Human Lie Detectors Almost Never Miss

Friday, October 15th, 2004

According to Human Lie Detectors Almost Never Miss, a small fraction of the population possesses a remarkable talent for spotting lies:

As he lies, the young man shrugs, flutters his eyelids and shakes his head. Another, on a witness stand, grimaces for a millisecond as he answers a question.

Most people believe they could easily detect such lying behavior, but in fact most miss a good 50 percent of lies, says deception expert Maureen O’Sullivan of the University of California San Francisco.

But O’Sullivan says she has found a special group — just 1 percent of those she has tested — who catch a lie nearly 90 percent of the time.

“We call them wizards,” O’Sullivan told a briefing sponsored by the American Medical Association on Thursday. “Wizardry is a special skill that seems magical if you don’t have it.”

These wizards have a special ability to ferret out little tics that show when a person is lying.

She and her colleagues have so far screened 13,000 people for their ability to catch a liar on videotape. “We found 14 people who we called ultimate experts,” she said.

They could tell when people deliberately lied about feelings, committing a crime or their own opinions.

Another 13 were good at detecting specific types of lies. For example, she said, “There was a group of cops who got very good scores — they got 80 percent or more on crime but none of them did well on the video about feeling.”

I have to ask a few statistical questions. First — and most trivially — how do 14 “ultimate experts” and 13 more specialized lie-detectors add up to 1% of the 13,000 people they’ve tested?

Second, if a normal person spots a lie 50% of the time, then 1% of those normal people will spot lies far more than 50% of the time, just by luck. (And another 1% of those normal people will spot lies far less than 50% of the time, just by back luck.) In fact, with a 50% chance of catching any particular lie, there’s a 1% chance of catching nine lies out of ten. (Of course, there’s roughly zero chance of catching 90 lies out of 100, if, in fact, you have a 50% chance of catching each lie.)

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Yahoo! News – Physics Professor Goes on Rage in Class

Thursday, October 14th, 2004

I had some bad professors in my time, but none quite like this University of Louisiana at Lafayette physics professor. From Yahoo! News – Physics Professor Goes on Rage in Class:

Student Kacie Spears said professor Louis Houston lost control right after class began Wednesday morning and was yelling obscenities.

‘Then he told us if we got out of our seats he’s gonna kill us. He went on the black board and wrote ’911 now’, so we were really in fear for our lives,’ Spears told KATC-TV.

Spears said Houston slapped a student and then told his class he was God.

After class ended, students left the room in Broussard Hall and someone called campus security.

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Yahoo! News – Cirque Du Soleil Show to Feature Beatles

Thursday, October 14th, 2004

When I think of the Cirque du Soleil, I may think of acrobatics and music, but I certainly don’t think of “Twist and Shout” — but that may change. From Yahoo! News – Cirque Du Soleil Show to Feature Beatles:

The Beatles are teaming up with Cirque du Soleil to create a theatrical production that will replace the legendary Siegfried & Roy act at The Mirage hotel-casino.

It is the first major theatrical partnership for The Beatles, whose musical archive has been carefully guarded for decades, said Neil Aspinall, managing director of the band’s Apple Corps label.

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Yahoo! News – Comic to Feature HIV-Positive Sidekick

Wednesday, October 13th, 2004

When I first read the headline, Comic to Feature HIV-Positive Sidekick, I thought, Wow, that’s some dark humor! Then I realized they were referring to a comic book:

Along with fighting alien menaces and criminal masterminds, the “Green Arrow” comic book will now feature a sidekick engaged in a more personal struggle — this one against HIV.

It’s the first major comic book to deal with the illness, and a dose of hard-edged reality to the usually fanciful world of costumed crime fighters.

In the latest issue of “Green Arrow” set for publication Wednesday, a teenage runaway named Mia — who has been in the care of the title hero for two years — discovers that her time spent as a street-dweller and prostitute has resulted in her picking up the virus.

Writer Judd Winick, who oversees the “Green Arrow” story line, said this is a way to explore socially conscious themes while also giving the Mia character extra motivation to make a difference in the world.

“We’ve been hinting all along the way that she’s interested in taking up the mantle, being a sidekick, getting out there in the streets and helping out,” Winick told The Associated Press. “Green Arrow won’t hear of it.”

