title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: Another theological dispute in the 5th century occurred over the teachings of Nestorius, the Patriarch of Constantinople who taught that God the Word was not hypostatically joined with human nature, but rather dwelt in the man Jesus. As a consequence of this, he denied the title "Mother of God" (Theotokos) to the Virgin Mary, declaring her instead to be "Mother of Christ" "Christotokos".


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: The Council confirmed the teachings of Athanasius and confirmed the title of Mary as "Mother of God". It also clearly stated that anyone who separated Christ into two hypostases was anathema, as Cyril had said that there is "One Nature [or One Hypostasis] for God the Word Incarnate" ("Mia Physis tou Theou Logou Sesarkōmenē"). The introduction to the creed, still recited in the church, is formulated as follows:


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: We magnify you O Mother of the True Light and we glorify you O saint and Mother of God "(Theotokos)" for you have borne unto us the Saviour of the world. Glory to you O our Master and King: Christ, the pride of the Apostles, the crown of the martyrs, the rejoicing of the righteous, firmness of the churches and the forgiveness of sins. We proclaim the Holy Trinity in One Godhead: we worship Him, we glorify Him, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord bless us, Amen. [not dissimilar to the "Axion Estin" Chant still used in Orthodoxy]


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: When in AD 451 Emperor Marcian attempted to heal divisions in the Church, the response of Pope Dioscorus–the Pope of Alexandria who was later exiled–was that the emperor should not intervene in the affairs of the Church. It was at Chalcedon that the emperor, through the imperial delegates, enforced harsh disciplinary measures against Pope Dioscorus in response to his boldness. In AD 449, Pope Dioscorus headed the 2nd Council of Ephesus, called the "Robber Council" by Chalcedonian historians. It held to the Miaphysite formula which upheld the Christology of "One Incarnate Nature of God the Word" (Greek: μία φύσις Θεοῦ Λόγου σεσαρκωμένη ("mia physis Theou Logou sesarkōmenē")), and upheld Eutyches, now considered a heretic by the Coptic Orthodox Church, claiming that he was orthodox.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: The Council of Chalcedon summoned Dioscorus three times to appear at the council, after which he was deposed. The Council of Chalcedon further deposed him for his support of Eutyches, but not necessarily for Eutychian Monophysitism. Dioscorus appealed to the conciliar fathers to allow for a more Miaphysite interpretation of Christology at the council, but was denied. Following his being deposed, the Coptic Church and its faithful felt unfairly underrepresented at the council and oppressed politically by the Byzantine Empire. After the Byzantines appointed Proterius of Alexandria as Patriarch to represent the Chalcedonian Church, the Coptic Church appointed their own Patriarch Timothy Aelurus and broke from the State church of the Roman Empire.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: In terms of Christology, the Oriental Orthodox (Non-Chalcedonians) understanding is that Christ is "One Nature—the Logos Incarnate," "of" the full humanity and full divinity. The Chalcedonians' understanding is that Christ is "recognized in" two natures, full humanity and full divinity. Oriental Orthodoxy contends that such a formulation is no different from what the Nestorians teach.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: From that point onward, Alexandria would have two patriarchs: the non-Chalcedonian native Egyptian one, now known as the Coptic Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of All Africa on the Holy Apostolic See of St. Mark, and the Melkite or Imperial Patriarch, now known as the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: Almost the entire Egyptian population rejected the terms of the Council of Chalcedon and remained faithful to the native Egyptian Church (now known as the Coptic Orthodox Church).


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: By anathematizing Pope Leo because of the tone and content of his tome, as per Alexandrine Theology perception, Pope Dioscorus was found guilty of doing so without due process; in other words, the Tome of Leo was not a subject of heresy in the first place, but it was a question of questioning the reasons behind not having it either acknowledged or read at the Second Council of Ephesus in AD 449. Pope Dioscorus of Alexandria was never labeled as a heretic by the council's canons.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: Copts also believe that the Pope of Alexandria was forcibly prevented from attending the third congregation of the council from which he was ousted, apparently the result of a conspiracy tailored by the Roman delegates.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: Before the current positive era of Eastern and Oriental Orthodox dialogues, Chalcedonians sometimes used to call the non-Chalcedonians "Monophysites", though the Coptic Orthodox Church in reality regards Monophysitism as a heresy. The Chalcedonian doctrine in turn came to be known as "Dyophysite". A term that comes closer to Coptic Orthodoxy is Miaphysite, which refers to a conjoined nature for Christ, both human and divine, united indivisibly in the Incarnate Logos.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: Prior to Chalcedon, the Imperial Church's main division stemmed from Nestorianism, eventually leading the Church of the East to declare its independence in AD 424. After the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451, the Coptic Church and its hierarchy felt suspicious of what they believed were Nestorian elements within the Chalcedonian Church. As a result, the anti-Chalcedon partisan, Timotheos Aelurus, consigned himself to depose the Chalcedonian Pope of Alexandria, Proterius of Alexandria, and to set himself up as the Pope of Alexandria in opposition to the Chalcedonian Church. Copts suffered under the rule of the Byzantine Empire. The Melkite patriarchs, appointed by the emperors as both spiritual leaders and civil governors, massacred those Egyptians they considered heretics. Many were tortured and martyred in attempts to force their acceptance of the Chalcedonian terms, but the Egyptians remained loyal to the Cyrillian Miaphysitism. One of the most renowned Egyptian saints of the period is Samuel the Confessor.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: The Muslim invasion of Egypt took place in AD 639. Relying on eyewitness testimony, Bishop John of Nikiu in his Chronicle provides a graphic account of the invasion from a Coptic perspective. Although the Chronicle has only been preserved in an Ethiopic (Ge'ez) text, some scholars believe that it was originally written in Coptic. John's account is critical of the invaders who he says "despoiled the Egyptians of their possessions and dealt cruelly with them", and he vividly details the atrocities committed by the Muslims against the native population during the conquest:And when with great toil and exertion they had cast down the walls of the city, they forthwith made themselves masters of it, and put to the sword thousands of its inhabitants and of the soldiers, and they gained an enormous booty, and took the women and children captive and divided them amongst themselves, and they made that city a desolation.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: Though critical of the Muslim commander (Amr ibn al-As), who, during the campaign, he says "had no mercy on the Egyptians, and did not observe the covenant they had made with him, for he was of a barbaric race", he does note that following the completion of the conquest, Amr "took none of the property of the Churches, and he committed no act of spoilation or plunder, and he preserved them throughout all his days."


