Category: Fast1

Sulfur directive and IPR

To be populistic: we pay now, but our industry has a payback time in 2020 and gets the money back from Greek merchant shipping.

[Local subjects for a change. Heavier IPR material moved to www.project-trogolodyte.org. // Paikallisia asioita vaihteeksi. Raskaampi IPR-materiaali siirretty ylläolevaan linkkiin.] 

[Finnish version: here. All the links in the article point to Finnish-language sources, but similar material can be found easily.] 

The sulfur directive has been  accepted in the EU parliament. By 2015, ships in the Baltic sea need to drop their sulfur emissions from the current 1% to 0.1%.
Finland is strongly polarized on this. Environmentalists (of whom I am one) against industry. The environmentalists “won” this round, but this is not the place for anyone to gloat, at least not arrogantly. On the contrary, both sides have valid concerns. The directive is positive for environmental and health reasons; it is negative for the Finnish economy and employment statistics.

How positive or negative? One should be skeptical of everyone and everything since it is such a complicated issue, but approximately:

  • The directive saves lives. Whether or not one believes the exact figures of the environmentalists (50,000 extra deaths a year), it is clear that sulfur and particle emissions do have large-scale health effects.
  • Finland will suffer economically. Whether or not one believes the exact figures given by industry, (600 millions EUR per year or 12,000 jobs), common sense and a look at the map says that Finland will suffer more than most countries. We are effectively an island.
  • This is not just an EU decision. The International Maritime Organization IMO has itself approved the limits already in 2008. The EU directive adds very little. If this directive really came as a surprise, someone has been sleeping soundly.
  • In 2015, the limit only affects the so-called SECA-areas, meaning the Baltic Sea, North Sea, English channel and the coasts of Canada and the USA. In the rest of the world, the limit will not be applied until 2020 at the earliest, possibly as late as 2025. It is easy to find this unfair: the directive hurts those countries the most which have already done a fairly good job reducing emissions in general.

The Finnish government has proposed to give 30 million EUR in subsidies to quickly attach scrubbers to ships, but this most likely cannot happen due to the anti-subsidy laws  of the EU.

If Finland had been prepared for the directive, there could have been a win-win scenario. That 30 million, rather than being used (or not used) for subsidies, could have been used to kick-start a major R&D program to create ultra-cheap ultra-flexible plug-and-play scrubbers that could fit into even the shabbiest ships of the world.

There are fewer limits on R&D subsidies, and the 30 million really would not be a major dent in the national budget.

In fact, the 5-10 years’ extension for the rest of the world is precisely what could have given us an opportunity. In 2020 (or 2025), everyone will be just as “surprised” as Finland is now, for example the Mediterranean countries. In the current economic situation, the Mediterranean countries really cannot afford large public R&D investments, even if they are awake.

The possibility would arise from using the IPR system correctly. To those who don’t know much about IPR, and to those who do but are skeptics (myself included), the word “patent” sounds like a boogieman. But this is exactly the kind of situation which the IPR system is meant for: to enable large investments now, in the hopes of recouping those investments much later via licensing. Patents are valid for 20 years. In these R&D programs, it would make sense to patent everything that moves.

To be populistic: we pay now, but our industry has a payback time in 2020 and gets the money back from Greek merchant shipping.

Ugly and heartless? Yes. IPR is ugly.

Unethical? No. This is what the IPR system is meant for, whether one likes it or not. This is not unfair against small inventors (a common complaint), because no one can build large-scale scrubbers in his garage. This is large machinery, requiring large companies.

The proposal may sound vaguely nauseating to everyone. But this is what I would do. It may be too late for the sulfur directive, which is regrettable. But when the next environmental “surprise” arrives, it would make sense to be prepared.

 

Pissing or flushing: Pharmaceuticals in drinking water

What happens when I flush a pill down the toilet? And why should I care?

[Finnish version: click here]

Trace amounts of medications have been found in drinking water in various places. Are there effects on health? Some media are alarmist, but the most accurate answer basically is that we simply do not know yet (WHO,CWA, CBS, New Scientist).

