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anonymous

OSU climate researchers discover 1,800-year-old 'Rosetta stone' ice cores - 0 views

www.dispatch.com/...t-rosetta-stone-ice-cores.html

climate ice

shared by anonymous on 04 Apr 13 - Cached
  • The Thompsons realized that the Peruvian cores were similar to other ice cores they had retrieved from Tibet and the Himalayas. When they found matches in ice cores taken from opposite sides of Earth, they knew they had “Rosetta Stones” with which to compare other climate histories from tropical and subtropical regions.
  • “Looking at ice cores from the tropics has been especially important in allowing us to understand how this very stable climate system has changed over time,” said Daniel Schrag, a Harvard University climatologist.
  • The Quelccaya ice is important because it is perched on a wide flat shelf in a region with clearly defined wet and dry seasons. Each year’s ice is separated by a thin layer of dust, which is blown there during dry months. Researchers can estimate changes in ocean temperature by measuring the ratio of different oxygen isotopes in frozen water molecules. The glacier’s flat perch also keeps each layer straight, which makes it easier to compute annual changes in snowfall, said Ian Howatt, an OSU glaciologist and ice core study co-author.
  • anonymous on 04 Apr 13
     
    "Ice cores taken from a remote South American glacier are revealing a year-by-year tropical climate history over nearly two millennia. "
anonymous

Companies won't even look at résumés of the long-term unemployed - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...es-of-the-long-term-unemployed

generations companies résumés unemployed

shared by anonymous on 15 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Matthew O’Brien reports on a striking new paper by Rand Ghayad and William Dickens of Northeastern University. The researchers sent out 4,800 fake résumés at random for 600 job openings. What they found is that employers would rather call back someone with no relevant experience who’s only been out of work for a few months than someone with lots of relevant experience who’s been out of work for longer than six months.
  • Here’s what this looks like in chart form:
  • the long-term unemployed are struggling to find work no matter how many job openings pop up.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • there’s some ambiguity about whether companies are discriminating irrationally against the unemployed or whether they have good reason for screening out people who have been out of work for six months or more.
  • Dozens of states have been considering legislation that would make it illegal to discriminate against the long-term unemployed. Some proposals would even allow unsuccessful applicants to sue under the same discrimination laws that apply to race or gender bias.
  • These proposals have plenty of critics. But it’s also unclear whether they would have much impact.
  • The Obama administration, for its part, has proposed a few other ideas, including training programs and tax credits for businesses that hire the long-term unemployed. (The latter were even included in the American Jobs Act that Republicans blocked in Congress.)
  • Yet economists have argued that while these programs might help at the margins, they won’t necessarily bring down the overall unemployment rate. For instance, a company might just hire a subsidized worker over someone else.
  • It’s worth noting, as Matt Yglesias points out here, that long-term unemployment was a major structural problem after the Great Depression too. But as this old essay by Richard Jensen suggests, it took World War II to finally solve the problem: “The war, by removing millions of prime men from the labor market, by restructuring the work process, by subsidizing wages, and by massive retraining, finally gave the private sector the methods and the incentives to rehire the hard-core.” That’s not really an option today, but it underscores a bleak fact about the recession. When the labor market stays weak for years on end, the damage becomes long-lasting — and extremely difficult to reverse.
  • anonymous on 15 Apr 13
     
    "Here's one big reason why America's unemployment crisis may be here to stay. Thanks to the lasting effects of the recession, there are currently 4.7 million workers who have been out of work for at least 27 weeks. And new research suggests that employers will almost never consider hiring them."
anonymous

Researchers Finally Replicated Reinhart-Rogoff, and There Are Serious Problems. - 0 views

www.nextnewdeal.net/...and-there-are-serious-problems

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 17 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Countries with debt-to-GDP ratios above 90 percent have a slightly negative average growth rate, in fact.
  • This has been one of the most cited stats in the public debate during the Great Recession.
  • In a new paper, "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff," Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst successfully replicate the results.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • After trying to replicate the Reinhart-Rogoff results and failing, they reached out to Reinhart and Rogoff and they were willing to share their data spreadhseet. This allowed Herndon et al. to see how how Reinhart and Rogoff's data was constructed.
  • They find that three main issues stand out.
  • First, Reinhart and Rogoff selectively exclude years of high debt and average growth.
  • Second, they use a debatable method to weight the countries.
  • Third, there also appears to be a coding error that excludes high-debt and average-growth countries.
  • All three bias in favor of their result, and without them you don't get their controversial result.
  • Selective Exclusions. Reinhart-Rogoff use 1946-2009 as their period, with the main difference among countries being their starting year.
  • The paper didn't disclose which years they excluded or why.
  • Unconventional Weighting. Reinhart-Rogoff divides country years into debt-to-GDP buckets. They then take the average real growth for each country within the buckets.
  • this weighting significantly reduces the average; if you weight by the number of years you find a higher growth rate above 90 percent.
  • Coding Error. As Herndon-Ash-Pollin puts it: "A coding error in the RR working spreadsheet entirely excludes five countries, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, and Denmark, from the analysis.
  • Being a bit of a doubting Thomas on this coding error, I wouldn't believe unless I touched the digital Excel wound myself. One of the authors was able to show me that, and here it is. You can see the Excel blue-box for formulas missing some data:
  • If this error turns out to be an actual mistake Reinhart-Rogoff made, well, all I can hope is that future historians note that one of the core empirical points providing the intellectual foundation for the global move to austerity in the early 2010s was based on someone accidentally not updating a row formula in Excel.
  • So what do Herndon-Ash-Pollin conclude? They find "the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent, not -0.1 percent as [Reinhart-Rogoff claim]." [UPDATE: To clarify, they find 2.2 percent if they include all the years, weigh by number of years, and avoid the Excel error.] Going further into the data, they are unable to find a breakpoint where growth falls quickly and significantly.
  • This is also good evidence for why you should release your data online, so it can be properly vetted.
  • But beyond that, looking through the data and how much it can collapse because of this or that assumption, it becomes quite clear that there's no magic number out there. The debt needs to be thought of as a response to the contingent circumstances we find ourselves in, with mass unemployment, a Federal Reserve desperately trying to gain traction at the zero lower bound, and a gap between what we could be producing and what we are. The past guides us, but so far it has failed to provide evidence of an emergency threshold. In fact, it tells us that a larger deficit right now would help us greatly.
  • anonymous on 17 Apr 13
     
