However, this openness argument is interestingly contested in the Times article by Farzad Mostashari, Director of Epidemiology at New York City and one of the early developers of syndromic surveillance. Mostashari criticizes Google.org precisely for its lack of openness: “If Google provided health officials with details of the inner workings of the system so that it could be validated scientifically, the data could serve as an additional way to detect influenza that was free and might prove valuable, said Mr. Mostashari.” Interestingly, this is precisely the criticism Mostashari and others levelled at Federal syndromic programs like BioSense: without providing access to the analytic algorithms, the parts of the system that determine and define what constitutes an epidemic event, it is difficult for the presented information to be taken up in public health practice.

Below you can find an interesting talk that is on the application of network techniques on complex, dynamic and stochastic processes such as the spread of diseases within population. We had first seen network analysis in the OEP’s engagement with pipeline optimization problems. Then if I am not wrong this sort of thinking came up again with Lyle’s engagement with syndromic surveillance, and we had discussed both in New York and Berkeley how these techniques might have lead to a reproblematization and reproblematization of ‘population’ as an ontological being under a new and novel form different from its 19th century understanding (as we know from Foucault’s and his followers’ work on this period).

Perhaps one of the epistemic shifts that become possible with the application of techniques such as network analysis and monte carlo simulations is the ability to intervene in very calculated and precise ways as the abstract below suggests. Fuzzy and macro processes that have been the object of intervention in the 19th century and most of the 20th century are now unconcealed in novel ways with these techniques which allow the experts to examine the object in exact and precise ways by visually re-constructing the object of intervention in its exact detail. To my knowledge there is almost no work that pays attention to this aspect, and furthermore to me this seems to be one of the crucial points of the vital systems argument.

 

 

Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2008 09:23:56 -0400 (EDT)

From: Rocco A. Servedio <ras2105@columbia.edu>

To: theoryread@lists.cs.columbia.edu

Subject: Theory reading group: David Kempe talk Mon Oct 20, 2:30pm

 

Please join us for a theory seminar on Monday, October 20 at 2:30pm in the

CS Conference Room.  David Kempe of USC will speak about “Optimization

Problems in Social Networks”; details below.

 

Please send me email if you would like to meet with David during his

visit.

 

Hope to see you at the talk,

 

Rocco

 

=========================================================================

 

Title:  Optimization Problems in Social Networks

 

Abstract: A social network - the graph of relationships and interactions

within a group of individuals - plays a fundamental role as a medium for

the spread of information, ideas, influence, or diseases among its

members. An idea or innovation will appear, and it can either die out

quickly or make significant inroads into the population. Similarly, an

infectious disease may either affect a large share of the population, or

be confined to a small fraction.

 

The collective behavior of individuals and the spread of diseases in a

social network have a long history of study in sociology and epidemiology.

In this talk, we will investigate graph-theoretic optimization problems

relating to the spread of information or diseases. Specifically, we will

focus on two types of questions: influence maximization, wherein we seek

to identify influential individuals to start a cascade of an innovation to

maximize the expected number of eventual adopters; and infection

minimization, wherein we seek to remove nodes so as to keep a given

infected component small.

 

We will present constant factor and bicriteria algorithms for versions of

these problems, and also touch on many open problems and issues regarding

competition among multiple innovators.

 

(This talk represents joint work with Jon Kleinberg, Eva Tardos, Elliot

Anshelevich, Shishir Bharathi, Ara Hayrapetyan, Martin Pal, Mahyar Salek,

and Zoya Svitkina.)

Well, probably many of us would agree with him, but what makes this point not interesting is precisely “we” would also include the economists he blames. This is probably an important point to make, though not it is not an interesting one as far as positive knowledge goes: I am not sure if economists think in terms of classical Walrasian neo-classical market models of general equilibrium of supply and demand. It is true that economists will teach this in their undergraduate courses and will speak in these terms to the public or the politicians. Also probably policy advisors, technocrats, experts, and politicians find this language helpful because we are all familiar with it. But I do not think this is how they operate. I do not think they wake up and look at their screens and see if the market is in equilibrium or not. First of all, general equilibrium models left their place to partial equilibrium models. Second, with rational choice theory and other decision making models economists turned to new analytical techniques to analyze the economy since the 1950s. So, to me it seems that the language of market equilibrium is a heuristic discursive device for certain actors who are responsible for informing the public on the economy. This is however is not an unimportant task as we are right now seeing there is a huge gap between what actually these experts do and how they talk about what they do. One might argue that this is why the bailout failed, precisely because it was not a bailout but a rescue attempt to save the economy conceptualized as a vital system. It would also be interesting to think about how as the Fed was trying to manage the crisis what they called systemic risk and therefore rescued, and what they called moral hazard and how they let it sank. There seems to be a high level of imprecision and non-correspondence between the language and terminology of the Fed and what they do…

