Medical/ chemical Model | Moral/ spiritual Model (Scriptural) |
| Man is nothing but physical | Man has a physical body controlled by a non-physical soul Eccl 12:7 |
| You are sick, therefore not responsible | You are a sinner and fully responsible. (2 Corinthians 5:10) |
| You have a chemical imbalance in the brain (Assumption: Life is no more than chemistry) | There is sin in your life, chemical imbalance in the brain are a myth. The spirit is making the body sick, not the other way around. (Psalm 38:1-5) |
| You are suffering from a mental illness | The notion of "Mental illness" is a myth. There is usually nothing wrong with your body or your brain, you are suffering the consequences of sin in your life. You do indeed feel sick, but you would get better if you repent and change your lifestyle. (1 Timothy 6:10) |
| Its not your fault, you didn't cause this | Your actions and choices are the primary cause of the guilt you should be feeling (Ps 51:3-4) |
| You need drugs | You need to repent (Luke 13:3) |
| Your genes are the cause of your problem | Your sin has caused most the problems you suffer (Proverbs 3:5-8) |
| The solution to your problems is outside help of a trained professional psychiatrist. | The solution to your problems is dependant upon your taking action to repent and cleansing the inside of your heart. (James 4:8) |
| The diagnosis of your problem from within you | The diagnosis of your problem from outside (God) (Proverbs 14:12) |
| Preachers make bad psychiatric councilors, cause damage to individuals. | Preachers and Christians in general, make good psychiatric councilors (Romans 15:14) |
| Only trained and certified psychiatrists can help. | Psychiatrists with 11 years of university education cannot help as well as knowledgeable Christians. (1 Peter 5:8) |
| Don't get personally involved with the person and keep your feelings out of it. | Personally involved as a brother and emotionally involved. (Acts 20; 2 Cor 11:29) |
| Never give advice or moralize | Preach the word, rebuke, reprove, exhort, with great patience and instruction 2 Tim 4:2 |
20080709
The Xtian view of psychology
Another Isolated Incident
Last Thursday, narcotics cops in Troy, New York shot the locks off a door, tossed a flash grenade through a window, and stormed a house as part of an early-morning drug raid. They found only a single mother inside, not the drugs or weapons described in the warrant. The raid seems to have stemmed from a bad tip from a confidential informant. But Troy authorities don't seem particularly repentant. Here's District Attorney Richard McNally:
"The checks and balances were in place. We checked and double-checked the information in this case. All the checks and double-checks were done. Unfortunately, it didn't work as planned."
Obviously the checks and balances weren't in place, or the police wouldn't have terrorized an innocent woman (fortunately, her five-year-old daughter wasn't home at the time).
One local TV reporter spoke with a police sergeant related to the case, who said the police have no intention of repairing the damage they did to the woman's home.
Sgt. Dean: "We did not hit the wrong house, we hit the house that the search warrant directed us to hit."
Anya: "But was that information that led up to that right?"
Sgt. Dean: "My bosses are going through this whole investigative process to make sure that we were as thorough as possible."
Anya: "What was the level of threat that you assessed prior to coming into the home?"
Sgt. Dean: "That there were weapons in the house, or that the drugs were stored in that manor."
Anya: "In this house, you found no drugs?" Sgt. Dean: "We are not publicly speaking on that issue at this point."
Anya: "Do you think this will hurt your credibility?"
Sgt. Dean: "The last thing we want to do is enter an innocent person's home - it doesn't get us anywhere, and it doesn't hamper the drug trade."
Anya: "Will you be going back to clean-up the damage to the house?"
Sgt. Dean: "We just have to enter lawfully with our search warrant, that is our only obligation."
Anya: "And you can leave it in any state that you left it?"
Sgt. Dean: "Yes. We had probable cause that led us to believe there was drug activity."
Which apparently means they feel no obligation to clean up the mess they made.
“Professional Courtesy” and DWI
by Radley Balko
Earlier this week, I posted on a DUI case in Mesa, Arizona where a police officer oddly saw signs of drunkenness in a woman whose blood-alcohol concentration came back .00.
Now out of San Jose, California comes a story about a well-connected former police officer who, apparently flat-out knockered, rear-ended an Escalade, which then flipped the median and struck an oncoming Jetta.
The ex-cop’s name is Sandra Woodall. We only know that thanks to the San Jose Mercury News. The police department wouldn’t release her name. Woodall now works as an investigator for the Santa Clara district attorney’s office. Her husband is a sergeant with the local police department. And her father-in-law was formerly a lieutenant at the same department. He’s also now an investigator for the district attorney’s office.
Unlike the case in Mesa, where a police officer reported he could smell booze on the breath of a woman who hadn’t been drinking, the cops in San Jose pointedly couldn’t smell liquor on the breath a former cop who was so drunk, she couldn’t remember what year it was.
Newly obtained court documents show there was ample evidence a former San Jose police officer was drunk when she crashed her SUV in March, but police chose not to question her about alcohol use or test her blood.
Soon after Sandra Woodall’s March 25 multi-car accident, she told paramedics that she was just out of rehab, had consumed “a lot” of alcohol and was so disoriented that she thought it was 2006, according to documents. Both of the paramedics who treated Woodall noted the strong smell of alcohol on her breath.
Sgt. Will Manion - a well-regarded senior officer who was the police supervisor on the scene - noted none of these things. Instead, Manion seemed to EMTs to be coaching Woodall on the correct way to answer their questions. He later tried to prevent them from taking her to a hospital, an EMT alleged. Manion insisted that he had no evidence she was drunk, and was trying to determine whether she could be forced to go to the hospital against her will.
But instead of exploring the possibility that Woodall was intoxicated, officers at the scene concluded that the speeding accident could have been caused because Woodall was eating egg rolls from Jack in the Box while she was driving. They decided not even to cite her for speeding - an unusual conclusion in so dramatic an accident.
The police didn’t give Woodall a field sobriety test. They didn’t ask her to take a breath test. And they didn’t take her blood.
Woodall has now finally been charged with felony drunk driving, though no thanks to the investigating officers. It took an outraged phone call to senior police officials from one of the people Woodall hit to get a proper investigation.
I’m sure Woodall will lose her job with the DA’s office. The real question is whether the officers who covered up for her will lose their jobs, too.
Oh, and this certainly isn’t the first time police officers have been caught letting fellow officers off the hook for DWI.
Do the Rights of the Disabled Extend to the Blind on the Web?
ACCORDING to an advocacy group, Target declined last year to make its Web site fully accessible to blind people with specialized screen-reading technology last year. If true — and Target has denied the accusation in court — it was a public relations blunder, and it may have been illegal as well.
The National Federation of the Blind sued Target, contending that the company’s inaction violated the Americans with Disabilities Act because the Web site is essentially an extension of its other public accommodations, and as such, should be easily accessible to people with disabilities.
A Target spokeswoman would not comment on those assertions, but in court the company offered testimony from three blind users rebutting the federation’s arguments.
On Sept. 6, a federal judge in California held, in a preliminary ruling on the suit, that in some instances, Web sites must cater to disabled people.
Legal scholars say the full reach of that ruling will not be clear until the case is decided, if it reaches that point.
But in the meantime, the dispute shows that although commercial Web sites have made considerable strides in serving this small fraction of their customer base, there are still substantial difficulties on both sides of the screen.
“Web sites are more useful than they used to be, but there are still a few more hurdles than you’d like to have to go through,” said James Gashel, an executive director of the federation, based in Baltimore.
Mr. Gashel said that most sites accommodate screen-reading technology, which tells blind users the layout of a Web page and describes images, search prompts and other fields into which users can type information to find a product or complete a purchase. (The most popular screen-reading software, Jaws for Windows from Freedom Scientific, sells for around $900.)
