Deep Thinkers

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

The more we study dolphins, the brighter they turn out to be:

At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has built up quite a reputation. All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans.

Her cunning has not stopped there. One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering this lucrative strategy, she taught her calf, who taught other calves, and so gull-baiting has become a hot game among the dolphins.

They show plenty of intelligence in the wild too:

In an estuary off the coast of Brazil, tucuxi dolphins are regularly seen capturing fish by “tail whacking”. They flick a fish up to 9 metres with their tail flukes and then pick the stunned prey from the water surface. Peale’s dolphins in the Straits of Magellan off Patagonia forage in kelp beds, use the seaweed to disguise their approach and cut off the fishes’ escape route. In Galveston Bay, Texas, certain female bottlenose dolphins and their young follow shrimp boats. The dolphins swim into the shrimp nets to take live fish and then wriggle out again — a skill requiring expertise to avoid entanglement in the fishing nets.

Dolphins can also use tools to solve problems. Scientists have observed a dolphin coaxing a reluctant moray eel out of its crevice by killing a scorpion fish and using its spiny body to poke at the eel. Off the western coast of Australia, bottlenose dolphins place sponges over their snouts, which protects them from the spines of stonefish and stingrays as they forage over shallow seabeds.
[...]
In the shallows of Florida Bay, Laura Engleby and her team have recently discovered an ingenious fishing strategy. A number of the local dolphin groups seem to use a circle of mud to catch mullet. The action usually begins with one dolphin swimming off in a burst of speed. It then dives below the surface, circling a shoal of fish, stirring up mud along the way. On cue, the other dolphins in the group move into position, forming a barrier to block off any underwater escape routes. As the circle of mud rises to the surface, the mullet are trapped. Their only option is to leap clear out of the water and unwittingly straight into the open mouths of the waiting dolphins.

They can mimic people:

At a dolphinarium, a person standing by the pool’s window noticed that a dolphin calf was watching him. When he released a puff of smoke from his cigarette, the dolphin immediately swam off to her mother, returned and released a mouthful of milk, causing a similar effect to the cigarette smoke. Another dolphin mimicked the scraping of the pool’s observation window by a diver, even copying the sound of the air-demand valve of the scuba gear while releasing a stream of bubbles from his blowhole.

They don’t seem to have a true language — but they can learn to understand human-created languages:

At Kewalo Basin Marine Laboratory in Hawaii, Lou Herman and his team set about testing a dolphin’s ability to comprehend our language. They developed a sign language to communicate with the dolphins, and the results were remarkable. Not only do the dolphins understand the meaning of individual words, they also understand the significance of word order in a sentence. (One of their star dolphins, Akeakamai, has learned a vocabulary of more than 60 words and can understand more than 2,000 sentences.) Particularly impressive is the dolphins’ relaxed attitude when new sentences are introduced. For example, the dolphins generally responded correctly to “touch the frisbee with your tail and then jump over it”. This has the characteristics of true understanding, not rigid training.

And they seem self-aware:

Diana Reiss and her researchers installed mirrors inside New York Aquarium to test whether two bottlenose dolphins were self-aware enough to recognise their reflections. They placed markings in non-toxic black ink on various places of the dolphins’ bodies. The dolphins swam to the mirror and exposed the black mark to check it out. They spent more time in front of the mirror after being marked than when they were not marked. The ability to recognise themselves in the mirror suggests self-awareness, a quality previously only seen in people and great apes.

Not only do dolphins recognise their mirror images, but they can also watch TV. Language-trained chimps only learned to respond appropriately to TV screens after a long period of training. In contrast, Lou Herman’s dolphins responded appropriately the very first time they were exposed to television.

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

Missed a Stage

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Pessimist John Derbyshire feels that he must have missed a stage of development:

I was at a friend’s house some years ago just before Christmas. My friend had a daughter, a sweet child about four years old. They were fixing little Christmas stockings to the edge of a shelf over the fireplace. The stockings didn’t stick very well, though. The little girl had particular trouble with one stocking. She pressed it to the shelf, but when she let go, it fell down at once. She picked it up and pressed again; it fell down again. At last she found a solution. She pressed it to the shelf, then as she let go she simultaneously turned away so she wouldn’t see the stocking fall. It was a great solution, a developmental milestone like the ones Piaget logged. I think I missed that particular stage of development, though.

