HBO recently aired a documentary entitled Hacking Democracy which looks at the secrecy surrounding electronic voting machines in use within the US, particularly those manufactured by Diebold; how do the machines work, how are votes counted, how are they audited and why is the whole process so secret?

It follows a group of concerned citizens as they try to break through the veils of secrecy and figure out exactly what is going on with these machines, and uncovers some ugly incidents: Gore being counted a total of -16,000 votes (yes, minus votes) in 2000, differences between official ‘on-the-night’ audit trails from Ohio 2004 and those published later, and those official trails ending up in the garbage; the official record of the public’s vote being deliberately thrown out?? It closes with a demonstration of how easy it is to fix an election by pre-loading votes onto the memory card before the election starts. The voting machine doesn’t pick up any tampering and duly certifies a rigged election.

Although it’s 1h20m long, this doco is well worth a look as a testament to what basically the death of democracy in the very nation which proclaims itself the greatest democracy on the planet.

See it on Google Video

Every now and then a science article will throw up something that I think is brilliant. An article in today’s Seed, entitled The Wiring of Desire, contained one such nugget.

After discussing how temperature affects sexual selection in developing gecko embryos, and how it also affects later behaviour, the author goes on to mention similar effects on other species:

It turns out that an embryo’s environment has similarly powerful effects in other species. Mice, for example, give birth to more than one pup at once — and the behavior of adult mice is affected by whom they were next to in the womb. A female who was between two sisters is more docile as an adult, and males tend to find her more attractive than other females. She is also more likely to be attacked if she rejects a male’s advances. A female who was sandwiched between two brothers will be more aggressive—and less attractive to males.

I just like it because it illustrates the fluid nature of everything in nature. It’s not simply a case of different, precisely controlled, doses of testosterone for male and female, but a general increase of testosterone in the area around embryonic males which then also raises levels in any surrounding females.

A web site showing CO₂ emissions, birth rate and death rate for every country on Earth. Turn the audio on and watch for a while. Strangely hypnotic…

BreathingEarth.net

The Loom as an interesting post discussing co-operation and cheating amongst slome molds:

After several hours, the Dictyostelium slug goes through another change. The back end catches up with the tip, and the slug turns into a blob. About 20 percent of the cells move to the top of the blob and produce a slender stalk. In order to keep the stalk from flopping over, these cells must produce rigid bundles of cellulose. Unfortunately, this cellulose also tears apart the amoebae that make it. The remaining amoebae in the blob then take advantage of the suicide of their slugmates. They slide up to the top and form a globe. Each amoeba in the globe covers itself in a cellulose coat and becomes a dormant spore. In this form the colony will wait until something – a drop of rainwater, a passing worm, the foot of a bird – picks up the spores and takes them to a bacteria-rich place where they can emerge from their shells and start their lives over.

If a particular mold can avoid becoming part of the stalk it could gain an evolutionary advantage, but as you would expect there are checks and balances in place to detect cheating. The rest of the article looks at the latest research on the topic and is worth a read.

The Caot Institute has a paper titled A False Sense of Insecurity (97KB PDF) which looks at the real risks associated with terrorism and compares them to risks encountered in everyday life.

Until 2001, far fewer Americans were killed in any grouping of years by all forms of international terrorism than were killed by lightning, and almost none of those terrorist deaths occurred within the United States itself. Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.

Kind of puts it all in perspective really. And for this the US has spent almost a trillion dollars on wars in Iraq & Afghanistan? Sounds like a complete waste of money to me… unless, could it really all be about oil?? ;-)

The article also makes the point that we are letting the terrorists by becoming unnecessarily worried and that our governments, particularly the US Government, are deliberately inflaming public opinion:

What is needed, as one statistician suggests, is some sort of convincing, coherent, informed, and nuanced answer to a central question: “How worried should I be?” Instead, the message the nation has received so far is, as a Homeland Security official put (or caricatured) it, “Be scared; be very, very scared — but go on with your lives.”

Or, as John Howard likes to say, “Be alert, not alarmed”. However, while this approach would be admirable, and certainly preferable to the current one, it would probably fail as the general public has an inability to understand relative risk. The article notes that an American’s odds of dying on an airline flight is around 1 in 13 million. You would get the same odds in a car, on the safest roads, after only driving 11 miles! Worth a read.

