Quotulatiousness

August 23, 2011

The value of computer models

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

Over the last several years, we’ve been bombarded with advice from climate scientists that in order to slow down global warming, we needed to abandon any hope of economic growth, as their models clearly showed that it was our growth that was causing increased temperatures around the world (except for the last ten years, somehow). In a case like this, we are assured that the models are (practically) infallible and that any delay in cutting our various emissions will invariably doom the planet to runaway temperature increases.

However, when we take the scientific community (or the more outspoken members thereof) at their word, and go with computer modelling, that’s dangerously irresponsible of us:

The current plan for Environment Canada is to monitor and measure less, and to rely more on modelling. Models are computer simulations based on scientific understanding that are applied to problems ranging from weather forecasting to economics. Models of complex systems can easily get it wrong, as the unanticipated economic collapse in 2008 revealed. This is not to say that models are not useful: in economics they give helpful guidance for investments and policy.

Models are, however, no substitute for measurements. No economist would suggest that we stop measuring economic performance, and neither should we abandon monitoring the environment in which we live. New data leads to better models and more accurate predictions.

H/T to Elizabeth for sending me the link and pointing out the models good/models bad case.

August 22, 2011

Ontario town of Goderich hit by tornado

Filed under: Cancon, Environment — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:46

One man died and nearly 40 others were reported injured in the Sunday tornado which devastated the historic town centre:

Environment Canada confirmed the Southwestern Ontario town was struck by either an F-2 or F-3 level tornado around 4 p.m. Sunday. The rating makes this the most powerful storm to strike Ontario since 1996, bringing winds of up to 300 km/h.

The one fatality, a 61-year-old man, was confirmed by officials as Norman Laberge of Lucknow, Ont. He had been working at a nearby salt mine when the tornado struck. Reports indicate he was working on a crane that collapsed during the storm.

Goderich’s historic square was hit directly by the storm and left completely ravaged. Several buildings had their roofs ripped off, numerous windows were shattered and a number of cars were tossed around. The downtown area, which has classic historic buildings, has been declared a “no-go” zone because of the severity of the damage.

August 19, 2011

Excellent news for players of impact sports

Filed under: Football, Health, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:04

It’s becoming more a topic of concern for players (and especially for the parents of younger players) in sports which feature significant amounts of contact: detecting when a player has suffered a concussion. Football and hockey players are often determined to prove how tough they are by “playing through” injury, but concussions are not like bruises or other injuries — they can have long-term dangerous side-effects. There’s now a product available at the retail level that may help:

Over the next few weeks, a U.S. company called Battle Sports Science is making its Impact Indicator available throughout Canada and the United States. It is a sensor that is fastened to a helmet chin strap and detects when the user’s head undergoes an impact likely to cause a concussion.

Football versions of this device should be on the way to Canada in two weeks, said Battle Sports CEO Chris Circo, and one for hockey is expected to be available in late September or early October.

When attached and operating, a green light will be illuminated at the player’s chin. If the light turns red, it’s indicating that the player has been hit hard and should be evaluated before returning to play.

Once the technology is widely available, the professional leagues and the college and university teams should adopt them as standard equipment. Junior players would have less reason to resist using the device if all the top-level players were seen to be using them. It’ll take longer to retrain sports announcers to stop glorify big hits and featuring them on slo-mo playbacks while saying things like “He got jacked-up”, “They blew him up” and “He got his bell rung on that hit”.

August 17, 2011

Ontario enables a “snitch line” in the fight against private health care

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:28

The Ontario government is fighting back against even the hint of privatization of health services in the province by, among other things, setting up a new snitch line:

“There’s no doubt in my mind that people are trying to get around (the law)…. I think it’s really important that we all protect our universal health-care system,” the Health Minister said in an interview. “It’s just important that we are ever-vigilant.”

Critics, however, call the initiative a politically motivated waste of money that could be better spent on improving actual medical services. In the lead-up to this fall’s provincial election, the Liberal government seems anxious to portray itself as a steadfast defender of public health care.

“How is this going to improve patient care for anybody?” Brett Skinner, president and health-care analyst at the conservative Fraser Institute think-tank, asked about the snitch line. “It’s not helping patients get better access. In fact, it’s designed to prevent patients from getting better access.”

The Canada Health Act generally forbids health-care providers from charging patients directly for services that are covered under medicare. Various private health services have cropped up in Quebec, B.C. and Alberta in recent years, however, with little interference by the federal government.

The Ontario Liberals, on the other hand, have presented themselves as strenuous foes of private health care.

