Annals of the Erosion of Privacy (cont’d.): Software to Track E-Mail Raises Privacy Concerns. David Brake‘s blog pointed me to this New York Times piece covering the little-known fact that, if your email client can read HTML mail, senders can tell when and if you read their messages. You can route your outgoing messages through Postel Services in Korea to be alerted when someone reads your mail.

Alzheimer’s: A disease of the young? “Figures suggest that more and more young
people are being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s
disease…It’s a terrifying illness
even for those in their
80s – but the tragedy
can be even more
poignant for those in
their 50s, 40s, and 30s.” BBC

BBC News has an all-you-need-to-know primer on Alzeimer’s Disease here. And –backing up a moment — here‘s a good overview of memory and its dysfunction in general, from the Canadian Broadcasting Co.

Defiant Milosevic Re-elected As Leader of Socialist Party. “An official at the U.N. war crimes
tribunal Sunday expressed outrage that
Slobodan Milosevic could
flaunt himself in the public and political arena while under an
international arrest warrant. Sunday he won re-election as leader
of Serbia’s Socialist party and has appeared on state television
twice in the week leading up to the party congress.” Reuters

U.N. Climate Conference Ends, No Agreement Reached. “World economic powers hurled blame at each other
for the two-week Hague summit’s ending without a plan to
coordinate cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.” The third world, which is considered at much higher risk from increased temperatures, faults the industrialized nations for squabbling over cost. The US, in particular, is criticized for thinking it can buy its way out of trouble, and, because it stands to face the greatest costs under the proposed new treaty, for a move, generally considered sleazy, to attempt to obtain credit for the CO2-removing photosynthetic effects of its forests and grasslands. (The New York Times says the US “can’t see the forest for the trees.”) The stalemate stacked up as the US, Australia, Canada and Japan against the EU. One more try is scheduled for May, 2001.

A Hangout That Caters to a Crowd From Space New York Times

Walter Dembski‘s book The Design Inference, this critic writes, is the spearhead of a new creationist attack on science, and remarkably ignorant of more than two hundred years’ of critical rejection of the argument from design dating from David Hume. BioScience

The new issue of Lingua Franca has several rewarding articles. First is a portrait of E. Fuller Torrey, an inspiring psychiatrist who has long argued that psychiatry should either just treat the most severe of brain disorders or give up its pretensions to being part of medical science. His mix of common sense and controversy has mostly been applied to schizophrenia (patients with which form the core of my professional activities as well); his 1983 book Surviving Schizophrenia is unexcelled as a guide for sufferers and their families. (In the same year, Torrey was demoted from his post at St. Elizabeth’s, the federal maximum-security psychiatric institution in Washington, DC, for publishing his findings that the hospital had colluded with Ezra Pound by declaring him insane to protect him from prosecution for treason during WWII.)

One thread of Torrey’s attention has been to the possibility that viral infection can cause schizophrenia. There has been a long, scientifically inconclusive, love affair with this theory in psychiatry, part of the agonizing search to explain such a mysterious, incurable and devastating condition. [My take on this is that the problem with explanations of schizophrenia is that it is probably a heterogeneous, “wastebasket” diagnosis for a number of different neurobiological conditions. For this reason, the effect size of any etiological theory that is researched is likely to be “washed out” by noise.]

Some of the provocative evidence includes data on the worldwide distribution of the disease; a seasonal pattern to schizophrenic births; and the discredit to the usual hereditary explanations done by the disease’s persistence in the face of its obvious adverse impact on reproductive fitness. Torrey has been fascinated by the possibility that toxoplasmosis, transmitted from housecats, could be an important key to this conundrum. Several studies under his aegis have shown that cat ownership (and, in the most recent study, specific serological evidence of toxoplasmosis exposure) is significantly more common among the parents of children who become schizophrenic, and it can be argued that there was an increase in the frequency of the illness at around the same time in the late 19th C. when cat ownership became popular.

“I’ve given talks on the cat stuff
and people’s response is almost universal: ‘I’m not surprised—I’ve
known my cat is schizophrenic for years!'” He chuckles. “One talk I
gave at a department of psychiatry, a fellow came up to me and said, ‘I
don’t want you to repeat this, but the former chairman of our
department of psychiatry was convinced that his cat was hallucinating,
so he gave him liquid Thorazine and it really seemed to help.'” Torrey
looks at me and smiles. “People find cats strange, so they don’t find
this idea so odd.”

Then there’s an interesting portrait of Richard Rorty, controversial, ambitious and erudite philosopher who arguably has best captured the era’s challenge to the concepts of truth and objectivity and who some describe as the closest thing we’ve got on this side of the Atlantic to a public, postmodern French intellectual. His work is a particular source of anxiety to conservative critics who feel it undermines the foundations of the public’s moral interity.

Like his idol John Dewey, whom he credits with breaking
through “the crust of philosophical convention,” he has pursued
twin careers as disciplinary bad boy and high-minded public
philosopher. He has set out to deflate the aspirations of his
profession—he rejects the idea of truth as an accurate reflection of
the world—while placing his own unorthodox philosophical views at
the center of an ambitious vision of social and historical hope. In
recent writings especially, he champions an unlikely brand of
“postmodern bourgeois liberalism” that has largely infuriated
postmodernists and liberals alike.

Finally, Jim Holt considers the Multiple Universes Hypothesis.

Sampling hidden populations. ‘A Cornell University sociologist has transformed the small world concept
of “six degrees of separation” into a scientific sampling method for
finding and studying “hidden populations,” from drug users to jazz
musicians.

‘There are no lists available or associations of runaway youths, for
example. But this sampling method takes advantage of the fact that
individuals in a group know each other. As we gather information during
the sampling process of referrals, we look at the degree to which people
tend to recruit those similar to them. Then, we can mathematically
correct for the non-randomness and project what the sample would have
been had there been no biases,” says Douglas Heckathorn, professor of
sociology at Cornell.’

Sampling hidden populations. ‘A Cornell University sociologist has transformed the small world concept
of “six degrees of separation” into a scientific sampling method for
finding and studying “hidden populations,” from drug users to jazz
musicians.

‘There are no lists available or associations of runaway youths, for
example. But this sampling method takes advantage of the fact that
individuals in a group know each other. As we gather information during
the sampling process of referrals, we look at the degree to which people
tend to recruit those similar to them. Then, we can mathematically
correct for the non-randomness and project what the sample would have
been had there been no biases,” says Douglas Heckathorn, professor of
sociology at Cornell.’