ProfessorBainbridge.com

How impressed should we be by China's climate control initiative?

Not very.

"Why Power Companies Build Nuclear Reactors on Fault Lines: The Case of Japan"

My friend and case book coauthor Mark Ramseyer has posted a fascinating paper on Why Power Companies Build Nuclear Reactors on Fault Lines: The Case of Japan. The abstract follows:

On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 38-meter tsunami destroyed Tokyo Electric's Fukushima nuclear power complex. The disaster was not a high-damage, low-probability event. It was a high-damage, high-probability event. Massive earthquakes and tsunami assault the coast every century.

Tokyo Electric built its reactors as it did because it would not pay the full cost of a melt-down anyway. Given the limited liability at the heart of corporate law, it could externalize the cost of running reactors. In most industries, firms rarely risk tort damages so enormous they cannot pay them. In nuclear power, "unpayable" potential liability is routine. Privately owned companies bear the costs of an accident only up to the fire-sale value of their net assets. Beyond that point, they pay nothing -- and the damages from a nuclear disaster easily soar past that point.

Government ownership could eliminate this moral hazard - but it would replace it with problems of its own. Unfortunately, the electoral dynamics in wealthy modern democracies combine to replicate nearly perfectly the moral hazard inherent in private ownership. Private firms will build reactors on fault lines. And so will governments.

Do looks really matter? Yes and no, depending on your gender

I'm not on the marriage market and don't plan to ever be on it again, but for the benefit of those of you who are, here's some interesting results of a UCLA study:

... there have been many instances in which beautiful women were attracted to men of wealth and power, regardless of what they looked like.

 

That’s all true, agreed Benjamin Karney, professor of social psychology and co-director of the Relationship Institute at UCLA. But the key factor in determining whether such "odd" couples are happy in their marriages seems to depend on the "relative attractiveness" between the man and the woman, he explained. His research suggests that in cases where attractive women are married to less attractive men, the chances for happiness are fairly high.

 

"The [less attractive] husbands seemed to be basically more committed, more invested in pleasing their wives when they felt that they were getting a pretty good deal. Because for men, the attractiveness of their wives is part of the deal," said Karney, who is also an adjunct behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation.

 

"For women, that’s not part of the deal. The deal that women get isn’t being with an attractive man. It’s being with a protective man, or a wealthy man, or an ambitious man, or even a sensitive man. So they didn’t care as much about the appearance of their husbands."

Much more results at the link.

Thomas Friedman meet Thomas Malthus

Thomas Friedman (2011):

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

Thomas Malthus (1798):

The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.

We humans are a lot more resourceful than the ecomentalists give us credit for being.

My review of Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid

I just finished reading Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid by Wendy Williams. (It's not just about squid, but about cephalopods generally). It's a highly accessible, very well written work of popular science. I learned a lot not just about squid but marine biology and medicine as well. Highly recommended.

Here's what Science said:

Williams also brings readers up to date on modern cephalopod science, including an exploration of the ongoing Humboldt squid invasion of California’s Monterey Bay. And how octopuses change color so quickly — that’s a topic too fascinating to pass up (hint: It works like a cellular peekaboo game). Most important, perhaps, these animals have also taught humankind a lot about itself. Much of what scientists know today about brain and spinal cells, for instance, came from studies of rice noodle–like neurons that run down the bodies of small squids.

Here's what Wired had to say:

Kraken is as an exploration of how we perceive squid, octopus, and cuttlefish. Only a handful of species – primarily the giant squid, the Humbolt squid, the longfin inshore squid, and the Pacific giant octopus – receive much detailed attention. These relatively familiar cephalopods act as molluscan ambassadors for the rest of their kind, and Williams uses them the draw out the general characteristics that make these creatures seem so strange. ...

Williams guides her readers over squid-filled boat decks, by aquarium tanks, and into dissection labs during her journey to understand cephalopods, but the narrative she creates is uneven. She is at her best when writing in the first person or recounting her conversations with researchers, but there are other explanatory portions of the book that simply fall flat. An early subsection about the evolutionary history of squid feels more like a Wikipedia article than part of a book, and long stretches of historical narrative in the neuroscience portion of the book feel tangential to the main storyline. Williams ends the book strong by considering what investigations of cephalopod intelligence might tell us about our own ability to understand the mental lives of other animals, though, and the portions of the book about the Humbolt and giant squid truly shine.

I think the Wikipedia analogy is unduly harsh, although the other criticism is fair. Even so, it's still a worthwhile read.