Maclean’s on transgendered teens

Filed under: Cancon, Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:19

Maclean’s covers a controversial topic:

Treatment of GID is highly controversial. Some experts believe that the best way to help children and teens is to convince them to accept their bodies and not undergo the therapies that will cause dramatic physical changes. Cormac, however, lives in Vancouver, where pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Daniel Metzger and the B.C. Transgender Care Group are based. The loosely organized group, of which Metzger is a member, is the sole provider of care for transgender youth in B.C. and offers the most extensive suite of medical services for GID adolescents in Canada. Metzger believes that the best course of treatment for teenagers diagnosed with GID is hormone therapy: either blockers to stop puberty or, if post-pubescent, hormones that physically alter the body in a way that reflects their chosen gender. For some teens like Cormac, who are confident, psychologically stable and have family support, this transformation can be complemented further with cosmetic surgery.

Without treatment, Metzger argues, the path to adulthood for GID teens can be torturous, as evidenced by shockingly high suicide rates: 45 per cent for those aged 18-44, in comparison to the national average of 1.6 per cent, according to the U.S. 2010 National Transgender Discrimination Survey Report on Health and Health Care. Cormac carefully considers what life would be like today if he were still Amber. He pauses for a few seconds then gravely announces, “I think that would push me to be suicidal.” He is much more calm now, he says, free from his obsession with wanting to be a boy. “Before I transitioned I thought about it a lot, like, every minute. Now, I feel like I have so much extra brain space,” says Cormac, who is an honour roll student.

August 16, 2011

Charles Stross on the future of network security

Filed under: Science, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:40

Charles isn’t a professional in network security, but he has a good track record of exploring the consequences of new technology in his science fiction works. He was invited to give the keynote address at the 2011 USENIX conference.

Unlike you, I am not a security professional. However, we probably share a common human trait, namely that none of us enjoy looking like a fool in front of a large audience. I therefore chose the title of my talk to minimize the risk of ridicule: if we should meet up in 2061, much less in the 26th century, you’re welcome to rib me about this talk. Because I’ll be happy to still be alive to rib.

So what follows should be seen as a farrago of speculation by a guy who earns his living telling entertaining lies for money.

The question I’m going to spin entertaining lies around is this: what is network security going to be about once we get past the current sigmoid curve of accelerating progress and into a steady state, when Moore’s first law is long since burned out, and networked computing appliances have been around for as long as steam engines?

I’d like to start by making a few basic assumptions about the future, some implicit and some explicit: if only to narrow the field.

July 28, 2011

Penn and Teller talk about their new TV show

Filed under: Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:29

Erik Amaya reports on the duo’s latest show, Penn & Teller Tell a Lie:

“We kind of forced Showtime into doing a show about science and reality,” admitted Penn Jillette, the more outspoken half of the duo. “We did get to have naked people and we did get to say profanity. I am one of the only people who does not own a motorcycle who has said ‘motherfucker’ enough.”

After referring to their new home as “The Disco Channel,” Jillette mentioned that the cable network was “more interested in science.” Unlike Bullshit, the performer hopes Tell a Lie will take a more pointed view of both science and objective reality. He then outlined the format: “We’re doing six packages, most of them [featuring] us. One of those stories will be a fake, a complete lie. [After each episode], the audience can go to discovery.com and vote on which is a lie.”

Teller clarified that segments within each episode will make certain claims. “We will claim that a single head of human hair can lift a Mustang,” he began. “We will claim that a wrecking ball can be stopped by special wallpaper. We’ll claim that you can put a person into a tank of live piranha and they will not kill him.”

“The person will be Teller,” Jillette interjected.

July 27, 2011

If you can persuade 10% that you’re right, you can win the argument

Filed under: Media, Politics, Science — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:53

Ten percent of the population may be the tipping point for mass conversion to a new idea:

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.

“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”

[. . .]

The researchers are now looking for partners within the social sciences and other fields to compare their computational models to historical examples. They are also looking to study how the percentage might change when input into a model where the society is polarized. Instead of simply holding one traditional view, the society would instead hold two opposing viewpoints. An example of this polarization would be Democrat versus Republican.

July 25, 2011

Unique view of the shuttle cockpit

Filed under: Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:05


Click to embiggen

Link provided by Chris Greaves.

Update: There’s a big comment on this shuttle post from Chris Taylor, discussing what the shuttle was originally intended to be, and why it ended up being significantly larger and more expensive than the first proposal.