Posted in John Derbyshire, Science | No Comments »

Profiting From the Crash

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

In the fall of 2007, John Paulson was scoring huge profits:

His firm, Paulson & Co., would make $15 billion in 2007.

Mr. Paulson’s personal cut would amount to nearly $4 billion, or more than $10 million a day. That was more than the 2007 earnings of J. K. Rowling, Oprah Winfrey and Tiger Woods put together. At one point in late 2007, a broker called to remind Mr. Paulson of a personal account worth $5 million, an account now so insignificant it had slipped his mind.

Mr. Paulson, known as J.P., bet that the housing market would collapse and risky mortgages would tumble in value. The moves put the fund manager from Queens, N.Y., alongside Warren Buffett, George Soros, and Bernard Baruch in Wall Street’s pantheon of traders. And as one rival fund manager later would say, with equal parts envy and respect, “Paulson’s not even a housing or mortgage guy…. Until this trade, he was run-of-the-mill, nothing special.”

Everyone but Paulson, it seemed, was making money in the housing market, so he had one of his analysts look into it — and it all seems so simple in retrospect:

Mr. Paulson charged Mr. Pellegrini with figuring out whether homes were, in fact, overpriced. Late at night, in his cubicle, Mr. Pellegrini tracked home prices across the country since 1975. Interest rates seemed to have no bearing on real estate. Grasping for new ideas, Mr. Pellegrini added a “trend line” that clearly illustrated how much prices had surged lately. He then performed a “regression analysis” to smooth the ups and downs.

The answer was in front of him: Housing prices had climbed a puny 1.4% annually between 1975 and 2000, after inflation. But they had soared over 7% in the following five years, until 2005. The upshot: U.S. home prices would have to drop by almost 40% to return to their historic trend line. Not only had prices climbed like never before, but Mr. Pellegrini’s figures showed that each time housing had dropped in the past, it fell through the trend line, suggesting that an eventual drop likely would be brutal.

“This is unbelievable!” Mr. Paulson said the next morning. The chart was Mr. Paulson’s Rosetta Stone enabling him to make sense of the housing market. They had to figure out how to profit from it.

Mr. Paulson went on to buy CDS insurance, betting that CDOs would fall:

Paulson & Co. eventually bet against about $5 billion of CDOs. Months later, they had made more than $4 billion of profits from these trades—including $500 million from a single transaction—according to the hedge fund’s investors and an employee of the firm.

Posted in Business | No Comments »

The Politics of Grocery Shopping

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

You might get the wrong impression of David Frum’s politics from his grocery shopping:

I happened into my nearest Whole Foods on Saturday. Among other things, I bought a half gallon of milk for $3.79 — almost double the price I could have paid at Walmart. For my money, I got organic milk from cows raised on grass rather than corn.

I prefer that my children drink milk free from pesticides, herbicides and artificial hormones. I am relieved not to contribute to the promiscuous overuse of antibiotics in cattle, hastening the development of anti-biotic resistant superbugs. If the extra tariff secures more humane treatment for the dairy cows on which we depend, that’s welcome news too.

As I bicycled the groceries home in my “I used to be a plastic bottle” recycled Whole Foods bag, I must have looked the image of a northwest Washington progressive. Yet it is very easy for me to imagine how the cultural polarities on food might have been reversed.

I can imagine a cultural left that fumed: The local family farm is as obsolete as the two-parent family! If you have an extra buck and three quarters burning a hole in your pocket, David Frum, why not give it to the panhandler on the corner rather than an overpriced dairy? Before getting exercised about the welfare of milk cows, how about some concern for the child prostitutes of the Third World or the underprivileged here at home?

Likewise, I can imagine a cultural right that championed premium milk in exactly the same way that it now champions luxury cars and $20 cigars. Or that worried as much about its own health and nutrition as it did about the strength and fitness of professional athletes.

No, it didn’t work out that way. But it easily could have — and could still again.

From the time of Teddy Roosevelt until the day before yesterday, it was the American right that worried more about the fitness and strength of the American population. (While the left tended to dismiss such concerns as imports from militaristic Prussia — as indeed they were.) It was President Eisenhower who founded the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, President Nixon who empowered the Environmental Protection Agency to monitor pesticides, and President Reagan who allowed himself to be photographed lifting weights. (He looked good at it too.)