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: Despite the political upheaval, the Egyptian population remained mainly Christian. However, gradual conversions to Islam over the centuries had changed Egypt from a Christian to a largely Muslim country by the end of the 12th century. Another scholar writes that a combination of "repression of Coptic revolts", Arab-Muslim immigration, and Coptic conversion to Islam resulted in the demographic decline of the Copts. Egypt's Umayyad rulers taxed Christians at a higher rate than Muslims, driving merchants towards Islam and undermining the economic base of the Coptic Church. Although the Coptic Church did not disappear, the Umayyad tax policies made it difficult for the church to retain the Egyptian elites.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: In 969, Egypt entered the Fatimid dynasty (in Egypt from 969 to 1171), who adopted a largely favorable attitude toward the Christians. The major exception to this was the persecution led by Caliph al-Hakim between 1004 and 1013, which included clothing regulations, prohibition of publicly celebrating Christian festivals, and dismissal of Christian and Jewish functionaries. However, at the end of his reign al-Hakim rescinded these measures, allowing the Copts to regain privileged positions within the administration.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: The Coptic patriarchal residence moved from Alexandria to Cairo during the patriarchate of Cyril II (1078–92). This move was at the demand of the grand vizier Badr al-Jamali, who insisted that the pope establish himself in the capital. When Saladin entered Egypt in 1163, this ushered in a government focused on defending Sunni Islam. Christians were again discriminated against, and meant to show modesty in their religious ceremonies and buildings.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: In 1798, the French invaded Egypt unsuccessfully and the British helped the Turks to regain power over Egypt under the Muhammad Ali dynasty.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: The position of Copts began to improve early in the 19th century under the stability and tolerance of the Muhammad Ali Dynasty. The Coptic community ceased to be regarded by the state as an administrative unit. In 1855 the jizya tax was abolished by Sa'id Pasha. Shortly thereafter, the Copts started to serve in the Egyptian army.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: Towards the end of the 19th century, the Coptic Church underwent phases of new development. In 1853, Pope Cyril IV established the first modern Coptic schools, including the first Egyptian school for girls. He also founded a printing press, which was only the second national press in the country. The Pope established very friendly relations with other denominations, to the extent that when the Greek Patriarch in Egypt had to absent himself from the country for a long period of time, he left his Church under the guidance of the Coptic Patriarch.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: The Theological College of the School of Alexandria was reestablished in 1893. It began its new history with five students, one of whom was later to become its dean. Today it has campuses in Alexandria and Cairo, and in various dioceses throughout Egypt, as well as outside Egypt. It has campuses in New Jersey, Los Angeles, Sydney, Melbourne, and London, where potential clergymen and other qualified men and women study many subjects, including theology, church history, missionary studies, and the Coptic language.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: In 1959, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church was granted its first own Patriarch by Pope Cyril VI. Furthermore, the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church similarly became independent of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church in 1994, when four bishops were consecrated by Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria to form the basis of a local Holy Synod of the Eritrean Church. In 1998, the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church gained its autocephaly from the Coptic Orthodox Church when its first Patriarch was enthroned by Pope Shenouda III.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: These three churches remain in full communion with each other and with the other Oriental Orthodox churches. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church do acknowledge the Honorary Supremacy of the Coptic Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria, since the Church of Alexandria is technically their Mother Church. Upon their selection, both Patriarchs (Ethiopian & Eritrean) must receive the approval and communion from the Holy Synod of the Apostolic See of Alexandria before their enthronement.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: Since the 1980s theologians from the Oriental (non-Chalcedonian) Orthodox and Eastern (Chalcedonian) Orthodox churches have been meeting in a bid to resolve theological differences, and have concluded that many of the differences are caused by the two groups using different terminology to describe the same thing.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: In the summer of 2001, the Coptic Orthodox and Greek Orthodox Patriarchates of Alexandria agreed to mutually recognize baptisms performed in each other's churches, making re-baptisms unnecessary, and to recognize the sacrament of marriage as celebrated by the other. Previously, if a Coptic Orthodox and Greek Orthodox wanted to get married, the marriage had to be performed twice, once in each church, for it to be recognized by both. Now it can be done in only one church and be recognized by both.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: In Tahrir Square, Cairo, on Wednesday 2 February 2011, Coptic Christians joined hands to provide a protective cordon around their Muslim neighbors during salat (prayers) in the midst of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: On 17 March 2012, the Coptic Orthodox Pope, Pope Shenouda III died, leaving many Copts mourning and worrying as tensions rose with Muslims. Pope Shenouda III constantly met with Muslim leaders in order to create peace. Many were worried about Muslims controlling Egypt as the Muslim Brotherhood won 70% of the parliamentary elections.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: On 4 November 2012, Bishop Tawadros was chosen as the 118th Pope. In a ritual filled with prayer, chants and incense at Abbasiya cathedral in Cairo, the 60-year-old bishop's name was picked by a blindfolded child from a glass bowl in which the names of two other candidates had also been placed. The enthronement was scheduled on 18 November 2012.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: The Coptic Orthodox Church only ordains men to the priesthood and episcopate, and if they wish to be married, they must be married before they are ordained. In this respect, they follow the same practices as all other Oriental Orthodox Churches, as well as all of the Eastern Orthodox Church.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: Communicants of the Coptic Orthodox Church use a breviary known as the Agpeya to pray the canonical hours at seven fixed prayer times while facing in the eastward direction, in anticipation of the Second Coming of Jesus; this Christian practice has its roots in Psalm 119:164, in which the prophet David prays to God seven times a day. Church bells enjoin Christians to pray at these hours. Before praying, they wash their hands and face in order to be clean before and present their best to God; shoes are removed in order to acknowledge that one is offering prayer before a holy God. During each of the seven fixed prayer times, Coptic Orthodox Christians pray "prostrating three times in the name of the Trinity; at the end of each Psalm … while saying the 'Alleluia';" and forty-one times for each of the Kyrie eleisons present in a canonical hour. In the Coptic Orthodox Church, it is customary for women to wear a Christian headcovering when praying. The Coptic Orthodox Church observes days of ritual purification. However, while meat that still contains blood after cooking is discouraged from being eaten, the Coptic Church does not forbid its members from consuming any particular type of food, unlike in Islam or Judaism.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: All churches of the Coptic Orthodox Church are designed to face the eastward direction of prayer and efforts are made to remodel churches obtained from other Christian denominations that are not built in this fashion.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: With respect to Eucharistic discipline, Coptic Orthodox Christians fast from midnight onwards (or at least nine hours) prior to receiving the sacrament of Holy Communion. They fast every Wednesday and Friday of the year (Wednesdays in remembrance of the betrayal of Christ, and on Fridays in remembrance of His crucifixion and death). In total, fast days in a year for Coptic Orthodox Christians numbers around 240, with the fasts for Advent and Lent being forty-three days and fifty-five days, respectively. In August, before the celebration of the Dormition of the Mother of God, Coptic Christians fast fifteen days; fasting is also done before the feast of Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, starting from the day of Pentecost.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: Available Egyptian census figures and other third party survey reports have not reported more than 4 million Coptic Orthodox Christians in Egypt. However media and other agencies, sometimes taking into account the claims of the Church itself, generally approximate the Coptic Orthodox population at 10% of the Egyptian population or 10 million people. The majority of them live in Egypt under the jurisdiction of the Coptic Orthodox Church. Since 2006, Egyptian censuses have not reported on religion and church leaders have alleged that Christians were under-counted in government surveys. In 2017, a government owned newspaper Al Ahram estimated the percentage of Copts at 10 to 15% and the membership claimed by the Coptic Orthodox Church is in the range of 20 to 25 million.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: There are also significant numbers in the diaspora outside Africa in countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, France, and Germany. The exact number of Egyptian born Coptic Orthodox Christians in the diaspora is hard to determine and is roughly estimated to be close to 1 million.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: While Copts have cited instances of persecution throughout their history, Human Rights Watch has noted "growing religious intolerance" and sectarian violence against Coptic Christians in recent years, and a failure by the Egyptian government to effectively investigate properly and prosecute those responsible. Over a hundred Egyptian copts have been killed in sectarian clashes from 2011 to 2017, and many homes and businesses destroyed. In just one province (Minya), 77 cases of sectarian attacks on Copts between 2011 and 2016 have been documented by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. The abduction and disappearance of Coptic Christian women and girls also remains a serious ongoing problem.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: In addition, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church are daughter churches of the Coptic Orthodox Church. Both the Patriarchate of Addis Ababa and all Ethiopia and the Patriarchate of Asmara and all Eritrea acknowledge the supremacy of honor and dignity of the Pope of Alexandria on the basis that both patriarchates were established by the Throne of Alexandria and that they have their roots in the Apostolic Church of Alexandria, and acknowledge that Mark the Apostle is the founder of their churches through the heritage and Apostolic evangelization of the Fathers of Alexandria.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: Joseph II consecrated the first Ethiopian-born Archbishop, Abuna Basilios, as head of the Ethiopian Church on 14 January 1951. In 1959, Pope Cyril VI of Alexandria crowned Abuna Basilios as the first Patriarch of Ethiopia.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: Following the independence of Eritrea from Ethiopia in 1993, the newly independent Eritrean government appealed to Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria for Eritrean Orthodox autocephaly. In 1994, Pope Shenouda ordained Abune Phillipos as first Archbishop of Eritrea.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: Under the guidance of Pope Shenouda, the church underwent a large transformation that allowed him to hold greater authority than any previous pope. Writing in 2013, the theologian Samuel Tadros stated "Today's Coptic Church as an institution is built solely on his vision".


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: Pope Shenouda III was criticized by the prominent monk Father Matta El Meskeen for the church's strong links with the Egyptian government under the dictator Hosni Mubarak. As the dispute began to grow, Shenouda explicitly denounced Matta's thoughts, labelling some of his writings "heresies". In turn, Matta promoted a radical focus upon personal faith in contrast to institutional religion and ecclesiastical authority. Shenouda, however, was heavily involved in politics and keen to extend the church's influence over the social lives of Copts.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: On 12 July 2020, Sally Zakhari began a series of posts on Facebook and Instagram in which she accused the now defrocked Hegomen Reweis Aziz Khalil of sexual assault when she was between the ages of 11 and 12. Zakhari said that church leaders were aware of several sexual assaults perpetrated by Khalil in his service as a priest across the U.S. for around 22 years, and refused to act on it. The incident sparked other reports of sexual assault and generated debate among church laity, with some in the American Coptic community describing the fallout of the incident as creating a "Coptic #MeToo movement", the #copticsurvivormovement.


title: Coptic Orthodox Church

text: The Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria is governed by its Holy Synod, which is headed by the Patriarch of Alexandria. Under his authority are the metropolitan archbishops, metropolitan bishops, diocesan bishops, patriarchal exarchs, missionary bishops, auxiliary bishops, suffragan bishops, assistant bishops, chorbishops and the patriarchal vicars for the Church of Alexandria.


title: SPSS

text: SPSS Statistics is a statistical software suite developed by IBM for data management, advanced analytics, multivariate analysis, business intelligence, and criminal investigation. Long produced by SPSS Inc., it was acquired by IBM in 2009. Current versions (post 2015) have the brand name: IBM SPSS Statistics.


title: SPSS

text: The software name originally stood for Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), reflecting the original market, then later changed to Statistical Product and Service Solutions.


title: SPSS

text: SPSS is a widely used program for statistical analysis in social science. It is also used by market researchers, health researchers, survey companies, government, education researchers, marketing organizations, data miners, and others. The original SPSS manual (Nie, Bent & Hull, 1970) has been described as one of "sociology's most influential books" for allowing ordinary researchers to do their own statistical analysis. In addition to statistical analysis, data management (case selection, file reshaping, creating derived data) and data documentation (a metadata dictionary is stored in the datafile) are features of the base software.


title: SPSS

text: The many features of SPSS Statistics are accessible via pull-down menus or can be programmed with a proprietary 4GL "command syntax language". Command syntax programming has the benefits of reproducible output, simplifying repetitive tasks, and handling complex data manipulations and analyses. Additionally, some complex applications can only be programmed in syntax and are not accessible through the menu structure. The pull-down menu interface also generates command syntax: this can be displayed in the output, although the default settings have to be changed to make the syntax visible to the user. They can also be pasted into a syntax file using the "paste" button present in each menu. Programs can be run interactively or unattended, using the supplied Production Job Facility.


title: SPSS

text: Additionally a "macro" language can be used to write command language subroutines. A Python programmability extension can access the information in the data dictionary and data and dynamically build command syntax programs. The Python programmability extension, introduced in SPSS 14, replaced the less functional SAX Basic "scripts" for most purposes, although SaxBasic remains available. In addition, the Python extension allows SPSS to run any of the statistics in the free software package R. From version 14 onwards, SPSS can be driven externally by a Python or a VB.NET program using supplied "plug-ins". (From Version 20 onwards, these two scripting facilities, as well as many scripts, are included on the installation media and are normally installed by default.)