Hat tip to Bruce Schneier

Juan Cole, and one of his readers, have come up with a theory of what is really going on in the Middle East, and it all centres on Iran’s oil & gas reserves.

In a worst case scenario, Washington would like to retain the option of military action against Iran, so as to gain access to its resources and deny them to rivals. If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, however, that option will be foreclosed. Iran may not be trying for a weapon, and if it is, it could not get one before about 2016. But if it had a nuclear weapon, it would be off limits to US attack, and its anti-American regime could not only lock up Iranian gas and oil for the rest of the century by making sweetheart deals with China. It also might begin to exercise a sway over the small energy-producing countries of the Middle East. (The oil interest would explain the mystery of why Washington just does not care that Pakistan has the Bomb; Pakistan has nothing Washington wants and so there was no need to preserve the military option in its regard.)

Even an Iranian nuke, of course, would not be an immediate threat to the US, in the absence of ICBMs. But the major US ally in the Middle East, Israel, would be vulnerable to a retaliatory Iranian strike if the US took military action against Iran in order to overthrow the regime and gain the proprietary deals for themselves.

In the short term, Iran was protected by another ace in the hole. It had a client in the Levant, Lebanon’s Hizbullah, and had given it a few silkworm rockets, which could theoretically hit Israeli nuclear and chemical facilities. Hizbullah increasingly organizes the Lebanese Shiites, and the Lebanese Shiites will in the next ten to twenty years emerge as a majority in Lebanon, giving Iran a commercial hub on the Mediterranean.

China and India could get Iran, and Iran could get Lebanon, and as non-OPEC energy production decreases, the US and Israel could find themselves out in the cold on the energy front.

From The Open Voting Foundation:

“Diebold has made the testing and certification process practically irrelevant,” according to Dechert. “If you have access to these machines and you want to rig an election, anything is possible with the Diebold TS — and it could be done without leaving a trace. All you need is a screwdriver.” This model does not produce a voter verified paper trail so there is no way to check if the voter’s choices are accurately reflected in the tabulation.

This is brilliant:

To see him speed down hallways and make sharp turns around corners is to observe a typical teen – except, that is, for the clicking. Completely blind since the age of 3, after retinal cancer claimed both his eyes (he now wears two prostheses), Ben has learned to perceive and locate objects by making a steady stream of sounds with his tongue, then listening for the echoes as they bounce off the surfaces around him. About as loud as the snapping of fingers, Ben’s clicks tell him what’s ahead: the echoes they produce can be soft (indicating metals), dense (wood) or sharp (glass). Judging by how loud or faint they are, Ben has learned to gauge distances.

The technique is called echolocation, and many species, most notably bats and dolphins, use it to get around. But a 14-year-old boy from Sacramento? While many blind people listen for echoes to some degree, Ben’s ability to navigate in his sightless world is, say experts, extraordinary. “His skills are rare,” says Dan Kish, a blind psychologist and leading teacher of echomobility among the blind. “Ben pushes the limits of human perception.”

From: People.com

RealClimate has an article up discussing potential tipping points in our climate which, among other things, elaborates further on Jim Hansen’s ‘ten years left’ comment:

The ‘10 year’ horizon is the point by which serious efforts will need to have started to move the trajectory of concentrations away from business-as-usual towards the alternative scenario if the ultimate warming is to stay below ‘dangerous levels’. Is it realistic timescale? That is very difficult to judge. Wrapped up in the ‘10 year’ horizon are considerations of continued emission growth, climate sensitivity, assumptions about future volcanic eruptions and solar activity etc. What is clear is that uncontrolled emissions will very soon put us in range of temperatures that have been unseen since the Eemian/Stage 5e period (about 120,000 years ago) when temperatures may have been a degree or so warmer than now but where sea level was 4 to 6m higher…

Scientific American has a blog post which tackles one of the common global warmign skeptic srguments, namely that the present warming could be a natural uptick. It examines all the different sources of evidence for global warming and explains why the current warming is almost certainly man-made and not a natural uptick. Well worth a read, simply to give you an idea of the depth of evidence. It’s also part of a series of articles dealing with common themes of global warming skepticism, so it’s worth reading the other articles in the series too.