    "In 2010, economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff released a paper, "Growth in a Time of Debt." Their "main result is that...median growth rates for countries with public debt over 90 percent of GDP are roughly one percent lower than otherwise; average (mean) growth rates are several percent lower." Countries with debt-to-GDP ratios above 90 percent have a slightly negative average growth rate, in fact."
anonymous

Freakonomics: What Went Wrong? - 0 views

www.americanscientist.org/...issue.aspx

shared by anonymous on 13 Dec 11 - Cached
  • Oster’s work stirred debate for a few years in the epidemiological literature, but eventually she admitted that the subject-matter experts had been right all along. One of Das Gupta’s many convincing counterpoints was a graph showing that in Taiwan, the ratio of boys to girls was near the natural rate for first and second babies (106:100) but not for third babies (112:100); this pattern held up with or without hepatitis B. In a follow-up blog post, Levitt applauded Oster for bravery in admitting her mistake, but he never credited Das Gupta for her superior work. Our point is not that Das Gupta had to be right and Oster wrong, but that Levitt and Dubner, in their celebration of economics and economists, suspended their critical thinking.
  • In SuperFreakonomics, Levitt and Dubner use a back-of-the-envelope calculation to make the contrarian claim that driving drunk is safer than walking drunk, an oversimplified argument that was picked apart by bloggers. The problem with this argument, and others like it, lies in the assumption that the driver and the walker are the same type of person, making the same kinds of choices, except for their choice of transportation.
  • Such all-else-equal thinking is a common statistical fallacy. In fact, driver and walker are likely to differ in many ways other than their mode of travel. What seem like natural calculations are stymied by the impracticality, in real life, of changing one variable while leaving all other variables constant.
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  • This unavoidable tradeoff between false positive and false negative errors is a well-known property of all statistical-prediction applications. Circling back to check all the factors involved in the problem might have helped the authors avoid this mistake.
  • How could an experienced journalist and a widely respected researcher slip up in so many ways? Some possible answers to this question offer insights for the would-be pop-statistics writer.
  • Leave friendship at the door: We attribute many of these errors to the structure of the authors’ collaboration, which, from what we can tell, relies on an informal social network that has many potential failure points.
  • Don’t sell yourself short: Perhaps Levitt’s admirable modesty—he has repeatedly attributed his success to luck and hard work rather than genius—has led him astray. If he feels he is surrounded by economists more exceptional and brilliant than he is, he may let their assertions stand without challenge.
  • Maintain checks and balances: A solid collaboration requires each side to check and balance the other side. Although there’s no way we can be sure, perhaps, in some of the cases described above, there was a breakdown in the division of labor when it came to investigating technical points.
  • Take your time: Success comes at a cost: The constraints of producing continuous content for a blog or website and meeting publisher’s deadlines may have adverse effects on accuracy.
  • Be clear about where you’re coming from: Levitt’s publishers, along with Dubner, characterize him as a “rogue economist.”
  • Use latitude responsibly: When a statistician criticizes a claim on technical grounds, he or she is declaring not that the original finding is wrong but that it has not been convincingly proven. Researchers—even economists endorsed by Steven Levitt—can make mistakes. It may be okay to overlook the occasional mistake in the pursuit of the larger goal of understanding the world. But once one accepts this lower standard—science as plausible stories or data-supported reasoning, rather than the more carefully tested demonstrations that are characteristic of Levitt’s peer-reviewed Research articles—one really has to take extra care, consider all sides of an issue, and look out for false positive results.
  • anonymous on 13 Dec 11
     
    In our analysis of the Freakonomics approach, we encountered a range of avoidable mistakes, from back-of-the-envelope analyses gone wrong to unexamined assumptions to an uncritical reliance on the work of Levitt's friends and colleagues. This turns accessibility on its head: Readers must work to discern which conclusions are fully quantitative, which are somewhat data driven and which are purely speculative.
anonymous

Gut Microbes May Drive Evolution - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

shared by anonymous on 09 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • A 2010 experiment led by Eugene Rosenberg of Tel Aviv University found that raising Drosophila pseudoobscura fruit flies on different diets altered their mate selection: the flies would mate only with other flies on the same diet. A dose of antibiotics abolished these preferences—the flies went back to mating without regard to diet—suggesting that it was changes in gut microbes brought about by diet, and not diet alone, that drove the change.
  • These studies are part of a growing consensus among evolutionary biologists that one can no longer separate an organism's genes from those of its symbiotic bacteria. They are all part of a single "hologenome."
  • Researchers believe that the microbiome is essential to human evolution as well. "Given the importance of the microbiome in human adaptations such as digestion, smell and the immune system, it would appear very likely that the human microbiome has had an effect on speciation," Bordenstein says. "Arguably, the microbiota are as important as genes."
  • anonymous on 09 Mar 12
     
    "The human body harbors at least 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells. Collectively known as the microbiome, this community may play a role in regulating one's risk of obesity, asthma and allergies. Now some researchers are wondering if the microbiome may have a part in an even more crucial process: mate selection and, ultimately, evolution."
anonymous