When sites do not accommodate screen-reading software, the online shopping or browsing experience breaks down for the 200,000 or so of the nation’s 1.3 million people with vision disabilities who are online, according to Mr. Gashel.
Most online stores go to great lengths to make sure that their sites are accessible to people with disabilities, simply because it is good business to allow as many people as possible to shop. And online-shopping technology specialists say it is not so difficult or costly a task.
“It’s very straightforward to make a site accessible,” said Dayna Bateman, senior information architect at Fry Inc., which operates e-commerce Web sites on behalf of large retailers including Brookstone, Eddie Bauer and Spiegel.
Ms. Bateman said that the more software coding a Web site could offer to help screen readers and other technologies navigate a site, the more likely it was that the Web site would show up on search engine results, because Google, Yahoo and others looked to the same coding for clues about the Web page’s content.
“So it’s actually an advantage in the marketplace,” she said. “I just don’t think a lot of folks are schooled enough in accessibility to know that.”
For advocates of people with disabilities, the most effective tool for ensuring a smooth online experience has been the Americans with Disabilities Act. But because the law was signed in 1990, before the Web was in common use, its language offers little guidance on how to approach questions of online accessibility.
A variety of lawsuits based on Disabilities Act provisions have been brought against online companies, notably one brought by Mr. Gashel’s organization against AOL in 1999, but the suits were settled before judges could offer clear guidance on how, or whether, the law applied to Web sites.
In denying Target’s motion to dismiss the suit two months ago, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of United States District Court in San Francisco held that the law’s accessibility requirements applied to all services offered by a place of public accommodation. Since Target’s physical stores are places of public accommodation, the ruling said, its online store must also be accessible or the company must offer equally effective alternatives.
So what about online-only Web merchants like Amazon.com, BlueNile, Drugstore.com and RedEnvelope as well as fast-growing young online companies like YouTube and MySpace?
“That issue is still up for grabs,” said Michael R. Masinter, a law professor who specializes in Disabilities Act and civil rights issues for Nova Southeastern University, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Mr. Masinter said the Target suit, since it involved an offline merchant’s online operations, would not address that issue.
The case, though, is important to Amazon, because it runs Target’s online store as it does those of a handful of other big offline merchants.
An Amazon spokeswoman, Patricia Smith, said that “as a matter of course we work cooperatively with all of our retail partners to develop and implement the tools and features they want incorporated onto their Web sites.” Amazon, she added, “is already generally usable for people with screen readers.” It has offered a text-only, streamlined site designed for such devices (amazon.com/access).
Mr. Masinter said one potentially thorny issue in the Target suit was whether phone services offered by online merchants were suitable substitutions for the Web site when the site did not work well for technologies like screen-reading software. Given the high cost of maintaining phone-based customer service operations, the question would be of particular interest to retailers and disabled people.
Companies in one emerging category of Internet commerce, online education, have the most ground to make up in adapting their offerings for the disabled, according to Jane Jarrow, president of Disability Access Information and Support, an education industry consultancy.
Most online-only schools, Ms. Jarrow said, “are oblivious to the fact that they have a significant issue here.” Many online-only schools rely on chat rooms, for instance, for class discussions, and screen-reading software does not function properly with chat rooms — nor can learning-disabled students often keep pace with the discussions.
The issue has become critical because many online-only schools became eligible this summer to receive federal student aid. But to get such funds, organizations must adhere to regulations in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which has been updated to say that all Web sites of groups receiving federal money must be accessible to people with disabilities.
Capella University, a Minneapolis-based institution known for online courses, employs a full-time disabilities specialist, who, among other things, has guided the school to avoid using online chat rooms for its courses. Some online schools follow similar approaches, but most do not, said Richard Allegra, director of professional development for the Association on Higher Education and Disability, an industry group.
“I think people are starting to understand their obligations to make their services accessible,” he said. “The question they have is, how to do that?”
Bush's Secret Army of Snoops and Snitches
Bush's Secret Army of Snoops and Snitches
The full scale of Bush's assault on our civil liberties may not be known until years after he's left office.
At the moment, all we can do is get glimpses here or there of what's going on.
And the latest one to come to my attention is the dispatching of police officers, firefighters, paramedics, and utility workers as so-called "terrorism liaison officers," according to a report by Bruce Finley in the Denver Post.
They are entrusted with hunting for "suspicious activity," and then they report their findings, which end up in secret government databases.
What constitutes "suspicious activity," of course, is in the eye of the beholder. But a draft Justice Department memo on the subject says that such things as "taking photos of no apparent aesthetic value" or "making notes" could constitute suspicious activity, Finley wrote.
The states where this is going on include: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Washington, D.C.
Dozens more are planning to do so, Finley reports.
Colorado alone has 181 Terrorism Liaison Officers, and some of them are from the private sector, such as Xcel Energy.
Mark Silverstein of the Colorado ACLU told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! that this reminds him of the old TIPS program, which "caused so much controversy that Congress eventually shut it down. But it is reemerging in other forms." Silverstein warns that there will be thousands and thousands of "completely innocent people going about completely innocent and legal activities" who are going to end up in a government database.
On the web, I found a description for a Terrorism Liaison Officer Position in the East Bay.
Reporting to the Alameda and Contra Costa Counties and the city of Oakland, these officers "would in effect function as ad hoc members" of the East Bay Terrorism Early Warning Group, which consists of local police officers and firefighters.
The "suggested duties" of these Terrorism Liaison Officers include: "source person for internal or external inquiry," and "collecting, reporting retrieving and sharing of materials related to terrorism. Such materials might include ... books journals, periodicals, and videotapes."
Terrorism Liaison Officers would be situated not only in agencies dealing with the harbor, the airports, and the railroads, but also "University/Campus."
And the private sector would be involved, too. "The program would eventually be expanded to include Health Care personnel and representatives from private, critical infrastructure entities, with communication systems specifically tailored to their needs."
In this regard, Terrorism Liaison Officers resemble InfraGard members. (See "The FBI Deputizes Business".) This FBI-private sector liaison group now consists of more than 26,000 members, who have their own secure channels of communication and are shielded, as much as possible, from scrutiny.
Terrorism Liaison Officers connect up with so-called "Fusion Centers": intelligence sharing among public safety agencies as well as the private sector. The Department of Justice has come up with "Fusion Center Guidelines" that discuss the role of private sector participants.
"The private sector can offer fusion centers a variety of resources," it says, including "suspicious incidents and activity information."
It also recommends shielding the private sector. "To aid in sharing this sensitive information, a Non-Disclosure Agreement may be used. The NDA provides private sector entities an additional layer of security, ensuring the security of private sector proprietary information and trade secrets," the document states.
As if that's not enough, the Justice Department document recommends that "fusion centers and their leadership encourage appropriate policymakers to legislate the protection of private sector data provided to fusion centers."20080707
DWI Arrest at 0.0
by Radley Balko
Woman was a designated driver. Didn’t have a drop to drink all night. She refused a roadside sobriety test because . . . well, because they’re utter bullshit (and unlike a blood or breath test, you’re allowed to refuse the roadside test). I’m sure it’s pure coincidence that her husband, who was in the car, is a DWI defense attorney, and had just beaten the cop in question in court.
In any case, after her arrest and incarceration, prosecutors were forced to quietly drop the charges when her blood test came back 0.0. Now, ask yourself how the officer writes the following about a stone sober woman:
It’s interesting to read the affidavit that Officer Gonzalez wrote that night about Heather Squires, intending to ask the Motor Vehicles Division of ADOT to yank her license. (He never mailed it — possibly because of the blood-test results.)
It describes “bloodshot and watery eyes.”
“Flushed face.”
