More bogus empathy research

The London UK Telegraph reports:

The new evidence shows how racism feeds on itself – the lack of empathy causing greater dehumanising of others which in turn leads to more racism.

In the study, with people of Italian and African descent, participants were asked to watch and pay attention to short films depicting needles penetrating a person's hand

A brain scanner then recorded how many pain neurons were firing in their brain.

Researchers found there was significantly less if the person being watched was from the different race. ...

In further studies, the researchers tested individuals' responses to pain inflicted on models with a violet hand.

Under those circumstances, participants' empathetic responses were restored.

Professor Salvatore Aglioti, of the University of Rome, said that the second result showed that racism was not inherent but learnt. When we had no prejudice, we were more likely to empathise. ...

Based on the findings, published in Current Biology, the scientists said that methods designed to restore empathy for people of other races might also help in dealing with racial prejudice.

This is crazy. It is natural and normal for people to empathize more with those who are more closely related. Pretending everyone has purple skin like the Avatar 3D movie is not going to reduce racial prejudice.

Here is a A Psychiatric Conference on Truthful Girl. In spite of the psychobabble, a lack of empathy is not the girl's problem. She is a Mohammedan. Her hatred is directed at people of the same skin color.

Crime to report on the cops

The Wash. Post reports:

In early March, Anthony Graber, a 25-year-old staff sergeant for the Maryland Air National Guard, was humming a tune while riding his two-year-old Honda motorcycle down Interstate 95, not far from his home north of Baltimore. On top of his helmet was a camera he often used to record his journeys. The camera was rolling when an unmarked gray sedan cut him off as he stopped behind several other cars along Exit 80. ...

A week later, on March 10, Graber posted his video of the encounter on YouTube. What followed wasn't a furor over the police officer's behavior but over Graber's use of a camera to capture the entire episode.

On April 8, Graber was awakened by six officers raiding his parents' home in Abingdon, Md., where he lived with his wife and two young children. He learned later that prosecutors had obtained a grand jury indictment alleging he had violated state wiretap laws by recording the trooper without his consent.

Here is the Maryland wiretap law:

§ 10-402.
(a) Except as otherwise specifically provided in this subtitle it is unlawful for any person to:

(1) Wilfully intercept, endeavor to intercept, or procure any other person to intercept or endeavor to intercept, any wire, oral, or electronic communication;

(2) Wilfully disclose, or endeavor to disclose, to any other person the contents of any wire, oral, or electronic communication, knowing or having reason to know that the information was obtained through the interception of a wire, oral, or electronic communication in violation of this subtitle; or ...

The law is critisized here and elsewhere.

It should be obvious that this is a wiretap law, and someone wearing a video camera on his head is not doing an "intercept". He is also not "wilfully" violating the law.

It also should be unambiguously legal to videorecord a cop making an arrest or issuing a citation in a public. Posting the recording on YouTube ought to be a free speech right. Many cops now have their own videorecorder to document their actions, including all Maryland state troopers. This motorcyclist has a legitimate complaint against Maryland police procedure, and the only way that he can make his point is to post the video.

The new disease of empathy

All the political pundits are saying that Pres. Barack Obama lacks empathy. Maureen Dowd writes:

"His aides from the Senate, the presidential campaign, and the White House routinely described him with the same words: 'psychologically healthy,' " writes Jonathan Alter in "The Promise," a chronicle of Obama's first year in office. ...

Obama's bloodless quality about people and events, the emotional detachment that his aides said allowed him to see things more clearly, has instead obscured his vision. It has made him unable to understand things quickly on a visceral level and put him on the defensive in this spring of our discontent, failing to understand that Americans are upset that greedy corporations have screwed over the little guy without enough fierce and immediate pushback from the president.

Check out this Jeremy Rifkin video on the empathic civilization. This video is brilliant as well as being subversive.

I am becoming convinced that empathy is the first 21st century disease. Nothing good is going to come from any policy decisions based on empathy.

Effect of net porn on kids

The Wash. Times reports:

"When a child sees this image of adult pornography, the mirror neurons that are in their brain will convince them that they are actually experiencing what they are seeing," she said.

Children are very vulnerable as compared to adults because of the presence of mirror neurons in the brain, Dr. Cooper said. Mirror neurons are part of the brain that convince us that when we see something we are actually experiencing it.

According to the American Psychological Association, over the past 12 years, girls have changed in their thinking. They are beginning to see themselves as having their only value in sexuality.

"When a child sees herself only as a sexual object, she is no longer able to demand the kind of respect she deserves," Dr. Cooper said. "The new definition of 'love' these days is sending a sexually explicit picture."

No, mirror neurons do not work that way. Kids know the difference between porn and the real thing.

USA soccer ties Slovenia

I caught the tail end of the USA v Slovenia soccer match. Slovenia is some small European country that I confuse with Slovakia. The game ended in a 2-2 tie. Soccer must be the only sport where no one knows when the game will end. The TV announcers did not know that the game was over until players started walking off the field. Soccer is also peculiar because people put up with so many boring ties. Many World Cup games have ended in a 0-0 tie.

The Americans were down 2-0, until they figured out that the Slovenia goalie was afraid of the ball. In the second half, the Americans scored twice by kicking the ball at the Slovenia goalie's head, and he ducked.

The Americans appeared to score an exciting winning goal in the final few minutes, but the referee called it back. The replay showed a clear goal, and no foul or offsides by the Americans. The referee did not even explain why he disallowed the goal. No one knows.

I am told that soccer has such ridiculous rules partially because non-Americans do not understand the concept of fairness. Europeans believe that kings have arbitrary authority over them, so they do not question soccer referees making capricious decisions. They just don't grasp the idea of holding their officials accountable.

Update: The soccer official are not planning any changes:

In perhaps every other sport, an explanation of such a decisive play would have been provided. But Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, has ignored calls for video replay and has decided against putting additional referees on the end line. He has said that he likes the debate that follows matches, believing that uncertainty and subjectivity boost the sport.

In other words, soccer fans like bad refereeing. This decision was so bad that the referee is rumored to be under review.

Murders in low-IQ neighborhoods

Reuters reports:

A murder in the neighborhood can significantly knock down a child's score on an IQ test, even if the child did not directly witness the killing or know the victim, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

The findings have implications both for crime control efforts and for the heavy reliance on standardized tests, said New York University sociology professor Patrick Sharkey, who conducted the study.

They can also explain about half the achievement gap between blacks and whites on such tests, he reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ...

In general, black U.S. children score about one standard deviation lower on standardized tests than white children. This finding accounts for half that difference, Sharkey said. ...

It is well documented that blacks are far more likely to be murdered than members of any other U.S. ethnic group -- murder is the most common cause of death for young black men.

Sharkey said the findings also have implications for IQ tests, which are supposed to be neutral assessments of ability.

"These tests are not purely capturing some underlying intelligence," he said.

So he found a correlation between high murder rates and low IQ rates in neighborhoods. Possible explanations include (1) low IQ causes people to commit murder, (2) murder causes people a few blocks away to have low IQ, and (3) both are byproducts of black neighborhoods. Which seems more plausible to you? The sociology prof chooses option (2). Apparently that is the only option permitted by his research focus:

Patrick Sharkey will join NYU's Department of Sociology ... His research focuses on various issues related to inequality in urban neighborhoods. One strand of research seeks to describe and explain the persistence of neighborhood inequality in Americas cities, and the mechanisms by which this inequality persists over time and across generations of family members. A second strand of his work focuses on the consequences of persistent neighborhood inequality for the life chances of individuals from different racial and ethnic groups in America.

There is more discussion here.

Voice reveals male strength

Some Santa Barbara researchers report:

Recent research has shown that humans, like many other animals, have a specialization for assessing fighting ability from visual cues. Because it is probable that the voice contains cues of strength and formidability that are not available visually, we predicted that selection has also equipped humans with the ability to estimate physical strength from the voice. We found that subjects accurately assessed upper-body strength in voices taken from eight samples across four distinct populations and language groups ...

These results provide, to our knowledge, the first direct evidence that both men and women can accurately assess men's physical strength from the voice, and suggest that estimates of strength are used to assess fighting ability.

You would think that voice would depend on innate factors, and would not have anything to do with how much time you spend pumping iron in the gym. I have noticed that there seem to be some correlations between voices and occupations, and between voices and personality types. Maybe that will get tested next.

