Learning without learning

Saturday, September 23rd, 2006

The Economist explains learning without learning — via epigenetic imprinting:

There is a growing school of thought that Freud was right, but for the wrong reasons. According to the members of this school, early experience does profoundly mould the brain. However, it is not memory that it moulds — at least, not memory as conventionally understood. What it actually moulds is the way genes work.
[...]
The first inkling of this came when Michael Meaney, one of Dr Szyf’s long-term collaborators, noticed that rat pups whose mothers spent a lot of time licking and grooming them grew up to be less fearful and better-adjusted adults than the offspring of neglectful mothers. Crucially, these well-adjusted rats then gave their own babies the same type of care — in effect, transmitting the behaviour from mother to daughter by inducing similar epigenetic changes.

When Dr Szyf looked at the brains of the two sorts of rats, he found differences in their hippocampuses. Among other jobs, the hippocampus is involved in responding to stress. Dr Szyf discovered that better-adjusted rats had, in their hippocampuses, more active versions of the gene that encodes a molecule called glucocorticoid-receptor protein. Glucocorticoid is a hormone produced in response to stress and its job is to make the animal behave appropriately. But too much glucocorticoid is a bad thing, so there is also a way to switch off its production. When glucocorticoid binds to its receptor in the hippocampus, that activates the expression of genes which dampen further synthesis of the hormone. This feedback system is weaker in rats that have had little maternal care. As a result, they are more anxious and fearful, and show a heightened response to stress.

The researchers went on to study what is responsible for the difference in expression of the glucocorticoid-receptor gene. They found that two types of imprinting are involved. One adds molecules called methyl groups to the DNA of the gene. This suppresses gene expression. The other adds acetyl groups, which are slightly larger, to the proteins around which the DNA is coiled. This has the opposite effect, making gene expression easier. Rats that had experienced little maternal care showed high levels of methylation and low levels of acetylation of the glucocorticoid-receptor gene and its neighbouring proteins. The opposite was true for those that had had a more attentive upbringing.

Frank Miller’s 300

Saturday, September 23rd, 2006

Frank Miller’s 300 is a graphic novel depicting the Spartans’ stand at Thermopylae. Now it is being turned into a movie, which, like Sin City before it, is to be highly stylized — “operatic” in the words of one of the designers.

You can view the trailer and production journals at YouTube. Naturally, I was drawn to Video Diary 3: Spartan Training and Video Diary 5: Fight Choreography. The actors have a personal trainer who has them clearly performing a CrossFit workout, and the fight choreographers are from the Inosanto Academy — so don’t be surprised if the Spartans fight in a vaguely Asian style.

Outstanding Lecture

Saturday, September 23rd, 2006

A recent Outstanding Lecture has led Arnold Kling to make this recommendation:

My impression is that the number of professors who teach in lecture format is much, much larger than the number of really effective lecturers. I think that the best way to deal with this is to take the typical professor out of the lecture hall and instead substitute videos of the quality of Rosling’s lecture.

What was this outstanding lecture? It was Hans Rosling’s latest TED Talk on economic development.

You may recognize some of the beautiful animated graphs from Has the world become a better place?, one of his earlier works through his GapMinder organization, which I mentioned a few months ago.

In Defense of Empires

Friday, September 22nd, 2006

Deepak Lal writes In Defense of Empires, which “have undeservedly got a bad name, particularly in America since President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the end of the Age of Empires and ushered in the Age of Nations”:

The major argument in favor of empires is that, through their pax, they provide the most basic of public goods — order — in an anarchical international society of states. This is akin to maintaining order in social life. The three basic values of all social life, without which it cannot exist, and which any international order should seek to protect, were cogently summarized by the late Hedley Bull in his magisterial book The Anarchical Society as: first, to secure life against violence which leads to death or bodily harm; second, that promises once made are kept; third that, “the possession of things will remain stable to some degree and will not be subject to challenges that are constant and without limit.”

Empires — which for our purposes can be simply defined as “multiethnic conglomerates held together by transnational organizational and cultural ties”[3] — have historically both maintained peace and promoted prosperity for a simple reason. The centers of the ancient civilizations in Eurasia — where sedentary agriculture could be practiced and yielded a surplus to feed the towns (‘civitas’ — the emblem of civilization) — were bordered in the North and South by areas of nomadic pastoralism: the steppes of the North and the semi-desert of the Arabian peninsula to the South. In these regions the inhabitants had kept up many of the warlike traditions of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and were prone to prey upon the inhabitants of the sedentary ‘plains’ and at times attempted to convert them into their chattel like cattle.[4] This meant that the provision of one of the classical public goods — protection of its citizens from invaders — required the extension of territory to some natural barriers which could keep the barbarians at bay. The Roman, Chinese, and various Indian empires were partly created to provide this pax, which was essential to keep their labor intensive and sedentary forms of making a living intact. The pax of various imperium has thus been essential in providing one of the basic public goods required for prosperity.