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

How decent bike parking could revolutionize American cities

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Tom Vanderbilt (Traffic) explores how decent bike parking could revolutionize American cities:

The most high-profile instance of this is the so-called “Bicycle Access Bill,” recently signed into law after a New York City Council vote of 46-1. The measure will require the owners of commercial buildings with a freight elevator to allow people to enter the building with a bicycle — though what happens from there depends on the building. (See this useful summary of the bill.)

While the right to enter a building with a bicycle may seem minor, the bill potentially represents a huge de facto increase in the city’s supply of bicycle parking, which is currently estimated at 6,100 racks, many of these outdoors. What’s more, New York’s City Council also passed a bill mandating that commercial parking garages provide spaces for bicycles — one bike space for every 10 cars, up to 200 cars.

Why do these measures matter? Because parking helps make commuters — a lesson long ago learned with cars. Studies in New York found that a surprisingly large percentage of vehicles coming into lower Manhattan were government employees or others who had an assured parking spot. Other studies have shown the presence of a guaranteed parking spot at home — required in new residential developments — is what turns a New Yorker into a car commuter.

On the flip side, people would be much less likely to drive into Manhattan if they knew their expensive car was likely to be stolen, vandalized, or taken away by police. And yet this is what was being asked of bicycle commuters, save those lucky few who work in a handful of buildings that provide indoor bicycle parking. Surveys have shown that the leading deterrent to potential bicycle commuters is lack of a safe, secure parking spot on the other end. (In England, for example, it’s been estimated that a bicycle is stolen every 71 seconds.)

A number of American cities are now waking up to the fact that providing bicycle parking makes sense. Philadelphia, for example, recently amended its zoning requirements to mandate that certain new developments provide bicycle parking; Pittsburgh’s planning department is weighing requiring one bicycle parking space for every 20,000 square feet of development (admittedly modest compared with the not-uncommon car equation of one parking space per 250 square feet); even the car-centric enclave of Orange County, Calif., is getting in on the act, with Santa Ana’s City Council unanimously passing a bill requiring proportional bicycle parking when car parking is provided. In Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities, pilot projects are investigating turning car-parking meters — once semireliable bike-parking spots, now rendered obsolete by “smart meter” payment systems — into bike parking infrastructure.

Few cities are doing more than Portland — which has been experiencing a particular boom in bicycle commuting — to increase bicycle parking. In September, for example, the City Council will vote on code changes that would require residential buildings to have the same bicycle parking requirements as commercial buildings. Granted, Portland, Ore., is an unusual place for the United States: a place where business owners actually petition the city to build “bike corrals,” or collections of racks that tend to swap one or two car parking spaces for a dozen bike spaces, in front of their establishments, and where residents casually drop lingo like staple, meaning the type of bicycle parking structure that looks like a staple stuck into the concrete. And in a move that is sure to give John McCain fits, the city is spending $1 million of federal stimulus funds on bicycle parking at transit hubs.

Posted in Urbanism | No Comments »

Serial Killers

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

In Serial Killers, Steve Sailer discusses the precursors to modern serial dramas like Mad Men:

In its time, thirtysomething was probably the best written and certainly the most realistic show on television (my twentysomething new bride and I watched it wide-eyed as we learned what was in store for us). For a few years, it had a limited but lucrative yupscale demographic enthralled over whether Michael and Hope would be able to make their marriage work and other questions that seemed a lot more interesting at the time than they do now. (At this point, I can mostly just remember Miles Drentell, the ruthless Sun Tzu-quoting CEO of the trendy ad agency where Michael worked.)

The downside of “And then what happens?” is that the answer usually turns out to be “A whole bunch of stuff.” While satisfying at the time, serials tend to be consumable only once. For example, although thirtysomething was immediately influential within the entertainment industry, it was almost forgotten by the public once its run was over in 1991. (It wasn’t even released on DVD until this year).

A reaches back to some even earlier precursors to such “novelistic” shows — actual novels:

Novelists have given up publishing their works in installments, even though that was hugely profitable for numerous 19th Century novelists, such as Charles Dickens. His books were typically serialized in 20 monthly installments of 32 pages of text and 16 pages of advertising. The protracted death of Little Nell in Dickens’ serialization of The Old Curiosity Shop turned into an ongoing international tragedy. At New York’s piers in 1841, American fans would shout out to docking boats from England, “Is Little Nell alive?”

