[Rep]

Hi Eggplant - I maybe should have thought of posting in the other thread as well....But I did not think of it.

I do like this thread, as running commentary is not expected. With 18 days to the election, my time online is limited.

Do you think it possible that the Bush Administration really doesn't want a strong investigative, enforcing SEC?

His hope is that the headlines from months ago saying how concerned he is about corporate welfare cheats made an impression on the people. Now he can go back to doing what he knows best. Big business friends will take care of him.

[eggplant43]

I love Lucy
This robot is the cleverest in the world. Her creator claims she is smarter than a frog. Is that as good as it gets in the search for artificial intelligence? By Jon Ronson.

Jon Ronson
Saturday October 19, 2002
The Guardian

For 50 years, scientists across the world have dedicated themselves to inventing a robot that, like Pinocchio, will come to life. This Herculean endeavour is known as the race to create AI - artificial intelligence. It is a Tuesday in late September. I'm on my way to meet Lucy, who is coming to life. Lucy, it is said, is the world's most artificially intelligent robot. For one so brilliant, it's a surprise that Lucy does not live in Harvard or MIT. She lives near Weston-super-Mare, on a table in a shed in a back garden down a country lane. From her photographs, she looks like an enraged ape.

When I telephoned her inventor, Steve Grand, he sighed and said, "Yeah, you can come and meet the useless piece of animated junk. She's sitting right in front of me now."

I resisted a tiny, stupid urge to say, "Shhh." (I've read enough Philip K Dick to know that AI robots remember the little insults.) Or maybe the urge wasn't so stupid. I found quotes from scientists who backed up the doomsday prophesies of the sci-fi writers. Professor Hugo de Garis who, like Grand, has been at the forefront of the race to invent AI, told the Guardian in 2000, "Eventually, they will become so smart they will take over their own development. At that point, humans lose control. I think and think about how this terrible scenario can be avoided, but I just can't see a way out of it."

In fact, de Garis lost control sooner than he'd anticipated. His Belgium-based AI project, Starlab, had its funding withdrawn soon after he gave that interview - another in a long line of AI casualties. That's the funny thing about this world. The scientists, in their struggle to bestow emotions on to robots, seem unable to keep their own in check. One minute they tell you that AI is just around the corner and it is going to be great; the next minute they tell you that AI is just around the corner and they're going to rise up and enslave humankind; and the minute after that they tell you that their lives are a disaster and, in 50 years of research, they've achieved nothing. Which is true?

Lucy won't actually be the first AI robot I've met. I bought my son an Aibo dog for Christmas last year. "From the first day you interact with Aibo it will become your companion," the packaging promised, adding that if you feed it, it will yelp in delight, if you put it to bed, it will sleep, etc. As we strung it up off the light fitting to see if it would cry, and deprived it of food and light and finally got bored with its constant yapping and turned it off completely and put it in a box, I pondered the same questions the scientists consider. The good news was that we gave Aibo perfect motive to rise up and enslave the Ronsons, and it didn't. But did it offer a thrilling window into tomorrow's world? No. Maybe it was our fault; maybe we didn't give it an opportunity to flourish and learn and grow. But the truth is, Aibo was a disappointment.

Even so, as I catch the train to Weston-super-Mare to meet Lucy, I hope to be wowed. Technology journalists call Steve Grand a bona fide genius, even though he's basically an amateur without funding. I tell Steve about my bad experience with Aibo and he sighs empathetically. "There's no real intelligence out there," he says. "Don't rely on anyone who tells you that you're buying something with AI. It's all marketing."

"What about my AI microwave oven?" I ask.

"Marketing!" he says.

"It knows how long the chicken needs to defrost," I say.

"Marketing!" he says. "Somebody taught it that. That's human intelligence, not artificial intelligence."

"Is there anything in the shops that's impressive to you?"

"Nothing," he says.

"Why have you dedicated your life to this endeavour?" I ask.

"Two reasons - I want to know what I am, while I am. And I can't program my video recorder."

"Yes," they are very complicated."

"No," he says, "they're too stupid. Computers are stupid. They can't interpret what we want." He paused. "I read in the paper about a street sweeper discovering a baby on the curb side. Imagine our automatic street sweeping machines doing anything but sweeping the baby up."

"Are you making breakthroughs that nobody else is making?" I ask.

"Yes," he says. "In fact, I've just had a major breakthrough. You've caught me at a good time."

In the shed, Lucy yawns and stretches. Then she says, "Arp."

She looks a little edgy and overwrought, like a cantankerous baby orang-utan. Her innards are comprised of complex circuitry. Luckily, she doesn't have any legs. If she did, I'd be worried that she might jump off the table and chase me around the room.

"She's stretching!" I say. "Is that the breakthrough?"

"That's not the breakthrough," Steve says. The stretching, he explains, was his idea, not Lucy's. It's nothing more than a bit of gaudy pizzazz; Lucy's way of testing her circuits.

"Her eyes are following me around the room!" I say. "Is that the breakthrough?"

"Her eyes aren't following you around the room," says Steve. "That's your imagination." There is a silence. "Actually," he adds, "Lucy's eyes can follow you around the room. She's just not doing it now."

"Wow," I say.

"Don't be so impressed," says Steve. "Right now Lucy's no more intelligent than a frog."

"A frog?" I exclaim, bowled over.

"Actually," says Steve, "she's slightly cleverer than a frog."

"That's amazing," I say.

"No, it isn't," says Steve. "If something big comes towards a frog, it jumps away. If something small comes towards a frog, it eats it. That's basically all a frog does."

Steve says I'm impressed with Lucy for all the wrong reasons. She looks good. She does things. That's the problem with the public, he says. We only want something that does something. We don't care about the means, just the ends. Steve, on the other hand, is only interested in doing things the hard way. Take Lucy's "Arp", he says. Sure, he could fit a voice box. Lucy could chatter away about all sorts. But the "Arp" is Lucy's own "Arp". Lucy learnt that herself. "I've given her lungs and vocal chords and a throat," says Steve. "What comes out is this burping sound. That's her voice."

