The freedom to say ‘no’

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

Why aren’t there more women in science and engineering? They just aren’t interested:

Now two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves. When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women — highly qualified for the work — stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else.

One study of information-technology workers found that women’s own preferences are the single most important factor in that field’s dramatic gender imbalance. Another study followed 5,000 mathematically gifted students and found that qualified women are significantly more likely to avoid physics and the other “hard” sciences in favor of work in medicine and biosciences.

I am shocked — shocked! — to hear this:

Rosenbloom and his colleagues used a standard personality-inventory test to measure people’s preferences for different kinds of work. In general, Rosenbloom’s study found, men and women who enjoyed the explicit manipulation of tools or machines were more likely to choose IT careers — and it was mostly men who scored high in this area. Meanwhile, people who enjoyed working with others were less likely to choose IT careers. Women, on average, were more likely to score high in this arena.

Personal preference, Rosenbloom and his group concluded, was the single largest determinative factor in whether women went into IT. They calculated that preference accounted for about two-thirds of the gender imbalance in the field. The study was published in November in the Journal of Economic Psychology.

More shocking discoveries:

Starting more than 30 years ago, the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth began following nearly 2,000 mathematically gifted adolescents, boys and girls, tracking their education and careers in ensuing decades. (It has since been expanded to 5,000 participants, many from more recent graduating classes.) Both men and women in the study achieved advanced credentials in about the same numbers. But when it came to their career paths, there was a striking divergence.

Math-precocious men were much more likely to go into engineering or physical sciences than women. Math-precocious women, by contrast, were more likely to go into careers in medicine, biological sciences, humanities, and social sciences. Both sexes scored high on the math SAT, and the data showed the women weren’t discouraged from certain career paths.

The survey data showed a notable disparity on one point: That men, relative to women, prefer to work with inorganic materials; women, in general, prefer to work with organic or living things. This gender disparity was apparent very early in life, and it continued to hold steady over the course of the participants’ careers.

This is legitimately intriguing:

Benbow and Lubinski also found something else intriguing: Women who are mathematically gifted are more likely than men to have strong verbal abilities as well; men who excel in math, by contrast, don’t do nearly as well in verbal skills. As a result, the career choices for math-precocious women are wider than for their male counterparts. They can become scientists, but can succeed just as well as lawyers or teachers. With this range of choice, their data show, highly qualified women may opt out of certain technical or scientific jobs simply because they can.

Posted in Policy, Science | No Comments »

Peter Thiel Makes Down Payment on Libertarian Ocean Colonies

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

Wired has now written about seasteading. Peter Thiel Makes Down Payment on Libertarian Ocean Colonies:

Instead of starting with a grand scheme worthy of a James Bond villain, the Institute is bringing an entrepreneurial, DIY mentality to creating oceanic city-states.

“There’s a history of a lot of crazy people trying this sort of thing, and the idea is to do it in a way that’s not crazy,” said Joe Lonsdale, the institute’s chairman and a principal at Clarium Capital Management, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund.

The seasteaders want to build their first prototype for a few million dollars, by scaling down

In essence, the seastead would consist of a reinforced concrete tube with external ballasts at the bottom that could be filled with air or water to raise or lower the living platform on top.

The spar design helps offshore platforms better withstand the onslaught of powerful ocean waves by minimizing the amount of structure that is exposed to their energy.

“You have very little cross-sectional interaction with waves [with] the spar design,” Gramlich said.

The primary living space, about 300 square feet per person, would be inside the tube, but the duo envisions the top platform holding buildings, gardens, solar panels, wind turbines and (of course) satellites for internet access.

To some extent, they believe the outfittings for the seastead will be dependent on the business model, say aquaculture or tourism, that will support it and the number of people aboard.

“We’re not trying to pick the one strategy because we think there will be multiple people who want one for multiple reasons,” Gramlich said.

