Cool Story, Wyss

This is pretty cool:

BOSTON -- The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University announced today that it has been awarded a $12.3 million, four-year grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a treatment for sepsis, a commonly fatal bloodstream infection. Sepsis is a major cause of injury and death among combat-injured soldiers in the field, as well as patients in hospital intensive care units.

The proposed treatment would involve a miniaturized, dialysis-like device that could rapidly clear the blood of a wide range of pathogens, much as a living human spleen does, without removing normal blood cells, proteins, fluids, or electrolytes. This novel "Spleen-on-a-Chip" would be portable, self-contained, and easily inserted into the peripheral blood vessels of a septic patient or soldier.

The award is part of DARPA's Dialysis Like Therapeutics program, which seeks to develop ways to dramatically decrease the morbidity and mortality of sepsis, thereby saving thousands of lives and billions of dollars in the United States each year. Worldwide, more than 18 million cases of sepsis are reported every year, with more than six million resulting in death.

9-11 Nine Years Later: The Definition of Insanity

Creating new enemies?This is Part III of a five-part series on the ninth anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 attacks.

Since the attacks of September 11th, 2001 and their effects are the biggest issues of our time, they should not be discussed only briefly on or around that date, but the attacks and their implications should be explored and examined repeatedly until the problems we have created for ourselves are resolved.

It remains unclear whether Benjamin Franklin or Albert Einstein first said, "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."  If this quote is to be taken as truth, then our policy since September 11th, 2001 is insane.  Two principle direct, observable causes of the September 11th attacks were (1) bureaucratic incompetence - a lack of communication between the FBI and the CIA resulted in the terrorists who perpetrated the September 11th attacks falling off the grid and not re-emerging until mid-flight; and (2) aggressive policy in the Middle East - the Middle East is a fairly complicated place.  By playing politics with the Middle East, basically breaking it up into meaningless nation states - meaningless because the Middle East is largely organized along tribal or ethnic lines - we created power vacuums, which usually we tried to micromanage by supporting dictators loyal to us over the Soviets.  This stirred up grassroots hatred and caused otherwise disparate peoples to organize and unite around mutual anti-Americanism (for example, Iran's fervent support for Palestine, al Qaeda in Afghanistan).  It might have turned out differently if, while maintaining a firm grip on political control of the region, we had also encouraged economic and infrastructure development in conjunction with intra-regional competition (our East Asia strategy under MacArthur).  

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Democratic Militarism

One of the best known theories of Political Science is the "Democratic Peace Theory" which notes that democracies rarely go to war with one another.  The most prominent explanation for this historical trend is that voting brings accountability preventing leaders from unnecessarily engaging in war.  However, Daniel Larison emphatically skewers the notion that Democracies aren't particularly warlike:

States that do not respect international legal norms vis-a-vis other states tend not to abuse human rights at home (or at least they abuse them much less often), while states that abuse human rights at home want to maintain certain strong international legal norms if only to guarantee non-interference in their internal affairs. Internal and external policies are never entirely separable, because the same government is responsible for both, but looking at the last sixty-five years it is not at all clear that repressive and abusive states are more likely to disrupt or undermine international stability.

In other words, China does lots of nasty things to its own citizens, but the U.S. is a hell of a lot more likely to go invade another country and do nasty things to those citizens.

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Eagle and Bear: Who's a Hawk?

Russia’s big week in the headlines proved a mixed blessing.  The announced START nuclear arms reduction agreement represented new progress and cooperation with the United States and brought a renewed sense that Cold War clash of civilizations is forever past; meanwhile the graphic violence of the subway bombings demonstrated that Islamic terrorism‘s barbarism has radicalized even the most violent asymmetric conflict in the world with new methods of casual murder.  The stories critically inform one another: the juxtaposition reminds of the opportunities that lie in even slightly improving on policy currently executed counter-productively, even if that just means finding a crappy equilibrium rather than struggling deeper into the quicksand.