"Is that the breakthrough?" I ask.

"No," says Steve.

Steve was a failure at school. "I completely screwed up," he says. "I forgot everything. School teaches you disparate facts. I have the kind of brain that's looking for central principles. If you have a lousy memory, what you have to do is remember the minimum stuff you need to work the rest out." That, essentially, is what he's trying to teach Lucy.

He trained as a primary school teacher. Watching the children he taught, and watching his own son grow up, he saw that "when you hit someone, you get hit back, and it hurts. I realised that you need emotions to make you smart."

He went to work for a computer software manufacturer. He invented a game called Creatures, for which he won the OBE. He says his Damascus moment came when he decided that the brain's cerebral cortex is not a lump of goo. In fact, he claims, it is a machine comprised of different chunks. If he could work out what each chunk did, he could replicate them, bit by bit, put each bit in a robot, and make the robot come to life.

Now he lives on the payoff he received when the software manufacturer made him redundant. He refuses offers of funding. "The investment banks say, 'Tell us what you're going to achieve and by when.' I reply, 'OK, I'm going to achieve **** all.' And that's the end of the conversation. You can't get funding for this kind of stuff. They say, 'That's too hard. Lower your sights a little.'"

So it's just Steve, his wife Ann, his son Christopher, all in a shed in the back garden, where they sit and stare at Lucy and wonder how to make her come to life. As my day with Steve progresses, I realise how utterly different his life and thought processes are to those of non-geniuses such as myself. First, he has dedicated himself entirely from something he will quite possibly never achieve. He'll only be satisfied, he says, if he can "put Lucy through nursery, although I'll settle for patty cake. If I can play patty cake with Lucy one day, that'll be enough. People have high expectations. People around here" - he points to his neighbours' houses - "think that Lucy is going to turn up at the local school any day now. People think this stuff is easy. It isn't easy."

"Do you think about it all the time?" I ask Steve over lunch in the local pub.

"Oh God, yes" sighs Ann.

Steve says he thinks about it most "during that moment between sleeping and waking when you get the butterflies and you try and catch them". He says he sits in fields for days and thinks, "Do squirrels dream of nuts?" and "When you shut your eyes and imagine a picture, and then you tilt your head from side to side, why does the picture stay locked on the horizon?" He tells me his nightmare scenario: "The answer will be on the tip of my tongue when I'm on my deathbed. I'll say, 'Ah!' And I'll die."

I think Steve's quest to instil emotions in a robot - somehow to replicate in a robot the brain's cerebral cortex, and allow a robot to think and grow - is driving him a little crazy.

After lunch, Marc, the Guardian's photographer, wants Steve to climb a tree with Lucy, she being an orang-utan. "What are you doing?" asks Christopher, Steve's son, joining us in the garden. "Showbiz," mutters Steve, mid-way up the ladder.

"You know what the others will say," says Ann. "They'll say, 'Look at the media whore up a tree! He should be in the lab but he's up a tree!'"

"Who are the others?" I ask.

"The other scientists," says Steve. "It's a 50-year-old field rife with tension. Of course, in-fighting is a social phenomenon in every community, but what makes it special to AI is that it's such a failure." He sighs. "Fifty years of failure."

"And what is it about you in particular that the others don't like?" I ask.

"Oh," says Steve. "How dare I say that I'll achieve anything ever?"

And now, Steve has achieved something. The breakthrough. He says he thought harder than he'd ever thought before, and came up with it. "Lucy," he says, "has learnt how to point at a banana. If you hold up an apple and a banana, Lucy will point at the banana." There is a short silence.

"Any banana?" I ask

"Exactly!" says Steve. He's glad that I finally understand something. "A big banana, a little banana, a green banana, a yellow banana, a banana far away, a banana up close. This is a very big step forward. She doesn't know what a banana is. She doesn't know what pointing is. The important thing is that she's learnt to do it."

"She's learnt," I ask, "or you've learnt?"

"I've learnt how to enable her to learn how to do it," says Steve. "I've given her a model of that bit of the cerebral cortex that knows how to do this."

"Has Lucy actually pointed at a banana yet?" I ask.

"No," says Steve. "I've tested all the steps. I've identified all the engineering principles. I just haven't put it all together yet."

"Why not?" I ask.

There is a silence. Steve smiles. "I spend too much of my time climbing trees and meeting journalists."

"And now that Lucy has the power to point at a banana, will she rise up and take over the world?" I ask.

This question spoils our newly achieved mutual understanding. "Why on earth would Lucy want to do that?" says Steve. "Does the average leopard envy pinstripe suits? Why are humans stressed out and envious? Why do we always want what the other guy's got? These are emotions we learnt living in the jungle. Lucy doesn't need our emotions."

Steve says it is the question that everybody asks, and it drives him mad. This is why he made Lucy look like a crotchety ape, he says, which might get angry if you say the wrong thing to it. It was his own way of getting back at the people who see doomsday scenarios in his work. "You know why people fear machines? Because they fear that if machines are like us, then we must be machines. Well, I'll tell you - I know machines better than a lot of people, and I'm proud to be a machine"


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002

Hello eggplant,

What a wonderful article. I don't know how to explain it, but it made me laugh and feel so much better. What a sense of humour Steve has, and such an outlook on life! Thanks for posting the article.

T2

Here is an article from The New Scientist:

NEW SCIENTIST - NEWSFLASH

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Brain tumour causes uncontrollable paedophilia

The sudden and uncontrollable sexual deviance exhibited by a
40-year-old man was caused by an egg-sized brain tumour, his doctors have told a scientific conference. Once the tumour had been removed, his sex-obsession disappeared, and he returned home to his wife.

