Misconduct in Science and Research

Recent news about procedural misconduct by scientists is easy to find.  However, searches of JSTOR uncovered zero articles about misconduct in scientific research from 1900 to 1950.  From 1950 to the present, 40 articles addressed the related problems.  An obvious upswing occurred after 1987. Gale CENGAGE yielded 56 titles, many of those reports of headline news about Jan Hendrik Schön and other immediacies.  On the other hand, if you search via Google or Bing for "research misconduct" or "misconduct in science" etc., there is no shortage of popular news stories and formal reports.  This summary from The New York Times is from 1991.  In fact, the NYT Articles database offers embarrassingly many such stories (link here).

Police chiefs know the easy generalization that 80% of your problems come from 20% of your addresses regardless of the neighborhood.  Crime is a universal problem. Nonetheless, variations in crime statistics show that predation and fraud are more common in some cities and states and nations than in others.  Harms flourish where they are wanted. 

So, while fraud in science research is known across all studies, it is now most common in health and medicine.  Tremendous funding is one factor.  Willy Sutton robbed banks because that's where the money was.  

And to be fair, living things are more complex than rocks and stars, so experimental results can be harder to duplicate. Not all researchers have the same finesse; and it is easy to believe that you have it, but your critics do not.

These same factors cause fraud in forensic science.  Joyce Gilchrist, Fred Zain, and Pamela Fish made headlines when their counterfeit lab reports were exposed.  [Annie Dookhan is added to the list.] The problems with fingerprinting go deeper (NecessaryFacts here).  As with other instances, the causal factors may be the pressure for results, the huge and easy funding for such work, and a desire to believe your own results, coupled with a faith in altruistic ends that justify any means.  But the rational choice theory of crime stands against such excuses and denials. 

According to the theory of crime based on objective psycho-epistemology, criminals act from the lack of thought.  When pressed later, words come out of their mouths, often generated by an intuitively correct feeling for what the interrogator wants to hear.  They don't mean it. 

The Office of Research Integrity of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports on its findings.  Defrauding the federal government is a federal crime, no surprise in that.  Every university has some similar "institutional review board" for human and life science experiments.  No similar agencies assure integrity in the physical sciences.  None exists for criminology. 

New age and post-modernist professors teach future police officers that there is no such thing as right and wrong.  According to Stuart Henry, Bruce A. Arrigo, Christopher Williams, and Mark M. Lanier, taking their cues from Paul Feyerabend and Jacques Lacan, the Enlightenment was a Euro-centric, phallo-centric conquest.  They claim that the senses are invalid, that logic has no validity.  Such assertions are the deepest expression of academic fraud. 

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Four Books about Bad Science
Criminalistics: Science or Folkway?
Junk Criminology as Pseudo-Science
Science Fair Science Fraud
David Harriman's Logical Leap
Great Scientific Experiments
Fantastic Voyages: Teaching Science with Science Fiction

What is Literacy?

We can feel good about the fact that literacy in the United States is 99% -- until we realize that this puts the USA tied for 21st with 24 other nations, all behind Tonga (99.2), Kazakhstan (99.6), Slovenia (99.7), Estonia (99.8) and Georgia (100%).  (Data is from  this Wikipedia article which cites this United Nations Development Programme report.)  According to the CIA World Factbook table on Literacy there is no common definition, so the CIA accepts prima facie the numbers provided by local governments.  Afghanistan counts those over age 15, which is a common threshhold.  Albania counts people over nine years of age.  Averages also must be parsed out by gender. 

I once worked a project where my manager was an ethnic Estonian.  He told me that during the worldwide depression of the 1930s, Estonians counterfeited postage stamps in preference to money.  He said that measured by the number of books published annually per capita in the native language, Estonia was second only to Iceland in literacy.  I never checked the figures from the 1930s, but today's numbers are available.  By this standard, the USA, which publishes the most books overall, is again 21st, behind Israel (20) Hungary (19), Estonia (14), Iceland (2), and the Vatican City (1). 

The table is at the bottom of this post.  I compiled the numbers from the usual sources via Wikipedia: books published annually; and 2010 population estimates.  I found it interesting to look at the number of people per book.  At the Vatican City it is four.   Here in the USA, it is over 1100. 

Of course, it is important to read the data.  The UK greatly leads the USA in books published annually, but literacy in English extends to the USA, Australia, etc.  My own copies of The Wealth of Nations and The Communist Manifesto were published in the UK, but bought (used) here in the USA.   The same must be recognized for Spanish and Chinese.  Hong Kong and Taiwan lead in literacy, but the mainland is third in total books published.  Also, literacy in ideographs can be problematic.  In a college class in Japanese for Business, I learned that it is paradoxical that a nation with 99% literacy has markedly fewer readers of newspapers.  To read a newspaper requires knowing about 3000 kanji characters.  I do not know what it takes to be literate in Chinese in China, but 3000 characters seems about right, given that Ogden's Basic English lists 850 words. 

