Quotulatiousness

October 16, 2012

Asking for help against bullying may be impossible

Filed under: Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:57

Matt Gurney in the National Post pointing out that the instinctive response of many to bullying just isn’t a viable alternative for many or even most victims of bullying:

The federal NDP has reverted to type, calling for a national strategy to combat bullying. School boards and educators will no doubt develop strategies and zero-tolerance procedures. Counsellors will want to chat about mediating the disputes. Well-intended suggestions, all. But they all suffer from the same fundamental weakness — they can only spring into action once the victim further victimizes themselves. For many, the solution is as bad as the problem.

I’m referring, of course, to the mere act of asking for help. Bullying is an intensely degrading assault. It strips power and dignity away from the victim. Sometimes it’s crushing and sudden, other times it’s gradual, with the victim’s mental defences whittled away piece by piece. The end result, as we all know, can be a victim utterly convinced that everyone is staring at them, laughing at them, enjoying the defenceless, pathetic state they’ve been reduced to. The bullies themselves feed off the crushing of their victims, but the keen attention of the mob is what makes it so humiliating for those targeted. It’s not just a humiliation. It’s a very, very public one.

And it is in that moment of maximum vulnerability and humiliation that the students are supposed to further compound their embarrassment and signal their total defeat by appealing for help from a teacher or counsellor? Or even a parent?

[. . .]

If there is a way forward on bullying — I’m not sure there is, as much as we’d all like one — it will have to recognize the inherent advantage bullies possess. Their victims don’t want help. They might desperately need it, but asking for it is, for most, a step too far, an added injury they simply cannot contemplate. The only effective means of deterring a bully may lie with the observing mob becoming enforcers of an anti-bullying code. And as that seems unlikely, outrage notwithstanding, this is probably a problem we’re stuck with.

Sorting out the real Ada Lovelace from the legend

Filed under: Britain, History, Science, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:18

At The Register, Dave Wilby tries to get to the real contributions of Ada Lovelace:

Ada Lovelace is a compellingly romantic figure, irresistible in today’s age of equal geeky opportunities.

The daughter of “mad, bad and dangerous to know” Lord Byron, her mathematics-loving mother Annabella Milibanke purportedly beat the poet out of her with relentless studies in science, maths and logic.

A beauty enthralled by scientific progress, cut down in her prime after the publication of her most notable work, Lovelace is often easily romanticised and reimagined as a steam punk heroine spearheading female invention and scientific emancipation.

Such claims are sure to be made again with Ada Lovelace Day today.

This image is fanciful, though, and to the unfortunate detriment of her genuine contribution to British technology.

So what are the facts? What did Ada Lovelace really achieve? Did she outshine her female contemporaries in the scientific field? And what debt do today’s female scientists really owe her?

Warren Ellis on the Space Shuttle, aka “NASA’s crucifix pendant”

Filed under: Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In his weekly column at Vice, Warren Ellis “celebrates” the end of the Space Shuttle era:

…and here, dearly beloved, down here in the deep valley of expectations – over whose sides The Future slides like a slab-avalanche of flaming diarrhoea – is where we sit and look up overhead to see the grand dame of the Promised World Of Tomorrow being toured around like an incontinent dowager getting a last viewing from the relatives before being locked away in the old people’s home to drown in her own piss. And not one of us, dearly beloved, not one of us points up at that thing, that Space Shuttle, and calls it out for what it really is: NASA’s crucifix pendant.

Five cosmonauts died in the Russian space programme. A programme of largely unsteerable launch vehicles made to much the same standard as tractors and fuelled with terrifying muck that you’d think was too good to spray on scorpions. The American Space Shuttle alone killed 14. That’s what everyone’s been applauding, by the way – a flying death box that killed 14 people, seven of whom died for the noble and future-facing cause of a good media window.

This leaking thing, paraded across America to joy and applause from a people who don’t even see the lie to them that it represents, will have no eventual museum information board explaining that the Shuttle was the first and only crewed American space vehicle to have no launch escape system. That a limited bailout system was added only after Challenger exploded. There will be no guides reciting the story of how Shuttle killed human spaceflight in America. Also, of course, there will be no large plaque proclaiming that This Isn’t The Real Story.

