Wake up! I know television is compelling, and all, but people are dying out here!

"Afghanistan either has to be fixed and be peaceful, or the whole region will run into hell with us," Mr. Karzai told a small group of journalists during a visit to this southern city, his hometown, which has been reeling from almost daily suicide bombings in the last 10 days. "It’s not going to be like the past, that only we suffer. Those who cause us to suffer will burn in hell with us. And I hope NATO recognizes this."

Pakistan’s Support for Militants Threatens Region, Karzai Says

"This is a major step forward to keep these predators off the Internet," McDonnell said. "We want to be a leader with legislation to protect kids."

Here's how the plan would work: After the state obtained a predator's e-mail addresses, officials would turn them over to MySpace. The company, using new software, would then block anyone using that e-mail address from entering the site.

Did somebody say new software? It's Sarb-Ox all over again.

"We are certainly going to put public safety ahead of these civil liberties concerns," said McDonnell.

"Public safety" is code for "business opportunity" and political "self preservation".

Dare anyone ask why there is suddenly such urgency?

Shouldn't we have a registry for terrorist e-mail addresses? I mean, no one wants a child talking to a predator, but EVERYONE is at risk when terrorists go Friending.

Virginia Proposal Aims to Keep Sex Offenders Off Networking Sites

Sex sells.

"It's a kind of blog that has turned into a crime-fighting resource."

"Every waking minute he’s on that computer," said his mother.

"I have a low opinion of men in general," he said.

The group's collaboration with “Dateline” has been lucrative. ... NBC [is] paying the group roughly $70,000 for each hour of television produced. Six new episodes are planned for the first half of 2007.

I am reminded of this quote:

You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!

Cha-ching!

We are a mere step away from live-televised, ad-supported street-level drug busts, filmed Candid Camera style, with a goofy sidekick popping out of nowhere to exclaim, with hands on cheeks in mock shock, "Oops!" as the sucker is handcuffed and deposited into the back of the police cruiser. The show could be called "Live Raid", or simply "Busted". Think of it as Room Raiders meets Cops meets Deal or No Deal.

You could also do a riff on Elimidate, wherein four women are paired with a convicted offender, then simply let the cameras roll! (With a uniformed bust crew in tow, of course. Can't be too cautious ...) The twist here is that three of the women are confederates, and paid professional actors; the fourth woman is in the dark, and so she is the real contestant on the show. The viewer's challenge is to identify the contestant among the women before she learns the true identity of her 'date' and ruins the party. The actors' challenge is for each to be eliminated in turn, so that in the last stage, the contestant "wins"; but in doing so, they should not prematurely reveal themselves to the audience as confederates.

You could also do a "suspense" version where the viewers are "in" on the conspiracy, and the question is whether the contestant will learn the truth before the date is done.

For safety and insurance reasons, of course, you might want to just use an actor for the male role, too.

Web Site Hunts Pedophiles, and TV Goes Along

Attorney General Bob McDonnell said he would seek legislation to require convicted sex offenders there to register their online identities with the state to help MySpace and other Web sites frequented by teenagers more easily block access. Senators Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona., announced plans for similar federal legislation last week, but theirs would apply only to those on probation or parole. Mr. McDonnell’s plan for Virginia would apply to all convicted sex offenders. Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace’s chief security officer, applauded the Virginia announcement. “This legislation is an important recognition that the Internet has become a community as real as any other neighborhood and is in need of similar safeguards,” Mr. Nigam said.

Virginia: Registry of Sex Offenders’ Online Identities

"Protect the children." Over the years that mantra has been applied to countless real and perceived threats. America has scrambled to protect its children from a wide variety of dangers including school shooters, cyberbullying, violent video games, snipers, Satanic Ritual Abuse, pornography, the Internet, and drugs.

Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent protecting children from one threat or other, often with little concern for how expensive or effective the remedies are—or how serious the threat actually is in the first place. So it is with America’s latest panic: sexual predators.

