Day: March 17, 2002

Dark Ages II Skims the Surface of Data Loss Problems

Dark Ages II: When the Digital Data Die
By Bryan Bergeron
306 pp.

I’d been avoiding reading Bryan Bergeron’s Dark Ages II: When the Digital Data Die because of the book’s doom-and-gloom blurb claiming that it described how “our data is at far greater risk than we’ve ever imagined — and envisions a frightening future, where so much critical information is lost that civilization itself could collapse.” Digital data loss is a problem, but a potential civilization killer?

But then I read an excerpt of the book on a web site and decided to give it a shot. I should have stuck with my original impressions — it turned out the short excerpt I read online was the only part of the book I found worthwhile.

Which does not necessarily mean that others might not find it worthwhile. The main problem with the book is that about 80 percent of the text is concerned with a simple, but thorough, look at various schemes that large corporations and other entities use to manage their data. Readers who do not already know about data warehousing and the benefits and drawbacks of Network Attached Storage vs. Storage Area Networks might find such a review of interest, but more technically astute readers will find this largely repetitive and redundant.

Which might not be so bad if Bergeron was able to deliver on his fears that contemporary civilization might be brought down with one fell swoop from data loss. Bergeron, unfortunately, does not even come close to this.

He opens his book with a nice history of data loss throughout the ages and how (some) data have been preserved despite traditional methods of destruction such as the burning of paper records and books. Bergeron also offers a nice summary of just how much more difficult it is to preserve data in the digital age over a long period of time. Hardware and software changes so quickly these days, that a method of data storage that was widespread 10 years ago might be impossible to read today (as is the case with data stored on 5 1/4″ floppy disks, for example).

Nowhere, though, does Bergeron make a serious argument that civilization might be in danger from a failure to properly archive data (though he presents a few horror stories that make it clear that corporations who fail to give this their attention could be in serious trouble in the event of a hardware/software failure).

That oversight is odd considering that it is not inconceivable that civilization could be endangered by a more intentional data loss. A few well placed electromagnetic pulse devices, for example, might achieve much the same result that more conventional means achieved during the various burnings and raids on the Alexandrian Library and other information repositories.

Neither does Bergeron address the issue of copy protection, which threatens to add another layer of problems. I experienced this first hand, having used a word processor for the Apple II in the early 1980s that copy-protected its data disks. Getting that data into a usable form in the early 1990s was made extremely difficult thanks to the copy protection scheme. With efforts to copy protect media files and even build copy protection into all computer hardware. That trend could make it extremely difficult to archive the past, but is an issue not really addressed in Dark Ages II.

Bergeron’s book might serve as a basic introduction to digital archiving, but for more technically astute readers, the book never gets beyond skimming the surface.

Dengue Fever Outbreak Hits Brazil

Brazil is in the grip of a full-blown outbreak of dengue fever with well over 400,000 cases reported and over 17 fatalities.

Dengue fever is a disease that usually causes severe headaches and muscle pains along with high fevers. Like malaria, it is usually transmitted by mosquito bites. Unusually heavy rains in parts of Brazil increased the number of mosquitos leading to the outbreak.

Efforts are underway to reduce the pools of stagnating water which the mosquito breed in, but there is still no end in sight to the disease outbreak.

Sources:

One-in-ten in Rio has dengue. The BBC, February 26, 2002.

Dengue fever grips Rio. The BBC, February 27, 2002.

Corruption, Instability Deters Investment in Caspian Sea

A recent conference on the status of the Caspian Sea area highlighted the ongoing lack of development due to corruption and a lack of any stable structure determining who has development rights over the area.

Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, control of the Caspian Sea was divided between Iran and the USSR. Currently five nations — Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan — claim rights over the sea, though so far the five nations have been unable to come to an agreement over the sharing of those rights.

That has left a lot of confusion that has deterred investment in the region. As U.S. envoy Steven Mann told the conference, “Successful development of the Caspian basin is not something we can consider inevitable.” That is true especially when the problem with corruption in the former Soviet republics is taken into account.

So what should be one of the wealthiest regions of the world, thanks to enormous untapped oil reserves, is nowhere near its potential due to a lack of a predictable legal structure.

Source:

Corruption ‘deters Caspian investors’. The BBC, February 26, 2002.

Does a Vegan Diet Minimize Animal Deaths?

The standard argument that animal rights advocated make for a vegetarian or vegan diet is that it is the diet that causes the least harm to animals. But is this, in fact, true?

Animals are killed, after all, in the production of the grains and vegetables that vegans and vegetarians eat. Steven Davis, an animal science professor at Oregon State University, recently looked at this issue and in an address to the European Society for Agriculture and Food Ethics argued that, in fact, a vegan diet is likely suboptimal if the main goal is to limit the number of animals killed.

The available data on how many animals are killed from agriculture is certainly spotty. Since field mice and other animals aren’t usually considered morally relevant, few people (including vegetarians and vegans) ever bother to ask how many animals die during the various aspects of agricultural production.