Dan Donovan, a long-time spokesman for Dominion, an energy company that operated Gulf of Mexico-based gas rigs, including Devils Tower, the world’s deepest spar structure, said the group’s plan wasn’t too far-fetched. His company’s off-shore rigs, which are much larger than the institute’s planned seasteads, provided long-term housing for its workers.

“They were sort of like mobile homes. We could move them from one place to another,” Donovan said. “People did live on them.”

Posted in Peter Thiel, Policy, Technology | No Comments »

Jon Favreau’s D&D background

Monday, May 19th, 2008

Los Angeles Times staff writer Geoff Boucher writes about Jon Favreau’s D&D background:

Some filmmakers get their start making shaky home movies, others catch the bug in a high school drama class or maybe through an art institute where they put paint to canvas. Favreau has more of an eight-sided education.

“It was Dungeons & Dragons, but I wouldn’t have owned up so quickly a few years ago,” Favreau said sheepishly.

“It’s rough. It’s one of the few groups that even comic-book fans look down on. But it gave me a really strong background in imagination, storytelling, understanding how to create tone and a sense of balance. You’re creating this modular, mythic environment where people can play in it.”

Maybe there should be a new Hollywood respect for eight- and 10-sided dice and a talent for troll tales: Robin Williams, Mike Myers, Stephen Colbert and Vin Diesel have all professed their passion (past or present) for the role-playing game.

For Favreau, it was the fantasy element that pulled him in, but it was the sense of story that he carried with him.

“It allowed me to not tamp down my imagination; I think there’s a tendency to turn that part of you off,” he said.

“Every kid has imagination, but at a certain age, that spigot gets turned off. I set it aside in high school. I really couldn’t do it now,” Favreau said, shaking his head. “There’s something in my heart — there was such a stigma to it.

“When I was young, it was exciting, but as I got older it felt like it was keeping me from progressing. You’re social in your small circle, but it’s asocial to the wider world.”

Favreau read comics, but he connected more with J.R.R. Tolkien, especially with Bilbo Baggins, the homebody-turned-hero of “The Hobbit.”

“It’s about a guy who just wanted to sit by a fire at home and live a very comfortable life, but then he was drawn out into the world onto an adventure,” he said. “I always related to that character. That’s sort of how I feel now. Going around the world to promote this picture, it’s exciting, but it also feels like I just want to sit at home with my family and have a nice boring life.”

Posted in Games, Media | No Comments »

The Inverted Pendulum of Whiggery

Monday, May 19th, 2008

In sharing his Jacobite history of the world, Mencius Moldbug suggests that the “W-force” of leftism — or Whiggery — behaves as an inverted pendulum, perhaps with a bit of a delay loop:

As an “absolute” monarch, the best strategy for maintaining your rule is to preserve your sovereignty entirely intact. Ripping off chunks of it and throwing them to the wolves only seems to encourage the critters.

Why was this not obvious to the kings and princes of old Europe? Perhaps it was obvious. The trouble was that absolute monarchy was always an ideal, never a reality. Every sovereign in history has been a creature of politics — not democratic politics, perhaps, but politics still. At the very least, a king who loses the support of the army is finished. So the pendulum is not quite vertical, and it’s all too easy to let it do what it obviously wants to do.

The inverted-pendulum model suggests that, for a stable and coherent nondemocratic state, eliminating politics requires very little repressive energy. Singapore, Dubai and China, for example, all have their secret police — as did the 19th-century Hapsburgs. Each of these governments is very different from the others, but they are all terrified of the W-force. Yet they manage to restrain it, without either falling prey to democracy or opening death camps.

Residents of these countries can think whatever they like. They can even say whatever they like. It is only when they actually organize that they get in trouble. If you don’t want the Ministry of Public Security to bother you, don’t start or join an antigovernment movement. Certainly this is not ideal — I don’t think this blog would be tolerated in China, and my image of the ideal state is one in which you can start all the antigovernment movements you want, as long as they don’t involve guns or bombs. However, when we compare this level of infringement of personal freedom to the experience of daily life under Stalin or Hitler, we are comparing peanuts to pumpkins.