Tom Wolfe, who had long denounced 20th-century literary fiction for not showing us The Way We Live Now (an Anthony Trollope novel that was, of course, serialized), published his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, in 27 installments in Rolling Stone in 1984–1985. Jan Wenner paid him $200,000 for the rights, and the pressure forced the vastly ambitious Wolfe past the writer’s block he had developed after spending years hinting broadly that one of these days he was going to show all living novelists how fiction should be written.

Unfortunately, Bonfire didn’t make much of a splash in Rolling Stone … because it wasn’t very good. It was a first draft, and Wolfe’s first drafts turned out not to be as good as Dickens’s had been. Moreover, there are obvious problems inherent in going public with the beginning before you’ve written the ending. (This has been a particular conundrum for American TV serial dramas because the writers don’t even know how many years the show will run. Thus, they tend to start strong and peter out. In Britain, however, fixed durations serials are more common.)

Wolfe then rewrote Bonfire after doing the additional research necessary to change his protagonist’s career from Wolfe’s lazy initial choice — writer — to a much more timely and under-publicized one — bond-trader. Revised, Bonfire became a huge bestseller. A long string of subsequent real-life incidents all the way up through the Duke lacrosse rape hoax that seem like plot twists out of Wolfe’s tale of the hunt for “the Great White Defendant” has cemented its status as the Great American Novel of the 1980s.

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The DM Finds Work for Idle Hands

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

David Friedman gets the impression that the best schools are getting better (or more numerous) and the worst worse (or more numerous):

It’s relevant, among other things, to the ongoing issue of the dispersion of income, apparently increasing. Quite a long time ago the authors of The Bell Curve expressed concern that one result of an increasingly meritocratic society was an increase in assortive mating, increased correlation between innate ability and status, hence an increased division between social groups. In the old days, they argued, the students who went to Harvard and the students who went to Podunk U. differed a lot in parental income and status, not so much in innate ability. As the system got better at identifying kids who were poor but smart and offering them scholarships to Harvard, an opportunity to become doctors, lawyers, or professors, it increased the odds that high status people would not only believe they were smarter than those lower down but be right — with potentially unattractive social consequences.

If they were correct, it would not be surprising if the K-12 schools, public and private, that serve the upper end of the income and status distribution were getting better while the schools serving the lower end were getting worse — as measured by the quality of schooling provided, itself in large part a function of the characteristics of the students being schooled.

Friedman adds that he’s skeptical that working students harder makes them better educated:

Some years back, I attended a reunion of my high school at which members of the current staff took the opportunity to tell the alumni what a good job the school was now doing. One of their central points was the amount of the students’ time being consumed.

My suspicion was that what I was hearing was “The Devil Finds Work for Idle Hands” theory of education. Keep the kids busy enough and they won’t have time to do drugs or get pregnant.

I doubt it works. It might just result in eating up time they could have used to educate themselves. Reading science fiction, arguing politics, playing board games, even playing D&D or World of Warcraft are, I suspect, more educational than homework given for the purpose of keeping kids busy.

I suspect that the Devil does find work for the idle hands of those kids most likely to do drugs or get pregnant — and extra homework does take away from the time young Friedmans would use to educate themselves.

Kids with low impulse-control and low IQ are fundamentally different from kids with high impulse-control and high IQ.

Posted in Education, Games, Policy | No Comments »

Golden Fetters

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

GK Chesterton delivered a wise warning to reformers, David Frum reminds us:

Never tear down a wall until you understand why it was put up. He might have balanced his advice with an equal warning to nostalgics: Never attempt to rebuild a structure until you understand why it was ripped down.

Frum’s case in point: the gold standard, discussed at length in Barry Eichengreen’s Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, published by Oxford University Press in 1992:

Although human beings have used gold as a store of value for hundreds if not thousands of years, the “gold standard” — meaning the use of gold as money — was a relatively modern development. Until comparatively recently, not enough gold existed above ground. The coins that liquefied commerce in ancient Rome and pre-Civil War America were silver, not gold.

The shift to gold began in Britain, and it began by accident, in the course of a 1695 currency reform intended to improve the state of Britain’s silver-coinage. The reform slightly under-priced silver and slightly over-priced gold. The result was an ironic working of Gresham’s law, whereby the bad (gold) money drove out the good (silver) money. Intended to improve silver coinage, Britain found itself with only gold. To cope, the Mint began to use copper for lower-value coins, especially the money of the poor, the penny. The rich used paper money backed by the gold backs accumulated in lieu of the silver they could no longer get. Britain stumbled along through the 18th century on this informal gold standard. The role of gold was at last formalized with the return of peace after the Napoleonic wars: the Coinage Act of 1816 fixed the pound’s value in terms of gold. (Nicholas Mayhew’s Sterling: The Rise and Fall of a Currency is a lively and entertaining history of British monetary developments.)

