"In God We Teach" documentary

Now on YouTube, "In God We Teach," a documentary about Matt LaClair's exposure of his U.S. History teacher's proselytization in the public school classroom.

Skeptics and "backward masking"

Below these two videos is a post I made (perhaps to the Kate Bush fans' "love-hounds" mailing list, I don't recall) back in 1986 regarding a 1985 Christian "rock music seminar" about alleged Satanic backwards messages in rock music.  I was familiar with the claims of supposed "backwards masking" where the sounds of ordinary lyrics were interpreted to have different messages when reversed, as well as actual examples of recordings that were put into songs in reverse.  The former seemed to me to be examples of subjective validation, and I tested it myself by closing my eyes and covering my ears when the presenter gave their claims about what we were supposed to hear prior to playing the samples.  Subsequently, this became one of the first tests the Phoenix Skeptics conducted as a student group at Arizona State University in October 1985.  We invited the speaker to give his demonstrations before our group, but required him to play the samples first without explanation and have everyone write down what they heard.  The result was that on the first pass, those unfamiliar with the samples had a wide variety of responses; on a second pass, once the expectation was set, everybody heard what they were supposed to hear.

It's interesting that this demonstration, the key example of which was a sample from Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," made a comeback two decades later--being used by skeptics to show the power of suggestion and expectation, as these two videos from Simon Singh and Michael Shermer demonstrate.

Simon Singh, 2006:


Michael Shermer, 2006 TED Talk:

Date:  Wed, 5 Feb 86 15:35 MST
From: "James J. Lippard" 
Subject:  Christian Death/rock seminar
Reply-To:  Lippard@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA

Yes, I've heard of Christian Death, though I haven't heard much by them.  That
reminds me of an article I wrote in October for ASU's "Campus Weekly"
(alternative campus newspaper) about a rock seminar I went to, and here it is.
The article was never printed, as the newspaper folded.  (Note: There was
originally an additional paragraph about a fourth type of backwards
message--the kind that's at the end of the first side of "The Dreaming".)

      Druids were Satanists.
      Van Morrison reads Celtic literature.
      Therefore, Van Morrison's music is evil.

   I had hoped this kind of feeble guilt-by-association reasoning applied to
rock music by religious fanatics had died off.  No such luck.  The above was
typical of the reasoning presented at a seminar on rock music on October 21 by
Christian Life.  Not only is the first premise false, the conclusion is a non
sequitur.

   Things looked promising enough at first.  A quote from the Confucian
philosopher Mencius about how the multitudes "act without clear understanding"
was projected on the large screen in Neeb Hall before the presentation began.
When the show finally started, the speaker gave some facts about the size of
the music industry and its influence on society.

   For a while things were rational.  Since the seminar was focusing on the
seamy side of rock, it seemed reasonable to show slides of Lou Reed shooting
heroin on stage, Sid Vicious, Kiss, and so forth.  Still, the impression was
given that this was representative of the majority of rock music.  Obscure
groups such as Demon, Lucifer's Friend, and the Flesh Eaters say nothing about
rock in general.

   Apparently the writers of the seminar were aware of this, because it then
shifted to analyzing album covers of fairly popular groups.  But this analysis
was taken to a ridiculous extreme, pulling interpretations out of a hat.  If
an album cover had a cross on it, it was automatically blasphemous.  Any other
religious symbols on an album along with a cross were putting down
Christianity by calling it "just another religion."

Other symbols also drew criticism.  From the following Bible verse, Luke
10:18, it was concluded that lightning bolts are a demonic symbol:
  And He  said to them,  "I was watching  Satan fall from  heaven
     like lightning."

   Since all lightning bolts are evil, the lightning bolts in the logos of
Kiss and AC/DC show that they are in league with the devil.  Interestingly, on
the backs of many electrical appliances is a symbol which serves as a warning
of potential shock hazard--a yellow triangle containing a lightning bolt
exactly like the one in AC/DC's logo.  Surely this is a more obvious source
than the Bible for AC/DC's lightning bolt, given the electrical symbolism in
their name and many of their album titles.

   As the Jesuits knew, if you teach a child your ways early, he will likely
follow them for the rest of his life.  But to conclude from this that Led
Zeppelin is trying to influence children because there are children on the
cover of their _Houses of the Holy_ album is absurd.

   In the interest of "fair play", quotes from several artists denying any
involvement with the occult were given.  But these were shrugged off,
including the disclaimer at the beginning of Michael Jackson's _Thriller_
video which says, in part, "this film in no way endorses belief in the
occult." Michael Jackson is a devout Seventh Day Adventist, so I seriously
doubt he had any more intent in promoting the occult through _Thriller_ than
the creators of Caspar the Friendly Ghost.

   Finally, the seminar got to its most entertaining subject: backwards
messages on rock albums.  There are several types of messages commonly
referred to as "backmasking," most of which were covered.  The first is a
message recorded normally, then placed on an album in reverse.  The example
given was from ELO's Face the Music album, which says "The music is
reversible, but time is not.  Turn back, turn back..." There is little doubt
about the content of such messages.

   The second type of backwards message is where words are sung backwards,
phonetically.  On Black Oak Arkansas' live album _Raunch and Roll_, there is
no question about what they are trying to do when the singer shouts "Natas!"
The conference speaker seemed to imply that this message was unintentional,
however, when he gave an example of a song by Christian Death.  The words are
sung backwards (as seen on the lyrics sheet), but pronounced in reverse
letter-by-letter rather than phonetically.  He seemed surprised that this
resulted in nonsense when reversed.

   The third type of backwards message is where a perfectly ordinary record
album is played in reverse to produce gibberish and creative imaginations
supply the translations for supposed messages.  According to the speaker, this
must occur in one of three ways.  Either they are intentional, accidental, or
spiritual.  They can't be intentional, because creating such a message is
unimaginably complex.  They can't be accidental, otherwise we would hear
messages saying such things as "God is love" or "the elephant is on the back
burner" as often as we hear messages about Satan.  Therefore, the messages
must be spiritual (i.e., Satan caused them to occur).

   This completely ignores what has already been well-established as the
source of these messages.  Someone person plays his records backwards,
listening for evil messages, and hears something that sounds like the word
"Satan".  He then tells his friends to listen for the message, and plays it
for them.  Since they have been told what to hear, their mind fills in the
difference between the noises on the album and the alleged message.

   This explanation was mentioned, but was dismissed out of hand because, the
speaker claimed, the backwards messages are as clear as most rock lyrics are
forwards.  He played the first message, in Queen's "Another One Bites the
Dust", without telling the audience what to hear.  I heard no message, but he
told us that we clearly heard "start to smoke marijuana".  When the tape was
played again, I could hear it.

   The rest of the messages of this type played at the seminar were
accompanied by text on the movie screen telling the audience what to listen
for.  I closed my eyes to ignore the hints, and was unable to hear anything
but gibberish.  The same method was used and the same results obtained by
several other audience members I questioned after the presentation.

   In addition, an anti-rock program aired a few years ago on the Trinity
Broadcasting Network stated that there were several messages on Led Zeppelin's
"Stairway to Heaven", including "here's to my sweet Satan" and "there is power
in Satan".  The rock conference, on the other hand, combined these two into
one large message which began "my sweet Satan" and ended "whose power is in
Satan".  Having heard the TBN version first, those were what I heard when they
were played at the conference.  If the words "there is" can be mistaken for
"whose", isn't it possible that the same is true for the rest of these
messages?

   Even the transcriber of the backwards messages had problems coming up with
words to fit the message.  The slide for Rush's live version of "Anthem"
played backwards read:
  Oh, Satan, you--you are the one who is shining, walls of Satan,
     walls of (sacrifice?)  I know.

   As any ventriloquist knows, many sounds can be mistaken for many other
sounds.  An m for an n, a t for a d, a c, a z, or a th for an s.  Given that
the most frequent letters in the English language are ETAOINSHRDLU, it is no
surprise that something sounding like "Satan" is quite common.

   With enough effort, evil symbolism and backwards messages can be found
anywhere.  Try visiting a record store and finding satanic symbols on
Christian album covers, or listening to some Christian albums backwards.  I'm
sure much can be found with little difficulty.

   It is true that most rock is not Christian.  It is even true that much of
it conflicts with the Christian faith in some way.  But to bury these points
in a mire of fuzzy logic and fanaticism by engaging in a witch hunt is
counter-productive.  Before the conference, I commented to a friend that if
"Stairway to Heaven" was played backwards, the presenters would have destroyed
any credibility they had.  That, unfortunately, was the case.


    Jim (Lippard at MIT-MULTICS.ARPA)

Additional information:

ReligiousTolerance.org has a good overview with scientific references on the subject.

Discredited doctor comes to Phoenix

British former surgeon Andrew Wakefield, whose discredited and abusive research was responsible for the resurgence of measles outbreaks in the UK and the U.S., is not just coming to Phoenix this Saturday, he is being celebrated by the Autism Society of Greater Phoenix at the Ritz Carlton Hotel.  Wakefield's 1998 paper in The Lancet reported symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease in twelve children with autism, and speculated that the cause was the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine.  What it didn't report was that Wakefield had a financial interest in his own alternative vaccine, that he had been paid by attorneys who were trying to prove that MMR vaccines were harmful, that his test subjects were recruited by those attorneys from among their plaintiffs, or that Wakefield engaged in unnecessary colonoscopies, colon biopsies, and spinal taps on children in his study.  Ten of Wakefield's 12 co-authors published a retraction of his interpretation of the paper, and the original paper was withdrawn by the journal this year.  Wakefield's name has been struck from the register of British medical doctors as a result of his unethical behavior.

