The New Atheists and existence of God

Yesterday, WIRED note its largest reader response "in memory" to a piece they published entitled The Church of the Non-Believers on beliefs of the "New Atheists" or, as they call themselves, "Brights". Other media, such as the NY Times and Washington Post have had similar specials on "faith" with huge reader response.

These issues permeate our lives and affect our behavior in major ways. One reason they are so visible lately is that the beliefs of Islam appear to be motivating some people to violent actions that have the US on the receiving end. These seem to be more visible within the US than violence inspired by Christianity for which the US or the West was on the delivering end, some of which occurred years or centuries ago.

Then, added to this mix of those calling for unbelievers to repent or die, come the New Atheists, who say "pox on both your houses", and, naturally, call for the unbelievers (in atheism) to repent or be in some cases forced to yield. The article mentions that some feel that religion at all, or belief in God, should be legally treated like smoking and parents should be prohibited by the state from subjecting their children to its harmful effects.

Disrespect towards those who see things differently, or violence towards them, seems to me a very dangerous way to go, that only pours gasoline on the fire. Freedom of religious diversity was one of the founding principles of the USA, after all.

So, without getting entangled in an endless debate over logical proofs of who is "right", is there something useful that can be said about this issue, from the perspective of health and public health? Definitely.

The first point is some ground rules. If people are going to get emotional or violent just from thinking about this subject, they should please stop reading now, or at least stop yelling, so the rest of us can hear what each other is saying.

I'll suggest some themes or approaches to this very important debate that may be more productive than most of the debate I've seen or wasted a decade or so pursuing. These are, in my mind, themes that both the scientific and skeptical community, and the religious moderate community could possibly agree on. Let's start there and build on strength.

First, we need a little perspective on where we are in understanding life around us.

Historically, the discovery of the "microscope" completely changed our understanding of the nature of life and human beings. It took centuries to adjust to the idea that we are not alone in our bodies, but are, in fact, hosts to millions of smaller living things that have varying degrees of cordiality to us. A few of those don't play nicely, and are called "pathogens" or "germs", and science tries to kill those off, but most of the rest get along with us just fine. Some, like mitochondria, have taken up permanent residence in every cell. Some, like the ones that live in our gut, are visitors that we need to digest food. It's spooky to be a "colony" organism.

A very large fraction of the US research budget is currently devoted to looking for "answers" to what ails us by peering down that microscope to the DNA within those cells, etc.

Actually, and relevant, if you look at a slice of living tissue through a microscope you'll see approximately nothing, because it is pretty transparent. You have to find something to stain it with first, some sort of dye, to see it at all. This is as important as the microscope itself.

You might think that Science is similarly equipped with a "macroscope", a tool that allows us to look upwards in the hierarchy of life, to see what's going on there. You'd be wrong.

It turns out, we don't have such a device. We have telescopes, but those look out at larger geographic space, not along the axis of the vertical hierarchy of life, the one that goes from who knows what to atoms to cells to people to ever larger aggregations of people like relationships and families and villages and communities and corporations and nations and cultures.

So, here's my point. It seems silly, or non-productive, to argue what the shape and nature is of the infinite limit version of life (ie, "God"), when we can't even make out what the shape and function is of the next few higher levels above us in any reliable and reproducible way. Couldn't we learn to crawl before we try to run?

So, my suggestion is that before we waste a lot of time and energy arguing about what is billions of levels above people, let's see if we can get any decent tools at all that look upwards at all, maybe just the next few levels. And let's learn how to "stain" it so we can see hidden structure.

Multilevel models have recently come into use, but they're really complicated and still leave out feedback. Most researchers don't know how to use them, the ones that do don't know how to persuade the others of their findings, and anything that involves loops is still left out of the model, which is most of life.

An "interaction" is by nature a bi-directional beast. Human interactions involve almost as much feed-forward, responding to what we think the other person is going to do in the future, as they do responding to the past. Causality gets totally messed up. Putting out garbage cans seems to cause the garbage trucks to arrive, based on the order things happen. It's hard to study.

Most of Science turned away from these fields with about the same bad taste that high school students have for "social studies" in general, but with more erudite arguments about these being somehow "soft sciences." The snooty implication was that these areas of life were not really worthy of study, or not important, or too complicated to study, or otherwise dismissed them and cleared them off the table so we could get down to real science, "hard" science, where things weren't so squishy and where causality stayed local where it could be measured.

Well, all those things we put off are coming back to haunt us now. Our lack of understanding of how societies and cultures work has certainly revealed itself in the USA's "nation building" efforts in the Middle East and Asia. Whatever else is going on there, it's clear that we have no solid body of knowledge that all scientists agree on that tells us how to build or rebuild a family or a town or a village or a community or a culture or a nation. Why don't we?

What do we have? Well, we have a huge number of books published on how to make a two-person relationship work. Judging from evidence, letting the "data speak", we don't know much about that yet either. We're surrounded by broken hearts, broken relationships, and broken homes.

So, that's strange, isn't it? What have we spent a trillion dollars on research for? Where's the beef?

We see this impact our bodies and health as well. Depression is rampant. Our medical and hospital system is oriented around a classical, reductionist, isolationist model where '"the patient" is the protoplasm blob that comes into the clinic, and the rest of the world that didn't come in has been treated as irrelevant to physiological health. But now we're realizing that is not true.

One of the strongest predictors of physical health or mortality is social connectedness. There are some sort of interactional things that happen that dramatically alter "our own" personal, physical bodies. Daniel Goleman's latest book, Social Intelligence, describes how when two people meet they, in some senses, take over control of each other's bodies with "mirror neurons." Spooky.

The evidence for such "psychosocial factors" impacting, or even determining "our health" is growing daily, and is very "robust", which is to say, that everywhere we look for it, we're finding it.

But, sadly, we don't even have the mathematics or methods to measure this yet, or to analyze it, or to write about it to other scientists. Scientists in fields like social epidemiology like Lisa Berkman or Ichiro Kawachi or Tom Glass are just barely started at figuring out how to incorporate "feedback" into these hierarchical models of humans-in-social-context. There a few books out, like Social Epidemiology by Berkman and Kawachi, which are collected papers, but they're expensive and academic.

The National Institutes of Health has an Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research that recognizes this hierarchy and seeks to understand it, but that's not been wildly popular or successful so far at "changing the paradigm." The latest research R21 RFA with grant funding to work on tools for the area is described below and is for a paltry $3 million.

The problem is that as soon as "feedback" comes in, almost all the standard statistical techniques we've used for the last 80 years become inapplicable. Those tools almost all rely on linear causal pathways, where the output doesn't feed back into the input. Study of such feedback effects has had 50 years since Jay Forrester at MIT laid out the field of system dynamics, and just now, this year, 2006, is the very first time that the term "system thinking" has made it into the Master of Public Health curriculum.

So, cut through all that. I started pondering God and ended up pondering my neighborhood.

I'm stating that there are huge discoveries being made every day now in public health about how the higher levels of the hierarchy of life that humans are in the middle of affects us. This field is in it's infancy, but starting to pick up steam.

I'm suggesting that development of this "macroscope" capacity, the ability to look upwards, at all, any distance, is what is happening, slowly, all around us. This is something I'd suggest that the religious folks, and the scientists, and the passionate New Atheists could and should support. Many of these "Brights" are techies and could help bring the power and tools of the web and advanced image and data processing and collaboration into the halls of public health, which currently desperately need such assistance.

