Be careful what you wish for

When I was very small, my father used to sing (at my own urgently repeated request) a little one stanza song when we were playing out in the open air. I render it here with an attempt to recapture the particular cadence of his delivery.

I'm a lit-tle prair-ie flow'r
Grow-ing wilder hour by hour.
No-one tries to cultivate me
So I'm as wild as wild can be!

This memory lies dormant for weeks, months, years at a time, then springs to front of stage for no obvious particular reason to dance in my conscious mind for a day or two before returning to the wings. Inconsequential though it may be, it embodies for me something very personally precious about my father, and his relationship with me. A conversation with my brother, a couple of days ago, somehow brought it out for a spin in the light and it is sparkling still at the edge of my day to day thoughts, son on the spur of the moment I just did a search for it.

There are several video clips and MP3 files in the Google listing. I stuck to text hits, though, and the first I found was a partial reference within a longer anecdote. There was a small discrepancy (shown here in red):

I'm a little prairie flower!
Growing wilder by the hour!

Then there is this version, from Mudcat, which provides a whole song of which mine is the first stanza. Again, there are minor differences:

I'm a little prairie flower,
Growing wilder every hour;
Nobody cares to cultivate me,
I'm as wild as wild can be.

The International Lions also give a whole song but shorter than and only partially resembling as Mudcat's. Subtitling it I'm a little lion cub, add a line repetition and a wordless twirl to the end of each stanza:

I'm a little prairie flower,
Growing wilder every hour;
Nobody cares to cultivate me,
I'm as wild as wild can be.
I'm as wild as wild can be,
Tu-ra-lu-ra, Tu-ra-le.

Wikipedia mentions the song only under its entry for Lesley Sarony, without attributing it to him, although there are a number of web pages which do make this attribution.

Courtesy of Google Books I find that The Rotarian, vol.13 #3 (September 1918) , gives exactly the same version as Mudcat but the previous month's issue (vol.13 #2, August 1918) adds the last line repeat (though not the wordless twirl) of the Lion's version. Exactly forty years later (vol.93 #3, September 1958), however, a couple of years after my father was singing it to me, has it as:

I'm a little prairie flower,
Growing wilder by the hour;
No one cares to cultivate me,
I'm as wild as I can be.

At this point, I realised that precious memory, whether accurate or flawed, was beginning to blur at the edges. So, I stopped looking. There can be such a thing as too much information, and there can be occasional limits to John's breezy (KJV 8:32) assertion that “the truth shall make you free”.

Picking over half a trillion words

Following JSBlog's enthusiasm, yesterday, (“Google just blew my bibliographic socks off”) for Google's new Ngram viewer, I've been busily catching up.

First stop was the viewer itself. Then a start on downloading the raw data sets which lie behind it, for more detailed analysis than the online viewer can deliver. Finally, while the data downloaded in the background (almost two gigabytes of it just for single words in English, even in ZIP form ... nearer to ten when expanded), reading the associated Science article by Michel et al.

It's going to be a good while before anything significant comes of the downloads, but I've done a couple of test drives. They can be intuitively checked with a quick visit to the viewer.

First experiment, resulting from a recent off the cuff discussion amongst a group of students: correlating uses of the words "twat", "twit" and "twerp". It's interesting to find positive correlation between the first and last from 1935 to 1980, but negative between them and "twerp" over the same period – which then reverses so that all three positively correlate over the past thirty years.

Second: the tendency to concatenate "bigrams" into single words. This train of thought was started by Google's example comparison of "child care" with "nursery school" and "kindergarten" ... I tried it out, and then added "childcare" to see if it made a difference. As examples to cut a long story short, "child care" declines markedly as "childcare" slightly increases (a negative correlation) from 1996 to 2008; "brood mare" and "broodmare" show a similar negative correlation from 1960 to 2000 but then "brood mare" recovers and the correlation becomes positive through to the present.

Those are, of course, trivial investigations and show nothing ... I mention them only to show the sort of five finger exercises that I've been playing with since yesterday. Much more interesting is some of the investigation mentioned by the authors of the Science article.

For example:

“Suppression – of a person, or an idea – leaves quantifiable fingerprints... ... ... Such examples are found in many countries, including Russia (e.g. Trotsky), China (Tiananmen Square) and the US (the Hollywood Ten, blacklisted in 1947)...

