Entries associated with the tag "Research":

I am not astonished at the existence of Dr. Vino's blog, but who knew there was an American Association of Wine Economists? (Thanks, Whet.)

Dr. Vino in a recent post waxes lengthy and eloquent on the carbon footprint of various wines, and reaches a conclusion I think somewhat similar to that of the omniscient Michael Pollan: local makes a lot of difference. A few tidbits:

"Shipping premium wine, bottled at the winery, around the world mostly involves shipping glass with some wine in it. In this regard, drinking wine from a magnum is the more carbon-friendly choice since the glass-to-wine ratio is less. Half-bottles, by contrast, worsen the ratio.

"Shipping wine in bulk from the source and bottling closer to the point of consumption lowers carbon intensity.

"Light packaging material such as Tetra-Pak or bag-in-a-box has much less carbon intensity...

"There’s a 'green line' that runs down the middle of Ohio. For points to the West of that line, it is more carbon efficient to consume wine trucked from California. To the East of that line, it’s more efficient to consume the same sized bottle of wine from Bordeaux, which has had benefited from the efficiencies of container shipping, followed by a shorter truck trip." 

And on and on. If you like this sort of thing, you'll want to read the whole thing, or better yet, the full study titled "Red, White and 'Green': The Cost of Carbon in the Global Wine Trade," (pdf), which is AAWE Working Paper no. 9.

But nerdliness has its limits. Speaking as someone who can lose all focus when confronted with the wonderful maps that show how many days it will take to ship something from La Porte to Laramie, I say stop it! Environmentalist wine connoisseurs shouldn't spend their time on such things. They should lobby Congress to impose a hefty carbon tax ASAP, so that we all get the message loud and clear from the price stickers on Ripple and everything else.

Nothing less will help, because nobody has time to go around calculating the carbon footprint of every damn thing they do/eat/drink. That's what markets are for.

A lot of data from a credible source says being mildly overweight might be OK.

JAMA abstract (full text costs $): "Overweight was associated with significantly decreased mortality from noncancer, non-CVD causes...but not associated with cancer or CVD mortality."

David Usborne from The Independent UK, elaborating: "Those Americans who were merely overweight were up to about 40 per cent less likely than normal-weight people to die from a whole range of diseases and risks including emphysema, pneumonia, Alzheimer's, injuries and various infections." 

"In the United States, the percentage of schoolchildren planning to become high-status professionals is grossly disproportionate to the percentage of such jobs comprising our division of labor. As in a game of musical chairs, it is not structurally possible for everyone to remain a contender."

Reed College anthropologist Anne Lorimer spends some quality time with nonpilot visitors to the Museum of Science and Industry's exhibit of an airplane cockpit. They talk about "how they visually experienced a pilot’s workplace, and the lessons they drew from this experience." She writes about it in the current issue of Teachers College Record (it's behind a paywall, but here's a sketchy summary).

As near as I can tell, she's interested in how people rationalize their failure to win the game of professional musical chairs, and how those rationalizations help or hurt them in doing what they can do. She's working on "a book-length ethnography" of the museum, and my guess is it'll either be really great or it'll sound like, well, a TCR article urging on us "a pedagogy in which, rather than appropriating technological knowledge, one appropriates one’s own alienation from this knowledge."

"Affected species have three possible responses to global climate change," write Robert Sullivan of Argonne National Laboratory and Milt Clark of USEPA's Region V in the March issue of Chicago Wilderness Journal: "change, move, or die."

They admit they can't answer their article's title question, "Can Biodiversity Survive Global Warming?" because ecosystems are complex and different climate models predict different degrees of warming. But "it is believed that the net effects of global climate change will favor invasive species -- those opportunists that can quickly exploit the new ecological niches that will open up as native species ...cannot adapt.... The additional stresses on ecosystems (along with higher temperatures) will also likely favor vector-borne diseases such as the mosquito-spread West Nile virus that has devastated populations of many bird species in the Chicago area."

Dying is as easy as ever, but moving isn't. Roads, cities, suburbs, and farms have broken up habitats, so that "species that could once move long distances freely to seek more favorite habitat are now faced with numerous man-made barriers," increasing the invasives' advantage. "Habitat fragmentation also reduces the genetic pool from which species can draw to evolve new mechanisms to cope with change."

The article is heavily footnoted to the scientific literature, some of which is accessible on-line free, including a thorough 35-page 2006 review, "Ecological and Evolutionary Responses to Recent Climate Change" by Camille Parmesan of the University of Texas, who notes that "documented rapid loss of habitable climate space makes it no surprise that the first extinctions of entire species attributed to global warming are mountain-restricted species," specifically frogs in the Costa Rican cloud forests. On a mountain, the only way to stay cool is to move up, and pretty soon you run out of mountain.

Bitch Ph.D. reads a two-year-old book, Promises I Can Keep by sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, and it makes her think:

The poor single moms interviewed "have mainstream, even conservative ideas of what marriage should be, and they don't want to get married if they don't trust that the men will be faithful, help provide for their children, not be abusive, etc. ... The women also have mainstream, conservative ideas about the value and importance of children--so much so that they often think of abortion as irresponsible. Which is an interesting and profound realization, I think, and one that those of us who are pro-choice would do well to think very hard about. A lot of the time we argue for abortion rights as if we were doing so on behalf of poor women; we need to realize that many poor women are not themselves pro-choice, and that if we really want to advocate for them, we should start by listening to what they have to say."

(Hmm -- calling basketball stars "hos" is irresponsible, but that doesn't mean the First Amendment should be trashed. Similarly, the rights to own a gun or to choose abortion aren't qualified by the fact that they're sometimes exercised irresponsibly.)

