Isegoria

Collecting corpses for a fee

April 17th, 2020

To put the coronavirus pandemic in perspective, consider what happened when the bubonic plague struck London in 1665:

The onset of the disease could be sudden, says Yale historian Frank Snowden: “You actually have people afflicted and in agony in public spaces.” Trade and commerce swiftly shut down, and “every economic activity disappeared.” The city erected hospitals to isolate the sick. “You have the burning of sulfur in the streets—bonfires to purify the air.”

Some 100,000 Londoners — close to a quarter of the population, equivalent to two million today — died. Some sufferers committed suicide by “throwing themselves into the Thames,” Mr. Snowden says. “Such was their horror at what was happening to their bodies, and the excruciating pain of the buboes” — inflamed lymph nodes — that are the classic symptom of the bubonic plague. Social order broke down as the authorities fled. “Death cart” drivers went door to door, collecting corpses for a fee and sometimes plundering the possessions of survivors.

The plague’s violent assaults on European cities in the Middle Ages and Renaissance periods created “social dislocation in a way we can’t imagine,” says Mr. Snowden, whose October 2019 book, Epidemics in Society: From the Black Death to the Present — a survey of infectious diseases and their social impact — is suddenly timely.

I interviewed Mr. Snowden, 73, over Skype. We’re both home in lockdown, I in California and he in Rome, where he’s gone to do research in the Vatican archives. In the mid-14th century, Italy was “the most scourged place in Europe with the Black Death,” he notes. In the 21st century, it’s among the countries hardest hit by Covid-19.

[...]

Isolation as a defense against infectious disease originated in the city-states of Venice and Florence. Italy was the center of Mediterranean trade, and the plague arrived in 1347 on commercial ships. The dominant theory at the time was “miasmatism” — the atmosphere was poisoned — perhaps by visitors’ garments — and people get sick “when they breathe that in, or absorb it through their pores,” Mr. Snowden says. “That is, there is some emanation, and it can be thought to be coming from the soil, or from the bodies” of sick people.

After plague visitations, the Venetian navy eventually began to force sailors arriving at the harbor to disembark on a nearby island, where they remained for 40 days — quaranta — a duration chosen for its biblical significance. The strategy worked when it was enforced as disease-ridden fleas died out and the sick died or recovered. Mr. Snowden notes that Americans returning from Wuhan, China, in early February were “detained on army bases for a quarantine period” — 14 days rather than 40.

“We can see the roots of many aspects of modern health already in the Renaissance,” he adds. Another example is the wax “plague costume” worn by physicians. It resembled modern-day medical garb — “the protective garments that you see in the hospital for people dealing with Ebola, or this sort of space suit” — but with a long beak containing resonant herbs. They were thought to “purify the air that you were breathing in.” The costume “did, in fact, have some protective value,” Mr. Snowden says, because the wax repelled the fleas that carried the disease.

[...]

The plague was more traumatic than a military assault, and the response was often warlike in its ferocity. One response was a “sanitary cordon,” or encircling of a city-state with soldiers, who didn’t allow anyone in or out. “Imagine one’s own city, and suddenly, in the morning, it’s cordoned off by the National Guard with fixed bayonets and helmets on, and orders to shoot if we cross,” Mr. Snowden says. Cordons were regularly imposed in European cities in times of plague risk, leading to terror and violence. In the 18th century, the Austrian army was “deployed to prevent bubonic plague from moving up the Balkan Peninsula and into Western Europe” by halting travelers who might be carrying it.

The sociologist Charles Tilly (1929-2008) famously argued that “war makes the state” — that borders and bureaucracies were forged by necessity in military conflict. Plague had similar effects, requiring “military commitment, administration, finance and all the rest of it,” Mr. Snowden says. In addition to a navy to enforce quarantines, “you needed to have a police power,” a monopoly on force over a wide area. Sometimes “watchmen were stationed outside the homes of people who had the plague, and no one was allowed in or out.”

[...]

Infectious disease can change the physical landscape itself. Mr. Snowden notes that when Napoleon III rebuilt Paris in the mid-19th century, one of his objectives was to protect against cholera: “It was this idea of making broad boulevards, where the sun and light could disperse the miasma.” Cholera also prompted expansions of regulatory power over the “construction of houses, how they had to be built, the cleanliness standards.”

Posted in Policy, Science | 2 Comments »

The mind can go either direction under stress

April 16th, 2020

Maria Konnikova (Mastermind) makes an embarrassing confession — well, to science fiction fans:

Until last week, I had never read Dune. I wasn’t even aware that I was supposed to have read Dune. Nor did I know I should be embarrassed at the failure. Consider me properly chastised. Fifteen or so years too late, I have finally finished the book that calls itself — on the cover of the 40th anniversary edition — “science fiction’s supreme masterpiece.” I wouldn’t go quite that far, but I will say that I was surprised by the accuracy of some of its insights into the human psyche, especially when it comes to our ability to deal with stressful situations.

Paul Atreides and his mother, Jessica, find themselves alone on Arrakis, the inhospitable desert planet, and Paul makes the most of their circumstances:

Instead of panicking at their isolation, he remarks, “I find myself enjoying the quiet here.” This, just before a journey that might well kill them both. His mother doesn’t quite buy it, but she does think to herself, “How the mind gears itself for its environment. The mind can go either direction under stress — toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.”

