Bank set up on Christian principles fails

Integrity Bank of Georgia, set up to run on Christian principles, has failed.

Integrity's employees regularly prayed before meetings or in branch lobbies with customers, while the bank gave 10 percent of its net income to charities.

"We felt if we prayed and obeyed God's word and did what He asked, that He would help us be successful," the bank's founder, Steve Skow, told the Journal-Constitution in 2005.

The executives seem to have done OK, though:

CEO Steve Skow earned $1.8 million that year, while senior lender and executive vice president Doug Ballard earned $847,222. A typical community bank CEO, banking consultants said, earn roughly $300,000 per year.

(Via Pharyngula.)

RNC protesters getting similar treatment as DNC protesters

P.Z. Myers reports on the behavior of police in Minneapolis, which looks similar to Denver.

Barack Obama answers the Sciencedebate 2008 questions

Barack Obama has supplied his answers to the fourteen questions from Sciencedebate 2008.

John McCain has said that he will also be supplying answers.

UPDATE (September 17, 2008): John McCain has also supplied his answers to the Sciencedebate 2008 questions. Click here to see their answers side-by-side.

Are the Republicans fans of Battlestar Galactica?

(Image from here. Hat tip to Dave Palmer on the SKEPTIC mailing list.)

Unintended effects of Helicobacter pylori eradication

Since the Helicobacter pylori bacterium was discovered and proven to be the cause of gastric ulcers, it has been disappearing from the developed world as it's treated with antibiotics. But multiple studies are now showing that there can be negative side-effects from its disappearance, including acid reflux, asthma, and obesity.

H. pylori helps regulate stomach acidity, the byproduct of which is sometimes ulcers. But when it is taken out of the picture, stomach acidity can increase and cause esophageal reflux disease, a disease which has increased to match the decrease in ulcers as H. pylori has been eradicated.

The asthma mechanism is less clear, but may be from H. pylori stimulating immune response. The evidence supporting the link is that U.S. children aged 3-13 who have H. pylori are 60% less likely to have asthma than those who do not.

The obesity connection is also not definitively established, but people without H. pylori produce more grehlin (which makes you feel hungry) than those who have it.

(Via "The twists and turns of fate," about the work of Martin Blaser, a microbiologist at New York University School of Medicine, in The Economist, August 23, 2008, pp. 68-69.)

When t-shirts, coffee tables, and screws are munitions

One of my prized possessions, now in a box in a closet somewhere, is a T-shirt that says on its front "This T-shirt is a munition." Underneath it is some machine-readable barcode that encodes the RSA public-key encryption algorithm expressed in Perl. As the seller of the shirt advertised, "it's machine washable and machine readable."

When I bought and regularly wore that shirt, taking it out of the country was a crime punishable by up to a $1 million fine and 10 years in federal prison. This is because U.S. rules under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), then enforced by the Department of Commerce, ruled that strong encryption qualified as a munition subject to export controls and requiring a special license for export. After the Dan Bernstein case was decided in 1996, computer source code printed in a book (human readable format) was not subject to export controls, but computer source code in a machine readable format, such as on my shirt, still was. So I could wear my other T-shirt with RSA Perl code on it, which had a program in the shape of a dolphin, out of the country, but not the machine readable "This T-shirt is a munition" shirt. The implication was that you could take a copy of Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography out of the country without an export license, but not a disk containing the very same code fragments printed in the book. This website authored by Adam Back, written at the time, proposed some possible motives for government restrictions on cryptography.

What the ITAR regulations on cryptography did for Internet software development was prohibit web browsers and server software from implementing the strong encryption necessary to protect electronic commerce from being exported from the United States. The result was that this development work simply occurred offshore. There were no barriers to importation of the software into the U.S., only to export it out. So the software was developed and sold by companies in places like Canada, Russia, and Estonia, which had no such inane restrictions.

Finally, in 1999, the U.S. wised up and relaxed the ITAR restrictions on encryption, allowing export without a license to most countries (the exceptions being countries with links to state-sponsored terrorism).