The United Nations Development Programme and the CIA both agree that literacy is a measure of prosperity and freedom.  Thus, it is telling that Arabic does not appear in the top tier.  In Iran, it is Farsi.  The most populous Muslim nation is Indonesia, where Arabic is a foreign language.  As the home of Mecca, with its small population, Saudi Arabia could be like the Vatican City, but it is not.  And that speaks to the economic and political poverty of the Arabic nations. 

Spain is joined by Argentina and Mexico as a top producer of books.  That compounds the magnitude of the raw numbers.  So does the aggregation of the UK, Canada, the USA, and Australia.  To balance that consider the linguistic isolation of leading producers such as Israel, Hungary, and Vietnam.  At the other extreme, India is a nation with five official languages.  Its rank (45th) does come as an aggregate of all books against total population.  Still, when contrasted with China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, the internal lingusitic barriers explain much of India's poverty.

Where does all of this leave the USA?  And how does the Internet impact the statistics?  What does it mean to be a nation of bloggers and tweeters? 

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Money is Speech

Money as Press and Speech

Money as Speech and Peacemaking

Start the Presses!

Click to see full chart of statistics.

Another Example of Unlimited Constitutional Government

Regardless of how stringent the constitution, the government always can be expanded.  Does the legislature have a right to establish its own reference library? The Library of Congress serves that purpose, and serves the nation secondarily.  Here in Michigan, the legislature has its library - open to the public at their request on our behalf.  They also have a museum.  A legislative museum might seem to be out of bounds, but certainly not every archive comes in the form of a book.  The government must have the right to record its own actions.  By extension, those acts - the papers; the artifacts - would become meaningless without a record of the cultural context.  So, a museum would be appropriate to support the knowledge base of the government.  How far would it be extended?

One of the young librarians, Will Tuchrello, in the South Asia department (which has Southeast Asia), saw that I was a serious researcher and he found a desk for me in a "researchers" room so I did not have to be out in the reading room. I also had a place to store a heavy bag of nickels which I used at the copy machine. I could also keep my books on the desk until I finished with them. My research really sped up!
[...]
But I am happy to report that Dr. Tuchrello was promoted up through the ranks and is now the Director of the LOC's Southeast Asia office in Jakarta, Indonesia. He travels the region looking for references, posters, maps, etc. to purchase to send back to the LOC. The LOC also trades American publications with countries too! The LOC could not have found a more dedicated person for the job! 

Howard A. Daniel III, E-Sylum Volume 14, Number 06, February 6, 2011
NUMISMATIC BOOK MUTILATION AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS here

So, in a strictly limited constitutional republic, it could be necessary to have librarians traveling the world trading on behalf of the government.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Unlimited Constitutional Government (January 2011 blogs) here.
An Objective Foundation for Government

The Cure for a Failing Empire

If you were a druid from 180 AD and had Merlin's insight, what could you tell the emperor Marcus Aurelius about the coming collapse of the Roman Empire, and how to avoid it?  That is the question raised and answered by Ugo Bardi, a professor of chemistry at the University of Firenze (Florence, Italy).  Prof. Bardi is also an active writer on the problem of "Peak Oil" and its consequences for our civilization.  His essay on Peak Civilization, delivered first as a talk to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, was reprinted by the Financial Sense blog here.  It runs 24 pages and bears a complete reading. 

Bronze sestertius of Marcus Aurelius.
Reverse: Minerva, goddess of war and wisdom, holding her owl.

Prof. Bardi's thesis is that the Middle Ages were the cure for the collapse of the Roman empire.  He makes a good case; and it deserves investigation, because there is more behind the theory that he does not address, but which speaks to our civilization and what we can expect to be the cure for America's failing empire.

This is not new.  It is not mainstream reading, but it has been said before.  Basement Nukes the Consequences of Cheap Weapons of Mass Destruction by Erwin S. Strauss (Mason, Michigan: Loompanics Unlimited, 1980) asserted many of the same conclusions, though from different data.  Strauss earned a B.S. in physics from M.I.T. and is well-known in science fiction fandom.  His father was a diplomat; and Strauss grew up in Washington D.C.  (Wikipedia here).   For Strauss, gunpowder was the operative paradigm for the limitations of our empire.  Castle walls fell to cannonades.  The result was the nation-state which replaced the baronies and dukedoms of the Middle Ages.  In our time, according to Strauss, the inability of those nation-states to protect their people from cheap weapons of mass destruction will result in a world of gated communities, connected via telecommunication. 

In contrast and support, Ugo Bardi's thesis is that the Roman empire was at its limit in 180 AD: the emperor was camped on the frontier, fighting Germans.  The empire could not raise enough soldiers to defend the extensive borders; and so, it took on native auxiliaries.  The empire had grown by plundering gold and silver which went to pay the soldiers who extended the empire.  Once there were no more rich cities to drain, the money ran out.  Meanwhile, farmland was showing depletion.  As agriculture was contracting, the bureaucracy was growing: fewer sources of taxable income had to meet ever greater demands for taxes. 