“Strong odor of an alcoholic beverage emitting from breath.”
The New Times writer adds:
Honestly, I don’t want to believe that Officer Gonzalez sought out the lawyer who beat him in court — and then penalized his wife when she’d done nothing wrong.But a rogue cop is almost preferable to a system that’s stacked against motorists who want nothing more than to get home at night. Those people might not be as sober as Heather Squires proved to be, but after one or two drinks, I’m willing to bet that they don’t have bloodshot eyes or reek of booze. You’re still going to read that in the police report.
This isn’t the first time pre-written, xeroxed or boilerplate DWI reports have come up. Not the first time someone’s been arrested at 0.0, either.
The Mesa Police Department is standing behind the officer.
20080706
Why it is hard to share the wealth
Jenny Hogan
Almost certainly more of the same, if you believe physicists who are using new models based on simple physical laws to understand the distribution of wealth. Their studies indicate that inequality in market economies may be very hard to get rid of.
Economists will join physicists to discuss these issues next week in Kolkata, India, at the first ever conference on the "econophysics" of wealth distribution. "We are interested in understanding whether there is some kind of social injustice behind this skewed distribution," says Sudhakar Yarlagadda of the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP) in Kolkata.
It is well known that wealth is shared out unfairly. "People on the whole have normally distributed attributes, talents and motivations, yet we finish up with wealth distributions that are much more unequal than that," says Robin Marris, emeritus professor of economics at Birkbeck, University of London.
Pareto's law
In 1897, a Paris-born engineer named Vilfredo Pareto showed that the distribution of wealth in Europe followed a simple power-law pattern, which essentially meant that the extremely rich hogged most of a nation's wealth (New Scientist print edition, 19 August 2000). Economists later realised that this law applied to just the very rich, and not necessarily to how wealth was distributed among the rest.
Now it seems that while the rich have Pareto's law to thank, the vast majority of people are governed by a completely different law. Physicist Victor Yakovenko of the University of Maryland in College Park, US, and his colleagues analysed income data from the US Internal Revenue Service from 1983 to 2001.
They found that while the income distribution among the super-wealthy - about 3% of the population - does follow Pareto's law, incomes for the remaining 97% fitted a different curve - one that also describes the spread of energies of atoms in a gas (see graphic).
Gas analogy
In the gas model, people exchange money in random interactions, much as atoms exchange energy when they collide. While economists' models traditionally regard humans as rational beings who always make intelligent decisions, econophysicists argue that in large systems the behaviour of each individual is influenced by so many factors that the net result is random, so it makes sense to treat people like atoms in a gas.
The analogy also holds because money is like energy, in that it has to be conserved. "It's like a fluid that flows in interactions, it's not created or destroyed, only redistributed," says Yakovenko.
Yakovenko also found that the total income of those in the poorer part of the distribution did not change significantly with time after accounting for inflation. But incomes for those in the Pareto curve shot up nearly five times from 1983 to 2000, before declining with the US stock market crash of 2001.
Class jumping
This, along with research data from other countries, suggests that there are two economic classes. In one, the rich grow richer while in the other the poor stay poor. Yakovenko explains this by going back to the analogy of atoms in a gas.
The atoms assume an exponential distribution of energy when they are in thermal equilibrium, and pushing the gas away from this state takes a lot of energy and it could prove similarly difficult to shift an economy to a different state. Randomness in the model does, however, mean that individuals can jump from one class to another.
"It suggests that any kind of policy will be very inefficient," says Yakovenko. It would be very difficult to impose a policy to redistribute wealth "short of getting Stalin", says Yakovenko, who will talk in Kolkata next week.
Saving plans
A more sophisticated model developed by Bikas Chakrabarti of the SINP and his colleagues paints a slightly less bleak picture for the poor. His team adjusted the gas model to allow people to save various proportions of their money.
This model predicts both the wealth classes that Yakovenko found. It also suggests that if you save more you are more likely to end up rich, although there are no guarantees. Changing people's saving habits could be an effective way of making the wealth distribution fairer, rather than enforcing taxes, says Chakrabarti, who is one of the Kolkata conference organisers.
Macroeconomist Makoto Nirei at Utah State University in Logan, US, whose own work will be presented at the conference, is supportive of the physicists' work but he has reservations about how they model the exchange of money. "The model seems to me not like an economic exchange process, but more like a burglar process. People randomly meet and one just beats up the other and takes their money."
Other economists warn it is too early to use such models to inform policies. "The models are too abstract," says Thomas Lux, an economist at the University of Kiel in Germany. But J. Doyne Farmer, a physicist from the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, US, points out that these models have their place: "Many economic theories don't even come close to producing the wealth distribution we see, and if you can't produce that you're dead in the water."
If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural
By Shankar Vedantam
The e-mail came from the next room.
"You gotta see this!" Jorge Moll had written. Moll and Jordan Grafman, neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health, had been scanning the brains of volunteers as they were asked to think about a scenario involving either donating a sum of money to charity or keeping it for themselves.
As Grafman read the e-mail, Moll came bursting in. The scientists stared at each other. Grafman was thinking, "Whoa -- wait a minute!"
The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.
Their 2006 finding that unselfishness can feel good lends scientific support to the admonitions of spiritual leaders such as Saint Francis of Assisi, who said, "For it is in giving that we receive." But it is also a dramatic example of the way neuroscience has begun to elbow its way into discussions about morality and has opened up a new window on what it means to be good.
Grafman and others are using brain imaging and psychological experiments to study whether the brain has a built-in moral compass. The results -- many of them published just in recent months -- are showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be hard-wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary processes that began in other species.
No one can say whether giraffes and lions experience moral qualms in the same way people do because no one has been inside a giraffe's head, but it is known that animals can sacrifice their own interests: One experiment found that if each time a rat is given food, its neighbor receives an electric shock, the first rat will eventually forgo eating.
What the new research is showing is that morality has biological roots -- such as the reward center in the brain that lit up in Grafman's experiment -- that have been around for a very long time.
The more researchers learn, the more it appears that the foundation of morality is empathy. Being able to recognize -- even experience vicariously -- what another creature is going through was an important leap in the evolution of social behavior. And it is only a short step from this awareness to many human notions of right and wrong, says Jean Decety, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago.
The research enterprise has been viewed with interest by philosophers and theologians, but already some worry that it raises troubling questions. Reducing morality and immorality to brain chemistry -- rather than free will -- might diminish the importance of personal responsibility. Even more important, some wonder whether the very idea of morality is somehow degraded if it turns out to be just another evolutionary tool that nature uses to help species survive and propagate.
Moral decisions can often feel like abstract intellectual challenges, but a number of experiments such as the one by Grafman have shown that emotions are central to moral thinking. In another experiment published in March, University of Southern California neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio and his colleagues showed that patients with damage to an area of the brain known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex lack the ability to feel their way to moral answers.
When confronted with moral dilemmas, the brain-damaged patients coldly came up with "end-justifies-the-means" answers. Damasio said the point was not that they reached immoral conclusions, but that when confronted by a difficult issue -- such as whether to shoot down a passenger plane hijacked by terrorists before it hits a major city -- these patients appear to reach decisions without the anguish that afflicts those with normally functioning brains.
Such experiments have two important implications. One is that morality is not merely about the decisions people reach but also about the process by which they get there. Another implication, said Adrian Raine, a clinical neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, is that society may have to rethink how it judges immoral people.
Psychopaths often feel no empathy or remorse. Without that awareness, people relying exclusively on reasoning seem to find it harder to sort their way through moral thickets. Does that mean they should be held to different standards of accountability?