title: SPSS

text: SPSS Statistics places constraints on internal file structure, data types, data processing, and matching files, which together considerably simplify programming. SPSS datasets have a two-dimensional table structure, where the rows typically represent cases (such as individuals or households) and the columns represent measurements (such as age, sex, or household income). Only two data types are defined: numeric and text (or "string"). All data processing occurs sequentially case-by-case through the file (dataset). Files can be matched one-to-one and one-to-many, but not many-to-many. In addition to that cases-by-variables structure and processing, there is a separate Matrix session where one can process data as matrices using matrix and linear algebra operations.


title: SPSS

text: The graphical user interface has two views which can be toggled by clicking on one of the two tabs in the bottom left of the SPSS Statistics window. The 'Data View' shows a spreadsheet view of the cases (rows) and variables (columns). Unlike spreadsheets, the data cells can only contain numbers or text, and formulas cannot be stored in these cells. The 'Variable View' displays the metadata dictionary where each row represents a variable and shows the variable name, variable label, value label(s), print width, measurement type, and a variety of other characteristics. Cells in both views can be manually edited, defining the file structure and allowing data entry without using command syntax. This may be sufficient for small datasets. Larger datasets such as statistical surveys are more often created in data entry software, or entered during computer-assisted personal interviewing, by scanning and using optical character recognition and optical mark recognition software, or by direct capture from online questionnaires. These datasets are then read into SPSS.


title: SPSS

text: SPSS Statistics can read and write data from ASCII text files (including hierarchical files), other statistics packages, spreadsheets and databases. SPSS Statistics can read and write to external relational database tables via ODBC and SQL.


title: SPSS

text: Statistical output is to a proprietary file format (*.spv file, supporting pivot tables) for which, in addition to the in-package viewer, a stand-alone reader can be downloaded. The proprietary output can be exported to text or Microsoft Word, PDF, Excel, and other formats. Alternatively, output can be captured as data (using the OMS command), as text, tab-delimited text, PDF, XLS, HTML, XML, SPSS dataset or a variety of graphic image formats (JPEG, PNG, BMP and EMF).


title: SPSS

text: Several variants of SPSS Statistics exist. SPSS Statistics Gradpacks are highly discounted versions sold only to students. SPSS Statistics Server is a version of SPSS Statistics with a client/server architecture. Add-on packages can enhance the base software with additional features (examples include complex samples which can adjust for clustered and stratified samples, and custom tables which can create publication-ready tables). SPSS Statistics is available under either an annual or a monthly subscription license.


title: SPSS

text: SPSS Statistics launched version 25 on Aug 08, 2017. SPSS v25 adds new and advanced statistics, such as random effects solution results (GENLINMIXED), robust standard errors (GLM/UNIANOVA), and profile plots with error bars within the Advanced Statistics and Custom Tables add-on. V25 also includes new Bayesian Statistics capabilities, a method of statistical inference and publication ready charts, such as powerful new charting capabilities, including new default templates and the ability to share with Microsoft Office applications.


title: SPSS

text: SPSS was released in its first version in 1968 as the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) after being developed by Norman H. Nie, Dale H. Bent, and C. Hadlai Hull. Those principals incorporated as SPSS Inc. in 1975. Early versions of SPSS Statistics were written in Fortran and designed for batch processing on mainframes, including for example IBM and ICL versions, originally using punched cards for data and program input. A processing run read a command file of SPSS commands and either a raw input file of fixed-format data with a single record type, or a 'getfile' of data saved by a previous run. To save precious computer time an 'edit' run could be done to check command syntax without analysing the data. From version 10 (SPSS-X) in 1983, data files could contain multiple record types.


title: SPSS

text: SPSS Statistics version 13.0 for Mac OS X was not compatible with Intel-based Macintosh computers, due to the Rosetta emulation software causing errors in calculations. SPSS Statistics 15.0 for Windows needed a downloadable hotfix to be installed in order to be compatible with Windows Vista.


title: SPSS

text: From version 16.0, the same version runs under Windows, Mac, and Linux. The graphical user interface is written in Java. The Mac OS version is provided as a Universal binary, making it fully compatible with both PowerPC and Intel-based Mac hardware.


title: SPSS

text: SPSS Inc announced on July 28, 2009 that it was being acquired by IBM for US$1.2 billion. Because of a dispute about ownership of the name "SPSS", between 2009 and 2010, the product was referred to as PASW (Predictive Analytics SoftWare). As of January 2010, it became "SPSS: An IBM Company". Complete transfer of business to IBM was done by October 1, 2010. By that date, SPSS: An IBM Company ceased to exist. IBM SPSS is now fully integrated into the IBM Corporation, and is one of the brands under IBM Software Group's Business Analytics Portfolio, together with IBM Algorithmics, IBM Cognos and IBM OpenPages.


title: SPSS

text: Companion software in the "IBM SPSS" family are used for data mining and text analytics (IBM SPSS Modeler), and realtime credit scoring services (IBM SPSS Collaboration and Deployment Services).


title: SPSS

text: SPSS Data Collection and SPSS Dimensions were sold in 2015 to UNICOM Systems, Inc., a division of UNICOM Global, and merged into the integrated software suite UNICOM Intelligence (survey design, survey deployment, data collection, data management and reporting).


title: SPSS

text: IDA (Interactive Data Analysis) was a software package that originated at what formerly was the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), at the University of Chicago. Initially offered on the HP-2000, somewhat later, under the ownership of SPSS, it was also available on DEC's DECSYSTEM-20. Regression analysis was one of "IDA"'s strong points.


title: SPSS

text: Although the "C" was for Conversational, it also represented a distinction regarding how the data was stored: it used a column-oriented rather than a row-oriented (internal) database.


title: SPSS

text: This gave good interactive response time for the SPSS Conversational Statistical System (SCSS), whose strong point, as with SPSS, was Cross-tabulation.


title: SPSS

text: In October, 2020 IBM announced the start of an Early Access Program for the "New SPSS Statistics", codenamed Project NX. It contains "many of your favorite SPSS capabilities presented in a new easy to use interface, with integrated guidance, multiple tabs, improved graphs and much more".


title: SPSS

text: In December, 2021, IBM opened up the Early Access Program for the next generation of SPSS Statistics for more users and shared more visuals about it.


title: Ginseng

text: Ginseng () is the root of plants in the genus "Panax", such as Korean ginseng ("P. ginseng"), South China ginseng ("P. notoginseng"), and American ginseng ("P. quinquefolius"), typically characterized by the presence of ginsenosides and gintonin. Ginseng is most commonly used in the cuisines and medicines of China and Korea.


title: Ginseng

text: Although ginseng has been used in traditional medicine over centuries, modern clinical research is inconclusive about its medical effectiveness. There is no substantial evidence that ginseng is effective for treating any medical condition, and in the United States, for example, its use has not been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a prescription drug. Although ginseng is commonly sold as a dietary supplement, inconsistent manufacturing practices for supplements have led to analyses showing that ginseng products may be contaminated with toxic metals or unrelated filler compounds, and its excessive use may have adverse effects or untoward interactions with prescription drugs.


title: Ginseng

text: One of the first written texts covering the use of ginseng as a medicinal herb was the "Shen Nong Pharmacopoeia", written in China in 196 AD. In his "Compendium of Materia Medica" herbal of 1596, Li Shizhen described ginseng as a "superior tonic". However, the herb was not used as a "cure-all" medicine, but more specifically as a tonic for patients with chronic illnesses and those who were convalescing.


title: Ginseng

text: Ginseng plants belong only to the genus "Panax". Cultivated species include "Panax ginseng" (Korean ginseng), "Panax notoginseng" (South China ginseng), and "Panax quinquefolius" (American ginseng). Ginseng is found in cooler climates – Korean Peninsula, Northeast China, Russian Far East, Canada and the United States, although some species grow in warm regions – South China ginseng being native to Southwest China and Vietnam. "Panax vietnamensis" (Vietnamese ginseng) is the southernmost "Panax" species known.


title: Ginseng

text: Wild ginseng () grows naturally in mountains and is hand-picked by gatherers known as "simmani" (). The wild ginseng plant is now almost extinct in China and endangered globally. This is due to high demand for the product in recent years, leading to the harvesting of wild plants faster than they can grow and reproduce (a wild ginseng plant can take years to reach maturity). Wild ginseng can be processed to be red or white ginseng. Wild American ginseng has long been used by Native Americans for medicine. Since the mid-1700s, it has been harvested for international trade. Today wild American ginseng can be harvested in 19 states but has restrictions for exporting.


title: Ginseng

text: Wild cultivated ginseng () is planted on mountains by humans and is allowed to grow like wild ginseng.


title: Ginseng

text: Ginseng seed normally does not germinate until the second spring following the harvest of berries in the Autumn. They must first be subjected to a long period of storage in a moist medium with a warm/cold treatment, a process known as stratification.


title: Ginseng

text: Fresh ginseng (), also called "green ginseng", is non-dried raw product. Its use is limited by availability.


title: Ginseng

text: White ginseng () is peeled and dried ginseng. White ginseng is fresh ginseng which has been dried without being heated. It is peeled and dried to reduce the water content to 12% or less. White ginseng air-dried in the sun may contain less of the therapeutic constituents. Enzymes contained in the root may break down these constituents in the process of drying. Drying in the sun bleaches the root to a yellowish-white color.


title: Ginseng

text: Red ginseng () is steamed and dried ginseng, which has reddish color. Red ginseng is less vulnerable to decay than white ginseng. It is ginseng that has been peeled, heated through steaming at standard boiling temperatures of , and then dried or sun-dried. It is frequently marinated in an herbal brew which results in the root becoming extremely brittle.