Although it is only human to be worried about humans, the effects on the wider ecosystem may be much larger. A small amount in purified water means a larger amount in the non-purified source water. Again, there are alarming case studies where large amounts of medicine-related hormones have had biological effects on fish populations. However, on the whole no one really knows how much contamination there is, nor what its overall effects are, nor who is causing it (USGS).

There are relatively few possible sources of contamination. Pharmaceutical manufacturers may cause some very high contamination peaks, but the question is controversial (NBC). Antibiotics in agriculture are also a major source (WCP). However, it is clear that some of the contamination is coming from ordinary consumers.

How much?  I don’t know. Rather than getting involved in a big-picture controversy on which we don’t have enough data, I decided to hone in on a small concrete detail. We, ordinary consumers, are contaminating the sewer system with our medications. Whether the effect is serious, we cannot know yet. But there is one question that we can try to answer. What is the mechanism that causes it? Or, to put it in a more earthy manner:

Is the contamination caused by pissing, or by flushing?

There are two ways to get a drug into the sewer system. A person can eat the pill and later excrete any excess medicine in his urine or feces. Or he may dispose of old medications by flushing them down the toilet.

I want to know whether the flushing is causing most of the overall contamination. This is an eminently practical question at the grassroots level. People will take the medications they need, whatever the environmental effect. But there are steps that can be taken against flushing, like information campaigns, creating better incentives to return the medications, or good take-back systems.

Finland has a strong take-back system. All aged medications can be returned to pharmacies free of charge, no questions asked. (The waste is then disposed of as hazardous waste). But even in Finland, flushing happens anyways.

I am trying to find a single number that would allow consumers to get an intuitive feel of the damage they cause by flushing. I may have found it in the inverse of the excretion rate. I am calling it the flush rate. This needs a little explanation.

Whenever a medicine is taken, a complex process occurs (ADME).  Some drugs are broken down almost entirely. Sometimes these byproducts are as harmful as the drug itself, but typically they are much less bioactive. Thus, passing a drug through a human is a good way to clean it up.

However, it is not a perfect way, and some of the drug passes unchanged directly into the urine or feces. If the body breaks up 98% of the drug, the person still urinates 2%. The flush ratio is the inverse of this, or 50. This means that if the person throws just one pill into the toilet, he causes as much contamination as he causes by eating 50 of those pills.

Some typical values for some drugs are shown below. These must be treated skeptically, as variations can be huge and closely related drugs may have completely different excretion rates. Also added is an estimate of the cost per pill, since this information has an effect on how the medication is likely to be treated.

  • Paracetamol, Aspirin (painkiller): Less than 2% excreted. Flush ratio is therefore 1/2%, or  about 50. Cost is ~1 cent per pill
  • Atorvastatin (anti-cholesterol): <2%. Flush ratio ~50, ~50 cnt per pill
  • Carbamazepine (epilepsy medication):  2-3%. Flush ratio ~40, ~20 cnt
  • Prozac (antidepressant): ~15%. Flush ratio ~6, ~1 EUR
  • Oxycodone (strong painkiller): ~19%. Flush ratio ~5, ~4 EUR
  • Cetirizin (anti-histamine): 30%. Flush ratio ~3, ~1 EUR
  • Antibiotics: Huge variations. 40-80% of some antibiotics (NIH). Flush ratio ~2, ~1 EUR/pill (for penicillin)
  • Lisinopril: (hypertension): 100% (Not metabolized at all by the body). Flush ratio ~1, ~30 cnt/pill.
  • Birth control pills (COCP): Special case. The metabolites are hormones which have an environmental effect. Flush ratio not known, but probably low. ~1 EUR/pill

The society-level impact of flushing of course requires knowledge of things like the toxicity of the drug, the speed at which it decays, and the number of people taking the drug. However, a list like the one above does give some indication of where to focus.

My hunch (it is no more than that) is that a low-cost high-flush-ratio over-the-counter (OTC)  medicine has the highest contamination risk. People can buy as much medication in reserve as they want, and the low price means they do not have much incentive to make sure the medication does not age (it is much easier to just buy new pills). In addition, people buy these painkillers like candy. Large amounts will go to waste.