July 24, 2011

Farewell Space Shuttle . . . you massive boondoggle

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Space, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:25

I’ve been ambivalent about the space shuttle program for decades — not because I’m anti-space, but because I think the shuttle was government methadone to replace a real space program. At that, I hadn’t connected all the dots the way Scott Locklin has here:

The Space Shuttle, an object lesson in the Sunk Cost Fallacy, has been with us since my early youth. This preposterous boondoggle was originally supposed to make manned space flight cheaper: to the point where getting a pound of matter into space would be as cheap as sending it to Australia. That was the only purpose for building the damn thing in the first place. The idea was, if your spaceship was reusable, it would be cheaper to send people and heavy things into space. If using the same thing multiple times isn’t cheaper, well, what’s the point? Conspicuous consumption, perhaps?

In one of its original incarnations, the Shuttle was supposed to launch like an ordinary aircraft. A jet + rocket powered “first stage” heavy lifter would propel the craft into the upper atmosphere, and the rocket propelled second stage would send the thing into space. Seems like a good idea to me. Jets are pretty easy to fly and maintain cheaply. Jets also don’t have to carry vast quantities of oxidizer. Plus; you get to reuse the whole mess.

Unfortunately, the politicians decided that building the first stage heavy lifter would cost “too much.” Instead they changed the design, and strapped a couple of solid rockets to a beefed up “orbiter” and giant non-reusable fuel tank. That wasn’t the worst of it: those pieces should have still in principle provided for a cheap launch vehicle. In practice, the silica tiles and engines turned out to have very high maintenance costs involving substantial labor, and turn around times were 1/6 of what they should have been, making the thing 6 (though more like 10) times as expensive as it was designed to be.

The goal of the space shuttle program was to have safe, re-usable spacecraft that could lift heavy loads to low earth orbit at a cost of about $50 per pound. What they ended up with was a dangerous fleet of hangar queens that took loads to orbit at an estimated cost of $50,000 per pound. That’s quite a missed set of goals.

July 22, 2011

The wine industry’s nemesis, Phylloxera vastatrix

Filed under: Environment, Europe, France, History, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:49

The Economist reviews a new book about the devastation to Europe’s wine makers caused by a tiny American invader:

These varieties are a reminder of the battle against phylloxera, a small, root-munching aphid that did incalculable damage to the wine business in the last 35 years of the 19th century. What George Gale, a philosophy professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, calls “the worst of all known invasive species disasters” swept across the viticultural landscape like a biblical plague. It destroyed vineyards from Rioja to Rheingau, Stellenbosch to Sicily. With good reason, Jules-Emile Planchon, the French botanist who helped to subdue the insect, dubbed it Phylloxera vastatrix.

[. . .]

In Europe, Gale’s research is no less assiduous. His coverage of the war between the largely Parisian scientific establishment, which believed that phylloxera was the effect, rather than the cause, of the devastation, and the so-called Américainistes of Montpellier and Bordeaux, who believed the opposite, is commendably detailed. The squabbling between the two sides stretched on into the 1880s, delaying the search for a solution.

Various remedies were proposed: flooding, planting on sandy soils and the use of carbon disulphide (a flammable, toxic chemical that was costly as well as tricky to apply). Growers then tried planting lower-quality American grapes, including Clinton and Noah, before switching, finally, to grafted vines combining phylloxera-resistant American rootstocks with European scions. This is still the practice in most of the world’s vineyards today.

Mark Lynas goes from green activist to “denier”

Filed under: Books, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Ben Pile reviews Mark Lynas’s new book:

Since becoming an advocate of genetic modification (GM) and nuclear power, Mark Lynas has drawn increasingly hostile criticism from his erstwhile comrades in the green movement. In turn, he has sharpened his criticism of environmentalists for their hostility to technological and economic development. In his new book, The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans, he attempts to reformulate environmentalism to overcome the excesses that have so far prevented it from saving the planet. This book will no doubt provoke debate, but what is this transformation really about, and is it really based on new ideas or merely the revision of old ones?

[. . .]

As a result, there is much to agree with in The God Species. Most importantly, Lynas makes a clean break from deep ecology — the idea that ‘nature’ has intrinsic moral value and a ‘right’ to be protected from our ambitions. He rebukes the environmentalism that imagines a return to a pristine nature, and that shows contempt for development as an attempt to ‘play god’ over nature. We should ‘play god’, he says, for the planet’s sake as well as our own comfort. There is a convincing criticism of green demands for austerity and environmentalists’ unrealistic expectations that people should make do with ‘happiness’ rather than material progress. These are the conceits of well-off, middle-class and self-indulgent whingers, Lynas explains. Some of us have been making similar arguments for a very long time.