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Fantasia and the Narrative Fallacy

As a new parent, I introspect constantly about the impact various media will have on my ten-month-old daughter's neural and moral development.  I seem to find major problems with nearly everything we try watching together, whether it's a disappointment with the Euclidean oversimplifications and anthropomorphism of everything in Inai Inai Baa, or a skeptical wariness of preachy Sesame Street.  While I certainly don't think it's healthy to be obsessed with a particular, fictitious, red monster, I usually convince myself that my criticisms are slightly overbearing, and that, as important as the first year of neurodevelopment is, thirty seconds a week of three triangles and a rectangle suddenly becoming a penguin is not going to force my daughter into a compartmentalized world-view or stymie an appreciation of the profound, true complexity of the cosmos.

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Brookings: How We're Doing in the World

Brookings recently released its annual survey of how the U.S. is doing in the world, a series of indices for the last four years concerning foreign policy and diplomacy as well as global economics and development.  According to the survey, the United States has made considerable diplomatic progress under the Obama Administration in nearly all spheres, while global economic indicators have gotten decidedly worse across the board.  And while this shouldn't surprise anyone, the progress made over the last two years goes to show the enduring power of a cooperative and cordial international stance and good PR, and the statistics highlight several neglected issues.

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Justified Homicide: Drone Warfare

Drone Attacks in PakistanThe Telegraph published results from a study by the New America Foundation that estimates that 32% of deaths caused by drones attacks in Pakistan since 2004 were civilians.

Their report, The Year of the Drone, studied 114 drone raids in which more than 1200 people were killed. Of those, between 549 and 849 were reliably reported to be militant fighters, while the rest were civilians.

"The true civilian fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 32 per cent," the foundation reported.

The actual study demonstrates how difficult it is to reliably ascertain who was killed by the attacks, as the confirmed number killed varies from 834 to 1,216.  If just the total casualty count varies by that much it's hard to imagine that knowing who exactly is included in the deaths is all that precise.  Nevertheless, the ratio of combatants to fatalities in either the low (34%) or the high (30%) estimate are close enough that their figure passes the smell test.

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Flawless Victory: Airstrikes and COIN

Yesterday, in a television address that was aired nationally in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChystal apologized for the NATO airstrike on Sunday that mistook a civilian bus convoy for insurgent reenforcement to the battle in Marja and resulted in as many as 27 deaths including four women and a child.  Apart from wondering about efficacy of television addresses as strategic communication in a country where in 2005 only 19% of households owned a TV, NATO's newfound sensitivity to civilian collateral damage underscores the difficulty of counter-insurgency warfare.  Can the U.S. win wars fought with its principal advantages used sparingly, a tactical necessity to avoid any mistakes to adhere to larger strategic goals and sharp political reprisals from allied leaders should any errors occur?  Moreover, will we have the patience and will to even try?

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The Evolution of Attitudes about Gay Rights.

No More Dan Choi'sAfter a first year of mostly punting gay rights down the road, President Obama's promise to end Don't Ask, Don't Tell at the State of Union felt reassuring, if long overdue.  Still, supporters of expanded gay rights probably weren't holding their breaths after nearly two decades of riding in the back of the bus of Democratic Party priorities.  Yet, within the week, Bob Gates and Mike Mullen affirmed their support for the Presidents decision before Congress.  They are temperamentally conservatively men so there was no grand speeches on equality, just support for a commission to explore changing the policy accompanied by an immediate change in enforcement, so that others could not "out" a gay member of the military.  So we will have to wait for a change that practically every subgroup in the country supports.  It was great comfort to hear Mike Mullen's statement of support on the subject: “No matter how I look at the issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.”

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Osama bin Laden is Conan and America is NBC

The upcoming trial of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed should be used to redefine the War on Terror as being about bringing the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice.

The Washington Post recently reported that al Qaeda Grand Poohbah, Osama bin Laden, has endorsed the failed Christmas Day attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound jet:

The message delivered to you through the plane of the heroic warrior Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a confirmation of the previous messages sent by the heroes of the Sept. 11," he said of the Nigerian suspect in the Dec. 25 botched attack.

"If our messages had been able to reach you through words we wouldn't have been delivering them through planes."

Directing his statements at President Barack Obama - "from Osama to Obama," he said - bin Laden added: "America will never dream of security unless we will have it in reality in Palestine."

While bin Laden would seemingly make a perfect Bond villain, this is a non-story.

