The corporation doesn’t go to the money farm to harvest some more cash

May 24th, 2021

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal calls raising the top tax rate on capital gains to 43.4% the dumbest tax increase:

First, under current tax rules, all gains from investments are fully taxed, but all losses are not fully deductible. Losses can offset gains in any given year, but losses that exceed gains can only be offset against personal income up to $3,000. The preferential rate compensates for this asymmetry.

Second, gains in asset values aren’t adjusted for inflation, so investors who hold assets for an extended period pay taxes on increases that are partly illusory. Other parts of the tax code, including the income-tax brackets, are indexed for inflation, but not capital gains that arguably need it the most since assets are often held for decades.

Third, a capital-gains tax is a second tax on corporate income. A neutral revenue code would tax all income only once. But the U.S. also taxes business profits when they are earned, and President Biden wants to raise that tax rate by a third (to 28% from 21%). When a business distributes after-tax income in dividends, or an investor sells the shares that have risen in value due to higher earnings, the income is taxed a second time.

[...]

The Congressional Budget Office says the revenue-maximizing rate for capital gains is about 28%. Other economists say it’s lower, and many think the ideal rate is zero. No one outside the fever swamps thinks it is more than 40%, much less the 55% or more that would apply in high-tax states if the Biden proposal becomes law.

Back when she was writing as Jane Galt, Megan McArdle noted that you can’t tax a corporation; you can only tax that corporation’s employees, shareholders, or customers:

When you say you’re going to “tax a corporation”, the corporation doesn’t go to the money farm to harvest some more cash to give to the government so we can expand job training for unwed mothers — some real person is going to pay that tax. When you put a tax on wages, such as social security or the unemployment tax, the employer doesn’t say, “oh, well, profits dropped 15% this year; better tell Merrill Lynch to issue a ‘sell’ rating” — they pay their employees less, both to lower the tax burden and to recover the lost profits. They hire fewer employees, because each employee is now more expensive. This costs real people money. When you up the corporate tax, either the employees pay, because the firm can’t afford as many of them; the customers pay, because the firms have to raise their prices to cover the taxes; or the shareholders pay because dividends are lower and the company is worth less. And before you liberal types start rubbing your hands in glee at the thought of those pained shareholders, keep in mind that the largest shareholders in companies are insurance companies, which invest in stocks in order to make the money they need to pay off when your house burns down; and pension funds, making the money to take picketing US Steelworkers off the streets and put them into good homes. The other big holders are mutual funds, which is what most of us have our 401(k)’s in. So when you say “I want to tax corporate profits”, try silently saying to yourself “so that Mom can sell the condo in Florida and move in with me.”

If the goal is “to redistribute money from the company’s richer owners, customers, and managers to its poorer employees,” then we already have a way to do that: “It’s a little thing I like to call the progressive income tax.”

Posted in Economics | 8 Comments »

An aristocratic family in decline, an ancestral mansion teeming with secrets, an atmosphere of illness and unease, and a creepy butler

May 23rd, 2021

Big Sleep by Raymond ChandlerChandler’s hard-boiled Marlowe novels resemble another genre, my annotated The Big Sleep explains, updated to 1940s LA:

An aristocratic family in decline, an ancestral mansion teeming with secrets, an atmosphere of illness and unease, and a creepy butler: Chandler transplants elements of the Gothic novel and the classic English mystery into the Southern California landscape. Critic Edward Margolies has called it “Los Angeles Gothic.”

[...]

A decade earlier, Dashiell Hammett had experimented with combining elements of the Gothic and hard-boiled genres in The Dain Curse (1929), set in San Francisco and starring the Continental Op in a mystery involving a family curse, a religious cult, and a troubled young heiress, Gabrielle Dain Leggett.

The Castle of Otranto is arguably the first gothic novel, and it is inarguably terrible.

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Why change Science Dog to Séance Dog?

May 22nd, 2021

When I saw the teaser trailer for Amazon’s new Invincible series, I was mildly amused by Omni-Man and his son playing catch the long way — around the Earth:

But I couldn’t help but think of what speed would be required to orbit the earth near the surface — and it’s roughly 8 km/s, or 18,000 mph, or Mach 23.

So it would take an hour to orbit the earth, and it wouldn’t be preceded by any noise. And, of course the ball would burn up and lose speed long before finishing the trip. It wouldn’t travel predictably, either.