In a press release from OSU, Davis said,

Over the years that I have been studying animal rights theories, I have never found anyone who has considered the deaths of — or, the ‘harm’ to — animals in the field. This, it seems to me, is a serious omission. . . . Because most of these animals have been seen as expendable, or not seen at all, few scientific studies have been done measuring agriculture’s effects on their populations.

Still, Davis maintains that, based on the best available evidence, mortality for food production is likely to be high. One study Davis mentions, for example, found a 50 percent reduction in gray-tailed voles from just a single mowing of alfalfa. Add to that tractors involved in plowing, planting, and harvesting of crops, and the death toll starts to add up.

Based on the current evidence, Davis argues that a ruminant-pasture model of food production would minimize the deaths of animals. Essentially this ditches almost all animal agriculture except for beef and dairy products. Ruminants minimize animal deaths because cattle requires fewer invasive entries into fields with tractors and other machines.

The OSU press release says,

According to his calculations, such a model would result in the deaths of 300 million fewer animals annually (counting both field animals and cattle) than would a total vegan model. This difference, according to Davis, is mainly the result of fewer field animals killed in pasture and forage production than in the growing and harvest of grain, beans, and corn.

So please, the next time you sit down to eat, remember the animals — have a steak.

Source:

OSU Scientist Questions the Moral Basis of a Vegan Diet. Peg Herring, Oregon State University, March 5, 2002.

Saudi Arabia’s Religious Police Allegedly Contribute to Death of 15 Girls

On Monday, March 11, 2002, a fire destroyed a school in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, killing 15 girls — most of whom were crushed to death in a panic to exit the building. But rescue efforts at the fire were hampered when members of Saudi Arabia’ religious police — the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice — refused to allow either girls to leave the building or firefighters to enter the building. The reason? The girls were not wearing their traditional head scarves or black robes.

The English-language Saudi Gazette quoted witnesses as saying that a member of the COmmission told men trying to enter the building to try to save the girls that, “it is sinful to approach them” because they were not wearing the required garb.

Meanwhile, a civil defense officer told Saudi Arabian newspaper al-Eqtisadiah that he saw members of the Commission “being young girls to prevent them from leaving the school because they were not wearing the abaya . . . We told them that the situation was very critical and did not allow for such behavior. But they shouted at us and refused to move away from the [school’s] gates.”

The official response from the Saudi Arabian government has been to claim that the people blocking access to the school were not really members of the Commission. In an article in the Saudi English-language newspaper Arab News, the Civil Defense Department now claims that it has information “which casts doubt on whether the members of the Commission for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice who allegedly played a role in hampering rescue operation at the fire-hit Makkah girls? school were really members of the organization.”

As the Wall Street Journal put it, this claim smacks of a bad cover-up, but either way this is exactly the sort of attitude toward women and girls that Saudi Arabia’s leaders have long promoted with their funding and promotion of Islamic extremism.

Source:

Were commission members at fire tragedy impostors? Khaled Al-Fadly & Saeed Al-Abyad, Arab News, March 17, 2002.

Saudi police face deaths criticism. Reuters, March 14, 2002.

Wendy McElroy on 21st Century Feminism

A frequent question I get via e-mail is exactly what exactly I mean by Equity Feminism. I stole the term from Christina Hoff Sommers who used it to describe a wide ranging movement that began in the 19th century, and continues to this day, which seeks to ensure that women and men have the same legal rights. This liberal and humanist ideal is contrasted both on the right by traditionalist anti-feminists and on the left by radical academic feminism, both of which end up opposing such a liberal agenda because they are wedded to the view that women and men are fundamentally different in a morally relevant way. Equity feminism, however, asserts that while women and men may be different biologically, there are few, if any, legal and moral distinctions that arise from this biological distinction.

Wendy McElroy captures this idea perfectly in her recent article for iFeminists.Com, 21st-Century Feminism. McElroy writes that,

The 21st-century feminist is anyone — female or male — who rejects gender privilege and demands real equality for men and women under the law. She makes her own choices and takes personal responsibility for them, without asking government for protection or tax dollars.

McElroy calls this view individualist feminism, and notes that this is originally what feminism was about in the 19th century. Today, of course, mention “feminism” and many people think of the illiberal views of academic feminism replete with its obsession with the triumvirate of “patriarchy,” “oppression,” and “victim.” Whereas equity/individualist feminism is concerned with ensuring that laws and public institutions are gender neutral, academic feminism is more interested in realizing a peculiar utopian vision of relations between men and women — whether men and women would prefer that peculiar vision or not.

Equity/individualist feminism is about ensuring that women and men are able to choose for themselves how to live their lives without interference from Big Brother or Big Sister. Apparently, even in the 21st century that is still too radical a notion to find support on either the right or left.

Source:

21st-Century Feminism. Wendy McElroy, iFeminists.Com, March 12, 2002.