In the great majority of wrecks, all souls were lost

July 18th, 2019

During the great Age of Exploration — from the 16th century through the advent of modern navigation and communications — there were more than 9,000 shipwrecks:

In the great majority of wrecks, all souls were lost to a watery grave. Occasionally, survivors endured at sea in small vessels; for example, the Essex went down in 1820, and its crew drifted in narrow whaleboats for weeks, eventually resorting to cannibalism. (Their story inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick.) But for our present purposes, we need cases in which survivors made landfall and set up camp, and those are rare.

Nicholas A. Christakis studied shipwrecks for data about the micro-societies that form and then succeed or fail:

We must acknowledge that, even in these twenty examples that fit our criteria, the survivors are not strictly representative of humanity. The people who traveled on ships were not randomly drawn from the human population; they were often serving in the navy or the marines or were enslaved persons, convicts or traders. Shipboard life involved exacting status divisions and command structures to which these people were accustomed. Survivor groups were therefore made up of people who not only frequently came from a single distinctive cultural background (Dutch, Portuguese, English and so on), but who were also part of the various subcultures associated with long ocean voyages during the epoch of exploration. These shipwreck societies were, consequently, mostly male. Furthermore, the majority of our research subjects had narrowly escaped death and were psychologically traumatized, arriving at their islands nearly drowned and sometimes naked and wounded.

We have already discussed some shipwrecks that went badly, devolving into murder and cannibalism. But what factors were shared by shipwreck societies that were most successful? In our sample, the groups that typically fared best were those that had good leadership in the form of mild hierarchy (without any brutality), friendships among the survivors, and evidence of co-operation and altruism.

Shipwrecks make good stories:

One shipwreck in which altruism involving resource sharing and risky volunteerism was particularly evident was the case of the Julia Ann. The ship wrecked in the Isles of Scilly, a reef in the Pacific, on September 7, 1855, stranding fifty-one people for two months. The misadventure was brought to a close when the captain and a crew of nine volunteered to row three days into the horizon to reach Bora Bora, 217 miles to the east, in order to get help. Five lives were lost when the Julia Ann struck a reef, but all of the fifty-one survivors were eventually rescued. A newspaper later reported:

Capt. Pond’s chief desire throughout the whole sad affair seemed to be to save the lives of the passengers and crew, as the following noble act illustrates: While the crew were engaged in getting the passengers ashore [using a lifeline from the wreck offshore], Mr. Owens, the second mate, was going to carry a bag containing eight thousand dollars belonging to the Captain, ashore. The captain ordered him to leave the money and carry a girl ashore…The child was saved, but the money lost.

This visible act of altruism at the outset powerfully established an example for the group to cooperate and work together. Half the Julia Ann castaways were of the Mormon faith, and this may have helped the group cohere. The captain noted that they were “so easy to be governed” and “always ready to hear and obey my counsel.”

This detail from the Blenden Hall account caught my eye:

The eighteen-year-old son of the captain, who himself showed great leadership during the ordeal, kept a diary in penguin blood written in the margins of salvaged newspapers

Christakis directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale.

Posted in Policy | 3 Comments »

America is losing its grip

July 18th, 2019

America is losing its grip — literally:

When she was a practicing occupational therapist, Elizabeth Fain started noticing something odd in her clinic: Her patients were weak. More specifically, their grip strengths, recorded via a hand-held dynamometer, were “not anywhere close to the norms” that had been established back in the 1980s.

[...]

In a study published in 2015 in The Lancet, the health outcomes of nearly 140,000 people across 17 countries were tracked over four years, via a variety of measures—including grip strength. Grip strength was not only “inversely associated with all-cause mortality”—every 5 kilogram (kg) decrement in grip strength was associated with a 17 percent risk increase—but as the team, led by McMaster University professor of medicine Darryl Leong, noted: “Grip strength was a stronger predictor of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality than systolic blood pressure.”

Grip strength has even been found to be correlated more robustly with “ageing markers” than chronological aging itself. It has become a key method of diagnosing sarcopenia, the loss of muscle mass associated with aging. Low grip strength has been linked to longer hospital stays, and in a study of hospitalized cancer patients, it was linked to a “an approximate 3-fold decrease in probability of discharge alive.” In older subjects, lower grip strength has even been linked with declines in cognitive performance.