"Eventually, you are bound to get into areas that for thousands of years we have preferred to keep mystical," said Grafman, the chief cognitive neuroscientist at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. "Some of the questions that are important are not just of intellectual interest, but challenging and frightening to the ways we ground our lives. We need to step very carefully."
Joshua D. Greene, a Harvard neuroscientist and philosopher, said multiple experiments suggest that morality arises from basic brain activities. Morality, he said, is not a brain function elevated above our baser impulses. Greene said it is not "handed down" by philosophers and clergy, but "handed up," an outgrowth of the brain's basic propensities.
Moral decision-making often involves competing brain networks vying for supremacy, he said. Simple moral decisions -- is killing a child right or wrong? -- are simple because they activate a straightforward brain response. Difficult moral decisions, by contrast, activate multiple brain regions that conflict with one another, he said.
In one 2004 brain-imaging experiment, Greene asked volunteers to imagine that they were hiding in a cellar of a village as enemy soldiers came looking to kill all the inhabitants. If a baby was crying in the cellar, Greene asked, was it right to smother the child to keep the soldiers from discovering the cellar and killing everyone?
The reason people are slow to answer such an awful question, the study indicated, is that emotion-linked circuits automatically signaling that killing a baby is wrong clash with areas of the brain that involve cooler aspects of cognition. One brain region activated when people process such difficult choices is the inferior parietal lobe, which has been shown to be active in more impersonal decision-making. This part of the brain, in essence, was "arguing" with brain networks that reacted with visceral horror.
Such studies point to a pattern, Greene said, showing "competing forces that may have come online at different points in our evolutionary history. A basic emotional response is probably much older than the ability to evaluate costs and benefits."
While one implication of such findings is that people with certain kinds of brain damage may do bad things they cannot be held responsible for, the new research could also expand the boundaries of moral responsibility. Neuroscience research, Greene said, is finally explaining a problem that has long troubled philosophers and moral teachers: Why is it that people who are willing to help someone in front of them will ignore abstract pleas for help from those who are distant, such as a request for a charitable contribution that could save the life of a child overseas?
"We evolved in a world where people in trouble right in front of you existed, so our emotions were tuned to them, whereas we didn't face the other kind of situation," Greene said. "It is comforting to think your moral intuitions are reliable and you can trust them. But if my analysis is right, your intuitions are not trustworthy. Once you realize why you have the intuitions you have, it puts a burden on you" to think about morality differently.
Marc Hauser, another Harvard researcher, has used cleverly designed psychological experiments to study morality. He said his research has found that people all over the world process moral questions in the same way, suggesting that moral thinking is intrinsic to the human brain, rather than a product of culture. It may be useful to think about morality much like language, in that its basic features are hard-wired, Hauser said. Different cultures and religions build on that framework in much the way children in different cultures learn different languages using the same neural machinery.
Hauser said that if his theory is right, there should be aspects of morality that are automatic and unconscious -- just like language. People would reach moral conclusions in the same way they construct a sentence without having been trained in linguistics. Hauser said the idea could shed light on contradictions in common moral stances.
U.S. law, for example, distinguishes between a physician who removes a feeding tube from a terminally ill patient and a physician who administers a drug to kill the patient.
Hauser said the only difference is that the second scenario is more emotionally charged -- and therefore feels like a different moral problem, when it really is not: "In the end, the doctor's intent is to reduce suffering, and that is as true in active as in passive euthanasia, and either way the patient is dead."
13 things that do not make sense
Michael Brooks
1 The placebo effect
DON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.
This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.
So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.
Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's disease (Nature Neuroscience, vol 7, p 587). He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients' brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson's symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer "bursts" of firing - another feature associated with Parkinson's. The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something.
We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body's biochemistry. "The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction," he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don't know.
2 The horizon problem
OUR universe appears to be unfathomably uniform. Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other, and you'll see that the microwave background radiation filling the cosmos is at the same temperature everywhere. That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old.
Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.
This "horizon problem" is a big headache for cosmologists, so big that they have come up with some pretty wild solutions. "Inflation", for example.
You can solve the horizon problem by having the universe expand ultra-fast for a time, just after the big bang, blowing up by a factor of 10
So, in effect, inflation solves one mystery only to invoke another. A variation in the speed of light could also solve the horizon problem - but this too is impotent in the face of the question "why?" In scientific terms, the uniform temperature of the background radiation remains an anomaly.
”A variation in the speed of light could solve the problem, but this too is impotent in the face of the question 'why?'
3 Ultra-energetic cosmic rays
FOR more than a decade, physicists in Japan have been seeing cosmic rays that should not exist. Cosmic rays are particles - mostly protons but sometimes heavy atomic nuclei - that travel through the universe at close to the speed of light. Some cosmic rays detected on Earth are produced in violent events such as supernovae, but we still don't know the origins of the highest-energy particles, which are the most energetic particles ever seen in nature. But that's not the real mystery.
As cosmic-ray particles travel through space, they lose energy in collisions with the low-energy photons that pervade the universe, such as those of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Einstein's special theory of relativity dictates that any cosmic rays reaching Earth from a source outside our galaxy will have suffered so many energy-shedding collisions that their maximum possible energy is 5 × 10
Over the past decade, however, the University of Tokyo's Akeno Giant Air Shower Array - 111 particle detectors spread out over 100 square kilometres - has detected several cosmic rays above the GZK limit. In theory, they can only have come from within our galaxy, avoiding an energy-sapping journey across the cosmos. However, astronomers can find no source for these cosmic rays in our galaxy. So what is going on?
One possibility is that there is something wrong with the Akeno results. Another is that Einstein was wrong. His special theory of relativity says that space is the same in all directions, but what if particles found it easier to move in certain directions? Then the cosmic rays could retain more of their energy, allowing them to beat the GZK limit.
Physicists at the Pierre Auger experiment in Mendoza, Argentina, are now working on this problem. Using 1600 detectors spread over 3000 square kilometres, Auger should be able to determine the energies of incoming cosmic rays and shed more light on the Akeno results.
Alan Watson, an astronomer at the University of Leeds, UK, and spokesman for the Pierre Auger project, is already convinced there is something worth following up here. "I have no doubts that events above 10
”One possibility is that there is something wrong with the Akeno results. Another is that Einstein was wrong
4 Belfast homeopathy results
MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.
In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.
So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.
You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.
5 Dark matter
TAKE our best understanding of gravity, apply it to the way galaxies spin, and you'll quickly see the problem: the galaxies should be falling apart. Galactic matter orbits around a central point because its mutual gravitational attraction creates centripetal forces. But there is not enough mass in the galaxies to produce the observed spin.
Vera Rubin, an astronomer working at the Carnegie Institution's department of terrestrial magnetism in Washington DC, spotted this anomaly in the late 1970s. The best response from physicists was to suggest there is more stuff out there than we can see. The trouble was, nobody could explain what this "dark matter" was.
And they still can't. Although researchers have made many suggestions about what kind of particles might make up dark matter, there is no consensus. It's an embarrassing hole in our understanding. Astronomical observations suggest that dark matter must make up about 90 per cent of the mass in the universe, yet we are astonishingly ignorant what that 90 per cent is.
Maybe we can't work out what dark matter is because it doesn't actually exist. That's certainly the way Rubin would like it to turn out. "If I could have my pick, I would like to learn that Newton's laws must be modified in order to correctly describe gravitational interactions at large distances," she says. "That's more appealing than a universe filled with a new kind of sub-nuclear particle."
”If the results turn out to be real, the implications are profound. We may have to rewrite physics and chemistry
6 Viking's methane
JULY 20, 1976. Gilbert Levin is on the edge of his seat. Millions of kilometres away on Mars, the Viking landers have scooped up some soil and mixed it with carbon-14-labelled nutrients. The mission's scientists have all agreed that if Levin's instruments on board the landers detect emissions of carbon-14-containing methane from the soil, then there must be life on Mars.
