In 1971 Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo came up with the idea for a radical experiment to investigate the effects of prison conditions on the behaviour of inmates and prison guards. He advertised for paid volunteers to take part in the study. These volunteers underwent psychological tests to root out all but the most "normal" subjects. Those selected were then denoted as either guards or prisoners on a random basis.

The prison was constructed in the basement of Stanford University's psychology department building, complete with cells, communal area and solitary confinement cell.

Those designated as prisoners were picked up by real police officers, booked, fingerprinted, strip-searched, deloused and made to wear gowns with their numbers sewn into them with no underclothes. On their heads they wore stockings, on their feet rubber sandals, and a chain was bolted to their ankles to remind them of their status at all times.

The guards had to wear identical khaki uniforms with mirrored sunglasses. They were told to keep the prisoners in line but given little advice on how to achieve this. Guards referred to prisoners by their numbers, prisoners addressed all guards as "Mr. Correctional Officer". The activities of the participants were observed using hidden video cameras.

Within less than 24 hours of the start of the experiment the prisoners had started a riot, and the guards had responded with physical and psychological force. They tamed the prisoners using icy blasts from CO2 fire extinguishers, taking their gowns, blankets and beds from them as a punishment. It was no longer a game.

The first prisoner broke down on the second day, and further days brought similar psychological collapse from one inmate a day, until the experiment broke down on only the sixth day of a proposed two weeks. All the prisoners were glad the ordeal was over. The guards wanted to carry on. The reason Zimbardo felt compelled to terminate the experiment lay in what he had seen on the video tapes recorded on the hidden cameras during the night shifts.

Guards were submitting the inmates to acts of psychological humiliation. Bags were placed over their heads. They were made to play leap-frog with each other, causing the jumper's genitals to come into contact with the head of the inmate he was jumping over. They were made to simulate acts of gay sex with each other. Sound familiar?





Over thirty years later, echoes of the experiment came back to haunt Zimbardo when it was found that American army reservists at Abu Ghraib had resorted to uncannily similar methods of humiliation with Iraqi prisoners. He could not have been totally surprised when he was called upon to act as an expert witness for the defense of one of the Abu Ghraib guards. This gave Zimbardo full access to the documentation and photos relating to the abuse, as well as the opportunity to interview the defendant regarding what had happened in the prison. His thoughts on the subject are recorded on the Edge.org website.

These terrible deeds form an interesting analog in America, because there are two things we are curious to understand about Abu Ghraib. First, how did the soldiers get so far out of hand? And secondly, why would the soldiers take pictures of themselves in positions that make them legally culpable? The ones that are on trial now are the ones in those pictures, although obviously there are many more people involved in various ways. We can understand why they did so not only by applying the basic social-psychological processes from the Stanford prison study, but also by analyzing what was unique in Abu Ghraib.

There are several important concepts. First, in both cases there's the deindividuation, the sense of anonymity. The CIA agents, the civilian interrogators, never wore uniforms or showed identification. In all of the pictures the soldiers were typically not wearing uniforms. They often had their tops off. That's a violation of military protocol, because even in a prison you're supposed to be wearing your uniform. In the 1970s the police would do that during student riots against the Vietnam War. They would take off their jackets with their names and ID numbers. I was at Columbia University in a police riot, and I was at Stanford in a police riot, and the first thing the cops did was to take off anything that identified themselves, or put on gas masks when there was no gassing, only to create a state of anonymity.

At Abu Ghraib you had the social modeling in which somebody takes the lead in doing something. You had the dehumanization, the use of labels of the other as inferior, as worthless. There was a diffusion of responsibility such that nobody was personally accountable. The Stanford prison study identified a whole set of principles, all of which you can see are totally applicable in this setting.

The other thing, of course, is that you had low-level army reservists who had no "mission-specific" training in how to do this difficult, new job. There was little or no supervision of them on the night and there was literally no accountability. This went on for months in which the abuses escalated over time. This also happened in my study. Each day it got worse and worse.

And then there is the hidden factor of boredom. One of the main contributors to evil, violence, and hostility in all prisons that we underplay is the boredom factor. In fact, the worst things that happened in our prisons occurred during the night shifts. Guards came on at ten o'clock and had eight hours to kill when nothing was happening. They made things happen by turning the prisoners into their playthings, not out of evil motives, but because this was what was available to break through the boredom. Also at play in the prison in Abu Ghraib was extreme fear among the guards because of the constant mortar attacks that had killed soldiers and prisoners, and escape attempts.

Dehumanization also occurred because the prisoners often had no prison clothes available, or were forced to be naked as a humiliation tactic by the military police and higher ups. There were too many of them, in a few months the number soared from 400 to over a thousand. They didn't have regular showers, did not speak English, and they stank. Under these conditions it's easy for guards to come to think of the prisoners as animals, and dehumanization processes set in.

