Category: Science

Can this result be true?  The guy claims that food production and refrigeration is so energy-expensive that it is more carbon-friendly to drive your car than to walk.  Walking requires that you eat more to make up the lost energy, as you can lose only so much weight (what’s the relevant margin here?  Ten feet of walking?  A lifetime of walking?).

It is also claimed that: "Paper bags cause more global warming than plastic."  Here is the book, I’ve ordered it and will report in due time.  In the meantime, here is Ezra’s coverage.

From Chicagoboyz, here is a good post on whether tangerines from a distance can be more carbon-friendly than local fruit.  Here is an earlier MR post on the same.

Here is the latest, excerpt:

Examining three years of birth records and pesticide data, scientists from the Public Health Department determined that the Central Valley women lived within 500 meters, or 547 yards, of fields sprayed with organochlorine pesticides during their first trimester of pregnancy. Eight of them, or 28%, had children with autism. Their rate of autism was six times greater than for mothers who did not live near the fields, the study said.

There is some attempt to look at larger numbers:

The scientists collected records of nearly 300,000 children born in the 19 counties of the Sacramento and San Joaquin river valleys. Of those children, 465 had autism. The scientists then compared the addresses during pregnancy to state records that detailed the location of fields sprayed with several hundred pesticides.  For most pesticides, no unusual numbers of autism cases were found, but the exception was a class of compounds called organochlorines.

I am mostly skeptical.  There are plenty of autistic children, here and abroad, who were never exposed to these chemicals.  Agricultural valleys in California don’t seem to have especially high rates of autism.  Should I believe "you either get autism from your parents, or in some cases, from pesticides"?  Or "pesticides are a potent epigenetic trigger"?  Or should I believe "they found 465 cases out of 300,000 when they should have found many many more.  Reporting of autism is biased in that sample, and the reporting bias is somehow correlated with certain kinds of agricultural activity."?

So far I’m sticking with the latter.  Four points of note: a) the study author is appropriately cautious, b) he does try to adjust for regional diagnosis center, c) I very much wish this study had a map of incidence, and d) is it really so difficult for the author to discuss what it means that the study is restricted to just one part of California?

In sum, monkey society is governed by the same two general rules that governed the behavior of women in so many 19th-century novels: stay loyal to your relatives (though perhaps at a distance, if they are a social impediment) but also try to ingratiate yourself with the members of high-ranking families.  The two rules interact in interesting ways.  For members of high-ranking matrilines, the rules of kin-based and rank-based attraction reinforce one another, whereas for the members of low-ranking families they counteract.  A member of a high-ranking matriline is attracted to her kin not only because they are members of the same family but also because they are high-ranking.  A member of a low-ranking family may be attracted to her kin, but she is also drawn away from them by her attraction to unrelated, higher-status individuals.  As a result, high-ranking families are often more cohesive than lower-ranking ones.  Or, to paraphrase Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, all high-ranking families are alike in their cohesiveness, each low-ranking family is cohesive or not, in its own way.

That is from the excellent Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind, by Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth.

This book also has the best discussion I have seen of the similarities and differences between human speech and animal vocalization, in this case baboon cries.

…a new study suggests our eyebrows serve to control how easily other people can tell where we are looking.

Here is more.

R. Preston McAfee (a great choice) is the new editor, and he writes in a mass email today:

More
insidious, in my view, is the gradual morphing of the referees from
evaluators to anonymous co-authors. Referees request increasingly
extensive revisions. Usually these represent improvements, but the
process takes a lot of time and effort, and the end result is often
worse owing to its committee-design. Authors, knowing referees will
make them rewrite the paper, are sometimes sloppy with the submission.
This feedback loop – submitting a sloppy paper since referees will
require rewriting combined with a need to fix all the sloppiness – has
led to our current misery. Moreover, the expectation that referees will
rewrite papers, combined with sloppy submissions, makes refereeing
extraordinarily unpleasant. We – the efficiency-obsessed academic
discipline – have the least efficient publication process.

