University, Jones writes, “”If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone” and, “We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.” Mr. Jones further urged Mr. Mann to join him in deleting e-mail exchanges about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) controversial assessment report (ARA): “Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re [the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report]?” All this to hide the fact that the earth has been cooling over the past decade instead of heating up as the models predicted.

Add the inability of AGW to be disproven (if global temperatures rise – it’s due to anthropogenic global warming. If they fall as they have been doing for the past ten years, it’s due to anthropogenic global warming), and it’s easy to see how James Delingpole at the Daily Telegraph calls the emails the “final nail in the coffin of ‘anthropogenic global warming’,” and what Andrew Bolt calls the greatest scandal in modern science.

I don’t expect the theory to die so easily. There is too much money behind the current orthodoxy, and worse, an entire generation of scientists have been raised to not question anthropogenic global warming. Fighting money and faith… Well I’m confident that in the end Truth will win out but before it does trillions of dollars will be wasted on solutions to a problem built on a shaky scientific foundation.

The Anthropogenic Global Warming theory points out the danger of professional science straying from the path of legitimate scientific inquiry into faith and orthodoxy. Science needs the amateur scientist and the skepticism and freedom of thought he or she brings now more than ever.

Update: Ilya Somin at Volokh Conspiracy writes:

Most of us, however, lack expertise on climate issues. And our knowledge of complex issues we don’t have personal expertise on is largely based on social validation. For example, I think that Einsteinian physics is generally more correct than Newtonian physics, even though I know very little about either. Why? Because that’s the overwhelming consensus of professional physicists, and I have no reason to believe that their conclusions should be discounted as biased or otherwise driven by considerations other than truth-seeking. My views of climate science were (and are) based on similar considerations. I thought that global warming was probably a genuine and serious problem because that is what the overwhelming majority of relevant scientists seem to believe, and I generally didn’t doubt their objectivity.

At the very least, the Climategate revelations should weaken our confidence in the above conclusion. At least some of the prominent scholars in the field seem driven at least in part by ideology, and willing to use intimidation to keep contrarian views from being published, even if the articles in question meet normal peer review standards. Absent such tactics, it’s possible that more contrarian research would be published in professional journals and the consensus in the field would be less firm. To be completely clear, I don’t think that either ideological motivation or even intimidation tactics prove that these scientists’ views are wrong. Their research should be assessed on its own merits, irrespective of their motivations for conducting it. However, these things should affect the degree to which we defer to their conclusions merely based on their authority as disinterested experts.

Update #2:
While packing for our move to North Carolina I found the Wife’s data books from her master’s research in Japan – a small boxed brick of penciled in data books.  That data was used for her degree resulted in several published papers. Not that the data was ever lost; I knew pretty much where it was at all times. I even know where all the Statistica, Excel, and other data files are on my home office network for that work, as well as her more important chimpanzee research that netted her her doctorate. Even though those files haven’t been touched in a decade they are backed up and stored. Why? Because you don’t throw out data.

Unless you believe in AGW - then it’s okay evidently.

Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

Science isn’t supposed to be this sloppy which is why I would hesitate calling the University of East Anglia personnel “scientists.” I believe “charlatans” and “hucksters” would be better terms.

Update #3:
Christopher Booker at the Daily Telegraph calls ClimateGate the “worst scientific scandal of our generation.” What I find particularly troubling is that by injecting science into politics, as AGW believers have done, they are also creating one of the worst political scandals of our generation.

Update #4:
Investors Business Daily takes issue with the lack of ClimateGate coverage by the mainstream media:

So the dominant media no longer check the growth of government, especially when government is poised to impinge on our freedoms.

Rather, they feed public perceptions in a propagandistic loop. Those fearless watchdogs of the press? Gone.

They’ve been gone for awhile – at least since becoming propagandists for Obama. Given the press’s infatuation with Leftist icons like Mao, Che, and Stalin (the New York Times was propagandizing about Comrade Josef almost sixty years ago) and adoration of collective action, it’s not a surprise. Thankfully there is the Internet – which they haven’t shut down. Yet.