“I’ve seen people refer to it as a ‘will-to-live’ meter,” says Richard Bohannon, a professor of health studies at North Carolina’s Campbell University. Grip strength, he suggests, is not necessarily an overall indicator of health, nor is it causative—if you start building your grip strength now it does not ensure you will live longer—“but it is related to important things.” What’s more, it’s non-invasive, and inexpensive to measure. Bohannon notes that in his home-care practice, a grip strength test is now de rigueur. “I use it in basically all of my patients,” he says. “It gives you an overall sense of their status, and high grip strength is better than low grip strength.”

Grip Strength vs. Age

Curious about what that all of that means for my own grip strength, I went out and bought a Jamar Hydraulic Hand Dynamometer, which is favored by clinicians. My strength rang in at nearly 62 kgs which, according to a chart of normative grip strengths in the Jamar’s manual, was above the mean for males 45-49, but not hugely outside the standard deviation. In that data, my age group did worse than the 20-24 age group, like you’d expect.

What was surprising was that my grip strength came in at 40 percent above a group of contemporary male college students that Fain measured last year. She found that a group of males aged 20-24—ages that had produced some of the peak mean grip strength scores in the 1980s tests—had a mean grip strength of just 44.7 kgs, well below my own and far below the same cohort in the 1980s, whose mean was in the low 50s. There were also significant declines in female grip strength.

I just dug out my dynamometer, and I may need to dig out my Captains of Crush grip trainers, too.

Posted in Fitness, Science | 5 Comments »

What did I learn today?

July 17th, 2019

Tyler Cowen shares a partial list of his intellectual practice strategies:

1. I write every day. I also write to relax.

2. Much of my writing time is devoted to laying out points of view which are not my own. I recommend this for most of you.

3. I do serious reading every day.

4. After a talk, Q&A session, podcast — whatever — I review what I thought were my weaker answers or interventions and think about how I could improve them. I rehearse in my mind what I should have said. Larry Summers does something similar.

5. I spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to crack cultural codes. I view this as a comparative advantage, and one which few other people in my fields are trying to replicate. For one thing, it makes me useful in a wide variety of situations where I have little background knowledge. This also helps me invest in skills which will age relatively well, as I age. For me, this is perhaps the most importantly novel item on this list.

6. I listen often to highly complex music, partly because I enjoy it but also in the (silly?) hope that it will forestall mental laziness.

7. I have regular interactions with very smart people who will challenge me and be very willing to disagree, including “GMU lunch.”

8. Every day I ask myself “what did I learn today?”, a question I picked up from Amihai Glazer. I feel bad if I don’t have a clear answer, while recognizing the days without a clear answer are often the days where I am learning the most (at least in the equilibrium where I am asking myself this question).

9. One factor behind my choice of friends is what kind of approbational sway they will exercise over me. You should want to hang around people who are good influences, including on your mental abilities. Peer effects really are quite strong.

10. I watch very little television. And no drugs and no alcohol should go without saying.

11. In addition to being a “product” in its own right, I also consider doing Conversations with Tyler — with many of the very smartest people out there — to be a form of practice. It is a practice for speed, accuracy in understanding written writings, and the ability to crack the cultural codes of my guests.

12. I teach — a big one.

Physical exercise is a realm all of its own, and that is good for your mind too. For me it is basketball, tennis, exercise bike, sometimes light weights, swimming if I am at a decent hotel with a pool. My plan is to do more of this.

Here are a few things I don’t do:

Taking notes is a favorite with some people I know, though my penmanship and coordination and also typing are too problematic for that.

I also don’t review video or recordings of myself, for fear that will make me too self-conscious. For many people that is probably a good idea, however.

I don’t spend time trying to improve my memory, which is either very bad or very good, depending on the kind of problem facing me. (If I need to remember to do something, I require a visual cue, sometimes a pile on the floor, and that creates a bit of a mess. But it works — spatial organization is information!)

I’ve never practiced trying to type on a small screen, though probably I should.

Posted in Education | 4 Comments »

Hospitals are sonic hellscapes

July 17th, 2019

Hospitals are some of the least restful places imaginable:

Hospitals today can be sonic hellscapes, which studies have shown regularly exceed levels set by the World Health Organization: droning IV pumps, ding-donging nurse call buttons, voices crackling on loudspeakers, ringing telephones, beeping elevators, buzzing ID scanners, clattering carts, coughing, screaming, vomiting.

Then there are the alarms. A single patient might trigger hundreds each day, challenging caregivers to figure out which machine is beeping, and what is wrong with the patient, if anything. (Studies have shown that as many as 99 percent of alarms are false.)

