Blogging on Corante's The Loom, Carl Zimmer calls attention to yet another flaw in the Kass Commission's anti-scientific approach to its subject:
Kass stumbled on another count, one that I think speaks to a profound problem with the council and one that I havent read much comment on. Kass claimed that Blackburn had to be replaced because the council will now be focusing on neuroscience, rather than reproduction and genetics, Blackburn's areas of expertise. If thats true, then the council is not ready for a shift to the brain. If the Bush administration wanted to beef up the council's neuroscience credentials, surely they would have replaced Blackburn and May with neuroscientists. They did not. In fact, the council as it's now constituted has only one member who does research on neuroscience.
Even more troubling, though, is the indifference the council has shown to what neuroscience tells us about bioethics itself.
Kass has written in the past about how we should base our moral judgments in part on what he calls "the wisdom of repugnance." In other words, the feeling you get in your bones that something is wrong is a reliable guide to what really is wrong. The Council on Bioethics embraces Kass's philosophy. They have declared that happiness exists to let us recognize what is good in life, while real anger and sadness reveal to us what is evil and unjust. "Emotional flourishing of human beings in this world requires that feelings jibe with the truth of things, both as effect and as cause," they write. By extension, repugnance is a good guide for making decisions about bioethics. If cloning gives you the creeps, its wrong.
But what exactly produces those creeps? In recent years neuroscientists and psychologists have made huge strides in understanding both emotions and moral judgments. They've scanned people's brains as they decide whether things are right or wrong; they've looked at the brain's neurochemistry, and they've gotten insights from the brains of animals and the fossils of ancient hominids as well. And their conclusions seriously undermine the philosophy of the council.
Read the whole post and its links. Of course, this irreverently materialist approach to the brain is exactly what we can expect the Kass Commission to attack next. Get ready to hear about how authentic human beings don't take Prozac.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 09, 2004 • Comments
Forbes.com has an interesting short piece on PortalPlayer Inc., the privately held Santa Clara company that supplies the chips and internal software for the iPod. PortalPlayer gets about $15 for every iPod sold, which makes it a very happy company. Peter Kafka reports:
Gary Johnson is having a very good 2004, too. His Santa Clara, Calif.-based shop, PortalPlayer Inc., supplies the chips and internal software that power Apple's iconic music player. More than 2 million of the white beauties have sold so far, with PortalPlayer grossing about $15 a pop.
Time for some boasting, no? No. Though PortalPlayer's connection to the iPod has been an open secret since 2002, Johnson doesn't dare acknowledge the relationship, for fear of offending his best--and a notoriously secretive--client. "I'm not even going to refer to those guys," he says.
Which is a shame, since Apple plays a starring role in PortalPlayer's success story. (Apple, for its part, will only confirm that PortalPlayer supplied "one of many components" for the iPod.) Privately held PortalPlayer says its revenue more than doubled to $20 million last year. In the fourth quarter it broke even for the first time (in the sense of earnings before interest, taxes and depreciation). Some people say the outfit could go public later this year....
Apple's in-house designers provide the look and feel that make the iPod so distinctive; PortalPlayer provides the innards that lie beneath. It won over Apple with a design that uses two modest processors and an operating system two years in the making.
PortalPlayer's "firmware" makes it easy for makers to mix and match features and rapidly stamp out upgrades without having to start from scratch. Apple picked PortalPlayer in the summer of 2001, and the iPod was in stores in November of that year.
This vertical disintegration is known as "outsourcing," whether it takes place at home, abroad, or in some combination. Companies, like individuals, specialize at what they do best, their partners to do the same, and the result is an increase in economic value all around. Self-sufficiency--for individuals, nations, or companies--sounds like a romantic ideal, but it's really a prescription for mediocrity and hardship.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 09, 2004 • Comments
The WaPost's David Ignatius offers an interesting hypothesis:
I can't begin to answer the jobs question, but I can provide some shreds of anecdotal evidence, drawn from recent conversations with business executives in the United States and abroad.
My sense is that investors and managers are still traumatized by the shocks to the system of the past three years--a chain of events including the collapse of the high-tech bubble; the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; a global war against Islamic terrorism; and the fallout from the Enron scandal.
These shocks, taken together, have made investors more risk-averse and cautious. Economists would define it as a change in the mental "discount" rate by which investors calculate how big a return they'll require in the future to part with their cash today. And at the very time investors are looking for this higher risk premium, prospective annual returns have settled back toward historical levels from the 20 percent-plus rates of the bubble years.
