HP blackmail

The SF CA paper reports:

Jodie Fisher, 50, identified herself through her attorney as the independent marketing contractor whose allegations eventually caused Friday's stunning resignation of Mark Hurd, CEO of HP.

"I was surprised and saddened that Mark Hurd lost his job over this," Fisher said in a written statement released by Los Angeles attorney Gloria Allred. "That was not my intention."

Fisher said she has reached a private, out-of-court settlement with Hurd, but did not disclose the financial terms.

No, her intention was a private shakedown. She collected unauthorized payments and benefits from HP, and a private payoff from Hurd. HP says that her complaint has no merit, and she is satisfied with the monetary payoff.

I wonder how often rich executives get blackmailed like this. Maybe they should either avoid female golddiggers, or have witnesses present.

Purpose of marriage

Law prof Nelson Lund explains the purpose of marriage:

Until very recently, same-sex marriage was unknown in human history, and it is opposed today by many progressive leaders, like Obama and Clinton. Can this be explained only by irrational prejudice or religious zeal? No. Only unions between men and women are capable of producing offspring, and every civilization has recognized that responsible procreation is critical to its survival. After the desire for self-preservation, sexual passion is probably the most powerful drive in human nature. Heterosexual intercourse naturally produces children, sometimes unintentionally and only after nine months.

Without marriage, men often would be uncertain about paternity or indifferent to it. If left unchecked, many men would have little incentive to invest in the rearing of their offspring, and the ensuing irresponsibility would have made the development of civilization impossible.

The fundamental purpose of marriage is to encourage biological parents, especially fathers, to take responsibility for their children. Because this institution responds to a phenomenon uniquely created by heterosexual intercourse, the meaning of marriage has always been inseparable from the problem it addresses.

Homosexual relationships (and lots of others as well), have nothing to do with the purpose of marriage, which is why marriage does not extend to them. Constitutional doctrine requires only one conceivable rational reason for a law, and the traditional definition of marriage easily meets that test.

Judge Walker's ruling for same-sex marriage is based on the premise that no rational person could believe this argument.

There is indeed a trend to eliminate the above purpose of marriage. The idea is that with DNA testing, massive national databases, and draconian family court laws, fathers can be forced to take financial responsibility for their children. Feminists argue that no non-financial responsibility is needed, as single moms can raise kids as long as they get enough welfare, food stamps, medical care, and forced child support payments from the biological dad.

It is an open question whether a civilization can be built on such an idea. That appears to be where we are headed, so I guess that we will find out. The evidence so far is that the kids reared by single moms do worse by every available measure.

Ten Reasons to Love the Bomb

J.R. Dunn writes:

Amid all this, it has become difficult to grasp the simple fact that nuclear weapons have benefits -- that they may well be, in Ray Bradbury's words, "The most blessed invention ever devised." But such benefits do exist, as the record clearly shows.

He does not even mention nuclear power generation, which is still the safest and cleanest method of large-scale power generation. No other carbon-free technology is competitive. It also does not mention medical and other applications of nuclear technology.

Rational basis for marriage

A San Francisco federal judge says that there is no rational basis for marriage being between a man and a woman. If you want to see the contrary view, you can read the high court opinions in other states. For example, the dissents in Connecticut explain it clearly.

Here is a CNN video about a counseling student being kicked out of school for her religious views on homosexuality. It is amazing to see someone defend the thought police police on TV. The argument that her personal beliefs disqualify her from being a counselor are silly. She could have personal beliefs about war, drug use, dogs, adultery, and an assortment of other topics, and those beliefs could conflict with those of her patients, but no one claims that she cannot study counseling for any of those reasons.

The US Supreme Court has also ruled against same-sex marriage already in Baker v. Nelson 1972, and in older cases:

Murphy v. Ramsey, 114 U.S. 15, 45, 5 S.Ct. 747, 29 L.Ed. 47 (1885) (recognizing “the idea of the family, as consisting in and springing from a union for life of one man and one woman in the holy estate of matrimony; the sure foundation of all that is stable and noble in our civilization”).