My hunch that people are careless with aspirin is supported by one study (LHWMP): aspirin contamination was found in 24% of tested streams. Aspirin can be toxic for example to cats (Manning), although the levels found in the water were in practice far below this toxicity level.

Thus, if I were to prioritize things based on these figures alone, I would target aspirin. The amounts may be tiny, but the point it that there is no reason for them to be there in the first place. Without flushing, the concentration would be close to zero. SInce the aspirin is not passed into the urine, people could take all the aspirin they want, as long as they disposed of the rest correctly.

I can also think of practical things that could follow from the priorization. Why not put extra notifications specifically on aspirin packages to encourage users to dispose of them correctly?  If such warnings are put indiscriminately on all medications, they may lose their effect. Focus them where the impact is the greatest.

I emphasize that the analysis above has too little data and too few parameters to be reliable. Aspirin may be a problem, but given that antibiotics and hormones have more severe biological effects, they may be much more serious problems. Someone should try to calculate this; I do not really have the competence.

I feel that this kind of analysis has psychological value, if nothing else. Arguments on environmental issues tend to become heated and repetitive. Sometimes it is worthwhile to look at things from a completely different perspective.

 

On teaching

Do elite nerds need any education? 

[Finnish version: click here]

Niko Porjo’s posting last week (Finnish only) raised some conflicting feelings. Summary: based on his own experiences when studying physics, Porjo strongly questioned whether lectures are an efficient type of teaching at all.  I found this argument compelling, given that it resonates with my own experiences.

Porjo then suggested, perhaps polemically, that it would be more efficient to get rid of most artificial and formal types of education. Learning by doing is the most efficient way, and theory should flow from the practical work rather than vice versa. I did not agree with this suggestion at all.

I believe Porjo may be right, but only within tight boundaries. It is true that sitting in compulsory classes is slow and inefficient, especially now that much of the information is available on the Net already. If someone wants to listen to good lectures, there are sites like  TEDx or the Khan Academy.

Whatever the field of study, the actual learning happens elsewhere, not in lectures. Physics requires vast amounts of exercises. Some subjects require massive amounts of reading and writing. In practical subjects, only the practical work teaches what the work really is.

I do not break any confidences if I say that Porjo is a gifted physicist and an extreme nerd (in the most positive sense of that term). He studied physics in Turku in the 90’s, and I studied physics in Helsinki in the 90’s. Although we only met at work in the 00’s, our student experiences are similar.

That is why I found Porjo’s skepticism about lectures so familiar, even heartwarming. I never got much out of lectures, even the good ones. I was mostly too fidgety to even sit in them, even the good ones. I did pass, and even got a PhD (though it took me exactly twenty years), but I was no academic star.

This was quite common in the University of Helsinki’s physics department in the 90’s. All the familiar faces sat at the cafeteria, not the lecture rooms. (Actually, the largest number of familiar faces sat at the library doing physics exercises. It is not possible to graduate in physics without undergoing a punishing regime of thousands of calculations. For every hour spent goofing off from lectures, I spent two hours doing exercises).

But — and here is the crux — we are talking about maybe a few dozen people. Not really an elite, but an unusual crowd. We spent our first kegger making physics calculations, even though there was beer on offer (no women though, for some reason). We spent all keggers that way, actually. Those were the days. The Big Bang Theory may be a parody of physicists, but it is a subtle parody.

What do the learning experiences of this crowd teach us about the ways in which education in Finland should be arranged?

Nothing.

The situation Porjo describes applies to a very specific group of Finns: introverted people who are voluntarily studying scientific or technical subjects. In practice, this group would teach itself the basics whether or not there was any formal teaching at all.

Should the world rotate around this group? It is trendy to suggest that a nation succeeds only if its cognitive elite succeeds. Give the top percent all the resources it needs, weed out the weak ones, and let Darwinism do its magic. The fittest will survive and save society.

I beg to disagree. A nation is on average as competent as its average citizens. Finland has no Nobel laureates, but even a mediocre engineer is quite good and well-rounded here. This is almost certainly one reason why the cell phone business rose so quickly in such a small country. A company could recruit almost anyone at random, and be reasonably sure that they were reasonably competent.

