The Lie That Just Happens

A Seattle paper reports about a man suffering a false rape allegation:

The Sheriff's department has staff who are specially tasked with determining whether or not an alleged victim is credible. A woman in the department sat down with the girl and carefully listened to her story to evaluate its veracity. That officer came away convinced. So did the department's sketch artist. For the next week, police issued press releases describing the incident and the truck. Using the girl's description, the department distributed an image of a man with wide-set, droopy eyes and long stringy hair. News outlets, including this one, posted it to their Web sites.

Likewise, Bekele's accuser also underwent a joint interview with prosecutors and investigators, and also came off as credible, according to Ian Goodhew, deputy chief of staff in the King County Prosecutor's office. That's why prosecutors decided to file charges in the case.

Susan Shapiro Barash, a gender-studies instructor at Marymount Manhattan College whose book, Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets: The Truth About Why Women Lie, was published last year, says women who choose to lie do so in part because they're good at it. "We're raised to tell little white lies," Barash says. "Part of the reason women can lie about something big is because they've been taught to lie about small things."

The accuser got busted when someone noticed that she had forged some emails. No motive for her false accusation was discovered. She agreed to get counseling.

Study links ADHD medicine with better test scores

AP reports:

CHICAGO – Children on medicine for attention deficit disorder scored higher on academic tests than their unmedicated peers in the first large, long-term study suggesting this kind of benefit from the widely used drugs.

The nationally representative study involved nearly 600 children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder followed from kindergarten through fifth grade.

Children's scores on several standardized math and reading tests taken during those years were examined. Compared with unmedicated kids, average scores for medicated children were almost three points higher in math and more than five points higher in reading. The difference amounts to about three months ahead in reading and two months in math, the researchers said.

Both groups had lower scores on average than a separate group of children without ADHD. The researchers acknowledged that gap but said the benefits for medicated youngsters were still notable.

It is no surprise that kids on stimulants do better on tests than kids who are not on stimulants. Everybody knows that. People drink coffee for a reason.

It would be more interesting if it could be shown that the ADHD drugs somehow help ADHD kids more than they help other kids. Or if it were shown that ADHD drugs were more effective than coffee. Otherwise, I don't see that these studies show anything useful at all. Maybe we would be better off just giving coffee to all the kids.

Mohammad

This illustration is taken from ''La vie de Mahomet'', by M. Prideaux, published in 1699. It shows Mohammed holding a sword and a crescent while trampling on a globe, a cross, and the Ten Commandments.

I found it on Wikipedia.

Phone footage clears man of rape

The UK Daily Mail reports:

A businessman has been cleared of raping a university student after jurors were shown footage of the sex session taken on a mobile phone.

Gary Taylor, 41, was accused of attacking the 27-year-old woman after turning up at her flat with cocaine and a bottle of red wine.

The woman, who can't be identified for legal reasons, told jurors that Mr Taylor forced her to perform a sex act on him and then raped her in her living room.

But during cross-examination she was shown footage Mr Taylor had taken on his mobile phone during the encounter on September 26, 2008.

Mr Taylor's barrister Karen Holt said the footage showed the woman 'actively' performing a sex act on him.

I guess that there is no free speech in Britain. I can understand keeping the names of rape victims secret, but this woman is not a victim. Taylor is a victim of a false accusation. It would be better for the newspaper to name her and not him.

Child porn hotline

Manitoba Canada has a new reporting law:

Manitobans who come across child pornography must now report it to authorities.

As of Wednesday, the province became the first in Canada to make it mandatory for anyone who suspects the existence of child pornography -- online, in books, photographs, or other audio and visual materials -- to immediately report it, Family Services Minister Gord Mackintosh said Wednesday.

I called the hotline 1-866-658-9022, and asked for details on how this law works. She said that there were no published guidelines on what is or is not reportable. She said that I must report anything that I believe may include child porn. As an example, she said that if somebody emails me a note to check out the pictures of hot babes at teenage-girls.com, then I should report it because the teenagers could include underage naked girls.