We probed the impact of censorship on a person’s cultural influence in Nazi Germany. Led by such figures as the librarian Wolfgang Hermann, the Nazis created lists of authors and artists whose “undesirable”, “degenerate” work was banned from libraries and museums and publicly burned... We plotted median usage in German for five such lists ... ... ... The five suppressed groups exhibited a decline. This decline was modest for writers of history (9%) and literature (27%), but pronounced in politics (60%), philosophy (76%), and art (56%). The only group whose signal increased during the Third Reich was the Nazi party members [a 500% increase...].

Given such strong signals, we tested whether one could identify victims of Nazi repression de novo. We computed a “suppression index” s for each person by dividing their frequency from 1933 – 1945 by the mean frequency in 1925-1933 and in 1955-1965... In English, the distribution of suppression indices is tightly centered around unity. Fewer than 1% of individuals lie at the extremes... In German, the distribution in much wider, and skewed leftward: suppression in Nazi Germany was not the exception, but the rule... At the far left, 9.8% of individuals showed strong suppression... This population is highly enriched for documented victims of repression, such as Pablo Picasso..., the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius, and Hermann Maas... ... ... At the other extreme, 1.5% of the population exhibited a dramatic rise... This subpopulation is highly enriched for Nazis and Nazi-supporters, who benefited immensely from government propaganda...

These results provide a strategy for rapidly identifying likely victims of censorship from a large pool of possibilities, and highlights how culturomic methods might complement existing historical approaches.”

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• Jean-Baptiste Michel, et al., "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books" in Science, 2010. DOI 10.1126/science.1199644
  

Son of "I am Google..."

I've just read "What digital literacies?", on Steve Wheeler's Learning with 'e's.

One of the digital literacies which he identifies is “Reusing/repurposing content”, which (given the trains of thought which I have been pursuing yesterday and today) linked in my mind to my two "I am Google" posts. (But the connection is mine and mine alone.)

For anything put up on the web, traditional copyright concerns are purely theoretical. Any material on this blog, for instance, could be copied and "reused" or "repurposed" by anybody else ... I'd be unlikely to even know about it, never mind have any realistic chance of doing anything about it. I don't have any problem with that ... I try to be punctilious about crediting my own reuse of others' work, but recognise that if I post something then the reality is as it is ... if I don't like it, I shouldn't post digital material.

But (this, if you were beginning to wonder, is the point): in the long run, both copyright and copyright law are, pragmatically at least, going to have to change. Both were invented in days when reproducing (and reusing or repurposing) were much more physically difficult. Laws of this kind can only really be enforced while their breach involves crossing a hurdle of some kind ... and these days there are no real hurdles to cross in breach of copyright.

Intellectual property remains important, both morally and economically ... but how the future will deal with it, I'm b*##*r*d if I know!

This is not an original thought, of course. The music industry has been grappling with it for decades, and one of the possible solution sets there has been provided by bands which treat downloadable music as a disposable hook into other, more controllable and financially activities or assets. Still, the situation is in flux and nobody knows which models will turn out to be stable and sustainable in the long run.

"Learned journals" have a similar problem: how to make use of the technology as an economic way to disseminate and capitalise upon content without losing control of it? The solution there makes the best of a bad job. If I want a copy of Pfning's Ferret wangling as a metacultural pursuit, (don't waste time looking it up – I invented and its author) I can either persuade an institution to purchase access or I can go to the journal in which it was published and pay to download a PDF copy ... but, either way, there is nothing beyond my own sense of things (and, of course, the number of people I know who have the slightest interest in ferret wangling) to stop me then providing copies to all and sundry. They rely on the fact that, by providing access, they minimise the growth of bootleg supply. The timing of DVD release and television network rights for films is similar ... hold onto the original cinema version long enough to maximise return, release legally purchasable copies soon enough to minimise the economic viability of piracy, then drop the DVD price for the same reason when television right kick in.

Back in education, which is what Steve Wheeler had in mind, it seems fairly clear that institutions which accept the free flow of information and content beyond their own cell wall (that's a biological metaphor, not a criminal one) through communal web reuse and repurpose are likely to do better than those who try to lock it up in their own VLN*. Maintaining miserly control involves costs and absorbs energy which could be better deployed in more positive ways. Any perceived loss in traditional terms is balanced by gain from the same process as material from elsewhere is reused and repurposed inward. Allowing your material to be accessed from elsewhere gives an institution kudos and reputation which has economic value of its own. And there are cross fertilisation benefits on both sides which probably swamp all other considerations. The only real benefit of guarding content accrues to those providers (institutional or commercial) who can provide an active, service based product which the client finds it more beneficial to buy than to duplicate.