The Bush administration tried to prevent Jim Hansen, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, talking to the press about climate change but the plan backfired. Here he gives his expert opinion on the global warming debate in the New York Review of Books, including this alarming warning:

As explained above, we have at most ten years — not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions. Our previous decade of inaction has made the task more difficult, since emissions in the developing world are accelerating. To achieve the alternative scenario will require prompt gains in energy efficiencies so that the supply of conventional fossil fuels can be sustained until advanced technologies can be developed. If instead we follow an energy-intensive path of squeezing liquid fuels from tar sands, shale oil, and heavy oil, and do so without capturing and sequestering CO2 emissions, climate disasters will become unavoidable.

An article in Scientific American details the latest research on how supervolcanoes form and erupt, and how their eruptions can have long term effects on the atmosphere.

The oxygen 17 excess and other chemical patterns that we found in sulfate from the Yellowstone and Long Valley ash samples thus implied that significant amounts of stratospheric ozone were used up in reactions with gas from the supereruptions in those regions. Other researchers studying the acid layers in Antarctica have demonstrated that those events, too, probably eroded stratospheric ozone. It begins to look as if supervolcano emissions eat holes in the ozone layer for an even longer period than they take to cool the climate.

This loss of protective ozone would be expected to result in an increased amount of dangerous ultraviolet radiation reaching the earth’s surface and thus in a rise in genetic damage caused by rays. The magnitude and length of the potential ozone destruction are still being debated. Space observations have revealed a 3 to 8 percent depletion of the ozone layer following the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. But what would happen after an event 100 times larger? Simple arithmetic does not solve the problem, because the details of atmospheric oxidation reactions are extremely complex and not fully understood.

A surgeon answers the question ’What’s it like to cut in to somebody?‘:

Nowadays, routine surgery, such as breast biopsies or other elective surgery, it doesn’t even raise my pulse anymore. But I never forget that, society has granted me and relatively few others the privilege to cut into living human bodies legally in order to try to cure them of disease. I like to think that I’ve earned that right through my skill, but it could just as easily have gone the other way.

An animated GIF of a time-lapse photo series, taken by one of the Mars Rovers, showing Earth rising in the sky as seen from Mars. That little dot rising on the right hand side encompasses everyone you’ve ever met, or will meet, every place you’ve been or will visit and your entire existence, past, present and future. Insignificant in the grand scheme of things, isn’t it?

Very interesting.

Picture a psychiatrist at her desk reviewing a case file. The report describes a young, teenaged male who, with several others his age, killed nearly a hundred victims. The case is astounding—not only because of the intensity and magnitude of the violence, but because nothing remotely like it has ever happened in the community before. Not even a single murder. As the psychiatrist turns the pages and reads on, the pieces of the puzzle start to come together. A few years before, the young killers had witnessed the massacre of their families and been orphaned. Afterwards, although still very young, they were relocated to another community with few adults to raise them; importantly, it was absent of older, mentoring males.

Read the full article for a surprise.

Ali Khamenie, the Supreme Jurisprudence of Iran, gave a speech yesterday in Iran. The U.S. Governement’s Open Source Centre has provided an english translation of the Persian, and Juan Cole has placed a section on his site, in which Khamenei addressed the issue of Iran trying to acquire nuclear weapons:

"Their other issue is [their assertion] that Iran seeks [a] nuclear bomb. It is an irrelevant and wrong statement, it is a sheer lie. We do not need a nuclear bomb. We do not have any objectives or aspirations for which we will need to use a nuclear bomb. We consider using nuclear weapons against Islamic rules. We have announced this openly. We think imposing the costs of building and maintaining nuclear weapons on our nation is unnecessary. Building such weapons and their maintenance are costly. By no means we deem it right to impose these costs on the people. We do not need those weapons. Unlike the Americans who want to rule the world with force, we do not claim to control the world and therefore do not need a nuclear bomb. Our nuclear bomb and our explosive powers are our faith, our youth and our people who have been present on the most difficult scenes with utmost power and faith and will continue to do so. (Chants of slogan, God is great).