The solution for Rome, according to Prof. Bardi?  Give up the extensive empire: disband the armies and turn them into civic militas to defend locales.  Stop cultivating old lands: plant trees; let the land recover.  Disband the bureaucracy.  Reduce taxes.  The result: the Middle Ages.  Localized communities, invested in themselves and their own defense, carried civilization forward.

The medieval cities were strong because they offered new opportunities.  "Stadtluft macht frei" - City air makes you free.  Max Weber's monograph The City (1921) describes a medieval society very familiar to Americans: a society of legally equal citizens, based on trades and crafts, where the citizen militia was armed with guns.  Whereas the manor was afiliated with a monastery, the city housed a university. 

Even after the nominal "fall" of Rome in 476 AD, Latin lived as the common language of Europe even into the 19th century.  (Carl Friedrich Gauss published Theoria residuorum biquadraticorum, Commentatio secunda in 1832.)  In the High Middle Ages of the 12th century the "Aquitaine Renaissance" brought new literary flourishes to common Latin.  The Roman Catholic Church, of course, also continued some old traditions: when Diocletian reorganized the Roman empire in 297-299, he created the diocese as an administrative unit.  And, in answer to Bardi's plea via Merlin to Marcus Aurelius, the bureaucracy was pledged at least nominally to austerity.  The Italian Renaissance of the quattrocento revived much from classical antiquity, of course, but added something wholly modern, even unique in history to that time: individualism.  

The fine art medal was invented by Antonio di Puccio Pisano in 1439.  Today, the standard catalog of Renaissance medals is called, appropriately enough, The Currency of Fame.  Not only was that attitude contrary to the Christian doctrine of humility, it would have shocked the Romans of the Republic who made crimes of both ambition and consumption.

As things continue, they change.  There is no surprise in that.

What, then, does the future hold for our empire?  Certainly, contraction.  Taxation must recede: there is no more to be looted.  Six of the 25 richest suburbs in American today are outside Washington D.C. (See Forbes magazine here.)   They have money, but they create no wealth.  Obviously, that cannot continue. 

  The new institution of the Middle Ages was the castle guarding a manor and estates.  That, too, had roots in the Roman empire.  In our future, the institution to replace the nation-state has grown past its roots: the corporation. 

Corporate money, good on corporate grounds.

Corporations go back to Rome; and the laws which empowered medieval universities as legally independent entities come from there, also.  But the modern corporation, the joint stock company, is a creature of modern capitalism.  Corporations can do what governments cannot: generate wealth.  Globalist corporations independent of weakening nation-states can bring stability.  Economically diversified and geographically distributed corporations are at once flexible and governable.  But the future is not so much about terran geography as it about the virtual terrain of cyberspace.

The operative resilience of such a society is that not everyone needs to be in a corporation.  Indeed, they cannot.  Historically, the independent merchant has been at the mercy of guardians who both protected and plundered: you could pay a robber baron's toll or take your chances through Robin Hood's forest.  In a new world of global enterprise, connected in cyberspace, the independent creator can trade for profit in a virtual world where the might that makes right is available to anyone with a three-digit IQ and three fingers of forehead.   Home-based technologies that we only now see outlined such as molecular manufacturing and nanotechnology will be eclipsed by intellectual crafts we cannot even predict. 


Corporate money that is transferable -
especially when cash would be awkward.

Between now and then, however, we must endure the modern equivalents of Visigoths and Huns. 

But it is not the end of the world.  It never is.  In the November 2009 issue of The Celator, I placed an article about the great fairs of medieval Champagne.  Research for that revealed to me a so-called "Dark Ages" rich with trade.  The courts of Charlemagne and English kings were in contact with the Muslim east.  Merchants carried the goods.  Trade was encumbered by risk and adversity... but when is it not?

From 1934: A B&O Railroad certificate held by Credit Suisse.

Cities existed millennia before Rome became the city that ruled an empire; and cities will continue, of course. Nation-states will continue, as well.  Global markets will continue.  Outer space will be explored and colonized, certainly orbital space.  The seabeds will be colonized.  The Arctic and Antarctic will be settled. The future will be shaped by corporations. 

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Capitalist Culture
Monsters from the Id
Art & Copy

Counterfeiting and the Tragedy of the Commons

It does not take much research to read far too much about the glut of counterfeit numismatic materials manufactured in China and sold on eBay.  Chinese counterfeit factories purchased old U.S. Mint equipment, old dies, and other tools.  Their work destroyed the markets in Seated Liberty coins and Trade Dollars, but any coin, even the most common, is a potential target.  Not surprisingly, some have faked the certifcation holders of PCGS and NGC. At conventions and shows, numismatists display educational exhibits of counterfeit coins in real holders and bogus coins in  bogus holders.  The federal government does nothing. 

On the other hand, ahead of the Super Bowl, enforcement against phony NFL gear is vigorous.

So far this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other agencies participating in "Operation Interception" have confiscated 36,273 counterfeit trademarked items nationwide, with more expected through the weekend. The value of the haul thus far: more than $3.56 million.   (Full story from CNN.com for February 5, 2011, is here.)

