kcontreary | August 23, 2007Every now and then, it behooves us to stop listening to the shouting heads on television and look at some numbers. A new study by the Pew Hispanic Center shows that Latino immigrants are moving up the economic ladder, out of low-wage jobs and into middle-wage employment.
The survey uses the hourly wage distribution in the US to examine relative income, dividing the distribution into five groups: low, low-middle, middle, high-middle, and high (bonus points for creativity!). Demographic group data comparisons from 1995 and 2005 provide the basis for inference about economic mobility. Both…
purepedantry | August 23, 2007This is genius.
These guys are proposing that we construct Fantasy Journals -- drafted sets of journal articles -- at meetings and scientific gatherings sort of like Fantasy Football. Each player would get access to say all the papers to be presented at the meeting (or a more limited number if that is too many). Your journal is selected from that number, and the winner is determined at the next year's meeting by the citation numbers for your papers.
Bergstrom et al. list the possible benefits:
This is a game that one would win by being good at picking the soon-to-be hot papers. Our lab…
purepedantry | August 22, 2007Megan McArdle on the morality -- not the economics -- of a single-payer healthcare system:
As a class, are the young and healthy more responsible for the bad health of the old and sick? Quite the reverse. Many people in the old and sick category did nothing at all to deserve their fate; they just aged or were victims of fate. But some members of the "old and sick" class contributed to their fate. Contra many of my interlocutors, there are a lot of very expensive diseases that have a substantial lifestyle component: high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, diabetes, lung cancer, emphysema…
purepedantry | August 22, 2007NYTimes Science section, why do you make me so mad?
Gretchen Reynolds published an article in the Times on cognitive improvements associated with exercise, and I would like to use it to make a point about how science journalism often gets the facts right but the interpretation wrong.
It begins with the following incorrect statement:
The Morris water maze is the rodent equivalent of an I.Q. test: mice are placed in a tank filled with water dyed an opaque color. Beneath a small area of the surface is a platform, which the mice can't see. Despite what you've heard about rodents and sinking…
purepedantry | August 21, 2007The space shuttle Endeavor has landed safely at Kennedy Space Center:
After two weeks of analyzing, worrying and ultimately taking no action to repair a small but deep gouge in the Endeavour's underside, NASA flight controllers cleared the shuttle to return to Earth this morning.
"You are go for the de-orbit burn," Christopher J. Ferguson, an astronaut at the NASA's mission control center in Houston, radioed to the Endeavour crew at 11:05 a.m. Eastern time.
Starting at 11:25 a.m., with broken clouds but otherwise blue skies over the landing strip and a steady breeze blowing near the ground,…
purepedantry | August 21, 2007Dusk in Autumn on the perils of blogs and Wikipedia:
In reality, the greatest threat to the intellectual lives of college graduates -- at least those whose minds have not irreparably rotted from studying literary theory or women's studies -- is internet pseudo-learning, exemplified by an addiction to Wikipedia and to blogs. I'll admit that a few years ago, I too was trapped in an ever-increasing spiral of Wikipedia tabs open simultaneously. For unlike TV, Wikipedia is seductive since there is a veneer of respectability to it, and clicking through its entries does, at least occasionally,…
purepedantry | August 20, 2007Anterior Commissure on the reproductive success explanation for why men insult women:
Researchers uncovered convincing evidence that partner-directed insults help to "maintain an intimate partner's exclusive involvement in the relationship." While men employed a variety of insults, ranging from physical to mental, insults that accused a mate of sexual infidelity were most predictive of men's successful mate retention. It's no suprise, then, that men most likely to insult their partner were those who believed their partners were likely to cheat. Based on these findings, researchers believe…
purepedantry | August 20, 2007If you wanted to measure the good effects of cooperative behavior in a species, how would you do it? There are many ways, but common ones are to measure the size of the animals in question (to see if they are eating well) or to measure the number of offspring. Positive effects for cooperative behavior would should result in increases in these measures.
Not always so, say Russell et al. in Science, largely because the birds are being tricky enough to exploit their neighbors.
The Superb Fairy-Wren (superb, I tell you...simply superb!) is a species of bird that raises its young other…
purepedantry | August 20, 2007We tend to think of memories in the brain once they are consolidated as relatively stable things. For example, you don't tend to think of any active biochemical process being necessary to maintain long-term memories. This is almost an intuitive conclusion: wouldn't any active process required for memory maintenance be eventually disrupted if expected to operate over a long period? Further, we know that it forgetting is an active rather than a passive process -- such as in fear extinction where activity in certain parts of the brain is necessary to successfully "forget" the fear.