The publication of his paper was responsible for a significant drop in UK vaccination rates due to fear of a link to autism, which was accompanied by a rise in measles outbreaks (but no drop in autism diagnosis rates).

It is a pity that the Autism Society of Greater Phoenix is promoting an unethical, discredited quack.

Science fiction scenarios and public engagement with science

Science fiction has been a popular genre at least since Jules Verne’s 19th century work, and arguably longer still. But can it have practical value as well as be a form of escapist entertainment? Clark Miller and Ira Bennett of ASU suggest that it has potential for use in improving the capacity of the general public “to imagine and reason critically about technological futures” and for being integrated into technology assessment processes (“Thinking longer term about technology: is there value in science fiction-inspired approaches to constructing futures?" Science and Public Policy 35(8), October 2008, pp. 597-606).

Miller and Bennett argue that science fiction can provide a way to stimulate people to wake from “technological somnambulism” (Langdon Winner’s term for taking for granted or being oblivious to sociotechnical changes), in order to recognize such changes, realize that there may be alternative possibilities and that particular changes need not be determined, and to engage with deliberative processes and institutions that choose directions of change. Where most political planning is short-term and based on projections that simply extend current trends incrementally into the future, science fiction provides scenarios which exhibit “non-linearity” by involving multiple, major, and complex changes from current reality. While these scenarios “likely provide...little technical accuracy” about how technology and society will actually interact, they may still provide ideas about alternative possibilities, and in particular to provide “clear visions of desirable--and not so desirable--futures.”

The article begins with a quote from Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute recommending that “hard science fiction” be used to aid in “long-term” (20+ year) prediction scenarios; she advises, “Don’t think of it as literature,” and focus on the technologies rather than the people. Miller and Bennett, however, argue otherwise--that not only is science fiction useful for thinking about longer-term consequences, but that the parts about the people--how technologies actually fit into society--are just as, if not more important than the ideas about the technologies themselves.

It ends with some examples of use of science fiction in workshops for nanotechnology researchers which have been conducted by Bennett and suggested uses in science education and in “society’s practices and institutions for public engagement and technology assessment.” About the former suggested use, the authors write that “The National Science Foundation, which has by and large not been in the business of supporting science fiction, might be encouraged to fund training and/or networking exercises that would foster greater interaction among scientists and fiction writers.”

While some steps have been taken to promote interaction between scientists and fiction writers--most notably the National Academy of Sciences’ Science and Entertainment Exchange project headed by executive director Jennifer Ouellette who spoke at last year’s The Amazing Meeting 7--this interaction is mostly one-way. The project is conceived of as a way for science to be accurately communicated to the general public through entertainment, rather than facilitating the generation of ideas for technological innovation and scientific development from the general public or the entertainment stories that are created. The SEE promotes the idea of collaboration between scientists and entertainment producers on the creative works of entertainment, but not necessarily directing creative feedback into science or building new capacities in science and technology, except indirectly by providing the general public with inspiration about science. Similarly, the Skeptrack and Science Track at the annual Dragon*Con science fiction convention in Atlanta provide ways for scientists and skeptics to interact with science fiction fans (and creators of science fiction works), but the communication is primarily in one direction via speakers and panels, with an opportunity for Q&A. (Unlike the notion of a SkeptiCamp, where all participants are potentially on an equal basis, with everyone given the opportunity to be a presenter.)

[P.S. The Long Now Foundation is an organization that makes the Foresight Institute’s time horizon look short--their time frame is the next 10,000 years, with a focus on how to make extremely long-term projects work and how to create an institutional framework that can persist for extremely long periods of time. (The obligatory science fiction references are Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and Neal Stephenson’s Anathem.)]

[A slightly different version of the above was written for my Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology core seminar. Thanks to Judd A. for his  comments--he raised the concern that SkeptiCamp is connected to a rationalist form of skepticism that is concerned to "narrow the range of 'acceptable' beliefs" rather than widen it.  While this may be true, depending on what the class of "acceptable" beliefs is prior to applying a skeptical filter, it need not be--applying scientific methodology and critical thinking can also open up possibilities for individuals.  And if the initial set of beliefs includes all possibilities, converting that set to knowledge must necessarily involve narrowing rather than expanding the range, as there are many more ways to go wrong than to go right.  But this criticism points out something that I've observed in my comparison of skepticism to Forteanism--skepticism is more concerned about avoiding Type I errors than Type II errors, while Forteans are more concerned about avoiding Type II errors than Type I errors, and these are complementary positions that both need representation in society.]

Matthew LaClair vs. Texas Board of Education

Matthew LaClair, who exposed his proselytizing U.S. history teacher/youth pastor in 2006, now hosts his own radio show, "Equal Time for Freethought," on WBAI 99.5 FM on Sundays at 6:30 p.m. ET in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut area.  The show is also online via streaming audio.

This coming Sunday, April 25, Matthew will be debating a conservative member of the Texas Board of Education about their recent changes to the curriculum (e.g., removing Thomas Jefferson).

If you happen to miss the show, it will subsequently be available in the online archives.

Is the general public really that ignorant? Public understanding of science vs. civic epistemology

Studies of the public understanding of science generally produce results that show a disturbingly high level of ignorance.  When asked to agree or disagree with the statement that “ordinary tomatoes do not contain genes, while genetically modified tomatoes do,” only 36% of Europeans answered correctly in 2002 (and only 35% in 1999 and 1996, Eurobarometer Biotechnology Quiz).  Those in the U.S. did better with this question, with 45% getting it right; Canada and the Netherlands got the highest level of correct answers (52% and 51%, respectively).  Tests of similar statements, such as “Electrons are smaller than atoms,” “The earliest human beings lived at the same time as the dinosaurs,” and “How long does it take the Earth to go around the Sun: one day, one month, or one year,” all yield similarly low levels of correct responses.

Public understanding of science research shows individuals surveyed to be remarkably ignorant of particular facts about science, but is that the right measure of how science is understood and used by the public at large?  Such surveys ask about disconnected facts independent from a context in which they might be used, and measure only an individual’s personal knowledge. If, instead, those surveyed were asked who among their friends would they rely upon to obtain the answer to such a question, or how would they go about finding a reliable answer to the question, the results might prove to be quite different.

Context can be quite important. In the Wason selection task, individuals are shown four cards labeled, respectively, “E”, “K,” “4,” and “7,” and are asked which cards they would need to turn over in order to test the rule, “If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side.” Test subjects do very well at recognizing that the “E” card needs to be turned over (corresponding to the logical rule of modus ponens), but very poorly at recognizing that the “7,” rather than the “4,” needs to be turned over to find out if the rule holds (i.e., they engage in the fallacy of affirming the consequent rather than use the logical rule of modus tollens). But if, instead of letters and numbers, a scenario with more context is constructed, subjects perform much more reliably. In one variant, subjects were told to imagine that they are post office workers sorting letters, and looking to find those which do not comply with a regulation that requires an additional 10 lire of postage on sealed envelopes. They are then presented with four envelopes (two face down, one opened and one sealed, and two face up, one with a 50-lire stamp and one with a 40-lire stamp) and asked to test the rule “If a letter is sealed, then it has a 50-lire stamp on it.” Subjects then recognize that they need to turn over the sealed face-down envelope and the 40-lire stamped envelope, despite its logical equivalent to the original selection task that they perform poorly on.

Sheila Jasanoff, in Designs on Nature, argues that measures of the public understanding of science are not particularly relevant to how democracies actually use science. Instead, she devotes chapter 10 of her book to an alternative approach, “civic epistemology,” which is a qualitative framework for understanding the methods and practices of a community’s generation and use of knowledge.  She offers six dimensions of civic epistemologies:

(1) the dominant participatory styles of public knowledge-making; (2) the methods of ensuring accountability; (3) the practices of public demonstration; (4) the preferred registers of objectivity; (5) the accepted bases of expertise; and (6) the visibility of expert bodies.  (p. 259)

She offers the following table of comparison on these six dimensions for the U.S., Britain, and Germany:

United States Contentious	Britain Communitarian	Germany Consensus-seeking
1 Pluralist, interest-based	Embodied, service-based	Corporatist, institution-based
2 Assumptions of distrust; Legal	Assumptions of trust; Relational	Assumption of trust; Role-based
3 Sociotechnical experiments	Empirical science	Expert rationality
4 Formal, numerical, reasoned	Consultative, negotiated	Negotiated, reasoned
5 Professional skills	Experience	Training, skills, experience
6 Transparent	Variable	Nontransparent

She argues that this multi-dimensional approach provides a meaningful way of evaluating the courses of scientific policy disputes regarding biotech that she describes in the prior chapters of the book, while simply looking at national data on public understanding of science with regard to those controversies offers little explanation.  The nature of those controversies didn’t involve just disconnected facts, or simple misunderstandings of science, but also involved interests and values expressed through various kinds of political participation.

Public understanding of science surveys do provide an indicator of what individuals know that may be relevant to public policy on education, but it is at best a very indirect and incomplete measure of what is generally accepted in a population, and even less informative about how institutional structures and processes use scientific information.  The social structures in modern democracies are responsive to other values beyond the epistemic, and may in some cases amplify rational or radical ignorance of a population, but they may more frequently moderate and mitigate such ignorance.

Sources:

• Eurobarometer Biotechnology Quiz results from Jasanoff, Designs on Nature, 2005, Princeton University Press, p. 87.
• U.S., Canada, Netherlands survey results from Thomas J. Hoban slide in Gary Marchant’s “Law, Science, and Technology” class lecture on public participation in science (Nov. 16, 2009).
• Wason task description from John R. Anderson, Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications, Second Edition, 1985, W.H. Freeman and Company, pp. 268-269.