Here is a summary of part of that CT dissent:

Justice Zarella used the rational basis test to examine the state's marriage laws. He determined that the state's interests in promoting and regulating procreative conduct are legitimate and limiting marriage to opposite sex couples is rationally related to the advancement of those interests. The interests he suggested could have motivated the legislature were that:

1. the power of biological ties means that heterosexual families are most likely to achieve stability and successfully perform the childbearing function;

2. children do best when they are raised by a mother and a father;

3. the benefits and social status associated with traditional marriage encourage men and women to enter into a state of long-term, mutually supported procreation that is conducive to procreation and responsible child rearing on the part of biological parents; and

4. limiting marriage to a man and woman accomplishes vital social goods, while the institution of civil union promotes the legitimate interests of those who enter into it

A Zarella excerpt is also here.

Lousy car sound system

A current GM Buick car ad brags that it has a 40-gigabyte hard drive.

I wonder if anyone is impressed by this. The current market value for such a drive is about $6. It would be far more useful if GM made a system that allowed us to plug in our own electronic devices and use them the way we please. Even when some fancy $50k luxury car supports an Apple ipod, it is often so crippled as to be nearly useless.

High fat diet wins again

The LA Times reports:

The fascination with low-carb versus low-fat diet continues; the latest news comes from a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine released today that found that people on both diets lost about the same amount of weight over two years. However, the low-carb group had an edge in raising HDL (good) cholesterol and lowering diastolic blood pressure.

Part of the fascination is that these research studies regularly prove that the American Medical Assn. and most mainstream physicians have been almost entirely wrong in most of the dietary advice that they has given over the last 50 years.

Doctor gagged for doubting shaken baby syndrome

NewScientist magazine reports:

A PATHOLOGIST in the UK who argues that the trademark triad of symptoms of "shaken baby syndrome" (SBS) can have an innocent cause has been prevented from testifying in court as an expert witness. The restriction could stand until January 2012.

Yet, according to researchers and lawyers contacted by New Scientist, there are serious doubts about the safety of many shaken baby convictions. This is despite the fact that the triad of symptoms has been taken as evidence of murder for 40 years. ...

Since then, biomechanical studies using dummies as surrogates have concluded that shaking alone doesn't cause the classic symptoms. ...

No independent witness has ever seen a shaken baby with such symptoms, ...

A central tenet behind the original concept of shaken baby syndrome is that the abuse would sever bridging veins that drain blood from the brain and direct it back to the heart via a channel in the brain.

Research is now showing that the bridging veins of infants are strong and seldom break when subdural haemorrhages occur.

This shows how the medical establishment can line up in favor of a witchhunt. We should not be sending parents to prison for this until someone proves that the crime is even possible.

There are a few cases where the perp admitted to shaking, but that does not prove that the shaking caused the injury. Perhaps the child was already unconscious, and someone was shaking to revive the child.

Schools are doomed to damnation

A California newspaper complains:

Sandra Nichols: Why 1,000 schools are doomed to damnation ...

In its infinite wisdom, the California Board of Education has approved emergency regulations and deemed the 1,000 schools utter failures from which parents can rescue their kids via "open enrollment," transferring them to other schools.

This is damnation? Any parent ought to be able to transfer his child out to another school. California law allows such transfers, and the tax money goes with the child. Someday, being forced to attend a particular state school may be seen as a human rights violation. Everyone should have a choice.

Students in more affluent school districts with well-educated parents have distinct advantages over students in poverty-stricken communities. Library cards, computers, Internet connections, ...

Library cards are free to all residents, even the illegal aliens. Students with computers and internet connections in the home have been shown to get lower grades in school.

Look at the schools on the list of 1,000 and you will find schools impacted by the real culprit, poverty. ... Public schools do not have entrance exams. They are open to all. There will always be children who learn slower and achieve less. This is a reality we can't ignore.

No, the public schools are not open to all. Students often have to attend an assigned school, and cannot transfer to another public school.

Yes, poor students will do worse in school, on average, no matter what. So? Is that a reason to block poor students from transferring to another public school?

Starbucks Sheila is an alias

I do not listen to NPR radio as much anymore, because it now has more ads than other radio stations. I do not understand why they are allowed to broadcast on the commercial-free frequencies.

NPR's core audience seems to be liberal urban white women who somehow find great personal moral dilemmas while buying a $5 cup of coffee at Starbucks. NPR reports:

When Shefali Kulkarni, a reporting fellow at the Village Voice in New York City, is asked for her name while ordering coffee at Starbucks, she tells the barista a little fib. She uses "Sheila," her "coffee name."

