Only 10 percent of big ocean fish remain, according to a recent study published in Nature:
A new global study concludes that 90 percent of all large fishes have disappeared from the world’s oceans in the past half century, the devastating result of industrial fishing.
What the article does not mention is that overfishing is a well-understood example of the tragedy of the commons.
Chris Anderson (The Long Tail) asks, How big would the movie industry be if there were more screens?:
One of the examples I use in the book to illustrate the distorting effect of limited “shelf space” in traditional markets is Hollywood box office revenues. The American megaplex theater network has only has enough screens to show about 120 films per year. Meanwhile, there are about 13,000 films shown in film festivals each year. So only a tiny fraction of the movies made get enough theatrical distribution to register any sort of significant box office revenues.How much bigger would the movie industry be if it didn’t have this distribution bottleneck suppressing measured demand for niche film? I get that question all the time, for various markets, and usually I can only guess at the answer. But now Kalevi Kilkki, Principal Scientist at Nokia Siemens Networks, has actually done the math. Building on the work in his earlier paper on this subject, he finds that for movies, the “latent demand” for films that don’t get adequate distribution is 60%-70% as big as the existing industry.
In a university not far away, sci-fi heaven:
UC Berkeley has the world’s premiere collection on Mark Twain — and Yale an unmatched trove of rare medieval manuscripts. But for research on Capt. Kirk, Frankenstein or Harry Potter, nothing tops the 110,000-volume Eaton collection at UC Riverside, the world’s largest library of science fiction, fantasy and horror books.“It’s like going to Graceland if you’re an Elvis fan,” said Drew Morse, a creative writing professor who made the pilgrimage to Riverside from Ohio last summer to study rare poetry by “Fahrenheit 451″ author Ray Bradbury.
As appreciation for the literary qualities of science fiction has grown in recent years, the UC Riverside collection has emerged from an academic ghetto. No institution had ever stockpiled science fiction like this, or subjected itself to such an internal clash over the worth of the genre.
Even public libraries had considered the books disposable literature, mainly because early science fiction was published almost exclusively in paperback. But a handful of professors and a librarian at UC Riverside saw something else, and started building.
IN 1969, English professor Robert Gleckner helped the school acquire 7,500 rare science fiction, fantasy and horror novels from an eccentric Bay Area physician, J. Lloyd Eaton. Among them was a first edition of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” Eaton had scribbled plot summaries and succinct criticisms of nearly every book on faded sheets of letterhead.
But Gleckner’s colleagues mocked the collection, and he banished the volumes to a storeroom and never touched them again.
And for 10 years, no one paid the books any attention — until UC Riverside’s head librarian, Eleanor Montague, found them and cracked open a few. She and comparative literature scholar George Slusser began cooking up an improbable scheme: Science fiction, for all its talk of wormholes and galaxies far, far away was a form of 20th-century American literature that someone ought to keep as a cultural archive.
So in 1979, Montague dubbed Slusser the Eaton collection’s first curator.
When he broke the news to friends, they shook their heads and warned him it would be career suicide.
“They told me ‘You’d better not touch that, you’ll never get tenured,’ ” Slusser said. “I said ‘Hell, I’m going to do it anyway.’ “
Slusser went by instinct and started scooping up every new science fiction novel that came out. With less than $10,000 to work with, he handed hundred-dollar bills to foreign graduate students so they could cart back sci-fi from Russia, Brazil, China and other worldly locales.
Slusser haunted used-book stores and estate sales on his own time. His best finds came from reclusive packrats who had refused to toss their paperbacks. One collector had drained his pool and turned it into underground storage for thousands of science fiction magazines and fan newsletters, including issues of “Amazing Stories,” a 1920s-era pamphlet regarded as the world’s first science fiction magazine.
All the while, fellow faculty tried to torpedo Slusser’s efforts.
Now, of course, science fiction is in vogue.
