Thousands of minks set loose in Germany

This cute little fellow is one of thousands of minks set loose in Germany — to die and likely destroy the local ecology in the process:

German conservationists have condemned the release of some 17,000 minks from a fur farm, apparently by animal rights activists, saying they are likely to starve in the wild and could disturb the ecological balance in the region.

Sigh.

Women in Science

On the topic of Women in Science, Phil Greenspun notes that "Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States." Perhaps there are few women in academic science because they found better jobs:

The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:

1. age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
2. age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
3. age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
4. age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
5. age 44: with young children at home (if lucky), fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s

This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.

Don't be fooled by sample bias, he notes, if you're a young student at MIT, surrounded by Nobel-winning science professors.

For whom does academic science as a career make sense?

The picture so far is pretty bleak. The American academic scientist earns less than an airplane mechanic, has less job security than a drummer in a boy band, and works longer hours than a Bolivian silver miner. Roger W. Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, in a March 2, 2006 discussion run by the Chronicle of Higher Education summarized the situation of the tenure lottery winners:

"The average full professor, someone who has been teaching for, say, fifteen years or longer, is making five times less than the average president at most institutions; works 60 - 70 hour weeks, uses holidays to do research, and tries desperately to find time to be a good spouse, father, mother, or partner. The life of the mind may seem cushy, but it is not."

Does this make sense as a career for anyone? Absolutely! Just get out your atlas.

Imagine that you are a smart, but impoverished, young person in China. Your high IQ and hard work got you into one of the best undergraduate programs in China. The $1800 per month graduate stipend at University of Nebraska or University of Wisconsin will afford you a much higher standard of living than any job you could hope for in China. The desperate need for graduate student labor and lack of Americans who are interested in PhD programs in science and engineering means that you'll have no trouble getting a visa. When you finish your degree, a small amount of paperwork will suffice to ensure your continued place in the legal American work force. Science may be one of the lowest paid fields for high IQ people in the U.S., but it pays a lot better than most jobs in China or India.

Read the whole thing.

Love on the Net

Not everyone's ready for Love on the Net:

George McCutcheon was in the business of selling periodicals, and he wanted to be able to take orders on the net. He wasn't very into technology, so he asked his teenage daughter, Maggie, to handle that part of the business. Maggie soon had the connection working, but also used it to flirt with many men she met on-line. She invited one of them, Frank, to visit her in the real world. Her father found out, and was furious...furious to the point that he threatened to kill her if she saw Frank again. Maggie had her father arrested and charged with threatening behavior.

Yawn, you say...why is this newsworthy? Things like this probably happen all the time.

The above incident, though, happened in the 1880s, and was written up in the 1886 edition of Electrical World. The "net" referred to above was the telegraph network.

That story came from Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet.

The Harvard Indicator

Investors are always looking for new, useful indicators to predict market performance. Behold The Harvard Indicator:

Many different indicators have been used in an effort to project future stock market directions — everything from interest rates to transportation volumes to the length of women's skirts. Here's a new one. Roy Soifer suggests that the collective career decisions of Harvard MBA graduates are a contrarian market indicator...that when the graduates are heading for Wall Street in droves, then the market is likely headed for a fall — whereas, when they are choosing jobs that aren't stock-market-oriented, then the future of the market will be bright. Specifically, Soifer (who is himself a Harvard MBA) says his data implies that: when the percentage of Harvard MBA grads going into market-related jobs is under 10%, it's a signal that stocks are a long-term buy...and when the number is over 30%, it's a sign that the markets are overvalued and due for a fall. (The most recent number is 26 percent, at the very high end of "neutral" territory.)

Chesterton on Living in a Small Community

This quote from Chesterton on Living in a Small Community seems increasingly relevant in our modern world of niche Net communities:

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing that is really narrow is the clique....The men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment like that which exists in hell.

Ask "Why" Five Times

One tactic of The Toyota Way is to Ask "Why" Five Times:

The Japanese mantra "ask why five times" is by now pretty well known, I believe, in U.S. manufacturing companies. But "ask why five times" has value outside manufacturing, and indeed in nonbusiness organizations as well as businesses. For those who are interested, a brief summary of the concept, taking the form of a manufacturing example:

There's a puddle of oil on the shop floor. One of the machines is leaking.

ACTION: Clean up the oil. But then ask...
WHY is there oil on the floor?

The machine has a bad gasket.

ACTION: Replace the gasket. But then ask..
WHY was the gasket bad?

Check out the condition of the gaskets on some other machines.
Looks like we've been buying inferior gaskets.

ACTION: Change the specifications so we don't get any more of these. But also ask..
WHY did we decide to buy the gaskets that we did?

Uhh...they were cheap? Turns out the purchasing policy for supplies like this says "always buy the low bid."

ACTION: Change the policy to give more weight to quality as well as price. But also ask...
WHY did the head of Purchasing ever approve a policy like this in the first place?

Maybe because his *incentive program* includes a big component for year-over-year reductions in supplies cost, with no measurement for downtime impact of bad items?

ACTION: Change the incentive program.
WHY did a one-sided incentive program like this get created and approved?

Turns out no one in Human Resources has any experience in incentive program design.

ACTION: Assign someone in HR to take some courses and do some reading in the field of incentive programs, how they go right, and how they can go wrong.

It may seem like common sense, but it's not that easy to implement:

As you go up the levels of successive "why"s, the nature of the problems changes, and hence, the set of people who must be involved in resolving them changes. You can expect a machine operator to notice the oil on the floor, and perhaps to assess and replace the gasket, but it would be unreasonable to expect him to identify the problems in the incentive plan for the director of Purchasing. Hence, handoffs in some form need to occur between the successive levels, and it is at these handoff points that the thread of the problem is likely to be lost.

Quantity Has A Quality All Its Own

Quantity Has A Quality All Its Own:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Low Buzz May Give Mice Better Bones and Less Fat

Dr. Clinton T. Rubin, director of the Center for Biotechnology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has found that a Low Buzz May Give Mice Better Bones and Less Fat:

All he does is put mice on a platform that buzzes at such a low frequency that some people cannot even feel it. The mice stand there for 15 minutes a day, five days a week. Afterward, they have 27 percent less fat than mice that did not stand on the platform — and correspondingly more bone.

Some background:

The story of the finding, which was published online and will appear in the Nov. 6 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, began in 1981 when Dr. Rubin and his colleagues started asking why bone is lost in aging and inactivity.

“Bone is notorious for ‘use it or lose it,’” Dr. Rubin said. “Astronauts lose 2 percent of their bone a month. People lose 2 percent a decade after age 35. Then you look at the other side of the equation. Professional tennis players have 35 percent more bone in their playing arm. What is it about mechanical signals that makes Roger Federer’s arm so big?”

