Culture
cortex | October 2, 2006Nobody knows much about this "ultracapacitor" technology - and one must always be skeptical of technological utopias - but it sure sounds promising:
Imagine the day when cellphones charge up in seconds, laptop batteries never degrade, and electric cars have the same power, driving range and purchase price as their gas-powered cousins.
It's a consumer's dream and an engineer's fantasy: Safe, affordable and eco-friendly batteries that can store immense amounts of energy, allow for lightning-fast charging, and handle virtually unlimited discharging with little affect on quality.
Such a battery…
cortex | September 30, 2006Sometimes I'm amazed at the pockets of ignorance lurking in our midst. This is the sad story of a Texas art teacher who got suspended for taking her class to the museum. Her crime? Letting her innocent pupils glimpse some 16th century paintings that - gasp! - revealed a nipple or two. If the mirror of art reveals our own reflection, then this is sad indeed. The same artistic subjects that were suitable for pre-Enlightenment Europe - even religious paintings used to celebrate the nude body - are now deemed pornographic. Manet is laughing at us:
cortex | September 29, 2006It's Michael Kinsley day here at the Frontal Cortex. Over at the Guardian, Kinsley has another stupendous piece lamenting the sharp division that American newspapers (especially the NY Times) try to draw between fact and opinion.
According to a column by its "public editor" (aka ombudsman, or official busybody), the New York Times has been asking itself whether it does enough to distinguish between fact and opinion in its pages. A "newsroom committee on credibility" looked into the matter and decided that what was needed was a "news/opinion divide committee". The nine lucky editors on this…
cortex | September 29, 2006No, I'm not talking crystal meth, and that much hyped syndrome, methmouth. I'm talking about your cholesterol medication, or your blood pressure pills, or your Prozac. From Steven Dubner:
Dr. Reiss [Dubner's dentist] told me that tooth decay in general, even among wealthy patients, is getting worse and worse, particularly for people in middle age and above. The reason? An increased reliance on medications for heart disease, high cholesterol, depression, etc. Many of these medications, Dr. Reiss explained, produces drymouth, which is caused by a constricted salivary flow; because saliva kills…
cortex | September 29, 2006It's not particularly difficult to expose the incoherence of current Republican policy. But few do it with the wit and brio of Michael Kinsley:
It was, I believe, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) who first made the excellent, bitter and terribly unfair joke about conservatives who believe in a right to life that begins at conception and ends at birth.
This joke has been adapted for use against various Republican politicians ever since. In the case of President Bush, though, it appears to be literally true.
Read the whole thing.
cortex | September 29, 2006It's one of the grandest experiments in American democracy since the invention of the paper ballot, and nobody seems to care. Many municipalities are now moving towards electronic voting, and the results are starting to trickle in. So far, things have not gone well. (In fact, things went so badly that Senate Democrats are trying to fund paper ballots as a back up.)
What are the big problems with electronic voting? Let us count:
1) The code that runs these touch-screen machines has never been vetted by independent computer security analysts.
2) On most machines, there is no way to determine…
cortex | September 22, 2006According to Ann Veneman, the executive director of Unicef:
"Women do 66 percent of the work in the world, produce 50 percent of the food, but earn 5 percent of income and 1 percent of the property."
cortex | September 22, 2006With all the debate in Congress over illegal immigration, this paper is bound to cause a serious brouhaha. I haven't read the manuscript yet, but the numbers cited in the abstract are certainly thought-provoking. Economics is ultimately a study of trade-offs, and these economists clearly believe that the big losers when it comes to increased immigration are African-American men. If that's true, should liberals rethink their support for a comprehensive immigration bill?
The employment rate of black men, and particularly of low-skill black men, fell precipitously from 1960 to 2000. At the…
cortex | September 21, 2006...is being a crack dealer. You make much less than minimum wage, and have to live with your mother. Steven Levitt explains.
cortex | September 21, 2006An excellent op-ed by Nina Plank on ways to reduce the amount of dangerous E. coli in our food supply. The answer is stupendously simple: feed cattle what they were meant to eat.
E. coli O157:H7 [the strain responsible for the latest outbreak] is not found in the intestinal tracts of cattle raised on their natural diet of grass, hay and other fibrous forage. No, O157 thrives in a new -- that is, recent in the history of animal diets -- biological niche: the unnaturally acidic stomachs of beef and dairy cattle fed on grain, the typical ration on most industrial farms. It's the infected manure…
cortex | September 21, 2006So the state of California has launched a frivolous lawsuit going after automakers for producing greenhouse gases.