"For the middle class and the wealthy, it makes a lot of economic sense to postpone having children. We're wrong, though, to prescribe waiting to poor women, for whom there are no economic disincentives to early childbearing. For these women, early childbirth is, at worst, neutral, and at best a positive improvement on not only their economic but also their emotional and mental well-being. We're used to thinking of what we have to teach the poor; this book does a great job of showing us what the poor have to teach us about parenting, childrearing, and looking at things from a more genuinely feminist point of view--one in which children really are a central part of life, rather than an optional choice."

Do you like this definition of feminism? Or Linda Hirshman's? 

Lots of old fogeys, including famous social scientist Robert "Bowling Alone" Putnam, have said that TV may be ripping up our social fabric, on the grounds that time spent with Tony Soprano is time not spent with friends and neighbors. It's hard to test this hypothesis because in the US the spread of TV coincided with other trends, like suburbanization, so the other trends might be at fault and TV an innocent bystander. But Harvard economist Benjamin Olken found a way, in Indonesia. The availability of TV in 600 villages in eastern and central Java there isn't related to other social trends as far as he can tell, making their experience a reasonable test case.

You can read all 44 pages of details here (PDF) if you want to quarrel with the methodology, but here's the gist:

"Reception of an extra channel of television is associated with a decline of about 7 percent in the total number of social groups in the village, and with the typical adult in the village attending 11 percent fewer group meetings. The effects are particularly strong among community self-improvement activities, neighborhood associations, school committees, and informal savings groups. These declines in social participation represent a net decline in social activity, rather than a shift from formal social groups to informal gatherings."

More TV also leads to "substantially lower self-reported levels of trust" in the villages, writes Olken, but did not seem to affect the level of corruption in ongoing road projects.

Is it too early to ask whether YouTube will bring us all back together again?

We'll need conservation in the short run, but some potential long-range global warming solutions are an environmental Luddite's nightmare:

"Solar photons can be converted into chemical fuel more resourcefully by breeding or genetically engineering designer plants, connecting natural photosynthetic pathways in novel configurations and using artificial bio-inspired nanoscale systems."

That's from an Argonne National Laboratory press release based on a sober assessment of solar technology potentials just published in Physics Today by George W. Crabtree of Argonne and Nathan S. Lewis of Cal Tech.

Read the whole thing for progress in artificial photosynthesis (and the lack of progress on batteries), but here's the big picture from the article itself:

"There is plenty of room for improvement [in gathering and using solar energy], since photovoltaic conversion efficiencies for inexpensive organic and dye-sensitized solar cells are currently about 10% or less, the conversion efficiency of photosynthesis is less than 1%, and the best solar thermal efficiency is 30%. The theoretical limits suggest that we can do much better" by improving on nature in various ways.

"Solar conversion is a young science. Its major growth began in the 1970s, spurred by the oil crisis that highlighted the pervasive importance of energy to our personal, social, economic, and political lives. In contrast, fossil-fuel science has developed over more than 250 years, stimulated by the Industrial Revolution and the promise of abundant fossil fuels. The science of thermodynamics, for example, is intimately intertwined with the development of the steam engine. The Carnot cycle, the mechanical equivalent of heat, and entropy all played starring roles in the development of thermodynamics and the technology of heat engines. Solar-energy science faces an equally rich future, with nanoscience enabling the discovery of the guiding principles of photonic energy conversion and their use in the development of cost-competitive new technologies."

These technical fixes will alarm both environmentalists who want to attach their pre-existing "stop being so materialistic" feelings to the climate change issue, and those denialists who are committed to exaggerating the costs of dealing with climate change, or even maniacally denying its reality. But they should look pretty good to everyone else.

Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed interviews Cornell profs Stephen J. Ceci (developmental psychology) and Wendy M. Williams (human development), coeditors of Why Aren't More Women in Science?: Top Researchers Debate the Evidence. The background, of course, is the controversy over Harvard president Larry Summers's suggestion that biology might play some part in women's underrepresentation in science.

Ceci and Williams: "For us, the worrisome aspect of the debate was not so much its substance as its tone. Defenders of Summer's remarks were vilified and dismissed. This does not serve the purpose of science -- it led to muzzling of the scholarly debate, with one side effectively silenced by the other. When we first sent out invitations to contribute essays to our book, we were saddened by the stories of some scholars who felt that they could not contribute because their views were scorned, and had resulted in personal attacks against them on their campuses.  If you read between the lines of several of the essays, you will detect this theme even among those who did contribute essays."

BTW, the editors' own position is nuanced. They write, "The story is complex and not apt to be reducible to single factors."

Voters didn't seem much interested in Republican Judy Baar Topinka's fiscal-responsibility message in the November governor's race (perhaps because her party's president hasn't shown much interest in it either). But the dire consequences of Rod Blagojevich's spend-and-don't-tax regime can't be ignored forever. The Center for Tax and Budget Accountability issued a report on state pension funds November 28. We've been skipping payments again. Full report here (PDF). The gist from Illinois Channel:

"'Illinois public pension liabilities are growing out of control, and the state's failure to pay keeps making them worse,' said Chrissy Mancini, Director of Budget and Policy Analysis for CTBA, a bipartisan fiscal think tank based in Chicago. 'If lawmakers don't act to meet these obligations now, the cost of catching up later will force cuts to education, health care and other essential public services.'

"The report concluded that, because Illinois has the nation's fewest state employees per capita, ranks 42nd in state spending per capita, and offers public pension benefits no richer than the national average, the pension debt can only be solved by adding revenue. The best available option is to fix 'the state's poorly designed tax system [that] doesn't grow with the economy' or produce enough revenue to fund both state services and pension obligations."