This business has now collapsed (see the Finnish-only blog by Timo Tokkonen), but the average competence means that people will learn to do something other than cell phones, although the transition will be painful. If all Finnish engineers were only trained to optimize Symbian code, we would be in trouble. Luckily, the educational system is well-rounded, at all levels.

So who should we focus on: the elite or the average? Porjo’s blog gives an immediate answer. The most gifted and motivated people will dig up their knowledge from under a rock, if they have to. All they need is Net access. After that there is no particular need to pamper them.

Resources should be put into providing a good well-rounded education for the average Finn. (In fact, I feel that a civilized society should give even its weakest members the best feasible education, even when it doesn’t seem to make quantitative economic sense. I have no rational defense for this idea, it is simply an ideology).

Since I know nothing about pedagogy, I don’t quite know what this means. Probably, it means that education must be quite structured, perhaps repetitive, and even include some formal discipline. It definitely cannot mean the type of anarchistic workaholism that got me and my friends through. But I am happy to leave the exact definitions to the professionals.

The key point is that in this debate, the experiences of people like Porjo and me are largely irrelevant. We have our place in the margins of society (an important place even). But in terms of the education debate, almost everyone else is more important.

Net voyeurs: a national resource?

If only we could utilize Internet voyeurs properly, how much could we get done?

[Finnish version: click here].

Recent tragedies in Finland have shown a gap between official communications and what is available on the Internet. Official communications are terse and protect the privacy of the people involved. The mainstream media, for the most part, does not publish the names of victims. However, any and all information can be found on the Internet. There are forums for everything, in good taste and bad. We haven’t yet gotten to the stage where crime scene photos are circulated, but that day may come. Petteri Järvinen summarizes this well in his blog (my translation).

“The Finnish police communicate very little about accidents and their victims. Names are withheld, based on privacy arguments or “tactical reasons”. The principle is good, but is it valid anymore in the Internet age? Net detectives can sometimes know more even than the police … Voyeurism is improper and insensitive, but it is an unavoidable consequence of the information society”.

That is true. Where transparency, there voyeurism. And especially now, with the recession, Finland is filled with thousands of people who have nothing better to do than sit at a computer. Net detectives have competence and time, and everything that can be found will be found.

The old-fashioned high-quality media does seem lost. Names are only published when everyone knows them already. Details are omitted, even when everyone knows them. Old-fashioned.

So? Why are professionalism and ethics a bad thing? Let it be old-fashioned. It is no one’s loss if the real media reports with professionalism and respect, and lets others dig in the dirt. After all, if all information is available elsewhere, then everyone can find a source that suits his mental level.

In fact there is no need for the media to lower itself, because the “bottom” is already raising itself. I admit (with shame) that I have followed (with interest) on the Internet as people have filled in the puzzles of these tragedies. The motives of these detectives are fuzzy at best, but there is one uncomfortable fact about them: they are good.

Not good journalists, but good intelligence operatives, as it were. Which begs the question: since the net detectives have the time and resources to find out things that the police cannot find, what could they achieve if they turned their energies to something socially useful?

Here is a concrete example whose details I have fuzzified (the exact information can be found on the Internet).

A Finnish city wants to expand its municipal waste landfill. The operator has tried to use a “light” approval process rather than the “heavy” one needed for all projects with a major environmental impact. The decision-makers did wake up, and are requiring the heavier process. Much of the information is secret, but public documents and information on the Internet can be used to piece together a rough picture.

The amount of waste is planned to increase by a factor of five. The heavy process is needed if certain thresholds are exceeded; perhaps by coincidence, all projected values are exactly below these thresholds. The application cites a change in the municipal waste strategy. This strategy, however, is not yet public (which only becomes apparent by searching through multiple sources).

Nothing illegal has happened, this may not even be in the grey zone, but it should still raise some alarm bells. In fact it has, and the situation in now being monitored (on the Internet). With near-zero resources, but monitored nonetheless.

There are hundreds or thousands of such cases. If even a fraction of the best Internet voyeurs put their energy into these issues, what would happen? A lot, I would claim. I am not an optimist, and I do not expect to see anything happen, but there is a lot of potential.

More on open monitoring: here.