At first, he assumed that the exercise effect came from a forceful impact — the pounding on the leg bones as a runner’s feet hit the ground or the blow to the bones in a tennis player’s arm with every strike of the ball. But Dr. Rubin was trained as a biomechanical engineer, and that led him to consider other possibilities. Large signals can actually be counterproductive, he said, adding: “If I scream at you over the phone, you don’t hear me better. If I shine a bright light in your eyes, you don’t see better.”

Over the years, he and his colleagues discovered that high-magnitude signals, like the ones created by the impact as foot hits pavement, were not the predominant signals affecting bone. Instead, bone responded to signals that were high in frequency but low in magnitude, more like a buzzing than a pounding.

That makes sense, he went on, because muscles quiver when they contract, and that quivering is the predominant signal to bones. It occurs when people stand still, for example, and their muscles contract to keep them upright. As people age, they lose many of those postural muscles, making them less able to balance, more apt to fall and, perhaps, prone to loss of bone.

“Bone is bombarded with little, teeny signals from muscle contractions,” Dr. Rubin said.

He discovered that in mice, sheep and turkeys, at least, standing on a flat vibrating plate led to bone growth. Small studies in humans — children with cerebral palsy who could not move much on their own and young women with low bone density — indicated that the vibrations might build bone in people, too.

Gesztenye

Today's dose of cute comes from a four-day old male tapir named Gesztenye, or Chestnut:

Four-day old male tapir Gesztenye (Chestnut) stands in his enclosure in the Xantus Janos Zoo of Gyoer,Hungary, as the baby is first shown to the public in Gyoer, 124 kms west of Budapest, Hungary, Monday, Oct. 29, 2007.

The Future of Tradition

I've cited Lee Harris's The Future of Tradition before, but I stumbled across it again, and I find it well worth re-reading:

A tradition, [Hayek] realizes, may well be justified by a community on nonsensical or irrational grounds; but this by itself need not make the tradition less useful to those who follow it. If a primitive tribe justifies its incest taboo with a myth about divine siblings whose sexual liaison produced a monstrously deformed cockroach, this does not make the tradition a bit less useful to the community.
[...]
For implicit in this observation is the insight that every inherited tradition has come down to us at two distinct levels — first, as a behavioral phenomenon, as an embodied value hardwired into our neural circuitry and into our sweat glands, and secondly, as an articulated value that can be analyzed and discussed, attacked and defended, in words.

In the case of the tradition against incest, at the primary level it exists in the form of the commandments, injunctions, prohibition, and so on, to keep brothers and sisters, or parents and children, from having sexual intercourse. They work by programming the members of the community to automatically and instinctively avoid committing incest. They constitute the visceral code of the community that commands us to act in certain ways and forbids us to act in other ways.

At the secondary level, there is what might be called (to use Marxist terminology) the ideological superstructure; i.e., the system of myths and statements and arguments that are used by the community to justify obedience to the commandments, injunctions, and prohibitions. In the case of our islander, this secondary level is represented by the myth of the gigantic cockroach spawned by incest. This ideological superstructure may be used polemically and apologetically as well and is often most fully developed and exploited for this purpose, frequently ending up in immense intellectual constructions that are Summa contra Gentiles: everything that can be argued against those who challenge the truth of the ideological superstructure.

In evaluating whether a “tradition” is useful or not, we must keep this distinction in mind. For when confronted with any particular tradition, we now have two different criteria to evaluate its usefulness — first, the usefulness of the tradition’s base, the visceral code out of which the social structure of the community is created, and second, the usefulness of the tradition’s ideological superstructure.

But once we grasp this distinction, it immediately becomes apparent that there can be a conflict, perhaps violent, between the two manifestations of one tradition: the embodied and visceral version versus the articulated and ideal version. In our primitive island’s traditional taboo against incest, for example, the visceral form of the tradition might succeed in preventing inbreeding among the islanders by producing visceral aversion; yet its articulated form, namely, the myth of the monstrously deformed cockroach, may work quite differently. Indeed, as the islanders become more and more sophisticated, the continued use of this myth may actually tend to make people more likely to violate the visceral code and to commit incest on the basis of the quite correct empirical belief that incestuous unions do not produce gigantic deformed cockroaches.

This means that as a population becomes more “enlightened,” it is more likely to challenge the tradition on the basis of its transparently mythic or fabulous origin; this in turn threatens to undermine the population’s willingness to instill the visceral code into its children. If “everyone” knows that incestuous lovers do not spawn enormous insect children, then what is the point of teaching one’s children not to commit incest?

DIY Drones

Chris Anderson has put together a site for DIY Drones:

This is a resource for all things about amateur Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): How-to's, links, videos, images and a discussion group.

Among other things, this is where we'll be listing all the parts, software and instructions to build each of our UAVs.

In my copious spare time I may have to give this a try:

GeoCrawler 2 (Based on a Lego Mindstorms autopilot. Less than $1,000 — start with this one)

The Innovator's Solution

David Foster reviews The Innovator's Solution, which develops four major themes, "which are amplified using examples ranging from semiconductors to automobiles to milkshakes":

1. Disruptive innovations — those destined to change the structure of an industry — tend to attack from below. They usually first appear in a form that is in some ways inferior to the existing dominant technologies, and hence are unlikely to get the attention or respect of industry incumbents.


2. In a venture dedicated to the introduction of a disruptive technology — whether a start-up business or a division of a larger company — early profitability is more important than early rapid growth. (This is a very contrarian opinion in some quarters.)


3. When attractive profits disappear in a market as a result of commoditization, the opportunity to earn attractive profits will usually emerge at an adjacent stage of the value chain.


4. In segmenting a market, the purpose for which the product is being bought ("circumstance," in the terminology of the authors) is a more useful dimension than the attributes typically used, such as customer demographics or product features.

Read the whole review. The summary points only hint at what he has to say.

After Succeeding, Young Tycoons Try, Try Again

After Succeeding, Young Tycoons Try, Try Again:

The Internet, a low-overhead medium with a global reach, has greatly accelerated the wealth creation phenomenon, producing a larger breed of multimillionaires even younger and richer than in the past.

They are happy to be wealthy, of course, but many of these baby-faced technology tycoons often seem indifferent to the buying power of their money, at least at this stage of their lives. Instead, nearly all of them have chosen to throw themselves back into a start-up, not so much because they want a spectacular new home or a personal jet — though many of them do — but because they are in a competition with themselves and one another.
[...]
Maximillian Rafael Levchin was born and raised in Kiev, Ukraine, a Jew living under Soviet rule for 16 years. As the Soviet Union was crumbling, the family moved to the United States and settled in Chicago. But the worst year of his life, he said, was not when he was growing up but after eBay bought PayPal.

