ARTS & FARCES internet

In 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act, which classified hallucinogens including lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), dimethyltryptamine (DMT), mescaline, peyote and psilocybin as Schedule I controlled substances, simultaneously starting the US government’s war on some drugs and immediately ceasing all research into the medicinal properties of the hallucinogens. As Schedule I controlled substances, these substances have no accepted medical use and therefore cannot be prescribed by a physician. Worse, the substances are thought to be so dangerous—even though early trials in treating alcoholism and mental illness were favorable—the government systematically increased its control such that almost all research was curtailed.

Only now are scientists taking another look at these substances, through the lens of medical use. Schaunacy Ferro, writing for Popular Science, reports that in the last 10 years, the government has slowly and begrudgingly allowed researchers to conduct small human trials. Initial studies indicate promising results for using one of the newest entries into the Schedule I controlled substances family, ecstasy (MDMA), to treat depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). Other researchers are re-investigating the usefulness of psilocybin and LSD to treat alcoholism, anxiety in the terminally ill, and and other maladies.

In order for a researcher to work with any of the hallucinogens, she must meet all of her institutional requirements, plus obtain FDA approval and be licensed by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to store and work with the particular substance. Ferro reports the approval and licensing process takes about nine months although researchers say “the DEA’s not in a hurry to grant these licenses.” Additinally, the approval and license must be renewed annually. Currently only 349 researchers have the necessary approval and license, and that number is declining.

The difficulty of getting necessary approval and licensing is just a small part of the problem. The largest part of the problem is that there’s no money in the research. Big Pharma isn’t interested in funding the research because as Rick Doblin, founder of the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) notes in a 2012 interview with Ido Hartogsohn, writing for Reality Sandwich, the hallucinogens are relatively easy to make in a basic chemistry lab and “psychedelics are off-patent, can’t be monopolized, and compete with other psychiatric medications that people take daily.”

How much further along would we be, individually and collectively, had our government not been so short-sighted.

A faceless and nameless task force within the Obama administration is drafting legislation that would add a provision to the Wiretap Act allowing fines to be levied against any internet service provider that resists complying with a wiretap order enabling law enforcement agencies to surveil online communications in real time. The move is thought to have come as a result of developments such as Google using end-to-end encryption for its email and text messages.

According to Ellen Nakashima, writing for the Washington Post, “federal officials typically back off when a company is resistant, industry and former officials said.”

Nakashima reports that the most recent draft circulating quietly in Washington, DC would institute a series of escalating fines—starting at tens of thousands of dollars and rising sharply—on firms that fail to comply with a wiretap order. Fines that are unpaid after 90 days would double each day they remain unpaid. The service providers argue they have no way to comply with certain wiretap orders but the law enforcement agencies find that argument less than convincing. The task force routes around the service providers’ unable to facilitate argument in a spectacularly Orwellian manner by specifically not defining how the wiretap capability must be implemented, only specifying that it must be built in order to comply. The service providers would be free to implement the wiretapping capability in any way they like, so long as it was compliant and “yielded the needed data.”

“This proposal is a non-starter that would drive innovators overseas and cost American jobs,” Greg Nojeim, a senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Nakashima. “They might as well call it the Cyber Insecurity and Anti-Employment Act.”

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the international standards organization for the web, seems intent on embedding digital rights management (DRM) technologies into HTML5, the latest version of the web’s markup language. The Free Culture Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation—along with more than 20 other organizations—have all called for the exclusion of any native DRM capabilities in the HTML5 standard on the grounds that it violates the W3C’s core mission of making the benefits of the web “available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability.”

The Free Culture Foundation recently published an excellent rebuttal to the most common claims in support of DRM, noting:

1. DRM is about limiting functionality and selling features back to users as services.
2. DRM encourages proprietary, platform-specific software.
3. The entertainment cartel needs the web a lot more than the web needs the entertainment cartel.

I recently updated the software that runs the core of ARTS & FARCES internet to ExpressionEngine 2.6.0. Like every other major ExpressionEngine point release (this site’s been running ExpressionEngine since the initial release of pMachine, its predecessor) major functionality of the site has failed spectacularly.

In this particular case, registered members—including the ARTS & FARCES principals—are unable to login to the front-end user accounts of the site (back-end, Control Panel functionality appears to be unaffected). To make matters worse, ExpressionEngine’s Wiki module has failed in a most unseemly way. It appears that the product’s code has unilaterally decided to throw a bunch of crap into any Wiki URL. A first access to any Wiki page seems to work, say, http://www.farces.com/index.php/wiki/Category:Technology::Adventures_with_the_naked_Mac_Mini_Server, for example seems to work just fine. But any subsequent navigation to any other Wiki page fails miserably: http://www.farces.com/index.php/wiki/Category:Technology::Adventures_with_the_naked_Mac_Mini_Server::ML-ExpressionEngine_titleCategory:Technology::Adventures_with_the_naked_Mac_Mini_Server::ML-ExpressionEngine for e,xample. In this example, everything after “_title” is redundant garbage. If you manually strip out everything from “_title” to the end of the URL, you can force it to work, but who needs that?

Oh yeah, and since we can’t get into the front-end user accounts, we can’t edit any of the Wikis. Like I said: Spectacular.

I remain convinced that EllisLab, which recently pivoted to a paid support business model, never spends much time—if any at all—testing its releases. In this case, I’ve filed the necessary bug reports (here and here) but I’m done serving as an involuntary quality assurance tester. Aside from that, EllisLab has singularly grown astoundingly arrogant, condescending, and hubristic over the years. Nothing wrong with the first two, by the way, so long as you’re under-promising and over-delivering; but EllisLab hasn’t done that for a very long while.

So, ARTS & FARCES internet is going to pivot to a new content management system (CMS). I’m not quite sure which just yet, but any change is going to bring major, irreparable breakage and one absolute certainty is that all existing links will permanently fail. I’ll produce new, accurate sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz files, of course, but there will surely be some confusion in the interim.

Shuvo Roy, at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) has assembled a multi-disciplinary team from across the US to develop an implantable artificial kidney. The device—about the size of a large coffee mug—would out-perform today’s dialysis machines that are roughly the size of a refrigerator.

Sandy Kleffman, writing for the San Jose Mercury News, reports that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as selected the device for its Innovation Pathway fast-track approval process. As such, animal testing could begin in 2016 with human trials beginning as early as 2017, and use as a routine therapy as early as 2020. “We realized we could achieve a dialysis filter that would be one-twentieth the size of what’s commercially available, and would require so little power that we could drive it just off blood pressure alone,” Roy, a UCSF associate professor of bioengineering and therapeutic sciences tells Kleffman. The tiny dialysis filter is assembled using silicon nanotechnology.

According to Kleffman’s interpretation, Roy’s device would be better than traditional hemodialysis, as “blood brought into one side of the device passes through a silicon filter that removes toxins, sugars, salts and water, creating an ‘ultrafiltrate.’ The filtrate would move to the other side of the device, where actual kidney cells would reabsorb the water, sugars and salts back into the bloodstream, mimicking a real kidney’s metabolic and water-balancing roles in a way that dialysis cannot. The team obtains the kidney cells from organs rejected for transplantation.”

Roy’s assumption is that immuno-suppressant drug therapy would not be needed because the kidney cells contained within the device would be separated from the patient’s bloodstream, making rejection much less likely.