You can argue with 'em here or attend CTBA's annual fiscal symposium in Chicago January 17.  John McCarron's Chicago Tribune column is also relevant.

• The blister beetles' variant of the badger game. In the southwest, baby blister beetles assemble on a blade of grass and emit smells that simulate those of a female bee. When assaulted by an unwitting male bee, they hitch a ride on him. When he finally blunders into an actual female [your joke here], they jump off onto her, ride back to her nest, eat her offspring and its food, grow up, live long, and prosper. Technical description here. (Hat tip to Coturnix.)

• Outsource your internal organs? It's been done. A Mediterranean worm has bacteria that eat and excrete on its behalf. Says one researcher, "In exchange for housing, the microbes take care of energy production and handling the waste." Technical description here. (Hat tip to Science Blog.)  [This inevitably reminds me of an old Dave Barry column in which he abused the Donald but then added in mitigation that he hadn't meant to imply that Donald Trump picked his nose. "That's what he has a staff for," he wrote.]

Over at Gristmill, John Tirman of MIT's Center for International Studies notes the bogosity of one particular piece of mud the right-wing anti-science machine has been flinging: a petition supposedly signed by more than 17,000 scientists stating that there's "no convincing scientific evidence" for human-caused global warming. Read the whole thing. (If it were what it purports to be, that fact would be reflected in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, which it is not.) But don't hold your breath waiting for Chicago's own Heartland Institute to apologize for its role in spreading this disinformation.

Those who harp on the supposed uncertainty of global warming rarely mention that uncertainty runs both ways, thus there's a possibility that the mainstream view of climate scientists might be unduly optimistic. Florida State University oceanographer Jeff Chanton and colleagues at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the Northeast Science Station in Cherskii, Russia, just published an article in the peer-reviewed journal Nature [if there's a link I haven't found it] reporting how one potential positive-feedback loop actually is contributing to warming. As Siberian permafrost melts into lakes, it releases methane--a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent but shorter-lived than carbon dioxide. "My fellow researchers and I estimate that an expansion of these thaw lakes between 1974 and 2000, a period of regional warming, increased methane emissions by 58 percent there," says Chanton in an FSU press release. This methane dates from the Pleistocene. More melting leads to more methane which leads to more melting. Best story so far is at Seed.

At the other end of the earth, Antarctic ice cores dating back 800,000 years have been analyzed now (the last 150,000 years' results apparently haven't been published yet), according to a BBC report quoting Dr. Eric Wolff of the British Antarctic Survey. Current levels of carbon dioxide are outside the natural range seen in that time, and today's rate of change is unprecedented: "In the core, the fastest increase seen was of the order of 30 parts per million (ppm) by volume over a period of roughly 1,000 years.  The last 30 ppm of increase has occurred in just 17 years.  We really are in the situation where we don't have an analogue in our records."

When like-minded people sit down and talk things out, they become more like-minded and less tolerant.

That's what David Schkade (University of California--San Diego), Cass Sunstein (University of Chicago), and Reid Hastie (University of Chicago) found out when they conducted a seemingly innocuous experiment in Colorado:

"Groups [of five members each] from Boulder, a predominantly liberal city, met and discussed global warming, affirmative action, and civil unions for same-sex couples; groups from Colorado Springs, a predominately conservative city, met to discuss the same issues. The major effect of deliberation was to make group members more extreme than they were when they started talk." Conservatives became more conservative, liberals more liberal.

As people increasingly are able to sort themselves into places where they feel comfortable--both physically and virtually--this isn't happy news. In the blogosphere, where physical and economic constraints are minimal, the most popular blogs seem to be the most partisan. How many people have both Michelle Malkin and Glenn Greenwald on their blogrolls?

Read all about it at "What Happened on Deliberation Day?" (PDF)

So much of education punditry is hackwork. On the left, the received wisdom is that educators must spend their time agitating for social change because schools can't be expected to do much when students have had such difficult lives. On the right, the received wisdom is that schools can bring about great changes if they were just reformed, usually through privatization in one way or another.

The debate is so sterile I don't usually read it. So I was pleasantly surprised to blunder into the middle of an ongoing controversy sparked by an August 6 New York Times article (PDF). Richard Rothstein (PDF) of the Economic Policy Institute discusses, soberly and without jargon, how these entrenched ideas might fit together into something resembling reality.

"At present . . . the average achievement of black and white children in America differs by about a full standard deviation, or about 30 percentile points in a distribution. . . . Social scientists generally consider an intervention to be extraordinarily successful if it has an effect size of 0.5, or more than 15 percentile points." So even an extraordinarily successful school would leave a significant achievement gap.

There are lots of stories out there about "beat the odds" schools alleged to have done this much or more. But Rothstein notes that "in every case, highly publicized 'beat the odds' schools enroll children who are more likely to have higher achievement" in any case, among them "a school where most children are poor but which is the location of a district-wide 'gifted and talented' program whose test scores are included in the school's averages; and schools where most children are poor but where an unusually high proportion of parents have college degrees."

These may be good schools, or very good, he hastens to add. But no one has done the work of distinguishing "the extent to which the standardized test scores of 'beat the odds' schools are attributable to school practices or to students with greater capacity to benefit from those school practices."

Rothstein advocates "a balanced set of reform policies, covering schools as well as the social and economic conditions that surround them." After all the ink that's been spilled, that's probably about what our moms would've said if we'd asked them across the dinner table.

More here. 