He thought he would spend the time after the sale “exploring my inner self.” Instead, he spent the better part of 12 months “feeling worthless and stupid” and baffled by what he might do with the remainder of his life. He felt too young to retire or downshift a gear or two — and too restless to become a philanthropist.

“I enjoy sitting on nice beaches and hanging out with my girlfriend and playing with my dog, but that’s three hours a day,” Mr. Levchin said. “What about the remaining 18 hours I’m awake?”

Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men

Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men originally appeared in the February 1924 issue of The American Magazine. An excerpt:

Every year I picked up a half-dozen live young fellows who seemed to have a capacity for hard work, and shoved them in at the bottom of the pile, letting them make their way up to the better air and sunlight at the top — if they had it in them to do it.

For a time I tried picking these youngsters out of the colleges. But my experience with college men was not fortunate. If I selected good students, I found too often that their leadership had been won by doing very well what their teachers had laid out for them. They had developed a fine capacity for taking orders, but not much initiative. If I hired athletes, too many of them seemed to feel that their life work was done; that the world owed them a living in exchange for what they had achieved for the grand old school. Also, there is not much social distinction in the grocery business. Young ladies — and their mothers — are much more thrilled by bonds than by butter and eggs.

So I took most of my raw material from our delivery wagons, or other places right at hand. Out of this hard-muscled, hard-headed stuff I have built a business that has made me rich according to the standards of our locality, and has built modest fortunes for at least twenty other men. More important than that, it has stood for clean dealing and a faithful adherence to the best business ethics. Even our hottest competitors, I think, are willing to grant us that.

Will Work With Food

I was just discussing the logistics of Internet-based grocers with some colleagues, and I came across this Forbes piece, Will Work With Food, about FreshDirect, which is succeeding where WebVan failed:

FreshDirect's continued success depends entirely on product quality and logistical prowess. "The challenge is for the 33 pieces to show up in the factory at the same time to get on the truck," says Kelly McGowan, chief information officer. He still spouts the lingo of his old job on Wall Street, comparing food delivery to the electronic transmission of stock and bond trading orders.

FreshDirect worries about things as minuscule as the number of times an item gets scanned before it gets to the packing station. There, workers wearing snowsuits (parts of the warehouse are chilled to 36 degrees) take items off a conveyor, scan them and put them in a cardboard box.

If the wrong item gets sent to the packers by mistake, a runner exchanges it, holding up the order and possibly the entire refrigerated truck. Over the last few years the company invested in additional scanners so that items get scanned three times before they reach the box, providing extra places to catch mistakes. The additional 50 cents it costs to find an error is a lot less than the $6 or so it would cost if the error slipped through. "We're eliminating human error as much as possible," says Operations Manager Ariel Ramirez.

FreshDirect benefits from not having to arrange items as a store would, with high-profit items at eye level and low-profit bulk items down low. Instead, items on eight long shelves are arranged based on how often they're ordered, how much they weigh and how delicate they are. Heavy jugs of Tide detergent go at the beginning of the picking process and fragile sliced breads at the end. Pickers take the items off the shelves and put them into a nine-box array that moves between picking bays on an overhead track, like a ski lift.

If orders are finished but their picking basket has to wait in line behind incomplete orders, the company wastes money. Pickers now send 35% of all orders through quicker, cutting the boxes' travel time from 45 minutes to 30. The software creates one pick list for items stored in farther-out aisles and another for closer-in items, where most of the pickers work. Where once an order traveled an average of 1,000 feet in the warehouse, now it goes 830 feet.

FreshDirect's 150 drivers must race to meet the two-hour window the company promises customers. Without maps or GPS, Manhattan-bound drivers have to know the intricacies of service elevators, parking spots and difficult building superintendents. That's why new drivers deliver 35% fewer orders than experienced ones. During rush hour FreshDirect limits the number of delivery slots it offers and keeps drivers away from crowded streets, instead dispatching a bigger truck to serve as a base for deliverymen pushing handcarts to customers' apartments.

The kitchen where FreshDirect's executive chef, Michael Stark, prepares his packaged meals is increasingly automated, too. Stark spent two years translating his recipes into the SAP factory software. When an order for lasagna comes in, the system checks the kitchen's inventory and orders meat, pasta, cheese and tomato sauce, routing the meat to the deli for grinding. There's more automation to come, with machines to grill pizzas and form meatballs.

New Yorkers already turn to Stark for 1,000 rotisserie chickens a week. As the company gets bigger, squeezing costs is as important as squeezing oranges.

Smart Complexifier

Tom Peters argues that the analyst from hell is the smart complexifier:

Years ago, in my McKinsey days, one of my bosses was bemoaning the help we were getting from an "economic genius." He said, "Tom, consider a matrix. One axis boils down to 'simplifier' vs 'complexifier.' The other is 'smart' and 'dumb.' Thus we are dealing with a 2X2 matrix. The analyst-from-heaven is the 'smart simplifier.' The analyst-from hell is 'smart complexifier.' He is, in fact, worse that the 'dumb complexifier,' who you can simply ignore, and the 'dumb simplifier' who might actually be of help."

Can Buffalo Ever Come Back?

Buffalo has dwindled to half its peak size. Can Buffalo Ever Come Back? Perhaps, but that's missing the point, says Edward L. Glaeser:

All this spending aimed at resurrecting Buffalo as a place — very different from government aid that seeks to help disadvantaged people, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit — was destined to fail. Urban migrations aren’t random. America’s deserts and mountain ranges aren’t densely inhabited for a good reason: few people want to live in such harsh places. Similarly, people and firms are leaving Buffalo for the Sunbelt because the Sunbelt is a warmer, more pleasant, and more productive area to live. The federal government shouldn’t be bribing them, in effect, to stay in the city.

A Life Saver Called "Plumpynut"

Anderson Cooper praises A Life Saver Called "Plumpynut":

Why are so many kids dying? Because they can't get the milk, vitamins and minerals their young bodies need. Mothers in these villages can't produce enough milk themselves and can't afford to buy it. Even if they could, they can't store it — there’s no electricity, so no refrigeration. Powdered milk is useless because most villagers don't have clean water. Plumpynut was designed to overcome all these obstacles.

Plumpynut is a remarkably simple concoction: it is basically made of peanut butter, powdered milk, powdered sugar, and enriched with vitamins and minerals. It tastes like a peanut butter paste. It is very sweet, and because of that kids cannot get enough of it.

The formula was developed by a nutritionist. It doesn't need refrigeration, water, or cooking; mothers simply squeeze out the paste. Many children can even feed themselves. Each serving is the equivalent of a glass of milk and a multivitamin.