Second, if we actually come back to his interesting argument, we see that what he is proposing is not so far from the kinds of things we saw at OEP. His basic point is that we cannot rely  on these ideal typical models and rather we should ground our regulatory practices on a realistic model of science instead of a formal one. Given that he is a physicist it is not surprising that his solution is “simulate the market” as opposed to model it.  The funny thing with this proposition is that the two are not contradictory practices, but rather are mutually complementary. This is one of the interesting things with the experts who are in the business of simulation. Often times because they get their models from other experts already black-boxed, they forget that simulation rests on a diffuse network that includes both the theoreticians and applied scientists. Without models, i.e. a formalist scientific practice, simulations would not make any sense; it would simply be guess work. (We might want to think if there is a similar process in the case of catastrophe enactments and exercises that Andy, Stephen and others on this blog have been thinking about. In other words, how do we or rather the experts themselves know that we are basing our simulations on right kinds of scenarios? Are scenarios types of models in correspondence to the computer simulations?) 

Finally, the article gives us interesting clues on how simulation is used to govern the economy in comparison to the early attempts we saw at the OEP. He gives 3 examples:

1) An agent model being developed by the Yale economist John Geanakoplos, along with two physicists, Doyne Farmer and Stephan Thurner, looks at how the level of credit in a market can influence its overall stability.

2) Professor Westerhoff and colleagues have used agent models to build realistic markets on which they impose taxes of various kinds to see what happens.

3) Charles Macal and colleagues at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and aimed at providing a realistic simulation of the interacting entities in that state’s electricity market, as well as the electrical power grid. 

These can be interesting experiments to follow to see where practices of governing might go that are linked to the types of problems we would like to tackle on VSS…

But here just a quickie on Georgia. I happened across a chilling article — pasted in below — from a Russian news service. The article is an exhortation for the Russian army to go all the way into Georgia. Among many interesting and disturbing things, it calls for a strategic bombing campaign against Georgia:

“Obviously, entrenching Russia’s military presence in South Ossetia cannot be the goal of this war. A source from the SKVO told us: “We have to go all the way - destroy the runways at all airfields, including civilian airports - and all key railway nodes. Cut off Georgia’s supplies of gas, and its electricity supplies - with 70% of that coming from the Inguri power plant in Abkhazia. Make the ports at Poti and Batumi inoperable, along with the oil terminal at Supsa, and the railway lines to Azerbaijan and Turkey.”

The kicker? The model is the U.S. bombing campaign against Serbia:

“Ruslan Pukhov agrees: “The USA demonstrated in Yugoslavia what ought to be done in this kind of situation. It isn’t clear why television broadcasting and cell-phones are still functioning in Georgia. I hope Russia at least decides to establish a 10-15 kilometer buffer zone around South Ossetia, patrolled by infantry
as well as from the air.”"

Full article after the jump…

RBC Daily
No. 148
August 11, 2008
FIGHTING TO WIN
In the war with Georgia, Russia needs to go all the way
Retaining the status quo with Georgia would amount to defeat for Russia
Author: Viktor Yadukha
[Unless Georgia's infrastructure is destroyed, Russia risks losing
the war. And if that happens, the Russian authorities can forget
about a worthy place in the international arena and support from
the Russian public.]