Evidence for animal mindreading

Ohio State research:

Scientists have caught male topi antelopes in the act of faking fear in front of females in heat as a way to improve their chances of having sex.

The male antelopes, observed in southwest Kenya, send a false signal that a predator is nearby only when females in heat are in their territories. When the females react to the signal, they remain in the territory long enough for some males to fit in a quick mating opportunity.

The signal in this case, an alarm snort, is not a warning to other antelopes to beware, but instead tells a predator that it has been seen and lost its element of surprise, the researchers found.

So when the scientists observed the animals misusing the snort in the presence of sexually receptive females, they knew they were witnessing the practice of intentional deception – a trait typically attributed only to humans and a select few other animal species.

The full paper is here.

This is an argument for animal mindreading, but I am not convinced. The authors claim that the topi snort for two reasons -- scaring lions and tricking females.

But the topi intentions in both cases are dubious. The topi may have no idea that the lions are scared, or that the females are tricked. The topi may snort because experience or instinct indicates that snorting gets him what he wants. The topi just wants to eat, avoid lions, and mate. Snorting doesn't get the topi any food, but it helps with those other two things. This simpler hypothesis may be all there is to it.

Human often do things with deceptive effects, without any deceptive purpose. Animals are much less self-aware, and maybe not self-aware at all. The obvious hypothesis is that the animals don't know what they are doing, and yet the paper does not even consider the possibility.

In other so-called deception, Sean B. Carroll writes that insects "display false eye and face patterns that mimic those of snakes, lizards or other animals."

Testing skin color bias with dolls

An anthropology blog writes:

Light- and dark-colored dolls have long been used to study how children acquire negative attitudes to dark skin. ... A doll test typically involves asking a child to choose between a lighter-colored doll and a darker-colored one. ... The first doll studies are well known today, even among non-academics.

You might think that these experiments show how kids learn racial prejudice from their parents. But there have been a lot of studies, and they do not show that at all. The preferences depend on age and sex, but are similar throughout the world regardless of what the kids are taught.

Hockey is a great sport

We just had another great Stanley Cup championship. Here are a few reasons why hockey is a great sport.

The action is fast in hockey. Basketball and soccer seem like slow-motion in comparison.

Hockey is intense.

Hockey players are tough. A Blackhawk player lost 7 teeth in a playoff game last month, and finished the game.

Hockey games are well-officiated. Using replays when necessary, the referees almost never get a goal wrong. Players do not fake being fouled in order to draw penalties.

Hockey favors all-around athletes. It is not like basketball favoring the tall and football favoring the big.

Hockey has sensible rules. Other sports have weird rules that disrupt the action, reward the wrong players, give the referee too much control over the game.

Empathy is the latest political buzzword

Last year, Pres. Barack Obama was justifying his Supreme Court appointment on the grounds that she had empathy, and people wondered why that was so important for a judge. Now the situation is reversed. Obama latest court appointment does not have any empathy to brag about, and Obama now has his own Katrina because of his own lack of empathy for Louisiana.

A blog comments:

I happened to catch The Bill Maher Show the other night and overheard a discussion about President Obama's handling of the Gulf disaster. Regardless of one's perception of how well or poorly Obama has done, Maher said, he lacks 'the empathy gene.'

I found the observation particularly astute. Obama does lack the empathy gene and reminds me of what I've read about President Woodrow Wilson.

The Wash. Post reports:

President Obama recorded his weekly Internet address from Grand Isle, La., on Friday, with a message of empathy for the people of the Gulf Coast who are suffering from the effects of the oil spill.

I am sure Obama's advisors are studying Bill Clinton's tapes where he would say, "I feel your pain", and speak of tears.

I just don't think that the public is any judge of empathy anyway. Millions of voters were fooled into thinking that John Edwards had empathy. He seemed like the phoniest of the presidential candidates to me. By the time these politicians get on the national stage, all of their emotions are faked.

Caffeine addicts get no real perk

Reuters reports:

Bristol University researchers found that drinkers develop a tolerance to both the anxiety-producing and the stimulating effects of caffeine, meaning that it only brings them back to baseline levels of alertness, not above them.

"Although frequent consumers feel alerted by caffeine, especially by their morning tea, coffee, or other caffeine-containing drink, evidence suggests that this is actually merely the reversal of the fatiguing effects of acute caffeine withdrawal," wrote the scientists, led by Peter Rogers of Bristol's department of experimental psychology.

The team asked 379 adults -- half of them non/low caffeine consumers and the other half medium/high caffeine consumers -- to give up caffeine for 16 hours, and then gave them either caffeine or a dummy pill known as a placebo.

Participants rated their levels of anxiety, alertness and headache. The medium/high caffeine consumers who got the placebo reported a decrease in alertness and increased headache, neither of which were reported by those who received caffeine.

But measurements showed that their post-caffeine levels of alertness were actually no higher than the non/low consumers who received a placebo, suggesting caffeine only brings coffee drinkers back up to "normal."

The researchers also found that people who have a genetic predisposition to anxiety do not tend to avoid coffee.

In fact, people in the study with a gene variant associated with anxiety tended to consume slightly larger amounts of coffee than those without it, Rogers wrote in a study in the Neuropsychopharmacology journal, published by Nature.

This suggests that a mild increase in anxiety "may be a part of the pleasant buzz caused by caffeine," he said.

I wonder how many coffee drinkers realize that they are mainly just easing their addiction withdrawal symptoms.

Life sentence for lewd behavior

If you don't believe that we have draconian penalties for sex crimes, check out this case:

Michelle Lyn Taylor received life sentence for forcing a boy to touch her breasts last week in Elko.

A video shows the sentencing arguments. The Nevada state law requires the life sentence.

Usually men get these sentences. There are murderers who have gotten less.

The jury verdict was for lewd behavior. The jury may have thought that the sentence would be probation or something like that. If you are ever on a jury, you might want to find out what the penalty is for the crime being charged.

Nutrition causes obesity

Today's bad advice:

Dear Annie: "Grossed Out in the Silver State" was upset about overweight people wearing ill-fitting clothes ...

It is well known that poor nutrition is a class issue. Many people have trouble eating well because they cannot afford healthy, fresh ingredients, or they don't have the time to prepare home-cooked meals. Eating right and exercising is easy when you have the time and resources, ...

Dear Massachusetts: We agree that poor nutrition and insufficient funds can make it difficult to maintain a healthy weight, even though jogging around the block doesn't require a lot of time or resources. What would help is for people to be better educated about the dangers of fast food and processed foods ...

No, they have it backwards. Obesity results from too much nutrition, not too little. Fresh ingredients and home-cooked meals are just as fattening as the alternatives. No one ever got fat from not being able to afford nutritious food.

Suspiciousness explained

Wired magazine reports:

A dose of testosterone might be enough to save gullible types from being ripped off, a new study reveals.

Testosterone is linked to aggression, competition and social status. Now scientists have found that the hormone also reduces naive individuals’ confidence in others.

This could explain why women are more gullible than men.

Pediatricians Flip Stance On Toddler Swim Class

AP reports:

CHICAGO -- The nation's largest pediatricians group is relaxing its stance against swimming lessons for children younger than 4.

A few small studies now suggest toddlers may be less likely to drown if they've had swim lessons.

These pediatricians issue a lot of unscientific opinions. They have no expertise on teaching toddlers to swim. Do it or don't do it as you please, but ignore the pediatricians.

Limits to using Google

More and more people seem to think that Google is the source of all the world's info.

From today's Meet the Press on NBC TV:

MR. WOODWARD: It, it, it is a potentially a giant disaster of the--I mean, most disasters come and go. 9/11 came and went, OK. This continues. And I, I picked, I picked up your newspaper on Saturday and had half a smile because it said, "BP steps up its effort," and then I read on, "to criticize others and point the finger at others, and blame everyone." Where are, you know, why don't they call in Google? Why don't they call in some of the people who have these great minds to fix it?

No, Google does not know how to cap a deep sea oil leak. Google may help you find trivia like a movie star's birthday, but not this.