This is an example of the tragedy of the commons.  The NFL trademarks belong to someone.  Those someones are also wealthy.  So, they get the government to pay attention when they are victimized, and rightfully so.  With collectible numismatic material, no one owns the images and designs.  (One exception is the Sacagawea Dollar, owned by artist Glenna Goodacre, and licensed to the U.S. Mint.)

Of course, counterfeiting an old silver dollar is also a federal offense: money is money; and all federal money is the lawful obligation of the U.S. Treasury, no matter how old it is.  With some exceptions, such as Gold Notes, all U.S. money is legal tender.  But, of course, no one spends rolls of 1872 Seated Dollars or even 1922 Morgans.  So, the actual threat to the govenment is minimal: individual collectors take the losses.  The real threats are from counterfeit paper money; and the Federal Reserve is a private institution.  By comparison, the Bank of England is also like our Fed, nominally private, with a government-appointed board of governors.  Bank of England money carries a copyright notice.  Counterfeiting is a crime, not so much because it wrong to defraud people - though there is that - but mostly because it transgresses the intellectual property of the banks.  Since no banks issue Bust Dollars or Capped Bust Half Dollars, enforcement is lax.

This story from About.Com exposing a Chinese counterfeiting factory dates to April 2, 2008.  The Collectors Universe message board (NASDAQ symbol CLCT) for September 27, 2009, carried a summary (read here) of Dr. Gregory V. DuBay's talk at that summer's ANA convention in Philadelphia, revealing more about the depth and breadth of numismatic counterfeits from China.  His system for classifying Chinese dies was included as an appendix in the first edition of the  Red Book Professional Edition, but was deleted from the second edition.  I spoke on the same subject at the ANA convention in Pittsburgh in 2004.  The information I presented was not new or original with me: I only gathered examples from others... and all too easily... 

This is a known problem.  Nothing is done because no one owns it. 

To Make Money

In "Francisco's Money Speech" from Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand claimed that the phrase "to make money" was invented in America.  We changed money from a static quantity to be looted to the product of the free and active mind.  That etymology is not correct but the claim is compelling. 

In the New York Times "Freakonomics" blog for January 20, 2011, Fred Shapiro cited the Oxford English Dictionary: "the fact is that the Oxford English Dictionary documents the expression “to make money” back to 1457."   Later that day, reader Claude posted a citation from Cicero.

 Cicero, de Divinatione, 1. 111 (written 44 BC): Milesium Thalem, qui, ut obiurgatores suos convinceret ostenderetque etiam philosophum, si ei commodum esset, pecuniam facere posse, omnem oleam, ante quam florere coepisset, in agro Milesio coemisse dicitur. (“Thales of Miletus, who, in order to confound his critics and show that even a philosopher could make money, if there is an advantage, is said to have bought up an entire olive crop before it began to flower.”)  — Claude

That same passage was cited a few years ago when the subject appeared in Mark Liberman's blog, "Language Log" (March 15, 2006) .  Liberman quoted from a source in 1472:  

"R. CALLE in Paston Lett. (1976) II. 356, I truste be Ester to make of money..at the leeste l marke.  (I believe that in modern orthography this would be "I trust by Easter to make of money..at the least one mark".) The letter's context makes it clear that Richard Calle was not writing to Margery Paston about a counterfeiting scheme. The quantity expression "1 marke of money" is antique, but the sense in which Paston anticipated "making" that amount seems contemporary enough." 

(That blog is worth reading through as the discussion ranges deeply.  Apparently, the transliteration is not "1 marke" but "L marke" i.e., 50 marks.  But all of that at your leisure...)

The origin of "to make money" came up on David Veksler's "Objectivism Online" message board.  So, I ran it through Babelfish.  Even among Europeans, different cultures express differently the creation of profits and the making of money.

English: A business creates profits when it makes money.
German Ein Geschäft verursacht Profite, wenn es Geld verdient.
Dutch: Zaken leiden tot winsten wanneer het geld maakt.
Italian: Un commercio genera i profitti quando fa i soldi.
Spanish: Un negocio crea beneficios cuando hace el dinero.
Portuguese: Um negócio cria lucros quando faz o dinheiro.
French: Des affaires créent des bénéfices quand elles gagnent l'argent.

In French you win silver when you create blessings - Cyrano de Bergerac was Catholic, of course.  Germans deserve the profits that are brought into ultimate objectivity - strict morality and academic metaphysics. While the Dutch do make money, being good Calvinists, they bear the burden of their winnings. 

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Atlas Shrugged, Part 1
Reflections on Atlas Shrugged, Part 1
John Aglialoro Does not Shrug
Anthem as a Graphic Novel

Money as Speech and Peacemaking

Athens c. 450 BCE

“Francisco’s Money Speech” is a monologue from Atlas Shrugged.  If you do not know the soliloquy you can find it online at Capitalism Magazine courtesy of the Ayn Rand Institute.  As dramatic as it is, the essay is as negative as positive, a denial that money (or the love of it) is the root of all evil.  The broad and deep anti-capitalist prejudices in education and arts leave us with few investigations into the benefits of money.  Pink Floyd’s hedonist plaint, Gordon Gecko’s short “Greed” speech, and Larry the Liquidator’s “Amen” are about the top of the heap in common culture.  