Yesterday’s reports from South Ossetia shed some light on the
contradictory picture of this war. It turned out that although the
Russian media had reported the capture of Tskhinvali two days
running, it wasn’t fully taken by Russian troops until Sunday,
August 10. But there remains the danger that the Russian military
will stop there, allowing the Georgian military to regroup again
on the commanding heights and descend on Tskhinvali. The only
viable option in this situation is to drive the enemy back toward
Tbilisi; but no orders to that effect had been issued as at Sunday
evening. Reports of Russian air-strikes on military bases,
airfields, and ports in Georgia are mostly coming from Georgian
sources, and may turn out to be greatly exaggerated,
unfortunately. That’s “unfortunate” because unless Georgia’s
infrastructure is destroyed, Russia risks losing the war. And if
that happens, the Russian authorities can forget about a worthy
place in the international arena and support from the Russian
public.
The war has been under way for almost a week, but there are
still more questions than answers. It isn’t clear why there still
hasn’t been a firm order for Russian troops to drive the enemy
back into the Georgian heartland. “Not much information is
available, but to all appearances, we’re afraid of a negative
reaction from the international community,” says Ruslan Pukhov,
head of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies
(CAST). Another possible reason is the condition of the Russian
Armed Forces. Pukhov says: “The North Caucasus Military District
(SKVO) is regarded as the most combat-capable district in Russia -
and we’re not in 1994 any more, obviously - but even now, our
troops aren’t in the best condition. To give Saakashvili credit,
his military is well-equipped and well-trained. Georgia has one of
the world’s highest per capita defense spending levels.”
Objectively, in the eyes of the West, Georgia’s genocide
against the Ossetians gives Moscow stronger formal grounds to
consolidate its military presence beyond the Great Caucasus Range
- and it will be harder for the Western media to ignore those
grounds. But statements from Russian officials indicate that
Russia has no techniques of its own in the media war with the
West: it’s the same old references to the impotent UN Security
Council, and the openly hostile OSCE and EU - with calls for
Saakashvili to face an international tribunal, as if anyone other
than Ossetians and Russians had the moral right to judge that
person. Neither does it inspire optimism to see Moscow unprepared
to confirm the bombing of military and transport infrastructure in
the Georgian heartland; and then there are the conflicting stories
about the Black Sea Fleet ships - either sailing along the
Abkhazian coast or approaching Novorossiisk.
Obviously, entrenching Russia’s military presence in South
Ossetia cannot be the goal of this war. A source from the SKVO
told us: “We have to go all the way - destroy the runways at all
airfields, including civilian airports - and all key railway
nodes. Cut off Georgia’s supplies of gas, and its electricity
supplies - with 70% of that coming from the Inguri power plant in
Abkhazia. Make the ports at Poti and Batumi inoperable, along with
the oil terminal at Supsa, and the railway lines to Azerbaijan and
Turkey. With support from aircraft, rocket artillery, and
infantry, tanks should be used to push the Georgian army back a
long way beyond South Ossetia. Russian paratroopers should land in
Abkhazia and Ajaria, to develop a reciprocal offensive, with naval
support. The finale should involve capturing Tbilisi and arresting
Saakashvili, who ought to have a $10 million reward on his head.
But that is not the case, and the prospects are uncertain.”
Ruslan Pukhov agrees: “The USA demonstrated in Yugoslavia
what ought to be done in this kind of situation. It isn’t clear
why television broadcasting and cell-phones are still functioning
in Georgia. I hope Russia at least decides to establish a 10-15
kilometer buffer zone around South Ossetia, patrolled by infantry
as well as from the air.”
A military source told us of apprehensions that Russian
troops, dug in amidst the smoking ruins of Tskhinvali, could be
drawn into years of sluggish positional crossfire, with an endless
supply of weaponry - which won’t stop unless Georgia’s
infrastructure is destroyed. And settling into that kind of status
quo would be equivalent to defeat for Russia. The whole world is
watching Russia’s actions closely. This war, which Russia couldn’t
avoid, is a test of Russia’s own viability as well as a test of
its combat capacities. The blood of thousands of dead Ossetians
will either entrench the outcomes of the USSR’s collapse
conclusively - or become a line marking the start of some new
history.
“Russia is prepared to tear Saakashvili and the Georgian
butchers to pieces,” said South Ossetian President Eduard Kokoity
on August 10. “This is expressed in the way so many Russian
volunteers are gathering at the border with South Ossetia. It’s
been a long time since Russia saw such strong popular mobilization
and outrage. There are queues at the checkpoints, and not everyone
who wishes to fight is able to do so.”
Translated by InterContact

In fact, this sort of thing is becoming increasingly routine. I have seen similar techniques applied, for example, to baseball statistics. (One particularly interesting example was an attempt to use simulations to figure out how likely it was that the record for consecutive games with a base hit would be tied or broken — the answer is fairly likely). And this is definitely the technique used in many formal catastrophe models.