That guy in front of you at the coffee shop might not actually be named "Bob."

Sherrod video not doctored

ABC News reports Shirley Sherrod To Sue Blogger Andrew Breitbart Over Doctored Video.

I think that Brietbart should sue ABC for libel. The video was not doctored. You can watch the videos here. The relevant part is around 17:00 to 19:00. It seems like a fair excerpt to me. She admits to having a racist policy 24 years ago, and starts to explain how she learned from it.

Number theory axioms

Steve Landsburg writes:

However, we still don’t know whether Fermat’s Last Theorem follows from the standard axioms for arithmetic.

Colin Mclarty says that the big modern cohomological number theory theorems, including Fermat’s Last Theorem, were all proved using Grothendieck’s tools, making use of an axiom stronger than Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory (ZFC). He says that there is a belief that these theorems can be proved in ZFC, but no one has done it.

Usually, mathematicians only agree that a theorem has been proved if it has been proved in ZFC. It seems to me that someone should prove that Grothendieck's work and its consequences is provable in ZFC.

Update: NewScientist reports:

To complete his proof, Wiles assumed the existence of a type of large cardinal known as an inaccessible cardinal, technically overstepping the bounds of conventional arithmetic. But there is a general consensus among mathematicians that this was just a convenient short cut rather than a logical necessity. With a little work, Wiles's proof should be translatable into Peano arithmetic or some slight extension of it.

The article says that large cardinals are needed to decide other arithmetic statements.

The horror of lesbian rape

This story is from a lesbian magazine:

My own first sexual experience with another woman was rape. Like many women, I didn’t know that women could rape other women. It wasn’t until I recounted the incident to a friend and she said, “So you were raped?” that I truly recognized this is what it was. ...

But each subsequent time she stayed at my house, the same scenario played out: She waited until I was asleep and then began having sex with me. It was years before I could acknowledge this was rape.

Weird. It might be a few more years before she convinces anyone. When you hear a woman claim that she was raped, it could be something like this.

How facts backfire

Here is another story about how people refuse to accept facts contrary to their beliefs:

New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month, suggests that once those facts — or “facts” — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge. In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.

For the most part, it didn’t.

The paper is here (and also here), and I don't find it so convincing. It seems possible that the revenue decline was caused by an economic downturn, and that the tax cuts led to more tax revenue than there would have been without the tax cuts.

The correction is not so effective. If the US President says one thing, and some reporter says something different, then why should I believe the reporter over the President? In the experiment, the reporter was not explicitly saying that the President was lying, so maybe the reader might infer that the President is correct.

Google English

It is a waste of time for Americans to learn foreign languages like French and Chinese, but maybe the schools should teach Google English. There are now several good online translation tools, such as http://translate.google.com. Yahoo Babelfish is similar. But these tools do not translate into grammatical English. So maybe the schools should teach how to read Google English instead. It would be a lot more useful than learning vocabulary words, as those words are easily machine translated.

Advice for the paranoid

Today's advice letter:

Dear Annie: Years ago, parents used to put up placards in their children's bedroom windows to let firemen know where they were in case of fire. That proved dangerous because pedophiles also knew which bedrooms the children were in.

Now parents are putting up stick figures of their families on the back of the car windows, including how many boys and girls they have.

Yesterday, I saw a car with two soccer ball emblems in the back window, each with the name of one of two girls. I assume those two girls were their daughters. To me, this is as dangerous as the window placards because any pedophile could follow the car home and target the children in the future. Should I be concerned for these children? — New York

Life must be difficult when your bizarre paranoid fears conflict. It seems to me that if a pedophile were going to follow a car, he would follow a car with kids and not a car with stick figures in the window. But then, I had no idea that pedophiles follow placards that were put in bedroom windows to guide firemen. The whole letter seems like a joke to me.

Confirming your prejudices

A UK newspaper reports:

Professor Geoffrey Munro took about 100 students and told them they were participating in a study on "judging the quality of scientific information", ...

Then they were asked about the research they had read, and were asked to rate their agreement with the following statement: "The question addressed in the studies summarised … is one that cannot be answered using scientific methods."

As you would expect, the people whose pre-existing views had been challenged were more likely to say that science simply cannot be used to measure whether homosexuality is associated with mental illness.

