Methylene Blue Reverses Progeria

Tuesday, January 12th, 2016

Methylene blue — a common, inexpensive, and safe chemical — could be used to treat progeria — and ordinary aging:

Progeria results from a defect in a single gene. This gene produces a protein called lamin A, which sits just inside the cell’s nucleus, under the nuclear membrane. Healthy cells snip off a small piece of each new lamin A molecule — a small edit that is necessary for lamin A to work properly. Cells with progeria, however, skip this important editing step. The defective lamin A interferes with the nuclear membrane, causing the nucleus to form bulges and deformations that make normal functioning impossible.

Cells with progeria also have misshapen and defective mitochondria, which are the small organelles that produce energy for the cell. Although previous studies suggested damage to mitochondria in progeria cells, the current study is the first to document the nature and extent of this damage in detail. Cao and her colleagues found that a majority of the mitochondria in progeria cells become swollen and fragmented, making it impossible for the defective mitochondria to function.

The team found that methylene blue reverses the damages to both the nucleus and mitochondria in progeria cells remarkably well. The precise mechanism is still unclear, but treating the cells with the chemical effectively improved every defect, causing progeria cells to be almost indistinguishable from normal cells.

Cao and her colleagues also tested methylene blue in healthy cells allowed to age normally. The normal aging process degrades mitochondria over time, causing these older mitochondria to resemble the mitochondria seen in progeria cells. Once again, methylene blue repaired these damages.

Methylene blue has many uses — including as a placebo:

Physicians would tell their patients to expect their urine to change color and view this as a sign that their condition had improved.

[...]

Methylene blue has been described as “the first fully synthetic drug used in medicine.” Its use in the treatment of malaria was pioneered by Paul Guttmann and Paul Ehrlich in 1891. During this period before the first World War, researchers like Ehrlich believed that drugs and dyes worked in the same way, by preferentially staining pathogens and possibly harming them. Methylene blue continued to be used in the second World War, where it was not well liked by soldiers, who observed, “Even at the loo, we see, we pee, navy blue.” Antimalarial use of the drug has recently been revived. The blue urine was used to monitor psychiatric patients’ compliance with medication regimes. This led to interest — from the 1890s to the present day — in the drug’s antidepressant and other psychotropic effects. It became the lead compound in research leading to the discovery of chlorpromazine.

[...]

It disappeared as an anti-malarial during the Pacific War in the tropics, since American and Allied soldiers disliked its two prominent, but reversible side effects: turning the urine blue or green, and the sclera (the whites of the eyes) blue.

A quick visit to Amazon uncovered plenty of reviews from people using fish medicine on themselves.

(Hat tip to P.D. Mangan.)

Posted in Science | 1 Comment »

Auditory Digital Aspect of Communication

Monday, January 11th, 2016

Richard Greene markets himself as “The Master of Charisma” and suggests that Trump has virtually every communication quality that he coaches candidates to have — with one glaring exception:

Trump is brilliantly conversational. The best I’ve ever seen in a political campaign, and this is a huge advantage. People listen differently, and more, when a candidate speaks in a conversational tone.

Trump speaks in what I call “Lasered, Compelling Messages.” These are headlines that turn a potentially boring topic (border fences) into a provocative and powerful theme (“We have to build a really big fence . . . and Mexico is going to pay for it!”). Very few politicians have the ability, the confidence, and also the naivete, to do this in the way Donald does.

Trump is phenomenal at communicating The Big Picture. This excites the “Visual” part of all voters’ brains, shows vision, gives voters comfort and is quite rare.

Trump knows how to tell and use stories — relatable, interesting, human, “behind the scenes” stories that almost no one can not listen to, understand or enjoy. Storytelling is THE art of public communicating and The Donald leverages it brilliantly.

Trump, in stark contrast to all but Bernie Sanders and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Ben Carson, brings in the absolutely critical “Authentic Passion.” Emotion is what stirs audiences and “Authenticity” is even more important. Even if every word out of Donald’s mouth is thought to be unrealistic or even crazy, the fact that Donald authentically believes it, and is passionate about it, is like catnip to almost every human being. It is what voters crave from all candidates, yet most candidates — throughout history — have somehow not gotten that memo. Add a dose of this to the Democratic front-runner, especially the “Authenticity” part, and her poll numbers would soar. Guaranteed.

But, despite Donald’s 5 great attributes, it is literally impossible, psychologically and even neurologically, to be taken seriously, by all people, as a major political candidate without one more piece.

It is what we call in Neuro Linguistic Programming, (NLP) the “Auditory Digital” aspect of communication. It is a special sub-part of the “Auditory” mode of the human brain and it is the Albert Einstein, fact, detail, analytical part that is generally appreciated by voters but absolutely essential to the “Auditory Digital Types” (highly educated, professional, scientific, mathematical, legal, financial types who also wanted, really wanted to know what books or newspapers Sarah Palin did in fact read).

[...]

I am not suggesting that Trump go into excruciating detail about his plans. No clever candidate, especially at this point, would ever do that. But by:

a) simply citing a real statistic, the names of obscure world leaders, some studies or books that he has read, here or there, and when relevant

b) giving more specificity on simple things (the exact height and precise building materials of his famous wall, for example)

c) citing historic examples to show that he has an intellectual grasp of history (when, for example, other countries, even centuries ago, might have, indeed, agreed to pay for security infrastructure to keep their people in).