Eventually this predator panic will subside and some new threat will take its place. Expensive, ineffective, and unworkable laws will be left in its wake when the panic passes. And no one is protecting America from that.

Have you seen Little Children?

Predator Panic

Francis Fukuyama has a new book, entitled "Beyond Bioethics: A Proposal for Modernizing the Regulation of Human Biotechnologies".

He writes:

The title "Beyond Bioethics" is not meant to downplay the importance of ethical issues, but rather to suggest we need rules now with real enforcement power. The entire field of bioethics was created back in the 1970s at least in part to relieve pressure on the scientific community for overt regulation; they could point to toothless bioethics committees and say that they were taking account of ethical issues, without having to face real limits on research. We are saying that the time for this is past; that we need to proceed under socially agreed upon rules that ensure that future research respects the dominant ethical concerns of the broader democratic community.

This book is freely available as a downloadable PDF; just complete the "order" form at this site.

Biotech Governance Project

This is not your father's high school biology; the days are long since gone when "bio" meant taking a razor to an earthworm, frog, or fetal pig.

Now, "bio" is applied pattern recognition ... cool hunting.

The genetic divergence time between two species varies substantially across the genome, conveying important information about the timing and process of speciation. Here we develop a framework for studying this variation and apply it to about 20 million base pairs of aligned sequence from humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and more distantly related primates. Human–chimpanzee genetic divergence varies from less than 84% to more than 147% of the average, a range of more than 4 million years. Our analysis also shows that human–chimpanzee speciation occurred less than 6.3 million years ago and probably more recently, conflicting with some interpretations of ancient fossils. Most strikingly, chromosome X shows an extremely young genetic divergence time, close to the genome minimum along nearly its entire length. These unexpected features would be explained if the human and chimpanzee lineages initially diverged, then later exchanged genes before separating permanently.

Reread that last sentence for emphasis. I missed this paper on initial publication, but on recent review, and in the context of the Year in Ideas and yesterday's NYT profile of its lead author, I have to say this is the closest thing to a Gold Star biology paper as I have seen recently.

If you've read The Ancestor's Tale, you'll recognize some of the analytical techniques applied here.

Genetic evidence for complex speciation of humans and chimpanzees

"I'm a data guy. What I know about is how to analyze big, complicated data sets."

In 2000, he pondered who had the most interesting, most complex data sets and decided "it had to be the biology people."

Biologists are awash in DNA code. Last year alone, the Broad Institute sequenced nearly 70 billion bases of DNA, or 23 human genomes’ worth. Researchers are mining that trove to learn how humans evolved, which mutations cause cancer, and which genes respond to a given drug.

Since biology has become an information science, said Eric S. Lander, a mathematician-turned-geneticist who directs the Broad Institute, "the premium now is on being able to interpret the data." That is why quantitative-minded geeks from mathematics, physics and computer science have flocked to biology.

A Cold War Cryptologist Takes a Crack at Deciphering DNA’s Deep Secrets

So numerous are the recruits that a tribal leader in southern Afghanistan, who did not want to be named because of the threat of suicide bombers, relayed an account of how one would-be suicide bomber was sent home and told to wait his turn because there were many in line ahead of him.

It's like seniority in a union.

Javed Iqbal, the newly appointed Pakistani secretary of the tribal areas, defended the North Waziristan accord:

"We have tried the coercive tactic, we did not achieve much. So what do you do? Engage."

I am reminded of this quote:

"It has become clear that Internet access in itself is a vulnerability that we cannot mitigate. We have tried incremental steps and they have proven insufficient."
        -- Undersecretary of Commerce Mark Foulon

Taliban and Allies Tighten Grip in North of Pakistan

They aren’t destroying local flavor—they’re providing variety and comfort

This is a short piece, worth reading.

The contempt for chains represents a brand-obsessed view of place, as if store names were all that mattered to a city’s character.

I wonder what Steven Johnson is saying about this?

In Praise of Chain Stores, by Virginia Postrel | The Atlantic Monthly