The stem cell hoax

NPR has this Stem Cell Research Update. In case you were thinking that the Pres. Obama administration would make stem cell cures possible, it hasn't happened. According to this program, Pres. Bush funded research on 23 embryonic stem cell lines. Pres. Obama allows 64 lines, but some lines are only approved for restricted purposes, and not all of the Bush 23 lines has been approved. No embryonic stem cell therapies have been approved for even clinical trials.

The whole idea that Bush stifled good stem cell cures was all a big hoax. There might be some therapies some day, but we are not getting them any sooner because of Obama's policies.

Even birds do not like organic food

Nwe food research:

Is organic food everything its advocates claim to be? A new study published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture describes an experiment in which the subjects were free from human biases. The authors found that wild birds preferred 'normal' bird food to the organic option. ...

In an attempt to explain this disparity, the researchers analyzed the seeds and found that the conventional seed contained upwards of 10 percent more protein per seed, most likely due to the use of inorganic nitrogen fertilizers used in conventional farming techniques.

Organic food is not necessarily better.

Defining stupidity

This video ofMiss Teen USA 2007 has been view 50 million times, and Miss South Carolina's answer to a question has become the modern example of stupidity.

I don't see it that way. The video is amusing, but I say that the questioner is the real idiot. The teenaged girl is asked to comment on a claimed fact that is actually completely false. The question is unfair and she is not prepared for it under such high pressure. But what is the questioner's excuse? The questioner had plenty of time to research a question that made sense.

Miss South Carolina 2007 could be smart girl who happened to get flustered under pressure. But I am not sure that there is much hope for the questioner, the pageant officials, and all the pundits who ridiculed her without noticing how bad the question was.

Just one accusation away

Lenore Skenazy writes:

Let us remember this when we look up our local sex offender maps and see two convicts: One who ostensibly exposes himself to children and one who ostensibly assaults them. ...

I spoke to the actual mom of these two young men. She's a fishing net-maker in Maine and she put it pretty succinctly: "We're all just one accusation away from the sex offender registry."

Read the column to see how innocent and trivial these offenses were. The sex offender registry now has so many falsely-accused names on it that it is useless for preventing sex crimes.

Genetic determinism in the news

I don't expect the NY Times to promote genetic determinism, but it has recent articles on how genes determine desirability of human eggs, happy marriages, and crime. Then there is the news that non-Africans have Neanderthal genes, whatever that means.

This study also got a lot of press:

"The greater the age difference, the lower the wife's life expectancy," Sven Drefahl of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany, said. "The best choice for a woman is to marry a man of exactly the same age."

Drefahl believed that having a relationship with a younger man may mean more stress for women because they are "violating social norms and thus suffer from social sanctions," which could result in a more stressful life, he said.

A "sugar daddy" with a wife seven to nine years his junior is seven percent less likely to die early — probably because she's more likely to nurse him in old age.

The explanations are ridiculous and unsupported. A woman who marries an older man has probably sized him up as being particularly healthy, and that is why he lives longer.

Moral loan default

The NY Times reported in Jan.:

Some homeowners may keep paying because they think it’s immoral to default. This view has been reinforced by government officials like former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., who while in office said that anyone who walked away from a mortgage would be “simply a speculator — and one who is not honoring his obligation.” (The irony of a former investment banker denouncing speculation seems to have been lost on him.)

But does this really come down to a question of morality?

A provocative paper by Brent White, a law professor at the University of Arizona, makes the case that borrowers are actually suffering from a “norm asymmetry.” In other words, they think they are obligated to repay their loans even if it is not in their financial interest to do so, while their lenders are free to do whatever maximizes profits. It’s as if borrowers are playing in a poker game in which they are the only ones who think bluffing is unethical.

A business prof debates White here.

There is a legal fiction that a contract is a legal agreement where the parties understand the terms. And yet millions of people sign mortgage contracts with basic misunderstandings about their legal obligations to pay.

Law schools teach classes on contracts. The subject is not difficult, but the law defines a contract in way that would surprise anyone who has never been to law school.

Dyslexia a cruel fiction leading to crime

A London UK Times article reported last year:

A Labour MP has provoked anger among literacy campaigners by calling dyslexia a “cruel fiction” that can often lead to criminal behaviour.

Graham Stringer, the Labour MP for Manchester Blackley, wrote in his column for Manchester Confidential magazine: “Dyslexia is a cruel fiction, it is no more real than the 19th-century scientific construction of ‘the aether’ to explain how light travels through a vacuum.”

Bad analogy. The term aether went out of favor in the early 20th century, but since about 1940 the concept has been essential to understanding how light travels thru a vacuum. Quantum field theory teaches that there is no such thing as a vacuum, and what we call the vacuum is actually filled with particles that are essential to the propagation of light.

In the same column, Mr Stringer argued: “The reason that so many children fail to read and write is because the wrong teaching methods are used.” He accused Ed Balls, the Education Minister, of wasting nearly £80million in disability benefits given to dyslexic children, when government policy should target an overhaul of the way that children are taught to read.

Mr Stringer pointed to the synthetic phonics method of teaching, whereby children were taught to associate letters with their phonetic pronunciation (reading “ee” for “y”, for example).

He said: “It is time that the dyslexia industry was killed off and we recognised that there are well known methods for teaching everybody to read and write.”

He has a point there. Phonics has been shown to be a superior method for teaching reading, but most schools don't use it.

Cheese sandwich confiscated

The UK Times reports:

Yet the impossible has happened: staff at a nursery in Pemberton, near Wigan, have confiscated a cheese sandwich belonging to a two-year-old pupil, Jack Ormisher. Its failing was to contain neither lettuce nor tomato.

Wigan Council has since confirmed that the straight-up combination of cheese and bread contravenes its healthy eating guidelines — and fully supported the cheese-snatchers. “The centre has a list of recommended healthy food, according to national guidelines, which children are encouraged to eat,” said a spokesman. “A cheese sandwich would not feature on the list.”

Unsurprisingly, Jack cried. He is now recovering. His mother sensibly moved him to a new, more cheese-friendly establishment.

First they came for the cheese sandwiches, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a cheese sandwich.

More evidence that fat is good for you

Scientific American reports:

Eat less saturated fat: that has been the take-home message from the U.S. government for the past 30 years. But while Americans have dutifully reduced the percentage of daily calories from saturated fat since 1970, the obesity rate during that time has more than doubled, diabetes has tripled, and heart disease is still the country’s biggest killer. Now a spate of new research, including a meta-analysis of nearly two dozen studies, suggests a reason why: investigators may have picked the wrong culprit. Processed carbohydrates, which many Americans eat today in place of fat, may increase the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease more than fat does—a finding that has serious implications for new dietary guidelines expected this year. ...

The finding joins other conclusions of the past few years that run counter to the conventional wisdom that saturated fat is bad for the heart because it increases total cholesterol levels. That idea is “based in large measure on extrapolations, which are not supported by the data,” Krauss says.

Yes, the Atkins crowd has been saying this for decades. The science behind cholesterol has never matched the physicians' recommendations.

Apple is evil

Google's motto used to be Don't Be Evil. More and more, it means Don't Be Like Apple.

Even the NY Times says that Apple has lost its cool. No other company uses the law to intimidate its media critics, as Apple does. No other company tries to restrict what you can do with its products, as Apple does. No other company is as hostile to open source software, as Apple is.

Apple products are overpriced and crippled. Apple has a loyal customer base, but it is a bit like AOL's customer base. People sign up because they think that the service limitations will make the product easier to use. But it is only easier if you are willing to be locked into to the company's business model. It is not easier if you want some flexibility in your use of the product.

Update: Pres. Obama is now a critic:

With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations--none of which I know how to work--information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.

Unused pig flu vaccines

Fumento reports:

According to Reuters, the U.S. has 71 million unused H1N1 swine flu vaccine doses. And damned if it isn't determined to use up every last one, in order to reduce the embarrassment of throwing away so much of the expensive stuff.

I am adding the 2009 swine flu to my list of modern hoaxes.

Iowa requires evidence of current crime

It always seemed obvious to me that if you are charged with a crime, the prosecutor should have to prove that you committed that actual crime, and not just present evidence of previous bad behavior. If you are charged with being a drug dealer, for example, the jury will not even be told of previous drug offenses.

If you are convicted, then previous convictions will be considered for sentencing, but not for determination of guilt or innocence.

Many states now make an exception for sex crimes. If you are charged with a sex crime, the prosecution is usually allowed to base its case on a general character assassination by scrutinizing your sex life.