From 1816 until 1914, the Bank of England stood ready to redeem paper money for the equivalent in gold coin.

But through the larger part of the period, no other bank on earth would do the same. Gold coins existed of course everywhere. But if you took paper money to the bank in the America of the 1830s, you’d expect it to be redeemed in silver dollars. In Berlin, you’d get silver marks from the Prussian authorities. Not until the 1870s did the world’s leading economic powers join Britain in defining their money as a certain weight of gold: The United States did not formally do so until 1900, although the demonetization of silver in 1873 made the US a gold standard country in all but time.

This “classical” gold standard lasted barely more than a generation. Eichengreen’s book opens by debunking some of the myths surrounding gold’s operations.

Theoretically, the gold standard was self-balancing — this is much of its appeal to modern libertarians. If business accelerated in any gold-standard country to a point that seemed to threaten inflation, gold would begin to withdraw from circulation. If any country ran a persistent trade deficit, gold would have to be exported to rectify the balance. The country would go into recession or slump until monetary values were restored and gold returned.

In practice, it did not work that way. The gold standard was maintained by a system of international cooperation, coordinated by a Bank of England that held surprisingly little gold in its own vaults but that could mobilize resources from other banks — especially France’s and Germany’s — who shared the British commitment to the stability of the system. This coordination succeeded in large part because of the weakness of democratic processes in the three countries: Everybody understood that the central bankers would accept very high levels of unemployment to protect the gold value of money — and there was not much short of revolution that voters could do to change their minds.

The United States did not fully participate in this system. Before 1913, the U.S. lacked a central bank. It was private American bankers, and most famously J.P. Morgan, who worked with the European central banks. Being the most democratic country, America’s commitment to gold was also least credible. The result was that the U.S. financial system was uniquely susceptible to panics and the risk of being forced off gold, as nearly happened in 1893 and again in 1907.

Frum editorializes:

It’s super hilariously ironic that modern monetary cranks of the Ron Paul variety now combine enthusiasm for gold with opposition both to an American central bank and hatred of international monetary cooperation — the two ingredients absolutely essential to sustaining the ancient currency regime for which they claim to yearn.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Inoculated against intellectual snobbery

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

John Derbyshire explains how he got inoculated against intellectual snobbery:

I belong to that generation of Westerners from low-class backgrounds who got access to higher education far beyond what was available to our parents. We spent our teens and our twenties with the unhappy understanding that our parents, whom we loved and admired, didn’t actually know much. This created all sorts of psychological stresses.

It had the great advantage, though, of teaching us that good, honest, worthy, hard-working people — lovable people, admirable people — could be very ignorant. I like to think that this inoculated us — some of us, at least — against intellectual snobbery. Certainly a contempt for ordinary people — often guiltily but imperfectly disguised — is very common among people raised in intellectual or professional households.

Posted in Education, John Derbyshire, Policy | No Comments »

Some troops have sixth sense for bombs

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

The military has spent 18 months and $5.4 million studying how troops spot bombs:

Military researchers have found that two groups of personnel are particularly good at spotting anomalies: those with hunting backgrounds, who traipsed through the woods as youths looking to bag a deer or turkey; and those who grew up in tough urban neighborhoods, where it is often important to know what gang controls which block.

Personnel who fit neither category, often young men who grew up in the suburbs and developed a liking for video games, do not seem to have the depth perception and peripheral vision of the others, even if their eyesight is 20/20.

The findings do not surprise Army Sgt. Maj. Todd Burnett, the top enlisted man with the Pentagon-based Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO, which conducted the study. He’s made multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and ridden in more than 1,000 convoys and, on 19 occasions, been in a vehicle hit by a roadside bomb.

The best troops he’s ever seen when it comes to spotting bombs were soldiers from the South Carolina National Guard, nearly all with rural backgrounds that included hunting.

“They just seemed to pick up things much better,” Burnett said. “They know how to look at the entire environment.”

Troops from urban backgrounds also seemed to have developed an innate “threat-assessment” ability. Both groups, said Army research psychologist Steve Burnett, “seem very adaptable to the kinds of environments” seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Video game enthusiasts are narrower in their focus, as if the windshield of their Humvee is a computer screen. “The gamers are very focused on the screen rather than the whole surrounding,” said Sgt. Maj. Burnett (no relation to the research psychologist).