When you put that set of horrendous work conditions and external factors together, it creates an evil barrel. You could put virtually anybody in it and you're going to get this kind of evil behavior. The Pentagon and the military say that the Abu Ghraib scandal is the result of a few bad apples in an otherwise good barrel. That's the dispositional analysis. The social psychologist in me, and the consensus among many of my colleagues in experimental social psychology, says that's the wrong analysis. It's not the bad apples, it's the bad barrels that corrupt good people. Understanding the abuses at this Iraqi prison starts with an analysis of both the situational and systematic forces operating on those soldiers working the night shift in that 'little shop of horrors.'

Coming from New York, I know that if you go by a delicatessen, and you put a sweet cucumber in the vinegar barrel, the cucumber might say, "No, I want to retain my sweetness." But it's hopeless. The barrel will turn the sweet cucumber into a pickle. You can't be a sweet cucumber in a vinegar barrel. My sense is that we have the evil barrel of war, into which we've put this evil barrel of this prison—it turns out actually all of the military prisons have had similar kinds of abuses—and what you get is the corruption of otherwise good people.

I was recently engaged as an expert witness for the defense of one of the Abu Ghraib night shift guards in his court martial trial. As such, I had access to all of the horror images that various soldiers took of their infamous deeds in action, along with most of the reports of the official investigations, spending a day with the defendant and his wife, arranging to have various psychological assessments made, and checking on his background and army reserve record.

In addition to realizing the relevance of my earlier research to understanding some of the forces acting on him and the other night shift soldiers, it became apparent that he was also totally abused by the situation that the military had thrust upon him. Image the cumulative stress of working 12 hour night shifts, 7 days a week, with not a day off for 40 days! Also regularly missing breakfast and lunch because he slept through them having finished his tour of duty at 4AM and sleeping in a small cell in another part of the prison that he rarely left. When he complained about children mixed with adult inmates or mentally ill or those with contagious TB among the prisoners, he was reprimanded, but rewarded for helping to get confessions by softening up the inmates. Not once was there any official supervision on his night shift that he could rely on. There were insufficient guards, 8 for 1000 inmates and none had been adequately trained for this tough job. His psychological testing and my interview revealed a young man who had not a single symptom of pathology that he brought into that prison; the situation was the pathological ingredient that infected his reason and judgment. Indeed, in many ways, this soldier is an American iconógood husband, father, worker, patriotic, religious, with many friends and a long history of having lived a most normal, moral small town life.

Despite my detailed trial testimony about all situational and systemic forces influencing his distorted group mentality, the judge threw the book at him, giving him 8 years in prison and many other penalties. He refused to acknowledge what many of the official investigations clearly revealed, that the abuses at Abu Ghraib could have prevented or would not have occurred were it not for "a failure or lack of leadership." Some reports list the officers and agencies responsible by name, but they are likely never to be considered bad apples, but only the custodians of a barrel that had some defects. The judge, and juries, in recent military jury trials, minimized the powerful situational and systemic factors that engulfed these young men and women. Their actions were assumed to be products of free will, rational choice and personal accountability. I argue not so when deindividuation, group mind and the host of stress, exhaustion, sleep deprivation and other psychological states are at play. They become transformed, just as the good angel, Lucifer, was transformed into the devil. Situations matter much more than most people realize or can acknowledge.

I've been teaching bright college students for nearly 50 years, and it's hard to get them to appreciate the situationist's analysis of evil, prejudice, or any kind of pathological behavior because our whole society is so wedded to the dispositional perspective: Good people do good deeds, and bad people do bad deeds. It's part of our institutional thinking. It's what psychiatry is all about. It's what medicine is all about. It's what the legal system is all about. And it's what religious systems are all about. We put good inside of people, and we put bad inside of people. It's so ingrained in the way we think, but the situationist's perspective says that although that may sometimes be true, we need to acknowledge that there can be powerful, yet subtle social forces in given settings that have potentially transformative power over us.

That's why Lord of the Flies had such a big impact. How could it be that just changing your appearance could make you kills when such an activity was previously alien to you? That's still a very difficult message to get across. You can tell students that the majority of subjects in the Milgram experiment went all the way. How likely is it that you would do it? "Oh no, I'm not that kind of person," they say. Well, the majority of guards in my study did brutal things. If you were a guard what would you do? "I would be a good guard," they answer.

It's partly a self-serving bias. We want to believe we are good, we are different, we are better, or we are superior. But this body of social-psychological research—and there are obviously many more experiments in addition to mine and Milgram's—shows that the majority of good, ordinary, normal people can be easily seduced, tempted, or initiated into behaving in ways that they say they never would. In 30 minutes we got them stepping across that line. I don't know, but I would bet that if you went to more collectivist cultures, cultures that focus on the community or the group as the unit rather than the individual, they might buy into a situationalist approach more freely.