Update #5:
Wired magazine explains how scientists screw up and some eventually overcome their own biases to make discoveries.

Dunbar came away from his in vivo studies with an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) “The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen,” Dunbar says. “But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn’t make sense.” Perhaps they hoped to see a specific protein but it wasn’t there. Or maybe their DNA sample showed the presence of an aberrant gene. The details always changed, but the story remained the same: The scientists were looking for X, but they found Y.

We visited with our elderly neighbors tonight. After a dinner of home-made potato soup and grilled cheese, the woman wanted to show us some pictures of her bunnies. As she was flipping through a photo album, she was narrating the subjects. “Here’s our chickens. Here’s our bunny rabbits. Here’s the space shuttle exploding. Here’s Pumpkin as a puppy…”

We stopped her and she pulled out the snapshot of the Challenger disaster. She had an entire series of the launch taken from a church parking lot – about a dozen snapshots all with the church’s cross in the foreground starting with the shuttle in its first seconds of flight and ending with the falling debris and unforgettable crazy spirals made by the solid fuel rocket boosters.

It turns out she once lived near Cape Canaveral/Kennedy and rarely missed a launch until she left Florida and moved back to North Carolina. She was there that day and witnessed first hand the event that I saw on a television screen in college.

I asked her how people reacted, and she acted it out for me. There were gasps followed by shouts of “it’s exploded!” to cries of “no, no, no.” She said that her prayer group held hands as the rockets continued their crazy spiral and the shuttle’s remains rained down on the sea and prayed for the families of the astronauts.

We then went back to her pictures of baby goats and chickens, but I won’t be forgetting those snapshots anytime soon.

I’m a child of two parents who survived the Great Depression. During that time my parents struggled to make ends meet, and it wasn’t until the mid-1950’s that my father made enough to feed his family of 5 children without worry. By the time I appeared on the scene a decade later they had a car, owned their own home, and saved enough to send my brother to college. But the Depression had left its mark in everything they did.

They couldn’t throw anything away until it was completely exhausted. Nothing was disposable. Objects were treated with respect to keep them in good condition. Broken things were mended. They saved just about everything. String. Paper. Rubber bands. I remember that my father came home from his job with some broken wrought iron chairs, bolted them together and they became our outdoor patio set. One was missing a leg, and my father cut a 2×2 down to fit in its place. In his eyes the chair was completely functional again, but in mine it was an iron chair with one wooden leg.

Consequently I grew up frugal myself.  Although the Wife has tempered this somewhat I find it difficult to the point of embarrassment to buy anything that is not on sale. Over the past decade I have used the Internet to find the best products at the lowest prices, and would buy everything on the web if I could.  But I’ve begun to question my own consumption pattern.

I like to read in bed and because the Wife is sensitive to light, I have bought numerous battery operated reading lights – all made in China. No matter what brands I purchase or how much I spend, within a couple of months the lights break and I’m left using a flashlight to read in bed until I go out and buy another. A reading light is quite a simple device consisting of a battery, LED, and wires all linked together in a circuit. This circuit is then encased in plastic, metal or a combination of the two. Although simple, these lights break within a few months. Sometimes the cases break, other times the soldering fails somewhere in the circuit. I try to repair them but the repairs inevitably fail after a few weeks. Over the past 5 years alone I have probably spent $150 on reading lights.

After reading Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppell Shell I now understand that my frustration is the result of the replacement of quality goods by shoddy ones made in China in order to maximize profit and minimize expense. In essence well-made lasting goods have been replaced by disposable goods that fall apart almost as soon as they are purchased. This exchange of shoddy for quality has happened as Americans have pursued low price at the expense of all else. We save money in the short term by pursuing low prices but lose much in the process including long lasting quality goods and decent paying jobs.

