The joyous first week begins

Things are back to usual here at Rhosgobel, as classes have started again; I just met my lecture students for the first time today. I was asked many spontaneous questions during the lecture; all of them were relevant to the topic at hand, and some were quite advanced. I couldn't have asked for a better first lecture.

It's been an interesting past few months; back in October our spring schedule was cut by a large fraction for budgetary reasons, but in the past few weeks the administration has realized that enrollment is now way down (gee, never would have expected that ...), and thus the administration has been frantically asking us to add lab sections. Adding labs at the last minute is an administrative disaster, as we have to find adjuncts to teach the labs, arrange for lab techs to support the labs, order supplies to teach the labs, and find timeslots to fit the labs in (oh yes, and notify the students that the new lab exists). My department has pulled through amazingly and added four new labs, two of them just in the past week. I'm so proud!

Other administrative headaches are also piling up and distracting me from teaching. Probably the largest is that the administration already wants both next summer's and next fall's schedules drafted out within the next few weeks. The fun never ends!

Why is this only being reported now?

CNN's big headline this morning read "FEMA's big kiss-off?"; it was positioned above a picture of a stranded Katrina victim captioned "Some loss of life 'might not have occurred,' senator says."

While I appreciate that CNN is covering the story about turned-away Katrina aid, it makes me wonder why that headline and provocative quote weren't present in the weeks after the hurricane (when, for instance, I was able to easily collect more than 20 unique reports of denied Katrina aid; see this post for the full list).

The CNN article appears to have been spurred by the investigations of a congressional committee into the response to hurricane Katrina (the committee is summarized here, and its hearings are detailed here). The CNN article does have some new information in it; for instance, the committee has uncovered evidence that FEMA even rejected offers of aid that came from within the US government.

The Interior Department offered FEMA 500 rooms, 119 pieces of heavy equipment, 300 dump trucks and other vehicles, 300 boats, 11 aircraft and 400 law enforcement officers, according to a questionnaire answered by a department official.

Interior law enforcement officers included special agents and refuge officers from the department's Fish and Wildlife Service.

"Although we attempted to provide these assets, we were unable to efficiently integrate and deploy these resources," an Interior Department official wrote the Senate committee investigating the government's response to Katrina.

...

[Within three days of the hurricane landing,] the Interior Department had offered FEMA hundreds of law enforcement officers trained in search-and-rescue, emergency medical services and evacuation, according to the documents.

"The Department of the Interior was not called upon to assist until late September," the Interior official writes.

The hurricane made landfall on August 29.

The chair of the investigatory panel (Senator Susan Collins) seems to be (understandably) outraged:

"Now, you might be able to understand if it came from outside government," she said. "But this is another federal agency, an agency that was offering trained personnel and exactly the assets that the federal government needed to assist in the search-and-rescue operations."

Circuses of the spineless

PZ Myers has posted two versions of the Circus of the Spineless: the first is the (more traditional) biological version, and the second is a special Senate version.

A bit of advance notice might have been useful ...

While reading Orac this morning I discovered that today was "International Internet-free Day". Well, so much for that idea.

An imprecise watch

BoingBoing has a summary of a very snazzy idea: a watch that displays time in imprecise units like "Around 6 Fifteen" and "Just Before 7". Apparently you can get a plugin to do this on your Mac menubar; I wonder if there's a Gnome/X-windows plugin for it.

Kerry's speech on Alito

Last night on CSPAN (yes, I've taken to watching CSPAN), I watched most of John Kerry's speech on why he's filibustering Alito; the speech was well-delivered and information-rich, and the full text is available online. Here's an excerpt:

"In 1984, for example, Judge Alito wrote a Justice Department memorandum concluding that the use of deadly force against a fleeing unarmed suspect did not violate the fourth amendment. The victim was a 15-year-old African American. He was 5 foot 4. He weighed 100 to 110 pounds. This unarmed eighth grader was attempting to jump a fence with a stolen purse containing $10 when he was shot in the back of the head in order to prevent escape. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals found the shooting unconstitutional because deadly force can only be used when there is 'probable cause that the suspect poses a threat to the safety of the officers or a danger to the community if left at large.' That is what we teach law enforcement officials.

