What's New Friday February 13, 2009

WHAT’S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 13 Feb 09   Washington, DC 

1.  DARWIN: HOMO SAPIENS EVOLVED IN A SAVAGE WORLD. 
The oldest remains of Homo sapiens have been dated at about 160,000 
years.  Hunter gatherers, they could talk, but we have no way of knowing 
what they said. It would be 150,000 years before the invention of 
writing.  We have changed little from the earliest Homo sapiens and almost 
not at all since the birth of civilization; instead, we changed the 
world.  That may explain why barely half the population believes we 
evolved over time as opposed to being created in our present form.  

2.  STRESSED: THE APE THAT TALKS OFTEN TELLS LIES.  
This morning I fed "polygraph" into the search engine on the WN archives 
http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/search.html and got 42 hits going back to 
1988.  I said back then that, "the polygraph can’t tell a lie from the sex 
act," which is still literally true.  Other countries also have liars and 
machines that lie about liars.  Today in Science there is a news story by 
Adrian Cho involving a 2007 paper in The International Journal of Speech, 
Language and the Law, about a voice-analysis technique used by local 
governments in the UK to weed out welfare cheats.  Two Swedish 
phoneticians reported the machine lies.  If I was on welfare, I would be 
stressed whether I lied or not. The Israeli maker of the voice analyzer 
threatened to sue the journal, which obligingly yanked the paper.  

3. WATERBOARDING: LEON PANETTA CONFIRMED TO HEAD THE CIA.
You will recall that the most infamous double agent, Aldrich Ames, passed 
dozens of polygraph tests.  Since then the agency has refined its lie 
detection methods.  The new technology is called "waterboarding" and is 
said to take stress to the limit.  Unfortunately, the quality of 
intelligence from the CIA remains a national disaster. Yesterday, Leon 
Panetta the former Democratic Congressman and White House Chief of Staff 
under Bill Clinton was confirmed by the Senate to head the CIA.  Concerns 
were raised about his lack of intelligence experience.  Is that a 
problem?  Just give Panetta a big broom.

4.  AUTISM: A SPECIAL FEDERAL COURT EXONORATES VACCINES.
On Thursday, three special masters demolished arguments that childhood 
vaccines, MMR in particular, cause autism.  Brian Deer reported in the 
Sunday Times of London that Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the British physician 
who set off the vaccine panic, "manipulated and altered data" (also known 
as "lying") in a 1998 Lancet paper.  The scientific case has been 
eloquently made by Paul A. Offit, Autism’s False Prophets, (Columbia 
University Press, 2008), who donated all royalties to autism research.

5.  CENSORSHIP:  FIGHT FOR FREEDOM BY BANNING BOOKS?
The Miami-Dade School Board banned "A Visit to Cuba," a book for children 
4 to 8, depicting the life of children in Cuba.  The complaint is that the 
book did not reflect the "political indoctrination" of Cuban children.  Is 
that anything like reciting a Pledge of Allegiance and celebrating 
Lincoln's Birthday?  The ACLU sued on the grounds that the ban violates 
the First Amendment; a Federal Appeals Court sided with the School Board.  
An editorial in the NY Times his morning says, "The Supreme Court should 
not let this ruling stand."  I would add that it’s time to rethink our 
Cuba policy.

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
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