Shell writes for the Atlantic and is a professor of journalism at Boston University. Throughout the book I searched for Shell’s anti-capitalist bias, but didn’t find it anywhere. Instead she writes “Trade is and must be free,” and believes that regulation and unionization is not the answer to our obsession with low prices. She quotes Adam Smith liberally and suggests that Smith himself would not be pleased with the junk on the shelves of America’s superstores. She writes that Smith advocated a system whereby workers earned a decent wage to purchase a decent life, and supporting that system were Smith’s heroes – consumers buying the goods and services made by the workers at fair prices. These prices weren’t inflated: the consumer received a quality product that performed the job it was intended to do.

Shell discusses the usual suspects – Wal-mart, dollar stores and discount chain stores – but she zeroes in on Ikea as a firm that has built a mythos around itself to shield it from the fact that it uses illegally harvested hardwoods from the Russian Far East and Asia (Ikea is the third largest consumer of wood in the world), and sources production to some of the lowest paying companies on the planet. Shell cites a table that sells for $69. A master craftsman admitted that he couldn’t buy the wood for that price, let alone build the table. Ikea headquarters exudes an aura of cultishness that is more reminiscent of Scientology than of a business. There workers design products that are meant to be made and ship cheaply – not to be comfortable. The products are given cutesy names that slaps a “happy face” onto what in essence is a soulless product.

While every move by American giant like Wal-mart is subjected to scrutiny by environmentally minded intelligentsia, she notes that Ikea is given a pass:

Wal-mart’s relentless march toward world retail domination provokes scathing exposes in books, articles, and documentaries. But most media responses to Ikea verge on the hagiographic, swallowing whole the well-polished rags-to-riches story the company wrote for itself.

Everything Ikea does is geared towards lowering its costs.  Ikea’s store placement outside of cities and away from public transit, as well as its refusal to deliver makes its customers drive to it is a conscious decision by the firm to minimize the cost per square foot of its stores by buying cheap land. It ships disassembled products to save on shipping and on manufacturing. It regularly squeezes its suppliers, thereby preventing workers in some of the poorest places on the planet from getting better wages while encouraging environmental abuses.

Shell’s criticism of Ikea hits home because I’ve bought from there. In fact the table that I’m writing on is from Ikea. Its wood grain is quite dense, unlike that from plantation farmed trees. Of course only its legs are wood; it’s top is wood veneer and already shows signs of wear after just three years. Did the legs come from illegally logged old-growth forest in Siberia or Indonesia? How environmentally friendly can this table be if it is already falling apart after 3 years and will need replacement in another year or two? It’s not friendly to the environment – but it is to Ikea’s profits if I’m stupid enough to go there and buy another table. No, it’s replacement will be a nice, well-worn American table from a second-hand shop.

Shell makes a convincing case that America’s love affair with shoddy goods is bad for the environment and living standards abroad. Unfortunately she could have made a better case that shopping at Wal-mart and Ikea leads to lower living standards at home. Shell mentions a worker in furniture manufacturing who was laid off by an American furniture maker and picked up by Ikea – at much lower wages and benefits. However families who shop at Wal-mart save roughly $2700 a year on their purchases, and since Wal-mart caters to the lower demographics the savings is a significant part of the demographic’s income. Shell argues that this savings is less than the family would have made had Wal-mart and the discount chains not driven jobs abroad, and because the jobs are gone forever Wal-mart consumers are locked into a decreasing standard of living that no amount of savings can justify.

Shell’s work is heavily footnoted but because the footnotes aren’t referenced in the text, I ended up reading them on their own after finishing the book. This is a small quibble with an otherwise fine and thought provoking book, but it would have made her arguments even stronger had the footnotes been referenced.

Shell’s writing style is easy to read and her ideas are well supported and researched. Her conclusion that it is up to Americans to recognize that things that fall apart quickly – like reading lamps – don’t provide good value in the long run leaves the decision whether or not to improve the situation up to us.

She believes that we need to educate ourselves on the products we consume – where they come from, how they are made, and what we consume is in line with our values. If we are comfortable buying cheap crap that falls apart, sending our dollars to the Chinese government that funds oppressive regimes in the Sudan, Burma and North Korea, then we have no one to blame but ourselves. She discusses the movement towards buying locally grown farm produce and second hand goods. While the people dismissed as “frugalistas” by Robert Novak are more than likely politically liberal, Shell’s presentation shows that the issue does not have to be a polarizing one. Rod Dreher proved in his book “Crunchy Cons” how it was possible to care about conserving the environment and eating healthier while at the same time upholding conservative values of a strong America and small government.