The proliferation of pinging and bleeping can contribute to patient delirium and staff burnout. And because caregivers know that many devices are crying wolf, they might be less responsive or apathetic, a potentially fatal safety issue known as alarm fatigue.

From 2005 to 2008, more than 500 patients in the United States had adverse outcomes, mostly death, because an alarm was ignored, or a device was silenced or mismanaged in some way, according to the Food and Drug Administration, which tracks adverse events involving medical devices.

[...]

Dr. Ozcan, who has had practice translating vast quantities of data into audio cues for the European Space Agency’s mission control dashboards, said her group at the lab was developing devices to hush the intensive care unit, which can be louder than a vacuum cleaner, and challenging conventional device design, possibly even making alarms “beautiful,” she said.

One of her group’s projects, called CareTunes, is a speculative, even quixotic, melodic design.

The device transcribes a patient’s physiological condition into songs that sound a bit like chill electronic dance music. (Ms. Sen was an artistic adviser to the project.)

The melody is derived from a patient’s vital signs: drums for the heartbeat, guitar for oxygen saturation and piano for blood pressure. When a patient is stable, the tune is harmonious, but it becomes dissonant when a patient’s status changes for the worse, ideally grabbing a caregiver’s attention.

Posted in Technology | 6 Comments »

Implicit learning ability is distinct from IQ or working memory

July 16th, 2019

Our implicit learning ability seems to be distinct from IQ or working memory:

Priya Kalra at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her colleagues gave 64 healthy young adults four types of tasks that required implicit learning. One involved detecting an artificial grammar (after studying a series of letter strings that all adhered to undisclosed grammatical rules, the participants had to judge which strings among a new set were “grammatical” and which were not.) The second task required them to learn whether a particular group of images was going to trigger one outcome, or another (and they were given feedback to help them to learn). For the third task, they had to predict where a circle was going to appear on a screen, based on prior experience, during which the circle sometimes appeared in a predictable sequence of positions and sometimes did not. Finally, they had to learn visual categories implicitly: with the help of feedback, they had to classify abstract visual stimuli into one of two categories. (Explicit learning could have fed into some of these tasks, but the researchers made efforts to investigate, and take into account, its contribution for each individual.)

One week later, the participants returned to complete different versions of all these tasks, as well as tests of working memory, explicit learning (they had to deliberately learn a list of words) and IQ.

For three of the four implicit learning tasks, the researchers found a “medium” level relationship between a participant’s initial performance and how well they did a week later. This suggests stability in implicit learning ability. The exception was the artificial grammar task; the researchers think it’s possible that explicit learning “contaminated” implicit learning in this task at the second time-point.

The team also found that how good a participant was at implicit learning bore no relation to their IQ or working memory results. It seems, then, to be driven by independent neural processes to those that underpin explicit learning, which is linked to IQ.

This finding fits with earlier work that has tied explicit and implicit learning to different brain regions and networks. (The hippocampus is important for explicit but not implicit earning, for example, whereas damage to the basal ganglia and cerebellum impair implicit, but not explicit, learning.)

The new results have implications for theories that intelligence depends upon a single fundamental factor, such as processing speed, the researchers write. “These data … provide evidence for the existence of a completely uncorrelated cognitive ability,” they added.

The findings also imply that someone might feasibly be smart, as measured by an IQ test, but poorer at implicit learning than someone else with a significantly lower IQ score.

This might explain all kinds of things, from book-smart nerds with no common sense, to Jared Diamond’s acquaintances in Papua New Guinea.

Posted in Education, Science | 5 Comments »

There are people who could afford any of the private schools in LA but want that school in particular

July 16th, 2019

I’ve mentioned Elon Musk’s Ad Astra school before, and now word is slowly spreading:

Ad Astra has a lower profile than most start-ups in stealth mode. Its website is just a logo and an email address, and the school does not market itself to parents. Musk himself has said virtually nothing about Ad Astra, and both SpaceX and Ad Astra declined our requests for comment. Currently, the only glimpses of Ad Astra available to outsiders come from a 2017 webinar interview with the school’s principal (captured in an unlisted YouTube video) and recent public filings like the IRS document referenced above.

Despite this mystique, demand among families in Los Angeles is astronomical, says Christina Simon, author of Beyond the Brochure, a guide to private elementary schools in the city. “There are people who could afford any of the private schools in LA but want that school in particular,” she says. “It’s very much about Elon Musk and who he is.”