In spite of some of his accurate criticisms, Lynas fails to get to the substance of environmentalism. We do not find out what takes environmentalists to their bleak view of the world and their low view of humanity. This is a shame, because Lynas is in a unique position to reflect on it, having once thrust a custard pie into Bjorn Lomborg’s face, with the words: ‘That’s for everything you say about the environment which is complete bullshit. That’s for lying about climate change. That’s what you deserve for being smug about everything to do with the environment.’

A decade on, Lynas now emphasises science and pragmatism rather than… erm… pies. It’s worth remembering that Lomborg started out on mission similar to Lynas’s: as an environmentalist, keen to establish the sensible limits of our interaction with the natural world. Before writing The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg aimed to debunk the works of the economist, Julian Simon, but ended up sympathetic to many of his arguments. Lynas, too, now finds himself sympathetic to many of the ideas from the economic right (he calls for the privatisation of all publicly owned water companies, for instance). And like Lynas, Lomborg never ended up ‘denying’ climate change, but instead sought to bring a sense of proportion to the problem, and to put it into context with other problems in the world. That is all it takes to find oneself called a ‘denier’: merely seeking a sense of proportion about environmental problems will put you in the lowest moral category, as Lynas, the ‘Chernobyl death denier’, has now discovered.

July 21, 2011

The “food desert” theory of US obesity

Filed under: Food, Health, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:06

In short, it fails to explain the phenomenon:

Policymakers are scrambling to find a solution to our growing waistlines. Some are targeting America’s “food deserts” — areas lacking in grocery stores.

As first lady Michelle Obama explained last March, “families wind up buying their groceries at the local gas station or convenience store, places that offer few, if any, healthy options.”

[. . .]

The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines a food desert as a low-income census tract where a large number of residents are more than a mile from a grocery store.

By this definition, 13.5 million Americans are supposedly McVictimized by food deserts. That’s less than 4.5 percent of the U.S. population, yet roughly two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese.

You don’t need a Ph.D. in mathematics to understand that food deserts are, at best, a very small aspect of a vast problem.

July 20, 2011

UN contemplating “Green Helmet” climate peacekeping forces

Filed under: Environment, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:39

No, this isn’t taken from the pages of The Onion — the United Nations is seriously considering adding “climate change” to its peacekeeping portfolio:

A special meeting of the United Nations security council is due to consider whether to expand its mission to keep the peace in an era of climate change.

Small island states, which could disappear beneath rising seas, are pushing the security council to intervene to combat the threat to their existence.

[. . .]

Wittig seems to agree, noting that UN peacekeepers have long intervened in areas beyond traditional conflicts.

“Repainting blue helmets into green might be a strong signal — but would dealing with the consequences of climate change — say in precarious regions – be really very different from the tasks the blue helmets already perform today?” he wrote.

In an official “Concept Note” ahead of the meeting, Germany said the security council needed to draw up scenarios for dealing with the affects of extreme temperatures and rising seas. How would the UN deal with climate refugees? How would it prevent conflicts in those parts of Africa and Asia which could face food shortages?

July 19, 2011

Virginia Tech publishes football helmet safety rankings

Filed under: Football, Health, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:41

Gregg Easterbrook has the details from a Virginia Tech comparative study of football helmets:

Researchers at Virginia Tech have produced the first brand-by-brand, model-by-model ranking for the likely concussion resistance of helmets. A star-rating system modeled on crash safety rankings for automobiles, the rankings clearly identify the best and worst helmets. Virginia Tech researchers give high marks to these helmets: the Riddell Speed, Riddell Revolution, Riddell Revolution IQ; the Schutt Ion 4D and Schutt DNA; and the Xenith X1.The Virginia Tech researchers give medium grades to the Schutt Air XP and Schutt Air Advantage. The Virginia Tech rankings warn players not to wear these helmets: the Riddell VSR4 and the Adams A2000.

Now the chilling part: the VSR4 — Virginia Tech’s second-lowest-rated helmet — was the most common helmet in the NFL last season. The VSR4 is widely worn in college and high school, too. Immediately after the Virginia Tech findings were released, Riddell advised football teams to stop using the VSR4, long the company’s best seller.

(The new Rawlings line of football helmets was not on the market in time to be included in the study. Virginia Tech will rank Rawlings helmets — which from the start is promoting safety features rather than styling — next year.)

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