Category: Science

Who says we are losing expertise in engineering?:

An Australian zoo was evacuated after an "ingenious" orang-utan
escaped from her enclosure by short-circuiting an electric fence today.

Staff
at Adelaide zoo said 137lb (62kg) Karta used a stick to short-circuit
the electric wires around her enclosure before piling up some more
sticks to climb out.

But the 27-year-old ape only ventured as far
as a surrounding fence, still metres from members of the public, during
her 30 minutes of freedom.

The zoo's curator, Peter Whitehead,
said she seemed to realise she was somewhere she was not supposed to be
and returned to her enclosure.

Here is the story.  I was intrigued to read this:

Burnett also examined feral children and was the only thinker of his
day to accept them as human rather than monsters. He viewed in these
children the ability to achieve reason.

They don't quite fit the stereotype:

Stand-up comedians are a vocational group with unique characteristics:
unlike most other entertainers with high creative abilities, they both
invent and perform their own work, and audience feedback (laughter or
derision) is instantaneous. In this study, the Big Five personality
traits (NEOFFI-R) of 31 professional stand-up comedians were compared
to those of nine amateur comedians, 10 humor writers and 400 college
students. All four groups showed similar neuroticism levels.
Professional stand-up comedians were similar to amateur stand-up
comedians in most respects. However, compared to college students,
professional and amateur stand-up comedians on average showed
significantly higher openness, and lower conscientiousness,
extraversion, and agreeableness. Compared to stand-up comedians, comedy
writers showed higher openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and
agreeableness. These results challenge the stereotype of comedians as
neurotic extraverts, and suggest a discrepancy between their stage
persona and their true personality traits.

Findings revealed vicious dog owners reported significantly more
criminal behaviors than other dog owners. Vicious dog owners were
higher in sensation seeking and primary psychopathy. Study results
suggest that vicious dog ownership may be a simple marker of broader
social deviance.

It is here and a short summary is here.  It is a good overview, noting that it does not cover the parts of the world most likely to be severely hit.  The paper is especially good at discussing the policy implications of scientific uncertainty.  This passage outlines a key issue and, in bureaucratese, asks how much it is possible to do:

Those insights have spurred some researchers who are particularly worried about low-probability but high impact outcomes to call for limiting long-term warming to no more than 3°F to 5°F with a high degree of certainty. However, since about 1.4°F of warming has already occurred, and past emissions have made a substantial amount of further warming inevitable, limiting long-term warming to such levels with a substantial degree of certainty would probably require very dramatic and potentially very expensive curtailment of expected future emissions. There is a large difference in costs between a policy that leaves a 50 percent risk of warming exceeding 5°F and a policy that virtually eliminates that risk. In moving along the continuum of risk from the former to the latter, each increment of risk reduction is likely to come at an increasing price.

I was taken by Paul Collier's earlier discussion of the ethics of climate change.  Using different terminology, given that "probabilistic aggression" against people in the poorer countries is problematic, concern for climate change is (or rather should be) the libertarian point of view.

I also found useful the dialogue "The Big Heat" in the June issue of Discover magazine (not yet on-line).  It's the best discussion I've seen of why the climate change skeptics clutch at a few pieces of (supposedly) favorable evidence but don't think about the issue at the very deep level or require that their scientific theories cohere as a whole or predict a wide range of climate-related data.

That all said, I come to the Waxman-Markey climate change bill.  Here is one estimate that the impact of that bill on global temperature will be very small.  I am not at all endorsing that estimate, but as someone concerned with the issue as a whole, I would like to know: what is the highest quasi-credible estimate for how much good that bill will do?

I would like to know.

According to one recent study, the portfolio effect dominates:

You might expect that being prompted (primed) to think of yourself as a good person would make you more altruistic or moral – but, in fact, the exact opposite appears to be
the case. Primed to think about what a good person you are, your most
likely reaction is to think you’ve paid your morality dues and go on
about your business.

The underlying model is this:

According to a new study in Psychological Science,
humans engage in a process called “moral self-regulation.” Basically,
we’re constantly calculating the trade-off between being able to see
ourselves as good people and the cost of engaging in all that
non-advantageous goodness.

I was intrigued to read this:

You are the victim of identity theft and the fraudster calls your bank to transfer money into their own account. But instead of asking them for your personal details, the bank assistant simply presses a button that causes the phone to produce a brief series of clicks in the fraudster's ear. A message immediately alerts the bank that the person is not who they are claiming to be, and the call is ended.

Such a safeguard could one day be commonplace, if a new biometric technique designed to identify the person on the other end of a phone line proves successful. The concept relies on the fact that the ear not only senses sound but also makes noises of its own, albeit at a level only detectable by supersensitive microphones.

If those noises prove unique to each individual, it could boost the security of call-centre and telephone-banking transactions and reduce the need for people to remember numerous identification codes. Stolen cellphones could also be rendered useless by programming them to disable themselves if they detect that the user of the phone is not the legitimate owner.

