Quotulatiousness

July 7, 2011

“Bodice-rippers” guilty of perverting women’s lives

Filed under: Books, Britain, Education, Health, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:00

Apparently, The Guardian thinks that women are weak-willed and easily (mis-)lead, especially when it comes to their sex lives:

Mills & Boon’s romance novels should come with a health warning, according to a report published in an academic journal.

Blaming romance novels for unprotected sex, unwanted pregnancies, unrealistic sexual expectations and relationship breakdowns, author and psychologist Susan Quilliam says that “what we see in our consulting rooms is more likely to be informed by Mills & Boon than by the Family Planning Association”, advising readers of the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care that “sometimes the kindest and wisest thing we can do for our clients is to encourage them to put down the books — and pick up reality”.

Her comments follow a recent claim that romance novels can “dangerously unbalance” their readers, with Christian psychologist Dr Juli Slattery saying she was seeing “more and more women who are clinically addicted to romantic books”, and that “for many women, these novels really do promote dissatisfaction with their real relationships”.

Cartoon history of the global warming panic

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:56

July 6, 2011

Restricting your salt intake? It may not help you

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:36

Rob Lyons recommends you take the constant barrage of advice about lowering your salt intake a bit less seriously:

The advice to reduce our salt intake has been so ubiquitous for so long that it simply must be correct, right? Those white crystals may make our food taste better, but it’s a Scientific Fact that salt increases blood pressure and, therefore, cutting back on it will reduce blood pressure and we’ll live longer. Trouble is, while this seems to make sense, the evidence keeps failing to back it up — and a study published today raises further questions about this simplistic advice.

The new study is the latest Cochrane Review, an effort to revisit the evidence on a wide variety of healthcare interventions to provide clearer guidance to medical practitioners and patients. The review took in seven studies involving 6,489 patients. ‘Intensive support and encouragement to reduce salt intake did lead to a reduction in salt eaten and a small reduction in blood pressure after more than six months’, according to the article’s lead author, Professor Rod Taylor of the University of Exeter. But the real question was ‘whether this dietary change also reduced a person’s risk of dying or suffering from cardiovascular events’.

And the answer was ‘not really’. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Previous studies have come to a similar conclusion: reducing salt does seem to reduce blood pressure a little, but the effect on cardiovascular disease is so small as to be hardly worth bothering with. If your blood pressure is high enough that you’ve been prescribed drugs to reduce it, then there may be some benefit in also reducing how much salt you eat. But that’s about it.

Perhaps they should call themselves the Canadian Fundraising Society?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Health — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:21

As it appears that they only have a sideline in cancer research these days:

An Ontario cancer researcher is concerned that the Canadian Cancer Society has proportionally shifted funding away from research and is spending more of its dollars on fundraising and administration costs.

“Most scientists don’t realize that the budget has been going up and up, and donations have been growing, but the budget for research has been shrinking,” said Brian Lichty, a researcher at McMaster University who is looking into treating cancer with viruses that kill tumours. “So they are surprised and disappointed when they find out that this is the case, and the trend.”

CBC’s Marketplace analyzed the Canadian Cancer Society’s financial reports dating back a dozen years. It discovered that each year, as the society raised more dollars, the proportion of money it spent on research dropped dramatically — from 40.3 per cent in 2000 to under 22 per cent in 2011.

The amount of money spent on research has increased slightly over the years, but as a portion of the Cancer Society’s growing budget, it’s almost been cut in half.

The fine distinction between actual disaster relief and mere tokenism

Filed under: Environment, Japan, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:26

In the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that hit the coast of Japan, many nations offered assistance and supplies to help the battered area. Some of these offers were both timely and appropriate. Others, however. . .

Stranger still was the arrival on May 11th, a full two months after the earthquake and tsunami, of Sri Lanka’s Disaster Relief Team. Some 15 officials from Colombo’s Ministry of Disaster Management came to help clear debris, via a local NGO called Peace Boat. An extremely decent gesture, likewise. But the flights to and from Japan must have cost the ministry a fortune, relatively. This follows an equally quixotic donation by the Sri Lankan government of 3m tea bags.

