The autism quacks

Reported rates of autism have been skyrocketing. Textbooks in the 1980s said that it affected less than 5 out of 10,000 kids. Today, a new report says this:

CHICAGO/SEOUL (Reuters) – One out of every 38 children in South Korea may have autism, a surprisingly high number based on a new research approach that suggests autism is a global problem that is significantly underdiagnosed, researchers said on Monday.

The estimate, which translates into 2.64 percent of children, is far higher than the estimated 1 percent rate seen in studies in the United States and Europe. ...

"The high prevalence comes from this new population we included in our study -- the kids without any previous developmental delays or mental health issues," Kim said. ...

In Asia, parents are largely ignorant about the disorder, which has no cure, and are reluctant to face it. ...

"One problem that seems to pop up frequently is that parents do not want to acknowledge that their child/children may be autistic," said the woman, who asked not to be named.

If I were a Korean parent of a kid with no developmental delays or mental health issues, and some Chicago shrink told me that my kid was born with an incurable mental disease, then I would be skeptical also.

Why is it that the only one to admit this obvious fact is a woman who refuses to be identified? I smell a rat.

There is a movement today among psychologists and other quacks to stigmatize as many kids as possible as having autism, attention deficit disorder, or some other malady. There is no science to this, other than the fact that different people have different personality characteristics.

Stop writing about geology

The NY Times reports:

Black children are most acutely affected: The study found that 17 percent of black children - nearly 1 in 5 - received a diagnosis of asthma in 2009, up from 11.4 percent, or about 1 in 9, in 2001.

No, 17 percent is 1 in 6, not 1 in 5. I always worry about the reliability of an article like this, when it has such a glaring arithmetic mistake. Worse, I did a google search for "one in five (17 percent)" shows 100s of articles! Apparently it is a common mistake.

I guess I should be glad that they bother to report statistical evidence at all. A famous writer for the New Yorker magazine (John McPhee) says that he gets hate mail when he writes about science:

Some lawyer in Boston sent me a letter —- this man, this adult, had gone to the trouble to write in great big letters: stop writing about geology. And it’s on the letterhead of a law firm in Boston.

I thought that New Yorker readers just read for literary style, and do not care what the articles are about. The magazine did publish a physics article recently:

Deutsch believes that if a quantum computer were built it would constitute near-irrefutable evidence of what is known as the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. A number of respected thinkers in physics besides Deutsch support the Many Worlds Interpretation, though they are a minority, and primarily educated in England, where the intense interest in quantum computing has at times been termed the Oxford flu. But the infection of Deutsch’s thinking has mutated and gone pandemic. Other scientists, although generally indifferent to the truth or falsehood of Many Worlds as a description of the universe, are now working to build these dreamed-up quantum computing machines.

This should sound fishy, even if you don't know anything about the subject. Researchers are trying to do an experiment that will prove the existence of Many Worlds, and yet they are indifferent to its truth or falsehood.

How can that be? Simple. The experiments will fail, and Many Worlds is an unscientific fantasy.

Why California is broke

The Si Valley paper reports:

According to reporting by Bay Area News Group, the average salary of a 30-year state employee is actually $67,000, on top of Social Security benefits that bring the annual retirement income to nearly $90,000 for many.

What is wrong here is that present-day taxpayers are on the hook for crooked political deals that were made 10 or 20 years ago. Upholding these pension contracts is incompatible with republican government.

The bored wife in her 40s

Today's Dear Annie advice column has yet another self-pitying whining letter from an age 40s woman bored with married life and lacking sexual intimacy. The advice is to find a "more understanding counselor", and to refer to the advice given to the last such letter:

You need to ask yourself that Ann Landers question: “Are you better off with or without him?” And only you can supply the answer.

My point is not to agree or disagree with this advice. I am just remarking that this is the dominant secular advice in our society today. Get a therapist who will validate your dissatisfactions, ignore your marriage vows, prepare to dump your family, and do whatever is in your personal self-interest.

Not everyone agrees with this advice. An online comment today from a Lily O. says:

I'm sorry for what you are going through, and I hope you take my words with all the Christian love intended.

I suspect the reason no one is responding to your cry of "rape" is because you were not, in fact, raped. I do not accuse you of being dishonest, only of being confused. Society has taught you that the definition of rape is broad, when it is not.

By your own words, you married a decent man, so I doubt he used physical violence against you. In fact, he merely reminded you of your marital duties. I understand that you may feel violated, as the Lord's Word on marital relations and the dynamic between a husband and wife has been lost in recent generations, but I suspect the help you seek is not on a therapists couch, but in a pastor's office. A loving, spiritually sound pastor will help you see that you have violated God's instructions to wives in this matter. Again, I am not blaming you. This is a confusing time we live in, and men and women's marital and sexual roles have been greatly confused.

Forget about calling your husband a rapist, and instead, work on making him once again the spiritual head of your household, and you will find peace within your marriage again. I wish you both luck.

This drew some enraged comments from other women:

Your comment of ‘marital duty' makes my blood boil. ... And I would not blame her for leaving him.

Marriage is defined by the dominant cultural norms, not me. I am just reporting some sharply differing opinions.

Orthorexia, the SWPL eating disorder

A Natural News site complains that others think that the health food freaks have a mental disorder:

Do you avoid foods that contain artificial colors and sweeteners, and stick to whole, unprocessed foods instead? If so, you just might have orthorexia, an imaginary "disease" created in 1997 by Dr. Steven Bratman that appears to be gaining more attention in recent days. According to a recent report in Yahoo! News, restricting one's diet to healthy, pure foods is a compulsive disorder that requires cognitive behavior therapy in order to cure.

Written about in so-called respected health journals like the Journal of the American Medical Association and Psychology Today, "orthorexia nervosa," which means "nervous about correct eating" in Latin, allegedly causes malnourishment, anxiety, and social disorders. Its creators claim it stems from a type of obsessive compulsive disorder, and that it can lead to anorexia.

Obsession with so-called natural and heathly foods is a mental disorder as much as many others in the official DSM-IV-TR. The SWPL folks who shop at Whole Foods are not any healthier than anyone else. There is no research that shows such food to be any better.

The bad science behind popular diet and nutrition advice is explained by Gary Taubes in the current Bloggingheads science show. He is right that the whole field is filled with quacks, and physicians are leading with the misinformation.

The healthiest food ever invented is the grilled cheese sandwich. Today's WSJ reports:

Over the years, his appetite and admiration grew, eventually culminating in the annual Grilled Cheese Invitational, which attracts fans eager to display novel takes on the ultimate American comfort food.

The event is a testament to the nation's grilled-cheese renaissance. That the humble gooey sandwich has gone gourmet is evidenced by trendy grilled-cheese trucks that tweet their whereabouts, the advent of top chefs divining grilled-cheese creations and the appearance of cookbooks devoted entirely to grilled-cheese recipes. The L.A. invitational has spawned regional competitions across the country.

"It's the power of cheese," says Mr. Walker, 38, unquestionably the Head Cheese at the invitational. "Cheese moves people," he said, an orange fez on his head.

The nation's grilled-cheese renaissance is the best news since the death of bin Laden.

Update: One of Taubes's more striking claims was that the data from studies show that (sodium) salt does not cause hypertension, contrary to what all the supposed experts say. This is confirmed by a new study, as reported in today's NY Times:

A new study found that low-salt diets increase the risk of death from heart attacks and strokes and do not prevent high blood pressure, but the research’s limitations mean the debate over the effects of salt in the diet is far from over.

In fact, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention felt so strongly that the study was flawed that they criticized it in an interview, something they normally do not do.

Wow, I was skeptical about Taubes on this point. I have mentioned before in 2005 that advice about salt may be wrong, but this goes beyond that.

Why physicians lack empathy

SciAm magazine explains why physicians lack empathy, and why that is a good thing:

In one experiment, physicians who practice acupuncture (as well as matched non-physician controls) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while watching videos of needles being inserted into another person’s hands, feet and areas around their mouth as well as videos of the same areas being touched by a cotton bud. Compared to controls, the physicians showed significantly less response in brain regions involved in empathy for pain. In addition, the physicians showed significantly greater activation of areas involved in executive control, self-regulation and thinking about the mental states of others. The physicians appeared to show less empathy and more of a higher-level cognitive response. ...

