Book Review: On the Social Contract

Title
On the Social Contract (Du Contrat Social)

Author
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Publication Date
1762

Publication Information
Dover (Dover Thrift Edition); 97 pages

Reason for Reading
In keeping with my goal of learning more of the American Revolution and the era in which it took place while simultaneously focusing on political theory to better understand the political system installed at that time, I picked this book by Rousseau discussing social contract theory. Given the time of publication, I would hazard a guess that many of the founding fathers of America (at least those involved in drawing up the new Constitution) would have read this. Whether or not it had any direct influence on either the Articles of Confederation or the Constitution I’m not certain. The little I’ve looked up online seems to indicate its effects on America’s founding were negligible, but it may have been more influential in the French Revolution. Regardless of this, the text remains noteworthy in the field.

Memories, Events, and Society: Not at the same level

Our minds: not prepared for today’s dialogue. Does it hurt our society?

Recently, Greg Miller from “Smithsonian.com” sat down and discussed how our brains make memories with Dr. Karim Nader from McGill University (neuroscientist). Nader talks about how memories can actually be changed each time we recall them, making accurate memories less likely with each recollection. Anecdotally, he says he remembers on 9/11 viewing on the television that night footage of the second plane hitting the second world trade center building. He later found out, footage of the incident did not become available until 9/12. But the traumatic event was played over-and-over on television and in his mind during discussion with friends and relatives that his brain actually re-wired to include that 9/12 footage into his 9/11 memories.

Now let’s apply this concept to something else. On June 15, 2010 President Obama addressed the nation from the Oval Office on live TV. His speech lasted a total of 17 minutes. However, the night and days following his 17 minute speech CNN, FoxNews, and MSNBC spent numerous hours discussing what the President did and didn’t not say, what he actually did say actually meant, and what he didn’t say says about his ideology in dealing with big business and how he handles national crisis.

Going back to Dr. Nader and what we now know about memories, it is quite possible that millions of people watching the aforementioned shows will remember Obama saying are not saying something he actually did not or did say. They will most likely remember what commentators think his words meant then the actual words the President used.

This is our mind: this is our media culture in the 21st century.

Source:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/How-Our-Brains-Make-Memories.html?c=y&page=1

Immigration through the eyes of an intellectual (Chomsky per usual)

I'm linking to a talk he gave at Brown where he goes into a history lesson on how NAFTA had the effect to, while helping its creators (wealthy), make the US a more attractive place to the bludgeoned poor of Central and South America economically. Therefore, our own actions during the Carter and Reagan years has made us more prone to illegal immigration.

He goes on to discuss that while since the late 19th/early 20th century, the 14th amendment rights for corporations as people have greatly expanded (due to their intrinsic power applied as legal appeal), the rights of illegal immigrants have been greatly reduced so that they are no longer consider people (slippery slope anyone?). He ties this in with the recent Arizona law where anyone who appears Latino has to carry around documentation of citizenship, in effect purporting a pro-white agenda in that state.

SB 1070

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBfHD2n13OA (50 mins duration)

Book Review: His Excellency

Title
His Excellency: George Washington

Author
Joseph J. Ellis
Professor of History – Mount Holyoke College

Publication Date
2004

Reason for Reading
With all the talk recently about what the Founding Fathers intended for the country, I’ve had an increased curiosity about the American Revolution and the people involved in starting it. I figured Washington to be a good place to start and wasn’t disappointed in my selection. Both Washington as a topic and Ellis as an author were good. Ellis has written a number of books on the period, and his reputation seems to be quite good. He won the Pulitzer for his book Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation.

Book Review: Better

Title

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

Author

Atul Gawande

Publication Date

2007

Reason For Reading

I've heard good things about the author from a number of sources. Most recently, the professor of my Health Management and Policy class mentioned in class that he was reading the book (or possibly one of the other two books by this author) for the second time, and strongly recommended it. One other thing he mentioned was that an article Gawande wrote for the New Yorker on health care costs was one that made a strong impression on President Obama and recommended members of Congress to read it (cited below). As such, it was also a reading we did for the class.

Supreme Court Case of the Month: Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals

Case

William Daubert, et ux., etc., et al., Petitioners v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc (1993)

Chief Justice
William Rehnquist

Background

A couple children were born with birth defects, which their parents claimed was due to use of the drug Bendectin (used to treat nausea & morning sickness). Merrell Dow's expert witness showed that there were no studies linking Bendectin to birth defects. The plaintiffs' witness showed that there was evidence of birth defects in in vitro and in vivo animal studies, pharmacological studies, and reanalysis of other published studies. However, these apparently were not generally accepted within the scientific community at that time.

Two previous standards come into play. The older precedent is the Frye law, a common law standard from 1923. The second is the 1975 Federal Rules of Evidence. The Frye law held that in order to be admissible as evidence, the techniques must be "generally accepted by a meaningful segment of the associated scientific community." The Federal Rules of Evidence are a broad set of rules that apply to pretty much every aspect of evidence, not just scientific. This is where it gets a little tricky. I'm not sure how exactly these differed from the Frye law. I think they just didn't clearly articulate how expert opinion would be allowed in court and what would qualify as expert opinion.

