10.10.03

All work and no blog make Homer something something ...

Posting will be sparse for the next few days, as I take some time for visiting and try to catch up on the work I should have been doing while visiting.
Stentor Danielson, 01:11,

9.10.03

Time travel

A warning to users of @mail: Wesley Clark was right. Time travel is possible. I hit the "back" button while reading my mail, and apparently the @mail system took that literally. When I got to my inbox, it had all my mail listed as having arrived on December 31, 1969. Groovy.
Stentor Danielson, 03:17,

8.10.03

Academic political bias

In discussing academic discrimination based on political views, Jacob Levy says:

The actual argument developed in a lecture is likely to be a serious matter, and not as likely to create the appearance of hostility to views other than the professor's own. (After all, it's an argument.) It's the little jokes, one-liners, casual asides, and obviously-everybody-knows comments that you've got to watch out for. This is a familiar point with regard to hostile environments against, e.g., women. But it's also true as regards whether the classroom is experienced as a place open to political disagreements. The more a prof's lecture is peppered with these little asides and dicta, the more the impression is created that views other than the prof's own won't be given a respectful hearing.

I've noticed a lot of these little asides this semester (more so than usual). My GIS professor likes to compare simple Ordered Weighted Average techniques to Reaganomics. My Geography of Fire professor refers to the President as "Georgie."* My Resource Geography professor opened class today by pointing out that the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger won the election in California proves that Americans are too stupid to govern themselves. On the one hand, these kind of things are probably not terribly discriminatory in effect simply because there are so few conservatives at Clark (and even fewer among the grad students), and both the liberals and the Marxists can agree that George Bush is a terrible president. But sometimes they even annoy me, and I agree with the sentiment behind them.

* This is one of my pet peeves: people disparagingly referring to public figures by mocking nicknames. The 2000 election was not between "albore" and "$hrub," and California's new governor is not "Ahnuld." If someone has to resort to such childish tactics, I begin to suspect they don't have a real argument.
Stentor Danielson, 14:35,

7.10.03

Green houses

Little Solar Houses For You And Me The most obvious clue to the larger picture -- a two-kilowatt BP Millenia thin-film solar system -- can be seen glinting on the rooftop of the home of Adam Indrajaya and Lina Kinandjar, a landscape worker and pastry decorator, respectively, who moved to Tennessee from Malaysia six years ago. The solar panels were provided by the Tennessee Valley Authority (the public electricity supplier throughout the seven-state region of the Southeast) and the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (located just miles away in Oak Ridge, Tenn.), which teamed up with Habitat for Humanity to build this experimental settlement. Even more impressive than the rooftop installation is the Oak Ridge-designed technology beneath it: special insulated walls, windows, and floors; energy-efficient lighting, appliances, and ducting; and state-of-the-art systems for heating, air conditioning, and hot water. The laboratory also added more esoteric efficiency measures, such as a system that captures the heat from shower water after it goes down the drain, and even one that captures the warmth that comes off the coils behind the fridge. ... Yet the family consumes roughly 25 kilowatts of electricity a day -- less than half the 60-kilowatt average in the U.S. And whether they intend to or not, the couple may be setting a lifestyle precedent for thousands, and perhaps millions, of others nationwide. Oak Ridge is working with the DOE to come up with a prototype house that, by 2010, will cost the same to build as a conventional middle-class home while being 50 to 70 percent more efficient and functioning as a net-zero-energy home (meaning it can produce as much energy per year as it consumes). "Right now, all too frequently, the typical solar home is something akin to a customized Cadillac," said Jeff Christian, director of the Buildings Technology Center at Oak Ridge and the man in charge of the Habitat for Humanity project. "What we're trying to do is come up with the Volkswagen of net-zero-energy homes."

This all sounds great, but one thing that the article didn't really address was the issue of retrofitting existing houses. A couple years ago Professor Klepeis took us out to see his new house, which he built using a variety of green ideas (though it wasn't as fancy as the house in this article). He told us that he had thought about trying to green-up one of the existing houses in Hamilton, but concluded it wasn't within his budget.