Whether during a surgery, biopsy, physical exam, or even a simple blood draw, healthcare professionals routinely must inflict pain on others to make them better in the long run. Physicians also need to have daily communication with patients who are physically injured, bleeding or otherwise suffering. Being too focused on the patient’s pain can make the doctor less effective. Suppressing the response to others’ pain may in fact free up information processing resources to more effectively solve clinical problems. This argument explains the finding that physicians get less empathic as they see more patients and progress through their training. ...

The key is knowing when empathy is called for and when it is detrimental. It should not be the goal of physicians, then, to be more empathetic.

Most people automatically assume that more empathy is a good thing. Sometimes it is, and often it is not.

Racist pro-Obama propaganda

Yahoo News reports:

So what's fueling the dogged questioning of Obama's origins? Many critics of the birther movement say its core tenets--and its stubborn resistance to evidence disproving those beliefs--can be traced to racial hostilities. The fundamental birtherist conviction, these critics say, is that an African-American can't have legitimately won the presidency -- and that his elevation to power therefore has to be the result of an elaborate subterfuge.

"There is a real deep-seated and vicious racism at work here in terms of trying to de-legitimate the president," Peniel Joseph, a professor of history at Tufts University, told The Ticket.

"This is more than just a conspiracy," Peniel added. "I think this is fundamentally connected to white supremacism in this country."

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. in early April called for the connection to be publicly drawn between birthers and racism: "So it is time to call this birther nonsense what it is--not just claptrap, but profoundly racist claptrap."

Nonsense. These folks have very short memories. I heard far more people say that G.W. Bush did not legitimately win the presidency.

USA Today reports:

What's behind the questions about Obama's bithplace? Racial prejudice plays a role, suggests a study led by Eric Hehman of the University of Delaware in the March Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, which contrasted voter's perceptions of vice president Joe Biden, "the most comparable target" with Obama.

"Overall, as expected, White participants tended to view Obama as less American," says the study, as well as worse-performing. "Moreover, Whites higher in prejudice rated Obama as less
American, and as performing more poorly as president."

This is bogus. There are reasons for saying that Pres. Obama is less American that have nothing to do with race.

Obama was born in Hawaii. His father and step-father were not Americans. He grew up in Indonesia. He was surrounded by people with anti-American views. There are many unanswered questions about his past.

The more current reasons for regarding Obama as less American are in his speeches and policies. He denies American exceptionalism, and he spent a month trying to get Arab League approval for bombing Libya, without bothering to consult the US Congress. Biden, Bush, McCain, Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Dole, etc. are all more American in their political philosophy than Obama, and it has nothing to do with race. The racists are the only trying to make a racial issue out of this.

Muslim had to retract evolution

From a NewScientist magazine interview:

We need devout Muslim scientists to speak out, says Usama Hasan, who has had death threats for saying evolution is compatible with the Koran ...

How common is the creationist position among Muslims?

It is the default position. Most of us are taught that evolution is wrong, unproven and a blasphemy. A lot of people enjoy science programmes on TV such as those by David Attenborough, but they tend to say he's an unbeliever so we can't trust him.

Recently you retracted your views because of the outrage they caused. Could you explain?

My retraction was saying that I misjudged how to go about explaining these things. Sooner or later someone will have to address the issue of evolution - it's a no-go area, especially with the clerics - but I'm abandoning my attempt to reconcile it with the Koran until things settle down. I am not willing to risk my life over this issue.

Why are Muslim scientists going to speak out, when he himself had to retract his pro-evolution views? And when are things going to settle down -- in another 500 years? The Mohammedans may never trust the unbelievers.

Nothing scientific about Freud

From a NewScientist magazine interview:

IN HIS new book Dream Life: An experimental memoir, psychiatrist and dream researcher J. Allan Hobson looks back on his life and puts forward his dream theory of protoconsciousness. ...

Psychoanalytic theory is popular because it's easy to understand, but I think it's wrong. I don't think dreams are caused by the release of repressed infantile wishes. There's nothing scientific about psychoanalysis, there's nothing scientific about Sigmund Freud. He didn't do a single experiment, he didn't do any direct observation, he used no controls. The guy was out to lunch.

Yes, Freud is popular even tho there is nothing scientific about his theories, and they are wrong. (But I am not sure this guy's theory is any better.)

More medical papers get retracted

I had no idea that so many medical papers get retracted:

The study examined the PubMed database for biomedical research papers retracted from 2000-2010. Almost 5 million publications resulted in 788 retractions over that decade. [Including 88 review articles - how does a review get retracted?]

Actually, I think that it is a good thing that more medical papers are being retracted. Studies indicate that most of them are dubious and cannot be replicated. There are probably millions of papers that ought to be amended, at the least.

Better gift than chocolates

I missed this story last week:

We have a bizarre tale to relate involving the journal Surgery News, which recently lost its editor-in-chief over a rather strange editorial he wrote in the February issue of the magazine.

The editorial is about Valentine's Day, and the one substance that has been shown to make women happier than chocolate.

Lazar Greenfield's resignation was also reported in the NY Times.

Apparently this research is politically incorrect. No one says that it is scientifically incorrect. Just impolite to say it, I guess.

Update: Dilbert says that it took him 15 minutes to figure out why some women might take offense, and theorizes that many women have a lot of difficulty compartmentilizing information. He finds that people are often offended by his jokes and comments, and it is usually because people confuse what he says. They smoosh together facts and opinions, and blame him for things he never said. The fault is with the smooshers.

Lean explanations

Andrew Gelman reports on psychology research:

How do we think about the intentional nature of actions? And how do people with an impaired mindreading capacity think about it? ...

Machery argues that (most) people see intentionality in settings with a "trade-off between a cost and a benefit." ...

Knobe seems to think that the crucial factor at play is something to do with morality

The experiments show that people give sharply different opinions about the intents of others in hypothetical scenarios. Some unconvincing explanations are given by psychologists.

I believe that there are two kinds of people on the world -- those who look for rich explanations of the behavior of others, and those who look for lean explanations. These differences become apparent whenever you talk about intentions or motivations of others. This terminology comes from Baron-Cohen here.

The above link has a simple scenario about a man buying a smoothie, and asks subjects about his intent. People give sharply differing answers. Some leap to a complex analysis of what the man was thinking, and others stick to simple facts. Neither is necessarily correct.

The rich explainers will argue that they are more perceptive, and responding to subtleties that the lean explainers are overlooking. The lean explainers argue that they are following the objective facts, and that the rich explainers have made some dubious inferences.

These two modes of thinking appear to be deeply ingrained, and most people seem to reject the validity of the other mode. Often someone finds a rich explanation, and denies that any other explanation is possible. Even when confronted with another explanation, he will assert some intuitive feeling that his explanation is correct, without being able to say why.

Boy scouts are emasculated

Laura Wood writes:

IN 2007, all Boy Scout groups in Britain were ordered to accept girls. The result? The boy scouts are now becoming the girl scouts. A majority of new recruits are girls.

When a traditionally male activity is opened to girls, it instantly becomes less appealing to boys, no matter how much pretense there is of preserving its masculine nature. That is a law of life. That law will never change unless science turns us into androgynous robots.

In order for masculinity to survive in any meaningful cultural sense, there must be groups that are strictly all-male.

More evidence that Britain is in decline.

No perjury conviction for Bonds

I have defended Barry Bonds, and now he has been convicted:

Home-run king Barry Bonds was convicted of obstruction of justice for impeding a grand jury investigation into illegal steroid distribution, closing a sordid chapter in a scandal that ensnared some of baseball's greatest players.

The verdict Wednesday against the former San Francisco Giants star capped a nearly seven-year probe that focused on Bonds' denials under oath about knowingly using performance enhancing drugs. ...

The jury of eight women and four men, which began deliberating Friday morning, also deadlocked on three counts of perjury. ...