Then there is the matter of blankets. Since the disaster some 17 countries as well as the European Union have offered blankets as part of their emergency relief supplies. In March this made sense. Some 25,000 blankets from India, 25,000 from Canada and 30,000 from Thailand were donated within days of the disaster. But did Chile really need to deliver 2,000 blankets on May 31st, by which time the temperatures were balmy to say the least?

Earlier Chile donated 100 kilograms of rice, purchased in Japan, to the city of Minamisanriku. Yet considering the Japanese government stockpiles about one million tonnes of rice in case of a crisis—which it buys under World Trade Organisation commitments, keeps off of the market to support local farmers, and burns after it rots—Chile’s altruism was more likely symbolic than satiating.

In the aftermath of natural disasters, the media usually makes a big, hairy deal if the head of government for the region, state, province, or country isn’t immediately seen touring the area. While it makes for useful video footage for the TV news shows, it’s often counter-productive for the people whose lives have been overturned by the disaster. Heads of state, in particular, don’t just jump in a taxi and head off — there’s a huge entourage that have to precede and accompany the leader. This takes up cargo space, landing slots, and flight paths that might be more usefully devoted to providing help to the afflicted area.

It may be useful psychologically for the victims and the relief workers to see the prime minister or the governor, or whatever, but between the TV and other media folks, the dignitaries themselves, their security detachments, and the other support staff, it almost certainly delays the disaster-struck area actually recovering.

July 4, 2011

Internet absolved of charges

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:58

Apparently the smear campaign against the internet — you know, the meme that we were all being turned into morons by video games, social networking sites, and Google — has no factual basis:

Has Google been making us stupid? Are young people nothing but mindless husks, helplessly addicted to Facebook? Is the very internet itself some sort of insidious virus, creeping through the fibre optics, rewiring our brains, deadening neurons, stunting IQs, stymieing human interaction?

You could be forgiven for worrying. You don’t have to go far to read a scare story about what the upsurge in digital life over the past 20 years has apparently done to our brains. Yet help is at hand.

A report released this morning (The impact of digital technologies on human well-being) claims that the internet has actually been the victim of some sort of vicious smear campaign. An analysis of current research by the Nominet Trust, a UK charity dedicated to increasing access to the internet, claims that we’ve really been worrying about nothing all along. Relax, get online and stop worrying, is about the gist of it.

British Green activist recants opposition to nuclear power

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:51

Unlike Germany, which has announced it will be shutting down its nuclear power plants, Britain is considering a new generation of plants to provide an even greater share of their electricity needs. Even a few green activists are changing their tune:

Also, as much as Greens are enthusiastic about solar electricity, in cloudy countries such as ours it is extremely inefficient and expensive. Nuclear power, on the other hand, is one of the cheapest ways of producing electricity, and it is much safer than many environmentalists would have us believe.

The objection of environmentalists to nuclear power — fears about the dangers of nuclear waste and the cost of decommissioning it — are overblown, which explains why many people don’t like the Greens.

[. . .]

Solving many of the world’s most critical environmental challenges will, in some cases, involve doing the exact opposite of what most environmentalists want.

Rather than retreating into hair-shirt austerity, I believe that, just as technology got us into this mess, technology is vital to get us out of it.

That means embracing some things that will make a lot of Green believers choke on their organic muesli.

It has taken me a long time to reach this conclusion. I used to passionately oppose not only nuclear power but GM crops. I once even threw a pie in the face of a Danish scientist who dared to question the orthodox environmental line. So what changed?

Through research, I found that much of what I believed about environmental issues had little, if any, basis in science. Put simply, though my concerns were right, my solutions were wrong.

June 30, 2011

xkcd: The first rule of model train layouts

Filed under: Humour, Railways, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 15:34

Jon sent me a link to this xkcd strip, which still amuses me:


Click to see the full image

June 27, 2011

Bodyhacking is closer than you may think

Filed under: Science, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:15

An occasional meme in science fiction stories is someone being able to control the actions of another using remote control. We may be closer to that, um, “vision” than we expect:

Now that pacemakers are to be loaded with firewalls and bionic-man body parts are appearing on production lines, the concept of body hacking has become a spooky possibility. Researchers in Japan have begun to try to teach people how to play instruments by remotely controlling their hands.

