Lesbians for birth defects

This LA Times story says that homosexual activists are offended by a drug therapy that reduces birth defects. When pregnant women take the drug, the baby girls are more like girls. I thought that would be a good thing.

"Most clinicians speak about this treatment as ambiguous-genitalia prevention," said Dreger, who co-wrote an editorial about the treatment in a July publication of the Hastings Center, a bioethics organization. "Others suggest that you should prevent homosexuality if you can. But being gay or lesbian is not a disease and should not be treated as such."

So the article says that some homosexual activists are offended at the use of this drug.

Their attitude is weird. Child malnutrition causes kids to be shorter than normal. Short people also complain about being discriminated against. But the short people do not complain about efforts to reduce malnutrition.

Explaining polls on Obama's religion

Political scientist Brendan Nyhan tries to explain why Americans increasingly say that Pres. Obama is a Moslem. His research paper says:

This study applies psychological research on the ineffectiveness of negations to the misperception that Barack Obama is a Muslim. We test two approaches to correcting the misperception -- a misperception negation ("I am not and never have been of the Muslim faith") and a corrective affirmation ("I am a Christian"). Our experiment has several innovative features, including a focus on the effectiveness of a candidateAs attempts to correct a misperception (rather than a neutral source) and the use of video-based corrections as experimental manipulations. ... Overall, the realistic nature of our experiment makes an important contribution to the study of misperceptions and attempts to correct them.

His basic premises are that people are stupid, Obama is a Christian, and that people should blindly accept statements from authority.

A flat denial by Obama has to combined with his numerous statements in support of Islam, and his support for building a mosque near the 9-11 WTC site.

Conspicuously absent from his research is the possibility of Obama affirming Christian beliefs. With Americans doubting his Christianity, it would be very easy for him to explain his Christian beliefs, if he has any.

There is no more reason to believe a bald self-serving denial from Obama as there is to accept one on Rod Blagojevich. If people find Obama's explanations confusing and insincere, then that is a sign of their intelligence, not their stupidity.

Update: There is also a poll showing that many people doubt Obama's birth:

The president celebrates his 49th birthday Wednesday. On the same day, a new national poll indicates some Americans continue to doubt the president was born in the United States. According to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey, more than a quarter of the public have doubts about Obama's citizenship, with 11 percent saying Obama was definitely not born in the United States and another 16 percent saying the president was probably not born in the country.

Forty-two percent of those questioned say they have absolutely no doubts that the president was born in the U.S., while 29-percent say he "probably" was.

Maybe some of the people are just expressing a belief that Obama does not share traditional American values.

Faiths likely to encourage violence

Law prof Volokh writes about a new Time mag poll:

So 46% of Americans believe Islam is more likely than other faiths to encourage violence against nonbelievers — which, as best I can tell, is an accurate belief. I don’t think most Muslims support violence against nonbelievers. But it seems to me that Islam as we see it in the world today is more likely than most other major faiths to encourage violence against nonbelievers, ...

A reader sarcastically adds:

Exhibit A: Christianity — Founded by a peaceful rabbi teacher who taught his followers to love your fellow man, even your enemy.

Exhibit B: Islam — Founded by a pedophile WARLORD sand murderer who PERSONALLY led his followers on campaigns around the desert where they robbed, killed, raped, and pillaged other villages and people. He taught his followers that anyone who denies him should be killed, and that their duty from now until the end of time is to take over the entire world until its all under their totalitarian religious pseudo-state control by either conversion, slavery, or death of all the peoples of the world.

Yeah, you guys are right...I see no difference there either. I can’t imagine why the followers of Islam are so different than the followers of every single other religion on the planet.

Of greater relevance is what those followers are taught today. I wonder why only 46% believe that about Islam. Perhaps they attribute some of the violence to Arabic culture and teachings of Mohammad that are not properly considered part of the Islamic faith.

In defense of Dr. Laura

Everyone is attacking the radio talk-show host and advice-giver Dr. Laura Schlessinger for using the N-word on the air. I wonder how many of them are even aware of the methodology that she has using for decades.

The typical pop psychologist operates by showing empathy. If a patient complains that her husband has acquired a drinking problem, the shrink will first try to say how he feels her pain, and then suggest that she join a support group. The idea is that she will feel better and learn to cope better if she connects with others who understand her.

Dr. Laura's approach is radically different. She is not really a psychologist at all, and does not do psychological therapy. She operates by abruptly confronting callers, and challenging them to take personal responsibility for their actions. So if a caller says that her husband has started drinking to much, Dr. Laura might ask, "Why did you marry an alcoholic?". The question is rude and offensive, as it is unlikely that the caller married an alcoholic or that she deserves blame for her husbands imperfections. But the question is designed to force the caller to express why she did marry the man, and what she can do about the problem. Dr. Laura has a very low tolerance for callers whining about their spouses.

