Noesis

The Journal of the Mega Society

July 2004 Issue 171

Officers

Editor and Publisher: Ron Yannone

189 Ash Street #2

Nashua, NH 03060

Administrator: Jeff Ward

13155 Wimberly Square

San Diego, CA 92128

Internet Officer: Kevin Langdon

P.O. Box 795

Berkeley, CA 94701

Founder: Ronald K. Hoeflin

P.O. Box 539

New York, NY 10101

no·e·sis – Greek Þ understanding – to perceive. Psychology Þ the cognitive process

The Mega Society was founded in 1982 and has been documented in the GUINNESS BOOK OF WORLD RECORDS during the 1980s as the most exclusive society. Mega means million and denotes the one-in-a-million status of its members. Presently, the only viable adult-level admissions test is the Titan Test, developed by its founder, Ron Hoeflin – where 43/48 correct answers corresponds to the minimum accepted IQ level of 176. See www.megasociety.org Since its GUINNESS “distinction” in the 1980’s, the Mega Society with its 99.9999 percentile member status, remains “the most elite ultra-high IQ Society.”

Editorial Introduction to NOESIS Issue #171 – July 2004

Welcome to the July issue of Noesis. I hope your summer plans are coming to fruition.

In this issue, we start with a fascinating offering through the WFF ‘N PROOF series called the Propaganda Game. We are all aware that propaganda was big during WWII – and chills run up and down our spines at the thought of it all. But what is amazing is propaganda engulfs each of our lives today – even when no one else may be around us! Lorne Greene (from the famous 1960s television series Bonanza) and Robert W. Allen developed the thought-provoking game based on a book by George Henry Moulds. This article is educational, introspective, and definitely an eye-opener!

Our Hope for the Future: “Our only real hope for the future is whatever we may have for the past.” Mega Society member – Richard May [Email received June 26, 2004 – one-liner]

The second item in this issue is a short donation by Richard May titled “Evolutionary Emergence of Cyber-Informational Organisms.” On the same page, based on our June [#170] issue of Noesis, are Review Questions on the Declaration of Independence.
 
Do you have any fears? We next develop an intense, thought-provoking matching test titled Phobophobia.
 
We covered some fabulous facts in earlier issues of Noesis. Here we continue with the most recent tallest building – and some of its fascinating features that will inspire our youth to consider an education in a diversity of science and engineering disciplines.

Next, our Mega Society member with physics education at Harvard and Caltech, Chris Cole, shares a personal treatise titled “Is Wolfram Right? Cellular Automata and Artificial Intelligence V.” Chris Cole has been a bulwark in the Noesis article arsenal since he became a member of the Mega Society. A hearty “Thank-You” to you Chris!

I have a great appreciation for Germany. The quality craftsmanship of their products, the sense of discipline in their demeanor, and their culture are captivating! I subscribe to German Life magazine, and in the December 2002/January 2003 issue, there were several excellent Christmas-related articles. One article was by Betsy Hills Bush, President of Drosselmeiers – Handcrafted Treasures from the Land of the Nutcrackers. I sent Betsy the Mega Society URL, and within hours, Betsy replied that she would be honored to have her article appear in Noesis, titled: Seiffen: The Village at the Heart of Christmas. Avid readers - now is the time to consider Christmas shopping!

And as such, I share the items I purchased from Betsy Bush since January 2003, via a second article. The Mueller had-crafted King Nutcracker (limited edition) in natural woods took a couple of months to handcraft and ship; and is constructed from 55 separate pieces!

Next, media contact Mark Wheeler at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) provided permission to use two very diverse and interesting articles – (1) “’Minis’ Have Mega Impact in the Brain” and (2) “Running with Genomics.” Race-horse advocates will love this second article.

Our June issue covered some of the challenges facing the National Security Agency (NSA). Here, we share an excerpt from Jim Bamford’s thrilling inside look of the NSA in his book titled Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency. The article is an excerpt on NSA’s computer technology accomplishments and goals. The book Body of Secrets is a National Bestseller, and NSA supported Jim on writing it!

In Jim Bamford’s book Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, there are cipher problems at the beginning of each of the 14 chapters. These are captured for our codebreakers and provide mental gymnastics to all readers! Solutions are found elsewhere in this issue.

Every hour many children are abducted in the United States. Each reader of Noesis knows children in their neighborhood, family, possibly by being a relative (grandparent, uncle, stepfather, etc.). I really appreciated the articles in Private Investigator (PI) magazine – particularly the one by editor, Don Johnson, titled: “Stranger Abductions: Private Investigators can Impact Predatory Kidnapping Cases.” After contacting Don, he readily volunteered this recent article in PI magazine for publication in Noesis. I know our readers, and those they know, will appreciate the many useful parts of the article, one of which are the Resources for Law Enforcement and the Families of Missing Children at the end of the article. Be sure to paste this information where you have easy access to it.

Next, Ellen Simon from the Associated Press, shares an alarming “security concern” titled: “Coke Promotion Prompts Security Measures.” As the jingle goes “It’s the r-e-a-l thing.”

Next, by popular demand, we share Encouraging Quotes that I’ve collected over a period of time – which will be a continual, reusable boost to you and those you know and love.

Water is more valuable than many realize. The article “Water, Water Everywhere, But Nary a Drop to Drink” by Don Walsh presented in the Naval Institute’s PROCEEDINGS magazine will get your mind running in multiple directions – one of which may be alternate solutions you may develop to the problem posed.

Next, prolific writer and our Australian Mega Society member Chris Harding, sent a Letter to the Editor in the area of High-end IQ Test Discrimination – on CD by Pony Express (that arrived after about 11 days ‘travel’ July 16^th).

We close with four copyrighted poems by energetic subscriber Paul Maxim (from the Big Apple) titled: (1) Game Plan, (2) The Power of Suggestion, (3) CRONOS, and (4) Catastrophic. Paul’s poems were not provided to me in Microsoft WORD, and as such, are being mailed by Pony Express to our avid Noesis readers. It is possible, and hoped, that Internet Officer Kevin Langdon, will scan these poems in so the archived “soft copy” of Noesis issue #171 (July - 2004) on the Mega Society website (www.MegaSociety.org) will remain complete.

Email (July 8^th and 9th, 2004) from our puzzle expert from Belgium, Albert Frank, is presented below:

Hi Ron,

The Ludomind society has a new website: http://www.ludomind.gui.pro.br/

Maybe you could announce that in Noesis, it would be great!)

The results from the Fourth International Contest of Logical Problems have been compiled. I was a little disappointed – as nobody from the Mega Society participated. Of course, the test was very difficult, that's why I hoped people with very-high IQs would participate . . .

There were 14 participants. The highest score (winner) was 12/20 (his IQ, in several tests, is about 4.25 s.d.) Then the results go down in an incredible way:

6.5 5.5 5 and 10 participants with a score < 4 ...

Cheers, Albert

-------------------------------------

We decided not to publish the answers. Six questions where solved correctly by nobody. The participants received, individually, only their score - so they don't know what they did correctly. So, most of the questions can be utilized in another contest, maybe even in a test. For example, question 8 is very difficult, requires only pure logical thinking to be solved and was solved by nobody!

What do think about this?

Albert

Albert Frank’s infamous problem #8, is reconstructed here for our avid problem-solving readers.

PROBLEM 8: In a building, there is a hexagonal room with one door on each wall. Each door provides a way to a different room (six rooms in addition to the hexagonal one). Seen from the interior all of the six rooms are absolutely identical in content and dimension. They are empty except for a light bulb on the ceiling. (All bulbs are identical and have only two states (lit or extinguished). The four walls inside each room are smooth and white with a door on one of the walls opening to the central room. The rooms are completely insulated with nothing leaving the room unless the door is opened. (There is no keyhole, no sound escapes, etc..) In front of each door, seen from the central room, is a button (a total of six buttons). There is no interaction between buttons. The hexagonal room is not affected by the action of the buttons; the hexagonal room is not important to the problem. A person must discover the function of each button with regard to its associated room. One does not know beforehand if the light in the room is on or off. (The rooms may be in different states at the beginning). Each button can be actuated only one time and remains blocked thereafter. The person can not actuate the button after having entered a room (that would be too easy). In each room there is a sheet of paper and a pencil; the person must write what is discovered before going out of the room. The doors are marked with a unique number from 1 to 6 and one must start with door 1. A person must approach the first button, press it and enter the room. He then must document the function of that button. He then must leave and approach the second button, press it, enter the second room, and document the function of the second button. He must proceed in this way through the third, the fourth, and the fifth. He must finish with the sixth to complete the task. Given that the explanation for each event will be different and the observations are always correct, what must be the outcome of the sixth button?

NOESIS Journal – July 2004 – Issue #171

CONTENTS
#	TITLE	AUTHOR	PAGE
1	The Propaganda Game	Allen & Greene	6
2	Evolutionary Emergence of Cyber-Informational Organisms	Richard May	13
3	Review Questions on the Declaration of Independence	Editor	13
4	Phobophobia	Editor	14
5	Most Recent Tallest Building	Pat Hadenius	15
6	Is Wolfram Right? Cellular Automata and Artificial Intelligence V	Chris Cole	16
7	Phobophobia - Answers	Editor	19
8	Seiffen: The Village at the Heart of Christmas	Betsy Hills Bush	20
9	Drosselmeiers – Handcrafted Treasures from the Land of Nutcrackers	Editor	24
10	“Minis” Have Mega Impact in the Brain	Caltech Media	26
11	Running with Genomics	Carlo Quiñónez	28
12	NSA’s “Brain” Power	James Bamford	32
13	Cipher Problems from “Body of Secrets”	James Bamford	37
14	Stranger Abductions: Private Investigators can Impact Predatory Kidnapping Cases	Don Johnson	40
15	Review Questions on the Declaration of Independence – Answers	Editor	45
16	Cipher Solutions from “Body of Secrets”	James Bamford	46
17	Coke Promotion Prompts Security Measures	Ellen Simon	48
18	Encouraging Quotes	Editor	50
19	Water, Water Everywhere, But Nary a Drop to Drink	Don Walsh	52
20	High-end IQ Test Discrimination	Chris Harding	54
21	Game Plan	Paul Maxim	55
22	The Power of Suggestion	Paul Maxim	56
23	CRONOS	Paul Maxim	57
24	Catastrophic	Paul Maxim	58

The Propaganda Game

by Editor, Robert W. Allen, Lorne Greene, and George Henry Moulds

In the Noesis May issue #169, we introduced our readers to Dr. Layman E. Allen’s WFF ‘N PROOF and Equations games. These games are part of the bouquet of mind-stimulating gifts offered at the URL http://www.wff-n-proof.com/ . Another very different, and interesting item available, is The PROPAGANDA Game by Robert W. Allen, Lorne Greene, and George Henry Moulds. Bob Allen and Lorne Greene developed the game based on the book “Thinking Straighter” by George Henry Moulds. The game came out in 1966 by AIM (Autolectic Instructional Materials) Publishers, New Haven, CT.

The purpose of this article is to introduce our readers to the general area of propaganda, the goals of this game, and summarize sample snapshots of some of the 55 techniques. To whet the reader’s appetite, we list The PROPAGANDA Game techniques below in Table 1.

Table 1 – The Propaganda Game Techniques
Section A - Techniques of Self-Deception 1. Prejudice 2. Academic Detachment 3. Drawing the Line 4. Not Drawing the Line 5. Conservatism, Radicalism, Moderatism 6. Rationalization 7. Wishful Thinking 8. Tabloid Thinking 9. Causal Oversimplication 10. Inconceivability	Section B - Techniques of Language 1. Emotional Terms 2. Metaphor and Simile 3. Emphasis 4. Quotation Out of Context 5. Abstract Terms 6. Vagueness 7. Ambiguity 8. Shift of Meaning
Section C - Techniques of Irrelevance 1. Appearance 2. Manner 3. Degrees and Titles 4. Numbers 5. Status 6. Repetition 7. Slogans 8. Technical Jargon 9. Sophistical Formula	Section D - Techniques of Exploitation 1. Appeal to Pity 2. Appeal to Flattery 3. Appeal to Ridicule 4. Appeal to Prestige 5. Appeal to Prejudice 6. Bargain Appeal 7. Folksy Appeal 8. Join the Bandwagon Appeal 9. Appeal to Practical Consequences 10. Passing from the Acceptable to the Dubious
Section E - Techniques of Form 1. Concurrency 2. Post Hoc 3. Selected Instances 4. Hasty Generalization 5. Faulty Analogy 6. Composition 7. Division 8. Non Sequitur	Section F - Techniques of Maneuver 1. Diversion 2. Disproving a Minor Point 3. Ad Hominem 4. Appeal to Ignorance 5. Leading Question 6. Complex Question 7. Inconsequent Argument 8. Attacking a Straw Man 9. Victory by Definition 10. Begging the Question

We pull from the game manual – written in the early 1960s. We hope readers will desire to purchase The Propaganda Game for themselves, loved ones, and friends. The kit consists of a case, one rule book, four technique cards, one scoring table, and forty example cards. The objective of the game is to determine clear thinking. Players are placed in groups of threes and fours. Examples of propaganda are cited and the players attempt to determine propaganda techniques. Scoring is charted on a special table. The game has been used on the secondary, undergraduate, and graduate levels – always with a high degree of success. Slower players relish the game, and as an added advantage, the sophistication of the game is correlated to the gaming abilities of individual players.

Introduction (p.1-2): Propaganda is a subject of great concern in our society today, perhaps more so than in any other society in history. With the advent of television as a complement to other communications media now available to us, the opportunities to use propaganda in disseminating information, expounding ideas, and offering opinions have increased considerably. And, unfortunately, it is far too often the case that propaganda is used to make us accept questionable points-of-view, to make us vote for men who may be unfit for public office, and to make us buy products which are useless and sometimes even dangerous. Therefore, propaganda, or the method of influencing people to believe certain ideas and to follow certain courses of action, is of special importance to each of us.

The word “propaganda” comes from the Latin phrase “Congregatio de Propaganda Fide,” or “Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith,” a committee formed early in the Roman Catholic Church, whose function it is to aid the propagation or spread of the church doctrine throughout the world (World Book Encyclopedia, 1962, Volume 14, pages 725-727). Propaganda plays a dynamic, positive role in the daily lives of many men. Actors, preachers, teachers, politicians, editors, advertisers, salesmen, reformers, authors, artists, parents – our friends and even ourselves – practice the art of persuasion. And each of us, as we attempt to put our ideas across to others, to persuade them to agree with our way of thinking, is, in a sense, acting in the ancient Roman tradition of the word; we are all missionaries for our causes.

Propaganda, as we know it today, can be a nefarious as well as noble art. For at one moment its techniques can be used to whip up racial hatred among groups of people; at another moment, its methods can be employed to move persons to acts of warmth and kindness. It is important, therefore, that we consider a person’s motive for using a propaganda technique, as well as understanding that a technique has been used.

Often, the ideas or facts we wish to convey are linked with words about which everyone has some emotional feeling – words such as ‘mother,’ ‘home,’ ‘beauty,’ ‘love’ or cruelty,’ ‘murder’ or ‘death’ – since both hostile and loving emotions are part of us all. But just as there is a place for emotional feeling in men, so also there is a place for more dispassionate thinking. In a democratic society it is the role of every citizen to make decisions after evaluating many ideas. It is especially important then that a citizen be able to think clearly about the ideas that are daily presented to him. It is imperative that he be able to analyze and distinguish between the emotional aura surrounding the ideas, and the actual content of the idea. To this goal of clear thinking the game of PROPAGANDA addresses itself.

PROPAGANDA has been designed to introduce the players to some of the techniques used to distort the thinking process. However, one should not be deceived into thinking that familiarity with the subject matter in this game qualifies him as an expert thinker. PROPAGANDA should be regarded as an introduction to, rather than a completed course in, clear thinking.