Developed by the University of Tokyo and Sony Computer Science Labs, the aptly named PossessedHand stimulates muscles that move our digits, New Scientist reports.

A belt with 28 electrode pads is strapped to the arm, sending signals to the joints between the three bones of each finger, with two for the thumb.

Stephen Gordon: The “broken window” fallacy of “green” jobs

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:51

It’s always nice to see a reference to Frédéric Bastiat in a modern day setting:

But it is possible to oversell the green jobs theme. Job creation should not be a goal of environmental policy, no more than it should be a policy goal in the fields of health or national security. If, instead of hiring people, we could use magic to stop disease, crime and environmental degradation, we would. Pointing to jobs ‘created’ to fix these problems is an error that Frédéric Bastiat identified in his ‘parable of the broken window’. Broken windows generate work for glaziers, but that doesn’t mean that breaking windows will increase national income.

An often-quoted statistic goes something like this: “wind energy produces 27 per cent more jobs per kilowatt hour than coal plants and 66 per cent more jobs than natural gas plants”. This could well be true, but it is hardly a strong argument in favour of the employment opportunities that would be generated by investing in wind energy: hiring more people to produce less energy is not a strategy for prosperity. Similar gains in employment could be obtained by outlawing mechanical excavators so that all digging must be done by hand. It may make sense to encourage the development of wind power, but increased employment is most emphatically not one of the reasons for doing so.

June 22, 2011

“Medicalizing” bad behaviour to avoid guilt

Filed under: Health, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

Frank Furedi looks at a disturbing ongoing phenomenon in western society: the “medicalization” of bad behaviour:

The rebranding of promiscuity as sex addiction is not confined to Britain. Throughout Europe and the US the numbers of sex addicts is said to be on the rise. Anthony Weiner has recently been diagnosed — by the media and self-styled experts at least — as a ‘sex addict’. Following the revelation that he sent rude pictures of himself to various women online, Weiner has been widely depicted as a sick man. ‘He needs treatment’, one expert told the Associated Press, because apparently, without help, ‘sex addicts’ can go ‘completely out of control and destroy their lives’.

[. . .]

Lust, infidelity, betrayal and the drive for sexual domination have always presented a challenge to a society’s grammar of morality. However, the contemporary conflation of a bad habit with a medical problem is symptomatic of the difficulty that Western societies now have in making moral judgments about human behaviour. Sometimes, even people who claim to possess religious convictions find it difficult to ascribe guilt to immoral behaviour. That is why behaviour that was once denounced as sinful is now increasingly discussed through the language of therapy rather than the language of morality.

[. . .]

The problem with this recycling of bad habits and degrading behaviour as medical problems is not simply that it fails to hold people to account for the choices they make and the consequences that their actions have. Yes, a lot of people — including celebrities such as Keith Urban, Tiger Woods, Michael Douglas and Lindsay Lohan — can present themselves as victims of an addiction rather than as lecherous and self-regarding individuals.

But the real problem is the message that this diseasing of human behaviour sends to all of us. The fashionable label of ‘addictive personality’ encourages people to acquiesce to their worst instincts in a quite fatalistic way. Addicts are portrayed as victims of circumstances beyond their control: they are literally counselled to accept powerlessness as the defining feature of their existences. Sexaholics Anonymous mimics the 12-step approach of Alcoholics Anonymous. The first step that a sex addict takes on the road to sexual sobriety is to admit that ‘we were powerless over lust’.

June 20, 2011

SpaceX and the rogue consultant

Filed under: Law, Space — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:48

SpaceX is going to court over a would-be consultant’s claims that their rockets are unsafe:

According to SpaceX’s filing with the Fairfax County circuit court in Virginia, Joseph Fragola, veep at tech consulting firm Valador, tried to obtain a hefty deal from SpaceX at the beginning of June:

     Fragola attempted to obtain a consulting contract from SpaceX worth as much as $1 million. He claimed that SpaceX needed an “independent” analysis of its rocket to bolster its reputation with NASA based on what he called an unfair “perception” about SpaceX. SpaceX did not respond favorably to Fragola’s offer.