I'm also suggesting that, instead of killing off each other for disagreements over what's on the very top of the pyramid of life, we should all agree to suspend violence while we all cooperate in efforts to get a good handle on the next few layers above humans.

This is where the rubber meets the road, where our behavior interacts with the behavior of others, where we get a lot of feedback and accountability for things we have done in the past, individually and collectively, often things we'd rather forget.

So, even a very basic look at systems thinking in a book like Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline will reveal that complex active systems all have both feedback and "lags" in them, that is, the feedback often takes a while to get back to us. We can't even measure that well yet.

Senge's book is great in that it introduces the "Beer Problem", where rational people, behaving rationally, end up at each other's throats and screaming and blaming others for hostility when, in point of fact, it's just the larger system structure that we'd gotten wrong, and everyone was actually well intentioned.

First, before we kill off each other, please, can't we understand that issue better, and figure out how much of what we're blaming each other for is really, sigh, in the end, the lagged reflections and downstream impacts of our very own actions?

Then, when we have those tools in hand, and know how to look upwards, let's come back and revisit this question of what is way, way up from us.

Till then, it seems, we have our work cut out for us, and it would be productive immediately and help our personal, community, and public health to learn how to understand psychosocial factors and build our "macroscope."

============

reference:

Recently, the National Institutes of Health (in the U.S.)
announced the availability of $3M to fund approximately 10 projects
designed to facilitate "Interdisciplinary Research via Methodological
and Technological Innovation in the Behavioral and Social Sciences."
Complete details about the grant program are available online.

The Request for Applications includes several explicit statements
encouraging submissions grounded in various forms of simulation
modeling, including SD (albeit misspelled in the announcement). The
long list of examples of research sought includes the follow excerpts...

* Methodologies and/or technologies that improve or develop new
approaches to nonlinear analysis e.g., recurrence quantification
analysis, fractal analyses, systems dynamic modeling, agent-based
modeling and other simulation techniques.

photo credit: "Spiral" by george_morgan

technorati tags:theology, science, religion, systems, systemsthinking, publichealth, sociology, psychology, atheism, beliefs, rootsofviolence

What a Difference a Decade Makes - IM and Skype

Intesting post by Jenny - the shifted Librarian, on use of Skype in education.

Here's part of it:

 There's no point in explaining that they'd be able to hear much better on the phone because for whatever reasons, this new way of communicating just feels more natural to them. I think they just connect better in this medium, they multitask, they can still IM with their other friends while doing it, and even participate in group chats. It's a dynamic I don't think I'd ever want to replicate for myself (although I do end up IMing and talking on the phone at the same time every once in a while at work), but for them, it's just natural.

Which is why I was chuckling to myself while reading Will Richardson's post about Skype Ideas for the classroom.

"But I happened to be watching an online presentation by my friend Alan November yesterday and he suggested a use that just made me slap my forehead in a 'Doh!' moment: Skype to allow parents to listen to their child's presentations at school!" [Weblogg-ed]

Will goes on to give eight great other ideas for using Skype in education, all of which Brent would totally groove on for learning. That's the kind of interactive environment in which he would learn best, because he's a very experiential type of learner. That's why he learns so well from video games, too.

Sure there are some security issues with Skype right now, but it's the concept as applied by Will that is so intriguing. The security issues will work themselves out or better software will come along (there are already good competitors).

While I see it in my job every day, I'm still constantly amazed how quickly the internet has pervaded our daily lives in just ten years. All of which is especially appropriate today as we celebrate the 15th anniversary of the creation of the first web page.

technorati tags:IM, Skype, kids, internet, messaging, networking, multitasking

Social Network Methods - on-line textbook

Marcus P Zillman blogs that there is a new on-line textbook available:

Introduction to Social Network Methods, by Hanneman and Riddle.

This on-line textbook introduces many of the basics of formal approaches to the analysis of social networks. ... You are invited to use and redistribute this text freely -- but please acknowledge the source. This has been added to Social Informatics Subject Tracer™ Information Blog

technorati tags:networks, socialnetworks, methods

Instant Messaging now rivals email - Betanews

Study: IM Equaling Popularity of E-mail

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

November 10, 2005, 11:16 AM

Instant messaging continues to grow as a medium for online communication, according to details of a study released by America Online on Thursday. Instant messaging is up 19 percent, and 38 percent of all users say they now send more IMs than e-mails.

The survey also found that one-third of users connect to instant messaging networks through their mobile phones. This is nearly twice the number recorded last year, when only 19 percent said they used such services, and over three times as high as in 2003, when the number stood at 10 percent...

technorati tags:IM, networking, socialnetworking, email, cscw

Virtue drives the bottom line

Religion, business, and science are often depicted as in conflict, so it catches the attention when all three of them agree on something. That something needs to be investigated.

Recently, the value of virtue in driving high-reliability, high-performance organizations is increasingly being revealed by studies and real-life examples.

The Ross School of Business is consistently recognized as being one of the best business schools in the US. Here's an excerpt from one of their sites - the Center for POS : (you have to go there for the links to actually work.)

============ start POS ===============

Mission

The Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship is a community of scholars devoted to energizing and transforming organizations through research on the theory and practice of positive organizing and leadership. More...

• Mission document (PDF)
• Essence of POS document (PDF)
  

Domains of Excellence

Domains of excellence describe areas of research depth and experience of the Center. Please click on a Domain name for more information.

Compassion Organizational Virtuousness Positive Identity Positive Leadership Empowerment Fundamental State of Leadership

Positive Social Capital High-Quality Connections Energy Networks Generalized Reciprocity Resilience Thriving Values

============ end POS ===============

It is recognized that these interpersonal skills may seem "soft", but the outcomes are definitely "hard" and very real. These findings show up in "learning organizations"

For example, the US Army is no one's "fluff" and is definitely oriented to what actually works in practice. Consider this excerpt from the US Army Leadership Field Manual (FM 22-100)

1-3: Leadership starts at the top, with the character of the leader, with your character. In order to lead others you have to make sure your own house is in order.

1-7: The example you set is just as important as the words you speak.

1-8: Purpose ... does not mean that as a leader you must explain every decision to the satisfaction of your subordinates. It does mean that you must earn their trust: they must know from experience that you care about them and would not ask them to do something - particularly something dangerous - unless there was a good reason...

1-10: Trust is a basic bond of leadership, and it must be developed over time.

1-15: People who are trained this way will accomplish the mission, even when no one is watching.

1-23: you demonstrate your character through your behavior.

1-56: Effective leaders strive to create an environment of trust and understanding that encourages their subordinates to seize the initiative and act.

1-74: The ultimate end of war, at least as America fights it, is to restore peace.

4-9: Be aware of barriers to listening. Don't form your response while the other person is still talking.

4-20: Critical Reasoning ... means looking at a problem from several points of view instead of just being satisfied with the first answer that comes to mind.

4-24: Ethical leaders do the right things for the right reasons all the time, even when no one is watching.