None of which solves my agonising over digitisation of Jay Appleton ... but does provide a welcome alternative path down which to wander!

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* VLN: Virtual Learning Environment

I am Google ... sort of (continued)

An interesting response to yesterday's "I am Google ... sort of" comes in a comment from AcerOne which has had me thinking further about the implications of copying a text for my own use. He compares my scanning of a printed text into digital form to [illegal] downloading from a file sharing site of music already purchased on physical media. I'm not sure that this is a true analogy in every way, although I do agree that the immediate (not extended) moral issue is the same.

I've just spent a while discussing this with a lawyer. Not professionally, I hasten to add: just chewing the fat with a friend who happens to be a lawyer (and not one with any specific experience of copyright law), as a way of trying out thoughts.

To some extent, what I say now in response to AcerOne is playing devil's advocate. Other parts I think I probably believe. I won't try to sort out the two at this point; I'm just having an exploratory dialogue with myself, using his words as a sounding board. In no way am I implying any judgment of AcerOne, for whom (and for whose moral sense) I have the greatest respect. What you are reading here is an internal monologue on my own outlook.

AcerOne: What difference does it make to anyone, the author included, if you also own a copy of the text in a digital format?

Well ... in practice, I think that depends upon circumstances. In the case of Appleton (the text I am currently digitising), perhaps none. If the text stays out of print, then my digitisation cannot cause any loss to Jay Appleton or his estate. Even if the text is reprinted, that remains true as long as I keep my digitised copy entirely for my own use. If, on the other hand, the text is later digitised and offered for sale in that form, I have arguably deprived the author or his estate of income from the digital copy which I might have purchased.

This becomes more acute, though not different in principle, if I digitise Spirin who is still very much in print but not available in electronic form. It becomes a very live issue if I digitise a book which is available as a purchasable electronic copy.

An analogy might be this. AcerOne is, amongst other things, a visual artist who currently has on show an exhibition of his paintings. He offers for sale both those paintings and prints of them. If I go to his show, photograph them, then make prints of the resulting photographs to hang on my wall, I very definitely feel that I have behaved shabbily. I should have bought his own prints – I have deprived him of the income which he would thus have made. If I take the same photographs and use them as illustrations in a lecture, on the other hand, I feel comfortable with that provided that I give details of source: I have not replaced his work, and may through publicising it contribute indirectly to his sales income. Whether it is legal or not is a different matter; I think it comes safely within "fair use", and my friendly lawyer (without wanting to be pinned down or quoted, of course) agrees.

AcerOne goes on...

“...i have on occasions used file-sharing websites to find music (both moral and copyright issues definitely breached). But [... ... ...] to download music i have already purchased and legitimately own; but on vinyl. [... ... ...] The thought of transferring it to my computer so that it can be played through my home system or on my iPod seems like a long and laborious task [...]So i have on occasions sourced and downloaded a digital version from file-sharing websites... Legally i have broken the law. But all i have done is chosen to take a simpler and far easier route to gaining the same outcome - a digital version of music i already own.”

There are several issues which occur to me here. The first is a technical one: the true analogy for my digitisation of a print text is, I think, not downloading a new copy^[1] but the transfer from vinyl to computer file. And that prompts me to consider the fact that I routinely buy a CD which I then do not play: I immediately "rip" it to digital form and play it from an MP3 player because most of my musical listening is done on the move. I have done the same with such vinyl or tape as I cannot replace with CD. So, I realise, my concern of digitisation of a book is somewhat hypocritical when I have done the same with in excess of two thousand albums. (Ripping is, of course, so endemic and so universally enabled by mainstream software providers as to be an unstoppable fait accompli . That's not, on the other hand, the same thing as being morally right. Nevertheless, I personally feel morally comfortable with both my and AcerOne's digital duplication of our music sources. There are other philosophically problematic issues around use of a file sharing site ... but I'll not go there as I've already bitten off more that I can chew with this topic.)