A country with a shrinking population is in trouble, writes U. of C. economics Nobelist Gary Becker at Opinion Journal:

"Smaller populations reduce the amount of innovation partly because it leads to fewer younger persons, both absolutely and compared to the number of older persons. This shift toward a younger [sic! he means "older"] population is bad for innovation because the vast majority of important new ideas come from inventors and scientists who are younger than age 50, often far younger."

Is this true? Becker's colleague David Galenson has reason to think otherwise. Galenson has studied lifetime patterns of creativity among painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, and filmmakers. They fall into two groups: those who innovate young ("conceptual" innovators like Picasso) and those who innovate late in life ("experimental" innovators like Monet). His latest book is Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity, reviewed in the Reader April 28. There Galenson briefly describes a study in which he branched out and looked at the life cycles of, er, Nobel laureates in economics born before 1927:

"Scholars categorized as conceptual were most likely to publish their most frequently cited work at the age of 43, whereas those categorized as experimental were most likely to publish their most cited work at 61."

Plenty more questions to come here: Do other fields--"inventors and scientists"--follow suit? Are there more conceptual innovators than experimental innovators? And so on.

I can see plenty of problems looming as American society becomes top-heavy with old people. But Galenson's studies of creativity so far don't suggest that a lack of important new ideas will be one of them.

Not long ago Slate listed some unexpected possible reasons for the alleged obesity epidemic, including prescription medications, lack of sleep, and air conditioning. But there are more . . .

• Food is cheap. Darius Lakdawalla of the Rand Corporation, writing on the Wall Street Journal's Econoblog:  "Since 1976, food has fallen in price by more than 12 percent compared to other goods. My colleague Tomas Philipson [University of Chicago] and I have shown that this reduction in price can explain at least half the recent growth in obesity." (Hat tip to Cafe Hayek.)
  

• Some of us are Baptists. Purdue sociologist Ken Ferraro finds that even when you control for living in the South (supposedly the home of unhealthy eating habits), "Baptists are more likely to be obese" than are members of other denominations.

• We don't have the right kind of P.E. Post-doc Victoria Brescoll at Yale's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity puts her years of study to work: "What if there were hip-hop dance classes during gym?"

"In the summer of 1997, Tyrone Hayes, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, accepted what seemed a harmless offer to join a panel of eight other scientists investigating the safety of the common weed-killer atrazine."

If you get to read anything longer than a paragraph this week, read the whole thing at Harpers.org. 

I'm no fan of the American Enterprise Institute, the D.C. policy shop that harbors Michael "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business" Ledeen.  But as far as I know, AEI's Nicholas Eberstadt is trying to understand reality, and his latest article aims a powerful destructo beam at the way the U.S. has defined poverty since the mid-60s.

The poverty line, which is now built into all kinds of government helping programs, was drawn up by a woman, Mollie Orshansky, who had first-hand experience with hunger. The line is essentially three times a minimum food budget, a level below which "everyday living implied choosing between an adequate diet of the most economical sort and some other necessity." Though adjusted for inflation, it's meant to measure absolute poverty (eating vs. not eating), not relative poverty (eating hamburger vs. foie gras). A War on Poverty wouldn't make much sense otherwise.

The percentage of Americans in poverty, as officially defined, dropped sharply during the 60s, but since 1973 it's either leveled off or risen a bit. "We have had a generation with basically no progress against poverty," the University of Michigan's Sheldon Danziger told the New York Times in 2004. "The economic growth is not trickling down to the poor."

Well, that's what the official definition would lead you to believe. About one American in eight (12.7 percent) lived below the official poverty line in 2004, compared to one in nine (11.1 percent) in 1973. So all those people must be just as bad off in real terms as they were three decades before, right?

Well, embarrassingly enough, no. They're better off. Eberhardt writes:

• "According to the National Pediatric Surveillance System of the CDC, the percentage of low-income children under five years of age who were categorized as underweight (in terms of BMI for age) dropped from 8 in 1973 to 5 in 2003."

• "In 1970, almost 27 percent of poverty-level households were officially considered overcrowded [i.e. more than one person per room]. By 2001, according to the AHS [American Housing Survey], just 6 percent of poor households were 'overcrowded'--a lower proportion than for nonpoor households as recently as 1970." Since 1980 the average heated square footage per household member among the poor has risen from 371 to 472.

• In 1972, about 40 percent of households in the bottom fifth of income had a car; in 2003, more than 60 percent did. "For all forms of motor transport, U.S. poverty households' ownership levels in 2003 matched overall U.S. families' auto ownership levels from the early 1960s."

• In the early 1970s, 60 percent of poverty-level adults had untreated cavities; by the late 1990s, the rate was 40 percent.

If the poor were really just as poor in 2004 as in 1973, none of this would be happening--and it's easy to imagine an alternative present in which it hadn't been. The poverty line isn't measuring what we think it is.

As Eberstadt firmly states, none of this implies that everything is fine, or that relative deprivation doesn't matter. It does imply that our yardstick for measuring absolute poverty is badly broken.

He suggests several reasons why it isn't doing the job Mollie Orshansky had in mind.  The most interesting is that people's incomes are a lot more variable than they used to be, especially at the low end. A Census Bureau survey found that "at some point during the four years 1996-1999, fully 34 percent of the [non-institutionalized] population spent two months or more below the poverty line. On the other hand, just two percent of the population spent all 48 months of 1996-99 below the poverty line."  (That rate was over five percent for blacks and Hispanics, something Eberstadt probably wouldn't mention if he were acting as a shill for conservative policies.) Since almost all the blog posts I can find on this subject are conservatives jumping to conclusions and yukking it up, note that this bit of evidence might well argue against lifetime limits on welfare assistance.

Anybody know of any evidence that the poverty line really is measuring what it's supposed to be measuring?

