Those Sweet Mysteries of Life, Deciphered

William Grimes in The New York Times:

THE LOGIC OF LIFE: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World

By Tim Harford

Timharford190 The world is a crazy place. It makes perfect sense only to conspiracy theorists and economists of a certain stripe. Tim Harford, a columnist for The Financial Times and the author of “The Undercover Economist,” is one of these, a devotee of rational-choice theory, which he applies ingeniously and entertainingly to all kinds of problems in “The Logic of Life.” The premise is simple. Human beings are rational creatures who respond to incentives and rewards. No matter how bizarre a choice might seem, there is logic at work, and Mr. Harford intends to expose it.

“People smoke and gamble,” he writes. “Fools fall in love. Offices are run by morons. City neighborhoods boom or collapse for no apparent reason.” To the keen eye of an economist it all makes sense, in the counterintuitive way exploited so successfully by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner in “Freakonomics.” Smoking provides Mr. Harford with one of his more arresting examples. Nicotine patches and nicotine gum, intended to wean smokers from their dangerous habit, actually seem to encourage teenagers to take the first puff, for reasons that any economist might have predicted. Since there are now products to help smokers quit, it becomes less risky, as a purely rational proposition, to pick up the habit.

More here.

Understanding the Mind of the Virtual Scholar

Nicholas Carr over at his blog (also for M.A.):

“The medium is the mind,” I write toward the end of The Big Switch, arguing, as others have before, that the tools we use to gather, store, and analyze information inevitably exert a strong influence over the way we think. As the internet becomes our universal medium – what the director of the Annenberg Center for the Digital Future terms “a comprehensive tool that Americans are using to touch the world” – its technical characteristics also begin to shape, slowly but inexorably, the workings of our memory and our other cognitive processes.

Because the Net is relatively new, we don’t yet have solid research, in the form of long-term “longitudinal” studies of web users, on its effects on cognition. But the British Library, working with researchers at University College London, this week published the results of what it calls a “virtual longitudinal study” that combines a review of “published literature on the information behaviour and preferences of young people over the past thirty years” and an extensive analysis, conducted over five years, of the logs of a British Library website, as well as a second popular research site, that serves to document people’s behavior in finding and reading information online. According to the researchers, “This is the first time that anyone has actually profiled on any real scale the information seeking behaviour of the virtual scholar by age.” (The full study, in pdf format, is available here.)

How to and Not to Structure a Stimulus Package, or Why We’re F@%&^$

Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (via Paul Krugman):

Changes reportedly made last night in the stimulus package would reduce its effectiveness as stimulus. Although the package includes a reasonably designed tax rebate, the two most targeted and economically effective measures under consideration — a temporary extension of unemployment benefits and a temporary boost in food stamp benefits — were zeroed out, apparently at the insistence of House Republican leaders.

The two respected institutions that have rated stimulus options in recent days — the Congressional Budget Office and Moody’s Economy.com — both give their two highest ratings for effectiveness as stimulus to the two measures that were dropped.

A Call for More Dialogue Between Science and the Humanities

Chris Mooney over at Science Progress (for Maeve Adams):

Nearly ten years ago, to get myself officially clear of college, I wrote a senior English essay about parallels between the work of Charles Darwin and the writings of several Victorian novelists. I singled out Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and George Eliot’s Middlemarch in particular. It seemed to me that the scientist and the novelists alike sought to address a particularly prevalent human failing: How we deceive ourselves into believing what we want about reality, rather than what is true, by selectively reading the evidence (rather than considering it in its entirety).

In short, I argued that Dickens and Eliot were proposing a kind of “scientific method” for avoiding self delusion, in life and especially in love. Darwin, meanwhile, had a similar approach to the naturalists who had come before him and had tried desperately to fit species into Linnean categories that just didn’t work any more—in the process disregarding the full range of evidence from nature, which showed insensible gradations between variations and species that, in turn, suggested common ancestry rather than immutability.

On some level, then, the scientist and the novelists were engaged in closely related endeavors.

Coming from this background, of course I found myself intrigued by Jonah Lehrer’s clever little book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, recently released by Houghton Mifflin.