All of this makes Dr. Laura's radio program infuriating. A lot of people hate it. Some people must like, as she is on a lot of radio stations. All of her regular listeners must surely know what they are getting.

A caller complained about relatives using the N-word. Dr. Laura said that black comics on HBO use the word all the time, and that:

If you're that hypersensitive about color and don't have a sense of humor, don't marry out of your race.

Yes, of course this is rude and offensive. Just like every other radio show where she uses her methodology of confronting people about their personal responsibility choices. This one just happened to push a racial hot button.

As Dr. Laura would say, if you don't want to have your beliefs challenged, then don't listen to an offensive radio program.

Orangutans are not remotely like humans

Helene Guldberg debunks ape mindreading:

Time and again, we are told that humans are not that special after all: abilities previously thought to be uniquely human are now purportedly evident amongst the great apes. ...

Take the example of vervet monkeys. Groundbreaking research by Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney in the 1980s on vervet monkeys in the wild showed a seemingly sophisticated method of communicating about the proximity of predators. Living on the edge of the savannah, vervet monkeys have many predators. Their chance of survival would therefore be greatly increased if they were able to respond appropriately to different vocal warnings. Indeed, it was found that the vervets have specific alarm calls for specific predators: the alarm call for an eagle is different from that for a leopard, which in turn is different from that for a python. ...

In fact, further research shows that the caller’s vocalisations are not ‘intended’ for other animals. ...

In The Language Instinct, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker persuasively takes apart many of the ‘preposterous’ claims made about apes’ and other animals’ language abilities. He stresses that we all have a tendency to anthropomorphise – thinking that animals are capable of a lot more than they are in reality. ‘People who spend a lot of time with animals are prone to developing indulgent attitudes about their powers of communication’, he writes, giving the example of his great-aunt Bella who ‘insisted in all sincerity that her Siamese cat Rusty understood English’.

It is funny how animal researchers are similar to that great-aunt Bella, and do not recognize their own mindreading limitations.

More people say that Obama is a Moslem

Half Sigma writes:

The Washington Post says, “The number of Americans who believe -- wrongly -- that President Obama is a Muslim has increased significantly since his inauguration and now account for nearly 20 percent of the nation's population.”

I still believe that Obama is an atheist, who is sympathetic to Islam because he was raised in an Islamic environment, who pretends to be Christian in order to get votes. There probably wasn’t a checkbox on the survey for that answer.

The figure is 24% according to a Time mag poll, with just as many being unsure. That means about half the population is unconvinced that he is a Christian.

People are called Jews if they grew up in a Jewish household and keep a Jewish name, even if they are really atheists. Obama's father and step-father were Moslems, and his mother was an atheist. He has a Moslem name and he has lived as a child in a Moslem country. He frequently supports Moslem causes, such as building a mosque in lower Manhattan.

I am sure that people would be happy to accept Obama as a Christian if he were to attend Christian church, say Christian prayers, and/or promote Christian ideals. The main reason for calling him a Christian is that he claimed to belong to a Christian church during his campaign. But then later he appeared to be unfamiliar with what goes on in that church every Sunday.

It is not just the right-wing Christians who doubt Obama's Christianity. Lots of leftist atheist sites do also. Eg, see Raban's article.

Update: Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne writes:

Many Americans are morons ... I still think he’s an atheist ...

We can write off the 18% as fools, since anybody who’s been alive for a year should know the incontrovertible evidence that Obama’s not a Muslim, but the 43% disturb me a bit, too. Who hasn’t heard of the Jeremiah Wright affair? And if you did, how could you not take in that Obama was attending a Christian church?

Simple. The Wright affair was about Obama denying that he heard the hateful and anti-American messages that Wright was regularly preaching in that Church, and Obama disassociating himself with the church.

Coyne says that he is disturbed that 43% don't know that Obama is a Christian, when Coyne himself does not believe that Obama is a Christian. Coyne offers this Christopher Hitchens video as proof that Obama is an atheist. Coyne is effectively classifying himself as a moron or a fool.

Half Sigma explains:

The attitude of the liberal MSM annoys me. The tone of articles will be, “Americans are stupid because 20% of them think that Obama is Muslim, even though we know he’s Christian because he says he is and we all know a politician would never lie about such a thing.”

Actually, what people consider someone else’s religion to be is more complicated than that. Obama was born a Muslim (as evidenced by his middle name, Hussein, after the grandson of Mohammed and an important early figure in the spread of Islam), his adopted father was a Muslim, and he was considered a Muslim in Indonesia.