The second issue is also technical, but in an important legal sense. AcerOne does not, in fact, own the music on his vinyl; nor I the music on my CDs. We own only the physical media upon which it is recorded, and have a licence to play the music (only for our own enjoyment at that; playing it for other people is, strictly speaking, breach of the licence). Similarly, when I buy a copy of Appleton's book I do not buy the content: only the physical paper and board construct within which my single copy is encoded. Calling again on the analogy of AcerOne's paintings: if I purchase one of his prints, I do not thereby own the image itself and have no right to reproduce it – the image remains the property of AcerOne.

On the other hand ... the legal copyright breach seems to lie not in reproduction but in "publishing". Going back to the technical breach of license when I play my CD to others (previous para), the issue is that legally I thereby "publish" the work to others. Software licences work on much the same basis, but make allowance for back up; my word processor, for instance, comes with a specific proviso that it can be copied for security back up purposes, and can be installed on more than one computer provided that it is only ever in use on one of them at the same time. By analogy, it would seem that photocopying^[2] or digitising a book stays within the fence so long as nobody else then sees the copy. But then again ... flipping open the nearest book to hand at this moment, I find inside the following unambiguous words: “no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher" ... which seems pretty unambiguous.

I could go on ... but enough, already. My feeling remains that I am staying within "fair use" so far, but it's not a subject which I can afford to regard as cut and dried. For my own peace of mind it needs revisiting at intervals, and in particular every time I consider digitising a new text.

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1. In my impecunious teens and student years, I regularly did deals with friends whereby one of us bought a vinyl album and the others made a tape cassette copy. Later, when my wife and I divorced amicably in our thirties, we solved the music problem by copying everything to tape cassette so that we each kept the whole collection. Both of these, it seems to me, are the true equivalents of file sharing. I wouldn't do it now, but it would be hypocritical of me to righteously condemn young people now who do it in the new ways which new technology makes available to them.

2. I do, in fact, have some photocopied texts. They were made in the days before digitisation. They were not made by me, but by the owners of print copies, as helpful gestures when I couldn't obtain a physical print copy of something to which I needed long term access. Who actually made them, however, is irrelevant here; my acceptance and retention of them is another blurring hypocrisy in the debate which I am having with myself over selfdigitisation.

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I am Google ... sort of

I am preparing a series of lectures on landscape imagery for next year, and find myself making frequent return to several books. Appleton's Experience of Landscape, for instance. Nash's Wilderness and the American mind. Spirin's The language of landscape.

As I go, I extract fragments for reference and/or quotation. Time was, I'd have hand written these on index cards; now I stick the book into a scanner and let OCR take the strain.

I'm also, of course, referring at the same time to numerous electronic sources – which is so much more convenient since, quite apart from instant searching, I just have to highlight, copy and paste ... or even "save page as" ... or, better still, just store a link to the page. I have, in my notes for this lecture, for example, links to recent posts by Ray Girvan (Old Park) and Julie Heyward (Instrumentality).

If only the printed texts were as instantly accessible in their entirety as the electronic sources.

Sometimes, of course, a printed text is also available in digital form. It's well worth my well, for something often used, to buy both forms: paper as definitive version, digital for flexible reference and quoting. But that's not possible for the above three examples.

As I scanned a paragraph today, it dawned on me that I am gradually and unintentionally compiling a fragmentary but increasingly complete digital copy of a book in this way.

How do I feel about this?

I take copyright very seriously. I would not knowingly do anything which in might in any perceivable way tend to undermine the author's income from the text. But it seems to me that as long as I keep the material solely for my on use, and no purchasable electronic version exists, I am not going beyond my own moral view of "fair use".

There is one difference between Appleton on one hand, Nash and Spirin on the other: Appleton is out of print. That is probably not a significant difference for any practical purpose ... but it feels different as a starting point. So, as of today, I have started deliberately scanning the whole chapter containing a section I need from Appleton, rather than just the section itself. When I have the whole lot, I'll combine it into one PDF file and bingo ... I will be my own miniature Google Books.

When I've done that, I'll consider what to do about the others.

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• Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape. 1986, Hull: Hull University Press. 0859584615. [Originally 1975, London: Wiley. 0471032565.] [Most recent edition 1996, Chichester: Wiley. 0471962333 (hbk) or 047196235X (pbk).] [Now out of print.]
• Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American mind. 1982, New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press. 0300029101 (pbk.). [originally 1967]
• Anne Whiston Spirin, The language of landscape. 1998, New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press. 0300077459, 9780300082944 (pbk).