Gaza’s Challenge and Its Implications

Over at Informed Comment, Joel Beinin on what the crisis in Gaza means:

It appears that the Annapolis summit and the sham “peace process” it was supposed to have reinvigorated are dead — killed by tens of thousands of unarmed Palestinians crossing the boarder into Egypt to meet their basic human needs. Shortly before President George W. Bush’s visit to the Middle East, Israel began an expanded campaign of pressure on the Gaza Strip, including an escalation in targeted assassinations. Hamas has sent several signals that it was prepared for an informal ceasefire with Israel. But the political perspective articulated at Annapolis and its aftermath requires that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas cooperate with Israel in crushing Hamas rather than try to restore Palestinian national unity. Egypt’s task in this drama is to stand silently by.

This is an impossible task and cannot in any way contribute to peace. Even if Mahmud Abbas were to come to terms and sign an agreement with Israel, it would have no credibility and would be very short lived without some degree of approval and participation from Hamas. A government of national unity that represents all the factions of the Palestinian people is the only entity capable of signing a viable peace agreement with Israel.

The Israeli government led by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert opposes the kind of agreement that a Palestinian national unity government would demand, as has every previous government of Israel.

Smile! You’ve Been Averaged

From Science:

Match If airports used today’s face-recognition technology to ID passengers, they would be wrong a lot of the time. But researchers have found a way to improve the technique: By replacing the standard photo on a person’s ID with an image generated by combining several shots of the individual, a team from the University of Glasgow in the U.K. dramatically boosted the technique’s accuracy.

Even human beings sometimes have difficulty recognizing people from their photographs, especially if the focus is blurry or the lighting poor. But as a face becomes more familiar, the brain improves at matching it to a photo. To explain this phenomenon, psychologists Rob Jenkins and A. Mike Burton came up with a model of how the mind constructs an image of a face from repeat encounters, distilling the essence of its features into a reliable mental representation. The researchers wondered if applying the model to a face-recognition system would improve its performance.

That’s exactly what they found when they tested the idea using a system that a few airports are trying out for small-scale recognition tasks, such as identifying airline crew members.

More here. (For Abbas after his JFK experience recounted in The Smart Set).

I Get Busy, Mo!

S. Abbas Raza in The Smart Set:

Screenhunter_10As it turned out, the man who was led to my cell and put in it with me about an hour later was a very large (about 6 foot 4, 250 pounds) man wearing a Mark Ecko sweatshirt and white sneakers, both covered in dried blood because earlier that evening he had stabbed someone he later described to me as “that Mexican nigga” during a robbery. He came in and casually pushed my legs off the bunk, not bothering to say anything. I knew that this was my cue to get tough, but at that moment I happened to be far too busy concentrating on not peeing my beltless, falling-off pants to actually think of something to say. It got worse. He looked at me with contempt and asked what I was in for, and when I tried to answer with a non-committal reply (I obviously didn’t want to admit to my fruity suspended-license rap), to my shock and horror my voice cracked out of nervousness and I heard myself stutter something incomprehensible in a higher-pitched falsetto than a goddamned Bee Gee. This, of course, amused my new friend to no end, and out of pity, I suppose, and good humor he reassured me that he would not hurt me. I realized that it is one thing to yell at my cat at home and scare her, or even at some annoying bureaucratic drudge or other behind a car-rental counter, and quite another to try and intimidate someone who is covered in the blood of his last attempted-murder victim and looks as if he could break me in two at the drop of his sideways-worn baseball cap. I now swore to myself that if I made it through this night in anything resembling wholeness, no matter how tempting, I would never ever do anything that had even an infinitesimal chance of landing me in an actual prison, where I now knew with certainty that I would last all of about three nanoseconds.

More here.

poor richard

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Benjamin Franklin’s genius gave him no rest. A discontented man finds no easy chair. On April 4, 1757, he left Philadelphia by carriage, and reached New York just four days later, ready to sail for London. But one delay piled upon another, like so much ragged paper jamming a printing press, and he found himself stuck for more than two months. In all his fifty-one years, he could barely remember having “spent Time so uselessly.” (From childhood, Franklin, the son of a chandler, had toiled from dawn to dusk only to squander the tallow “reading the greatest Part of the Night.”) Waste not life; in the grave will be sleeping enough. He had some business to attend to—he wrote a new will, and more letters than other men write in a lifetime—but it was scarcely enough. “This tedious State of Uncertainty and long Waiting, has almost worn out my Patience,” he wrote to his wife, asking her to send along a pair of spectacles he had left behind. What signifies your Patience, if you can’t find it when you want it. He didn’t board until June 5th, and then the confounded ship lay anchored at Sandy Hook for two weeks. In his cabin, maybe even before the ship finally sailed on June 20th, he at last found something to do: he set about stringing together proverbs taken from twenty-five years of his “Poor Richard’s Almanack.”

more from The New Yorker here.