[A slightly different version of the above was written as a comment for my Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology core seminar. Thanks to Brenda T. for her comments.]

Many Species of Animal Law

Today I went to hear Bruce Wagman speak on the subject of "Many Species of Animal Law" at ASU's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law.  Wagman, an attorney with Schiff Hardin who is also an outside litigator for the Animal Legal Defense Fund, has litigated cases involving animals for 18 years, written a case book on animal law, and teaches animal law courses at several law schools as an adjunct faculty member.  He was introduced by ASU Law School Dean Paul Berman and Arizona Court of Appeals Judge Pat Norris.

Wagman began by defining "animal law" as any law where the status of an animal matters--psychological, biological, welfare, etc. status of the animal, as opposed to its value as property.  He suggested that animal law attorneys "may be the only lawyers on earth whose clients are all innocent."

He divided his talk up into multiple "species" of animal law.

Species 1: Companion Animal Issues

He said this makes up the majority of his cases, and includes injuries by or to animals, including veterinary malpractice.  The challenge is to get courts to recognize that animals are not merely property, since historically companion animals have been viewed as property with low or even zero market value.  In cases where an animal is injured or killed, the market value doesn't recognize the interests of the animal or other kinds of value that companion animals give.  Under the American Law Institute's Restatements of the Law, however, there is a notion of "special property" (or "peculiar property" in California's statutes) which allows quantification of other kinds of worth to an animal owner, for instance if the animal is a therapy dog.  There are no emotional stress damages available.

Other sorts of companion animal cases include custody disputes, which often occur as a result of one partner just trying to inflict distress on another rather than having actual interest in the animal.  Wagman said that courts are beginning to take a better look at the interests of the animal in such cases, and be willing to appoint a guardian ad litem, as occurred in the Michael Vick case and in another case in Tennessee where there was a dispute over custody of a dog between a dead man's girlfriend and parents.

There are dangerous dog issues, where an attorney may be fighting against the classification of a dog as a dangerous or vicious animal, or against its euthanasia--what he called "capital cases" for animals.  In three counties surrounding San Francisco, what happens in the case of a dog biting another dog that requires stitches varies dramatically.  In one county, the dog gets a period of probation.  In another, the dog gets labeled as a dangerous or vicious dog, which requires the owner to meet various conditions of housing the dog, having a certain height of fence, carry additional insurance, and so forth.  And in Santa Clara County, the dog gets euthanized.  He pointed out that that county's statute has an exemption for "mitigating circumstances" which he's successfully used to prevent dogs from being euthanized.

Finally, there are wills and trusts--he said he doesn't do that sort of work, but that 48 states now have mechanisms for having trusts for animals.

He said he considers companion animals to be a sort of "gateway animal" for getting recognition of animals in the law, and noted that we tend to be "speciesists" who would feel very different about snakes vs. Labrador Retrievers.  [IMO, this is rational to the extent that animals differ in cognitive capacities, and I note that at no point did he discuss litigating on behalf of cockroaches against pest control companies.]

Species 2: Farm animal issues--legislation and litigation.

His second species of animal law was about animals killed for food--about 10 billion per year in the United States.  He said the goal here is not to stop the killing, but just to improve the living conditions of animals before they're killed for food.  This is problematic, however, because the animal cruelty statutes are criminal rather than civil (with an exception in North Carolina that will be discussed with regard to Species 3 of animal law), and that the criminal law for animal cruelty excludes farm animals in 35 states.  He discussed a few of the more abusive methods of animal treatment in factory farming--calf crates, in which calves are placed for about the first 60 days of life, gestation crates for pigs (outlawed in Arizona since 2006, as well as illegal in Florida, Oregon, Colorado, and California), and battery cages for chickens.

He also discussed downer animals--animals which are either so seriously injured or ill that they are unable to move, which the meat industry wants to drag in that condition to slaughter.  Wagman raised the concern that such animals, if sick, could potentially spread illness to humans, and listed a bunch of diseases that could potentially so spread, with BSE (mad cow) at the top of the list along with avian flu.  Of these, only BSE has been documented to spread to humans, and the industry position is that there should be no restrictions on downer pigs unless and until a human actually gets sick.  The state of California passed a law that said that all downer animals must be euthanized on the spot; the meat industry sued and overturned the statute in federal district court, but the 9th Circuit just reversed it last week (National Meat Association v. Brown).

Species 3: Animal hoarding--private ownership, breeders, and the sanctuary that is not

Wagman said that there have been 250,000 documented cases of animal hoarding, and that they are difficult cases to work with in multiple ways.  He said he believes such cases involve mental illness, but while the APA has a diagnosis for "hoarding" behavior, it excludes animal hoarding which is considered to be different.  How many animals constitutes hoarding?  He said he likes to say "more than eight," because he has eight animals at home.  Hoarders characteristics include possessing more animals than they can care for, having a sense of being persecuted, and living in deplorable conditions.

He discussed two cases that he litigated, ALDF v. Barbara & Robert Woodley, and ALDF v. Janie Conyers, which involved over 500 animals between them.  The former case, in North Carolina, was able to use North Carolina statute 19a, which allows a civil cause of action for animal cruelty.  Wagman had some horrifying photos from the Woodley case.  They had hundreds of dogs in their home living in their own feces, where ammonia levels were 20 times the USDA maximum allowed in a pig facility.  These ammonia levels caused blindness in the dogs, as well as chemical burns to bare skin that contacted the floor, such as dogs' scrotums.  Multiple dogs were kept in wooden boxes with lids on them, and never let out.  Mrs. Woodley's favorite dog, Buddy, not only had his eyes burned to blindness from ammonia, but the bone in the dog's jaw deteriorated from malnutrition.  Local officials had known of Woodley's problem for 20 years, but considered themselves powerless to do anything about it, since the scale of the problem was so large--the local shelter had only eight kennels, while the Woodleys had about 450 animals.  The ALDF had to coordinate a massive effort to manage the rescue of the animals through their case.

Conyers was an AKC poodle breeder who had 106 poodles living in their own feces.

Wagman said that animal psychological suffering is difficult to show, but it can be done; demonstrating physiological suffering is easier, with objective criteria like the ammonia levels and physical injuries to animals.

There is no law against hoarding (except in Hawaii), just the criminal abuse statutes (and civil in NC).  In the hoarding cases the abuse is typically neglect rather than active abuse.

Species 4: Exotic animal ownership

Wagman has handled about 10 chimpanzee cases.  One was a case involving a couple in West Covina, California who had a chimp named Moe for 35 years that bit two people.  He argued for a guardian ad litem to determine what was in the best interests of the chimp, and arranged to get Jane Goodall and Roger Fouts for that role.  The court looked upon it favorably, but the couple came to an out-of-court settlement.

He also briefly discussed the Stamford, Connecticut case of Travis, the 200-pound chimpanzee who attacked a woman that was in the news last year.

He argued that there should be a legislative fix to ban exotic animal ownership completely--they're wild animals.  [A complete ban seems to me too much--there should be exceptions for research, conservation, breeding programs for endangered species, and so forth.  And shouldn't it be possible to domesticate other wild animals?]  Connecticut has taken the step of banning chimp ownership.

Species 5: Shelter practices - euthanasia, veterinary care, adequate food, water, and sanitation, and hold periods

Animal shelters have an overwhelming job, said Wagman.  The County of Los Angeles, which he sued, operates seven shelters which handle tens of thousands of animals per year.  California law says that all animals must get veterinary care and be held for five days, and allowing animal suffering without treatment is not permissible.  The shelters' own records showed that they weren't meeting that standard for thousands of animals, but they're now working to meet them and having their activity monitored for compliance.  A similar set of cases occurred in Kentucky, when the state transferred all shelter responsibility to the counties.  Although the standards of care were minimal, they weren't meeting it, and there were nutrition, veterinary care, and euthanasia issues.  Upon getting notice, they quickly took action to remedy.

In Georgia, by contrast, there is a statute that prohibits the use of gas chambers for euthanization at shelters, but the Commissioner of Agriculture sent out letters to the shelters asking that they purchase gas chambers for euthanization.  Gas chambers apparently have very ugly results in some cases, such as with unhealthy dogs.  A lawsuit against the state of Georgia for its failure to comply with its own statute resulted an an injunction, which they then immediately violated by sending out more letters asking for gas chamber purchases.  After obtaining a contempt ruling from the court, they finally got compliance.

Species 6: Entertainment

Wagman called this category both the most obvious and the most hidden.  The use of animals in entertainment is obvious, but what is not obvious is what goes on behind the scenes, the knowledge of which drains the fun out of the entertainment.

Circuses, zoos, film and TV ads, animal fighting, public appearances, racing and rodeos, and hunting and fishing are all cases of animals used for entertainment.  Wagman first discussed elephants in circuses, commenting on a recent Ringling Brothers case which was tossed out on an issue of standing.  The case involved the use of bullhooks for elephant training, which injures the animals.  The defense didn't deny use of bullhooks, but claimed that they only use them as "guides."

Elephant treatment in zoos is also problematic, since standing around on hard surfaces causes painful arthritis.  In the wild, elephants are awake 21 hours a day and may move 35 miles per day.

Wagman discussed dog fighting, and said that the Michael Vick case was a wakeup call for America to the reality of dog fighting, which exists in every state and most major cities.