Making tables disposable may boost Ikea’s profits, but in the long run we spend more, degrade the environment and prop up regimes that we should be undermining instead. That’s something that Greens and Conservatives can agree on.

I’m thinking about the loss of Air France flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, and what troubles me is the apparent suddenness of the disaster.

Facts:

The plane was entering a zone of weather activity and the pilot reported that the plane was experiencing turbulence as it flew into a stormy area. Stratfor notes that the plane issued automated messages over a period of 4 minutes before being lost by radar. There were no human distress calls made. Fox News gives this chronology:

The pilot sent a manual signal at 11 p.m. local time Sunday saying he was flying through an area of black, electrically charged cumulonimbus clouds that come with violent winds and lightning.

Ten minutes later, a cascade of problems began: Automatic messages indicate the autopilot had disengaged, a key computer system switched to alternative power, and controls needed to keep the plane stable had been damaged. An alarm sounded indicating the deterioration of flight systems.

Three minutes after that, more automatic messages reported the failure of systems to monitor air speed, altitude and direction. Control of the main flight computer and wing spoilers failed as well.

The last automatic message, at 11:14 p.m., signaled loss of cabin pressure and complete electrical failure — catastrophic events in a plane that was likely already plunging toward the ocean.

The plane entered service in 2005 and was serviced most recently in April.

Speculation:

The fact that the pilot didn’t issue a distress call lends me to believe that the plane suffered a catastrophic event that prevented the pilot or copilot from radioing for help. This raises several questions:

1. Can weather cause the plane to break up? According to Fox News/AP, experts discount lightning – but that doesn’t mean that some other weather-related event could not have caused it.

But wouldn’t weather related events have caused a gradual catastrophe? If lightning had knocked out avionics, the pilot should have been able to issue a distress call. After all, the plane itself was able to transmit the automated messages.

Wind sheer could have stressed the airframe beyond tolerance and led to failure of its composite-based components and structures.  Was the radar installed in the plane able to read the severity of the weather the pilot was flying in to? Experienced pilots would have avoided the storms and either adjusted course or gone higher to fly over them, but it’s possible that the pilot flew into a severe storm cell without knowing it.

Given the location of the event – in a zone characterized by frequent severe storms – weather may have played a role in the disaster. However planes just don’t suddenly break up in flight for no reason. Planes are strong and flexible aerodynamic structures that are designed to resist all but the worst weather extremes.

2. The detonation of a bomb on board would fit the facts of the disaster as it stands today. Reports – apparently unsourced and not fully confirmed – is that a bomb threat was issued against an Air France flight from Buenos Aires to Paris. Worse, the names of two passengers match two terrorists on a French watch list.

Consider what would have happened had Richard Reid been successful in his attempt to blow up an airliner with a shoe bomb. There would have been no distress calls. Automated messages would have reported the same cabin depressurization and systems failures. A bomb would be easier to get aboard a plane flying from a South American country to France rather than the opposite direction.

At this time we don’t have much evidence. The evidence we do have, although scant, supports either of these two scenarios about the same. So with equal evidence we then apply Occam’s Razor, the namesake of this journal. Given equal evidence the simpler of two explanations is most likely the one that is true. Either a unique weather event compounded by mechanical failure brought the plane down or a bomb did. At the time of writing Occam’s Razor favors the terror scenario.

Evidence is slowly being gathered and each piece can support one or the other of these two scenarios. It could also indicate something else completely. But today logic would seem to dictate that Flight 447 is the worst single terrorist event since September 11, 2001.

UPDATE 6/12/2009:

After the argument put forward by Gerard in the comments thread I was able to confirm that his assertion that the decompression message was one of the last to occur. Based on this I would have to revise my conclusion and state that the evidence isn’t equal anymore and in fact would favor the weather/mechanical failure argument. Occam’s Razor would therefore  not apply in this situation (it only can be used with equally weighted evidence).