I hate to sound all Malthusian and rain on everyone's parade, but this seems to be the real problem:

It's hard to imagine a less industrialized country than Niger. On a list of 177 developing countries, the United Nations ranked Niger dead last — least developed. More than 70 percent of the people don’t know how to read. Most work in the fields and earn less than a dollar a day. Nomadic goat herders still roam this land — their children and their kids travel by camel. Goats seem to be the main garbage disposal, but clearly the goats are falling behind. You can still spot a skinny guard dog, but we were told all the cats have been cooked.

In the countryside, where 85 percent of people live, girls start marrying as young as 11 years old. By the age of 15 most are wed, and by 16 most have already become mothers. The average woman here will give birth at least eight times in her lifetime. But largely because of malnutrition, one in five of their children will die before they reach the age of five. Of those who survive, half will have stunted growth and never reach full adult height.

But now, with Plumpynut, more children are surviving and thriving.

Don't Forget to Listen to the Ship

David Foster shares some deep thoughts on Decision-Making in Organizations from Don Sheppard's Bluewater Sailor:

When a decision is made in an organizational context (as opposed to a decision by an entirely autonomous individual), additional layers of complexity and emotion come into play. The person who must make the decision is often not the person who has the information/expertise on which the decision must be based. Indeed, the information and expertise are often distributed across multiple individuals. These individuals may have their own objectives and motivations, which may differ from the objectives and motivations of the formal decision-maker, and which may conflict with each other. And the making of the decision may alter power relationships within the organization, as well as influencing the phenomena about which the decision is ostensibly being made.

The above factors are illustrated with crystalline clarity in the story of a seemingly very simple decision, which had to be made onboard a U.S. Navy destroyer sometime during the 1950s.

Don Sheppard was the newly-appointed Engineering Officer of the USS Henshaw, with responsibility for its 60,000-horsepower turbine plant. But his knowledge of propulsion equipment came entirely from study at the navy's Engineering Officer School. Reporting to Sheppard was the "Chief," an enlisted man with no theoretical training but with twenty years of experience in the practical operation of naval power plants. When Sheppard assumed his new duties, the Chief's greeting "bordered on rudeness." The man clearly believed that engineering officers might come and go, but that he, the Chief, was the one who really ran things, who was the "Prince of the Plant."

During maneuvers off the Pacific coast, a bizarre accident resulted in the Henshaw dropping a depth charge which exploded very close to its own stern. The shockwave was enough to knock down men who were standing on deck. Sheppard asked the Chief if he thought the plant might have suffered any damage:

He furrowed his brow, glaring at me. "Damage, sir? We'd know about any major damage by now if the plant suffered. i don't think we got any problems, sir," he answered — patronizingly — in a civil enough tone, but barely so. Who was I, an interloper, to dare question the Prince of the Plant?

But Sheppard remembered a movie he had seen in Engineering Officer School: it suggested that a shock like the one Henshaw had just experienced might have damaged the stern tube packing and the bearings through which the drive shafts ran. He mentioned this concern to the Chief, who discounted it with considerable sarcasm. "Maybe in some of them fancy movies it happened that way, sir, but nothin's wrong here."

Sheppard went to see the captain, and reported his concern about the possible damage. The spring bearnings could not be easily checked with the ship underway. The decision that had to be made was this: to check and possibly replace the bearings while at anchor, or to sail with the flotilla. The flotilla was comprised of eight destroyers, and the commodore was looking forward to having them all sail into Toyko Bay together. Furthermore, if Henshaw didn't sail with the group, they would miss the rendezvous with the refueling tanker, and would have to refuel at an upleasant place called Dutch Harbor. But if they did sail and the bearings failed, they would have to be replaced while underway — a difficult and possibly dangerous task.

Legally and formally, the decision was the captain's. But he knew little about the propulsion plant: it is doubtful that he really understood what the spring bearnings actually were. He had to depend on the opinions of his subordinates.

He asked the advice of those assembled for the conference. The Executive Officer said "sail." The Chief recommended, "sail." Now the captain turned to his Engineering Officer and asked very formally: "Your opinion, Mr Sheppard?"

What a dilemma the captain was in. Here, a junior officer with six days' experience as a chief engineer is obviously wanting to pull out of the squadron sail and check all the spring bearings in direct contradiction to a professional, well-experienced engineering chief who'd been doing the job for twenty years.

If the captain said yes to the inspection and we missed the squadron sail, he'd look bad. He'd look even worse if he suspected they might be bad and they were, and they failed at sea. in rough weather he'd still be left behind and another ship would have to be used as an escort. The commodore had his dream set on his full squadron of eight destroyers steaming proudly into Toyko Bay. It hadn't happened in a long time.

If I said we should inspect the spring bearings and the captain agreed with me, and the bearings were bad, it would injure the chief's pride and his position in the engineering department. A wise-ass ensign would have shown him up, thereby throwing into question his professional ability.

If I said don't sail and the bearings checked out okay, it would reinforce the opinion that officers stick together no matter how stupid the officers' actions might be.

If I said don't sail before a bearings check and we sailed anyway and the bearings failed, the captain's competence would be called into quesion by the crew. He would have been wrong, and the word gets around the fleet mighty fat.

On the other hand, if I said we should sail, thereby taking a chance of a failure and the bearings were okay, it would just show my inexperience and that I didn't really know what was going on. After all I had been a chief engineer for only six days. There would be little harm done.

Who is the real decision-maker in this scenario? The captain has the formal authority, but little relevant knowledge, either practical or theoretical. The Chief has the practical experience, but no theoretical training, and lacks the authority of officer rank. Sheppard has formal authority for the plant, together with theoretical training, but almost no practical experience.

Most likely, the true decision-maker is Sheppard. From the dynamics of the situation, I suspect that the captain would have done whatever he advised.

"Sail, Captain, I think they'll be okay," I answered, as the ship whispered to me that I was wrong.

As the ship whispered to him that he was wrong.

Henshaw sailed with the flotilla, and almost immediately came the report that Number 3 spring bearing was running hot. The starboard engine was stopped, and sailors began the arduous task of replacing the bearing. This involved sliding jacks under the shaft and lifting it up a few centimeters, then sliding out the 80-pound bearing and sliding a new one in. This had to be done as the ship pitched and rolled, while standing in icy bilge water. The task wasn't complete when the report came that another bearing had failed — this time, the Number 2 bearing on the port engine. That engine had to be stopped also, and Henshaw was taken in tow by another ship of the flotilla. Sheppard pitched in with the work, and had his hand badly cut by protuding metal slivers. Others were hurt more seriously; one man had his right hand badly injured when Number 2 bearing broke loose, smashing his hand against the bearing foundation.

Glassy eyed from the painkillers...Smallwood held onto the throttle board, trying to keep his attention on the gauges. His head nodded. Chief Maclin sent him to his bunk. "I'm sorry, Smallwood," he said, helping him up the ladder. "Goddamn, I'm really sorry."