"But Judge Alito disagreed. Judge Alito said: No, he believed the shooting was reasonable because 'the State is justified in using whatever force is necessary to enforce its laws'--even deadly force. That is his conclusion. That is the standard that is going to go to the Supreme Court if ratified. It is OK to shoot a 15-year-old, 110 pounds, a 5-foot-4-inch kid who is trying to get over a fence with a purse, shoot him in the back of the head.

...

"Perhaps Professor Liu of the Berkeley Law School put it best when he wrote this. He said:

'Judge Alito's record envisions an America where police may shoot and kill an unarmed boy to stop him from running away with a stolen purse; where federal agents may point guns at ordinary citizens during a raid, even after no sign of resistance; where the FBI may install a camera where you sleep on the promise that they won't turn it on unless an informant is in the room; where a black man may be sentenced to death by an all-white jury for killing a white man, absent a multiple regression analysis showing discrimination; and where police may search what a warrant permits, and then some. This is not the America we know. Nor is it the America we aspire to be.'"

Google China

Much media hay was made of Google's recent decision to launch google.cn, a Chinese version of their search engine that censors (or, in Google's terminology, "filters") search results. Today Google posted a detailed article outlining their reasoning for bowing to Chinese censorship. Of note is a part of the story that isn't being reported heavily:

... Chinese regulations will require us to remove some sensitive information from our search results. When we do so, we'll disclose this to users, just as we already do in those rare instances where we alter results in order to comply with local laws in France, Germany and the U.S.

As an example, the search results for "tiananmen" are drastically different in the Chinese and English versions, but there appears to be text at the bottom of the Chinese page that indicates the search has been censored (babelfish translates the text as "According to the local law laws and regulations and the policy, the part searches the result not to demonstrate. You are not must look: Tiananmen").

It'll be interesting to hear what Semantic Compositions has to say on the topic, as he's previously talked about Google's censorship of US search results.

You know blogs are big when ...

... the source the New York Times uses to report that a senator (John Kerry) has called for a filibuster is that senator's personal post on a blog (Daily Kos; Kerry's post can be found here).

The issue, of course, is the confirmation hearing of proposed Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito; see this New York Times editorial for why some might want to fillibuster Alito.

Surveilling Americans

The ACLU of Georgia has filed a lawsuit alleging that the government has been secretly surveilling peaceful protests. The lawsuit is based on the questionable arrest of two activists after they wrote down the license plate number of an undercover Homeland Security agent taking pictures of the protest. WXIA news has a story on the suit:

Two documents relating to anti-war and anti-government protests, and a vegan rally, prove the agencies have been "spying" on Georgia residents unconstitutionally, the ACLU said. (Related: ACLU Complaint -- PDF file)

For example, more than two dozen government surveillance photographs show 22-year-old Caitlin Childs of Atlanta, a strict vegetarian, and other vegans picketing against meat eating, in December 2003. They staged their protest outside a HoneyBaked Ham store on Buford Highway in DeKalb County.

An undercover DeKalb County Homeland Security detective was assigned to conduct surveillance of the protest and the protestors, and take the photographs. The detective arrested Childs and another protester after he saw Childs approach him and write down, on a piece of paper, the license plate number of his unmarked government car.

...

The government file lists anti-war protesters in Atlanta as threats, the ACLU said. The ACLU of Georgia accuses the Bush administration of labeling those who disagree with its policy as disloyal Americans.

The ACLU has the full text (PDF) of its complaint online; it contains a detailed narrative of the events surrounding Childs' arrest (starting on page 6).

Ah, satire

Fafblog has recently posted two good satirical pieces; the first is an explanation of recent Democratic party behavior, and the second is a Q&A session about Bush's NSA wiretapping program. I'll steal BoingBoing's quote from the second article as a small sample of what awaits on the other side of the links:

Q. ... But is it legal for the president to ignore the law?
A. Maybe not according to plain ol stupid ol regular law, but we're at war! You don't go to war with regular laws, which are made outta red tape and bureaucracy and Neville Chamberlain. You go to war with great big strapping War Laws made outta tanks and cold hard steel and the American Fightin Man and WAR, KABOOOOOOM!
Q. How does a War Bill become a War Law?
A. It all begins with the president, who submits a bill to the president. If a majority of both the president and the president approve the bill, then it passes on to the president, who may veto it or sign it into law. And even then the president can override himself with a two-thirds vote.

What is this, wake up Radagast and SO early month?

