Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Begin It Now

Hesitation is an insidious disease of the human mind that inhibits change.


For me, it is a voice that interrupts the silence of focused reasoning and purposeful intent with an unwelcome dialogue of doubt and fear. It causes delay that sadly leaves words unspoken, works unformed, relationships unjoined, and scars of regret.

Fine art painting entitled Hesitation by William Henry Bartlett. Shows shows an adolescent girl seated on a rock by the edge of the sea, with an outstretched foot poised above the water, pondering the consequences of taking the plunge.
Hesitation -William H. Bartlett
Unchecked, hesitation can become incapacitating. It is especially difficult to overcome as others misjudge your inaction as negligence, procrastination or simple laziness. It is not.

Reduce hesitation in life.


A confidant, mentor and great human being named Buddy Portugal showed me how to engage spontaneity, act on ideas and reduce hesitation in ways that have been life changing. Hesitation, he said, is a state-of-mind that can be tamed by awareness and practice.

People sacrifice the present for the future. But life is available only in the present. That is why we should walk in such a way that every step can bring us to the here and the now.--Thích Nhất Hạnh
His advice is to live in the present and be self-aware.

Much hesitation is fostered by something that might happen in the future, e.g., What will they think? What will happen next? All you can control is your actions at the present - act now. The future and how others react is out of your control.

Next, be very conscious to recognize the voice of hesitation in your thinking.  The very second that quiet thought becomes a dialogue, stop the discussion and get to work. Don't give creeping doubt and fear a voice.
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now --Goethe

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Scientists Beware: Fox News and Politicians Poison Minds with Junk Science

In answer to a Sisyphean societal problem called we can't fix stupid, I recently proposed that we all take some responsibility for chipping away at the roots of stupidity instead of simply having a good laugh and sharing anecdotes with our friends. Digging deeper though, it seems so much of the stupidity we witness in society is a direct result of misinformation, fake facts, and junk science proliferated by the media.  I asked myself, how do we go about attacking junk science?  Then I thought about Don.

Harness brainpower to eliminate junk science


Perspective view of CERN Particle Accelerator with superimposed math equations
In the late 80s I met my neighbor Don for the first time. Don was a mathematician working for then Bell Labs and one of the first truly genius-level people I ever met. He created programming algorithms for something affectionately known among phone company employees as "the switch".  While I can't pretend to really know what he did at his job, allow me to digress for a moment to give you a sense of the complexity of the problems he solved.

Long before today's computing power, before the world wide web, before cell phones and laptops, Don was part of a very, very elite group of mathematicians and engineers working on the switch. What the switch did was in simple terms was traffic phone communications between caller and receiver. Say if you dialed 123-4567 your call was slowly directed by telephone circuits, in rooms literally filled with electromechanical relays, to a friend or business in your local area.  It could take up to ten seconds to dial a 10-digit phone number. Society's desire for speed and new features meant switching a call was becoming many orders of magnitude more complex.

During this time touch-tone dialing was replacing rotary dial phones, so the switch had to discern between a rotary signal and a touch-tone signal. Also, area codes were introduced (but not required) and therefore the system had to discern whether a call was local or to be switched to another largely electromechanical switch room in a different city. Features now taken for granted were being added like forwarding, conferencing, call waiting, and voice mail -- all seemingly  too much for electromechanical switches and simple computing power. Within the switch and its subsystems call functions were increasingly controlled by hard and soft coded instructions. Don created the mathematical algorithms that kept all this complexity and innovation progressing.

His head was always in the clouds, I'd engage him on the possibilities of what could be achieved by pure math power and he lit up. Despite downing more than one cocktail trying to track through his descriptions of how complex math could be employed to solve nearly any problem, I walked away having no doubt he was right.

Scientists, mathematicians, engineers, economists, and researchers -- Speak up!


What if Don were to apply just a fraction of his brainpower toward eliminating junk science? Wow. And there are a lot of really smart people just like him working on remarkable innovations all throughout the U.S. According to National Science Foundation statistics, some 3.5 million work in science & engineering research. So with all this brain power around, why are our lives dominated by an abundance of political, cultural, and economic junk science?