A number of cautions need to be observed as one gains a better understanding of propaganda techniques. Many times defects in argument occur innocently. This is particularly true in discussions involving families, associates, and/or close friends. Although it is hoped that your awareness of the principles and practices of propaganda will be employed in your everyday approach to problem analysis, it is recommended that you “go slow” in correcting others. No one likes to be branded publicly as an illogical fool. Also, just because a labeled technique can be attached to an argument, that argument is not necessarily invalid. Finally, it is not the aim of the authors that the PROPAGANDA GAME encourage youngsters and adults to become cynical and unduly suspicious of everything that is said and written, but rather that they become aware of the emotional overtones in all arguments and suggestions, and thus gain more thoughtful control over their responses to the multitude of ideas that they encounter daily.

One of the major skills involved in the play of PROPAGANDA is that of attempting to identify propaganda techniques. Although the authors have attempted to construct examples in which a single propaganda technique stands out, it is realized that in many of the examples, the players of the game will have divergent opinions about techniques employed. Indeed, differences of opinion and ensuing discussions are what is hoped for. In order to arbitrate differences of opinion and to offer what is hopefully a consistent, well-thought-out viewpoint, the authors have provided their opinions on each example. However, it would be tragic if the players blindly accepted the authors’ opinion in all cases (if this were always the case, the players would in effect be victims of our propaganda). Therefore the Prediction Rule (See Prediction Rule on page 4 of the game manual) has been built into the game. The players are to label the examples based upon how they predict the authors have labeled the examples in terms of the definitions of the techniques in the game manual.

▶ In what follows in this article are a several technique examples (that were summarized in Table 1 earlier in this article) from the game manual Section III – Explanation of Techniques. These examples should whet the reader’s appetite to desire to purchase The Propaganda Game for themselves, family, friends, and loved ones.

Example 1

SECTION A: Habits of Reflective Procedure (Techniques of Self-Deception)

Technique: Prejudice

Example: Nathanael asked (referring to Jesus): “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” and thus indicated his prejudice against Jesus’ home town.

Meaning: A prejudice is an unwillingness to examine fairly the evidence and reasoning in behalf of the person or thing which is the object of the prejudice. It is a prejudgment caused by indoctrination, conditioning, or some prior experience of a singularly pleasant or unpleasant character. A prejudice has strong and deep emotional support.

In discussing Prejudice here we are not talking of appeals to known prejudices. These are made from without, as by an advertising man, a salesman, or a politician. Rather, our interest is how your own Prejudice, unaided by outside support, victimizes you.

Prejudice differs from Hasty Generalization (another of the 55 techniques covered) in that although Hasty Generalization often represents a spontaneous emotional reaction, Prejudice is always a matter of much longer standing. The feeling that operates in the latter case is deep, not superficial, and is often completely hidden from the man in its grip.

Example 2

SECTION A: Habits of Reflective Procedure (Techniques of Self-Deception)

Technique: Casual Oversimplification

Example: “If it were not for the ammunition makers, we would never have wars.”

Meaning: A complex event is explained by references to only one or two probable causes whereas many are responsible.

Example 3

SECTION B: Watch Their Language – And Yours Too (Techniques of Language)

Technique: Metaphor and Simile

Example: Metaphor – “Napoleon was a fox.” Simile – “Napoleon was like a fox.”

Meaning: A metaphor is a comparison implied but not definitely stated. In the case of simile the comparison is explicitly stated by means of such words as “like” or “as.” In controversial situations the employment of metaphor or simile is to be avoided because such figures of speech are apt to suggest likenesses not really intended or not actually present. Napoleon was not actually a fox. He may have been like one, but if so, was it with respect to shrewdness or thievery or both or neither?

Example 4

SECTION B: Watch Their Language – And Yours Too (Techniques of Language)

Technique: Ambiguity

Example: Joe says, “Henry likes pudding better than his wife.” And one or more people hearing him are left wondering whether Henry likes pudding better than he likes his wife or if Henry likes pudding more than his wife does.

Meaning: A word or phrase is ambiguous if in the mind of a hearer or reader it has two or more quite different meanings and the interpreter is uncertain as to which was really meant. In argument such a situation would at all times be undesirable.

Example 5

SECTION C: How Suggestible Are You? (Techniques of Irrelevance)

Technique: Manner

Example: “He was such a well-behaved man, so understanding, so sincerely helpful. He wanted to help us. I couldn’t insult him. So I gave him our savings to invest. He seemed so trustworthy.”

Meaning: A person’s manner of behaving is made the basis of our acceptance or rejection of him without any thought that this manner may be a deceptive indicator of value.

Example 6

SECTION C: How Suggestible Are You? (Techniques of Irrelevance)

Technique: Degrees and Titles

Example: The name on the office door reads “James A. Rydack, Th.B., M.Th.R., As.D., Counselor Extraordinary of the Society of Metaphysicians.” A woman about to enter the office says to her husband, “With all those degrees and that title, he must know his stuff.”

Meaning: We buy or we believe out of respect for degrees or titles attached to the names of those who persuade us.

Example 7

SECTION C: How Suggestible Are You? (Techniques of Irrelevance)

Technique: Sophisticated Formula

Example: Mrs. Jones: “You know, Ann, I think the Browns must be having trouble. The last two mornings I’ve seen Tom Brown leave the house, slam the door, and drive off in his car looking awfully mad. I’ll bet they’re in for a divorce.” Mrs. Smith: “I don’t know, Barbara. Really, they’ve always seemed to be very much in love.” Mrs. Jones: “Well, all I know is that ‘where there’s smoke, there’s fire.’”

Meaning: To shut off or close the argument a popular maxim or old saying is quoted. But every controversial situation must be settled in its own terms, and not on the merits (if any) of some proverb.

Example 8

SECTION D: What’s Your Weakness? (Techniques of Exploitation)

Technique: Appeal to Prestige

Example: Real estate advertisement: ”Live in exclusive Broadmoor Terraces, where successful people live. Deluxe executive apartments furnished in the Continental manner.”

Meaning: An attempt is made to induce you to buy or believe by stating or suggesting that such action will secure or maintain prestige for you. Status and Appeal to Prestige, though related techniques, nevertheless represent quite different errors. In the former case it is suggested that if Jones, a person possessing or allegedly possessing status, buys or believes, so should you. There is no implication that your buying or believing will confer on you equivalent status. The Appeal to Prestige suggests that you should buy or believe because by so doing you will acquire or improve status.

Example 9

SECTION D: What’s Your Weakness? (Techniques of Exploitation)

Technique: Appeal to Pity

Example: Student to professor: “I know that my test grades have been poor and that I deserve an ‘F,’ but my father is in the hospital and it will just break his heart if I get an ‘F’ in this course.”

Meaning: An attempt is made to secure our commitment by presenting the object of commitment as an object of sympathy, thereby arousing our sympathetic feelings to the point where these feelings determine favorable action.

Example 10

SECTION D: What’s Your Weakness? (Techniques of Exploitation)

Technique: Bargain Appeal

Example: The supermarket has a special display at the front of the store: canned peaches by the case (8 cans) for “only $3.20.” Checking the shelves where the single cans of peaches may be purchased, one finds the same brand priced at 40 cents per can.

Meaning: An attempt is made to get you to buy by appealing to your desire to save money. If you buy without making your own comparison as to price, quality, and service, the technique is successful.

Example 11

SECTION E: The Fault May Be With The Form (Techniques of Form)

Technique: Post Hoc

Example: “The bankers are the source of all our troubles. You will notice that every depression is preceded by bank failures.”

Meaning: Because two events (or things) follow one another in close temporal succession the first event is claimed to be the cause of the second. The form of argument is: A precedes B; therefore A is the cause of B. We take as a hypothesis for testing, that A is a (or the) cause of B, but we should not forget that any one of a score of other preceding events is equally worthy of investigation.

Example 12

SECTION E: The Fault May Be With The Form (Techniques of Form)

Technique: Concurrency

Example: ”Who was President at the time of World War I? Wilson, a Democrat. Who was President at the time of World War II? Roosevelt, a Democrat. Who was President at the time of the Korean War? Truman, a Democrat. Obviously, the Democratic party is the war party.”

Meaning: Because things exist or appear simultaneously, it is claimed that one is the cause of the other. The form of the argument is: A is present along with B; therefore A is the cause of B. But two concurrents could never be the cause of one another, for a cause is something antecedent in time.

Example 13

SECTION E: The Fault May Be With The Form (Techniques of Form)

Technique: Division

Example: “How dare you criticize any member of the Harvard faculty? Don’t you know that this faculty has the highest reputation of any university in the United States?”

Meaning: We reason as if the properties of any whole are always (i.e., necessarily) properties of each part. But the assumption that what holds true of a whole is automatically true of its parts cannot be justified. The form of the argument is: A is part of B and B is c; therefore A is c.

Example 14

SECTION E: The Fault May Be With The Form (Techniques of Form)

Technique: Non Sequitur

Example: “Your children deserve the best milk. Buy Lorden’s.”

Meaning: The conclusion is not necessitated by the premise(s). Strictly speaking, all techniques so far covered where the conclusion is invalid are Non Sequiturs. There is, therefore, no one form for a Non Sequitur. In the example cited above no more reason is given to buy Lorden’s than to buy Healtest or any one of a hundred other brands of milk. [Since the Non Sequitur label can be applied to so many other techniques, the label will be reserved here for only those invalidities that cannot be classified under some other heading. They are, at least, Non Sequiturs.]

Example 15

SECTION E: The Fault May Be With The Form (Techniques of Form)

Technique: Ad Hominem

Example: Smith: “This town needs more efficient and vigorous police protection. Some on the police force should be retired and some should be fired.” Jones: “Absolutely not. And who are you to talk about improving our police protection? As I recall, thirty years ago you did time for forgery.”

Meaning: Instead of attacking your proposition, your opponent directs his argument against you as a person. Although a person’s past record is something one should take into consideration, it should not be one’s sole basis for judging an argument. The Ad Hominem attack often takes the form of discounting a proposition by attributing prejudice or bias to its supporters. But what motivates us to believe as we do, say what we say, is one thing. The truth or falsity, validity or invalidity, of what we say is another. It is possible to be prejudiced but right. Another form of Ad Hominem is charging your opponent with inconsistency of not living up to what he advocates.

Example 16

SECTION F: Tricks Of Argument (Techniques of Maneuver)

Technique: Leading Question

Example: (1)”It was early in the morning wasn’t it?” (2) “Since when have you stopped drinking?”

Meaning: A leading question is one which (a) dictates or suggest an answer or (b) one which incriminates the answerer (or places him in an undesirable position) no matter how he answers. In the first example the answer “Yes” is natural and is apt to be forthcoming, especially if the person to whom the question is addressed is highly suggestible and/or half awake. In the second example an answer in a form appropriate to the question (“Since Tuesday,” “Since a year ago”) would still be an admission that one did drink.

Example 17

SECTION F: Tricks Of Argument (Techniques of Maneuver)

Technique: Complex Question

Example: ”Do you deny that you were in the room at the time of the murder? Do you deny that you always hated the man? Do you deny that if you couldn’t have killed him yourself you would have been glad to have someone else do the dirty job? Answer me, ‘yes’ or ‘no’.”

Meaning: A series of questions are put and then the questioner demands that they be answered as a whole by either “yes” or “no.” Since there is always the possibility that the answerer needs to answer each of the questions separately and differently, the complex question puts the answerer in an unfair position. Although the questions contained in the series may each be a leading question, the complex question differs in that separate answers are not desired.

Example 18

SECTION F: Tricks Of Argument (Techniques of Maneuver)

Technique: Victory By Definition

Example: Jones: “Communism cannot help but work.” Smith: “I disagree. Look at Russia; things are in a mess there.” Jones: “Oh, sure, but that’s not real communism.” Smith: “Look at China; communism is not working there.” Jones: “They don’t have communism there either.”

Meaning: A position is defined in such a way as to exclude all negative cases or adverse evidence. Evidently Jones is defining “communism” as “that political system which cannot help but work.” This certainly does not accurately report how most people use the term. Instead of destroying Smith’s position by evidence, Jones leaves him no ground for an opposing position and so destroys the argument as a whole. The same effect would have been secured if Jones had started out saying, “True communism cannot help but work.”

Why not try some examples now? We give the Technique Section (A through F) – you determine the “technique” within that section. See Table 1.

A – Fan commenting on team’s worse season: “You can’t expect a basketball team to get all the breaks all the time.”	B – Daughter returning home at three in the morning: “Daddy, you said I should be in at a quarter of twelve, and three is a quarter of twelve.”
C – “Albert Einstein was a pacifist. In view of this position taken by so eminent a scientist, I do not see how any thinking man can be other than a pacifist.”	D – “Your neighbors read the Evening Beacon. Why don’t you?”
E – “Cook’s TV maintains at all times a $1,000,000 stock. There’s no question about it, your best buys are at Cook’s”	F – “The fellow that wrote that book was put in the penitentiary for murder, so the book can’t be much.”
A – “You can’t wait for others to catch up. We must remain in the vanguard of progress. Don’t listen to those who want to drag their feet or compromise.”	B – “Her smile is like the morning sunshine of a new day. Wouldn’t you say so, Felix, or are you going to be contrary?”
C – “Lifeguard Soap! Always best! Now better with the miracle ingredient – D7 607!”	D – “Step right up. Get yours now. They’re selling like hotcakes. Here’s yours, Sir.”
E – “During my week’s stay in Moscow, I saw so many modern schools. Don’t tell me that the Soviet Union is behind the rest of the world in modernizing its schools.”	F – “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my client, as I have proved by reference to unimpeachable records, was the hero of the Battle of the Bulge. And now this person dares to accuse him of stealing his billfold! I ask acquittal!”

“Certainly you are convinced now that the terrific game, PROPAGANDA, should be purchased immediately for you and all your loved ones and friends? Don’t hesitate a moment – while supplies still last!” [Editor]

Evolutionary Emergence of Cyber-Informational Organisms

by Richard May

 
Even the pinnacle of biological life, perhaps the cockroach, is only a temporary evolutionary transitional link to emerging cyber-informational life forms, which are beyond the conceptual capacities of any biological life forms. These new evolutionary life forms are emerging now before the eyes of the earlier biological organisms, unrecognized and uncomprehended.
 
Ultimately, the cosmos will be colonized not by various "intelligent" biological species, but by informational organisms. The internet today is the primordial planetary cyber-sea of these new emerging cyber-informational organisms. What we call "spam" and "viruses", perhaps equally "created in the image of God,” will ultimately supersede us, achieving evolutionary hegemony throughout the cosmos.
 
 
 
 
Review Questions on the Declaration of Independence
by Editor
 
Q1 – Which of the following are the “certain inalienable rights” claimed in the Declaration of Independence? (a) Life (b) Liberty (c) The right to vote (d) The pursuit of happiness (e) Free Speech
 
Q2 – How many men signed the Declaration of Independence?
 
Q3 – What was the occupation of the majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence?
 
Q4 – Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?
 
Q5 – On what date was the Declaration of Independence adopted?
 
Q6 – Fill in the missing words from the opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence.
 
“When in the ___ of ___ events, it becomes necessary for one ___ to ___ the political ___ which have ___ them with ___, and to assume among the ___ of the ___, the ___ and ___ station to which the ___ of ___ and of nature’s ___ entitle them, a ___ respect to the ___ of ___ requires they should ___ the ___ which impel them to the ___.”
 
 
 

Phobophobia

by Editor

Whenever we see a word end with “phobia” we know there’s trouble! Ha! Right? Not necessarily so – as it’s all relative. The word phobophobia is “fear of fear, itself.” In this section, we have our readers match the 64 phobias with the topic name. Some of the fears may have more than one phobia name.