Jurors said they concluded that Bonds had been evasive before the grand jury, but they disagreed on whether he had lied to the panel about knowingly using steroids or human growth hormones.

So assuming we respect the jury verdict, we do not know that Bonds ever took steroids, or that he ever lied about it. All we know is that he was evasive, whatever that means, and that a 7-year multi-million prosecution failed to prove that he lied about anything.

Another report said:

The essence of the case against Bonds, the record-holder for home runs in a career (762) and in a season (73), is that he lied to a grand jury in 2003 regarding the use of anabolic steroids and the fact that he’d gotten injections from someone other than his doctors. ...

“I think it will be seen by most people as affirming that Bonds was cheating and using steroids,” former Major League Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent told Bloomberg News.

These comments are irresponsible. Some of us believe in innocence until proven guilty. A failed prosecution should be seen as innocence, not guilt. And the more time and money spent by the feds, the more Bonds should be seen as the victim of a faulty witchhunt.

I don't even see how the obstruction conviction should stand. If Bonds did not lie, and he did not interfere with the prosecution of BALCO and others, then where is the obstruction? It makes no sense to me. The feds could retry him on the perjury charges, but I think that they ought to cut their losses. They have no legitimate interest in keeping him out of the baseball hall of fame.

Update: Apparently this is the actual transcript of the testimony used to convict Bonds of obstruction:

Q: Did Greg ever give you anything that required a syringe to inject yourself with?

Bonds: I've only had one doctor touch me. And that's my only personal doctor. Greg, like I said, we don't get into each others' personal lives. We're friends, but I don't - we don't sit around and talk baseball, because he knows I don't want - don't come to my house talking baseball. If you want to come to my house and talk about fishing, some other stuff, we'll be good friends, you come around talking about baseball, you go on. I don't talk about his business. You know what I mean? ...

Q: Right.

A: That's what keeps our friendship. You know, I am sorry, but that - you know, that - I was a celebrity child, not just in baseball by my own instincts. I became a celebrity child with a famous father. I just don't get into other people's business because of my father's situation, you see ...

The jury foreman said that this was a BS answer, and I guess it was, but I fail to see how it obstructed any justice. Bonds was explaining his relationship with Greg Anderson, and that seemed to be of interest to the district attorney. If the attorney needed additional info, then he should have specifically asked for it. Bonds has no way of knowing what the attorney needs. Anderson and the BALCO officials were convicted, and I really don't see how this answer could have hindered that prosecution.

I have been a witness when the attorney was dissatisfied with my answer for some reason. When that happens, he repeats or rephrases the question. Always. Sometimes I have missed the point of the questions. Most witnesses do. It appears to me that the attorney did a sloppy job, and Bonds is being blamed for it.

Women earn more, work less

Carrie Lukas writes in the WSJ:

Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women's earnings are going up compared to men's.

Meanwhile, NY Times letters from physicians admit that women work less:

My husband and I are physicians of both persuasions. He works more than 60 hours each week and takes calls and pages 24/7, 365 days a year, including while on family vacations. His compromise so I can sleep is that the pager clipped to his pajamas buzzes almost silently.

When I was pregnant with my third child, I switched to part time, and am currently working 27 hours a week with no night call.

Dubious anthropology

Today's alarming science news is that the first homosexual caveman was found, and women's heads been getting bigger over the last 300 years. Weird.

Fighting for Mohammedans

The USA has now gone to war 6 times in the last 20 years to save Mohammedans.
Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.


Meanwhile, today's controversy is
Koran_burning and the ensuing rioting on the other side of the world:

US President Barack Obama denounced the act of burning a Koran but did not mention Jones by name.

"The desecration of any holy text, including the Koran, is an act of extreme intolerance and bigotry," Mr Obama said in a statement released by the White House.

"However, to attack and kill innocent people in response is outrageous, and an affront to human decency and dignity."

Most Christians would not call the Koran a "holy text".

The mock trial and execution was not an act of intolerance and bigotry either. It is completely reasonable for a religious preacher to explain why his religion is better than the alternatives. Terry Jones was apparently trying to make the point that Islam is not a religion of peace, and the response to Jones would seem to prove it.

Book has Gandhi's many faults

A WSJ review says:

Joseph Lelyveld has written a generally admiring book about Mohandas Gandhi, the man credited with leading India to independence from Britain in 1947. Yet "Great Soul" also obligingly gives readers more than enough information to discern that he was a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist -— one who was often downright cruel to those around him. Gandhi was therefore the archetypal 20th-century progressive intellectual, professing his love for mankind as a concept while actually despising people as individuals.

Google book deal killed

The NY Times reports:

Google’s ambition to create the world’s largest digital library and bookstore has run into the reality of a 300-year-old legal concept: copyright.

The company’s plan to digitize every book ever published and make them widely available was derailed on Tuesday when a federal judge in New York rejected a sweeping $125 million legal settlement the company had worked out with groups representing authors and publishers.

Judge Denny Chin said the legal settlement with publishers and authors would have granted Google a “de facto monopoly.”

It was always clear that an opt-in settlement would be legal. The class action lawsuit against Google was based on the premise of protecting the interests of those who do not want to opt-in. The phony settlement was an opt-out deal. Such a settlement cannot possibly be in the interests of the class. The judge was right to kill this deal.

Google is right that copyright is broken in that orphan works get effectively buried for a century. But Congress needs to fix it, and not some sleazy Google deal with some crooked lawyers.

Slide blocks road

Here is a video of a rock slide, about a mile from me. More news here and here.

Environmentalists in nuclear panic

The Santa Cruz newspaper published this letter:

No environmentalists support nuclear power

Reading the article "U.S. rethinks nuclear energy policy in wake of disaster" was a small relief. I was at first heartened to read that with the terrible events unfolding in Japan, at least the U.S., and hopefully other nations, will see that building more nuclear power plants is a horrible plan. No power source that generates toxic waste could be a good long-term solution to our need for energy anywhere, let alone in a seismically active region like California. But I was surprised with Broder's reporting that until recently several mainstream environmental groups agreed nuclear power is a viable option for solving the climate change crisis. I couldn't believe this to be true. After trolling the web, I found, indeed, no mainstream environmental groups are condoning nuclear power as a method for combating climate change, never have, and probably never will. The real supporters of these plants are the companies who want taxpayers' money to build them.

Landa Rosebraugh, Watsonville

Let's get this in perspective. In Japan, 20,000 people are dead or missing from the earthquake. So far, the nuclear power disaster is not known to have killed anyone. The power plants were based on a 50-year-old design. If a reactor melts down and kills a dozen people, it will still be a minor footnote in this story. A new reactor can be designed to avoid this sort of problem.

If environmentalists oppose nuclear power, then they obviously are not serious about global warming. There is no other feasible alternative for large-scale power production without greenhouse gases. That is why global warming alarmists like James Hansen favor nuclear power.

Update: Here is one environmentalist view:

You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

Perhaps Japan can now use Fukushima to dump their nuclear waste, since it is contaminated anyway.

Infinity is not a cheat

I was watching What Happened Before the Big Bang? on the Science Channel. There are some clips on YouTube from last year's BBC Horizon version, such as here. At about a third of the way, and at the end of the YouTube clip, it says:

Eventually that space will become infinitely small, and in mathematics, invoking infinity is the same as giving up, or cheating.

I don't know how anyone could say anything so silly. Studying infinities has been a central object of mathematics for centuries.

The Brooks social animal

Thomas Nagel reviews The Social Animal, by David Brooks:

The main idea is that there are two levels of the mind, one unconscious and the other conscious, and that the first is much more important than the second in determining what we do. ... The main problem that Brooks addresses in this book is how to understand the relation between these two mental domains. His aim is to “counteract a bias in our culture. ...”

We may think that what we believe and do is largely under our conscious control, and we may believe that we should try to increase this control by the conscious exercise of reasoning and will power, but Brooks says that this is all wrong.

