Gattaca (1997)

Last night, on a colleague's recommendation I watched Gattaca(1997). A very interesting film indeed, and one that provides a surprisingly mature and humanistic take on the complex issues surrounding the use of genetic screening.

You are wondering why "complex", isnt it an open and shut case of being plainly wrong?

There is an operational issue associated with genetic screening (to make hiring decisions), that I think hasnt been resolved even today.

As an example: suppose there is a job requiring a person to look at a flashing light and based on it's color press the appropriate button -- when the color flashes red, a red button on the panel is to be pressed within 5 seconds, and when the light is green or not flashing, no action is to be performed. So, it turns out that there is a single vacancy available for this job and we seek to find the "appropriate" candidate. What would be a rational approach to pick the one appropriate from the 50 applications for the job?

As such, to perform this job a person would need to have the basic physical capability for color identification and a certain level of eye-hand coordination. So, at the basic level, the very job description results in a separation of the group of 50 candidates into two groups -- A, those who possess the physical capability to perform the task, and B, those who do not have these capabilities. With regard to human categories, A would tend to coincide with a notion of "normal" people, and B coincide with those who have physical disabilities related to color-vision and eye-hand coordination, whether due to age or "abnormalities". This separation is based on a rational considerations of competence alone but at the same time it is also clearly discriminatory in the sense of separating the "capables" from the "incapables". Is this fair/acceptable? Is there a consistent way to conceptually resolve this scenario (no, Social Darwinism is not an acceptable solution!!)?

In Gattaca, this is taken several steps further where genetic screening is used to discriminate between those suited for space-expeditions and those who are not. At every step it is apparent that the "valids" are indeed physically "superior" to Vincent (the protagonist) who is an "in-valid" (i.e. they can run faster, swim faster, etc). However, the issue in the movie is that genetic screening as the only method of screening results in false negatives (i.e. could say that X is "incapable", when X is indeed capable). It is this operational shortcoming -- the possibility for false negatives -- that forms the basis for the film.

Now, on operational grounds one could argue that if the battery of tests were more comprehensive then such false negatives would be impossible, and an act of fraud like what Vincent perpetrates would in fact be unethical and dangerous putting other lives at risk. So to return to my main point: While the operational limitations and the possibility of mistakes is often the source for outcry, even in our present times discrimination based on the criterion of "competence" to resolve competition wouldnt make many people cringe especially when performed accurately with the tools and methods of science. How is this to be resolved?

Errol Morris

:) Errol Morris, the film-maker, was on campus last week and gave an excellent talk titled "Cinema, Photography, and Lying". Unlike other talks and discussions about this issue, he didnt take the philosopher's approach of starting with the semantic tar-pit of trying to define "truth" (I was greatly thankful for that!). Instead he talked about his deliberate anti-cinema verite approach to documentary making and using various film-clips and witty anecdotes by the end of the talk he had engaged with this issue in a very interesting way.

The key message that he emphasized was that human beings have an incredible capability for self-deception (yes that includes me and you, good reader), clogged up in a psychological morass of rationalizations, motivations, values and such. It was the strange absurdity of this that he sought to explore in all his documentaries (the clips he had were mainly from The Fog of War:Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, The Thin Blue Line, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. and Vernon, Florida). In all of these films, as viewers we can see that the central characters seem to reveal an inordinate level of self-deception leaving us wondering -- how could anybody so thoroughly deceive themselves and have such beliefs, when further inquiry would reveal that the facts unambiguously indicate otherwise.

So his thesis is less about the ultimate questions of truth (i.e. whether it exists) but more about the pragmatics of it i.e. a person's capability to challenge the accuracy of his/her own beliefs and conception of the world and to place it under serious scrutiny. To illustrate it, he had a funny re-rendering of Santayana's observation -- "those who forget the past, are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility".

To summarize my understanding of all this, here's an example, suppose I have a red apple in a brown paper bag. Now Bob comes along and asks me what the color of the apple is, as he cannot see it through the brown paper bag. Now, I could deliberately lie to him and say that the apple is green in color, fully knowing that it was actually red. This is a vastly different scenario from the following situation where Bob comes along and to the same question I insist that the apple is green. Now all I need to do verify if I am right is to open the bag and see that the apple is actually red. However even after seeing that it is red if I continue to fervently believe it is green (and would even swear in court that it was so) then this situation begins to border on the absurd. When we map {apple, Bob, and me} in different ways to {films, film-makers, viewers}, we begin to see Morris' take on films, truth and it's relation to us the viewers.