The news that she has HIV leads her to push Green Arrow even more. Fighting crime, Winick said, is what she wants to do with her life. “So he allows her to slap on a costume and become his sidekick, which has the silly name of Speedy,” Winick said. “It’s not as a death wish, but she can’t fool around anymore. This isn’t about an abbreviated life span. It is about life having focus,” he added.

Speedy was originally a boy sidekick, but the character is now grown up and goes by the more mature name of Arsenal.

They left out a very important detail: the original Speedy became a drug addict in one of the first “socially conscious” comic book stories, back in the 1960s. (Around that same time, Oliver Queen, Green Arrow’s millionaire alter ego, lost his vast wealth and became explicitly left wing.)

I didn’t immediately recognize Judd Winick’s name:

Winick may be known to some from his stint on MTV’s roommate reality-show, “The Real World” 1993, on which he appeared with Pedro Zamora, who died the next year after a public battle with AIDS.

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The Venture Brothers

Wednesday, October 13th, 2004

On my brother’s advice, I recently checked out The Venture Brothers on Cartoon Network, a new animated show by Chris McCulloch, a writer from The Tick (animated series and live series), who describes it like this:

It’s called ‘The Venture Brothers’ and at it’s core it’s kind of a parody of the old Jonny Quest cartoons from the mid-sixties, as well as The Hardy Boys and Tom Swift boys’ adventure novels of the past. So it’s got elements of adventure, spy, science fiction and even some comic book genre stuff. The Venture brothers, Hank and Dean, are fraternal twins; teenaged idiots who think, act and talk like it’s the sixties (though it takes place in the present). They’re the sons of Dr. Venture, a world renowned scientist (mostly world renowned due to the reputation of his late father, who though we don’t see him in the pilot was about as cool as Doc Savage in his day) who can’t really stand them. Doc pops ‘diet pills’ like candy and reeks of failure and unrealized potential. Their family bodyguard, Brock Samson, is a former secret agent who responds to any and all crises with relentless, remorseless brutality. He’s kind of a white trash James Bond/Steve McQueen.

In the pilot episode, the family travels to New York City because Doc is scheduled to present his latest invention at an international science convention at the United Nations. They are pursued by The Monarch — a megalomaniacal, butterfly-themed supervillain unworthy of James Bond or the Fantastic Four with a long time hatred of Dr. Venture — and a mysterious ninja, Otaku Senzuri, who wants to get his hands on the Doc’s invention. While Doc gives his presentation uptown, the boys get lost in the city’s seamy downtown — meeting hookers, muggers and drug dealers as they flee The Monarch. And of course, no family science fiction action adventure story would be complete without supersonic jet airplanes, mummies, crocodiles and army guys.

Brock Samson sounded very, very familiar — because he’s played by Patrick Warburton (of The Tick and Seinfeld).

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A Nobel for Real Business Cycles

Tuesday, October 12th, 2004

In A Nobel for Real Business Cycles, Alex Tabarrok explains the Nobel-prize-winning work of economists Kydland and Prescott:

Recessions have almost always been thought of as a failure of market economies. Different theories point to somewhat different failures, in Keynesian theories it’s a failure of aggregate demand, in Austrian theories a mismatch between investment and consumption demand, in monetarist theories a misallocation of resource due to a confusion of real and nominal price signals. In some of these theories government actions may prompt the problem but the recession itself is still conceptualized as an error, a problem and a waste.

Kydland and Prescott show that a recession may be a purely optimal and in a sense desirable response to natural shocks. The idea is not so counter-intuitive as it may seem. Consider Robinson Crusoe on a desert island (I owe this analogy to Tyler). Every day Crusoe ventures out onto the shoals of his island to fish. One day a terrible storm arises and he sits the day out in his hut — Crusoe is unemployed. Another day he wanders out onto the shoals and finds an especially large school of fish so he works especially long hours that day – Crusoe is enjoying a boom economy. Now add into Crusoe’s economy some investment goods, nets for example, that take “time to build.” A shock on day one will now exert an influence on the following days even if the shock itself goes away — Crusoe begins making the nets when it rains but in order to finish them he continues the next day when it shines. Thus, Crusoe’s fish GDP falls for several days in a row — first because of the shock and then because of his choice to build nets, an optimal response to the shock.

An analogy is one thing but K and P showed that a model built from exactly the same microeconomic forces as in the Crusoe economy could duplicate many of the relevant statistics of the US economy over the past 50 years. This was a real shock to economists! There are no sticky prices in K & P’s model, no systematic errors or confusions over nominal versus real prices and no unexploited profit opportuniites. A perectly competitive economy with no deviations from classical Arrow-Debreau assumptions could/would exhibit behaviour like the US economy.