That seems wrong to me, and now the Iowa court agrees:

But in State v. Cox, decided April 30, the Iowa Supreme Court held that the admission of such propensity evidence violates the Iowa Constitution’s Due Process Clause. “The policy against admissibility of general propensity evidence stems from ‘a fundamental sense that no one should be convicted of a crime based on his or her previous misdeeds.’ ‘A concomitant of the presumption of innocence is that a defendant must be tried for what he did, not for who he is.’ This concept is ‘fundamental to American jurisprudence.’” In this, the court departed from the view of federal courts and most state courts, and adhered to the minority view, which until then apparently was followed only by the Missouri Supreme Court.

Cops help illegal aliens get visas

Texas news:

But when the police came, they didn’t ask Monica about her immigration status. Instead they referred her to The Friendship of Women, a battered women’s shelter in Brownsville, where she received therapy and legal assistance. She got a protective order to keep her and her son safe. She learned about visas available to help victims of domestic violence get on the path to permanent residency, and began the application process. The U Visa is available to victims of violent crime, and the Violence Against Women Act also gives women who are married to or recently divorced from their abusers the ability to self-petition for permanent residency.

Monica’s is a success story now unlikely to be repeated in neighboring Arizona, where a new immigration law is set to give victims a heightened fear of deportation if they come forward to report crimes, and criminals the confidence to perpetrate crimes without fear of retribution.

Illegal alien women are discovering that the easiest way to get a visa and free welfare services is to make phony domestic violence accusations. If the new Arizona law stops this, so much the better.

Salt is controversial

NewScientist magazine claims that a salt conspiracy has planted articles in the NY Times:

There's no doubt about the health dangers of salt

SALT hidden in food kills millions of people worldwide. Reducing dietary salt is therefore important for public health; it is also one of the cheapest and easiest ways to save lives. So why are efforts to cut dietary salt being met with fierce resistance?

First the facts. Decreasing salt intake substantially reduces blood pressure, thus lowering the risk of heart attacks and strokes. An analysis of all the available evidence, published in 2007, suggested that reducing salt intake around the world by 15 per cent could prevent almost 9 million deaths by 2015. ...

Most people agree that even in free-market economies, governments have a duty of care. This is especially true for children, who are particularly vulnerable to high salt intake.

This is the ethical justification for public health interventions in salt consumption. Governments legislate to make public spaces smoke-free, and they mandate cholera-free drinking water. They should also aim to progressively reduce the salt hidden in food. ...

The salt industry's annual turnover is several billion dollars and it has no plans to downsize. Thus, in advance of the new US guidelines, articles have appeared in The New York Times and elsewhere claiming that the evidence for reducing salt is not clear-cut.

This controversy is fake. The evidence for salt reduction is clear and consistent.

I am suspicious any time some left-wing conspiracy-monger tries to promote some far-reaching policy on the grounds that there is a scientific consensus.

Salt is not comparable to cholera. Cholera is undesirable and harmful in all quantities. Salt is essential to life, and has no known harm to children and adults with normal blood pressure.

A science article should be telling us the trade-offs, not lecturing us on how govt authorities should be telling us what to eat. Salt is in food for reasons, and not just because of pressure from the salt lobby. Whether it is for taste or as a preservative, reducing salt will have its costs. Whether it is worth the costs is a political question, not a scientific one.

Poor study on teacher quality

AAAS Science magazine reports this study:

Teacher Quality Moderates the Genetic Effects on Early Reading
J. Taylor, A.D. Roehrig, B. Soden Hensler, C.M. Connor, C. Schatschneider

Children’s reading achievement is influenced by genetics as well as by family and school environments. The importance of teacher quality as a specific school environmental influence on reading achievement is unknown. We studied first- and second-grade students in Florida from schools representing diverse environments. Comparison of monozygotic and dizygotic twins, differentiating genetic similarities of 100% and 50%, provided an estimate of genetic variance in reading achievement.

This is okay so far, except that "reading achievement" seems to be just reading aloud from a book, without testing comprehension.

Teacher quality was measured by how much reading gain the non-twin classmates achieved. The magnitude of genetic variance associated with twins’ oral reading fluency increased as the quality of their teacher increased. In circumstances where the teachers are all excellent, the variability in student reading achievement may appear to be largely due to genetics. However, poor teaching impedes the ability of children to reach their potential.

No, this does not measure teacher quality. One classroom might do better than another classroom for many reasons besides teacher quality, such as the IQ of the classmates and whether misbehaving students are disrupting the class.

The full paper is behind a paywall, but I checked it, and it admits that the study just assumed that test scores reflect teacher quality.

This is a simple twin study to quantify nature-nurture differences. Apparently, it had to slap on some bogus conclusions about teacher quality in order to get it published in a leftist science magazine.

Dead people had bad habits

AP reports on a widely publicized study:

Four common bad habits combined — smoking, drinking too much, inactivity and poor diet — can age you by 12 years, sobering new research suggests.

The findings are from a study that tracked nearly 5,000 British adults for 20 years, and they highlight yet another reason to adopt a healthier lifestyle.

Overall, 314 people studied had all four unhealthy behaviors. Among them, 91 died during the study, or 29 percent. Among the 387 healthiest people with none of the four habits, only 32 died, or about 8 percent.

The risky behaviors were: smoking tobacco; downing more than three alcoholic drinks per day for men and more than two daily for women; getting less than two hours of physical activity per week; and eating fruits and vegetables fewer than three times daily.

No, this study does not prove that those bad habits age you. Maybe the exercise does not make you healthier or make you live longer at all. Maybe the folks who are in poor health are about to die are physically incapable of exercise. Then this study would make it appear that exercising is making people live longer, but the exercise could be just a symptom, not a cause.

Virginia stamps out coded message

The Wash. Post reports:

A few hours later, the DMV agreed that the plate contains a coded message: The number 88 stands for the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, doubled to signify "Heil Hitler," said CAIR's Ibrahim Hooper. "CV" stands for "Confederate veteran" -- the plate was a special model embossed with a Confederate flag, which Virginia makes available for a $10 fee to card-carrying members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. And 14 is code for imprisoned white supremacist David Lane's 14-word motto: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

The giveaway that something was amiss, Hooper said, was the truck itself. An enormous photo of the burning World Trade Center towers covers the entire tailgate, with the words: "Everything I ever needed to know about Islam I learned on 9/11."

Where I live, thousands just celebrated April 20 because 4-20 is a coded message for dope smoking. What if 9-11 becomes a coded message for, "Everything I ever needed to know about Islam"?

New missing link

Here is a picture of the latest missing link, a Neanderthal half-breed. Nature reports:

Archaic humans such as Neanderthals may be gone but they're not forgotten — at least not in the human genome. A genetic analysis of nearly 2,000 people from around the world indicates that such extinct species interbred with the ancestors of modern humans twice, leaving their genes within the DNA of people today.

The theory is that today's Europeans are descended from people who migrated out of Africa and then interbred with Neanderthals. Sounds dubious to me, but I am sure we will hear more about this. There is current a project to sequence the Neanderthal genome, and we should be hearing some results soon.

There is also a far-fetched theory that autism is caused by Neanderthal genes. The article suggests testing the theory by seeing whether autistic kids have a natural ability to recognize Neanderthal faces better than human faces.

California seeks to ban public statements

AP reports:

Do gun-toters pose a danger when they carry their weapons in public, even if they're unloaded? ...

"What I'm concerned about is people who have no training can carry a gun for no other purpose than to make a public statement," said the bill's author Democratic Assemblywoman Lori Saldana of San Diego.

So the purpose of her proposed law is to censor that public statement?

The US supreme court says that we have a constitutional right to burn an American flag because flag-burners are making a public statement and because the laws against flag-burning were motivated by suppressing that statement. The same reasoning implies that people should be able to carry an unloaded gun as a public statement.

As the article explains, 32 other states allow people to openly carry loaded guns without any license or permit.

Why are some people smarter?

NewScientist reports:

Martijn van den Heuvel, a neuroscientist at Utrecht University Medical Center in the Netherlands, found that smarter brains seem to have more efficient networks between neurons - in other words, it takes fewer steps to relay a message between different regions of the brain. That could explain about a third of the variation in a population's IQ, he says.