Viking reports a positive result. Something is ingesting the nutrients, metabolising them, and then belching out gas laced with carbon-14.
So why no party?
Because another instrument, designed to identify organic molecules considered essential signs of life, found nothing. Almost all the mission scientists erred on the side of caution and declared Viking's discovery a false positive. But was it?
The arguments continue to rage, but results from NASA's latest rovers show that the surface of Mars was almost certainly wet in the past and therefore hospitable to life. And there is plenty more evidence where that came from, Levin says. "Every mission to Mars has produced evidence supporting my conclusion. None has contradicted it."
Levin stands by his claim, and he is no longer alone. Joe Miller, a cell biologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has re-analysed the data and he thinks that the emissions show evidence of a circadian cycle. That is highly suggestive of life.
Levin is petitioning ESA and NASA to fly a modified version of his mission to look for "chiral" molecules. These come in left or right-handed versions: they are mirror images of each other. While biological processes tend to produce molecules that favour one chirality over the other, non-living processes create left and right-handed versions in equal numbers. If a future mission to Mars were to find that Martian "metabolism" also prefers one chiral form of a molecule to the other, that would be the best indication yet of life on Mars.
”Something on Mars is ingesting nutrients, metabolising them and then belching out radioactive methane
7 Tetraneutrons
FOUR years ago, a particle accelerator in France detected six particles that should not exist. They are called tetraneutrons: four neutrons that are bound together in a way that defies the laws of physics.
Francisco Miguel Marquès and colleagues at the Ganil accelerator in Caen are now gearing up to do it again. If they succeed, these clusters may oblige us to rethink the forces that hold atomic nuclei together.
The team fired beryllium nuclei at a small carbon target and analysed the debris that shot into surrounding particle detectors. They expected to see evidence for four separate neutrons hitting their detectors. Instead the Ganil team found just one flash of light in one detector. And the energy of this flash suggested that four neutrons were arriving together at the detector. Of course, their finding could have been an accident: four neutrons might just have arrived in the same place at the same time by coincidence. But that's ridiculously improbable.
Not as improbable as tetraneutrons, some might say, because in the standard model of particle physics tetraneutrons simply can't exist. According to the Pauli exclusion principle, not even two protons or neutrons in the same system can have identical quantum properties. In fact, the strong nuclear force that would hold them together is tuned in such a way that it can't even hold two lone neutrons together, let alone four. Marquès and his team were so bemused by their result that they buried the data in a research paper that was ostensibly about the possibility of finding tetraneutrons in the future (Physical Review C, vol 65, p 44006).
And there are still more compelling reasons to doubt the existence of tetraneutrons. If you tweak the laws of physics to allow four neutrons to bind together, all kinds of chaos ensues (Journal of Physics G, vol 29, L9). It would mean that the mix of elements formed after the big bang was inconsistent with what we now observe and, even worse, the elements formed would have quickly become far too heavy for the cosmos to cope. "Maybe the universe would have collapsed before it had any chance to expand," says Natalia Timofeyuk, a theorist at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK.
There are, however, a couple of holes in this reasoning. Established theory does allow the tetraneutron to exist - though only as a ridiculously short-lived particle. "This could be a reason for four neutrons hitting the Ganil detectors simultaneously," Timofeyuk says. And there is other evidence that supports the idea of matter composed of multiple neutrons: neutron stars. These bodies, which contain an enormous number of bound neutrons, suggest that as yet unexplained forces come into play when neutrons gather en masse.
8 The Pioneer anomaly
THIS is a tale of two spacecraft. Pioneer 10 was launched in 1972; Pioneer 11 a year later. By now both craft should be drifting off into deep space with no one watching. However, their trajectories have proved far too fascinating to ignore.
That's because something has been pulling - or pushing - on them, causing them to speed up. The resulting acceleration is tiny, less than a nanometre per second per second. That's equivalent to just one ten-billionth of the gravity at Earth's surface, but it is enough to have shifted Pioneer 10 some 400,000 kilometres off track. NASA lost touch with Pioneer 11 in 1995, but up to that point it was experiencing exactly the same deviation as its sister probe. So what is causing it?
Nobody knows. Some possible explanations have already been ruled out, including software errors, the solar wind or a fuel leak. If the cause is some gravitational effect, it is not one we know anything about. In fact, physicists are so completely at a loss that some have resorted to linking this mystery with other inexplicable phenomena.
Bruce Bassett of the University of Portsmouth, UK, has suggested that the Pioneer conundrum might have something to do with variations in alpha, the fine structure constant (see "Not so constant constants", page 37). Others have talked about it as arising from dark matter - but since we don't know what dark matter is, that doesn't help much either. "This is all so maddeningly intriguing," says Michael Martin Nieto of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. "We only have proposals, none of which has been demonstrated."
Nieto has called for a new analysis of the early trajectory data from the craft, which he says might yield fresh clues. But to get to the bottom of the problem what scientists really need is a mission designed specifically to test unusual gravitational effects in the outer reaches of the solar system. Such a probe would cost between $300 million and $500 million and could piggyback on a future mission to the outer reaches of the solar system (www.arxiv.org/gr-qc/0411077).
"An explanation will be found eventually," Nieto says. "Of course I hope it is due to new physics - how stupendous that would be. But once a physicist starts working on the basis of hope he is heading for a fall." Disappointing as it may seem, Nieto thinks the explanation for the Pioneer anomaly will eventually be found in some mundane effect, such as an unnoticed source of heat on board the craft.
9 Dark energy
IT IS one of the most famous, and most embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998, astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at ever faster speeds. It's an effect still searching for a cause - until then, everyone thought the universe's expansion was slowing down after the big bang. "Theorists are still floundering around, looking for a sensible explanation," says cosmologist Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "We're all hoping that upcoming observations of supernovae, of clusters of galaxies and so on will give us more clues."
One suggestion is that some property of empty space is responsible - cosmologists call it dark energy. But all attempts to pin it down have fallen woefully short. It's also possible that Einstein's theory of general relativity may need to be tweaked when applied to the very largest scales of the universe. "The field is still wide open," Freese says.
10 The Kuiper cliff
IF YOU travel out to the far edge of the solar system, into the frigid wastes beyond Pluto, you'll see something strange. Suddenly, after passing through the Kuiper belt, a region of space teeming with icy rocks, there's nothing.
Astronomers call this boundary the Kuiper cliff, because the density of space rocks drops off so steeply. What caused it? The only answer seems to be a 10th planet. We're not talking about Quaoar or Sedna: this is a massive object, as big as Earth or Mars, that has swept the area clean of debris.
The evidence for the existence of "Planet X" is compelling, says Alan Stern, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. But although calculations show that such a body could account for the Kuiper cliff (Icarus, vol 160, p 32), no one has ever seen this fabled 10th planet.
There's a good reason for that. The Kuiper belt is just too far away for us to get a decent view. We need to get out there and have a look before we can say anything about the region. And that won't be possible for another decade, at least. NASA's New Horizons probe, which will head out to Pluto and the Kuiper belt, is scheduled for launch in January 2006. It won't reach Pluto until 2015, so if you are looking for an explanation of the vast, empty gulf of the Kuiper cliff, watch this space.
11 The Wow signal
IT WAS 37 seconds long and came from outer space. On 15 August 1977 it caused astronomer Jerry Ehman, then of Ohio State University in Columbus, to scrawl "Wow!" on the printout from Big Ear, Ohio State's radio telescope in Delaware. And 28 years later no one knows what created the signal. "I am still waiting for a definitive explanation that makes sense," Ehman says.
