May 17, 2008
Category: Economics
Zimbabwe is in the midst of skyrocketing inflation (check out this chart in the Economist), so this story -- while amusing -- is not entirely unexpected:
I had lunch in Mutare yesterday, a town in Zimbabwe on the Mozambique border.
To give you a benchmark -- bread is currently over 110 million a loaf; on 22nd April it was 40 million per loaf.
The lunch bill: soup -- 50 million, oxtail -- 600 million, coffee -- 50 million, with no charge for the pink ice cream.
During the meal, one of my mates was drinking beer -- 750ml bottles of Castle Lager (fondly called bombers). He ordered a fifth one, was advised that the price, which when he ordered his first, second, third and fourth ones was 160 million per bottle, had gone up to 340 million per bottle.
Hat-tip: Free Exchange
Posted by Jake Young at 12:32 PM • 4 Comments • View blog reactions
May 16, 2008
Category: Economics
The WSJ has a fascinating article on the economics of bubbles and why it might be rational to support a bubble until it bursts:
Bubbles often keep inflating despite cautions such as Mr. Greenspan's famous warning of "irrational exuberance." Tech stocks rose for more than three years after he said that, in late 1996. Markus Brunnermeier, 39, thinks he understands why this happens.
Growing up near Munich, Germany, he expected to become a carpenter like his father. A building slump dissuaded him, and after stints in a tax office and the army he enrolled at the University of Regensburg.
Read on »
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Category: Learning and Memory
This is a cool story, but not for the reason the authors are attributing. Researchers at Princeton showed that bacteria can evolve to anticipate future environmental changes. Here is the coverage in Science:
Researchers already know that microbes can mount simple responses to changes in their environment, such as acidity fluctuations, by altering their internal workings. If the changes are regular enough, bacteria can respond ahead of time. But systems biologist Saeed Tavazoie of Princeton University wondered if microbes were capable of more sophisticated reasoning. Could they, for example, learn to match a signal that didn't occur regularly to a probable future event? If so, the bacterium could improve its chances of survival by turning on a preemptive response to that event.
Read on »
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May 14, 2008
Category: Libertarian politics
Two good articles on libertarian politics this week.
First, the Economist covers Freedom House's "How Free?" report on the US:
But the verdict on the Bush years is nevertheless sharp. "How Free?" not only details and condemns the administration's familiar sins, from Guantanamo to extraordinary rendition to warrantless wiretapping. It reminds readers of its aversion to open government. The number of documents classified as secret has jumped from 8.7m in 2001 to 14.2m in 2005 -- a 60% increase over three years. Decade-old information has been reclassified. Researchers report that it is much more difficult and time-consuming to obtain information under the Freedom of Information Act.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 10:24 AM • 2 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Other People's Work
Not Exactly Rocket Science has a great post showing that sloths in the wild may be slow, but aren't actually that sleepy:
Rattenborg captured three female brown-throated three-toed sloths in the Panamanian rainforest and fitted them with the recording cap, a radio-telemetry collar to reveal their locations and an accelerometer to record their movements. After several days of monitoring, the recorders revealed that the sloths slumbered for only 9.6 hours every day, more than 6 hours less than the data from captive animals would have us believe. REM sleep made up about 20% of total sleep, a very similar proportion to humans.
Read on »
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Category: Depression
Well that is reassuring:
A new University of Alberta study of almost 600 of its graduates (ages 20-29 years old) tracked mental health symptoms in participants for seven years post-graduation and looked at how key events like leaving home and becoming a parent were related to depression and anger. Graduates showed a significant decrease in depressive symptoms over the seven years. Expressed anger also declined over time after graduation, suggesting improved mental health.
The researchers also found that while home may be a haven for young people in the early years of adulthood, the longer they stay at home, or if they return home, the more likely they are to experience symptoms of depression. Previous research has found that more than half of students under 25 in four-year university programs lived with their parents.
In this study, it was shown that younger participants were more depressed at times when they lived on their own, while older participants were more depressed while they lived with their parents.
In spite of all the travails of personal and professional life, I can always comfort myself that at least I don't live at home. (This is an impression that I assure you my parents share.) Not tested in this study were the increases in parent anxiety and depression from the delayed adolescence of their children.