Burrowing into the bran tub

Intelligence organs of a fairly small but technologically proficient country managed to clone the email and document bases of a fairly large but unsuspecting company with an active and diverse research operation. Not the research results bases themselves; just the email and document archives. The immediate benefits of the theft were obvious, mundane, and irrelevant here. More interesting from a scientific computing viewpoint (if no more morally or legally defensible) were the spinoffs from applying statistical information mining techniques to the combined database contents.

As a direct result of the operation, other companies, seen as friendly to the small country's interests, received repackaged and anonymised material suggesting productive new lines of enquiry. Patents resulting from these have already been filed; others are in the pipeline. The large company which was the target of the operation, significantly, remains unaware of the opportunities which exist within components of its own activities which have never been brought together.

The story illustrates a truth: that much knowledge is locked away in information stores assembled for one set of reasons and never reexamined in other ways.

Less melodramatically, and less dubiously, information openly published on the internet forms a huge field within which to prospect potential information seams - "The low user entry barrier of the Web has resulted in massive amounts of unstructured and weakly structured data referring to objects, concepts, user interests and communities", to quote the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at Galway. As SAS's David Smith points out, tweets and blog entries can contain pointers to early identification of potentially vital phenomena. This is an aspect of what is known in the industry as pharmacovigilance, which "can be defined as a set of practices aiming at the detection, understanding and assessment of risks related to the use of drugs in a population, and the prevention of consequential adverse effects [or] in a narrower sense ... postmarket surveillance"^[1]. [More...]

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1. Langlitz, N., "Pharmacovigilance and Post-Black Market Surveillance" in Social Studies of Science, 2009. 39(3): p. 395.

Pilate asked: What is truth?

Yesterday my brother sent me, without comment, a Discovery Channel News link referencing the speculatively constructed and partially animated version of Tiger Woods' automotive mishap. This morning, I found that Thinking through my fingers takes this same video as the starting point for a consideration of where our opportunities for accessing “true” news are heading. (Looking back, I see that TTMF referenced the same video a week earlier; but I didn't pick up on it.)

On the face of it, a very obviously constructed fiction (and one in which Woods, and his wife, and even the physics of real life movement, are scarcely recognisable) should be of little concern to anyone except the Woods family and their lawyers. It exists in the same intellectual space as Ice age 3: the dawn of the dinosaurs about which I grumbled recently. But that is disingenuous; the reality is that very few news consumers give much critical consideration to their sources, and very many make only blurred distinctions between fiction and nonfiction.

On the other hand, to start crying that the dividing line is being eroded between imaginative interpretation and objective reportage is equally disingenuous. I doubt that there has ever been such a distinction; certainly I cannot remember a time when it existed outside the platonic ideal in the minds of its champions (of which I, for the record, am one – if not a very active or heroic one). "Briefing against" is at east as old as China's "warring states period (476-221 BCE); eighteenth and nineteenth century press in Europe and the Americas offered political commentary skewed and invented to a degree unrivalled today; and Ray Girvan recently offered, over at JSBlog, an example of a 19th century "tabloid smear" against ordinary people. Truth has always been an elusive, provisional, partial thing, and finding even a worthwhile approximation to it has always been a process of determined exploration and detective work.

That last sentence is where TTMF starts: that "truth" (of even the blurred and provisional variety) can only be found (even by those actively seeking it) if somebody is somewhere telling it. Or, more accurately, if enough sources genuinely trying to tell it can be found and compared.

What concerns me even more is that as the volume of information sources multiplies, the fragmentarily "true" is ever harder to find. Whether or not disinformation is proliferating faster than information is a moot point about which we can all argue forever on the head of a pin, but is irrelevant. As the haystack grows exponentially, the pins will become harder to find even if they proportionally keep pace.

I don't suggest that anything be done about this, even if that were possible (which it is not): I would deplore central censorship of dis/information flow even more. But I do dispute the widespread idea that ever greater flow of information form every greater numbers of sources is synonymous with "more truth". The vital importance of critical thinking by consumers about sources and their content increases as a direct function of information volume.

I realise, belatedly, that this is little more than a rehash of my Whither democracy post, almost two years ago ... ah, well; “I grow old ... I grow old”* ... at least I stopped short of requoting Lem!

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• T S Eliot, "The love song of J Alfred Prufrock", line 120, in Prufrock and other observations. 1917, London: The Egoist Ltd.

David Attenborough, where are you?

Note: this post contains unjustified criticism on the basis of incorrect assumption from the title. See addendum* below.