Study links autism with growth hormones, big heads:
Writing in the journal Clinical Endocrinology, Dr. James Mills of the NICHD and colleagues said they compared the height, weight, head circumference and levels of growth-related hormones to growth and maturation in 71 boys with autism to a group of 59 healthy boys.The boys with autism had higher levels of two hormones that directly regulate growth — insulin-like growth factor-1 and IGF-2. The boys also had higher levels of hormones that indirectly affect growth.
The researchers did not measure the boys’ levels of human growth hormone, which for technical reasons is difficult to evaluate.
The boys with autism and those with autism spectrum disorders had a greater head circumference on average, weighed more and had a higher body mass index than the other boys, although there was no difference in height between the two groups of boys.
Hefty Fees In Store for Misbehaving Virginia Drivers:
Say you are driving 78 mph on the Capital Beltway and a state trooper tickets you for “reckless driving — speeding 20 mph over.” You will probably be fined $200 by the judge. But then you will receive a new, additional $1,050 fine from the Old Dominion, payable in three convenient installments. So convenient that you must pay the first one immediately, at the courthouse.First-time drunk driver? A $300 fine from the judge and a $2,250 fee from the commonwealth.
Driving without a license? Maybe a $75 fine. Definitely a $900 fee from Virginia.
As part of the plan to fund the annual $1 billion transportation package approved this year, state legislators endorsed a new set of “civil remedial fees” for all misdemeanor and felony traffic violations, such as speeding 20 mph above the limit, reckless driving and, in some cases, driving with faulty brakes. Drivers with points on their licenses — a speeding ticket usually earns four points — will be hit for $75 for every point above eight and $100 for having that many points in the first place.
The new fees will go into effect July 1, and defense attorneys, prosecutors and judges expect chaos. Court clerks fear having to deal with angry hordes learning about the fees for the first time at the payment window.
Naturally, my first thought was, Note to self: Do not drive through Virginia, but non-residents have an out:
The fees will be imposed only on Virginia residents. All defendants must pay the fines, but the “abuser fees,” as Del. David B. Albo (R-Fairfax) calls them, are part of the state licensing fees and cannot be imposed on out-of-state drivers.
The money has to come from somewhere, and it doesn’t look like a gas tax was on the table:
Albo and Del. Thomas D. Rust (R-Fairfax), who co-sponsored the fee legislation, project that $65 million to $120 million will be raised annually to cover costs of snow removal, pothole repair and grass-mowing. Money for Northern Virginia’s congested roads had to come from somewhere, they reasoned, and new taxes were not going to fly in the GOP-controlled House of Delegates.
Business 2.0 describes Threadless as ‘Project Runway’ for the t-shirt crowd:
Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart were fresh out of high school seven years ago when they had the idea that would make them millionaires. After entering an Internet T-shirt design competition, the two Chicagoans thought maybe that was the way all T-shirts should be made.Most stores print a bunch of shirts and lose money on the ones people don’t like. Instead, they figured, why not let customers rank designs ahead of time and then print only the winners?
The idea grew into an online store called Threadless that struck a chord with Web-savvy designers in Chicago and beyond; last year Nickell and DeHart sold $16 million worth of T-shirts.
The key to their success? High profit margins — the shirts cost as little as $4 each to make and sell for $15 and up — and a business model built on the care and feeding of an online community.
To keep the enterprise humming, Nickell, DeHart, and creative director Jeffrey Kalmikoff lead a team of 28 employees who are focused on getting customers to come back again and again — and to bring their friends.
Threadless does it by working a simple formula. Every week, contestants upload T-shirt designs to the site, where about 700 compete to be among the six that get printed. Threadless visitors score designs on a scale of 0 to 5, and the staff selects winners from the most popular entrants.
The six lucky artists each get $2,000 in cash and merchandise, and the company gets a battle-tested design. Threadless sells out of every shirt it offers.
Arnold Kling cites economist Douglass North on Adaptation and the Economy to emphasize that economics isn’t just about allocation:
[Textbook] economics applied to economic development or economic history may account well for the performance of an economy at a moment of time or … contrasts in the performance of an economy over time; but it does not and cannot explain the dynamics of change. The major source of changes in an economy over time is structural change in the parameters held constant by the economist — technology, population, property rights, and government control over resources.