Even setting aside qualms about suburban sprawl, since these houses seem to offer a technical fix for obvious environmental issues without requiring much of a lifestyle change, it's simply not feasible to build a high-tech new house for every person. Things like recycling, low-flow toilets, and more energy-efficient refrigerators worked because they could be slotted in to the existing building infrastructure. But getting some of the improvements the article describes might almost require rebuilding from scratch.
Stentor Danielson, 22:51,

Greenpeace gets in trouble

Seeing Greenpeace Specifically, [charity watchdog group] PIW accuses Washington-based Greenpeace of shifting tax-deductible donations from Greenpeace Fund — its reputedly educational, public-interest-oriented 501(c)(3) — to Greenpeace, Inc., a more directly political and activist unit. As such, the Internal Revenue Code designates the latter as a 501 (c)(4). "Greenpeace has devised a system for diverting tax-exempt funds and using them for non-exempt — and oftentimes illegal — purposes," Hardiman said in unveiling the grievance. "It's a form of money laundering, plain and simple." ... If Greenpeace runs afoul of tax authorities, it will not be the first time. Revenue Canada withdrew the tax-free status of the Greenpeace Environmental Foundation in 1989. The Canadian federal tax unit ruled that tax-exempt organizations there had to provide some public benefit, and that Greenpeace did not. "I do not think it can be assumed that remedying any and all forms of pollution always conveys a public benefit," wrote Carl Juneau, assistant director of the charities division, according to Stewart Bell's account in the June 5, 1999 National Post [story here]. "At the least, the possibility of countervailing detriment to the public has to be entertained and competing interests weighed. For example, closing down a polluting mill may make for a cleaner town and a healthier population, but it may also propel that population into poverty."

If PIW's charges are correct, Greenpeace seems to be in trouble. But it's a different kind of trouble than the trouble that they apparently encountered in Canada. The US challenge is based on the idea that money taken in by the non-profit arm of the organization was used for political activity, which is not allowed to be tax-exempt. The Canada challenge appears to have been based on a judgement that Greenpeace's activity was not beneficial to the public. The political versus nonpolitical activity distinction, while slippery and questionable, seems on the whole more neutral and less subjective than the benefits society versus doesn't benefit society distinction.

Perhaps it's just my ignorance of Canadian law, I'm a bit disconcerted by the idea that the government can revoke a charity's status based on whether it was benefitting the public. It seems like that's a determination that the charity's funders ought to be making, and enforcing according to whether they donate money or not. I'm a bit skeptical myself of whether Greenpeace's activities, on the whole, are beneficial to the public (it's a milder version of my complaint against direct-action tactics in the case of ELF). At best, the government can step in when an organization actively harms society in a substantial way -- that is, when it commits a crime. But civil society should have wide latitude to pursue different ideas of what benefits society.

On the other hand, preventing an organization from moving money about from fund to fund is necessary to make that private vote of dollars work. If I were to contribute money to Greenpeace's education fund, believing that those activities were beneficial to society, I'd be a bit upset if they were using that money to fund direct action that I see as detrimental to society.
Stentor Danielson, 22:08,

6.10.03

They need me

Australia Burning To Learn Better Bushfire Science Australia was crying out for sound science on bushfire management to help it fight fires and curb the debate over hazard reduction burning, fire experts were told yesterday. Speaking at the third international wildland fire conference in Sydney, the Federal Science Minister, Peter McGauran, said there was a big split on bushfires, and people were now looking to scientists to "break the deadlock" between pro-burning and anti-burning special interest groups. ... Bob Alexander, of NSW Fire Brigades, told the conference that a survey of communities affected by the 2001-02 Black Christmas fires showed most residents had a poor understanding of the risk posed by bushfires and how to preserve their lives and property.

This is encouraging in a way, since I'm planning on researching Australian bushfire for my dissertation. Of course, ceteris paribus things would be better if people knew everything they needed to know about bushfire already. But if there are going to be gaps in our knowledge, I can't complain if those gaps are ones I'm interested in helping to fill. The article focuses mostly on the need for biophysical sorts of research about the best frequency of burns and so forth. But if people are as ill-informed about fire as the study cited in the third paragraph I quoted suggests, there may be plenty of room for what I'd like to do -- a study of the social mechanisms for how people acquire, process, and transmit information about fire and fire safety.
Stentor Danielson, 19:43,

Dog on fire

While I'm on this "stories about animals" kick ...

Small Wildfire Started By Burning Dog ... Northern Idaho firefighters say they’ve never seen anything like this: A couple driving a van on Saturday ran out of gas and pulled off Highway 95 near Culdesac. Fire Chief Gary Gilliam says the motorist tried to prime the van’s carburetor with starting fluid. But the carburetor backfired, throwing fire into the cab and onto a dog sitting on the lap of a female passenger. ... The dog rolled onto the dry grass, starting a fire.