The original Invincible comic came out in 2003, right before its creator Robert Kirkman went on to produce his Walking Dead comic, which of course landed its own hit show. Another one of his creations shows up in the Invincible comic, as something his teenage protagonist reads, but it shows up in the show in a slightly different form:

I always like to open up the hardest hitting question right off the bat. So: why change Science Dog to Séance Dog?

Robert Kirkman: [Laughs] Yeah, look. I think that the nuts and bolts answer… I’m trying to come up with something creative and fun, but the nuts and bolts answers is that Science Dog is a separate comic book that Cory Walker and I created that just happened to appear [in Invincible]. It’s possible that we may do a movie or TV show or something at some point. Instead of putting that down in our deal with Amazon, on Invincible, we decided to strip it out and put in something new so that we would have the ability to do that.

I haven’t watched The Boys or read the original comic, but I was immediately reminded of it:

I don’t know how much you necessarily can speak to this, but how instrumental if at all, was the success of The Boys in selling the show to Amazon?

Internally, I don’t know. I mean, The Boys had not launched yet when this got greenlit. So the success of The Boys wasn’t the only reason this got picked up. But I think that they knew they had something special in The Boys from the get go. Internally, I can’t help but think that Amazon had to be like, The Boys is going to work and maybe Invincible will work too, let’s give it a shot. So I’m very appreciative Garth [Ennis] and Darick [Robertson] were able to create the comics. Everybody’s been able to accomplish so much with the show, I think it really paved the way for what we’re going to be able to do with Invincible.

Posted in Media | 1 Comment »

Ice Novice to Winter Olympian in 14 Months

May 21st, 2021

Sports Gene by David EpsteinIn August 2004, the Australian Institute for Sport, David Epstein explains (in The Sports Gene), had a year and a half to try to qualify a woman for the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, in the sport of skeleton:

The Aussie scientists had never even seen the sport, but they had learned that the beginning sprint accounts for about half of the variation in total race time. So they announced a nationwide call for women who could fit snugly on a tiny sled and who could sprint.

[...]

The women came from track, gymnastics, water skiing, and surf lifesaving, a popular sport in Australia that mixes open-water rowing and kayaking, surf paddling, swimming, and footraces in the sand. Not one woman had heard of skeleton, much less tried it.

Five of the ten spots were filled solely based on the 30-meter sprint, the other five by consensus of the scientists and AIS coaches, based on how well the athletes did in a dry land test during which they had to jump on a sled fitted with wheels.

[...]

Within three slides, the newbies were recording the fastest runs in Australian history, faster than the previous national record holder, who had had years of training. “That first week on the track, it was all over,” says Gulbin. “The writing was on the wall.”

[...]

Ten weeks after she first set foot on ice, Melissa Hoar bested about half the field at the world under-twenty-three skeleton championships. (She won the title in her next try.) And beach sprinter Michelle Steele made it all the way to the Winter Olympics in Italy.

The AIS titled their paper on the project “Ice Novice to Winter Olympian in 14 Months.”

Australia, a world sports powerhouse, has thrived off talent identification and “talent transfer,” the switching of athletes between sports. In 1994, as part of the run-up to the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the country launched its National Talent Search program. Children ages fourteen to sixteen were examined in school for body size and tested for general athleticism. Australia, home to 19.1 million people at the time, won 58 medals in Sydney. That’s 3.03 medals for every million citizens, nearly ten times the relative haul of the United States, which took home 0.33 medals per million Americans.

Posted in Education, Fitness | 1 Comment »

Friendship cues triggered a habit to please the questioner

May 20th, 2021

A psychologist at the University of Western Ontario took a different approach, Charles Duhigg explains (in The Power of Habit), to studying the question of why some eyewitnesses of crimes misremember what they see, while other recall events accurately:

She wondered if researchers were making a mistake by focusing on what questioners and witnesses had said, rather than how they were saying it.

[...]

She saw that witnesses who misremembered facts usually were questioned by cops who used a gentle, friendly tone. When witnesses smiled more, or sat closer to the person asking the questions, they were more likely to misremember.

In other words, when environmental cues said “we are friends” — a gentle tone, a smiling face — the witnesses were more likely to misremember what had occurred. Perhaps it was because, subconsciously, those friendship cues triggered a habit to please the questioner.

But the importance of this experiment is that those same tapes had been watched by dozens of other researchers. Lots of smart people had seen the same patterns, but no one had recognized them before. Because there was too much information in each tape to see a subtle cue.

Once the psychologist decided to focus on only three categories of behavior, however, and eliminate the extraneous information, the patterns leapt out.

