8 Ways to Sunday

According to a Washington Post article published yesterday, Congress may have anti-spyware legislation on the President’s desk before the November recess.

The proposed legislation would probably be a combination of two bills already approved separately by the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the House Judiciary Committee. The Senate Commerce Committee has also recently passed its own version of an anti-spyware measure. Rather than making certain types of software illegal — a tactic understandably opposed by the tech industry — the final combined bill is likely to target specific behaviors commonly associated with spyware. One example would be installing a program on a computer without a user’s explicit permission.

Frankly, I think this is probably a last-minute attempt by legislators to score brownie points with an increasingly tech-savvy electorate prior to the November elections. Even so, I’ll be happy if it produces some good results.

A neighbor of mine — about half a block away across a large expanse of empty lawn in my sparsely-populated neighborhood — is playing Song of the South so loudly tonight that I can hear every word from my back porch. I can’t decide whether my neighbor is deaf, or making some kind of ersatz political statement.

A 1988 promotional film from Apple, imagining the computer interface of 2012. I particularly like the dorky bow tie on the computerized character.

(citation: AlwaysOn)

The International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, an agency of the United Nations, released a report yesterday stating that increasing numbers of people around the world are being effected by natural disasters.

The report claims that 254 million people were affected by such disasters last year — almost three times as many as in 1990. According to the report fatalities from natural disasters reached 83,000 in 2003, 30,000 more than in 1990. The increases are said to be at least partially due to increased migration to urban centers and vulnerable coastal areas.

ISDR director Salvano Briceno summarized the main causes cited in the report, saying, “The urban concentration, the effects of climate change, and the environmental degradation are greatly increasing vulnerability.”

I believe that the effects of global warming are real, and I’ve certainly noticed an increase in “heavy weather” since the days of my youth. That said, the way this was presented (at least by the BBC in the above-linked article) tripped my built-in scientific bullshit detector.

When I took microbiology my junior year of college, the first few weeks of the course were devoted entirely to learning how to spot logical and procedural flaws in published scientific research. The point was to make us aware of the kinds of mistakes that we shouldn’t be making in our own work during the class. However, I’ll be forever grateful to professor Carolyn Herman for this lesson in “bunk spotting” because, even though I didn’t go on to a career in science, it’s served me well in watching the science and technology news reports that stream endlessly across the television and the web these days.

I can’t claim any real knowledge of the ISDR’s methodology without having read their published report, but one major omission stands out at me after reading the BBC article and a few others. Efforts to improve disaster response and reporting are always ongoing — especially in the Third World. The information technology required to report pending and in-progress catastrophes, and the subsequent casualties, has become far more widespread and inexpensive in the time since 1990, the report’s apparent baseline.

Were these changes taken into account in the report and factored into the estimated increases? Improved health and IT infrastructure in Third World nations could have lead to faster and more thorough casualty reporting that might easily account for the increases cited in news reports.

What I’d really be interested in seeing is some data on changes in the incidence of natural disasters over the last 13 years. Does anyone know if this is part of the report, and where I can find it?

“People are going to vote for Bush because they think he’s a tough guy, because he started a war. But to start a fire doesn’t take a tough guy; it’s to extinguish that fire that takes a tough guy. They have just started fire after fire after fire with no plan to put them out.”

— Julie Delpy on “Real Time with Bill Maher“

Note, 9/18/2004: Quote corrected after watching a rerun. Delpy is just so cute when she’s being all politically passionate in her adorable French accent.