Rolling Stone presents an article titled Was The 2004 Election Stolen? which looks at the discrepancies in the US Presidential election. There are a number of discrepancies in any process as large as an election in a nation of almost 300 million people, but when almost all of those discrepancies favour one candidate over the other, there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark. In one instance “Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent.”,1),
(

What’s more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent — a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.(39)

‘’When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the supposition of election fraud,’’ concludes Freeman. ‘’The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud — and yet this supposition has been utterly ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.’‘

Sure, the article is written by Robert F. Kennedy, so there’ll be accusations of partisan bias, but all his sources are listed at the bottom of the article and there’s just too much evidence for it all to be easily explained away.

Knowing what we now know about the insecurity of the Diebold election machines and the fact that the company refuses to allow independent analysis of the machines’s software, it’s easy to see how the result could be suspect. When the owner of the company, who’s a major Republican donor, comes out with a quote like the following it’s even more suspect. [link]

David Bear, a spokesman for Diebold Election Systems, said the potential risk existed because the company’s technicians had intentionally built the machines in such a way that election officials would be able to update their systems in years ahead.

“For there to be a problem here, you’re basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of software,” he said. “I don’t believe these evil elections people exist.”

This idiot doesn’t believe corrupt election officials exist?? What planet is he living on?

It’s a long article, but definitely worth a read.

The Boston Review has a long article by Helena Cobban titled Hamas’s Next Steps in which she interviews the new Palestinian Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister on what their plans are now that they are in power.

Coggan touches on the reluctance of Fateh to accept Hamas’s victory, the difficulties in ruling the West Bank given Israeli travel restrictions, and the refusal to recognise Israel:

Dr. Mahmoud Ramahi, Hamas’s chief whip in the PLC, made a similar statement when I interviewed him a few days earlier in the PLC’s main seat in Ramallah:

“We have said clearly that Israel is a state that exists and is recognized by many countries in the world. But the side that needs recognition is Palestine! And the Israelis should recognize our right to have our state in all the land occupied in 1967. After that it should be easy to reach agreement. They ask us to recognize Israel without telling us what borders they’re talking about! First let us discuss borders, and then we will discuss recognition.”,1),
(

Haniyeh made clear in our short interview that his government would be putting domestic rather than international affairs at the top of its agenda. “We are confident we can succeed in this new challenge of organizing the Palestinian house,” he said. “Our people want internal security now.”

She also touches on Hamas’s relationship with the Arab League, and how the League will be encouraging Hamas to adopt their line on conditional recognition of Israel, their plans to buildup economic ties independent of Israel and their views on the rights of women.

What are the prospects for Palestinian women, Christians, and secular Muslims if Hamas extends its power? Hamas is different from al Qaeda and the Taliban in many important ways—just as Palestinian society is very different from those of the rugged, underdeveloped areas of Afghanistan and Waziristan that spawned and incubated the two other movements. To understand this, it helps to meet a woman like Jamila Shanty, a longtime professor at the Gaza Islamic University and one of six Hamas women elected to the PLC in January.

Shanty clearly relishes her new role in the parliament, where, she told me, she hoped to sit on the political and legal-affairs committees. She said she was inspired mainly by the Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. “Sheikh Yassin always paid such a lot of attention to women’s affairs.” she said. “He made sure the mosques all provided enough space for the women to pray in, and that they offered lectures and other activities for women. He told us that the work we do in our homes is important because it has real political value. But he also strongly encouraged women to become engaged in causes outside the home. Whenever he visited a mosque he would make sure to have a meeting with the women there, and he would urge all the women to finish their education and contribute what they could to society. He was an example not just to Palestinians but all Muslims.”

It’s a very interesting read, especially since the usual crap you read in other newspapers just parrots the “Hamas are terrorists” line without providing any background or making any effort to educate readers about the ins and outs of Palestinian politics. While there’s no doubt that Hamas does have a military wing known for attacks on Israel, it’s also a fact that the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, no slouches themselves on the suicide-bombings front, was an integral part of Fateh, the party which held power in Palestine for twelve years prior to Hamas’s victory. Foreign aid still flowed in to Palestine while they were in charge, so why is there suddenly all this talk of cutting off the flow now that Hamas are in their place, especially since Hamas decided to unilaterally enforce a ceasefire in 2005, which they have stuck to? It would seem that now is the good time to engage with the official representatives of the Palestinian people, who, let’s not forget, were democratically elected, not to shun them.

Walter Tschinkel of the Department of Biological Science at Florida University has published a paper on the nest architecture of the Florida harvester ant, Pogonomyrmex badius. Not particularly interesting you say, but I like the way he took casts of the nests: by pouring orthodontic plaster into the nest entrance, allowing it to harden, and then excavating the result.