Stentor Danielson, 19:36,

Rat-bashing

Something To Gnaw On So you may have been unaware, especially if you keep a garden compost pile out back, that the world had a shortage of rats. And that scientists have been desperately trying to clone them in labs in Missouri and France. Growing more rats might strike some as akin to developing a new strain of herpes, a potentially interesting project on paper, but why? The rat group spent years on 875 unsuccessful tries before successfully cloning Ralph and three other rats.

Cloning herpes is like cloning newspaper editors with an inflated sense of their own funniness.

On a more serious note, the premise of the criticism is the popular idea that cloning is about cheaply mass-producing organisms. Maybe I'm shortsighted, but I don't see that as being the practical application of cloning. If we needed more rats, the sensible thing to do would be to let them breed. Cloning, no matter how cheap and easy (at the moment it's very expensive and very hard) offers no improvement, in volume and time terms, over breeding. The clone still has to grow up from an embryo. What cloning offers is a way to ensure that the organisms you produce have certain genetic characteristics. So we hope that, for example, investing the money in cloning lab animals will allow us to weed out genetic differences that could complicate tests. The much-feared army of a million Hitlers is worrisome not because there are so many of them -- it would be much easier to recruit, or even breed, a genetically diverse army -- but because they would include Hitler's genes, which would presumably incline them to be genocidal maniacs.
Stentor Danielson, 17:55,

5.10.03

Pope vs. poodle sweaters

Owners Of Pampered Pets In The Doghouse An authoritative magazine published by the Jesuits has lashed out at the culture of pampered pets, saying animals have no souls or rights. The Roman Catholic magazine Civilta Cattolica, whose contents are approved by the Vatican, criticised the spending of "good money" on outlandish pet foods, calling the practice mad and "morally condemnatory". Such money, it said, would be better spent on nobler causes, "such as the starving children of the Third World". "Animals don't have rights, because these belong to Man," it declared on Friday.

I'm a bit reluctant to comment on this since I don't know Italian and hence can't read the original article. But I'll presume that the Telegraph-via-Sydney Morning Herald version captures the essence of it.

Based on the summary, it looks like we're dealing with two separate propositions -- that money spent on pampering pets is better spent on needy humans, and that animals are not moral entities. The first proposition is framed as utilitarianism -- the philosophy that we should use our resources so as to maximize the benefits to all moral entities (typically including just humans). That's all we need so long as we're dealing with pampering. Pampering is care that goes beyond meeting needs. But an injunction to buy Meow Mix instead of Fancy Feast and give the savings to Oxfam could be produced by a hard-line animal rights view that makes animals moral entities on the same level as humans. The utilitarian consideration that not starving creates more happiness than wearing one of those little poodle sweaters is enough to do the work. At most, the soullessness of animals would direct where you spent the savings from not pampering anything -- the children of Kabul rather than the Kabul Zoo.

It would be helpful to know if the Jesuits would condemn, say, the Humane Society. Humane Society pets aren't pampered by any usual definition. Yet the Society does expend a great deal of money and time caring for them and finding homes for them. If animals are truly moral non-entities, the Humane Society's resources would be better spent feeding poor humans (and indeed some people will argue this). It's possible that if one denied all rights to animals, any care of an animal would seem to be a sort of pampering. The article does mention that humans are to care for nature and be good stewards, but it's not clear whether that simply means to abstain from wanton cruelty, or if it entails a positive duty to help suffering animals -- such as the strays the Humane Society takes in, or the denizens of the Kabul Zoo. If the latter, we once again get very close to the conclusions of an animal-rights utilitarianism.

It's interesting that the article saw animal rights as the underpinning for pampering of animals. Certainly, many people -- pamperers and non-pamperers -- tend to think of their pets as people (and are bemused by the fact that the pets seem to agree). But in my experience (admittedly anecdotal), people who articulate a strong animal rights view do not pamper their pets. Their concerns about animals are directed at those that are truly suffering (which the Jesuits may agree deserve our help, at least in cases of wanton cruelty or environmental destruction, though there's probably a divergence of feeling over the meat industry).

I suspect most people that pamper their pets do it for the owner's benefit. An analogy to spoiled children suggests that egregious pampering is probably not in the pet's long-term best interest. In this sense, pampering one's pet is little different from pampering oneself with fancy clothes and food, or being obsessive over the niceness of one's car or house. Thus, what the Jesuits ought to be aiming at is not animal rights, but selfishness.
Stentor Danielson, 21:21,

"Calvin and Hobbes" criticisms

I am apparently result #10 for "'calvin and hobbes' criticisms" on Google. So let me take this opportunity to point out to the person who found me with this search request that the only valid criticism of Calvin and Hobbes is that the strip isn't being drawn anymore.
Stentor Danielson, 15:02,