If The Donald did these 3 things, or even any of them well, he would communicate that he does have the all-essential “Auditory Digital” part of his brain and forever change the nagging perception that he is not substantive enough to be President of The United States.

It’s really that simple.

Posted in Policy | 3 Comments »

Bowie’s In Space

Monday, January 11th, 2016

I like to imagine Bowie’s in space now, jamming out with the Mick Jagger-nauts.

Posted in Media | 2 Comments »

Free Riders

Monday, January 11th, 2016

In two separate sections of The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt notes that conservatives are much more focused on the issue of free riders:

First, he acknowledges, somewhat surprised, that conservatives are more generous to others, but notes that they like to keep control over who benefits from their generosity. They are very quick to help those who are clearly innocent victims, or those who are perceived as having been on the short end of luck, such as bystanders or those in extreme weather conditions. But as the causes of the misfortune become more ambiguous, conservatives back off. In the cases of folks who have caused much of their own misery, conservatives are not only uncaring, but often hostile. Liberals, he finds, tend to make these distinctions far less often. Suffering in itself calls out for compassion, and more subtly, we seldom can see cause and desert as clearly as we think we do.

The Assistant Village Idiot continues with his own thoughts and feelings:

Contemplating that the free rider problem is an enormous issue to conservatives, I realised that it is an enormous issue to me personally as well. It may explain nearly entirely my siding with conservatives generally despite my objections to them on many fronts. To not be a free rider is as powerful and animating force for me as I can identify. My children were clubbed by it, sometimes in word, always by example. One does his bit, however distasteful, and there’s an end to it.

I make distinctions that many conservatives, or at least the noisier ones, do not, revolving around my fury at their declaring some to be free riders who have had little or no control over their situations. It might be technically true that people with Down’s Syndrome are free riders, but I don’t respond to the helpless that way emotionally, and I certainly can’t find Christian justification for it. You may quote “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat” as much as you please, but Jesus didn’t seem to address beggars in that way, nor did Peter and Paul. Yet you can find Christians who draw the circle very widely of who is a free rider and who is not. I find it infuriating.

Yet at some level, I get it. I apply a very high standard to myself on such matters (or did until a few years ago; there are lacunae in the fabric now). I have little sympathy for those who ride free off others — and I have known some quite well. One consequence is that I no longer regard their opinion on any moral issue as having the least weight. If hatred for free riders turns out to be heritable, and a common cause of conservatism, I would put down money that I have plenty of genes that could play out that way.

Posted in Policy | 3 Comments »

A Modest Proposal to Reduce Inequality

Sunday, January 10th, 2016

Glenn Reynolds presents a modest proposal to reduce inequality, abolish the Ivy League:

Because if you’re worried about inequality among Americans, I can think of no single institution that does more to contribute to the problem.

As former Labor secretary Robert Reich recently noted, Ivy League schools are government-subsidized playgrounds for the rich: “Imagine a system of college education supported by high and growing government spending on elite private universities that mainly educate children of the wealthy and upper-middle class, and low and declining government spending on public universities that educate large numbers of children from the working class and the poor.

“You can stop imagining,” Reich wrote. “That’s the American system right now. … Private university endowments are now around $550 billion, centered in a handful of prestigious institutions. Harvard’s endowment is over $32 billion, followed by Yale at $20.8 billion, Stanford at $18.6 billion, and Princeton at $18.2 billion. Each of these endowments increased last year by more than $1 billion, and these universities are actively seeking additional support. Last year, Harvard launched a capital campaign for another $6.5 billion. Because of the charitable tax deduction, the amount of government subsidy to these institutions in the form of tax deductions is about one out of every $3 contributed.”

The result? “The annual government subsidy to Princeton University, for example, is about $54,000 per student, according to an estimate by economist Richard Vedder,” Reich pointed out. “Other elite privates aren’t far behind. Public universities, by contrast, have little or no endowment income. They get almost all their funding from state governments. But these subsidies have been shrinking.”

Nor does all this money go to enhance opportunities for the non-elites. Ivy League admissions are mostly tilted toward the upper-middle class and the wealthy. As Ross Douthat wrote in The New York Times, there is “a truth that everyone who’s come up through Ivy League culture knows intuitively — that elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class.”

Nor does the problem end there. Once you’re out of college, your chances of making it to the top are much, much greater if you’re an Ivy League graduate. Take the Obama administration. A National Journal survey of 250 top decision-makers found that 40% of them were Ivy League graduates. Only a quarter had earned graduate degrees from a public university. In fact, more Obama administration officials had degrees from England’s Oxford University than from any American public university. Worse yet, more than 60 of them — roughly a fourth — had attended a single Ivy League school, Harvard.

Posted in Education, Policy | 1 Comment »

Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace

Sunday, January 10th, 2016

While untangling the tale of Ada Lovelace, Stephen Wolfram eventually gets to Ada’s paper on Babbage’s Analytical Engine and what might have been:

Despite the lack of support in England, Babbage’s ideas developed some popularity elsewhere, and in 1840 Babbage was invited to lecture on the Analytical Engine in Turin, and given honors by the Italian government.

