Quotulatiousness

April 24, 2012

Is your boss a baboon? You’re quite correct

Filed under: Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:07

Matt Ridley reviews a new book, Games Primates Play by Dario Maestripieri:

Generally, junior professors write long and unsolicited emails to senior professors, who reply with short ones after a delay; the juniors then reply quickly and at length. This is not because the seniors are busier, for they, too, write longer and more punctually when addressing their deans and funders, who reply more briefly and tardily. The asymmetry in length and speed of reply correlates with dominance.

When a subordinate chimpanzee grooms a dominant one, it often does so for a long time and unsolicited. When it then requests to be groomed in turn, it receives only a brief grooming and usually after having to ask a second time.

[. . .]

He observes two university colleagues in a coffee shop and notes how the senior one takes the chair with the back to the wall (the better to spot attacks by rivals or leopards), is less attentive to her colleague’s remarks than vice versa, stares down her colleague when a contentious issue comes up and takes the lead on walking out the door at the end-all of it neatly corresponding to the behavior of two baboons when one is dominant.

(A new member of a committee on which I served once asked me why a senior colleague was being so horrible to him. I replied: “Oh, it’s because when a new male baboon joins a troop, it’s traditional for the alpha male to beat him up before becoming his best friend — soon he’ll think the world of you.” I was right.)

It includes a fascinating insight into the benefits and problems of peer review.

April 23, 2012

Autism

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:41

Sandy Starr refutes the notion that “we are all on the autism spectrum now”:

Is autism a disorder? Is autism an identity? If you had asked me these questions a few years ago, before I became involved with the Autism Ethics Group at King’s College London, then my answer would have been a clear ‘yes’ and ‘no’ respectively. Clearly, autism is most usefully understood as a disorder. And clearly, it is not useful to understand autism as an identity.

If you were to ask me the same two questions today, then I would say exactly the same thing.
[. . .]

The whole concept of autism originates in psychopathology. Hans Asperger (after whom Asperger’s syndrome is named) talked about ‘autistic psychopathy’. Autism is found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). And yet we now seem uneasy about the characterisation of autism as a disorder. Why?

For one thing, a disorder implies a lack of normal or typical function. The increasing numbers of people who are thought to warrant a diagnosis of either ‘classical’ autism, atypical autism or Asperger’s syndrome is now of a scale sufficient to make one ask whether autism is, in fact, exceptional. Only last month, there were newspaper headlines about the fact that about one per cent of schoolchildren in the UK are now recorded as having some kind of autistic spectrum disorder (double the figure from only five years previously). This was followed by the news that according to a new study by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, one in 88 children in the USA now have an autistic spectrum disorder (again, almost double the figure from five years previously).

We can speculate about the reasons for this recent upsurge, but, in order to understand it, I think it’s necessary to go back a little further and look at the broadening of autism through the concept of the ‘autism spectrum’, which is what has made it possible for autism to encompass high-functioning individuals such as myself. I think the potential for an unimpeded expansion of the category of autism, of the sort we are now seeing, may have already been there when autism was first conceptualised in the 1940s. It was certainly there once the notion of the ‘spectrum’ was introduced into psychiatry at the end of the 1960s.

I would argue that the category of autism has become less coherent, and consequently less meaningful and less useful, as a result of its expansion. And I think the osmosis into informal discourse and the pop culture of clinical terminology about autism has further undermined the category’s coherence. This has led to a situation where the ‘spectrum’ — once a categorical means of bringing together low- and high-functioning individuals who (arguably) have some features in common — is now routinely used to mean an uninterrupted continuum, ranging all the way from the pathological to the normal.

April 22, 2012

Earth Day: 42 years of crying “wolf”

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

Peter Foster piles on the scorn for the 42nd anniversary of Earth Day:

For more than 40 years, Earth Day has both reflected genuine environmental concern and mirrored the UN’s attempted eco power grab. Sunday’s Earth Day comes two months ahead of the vast, but significantly brief, UN Rio+20 conference. Both are pale reflections of their original radical aspirations. Earth Day is still celebrated, but 42 years of crying wolf have inevitably had an effect. The event has also been corporatized, greenwashed and taken over by such announcements as that of the “50 sexiest environmentalists.” Rio+20 will represent the graveyard of aspirations for all prospective — and inevitably less sexy — Captains of Spaceship Earth, Global Saviours, and High Priests of Gaia.