Decades of psychological research have proven her to be quite correct. The story begins in 1949, with Donald Hebb. (Actually, it begins much earlier, but you need to start somewhere.) Hebb — a student of Wilder Penfield (who found that stimulating different areas of the temporal lobe during open-brain surgery could elicit different memories and sensations) and Karl Lashley (who quested for the engram, or the location for a specific memory, in the brains of rats) — believed that memories are stored by virtue of repeat association: an action causes activity in a cell, which in turn excites a neighboring cell. With each repetition, the connection between these two cells is strengthened, and over time, the cells become associated with one another, so that the activation of one predictably causes the activation of the other (as Carla Shatz memorably described it in 1992, “cells that fire together wire together”). These strengthening connections are now known as Hebbian plasticity, and Hebb’s idea, Hebb’s postulate.

But Hebb goes a step further than actual sensory experience. As he famously wrote, “You need not have an elephant present to think of elephants.” The thought itself can be enough to trigger the type of association that comes with learning. In other words, Paul Atreides need never have been in this specific desert environment in order to react as he does. It is enough for him to have trained his mind for that particular reaction, toward the positive and away from the negative, for the reaction to take place in reality.

Hebb’s work has since been expanded on, refined, and modified, but the general principle remains the same: training matters when it comes to how we learn and what we remember. Habit is king. Hebb’s postulate explains much of the logic behind such phenomena as Pavlovian conditioning (bell plus food equals salivation; fast forward to bell alone equals salivation), Skinnerian conditioning (pull lever, get pellet, learn to pull lever for pellet), fear conditioning and desensitization (think James Watson and poor Little Albert, or James Ledoux and scary snakes), and visual learning (Hubel and Wiesel and monocular deprivation in cats — no visual stimulus during the critical period makes for blind felines). Of course, it’s far more complicated than a single postulate, but the basic process is all about how our brains are trained, by our external and internal environment both, to respond to various situations in a predictable fashion.

Jessica, however, doesn’t just talk about training. She also brings in stress. Here, too, she is correct: where you will see the effect of the synaptic bonds most openly is under highly emotional conditions. There, habit memory — the same type of procedural memory that you use when you do something that you’re skilled at, like drive a car or perform an integral function of your job — will take over, and declarative memory — or that memory that functions when you memorize something or when you’re still learning a new skill — will recede into the background. Nothing like stress to distinguish real habit from what you wish were habit.

In one study, participants who experienced a stress condition — the cold pressor task, where one hand is submerged in freezing (0-2 degrees Celsius) water for three minutes — reverted to habit when performing a forced choice task – whereas those who were not stressed were able to perform admirably on new contingencies. Specifically, habit was chosen at the expense of goal-directed performance when choosing what food to eat: a food that had previously been devalued or one that had not. Stressed individuals chose to eat the same food they had been eating to the point of over-satiation, while non-stressed individuals chose to diversify their food choices.

So, not only does stress inhibit new learning, but it pushes the brain to fall back on those habits of mind that are second nature. Of course, the process can vary from person to person — and it’s important to remember that stress follows an inverted-U function; that is, performance under stressful conditions actually improves up to an optimal point, and then drops off dramatically as more stress is added — but in general, stressful conditions are not the best for trying to assimilate new information. Indeed, chronic stress can reduce the volume of the hippocampus (an area of the brain intimately involved in memory formation and consolidation) and can aversely impact the dopaminergic reward pathways in the brain, so that we overvalue rewarding outcomes and are impaired in our ability to learn about negative outcomes. In other words, were we to land unprepared in the arid desert of Arrakis, we’d be in bad shape, indeed.

Humans are remarkably adaptable. Paul learns quickly to appreciate the positive aspects of his new surroundings, to enjoy the quiet and value the beauty of the new landscape. But he could have just as easily shut down, spiraling into a negative feedback loop and losing his cool entirely. In fact, had he not had prior mental training to dealing with just such stressful contingencies, he would have likely done so; certainly, he would not have been in a position to learn a new positive coping mechanism in the heat of the moment.

The Kindle edition of Dune appears to be on sale for $1.99 at the moment.

My feelings on Dune are mixed, but it’s definitely a thought-provoking novel.

Posted in Education, Media, Science | 10 Comments »

Most subjects found this very confusing

April 15th, 2020

We’ve been hearing about pandemic models and policy responses lately. With that in mind, James Thompson discusses the logic of failure;

At a Royal Society lecture in 1990 I was charmed by a diffident presentation given by Prof Dietrich Dorner who described not his success in modelling the future, but the difficulties subjects had when they tried to manage fairly simple models.

His first example was extremely simple. Subjects had to turn a control dial so as to get a small target to move from the top of the screen to a line drawn horizontally across the middle. Clearly, the solution was to turn the knob clockwise so that the target sank down to the mid-line. This proved difficult. Dorner had arranged the system so the target only moved after a delay. Most subjects found this very confusing. They kept turning the dial to get the target down, only to find that after a period of no response the target suddenly shot down past the desired mid-line to the bottom of the screen. Irritated and confused, subjects then twisted the dial anti-clockwise, thus making it shoot back to the top of the screen. It took many corrections and much time to get the target onto the desired mid-line. A minority of subjects made just one cautious movement and then waited to see what happened. Such subjects were able to place the target onto the mid-line quickly and with very few moves.

This was a beautiful illustration of the key feature of executive power, that even if what you command has a real effect on a complex system in the real world, it is usually a delayed effect. Oil tankers take time to turn around.

I’ve discussed The Logic of Failure twice before.

Posted in Policy, Science | 20 Comments »

They still think what Palo Alto brought to the table was computer science

April 14th, 2020

Most Americans remember when Washington couldn’t build a website, Mencius Moldbug says, and Palo Alto bailed it out:

They still think what Palo Alto brought to the table was computer science.