Two weeks ago it was collapsing shelves. Today it's someone using a sledgehammer to knock down our fence. Before 8am. Very loudly.

You'd think we'd be expecting something like that, what with our fence falling down last year and us hiring a contractor to replace it. And you'd be right, except that we were expecting our contractor to show up tomorrow. Not today.

After groggily wandering out into the backyard (and deciding that "What the *$#@ are you doing on my property?" was probably not the best way to start a conversation), I found out that our contractor neighbor had just decided to get things started early. Oh yay. So much for sleeping in.

Something fun

OK, after the last three posts we need something fun here, and thanks to BoingBoing I've got just the thing: Business 2.0's list of the 101 dumbest moments in business of 2005. They also have a (much shorter) list of the smartest business decisions (which can be found via the previous link).

Iraq reconstruction

The LA Times and New York Times both have articles showing that the reconstruction of Iraq is not proceeding as planned. The LA Times reports that oil production in Iraq (which was intended by the US to help fund reconstruction) has decreased:

Iraqi oil production fell by 8 percent last year, with a sharp decline near year's end that left average daily production at half the 3 million barrels envisioned by U.S. officials at the outset of the war in 2003.

Prospects for improvement this year are slim, according to many experts, calling into question Iraq's ability to support itself and fund reconstruction efforts as U.S. assistance is scaled back. Reasons for the shortfall include the poor state of the nation's oil fields, a creaky infrastructure, poor management and ongoing insurgent attacks, particularly to pipelines in the north-central region meant to export oil through Turkey.

...

Oil revenues contribute 94 percent of the fledgling government's budget and a drop in oil global prices from current high levels could wreak havoc if output remains depressed.

The New York Times reports on an audit by the military's Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) into use of Iraq reconstruction funds:

A new audit of American financial practices in Iraq has uncovered irregularities including millions of reconstruction dollars stuffed casually into footlockers and filing cabinets, an American soldier in the Philippines who gambled away cash belonging to Iraq, and three Iraqis who plunged to their deaths in a rebuilt hospital elevator that had been improperly certified as safe.

...

Agents from the inspector general's office found that the living and working quarters of American occupation officials were awash in shrink-wrapped stacks of $100 bills, colloquially known as bricks.

One official kept $2 million in a bathroom safe, another more than half a million dollars in an unlocked footlocker. One contractor received more than $100,000 to completely refurbish an Olympic pool but only polished the pumps; even so, local American officials certified the work as completed. More than 2,000 contracts ranging in value from a few thousand dollars to more than half a million, some $88 million in all, were examined by agents from the inspector general's office. The report says that in some cases the agents found clear indications of potential fraud and that investigations into those cases are continuing.

...

[T]he portrait it [the audit] paints of abandoned rebuilding projects, nonexistent paperwork and cash routinely taken from the main vault in Hilla without even a log to keep track of the transactions is likely to raise major new questions about how the provisional authority did its business and accounted for huge expenditures of Iraqi and American money.

...

Sometimes the consequences of such loose controls were deadly. A contract for $662,800 in civil, electrical, and mechanical work to rehabilitate the Hilla General Hospital was paid in full by an American official in June 2004 even though the work was not finished, the report says. But instead of replacing a central elevator bank, as called for in the scope of work, the contractor tinkered with an unsuccessful rehabilitation.

For the full-text of the SIGIR audit mentioned in this article, as well as many other SIGIR audits, see this page.

Katrina: investigations hindered and water wasted

Now that I'm back from vacation, it's time to catch up on my political reading. First on my list was catching up on hurricane Katrina news. The New York Times reports that the Bush administration is hindering a Congressional investigation into the response to the hurricane:

The Bush administration, citing the confidentiality of executive branch communications, said Tuesday that it did not plan to turn over certain documents about Hurricane Katrina or make senior White House officials available for sworn testimony before two Congressional committees investigating the storm response.

...

"There has been a near total lack of cooperation that has made it impossible, in my opinion, for us to do the thorough investigation that we have a responsibility to do," Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, said at Tuesday's hearing of the Senate committee investigating the response. His spokeswoman said he would ask for a subpoena for documents and testimony if the White House did not comply.

...

[E]ven Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, objected when administration officials who were not part of the president's staff said they could not testify about communications with the White House.