That Earth Day has gone Happy Face, and Rio+20 will be a farce, reflects the fact that their apocalyptic assumptions have turned out to be so wrong. In Canada, as in other developed countries, we can celebrate significant improvements in air quality, and success in coping with industrial impacts on water. The Great Lakes have been cleaned up, forest cover has been maintained, and the amount of “protected” land doubled. The use of toxic chemicals in industrial production has been slashed. Some credit must obviously go to activism, but the more radical end of the movement has always had a lot more than just the environment in mind.

[. . .]

That misunderstandings and misrepresentations were at the root of radical environmental thinking was exemplifed by an “equation-of-doom” hatched in the 1970s by two prominent radicals, Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren (President Obama’s current senior science and technology advisor). The equation was I=P x A x T: Human Impact (I) equals Population (P) times Affluence (A) times Technology (T). The formula was vague, but it clearly suggested that population, wealth and technology were all “bad” for Mother Earth.

Such thinking was based on a primitive, static, zero-sum view of economic development and a demonization of business. Since resources were “finite,” all development was claimed by definition to be “unsustainable.” Advancing technology merely chewed up resources faster and accelerated us down the road to exhaustion. All this came with biblical overtones. On the first Earth Day, Prof. Ehrlich thundered that “In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.”

April 20, 2012

Building High Speed Rail won’t do much to cut carbon dioxide emissions

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:11

Brad Plumer at the Washington Post on the latest straw that high speed rail enthusiasts have been grabbing to justify their expensive toys:

… Brown’s administration has proposed using money raised by California’s new climate law. Under the state’s cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, power plants and factories will have to buy permits to pollute. Brown has suggested diverting this money into high-speed rail. But there are two problems here. For one, this might be illegal, as the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office concluded on Tuesday. But second — and more broadly — high-speed rail turns out not to be the most effective use of money that’s meant to combat global warming.

Paul Druce at Reason & Rail offered up a few numbers on this topic last year. The California High Speed Rail Authority claims that by 2030, if the train ran entirely on renewable energy, then it would reduce the state’s carbon emissions by about 5.4 million metric tons a year. If you ignore all the energy used to build the system, that means the rail network would reduce California’s emissions at a cost of $12,506 per metric ton of carbon dioxide.

That’s a pricey way to cut carbon. To put this in perspective, research has suggested that you could plant 100 million acres of trees and reforest the United States for a cost of about $21 to $91 per ton of carbon dioxide. Alternatively, a study by Dan Kammen of UC Berkeley found that it would cost somewhere between $59 and $87 per ton of carbon dioxide to phase out coal power in the Western United States and replace it with solar, wind and geothermal. If reducing greenhouse gases is your goal, then there are much more cost-effective ways to do it than building a bullet train.

April 19, 2012

“Ontario is on track to have the highest electricity prices … in North America”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:08

Scott Stinson explains why Ontario consumers are facing huge price hikes for electricity over the next 18 months:

It’s no secret that Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals have placed a huge bet on growing a green-energy sector by subsidizing the production of renewable energy. Although energy bills have been steadily rising since the party took power in 2003 — the average cost of a kilowatt of electricity was more than 30% higher last year than it was five years ago — the Liberals have somewhat masked this fact by handing a 10% rebate back to consumers with the euphemistically named Clean Energy Benefit, which also happens to utterly contradict the conservation incentive that should be part of a switch to a greener grid.

Electricity costs, though, are set to spike.

“Ontario’s power system is fuelled by consumers to the tune of about $16-billion a year,” says Tom Adams, an energy consultant who has written extensively on electricity and environmental issues. “That number is headed for $23-billion or $24-billion soon, by 2016,” he says in an interview.

[. . .]

Mr. Adams notes that when the Green Energy Act, with its guarantees of above-market rates for wind and solar electricity known as feed-in-tariffs (FIT), was introduced in 2009, the Liberals said electricity costs would only be impacted by about 1% annually. We now know that rates for consumers are rising by 9% a year. “The government says about half of that is due to Green Energy, but if they were being honest it would be more than that,” Mr. Adams says.

The coming increases, meanwhile, which can partly be attributed to locked-in contracts for renewable energy, are also a result of a host of other factors, from new generation capacity being introduced to phase-out costs of existing facilities to new transmission capacity being added to the energy grid.

The Limits to Growth scorecard, 40 years on

Filed under: Books, Economics, Environment, Food, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:00

Ronald Bailey tots up the hits and misses from that 1972 dystopia manual, The Limits to Growth:

Industrial development: World GDP stood in real 2010 dollars at about $19 trillion in 1972 and has tripled to $57 trillion today. Average per capita incomes rose in real dollars from $5,000 to $8,100 today. Just to explore how incomes might evolve between 1972 and 2000, the researchers simply extrapolated the current growth, investment, and population growth rates to calculate GDP per capita for 10 large countries. They stressed these were not “predictions” but added that if one disagreed then one was obligated to specify which factors changed, when and why. A comparison of their extrapolations with actual GDP per capita (in 2010 dollars) finds U.S. GDP per capita $56,000 versus actual $44,000; Japan’s per capita GDP was projected to be $120,000 versus actual $46,000; the now defunct USSR would be $33,000 versus Russia’s $2,200; and China’s per capita income was supposed to grow to $500, but was instead $1,200.