These empires can further be distinguished as being either multi-cultural or homogenizing. The former included the Abbasids, the various Indian empires, the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and the British, where little attempt was made to change ‘the habits of the heart’ of the constituent groups — or if it was, as in the early British Raj, an ensuing backlash led to a reversal of this policy.

The homogenizing empires, by contrast, sought to create a ‘national’ identity out of the multifarious groups in their territory. The best example of these is China, where the ethnic mix was unified as Hans through the bureaucratic device of writing their names in Chinese characters in a Chinese form, and suppressing any subsequent discontent through the subtle repression of a bureaucratic authoritarian state.[5] In our own time the American ‘melting pot’ creating Americans out of a multitude of ethnicities by adherence to a shared civic culture and a common language, has created a similar homogenized imperial state. Similarly, the supposedly ancient “nations” of Britain and France were created through a state-led homogenizing process.[6] India, by contrast is another imperial state whose political unity is a legacy of the British Raj, but whose multiethnic character is underwritten by an ancient hierarchical structure which accommodates these different groups as different castes.

The article is not a short one, and it eventually works its way around to the Middle East, where Lal brings in a bit of personal history:

The amazing thing for me is that, the “right to return” after fifty years is still an issue and is being kept alive by the large number of Palestinians still in refugee camps. Why are they still there after fifty years? On a personal note, my family and I, along with millions of others lost their land and property as a result of the partition of India in 1947. We were refugees. Both the Indian and Pakistani governments provided some help, but most importantly the refugees themselves, after a little while, made new lives for themselves. There are no refugee camps on both sides of the Indo-Pakistani border with millions demanding “the right of return.”

History is never just, and economists have been right to maintain that “bygones are bygones.” This is particularly important in that highly contested territory of Palestine. This came home to me in the late 1970s when a friend was carrying out a dig near the Wailing Wall. He took me down, and showed me layer upon layer of corpses. The ones in each layer had been killed by those above, and then they themselves in a later layer had killed those below them. To decide who has the original rights to the land in this fiercely contested territory, where “might has been right” for millennia, to right historical wrongs on the basis of some principle of restitution would defeat even the wisdom of Solomon. Sensibly, losers in these continual shifts in fortune through history have come to terms with their losses and continued with their lives.

The Overselling of Higher Education

Friday, September 22nd, 2006

George Leef opens his The Overselling of Higher Education with some harsh words:

Higher education in the United States has been greatly oversold. Many students who are neither academically strong nor inclined toward serious intellectual work have been lured into colleges and universities. At considerable cost to their families and usually the taxpayer as well, those students sometimes obtain a degree, but often with little if any gain in human capital that will prove beneficial in the labor market or in dealing with the challenges of life.

Leef shares this quote from David Labaree’s How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning:

When students at all levels see education through the lens of social mobility, they quickly conclude that what matters most is not the knowledge they attain in school but the credential they acquire there. Grades, credits, degrees — these become the objects to be pursued. The end result is to reify the formal markers of education and displace the substantive content… The payoff for a particular credential is the same no matter how it was acquired, so it is rational behavior to try to strike a good bargain, to work at gaining a diploma, like a car, at a substantial discount.

I suspect most young Americans would find this statistic shocking:

Prior to World War II, only about one high school graduate in ten subsequently enrolled in a college or university.

Read the whole article.

Considering the Effects of a Catastrophic Terrorist Attack

Friday, September 22nd, 2006

For decades, the egg-heads at RAND have been thinking about the unthinkable. RAND’s recent report, Considering the Effects of a Catastrophic Terrorist Attack, examines the results of one such “unthinkable” scenario:

In our scenario, terrorists conceal a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb in a shipping container and ship it to the Port of Long Beach. Unloaded onto a pier, it explodes shortly thereafter. This is referred to as a “ground-burst” as opposed to an “airburst” explosion. We used this scenario because analysts consider it feasible, it is highly likely to have a catastrophic effect, and the target is both a key part of the U.S. economic infrastructure and a critical global shipping center.

What would the results be? Roughly 60,000 lives and $1 trillion dollars lost:

Secrets Of The Self-Made

Friday, September 22nd, 2006

In ForbesSecrets Of The Self-Made, “fourteen self-made members of the vaunted Forbes 400 shared candid, contrarian and even comedic answers to 20 thoughtful questions — ranging from what they eat for breakfast and how they pray to the importance (or lack thereof) of getting an M.B.A. and what advice they would give aspiring entrepreneurs.”