The cancer was located in the right lobe of the orbifrontal cortex,
which is known to be tied to judgment, impulse control and social
behaviour. But neurologists believe it is the first case linking
damage to the region with paedophilia.


To read the full story on NewScientist.com go to:
Read more daily science and technology news at
http://www.newscientist.com

T2

[Mulderator]

Originally posted by Tuppence2:
Here is an article from The New Scientist:

NEW SCIENTIST - NEWSFLASH

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Brain tumour causes uncontrollable paedophilia

The sudden and uncontrollable sexual deviance exhibited by a
40-year-old man was caused by an egg-sized brain tumour, his doctors have told a scientific conference. Once the tumour had been removed, his sex-obsession disappeared, and he returned home to his wife.

The cancer was located in the right lobe of the orbifrontal cortex,
which is known to be tied to judgment, impulse control and social
behaviour. But neurologists believe it is the first case linking
damage to the region with paedophilia.


To read the full story on NewScientist.com go to:
Read more daily science and technology news at
http://www.newscientist.com

T2

Hmmmmmm. Now if only I could figure out how to grow a tumor on Mrs. Mulder's brain in the area that will cause an uncontrollable sex-obsession for her hubby!

[eggplant43]

Justice Spargo Faces Inquiry

By John Caher
New York Law Journal


When election law expert and longtime Republican activist Thomas J. Spargo was caught on film participating in a noisy political demonstration, nobody close to politics was particularly surprised. Spargo is a seasoned regular in the political game, and that he would show up in Florida at the Miami-Dade County Board of Elections during the Bush-Gore electoral debacle of November 2000 was almost predictable.

But there was one thing troubling about that image.

At the same time he was stumping for George W. Bush and chanting with other Republican supporters at what amounted to a boisterous sit-in, Spargo was serving as a part-time judge in the rural Albany County town of Berne. Judges are not supposed to get involved in politics.

Now, Spargo is a state Supreme Court justice, and the Commission on Judicial Conduct is hot on the tail of the onetime feisty election law litigator and political firebrand. The commission has accused Justice Spargo of multiple ethical breaches for his political conduct. It alleges he violated ethics rules by:

• Buying drinks, donuts, pizzas, coffee and gasoline for potential voters while campaigning for Berne town justice.

• Appearing as election counsel for Albany County District Attorney-elect Paul A. Clyne in fall 2000, and then failing to disclose in his capacity as town justice that he had a relationship with the prosecutor.

• Participating in a "loud and obstructive demonstration" during the Florida recount "with the aim of disrupting the recount process."

• Delivering the keynote speech at a Monroe County Conservative Party fund-raiser on May 18, 2001, at a time when he was simultaneously a practicing political lawyer, a sitting town justice and an announced candidate for state Supreme Court.

• Authorizing his state Supreme Court campaign committee to pay a $5,000 political consulting fee to a Democratic and an Independence Party judicial nominating convention delegate. Ultimately, Justice Spargo won the uncontested election with cross endorsements.

Commission Administrator Gerald Stern has not indicated whether the panel will seek to have Justice Spargo removed or impose a lesser sanction, such as admonishment or censure. The recommended sanction depends on the outcome of a hearing. Justice Spargo is attempting to ensure that it never gets to that point and is taking on the commission in federal court.

Restraining Order

On Wednesday night, Northern District U.S. District Judge Lawrence E. Kahn of Albany issued a temporary restraining order halting a hearing that was slated for Oct. 21. The matter is returnable Oct. 23 before U.S. District Judge David N. Hurd of Utica.

Justice Spargo is asking Judge Hurd to declare that the Code of Judicial Conduct violates his free speech, equal protection, and association rights under both the state and U.S. Constitutions.

"Out of concern that additional charges will be levied against me, and the concomitant threat of sanctions, I have refrained from exercising my free speech and associational rights and will continue to do so until a court declares the Code [of Judicial Conduct] and its interpretation to be unconstitutional or the Code is modified to eliminate the unduly restrictive provisions," Justice Spargo said in an affidavit. He declined Thursday to comment.

The matter raises both legal and pragmatic questions, and hinges at least partially on the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in Republican Party of Minnesota v. White, 122 S. Ct. 2528 (2002). In that case, the Court ruled unconstitutional a provision in the Minnesota code of judicial conduct barring judicial candidates from revealing their views on "disputed legal or political issues."

Here, Justice Spargo's attorney, David F. Kunz, a partner with DeGraff, Foy, Holt-Harris, Kunz & Devine in Albany, cites the U.S. Supreme Court case. He insists that the ethics rules as applied by the Commission on Judicial Conduct impermissibly burden the constitutional rights of candidates for judicial office and subject those candidates to restrictions that do not apply to people seeking other elective office.

Stern said Thursday that he intends to argue in support of the rules and the commission's interpretation.

"Obviously, we will oppose [Justice Spargo's] interpretation of the rules and his position," Stern said. "But that will be decided by Judge Hurd."

Colorful Character

Justice Spargo is a colorful and well-known character in New York and national political circles, with a carefully nurtured reputation as a master manipulator of the state's mind-bending election laws.

Serving as counsel to the State Senate Election Committee, Spargo helped craft byzantine statutes, which he then used to clients' advantage when moonlighting as chief counsel to the State Republican Committee. Even bitter opponents describe Spargo as an honest adversary and a happy warrior of sorts who always seemed to get a kick out of twisting election laws ever so close to the breaking point, without losing either his temper or sense of humor. While appearing in myriad hypertechnical elections cases, Spargo often wore a bemused grin, as if he were the only one present who got the joke.

The former seminarian and onetime Army paratrooper worked for the GOP for 15 years, but that era came to an end in the wake of a lengthy and at times entertaining state investigation. From 1985 through 1989, the Commission on Government Integrity attempted to determine whether Spargo helped funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign funds from a shopping center developer to Poughkeepsie town board candidates. It never really got its answer.