“[T]he two most significant changes in economic history were the adoption of settled agriculture around 10,000 BC and the marriage of science and business starting in the 19th century”:
The First Economic Revolution created agriculture and “civilization”; the Second created an elastic supply curve of new knowledge which built economic growth into the system. Both entailed substantial institutional reorganization.
What did these revolutions mean?
Both revolutions overthrew the law of diminishing returns. Hunter-gatherers encountered diminishing returns, because there was nothing to stop over-hunting over over-foraging a heavily populated area. Agriculture could feed much larger populations. Labor and capital (such as farm implements) also were subject to diminishing returns, but scientific advances broke those constraints.Both revolutions solved problems of dealing with the physical environment but created new problems for dealing with the social environment. For agriculture to work well, property rights must be defined. To reach the stage that we call modern economic development, rules need to cover trading rather than basic sharing.
Sometimes we forget how much the rules have changed:
In short, what is required is a shift from a status-based and coercive society that relies on mutual control, respect of ranks, and strictly enforced codes of generosity, to an open society where free entry and exit, democratic governance (including acceptance of dissent), competence criteria, and socioeconomic differentiation are used as guiding principles or expressly allowed to operate.
David Allen, the master of getting thing done, has lived an odd life:
He’s been a drug-taking grad-school dropout, a Zen-inspired karate black belt, and a trainer for personal-growth seminars, all before finding his calling at age 36 as a training consultant for corporations such as Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, and General Mills.
[...]
Allen was a 23-year-old grad student at UC Berkeley in 1968 when he met a psychic named Michael who said he owed Allen a karmic debt over a past-life transgression. Michael began teaching him karate and sharing Zen concepts such as “mind like water. ” (It means that just as a pebble tossed into a still pond creates only gentle ripples, small events need not create big waves in our lives.)Michael’s teachings convinced Allen that the life he was living was phony. He quit everything — school, drugs, his first marriage, his home — and took a job driving a cab. “I was just one wired, raw thing,” Allen says.
Thus began a spiritual quest that eventually led him in 1971 to John-Roger, an L.A.-based mystic who later formed a church called the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness that has courted controversy and attracted such high-profile adherents as Arianna Huffington.
“I knew in the first 30 seconds that he didn’t give a rat’s ass if anybody believed him,” Allen says. “He knew what he was talking about.”
Allen was inspired. He quit his job and moved to Los Angeles. For the next six years, he worked a series of odd jobs — landscaper, vitamin distributor, glass-blowing lathe operator, travel agent, gas station manager, U-Haul dealer, moped salesman, restaurant cook — until John-Roger started a personal-growth training program in 1978 called Insight Seminars.
Insight was based on a popular self-help seminar for young professionals called Lifespring, which employed potent psychological techniques to break down participants’ entrenched thought patterns and replace them with ostensibly more positive states of mind. Although many graduates swore that Lifespring changed their lives for the better, the for-profit company was also slapped with dozens of lawsuits claiming psychological trauma and even wrongful death by suicide.
Marc Andreessen lists his Top 10 science fiction novelists of the ’00s — so far — and I can’t say I’ve read any of them. I might have to fix that.
In Vote for me, dimwit, the Economist reviews Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter:
The world is a complex place. Most people are inevitably ignorant about most things, which is why shows like “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?” are funny. Politics is no exception. Only 15% of Americans know who Harry Reid (the Senate majority leader) is, for example. [...] Many political scientists think this does not matter because of a phenomenon called the “miracle of aggregation” or, more poetically, the “wisdom of crowds”. If ignorant voters vote randomly, the candidate who wins a majority of well-informed voters will win. The principle yields good results in other fields. On “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”, another quiz show, the answer most popular with the studio audience is correct 91% of the time. Financial markets, too, show how a huge number of guesses, aggregated, can value a stock or bond more accurately than any individual expert could. But Mr Caplan says that politics is different because ignorant voters do not vote randomly.Instead, he identifies four biases that prompt voters systematically to demand policies that make them worse off. First, people do not understand how the pursuit of private profits often yields public benefits: they have an anti-market bias. Second, they underestimate the benefits of interactions with foreigners: they have an anti-foreign bias. Third, they equate prosperity with employment rather than production: Mr Caplan calls this the “make-work bias”. Finally, they tend to think economic conditions are worse than they are, a bias towards pessimism.