Why does China not tolerate peaceful antigovernment politics? Because “people power” can defeat the People’s Liberation Army? No. Because China is not a perfectly stable state, and it knows that quite well. Within the Chinese Communist Party, there is politics galore. One move that is off-limits for contending figures within the Chinese regime, however, is imposing one’s will on one’s adversaries by means of mob politics. Almost everyone in any position of responsibility in the PRC today was personally scarred by the Cultural Revolution, in which China felt all the vices of democracy and none of its virtues. Only by outlawing politics can the Party hold itself together.

Note that in 1989 the Chinese government broke the cardinal rule of Whig government: never fire on a mob. As John F. Kennedy put it, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Not only did the Chinese government make peaceful revolution impossible — they made peaceful revolution violent. And the result? Violent revolution? No — twenty years of peace, unparalleled prosperity, and personal if not political freedom. As philosophers say, one white raven refutes the assertion that all ravens are black.

Posted in Mencius Moldbug, Policy, Singapore | No Comments »

Commodities and the New Imperialism

Monday, May 19th, 2008

In Commodities and the New Imperialism, Dennis Mangan notes that one reason why commodities have climbed in price is that many are produced in “developing” countries, which are rationing power:

Chile’s worst drought in five decades and power rationing from South Africa to China mean the price of aluminum, gold, copper and platinum will keep climbing as the lights go out in the world’s biggest mines.

Those governments are being forced to choose whether to reduce power to their 1.4 billion residents or curtail energy supplies to the world’s biggest copper, aluminum, platinum and gold factories. The energy used by China’s aluminum smelters each week could provide enough power for more than 2 million people for an entire year.

Runaway growth in emerging markets that’s squeezing world oil supplies has led to electricity shortages, cutting output of commodities needed for ever-rising demand. Platinum jumped to a record in January after mines in South Africa closed for five days as utilities rationed power. Cobalt gained 58 percent in the past year as production growth in the Democratic Republic of Congo was limited by electricity supply.

Food is also climbing in price, of course, and the Chinese seem to be securing enough lebensraum to feed their people:

Chinese companies will be encouraged to buy farmland abroad, particularly in Africa and South America, to help guarantee food security under a plan being considered by Beijing.

A proposal drafted by the Ministry of Agriculture would make supporting offshore land acquisition by domestic agricultural companies a central government policy. [...]

The move comes as oil-rich but food-poor countries in the Middle East and north Africa explore similar options. Libya is talking with Ukraine about growing wheat in the former Soviet republic, while Saudi Arabia has said it would invest in agricultural and livestock projects abroad to ensure food security and control commodity prices.

China is losing its ability to be self-sufficient in food as its rising wealth triggers a shift away from diet staples such as rice towards meat, which requires large amounts of imported feed.

China has about 40 per cent of the world’s farmers but just 9 per cent of the world’s arable land. Some Chinese scholars argue that domestic agricultural companies must expand overseas if China is to guarantee its food security and reduce its exposure to global market fluctuations.

Of course, if things get ugly, “owning” farm land overseas might not mean much.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Disconnecting Distraction

Monday, May 19th, 2008

Paul Graham shares one of his tricks for Disconnecting Distraction:

Maybe in the long term the right answer for dealing with Internet distractions will be software that watches and controls them. But in the meantime I’ve found a more drastic solution that definitely works: to set up a separate computer for using the Internet.

I now leave wifi turned off on my main computer except when I need to transfer a file or edit a web page, and I have a separate laptop on the other side of the room that I use to check mail or browse the web. (Irony of ironies, it’s the computer Steve Huffman wrote Reddit on. When Steve and Alexis auctioned off their old laptops for charity, I bought them for the Y Combinator museum.)