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Understanding Risk and Reward

Tuesday, October 12th, 2004

Understanding Risk and Reward shares some pharmaceutical research costs:

It costs over $800 million to bring a new drug to market. Indeed, Sir Tom McKillop CEO of AstraZeneca said yesterday that it costs as much as $1.2 billion from inception to first sale. The cost is so high because the vast majority of compounds discovered and tested don’t do anything useful, the ones that do might be toxic or have side-effects significant enough to make them unworkable. These defects won’t be realized until after many years of trials, costing millions of dollars for each failure — most compounds that make trials fail. The few that survive can make a fortune, but even then may have to be withdrawn, with lost revenue and potential litigation costs escalating.

But since the returns can be high, the U.S. research-based (non-generic) pharmaceutical industry currently spends upwards of $33 billion annually on R&D.

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Welcome to the Post-Progressive Era

Tuesday, October 12th, 2004

Welcome to the Post-Progressive Era explains how modern journalistic practices of reporting only news that’s “fit to print” are a fairly recent development:

In the 18th and 19th century, the press was unabashedly partisan and ideological, on one side or the other. That is, everything that the Federalists did was great, everything that the Whigs did was terrible — or vice versa. To this day, there are still a few newspapers with names such as ‘Republican’ or ‘Democrat’ in their titles. And a few active bastions of this polarized and pugilistic era still survive: The Manchester Union-Leader runs front-page editorials; The New York Post never hesitates to let its opinions percolate through the whole paper.

But for the most part, beginning around the turn of the 20th century, newspapers have operated according to different rules. This was the work of the Progressives, the bipartisan movement — including, as its great champions, presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson — that remade America from 1890 to 1920. The Progressives wanted to clean up corruption and patronage, but that was just for openers.

The Progressives were, in fact, much more than reformers. They were more elitist and paternalistic than democratic; their goal was to use new tools, such as bureaucracy and regulation, to bring predictability and “efficiency” into society.

The American Medical Association, incorporated in 1897, was an emblematic Progressive institution; it sought to professionalize medical education and to improve medicine — and also, critics noted, to illegalize folk practitioners and alternative providers, such as chiropractors or midwives. Which is to say, the Progressives had a certain vision of the Great Society. And woe to those who disagreed.

The same Progressive ethos conquered journalism. The Columbia Journalism School, founded in 1912, was designed to bring the new science of professionalism and objectivity to the bloody-knuckled, as well as ink-stained, wretches of newspaperdom. The new idea was that journalists, educated and inculcated in the latest thinking, would seek out the truth and bestow it upon the masses, for the general betterment of all.

That was the pattern for the new century. Journalists, working from big and quasi-monopolistic newspapers, scanned the horizon for all the news that was “fit to print.” There was one huge catch in this media approach, of course — it was boring. In the 19th century, The Times of London earned the nickname, “The Thunderer,” for its lightning-like excoriations of British politicians; plenty of American papers, too, prided themselves on savaging their foes. But in the new Progressive era, such invective was seen as unprofessional. And so hot, populist, passionate copy was mostly consigned to a few columnists or, more often, exiled completely to the tabloid nether realm. So the news became, in a word, dull. Slightly left-of-center, of course, but still dull.

Later, the print-establishment was joined by, and eventually superseded by, television. But TV news, infected with Progressive thinking and further constrained by the Federal Communications Commission, was dull, too.

This paternalistic, hegemonic order — of trained and credentialed journalists, administering the news — survived into the early 90s.

Now we have Fox News.

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Economic Illiteracy Quadrifecta

Tuesday, October 12th, 2004

Arnold Kling explains the Economic Illiteracy Quadrifecta:

In the minds of the public, prices apparently go up when businesses suddenly start to feel greedier. Economists, in contrast, expect businesses to be greedy year-in, year-out; but depending on market conditions, greed may call for prices to go up, go down, or stay the same.
— Bryan Caplan, Straight Talk About Economic Literacy

Bryan Caplan has compared the answers of economists and non-economists to identical questions about markets and the economy. Caplan found that the differences could be grouped into four categories of economic illiteracy: anti-market bias, as explained above; anti-foreign bias; pessimistic bias; and make-work bias.

