Category: Science

OH NY GOD…READ THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

From The Economist:

In economic theory the winner’s curse refers to the idea that
someone who places the winning bid in an auction may have paid too
much…The same thing may be happening in scientific publishing, according
to a new analysis. With so many scientific papers chasing so few pages
in the most prestigious journals, the winners could be the ones most
likely to oversell themselves–to trumpet dramatic or important results
that later turn out to be false. This would produce a distorted picture
of scientific knowledge, with less dramatic (but more accurate) results
either relegated to obscure journals or left unpublished.

My colleague Omar Al-Ubaydli was part of this work.  Fortunately, it is mentioned on the very cover of the magazine.  Nonetheless I believe it is true and it is most true for "hot" fields.  The original paper is here.

1. "Crows seem to be able to use causal reasoning to solve a problem, a feat previously undocumented in any other non-human animal, including chimps."  Here is more.

2. "I, Crayon," so to speak, a video.

3. Should libertarians migrate to Canada?

4. Treadmill desks.

The NYTimes Bits Blog reports:

The search and advertising company has filed for a patent
that describes a “water-based data center.” The idea is that Google
would create mobile data center platforms out at sea by stacking
containers filled with servers, storage systems and networking gear on
barges or other platforms.

This would let Google push computing centers closer to people in
some regions where it’s not feasible, cost-effective or as efficient to
build a data center on land. In short, Google brings the data closer to
you, and then the data arrives at a quicker clip.

Perhaps even more intriguing to some, Google has theorized about
powering these ocean data centers with energy gained just from water
splashing against the side of the barges.

Hmmm, do I spy the work of Patri Friedman, libertarian, Googler and seasteading proponent?  Perhaps the seasteaders are ensuring that they have good internet access.  As you may recall, Paypal entrepreneur Peter Theil is backing the seasteaders so there is more than one Silicon Valley entrepreneur with an eye on the sea.

By the way, the First Annual Seasteading Conference will be held in Burlingame, CA on October 10.  The conference is sure to be interesting but shouldn’t it have been held here? 

…off the top of my head, I cannot come up with any reason to
subsidize mortgage indebtedness. How does your having a mortgage loan
benefit me? Does anyone have an answer for that? Bueller?

I think that mortgage subsidies emerged pretty much by accident. The
income tax deductibility began when hardly anyone paid income tax, and
it has been grandfathered in ever since. In the 1930’s, government
decided to reshape the mortgage market, and that effort evolved into
government agencies, such as Fannie Mae, FHA, and Freddie Mac. Fannie
and Freddie were subsequently spun out to private shareholders as
government-sponsored enterprises, but Congress never let the GSE’s
forget that they had a "mission" to provide subsidies to low-income
borrowers.

That’s Arnold Kling.  I’ll add two complementary points.  First, higher investment in homes may bring negative externalities through climate change.  Second, home ownership apparently makes a laborer less geographically mobile and increases the severity of business cycles and real shocks.

A few years ago I wrote (follow up here):

Suppose that you find a watch in the forest.  If you know there is
no watchmaker then the theory of evolution is a brilliant and
compelling explanation for the presence of complexity without design.
But suppose that you know a watchmaker exists then surely the simplest
and most compelling explanation is that the watchmaker made the watch.
Any other explanation, particularly one so improbable
as evolution would seem to be preposterous and beside the point.

Thus for someone who knows, really knows, that
god(s) exists (and there are many people who claim to know that god(s)
exists) then some form of creationism follows as a
rational deduction from the premises.  It’s no point telling these
people that creationism is unscientific because given the premise that god(s) exists creationism is scientific.
If god(s) exists then evolution is almost certainly false, if not in
every particular then surely in the grand claims of a undesigned
nature.

Not surprisingly the argument created a firestorm of opposition (see the many nasty comments on the two original posts).  Thus, I am quite pleased to see that renowned philosopher Thomas Nagel writing in Philosophy and Public Affairs has recently made the same argument.  Nagel writes:

What [Intelligent Design] does depend on is the assumption that the hypothesis of a designer makes sense and cannot be ruled out as impossible or assigned a vanishingly small probability in advance. Once it is assigned a significant prior probability, it becomes a serious candidate for support by empirical evidence, in particular empirical evidence against the sufficiency of standard evolutionary theory to account for the observational data…

…Judge Jones cited as a decisive reason for denying ID the status of science that Michael Behe, the chief scientific witness for the defense, acknowledged that the theory would be more plausible to someone who believed in God than to someone who did not. This is just common sense, however, and the opposite is just as true: evolutionary theory as a complete explanation of the development of life is more plausible to someone who does not believe in God than to someone who does.

Nagel has much more of interest to say about teaching science given that ID is scientific if one accepts belief in god. 