The last admissions cycle in 2017 saw up to 400 families visit in the hope of securing one of just a dozen open spots.

In December, an online application form purportedly for Ad Astra starting popping up in Los Angeles parenting forums and Facebook groups. The form asked for details of grades, test scores, and personal information about families, but it had no affiliation or contact listed.

“I talked to several parents who were going to take a chance and apply, even though it was impossible to verify that it was an Ad Astra application,” says Simon. “That’s the level of interest in this school. I cannot imagine that happening with any other school, public or private.”

The school is even mysterious within SpaceX, Musk’s rocket company that houses Ad Astra on its campus in the industrial neighborhood of Hawthorne. About half Ad Astra’s students are children of SpaceX employees, and the school is touted during recruiting, says Simon. “I’ve heard from various SpaceX families that they have tried and failed to get information about the school, even though they were told it was a benefit during the interview,” she says.

The lucky few who succeed in applying, pass a reasoning test, and are admitted ultimately enter a school quite unlike any other. For a start, Ad Astra’s location inside a working company is unconventional to say the least. “We started with eight kids in a really small conference room with transparent walls,” says Joshua Dahn, head of the school, speaking in conversation with entrepreneur Peter Diamandis last year. “Engineers [would] always come drop by and peek on it.”

That first year, Musk’s children accounted for nearly two thirds of the student body. “It was really small,” remembers Dahn. “Especially when five [students] from the same family… go on vacation and you have three kids [left].”

It is not unusual for parents to have a grassroots effort to build their own school, according to Nancy Hertzog, an educational psychology professor at University of Washington and an expert in gifted education. “But money talks in terms of how that school is directed and supported,” she says. “The worry would be, are these schools preventing kids from other populations getting in? Are there strict test scores, and can they support kids with disabilities?”

A non-discrimination policy quietly published in the Los Angeles Times in 2016 stated that Ad Astra does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national and ethnic origin, but the document made no mention of disabilities.

Although Ad Astra now has dedicated classrooms and a chemistry lab at SpaceX, its start-up chic still includes whiteboard walls, a Mac laptop for every student, and food trucks for after-school sessions. These, like everything else at school including tuition, are paid for by Elon Musk. He gave Ad Astra $475,000 in both 2014 and 2015, according to the IRS document, and likely more in recent years as the school grew to 31 students.

“[Elon] is extraordinarily generous,” says Dahn. “And it allows us to take any kid that sort of fits… We don’t have unlimited resources but we have more resources than a traditional school.”

Posted in Education | 8 Comments »

Kiwis are keeping their guns

July 15th, 2019

New Zealand has an estimated 1.5 million firearms. It’s not clear how many of those are semi-automatic, but it’s probably far, far more than the 700 that have been turned in under the new gun control scheme:

That gun owners would, in large numbers, defy restrictions should have been anticipated by anybody who knows the history of government attempts to disarm their subjects — or who just glanced across the Tasman Sea to Australia.

“In Australia it is estimated that only about 20% of all banned self-loading rifles have been given up to the authorities,” wrote Franz Csaszar, professor of criminology at the University of Vienna, after Australia’s 1996 compensated confiscation of firearms following a mass murder in Port Arthur, Tasmania. Csaszar put the number of illegally retained arms in Australia at between two and five million.

“Many members of the community still possess grey-market firearms because they did not surrender these during the 1996–97 gun buyback,” the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission conceded in a 2016 report. “The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission continues to conservatively estimate that there are more than 260,000 firearms in the illicit firearms market.”

Posted in Policy, Weapons | 1 Comment »

You won’t be at the table

July 15th, 2019

Saleforce.com has announced a ban on its customers selling “military-style rifles,” and this leads Eric S. Raymond to discuss the dangerous folly of “Software as a Service”:

It’s 2019 and I feel like I shouldn’t have to restate the obvious, but if you want to keep control of your business the software you rely on needs to be open-source. All of it. All of it. And you can’t afford it to be tethered to a service provider even if the software itself is nominally open source.

Otherwise, how do you know some political fanatic isn’t going to decide your product is unclean and chop you off at the knees? It’s rifles today, it’ll be anything that can be tagged “hateful” tomorrow — and you won’t be at the table when the victim-studies majors are defining “hate”. Even if you think you’re their ally, you can’t count on escaping the next turn of the purity spiral.