Actually, plenty of people in DC can code just fine. What Palo Alto brought was the ability to execute at scale. Back then, some website seemed important. Now we know what important means.

Posted in Business, Policy, Technology | 4 Comments »

The first recorded epidemics in New England killed many Indians more than a century before the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock

April 13th, 2020

The first recorded epidemics in New England killed many Indians more than a century before the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock:

In what is now Canada and Maine, contact with Europeans began at least in 1504 with the first documented French vessel on the Grand Banks. By 1519, more than 300 European ships made round trips to Newfoundland in the summer. All came to fish.

The European visitors brought with them diseases to which the Indians had no immunity, including smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, cholera and bubonic plague.

In 1586, a typhus epidemic devastated Maine’s Passamaquoddy Indians, among the first to make contact with Europeans.

In 1616, a terrible plaque swept the Massachusetts coast – perhaps smallpox, perhaps yellow fever, perhaps bubonic plague. It killed as many as 90 percent of the Massachusetts people and devastated the Pennacooks in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. It also felled the Agawam in Ipswich and the Naumkeag in Salem. And it cleared nearly all the Wampanoag along the coast from Plymouth to Boston.

Then a smallpox epidemic in 1633 killed many more Massachusetts and Narragansetts in Rhode Island.

And after the Pequot War, smallpox, diphtheria, flu and measles killed two-thirds of the Pequot-Mohegans in Connecticut.

Posted in Science | 17 Comments »

Coronavirus is kickstarting the 21st Century

April 12th, 2020

A global pandemic has done what 30 years of internet manifestoes never accomplished — a mass migration into our screens:

Posted in Technology | 3 Comments »

Fashionable women wear lacy veils to protect against dust

April 11th, 2020

Virginia Postrel walks through the history of medical face masks:

19th century

Fashionable women wear lacy veils to protect against dust, particularly from the disruptions of Georges-Eugene Haussmann’s remaking of Paris. As germ theory spreads, the fashion takes on a medical aura when researchers using microscopes find bacteria on dust particles.

In an 1878 article printed in the Hospital Gazette and in Scientific American, A.J. Jessup, a Westtown, New York, physician, recommends cotton masks to limit contagion during epidemics:

Thus we see that as quarantine and disinfection will certainly spread of contagion from patient to patient, may we not confidently hope, by preventing the entrance of germs into the lungs and blood, by a properly constructed filtering mask to yet witness the spectacle of a population walking about the streets of a cholera infested city, without fear of its infection however deadly. As a properly made cotton filter worn over the mouth and nose must shut out all atmospheric gems of the ordinary putrefactive kind. We may confidently assured that those of disease will be equally excluded.

He cites his experiments with test tubes with and without cotton stoppers. His idea does not catch on.

Early 20th century

Although the first study advocating the use of masks during surgery is published in 1897, they are rare at the turn of the century.

In 1905, Chicago physician Alice Hamilton publishes an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, reporting on experiments measuring the amount of streptococci bacteria expelled when scarlet fever patients cough or cry. She also measures the strep bacteria from healthy doctors and nurses when they talk or cough, leading her to recommend masks during surgery.

“I was told by a student in a large medical college in Chicago,” she writes, “that he had often noticed at the clinics of a certain surgeon that, when the light was from a certain direction, he could see, from his seat in the amphitheater, a continuous spray of saliva coming from the mouth of the surgeon while he discoursed to the class and conducted his operation. Obviously, protection of the mouth, of some sort as to catch and impression the droplets of sputum, should be a routine precaution for surgeons and for surgical nurses during operations.”

In 1910, an epidemic of pneumonic plague strikes Manchuria. Appointed by the Chinese court to head anti-plague efforts, the Penang-born, Cambridge-educated physician Wu Lien-Teh (Wu Liande) argues that the disease is transmitted through airborne contact. To prevent its spread, he develops masks to be worn by medical personnel and the general public.

During the 1918 global flu epidemic, medical personnel routinely adopt masks to protect themselves, and many cities require them in public. In Seattle, where streetcars require all riders to have masks, the local Red Cross enlists 120 workers to turn out 260,000 masks in three days.

In the 1920s, masks are standard in operating rooms.

Posted in Science | 1 Comment »

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy appears to be treating the hypoxemia and underlying pathology (lung inflammation) in COVID-19

April 10th, 2020

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy appears to be treating the hypoxemia and underlying pathology (lung inflammation) in COVID-19:

Recently, two articles published in China featured the application of hyperbaric oxygen therapy in patients with novel coronavirus 19 (COVID-19) pneumonia.

The first was a case report of a severely ill patient who was failing standard respiratory support (not intubated) and whose disease course was reversed with eight hyperbaric oxygen treatments (HBOTs) at 200 kPa/95 minutes total treatment time.

The second was a more severely afflicted patient on a ventilator with acute respiratory distress syndrom (ADRS) whose life was saved by the application of five HBOTs.

By direct voice and electronic communication with the authors/treating physicians this author has reviewed the data and treatment of four additional severely ill COVID-19 patients with bilateral ground glass opacities who were failing standard mask oxygen therapy, were treated with 3-5 HBOTs and discharged from the hospital to home.

The authors reported that they have safely treated an additional 29 less severe patients with the same outcome.

The five non-intubated patients had been on oxygen support for days to weeks with immediate pre-HBOT oxygen saturation levels as low as 70% on mask oxygen. With each once daily administration of HBOT the patients experienced sustained elevation of oxygen saturation and improvement in symptom that persisted to the following morning.