The link below is best source found so far that lays out the timeline of messages sent by the doomed flight.

http://blog.seattlepi.com/aerospace/archives/170669.asp

Pay particular attention to the comments section which seemed to attract several intelligent comments from members of the aviation industry. The links to PDF’s giving the raw data of the messages with explanations are also worth reviewing.

In short the current theory is that the disaster is a combination of human error and weather which stressed the plane beyond its tolerances and led to its breakup over the Atlantic Ocean. As Gerard mentions in the comments section of this entry, it’s a pretty terrible way to go.

Update 6/13/2009:

Eurocockpit has what appears to be the official message log shown below. Link to site (French), (English via Google Translator).

It is interesting to note that Eurocockpit places blame on Air France for knowing about the pitot tube problem and doing nothing about it.

Clearly, a few hours after the accident, the BEA, Airbus and Air France had heard the contents of messages and their meaning. Ils savaient qu’il s’agissait – de nouveau – d’un problème sur les tubes Pitot. They knew it was – again – a problem on the Pitot tube.

ATA 34 sous-ATA 11/15, et Air France et le BEA viennent nous parler de problèmes électriques, de foudre, de turbulences, d’orages, de FIT, de ZCIT, devant toutes les caméras du monde entier ? ATA ATA-34 in 11/15, and Air France and BEA come talk to us about electrical problems, lightning, turbulence, thunderstorms, of FIT, the ITCZ, before all the cameras around the world?

1. Gee I hope I can get a signal here.
2. God d****t what do you mean “communication error” on my Blackberry? I’m showing 5 frickin’ bars!
3. Guess I should’ve gotten an iPhone on AT&T.

Happy Anniversary to me…

The Wife made an astute observation today. She said that she thought Facebook and other social networking sites were the high-tech equivalent of a sandbox.

When toddlers are playing in a sandbox, there isn’t much interaction between them. Instead each is in his or her own little world, babbling away. Sometimes the worlds of two or three might intersect briefly, but eventually they pull apart and the tots are alone again.

Facebook is quite similar. Most posts are mundane and few garner comment. When there is interaction, it’s usually brief – a comment or two on a particular post. There are a few people who get more attention than most, and there are some celebrities whose every grunt and online fart spawns hundreds of comments from fans. But Facebook is a sea of people babbling away in their own little worlds with little interaction between them.

I recently completed building my latest creation – The Crystal – a scratchbuilt desktop with an acrylic case having the following specs:
CPU: Intel Q6600 (currently running at stock speed)
Motherboard: Gigabyte EP45-UD3L
RAM: Corsair 2×2gb
GPU: Radeon 4870 512mb
HD: Hitachi 1tb

Since the completion coincided with the release of Windows 7 RC1 to the public, I’ve loaded that OS. Installing Windows 7 was actually the easiest install of an operating system that I can recall. You simply answer a few questions, enter the product key, and less than 1/2 hour later your PC is ready to go.

I’m currently loading drivers. ATI already released a Windows 7 one, but the ethernet driver isn’t playing nice. If I try loading the Vista version it says “This driver cannot be installed under Windows XP” and if I download and try installing the XP version of the driver I get the error “This driver cannot be installed under Vista.” Oh well there had to be some trouble somewhere – otherwise people would trust computers and the professionals that shepherd them.

Two related articles. First, a look at outdated technology that refuses to die:

Fax machines should go the way of the dinosaur. With the instant delivery and reliability of email, fax should be a thing of the past.

Second, 10 technologies about to go extinct:

3. Wristwatches: Throwing on a fancy watch may make you look professional, but let’s be honest. Cell phones and iPods tell you the time when you’re out and about, and virtually every appliance in your home — from your refrigerator to your coffeemaker to your television and your DVD player — has a clock. No one wears a wristwatch anymore, unless he or she grew up with one.