I blame Jenny McCarthy

Megan McArdle:

... vaccine resistance is spreading among parents who want to free ride on the herd immunity of others.  If these diseases were widespread, they'd be rushing to vaccinate their kids.  But they can delay, or forgo the vaccines entirely, thanks to other parents who are willing to risk their kids in order to do the right thing.

They're already killing little babies who catch pertussis before they can be vaccinated, and now measles has killed six people in France just since the start of the year.

People complain that conservatives are anti-science, because some of us are skeptical about handing the economy over to climate scientists or that we ought to kill babies so as to experiment on their stem cells. But we also need to be talking about the anti-science views of Hollywood limousine liberals like Jenny McCarthy.

More on scientific consensuses: Species extinction rates overestimated

Apropos of the discussion we had the other day about the scientific consensus on climate change comes news that:

The most widely used methods for calculating species extinction rates are "fundamentally flawed" and overestimate extinction rates by as much as 160 percent, life scientists report May 19 in the journal Nature.

However, while the problem of species extinction caused by habitat loss is not as dire as many conservationists and scientists had believed, the global extinction crisis is real, says Stephen Hubbell, a distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA and co-author of the Nature paper. ...

"The overestimates can be very substantial. The way people have defined 'extinction debt' (species that face certain extinction) by running the species-area curve backwards is incorrect, but we are not saying an extinction debt does not exist."

The point is not that we should ignore environmental concerns. The point is that we should be wary about claims that massive social and economic changes are necessary simply because the scientific consensus of the moment claims they're desirable. Like the medical claims about salt I mentioned in my earlier post, and like this latest news, the consensus of the moment can turn out to be seriously flawed.

Yeah, but they keep changing their minds

Andrew Sullivan:

From The Annals Of Sane Conservatism II

"I'm not a meteorologist. All I know is 90 percent of the scientists say climate change is occurring. If 90 percent of the oncological community said something was causing cancer we'd listen to them," - Jon Huntsman, in Time.

Fair enough. I'm prepared to listen to them too. BUT oncology's an interesting example. Why? because the damned doctors keep changing their mind all the time. Take salt, for example. When I was a kid, we were told to take salt tablets if we got really sweaty, so as to restore our electrolytes. When I got older, I was told to bypass salt or I'd end up having to get a heart bypass. And now there's a brand new study that says:

...liberal use of the salt shaker might actually be more of a cure than a curse when it comes to human health, according to new research.

The study, published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), followed health trends in 3,681 individuals over a median of almost 8 years, and found that a higher sodium intake was actually associated with a lower incidence of cardiovascular disease (CVD), and that the amount of salt consumed had no correlation with hypertension.

So we listen. But we are justifiably skeptical. Paradigm shifts happen in science all the time. Before we trash the economy, we better be damned sure those 90% of meterologists are really right. (And not just saying what they need to say to, for example, get their next grant.)

The world's worst environmental villain?

Very interesting:

The Japanese Nuclear Power Plant Crisis and Evaluating High Cost/Low Risk Events

The problems at Japanese nuclear power plants in the wake of the tsunami are likely to put a serious dent in the nascent political efforts to restart the nuclear power plant. The accident doesn't change the science. But it does change the politics. It does so because people make systematic errors in assessing what Richard Zeckhauser and Cass Sunstein aptly called "fearsome risks."

Their essay, Overreaction to Fearsome Risk, focuses on risks that invoke strong negative emotional responses, such as fear and anxiety.

Such risks, which usually involve high consequences, tend to have extremely low probabilities, since life today is no longer nasty, brutish and short. We aim to show here that in the face of a fearsome risk, people often exaggerate the benefits of preventive, risk-reducing, or ameliorative measures. In both personal life and politics, the result is damaging overreactions to risks.

This happens because of a systematic error most uninformed members of the public make when it comes to such risks. To quote Agent Kay, "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it."

Specifically, as Howard Margolis, argued in his 1996 book, Dealing with Risk: Why the Public and the Experts Disagree on Environmental Issues, the public tends to consider only the costs associated with such risks. In contrast, experts will balance costs and benefits.