This law is unusual because it applies to everyone in Manitoba, not just teachers and professional, it applies to porn that could be anywhere in the world on the internet, it applies to mere suspicions, and people can make anonymous reports. The penalty is two years in prison.

I am all in favor of cracking down on child porn, but this is extreme. I don't want to check web sites for child porn, or even to report my suspicions. Checking could be dangerous because mere possession of child porn is a crime. I cannot tell whether the girls are over 18 or not anyway. Let the law enforcement officials scour the internet for naked 17-year-old girls, if that is what they want to do.

Tax on sugary drinks

William Saletan writes:

The food police are closing in on their next target: a soda tax.

New York City's health commissioner, Thomas Frieden, is leading the way....

Persuading Americans to regulate soda the way we regulate cigarettes won't be easy. Isn't soda a kind of food? Isn't food a good thing? And isn't it a matter of personal choice? Doesn't taxation to control people's eating behavior cross a fundamental line of liberty?

In their article, Frieden and Brownell methodically attack these objections. Going well beyond science, they lay out a political battle plan for the war on junk food.

Step 1 is to convince us that soda isn't really food.

The evidence for soda being unhealthy is pretty thin. There are some papers saying that it contributes to type 2 diabetes, but I'm not sure that it is worse than any other sugary food. Diabetics do have to control their sugar intake, and can have trouble if they eat too little or too much.

Young pulsar shows its hand

This is a real image from outer space, with false colors. (Xray wavelengths were mapped into visible colors.)

Google warns against its own service

I just got this message from my Google Chrome browser. Google owns Blogger.com, and it is the service I use to post these message. They have a bug.

Best interest of the economy

Jon Stewart asked Nancy Pelosi how he can get some TARP money, and asked about the allocation rules. She answered:

That is a Treasury Department decision, and that's what's in the best interest of the economy, they tell us.

Now there is a meaningless phrase. Since when does the economy have its own interest? This silly jargon reminds of another meaningless phrase, the best interest of the child, also known as BIOTCH. Nobody knows what that is either.

Fat women are less successful

A Scotland paper reports:

Being fat is fine for men in the business world, but it might just weigh down women's prospects for promotion, research suggested yesterday. ...

Researcher Mark Roehling, an associate professor of human resource management at Michigan State University, said that the attitudes appeared to contribute to the glass ceiling.

"The results suggest that while being obese limits the career opportunities of both women and men, being 'merely overweight' harms only female executives – and may actually benefit male executives."

The results echo previous research showing that among white, middle-class communities, women faced "harsher weight standards" than men, Prof Roehling said.

No, it doesn't show that at all. Maybe thin men are treated just as harshly as fat women.

Income in the USA is correlated with weight. Rich folks tend to be fat men and thin women. Poor folks tend to be thin men and fat women. There are a lot of explanations that have nothing to do with a glass ceiling.

Silly quiz about Indian car

My newspaper prints a Globalist Quiz every week. Here is this week's quiz:

Which of these facts about the Tata Nano is correct?

A. Its horsepower is comparable to that of a lawnmower
B. It is inspired by the Model T
C. It is a relatively safe car
D. All the above

The Tata Nano generates 10 times the horsepower of most lawn mowers, has nothing to do with the Model T, and fails to meet European and American safety standards. So I would say that all are incorrect. The paper says that the correct answer is that all are correct! This quiz is terrible.

How to get fired as a soccer coach

A small Mass. USA newspaper reports:

A girls soccer coach who told parents of his 6- and 7-year-old charges that he expected his players to “kick ass” has resigned.

Michael Kinahan says he “meant to give parents a chuckle” but that people took his message on a the team he dubbed “Green Death” the wrong way.

This paper actually shows the text of Kinahan's original e-mail and resignation.

Some big city papers have printed this story, but they don't give a link to the actual email. This is yet another reason that they are going bankrupt. None of them has learned to use the web effectively. I predict that as soon as we have a major city with no major newspaper, we will see a whole new kind of newspaper web site.