This is a values issue, but I never was quite happy until I started taking care of myself. Though economic pressures often keep children at home longer than they would like, I can't but think that it comes at a price.
(I love you, Mom and Dad, and I will still visit!)
Posted by Jake Young at 9:54 AM • 1 Comments • View blog reactions
May 12, 2008
Category: Carnivals
Encephalon #45 is up at Podblack Blog.
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Category: Labor
Recently, there were a set of posts arguing for different models of the effects of the minimum wage on employment. Megan McArdle argues that perfect competition models of the effects of minimum wage on the labor market implies that increases in the minimum wage will raise unemployment. Kathy G at Crooked Timber disagrees. She argues that a more accurate model of the minimum wage is a monopsony model. Monopsony is the opposite of monopoly meaning that there is one buyer -- in this case one employer. (Feel free to ignore the very bloggeresque sniping.)
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 1:43 PM • 4 Comments • View blog reactions
May 9, 2008
Category: Haha, a funny
This is funny. Daniel Drezner, having received the full professor status, lists the benefits:
6) Something better than that stupid f@#%ing pen ceremony. As this site observes, "The scene in the movie A Beautiful Mind in which mathematics professors ritualistically present pens to Nash was completely fabricated in Hollywood. No such custom exists."
In the actual ceremony, colleagues ritualistically present signed and notarized statements in which they confess that they were in error when they labeled your research as "putrid swill" back when you were a post-doc.
...
4) When required to wear full academic regalia, full professors get to wear swords. Nobody better mess with me at commencement.
Read the whole thing.
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Category: Linguistics
Language Log has a fascinating article about creole languages and birdsongs:
Zebra finches are among the songbirds who learn their songs by imitating adults, just as human children learn their language by interaction with those who already know it. Male songbirds raised in isolation, without any conspecific adult models during the critical period for song learning, are handicapped for life: they develop only an ill-organized, infantile "subsong". From the example of abused or feral children like Genie, we know that something similar happens with human children.
In both cases, this raises a sort of chicken-and-egg question: if normal development requires an adult model, then which came first, the pupil or the tutor?
One obvious possibility is that the normal pattern is implicit in the species genotype, but requires a combination of cultural evolution and infant learning, repeated over several generations, to develop completely.
...
The cited work by Olga Feher et al. demonstrates this kind of "multi-generational phenotype" (Ofer's phrase) experimentally, in a colony of zebra finches whose founder was an isolate. As each succeeding generation learns songs from the preceeding one, the effects of biases in the learning process accumulate, so that after a few generations, normal zebra finch songs have re-emerged.
Read the whole thing.
Posted by Jake Young at 1:49 PM • 0 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Neuroscience
We have known for some time that there is a double dissociation (I will define that term in a minute) between location and identification in the visual system. Neuroscientists speak of a "where" pathway that goes from the primary visual cortex in the occipital lobe up into the parietal lobe. Lesions to this pathway produce deficits in locating objects in space using vision. There is also a "what" pathway that goes from the primary visual cortex down into the temporal lobe. Lesions to this pathway produce deficits in identifying objects using vision.
We knew that was true for vision, but there is less evidence that this division exists in hearing. Lomber and Malhotra, publishing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, show that this division does exist. They use a double dissociation experiment in cats.
Read on »
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May 8, 2008
Category: Haha, a funny
Stephen Colbert skewers as per usual...
Read on »
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Category: Exercise
Thank you, NYTimes, for clarifying something I have always wondered about: how does running outside compare to running on a treadmill?
A number of studies have shown that in general, outdoor running burns about 5 percent more calories than treadmills do, in part because there is greater wind resistance and no assistance from the treadmill belt. Some studies show, for example, that when adults are allowed to set their own paces on treadmills and on tracks, they move more slowly and with shorter strides when they train on treadmills.
I will say that in my case outside running burns more calories because I go much farther. Running on a treadmill bores me to death, so I don't do it.
Posted by Jake Young at 12:57 PM • 4 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Other People's Work
In honor of Mother's Day, NPR has a great piece on the difficulties of being a modern Mom and delaying having children:
Fertility seems to peak at about age 22, says Marcel Cedars, director of reproductive endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco. After that, it gradually declines, and past the age of 35, pregnancy is much harder to achieve.
