Word Search

This isn't a criticism of the Amber Alert system. The idea of your child going missing is a nightmare of unparalleled scope to a parent, and having a system in place to find them as soon as possible is a good thing. But the fear to be found in a society that needs such a system is unbelievably destructive, and many factors dovetail to create this fear.

Many of you won't believe this, but Western societies are safer than they ever have been in history. This is hard to believe because of a constant struggle between two human factors, the Head (rational thought) and the Gut (hard-wired survival instincts). This conflict is laid bare in a new book by Dan Gardner: RISK:The Science and Politics of Fear. Within this 300+ page book, Mr. Gardner, a journalist and historian, throws the fear that pervades our lives into sharp relief. He not only shows how we're all wired to be terrified of unrealistically small risks, he also shows that the media, our governments, and big corporations encourage these fears. Sometimes they encourage them for mercenary reasons; other times, the fear is encouraged inadvertently.

There is a constant battle being fought in our psyches between these two 800-lb. gorillas within our behaviourial matrix. Generally, we rely on Gut to guide us in making decisions, with Head stepping in to ameliorate the more extreme reactions with rational assessments. For example, if we hear an ominous sound in a dark alley, Gut sets off the alarm and tells us to leave. Head, however, also notes that there's quite a wind blowing, and the sound we heard could be easily explained by boxes and cans being knocked over. We adjust our reaction and carry on.

Sometimes though, Head isn't given enough (or any!) information to be helpful in adjusting Gut's reactions. Gardner explains that much of this comes from the advent of mass communications, which is no real surprise. A century ago, your window to the world was in fact the front window of your house. You paid attention to threats that were local. You could read the paper and note the threats that were far away, but they had little impact on your daily assessments. Fifty years ago, your window to the world was the television. With visuals and the humanizing effect of in-person interviews, distant threats became more real and pertinent to Gut. Today, what you see on television has become your local community, with all of the rapes, murders and abductions from around the world neatly organized and queued up for your consumption. When a sweet little girl 1400 km away goes missing, Gut tells you that all little children in your immediate community are at risk. The truth, of course, is quite different.

But the truth, the hard numbers that make sense to Head, are decidedly unavailable. When you watch the news, you're told truthfully that cancer rates are set to rise sharply over the next 15 to 25 years. What the newscasters (and cancer foundations) don't give you is the context, that due to dramatic improvements in health care, people are living much longer and cancer is by and large a disease of the elderly. An aging population will by definition become one where incidents of cancer will rise. Without that latter piece of information, Gut is left to shriek in fear in the corner, and money flows into the coffers of Big Pharma, sunscreen manufacturers and cancer research foundations. Funding going to research to fight cancer is certainly an excellent thing, but this example serves to show you that even noble, altruistic organizations have no problem with manipulating the public to help serve their ends.

Where were you on 9/11? Everyone remembers. I also remember that the U.S. airline industry took it in the pouch for a full year after that tragic day. Almost no one wanted to fly, because Gut said that the risk was too great, and Head had no data to mitigate that fear. Everyone decided to drive instead, and this choice caused a spike in driving deaths. In the U.S., there is a 1-in-135,000 chance of being killed in a hijacking if you fly once a month for a year -- trivial odds, especially when you consider that there is an annual 1-in-6,000 chance of being killed in a car crash. Nearly 3,000 people lost their lives on 9/11. The switch from flying-to-driving caused an additional 1,595 people to die the year following 9/11. The news media didn't notice, because it wasn't spectacular like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina. Only the loved ones of the dead paid any attention.

The "spectacular" litmus test for today's news channels is what helps drive so much of this unreasoning fear. Gut believes that what we see on the news, the spectacular tragedies of serial killings, child abductions, terrorism, ad infinitum ad nauseum is a truthful representation of our world. So Gut rightfully judges our world to be a terrifying place, where paedophiles, terrorists, murderers and cyclones lurk around every corner, to pounce on us the instant that we stop being careful. We vilify the news media for being merchants of fear, yet what the news media offers is what we want. Gut is always looking for examples of threats to help protect us, and eats up what CNN and its brethren have to offer. The more we watch, the more scared we become, and the more scared we become, the more we want to watch. In many ways, we created what the media have become today.

I picked up Gardner's book and consumed it in two sittings, then went back to read it again. His writing style is clear and his research is impeccable. The only agenda he has in this book is to educate the reader on how we are doing a fantastic job of undermining our own world by scaring ourselves and allowing ourselves to be scared. In an age where fear is the coin of the realm, learning of what we should be reasonably scared about (and it's none of the things you hear about on the news on a daily basis) is priceless. I highly recommend Gardner's book: 5/5.

By the way, in Canada, the number of children under the age of fourteen that were abducted during the years 2000 and 2001 by someone other than a parent was exactly one. That's an annual risk rate of 1 in 5.8 million. And yet you can bet junior isn't allowed to go out to the park to play hide-and-seek alone with his friends. Imagine what he's going to teach his kids.

Making better strains of rice has traditionally been accomplished through cross breeding of strains to produce hybrids with the best features. However, this is limited to crossing strains with easily observable traits.

Complex traits (such as high yield, disease resistance, or nutrient content) come from complex biochemical interactions of individual component proteins. Identifying such proteins and understanding their properties and interactions gives farmers the opportunity to affect these traits in a refined manner by choosing more subtle candidates for cross breeding.

Join Team UserFriendly.Org as we tackle this new computational challenge, finding another way to make our computer hardware useful.