Hat tip to Robin Hanson’s post, Intelligent Design Honesty, at Overcoming Bias.

It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India’s or Zimbabwe’s than in the Netherlands or the United States.

That is John Tierney, here is more.

Here’s a great, little video from Ed Rondthaler former president of the American Literacy Council and author of The Dictionary
of Simplified American Spelling.  Loyal readers will know that simplified spelling or what I call rational spelling holds a special place in my heart.

I worry that the tyranny of spell checkers impedes evolution towards rational spelling.

Hat tip to Boing Boing.

What do you get when you plot the genetic fingerprints of more than
1000 Europeans on a grid? An image that looks surprisingly like a map
of Europe. The findings reveal that our DNA contains a sort of global
positioning system, which researchers can use to pinpoint where in the
world both we and our relatives came from….

"I couldn’t believe the picture was so clear," says Carlos
Bustamante, senior author and statistical geneticist at Cornell
University. "I, for one, fell off my chair." Italy and Spain clearly
had their own cluster of genetically similar individuals, for example,
and there were even distinctions between French-, German-, and Italian-
speaking populations within Switzerland.

The results make sense,
says Bustamante. Because people in a region are more likely to marry
and mate with each other–a factor that may be largely due to shared
language–that gene pool will evolve as a separate cluster that
corresponds to a place on the globe, he explains. "You don’t randomly
mate within Europe. … If you live in Strait of Gibraltar, you’re more
likely to marry someone in Spain versus someone in Moscow."

That’s Science reporting on a new paper, Genes Mirror Geography with Europe, in Nature.

So if we could get people to exercise more, would they become more risk-loving, want less insurance, make more aggressive investments, and induce faster economic growth?  Would this be a good thing?

That’s Robin Hanson, the basic empirical result is that physically weaker people are more risk-averse in a wide variety of settings.

People exhibit less prejudice when they’re in the presence of a mirror, Dutch researchers have shown. Carina Wiekens
and Diederik Stapel said this effect occurs because mirrors make us
more aware of our public appearance, and therefore remind us of the
need to fall in line with social norms.

Here is more.  Perhaps I have seen too many vampire movies, but in general I am of the opinion that mirrors have a real influence on our behavior.

A man who knows he has this allele, she added, might be able to use the
knowledge to ignore tugs of restlessness he might feel in his marriage:
"You can say, ‘Oh, it is just my DNA, and I am going to ignore it.’ "

…Fisher [an academic researcher], who described herself as a romantic, said she would not reject
a potential mate who has two copies of the risky allele. She paused,
then added: "But I might not start a joint bank account with them for
the first few years."

Here is the full story.  Maybe they should put that on a T-shirt: "Oh, it is just my DNA, and I am going to ignore it."

Here are some recent results, from Sandra Black, Paul Devereux, and Kjell Salvanes.

More able parents tend to have more able children. While few would
question the validity of this statement, there is little large-scale
evidence on the intergenerational transmission of IQ scores. Using a
larger and more comprehensive dataset than previous work, we are able
to estimate the intergenerational correlation in IQ scores, examining
not just average correlations but also how this relationship varies for
different subpopulations. We find that there is substantial
intergenerational transmission of IQ scores; an increase in father’s IQ
at age 18 of 10% is associated with a 3.2% increase in son’s IQ at the
same age. This relationship holds true no matter how we break the data.
This effect is much larger than our estimated elasticity of
intergenerational transmission of income of approximately .2.

Here are ungated versions, or here.  Note that a) this is based on Norwegian data, b) income elasticity declines with birth order, c) intergenerational IQ elasticities are broadly the same across different levels of education for the father, d) the sample size is much larger than usual, and e) the author caution against assuming this is entirely a genetic effect; in another study large family size lowers IQ for instance, adjusting for parental IQ.

It has been found, for example, that women can predict a man’s
interest in infant children from his face. Trustworthiness also shows
up, as does social dominance. The latest example comes from a paper
just published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society by
Justin Carré and Cheryl McCormick, of Brock University in Ontario,
Canada.

The thesis developed by Mr Carré and Dr McCormick is that
aggressiveness is predictable from the ratio between the width of a
person’s face and its height. Their reason for suspecting this is that
this ratio differs systematically between men and women (men have wider
faces) and that the difference arises during puberty, when sex hormones
are reshaping people’s bodies. The cause seems to be exposure to
testosterone, which is also known to make people aggressive. It seems
reasonable, therefore, to predict a correlation between aggression and
face shape.

The bottom line is that a wide face predicts male aggression.  The study is based on photos of hockey players and measures of their combativeness.  Here is the full story.  Here is an Oprah magazine article on how women can camouflage a wide face with the right haircut.