====================

A thought from the Baha'i faith on consultation:

They must... proceed with the utmost devotion, courtesy, dignity, care, and moderation to express their views. They must in every matter search our the truth and non insist upon their own opinion, for stubbornness and persistence in one's own views will lead ultimately to discord and wrangling and the truth will remain hidden. Abdu'l-Baha

From the Christian Bible (New American Standard):

Where there is no guidance, the people fall, But in abundance of counselors there is victory (Proverbs 11:14)

====================

If you have an hour, the video on the Ross School's POS site on "making the impossible possible" is worth viewing. It documents how these "soft" factors saved a literal hundred billion dollars, had helped to make an "impossible' cleanup at the worst radioactive dump site of the Department of Energy take 2 years instead of the projected 200 with the unions going along with management on the job.

The atmosphere of trust and open honesty where people are free to question the mental models of authorities without challenging their authority itself is also crucial for "safety culture" in high-risk business, such as nuclear reactor control, hospital operating rooms, chemical plants, aircraft cockpits, etc. Without it, management can plow into obstacles or off cliffs that subordinates saw coming and knew about, but felt unable to have a voice - totally avoidable costs.

Interestingly, use of these techniques that fit with "Theory Y" are truly liberating for the leadership as well, because they no longer need to act as if they knew everything, which they know in their hearts they certainly don't. It becomes OK and safe for them to say "I don't know, do you?" This opens the door to active organizational learning, as described by Michael Marquardt in his management text "Leading with Questions." This takes off the cap on learning, which in turn takes off the cap on innovation in problem solution.

====================

A continuing stream of examples show that, in T.S. Eliot's words, we should stop "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good", and focus attention on what this "soft" quality of "good" is that seems to make so much difference in practice.

A last quote from Proverbs (21:31) also reflects the idea that technology is fine, but unless it has a solid base of social integrity, you might as well not have it.

The horse is prepared for the day of battle,

But victory belongs to the Lord.

==================

References and further reading

High-Relability Organizations and asking for help

Secrets of High-Reliability Organizations (in depth, academic paper)

High-Reliability.org web site

Threat and Error Management - aviation and hospital safety

Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject (link to John Gall Systemantics)

Houston - we have another problem (on complexity and limits of one person's mind)

Institute of Medicine - Crossing the Quality Chasm and microsystems (small group teamwork)

Pathways to Peace - beautiful slides and reflections to music on the value of virtues

(photo credit: Ollieda )

technorati tags:virtue, values, effectiveness, organizations, POS, collaboration, trust, army, leadership

US economic competitiveness and spirituality

Religion and financial prosperity should not be in conflict. Here's one example.

One of the core beliefs of the Baha'i faith is this:

• spiritual solutions to economic problems and the removal of economic barriers and restrictions.

One of the meanings of this concept is "sustainable development."

Though the term "sustainable development" is relatively recent, Baha'is have always supported the concept. Sustainable development has been described as "development that meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs."

A group which converts thinking to action is the Baha'i Business Forum of the Americas (BBFA), which believes in thinking "Beyon the Bottom LIne: a New Vision of Human Prosperity"

That's the theme of the Fourth Annual Baha'i Business Forum of the Americas (BBFA) Conference, held Feb. 17-19, 2006 at the Hyatt Regency Reston in Reston, Va. The conference [was] open to both Baha´i and non-Baha'i business leaders.

Programs at the conference are divided into Sharing the Wealth, Human Beings as Assets, Ethics and Leadership. Seminars include "Spirituality Inspired Corporate Citizenship: Can you be true to yourself while also serving corporate stakeholders' best interests?", "People Make the Difference: Energy and Competence in the Workplace", "Ethics and the New Spirit of Transformation in Personal and Professional Life" and "Good to Glorious: How Baha'i Principles Make Leaders and Companies Successful."

The BBFA is a non-profit organization dedicated to applying Baha'i; principles in business, economics and management. Members believe that business has social and economic responsibility for carrying forward an ever-advancing civilization and that business should:

• Justly serve the legitimate interests of its stakeholders.
• Strive to apply principles of consultation, fairness and honesty in its deliberations.
• Demonstrate the principles of the oneness of humanity and the equality of men and women in all interactions with its stakeholders.
• Follow the maxim that whatever matters to humans, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives.
• Have a role in moderating the extremes of wealth and poverty.

technorati tags:honesty, innovation, virtues, economics, competitiveness, trade

Lofty vision for capitalism stresses responsibility

A virtuous 'circle of accountability' begins with individual share owners. The goal is sustainable prosperity.

By Stefan Stern, Financial Times
in latimes.com (Los Angeles Times)
December 3, 2006

There are facts, and then there is interpretation. Is that glass halfempty or half full? The authors of "The New Capitalists" are definitely"half-full" men....

They set out a vision of a new "civil economy," the goal of which issustainable prosperity brought about by "responsible management."

Cynics might stop reading at this point, but they would be wrong.

The argument is not being offered up by a rabble of anti-globalization protesters. Davis is a leading corporate governance expert, and Lukomnik is a former deputy comptroller for New York City and is now a financial consultant. Pitt-Watson was until recently chief executive of Hermes Focus asset management, an activist fund manager.

The whole piece is worth a read.

But - here's a point to ponder. "Capitalism" is a definition, or a justification, of an environment. As such, it directs our attention the wrong way. What is more interesting to focus on is the product of that environment, or of communism, or of socialism, or of pretty much any resource-distribution algorithm - the large-scale organization of humans into some kind of larger active structure. One such species is the "corporation." And, as they say "for profit" is a tax strategy, not a business strategy.

In fact, anything that's alive has to take in more energy than it expends, if it is to continue to live and survive. Arguments over rates only change the time constant or estimated time at the destination. Overly rapid growth is self-destructive and miserable to live near, but popular among stressed small-scale investors seeking 37% on their money. Very large investors will tend to be looking for anything that's sustainable at any true return greater than zero.

So, if corporations are part of the next layer up of the way life on earth is self-assembling (or assembling with direction or intervention, whatever your preference ) then they are also part of the equation that determines our overall true health and wealth.

Many advocates of public health get carried away with environmental protection and forget that losing one's job has a pretty large health impact too. If the economy goes totally sour, people's health will go sour too. On the other hand, and less obvious to business leaders apparently, it goes the other way. If the population of humans that are being used as workers or consumers all goes broke or dies off from pollution or poverty, there goes the business.

So, both public health and business, kicking and screaming, are going to have to come together and work together to solve the joint problems of survival and sustainability, and multiple levels, cellular, organ systems, humans, families, neighborhoods, communities, states, countries, continents, and planetary. These only look like separate problems because both sides are using too narrow a time-window for planning strategy and assessing impact.

Besides, after a fairly short period, maybe within our lifetimes, some corporation, legal or otherwise, may succeed in taking over everything. Then what? At some point the question comes up, once you own all the marbles, what are you going to do with them?

Then, there's no one left to blame for things that go wrong, or systems that start failing right and left. Then, the "natural accidents" that Charles Perrow writes about will start happening more and more frequently, despite, or more precisely, because of misguided theories about the nature of top-down "control" of complexity.

Machines may be controllable, but living, complex, adaptive systems are not controllable in that sense. This is a problem that has to be faced, whether coming from business, capitalism, pure greed, or the most altruistic religion.

These are "system" problems, and we're surrounded with them, because they're the sludge that's left over after all the easy problems got solved, after everything that was linear and reductionistic got reduced. Efforts to forcibly make the rest of life into a "linear" solution and to "get into line" are doomed to fail, because, alas, they are loops and loops don't reshape into lines without breaking them.

