May 2007 – Page 6 – a sibilant intake of breath

From Hubble to Webb

NASA has announced some more details on the James Webb telescope, slated to replace Hubble as the most important such instrument in orbit. Hubble is located in an elliptical low Earth orbit, with an orbital height of 589km and an orbital velocity of 7,500 m/s. The Webb will be located at Lagrange Point 2. This is an area where gravity will keep the telescope in a sun-earth line. As a result, the telescope will always be in the shadow of the Earth. NASA has a report on the transition.

Hubble has been one of NASAs great successes over the last 17 years, both in terms of the quality scientific information generated and in terms of the way the project reflects upon the organization. By finally offering an astronomical vantage point not affected by the Earth’s atmosphere, Hubble has been able to make unprecedented observations and discoveries. For example, consider the various exoplanets discovered in recent years, either because of how they obscure stars by passing in front of them or cause stars to wobble with their gravitational pull. Hubble was also ideally placed to observe the impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into Jupiter. I remember watching the video feed from that at the Vancouver Planetarium, back in 1994. Some pretty stunning images of the universe have also been generated.

Just yesterday, Hubble may have observed a ring of dark matter. Given the disjoint between how galaxies behave gravitationally and the number and mass of stars we can observe, scientists have speculated that most of the material composition of the universe consists of dark matter and dark energy. The former has gravitational effects but does not interact with electromagnetic radiation. The latter is hypothetically involved in universal expansion: serving as one possible explanation for why the universe is expanding at an expanding rate, as observed through the Doppler shift. Data from the remainder of Hubble’s operational life and the full span of the Webb telescope’s operation may help with the refinement or rejection of both of these ideas, with coincidental improvement in our understanding about the contents and evolution of the universe.

Hubble has been discussed here before. A song about the Doppler shift has also been linked.

Odd bit of pharmacology

I learned an interesting fact at my second Wadham High Table dinner in as many days. Apparently, the antibiotic tetracycline binds aggressively with calcium. This is why you can’t drink milk when you are taking it, since the drug will bond to the milk and not enter your bloodstream. For the same reason, it builds up inside bones and teeth that are growing. If you examine a skeleton from a person who took tetracycline, the bones that were growing at the time can be made to fluoresce.

Because tetracycline turns brown when exposed to light, people who take these drugs while their teeth are still growing are likely to have them turn brown permanently.

An urban world

In recognition of how half the global population now lives in cities, this week’s issue of The Economist has a survey on urbanization. Much of it makes for fascinating reading. For instance, they allege that the Kibera slum in Nairobi exists more for reasons of corruption than of poverty. The provision of private services and the need for constant bribery make its continued existence profitable, just as the pool of cheap labour it provides plays an important economic role.

As always, they come up with some interesting statistics, as well. Vancouver is ranked as the most livable city in the world, and one is reminded that Tokyo has a larger population than all of Canada. Delhi has the world’s dirtiest air, as measured by particulates, followed by Cairo and Calcutta. More than 70% of all urban dwellers in sub-Saharran Africa live in slums. In Ethiopia, Malawi, and Uganda that figure is over 90%.

The United Nations envisions human population growth as a phenomenon that will eventually slow, leaving the world with a population of about eleven billion. By then, more than 60% of people will be living in cities, dependent upon agricultural productivity elsewhere to be able to sustain themselves. Hopefully, climate change and other ecological phenomena will not make that overly challenging.

Little Miss Sunshine

As dysfunctional family films go, this is a clever and artistic one. Tolstoy was right to say that the genre is infinite. This film has strong hints of The Royal Tenenbaums: over-the-top characters, bearded men trying to commit suicide, and a similar tendency towards set-piece funny lines. At times, it is very funny indeed.

The first time I watched the film, it was unfortunately interrupted about ten minutes before the end. Only tonight did I finally get to see the conclusion, based on my flatmate Kai’s enviable collection of DVDs.

Little Miss Sunshine is recommended to those who like humour based on bizarre characterization and a have a reasonable tolerance for social criticism and absurdity. While the film is sometimes a bit on the disturbing side, it never comes close to the unwholesomeness of child beauty contests themselves.

PS. This is what my father and I intended to go see, only to find ourselves watching The Devil Wears Prada.