What Happened to Psychiatry's Magic Bullets? - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...health-theory-discredited.html

shared by anonymous on 09 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Despite our ambivalence, sales of psychiatric drugs amounted to more than seventy billion dollars in 2010. They have become yet another commodity that consumers have learned to live with or even enjoy, like S.U.V.s or Cheetos.
  • In the past few years, one pharmaceutical giant after another—GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Novartis, Pfizer, Merck, Sanofi—has shrunk or shuttered its neuroscience research facilities.
  • Clinical trials have been halted, lines of research abandoned, and the new drug pipeline has been allowed to run dry.
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  • The answer lies in the history of psychopharmacology, which is more deeply indebted to serendipity than most branches of medicine—in particular, to a remarkable series of accidental discoveries made in the fifteen or so years following the end of the Second World War.
  • By 1960, the major classes of psychiatric drugs—among them, mood stabilizers, antipsychotics, antidepressants, and anti-anxiety drugs, known as anxiolytics—had been discovered and were on their way to becoming a seventy-billion-dollar market.
  • Having been discovered by accident, however, they lacked one important element: a theory that accounted for why they worked (or, in many cases, did not).
  • —they fashioned an explanation: mental illness was the result of imbalances among these neurotransmitters, which the drugs treated in the same way that insulin treats diabetes.
  • In 1965, Joseph Schildkraut, a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health, reverse-engineered antidepressants and offered an actual theory: at least when it came to depression, the imbalances were to be found in the neurotransmitters he thought were affected by the drugs, dopamine and norepinephrine. Seven years after antidepressants were invented, and five years after Ayd asserted that depression was a chemical problem, psychiatrists finally had a precise, scientific explanation for why they worked. The paper quickly became one of the most cited articles in the medical literature.
  • But Schildkraut was wrong. Within a few years, as technology expanded our ability to peer into the brain, it became clear that antidepressants act mostly by increasing the availability of the neurotransmitter serotonin—rather than dopamine and norepinephrine, as previously thought.
  • The serotonin-imbalance theory, however, has turned out to be just as inaccurate as Schildkraut’s. While S.S.R.I.s surely alter serotonin metabolism, those changes do not explain why the drugs work, nor do they explain why they have proven to be no more effective than placebos in clinical trials.
  • Despite their continued failure to understand how psychiatric drugs work, doctors continue to tell patients that their troubles are the result of chemical imbalances in their brains.
  • As Frank Ayd pointed out, this explanation helps reassure patients even as it encourages them to take their medicine, and it fits in perfectly with our expectation that doctors will seek out and destroy the chemical villains responsible for all of our suffering, both physical and mental. The theory may not work as science, but it is a devastatingly effective myth.
  • the dry pipeline of new drugs bemoaned by Friedman is an indication that the drug industry has begun to lose faith in the myth it did so much to create.
  • Bedazzled by the prospect of unraveling the mysteries of psychic suffering, researchers have spent recent decades on a fool’s errand—chasing down chemical imbalances that don’t exist. And the result, as Friedman put it, is that “it is hard to think of a single truly novel psychotropic drug that has emerged in the last thirty years.”
  • anonymous on 09 Sep 13
     
    "It's been just over twenty-five years since Prozac came to market, and more than twenty per cent of Americans now regularly take mind-altering drugs prescribed by their doctors. Almost as familiar as brands like Zoloft and Lexapro is the worry about what it means that the daily routine in many households, for parents and children alike, includes a dose of medications that are poorly understood and whose long-term effects on the body are unknown. "
anonymous

Thoughts on Minority Threat and Modern Day Vigilantes - 0 views

crimegeek.com/reat-and-modern-day-vigilantes

shared by anonymous on 17 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • What do many of them initially believe about Crime in America? Two things stand out. . . One, cities are a dangerous place filled with gang bangers, thieves, and drug dealers. Two, the criminal justice system is essentially at war with a group of bad people who are hell bent on making life miserable for the rest of us.
  • We tend to fear what is either unknown or different. We all have our personal boogeymen, those things that cause the hair on the back of our necks to stand up. In the academic study of policing, we call this boogeyman the symbolic assailant (SA).
  • When I first discuss SA’s with my students they automatically assume I am talking about profiling. Not exactly. The symbolic assailant is a composite of every person who has ever given you shit, acted out of line, or been a threat to themselves or others.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • What separates this from profiling is that this imaginary person is based upon direct experiences the officer has had with specific citizens. When an officer looks over their shoulder to see what went bump in the night, this is what they’re looking for – a trigger that lets them know if the situation they’ve wandered into is safe or not.
  • Profiling, on the other hand, is based upon indirect experiences with broad groups (or types) of people.
  • Zimmerman is not alone in using race as a primary indicator of perceived dangerousness. A common refrain used to justify behavior like Zimmerman’s is that sadly young African-American males do commit the lions share of crime in America.
  • This argument uses Uniform Crime Report (UCR) data to back up its assertions. By that standard, it becomes very easy to then connect the dots and see somebody like Travyon Martin as a potential threat.
  • the UCR is not only voluntarily submitted by police departments but more importantly only measures crime actually reported to the police.
  • Research studies have found that anywhere from 30 to 50% of crime goes unreported. If anything, this data reflects citizen and police behavior more than actual crime incidents.
  • When our images of young African Amrican males are limited to hoodlums and athletes it should come as little surprise that Zimmerman (and the jury) thought he’d made the right call in his pursuit of Martin. This works both ways however.
  • One of my favorite courses to teach is Criminal Justice and Film. One of my favorite parts of the course is when I screen a double feature of “Dirty Harry” and “Taxi Driver.” Everybody always cheers and collectively feels a sense of relief when Eastwood takes matters into his own hands and guns down the psychotic Scorpio killer. At the end of the film, Eastwood tosses his badge away in disgust.
  • The reaction is markedly different with “Taxi Driver”. Instead of relief, the audience feels disgust and revulsion when the psychotic Travis Bickle saves a child prostitute by massacring a tenement full of pimps and thugs. The public reaction within the film treats Bickle as a hero. As an audience we know the truth, Bickle is a mentally disturbed Vet and a failed political assassin.
  • Despite the wildly different audience reactions to these two films, both characters are eerily similar. Both Harry and Bickle are struggling to overcome personal traumas ( the death of a wife and the horrors of War respectively). Both view the decaying cities of the 70s as being filled with animals. Both are increasingly disgusted with a society that seems to care more about protecting scum than the innocent. Both men are overwhelmingly alone and have trouble maintaining any semblance of a social relationship. And both have developed speeches and phrases to deliver as they mete out their own brand of vigilante justice.
  • Why do we view these characters so differently? One word: perception.
  • It becomes much easier to excuse and justify Harry’s actions simply because he’s a much more (seemingly) likable and charming person. This is why stand your ground laws are so problematic from a public policy perspective.
  • Public policy, particularly criminal justice policy, tends to be based more on conventional wisdom or common sense than empirical research.
  • Academics need to not only do a better job publicizing their research but we need to make it more accessible and relatable to non professional nerds. Only when this happens will public policy reflect science instead of somebody’s gut feeling. Let’s get to work.
  • anonymous on 17 Aug 13
     