As is obvious in fields like enterprise-wide information processing, just trying to keep this complex mess from crashing is becoming a full-time job, with every part migrating on its own. It's like herding cats. As the world gets smaller, the slack gets less, and the systems interact more and more. That's the world we need to develop the tools to address - the heavy interaction end, and how to make that work at all, period.

(photo by alanconnor )

technorati tags:capitalism, governance, ethics, sustainability, future, vision, responsibility, accountability

Distal causality and the FBI, CIA, NSA, religion, business, public health

We wouldn't see it if it bit us. Most of our detection equipment is broken, and we don't even realize it. Let's start there.

Among all the tacit assumptions we hold, probably the worst one is that our detection equipment is actually functioning. We sort of know that, in the sense that no certified laboratory would ever do a run of samples through a piece of equipment without first calibrating the piece of equipment to prove it was actually working.

This problem was brought home to me and my wife a few years ago at a conference dealing with social support for "self regulation of health behaviors." Already, there's a problem. The issue is that about 2/3 of the USA's health care bill is due to lifestyle choices such as smoking, drinking, exercise, job stress. And, guess what, it's hard to get people to change. So there was a conference looking at what worked and what didn't, with the world's leading experts on the panel.

At the end of it, papers had been presented, and conclusions reached. I asked about the bizarre realization that every single one of the presented had related interpersonal interventions that worked the best, but only published personal actions. So, for example it was far more effective to pay a woman's children $10 per pound she lost, than to pay her. Why hadn't these top interventions made it into the papers? Well, came back teh answer, the researchers didn't know how to compute p-values for multiperson feedback looops, so they just erased that inconvenient data point and left it out of their papers. My jaw must have dropped to the floor.

The single most important, most effective interventions, for the most expensive problem our nation faces, and it was blipped because the researchers didn't have tools to deal with feedback systems, didn't want to talk to engineers to get them, and didn't want to be embarrassed. And we wonder why health care costs are running out of control.

It's the scientific paradigm that's broken here. That's what needs to be fixed. 50 years of systems dynamics still hasn't made it into biostatistical techniques as the new paradigm. This is amazing. Thomas Kuhn must be laughing.

Our problem is that the piece of equipment that's broken is our reliance on detection algorithms that in turn rely on the generalized linear model of causation. As soon as we get into non-linear feedback loops, those assumptions are all broken.

What this means is that we, as individuals and organizations, are almost completely blind to anything involving distal causality. It's hard enough for individuals to start seeing psychosocial factors behind depression, or enemy intent behind some far downstream event X; but then the peer-group resistance not only damps out that dim perception, but pushes back further into our own minds and discounts such perceptions before they even get to our consciousness. We become walking blind and totally unaware of it.

This is a shared problem across the board. In social epidemiology, those suggesting distal causality are more or less shunned as "making the problem too complicated' and "needing to focus." It is "obvious" that bleeding causes death, not bullets, not guns, not terrorists with guns, not a reservoir of anger causing men to become terrorists and obtain and use guns, etc. As soon as that is accepted as a "fact", all the great upstream, high-leverage intervention points fall off the map.

Judging from press releases, it appears that, say, George Bush absolutely cannot conceive of the core systems thinking idea that it is our own actions that are causing the increase in terrorism, our own attitudes coming back to haunt us.

Similarly, the huge social debate between "religion" and "science" is futile until one basic fact is recognized: the equipment we're using is broken. We wouldn't see "God" using linear, reductionistic, "scientific method" techniques if He/She was sitting across from us in the room. It's trivial to set up a basic multiloop feedback scenario and ask someone to make measurements of it and tell you what's going on, and see that, well, they can't do it.

The tool doesn't even work on tiny, easy, synthetic problems where we know the answer because we just designed it as a calibration test case.

So, there are two interlocked problems that we keep smashing our heads into:

1) The linear scientific method has a blind spot when it comes to analyzing complex, active, adaptive systems that involve thousands of cycles of feedback, and

2) The sociology of science, still stuck on the idea that Science has replaced God and is, in fact, godlike, is having a lot of trouble recognizing and admitting that their old model, like everything else in life, is obsolete and needs a new version and an update.

We're in the middle of a huge paradigm shift here, and it's not pretty. Jay Forrester laid out the basic principles of system dynamics 50 years ago, and they're only just now starting to actually get into practice. Part of that, of course, is that we needed huge computing power to manage the task, along with astoudingly good visual graphics, and that didn't arrive until the last decade.

There is, blocking the road, yet another fallen tree that needs to be dealt with, and that is the legacy of Turing and the concept of Turing machines and computability, the holy grail of some computer scientists. Turing modelled "all" computing problems as a little machine that could read an infinitely long tape that had ones and zeros on it.

3) Our problem in this reality is that the tape is noisy and biodegrades pretty rapidly with time and distance. The implications of that problem are pivotal. It means that no amount of processing of linear strings of symbols can possibly work, if accuracy matters. We have most of the best scientific minds of the world tied up trying to get one more decimal place of accuracy on "facts" that don't really matter, that can't really matter, because at least one of them is wrong, so the serial aggregation of them will be wrong. The algorithm sucks.

We already have the workaround for that in our hands, accelerated in hardware, namely, image processing techniques. Images, unlike symbol strings, are remarkably robust against most types of noise, at least when processed by humans. In other posts, I talk about how business has to operate this way in the real world, you know, the one scientists left "for later" when they shut their doors and poured their lives to looking down the microscope instead of out the window.

In any case, the paradigm is shifting, now at an accelerating rate. People are starting to accept that feedback is not only part of the equation we can't get rid of, but that feedback is the part we care about.

In fact, in many fields, such as general relativity, there are two ends of the world that can be examined that are relatively simple, and a middle region which is a mess. (See posts on near-field and far-field approximations of radiation patterns.)

There are "self-terms", where what we call "objects" do something we call "exist." Then there are interaction terms, where the effect of active interactions between objects are described.

The billiard ball, particle model of the world was great because it was relatively simple at the limit where interactions were reduced to a few "collisions", and mostly self-terms dominated. Then came waves, and worse, quantum mechanics, and relativity, and worse, general relativity.

In general relativity, there is feedback between context and content, and the two become smeared out in space and time. Uglier than the flat, linear approximation.

So as we get more complex, the math gets harder. But, just as with behaviors of of a gas or liquid, at the high end where there are billions of interactions, life gets easy again - it's just that we no longer even try to track individual molecules, we just look at bulk properties like "volume" and "pressure" and "flow", that mean nothing to individual molecules.

So, equivalently, we need to get past the ugly middle, and just skip over it, actually, and focus on the high-interaction end of life, where the "self-energy" terms can be dropped out of the equation, and the only thing left is the interaction terms, the synergy, the emergent properties that are, again, simple.

For hierarchies of living stuff, this seems to happen repeatedly across the vertical axis of scale, where, at the next larger scale, things close in on themselves and take on a life of their own, independent of the lower level substrate matrix upon which these upper level soliton waves now have an existence. One thing is sure, and that is that the universal basis of life, the regulatory feedback loop, will be found again at each level. We call the levels below us "alive", and call ourselves "alive." I

t gets really emotional to call levels above humans "alive", and goes off on tangents that distract us, so let me just call them systems with the "MAWBA" property - that is, they May As Well Be Alive. They consume energy, they have goals, they are goal seeking, they are aware of their environments, they have "controller" software that has mental models of the world and measures differences between sensed reality and desired reality and takes an action that, in that mental model, will tend to close that gap, etc.