Coming from the direction of Sagittarius, the pulse of radiation was confined to a narrow range of radio frequencies around 1420 megahertz. This frequency is in a part of the radio spectrum in which all transmissions are prohibited by international agreement. Natural sources of radiation, such as the thermal emissions from planets, usually cover a much broader sweep of frequencies. So what caused it?
The nearest star in that direction is 220 light years away. If that is where is came from, it would have had to be a pretty powerful astronomical event - or an advanced alien civilisation using an astonishingly large and powerful transmitter.
The fact that hundreds of sweeps over the same patch of sky have found nothing like the Wow signal doesn't mean it's not aliens. When you consider the fact that the Big Ear telescope covers only one-millionth of the sky at any time, and an alien transmitter would also likely beam out over the same fraction of sky, the chances of spotting the signal again are remote, to say the least.
Others think there must be a mundane explanation. Dan Wertheimer, chief scientist for the SETI@home project, says the Wow signal was almost certainly pollution: radio-frequency interference from Earth-based transmissions. "We've seen many signals like this, and these sorts of signals have always turned out to be interference," he says. The debate continues.
”It was either a powerful astronomical event - or an advanced alien civilisation beaming out a signal
12 Not-so-constant constants
IN 1997 astronomer John Webb and his team at the University of New South Wales in Sydney analysed the light reaching Earth from distant quasars. On its 12-billion-year journey, the light had passed through interstellar clouds of metals such as iron, nickel and chromium, and the researchers found these atoms had absorbed some of the photons of quasar light - but not the ones they were expecting.
If the observations are correct, the only vaguely reasonable explanation is that a constant of physics called the fine structure constant, or alpha, had a different value at the time the light passed through the clouds.
But that's heresy. Alpha is an extremely important constant that determines how light interacts with matter - and it shouldn't be able to change. Its value depends on, among other things, the charge on the electron, the speed of light and Planck's constant. Could one of these really have changed?
No one in physics wanted to believe the measurements. Webb and his team have been trying for years to find an error in their results. But so far they have failed.
Webb's are not the only results that suggest something is missing from our understanding of alpha. A recent analysis of the only known natural nuclear reactor, which was active nearly 2 billion years ago at what is now Oklo in Gabon, also suggests something about light's interaction with matter has changed.
The ratio of certain radioactive isotopes produced within such a reactor depends on alpha, and so looking at the fission products left behind in the ground at Oklo provides a way to work out the value of the constant at the time of their formation. Using this method, Steve Lamoreaux and his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico suggest that alpha may have decreased by more than 4 per cent since Oklo started up (Physical Review D, vol 69, p 121701).
There are gainsayers who still dispute any change in alpha. Patrick Petitjean, an astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, led a team that analysed quasar light picked up by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and found no evidence that alpha has changed. But Webb, who is now looking at the VLT measurements, says that they require a more complex analysis than Petitjean's team has carried out. Webb's group is working on that now, and may be in a position to declare the anomaly resolved - or not - later this year.
"It's difficult to say how long it's going to take," says team member Michael Murphy of the University of Cambridge. "The more we look at these new data, the more difficulties we see." But whatever the answer, the work will still be valuable. An analysis of the way light passes through distant molecular clouds will reveal more about how the elements were produced early in the universe's history.
13 Cold fusion
AFTER 16 years, it's back. In fact, cold fusion never really went away. Over a 10-year period from 1989, US navy labs ran more than 200 experiments to investigate whether nuclear reactions generating more energy than they consume - supposedly only possible inside stars - can occur at room temperature. Numerous researchers have since pronounced themselves believers.
With controllable cold fusion, many of the world's energy problems would melt away: no wonder the US Department of Energy is interested. In December, after a lengthy review of the evidence, it said it was open to receiving proposals for new cold fusion experiments.
That's quite a turnaround. The DoE's first report on the subject, published 15 years ago, concluded that the original cold fusion results, produced by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and unveiled at a press conference in 1989, were impossible to reproduce, and thus probably false.
The basic claim of cold fusion is that dunking palladium electrodes into heavy water - in which oxygen is combined with the hydrogen isotope deuterium - can release a large amount of energy. Placing a voltage across the electrodes supposedly allows deuterium nuclei to move into palladium's molecular lattice, enabling them to overcome their natural repulsion and fuse together, releasing a blast of energy. The snag is that fusion at room temperature is deemed impossible by every accepted scientific theory.
”Cold fusion would make the world's energy problems melt away. No wonder the Department of Energy is interested
That doesn't matter, according to David Nagel, an engineer at George Washington University in Washington DC. Superconductors took 40 years to explain, he points out, so there's no reason to dismiss cold fusion. "The experimental case is bulletproof," he says. "You can't make it go away."
Secret Habits of the Super-Rich
Luxury Goes Undercover
The best things in life aren't necessarily flashy objects but discreet, meaningful experiences.
By Rana ForooharThere are bespoke suits. And then there are bespoke books. For the mogul who truly has everything, there's something new: a custom-made autobiography. For any where from a few grand to $100,000, Myspecialbook.com, a publishing company started a few years back by wealthy Argentines, will write, design and publish a book all about anyone who can afford it. The glossy pages will be filled with beautiful photos, personal letters and other mementos, artfully laid out to illustrate a life of wealth and privilege. The text will feature quotes and anecdotes from the subject's rich and powerful friends. Milton Pedraza, director of the New York-based research firm the Luxury Institute, recalls a well-known private-equity billionaire who was recently brought to tears after receiving such a birthday gift from his wife. "It's the story of your life, told by the people who love you," he says. "Can you imagine anything more personal? That's real luxury."
The luxury industry sure isn't what it used to be. Forget haute couture handbags; those were commoditized years ago. Custom-made yachts? A dime a dozen in chic ports. Even the purveyors of luxury themselves seem a bit bored by it all—top designers craft clothes for discount stores, and high-end hotel chains nix frigid marble palaces in favor of beach shacks. After years of unprecedented global wealth creation—there are now some 8.7 million millionaires, according to the 2006 Merrill Lynch-Capgemini World Wealth Report. The rich hold some $33.3 trillion in assets, up from $16.6 trillion a decade ago. Meanwhile, the sheer proliferation of luxury goods has made them accessible, at some level, to many millions more. In an era in which anybody can go online to buy toiletries handmade by Florentine nuns, and the Louvre is opening a branch in Abu Dhabi, is anything truly exclusive anymore?
The answer, of course, is yes; luxury, by its very nature, will always seek higher ground. But the luxury business is undergoing a radical change. For starters, its customer base is shifting dramatically, as wealth continues to spread to new parts of the globe. Luxury distribution is changing, too; online luxury, once an oxymoron, is now omnipresent. Meanwhile, members-only services for dining, travel, entertainment and retail are proliferating. Clearly, the rich want to be rich in private, with members of their own tribe.
Most important, the nature of luxury goods and services themselves are evolving. Rather than flash, luxury consumers are now seeking discretion, special access, surprise, humor, even secrecy. They don't crave another pair of Jimmy Choos or a custom-made Bentley so much as the challenge of vying for an appointment at the Parisian jeweler JAR—maybe you'll get a slot that day, maybe not—or an invitation to a resort where they'll be entertained by rock stars and educated by Nobel laureates. Most of all, they want meaning, emotion and connection—witness the rise of "philanthropic travel," where visitors to ultraposh resorts in far-flung places might help build a school or launch a mini-foundation for water-sanitation projects in between beachcombing. It's not about keeping up with the Joneses, but about keeping up with the Gateses.