The book is currently no. 6 on the Amazon bestseller list. His view seems to be a mixture of Freud and the nurture side of the nature v nurture debate. In case you think that has side on his side, the Wikipedia article Sigmund Freud says:

Freud has been described by David Stafford-Clark as "a man whose name will always rank with those of Darwin, Copernicus, Newton, Marx and Einstein; someone who really made a difference to the way the rest of us can begin to think about the meaning of human life and society." In contrast, Hans Eysenck claims that Freud "set psychiatry back one hundred years". Psychology departments in American universities today are scientifically oriented, and Freudian theory has been marginalized, being regarded instead as a "desiccated and dead" historical artifact, according to a recent APA study.

Philosophers have debated the scientific status of psychoanalysis. Karl Popper, who argued that all proper scientific theories must be potentially falsifiable, claimed that Freud's psychoanalytic theories were presented in unfalsifiable form, meaning that no experiment or observation could ever prove them wrong. ...

Peter Medawar, a Nobel Prize winning immunologist, made the oft-quoted remark that psychoanalysis is the "most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century". Freud critic Richard Webster calls psychoanalysis "perhaps the most complex and successful" pseudoscience in history. Ethan Watters and Richard Ofshe wrote that, "Freud created one of the twentieth century's most significant myths but presented it as a scientific theory, supposedly based on rationalism and empirical observation. He claimed to be opening up the complexity of the mind to the world, but in fact he created a convoluted and speculative system of assumptions that has misled thousands upon thousands of well-intentioned therapists and vulnerable patients over the last hundred years".

That is correct. Except that the comparison to the other famous intellectuals makes me wonder what the guy thinks that they accomplished. Brooks claims to have newer research, but nearly all of it is dubious. For example, he tells the story of dentists named Dennis, but that appears to be debunked here.

What makes us human

Anthropologists are always trying to find why humans are different from animals. The usual story is big brains, upright walking, and language. The latest research is non-kin social groups and soft foreskins.

A NY Times update says that it is also the large whites of our eyes.

Psychiatrists now just do pills

NY Times reports:

Like many of the nation’s 48,000 psychiatrists, Dr. Levin, in large part because of changes in how much insurance will pay, no longer provides talk therapy, the form of psychiatry popularized by Sigmund Freud that dominated the profession for decades. Instead, he prescribes medication, usually after a brief consultation with each patient. So Dr. Levin sent the man away with a referral to a less costly therapist and a personal crisis unexplored and unresolved.

Medicine is rapidly changing in the United States from a cottage industry to one dominated by large hospital groups and corporations, but the new efficiencies can be accompanied by a telling loss of intimacy between doctors and patients. And no specialty has suffered this loss more profoundly than psychiatry. ...

Of course, there are thousands of psychiatrists who still offer talk therapy to all their patients, but they care mostly for the worried wealthy who pay in cash. In New York City, for instance, a select group of psychiatrists charge $600 or more per hour to treat investment bankers, and top child psychiatrists charge $2,000 and more for initial evaluations.

The next step is to figure out how little training is needed to hand out happy pills. Perhaps nurses should be allowed to do it, if they take a class on the subject.

Lunch-bucket workers with Ph.D.s

A WSJ article tells about companies like Intel moving jobs to Vietnam:

All is not lost, America. The techs in Intel's Saigon plant mostly have masters or vo-tech degrees. For its new factories in Oregon (wafer fabrication) and Arizona (making beyond-small 14-nanometer microchips), Intel needs loads of lunch-bucket workers with Ph.D.s -— if they can find them in the U.S.

Vietnam's millions, rolling endlessly forward on their agile motorbikes, seem to know where they want to go. Next question: Do we?

I hope so. Hiring loads of lunch-bucket workers with Ph.D.s in Vietnam is not it.

Detecting overpaid workers

Economist Steve Landsburg explains why you should ignore the complaints of those getting pay cuts:

If you cut the pay of an overpaid worker, he’ll generally scream bloody murder. After all, overpaid workers like to stay overpaid. But if you cut the pay of a non-overpaid worker, you haven’t really damaged him. He just quietly leaves and gets a job elsewhere. After all, the ability to find a comparable job elsewhere is pretty much the definition of not being overpaid.

The more they scream bloody murder, the more likely that they are grossly overpaid.

There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes people cannot easily change jobs for other reasons. Maybe Charlie Sheen really is underpaid, at $2M an episode. And maybe the Wisconsin teachers are underpaid. But it is unlikely.

Compared to a pig

Here is a letter to today's advice column:

Dear Annie: You have printed a few letters about teaching children manners, and one writer suggested a game called "Pass the Piggy."

When I was 4 years old and first learning to use utensils, I dropped something off my fork. My father leaned over and said, "Am I going to have to get you a pig trough?"

The next night he watched me intently, and when something fell from my trembling hand, he exclaimed, "That's it!" He had nailed together a wooden pig trough, which he dropped in front of me and then laughed like it was the most hilarious joke in the world.

Since then, I have felt shamed and unlovable. When I started school, I was terrified that somehow the other children would find out about it. I have had two bad marriages and don't date. I'm now 59 and was only recently able to talk about this incident in a support group, and only after both of my parents died.

When your psyche is damaged in childhood, it is irreparable. Don't ever compare your children to pigs. — Texas Single Woman

This letter is a prank. 4-year-old kids like pigs. There is no record of anyone being damaged by such a childhood remark.

Argument to defend marriage law

The Obama administration says that it will no longer defend the constitutionality of federal marriage law. If the matter were really being settled by the soundness of the legal arguments, then no additional briefs should be necessary anyway. The Obama DoJ has already written its brief on the subject, and you can find it here and here. Any judge just could just read this brief, regard of how Obama is shifting his political stances. That will not happen, because the dispute is political and the court action is a smokescreen.

Monopoly business tactics

This confirms monopolistic behavior by Apple:

Apple also allegedly told Sony that the app couldn’t access content purchased on other Sony Reader devices, which is where most of the outrage was focused. Amazon’s Kindle app and Barnes & Noble’s Nook app are both popular mechanisms for users to download and read books that they have purchased from the respective stores. Many feared that this supposed change in Apple policy would take their e-books away from their iPads, iPhones and iPod touches. Apple’s second statement indicates that this is indeed the case ...

and by Google:

Google has punished e-commerce sites, including J. C. Penney, for inflating its rankings by paying for links from unrelated sites.

In both cases, the company is trying to extend its monopoly in one market to another.

If I buy my own Apple iphone/ipod/ipad, and I buy my own ebooks and ebook reader, then I should be able to read my ebooks as I please without a veto from Steve Jobs. But he is saying that he will forbid it, because he did not get his 30% cut of the ebook sale.

Likewise, if I am doing a Google search, I should not be blocked from finding JC Penney just because PC Penney bought ads from a rival.

Apple and Google admit to these monopolistic practices. I recommend using alternative products.

Jury Nullification Advocate Is Indicted

Law prof Volokh writes:

The New York Times reports:

Since 2009, Mr. Heicklen has stood ... at courthouse entrances ... and handed out pamphlets encouraging jurors to ignore the law if they disagree with it, and to render verdicts based on conscience.

That concept, called jury nullification, is highly controversial, and courts are hostile to it. But federal prosecutors have now taken the unusual step of having Mr. Heicklen indicted on a charge that his distributing of such pamphlets at the courthouse entrance violates the law against jury tampering.

It seems to me that such speech is constitutionally protected, and that the indictment therefore violates the First Amendment. One can debate whether jury nullification is good or bad for the legal system, but it’s clear that it’s not a crime for jurors to refuse to convict even when the jury instructions seem to call for a guilty verdict. So Heicklen is encouraging a jury to engage in legal — even if, in the view of some, harmful — conduct.

So a retired chemistry professor has been indicted for advocating what has been considered a legal and essential liberty for 300 years. He has already been denied a jury trial. His own notes are here, where he describe distributing this pamphlet. For those who think that jury nullification is somehow illegal for reasons of perjury or some other reason, please read the pamphlet. This retired professor was performing a public service.

Update: There are persistent comments on Volokh's blog from people who argue that jury nullification violates a juror's oath to uphold the law. These comments show a fundamental logical error. The jury system is in our constitution. The law says that juries are supposed to return verdicts, not factual determinations. No oath could be contrary to that.