With just 3–8 HBOTs the patients were bridged through the hypoxemic crisis phase of the infection and successfully discharged from the hospital. The authors suggested that HBOT applied earlier in the disease process would prevent the deterioration that leads to the significant morbidity and mortality of COVID-19 infection.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

Twenty-first-century American elites turn out to resemble the Chinese mandarins of yore

April 9th, 2020

Had he been asked in late 2019 what would eventually break American global dominance, Razib Khan would have said the rise of China:

My thinking, pre-pandemic, was that the psychic shock of America’s eventual demotion might trigger cultural and political turmoil, as the nation would find itself forced into a reckoning. Then came 2020. The true shock to our civilization has come not from our own self-image but from nature itself. Western elites were clearly not prepared for this turn, a shattering of our conceit that reality is ours to create. In the U.S., bickering about an appropriate official name for Covid-19, along with a sequence of bureaucratic blunders that led to dire shortages of diagnostic testing and medical gear, highlight the core competencies of today’s media and governmental elites: administrative turf wars and verbal jousting to burnish status in positional games. Even in this high-stakes moment, they cannot abandon unproductive old reflexes. In a strange turn of events, twenty-first-century American elites turn out to resemble the Chinese mandarins of yore, absorbed in intricate intrigues at court to advance their careers while European gunboats prowl the waterways.

The politicians who govern us and the media who tell us how the world “really is” acted as if the basics of economic well-being would be an everlasting bounty. Economists, those apex predators of social science, marshaled the evidence for efficiencies and gains in productivity due to trade and international supply chains. “Just in time” inventories reduced waste and made modern retail a lean, mean prosperity machine. Plentitude wasn’t some miracle achieved through hard work and focused attention; it was our birthright, a steady-state condition of the universe that we inhabited. A global pandemic wasted no time in making a mockery of many of these late twentieth-century assumptions. All our efficiencies melted away in the face of a man-made depression. Perhaps the world was never what we presumed it to be.

In January, empirical evidence from Wuhan should have caused alarm for anyone who bothered to look closely. Epidemiological frameworks are some of the most well understood theoretical systems in population biology, so the high average number of secondary cases was immediately worrisome to scientists, statisticians, and physicians. The WHO, the CDC, and independent observers hoped that Covid-19 would be slowed by the same factors that slowed and contained SARS and MERS in the past, but there was no guarantee. By late January, a small but vocal group of epidemiologists and infectious-disease specialists, along with an eclectic array of Silicon Valley figures, had begun raising the alarm. But these worries failed to gain broader traction in the U.S. media and political landscape for much of February. The media seemed more anxious about the possibility of anti-Asian racism than the threat of a deadly pandemic.

Scenes that played out in Wuhan were repeated with eerily specific similarity in Lombardy in March, and then in New York shortly thereafter. Despite the reality that we live in a world where China’s economic and geopolitical heft looms large, American elites, nursing a twentieth-century hangover, haven’t updated their understanding of the world. China may be remote, alien, and exotic, but it was too easy to dismiss the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan as sui generis. In a global age, we have become too parochial as a nation, held captive by our own particular history.

Too many of our elites lack the most basic analytical tools to understand the threats that we face from nature.

[...]

Now Covid-19 has thrust the untamed physical world back into our line of vision. It has brought post-materialist, twenty-first-century humanity face to face with one of the species’ deepest and most atavistic fears: pestilence and plague. The disease will not be defined away. It is not a social construction or interpretation. It is immune to critique or public shaming on social media. Covid-19 will not be “cancelled.”

[...]

For decades, scientists and thinkers have warned that our twentieth-century victories against infectious disease could be merely a pause. Covid-19 has brought this prophecy to life. Rather than attend to internecine arguments about the ideal marginal tax rate or the gendered nature of the English language, we need to face outward and confront a real foe. The American elite must stop treating science like inscrutable magic that provides its bounty automatically. Science and engineering are instruments that grant us insight and mastery only through massive investments of time, energy, and will.

We must acknowledge the importance of mastering reality if we are to survive and flourish as a civilization. Otherwise, governing and media elites’ lack of basic scientific and statistical literacy will doom us to fly blind in the face of future natural disasters. Our only hope is to turn our backs on an era where our only leaders are business executives and lawyers. Data journalism cannot remain a niche; it deserves to occupy a prominent spot on any editorial board. Scientists and engineers must step outside of their laboratories and make their voices heard in the halls of power. They must become part of the establishment that they once had the luxury of viewing chiefly as a source of funding and institutional support.

Posted in Policy, Science | 17 Comments »

The resilient children had an internal locus of control

April 8th, 2020

Maria Konnikova — author of The Confidence Game and Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes — explains how people learn to become resilient — or not:

In 1989 a developmental psychologist named Emmy Werner published the results of a thirty-two-year longitudinal project. She had followed a group of six hundred and ninety-eight children, in Kauai, Hawaii, from before birth through their third decade of life. Along the way, she’d monitored them for any exposure to stress: maternal stress in utero, poverty, problems in the family, and so on. Two-thirds of the children came from backgrounds that were, essentially, stable, successful, and happy; the other third qualified as “at risk.” Like Garmezy, she soon discovered that not all of the at-risk children reacted to stress in the same way. Two-thirds of them “developed serious learning or behavior problems by the age of ten, or had delinquency records, mental health problems, or teen-age pregnancies by the age of eighteen.” But the remaining third developed into “competent, confident, and caring young adults.” They had attained academic, domestic, and social success—and they were always ready to capitalize on new opportunities that arose.