title: Ginseng

text: Commercial ginseng is sold in over 35 countries, with China as the largest consumer. In 2013, global sales of ginseng exceeded $2 billion, of which half was produced by South Korea. In the early 21st century, 99% of the world's 80,000 tons of ginseng was produced in just four countries: China (44,749 tons), South Korea (27,480 tons), Canada (6,486 tons), and the United States (1,054 tons). All ginseng produced in South Korea is Korean ginseng ("P. ginseng"), while ginseng produced in China includes "P. ginseng" and South China ginseng ("P. notoginseng"). Ginseng produced in Canada and the United States is mostly American ginseng ("P. quinquefolius").


title: Ginseng

text: Ginseng may be included in energy drinks or herbal teas in small amounts or sold as a dietary supplement.


title: Ginseng

text: The root is most often available in dried form, either whole or sliced. Ginseng leaf, although not as highly prized, is sometimes also used.


title: Ginseng

text: In Korean cuisine, ginseng is used in various "banchan" (side dishes) and "guk" (soups), as well as tea and alcoholic beverages. Ginseng-infused tea and liquor, known as "insam cha" (literally "ginseng tea") and "insam-ju" ("ginseng liquor") is consumed.


title: Ginseng

text: Although ginseng is commonly sold as a dietary supplement, concerns have been raised about manufactured ginseng products containing toxic metals or filler materials, such as rice or wheat.


title: Ginseng

text: Although ginseng has been used in traditional medicine for centuries, modern research is inconclusive about its biological effects. Preliminary clinical research indicates possible effects on memory, fatigue, menopause symptoms, and insulin response in people with mild diabetes. Out of 44 studies examined between 2005–2015, 29 showed positive, limited evidence, and 15 showed no effects. , there is insufficient evidence to indicate that ginseng has any health effects. A 2021 review indicated that ginseng had "only trivial effects on erectile function or satisfaction with intercourse compared to placebo".


title: Ginseng

text: Although the roots are used in traditional Chinese medicine, the leaves and stems contain larger quantities of the phytochemicals than the roots, and are easier to harvest. The constituents include steroid saponins known as ginsenosides, but the effects of these ginseng compounds have not been studied with high-quality clinical research as of 2021, and therefore remain unknown.


title: Ginseng

text: As of 2019, the United States FDA and Federal Trade Commission have issued numerous warning letters to manufacturers of ginseng dietary supplements for making false claims of health or anti-disease benefits, stating that the "products are not generally recognized as safe and effective for the referenced uses" and are illegal as unauthorized "new drugs" under federal law.


title: Ginseng

text: Ginseng generally has a good safety profile and the incidence of adverse effects is minor when used over the short term. Concerns exist when ginseng is used chronically, potentially causing side effects such as headaches, insomnia, and digestive problems.


title: Ginseng

text: The risk of interactions between ginseng and prescription medications is believed to be low, but ginseng may have adverse effects when used with the blood thinner warfarin. Ginseng also has adverse drug reactions with phenelzine, and a potential interaction has been reported with imatinib, resulting in hepatotoxicity, and with lamotrigine. Other side effects may include anxiety, insomnia, fluctuations in blood pressure, breast pain, vaginal bleeding, nausea, or diarrhea. If taken with other herbal supplements, ginseng may interact with them or with prescribed medicines or foods.


title: Ginseng

text: The common ginsengs ("P. ginseng" and "P. quinquefolia") are generally considered to be relatively safe even in large amounts. One of the most common and characteristic symptoms of an acute overdose of "P. ginseng" is bleeding. Symptoms of mild overdose may include dry mouth and lips, excitation, fidgeting, irritability, tremor, palpitations, blurred vision, headache, insomnia, increased body temperature, increased blood pressure, edema, decreased appetite, dizziness, itching, eczema, early morning diarrhea, bleeding, and fatigue.


title: Ginseng

text: Symptoms of severe overdose with "P. ginseng" may include nausea, vomiting, irritability, restlessness, urinary and bowel incontinence, fever, increased blood pressure, increased respiration, decreased sensitivity and reaction to light, decreased heart rate, cyanotic (blue) facial complexion, red facial complexion, seizures, convulsions, and delirium.


title: Ginseng

text: The English word "ginseng" comes from the Hokkien Chinese (; where this transliteration is in Pe̍h-ōe-jī). The first character (pinyin "rén"; or ) means "person" and the second character (; ) means "plant root" in a forked shape.


title: Ginseng

text: The Korean loanword insam comes from the cultivated ginseng (), which is less expensive than wild ginseng.


title: Ginseng

text: The botanical genus name "Panax", meaning "all-healing" in Greek, shares the same origin as "panacea" and was applied to this genus because Carl Linnaeus was aware of its wide use in Chinese medicine as a muscle relaxant.


title: Ginseng

text: True ginseng plants belong only to the genus "Panax". Several other plants are sometimes referred to as ginseng, but they are from a different genus or even family. Siberian ginseng is in the same family, but not genus, as true ginseng. The active compounds in Siberian ginseng are eleutherosides, not ginsenosides. Instead of a fleshy root, Siberian ginseng has a woody root.


title: Gary Webb

text: He began his career working for newspapers in Kentucky and Ohio, winning numerous awards, and building a strong reputation for investigative writing. Hired by the "San Jose Mercury News", Webb contributed to the paper's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake.


title: Gary Webb

text: Webb is best known for his "Dark Alliance" series, which appeared in "The Mercury News" in 1996. The series examined the origins of the crack cocaine trade in Los Angeles and claimed that members of the anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua had played a major role in creating the trade, using cocaine profits to finance their fight against the government in Nicaragua. It also stated that the Contras may have acted with the knowledge and protection of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The series provoked outrage, particularly in the Los Angeles African-American community, and led to four major investigations of its charges.


title: Gary Webb

text: The "Los Angeles Times" and other major papers published articles suggesting the "Dark Alliance" claims were overstated and, in November 1996, Jerome Ceppos, the executive editor at "Mercury News," wrote about being "in the eye of the storm". In May 1997, after an internal review, Ceppos stated that, although the story was right on many important points, there were shortcomings in the writing, editing and production of the series. He wrote that the series likely "oversimplified" the crack epidemic in America and the supposed "critical role" the dealers written about in the series played in it. Webb disagreed with this conclusion.


title: Gary Webb

text: Webb resigned from "The Mercury News" in December 1997. He became an investigator for the California State Legislature, published a book based on the "Dark Alliance" series in 1998, and did freelance investigative reporting. He died by suicide on December 10, 2004.


title: Gary Webb

text: The "Dark Alliance" series remains controversial. Critics view the series' claims as inaccurate or overstated, while supporters point to the results of a later CIA investigation as vindicating the series. The follow-up reporting in the "Los Angeles Times" and other papers has been criticised for focusing on problems in the series rather than re-examining the earlier CIA-Contra claims.


title: Gary Webb

text: Webb was born in Corona, California. His father was a Marine sergeant, and the family moved frequently, as his career took him to new assignments. When Webb's father retired from the Marines, the family settled in a suburb of Indianapolis, where Webb and his brother attended high school.


title: Gary Webb

text: After high school, Webb attended an Indianapolis community college on a scholarship until his family moved to Cincinnati. He then transferred to nearby Northern Kentucky University.


title: Gary Webb

text: Webb first began writing for the student newspaper at his college in Indianapolis. After transferring to Northern Kentucky, he entered its journalism program and wrote for the school paper, "The Northerner". Although he attended Northern Kentucky for four years, he did not finish his degree. Instead, he found work in 1978 as a reporter at the "Kentucky Post", a local paper affiliated with the larger "Cincinnati Post". In 1979, Webb married Susan Bell; the couple eventually had three children.


title: Gary Webb

text: Webb's first major investigative work appeared in 1980, when the "Cincinnati Post" published "The Coal Connection," a seventeen-part series by Webb and "Post" reporter Thomas Scheffey. The series, which examined the murder of a coal company president with ties to organized crime, won the national Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for reporting from a small newspaper.


title: Gary Webb

text: In 1983, Webb moved to the "Cleveland Plain Dealer", where he continued doing investigative work. A 1985 series, "Doctoring the Truth," uncovered problems in the State Medical Board and led to an Ohio House investigation which resulted in major revisions to the state Medical Practice Act. Webb then moved to the paper's statehouse bureau, where he covered statewide issues and won numerous regional journalism awards. In 1984, Webb wrote a story titled “Driving Off With Profits” which claimed that the promoters of a race in Cleveland paid themselves nearly a million dollars from funds that should have gone to the city of Cleveland. The article resulted in a lawsuit against Webb's paper which the plaintiffs won. A jury awarded the plaintiffs over 13 million dollars and the case was later settled. In 1986, Webb wrote an article saying that the Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, Frank D. Celebrezze accepted contributions from groups with organized crime connections. Celebrezze eventually sued the "Plain Dealer" and won an undisclosed out of court settlement.


title: Gary Webb

text: In 1988, Webb was recruited by the "San Jose Mercury News", which was looking for an investigative reporter. He was assigned to its Sacramento bureau, where he was allowed to choose most of his own stories. As part of "The Mercury News" team that covered the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, Webb and his colleague Pete Carey wrote a story examining the causes of the collapse of the Cypress Street Viaduct. "The Mercury News"'s coverage of the earthquake won its staff the Pulitzer Prize for General News Reporting in 1990.


title: Gary Webb

text: Webb began researching "Dark Alliance" in July 1995. The series was published in "The Mercury News" in three parts, from August 18–20, 1996, with one long article and one or two shorter articles appearing each day. It was also posted on "The Mercury News" website with additional information, including documents cited in the series and audio recordings of people quoted in the articles. The website artwork showed the silhouette of a man smoking a crack pipe superimposed over the CIA seal. This artwork proved controversial, and "The Mercury News" later removed it.


