Eeeeek!

WHO says who's drinking

The World Health Organization, WHO, just released its Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health. Excerpts include:

"Alcohol consumption and problems related to alcohol vary widely around the world, but the burden of disease and death remains significant in most countries. Alcohol consumption is the world’s third largest risk factor for disease and disability; in middle-income countries, it is the greatest risk. Alcohol is a causal factor in 60 types of diseases and injuries and a component cause in 200 others. Almost 4% of all deaths worldwide are attributed to alcohol, greater than deaths caused by HIV/AIDS, violence or tuberculosis. Alcohol is also associated with many serious social issues, including violence, child neglect and abuse, and absenteeism in the workplace.

"The harmful use of alcohol is a particularly grave threat to men. It is the leading risk factor for death in males ages 15–59, mainly due to injuries, violence and cardiovascular diseases. Globally, 6.2% of all male deaths are attributable to alcohol, compared to 1.1% of female deaths. Men also have far greater rates of total burden attributed to alcohol than women – 7.4% for men compared to 1.4% for women. Men outnumber women four to one in weekly episodes of heavy drinking – most probably the reason for their higher death and disability rates. Men also have much lower rates of abstinence compared to women. Lower socioeconomic status and educational levels result in a greater risk of alcohol-related death, disease and injury – a social determinant that is greater for men than women.

"Worldwide per capita consumption of alcoholic beverages in 2005 equaled 6.13 litres of pure alcohol consumed by every person aged 15 years or older.  The highest consumption levels can be found in the developed world, mostly the Northern Hemisphere, but also in Argentina, Australia and New Zealand. Medium consumption levels can be found in southern Africa, with Namibia and South Africa having the highest levels, and in North and South America. Low consumption levels can be found in the countries of North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean region, and southern Asia and the Indian Ocean. These regions represent large populations of the Islamic faith, which have very high rates of abstention.

"Globally, 45% of the world’s population has never consumed alcohol (men: 35%; women: 55%). In addition, 13.1% (men: 13.8%; women: 12.5%) have not consumed alcohol during the past year. In conclusion, almost half of all men and two thirds of all women worldwide have abstained from drinking alcohol in the past 12 months."

In other news, global spirits company Diageo announced today its largest acquisition in a decade, acquiring Turkish spirits company Mey Içki Sanayi ve Ticaret AS for $2.11 billion, giving Diageo access to a vast distribution network for its brands.  According to The Wall Street Journal:

"But Turkey, though a secular democracy, is predominantly Muslim—and alcohol consumption, forbidden under Islam, has become a point of contention in recent months, with the conservative-leaning ruling party tightening regulations on booze. In January, the government banned the use of drink-company names in sports clubs, restricted advertising that promotes drinking and confined alcohol sales to stores in sequestered areas. The move—criticized by some of the ruling party's opponents as emblematic of a hidden Islamist agenda—came just a few months after the government raised a special tax on alcohol by 30%."

Life

Keith Richards' memoir Life lives up to its name. It's a fiercely honest book that starts with his youth in Dartford, England, where he grew up younger and smaller than his school mates due to his late December birthday. It then sweeps more than 60 years from the early days of The Rolling Stones, through all of the albums, tours, loves, lives, and of course, the drugs and booze.

Richards is a musician who loves other musicians and what happens when they come together in places like Nellcote, France, where the Stones made what most consider their best album, Exile on Main Street, and in studios in New Orleans, New York, LA, Muscle Shoals, Montserrat, Jamaica and even the "Room Called L" in his home in Weston, Connecticut, next door to my Westport roots.

Richards writes honestly about drugs with few regrets, explaining that it was equal parts fun, addiction, and living up to the mythology that the media churned out as mates like Graham Parsons and countless others OD'd in their 20s:

"I can't untie the threads of how much I played up the part that was written for me. People think I'm still a goddamn junkie. It's thirty years since I gave up the dope! Image is like a long shadow. People love that image. They imagined me, they made me, the folks out there created this folk hero. Bless their hearts."