It looks like they all exercise a lot and read a lot — and most respect the idea of getting an MBA, even if they didn’t.

The unmourned end of libertarian politics

Friday, September 22nd, 2006

Michael Lind announces the unmourned end of libertarian politics:

The most epochal event in world politics since the cold war has occurred — and few people have noticed. I am not referring to the conflict in Iraq or Lebanon or the campaign against terrorism.

It is the utter and final defeat of the movement that has shaped the politics of the US and other western democracies for several decades: the libertarian counter-revolution.

I, for one, welcome our new big-government Republican overlords.

French and German remakes of the BBC’s Office

Friday, September 22nd, 2006

Liesl Schillinger looks at the French and German remakes of the BBC’s Office — and the US version as well — and draws some conclusions about our varied national cultures:

Watching all four versions back-to-back is not only a strangely unmooring experience — like seeing the film Groundhog Day over and over — it’s a crash course in national identity. And if any conjecture could be made about the cultural differences that these subtly contrasting programs reveal, it might be this one: These days, Germans and Americans are doing much of their living in and around their offices, while the Brits and French continue to live outside of them. Here, in broad strokes, are the chief differences. In the British version, nobody is working, nobody has a happy relationship, everyone looks terrible, and everybody is depressed. In the French version, nobody is working but even the idiots look good, and everybody seems possessed of an intriguing private life. In the German version, actual work is visibly being done, most of the staff is coupled up, and the workers never stop eating and drinking—treating the office like a kitchen with desks. Stromberg continually calls his staff “Kinder,” or “children,” further blurring the line between Kinder, Computer, and Küche.

While Michael Scott also sometimes calls his American office a “family,” his staff knows he’s the kid brother, not the father, and that if there’s to be any Kinder in their lives, they’re going to have to get busy with one of their fellow prairie dogs, because really — who else are they likely to meet, given the stretching parameters of the U.S. working day? We may still talk of “working like a dog,” but the Russians lately have coined the expression, “to work like an American,” reflecting our 24/7 on-call mentality. These days, for Americans, “home office” is not just a place, it’s a state of mind. And it’s perfectly reflected by our version of this global sitcom — in which work is ostensibly cared about (though skimped on), romantic tension simmers on numerous fronts, and the whole enterprise is gently inflated by a mood of eventual, possible progress in work and love — like a bowl of dough that could have used a little more yeast but is doing its best to rise. Vive la différence.

(Hat tip to Dan Drezner.)

What’ll it be?

Friday, September 22nd, 2006

In What’ll it be? Wretchard looks at the “real” moral dilemma of “coercive interrogation”:

Hotair has a video of ABC chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross describing what his CIA contacts told him about coercive interrogation. Not surprisingly, it turns out that the technique was able to extract useful information. One of the most pernicious fallacies peddled in the debate over coercive interrogation — or torture — as you would have it, is that duress is absolutely useless is providing any kind of intelligence. According to this point of view, coercive interrogation is just pointless cruelty. And those who advocate it are simply looking for excuses to engage in fruitless sadism.

But the real moral dilemma arises from the fact that coercion can produce intelligence information. If it were useless, as some commentators claim, there would be no dilemma. It is precisely because innocent lives can occasionally be saved by recourse to coercion that this problem is the devil’s own. Therefore the correct approach must be to acknowledge the fact that we will have to pay in blood and treasure for not using certain techniques. And if we are prepared to accept that payment then we may willingly forgo these techniques. However, if we are unwilling to pay the price of those risks, we cannot honestly promise the public safety without lying to them. It is the therefore the task of policymakers to inform the public what the tradeoffs are and get them to accept those risks.

Milken on the World Economy

Friday, September 22nd, 2006

Greg Mankiw cites Milken on the World Economy:

China and India combined to produce nearly half the world’s economic output in 1820 compared to just 1.8% for the U.S. Our remarkable growth since 1820 has benefited from democratic institutions, a belief in capitalism, private property rights, an entrepreneurial culture, abundant resources, openness to foreign investment, the best universities, immigration and relatively transparent markets.

(Hat tip to the Belmont Club.)

A Low Impact Woodland Home

Friday, September 22nd, 2006

An English fellow has built A Low Impact Woodland Home that looks quite a bit like a hobbit hole:

You are looking at pictures of our family home. It was built by myself and my father in law with help from passers by and visiting friends. 4 months after starting we were moved in and cosy. I estimate 1000-1500 man hours and £3000 put in to this point. Not really so much in house buying terms (roughly £60/sq m excluding labour).