title: Gary Webb

text: The lede of the first article set out the series' basic claims: "For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency." This drug ring "opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles" and, as a result, "The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America."


title: Gary Webb

text: To show this, the series focused on three men: Ricky Ross, Oscar Danilo Blandón, and Norwin Meneses. Ross was a major drug dealer in Los Angeles. Blandón and Meneses were Nicaraguans who smuggled drugs into the U.S. and supplied dealers like Ross. After introducing the three, the first article discussed primarily Blandón and Meneses, and their relationship with the Contras and the CIA. Much of the article highlighted the failure of law enforcement agencies to successfully prosecute them and stated that this was largely due to their Contra and CIA connections.


title: Gary Webb

text: The second article described Blandón's background and how he began smuggling cocaine to support the Contras. Meneses, an established smuggler and a Contra supporter as well, taught Blandón how to smuggle and provided him with cocaine. When Ross discovered the market for crack in Los Angeles, he began buying cocaine from Blandón. Blandón and Meneses' high-volume supply of low-priced high-purity cocaine "allowed Ross to sew up the Los Angeles market and move on. In city after city, local dealers either bought from Ross or got left behind."


title: Gary Webb

text: The third article discussed the social effects of the crack trade, noting that it had a disparate effect on African-Americans. Asking why crack became so prevalent in the Black community of Los Angeles, the article credited Blandón, referring to him as "the Johnny Appleseed of crack in California." It also found disparities in the treatment of Black and White traffickers in the justice system, contrasting the treatment of Blandón and Ross after their arrests for drug trafficking. Because Blandón cooperated with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), he spent only 28 months in prison, became a paid government informant, and received permanent resident status. Ross was also released early after cooperating in an investigation of police corruption, but was rearrested a few months later in a sting operation arranged with Blandón's help. The article suggested this was in retribution for Ross' testimony in the corruption case.


title: Gary Webb

text: After the publication of "Dark Alliance," "The Mercury News" continued to pursue the story, publishing follow-ups to the original series for the next three months. Other papers were slow to pick up the story, but African Americans quickly took note, especially in South Central Los Angeles where the dealers discussed in the series had been active. They were outraged by the series's charges.


title: Gary Webb

text: California senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein also took note and wrote to CIA director John Deutch and Attorney General Janet Reno, asking for investigations into the articles' allegations. Maxine Waters, the representative for California's 35th district, which includes South-Central Los Angeles, was also outraged by the articles and became one of Webb's strongest supporters. Waters urged the CIA, the Department of Justice, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to investigate.


title: Gary Webb

text: By the end of September, three federal investigations had been announced: an investigation into the CIA allegations conducted by CIA Inspector-General Frederick Hitz, an investigation into the law enforcement allegations by Justice Department Inspector-General Michael Bromwich, and a second investigation into the CIA by the House Intelligence Committee.


title: Gary Webb

text: Webb's continuing reporting also triggered a fourth investigation. The first article in "Dark Alliance" that discussed the failure of law enforcement agencies to prosecute Blandón and Meneses had mentioned several cases. One of these was a 1986 raid on Blandón's drug organization by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, which the article suggested had produced evidence of CIA ties to drug smuggling that was later suppressed. When Webb wrote another story on the raid evidence in early October, it received wide attention in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department began its own investigation into the "Dark Alliance" claims.


title: Gary Webb

text: After the announcement of federal investigations into the claims made in the series, other newspapers began investigating, and several papers published articles suggesting the series' claims were overstated.


title: Gary Webb

text: The first detailed article on the series's claims appeared in "The Washington Post" in early October. In their front-page article, reporters Roberto Suro and Walter Pincus wrote that "available information" did not support the series's claims and that "the rise of crack" was "a broad-based phenomenon" driven in numerous places by diverse players. The article discussed Webb's contacts with Ross's attorney and prosecution complaints of how Ross's defense had used Webb's series.


title: Gary Webb

text: "The New York Times" published two articles on the series in mid-October, both written by reporter Tim Golden. One article, dealing mostly with the response of the Los Angeles Black community to the stories, described the series's evidence as "thin". Golden also referred to the controversy over Webb's contacts with Ross's lawyer. The other article, citing interviews with current and former intelligence and law-enforcement officials, questioned the importance of the drug dealers discussed in the series, both in the crack cocaine trade and in supporting the Nicaraguan Contras' fight against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.


title: Gary Webb

text: The "Los Angeles Times" devoted the most space to the story, publishing a three-part series called "The Cocaine Trail." The series ran from October 20–22, 1996, and was researched by a team of 17 reporters. The three articles in the series were written by four reporters: Jesse Katz, Doyle McManus, John Mitchell and Sam Fulwood. The first article, by Katz, developed a different picture of the origins of the crack trade than "Dark Alliance" had described, with more gangs and smugglers participating. The second article, by McManus, was the longest of the series and dealt with the role of the Contras in the drug trade and CIA knowledge of drug activities by the Contras. McManus wrote that Blandón's and Meneses's contributions to Contra organizations were significantly less than the "millions" claimed in the series, and stated there was no evidence that the CIA had tried to protect them. The third article, by Mitchell and Fulwood, covered the effects of crack on African-Americans and how it affected their reaction to some of the rumors that arose after the "Dark Alliance" series.


title: Gary Webb

text: In 2013, Jesse Katz, a former "Los Angeles Times" reporter, said of the newspaper's coverage "As an "L.A. Times" reporter, we saw this series in the "San Jose Mercury News" and kind of wonder[ed] how legit it was and kind of put it under a microscope, and we did it in a way that most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill. We had this huge team of people at the "L.A. Times" and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California." And "we really didn't do anything to advance his work or illuminate much to the story, and it was a really kind of tawdry exercise. ... And it ruined that reporter's career."


title: Gary Webb

text: Surprised by "The Washington Post" article, "The Mercury News's" executive editor Jerome Ceppos wrote to the "Post" defending the series. The "Post" refused to print his letter. Ceppos also asked reporter Pete Carey to write a critique of the series for publication in "The Mercury News", and had the controversial website artwork changed. Carey's critique appeared in mid-October and went through several of the "Post"'s criticisms of the series, including the importance of Blandón's drug ring in spreading crack, questions about Blandón's testimony in court, and how specific series allegations about CIA involvement had been, giving Webb's responses.


title: Gary Webb

text: When the "Los Angeles Times" series appeared, Ceppos again wrote to defend the original series. He also defended the series in interviews with all three papers. The extent of the criticism, however, convinced Ceppos that "The Mercury News" had to acknowledge to its readers that the series had been subjected to strong criticism. He did this in a column that appeared on November 3, defending the series, but also committing the paper to a review of major criticisms.


title: Gary Webb

text: Ceppos' column drew editorial responses from both "The New York Times" and "The Washington Post". An editorial in the "Times", while criticizing the series for making "unsubstantiated charges", conceded that it did find "drug-smuggling and dealing by Nicaraguans with at least tentative connections to the Contras" and called for further investigation.


title: Gary Webb

text: The "Post"'s response came from the paper's ombudsman, Geneva Overholser. Overholser was harshly critical of the series, "reported by a seemingly hotheaded fellow willing to have people leap to conclusions his reporting couldn't back up." But while calling the flaws in the series "unforgivably careless journalism," Overholser also criticized the "Post's" refusal to print Ceppos' letter defending the series and sharply criticized the "Post's" coverage of the story. Calling the "Post's" overall focus "misplaced", Overholser expressed regret that the paper had not taken the opportunity to re-examine whether the CIA had overlooked Contra involvement in drug smuggling, "a subject "The Post" and the public had given short shrift."


title: Gary Webb

text: In contrast, the series received support from Steve Weinberg, a former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors. In a long review of the series' claims in "The Baltimore Sun", Weinberg said "I think the critics have been far too harsh. Despite some hyped phrasing, "Dark Alliance" appears to be praiseworthy investigative reporting."


title: Gary Webb

text: After the series's publication, the Northern California branch of the national Society of Professional Journalists voted Webb "Journalist of the Year" for 1996. Despite the controversy that soon overtook the series, and the request of one board member to reconsider, the branch's board went ahead with the award in November.


title: Gary Webb

text: After Ceppos' column, "The Mercury News" spent the next several months conducting an internal review of the story. The review was conducted primarily by editor Jonathan Krim and reporter Pete Carey, who had written the paper's first published analysis of the series. Carey ultimately decided that there were problems with several parts of the story and wrote a draft article incorporating his findings.


title: Gary Webb

text: The paper also gave Webb permission to visit Central America again to get more evidence supporting the story. By January, Webb filed drafts of four more articles based on his trip, but his editors concluded that the new articles would not help shore up the original series's claims.


title: Gary Webb

text: The editors met with Webb several times in February to discuss the results of the paper's internal review and eventually decided to print neither Carey's draft article nor the articles Webb had filed. Webb was allowed to keep working on the story and made one more trip to Nicaragua in March. At the end of March, Ceppos told Webb that he was going to present the internal review findings in a column. After discussions with Webb, the column was published on May 11, 1997.


title: Gary Webb

text: In the column, Ceppos defended parts of the article, writing that the series had "solidly documented" that the drug ring described in the series did have connections with the Contras and did sell large quantities of cocaine in inner-city Los Angeles.


title: Gary Webb

text: But, Ceppos wrote, the series "did not meet our standards" in four areas. 1) It presented only one interpretation of conflicting evidence and in one case "did not include information that contradicted a central assertion of the series." 2) The series's estimate of the money involved was presented as fact instead of as an estimate. 3) The series oversimplified how the crack epidemic grew. 4) The series "created impressions that were open to misinterpretation" through "imprecise language and graphics."


