Summaries of Important Research
Edited By Eli Lehrer

BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS

 

Spam War

Evan Schwartz, “Spam Wars,” in Technology Review, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, August 2003 (technologyreview.com)

 

From advertisements for herbal “Viagra” to unsolicited letters asking recipients to claim large sums of money, unsolicited commercial e-mail, also known as spam, has become a major problem for nearly everyone with Internet access. As of the late summer of 2003, spam constituted a majority of all e-mail being sent, says technology writer Evan Schwartz.

 

While thousands of operators and shady businesses use spam as a marketing tool, just around 200 people worldwide send about 90 percent of all spam, experts agree. Already, most major Internet service providers weed out around 70 percent of spam using filters and decoy e-mail addresses to find spammers. But spammers have figured out ways around this approach.

 

Several new tools, however, promise to improve things further. Among them:

• Heuristic algorithms: Human-created statistical rules that weed out unsolicited messages.
• Collaborative filters: Software that allows a community of users to vote on what’s spam and what isn’t: When a type of message reaches a certain vote total, all similar messages are blocked.
• Bayesian filters: Computer programs that learn over time, basing their knowledge on statistical models that determine the likelihood of future events.

Internet service providers have pursued legal action against spammers (meeting with mixed success), and proposals to make e-mail easier to trace have also gained ground. In addition, proposals to tax e-mails (even one tenth of one cent per e-mail would cripple most spamers), and requiring computers to solve math problems before they send e-mails (thus overwhelming computers that are used to send out billions of e-mails) also have some supporters. But Schwartz concludes that the “war on spam won’t be won until” the most  prolific spammers “are somehow forced to change their minds” about the viability of dumping messages upon unwilling recipients.

 

NATIONAL SECURITY

 

State Department Follies

Newt Gingrich, “Rogue State Department,” in Foreign Policy, July/August 2003 (foreignpolicy.org)

 

Does the State Department really have Americans’ best interests at heart? AEI senior fellow Newt Gingrich doesn’t think so. According to Gingrich, the department has been hugely resistant to reform and, despite efforts to the contrary, makes policy mostly at the behest of career foreign service officers rather than following the directives of the President and Congress. In order to fix this, Gingrich argues that the State Department “needs to experience a culture shock, a top-to-bottom transformation that will make it a more effective communicator of U.S. values around the world.”

 

To this end, Gingrich proposes efforts to expand the Foreign Service officer ranks by about 40 percent, improve their training, and most importantly, improve the State Department’s international communication. Gingrich proposes that the State Department do more to publicize the calamitous effects of terrorism and terrorist states, that the President receive a weekly report about America’s success or failure in communicating its policy, and that State develop clear objectives and indicators showing progress toward achieving those objectives. Not changing the State Department, Gingrich concludes, will place the United States in “a dangerous and unacceptable position for the world’s leading democracy.”

 

Hold the Obituaries

Bruce Hoffman, “Al-Qaeda, Trends in Terrorism, and Future Potentialities: An Assessment,” RAND, June 2003 (rand.org)

 

Hoffman, the director of RAND’s Washington office, believes al-Qaeda is alive and well—and that it might escalate its activities now that Iraq has provided a “target-rich environment” for strikes. “Al-Qaeda’s inability to make good on any of their pre-invasion threats is a monumental setback,” Hoffman concedes. But, from Tunisia to the Philippines, the group has continued its bloody business in the past year. Hoffman believes the destruction of its Afghan bases was largely inconsequential for al-Qaeda. The bases were important in the context of the Afghan civil war, but provide no use for the group’s worldwide activities. Certainly the Afghan bases were irrelevant in carrying out the 9/11 attacks, he notes.

 

Meanwhile, while almost half of its top officers have been wiped out, the group’s “vital core leadership” remains at large--including bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri, often cited as the “brains” behind his boss. Its recruitment of rank-and-file has been as perky as ever, especially among Muslim communities in Europe. And with al-Qaeda’s decentralized nature, agile propaganda machine, and ideological inclusiveness, the group is more than the sum of its resources. He wonders, indeed, if the group is “an army or an ideology” but concludes that it’s too soon to know.