Steve Sailer adds some history:

Back in the 1960s, the Air Force officer qualifying exam had a 100 item Officer Biographical Inventory. The latter was a personality test that asked about “past experiences, preferences, and certain personality characteristics related to measures of officer effectiveness.” It inquired into enthusiasm for sports and hunting, and was only vaguely correlated with IQ.

(A retired Air Force test psychologist told me that this section was later dropped because women did very poorly on it, and urban and suburban youths didn’t do as well as country boys. “It was politically incorrect, but” — he recalled wistfully — “It was a predictor of success as an officer.”)

Posted in Science, War | No Comments »

French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

Paris’s “free bike” program, Vélib’ is actually a bicycle rental program:

Subscriptions can be purchased at €1 per day, €5/week or €29/year. With a subscription bike rental is free for the first half hour of every individual trip; an unlimited number of such free trips can be made per day. A trip that lasts longer than 30 minutes incurs a charge of €1 to €4 for each subsequent 30-minute period. The increasing price scale is intended to keep the bikes in circulation.

The program has hit a bit of a snag — reality:

Many of the specially designed bikes, which cost $3,500 each, are showing up on black markets in Eastern Europe and northern Africa. Many others are being spirited away for urban joy rides, then ditched by roadsides, their wheels bent and tires stripped.

With 80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles stolen or damaged, the program’s organizers have had to hire several hundred people just to fix them.

Quel surprise! You have to love the explanation:

The heavy, sandy-bronze Vélib’ bicycles are seen as an accoutrement of the “bobos,” or “bourgeois-bohèmes,” the trendy urban middle class, and they stir resentment and covetousness. They are often being vandalized in a socially divided Paris by resentful, angry or anarchic youth, the police and sociologists say.

Bruno Marzloff, a sociologist who specializes in transportation, said, “One must relate this to other incivilities, and especially the burning of cars,” referring to gangs of immigrant youths burning cars during riots in the suburbs in 2005.

He said he believed there was social revolt behind Vélib’ vandalism, especially for suburban residents, many of them poor immigrants who feel excluded from the glamorous side of Paris.

“It is an outcry, a form of rebellion; this violence is not gratuitous,” Mr. Marzloff said. “There is an element of negligence that means, ‘We don’t have the right to mobility like other people, to get to Paris it’s a huge pain, we don’t have cars, and when we do, it’s too expensive and too far.’ ”

This violence is not gratuitous. No, not at all:

At least 8,000 bikes have been stolen and 8,000 damaged so badly that they had to be replaced — nearly 80 percent of the initial stock, Mr. Asséraf said.

JCDecaux must repair some 1,500 bicycles a day. The company maintains 10 repair shops and a workshop on a boat that moves up and down the Seine.

JCDecaux reinforced the bicycles’ chains and baskets and added better theft protection, strengthening the mechanisms that attach them to the electronic parking docks, since an incompletely secured bike is much easier to steal. But the damage and theft continued.

“We made the bike stronger, ran ad campaigns against vandalism and tried to better inform people on the Web,” Mr. Asséraf said. But “the real solution is just individual respect.”

What we need is a new state program to instill individual respect:

“We found many stolen Vélib’s in Paris’s troubled neighborhoods,” said Marie Lajus, a spokeswoman for the police. “It’s not profit-making delinquency, but rather young boys, especially from the suburbs, consider the Vélib’ an object that has no value.”

The “suburbs” mentioned are not American-style suburbs. The banlieus are where poor Arab and African immigrants live.

Posted in Business, Policy | No Comments »

Science Knowledge

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

The Pew Research Center offers a short science knowledge quiz that shouldn’t challenge anyone reading this blog — and they share the percentage of each demographic group that answered each question correctly in their telephone survey. Men did better than women, college grads did better than less-educated folks, and those in their 30 and 40s did better than younger and older folks. Not too surprising.