title: Gary Webb

text: Ceppos noted that Webb did not agree with these conclusions. He concluded, "How did these shortcomings occur? ... I believe that we fell short at every step of our process: in the writing, editing and production of our work. Several people here share that burden ... But ultimately, the responsibility was, and is, mine."


title: Gary Webb

text: Webb strongly disagreed with Ceppos's column and, in interviews, was harshly critical of the paper's handling of the story. Editors at the paper, on the other hand, felt that Webb had failed to tell them about information that contradicted the series's claims and that he "responded to concerns not with reasoned argument, but with accusations of us selling him out." In June 1997, "The Mercury News" told Webb it was transferring him from the paper's Sacramento bureau and offered him a choice between working at the main offices in San Jose under closer editorial supervision, or spot reporting in Cupertino; both locations were long commutes from his home in Sacramento. Webb eventually chose Cupertino, but was unhappy with the routine stories he was reporting there and the long commute. He resigned from the paper in November 1997.


title: Gary Webb

text: The reports of the three federal investigations into the claims of "Dark Alliance" were not released until over a year after the series's publication. The reports rejected the series's main claims but were critical of some CIA and law enforcement actions.


title: Gary Webb

text: The Department of Justice Inspector-General's report was released on July 23, 1998. According to the report's "Epilogue," the report was completed in December 1997 but was not released because the DEA was still attempting to use Danilo Blandón in an investigation of international drug dealers and was concerned that the report would affect the viability of the investigation. When Attorney General Janet Reno determined that a delay was no longer necessary, the report was released unaltered.


title: Gary Webb

text: The report covered actions by Department of Justice employees in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the DEA, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and U.S. Attorneys' Offices. It found that "the allegations contained in the original "Mercury News" articles were exaggerations of the actual facts." After examining the investigations and prosecutions of the main figures in the series, Blandón, Meneses and Ross, it concluded that "Although the investigations suffered from various problems of communication and coordination, their successes and failures were determined by the normal dynamics that affect the success of scores of investigations of high-level drug traffickers … These factors, rather than anything as spectacular as a systematic effort by the CIA or any other intelligence agency to protect the drug trafficking activities of Contra supporters, determined what occurred in the cases we examined."


title: Gary Webb

text: It also concluded that "the claims that Blandón and Meneses were responsible for introducing crack cocaine into South Central Los Angeles and spreading the crack epidemic throughout the country were unsupported." Although it did find that both men were major drug dealers, "guilty of enriching themselves at the expense of countless drug users," and that they had contributed money to the Contra cause, "we did not find that their activities were responsible for the crack cocaine epidemic in South Central Los Angeles, much less the rise of crack throughout the nation, or that they were a significant source of support for the Contras."


title: Gary Webb

text: The report called several of its findings "troubling." It found that Blandón received permanent resident status "in a wholly improper manner" and that for some time the Department "was not certain whether to prosecute Meneses, or use him as a cooperating witness." Regarding issues raised in the series's shorter sidebar stories, it found that some in the government were "not eager" to have DEA agent Celerino Castillo "openly probe" activities at Ilopango Airport in El Salvador, where covert operations in support of the Contras were undertaken, and that the CIA had indeed intervened in a case involving smuggler Julio Zavala. It concluded, however, that these problems were "a far cry from the type of broad manipulation and corruption of the federal criminal justice system suggested by the original allegations."


title: Gary Webb

text: The CIA Inspector-General's report was issued in two volumes. The first one, "The California Story," was issued in a classified version on December 17, 1997, and in an unclassified version on January 29, 1998. The second volume, "The Contra Story," was issued in a classified version on April 27, 1998, and in an unclassified version on October 8, 1998.


title: Gary Webb

text: According to the report, the Inspector-General's office (OIG) examined all information the agency had "relating to CIA knowledge of drug trafficking allegations in regard to any person directly or indirectly involved in Contra activities." It also examined "how CIA handled and responded to information regarding allegations of drug trafficking" by people involved in Contra activities or support.


title: Gary Webb

text: The first volume of the report found no evidence that "any past or present employee of CIA, or anyone acting on behalf of CIA, had any direct or indirect dealing" with Ross, Blandón, or Meneses or that any of the other figures mentioned in "Dark Alliance" were ever employed by or associated with or contacted by the agency.


title: Gary Webb

text: It found nothing to support the claim that "the drug trafficking activities of Blandón and Meneses were motivated by any commitment to support the Contra cause or Contra activities undertaken by CIA." It noted that Blandón and Meneses claimed to have donated money to Contra sympathizers in Los Angeles, but found no information to confirm that it was true or that the agency had heard of it.


title: Gary Webb

text: It found no information to support the claim that the agency interfered with law enforcement actions against Ross, Blandón or Meneses.


title: Gary Webb

text: The House Intelligence Committee issued its report in February 2000. According to the report, it used Webb's reporting and writing as "key resources in focusing and refining the investigation." Like the CIA and Justice Department reports, it also found that neither Blandón, Meneses, nor Ross were associated with the CIA.


title: Gary Webb

text: Examining the support that Meneses and Blandón gave to the local Contra organization in San Francisco, the report concluded that it was "not sufficient to finance the organization" and did not consist of "millions," contrary to the claims of the "Dark Alliance" series. This support "was not directed by anyone within the Contra movement who had an association with the CIA," and the Committee found "no evidence that the CIA or the Intelligence Community was aware of these individuals’ support." It also found no evidence to support Webb's suggestion that several other drug smugglers mentioned in the series were associated with the CIA, or that anyone associated with the CIA or other intelligence agencies was involved in supplying or selling drugs in Los Angeles.


title: Gary Webb

text: After his resignation from "The Mercury News", Webb expanded the "Dark Alliance" series into a book that responded to the criticism of the series and described his experiences writing the story and dealing with the controversy. It was published in 1998 as "Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion". A revised version was published in 1999 that incorporated Webb's response to the CIA and Justice Department reports. The February 2000 report by the House Intelligence Committee in turn considered the book's claims as well as the series' claims.


title: Gary Webb

text: "Dark Alliance" was a 1998 Pen/Newman's Own First Amendment Award Finalist, 1998 "San Francisco Chronicle" bestseller, 1999 Bay Area Book Reviewers Award Finalist, and 1999 Firecracker Alternative Booksellers Award Winner in the Politics category.


title: Gary Webb

text: In interviews after leaving "The Mercury News", Webb described the 1997 controversy as media manipulation. "The government side of the story is coming through the "Los Angeles Times", "The New York Times", "The Washington Post"", he stated. "They use the giant corporate press rather than saying anything directly. If you work through friendly reporters on major newspapers, it comes off as "The New York Times" saying it and not a mouthpiece of the CIA." Webb's longest response to the controversy was in "The Mighty Wurlitzer Plays On," a chapter he contributed to an anthology of press criticism:


title: Gary Webb

text: Within "The Mighty Wurlitzer Plays On" essay Webb stated he believed there was an active "collusion between the press and the powerful" to report freely on inconsequential matters, "but when it comes to the real down and dirty stuff... We begin to see the limits of our freedoms". He also stated "the series presented dangerous ideas" by suggesting "crimes of state had been committed" (i.e. that the "federal government bore some responsibility, however indirect, for the flood of crack that coursed through black neighborhoods in the 1980s").


title: Gary Webb

text: After leaving "The Mercury News", Webb worked as an investigator for the California State Legislature. His assignments included investigating racial profiling by the California Highway Patrol and charges that the Oracle Corporation had received a no-bid contract award of $95 million in 2001.


title: Gary Webb

text: While working at the legislature, Webb continued to do freelance investigative reporting, sometimes based on his investigative work. For instance, he published an article on racial profiling in traffic stops in "Esquire" magazine, in April 1999.


title: Gary Webb

text: Webb later moved to the State Assembly's Office of Majority Services. He was laid off in February 2004 when Assembly Member Fabian Núñez was elected Speaker.


title: Gary Webb

text: In August 2004, Webb joined the "Sacramento News & Review", an alternative weekly newspaper, where he continued doing investigative writing. One of his last articles examined "America's Army", a video game designed by the U.S. Army.


title: Gary Webb

text: Webb was found dead in his Carmichael home on December 10, 2004, with two gunshot wounds to the head. His death was ruled a suicide by the Sacramento County coroner's office. According to a description of Webb's injuries in the "Los Angeles Times", he shot himself with a .38 revolver, which he placed near his right ear. The first shot went through his face, and exited at his left cheek. The coroner's staff concluded that the second shot hit an artery.


title: Gary Webb

text: After a local newspaper reported that Webb had died from multiple gunshots, the coroner's office received so many calls asking about Webb's death that Sacramento County Coroner Robert Lyons issued a statement confirming Webb had died by suicide. When asked by local reporters about the possibility of two gunshots being a suicide, Lyons replied "It's unusual in a suicide case to have two shots, but it has been done in the past, and it is in fact a distinct possibility." News coverage noted that there were widespread rumors on the Internet at the time that Webb had been killed as retribution for his "Dark Alliance" series, published eight years before.


title: Gary Webb

text: Webb's ex wife, Susan Bell told reporters that she believed Webb had died by suicide. "The way he was acting it would be hard for me to believe it was anything but suicide," she said. According to Bell, Webb had been unhappy for some time over his inability to get a job at another major newspaper. He had sold his house the week before his death because he was unable to afford the mortgage.


title: Gary Webb

text: After Webb's death, a collection of his stories from before and after the "Dark Alliance" series was published. The collection, "The Killing Game: Selected Stories from the Author of Dark Alliance", was edited by Webb's son, Eric.