Investigators Frustrated

Spargo frustrated the investigators at every juncture, and seemed to delight in doing so. He filed a series of 16 lawsuits, and finally agreed to testify only after a judge ordered him arrested for contempt. He then invoked the Fifth Amendment 19 times. The investigation eventually petered out after Spargo, who consistently denied any wrongdoing, resigned his party and state posts, and reverted to private practice in the public forum of electoral politics.

In recent years, Spargo, as an elections lawyer, represented politicians of all stripes, and even a few stars.

He counseled Ross Perot, Steve Forbes and Jerry Brown in presidential politics. He aided Karen Burstein, the Democrat who ultimately lost the 1994 New York attorney general race to Republican Dennis C. Vacco. Four years later, he advocated for Vacco when the incumbent attempted to salvage a victory from his close battle with current Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Spargo has represented Gov. George E. Pataki as well as billionaire Thomas Golisano, who is now running an aggressive Independence Party campaign against the governor.

But by the time Spargo was hired to aid now-President Bush, he was a sitting judge, and therein lies the problem.

Justice Spargo was among the roughly 2,200 part-time judges in New York who are paid a relatively paltry sum for serving in the judiciary and earn their living through private practice. However, for Justice Spargo earning a living meant practicing election law, and practicing election law meant involvement in politics. How, or whether, he could switch hats from partisan hired gun to objective jurist is at the eye of this storm.

More and more, attorneys are wrestling with the ethical implications of advocacy in the court of public opinion, a professional tactic that the U.S. Supreme Court has suggested is not only legitimate but perhaps obligatory in the age of mass communications.

In Gentile v. State Bar of Nevada, 501 U.S. 1030, (1991), Justice Anthony Kennedy observed that "an attorney's duties do not begin inside the courtroom door," and that those duties may include "an attempt to demonstrate in the court of public opinion that the client does not deserve to be tried."

Justice Spargo's many roles -- part-time judge, full-time advocate, candidate for judicial office -- add another element to the quandary of just what lawyers could or should do to advance the interests of their clients outside the courtroom.

Although there is no allegation that Justice Spargo did anything in Florida that would violate his oath as an attorney, and every indication that he was acting as a vigorous advocate for his client's interests, the commission maintains that a part-time judge cannot cavalierly separate his judicial role from his advocate's role and switch hats on a whim.

By participating in a campaign that was not his own, even though that was the nature of his private practice, Justice Spargo violated the Rules Governing Judicial Conduct, according to the commission.

The other charges are similar in that they center on behavior that is constitutionally protected when performed by an attorney or any other citizen, but forbidden if the individual happens to be a judge. In his affidavit, Justice Spargo suggests that when he donned robes he agreed to leave his biases, but not his constitutional rights, at the courthouse door.

"The distinguishing feature latched upon by the Commission is the fact that I chose to exercise my constitutional rights while seeking to be elected a town judge or a Supreme Court judge," Justice Spargo said in the affidavit.


Date Received: October 17, 2002

[eggplant43]

www.sfgate.com Return to regular view
JetTrain proposed for state railroad
Would travel from S.F. to L.A. in 2 1/2 hours
Edward Epstein, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Wednesday, October 16, 2002
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.



Washington -- With dollar-sign dreams tempting them, rail equipment manufacturers worldwide are eyeing California, where notions of a $25 billion high-speed passenger train service are moving nearer to reality.

On Tuesday, Bombardier Transportation of Canada unveiled its prototype of a sleek JetTrain, outfitted with a 5,000-horsepower Pratt & Whitney jet engine and capable of sustained speeds of 150 mph. It's perfect for aspects of the California system that planners envision will whisk people from San Diego and Los Angeles in the south to San Francisco and Sacramento in the north, Bombardier officials say.

California's high-speed rail plan is one of about a dozen across the country that are moving forward. Florida issued a request for proposals for its rail project two weeks ago, and Californians will vote on a $9.95 billion high-speed rail bond issue in November 2004 to get construction started.


HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF JOBS
"The New California Gold Rush" is how the state's High Speed Rail Authority bills its ambitious plan. It envisions creating hundreds of thousands of jobs building railroad track and cars. A high-speed rail system would relieve congestion in the air and on the state's major north-south freeways by someday carrying 32 million passengers annually and making the downtown San Francisco- Los Angeles trip in 2 1/2 hours.

"We want to have as many bidders as we can," said longtime rail advocate and ex-Santa Clara County Supervisor Rod Diridon, who now heads the state authority. "I'm sure in the end the work will go to a consortium. This will be a large-scale enterprise and the companies will figure it's best to spread the risk."

Bombardier, which is already the world's largest supplier of high-speed rail cars and engines, is preparing for the challenge, and keeping watch on its competitors, including France's Alsthom and Siemens of Germany. All have built systems in Europe and Asia.


FASTER THAN 200 MPH
The main line of the California bullet train, which is designed to enter downtown San Francisco from the Peninsula, will feature electric trains "powered by fuels that result in zero emissions" and go faster than 200 mph. Companies that make high-speed engines and passenger cars will line up to supply the electric trains, many of which will get their power from overhead wires.

But the 2004 bond issue also calls for spending $950 million on rail feeder lines for the high-speed system, such as on the coastal route from San Diego to Los Angeles' Union Station. The authority already admits that coastal communities in Orange County are unlikely to accept the unsightly overhead wire, so it is searching for other options.

Enter the JetTrain, Bombardier hopes.

"Some parts of the California project present a bit of a challenge, and the Los Angeles to San Diego corridor is one of them," said Pierre Lortie, Bombardier Transportation president. "JetTrain may be an answer that meets California standards and the need to compete effectively."