    "I teach Criminal Justice in a rural and predominantly White state. One of the difficulties teaching my discipline in this environment is that I am mainly discussing urban problems in a place where the nearest large city is several hours and an entire state away. Many of my students only know about crime and urban America from what their family, cable news and AM radio tell them."
anonymous

For Goodness' Sake - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...deWaal-t.html

humanity sociology altruism layscience

shared by anonymous on 12 Jul 10 - Cached
  • “The Price of Altruism” is about far more than Price himself. It covers the entire 150-year history of scientists’ researching, debating and bickering about a theoretical problem that lies at the core of behavioral biology, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology: Why is it that organisms sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others?
  • Haldane was one of the architects of the now familiar “gene’s-eye view” of evolution. Looked at from the gene’s perspective, altruism seems a little less perplexing. When an organism sacrifices its life to save a relative, it helps perpetuate the genes they share.
  • anonymous on 12 Jul 10
     
    "[The book] is about far more than Price himself. It covers the entire 150-year history of scientists' researching, debating and bickering about a theoretical problem that lies at the core of behavioral biology, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology: Why is it that organisms sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others?" By Frans de Waal at The New York Times Book Review on July 1, 2010.
anonymous

Searching for Superguy in Gotham - 0 views

schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/...arching-for-superguy-in-gotham

education superman

shared by anonymous on 28 Sep 10 - Cached
  • For an exceptional review of charter school research, I would recommend Robert Bifulco and Katrina Bulkley’s chapter on Charter Schools in the Handbook of research on Education Finance and Policy. Neither of these scholars are charter school naysayers, yet they conclude: research to date provides little evidence that the benefits envisioned in the original conceptions of charter schools – organizational and educational innovation, improved student achievement, and enhanced efficiency – have materialized.
  • Of course, the true believers in Superguy (as charter operator) will argue vehemently that the finding that charters, on average, are average does not shake their belief… because the “upper half of charter schools is really good!, better than average, in fact!” Skeptically, I respond – isn’t the upper half of all schools better than average? If so, might Superguy actually be found in any school that’s better than average? But who am I to nitpick?
  • Those pesky, curmudgeonly,  academics are at it again… denying the true believers that Superguy comes in the singular form of a New York City charter school operator!
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  • Arguably, charter pundits and the media outlets who uncritically go along with them have created a “market for lemons” with charters – making bad charters sustainable. I expect (though haven’t gathered the data yet) that many dreadfully failing charters have long waiting lists and plenty of kids enrolled. Parents are being convinced that charters are better – all charters are better – simply because they are charters. For the average parent, the flood of pop media on charters (like The Lottery and Superman) is creating a significant asymmetry of information. The sellers of charters are deceiving the consumers and no-one is stepping in to counterbalance the asymmetry.
  • anonymous on 28 Sep 10
     
    "Who is Superguy? By most popular accounts, Superguy is a figure of mythical proportion (urban legend proportion) capable of swooping down into the poorest of urban neighborhoods of America's largest cities, gaining immediate access to schooling facilities, rounding up unthinkable private contributions from wealthy philanthropists and quite simply saving the lives of low-income urban school children trapped in bleak, adult-centered, perpetually failing traditional public schools." By Bruce D. Baker at School Finance 101 on September 6, 2010.
anonymous