 

The occupation of Iraq does present opportunities for guerilla warfare, the kind of fighting Osama bin Laden has always extolled. In fact, one of the aims of the 9/11 attacks was to draw the U.S. into a costly ground war in Afghanistan, Hoffman writes.

 

But another spectacular attack is not immediately likely. Al Qaeda may be functional, but it is weakened, and Hoffman thinks it will continue with low-level violence “mostly against accessible, soft targets”--like last year’s bombing of a nightclub on a Saturday night in Bali. America’s adversaries measure this conflict in terms of years and even decades, not months, Hoffman writes. For them, the battle’s just begun.

--Alex Fak

 
Lessons from Iraq

Richard Perle, “Lessons of Operation Iraqi Freedom,” AEI On The Issues, August 11, 2003 (aei.org) 

 

In remarks delivered at AEI, resident fellow Richard Perle, former chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, argues that America’s quick and easy victory in Iraq offers important lessons for future conflicts.

 

First, Perle believes that success in the war relied on an “extraordinary sense of purpose, determination, and courage” on the part of the President, Vice President, and Secretary of Defense: The three garnered “huge rewards” for the risky decision to use ground forces at the outset. This surprised the Iraqi dictator and allowed the “coalition of the willing” to achieve a speedy victory.

 

America’s advanced technology also helped. Precision weapons minimized civilian casualties, new war-fighting techniques allowed coalition forces to face down a numerically superior enemy, and America’s awesome might gave Saddam’s already shaky subjects less of a reason to fight.

 

Politically, Perle notes that the war didn’t spark the pan-Arab uprisings some had predicted. “The terrorists and their friends and supporters and sponsors are on the defensive,” Perle states. America’s allies, however, showed woefully inadequate military strength, a situation Perle thinks unlikely to change soon.

 

Perle believes that Iraq is on the cusp of an extremely significant political transformation. If things work out in post-war Iraq, democracy and freedom, “by inspiring others who are now the victims of oppression,” will spread around the Arab world.  

--Anne Beaumont

OTHER COUNTRIES

 

A Wasted Talent

Mark Falcoff, “Troubles at Midpassage for Peru’s Toledo,”  Latin American

Outlook, July 2003 (aei.org)

 

When President Alejandro Toledo took office in Peru two years ago, many had high hopes for the Stanford-trained economist who became the country’s first chief executive of Peruvian-Indian ancestry. AEI scholar Mark Falcoff, however, believes these hopes have not been fulfilled: Although Peru has posted a good economic performance under his leadership, the president’s approval rating has fallen to a dismal 14 percent. Although Toledo has made only modest market oriented reforms, opponents accuse him of following a strictly “neoliberal” (free market) course in trying to remake the country.                          

 

Independent of any political party, Toledo has been forced to come to grips with the mountainous nation’s only important political party, ARPA. At the same time, leftist agitators, rabble-rousing populists, and communist guerillas menace him from all directions. Many politicians propose “soak the rich” tax policies and other leftist measures even though they have almost no chance of working. Plans to privatize money-losing state companies, particularly the electric monopoly, didn’t go forward when criticism seemed too severe. Efforts to eliminate drug cultivation have also suffered and the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas--a criminal gang that talks a communist line--have begun to make a modest comeback. Having wasted the first two years of his term, however, Falcoff says that Toledo can do little but “hope for a bit of luck on commodity prices and interest rates, combined with a bit of foreign investment.” 

 

SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT

 

The Boring Twentieth Century

Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, Lessons and Limits of Climate History: Was the 20th Century Climate Unusual?, The George C. Marshall Institute, April 2003 (marshall.org)

 

Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, two scientists affiliated with the Harvard- Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, examine the repeated claim that the earth’s climate during the twentieth century was unusual compared with other centuries in the last millennium. They point out that the temperature of the past 1,000 years is not known well enough to allow a precise comparison with previous centuries. A worldwide set of temperature measurements has only been available since 1861, and there are large gaps in coverage.