The predictable result of the Japanese accidents thus is that people will freak out again, just as they did after Three Mile Island, overestimating the risks and ignoring the benefits. Zeckhauser and Sunstein opine:

Overreaction to risk is frequently found in the environmental realm. A dramatic example is provided by the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. Significant amounts of reactor coolant were leaked to the environment, including releases of cancer-inducing agents. The Kemeny Commission Report, created under Presidential order, concluded that in expectation less than one case of cancer would be created. Yet the accident affected public and political opinion sufficiently to terminate the construction of any new nuclear plants in the United States for 30 years. The coal- and oil-fueled plants built in their stead surely caused many more health problems, looking only at the air pollution they produced. (Today, nuclear power is poised to make a comeback given concerns about global warming due significantly to CO2 emissions from conventional power plants. [Ed.: Or it was, until this episode.]) The impact of Three Mile Island was reinforced due to the release of the movie The China Syndrome the same month as the accident. The movie made a catastrophic accident – narrowly avoided due to courageous action of the movie’s heroes -- “available” in the public mind. When an example of an event can readily be brought to mind, it is judged to be much more likely (Tversky and Kahneman, 1973 and 1974).

Now the Japanese reactor accidents will have precisely the same effect. People will panic and ignore the very real benefits of nuclear power. For example, you want to reduce your carbon fotprint by buying a plug-in hybrid? What about the carbon emitted by the oil- or gas-powered electric plants that produced the electricity that flows through your plug? Nuclear power offers an alternative to carbon-based fuels that could provide, at the very least, a transition power source as we search for the Holy Grail of cost-effective renewables.

The politicians know--or at least should know--better. Hell, Cass Sunstein is a top Obama adviser. But Obama hasn't lead on Libya, health care reform (left it to Congress), fiscal reform (ditto), or practically anything since he took office. Why should we expect an different on nuclear power? Which is not to say that the rest of the political class--Republican or Democratic--is likely to do better. They simply don't have the stones to fight the kind of massive, systemic error in risk evaluation that's about to unfold in front of them.

Zekchauser and Sunstein put the political problem less polemically, but make basically the same point:

If probability neglect characterizes individual judgment under certain circumstances, government and law are likely to be neglecting probability under those same circumstances. If people show unusually strong reactions to low-probability catastrophes, a democratic government is likely to act accordingly, either because it is responding to the public, or because its officials suffer the same proclivities.

More likely the former in this case.

What to do? Back to Zeckhauser and Sunstein:

The government should not swiftly capitulate if the public is demonstrating action bias and showing an excessive response to a risk whose expected value is quite modest. A critical component of government response should be information and education. But if public fear remains high, the government should determine which measures can reduce it most cost effectively, almost in the spirit of looking for a placebo that may do little for risk but do a lot to reduce fear. Valued attributes for such measures will be high visibility, low cost, and perceived effectiveness. Reducing fear offers two major benefits: (1) Fear itself imposes significant costs. (2) Both private and public responses in the face of fearsome risks are likely to be far from rational.

It'll take leadership. Unfortunately, as I noted above, leadership is not an attribute I find to be very common amongst our modern governing class.

Update: Time Magazine 2006:

When our emotions overtake our reasoning we worry about sensational events which are statistically unlikely to harm us — such as airline disasters, shark attacks, or terrorism — rather than everyday dangers that kill thousands. John Graham, who spent four years as administrator of the federal Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, says news of SUV tire failures left him besieged with demands for tire pressure warning systems even though government reports listed 41 car-crash deaths per year due to under-inflated tires, versus 9,800 deaths from side-impact crashes. "People's capacity to visualize a risk is an important part of the attention they give to it," says Graham. "If you're within six months of a Three Mile Island, a Love Canal, or a 9/11, the policymakers and the public don't have the patience for the kind of cerebral risk analysis we need."

That falls in line with what Princeton professor Daniel Kahneman coined "the availability heuristic": the concept that if people can think of an incident in which a risk has come to fruition, they will exaggerate its likelihood. "Somehow the probability of an accident increases [in one's mind] after you see a car turned over on the side of the road," says Kahneman, who won a 2002 Nobel prize for his work. "That's what availability does to you: it plants an image that comes readily to mind, and that image is associated with an emotion: fear."

Update: I'm having a flame war on Twitter with a tweeter who claims that we're dealing here with one of Nassim Taleb's black swans. But so what? As has been observed in defense of the Bataan reactor in the Philippines:

A nuclear accident, such as those mentioned above, is a “black swan” or an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations, as Nassim Taleb puts it in his self-same book. Key to reducing, if not, eliminating the fear of nuclear power is understanding the risk associated with it Why are we willing to risk our health, the environment, and our very existence with the use of fossil fuels over an improbable catastrophic nuclear meltdown of a reactor?