The other important thing is to see this as a progression. If the Stanford prison study had continued on for three months then I'd have to predict that there would have been a steady increase in the level of dehumanization and degradation that might have rivaled the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

"If anyone orders Merlot, I'm leaving. I am not drinking any fucking Merlot!"

Could this quote from neurotic wine buff/alcoholic Miles in the film Sideways shake up the relative popularity of wine varietals in California, and perhaps beyond?The San Francisco Chronicle investigates:

Suddenly, America's favorite red wine is also its most uncool.

Merlot sales are still rising overall, but AC Nielsen reported some early warning signs of a possible reversal Monday: the percentage of households buying it is down 2 percent compared to a similar 12-week period a year ago; repeat purchases of Merlot are down 3 percent.

[...]

Merlot achieved rapid prominence because at its best, it's the easiest fine wine for novices to appreciate. It's ironic that these are now the very consumers who won't let friends overhear them ordering it.

Katie Couric said on NBC's "Today Show" that she's heard she's not supposed to drink Merlot. A New York City waiter posted an entry on the blog waiterrant.blogspot.com in which multiple patrons chastised him ("Haven't you seen 'Sideways'?") when he told them the by-the-glass special was Merlot.

Here's my favorite evidence of Merlot's fall from grace. An interview with "Sideways" actress Virginia Madsen by writer Strawberry Saroyan in the Jan. 16 edition of the New York Times includes the following passage:

"They brought out this wine and we were like, this is really good, thinking it was the pinot as usual." It turned out to be a Merlot: horrors. "If you saw it on a menu, you'd throw it across a room. It was a Merlot from Malibu." Only connoisseurs could have such conviction.

Actresses can be forgiven for shallowness, but note the position of the quotes: when the New York Times calls someone who would throw a good-tasting wine across the room just because it's Merlot a "connoisseur," the grape has an image problem.

Though Cabernet Sauvignon is the star of France's Bordeaux region, Merlot is actually the most-planted grape there, according to Bordeaux.com, the official site of Bordeaux wines. Merlot ripens earlier, a welcome hedge for wineries against autumn rains. In the bottle, its gentle qualities have long been prized in top estates' blends to help tame Cabernet's tannins.

[...]

The wines of St.-Emilion and Pomerol, on Bordeaux's right bank, are based largely on Merlot, but consumers are mostly unaware of this because Bordeaux wineries don't usually list varietals on the label.

In fact, the wine that Miles most treasured in "Sideways," Chateau Cheval Blanc, is a blend of Merlot and another varietal he slams, Cabernet Franc. The filmmakers originally wanted Miles' fetish wine to be Chateau Petrus Pomerol, the world's most sought-after (and most expensive) Merlot.

"Quite a few film scripts cross my desk and I vaguely recall 'Sideways' asking for permission to use Petrus," Christian Moueix, who runs Chateau Petrus, said by fax. "I am afraid that at that time, I found the script unexciting and declined."

Oops. Petrus doesn't need the extra publicity, but Merlot could have used the ironic balance.

[...]

"When Merlot became popular, they grew it everywhere," says Pride Mountain Vineyards winemaker Bob Foley. "There's an ocean of Merlot out there, and a lot of it is not very good."

California was not alone in rushing to satisfy Americans' thirst for "a glass of Merlot." It is also widely planted in Washington and New York states, not to mention Italy, Chile and Australia. I recently clicked on "Merlot" at bevmo.com, the online sales branch of Beverages & More, and was offered a choice of 230. A similar click on "Pinot Noir" came up with only 90. This year.

"Merlot has been dropping in sales," says Wilfred Wong, e-commerce cellarmaster for Beverages & More. "The trend has already been set. Syrah has really been gaining and so has Pinot Noir. As the movie ("Sideways") comes out in DVD, it will continue."

However, a random survey of Bay Area sommeliers turned up a surprising shared conclusion: Every one said that while Pinot Noir sales are rising, Merlot sales by the glass aren't falling sharply yet. Cabernet Sauvignon is taking more of a hit here, not a bad thing as Cabernet doesn't match food as well as light-bodied Pinot or gentle Merlot. The rest of the country is different.

"Where we're really seeing it is in our restaurant in New York, Per Se," says Paul Roberts, wine director for the Thomas Keller restaurant group that includes the French Laundry in Yountville. "I always thought for a long time, with Merlot and Chardonnay, people didn't know what they were ordering. They were ordering a beverage. Now they're ordering Pinot Noir that way. In New York, in what you'd call B-level restaurants, you used to need Merlot by the glass. Now you need Pinot Noir."

[...]

Most cliches started as truths. "A glass of Merlot" became a substitute for "a glass of red wine" for a very good reason -- few red wines are better by themselves before a meal, or just as a cocktail. Starting at the bar with a glass of a heavier wine, like Cabernet or Zinfandel, requires subsequent wines to also be big and bold, or they will be overshadowed. However, gigantic wines overpower most foods, so you're trapped.