Last year the journal Social Research had a special issue on "busyness," in which Robert Levine, a professor of psychology at California State University, Fresno, wrote:

"Many people use their social activities to mark time rather than the other way around. In parts of Madagascar, questions about how long something takes might receive an answer like 'the time of a rice cooking' (about half an hour) or 'the frying of a locust' (a quick moment).  Similarly, natives of the Cross River in Nigeria have been quoted as saying 'the man died in less than the time in which maize is not yet completely roasted' (less than fifteen minutes).  Closer to home, not too many years ago the New English Dictionary included a listing for the term 'pissing while'--not a particularly exact measurement, perhaps, but one with a certain cross-cultural translatability."  (It's in the Oxford English Dictionary, which cites usages as far back as Shakespeare.)

Does anyone have personal experience with marking time this way, rather than clockwise?

Anthropologist Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii tells a good scientific tale in American Scientist. He came to Easter Island, aka Rapa Nui, believing--as we've been told for years--that it was a poster child for how overpopulation and overuse of scarce resources can lead to ecological collapse. But over several years he's found converging strands of evidence that introduced rats may have had more to do with the deforestation of Easter Island than did its Polynesian settlers. (There may have been a peak rat population of more than 3 million on the small island.)

"The human population probably reached a maximum of about 3,000, perhaps a bit higher, around 1350 AD and remained fairly stable until the arrival of Europeans," Hunt writes. "The environmental limitations of Rapa Nui would have kept the population from growing much larger [as previously thought]. By the time Roggeveen arrived in 1722, most of the island's trees were gone, but deforestation did not trigger societal collapse, as Diamond and others have argued." If Hunt's findings hold up, Easter Island isn't a microcosm of the planet, but it may still be a more prosaic warning about invasive species.

Diamond, of course, is Jared Diamond, author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, reviewed in the Reader March 4, 2005. Hunt is a credible critic, as he's a professional anthropologist who doesn't have an ax to grind.

Unfortunately there are plenty of ax-grinders out there, such as "slithering reptile" at Not PC, who are happy to use Hunt's findings just as Diamond used the reports he drew on: as confirmation of stuff they already believed.

The research on Easter Island has made it out of the academic anthropology journals because it's ammo for these two sides. For want of better labels, they are:

• "Environmentalists" who think we're in a world of trouble, and the way to deal with it is to conserve and cut back on our use of natural resources, and
  

• "Antienvironmentalists" who think we're in very little trouble, and if we are the way to deal with it is to put a price tag on everything and let the capitalists sort it out.

I have one foot firmly in each camp--I've criticized Diamond for selecting just-so stories from the historical record and disregarding the parts that don't fit his thesis. So my strongest sympathies lie with neither. We need more people like Terry Hunt.  I don't just mean scientists; I mean people who can take seriously evidence that doesn't fit their pre-ordained worldviews.  Hunt's conclusion: 

"I believe that the world faces today an unprecedented global environmental crisis, and I see the usefulness of historical examples of the pitfalls of environmental destruction. So it was with some unease that I concluded that Rapa Nui does not provide such a model. But as a scientist I cannot ignore the problems with the accepted narrative of the island's prehistory. Mistakes or exaggerations in arguments for protecting the environment only lead to oversimplified answers and hurt the cause of environmentalism. We will end up wondering why our simple answers were not enough to make a difference in confronting today's problems.

"Ecosystems are complex, and there is an urgent need to understand them better. Certainly the role of rats on Rapa Nui shows the potentially devastating, and often unexpected, impact of invasive species. I hope that we will continue to explore what happened on Rapa Nui, and to learn whatever other lessons this remote outpost has to teach us."

Will Jared Diamond acknowledge new evidence and be part of this solution?  His friend Paul Ehrlich never did.

A different take on Buddhism, the favorite escape hatch of ex-Christians who want to keep some kind of religion on hand: 

"Gautama Siddartha, you may recall, decided the world was a place of unmitigated suffering and unhappiness, to be escaped at all costs, after he first encountered old, sick and poverty-stricken people. Only recently did a sharp American psychologist, Robert Biswas-Diener, say, 'But hang on—did he ever get down from his gilded chariot and ask those people if they were unhappy?'"

Evidently not. So Biswas-Diener undertook to answer a question left unasked for a couple of millennia.

In India, "He even questioned sex workers in the back streets of Calcutta, surely the most wretched of the earth. 'No,' they said, 'we’re mostly quite happy, thanks.' How can this be? Well, compare it with the experience of paraplegia. Calcutta’s prostitutes are dirt poor, but then money doesn’t make you happy. Having intense friendships, close-knit families and neighbourhoods certainly does: and that’s just what they have. Bye-bye Buddhism."

And hello New Urbanism, which is really light on theology!

(Hat tip to 3 Quarks Daily, where you can read the whole thing, a Times [of London] Online review of several recent books about happiness.) 

If you find value in religion, or Republicanism, be sure to let your friends and family know that you nevertheless don't countenance ignorance and abortion. Yes, it's gotten that bad.

Hello, Tom? Mammon here. Talk To Action continues its run of stunning investigative reports, reminding us of a hellhole parcel of U.S. territory on the Marianas Islands in the Pacific where where "thousands of garment workers--most of them young Chinese women--labor in indentured servitude, live in labor camps run by members of the Chinese Communist Party, and submit to forced abortions if they become pregnant. Human rights worker Eric Gregoire told ABC News, 'With 11,000 Chinese workers here, I have never seen a Chinese garment factory worker have a baby.'"

What satanic creature would countenance such conditions--and protect them by using his power in Congress?  Recently indicted Republican Tom DeLay, that's who---the darling of the Family Research Council, Concerned Women of America, Focus on the Family, and many other stalwarts of the religious right.