I’m one of the people who gave up on watches after I bought my first cell phone. I haven’t worn one in about 10 years and really don’t miss it.

And don’t get me started on faxes. I still have to send them regularly – most recently over the weekend to the Delaware Division of Revenue.

Here are some technologies that I want to see die, and the sooner the better.

1. Checkout scanners – At the store near me there are often lines at the self-service checkout lanes because it keeps the store’s labor costs down. However the cashier minding these works harder than anyone else in the store because they inevitably screw up. Scanning your own items also takes longer because you have to scan each one several times before the scanner recognizes it. The technology exists today to outfit a checkout lane with an RFID antenna that would pick up the price of each product outfitted with an RFID tag. Imagine bagging your groceries while you shop, then pushing your cart through a checkout lane; no more loading the cart, unloading the cart, bagging, loading the cart and paying. Add a cheap RFID antenna at home and you could even keep an inventory.

2. Cords – I’m looking at a mass of cables on the floor that were hidden by a piece of furniture I’ve moved. Each powers or carries a signal to a TV, router, a couple of printers, a PS3, a couple of USB enclosures, PCs, monitors, keyboards, and assorted electronic gizmos of the 21st Century… The power of all these devices could be captured with induction coils, and short-range wireless could handle communication between everything else. We started with keyboards and mice, but hopefully we’ll progress to monitors soon and power within the next decade or two.

I’m a systems analyst and deal with complex software every day. However I’m still amazed when companies release bad code on their customers. Case in point: Pizzahut.com

I received an email from Pizza Hut offering their Panormous Pizza for $10. I happened to be lazy and hungry at that very moment and clicked on the “Order Now” button in the HTML. As the site loaded I notice that the URL was passing several knapsacks (marketing and order variables) to the site. I was then prompted to login. For some reason the website for ordering pizza has a login that is more restrictive than most. If you screw up either your login ID or password it doesn’t tell you which you entered wrong; it just says “login incorrect”. After a few attempts at remembering my login ID and password for a fast-food website, I figure out the combo – and the real fun begins.

First I’m presented with a screen after the login that shows my “hometown Pizza Hut” – the closest store to my home – correctly and asks if I want carryout or delivery. I select carryout because I may be lazy but I’m also cheap; having worked as a pizza delivery guy in my youth I always tip them well – so most of the time I pick up the orders myself. The next screen I’m prompted to select the location nearest my house and presented with a Microsoft Virtual Earth satellite view of my neighborhood complete with all the Pizza Huts in southeastern PA and northern DE shown with tiny Pizza Hut icons. But my “hometown pizza hut” was displayed correctly on the previous page. Why am I being asked to select it again? I do it anyway.

By this time I notice that all the knapsack information is gone. The site doesn’t know that I want the Panormous Pizza for $10 – so I have to find it. Is it a featured product? Nope. It sure isn’t a Tuscani Pasta. After clicking on various tabs I finally find it hidden under “Pick Your Crust”. The Panormous is not a crust – it’s a pizza. So what is it doing there? Now I’m not just hungry, I feel hungry AND like I’m still at the office.

The website allows you to customize the toppings per pizza – but the Panormous is actually two separate pizzas packaged together. Each pizza can have a separate topping but I can either double my order or have both pizzas be the same topping. The page is confusing and offers too many choices (why? I’m ordering a pizza, not building a house) – but the page cannot handle two pizzas, two different toppings, one price. To make matters worse the Panormous is showing up at regularly price, not the $10 promised in the email.

I search the website and find a phone number to call. I speak to a woman who mispronounces my name after I’ve spelled it twice. I explain my trouble with the site and ask her how to order a pizza on the website. Her solution? “Call the store and place your order over the phone. Do you want the number?” I mention that they will need a coupon code to complete the order (I’ve actually gone through this before a long time ago). She said that the website may not be displaying correctly because the store doesn’t offer the pizza. I laughed. “You don’t really know, do you?” I said and hung up. Now I’m not only hungry, I’m really annoyed.

I find a feedback form and start typing away in the memo section… And run out of space. The memo field is limited to 520 characters including line breaks – that’s about 80 words or so.