Babbage had never published a serious account of the Difference Engine, and had never published anything at all about the Analytical Engine. But he talked about the Analytical Engine in Turin, and notes were taken by a certain Luigi Menabrea, who was then a 30-year-old army engineer—but who, 27 years later, became prime minister of Italy (and also made contributions to the mathematics of structural analysis).

In October 1842, Menabrea published a paper in French based on his notes. When Ada saw the paper, she decided to translate it into English and submit it to a British publication. Many years later Babbage claimed he suggested to Ada that she write her own account of the Analytical Engine, and that she had responded that the thought hadn’t occurred to her. But in any case, by February 1843, Ada had resolved to do the translation but add extensive notes of her own.

Over the months that followed she worked very hard—often exchanging letters almost daily with Babbage (despite sometimes having other “pressing and unavoidable engagements”). And though in those days letters were sent by post (which did come 6 times a day in London at the time) or carried by a servant (Ada lived about a mile from Babbage when she was in London), they read a lot like emails about a project might today, apart from being in Victorian English. Ada asks Babbage questions; he responds; she figures things out; he comments on them. She was clearly in charge, but felt she was first and foremost explaining Babbage’s work, so wanted to check things with him—though she got annoyed when Babbage, for example, tried to make his own corrections to her manuscript.

It’s charming to read Ada’s letter as she works on debugging her computation of Bernoulli numbers: “My Dear Babbage. I am in much dismay at having got into so amazing a quagmire & botheration with these Numbers, that I cannot possibly get the thing done today. …. I am now going out on horseback. Tant mieux.” Later she told Babbage: “I have worked incessantly, & most successfully, all day. You will admire the Table & Diagram extremely. They have been made out with extreme care, & all the indices most minutely & scrupulously attended to.” Then she added that William (or “Lord L.” as she referred to him) “is at this moment kindly inking it all over for me. I had to do it in pencil…”

William was also apparently the one who suggested that she sign the translation and notes. As she wrote to Babbage: “It is not my wish to proclaim who has written it; at the same time I rather wish to append anything that may tend hereafter to individualize, & identify it, with the other productions of the said A.A.L.” (for “Ada Augusta Lovelace”).

By the end of July 1843, Ada had pretty much finished writing her notes. She was proud of them, and Babbage was complimentary about them. But Babbage wanted one more thing: he wanted to add an anonymous preface (written by him) that explained how the British government had failed to support the project. Ada thought it a bad idea. Babbage tried to insist, even suggesting that without the preface the whole publication should be withdrawn. Ada was furious, and told Babbage so. In the end, Ada’s translation appeared, signed “AAL”, without the preface, followed by her notes headed “Translator’s Note”.

Ada was clearly excited about it, sending reprints to her mother, and explaining that “No one can estimate the trouble & interminable labour of having to revise the printing of mathematical formulae. This is a pleasant prospect for the future, as I suppose many hundreds & thousands of such formulae will come forth from my pen, in one way or another.” She said that her husband William had been excitedly giving away copies to his friends too, and Ada wrote, “William especially conceives that it places me in a much juster & truer position & light, than anything else can. And he tells me that it has already placed him in a far more agreeable position in this country.”

Within days, there was also apparently society gossip about Ada’s publication. She explained to her mother that she and William “are by no means desirous of making it a secret, altho’ I do not wish the importance of the thing to be exaggerated and overrated”. She saw herself as being a successful expositor and interpreter of Babbage’s work, setting it in a broader conceptual framework that she hoped could be built on.

There’s lots to say about the actual content of Ada’s notes. But before we get to that, let’s finish the story of Ada herself.

While Babbage’s preface wasn’t itself a great idea, one good thing it did for posterity was to cause Ada on August 14, 1843 to write Babbage a fascinating, and very forthright, 16-page letter. (Unlike her usual letters, which were on little folded pages, this was on large sheets.) In it, she explains that while he is often “implicit” in what he says, she is herself “always a very ‘explicit function of x’”. She says that “Your affairs have been, & are, deeply occupying both myself and Lord Lovelace…. And the result is that I have plans for you…” Then she proceeds to ask, “If I am to lay before you in the course of a year or two, explicit & honorable propositions for executing your engine … would there be any chance of allowing myself … to conduct the business for you; your own undivided energies being devoted to the execution of the work …”

In other words, she basically proposed to take on the role of CEO, with Babbage becoming CTO. It wasn’t an easy pitch to make, especially given Babbage’s personality. But she was skillful in making her case, and as part of it, she discussed their different motivation structures. She wrote, “My own uncompromising principle is to endeavour to love truth & God before fame & glory …”, while “Yours is to love truth & God … but to love fame, glory, honours, yet more.” Still, she explained, “Far be it from me, to disclaim the influence of ambition & fame. No living soul ever was more imbued with it than myself … but I certainly would not deceive myself or others by pretending it is other than a very important motive & ingredient in my character & nature.”

She ended the letter, “I wonder if you will choose to retain the lady-fairy in your service or not.”