Posted in Crime, Science | 1 Comment »

It was going to rain hard

May 19th, 2021

Big Sleep by Raymond ChandlerChandler’s Marlowe novels are associated with trench coats and fedoras — and rain. But they take place in Los Angeles. It turns out that The Big Sleep came out at a peculiar time:

In fact, heavy rains and flooding covered the LA area in February and March 1938. The Red Cross called it the fifth-largest flood in history, and the Los Angeles Times reported a death toll of more than thirty.

In fact, the previous two years (1936-1937 and 1937-1938) were exceptionally rainy.

Posted in Media | No Comments »

A near miss means you still lose

May 18th, 2021

In 2010, a cognitive neuroscientist named Reza Habib asked twenty-two people to lie inside an MRI, Charles Duhigg explains (in The Power of Habit), and watch a slot machine spin around and around. The pathological gamblers got more excited about winning:

“But what was really interesting were the near misses. To pathological gamblers, near misses looked like wins. Their brains reacted almost the same way. But to a nonpathological gambler, a near miss was like a loss. People without a gambling problem were better at recognizing that a near miss means you still lose.”

In the late 1990s, one of the largest slot machine manufacturers hired a former video game executive to help them design new slot machines:

That executive’s insight was to program machines to deliver more near wins. Now, almost every slot contains numerous twists — such as free spins and sounds that erupt when icons almost align — as well as small payouts that make players feel like they are winning when, in truth, they are putting in more money than they are getting back. “No other form of gambling manipulates the human mind as beautifully as these machines,” an addictive-disorder researcher at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine told a New York Times reporter in 2004.

Posted in Games, Science | No Comments »

Graf was at the top of every single test

May 17th, 2021

Sports Gene by David EpsteinPsychologist Wolfgang Schneider had no idea in 1978, David Epstein explains (in The Sports Gene), that he was being handed the study sample of a lifetime when the German Tennis Federation helped him recruit 106 of the top eight-to-twelve-year-old tennis players in the country:

Of 106 kids, 98 ultimately made it to the professional level, 10 rose to the top 100 players in the world, and a few climbed all the way to the top 10.

[...]

When the researchers eventually fit their data to the actual rankings of the players later on, the children’s tennis-specific skill scores predicted 60 to 70 percent of the variance in their eventual adult tennis ranking.

[...]

The tests of general athleticism — for example, a thirty-meter sprint and start-and-stop agility drills — influenced which children would acquire the tennis-specific skills most rapidly.

[...]

“We called Steffi Graf the perfect tennis talent,” Schneider says. “She outperformed the others in tennis-specific skills and basic motor skills, and we also predicted from her lung capacity that she could have ended up as the European champion in the 1500-meters.”

Graf was at the top of every single test, from measures of her competitive desire to her ability to sustain concentration to her running speed. Years later, when Graf was the best tennis player in the world, she would train for endurance alongside Germany’s Olympic track runners.

[...]

The future pros not only tend to practice more, but they take responsibility for practicing better.

[...]

“What we see in the shuttle sprints,” Elferink-Gemser says, “is that the ones signing a professional contract later are the ones that are on average 0.2 seconds faster when they are younger, at the age of twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. They are always on a group average about 0.2 seconds faster than the ones who end up on the amateur level. That really gives some indication that it is important to be fast. You need a minimum speed. If you’re really slow, then you cannot catch up, and speed is really hard for them to train.”

[...]

“We’ve tested over ten thousand boys,” he says, “and I’ve never seen a boy who was slow become fast.”

Posted in Education, Fitness | 3 Comments »

There is no chance that someone can override it through logic or reason

May 16th, 2021

Most people transition in and out of paralysis multiple times per night, Charles Duhigg explains (in The Power of Habit), but some experience switching errors and end up sleepwalking:

“Sleepwalking is a reminder that wake and sleep are not mutually exclusive,” Mark Mahowald, a professor of neurology at the University of Minnesota and a pioneer in understanding sleep behaviors, told me. “The part of your brain that monitors your behavior is asleep, but the parts capable of very complex activities are awake. The problem is that there’s nothing guiding the brain except for basic patterns, your most basic habits. You follow what exists in your head, because you’re not capable of making a choice.”

[...]

Sleepwalkers can behave in complex ways — for instance, they can open their eyes, see, move around, and drive a car or cook a meal — all while essentially unconscious, because the parts of their brain associated with seeing, walking, driving, and cooking can function while they are asleep without input from the brain’s more advanced regions, such as the prefrontal cortex.