"Each egg is more likely to be genetically abnormal," Cedars says. "And a genetically abnormal egg is less likely to fertilize, is less likely to develop. It is less likely to implant. If it implants, it is more likely to miscarry."
Amy Harrison, of Norwell, Mass., has found that to be the case. At 38, she has a good job, a nice home and a husband who she thinks "will be a wonderful father," she says. "I finally feel like I'm ready to give a child or children a good home."
Her body isn't as ready. Harrison has endured fertility treatments for two years. "When I look at these people who get pregnant at a drop by accident ... yeah, it makes me very angry," she says, noting she'd wrongly believed she'd succeed as long as she began trying "by the time I was 38 or 40."
Read on »
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Category: Energy Policy
Bryan Caplan writing in the NYTimes suggests that in spite of making no economic sense whatsoever the gas tax holiday might be a good idea as a symbolic gesture:
The first is that the tax holiday is a relatively cheap symbolic gesture that makes truly bad policies less likely. The main causes of high gas prices are probably factors beyond our control, like rapid growth in China and India and low real interest rates. But voters don't want to hear this; they want politicians to "do something!"
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 10:59 AM • 4 Comments • View blog reactions
May 7, 2008
Category: Alcohol
There is an interesting article by Brandon Busteed in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about college drinking. Busteed argues that the problem is not the population that addiction specialists tend to focus on: the really heavy drinkers. Rather the problem is in the much more numerous group of moderate drinkers with infrequent binges:
Despite conventional wisdom, the alcohol problem colleges face is not mainly about high-risk drinkers, and the solution is not about intervening with them alone. If it were, we'd have declared success long ago because we have invested so much time, money, and resources doing just that. Yet our studies show that, despite a handful of solid efforts in the realm of primary prevention, most colleges take a group-think approach to identifying and intervening with high-risk drinkers. The solution lies instead in a counterintuitive approach: working with the 80 percent of students who are not frequent heavy drinkers, and changing their ideas about what constitutes normal college drinking habits.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 1:22 PM • 8 Comments • View blog reactions
May 5, 2008
Category: Other People's Work
Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone! Down with that imperialist aggressor Napoleon III! (The painting to the right is Manet's Execution of Maximillian. Supposedly, the chap on the right looks like Napoleon III, in a zinger to his administration which Manet viewed as responsible for Maximillian's death.)
Cosmic Variance has a great post on the physics of chocolate and why it doesn't always solidify the way you want it to:
If you've ever tried to use chocolate in its melted form, you've probably discovered that chocolate has a number of peculiarities that frequently thwart your best culinary efforts. For example, if your melted chocolate becomes contaminated with an errant drop of water, the chocolate siezes up. If you try to reharden chocolate that's been melted (say, in making chocolate covered strawberries), you're frequently left with a matte finish and crumbly texture that in no way resembles the dark glossy chocolate you began with.
The reasons for this should be familiar to any solid state physicist (or at least, they were to the one who made my wedding cake and first clued me in). Cocoa butter, one of the dominant ingredients in chocolate, contains several triglycerides that lock into a crystal form when cooled. However, there is not just one form that the triglycerides can lock into, but six of them (beta(I) through beta(VI)). Each successive form is more stable and has a higher melting point. Almost all commercial chocolate is in the beta(V) form -- from what I can tell, you only get to sample beta(VI) in the afterlife, if you've been very, very good. When chocolate goes all wrong, it is usually a failure of the melted and cooled chocolate to recrystallize into the beta(V) state.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 1:32 PM • 0 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Linguistics
A post over at the Scientist blog laments the difficulty in getting people to acknowledge the English-language bias in science:
Many, perhaps most, scientists are grateful that English has become the international language, but an informative protest comes from Prof. Tsuda Yukio of Japan, who has taught in the U.S.
"Today one speaks of globalization. It's really Americanization....the dollar economy and communication in English. Isn't it appropriate to think about egalitarian communication and linguistic equality? .... When I told Americans that the reign of English causes linguistic discrimination they argued adamantly that the world chose English, so what's the problem?
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 1:31 PM • 23 Comments • View blog reactions
May 4, 2008
Category: Movies
Check out this video of synchronizing metronomes...
Read on »
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May 2, 2008
Category: Academia
There is a great blogginghead.tv conversation up between two of my favorite bloggers, Megan McArdle and Daniel Drezner.