My rule is that I can spend as much time online as I want, as long as I do it on that computer. And this turns out to be enough. When I have to sit on the other side of the room to check email or browse the web, I become much more aware of it. Sufficiently aware, in my case at least, that it’s hard to spend more than about an hour a day online.

And my main computer is now freed for work. If you try this trick, you’ll probably be struck by how different it feels when your computer is disconnected from the Internet. It was alarming to me how foreign it felt to sit in front of a computer that could only be used for work, because that showed how much time I must have been wasting.

Wow. All I can do at this computer is work. Ok, I better work then.

Posted in Paul Graham, Technology | No Comments »

The Failed Project of Conservatism

Saturday, May 17th, 2008

In building the case for his Jacobite history of the world, Mencius Moldbug addresses “the failed project of conservatism”:

This brings us to the failed project of conservatism, which puts its money in a slightly different place — the proposition that all the concessions made to the W-force in the past are good and necessary, but any further concessions are bad and unnecessary. The Confederate theologian R.L. Dabney dispensed with this quite eloquently:
It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader.

This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance. The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip.

No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to donkeys. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.

I’m sure Rev. Dabney would have regarded the era of Ingrid Newkirk with great amusement.

However, note how thoroughly hoist on his own petard he is. The proposition that suffrage is a bad idea, period, may not be one you regard as defensible — but it is surely more defensible than the proposition that all men should be able to vote, but not all women. (Or white men and not black men, another proposition of which the Rev. Dabney was convinced. Note that this bastion also proved impractical to defend.)

Posted in Mencius Moldbug, Policy | No Comments »

Australian pokes shark in eye during attack

Friday, May 16th, 2008

Australian pokes shark in eye during attack:

Jason Cull was swimming off a beach on Australia’s southwest coast on Sunday when the four meter (12 feet) shark attacked.

“Initially I thought it was a dolphin,” Cull told The Australian newspaper on Monday. “I just remember being dragged along backwards. I was trying to feel its gills but I found its eye and I stuck my finger in and that’s when it let go.”

The shark tore two chunks from Cull’s left leg, ripping off half his calf and leaving him with deep lacerations to his knee and thigh. A local surf lifesaver heard Cull, 37, screaming and raced into the surf to rescue him.

Posted in Animals | No Comments »

Lies We Tell Kids

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

Paul Graham notes that adults lie constantly to kids, and whether we stop or not, we should at least examine which lies we tell kids and why:

One of the most remarkable things about the way we lie to kids is how broad the conspiracy is. All adults know what their culture lies to kids about: they’re the questions you answer “Ask your parents.” If a kid asked you who won the World Series in 1982 or what the atomic weight of carbon was, you could just tell him. But if a kid asks you “Is there a God?” or “What’s a prostitute?” you’ll probably say “Ask your parents.”

Since we all agree, kids see few cracks in the view of the world presented to them. [...] The conspiracy is so thorough that most kids who discover it do so only by discovering internal contradictions in what they’re told. It can be traumatic for the ones who wake up during the operation. [...] I remember that feeling. By 15 I was convinced the world was corrupt from end to end. That’s why movies like The Matrix have such resonance. Every kid grows up in a fake world.

The most common reason adults give for lying to children is to protect them, which can backfire when 15-year-olds are still treated like 10-year-olds:

But few tell their kids about the differences between the real world and the cocoon they grew up in. Combine this with the confidence parents try to instill in their kids, and every year you get a new crop of 18 year olds who think they know how to run the world.

Don’t all 18 year olds think they know how to run the world? Actually this seems to be a recent innovation, no more than about 100 years old. In preindustrial times teenage kids were junior members of the adult world and comparatively well aware of their shortcomings. They could see they weren’t as strong or skillful as the village smith. In past times people lied to kids about some things more than we do now, but the lies implicit in an artificial, protected environment are a recent invention. Like a lot of new inventions, the rich got this first. Children of kings and great magnates were the first to grow up out of touch with the world. Suburbia means half the population can live like kings in that respect.