Merlot's gentle nature makes it acceptable with a wide range of foods -- not as wide as Pinot Noir, the default red-wine choice for difficult pairings, but still good with anything from meatless fare ("It has a tobacco quality that comes out nicely with vegetarian dishes," says Roberts) through chicken to wild game. Many winemakers I spoke with like Merlot best with lamb. Tracy said he often serves Merlot at La Toque with fish in red wine sauces.

Foley, Pride Mountain Vineyards' sole winemaker since its founding in 1992, says Merlot's steep rise in popularity and sudden fall from grace is an American phenomenon.

"The U.S. is kind of new to wine," says Foley, an East Bay native. "There's a tendency to discover something and then overdo it. It happened with white Zinfandel, it happened with Chardonnay."

Now, it's happening with Pinot Noir. Foley, who has been making Merlot since his parents planted a family vineyard in Alamo in 1964, says he hasn't seen "Sideways" and will brook no sweeping statements against Miles' least- favorite grape.

"Anybody who doesn't like Merlot, try mine," says Foley. "If you still don't like Merlot, that's fine."

More for the rest of us.

Great news for British film buffs. The world's first digital cinema network is to be set up in the UK.

Most cinemas currently have mechanical projectors but the new network will see up to 250 screens in up to 150 cinemas fitted with digital projectors capable of displaying high definition images.

The new network will double the world's total of digital screens.

[...]

The key benefit of the digital network will be an increase in the distribution and screening of British films, documentaries and foreign language films.

"Access to specialised film is currently restricted across the UK," said Pete Buckingham, head of Distribution and Exhibition at the UK Film Council.

"Although a genuine variety of films is available in central London and a few other metropolitan areas, the choice for many outside these areas remains limited, and the Digital Screen Network will improve access for audiences across the UK,"

Digital prints costs less than a traditional 35mm print - giving distributors more flexibility in how they screen films, said Ms Deans.

"It can cost up to £1,500 to make a copy of a print for specialist films. "In the digital world you can make prints for considerably less than that.

"Distributors can then send out prints to more cinemas and prints can stay in cinemas for much longer."

For those of us outside of the London area who have an appetite for films other than the big Hollywood blockbusters this is potentially great news. I am relatively lucky in that I live within striking distance of Bristol and Bath, but even in these cities the access to independent films is scandalous.

Foreign movies will perhaps show once or twice in the couple of art house cinemas in the centre of Bristol. Even successful independent cinema is difficult to find. Sideways is currently showing 6 times a day in the Bristol/Bath area, Vera Drake 10 times, the same week they are both in contention for Oscars. Compare this with the daily 39 screenings of Meet the Fockers. Bring on the choice.

Who can be bothered to read license agreements before installing software? To find out, PC Pitstop.com added an unusual clause to one of their End User License Agreements



Out of more than 3,000 downloads, only one reply was received. Living up to their promise, PC Pitstop sent him a cheque for $1,000.

The column goes on to give real-life examples of what we may be signing up to when we press the "I Accept" button. I would love to say that I've learned a valuable lesson from the article, but something tells me I'll still be clicking the "I have read and agree with..." button with crossed fingers. Life just seems to short for legalese.

A better approach, it seems to me, is to download software from trusted software wherever possible, and to check reviews such as those at CNet's Download.com before installing if there are any lingering doubts. Having virus/spyware detection software installed and active as a last line of defence goes without saying.

Following on from the theme of my last post, Newsweek has uncovered details of The CIA's transport of prisoners around the globe for interrogation. The article tells the story of Khaled el-Masri.

Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, says he was taken off a bus in Macedonia in south-central Europe while on holiday on Dec. 31, 2003, then whisked in handcuffs to a motel outside the capital city of Skopje. Three weeks later, on the evening of Jan. 23, 2004, he was brought blindfolded aboard a jet with engines noisily revving, according to his lawyer, Manfred Gnjidic. Masri says he climbed high stairs "like onto a regular passenger airplane" and was chained to clamps on the bare metal floor and wall of the jet.

Masri says he was then flown to Afghanistan, where at a U.S. prison facility he was shackled, repeatedly punched and questioned about extremists at his mosque in Ulm, Germany. Finally released months later, the still-mystified Masri was deposited on a deserted road leading into Macedonia, where he brokenly tried to describe his nightmarish odyssey to a border guard. "The man was laughing at me," Masri told The New York Times, which disclosed his story last month. "He said: 'Don't tell that story to anyone because no one will believe it. Everyone will laugh'."
[...]
The new evidence supporting Masri's case will only inflame the debate. According to data filed with European aviation authorities, the Boeing 737 landed in Skopje on Jan. 23, 2004, after a flight from the island of Majorca off Spain (a U.S.-friendly government), and left that night. Masri's passport has a Macedonian exit stamp for Jan. 23. The flight plan shows that the plane landed the next day in Baghdad and then went onto Kabul, Afghanistan, on Jan. 25, which also conforms to Masri's account. According to Federal Aviation Administration records, the jet was owned at the time by Premier Executive Transport Services, a now-defunct Massachusetts-based company that U.S. intelligence sources acknowledge to NEWSWEEK fits the profile of a suspected CIA front.