Taleb, in his book, says the focus of the investigation should not be on how to avoid any specific black swan, for we don't know where the next one is coming from. The focus should be on what general lessons can be learned from them.

And indeed we learned. It is estimated that the probability for a plant to have a serious flaw has decreased from 0.1 to 0.01 during the developmental phase of the nuclear industry. At the same time the equivalent frequency of accidents has decreased from 0.04 per reactor year to 0.0004 per reactor year, and this is according to a study by Jussi vaurio in 1984!

Another positive development is through a player in this nuclear industry, Thorium Power based in Russia which currently qualifying its proprietary thorium (a silvery metal which is thought to be between three and four times more abundant) fuel designs for use in existing and future commercial nuclear reactors. These designs have three major benefits: no production of nuclear weapons-usable materials in spent fuel, reduced nuclear waste, and improved industry operating economics. The technology will be commercially available in 2013.

William Saletan makes much the same point, arguing that:

For 40 years, they've quietly done their work. Three days ago, they were hit almost simultaneously by Japan's worst earthquake and one of its worst tsunamis. Not one reactor container has failed. The only employee who has died at a Japanese nuclear facility since the quake was killed by a crane. Despite this, voices are rising in Europe and the United States to abandon nuclear power. Industry analysts predict that the Japan scare, like Chernobyl, will freeze plant construction. ...

If Japan, the United States, or Europe retreats from nuclear power in the face of the current panic, the most likely alternative energy source is fossil fuel. And by any measure, fossil fuel is more dangerous. The sole fatal nuclear power accident of the last 40 years, Chernobyl, directly killed 31 people. By comparison, Switzerland's Paul Scherrer Institute calculates that from 1969 to 2000, more than 20,000 people died in severe accidents in the oil supply chain. More than 15,000 people died in severe accidents in the coal supply chain—11,000 in China alone. The rate of direct fatalities per unit of energy production is 18 times worse for oil than it is for nuclear power.

Even if you count all the deaths plausibly related to Chernobyl—9,000 to 33,000 over a 70-year period—that number is dwarfed by the death rate from burning fossil fuels. The OECD's 2008 Environmental Outlook calculates that fine-particle outdoor air pollution caused nearly 1 million premature deaths in the year 2000, and 30 percent of this was energy-related. You'd need 500 Chernobyls to match that level of annual carnage. But outside Chernobyl, we've had zero fatal nuclear power accidents.

That doesn't mean we can ignore what has happened in Japan. Precisely because nuclear accidents are so rare, we have to study them intensely. Each one tells us what to fix in the next generation of power plants. The most obvious mistake in Japan was parking the diesel generators in an area low enough to be flooded by a quake-driven tsunami. The batteries that backed up the generators weren't adequate, either. They lasted only eight hours, and power outage fallback plans at U.S. reactors are even shorter. Moreover, this is the second time an advanced nuclear facility has had to vent radioactive vapor (Three Mile Island was the first). Maybe it's time to require filtration systems that scrub the vapor before it's released.

Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut says we should "put the brakes" on nuclear power plant construction until we figure out what went wrong in Japan. Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts wants a moratorium on new reactors in "seismically active areas" while we study the problem. That's fine. But let's not block construction indefinitely while we go on mindlessly pumping oil. Because nuclear energy, for all its risks, is safer.

Spelling doesn't matter to comprehension

So says Barry:

Spelling don’t matter. Comprehension remains essentially unchanged, even when all letters of a word are totally mixed up — just so long as the first and last letters are in their proper place.

And he's got a jumble to prove it. It's very cool. Go try it.

As one of the world's worst spellers, however, I await proof that spelling and intelligence are not correlated.

Liberalism is a genetic defect

At least, that's how I chose to interpret this report:

An article published in the Journal of Politics looked at 2,000 subjects from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, examining their genes, social networks, and political affiliations. What they found was that adolescents who possess a certain variant of the dopamine receptor gene DRD4 were more likely to grow up to be liberal adults. Furthermore, that correlation only existed when adolescents had active social lives.

Remember I was a biophysical inorganic chemist before I was a lawyer, so I know of what I speak on these matters.

I have a cold. I blame Bush.

I'm coming down with a cold. And it's going to be a bad one, I suspect. And I blame President Bush. Not for giving me the cold, but for making the symptoms worse. Here's why.

There was a story in today's WSJ that the safety nannies have been giving the makers of Pom a hard time for claiming that there are health benefits to drinking pomengrate juice:

Fewer than 4% of Americans had tried the fruit before 2002, when marketing mavens Lynda and Stewart Resnick launched the 100% fruit juice they call POM Wonderful. It's since become a top seller, in its curvy hourglass-shaped bottle.