Instilling kids with confidence has its downsides:

One thing adults conceal about sex they also conceal about drugs: that it can cause great pleasure. That’s what makes sex and drugs so dangerous. The desire for them can cloud one’s judgement — which is especially frightening when the judgement being clouded is the already wretched judgement of a teenage kid.

Here parents’ desires conflict. Older societies told kids they had bad judgement, but modern parents want their children to be confident. This may well be a better plan than the old one of putting them in their place, but it has the side effect that after having implicitly lied to kids about how good their judgement is, we then have to lie again about all the things they might get into trouble with if they believed us.

If parents told their kids the truth about sex and drugs, it would be: the reason you should avoid these things is that you have lousy judgement. People with twice your experience still get burned by them. But this may be one of those cases where the truth wouldn’t be convincing, because one of the symptoms of bad judgement is believing you have good judgement. When you’re too weak to lift something, you can tell, but when you’re making a decision impetuously, you’re all the more sure of it.

Another reason we lie to children is to keep them innocent — but why?

It’s not surprising we’d have an inborn desire to love and protect helpless creatures, considering human offspring are so helpless for so long. Without the helplessness that makes kids cute, they’d be very annoying. They’d merely seem like incompetent adults. But there’s more to it than that. The reason our hypothetical jaded 10 year old bothers me so much is not just that he’d be annoying, but that he’d have cut off his prospects for growth so early. To be jaded you have to think you know how the world works, and any theory a 10 year old had about that would probably be a pretty narrow one.

Innocence is also open-mindedness. We want kids to be innocent so they can continue to learn. Paradoxical as it sounds, there are some kinds of knowledge that get in the way of other kinds of knowledge. If you’re going to learn that the world is a brutal place full of people trying to take advantage of one another, you’re better off learning it last. Otherwise you won’t bother learning much more.

Read the whole thing.

Posted in Education, Paul Graham | No Comments »

Inca Skull Surgeons Were Highly Skilled

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

Inca Skull Surgeons Were Highly Skilled — but not at first:

The surgical procedure—known as trepanation—was most often performed on adult men, likely to treat injuries suffered during combat, researchers say.

A similar procedure is performed today to relieve pressure caused by fluid buildup following severe head trauma.

Around the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco, remains dating back to A.D. 1000 show that surgical techniques were standardized and perfected over time, according to the report.

Many of the oldest skulls showed no evidence of bone healing following the operation, suggesting that the procedure was probably fatal.

But by the 1400s, survival rates approached 90 percent, and infection levels were very low, researchers say.

The new findings show that Inca surgeons had developed a detailed knowledge of cranial anatomy, said lead author Valerie Andrushko, of Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

The Zero-Emissions One-Wheeled Motorcycle

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

Popular Science calls Ben Gulak’s Uno the zero-emissions one-wheeled motorcycle. In fact, it has two wheels:

To give the ride more stability, he put the wheels side-by-side just an inch apart and directly under the rider, who accelerates by leaning forward, as he would on a Segway. When the rider leans into a turn, the inside wheel lifts and the outside wheel lowers, so both stay firmly on the ground.

Gulak put off college for a year (now 19, he enrolls at MIT this fall) and began building the Uno at a motorcycle shop outside Toronto. He modified the frame from a Yamaha R1, which is wider than most motorcycles, so it can house the side-by-side wheels. But he quickly realized that he was out of his depth in the electronics department: He would ride the Uno for a few seconds, and the circuitry would catch fire. So he contacted Trevor Blackwell, a robotics engineer who specializes in self-balancing software. With Blackwell’s help, Gulak equipped the Uno with a gyroscope and a control system that both keeps the rider balanced over the tires and manages the suspension.

TheUno’s two wheelchair motors should, theoretically, give it a top speed of 40 mph, but for safety’s sake, Gulak hasn’t taken it above 15 mph yet.