The Boeing flights are part of a detailed two-year itinerary for the 737 obtained by NEWSWEEK. The jet's record dates to December 2002 and shows flights up until Feb. 7 of this year. The Boeing 737 may have served as a general CIA transport plane for equipment and supplies as well. Among the stops recorded are Libya, where the U.S. government has been dismantling Muammar Kaddafi's clandestine nuclear program, and Jordan, where the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported that high-level Qaeda detainees, including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, were being held. (A Jordanian spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.) The Boeing also landed at Guantanamo.
[...]
U.S. officials insist the CIA has stopped rendering suspects to countries where they believe torture occurs. NEWSWEEK has learned that shortly after a Canadian jihadi suspect of Syrian origin, Maher Arar, was shipped back to Syria in September 2002, officials began having grave second thoughts about rendering suspects to that nation. As a result, the administration made a secret decision to stop sending suspects to Syria. But officials acknowledge that such scruples are being ignored when it comes to rendering suspects to allies like Egypt and Jordan, even though some officials do not believe "assurances" from these nations that they were not mistreating prisoners. Now the CIA may have to supply many more assurances—and Khaled el-Masri, among others, is waiting for them.

What happens when you get a bunch of spooks, lawmakers, gadget geeks, and military interrogators together in a hotel conference room and ask them to talk - on the record? Well, more is let out of the bag than may be imagined, as documented in this piece in the Boston Globe.

The event was INTELCON, an attempt to bring together representatives from all facets of American government intelligence (an oxymoron if ever I heard one) organisations as well as from the private sector. The fact that journalists were invited would seem to suggest that one of the purposes of the conference was to demonstrate the open cross-fertilisation of ideas between intelligence and security professionals in the new post 9/11 era. This display of openness was perhaps meant to allay the fears of the general public, but I have to admit that the testimonies in this article had entirely the opposite effect on me, particularly those of Bill Tierney, an interrogator recently returned from Iraq:-

''The Brits came up with an expression - wog,'' Tierney said. ''That stands for Wily Oriental Gentleman. There's a lot of wiliness in that part of the world.'' And when it comes to interrogating wily insurgents, Tierney explained, he favors ''smarts over smack.''

''It's the amateur who resorts to violence,'' he said. ''There's always a mental lever to get them to do what you want them to do.''
...
''I tried to be nuanced and culturally aware. But the suspects didn't break.''

Suddenly Tierney's temper rose. ''They did not break!'' he shouted. ''I'm here to win. I'm here so our civilization beats theirs! Now what are you willing to do to win?'' he asked, pointing to a woman in the front row. ''You are the interrogators, you are the ones who have to get the information from the Iraqis. What do you do? That word 'torture'. You immediately think, 'That's not me.' But are we litigating this war or fighting it?''

Some listeners murmured in assent; others sat in rapt attention. In all the recent debates about the Bush administration's stance on torture, this voice, the voice of the interrogators themselves, has been almost entirely absent.

Asked about Abu Ghraib, Tierney said that for an interrogator, ''sadism is always right over the hill. You have to admit it. Don't fool yourself - there is a part of you that will say, 'This is fun.'''

It is that part, he continued, that a successful interrogator has to learn to identify and control. ''Right now the Army wants to get interrogators right out of high school,'' he said. ''A high school grad does not have the maturity to handle this job. There was a 19-year-old with me in Baghdad. What's going on in her head is what kind of fingernail polish she's going to wear. And she's sitting across from a guy from Yemen....'' His voice trailed off.

Indeed, a certain bitterness pervaded the conference, a palpable feeling that America's spies are being hobbled by the civil libertarian protests of precisely those people they are trying to protect. In a lunch talk, James Woolsey, CIA director in the first Clinton administration, invoked Justice Robert Jackson's famous suggestion that ''the Constitution is not a suicide pact.''

This notion was given starker expression by a former Marine Corps officer on a panel about military intelligence collection within the United States. When queried about interrogation techniques, he replied simply, ''I'm a fan of 220 volts,'' and was greeted with scattered applause.

The long-awaited implementation of the Kyoto protocol is without doubt cause for celebration but I can't help thining that the principal achievement is conscience-salving among the signatories rather than world-saving. A lot more needed to be done a lot earlier to have any chance of preventing what is now (and probably was before) a significant, harmful shift in the earth's climate. Many scientists believe that the tipping point, beyond which significant and harmful levels of global climate change become irreversible, is imminent and some even believe it has already been passed.

Even if we have a few years to try to reverse the trend, the scale of the problem in the rapidly developing world makes efforts to scale back global CO2 emissions resemble King Canute attempting to turn back a tsunami.