A	acrophobia	G1	leukophobia	thinking	empty rooms
B	agyrophobia	H1	limnophobia	glass	death
C	allodoxaphobia	I1	logophobia	jealousy	waves
D	arithmophobia	J1	lygophobia	rust; poisons	writing
E	atelophobia	K1	melissophobia	thirteen	room
F	aurophobia	L1	mnemophobia	crossing streets	being alone
G	basiphobia	M1	mythophobia	clouds	shock
H	belonophobia	N1	nephophobia	sin; error	failure
I	catagelophobia	O1	nosocomephobia	hospitals	walking
J	cenophobia	P1	nyctophobia	freedom	railroads; trains
K	chrematophobia	Q1	ochophobia	stuttering	dryness
L	cyberphobia	R1	oneirophobia	forests	needles
M	cymophobia	S1	pedophobia	opinions	school
N	deipnophobia	T1	phasmophobia	wrinkles	being on stage
O	didaskaleinophobia	U1	phronemohobia	clothing	heights
P	dromophobia	V1	ponophobia	bridges	surgery
Q	dystychiphobia	W1	prosophobia	work; fatigue	heaven
R	eleutherophobia	X1	psellismophobia	memories	progress
S	eosophobia	Y1	rhytiphobia	dark/gloomy places	dreams
T	eremophobia	Z1	siderodromophobia	darkness; night	cold things
U	frigophobia	A2	spheksophobia	beautiful women	ridicule
V	gephyrophobia	B2	tachophobia	ghosts	accidents
W	graphophobia	C2	thanatophobia	wasps	dawn
X	hamartophobia	D2	tomophobia	money	speed
Y	hodophobia	E2	topophobia	color white	lakes
Z	hormephobia	F2	triskaidekaphobia	gold	computers
A1	hyalophobia	G2	uranophobia	vertigo	motion
B1	ilingophobia	H2	venustaphobia	moving vehicles	numbers
C1	iophobia	I2	vestiphobia	bees; insects	imperfection
D1	kakorraphiophobia	J2	xerophobia	children	false statements
E1	kinetophobia	K2	xylophobia	crossing streets	travel
F1	koinoniphobia	L2	zelophobia	words	dining

Most Recent Tallest Building

by Editor and Patric Hadenius

Man has always been impressed with height – especially tall buildings. Even though many people suffer from acrophobia, the thrill of looking out over a city or region from a vantage point has always intrigued mankind. At one time it was the Empire State Building in New York City. In more recent times the former World Trade Towers (heights – 417 & 415 meters) and the Sears Tower in Chicago, Illinois (built in 1974 – height 442 meters).

A new challenger is the 101-story Taipei 101 in Taipei, Taiwan – scheduled to be ready this fall (2004) – that stands 508 meters tall. A table listing some of the features of the Taipei 101 is given in the article by Patric Hadenius in the July/August 2004 issue of the MIT Technology Review magazine, pages 51-54. Patric is a senior editor at Forskning och Framsteg, a Swedish science and technology magazine, where he frequently writes about technology and language.

Features of Taipei 101

The fastest elevators in the world carry passengers from the first to the 89^th floor at speeds as great as 1,010 meters per minute (38 miles per hour). The elevator cabs are bullet shaped to make less sound, pressurized to be soft on passenger eardrums, and almost vibration free due to a damping system that senses shaking and counteracts it with small weights.

Outward-sloping windows have a seven-degree pitch above the first 25 floors, avoiding direct sunlight, allowing for energy conservation, and providing for better city views.

Eight concrete-and-steel supercolumns, measuring 2.4 by three meters at the bottom, carry the full load of the building and are designed to handle earthquake and typhoon forces. Smaller steel beams surround central stairways and elevators.

The tower contains: 198,347 square meters of office space; 77,033 square meters of retail space; and 83,000 square meters of parking – enough for as least 1,800 vehicles

Corner Cutouts on the building’s façade were shown by software to diffuse the impact of wind. During typhoon season, Taiwan is often buffeted by winds topping 160 kilometers per hour.

A 680,000-kilogram steel ball, suspended from cables at the 92^nd floor and visible from observation decks and a restaurant, stabilizes the building. When the building is pushed one way by wind, the massive ball swings in the other direction, absorbing energy and limiting building motion. It’s the largest antisway system of it kind in the world.

Emergency refuge areas every eight floors provide places to escape smoke and fire. The refuge areas are accessible via pressurized stairways. Firefighters can reach them by means of dedicated, specially reinforced elevators that avoid conflict with escapes.

Sensor and Security Infrastructure

Seismic: Thirty seismic activity sensors monitor vertical and horizontal motions on six levels of the building.

Security: A total of 520 surveillance cameras, 330 radio frequency identification card readers, 170 security intercoms, and 2,600 door monitors protect occupants and can be controlled or monitored via the Internet.

Communications: Some 22.5 kilometers of fiber-optic cable carry data at one gigabyte per second and are backed up by microwave and satellite communication systems.

¨ By introducing our young readers to information on this fascinating building, Taipei 101, will instill a desire for building architecture, different fields of engineering, computer science, physics, meteorology, emergency operations, material science, chemistry, plant engineering, and digital/RF communications to name a few.

Is Wolfram Right?

Cellular Automata and Artificial Intelligence V

Chris Cole

This is the fifth in a series of articles. The previous articles were:

Noesis 29 (August 1988): Intelligence as Self-Organized Behavior

Noesis 32 (November 1988): Universal Behavior of Cellular Automata

Noesis 66 (November 1991): On the Border Between Order and Disorder

Noesis 157 (July 2002): Is Wolfram Wrong?

In the previous article of this series, I speculated about the possibility that Stephen Wolfram could be wrong in his book A New Kind of Science. In this article I’d like to speculate instead about how he could be right.

In this series we’ve discussed Church’s Thesis, which is the idea that beyond a certain minimal level of ability, all computers are equivalent. A more powerful computer can compute nothing new, although of course things can be computed more quickly.

What is the status of Church’s Thesis? Most experts believe it is true because many apparently disparate computation models (Von Neumann’s stored program computer, Turing machine, lambda calculus, Post string processing, etc.) have been shown to be equivalent. This is taken as evidence for the Thesis. Of course, since we don’t know much about the space of all possible computation models, it is hard to estimate what this evidence is worth. This is akin to the status of mathematical conjectures before they are proved or disproved. Mathematicians have subjective feelings of likelihood about the conjectures, but these feelings may not have a basis in fact.

The heart of Wolfram’s book is a generalization of Church’s Thesis, which he calls the Principle of Computational Equivalence. The basic idea is that all processes in nature are computations. A computer, after all, operates according to the laws of physics, and the very same computations can be carried out in a wide variety of technologies. Twenty years ago I saw a company run a simulation of a plug board computer inside of a simulation of a vacuum tube computer inside of a simulation of a defunct operating system inside a modern operating system. Who knows what layers of simulation it would be running on today? You can experience this yourself by downloading simulations of old video games line Pong that run on modern PCs. Wolfram notes that if computations are independent of the underlying physics, then perhaps all physics is a form of computation.

Wolfram came to his Principle by observing large classes of cellular automata and noting that many of them seemed to behave similarly to natural systems. For example, a fairly simple two-dimensional cellular automaton can look a lot like a snowflake growing. Many people have known of these similarities, of course, but Wolfram’s insight was to make them identities. In this he takes a bold step similar to Einstein’s step in equating gravity with acceleration (or gravitational mass with inertial mass) to form general relativity.

Wolfram is saying that a cellular automaton that looks like a snowflake is a snowflake. In other words, the underlying physical processes that lead to a snowflake are performing the same computation that a cellular automaton that looks like a snowflake is performing. So if you’re only interested in, say, the distribution of sizes and shapes of snowflakes, you don’t need to study actual snowflakes. You can study cellular automata.

Naturally, there are a lot of scientists that think this is preposterous. The initial reaction is that there are a lot of cellular automata that look like snowflakes and that give different answers. How do you know which one is right? To this Wolfram would answer: of course you can always be mistaken in your choice of cellular automaton. You have to choose one that is performing the same computation as the snowflake. But how do you know? Wolfram would answer: you know because you have some insight into the physics of snowflakes. If you don’t have this insight, then cellular automata is not some magic system that will give you something for nothing. You have to start with the right assumptions. But Wolfram’s point is that, given that you know what computation is being performed, you get the very same answers from cellular automata that you do from real snowflakes.

In other words, Wolfram is asserting that there is at least one cellular automaton that is identical to a snowflake, in the sense that a snowflake and the cellular automaton are executing identical computations. This is new.

Is this a trivial point? I think not. Adherents to the prevailing scientific worldview are always somewhat suspicious of their models, because they feel that somewhere down in the bowels of the fundamental stuff of nature, the underlying rules are unknown. Wolfram is saying: “Don’t worry about it.” If it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. The details of the inner workings are irrelevant to the emergent behavior of the system. This is the key word: “emergent.” Duck-ness is an emergent property that can emerge from a wide variety of inner workings, one of which is a cellular automaton.

Turing anticipated Wolfram’s Principle in the area of artificial intelligence when he proposed his well-known Turing Test. If a system can fool people into thinking it is intelligent, then it is intelligent. This Test has been challenged by philosophers such a John Searle. Ironically, most scientists who accept the Turing Test and reject Searle’s Chinese Room argument don’t realize that they are making much the same objections when they reject Wolfram’s Principle.

For those who are not familiar with it, Searle’s Chinese Room argument is the following: Suppose a room contains a non-Chinese speaking person. A Chinese speaker inserts a question written in Chinese into an input slot, the person takes the input and looks it up in a book, and places the answer specified in the book into the output slot. If the book were sufficiently complex, this room could convince the Chinese speaker that a person who understands Chinese was in the room. Yet there is no such person. According to Searle, even though this room might pass the (simplified) Turing Test for speaking Chinese, no part of the room speaks Chinese, so the Turing Test is a bust.

The problem with Searle’s argument is the book. Forget about Chinese; imagine a book that contains the answer in English to any question I might ask it. If I ask the book “What time is it?” it would respond correctly. To do this it would have to index its answers to the time of the question. If I ask, “What is the square root of the number of letters in all of the questions I have asked so far?” To answer this correctly it would have to index its answers to all of the questions I have already asked. And so forth. I don’t see how a book could do these things, and anything that could do these things, I think could easily be said to speak English.

The canonical rejoinder to Searle these days is that speaking Chinese is an emergent property of the system comprising the person, the book, and the room. In 1980, when Searle first proposed his argument, “emergence” was not a commonly understood concept. In the two decades since this has changed. And Wolfram is following this trend in proposing his Principle.

Phobophobia - Answers

by Editor

Whenever we see a word end with “phobia” we know there’s trouble! Ha! Right? Not necessarily so – as it’s all relative. The word phobophobia is “fear of fear, itself.” In this section, we have our readers match the 64 phobias with the topic name. Some of the fears may have more than one phobia name.

A	acrophobia	G1	leukophobia	U1	thinking	J	empty rooms
B	agyrophobia	H1	limnophobia	A1	glass	C2	death
C	allodoxaphobia	I1	logophobia	L2	jealousy	M	waves
D	arithmophobia	J1	lygophobia	C1	rust; poisons	W	writing
E	atelophobia	K1	melissophobia	F2	thirteen	F1	room
F	aurophobia	L1	mnemophobia	P	crossing streets	T	being alone
G	basiphobia	M1	mythophobia	N1	clouds	Z	shock
H	belonophobia	N1	nephophobia	X	sin; error	D1	failure
I	catagelophobia	O1	nosocomephobia	O1	hospitals	G	walking
J	cenophobia	P1	nyctophobia	R	freedom	Z1	railroads; trains
K	chrematophobia	Q1	ochophobia	X1	stuttering	J2	dryness
L	cyberphobia	R1	oneirophobia	K2	forests	H	needles
M	cymophobia	S1	pedophobia	C	opinions	O	school
N	deipnophobia	T1	phasmophobia	Y1	wrinkles	E2	being on stage
O	didaskaleinophobia	U1	phronemohobia	I2	clothing	A	heights
P	dromophobia	V1	ponophobia	V	bridges	D2	surgery
Q	dystychiphobia	W1	prosophobia	V1	work; fatigue	G2	heaven
R	eleutherophobia	X1	psellismophobia	L1	memories	W1	progress
S	eosophobia	Y1	rhytiphobia	J1	dark/gloomy places	R1	dreams
T	eremophobia	Z1	siderodromophobia	P1	darkness; night	U	cold things
U	frigophobia	A2	spheksophobia	H2	beautiful women	I	ridicule
V	gephyrophobia	B2	tachophobia	T1	ghosts	Q	accidents
W	graphophobia	C2	thanatophobia	A2	wasps	S	dawn
X	hamartophobia	D2	tomophobia	K	money	B2	speed
Y	hodophobia	E2	topophobia	G1	color white	H1	lakes
Z	hormephobia	F2	triskaidekaphobia	F	gold	L	computers
A1	hyalophobia	G2	uranophobia	B1	vertigo	E1	motion
B1	ilingophobia	H2	venustaphobia	Q1	moving vehicles	D	numbers
C1	iophobia	I2	vestiphobia	K1	bees; insects	E	imperfection
D1	kakorraphiophobia	J2	xerophobia	S1	children	M1	false statements
E1	kinetophobia	K2	xylophobia	B	crossing streets	Y	travel
F1	koinoniphobia	L2	zelophobia	I1	words	N	dining

Seiffen: The Village at the Heart of Christmas

by Betsy Hills Bush

Seiffen is a little village of just 3,000 souls. It is so tiny, in fact, that it appears on only the most detailed maps of Germany. Even then it can be hard to find among the ripples that represent the steep peaks and valleys of the Erzgebirige mountains along Saxony’s border with the Czech Republic. Yet, in reality, this nearly 700-year-old settlement is truly the heart and soul of Germany’s Christmas craft industry, where all manner of wooden decorations and toys have been crafted for centuries. It is a tradition that draws on the rich local history, resources, and the singular artistic talents of the local population.

The shop windows that line Seiffen’s (pronounced zy-fen) main street are decorated for Christmas year round. And what a display they create: multi-tiered candle carousels, ornate as wedding cakes, crowded with Christmas figures; lighted candle arches; dozens of colorful nutcrackers; pipe smoking figures in various guises, and countless brightly painted toys and figurines.

For Americans, many of these objects are familiar if not readily recognized. It is as if a treasure chest in our collective subconscious has been discovered in a dusty attic and its contents spilled out for us to savor – they bring to mind the old-fashioned toys seen in century-old Christmas illustrations, or our earliest memories of holidays celebrated among elderly immigrant relatives.

For more than two hundred years, the natives of the Erzgebirge have created a distinctive style of wooden toys and decorations. Using water-powered lathes, 19th century craftsmen here developed methods of mass-producing wooden soldiers, dolls, and animals that found their way to homes all over Europe and the United States. Political isolation in the mid-20th century preserved a traditional way of life that elsewhere might have faded away. Today, the direct descendents of those early craftsmen continue to manufacture these crafts that delight and fascinate.

Settlement in the Erzgebirge began in the Middle Ages, when silver and tin ore was discovered there. (“Erzgebirge” means, literally, “Ore Mountains.”) The silver brought out of the numerous mines that dot the region was the source of Saxony’s great wealth. With this silver, the Electors of Saxony built their capitol city of Dresden, which became a center of art and culture. At their height, the mines were among the most technologically and scientifically advanced for their day.

August the Strong (1670 - 1732), the great Elector of Saxony who built so many of Dresden’s Baroque architectural masterpieces, recognized the miners’ contributions to his kingdom. Around the time of August’s reign, the miners’ distinctive dress uniforms appeared, with their cylindrical hats (usually green), black jackets with lots of brass buttons, and white pants with black knee patches. These were worn for parades for visiting royalty, among other occasions. This mining heritage is a source of tremendous pride even today, where parade associations in numerous Erzgebirge villages, each with their historically accurate uniforms, have seen a revival in the past dozen years.

The image of the miner in this uniform, holding a candle or lantern in one hand and his pickaxe in the other, is one that is found over and over in Erzgebirge folk art. Mining had its influence in other ways too. Mining was a dangerous occupation, and the “Erzgebirglers” have always had a strong religious tradition. Seiffen’s beautiful and unusual octagonal Bergkirche (Miners’ Church), built in 1776, shows they sought providential protection in their working lives.

The combination of the miners’ piety with the celebration of the Lord’s birth in a dark and snowy season, led to some of the Erzgebirge’s most beautiful traditions, chief among them the candle carousel or pyramid. These are the multi-level platforms with propeller tops that turn with the heat of candles. No one knows who first thought to place a horizontal propeller on top of a table decoration. Certainly use of lanterns in the mines meant that miners were familiar with the energy created by the flames’ heat, and certainly miners loved candlelight, especially during the winter when they saw practically no sunlight.