Punishment feedback

 

Not admitting that criminals are humans will lead to a nasty society, admitting it is expensive. Can this be used to create a feedback loop that makes the world a better place? We have discussed punishment mechanisms before on Zygomatica, but in Finnish only (on the stupidity of punishing car drivers for unintentional mistakes,  on substituting soft technology for hard punishment and on why these don’t necessarily work).

While I mostly lurk, I recently took part in a couple of conversation on Google+, about last meals (here) and death penalty (here). In the best spirit of internet discussions my comments were a bit off topic.

I’m too lazy to check what is google’s policy on quoting the discussions, but I’m pretty confident that I can use my own blurts. You’ll have to go through the above links if you want to see the responses.

In the first instance there was some discussion on how expensive it is to keep people in prison vs. executing them. This got me thinking about when and where has capital punishment been used a lot. My feeling is (I’m not an expert on this) that when it has been used a lot it has been either fairly cheap or even profitable. Cheap because of summary executions and profitable through slave labor. This of course only considers the direct costs. I then tried to generalize and came up with this (includes edits to correct spelling):

+G.G exile would be a cheap alternative and would make it easy to get rid of people breaking the law. I’m afraid this would eventually lead to a dystopia, through someone’s utopia. As punishing would now be cheap and easy there would be more punishing for less serious crimes. Because the people thinking differently would be exiled the remaining population would be more extreme and would change the law. Some people would break these new laws and be exiled. It’s called positive feedback and it leads to an unstable system. This is how a dictatorship is created, get rid of the people who think the system should different.

I think it is impossible to create an acceptable definition for crime that would make a clear distinction between political views and actual crimes. Thus there is no way of cramming cheap punishment and pursuit of happiness in one society.

Comments in the other discussion also referred to cost of the prison system, so the same thought came to me and I came up with this:

To keep up the heat up in the discussion I propose that the living conditions of prisoners are made so much better that the associated cost really does hurt the taxpayer. This will give a feedback mechanism that will lower the number of people that need to be imprisoned.

In the other direction, lowering the cost of punishment, lies a society where none of you will want to live.

And after someone appeared interested I continued with this:

+V. M. many (if not most) crimes are intimately connected to the surrounding society. In effect due to the path their lives have taken the criminals don’t have much choice. These people may have made bad decisions which have led to their current situation, but even those choices could have been different had the surroundings been different.

To lower the number of people that end up being punished society, not only the potential criminals need to change. This change will encounter resistance and it will cost money. By increasing the cost of punishment the trade off becomes visible. Take care of the criminals inside the prison or take care of the potential criminals outside of it. The current situation is that the harm (i.e. overcoming the resistance to change and the cost of running a different kind of society) has been externalized to the criminals.

This was immediately debunked as including the “economists mistake”, i.e. that I had assumed a rational actor. It was further claimed that my actor would need fairly advanced reasoning powers and that the evidence shows that this is not the case. To this I commented:

+V. M. “But it already does, and he already doesn’t” this is not true, society is clearly changed by imprisoning a large number of people. Further, it is done specifically because crime hurts the actor. What I am proposing is actually only a different change.

I think the reason behind your argument is not that society is not changed or that the actor is not rational enough. It is that the actor doesn’t care. It is happening to other people elsewhere. This is a valid point.

There however is a trick that has been used before. Grant that the criminals are humans and they cannot be stuffed to small boxes without anything to do. (You can reuse this if you change the word human to “chicken” or “pig” etc.). From this it follows that to lower costs you can either lower the number of criminals by changing society in a way that steers people away from crime or you can use other methods which are usually excluded by admitting humanity. I believe this method has been used in some European countries with a degree of success. Because the admission of humanity can be done at an emotional level less rationality is required.

Basically I tried to show that the evidence does not lead to the conclusion made in the critique and offered an alternate explanation to the observations. I then tried again to sell my idea, which I still think is valid.

In summary: If you increase the cost of punishment it will lead to less of it, if for no other reason then simply because it can not be afforded. I don’t think that the real crux is making the actor act rationally. The difficult part is making her admit that criminals are humans and deserve to be treated as such, regardless of what they have done.

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