Will, a loyal MR reader, asks:

I just ran across an interesting post by a Jess Weiss on a
pro-streetcars-for-DC blog that asks the following question – "In
several places in the U.S., most notably Portland, Oregon that's built
the most extensive streetcar system in the U.S. to date, they report
"people simply like streetcars more than buses", but nobody seems to be
able to really point their finger at hard data why that is.

Why do you think streetcars are better than buses?"

Here in Lisbon the streetcars are full of pick-pockets, overcrowded, and hard to keep your balance in.  Yet those same streetcars are beloved by the tourists and common on the postage stamps.

I believe this is a question for Mrs. Cowen, not me.  I did ride them in Lisbon — once.  I'm still wondering why so many people are reluctant to take cabs for cheap, short rides.

Here is a Megan McArdle post on streetcars.  Natasha believes that street car lovers wish to "affiliate themselves with the past."  (When I heard this phrasing I realized we are no longer newlyweds.)  I believe that streetcars help you avoid that "low class feeling" which all too often comes from riding on the bus.  The whole point of a streetcar is to avoid creating an ambience separate from the urban trappings which surround you.  Which is precisely why they are charming yet not always so comfortable.

Here is a short article on the popularity of streetcars.  Putting aside the social cost-benefit analysis, and focusing only on the individual ridership decision, why do people like streetcars so much?

The story starts off with this:

Women given testosterone for a month were no more likely than women not receiving the hormone to engage in risky financial decisions, according to researchers in Sweden. The findings could suggest that women are a safer pair of hands on the stock-market trading floor than men – or throw into doubt earlier findings about the effect of the hormone on men.

A spate of recent studies have found correlations between testosterone levels and risky behaviour in men, including one that found that male securities traders with more testosterone in their saliva made riskier financial decisions.

But now a team led by Magnus Johannesson, an economist at the Stockholm School of Economics, has found no such effects in a group of 200 post-menopausal women. The women were administered testosterone, oestrogen or a placebo for four weeks and asked to play a series of economic games that measure the player's propensity to take risks, their trust and their willingness to share resources.

One researcher notes:

"I'm relatively pessimistic of finding an effect in men," Johannesson says. He writes in the paper that it is possible that previously published links between testosterone and risk-taking are "spurious". Studies that do not find a correlation between sex hormone levels and economic behaviour may simply have a harder time getting published. "Negative correlation results don't get published," he says.

The original research is here.  I would simply urge caution in interpreting results from this area.  We're not yet in a "safe zone" of knowing what replicable results look like.

Groups talk about what they already know:

A new meta-analysis (pdf) of 72 studies, involving 4,795 groups and over 17,000 individuals has shown that groups tend to spend most of their time discussing the information shared by members,
which is therefore redundant, rather than discussing information known
only to one or a minority of members. This is important because those
groups that do share unique information tend to make better decisions.

Another important factor is how much group members talk to each other. Ironically, Jessica Mesmer-Magnus and Leslie DeChurch found that groups that talked more tended to share less unique information.

Hey, Alex, demand curves slope downwards!  Hey Robin, people signal!  Hey, Bryan, etc.

Gretchen Rubin interviews Todd Kashdan (of GMU I might add, though I don't know him):

Is there anything you find yourself doing repeatedly that gets in the way of your happiness?
There is a dark side to my desire to become an expert in psychology,
knowledgeable about science and literature, skilled as a parent,
mountain biker, and weightlifter, and attentive as a husband. When I
think I know something, I stop paying attention. It happens far too
often and when it does, opportunities close. I constantly have to
remind myself to let go of my ego, let go of my expectations, and stay
flexible and profoundly aware of what is right in front of my senses.

Here is Todd's new blog.  Here is Todd on the Mayan afterlife.  Here is Gretchen's version of phony advertising markets in everything.

Here is Todd's home page, with Todd's lists.

I have not had time to read the original study but this rings true to me:

But now Benjamin Scheibehenne and colleagues have waded into the topic with the claim that the "too-much-choice effect" has in fact failed to appear in many experiments, and with the real-life observation that shops that offer more consumer choice tend to be more successful.

In a series of experiments, Scheibehenne's team tested 598 participants who were asked to choose from among restaurants, charities and music downloads. Throughout, they varied factors that they hoped might explain why the too-much-choice effect sometimes occurs and sometimes doesn't.

Examples of these factors included the need to justify one's choice; the perceived variety of choice, as opposed to actual amount of choice; the mean attractiveness of a range of choices; cultural differences (they tested German and US students); and individual differences such as people's tendency to maximise – that is, their consistent desire to find the perfect option.

For most of the experiments, the too-much-choice effect wasn't actually observed and when it did, the only relevant factor which increased the effect was the need to justify one's choice.

"The fact that most of the variables that we tested were not sufficient to elicit choice overload suggests that the too-much-choice effect is less robust than previously thought," the researchers said.

Repeat this fragment after me: "…the real-life observation that shops that offer more consumer choice tend to be more successful."  

Why do I choose that you should repeat that fragment and not some other?  I'm not going to tell you.