I call my “hometown pizza hut” in desperation and they hook me up – no problem.

The whole ordering online process is a mess. It clearly hasn’t been quality tested thoroughly. It seems laid out more for product placement and advertising than it does for ordering products. In fairness to the web designers they probably did what they were paid to do. The site requirements came from the marketing department where everybody thought about how cool the site looked and nobody considered its purpose. Had they actually tried to order a pizza the errors would have been easily apparent. A round of QA would have kept this multimillion dollar firm from releasing one of the worst websites I’ve used that doesn’t have a URL that ends in .gov.

In the Grand Scheme of things the failure of this website means little, but it doesn’t take much to do a decent website in the year 2009.

Glenn Reynolds links to this piece in the New York Times that asks “Where have all the primary doctors gone?” The writer, a doctor herself, tells us

In the last several months there have been reports in medical journals about an impending shortage of primary care physicians. This spring in the health policy journal Health Affairs, researchers at the University of Missouri -Columbia and the federal Department of Health and Human Services published a study that projected a generalist physician shortage of 35,000 to 44,000 by the year 2025.

The writer notes:

The Physicians’ Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports physicians’ work with patients, last month published the results of a survey on current medical practice conditions in the United States. Some 12,000 doctors responded, the vast majority of whom were primary care physicians.

Nearly half of them said they planned in the next three years to reduce the number of patients they see or to stop practicing altogether. While these doctors rated patient relationships as the most satisfying aspect of practice, over three-quarters felt they were at “full capacity” or “overextended and overworked.”

She also forecasts that things will only get worse as Obama enacts his plans to “fix” the health care system.

The situation in Massachusetts should be a wake-up call. Since a landmark law was enacted in 2006 requiring health insurance for nearly all residents, the state has struggled to provide primary care to the estimated 440,000 newly insured.

Since Dr. Wife is finishing up her residency as a primary care physician, I’ve become quite familiar with the job market for primary care physicians. She had her mind set on family practice before she began pre-med class a decade ago and never wavered in her desire to become a traditional GP.

Supply Imbalance and Market Limitations
If primary care physicians are so scarce, why don’t their salaries reflect the scarcity? The average salary for primary care physicians in practice for at least 3 years is around $147,000 nationally. Starting salaries are about $20,000 below that on average. This conceals tremendous variation depending on region and locality. For example starting salaries in the Philadelphia area for PCPs are roughly $90,000, while it’s no secret that the highest salaries are in the rural South and Midwest that can approach $180,000 for physicians fresh out of residency.

Why the difference? Because Philadelphia has 5 medical schools; medical students tend to apply to residencies near where they went to school and newly minted physicians tend to practice where in the same area that they do their residencies. Philadelphia is a large metropolitan area with the amenities that come with it.  It therefore has an abundance of primary care physicians, although managed care and malpractice insurance rates that border on the obscene are starting to force them out of the area.

Meanwhile few doctors want to live in places like Grant New Mexico or Greeley Nebraska. Rural areas such as these don’t offer many opportunities for single physicians to meet potential spouses, nor do they have many job openings for the minority of new physicians with spouses. The migration of American population from rural areas to urban began a century ago and continues today. Doctors are no different from the general population.

What results is an imbalance of supply and demand, with low supply/high demand in rural areas and low demand/high supply in urban areas. The salaries offered by rural areas although substantial have so far failed to attract physicians away from the urban settings. But given the depressed economics of rural America this “rural premium” on PCP salaries has most likely already reached the maximum rural areas can bear.

In order for primary care physician salaries to draw residents away from the urban areas they would most likely have to double to $240,000-$300,000. Since Medicare makes up about a third to half of a PCP’s patient load, Medicare reimbursements would have to  quadruple for rural doctors. Currently Medicare reimburses a third less than private insurers, discouraging doctors from taking new Medicare patients and pushing them to replace those they do have with the privately insured.