The teenage slut gene

NewScientist mag reports:

Sexual precociousness is in our genes, new research suggests. A unique study of twins separated at birth finds a genetic link to the age at which a person first engages in sexual intercourse. ...

However, determining the extent to which sexual precociousness is inherited is trickier than making a similar calculation for height. A common family environment – whether it promotes or hinders early sex – could cause scientists to overestimate the effect of genes.

Social effect
By studying 48 pairs of twins raised apart, as well as 23 individual twins, Segal's team sidesteps this confounding factor. "This gives us a pure estimate about how much genes affect behaviour," she says. ...

Segal's team also found that female participants who felt unhappy and unfulfilled in their home life were more likely to have sex at a younger age.

The estimate cannot possibly be that pure. There could be a gene that causes a girl to be "unhappy and unfulfilled" if she also has a lousy home life. Most behavior is probably partially genetic, but pure estimates are nearly impossible.

Benefits of spanking adults

Here is the lastest research on spanking therapy:

Spanking is stressful at first, but it could bring consenting couples closer together. That's the implication of two studies of hormonal changes associated with sadomasochistic (S&M) activities including spanking, bondage and flogging. ...

Nick Neave, a psychologist at the University of Northumbria, UK, says the results are interesting, but future studies should control for whether participants experienced orgasm, ...

I guess Neave wants to know whether the benefit comes from the spanking or the orgasm. I will be looking for the followup research.

Zoo apes found throwing rocks

This study got a lot of press as a big breakthru:

Planning for a future, rather than a current, mental state is a cognitive process generally viewed as uniquely human. Here, however, I shall report on a decade of observations of spontaneous planning by a male chimpanzee in a zoo. The planning actions, which took place in a calm state, included stone caching and the manufacture of discs from concrete, objects later used as missiles against zoo visitors during agitated chimpanzee dominance displays. Such planning implies advanced consciousness and cognition traditionally not associated with nonhuman animals.

Maybe these zoo chimps just happen to like collecting rocks, and throwing rocks at targets. Maybe they are bored and have nothing else to do.

The particularly far-fetched claim is that the chimps are planning for a future mental state. The theory is that they are only collecting the rocks because they anticipate being upset when the zoo visitors arrive, and that they will want to throw the rocks when they are in an upset mental state. This is anthropomorphism.

Humans might buy a bottle of aspirin in anticipation of having a headache later. Is this really supposed to be analogous behavior in chimps? I think that there are leaner explanations. Maybe the chimps collect the rocks because they want to throw them, and then hide them when they cannot find any targets. When the targets show up, they throw the rocks. No mental state analysis is necessary, except that these chimps like to throw rocks.

The article also says:

The behaviours also hint at a parallel to human evolution, where similar forms of stone manipulation constitute the most ancient signs of culture. Finds as old as 2.6 million years suggest that hominins carried and accumulated stone artefacts on certain sites, presumably a case of future need planning.

I think this guy has been watching Planet Of The Apes.

Crisis blamed on blue eyes

Brazil news:

Speaking in Brasília at a joint press conference with U.K. prime minister Gordon Brown, Brazil's president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva blamed the global economic crisis on white people. ...

“This crisis was caused by the irrational behaviour of white people with blue eyes, who before the crisis appeared to know everything and now demonstrate that they know nothing. I do not know any black or indigenous bankers so I can only say [it is wrong] that this part of mankind which is victimized more than any other should pay for the crisis."

There are areas of Brazil with no white people. Maybe Lula should move there, and see how she likes it.

JAMA goes nuts defending psycho drugs

A WSJ blog:

Editors of The Journal of the American Medical Association, better known as JAMA, can be a little thin-skinned when it comes to outsiders taking issue with studies published in the prestigious medical journal.