And that’s disregarding all the more mundane risks that come from the fact that your vendor’s business objectives aren’t the same as yours.

Posted in Policy, Technology | 9 Comments »

Like any editor, Stalin could be ambivalent

July 14th, 2019

The Soviet Union, Aaron Lake Smith reminds us, was a regime founded by freelance writers and editors:

In other words, a nightmare. Pamphleteers, autodidactic theoreticians, critics, publishers of small journals, hot-­take artists, takedown artists, and failed poets who’d reinvented themselves as labor organizers — fractious and at constant war with one another, literary people through and through.

If we imagine the early Soviet Union as a hierarchical publishing company, a magazine or new media outfit like The New Republic or BuzzFeed, Lenin was the founder and publisher, Trotsky was the deputy editor, and Stalin was the seemingly humble managing editor. As anyone who has worked in publishing knows, the managing editor is the hardest worker. They make sure the deadlines are met and the trains run on time. They are, above all, reliable. This particular managing editor takes no vacations, never leaves town. He lives for the work, strives to appear to be the mere executor of the will of the publisher and the company.

When the publisher becomes very sick, it is the managing editor who visits him at home to cheer him up with jokes and receive his instructions. By bringing the boss’s instructions back to the office from on high, he leverages this personal relationship and increases his authority within the organization. It’s not hard to see how Stalin’s ascent within the Bolshevik hierarchy happened. We’ve all seen this person before. When the publisher dies, no one suspects the managing editor of harboring ambitions to take over. But really, who better understands the day-­to-­day functioning of the organization, who better to be in charge?

Stalin was a consummate editor. He seemed to understand that the role was to sublimate ego in order to shape the world quietly in the background. Good editors know how to render themselves invisible. Stalin’s blue pencil, unlike that of other editors, glided across not just poetry chapbooks and literary journals but life itself. “Fool,” “bastard,” “scoundrel,” he wrote in the margins of Andrei Platonov’s 1931 novella, Profit, destroying Platonov’s career. “Radek, you ginger bastard, if you hadn’t pissed into the wind, if you hadn’t been so bad, you’d still be alive,” he scrawled on a male nude drawing that reminded him of Karl Radek, an editor and strategist of the October Revolution whose death he had ordered years earlier. “You need to work, not masturbate,” he wrote on another. The combination of editorial influence with the power of life and death itself resulted in absurd, nearly un­believable situations — such as when Stalin’s old friend and comrade Nikolai Bukharin wrote him from the prison cell Stalin had put him in, begging his inquisitor for a preface to what would be his last book. “I fervently beg you not to let this work disappear… this is completely apart from my personal fate… Have pity! Not on me, on the work!”

Like any editor, Stalin could be ambivalent. “Stalin has a very particular attitude toward me,” the great Soviet writer Vasily Grossman told his daughter. “He does not send me to the camps, but he never awards me prizes.” Several times anticipated to win the prestigious Stalin Prize for his celebrated novels — in one instance, having planned the victory party, à la ­Hillary at the Javits Center — at the last minute Grossman found his name mysteriously removed from the list each time.

Today Grossman is best known as the author of Life and Fate, a novel often called the War and Peace of the twentieth century. The kaleidoscopic thousand-­page book, which follows the middle-­class Shaposhnikov family through the Second World War, is an indictment of ideological zealotry and a stark account of the horrors of Stalinism. The narrative ranges from the Great Terror to the gulag, the German camps, and Stalin’s late anti-­Semitic campaigns of the 1950s, slowly building the sense that, in their lack of humanity, the Soviet and Nazi regimes became mirror images of each other. “Does human nature undergo a true change in the cauldron of totalitarian violence? Does man lose his innate yearning for freedom?” Grossman asks at a pivotal moment. “The fate of both man and the totalitarian State depend on the answer to this question.” The book was considered so dangerous that all known copies of the text were “arrested” and suppressed by the KGB in 1961, an experience that broke Grossman physically and spiritually. “They strangled me in a dark corner,” he said. After his death, a copy he had hidden with an old friend was smuggled out of Russia on microfilm and published in the West in 1980, only appearing in Russia during the glasnost.

Posted in Policy | 5 Comments »

Front-seat belts have pretensioners and load limiters

July 13th, 2019

Seat belt technology has improved over the years — but only in the front seats, which are now safer than the back seats:

For the sake of comfort, modern seat belts give a little as occupants move. But if a passenger suddenly pitches forward, a mechanism called an inertia-lock retractor will prevent the belt from completely unspooling. This device is used in both front- and rear-seat belts.