Mathematically, the frustrating thing is that causality doesn't stay within one plane, but insists on having closed feedback loops vertically, across planes or levels of this hierarchy. If that is facilitated and made to work, we can solve the cybernetic 101 model of sensors feeding a mental model which controls actions which are sensed, and all is good. That's more or less what the Army leadership doctrine attempts to do - establish a safety culture where data challenging the model can flow upwards and make it to the brain.

If the synthesized cyernetic being is fragmented and these phase-lock loops are broken or made unidirectional (which would always be "top down"), the whole model collapses. We are walking blind.

What about the model of simply exchanging messages between silos, where the upper levels decide what is important based on "experts" at layers above who know all and see all? That can't possibly work either. The datastreams are too noisy. This is the Turing tape problem. If people can see all the facts for themselves, if the tank commander can see the whole battlefield, they can do sense-making despite the noise, and "see through" the noise. You can get the same effect with "adaptive contours" or "snakes" in 3-D MRI image analysis, where a coherent balloon type structure is "moved" through the pixel space and, by retaining it's own coherence, can see through amazing degrees of noise at any individual MRI plane and detect the contours of a tumor.

You cannot serialize this process. This process does not flatten. You cannot serialize this process. You do not end up with the same power if you ask each plane to detect the shape of its own contour, only, in isolation, and then have some "higher" power assemble those varying size circles, say, into the outline of a sphere. That does not work. That cannot work. Each layer needs the feedback, live, real-time, from the neighboring levels, to know whether to suspect that the spike it sees infront of it is noise or signal.

You cannot have each isolated subunit "find a dot" and then have the higher up experts "connect the dots." That algorithm is broken. That algorithm assumes that there is a high signal to noise ratio, which isn't true in practice.

OK, where's all that get us. We are faced in business, in intelligence operations, in epidemiology, in daily life, with trying to detect and respond to distal causality. Our current tools are demonstrably lousy, and sociologically stuck there by people who think civilization will end if a better version of the tools is released and they have to go back to school to learn it.

We should join forces and attack this problem together. Science, religion, business, intelligence, homeland security all care about the tools and techniques that will address it.

technorati tags:science, scientific, methods, methodology, feedback, systems, syststemsthinking, casuality, distalcausality, sensemaking, seeing, statisticalpower, business, religion, detection, Turing, computability, imageprocessing, symbolprocessing, noise, SNR

Aperture synthesis - a technical note

In the technique of aperture synthesis, multiple small sensors have their signals combined so as to form, virtually, a sensor the size of the outline of the whole grid with the gaps filled in.

The effect is to make a virtual telescope that can see much more than you'd think.

In optical or radio astronomy, this matters because the smallest object that can be resolved is inversely related to the diameter of the telescope. So, by linking a small telescope in the USA with one in Sweden, effectively a 5000 kilometer diameter "dish" is created, virtually. This is a standard production technique.

The key is not only that the signals be brought together, but that the phase information has to not be lost as well. This is subtle but crucial. (See VLBI information on wikipedia for the idea.)

A mathematically similar type of thing occurs when multiple databases in different places are made to "act as one", which requires each of them to give up a little bit of control in order to establish a realm where "two-phase commit" works. The concept is that when an update shows up at any site, none of them should recognize it as "true" until they are all ready to recognize it as true, at which point they all change as one, so there is never a time at which some databases think the fact is true, and others think it is false. This is the key difference between an actual distributed database architecture and a tinker-toy grid of legacy systems that send messages back and forth to each other, with each one retaining its own authority to decide for itself whether something is true or not.

The cost of not yielding control is that the "aperture synthesis" part goes away. Suddenly, we're back to having 14 small dishes that talk and argue, not one virtual huge dish that sees things as one that none could see separately.

The point is that it cannot work if it is compartmentalized.

Compartmentalization and emergent aperture synthesis are incompatible.

If some unit wants to be sure it is the only one that ever sees the aggregate whole, then the cost is that the aggregate whole will be tiny and flawed. Either everyone sees the new truth, or no one sees it.

So, organizational politics of top-down control and secrecy interferes, fatally, with abilty of disparate units to act as one. And, no, a top-down tree-structure doesn't fix this problem.

Assuming the above analysis is correct, sooner or later someone will accomplish just exactly such a synthesis. Effectively, the IQ of their organization as a whole will jump by a factor of 100 over everyone else. Self-interst would argue that the someone should be us.

First side to overcome theory X with theory Y wins all the marbles. The clock is running.

(Image of the Very Large Array, as featured in the movie Contact, is from wikipedia.)

technorati tags:theoryY, aperture, synthesis, aperturesynthesis, telescopes, collaboration, fusion, phaselock, phaselockloops, PLL, control, organiztions

weblogs wikis and spying - NY Times

Here's some excerpts from the Dec 3 NYTimes on open-source spying, that is, web 2.0 technology applied to information acquisition, fusion, and sense-making.

Following those i have some comments on prior work in this field by David Shepherdson, (see links), myself, and others. Summary - i agree 1000% with Dale Meyerrose.

First this:

New York Times on-line

December 3, 2006

Open-Source Spying

By CLIVE THOMPSON

(selected excepts from the 10 page article):

By way of contrast, every night when Burtonwent home, he was reminded of how good the everyday Internet had become at connecting dots. “Web 2.0” technologies that encourage people to share information — logs, photo-posting sites like Flickr or the reader-generated encyclopedia Pediatric — often made it easier to collaborate with others. When the Orange Revolution erupted in Ukrainein late 2004, Burtonwent to Technorati, a search engine that scours the “blogosphere,” to find themost authoritative blog postings on the subject. Within minutes, he had found sites with insightful commentary from American expatriates who were talking to locals in Kievand on-the-fly debates among political analysts over what it meant. Because hand his fellow spies were stuck with outdated technology, they had no comparable way to cooperate — to find colleagues with common interests and brainstorm online.

Burton, whoas since left the D.I.A., is not alone in his concern. Indeed, throughout the intelligence community, spies are beginning to wonder why their technology has fallen so far behind — and talk among themselves about how to catch up. Some of the country’s most senior intelligence thinkers have joined the discussion, and surprisingly, many of them believe the answer may lie in the interactive tools the world’s teenagers are using to pass around YouTube videos and bicker nonlinearity their favorite bands. Billions of dollars’ worth of ultrasecret datanetworks couldn’t help spies piece together the clues to the worst terrorist plot ever. So perhaps, they argue, it’ s time to try something radically different.Could blogs and wikis prevent the next 9/11?

----

To disrupt these new plots, some intelligence officials concluded, Americanagents and analysts would need to cooperate just as fluidly — trading tips quickly among agents and agencies. Following the usual chain of command could be fatal. “To fight a network like Al Qaeda, you need to behave like anetwork,” John Arquilla, the influential professor of defense at the Naval Postgraduate School, told me.

It was a fine vision. But analysts were saddled with technology that was designed in the cold war. They now at least had computers, and intelligence arrived as electronic messages instead of paper memos. But their computers still communicated almost exclusively with people inside their agencies. When the intelligence services were computerized in the ’90s, they had digitally replicated their cold-war divisions — each one building a multi million-dollar system that allowed the agency to share information internally but not readily with anyone outside.