Anglais, terriblement anglais

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Ever since Rome established its domination of the Mediterranean, letter-writing has been a regular adjunct of civilized life. The spread of Latinitas and reliable couriers allowed Cicero to exchange personal messages and canvass cronies throughout the Roman world. His letters, like those of many subsequent writers, are at once seemingly off the record and artfully composed. The epistolary Cicero is as much the advocate of his own fame, and poster-boy of his wit, as Cicero the orator. If a writer’s correspondence seems to reveal him without artifice, his prose is professionally calculated to entertain, seduce or intimidate. “When an artist spits”, the Dadaist said, “that’s art!” And when Graham Greene writes a letter, it is no less (or more) his work than anything else. To believe that letters affect to show what he was “really like” discounts his mutability. In any case, to be “like” implies approximation, if not imposture, the novelist’s working habit. It was said of a portrait by John Singer Sargent that you couldn’t see the man for the likeness. Greene was like many things, but no one essential thing, unless it was English: “Anglais, terriblement anglais”, was a French critic’s sighing encomium.

more from the TLS here.

Rerunning Film Noir

Richard Schickel in The Wilson Quarterly:

Noir, despite its Frenchified name, is a truly American form, as Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward observe in Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style (1979). Yes, many of its leading directors (Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Jacques Tourneur, André de Toth) were born in Europe and well versed in expressionism. But their ­source—­often directly, always at least ­indirectly—­was the American crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, W. R. Burnett, and others. Almost all noir actors and many of the directors’ significant collaborators (cameramen, editors, etc.) were American born and certainly American ­trained. “Film Noir,” he wrote, “The disillusionment many soldiers, small businessmen and housewife/factory employees felt in returning to a peacetime economy was directly mirrored in the sordidness of the urban crime film. . . . The war continues, but now the antagonism turns with a new viciousness toward the American society itself.” I’ve never seen this rather casual bit of sociology disputed, mostly because the many commentators on noir tend to focus on specific films, with little interest in the society that produced ­them.

How, then, to square the dark visual and psychological designs of this thoroughly American genre with the general mood of the country in the immediate postwar years? Screenwriter and director Paul Schrader thought that was easy. In his seminal 1972 article “Notes on

Estimating Duplication in Scholarly Journals

Declan Butler over at news@nature:News20085201

As many as 200,000 of the 17 million articles in the Medline database might be duplicates, either plagiarized or republished by the same author in different journals, according to a commentary published in Nature today1.

Mounir Errami and Harold ‘Skip’ Garner at the The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, used text-matching software to look for duplicate or highly-similar abstracts in more than 62,000 randomly selected Medline abstracts published since 1995. They hit on 421 possible duplicates.

After manual inspection they estimated that 0.04% of the 62,000 articles might be plagiarized, and 1.35% duplicates with the same author. These percentages are lower than those calculated by similar previous studies. As yet, the researchers aren’t sure why that is.

A Hedonic Take on the Evolution of Marriage and the Case Against Regulating It

From the libertarians over at Cato Unbound, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers:

[M]arriage isn’t dead, it is, again, transforming. Hedonic marriage is different from productive marriage. In a world of specialization, the old adage was that “opposites attract,” and it made sense for husband and wife to have different interests in different spheres of life. Today, it is more important that we share similar values, enjoy similar activities, and find each other intellectually stimulating. Hedonic marriage leads people to be more likely to marry someone of their similar age, educational background, and even occupation. As likes are increasingly marrying likes, it isn’t surprising that we see increasing political pressure to expand marriage to same-sex couples.

At this juncture it should be clear that any sensible theory of marriage has to acknowledge that it is a responsive and adaptive institution, changing as circumstances change. Why then is the debate about family policy so polarizing? We suspect that much of the disagreement is driven by a failure of political advocates to adapt their understanding of marriage even as circumstances have changed.

Many have cited high and rising divorce rates as pointing to the collapse of the family, and Kay Hymowitz’s essay reprises these themes. Yet the high divorce rates among those marrying in the 1970s reflected a transition, as many married the right partner for the old specialization model of marriage, only to find that pairing hopelessly inadequate in the modern hedonic marriage.