Small Nuclear War Could Reverse Global Warming

Nat. Geo. reports:

Even a regional nuclear war could spark "unprecedented" global cooling and reduce rainfall for years, according to U.S. government computer models. ...

Earth is currently in a long-term warming trend. After a regional nuclear war, though, average global temperatures would drop by 2.25 degrees F (1.25 degrees C) for two to three years afterward, the models suggest. ...

After ten years, average global temperatures would still be 0.9 degree F (0.5 degree C) lower than before the nuclear war, the models predict.

That cheers me up. I am always reading scare stories about all the bad things that are going to happen in the world, but it is nice to hear some of those bad effects may cancel out.

Whooping vaccine hysteria

A WSJ op-ed by Paul Howard and James R. Copland says:

Vaccines, which save millions of lives every year, are one of the most successful public-health interventions in the history of modern medicine. Among the diseases that they prevent is the whooping cough. Why, then, is that sickness making a scary comeback in California, which is currently weathering its largest whooping-cough epidemic since 1947, with over 7,800 cases and 10 deaths in 2010? Mainly because more and more parents, worried about the vaccine's supposed side effects, are choosing to delay vaccinating their children -— or not to do it at all.

No that is not why California has a pertussis (whooping cough) outbreak. Pertussis is primarily spread by teenagers who were vaccinated as infants, but had the vaccination wear off. Even the NY Times reported:

The rise in pertussis doesn’t seem to be related to parents’ refusing to have their children vaccinated for fear of potential side effects. In California, pertussis rates are about the same in counties with high childhood vaccination rates and low ones. And the C.D.C. reports that pertussis immunization rates have been stable or increasing since 1992.

Five babies have died, but they were too young to be vaccinated, and would not have been saved by stricter vaccine requirements. California's reaction, appropriately, has been to target older kids and adults. See Calif. urgers pertussis vaccination for pregnant women and New Calif. law requires vaccine for grades 7-12.

The op-ed continues:

Today's anti-vaccine hysteria can be traced in part to a 1974 British study that appeared to link the whooping-cough vaccine to rare brain injuries. The study was later debunked, but vaccination rates plummeted for a time in the United Kingdom, Japan, and Sweden.

No, that is not true. As you can read here, The DTP vaccine rate dropped in Sweden because a defective vaccine was ineffective, and in Japan because of adverse reactions. That's right, the parents who had a choice about the vaccines seemed to have a better understanding of the situation than the public health authorities. The rates went back up in Sweden when they got a more effective vaccine, and in Japan when they got the safer DTaP vaccine.

Because of greater medical freedoms, Japan and other countries got the safer DTaP (acellular pertussis) vaccine 20 years before the USA. The US CDC did not want to introduce the DTaP in the USA because the mandatory DTP vaccine had been accepted with about 98% compliance, and the feds did not want to admit that we were using an inferior vaccine.

In October, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, a case involving the seizures and mental retardation suffered by an infant vaccinated for whooping cough in 1992. The plaintiffs' lawyers in Bruesewitz argue that cases involving defects in drug design shouldn't be decided by the VICP -— and that Wyeth is at fault because it didn't use a supposedly safer vaccine design developed by Eli Lilly in the 1960s. (The Lilly design, by the way, was never certified by the FDA as safer.)

I am not sure about VICP jurisdiction, but there is no question about DTaP being safer than DTP. That is what Japan and Europe decided in the 1980s, and what the CDC decided in about 2000. The DTP is off the market.

The op-ed authors work for the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a "conservative, market-oriented think tank". What they are really saying here is that drug companies should not be liable for what they lobby to become a govt mandate, and they pretend that a California pertussis outbreak proves that the mandates are necessary. The pertussis scare story is just a big smokescreen to cover up some flawed govt mandates. A truly conservative market-oriented solution would be to drop the mandates, let people use the safer vaccines, and encourage vaccine usage among those who are actually spreading the disease.

Update: The US Supreme Court just ruled 6-2 in favor of the vaccine manufacturers.

In a final footnote, Justice Sotomayor wrote that a concern about an asserted link “between certain vaccines and autism spectrum disorders” appeared to “underlie the majority and concurring opinions in this case.”

That is weird. All of the experts say that the alleged link has been disproved.

Much of the oral argument was concern with the policy question of who should be determining which vaccines are safe and effective. Some of the justices did not want state juries second-guessing CDC determinations. But nobody was able to say just what the CDC determines when it makes a recommendation.

Manning up

Kay Hymowitz has a new book on Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys. It has Amazon reviews even before its release.

You can just read her 2008 article:

Not so long ago, the average mid-twentysomething had achieved most of adulthood’s milestones—high school degree, financial independence, marriage, and children. These days, he lingers—happily—in a new hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. Decades in unfolding, this limbo may not seem like news to many, but in fact it is to the early twenty-first century what adolescence was to the early twentieth: a momentous sociological development of profound economic and cultural import. Some call this new period “emerging adulthood,” others “extended adolescence”; David Brooks recently took a stab with the “Odyssey Years,” a “decade of wandering.”

But while we grapple with the name, it’s time to state what is now obvious to legions of frustrated young women: the limbo doesn’t bring out the best in young men. ...

That adds up to tens of millions more young men blissfully free of mortgages, wives, and child-care bills. ...

That sound you hear is women not laughing.

The article has the sound of women whining. What she describes is the inevitable consequence of feminism, and she never addresses the root causes of why marriage has become less attractive to men.

Covered with snow and ice

A London newspaper admits:

Climate contrarians have been making much of an article published on 20 March 2000 – the last day of winter – with the headline: "Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past."

Self evidently, snow has not become a thing of the past, judging from the amount that fell in Britain in December.

It is also evident from the spectular satellite picture here:

But this astonishing picture shows the world as it is today - with half the Northern Hemisphere covered with snow and ice.

The Obama misconception

The Wikipedia List of common misconceptions says:

According to various polls, between 20 to 24% of Americans incorrectly believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim.[33] The White House describes Obama as a "devout Christian" who prays every day.[34]

But Jerry Coyne and Bill Maher argue that Obama is an atheist.

As mentioned before, there are reasons for saying that Obama is a Moslem. It is customary to call someone a Moslem if he was born a Moslem and does not overtly repudiate the faith. Yes, Obama says he joined Rev. Wright's church and wrote about it in his autobiography, but he also quit the church when he found out what was going on there from public press reports. Apparently he never attended enough to find out for himself.

So I do not think that it is a misconception just because people tell a pollster something different from what the White House spokesman says.

Illegal sex selection

The UK Daily Mail reports:

Sex selection was made illegal in Britain by the Human Fertilisation And Embryology Act 2008 except on very narrow medical grounds. However, the UK Cypriot Fertility Association (UKCFA), in which Mr Kingsland is a shareholder, is offering it to women who want to choose the gender of their child for purely social reasons.

On its website, the company advertises that the ‘family balancing’ treatment will be carried out at its affiliated clinic, the Cyprus IVF Centre in Famagusta, in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The state – which is not recognised diplomatically by any nation other than Turkey – is the only place in Europe where sex selection is legal.

This law is very strange. You can have an abortion or test-tube baby for any reasons you want, but it you want a boy or a girl, the law prohibits the choice.

How Google punishes

A NY Times podcast (Weekend Business, February 11, 2011, at 11:00 to 18:40) has reported that Google demoted a JC Penney search rank from 1 to 76 after discovering that JC Penney was benefiting from ads in a non-Google ad network. The podcast went on to say that Google likes to use its monopoly power to enforce its own unwritten rules about business should advertise on the web. "It is extraordinary to see what happens when Google decides that they want to sink you." (at 15:57)

The podcast also told about how Google has used its power to punish businesses who offer advertising services that compete with Google's business model. Google has even taken a company off of its search engine, just because it advertised for employees to work in search engine optimization.

The article credits Google with "trying to not seem despotic". Google seems despotic to me. I suggest using Yahoo search.