There are many rants about Mick Jagger, his moods, and need to control all around him. Richards calls him Brenda and makes fun of his "lead vocalist syndrome," "tiny todger," and knighthood, but says he loves and hates him like a brother. The Stones' nearly 50-year run more than speaks for itself.

What's Next, Watson?

The three-day "man versus machine" Jeopardy competition between the game show's all-time champions and IBM's Watson computer concluded last night with Watson's victory.

Contestant Ken Jennings finished in second-place with his Final Jeopardy question "Who is Stoker?," adding a parenthetic "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords."

Now that the fun is over the big question is what's next for Watson?

According to today's Wall Street Journal:

"IBM is trying to commercialize Watson now. On Thursday the company plans to announce a research agreement to develop commercial applications of the Watson technology for the health-care industry. Columbia University Medical Center and the University of Maryland School of Medicine are joining the research effort."

Computerworld reports:

"IBM's computer could very well herald a whole new era in medicine. That's the vision of IBM engineers and Dr. Eliot Siegel, professor and vice chairman of the University of Maryland School of Medicine's department of diagnostic radiology.

"Siegel and his colleagues at the University of Maryland, as well as at Columbia University Medical Center, are working with IBM engineers to figure out the best ways for Watson to work hand-in-hand with physicians and medical specialists.

"Siegel, who refers to the computer not as the champ of Jeopardy but as 'Dr. Watson,' says he expects the computer, which can respond to questions with answers instead of data and spread sheets, to radically improve doctors' care of their patients.  'There is a major challenge in medicine today,' Siegel told Computerworld.' There's an incredible amount of information in a patient's medial record. It's in the form of abbreviations and short text. There's a tremendous amount of redundancy and a lot of it is written in a free-form fashion like a blog or text.'

'As a physician or radiologist, it might take me 10 or 20 or 60 minutes or more just to understand what's in a patient's medical record,' he said.  Within a year, Siegel hopes that 'Dr. Watson' will change all of that. Watson is expected to be able to take a patient's electronic medical records, digest them, summarize them for the doctor and point out any causes for concern, highlighting anything abnormal and warning about potential drug interactions.

'It offers the potential to usher in a whole new generation of medicine,' Siegel said. 'If all Dr. Watson did was allow me to organize electronic medical records and bring to my attention what's most important and summarize it, that would be incredibly valuable to me.  Even small things that Watson can do will change the way I, and my colleagues, practice medicine,' he said."

How else can Watson's technology apply to business, government and society?  Today at 11:30 am ET on ted.com, you can tweet questions to the hashtags #ibmwatson and #askwatson in a moderated chat.

Well done Watson, you've made your namesake and all IBMers proud.

IBM founder Thomas J. Watson

Love

Makonikey in Winter

Beach Bombs

A modified Bell 206 helicopter equipped with an "undercarriage-mounted array of magnetometer-studded limbs" brings new meaning to the word beachcomber.  It's currently being used in a $5.6 million effort to find unexploded ordnance left behind on Martha's Vineyard beaches from WWII training missions.

According to today's Vineyard Gazette:

"Since December the Army Corps of Engineers has been engaged to close the books on one of the more peculiar chapters in Martha’s Vineyard history, methodically surveying Tisbury Great Pond, South Beach and Chappaquiddick by land, sea and air for potentially dangerous ordnance. Seventy years ago, while the world was at war, the Vineyard was a Naval proving ground and the three sites all served as aerial dive-bombing target ranges for the screaming Grumman F6F Hellcats that emptied their practice (and not-so-practice) rockets all along the Vineyard coastline.

"Although it is designed to find metallic objects, on Thursday, after a project supervisor saw a local ad for the lost Chilmark black Labrador retriever Olive (and its attendant $5,000 reward) Mr. Christie joked that the ordnance search was doubling as a high-tech dog hunt."

Not mentioned in the article is nearby Nomans Land, an uninhabited island three miles off Martha's Vineyard that's closed to the public due to unexploded ordnance.  In addition to old bombs, Nomans Land has the disputed rune stone some claim as proof Vikings visited hundreds of years before the Pilgrims.

"Joshua Crane, the former owner of Noman's Land, first discovered the strange lettering on the large black rock late one afternoon when the setting sun sank low on the horizon in 1926.