“It doesn’t get any tighter,” Mr. Zuby said. “It just stops where it is.”

Front seat belts, though, have two safety features that typically aren’t found in back: a pretensioner and a load limiter.

The pretensioner reels in a seat belt when a vehicle rapidly decelerates, pulling occupants firmly against the seat to prevent them from smashing into the steering wheel or glove compartment. The load limiter causes the belt to loosen slightly if the tension of a passenger launching forward against an unyielding belt reaches a dangerous threshold.

“The idea of a seat belt is twofold,” Mr. Zuby said. “Pretensioners take out slack before the occupant pushes into the belt. Load limiters allow the belt to pay out to make sure the forces that keep you with the car don’t get high enough to injure you, in particular your chest.”

To see what happens in frontal crashes—when seat belts offer the most protection—the Insurance Institute examined injuries to 117 belted rear-seat passengers in collisions that occurred from 2004 through 2015. The occupants in the study, which was published in April, were age 6 or older. The vehicles were model year 2000 or later and were no more than 10 years old at the time of the crash.

Thirty-six of the rear-seat passengers were seriously injured and 81 were killed. More than half were more seriously injured than front-seat passengers in the same crash.

[...]

Since then, a 2013 study by NHTSA has found that front-seat occupants of passenger vehicles wearing seat belts with pretensioners and load limiters had a 12.8% lower fatality risk than occupants restrained by front-seat belts without these technologies.

Posted in Technology | 5 Comments »

The numbers used to assess health are not helpful

July 12th, 2019

The numbers used to assess health are, for the most part, not helpful, but other, simpler metrics are:

The speed at which you walk, for example, can be eerily predictive of health status. In a study of nearly 35,000 people aged 65 years or older in the Journal of the American Medical Association, those who walked at about 2.6 feet per second over a short distance — which would amount to a mile in about 33 minutes — were likely to hit their average life expectancy. With every speed increase of around 4 inches per second, the chance of dying in the next decade fell by about 12 percent. (Whenever I think about this study, I start walking faster.)

Walking speed isn’t unique. Studies of simple predictors of longevity like these come out every couple of years, building up a cadre of what could be called alternative vital signs. In 2018, a study of half a million middle-aged people found that lung cancer, heart disease, and all-cause mortality were well predicted by the strength of a person’s grip.

Yes, how hard you can squeeze a grip meter. This was a better predictor of mortality than blood pressure or overall physical activity. A prior study found that grip strength among people in their 80s predicted the likelihood of making it past 100. Even more impressive, grip strength had good predictive ability in a study among 18-year-olds in the Swedish military on cardiovascular death 25 years later.

Another study made headlines earlier this year for declaring that push-up abilities could predict heart disease. Stefanos Kales, a professor at Harvard Medical School, noticed that the leading cause of death of firefighters on duty was not smoke inhalation, burns, or trauma, but sudden cardiac death. This is usually caused by coronary-artery disease. Even in this high-risk profession, people are most likely to die of the same thing as everyone else.

Still, the profession needed effective screening tests to define fitness for duty. Since firefighters are generally physically fit people, Kales’s lab looked at push-ups. He found that they were an even better predictor of cardiovascular disease than a submaximal treadmill test. “The results show a strong association between push-up capacity and decreased risk of subsequent cardiovascular disease,” Kales says.

You would think the drive to move to these new metrics would come from their effectiveness and efficiency:

This is driven in part by the Americans With Disabilities Act, which mandates that people not be discriminated against in occupational settings based on BMI or age.

This estimate caught my eye:

Granted, Joyner and other experts I heard from estimated that the number of Americans who can do a single push-up is likely only about 20 or 30 percent.

Posted in Fitness, Science | 6 Comments »

How to fight a war in space (and get away with it)

July 11th, 2019

We depend on satellites, so knocking them out is becoming a military priority:

Today, much more civilian infrastructure relies on GPS and satellite communications, so attacks on them could lead to chaos. The military leans more heavily on satellites too: data and video feeds for armed UAVs, such as the Reaper drones that the US military has flying over Afghanistan and Iraq, are sent via satellite to their human operators. Intelligence and images are also collected by satellites and beamed to operations centers around the world. In the assessment of Chinese analysts, space is used for up to 90% of the US military’s intelligence.

[...]

Non-state actors, as well as more minor powers like North Korea and Iran, are also gaining access to weapons that can bloody the noses of much larger nations in space.