Update: The NY Times article is now online as The Dirty Little Secrets of Search. There are also some comments on Google Buzz suggesting that Google's view may be found on the Matt Cutts blog. The article quotes Cutts, speaking for Google:

“I can confirm that this violates our guidelines,” said Mr. Cutts during an hourlong interview on Wednesday, after looking at a list of paid links to JCPenney.com. ...

Mr. Cutts avoids the word “punished” ...

“Am I happy this happened?” he later asked. “Absolutely not. Is Google going to take strong corrective action? We absolutely will.”

And the company did. On Wednesday evening, Google began what it calls a “manual action” against Penney, essentially demotions specifically aimed at the company.

You get the sense that Mr. Cutts and his colleagues are acutely aware of the singular power they wield as judge, jury and appeals panel, and they’re eager to project an air of maturity and judiciousness. ...

The tweak affected “how we trust links,” Mr. Cutts said, declining to elaborate. ... But the real damage to Penney’s results began when Google started that “manual action.” ...

MR. CUTTS said he did not plan to write about Penney’s situation, as he did with BMW in 2006.

Google likes to pretend that its search is driven by an objective algorithm. It is not. The bottom line here is that Google management made a conscious decision to punish JC Penney for having a network of paid ads that allegedly violate Google guidelines. Except that Google prefers to call it a “manual action” or a “strong corrective action”, instead of punishment.

Dennis the dentist, debunked

Here is an example of psychology textbooks saying something contrary to the better research:

Three articles published [by Brett Pelham et al.] have shown that a disproportionate share of people choose spouses, places to live, and occupations with names similar to their own. These findings, interpreted as evidence of implicit egotism, are included in most modern social psychology textbooks and many university courses. The current article successfully replicates the original findings but shows that they are most likely caused by a combination of cohort, geographic, and ethnic confounds as well as reverse causality.

It seems likely that people will be making bogus arguments for decades, and supporting them with claim that more dentists are named Dennis.

Discrimination against conservatives, not women

Here is a new study:

It has long been the conventional wisdom in science that women are discriminated against in publication (female-authored manuscripts are said to be rejected more often than those written by males), in funding (female-authored grants are less successful), and in hiring. This, it is said, accounts for the underrepresentation of women in some areas of science, particularly math-related areas like physics.

The authors simply surveyed a number of studies (and there are many) addressing these claims. It turns out that, since at least the late 1970s, the claims of biases in publication, funding, and hiring aren’t borne out by the data: the usual citations of biases are based on only a handful of studies whose results have not been replicated by other work. In general, the authors show that in the three areas of “bias” mentioned above, women are on par with men.

Meanwhile, the NY Times
reports that the social psychologists who make some of these discrimination allegations have much more evidence that their own field discriminates against political conservatives.

Countering Muslim stereotypes

CNN reports:

(CNN) -- After a three-week trial and one hour of deliberations, an upstate New York jury on Monday found Muzzammil "Mo" Hassan guilty of second-degree murder for beheading his wife.

In February 2009, Hassan, who founded a TV network aimed at countering Muslim stereotypes, went to a police station in the Buffalo, New York, suburb of Orchard Park and told officers his wife was dead, police have said. ...

"Mr. Hassan has felt that throughout the tenure of his marriage, no one had listened to his side," Schwartz told reporters after the verdict. "It was important for him in the two hours that he had for summation to get across his side and how he saw his marriage." ...

According to prosecutors, Aasiya Hassan had filed for divorce less than a week before she died. ...

Police earlier said they had responded to several domestic violence calls at the couple's home, but no one had ever been arrested.

Hassan was the chief executive officer of the network Bridges TV, and Aasiya Hassan was the general manager.

He launched Bridges TV, billed as the first English-language cable channel targeting Muslims inside the United States, in 2004. At the time, Hassan said he hoped the network would balance negative portrayals of Muslims following the attacks of September 11, 2001.

So he had 6 years of TV broadcasts and 2 hours of court time to get his point across about Muslim stereotypes. We got the message.

Here is another story in today's news about Moslem justice:

A Muslim mob burned churches and clashed with police in Indonesia on Tuesday as they demanded the death penalty for a Christian man convicted of blaspheming against Islam, police said.

Two days after a Muslim lynch mob killed three members of a minority Islamic sect, crowds of furious Muslims set two churches alight as they rampaged in anger over the prison sentence imposed on defendant Antonius Bawengan, 58.

A court in the Central Java town had earlier sentenced the man to five years in jail, the maximum allowable, for distributing leaflets insulting Islam.

But this only enraged the crowd, who said the sentence was too lenient, police said.

"Today was the climax of the trial... The mob shouted that he should receive the death sentence or be handed over to the public," Central Java province police spokesman Djihartono told AFP.

I hope these facts help counter whatever false Moslem stereotypes could be circulating.

The shaken-baby hoax

NY Times Magazine reports:

As the diagnosis of shaken-baby syndrome took hold in medicine, and prosecutors began to bring charges based on it, doctors testified that shaking could generate the same terrible force as throwing a child from a second-­story window. It turned out they were wrong. ...

Later experiments confirmed this finding and have made some doctors and biomechanical engineers skeptical that shaking alone can cause severe brain damage or death.

I think that they should show that the syndrome is physically possible before they send parents to prison for it.

How Google spies on users

Google has gotten a lot of publicity about its complaint about Bing. There are some good comments here.

When you use Google Chrome, with its default Google search option, it spies on your browsing habits by sending your URLs back to Google. It does this, presumably, to improve its search rankings and advertising revenue.

Now Google has discovered that if you use the Microsoft IE8 browser, enable an option to send data back to Microsoft, and install the Microsoft Bing toolbar, then certain browsing habits are reported back to Microsoft for use in the Bing search engine. So why is this a problem?

I set the default search engine in Chrome to be Yahoo, just to cut back on Google spying. I hope Google publicizes this more, but a lot of people think that Google search results are based entirely on algorithmic Page Rank. In fact it is based largely on hand-tuning of favored sites, and on user spying. Bing is just playing the same game.

Update: This article details how Chrome sends info back to Google. Google says that it does not track what you type into the address bar, but, as you can see from the article, that is not true.

American biological degeneracy

A SciAm podcast tells the story:

Biologist and author Lee Dugatkin talks about his article "Jefferson's Moose" in the February issue of Scientific American, the story of Jefferson's battle against the European theory of American biological degeneracy.

I had no idea that Jefferson and Madison were so concerned with measuring weasels in order to debunk some silly French theory about American inferiority.

Statistical blog misreads a chart

Phil Price writes:

I think it's rare to see an outright lie, especially about a really major issue. We had a doozy yesterday, when Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann presented a graphic that attributed the 2009 federal budget to the Obama administration. Oddly, most of the other facts and figures she presented were correct, ...

I don't know who Phil Price is. I read the blog because all the regular entries are written by an expert statistician with useful insights. His opinions on charts is excellent. Price is misreading the graph and putting out a DailyKos style partisan political attack.

The graphic does not attribute the 2009 federal budget to the Obama. As Price later admits, it is common knowledge that many budget decisions are made far in advance. The chart merely shows the annual deficits, and labels them with the administrations in which the deficits occurred.

Bachmann's point is to show that the deficits have gotten much worse in the last two years, and she is correct.

By comparison, I have shown above a chart of USA casualties in Afghanistan. As you can see, it is going up just like the deficit! It would be completely fair and accurate to label the last two years as being during the Obama administration, even tho some of the deaths are attributable to continuing policies that begun under Bush.

Update: Price's latest response is to say:

The budget deficit in any given year is almost entirely determined by votes that took place several months earlier.

Yes, of course budgets are based on advance planning. Everybody knows that. But the Bachmann chart shows actual deficits, not the proposed budget deficits. Price is wrong.

Update: A reader sends these definitions of lying. I am not accusing Price of lying because it is not clear that he understands the difference between a proposed deficit and an actual deficit, and a fiscal year and a calendar year. It also is not clear that he understands that people often state facts without attributing blame, and that making a statement about someone's intentions requires some mindreading. I just point out that Price is wrong because he attributes to Bachmann something that she did say, that she did not imply, and that is not a part of her message.