Issue 7

Commentary

Theme issue: Biosecurity: spaces, practices, and boundaries
Guest editors: Nick Bingham, Gareth Enticott, Steve Hinchliffe

Guest editorial

Securing life: the emerging practices of biosecurity 1534 – 1551
Steve Hinchliffe, Nick Bingham

Biosecurity after the event: risk politics and animal disease 1552 – 1567
Andrew Donaldson

The spaces of biosecurity: prescribing and negotiating solutions to bovine tuberculosis 1568 – 1582
Gareth Enticott

Safe from the wolf: biosecurity, biodiversity, and competing philosophies of nature 1583 – 1597
Henry Buller

Flexible boundaries in biosecurity: accommodating gorse in Aotearoa New Zealand 1598 – 1614
Kezia Barker

Signals come and go: syndromic surveillance and styles of biosecurity 1615 – 1632
Lyle Fearnley

Affect work and infected bodies: biosecurity in an age of emerging infectious disease 1633 – 1646
Claire Major

The practice of biosecurity in Canada: public health legal preparedness and Toronto’s SARS crisis 1647 – 1663
Estair Van Wagner

The record storms and floods that swept through the Midwest last month struck at the heart of America’s corn region, drowning fields and dashing hopes of a bumper crop.

They also brought into sharp relief a new economic hazard. As America grows more reliant on corn for its fuel supply, it is becoming vulnerable to the many hazards that can damage crops, ranging from droughts to plagues to storms.

Apparently the price of ethanol went up by 19 percent in a month after the floods. The article goes on to construct a scenario that can take place once the share of biofuel in the overall supply of gasoline goes up to 20 percent:

Experts fear that a future crop failure could take so much fuel out of the market that it would send prices soaring at the pump. Eventually, the cost of filling Americans’ gas tanks could be influenced as much by hail in Iowa as by the bombing of an oil pipeline in Nigeria.

Just as in the case of OEP once again a catastrophic event (storm and flood) in a medium inherently governed by stochastic processes (the weather) problematized as a potential threat to the stability of the economy as a vulnerable system (eventually leads to the question of resilience again as we saw in the case of war mobilization and inflation problem by the early 70s under Nixon). As the article argues, introduction of biofuel leads to a new level of vulnerability:

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita interrupted a quarter of the nation’s oil production and closed dozens of refineries for weeks. Lines formed for the first time since the 1970s as gasoline spiked above $3 a gallon, a record at the time. The nation’s increasing dependence on crops for motor fuel adds another level of vulnerability from the weather.

I thought what is particularly interesting in this case is the opening up of a blockage as we pass a threshold with the emergence of biofuel. To my knowledge this is a very new development as corn, a conventional and critical source of food for populations is becoming a source of energy as the seemingly stable barrier between these two categories of vital domains are being linked for the first time as we demolished the barrier separating these two domains. Now we face with a new interface that is in need of being governed as one can even see in the concerns that IMF and World Bank have expressed their worries about this new phenomenon recently. 

It seems like at a technical level the first 3 generations of biofuels, there is nothing new about the process of transforming biomass into biofuel. It is a simple process of production of ethanol. However, what is interesting is that a company called Synthetic Genomics is is genetically engineering microorganisms to produce fuel directly from carbon dioxide on an industrial scale, which might be a possible solution to the problem of vulnerability mentioned above. I believe the founder of the company might be a familiar figure to those who are working on synthetic biology: Craig Venter, a member of the effort to map the human genome and the founder of The Institute for Genomic Research. An interesting convergence of VSS and Synthetic Biology and Nanotechnology blogs…

Increasingly, governmental responses to incalculable, but high-consequence, threats to life and security are framed by what has been described as the `precautionary principle’ (Ewald), `preparedness’ (Collier, Lakoff & Rabinow) or `pre-emption’ (Derrida). This article redescribes features common to these characterizations as the paradigm of prudence and examines how this approach to risk management is playing out in the context of fears that feature within the Australian political imaginary. We explore how the approach to the future entailed in the paradigm enframes `life’ and stifles democratic participation and innovation in ways of living. Three case studies (in biosecurity, bioecology and biomedicine) demonstrate not only how the paradigm pervades the government of everyday life, but also how it is challenged by human `agents’, material `life’ and the dynamic relations between these two. By formulating what this involves, we point to a concept of the political more conducive to democratic pluralism, diversity of life and innovative culture.