The Audacious Epigone noticed a pattern in the right or wrong answers:

The following nine questions were more frequently answered correctly by men than they were by women:
  • According to most astronomers, which of the following is no longer considered a planet?
  • Which of the following may cause a tsunami?
  • The global positioning system, or GPS, relies on which of these to work?
  • What gas do most scientists believe causes temperatures in the atmosphere to rise?
  • What have scientists recently discovered on Mars?
  • The continents on which we live have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move in the future. (T/F)
  • Lasers work by focusing sound waves. (T/F)
  • Electrons are small than atoms. (T/F)
  • All radioactivity is man-made. (T/F)

In contrast, women did better than men did on the following three questions:

  • Which OTC drug do doctors recommend that people take to help prevent heart attacks?
  • How are stem cells different from other cells?
  • Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria. (T/F)

This sheds some light on Steve Sailer’s lament that women are being pushed into physical sciences, to bolster their numbers there, when they find life sciences more interesting and important.

Posted in Education, Science | No Comments »

One of those biographies that leave the reader feeling exhausted and ineffectual

Sunday, November 1st, 2009

John Derbyshire recently read one of those biographies that leave the reader feeling exhausted and ineffectual:

Joseph Needham’s first career was as a biochemist, one of great distinction. He took his degree at Cambridge University in 1921, then joined the research team of Frederick Gowland Hopkins, co-discoverer of vitamins and the first ever professor of biochemistry at Cambridge. The young man blossomed at the university, taking up nudism, English folk dance, Christian socialism, and sex, all with unrestrained enthusiasm. In 1924 he contracted an “open” marriage with Dorothy Moyle, a fellow researcher at Hopkins’s lab. They remained married until her death sixty-three years later.

A month after his marriage, Needham was awarded his doctorate and elected a fellow of his college, equivalent to tenure. He settled into academic life, in 1931 producing a three-volume work, Chemical Embryology, that was definitive in its tiny field.

In the late summer of 1937, Needham’s life turned a crucial corner. A young Chinese woman, Lu Gwei-djen, arrived at Hopkins’s institute to study, along with two other Chinese scientists. Needham and Lu quickly became lovers, with Dorothy’s full knowledge and approval. It was inevitable that Needham, with his keen curiosity towards everything he encountered, would want to learn about China.

Working from Needham’s diaries, Winchester reconstructs the key scene in some detail. Needham and his new mistress were both cigarette smokers. Lying in bed in his rooms one evening in February 1938, the two lovers lit up. Needham asked Lu to give him the Chinese word for “cigarette.” She duly did so: it is xiangyan — “fragrant smoke.” He then asked her to show him how the word is written. She wrote the two Chinese characters, and coached Needham through the writing of them.

“It was very sudden,” Gwei-djen remembered. “He said to me: I must learn this language — or bust!” She was to be his first teacher, he demanded, urgently. And she agreed, readily.

Thus Joseph Needham acquired what administrators at lonely outposts in the British Empire used to call a “sleeping dictionary.” His keen intellect and capacity for hard mental work took care of the rest. Through 1938 and 1939 he studied hard, attaining spoken and written fluency. Lu drafted in the professor of Chinese at Cambridge as an assistant teacher. By the time Britain entered World War II, Needham was ready for a career in sinology.

While mastering Chinese, Needham remained a professor of biochemistry. In 1942, he published a major work, Biochemistry and Morphogenesis, that was a standard text in its field for twenty years. The man’s energy was simply astonishing. Reports Winchester:

He completed this book while he was still campaigning in England and lecturing in America for recognition of the plight of the Chinese, and at the same time was busy teaching his students, writing his half-crown monograph … on the history of a particular branch of English socialism, regularly giving morris dance performances, swimming naked, attending meetings of the Cambridge Communist Party, offering sermons from the pulpit at Thaxted Church, and living through the manifold complications of his peculiarly organized love life.

Needham’s travels in China generated a vast apocrypha:

Needham and his party were traveling on horseback with guides through a remote, forested region. Suddenly they came up against another horseback party on the trail, led by a notorious local bandit, their terrified guides whispered. Needham dismounted, stepped in front of his party, up to the bandit leader’s horse, and with his customary vigor executed an English folk dance. The bandit leader watched with interest. When Needham had finished, the bandit dismounted, stepped forward, and performed one of his own people’s dances. The ice thus broken, everyone laughed and shook hands, and the two parties proceeded on their respective ways.

Read the whole review.

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Police Friends

Sunday, November 1st, 2009

Bob Sutton asked his daugher’s soccer coach, SWAT sniper Nick Gottuso, why some of the coins on his key chain had bullet holes in the side rather than middle. Had he missed?

He answered that he had put the bullet on the side because it made it easier to get on the key chain.

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