These systems have served us very well for five decades,” Dale Meyerrose told me when I spoke with him recently. But now, he said, they’re getting Anthe way. “The 16 intelligence organizations of the U.S. are without peer. They are the best in the world. The trick is, are they collectively the best?”

Last year, Meyerrose, a retired Air Force major general, was named the chief information officer — the head computer guy, as it were — for the office of the director of national intelligence. Established by Congress in 2004, the D.N.I.’s office has a controversial mandate: it is supposed to report threats to the president and persuade the intelligence agencies to cooperate more closely. Both tasks were formerly the role of theC.I.A. director, but since the C.I.A. director had no budgetary power over the other agencies, they rarely heeded his calls to pass along their secrets. Soothe new elevated position of national-intelligence director was created; ever since, it has been filled by John Negroponte. December's, Negroponte hired Meyerrose and gave him the daunting task of developing mechanisms to allow the various agencies’ aging and incompatible systems to swap data.

. But bureaucratic obstacles were just a part of the problem Meyerrose faced. He was also up against something deeper in the DNA of the intelligence services. “We’ve had this ‘need to know’ culture for years,” Meyerrose said.“Well, we need to move to a ‘need to share’ philosophy.”

. In his essay, “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex adaptive intelligence Community,” Andrus posed a deceptively simple question: How did the Internet become so useful in helping people find information?

Andrus argued that the real power of the Internet comes from the boom in self-publishing: everyday people surging online to impart their thoughts and views

Spies, Andrus theorized, could take advantage of these rapid, self-organizing effects. If analysts and agents were encouraged topost personal blogs and wikis on Intelink — linking to their favorite analyst reports or the news bulletins they considered important — then mob intelligence would take over.

Fingar and Wertheimer are now testing whether a wiki could indeed help analysts do their job. In the fall of 2005, they joined forces with C.I.A. wiki experts to build a prototype of something called Intellipedia, a wiki that any intelligence employee with classified clearance could read and contribute to.To kick-start the content, C.I.A. analysts seeded it with hundreds of articles from nonclassified documents like the C.I.A. World Fact Book. In April, they sent out e-mail to other analysts inviting them to contribute, and sat back to see what happened.

Yet Intellipedia also courts the many dangers of wikis — including the possibility of error.

The blog seemed like an awfully modest thing tome. But Meyerrose insists that the future of spying will be revolutionized as much by these small-bore projects as by billion-dollar high-tech systems.Indeed, he says that overly ambitious projects often result in expensive disasters, the way the F.B.I.’s $170 million attempt to overhaul its case-handling software died in 2005 after the software became so complex that the F.B.I. despaired of ever fixing the bugs and shelved it. In contrast, the blog software took only a day or two to get running. “We need to think big,start small and scale fast,” Meyerrose said

There was never a tipping point — “never a moment when two people who never knew each other could begin discussing something,” as Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University who was hired to consult on the project, explained to me. For the intelligence agencies to benefit from “social software,” he said, they need to persuade thousands of employees to begin blogging and creating wikis all at once. And that requires a cultural sea change: persuading analysts, who for years have survived by holding their cards tightly to their chests, to begin openly showing their hands online.

The premise of spy-blogging is that a million connected amateurs will always be smarter than a few experts collected in an elite star chamber; that Wikipedia will always move more quickly than the Encyclopedia Britannica; that the country’s thousand-odd political bloggers will always spot news trends more quickly than slow-moving journalists in the mainstream media.
For all the complaints about hardware, the challenges are only in part about technology. They are also about political will and institutional culture — and whether the spy agencies can be persuaded to change.

Today’s spies exist in an age of constant information exchange, in which everyday citizens swap news, dial up satellite pictures of their houses and collaborate ondistant Web sites with strangers. As John Arquilla told me, if the spies do not join the rest of the world, they risk growing to resemble the rigid, unchanging bureaucracy that they once confronted during the cold war.“Fifteen years ago we were fighting the Soviet Union,”he said. “Who knew it would be replicated today in the intelligence community?”

My comments

First, numerous posts advocating use of web-2 technology, web logs, wikis, etc. are on the site of W. David Stephenson on his Homeland Security site. (see links in this weblog or click here. ) See particularly: Fostering emergent behavior by a networked homeland security strategy: chaos or community. a talk to the International Conference on Complex Systems in June 26, 2006.

Even in 2002, at Infowarcon, Stephenson was sounding this message

These are all reflections of obsolete thinking:

* creating linear, hierarchical practices

* working in isolation

* and devaluing the insights of those from outside our organization or who are low on the organization chart.

Instead, our response to terrorism must be marked by three diametrically opposite characteristics.

First,
we must think cyclically. We paid a terrible price for outmoded procedures that forced people with critical information to route it through a ponderous chain of command designed more to weed out information than speed critical knowledge to everyone who needed it ASAP. So much of the terrorist threat is so unprecedented, so alien to our traditional approaches, that we must instead act quickly, then revise procedures on the fly based on immediate feedback.

Second,
we must link everything. Agencies that have guarded their proprietaryinformation and prerogatives instead of sharing it are intolerable.

Finally,
and most important, we must empower individuals -- in fact, every individual. Preventing and/or responding to terrorist attacks is too great a challenge for government by itself: it must be everyone's job.

He has many more posts indexed on his site that are worth reading.

On my own weblogs, the original "Reticula: weblogs, wikis, and public health", currently renamed "Systems Thinking in Public Health" has a number of posts on this topic, as does this current "Prespectives in Public Health" at http://newbricks.blogspot.com.

I have a somewhat stronger thesis than even Meyerrose or Stephenson, namely, that what we are looking at here is not data fusion but cognition fusion. The point isn't to get some abstract data structure into a particular shape, but to get the cognitive perception process into a particular flow. This is a form of "aperture synthesis", made famous in radio astronomy, where many small radio telescopes could be mathematically merged into one huge virtual receiver with far better resolution than any dish.

This is a brain model, by the way. The brain, after all, has no "master neuron" to which all other neurons report. Human vision does have specialized systems to compute texture, to find straight lines, to connect the dots in aspects of images that vary coherently, but these do not feed into any master center where they are combined and reviewed by the expert neuron -- there is no expert neuron. There is no master center. The findings of each subsystem are shared with all other subsystems in a rapid-fire continuous feedback loop, and the "picture" of what is out there "emerges" collectively.

This model of vision or governance, without any "top person" or "CEO" or "president" or "Director", flies in the face of our machine-age based intuition, unless you've been studying how human vision works.

Posts on the subject:
on aperture synthesis: Houston, we have another problem (Nov 7, 2006, originallyposted Feb 17, 2006 here.)

Blogosphere as Synthetic Social Vision System (Oct 10, 2005)

Seeing Large ideas through small keyholes (Oct 11, 2005)

My weblog: Might as well be alive on meta-life organisms and multilevel architectures.

Positive Organizational Scholarship - making the impossible possible (U of Michigan, Kim Cameron) - getting people at DOE to work together that everyone said couldn't be done.

High reliability organizations

Threat and Error Management (aviation lessons)

US Army Leadership Field Manual FM22-100 (where the doctrine of "integrity" and breaking the top-down information mentality is incorporated into learning organization practices.)

photo by genista.