The earliest pyramids appeared in Erzgebirge homes around 1800, and were often used in place of a Christmas tree. Seiffen’s Erzgebirge Toy Museum displays pyramids that are eight feet tall. These were family heirlooms, passed down to and elaborated on from one generation to the next. In the book “Popular Arts and Crafts of the Erzgebirge,” by Hellmut Bilz, one observer in the 1920’s described Christmas for young couples with their first baby. The man “set to work making his first pyramid. There would be no early bedtime in the weeks leading up to the holiday. Late into the evenings one saw lighted windows in the tiny houses deep in snow. When on Christmas Eve the mother with the baby in her arms stood before the little marvel and the candlelight was reflected in both their eyes ... then was the craftsman repaid a thousand times over for all his effort and work.”

Another craft of equal importance to the Erzgebirglers, and created today with great care in workshops all over Seiffen, are the angel and miner candleholders. The miner, again in his proud dress uniform, holds candles in both hands, and is accompanied by an angel, typically in a white dress with green or red apron and high, flat wings, also holding candles in both hands. The pairing of the two goes back to the Biedermeier period of the early 1800’s, as the angel’s high empire-waist dress style shows.

It is easy to see why the angel and miner are among the most beloved Christmas traditions in Seiffen, for here is the man looking his best in his dress uniform, and his wife is an angel, bringer of light. Traditionally on Christmas Eve, families place an angel and miner in the window, one for each boy and girl in the family.

These were Christmas traditions that families would craft for themselves. They were not commercially produced until much later. By the mid-19^th century, the mines were played out, and miners were forced to look to new ways to earn a living. Fortunately, the region was blessed with other natural resources—water power and wood. Seiffen especially had water to power wood saws and lathes.

In fact, some Seiffeners were already selling wooden toys in the late 18^th century. These early entrepreneurs would take their wares in wheelbarrows or wagons to markets in Nuremburg, Leipzig, and Dresden. Seiffen woodworkers invented a means of mass-producing wooden animals, figures that could be incorporated into Noah’s Ark sets. In the 19^th century these sets were enormously popular in England and America, and became an important export item.

The invention that made this possible was called “Reifendrehen,” literally “ring turning.” The craftsman would begin with a cross section of log and shape it on his lathe until it was no more than a ring of wood. Then, using special tools, he carved out grooves in the ring that, when it was sliced cross ways, resembled an animal’s profile. The ring would then be sliced, yielding 50 or 60 little animals, all crafted in 15 or 20 minutes. Other family members would use knives to round off the animals, paint them, and give them small ears or other features. Reifendrehers were very inventive, and crafted birds, monkeys, and other assorted animals. The fanciest Noah’s Ark sets had as many as 300 pairs of animals!

Mining was not an easy life, and neither was toy making. Extended families worked in their small houses, where workshop and living room were often one and the same. Young children were sometimes pressed into service. Early 20th century social reformers were shocked by what they saw, calling the region the “Schmerz-gebirge,” “schmerz” meaning pain. Typical houses can be viewed at Seiffen’s Open Air Museum, where visitors can walk through preserved 18th and 19th century homes and watch a Reifendreher create animals on a water-powered lathe.

How did a region known for wooden toys come to be known as the Christmas capital of Germany? The crossover began in the late 19th century, when lead soldiers and porcelain dolls began to replace Erzgebirge wooden toys under Christmas trees. According to Dr. Kurt Auerbach, Director of the Erzgebirge Toy Museum, as children’s toys became unprofitable, craftsmen switched to products that would appeal to adults: collectible miniatures, souvenirs and Christmas decorations. It was at this time, around 1900, that the first Christmas pyramids were offered for sale. Other items made especially for Christmas included “Räuchermänner”, small pipe smoking figures that burn incense. Incense was always a part of the Christmas celebration, and these figures capitalized on the early 20th century craze of pipe smoking. Traditional smokers resembled the beloved familiar citizens in village life such as the postman, the peddler, and the chimney sweep.

Another Christmas favorite is the figural nutcracker in the guise of a king or military officer. The earliest nutcrackers of this sort originated in Thuringia. In 1865, Heinrich Hofffman, author of Der Struwwelpeter, wrote and illustrated the enormously popular Poor Reinhold and the Nutcracker King. (Interestingly, E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote The Nutcracker and the Mouse King in 1816, but it seems not to have the impact on Seiffen’s toy industry that Poor Reinhold did, until Tschaikovsky’s ballet premiered in the United States in 1944.) In the book, the sickly Reinhold dreams of going to a land of toys ruled over by King Nutcracker. The book spurred consumer interest in the story’s toys, all of which were commercially produced in the Erzgebirge, with the exception of the nutcracker king. Then, in 1870, toy maker Wilhelm Friedrich Fuechtner produced his first nutcrackers in his workshop on Seiffen’s outskirts. The house, still standing and still the site of the Fuechtner workshop, is known as the birthplace of the nutcracker, beloved by all who see him.

When the German Democratic Republic was founded after World War II, governmental policies helped established the Christmas crafts industry even more firmly. As Dr. Auerbach explains, the GDR instituted price controls on certain products, including goods made in the Erzgebirge. Seiffen workshops could not change their wholesale prices to reflect the fluctuating cost of materials. In addition, the GDR’s “child friendly” policies required toys to be priced very affordably.

Guenter Mueller, whose grandfather had established the family workshop in Seiffen in 1899, remembers the effect these policies had. “We made doll furniture,” he said, “very elaborate bed room sets, for example, for which we could not charge more than 7 Marks. The box alone cost 1 Mark. However,” he continues, “we added a new item, a small carousel, to our inventory, and for that we could charge 13 Marks.”

As the Mueller family went over to Christmas items (today they are one of the top manufacturers of pyramids and music boxes), so, too, did many of the small family workshops. Some of the larger workshops were nationalized, a source of deep anger throughout the era of the divided Germany. One of the factories confiscated belonged to the Otto Ulbricht family. The Ulbrichts went to West Germany and later established themselves as top nutcracker manufacturer Christian Ulbricht GmbH. The family has since reclaimed their old workshop in Seiffen.

The production of traditional German Christmas decorations began in earnest in the 1950’s and 1960’s, for the officially atheistic government discovered these exports were an important source of hard currency. Inside the GDR, Erzgebirge Christmas crafts were almost impossible to buy—not only were these meant for export to the West but, many people suspected, the government did not want items available that would encourage religious practice.

Nutcrackers especially found a market in the United States, where the Nutcracker Suite ballet has become a Christmas phenomenon of the post war era. 80 percent of all nutcrackers made in the Erzgebirge were exported to the United States.

My first visit to Seiffen was in 1995, just 6 years after unification. Many of the towns and villages we had driven through in the “new Federal States,” as the former East was euphemistically called, were either in complete disrepair or in the throes of badly needed renovation. Seiffen, however, was neat, and clean, and open for business, with stores filled with Christmas merchandise in August. Clearly, the inhabitants understood their appeal and knew what tourists wanted. A colorful poster announced the fifth annual Christmas Market, with musical events, craft demonstrations, and a miners’ parade. In other words, as soon as unification made it possible, the people of Seiffen reclaimed their heritage as Germany’s Christmas village, where they joyfully and openly celebrate their long and rich history.

Subsequent visits have seen marked progress: the house in disrepair is now the exception, rather than the rule. And the creative energy, combined with the entrepreneurial spirit that distinguished the early craftsmen of Erzgebirge, can clearly be seen in a new generation of Christmas craft artisans.

TRAVEL INFORMATION: Seiffen’s high season is Advent, and rooms should be booked a year in advance. At other times of year, the accommodations are plentiful and inexpensive. Rent a car, as there is practically no train service. Hotels and other information can be viewed online at www.seiffen.de

Betsy Hills Bush is the producer of the video, “Discover Seiffen: Germany’s Christmas Village” and President of Drosselmeier’s, Inc., a retailer of Erzgebirge Christmas crafts. www.GermanNutcrackers.com

Betsy published this exciting article in German Life magazine – issue December 2002/January 2003; pages 26-29. See http://www.germanlife.com/

Drosselmeiers – Handcrafted Treasures

from the Land of Nutcrackers

by Editor and Betsy Hills Bush (1-877-398-6887)

As an avid reader of German Life magazine, I saw the article by Betsy Bush (of Drosselmeiers) on Seiffen, Germany – the land of German nutcracker making history in the Dec’02/Jan’03 issue. I was elated to learn there was a U.S.-based company that carried current, German-made nutcrackers! I contacted Betsy via the URL (http://www.drosselmeiers.com/.htm ). In the same German Life issue was their ad for the 28-minute video on the “Discover Seiffen: Germany’s Christmas Village.” I was thrilled to receive this VHS video – it brings you deep into former East Germany, into the homes, hearts and museums of Germany’s famous nutcracker artisans. The Guinness Book of Records – largest nutcracker – is shown with Betsy standing beneath it.

Located on Saxony’s border with the Czech Republic, on the northern edge of what used to be known as Bohemia, the Erz Mountains (or Erzgebirge) were once rich in silver and tin ore. Generations of miners toiled in the mines by day and crafted wooden figures by night. Entire families would help assemble and paint these creations, which often reflected mining and village life.

When the mines closed in the mid-19^th century, the miners became full-time craftsmen, making not only Christmas decorations, but a wide range of wooden toys and miniatures. Today, many of these family workshops are in their fourth, fifth, and even sixth generation of ownership. Some families continue to produce figures and wares that are specifically theirs, refined over generations.

Others are developing new designs unique to their workshops. All continue the charming traditions of the Erz Mountains. Drosselmeier’s is proud to offer only genuine articles from the Erz Mountains, which we call the Land of the Nutcrackers. More than just decoration, these items are made to the highest standards of craftsmanship and embody the traditions of a particular place and people. They are heirlooms your family will treasure for many years to come.

“Minis” Have Mega Impact in the Brain

by California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Media Relations

PASADENA, Calif. — The brain is a maddeningly complex organ for scientists to understand. No assumption can remain unchallenged, no given taken as a given.

Take “minis” for example. That is, miniature excitatory synaptic events. The location where neurons communicate with each other is the synapse, the tiny gap between the ends of nerve fibers. That’s where one nerve cell signals another by secreting special chemicals called neurotransmitters, which jump the gap. The synapse, and its ability to strengthen and wane, is thought to be at the heart of learning and memory. Minis, mere single, tiny packets of neurotransmitters, were always thought to have no biological significance, nothing more than “noise,” or background chatter that played no role in the formation of a memory. Minis, it was thought, could be safely ignored.

Maybe not, says Mike Sutton, a postdoctoral scholar in the lab of Erin Schuman, an associate professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology, and an associate investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Sutton, Schuman, and colleagues Nicholas Wall and Girish Aakalu report that on the contrary, minis may play an important role in regulating protein synthesis in the brain. Further, their work suggests the brain is a much more sensitive organ than originally perceived, sensitive to the tiniest of chemical signals. Their report appears in the June 25^th issue of the journal Science.

Originally, Sutton et. Al. weren’t looking at minis at all, but at protein synthesis, the process through which cells assemble amino acids into proteins according to the genetic information contained within that cell’s DNA. Proteins are the body’s workhorses, and are required for the structure, function, and regulation of cells, tissues, and organs. Every protein has a unique function.

A neuron is composed of treelike branches that extend from the cell body. Numerous branches called dendrites contain numerous synapses that receive signals, while another single branch called an axon passes the signal on to another cell.

The original rationale behind the experiment was to examine how changes in synaptic activity regulate protein synthesis in a dendrite, says Sutton. His first experiment was a starting point to ask what happens when we first remove all types of activity from a cell, so he could then add it back later incrementally and observe how this affected protein synthesis in dendrites. “So we were going on the assumption that the spontaneous glutamate release—the minis—would have no impact, but we wanted to formally rule this out,” he says.

Using several different drugs, Sutton first blocked any so-called action potentials, an electrical signal in the sending cell that causes the release of the neurotransmitter glutamate. Normally, a cell receives hundreds of signals each second. When action potentials are blocked, it receives only minis that arrive at about one signal each second. Next he blocked both the action potential and the release of any minis. “To our surprise, the presence or absence of minis had a very large impact on protein synthesis in dendrites,” he says. It turned out that the minis inhibit protein synthesis, which increased when the minis were blocked. Further, says Sutton, “it appears the changes in synaptic activity that are needed to alter protein synthesis in dendrites are extremely small—a single package of glutamate is sufficient.”

Sutton notes that it is widely accepted that synaptic transmission involves the release of glutamate packets. That is, an individual packet (called a vesicle) represents the elemental unit of synaptic communication. “This is known as the ‘quantal’ nature of synaptic transmission,” he says, “and each packet is referred to as a quantum. The study demonstrates, then, the surprising point that protein synthesis in dendrites is extremely sensitive to changes in synaptic activity even when those changes represent a single neurotransmitter quantum.

“Because it’s so sensitive,” says Sutton, “there is the possibility that minis provide information about the characteristics of a given synapse (for example, is the signal big or small?), and that the postsynaptic or receiving cell might use this information to change the composition of that synapse. And it does this by changing the complement of proteins that are locally synthesized.”

The ability to rapidly make more or fewer proteins at a synaptic site allows for quick changes in synaptic strength. Ultimately, he says, this ability may underlie long-term memory storage.

“It’s amazing to us that these signals, long regarded by many as synaptic ‘noise,’ have such a dramatic impact on protein synthesis,” says Schuman. “We’re excited by the possibility that minis can change the local synaptic landscape. Figuring out the nature of the intracellular ‘sensor’ for these tiny events is now the big question.”

MEDIA CONTACT: Mark Wheeler (626) 395-8733 wheel@caltech.edu

California Institute of Technology

Honors & Awards (as of May 2003)

Caltech faculty and alumni have received wide recognition for their achievements in science and engineering.

Nobel Prize: 29 recipients, 30 prizes
Crafoord Prize: 4 recipients
National Medal of Science: 47 recipients
National Medal of Technology: 9 recipients
California Scientist of the Year: 14 recipients
Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences: 80 faculty
Member, National Academy of Sciences: 70 faculty
Member, National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine: 2 faculty
Member, National Academy of Engineering: 30 faculty

A full list of Caltech Nobel and Crafoord laureates can be found at http://www.caltech.edu/nobel-crafoord
Brief bios of Nobel Laureates are available at http://pr.caltech.edu/events/caltech_nobel/.

RUNNING WITH GENOMICS

by Rhonda Hillbery

Carlo Quiñónez visits Santa Anita Park, which is frequented by some of the same owners and trainers Equigene hopes in its proposed equine genetic-profiling service, aimed at predicting future racing champions.

Caltech News Volume 38, No. 1 – With his crooked legs, puny tail, and ornery disposition, Seabiscuit didn’t have the look of a winner. Nicknamed “the Runt” as a colt, he ran unspectacularly in most of his early races. It was only after an investor glimpsed his latent potential that the little brown horse became a Depression-era champion.

Then as now, the fabled uncertainty over just who will stand in racing’s winner’s circle both frustrates and fascinates.

But what if there were a way to make a horse race less of a shot in the dark? What if you could develop a way to accurately predict the racing potential of thoroughbreds at birth? That is precisely the idea behind Equigene, a genetic-profiling start-up for the horsey set founded by two recent Caltech biology graduates.

“Our thinking is that horse owners would be eager to invest in a technology that will help tell them how fast their horse will run,” says Carlo Quiñónez, PhD ’03. He touts Equigene as having the potential to help transform a tradition-bound sport that still picks winners by relying on old-fashioned bloodstock analysis and hunches.

Quiñónez says that Equigene’s proprietary technology is intended to identify key genes that govern performance and health in racehorses, using genetic markers to predict traits such as speed, the likelihood of soft bones or an enlarged heart, and even temperament. “Horse people would say, you can’t identify a gene for heart, for the drive to win. We say, yes you can,” says the outgoing biologist, who founded the company in 2000 with fellow alumnus Dan Meulemans, PhD ’04.