The big letdown - 0 views

www.boston.com/...the_big_letdown

politics

shared by anonymous on 12 Oct 10 - Cached
  • In short, alleviating disappointment means understanding what someone actually means when they say they’re disappointed. And for a politician, it means realizing that a certain amount of disillusionment is built into the system--the natural human optimism that allows people, election after election, to believe campaign promises also consigns them to repeated bouts of disappointment. Even if a voter manages to keep his expectations low in the fever of a campaign, research suggests that his conception of the counterfactual--what might have been if different decisions had been made, different policies pursued, or different politicians elected--grows increasingly positive in his memory, setting him up for disappointment.
  • Of the two sister emotions, regret is by far the more studied. Regret--or, more accurately, our desire to avoid future regret--is a major factor in how we decide what to do, what to say, and what to buy. A man might go on an adventurous vacation because he doesn’t want to regret missing the opportunity, or he might forgo ordering a fifth and then a sixth cocktail because he regretted it the last time he did it. Disappointment, on the other hand, usually drives us to do not much at all, making it a less fruitful emotion for marketers and professional motivators. Negative emotions like anger or fear give people energy and incentive to act; disappointment does the opposite. That difference is reflected in polling right now that shows a yawning enthusiasm gap between Republicans and Democrats, with the former angry, motivated, and eager to vote, and the latter listless and expected to stay home in the upcoming mid-term elections.
  • Gilovich sees several reasons for this, but one of them is that over time we steadily minimize the barriers to action that shape our decisions. Our instinct is to come to believe that the thing we didn’t do would have been less difficult than we found it at the time. ”We think it’s easy in retrospect to have learned a foreign language. Sure, we think, we could have found a half an hour a day to listen to tapes. But half an hour a day in actual life is hard to find,” says Gilovich.
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  • Taken together, this body of research underlines just how inevitable some degree of disappointment is, in electoral politics as in our personal lives. There’s ample research in the psychology literature that shows just how incorrigibly optimistic and trusting human beings can be, and how vulnerable, as a result, they are to campaign rhetoric like Obama’s in 2008. ”Don’t compare me to the Almighty,” Vice President Joe Biden likes to say, quoting Boston’s former mayor Kevin White, ”compare me to the alternative.” Even when they think they’re doing just that, though, people tend to romanticize the road not taken.
  • anonymous on 12 Oct 10
     
    "America is disappointed. The economic recovery, such as it is, has produced few jobs and little growth, the war in Afghanistan is going poorly, and Washington's political culture, which President Obama took office promising to reform, is as vitriolic and paralyzed as ever. As a supporter put it to Obama at a Sept. 20 town hall meeting, "I have been told that I voted for a man who said he was going to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class. I'm one of those people. And I'm waiting, sir. I'm waiting."" By Drake Bennett at The Boston Globe on October 10, 2010.
anonymous

Stepping off the narrow path of reality - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...off-the-narrow-path-of-reality

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 22 Mar 10 - Cached
  • You might think that believing in Santa Claus is a lot sillier than believing in homeopathy, but really they’re the same: they’re both fantasy.
  • For support in this thesis of mine, I present to you an article in the New York Times about how politicians who attack evolution legislatively are now also attacking global warming.
  • But the other reason I’m not surprised is that, over the past decade or so in particular, we’ve seen the far right promote fantasy over reality. Abstinence-only education, creationism, global warming denialism, defunding stem cell research, the mocking of volcano research, fruit fly research, planetarium star projectors.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It shows to me that once you buy into one flavor of candy-coated nonsense, they all start to taste pretty good.
anonymous

Bill Gates Funds Seawater Cloud Seeding, "the Most Benign Form of Geoengineering" - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...-spray-seawater-to-seed-clouds

layscience technology sustainability

shared by anonymous on 13 May 10 - Cached
  • a fleet of 1,900 ships costing £5 billion (about $7.5 billion) could arrest the rise in temperature by criss-crossing the oceans and spraying seawater from tall funnels to whiten clouds and increase their reflectivity [The Times].
  • Armand Neukermanns, who is leading the research, said that whitening clouds was “the most benign form of engineering” because, while it might alter rainfall, the effects would cease soon after the machines were switched off [The Times]
  • the billionaire former head of Microsoft announced he’s give nearly $5 million of his fortune to fund research into geoengineering projects.
  • anonymous on 13 May 10
     
    By Andrew Moseman under 80beats at Discover Magazine.
anonymous

Your Commute Is Killing You - 2 views

www.slate.com/...all

layscience

shared by anonymous on 10 Jun 11 - Cached
  • This week, researchers at Umea University in Sweden released a startling finding: Couples in which one partner commutes for longer than 45 minutes are 40 percent likelier to divorce.
  • Commuting is a migraine-inducing life-suck—a mundane task about as pleasurable as assembling flat-pack furniture or getting your license renewed, and you have to do it every day.
  • First, the research proves the most obvious point: We dislike commuting itself, finding it unpleasant and stressful.
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  • That unpleasantness seems to have a spillover effect: making us less happy in general.
  • Long commutes also make us feel lonely.
  • Those stressful hours spent listening to drive-time radio do not merely make us less happy. They also make us less healthy.
  • It is commuting, not the total length of the workday, that matters, he found. Take a worker with a negligible commute and a 12-hour workday and a worker with an hourlong commute and a 10-hour workday. The former will have healthier habits than the latter, even though total time spent on the relatively stressful, unpleasant tasks is equal.
  • overall, people with long commutes are fatter, and national increases in commuting time are posited as one contributor to the obesity epidemic.
  • So, in summary: We hate commuting. It correlates with an increased risk of obesity, divorce, neck pain, stress, worry, and sleeplessness. It makes us eat worse and exercise less. Yet, we keep on doing it.
  • Why do people suffer through it? The answer mostly lies in a phrase forced on us by real-estate agents: "Drive until you qualify."
  • But wait: Isn't the big house and the time to listen to the whole Dylan catalog worth something as well? Sure, researchers say, but not enough when it comes to the elusive metric of happiness. Given the choice between that cramped apartment and the big house, we focus on the tangible gains offered by the latter. We can see that extra bedroom. We want that extra bathtub. But we do not often use them. And we forget that additional time in the car is a constant, persistent, daily burden—if a relatively invisible one.
  • anonymous on 10 Jun 11
     
    "Long commutes cause obesity, neck pain, loneliness, divorce, stress, and insomnia." - By Annie Lowrey - Slate Magazine
anonymous