"Mr. Crane took the oldest known photographs of the inscription in 1926, which were published in a book by Edward Gray titled Leif Eriksson, Discoverer of America. The stone was later examined by E.B. Delbarre in the New England Quarterly in 1935 and again by Hjamar P. Holland in the same publication in 1944, both of whom dismissed the rock as a hoax.

"Both scholars found it highly unlikely that an engraving could withstand the constant wave action and erosion of the ocean, and questioned the use of the Roman numerals because such enumeration was not used for dating until the 14th or 15th centuries in Scandinavia.

"But perhaps the most damning report of the authenticity of the rune stone came on August 31, 1954, when the Gazette reported that "over the past weekend Capt. Martin Dahl said he saw a Norwegian cook chisel the message into the rock in 1913."

Egypt Sphinxed by Internet

Egypt's President, General Intelligence Service and military have been outgunned by bloggers, Facebook and Twitter.

As revealed last November in Wikileak's dump of diplomatic cables, Egypt's bloggers were poised to engage the country's younger, disaffected urban population.  According to 09CAIRO544 (redacted):

"Egypt has an estimated 160,000 bloggers who write in Arabic, and sometimes in English, about a wide variety of topics, from social life to politics to literature. One can view posts ranging from videos of alleged police brutality (ref B), to comments about the GOE’s foreign policy, to complaints about separate lines for men and women in government offices distributing drivers’ licenses. One NGO contact estimated for us that a solid majority of bloggers are between 20 and 35 years old, and that about 30 percent of blogs focus on politics. Blogs have spread throughout the population to become vehicles for a wide range of activists, students, journalists and ordinary citizens to express their views on almost any issue they choose. As such, the blogs have significantly broadened the range of topics that Egyptians are able to discuss publicly."

Facebook played a key role too.  Wael Ghonim, an Egyptian Google product manager in Dubai, was responsible for setting up the Facebook page "We Are All Khaled Said," now with 500,000 members, as well as the campaign web site for opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei and ElBaradei's Facebook account.

After the most recent Tahrir Square protests began Ghonim posted on his Facebook page:

• "I said one year ago that the Internet will change the political scene in Egypt and some Friends made fun of me :)"

A day or so later Ghonim tweeted:

• "Revolution can be a Facebook event that is liked, shared and tweeted."

Ghomim was taken into custody last week by Egypt's General Intelligence Services but was reportedly scheduled to be released.

In the latest Wonderland column in The Wall Street Journal, Dan Henninger contends that social media has ushered in a new era of political instability:

"In 2007, Egypt sentenced a blogger named Kareem Amer to four years in prison for insulting the president. Ten years ago, Mr. Amer would have simply disappeared, like all the others. So what if his family and 15 friends grumbled? Stability.

"Not now. Instead, Mr. Amer became an icon of regime repression. What changed? Instead of 15 friends whispering over coffee in a café, 15,000 can talk to each other all day and every day via Internet cafés about who's getting tortured. According to the Open Net Initiative's helpful country profiles, some one million Egyptian households have broadband access, often sharing lines.

"Think what this means at the crudest level: Huge swaths of any wired population exist in a state of engagement. Instability. Before, stifled populations were mostly sullen. Now, all the time, they're in mental motion.

"Even if the Mubarak thugs somehow disperse the people in the street, they'll return some day because there is no effective way to cap their ability to share grievances on a massive scale. Egypt earlier pulled the plug on its entire Internet. So what? No nation will turn it off forever."

The New York Times' Frank Rich pooh poohed the whole connection between the Cairo protests and the Internet, calling it "simplistic Western chauvinism" that thinks "two great American digital innovations can rescue the downtrodden, unwashed masses."  His NYT colleague Thomas Friedman, who actually travels and knows a thing or two about about the web completely disagrees with him in his most recent column, China, Twitter and 20-Year-Olds vs the Pyramids.

No nation can really just turn off social networking, especially with the explosion of smartphones and texting.  You have to figure Saudi Arabia, China, North Korea, Cuba and other "fear societies" are reassessing their enemies in the cloud.

40 at 100

Groundhog Day

 

Yep