Another key factor is the insulating fatty sheath encasing neuron fibres, which affects the speed of electrical signals. Paul Thompson at the University of California, Los Angeles, has found a correlation between IQ and the quality of the sheaths (The Journal of Neuroscience, vol 29, p 2212).

We still don't know exactly how much genes contribute to intelligence, with various studies coming up with estimates ranging from 40 to 80 per cent. This wide range of estimates might have arisen because genes contribute more to IQ as we get older, according to a study published last year. By comparing the intelligence of 11,000 pairs of twins, Robert Plomin of King's College London found that at age 9, genes explain 40 per cent of the variation, but by 17 they account for roughly two-thirds (Molecular Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1038/mp.2009.55).

People sometimes mistakenly assume that if a trait is genetic, then it is measurable at an early age.

I mentioned below a study that correlates aggressive behavior in kids aged 3 to 5. It assumed that if a kid has an innate inclination towards aggressive behavior, then such an inclination would not change between 3 and 5. So if the kid became more aggressive, then it must be caused by something that the mom was doing. But it seems likely to me that, like IQ, genes explain a great portion of the variation in aggression as we get older.

No benefit to vegetables

CNN reports:

Eating an additional 200 grams a day of fruits and vegetables (about two servings) resulted in only a 3 percent reduction of cancer risk, which was described as "very weak," according to the study published online in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. ...

Researchers raised the prospect that people who ate more fruits and vegetables could have lower cancer risks because they had generally healthier lifestyles, "such as lower intake of alcohol, never smoking, short duration of tobacco, and higher level of physical activity." These could've been factors rather than just fruit and vegetable intake.

Previous studies have touted the benefits of produce, with findings of 20 to 30 percent reduced cancer rates. The latest finding from the European study was low in comparison.

This is a neglible effect. Most of the supposed health benefits of eating fruits and vegetables are completely bogus.

New bogus spanking study

The pediatricians have a new study on spanking:

According to the study, kids who were spanked often were twice as likely as those who weren't spanked to develop aggressive behaviors such as getting into fights, destroying things or being mean to others. ...

"Causality is extremely difficult to prove," Taylor told Reuters Health. Still, she added, "the evidence is at a point where we want to encourage parents to use techniques other than spanking that can actually lower children's risk for being more aggressive." ...

The study only claims 1.49 times as likely, not twice as likely. I think that it is funny that "aggressive" is used to be synonymous with bad. Aggression is not necessarily bad.

"The evidence is clear that spanking does lead to aggression," psychologist Sandra A. Graham-Bermann, who was not involved in the new study, told Reuters Health in an e-mail. ...

Despite the opinion of professional societies, surveys show that as many as 90 percent of parents spank their children. Taylor encourages parents to talk to a pediatrician about how to better control their toddlers if they use this type of punishment.

"Children need guidance and discipline," said Taylor. "However, parents should focus on positive, non-physical forms of discipline and avoid the use of spanking."

So 90% of parents are doing something wrong? It is much more likely that their study is wrong. They should try to figure out how 90% of parents could be wrong before jumping to conclusions.

Here is the study:

Objective The goal was to examine the association between the use of corporal punishment (CP) against 3-year-old children and subsequent aggressive behavior among those children.

Methods Respondents (N = 2461) participated in the Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study (1998–2005), a population-based, birth cohort study of children born in 20 large US cities. Maternal reports of CP, children's aggressive behaviors at 3 and 5 years of age, and a host of key demographic features and potential confounding factors, including maternal child physical maltreatment, psychological maltreatment, and neglect, intimate partner aggression victimization, stress, depression, substance use, and consideration of abortion, were assessed.

Wow, that is a bizarre list of factors. So they tried to consider whether the parent was spanking the child because of an earlier consideration of abortion? Or whether the child was misbehaving because the dad was beating the mom?

All these factors make the study sound scientific, but ultimately they were just asking the mom whether the child was misbehaving, and asking whether she spanked the child. They found a correlation between misbehavior and spanking, as reported by the mom. This should not be surprising. Presumably the moms said that they spanked as punishment for the misbehavior.

But the study just found a correlation, and cannot determine whether the misbehavior caused the spanking, or the spanking caused the misbehavior. The researchers have chosen to interpret the results as the spanking causing the misbehavior. Such a conclusion might be valid if the misbehavior were predictable from all those other factors, but it is not, of course.

The study concludes:

Conclusions Despite American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations to the contrary, most parents in the United States approve of and have used CP as a form of child discipline. The current findings suggest that even minor forms of CP, such as spanking, increase risk for increased child aggressive behavior. Importantly, these findings cannot be attributed to possible confounding effects of a host of other maternal parenting risk factors.

Note the weasel words. The study definitely does not show that spanking increases aggressive behavior. So they say that the study suggests an increase in risk. By risk, they mean the chance that the study analysis is correct.

The AAP is an anti-spanking organization, and I am surprised that this the best anti-spanking evidence that they can find. As far as I know, there is no proof that any other form of child discipline works better than spanking.

The Truth about Boys and Girls

A Scientific American Mind article says:

Boys and girls are different, but most psychological sex differences are not especially large. For example, gaps in intellectual performance, empathy and even most types of aggression are generally much narrower than the disparity in adult height, in which the average man is taller than 99 percent of women. ...

Most sex differences start out small -— as mere biases in temperament and play style -— but are amplified as children’s pink- or blue-tinted brains meet our gender-infused culture, including all the tea parties, wrestling matches, playground capers and cafeteria dramas that dominate boys’ or girls’ existence.

The article has some data on male-female differences, but does not really have any evidence that the differences are amplified by culture. It is possible for innate differences to become more significant over time. After all, the height differences increase with age, and that is not from culture.

10 kinds of people

You can categorize people based on how they divide up everybody else. For example, psychologists classify people according to the Big Five personality traits, or other systems. Cops tend to divide people into cops, civilians, and scumbags.

Computer scientists divide people according to this:

There are 10 kinds of people. Those who understand binary notation, and those who do not.

In other words, those who get this joke and those who don't.

Some people divide according to religion, right-left politics, IQ, or some other litmus test.

Mathematician T. Tao brilliantly describes how he divides people:

One can broadly divide the outcomes of any given action into three categories: the worst-case scenario, the average-case scenario, and the best-case scenario. ... One can roughly subdivide different modes of thinking by what upper bounds and lower bounds one chooses to set: ...

Some of these distinctions might be incomprehensible to those who do not make them.

The previous post can be understood as Friedman advocating an advantage to one of Tao's types, altho Friedman doesn't suggest actually doing anything to separate those types.

Attracting creative risk-takers

NY Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman :

If we want to bring down unemployment in a sustainable way, neither rescuing General Motors nor funding more road construction will do it. We need to create a big bushel of new companies — fast. … Good-paying jobs don’t come from bailouts. They come from startups. And where do startups come from? They come from smart, creative, inspired risk-takers. How do we get more of those? There are only two ways: Grow more by improving our schools or import more by recruiting talented immigrants. Surely, we need to do both, and we need to start by breaking the deadlock in Congress over immigration, so we can develop a much more strategic approach to attracting more of the world’s creative risk-takers.

... Think Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, or Vinod Khosla, the India-born co-founder of Sun Microsystems. ...

Right now we have thousands of foreign students in America and 1 million engineers, scientists and other highly skilled workers here on H-1B temporary visas, which require them to return home when the visas expire. That's nuts.

His examples did not have H-1B visas, of course. Brin came here as a small child, and Khosla was just an investor in Sun, not a founder. The whole purpose of the H-1B program is to get cheap foreign labor that will be tied to a particular company. Those workers are prohibited from starting their own companies.

Google and Sun were famously successful, but only in rapidly growing markets that included many other American start-up companies with similar technologies.

We have a racist immigration policy that favors unskilled workers from Mexico and other countries. We get millions of legal immigrants and illegal aliens that way.

The insult apology

The NY Times (or Int. Herald Tribune) has avery strange apology. You may know the non-apology apology, which pretends to apologize, but only expresses regret that anyone was offended. This Times apology is the insult apology. It pretends to apologize, but really repeats and emphasizes the insult for anyone who may have missed it the first time. It essentially says:

We made a deal with Lee not to call him a crook, but we broke that deal. So we are now saying that we did not intend the reader to infer that Lee is a crook, and we apologize to Lee for the distress of being labeled a crook.