[...]

However, as scientists have examined the brains of sleepwalkers, they’ve found a distinction between sleepwalking — in which people might leave their beds and start acting out their dreams or other mild impulses — and something called sleep terrors. When a sleep terror occurs, the activity inside people’s brains is markedly different from when they are awake, semi-conscious, or even sleepwalking.

[...]

Because sleep deactivates the prefrontal cortex and other high cognition areas, when a sleep terror habit is triggered, there is no possibility of conscious intervention. If the fight-or-flight habit is cued by a sleep terror, there is no chance that someone can override it through logic or reason.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

Shots using viral vector technology haven’t been administered at scale

May 15th, 2021

In Germany, one researcher thinks he has found what is triggering the clots in patients who have received a COVID vaccine:

Andreas Greinacher, a blood expert, and his team at the University of Greifswald believe so-called viral vector vaccines — which use modified harmless cold viruses, known as adenoviruses, to convey genetic material into vaccine recipients to fight the coronavirus — could cause an autoimmune response that leads to blood clots. According to Prof. Greinacher, that reaction could be tied to stray proteins and a preservative he has found in the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Prof. Greinacher and his team has just begun examining Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine but has identified more than 1,000 proteins in AstraZeneca’s vaccine derived from human cells, as well as a preservative known as ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid, or EDTA. Their hypothesis is that EDTA, which is common to drugs and other products, helps those proteins stray into the bloodstream, where they bind to a blood component called platelet factor 4, or PF4, forming complexes that activate the production of antibodies.

The inflammation caused by the vaccines, combined with the PF4 complexes, could trick the immune system into believing the body had been infected by bacteria, triggering an archaic defense mechanism that then runs out of control and causes clotting and bleeding.

[...]

One reason vaccine-induced clotting might not have been reported in the past is because shots using viral vector technology haven’t been administered at scale. The Russian vaccine Sputnik V and the shot by CanSino Biologics from China use the same technology as AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, but haven’t been linked to the condition so far.

The only similar shot widely administered before the pandemic is one against Ebola by Johnson & Johnson, which was given to at least 60,000 people as of last July.

Clotting occurs between one in 28,000 and one in 100,000, according to European data — extremely rare amid the hundreds of millions of doses administered so far, yet higher than one in 150,000 previously assumed by some medical authorities, Prof. Greinacher said. Most of the hundreds of people who have been diagnosed recover, but between a fifth and a third have died, and others could suffer permanent consequences.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

The expanded Wilshire was emblematic of the newly auto-centric city

May 15th, 2021

Big Sleep by Raymond ChandlerChandler’s Marlowe novels take place in Los Angeles and “Bay City” (Santa Monica). My annotated version of The Big Sleep explains the historical importance of Wilshire Boulevard:

A historic and even prehistoric route, once traveled by the Pleistocene animals that ended up in the tar pits at La Brea, Wilshire was widened in 1924 as part of developer A. W. Ross’s scheme to move shopping away from the traffic-choked downtown.

The expanded Wilshire was emblematic of the newly auto-centric city: it could accommodate six lanes of traffic, had synchronized traffic lights, and funneled automobiles to a brand-new shopping district (named Miracle Mile in 1928) where each building had its own parking lot.

They didn’t foresee the high cost of free parking.

Posted in Media, Urbanism | No Comments »

Hamas and Islamic Jihad sent their first-line of defense into the tunnels to start taking up positions

May 14th, 2021

At about 9 pm on Thursday night, the IDF began assembling ground forces along the border with the Gaza Strip, after having said earlier in the day that a ground offensive was on the table:

Yes, the IDF had deployed troops along the border but they did not cross into Gaza. What did happen was in the air where 160 aircraft had assembled for a massive bombing run over the Gaza Strip. Their target was what the IDF called Hamas’s “Metro”, an underground network of tunnels where Hamas stored its weapons and used to move throughout Gaza hidden from Israeli aircraft.

The “Metro” had been built in the years after the 2014 war in the Gaza Strip, also known in Israel as Operation Protective Edge. It was a network of dozens of kilometers of tunnels that crisscrossed Gaza and provided safety from Israeli aerial incursions.

According to reports, due to the deployment along the border and the news coming out in the foreign media of a ground incursion, Hamas and Islamic Jihad sent their first-line of defense into the tunnels to start taking up positions. These were the anti-tank missile teams and mortar squads meant to strike at incoming Israeli ground forces.