Delivering the goods to ever more discriminating and demanding luxury consumers is requiring companies to rethink their entire business models, an evolution that is long overdue. Until quite recently, luxury was strictly segmented by product (fashion houses did clothes, wine makers made wine, etc.) and run privately, often by second- or third-generation families. There were only a couple of big conglomerates (LVMH, Pinault-Printemps-Redoute), and they had a fairly predictable formula: blend mass (Louis Vuitton handbags) with class (Bottega Veneta dresses), growing the customer base at one end while keeping margins and brand value high at the other.
It wasn't a bad formula; after all, the luxury business has been growing at around 8 percent a year for the past few years—faster than retail sales overall. But a younger generation of luxury consumers has grown tired of the usual offerings. "The average high-end female consumer today has four or five designer handbags, versus one or two a decade ago," says HSBC luxury analyst Antoine Belge. At the same time, they have more money to spend on luxury purchases than their parents did (according to a survey by Pennsylvania-based Unity Marketing, Gen-Xers spend about $16,000 more a year on luxury than boomers do), and are looking for new types of goods and services on which to drop their extra cash.
Enter private-equity investors, who buy up and revamp ailing firms. Flush with cash, and looking for new targets, private equity has been snapping up luxury brands—recent buys include Jil Sander and Jimmy Choo. As fashion's old guard (Garavani Valentino, Giorgio Armani, Karl Lagerfeld) begin to step down over the next few years, financiers, rather than fashionistas, will increasingly shape the future of luxury. While some in the industry have lamented the end of designer leadership, there's already evidence that the moneymen are a boon to both profitability and creativity. Brands like Versace, under new leadership, are moving beyond red-carpet dresses into areas like interior jet and auto design. Last year Donna Karan went a step further, researching the launch of a branded airline. Meanwhile, formerly fusty or low-profile brands like Goyard (upscale luggage) and Valextra (leather goods) have been acquired and reinvented for new audiences who appreciate their quiet elegance.
Far from homogenizing luxury, industry experts like investment banker Gail Zauder of Elixir Advisors believe that the flood of cash will infuse it with energy. "Private equity is going to help many more niche brands grow and survive," she predicts. Already, there are luxury brands coming from places previously unheard of: Wisconsin (W.C. Russell Moccasin Co.), for example, or Alabama (Project Alabama, purveyor of handmade fashions). This reflects the growing availability of funding, and the ability of small brands to reach faraway audiences via the Internet, but also the tastes of a new kind of consumer who enjoys the stealth surprise factor of having, say, a $20,000 gown embroidered by Red State seamstresses rather than by the usual Parisian suspects.
That's not to say that luxury customers won't still stroll the Avenue Montaigne, but an increasing number will come from more-unexpected places as well. Globalization, wealth expansion and demand for luxury products continue to march in step; according to HSBC, Kazakhstan, Des Moines and Oslo are now bustling luxury markets, as are many second cities in China, where personal wealth is beginning to rival hubs like Hong Kong and Shanghai. Chicago, better known for big department stores than cutting-edge boutiques, is turning out topnotch designers who peddle their wares in tiny, hidden stores; Ikram, an understated shop on Rush Street, can't keep $20,000 dresses in stock. Clients who prize individuality above all favor slightly lower-profile designers like Azzedine Alaia, and many expect their chosen outfits to fly first class to their second homes on the day of purchase. "Having salespeople fly dresses to clients is pretty standard," says owner Ikram Goldman.
But while the rich are clearly willing to pay almost any price for great service, they are also increasingly interested in immediacy and convenience. Web sites like vivre.com, net-a-porter.com, or 20ltd.com allow consumers to shop for $22,500 Erickson Beamon chandeliers or $800 Loro Piana travel pillows in total privacy. According to Luxury Institute research, nearly all wealthy Americans (98 percent) use the Web to purchase such goods and services, and more than half do it frequently. It was only a matter of time before even the most upscale brands, like Hermès, started selling in cyberspace. Earlier this year, players of the online game Second Life were treated to a preview of Victoire de Castellane's one-of-a-kind jewelry for Dior.
When they aren't shopping online, the rich may still protect their privacy by shopping at home—house calls are now de rigueur for upscale retailers. Individual trunk shows held in clients' homes, or in small, plush venues for only a handful of viewers, are also becoming more common. "Fashion shows have become media spectacles, and designers combine discount goods and couture on the catwalk at the same time," notes Sonnet Stanfill, a fashion curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. "It's gotten completely away from the old-fashioned notion of luxury, which was very much about privacy and exclusivity. Clients would sit quietly, smoking or having a cup of tea, while viewing a collection. That hothouse atmosphere is starting to come back now."
Even when they travel, the wealthy crave the quiet comforts of home. Some upscale hotels monogram linens especially for regular customers. Quintessentially, the London-based luxury concierge service, is launching a chain of members-only hotels in 2008, where visitors won't even have to check in; a swipe card flashed at the door will alert staff, who will then greet them personally while their bags are whisked up to the usual room.
In nearly all aspects of luxury travel, understated is now the rule. Rather than a bottle of free Cristal or a mammoth plasma TV—now standard in even midpriced hotels—sophisticated travelers prefer the thoughtful touches: a bundle of fragrant local flowers left on the back seat of their car upon departure, a surprise trip to the concierge's own favorite local haunt or the recipe for a favorite dish printed up and left with their bill. "It's all about 'being' versus 'having'," says Jacques-Olivier Chauvin, CEO of the small high-end hotel group Relais & Chateaux.
Not surprisingly, there are a host of new companies springing up to help the wealthy "be." The education of a new breed of domestic workers—butlers, maids, personal chefs and wine stewards—has be-come a cottage industry, and training centers like the Starkey International Institute for Household Management in Denver, Colorado, are booming. Students learn things like how to best serve the low-key, self-made owner of a $10 million Jackson Hole, Wyoming, fishing shack, who may prefer burgers on the deck with the kids rather than three-course meals on fine china. PinnacleCare medical concierge service not only advises on health but can also secure hard-to-get appointments with a coveted fertility expert or cancer specialist. Family Office Exchange brings together the growing number of family investment officers around the world to exchange stock tips and trade references for top lawyers or brokers.
This trend of the rich servicing the rich will only grow. Already, many new niche luxury brands are being started by socialites who have the most intimate knowledge of what their peers are looking for. The Luxury Institute's Pedraza expects that the scions of today's wealthy families will be the ones to launch tomorrow's private-jet management companies and new Web sites catering to the affluent; already there are a number of closed-door sites (including one run by the Luxury Institute, which vets members by wealth) where the world's richest people can exchange everything from restaurant recommendations to business plans. "The rich will increasingly exist in gated, private communities, online and offline," says Pedraza.
But there is an encouraging backlash to this somewhat disturbing trend: when you can have anything you want, the most discreetly fashionable gesture of all, it turns out, is giving it all away. There has been a sharp rise in philanthropic giving among the growing crop of younger financiers and entrepreneurs, often via their own namesake foundations. It's perhaps no surprise that a recent HSBC luxury-goods research report contained a graphic of American psychologist Abraham Maslow's famous hierarchy of emotional needs. After all, some of the most successful luxury launches in recent memory (American Express's Red Card, Bono's green clothing line) have been linked to higher causes. "The future of luxury will be about imparting real meaning into a product," says Elixir's Zauder. It's anybody's guess what the next generation of luxury products and services might look like. But if it touches a mogul's heartstrings, you can bet it'll be expensive.
20080705
Our Government: Powerless to Outlaw Guns, Able to Outlaw Sexual Expression
By Dr. Marty Klein
Why is the government allowed to jail people for selling videos of adults having (consensual) sex?
The Supreme Court recently ruled that the government has virtually no right to regulate guns in Washington, D.C.
You may also have read about yet another obscenity bust in Florida, which ended in a deal that puts more people in jail for selling videos of adults having (consensual, enthusiastic) sex with adults.