I have to think this thing would get you killed even faster than most sport bikes.

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Individual Differences in Executive Function Are Almost Perfectly Heritable

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

A recent twin study shows that Individual Differences in Executive Function Are Almost Perfectly Heritable — they’re 99% genetic, according to latent variable analysis:

The components of executive function (as determined through previous latent variable analyses) can be loosely described as inhibition (the ability to resist habit), updating (the ability to quickly change the focus of attention or the contents of working memory), and shifting (the ability to quickly change goals and respond appropriately).

Posted in Science | No Comments »

The Uneven Playing Field

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

I must admit that I’m shocked that the New York Times is willing to address The Uneven Playing Field of scholastic sports — that is, the fact that girls and boys are different:

Title IX, the federal law enacted in 1972 mandating equal opportunity in sports, has helped to shape a couple of generations of girls who believe they are as capable and as tough as any boy.

For instance:

By Janelle’s and her mother’s count, her club team, with 18 players, had suffered eight A.C.L. tears — eight — during her high-school years: Janelle’s two, another player’s two and four other girls with one each. A high-school teammate one class above Janelle endured chronic ankle problems and, according to a Miami Herald article, six ankle operations — three in each leg — over the course of her four years on the varsity soccer team.

This casualty rate was not due to some random spike in South Florida. It is part of a national trend in the wake of Title IX and the explosion of sports participation among girls and young women. From travel teams up through some of the signature programs in women’s college sports, women are suffering injuries that take them off the field for weeks or seasons at a time, or sometimes forever.

Girls and boys diverge in their physical abilities as they enter puberty and move through adolescence. Higher levels of testosterone allow boys to add muscle and, even without much effort on their part, get stronger. In turn, they become less flexible. Girls, as their estrogen levels increase, tend to add fat rather than muscle. They must train rigorously to get significantly stronger. The influence of estrogen makes girls’ ligaments lax, and they outperform boys in tests of overall body flexibility — a performance advantage in many sports, but also an injury risk when not accompanied by sufficient muscle to keep joints in stable, safe positions. Girls tend to run differently than boys — in a less-flexed, more-upright posture — which may put them at greater risk when changing directions and landing from jumps. Because of their wider hips, they are more likely to be knock-kneed — yet another suspected risk factor.

This divergence between the sexes occurs just at the moment when we increasingly ask more of young athletes, especially if they show talent: play longer, play harder, play faster, play for higher stakes. And we ask this of boys and girls equally — unmindful of physical differences. The pressure to concentrate on a “best” sport before even entering middle school — and to play it year-round — is bad for all kids. They wear down the same muscle groups day after day. They have no time to rejuvenate, let alone get stronger. By playing constantly, they multiply their risks and simply give themselves too many opportunities to get hurt.

More:

Girls are more likely to suffer chronic knee pain as well as shinsplints and stress fractures. Some research indicates that they are more prone to ankle sprains, as well as hip and back pain. And for all the justifiable attention paid to concussions among football players, females appear to be more prone to them in sports that the sexes play in common. A study last year by researchers at Ohio State University and Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, reported that high-school girls who play basketball suffer concussions at three times the rate of boys, and that the rate for high-school girls who play soccer is about 1.5 times the rate for boys. According to the N.C.A.A. statistics, women who play soccer suffer concussions at nearly identical rates as male football players. (The research indicates that it takes less force to cause a concussion in girls and young women, perhaps because they have smaller heads and weaker necks.)
[...]
If girls and young women ruptured their A.C.L.’s at just twice the rate of boys and young men, it would be notable. Three times the rate would be astounding. But some researchers believe that in sports that both sexes play, and with similar rules — soccer, basketball, volleyball — female athletes rupture their A.C.L.’s at rates as high as five times that of males.
[...]
Men also tear their A.C.L.’s, most frequently in football and from direct blows to the leg. But even football players, according to N.C.A.A. statistics, do not rupture their A.C.L.’s during their fall seasons at the rates of women in soccer, basketball and gymnastics. The N.C.A.A.’s Injury Surveillance System tracks injuries suffered by athletes at its member schools, calculating the frequency of certain injuries by the number of occurrences per 1,000 “athletic exposures” — practices and games. The rate for women’s soccer is 0.25 per 1,000, or 1 in 4,000, compared with 0.10 for male soccer players. The rate for women’s basketball is 0.24, more than three times the rate of 0.07 for the men. The A.C.L. injury rate for girls may be higher — perhaps much higher — than it is for college-age women because of a spike that seems to occur as girls hit puberty.