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Here we go ... another occasion when I justify the title of this blog.

I have an inner conflict over historical accuracy in films (other media too, but most strongly in films and television; so "films" is my shorthand for the lot).
On the one hand, I robustly defend the thesis that fiction has no obligation to fact – as Ralph Harper puts it, “Fiction and romance do not need facts to tell the truth...” Its only obligation is to the reader: violate too many expectations and the contract to suspend disbelief will be ruptured, but short of that anything goes. Without that acceptance, we would have no fiction at all.
On the other hand, I am alarmed by how common it is to have a view of the world which results from the failure to separate fiction from fact.

I suppose, if pushed to it, I would say that I am happy with any amount of invention if it supports the fiction but that I see no reason to mess with accuracy where there is no reason to do so.

Why am I moaning on about this? Because I am surrounded at the moment by advertisements for the DVD release of Ice age 3: dawn of the dinosaurs.

I watched and immensely enjoyed the first in this franchise; I watched and moderately enjoyed the second. The anachronisms and other liberties (including the extinction of the dodo several millennia early) didn't bother me in the slightest; hey, it's a fiction. I haven't seen the third, but have no doubt that I would enjoy that too ... yet that title gnaws at me. For a bunch of mammals to witness the dawn of the dinosaurs (who actually predeceased them by tens of millions of years) is ... just ... one violated expectation too far, for this viewer at least.

Why undermine children's learning, and the efforts of overworked primary school teachers, for no reason?

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*Addendum (17 July 2013): having been reminded of this rant by Jazz of PsychoBabble, I must come back and put the record straight.

Since writing the above, I have seen the film ... and it does not suggest that the dinosaurs post dated mammals at all. This is fiction in the mould of Jules Verne's Voyage au centre de la Terre, (or Edgar Rice Burroughs' The land that time forgot): our assorted anthropomorphic friends Diego, Manny and Sid discover a preserved subterranean world in which dinosaurs have escaped distinction.

So ... I unreservedly apologise to the film's creators for my undeserved criticism.

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• Carlos Saldanha, Ice age 3: dawn of the dinosaurs. 2009: 20th Century Fox
• Ralph Harper, The world of the thriller. Cleveland, Ohio, 1969: Press of Case Western Reserve University. 0829501487.

Soul searching

I have a moral quandary when it comes to science and the place of animal experiments within it.

I am, unequivocally, of the philosophical opinion that experiments on living animals (or the killing of animals for subsequent experiment) are morally indefensible in principle. Observation, yes; intervention, no.

(I do not, by the way, have the same objection to killing animals for food. I don't choose to do it myself, but that is because I have the luxury of living in a society where the choice exists.)

On the other hand, I am a scientist fascinated by the vast body of knowledge acquired, very often ... by experiment on animals.

I am pragmatic enough to say that I can do nothing about past experimentation, and that no purpose is served by refusing to use the knowledge thus gained. But ongoing use is a different matter.

I have just learned, and made use of for good purposes, information derived from long distance migratory birds with tracking devices surgically implanted within their bodies, and from birds deliberately flown for hours, to exhaustion, within a wind tunnel. The first I find repugnant; the second unforgivable. But what I think will not change the fact that these methods are being used by a majority who feel differently. As a scientist, I cannot isolate myself from the knowledge of where my information and understanding come from.

Now ... I also hold it to be true that there is no conceptual different between a human being and a bird or a dog. Of course, faced with the choice, if I find a human being under attack from a bird or a dog and know nothing of the context, I will help the human being – but that is instinctive social species loyalty, not philosophical acceptance of conceptual difference. I would not force a human being to run in a wind tunnel until s/he dropped, so I would not do it to a bird.

So (and I know the anger that this will stir up) ... if I remain a scientist despite knowing that the raw material is being obtained by methods which I consider morally unacceptable, on creatures which I consider conceptually no different from a human being, how do I (in my own moral perception, not in absolute fact) differ from a Nazi conducting experiments on human beings in a tank of freezing water? In fact, am a I perhaps even worse – because I cannot claim, as that Nazi did, that in her/his perception there was a conceptual difference between experimenter and subject?

Socially, that's not an acceptable question to ask post 1945. But it is, I think, an important one.

Seek and ye shall find

I've been playing with Wolfram's Alpha computable data search (or "computational knowledge") engine.

It's an educational gift. Try typing in:

• malaria Tanzania

...or...

• HIV/AIDS Botswana