 

For earlier years, paleoclimatologists use proxy measurements from tree rings, corals, and ice cores. From these they can estimate temperatures in the local areas. But Soon and Baliunas suggest these data are far too incomplete in geographic coverage and in the temperature information they convey to allow a realistic estimate of global surface temperature.

 

The authors point out that the research featured heavily in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that suggests a sharp increase in global temperatures in the last century “depends heavily on a single set of tree growth data from the Western U.S., and the assumption that the differences in temperature between the Western U.S. and the rest of the Northern Hemisphere for the last millennium were the same as they were in the twentieth century.”  Soon and Baliunas contend that this is an unrealistic assumption, because it is well known that local climate trends are not uniform over areas as large as a hemisphere.

 

They also survey the scientific literature to compare the experiences of the twentieth-century climate with the climate as it existed in individual locations over the preceeding 900 years.  They found that it is possible to identify 50-year periods in which the locations were warmer than in the twentieth century in most of the locations for which they had reliable proxies, providing strong evidence that the twentieth century was not unusual but fell within the normal range of the last thousand years.

 

The researchers also found strong evidence to support the existence of a period of warmer temperatures worldwide--the medieval warm period, from 800 to 1,300 A.D., when Greenland was colonized and grapevines were grown in England--and also a cooler period known as the little ice age, from 1,400

to 1,900 A.D.

--Iain Murray

Taken for a Ride?

Christopher Essex and Ross McKitrick, Taken by Storm, Key Porter Books, 2002 (keyporter.com)

 

Most books skeptical of global warming aim to dispute certain findings of, say, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Christopher Essex, a mathematician, and Ross  McKitrick, an economist, instead, ask the really fundamental questions about global warming: Are the concepts worthwhile or knowable in the first place?

 

Take the global average temperature, fundamental to the question of whether the planet is warming. They point out that the concept is basically meaningless. Temperatures are like telephone numbers: If you add them up, then divide to find an average, it does not tell you anything. Moreover, the properties of climate, “most of which are physical aspects,” have “little to do with temperature, and certainly less to do with some official global temperature statistic.”

 

Perhaps the most useful idea in this book is that the public is being fed a false Doctrine of Certainty--the claim that we understand the climate, what is wrong with it, and how to fix it, and that one ought not say otherwise publicly.

 

SOCIETY

 

Pay Less to Die

David Harrington, “Breathing Life into the Funeral Market,” Regulation,

The Cato Institute, Spring 2003 (cato.org/pubs/regulation)

 

Do Americans spend too much money to bury loved ones? Kenyon College professor David Harrington thinks so: He believes that state laws requiring licensing and other regulations in the funeral market drive up the cost of burials to no good effect. In particular, he believes that cremation rates may shed some light on the effects of regulation.

 

A study Harrington conducted shows that people are more likely to choose less costly cremation over burial in states where there is less regulation of the funeral market. In 1990, consumers were 15 percent more likely to opt for cremation in relatively unregulated states than in more heavily regulated ones. This suggests that in highly regulated markets, where funeral directors enjoy less competition, “directors may induce demand by steering consumers away from cremations,” which are less expensive than tra-ditional burials.

 

The study also found that cremation rates decline in regions where there are fewer deaths, “suggesting that funeral directors react to income losses from contracting markets by persuading more consumers to choose traditional funerals over less-profitable cremations.”

 

Cremations are not the sole object of funeral directors’ scorn, however. On-line casket retailers also pose a potential threat to their profits. Where many funeral directors have actively tried to prevent customers from choosing on-line caskets (warning they are “made by prisoners”), a site called FuneralDepot.com has the potential to deliver true competition to the funeral market.

 

Funeral homes promise to accept on-line caskets in exchange for referrals from the site. The site makes shopping around more simple for the mourning consumer, as price and service information become easily accessible.

 

Harrington argues that lack of competition in the funeral market stems from government regulation that sets strict standards for facilities, training, and licensing. Yet despite these regulations, the market is beginning to force funeral homes to compete for customers.

--Courtney Richard