Oddly enough, Ludwig von Mises agreed with Karl Marx that money derived from trade and that by natural selection, gold and silver became the best forms of commodity money.  (Compare Mises, Human Action, Chapter XVII “Indirect Exchange” with Marx, Capital Volume One; Chapter Two: “Exchange and Volume,” One Chapter Three: “Money, or the Circulation of Commodities.”)  In our time the across the political right wing, it is perhaps impossible to find anyone who describes themselves as conservative, libertarian or objectivist, who does not believe this.  

Summary of Traditional Moneys

In fact, money did not begin with trade, trade did not begin economic calculation, and the true power of money is not what you can get for it – though that is, indeed, powerful – but what it says to you and for you. ("The Technology of Ritual Exchange is now on the new Washtenaw Justice here)  Historically, in human and perhaps proto-human development, friendship came from the exchange of gifts.  When strangers met, giving and receiving almost anything at all avoided conflict. 

In The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs posited that the cities derived from permanent hunting camps, not from agricultural settlements.  Successful hunters exchanged their bounty, more for novelty than for need.  According to Jacobs, grains that were not eaten before the next gathering were tossed aside.  When they grew, agriculture was discovered within the city walls.  The need for space took agriculture outside.  According to her theory, where today we find pastoral people, somewhere near the center of their range, we can find a lost city.  

If gold and silver as money derived from trade as economic calculation, then tin and copper (and bronze) would be the basis for money.  And there is support for this.  We know bronze blocks the shape and size cowhides.  The first Roman metal money was in blocks of the stuff, weighing one pound, cast with the images of pigs and elephants. The value in silver and gold is that they can be exchanged for bronze.  At the same time, however, there is no doubting the beauty of precious metals.  That, too, is valid.  Durable, uniform and malleable, they excel over other pretty stones and attractive feathers.  But as such, they have no utility except exchange.  Fundamentally, the value in money is that it allows us to make peace.  Economic calculation then becomes possible, but that is not the origin of money.

Once coinage was invented, money took on a new dimension: it carried images, and eventually words.  For pre-literate and proto-literate people, coins spoke in symbolic images.  Ancient coins were read in a depth of meaning that even numismatists too often glide past.  But no one mistakes what Junius Brutus meant when he issued coins celebrating the Ides of March.  Roman imperial coins announced military victories and the subsequent enslavement of peoples, as well as the emperor's tours of the provinces, the liberality of his gifts to the people, and the renewal of his appointment to office by the senate.

Even in the Dark Ages, coins carried so many words that they had to be abbreviated.  Historically, in obedience to the Commandments, coins from Muslim nations displayed no images, but announced, “There is no god but God; and Mohammed is the prophet of God.”  In China, from ancient times to the 19^th century, the common cash coins carried four characters, at least two of which were the political message of the emperor, just as our presidents announced a “New Deal” or a “Great Society.”  In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, privately struck coins in England and America carried explicit political messages threatening revolution and touting our rights – and celebrating hard work and free trade with beehives and handshakes.  In America of the 1830s, one series of tokens lampooned Andrew Jackson as a jackass with a law degree; another showed the general, sword in hand, taking responsibility for an empty treasure chest.  Today, we use paper money and the typical Federal Reserve Note carries twenty different messages from the letter seal of the bank to the printing plate position, from the Eye over the Great Pyramid to “In God We Trust.”   

Pan American Airways

Stock certificates from the great age of capitalism carried vignettes.  Generic deities posed with wonderful machines.  Some of those demi-gods sported slide rules and calipers.  Goddesses of agriculture delivered bounties via railroad. The goddess of Gulf States Electric delighted her child with sparks from a generator.  

As the Internet eclipses print, we no longer purchase bank checks dressed up with icons and messages.  Electronic money is anonymous, surrendering its powers of speech and peacemaking.  But the foundation remains.  On the Internet, that overt trust is too easily exploited, but it could not be stolen by the dishonest if it did not exist.  Each exchange minimizes conflict and allows an opportunity for friendship. 

ALSO  ON NECESSARY FACTS

Money is Speech

Money as Press and Speech

Start the Presses!

Republican Rebels

Unlimited Constitutional Government

Begin with that ideal state limited by a constitution with strict language that is narrowly understood and big government is just a matter of time.

Most Americans agree that we have too much government. The general theory along the right wing among conservatives, libertarians, and objectivists is that we need to adhere to strict construction, not loose interpretation, of the Constitution.  Specifically, the “minarchists” (versus anarchists) claim that the only proper functions of government are those that protect rights; and that government should be limited to defense (armies, police) and adjudication (civil and criminal courts).  Ayn Rand was not alone in saying this, but of all the advocates for individualism and the market she did most clearly state the hypothesis.   