What was it that set the resilient children apart? Because the individuals in her sample had been followed and tested consistently for three decades, Werner had a trove of data at her disposal. She found that several elements predicted resilience. Some elements had to do with luck: a resilient child might have a strong bond with a supportive caregiver, parent, teacher, or other mentor-like figure. But another, quite large set of elements was psychological, and had to do with how the children responded to the environment. From a young age, resilient children tended to “meet the world on their own terms.” They were autonomous and independent, would seek out new experiences, and had a “positive social orientation.” “Though not especially gifted, these children used whatever skills they had effectively,” Werner wrote. Perhaps most importantly, the resilient children had what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”: they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the orchestrators of their own fates. In fact, on a scale that measured locus of control, they scored more than two standard deviations away from the standardization group.

[...]

George Bonanno is a clinical psychologist at Columbia University’s Teachers College; he heads the Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab and has been studying resilience for nearly twenty-five years. Garmezy, Werner, and others have shown that some people are far better than others at dealing with adversity; Bonanno has been trying to figure out where that variation might come from. Bonanno’s theory of resilience starts with an observation: all of us possess the same fundamental stress-response system, which has evolved over millions of years and which we share with other animals. The vast majority of people are pretty good at using that system to deal with stress. When it comes to resilience, the question is: Why do some people use the system so much more frequently or effectively than others?

One of the central elements of resilience, Bonanno has found, is perception: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow? “Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic,” Bonanno told me, in December. “To call something a ‘traumatic event’ belies that fact.” He has coined a different term: PTE, or potentially traumatic event, which he argues is more accurate. The theory is straightforward. Every frightening event, no matter how negative it might seem from the sidelines, has the potential to be traumatic or not to the person experiencing it. (Bonanno focusses on acute negative events, where we may be seriously harmed; others who study resilience, including Garmezy and Werner, look more broadly.) Take something as terrible as the surprising death of a close friend: you might be sad, but if you can find a way to construe that event as filled with meaning—perhaps it leads to greater awareness of a certain disease, say, or to closer ties with the community—then it may not be seen as a trauma. (Indeed, Werner found that resilient individuals were far more likely to report having sources of spiritual and religious support than those who weren’t.) The experience isn’t inherent in the event; it resides in the event’s psychological construal.

[...]

The good news is that positive construal can be taught. “We can make ourselves more or less vulnerable by how we think about things,” Bonanno said. In research at Columbia, the neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner has shown that teaching people to think of stimuli in different ways—to reframe them in positive terms when the initial response is negative, or in a less emotional way when the initial response is emotionally “hot”—changes how they experience and react to the stimulus. You can train people to better regulate their emotions, and the training seems to have lasting effects.

Similar work has been done with explanatory styles—the techniques we use to explain events. I’ve written before about the research of Martin Seligman, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist who pioneered much of the field of positive psychology: Seligman found that training people to change their explanatory styles from internal to external (“Bad events aren’t my fault”), from global to specific (“This is one narrow thing rather than a massive indication that something is wrong with my life”), and from permanent to impermanent (“I can change the situation, rather than assuming it’s fixed”) made them more psychologically successful and less prone to depression. The same goes for locus of control: not only is a more internal locus tied to perceiving less stress and performing better but changing your locus from external to internal leads to positive changes in both psychological well-being and objective work performance. The cognitive skills that underpin resilience, then, seem like they can indeed be learned over time, creating resilience where there was none.

Unfortunately, the opposite may also be true. “We can become less resilient, or less likely to be resilient,” Bonanno says. “We can create or exaggerate stressors very easily in our own minds. That’s the danger of the human condition.” Human beings are capable of worry and rumination: we can take a minor thing, blow it up in our heads, run through it over and over, and drive ourselves crazy until we feel like that minor thing is the biggest thing that ever happened. In a sense, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Frame adversity as a challenge, and you become more flexible and able to deal with it, move on, learn from it, and grow. Focus on it, frame it as a threat, and a potentially traumatic event becomes an enduring problem; you become more inflexible, and more likely to be negatively affected.

Posted in Education, Science | 7 Comments »

We don’t need a Marine Corps with tanks

April 7th, 2020

General David Berger became commandant of the Marine Corps on July 11, 2019 and immediately published his Commandant’s Planning Guidance, which laid out his vision for where the Marine Corps needed to go:

Central to Berger’s vision is the ability to operate within an adversary’s (read China’s) bubble of air, missile, and naval power (which the Marine Corps calls the weapons engagement zone, or WEZ). The concept is that the Marine Corps will be a “stand-in force” that will operate within this WEZ, not a stand-off force that must start outside and fight its way in. As the guidance states: “Stand-in forces [are] optimized to operate in close and confined seas in defiance of adversary long-range precision ‘stand-off capabilities.’”

One requirement to implement this concept is developing “low signature, affordable, and risk worthy platforms” because existing ships and aircraft are the opposite—highly capable but expensive, few, and highly visible.

Another element of the concept is “distributed operations,” the ability of relatively small groups to operate independently rather than as part of a large force, as in previous wars. “We recognize that we must distribute our forces ashore given the growth of adversary precision strike capabilities.” Thus, small Marine forces would deploy around the islands of the first island chain and the South China Sea, each element having the ability to contest the surrounding air and naval space using anti-air and antiship missiles. Collectively, these forces would hem in Chinese forces, prevent them from moving outward, and ultimately, as part of a joint campaign, squeeze them back to the Chinese homeland.