That doesn’t necessarily mean blowing up satellites. Less aggressive methods typically involve cyberattacks to interfere with the data flows between satellites and the ground stations. Some hackers are thought to have done this already.

For example, in 2008, a cyberattack on a ground station in Norway let someone cause 12 minutes of interference with NASA’s Landsat satellites. Later that year, hackers gained access to NASA’s Terra Earth observation satellite and did everything but issue commands.

[...]

There are strong suspicions that Russia has been jamming GPS signals during NATO exercises in Norway and Finland, and using similar tactics in other conflicts. “Russia is absolutely attacking space systems using jammers throughout the Ukraine,” says Weeden. Jamming is hard to distinguish from unintentional interference, making attribution difficult (the US military regularly jams its own communications satellites by accident). A recent report from the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) claims that China is now developing jammers that can target a wide range of frequencies, including military communication bands. North Korea is believed to have bought jammers from Russia, and insurgent groups in Iraq and Afghanistan have been known to use them too.

Spoofing, meanwhile, puts out a fake signal that tricks GPS or other satellite receivers on the ground. Again, it’s surprisingly easy. In the summer of 2013, some students at the University of Texas used a briefcase-sized device to spoof a GPS signal and cause an $80 million private yacht to veer hundreds of meters off course in the Mediterranean. Their exploit wasn’t detected (they later announced it themselves).

[...]

There’s no evidence that anyone has yet used lasers to destroy targets in space, though aircraft-borne lasers have been tested against missiles within the atmosphere. The DIA report suggests that China will have a ground-based laser that can destroy a satellite’s optical sensors in low Earth orbit as early as next year (and that will, by the mid-2020s, be capable of damaging the structure of the satellite). Generally, the intention with lasers is not to blast a satellite out of the sky but to overwhelm its image sensor so it can’t photograph sensitive locations. The damage can be temporary, unless the laser is powerful enough to make it permanent.

Lasers need to be aimed very precisely, and to work well they require complex adaptive optics to make up for atmospheric disturbances, much as some large ground-based telescopes do. Yet there is some evidence, all unconfirmed and eminently deniable, that they are already being used. In 2006, US officials claimed that China was aiming lasers at US imaging satellites passing over Chinese territory.

[...]

In November 2016, the Commercial Spaceflight Center at AGI, an aerospace firm, noticed something strange. Shortly after it was launched, a Chinese satellite, supposedly designed to test high-performance solar cells and new propellants, began approaching a number of other Chinese communications satellites, staying in orbit near them before moving on. It got within a few miles of one—dangerously close in space terms. It paid visits to others in 2017 and 2018. Another Chinese satellite, launched last December, released a second object once it reached geostationary orbit that seemed to be under independent control.

The suspicion is that China is practicing for something known as a co-orbital attack, in which an object is sent into orbit near a target satellite, maneuvers itself into position, and then waits for an order. Such exercises could have less aggressive purposes—inspecting other satellites or repairing or disposing of them, perhaps. But co-orbiting might also be used to jam or snoop on enemy satellites’ data, or even to attack them physically.

Russia, too, has been playing about in geostationary orbit. One of its satellites, Olymp-K, began moving about regularly, at one point getting in between two Intelsat commercial satellites. Another time, it got so close to a French-Italian military satellite that the French government called it an act of “espionage.” The US, similarly, has tested a number of small satellites that can maneuver around in space.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 7 Comments »

Fortnite’s dominance is ebbing

July 10th, 2019

The Wall Street Journal takes a look at the man behind Fortnite:

By age 30, Epic Games Inc. founder and CEO Tim Sweeney had a couple of successful videogames under his belt and was starting to make real money.

“I had a Ferrari and a Lamborghini in the parking lot of my apartment,” he recalled. “People who hadn’t met me thought I must be a drug dealer.”

Today, Mr. Sweeney, at 48, is worth more than $7 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. Epic was last valued at $15 billion, counting Walt Disney Co. and China’s Tencent Holdings PLC among its investors. And “Fortnite,” its blockbuster game, has racked up 250 million players and $3.9 billion in estimated revenue.

[...]

While the biggest U.S. videogame companies are clustered in Los Angeles, New York and the Bay Area, Epic is based in Cary, N.C., down the road from Raleigh. Mr. Sweeney said the location prevents Epic from being swayed by Silicon Valley groupthink.

[...]