Making America safe for stupidity.  Americans are the second most ignorant country on the subject of evolution, narrowly edging out Turkey. That's the news from political scientist Jon D. Miller--formerly of the Chicago Academy of Sciences and Northwestern University, now at Michigan State--in a paper published in the August 11 issue of Science. The original is behind a pay wall, but reasonable summaries are here and here (more spice). Oh, here's the one-sentence abstract:

"The acceptance of evolution is lower in the United States than in Japan or Europe, largely because of widespread fundamentalism and the politicization of science in the United States."

Miller is no alarmist and no sound-bite artist (as I learned when writing up his work on scientific literacy for the Reader November 18, 1994), so when he starts talking like this I pay attention.

He and his coauthors found that "individuals who hold a strong belief in a personal God and who pray frequently were significantly less likely to view evolution as probably or definitely true," and this effect was stronger in the United States, presumably because of political pandering (my word, not theirs):

"The conservative wing of the Republican Party has adopted creationism as a part of a platform designed to consolidate their support in southern and midwestern states—the 'red' states. In the 1990s, the state Republican platforms in seven states included explicit demands for the teaching of 'creation science.' There is no major political party in Europe or Japan that uses opposition to evolution as a part of its political platform."

The percentage of Americans who disbelieve or doubt one of the best-established scientific frameworks for understanding our world has actually risen--from 55 to 60 percent in the last 20 years.

Buying an older house to tear it down and build a new and bigger one is "a growing disaster," "a cancer," and "an orgy of irrational destruction," according to Richard Moe of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Now UIC economist Daniel P. McMillen is publishing research that goes beyond the rhetoric. It's not all about the evil.

Data from Chicago and six high-demand inner-ring suburbs show the highest rate of demolition in Winnetka, where between 1996 and 2003, nine percent of total housing was torn down. (Chicago's overall rate is around three percent, but surely higher in pricey neighborhoods.) The research also shows that teardowns are purchased for the land underneath--it's all about location, meaning transit, walkability, and good schools.

Writing in Land Lines, a publication of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, McMillen acknowledges that teardowns can in some cases harm neighborhood character and reduce the stock of affordable housing. But they bring benefits too:

• Property taxes: "Additional revenue from high-priced replacement houses is often quite welcome."

• Aesthetics: "Not all teardown buildings are historic, architecturally significant, or mourned when they are demolished. Some teardowns are simply eyesores. Some of the new houses being built today will eventually be viewed as historically significant properties in their own right. Once entire blocks are rebuilt, the new housing no longer looks out of place. It is surprising to discover how stark and incompatible some properties built in the early 1900s appear in historic photographs taken before trees grew and the neighborhood filled in with similar houses."
  

• Urban policy: "Teardowns may help to curb sprawl. [Moe disputes this point, but not very well.] One reason people move to the urban fringe is to build a new house in a contemporary construction style. Allowing people to tear down a small, outdated house and replace it with a modern house may induce them to stay in centrally located areas."

FYI links: There is a anti-teardown Yahoo group (mostly suburban), and a real-estate site for buyers and sellers. Neither one seems terribly frenetic. McMillen's technical article, coauthored with Richard Dye, is forthcoming in the Journal of Urban Economics. A draft as of May 26 is here for those thirsty for technicalities.

In January 2002 Peter Doran of the University of Illinois at Chicago published a four-page article in Nature.  A  contribution to Antarctic climatology, after almost five years it's still newsworthy enough that he wrote about it in the July 27 New York Times. (A fuller free version is available here .)

"My research colleagues and I found that from 1986 to 2000, one small, ice-free area of the Antarctic mainland had actually cooled. Our report . . . found that, from 1966 to 2000, more of the continent [58 percent] had cooled than had warmed. Our summary statement pointed out how the cooling trend posed challenges to models of Antarctic climate and ecosystem change."

That's how science works:  a theory (or model) makes predictions, researchers check them out and report the results.  When they don't fit, it's time to check the research findings, and if they seem valid, to revise the model.

This patient iterative process is too slow for the mainstream media, and too impartial to suit climate-change denialists.  Writes Doran, "Our results have been misused as 'evidence' against global warming by Michael Crichton in his novel 'State of Fear' and by Ann Coulter in her latest book, 'Godless: The Church of Liberalism.'"

Chicago's Heartland Institute, which purports to champion "sound science," joined this company with an article in 2002 that overgeneralized Doran's findings and linked them to unrelated studies, in order to create the impression (well known to be false) that the globe as a whole isn't warming.  Much as creationists take any revision in evolutionary theory (no matter how slight) as proof that the whole theory of evolution by natural selection is worthless, these special pleaders misread the very process of science in order to deny its results. 

The media echo chamber continues to resound with these misrepresentations.  A newspaper in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, fabricated a Doran quote to suit its purposes on June 25.  In the on-line comments section June 29, Doran denied ever saying or thinking it, and asked that it be removed.  It's still up.

(Which reminds me -- has any denialist outfit ever explained Doran's actual findings and apologized for misrepresenting them?)

Of course, science has been plodding on meantime.  Writes Doran, "Climate models created since our paper was published have suggested a link between the lack of significant warming in Antarctica and the ozone hole over that continent. These models, conspicuously missing from the warming-skeptic literature, suggest that as the ozone hole heals — thanks to worldwide bans on ozone-destroying chemicals — all of Antarctica is likely to warm with the rest of the planet."

Doran includes a fuller version of his Times op-ed and additional materials at his UIC web site.  One of his side comments pretty much summarizes the whole sorry business:

"It has always amazed me that skeptics of climate warming are quite ready to distrust 99% of the scientific community, but they immediately trust me only because I wrote a paper they 'thought' supported their argument."