Spam egg sausage and spam

As time goes by and Google indexes more and more of my content, I get more spam of every variety. I get spam emails, spam comments on the blog, and spam added to the wiki. Of the three, the email spam is the most common, but also the most easily dealt with. It has existed for so long that good systems exist for dealing with it: whether based on Bayesian reasoning or on group filtering processes. The former are largely centered around word usage. If an email contains the word ‘Viagra’ the chances of it being spam are high. If it includes the string of characters ‘V1agr4!!!’ it is virtually certain to be spam. The latter are based on user reporting. Most spam isn’t very original. As such, if GMail has 1000 people report that a particular message is spam, it can pretty reliably block it for everybody else.

I cannot get too far into how this blog’s anti-spam system works. This is because automated systems seem to have become capable of determining which system or combination of systems a site is using and then launching an appropriate attack. Suffice it to say that the blog uses a variant of both approaches above, plus one more special thing. Since the system was implemented, it has dealt with spam from 9188 different IP addresses. Security through obscurity may not be intelligent or rubust in many circumstances, but it works well enough when you are somewhat better defended than most sites, not of much value to attack, and surrounded by sites with much worse systems.

The wiki is the most vulnerable, precisely because the intended purposes of a wiki requires easy editing. Given that so few users contribute to mine, the best solution might be to lock it down so that only those with approved accounts can access it.

One possible lesson to be drawn from this is that technology eventually evolves the ability to deal with abuse. The older the system being attacked is, the more likely a sensible and effective set of countermeasures will be developed. Alternatively, it is possible that the more open approaches used by blogs and wikis are fundamentally more vulnerable to abuse.

Only time will tell.

Obviousness and patents

This week, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling related to the ‘obviousness’ test in patent filing. The case – KSR Int’l Co. v. Teleflex Inc. (PDF) – hinged on whether an automatic adjustment device for an accelerator pedal created by KSR infringed upon the patents of Teleflex. KSR argued that the combination of technologies was obvious, and that Teleflex could not claim royalties.

In order to maintain a fair and beneficial system, the condition that patents cover non-obvious innovations is highly important. The whole reason for granting patents is to foster innovation by granting temporary monopolies to innovators. Patents are meant to include enough information to allow a skilled practitioner to actually make the thing being patented. Under this system, inventors are meant to be willing to disclose the nature of what they have accomplished so that it might serve to aid the investigations of others. In exchange, they get legal rights over their invention for a defined period of time. This trade-off hardly makes sense when companies are permitted to patent trivial innovations, such as the much ridiculed patent awarded to Amazon.com for ‘one click shopping.’

Recently, there have been a good number of cases where the patent system is accomplishing something quite unlike this ideal. ‘Patent trolls‘ acquire patents of a broad and obvious kind, then wait for another company to release a successful product that arguably infringes on them. More often than not, the objective is simply to receive some kind of payment in return for ending the legal hassle. Of course, this interferes with the processes of innovation, as well as undermining the general credibility of the patent system. RIM and Vonage have both recently been targeted by such suits.

It seems sensible that patent offices should be more aggressive in their interpretations of what it means for an invention to be ‘novel’ and ‘non-obvious.’ As such, they would reduce the occurrences in which someone is unfairly granted rights over an idea that many other people have likely come up with, but not bothered to go through the process of trying to patent. It would also reduce the danger of patent trolling, particularly if the courts recognize that such behaviour can be predatory, and that the patent system ultimately exists to serve the public good.

PS. Slashdot has commented on the Supreme Court ruling. Most of these entries are also relevant.

Piracy today

Today’s Strategic Studies Group meeting was unusually interesting. Lieutenant Commander Nigel JF Dawson was speaking about contemporary piracy and gave me specific permission to discuss it here a little. Basically, there are two hotspots of piracy in the world today: off the coast of Somalia and in the Malacca Strait. The latter waterway carries about 60% of world trade, including all the oil used by Japan and China.

Apparently, there are two major types of piracy happening in Southeast Asia. The first is simple enough: unsophisticated robbery of ships by individuals with few weapons and little organization. The second is much more dramatic: the wholesale capture of ships. Organized gangs steal whole oil tankers, repaint them, produce fake documentation for them, sell the cargo, and then sell or scrap the ships themselves. In the Malacca region, the unsophisticated kind of piracy is the norm south of the third parallel, while the region to the north involves mostly the larger scale sort. The character of piracy off the African coast was less thoroughly discussed. I have heard of an incident where the Tamil Tigers stole a ship containing a consignment of munitions for the Sri Lankan government.