• As was true with civil defense, local officials are looking to find ways to use these funds to deal with problems that they face on a routine basis. So there are some interesting concepts emerging like “all-crimes” programs (a complement to all-hazards).

• There is a clear normative conflict — of the type that Lyle, Dale, and others have analyzed in public health-health security discussions, and that Andy and I summarize in the new biosecurity volume — between the way that central officials think about threats and the way that local officials do. Local officials here seem to have something like a classic cost-benefit approach in thinking about crime, as opposed to an orientation to catastrophic terrorism. No doubt, as is the case in public health, one could trace a tradition of approaching crime that emphasizes archival statistics and a “maximization” logic in the allocation of resources that comes into conflict with “existential threat” thinking.

• There is a concern with a creep in the mission. Typical: Catastrophic events keep not happening, so it is hard to stay focused on them. It is easier, notably, in a military in which all you *do* is think about such threats. But harder when you are a local agency spending 99% of your time on other things that seem more pressing, and that are now being starved for funds due to the downturn in local government revenues.

May 26, 2008

States Chafing at U.S. Focus on Terrorism

By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID JOHNSTON

Juliette N. Kayyem, the Massachusetts homeland security adviser, was in her office in early February when an aide brought her startling news. To qualify for its full allotment of federal money, Massachusetts had to come up with a plan to protect the state from an almost unheard-of threat: improvised explosive devices, known as I.E.D.’s.

“I.E.D.’s? As in Iraq I.E.D.’s?” Ms. Kayyem said in an interview, recalling her response. No one had ever suggested homemade roadside bombs might begin exploding on the highways of Massachusetts. “There was no new intelligence about this,” she said. “It just came out of nowhere.”

More openly than at any time since the Sept. 11 attacks, state and local authorities have begun to complain that the federal financing for domestic security is being too closely tied to combating potential terrorist threats, at a time when they say they have more urgent priorities.

“I have a healthy respect for the federal government and the importance of keeping this nation safe,” said Col. Dean Esserman, the police chief in Providence, R.I. “But I also live every day as a police chief in an American city where violence every day is not foreign and is not anonymous but is right out there in the neighborhoods.”

The demand for plans to guard against improvised explosives is being cited by state and local officials as the latest example that their concerns are not being heard, and that federal officials continue to push them to spend money on a terrorism threat that is often vague. Some $23 billion in domestic security financing has flowed to the states from the federal government since the Sept. 11 attacks, but authorities in many states and cities say they have seen little or no intelligence that Al Qaeda, or any of its potential homegrown offshoots, has concrete plans for an attack.

Local officials do not dismiss the terrorist threat, but many are trying to retool counterterrorism programs so that they focus more directly on combating gun violence, narcotics trafficking and gangs — while arguing that these programs, too, should qualify for federal financing, on the theory that terrorists may engage in criminal activity as a precursor to an attack.

Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security secretary, said in an interview that his department had tried to be flexible to accommodate local needs.

“We have not been highly restrictive,” Mr. Chertoff said. But he said the department’s programs were never meant to assist local law enforcement agencies in their day-to-day policing. The requirements of the Homeland Security programs had helped strengthen the country against an attack, Mr. Chertoff said, expressing concern about shifting money to other law enforcement problems from counterterrorism. “If we drop the barrier and start to lose focus,” he said, “we will make it easier to have successful attacks here.”

Local officials have long groused that Homeland Security grants seemed mismatched with local needs and that the agency’s requirements failed to recognize regional differences. After Hurricane Katrina struck Gulf Coast states in 2005, federal authorities demanded that cities come up with evacuation plans, even on the West Coast where earthquakes, not hurricanes, are a threat.