One classroom in the FBI's 10-acred Hogan's Alley
urban simulation training site at Quantico, Virginia.

Government is an agency of law.  Where do laws come from?  We are comfortable with legislatures and executives.  Even a part-time parliament and a temporary president need buildings.  Certainly, the courts cannot meet in open fields.  Even if the police and army lived in tents, they would need at least those, though, hopefully, we could shelter them in better facilities.  How are these to be built and maintained?  What prevents the government from constructing them, using government- trained skilled trades workers from government craft programs? Military academies train military engineers. Why would the government not have other schools for training civil, mechanical, electrical, etc., engineers and scientists for government service?

Libertarians would like to privatize the post office, but does the government have no right to transmit its own messages? If the government can publish legislative minutes and proposed laws and notes of enforcement and judicial proceedings, then can the government not own its printing presses, television and radio stations, websites and other communications media? What mandate is there that the government must pay private contractors to provide any or all of its services?

U.S. Treasury Building being restored.

Today, the federal government operates military academies and police academies. Should the government not operate its own law schools, legislative seminaries, and bureau or agency colleges? If government buildings are not to be insults, they must be decorative, and thus we can imagine government schools of art and design. What prevents the existence of government craft manufacturers to make the things created by the designers and artists for use in government facilities?  Who maintains government facilities? Who paints the walls; and who trims the grass; and who clears the snow and ice? 

We accept that courts need support, of course, from recorders, bailiffs, and clerks. The police need dispatchers, clerks, receptionists.  These people need equipment.  Who makes it?  Napoleon Bonaparte was not the first general to realize that an army moves on its stomach.  What prevents the police and courts from having their own internal departments for food production and preparation? Who produces the pots and pans and stoves and refrigerators?  If the legislature decided that its work could be better engaged listening to music, could there not be a government orchestra? After all, the military has its bands and orchestras, why not the courts and police, and why not the engineers and gardeners? 

Products of the Springfield Armory.
(Where does the steel come from?)

Today’s news contains complaints about the wages paid to government employees (see close), but the open market in labor determines those payments.  More to the point, every business wants the best employees and, certainly, we, the people deserve the best in government services.  Why not have this work done by government employees, trained at government schools, clothed from government factories, fed from government farms?  What mandate is there that government employees cannot be given homes as part of their compensation? 

This is the “arsenal theory” of government.  In order to assure that it can carry out its strictly defined and narrowly interpreted functions, the government must be able to produce the goods and services it needs.

There is another theory: COTS – commercial off the shelf technology.  Patriotic innovators and greedy charlatans have always wanted to sell things to the state, but the modern system of procurement originates in the industrial revolution which made interchangeable parts possible.  (See close.)  Would the only allowable alternative be that government be supplied via competitive bid contracts?  It may be a sound theory.  Today, those contracts are the source of the “military industrial complex” and the “revolving door” between agencies and their suppliers. 

Over the years, I have interviewed many business people for magazine articles that I write.  A sales manager for IBM once told me that if the first he heard of a government agency placing an open bid for a printer was reading about it in a bid list, he would fire the salesman assigned to the account.  It is the job of the technical marketing representative to help the client understand their needs.  Ideally for them, the provider crafts the language of the bid.  How fast should a printer be?  How often should you need to replace the ribbons?  Those are technical questions.  The same principle applies to new jet fighter craft.  Competing providers will vie against each other for the opportunity to inform and influence the specifications.  Today, both the arsenal and COTS modes are in operation.  Nothing in republican, libertarian, or objectivist political theory provides a standard to know which should be what. 

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Another Example of Unlimited Constitutional Government
An Objective Foundation for Government
Republican Rebels

City Air Makes You Free
Money is Speech

THE FALLIBILITY OF FINGERPRINTING

The easy truth is that fingerprints are not reliable. The deeper facts are necessarily more complicated. Whether and to what extent fingerprints - or, ultimately DNA, retinal scans, and other biometric identifications - may be putatively "infallible" there remains an underlying desire to segregate good people from bad, to control the latter for the benefit of the former. 

Suspect Identies: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification  
by Simon Cole (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

However, an admittedly unscientific poll by CNN Money in 2004 found that 21% of Americans cheat on their federal income  tax.     A story in the New York Times for May 1, 2010, claimed that 20% to 30% of the wealth in Greece is off the books in undisclosed transactions.   That number might reflect American realities as well.  (Prof. Liqun Cao told our criminology classes that perhaps 20% of the goods on the market have no clear title.)  Furthermore, according to the social taxonomy for "anomie" presented by Robert King Merton, "innovators" are those who seek socially-approved goals in unapproved ways.  You might think that defines robbery (and it does), but it also defines the "pirates of Silicon Valley" who created new computer resources otherwise denied to them: they were hackers before they became inventors.  Even if we could tag everyone, do we want to?  What is achieved by criminalizing young people for thinking outside the box?  