Synopsis

Both the district court and the Circuit court found for Merrell Dow, so it wasn't a surprise that the Supreme Court found for the defendant as well, but the case established a new precedent for how scientific evidence is allowed. Frye appears to be quite similar to the Daubert Standard, and I think the significance of Daubert is just that it essentially overruled the Federal Rules of Evidence and established a Supreme Court precedent. More specifically, I think the FRE didn't clearly articulate what was permissible for expert opinions, and this case essentially clarified what would be, and it's similar to the original Frye Standard.

Two things were mentioned about the plaintiffs' evidence that bears mentioning. First, the evidence they submitted appeared to have been prepared specifically for litigation, which apparently made the Circuit Court skeptical. Also, the plaintiff's expert witness was later found to have falsifed research on the teratogenic effects of Bendectin, but that appears to have been after the case was heard by the Supreme Court.

Vote & Dissenting Opinions

Majority: 7 Concur/Dissent: 2

Notable on this is that Chief Justice Rehnquist is one of the two dissenters.

Further Discussion

I stumbled onto this case when it was mentioned in my Epidemiology text book. One of the first quotes I read was that this is the most important Supreme Court case you've never heard of.

It reminded me a bit of the Thimerosal vaccine discussion we had recently. How might this apply to potential cases involving Thimerosal? I would guess at this juncture, any cases with that would get thrown out pretty quickly or be an easy ruling for the defendants if the only evidence is one questionable research study that was later retracted by the journal that published it, so it's not exactly a valid comparison.

References and Further Reading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daubert_v._Merrell_Dow_Pharmaceuticals

http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jus/0302/orofino.pdf

Federal Rules of Evidence as of 12/1/09:

http://www.uscourts.gov/rules/EV2009.pdf

Obama Goes Nuclear!

Here's the rundown on old arguments (WSJ - provided):

• Nuclear isn't safe. The 1979 Three Mile Island accident—in which a faulty cooling valve led to a meltdown without injuring anyone—occurred when computer technology had barely penetrated the U.S. industry. In the 1970s, each reactor was an island unto itself. Industry officials barely communicated. The valve that failed at Three Mile Island had failed nine times previously, yet nobody said a thing about it.

Today, thanks to the Price-Anderson Act, first adopted in 1957 and amended several times since, each of America's 104 reactors is now on the hook for $100 million in damages for an accident at another reactor ($10 billion coverage in all). You can bet they talk to each other. Accidental "scrams" and safety outages have been reduced to nearly zero. Our entire fleet is up and running 90% of the time. That's why, even though nuclear constitutes only 11% of generating capacity, it provides 20% of electricity.

• Nuclear is too expensive. Building a 1,500-megawatt reactor will cost around $5 billion, which seems expensive until you compare it to everything else. The equivalent capacity in wind power would easily cost $4 billion because you have to build 4,000 windmills at $1 million apiece plus hundreds of miles of transmission lines and an almost equal capacity of natural gas generators to back them up when the wind doesn't blow.

Building zero-emissions coal plants that capture the carbon dioxide and bury it underground will probably cost more, but nobody really knows because it's never been done. Only natural gas is cheaper to build, but that's because 95% of the cost is in the fuel. (With nuclear it's only 26%.) Natural gas prices fluctuate. Would anyone care to predict what the price of natural gas will be in 25 years?

• A hijacked jet liner crashing into a reactor would cause a nuclear holocaust. Go to YouTube and search "plane crashing into wall." You'll see a video of an F-4 fighter jet hitting a concrete containment wall at 500 miles per hour. The plane simply disappears. The wall barely budges. Nuclear opponents argue that a jumbo jet would have a greater impact, but the laws of physics say it would be about the same. A jet is a hollow metal tube. Even at the speed of a bullet (700 mph) it could not penetrate a concrete containment wall.

• We haven't figured out what to do with the waste. Basically, there is no such thing as nuclear waste. The reason we have the controversy over the Yucca Mountain storage facility is because we gave up fuel reprocessing in the 1970s. Reprocessing reduces the volume of spent fuel—already remarkably small—by 97%. The French reprocess and store all their high-level waste from 30 years of producing 70% of their electricity beneath the floor of one room in their La Hague plant.

• We can't reprocess because that will lead to nuclear proliferation. The conceit of the 1970s was that if we isolated plutonium in an American reprocessing plant, some foreign terrorist would steal it to make a bomb. Half a dozen countries have since built nuclear bombs, none of them with stolen American plutonium. North Korea built its own reactor. Iran has been enriching uranium. France, Japan and Russia all reprocess and no one has stolen their plutonium. Reprocessing American fuel has nothing to do with nuclear proliferation.

• The nuclear revival is being forced on America by the powerful nuclear industry. There is no American "nuclear industry." Westinghouse is now owned by Toshiba. Areva is French. GE partners with Hitachi but is running in last place. Only three of the 33 proposed American reactors are GE designs. The biggest new international competitor is South Korea, which just won a $20 billion contract to build four reactors in the United Arab Emirates. China is building four Westinghouse AP1000 reactors, even though its design has not yet been approved by our Nuclear Regulatory Commission. When the first new reactors are built here, 70% of the parts will come from abroad.

So, is nuclear a viable option in America's (hopefully) green future or will the same country that had to change NMR to MRI have to find another alternative fuel?