Darpa Searches for Life's Master Clock - 0 views

www.wired.com/...darpa-life-master-clock

longnow longevity cycles timescale

shared by anonymous on 01 Aug 11 - Cached
  • If the effort succeeds — and, boy, is that a big if — the recently announced Biochronicity program could help us understand why cancer is so hard to beat, how stem cells self renew and why cells are programmed to die. In other words, it’ll be one of the biggest breakthroughs Darpa has ever had.
  • it’s clear that all life processes depend on some internal time keeping.
  • Darpa wants to find the master regulator, and then use that knowledge to develop “predictive models of molecular-timed events, cell-cycle progression, lifespan, aging, and cell death, response to stress, and useful treatment strategies and drug delivery.” The key word is predictive. Darpa is no longer content with biology as a descriptive enterprise, watching cells and enzymes do their thing. Now, it wants mathematical models and algorithms and theories to tell what they’ll do next.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Scientists know that certain bits of DNA on the end of chromosomes called “telomeres” shorten each time the cell divides, playing a role in cell aging and eventual cell death
  • New research has uncovered how stress levels and diet can affect the biological age of an organism as opposed to chronological age, or calendar years.
  • For years scientists thought that sequencing DNA would uncover the “gene-for” almost everything, unraveling the mysteries of disease and resulting in new drugs and gene-specific treatments. It didn’t exactly pan out that way.
  • So to uncover the calculus within the genome, it might take some looking beyond the genome. Genes may contribute a few elements to the inner clock, but they interact within a larger scaffolding of cell processes and environmental factors.
  • anonymous on 01 Aug 11
     
    "There's a hidden clock that underlies every process of every living thing - from when our cells start dividing to how quickly we age. Researchers at Darpa, the Pentagon's extreme science agency, believe they can find it, using a mash-up of biology, code-cracking, mathematics and computer science."
anonymous

Salt: More confirmation bias for your preferred narrative - 0 views

www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/...s-for-your-preferred-narrative

layscience salt criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 21 Jul 11 - Cached
  • When it comes to health, it’s the hard outcomes we care about. We pay attention to measures like high blood pressure (hypertension) because of the relationship between hypertension and events like heart attacks and strokes. The higher the blood pressure, the greater the risk of these events. The relationship between the two is well established. So when it comes to preventive health, we want to lower blood pressure to reduce the risk of subsequent effects. Weight loss, diet, and exercise are usually prescribed (though often insufficient) to reduce blood pressure. For many, drug treatment is still required.
  • There is reasonable population-level data linking higher levels of salt consumption with higher blood pressure.
  • From a population perspective, interventions that dramatically lower salt intake result in lower blood pressure.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • the causality between salt consumption, and all of these negative effects, is less clear.
  • So does reducing dietary salt reduce cardiovascular events? That’s the key question.
  • When it comes to clinical practice guidelines, low salt diets are the mainstays of pretty much every set of guidelines on the management of high blood pressure.
  • The evidence supporting the relationship with hard outcomes is robust, but not rock-solid. We don’t have causal data, but we do have considerable epidemiologic evidence to suggest that reducing dietary salt consumption is likely to offer net benefits in the management of hypertension.
  • The vast majority of the salt we eat (75%) is from processed foods. Restaurants are a large source, too.
  • Few foods in their original state are naturally high in salt, and in general, we don’t add that much at the table.
  • Seven studies made up this meta-analysis, including 6,489 patients in total. Three studies looked at those with normal blood pressure, two included patients with high blood pressure, and one was a mixed population, including patients with heart failure. The overall effect? Interventions had small effects on sodium consumption, which led to small effects on blood pressure. There was insufficient information to analyze the effects on cardiovascular disease endpoints.
  • The authors go on to make the following point, which was ignored in the media coverage: Our findings are consistent with the belief that salt reduction is beneficial in normotensive and hypertensive people. However, the methods of achieving salt reduction in the trials included in our review, and other systematic reviews, were relatively modest in their impact on sodium excretion and on blood pressure levels, generally required considerable efforts to implement and would not be expected to have major impacts on the burden of CVD.
  • The authors did not conclude that reducing salt consumption is ineffective.
  • Despite the modest and equivocal results, the authors seem to have lost the narrative on their own research findings: Professor Rod Taylor, the lead researcher of the review, is ‘completely dismayed’ at the headlines that distort the message of his research published today. Having spoken to BBC Scotland, and to CASH, he clarified that the review looked at studies where people were advised to reduce salt intake compared to those who were not and found no differences, this is not because reduced salt doesn’t have an effect but because it’s hard to reduce salt intake for a long time. He stated that people should continue to strive to reduce their salt intake to reduce their blood pressure, but that dietary advice alone is not enough, calling for further government and industry action.
  • The true finding from the Cochrane review is that dietary interventions to reduce salt intake are largely ineffective at reducing salt consumption.
  • Until the data are more clear, you can find the data to support whatever narrative you believe. If you want to demonize salt and ignore other factors that contribute to poor cardiovascular outcomes, you can do that. And if you believe that interventions to reduce salt consumption are misguided and unwarranted, and symptomatic of an overreaching nanny state, then you can find data to support that position, too.
  • anonymous on 21 Jul 11
     
    "Judging by the recent press reports, the latest Cochrane review reveals that everything we've been told about eating salt, and cardiovascular disease, is wrong."
anonymous