What these Hamas operatives did not know was that there was no ground offensive. Instead, once they were out of the tunnels, they were exposed to Israeli aircraft. Within minutes, the “Metro” attack went ahead.

Crafty.

Posted in War | 40 Comments »

Giving everyone new habits has become a focus of the church

May 14th, 2021

In 1979, a poor Baptist preacher was looking for a place to start a new congregation among people who didn’t already attend church, Charles Duhigg explains (in The Power of Habit), when he stumbled across a description of Saddleback Valley in Orange County, California:

The book Warren was reading said it was the fastest-growing region in the fastest-growing county in one of the fastest-growing states in America.

[...]

Warren’s focus on building a congregation among the unchurched had begun five years earlier, when, as a missionary in Japan, he had discovered an old copy of a Christian magazine with an article headlined “Why Is This Man Dangerous?” It was about Donald McGavran, a controversial author focused on building churches in nations where most people hadn’t accepted Christ. At the center of McGavran’s philosophy was an admonition that missionaries should imitate the tactics of other successful movements — including the civil rights campaign — by appealing to people’s social habits.

[...]

McGavran laid out a strategy that instructed church builders to speak to people in their “own languages,” to create places of worship where congregants saw their friends, heard the kinds of music they already listened to, and experienced the Bible’s lessons in digestible metaphors.

[...]

Most important, McGavran said, ministers needed to convert groups of people, rather than individuals, so that a community’s social habits would encourage religious participation, rather than pulling people away.

[...]

Today, thirty years later, Saddleback Church is one of the largest ministries in the world, with more than twenty thousand parishioners visiting its 120-acre campus — and eight satellite campuses — each week.

[...]

When Warren first arrived in Saddleback Valley, he spent twelve weeks going door-to-door, introducing himself and asking strangers why they didn’t go to church. Many of the answers were practical — it was boring, people said, the music was bad, the sermons didn’t seem applicable to their lives, they needed child care, they hated dressing up, the pews were uncomfortable.

[...]

He told people to wear shorts and Hawaiian shirts, if they felt like it. An electric guitar was brought in. Warren’s sermons, from the start, focused on practical topics, with titles such as “How to Handle Discouragement,” “How to Feel Good About Yourself,” “How to Raise Healthy Families,” and “How to Survive Under Stress.” His lessons were easy to understand, focused on real, daily problems, and could be applied as soon as parishioners left church.

[...]

He was never certain he would have enough classrooms to accommodate everyone who showed up for Bible study, so he had asked a few church members to host classes inside their homes. He worried that people might complain about going to someone’s house, rather than a proper church classroom. But congregants loved it, they said. The small groups gave them a chance to meet their neighbors. So, after he returned from his leave, Warren assigned every Saddleback member to a small group that met every week. It was one of the most important decisions he ever made, because it transformed church participation from a decision into a habit that drew on already-existing social urges and patterns.

[...]

“The congregation and the small groups are like a one-two punch. You have this big crowd to remind you why you’re doing this in the first place, and a small group of close friends to help you focus on how to be faithful. Together, they’re like glue. We have over five thousand small groups now. It’s the only thing that makes a church this size manageable. Otherwise, I’d work myself to death, and 95 percent of the congregation would never receive the attention they came here looking for.”

[...]

Every Saddleback member is asked to sign a “maturity covenant card” promising to adhere to three habits: daily quiet time for reflection and prayer, tithing 10 percent of their income, and membership in a small group. Giving everyone new habits has become a focus of the church.

Posted in Business | No Comments »

The players were literally off the charts

May 13th, 2021

Sports Gene by David EpsteinLouis J. Rosenbaum had been the team ophthalmologist for the Phoenix Cardinals football team, but in 1992, David Epstein explains (in The Sports Gene), he was brought in to work with the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, and he met with an unexpected problem:

The players were literally off the charts.

[...]

The trouble was that Rosenbaum used commercially available Landolt ring charts, which tested visual acuity down to 20/15. Nearly every player maxed out the test.

Landolt Ring Chart

When Tommy Lasorda asked him to predict which minor leaguer would thrive in the major league, he didn’t have the players’ baseball statistics, but he did have the vision testing data from his other tests:

He chose a minor league first baseman with outstanding scores. The player was Eric Karros, a mere sixth-round pick in the 1988 draft. By ’92, though, Karros was starting at first base for the Dodgers and won the National League Rookie of the Year award. It was his first of thirteen full seasons as a major leaguer.