As I stated above, what a person’s religion is considered to be is rather complicated, but generally people are ascribed to the religion of their birth and upbringing unless they make a convincing display of converting to another religion. ...

Also, people generally don’t default into atheism and agnosticism, so a person born to Methodist parents is still considered to be a Methodist even if he hasn’t been to church in the last five years.

Also, depending on the religion, merely attending church services doesn’t always count as a religious conversion. For example, Jews would consider a Methodist who attends Synagogue every week to be a Methodist who’s attending Synagogue every week; he doesn’t become a Jew until he undergoes a formal and rigorous conversion process.

Complicating the issue of Obama’s supposed conversion to Christianity is that Obama’s “church,” led by Jeremiah Alvesta Wright, is not unanimously considered to be a real Christian Church. Some may think of it as a political organization where God and Jesus are occasionally mentioned, kind of like a radical leftist version of the Republican National Convention. Furthemore, it’s not clear that Obama ever underwent any formal conversion process at this “church.”

So people who think that Obama is still a Muslim may have a legitimate basis for their belief. ... Certainly, many Christians legitimately believe that Obama does not share their values and therefore they don't consider him to be Christian.

He is right, and the morons and fools are the ones who do not understand this.

Update: Half Sigma now says:

How Obama describes his religious beliefs can best be classified as unitarian universalist. As I’ve written before, unitarian universalism is the religion of the elites. Unitarian universalists believe that the major religions of the world are inspired by God and therefore they are all good and one can get closer to God by following the beliefs of any religion.

Obama explains that (1) he doesn’t believe in a literal Heaven or Hell; (2) he doesn’t believe that belief in Jesus is a path to salvation; he only believes that Jesus was a teacher of moral values; (3) he admires Ghandi who is a famous univeralist;

This is all stuff that an atheist politician might say. I can understand someone not wanting to call him a Christian.

Blago verdict on one minor count

The trial of Rod Blagojevich just ended, and failed to convict on all the substantive charges. AP reports:

The count on which Blagojevich was convicted, one of the less serious counts against Blagojevich, included accusations that he lied to federal agents when he said he did not track campaign contributions and kept a "firewall" between political campaigns and government work.

This is another boondoggle from U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. He claimed to have wiretaps to prove that Blago tried to sell Barack Obama's US Senate seat. Nearly everyone (but me) was impressed by Fitzgerald's case, and Blago was impeached and removed from office.

The weakness in the case was that the feds never found any evidence that Blago every took a dime in a corrupt transaction.

Apparently Blago used the terms "track" and "firewall" loosely while he was defending himself. The statements were not even under oath. I don't like lying politicians any more than anyone else, but it seems to me that the conviction is on a rather trivial charge, compared to the media witchhunt that Fitzgerald orchestrated.

This is the same Fitzgerald who tried Scooter Libby on grand accusations of a White House conspiracy to punish political enemies who expose bad Iraq War policies. But Libby was also acquitted on all the substantive charges, and only convicted on making one minor misstatement of no consequence. Libby did not even have any obvious motive for the misstatement, and it appeared to be just a memory mistake.

The curious thing about Blago is how many people are persuaded of his corruption, without being able to say just what he did that was corrupt. I think that they are engaging in faulty mindreading.

Male and female ability differences

Here is yet another argument in the endless nature-nurture debate:

Men instinctively like the colour blue and are bad at coping with pain, we are told, while women cannot tell jokes but are innately superior at empathising with other people. Key evolutionary differences separate the intellects of men and women and it is all down to our ancient hunter-gatherer genes that program our brains.

The belief has become widespread, ... In fact, there are no major neurological differences between the sexes, says Cordelia Fine in her book Delusions of Gender, which will be published by Icon next month. There may be slight variations in the brains of women and men, added Fine, a researcher at Melbourne University, but the wiring is soft, not hard. "It is flexible, malleable and changeable," she said. ...

John Gray, author of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus: "A man's sense of self is defined through his ability to achieve results. A woman's sense of self is defined through her feelings and the quality of her relationships"

The author, Fine, has published research in Neurofeminism, whatever that is. An article on neurosexism complains about the ethics of books that say that women have superior mindreading skills, because such ideas might reinforce stereotypes. I doubt that she has much science to back up what she says.

Meanwhile, here is some plausible new research on sex differences. The article is complete with a picture of the attributes that make a hitchhiker likely to get picked up.

Fooled by monkeys

A big-shot psychology professor has been accused of mindreading monkeys:

Marc Hauser, a Harvard academic who gained prominence with the publication of a book on the origin of morality, has gone on leave after an investigation by the university into problems with his research. ...