At noon the next day she wrote to Babbage again, asking if he would help in “the final revision”. Then she added, “You will have had my long letter this morning. Perhaps you will not choose to have anything more to do with me. But I hope the best…”

At 5 pm that day, Ada was in London, and wrote to her mother: “I am uncertain as yet how the Babbage business will end…. I have written to him … very explicitly; stating my own conditions … He has so strong an idea of the advantage of having my pen as his servant, that he will probably yield; though I demand very strong concessions. If he does consent to what I propose, I shall probably be enabled to keep him out of much hot water; & to bring his engine to consummation, (which all I have seen of him & his habits the last 3 months, makes me scarcely anticipate it ever will be, unless someone really exercises a strong coercive influence over him). He is beyond measure careless & desultory at times. — I shall be willing to be his Whipper-in during the next 3 years if I see fair prospect of success.”

But on Babbage’s copy of Ada’s letter, he scribbled, “Saw A.A.L. this morning and refused all the conditions”.

Yet on August 18, Babbage wrote to Ada about bringing drawings and papers when he would next come to visit her. The next week, Ada wrote to Babbage that “We are quite delighted at your (somewhat unhoped for) proposal” [of a long visit with Ada and her husband]. And Ada wrote to her mother: “Babbage & I are I think more friends than ever. I have never seen him so agreeable, so reasonable, or in such good spirits!”

Then, on Sept. 9, Babbage wrote to Ada, expressing his admiration for her and (famously) describing her as “Enchantress of Number” and “my dear and much admired Interpreter”. (Yes, despite what’s often quoted, he wrote “Number” not “Numbers”.)

The next day, Ada responded to Babbage, “You are a brave man to give yourself wholly up to Fairy-Guidance!”, and Babbage signed off on his next letter as “Your faithful Slave”. And Ada described herself to her mother as serving as the “High-Priestess of Babbage’s Engine”.

But unfortunately that’s not how things worked out. For a while it was just that Ada had to take care of household and family things that she’d neglected while concentrating on her Notes. But then her health collapsed, and she spent many months going between doctors and various “cures” (her mother suggested “mesmerism”, i.e. hypnosis), all the while watching their effects on, as she put it, “that portion of the material forces of the world entitled the body of A.A.L.”

Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »

Diversity Policies Don’t Help Women or Minorities, and They Make White Men Feel Threatened

Saturday, January 9th, 2016

U.S. companies spend millions annually on diversity programs and policies. Are they working? Not really:

A longitudinal study of over 700 U.S. companies found that implementing diversity training programs has little positive effect and may even decrease representation of black women.

Most people assume that diversity policies make companies fairer for women and minorities, though the data suggest otherwise. Even when there is clear evidence of discrimination at a company, the presence of a diversity policy leads people to discount claims of unfair treatment. In previous research, we’ve found that this is especially true for members of dominant groups and those who tend to believe that the system is generally fair.

All this has a real effect in court. In a 2011 Supreme Court class action case, Walmart successfully used the mere presence of its anti-discrimination policy to defend itself against allegations of gender discrimination. And Walmart isn’t alone: the “diversity defense” often succeeds, making organizations less accountable for discriminatory practices.

There’s another way the rhetoric of diversity can result in inaccurate and counterproductive beliefs. In a recent experiment, we found evidence that it not only makes white men believe that women and minorities are being treated fairly — whether that’s true or not — it also makes them more likely to believe that they themselves are being treated unfairly.

We put young white men through a hiring simulation for an entry-level job at a fictional technology firm. For half of the “applicants,” the firm’s recruitment materials briefly mentioned its pro-diversity values. For the other half, the materials did not mention diversity. In all other ways, the firm was described identically. All of the applicants then underwent a standardized job interview while we videotaped their performance and measured their cardiovascular stress responses.

Compared to white men interviewing at the company that did not mention diversity, white men interviewing for the pro-diversity company expected more unfair treatment and discrimination against whites. They also performed more poorly in the job interview, as judged by independent raters. And their cardiovascular responses during the interview revealed that they were more stressed.

Posted in Business, Policy | No Comments »

How did Elon Musk learn enough about rockets to run SpaceX?

Saturday, January 9th, 2016

How did Elon Musk learn enough about rockets to run SpaceX? Rocket scientist Jim Cantrell explains:

Once he has a goal, his next step is to learn as much about the topic at hand as possible from as many sources as possible. He is by far the single smartest person that I have ever worked with, period. I can’t estimate his IQ but he is very very intelligent. And not the typical egg-head kind of smart. He has a real applied mind. He literally sucks the knowledge and experience out of people that he is around. He borrowed all of my college texts on rocket propulsion when we first started working together in 2001. We also hired as many of my colleagues in the rocket and spacecraft business that were willing to consult with him. It was like a gigantic spaceapalooza. At that point we were not talking about building a rocket ourselves, only launching a privately funded mission to Mars. I found out later that he was talking to a bunch of other people about rocket designs and collaborating on some spreadsheet level systems designs for launchers. Once our dealings with the Russians fell apart, he decided to build his own rocket and this was the genesis of SpaceX.

I knew he read textbooks, but I didn’t know exactly which textbooks: Rocket Propulsion Elements, Aerothermodynamics of Gas Turbine and Rocket Propulsion, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, and the International Reference Guide to Space Launch Systems.

Posted in Business, Education, Science, Technology | 5 Comments »

Guns And Countries

Friday, January 8th, 2016

While examining Guns And States, Scott Alexander drifts into gun ownership in different countries:

According to MA&H 2007, each absolute percentage point in gun ownership was related to a 2.2 relative percentage point difference in homicide. This part of the study was beyond my ability to check, and I’m not sure why they switched from absolute to relative percents there, but suppose we take it seriously.