A third element was institutional: the Marine Corps would leave sustained ground combat to the Army and focus on the littorals. Ground wars in the Middle East, North Korea, and Europe would be Army responsibilities.

The final element was political: General Berger judged that defense budgets are likely to be flat for the foreseeable future. “My assumption is flat or declining [budgets], not rising…. If [an increase] happens, great, but this is all built based on flat or declining [budgets].” Thus, unlike in the previous five years, when rising budgets allowed new investment and stable force levels, trade-offs would now be necessary. If the Marine Corps wanted to invest in new capabilities, it had to cut some existing units.

[...]

Maintaining small and vulnerable units deep inside an adversary’s weapons engagement zone will be challenging. Even small units need a continuous resupply with fuel and munitions. If that is not possible, or if the Chinese figure out a way to hunt these units down, the concept collapses.

The Wall Street Journal gives its own summary:

The 10-year plan to revamp the Corps, scheduled to be unveiled this week, follows years of classified U.S. wargames that revealed China’s missile and naval forces to be eroding American military advantages in the region.

“China, in terms of military capability, is the pacing threat,” Gen. David Berger, the Marine Corps commandant, said in an interview. “If we did nothing, we would be passed.”

To reinvent themselves as a naval expeditionary force within budget limits, the Marines plan to get rid of all of their tanks, cut back on their aircraft and shrink in total numbers from 189,000 to as few as 170,000, Gen. Berger said.

[...]

Among an array of new high-tech programs, the Air Force is developing a hypersonic missile that would travel five times the speed of sound, and has been experimenting with the “loyal wingman,” an unmanned aircraft that would carry bombs and fly in formations with piloted planes.

The Army, which has established a Futures Command to oversee its transformation, tested a cannon at the Yuma Proving Ground earlier this month that fired shells about 40 miles—roughly twice the range of current systems. The Navy, for its part, has been developing tactics to disperse aircraft carrier battle groups to make them a less inviting target for Chinese medium-range missiles, and it is pursuing the development of unmanned submarines and ships.

[...]

The Pentagon’s $705 billion spending request for the 2021 fiscal year includes the largest research-and-development budget in 70 years: nearly $107 billion.

[...]

If war broke out, U.S. officials concluded, China could fire hundreds of missiles at U.S. and allies’ air bases, ports and command centers throughout the Pacific, jam the U.S. military’s GPS, attack American satellite systems and use its air defenses to keep U.S. warplanes at bay.

Russia similarly would use the surface-to-surface missiles, air defenses and antiship missiles deployed in Kaliningrad and on the Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.

The [Marines’ Combat Development Command in Quantico, Va.] has run classified wargames such as “Pacific Surprise” and “Ghost Fleet,” which looked at how the Marines might counter the Chinese threat in the decade ahead.

For the Marines, the new Pentagon strategy raised questions about whether it should adapt for a toe-to-toe fight against China or should concentrate on lesser but still challenging dangers.

“The wargames do show that, absent significant change, the Marine Corps will not be in a position to be relevant” in a clash with a “peer competitor,” said Lt. Gen. Eric Smith, who succeeded Gen. Berger as the head of that command.

Gen. Berger’s answer was to reconfigure the Corps to focus on a China threat. The Marines would fight within reach of Chinese missiles, planes and naval forces to blunt any aggression. While other services might lob missiles from long range, the Marines, in military parlance, would operate inside “the weapons engagement zone.”

[...]

At the heart of Gen. Berger’s plan is the establishment of new naval expeditionary units—what the Marines call “littoral regiments”—whose mission would be to take on the Chinese navy.

If a military confrontation loomed, the regiments would disperse small teams of Marines, who would rush in sleek landing craft to the tiny islands that dot the South and East China Seas, according to Gen. Berger and other senior Marine officers. Armed with sensor-laden drones that operate in the air, on the sea and underwater, the Marines would target Chinese warships before they ventured into the wider Pacific Ocean. The Marine teams, which could have 50 to 100 personnel, would fire antiship missiles at the Chinese fleet. Targeting data also would be passed to Air Force or Navy units farther away, which would fire longer-range missiles.

To elude retaliatory blows, the Marines would hop from island to island every 48 or 72 hours, relying on a new generation of amphibious ships, which could be piloted remotely. Other Marine teams would operate from U.S. warships with decoy vessels nearby.

Gen. Berger said the wargames showed that the new Marine capabilities and tactics would create “a ton of problems” for the Chinese forces. “It is very difficult for them to counter a distributed naval expeditionary force that is small, that is mobile, but has the capability to reach out and touch you,” he said.

To carry out the strategy, the Marines would deploy new missile batteries, armed drone units and amphibious ships. A major push is being made to ease the logistical burden, such as exploring the use of 3-D printing on the battlefield to make spare parts. The strategy requires deeper integration with the Navy, and Marine teams might perform other missions like refueling submarines or sub-hunting planes. While most of the effort to transform the Corps is focused on the Pacific, the Marines would retain other forces to respond to crises world-wide, including floating 2,200-strong Marine expeditionary units

To fund the new capabilities, the Marines will dispense with all of its tanks over the next few years, eliminate its bridge-laying companies and cut back on aviation and howitzers. “We need an Army with lots of tanks,” Gen. Berger said. “We don’t need a Marine Corps with tanks.”

The Fourth Industrial Revolution will transform the character of war.

Ghost Fleet is a reference to the book of the same name, which I’ve discussed a few times.