Divorce rates have actually been falling since reaching a peak thirty years ago. And those who have married in recent years have been more likely to stay together than their parents’ generation. These facts should be emphasized and bear repeating — divorce has been falling for three decades — since this important fact is often ignored in the discussion of the current state of the family.

A Dictionary of the Unexplained

Hilary Mantel reviews Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained (edited by Una McGovern), in the LRB:

What an enticing prospect: A-Z elucidation, or at least the admission in print that most of life’s pressing questions are never answered. But won’t all the entries begin with ‘W’? Where has youth gone? Why dost thou lash that whore? Why are you looking at me like that? And of course the question that trails us from playgroup to dementia ward: well, if you will go on like that, what else did you expect?

But of course we’re not dealing with that kind of unexplained. The clue is on the cover: a person with popping eyes, flying through the air. This dictionary’s greatest fans will be people more interested in the exception than the rule, and often, it must be said, ignorant of what the rule is. To many of us, a great deal of what we encounter daily is unexplained. If you are in mid-life now, it is possible to have received what was described at the time as a good education and still know nothing of science or technology. Those on the other side of the cultural divide complain that the artists are proud of their deficiency, but this is seldom so. It’s easy, if you can read, to brush up your Shakespeare, but not so easy to use your spare half-hours to catch up on the inorganic chemistry you missed. It’s the people cringing from their scientific illiteracy who buy Stephen Hawking books they can’t read, as if having them on the shelf will make the knowledge rub off; they snap up tracts on atheism, too, to show that if they’re ignorant they’re at least rational. But still, our understanding of the mechanisms of the world remains fuzzy around the edges. If we were told that our computer worked because there was an angel inside, some of us couldn’t disprove it. The cultures were undivided in Leonardo’s day, but now those of us who deal in metaphors don’t know how to make machines. If we wanted to move a mountain, we would have to rely on faith.

The Tiger Woods Effect

When he’s in the field, everyone else plays worse. How Tiger throws off golf’s incentive structure.

Joel Waldfogel in Slate:

Screenhunter_9Analyzing data from round-by-round scores from all PGA tournaments between 2002 and 2006 (over 20,000 player-rounds of golf), Brown finds that competitors fare less well—about an extra stroke per tournament—when Tiger is playing. How can we be sure this is because of Tiger? A few features of the findings lend them plausibility. The effect is stronger for the better, “exempt” players than for the nonexempt players, who have almost no chance of beating Tiger anyway. (Tiger’s presence doesn’t mean much to you if the best you can reasonably expect to finish is about 35th—there’s not much difference between the prize for 35th and 36th place.) The effect is also stronger during Tiger’s hot streaks, when his competitors’ prospects are more clearly dimmed. When Tiger is on, his competitors’ scores were elevated by nearly two strokes when he entered a tournament. And the converse is also true: During Tiger’s well-publicized slump of 2003 and 2004, when he went winless in major events, exempt competitors’ scores were unaffected by Tiger’s presence.

A skeptic might ask whether a golfer can really try harder, but in fact there are many ways for players to improve their performance in a given tournament. They can study the course. They can hit more balls on the driving range. They can arrive at the tournament a few days early and play more practice rounds.

More here.

Rebels with Causes: Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Paine, and two modern revolutions

Hitchens’s Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man: A Biography is not, in fact, his latest book. (Who can keep up?) Though just out on this side of the pond, it was published a year ago in Britain, well before the blockbuster God Is Not Great. Book Hitchens tells us that modern revolutions eat their children—and the progeny almost included Thomas Paine. Paine wrote the first part of The Age of Reason, his critique of revealed religion and defense of deism, in a rush. He did so, as he tells us in the preface to the second part of that work, because, suspected by the Jacobins for his respect for the rule of law, he thought that his arrest was imminent—as indeed it was. On December 23, 1793, just six hours after finishing the book’s first part, he was arrested on the orders of the Committee of General Security and carted off to Paris’s Luxembourg Prison, where only by a stroke of good luck did he avoid the stroke of the guillotine. The Girondin Paine got out of prison only after Robespierre’s death, and thanks to the exertions on his behalf by the American ambassador, James Monroe.