Forgetting about the fact that the USA, whose 250 million odd inhabitants alone consume one quarter of the world's energy, is a non-signatory, let's look for a moment at the UK. Britain's 60 million inhabitants currently use around a quarter of the energy of China, and two thirds of India's. It doesn't take a genius to work out the effects on the environment as these countries develop and their populations aspire to energy usage levels of those in the West. China plans to open dozens more coal-fired power stations in the coming years to support the rapidly growing needs of it's industrialising firms and consumers.

Kyoto is unfortunately a case of the (non-US) developed nations fiddling while the world cooks. That doesn't invalidate the fiddling - it just means that the treaty represents the first upward step onto a rapidly descending escalator, at the bottom of which lies a world in continual global conflict to control increasingly scarce energy resources, water and the means to protect our ultimately unsustainable way of life.

Promises to use energy more responsibly represent a sticking plaster on a gaping wound which is now starting to fester. Our only real hope lies in basic scientific research and a political will to develop practical solutions which may allow us to avoid the nightmare scenarios which loom only a matter of decades from now.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of bestsellers The Tipping Point and Blink, gave an interview to Jeff Merron of ESPN shortly before the Superbowl to explain how some of the theories in his latest book Blink apply to the split-second pressure decisions faced by sports stars.

The interview includes some interesting snippets, including the following:-

I use "momentary autism" to describe those moments when otherwise normal people become autistic -- that is, like people suffering from that disorder, they lose the ability to mind-read, to make sense of the intentions of others. An autistic person can follow the literal meaning of words, for instance, but cannot interpret gestures. They can understand flirting, in other words, only if one party says to another "I'm flirting with you."

I think all of us become momentarily autistic when we're under extreme physiological stress. For instance, when our heart rate gets above 145, our ability to make sophisticated judgments and to engage in this kind of mind-reading begins to erode very rapidly.

[...]

I talked for a long time when I was doing "Blink" with a fascinating guy named Gavin deBecker, who runs one of the top personal security agencies in Los Angeles.

Basically, if you're a movie star or a billionaire or the Sultan of Brunei, he provides you with your bodyguard. DeBecker talked a lot about how rigorously he trains his people. If the quality of our coordination and instinctive reactions breaks down when our heart rate gets above 145, he wants to expose his people to stressful situations over and over and over again until they can face them at 130, 110 or 90.

So he fires bullets at people, and does these utterly terrifying exercises involving angry pit bulls. The first and second and third and fourth time you run through one of deBecker's training sessions you basically lose control of your bowels and take off like a scalded cat. By the fifth time, essential bodily functions start to return. By the 10th time, you can function as a normal human being.

This, by the way, is why police officers will tell you that you must practice dialing 911 at least once a week. Because if you don't, when a burglar is actually in the next room, believe it or not you won't be able to dial 911: you'll forget the number, or you'll have lost so many motor skills under the stress of the moment that your fingers won't be able to pick out the buttons on the phone.

So I'd run quarterbacks who don't do well under pressure through deBecker's gauntlet -- or any other kind of similar exercise so they have a sense of what REAL life-threatening stress feels like. I'd run them through a live-fire exercise at Quantico. I'd have them spend the offseason working with a trauma team in south-central L.A. It is only through repeated exposures to genuine stress that our body learns how to function effectively under that kind of pressure. I think its time we realized that a quarterback needs the same kind of exhaustive preparation for combat that we give bodyguards and soldiers.

Any England rugby fans who saw today's game against France may recommend the same course of treatment for Charlie Hodgson (regardless of how much good it may do).

For anyone looking for more Gladwell on the internet, an index of his New Yorker articles is included on his website, and I thoroughly recommend the Real Audio feed of a talk from his recent lecture tour carried on the IT Conversations website (free registration required).

Classic black humour from The Onion. A Project Manager takes his own life, leaving a 48-slide PowerPoint presentation as his suicide note.

"When I first heard that Ron had swallowed an entire bottle of sleeping pills, I was shocked," said Hector Benitez, Butler's friend and coworker at Williams+Kennedy Marketing Consultants. "But after the team went through Ron's final PowerPoint presentation, I had a solid working knowledge of the pain he was feeling, his attempts to cope, and the reasons for his ultimate decision."

Here's an amazing story from the LA Times.

Ben Waldrep owned a $800,000 house in Manhattan Beach, California. When his wife died in 2000 he decided to move out, but instead of putting the house on the market he decided to offer it as first prize in an essay contest, with applicants paying a $195 entrance fee. He aimed to give 10% of the proceeds to a cancer charity. The contest was to be judged by four independent panelists.

David McNair, a Canadian citizen from British Columbia was declared the winner, but then things started to get strange. McNair suddenly didn't seem too interested in moving into his new home, and Waldrep didn't seem to eager to move out. There were no rules in the contest regarding what would happen if the winner didn't claim the prize, so it lapsed back to Waldrep, who later sold the house for $1.2 million.