Posted in War | 4 Comments »

The 100-yr-old BCG vaccine for TB is being tested against the novel coronavirus

April 6th, 2020

The BCG vaccine has an unusual history:

It was inspired in the 1800s by the observation that milkmaids did not develop tuberculosis. The vaccine is named after its inventors, Dr. Albert Calmette and Dr. Camille Guerin, who developed it in the early 1900s from mycobacterium bovis, a form of tuberculosis that infects cattle.

The scientists cultured bacterial scrapings from cow udders, and continued to culture bovine TB for over a decade until it was weak enough that it no longer caused virulent disease when given to lab animals.

The weakened virus was first used in humans in 1921 and was widely adopted after World War II. Now BCG is primarily used in the developing world and in countries where TB is still prevalent, where it is given to over 100 million babies a year.

Like other vaccines, BCG has a specific target: TB. But evidence accumulating over the past decade suggests the vaccine also has so-called off-target effects, reducing viral illnesses, respiratory infections and sepsis, and appears to bolster the body’s immune system.

The idea is an offshoot of the “hygiene hypothesis,” which suggests that the modern emphasis on cleanliness has deprived children of exposure to germs. The lack of “training” has resulted in weakened immune systems, less able to resist disease.

One of the earliest studies hinting at the broad benefits of BCG vaccination was a randomized trial of 2,320 babies in Guinea-Bissau in West Africa, published in 2011, that reported that death rates among low-birth-weight babies were dramatically reduced after vaccination. A follow-up trial reported that infectious-disease mortality rates in low-birth-weight babies who were vaccinated were cut by more than 40%.

Other epidemiological studies — including a 25-year study of over 150,000 children in 33 countries — have reported a 40% lower risk of acute lower respiratory tract infections in children who received a BCG vaccine. A study in the elderly found that consecutive BCG vaccinations reduced the incidence of acute upper respiratory tract infections.

A recent review by the World Health Organization concluded that BCG had beneficial “off-target effects,” and recommended doing more trials of the vaccine against a wider range of infections.

[...]

There is little evidence yet that the vaccine will blunt infection with the coronavirus, but a series of clinical trials may answer the question in just months.

On Monday, scientists in Melbourne, Australia, started administering the BCG vaccine or a placebo to thousands of physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists and other health care workers — the first of several randomized controlled trials intended to test the vaccine’s effectiveness against the coronavirus.

[...]

A clinical trial of 1,000 health care workers began 10 days ago in the Netherlands, said Dr. Mihai Netea, an infectious disease specialist at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen. Eight hundred health care workers have already signed up. (As in Australia, half of the participants will receive a placebo.)

Posted in Science | 4 Comments »

That works only because demand is typically so steady

April 5th, 2020

The shelves are bare, because the toilet paper industry is split into two, largely separate markets, commercial and consumer:

Georgia-Pacific, a leading toilet paper manufacturer based in Atlanta, estimates that the average household will use 40% more toilet paper than usual if all of its members are staying home around the clock. That’s a huge leap in demand for a product whose supply chain is predicated on the assumption that demand is essentially constant. It’s one that won’t fully subside even when people stop hoarding or panic-buying.

[...]

Talk to anyone in the industry, and they’ll tell you the toilet paper made for the commercial market is a fundamentally different product from the toilet paper you buy in the store. It comes in huge rolls, too big to fit on most home dispensers. The paper itself is thinner and more utilitarian. It comes individually wrapped and is shipped on huge pallets, rather than in brightly branded packs of six or 12.

[...]

Because toilet paper is high volume but low value, the industry runs on extreme efficiency, with mills built to work at full capacity around the clock even in normal times. That works only because demand is typically so steady. If toilet paper manufacturers spend a bunch of money now to refocus on the retail channel, they’ll face the same problem in reverse once people head back to work again.

Other industries face similar challenges:

The CEO of a fruit and vegetable supplier told NPR’s Weekend Edition that schools and restaurants are canceling their banana orders, while grocery stores are selling out and want more. The problem is that the bananas he sells to schools and restaurants are “petite” and sold loose in boxes of 150, whereas grocery store bananas are larger and sold in bunches. Beer companies face a similar challenge converting commercial keg sales to retail cans and bottles.

Posted in Business | 10 Comments »

Modern meteorology was born 60 years ago

April 4th, 2020

Modern meteorology was born 60 years ago, with the launch of the Television InfraRed Observation Satellite, or TIROS-1:

During its 78 days of operation, TIROS-1 successfully monitored Earth’s cloud cover and weather patterns from space.

This was a potent moment for the field of meteorology. For the first time, scientists were able to combine space-based observations with physical models of the atmosphere that were just beginning to be run on supercomputers.

After World War II, mathematician John von Neumann led development of a computer to crunch through a set of equations put together by Jule Charney and other scientists. By the mid-1950s, Charney’s group began to produce numerical forecasts on a regular basis.

All of a sudden, meteorologists had two incredibly useful tools at their hands. Of course, it would take time for more powerful computers to produce higher-resolution forecasts, and the sensor technology launched on satellites would require decades to improve to the point where spacecraft could collect data for temperature, moisture, and other environmental variables at various levels in the atmosphere.

But by around 1980, the tools of satellite observations and numerical models that could process that data started to mature. Scientists had global satellite coverage, 24 hours a day, and forecasts began to improve dramatically. Today, the fifth day of a five-day forecast on the app on your phone is about as accurate as the next day’s forecast was in 1980.