Science-Based Medicine » It's a part of my paleo fantasy, it's a part of my paleo dream - 0 views

www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/...y-its-a-part-of-my-paleo-dream

shared by anonymous on 22 Mar 13 - Cached
  • If I had to pick one fallacy that rules above all among proponents of CAM/IM, it would have to be either the naturalistic fallacy (i.e., that if it’s natural—whatever that means—it must be better) or the fallacy of antiquity (i.e., that if it’s really old, it must be better).
  • Basically, it’s a rejection of modernity, and from it flow the interest in herbalism, various religious practices rebranded as treatments
  • there is a definite belief underlying much of CAM that technology and pharmaceuticals are automatically bad and that “natural” must be better.
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • it’s hard not to note that cancer and heart disease are primarily diseases of aging, and life expectancy was so much lower back in the day that a much smaller percentage of the population lived to advanced ages than is the case today.
  • Even so, an implicit assumption among many CAM advocates is that cardiovascular disease is largely a disease of modern lifestyle and diet and that, if modern humans could somehow mimic preindustrial or, according to some, even preagricultural, lifestyles, that cardiovascular disease could be avoided.
  • Over the last decade, Cordain has become the most prominent promoter of the so-called “Paleo diet,” having written The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Foods You Were Designed to Eat and multiple other books advocating a paleolithic-mimetic diet as the cure for what ails modern humans.
  • But how does one determine what the prevalence of cardiovascular disease was in the ancient past?
  • there have been indications that the idea that ancient humans didn’t suffer from atherosclerosis is a comforting myth, the most recent of which is a study published a week ago online in The Lancet by Prof. Randall C. Thompson of Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute and an international team of investigators entitled Atherosclerosis across 4000 years of human history: the Horus study of four ancient populations.
  • Basically, it was a study of 137 different mummies from four different geographic locations spanning 4,000 years.
  • So, although there was a fair amount of evidence from studies of Egyptian mummies that atherosclerosis was not uncommon, in Egypt it was mainly the wealthy and powerful who were mummified after their deaths. Conceivably, they could have lived a very different lifestyle and consumed a very different diet than the average Egyptian living around that time.
  • So the authors obtained whole-body CT scans of the 137 mummies, either pre-existing scans or scans prospectively done, and analyzed them for calcifications.
  • The mummies to be included in the study were chosen primarily based on two factors, being in a good state of preservation with identifiable vascular tissue, and being adults.
  • The authors obtained identifying information from an extensive search of museum and other databases by a team of archeologists and experts in mummy restoration, and sex was determined by either analysis of the genitals and reproductive organs when present and by pelvic morphology when they were not present.
  • Age was estimated by standard analysis of architectural changes in the clavicle, femur, and humerus.
  • Finally, multiple anthropological and archeological sources were used in an attempt to estimate likely risk factors for the mummies.
  • Figure 2 summarizes the findings nicely: There’s also this video featured in a Nature report on the study showing the reconstructed scan of one of the mummies with atherosclerotic plaques in the coronary arteries.
  • As expected, more atherosclerosis correlates with advanced age, and the amount of atherosclerosis in the young and middle-aged (although the times in which the people who became these mummies after death lived age 50 was old) was less.
  • Although the sample number was far too small to draw definitive conclusions (as is often the case in archeological research), the prevalence of atherosclerotic disease in these mummies did not appear to correlate with the cultures in which the mummies lived.
  • As is noted in Thompson’s article, ancient Egyptians and Peruvians were agricultural cultures with farms and domesticated animals, Ancestral Puebloans were forager-farmers, and the Unangans were hunter-gatherers without agriculture. Indeed, the Peruvians and Ancestral Puebloans predated the written word and were thus prehistoric cultures.
  • One notes that no one, including the authors of this study, is saying that lifestyle and diet are not important factors for the development of atherosclerotic heart disease.
  • What they are saying is that atherosclerosis appears to be associated with aging and that the claims that mimicking paleolithic diets (which, one notes, were definitely not vegan) are overblown. In other words, there is a certain inherent risk of atherosclerosis that is related to aging that is likely not possible to lower further
  • I actually think that the authors probably went too far with that last statement in that, while they might be correct that atherosclerosis is an inherent component of human aging, it is quite well established that this inherent component of aging can at least be worsened by sedentary lifestyle and probably certain diets.
  • One notes that, although the Paleo Diet is not, strictly speaking, always sold as CAM/IM, the ideas behind it are popular among CAM advocates, and the diet is frequently included as part of “integrative medicine,” for example, here at the University of Connecticut website, where it’s under integrative nutrition.
  • In particular, the appeal to ancient wisdom and ancient civilizations as yet untouched by the evil of modernity is the same sort of arguments that are made in favor of various CAM modalities ranging from herbalism to vegan diets rebranded as being somehow CAM to the appeal to “natural” cures.
  • Indeed, the fetish for the “natural” in CAM is such that even a treatment like Stanislaw Burzynski’s antineoplaston therapy is represented as “natural” when in fact, if it were ever shown to work against cancer, it would be chemotherapy and has toxicities greater than that of some of our current chemotherapy drugs.
  • The book is by Marlene Zuk and entitled Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live. Zuk is an evolutionary biologist, and in particular she points out how the evolutionary arguments favored by advocates of the Paleo diet don’t stand up to scrutiny.
  • The interview begins with Zuk confronting Cordain at a conference on evolution and diseases of modern environments. At his lecture, Cordain pronounced several foods to be the cause of fatal conditions in people carrying certain genes.
  • These foods included, predictably, cultivated foods such as bread (made from grain), rice, and potatoes. Zuk couldn’t resist asking a question, namely why the inability to digest so many common foods would persist in the population, observing, “Surely it would have been selected out of the population.” Cordain’s response? That humans had not had time to adapt to these foods, to which Zuk retorted, “Plenty of time.” Apparently, in her book, Zuk produces numerous examples of evolution in humans occurring in a time frame of less than 10,000 years, including:
  • Blue eyes arose 6,000 to 10,000 years ago
  • Rapid selection for the CCR5-D gene variant that makes some people immune to HIV
  • Lactase persistence (production past the age of weening of the lactase enzyme that digests lactose in milk) probably dates back only around 7,500 to 10,000 years, around the time that cattle were domesticated
  • there is no one diet or climate that predominated among our Paleolithic ancestors:
  • Zuk detects an unspoken, barely formed assumption that humanity essentially stopped evolving in the Stone Age and that our bodies are “stuck” in a state that was perfectly adapted to survive in the paleolithic environment. Sometimes you hear that the intervention of “culture” has halted the process of natural selection. This, “Paleofantasy” points out, flies in the face of facts. Living things are always and continuously in the process of adapting to the changing conditions of their environment, and the emergence of lactase persistence indicates that culture (in this case, the practice of keeping livestock for meat and hides) simply becomes another one of those conditions.
  • For this reason, generalizations about the typical hunter-gatherer lifestyle are spurious; it doesn’t exist. With respect to what people ate (especially how much meat), the only safe assumption was “whatever they could get,” something that to this day varies greatly depending on where they live. Recently, researchers discovered evidence that people in Europe were grinding and cooking grain (a paleo-diet bugaboo) as far back as 30,000 years ago, even if they weren’t actually cultivating it. “A strong body of evidence,” Zuk writes, “points to many changes in our genome since humans spread across the planet and developed agriculture, making it difficult at best to point to a single way of eating to which we were, and remain, best suited.”
  • Oh, and, as Zuk tells us, paleolithic people got cancer, too.
  • we humans have long been known to abuse and despoil our environment, even back in those “paleo” days. Indeed, when I took a prehistoric archeology course, which was largely dedicated to the period of time of the hunter-gatherers, one thing I remember my professor pointing out, and that was that what he did was largely the study of prehistoric garbage and that humans have always produced a lot of it.
  • anonymous on 22 Mar 13
     