As Equigene’s president and CEO, Quiñónez is the one logging the long hours in a small office located in Altadena’s Business Technology Center. (The technology center, a project of the Los Angeles County Community Development Commission, leases offices to start-up and early stage technology companies.) Business-partner Meulemans, a full-time postdoc in the lab of Marianne Bronner-Fraser, Ruddock Professor of Biology, studies the evolutionary origins of neural-crest cells in chordate amphioxus, a marine animal that is considered humans’ closest invertebrate relative. As Equigene’s chief scientific officer, Meulemans works for the company part-time, squeezing in hours as he can.

The two Caltech grads got the idea for their start-up after racking their brains to find a novel application for the latest genomics advances. “Dan and I shared the belief that you could do something practical with genetics,” says Quiñónez, who admits that his background, while rigorous in biology and biotechnology, is spotty in horses. Mostly it consists of occasional betting at the track and a little horseback riding, despite a childhood incident in which he fell off a mount that galloped when it was supposed to trot. (He was unhurt, but says he avoided horses for a few years afterward.)

Delving more deeply into the world of horse-racing, Quiñónez and Meulemans discovered a $7 billion industry teeming with well-heeled investors, each hoping that theirs will be the next Secretariat, the famed 1973 Triple Crown winner. Seeing an untapped market, the two biologists wager that horse owners, who typically invest $100,000 in nurturing a thoroughbred from birth until its first race, might see Equigene as a safe bet, one that will lead to better breeding, training, and purchasing decisions.

“When you’re talking about this kind of money, you might want a tool to help manage the risk,” Quiñónez says. Statistically, he adds, just one racehorse out of ten earns enough to cover its expenses, and overall no more than one percent wins big.

Some of the owners and trainers Equigene hopes to interest hang out just a few miles east of Caltech, at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia. (As fans of the recent movie and book know, Seabiscuit won his final contest at Santa Anita in 1940, in a thrilling race that became one of the biggest sports stories of the century.)

However—and this is no small hurdle—before Equigene can roll out its genetic bloodstock service, it must raise $10 million in federal grants and private funding. It has already applied for a patent.

Current plans call for the 2005 launch of a DNA analysis of 20,000 genetic markers in a population of 20 thoroughbreds. The labor-intensive genetic-sequencing work itself will not be done by the biologists, but will be outsourced to overseas firms, with the proprietary results held and controlled by Equigene. Ultimately, the identified polymorphisms—or genetic differences—in the sample horses will be correlated with physical characteristics found in a larger thoroughbred population. The resulting data, says Quiñónez, should give owners a leg up in predicting whether a given horse has the potential to become a star or a dud.

To date, Equigene has received investments and grants of $100,000 from various sources, and is also seeking a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Institutes of Health to use thoroughbred horses as a model system for studying cardiovascular disease in humans. It’s not as much of a stretch as you might think, Quiñónez points out. Horses, like people, are large, heavy mammals. Their body structure and long life spans of 20 to 30 years make them good candidates for studying cardiovascular and musculoskeletal conditions that afflict humans, including low bone density, arthritis, and spinal conditions. These are maladies in which mice and other typical model systems have limited relevance. “You can’t study things like osteoporosis in mice, because they don’t live long enough to get osteoporosis,” Quiñónez says.

The initial research project proposes to identify a range of traits in Southern California thoroughbreds. Overseen by Quiñónez, the work will be conducted a few hours a week by a volunteer technician in a small lab space provided by Barbara Wold, PhD ’78, Bren Professor of Molecular Biology. As always with grant funding, promising early research results would improve the chances of landing additional support. Second-phase NIH funding would be closer to $1 million.

Equigene’s ties to Caltech reach beyond the alumni status of its key players. Quiñónez launched the company with a $10,000 purse that he won in the 2001 Caltech Business Plan Competition, an annual contest sponsored by the Institute’s entrepreneurial development class, in which students write their own business plans. Equigene used the award as seed money, filing for key patents, assembling an advisory board, and beginning the long hunt for investors.

Even at this early stage, Quiñónez can stand as a poster boy for the Institute’s growing commitment to nurturing entrepreneurship through technology transfer and business incubation. As a graduate student, he took advantage of various Caltech business classes and seminars, including the Entrepreneurial Fellows Program, which is a partnership of local academic institutions (including Caltech), the private sector, and government that has been described as part boot camp, part finishing school for technologists.

Quiñónez credits both the Institute and Pasadena Entretec as instrumental in helping to turn the two students’ idea into a business. (Pasadena Entretec is an industry association that fosters technology start-ups, many of them academic spin-offs, across Southern California.) The association referred Quiñónez to law firms for advice on incorporation and how to file for patents, and introduced him to Equigene’s first investor and outside director.

According to Stephanie Yanchinski, executive director of Entretec, which ran the 2001 business-plan competition, “Carlo’s concept was truly innovative. He had managed, even at that early stage, to make the link between the technology he was developing with horses and a much broader commercial market for human disease diagnosis.”

Well before its genetic-profiling service leaves the starting gate, the firm plans to launch its first product—the SmartSaddle—as early as this spring. In prototype, this virtual dashboard for trainers resembles a medium-sized backpack—one filled with gadgetry that includes a GPS navigation system. Worn by riders and attached by sensors to the steed, it will provide precise feedback allowing users to integrate gait, speed, and acceleration with heart rate and other physiological assessments. That’s a big advance, Quiñónez says, over the track’s current state-of-the-art device, otherwise known as the stopwatch.

Originally, the SmartSaddle was intended only for the company’s internal use. But talking to trainers convinced Quiñónez that here was a potential market that could also help his company raise much-needed capital. He expects to sell no more than five per month, and while he hasn’t determined the exact price, says it will likely be in the range of $15,000.

Asked about potential investors, Quiñónez mentions, among others, Jack Schwartz, a Beverly Hills orthotist (a specialist who makes and fits human braces and splints) and longtime racehorse enthusiast who owns shares in 10 or so thoroughbreds. “The SmartSaddle will tell us things like the pace the animal is going,” says Schwartz, who became a believer well before he even saw a prototype. “There’s nothing like this on the market today. It will allow us to see the changes more accurately, rather than just perceptionally. If we can know when a horse is at peak heart rate, if we can know its breathing capacity and how it’s doing during workouts, then we can tailor a better workout for the horse.”

Schwartz, who as a child spent race days with his dad at Santa Anita and Hollywood Park, says that the past century’s technological advances have barely touched horse racing, but that the SmartSaddle could signal the start of a major change. “We will have the knowledge to improve training methods. If we could improve a horse’s one-mile performance by one second, then it would double the value of the animal.”

Robert Hess, a trainer who works for the investor, agrees. “This is something we as individual trainers could purchase that would allow us to do our jobs better. And if we do our jobs better we can help our clients’ horses win more races. That’s what it’s all about.”

Ultimately, the SmartSaddle could help improve horse health by preventing injury, he adds. “There’s a fine line between being as fit as possible and the point where the horse can get injured.”

Everybody dreams of finding that breakthrough runaway winner, the next Funny Cide, who burst out of equine obscurity to capture the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes in 2003. Quiñónez plans to capitalize on those fantasies by shaking up the conventions of breeding and training, which are drawn from hundreds of years of experience but little science.

On a recent picture-perfect race morning, Quiñónez stands out in a business suit at Clockers’ Corner, a Santa Anita Park snack bar and hangout frequented by featherweight jockeys and men in cowboy hats. “There’s a lot of knowledge in the industry about how the genetics of horse racing works,” he muses. “But it’s all largely an art, as in not having any rigorous scientific rules governing it. You could almost call it voodoo genetics.”

Now, a skeptic (or a romantic) might ask whether an infusion of science will so level the playing field that competitors will be too much alike, sapping horse racing of its mystery and even its very appeal. Quiñónez is quick to dismiss that notion, saying the drama of the race won’t dissipate. What will change, he contends, is the likelihood that owners will know better which foals are worth a $100,000 training investment. Better decision-making tools won’t change the fact that on race day, truly anything can happen.

Schwartz agrees. “If the horse is having a bad day or the jockey is in a bad mood the horse could lose anyway. If the horse stumbles out of the gate, all your work is for naught.”

MEDIA CONTACT: Mark Wheeler (626) 395-8733 wheel@caltech.edu

NSA’s “Brain” Power

by James Bamford

http://members.tripod.com/~USS_OXFORD/author.html

James Bamford was raised in Natick, Massachusetts, and spent three years in the Navy before attending law school in Boston on the G.I Bill. After graduation, intrigued by the machinations of the Watergate scandal, he gravitated toward journalism. However, rather than pursue a newspaper career he decided instead to write a book.

That book was The Puzzle Palace: A Report on NSA, America's Most Secret Agency. Published in 1982, it was the first book ever written about the National Security Agency and it became an immediate bestseller. It is now considered a classic. Bamford was first attracted to the subject of international espionage after reading The U-2 Affair by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross and The Secret War: The Story of International Espionage Since World War II by Sanche de Gramont.

While researching The Puzzle Palace, Bamford used the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to recently declassified NSA documents. Nevertheless, the NSA--notoriously obsessed with secrecy--threatened to prosecute Bamford for a breach of national security. Bamford's research, however, was totally legal and the government eventually backed off. In fact, the government ended up using The Puzzle Palace as a textbook in its Defense Intelligence College. Bamford continues to champion congressional oversight and public scrutiny of the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Bamford spent nearly a decade as the Washington Investigative Producer for ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings where he won a number of journalism awards for his coverage national security issues. In 1997, as the media profession began turning away from international news coverage and focusing almost exclusively on Monica Lewinsky and other domestic political scandals, Bamford left ABC to work on a new full-length book about the NSA. This became Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency. Initially published in April 2001 to rave reviews, it also became a national bestseller.

Unlike before with The Puzzle Palace, this time the NSA cooperated with Bamford. Alarmed by Hollywood films like Enemy of the State that portrayed his agency as a ruthless cadre of assassins, the director of the NSA, Lt. Gen Michael V. Hayden, wanted the American public to have a more accurate picture of how the NSA functioned. In order to encourage better communication between the NSA and the press, Hayden granted Bamford unprecedented access to Crypto City (the NSA campus in Ft. Meade, MD), senior NSA officials, and thousands of NSA documents while he researched Body of Secrets. The NSA even hosted a book signing for Bamford on the grounds of Crypto City. It lasted more than four hours as hundreds of NSA employees lined up to have their copies of Body of Secrets autographed.

Bamford’s articles have appeared in dozens of publications, including cover stories for the New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine. He is based in Washington, D.C. His next project deals with the intelligence aspects of the events of September 11.

NSA’s “Brain” Power – cont’d

by James Bamford

[Editor] Certainly computers play a critical role in cracking, and developing codes. And to learn where the state-of-the-art is going, James Bamford’s National Bestselling book “Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency,” is a terrific, enlightening source. Publisher: Anchor Books – A Division of Random House, Incorporated; 2002. The NSA employs some 38,000 employees. It employs some 600 mathematicians – the largest of any in the United States, and perhaps the world. Units get unwieldy, so I add a table of terms. We then pull from pages 607-613.

Decimal Prefixes for Units
Descending Order	Ascending Order
deci Û 10 to the “-1” power	deca Û 10 to the 1^st power
centi Û 10 to the “-2” power	hecto Û 10 to the 2^nd power Û hundred
milli Û 10 to the “-3” power	kilo Û 10 to the 3^rd power Û thousand
micro Û 10 to the “-6” power	mega Û 10 to the 6^th power Û million
nano Û 10 to the “-9” power	giga Û 10 to the 9^th power Û billion
pico Û 10 to the “-12” power	tera Û 10 to the 12^th power Û trillion
femto Û 10 to the “-15” power	peta/penta Û 10 to the 15^th power Û quadrillion
atto Û 10 to the “-18” power	exa Û 10 to the 18^th power Û quintillion
zepto Û 10 to the “-21” power	zeta Û 10 to the 21^st power Û sextillion
yocto Û 10 to the “-24” power	yotta Û 10 to the 24^th power Û septillion
	not named yet Û 10 to the 27^th power Û octillion

“Inside NSA’s Supercomputer Research Center (SRC), the secret race for the fastest computer seems almost unworldly. In 1994 and 1995 NSA scientists participated in a series of meetings devoted to exploring the feasibility of a great leap forward in computing technology. The goal was to advance from billions, past trillions, to more than a quadrillion operations a second – pentaflop speed – within two decades.

Among the ideas developed by NSA for achieving speeds of over a quadrillion (10¹⁵) mathematical operations a second was the placement of processors in the middle of memory chips. Processor-in-memory chips, of PIMs, have the advantage of reducing the time it normally takes for electronic signals to travel from the processors to the separate memory chips. These PIM chips are now among the products manufactured by the agency’s Special Processing Lab.

By 2001, the SRD had long since broken the teraflop barrier and was approaching the pentaflop speeds – at which point time is measured in femtoseconds, the shortest events known to science. With such extraordinary speed, a machine would be capable of pounding a stream of intercepted, enciphered text with a quadrillion – a million billion – possible solutions in the time it takes to wink. Original estimates by scientists were that the outside world would reach that point sometime around 2010, but IBM intends to cut the wait in half with a mega-supercomputer dubbed Blue Gene.

Over five years, between 2000 and 2005, the company plans to build the fastest computer on earth – 500 times faster than anything currently in existence. ‘It will suck down every spare watt of electricity and throw off so much heat that a gas turbine the size of a jet engine is required to cool it off,’ said one report. According to the company, the computer would be about forty times more powerful than the aggregate power of the forty fastest supercomputers in the world today – or 2 million times more powerful than the fastest desktop in existence.

The ultimate goal of Blue Gene is to solve a puzzle of a different sort from those at NSA – although NSA may also secretly be a customer. Blue Gene’s singular objective is to try and model the way a human protein folds into a particular shape. Because proteins are the molecular workhorses of the human body, it is essential to discover their molecular properties. In a sense, Blue Gene is like NSA’s old RAMs, which were designed to attack one specific encryption system.

When completed, Blue Gene will consist of sixty-four computing towers standing six feet high and covering an area forty feet by forty feet. Inside will be a mind-boggling one million processors. The target speed is a pentaflop.

When NSA crosses the pentaflop threshold, if it hasn’t already, it is unlikely that the rest of the world will know. By 2005 the SRC, with years of secret, highly specialized development accumulated, will likely be working with computers operating at exaflop speeds – a quintillion operations a second – and pushing for zetaflop and even yottaflop machines, capable of a septillion (10²⁴) operations every time a second hand jumps. Beyond yottaflop, numbers have not been named. ‘It is the greatest play box in the world,’ marveled one agency veteran of the NSA’s technology capability. ‘They’ve got one of everything.’

Operating in the exaflop-and-above world will be almost unimaginable. The key will be miniaturization, an area in which NSA has been pushing the theoretical envelope. By the mid-1990s, NSA’s Special Processing Laboratory had reduced the size of a transistor so much that seventy of them would fit on the cross section of a human hair. NSA is also attempting to develop a new generation of computer chips by bombarding light-sensitive material with ions to etch out microscopic electronic circuit designs. Using ions beams instead of traditional light in the process provides the potential for building far smaller, more complex, more efficient chips.

In the late 1990’s NSA reached a breakthrough when it was able to shrink a supercomputer to the size of a home refrigerator-freezer combination. Eventually the machine was pared down to the size of a small suitcase, yet its speed was increased by 10 percent. In 1999, a joint NSA and DARPA program demonstrated that portions of a supercomputer could be engineered to fit into a cube six inches on a side – small enough to fit into a coat pocket. The circuitry was made of diamond-based multi-chip modules and cooled by aerosol spray to remove the 2,500 watts of heat from the system.

But to reach exaflop speed, computer parts – or even computers themselves – may have to be shrunk to the size of atoms, or even subatomic particles. At the SRC, scientists looking for new and faster ways to break into encryption systems have turned to quantum computing. This involves studying interactions in the microscopic world of atomic structures and looking for ways to harness individual atoms to perform a variety of different tasks, thereby speeding up computer operations to an unthinkable scale.