He argued that the use of great apes in film and television should be banned, because of how the training process works.  He said that while trainers claim to use only positive reinforcement training, an undercover person who volunteered for a year and a half with trainer Sid Yost found otherwise.  A young chimpanzee is immediately treated to beating and punching to get them to comply.  Their performance lifetime is about 3-5 years, after which they become to strong to conrol, and end up in private homes, in research, or in zoos, often all alone in barren cases.  Wagman pointed out that the common use of a "smiling" chimpanzee is actually a fear grimace.  He does lots of work for sanctuaries, of which there are nine in the U.S. for chimpanzees (including chimpsanctuarynw.org).

Regarding hunting, he distinguished traditional hunting from canned hunting and Internet hunting.  Hunting is protected in most states, including in many state constitutions.  Canned hunting ranches, where animals are fed by hand by humans before they are flushed out into open areas to be shot, are not considered to be hunting by most traditional hunters.  [But is considered hunting by our former Vice President, Dick Cheney.]  Internet hunting, where a rifle can be fired at live animals over the Internet, has been banned in 30 states.

He mentioned mountain lion hunting in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where mountain lions have become fairly scarce.  A lawsuit was filed to try to stop the hunting on grounds of near-extinction of the animals, but the injunction was denied on the grounds that there were unlikely to be any mountain lions even found and killed.  Two mountain lions were killed shortly thereafter in fairly quick succession, and even though there was a law that prohibited killing female mountain lions with cubs, the second one killed had a cub, and there was no prosecution.

Some Adidas shoes are made with kangaroo skin, and the state of California has banned the importation of kangaroo skin, which Adidas ignored.  Adidas was sued as a result, and they lost at the California Supreme Court--but they responded by persuading the legislature to repeal the ban rather than changing their practices.

Species 7: Species and breed-specific legislation and ADA breedism case.

A variety of dog breeds have been considered at various times and places to be "bad dogs" that create a special danger.  After WWII, it was German Shepherds and Dobermans.  All cases to stop such breed-specific legislation have failed, because the "rational relation" standard is met by only a single case of harm.  A case in progress right now in Concord, California involves Theresa Huerta, a woman suing under the Americans with Disabilities Act to keep her pit bull therapy dog from being euthanized.

Wagman concluded by saying that his overall objective is to keep the public and the courts focused on the real issue, which is ending blatant cases of animal abuse.  Animal law is a growing field, and there's an annual animal law conference in Portland that's now in its fifth year.

Joel Garreau on radical evolution

Yesterday I heard Joel Garreau speak again at ASU, as part of a workshop on Plausibility put on by the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes (CSPO). I previously posted a summary of his talk back in August on the future of cities. This talk was based on his book, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies--and What It Means to Be Human.

Garreau was introduced by Paul Berman, Dean of the Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law at ASU, who also announced that Garreau will be joining the law school faculty beginning this spring, as the Lincoln Professor for Law, Culture, and Values.

He began by saying that we're at a turning point in history [has there ever been a time when we haven't thought that, though?], and he's going to present some possible scenarios for the next 2, 3, 5, 10, or 20 years, and that his book is a roadmap. The main feature of this turning point is that rather than transforming our environment, we'll be increasingly transforming ourselves, and we're the first species to take control of its own evolution, and it's happening now.

At some point in the not-too-distant future, he said, your kid may come home from school in tears about how he can't compete with the other kids who are more intelligent, more athletic, more attractive, more attentive, and so forth--because you haven't invested in the human enhancement technologies coming on the market. Your possible reactions will be to suck it up [somebody's still gotta do the dirty jobs in society?], remortgage the house again to make your kid competitive, or try to get the enhanced kids thrown out of school. What you can't do is ignore it.

He then asked people to raise their hands who could remember when things were still prevalent:

• The Sony Walkman
• When computer screens were black and white. (An audience member said "green and black!")
• Rotary dial phones
• Mimeograph machines and the smell of their fluid
• Polio

This shows, he said, that we're going through a period of exponential change.

His talk then had a small amount of overlap with his previous talk, in his explanation of Moore's Law--that we've had 32 doublings of computer firepower since 1959, so that $1 of computing power is about 2 billion times more than it was then, and an iPhone has more computing power than all of NORAD had in 1965. Such doublings change our expectations of the future, so that the last 20 years isn't a guide to the next 20, but to the next 8; the last 50 years is a guide to the next 14. He pulled out a handkerchief and said this is essentially the sort of display we'll have in the future for reading a book or newspaper.

He then followed Ray Kurzweil in presenting some data points to argue that exponential change has been going on since the beginning of life on earth (see P.Z. Myers' "Singularly Silly Singularity" for a critique):

It took 400 million years (My) to go from organisms to mammals, and

• 150My to monkeys
• 30My to chimps
• 16My to bipedality
• 4My to cave paintings
• 10,000 years to first settlements
• 4,000 years to first writing

At this point, culture comes into the picture, which causes even more rapid change (a point also made by Daniel Dennett in his talk at ASU last February).

• 4,000 years to Roman empire
• 1800 years to industrial revolution
• 100 years to first flight
• 66 years to landing on the moon

And now we're in the information age, which Garreau identified as a third kind of evolution, engineered or radical evolution, where we're in control. [It seems to me that such planned changes are subject to the limits of human minds, unless we can build either AI or enhancement technologies that improve our minds, and I think the evidence for that possibility really has yet to be demonstrated--I see it as possible, but I place no bets on its probability and think there are reasons for skepticism.]

Garreau spent a year at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the organization that invented the Internet (then the ARPANet), which is now in the business of creating better humans, better war fighters. [DARPA was also a subject of yesterday's Law, Science, and Technology class. It's a highly funded organization that doesn't accept grant proposals, rather, it seeks out people that it thinks are qualified to give funding to for its projects. It has become rather more secretive as a result of embarrassment about its Total Information Awareness and terrorism futures ideas that got negative press in 2003.]

Via DARPA, Garreau learned about their project at Duke University with an owl monkey named Belle, that he described as a monkey that can control physical objects at long distances with her mind. Belle was trained to play a video game with a joystick, initially for a juice reward and then because she enjoyed it. They then drilled a hole in her head and attached fine electrodes (single-unit recording electrodes like the sort used to discover mirror neurons), identified the active regions of her brain when she operated the joystick, and then disconnected the joystick. She became proficient and playing the game with the direct control of her brain. They then connected the system to a robotic arm at MIT which duplicated the movements of her arm with the joystick.

Why did they do this? Garreau said there's an official reason and a real reason. The official reason is that an F-35 jet fighter is difficult to control with a joystick, and wouldn't it be better to control it with your mind, and send information sensed by the equipment directly into the mind? The real reason is that the DARPA defense sciences office is run by Michael Goldblatt, whose daughter Gina Marie (who recently graduated from the University of Arizona) has cerebral palsy and is supposed to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. If machines can be controlled with the mind, machines in her legs could be controlled with her mind, and there's the possibility that she could walk.

Belle first moved the robotic arm 9 years ago, Garreau said, and this Christmas you'll be able to buy the first toy mind-machine interface from Mattel at Walmart for about $100. It's just a cheap EEG device and not much of a game--it lets you levitate a ping pong ball with your mind--but there's obviously more to come.

Garreau said that Matthew Nagel was the first person to send emails using his thoughts (back in 2006), and DARPA is interested in moving this technology out to people who want to control robots. [This, by the way, is the subject of the recent film "Sleep Dealer," which postulates a future in which labor is outsourced to robots operated by Mexicans, so that they can do work in the U.S. without immigrating.]

This exposure to DARPA was how Garreau got interested in these topics, which he called the GRIN technologies--Genetics, Robotics, Information science, and Nanotechnology, which he identified as technologies enabled by Moore's Law.

He showed a slide of Barry Bonds, and said that steroids are sort of a primitive first-generation human enhancement, and noted that the first uses of human enhancement tend to occur in sports and the military, areas where you have the most competition.

Garreau went over a few examples of each of the GRIN technologies that already exist or are likely on the way.

Genetics
Dolly the cloned sheep. "Manipulating and understanding life at the most primitive and basic level."

"Within three years, memory pills, originally aimed at Alzheimer's patients, will then move out to the needy well, like 78 million baby boomers who can't remember where they left their car, then out to the merely ambitious." He said there's already a $36.5 billion grey market for drugs like Ritalin and Provigil (midafonil), and asked, "Are our elite schools already filling up with the enhanced?" [There's some evidence, however, that the enhancement of cognitive function (as opposed to staying awake) is minimal for people who already operate at high ability, with the greatest enhancement effect for those who don't--i.e., it may have something of an egalitarian equalizing effect.]

He said DARPA is looking at ways to end the need for sleep--whales and dolphins don't sleep, or they'd drown, but they do something like sleeping with one half of the brain at a time.

DARPA is also looking at ways to turn off hunger signals. Special forces troops burn 12,000 calories per day, but can't carry huge amounts of food. The body carries extra calories in fat that are ordinarily inaccessible unless you're starving, at which point they get burned. If that switch to start burning fat could be turned on and off at will, that could be handy for military use. He observed that DARPA says "the civilian implications of this have not eluded us."

Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, started by David Sinclair of the Harvard Medical School, aims to have a drug to reverse aging based on resveratrol, an ingredient from grapes found in red wine. [Though Quackwatch offers some skepticism.]

Garreau looks forward to cures for obesity and addiction. He mentioned Craig Venter's plan to create an organism that "eats CO2 and poops gasoline" by the end of this year, that will simultaneously "end [the problems in] the Middle East and climate change." [That seems overly optimistic to me, but ExxonMobil has given Venter $600 million for this project.]

He said there are people at ASU in the hunt, trying to create life forms like this as well. [Though for some reason ASU doesn't participate in the iGEM synthetic biology competition.]