"I completely disagree with that practice," Ms. Collins, chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said in an interview Tuesday.

According to Mr. Lieberman, Michael D. Brown, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, cited such a restriction on Monday, as agency lawyers had advised him not to say whether he had spoken to President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or to comment on the substance of any conversations with any other high-level White House officials.

And, to keep adding to the list of unused aid, the USA Today reported a few weeks ago:

One million cans of drinking water donated for hurricane relief have been emptied and recycled because the water was never used at Texas and Louisiana hurricane shelters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said.

FEMA hauled the 400,000 liters of water, or 18 truckloads, to a scrap metal business in the Dallas area last month. The water was dumped into a sewer and the cans sent for recycling.

The joys of being department chair

Normally the week before the semester starts is a relatively peaceful one: no students are on campus, and I typically work at home at my own pace. However, on returning from my trip I had two phone messages at home and dozens of e-mails, most of them relating to my role as department chair. The administration has decided it wants to add some classes at the last minute; the department has already found the adjuncts required to do it, but I've got to make sure all of our (already overworked) techs get paid for the extra work they'll be required to do. Also on my schedule for this week is preparing to fight to get a replacement position for a faculty member who's leaving, and trying to figure out how to pay for an unexpected multi-thousand dollar repair bill.

Oh yes, and sometime I should get ready for my courses ...

I'm back!

While my SO and I enjoyed our trip, our house is now filled with many contented sighs as we're both happy to be back home. The trip had lots of fun little tidbits, including:

• Staying with church friends of my mom in upstate New York; we were initially very hesitant to stay with complete strangers, but they ended up being among the nicest people we know. Both were in their 80s (yet are more active than we are), and were great fun to chat with over the breakfasts they kindly made for us each morning.
  
• Once again meeting my great aunt via a trip that entailed both of us traveling many more hours than it would take us to drive to each others' houses.
  
• Having yet more delicious food, including chicken paprikash (a favorite of ours that I've never gotten around to posting), an improvised chocolate version of baked French toast, and a tasty gathering at Buca di Beppo.
  
• Remembering why I love Firefox so much by being forced to use Internet Explorer for days on end.
• Providing a very good excuse for me to avoid reading work e-mail for a full seven days.
  
• And finally, an event that should make PZ proud: we experienced an upstate New York snow storm (~5.5" in one day), and were wandering around in 25F weather many nights on our way back to our lodging. Hats, scarves, gloves, and jackets were worn regularly!

I'll return to regular posting tomorrow; right now it's time to collapse.

It's a bug!

Really! It is! This bundle of cuteness is a hemipteran - a true bug (see this post for more on what a hemipteran is, and why this is one of the only organisms you can actually call a bug).

This is the nymph of a southern green stink bug (Nezara viridula), which I found on my tomato plants this past summer. I took the pictures way back in August, but never got around to posting them, so now that it's winter and I'm on vacation it seems like a perfect time to pull them out.


When I saw this crawling around on my tomato plants I immediately recognized it as a hemipteran, but I had no idea what species it was. After much searching I got the species ID from bugguide.net, where they have pages on hemipterans, stink bugs, and southern green stink bugs. I shouldn't have wasted my time hunting for the ID though, as Urtica posted the species ID as a comment on my Flickr page only minutes after I uploaded it. Thanks, Urtica!


As with all hemipterans, this insect has piercing mouthparts (which you can see in the picture above; the mouthpart is the brown tube reaching back from the insect's head on the underside of its body) that are used for feeding on fluids . In fact, while I was taking pictures I got to see the hemipteran use the tube to feed on a tomato leaf. These bugs feed primarily on tomatoes, and when they feed on the developing fruit of the tomato they can cause it to become disfigured:

When the young green fruit is injured, the cells at the site of feeding are killed by the toxic saliva injected by the bugs into the plant. This area of the fruit stops expanding, while the cells around the dead cells continue to expand by increasing their water content. The result is deformed fruit that appears to have dimples. This type of damage has been called "cat facing." When ripened or nearly ripened fruit is injured, the injection of toxic saliva merely kills a cluster of cells that later forms an off-color hard mass in the fruit, reducing fruit quality and producing a bad flavor to the fruit.

For more information on these bugs, see the Texas Cooperative Extension (where the quote above comes from), the University of California IPM online, and the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension (which includes pictures of nymphs).