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Book Review: David Loyn - In Afghanistan

In a new reoccurring feature, The Inductive will review relevant policy books.

David Loyn's In Afghanistan: Two Hundred Years of British, Russian and American Occupation tells the story of history forgotten and repeated.  Afghanistan has never been important in and of itself, but it touches so many important things, geographically, strategically, politically and religiously, that the great powers sought to possess it and had to pay again and again to learn that it will not be ruled.  Peppered with references to current battles in its descriptions of the violence of antiquity and as it reaches the modern day the locations reveal the permanent violence that we continue.  I felt overwhelmed by the sense that our current war there was not even the culmination of history, but its pathetic continuation as a lesson forever unlearned.  

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Doomsday Clock Reset at Six Minutes to Midnight

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which measures the civilization-ending potential of nuclear weapons, climate change, and potentially dangerous emerging technologies in the life sciences, issued a press release yesterday announcing that the famous Doomsday Clock would be reset from five minutes to midnight to six minutes to midnight.  From the BAS Board:

It is 6 minutes to midnight. We are poised to bend the arc of history toward a world free of nuclear weapons. For the first time since atomic bombs were dropped in 1945, leaders of nuclear weapons states are cooperating to vastly reduce their arsenals and secure all nuclear bomb-making material. And for the first time ever, industrialized and developing countries alike are pledging to limit climate-changing gas emissions that could render our planet nearly uninhabitable. These unprecedented steps are signs of a growing political will to tackle the two gravest threats to civilization--the terror of nuclear weapons and runaway climate change.

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Sullivan: America Wakes up to the Shift in Global Power

Andrew Sullivan recently wrote a column for the Times Online called "America wakes up to the shift in global power."  Sullivan's column is a response to recent Pew Research Center polls that have found record levels of support for positions on international affairs commonly labeled "isolationist."  According to the polls, 44 percent of Americans feel the U.S. should "go its own way" on international affairs; 49% of Americans believe the U.S. should "mind its own business."  The same poll shows a majority of Americans think of China as the world's pre-eminent economic power and that 47% think Afghanistan will revert to the Taliban after U.S. troop withdrawal. 

Sullivan interprets the polls as showing a new public recognition of global realties.  It is rare for me to disagree with Sullivan, however, I feel the poll results are skewed by disappointment with current U.S. international policy, a populace manipulated by politicians and media, public recognition of American hypocrisy, a poor economy with unsustainable debt, a very short-term perspective, a widespread zero-sum worldview, and a more-interconnected world.  That is to say, the poll results reflect pessimistic dread and misunderstanding more than reality.  That is not to say, however, that America isn't on a dangerous path.  I have clarified my position on America's standing in the world in my article, The Default Power and the Sword of Damocles.

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Obama Makes No One Happy: Afghanistan Surge

David Guttenfelder Photo of Troops Sleeping in AfghanistanThere is a great Calvin and Hobbes quote - "A good compromise leaves everyone mad" - that sums up Obama's decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.  The left has learned more about this war it wants nothing more to do with, while the right does not like Obama's plan to start removing troops in July 2011 as it seems defeatist.  I'm more charitable, but then this is exactly the recommendation I gave last month: give the generals what they want on the condition of leaving, rather than create a fragile peace that invested us there long term.  In a vacuum we should just leave now, but Afghanistan isn't a vacuum.

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The Terrorists Never Win- But Neither Do We

On Veteran's Day, it seems fitting to discuss the murder of 13 members of the Army at Fort Hood last week.  To start with the obvious, the Fort Hood murders were despicable and the circumstances, a radical Muslim shooter who yelled ""Allahu Akbar" as he opened fire, were another reminder how fundamentalist Islam can be used as motivation for atrocities.  There have been reports that Nidal Malik Hasan attended the same Mosque as two 9/11 hijackers, vocally had advocated suicide bombing, and had attempted to contact al-Qaeda.  For now, it seems that he acted without informing any organized terror groups of his plan; though clearly the attack itself was planned and not rash or spur of the moment.  For those who believe that radical Islam poses an existential threat to Western civilization the temptation to view the attack as proof that their entries for greater vigilance have been under-appreciated must be alluring.  To succumb to that temptation and make the specific general is wrong-headed and frankly dangerous.  

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