Robotics
Garreau showed a photo of a Predator drone, and said, "Ten years ago, flying robots were science fiction, now it's the only game in town for the Air Force." He said this is the first year that more Air Force personnel were being trained to operate drones than to be pilots. 2002 was the first year that a robot killed a human being, when a Predator drone launched a Hellfire missile to kill al Qaeda members in an SUV in Yemen. He said, "while there's still a human in the loop, philosophical discussions about homicidal robots could be seen as overly fine if you were one of the guys in the SUV."

"We're acquiring the superpowers of the 1930s comic book superheroes," he said, and went on to talk about a Berkeley exoskeleton that allows you to carry a 180-pound pack like it weighs four pounds, like Iron Man's suit. He asked the engineers who built it, "Could you leap over a tall building in a single bound?" They answered, "yes, but landing is still a problem."

Functional MRI (fMRI) is being used at the University of Pennsylvania to try to determine when people are lying. Garreau: "Then you're like the Shadow who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men."

Cochlear implants to give hearing to people for whom hearing aids do nothing, connecting directly to the auditory nerve. Ocular implants to allow the blind to have some vision. Brain implants to improve memory and cognition. Garreau asked, "If you could buy an implant that would allow you to be fluent in Mandarin Chinese, would you do it?" About half the room raised their hands. [I didn't hear a price or safety information, so didn't raise my hand.]

Information
He showed a photo of a camera phone and said, "Fifteen years ago, a machine like this that can fit in your pocket, with a camera, GPS, and MP3 player, and can send email, was science fiction. Now it's a bottom-of-the-line $30 Nokia."

He asked, "Does anyone remember when music players were three big boxes that you put on your bookshelves? Now they're jewelry. Soon they'll be earrings, then implants."

Close behind, he said, are universal translators. "Google has pretty good universal translation on the web, and see it as moving out to their Droid phones." He observed that Sergey Brin was talking in 2004 about having all of the world's information directly attached to your brain, or having a version of Google on a chip implanted in your brain. [I won't get one unless they address network security issues...]

Nanotechnology
Garreau said, "Imagine anything you want, one atom or molecule at a time. Diamonds, molecularly accurate T-bone steaks." He said this is the least developed of the four GRIN technologies, "so you can say anything you want about it, it might be true." It's estimated to become a $1 trillion/year market in the next 10 years. There may be nanobots you can inject into your bloodstream by the thousands to monitor for things about to go wrong [see this video for the scenario I think he's describing], hunter-killers that kill cancer cells. "When you control matter at a fundamental level, you get a feedback loop between the [four] technologies."

At this point, Garreau said he's really not all that interested in the "boys and their toys" so much as he is the implications--"where does this take culture and society and values?" He presented three possible scenarios, emphasizing that he's not making predictions. He called his three scenarios Heaven, Hell, and Prevail.

Heaven
He showed a chart of an exponential curve going up (presumably something like technological capacity on the y axis and time on the x axis).

He said that at the NIH Institute on Aging, there's a bet that the first person to live to 150 is already alive today. He mentioned Ray Kurzweil, said that he pops 250 pills a day and is convinced that he's immortal, and is "not entirely nuts." [I am very skeptical that 250 pills a day is remotely sensible or useful.]

For the last 160 years, human life expectancy has increased at about 1/4 of a year every year. He asked us to imagine that that rate improves to one year per year, or more--at that point, "if you have a good medical plan you're effectively immortal." [I questioned this in the Q&A, below.]

Hell
He showed a chart that was an x-axis mirror of the Heaven one, and described this as a case where technology "gets into the hands of madmen or fools." He described the Australian mousepox incident, where researchers in Australia found a way to genetically alter mousepox so that it becomes 100% fatal, destroying the immune system, so that there's no possible vaccine or prevention. This was published in a paper available to anyone, and the same thing could be done to smallpox to wipe out human beings with no defense. He said the optimistic version is something that wipes out all human life; the pessimistic version is something that wipes out all life on earth. [In my law school class, we discussed this same topic yesterday in more detail, along with a similar U.S. paper that showed how to reconstruct the polio virus.]

The problem with both of these scenarios for Garreau is that they are both "techno-deterministic," assuming that technology is in control and we're "just along for the ride."

Prevail
He showed a chart that showed a line going in a wacky, twisty pattern. The y-axis may have been technological capacity of some sort, but the x-axis in this case couldn't have been time, unless there's time travel involved.

Garreau said, if you were in the Dark Ages, surrounding by marauding hordes and plagues, you'd think there wasn't a good future. But in 1450 came the printing press--"a new way of storing, sharing, collecting, and distributing information," which led to the Renaissance, enlightenment, science, democracy, etc. [Some of those things were rediscoveries of advancements previously made, as Richard Carrier has pointed out. And the up-and-down of this chart and example of the Dark Ages seems to be in tension, if not in conflict, with his earlier exponential curve, though perhaps it's just a matter of scale. At the very least, however, they are reason to doubt continued growth in the short term, as is our current economic climate.]

Garreau called the Prevail scenario more of a co-evolution scenario, where we face challenges hitting us in rapid succession, to which we quickly respond, which creates new challenges. He expressed skepticism of top-down organizations having any capacity to deal with such challenges, and instead suggested that bottom-up group behavior by humans not relying on leaders is where everything interesting will happen. He gave examples of eBay ("100 million people doing complex things without leaders"), YouTube ("no leaders there"), and Twitter ("I have no idea what it's good for, but if it flips out the Iranian government, I'm for it.") [These are all cases of bottom-up behavior facilitated by technologies that are operated by top-down corporations and subject to co-option by other top-down institutions in various ways. I'm not sure how good the YouTube example is considering that it is less profitable per dollar spent than Hulu--while some amateur content bubbles to the top and goes viral, there still seems to be more willingness to pay for professional content. Though it does get cheaper to produce professional content and there are amateurs that produce professional-quality content. And I'll probably offer to help him "get" Twitter.]

The Prevail scenario, he said, is "a bet on humans being surprising, coming together in unpredicted ways and being unpredictably clever."

He ended by asking, "Why have we been looking for intelligent life in the universe for decades with no success? I wonder if every intelligent species gets to the point where they start controlling their own destiny and what it means to be as good as they can get. What if everybody else has flunked. Let's not flunk. Thanks."

Q&A
I asked the first question, which was whether there is really so much grounds for optimism on extending human lifespan when our gains have increased the median lifespan but not made recent progress on the top end--the oldest woman in the world, Jeanne Calment, died at 122 in 1997 and no one else has reached that age. He answered that this was correct, that past improvements have come from nutrition, sanitation, reducing infant mortality, and so forth, but now that we spent $15 billion to sequence the first human genome and the cost of sequencing a complete human genome is approaching $1,000 and personalized medicine is coming along, he suspects we'll find the causes of aging and have the ability to reverse it through genetic engineering.

Prof. David Guston of CSPO asked "What's the relation between your Prevail scenario and the distribution of the success of the good stuff from GRIN technologies?" Looking at subgroups like males in post-Soviet Russia and adults in Africa, he said, things seem to be going in the wrong direction. Garreau answered that this is one of the nightmare scenarios--that humans split into multiple species, such as enhanced, naturals, and the rest. The enhanced are those that keep upgrading every six months. The naturals are those with access to enhancements that "choose not to indulge, like today's vegetarians who are so because of ethical or aesthetic reasons." The rest are those who don't have access to enhancements, and have envy for and despise those who do. "When you have more than one species competing for the same ecological niche," he said, "that ends up badly for somebody." But, he said, that's assuming a rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer belief, "a hallmark of the industrial age." Suppose that instead of distributing scarcity, we are distributing abundance. He said that transplanted hearts haven't become cheap because they aren't abundant, but if we can create new organs in the body or in the lab in a manner that would benefit from mass production, it could become cheap. He pointed out that cell phones represent "the fastest update of technology in human history," going from zero to one phone for every two people in 26 years, and adapted to new uses in the developing world faster than in the developed world. He brought up the possibility of the developing world "leapfrogging" the developed world, "the way Europeans leapfrogged the Arab world a thousand years ago, when they were the leaders in science, math, and everything else." [I think this is a very interesting possibility--the lack of sunk costs in existing out-of-date infrastructure, the lack of stable, firmly established institutions are, I think, likely to make the developing world a chaotic experimental laboratory for emerging technologies.]

Prof. Gary Marchant of the Center for the Study of Law, Science, and Technology then said, "I'm worried about the bottom-up--it also gave us witch trials, Girls Gone Wild, and the Teabaggers." Garreau said his Prevail scenario shows "a shocking faith in human nature--a belief in millions of small miracles," but again said "I'm not predicting it, but I'm rooting for it."

Prof. Farzad Mahootian and Prof. Cynthia Selin of CSPO asked a pair of related questions about work on public deliberations and trying to extend decision-making to broader audiences, asking what Garreau thought about "DARPA driving this or being porous to any kind of public deliberation or extended decision-making?" Garreau responded that "The last thing in the world that I want to do is leave this up to DARPA. The Hell scenario could happen. Top-down hierarchical decision-making is too slow. Anyone waiting for the chairman of the House finance committe to save us is pathetic. Humans in general have been pulling ashes out of the fire by the skin of their teeth for quite a while; and Americans in particular have been at the forefront of change for 400 years and have cultural optimism about change." [I think these questions seemed to presuppose top-down thinking in a way that Garreau is challenging.]