Boys are not doing worse in school--their performance just isn't improving as fast as girls'. And far larger than any gender gap is the gap between white children and the rest. In high school, where boys are doing worse than before, girls are too.

Sara Mead, a "senior policy analyst" at Education Sector, uses nothing but data to demolish the latest "boy crisis" fad. As a bonus, she also plows salt into the ruins--explaining how a claim with so little basis in reality could be turned into a bevy of books and pop-magazine sociology.

The media, it seems, were just bored with the well-known socio-economic gap. Pundits, she argues, simply used the "boy crisis" to push harder whatever line they were pushing before:

"A number of conservative authors, think tanks, and journals have published articles arguing that progressive educational pedagogy and misguided feminism are hurting boys. . . . Progressive education thinkers, on the other hand, tend to see boys' achievement problems as evidence that schools have not gone far enough in adopting progressive tenets and are still forcing all children into a teacher-led pedagogical box that is particularly ill-suited to boys' interests and learning styles. . . . In other words, few of these commentators have anything new to say--the boy crisis has just given them a new opportunity to promote their old messages."

This heels-dug-in thinking reminds me of 9/11. Supposedly it "changed everything," but in fact those who were warmongers before kept right on, and those who thought everything would be fine if we just quit writing blank checks to Israel kept thinking that way too.

(Hat tip to Crooked Timber.)

When Tom DeLay argued for federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo case on Palm Sunday 2005, he compared her situation to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. In doing so he mixed up references to the solitary, despairing Jesus of the Gospel of Mark ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?") and the serenely confident Jesus of the Gospel of John ("It was for this very reason that I came to this hour!").

When James Dobson of Focus on the Family answered an online question about how children should be disciplined, he cited several New Testament texts, only one of which actually uses the word "discipline," and proceeded to summarize the theme he perceived to unite those passages. Whether his reading is reasonable or not, that ain't literalism. (And when asked specifically about spanking children, he relies on personal reminiscence and anecdote.)

These are two of the many examples that Margaret M. Mitchell examines in an essay on how the Christian Right actually uses the Bible. Mitchell is an expert on the first four centuries of Christian thought and a professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature at the University of Chicago. Her specific point is that "what most characterizes the Christian Right's biblical interpretation is no single method, but rather its selection of passages and topics."

Her more general point is that there are way more than just two ways of reading and understanding the Bible, and everyone uses it selectively to argue for their preferred conclusions. The conventional wisdom that there are just two ways, reading the letter and reading the spirit, plays into the hands of the story the Christian Right is determined to tell.

(Hat tip to "Talk to Action.")  

Wal-Mart supporters in Chicago have a constant refrain that seems hard to argue with: "Something is better than nothing." A new study suggests that, at least in rural areas, that may not be true.

The first meticulous academic study of Wal-Mart's effects on county poverty levels has just been published in Social Science Quarterly. (Abstract here; full October 2004 version here; press release on earlier version here.)  Wal-Mart haters are pushing it, but what does it actually say?

"Holding constant the initial (1989) poverty rate, the results show that counties with more Wal-Mart stores (in 1987) had a higher poverty rate in 1999 (or a smaller reduction in the rate) than did counties with fewer or no Wal-Mart stores in 1987.  . . . [T]he spread of Wal-Mart stores during the 1990s was associated with higher usage of food stamps per capita, or with smaller reductions in this variable, holding other factors constant.  . . . The chain is not the engine of local economic growth that the company's spokespersons and public relations material suggest."

The authors--Stephan J. Goetz of Penn State's department of agricultural economics and Hema Swaminathan of the International Center for Research on Women--controlled for other causes of poverty. (They also took special care to control for the possibility that Wal-Mart might choose poorer locations to start with.) They acknowledge that they do not provide a complete balance sheet: they were unable to factor in either the benefits of lower prices or the cost of government subsidies to Wal-Mart.

No one study is conclusive, but any locality weighing the costs and benefits of a new Wal-Mart will need to consider this one.

The authors also don't know exactly how new Wal-Mart stores marginally increase poverty. They theorize that the causes might include the demise of existing mom-and-pop stores, lower retail wages overall, closing of local suppliers that had served the mom-and-pop stores, or the loss of local leadership and "social capital" if proprietors and suppliers choose to leave the area.

Many of these factors have more to do with rural than urban areas. But anyone who proposes subsidies for new Wal-Mart locations should bear the burden of showing that a new store's benefits really do exceed these costs. It's not all good.

In the new issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Scott Atran and Marc Sageman, author of Understanding Terror Networks, describe what they're learning from their database of more than 500 participants in what they call Global Network Terrorism. They focus on "the complexities of people, rather than incidents" and offer little comfort to either kill-em-all conservatives or get-out-of-Israel liberals:

"We find no evidence of specific traits that indicate a personal predisposition toward involvement in GNT; terrorists are as diverse as the general population," they write. "Likewise, no broad 'root cause' generates terrorists; millions of people are subjected to the same political and socioeconomic conditions, but very few resort to violent activities. Further, we learned that terrorists are very rarely recruited by strangers.

"Although most individuals enlist in terrorist groups outside their country of origin (about 80 percent), most do so through friendship (about 70 percent) and/or kinship (about 20 percent). The preferred terrorist cell size is eight members, often consisting of friends made during the critical period when a person is between the ages of 15 and 30. This suggests that studying the dynamics of small groups--a sort of 'band of brothers'--might best reveal the processes that lead people to kill and to die for causes and comrades."