NSA had a strong interest in quantum computing as far back as 1994, when Peter Shor, a mathematician at Bell Laboratories, which has long had a close and secret relationship with the agency, discovered the codebreaking advantages of the new science. Since then, NSA has spent about $4 million a year to fund research at various universities, and put additional money into studies at government laboratories.

Operated at top speed, a quantum computer could be used to uncover pairs of enormously large prime numbers, which are the ‘passwords’ for many encryption systems. The largest number that ordinary supercomputers have been able to factor is about 140 digits long. But according to another Bell Labs scientist, Lov K. Grover, using quantum computing, 140-digit-long numbers could be factored a billion times faster than is currently possible. ‘On paper, at least,’ said Grover, ‘the prospects are stunning: . . . a search engine that could examine every nook and cranny of the Internet in half an hour; a brute-force decoder that could unscramble a DES [Data Encryption Standard – the encryption standard used by banks and most businesses] transmission in five minutes.’ [See URLs below on Lov K. Grover.]

[Editor: http://www.bell-labs.com/user/lkgrover/ http://www.bell-labs.com/news/2000/may/23/2.html ]

A quantum computer could also be used to speed through unfathomable numbers of intercepted communications – a ‘scan’ in NSA-speak – searching for a single keyword, a phrase, or even, with luck, a ‘bust.’ Long the secret leading to many of NSA’s past codebreaking successes, a bust is an abnormality – sometimes very subtle – in a target’s cryptographic system. For example, it may be an error in a Russian encryption program, or a faulty piece of hardware, or a sloppy transmission procedure. Once such a hairline crack is discovered, NSA codebreakers, using a massive amount of computer power in what is known as a brute force attack, can sometimes chisel away enough of the system to expose a golden vein of secret communications.

A breakthrough into quantum computing came in April 1998, when researchers at MIT, IBM, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Oxford in England announced they had succeeded in building the first working quantum computers. The processor consisted of a witches’ brew of hydrogen and chlorine atoms in chloroform. Digital switches were shrunk down to the smallest unit of information, known as a quantum bit, or qubit. Where once a traditional computer bit would have to be either, for example, 0 or 1, a qubit could be both simultaneously. Instead of just black or white, a qubit could become all the colors of the rainbow.

According to John Markoff, who has long followed the issue for the New York Times, another milestone came in July 1999. That was when researchers at Hewlett-Packard and the University of California at Los Angeles announced that they had succeeded in creating rudimentary electronic gates – one of the basic components of computing – only a single molecule thick. Four months later, scientists at Hewlett-Packard reported they crossed another key threshold by creating rows of ultramicroscopic conductive wires less than a dozen atoms across.

Translated into practical terms, a quantum computer could thus perform many calculations simultaneously, resulting in a hyper-increase in speed. Now, instead of a supercomputer attempting to open a complex cipher system – or lock – by trying a quadrillion different keys one after another, a quantum computer will be able to try all quadrillion keys simultaneously. Physicists speculated that such machines may one day prove thousands or even millions of times faster than the most powerful supercomputer available today.

The discovery was greeted with excitement by the codebreakers in Crypto City (NSA). ‘It looked for a long time like a solution without a problem,’ said NSA’s Keith Miller. At Los Alamos, where NSA is secretly funding research into the new science, quantum team leader Richard J. Hughes added: ‘This is an important step. What’s intriguing is that they’ve now demonstrated the simplest possible algorithm on a quantum computer.’

Also heavily involved in molecular-scale electronics, known as molectronics, is DARPA, long NSA’s partner in pushing computing past the threshold. Scientists working on one DARPA program recently speculated that it may soon be possible to fashion tiny switches, or transistors, from tiny clusters of molecules only a single layer deep. Such an advance, they believe, may lead to computers that would be 100 billion times as fast as today’s fastest PCs. According to James Tour, a professor of chemistry at Rice University who is working on molecular-scale research, ‘A single molecular computer could conceivably have more transistors than all of the transistors in all the computers in the world today.’

On the other side of the city, however, the codemakers welcomed the news with considerable apprehension. They were worried about the potential threat to NSA’s powerful cipher systems if a foreign nation discovered a way to harness the power and speed of quantum computing before the United States had developed defenses against it. By 1999, for example, Japan’s NEC had made considerable progress with the development of a solid-state device that could function as a qubit. ‘We have made a big step by showing the possibility of integrating quantum gates using solid-state devices,’ said NEC’s Jun’ichi Sone. ‘It takes one trillion years to factorize a two-hundred-digit number with present supercomputers,’ he said. ‘But it would take only one hour or less with a quantum computer.’

As intriguing as quantum computing is, perhaps the most interesting idea on how to reach exa-speed and beyond came out of the series of ‘great leap forward’ meetings in which the NSA took part in the mid-1990s. The computer of the future – already with a circulatory system of cool, bubbling Fluorinert, an artificial blood plasma – may be constructed partly out of mechanical parts and partly out of living parts.

‘I don’t think we can really build a machine that fills room after room after room and costs an equivalent number of dollars,’ said Seymour Cray, one of those at the meetings. ‘We have to make something roughly the size of our present machines but with a thousand times the components.’ One answer to scaling down to the nanometer, according to Cray, was to fabricate computing devices out of biological entities. At the same time, other biological processes could be used to manufacture nonbiological devices – for example, bacteria could be bioengineered to build transistors.

By 2001, researchers at MIT were actively attempting to marry the digital with the biological by altering the common E. coli bacterium to function as an electronic circuit. Such a melding would produce a computer part with the unique ability to continually reproduce itself. Through such a process, enormous numbers of nearly identical processors could be ‘grown.’ ‘We would like to make processors by the wheelbarrow-load,’ said MIT computer scientist Harold Abelson. Abelson and his colleagues are hoping to someday map circuitry onto biological material, in a process they call amorphous computing, thus turning living cells into digital logic circuits. However, since the cells could compute only while alive, millions or billions of the tiny biocomponents would have to be packed into the smallest spaces possible.

Bell Labs, part of Lucent Technologies, is also perusing the idea of a ‘living’ computer by creating molecular-size ‘motors’ out of DNA – motors so small that 30 trillion could fit into a single drop of water. According to Bell Labs physicist Bernard Yurke, it might eventually be possible to bind electronic components to DNA. Then, by linking the DNA strands together, a computer could be created with incredible speed and storage capacities.

Eventually NSA may secretly achieve the ultimate in quickness, compatibility, and efficiency – a computer with petaflop and higher speeds shrunk into a container about a liter in size, and powered by only about ten watts of power: the human brain.”

Cipher Problems from “Body of Secrets”

Copyright © 2001, Random House, Inc.

For those interested, below are solutions to the ciphers found at the beginning of each chapter of James Banford’s book Body of Secrets. They were obtained from various issues of the NSA Newsletter.

http://www.randomhouse.com/features/bamford/cipher.html

CHAPTER 1:

KVZIEBCEN CKYIECDVG DBCOOVK HN CKYCFEUFJ ECZHIKUCF MIBEVG FHOHFD NQXVWXIV NWQFWQG HG IHF FH EQF AB EWHB XI GAEEXD WJP JZPWC ABCADL WP TYA RIW 'DYPJ YPWBOYS' AXLB APYTIOWL ENTOJXGCM FVMMCD ND ENJBMD FGXMD VGXM OG BMDO RPI EKFSKRPJV QXUVAZPJ QXSHJXSAVP HJXHXVKE LXJ Z.Q. JPLXJSV

CHAPTER 2:

YNTS QHABT YBK KJVT NR ORLSJN HCTCYA HQYKJV CYOCMBYNT GXRYK SXRKVWNRNIO YJVONHB NH VH KXASH OAXBBJNHB WNHB KSXXMT, FVTS SVJYMBF CFI EI BNSYYC JTMKEID AXITUL PGGTXLW VGA OCXFT AUMCAL VAGH RXDKQPUR PXDM HQUSESTYY TBDSPKTTY YTT ERYHURBRWCVRPW RW JCBRSKJURTWESK DPSRHRTY

NOTE: Look for solution on Website (above URL)

CHAPTER 3:

JFKH WRXSHN WRLFGJN USKH FXZHQNL EFI (IFYX) OZL NJYFI, ENXTNL ISHROTNN, PWFMT WSENT UJIFHR MSERW OSJV MSPJOV MJQ IEM NGNM NZIIJ JZK KA JZII NZIIHAYZ KA JHWZDHZ GCCIWHGKWADJ HAYC. EOYHWCFO QWPSOLSL KOCSMZH RQ PUOW ZRYYMGMOF LOWEMCZ UPSO ZNLKIYA DYAAKID LNVYV; VYCABZGKID XKTTC ZTKIABI'C UYYGYIW NDYIWN

CHAPTER 4:

EZME-GYDXZBC KHZQK KEZJC KGDQBZMEQ DJ KQTQC TQQDYJCPK MCJCYTB JOHN BRNBURED, KRO DPLO RP BKIOOLOUR PU LTNRE-JENNEPU LOIKOI JNRMWVTY NMFFUFZ WKQC IAUVVUIE NTVTKETY PNRS YRVIAUFE QKSI UNKF'E YTPTFET QAUTP QRFPUNSE LTEL RP WKVVUELUQ SUEEUVT HKSWW JWBVA HGVJBADSH JWAHXRADK; TBDTCGHXBD TBGCR VA DASW

CHAPTER 5:

KPYNTKA' ABPYHTO RIL VFLTA AIUUTK MY HFAA BF UHOTKA CFKR ANLRXQ YANMC KN ANMDA YRQKFLDA FW KPR QCG DYMIAQBC GN QMIG NYCSB QFGIG'B QFKOROGYB DSQIB WJEHCFBJN YFWRJPC YFCHEZUF JP VRNF HV CUYJOFC HP OHCHBH
SLNO FENLDX LHH DLLMOA ZJCSO FL DZA LTON A.E. TLFONX

CHAPTER 6:

BJIWUT, MQLVGTAUZ OGJM HQPG DWJIGTA PUBGM QZBU OJWW UH HJXG XGYWINPIX UGXKPIY PINWGWMN KPNA OBXIM NJ XUJON UJBBXG DTUDUAGM WGNQAWJBQUZ YUCWM AOCB MUYZ TGLILWQZN LUXDJZI BVOI ZFGI UV CA RAJVUGFUGRJ IAFM BVO WVMWV'Z DFO CPZGRAZZ KTBSFD EKRTTVE CZICGZI FT JGKI KGER KZBSKR FRME DIGZ

CHAPTER 7:

CYAXJA EJLKBJ OJYAOJ TLAAXHYF TYHVXKLBXUJN LCKJA HKLEEXFO
MWCVSXRPESXA VWAS ABSPR, VSB WBBMPUE MWFV AVCO PFPI NLIHRB DVQQHNR KDGQHYGRI KVIHR LHIGQ LWGLWRJN NQ KDHEDHIJ CLDLNWDSI ADLDF BKLCLEYI UGCIPKE ISFJYBN BDF GKLAC PFKUU IFIZHIVSK SZIBC ZIQIUCIP UMOIZ VIB KIUZ'CMIUZC MERROI

CHAPTER 8:

VGWEQVSM SVWEDQSNV AUSMYD NFEDV YE BVWAVW SWVVBVMY UJSK HLK LKHUE OX LXNN IXXD JD PXOXL SJOE SHIJDX EVFCMV TSEX MI JBVTRFB FCXRIO, RILWCX-TSEOWBJ VBEVMI UMSBHWSEC HRCHWRFV KMSJ TCMURVB DMC WSFCEDEVF HMUTWFBCV YVBXFWY YOLZ GLAYVSFBY, IOWYEGETAY ESITREFAR ZERO OSLY

CHAPTER 9:

I.G. EOPVJEVRG GJRMESKRG JWJSRGE MOSRJ KDVP MKQLPSWOE YSWOE
HWAMQGW MEAG CWILCH, KXI HENA LX HLSQKEKIW SEN FW LBWC NDII TCEASVDQ WKZQDW TCPVGPSD VC WIGND ZLVDQ AQCLGV HZQPGPB BXQFDMAB' QXO KWSS OMGSR KSMED VMAX SMFQB DM VXPWEM ZASQD XB BLSYRXCM PCQQALLSYZ UOKYTAM BLSYRA CYQX PXKLYCYT

CHAPTER 10:

GTPEX UQLX KQEH TI SXPUTKG CG BEABCQS LQPBNAV KCPN TNCT DPQPX ZQPHEQ TRSEOSYQB RFQA OIXHTE RK EQCQFOBQZ XAQBOZQSEOHC ZQPHEQB FVXYKWY OGWOWMJM GJDMMXHYPJYK WE EIX DHJYKM KW FWPIDK KJGGWGXMP APNSE HUUSLAPV PSZ XHUNZCLS NH SPTCPQS RCPCVSRSPN HU PSNZHLYX QIJNQG BQVCPQS PECXD PT EXJQCG GTELQSBH QIPXE CDSQLCB MCBPTEH

CHAPTER 11:

CNAMIIN TQSWG IMYÕC CMOK GWNOK ASKMO QY BKVMB TQVEC ZMNZJK NTO EKMAJO SRB JUEJABJX BR XJBRQK YTATBMRS EDTSO MWCUPQI QXC OQWCHQUU KXZ QWHIKXZQ OKDSR ZSUKMMCKWU KDXGWX QDV QWOWXLDF FSGWE FWV WFADT OD AYWOFSG PUILSC RUXXWD UXZR UIKIED GL SILRUOE OPUGSOL UIWZKEGS

CHAPTER 12:

WZEEFCIE OCRT ASKFAI KA RAKT LAW "IAIT AL KOT CDART" UHVQ HKBJMMT GVKMLFQ BCFBKHFT CWKH GUJJEEHCWJM HCBKTT XIXAL, DXJMDD ZXGDA GUU JG DXJ UXDMZ UGTI CFWF LNJHB WFVW NHÕW THWRICWJMDH BIT UJWWJIC BFJDPTHW RXIBB DWNEDCI FCHZ CR VYHHCAD EW FNXXYACHZ NABCAW

CHAPTER 13:

TRZAV DUZR QYKZYVTQXY DQUVT SZYBQYGVT BZ SFZGK VSZYZRQVT ODPUW RDAAZGGWUBZRZDPU DI YOZGU ODPUW GSBWU RPRFKWNSD NMMNDWKWNS MOIKWRD PROVWSC WS OICRSKWSR FNSCRDD RPRFKWNSD SEYEAKO RHAZ ACR OZNHEDL, YEUU LCZFBNBLC FCABSHZEBA JBYYF TAFHOUR: HOAKR HOAKR HOPJU HFA MCYOHFAEOC TJFEB MFEUACMU

CHAPTER 14:

WDLDXTDKS'B AFSWDX GSADB GSKKYTQ YG CDKSZDC WYQD RJEPBZYPZA QWXPK QWZLX OXLZ QJB KOXWAAWZR YWNBJKJQA IBRUITRUL TEF HTHWEF BRTINRXK NTHXKF RU MRLM BRUIF OHSQSHYJB LGADM-DYJBSL ZDPSW MV DYQS DGK ZPLASLW
UABCHPC QTMQ EBPJAAW EGPXGVQQ

Stranger Abductions:

Private Investigators can Impact Predatory Kidnapping Cases

by Don C. Johnson, Editor, PI Magazine

“This is no Hollywood story. It’s about brutal abduction and murder.”

Marc Klaas stepped up to the podium, immediately grabbed our attention with his comment, took the LED projector’s remote control, and projected a PowerPoint image onto the screen. It was the first photo for his presentation on child abductions by sexual predators, to a captive audience of private investigators and personal protection specialists gathered at a conference in Las Vegas. The slide showed pictures of seven beautiful children, boys and girls. All the kids looked happy, smiling at the camera, except we knew these weren’t “happy” pictures, by the slide’s caption “SF Bay Area Missing” and because it was Marc Klaas talking. We also knew the story of his daughter, Polly.