An amusing illustration:
The make-work bias is best illustrated by a story, perhaps apocryphal, of an economist who visits China under Mao Zedong. He sees hundreds of workers building a dam with shovels. He asks: “Why don’t they use a mechanical digger?” “That would put people out of work,” replies the foreman. “Oh,” says the economist, “I thought you were making a dam. If it’s jobs you want, take away their shovels and give them spoons.”
J. Brad Hicks compares Sarah Hrdy’s discoveries about infanticide to the forbidden knowledge of Arthur Machen’s horror classic, The Great God Pan:
So she quietly continued her study, working behind the scenes with other researchers while she directed her own studies towards less controversial animals, such as insects. Eventually she discovered something that appalled even her with its simplicity. Not only do mothers sometimes kill their own children, they are almost never insane when they do so. On the contrary, for a mother to murder her own child is an evolutionary adaptation without which our species would not have survived some of the environmental and social disasters of the past.What’s more, the actual reasoning behind this is so simple that a straightforward simple equation in four variables is sufficient to provide a reliable estimate of the probability that any particular mother will murder any particular infant: the age of the mother, whether or not this child is the gender that the mother wanted (which, itself, turns out to be easily and universally predicted based on only two variables, the mother’s social status and the predicted reliability of the food supply), the child’s birth weight (and to a lesser extent other indicators of long-term viability), and her estimate of whether or not attempting to nurture this particular child will only get both her and the child killed.
When she took her early estimates for this equation to the 1990 conference, she discovered that epidemiologists studying SIDS, primatologists studying infanticide (following her 1976 tip), historians digging through old records to try to quantify infanticide throughout the ages, criminologists and social psychologists trying to come up with statistical models to predict mother-on-child infanticide, and anthropologists trying to statistically analyze what variables are most consistent with cultures that have high versus low rates of infanticide, had all independently discovered the same equation.
And from her viewpoint as an evolutionary biologist, Hrdy demonstrates that any sane, healthy, normal, intelligent mothers who weren’t capable of coldly murdering their own infant children almost certainly had no surviving descendants at all to be our ancestors during some of the species-wide threats that have been demonstrated to have happened from the fossil record and from studies of rates of genetic drift.
Hrdy’s work led another researcher to the conclusion that 75 percent of SIDS cases were infanticides.
Tyler Cowen makes some claims that intelligent left-wing bloggers couldn’t possibly agree with:
We don’t take steps to redress inequalities of looks, friends, or sex life. We don’t grab a kidney from you to save someone’s life, even though that health difference was unfair brute luck. Redistribution of wealth has some role in maintaining a stable democracy and preventing starvation. But the power of wealth redistribution to produce net value is quite limited. The power of wealth creation to produce net value is extraordinary. Most of America’s poor are already among the best-off of all humans in world history. We should be putting our resources, including our advocacy and our intellectual resources, into wealth creation as much as we can.
In Dumbocracy in America, Nick Schulz interviews Bryan Caplan on his recent book, The Myth of the Rational Voter:
If people were merely ignorant about economics, I wouldn’t be worried. After all, if you never studied a subject, we’d expect you just to be agnostic about it. The real problem is that people have strong opinions about economics even though they’ve never studied it — and their strong opinions tend to be the opposite of what you’d learn in an economics class.As you indicate, I identify four main ways that people’s beliefs about economics tend to go wrong. I call them anti-market bias, anti-foreign bias, make-work bias, and pessimistic bias. But you want “striking concrete examples,” not exposition, so here goes:
Example of anti-market bias: The way people react to higher gas prices in the face of natural disasters. When supply goes down in a competitive market, you should expect the price to go up. It’s hardly a sign of “conspiracy” or “gouging,” contrary to much of the public. More importantly, this price rise has large socially beneficial effects: In the short run, it encourages people to cut back on low-value uses of fuel; in the slightly longer-run, it encourages sellers to direct their inventories to the hardest-hit areas; and given a little more time, the price rise encourages additional production until the crisis abates.