Some updates

Films I've seen recently:

• Sideways(2004): A truly excellent film! Much like About Schmidt this is a very perceptive study of loneliness but wrapped in a package that is very funny and tasting like fine wine.
  
  
• The Weather Underground(2002): There is a lot to be said for this film but it will have to wait for another post and another day.
  
  
• Human Nature (2001): Yawn -- smart, innovative, a little too preachy, intermittently funny and not particularly compelling. [;-) how's that for being opinionated and snobbish!]

A response from the State dept

Ah - the government responds!!

So, in my posting yesterday about the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment overview I mentioned Juliet Eilperin's article "U.S. Wants No Warming Proposal: Administration Aims to Prevent Arctic Council Suggestions", which talks about the report being leaked to the press and (based on assorted unnamed sources) notes that the Bush administration has been highly non-committal towards making any major policy decisions.

"Several individuals close to the negotiations said the Bush administration -- which opposes mandatory cuts in carbon emissions on the grounds that they will cost American jobs -- had repeatedly resisted even mild language that would endorse the report's scientific findings or call for mandatory curbs on greenhouse gas emissions.

An early draft of the policy statement -- which is set to be issued two weeks after the 144-page scientific overview is released Monday -- included a paragraph saying that to achieve the goals set under a 1992 international climate change treaty known as the Rio Accord, the "Arctic Council urges the member states to individually and when appropriate, jointly, adopt climate change strategies across relevant sectors. These strategies should aim at the reduction of the emission of greenhouse gases."

The administration has pushed to drop that section. As one senior State Department official who asked not to be identified put it, "We're bound by the administration's position. We're not going to make global climate policy at the Arctic Council."

At the same time, the article also quotes Paula Dobriansky, the undersecretary of state for global affairs who will be leading the U.S. delegation to Reykjavik, Iceland, later this month as saying that "...the administration supports publication of the policy report this month. "Allegations that the United States is seeking to suppress the policy recommendations are simply not true," she said...."

So
All that said, this morning's edition of the Washington Post has a letter from Richard A. Boucher, a spokesman for the State Department responding to Juliet Eilperin's claims titled -- "The U.S. Commitment to a Climate Study" and begins "Contrary to Juliet Eilperin's Nov. 4 news story "U.S. Wants No Warming Proposal; Administration Aims to Prevent Arctic Council Suggestions," the United States is an active participant in the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum that addresses important scientific and environmental issues in the Arctic..." and goes on to emphatically restate that there was never any question of the US govt's commitment to this issue.

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So now it remains to see what the November 24th report with policy recommendations is going to be like.

Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report

Last night on C-SPAN, I watched the presentation accompanying the official release of the overview of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report [download]. I emphasize "official" because this overview was apparently leaked to the press last week as the findings show the Bush administration's policies in a very bad light.

The content of the report was coherently and cogently presented by the scientists addressing both an evaluation of the present state of the Arctic as well as projections based on several different global warming scenarios (using different models). Independent of the broader implications, the presentation went to some length to explain the role of sea-ice, it's impact on the climate and ecology, and various mechanisms by which these changes could have global effects. (I highly recommend the well-written, graphic intensive, lay-person accessible overview which I have provided a link to above).

The findings and projections are particularly of concern due to the extremely short time scales [~10-20 years] over which they can be expected to occur, and the magnitude of these changes to the ecology and climate of the Arctic, even with optimistic models of global temperature change. Some of the more extended projections included the possibility of Greenland melting away almost entirely by the end of the century, and also the possibility of the polar bear becoming extinct due to the disappearance of sea-ice.

During the Q&A session after the presentations, there was one particularly interesting question (and answer!). The question was whether the report was largely filled with "negative" findings and if it had any "positive" findings in it. The response from Robert Corell (the chairman of the panel) was very good: He said that this was a question of perspective.

• From the standpoint of the indigenous people who lived in the Arctic, these climate changes were almost completely "negative" because it was causing severe changes to their basic subsistence life-styles (for example, impacts on the Arctic vegetation due to increased freeze-and-thaw cycles which directly effected the caribou and reindeer populations) and also to the safety of their homes due to extensive coastal erosion and flooding (184 villages out of 213 in Alaska itself, leave alone the rest of the Arctic, have been effected and may need relocation soon as also confirmed by an independent GAO report released last year).
  
