Polly Want a Legal Status

The miniature horse pictured above is notable not only for being fairly adorable, but for serving as a service animal, just like a seeing-eye dog. An article in today's New York Times Magazine reports on the expanding definition of 'service animal.' The new uses of animals are clever, none more so than the assistance parrot named Sadie which talks Jim Eggers's down from his bipolar rages:

Eggers’s [bipolar disorder with psychotic tendencies] has landed him in court several times: a disturbing-the-peace charge for pouring scalding coffee onto a man under his apartment window who annoyed him; one-year probation for threatening to kill the archbishop of St. Louis. Sadie is one of the few things keeping Eggers from snapping.

Sadie rides around town on Eggers’s back in a bright purple backpack specially designed to hold her cage. When he gets upset, she talks him down, saying: “It’s O.K., Jim. Calm down, Jim. You’re all right, Jim. I’m here, Jim.” She somehow senses when he is getting agitated before he even knows it’s happening. “I still go off on people sometimes, but she makes sure it never escalates into a big problem,” he told me, grinning bashfully at Sadie. “Now when people make me mad I just give them the bird,” he said, pulling up his sleeve and flexing his biceps, which is covered with a large tattoo of Sadie.

Unfortunately for Eggers and Sadie, the line between 'service animal' (allowed to accompany its owner into public places) and 'therapy animal' is largely unclear. The Department of Justice has proposed limiting the definition of 'service animal' to “dog or other common domestic animal,” specifically excluding “wild animals (including nonhuman primates born in captivity), reptiles, rabbits, farm animals (including any breed of horse, miniature horse, pony, pig or goat), ferrets, amphibians and rodents.”

Rather than attempt to create a bright line definition that could put Eggers and other innovative patients at risk, the DoJ should sign off on a broader definition of service animal, contingent primarily on a doctor's affadavit and simply hold users accountable for the reasonable behavior of their animals in public. The law is not meant to be twisted to preempt every extreme, improbable case.

Fiber Fix and CAPTCHA Tricks

I'm planning to post on consumer-owned fiber in more detail, later, but I wanted to respond to Nikki's post at TechRepublican. Talking about the FCC's ruling that reprimanded Comcast for strangling P2P traffic, Nikki said,

It's tempting to fall back on our old friend Let The Market Decide. After all, if Comcast throttles BitTorrent traffic, the BitTorrent folks use a different ISP, Comcast loses market share, and eventually it changes policy. Voila: market signals triumph, seed rates soar, and everyone gets a pony.

But it's not a free market.

Most Americans are confronted with a duopoly (at best) when choosing broadband providers, and the infrastructure is so expensive that it's hard to break into the market. Without meaningful competition, consumers can't push for better service. I can get my high-speed Internet from Comcast, with all its attendant issues, or I can use dial-up.

Happily, consumer owned cables could make competition among ISPs possible. This article from Ars Technica lays out the basics of the idea.

In this plan, consumers would own the "last mile" of high speed fiber cable that linked their house to the larger fiber bundle. Since ISPs could enter a market for the lower start up cost of installing a main pipeline, rather that connecting up hundreds of houses. If consumers are linked to two pipelines and can decide, month to month, which provider they prefer, the ISPs will actually have to compete with one another. More on this, later.

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Meanwhile, this Ars Technica article is just straight-up awesome. When scanning old or damaged texts, researchers are often frustrated, as the computers are unable to acurately read many words. Now, those researchers are outsourcing the job to humans in the form of CAPTCHAs.

CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are used to make sure the person filling out an online form is really a human. (The word verifications that blogger uses are a prime example). Since only humans can accurately identify these scanned words, the researchers can correct errors without anyone having to do additional work.

(Neat Bonus: these recycled CAPTCHAs (reCAPTCHAs) are actually better at filtering out bots than ordinary CAPTCHAs, since the distortions introduced by the scanning process are not the result of pure mathematical formulas, and are harder to undo.)

Science Tuesday: Curing the Symptom/Curing with the Symptom

To follow up on an earlier post, I was complaining about the modern desire to ignore oversimplify systems, favoring quick fixes (hookworm-based pills) over an acknowledgement of the complexity of its dynamics. This week's New York Times Magazine's cover story was on "Pill Popping Pets," animals who are prescribed mood-regulating drugs. This article did make a good case for treating the (inbred) dogs that suffer from compulsive, self-harming behaviors. Plus, it included this quote:

Eli Lilly brought to market its own drug Reconcile last year. The only difference between it and Prozac is that Reconcile is chewable and tastes like beef.

More worrying is that fundamentally, these people are medicating their dogs for being dogs, whether the dogs are restless from being stuck in an appartment all day or are so attached to their owners that they panic when their owners leave. The most objectively egregious example are pet owners who demand diet pills for their pets. Just feed them less! For the most part, pet prescriptions are another easy-out solution that avoids acknowledging the real problem by focusing on the symptoms.

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Then again, someone's found an awesome way to use symptoms to find cures (hat tip to Ars Technica for the story. By using data mining techniques on side effects of FDA approved drugs, scientists are finding the target mechanism of drugs and clarifying protein pathways. Unfortunately, some symptoms were just not helpful. According to Ars Technica, "so many drugs were reported to cause dizziness that it was nearly useless for the analysis."

Science Tuesday: Healing with Hookworms

First it was leeches draining excess blood from grafts, then maggots began saving limbs from amputatation, now, hookworms may be next to make the leap from pest to prescription. Scienctist David Pritchard (profiled here) knows hookworms
(in limited dosage) are safe, since he had ten crawl through his skin and set up home in his gut. He believes that the worms can suppress immune function in people with severe allergies or autoimmune disorders. So far, so good.

The National Health Services ethics committee let him conduct a study in 2006 with 30 participants, 15 of whom received 10 hookworms each. Tests showed that after six weeks, the T-cells of the 15 worm recipients began to produce lower levels of chemicals associated with inflammatory response, indicating that their immune systems were more suppressed than those of the 15 placebo recipients. Despite playing host to small numbers of parasites, worm recipients reported little discomfort. Trial participants raved about their allergy symptoms disappearing.

This is one of the good arguments for not mindlessly annihilating species, even parasites. But Dr. Pritchard's long term goals seem to miss why this kind of science is so cool. He hopes to "to figure out exactly how the worms turn down the immune-system radar, so he can borrow the tactics to develop alternatives to immune-suppressant and allergy-fighting drugs."

The problem that the hookworms are dealing with is caused by not being aware of our connection with nature. Not in some Kumbaya, Mother Spirit way, but a simple humility and willingness to recognize that removing ourselves from nature can be debilitating. Irritable Bowel Syndrom, whose rates have been skyrocketing in an age of casually prescribed antibiotics, may be caused or exacerbated by destruction of intestinal bacteria.

It may be that no distillation of hookworms can reproduce the effect actual hookworms have in a human body. We may be desperately trying to remove ourselves from the environment, but it's important to remember we aren't just a sack of chemicals, we are an ecosystem within an ecosystem. Ultimately, recognizing this reality may produce solutions that are more effective, as well as objectively awesome.