America has a gun ownership rate of 32%, so if we somehow decreased that to zero, we would naively expect about a 70% decrease in homicides. Unfortunately, only 67% of American homicides involve guns, so we’re back to pretending that eliminating guns will not only have zero substitution effect but also magically prevent non-gun homicides. This shows the dangers of extrapolating a figure determined by small local differences all the way to the edge of the graph.

Maybe we can be more modest? Canada has a gun ownership rate of aboot 26%, so…

…wait a second. I thought we’ve been told that the US has a gun ownership rate seven zillion times that of any other country in the world, and that is why we are so completely unique in our level of gun crime? And now they’re telling us that Canada has 26% compared to our 32%? What?

Don’t trust me too much here, because I’ve never seen anyone else analyze this and it seems like the sort of thing there should be loads of analyses of if it’s true, but I think the difference is between percent of households with guns vs. guns per capita. US and Canada don’t differ very much in percent of households with guns, but America has about four times as many guns per capita. Why? I have no idea, but the obvious implication is that Canadians mostly stop at one gun, whereas Americans with guns buy lots and lots of them. In retrospect this makes sense; I am looking at gun enthusiast bulletin boards, and they’re advising other gun enthusiasts that six guns is really the bare minimum it’s possible to get by with (see also “How many guns can you have before it’s okay to call your collection an ‘arsenal’?”, which I have to admit is not a question that I as a boring coastal liberal have ever considered). So if the guy asking that question decides he needs 100 guns before he gets his arsenal merit badge, that’s a lot more guns per capita without increasing percent household gun ownership. This should actually be another argument that guns are not a major factor in differentiating US vs. Canadian murder rates, since unless you’re going on a mass shooting (WHICH IS REALLY RARE) you wouldn’t expect more murders from any gun in a household beyond the first. That means that the small difference between US and Canadian household percent gun ownership rates (32% vs. 26%) would have to drive the large difference between US and Canadian murder rates (1.4 vs. 3.8), which just isn’t believable.

…okay, sorry, where were we? Canada has a gun ownership rate of about 26%, so if America were to get its gun ownership as low as Canada, that would be -6 absolute percentage points = a 13% relative decrease in murder rate = the murder rate going from 3.8 to 3.3 = a 0.5 point decrease in the murder rate. That’s pretty close to the difference between our 2.1 US-sans-culture-of-violence estimate and the 1.4 Canadian rate – so maybe beyond the cultures of violence, the rest of the US/Canada difference really is due to guns?

(I’m not sure whether I should be subtracting 13% from 2.1 rather than 3.8 here)

In Germany, 9% of households own firearms (wait, really? European gun control is less strict than I thought!) Using MA&H’s equation, we predict that if the US had the same gun ownership rate as Germany, its murder rate would drop 50%, eg from 3.8 to 1.9. Adjust out the culture of violence, and we’re actually pretty close to real Germany’s murder rate of 0.8.

How much would gun control actually cut US gun ownership? That obviously depends on the gun control, but a lot of people talk about Australia’s gun buyback program as a model to be emulated. These people say it decreased gun ownership from 7% of people to 5% of people (why is this number so much lower than Canada and Germany? I think because it’s people rather than households – if a gun owner is married to a non-gun-owner, they count as one gun-owner and one non-owner, as opposed to a single gun-owning household. The Australian household number seems to be 19% or so). So the gun buyback program in Australia decreased gun ownership by (relative) 30% or so. If a similar program decreased gun ownership in America by (relative) 30%, it would decrease it by (absolute) 10% and decrease the homicide rate by (absolute) 22%. Since there are about 13000 homicides in the US per year, that would save about 3000 lives – or avert about one 9/11 worth of deaths per year.

(note that our murder rate would still be 3.0, compared to Germany’s 0.8 and Canada’s 1.4. Seriously, I’m telling you, the murder rate difference is not primarily driven by guns!)

Is that worth it? That obviously depends on how much you like being able to have guns. But let me try to put this number into perspective in a couple of different ways:

Last time anyone checked, which was 1995, about 618,000 people died young (ie before age 65) in the US per year. Suppose that the vast majority of homicides are of people below 65. That means that instituting gun control would decrease the number of premature deaths to about 615,000 – in other words, by about half a percentage point. I’m having to borrow this data from the UK, but if it carries over, the average person my age (early 30s) has a 1/1850 chance of death each year. Gun control would decrease that to about 1/1860. I’m very very unsure about the exact numbers, but it seems like the magnitude is very low.

On the other hand, lives are very valuable. In fact, the statistical value of a human life in the First World – ie the value that groups use to decide whether various life-saving interventions are worth it or not – is $7.4 million. That means that gun control would “save” $22 billion dollars a year. Americans buy about 20 million guns per year (really)! If we were to tax guns to cover the “externality” of gun homicides preventable by Australia-level gun control, we would have to slap a $1000 tax on each gun sold. While I have no doubt that some people, probably including our arsenal collector above, would be willing to pay that, my guess is that most people would not. This suggests that most people probably do not enjoy guns enough to justify keeping them around despite their costs.