  
• From the perspective of new economic prospects -- the "positive" aspects were the melting ice was making Arctic resources more accessible (apparently British Petroleum had just finalized a deal to open a several billion dollar oil-drilling outfit in Scandinavia), enabling new land to be made available for agriculture, and also that due to the melting sea-ice there was increasing chance of a new northern shipping channels opening up.

So whether all this was "negative" or "positive" was truly indeed in the eyes of the beholder.

A particularly noticeable aspect of the presentation was that at every step the presenters were repeatedly trying to emphasize:

1. that this was a work of science and not policy. [The policy report based on the scientific report is due to be released on November 24th]
   
2. that it was a legitimate, non-controversial scientific work involving a large international group of scientists and that the 1200-page report was extensively reviewed and vetted by non-governmental and governmental scientists and agencies as well as the different indigenous Arctic communities.
   
3. that the funding for this study was provided by the governments of the Arctic countries, so this was not (atleast by definition) an "activitist, anti-establishment" scientific work

This strong defensive posture was highly amusing. I imagine for a govt-funded study to reveal findings that are highly critical to the govt must be a great source of pressure. But that apart I'm also glad for this defensive approach to doing the science -- when it could provide the basis for policy decisions which could have significant long term effects, I imagine that it is not a time to be lax or overconfident.

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Noting the presence of a Washington Post reporter at the presentation who asked a couple of questions, I looked up today's edition to see how this had been reported. The article (by Juliet Eilperin) is loosely faithful though choosing to take the more sensationalist route with the title "Study Says Polar Bears Could Face Extinction: Warming Shrinks Sea Ice Mammals Depend On". Furthermore, it seems to have found an expert to provide the token soundbite cautioning against a hasty acceptance of these results:

"....While some questioned the report -- Los Alamos Laboratory atmospheric scientist Petr Chylek said he has charted declining temperatures at the summit of Greenland's ice sheet between 1986 and 2003 -- environmentalists said it [the report] shows the need for stricter curbs on greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming."

:-( Apart from the credential that he was from the Los Alamos Labs, sadly there is no information provided about how the reporter came to possess this piece of information -- whether it was in a scientific article or from a personal conversation -- so it did little to inform the article or contribute to it's understanding.

The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (Yukiyukite shingun) (1987)

Saw this terrific Japanese documentary last night. The director Hara Kazuo was also there in person providing some amusing anecdotes about Okuzaki (the main protagonist in the film) and answering questions about the film.

There were some shocking revelations in the film where these old men who were once soldiers posted in New Guinea during World War-II admit with great guilt and agony that they had resorted to cannibalism to stay alive under those hostile conditions. It began with eating the natives and the enemy soldiers but at some point they even began to even kill each other. The film brings out the contrast that while Okuzaki came away from New Guinea (where only 300 of the 1300 soldiers who went there returned alive) intensely angry with the Emperor for having put them in such a situation and wanting to do something about it, the others had quietly integrated themselves back into society despite feeling the same anger and guilt.

1. The blurb from the HFA, where I saw the film: "A true radical, Hara Kazuo has produced a series of shockingly personal documents which challenge the mores of postwar Japanese society through stark, revelatory modes of presentation. In The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, Hara turns his probing camera on Kenzo Okuzaki, a World War II veteran who served prison terms for murder and for shooting pachinko balls at the emperor. Okuzaki seeks out members of a squadron who were responsible for the death of two of their own soldiers. The pursuit grows stranger and more unexpected as Okuzaki becomes more aggressive in his tactics, physically attacking anyone who resists his inquiries. Although fully engaged in the filming process, Hara’s reserved, observational position allows his volatile subject to express his unpopular political position with reckless abandon."
   
   
2. For a good (thought dated) commentary on the film: "Filming at the Margins: The Documentaries of Hara Kazuo", Jefferey Ruoff and Kenneth Ruoff, Iris: A Journal of Theory on Image and Sound, no. 16 (Spring 1993), 115-126.
   

Breaking news: Darfur

This morning while much of the media focus is on the Presidential elections, there is worrying news from Darfur [AP][Reuters] -- "The Sudanese army has surrounded camps holding internally displaced people near Nyala in Sudan's Darfur region, and aid agencies fear they could be forcibly moved, a U.N. official said Tuesday".

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If you havent been keeping track of this unfolding crisis so far:

• Synposis of Darfur conflict with several highly informative links [from Wikipedia]
  
• Also see: Depoortere et al., "Violence and mortality in West Darfur, Sudan (2003–04): epidemiological evidence from four surveys", The Lancet, Volume 364, Issue 9442, 9 October 2004, Pages 1315-1320