Chief Maclin turned to me, wiping a tear from his eyes, and without word or expression offered his greasy, bloody hand.

After everything was under control, the captain called Sheppard to his cabin for a debriefing on what had happened. First, he critized himself for the mishap that had led to the initial proble, the accident with the depth charge. Second, he criticized himself for not listening more seriously to Sheppard's initial concerns about the bearings. But he also had something else to say:

"And third, Don, you, you're a direct contributor." My face dropped. I thought I was a hero. "If you thought you wre right — and you did think you were right — you should have put up more opposition, not roll over dead because of the obvious resistance of the three of us. I think, Don, that's the greatest lesson for you to learn in this whole thing."

The kind of political anaysis that Sheppard conducted before making his recommendation — what will be the effect of this alternative on my relationship with the Chief?..what will be the effect on the Chief's image with his own subordinates? — is made every day by people in organizations, and must be made, given the realities of organizational life.

But while considering the political dynamics — don't forget to listen to the ship.

The Logic of Failure

I've been meaning to read The Logic of Failure — subtitled : Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations — for some time, but after reading this review I realize it's even more up my alley than I imagined:

In any bookstore, you will find dozens or even hundreds of books devoted to "success." In this book, Dietrich Doerner works the other side of this street. He studies failure. Doerner, a professor of Psychology at the University of Bamberg (Germany) uses empirical methods to study human decision-making processes, with an emphasis on understanding the ways in which these processes can go wrong. His work should be read by anyone with a responsibility for making decisions, particularly complex and important decisions.

Doerner's basic tool for study is the simulation model. Many of his models bear a resemblence to Sim City and similar games, but are purpose-designed to shed light on particular questions. The nature of many of these models implies that they use human umpires, as well as computer processing. (Doerner uses the simulation results of other researchers, as well as his own experimental work, in developing the ideas in this book.)

Probably the best way to give a feel for the book is to describe some of the simulations and to discuss some of the conclusions that Doerner draws from them.

In the fire simulation, the subject plays the part of a fire chief who is dealing with forest fires. He has 12 brigades at his command, and can deploy them at will. The brigades can also be given limited autonomy to make their own decisions.

The subjects who fail at this game, Doerner finds, are those who apply rigid, context-insensitive rules...such as "always keep the units widely deployed" or "always keep the units concentrated" rather than making these decisions flexibly. He identifies "methodism," which he defines as "the unthinking application of a sequence of actions we have once learned," as a key threat to effective decision-making. (The term is borrowed from the great military writer Clausewitz.) Similar results are obtained in another simulation, in which the subject is put in charge of making production decisions in a clothing factory. In this case, the subjects are asked to think out loud as they develop their strategies. The unsuccessful ones tend to use unqualified expressions: constantly, every time, without exception, absolutely, etc...while the successful "factory managers" tend toward qualified expressions: now and then, in general, specifically, perhaps,...

The Moro simulation puts the subject in charge of a third-world country. His decision-making must include issues such as land use, water supply, medical care, etc. Time delays and multiple interactions make this simulation hard to handle effectively...a high proportion of subjects wound up making things worse rather than better for their "citizens." Human beings, Doerner argues, have much more difficulty understanding patterns that extend over time than patterns that are spatial in nature.

Many subjects in this simulation showed obsessive behavior — they would focus on one aspect, such as building irrigation canals, and ignore everything else, without even really trying to understand the interactions.

Doerner wanted to know what kinds of previous experience would help most in this game, so he ran it once with a set of college students for subjects, and again with a set of experienced business executives. The students had probably been more exposed to concepts of "ecological thinking" — but the executives did significantly better. This argues that there are forms of "tacit knowledge" which are gained as a result of decision-making experience, and which are transferable to at least some degree across subject matter domains.

One simple but surprisingly interesting experiment was the temperature control simulation. Subjects were put in the position of a supermarket manager and told that the thermostat for the freezers has broken down. They had to manually control the refrigeration system to maintain a temperature of 4 degrees C — higher and lower temperatures are both undesirable. They had available to them a regulator and a thermometer; the specific control mechanism was not described to the subjects. The results were often just bizarre. Many participants failed to understand that delays were occurring in the system (a setting does not take effect immediately, just as an air conditioner cannot cool a house immediately) and that these delays needed to be considered when trying to control the system. Instead, they developed beliefs about regulator settings that could best be described as superstitious or magical: "twenty-eight is a good number" or, even more strangely, "odd numbers are good."

One very interesting angle explored by Doerner is the danger, in decision-making tasks, of knowing too much — of becoming lost in detail and of always needing one more piece of information before coming to a decision. He posits that this problem "probably explains why organizations tend to institutionalize the separation of their information-gathering and decision-making branchs" — as in the development of staff organizations in the military. (It may also, it seems to me, have much to do with the hypercritical attitude that many intellectuals have toward decision-makers in business and government — that is, they fail to understand that the effective decision-maker must reduce a problem to its essences and cannot be forever exploring the "shades of gray")

Red Rain

Back in 2001, red rain fell on the Indian state of Kerala.

Dr. Godfrey Louis, a Professor of Pure and Applied Physics at Mahatma Gandhi University, collected samples, and put them under the microscope.

The rust-red cells he found had diameters averaging 10 microns, a little bigger than human blood cells.

Here's where things get wild:

Over several months, Dr. Louis began experimenting with different temperatures to see if the cells would respond. As the temperature rose, he saw more activity. Eventually he got up to 300 degrees Celsius, which is 572 degrees Fahrenheit. He also increased the pressure to 300 pounds per square centimeter. It is assumed that normal Earth life would die at such a high temperature and pressure. But the red-walled cells in the Kerala rain water seemed to thrive.

During his experimentation with temperatures and pressures, Dr. Louis studied the cells under a microscope. As he watched,the cells produced smaller cells internally that were colorless, or whitish. He began calling those new, little cells “daughters” of the original “mother” cells. Once he counted as many as fifteen daughter cells bud inside one of the adult “mother cells.” As the daughter cells grew, their cell walls also became red and eventually, the daughter cells erupted through the wall of the mother cell. This is clearly a process of replication. The budding is what provoked some biologist to say the red rain cells must be a form of yeast, since yeast cells also replicate by budding. But yeast cells have DNA, as all normal Earth biology has. On Earth, replication of cells requires the presence of DNA. But Dr. Louis could not find DNA.

So, he sent red rain water to scientists at Cornell University in the United States for isotopic ratio studies of the elemental composition of the red rain water. Elements confirmed so far are hydrogen, silicon, oxygen, carbon, and aluminum. No phosphorous was confirmed, which would be present if Earth DNA were present.