He said he had reported a few years ago about the maquiladoras in Mexico and called it a "revolution," to which he got responses from Mexicans saying, "we're not very fond of revolutions, it was very messy and we didn't like it," and asking him to use a different word. By contrast, he said, "Americans view revolutions fondly, and think they're cool, and look forward to it." [Though there's also a strange conservatism that looks fondly upon a nonexistent ideal past here, as well.] With respect to governance, he said he's interested in looking for alternate forms of governance because "Washington D.C. can't conceivably respond fast enough. We've got a long way to go and a short time to get there." [Quoting the 'Smokey and the Bandit' theme song.]

He went on to say, "I don't necessarily think that all wisdom is based here in America. Other places will come up with dramatically different governance." He talked about the possibility of India, which wants to get cheaper drugs out to the masses, taking an approach different from FDA-style regulation (he called the FDA "a hopelessly dysfunctional organization that takes forever to produce abysmal results"). "Let's say the people of India were willing to accept a few casualties to produce a faster, better, cheaper cure for malaria, on the Microsoft model--get a 'good enough' version, send it out and see how many computers die. Suppose you did that with drugs, and were willing to accept 10,000 or 100,000 casualties if the payoff was curing malaria once and for all among a billion people. That would be an interesting development." By contrast, he said, "The French are convinced they can do it the opposite way, with top-down governance. Glad to see somebody's trying that. I'll be amazed if it works." His view, he said, was "try everything, see what sticks, and fast." [This has historically been the intent of the U.S. federal system, to allow the individual states to experiment with different rules to see what works before or in lieu of federal rules. Large corporations that operate across states, however, which have extensive lobbying power, push for federal regulations to pre-empt state rules, so that they don't have to deal with the complexity.]

There were a few more questions, one of which was whether anyone besides DARPA was doing things like this. Garreau said certainly, and pointed to both conventional pharmaceutical companies and startups working to try to cure addiction and obesity, as well as do memory enhancement, like Eric Kandel's Memory Pharmaceuticals. He talked about an Israeli company that has built a robotic arm which provides touch feedback, with the goal of being able to replace whatever functionality someone has lost, including abilities like throwing a Major League fastball or playing the piano professionally.

Prof. Selin reported a conversation she had with people at the law school about enhancement and whether it would affect application procedures. They indicated that it wouldn't, that enhancement was no different to them than giving piano lessons to children or their having the benefit of a good upbringing. Garreau commented that his latest client is the NFL, and observed that body building has already divided into two leagues, the tested and the untested. The tested have to be free of drugs, untested is anything goes. He asked, "can you imagine this bifurcation in other sports? How far back do you want to back out technology to get to 'natural'? Imagine a shoeless football league." He noted that one person suggested that football minus technology is rugby. [This reminded me of the old Saturday Night Live skit about the "All Drug Olympics."]

All-in-all, it was an interesting talk that had some overlap with things that I'm very interested in pursuing in my program, especially regarding top-down vs. bottom-up organizational structures. Afterward, I spoke briefly with Garreau about how bottom-up skeptical organizations are proliferating and top-down skeptical organizations are trying to capitalize on it, and I wondered to what extent the new creations of bottom-up organizations tend to get co-opted and controlled by top-down organizations in the end. In that regard, I also talked to him a bit about Robert Neuwirth's work on "shadow cities" and the Kowloon Walled City, where new forms of regulatory order arise in jurisdictional no-man's-lands (I could also have mentioned pirate codes). Those cases fall between the cracks for geographical reasons, while the cases that are occurring with regard to GRIN technologies fall between the cracks for temporal reasons, but it seems to me there's still the possibility of the old-style institutions to catch up and take control.

UPDATE: As a postscript, I recently listened to the episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast on human enhancement with philosopher Allen Buchanan, who was at the University of Arizona when I went to grad school there. Good stuff.

Teaching the Bible in public schools

The following is a letter to the editor of Arizona State University's State Press that the paper didn't print. It was written in response to an editorial by Will Munsil, son of Len Munsil, who was editor of the State Press when I was an undergraduate in the 1980s. Len Munsil is an extremely conservative Republican, failed Republican candidate for Governor in 2006, and founder of the Center for Arizona Policy, Arizona's version of the American Family Affiliation. His daughter, Leigh Munsil, is the State Press's current editor-in-chief. When Munsil Sr. edited the school paper, he sometimes refused to print my letters to the editor for shaky reasons.

The letter below was written in response to Will Munsil's "Putting the Bible back in public schools," which was published on October 14.

I disagree with Will Munsil's assertion that the Bible is the foundation of American political thought. On the contrary, the American form of government was rooted in the work of enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. The U.S. Constitution's form of government has more resemblance to Caribbean pirate codes than to the Ten Commandments.

That said, however, I agree with Munsil that knowledge of the Bible is worthwhile and should be taught in public schools for the purpose of cultural literacy, so long as it is done without endorsing Christianity or Judaism. The Bible Literacy Project's curriculum might be one way to do it. One way not to do it is to use the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools' curriculum--it takes a sectarian perspective, is full of errors, and has failed legal challenges in Texas and Florida for being unconstitutional.

I suspect this letter wasn't excluded by reason of content, but because they had already printed a couple of letters critical of Will Munsil's op-ed by the time I submitted this on October 16. Perhaps I should have mentioned that I'm an atheist, which makes the extent of my agreement with Munsil more interesting. Of course, my view is contrary to Munsil's in that I think Bible literacy is likely to decrease, rather than increase, religious belief. But it wouldn't surprise me if the NCBCPS curriculum is the one that Will Munsil had in mind.

I should point out that I think it should probably be taught as part of a world religions class that covers more than just Christianity--kids should not only get information about the Bible that they won't get in Sunday School, they should be informed about other religions, as well as the fact that history has been full of doubters of religion, as documented in Jennifer Michael Hecht's excellent Doubt: A History.

You can find out more about the NCBCPS curriculum that failed legal challenge in Texas here.

Munsil cited Stephen Prothero, whose op-ed piece, "We live in a land of biblical idiots," I wrote about at the Secular Web in early 2007.

Joel Garreau on the future of cities

Today I attended a lecture at ASU by Washington Post writer Joel Garreau, author of Edge Cities and Radical Evolution, about the future of cities. What follows is a rough sketch of his talk based on my notes.

He began by saying that he's interested in culture and values, and isn't a "gear-head" about the emerging technologies that he's written about ("GRIN" technologies--genetics, robotics, information systems, and nanotechnology).

He currently studies cities--how they are shaped by technology, and how cities shape us.

He started with a slide of an old Spanish map of the New World, which was mostly accurate, except for an oversized Florida and drawing California as an island. Why was California shown as an island? Because explorers in the Seattle area saw a body of water that went very far to the south, and explorers in the Baja California area saw a body of water that went very far to the north, and they just connected the dots. That error took 100 years to correct. Spanish explorers would land in Monterey Bay and carry boats inland, expecting to hit water, and they always commented that the Indians in the area seemed to be friendly. Garreau suggested that they were actually laughing at them for pointlessly carrying boats inland. When the explorers would fail to hit another body of water, they would report back that the map was wrong, only to be told that they must not have been where they thought they were. It finally took a decree from the King of Spain to change the map.

His next slide was of the Los Angeles area, pointing out what he called "edge cities," which he called "the biggest change in 150 years of how we build cities." "Edge cities" are major and new urban centers around old big cities. They have a large amount of office and retail space, lots of jobs, and didn't exist 30-40 years ago. They are popping up everywhere there is major growth. The area around John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, is an edge city--it has 5 million square feet of office space (more than Memphis), 600,000 square feet of retail space. It's not a suburb, or sub-anything. It's not a bedroom community. It has the features of office parks and all traditional city functions. The edge cities in New Jersey in the greater New York area have more jobs than Manhattan.

Phoenix was one of the earliest places to recognize that it was going to have more than one city center--we have major centers downtown, uptown/Central Avenure, Camelback/Biltmore, South Mountain, and Tempe (among others), and these were recognized as centers that would exist by city planners a couple of decades ago.

Paris has La Defense as an edge city, as well as Marne-la-Vallee, where EuroDisney is. When superior locations for growth are first found, the rich people move in first, and tend to go uphill, upwind, and upriver, byt Marne-la-Vallee was a poor area that was planned to be an edge city by selecting it as the location for EuroDisney, and it succeeded.

Boston edge cities include the Burlington Mall area, MIT area, downtown, Quincy/Braintree, and Framingham area.

One major factor that has changed cities are the available modes of transportation. Chicago was formed as a rail town, based around inter- and intra-urban rail. Detroit was formed as an automobile town.

The last industrial age downtown built in North America was Calgary, Alberta, Canada in 1914. In 1915, the one millionth Model T Ford came off the assembly line, and ended the old downtowns. The old industrial downtowns were from the 1840s to 1914, and existed because of the necessity of collecting raw materials in one place and having thousands of people there to work on those materials.

Prior to those downtowns, cities were places like Jefferson's Charlottesville, Washington's Alexandria, and Lincoln's Philadelphia. Most people earned a living from the land, and lived outside of cities.

The automobile suddenly made places outside the old industrial cities far more valuable, like Long Island.

Until 1955, the southwestern-most Major League Baseball team was in St. Louis, because movement by train placed constraints on scheduling. The Cardinals were thus the team rooted for by everyone further south and west. Once airplanes came into the picture, baseball could spread, and other cities could become major cities--Los Angeles, Dallas, Phoenix, Seattle, Houston.

Garreau asked, if Chicago were leveled, what would you rebuild first--O'Hare, or downtown. O'Hare is more critical today.

But the changes caused by automobiles and airplanes is nothing compared to the networked computer, which is making changes more significant and more rapidly than the automobile.