The following spring, Rosenbaum returned to Dodgertown with a custom-made visual acuity test that went down to 20/8. Given the size and shape of particular photoreceptor cells, or cones, in the eye, 20/8 is around the theoretical limit of human visual acuity.

[...]

This time, the player whose vision tests stood out to Rosenbaum was Mike Piazza, a lightly regarded catcher.

Piazza had been picked by the Dodgers five years earlier in the sixty-second round of the draft, the 1,390th player taken overall, and only because Piazza’s father was a childhood friend of Lasorda’s. Nonetheless, Piazza would make good on Rosenbaum’s prediction. He won the National League Rookie of the Year in 1993 and went on to become the greatest hitting catcher in baseball history.

Over four years of testing, and 387 minor and major league players, Rosenbaum and his team found an average visual acuity around 20/13.

[...]

Major league position players had an average right eye visual acuity of 20/11 and an average left eye visual acuity of 20/12. In the test of fine depth perception, 58 percent of the baseball players scored “superior,” compared with 18 percent of a control population. In tests of contrast sensitivity, the pro players scored better than collegiate baseball players had in previous research, and collegiate players scored better than young people in the general population.

In each eye test, pro baseball players were better than nonathletes, and major league players were better than minor league players.

“Half the guys on the Dodgers’ major league roster were 20/10 uncorrected,” Rosenbaum says.

[...]

In the Indian study, out of 9,411 tested eyes, one single eye had 20/10 vision. In the Beijing Eye Study, only 22 out of 4,438 eyes tested at 20/17 or better.

[...]

Seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds in a Swedish study had average visual acuity around 20/16.

Ted Williams, the last man to hit .400 over a major league season, used to insist that he only saw ducks on the horizon before his hunting partners because he was “intent on seeing them.” Perhaps. But Williams’s 20/10 vision, discovered during his World War II pilot’s exam, probably didn’t hurt either.

About 2 percent of the players in the Dodgers organization dipped below 20/9, flirting with the theoretical limit of the human eye.

[...]

When Laby and Kirschen studied U.S. Olympians from the 2008 Beijing Games, they found that the softball team had an average visual acuity of 20/11, outstanding depth perception, and better contrast sensitivity than athletes from any other sport.

Olympic archers also had exceptional visual acuity — they scored similarly to the Dodgers — but not particularly good depth perception. That makes sense, Laby says, because the target is far away, but it’s also flat.

Fencers, who must make rapid use of tiny, close-range variations in distance, scored very well on depth perception.

Athletes who track flying objects at a distance — softball players and to a lesser extent soccer and volleyball players — scored well on contrast sensitivity, which is “probably set at a certain ability you’re born with,” Laby says.

[...]

In a study of catching skill among Belgian college students, some of whom had normal depth perception and others who had weak depth perception, there was little difference in catching ability at low ball speeds. But at high speeds, there was a tremendous difference in catching skill.

[...]

A clever follow-up study by an international team of scientists recruited a group of young women, all with normal visual acuity but some who had poor depth perception and others with good depth perception. Each woman had a catching pretest — in which she had to snag tennis balls shot out of a machine — followed by more than 1,400 practice catches over two weeks, and then a posttest. The women with good depth perception improved rapidly during the training, while the women with poor depth perception didn’t improve at all.

[...]

Conversely, a 2009 Emory medical school study suggested that children with poor depth perception start self-selecting out of Little League baseball and softball by age ten.

Posted in Education, Fitness, Science | 1 Comment »

The project came to be known as Freedom Summer

May 12th, 2021

In 1964, students from across the country, Charles Duhigg explains (in The Power of Habit), applied for something called the “Mississippi Summer Project”:

It was a ten-week program devoted to registering black voters in the South. The project came to be known as Freedom Summer, and many who applied were aware it would be dangerous.

[...]

Each applicant was asked to list their memberships in student and political organizations and at least ten people they wanted kept informed of their summer activities, so McAdam took these lists and used them to chart each applicant’s social network. By comparing memberships in clubs, he was able to determine which applicants had friends who also applied for Freedom Summer.

[...]

The students who participated in Freedom Summer were enmeshed in the types of communities where both their close friends and their casual acquaintances expected them to get on the bus.

[...]

When McAdam looked at applicants with religious orientations — students who cited a “Christian duty to help those in need” as their motivation for applying, for instance, he found mixed levels of participation. However, among those applicants who mentioned a religious orientation and belonged to a religious organization, McAdam found that every single one made the trip to Mississippi.

Posted in Policy | 1 Comment »

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