The new technology, developed under a $25 million grant from the Federal Railroad Administration, is more fuel-efficient, quieter and less-polluting than the latest diesel technology, Bombardier and Pratt & Whitney contend. Each engine weighs about 19 tons less than a typical big diesel engine, and that translates into a lot less wear on tracks, a factor that should appeal to the freight lines that probably will share some of the high-speed rail system's feeder lines.

"You'll see a real feeding frenzy of people trying to get into the California action," said Richard Silver of the Rail Passenger Association of California.

It's not just the rail manufacturers who are enthusiastic. The authority board has received presentations from operators of the French TGV system, Japan's Shinkansen bullet trains and Germany's ICE trains. They might be interested in managing or designing aspects of California's massive system.


TALKING TO AIRLINES
The authority has also been talking about its plan with United Airlines and American Airlines, hoping to convince the major air carriers between the Bay Area and the Los Angeles area not to oppose the project, or maybe sign on as supporters.

In all, the authority expects to spend $1.2 billion on engines and passenger coaches, its business plan says, and hopes to begin construction in 2005, if the bond issue passes and environmental reports are successfully completed, Diridon said.



©2002 San Francisco Chronicle. Page A - 1

[eggplant43]

For Bush, Facts Are Malleable
Presidential Tradition Of Embroidering Key Assertions Continues

By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 22, 2002; Page A01


President Bush, speaking to the nation this month about the need to challenge Saddam Hussein, warned that Iraq has a growing fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be used "for missions targeting the United States."

Last month, asked if there were new and conclusive evidence of Hussein's nuclear weapons capabilities, Bush cited a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency saying the Iraqis were "six months away from developing a weapon." And last week, the president said objections by a labor union to having customs officials wear radiation detectors has the potential to delay the policy "for a long period of time."

All three assertions were powerful arguments for the actions Bush sought. And all three statements were dubious, if not wrong. Further information revealed that the aircraft lack the range to reach the United States; there was no such report by the IAEA; and the customs dispute over the detectors was resolved long ago.

As Bush leads the nation toward a confrontation with Iraq and his party into battle in midterm elections, his rhetoric has taken some flights of fancy in recent weeks. Statements on subjects ranging from the economy to Iraq suggest that a president who won election underscoring Al Gore's knack for distortions and exaggerations has been guilty of a few himself.

Presidential embroidery is, of course, a hoary tradition. Ronald Reagan was known for his apocryphal story about liberating a concentration camp. Bill Clinton fibbed famously and under oath about his personal indiscretions to keep a step ahead of Whitewater prosecutors. Richard M. Nixon had his Watergate denials, and Lyndon B. Johnson was often accused of stretching the truth to put the best face on the Vietnam War. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, too, played with the truth during the Gary Powers and Bay of Pigs episodes.

"Everybody makes mistakes when they open their mouths and we forgive them," Brookings Institution scholar Stephen Hess said. Some of Bush's overstatements appear to be off-the-cuff mistakes. But, Hess said, "what worries me about some of these is they appear to be with foresight. This is about public policy in its grandest sense, about potential wars and who is our enemy, and a president has a special obligation to getting it right."

The White House, while acknowledging that on one occasion the president was "imprecise," said it stands by his words. "The president's statements are well documented and supported by the facts," Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer said. "We reject any allegation to the contrary."

In stop after stop across the country, Bush has cited an impressive statistic in his bid to get Congress to approve terrorism insurance legislation. "There's over $15 billion of construction projects which are on hold, which aren't going forward -- which means there's over 300,000 jobs that would be in place, or soon to be in place, that aren't in place," is how he put it last week in Michigan.

But these are not government estimates. The $15 billion figure comes from the Real Estate Roundtable, a trade group that is leading the fight for the legislation and whose members have much to gain. After pleas earlier this year from the White House for "hard evidence" to make its case for terrorism insurance, the roundtable got the information from an unscientific survey of members, who were asked to provide figures with no documentation.

The 300,000 jobs number, the White House said, was supplied by the carpenters' union. But a union official said the White House apparently "extrapolated" the number from a Transportation Department study of federal highway aid -- not private real estate -- that the union had previously cited.

The president has also taken some liberties as he argues for his version of homeland security legislation. He often suggests in stump speeches that the union covering customs workers is blocking the wearing of radiation detectors. "The leadership of that particular group of people said, 'No way; we need to have a collective bargaining session over whether or not our people should be made to wear these devices,' " he said in Michigan last week. "And that could take a long period of time."

The National Treasury Employees Union did indeed argue in January that the radiation devices should be voluntary, and it called for negotiations. But five days later, the Customs Service said it saw no need to negotiate and would begin to implement the policy, which it did. After a subsequent exchange between the union president and Customs Service commissioner, the union wrote in April that it "does not object" to mandatory wearing of the devices.

The Customs Service said the delay had less to do with the dispute than the fact that customs lacks enough devices (about 4,000 are on order). The White House and Customs Service said the dispute was settled in part because Bush had the authority to waive collective bargaining, although he did not exercise it.

On Sept. 7, meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair at Camp David, Bush told reporters: "I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied, finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic -- the IAEA -- that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need."

The IAEA did issue a report in 1998, around the time weapons inspectors were denied access to Iraq for the final time, but the report made no such assertion. It declared: "Based on all credible information to date, the IAEA has found no indication of Iraq having achieved its program goal of producing nuclear weapons or of Iraq having retained a physical capability for the production of weapon-useable nuclear material or having clandestinely obtained such material." The report said Iraq had been six to 24 months away from nuclear capability before the 1991 Gulf War.

The White House said that Bush "was imprecise on this" and that the source was U.S. intelligence, not the IAEA.

In the president's Oct. 7 speech to the nation from Cincinnati, he introduced several rationales for taking action against Iraq. Describing contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq, Bush cited "one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year." He asserted that "we have discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet" of unmanned aircraft and expressed worry about them "targeting the United States."