However,…
purepedantry | August 17, 2007A lab in Japan has created a new way of making 3D animation by using lasers to create balls of plasma in the air:
Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) has developed a device that uses lasers to project real three-dimensional images in mid-air. The institute unveiled the device on February 7 in a demonstration that showed off the device's ability to project three-dimensional shapes of white light.
AIST developed the projector with the cooperation of Keio University and Burton Inc. (Kawasaki, Japan). Until now, projected three-dimensional imagery has…
purepedantry | August 17, 2007Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, in their seminal work A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 (1963), argued that the policies of the Federal Reserve led to the Great Depression. These policies included cheap money during the 20s followed by a precipitous contraction in the money supply during the recession of the late 20s and early 30s. They argue that this prolonged what would have been a relatively short recession. Their view contrasts Keynes's argument view that the because of a liquidity trap, monetary policy by the Federal Reserve would be ineffective at staving off a…
purepedantry | August 16, 2007The New Yorker has an exquisite article by Adam Gopnik on science fiction writer, Phillip K. Dick. Gopnik doesn't pull punches; Dick was in many ways bat-shit crazy. He also had a genius for understanding that the future would likely be just as wrong -- in the way that people in 60s tended to define wrong -- as the present. This sense of stability in human nature made his books ironic and deeply satirical.
Money quote:
Dick's admirers identify his subjects as..."reality and madness, time and death, sin and salvation." Later, as he became crazier, he did see questions in vast cosmological…
kcontreary | August 15, 2007As Winston Churchill once said: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." While still humorous in its construction, this statement is hardly controversial in this day and age, when most of the world is (at least in name) governed "by the people". But Bryan Caplan, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and associate professor of economics at George Mason University, would like us to revisit our belief in democracy as the ideal form of government, if not in fundamentals, then certainly in scope. He has written a book…
purepedantry | August 14, 2007I hadn't really ever thought about it, but surveys consistently report that heterosexual men have a larger number of sexual partners on average than heterosexual women. However, that really isn't logically possible, is it? I mean, last time I checked it took two to tango. Mathematician David Gale demonstrates why these results cannot be right in the NYTimes:
One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. Another study, by British researchers, stated that men had 12.7…
purepedantry | August 14, 2007I sometimes gave my anatomy professors hell for wearing anatomy-themed t-shirts, but this is a whole new level. Check out these anatomy-themed tattoos.
There are many more here.
Hat-tip: Andrew Sullivan
purepedantry | August 14, 2007This is pretty funny, but also quite true. It is from a comment on a post at Chicago Boyz:
One of the arguments in Jonathan Rauch's "In Defense of Prejudice," is another dirty secret is that, no less than the rest of us, scientists can be dogmatic and pigheaded. "Although this pigheadedness often damages the careers of individual scientists," says Hull, "it is beneficial for the manifest goal of science," which relies on people to invest years in their ideas and defend them passionately. And the dirtiest secret of all, if you believe in the antiseptic popular view of science, is that this…
purepedantry | August 14, 2007This has got to be the dumbest article I have ever read.
The headline reads: Brain blood flow helps treat depression.
Well, yeah. Try having a brain without blood flow, and you will be pretty depressed too.
It gets better. Here is what the article says:
Israeli scientists have confirmed the usefulness of established molecular imaging approaches in the treatment of depression.
"Individuals in a depressed emotional state have impaired cerebral blood flow," said Associate Professor Omer Bonne at Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem. "Clinical improvement in depression is…
purepedantry | August 13, 2007If you haven't read this post by Matthew Nisbet at Framing Science, you really, really should. It shows how framing scientific issues in terms of jobs and economic competitiveness is much more likely to pass funding bills:
As I've noted here many times, major funding initiatives for science are mostly likely to be successful in winning support from policymakers under conditions where they can be exclusively defined in terms of economic competitiveness and growth. If opponents are unable to recast elements of the proposal in terms of public accountability (funding in the public vs private…
purepedantry | August 13, 2007I read this article in the Economist that summarizes a paper showing that men wanting to attract women spend conspicuously and women wanting to attract men volunteer conspicuously. All I could think about when I read it was, "Well, I guess Veblen was right about something." (I will get to the article at the bottom, but this is an interesting history lesson for those of you who haven't heard of Veblen.)
Thorstein Veblen was a turn of the century economist and social critic noted for coining term conspicuous consumption. Conspicuous consumption is when you buy something really expensive so…
purepedantry | August 10, 2007Nicholas Wade reports in the NYTimes about a UCD professor, Gregory Clark, and his theory of the Industrial Revolution. His answer is that high fertility rates in the upper classes caused them to steadily supplant lower classes. They brought productive values with them such that when the population reached a critical mass of individuals with middle class breeding so to speak, the Industrial Revolution occurred:
A way to test the idea, he realized, was through analysis of ancient wills, which might reveal a connection between wealth and the number of progeny. The wills did that, but in…