Or if all gun enthusiasts wanted to band together for some grand Coasian bargain to buy off the potential victims of gun violence, each would have to contribute $220/year to the group effort – not totally impossible, but also not something I can really see happening.

Posted in Crime, Policy | No Comments »

Hundreds of Flying Robots

Friday, January 8th, 2016

We don’t think about them that often, but above us are hundreds of flying robots that play a large part in our lives on Earth:

In 1957, lonely Sputnik circled the Earth by itself, but today, the worlds of communication, weather forecasting, television, navigation, and aerial photography all rely heavily on satellites, as do many national militaries and government intelligence agencies.

The total market for satellite manufacturing, the launches that carry them to space, and related equipment and services has ballooned from $60 billion in 2004 to over $200 billion in 2015. Satellite industry revenue today makes up only 4% of the global telecommunications industry but accounts for over 60% of space industry revenue.

[...]

About two-thirds of active satellites are in Low Earth Orbit. LEO starts up at 99 miles (160 km) above the Earth, the lowest altitude at which an object can orbit without atmospheric drag messing things up. The top of LEO is 1,240 miles (2,000 km) up. Typically, the lowest satellites are at around 220 miles (350 km) up or higher.

Most of the rest (about one-third) of the satellites are much farther out, in a place called geostationary orbit (GEO). It’s right at 22,236 miles (35,786 km) above the Earth, and it’s called geostationary because something orbiting in it rotates at the exact speed that the Earth turns, making its position in the sky stationary relative to a point on the Earth. It’ll seem to be motionless to an observer on the ground.

[...]

A small percentage of other satellites are in medium Earth orbit (MEO), which is everything in between LEO and GEO. One notable resident of MEO is the GPS system that most Americans, and people from many other countries, use every day. I never realized that the entire GPS system, a US Department of Defense project that went live in 1995, only uses 32 satellites total. And until 2012, the number was only 24—six orbits, each with four satellites.

Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »

Guns And States

Thursday, January 7th, 2016

The entire effect Vox highlights in their graph of gun ownership vs. gun deaths is due to gun suicides, but they are using it to imply conclusions about gun homicides, Scott Alexander notes:

Gun Ownership vs. Gun Deaths

Gun Ownership vs. Gun Suicides

Gun Ownership vs. Gun Homicides

The relationship between gun ownership and homicide is weak and negative, he notes, while the relationship between gun ownership and suicide is strong and positive.

The Vox piece also emphasizes that the US has by far the highest number of privately owned guns in the world, but this is not the most important factor in explaining America’s higher homicide rate, or even close to the most important factor:

1. The United States’ homicide rate of 3.8 is clearly higher than that of eg France (1.0), Germany (0.8), Australia (1.1), or Canada (1.4). However, as per the FBI, only 11,208 of our 16,121 murders were committed with firearms, eg 69%. By my calculations, that means our nonfirearm murder rate is 1.2. In other words, our non-firearm homicide rate alone is higher than France, Germany, and Australia’s total homicide rate. Nor does this mean that if we banned all guns we would go down to 1.2 – there is likely a substitution effect where some murderers are intent on murdering and would prefer to use convenient firearms but will switch to other methods if they have to. 1.2 should be considered an absolute lower bound. And it is still higher than the countries we want to compare ourselves to.

2. There are many US states that combine very high firearm ownership with very low murder rates. The highest gun-ownership state in the nation is Wyoming, where 59.7% of households have a gun (really!). But Wyoming has a murder rate of only 1.4 – the same as right across the border in more gun-controlled Canada, and only about a third of that of the nation as a whole. It seems likely that the same factors giving Canada a low murder rate give Wyoming a low murder rate, and that the factors differentiating the rest of America from Wyoming are the same factors that differentiate the rest of America from Canada (and Germany, and France…). But this does not include lower gun ownership.

3. There are many US states that combine very low firearm ownership with very high murder rates. The highest murder rate in the country is that of Washington, DC, which has a murder rate of 21.8, more than twenty times that of most European countries. But DC also has the strictest gun bans and the lowest gun ownership rate in the country, with gun ownership numbers less than in many European states! It seems likely that the factors making DC so deadly are part of the story of why America as a whole is so deadly, but these cannot include high gun ownership.

The traditional answer for America’s high homicide rate is that America has a “culture of violence”:

America has several cultures of violence. There’s the Southern culture of violence that gave us the Hatfield-McCoy feud. And there’s are the various minority cultures of violence that gave us the word “diss” and approximately 100% of rap lyrics. This provides a testable theory: if we compare American non-Southern whites to European countries mostly made up of non-Southern whites, we’ll find similar murder rates. But first, some scatter plots:

This is murder rate by state, correlated with perceived Southernness of that state as per 538’s poll. I’ve removed DC as an outlier on all of the following.

Southernness vs. Murder Rate

And this is murder rate by state correlated with percent black population:

PBlack vs. Murder

This would seem to support the “culture of violence” theory.

Posted in Crime, Policy | 5 Comments »

Ivan Jurevic on Cologne

Thursday, January 7th, 2016

Ivan Jurevic is a bodybuilder, martial artist, and actor in Germany, where he witnessed — well, more than witnessed — the recent events in Cologne:

Running his own security agency, Mr. Jurevic was working the door of an exclusive New Year’s Eve party charging some €300 a head for entry when young women starting coming to him for protection having been attacked outside the cathedral and the railway station. In the viral video that has been viewed millions of times, Mr. Jurevic said:

“As I started to work that evening, I thought it would be a nice evening with some well to do people… suddenly between nine and ten o’clock it started outside the hotel, a stabbing occured. One person was in critical condition… and then the whole thing escalated”.