These should be rights, not crimes

In California and some other states, there are procedures for kids to attend public schools outside their home school districts. It is called public school choice, and it ought to be a constitutional right. Apparently it is a crime in Ohio:

An Akron woman was sentenced to 10 days in the Summit County Jail, placed on three years of probation and ordered to perform community service after being convicted of falsifying residency records so that her two children could attend Copley-Fairlawn schools. ...

After seven hours of deliberations, a jury convicted her late Saturday of two counts of tampering with records.

While her two girls were registered as living with her father in Copley Township within the Copley school district, prosecutors maintained that they actually were living with Williams-Bolar on Hartford Avenue in Akron, in subsidized housing provided by the Akron Metropolitan Housing Authority. ...

On the tampering conviction, Cosgrove gave Williams-Bolar the maximum prison sentence — five years — for each of the two charges, with the sentences to run concurrently.

I doubt that the jury was told that the mom could get ten years in prison for sending her kids to a better school.

Maybe the mom should be prosecuted for having two kids she cannot support, cutting their dad out of their lives, and living off welfare, but school choice should be a right, not a crime.

In nearly all states it is legal to record govt agents who are threatening your liberty. This ought to be a constitutional right also. But apparently it is a crime with a 5-year prison term in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland:

Ms. Moore, whose trial is scheduled for Feb. 7 in Cook County Criminal Court, is accused of using her Blackberry to record two Internal Affairs investigators who spoke to her inside Police Headquarters while she filed a sexual harassment complaint last August against another police officer. Mr. Drew was charged with using a digital recorder to capture his Dec. 2, 2009, arrest for selling art without a permit on North State Street in the Loop. Mr. Drew said his trial date was April 4.

Both cases illustrate the increasingly busy and confusing intersection of technology and the law, public space and private.

No, this is not confusing. There are probably 100M Americans who have these devices and who see nothing wrong with recording cops.

Do not argue with physicians

A NY Times op-ed complains that some people are not persuaded by this:

The evidence against the original article and its author, a British medical researcher named Andrew Wakefield, is damning. Among other things, he is said to have received payment for his research from a lawyer involved in a suit against a vaccine manufacturer; in response, Britain’s General Medical Council struck him from the medical register last May.

I am not either, for reasons noted here. I don't know why Wakefield receiving payment would be so persuasive. The leading vaccine advocates at the CDC like Paul Offit have received millions from the vaccine industry. Silencing Wakefield just suggests that knowledge is being suppressed. When people claim to be experts and give fallacious arguments like this, then I wonder whether they have any good arguments.

The paper printed several response letters, including this:

It always astounds me that these same individuals don’t argue with architects regarding building materials, or airline pilots on how to fly a plane or with doctors on most other aspects of medical care, but they feel that they know best when it comes to disease prevention.
Ben Z. Katz

It astounds me whenever a physician wants to argue with me about anything. His job is to advise the patient so that he can make his own medical decisions. If he is arguing, then he has abandoned his proper role as a physician.

Completely inaccurate facts

AP reports:

Taco Bell quickly denied the accusation. "The lawsuit is bogus and filled with completely inaccurate facts," Taco Bell President Creed said in an interview.

Most fast-food customers, [a fast food litigator] said, realize taco meat has other ingredients besides beef.

Okay, I feel better now. That denial is a good one. When I goto more authentic Mexican restaurants, they serve tongue and other oddities.

Chasing that wasted college education

Here is the best explanation of what is wrong with Tiger mom Amy Chua and her theory about why Chinese moms are superior:

Here's the question: what is the point of all this? Making the kids play violin, of being an A student, all the discipline, all of this? Why is she working her kids so hard? You know the answer: college.

She is raising future college students.

Oh, I know that these things will make them better people in the long run, but silently agree that her singular purpose is to get the kids into college. Afterwards she'll want other things for them, sure, but for 18 years she has exactly one goal for them: early decision.

Yes, only a horrible mom would be so preoccupied with college admissions. Maybe she should be concerned that most kids do not learn much in college anyway:

The study of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.

One problem is that students just aren't asked to do much, according to findings in a new book, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses." Half of students did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week.

You can find other opinions on Chua here.

Reading smiles

Paula Niedenthal says that there are four kinds of smiles: playful, social, power, and fake.

Then Dr. Niedenthal and her colleagues asked the students to place a pencil between their lips. This simple action engaged muscles that could otherwise produce a smile. Unable to mimic the faces they saw, the students had a much harder time telling which smiles were real and which were fake.

I am skeptical about someone with a name like Dr. Neanderthal, but she seems to have shown that putting a pencil in your mouth inhibits mindreading abilities.

Phone company surprise bills

Randall Stross writes:

To be precise, there’s a 1-in-25 chance during a 12-month period of getting a cellphone bill that is $100 higher than expected, based on experiences of respondents in a recent Consumer Reports survey. About one in five reported a significantly higher cellphone bill, of some amount, that was not anticipated.

Last October, the Federal Communications Commission proposed requiring wireless carriers to alert consumers when they’re about to reach their plans’ limits — in call minutes, text messages or data use — so they won’t be shocked at billing time. It conducted its own survey of cellphone users last spring and found that 17 percent had experienced a sudden increase in their bill at some point. That’s 30 million people, the F.C.C. says. ...

Mr. Guttman-McCabe says the F.C.C.’s alerts requirement would cost “tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars to implement.”

That's ridiculous. I prefer a prepaid phone.

Consumers should not be legally liable for unexpected bills. Usually the law says that people are only responsible for the services for which they have agreed. My guess is that the phone companies are actually spending hundreds of millions of dollars to trick consumers into misunderstanding their contracts, and into keeping them from knowing their liabilities. Better regulation would save a lot of money.

Biggest Threat to Humanity

The biggest threat is the Singularity, according to this futurist, and this NPR piece.

Chinese domination

If I read the economic news once every ten years, I would have learned this:

1960: USA had a missile gap, so we built a military-industrial complex.
1970: Nixon bragged that we built the world's largest shopping center.
1980: USSR was the economic equal of the USA.
1990: Japan was the economic equal of the USA.
2000: EU was the economic equal of the USA.
2010: China is the economic equal of the USA.

The business news is covered with stories about how China has passed us up in various ways, how we have been completely dependent on China for raw materials, manufactured goods, and money, and how even American schools are teaching Chinese so that our kids will be able to speak to our new overlords. Even my kids are going to be outdone those reared by Chinese Tiger Moms.

I am going to wait another ten years before leaping to any conclusions.

Boys like sticks

The Slate Explainer's 2010 Question of the Year is Why Do Boys Like Sticks?

If you doubt the conclusion, then check out this stick dance, and tell me whether you have even seen girls do a dance like that.

Dodo bird verdict

Psychiatry professor Richard A. Friedman writes in NY Times:

It is practically an article of faith among many therapists that self-understanding is a prerequisite for a happy life. Insight, the thinking goes, will free you from your psychological hang-ups and promote well-being.

Perhaps, but recent experience makes me wonder whether insight is all it’s cracked up to be.

He goes on to explain how insights made his patient unhappy. He also admits that the dodo effect means that no psychotherapy method has ever been shown to have any benefit anyway.

Nevertheless he says that he is "pretty good at treating clinical misery with drugs and therapy". Apparently he lacks the the insight to understand that his treatment is no better than doing nothing.

Meanwhile, a British shrink is in trouble for doing just what the patient asked:

A psychotherapist faces being struck off after trying to 'convert' a homosexual man.

Lesley Pilkington, 60, a therapist for 20 years, is accused of 'praying to God' to 'heal' the patient .

Mrs Pilkington, will appear at a landmark disciplinary hearing this week where she faces being stripped of her accreditation to the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. ...

Mrs Pilkington accused Strudwick of entrapment. She said: 'He told me was looking for a treatment for being gay.

'I told him I only work using a Christian biblical framework and he said that was exactly what he wanted.'

Her defence is being funded by the Christian Legal Centre which has instructed a leading religious rights barrister to fight the case.

She should not have to argue religious freedom. Her approach is no more bogus than most of the other psychotherapy.