Jonathan Leo, a professor of neuro-anatomy at tiny Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tenn., posted a letter on the Web site of the British Medical Journal this month criticizing a study that appeared in JAMA last spring. The study concerned the use of the anti-depressant Lexapro in stroke patients. In addition to identifying what he said was an important omission in the paper — that behavioral therapy worked just as well as the drug when compared head to head in the study — Leo also pointed out that the lead author had a financial relationship with Forest Laboratories, the maker of Lexapro, that was not disclosed in the study.

Leo says he received an angry call from JAMA executive deputy editor Phil Fontanarosa last week, shortly after Leo’s article was published on the BMJ Web site. “He said, ‘Who do you think you are,’ ” says Leo. “He then said, ‘You are banned from JAMA for life. You will be sorry. Your school will be sorry. Your students will be sorry.”

Seth’s blog nails it. It is amazing to read what JAMA still has to say in defense of blackballing Leo for some legitimate criticism.

The JAMA author was quoted in the press:

I hope I don't have a stroke, but if I do, I would certainly want to be on an antidepressant.

Leo pointed out two problems with this claim: the study did not show that anti-depressant drugs had any statistically significant advantage over non-drug therapy, and the author had an undisclosed conflict of interest.

Taking the aisle seat

From yesterday's paper:

DEAR ABBY: Last night, I went to the movies and took an aisle seat in the back row. Two different couples came in late, and each one asked me to move over so they could sit together. I said, "I got here early, and I like this seat." I did not go on to explain ... Couldn't those people spend two hours separated by one seat from their spouse? -- MARSHA IN SAUSALITO, CALIF.

This doesn't even make any sense. If she took the aisle seat, then she would not have separated other seats.

I agree that she should not explain why she took the aisle seat. No one wants to listen to her problems. But she should not complain about latecomers climbing all over her to get to the available seats, either.

Bear market movies

During bull markets, the Hollywood movies are uplifting movies with happy endings. I just saw the new movie Knowing. It is a bear market movie. Roger Ebert gives it 4 stars, his top rating (with a spoiler):

"Knowing" is among the best science-fiction films I've seen -- frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome. ...

The plot involves the most fundamental of all philosophical debates: Is the universe deterministic or random? Is everything in some way preordained or does it happen by chance? If that questions sounds too abstract, wait until you see this film, which poses it in stark terms: What if we could know in advance when the Earth will end?

Yes, the world comes to an end. Everyone dies. The only ones who escape are 3 sinister space aliens and the 2 kids they kidnap.

The remarkable thing is that no one shows any interest in saving anyone. The atheist scientist and his Christian preacher father make no effort to survive. Most people spend their last hours looting. They are all morbid and depressed all the time, and completely fatalistic that horrible things are going to happen and there is nothing that they can do about it.

Sugar is sugar

I keep hearing people complain about how unhealthy High-fructose corn syrup, and how it is much worse than ordinary sugar. Here is the story.

The two simplest sugars are glucose and fructose. Ordinary table sugar is sucrose. Each sucrose molecule consists of one glucose molecule and one fructose molecule joined together. When you eat sucrose, the first thing your body does is break it down into 50% glucose and 50% fructose. All of these sugars occur naturally in many plant foods.

High-fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose and 45% glucose, plus some water to make it liquid. It is cheaper than sucrose because Iowa grows corn and Cuba grows cane sugar, and the USA has policies favoring Iowa farmers. It is easier because it is liquid.

I don't see how HFCS could be any less healthy than sucrose. It is essentially the same stuff once it gets into your body.

Update: Here is some new research:

Two papers in the journal PNAS in 2007 and 2008 showed that glucose and fructose act quite differently in the brain (hypothalamus) - glucose decreasing food intake and fructose increasing food intake. ...

The fact that fructose metabolism by the brain increases food intake and obesity risk raises health concerns in view of the large and increasing per capita consumption of high fructose sweeteners, especially by youth.

I don't know if this is significant or not. It seems to me that all good-tasting foods make me want to eat more, and bad-tasting foods make me want to eat less. So maybe that makes good-tasting foods fattening.