While most Americans would be happy to make $147,000 a year, they might think twice about doing so when other factors are considered. The AMA estimates that in 2007 the average medical student graduated with $140,000 in educational debt. The average medical school loan is for a term of 15 years, and at 4% interest requires a monthly payment of just over $1,000 every month for the life of the loan. Loan repayment of $12,000/year + taxes paid on that income (another $3,000 – medical school debt is not tax free) reduces that salary down to $125,000.   Physicians usually work far beyond 40 hours a week, with the average PCP putting in 53 hours a week (specialists tend to work even longer.) Therefore on an hourly basis the average primary care physician earns $45/hour after debt repayment and before taxes.

Finally all PCPs operate with the threat of malpractice hanging over their heads. This threat varies by state with some being more litigious than others (Pennsylvania is notoriously bad). The threat of possible litigation makes PCPs practice “defensive medicine” whereby the doctor does procedures and orders tests that may not be necessary for the health of the patient, but could fend off a line of attack by an aggressive malpractice attorney should the doctor wind up in court. This drives up costs for everyone from the physician to the insured and his or her provider and employer.

Is $45/hour worth 4 years of undergrad, 4 years of medical school, 3 years of training and a week per year of continuing education with the ever present threat of having to explain one’s actions in court? Evidently fewer doctors think so as Dr. Chen points out.

Whenever the supply of something decreases while demand for it goes up, its price must also rise. Yet this has not happened for doctors practicing in primary care. Why? Managed care. Primary care physicians are reimbursed on a per patient, per procedure basis with rates set by the insurance company or Medicare. These rates are not based on the time or effort required by the doctor, nor are they negotiable except in rare time consuming cases when doctors must challenge insurance companies to allow an off-schedule prescription or procedure. This forces doctors to either accept the reimbursements as they are and choose to bill the patient for the difference or refuse the insurance. Since there is little competition between insurance companies within a region, there is no incentive for them to listen to their patients who want to see a particular doctor. At the same time a doctor who refuses to accept patients from a particular provider can freeze herself out of a significant chunk of the market.

This shifts the payment burden from the insurance company to the physician who must decide whether to bill the patient for the difference. Since the physician is bound both morally and legally by an oath to provide care regardless of cost, the doctor is the one forced to provide services to patients who can’t afford them, then turn around and bill the patient at a reduced rate, market rate, or not recoup the cost of his or her services. Most either bill their patients at a reduced rate or not at all.

As a capitalist society we do not expect people to work for free, yet we expect doctors to perform their services for free or reduced cost in the managed care system. The so-called savings promised a decade ago from the managed care system have yet to materialize even as doctors face declining reimbursements from providers; as a result doctors are burning out and patients are left receiving substandard and expensive care.

Once a doctor establishes his or her practice in an area, it is extremely difficult to uproot and move somewhere else where the malpractice climate and reimbursements are better. In response doctors are leaving primary care for more lucrative and less taxing boutique practices, positions in the pharmaceutical industry, or better paying specialties. This forces patients to find new doctors within their area, and since many of the remaining doctors refuse new patients this leaves people to rely upon emergency rooms and urgent care centers for their primary care needs – something that these facilities are not intended nor designed for.

So what is the answer? There isn’t a single problem within the medical system in America; there are more than one. Irresponsible patients who refuse to leave a doctor’s office without a prescription for their common colds or viral infections. Others who gamble with their own health care by avoiding the expense of insurance only to end up seriously ill in the hospital. A legal system that demands perfection from doctors and a society that refuses to bear the burden of that level of care. Huge bureaucracies shuffling paper in independent and loosely regulated insurance companies, each with its own unique codes for procedures and treatments. Electronic medical records systems that cannot communicate with each other let alone their own billing modules. The misapplication of HIPAA by health care professionals who don’t understand it. A society that treats medical care like any other business yet blanches when medical care providers act like one. Doctors who receive no formal training in the business of medicine. The grey area separating public from private health care.

These are just a few of the problems facing the American medical care system. Each is complex and a microcosm of competing interests with no obvious solution. As HL Mencken quipped “For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong.” Medical care seems to fit his aphorism nicely.