The house was built with maximum regard for the environment and by reciprocation gives us a unique opportunity to live close to nature. Being your own (have a go) architect is a lot of fun and allows you to create and enjoy something which is part of yourself and the land rather than, at worst, a mass produced box designed for maximum profit and convenience of the construction industry. Building from natural materials does away with producers profits and the cocktail of carcinogenic poisons that fill most modern buildings.

The Bombing of Japanese Cities as Omen

Thursday, September 21st, 2006

In The Bombing of Japanese Cities as Omen, Jonathan of Chicago Boyz describes the tail end of a public-TV documentary he caught:

I have no doubt that our bombing of German and Japanese cities was one of the most terrible things ever done. But what made the documentary tendentious was that it left out the political and military context; there was no more than superficial discussion of what led the USA to adopt such brutal tactics. The remarkable tenacity and cruelty of the Japanese fighters we encountered in our island-hopping campaign weren’t discussed, nor was the terrifying prospect of invading the Japanese home islands — a prospect which, until the atomic bombings, appeared certain and would have certainly killed millions. Instead the documentary framed our decision to burn the cities as having been based on Curtis LeMay’s desire to find a more-effective alternative to using inaccurate high-explosive bombs against Japanese factories. Of course, when you present the story in such a narrow way it makes it look like we went too far. The documentary might have been redeemed if someone had said: Yes, we did terrible things, but they only became conceivable late in the war after we learned what the enemy was capable of, and the alternatives were all much worse. But no one said that, at least not that I heard.

I don’t think this documentary could have been made in the 1960s or 1970s. It would have been widely seen as revisionist. Too many people were still aware, either from direct experience or from having learned about the war from family elders or in school or from the media, of the rationale for destroying the Japanese cities. But nowadays probably a lot of the people doing film production, and certainly a lot of the viewers, are too young and too scantily educated about World War II to recognize an incomplete historical treatment when they see one. This is a great pity in the context of the current war, because people in the democracies need to understand that insufficient seriousness in fighting radical Islam now could in the long run lead to a situation in which we kill millions in order to get the fight over with and protect our people. It could happen. The history of our war with Japan makes clear what we are capable of doing to an enemy who provokes us sufficiently. The Islamists, who are as cruel as the Japanese were, need to understand this too, but probably won’t until it’s too late.

What’ll it be?

Thursday, September 21st, 2006

In What’ll it be? Wretchard looks at the “real” moral dilemma of “coercive interrogation”:

Hotair has a video of ABC chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross describing what his CIA contacts told him about coercive interrogation. Not surprisingly, it turns out that the technique was able to extract useful information. One of the most pernicious fallacies peddled in the debate over coercive interrogation — or torture — as you would have it, is that duress is absolutely useless is providing any kind of intelligence. According to this point of view, coercive interrogation is just pointless cruelty. And those who advocate it are simply looking for excuses to engage in fruitless sadism.

But the real moral dilemma arises from the fact that coercion can produce intelligence information. If it were useless, as some commentators claim, there would be no dilemma. It is precisely because innocent lives can occasionally be saved by recourse to coercion that this problem is the devil’s own. Therefore the correct approach must be to acknowledge the fact that we will have to pay in blood and treasure for not using certain techniques. And if we are prepared to accept that payment then we may willingly forgo these techniques. However, if we are unwilling to pay the price of those risks, we cannot honestly promise the public safety without lying to them. It is the therefore the task of policymakers to inform the public what the tradeoffs are and get them to accept those risks.

The ethanol myth

Thursday, September 21st, 2006

In The ethanol myth, Consumer Reports shares its findings from its test of a flexible-fuel Chevy Tahoe:

When running on E85 there was no significant change in acceleration. Fuel economy, however, dropped across the board. In highway driving, gas mileage decreased from 21 to 15 mpg; in city driving, it dropped from 9 to 7 mpg.

You could expect a similar decrease in gas mileage in any current FFV. That’s because ethanol has a lower energy content than gasoline: 75,670 British thermal units per gallon instead of 115,400, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. So you have to burn more fuel to generate the same amount of energy. In addition, FFV engines are designed to run more efficiently on gasoline. E85 fuel economy could approach that of gasoline if manufacturers optimized engines for that fuel.

When we took our Tahoe to a state-certified emissions-test facility in Connecticut and had a standard emissions test performed, we found a significant decrease in smog-forming oxides of nitrogen when using E85. Ethanol, however, emits acetaldehyde, a probable carcinogen and something that standard emissions-testing equipment is not designed to measure.