Boys seem to learn athletic movement patterns simply by being boys. Girls seem to need explicit training to avoid “running like a girl”:

“Women tend to be more erect and upright when they land, and they land harder,” he said. “They bend less through the knees and hips and the rest of their bodies, and they don’t absorb the impact of the landing in the same way that males do. I don’t want to sound horrible about it, but we can make a woman athlete run and jump more like a man.”
[...]
Silvers, along with a Santa Monica orthopedic surgeon, Bert Mandelbaum, designed an A.C.L.-injury-prevention program that has been instituted and studied in the vast Coast Soccer League, a youth program in Southern California. Teams in a control group did their usual warm-ups before practices and games, usually light running and some stretching, if that. The others were enrolled in the foundation’s “PEP program,” a customized warm-up of stretching, strengthening and balancing exercises. An entire team can complete its 19 exercises — including side-to-side shuttle runs, backward runs and walking lunges — in 20 minutes. One goal is to strengthen abdominal muscles, which help set the whole body in protective athletic positions, and to improve balance through a series of plyometric exercises — forward, backward and lateral hops over a cone. Girls are instructed to “land softly,” or “like a spring.”
[...]
The subjects were all between 14 and 18. In the 2000 soccer season, researchers calculated 37,476 athletic exposures [practices or games] for the PEP-trained players and 68,580 for the control group. Two girls in the trained group suffered A.C.L. ruptures that season, a rate of 0.05 per 1,000 exposures. Thirty-two girls in the control group suffered the injury — a rate of 0.47. (That was almost twice the rate for women playing N.C.A.A. soccer.) The foundation compiled numbers in the same league the following season and came up with similar results — a 74 percent reduction in A.C.L. tears among girls doing the PEP exercises.

The PEP program:

1. Warm-up
A. Jog line to line (cone to cone):
B. Shuttle Run (side to side)
C. Backward Running

2. Stretching
A. Calf stretch (30 seconds x 2 reps)
B. Quadricep stretch (30 seconds x 2 reps)
C. Figure Four Hamstring stretch (30 sec x 2 reps)
D. Inner Thigh Stretch (20 sec x 3 reps)
E. Hip Flexor Stretch (30 sec x 2 reps)

3. Strengthening
A. Walking Lunges (3 sets x 10 reps)
B. Russian Hamstring (3 sets x 10 reps)
C. Single Toe Raises (30 reps x 2 reps)

4. Plyometrics
A. Lateral Hops over Cone (20 reps)
B. Forward/Backward Hops over cone (20 reps)
C. Single Leg hops over cone (20 reps)
D. Vertical Jumps with headers (20 reps)
E. Scissors Jump (20 reps)

5. Agilities
A. Shuttle run with forward/backward running
B. Diagonal runs (3 passes)
C. Bounding run (44 yds)

6. Alternative Exercises-Warm Down and Cool Down
A. Bridging with Alternating Hip Flexion (30 reps)
B. Abdominal Crunches (30 reps x 2 reps)
C. Single and Double Knee to Chest (30 sec x 2 reps)
D. Figure Four Piriformis stretch (30 sec x 2 reps)
E. Seated Butterfly stretch

If the goal is to get teenage girls to perform more like teenage boys, they probably don’t need stretching (step 2) or a cool-down (step 6). They need strength and power training (steps 3, 4, and 5). And they can warm up (step 1) with skill training.