Adding to this culture of caution are the regulatory changes that followed the tech collapse, the Enron fiasco and other Wall Street scandals. Hoping to restore investor confidence, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, which required corporate chief executives, in effect, to take personal responsibility for what their underlings were doing in complicated financial transactions. That sounds great in principle, but in practice it has added to the wariness of CEOs, and probably reduced the job-creating dynamism of the economy.
One unintended consequence of the new rules is that they make it costlier for small start-up companies to go public. Ann Winblad, who is one of the principals of a big San Francisco investment firm, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, estimates that for a company with $50 million in revenue, the extra cost of compliance could total $1 million to $3 million annually -- when you add in the three required independent directors, the outside auditors, the internal auditors, the directors' and officers' insurance, and other costs.
Certainly the venture capital business reflects the new caution: Where 629 venture funds raised a total of $105.4 billion in 2000, last year there were just 113 funds that raised $10.8 billion. Warren Buffett, the iconic figure of American capitalism, expressed the new wariness in his annual report released Saturday. Noting that he's sitting on a company-record $36 billion in cash, he explained: "Our capital is underutilized now. . . . It's a painful condition to be in -- but not as painful as doing something stupid."
Read the whole (short) thing.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 09, 2004 • Comments
I finally had a chance to fondle the mini iPod today, and I'm not the least bit surprised that they're flying out of the stores. They're beautiful and cute at the same time. And how often do you really need to carry around more than 1,000 songs? In this case, style represents a huge quality improvement, regardless of what capacity-obsessed analysts may have thought.
Thanks to Jeff Taylor for sending this article about the early sales results:
Apple found sweet success last year with the original iPod, which, paired with legitimate song service iTunes, has won the company dominant market position in both market sectors. Apple said it intends to broaden the market further for iPod by pushing the mini version--a 3.6-ounce player capable of holding 1,000 CD-quality songs.
Early indications are that iPod mini, which garnered more than 100,000 preorders since being announced in January, is outdoing the success of the original iPod, which sold 125,000 units in its first quarter of availability, Apple said.
"The customer response has been incredible--it's just been off the charts," Apple worldwide iPod marketing manager Danika Cleary told TechNewsWorld. "It's meeting and exceeding our expectations."
Referring to long lines at Apple stores for the iPod-mini debut, Cleary said the smaller player, priced at US$250, is riding the wave of popularity generated by the original iPod, which Apple has sold to more than 2 million customers. The company sold 730,000 of the music players during the holiday quarter alone, she reported.
The mini's stylish charm is captivating even tech columnists:
At a Best Buy store in Manhattan a week ago Friday, they lined up to plunk down $250 on the newest flavor, the iPod Mini. Queues like this one used to form only on very special occasions--the release of a Rolling Stones album, Springsteen tickets--but not for a battery-operated music player. By 7 p.m., the thing was sold out. "Try next week," said the clerk. "Come early."
Cuddliness has been one key in driving the success of iPods in the past couple of years. And, this low-carb South Beach model arrives in a rainbow of metallic hues. Compared to its snow-white big brother, the Mini is less than half the size and only about half as heavy. The guts, however, are a different can of technology: While the least-expensive "normal" iPod spins a dense 15-gig hard drive that holds nearly 4,000 tunes, Junior is built around a 4GB Hitachi-built hard disc with a max capacity of about 1,000 songs.
The difference in price is $50; the trade-off--sex and style and wow, for more data storage in the more expensive large 'Pod--is your choice to make.
Of course, I'll choose the Mini. For cachet, it's without peer, the Louis Vuitton of portable audio. Sonically, it's a match for anything else MP3-ish on the market.
I didn't buy a mini iPod today, but that doesn't mean I didn't want to.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 08, 2004 • Comments
On Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok recently conducted lively discussion of whether we're facing economic and fiscal disaster. You can start with the final entry and read backwards.
Ultimately, both fiscal and economic futures depend on economic growth. If productivity (measured and unmeasured) keeps rising, even the fiscal problems become less significant. If our grandkids are filthy rich by today's standards, which is actually quite possible, they won't have as hard a time covering social security's promises. Medicare's, which rise with the medical standard of living, are a different matter--unless, of course, medical care somehow gets cheaper as well as better.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 08, 2004 • Comments
For the paperback edition of TSOS, I did a Q&A that included a question about what recent designed objects I like. Among the answers: the Cross Ion pen, which comes in more colors and styles than I imagined before I went online to check the spelling of Ion. (I don't get any money if you order one, but don't let that stop you.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 08, 2004 • Comments
The San Francisco Chronicle suggests that the turnout at Bush's Silicon Valley fundraiser was less than impressive. No Arnold, no star power.