One of Paine’s best quips (it’s not all that good) in Rights of Man is the little pun that he inserted in his account of the French nobility’s having become despised for its imbecility, thanks to the inevitable result of the principle of heredity. Such, says Paine, is “the general character of aristocracy, or what are called the Nobles, or Nobility, or rather No-ability, in all countries.” Hitchens seems to prefer another Paine quip to the same effect—that the idea of hereditary legislators is as absurd as the idea of hereditary mathematicians—but Paine most likely didn’t coin this one himself, since Franklin used it to describe the House of Lords in his Journal of Negotiations in London, written while aboard ship to America in March 1775. On equality and the hereditary principle, Franklin, Paine, and Hitchens are three peas in a pod.

More here.

1,000 Genomes Project: Expanding the Map of Human Genetics

From Scientific American:

Dna The number of sequenced human genomes will soon swell to more than 1,000 as part of a new international research consortium’s effort to trace the potential genetic origins of disease. But first the mother, father and adult child of a European-ancestry family from Utah and a Yoruba-ancestry family from Nigeria will join an anonymous individual as well as famous geneticists Craig Venter and James Watson as part of the handful of humans to have on record a complete readout of their roughly three billion pairs of DNA. And these six will also each have their genetic codes examined at least 20 times, providing 10 times the accuracy of existing genetic sequences as well as paving the way for the ambitious effort dubbed the 1,000 Genomes Project, which will comprehensively map humanity’s genetic variation.

The project will proceed in three steps, according to the consortium. The first, currently underway and expected to be completed by year’s end, is the detailed scanning of the six individuals. This will be followed by less detailed genome scans of 180 anonymous people from around the world and then partial scans of an additional 1,000 people. “If we look at about 1,000 individuals, we’ll get genetic variants in those samples that are somewhere around 1 percent or lower frequency” in the human population, says geneticist Lisa Brooks, director of the Bethesda, Md.–based National Human Genome Research Institute’s Genetic Variation Program.

More here.

THURSDAY POEM

Birches 
Robert Frost 

When I see birches bend to left and right  Image_ice_storm
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows–
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

M.D. Anderson turns to toxic toad venom

Todd Ackerman in the Houston Chronicle:

311xinlinegalleryA Houston hospital known for seeking the most advanced cancer therapies that modern science can develop is turning its attention to a centuries-old Chinese treatment: toad venom.

Scientists from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center are investigating whether the stuff that some types of toads use to sicken their natural predators can also be a healer, as doctors of traditional Chinese medicine have long believed.

“Without hesitation, toad venom was the No. 1 drug (Chinese) doctors mentioned when we asked them to suggest the best natural cancer medicines to test,” Lorenzo Cohen, director of M.D. Anderson’s integrative medicine program, said from China. “It may sound wild to Americans, but it’s accepted as a standard of care here.”

It also appears to hold promise. In clinical trials Cohen is leading in Shanghai, the venom secreted by the Asiatic toad has shown some benefit and no apparent side effects in patients with advanced liver, pancreatic and lung cancer — which are not easy cancers to fight.

Cohen said he hopes to bring the drug to Houston to test on M.D. Anderson patients in a couple of years. It already has been tested successfully in laboratory and mouse studies at the cancer center.

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Time Adjusters & Other Stories

Eric D. Lehman at Empty Mirror Books:

Screenhunter_8The modern fables that make up Bill Ectric’s new collection of stories, Time Adjusters, are difficult to classify, in the best way possible. They seem a comic-book mishmash of science fiction and magical realism, one turn of the screw toward another world. At first, the author paints a suburban landscape where pet baboons chase children through the streets, and we are not sure whether this isn’t our world after all. Readers get multiple perspectives, disturbing our sense of reality further, leaving us with small growths on our analytical minds that may or may not be benign.

And then, Mr. Ectric turns the screw one more time for stories like “Time Adjusters,” inserting elements like an attacking Neanderthal imported through a time gateway. And yet, this still does not happen in a fantastic world beyond imagination, but in the smiling environs of Insurance Co. Often, the real stories take place in a character’s mind, and amidst all this narrative chaos, the reader is led astray. When I read the “The Little Robot,” a deceptively simple story about a young boy who uses his robot as a rosary, I had no idea where the story was going. Who knows what could happen — the robot could burst alive or the little boy could transform into a machine. Ectric plays with our expectations, and so when we are left with a sad but powerful story about the human capacity for belief, we are surprised and gratified.

More here.