Epic tried something different. It made “Fortnite” free and put it on every major device people use to play games — consoles, computers, smartphones and tablets. It put its own spin on a trendy new genre called Battle Royale, where a large group of players fight until only one person or squad is left standing. It constantly tweaked the game’s virtual world to give players something new to discover. And it took the popular shooter format and made it less violent and more playful, with colorful characters who compete with dance moves as well as firearms.

[...]

By erasing the barriers between players with different devices, Epic effectively turned “Fortnite” into a massive social network. Wearing headsets to talk to one another, groups of friends trade jokes and gossip while battling to survive.

[...]

Mr. Sweeney founded Epic in 1991 from his parents’ basement, at age 20, funding it with $4,000 in personal savings. He later dropped out of the University of Maryland a few credits shy of a mechanical-engineering degree. “I went from mowing lawns to being CEO of Epic,” said Mr. Sweeney, who got his diploma in 2018.

In its early years, the company had some success with a handful of games, including “Unreal Tournament” and “Gears of War,” that followed more traditional shoot-’em-up formats.

[...]

Today, “Fortnite’s” dominance is ebbing. Monthly revenue from sales of virtual perks such as costumes and dance moves for players’ avatars has fallen 56% since peaking at a record $372.2 million in December, according to Nielsen’s SuperData.

Posted in Business, Games | 1 Comment »

All the hand-wringing about getting into good colleges is probably a waste of time

July 10th, 2019

Scott Alexander looks at increasingly competitive college admissions and ends with this summary:

  1. There is strong evidence for more competition for places at top colleges now than 10, 50, or 100 years ago. There is medium evidence that this is also true for upper-to-medium-tier colleges. It is still easy to get into medium-to-lower-tier colleges.
  2. Until 1900, there was no competition for top colleges, medical schools, or law schools. A secular trend towards increasing admissions (increasing wealth + demand for skills?) plus two shocks from the GI Bill and the Vietnam draft led to a glut of applicants that overwhelmed schools and forced them to begin selecting applicants.
  3. Changes up until ten years ago were because of a growing applicant pool, after which the applicant pool (both domestic and international) stopped growing and started shrinking. Increased competition since ten years ago does not involve applicant pool size.
  4. Changes after ten years ago are less clear, but the most important factor is probably the ease of applying to more colleges. This causes an increase in applications-per-admission which is mostly illusory. However, part of it may be real if it means students are stratifying themselves by ability more effectively. There might also be increased competition just because students got themselves stuck in a high-competition equilibrium (ie an arms race), but in the absence of data this is just speculation.
  5. Medical schools are getting harder to get into, but law schools are getting easier to get into. There is no good data for graduate schools.
  6. All the hand-wringing about getting into good colleges is probably a waste of time, unless you are from a disadvantaged background. For most people, admission to a more selective college does not translate into a more lucrative career or a higher chance of admission to postgraduate education. There may be isolated exceptions at the very top, like for Supreme Court justices.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | 5 Comments »

The trees are ready to cut

July 9th, 2019

A new federal program in the 1980s offered farmers money to reforest depleted land:

Pine trees appealed to Mr. George. He bought loblolly seedlings and pulled his pickup into a parking lot where hands-for-hire congregated.

“We figured we’d plant trees and come back and harvest it in 30 years and in the meantime go into town to make a living doing something else,” he said.

Three decades later the trees are ready to cut, and Mr. George is learning how many other Southerners had the same idea.

A glut of timber has piled up in the Southeast. There are far more ready-to-cut trees than the region’s mills can saw or pulp. The surfeit has crushed timber prices in Mississippi, Alabama and several other states.

The volume of Southern yellow pine, used in housing and to make paper, has surged in recent decades as farmers replaced cropland with trees and as clear-cut forests were replanted. By 2020, the amount of wood growing per acre of timberland in many counties will have more than quadrupled since 1980, U.S. forestry officials estimate.

It has been a big loser for some financial investors, among them the country’s largest pension fund. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System spent more than $2 billion on Southern timberland, and harvested trees at depressed prices to pay interest on money borrowed to buy. Calpers sold much of its land this summer at a loss. A spokeswoman for the pension fund declined to comment.

It has also been tough for the individuals and families who own much of the South’s forestland, and who had banked on its operating as a college fund or retirement account. The region has more than six million owners of at least 10 wooded acres, say academics and forestry consultants. Many of the owners were counting on forests as a long-term investment that could be replenished and passed on to heirs.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 3 Comments »

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