The lawsuit contends that the greenhouses gases, mostly carbon dioxide, emitted from cars is a public nuisance and that automakers should pay for damages to the state's environment and public works.
"Basically, what we are saying is it's old-fashioned economics. You should pay for the damage you cause," Lockyer said in an interview. He noted that "the automobile industry manufactures products that are the largest growing source of carbon emission in the state and country."…
cortex | September 20, 2006Looks like even the camera - that tool of verisimilitude - is leaving the reality based community. HP just introduced a digitical camera capable of "slimming photos". After all, who needs to diet when you can just admire pictures of your skinny self? The company says that the technology can take off 10 pounds. Look at the promotional website to see for yourself.
cortex | September 20, 2006One of the more unfortunate side-effects of the endless creationist controversy is that it dehumanizes Darwin: he either becomes a biological prophet - the Newton of life - or a Faustian devil, a thinker who sold his soul to discredit god. What gets lost is Darwin's astonishing scientific process, the stubborn way he solved the history of life by trying to make sense of its strange details. (Among creationists, it's also a truism that Darwin did no experiments, that the "theory" of natural selection was never empirically tested. Needless to say, they are magnificently wrong.) David Quammen's…
cortex | September 19, 2006I was raised on Costco farmed salmon, those mealy slabs of pinkish fish protein. My first bite of wild salmon was a revelation. It was a different species of taste, so rich and oily and strong. You could practically taste the swim upstream. So I was interested in this WSJ article on the billions of conservation dollars that have been wasted on wild salmon in the Northwest. The failed program offers a lesson in the difficulty of tampering with the logic of nature, even when our intentions are noble:
For more than a quarter of a century, a federal agency in the Pacific Northwest has been…
cortex | September 19, 2006One of the few accurate criticisms of An Inconvenient Truth was the way it deliberately avoided difficult policy prescriptions. For one thing, there was no mention of a high carbon tax, one thing our country (and atmosphere) desperately need. (And liberals aren't the only ones endorsing a carbon tax. See this list of Pigou club members...)
In an eloquent speech yesterday at NYU, Gore made up for any wonkish details that his movie left out. I was most struck by his proposal to replace all payroll taxes with pollution taxes.
For the last fourteen years, I have advocated the elimination of all…
cortex | September 18, 2006Peers matter. According to two recent economics papers, the behavior of our peers determines our own. Alexandre Mas and Enrico Moretti looked at worker productivity:
A 10% increase in average co-worker permanent productivity is associated with 1.7% increase in a worker's effort. Most of this peer effect arises from low productivity workers benefiting from the presence of high productivity workers.
A separate working paper looked at the peer effects on 6th graders. Was their behavior affected by whether or not they went to a middle school (with older peers) or an elementary school (with…
cortex | September 16, 2006From David Remnick's outstanding profile of Bill Clinton in The New Yorker (not online):
"'I keep reading that Bush is incurious, but when he talks to me he asks a lot of questions,' Clinton went on. 'So I can't give him a bad grade on curiousity. I think both he and his father, because they have peculiar speech patterns, have been underestimated in terms of their intellectual capacity. You know, the way they speak and all, it could be, it could just relate to the way the synapses work in their brain.'"
I just love the reference to neuroscience. The whole article, though scrupulous and fair,…
cortex | September 15, 2006The always interesting Sharon Begley has a WSJ column today on the new scientific journals that only publish negative results.
A handful of journals that publish only negative results are gaining traction, and new ones are on the drawing boards.
"You hear stories about negative studies getting stuck in a file drawer, but rigorous analyses also support the suspicion that journals are biased in favor of positive studies," says David Lehrer of the University of Helsinki, who is spearheading the new Journal of Spurious Correlations.
"Positive" means those showing that some intervention had an…
cortex | September 14, 2006From the WSJ:
Nature, one of the world's most prestigious scientific research journals, has embarked on an experiment of its own.
In addition to having articles submitted for publication subjected to peer reviews by a handful of experts in the field, the 136-year-old journal is trying out a new system for authors who agree to participate: posting the paper online and inviting scientists in the field to submit comments praising -- or poking holes -- in it.
Lay readers can see the submitted articles as well, but the site says postings are only for scientists in the discipline, who must list…
cortex | September 13, 2006According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Starbucks Frappuccino is equivalent in calories to a McDonald's coffee plus 11 of their creamers and 29 packets of sugar. A venti Caffè Mocha with whipped cream is calorically equivalent to a Quarter Pounder with cheese. This is the glory of American fast food: it can even make espresso drinks fattening.