The Shuttle was sold on the lie that it was the Future, when it was no such thing and never intended for that purpose. It was a domestic political tool for the most part. But it’s also a great object lesson.

October 15, 2012

Jonathan Kay on bullying

Filed under: Health, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:38

In his National Post column, he responds to a fellow journalist’s column on the topic of bullying:

The appetite to bully cannot be treated as a social sickness, or the product of maladaptive psychological development — which is how it is universally depicted in the media, and in government-funded public-service announcements. Bullying is in our genes. And any effort to fight it must reflect that fact.

The reason that bullying has become part of human evolutionary psychology is that it works — for both males and females — as a strategy to increase one’s attractiveness to the opposite sex, one’s perceived social status, and the cohesiveness of one’s social alliances.

In movies, bullies are shown to be wounded individuals whose bullying is a perverse symptom of the pain that’s been inflicted on them by abusive parents inhabiting poor and broken homes, or by more dominant figures in their social pecking order. There is no evidentiary basis for this stereotype. In fact, research cited by Anthony Volk, Joseph Camilleri, Andrew Dane and Zopito Marini in a 2012 Aggressive Behavior journal article indicate that bullying-induced social dominance is correlated with reduced stress and improved physical health. Amazingly, “bullying is also positively linked with other positive mental traits such as … cognitive empathy, leadership, social competence, and self-efficacy.”

[. . .]

The strategy works: Studies show that boys who bully other boys, on average, gain status with girls, who perceive the boys as more dominant. And girls who bully, on average, receive more positive attention from boys.

As the aforementioned authors report, “Dominance has been found to be positively associated with both bullying and peer nominations of dating popularity among adolescents. Bullying is also positively correlated with peer nominations of power, social prominence, student and teacher ratings of perceived popularity and peer leadership” — all of which translate to social capital, which in turn means social or mating opportunities with the opposite sex.

An earlier post on this topic is here.

October 11, 2012

David Suzuki “owes economists an apology”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:09

In the Globe and Mail, Mike Moffatt examines Suzuki’s latest attack on the economics profession and finds it extremely unpersuasive:

Popular environmentalist David Suzuki has described conventional economics as a form of brain damage. In a documentary called Surviving Progress, he quotes a fictional economist by saying, “who cares whether you keep the forest — cut it down. Put the money somewhere else. When those forests are gone, put it in fish. When those fish are gone, put it in computers.”

Beyond tarring the economics profession, he displays a perplexing lack of understanding of basic economic concepts. First of all, none of the rules taught in undergraduate economics course advise the owner of a resource to deplete it as quickly as possible. Perhaps he was confused with the Tragedy of the Commons problem, where lack of private ownership causes a resource to be overused.

[. . .]

The idea that economists do not care about externalities is a strange one, given how prominently they are featured in economics textbooks. An externality is, simply put, a spillover effect. It is the unintended costs or benefits from a transaction or decision experienced by third parties (that is, they were external to the decision). It does not mean phenomena that are external to economic modelling or things outside the interest of economists. Since, as Dr. Suzuki points out, the world is full of externalities, the concept is crucial in economic research.

October 9, 2012

The fight to save booze-soaked Britons from themselves

Filed under: Britain, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:45

At sp!ked, Tim Black points out that the inconvenient truth is that Brits drink less than they used to, despite all the tabloid coverage of boozy downtown outings:

Not that painting a miserable portrait of our drinking habits is particularly hard today. There seems to be a consensus across political parties and the media that alcohol consumption is indeed a big, big problem. The only discussion centres upon the best way to address it. Prime minister David Cameron, for instance, can announce, as he did earlier this year, that the ‘scandal’ of drunkenness and alcohol abuse needs to be tackled, and no one bats an eyelid. Booze Britain, complete with puking teens and pissed parents, is a given, a fact that simply doesn’t need to be challenged.

Yet it really should be challenged. At the same time as 4Children was busy readying its assault on parents who — shock, horror — like to drink, the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) released rather sobering figures. Using tax-receipt data from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and survey material from the Office for National Statistics, the BBPA revealed that reality was rather drier than the drink-soaked fantasists would have us believe. In fact, alcohol consumption in Britain has actually fallen to its lowest level for 13 years. Furthermore, according to The Economist, supping rates have veritably plummeted among the young over the past 10 years. That is, the very people deemed to be vomiting and fighting at the coalface of binge-drink Britannia don’t actually seem to be drinking that much. ‘In 2003’, reports The Economist, ‘70 per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds told interviewers they had had a drink in the previous week; by 2010, just 48 per cent had. The proportion of 11- to 15-year-olds who had drunk in the previous week halved over the same period. Heavy drinking sessions are down, too.’

And this is why the existence of 4Children’s scaremongering report is revealing. In its contorted argument, its counterfactual assertion that there is a big, big problem, it shows how the largely state-backed anti-booze industry, a morass of report-churning quangos and ever-so-concerned charities, is dead set on creating a problem where there really isn’t one. Or perhaps more accurately, it wants to problematise an aspect of our everyday behaviour. It wants to wrest an accepted part of social life from its mundane context, and present it back to us as something weird, harmful, perhaps even sinister.

Falcon 9 loses an engine, able to partially complete mission

Filed under: Space, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:40

Lewis Page at The Register, with a well-timed reminder that work in space is still not routine or ordinary:

The Falcon 9 rocket from upstart rocket firm SpaceX, which lifted off yesterday with supplies for the International Space Station, will deliver those supplies successfully following loss of an engine during launch. However a commercial satellite which was also aboard the rocket has been placed into a lower orbit than planned as a result of the mishap.

As we previously reported, the nine-engined Falcon first stage suffered an engine failure as it climbed towards space, with launch video giving the impression that one of the Merlin rockets had lost its nozzle. The Falcon is designed to carry out its mission even having lost an engine, and the flight path was duly adjusted. The Dragon capsule with supplies for the International Space Station was successfully sent on its way and is expected to reach the ISS without trouble.

[. . .]

Orbcomm says it is investigating the possibility of getting its satellite into the right place using its own onboard propulsion. Even if this can be achieved, however, it will be unsatisfactory as a satellite’s own fuel must be sparingly eked out over its operational lifespan to maintain it in orbit. Using up a lot of it before even beginning operations is liable to mean a short working life for the Orbcomm bird.

October 7, 2012

Recycle, re-use, re- … oops.

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Food, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:48

The EU is being its traditional bureaucratic self again, this time in the home-made jams and jellies department:

It’s a fairly usual part of modern government to try to increase the rate at which people recycle used items. Sometimes it’s a very sensible practice indeed (we’ve been recycling gold for millennia precisely because it is so valuable) and sometimes it’s really rather silly (no trees are saved by paper recycling as we make paper from trees that we grow specifically to make paper). But more recycling is generally seen as a good thing. Which is what makes this latest piece of tomfoolery from the European Union so strange:

    But the thousands who regularly sell their home-made jam, marmalade or chutney in re-used jars may have to abandon their traditions after a warning that they are breaching European health and safety regulations.

    Legal advisers to Britain’s Churches have sent out a circular saying that while people can use jars for jam at home or to give to family and friends, they cannot sell them or even give them away as raffle prizes at a public event.

No, it’s not a spoof. It really is true that those tasked with running an entire continent, the bureaucrats in Brussels, think that putting home made jam (jelly to you perhaps) in used jam jars should be and is a crime. With serious penalties too:

    The agency said it was up to local authority environmental health officers to enforce the regulations, and penalties can reach a maximum of a £5,000 fine, six months’ imprisonment, or both.

Swedish lunch lady ordered to discontinue food that is “too good”

Filed under: Education, Europe, Food, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:37

Everyone wants the best for their kids, but heaven help you if you provide higher quality food than kids at other schools get:

Annika Eriksson, a lunch lady at school in Falun, was told that her cooking is just too good.

Pupils at the school have become accustomed to feasting on newly baked bread and an assortment of 15 vegetables at lunchtime, but now the good times are over.

The municipality has ordered Eriksson to bring it down a notch since other schools do not receive the same calibre of food — and that is “unfair”.

Moreover, the food on offer at the school doesn’t comply with the directives of a local healthy diet scheme which was initiated in 2011, according to the municipality.

“A menu has been developed… It is about making a collective effort on quality, to improve school meals overall and to try and ensure everyone does the same,” Katarina Lindberg, head of the unit responsible for the school diet scheme, told the local Falukuriren newspaper.

However, Lindberg was not aware of Eriksson’s extraordinary culinary efforts and how the decision to force her to cut back had prompted outrage among students and parents.

Of course, Toronto is rapidly catching up to Swedish standards in this regard: we have an active “parents group” that protests against school fundraising efforts because not all schools can raise the same level of donations, so they want equality imposed: either all funds raised should be shared with every school or no fundraising should be allowed at all.

September 30, 2012

Tracking (smaller) space junk in orbit

Filed under: Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:04

Strategy Page on the latest developments in tracking even smaller pieces of space junk in orbit around the Earth:

The U.S. Air Force is spending nearly $4 billion to build a S-Band radar on Kwajalein Island in the Pacific. This will make it easier and cheaper to find and track small (down to 10mm/.4 inch) objects in orbit around the planet. Such small objects are a growing threat and Space Fence will make it possible to track some 300,000 10mm and larger objects in orbit.

Getting hit by an object 100mm (4 inch wide), if it’s coming from the opposite direction in orbit, results in an explosion equivalent to 20 kg (66 pounds) of TNT. That’s all because of the high speed (7 kilometers a second, versus one kilometers a second for high-powered rifles) of objects in orbit. Even a 10mm object hits with the impact of 50-60 g (2 ounces) of explosives. In the last 16 years eight space satellites have been destroyed by collisions with one of the 300,000 lethal (10mm or larger) bits of space junk that are in orbit. As more satellites are launched more bits of space junk are left in orbit. Based on that, and past experience, it’s predicted that ten more satellites will be destroyed by space junk in the next five years. Manned space missions are at risk as well. Three years ago a U.S. Space Shuttle mission to fix the Hubble space telescope faced a one in 229 chance of getting hit with space junk (that would have likely damaged the shuttle and required a backup shuttle be sent up to rescue the crew). Smaller, more numerous, bits of space junk are more of a danger to astronauts (in space suits) working outside. The shuttle crew working outside to repair the Hubble satellite had a much lower chance of being killed by space junk because a man in a space suit is much smaller and the space suits are designed to help the person inside survive a strike by a microscopic piece of space junk.

September 29, 2012

Regulating the size of soft drinks won’t solve the obesity problem, but will infringe on individual rights

Filed under: Food, Health, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:41

At Reason, Baylen Linnekin explains that even if all the claims about the nutritional evils of sweetened soft drinks are completely true, regulations will not actually make much difference:

As an opponent of increased regulations, I find these latter scientific points noteworthy. But I also believe that even if sugar-sweetened drinks turn out to be virtually everything their opponents claim, people still have a right to buy and drink these beverages — just as much, as I argued in a recent Bloggingheads debate, as they have a right to buy a Big Mac. After all, we don’t have a right to free speech or to travel from one state to another because speech or travel has been proven by the scientific community to promote good health.

But suppose, for the sake of argument, I was to take at face value the assertions of those who claim the NEJM studies justify some combination of sugary drink taxes and bans.

There is still this problem: The solutions these advocates propose won’t likely solve the problem of obesity. For example, studies have suggested taxes will have little or no impact on obesity. And not one person has (to the best of my knowledge) even attempted to argue that soda bans would have any specific impact, either — unless one counts “sending a message” or “creating a debate” as conditions precedent to weight loss.

There is also the issue of a genetic predisposition, which again is one finding of the studies. Many people are genetically predisposed to certain food allergies — including soy, dairy, gluten, nuts, and seafood — and food intolerances. I have never seen a researcher or AP journalist like Marchione argue seriously that the widespread impact of food allergies “adds weight to the push for taxes” on wheat, tofu, and shrimp. Yet if one were to buy the argument of those calling for taxes and bans to combat consumption of sugary drinks in light of the NEJM studies, one would have to accept the idea of taxing society writ large based largely on the outcomes of what these researchers argue is a genetic condition.

September 28, 2012

The future of electronics might be biodegradable

Filed under: Health, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:14

Brid-Aine Parnell at The Register, talking about specialized electronic development:

When it comes to electronics, boffins are usually going one way — how to make them smaller, faster and longer lasting, but a few researchers are going against the tide — looking for electronics that can last just a moment and then disappear.

At the University of Illinois, with help from Tufts and Northwestern Universities, scientists have come up with biodegradable electronics that can do their job and then dissolve. Apart from reducing the amount of consumer electronics in landfills, the disappearing gizmos could also work as medical implants, before dissolving in bodily fluids, as environmental monitors or any other device that needs to disappear.

“From the earliest days of the electronics industry, a key design goal has been to build devices that last forever — with completely stable performance,” Illinois professor of engineering and project leader John Rogers said.

“But if you think about the opposite possibility — devices that are engineered to physically disappear in a controlled and programmed manner — then other, completely different kinds of application opportunities open up.”

Reason.tv: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring at 50 Years

Filed under: Books, Environment, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:57

“It’s not polite to talk about brown and black people dying because rich white people in America feel better about themselves when the brown and black people don’t get to use DDT,” says the University of Alabama’s Andrew Morriss, co-editor of the new book Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson.

Published by the Cato Institute, the collection of essays by environmentalists, law professors, economists, and other analysts argues that the legacy of Carson’s best-known book — widely considered the starting point of the modern environmentalist movement and the international ban on the malaria-fighting pesticide DDT — has caused many more problems than it has solved.

Reason‘s Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down with Morriss to talk about Carson’s work and influence on environmental policy.

September 25, 2012

SpaceX Grasshopper completes first (tiny) hop

Filed under: Space, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:06

At The Register, Lewis Page discusses the first successful launch-and-hover by SpaceX’s Grasshopper:

SpaceX, the upstart space startup founded and bankrolled by famous internet nerdwealth kingpin Elon Musk, says it has carried out the first test of a new rocket craft which could lead to development of fully reusable spacecraft.

[. . .]

Grasshopper uses the fuel tank of the Falcon 9 first stage, but has only one Merlin rocket engine (as opposed to 9 on the real deal), so it is only a test vehicle. It is evidently intended to prove the technology needed to let a rocket descend to a vertical hovering landing. Such kit has already been proven in Moon and Mars lander missions, but is seldom employed for setdowns on Earth — and the job of putting down a towering 100-foot tall booster as opposed to a relatively handy capsule could be particularly challenging.

The idea would be that in future a Falcon 9 rocket stack would lift off as normal: but rather than waiting until the first stage had run out of fuel to separate and fire up the second stage, the lower booster would break away while it still had fuel left — enough to come down to a hovering pad landing. This would rob the whole stack of some lifting power, but on the other hand it would avoid the need to crash the pricey first stage into the sea and destroy it every time. This could potentially slash the costs of space launch: which is the avowed mission of SpaceX.

A bit more progress in autism research

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:19

An article at the Wall Street Journal discusses some recent advances in uncovering the causes of autism:

Scientists say that roughly 20% of autism cases can be linked to known genetic abnormalities, and many more may be discovered.

Pinpointing a genetic explanation can help predict whether siblings are likely to have the disorder — and even point to new, targeted treatments. Last week, for example, researchers reported that an experimental drug, arbaclofen, reduced social withdrawal and challenging behaviors in children and adults with Fragile X syndrome, the single most common genetic cause of autism.

[. . .]

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a collection of conditions that can range in severity from the social awkwardness and narrow interests seen in Asperger’s to severe communication and intellectual disabilities. ASD now affects 1 in every 88 U.S. children — nearly double the rate in 2002 — according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

No single blood test or brain scan can diagnose autism spectrum disorders — in part because environmental factors also play a major role. But once a child is diagnosed, on the basis of symptoms and behavioral tests, researchers can work backward looking for genetic causes.

Both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Medical Genetics recommend that all children diagnosed with ASD be tested for Fragile X Syndrome and other chromosome abnormalities. The newest tests, called chromosomal microanalysis, can identify submicroscopic deletions or duplications in DNA sequences known to be associated with autism. Together, these tests find genetic explanations for more than 10% of autism cases.

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