But ITAR is still around, and still having the unintended effect of pushing business out of the United States. The current victim is commercial satellite production. In 1999, ITAR authority over satellite technology export was shifted from the Department of Commerce to the Department of State, and since that time the U.S. share of commercial satellite manufacturing has dropped from 83% to 50%. The company Alcatel Alenia Space, now known as Thales Alenia, took steps in the late nineties to eliminate all U.S.-manufactured components from its satellites, with the result that it has subsequently doubled its market share to over 20%. The European Space Agency, Canada's Telesat, and the French company EADS Sodern, that makes satellite control and positioning systems, have all been phasing out their use of U.S.-supplied components. They've done this because dealing with U.S. vendors increases costs (due to regulatory compliance costs) and causes unpredictable delays in the supply of parts.

Nevada's Bigelow Aerospace delivered an aluminum satellite stand to Russia in 2006, which Robert Bigelow described as "indistinguishable from a common coffee table." But because it's associated with a satellite and officially part of a satellite assembly, it is covered by ITAR and had to be guarded by two security guards at all times. Even commodity items like screws and wiring, when part of a satellite, are covered by ITAR regulations.

The purpose of ITAR is to prevent key U.S. technologies with military applications from being leaked out to other countries that might be hostile to the U.S. But the effect of its overly broad application has been to shift the development of that technology to other countries and reduce the ability of U.S. companies to compete in the commercial satellite business.

Congress should look to reform ITAR--when export controls are so badly broken as to have nearly the opposite of the intended effect, they clearly need to be relaxed.

(Satellite and ITAR info via "Earthbound," The Economist, August 23, 2008, pp. 66-67.)

ABC News producer arrested in Denver

Police told ABC News producer Asa Eslocker to move off a public sidewalk, pushed him into the street, and then arrested him after telling him he was trespassing and "impeding the flow of traffic." ABC has video at their site, which shows another police officer who needs to be fired.

Military botnets article

I'm quoted in Peter Buxbaum's "Battling Botnets" article in the August 20, 2008 Military Information Technology. It didn't really fully capture the points I made in the interview, and I don't remember saying the statement at the end about using botnets as an offensive measure as "a nuclear option." I said that nullrouting is a much better method of denial of service for network service providers than flooding attacks, and made a point similar to Schneier's about military attacks on the infrastructure of another nation that the U.S. is at war with--it would be more useful to obtain access to their systems, monitor, and disrupt than to just shut off access completely, but those points weren't reflected in the article.

I've written more about military use of botnets at this blog.

Obama sign stolen

We put a Barack Obama for President sign in front of our house on Sunday; it's already gone today.

A Google search for "Obama sign stolen" shows that thefts of Obama yard signs are occurring all over the place--Midland, TX; Staunton, VA; Springfield, MO; Ivins and St. George, UT; Sartell, MN; Upper Arlington, OH; and so on. A Google search for "McCain sign stolen" shows allegations about McCain stealing a prisoner of war story, Cindy McCain stealing a recipe, and stories of thefts of Obama yard signs--but no reports of stolen McCain signs.

I suppose either our sign was stolen by an unethical Obama supporter for their own use (in which case the stolen sign should be popping up elsewhere), or by an unethical McCain supporter who has no respect for freedom of speech or private property. I suspect it's probably the latter.

UPDATE (November 5, 2008): Here's a story about a university instructor who wrote about his stealing a McCain/Palin sign in Minnesota--he has resigned his visiting professorship at St. Olaf College as a result. Philip Busse is described in the article as a journalist and political activist from Portland, Oregon.

Lori Lipman Brown on the Colbert Report tonight

Lori Lipman Brown, the nonbelievers' lobbyist in Washington D.C., will appear on The Colbert Report tonight. She works for the Secular Coalition of America, an organization whose members include the American Humanist Association, the American Ethical Union, Atheist Alliance International, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Institute for Humanist Studies, the Internet Infidels, the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, the Secular Students Alliance, and the Society for Humanistic Judaism.

UPDATE: She won't be on tonight--maybe next week?

UPDATE (August 30, 2008): She was on last night's show, which is online.