Losing entrant Dan Coulson smelt a rat, having read the winning essay which he didn't feel was worthy of the prize. He decided to take legal action. In the course of the trial document experts for the prosecution put forward evidence that the scores had been changed to fix the result. After deliberation the jury found Waldrep guilty of fraud. At this point the story took a final twist.

The jury decided that the entry fees should be returned to the entrants, plus punitive damages of $1 million - to be split between the essay writers. They forgot to mention the last part, however, leading the judge to award the entrants $1 million each in damages! Not bad for writing a 400 word essay. Now Waldrep just needs to come up with $1.8 billion...

Waldrep's lawyer will table an objection next month, when I guess everything will be sorted out - unless a further surprise awaits us.

Yesterday Tony Blair unveiled the Labour Party's pledges for the forthcoming (although as yet unscheduled) election.

By the time he reached Battersea he had slipped into his 'meet the people' accent, swapping Eton for Estuary, dropping opening h's and closing t's in exchange for the ubiquitous glottal stop. Maybe the next time we see Blair employ t and h will be following "May" and "5". Who knows?

Here is the pledge card for this time around





As one wag put it, they could have added:

7. Your language's verbs now redundant.

Is it just me, or are these commitments just a tiny bit on the vague side? With the exception of the commitment to reduce operation waiting times to no more than 18 weeks, there seems to be very little more headline grabbing promises beyond the soundbites. This marks a departure from previous Labour pre-election pledges. Compare the above with the card from 2001:-



Four out of five are specific and open to objective measurement. It's a shame that Labour are not confident enough to make such clear pledges this time around.

John Reid commented that the 2005 pledges are the result of the Big Conversation, Labour's year long consultation process to take the pulse of the British electorate to find out what they really want, and that the govenrnment's pledges reflect the findings.

Less charitable voices may see the election pledges this time around as an exercise in stating the bleeding obvious in such a nebulous way as to minimise the risk of accusations of clear failure in the future.

How about the following to finish off?

8. Your government's pledges specific enough for them to be held properly to account in the future

I appreciate that Ikea has an interest in spreading its particular brand of stylish, value-for-money furniture as widely as possible, but surely the promotion of flat-pack people is taking things too far.

Just a short note of reassurance for anyone who may have caught snippets of yesterday's news concerning the limited authorisation to certain parties for the cloning of human embryos, and may not be familiar with previous breakthroughs in mammal cloning.

The creator of Dolly the Sheep is in no way related to the creator of Larry the Lamb, and is in fact a celebrated scientist rather than a deviser of cult fictional children's characters. It should further be stressed that there are no plans (as far as I know) to extend the power to clone humans to the creators of Muffin the Mule, Champion the Wonder Horse, or even Noggin the Nog.

I hope I have put some minds to rest.

There is an astonishing piece in the current edition of The Public Interest conerning population decline in Russia.

In the twelve years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union Russia's population has fallen by 5 million people - around 3% of the population. This is in spite of net immigration of around 5.5 million people over the same period. The reason for depopulation is simply that there are far fewer people in Russia busy being born than busy dying.

Any depopulation trend in Western Europe due to falling birth rates is laughable by comparison. Italy, which has the lowest birth rate in Europe, has 103 deaths for every 100 live births. Russia has 160.

This crash has coincided with the collapse of Communism. In 1987 there were 2.5 million births against 1.5 million deaths. In 1997 there were 1.4 million births and 2.3 million deaths - almost a mirror image.

So what lies behind these figures. The article looks at the problem from a number of angles.

Various arguments are put forward for the fall in birth rate - high rates of infertility (at least 13% in child-bearing age couples vs. 7% in Western Europe), abortion (120 for every 100 live births in 2002) and marriage breakdown (3 divorces for every 4 marriages in 2001), but none of these arguments are in themselves convincing. In any case, falling birth rates have been seen in many countries and do not present the real anomaly. It is the astonishing rise in the death rate which needs the most explanation.

Life expectancy has fallen by 5 years for Russian men since the 1960's and has seen a slight decline for women over the same period. In 2002 it stood at around 59 for men, lower than the average for the world's developing nations.

The increased risk of death has particularly affected those of working age. Nearly all of this increase can be traced back to an increase in cardiovascular disease, for which the death rate rose by 65% for men between 1965 and 2001, attaining a mortality rate eight times higher than in France.

Probable causes are increased alcohol intake (including a trand towards binge drinking), the increased stress brought on by the massive upheaval of Russia's transmission from Communism and the corresponding failure of the health system. The article doesn't mention how access to health services has changed since 1992 but I cannot help speculating that many have been (literally) left out in the cold. Other factors could be to blame (sedentary lifestyles, diet) but there doesn't seem to be much evidence of these changing much over the last 20 years.