If you expect logic from America about sex, the juxtaposition is bewildering. If you're more realistic, it's simply enraging.
Our Constitution says (2nd Amendment) that "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed."
Our Constitution also says (1st Amendment) that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."
To put it simply, Americans can own guns, and Americans can express themselves as they wish.
So if the government can't restrict the first, why is it allowed to restrict the second? Oh, for a similar decision affirming our unrestricted right to free expression!
The right to watch what we want on TV without FCC interference; to buy adult porn without FBI or Andy-of-Mayberry sheriffs busting producers; to see strippers close up and nude without county ordinances requiring tape measures and pasties; to enjoy swingers clubs without city councils closing them by inventing health emergencies out of thin air.
We're used to reasonable limits on our rights of free expression, embodied in the famous prohibition on yelling fire in a crowded theater. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes used the analogy in banning (for better or worse) anti-war leaflets during World War I as presenting a "clear and present danger" to the Republic. A restriction on speech was legitimate if and only if it prevented an obvious threat to public safety.
So why can't you show a picture of a fire in a crowded theater? What about yelling "fuck" in a nearly empty theater? Or your home theater?
Obscenity law started centuries ago not focused on sex, but on power: as a tool to prevent people from making fun of their ruler, opposing religion, or inciting resistance to the state. Censorship protected rulers from the people.
In this century the goal of censorship has become protecting people from themselves and each other. But inevitably, when government attempts to protect people from each other -- or from themselves -- it's an expression of political ideology.
Our government has decided what's not good for us -- our sexuality. Sex is the political agenda of our federal, state, and local governments. And so they continue prosecuting business people, large and small, who provide adults with sexually explicit images of other adults.
This week, the Supreme Court ruled that the government is powerless to regulate something demonstrably dangerous, something provably implicated in tens of thousands of deaths each year. The very same government, however, can regulate pictures and words used in the privacy of one's home, in an activity that hurts no one.
George Carlin said, "I don't understand why prostitution is illegal. Selling is legal. Screwing is legal. Why isn't selling screwing legal?"
We demand an answer to the same question about sexual imagination: selling is legal. Imagining sex is legal. Why is selling someone's imagination about sex illegal?
The New York City Mob
Not the Gambinos. NYPD.
Last year, New York police officers were seen dancing in the streets just before arresting four men in a city nightclub on charges of selling $100 worth of cocaine. It took six months and the men's life savings, but their names were finally cleared when prosecutors took the unusual step of announcing in court that the men had committed no crime.
That's because club surveillance video shows that the undercover cops had no contact with the accused men in the two hours they were in the club.
Now, club owner Eduardo Espinoza says the police are retaliating against him.
Espinoza said he thinks police are retaliating against him because of a strange phone call he received shortly before the harassment began.
A man who identified himself as the officer who made the drug arrest in his club demanded to know if Espinoza had taped the events of that night.
"I said I already gave it to the defendants," Espinoza said, "He said, 'Oh s--t.' He hung up."
Espinoza had received just two summonses in the two-and-a-half years he owned the club prior to turning over the videotapes. He has received more than a dozen since.
"I been harassed so much, I'm selling my business," said Espinoza, owner of Delicias de Mi Tierra on 91st Place in Elmhurst.
"Every two to three weeks, there's cops in here, searching the bar. If there's no violation, they'll make it up. I lost all my clients - everybody's scared to come in my place right now."
The officers implicated by the surveillance tapes are being investigated, but still on duty.
20080703
Because Celebrating the Fourth Is All About Freedom!
by Radley Balko
So fireworks are illegal in the city of Houston. But they’re legal in surrounding Harris County. The problem is, Houston has annexed several roads outside the city limits, though there are no signs to let Harris County residents know this.
So Houston police are watching as Harris County residents buy fireworks at a perfectly legal fireworks stand, then stopping and fining them when they pull onto a road the city has annexed. Fines range from $500 to $2,000.
Obama to expand Bush's faith based programs
By JENNIFER LOVEN
CHICAGO (AP) - Reaching out to evangelical voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is announcing plans to expand President Bush's program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and—in a move sure to cause controversy—support some ability to hire and fire based on faith.
Obama was unveiling his approach to getting religious charities more involved in government anti-poverty programs during a tour and remarks Tuesday in Zanesville, Ohio, at Eastside Community Ministry, which provides food, clothes, youth ministry and other services.
"The challenges we face today ... are simply too big for government to solve alone," Obama was to say, according to a prepared text of his remarks obtained by The Associated Press. "We need all hands on deck."
Obama's announcement is part of a series of events leading up to Friday's Fourth of July holiday that are focused on American values.
The Democratic presidential candidate spent Monday talking about his vision of patriotism in the battleground state of Missouri. By twinning that with Tuesday's talk about faith in another battleground state, he was attempting to settle debate in two key areas where his beliefs have come under question while also trying to make inroads with constituencies that are traditionally loyal to Republicans and oppose Obama on other grounds.
But Obama's support for letting religious charities that receive federal funding consider religion in employment decisions could invite a protest from those in his own party who view such faith requirements as discrimination.
Obama does not support requiring religious tests for recipients of aid nor using federal money to proselytize, according to a campaign fact sheet. He also only supports letting religious institutions hire and fire based on faith in the non-taxypayer funded portions of their activities, said a senior adviser to the campaign, who spoke on condition of anonymity to more freely describe the new policy.
Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, criticized Obama's proposed expansion of a program he said has undermined civil rights and civil liberties.
"I am disappointed that any presidential candidate would want to continue a failed policy of the Bush administration," he said. "It ought to be shut down, not continued."
Bush supports broader freedoms for taxpayer-funded religious charities. But he never got Congress to go along so he has conducted the program through administrative actions and executive orders.
David Kuo, a conservative Christian who was deputy director of Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives until 2003 and later became a critic of Bush's commitment to the cause, said Obama's position on hiring has the potential to be a major "Sister Souljah moment" for his campaign.
This is a reference to Bill Clinton's accusation in his 1992 presidential campaign that the hip hop artist incited violence against whites. Because Clinton said this before a black audience, it fed into an image of him as a bold politician who was willing to take risks and refused to pander.
"This is a massive deal," said Kuo, who is not an Obama adviser or supporter but was contacted by the campaign to review the new plan.
Obama proposes to elevate the program to a "moral center" of his administration, by renaming it the Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and changing training from occasional huge conferences to empowering larger religious charities to mentor smaller ones in their communities.
Saying social service spending has been shortchanged under Bush, he also proposes a $500 million per year program to provide summer learning for 1 million poor children to help close achievement gaps with white and wealthier students. A campaign fact sheet said he would pay for it by better managing surplus federal properties, reducing growth in the federal travel budget and streamlining the federal procurement process.
Like Bush, Obama was arguing that religious organizations can and should play a bigger role in serving the poor and meeting other social needs. But while Bush argued that the strength of religious charities lies primarily in shared religious identity between workers and recipients, Obama was to tout the benefits of their "bottom-up" approach.
"Because they're so close to the people, they're well-placed to offer help," he was to say.
Kuo called Obama's approach smart, impressive and well thought-out but took a wait-and-see attitude about whether it would deliver.
"When it comes to promises to help the poor, promises are easy," said Kuo, who wrote a 2006 book describing his frustration at what he called Bush's lackluster enthusiasm for the program. "The question is commitment."
Obama also planned to talk bluntly about the genesis of his Christian faith in his work as a community organizer in Chicago, and its importance to him now.
"In time, I came to see faith as being both a personal commitment to Christ and a commitment to my community; that while I could sit in church and pray all I want, I wouldn't be fulfilling God's will unless I went out and did the Lord's work," he was to say.
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