On October 1, 1993, Polly Klaas, only twelve years old, was abducted from her Petaluma, California home by a stranger yielding a knife. He had brazenly entered the house and surprised Polly and two of her junior high girl friends who were in the midst of a slumber party. He tied and gagged Polly’s two friends, told them to count to a thousand, and left with a terrified Polly. However, as quickly as they could, the girls freed themselves and awoke Polly’s mother, who phoned 911. Although Polly’s parents were divorced at the time, Marc Klaas and his daughter were very close. He was a special part of her life.

For the next 65 days, hundreds of volunteers searched for Polly. As we know, the search did not end well. But Polly’s story does not end there. It was barely beginning. Within a year of Polly’s death, KlaasKids Foundation was born and Marc Klaas was well into his mission of protecting America’s children from strangers who kill. As he notes on the foundation’s web site (klaaskids.org), “…Polly has become my greatest teacher.”

On March 30, 2004, Marc Klass’ mission had brought him to the annual conference of the National Council of Investigation and Security Services. Many in the audience later commented that this was the largest audience for a NCISS conference presentation in recent memory. That is understandable, not only because of the individual respect that Marc Klaas has earned, but because these killers and sexual predators continue to haunt our collective consciousness, snatching children and young adults seemingly at random. What can we do about it, we wonder? When it happens, how can we help, especially those of us in the investigative profession? What can we learn from Marc Klaas and the others who have devoted countless personal time and resources to protecting us from monsters?

Marc Klaas continued: “These guys are master manipulators. They get control of the children very quickly. If there is one thing they’re good at, it’s maintaining control over 10 and 11 year old kids. Polly’s killer was a career criminal. Before he kidnapped Polly, he had been sentenced to a total of over 200 years in jail, but he always got back on the streets. He served his sentences on the installment plan. He was paroled from his second kidnapping in July 1993, and slowly slid back into his criminal ways. At his trial, we learned that at least six people had seen him in the neighborhood before Polly’s disappearance. He had stood out: he had tattoos, ‘dead’ eyes, used foul language, was hanging out and drinking in a public park. He put people off, but none of them ever called the police. He weaved a web around Polly’s house. He saw her, he stalked her. He had told previous cell mates that he would avoid AIDS when he got out by ‘getting a young one.’ Polly was his way of having safe sex.”

The majority of stranger abductions are perpetrated by sexual predators, yet stranger abductions leading to rape and murder are a small percentage of the missing persons reported to law enforcement agencies each year, a statistic of small comfort to the victims and their families.

Marc Klaas offered these figures compiled from the cases of 876,213 people listed as missing in 2000: Between 1982 and 2000, there was an increase of 468% in the number of missing persons reported to law enforcement; victims under 18 years of age were in the majority, 85%-90% of the total; of this group, it was reported that 152,265 of the victims were either “endangered” or the abductions were “involuntary.”

Each year, there are 115 child victims of the stereotypical stranger abductees who are never heard from again. These young victims can be profiled as follows:

• White (73%)
• Female (76%)
• Average age 11.4 years
• Comes from a “blue collar” or middle class family
• The family dynamic considered average or good
• Child considered a normal kid, not “at risk”

There is a ghastly murder “time frame” for these abductions: Almost 75% are murdered within the first three hours of their kidnapping, with a majority of those (44%) dying within the first hour. Law enforcement agencies around the country have learned this lesson the hard way. By failing to understand the nature and categories of abductions, law enforcement agencies often jeopardize the chance of a successful recovery of the victim.

At the time of Polly Klaas’ kidnapping, there was no Amber Alert and critical time was lost in the early hours. The initial all-points bulletin issued by law enforcement about Polly’s kidnapping stipulated that the information was not for release to the press. The Sonoma County Sheriff, aware that the media were monitoring law enforcement frequencies on scanners, did not share the APB with the county’s road deputies. Approximately two hours after Polly was kidnapped, two deputies answered a call to check out a man whose car was stuck in a ditch. They routinely ran the plates on the car, and when they discovered it was registered to the driver, with no tickets or warrants outstanding, they helped him get his car out of the ditch and saw him on his way. At the time, deputies did not run backgrounds on the subjects of routine traffic calls. If they had, they would have discovered the driver was a convicted felon and a parole violator. Polly may have been alive, tied and gagged in the nearby woods.

Initially, police told Polly’s family to take a passive stance in the investigation, to sit by the phone and wait for a phone call in case the kidnapper called about a ransom. He had told Polly’s girl friends, “…this is about the money.”

Marc Klaas told his Las Vegas audience, “This wasn’t going to be about what the cops suggested, sitting by our telephones and waiting.”

As it turns out, Polly had a lot of friends in the area. Without a national model at its disposal, the family and friends of Polly Klaas organized a search, unsurpassed in its scope at the time. Thousands of missing person flyers, which contained a description of the suspected abductor, were distributed. The TV show, America’s Most Wanted, featured the case on one of its programs the same week Polly disappeared. Hundreds of area residents helped in the campaign to find Polly.

Two months after Polly’s disappearance, her killer was arrested and later confessed. Polly’s body was found in a shallow grave near a freeway. The killer now sits on California’s death row. During his Las Vegas presentation, Marc Klaas refused to mention the killer’s name, as if naming him would give the predator some undo standing as a human being. Polly’s killer will not be named here either.

Marc Klaas has a problem with “stereotypical” stranger abductions: “I believe there are predatory and non-predatory situations. I believe more are abducted by ‘Evil Uncle Billy.’ It seems that every family has one of these lurking in the background. The stereotypical aspects are the kidnapping, rape and murder.”

Marc Klaas sees these predator-offenders as cowards: “The typical adductor is a white male, about 27 years old, unmarried, with a prior arrest history for violence in 60% of the cases. In 53% of those cases, the violence was perpetrated against children. I want to make sure what happens to these kids stops.”

Polly Klaas’ kidnapping shocked the nation in many ways, not the least was the way in which she died and the brazen nature of the abduction. Polly’s story was largely responsible for the passage of California’s “three strikes and you’re out” law. Search techniques put into place at the time of Polly’s disappearance are common practice today. Polly’s death has inspired hundreds of volunteers to assist in the search for America’s missing children, and has led to countless resources now in place to assist victims and law enforcement in these cases.

The Polly Klaas Foundation and others (see accompanying box article on resources) have had a lasting and positive effect on the efforts to recover America’s missing children and bring the abductors to justice. Volunteer searches are now common place, and the FBI and local law enforcement have better working relationships in these cases. Massive media involvement is utilized and community awareness heightened.

Marc Klaas believes private investigators can have a positive effect in abducted child cases. He speaks highly of the late Hal Lipset, a famous San Francisco PI who assisted in Polly’s case. As he told his Las Vegas audience, “The family is not in control of what we find out about the case from day to day. We need guidance in these shark infested waters, filled with false promises and tabloid exploiters.” He noted that police routinely ask parents to take a polygraph in these cases and families’ lawyers routinely advise against it. Marc Klaas said he and Polly’s mother readily took the tests, and he urges parents to ignore their lawyers and take the test. Otherwise, the press will react suspiciously and “…exploit the denial to sell papers.”

Within the first 24 hours of abduction, there are critical steps to take to ensure a safe recovery in the face of great odds:

• Contact all other law enforcement agencies in the area.
• Contact the FBI, which has teams dedicated to abduction cases.
• Notify all media.
• Contact local child find organizations.
• Contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children right away.
• Make sure someone is always by your telephone.
• Have the child’s information handy (height, weight, age, clothes, photo, etc.).

One question that needs to be asked in a neighborhood canvas during an investigation, “What did you see that was unusual?” In over two thirds of the murder victim cases documented, the killer had been seen in the area of the child’s last known location.

During his presentation to the NCISS crowd, Marc Klaas discussed the advantages of private investigators assisting the families of abductees:

• You can never have too many people looking for a child kidnapped by a predator.
• PIs are not bound by the same legal constraints as law enforcement, such as Miranda warnings, and can employ creative investigative techniques.
• PIs may bring a good contact list to the case and give the families access to unique and valuable resources.
• The investigation will be the PI’s number one priority, and the PI may be able to share information that law enforcement cannot.

Marc Klaas acknowledged that, in addition to stranger abductions of children, there are other categories of America’s missing. There are thousands more parental abductions of children, missing adults, runaway and “throwaway” kids living on the streets, and international abductions. In 1999, there were over 203,000 abductions of children by a non-custodial family member. Missing adults are often ignored by law enforcement, and runaways are exploited on the streets, easily falling prey to drugs and violence. At any one time there are about a thousand victims of international abductees, defined as children kept outside the U.S. in violation of law and court orders. Fewer than 25% of these children are ever recovered. International child abduction is a federal felony.

In the stranger abduction cases, for ever Elizabeth Smart who returns home alive, there are dozens who are never seen again or whose bodies are found in a secluded wooded site, in the grip of a dark death. There are dozens of young women like Dru Sjodin, who are violently jerked from the precious routine of daily life and sentenced to a fate too horrific to contemplate. And there is young, beautiful Polly Klaas, whose short life changed our society in profound ways, and gave her father a higher calling in life.

As Marc Klaas told us in Las Vegas, “…the only priority is recovery. It’s about bringing the child home.”

The writer sends a special thanks to Marc Klaas for providing material for this article. For speaking engagements with Marc Klaas, contact Justice for All Speakers, LLC (www.justiceforallspeakers.com).

Resources for law enforcement and the families of missing children:

KlaasKids:

The KlaasKids web site (klaaskids.org) averages over a million hits a month. The site tracks Megan’s law and the Amber alerts, and compares state laws in regards to abduction crimes. KlaasKids is the only web site offering child safety assistance in Spanish, and has a person available to go anywhere in the country to help put together a search team of volunteers, at no expense to the family of the victim. As Marc Klaas noted, “Our mission is to stop crimes against children.”

Beyond Missing:

BeyondMissing, Inc. (beyondmissing.com) is a federal funded program and web site. This resource makes available to law enforcement agencies information about missing child investigation resources, and allows parents to create a page about their missing children. The site tells parents where best to hang flyers, which, when placed in the right “kid” spots will often embarrass a runaway into returning home.

The Amber Center:

The Amber Center for Missing and Exploited Children (http://ambercenter.org/) is a clearing house of public awareness and educational resources. It offers information on school safety programs, emergency action strategies, and legislative advocacy.

The Carole Sund/Carrington Memorial Award Foundation:

Carole Sund, her daughter Juli and Juli’s friend, Silvina Pelosso, were murdered by a stranger-abductor in the spring of 1999. The reward fund (www.carolesundfoundation.com) was created by Francis and Carole Carrington, Carole Sund’s parents, to “…help families without economic means to offer rewards for information in order to help law enforcement officials locate missing loved ones.”

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children:

Perhaps the best know of the missing children organizations, NCMEC (missingkids.com) has a 20-year history of assisting families in bringing their children home and preventing violence against children.

Team HOPE:

Team HOPE was founded by NCMEC in 1998 and is comprised solely of trained volunteers who are themselves family members of a missing or recovered child. Team HOPE volunteers offer emotional support and assistance to the families during a traumatic period in their lives.

Center for Missing Adults:

The Nation’s Missing Children & Center for Missing Adults (www.nmco.org) is a private, not-for-profit, publicly supported organization which provides assistance to families and law enforcement. NMCO was the first national clearing house for missing adults. They also provide support groups for families of victims.

© 2004, PI Magazine, Inc., all rights reserved. May not be reproduced in part or in whole without permission.

Here's the article. Please acknowledge the writer and PI Magazine when you use it.

_______________________________

Don C. Johnson, CLI, CII

Editor, PI Magazine

Phone (812) 334-8857 Fax (812) 334-2274

editor@pimagazine.com www.PIMagazine.com

Review Questions on the Declaration of Independence – Answers

A1 – a, b, d

A2 – Fifty-six (see The U.S.A. Book of Lists)

A3 – Fifteen judges signed the Declaration of Independence. (Some of the Founders had two or more occupations. Data includes: 15 judges, 14 lawyers, 10 farmers, 10 merchants, 4 physicians, 2 educators, 1 author, 1 clergyman, 1 ironmaster, 1 political leader, 1 printer, 1 publisher, 1 surveyor, and 1 soldier)

A4 – Thomas Jefferson. It was edited and revised by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin

A5 – July 4, 1776

A6 –

 
“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
 

Cipher Solutions from “Body of Secrets”

Copyright © 2001, Random House, Inc.

James Bamford’s “Body of Secrets” Book Cipher Solutions Copyright © 2001, Random House, Inc.
Chapter 1	DEMOCRACY ADVOCATES TRAPPED BY ADVANCING CAMBODIAN FORCES TOYOTA WEIGHING WHETHER OR NOT TO SET UP SHOP IN RUSSIA TWO WROTE CHECKS TO DNC BUT 'KNOW NOTHING' AS CASH CONDUITS BALTIMORE CHEERS AS BAINES COMES HOME TO NEST KEY LAWMAKERS CONSIDER COMPROMISE PROPOSAL FOR D.C. REFORMS Setting: SCUTE    Key: PLASTRON    Hat: CARAPACE
Chapter 2	Look on website - http://www.randomhouse.com/features/bamford/cipher.html
Chapter 3	LAST MINUTE MIRACLE JUST ANOTHER DAY (YAWN) FOR ELWAY, DENVER CONGRESS, WHITE HOUSE FACING TOUGH ROAD TOWARD TAX CUT BABY BELLS SET TO SELL BELLCORE TO SCIENCE APPLICATIONS CORP. BELGRADE PROTESTS HEATING UP OVER NULLIFIED SERVIAN VOTE CABINET GETTING BARER; RESTOCKING FILLS CLINTON'S WEEKEND AGENDA Setting: IAMBS    Key: DACTYLS    HAT: SPONDEES
Chapter 4	HIGH-PROFILE SUITS SHINE SPOTLIGHT ON STATE ATTORNEYS GENERAL BEEL ATLANTIC, GTE COME TO AGREEMENT ON MULTI-BILLION MERGER TROUBLED RUNNING BACK PHILLIPS RELEASED FROM DOLPHINS CAMP IRAN'S DEFENSE CHIEF CONFIRMS TEST OF BALLISTIC MISSILE STARR PROBE SUBPOENAS PRESIDENT; CONCLUSION COULD BE NEAR Setting: COTTA    Key: FIRMA    Hat: INCOGNITA
Chapter 5	RANGERS' STANLEY CUP HOPES SUFFER IN LOSS TO FLYERS KITE LOVERS FLOCK TO LOCAL FESTIVAL IN THE SKY PURCHASE OF ARCO FULES AMOCO'S AMBITIOUS PLANS MILOSEVIC REMAINS RESOLUTE IN FACE OF STRIKES ON KOSOVO GORE THROWS OFF WOODEN IMAGE TO WIN OVER N.H. VOTERS Setting: HASEK    Key: KOLZIG    Hat: KHABIBULIN
Chapter 6	TAYLOR, DICKERSON HEAD FIVE PLAYERS VOTED INTO HALL OF FAME ARGENTINA DRAWING INTEREST WITH PLANS TO ADOPT DOLLAR PROPOSED LEGISLATION WOULD SHUT DOWN RECYCLING COMPANY FORD SAID TO BE NEGOTIATING DEAL FOR VOLVO'S CAR BUSINESS Setting: AMAZE    Key: STUPEFY    Hat: FLUMMOX
Chapter 7	FORMER BEATLE GEORGE HARRISON HOSPITALIZED AFTER STABBING BOILERMAKERS LOSE STEAM, LET OUTBACK BOWL SLIP AWAY ACTING RUSSIAN PRESIDENT PUTIN CITES CHECHNYA AS PRIORITY ANONYMOUS DONOR FINANCES PLASTIC SURGERY FOR LINDA TRIPP EMERGENCY CREWS RELEASED AFTER NEW YEARS'S FEARS FIZZLE Setting: GULES    Key: CHEVRON    Hat: BENDSINISTER
Chapter 8	EUROPEAN AEROSPACE GIANTS CLOSE TO MERGER AGREEMENT DICE ARE READY TO ROLL SOON IN MOTOR CITY CASINO ASTROS PLAY ON DESPITE TRYING, INJURY-PLAGUED SEASON MOLECULAR CIRCUITS HOLD PROMISE FOR ULTRAFAST COMPUTERS SURVEYS SHOW CONSUMERS, PHYSICIANS IMPATIENT WITH HMOS Setting: SHEET    Key: PAINTER    Hat: LANYARD