Population: The Limits researchers noted, “Unless there is a sharp rise in mortality, which mankind will strive mightily to avoid, we can look forward to a world population of around 7 billion persons in 30 more years.” In addition, they suggested that in 60 years there would be “four people in the world for everyone living today.” In fact, average global life expectancy rose from 60 to nearly 70 years. On the other hand, the global fertility rate (the average number of children a woman has during her lifetime) fell from about 6 per woman in 1970 to 2.8 today and continues to fall.

[. . .]

Food supplies: According to the data from the Food and Agriculture Organization, global food production has more than tripled since 1961, while world population has increased from 3 billion to 7 billion. This means that per capita food has increased by more than a third. The latest figures from the United Nations show that as world population increased by a bit over 10 percent between 2000 and 2009, global food production rose by 21 percent.

[. . .]

Nonrenewable resources: Probably the most notorious projections from the MIT computer model involved the future of nonrenewable resources. The researchers warned: “Given present resource consumption rates and the projected increase in these rates, the great majority of currently nonrenewable resources will be extremely expensive 100 years from now.” To emphasize the point they pointed out that “those resources with the shortest static reserve indices have already begun to increase.” For example, they noted that the price of mercury had increased 500 percent in the last 20 years and the price of lead was up 300 percent over the past 30 years. The advent of the “oil crises” of the 1970s lent some credibility to these projections.

To highlight how dire the situation with nonrenewable resources was, the MIT researchers calculated how quickly exponential consumption could deplete known reserves of various minerals and fossil fuels. Even if global consumption rates didn’t increase at all, the MIT modelers calculated 40 years ago that known world copper reserves would be entirely depleted in 36 years, lead in 26 years, mercury in 13 years, natural gas in 38 years, petroleum in 31 years, silver in 16 years, tin in 17 years, tungsten in 40 years, and zinc in 23 years. In other words, most of these nonrenewable resources would be entirely used up before the end of the 20th century.

[. . .]

Environment: In most of the Limits model runs, the ultimate factor that does humanity in is pollution. In their model pollution directly increases human death rates and also dramatically reduces food production. In fact, as the world economy has grown, global average life expectancy has increased from 52 years in 1960 to 70 years now. It must be acknowledged that globally, pollution from industrial and agricultural production continues to rise. But the model assumed that pollution would increase at exponential rates. However, many pollution trends have not increased exponentially in advanced countries.

Consider that since 1970, the U.S. economy has grown by 200 percent, yet the levels of air pollutants regulated by the federal government have fallen by nearly 60 percent. For example, in both the U.S. and the European Union sulfur dioxide emissions have dropped by nearly 70 percent since 1990. Recent data suggests that sulfur dioxide emissions even from rapidly industrializing China peaked in 2006 and have begun declining. Earlier studies cite evidence for a pollution turning point income threshold (purchasing power parity) of around $10,000 for demands to reduce this form of air pollution.

April 18, 2012

Reason.tv: The Space Shuttle Era is Over (Thank God!)

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Space — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:49

So the space shuttle Discovery has flown its last mission; it’s been towed over the nation’s capital like a bruised Chevy after a demolition derby before being deposited at the Udvar-Hazy air and space museum in northern Virginia.

Other space junkers — Atlantis and Endeavour — are being retired like Brett Favre in a pair of Crocs, too, bringing to end an underwhelming three decades of fruitless and tragic exploration of low-earth orbiting patterns.

Let’s face it: Once we beat the Russians to the moon, the national rocket grew limper than Liberace at a speculum convention. NASA has been dining out on a single 1969 hit longer than Zager and Evans.

The good news is that amateur hour is now over and the private space race has begun. Where two Cold War superpowers failed, let a thousand business plans bloom!

April 17, 2012

Buckyballs: the silver bullet for aging?

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

Well, it’s been shown to almost double normal lifespan … in rats. But in only one study so far:

In the current study researchers fed the molecule dissolved in olive oil to rats and compared outcomes to a control group of rats who got plain olive oil.

The main question they wanted to answer was whether chronic C60 administration had any toxicity, what they discovered actually surprised them.