Sloan on religion and medicine

Richard Sloan had an op-ed piece "Doctors aren't chaplains" in the LA Times today. Here's the gist of it:

The misguided effort to meld religion and medicine. By Richard P. Sloan
RICHARD P. SLOAN, director of the behavioral medical program at Columbia University Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, is the author of "Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine

December 2, 2006

HOW WOULD you like your doctor, at your next examination, to ask not only about your diet and symptoms but about your spiritual life?

... A concerted effort is underway to make religious practices part of clinical medicine. About two-thirds of U.S. medical schools now offer some form of training on the role of religion and spirituality in medicine, according to Dr. Harold Koenig of Duke University....

But before organized medicine decides that religion has any value in physical healing, several things ought to be considered. First, the scientific evidence supposedly linking religious practices with better health is shockingly weak ...Most research studies that claim to show how religious involvement is associated with better health fail to rule out other factors that might account for the relationship.

We all agree, for instance, that there is a real connection between lung cancer and carrying a cigarette lighter in your pocket, but no one thinks that the lighter causes cancer. The lighter is a marker of another factor — smoking — that has been scientifically proved to cause the cancer.

In precisely the same way, religious practices are likely to be markers of some other factor — for example, social support from family, friends or the community or, perhaps, the absence of behavioral risk factors — that may lower the risk of disease...

The effort to link health and religion has other problems as well. For one thing, doctors already have so little time in their interactions with patients that they routinely fail to follow established guidelines for preventive care and for treatment of chronic disease. If, in the future, physicians spend their limited time with patients engaging in spiritual inquiries, they will have even less time to address depression, smoking cessation, weight control or diabetes self-care — factors that are demonstrably related to disease and an increased risk of mortality.

More problematic still is the actual effect on patients when physicians abuse the privileged authority ...

Perhaps most important of all, efforts to connect religion and medical practice are bad for religion itself. Bringing religion to the examining table subjects it to the laws of science, stripping away all elements of transcendence.
... These are matters for patients, their families and the ordained clergy.

Sloan has published a number of papers and op-ed pieces, in addition to his book. Here's a more recent one:

Religious attendance as a predictor of survival in the EPESE cohorts, Emilia Bagiella, Victor Hong, and Richard P. Sloan, Intl J of Epid 2005;34(2):443-451

Results Our analyses show that after controlling for important prognostic factors, frequent religious attendance was associated with increased survival in the entire cohort [risk ratio (RR) = 0.78, 95% Confidence interval (CI) 0.70–0.88]. However, stratified analyses show that this association exists for only two of the four sites.

Conclusions We conclude that the association between religious attendance and survival is not robust and may depend upon unknown confounders and covariates.

And, here's a commentary printed along with that in the same issue of the International Journal of Epidemiology:

Commentary: Understanding religious involvement and mortality risk in the United States: comment on Bagiella, Hong and Sloan, Intl. J. of Epid 2005;34(2):452-3 , Robert A. Hummer

Population Research Center and Department of Sociology, University of Texas at Austin, TX, USA. E-mail: rhummer@prc.utexas.edu

There are a number of excellent classic and contemporary works conceptualizing religious attendance as a social phenomena, detailing measures of religion and what they mean, and laying out the behavioural, psychological, social, and health mechanisms by which religious involvement might work to influence mortality.^5–10 None of this literature is referenced, nor did it have any impact on what BHS apparently thought about religious attendance, the religion-mortality relationship, or the possible confounders or mediators of this relationship. As a result, their interpretation of the findings and conclusions can be seriously questioned.

What must be remembered here is that religious attendance should, indeed, display no association with mortality if the complete set of confounding and mediating variables that drive the overall relationship are included in the statistical models...

Third, if the intent of the BHS study is to aid in their well-publicized efforts to keep religious influences out of the practice of medicine, at least based on findings like their own or well-received studies in the religion–mortality area, I am in agreement. A recently published review by myself and several of my colleagues reflects such sentiment.¹¹ Based on findings in the religious attendance–mortality literature, implications for the practice of health care and medicine are limited. Other portions of the religion–health literature—that deal much more directly with religion's possible impacts within clinical settings and with which I am much less involved or an expert on—would seem to be much more relevant in terms of possible implications for health care and medical practice. At the same time, the work by BHS in this issue, as well as related religion–mortality studies within this literature, absolutely beg for a greater understanding of the population-based relationship between religious involvement and mortality for a number of reasons, most importantly including: (i) the development of better social and epidemiological theories of health and mortality; (ii) the better understanding of how demographic and social contexts have impacts on health and mortality patterns.

In conclusion, the BHS article is interesting because it comes from outspoken critics in this area of study, but includes interpretations of the data and conclusions that seem to be based on: (i) a lack of understanding of religious attendance as a social phenomena in the United States; (ii) no theoretical guidance; (iii) questionable interpretations of what their regression coefficients might mean; (iv) little concern for how contexts are important for mortality patterns at the population level; and (v) an agenda that seems to be based on keeping religion out of medicine and health care but is trying to do so using social science and social epidemiology research findings that do not really touch upon religion as an aspect of medical or health care. This fascinating area of scientific inquiry deserves better treatment. It is time to put aside other agendas and work towards scientifically better understanding, with appropriate theoretical guidance, why religious involvement seems to have a beneficial association with mortality risk in the United States. [emphasis added]

⁵ Durkheim E. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. New York: Free Press, [1897] 1951.

⁶ Ellison CE, Levin JS. The religion-health connection: evidence, theory and future directions. Health Educ Behav 1998; 25:700–20.[Abstract]

⁷ Koenig HG, McCullough ME, Larson DB. Handbook of Religion and Health. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

⁸ Idler EL, Musick MA, Ellison CG et al. Measuring multiple dimensions of religion and spirituality for health research. Res Aging 2003; 25:327–65.[Abstract]

⁹ Waite LJ, Lehrer EL. The benefits from marriage and religion in the United States: a comparative analysis. Popul Dev Rev 2003; 29:255–76.[CrossRef][ISI]

¹⁰ Musick MA, House JS, Williams DR. Attendance at religious services and mortality in a national sample. J Health Soc Behav 2004; 45:198–213.[ISI][Medline]

¹¹ Hummer RA, Ellison CG, Rogers RG, Moulton BE, Romero RR. Religious involvement and adult mortality in the United States: review and perspective. Sout Med J 2004; 97:1223–30.[CrossRef][ISI]

I agree with Robert Hummer's critique on this issue. When we have religious groups, such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (mormons) with an undisputed well-document life expectancy almost 10 years longer than the average US resident, it's both hard and irresponsible to not investigate this question further.

Is Sloan correct that religious attendance is really just a proxy for something deeper? Sure. Is the fact that smoking and alcohol are prohibited by that religion related to this mortality rate? Certainly. Is that's all that's going on? Science doesn't actually know yet.

But if we're spending $100,000 to keep people alive another month in hospitals, you'd think we, collectively, would find it a good investment to put a billion dollars into studying this question correctly, instead of simply complaining that prior studies had weaknesses. After all, it was only a decade ago that organized medicine was willing to recognize that there was a "mind-body" connection, and then only when they could see it on the MRI images.

So, yes, there are many ill-conceived, anecdotal, poorly done "studies" out there. Let's fix that situation by having some much better studies, not by dismissing the question.

