My summer quasi-hiatus is going to get a lot less quasi for the next 6 or so weeks. The computer lab in the dorm has been closed for the summer on a day's notice for upgrading. So I've only got the public library for my internet needs, and it's not open every evening.
Stentor Danielson, 11:44,
Doctors, environmentalists, and public health advocates have been fighting the change. When the EPA first took up the idea, medical experts began to pore over a stack of human tests. They found many of the studies were cloaked in claims of valid research but were dominated by practices that belonged in the annals of medical farce.
Today, big chemical companies are fans of human research because it encourages less stringent standards. With data from lab animals, the EPA assumes the predicted hazards for humans would be greater by a factor of 10. It's called the "inter-species rule," adopted by Congress to account for potential differences between reactions in, say, a two-year-old child and a mature lab rat. Testing on humans lets a company duck the automatic increase.
... Critics say the companies give sparse attention to decent testing procedures and that nearly every aspect of the testing seems driven by the need to get EPA approval.
I'll set aside this article's gratuitous invocations of Naziism and corporate greed, and try to deal with the meat of it.
The disparity between human and animal results is a twisted sort of argument. If it's true that tests on humans allow chemicals to meet safety standards more easily than tests on animals subjected to the inter-species rule, that simply demonstrates that the inter-species rule is an inadequate measure of the difference between animal and human biochemistry, specifically that the rule -- but not direct human testing -- is over-cautious about calculating human safety. It seems logical that a direct empirical test of a phenomenon (i.e., human testing) would be a better measure of the phenomenon than secondhand calculated tests (i.e., animal testing plus the inter-species rule). The author favors the "wrong" side of this inconsistency because of an unspoken assumption that the intended level of safety (captured more accurately by the human tests) is too low. Is he that pessimistic about making a straightforward appeal for more stringent standards that he depends on this backdoor way of seeing them achieved?
The third quoted paragraph shows what's really at issue: poorly done tests. It's not so much a matter of valid human testing being bad, but rather a matter of human testing being done shoddily. That's certainly something to worry about, both in terms of allowing bad products on the market because of fudged data, as well as the safety of the test subjects. The author is apparently quite pessimistic about the possibility of improving testing standards, making a ban our only hope. But bad testing can be done as easily -- I would venture to say more easily -- on animals as on humans. In terms of impacts on consumers and the environment, it doesn't matter what species the tests were run on if the results were bad (and if you're an animal rights proponent, it doesn't matter in terms of test subject safety). One wonders, then, why these greedy corporations are apparently so eager to test their products on humans. The explanation that direct testing is scientifically better than secondhand -- offered by a company spokesman -- is dismissed on the basis that such concerns don't fit the corporate greed model. Perhaps that inter-species rule is so out of proportion that it would take truly egregious fudging of animal test results to make up for it.
(Note that I'm not advancing the opposite case -- that companies should be trusted to test their products on humans. I don't know enough about the issue to do more than criticize this particular attempted argument.)
Stentor Danielson, 20:04,
Recently, Clark University switched to a new web email system. I wasn't thrilled when Colgate had made the upgrade to the new version of Outlook Web, and I was pleased when Clark maintained the old style all of last year. When Clark did decide to upgrade, I was pleased to hear that it was moving to a different system -- @Mail -- which would, I hoped, not annoy me the way the new Outlook Web that Colgate used did.
Alas, it was not to be. I have yet to locate a feature of @Mail that constitiutes an improvement over the old Outlook for Web. Even the hoped-for sorting-by-name feature is absent. But I have located many drawbacks, including:
Slower loading pages
Unread messages are not marked as such
The delete button doesn't work (Clark's ITS describes this as a "known bug"
The inbox launches in a new window, meaning that to stay logged in you must keep two windows -- the original one, which just says "you are logged in to @Mail," as well as the actual inbox -- open.
The change password utility was not available for two weeks, so I had to haul out my ID every time I wanted to check my email (they reset our passwords to our ID numbers)
So, I shall forward @Mail to the Kiosk.
Stentor Danielson, 18:36,
8.7.03
Morat has the inside scoop on the EPA and Bush's Clear Skies bill. What struck me in it was this sentence:
... there are industry groups who hate it [Clear Skies] because they know regulations on CO2 are coming eventually and they want regulatory certainty on it now instead so they can keep all the issues in mind when they're making renovations and upgrades.
This is an oft-overlooked success of the environmental movement: creating a sense of social progress that will inevitably lead to greater environmental protection -- both legislatively and in terms of consumer conduct. Here we see it getting polluting industries behind CO2 regulation, and I've read about (don't have the citation on me at the moment) oil companies becoming more environmentally friendly because of a sense that it will be necessary eventually due to consumer demand. I don't think it is inevtiable that we'll take better care of the environment, but it's surprising in a way to see how that idea has taken hold. Often what you hear from environmentalists is doomsday scenarios of an overpopulated, overpolluted earth -- seemingly just the opposite of the inevitable environmentalism meme. But this doomsaying may be contributing to the sense of progress, because it helps to fix environmental degradation as both a threat and an injustice (wrong both pragmatically and morally). This fits well into the progressive narrative of history, which tells of humanity gaining more and more control over the world (conquering pragmatic obstacles -- the advance of science and technology) as well as weeding out injustices (conquering moral obstacles -- first aristocracy, then slavery, then racism, and now my cause).