They discuss whether academics are bitter. McArdle argues that the labor market makes their lives very unfortunate. Drezner argues that the issue is complicated by the fact that some academics how outside job choices such as industry. They are both probably right.
Posted by Jake Young at 3:53 PM • 3 Comments • View blog reactions
May 1, 2008
Category: Sports Doping
After the whole Floyd Landis thing, I wrote a long post about the science of detecting steroid abuse. The primary test uses something called the T/E ratio to determine whether the athlete has injected steroids. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has a maximum T/E ratio of 4. If an athlete gets greater than four on any test, an investigation gets started.
However, researchers in Sweden have just published a paper suggesting that this test has a possibly fatal flaw.
Schulze et al. show that a gene variant present with alarming frequency in the population allows individuals to inject testosterone without a large increase in their T/E ratio.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 3:25 PM • 1 Comments • View blog reactions
April 30, 2008
Category: Energy Policy
(Keeping with our trend towards a week of economics -- see here and here -- I have another post where I attempt to talk above my pay grade.)
I am as unhappy as anybody about high oil prices making everything on Earth expensive, but I am getting a little annoyed by the Presidential candidates glib statements about how the intend to make it better.
Both Clinton and McCain have come out for a gas tax holiday over the summer. This is a horrible idea for at least two reasons. (1) It will just be a wind fall for oil producers. (2) We need to lower our oil consumption, and high prices are the most effective means for doing so.
Read on »
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April 29, 2008
Category: Economics
Paging Kara (or some other economist).
I have an economics question. We were discussing monopolistic competition in micro today. So I get how because the quantity produced under monopolistic competition is less than the efficient scale there is some dead weight loss on the level of the firm. The quantity is less than where the marginal cost and the demand curves cross.
Here is my question:
Is there a dead weight loss on the level of the market? Does monopolistic competition result in a dead weight loss as compared to perfect competition? Is it sort of like a tax that way, or am I just comparing apples and oranges?
Anyone who can answer that for me will me my deepest appreciation.
Posted by Jake Young at 10:49 PM • 5 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Textbooks
The NYTimes Editorial Board wrote at piece lamenting the high prices of college textbooks and praising Congressional action to limit them:
College students and their families are rightly outraged about the bankrupting costs of textbooks that have nearly tripled since the 1980s, mainly because of marginally useful CD-ROMs and other supplements. A bill pending in Congress would require publishers to sell "unbundled" versions of the books -- minus the pricey add-ons. Even more important, it would require publishers to reveal book prices in marketing material so that professors could choose less-expensive titles.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 4:58 PM • 9 Comments • View blog reactions
April 28, 2008
Category: Haha, a funny
This is pretty funny. Check out Dr. Mezmer's Dictionary of Bad Psychology.
Some of my favorites:
Evolutionary Psychology: A branch of psychology, unwittingly inspired by Charles Darwin and Rudyard Kipling, that describes how we behave through made up stores that guess why we had to behave. In this case, the stories are about what traits our ancestors had to evolve 250,000 years ago to survive. At that time, Mother Nature or evolution was especially demanding, and selected those behavioral traits that permitted survival, much like a mom selects out table manners in her kids. Since all the evidence of this selection process has been washed away in the sands of time, this provides a wonderful opportunity for psychologists to act like trial lawyers, and fabricate evidence and design in tightly spinning plots that would do Agatha Christie proud. Evolutionary psychologists provide 'just so' stories to explain everything about human behavor, and all without the troublesome need to assemble proof. Thus, according to EP, we can run fast because our ancestors had to escape cave bears, got smart because they had to know where the cave bears were, and got sexy because they could rescue cave babes from the cave bears.
And:
Popper, Karl (1902-1994) Distinguished philosopher of science and spoil sport. Popper asserted that you cannot have scientific principles unless they can be subject to disproof or test, and that the spirit of science is to make wild and unfounded conjectures, and to challenge them unmercifully. This Socratic spirit of informed self-doubt is thankfully not needed in psychology, where every year we get new books full of untestable conclusions that purport to explain it all, without a doubt. (see Steven Pinker)
Hat-tip: Mind Hacks
Posted by Jake Young at 2:53 PM • 2 Comments • View blog reactions
April 24, 2008
Category: Food
I can tell you from personal experience that being a med/grad student is not an environment that promotes healthy eating. Your schedule is all over bejesus and back, you're poor, and your often stressed. Rising food prices have made eating out at some place healthy a non-starter. Let's just say the easy fast food fix is very tempting.