This worrying trend is not limited to Russia, either. It has been observed in a number of other Eastern and Central European nations. Latvia and Estonia, for example, are expected by the UN to lose around 50% of their populations by 2050. Whatever the root causes of these trends, this remarkable "hollowing out" of Eastern Europe is likely to pose problems far greater than the concerns being expressed in Europe and North America regarding greying populations and pension shortfalls. We should look eastward and count ourselves lucky.

One of the internet killer apps in our house is the streaming of live or recorded radio from around the world. My wife loves to listen to Canadian radio, particularly CBC, to keep her in touch with what's going on at home. I use the excellent BBC radio player to
"time-shift" recent programmes to a more appropriate hour.

The UK also has a very limited choice of music output for those with interests outside the mainstream, particularly for those outside London, where there are very few, if any, dedicated local or national non-digital music stations catering for a non pop/classical music audience. Access to niche stations from around the globe is thus a great asset for the British music fan.

I was therefore very interested to find out from Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools
weblog about a new service called RadioTime, which pulls together in one place the schedules and feeds of around 5,000 radio stations from around the globe. The real clever bit is that for a subscription of $39 a year, the user gains the ability to program the site to download selected programs to your hard disk for listening at your convenience. As per Kevin Kelly's review:-

There are 36,000 radio stations world-wide streaming some part of their programs. Only a tiny sliver of all that is produced is aired in one locale... Whole rivers of great stuff -- music, stories, interviews, talk, sports -- are flowing by invisibly. A monthly subscription to RadioTime will record your favorites, but also make visible and manageable this sonic tide, an entirely new territory.

It will inevitably take time for people to get used to the concept of global, user-definable radio, but when they do it will revolutionise the ways in which we listen and the content we listen to.

Now that the citizens of Iraq have demonstrated their enthusiasm for democracy, the issue now becomes the nature of the democracy they are likely to end up with.

Let us assume that the country rides the storm of violence and finds a constitutional settlement which is acceptable enough to all parties to avoid a breakdown into factionalism and potential Civil War. In other words, a workable democracy comes into being which to a realistic degree represents and reflects the wishes of the Iraqi electorate.

The next step represents the acid test of American good intentions. The initial premise for war was non-existent weapons of mass destruction. The goal of the peace has purportedly been the implementation of a representative democracy. However, true freedom and democracy implies the ability to make decisions independent of and, where appropriate, contrary to the wishes of Washington. The question is whether the US will keep its hands off.

Noam Chomsky illustrated the point well in a recent speech (audio here)

Let’s just imagine what the policies might be of an independent Iraq, independent, sovereign Iraq, let’s say more or less democratic, what are the policies likely to be?

Well there’s going to be a Shiite majority, so they’ll have some significant influence over policy. The first thing they’ll do is reestablish relations with Iran. Now they don’t particularly like Iran, but they don’t want to go to war with them so they’ll move toward what was happening already even under Saddam, that is, restoring some sort of friendly relations with Iran.

That’s the last thing the United States wants. It has worked very hard to try to isolate Iran. The next thing that might happen is that a Shiite-controlled, more or less democratic Iraq might stir up feelings in the Shiite areas of Saudi Arabia, which happen to be right nearby and which happen to be where all the oil is. So you might find what in Washington must be the ultimate nightmare—a Shiite region which controls most of the world’s oil and is independent. Furthermore, it is very likely that an independent, sovereign Iraq would try to take its natural place as a leading state in the Arab world, maybe the leading state. And you know that’s something that goes back to biblical times.

What does that mean? Well it means rearming, first of all. They have to confront the regional enemy. Now the regional enemy, overpowering enemy, is Israel. They’re going to have to rearm to confront Israel—which means probably developing weapons of mass destruction, just as a deterrent. So here’s the picture of what they must be dreaming about in Washington—and probably 10 Downing street in London—that here you might get a substantial Shiite majority rearming, developing weapons of mass destruction, to try to get rid of the U.S. outposts that are there to try to make sure that the U.S. controls most of the oil reserves of the world. Is Washington going to sit there and allow that? That’s kind of next to inconceivable.

For the American Right, the symbolic touchstone of freedom is the right to bear arms, the right to protect oneself against a sovereign power which may one day against their own interests. This is not, however, a freedom likely to be unconditionally granted to other nations which it liberates.

Chomsky's scenario does not strike me as particularly unrealistic given a truly free Iraq. There are many others equally unpalatable to Washington. Washington knows this of course, and that is why it is surely inconceivable that Iraq will truly be allowed to act freely. In the most blatant scenario, American troops and administrators will dig their heels in and keep pulling the strings in an overt manner. In the most likely one, Iraq will languish between a carefully concocted selection of American sticks and carrots in a similar manner to the multitude of other puppet states set up in the post-war era.

In any case, I feel that the best strategy for Iraq at the moment must be to do the right thing and work towards installing the democracy the country wants and needs. When a situation arises where the freely elected government of Iraq wishes to act in opposition to the US, let the world clearly see whether America is truly committed to freedom and democracy in the world.