Prof. Louis also sent red rain cell water to Cardiff University’s Center for Astrobiology in Wales, directed by now-retired Prof. Emeritus, Chandra Wickramasinghe to see if DNA could be confirmed — but to date, DNA has not been confirmed.

Wikipedia has much more.

Dramatic Comet Outburst Could Last Weeks

That's no moon. Dramatic Comet Outburst Could Last Weeks:

A comet that suddenly brightened earlier this week has astronomers around the globe fascinated. And the show could go on for some time.

Comet Holmes, discovered in 1892, had in recent years been visible only through telescopes until a dramatic outburst made it visible to the naked eye. In fewer than 24 hours, it brightened by a factor of nearly 400,000.

It has now brightened by a factor of a million times what it was before the outburst, a change "absolutely unprecedented in the annals of cometary astronomy," said Joe Rao, SPACE.com's Skywatching Columnist.

The comet is now rivaling some of the brighter stars in the sky.
[...]
The comet is located among the stars of the constellation Perseus, which is about halfway up in the northeast sky in the evening. Perseus is almost directly overhead by around 2 a.m. local daylight time and remains well up in the northwest at dawn.

Maggots Rid Patients Of Antibiotic-resistant Infection, MRSA

Maggots Rid Patients Of Antibiotic-resistant Infection, MRSA:

University of Manchester researchers are ridding diabetic patients of the superbug MRSA — by treating their foot ulcers with maggots. Professor Andrew Boulton and his team used green bottle fly larvae to treat 13 diabetic patients whose foot ulcers were contaminated with MRSA and found all but one were cured within a mean period of three weeks, much quicker than the 28-week duration for the conventional treatment.

Don't look at the picture.

Some quotes:

"Maggots are the world's smallest surgeons. In fact they are better than surgeons - they are much cheaper and work 24 hours a day," Professor Boulton jokingly said.

"They have been used since the Napoleonic Wars and in the American Civil War they found that those who survived were the ones with maggots in their wounds: they kept them clean. They remove the dead tissue and bacteria, leaving the healthy tissue to heal.

"Still, we were very surprised to see such a good result for MRSA. There is no reason this cannot be applied to many other areas of the body, except perhaps a large abdominal wound."

In their next study, they "will compare larval treatment with antibacterial silver dressings and the biogun treatment, which uses ionized air to create superoxide radicals and eradicate bacteria."

Official: organic really is better

Official: organic really is better:

The evidence from the £12m four-year project will end years of debate and is likely to overturn government advice that eating organic food is no more than a lifestyle choice.
[...]
Researchers grew fruit and vegetables and reared cattle on adjacent organic and nonorganic sites on a 725-acre farm attached to Newcastle University, and at other sites in Europe. They found that levels of antioxidants in milk from organic herds were up to 90% higher than in milk from conventional herds.

As well as finding up to 40% more antioxidants in organic vegetables, they also found that organic tomatoes from Greece had significantly higher levels of antioxidants, including flavo-noids thought to reduce coronary heart disease.

Costs for Simulations

Clark Aldrich goes over the costs for simulations — which can vary quite a bit:

Branching story:

Simulation in which students make a series of decisions via a multiple choice interface to progress through and impact an event.

• Custom short (Less than 10 minutes): 30K
• Custom medium (Between 10 minutes and 30 minutes): 100K
• Custom long (Between 30 minutes and 2 hours): 500K
• Off the shelf short (per user): $30
• Off the shelf medium (per user): $100
• Off the shelf long (per user): $500

Interactive spreadsheets:

Simulation in which students typically try to impact critical metrics by allocating resources along competing categories and getting feedback of their decisions through graphs and charts.

• Custom short (Less than 1 hour): 30K+
• Custom medium (Between 1 hour and 4 hours): 100K+
• Custom long (Between 4 and 8 hours): 500K+
• Off the shelf short (per user): $30*
• Off the shelf medium (per user): $100*
• Off the shelf long (per user): $500*

+ plus cost of facilitation, * including cost of facilitation

Mini games:

Small, easy-to-access game built to be simple and addictive, which often focuses on mastering an action and can provide awareness of more complicated issues.

• Custom short (5 minutes): 10K
• Custom medium (10 minutes): 15K
• Custom long (30 minutes): 40K
• Off the shelf short (per user): n/a
• Off the shelf medium (per user): n/a
• Off the shelf long (per user): n/a

Virtual product or virtual lab:

A series of challenges/puzzles to be solved using on-screen representations of real-world objects and software.

• Custom short (30 minutes): 30K
• Custom medium (1 hour): 75K
• Custom long (4 hours): 150K
• Off the shelf short (per user): $10
• Off the shelf medium (per user): $30
• Off the shelf long (per user): $100

Practiceware:

Real-time, often 3D sims that encourages participants to repeat actions in high fidelity situations until the skills become natural in the real-world counterpart

• Custom short (1 hour): 100K+
• Custom medium (5 hours): 500K+
• Custom long (20 hours): 1000K+
• Off the shelf short (per user): $100*
• Off the shelf medium (per user): $400*
• Off the shelf long (per user): $1000*

+ plus cost of facilitation, * including cost of facilitation

Increasing Cost

Here are some items that typically and significantly increase costs:

• full motion video (many instead use comics / illustrations)
• advanced graphics
• calibrating units, maps, processes, and other parts of relevant systems
• creating a new Genre
• having a totally self-paced/asynchronous deployment
• customizing or building software instead of configuring or using off-the-shelf
• distance deployed multiplayer
• building a complex game

Note: All genre links include examples of the genre in [brackets]. Go to mini games and launch a few [examples].

He also shares an exasperating example of trying to sell a simulation project to a corporate training person:

Training Person: I can't do simulations. They are too expensive.

Me: Not necessarily. There are many simple models. There are branching stories, virtual products, interactive spreadsheets, game based models, just to name a few.

Training Person: And are these more effective in achieving learning goals?

Me: Yes. They have very impressive long term productivity benefits.

Training Person: Those are great. But how about multiplayer ? Do you have any examples of multiplayer?

Me: OK. Here they are.

Training Person: Those are cool. But you have any with better scoring and coaching built in as well?

Me: Sure. Here are a few other examples.

Training Person: Animations and advanced graphics are really important to me. Do you have any examples of sims also with really great, smooth animation?

Me: Yup, I have a few right here.

Training Person: Our corporate colors are blue and red? Is it possible to customize it?

Me: Yes.

Training Person: Wow, that is so fantastic. That really blow me away. It's too bad, really.

Me: What is?

Training Person: I can't do simulations. They are too expensive.

Xenith X1 Football Helmet

The Xenith X1 football helmet aims to provide the next generation in concussion prevention:

The Xenith X1 football helmet is designed to reduce the sudden and violent acceleration and deceleration of the head and the brain after impact. A flexible bonnet is embedded with shock absorbers that gradually release air to dissipate the energy from impact. Traditional helmets use foam inserts.

