SubscribeBut there's a fine line between how much memory is enough and too much. Tim Tully, a memory researcher at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, worries that memory-enhancing medicine taken over a long period of time could result in the storage of too much information.
"Maybe we forget things for a reason," said Tully, who started a company that's designing memory drugs based on his research findings. "Do we want to remember everything that goes on in a given day? Absolutely not."
And he cautioned there might be risks attached to altering the brain's ability to learn and remember. "If you are diabetic, restoring insulin does good things," he said, by comparison. "For normal people, it can do a lot of harm."
"In the virtual worlds of computer security, networking, and email, the lines separating the inner workings of the current government in Washington D.C. and the outer world of partisan politics exist only in theory. The recent discovery that top strategists emailed plans for dismissing 8 U.S. Attorneys using accounts on the gwb43.com and georgewbush.com domains, hosted and paid for by the RNC, is just one indication of a much bigger disregard for the necessary separation of government and private industry.
Not only are the lines now blurred, but they became so years ago. Indeed, at the very inception of the Bush Administration, there was an effort to leverage partisan loyalty on the outside to preferred vending inside of dot gov.
The recent stories, diaries and articles surrounding the use of external email servers by senior White House members only scratch the surface. Come along to discover who is behind the dot com twins, georgewbush and gwb43, but be careful not to trip over the line." *
"Via Muckraker, U.S. News reports that “just a week after E-mails in the U.S. attorneys case became a main focus of congressional Democrats probing the firings, several aides said that they stopped using the White House system except for purely professional correspondence.” But rather than use RNC accounts, “they have subsequently bought their own private E-mail system through a cellular phone or Blackberry server. When asked how he communicated, one aide pulled out a new personal cellphone and said, ‘texting.’”
UPDATE: Josh Marshall: “[T]his may have been too clever by half. If the president’s aides were using RNC emails or emails from other Republican political committees, they can’t have even the vaguest claim to shielding those communications behind executive privilege.”
UPDATE II: A Laura Rozen reader notes that other federal agencies have apparently banned this practice over security concerns.
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and this: ...After the presentation, Doan reportedly asked other employees how the agency could help "our candidates." ...
posted by amberglow at 3:26 PM on March 28, 2007