title: Gary Webb

text: Views on Webb's journalism have been polarized. During and immediately after the controversy over "Dark Alliance," Webb's earlier writing was examined closely. A January 1997 article in "American Journalism Review" noted that a 1994 series Webb wrote had also been the subject of a "Mercury News" internal review that criticized Webb's reporting. A "New York Times" profile of Webb in June 1997 noted that two of his series written for the Cleveland "Plain Dealer" had resulted in lawsuits that the paper had settled.


title: Gary Webb

text: On the other hand, many of the writers and editors who worked with him have had high praise for him. Walter Bogdanich, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who worked with Webb on "The Plain Dealer", told "American Journalism Review" editor Susan Paterno "He was brilliant; he knew more about public records than anybody I've ever known." Mary Anne Sharkey, Webb's editor at "The Plain Dealer", told writer Alicia Shepard in 1997 that Webb was known as 'the carpenter' "because he had everything nailed down. Gary's documentation is awesome and his work ethic is unbelievable." California Representative Maxine Waters, who was Webb's strongest supporter in Congress after the "Dark Alliance" controversy broke, issued a statement after Webb's death calling him "one of the finest investigative journalists that our country has ever seen."


title: Gary Webb

text: Jonathan Krim, "The Mercury News" editor who recruited Webb from "The Plain Dealer" and who supervised "The Mercury News" internal review of "Dark Alliance," told "AJR" editor Paterno that Webb "had all the qualities you'd want in a reporter: curious, dogged, a very high sense of wanting to expose wrongdoing and to hold private and public officials accountable." But as Krim told Webb's biographer Nick Schou, "The zeal that helped make Gary a relentless reporter was coupled with an inability to question himself, to entertain the notion that he might have erred." Scott Herhold, Webb's first editor at "The Mercury-News", wrote in a 2013 column that "Gary Webb was a journalist of outsized talent. Few reporters I've known could match his nose for an investigative story. When he was engaged, he worked hard. He wrote well. But Webb had one huge blind side: He was fundamentally a man of passion, not of fairness. When facts didn't fit his theory, he tended to shove them to the sidelines."


title: Gary Webb

text: Webb's reporting in "Dark Alliance" remains controversial. Many writers discussing the series point to errors in it. The claim that the drug ring of Meneses-Blandón-Ross sparked the "crack explosion" has been perhaps the most criticized part of the series. Nick Schou, a journalist who wrote a 2006 biography of Webb, has claimed that this was the most important error in the series. Writing on the "Los Angeles Times" opinion page, Schou said, "Webb asserted, improbably, that the Blandón-Meneses-Ross drug ring opened 'the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles,' helping to 'spark a crack explosion in urban America.' The story offered no evidence to support such sweeping conclusions, a fatal error that would ultimately destroy Webb, if not his editors."


title: Gary Webb

text: While finding this part of the series unsupported, Schou said that some of the series's claims on CIA involvement are supported, writing that "The CIA conducted an internal investigation that acknowledged in March 1998 that the agency had covered up Contra drug trafficking for more than a decade." According to Schou, the investigation "confirmed key chunks of Webb's allegations." In a 2013 article in the "LA Weekly", Schou wrote that Webb was "vindicated by a 1998 CIA Inspector General report, which revealed that for more than a decade the agency had covered up a business relationship it had with Nicaraguan drug dealers like Blandón."


title: Gary Webb

text: Writing after Webb's death in 2005, "The Nation" magazine's former Washington Editor David Corn said that Webb "was on to something but botched part of how he handled it." According to Corn, Webb "was wrong on some important details, but he was, in a way, closer to the truth than many of his establishment media critics who neglected the story of the real CIA-contra-cocaine connection." Like Schou, Corn cites the inspector general's report, which he says "acknowledged that the CIA had indeed worked with suspected drugrunners (sic) while supporting the contras."


title: Gary Webb

text: Not all writers agree that the Inspector-General's report supported the series's claims. Jeff Leen, assistant managing editor for investigative reporting at "The Washington Post", wrote in a 2014 opinion page article that "the report found no CIA relationship with the drug ring Webb had written about." Leen, who covered the cocaine trade for the "Miami Herald" in the 1980s, rejects the claim that "because the report uncovered an agency mindset of indifference to drug-smuggling allegations", it vindicated Webb's reporting.


title: Gary Webb

text: Peter Kornbluh, a researcher at George Washington University's National Security Archives, also does not agree that the report vindicated the series. Noting that most of the activities discussed in the report had nothing to do with the people Webb reported on, Kornbluh told Schou, "I can't say it's a vindication. It was good that his story forced those reports to come out, but part of what made that happen was based on misleading information."


title: Gary Webb

text: "Kill the Messenger" (2014) is based on Webb's book "Dark Alliance" and Nick Schou's biography of Webb. Actor Jeremy Renner portrays Webb.


title: Gary Webb

text: "Snowfall" is an American crime drama television series set in Los Angeles in 1983. The series revolves around the first crack epidemic and its impact on the culture of the city. The series follows the stories of several characters whose lives are fated to intersect including CIA operative Teddy McDonald who helps to secure guns for the Contras. The character reporter Irene Abe is said by fans of the show to be a stand in character for the real life Gary Webb.


title: Causality

text: Causality (also referred to as causation, or cause and effect) is influence by which one event, process, state, or object ("a" "cause") contributes to the production of another event, process, state, or object (an "effect") where the cause is partly responsible for the effect, and the effect is partly dependent on the cause. In general, a process has many causes, which are also said to be "causal factors" for it, and all lie in its past. An effect can in turn be a cause of, or causal factor for, many other effects, which all lie in its future. Some writers have held that causality is metaphysically prior to notions of time and space.


title: Causality

text: Causality is an abstraction that indicates how the world progresses. As such a basic concept, it is more apt as an explanation of other concepts of progression than as something to be explained by others more basic. The concept is like those of agency and efficacy. For this reason, a leap of intuition may be needed to grasp it. Accordingly, causality is implicit in the logic and structure of ordinary language.


title: Causality

text: In English studies of Aristotelian philosophy, the word "cause" is used as a specialized technical term, the translation of Aristotle's term αἰτία, by which Aristotle meant "explanation" or "answer to a 'why' question". Aristotle categorized the four types of answers as material, formal, efficient, and final "causes". In this case, the "cause" is the explanans for the explanandum, and failure to recognize that different kinds of "cause" are being considered can lead to futile debate. Of Aristotle's four explanatory modes, the one nearest to the concerns of the present article is the "efficient" one.


title: Causality

text: David Hume, as part of his opposition to rationalism, argued that pure reason alone cannot prove the reality of efficient causality; instead, he appealed to custom and mental habit, observing that all human knowledge derives solely from experience.


title: Causality

text: The nature of cause and effect is a concern of the subject known as metaphysics. Kant thought that time and space were notions prior to human understanding of the progress or evolution of the world, and he also recognized the priority of causality. But he did not have the understanding that came with knowledge of Minkowski geometry and the special theory of relativity, that the notion of causality can be used as a prior foundation from which to construct notions of time and space.


title: Causality

text: A general metaphysical question about cause and effect is what kind of entity can be a cause, and what kind of entity can be an effect.


title: Causality

text: One viewpoint on this question is that cause and effect are of one and the same kind of entity, with causality an asymmetric relation between them. That is to say, it would make good sense grammatically to say either ""A" is the cause and "B" the effect" or ""B" is the cause and "A" the effect", though only one of those two can be actually true. In this view, one opinion, proposed as a metaphysical principle in process philosophy, is that every cause and every effect is respectively some process, event, becoming, or happening. An example is 'his tripping over the step was the cause, and his breaking his ankle the effect'. Another view is that causes and effects are 'states of affairs', with the exact natures of those entities being less restrictively defined than in process philosophy.


title: Causality

text: Another viewpoint on the question is the more classical one, that a cause and its effect can be of different kinds of entity. For example, in Aristotle's efficient causal explanation, an action can be a cause while an enduring object is its effect. For example, the generative actions of his parents can be regarded as the efficient cause, with Socrates being the effect, Socrates being regarded as an enduring object, in philosophical tradition called a 'substance', as distinct from an action.


title: Causality

text: Since causality is a subtle metaphysical notion, considerable intellectual effort, along with exhibition of evidence, is needed to establish knowledge of it in particular empirical circumstances. According to David Hume, the human mind is unable to perceive causal relations directly. On this ground, the scholar distinguished between the regularity view on causality and the counterfactual notion. According to the counterfactual view, "X" causes "Y" if and only if, without "X, Y" would not exist. Hume interpreted the latter as an ontological view, i.e., as a description of the nature of causality but, given the limitations of the human mind, advised using the former (stating, roughly, that "X" causes "Y" if and only if the two events are spatiotemporally conjoined, and "X" precedes "Y") as an epistemic definition of causality. Having an epistemic concept of causality is needed to distinguish between causal and noncausal relations. The contemporary philosophical literature on causality can be divided into five big approaches to causality. These include the (mentioned above) regularity, probabilistic, counterfactual, mechanistic, and manipulationist views. The five approaches can be shown to be reductive, i.e., define causality in terms of relations of other types. According to this reading, they define causality in terms of, respectively, empirical regularities (constant conjunctions of events), changes in conditional probabilities, counterfactual conditions, mechanisms underlying causal relations, and invariance under intervention.


title: Causality

text: Causality has the properties of antecedence and contiguity. These are topological, and are ingredients for space-time geometry. As developed by Alfred Robb, these properties allow the derivation of the notions of time and space. Max Jammer writes "the Einstein postulate ... opens the way to a straightforward construction of the causal topology ... of Minkowski space." Causal efficacy propagates no faster than light.


title: Causality

text: Thus, the notion of causality is metaphysically prior to the notions of time and space. In practical terms, this is because use of the relation of causality is necessary for the interpretation of empirical experiments. Interpretation of experiments is needed to establish the physical and geometrical notions of time and space.