Genetic Disorders Hit Amish Hard

Genetic disorders hit the Amish hard, as centuries of intermarriage make tremendously rare diseases more likely:

The Amish make up only about 10 percent of the population in Geagua County in Ohio, but they’re half of the special needs cases. Three of the five Miller children, for example, have a mysterious crippling disease that has no name and no known cure.
[...]
The three Byler sisters were all born with a condition that has no cure and mysteriously leads to severe mental retardation and a host of physical problems. Last year, doctors figured out the girls have the gene for something called Cohen Syndrome; there are only 100 known cases worldwide.

Since then, more than a dozen other cases of Cohen’s have been discovered in Ohio Amish country.

“Nobody knew it was around here and we found, what, 20 to 30 cases in this area now that they didn't realize. Nobody knew about it," says Erwin Kuhns.

But for so many years, the Amish have had no names for these disorders. It was simply a mystery why half the headstones in Amish cemeteries were headstones of children.

The genetic problems come down to something called the "founder effect" because the nearly 150,000 Amish in America can trace their roots back to a few hundred German-Swiss settlers who brought the Amish and Mennonite faiths to the United States in the 18th century. Over generations of intermarriage, rare genetic flaws have shown up, flaws which most of us carry within our genetic makeup but which don't show up unless we marry someone else with the same rare genetic markers.

Kuhns and Miller admit these conditions have gotten more widespread in recent years. So much so that concerned families pulled together, held an auction and raised enough to build a clinic within buggy range of all the Amish. They also hired a pediatrician and researcher named Dr. Heng Wang to start caring for their children.

Why Some People Are Lucky

Watch this video. (It's a Java applet.) When viewing the video, try to count the total number of times that the people wearing white pass the basketball. Do not count the passes made by the people wearing black.

Watch the video. I'll wait.

I've commented on that video before, but it turns out that it's also a favorite of Richard Wiseman, who recently explained to Forbes
why some people are lucky:

The human brain is amazingly good at detecting what it wants to find. When you are hungry, your brain focuses on finding food. When you are thirsty, it looks for liquid. The problem is, your brain can become so focused on seeing what it expects to see, it misses things that are obvious but unexpected. Lucky people tend to have a somewhat relaxed view of life. They are less concerned with mundane details and more prone to look at the bigger picture. Ironically, by trying less, they see more.

Exactly the same principle applies to the opportunities that bombard us in everyday life. In another experiment, I gave some volunteers a newspaper and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. What I didn't tell them was that halfway through the newspaper I had placed an unexpected opportunity. This "opportunity" took up half a page and announced, in huge type, "Win £100 by telling the experimenter you have seen this." The unlucky people tended to be so focused on counting the photographs they failed to notice the opportunity. In contrast, the lucky people were more relaxed, saw the bigger picture and so spotted a chance to win £100.

There's more. "Lucky people possess a whole host of opportunity-attracting traits."

You will quickly exhaust your potential opportunities if you keep talking to the same people, taking the same route to and from work and going to the same places on holiday. But introducing new or random experiences is like visiting a new part of the orchard--suddenly you are surrounded by hundreds of apples.

Lucky people had developed various interesting ways of introducing such variety. One noticed that whenever he went to a party, he tended to talk to the same type of people. To help disrupt this routine, he randomly chose a color before arriving at the party, and then only spoke to people wearing that color of clothing at the party.

Yet another trait:

Lucky people experience a large number of seemingly chance encounters. They bump into someone at a party, discover that they know people in common, and from these connections end up getting married or doing business together. Or when they need something, they always seem to know someone who knows someone who can solve their problem.

I wondered if these "small world" experiences were due to knowing a large number of people, and being tied into more elaborate social networks than most. To discover if this was the case and quantify the nature of these networks, I employed a method described by Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point. To explore the notion of social connectivity, Gladwell carried out an informal study in which he presented people with a list of surnames and asked them to indicate if they knew people with that surname. Similarly, I asked hundreds of lucky and unlucky people to look at a list of 15 common surnames, and indicate if they were on first-name terms with at least one person with each surname.

The results were dramatic and demonstrated the huge relationship between luck and social connectivity. Almost 50% of lucky people ticked eight or more of the names, compared with just 25% of unlucky people. Further work has shown lucky people tend to be extroverts who both meet a large number of people and keep in contact with them. The building and maintaining of such social networks significantly increases the likelihood of having a "lucky" chance encounter.

One Hill, One Marine

One Hill, One Marine:

World War Two is generally calculated from Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939. But that's a eurocentric view. The Japanese had been limbering up their muscles in Korea and Manchuria as early as 1931, and in China by 1934. By 1942 they'd devastated every major Pacific military force or stronghold of the great pre-war powers: Britain, Holland, France, and the United States. The bulk of America's proud Pacific fleet lay beached or rusting on the floor of Pearl Harbor. A few aircraft carriers and submarines remained, though as Mitchell Paige and his 30-odd men were sent out to establish their last, thin defensive line on that ridge southwest of the tiny American bridgehead on Guadalcanal on Oct. 25, he would not have been much encouraged to know how those remaining American aircraft carriers were faring offshore.
[...]
As Paige — then a platoon sergeant — and his riflemen set about carefully emplacing their four water-cooled Brownings, it's unlikely anyone thought they were about to provide the definitive answer to that most desperate of questions: How many able-bodied U.S. Marines does it take to hold a hill against 2,000 desperate and motivated attackers?

The Japanese Army had not failed in an attempt to seize any major objective since the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. Their commanders certainly did not expect the war to be lost on some God-forsaken jungle ridge manned by one thin line of Yanks in khaki in October of 1942.

But in preceding days, Marine commander Vandegrift had defied War College doctrine, "dangling" his men in exposed positions to draw Japanese attacks, then springing his traps "with the steel vise of firepower and artillery," in the words of Naval historian David Lippman.

The Japanese regiments had been chewed up, good. Still, the American forces had so little to work with that Paige's men would have only the four 30-caliber Brownings to defend the one ridge through which the Japanese opted to launch their final assault against Henderson Field, that fateful night of Oct. 25.

By the time the night was over, "The 29th (Japanese) Infantry Regiment has lost 553 killed or missing and 479 wounded among its 2,554 men," historian Lippman reports. "The 16th (Japanese) Regiment's losses are uncounted, but the 164th's burial parties handle 975 Japanese bodies. ... The American estimate of 2,200 Japanese dead is probably too low."

Among the 90 American dead and wounded that night were all the men in Mitchell Paige's platoon. Every one. As the night wore on, Paige moved up and down his line, pulling his dead and wounded comrades back into their foxholes and firing a few bursts from each of the four Brownings in turn, convincing the Japanese forces down the hill that the positions were still manned.