NPR had a great story this morning about a Harvard medical student -- Michelle Hauser -- who is also a former chef. She has been teaching her classmates easy meals to cook that are also relatively healthy. This is important stuff for more than just student health. Doctors are role-models for things like this. If you can show that you can be busy and eat right, you are much more likely to inspire your patients to as well.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 4:02 PM • 35 Comments • View blog reactions
April 23, 2008
Category: Politics
Boo on you, Barack and Hillary.
Others have this subject amply covered, but I wanted to note that Barack and Hillary have both jumped on the anti-vaccinationist bandwagon. The bandwagon is getting crowded what with McCain already being on it.
Granted, Barack and Hillary did not say something as flagrantly wrong as when McCain cited "strong evidence" that thiomerosal causes autism. But it is still very disconcerting when politicians engage in this sort of flagrant pandering. Don't they have advisers? Don't they have a single person on their staff who can screen out this nonsense?
It just sucks that they have made evaluation that kooks are a much more valuable constituency than people who care about science.
I dream that there will someday be a candidate who comes out strong not just for scientific funding but scientific accuracy -- for making what they say conform with what we know about the world.
Sadly, it doesn't look like any of these three fit the bill.
Posted by Jake Young at 3:59 PM • 2 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Language
(I have been meaning to post this for about two weeks, so if it is a bit dated forgive me.)
Dyslexia is a learning disability characterized by slower reading skills acquisition, and it is associated with certain structural abnormalities in the brain. However, it turns out that different areas of the brain are affected depending on whether your language is alphabetic (like English) or symbolic (like Chinese).
Siok et al. present evidence in PNAS that English and Chinese languages utilize different brain systems and that as a consequence dyslexia presents differently in English and Chinese speakers.
Read on »
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April 22, 2008
Category: Psychology
The NYTimes has a great interview with Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert:
What we've been seeing in my lab, over and over again, is that people have an inability to predict what will make us happy -- or unhappy. If you can't tell which futures are better than others, it's hard to find happiness. The truth is, bad things don't affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That's true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either.
So the good news is that going blind is not going to make you as unhappy as you think it will. The bad news is that winning the lottery will not make you as happy as you expect.
Read the whole thing.
Gilbert is the author of Stumbling on Happiness, which I highly recommend picking up if you have time. It is not a self-help book instructing people on how to be happy. Rather he expands the argument that people are fundamentally bad at predicting what will make them happy. Their poor predictions result in strategic errors in decision making. He does have some concrete suggestions about what makes people happy more consistently, but mostly it is a book about psychology.
After reading it, however, I was struck by a philosophical question.
Why are humans so bad at predicting the future? And it isn't just our own happiness that we are bad at predicting. Philip Tetlock shows in his book Expert Political Judgment that human beings are likewise piss-poor at predicting the future of complex systems.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 3:36 PM • 5 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Autism
The subpeona against Kathleen Seidel has been quashed.
ENDORSED ORDER granting MOTION to Quash Subpoena.
Text of Order: "Granted. Attorney Clifford Shoemaker is ordered to show cause within 10 days why he should not be sanctioned under Fed R Civ P 11 -- see Fed R Civ P 45(a)(2)(B) which requires that a deposition subpoena be issued from the court in which the deposition is to occur and Fed R Civ P 45 (c)(1) commanding counsel to avoid burdensome subpoenas. A failure to appear will result in notification of Mr Shoemaker's conduct to the Presiding Judge in the Eastern District of Virginia."
So Ordered by Magistrate Judge James R. Muirhead.
(Entered: 04/21/2008)
And the can of mighty whoop-ass was opened, and the just layeth the smack down upon the wicked. Amen.
Mr. Shoemaker now has a little legal problem. See the tiny tear fall down my cheek. Oh wait, you can't because this is the Internet. Oh wait, you also can't because it is too small to be observed by the human senses.
(I love waking up to good news. This is going to put a smile on my face all day.)
Hat-tip: Liz Ditz
Posted by Jake Young at 7:48 AM • 4 Comments • View blog reactions
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