I don't suppose we'll ever see anything analogous to the phenomenon just reported on in Nature--that certain smokers "stopped smoking immediately after having a stroke that damaged their insular cortex. This seems to be not because they were concerned about their health, but because they had lost all interest in cigarettes." 

Last Monday the Government Accountability Office reported on 864 phone calls (PDF) to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which runs the new Medicare prescription drug program. GAO researchers received accurate and complete answers about one-third of the time. That's not even halfway to a passing grade.

Alan Wolfe wouldn't be surprised. As he recently argued in the Washington Monthly:

"Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well."

More specifically, conservatives get elected by promising to shrink government, but they can't get re-elected without responding to constituents who want government to improve their lives. So, as Wolfe puts it, "contemporary conservatism is a walking contradiction. Unable to shrink government but unwilling to improve it, conservatives attempt to split the difference, expanding government for political gain, but always in ways that validate their disregard for the very thing they are expanding."

This argument would have struck me as extreme and implausible five years ago. Today it makes sense. Is it just me? Or is our best hope for sanity someone like Bill Clinton, who talked liberal but often governed from the right?

Take two similar places, and the one with more "alcohol outlets" tends to be more violent. Now two researchers from the Prevention Research Center in Berkeley, California, (one of 15 sponsored by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism) have found that if you watch the same places over time, the same result appears--at least in 581 California zip codes.

Paul Gruenwald and Lillian Remer write, “Assault rates were most strongly related to median household incomes and minority populations within zip code areas.” But once they factored that out, “ten-percent increases in numbers of off-premise outlets and bars were related to 1.67 and 2.06 percent increases in violence rates across local and lagged [bordering] spatial areas. Every six outlets accounted for one additional violent assault that resulted in at least one overnight stay at hospital.”

And as if you didn’t already know who was mixing it up, “These effects increased with larger male populations, doubling with every three-percent increase in percent males.”

You have to pay for the article, but the abstract is free here.

Well-off and white people get more sleep than nonrich and nonwhite people, according to a recent University of Chicago study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

The study didn’t address the reasons why--its main finding was that people in general sleep less than they think--but Diane Lauderdale, an associate professor of health studies, speculated that people who make more money may have fewer worries or more control over their sleep environment. That bored one blogger, who wrote, “I can't believe money--taxpayer money, probably--was spent on a study like this. Is it just me or does this seem like a no-brainer?”

She missed the odd part. The study also found that, on average, women sleep more than men. Scorecard: white women 6.7 hours, white men 6.1, black women 5.9, black men 5.1.

If privileges like wealth and whiteness confer the additional privilege of more sleep, what happens to the privilege of maleness when we hit the sack? Or, in Chicago terms, where’s mine?

Sociologist Eric Klinenberg uncovered a similar oddity in his 2002 book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. Short version from my Reader review (July 26, 2002):

“Not all of the vulnerable people are the usual suspects, and not all of the usual suspects are vulnerable. Yes, blacks died half again as often as whites [during Chicago’s 1995 killer heat wave]. But Latinos--comparably poor and downtrodden--died much less often than either . . . . Most surprisingly, men died at almost three times the rate of women--19 men per 100,000, compared to just 7 women per 100,000. This is a dramatically greater difference than that between racial and ethnic groups . . . .

“According to the usual left-liberal analysis, the victims of incipient social breakdown are supposed to be women and people of color, not just men and blacks. The heat wave does indeed reveal some social faultlines, but not quite the ones you might expect.”

Has anyone taken a probe to this anomaly? Heck, does anyone even have a good guess as to what’s going on here?

Will Wilkinson at the libertarian Cato Institute reflects on this Scientific American essay on “confirmation bias” and how we mostly try to avoid taking our opponents seriously (except as deranged dingbats). And he makes a nice suggestion, even if it does suddenly go all puritan at the end:

“This Independence Day, why not pick up a political book you know you’ll disagree with. Or write a short essay giving the best argument you can think of for a position you find abhorrent. Or really listen to what your annoying brother-in-law thinks about the war at the family picnic. We could all be a little more rational, and a little more free, if only we really wanted to be. Dogmatic, whole-hearted commitment does feel good. But there is more to life than feeling good.”

Almost had me there.

“From time to time, most people discuss important matters with other people.  Looking back over the last six months--who are the people with whom you discussed matters important to you?”

The General Social Survey, a project of the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, asked that question in 1985 and again in 2004. The results were surprising.

(FYI, this isn’t just any poll. The GSS is the gold standard of impartial public opinion research, conducted face-to-face with a random sample of 3,000 Americans every other year. It's been a model of caution and care in tracking public opinion on general subjects since 1972, and on some subjects well before that. More.)

Twenty years ago the average person had a “network” of three people with whom he or she could talk over important matters. Now it’s down to two, and those two are more likely than before to be family members, rather than neighbors or coworkers. In 1985 about 10 percent said they had nobody to talk to; now it’s 25 percent.

Miller McPherson of the University of Arizona and two other sociologists report the findings in the American Sociological Review. Money quote:

“In his groundbreaking [1982] study of social networks, To Dwell Among Friends, Claude Fischer labeled those who had only one or no discussion ties with whom to discuss personal matters as having marginal or inadequate counseling support. By those criteria, we have gone from a quarter of the American population being isolated from counseling support to almost half of the population falling into that category.”

No one study is conclusive but this is a solid piece of evidence that’s pretty hard to spin as good news. Unlike many GSS questions, this one hasn’t been asked in every survey, so there aren’t as many data points as one would like. And perhaps most people define “important” differently now than before, though I know of no evidence for this.

According to Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber, this is the best media summary. Discussion here and a determinedly skeptical take here. Gross overstatement here that's well answered here.