This apology is much more insulting than saying nothing, because it suggests that the paper accidentally told the truth that Lee is a crook, in spite of some underhanded deal to cover up the truth. Perhaps the newspaper was only allowed to operate in Singapore if it was sufficiently respectful of the govt.

I had no idea that it was respectable to use such a brazenly insulting apology. I think that I will try it out myself.

I want to apologize for blog comments that some readers may construed to say that the new Apple iPad is a useless piece of junk. I had promised Steve Jobs that I would not point out the long list of shortcomings to that product, and not explain that it is a useless piece of crap. I wish to state clearly that I was not intending my readers to think that I had broken my promise to Jobs. I apologize to Jobs for any distress or embarrassment caused by any breach of my promise.

Math textbook errors

The Sacramento California newspaper reports:

Five times three equals five.

Second-graders at 79 Sacramento-area schools can find that equation in their new math books.

Other students using the math series are being asked to count the flies in the playground – only there's no picture of a playground on the page. ...

It's not unusual to find occasional mistakes in textbooks, according to educators. But the errors popping up in the Macmillan/McGraw-Hill series are unusually pervasive: In Folsom Cordova – where some teachers have students looking for the bloopers as a learning exercise – the fourth grade has documented 90 errors in its textbook and related materials, said Assistant Superintendent Janie DeArcos.

It is a scandal that the taxpayers have to buy new math books at all. There are old math books that are much better than the modern ones, and they can be bought cheaply. Maybe the old books don't have DVDs, politically correct messages, and lobbyists vouching for them. But what is more important, learning math or watching an entertaining DVD?

The Male Brain

Psychiatrist Louann Brizendine has a new book on the male human brain, and writes:

The "defend your turf" area -- dorsal premammillary nucleus -- is larger in the male brain and contains special circuits to detect territorial challenges by other males. And his amygdala, the alarm system for threats, fear and danger is also larger in men. These brain differences make men more alert than women to potential turf threats.

I always thought that women were territorial. According to this blog, her statement was based entirely on rat studies that do not apply to humans.

Mindreading is The Next Big Thing

The NY Times reports:

This layered process of figuring out what someone else is thinking — of mind reading — is both a common literary device and an essential survival skill. Why human beings are equipped with this capacity and what particular brain functions enable them to do it are questions that have occupied primarily cognitive psychologists. ...

Zealous enthusiasm for the politically charged and frequently arcane theories that energized departments in the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s — Marxism, structuralism, psychoanalysis — has faded. Since then a new generation of scholars have been casting about for The Next Big Thing.

The brain may be it. Getting to the root of people’s fascination with fiction and fantasy, Mr. Gottschall said, is like “mapping wonderland.”

Literature, like other fields including history and political science, has looked to the technology of brain imaging and the principles of evolution to provide empirical evidence for unprovable theories.

I do think that a lot of fiction is particularly appealing to those with mindreading delusions.

It all seems very scientific if the publications show brain scans, even if it is an attempt to prove some unprovable theories.

Failure to communicate

Some people foolishly believe that communication can solve all problems. Here is a recent example:

Imagine if somebody were to really sit down with Osama Bin Ladin and say, ‘listen man, what is it that you’re so angry at me about that you’re willing to have people strap bombs to themselves, or get inside of airplanes and fly them into buildings.’ That would be the miracle if we can get, sit down and talk to our enemies and find a way for them to hear us. – Matthew Modine

Modine was an actor in the movie Full Metal Jacket. Bin Laden has made himself clear enough.

Study finds supertaskers

CBS News reports:

A new study by University of Utah psychologists on the ability of people to operate a motor vehicle and talk on a cell phone ...

Reaction to hit the brakes was slowed 20 percent. Drivers also failed to keep pace with traffic, as following distances increased 30 percent. Their performances in memorization declined (by 11 percent), and math performance dropped as well (by 3 percent).

Yet for the "supertaskers," there was no change in their braking times, following distances or mathematical ability - and their memory improved by 3 percent.

Researchers found this small group of "supertaskers" also displayed better performance when performing a single task than did the rest of the subjects.

Maybe the DMV driving test should test for multitasking. Those who can do it are probably safer with the legal right to use cellphones.

Men must now buy maternity insurance

Most men have probably ignored the health care insurance abortion debate, because they don't need abortion insurance anyway. But now that changes. Men will not only have to buy abortion insurance, they will have to buy maternity insurance:

Until now, it has been perfectly legal in most states for companies selling individual health policies — for people who do not have group coverage through employers — to engage in “gender rating,” that is, charging women more than men for the same coverage, even for policies that do not include maternity care. The rationale was that women used the health care system more than men. ...

In addition, individual policies often excluded maternity coverage, or charged much more for it. Now, gender rating is essentially outlawed, and policies must include maternity coverage, considered “an essential health benefit.”

Some people say that more health insurance will save money, because increased preventive care will cut more expensive treatments later. But the truth is just the opposite:

And the new health care legislation, he says, is not going to make a bit of difference.

To truly change the nation’s chronic overuse of medical care, there will have to be a substantial change in the way patients think about health care, how medicine is practiced and how it is paid for, economists and doctors say.

The legislation does little to help in those areas.

Most preventive care is not really cost-effective, so it is inevitable that it will be rationed, now that everyone expects to get it for free.

Women seek mental health treatments much more than men, and the new law has a big payoff for them:

Even without the new health care law, mental health advocates were getting ready to celebrate parity — a law requiring benefits for substance abuse and mental illnesses to be on par with benefits for medical illnesses. ...

Now mental health advocates are almost giddy. The law signed by President Obama last week expands parity to a much wider pool, making it possible for millions more people to get the same coverage for substance abuse and illnesses like bipolar disorder, major depression and schizophrenia as they would for, say, diabetes or cancer.

So I'll also have to pay for mental health insurance that I do not want or need.

I suspect that millions of Americans may decide that it makes more sense not to buy that health insurance for things they don't need. They can wait until they get sick, and then take advantage of the inability of insurance companies to look at pre-existing conditions.

Insurance used to mean paying a big company to take the risk of uncertain accident or illness. That concept is dead. Now it means paying for either the medical conditions you already have, or the ones you will never have.

Innumerate math teachers

A Psychology Today article writes:

In an article published in 2005, Patricia Clark Kenschaft, a professor of mathematics at Montclair State University, described her experiences of going into elementary schools and talking with teachers about math. In one visit to a K-6 elementary school in New Jersey she discovered that not a single teacher, out of the fifty that she met with, knew how to find the area of a rectangle.[2] They taught multiplication, but none of them knew that multiplication is used to find the area of a rectangle. Their most common guess was that you add the length and the width to get the area.

This is pathetic, but widespread. Elementary schools just don't believe in hiring the sort of teachers who are interested in math. They would probably drop math altogether, if they could get away with it. Math is on the standardized tests, so they have to keep it. They just teach it badly.

Why babies get fat

The NY Times reports:

Babies whose mothers smoked during pregnancy are at risk of becoming obese, even though the babies are usually small at birth.

Babies who sleep less than 12 hours are at increased risk for obesity later. If they don’t sleep enough and also watch two hours or more of TV a day, they are at even greater risk.

It seems unlikely to me that these things really cause obesity. Maybe it is a simple matter that those who do not follow health guidelines tend to smoke and get fat, but there is no direct relationship between a mom smoking and a baby getting fat. There could also be genetic reasons for a correlation. I expect that official health guidelines will list these things as causes of childhood obesity, but they are more likely to be spurious correlations.

New research indicates HFCS may be causing obesity:

When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they're becoming obese -- every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don't see this; they don't all gain extra weight.

That quote is from a psychology professor. I would think that medical researchers could figure stuff like this out, but I guess they are too busy doing retrospective cohort studies.

Attacks on the Pope

The NY Times has another page one story attacking the Catholic Church. This one is titled, Warned About Abuse, Vatican Failed to Defrock Priest.

Apparently there were some allegations against a Milwaukee priest in 1974, and the Church transferred him elsewhere. Additional action was considered in 1996, before the priest died in 1998. The paper reports:

But Cardinal Bertone halted the process after Father Murphy personally wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger protesting that he should not be put on trial because he had already repented and was in poor health and that the case was beyond the church’s own statute of limitations.