Bush also stated that in 1998, "information from a high-ranking Iraqi nuclear engineer who had defected revealed that despite his public promises, Saddam Hussein had ordered his nuclear program to continue." He added, "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," an alliance that "could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."

In each of these charges, Bush omitted qualifiers that make the accusations seem less convincing. In the case of the al Qaeda leader receiving medical treatment, U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged that the terrorist, Abu Musab Zarqawi, was no longer in Iraq and that there was no hard evidence Hussein's government knew he was there or had contact with him. On the matter of the aircraft, a CIA report this month suggested that the fleet was more of an "experiment" and "attempt" and labeled it a "serious threat to Iraq's neighbors and to international military forces in the region" -- but said nothing about it having sufficient range to threaten the United States.

Bush's statement about the Iraqi nuclear defector, implying such information was current in 1998, was a reference to Khidhir Hamza. But Hamza, though he spoke publicly about his information in 1998, retired from Iraq's nuclear program in 1991, fled to the Iraqi north in 1994 and left the country in 1995. Finally, Bush's statement that Iraq could attack "on any given day" with terrorist groups was at odds with congressional testimony by the CIA. The testimony, declassified after Bush's speech, rated the possibility as "low" that Hussein would initiate a chemical or biological weapons attack against the United States but might take the "extreme step" of assisting terrorists if provoked by a U.S. attack.

White House spokesmen said in response that it was "unrealistic" to assume Iraqi authorities did not know of Zarqawi's presence and that Iraq's unmanned aircraft could be launched from ships or trucks outside Iraq.

Some of the disputed Bush assertions are matters of perspective.

Bush often says, as he did Friday in Missouri, that "because of a quirk in the rules in the United States Senate, after a 10-year period, the tax-relief plan we passed goes away." There is a Senate rule that required a 60-vote majority for the tax cut, but the decision to let the cuts expire was based on pragmatic considerations. Proponents of the cut from the House and Senate -- both under GOP control at the time -- decided to have the tax cut expire after nine years to keep its price tag within the $1.35 trillion over 10 years that had been agreed between lawmakers and Bush.

Other times, the president's assertions simply outpace the facts. In New Hampshire earlier this month, he said his education legislation made "the biggest increase in education spending in a long, long time."

In fact, the 15.8 percent increase in Department of Education discretionary spending for fiscal year 2002 (the figures the White House supplied when asked about Bush's statement) was below the 18.5 percent increase under Clinton the previous year -- and Bush had wanted a much smaller increase than Congress approved. Earlier this month, Republican moderates complained to Bush's budget director, Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., that the administration was not spending the full amount for education that Congress approved. Daniels said it was "nothing uncommon" and decried the "explosively larger education bill."

[eggplant43]

By Katrina Woznicki
UPI Science News
From the Science & Technology Desk
Published 10/22/2002 4:00 PM


WASHINGTON, Oct. 22 (UPI) -- Nurses are getting older and there are fewer of them, leaving patients and hospitals in serious trouble as a work shortage reaches a crisis level in American hospitals.

Nursing advocates warn the staffing situation in hospitals is getting worse and a study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds the higher the patient-to-nurse ratio in a hospital, the greater the likelihood of patients dying or suffering life-threatening complications from surgery.

The findings also show high patient-to-nurse ratios are linked with nurse burnout and feeling dissatisfied with their jobs.

"The flight of nurses from hospitals is the source of the problem of too few nurses," lead study author Linda Aiken, of University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing in Philadelphia and a registered nurse, told United Press International in a telephone interview. "Nurses' salaries, for example, have been absolutely flat. So here we have an acute shortage of nurses with no wage response."

Aiken's study looked at surveys of 10,184 nurses at 168 general hospitals. It also analyzed the outcomes of 232,342 patients at these hospitals who ranged in age from 20 to 85 and had been treated between April 1, 1998, and Nov. 30, 1999. Researchers then looked at patient complications and death rates during the 30 days after patient admission to the hospital.

After adjusting for hospital size and staff, the study showed each additional patient per nurse was associated with a 7 percent increase in the likelihood of dying within 30 days of hospital admission. For example, Aiken noted, the difference from four to six patients per nurse compared to four to eight patients per nurse translated into a 14 percent and 31 percent increase in mortality, respectively. For every additional patient, job burnout among nurses rose by 23 percent and job dissatisfaction went up by 15 percent.

Similar findings were echoed in Washington, where the report "Health Care's Human Crisis: The American Nursing Shortage" was released.

"Nursing has simply become less and less attractive to women," author Edward O'Neill of the Center for the Health Professions at the University of California at San Francisco, stated in the report.

O'Neill's report said the average age of today's nurse is 44 and low salaries, difficult hours and a high-stress environment make it difficult for hospitals to recruit younger nurses.

Previous reports have mirrored those conclusions. In one published in the June 14, 2000, issue of JAMA, Peter Buerhaus of the Vanderbilt University School of Nursing in Nashville, Tenn., warned over the next two decades the nursing population will continue to gray, while failing to recruit younger workers.

Based on current trends, Buerhaus predicted "the total number of full-time equivalent RNs (registered nurses) per capita is forecast to peak around the year 2007 and decline steadily thereafter as the largest cohorts of RNs retire. By the year 2020, the RN workforce is forecast to be roughly the same size as it is today, declining nearly 20 percent below projected RN workforce requirements."

"This is both an age-driven and work condition-driven shortage," Marla Salmon, dean and professor of the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing at Emory University in Atlanta, told UPI. "I would call it a failing demographic equation."

Salmon, who also is director of the Lillian Carter Center of International Nursing, an organization named after Nobel Laureate Jimmy Carter's mother, added less than 10 percent of all nurses in the United States are under age 30. Nursing in the emergency room, the operating room and intensive care units "are appearing to be particularly hard hit," she said.