Proliferation of junk science has become an industry unto its own --overwhelming real science, truth, and fact at every turn. And the sad result is junk science is literally killing us humans in the form of pollution and exploitation of natural resources; it also poisons our society through misguided legislation, and suppression of the truth.

A 2010 study on the impact of misinformation in the U.S. electorate offers a staggering set of conclusions:
1. An overwhelming majority of voters... encountered misleading or false information during the prior election
2. The poll found strong evidence that voters were substantially misinformed on...
 the stimulus legislation, healthcare reform law, TARP, state of the economy, climate change, campaign contributions by the US Chamber of Commerce and President Obama’s birthplace, to name a few. In particular, voters had perceptions about the expert opinion of economists and other scientists that were quite different from actual expert opinion
3. There were significant differences in the level 
of misinformation encountered by those who voted Democratic and Republican
4. Consumers of all sources of media evidenced substantial misinformation, suggesting that false or 
misleading information is widespread in the general information environment... increasing exposure to news sources decreased misinformation; however, for notable conservative news sources (like Fox), higher levels of exposure increased misinformation.
A notorious marketing axiom has that you can build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. Manufacturers and retailers who have relied on this strategy are long dead.  But scientists, mathematicians, engineers, economists, and other researchers who figuratively invent better mousetraps every day seem to be stuck to this old model, and will likely eventually share the same fate -- unless they change.  Their problem is the world doesn't pay attention to published research papers.

So what to do?  Speak up. Don't let your hard work and that of your colleagues be misrepresented in the media, twisted repetitively by our cultural leaders, and enacted into self-serving policies by politicians. Imagine if some 3.5 million really smart people were to devote just an hour a week of their time to ensure the accurate representation, dissemination, communication, and education of science to the masses.

182 million hours a year to promote common understanding of scientific fact


So what does scientific activism look like? Well to Stephen Hawking, it was publishing a book to help non-scientists understand fundamental questions of physics and our existence called, A Brief History of Time.  To others it is speaking as an expert on NPR, or other main stream media, writing a column, recording a podcast for the masses, starting a website or a blog, becoming more outspoken in your associations, demanding your peer groups take a stand on broader dissemination of the truth.

Our democracy cannot function if we are all making choices based on lies.

Friday, February 6, 2015

Let's Enforce the Logan Act

Bust of Brutus What do these people have in common?

Robert Hanssen, Robert Ford,
Benedict Arnold, Aldrich Ames
Brutus, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
Judas Iscariot, Mata Hari
Tokyo Rose, and John Boehner

Traitors


Two weeks before national elections in Israel, prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu will have an opportunity to stand before a joint session of the US Congress at the invitation of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner.  There is one small problem here.

Speaker Boehner extended the invitation to the foreign leader without constitutional authority to do so, or permission from the White House. By law the President of the United States has sole authority to lead and conduct foreign policy.  When he or she engages in formulating treaties with foreign governments they are to seek the advice and consent of the Senate. The Constitution gives the House of Representatives no separate powers.
The Logan Act (1 Stat. 613, 30 January 1799, currently codified at 18 U.S.C. § 953) is a United States federal law that forbids unauthorized citizens from negotiating with foreign governments. It was passed in 1799 and last amended in 1994. Violation of the Logan Act is a felony, punishable under federal law with imprisonment of up to three years.-- Wikipedia
The Logan Act was passed under the administration of President John Adams, during tension between the U.S. and France.  It is named after Dr. George Logan of Pennsylvania, a member of Congress, who in 1798 engaged in semi-negotiations with France during the Quasi-War. The Act was intended to prohibit United States citizens without authority from interfering in relations between the United States and foreign governments.  Here is text:
§ 953. Private correspondence with foreign governments. 
Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

This section shall not abridge the right of a citizen to apply himself, or his agent, to any foreign government, or the agents thereof, for redress of any injury which he may have sustained from such government or any of its agents or subjects.
1 Stat. 613, January 30, 1799, codified at 18 U.S.C. § 953 (2004)
The sedition that passes for governing on the Right is growing old.  It is time to remind elected officials much of what is going on lately is against the interests of the people they're elected to represent and against the law. 


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