    "There are many fallacies that undergird alternative medicine, which evolved into "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), and for which the preferred term among its advocates is now "integrative medicine," meant to imply the "best of both worlds.""
anonymous

Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature - 0 views

iopscience.iop.org/...article

shared by anonymous on 16 May 13 - Cached
  • anonymous on 16 May 13
     
    "We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991-2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors' self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research."
anonymous

Climate Change Is Making the Whole Planet Tip - 0 views

blogs.smithsonianmag.com/...is-making-the-whole-planet-tip

shared by anonymous on 15 May 13 - Cached
  • The Earth is a ball that floats in space, and the Earth’s surface—the tectonic plates that make up the land—are like a shell that floats on the mantle below. Just like the hard chocolate coating can slip and slide on your soft serve ice cream, the crust of the Earth can slide over the mantle. This is different than continental drift. This is the whole surface of the planet moving as one. The rotation axis of the Earth stays steady, the land masses shift around it. The idea is known as “true polar wander,” and its occurrence is a part of the planet’s history.
  • The Earth is not a perfect sphere—it’s kind of fat at the middle—and changing how the mass on the surface is distributed changes how the tectonic plates sit in relation to the planet’s rotation axis.
  • anonymous on 15 May 13
     
    "Climate change is changing the planet. Yes, it's doing it in all those ways that you already know about: rising seas, rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, more extreme weather. But climate change is changing the planet in another dramatic way, too: It's actually causing the entire crust of the Earth to shift. According to new research by Jianli Chen and colleagues, climate change-induced glacier melt and sea level rise have thrown the whole planet off-kilter."
anonymous

Was Hitler Really a Fan of Gun Control? - 0 views

www.motherjones.com/...hitler-stalin-gun-control

shared by anonymous on 11 Jan 13 - Cached
  • Gun enthusiasts often mention that the Soviet Union restricted access to guns in 1929 after Joseph Stalin rose to power. But to suggest that a better armed Russian populace would have overthrown the Bolsheviks is also too simplistic, says Spitzer. "To answer the question of the relationship between guns and the revolutions in those nations is to study the comparative politics and comparative history of those nations," he explains. "It takes some analysis to break this down and explain it, and that's often not amenable to a sound byte or a headline."
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 11 Jan 13
       
      That's what's stuck in my mind the last week. Do militia members really think they're some bulwark against the nation that spends more on national defense than the next 12 nations combined? If America becomes some Orwellian police state, it will have nothing to do with gun laws. We have the most effective vanguard fighting force in *history* and I think it can manage it's home turf pretty well when it continues to field materials all over the fucking world.
  • Even if President Obama suddenly unleashes his inner totalitarian, there's no chance he could successfully round up all of America's 300 million-plus firearms. Such an idea is practically and politically impossible. A tough assault weapons ban like one Democrats are currently proposing would affect just a fraction of the total privately owned firearms in the country. Yet by invoking the historical threat of disarmament, Spitzer says, "the gun lobby has worked to throw a scare into gun owners in order to rally them to the side of the NRA."
  • anonymous on 11 Jan 13
     
    ""But guns didn't play a particularly important part in any event," says Robert Spitzer, who chairs SUNY-Cortland's political science department and has extensively researched gun control politics. Gun ownership in Germany after World War I, even among Nazi Party members, was never widespread enough for a serious civilian resistance to the Nazis to have been anything more than a Tarantino revenge fantasy. If Jews had been better armed, Spitzer says, it would only have hastened their demise. Gun policy "wasn't the defining moment that marked the beginning of the end for Jewish people in Germany. It was because they were persecuted, were deprived of all of their rights, and they were a minority group.""
anonymous

Viewpoint: The myth of the lecturer - 0 views

www.michigandaily.com/...04viewpoint-myth-lecturer02

shared by anonymous on 15 Apr 13 - Cached
  • anonymous on 15 Apr 13
     
    "We write in response to Amrutha Sivakumar's March 19 article, "The Research Difference: How the University varies the value of faculty members." The report addresses the relative value of tenure-line and non-tenure-track faculty at the University, and Sivakumar presents several keen insights into the work of University lecturers."
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