The system is broken.

Consequently, Economic
Inquiry is starting an experiment. In this experiment, an author can
submit under a ‘no revisions’ policy. This policy means exactly what
it says: if you submit under no revisions, I (or the co-editor) will
either accept or reject. What will not happen is a request for a
revision.

I
will ask referees: ‘is it better for Economic Inquiry to publish the
paper as is, versus reject it, and why or why not?’ This policy returns
referees to their role of evaluator. There will still be anonymous
reports.

Authors
who receive an acceptance would have the option of publishing without
changes. If a referee noticed a minor problem and put it in the report,
self-respecting authors would fix the problem. But such fixes would not
be a condition of publication.      

You could try dating women on this basis as well; we’ll see how it goes.  Elsewhere in the world of journals, Science is ending its link to JSTOR, a sad moment for scholarship.

Discover Your Inner Economist has lots of great insights.  But this one Tyler gets all wrong.

Small changes in incentives can make a big difference in our beliefs.  For instance, UFO sightings are down dramatically in the last decade…I think [one factor is] cell phones and cell phone cameras.

"The spaceship was in a no-call dead zone.  And you didn’t snap a picture?"

…The story is suddenly a little harder to swallow.  Most of all, it is harder to fool oneself, not just one’s spouse and friends.

I mean really.  Why jump to conclusions?  OBVIOUSLY the aliens know we have cell phone cameras now.

I’m not sure they are all true, or for that matter politically incorrect, but here is the list.

Thanks to a loyal reader for the pointer.

Even on a clear, sunny day, the people who keep the subway going have to pump 13 million gallons of water away.  Otherwise the tunnels start to flood.

That is from the July 2007 Scientific American, drawing upon Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us; I have pre-ordered my copy and I am waiting for his secret blog.

The buds or leaves of many plants are arranged not randomly but in sophisticated spiral structures that exhibit many mathematical properties involving Fibonacci sequences and golden angles. 

A theist might see evidence of intelligent design in these structures.  An evolutionary biologist (or economist) might see evidence of unintelligent design i.e. they will assume that since the patterns are far from random there must be some functional advantage to spiral patterns and that natural selection operating over many generations results in a convergence to or near the optimum.

There is, however, a third – often overlooked – possibility.  Sophisticated structures may be the result of unintelligent, non-design.  Here’s an interesting article, for example, arguing that the spiral patterns in flowers are the result of physical processes of attraction and repulsion.  In particular, check out this cool movie which shows magnetized drops of ferrofluid being dropped into a dish that is magnetized at its
edge and filled with silicone oil. The droplets are attracted to the edge of the dish and repelled from one another.  What’s interesting is that when the droplets are dropped slowly they float directly away from one another in a simple pattern but when they are dropped quickly they form intricate spirals with different properties depending on how quickly they are dropped.  (Note that the movie is a bit long – just grab the slider and you will see what is going on).  The physical model is only suggestive of what is going on in flowers, of course, but the idea is generating new testable predictions about the kinds of patterns we should see in real flowers.

My suspicion is that quite a few of the sophisticated patterns that we see in nature and elsewhere is neither intelligent nor unintelligent design, i.e. not functional in any direct sense, but rather the result of unintelligent, non-design.

Prehistoric Polynesians beat Europeans to the Americas, according to a new analysis of chicken bones.

Here is more.  When I was 9 I read Kon-Tiki at least five times.

It’s called Ortho-K, or Orthokeratology, and involves wearing special contact lenses while you sleep, to correct the curvature of the eye.  When you wake up the next morning and take out the lenses, you have perfect vision throughout the day.