Most of the $23 billion in federal grants has been spent shoring up local efforts to prevent, prepare for and ferret out a possible attack. Because official post-9/11 critiques found huge gaps in communication and coordination, billions of dollars have been spent linking federal law enforcement and intelligence authorities to the country’s more than 750,000 police officers, sheriffs and highway patrol officers. Many Homeland Security-financed “fusion centers,” designed to collect and analyze data to deter terrorist attacks, have evolved into what are known as “all-crimes” or “all-hazards” operations, branching out from terrorism to focus on violent crime and natural disasters.

Intelligence officials assert that Al Qaeda remains intent on striking inside the United States. The Seattle chief of police, R. Gil Kerlikowske, said, “If the law enforcement focus at the local level is only on counterterrorism, you will be unable as a local entity to sustain it unless you are an all-crimes operation, and you may be missing some very significant issues that could be related to terrorism.”

Chief Kerlikowske is president of a group of police chiefs from major cities who said in a report last week that local governments were being forced to spend increasingly scarce resources because, they say, Homeland Security did not pay for all the costs. “Most local governments move law enforcement, counterterrorism and intelligence programs down on the priority list because their municipality has not yet been directly affected by an attack,” the report said.

Seattle has experienced its own terrorism scares since 9/11, after photographs of the Space Needle were recovered in 2002 from suspected Qaeda safe houses in Afghanistan. The city had another jolt last year when the Federal Bureau of Investigation sought the public’s help in locating two men “exhibiting unusual behavior” on a ferry. Neither episode proved an actual threat.

In the case of this year’s focus on improvised explosives, the main killer of American troops in Iraq, Homeland Security officials say the attention to the domestic threat stems from a classified strategy that President Bush approved last year that is designed to help the country to deter and defeat I.E.D.’s before terrorists can detonate them here.

The administration is completing a plan to assign specific training, prevention and response duties to several federal agencies, including the F.B.I. and Homeland Security, the officials said. But they also said that state advisers misunderstood the financing guidelines, and that states could also meet the requirement by improving their overall preparedness against a range of undefined terrorist threats.

State officials say the federal government issued the grant requirement without providing any new information pointing to the danger of bomb threats in the United States — an approach they said underscored the glaring disconnect between how states and the federal government view the terrorist threat.

“I.E.D. detection, protection, and prevention is an important issue, and we all need to be looking at that,” Matthew Bettenhausen, California’s homeland security director, said in a telephone interview. But, he said of the grant requirement: “It’s another thing to be so prescriptive; that came as a surprise to many of us states.”

Maj. Gen. Tod M. Bunting, the homeland security director for Kansas, said Washington ran the risk of raising undue public alarm by prescribing such a large part of the grant to bomb prevention.

“A federal cookie-cutter mandate doesn’t work on every state,” said General Bunting, who is also the state’s adjutant general.

Leesa Berens Morrison, Arizona’s homeland security director, said the new federal guidance “absolutely surprised us,” and said state officials were scrambling to comply.

In Massachusetts, Ms. Kayyem regarded a potential grant this year of $20 million in federal homeland security money as too important to pass up, even though she said that technically one-quarter of it had to be spent on I.E.D.’s to qualify for the money. So, Massachusetts officials wrote a creative proposal, pledging to upgrade bomb squads in many of the state’s 351 cities and towns. It also proposed buying new hazardous-material suits, radios to communicate between law enforcement agencies and explosive-detection devices.

But Ms. Kayyem acknowledged that much of the equipment was chosen to serve double duty. Hazmat suits could be useful in the event of a bombing, but would be even more help with accidents that state officials regarded as much more probable, like chemical spills on the Massachusetts Turnpike.

The grant was approved by federal authorities, but Mr. Chertoff warned: “There are times when you get so far away from the core purpose that it’s hard to justify the grant money.”

In one effort to crack down on what Mr. Chertoff referred to as “mission creep,” Homeland Security officials last year imposed restrictions on use of a heavy truck by the police in Providence, R.I.

The truck had been bought with federal counterterrorism money, based on a plan that it be used to haul a patrol boat used for port security. But when the Police Department began to use the truck instead to pull a horse trailer, federal authorities sought to draw the line, relenting only after local officials protested in a phone call with Washington, said local and federal officials.

Eric Schmitt reported from Boston, Phoenix and Topeka, Kan.; and David Johnston from Washington.