title: Causality

text: The deterministic world-view holds that the history of the universe can be exhaustively represented as a progression of events following one after as cause and effect. The incompatibilist version of this holds that there is no such thing as "free will". Compatibilism, on the other hand, holds that determinism is compatible with, or even necessary for, free will.


title: Causality

text: Causes may sometimes be distinguished into two types: necessary and sufficient. A third type of causation, which requires neither necessity nor sufficiency in and of itself, but which contributes to the effect, is called a "contributory cause".


title: Causality

text: J. L. Mackie argues that usual talk of "cause" in fact refers to INUS conditions (insufficient but non-redundant parts of a condition which is itself unnecessary but sufficient for the occurrence of the effect). An example is a short circuit as a cause for a house burning down. Consider the collection of events: the short circuit, the proximity of flammable material, and the absence of firefighters. Together these are unnecessary but sufficient to the house's burning down (since many other collections of events certainly could have led to the house burning down, for example shooting the house with a flamethrower in the presence of oxygen and so forth). Within this collection, the short circuit is an insufficient (since the short circuit by itself would not have caused the fire) but non-redundant (because the fire would not have happened without it, everything else being equal) part of a condition which is itself unnecessary but sufficient for the occurrence of the effect. So, the short circuit is an INUS condition for the occurrence of the house burning down.


title: Causality

text: Conditional statements are "not" statements of causality. An important distinction is that statements of causality require the antecedent to precede or coincide with the consequent in time, whereas conditional statements do not require this temporal order. Confusion commonly arises since many different statements in English may be presented using "If ..., then ..." form (and, arguably, because this form is far more commonly used to make a statement of causality). The two types of statements are distinct, however.


title: Causality

text: For example, all of the following statements are true when interpreting "If ..., then ..." as the material conditional:


title: Causality

text: The first is true since both the antecedent and the consequent are true. The second is true in sentential logic and indeterminate in natural language, regardless of the consequent statement that follows, because the antecedent is false.


title: Causality

text: The ordinary indicative conditional has somewhat more structure than the material conditional. For instance, although the first is the closest, neither of the preceding two statements seems true as an ordinary indicative reading. But the sentence:


title: Causality

text: intuitively seems to be true, even though there is no straightforward causal relation in this hypothetical situation between Shakespeare's not writing Macbeth and someone else's actually writing it.


title: Causality

text: Another sort of conditional, the counterfactual conditional, has a stronger connection with causality, yet even counterfactual statements are not all examples of causality. Consider the following two statements:


title: Causality

text: In the first case, it would not be correct to say that A's being a triangle "caused" it to have three sides, since the relationship between triangularity and three-sidedness is that of definition. The property of having three sides actually determines A's state as a triangle. Nonetheless, even when interpreted counterfactually, the first statement is true. An early version of Aristotle's "four cause" theory is described as recognizing "essential cause". In this version of the theory, that the closed polygon has three sides is said to be the "essential cause" of its being a triangle. This use of the word 'cause' is of course now far obsolete. Nevertheless, it is within the scope of ordinary language to say that it is essential to a triangle that it has three sides.


title: Causality

text: A full grasp of the concept of conditionals is important to understanding the literature on causality. In everyday language, loose conditional statements are often enough made, and need to be interpreted carefully.


title: Causality

text: Fallacies of questionable cause, also known as causal fallacies, "non-causa pro causa" (Latin for "non-cause for cause"), or false cause, are informal fallacies where a cause is incorrectly identified.


title: Causality

text: Counterfactual theories define causation in terms of a counterfactual relation. These theories can often be seeing as "floating" their account of causality on top of an account of the logic of counterfactual conditionals. This approach can be traced back to David Hume's definition of the causal relation as that "where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed." More full-fledged analysis of causation in terms of counterfactual conditionals only came in the 20th century after development of the possible world semantics for the evaluation of counterfactual conditionals. In his 1973 paper "Causation," David Lewis proposed the following definition of the notion of "causal dependence":


title: Causality

text: Causation is then defined as a chain of causal dependence. That is, C causes E if and only if there exists a sequence of events C, D, D, ... D, E such that each event in the sequence depends on the previous. This chain may be called a "mechanism".


title: Causality

text: Note that the analysis does not purport to explain how we make causal judgements or how we reason about causation, but rather to give a metaphysical account of what it is for there to be a causal relation between some pair of events. If correct, the analysis has the power to explain certain features of causation. Knowing that causation is a matter of counterfactual dependence, we may reflect on the nature of counterfactual dependence to account for the nature of causation. For example, in his paper "Counterfactual Dependence and Time's Arrow," Lewis sought to account for the time-directedness of counterfactual dependence in terms of the semantics of the counterfactual conditional. If correct, this theory can serve to explain a fundamental part of our experience, which is that we can only causally affect the future but not the past.


title: Causality

text: Interpreting causation as a deterministic relation means that if "A" causes "B", then "A" must "always" be followed by "B". In this sense, war does not cause deaths, nor does smoking cause cancer or emphysema. As a result, many turn to a notion of probabilistic causation. Informally, "A" ("The person is a smoker") probabilistically causes "B" ("The person has now or will have cancer at some time in the future"), if the information that "A" occurred increases the likelihood of "B"s occurrence. Formally, P{"B"|"A"}≥ P{"B"} where P{"B"|"A"} is the conditional probability that "B" will occur given the information that "A" occurred, and P{"B"} is the probability that "B" will occur having no knowledge whether "A" did or did not occur. This intuitive condition is not adequate as a definition for probabilistic causation because of its being too general and thus not meeting our intuitive notion of cause and effect. For example, if "A" denotes the event "The person is a smoker," "B" denotes the event "The person now has or will have cancer at some time in the future" and "C" denotes the event "The person now has or will have emphysema some time in the future," then the following three relationships hold: P{"B"|"A"} ≥ P{"B"}, P{"C"|"A"} ≥ P{"C"} and P{"B"|"C"} ≥ P{"B"}. The last relationship states that knowing that the person has emphysema increases the likelihood that he will have cancer. The reason for this is that having the information that the person has emphysema increases the likelihood that the person is a smoker, thus indirectly increasing the likelihood that the person will have cancer. However, we would not want to conclude that having emphysema causes cancer. Thus, we need additional conditions such as temporal relationship of "A" to "B" and a rational explanation as to the mechanism of action. It is hard to quantify this last requirement and thus different authors prefer somewhat different definitions.


title: Causality

text: When experimental interventions are infeasible or illegal, the derivation of a cause-and-effect relationship from observational studies must rest on some qualitative theoretical assumptions, for example, that symptoms do not cause diseases, usually expressed in the form of missing arrows in causal graphs such as Bayesian networks or path diagrams. The theory underlying these derivations relies on the distinction between "conditional probabilities", as in formula_1, and "interventional probabilities", as in formula_2. The former reads: "the probability of finding cancer in a person known to smoke, having started, unforced by the experimenter, to do so at an unspecified time in the past", while the latter reads: "the probability of finding cancer in a person forced by the experimenter to smoke at a specified time in the past". The former is a statistical notion that can be estimated by observation with negligible intervention by the experimenter, while the latter is a causal notion which is estimated in an experiment with an important controlled randomized intervention. It is specifically characteristic of quantal phenomena that observations defined by incompatible variables always involve important intervention by the experimenter, as described quantitatively by the observer effect. In classical thermodynamics, processes are initiated by interventions called thermodynamic operations. In other branches of science, for example astronomy, the experimenter can often observe with negligible intervention.


title: Causality

text: The theory of "causal calculus" (also known as do-calculus, Judea Pearl's Causal Calculus, Calculus of


title: Causality

text: Actions) permits one to infer interventional probabilities from conditional probabilities in causal Bayesian networks with unmeasured variables. One very practical result of this theory is the characterization of confounding variables, namely, a sufficient set of variables that, if adjusted for, would yield the correct causal effect between variables of interest. It can be shown that a sufficient set for estimating the causal effect of formula_3 on formula_4 is any set of non-descendants of formula_3 that formula_6-separate formula_3 from formula_4 after removing all arrows emanating from formula_3. This criterion, called "backdoor", provides a mathematical definition of "confounding" and helps researchers identify accessible sets of variables worthy of measurement.


title: Causality

text: While derivations in causal calculus rely on the structure of the causal graph, parts of the causal structure can, under certain assumptions, be learned from statistical data. The basic idea goes back to Sewall Wright's 1921 work on path analysis. A "recovery" algorithm was developed by Rebane and Pearl (1987) which rests on Wright's distinction between the three possible types of causal substructures allowed in a directed acyclic graph (DAG):


title: Causality

text: Type 1 and type 2 represent the same statistical dependencies (i.e., formula_3 and formula_14 are independent given formula_4) and are, therefore, indistinguishable within purely cross-sectional data. Type 3, however, can be uniquely identified, since formula_3 and formula_14 are marginally independent and all other pairs are dependent. Thus, while the "skeletons" (the graphs stripped of arrows) of these three triplets are identical, the directionality of the arrows is partially identifiable. The same distinction applies when formula_3 and formula_14 have common ancestors, except that one must first condition on those ancestors. Algorithms have been developed to systematically determine the skeleton of the underlying graph and, then, orient all arrows whose directionality is dictated by the conditional independencies observed.


title: Causality

text: Alternative methods of structure learning search through the "many" possible causal structures among the variables, and remove ones which are strongly incompatible with the observed correlations. In general this leaves a set of possible causal relations, which should then be tested by analyzing time series data or, preferably, designing appropriately controlled experiments. In contrast with Bayesian Networks, path analysis (and its generalization, structural equation modeling), serve better to estimate a known causal effect or to test a causal model than to generate causal hypotheses.