Referring to the extraordinary scenes seen in Germany in September as migrant trains arriving were greeted by cheering crowds, Mr. Jurevic said: “These people that we welcomed just three months ago with teddy bears and water bottles on the Munich railway station started shooting [fireworks] at the police who had come equipped with helmets onto the [Cathedral] platform… seasoned police officers then told me they had never seen anything like it in their entire life.

“They called it, and I quote, ‘a civil war like situation’ And there was no press coverage of this whatsoever!

“Throughout the evening again and again women came to me and asked if they could just stand next to me so I could look after them. I still didn’t quite know what that was all about. They told me they were chased by these guys”.

The men who had chased the girls then attempted to attack again, but martial arts expert Jurevic was ready: “These guys that chased them, then they really tried to attack me. I’ll have to be honest, I beat them all up.

“I’ve never witnessed something like this, I always thought this stuff would be some sort of right wing propaganda. But it was real!”.

Explaining the small number of arrests made by German police that night, Mr. Jurevic said he witnessed migrant criminals being rounded up but then released hours later, as there were no available police vans to take them away, and all the cells in the city has already been filled. As the migrants were released, he witnessed them turn around and shout “fuck the police”.

A number of women have described what happened, too.

Posted in Crime, Policy, War | 2 Comments »

Why Practicing Practicing from an Early Age Is so Important

Thursday, January 7th, 2016

Noa Kageyama reviews why practicing practicing from an early age is so important — or, why training kids how to practice is so important:

Two Australian researchers did a study tracking young musicians’ practice habits over a three-year span, to see how effectively young learners could self-regulate – or control and direct their own learning behaviors in six specific areas:

Motive: How capable are students of initiating practice on their own?

Time: How much do students practice? How effectively do they manage their practice time?

Method: What sorts of practice strategies do students use?

Performance outcomes: How capable are students at monitoring, evaluating, and controlling their playing?

Physical environment: How effectively do students structure their practice environment to minimize distractions and maximize learning?

Social factors: How much initiative do students take in seeking out help that might help them improve faster (asking questions, help from parents, etc.)?

1. Practice motive

Even at this young age, there were clear differences in motivations for learning an instrument. Some expressed more externally motivated reasons, like wanting to be in band because their friends were doing it. Others had more internally driven reasons, such as liking music, or wanting to play specific pieces they liked.

Ultimately, the researchers found that the children who had more extrinsic reasons for learning made the least progress, while those who identified intrinsic reasons progressed more quickly. It seems that students motivated by a more personally meaningful reason to learn are more likely to engage in the kinds of behaviors that maximize learning.

2. Practice time

Not all “practice time” was actually spent practicing. In year 1, for instance, only 72.9% of their time was spent actually practicing. They spent the remainder of time engaged in activities like looking for music, day-dreaming, etc.

As a group, they became more efficient practicers over time, but there were pretty significant individual differences from the very beginning. “Male Trumpet 1”, for instance, spent less time practicing than the others, instead engaging in avoidance behaviors like fiddling around with his instrument. As a result, it took him 3 years to reach the same level of playing that many of his peers had reached in 1 year.

The researchers suggest that tiny differences in the beginning can add up and have a significant impact on subsequent learning and students’ progress as the years go by.

3. Practice strategies

As you might imagine, the beginners’ practice strategies were pretty unsophisticated. The most popular strategy was to simply play the piece through from beginning to end, which represented about 95% of their practice time.

There were some additional strategies, like foot-tapping, counting, thinking, singing, or silent fingering, but these were pretty rare to see (<2% of their time).

Another finding, was that despite being asked by their teachers to repeat pieces until they came more easily, ~90% of the time, students played through a piece only once, and looked pretty content to move onto something else once they got to the end, regardless of how it sounded.

4. Performance outcomes

One of the key areas of self-regulation is the ability to know when you’ve made an error, stop playing, and fix it.

In year 1, most of the young learners simply ignored their pitch errors (there were so many rhythm errors that the researchers stopped keeping track). But here too there were individual differences. Some students were much more capable of noticing and correcting their errors, and played better on the second run-through of a piece, while others actually made more errors on subsequent run-throughs.

Based on their data, the researchers suggest that teachers stop during lessons and ask students to reflect and comment on the accuracy of what they just played.

This could then be the basis for teaching students strategies like mentally singing the opening phrase before playing, or looking at the music to identify potential trouble spots, or remembering to think about the tempo or key before they play.

Their other suggestion was to occasionally take a momentary time-out in lessons and ask students to demonstrate how they would practice a tricky section. To see how they approach listening and problem-solving – to essentially practice practicing in lessons.

Recommendations to teachers

Spend time demonstrating or modeling specific practice strategies during lessons, that students can try using at home during the week.

Find ways to help young learners reflect on the quality of their practice time. Whether through practice diaries or goal-setting exercises, help students get better at listening/evaluating their own playing, and making better decisions about what to spend time working on. Because these are not necessarily things that students will intuit on their own – and the researchers suggest that the tiny differences that start to appear even in the very first practice sessions accumulate over time and could very well be the difference between a student who practices harder, is more confident about their learning ability, and achieves at a higher level, and a student who lags behind.