President Bush gathered Republicans together north and south this week, picking up cash and praising Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the political star who he said has shown "no party can take California for granted."
Problem: The star was noticeably absent.
Schwarzenegger did not appear at public events for Bush on Wednesday in Los Angeles or Thursday in Bakersfield and Santa Clara.
And it showed.
The cavernous Santa Clara Convention Center was only half full at Bush's fund-raiser in Silicon Valley, normally a piggybank for political campaigns. Curtains masked vacant areas, but the sense of excitement was harder to cover.
Bush's solo act took in just $700,000, the smallest take of any of his eight California fund-raisers since last June, when Bush-Cheney '04 began to rake in the dough for the coming campaign.
Compare that with the night before. At an exclusive Republican National Committee fund-raiser in Los Angeles--the only one of three Bush fund-raisers the governor attended--the take was a juicy $3.5 million.
Why the small turnout for the president, whose office usually rates top billing? Several possibilities come to mind. His Silicon Valley support may simply be weak. High-tech types can't stand aggressive social conservatism, and that goes double when it comes to attacks on science. It's also possible that Bush's fundraising success has been so well publicized that "swing funders," as opposed to hard-core supporters, figure he just doesn't need the money and spend their political dollars elsewhere. State politics is hot right now.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 08, 2004 • Comments
Debra Saunders covered Bush's Silicon Valley fundraising speech and has some friendly but tough advice for the Bush campaign. Bottom line: "It's time for some new material."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 08, 2004 • Comments
Ron Bailey's devastating deconstruction of Leon Kass's claim not to know the views of the council's new members is a must read.
It's tacky to say it, so no one to my knowledge has. But I'll risk noting that in the head counts that characterize such commissions, Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Benjamin Carson is probably not the replacement for Elizabeth Blackburn, as Kass maintains, but a more relevant and eminent substitute for Stephen Carter. The Bush administration is not colorblind, and the council needs to have a few public Christians among all the Straussians.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 05, 2004 • Comments
What makes human beings human? Our big brains. And where did they come from? Apparently a genetic defect that proved advantageous under just the right circumstances. Here's an excerpt from the Discover.com report:
Scientists have long suspected that humans evolved large brains because our hominid ancestors had to outwit and elude predators, learn to use fire, and develop complex social structures. The smart hominids survived, while the stupid ones were more likely to get eaten or freeze to death. Over millions of years, the result of this game of survival of the fittest was the appearance of big-brained, peculiarly intelligent modern humans. Now Bruce Lahn, a biomedical researcher at the University of Chicago, has found the first clear indication of the genetic changes that led to the rapid expansion of our brain.
Lahn and his colleagues looked at the abnormal spindle-like microcephaly associated (ASPM) gene, which scientists had previously identified as a key player in brain development. He grew intrigued by ASPM after other researchers discovered that serious defects in the gene cause microcephaly--a drastic reduction in the size of the brain's cerebral cortex, the region responsible for such higher brain functions as abstract thought and planning. Lahn wondered: Could changes in this gene, favored by the pressures of natural selection, have directed the development of the big, modern human brain?
To find out, Lahn compared the sequence of the human ASPM gene with the equivalent gene sequences of various primates--including chimpanzees, gorillas, and gibbons--and with the sequences of nonprimate species such as mice, cows, and dogs. He isolated genetic mutations that altered the structure of the ASPM protein and thus could have affected brain size, while weeding out the random mutations that had no structural effect and hence would have been unaffected by evolutionary pressures. Lahn found that the ASPM gene in humans has undergone 15 important mutations since we last shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees, about 5 million years ago. Significantly, compared with the other animals studied, humans have experienced the fastest overall rate of change in the gene since our evolutionary line parted ways with chimpanzees and other primates. Evidently, ASPM responded to natural selection, and the resulting changes contributed to our large brains.
This sort of indirect genetic evidence for human evolution is going to pile up until it resembles the overwhelming geological case against believing the earth is a few thousand years old. More important, and more interesting, will be how understanding the genetic origins of brain functions lets us affect how our minds work. With the Kass Commission hot to talk about brains, can proposals for new criminal laws against neuroscience be far behind? After all, that research might threaten classical conceptions of the mind. And if they were good enough for Plato, they're good enough for us.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 05, 2004 • Comments