The federal government is trying to alleviate the problem. On Aug. 1 President Bush signed into law the Nurse Reinvestment Act, which seeks to increase scholarships to nurses and improve recruitment and retention. The bill had bipartisan support in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

"(However), there is no appropriation for it, so basically the bill has not been funded," Aiken said.

While nursing advocates wait for implementation of the new law, hospitals are attempting to make progress on their own, according to Pamela Thompson, chief executive officer for the American Organization of Nurse Executives, a subsidiary of the American Hospital Association based in Washington, D.C.

"I think the hospitals are working on multiple fronts to correct the factors that have led to the shortage," Anderson told UPI. "Potentially (it) could get worse from a numbers point of view."

Such corrections include hospitals offering on-site day care, an attractive incentive geared toward younger women and men with children, better pay, and nursing education tuition reimbursement, Thompson said.

Copyright © 2002 United Press International

[eggplant43]

Will Parents Dare to Discipline?
by Thomas R. Eddlem

The videotape of Madelyne Gorman Toogood’s abuse is being used in a campaign to prohibit parents from employing legitimate corporal discipline in bringing up their children.

Thanks to the major media, "monster mother" Madelyne Gorman Toogood is turning out to be a threat to all American children, and not merely to her own four-year-old daughter. The widely broadcasted videotape of Toogood’s abuse is being parlayed into a campaign to prohibit — or at least intimidate parents from employing — legitimate and loving corporal discipline in the upbringing of their children. "Across America virtually everyone, including Toogood, agrees that she crossed the line," reported the Chicago Tribune on September 25th. "But just where is the line? One swat? Two? Or is any corporal punishment of children over the line?"

The article went on to retail worn-out arguments for banning spanking completely. "As soon as you start using violence to settle something with a child, you’re saying violence is the way to go," the Tribune quoted pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton as saying. Brazelton is apparently convinced that children fail to distinguish between a disciplinary swat on the bottom and a pummeling to the head for no apparent reason.

The famous jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked that "even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked." Yes, even a dog can understand that all blows are not alike and that there are sometimes different reasons why discomfort is inflicted. Anti-spanking advocates are really arguing that their children lack a power of distinction possessed by dogs. One might next expect anti-spanking advocates to lecture football players against batting each other on the buttocks after a successful play so as not to be a role model for violence. I wonder if the "no spankers" will subsequently tell us that "time outs" teach children that it is okay to unlawfully imprison people, and that taking away favorite toys as punishment teaches children that stealing is acceptable.

While it is possible to accept that academic pedants and their pacifistic fellow travelers lack the mental capacity to discern the difference between loving discipline and a vindictive beating, children are not so intellectually impoverished. Most children are quite bright, and they easily make these basic distinctions.

"The result of spanking is our children’s fear and resentment of us," asserts Murray Straus, the most prominent "researcher" of the anti-spanking movement. Here again the anti-spanking lobby assumes children are intellectual morons, incapable of simple distinctions. The reality is that children spanked for misbehaving will only fear their parents when they misbehave. Should this be controversial? Perhaps Straus believes that children should not be afraid of swearing at their teachers or hitting their little sisters. Perhaps he believes children will grow up resenting their parents for making them afraid of putting their fingers in electrical outlets. Savvy observers of Straus’ statement might ask, "How could loving discipline possibly cause lasting resentment in children?"

Straus is ready with a reply. His studies, he says, demonstrate a strong correlation between spanking and psychological trauma æ specifically, depression and suicide. But Straus fails to explain how anti-spanking Scandinavian nations such as Sweden, the first nation to ban spanking, have the highest suicide rates in the industrialized world.

More importantly, Straus’ studies æ along with all similar studies on the subject æ are hopelessly flawed by making little or no distinction between simple spanking and severe physical abuse. Most of these studies are additionally self-discrediting by focusing solely on parents who spank teenagers rather than on parents who spank younger children.

My personal experience as a father of three children is that the effectiveness of spanking begins to diminish after age six, and is almost entirely ineffective æ except as an unused and unspoken specter æ by age ten. During the teen years parents possess a whole battery of non-corporal disciplinary measures (such as grounding and denial of privileges) far more effective than corporal punishment. So Straus’ academic studies are, simply put, irrelevant to competent parents engaging in loving discipline.

Spanking is most effective for young children, from the age of understanding (between 18 months and three years) to six or seven years of age because young children are always living so fully in the present. Toddlers do not always make the connection between bad behavior now and a "time out" imposed hours later after returning from the mall. A sternly spoken rebuke at the moment the child misbehaves and a little swat on a diapered bottom æ even though the swat is lighter than normal horseplay æ do far more good at that age than the "time out" equivalent of life without parole later.

Excessive publicity over the Toogood beating will diminish the advantage of spanking. Parents otherwise tempted to swat their mischievous children publicly on the behind will now hesitate to do so, fearing intervention from state social service organizations. Tremendous social pressure will cause them to postpone spankings until safely in their homes. And we can expect more out-of-control toddlers in department stores — unless parents love their children enough to dare to discipline.

[angelize56]

Giant iceberg drifts into south polar seas
Wednesday, 23 October 2002

An iceberg more than twice the size of the ACT has ventured into the south polar seas, after wrenching itself free of the Antarctic ice shelf.

David Vaughan - of the British Antarctic Survey - says at 200 kilometres long, 30 kilometres wide and about 200 metres thick, C-19 is one of the biggest icebergs seen in recent years.

He says the iceberg is still in the Ross Sea, about 300 kilometres from the ice-front from which it has broken off.

Mr Vaughan says it will not start melting until it leaves the cold polar waters.

C-19's formation on the Ross Ice Shelf was first spotted in May by the US National Ice Centre.

A European environment satellite then monitored its gradual break-out into the open sea.

The nearest land to C-19 is New Zealand, several thousand thousand kilometres away.