The rocket company — which as everyone knows is helmed, CTO’d and in part bankrolled by famous nerdwealth kingpin Elon Musk — says it then found out that Fragola had subsequently done his level best to create such a perception:

     SpaceX subsequently leamed that Fragola has been contacting officials in the United States Government to make disparaging remarks about SpaceX, which have created the very “perception” that he claimed SpaceX needed his help to rectify.

     For instance, in an email he wrote on June 8, 2011, to Bryan O’Connor, a NASA official at NASA’s headquarters in Washington, DC, Fragola falsely stated: “I have just heard a rumor, and I am trying now to check its veracity, that the Falcon 9 experienced a double engine failure in the first stage and that the entire stage blew up just after the first stage separated. I also heard that this information was being held from NASA until SpaceX can ‘verify’ it.”

SpaceX for its part says that this rumour is “blatantly false… as a purported ‘expert’ in the industry, he should have known that the statements were false.”

June 17, 2011

Sunspots and the Maunder Minimum

Filed under: Environment, History, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:20

Don J. Easterbrook provides more background information on the historical situation at the time of the last low-to-no-sunspot period:

Galileo’s perfection of the telescope in 1609 allowed scientists to see sunspots for the first time. From 1610 A.D. to 1645 A.D., very few sunspots were seen, despite the fact that many scientists with telescopes were looking for them, and from 1645 to 1700 AD sunspots virtually disappeared from the sun (Fig. 1). During this interval of greatly reduced sunspot activity, known as the Maunder Minimum, global climates turned bitterly cold (the Little Ice Age), demonstrating a clear correspondence between sunspots and cool climate. After 1700 A.D., the number of observed sunspots increased sharply from nearly zero to more than 50 (Fig. 1) and the global climate warmed.


FIGURE 1. Sunspots during the Maunder Minimum (modified from Eddy, 1976).

The Maunder Minimum was not the beginning of The Little Ice Age — it actually began about 1300 AD — but it marked perhaps the bitterest part of the cooling. Temperatures dropped ~4º C (~7 º F) in ~20 years in mid-to high latitudes. The colder climate that ensued for several centuries was devastating. The population of Europe had become dependent on cereal grains as their main food supply during the Medieval Warm Period and when the colder climate, early snows, violent storms, and recurrent flooding swept Europe, massive crop failures occurred. Winters in Europe were bitterly cold, and summers were rainy and too cool for growing cereal crops, resulting in widespread famine and disease. About a third of the population of Europe perished.

Glaciers all over the world advanced and pack ice extended southward in the North Atlantic. Glaciers in the Alps advanced and overran farms and buried entire villages. The Thames River and canals and rivers of the Netherlands frequently froze over during the winter. New York Harbor froze in the winter of 1780 and people could walk from Manhattan to Staten Island. Sea ice surrounding Iceland extended for miles in every direction, closing many harbors. The population of Iceland decreased by half and the Viking colonies in Greenland died out in the 1400s because they could no longer grow enough food there. In parts of China, warm weather crops that had been grown for centuries were abandoned. In North America, early European settlers experienced exceptionally severe winters.

BoingBoing on the new sunscreen regulations

Filed under: Health, Randomness, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:28

Maggie Koerth-Baker goes into some detail on four things you (probably) don’t know about sunscreen:

Starting next year, sunscreen — and the way its marketed — will change. This is good news. The changes correct some rather glaring examples of consumer misinformation. And it’s also important news … at least, from the perspective of this redhead.

New Food and Drug Administration regulations mean that, by the summer of 2012, there will be no such thing as “waterproof” sunscreen. That’s because, frankly, there already wasn’t such a thing. A sunscreen might be more water resistant than a competitor. But you can’t assume that one application of the “waterproof” stuff will stay with you through hours of pool time. Next year, sunscreen bottles will be honest about that fact, and they’ll tell you how long you can expect water resistance to last.

The other big change: What the sunscreen protects you from. Under the new regulations, only broad-spectrum sunscreens — the kind that protect you from both the UVA and UVB wavelengths of solar radiation — with SPF values of 15 and higher, can claim to prevent skin cancer. Anything else must tell you that it’s just for preventing sunburn.