Purpose of insurance

California news:

Starting this month, a new state law prohibits health insurers in California from using gender as a factor in pricing individual policies. ...

"The basic idea of insurance is that the risk is supposed to be spread across the entire pool," she said. "Once you start identifying certain populations and saying they have to pay more for various reasons, then that defeats the purpose of insurance."

No, the purpose of insurance is to hedge against uncertain losses. It is not to make life cheaper for hypochondriacs.

Insurance is more efficient when companies are able to make use of the available information. Women don't really get sick any more than men, but they do seek medical services more often. This is especially true in mental health services. Insurance works well because the companies are able to discriminate, and then spread the risk among similarly situated customers. We pay a price for these non-discrimination laws.

Email disclaimers

Wired magazine says that email disclaimers are meaningless:

“You have no obligation to obey the disclaimer if you decide to read a misdirected email, send it to your friends, or send it to a Wired reporter,” says Susan Lyon, a privacy and data security attorney for Perkins Coie. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

It is especially amusing to see lawyers use these silly disclaimers. It is like getting an email from a weatherman saying that a rain dance might cause a rain. It just makes me suspect that they have some misunderstandings about the law. Here is my favorite disclaimer.

US Says Too Much Fluoride

The recent Skeptics' Guide To The Universe podcast started by making fun of "cranks" who complain about water fluoridation requirements in public water supplies. The guy says that the current doses are "perfectly safe".

I am sympathetic to these skeptics debunking charlatans, except that they do not seem be very skeptical of authorities who force dubious policies on everyone. In fact, there is solid evidence against fluoridation policies, such as this AP story:

In a remarkable turnabout, federal health officials say many Americans are now getting too much fluoride because of its presence not just in drinking water but in toothpaste, mouthwash and other products, and it's causing splotches on children's teeth and perhaps more serious problems.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced plans Friday to lower the recommended level of fluoride in drinking water for the first time in nearly 50 years, based on a fresh review of the science. ...

The government first began urging municipal water systems to add fluoride in the early 1950s. ...

One reason behind the change: About 2 out of 5 adolescents have tooth streaking or spottiness because of too much fluoride, a government study found recently.

California rejected fluoridation in the 1950s, and has only been adding it in the last few years. My county does not have it, as it is staunchly opposed by the left-wingers. It has to be forced on us. It used to be opposed by right-wingers. There are a lot of good reasons to be skeptical about the official fluoride policies. The Jan. 2008 Scientific American had an article on how adding fluoride to water has an assortment of health risks, and little benefit to those who brush their teeth.

Vaccine persecution continues

The vaccine proponents are gloating about a finding that Andrew Wakefield described 12 cases inaccurately in a 1998 paper on MMR and autism.

The attacks on Wakefield have been going on for years, as noted here.

A minor 1998 study being wrong should not be news, since much medical research is wrong. My concern is that now researchers will be intimidated into not publishing results that deviate from official vaccine recommendations. The Wakefield example shows that they would risk having vaccine promoters taking extraordinary steps to destroy their careers if they question vaccines.


The NY Times reports:

One of psychology’s most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events.

The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. ...

Some scientists say the report deserves to be published, in the name of open inquiry; others insist that its acceptance only accentuates fundamental flaws in the evaluation and peer review of research in the social sciences.

“It’s craziness, pure craziness. I can’t believe a major journal is allowing this work in,” Ray Hyman, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University Oregon and longtime critic of ESP research, said. “I think it’s just an embarrassment for the entire field.”

It is craziness, but it is better than having to listen to ESP advocates complain that their research is censored for ideological reasons. Sensible people will understand that some studies are outweighed by overwhelming contrary evidence.

Why math is unique

The brilliant mathematician Timothy Gowers wrote an elementary book on Math,
and makes this point:

For example, as I was re-reading an interesting little maths primer this week by Timoth Gowers (A Fields medal winner and maths prof at Cambridge) I found him briefly discussing axiomatics and the role of Russell and Whitehads' "Principia Mathematica". The importance of this text, for Gowers, is that it establishes the axiomatic hermeneutic (my phrase not his btw) which "means that any dispute about the validity of a mathematical proof can always be resolved".

That is correct. Furthermore, as Gowers goes on to explain:

Nevertheless, the fact that disputes can in principle be resolved does make mathematics unique. There is no mathematicd equivalent of astronomers who still believe in the steady-state theory of the universe, or of biologists who hold, with great conviction, very different views about how much is explained by natural selection, or of philosophers who dis- agree fundamentally about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world, or of economists who follow opposing schools of thought such as monetarism and neo-Keynesianism. [p.49]

That is correct, and it is a consequence of logicism. Math is the only subject that resolves all of its disputes.

You might think that the The hard sciences would be able to resolve disputes, but they are not. Physics has a dispute over the merits if string theory, and there is no hope of any resolution.

Update: I see that the Wikipedia article on Mathematics has some nonsense about philosphers and mathematicians deciding that math must be like a science because Goedel proved that it was not reducible to logic. As explained below, they are wrong. You can find a more accurate description of the logical nature of math in the article on Axiomatic set theory. I'd like to see those philosophers and mathematicians named.

Obama portrayed as space alien

V (2009 TV series) is back on the air, and the parody of Pres. Barack Obama is creepy. He is played by a female alien heartless reptile named Anna. She is a paranoid megalomaniac. She lures earthlings with grand promises in order to control them. She hates human emotions, and keeps the details of her grand evil schemes secret. She even looks like Obama. I noted similarities before.

Words even Twain cannot say anymore

Today's news about our flawed criminal justice system:

DALLAS (AP) -- Prosecutors declared a Texas man innocent Monday of a rape and robbery that put him in prison for 30 years, more than any other DNA exoneree in Texas.

DNA test results that came back barely a week after Cornelius Dupree Jr. was paroled in July excluded him as the person who attacked a Dallas woman in 1979, prosecutors said Monday. Dupree was just 20 when he was sentenced to 75 years in prison in 1980.

And today's censorship:

What is a word worth? According to Publishers Weekly, NewSouth Books’ upcoming edition of Mark Twain’s seminal novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will remove all instances of the “n” word -— I’ll give you a hint, it’s not nonesuch -— present in the text and replace it with slave. The new book will also remove usage of the word Injun.

White liberals are responsible for this outrage.

In another story:

Christina Scavo and Shannon O'Toole contend in a lawsuit filed Monday they were subjected to sexual harassment and job discrimination. ...

While the women don't say they received any messages directly from Favre, the quarterback referred to Scavo in a message proposing a meeting with her and a third, unidentified massage therapist, the lawsuit says.

"Kinda lonely tonight," he added in a subsequent message to the third masseuse, the lawsuit said. "I guess I have bad intentions."

So two massage therapists are suing Favre because he sent a suggestive message to a third woman who is not suing! Are they jealous?

Blind critters and funny video

It is a new year, and I am already swamped with news stories that show our society's warped values. I think that it is evidence for our decline that these are even stories. AP reports that sea lion shootings are up:

Wildlife officials say sea lion and human populations continue to increase, making interaction more common, especially among fishermen who compete for the same food and often view the creatures as a nuisance. ...

Veterinarians at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, Calif., are treating the wounded critter in the hope an aquarium or zoo will take it. The 7-foot-long male, dubbed Silent Knight by its rescuers, is now blind and cannot return to the wild. ...

Larry Legans of Sacramento was ordered to pay more than $51,000 in restitution for the cost of treating the critter, who recently underwent plastic surgery at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom to close bullet holes in its muzzle. Legas also spent a month in jail and got five years probation.

So the population of the critters is up, they are eating too many fish, and more are getting shot. So what is the problem? Why do plastic surgery on blind critters? We have too many of them anyway.

A Navy captain, Owen Honors, is accused of making an inappropriate video. I've watched it. What's the problem? How is it that non-soldiers are even expressing an opinion on what is appropriate on a military submarine. They have no idea.

Meanwhile, look at these pictures of Detroit here and here. There is a serious decline of a once-great city.

Update: Pres. Obama has not fired Owens. This shows where Obama's concerns are.