Check out this 12-metre cast!

NASA have published an interesting video showing the operation of one of the cameras aboard the Huygens probe as it descended towards the surface of Titan, including various data readouts. It’s also interesting because of the amount of data crammed on to the screen, and the way they use sound to convey data as well.

Stephen Wiltshire is a British autistic savant which the ability to draw detailed cityscapes from memory. He was recently taken on a 30-minute helicopter flight over Rome, after which he sat down and drew everything he’d seen on a 15-ft scroll of paper.

As a child, Stephen was mute and did not relate to other human beings. Aged three, he was diagnosed as autistic. He had no language, uncontrolled tantrums and lived entirely in his own world.

At the age of five, Stephen was sent to Queensmill School in London, a school for children with special needs, where it was noticed that the only pastime he enjoyed was drawing. It soon became apparent he communicated with the world through the language of drawing; first animals, then London buses, and finally buildings. These drawings show a masterful perspective, a whimsical line and reveal a natural innate artistry.

He has also done similar drawings of Tokyo and Hong Kong. Have a look through the site, and be sure to check out some of the videos of him in action.

The nut-jobs in the US are at it again, making plans to attack Iran. It’s a repeat of the bullshit job done on Iraq, with the usual suspects claiming that Iran is a threat to global security, sponsor of terrorists, about to nuke Israel etc. Seymour Hersh has the details in the New Yorker.

“This is much more than a nuclear issue,” one high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna. “That’s just a rallying point, and there is still time to fix it. But the Administration believes it cannot be fixed unless they control the hearts and minds of Iran. The real issue is who is going to control the Middle East and its oil in the next ten years.”

Another Iraqi official has said that his country is in the midst of a civil war:

Despite the violence, U.S. officials have discounted talk of civil war. However, a senior Iraqi official said Saturday that an “undeclared civil war’’ had already been raging for more than a year.

”Is there a civil war? Yes, there is an undeclared civil war that has been there for a year or more,‘’ Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal told The Associated Press. "All these bodies that are discovered in Baghdad, the slaughter of pilgrims heading to holy sites, the explosions, the destruction, the attacks against the mosques are all part of this.’‘

Even the U.S’s own assessments admit that the situation in Iraq is a mess, with only 3 out of 18 provinces deemed to be stable, though you’ll never hear the politicians describe the situation as a civil war. In fact, they’re all remarkably upbeat for some reason not supported by evidence. Propaganda perhaps?

Some interesting stuff:

First up, The Blind Locksmith discusses the reconstruction, and use, of ancestral proteins to figure out how evolution produces complex systems:

Scientists reconstruct an ancestral protein by tracing its evolution into new versions carried by living species. Along each lineage, the gene for that protein picks up mutations, some of which alter the structure of the protein. Scientists can determine many of those mutations, and by working backwards up the evolutionary tree, they can determine what the original gene looked like. Thanks to powerful statistical techniques, they can determine how much confidence they can have in each letter in the genetic sequence they reconstruct. If they find a lot of statistical confidence in the overall sequence, they can then go to the lab and use it as a guide to build the corresponding protein. And once they have the protein in hand (or in beaker), they can see how it works.

Second, we have a news item from Nature on the discovery of a fossil in Canada which illustrates how fish came out of the water and evolved into mammals:

The beast has bony scales and fins, but the front fins are on their way to becoming limbs; they have the internal skeletal structure of an arm, including elbows and wrists, but with fins instead of clear fingers. The team is still looking for more complete specimens to get a better picture of hind part of the animal.

Finally, this one isn’t evolution-related, but rather an account of one guy’s trip to Los Alamos and the site of the first atomic bomb test. The Trinity site is only open to the public twice a year, so this guy went along, took some video and loads of photos, and wrote it up. It’s an interesting read:

Every August, Ed stands downtown with an American flag and a banner that reads WE ARE SORRY FOR HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI. It’s not a widely-shared sentiment in this city of bombmakers; sometimes Lab workers show up with signs that read NO WE’RE NOT, ED, and sometimes passers-by yell and swear at Ed. This may, in fact, be the only place that I’ve ever heard anyone express the opinion that nuclear bombs are a good thing.