Leftist-atheist religion-haters are going nuts with this, such as Hitchens.

This is ridiculous. It is a complaint about how someone 14 years ago may or may not have handled something that may or may not have happened 36 years ago. It is not possible to find out the facts. Whatever happened, it could not have been that bad, or someone would have complained before now. The only reason anyone is complaining now is that there are some opportunistic lawyers in Wisconsin who are suing for a lot of money. Maybe the complainers just made the allegations up in order to collect millions of dollars in court.

There are reasons why we have statutes of limitations. There are also reasons for a presumption of innocence. Nothing good is going to come out of this story.

It is disturbing how people uncritically accept these dubious accusations. It is somewhat similar to how the news media has accepted wacky stories of Toyota runaway acceleration, even tho the last one was shown to be a hoax.

Reality show is scripted

The NY Post reports:

A teen ex-beauty queen is suing Disney and the TV show "Wife Swap" for $100 million -- charging that they intentionally ruined her life by making her look like a spoiled brat, exposing her to "ridicule, mockery and derision." ...

And while the show claims to be reality, many of its sequences were scripted, the suit alleges.

I guess the kid can sue because she was under age during filming, and now she is over 18 and not bound by contract. Mockery is much of the purpose of these shows.

This study claims to explain why skinny models are so popular with women:

According to a new study by the University of Arizona, ads featuring bigger models don’t actually make most women feel very good about themselves. Apparently, pretty much everything makes women feel like crap about how they look.

According to the researchers, larger women feel better about themselves when ads don’t include any models at all, average-sized ladies actually have lower self-esteem after looking at ads with plus-sized models rather than uber-skinny ones, and thin folk prefer the traditional tiny models.

Teen prankster arrested for racial joke

The NY Times reports:

WASHINGTON TOWNSHIP, N.J. — The authorities in southern New Jersey said Saturday that they had arrested a 16-year-old boy for activating a public-address system at a Wal-Mart store last week and ordering “all black people” to leave.

The boy, from Atlantic County, was charged by Gloucester County authorities with bias and intimidation and harassment in connection with the episode last Sunday. If convicted, he could face up to a year in a juvenile detention center, officials said. His name was not released because he is a minor.

According to the police, the boy picked up a public-address telephone in the Wal-Mart in Washington Township, one of two dozen accessible to the store’s customers, and said, “All black people, leave the store now.” ...

Investigators also scoured Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, and found postings, including some that the police chief said involved “kids bragging” about what happened.

With the help of anonymous tipsters, he added, investigators were led to the suspect, who was arrested Friday.

I can see why Wal-Mart is embarrassed, but what is the crime?

Wal-Mart could easily prevent this sort of thing if it wanted to. It could turn of the system when not in use. Apparently it has a store full of video cameras, but they did not record this.

The black people in the store did not leave, and assumed that it was a joke.

If no one was harmed, then what was the crime? Is rude behavior in a Wal-Mart now illegal?

I also heard this story reported on the radio. This is only news because some editors think that it is funny. So how are these editors better than that teenager? He risked offending a couple of black folks in the store, while the editors risk offending millions of blacks.

In other teen crime news:

In most states, teenagers who send or receive sexually explicit photographs by cellphone or computer — known as “sexting” — have risked felony child pornography charges and being listed on a sex offender registry for decades to come.

But there is growing consensus among lawyers and legislators that the child pornography laws are too blunt an instrument to deal with an adolescent cyberculture in which all kinds of sexual pictures circulate on sites like MySpace and Facebook.

The problem here is that there are draconian penalties for behavior that today's teenagers see as harmless fun. The authorities are going to have to convince the teenagers that it is harmful, change the law, or prosecute a lot of kids.

Odd national origin options

I am filling out my US Census form, and I find several things odd. I have the short form, with only ten questions.

There is no question about my citizenship, or one that directly asks for my national origin, but there are about 25 national origins lists. None apply to me, and I have never even heard of some of them. I can say that I am Korean, but I cannot say that I am American or even French.

It separates race from being Hispanic, which makes sense, but what box do they expect non-white Mexicans to check? My guess is to check both "white" and "American Indian" to indicate mixed ancestry, but the latter asks for a tribe name, and Mexicans don't have that, as far as I know.

Only one answer is boldface, and that is the "No" for not being Hispanic. Is that for people who are emphatically not Hispanic?

What ever happened to the oriental race? There is no Caucasian race either anymore. It appears that the entire sub-continent of India has been kicked out of the white race.

The Census web site does not explain any of this. You cannot even file your census response online.

More evidence that copyright is broken

From an unofficial Google watcher:

The truth is difficult to find if those that know it have a lot to lose when it's revealed. Three years after Viacom sued YouTube for 1 billion dollars, some pieces of truth are revealed:

"For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. " ...

"... The team told senior Google execs that YouTube was a "rogue enabler" of content theft, that its content is all free, and much of it is highly sought after pirated clips and that YouTube's business model is completely sustained by pirated content. " ...

Google will probably have to pay millions of dollars, because YouTube would have never taken off without that pirated content. And yet hardly anyone sees anything wrong with it.

Differences between men and women

Funny columns today on the differences, from a man:

Men move the discussion forward. Women swap recipes and beauty tips.
Men debate. Women wheedle.
Men confront. Women slander.
Men act. Women plot.
Men invent. Women benefit.
Men are passionate. Women are passion parasites.
Men cheat. Women betray.

and a woman:

Guys seek thrills and speed. They go for the adrenalin rush. They get pumped by going higher, faster, farther than anyone else. They want lots of action and instant gratification. That's also why guys like blogging – instant opinions, and lots of them.

Prize for Poincare conjecture solution

Today's math news:

The Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) announces today that Dr. Grigoriy Perelman of St. Petersburg, Russia, is the recipient of the Millennium Prize for resolution of the Poincaré conjecture.

Math is the only academic subject who people get credited for what they actually do, and not for self-promotion. Perelman has dropped out, and done nothing to promote his work. He just posted it, and lectured on it.

Poincare discovered and published relativity theory before Einstein, and most physicists refuse to credit him to this day.

Update: Pravda claims that Perelman does not want the money. He is not talking, so nobody really knows.

Update: As of July 2, 2010, Perelman has refused the prize.

Female prison guard misconduct

Here is a weird story about sex in prison, with the authorities having trouble figuring out who is raping whom. AP reports:

HELENA, Mont. — Inmate Michael Murphy sought out female guards and prison workers that he knew would be easy to charm.

He started by seeking a small favor, which could lead to a kiss or love letters. In at least five cases, he convinced women to have sex with him or perform other significant illegal favors.

And yet Michael Murphy is considered the victim in each case, because inmates cannot legally consent to sex.

In each of those cases, the female corrections employees were caught, shamed and forced out of a job, according to documents detailing an investigation by Montana prison officials and obtained by The Associated Press after an open records lawsuit.

The women officers described Murphy as the aggressor, even as the predator. But that makes no difference in either state or federal penitentiaries, where prison employees — male or female — are the violators if they have sex with inmates.

A Justice Department study shows that cases like Murphy's are common: Female staff are more often implicated than their male counterparts in prison sexual misconduct. ...

The therapist, for instance, told internal investigators that from the start that she knew she had been manipulated and compromised.

"And then he kissed me one day in my office and I just thought, 'What the f--- did I just do, what just happened?'" she said in a 2008 interview she was told would be confidential. "From that point on I just, I felt like I couldn't do anything, I couldn't say no to him, I couldn't get myself out of it. It's like he had that over me, and he continued to push."

Wow, a female prison therapist cannot control herself any better than that?

Neanderthal med student article

An article by 24-year-old med student Brent Thoma drew this response:

"I can only hope that he is sincere in his decision to forgo a career in Family Medicine, thereby sparing countless future female patients the agony of having to deal with his apparent Neanderthal tendencies," one professor wrote. Several letters were subsequently sent to the journal defending the student.

At least one member of the public has also written to Canadian Family Physician demanding an apology and retraction.

"Congratulations on publishing the most offensive, insensitive article ever," wrote Grace Sanchez MacCall, a business owner from Toronto.

In an interview, Ms. Sanchez MacCall understood that the article addresses a legitimate issue. "But the way it was addressed, using humour ineptly, was completely inappropriate and had no place in being legitimized by a professional association's journal," she said.