[eggplant43]

AUDUBON RELEASES LIST OF AMERICA’S MOST IMPERILED BIRDS

‘Audubon WatchList 2002’ Names 201 Birds in Jeopardy; Represents More than One-quarter of North American Species


New York, NY October 22, 2002— Despite the exciting recovery of Endangered birds like the Bald Eagle and Peregrine Falcon, more than one-quarter of America’s birds are in trouble or decline, according to the National Audubon Society. In a report released today, entitled “WatchList 2002”, Audubon identifies 201 species that show either significantly decreasing numbers or restricted range, or are under other threats.

“Audubon WatchList 2002 is a warning system that shows us where to focus our attention and resources if we want to help the survival of a vast number of bird species," says Frank Gill, Audubon's chief ornithologist and senior vice president for science, and author of the comprehensive reference, Birds of North America. “It is also a powerful tool that policy-makers, businesses, and the general public can use now to take positive conservation action.”

Based on a stoplight model, WatchList places selected bird species in green, yellow, or red categories, depending on the danger they face. A centerpiece of conservation efforts at Audubon, the WatchList aims to halt the declines of America’s birds and to rebuild their populations to healthy, green-light status.

WatchList serves to underscore some disturbing trends; since 1970, many songbird species have declined by as much as 50 percent or more. The California Thrasher and the southeast’s Painted Bunting both show declines in excess of 50 percent, while the Cerulean Warbler of the eastern U.S. has declined by more than 70 percent and the Henslow’s Sparrow from the Midwest has dangerously dropped by 80 percent. The Hawaiian ‘Akikiki from Kauai has dropped from about 6,800 birds in the early 70’s to only 1,000 individuals today.

Ironically, these declines come at a time when bird watching is hitting an all-time high in popularity; the National Survey on Recreation and the Environment tallies 71 million Americans participating in 2001, up 250 percent from 1982, making birding the fastest-growing outdoor activity in the U.S. And, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Americans spent $40 billion on wildlife watching in 2001, up steadily from $30 billion in 1996 and $21 billion in 1991.

“WatchList is preventative medicine,” continued Gill. “It will be used first and foremost to enlist federal, state, and local governments to focus their resources towards protecting these birds before they become endangered or threatened – when they would demand more serious action and major taxpayer support to recover.”

Audubon WatchList is a unique project that filters information on bird populations compiled by field scientists in the U.S. and overseas. The final product recognizes three levels of concern:

RED - Species in this category of global conservation concern are declining rapidly, have very small populations or limited ranges, and face major conservation threats. Audubon identifies several red-listed species as probable candidates for inclusion on the Federal Endangered or Threatened Species Lists.

YELLOW: Category includes the majority of species identified. Yellow-list birds are declining, but at slower rates than those in the red category. These typically are birds of national conservation concern, and those that can be saved most cost-effectively.

GREEN: species in this category are not declining, have unknown trends, or have very large population sizes. These species are not included on the Audubon WatchList.

For the first time in 2002, the Audubon WatchList includes birds of Hawaii and Puerto Rico, in addition to the birds of mainland North America.

“The reasons for identifying species on the WatchList is not entirely altruistic,” concluded Gill. “Like the proverbial canary in the coalmine, birds are primary indicators of environmental health, and what hurts birds also hurts the people who share the same space. We should in no way take WatchList birds for granted; we should rather listen to what their declines are telling us about the ecosystems we both inhabit.”

Methodology used in the WatchList was developed in conjunction with Partners in Flight, a coalition of North American ornithological groups of which Audubon is a leading member. Bird Life International developed global methodology; Audubon is the U.S. partner designate for BLI.

Related Link: WatchList Press Room

[Mike C UK]

birds are primary indicators of environmental health, and what hurts birds also hurts the people who share the same space

Dark Star and me just wanna say we couldn't agree more about the TSG environment!

Quack! Quack!

Daffy
pp Dark Star

(On a serious note, as a member of the RSPB here in Britain I heartily endorse any process that aids in identifying the decline or rise of our avian friends. I have lived here in a farm environment for over 26 years and the decline in formerly common birds, such as the Plver and Common House Sparrow, has been sad to witness. I log many bird appearances in the vicinity and keep the RSPB updated regularly with my unofficial surveys, as do many others of like mind.)

Mike

[Rep]

Bush Served on Harken Board During Enron Trades
Tue Oct 22, 6:50 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - While President Bush (news - web sites) served on Harken Energy Corp.'s board more than 10 years ago, it engaged in complex trades with Enron Corp., a watchdog group said on Tuesday.



Enron's relationship with Bush has become a political issue since its collapse in December amid a widening financial scandal. The company was one of Bush's biggest campaign contributors.


Administration officials say Bush did nothing improper.


The documents, released by the Center for Public Integrity, showed that one of Harken's partners in commodities trading was Enron. A June 1990 memo from Harken Marketing, a Harken subsidiary, listed a $363,000 letter of credit with the now bankrupt energy trader.


White House officials had no comment on the transaction. Harken officials were not immediately available to comment.


The nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity said other documents showed that Bush was paid $80,000 in 1987-88 to consult for Harken even though he was working full time for his father's presidential campaign.


Bush flew to Texas and to New York to attend Harken board meetings. These trips were paid for by his father's campaign, and reimbursed by Harken, the Center said, citing Bush campaign receipts and Harken documents.


White House officials said there was nothing improper about Bush simultaneously working for Harken and his father's campaign.


Bush served on Harken's board from 1986 until 1993.


Former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay was a longtime Bush ally and a generous donor to his political campaigns. He was part of an elite group known as the "Bush Pioneers" who gathered at least $100,000 in donations for Bush's 2000 run for the presidency.


High-level members of the Bush administration said Lay called asking for help while he fought to keep Enron out of bankruptcy, but they said they did nothing and that the president knew nothing about it.

[eggplant43]

Not exactly arms length, is it?