Posted in Education, Fitness, Science | No Comments »

Debt burden

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

Megan McArdle argues that increasing levels of debt do not necessarily imply a greater debt burden:

I would argue that this [chart of increasing debt] doesn’t tell us what we really want to know, which is: how much is this debt costing us?

Look at the first chart. What’s striking is how much the top line [debt as share of disposable income] differs from the bottom line [debt as share of assets]. If what we were seeing was America plunging itself into debt to finance consumption, they should all be rising roughly in line with each other. In fact, the top line breaks away from the others.

What’s going on here? Ezra misstates just slightly: it’s not all debt as a share of income, it’s all debt as a share of disposable income. That is to say, income after taxes. In 1949, personal disposable income was 95% of GDP; by 2007, it was 89%. So part of that increase is simply that the share of income dedicated to taxes has risen substantially.

That is not, of course, the entire story. There’s also the fact that in 1940, homeownership rates were around 45%; it’s now almost 68%. All of that transition was financed by debt, and not only by debt, but by a dramatic shift in the type of debt: the emergence in the 1950s of the thirty year fixed-rate amortizing mortgage as the dominant form of home financing. Prior to that, mortgages had been much shorter, and usually featured balloon payments.

Meanwhile, the dramatic rise in effective income taxes on the middle class at federal and state levels made the mortgage interest tax deduction much more valuable, encouraging people to take on more debt. As you can see, most of the increase is actually housing debt.

On the revolving debt side, you’ll notice that the largest increases take place in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, is basically flat in the 1980s and 1990s, and then ticks up again in 2000.

This represents a number of different trends: first there was the auto loan revolution in the 1950s and 1960s; then came the introduction of Diner’s Club, shortly followed by Amex, in the 1960′s. Almost all of this debt was either secured by automobiles, or paid off each month; the latter represents float, not real revolving debt.

In the 1970s, the effective repeal of bank usury laws made Mastercard and Visa ubiquitous, causing debt to march upwards again. This is actual credit expansion. But it’s hard to be sure how much, because this era is the death of another kind of debt: installment buying.

If people massively expand their asset base by a house and a couple of cars, not to mention labor-saving appliances like dishwashers and washing machines, 40% of it all debt financed, this is not an obviously worrisome trend. Especially since a lot of that represents a shift from expenses like rent to debt payments, which is not actually a net deterioration in people’s finances. Nor is it clear that we should mourn for the days when the repo man could take away your furniture, television, and appliances.

Posted in Economics | No Comments »

The Conservative Revival

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

David Brooks discusses The Conservative Revival in the UK — which really goes to show that conservative and liberal are both progressive these days:

The British conservative renovation begins with this insight: The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government. The right stood for individual freedom while the left stood for extending the role of the state. But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life. In this new debate, it is necessary but insufficient to talk about individual freedom. Political leaders have to also talk about, as one Tory politician put it, “the whole way we live our lives.”

That means, first, moving beyond the Thatcherite tendency to put economics first. As Oliver Letwin, one of the leading Tory strategists put it: “Politics, once econo-centric, must now become socio-centric.” David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader, makes it clear that his primary focus is sociological. Last year he declared: “The great challenge of the 1970s and 1980s was economic revival. The great challenge in this decade and the next is social revival.” In another speech, he argued: “We used to stand for the individual. We still do. But individual freedoms count for little if society is disintegrating. Now we stand for the family, for the neighborhood — in a word, for society.”

This has led to a lot of talk about community, relationships, civic engagement and social responsibility. Danny Kruger, a special adviser to Cameron, wrote a much-discussed pamphlet, “On Fraternity.” These conservatives are not trying to improve the souls of citizens. They’re trying to use government to foster dense social bonds.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

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