A Piracy Reporting Centre in Malaysia apparently keeps track of all this, though only about one in four incidents are actually reported. I suppose it would make the clients of shipping companies nervous to learn that their cargo faces such perils.

It seems like the easiest way to target the problem would be to deal with the on-shore networks that support the trade. In particular, there must be ways to combat the wholesale expropriation and re-titling of ships. A global registry seems as though it would have a decent chance of being useful, at least when it comes to trade in huge oil and gas tankers.

54 days left in England

I have booked my flight back to Canada for the 2nd of July. My exams are between June 11th and 13th. On the 29th, it is possible that I will have a viva (oral) examination. That would only be if I found myself on the cusp of passing or failing, or passing and getting a distinction.

Whittling down my possessions to two checked bags of under 20kg will be a challenge. Oxford residents may be interested in what I have for sale.

Buying compliance?

Unusually, this week’s roster of environment related presentations at Oxford included something on the Stockholm Convention. Specifically, Dr. Veerle Heyvaert from the LSE spoke to the Socio-Legal Dimensions of Environmental Law and Regulation seminar series about ‘buying compliance’ within the Stockholm framework.

The central part of her presentation addressed the relationship between the two major kinds of state involved in Stockholm. Essentially, there are rich developed states that had already sharply restricted or banned most persistent organic pollutants (POPs) covered by Stockholm before negotiations even began. Then, there are developing states that either still used some of the pesticides restricted or produced large amounts of unwanted by-products such as dioxins or furans. The differences between the two are largely centered around ongoing behaviour, financial resources, and institutional capabilities.

Dr. Heyvaert suggested that the major contribution of the rich states is to help pay for the costs of POP abatement in the poor states. She expressed concern that while the latter is seen as binding, the former is somehow seen as voluntary or charitable. While the Stockholm Convention lacks any official mechanism to ensure compliance, it seems more likely that pressure will be put on poor states to stop emitting than on rich states to help pay for it.

Clearly, there are issues of equity involved. From the perspective of international law, however, it seems to me that there is a more fundamental issue at hand. Cases like the Trail Smelter Arbitration of 1937 have helped to make explicit the norm in international customary law that states do not have the right to pollute the territory of their neighbours. As such, states that have already cut back are not in violation, whereas those that continue to emit are. While this may be a neatly expressed legal situation, it doesn’t conform too well with the reality of who can pay and what actions individuals are likely to take. As such, mechanisms such as those in the Stockholm Convention that allow richer states to assist with the costs of cleaning up industrial and agricultural processes in poor states seem to make both equitable and legal sense.

The question is how to apply such arrangements to more demanding cases. Nobody with a choice is going to pump out large volumes of Mirex or Toxaphene. They are among the nastiest chemicals humans have ever dreamed up. As such, there is a limited incentive to free ride on a system that seeks to limit their production and usage, especially when there are effective channels for financial and technical assistance in doing so.

At the base of all this, there is the question of what goes into the equity calculation. You might choose to consider past emissions when deciding who pays what, or you might look only at present practice. You might consider overall wealth or not do so; require states to pay equal amounts, equal percentages of GDP, or use some other formula. What kind of balance you adopt is the stuff of political deal-making, which I suppose is where most international considerations of equity are ultimately addressed in a meaningful way.

The Lives of Others

The Lives of Others (Leben der Anderen, Das) is a potent and pertinent film: a reminder of recent history that speaks to ongoing questions about surveillance, as well as the human and inhuman aspects of state security organizations. The film is especially impressive because of the subtlety with which the topic is approached, and the space for contemplation it affords to the viewer.

The cinematography of the film is elegant to the extent that one is in danger of missing subtitles on account of preferring to keep one’s eyes where the film-makers wanted them. The only minor lapse in good judgment is in a few scenes where the use of very wide-angle lenses produces an unwelcome and disconcerting effect. The set designs, costumes, and performs are all extremely well chosen, really managing to convey a certain vision of life under the GDR.

The film struck me as a kind of inversion of Good Morning, Night (Buongiorno, notte) which I saw back in November of last year. One explores the moral dilemma of a member of Stasi, the infamous East German secret police, while the other is about a member of the Red Brigades, an Italian terrorist movement in the 1970s. In a way, both films are comments on how people can and do deal with the structures in which they find themselves. In particular, how exposure to the humanity and vulnerability of others affects one’s pre-existing convictions.

People in Oxford may find it useful to know that it is playing at the Phoenix Cinema on Walton Street until Wednesday May 9th.