The basic problem here, of course, is that such tagging is not reliable.  It does not work.  Experts who study fingerprints know the problems.  Worst of all, they deny, minimize, and obfuscate their different interpretations of the facts in order to present a united front to the world, claming that fingerprints are certain, not probabilistic. Simon Cole's work has a few weak points.  He presents the same information twice, in the absence of giving new data to substantiate a new claim.  With that caveat, it remains that this book is an excellent history of the attempts to measure and identify criminals. 

Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting
and Criminal Identificaion by Simon Cole,
Harvard University Press, 2002, 2009.

Though with several other roots as well - India under British rule in 1858, for instance - "Anthropometry" began in the 1870s with Cesare Lombrosco. Again, both motives were active.  First, criminologists thought that law-breakers were physically different from normal people.  The criminal could be detected by the geometry of his skull and the ratio of his legs to this torso. Calling themselves scientists, they developed complex taxonomies for ear shape.  In theory, if they could measure everyone, they could cull the criminals from society and prevent if not eradicate crime.  Second, the police and courts (and the military) had a large body of repeat offenders. Identifying them would facilitate processing -- and prevent wrongful pleas for mercy from self-defined "first time offenders."  Similarly, the U.S. Army needed to keep out those it threw out but who came back via another recruiter. 

Anthropometry was hard work. Special calipers applied to the unclothed body provided raw numbers for the calculation of ratios and proportions.  And it only worked with males.  In the 19th century, despite hand-wringing over the evils of prostitution, few were willing to measure a woman in the same manner.  And the numerical models were lacking.  Anthropometry had limitations, of course; and Coles tells (pp. 140-142) the famous case of the two William Wests carefully measured and then confused by Leavenworth Prison.  That hallmark case is a classic justification for the reliability of fingerprinting.  It appears in college textbooks for criminal investigations.

Fingerprinting solved a lot of problems, not the least of which was differentiating the two Misters West. Fingerprints are easy to get -- from men or women, living or dead. 

Meticulous cataloguing suggested that no two people had the same set of prints.  That may well be true.  We do not know for sure.  This is an empirical truth only.  Like primitives for whom the sun has always come up in the east, but who have no knowledge of astronomy, we can take all the measurements we want, but we do not know the genomes and alleles for fingerprints; we know the what, but not the why.

We could live with that.  But in a few decades from the 1920s to the 1940s, fingerprinting devolved to the point where trained examiners claimed under oath that a partial print unabiguously identified a perpetrator.  Comparing good "native" prints from each of ten fingers was reduced to accepting claims about partial latent (secondary) prints.

Fingerprint examiners never disagree with each other in court.  They only agree that the prints identify or are "inconclusive."  Coles tells the story (pp. 264-266; 272-274; 282) of experts in disagreement all of whose certifications were revoked because that was the only way for the International Association for Indentification to maintain the fiction that experts do not disagree about fingerprints.  Today, fingerprints are unassailable.

The Numbers Behind NUMB3RS by
Gary Lorden and Keith Devlin,
Plume Books, 2007

The fact remains that fingerprints have been forged by several methods by police and by criminals.  (The FBI first found a forgery by a law enforcement officer in 1925.)  And of course there is politics.  J. Edgar Hoover and New York City Police Commissioner Richard E. Enright both had strong claims that their agency was best suited to be the central clearning house and repository.  Suspect Identities is a dense book that covers a lot of ground in 350 pages, but the index is an exemplary epistemological map to this complex presentation.

The epistemological and methodological problems in fingerprinting are not taught to law enforcement professionals.  After completing a BSc in criminology in 2008, I was watching a rerun of NUMB3RS, the CBS drama series (2005-2010) about mathematician Charlie Eppes and his brother, FBI Special Agent Don.  The first season show Identity Crisis centered on fingerprinting.  Prof. Eppes identified the key difference between DNA and fingerprinting, asking rhetorically, "But prints don't have odds?" A fuller treatment of the problem can be found in The Numbers Behind NUMB3RS by Keith Devlin and Gary Lorden.  (Dr. Devlin teaches at Stanford and is NPR's "Math Guy."  Dr. Lorden teaches at CalTech and was the technical advisor for the series.) 
The case of Brandon Mayfield may become paradigmatic.  You can google him and find the Wikipedia article.  As Mayfield is an attorney, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers has an insightful summary on their website.  Mayfield was wrongfully accused of being an Al Qaeda operative, in large part because FBI fingerprint examiners refused to disagree with their boss.  The evidence - such as it was - began with a single latent fingerprint.


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More on Necessary Factual Truths

Greg Browne writes:

The big question is:
How can we know the truth of universal generalizations (All S is P) about kinds (such as "All triangles have angles that had add up to 180 degrees" and "All water is H20") with certainty?
To know them with certainty, or even with probability, requires that they be necessary.

Some, such as Hume, deny that any factual truths are necessary, but they are wrong.
Some who admit that they factual truths can be necessary will still say that we need innate ideas or other a priori aides to know them, that experience is not enough, but they are wrong, too.
So how can we know necessary factual truths empirically (through experience)?