Oh, and if you thought that I was being taxonomically inappropriate with my magazine cover headline, I had these pictures in mind when I created it.

Ants with antibiotics and herbicides

One of the fun biology facts I love to introduce in my biology classes is that humans weren't the first species to develop farming; ants began farming millions of years before our ancestors were even walking bipedally. For example, leafcutter ants (genera Atta and Acromyrmex) bring back pieces of leaves to their nest, which they then use as a medium for growing fungus; the fungus digests the cellulose in the leaves (which the ants can't do alone), and then the ants eat the fungus. The ants even bring fungal spores with them when they start a new nest.

I've known for a while that leafcutter ants weed their fungus farms, but Scientific American's online news has a few neat stories showing that tropical ants use both antibiotics and herbicides to modify their environment.

Some ants rear a type of bacteria that kills other bacteria:

Entomologist Cameron Currie of the University of Wisconsin and his colleagues discovered the antibiotic bacteria in crescent-shaped pits on the exoskeletons of two species of Panamanian ants, Cyphomyrex longiscapus and C. muelleri, after scanning them with an electron microscope. The bacteria--of the Pseudonocarida genus--bloom on the individual face plates and other exterior parts of the ant, allowing it to rub the antiparasitic agent on its fungi crop. The ant also nurtures the microbe by secreting nutrients from special exocrine glands connected to the shallow pits.

And some ants use formic acid as an herbicide:

Sections of the rainforest made-up almost entirely of the tree species Duroia hirsuta, are called "Devil's gardens." Local legend holds that they were produced by an evil forest spirit, report Megan E. Frederickson of Stanford University and her colleagues. But the results of a four-year field study reveal that ants that make their nests in D. hirsuta are the driving force between the homogeneous plots of vegetation. The team introduced saplings of another common Amazonia tree to "Devil's gardens," using a barrier to protect some of them from the ants. Those that were unprotected, however, were quickly attacked by worker ants, which injected poisonous formic acid into the leaves. Trees began to show signs of withering within 24 hours and most of the leaves were lost after five days.

Why Bush's NSA spying program is illegal

Fourteen legal scholars have written a letter to congress detailing why Bush's NSA wiretapping of US citizens without a warrant (which I've written about before) violates existing statute and is almost certainly illegal. The letter is titled "On NSA Spying: A Letter to Congress" and can be found here.

In the letter the scholars provide a lot of background on FISA and relevant Supreme Court decisions, as well as a point-by-point rebuttal of the recent Department of Justice memo (PDF) that attempted to justify the NSA spying program. The letter is well worth reading; here's the conclusion:

In conclusion, the DOJ letter fails to offer a plausible legal defense of the NSA domestic spying program. If the administration felt that FISA was insufficient, the proper course was to seek legislative amendment, as it did with other aspects of FISA in the Patriot Act, and as Congress expressly contemplated when it enacted the wartime wiretap provision in FISA. One of the crucial features of a constitutional democracy is that it is always open to the President—or anyone else—to seek to change the law. But it is also beyond dispute that, in such a democracy, the President cannot simply violate criminal laws behind closed doors because he deems them obsolete or impracticable.

A view of the trip

Last night, while watching "Wal*Mart - The High Cost of Low Price" (a good look at Wal*Mart's bad business practices, though I would have preferred the movie had stuck to presenting the facts of why Wal*Mart isn't a good company and left out some of the attempts at heart-rending stories), my SO's parents' cat decided that she wanted some of my milk:


How undignified.

I'm not going to argue with those teeth ...
Another interesting occurrence was that, on the way home from Sweet Lucy's Smokehouse (an excellent barbeque restaurant in Philadelphia) it got very cold and some white stuff began falling from the sky. The locals informed me that it was called "snow", and made up of frozen water (the craziest things happen when you leave California). After a short while it began sticking to the ground, and when I woke up this morning it was all over the place.


Snow!
The trip has been superb so far from a gastronomic perspective. On the way home from the airport (less than an hour after arriving in Philadelphia) my SO's parents stopped by their favorite local cheesesteak place and picked us up some cheesesteaks (with gooey melted American cheese and fried onions, of course) and a garlic pizza. Then it was fresh bagels the next morning, followed shortly by Memphis baby back ribs at Sweet Lucy's Smokehouse in the evening.