Unfortunately, rationality is not what determines how money is spent in the health care arena. If it were, "prevention" would be getting much more than its current 2% of the $1.2 trillion health care bill in the USA today. Prevention is far more cost-effective than heroic repair, but far less glamorous, and far less profitable to the "provider" industry.

It is somewhat paradoxical, but while physicians as individuals are striving to repair and heal patients and maintain good health, the health-care industry as a whole would shut down and die if every person suddenly got well and stayed well. Perhaps that has something to do with why preventive care is so low on the national agenda. Still, it's like not wanting to pay to fix the roof, but being perfectly willing to pay to replace the ceiling and rain-soaked furniture every year.

There are unstated assumptions and broken mental models in the "organized medicine" community regarding the whole area of "public health." It is as important to address these "religiously" held misconceptions and biases and mental models among scientists and doctors as it is to address misconceptions among the various religious groups.

technorati tags:sloan, hummer, religion, medicine, doctors, spiritual, healing, mormons, LDS, lifeexpectancy, clergy

The importance of social relationships

On the importance of relationships in the successful outcomes any kind of planning:

1) For a human to sustain peak performance, it is not enough to engage the brain; we have to engage the heart.

2) We're very social animals, always watching each other for clues; to sustain a value, we need to see constant reaffirmation from others that it is still a value today.

3) We are each other's context, and have to proactively make an effort daily to give that reaffirmation of our shared values and positive feedback/encouragement for the right thing, not just criticism of the wrong thing.

4) Sustaining that shared spirit is what makes the daily pain tolerable; to paraphrase old wisdom: the spirit can survive any illness, but a broken spirit - who can bear?

5) The side-conversation of any "business" decision has to be a human conversation that says: "We share a goal, we share these values. I really like you. Now, what was it we were arguing over and deciding?"

6) If it doesn't have a spirit, create one; if it has a Spirit, treat that as if it were a living being, with its own "health" and "fitness," and make sure that there's a program to keep it healthy.

7) Beware of solutions based on technology or "systems" that neglect compassion. Compassion is the strongest suit there is, the strength to build on - "He ain't heavy, Father, he's my brother."

The "caring" in "health care" is what makes it work. Not caring will kill any business model, cold. We don't build cars. We don't entertain. We care about people and do something about it. And that's what defines us and gets us up in the morning and holds us up 36 hours later.

8) Spiritual issues (above) have a dramatic impact on the bottom line, clinically and financially.

I see this daily in software design and performance outcomes our IT shop produces, something that at first looks 100% technical. People who care build things that survive. People who don't care build things that look similar but turn out to be a waste of time.

A story is told of two stone-masons working on a huge church in Europe, one with great work and one with sloppy work that needed to be torn down and redone. When asked what they were doing, the poor one said: "I'm building a wall." The other said: "I'm building a cathedral." The spiritual issue matters so much it hurts, in ways science doesn't begin to grasp at the moment.

(photo by jarkkoS )

==========

technorati tags:POS, relationships, loneliness, depression, health, mentalhealth, connections, socialcapital, interactions, socialnetworks, networks, theoryY, impossible, DOE, rockyflats

US Army Leadership Field Manual FM 22-100

Review: In the introduction by Jeffrey A. Krames, Author of What the Best CEO's Know, he states The US Army Leadership Field Manual presents vital information that can help to shape leaders who inspire people, organize actions, develop strategy, and respond to uncertainty with speed and effectiveness."

As a civilian and MBA, I was startled and pleasantly surprised by the new US Army Leadership Field Manual, affectionately known as "FM 22-100." The concepts presented seem to me to be very much in line with all the recent academic papers on best practices in High-Reliablity Organizations and also Positive Organizational Scholarship.

In fact, whether for daily operations in peacetime, or for preparation for the chaos of an actual bioterrorist event, the book, and the approach of a consistent approach based on character and culture, seems indispensible.

Especially since Public Health, industry, and the military will need to work together in a complete catastrophic event, whether manmade or natural, it would be a great idea to all be on the same wavelength.The Center for Army Leadership has published just such a "wavelength" that appears to me to be suitable for public health, private health centers, private industry, and the US Army.

The burden now, I'd suggest, is for public health leadership to either accept this framework and join in advocating it, or to use it as a benchmarking standard, and evolve something at least that good but fine-tuned to the specific situation and language.

The book is not filled with images of "Rambo", recommendations of a "Kill, kill, kill!" mentality, or other short-sighted violence. In fact, the book notes that the mission of the Army is to resolve any war they are called on to fight in such a way as to build a basis for a sustainable peace afterwards. That approach is far more enlightened than many civilian approaches.

The focus of the book is on a unified, top-to-bottom leadership doctrine that is designed and tested to work in practice, with real people not superheroes, under rapidly changing conditions and great uncertainty about what is going on - a situation US businesses increasingly find familiar.

The surprising central theme is that the crucial element is not technology, or command and control systems, but "how Army values form the basis of character."The McGraw Hill book can be purchased for $15 at Borders or $20 at Amazon here, and viewed in a regretably ugly format on-line as html pages here, if you have a low-speed connection, since the entire manual in pdf form can be downloaded for no charge (it's 9.5 Megabytes.)

The Center for Army Leadership has created a book that is consistently approachable, accessible, practical, and grounded in examples. It is easy and pleasant to read and free of academic or military jargon. I highly recommend it.

technorati tags:army, leadership, doctrine, character, integrity, reliability, highreliability, mindfulness, safetyculture, morality, usarmy, ceo, warfare, culture, corruption, feedback, systems, organizations

Blog blogs blogging

From Wired

It's the idea that just won't die: A scientific experiment to track the viral spread of a "meme" -- a contagious quanta of thought -- has become so popular that it's creator has had trouble tracking it.

The experiment being conducted by comparative literature graduate student Scott Eric Kaufman was intended to measure how quickly a simple idea would jump between blogs covering different academic disciplines.

The post languished on his site for a few hours and then got picked up by a colleague's blog. After that, the meme took flight in a way that surprised the literature student: Almost 50 blogs, including a number of science forums, linked back to the post in less than three days. "I didn't realize this many people would be interested," said Kaufman, "which is itself of interest."

(photo credit: zachstern at flickr )

technorati tags:blogs, memes, blogosphere, connectionism

Radioactivity in cigarette smoke

New York Times Op-Ed piece on polonium in cigarettes

Puffing on Polonium

December 1, 2006

By ROBERT N. PROCTOR

WHEN the former K.G.B. agent Alexander V. Litvinenko was found to have been poisoned by radioactive polonium 210 last week, there was one group that must have been particularly horrified: the tobacco industry.

The industry has been aware at least since the 1960s that cigarettes contain significant levels of polonium.

Subscribers to NYTimes, click here for the rest of the article.

Robert N. Proctor is a professor of the history of science at Stanford University.

==========================

See new figures on smoking's toll in WHO's latest projections for 2015 and 2030 from Public Library of Science Medicine. According to the World Health Organization:

"But, even given the rise in HIV/AIDS deaths, the new projections predict that more people will die of tobacco-related disease than of HIV/AIDS in 2015."

Citation: Mathers CD, Loncar D (2006) Projections of global mortality and burden of disease from 2002 to 2030. PLoS Med 3(11): e442. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0030442

(photo credit: digital_trash on flickr)

technorati tags:tobacco, smoking, polonium, radioactivity, tobaccocontrol, WHO, risks, healthrisks, actualrisks, riskmanagement