Update: And, for a bit of balance, openmarket.org points out that this is probably a solution in search of a problem:

Unfortunately, this good/bad assessment comes from the bureaucrats of the FDA and not actual consumers, who are the ones that make this subjective assessment every time they make a purchase. This new labeling rule is akin to a customer review, which then begs the question as to why the FDA has the right to express its opinion on every bottle of sunscreen while the average consumer does not? Is it because those at the FDA are ostensibly smarter and more in-tune about what is in our best interest than we lowly plebeians are? I’m sure they certainly think so.

Finally, the FDA ignores that many consumers are already adequately informed and realize (when they buy an SPF 4 sunscreen, for example) that their desired sunblock may not strongly protect them from UVA or UVB rays — who actually believes an SPF 4 provides real protection? Much like who honestly believes that smoking isn’t hazardous to health and relies on the FDA-mandated labels to make him/her aware of this misconception? Consumers already weed out the good products from the bad through company reputation, trial and error, word of mouth, etc. This new regulation only serves to discourage and worry those who already buy sunscreen that they value and increase its cost of production. The notion that we’d all be ignorant consumers incapable of acting in our own best interest without the benevolent patriarchy of the FDA is absurd.

June 15, 2011

Fight that natural urge to (over-) protect your children

Filed under: Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:39

An interesting article by Lori Gottlieb on the perils of over-protective parenting styles:

Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist and lecturer at Harvard, warns against what he calls our “discomfort with discomfort” in his book Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age. If kids can’t experience painful feelings, Kindlon told me when I called him not long ago, they won’t develop “psychological immunity.”

“It’s like the way our body’s immune system develops,” he explained. “You have to be exposed to pathogens, or your body won’t know how to respond to an attack. Kids also need exposure to discomfort, failure, and struggle. I know parents who call up the school to complain if their kid doesn’t get to be in the school play or make the cut for the baseball team. I know of one kid who said that he didn’t like another kid in the carpool, so instead of having their child learn to tolerate the other kid, they offered to drive him to school themselves. By the time they’re teenagers, they have no experience with hardship. Civilization is about adapting to less-than-perfect situations, yet parents often have this instantaneous reaction to unpleasantness, which is ‘I can fix this.’”

Wendy Mogel is a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who, after the publication of her book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee a decade ago, became an adviser to schools all over the country. When I talked to her this spring, she said that over the past few years, college deans have reported receiving growing numbers of incoming freshmen they’ve dubbed “teacups” because they’re so fragile that they break down anytime things don’t go their way. “Well-intentioned parents have been metabolizing their anxiety for them their entire childhoods,” Mogel said of these kids, “so they don’t know how to deal with it when they grow up.”

Oh, and for those of you who regularly utter phrases like “Good job, buddy!” every time your kid manages to do something trivial, you can just knock that right off:

A few months ago, I called up Jean Twenge, a co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic and professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who has written extensively about narcissism and self-esteem. She told me she wasn’t surprised that some of my patients reported having very happy childhoods but felt dissatisfied and lost as adults. When ego-boosting parents exclaim “Great job!” not just the first time a young child puts on his shoes but every single morning he does this, the child learns to feel that everything he does is special. Likewise, if the kid participates in activities where he gets stickers for “good tries,” he never gets negative feedback on his performance. (All failures are reframed as “good tries.”) According to Twenge, indicators of self-esteem have risen consistently since the 1980s among middle-school, high-school, and college students. But, she says, what starts off as healthy self-esteem can quickly morph into an inflated view of oneself—a self-absorption and sense of entitlement that looks a lot like narcissism. In fact, rates of narcissism among college students have increased right along with self-esteem.

Meanwhile, rates of anxiety and depression have also risen in tandem with self-esteem. Why is this? “Narcissists are happy when they’re younger, because they’re the center of the universe,” Twenge explains. “Their parents act like their servants, shuttling them to any activity they choose and catering to their every desire. Parents are constantly telling their children how special and talented they are. This gives them an inflated view of their specialness compared to other human beings. Instead of feeling good about themselves, they feel better than everyone else.”

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