Stentor Danielson, 20:14,
7.7.03
To follow up on that last post, The Hamster also links to an encouraging article about the generational divide over homosexuality in which Glenn Stanton, an analyst for the social conservative group Focus on the Family, gives a good example of the contrast between instrumentalists' love of trial and error versus romantics' love of the eternal:
"What kind of culture are [young people] going to be creating for us, and are those decisions good?" he asks. "They were raised in the midst of a huge family experiment called no-fault divorce.... They don't realize they're going to subject a whole other generation to another experiment."
(When I did my template redesign earlier this summer, I had this idea that I was going to try to focus more on environment and anthropology-related topics. But lately this seems to be turning into a gay-rights blog.)
One of the most frequent claims made against gay marriage is that it breaks down the stability of marriage. There is rarely much to back it up, and so it's frequently ridiculed (as in this interesting article, found via The Hamster) by gay marriage proponents. But I think there's a way in which the argument is not quite as absurd as it seems.
It all depends on what you consider the basis of the stability of marriage, and on this issue the two sides seem to follow the two major trends of modern philosophy. Gay marriage proponents tend to take an instrumentalist view -- for them, marriage is a sort of contract that people enter into to solidify and formalize their relationship and secure certain benefits for themselves. This perspective is most apparent in talk about how marriage could be expanded to accomodate polygamy, and in proposals to split the religious from the secular/governmental aspects of marriage. Gay marriage opponents, on the other hand, take a romantic view -- for them, marriage is a mystical and time-honored union that cannot be captured by our crude utilitarian logic. This is most clearly evidenced in appeals to God's institution of heterosexual marriage in Genesis.
Romanticism often goes hand-in-hand with an appeal to the past. Mystical power tends to come to us from time immemorial, validated by its pedigree as something special because it is eternal and outside our human trials and errors. (Instrumentalists, on the other hand, celebrate trial and error and openness to reconsidering and revising.) So for marriage to work as advertised, it must maintain that myth. Any change made to the rules of marriage would weaken it -- and people's faith in it as an institution -- by demonstrating that it's merely a human social convention, subject to revision as we see fit. This is, in essence, a sophisticated version of the pure slippery slope argument I outlined earlier ("there's nothing wrong with gay marriage per se, but we can't change the version of marriage that we have").
In a sense, the romantic argument that gay marriage will undermine marriage as a whole is correct to the extent that people considering marriage take the romantic view. The question, then, is whether those people can be accounted for by a combination of 1) winning them over to an instrumentalist view, 2) allowing the passage of time to enshrine "any two adults" as the operational definition of the partners in a romantic view, and 3) weakening of marriage that is an acceptable cost of the gain in gay rights, a la the article linked in the first paragraph (I suspect that hard-core instrumentalists such as myself would see this third category as quite large).
Stentor Danielson, 17:56,
Centuries ago the small indigenous Uros tribe conceived of the [floating] islands [of Lake Titicaca] as a way to isolate and protect themselves from rival tribes, the Collas and the Incas. The Uros people harvested the reeds in the shallows of the lake, bundled them together tightly and built floating island platforms complete with reed houses and canoes.
... "The issues facing the people living on the floating islands are multifold," says anthropologist Arrufo Alcantara Hernandez, director of the faculty of social sciences at the Universidad Nacional del Altiplano in Puno. "The waters of the Uros have been overfished by commercial fishermen, tourists are affecting their traditional culture and sewage from Puno is causing environmental and health problems."
This is an interesting -- though hardly unique -- story of how, after a lifestyle becomes unviable after being out-competed in the struggle for resources, it is preserved on the basis of showing off the lifestyle. Instead of being a straightforward solution to the problem of making a living, it becomes a secondhand or once-removed solution -- making a living from tourism by pretending to make your living in a "traditional" way.
Usually when we hear these stories, the blame is placed on those who have made the traditional lifestyle unviable -- in this case polluters and commericial fishers. Indeed, it often seems that making someone else's lifestyle less viable is prima facie wrong, even if the actions in question aren't otherwise bad. But this article ultimately swings in the opposite direction, portraying the situation as purely an issue for the Uros to deal with, as if it were akin to a storm or earthquake that no entity can be held responsible for:
"They've successfully dealt with many serious challenges over the last few centuries," he [Hernandez] says. "I think if the Uros people use foresight and care, they'll be able to overcome their problems and balance their traditional lifestyles with the modern world."
debitage 
My summer quasi-hiatus is going to get a lot less quasi for the next 6 or so weeks. The computer lab in the dorm has been closed for the summer on a day's notice for upgrading. So I've only got the public library for my internet needs, and it's not open every evening.