The article obviously struck a nerve, as it appeared several months ago and people are still complaining about it.

Mohammedan history lesson

Nobody wants to explain Mohammedanism, but check out this video: Colonel Allen West Answers a Marine's Question.

Marriage expert debunked

John Gottman claims to have a method of analyzing marriage, but this article shoots it down:

Then, three to six years later, Gottman's team checked on the same couples' marital status and announced that based on the coding of the tapes, they could predict with 83 percent accuracy which ones were divorced. ...

Malcolm Gladwell devoted most of a chapter to him in his huge best-seller Blink. In a 2007 survey asking psychotherapists to elect the 10 most influential members of their profession over the last quarter-century, Gottman was only one of four who made the cut who wasn't deceased. "Many in the field now believe that most of what we know about marriage and divorce comes from his work," states an article accompanying the Top 10 list.

Sounds amazing, but the research is worthless. Andrew Gelman agrees that the claims are bogus.

This is another example of Gladwell's junk. He has sold millions of dollars worth of book with convincing explanations, but it is snake oil.

Making it hard to filter porn

Slashdot reports:

The Associated Press reports that the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has deferred a decision until June on whether to create a '.xxx' Internet suffix as an online red-light district, ... Backers of '.xxx' have billed the proposal as a way for the adult-entertainment industry to clean up its act, though some adult sites worry that governments would wind up mandating the use of '.xxx' and that sites with the '.xxx' suffix could easily be blocked by government web filters in the future.

If a .xxx top-level domain makes it easier to filter porn, so much the better. I think that laws ought to encourage the hard-core porn to get over to .xxx.

There are always civil-liberties types who complain that filtering should not be easy, because that encourages censorship. I think that is backwards. We should have the liberty to easily reject the porn, if we want.

Yes, I imagine that most employers will block the .xxx domain on company computers. Workers are not being paid to watch porn. Okay with me. There is no shortage of porn on the internet.

Swiss voters reject animal lawyers

AP reports:

GENEVA – The result was emphatic: Swiss voters don't think abused animals need to have their own lawyers. ...

Official results showed that 70.5 percent of voters cast their ballot against the proposal to extend nationwide a system that has been in place in Zurich since 1992. Some 29.5 percent of voters backed the proposal, with turnout at just over 45 percent.

According to the country's only animal lawyer, Antoine F. Goetschel, public prosecutors are often unsure about animal rights and shy away from pursuing cases ...

Most of his clients are dogs, cows and cats, Goetschel told The Associated Press in a recent interview. Many cases involve the serious abuse of animals, such as deliberate wounding, rape and neglect.

But in one high-profile case last month, Goetschel represented a dead pike after an animal protection group accused the angler who caught it of cruelty for taking 10 minutes to haul the fish in.

The angler was found not guilty.

This article is not a joke. A Swiss lawyer represented a dead pike fish. 30% of the Swiss voted for this nutty law.

I am waiting for Switzerland to get its second animal lawyer. Then they can sue each other when one rabbit rapes another.

Popular Science

Popular Science (Monthly) magazine has put its old issues online. Popular Science (Monthly) magazine has put its old issues online.

A 1952 letter confronts Einstein with his bogus claims about creating a unified field theory. Einstein. Einstein denies any responsibility for his publicity-seeking behavior, and then gives some doubletalk excuses. His theories were garbage.

A 1929 story updates an experiment that led to relativity theory. The trouble with this is that Einstein denied that the experiment had anything to do with his work on relativity. It was only used by those who actually invented relativity.

The magazines are complete with the original ads, which are unlike any ads today.

Publishing phony facts

You would think that a writer's career might be damaged by this NY Times book review:

If Charles Pellegrino weren't so shamelessly self-promoting, it might be O.K. to let this book drift into oblivion past the icebergs that it ought to hit. But he quotes himself in epigraphs, invents friendships with famous people and claims scientific authority for a work that flouts most principles of scientific scholarship. He shouldn't get away with it.

But he got another book published, and it is getting worse treatment:

In the case of “The Last Train From Hiroshima,” the author, Charles Pellegrino, said he had been duped by a source and insisted that other sources the publisher questioned definitely existed. ...

Mr. Pellegrino said he had relied on information from a source, Joseph Fuoco, who claimed he was a last-minute substitute as a flight engineer on one of the escort planes for the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Late last month, scientists, historians and veterans denounced Mr. Fuoco as an impostor who did not ride on the mission. ...

Mr. Pellegrino said he had been awarded the doctorate at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand in the early 1980s and then stripped of it a few years later because of a disagreement with department members over evolutionary theory. “It got to be a very hot and nasty topic in 1982,” Mr. Pellegrino said in a telephone interview. ...

In a telephone interview Mr. Pellegrino talked repeatedly of his supporters, including Stephen Jay Gould, who died in 2002, but who, according to Mr. Pellegrino, knew that he had been academically persecuted.

Earlier, this book got a rave review in the NY Times.

I guess that it is impractical for most publishers and book reviewers to do any fact-checking.

Iceland rejects debt repayment

Iceland has voted overwhelmingly against a plan to repay some unusual and excessive debts created by its bank. This is great. How can we vote to repudiate debt?

California has a constitution requiring a balanced budget, and yet we have accumulated vast amounts of debt.

I think that we need a new California constitution amendment to limit debt. It should say that no session of the legislature should be obligated to pay a debt burden created by a previous session.

I particularly object to debt created by unbalanced budgets and unfunded pension plans.

Someone might argue that such an amendment would interfere with federal law on the enforcement of contracts, but I don't think so. California would just have to put a clause in its contracts that state obligations are limited by constitutional spending authority. If some state agency signs a contract with a union saying that employees can retire at 95% of full salary with annual increases, then a clause would have to say that the pension payments could be limited by what is in the fund and what some future legislature decides to appropriate. It should be legally impossible for the state to guarantee a pension greater than that.

As it is, we have thousands of state bureaucrats retiring on six-figure pensions, and they are bankrupting the state. The politicians who made these promises are gone and no one is accountable.

Publishers reject cold submissions

The WSJ reports:

In 1991, a book editor at Random House pulled from the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts a novel about a murder that roils a Baltimore suburb. Written by a first-time author and mother named Mary Cahill, "Carpool" was published to fanfare. Ms. Cahill was interviewed on the "Today" show. "Carpool" was a best seller.

That was the last time Random House, the largest publisher in the U.S., remembers publishing anything found in a slush pile. Today, Random House and most of its major counterparts refuse to accept unsolicited material. ...

It used to be that you could bang out a screenplay on your typewriter, then mail it in to a studio with a self-addressed stamped envelope and a prayer. Studios already were reluctant to read because of plagiarism concerns, but they became even more skittish in 1990 when humorist Art Buchwald sued Paramount, alleging that the studio stole an idea from him and turned it into the Eddie Murphy vehicle, "Coming to America." (Mr. Buchwald received an undisclosed settlement from Paramount.)

She makes it sound as if Paramount got burned by a chance similarity to an unsolicited manuscript. In fact, Paramount had a signed contract with Buchwald, made the movie with his plot, and cheated him out of his share of the $288M in earnings.

Female US ship captain fired

Time magazine reports:

... booted as captain of a billion-dollar warship for "cruelty and maltreatment" of her 400-member crew. According to the Navy inspector general's report that triggered her removal — and the accounts of officers who served with her — Captain Holly Graf was the closest thing the U.S. Navy had to a female Captain Bligh.

A Navy admiral stripped Graf of her command of the Japan-based guided missile cruiser U.S.S. Cowpens in January. The just-released IG report concludes that Graf "repeatedly verbally abused her crew and committed assault" and accuses her of using her position as commander of the Cowpens "for personal gain." But old Navy hands tell TIME that those charges, substantiated in the IG report, came about because of the poisonous atmosphere she created aboard her ship.

The article goes on to give examples of her using profanity to sailors, including those who had gone to her for personal advice.

I don't doubt that she is incompetent, and was only promoted because of misguided affirmative action policies. But is profanity really that upsetting to today's sailor? And why was anyone asking her for personal advice, if she were really a female Captain Bligh?

The complaints against Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty were things like cruelly flogging sailors for no reason. I don't recall sailors complaining about profanity and hurt feelings. I don't know how we can fight a war unless we have tougher sailors than this.