Here is more.  When I ponder the possibility of laser eye surgery, I start calculating the probability of a sudden Virginia earthquake.  I’m now at the point where I need glasses for more than half of my reading material.  I don’t mind the look but it slows me down ever so slightly…

The Economist says so:

But one feature–whether a language uses pitch as well as vowels and
consonants to convey word meanings–stood apart.  Those, such as Chinese,
that encipher meaning in pitch are called “tonal languages”.  Those that
do not, like English, are “non-tonal”.  And it was versions of Dr
Dediu’s and Dr Ladd’s two microcephaly-related genes that matched the
49 populations along tonal and non-tonal lines.

Language Log (one of the best blogs) has excellent commentary.

Are you a good liar? Most people think that they are, but in reality there
are big differences in how well we can pull the wool over the eyes of others.
There is a very simple test that can help determine your ability to lie. Using
the first finger of your dominant hand, draw a capital letter Q on your
forehead.

Some people draw the letter Q in such a way that they themselves can read it.
That is, they place the tail of the Q on the right-hand side of their forehead.
Other people draw the letter in a way that can be read by someone facing them,
with the tail of the Q on the left side of their forehead. This quick test
provides a rough measure of a concept known as "self-monitoring". High
self-monitors tend to draw the letter Q in a way in which it could be seen by
someone facing them. Low self-monitors tend to draw the letter Q in a way in
which it could be read by themselves.

High self-monitors tend to be concerned with how other people see them. They
are happy being the centre of attention, can easily adapt their behaviour to
suit the situation in which they find themselves, and are skilled at
manipulating the way in which others see them. As a result, they tend to be good
at lying. In contrast, low self-monitors come across as being the "same person"
in different situations. Their behaviour is guided more by their inner feelings
and values, and they are less aware of their impact on those around them. They
also tend to lie less in life, and so not be so skilled at
deceit.

Long time readers will not be surprised to learn that I find it difficult to see things from other people’s perspective and thus, consistent with the theory, I am a lousy liar!

More here.  Hat tip to Koettke. 

A quick test: how many of you can name the product being advertised in
the banner ad at the top of the page?  Chances are, the ad’s presence
didn’t even register with most seasoned web browsers.  But that’s
probably okay, at least according to research that appears in June’s Journal of Consumer Research.
The research concludes that repeated exposure to a product via banner
ads generates a positive feeling towards that product.  The good news
for consumers is that a critical reevaluation of the product can make
these positive feelings vanish.

Here is more.  I’ve also thought that clicking to make the ad go away makes the ad, in terms of your subconscious, more effective than watching it.  Once you associate the ad with feelings of control, the product becomes something you can deal with.

The pointer is from www.geekpress.com.

In many data series a surprising number of entries begin with the number 1, and the number 2 is also more common than a random distribution might suggest.  This is called Benford’s Law.  For instance about one third of all house numbers start with one.  That may be a quirk of bureaucratic numbering psychology, but the principle also applies to the Dow Jones index history, size of files stored on a PC, the length
of the world’s rivers, and the numbers in newspapers’ front page headlines.  It does not apply to lottery-winning numbers, see the graph at the above link.  Here is an exact statement of the law:

Besides the number 1 consistently appearing
about 1/3 of the time, number 2 appears with a frequency of 17.6%,
number 3 at 12.5%, on down to number 9 at 4.6%.  In mathematical terms,
this logarithmic law is written as F(d) = log[1 + (1/d)], where F is
the frequency and d is the digit in question.

I feel as if someone is pulling my leg.  And I keep thinking of nominal interest rates being bounded from below at zero.  Yes this has practical implications:

…because a year’s accounting data of a company
should fulfill the law, economists can detect falsified data, which is
very hard to manipulate to follow the law. (Interestingly, scientists
found that numbers 5 and 6, rather than 1, are the most prevalent,
suggesting that forgers try to “hide” data in the middle.)

The law was first discovered by an economist (and astronomer), Simon Newcomb.  Here is Wikipedia on the law.  Here is more startling data on where the law applies.  From a completely orthogonal but I suspect not totally irrelevant direction, here is Tim Harford on price stickiness.

This whole topic makes me feel like an idiot for even bringing it up, with apologies to Pythagoras.