I had always assumed that spy satellites used TV cameras, but the first spy satellites used film:

The Corona satellites used special 70 millimeter film with a 24-inch (610 mm) focal length camera.[7] Manufactured by Eastman Kodak, the film was initially 0.0003 inches (7.6 ?m) thick, with a resolution of 170 lines per 0.04 inches (1.0 mm) of film.[8][9] The contrast was 2-to-1.[8] (By comparison, the best aerial photography film produced in World War II could produce just 50 lines per mm (1250 per inch) of film.)[8] The acetate-based film was later replaced with a polyester-based film stock that was more durable in Earth orbit.[10] The amount of film carried by the satellites varied over time. Initially, each satellite carried 8,000 feet (2,400 m) of film for each camera, for a total of 16,000 feet (4,900 m) of film.[8] But a reduction in the thickness of the film stock allowed more film to be carried.[10] In the fifth generation, the amount of film carried was doubled to 16,000 feet (4,900 m) of film for each camera for a total of 32,000 feet (9,800 m) of film. This was accomplished by a reduction in film thickness and with additional film capsules.[11] Most of the film shot was black and white. Infrared film was used on mission 1104, and color film on missions 1105 and 1008. Color film proved to have lower resolution, and so was never used again.[12]

The cameras were manufactured by the Itek Corporation.[13] A 12-inch (30 cm), f/5 triplet lens was designed for the cameras.[14] Each lens was 7 inches (18 cm) in diameter.[8] They were quite similar to the Tessar lenses developed in Germany by Zeiss.[15] The cameras themselves were initially 5 feet (1.5 m) long, but later extended to 9 feet (2.7 m) in length.[16] Beginning with the KH-4 satellites, these lenses were replaced with Petzval f/3.5 lens.[12] The lenses were panoramic, and moved through a 70° arc perpendicular to the direction of the orbit.[8] A panoramic lens was chosen because it could obtain a wider image. Although the best resolution was only obtained in the center of the image, this could be overcome by having the camera sweep automatically (“reciprocate”) back and forth across 70° of arc.[17] The lens on the camera was constantly rotating, to counteract the blurring effect of the satellite moving over the planet.[12]

The first Corona satellites had a single camera, but a two-camera system was quickly implemented.[18] The front camera was tilted 15° aft, and the rear camera tilted 15° forward, so that a stereoscopic image could be obtained.[8] Later in the program, the satellite employed three cameras.[18] The third camera was employed to take “index” photographs of the objects being stereographically filmed.[19] The J-3 camera system, first deployed in 1967, placed the camera in a drum. This “rotator camera” (or drum) moved back and forth, eliminating the need to move the camera itself on a reciprocating mechanism.[20] The drum permitted the use of up to two filters and as many as four different exposure slits, greatly improving the variability of images that Corona could take.[21] The first cameras could resolve images on the ground down to 40 feet (12 m) in diameter. Improvements in the imaging system were rapid, and the KH-3 missions could see objects 10 feet (3.0 m) in diameter. Later missions would be able to resolve objects just 5 feet (1.5 m) in diameter.[22] A single mission was completed with a 1 foot (0.30 m) resolution but the limited field of view was determined to be detrimental to the mission.[citation needed] 3 feet (0.91 m) resolution was found to be the optimum resolution for quality of image and field of view.

[...]

Film was retrieved from orbit via a reentry capsule (nicknamed “film bucket”), designed by General Electric, which separated from the satellite and fell to Earth.[30] After the fierce heat of reentry was over, the heat shield surrounding the vehicle was jettisoned at 60,000 feet (18 km) and parachutes deployed.[31] The capsule was intended to be caught in mid-air by a passing airplane[32] towing an airborne claw which would then winch it aboard, or it could land at sea.[33] A salt plug in the base would dissolve after two days, allowing the capsule to sink if it was not picked up by the United States Navy.[34] After Reuters reported on a reentry vehicle’s accidental landing and discovery by Venezuelan farmers in mid-1964, capsules were no longer labeled “SECRET” but offered a reward in eight languages for their return to the United States.[35] Beginning with flight number 69, a two-capsule system was employed.[24] This also allowed the satellite to go into passive (or “zombie”) mode, shutting down for as many as 21 days before taking images again.[11] Beginning in 1963, another improvement was “Lifeboat”, a battery-powered system that allowed for ejection and recovery of the capsule in case power failed.[36][37] The film was processed at Eastman Kodak’s Hawkeye facility in Rochester, New York.[38]

Posted in Science, Technology | 2 Comments »

How many lives is hospitalization saving in the pandemic?

April 3rd, 2020

Do we have evidence that hospitalization of COVID19 patients is actually saving significant numbers of lives?

I’ve now seen multiple studies suggesting that up to 80 or 90 percent of patients who end up on ventilators ultimately die. At this point, I guess there’s no way to know if the other 10 percent would have lived without the ventilators. From what I can tell, most other hospitalized patients are getting supplemental oxygen, IV fluids and antibiotics. I have not seen any evidence on the effectiveness of these treatments. Many of those patients live, but we don’t know whether they would have recovered without hospitalization. It would obviously be impossible to do a RCT on that at the moment.

Answering the question about the efficacy of hospitalization would seem to be critical, though, since, as best I can tell, the main justification for shutting down society now is to prevent our health care system from being overwhelmed — especially the supply of ventilators. If our hospitals are overwhelmed, not only COVID19 patients, but others with treatable injuries/diseases might die. But if hospitalization is not actually saving COVID19 patients in large numbers, then all the costly social interventions we are implementing now are mostly just delaying the spread of infection.