He showed a photograph of a Kresge's in the Capitol Hill area of D.C., explaining that it was a discount 5 & dime store, the K in K-Mart. He said Kresge's is dead, and K-Mart is dying, but do you think the building is still there, and if so, what is it? The first guess--Starbuck's--was almost correct. It is a coffee shop. He argued that Kresge's and K-Mart has been killed by Wal-Mart, which is really an IT company that happens to sell sneakers. He claimed that when you buy a pair of sneakers at Wal-Mart, a process kicks off at check out that starts to make a replacement pair in Malaysia within 24 hours.

So why are coffee shops popular, and why do people pay $4 for coffee? Is it the free wireless? He argued that it is a social thing, only marginally about the coffee and the wifi. The main factor around the physical environment is that the rare stuff we can't digitize, like face-to-face contact, has much higher relative value than it did before.

Bill Mitchell of the MIT Media Lab, and former head of the architecture department, has catalogued 87 forms of real estate in cities, all being transformed by information technology. One form is super markets. Garreau asked, if you could get hamburger and toilet paper delivered to your home for free, why would you get in your car to go get groceries? To buy produce or meat, was the answer suggested by the audience. He then showed a photo of a Freshfields, a modern farmer's market, and showed a photo of booths with tables inside it--it's also a place to sit and socialize.

Another type of building is a prison. He suggested that we don't need as many prisons if we use GPS anklets or bracelets for nonviolent offenses.

He then argued that Moore's Law will continue to hold for the forseeable future, and we've already seen 32 doublings in processors since 1959. The only thing comparable is railroad capacity doubling, which saw 14.5 doublings before leveling out due to requirements of coal, steel, and land, and being superseded by the automobile. The IT limits are the laws of physics, the marketplace, human ingenuity, and our culture and values, and he argued that only our culture and values set real limits for the forseeable future. (In a class yesterday, one of my professors said that a physics professor speaking at ASU last year said that we've reached the physical limits for silicon chips, and won't see any more doublings, but a subsequent new development has already refuted him with a four-times improvement due to nanotechnology--presumably this.)

Sequencing the human genome was thought nuts, impossible, and/or would cost a fortune, but was done in 2000 at a fraction of the expected cost, far sooner than anyone expected, thanks to Moore's Law.

Garreau suggested that ten years from now, anything you can put in a lab for $1 million will be something you can put in your home for $1,000; anything you can get now for $1,000 will be "pocket lint." He used USB memory fobs as an example of today's "pocket lint."

He showed a photo of students at CMU in a computer lab, and asked, "Is there a future for physical university campuses?" He gave a yes, on the grounds that this is where you "meet your first spouse and friends for a lifetime"--the social aspects. Distance learning has been around for a very long time (Benjamin Franklin did learning-by-mail), but it's always a second choice.

Shopping malls, he said, are turning into entertainment spaces. He cited his friend Jaron Lanier (a virtual reality pioneer), who suggests that the first thing to disappear will be escalators, replaced by rides--so when you go up by ferris wheel and come down by water slide, think of Lanier. He observed that if you go to a mall at 10 a.m., you'll see the senior mall walkers, and if you go in the afternoon, you'll see "drug dealing rugrats." (He didn't note, but I thought of how Arizona Mills Mall in Tempe has turned one space into an indoor miniature golf course.)

Office space--is there any future to it? Again, he argued for the social aspect, and maintained that the accidental casual face-to-face contact is impossible to digitize, yet he finds the random conversation at the printer jam (the modern equivalent of the water cooler) to be his most productive time of day. To this, Prof. Brad Allenby objected that there is casual contact in World of Warcraft and Second Life, and we shouldn't assume that such things can't be digitizable.

Another audience member suggested that because human beings need touch, we need real physical contact. (But that assumes the impossibility of tactile telepresence.) Yet another pointed out that movie theater attendance is up, even though you can watch online or at home cheaper.

Garreau said, supposed you decide face-to-face matters, but only need it two days a week--how would that affect where you live? If you only needed it 3 days a month, then where might you live?

He said some cities will live, if they are good for face-to-face contact. Others will die, if they aren't. We're headed to a profound shift of what is urban/urbane, and cities like Santa Fe are the future. It has 63,000 people, opera, restaurants, second-hand boot stores.

The top fastest-growing metro areas are smaller cities that are like villages with face-to-face spaces and are somewhat dispersed. The top ones are Wenatchee, WA, Provo-Orem, UT, Grand Junction, CO, Gulfport-Biloxi, MS, and Myrtle Beach, SC. The top states for real estate price appreciation are Utah, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Other example cities in this model include the Adams-Morgan area of D.C., Tempe, AZ, and Marrakesh.

He then briefly turned to other technologies. He said that Craig Venter says that by the end of this year he will have an organism that "eats CO2 and poops gasoline." (And his company has just received $600 million in funding from ExxonMobil.) Nanotech may build membranes that purify water. These things will impact where cities become feasible. "Is Darfur the next garden spot?"

He then referred to a book by Leo Marx of MIT, titled The Machine in the Garden. He argued that in the industrial age, we suffered a split--we had to come into the cities and leave nature behind. Now we're trying to put what we like about cities into a garden.

In the final Q&A, he said he has a hidden assumption that we will continue moving forward and not go back to pre-industrial society; he said "no petroleum engineers think we're running out of oil, only cheap oil."

He said that we're seeing a new explosion of religious fervor, and included environmentalism in that, saying that it has its own saints and heretics. He thinks human beings are "hardwired to have faith--even Russia made Marxism into faith," but said that he's "a hardcore rationalist" even though "rationalism doesn't seem to be emotionally satisfying." He said, following Popper, that "science can't tell you what is true, only what is false, but it can changes minds without killing people." (I disagree with his statement that science can't tell you what is true--theories that keep passing tests do at least approximate truth.)

An audience member commented that virtual environments can convey mental and physical aspects, but not emotional and spiritual. Garreau agreed, but I think both (and a few other questioners) were making an unwarranted assumption that virtual environments will not be able to reach a point of being indistinguishable (or very nearly so) from real environments, and thus allowing effective conveyance of body language, subtle gestures, and so forth, perfectly adequate for transmitting emotional information. (As for spiritual properties, I think they're in need of demonstration before we worry about them--and given claims that have been made about them, it's surprising that the questioner thought physical proximity was a limitation.) In a conversation with Prof. Allenby afterward, he also pointed out that we may be better able to make judgments of trust in a virtual environment because we are more alert to the possibility of a partial presentation of a personality and to intentional distortions. There are also some types of cues that are more accurately picked up audibly, while visual information can overwhelm those cues.

Prof. Allenby also noted that major technological changes may turn what we now think of as fundamental truths into contingencies, and that may include some aspects of what we call human nature.

Garreau ended by observing that past predictions of what the future will be like have usually been wrong, becasue things are more complex and more expensive then we think--and then we get blindsided by innovations like the iPhone.

Back to school

This blog is entering its fifth year today, and the content will be shifting a bit now that I am returning to school. Today was my first day of new graduate student orientation before classes begin next week; I'm a Ph.D. student in Arizona State University's Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology program, which is beginning its second year. This is an interdisciplinary program within the Graduate College and allied with the School of Life Sciences, so today's orientation was with new graduate students from other programs in SoLS. SoLS has 250 graduate students in 11 programs, of which 49 are entering this semester. (I chatted a bit with a couple of new graduate students in neuroscience.)

There seems to be a wealth of supporting organizations and structures to SoLS programs to assist in getting funding, doing research, participating in education and public outreach, and dealing with administrivia. I'll be delving into as much of it as I can, and periodically reporting on items of particular interest here.

From today's orientation, a few items that are part of SoLS education and public outreach are worthy of note. ASU has an "Ask-a-Biologist" program online, which you can also follow via Twitter. That program is intended for students in grades K-12, and is projected to hit a million visitors this year. There's also the Science Studio Podcasts for adult education. And the International Institute for Species Exploration website. There's also a program run by SoLS graduate students called Graduate Partners in Science Education, where graduate student volunteers work with underprivileged and at-risk junior high school students on field biology research projects.

My current aim in the HSDST program is to build upon my past graduate experience in philosophy and cognitive science, my career in Internet services and information security, my interest in skeptical inquiry and critical thinking, and my interest in law to explore the concepts of trust and reputation as they pertain to online and digital media. At the moment, I'm signed up for a seminar on "Law, Science, and Technology," a seminar on "Human and Social Dimensions of Climate Change," the HSDST Core Seminar and Colloquium, and a course with one of my favorite undergraduate philosophy professors on Advanced Logic (that's my "just for fun" class).

Tomorrow's a reception for all of the new graduate students at ASU's Tempe campus, and later in the week I have some training on fire and lab safety--and next week, it's back to class.

O'Reilly on Amsterdam

Via Pharyngula, a video rebuttal to a recent Bill O'Reilly show claim that Amsterdam's drug policies are a failure that has led it to be a "cesspool of corruption, crime, everything is out of control, it's anarchy," according to guest Monica Crowley, Ph.D. (In a bit of irony, her doctorate is in "international relations." She's a Fox News foreign affairs and policy analyst who was a personal foreign policy assistant to Richard Nixon from 1990-1994--I didn't realize former presidents needed personal foreign policy assistants.)



Various cities in the Netherlands have placed additional restrictions on coffee shops that sell marijuana, such as not permitting them to operate within 200m of a school. The Wikipedia entry on drug policy in the Netherlands documents this, along with the details of their decriminalization (not legalization) policies.