Example of anti-foreign bias: These days, the best example has to be hysteria about immigration. In essence, trading labor is like trading anything — it’s mutually beneficial for buyer and seller. But public opinion has made immigrants a scapegoat for a long — and often contradictory — list of social ills. We hear simultaneous complaints that immigrants are “taking all our jobs” and “all going on welfare” — well, which is it? Their underlying theory is that economic interaction with foreigners has to have bad consequences, so people eagerly blame foreigners for anything that comes to mind.
Furthermore, even if you take some of the complaints about immigration seriously, the subjective reaction is out of proportion to the objective magnitude. George Borjas, an economist famous for emphasizing the costs of immigration, estimates that immigrants have reduced low-skilled Americans’ wages by only 8%. And if that were one’s real complaint, why would you want to deport millions of immigrants, instead of e.g. proposing extra taxes on immigrants to compensate low-skilled Americans?
Example of make-work bias: Make-work bias is probably one of the main rationales behind European labor market regulation. Among other things, you have a lot of laws that make it difficult to fire workers, seemingly forgetting that the key to social prosperity is not employment, but production. These laws backfire in other ways – making it hard for employers to fire workers also makes employers reluctant to hire in the first place. But the key point is that labor is a valuable resource — and passing laws that require employers to waste valuable resources makes little sense.
Example of pessimistic bias: The example that strikes me more and more as I grow older is the refusal to recognize how much life has improved over the past twenty years. I remember life in the ’80′s — the Internet alone has raised my standard of living in ways I could barely have imagined. But many remain convinced that life is getting worse — and want to “do something” about it.
Schulz asks Caplan about economists underestimating the value of markets:
Actually, I say that economists underestimate the virtues of markets relative to the democratic alternative. Rational voter models have made economists too optimistic about democracy. If you think that democracy works well, then every market failure you find makes you say “Let’s turn to the democratic process to fix it.” If and when economists give up on rational voter models, they will be a lot more likely to say “The market’s not perfect, but I’m worried that the democratic process will just make the problem worse.”
Definitely read the whole thing.
The professor who put 50 worms in his own body may have found a cure for allergies:
He wanted to test his theory by infecting asthmatics in a clinical trial. But the Ethics Committee refused to grant him permission: they weren’t confident that it was safe.So, in that famous medical tradition, Pritchard infected himself, along with volunteers from his laboratory at Nottingham University. “My wife thought I was mad” he recalled.
He stuck 50 hookworms on a plaster and attached it to his arm. It began to itch — an excruciating pain, he says, far worse than a mosquito bite.
The worms — which grow up to a centimetre in length — spent two days in his skin before migrating into his blood vessels. Pritchard experienced no more symptoms until four weeks later, when the parasites arrived in his gut and began laying eggs. The eggs were excreted, but the parasites began sucking blood from his gut wall. He developed severe diarrhoea and began to ache under his ribs. Unable to sleep, he took de-worming tablets to get the bugs out of his system.
Evidently 50 worms was too many, but 10 worms was safe. The trial has begun.
Women absorb up to 5lbs of damaging chemicals a year thanks to beauty products:
Among the chief chemical suspects are parabens – preservatives widely used in skin and hair products, including soap, shampoo, deodorant and baby lotion.Capable of stopping bacterial growth, parabens are also thought to mimic the effects of the female sex hormone oestrogen, which is known to help tumours grow.
Traces of the chemical have been found in breast tumour samples but the link with cancer is, however, hotly disputed.
Sodium lauryl sulphate, which helps soap, shampoo, shaving foam, toothpaste and bubble bath lather up, can irritate skin.
Other potential irritants include benzyl alcohols, which are used to scent and preserve perfume, makeup and hair dyes.
Cocamide MEA, which binds the ingredients of many moisturisers, is also a suspect.
The average woman absorbs 4lb 6oz of chemicals from toiletries and make-up every year, the industry magazine In-Cosmetics recently reported.