The citation for Paige's Congressional Medal of Honor picks up the tale: "When the enemy broke through the line directly in front of his position, P/Sgt. Paige, commanding a machinegun section with fearless determination, continued to direct the fire of his gunners until all his men were either killed or wounded. Alone, against the deadly hail of Japanese shells, he fought with his gun and when it was destroyed, took over another, moving from gun to gun, never ceasing his withering fire."

In the end, Sgt. Paige picked up the last of the 40-pound, belt-fed Brownings — the same design which John Moses Browning famously fired for a continuous 25 minutes until it ran out of ammunition at its first U.S. Army trial — and did something for which the weapon was never designed. Sgt. Paige walked down the hill toward the place where he could hear the last Japanese survivors rallying to move around his flank, the gun cradled under his arm, firing as he went.

The weapon did not fail.

Coming up at dawn, battalion executive officer Major Odell M. Conoley first discovered the answer to our question: How many able-bodied Marines does it take to hold a hill against two regiments of motivated, combat-hardened infantrymen who have never known defeat?

On a hill where the bodies were piled like cordwood, Mitchell Paige alone sat upright behind his 30-caliber Browning, waiting to see what the dawn would bring.

One hill: one Marine.

Prejudice: The Watson Case

Sometimes David Friedman is willing to discuss ideas that no normal person would discuss publicly — like Prejudice: The Watson Case:

In the recent flap over public comments by James Watson, one of the things that strikes me is the odd misuse, in attacks on him, of the term "prejudice."

A prejudice is a belief held in advance of the evidence. Watson's biological claim — that human populations that have spent a long time separated from each other in different environments can be expected to differ in heritable characteristics — is so obviously true that I find it hard to imagine anyone honestly denying it. His application, his conclusion from his own observation that sub-Saharan Africans are on average less intelligent than Europeans, may or may not be correct, but without knowing what his observations have been it is hard to see how one can know that it is due to prejudice.

Unless, of course, one knows in advance that Watson's conclusion is false. So far as I can tell, there is literally no evidence to support that position. At least, in all of the arguments on the subject that I have observed, those arguing for racial equality of intelligence do so not by producing evidence that it is true but by arguing that the evidence that it is false is inadequate or mistaken. Even if all of their arguments are correct, the conclusion is not that we know that racial groups don't differ in intelligence but only that we don't know if they do, or if so how.

Watson's comment was surely tactless as well as imprudent; his conclusion may, for all I know, be mistaken. But all of the prejudice so far exhibited in the case is on the other side.

He goes on to discuss Ethnic Cleansing, Other Horrors, and the Racial IQ Controversy:

In the discussion set off by my post on the Watson controversy, one person writes:

"It is never too much to remember how much ethnic cleansing was made in the past based on 'scientific evidence' that some races were 'not as intelligent as ours'..."

I think claims of this sort are often made, but I'm not sure there is any basis for them. Ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, so far as I can tell, had nothing to do with any scientific evidence, real or bogus, about the relative intelligence of races. In some cases the cleansers and their victims differed only in whether their ancestors had or had not converted to Islam in the distant past. In others, the justification offered for the cleansing was "it's historically our land, and they have taken it over by immigrating and having more babies than we did."

What about the Holocaust? I believe some Nazis made claims about Jewish inferiority of one sort or another. But the basis for their anti-semitism, so far as I can tell, was the idea that Jews were race enemies — in which case the more intelligent they were, the more dangerous. One can see that pretty clearly in Henry Ford's (less malevolent) version of anti-semitism. I don't know what justifications were offered for killing Gypsies, who were the other main "racial" target.

In the post-war period, I think the largest scale race killing has been the Hutu/Tutsi conflicts in southern Africa. It's hard to believe that any significant amount of it was motivated by evidence of IQ differences between the two groups.

If we move from killing to enslaving, the case becomes a little stronger. My impression is that one argument used against freeing black slaves was that they were less intelligent and so unable to run their lives themselves — although it's hard to see that as a plausible argument for enslaving them in the first place. But I thought the main justification offered — insofar as any was needed beyond the usefulness of slavery to slave owners--was biblical, the "sons of Ham" argument. And in any case, all of this predates the invention if IQ and scientific literature on it.

In the case of classical antiquity, slavery frequently involved slaves of the same ethnic stock as the slave owners. So although philosophers might make arguments about some sorts of people being natural slaves, it's hard to see how any such arguments could have explained the actual practices.

So here is my challenge: Can anyone offer an actual historical example of genocide, ethnic cleansing, or slavery where either the main reason for it, or the main justification offered, was scientific or pseudo-scientific evidence that the victims were, on average, less intelligent than the perpetrators?

Some Neanderthals may have been redheads

Some Neanderthals may have been redheads:

The researchers homed in on the MC1R gene linked to hair and skin color and used DNA analysis to find a variation that produced the same kind of pigmentation changes as in humans with red hair and pale skin.

How to Raise Prices in Health Care and Education

Arnold Kling notes that we use the same formula to raise prices in both health care and education: (a) Subsidize demand; (b) Restrict supply using accreditation rules.

Video Game Shown to Cut Cortisol

Video Game Shown to Cut Cortisol — by 17 percent:

Prof. Baldwin and his team — McGill PhD graduates Stephane Dandeneau and Jodene Baccus and graduate student Maya Sakellaropoulo — have been developing a suite of video games that train players in social situations to focus more on positive feedback rather than being distracted and deterred by perceived social slights or criticisms. The games are based on the emerging science of social intelligence, which has found that a significant part of daily stress comes from our social perceptions of the world.

In a 2004 study of 56 students, a standard reaction-time test showed that the game, called the Matrix, helped people shift the way they processed social information. The researchers next conducted several studies to see whether the effects of the game would translate into lower stress levels in a high-pressure context.

In one of their recent studies, they recruited 23 employees of a Montreal-based call centre to play one of their games, which involves clicking on the one smiling face among many frowning faces on a screen as quickly as possible. Through repetitive playing, the game trains the mind to orient more toward positive aspects of social life, said Prof. Baldwin.

The call-centre employees did this each workday morning for a week. They filled out daily stress and self-esteem questionnaires and had their cortisol levels tested through saliva analysis on the final day of the experiment. These tests showed an average 17-percent reduction in cortisol production compared to a control group that played a similar game but without the smiling faces. The cortisol levels were tested by Jens Pruessner of the Montreal Neurological Institute's McConnell Brain Imaging Centre and Douglas Hospital Research Centre, a co-author of the study.

Setting the bar high

The Economist's Setting the bar high revolves around a very USA Today graphic:

Why Blackwater is Invulnerable

Jim Dunnigan explains