The journal Cognition published an article by Dr. Hauser and others in 2002 saying that tamarin monkeys could learn certain rules much as human infants do. The journal is about to run a retraction ...

Dr. Hauser is a fluent and persuasive writer, and his undoing seems to have been his experiments, many of which depended on videotaping cotton-topped tamarin monkeys and noting their responses. It is easy for human observers to see the response they want and so to be fooled by the monkeys. ... cotton-topped tamarins were said to recognize themselves in a mirror. When he received the videotapes, Dr. Gallup could see no evidence that this was the case.

I don't want to accuse him of fraud, because his work is probably typical of bogus research in the field. I could say that he relied on instinctual monkey morals for his research practices, but that would be a cheap shot. I do think that it is a little odd that the NY Times refers to him as an "academic", "writer", and "researcher", but not a professor. His Harvard web page identifies him as a professor. The newspaper is usually conscientious about getting titles right. It does refer to one of his critics as a professor, and link to an article saying Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left.

Hauser is famous for arguing that morality is a hard-wired instinct that not ground in any religious teaching. He argues:

One problem is that we cannot, without lapsing into tautology, simultaneously say that God is good, and that he gave us our sense of good and bad. For then we are simply saying that God meets God’s standards. ...

These studies provide empirical support for the idea that, like other psychological faculties of the mind, including language and mathematics, we are endowed with a moral faculty that guides our intuitive judgments of right and wrong. These intuitions reflect the outcome of millions of years in which our ancestors have lived as social mammals, and are part of our common inheritance. These facts are incompatible with the story of divine creation.

I say that bogus mindreading is the hardwired instinct. He is naturally fooled by those monkeys.

Update: Harvard has reprimanded Hauser, after a three-year investigation.

Evolutionist reads the mind of God

I often criticize people for leaping to faulty conclusions from mindreading. They usually do not appear to even realize that they are engaging in mindreading.

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne writes about some students calling him an a**hole:

I asked for clarification, and the teacher sent me a short explanation, including a reconstructed dialogue with a female student who was apparently horrified by one statement in the book: “If a designer did have discernible motives when creating species, one of them must surely have been to fool biologists by making organisms look as though they evolved.” ...

There is of course a trace of satire in what I said, but what students really object to, I think, is the cognitive dissonance it creates in them. Indeed, why would God have done that? And what kind of God would have done that? A duplicitous one? And so they take their dissonance out on me.

He is mindreading God as well as the students. It is more likely that the students were offended by his mindreading.

Coyne's response is that he is the biology professor, so he has a right to insult religious students. His colleague's response was to give a lecture on misstatements that have been made by creationists. Neither of them address the students' point that it was unnecessary to make such an outlandish statement about God's motives. Coyne could have made all his points about the evidence for evolution without being an a**hole who makes gratuitous attacks on the motives of others. God, in this case, as well as the students.

A reader comments:

I have some very good friends who are staunch YECs. After various discussions I think I’m now pretty close to them agreeing to read a book about evolution, to be recommended by me.
I obviously want this book to be ONLY about the mechanics, so to say, of evolution, and NOT contain even the slightest hint of creationism-bashing (because, that’s where they would stop reading. Whether that’s dumb or not, I don’t want that to happen). My problem: I can’t find such a book! There’s ALWAYS, no matter how mild, a sneer in there towards creationism.

It is funny how these scientists cannot stick to the science.

Obesity is genetic

The San Francisco same-sex marriage case ruling is filled with fact-finding such as this:

Individuals do not generally choose their sexual orientation. No credible evidence supports a finding that an individual may, through conscious decision, therapeutic intervention or any other method, change his or her sexual orientation.

The supposed proof for this is statements like these:

Herek: “It is certainly the case that there have been many people who, most likely because of societal stigma, wanted very much to change their sexual orientation and were not able to do so.”

Kendall: “I knew I was gay just like I knew I’m short and I’m half Hispanic. And I just never thought that those facts would change.”

There is actually stronger scientific evidence that being fat is predetermined. There are millions of fat people who have wanted very much to lose weight, but have accepted themselves as fat. Furthermore, there is evidence that obesity is genetic:

According to Thomas Bouchard’s 1990 article in Science, the R correlation for weight between identical twins reared apart is 0.73. and for twins reared together, 0.83. So like IQ, weight is predominately genetically determined. A more recent scholarly article discovered, based on identical twin studies, that change in BMI as an adult is also strongly genetically influenced. (In other words, when one identical twin gained weight in his adult years, so did the other.)

Of course obesity is also completely determined by whether calories consumed exceeds calories expended.

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.