The Resnicks, who also owns the Teleflora and FIJI water businesses, invested in orchards in California in the 1980s. They've also commissioned research on the anti-oxidant properties of pomegranates—too much research, according to a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) complaint last month alleging deceptive advertising. "Any consumer who sees POM Wonderful products as a silver bullet against all diseases has been misled," said David Vladeck, who runs the agency's Bureau of Consumer Protection.

This is hyberbole—no POM ads claim the pomegranate can cure "all diseases." But the complaint is a stalking horse for the agency's more radical position: that health-food companies now need to get Food and Drug Administration approval for scientific claims, similar to the process pharmaceutical companies follow for drugs.

In the case of Pom, it looks like there's actual scientific evidence that pomegranate juice has some health benefits. But so what?

Suppose people believed that pomegranate juice was good for them. So they switch from drinking soft drinks to Pom. And some of them, believing that Pom is good for them, really do get better from whatever ails them. Isn't that a good thing?

Placebos work, after all, at least for some people. Some of my fellow UCLA faculty have proven it:

... for some people, the placebo works nearly as well as the medication. ... Placebos are thought to act by stimulating the brain's central reward pathways by releasing a class of neurotransmitters called monoamines, specifically dopamine and norepinephrine. These are the brain chemicals that make us "feel good." Because the chemical signaling done by monoamines is under strong genetic control, the scientists reasoned that common genetic variations between individuals - called genetic polymorphisms - could influence the placebo response. ...

Leuchter noted that this is not the sole explanation for a response to a placebo, which is likely to be caused by many factors, both biological and psychosocial. "But the data suggests that individual differences in response to placebo are significantly influenced by individual genotypes," he said.

What does all this have to do with Bush? I'm getting there.

For a long time, I've taken Airborne religiously at the first sign of a cold. At first, it really seemed to work. My colds were a few days shorter and the symptoms were not as bad. Really.

But then back in 2008 I started reading stories in the press about how the Bush FTC was going after the makers of Airborne for making false claims. Specifically, the FTC complaint that "there is no competent and reliable scientific evidence to support the claims made by the defendants that Airborne tablets can prevent or reduce the risk of colds, sickness, or infection; protect against or help fight germs; reduce the severity or duration of a cold; and protect against colds, sickness, or infection in crowded places such as airplanes, offices, or schools."

Ever since then, Airborne doesn't seem to work as well. I still take it, but my colds seem to last longer and be more severe. The same thing happened to behavioral economist and Predictably Irrational author Dan Ariely:

Assume Airborne is/was a placebo. As far as I can tell from some cursory research, open placebos can work but no where near as well as closed ones. As Ariely says, you have to at least mostly believe it works. So telling people something is a placebo seriously undermines its effectiveness. Even so, the FTC turned Airborne into an open placebo without so much as a by your leave.

As long as something like Airborne is not hurting people, why should the government come along and advertise the fact that it's a placebo? If millions of people are getting over their colds faster and with less suffering, isn't that a good thing? And, if so, shouldn't the government just keep its damn mouth shut? (All the more so in the case of Pom, where there apparently is preliminary evidence that it has benefits?)

Which is why I blame Bush.

Don't tell Glen Beck

Evolution in action:

As one of the primary carriers of malaria, the Anopheles gambiae mosquito is one of the most dangerous animals in the world. Now efforts to wipe out malaria must succeed quickly, because it's rapidly evolving into two separate species.

Malaria infects two hundred million people a year, and killed nearly 900,000 people in 2009. Many efforts to stop the spread of the disease involved targetting the different strains of the Anopheles gambiae mosquito. Researchers at Imperial College London have found that two strains which are physically identical but have genetic variations at 400,000 points in their genome. The variations are not likely to converge. In fact, Dr Mara Lawniczak of Imperial College London says they're diverging quickly:

From our new studies, we can see that mosquitoes are evolving more quickly than we thought and that unfortunately, strategies that might work against one strain of mosquito might not be effective against another. It's important to identify and monitor these hidden genetic changes in mosquitoes if we are to succeed in bringing malaria under control by targeting mosquitoes.

One of the things I found attractive about Catholicism was its openness to evolution relative to the creationism that dominates the evangelical churches in which I grew up. Rome's come a long way since Galileo.

Global collapse?

Ten questions for Jared Diamond, our modern day Malthus.