Index of Conference Summaries

This is a reverse-chronological list of conference and talk summaries I've written up, either at my blog or elsewhere. Most pertain to skepticism and critical thinking in some way (and I'd like to think that all involve the application of skepticism and critical thinking to the topics at hand), some are political, and some involve information security. I've got a few more of these in print form that are online in the issues of the Arizona Skeptic.

Bruce Wagman on "Many Species of Animal Law," April 7, 2010, Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, Tempe, Arizona, Armstrong Hall 116.

Joel Garreau on Radical Evolution, November 18, 2009, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, Coor 5536, CSPO Plausibility Project.

Richard Carrier on "Christianity and Science (Ancient and Modern)," November 8, 2009, Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix, Home Town Buffet, Scottsdale.

Robert B. Laughlin on "The Crime of Reason," November 5, 2009, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law, Great Hall; 2009 Hogan & Hartson Jurimetrics Lecture in Honor of Lee Loevinger.

Roger Pielke Jr. on climate change adaptation, November 5, 2009, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, Decision Theater.

Roger Pielke Jr. on climate change mitigation, November 5, 2009, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, Coor 5536.

Robert Balling on climate change, October 30, 2009, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, Coor L1-74.

Personalized medicine research forum, October 23, 2009, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, The Biodesign Institute.

Atheist Alliance International convention, October 2-4, 2009, Burbank Marriott, Burbank, California. Speakers: P.Z. Myers, Ed Buckner, Lawrence Krauss, Carolyn Porco, Martin Pera, Jerry Coyne, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Gerardo Romero, Jonathan Kirsch, Eugenie Scott, Brian Parra.

Marco Iacoboni on imitation and sociality, August 27, 2009, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, psychology department colloquium, MU202.

Joel Garreau on the future of cities, August 26, 2009, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes colloquium, Coor L1-10.

The Amazing Meeting 7, July 9-12, 2009 at the South Point Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada.
Part 1: Introduction, Hal Bidlack, Phil Plait, James Randi, Bill Prady keynote.
Part 2: Fintan Steele, Phil Plait, Robert Lancaster.
Part 3: Jamy Ian Swiss/James Randi, Jennifer Ouellette, anti-anti-vax panel (Steven Novella, David Gorski, Joe Albietz, Harriet Hall, Michael Goudeau, Derek Bartholomaus), Joe Nickell.
Part 4: Skeptics Guide to the Universe/Rodrigues-Watson wedding, Michael Shermer, Adam Savage.
Part 5: Panel on ethics of deception (D.J. Grothe, Penn Jillette, Teller, Ray Hyman, Jamy Ian Swiss), Stephen Bauer, panel on skepticism and the media (Penn Jillette, Teller, Adam Savage, Bill Prady, Jennifer Ouellette), Phil Plait.
Part 6: Sunday paper sessions, Million Dollar Challenge with Danish dowser Connie Sonne.

Science-Based Medicine Conference at The Amazing Meeting 7, July 9, 2009 at the South Point Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada.
Part 1: Steven Novella on science-based medicine.
Part 2: David Gorski on cancer quackery.
Part 3: Harriet Hall on chiropractic.
Part 4: Kimball Atwood on evidence-based medicine and homeopathy.
Part 5: Mark Crislip on chronic Lyme disease.
Part 6: Val Jones on online health and social media, and Q&A panel.

American Humanist Association annual conference at Tempe Mission Palms Hotel, Tempe, Arizona, June 5-9, 2009.
Sorry, only covered my own talk from the pre-conference workshops and the ArizonaCOR press conference.

Jeff Benedict on the Kelo case and his book Little Pink House, Goldwater Institute, Phoenix, Arizona, April 15, 2009.

SkeptiCamp Phoenix, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, March 28, 2009. Speakers: Tony Barnhart, Abraham Heward, David Jackemeyer, Don Lacey, Jim Lippard, Shannon Rankin, John Lynch, Jack Ray, David Weston, Mike Stackpole, Charlie Cavanaugh Toft, Xarold Trejo.

Daniel Dennett's 2009 Beyond Center Lecture, Galvin Playhouse, Arizona State University, February 18, 2009, on "Darwin's 'Strange Inversion of Reasoning.'"

Bill of Rights celebration event at the Wrigley Mansion, Phoenix, Arizona, December 14, 2008.

The Amazing Meeting 6, June 19-22, 2008 at the Flamingo Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada.
Overview and photo link.
Part 1: Banachek memory workshop.
Part 2: Hal Bidlack, James Randi welcome, Ben Goldacre on homeopathy, Neil deGrasse Tyson keynote, Alec Jason on Peter Popoff and criminal forensics, Penn & Teller Q&A, George Hrab musical interlude, P.Z. Myers on bat wings, Richard Saunders on educational materials for kids, panel discussion on identifying as a skeptic (James Randi, P.Z. Myers, Michael Shermer, Margaret Downey, Phil Plait, Hal Bidlack, and a member of the NYC Skeptics whose name I didn't catch).
Part 3: Michael Shermer on the Skeptologists and why people believe weird things, Sharon Begley on creationism and other weird beliefs, Derek and Swoopy on Skepticality and podcasting, Steven Novella on dualism and creationism, Jeff Wagg JREF update, Jim Underdown on the Independent Investigations Group and award to Randi, Randi on patching up relations with CSI (formerly CSICOP), Skeptologists pilot.
Part 4: Phil Plait on astronomy, Adam Savage on his Maltese falcon, Matthew Chapman on creationism and Science Debate 2008, Richard Wiseman on the "colour changing card trick" and mass spoonbending lesson, panel discussion on the limits of skepticism (Goldacre, Daniel Loxton, Radford, Savage, Novella, Hrab, Randi, Banachek, and Saunders), Sunday conference papers: John Janks on Marfa lights, Don Nyberg on pseudoscience, Steve Cuno on myths in marketing, Tracy King on viral video.
Part 5: Lee Graham on artificial creatures and real evolution, Christopher French on anomalistic psychology, Tim Farley on building skeptical tools online, Brian Dunning on The Skeptologists.

Gene Healey on his book The Cult of the Presidency, Goldwater Institute, Phoenix, Arizona, May 1, 2008.

Richard Dawkins 2008 Beyond Center Lecture, Grady Gammage Auditorium, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, March 6, 2008, on "The God Delusion."

New Mexico InfraGard Member Alliance "$-Gard" conference, February 22, 2008, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Speakers: Frank Abagnale on protecting yourself from fraud, Anthony Clark and Danny Quist on malware secrets, Alex Quintana on current trends in malware, Melissa McBee-Anderson on the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).

Ayaan Hirsi Ali at the Phoenician Resort, Goldwater Institute award banquet, Phoenix, Arizona, December 7, 2007.

Screening of "Mr. Conservative" documentary about Barry Goldwater, Goldwater Institute, Phoenix, Arizona, August 16, 2007. Features Barry Goldwater, George Will, Barry Goldwater, Jr., Sandra Day O'Connor, Ben Bradlee, Sally Quinn, Al Franken, Julian Bond, Hillary Clinton, and Jack Valenti.

Ron Paul launches Arizona campaign at private home in Paradise Valley, Arizona, March 30, 2007.
Followed up by Einzige's "Ron Paul, Religious Kook," my "Spammers and criminals for Ron Paul," and "Ron Paul connected to white supremacists?"

Skeptics Society conference on "The Environmental Wars," Caltech, Pasadena, California, June 2006.
Intro and links to other summaries.
Jonathan Adler on federal environmental regulation.

Eugenie Scott on "Creationism and Evolution: Current Perspectives," Robert S. Dietz Memorial Lecture at Arizona State University, Physical Sciences building, February 3, 2006.

National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C) Economic Crime Summit, November 8-9, 2005, downtown Phoenix, Arizona, and Freedom Summit, November 12-13, 2005, Grace Inn Ahwatukee.
Economic Crime Summit and Freedom Summit comparison/contrast/overview--prayer vs. atheism debate, Terry Goddard, Roger Vanderpool, John Vincent, Kevin Robinson, Charles Cohen, George H. Smith, Eric Lounsbery, David Friedman, Chris Heward, Karen Kwiatkowski, Jim Bovard.
Freedom Summit: Stuart Krone on technology and why we're screwed.
Freedom Summit: Steven Greer on aliens and conspiracy.
Freedom Summit: Links to photos and other summaries.

CSICOP Conference on "The Psychology of Belief," Seattle, Washington, June 23-26, 1994.

CSICOP Conference on "Fairness, Fraud, and Feminism: Culture Confronts Science," Dallas, Texas, October 16-18, 1992.
Part 1: Panel on multicultural approaches to science (moderator Eugenie Scott, Diana Marinez, Joseph Dunbar, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano), unofficial session on faith healing with Ole Anthony.
Part 2: Intro remarks by Lee Nisbet, panel on gender issues in science and pseudoscience (moderator James Alcock, Carol Tavris, Susan Blackmore, Steven Goldberg), Richard Dawkins keynote on viruses of the mind.
Part 3: Fraud in science panel (moderator Ray Hyman, Elie Shneour, Paul Friedman, Walter Stewart), Sergei Kapitza and Evry Schatzman on international skepticism, panel on crashed saucer claims (Philip Klass, James McGaha).
Part 4: Robert Young on the Kecksburg meteor, Donald Schmitt on Roswell, awards banquet (Richard Dawkins, Henry Gordon, Andrew Skolnick), entertainment by Steve Shaw (now better known as Banachek), visit to Dealey Plaza.

CSICOP Workshop on UFOs, Ramada Inn Airport Hotel, Tucson, Arizona, November 16-17, 1990. James McGaha, Robert Sheaffer, Robert Baker, and Ronald Story, all on UFOs.