I saw that it is my discovering and analyzing patterns.   For example, we encounter several things with triangular surfaces and realize that there is a pattern here, the pattern of being a triangle, or we encounter several cases of water and realize that there is a pattern here, the patter of being water.

Now of course the process is different in these 2 cases.   In the case of triangles, we can do it in our armchair (more geometrico).   In the case of water, it is much more complex and difficult--and so many don't even think it is possible.   Indeed, while we can deduce from the basic concept of a triangle many truths, such as having angles add up to 180 degrees, in the case of water we cannot easily, if it all, deduce the superficial qualities from any one of those superficial qualities: rather, the quality that we can deduce the superficial qualities from--namely, the atomic structure--required a lot of effort and time to discover.   Nonetheless, once we have this fundamental quality, we can deduce the other qualities from them.

So in both cases we deduce from concepts, though in the case of water the concepts require a lot more work to discover.

So forming the concept, by discovering the pattern, is key.

And it Aristotle would agree, and call the process by which we discover it "induction".   It sounds like Harriman is going to say the same thing.

Note: I do believe that this process can take place by analyzing just one example.  For example, if you know that a key does not fit in a lock, then you know that all keys of that shape and size will not fit in that lock--indeed, that they will not fit in any lock of that size and shape.   As to the example you gave of Galileo (I am going only by what you said, since I am that familiar with methodology), you said that he tried many tests of hypothesis--but you also added that he tried them in many variations--many different substances and/or many different sizes of ball, etc.

In general, I give the "Continental Rationalists" such as Descartes more credit than do most Randians (or most Aristotelians).

Note: though I think that this demonstrative method works in a much wider range of fields than most do, I admit that sometimes we can only have probabilistic knowledge.   For example, we may say that a correlation is so strong that there is probably a necessary causal connection even though we do not yet know what the causal connection is (e.g. aspirin use and pain relief for a century, until recent decades.)

Also, I got the Harriman book today, but I have just started reading it, and these thoughts are from before I got it.

Greg

Gregory M Browne's Necessary Factual Truths

This blog is named for Dr. Gregory M. Browne's work bridging metaphysics and epistemology.  In the Introduction to Necessary Factual Truths, Browne explains that his work was inspired by Leonard Peikoff's essay, "The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy."  This book goes further to uniting inductive and deductive truths.  Inductive truths are factual (empirical; evidentiary), while deductive truths are necessary (logical, rational).  As an Objectivist, Browne expects that there is no dichotomy between the factual and the necessary, the empirical and the rational. 

According to Browne, the historical difficulty derives from the fact that not everything essential to identification and definition is immediately perceptible.  He delineates "shallow" truths from "deep" truths.  Mathematics and logic are "shallow" because everything you need to know is immediately provided.  On the other hand, the internal structures of atoms and stars, the mechanisms of life, and the panorama of human history are "deep" because they are less tractable.  They do have natures. Existence is identity: to be is to be something.  However, we just have not always known -- and may not yet know -- much about these more complicated entities.  When such things are first discovered, we know that they are, but we do not know what they are.  Eventually, we learn more.  According to Dr. Browne, historically, Aristotle followed a unified inductive-deductive methodology.  Over the centuries, philosophers narrowed their certainties, eventually abandoning the empirical, evidentiary, experimental, realistic aspects of knowledge for those that could be argued like geometry.

"...I say that some kinds are such that a description that is logically equivalent to the name - which would be a definition by necessary and sufficient conditions - is not always available. ... This is because some some kinds have attributes which are unknown when they are first discovered, as we shall see, and so it takes work to discover the attributes, and thus come up with a definition by necessary and sufficient attributes, and at any given time we may not have discovered them all." (168-169) 

Browne opens his treatise by discussing why philosophers denied necessary factual truths and created dichotomies.  He then goes on to define categories, classes and kinds, necessity and causality, explaining extension (breadth and narrowness of definition) and intension (depth and shallowness of meaning).  The book argues for three broad claims. First, "some admittedly factual truths - including truths in chemistry and biology - are indeed necessary..."  He achieves this by his explanation of Deep Kinds, entities whose nature is complex and not entirely known.  He ties this to other side of the equation by investigating Narrow Classes and the necessary truths about individuals.  His second claim is that certain factual truths - such as Newton's Three Laws of Motion - are necessary.  Finally, Browne demonstrates why the necessary truths are more than conventions, but factual: they are true because of how the world is.


Gregory M. Browne completed a dual major in political philosophy and political science at Michigan State University's James Madison College in 1979.  Continuing his studies at the University of Michigan in history and philosophy, he returned to MSU, completing a master's degree in political science in 1984 and another in philosophy in 1988 before earning a doctorate in philosophy in 1994.  He taught at Yorktown University in Denver and at community colleges in Michigan before coming to Eastern Michigan University.  In the fall semester 2007, waiting for a class in police operations, I was walking the halls and heard him lecturing about Ayn Rand. His essay on reference and neccesity (in reply to Roderick Long) appeared in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies Vol 8, No 1.

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