But then, moving on, the researchers asked a further set of questions, about whether science could be usefully deployed to understand all kinds of stuff, all entirely unrelated to stereotypes about homosexuality: "the existence of clairvoyance", "the effectiveness of spanking as a disciplinary technique for children", "the effect of viewing television violence on violent behaviour", "the accuracy of astrology in predicting personality traits" and "the mental and physical health effects of herbal medications".

If people find out that supposedly-scientific research was faulty in one area, then it stands to reason that they would be more skeptical about other research.

This research is supposed to prove that people are unscientific when they prejudices are challenged. I don't read it that way. A lot of social science is bogus but sounds convincing. You don't realize how bogus it is until it contradicts common sense. Then you look at it more critically. And when you find out that reputable journals are publishing research with obvious holes in it, then you are naturally going to be more skeptical. I think that these study subjects are not necessarily being irrational. Maybe they were just learning a lesson in how social science research works.

Still no iphone multitasking

The Apple iphone users are all excited because the new iphone-4 has some sort of limited multitasking. But it still just approximates what DOS users had back in the 1980s.

DOS did not get true multitasking until DOS version 6, or versions that had the ability to load a Windows kernel. But long before those, it had the terminate-and-stay-resident command. That allowed user apps to continue to reside in memory and to service interrupts. The best known such app was the Sidekick text editor, but you could also do downloading, CD music playing, print spooling, and other tasks in the background. You could keep text in your editor and paste it into other apps.

You cannot do any of these things with the iphone 1, 2, or 3. There are certain system functions that give an illusion of multitasking, such as a system program that allows you to browse the internet and listen to music at the same time, but you cannot acquire a music-playing app like Pandora and run that at the same time as another app. Worse, you cannot even suspend an app, and later return to its previous state.

The new iphone-4 promises some new features that allow apps to be written so that some limited set of functions can proceed in the background. This reminds me of DOS in the 1980s. Except of course that you could write any DOS apps you wanted, and you never had to get Microsoft's approval. The iphone only allows apps that Apple approves as being consistent with its business strategy. It has even rejected a political cartoonist on the grounds that a politician might be offended. Meanwhile, all the smart phones on the market allow true multitasking. You can have two or more user apps running at the same time, and the system automatically switches among them.

Parasites cause low IQ

A widely publicized study found a correlation between countries with low IQ and parasite infections. It actually found a greater correlation with skin color, but that analysis was suppressed because of the lack of a causal model. There are probably correlations with sunlight and tropical weather as well. I guess these researchers can put politically incorrect data in their papers as long as they explain it away somehow.

Wearing a bike helmet might not make you any safer

This article says that there is no proof that helmets make bicyclists any safer:

According to a 2003 article in the American Heritage Invention and Technology magazine, a surge in bicycle helmets from 1991 to 2001 -- to the extent that 69 per cent of child cyclists and 43 per cent of adult cyclists wore helmets by the end of the period -- was accompanied by a decline in ridership and an increase in cyclist accidents, resulting in 51 per cent more head injuries per cyclist. ...

One source cites statistics from Western Australia where head injuries fell by 11 to 21 per cent when helmet requirements were put in place, but cycle use fell by 30 per cent or more, meaning the risk of head injury increased for those who continued to cycle. ...

In the Netherlands, there is high a rate of cycling and a low rate of cycling injuries. Virtually no one wears a helmet.

The real purpose of the helmet laws may be just to discourage bicycling.

The empathy deficit

Pres. Barack Obama gave this 2006 speech to Northwestern Univ. grads:

There’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit — the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world through those who are different from us — the child who’s hungry, the laid-off steelworker, the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room.

As you go on in life, cultivating this quality of empathy will become harder, not easier. ... Not only that — we live in a culture that discourages empathy.

Now Obama is known for his skyrocketing federal budget deficit, and his own personal empathy deficit. I guess he was speaking from experience, as his advisors have been begging him to fake some empathy for the BP oil spill.

Meanwhile research is showing that college student empathy is dropping, but there is plenty of empathy in ravens (birds) and robots.

Reader thinks Freud invented zoning out

Here is a NY Times letter:

SIT, or “mind-wandering,” is a phenomenon generated during times of non-purposeful attention. This construct is virtually identical to the concept of free association, discovered by Freud, and most effective during psychoanalytic therapy. How far we have come since 1895, when Freud attempted to develop a comprehensive dynamic neurological theory of psychological functioning.