I will discuss these biases in the context of the current election. In fact, it turns out that in the second Presidential debate, even though economic issues were only touched on in a few of the questions, Democratic candidate Senator John Kerry managed to appeal to all four of the economically ignorant biases identified in Caplan’s paper. You could say that Kerry hit the economic illiteracy quadrifecta!

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Ultraviolet B, Not A, Radiation Triggers Melanoma

Tuesday, October 12th, 2004

Years ago, Ultraviolet B radiation (UVB) was considered the dangerous portion of the UV spectrum, because it caused sunburns. More recently, UVA got a reputation for being the more dangerous portion of the spectrum, because it penetrates deeper than UVB, and suntan lotions have scrambled to provide adequate UVA protection. But it looks like UVB is responsible for deadly melanomas:

Dr. Edward C. De Fabo of The George Washington University Medical Center, Washington DC, and colleagues, exposed mice to light of various wavelengths. This included UVA, UVB, solar simulation, an unfiltered sunlamp, and a sunlamp filtered to remove more than 96 percent of the UVB spectrum.

Melanoma was triggered most strongly by the UVB lamp, followed by the solar simulator and the sunlamp, which both had comparable melanoma-inducing properties, De Fabo’s group reports in the September 15th issue of Cancer Research.

In contrast, mice exposed to UVA light or to the filtered sunlamp had responses no different from those of a comparison group of animals that were not exposed to any of the light sources.

When it comes to tanning, UVB triggers melanin production, and UVA oxidizes (and browns) the melanin once it is produced.

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Jacket Grows From Living Tissue

Tuesday, October 12th, 2004

Perhaps I’ve finally found my inner Luddite. This sounds far creepier than killing an animal, skinning it, and tanning its hide. From Jacket Grows From Living Tissue:

Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr at the Tissue Culture & Art Project are attempting to grow a semi-living jacket in an effort to create ‘victimless leather.’ Hoping to highlight the possibility of wearing leather without killing an animal, the duo is presently focused on growing living tissue into a leather-like material and having it mature in the form of a miniature, stitchless, coat-like shape.

Some specifics:

Grown using a combination of mouse and human cells, the jacket is currently quite tiny (about 2 inches high and 1.4 inches wide) and would just fit a mouse. Using a biodegradable polymer as a base, the team coated it with 3T3 mouse cells to form connective tissue and topped it up with human bone cells in the hope of creating a stronger layer of skin. The jacket is being grown inside a specially designed bioreactor that acts as a surrogate body. The group hopes that once the polymer degrades, a whole jacket that maintains its shape and integrity will be left behind.

Actually, that doesn’t sound so bad. But this does:

The artists [at SymbioticA: The Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory at the University of Western Australia] are also designing what they call a MetaBody, creating a semi-living object consisting of different tissues that originate from different bodies. They will be collaborating with the French performance artist Orlan, who constantly experiments with her own face, using plastic surgery to transform herself into the quintessence of classical beauty: a new being modeled on Venus, Diana, Europa, Psyche and Mona Lisa.

The artists will culture Orlan’s own skin and hybridize it with skins of different pigmentation from other people of different races to create a miniature Harlequin dress. By culturing these tissues together while they are stripped from the bodies’ immune systems and making them a single, semi-living entity, they intend to abolish identities of individuals, genders, races and species.

They’ll also be growing facial parts for Stelarc, an Australian artist who explores extending the body through prosthetics. The duo plans to grow a nose, lips and a shape of the eyes, connecting them to form a living mask that would either imitate a face or represent a mutation of it.

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School Ups Grade by Going Online

Tuesday, October 12th, 2004

School Ups Grade by Going Online reports on a technology I’ve been expecting to see for years:

Until last year, Walt Whitman Middle School 246 in Brooklyn was considered a failing school by the state of New York.

But with the help of a program called HIPSchools that uses rapid communication between parents and teachers through e-mail and voice mail, M.S. 246 has had a dramatic turnaround. The premise behind ‘HIP’ comes from Keys Technology Group’s mission of ‘helping involve parents.’

The school has seen distinct improvement in the performance of its 1300 students, as well as regular attendance, which has risen to 98 percent (an increase of over 10 percent) in the last two years according to Georgine Brown-Thompson, academic intervention services coordinator at M.S. 246.
[...]
Available in over 60 schools nationwide, HIPSchools was created by Brady Keys Jr., a 67-year-old retired professional football player turned entrepreneur. The system allows teachers to post homework assignments and parental announcements to a website, and students and parents can check on them at any time. Messages are sent out to parents giving homework assignments and letting them know of parent meetings. And the parents are notified if their child is tardy.