“Here we show that oral administration of C60 dissolved in olive oil (0.8 mg/ml) at reiterated doses (1.7 mg/kg of body weight) to rats not only does not entail chronic toxicity,” they write “but it almost doubles their lifespan.”

“The estimated median lifespan (EML) for the C60-treated rats was 42 months while the EMLs for control rats and olive oil-treated rats were 22 and 26 months, respectively,” they write.

Using a toxicity model the researchers demonstrated that the effect on lifespan seems to be mediated by “attenuation of age-associated increases in oxidative stress”

SpaceX Dragon cleared for April 30 flight to ISS

Filed under: Science, Space, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Brid-Aine Parnell updates the status of the SpaceX Dragon re-supply flight to the International Space Station at the end of the month:

The cargoship test flight, assuming it goes off without a hitch, will mark the first time a commercially made spacecraft has ever blasted off to visit the ISS.

NASA and SpaceX officials met yesterday in Houston for the Flight Readiness Review, a typical part of pre-launch prep at the agency, and confirmed that the Dragon and its SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket were on track for the end of this month.

“Everything looks good heading to the April 30 launch date,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, in a canned statement.

The Dragon is due to blast off from Cape Canaveral at 12.22 EDT (16.22 GMT) carrying 1,200 pounds of cargo.

Because this is a test flight, the cargo isn’t critical stuff for the astronauts, but NASA and SpaceX are still hoping to see the ship fly close enough to the station for its robotic arm to grab it and berth it, which is the tricky bit.

April 13, 2012

Mapping 18th century shipping patterns

Filed under: Africa, Americas, Asia, Economics, Europe, History, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

An interesting post at the Guardian on tracing historical shipping patterns:


(Larger version at the original URL)

James Cheshire, of Spatial Analysis, has taken historical records of shipping routes between 1750 and 1800 and plotted them using modern mapping tools.

The first map, above, shows journeys made by British ships. Cross-Atlantic shipping lanes were among the busiest, but the number of vessels traveling to what was than called the East Indies — now India and South-East Asia — also stands out when compared to Dutch and Spanish records.

I was surprised to see how many trading voyages there were to and from the Hudson Strait — fur trade traffic, I assume.


(Larger version at the original URL)

This second map shows the same data for Dutch boats. The routes are closely matched to the British ones, although the number of journeys is noticeably smaller.

You can also see the scattering of journeys made by Dutch ships to Svalbard, off the North coast of the Norwegian mainland

Filling in for Envisat: “the CSA’s Radarsats 1 and 2 will try to fill some of the gaps”

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Science, Space — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:43

The European Space Agency is still at a loss on why their flagship Envisat satellite suddenly went silent, but while they’re trying to diagnose and hopefully fix the problem, the Canadian Space Agency is helping to cover some of the gaps:

Controllers say the eight-tonne spacecraft appears to be in a stable condition, but they are not receiving any data at all from it.

Contact was lost with Envisat at the weekend shortly after it downloaded pictures of Spain’s Canary Islands.

A recovery team, which includes experts from industry, is now trying to re-establish contact with the craft.

Mission managers said on Friday that they were working through a number of possible fault scenarios but conceded they had little to go on.

[. . .]

Of more immediate concern are the operational and scientific projects that rely on Envisat data.

The satellite’s information is used daily to monitor for oil spills at sea, to check on iceberg hazards, and to provide information for meteorological forecasts, among a wide range of services.

All this had now been disrupted, said Prof Liebig.

“What we have done is [activate] the contingency agreement we have with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) which we have had for many, many years. Canada has responded very positively. So, for a certain time, the CSA’s Radarsats 1 and 2 will try to fill some of the gaps.”

April 12, 2012

Crispian Jago’s Periodic Table of Irrational Nonsense

Filed under: Humour, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:09


Click to see full size image at http://www.crispian.net/page2/page2.html

April 7, 2012

Rationing is not the optimal solution to shortages

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Economics, Environment — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:36

Tim Harford on the recently imposed “hosepipe bans” in parts of southern England:

But it was chucking down with rain this week. It was snowing, too. How can we be talking about drought?

Water isn’t like electricity: it can be stored, within limits. You don’t get a water shortage if you have a dry week and you don’t cure a water shortage with a few April showers. You get water shortages after a couple of years of low rainfall.

And how do you cure water shortages?

Hosepipe bans, apparently.

Is that a good idea?

Probably not. It’s appealing for the water companies because the revenue they receive is capped by the regulator. They can’t make more money by supplying as much water as possible to as many joyful customers as they can reach. It’s easier to just yell at customers to stop watering their lawns. It might be annoying but the water companies don’t lose much as a result.

[. . .]