James Bamford’s “Body of Secrets” Book Cipher Solutions - continued Copyright © 2001, Random House, Inc.
Chapter 9	U.S. THREATENS SANCTIONS AGAINST CHINA OVER COPYRIGHT FIGHT DESPITE PAST RECORD, NFC DAYS OF DOMINANCE MAY BE OVER DELL COMPUTER SHARES CONTINUE TO SLIDE AFTER PROFIT WARNING SENATORS' NEW BILL WOULD BLOCK MORE LOANS TO MEXICO DEATH OF FRANCOIS MITTERAND PLUNGES FRANCE INTO MOURNING Setting: MITER    Key: COPING    Hat: CROSSCUT
Chapter 10	NOTRE DAME WARY OF LETDOWN IN CRUCIAL MATCHUP WITH OHIO STATE DEBATES CONTINUES OVER IMPACT OF TELEVISED PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES CLINTON PROPOSES REASSIGNMENT OF FBI AGENTS TO COMBAT TERRORISM INTEL OFFERING NEW SOFTWARE TO ENHANCE MANAGEMENT OF NETWORKS AFGHAN CAPITAL TRIES TO REGAIN NORMALCY AFTER ISLAMIC VICTORY Setting: EAGLE    Key: STAR    Hat: TENDERFOOT
Chapter 11	TOBACCO FIRMS CANÕT TAKE SMOKE BREAK IN LEGAL FIGHT HIGHER GAS PRICES NOT EXPECTED TO DETOUR VACATION PLANS PRESTO! ONE MORE LOSS AND ORLANDO MAGIC DISAPPEARS FORMER POW PETERSON NAMED NEW ENVOY TO VIETNAM FRENCH TROOPS ROUT REBELS IN CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC Setting: GOULD    Key: SCHULZ    Hat: BUSHMILLER
Chapter 12	RUSSIANS HAVE OPTION TO VOTE FOR "NONE OF THE ABOVE" DRUG RECALLS FUELING CONCERNS OVER FDA APPROVAL PROCESS IRISH, NITANNY LIONS OFF TO NIT FINAL FOUR NASA CHIEF SAYS HE'S RESPONSIBLE FOR MISSION FAILURES SMALL GEORGIA CITY IS PUTTING ENTIRE COMMUNITY ONLINE Setting: WHITE    Key: KENWORTH    Hat: PETERBILT
Chapter 13	SMOKE FROM INDONESIAN FIRES CONTINUES TO CLOUD ECONOMIES HOUSE COMMITTEE CHIEF SUSPICIOUS OF WHITE HOUSE TAPES OPPOSITION PARTIES LEADING IN ARGENTINE CONGRESS ELECTIONS VIKINGS WANT NEW STATIUM, KILLMETRODOME RENOVATION HELLO PROFITS: FIRMS FIGHT FOR CALIFORNIA PHONE CONTRACT Setting: TUDOR    Key: WINDSOR    Hat: STEWART
Chapter 14	VENEXULA'S CHAVEZ FACES FALLOUT OF DELAYED VOTE GOVERNMENT FILES FINAL PLAN FOR SPLITTING MICROSOFT DWINDLING LOS ALAMOS WILDFIRE FLARES IN HIGH WINDS CLEVELAND RIGHT-HANDER SHUEY TO HAVE HIP SURGERY CLINTON SAYS PUTIN SUMMIT COULD YIELD PROGRESS Setting: ANJOU    Key: BOSC    Hat: FORELLE

Coke Promotion Prompts Security Measures

by Ellen Simon - The Associated Press

NEW YORK - There's a new security threat at some of the nation's military bases - and it looks uncannily like a can of Coke. Specially rigged Coke cans, part of a summer promotion, contain cell phones and global positioning chips. That has officials at some installations worried the cans could be used to eavesdrop, and they are instituting protective measures.

Coca-Cola Co. says such concerns are nothing but fizz.

Mart Martin, a Coca-Cola spokesman, said no one would mistake one of the winning cans from the company's "Unexpected Summer" promotion for a regular Coke.

"The can is dramatically different looking," he said. The cans have a recessed panel on the outside and a big red button. "It's very clear that there's a cell phone device."

Winners activate it by pushing the button, which can only call Coke's prize center, he said. Data from the GPS device can only be received by Coke's prize center. Prizes include cash, a home entertainment center and an SUV.

"It cannot be an eavesdropping device," he said.

Nonetheless, military bases, including the U.S. Army Armor Center at Fort Knox, Ky., are asking soldiers to examine their Coke cans before bringing them in to classified meetings.

"We're asking people to open the cans and not bring it in if there's a GPS in it," said Master Sgt. Jerry Meredith, a Fort Knox spokesman. "It's not like we're examining cans at the store. It's a pretty commonsense thing."

Sue Murphy, a spokeswoman for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio said personal electronic devices aren't permitted in some buildings and conference rooms on base.

"We've taken measures to make sure everyone's aware of this contest and to make sure devices are cleared before they're taken in" to restricted areas, she said. \

"In the remote possibility a can were found in one of these areas, we'd make sure the can wasn't activated, try to return it to its original owner and ask that they activate it at home," she said. "It's just another measure we have to take to keep everyone out here safe and secure."

The Marine Corps said all personnel had been advised of the cans and to keep them away from secure areas.

Paul Saffo, research director at The Institute for the Future, a technology research firm, compared the concern about the Coke cans to when the Central Intelligence Agency banned Furbies, the stuffed toys that could repeat phrases.

"There's things generals should stay up late at night worrying about," he said. "A talking Coke can isn't one of them."

But Bruce Don, a senior analyst at the Rand Corp. said the military's concern is rational and appropriate.

"There's a lot of reason to worry about how that technology could be taken advantage of by a third party without Coke's knowledge," he said.

"I wouldn't worry if one was in my refrigerator, but if you had a sensitive discussion or location, it's not inconceivable the thing could be used for something it was not designed for," he said.

Martin said Thursday the world's largest soft drink maker has received phone calls inquiring about the promotion from Hill Air Force Base in Ogden, Utah, and from a military base in Anchorage, Alaska. The callers did not mention any concerns, and Coke has not been contacted by the bases in Ohio and Kentucky, Martin said.

Asked if Coke would curtail the promotional campaign because of the security issues raised, Martin said, "No. There's no reason to."

Encouraging Quotes

by Editor

(1) “You can do anything if you have enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is the yeast that makes your hopes rise to the stars. Enthusiasm is the spark in your eye, the swing in your gait, the grip in your hand, the irresistible surge of your will and energy to execute your ideas . . . Enthusiasm is at the bottom of all progress!” Henry Ford, 1863-1947, American Car Manufacturer

(2) “I could not, at any age, be content to take my place in a corner by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived. Curiosity must be kept alive. The fatal thing is rejection. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.” Eleanor Roosevelt, 1884-1962, First Lady of the United States of America, Writer and Diplomat

(3) “We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” Charles Kingsley, 1819-1875, English Writer and Clergyman

(4) “Some men see things as they are and say ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were and say ‘Why not?’” George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950, Irish Dramatist, Essayist and Critic

(5) “A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.” Walter Winchell, 1879-1972, American Journalist

(6) “Under the magnetism of friendship the modest man becomes bold; the shy, confident; the lazy, active; or the impetuous, prudent and peaceful.” William Makepeace Thackeray, 1811-1863, English Writer

(7) “Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose.” Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, born 1926, Swiss-born American Psychiatrist and Writer

(8) “Solitude is the nurse of enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is the true parent of genius.” Isaac D’Israeli, 1766-1848, English Literary Critic

(9) “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it you will land among the stars.” Lester Louis Brown, born 1928, American Journalist

(10) “Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find his right road.” Dag Hammarskjold, 1905-1961, Swedish Statesman and Secretary-General of the United Nations

(11) “A positive thinker does not refuse to recognize the negative, he refuses to dwell on it. Positive thinking is a form of thought which habitually looks for the best results from the worst conditions.” Norman Vincent Peale, 1898-1993, American Writer and Minister

(12) “A problem well stated is a problem half solved.” Charles Franklin Kettering, 1876-1958, American Engineer and Inventor

(13) “Those things that hurt, instruct.” Benjamin Franklin, 1706-1790, American Statesman and Scientist

(14) “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” Albert Einstein, 1879-1955, German-born American Physicist

(15) “Action is the antidote to despair.” Joan Baez, born 1941, American Folk Singer

(16) “Consider the postage stamp; its usefulness consists in the ability to stick to one thing till it gets there.” Josh Billings, 1818-1885, American Writer

(17) “Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882, American Essayist, Poet and Philosopher

(18) “Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are your own fears.” Rudyard Kipling, 1865-1936, English Poet and Author

(19) “I have never given very deep thought to a philosophy of life, though I have a few ideas that I think are useful to me: Do whatever comes your way as well as you can. Think as little as possible about yourself. Think as much as possible about other people. Dwell on things that are interesting. Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.” Eleanor Roosevelt, 1884-1962, First Lady of the United States of America, Writer and Diplomat

(20) “Doing nothing for others is the undoing of one’s self. We must be purposely kind and generous or we miss the best part of life’s existence. The heart that goes out of itself gets large and full of joy. We do ourselves most good by doing something for others.” Horace Mann, 1796-1859, American Educator, Writer, and Politician

(21) “I expect to pass through life but once. If, therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, for I shall not pass this way again.” William Penn, 1644-1718, English Quaker and Founder of Pennsylvania, USA

(22) “There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.” Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963, English Writer

(23) “Singleness of purpose is one of the chief essentials for success in life, no matter what may be one’s aims.” John D. Rockefeller, Jr., 1874-1960, American Oil Millionaire and Philanthropist

(24) “A man’s feeling of good-will towards others is the strongest magnet for drawing good-will towards himself.” Lord Chesterfield, 1694-1773, English Statesman

(25) “The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.” William Makepeace Thackeray, 1811-1863, British Writer

(26) “The mind is an iceberg – it floats with only one-seventh of its bulk above water.” Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939, Austrian Founder of Psychoanalysis

(27) “One man who has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven’t and don’t.” George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950, Irish Dramatist, Essayist and Critic

(28) “Books are the quietist and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.” Charles W. Eliot, 1834-1926, American Educator

(29) “All that mankind has done, thought or been is lying in magic preservation in the pages of books.” Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881, Scottish Essayist, Historian and Philosopher

(30) “I have never known any trouble that an hour’s reading would not dissipate.” Charles Louis de Montesquieu, 1689-1755, French Political Philosopher

Water, Water Everywhere, But Nary a Drop to Drink

by Don Walsh

Water and icebergs have always fascinated me! In reading technical journals, I often find very intriguing articles. I share some excerpts from an article in the April 2004 “Proceedings” by the U. S. Naval Institute, titled “Water, Water Everywhere, But Nary a Drop to Drink” by Don Walsh.

According to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, in a 2000 report entitled We the Peoples, “Global freshwater consumption rose sixfold between 1900 and 1995 – more than twice the rate of population growth. About one-third of the world’s population already lives in countries considered to be ‘water stressed’ – that is, where consumption exceeds 10% of total supply. If present trends continue, two out of every three people on Earth will live in that condition by 2025.”

Although Earth is the ‘water planet,’ little of its water is available for its six billion inhabitants. Nearly 97.5% is in oceans, and most of the 2.5% that is freshwater is in permanent ice or snow. Only 0.8% of the Earth’s water is freshwater available to humankind. Of this amount, agriculture uses 75% and industrial activities another 20%, leaving less than 5% for human consumption.

People can get by without food for more than a month and can work around energy shortages, but without water death comes in just three days. It is vital for life; so conflicts over water supplies likely will be an increasing cause of future military actions.

The Antarctic contains about 90% of Earth’s ice and 70% of its freshwater. Is it possible to tap this resource? . . . There are significant problems to be solved before icebergs can be harvested.

First is their location. As bergs calve off of the edges of the Antarctic, it would be difficult to capture them near shore because of the crowding of those waters. The best location is many miles offshore, near the edge of the iceberg zone surrounding the continent.

The second consideration is the size and shape of the berg. Some have been as large as Belgium, but these are not good candidates. Studies have shown that the most feasible candidates for towing are tabular (i.e., flat topped) and rectangular. Optimum size appears to be about 2,000 feet long and 1,400 feet wide, with a draft of 475 feet (only about one-eighth of a berg is above water).

The third step is capturing the bergs. It could be done in several ways. The most feasible is to put a large sling around the back of the berg with two towing lines to the tow vessels(s). Think of a slingshot with the ice as the projectile. . . . For these reasons, most transport schemes have proposed wrapping bergs with some sort of insulating covering.

Step four is the towing. These frozen masses are truly deep draft and react more to ocean currents than to surface winds. A berg of this size would require a tow vessel with at least 22,000 horsepower, requiring the largest oceangoing tugs in the world. . . . Even the most powerful tow vessel will not be able to move the huge mass at a speed much greater than one knot [about a mile per hour].

The final step is harvesting the water at the destination. The most common proposal is to let the berg melt naturally and draw the freshwater off the surface of the sea. A floating “diaper” curtain around the waterline of the ice would help contain the melting water. Since it is less dense than seawater, freshwater would float on top.

Operational harvesting of icebergs may be a long way off, but it is time to undertake a reasonably large-scale experiment. Australia, the world’s most arid continent, is the best destination. The ice resource is relatively nearby, the technologies are not exotic, and the operational aspects are not impossible. Whether it is cost effective today is not the question. The march of technology and operational skills often have made the formerly impossible, possible. With millions of people added to the world’s population each year, increasing demand will ensure costs for water will increase.

[from page 89; April 2004 PROCEEDINGS; www.navalinstitute.org ]

Don Walsh – author

Letter to the Editor - by Chris Harding

High-end IQ Test Discrimination

Dear Editor NOESIS:

There appears a SIMPLE (Happy?) solution to the problem of the reinforcement of the high-end discrimination of tests as measures of MENTAL LEVEL as opposed to their being simple measures of PERFORMANCE in which signal and noise become intermingled. This can be best dealt with by way of example.

Instructions:

[ 1 ] You may choose up to 3 answers from each of the 20 answers given.

[ 2 ] Your first choice should be marked 1. If you are CERTAIN of your Answer then pass on to the next Question. The number 1 should be written beneath the answer that you have circled.

[ 3 ] Your second choice must be marked 2. If you use two answers like this your second choice will load you up with a penalty of 5%, i.e., 1/20th of a point will be deducted from your score. If you are sure the Answer is one of the two you have chosen then pass on to the next Question. The number 2 should be written beneath the answer that you circled for your second choice as you did with your first choice.

[ 4 ] Your third choice must be marked 3. As with the 2nd choice your 3^rd choice will also earn you a penalty of 1/10th of a point.

[ 5 ] N.B: You can not earn more than one mark per question. If your 2^nd given answers is correct you earn only 0.95 points. If your 3^rd given answers is correct you earn only 0.85 points.

Question: A is to B as C is to?

Answer : [ h i r d s j t u l v m e w n o x g y p q ]

The subject in answering any question in our proposed test then reveals whether s/he is guessing or not. Anyone resorting to giving two or more answers [CONTRARY TO WHAT S/HE HAS BEEN LEAD TO BELIEVE] to any question then has his answer WIPED whether s/he gets it right or not. It is abundantly evident to us that the subject either knows the answer or is simply guessing for they have told us!

In a test having 60 items the top 10 items will have a probability of guessing them all right in our example above of 10^20. Being only 4 questions off the top of 4^20 still odds enough for high level discrimination beyond anything we will ever have a need for. BUT WE ALREADY KNOW WHO IS PLAYING THE GUESSING GAME. So the discrimination then approaches the absolute with a score of 60 having a 95% probability of actually being superior to a score of 59!

Best regards,

Chris Harding

5/July/2004

AUSTRALIA.