Leon Hoffman, M.D.

It is funny how these shrinks can pretend that Freud said something useful, when he only said some untestable trivialities.

Another article cites Freud for the idea that it is unhealthy to suppress anger and other emotions.

Deadbolt the doors

An Oakland newspaper reports:

In anticipation of the Mehserle verdict, the City of Oakland has suggested that city retailers take one of more of the following actions to avoid the kind of destruction witnessed after Oscar Grant’s death last year:

Remove or secure large trash cans;
Park cars in safe locations;
Provide employees with the option to close shop;
Stock up on plywood to board windows;
Make sure all spaces are well lit, closed circuit TVs are working and turned on, and all doors and windows have strong locks.

The city also recommends that all exterior doors be equipped with deadbolts, gaps in door jams be covered with a steel plates, and cash drawers be left empty and open after business hours.

Wow. Baghdad would be safer. If I still lived in Oakland, I would make sure that my gun is loaded and accessible. It is amazing that we have four US supreme court justices who deny that we have right to use a gun for self-defense, and Pres. Obama is appointing another one.

Paranormal belief is a feminine trait

So says this study:

Higher (feminised) 2D:4D correlated with stronger beliefs in men, even when controlled for age, education, adult height and weight, and birth length and weight. Shorter (feminised) finger length correlated with more superstition among women, but not when controlled for the same covariates.

The digit ratios are known to be innate, but there could be some other forces at work.

Hollywood cigarettes

I just watched the 1957 movie, Time Limit, directed by Karl Malden. In an argument between military officers, it casually mentioned that smoking causes lung cancer. I didn't think that the general public knew that until The 1964 Report on Smoking and Health from the USA Surgeon General. I also thought that Hollywood was an unrestrained promoter of tobacco use. Somebody in 1957 did not get the memo, I guess.

Uses of botox

PhysOrg reports:

Researchers studying the effects of Botox, a chemical used to smooth out facial wrinkles, have found the paralysis of facial muscles can reduce feedback to the brain and in turn reduce the intensity of emotional responses, especially to mildly positive stimuli.

Botox contains a protein (onabotulinumtoxinA) that temporarily paralyzes the facial muscles that create the creases we call wrinkles. This reduces wrinkles, but can also make the face lack expression and appear frozen. ...

The results, published in the journal Emotion indicated the Botox patients reported an “overall significant decrease in the strength of emotional experience” compared to the Restalyne group. The response to mildly positive clips was especially reduced after the injections. The group on Restylene did not experience the reduced emotional response, but did show an unexpected increase in response to negative clips.

The researchers said the results suggest feedback from facial expressions is not necessary for emotional experience, but may exert an influence in some circumstances. ...

Botox injections were the most common non-surgical cosmetic procedure used in the USA in 2009

Soon, shrinks will be prescribing botox for depression. The idea is if you are worried a lot, and you also look in the mirror a lot, and you don't look worried, then you will convince yourself that all is well. It makes as much sense as other psychiatric drugs.

Update: I had no idea that teenaged girls are getting botox:

“We do a lot of Botox, and there’s definitely a propensity for younger people doing it,” says Dr. Glenn Vallecillos, a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. “I’d say 30 percent of my clients are 20 to 25 years old and probably 5 to 8 percent are under age 20. The trend, at least at our offices, is younger people.”

Statistics also suggest Botox use is trickling down even younger.

In 2009, the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery reported 12,110 Botox or Dysport (another wrinkle-relaxing shot) procedures performed on patients 18 and under (in 2008, the number was 8,194) while the American Society of Plastic Surgeons found 11,889 cosmetic Botox/Dysport procedures were performed on patients age 13 to 19 (an increase of 2 percent from 2008).

Mindreading with fMRI

A statistician reports:

Brain scans may be able to predict what you will do better than you can yourself . . . They found a way to interpret "real time" brain images to show whether people who viewed messages about using sunscreen would actually use sunscreen during the following week.

The scans were more accurate than the volunteers were, Emily Falk and colleagues at the University of California Los Angeles reported in the Journal of Neuroscience. ...

But these results are not as impressive as they sound, as Gelman explains. If they ever figure out how to do fMRI mindreading, it will be a bigger story than this.

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.