You’re not suggesting a “flushing the toilet ban”?

I am not suggesting any kind of ban. It’s the idea of the ban that’s problematic. A new article by economists Jeremy Bulow and Paul Klemperer analyses the advantages to consumers of rationing schemes rather than simply raising the marginal price. The bottom line: the advantages are typically illusory. Rationing reduces supply, relative to what could be provided if prices were higher. It also misallocates resources — there’s no reason to expect that the people who get the scarce product are the ones who value it most. And rationing encourages all kinds of fun and games to try to get around the rules.

So you just want water to become more expensive.

I hope water will become cheaper, on average. But I certainly want it to be expensive to use lots of water at a time of shortage. We want everyone to have an incentive to save some water and the obvious way to do this is through water metering.

April 5, 2012

Paradox: maintaining the “balance of nature” generally requires intensive management

Filed under: Books, Environment, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:27

A Matt Ridley column from the Wall Street Journal last month:

In her remarkable new book “The Rambunctious Garden,” Emma Marris explores a paradox that is increasingly vexing the science of ecology, namely that the only way to have a pristine wilderness is to manage it intensively. Left unmanaged, a natural habitat will become dominated by certain species, often invasive aliens introduced by human beings. “A historically faithful ecosystem is necessarily a heavily managed ecosystem,” she writes. “The ecosystems that look the most pristine are perhaps the least likely to be truly wild.”

In the Netherlands, for example, cattle are being used to re-create a simulacrum of a Pleistocene woodland, because their aurochs ancestors would have been vital in keeping forest patchy. To keep African national parks from deforestation, elephant control is sometimes needed. To let aspen, willow and beaver return to Yellowstone, it was necessary to reintroduce the wolf, which reduced elk numbers. To preserve Mojave Desert tortoises, it is essential to control native ravens, whose numbers have been boosted by distant landfill sites.

[. . .]

Ms. Marris’s book goes further, challenging the very idea of a balance of nature. In the first half of the 20th century, ecologists came to believe in equilibrium-that natural systems tended toward a steady state. So, for example, a bare patch of ground would be colonized by a succession of species-annual weeds, then grasses, then shrubs, then trees — until it reached its “climax” state. Conservation, therefore, was a matter of restoring this climax.

Academic ecologists have abandoned such a static way of thinking for something much more dynamic. For a start, they now appreciate that climate has always changed, and with it, ecology. Twenty thousand years ago the spot where I live was under a mile of ice. Then it was tundra, then birch forest, then pine forest, then alder, linden, elm and ash, then most recently oak, but beech was coming.

Which is its climax? We now know that oak seedlings rarely thrive under mature oaks (which rain caterpillars on them), so the oak climax was just a passing phase.

April 3, 2012

Creativity as mainly hard work, plus a bit of talent and inspiration

Filed under: Media, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:51

As I’ve said before, I’m not at all a creative person but I’ve always admired those people who are creative. However, Jonah Lehrer suggests that perhaps I’m just lazy:

“Creativity shouldn’t be seen as something otherworldly. It shouldn’t be thought of as a process reserved for artists and inventors and other ‘creative types.’ The human mind, after all, has the creative impulse built into its operating system, hard-wired into its most essential programming code,” writes Jonah Lehrer in his new book Imagine.

In his book, Lehrer examines the inner workings of what we call imagination. He looks at the neuroscience behind sudden insights, how the brain solves different kinds of problems and which personal traits help foster creativity. He also shares how external forces factor into the creative process, how to design a workspace to enhance your chances of having an epiphany, why creativity tends to bubble up in certain places and how we can encourage our collective imaginations.

Above all, though, the message of Lehrer’s book is that creativity is not a super power. Anyone can be creative — it just takes hard work. “We should aspire to excessive genius,” says Lehrer, who took some time from his book tour to sit down with Mashable and answer a few questions about the mysteries of how we imagine.

[. . .]

Yo-Yo Ma says his ideal state of creativity is “controlled craziness.” How can we learn to harness that?

What Yo-Yo Ma is referring to is the kind of creativity that occurs when we let ourselves go, allowing the mind to invent without worrying about what it’s inventing. Such creative freedom has inspired some of the most famous works of modern culture, from John Coltrane’s saxophone solos to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. It’s Miles Davis playing his trumpet in Kind of Blue — most of the album was recorded on the very first take — and Lenny Bruce inventing jokes at Carnegie Hall. It’s also the kind of creativity that little kids constantly rely on, largely because they have no choice. Because parts of the brain associated with impulse control remain underdeveloped, they are unable to censor their imagination, to hold back their expression. This helps explain the truth in that great Picasso quote: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress