Posted at 07:15 PM in Science | Permalink | Comments (0)
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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.
Posted at 12:44 PM in Science | Permalink | Comments (0)
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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."
Posted at 12:33 PM in Science | Permalink | Comments (0)
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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.
Posted at 11:39 AM in Science | Permalink | Comments (1)
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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.
Posted at 04:01 PM in Books, Science | Permalink | Comments (0)
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... 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.
Posted at 05:31 PM in Science | Permalink | Comments (3)
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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.
Posted at 02:40 PM in Science | Permalink | Comments (1)
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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.)
Posted at 03:40 PM in Science | Permalink | Comments (25)
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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.
Posted at 10:45 PM in Science | Permalink | Comments (1)
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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.
Posted at 09:57 AM in Science | Permalink | Comments (3)
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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.
Posted at 01:36 PM in Science | Permalink | Comments (3)
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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.
Posted at 01:54 PM in Religion, Science | Permalink | Comments (6)
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Posted at 01:11 PM in Science | Permalink | Comments (0)
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We have released the genie from the bottle: climate change is coming, and there’s no stopping it. The question, according to Matthew Kahn, is not how we’re going to avoid a hotter future but how we’re going to adapt to it. In Climatopolis, Kahn, one of the world’s foremost experts on the economics of the environment, argues that cities and regions will adapt to rising temperatures over time, slowly transforming our everyday lives as we change our behaviors and our surroundings. Taking the reader on a tour of the world’s cities— from New York to Beijing to Mumbai—Kahn’s clear-eyed, engaging, and optimistic message presents a positive yet realistic picture of what our urban future will look like.
Posted at 11:06 AM in Books, Science | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Glenn Reynolds has a column in The Examiner pondering the possibility of some highly competent scientist/ecomentalist (to borrow Jeremy Clarkson's wonderful neologism) taking eliminationist rhetoric seriously:
Filthy. Parasites. Disgusting, overbreeding candidates for sterilization and extermination. Possessed of false morals and a “breeding culture.”
Hitler talking about the Jews? Nope. This is Discovery Channel hostage-taker James Lee talking about ... human beings. Compared to Lee, Hitler was a piker, philosophically: Der Fuehrer only wanted to kill those he considered “subhuman.” Lee considered all humans to be subhuman.
Lee was a nut, an eco-freak who said he was inspired by Al Gore’s environmental scare-documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” His badly written “manifesto” underscores his craziness. He hated “filthy human babies.”
But, of course, Lee’s not alone. Looking at the environmental literature, we find terms like those used above -- the currently stylish description is “eliminationist rhetoric” -- used widely, and plans for mass sterilization are fairly common.
And, as Mark Hemingway pointed out in these pages a few days ago, one need only look to the writings of President Obama’s “science czar,” John Holdren to find something similar. Seeing humanity as destructive, Holdren wrote in favor of forced abortion and putting sterilizing agents in the drinking water, and in particular of sterilizing people who cause “social deterioration.”
Holdren has since distanced himself from these views, but still. Lee was a violent nut, but not a scientist. Holdren is a scientist (who held nutty views, at least at one point) but he’s not a violent nut.
But here’s what worries me: What if we get the two in combination?
...
So far, we’ve been pretty lucky that there aren’t more scientists who are also nuts. Though the “mad scientist” is a staple of literature, they’re fortunately pretty rare in real life.But biotechnology is getting more common and -- thanks to folks ranging from Paul Ehrlich (Holdren’s coauthor) to Al Gore -- so are apocalyptic environmental views that treat humans as a cancer upon the earth.
You should, of course, go read the whole thing. But first a quick pop culture quiz:
Answers below the fold.
Continue reading "Glenn Reynolds Channels Which Famous Novelist?" »
Posted at 06:39 PM in Books, Science | Permalink | Comments (3)
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