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Wired News: People Are Human-Bacteria Hybrid

Monday, October 11th, 2004

Wired News: People Are Human-Bacteria Hybrid emphasizes just how many “friendly aliens” share our bodies with us:

Most of the cells in your body are not your own, nor are they even human. They are bacterial. From the invisible strands of fungi waiting to sprout between our toes, to the kilogram of bacterial matter in our guts, we are best viewed as walking ‘superorganisms,’ highly complex conglomerations of human, fungal, bacterial and viral cells. [...] More than 500 different species of bacteria exist in our bodies, making up more than 100 trillion cells. Because our bodies are made of only some several trillion human cells, we are somewhat outnumbered by the aliens. It follows that most of the genes in our bodies are from bacteria, too.

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We’ve Created a Monster!

Friday, October 8th, 2004

We’ve Created a Monster! explains how the acquisitions guys from the Sci Fi channel became B-movie producers:

Cannella & Co. got into the monster business only after they became frustrated with the quality of movies they were buying from independent producers. As acquisitions director for Sci Fi, Cannella was screening hundreds of films a year. His conclusion: He and his number-crunching friends could do better. [...] Hammer gave the group the go-ahead to make one original film in 2002, on the condition that it didn’t interfere with their regular work. Last year, they produced a few more. It was soon clear that their movies were outscoring the independently produced features they purchased.

Their rules for making a monster movie:

The first rule: Show the monster. The failure of independently produced features to give ample air time to monsters was what drove the Sci Fi Channel to make its own movies in the first place, and the need for frequent shots of the creature remains an article of faith.
[...]
The second rule: Put the monster in the title. “Boa vs. Python does better than Terminal Invasion,” says Regina. This is because Boa vs. Python makes an unmistakable commitment to giant snakes, while Terminal Invasion doesn’t indicate that people will be murdered by aliens while snowed in at an airport. The best titles are as explicit as legal documents.

Invariably, a Saturday night creature feature runs for 88 minutes. The creature must appear by minute 15. Hollywood dogma calls for a plot structure of three acts, but three-act dramas are too slow for Cannella, Vitale, and Regina. Cannella tells his writers and directors that he wants a death every eight minutes — including monsters eating people and pooping them out. Their movies come in seven acts. That gives you six cliffhangers, plus a climax, if you do things right.

When it comes to the stories, Cannella likes plots that are based — very loosely — on headline news.

The financial side:

The Sci Fi guys follow a strict plan to get their ideas onscreen. They pay a flat fee of $750,000 to indies like Beach. Sometimes – as in the case of Mansquito – they approach filmmakers with a fleshed-out scheme; other times, they’ll simply have a monster in mind. The $750,000 covers everything from the script and actors to location costs and production work. In the straight-to-video world, that’s a dominating sum. “Everybody gets the same deal, because we need movies, not problems,” says Cannella. “We depend on these guys. We don’t want them going out of business.”

Typically, it costs Beach and other filmmakers $1.4 to $1.8 million to make a movie; they supplement the fee from Sci Fi with revenue they earn through foreign-licensing agreements (the Sci Fi Channel keeps the US film rights).
[...]
These days, a million dollars can get you at least passable, and sometimes genuinely creepy, monsters. CGI workstations have plummeted from $10,000 to $3,000 each; renegade animators have set up shop outside Hollywood, and low-end production firms offer professional studio services in Eastern Europe. Now, even the rawest B-movies have that extra sheen. While there are odd slipups in continuity or editing (in Snakehead Terror, for instance, a recognizable shot repeats), there is little in the production quality of these films that is simply laughable.

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Feds Poison Prairie Dogs to Save Ferrets

Friday, October 8th, 2004

I’m sure there’s a metaphor in here somewhere: Feds Poison Prairie Dogs to Save Ferrets:

The federal government will begin poisoning prairie dogs in southwestern South Dakota next week after reaching a deal with conservationists designed to protect the endangered black-footed ferret.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed to distribute poison on only 5,000 acres instead of about 8,000 acres in the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands, including the Conata Basin, where more than half of the nation’s 400 wild ferrets live.

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