Posted in Education | No Comments »

Flash, then Bang

Wednesday, January 6th, 2016

If you’ve ever watched a professional fireworks display, you know that the bright flash precedes the loud bang by a few seconds.

If you watch an atomic bomb blast, the bright flash precedes the loud bang by half a minute:

By the way, that bright flash is bright enough “that people can see bones showing through hands covering their closed eyes,” and that loud bang comes from a pressure wave of 0.2 psi, “an immense punch to the whole body” at 10 km.

Also, it is a bang, rather than a boom:

The sound of a nuclear blast is distinctive as more of a bang than a boom because thermal energy is directly proportional to low frequency absorption. or heat soaks up low frequencies. There is a hell of a lot of heat in a nuclear bomb — hence the higher pitched bang sound than you would expect from such a massive explosion.

Over at the Glasstone blog — “a blog all about contradicting the widespread superstition that nuclear wars are unsurvivable and debunking hardened dogma of exaggerated nuclear effects” — our Slovenian guest asked, which comes first, the shock wave, or the bang?

A simple calculation of the arrival time of “sound” corresponds roughly to the arrival time of zero pressure after the shock wave! At very long distances where the shock velocity decays to sound velocity, the blast duration peaks and ceases to increase further. So you can get an idea of the blast wave or sound wave duration by subtracting the calculated sound wave arrival time from the shock wave arrival time!

Some examples. Sound takes 4.7 seconds to travel one mile. So if you are at 10 miles from a 1 megaton low air burst over Trafalgar square, the shock front arrives at 40 seconds after the first flash of the explosion, and zero pressure (sound arrival time) is about 47 seconds, so the total shock duration is around 7 seconds!

There’s some interesting physical mechanisms. Because sound is a longitudinal pressure wave, and is not a transverse wave, it is basically an outward force (pressure = force/area). So you get some simple basic concept physically, like Energy = Force x Distance, or more precisely: Energy = Integral of Force over distance. The distance here is the distance of the outward pressure phase of the shock. Then by Newton’s 3rd law of motion, you get the prediction of the negative (inward directed) pressure phase, which has lower peak (negative) pressure, and so has a somewhat longer duration. Of course, in the very early phase of the blast wave there is no negative pressure, because when the pressure wave is isothermal, Newton 3rd law reaction force consists entirely of the blast going out in the opposite direction, e.g. before the negative phase sets in, the reaction force of the blast force which is going Southwards is simply the blast force that’s going Northwards. After the pressure in the middle drops to ambient due to outward motion of most of the air in the shock front, this reaction force is replaced by the negative phase (reversed blast winds). So it’s possible to get a physical, intuitive feel for the physics of all the details of the blast wave.

The first sound in actual nuclear blast, regardless of the blast duration, is like a pistol shot, according to Jack W. Reed, who saw more atmospheric nuclear tests than anyone else in the West while in the Nevada long-range nuclear blast prediction unit (which had to predict blast reflections from atmospheric temperature inversions to prevent broken windows and injuries in Las Vegas, etc.). Humans can only hear sounds with frequencies of 20 Hz – 20 kHz, so a 1 second blast duration is 1 Hz and is too low to hear. So all you hear in a nuclear explosion is:

1. The crack-like (pistol shot) sound of the abrupt rise in pressure when the shock front arrives (if it takes 1 ms to go from ambient pressure to peak overpressure, that is a frequency of around 1 kHz).

2. The sound of the wind blowing behind the shock front (which is only 40 miles/hour peak wind speed at 10 miles from 1 megaton, but is much higher closer in).

3. Sounds from damage caused like breaking windows, impacts of blown debris.

Posted in War, Weapons | 8 Comments »

How Useful Is the Theory of Disruptive Innovation?

Wednesday, January 6th, 2016

In The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, Christensen and Raynor discuss 77 cases of disruptive innovation. Andrew A. King and Baljir Baatartogtokh interviewed experts on each of those cases and discovered something:

Many of the theory’s exemplary cases did not fit four of its key conditions and predictions well. A handful corresponded well with all four elements (notably, for example, the disruptions by Salesforce.com, Intuit’s QuickBooks, and Amazon.com). However, a majority of the 77 cases were found to include different motivating forces or displayed unpredicted outcomes. Among them were cases involving legacy costs, the effect of numerous competitors, changing economies of scale, and shifting social conditions. Discussions with our industry experts also helped us to identify the most generally applicable elements of the theory of disruptive innovation as well as to define other ways managers can guide businesses through stormy times.

[...]

Before surveying and interviewing experts on each of the 77 cases, we identified four key elements of the theory of disruption: (1) that incumbents in a market are improving along a trajectory of sustaining innovation, (2) that they overshoot customer needs, (3) that they possess the capability to respond to disruptive threats, and (4) that incumbents end up floundering as a result of the disruption.

[...]

In summary, although Christensen and Raynor selected the 77 cases as examples of the theory of disruptive innovation, our survey of experts reveals that many of the cases do not correspond closely with the theory. In fact, their responses suggest that only seven of the cases (9%) contained all four elements of the theory that we asked about.

Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »