“Science Suffers From an Excess of Significance”

Want to win a political argument? Want to get your spouse to change a health habit? Want to get your story on page one? Flash a scientific study. Except…

We all make mistakes and, if you believe medical scholar John Ioannidis, scientists make more than their fair share. By his calculations, most published research findings are wrong.

Dr. Ioannidis is an epidemiologist who studies research methods at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece and Tufts University in Medford, Mass. In a series of influential analytical reports, he has documented how, in thousands of peer-reviewed research papers published every year, there may be so much less than meets the eye.

This column is by Wall Street Journal science writer Robert Lee Hotz.  The link is for WSJ subscribers.   Here’s a little more:

These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis. “There is an increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims,” Dr. Ioannidis said. “A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true.”

The hotter the field of research the more likely its published findings should be viewed skeptically, he determined.

A universal truth as applied to the discovery of information, one that applies to journalists, auditors, investigators.  If the spotlight is on, you want your performance to be memorable.

Take the discovery that the risk of disease may vary between men and women, depending on their genes. Studies have prominently reported such sex differences for hypertension, schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis, as well as lung cancer and heart attacks. In research published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Ioannidis and his colleagues analyzed 432 published research claims concerning gender and genes.

Upon closer scrutiny, almost none of them held up. Only one was replicated.

Statistically speaking, science suffers from an excess of significance. Overeager researchers often tinker too much with the statistical variables of their analysis to coax any meaningful insight from their data sets. “People are messing around with the data to find anything that seems significant, to show they have found something that is new and unusual,” Dr. Ioannidis said.

Money is at the root of bad science…

Gossip Counts the Most*

In the previous post about Live Earth, I tried to weave in a mindblowing article from the Sunday NY Times Magazine, “The Gregarious Brain.” The article is about Williams Syndrome, a genetic developmental disorder. Among its symptoms is extreme friendliness and aggressive conversational gregariousness, which shows up at an early age.

But while the victims of this syndrome are charming in small doses, they often find themselves socially isolated because their lack of social fear leads to a lack of “social savvy.”

Most of us know when our conversation partners have had enough of us. Williams sufferers do not. In studying how the Williams syndrome brain differs from a normal human brain, some neurological scientists believe the development of social skills, in particular the ability to get information about our peers via conversation, was a key to both individual survival and, ultimately, our species’ dominance.

The people with Williams syndrome bring the nature of those social skills into sharper relief.  It’s a tightrope walk between getting what we need out of our association with a group, and managing our (rational) fears about the group members on whom we must depend.

To get across this tightrope, we depend on our ability to suss people out. Our brains are very attuned to getting information about the people in our group. We figure out who to trust by what others say about them. We’re not like Williams syndrome people, friendly to one and all. We are careful, even among people we’ve known and worked with for a long time.

We get the signals we need from gossip.  If we didn’t have access to gossip, our social fabric would fall apart.  An enormous percentage of our mental energies are devoted to gathering and processing gossip, and our brains have evolved accordingly.

We bring the same wary habits to our public acts, as voters and consumers. We are all part of a global “group” now, processing information not just about our local cohorts, but about our cultural, economic and political leaders from what we learn about them in the media.

When the media puts up artificial filters, they say they do it for our own good. But we don’t feel protected. We feel trapped, and we look for a way out. In totalitarian societies, people are willing to risk imprisonment or death to obtain gossip about their governments.  The controls over information in American society are looser, but they undeniably exist.  When the mainstream media sits on information because they don’t think it’s appropriate to answer its consumers’ questions, we now can turn to the internet, the id of mass communication, to get the gossip we need.

Consider the case of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

In the past week or so, we have learned first from blogs, then from the mainstream press, that his wife is divorcing him, because he has been unfaithful to her with a reporter who covers him for Telemundo. There are unconfirmed reports about other affairs; the reporter might or might not be his current girlfriend. All these shenanigans played out during the past year, a difficult year for Villaraigosa politically. His signature issue, school reform, crashed and burned in part because of the mayor’s mistaken judgments and temporary loss of political mastery.

To LA Times columnist Tim Rutten, all this is none of our business, so shame on us for our interest in Villaraigosa’s private life and shame on the bloggers who dug it out.

Hang onto something solid, Rutten bloviates up a stiff wind here:

When it comes to reporting on politics and elected officials, distinguishing between what is properly private and what is necessarily public becomes more difficult all the time.

It’s easy to blame the news media for this — for all the obvious reasons. They include an increasing number of editors willing to take their cue from journalism’s lowest common denominator, the gossip sheets, whether online or on slick paper, that continue to proliferate like informational vermin. By its very nature, gossip does not respect the distinction between public and private because it doesn’t acknowledge the existence of such a dichotomy. In fact, part of gossip’s guilty appeal comes from thumbing its nose at such niceties. The insatiable maw of the 24-hour news cycle also is a factor, as is the generalized collapse of confidence by newspapers engendered by print journalism’s passage through an economically wrenching transformation.

He goes on to point out that prior LA mayors had affairs that weren’t reported “because, even if City Hall reporters had been inclined to pursue the story, it would have been virtually impossible to make it conform to the standards their editors enforced.”

Were those editors — who also covered up the misdeeds of national politicians — more virtuous than today’s? Or were they depriving us of information we could’ve used and were entitled to?

Luckily, an even more senior LA Times‘ columnist gets it intuitively. George Skelton writes today:

Those who claim this is nobody’s business except for the people directly involved ignore the fact that many Angelenos voted for Villaraigosa believing he’d be an inspirational mayor and someone whom Latino kids could look up to as a role model. This infidelity is these voters’ business too. The first Latino mayor of modern L.A. has soiled his image and spoiled their dreams.

Some voters insist that they don’t care about a politician’s dalliances. Fine, they can click the remote or turn the page. Others do care. They’ll factor it into their attitudes about the man.

Outside the Los Angeles Basin, Villaraigosa has been little known. Now, he’s being introduced statewide as a serial philanderer who dumped on his wife years ago, sweet-talked her back into the house, used her as a political prop and returned to the pattern of womanizing. The family breakup is especially disturbing because the mayor and his wife have two teen children.

Later Skelton points out the crucial difference between Villaraigosa and other philandering politicians like Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger: Villaraigosa’s wife has demanded a divorce. Corrina is not “standing by her man.” That’s an important detail. Another crucial difference? Villaraigosa wants more from us. He wants to put the genie back in the bottle, become again “someone whom Latino kids could look up to as a role model,” and run for governor.

Rutten ultimately joins Skelton in condemning Villaraigosa, but for the most weightless of reasons: Because his lover is a journalist!

Villaraigosa’s personal connection with Salinas is a private issue that legitimately concerns only the two of them and their families. No one else has a moral or rhetorical right to an opinion on that aspect of their conduct. However, the fact that Salinas continued to report on the mayor while they were involved in this fashion is a public issue.

(snip)

Villaraigosa knows perfectly well that an intimate relationship with a reporter is bound to raise questions about whether he granted her special access. Worse, it also raises profound conflict-of-interest questions for Telemundo. Has the network’s reporting on his tenure been manicured by a reporter in love with her subject? Has that subject used his mutual affection with the reporter to manipulate coverage of his agenda?

Those aren’t particularly pleasant questions, but Salinas and Villaraigosa have behaved recklessly in an environment that, for better or worse, has become unforgiving.

Yeah, Rutten. That’s probably the first question Mrs. Villaraigosa asked. “Did you grant her…special access??” And then the flying plates.

Rutten is a smart man, but writing like this makes him seem almost as disconnected from reality as the Williams’ syndrome people. The ethics of journalism aren’t the only ethics that matter. In fact they won’t matter, if and when Antonio presents himself to the voters again. We’ll be talking about his affair and whether or not he has found the way back to being seen as trustworthy. We’ll be talking about whether he got his act together and saved his mayoralty. We’ll be talking about whether he’s a good person — or not.

We’ll look for clues to the real Antonio, and if we have to search for them on those dreaded “online media” sites — because the LA Times loves its “standards” more than its readers — that’s where we’ll go. It’ s not because we’ve succumbed to “informational vermin.” It’s because that’s how we’re wired as humans.

*Edited, 7/10/07

Bright Lights, Big City, Gone to My Planet’s Head

Bright lights, big city
Gone to my baby’s head
Bright lights, big city
Gone to my baby’s head

Nobody’s listening to Jimmy Reed, I guess.   They’re stampeding from the country to the city, all the world over.

As of last Wednesday, May 23rd, more people on Earth are living in urban areas than rural. According to Science Blog, scientists at North Carolina State University and the University of Georgia used United Nations data to determine the moment of transition. 

The United States is long past its tipping point: We became more urban than rural in 1910.

I’d tried to tell the woman
But she doesn’t believe a word I said
Go light pretty baby…
Gonna need my help some day
It’s all right pretty baby…
Gonna need my help some day

You’re gonna wish you listened
To some of those things I said

In spite of all the warnings, the reason for the rural to urban migration is obvious.  Earth’s rural areas are its most impoverished.

Findings by the International Fund for Agricultural Development show that 1.2 billion of the world’s people live on less than what a dollar a day can buy. Globally, three-fourths of these poor people live in rural areas.

The researchers add that, in addition to having a highly disproportionate share of the world’s poverty, rural areas also get the urban garbage. In exchange for useable natural resources produced by rural people for urban dwellers, rural places receive the waste products – polluted air, contaminated water, and solid and hazardous wastes – discharged by those in cities.

NC State sociology professor Dr. Ron Wimberley sees the shift as ominous, according to the university’s news release:

“So far, cities are getting whatever resource needs that can be had from rural areas,” he said. “But given global rural impoverishment, the rural-urban question for the future is not just what rural people and places can do for the world’s new urban majority. Rather, what can the urban majority do for poor rural people and the resources upon which cities depend for existence? The sustainable future of the new urban world may well depend upon the answer.”

It seems to me that this story gets closer to the heart of what I maintain is the world’s most pressing environmental task: Improving basic health conditions for the world’s rural poor, including potable water, wastewater treatment, reduction in toxic chemicals, sustainable and productive agriculture.  As Dr. Wimberley suggests, the fate of the entire world depends on how well we address these challenges. Dealing with global warming is connected with this agenda, but should not take precedence over it.

Go ahead pretty baby
Oh, honey knock yourself out
Go ahead pretty baby
Oh honey knock yourself out

I still love you baby
Cause you don’t know what it’s all about 

Sweet DRMs, Baby

It sure looks as if digital-rights management (DRM) coding will die without a friend in the music business.   First Steve Jobs blames the music industry for the restrictions iTunes places on purchased music, and calls for a DRM-free marketplace.  Now this: 

Almost two-thirds of music industry executives think removing digital locks from downloadable music would make more people buy the tracks, finds a survey.

The Jupiter Research study looked at attitudes to Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems in Europe music firms.

Many of those responding said current DRM systems were “not fit for purpose” and got in the way of what consumers wanted to do.

And yet, the article goes on to say:  

Despite this few respondents said DRM would disappear in the near future.

What are they saying? Is DRM a kind of vampire?   The biggest retailer doesn’t want it.  The producers don’t want it.  Obviously the consumers don’t want it.  So let’s round up the villagers and storm the castle.  

Among all those questioned, 70% believed that the future of downloadable music lay in making tracks play on as many different players as possible. But 40% believed it would take concerted government or consumer action to bring this about.

Despite these feelings, said (report co-author Mark) Mulligan, record labels are committed to using DRM because their digital music strategies revolve around these technologies.

“Despite everything that has been happening the record labels are not about to drop DRM,” said Mr Mulligan. “Even though all they are doing is making themselves look even less compelling by using it.”

“Concerted government or consumer action,” eh?   Well consumer action is already happening in the form of music piracy, which is still going strong among younger music fans.  What more do you want them to do?  As for government action, which government? Music is borderless.  These music execs have far more power to enforce some kind of anti-DRM, interoperability mandate than a national government.  They just need to get their act together.

America’s Starving Obese

Read this profile of Berkeley biochemist Bruce Ames — an admirably stubborn and brilliant researcher focused on cancer and aging, who made enemies among the environmental community for pooh-poohing their fears about pesticide exposure.  

Ames’ focus now is on obesity and malnutrition — and the millions of American who suffer from both maladies at the same time.

Here’s a long excerpt from a much, much longer piece.  It ran in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle.  The whole piece, written by Leah Messinger, is worth your time.

Recently, Ames overheard a colleague mention 60 cases of rickets at nearby Children’s Hospital Oakland. The disease, which is caused by vitamin D or calcium deficiency and had essentially been eliminated in the United States, is still common in countries with an unpredictable food supply. How, Ames wondered, could ailments such as rickets, which have historically been associated with malnutrition occur in a population that grows increasingly plump?

Could it be, he asked, that a society gorging on empty calories is simultaneously starving itself of the vitamins and minerals needed to keep its internal gears churning? Or that children who once played outdoors in the sunshine required to make vitamin D in the skin now stay indoors, hypnotized into inactivity by their TV screens? For years obesity was a sign of wealth; people with limited cash went hungry. But as cheap, highly processed foods have taken root in our supermarkets, narrowing the shelf space for fruits and vegetables, obesity is more frequently associated with poverty.

Ames continues to assemble evidence that a dearth of micronutrients can damage DNA. “We’ve been taking human cells in tissue culture, and they go through a certain number of generations and then they senesce,” he explains, adding that when the cells are deficient in a certain micronutrient, they senesce, or age, prematurely. “We still have to prove it in people and at what level, but so far for every vitamin and mineral deficiency we’ve looked at they senesce early and we see a lot of DNA damage.”

A properly functioning body requires healthy mitochondria, the “power plants” of nearly every human cell. Vitamins and minerals fuel the mitochondria, which in turn burn fats, carbohydrates, and protein in food to form energy for the rest of the body. With age, mitochondria degrade and lose efficiency. Oxygen radicals, atoms with unpaired electrons that are also called “free radicals,” result from that inefficiency and bind with other molecules to interfere with normal cell operations.

Inadequate micronutrient intake, Ames believes, affects the mitochondria in much the same way as aging. He has proved in tissue cultures that micronutrient deficiencies can degrade DNA, leading to the production of mutated chromosomes that can cause cancer. Over the short term, nature appears to be kind to the mildly micronutrient deficient human body. But chromosome disintegration will result in dire long-term health consequences, Ames says. In the absence of enough nutrients, he postures, “What nature would want is for the animal to survive, but anything long term will be ruthlessly dispensed with. So it’s a triage system. And I think DNA damage is long term. It shows up as cancer 30 years later.”

A college roommate of mine was one of Ames’ acolytes, and although I was a mere English major and then a journalism graduate student, I learned quite a bit from Ames through secondary osmosis.  This is a new direction for him.  In the absence of good farmer’s markets and a culture that worships poor eating habits, Ames says in this story that the fastest, cheapest and most effective solution might be widespread distribution of vitamin pills that could provide the ingredients missing from the typical American diet.

What the #$*! Does SCAG Know!?*

When the Southern California Association of Governments puts out its annual State of the Region report, it’s usually a one-day story in the L.A.-area local media, and no story at all in Sacramento or Washington, D.C., where one could argue SCAG’s findings are really aimed — at the custodians of the mythical treasure chests where money to build all the roads, commuter rail lines, housing and schools we need is supposed to come from.  

SCAG’s report would get even less attention if it weren’t for the easy PR hook of a “report card.”  The report card itself is unpleasant reading, as the headlines reflect: “Quality of Life is Dim.” “State of Region Report is Bleak.” “Traffic Negatively Affects Life in SoCal…Duh.” The LA Times didn’t bother with it, instead choosing to focus on how the Inland Empire used to be affordable, but not so much anymore.  

The percentage of households able to afford a median-priced home in Riverside and San Bernardino counties dropped from 48% in 2001 to 18% last year, as the median price for an Inland Empire home increased from $157,000 to $374,000 during the same period, the study found.

Riverside Mayor Ron Loveridge is also a SCAG board member and was in charge of this report.  As he assesses the explosive growth in his area, he makes the point that has always annoyed me about SCAG:

Loveridge compared his region’s growth to the boom that hit Orange County and the San Fernando Valley years ago. “You try to learn lessons,” he said, “but there are clearly market forces and social forces that help shape what takes place.”

New residents are moving to Riverside and San Bernardino counties from elsewhere in the United States, the study showed, bucking a larger regional migration trend.

Last year, 24,000 more people left Southern California to live and work in other parts of the United States than moved here, according to SCAG statistics.

Regional officials suggested that that turnaround could reflect Southern California’s cost of living, including high housing prices. The region last year registered a near-record-low mark in housing affordability, the report found. Still, it has not dampened the region’s housing construction boom.

In other words, nothing SCAG does or says matters.  If you’ve been around public affairs in LA long enough, you know that by now, SCAG could phone in these reports from a shack in Wyoming.  The numbers they crunch and package for public consumption are meant to spur action to change the region’s negative trends, but they can’t even stop history from repeating itself. Against “market forces and social forces,” SCAG and the region-wide consensus of elected officials who all endorse its agenda are impotent.  

The clue to SCAG’s weakness?  The report card, with all its C’s and D’s and F’s, is a policy-wonk view that doesn’t fit with what real people think.   According to SCAG’s own survey, more than half of Southern Californians think things are going “very well” or “somewhat well,” while less than 10 percent think things are going very badly.  Only about 20 percent of Southern Californians think transportation is the region’s top problem — and the survey shows there is no consensus about what the top problem really is. Crime, environment, economic concerns, education and immigration are each named by about 10-15 percent of the region’s residents as the top problem. 

SCAG, which is chartered as a regional planning entity, claims authority “to promote economic growth, personal well-being, and livable communities for all Southern Californians,” but has few tools with which to fulfill this grandiose promise.  This is why the agency is so relentless in telling us that traffic, the environment and affordable housing are bad and getting worse.  Its leaders perpetually wait for a call from the people of Southern California to come to their rescue.  

We’ve got myriad problems in Southern California, but the ones SCAG focuses on aren’t especially unique.  The environment is now perceived as a global issue.  Where you stand on housing affordability depends on whether you are currently an owner or a renter.  Most Southern California owners have an investment that appreciates faster than most other ventures. 

Traffic congestion is part of living in an urban area; it improves only when the economy weakens, and no one wants that.  People in Southern California figure that part of living and working includes traffic jams, crowded buses and trains, parking hassles, etc.  They don’t think it’s much different in other cities, where you can also get stuck in traffic — and freeze your butt off in December.  They don’t think anyone has the answers to problems like this — least of all an obscure public agency that seems obsessed with telling them what they already know. 

*Edited, 12/17

Intimate Strangers

Talking Heads, the fascinating “new wave” band that began in the late 70s, made its biggest mark on pop culture with the hit, “Once in a Lifetime” – thanks in part to MTV’s embrace of the surreal video, but also because of the song’s highly resonant lyrics, especially:

You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
You may find yourself in another part of the world
You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
You may ask yourself; Well…How did I get here?

(snip)

You may ask yourself
How do I work this?
You may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
You may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
You may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!

That song ran through my mind when reading Meghan Daum’s column in this morning’s LA Times.  She riffs on a new study that purports to show how ”the more we know about our loved ones, the less we know what they want from life,” which explains why “couples give each other such lame gifts.”  The study itself is fascinating:

An article in the December issue of the Journal for Consumer Research, snappily titled “Why It Is So Hard to Predict Our Partner’s Product Preferences: The Effect of Target Familiarity on Prediction Accuracy,” explains that we often confuse our own desires with the desires of our partners. Moreover, the study found that we tend to be more dismissive of our partners’ tastes than of the preferences of strangers.

In a series of experiments, marketing scholars in the Netherlands and Belgium showed images of bedroom furniture to couples who had been together for at least six months. Separately, each subject was asked to choose the styles he or she liked best. Then half were asked to predict what their partners would prefer, while the other half was given information about the preferences of a stranger, called “Person X,” and asked to choose styles for them based on those preferences.

As it turned out, members of the second group were much better at guessing what furniture Person X would choose than the first group was at guessing on behalf of their partners. Oops. And unbeknownst to those in the second group, their Persons X were their partners.

All of this suggested to the researchers that the more information you may have in your brain about someone, the less you may be able (or likely) to tease out their likes and dislikes. That may be a result of couples having more important things to talk about than bedroom furniture, but sometimes, the study found, it’s because we impose our own preferences on our partners, something we don’t do to mere strangers.

Technology, it seems to me, might have the answer.  In my extended family, we’re all instructed by my mother to post what we want for Christmas on our Amazon “Wish Lists.”  It’s the main reason I think she has a computer.

My wife and I force our son to sit down and write up his Christmas list at least a month before the holiday.  My wife is the hardest to pin down, so when she tells me something she wants, I make a point of memorizing it or writing it down.  Left to my own devices, I’d just screw it up.

P.S. In creating a link for “Once in A Lifetime,” I learned from Wikipedia that the songwriters, David Byrne and Eno, took the lyrics from a sermon they heard on the radio.

Give the Customers What They Want: Bias

This study, reported in the New York Times today, should not be surprising, but in today’s incredibly politicized media environment, it counts as news.  The University of Chicago has learned that a newspaper’s political biases reflect the belief systems of their readers. 

The authors calculated the ideal partisan slant for each paper, if all it cared about was getting readers, and they found that it looked almost precisely like the one for the actual newspaper. As Dr. Shapiro put it in an interview, “The data suggest that newspapers are targeting their political slant to their customers’ demand and choosing the amount of slant that will maximize their sales.”

On one hand that sounds a little mercenary. On the other hand, there is certainly good news in the finding. If slant comes from customers, then the views of the owners and the reporters do not matter. We do not need to fear that some partisan billionaire will buy up newspapers and use them for propaganda.

Indeed, the study found that the views of the owner had no significant effect on the slant of the newspaper. The partisanship of corporate donations from the owner had no bearing on the slant of the news coverage in the paper. The slant of a newspaper group’s other newspapers had no bearing, either. The New York Times Company’s newspaper in Spartanburg, S.C., for example, had the same slant as other newspapers in South Carolina that the company did not own.

So although politicians from both sides tend to accuse the news media of partisanship and negativity, the data suggests that they ought to blame the public. The papers basically reflect what their readers want to hear.

The study determined which papers were liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, based on the words they used.  A liberal newspaper was more likely to use the words “oil companies,” “middle class” and “public broadcasting.”  A conservative one was more likely to use “death tax,” “illegal aliens” and “nuclear power.”

This is kind of a weird way to measure bias.  If the New York Times decided to run a 10-part series on nuclear power around the world, and used the words “nuclear power” 10 times in each story, that would steer the paper toward the right? 

Anyway, this finding makes intuitive sense to me.  It would be nice to think the “objective media” still existed, but the fact is, a serious news consumer who wants the full story free of political spin, has to travel on both the left and right sides of the media nowadays, and then do some kind of averaging to find where the truth lies.

Dinosaurs: Hard to Kill

It took a lot more than just one meteor slamming into Mexico to wipe out the big lizards, it turns out:

There’s growing evidence that the dinosaurs and most their contemporaries were not wiped out by the famed Chicxulub meteor impact, according to a paleontologist who says multiple meteor impacts, massive volcanism in India, and climate changes culminated in the end of the Cretaceous Period.

The Chicxulub impact may, in fact, have been the lesser and earlier of a series of meteors and volcanic eruptions that pounded life on Earth for more than 500,000 years, say Princeton University paleontologist Gerta Keller and her collaborators Thierry Adatte from the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, and Zsolt Berner and Doris Stueben from Karlsruhe University in Germany. A final, much larger and still unidentified impact 65.5 million years ago appears to have been the last straw, exterminating two thirds of all species in one of the largest mass extinction events in the history of life. It’s that impact — not Chicxulub — which left the famous extraterrestrial iridium layer found in rocks worldwide that marks the impact that finally ended the Age of Reptiles.

“The Chicxulub impact could not have caused the mass extinction,” says Princeton University paleontologist Gerta Keller, “because this impact predates the mass extinction and apparently didn’t cause any extinctions.”

The climate changes, caused in part by greenhouse gases released from “prolonged and massive eruptions” of the Deccan Flood Basalts in India, were pretty extreme: Oceans 3 or 4 degrees warmer, and land temperatures 7 or 8 degrees warmer, 20,000 years before, and 100,000 years after, the Chicxulub meteor struck. Marine life was affected by growing smaller and reproducing more offspring — to increase the odds for survival. Tropical species were on the edge of extinction. Then there was another huge meteor impact, comparable to the first. Where did that meteor strike? Scientists don’t know, although some are suggesting a 500-kilometer-wide crater in India might be a remnant of it.

Tea and Sympathy and Science

Maybe the British are tired of everyone making fun of them for their seemingly fussy obsession with tea. University College London has conducted a study of tea-drinkers and has determined, scientifically, that “daily cups of tea can help you recover more quickly from the stresses of everyday life,” according to this item in Science Blog.

Professor Andrew Steptoe, UCL Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, says: “Drinking tea has traditionally been associated with stress relief, and many people believe that drinking tea helps them relax after facing the stresses of everyday life. However, scientific evidence for the relaxing properties of tea is quite limited. This is one of the first studies to assess tea in a double-blind placebo controlled design – that is, neither we nor the participants knew whether they were drinking real or fake tea. This means that any differences were due to the biological ingredients of tea, and not to the relaxing situations in which people might drink tea, whether they were familiar with the taste and liked it, and so on.

“We do not know what ingredients of tea were responsible for these effects on stress recovery and relaxation. Tea is chemically very complex, with many different ingredients. Ingredients such as catechins, polyphenols, flavonoids and amino acids have been found to have effects on neurotransmitters in the brain, but we cannot tell from this research which ones produced the differences.

“Nevertheless, our study suggests that drinking black tea may speed up our recovery from the daily stresses in life. Although it does not appear to reduce the actual levels of stress we experience, tea does seem to have a greater effect in bringing stress hormone levels back to normal. This has important health implications, because slow recovery following acute stress has been associated with a greater risk of chronic illnesses such as coronary heart disease.”

The two groups — one that had been given caffeinated tea, but in a fruit-flavored drink that deprived the drinker of all the tea-drinking atmospherics like decorative teacups, tea cozies, finger sandwiches and framed pictures of the Queen; and one that was given a caffeinated placebo with a similar flavor — were subjected to stressful experiences.

The real tea-drinkers had the same level of stress response as the placebo group, but “50 minutes after the task, cortisol levels had dropped by an average of 47 per cent in the tea drinking group compared with 27 per cent in the fake tea group.”

Expect the folks at Lipton, Bigelow and Celestial Seasonings to start marketing their products around these findings– teaming up with stress-management experts and putting them on media tours, sponsoring tea-tastings outside locations associated with stress, such as office buildings, DMV offices and Bar-exam test sites. The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, struggling to stay relevant in a Starbucks world, might start pushing the tea side of their business more.

Adagio Teas already sponsors “Tea Chat.” On the Black Tea forum, the University College findings are already causing quite a stir. This site also links to a “Tea Map,” described as “the online destination for finding tea rooms in and around your area.” For example, residents of the High Desert community of Lancaster can visit the Belladona Gift Boutique and Tea Room,

located in a renovated ‘1954 Storybook Home’ painted in true Victorian Flair with purple, yellow and teal. Your experience actually begins with the fragrance of roses along the walk-way while discovering the teapot shaped cut-outs in the concrete. Don’t miss the hardscape greeting around the bend – it is very colorful and full of sweet meaning.

First time visitors always catch their breath with surprise at the whimsical decor and enchanting aromas. The most delightful statement made was ‘Oh my Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore’.

Coffee-makers won’t take this lying down. I imagine they will soon commission a study showing the benefits of stress, and then dust off their old “Coffee Achievers” campaign.

Reverse-Engineering 9/11

It amazes me that 9/11 conspiracy theorists can get an audience.

If you think the towers fell as a result of a planned demolition, think about the number of people who would have to be involved to carry out such a scheme. Demolition experts to set up the bombs. Security personnel at the WTC to give them access. Ditto at the Pentagon. Nineteen suicidal Muslims who could fly planes, and who could each be given fake backgrounds implicating Al-Queda. People to teach them to fly. A group of people to coordinate all this activity. This conspiracy would be immediately exposed if either of the WTC planes were delayed by bad weather or maintenance problems — like that never happens. So there had to be people inside the airlines and air traffic control.

To pull off a stunt like this would require the work of dozens, if not hundreds, of trained and educated people. All of them would have to agree to take the secret to their graves. Not one of them could experience a change of heart later, or be tempted by the chance to become a celebrity by blowing the whistle, writing a book, going on Oprah. They would also all have to keep the secret from their families and friends — including their cover stories to explain what they were doing during the years of preparation a plot like this would require. All of them would have to be well-compensated to ensure this silence; a lot of money to obtain and distribute without the notice of any banking regulators or the IRS. You’d have to vigilantly ensure their continued silence. That means you’re paying a crack team of spies and assassins to monitor and control everything these people say and do — forever.

Forever — because who are the suspects in this alleged conspiracy? President Bush? He has an ambitious family that could not survive exposure of this plot. This dynasty does not intend for W to be the last Bush who serves as president. The oil companies? I assume these publicly-traded companies think they’ll be around for a long time in some form, and thus would remain liable for damages into the trillions if they were conclusively fingered. Any powerful person in business or politics would be extremely paranoid about one person leaking the plot — so paranoid that even if they had some yearning for 9/11 to happen to facilitate war or a U.S. takeover of the Middle East’s oil supply, they would probably shy away from the risks.

Anyway…these thoughts came to mind when I came across this study on Science Blog — a Purdue University-sponsored mathematical simulation of what happened when the jet hit the north tower. This quote is from Mete Sozen, the Kettelhut Distinguished Professor of Structural Engineering in Purdue’s School of Civil Engineering:

“Current findings from the simulation have identified the destruction of 11 columns on the 94th floor, 10 columns on the 95th floor and nine columns on the 96th floor,” he said. “This is a major insight. When you lose close to 25 percent of your columns at a given level, the building is significantly weakened and vulnerable to collapse.”

To depict the first half-second after the plane hit the building required 80 hours of a high-performance computer’s time. Many of the same researchers in 2002 conducted a study of the 9/11 Pentagon crash. If I’m reading the following correctly, the presence of 10,000 gallons of jet fuel and other liquids were responsible for much of the damage — even before the fuel caught fire:

“As a result of the Pentagon research, we have a better understanding of what happens when a tremendous mass of fluid such as fuel hits a solid object at high velocity,” Sozen said. “We believe most of the structural damage from such aircraft collisions is caused by the mass of the fluid on the craft, which includes the fuel.

“Damage resulting solely from the metal fuselage, engines and other aircraft parts is not as great as that resulting from the mass of fluids on board. You could think of the aircraft as a sausage skin. Its mass is tiny compared to the plane’s fluid contents.”

The simulation represents the plane and its mass as a mesh of hundreds of thousands of “finite elements,” or small squares containing specific physical characteristics. Like the previous Pentagon simulation, the software tool uses principles of physics to simulate how a plane’s huge mass of fuel and cargo impacts a building.

Do you believe the conspirators had the knowledge or ability to stage explosions that would precisely mimic these effects? That means there’s some fluid-mechanics genius with a high-performance computer out there going, “Mwah-hah-hah, they’ll never be able to tell the difference!”

I think most of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are actually hucksters. Generally, you have to pay for something — a book, a lecture, a downloadable video — in order to get them to tell you the real story.

Memo To My Teenage Son: Multitasking Isn’t Learning!

It’s actually pretty safe to say my son doesn’t read my blog.  Most of what I write about is incredibly boring, according to him:  Politics, PR, baseball, science…yawn!  So I might have to pay him to read this:

Multi-tasking affects the brain’s learning systems, and as a result, we do not learn as well when we are distracted, UCLA psychologists report this week in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Multi-tasking adversely affects how you learn,” said Russell Poldrack, UCLA associate professor of psychology and co-author of the study. “Even if you learn while multi-tasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily. Our study shows that to the degree you can learn while multi-tasking, you will use different brain systems.

“The best thing you can do to improve your memory is to pay attention to the things you want to remember,” Poldrack added. “Our data support that. When distractions force you to pay less attention to what you are doing, you don’t learn as well as if you had paid full attention.”

Shouldn’t that be obvious? 

I’ll tell you something else:  If you want to know why business and government are making so many bad decisions nowadays, you can blame the same thing — this absurd faith high-level people have in their own ability to multi-task.  Writing an e-mail, while having a meeting, while reading a report, while monitoring a conference call…this is how busy executives feel important.  They even multi-task while they’re on vacation!  Because, my God, if that phone ever stopped ringing, if those e-mails stopped flying over the transom, you might cease to exist!

But back to my son, who tries to tell me he’s doing work when, in fact, five Instant Message windows are open and actual dialogues are taking place; and he’s playing music; and talking on the phone.  Here is a snapshot of his brain:

Different forms of memory are processed by separate systems in the brain…. When you recall what you did last weekend or try to remember someone’s name or your driver’s license number, you are using a type of memory retrieval called declarative memory. (Patients with Alzheimer disease have damage in these brain areas.) When you remember how to ride a bicycle or how to play tennis, you are using what is called procedural memory; this requires a different set of brain areas than those used for learning facts and concepts, which rely on the declarative memory system. The beeps in the study disrupted declarative memory, said Poldrack, who also studies how the types of memory are related.

The brain’s hippocampus — a sea-horse-shaped structure that plays critical roles in processing, storing and recalling information — is necessary for declarative memory, Poldrack said. For the task learned without distraction, the hippocampus was involved. However, for the task learned with the distraction of the beeps, the hippocampus was not involved; but the striatum was, which is the brain system that underlies our ability to learn new skills.

The striatum is the brain system damaged in patients with Parkinson disease, Poldrack noted. Patients with Parkinson’s have trouble learning new motor skills but do not have trouble remembering the past.

“We have shown that multi-tasking makes it more likely you will rely on the striatum to learn,” Poldrack said. “Our study indicates that multi-tasking changes the way people learn.”

The researchers noted that they are not saying never to multi-task, just don’t multi-task while you are trying to learn something new that you hope to remember.  (emphasis mine)

Because, dude, this is so on the test!

The Snake and Us

Some 60 million years ago, snakes added venom to their arsenal of survival tools.  The first predators mammals faced were snakes.  And so, according to this story on Science Blog, some primates evolved better eyesight, larger brains and more dextrous hands and feet to avoid being poisoned and/or eaten.

According to Lynne Isbell, a UC Davis anthropology professor,

“There’s an evolutionary arms race between the predators and prey. Primates get better at spotting and avoiding snakes, so the snakes get better at concealment, or more venomous, and the primates respond…. A snake is the only predator you really need to see close up. If it’s a long way away it’s not dangerous.”

The eye that would prevent a sneak snake attack eventually became the eye that could distinguish other things in our world, and facilitate social interaction. Primates fortunate enough to live in a paradise where snakes lack venom tend not to have evolved as far, according to Isbell.

Try to stack this theory up with Genesis. Snakes tempted humankind to acquire knowledge, the Bible says. Indeed, they may have. Perhaps God’s wrath was unwarranted. Or perhaps Adam and Eve left of their own accord, trying to get away from that snake, whom they could now see with frightening clarity.

Isbell is writing a book about primate origins. Her article appeared in the Journal of Human Evolution’s July edition.

Catching an Ancient Raindrop

They were after gold, these miners who shot streams of water through a cannon against Sierra Nevada mountain faces, cracking them open in hopes that treasure would spill out. Armed with these hydraulic hammers, miners could blast away “half a mountain in a few minutes,” according to a historian of the Gold Rush era. It was the kind of environmental assault that a fever for wealth often would inspire during this country’s first two centuries.

The crushing blows from the water cannons exposed soil and rock from the Eocene era — 40 to 50 million years ago. Embedded in those minerals are ancient raindrops. A team of geological researchers from Stanford University conducted chemical analysis of those raindrops, and concluded that the mammoth granite mountain range that cradles Yosemite Valley is much, much older than commonly believed.

From Science Blog:

(I)n a study published in the July 7 edition of the journal Science, Chamberlain and Stanford colleagues Andreas Mulch and Stephan A. Graham present strong evidence that the Sierra Nevada range has stood tall–7,200 feet (2,200 meters) or higher–for at least 40 million years.

“An elevation profile drawn across the northern Sierra Nevada 40 to 50 million years ago would not look much different than today’s profile,” said Graham, the Welton Joseph and Maud L’Anphere Crook Professor of Applied Earth Science at Stanford.

“Those mountains probably have persisted since the Mesozoic Era–more than 65 million years ago–until today,” Chamberlain added. Back then, according to many scientists, California was split by an ancient subduction zone–a region of constant geologic upheaval, where a plunging oceanic tectonic plate continuously pushed the continental North American plate higher and higher to create the Sierra Nevada range.

This version of events is in sharp conflict with the “recent uplift” scenario, which argues that the Sierra rose from sea level to 7,200 feet about 3 million to 5 million years ago after an enormous block of the Earth’s crust broke off and fell into the mantle. According to this hypothesis, the crust was then replaced by hot, buoyant mantle material that eventually raised the mountains. Although the Science study found no evidence to support this scenario, data revealed that a modest uplift of 1,100 to 2,000 feet (350 to 600 meters) did occur as recently as 3 million years ago.

How do you catch an “ancient raindrop?” How do you get that raindrop to tell you its secrets?

(T)he scientists used an increasingly popular research tool that combines geology and chemistry to create a record of prehistoric rainfall patterns dating back millions of years. This technique relies on the fact that in nature, hydrogen and other atoms occur in different sizes called isotopes. Deuterium, for example, is a slightly heavier form of hydrogen, and drops of rainwater that contain deuterium isotopes often fall at lower elevations.

“If you have a cloud coming in and dropping out water, as it climbs the mountain its preference is to first drop the heavy water that’s rich in deuterium,” Chamberlain said. “As you go up in elevation, the raindrops become lighter and lighter. Therefore, the rainwater becomes gradually depleted of deuterium the higher up the mountain range it falls.”

Over time, some raindrops are incorporated into molecules of clay and other minerals that form on the ground. These clays provide scientists with a geologic record of ancient precipitation, which can then be compared with samples of modern precipitation collected at the same altitude. If the comparison reveals similar isotopic ratios, then the elevation of the mountain must have been similar in ancient and modern times.

The Stanford researchers believe the crest of the Sierras was once the western edge of the Great Basin of Nevada and Utah — before it was a basin. It was a large plateau that “basically collapsed,” according to Chamberlain.

Can the study of ancient raindrops help us understand global climate patterns? Yes, and that’s one reason why the Stanford team is engaged in this research. To model future climate change, Chamberlain says,

“There are basically six large mountain ranges climatologists need to know the history of–western North America, the Himalayas, Antarctica, Greenland, the spine down Africa and the Andes,” Chamberlain noted. “To get an idea of what’s going to happen if carbon dioxide levels double in the future, you’d have to go back 20 or 30 million years in time. If you knew what the topography of these six mountain ranges was then, you could include that in your computer models and see how they respond when you double the carbon dioxide.”

The Secret to Making Money from Blogs

You can't make money blogging, or at least you can't make much. At least not now. Well, actually nobody knows. I don't have any ads on this site, the main reason being nobody has ever asked me to put their ad on this site. Maybe advertisers are missing a huge opportunity!

But I think I've figured out the secret to making money from blogs. Get someone to pay you to monitor them.

That's the conclusion I draw from Deborah Brown's op-ed (subscription required) in the current PR Week. Deborah Brown is senior director at Peppercom, a much-awarded small firm with offices in New York, San Francisco and London. She's got a common-sense approach to what she calls "digital media" that reminded me of the John Prine lyric, "It don't make much sense, this common sense don't make no sense no more."

For example, she says:

It’s also critical to understand that your company cannot state the same key messages via digital media that are allowed in other marketing initiatives such as advertising. With digital, the customer is in complete control. You need to understand how to communicate and connect in a new environment in which you have little or no control.

This is true, but it is fast becoming a cliche. Realizing you have little or no control is good Zen discipline, but pretty soon the clients are going to start asking their PR people for something more than a list of "what-not-to-do's." From my perch, I think we're at the point where an old economic idea, "Creative Destruction," needs to be applied to these new realities. From Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, written in 1942:

(T)he contents of the laborer's budget, say from 1760 to 1940, did not simply grow on unchanging lines but they underwent a process of qualitative change. Similarly, the history of the productive apparatus of a typical farm, from the beginnings of the rationalization of crop rotation, plowing and fattening to the mechanized thing of today–linking up with elevators and railroads–is a history of revolutions. So is the history of the productive apparatus of the iron and steel industry from the charcoal furnace to our own type of furnace, or the history of the apparatus of power production from the overshot water wheel to the modern power plant, or the history of transportation from the mailcoach to the airplane. The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation–if I may use that biological term–that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in. . . .

"Industrial mutation" — there's a term I'd like to see the PR blogs use more often! The fact is, in a breathtakingly short period of time, mass communications has undergone a profound mutation, to which the PR industry and current practices might not successfully adapt.

In PR Week, Brown quotes Christopher Barger, "Blogger-in-Chief" at IBM, saying the customers "want relationship building" and not "traditional messages." From this article and dozens more like it all over the PR blogosphere and trade media, you get the idea that some PR industry leaders see "relationship building" as just another tactic in the PR professional's arsenal.

I don't think so. Training in the PR industry is notoriously poor, but from what I remember, it's mostly about dealing with the news media, elements of good writing, client relations and "managing for profitability." There aren't many PR agency GMs who could instruct staff to go forth and help clients "build relationships" via "digital media" and have any confidence in how their employees would translate those words into action. Chaos would ensue. It might be funny like "The Office" is funny. But a client shouldn't pay for people to do something they aren't qualified to do.

I don't mean to knock Deborah Brown. Her article is good as far as it goes. She has a clear view of the mutation process, and how control is slipping away. The rather tentative tone of her article is probably appropriate. Nobody really knows what to do, and she doesn't pretend to either.

However, she did make one suggestion that made me laugh.

Monitor…monitor….monitor…know what’s being said about your company, but know when it makes sense to react.

Digital monitoring: It's a tactic PR people can certainly do. It's just like media monitoring, except more billable hours, since, according to a Pew Internet & American Life Project report,

As of last December, 35 percent of Americans had posted to a blog, created a Web page, shared online photos, or otherwise generated content. That proportion is more than double the 16 percent that had posted any content to the Web in January 2002, when Pew first researched the topic.

Can you imagine how many of those posts mention a brand-name company, one that might have PR people in-house or under contract? Monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor…

Separated at Birth

We're twins, and we didn't even know it! From Science Blog:

The Binary Research Institute (BRI) has found that orbital characteristics of the recently discovered planetoid, "Sedna", demonstrate the possibility that our sun might be part of a binary star system. A binary star system consists of two stars gravitationally bound orbiting a common center of mass. Once thought to be highly unusual, such systems are now considered to be common in the Milky Way galaxy.

Walter Cruttenden at BRI, Professor Richard Muller at UC Berkeley, Dr. Daniel Whitmire of the University of Louisiana, amongst several others, have long speculated on the possibility that our sun might have an as yet undiscovered companion. Most of the evidence has been statistical rather than physical. The recent discovery of Sedna, a small planet like object first detected by Cal Tech astronomer Dr. Michael Brown, provides what could be indirect physical evidence of a solar companion. Matching the recent findings by Dr. Brown, showing that Sedna moves in a highly unusual elliptical orbit, Cruttenden has determined that Sedna moves in resonance with previously published orbital data for a hypothetical companion star.

What's the Binary Research Institute? It's a scientific research organization based in Newport Beach "formed in 2001 to support and fund research regarding the hypothesis that the Sun is part of a binary star system. It is the goal of the Binary Research Institute to present evidence for this theory, showing that the motion of the sun along a binary orbital path can result in and better explain" various phenomena such as the Earth's wobbling rotation, and help us understand the movement of our solar system through the Milky Way.

Its founder is Walter W. Cruttenden, a private investor, amateur astronomer and archeoastronomer. (I must admit, his organization's name makes me a little suspicious. It's one thing to begin a scientific inquiry with a hypothesis, but if I founded the "Life on Mars Institute," wouldn't that insert bias into the whole enterprise? Just asking.)

If our Sun has a partner, shouldn't we be able to see it? Not necessarily. According to the Institute,

there could be a dark binary, such as a brown dwarf or possibly a relatively small black hole, either of which might be very difficult to detect, without accurate and lengthy analysis.

Beyond direct detection – one way to determine if we are in a binary system is to see if the Sun is curving through space. To us on Earth that means we should experience a gradual “changing orientation to inertial space.” Such a phenomenon is observed as the precession of the equinox.

Precession of the equinox refers to the fact that the stars are fixed, but over a 25,800-year period, their position in the sky relative to Earth completes a cycle. Lots of guesses as to why, but no firm findings. The Institute believes our Sun's secret friend might explain it. 

If this hypothesis is true, it would be big news to us, but it wouldn't be all that remarkable. Many easily observable stars are part of binary systems. Our partner might be very far away, completing a distant orbit — a dancer on the other side of the ballroom. And, as suggested above, it might not be visible. Black holes don't emit light, and brown dwarves cannot sustain nuclear fusion and thus burn only dimly.

Being followed by something big that we can't see…a paranoia-inducing concept! Somehow I'm reminded of my misspent youth, when police cars sometimes followed my pals and me in the wee hours with their lights off, only to reveal themselves at the last minute to determine if we were up to no good. (Fortunately, we were all choirboys, pure at heart.)

“When Two Black Holes Collide, Space Shivers Like Jello.”

It's all over the news: NASA has simulated what happens when two black holes collide. This is a case, however, where the visual doesn't convey the magnitude of the achievement. Words do. From CNet (via ZDNet):

When two black holes collide, space shivers like Jell-O. With the help of a supercomputer to simulate this event, NASA seeks to prove Albert Einstein's theories and unveil universe's secrets.

The NASA supercomputer Columbia just performed its largest astrophysical calculation ever; a 3D simulation of two black holes merging. "This merger is a cataclysmic event, second only to the Big Bang in the amount of energy it produces," Joan Centrella, chief of the NASA Gravitational Astrophysics Laboratory in Greenbelt, Md., said Tuesday in a press teleconference.

NASA called the successful simulation a breakthrough in the observation of black holes, as well as the understanding of the entire universe. In fact, NASA claims that it might even provide the ultimate proof for Einstein's theory of general relativity.

And from ScienceBlog,

Previous simulations had been plagued by computer crashes. The necessary equations, based on Einstein's theory of general relativity, were far too complex. But scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., have found a method to translate Einstein's math in a way that computers can understand.

"These mergers are by far the most powerful events occurring in the universe, with each one generating more energy than all of the stars in the universe combined. Now we have realistic simulations to guide gravitational wave detectors coming online," said Joan Centrella, head of the Gravitational Astrophysics Laboratory at Goddard.

The simulations were performed on the Columbia supercomputer at NASA's Ames Research Center near Mountain View, Calif. This work appears in the March 26 issue of Physical Review Letters and will appear in an upcoming issue of Physical Review D. The lead author is John Baker of Goddard.

Similar to ripples on a pond, gravitational waves are ripples in space and time, a four-dimensional concept that Einstein called spacetime. They haven't yet been directly detected.

Gravitational waves hardly interact with matter and thus can penetrate the dust and gas that blocks our view of black holes and other objects. They offer a new window to explore the universe and provide a precise test for Einstein's theory of general relativity. The National Science Foundation's ground-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory and the proposed Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, a joint NASA – European Space Agency project, hope to detect these subtle waves, which would alter the shape of a human from head to toe by far less than the width of an atom.

Black hole mergers produce copious gravitational waves, sometimes for years, as the black holes approach each other and collide. Black holes are regions where gravity is so extreme that nothing, not even light, can escape their pull. They alter spacetime. Therein lies the difficulty in creating black hole models: space and time shift, density becomes infinite and time can come to a standstill. Such variables cause computer simulations to crash.

If he were alive today, I suppose Einstein would be unsurprised by this. He would also note that he didn't use a computer to figure it out.

Mighty, Mighty Stress

I wonder if talk-radio fans get embarassed when they hear who sponsors their favorite programs: Peddlers of marginal cures for obesity, baldness and tax problems. I assume there is some basis for their claims, however slight, but it is delightfully surreal to listen to hard-heads like Rush Limbaugh and Hugh Hewitt tout herbal cures that promise to build your brain or restore your eyesight without glasses. The most disquieting ad I’ve heard is for a product that will make your children taller. Please, parents are competitive enough already!

This digression leads into a startling fact I learned this morning via Boing-Boing: Severe stress can cause children to stop growing. The most famous case of psychogenic dwarfism is JM Barrie, author of “Peter Pan.” The site’s Cory Doctorow wants to draw your attention to a couple of “mind-opening” lectures by Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford researcher and expert on the physiology of stress, now available via podcast. The links are here on Boing-Boing and on BrainConnection.com, which includes a short summary of Sapolsky’s lectures:

Sapolsky related a story about a boy from a very psychologically-abusive setting who was hospitalized in a New York hospital with zero growth hormone in his bloodstream. Over the next two months he developed a close relationship with the nurse at the hospital–undoubtedly the first normal relationship he had ever had–and soon, amazingly enough, the growth hormone levels zoomed back to normal. The nurse then went on vacation and the levels dropped again, rising once more immediately after her return.

“Think about it,” Sapolsky said, commenting upon the story. “The rate at which this child was depositing calcium in his bones could be explained entirely by how safe and loved he was feeling in the world.” He added that while this standard textbook version of stressed dwarfism is rare, there is nevertheless “major league psychopathology” throughout society, retarding human growth.

“Major stress is the police and social workers breaking down the door of the apartment, finding the kids who have been locked in the closet for two months, the food slipped under the door. Total nightmare situations that turn out often in history. . . kids in war zones, kids in areas of civil strife.”

The problem with human beings, Saplosky says, is that unlike animals, we expose ourselves to sustained periods of stress — sometimes through undergoing a prolonged, horrific experience like war or abuse, sometimes because we anticipate, or remember stressful experiences…and sometimes because we choose stress as a lifestyle.

Stress is fundamental to our economy. We make heroes out of people whose work habits are unhealthy, and tell young employees to model themselves after stress addicts. Without asking the question directly, employers try to assess potential employees’ ability to handle stress. Job applicants understand this game, too. They know it won’t be helpful to their employment prospects if show too much curiosity about the company’s “work-life balance policies.” Better to say, “I’m used to working long hours,” or even “I don’t have a life.”

The only job interviews where prospects raise “work-life balance” occur when the prospect knows they have many competitors for their services. But even in cases where bidding is heavy, the potential employee’s perceived market value is usually associated more with their ability to carry a huge workload than their talents. “He’s a horse,” a boss will say admiringly. “She’s got such energy.”

The glorification of stress may never change, but the employer eventually pays a price, Sapolsky research suggests. Stressed-out workers slowly become stupider.

Until recently…it was commonly believed that if you lost brain cells they were lost forever. “You can make new neurons in your brain after all,” Sapolsky said, “and especially in the Hippocampus in response to things like learning and environmental stimulation. But stress will block the formation of new neurons.”

While the hippocampus does have the capacity to regenerate, it’s far from certain that this will occur, Sapolsky asserted. People who have endured horrible stress, such as Vietnam combat veterans and victims of prolonged childhood sexual abuse, are often fated to suffer permanent damage to the hippocampus, resulting in memory loss.

Depression, “what Sapolsky termed the common cold of psychopathology,” also attacked the hippocampus with stress hormones. Massive long-term depression, he said, was almost certain to cause permanent damage in the form of memory loss.

Companies that want to “invest in their employees” need to keep this in mind. Your best employees’ long hours might make them more profitable, but the brainpower-per-square-inch will decline unless you take some of the pressure off.

Deep Down, We’re Altruistic

Well, here’s a hopeful finding from the world of science to begin a Friday:

Psychology researcher Felix Warneken performed a series of ordinary tasks in front of toddlers, such as hanging towels with clothespins or stacking books. Sometimes he “struggled” with the tasks; sometimes he deliberately messed up.

Over and over, whether Warneken dropped clothespins or knocked over his books, each of 24 toddlers offered help within seconds but only if he appeared to need it. Video shows how one overall-clad baby glanced between Warneken’s face and the dropped clothespin before quickly crawling over, grabbing the object, pushing up to his feet and eagerly handing back the pin.

Warneken never asked for the help and didn’t even say “thank you,” so as not to taint the research by training youngsters to expect praise if they helped. After all, altruism means helping with no expectation of anything in return.

And this is key the toddlers didn’t bother to offer help when he deliberately pulled a book off the stack or threw a pin to the floor, Warneken, of Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, reports Thursday in the journal Science.

To be altruistic, babies must have the cognitive ability to understand other people’s goals plus possess what Warneken calls “pro-social motivation,” a desire to be part of their community.

“When those two things come together they obviously do so at 18 months of age and maybe earlier they are able to help,” Warneken explained.

Warneken is from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.  This AP story is based on an article in Science.

That Billboard…It’s Alive…!

ZDNet’s “Emerging Technology” blogger Roland Piquepaille points to a New Scientist report that will surely cause immense ripples among advertisers — as well as consumer activists who believe no one should market anything to us without our permission.  How’re you going to stop this?

The night sky could soon be lit up with gigantic three-dimensional adverts, thanks to a Japanese laser display that creates glowing images in thin air.

The system is being developed by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Tokyo, in collaboration with Burton Inc and Keio University.

“We believe this technology may eventually be used in applications ranging from pyrotechnics to outdoor advertising,” says a spokesman for AIST. According to Burton Inc, the technology might also be used for emergency distress signals or even temporary road signs.

The display utilises an ionisation effect which occurs when a beam of laser light is focused to a point in air. The laser beam itself is invisible to the human eye but, if the intensity of the laser pulse exceeds a threshold, the air breaks down into glowing plasma that emits visible light.

And:

The researchers behind the demonstration system plan to upgrade it to a higher pulsing rate, which should produce more dots and so smoother images. Future versions should also include moving pictures and AIST claims it should be possible to scale the system up to produce displays of any size. However, only white flashpoints can be created so a colour display will not be possible.

If you flip to the New Scientist story, don’t miss the comment thread it generated. “Peter” had this to say:

The technology sounds fantastic, but use it constructively, like at airports for approach vectors or to mark lanes in the air for our new flying cars or for other safety or emergency information applications. Satellites could project grid points above the ocean for search and rescue, yatch racing markers at night, etc etc.

The minute i see a nike swoosh or ‘enjoy coke’ in my night sky is the minute I begin researching homemade GPS guided nuclear weapons.

How dangerous is the beam, what would happen if a bird or light plane just happened to get in the way, does it produce ozone? what are the long term side effects? wiill the beam ionise enough air to effectively become a lightning conductor down the beam and into the equipment sending it (if its a nice bright ‘coke’ symbol then we can only hope)? How much power will it really take to project a big 3d coke symbol, probably hundreds or thousands of kilowatts.

“Help us Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re our only hope!”

Mario…Save My Brain!

I’m 50. Well let me back up. I grew up in a household with four brothers. Even when I was 15 and my brain was young and dew-covered, I didn’t always call them by their correct names. But now that I’m 50, all kinds of memories seem a little further out of reach than they were ten years ago. Don’t get me wrong. The offsetting benefit of experience adding perspective makes up for the fade-out of things I used to remember.

I want to be able to use that experience for at least another two or three decades. But if I can’t remember stuff…wait, what was I saying?

Fortunately we live in a time when functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can track what’s going on inside our skulls, showing us with great precision the brain locations were different work is done. For example, the Max Planck Institute in Germany recently discovered the precise spot inside our brains where complex grammar gets processed — a key trait that separates humans from other species. (Hat tip to ZDNet’s Emerging Technology Blog.)

There is a spot inside your brain that lights up on the fMRI when you need to process a simple linguistic concept: Subject, verb. Article, noun. Apes are also equipped with that capability. We, humans and apes, can understand the difference between a likely combination that conveys information, and an unlikely combination that conveys nonsense. However, when you have to understand or create a complex sentence, what lights up is an area of the brain that apes never developed.

English majors like me will be glad to find out that the ability to understand a complicated sentence provides an evolutionary advantage. Adept use of parenthetical phrases got you better mates.

This kind of knowledge is more than just scientifically interesting. It can help us prolong the useful life of our most precious physical asset.

Our brains age, but the effects of aging can be reversed. University of Illinois scientists, using the same fMRI imaging technology, discovered the brain can be exercised; and that those who train their brains can restore their ability to think and remember.

For the new study, researchers in (Professor Arthur F.) Kramer’s lab looked at areas of the brain known to be associated with executive control — scheduling, planning, juggling multiple tasks and working memory. These areas, the ventral and dorsal prefrontal cortexes, are tied to cognitive declines in aging.

Participants were 32 men and women, ages 55 to 80, and 31 younger adults. They were divided into control and experimental groups, with the latter receiving training on a time-measured task of identifying green or yellow Xs and/or whether a letter on the computer monitor was a B or C. Researchers then analyzed comprehensive fMRI data compiled before and after training of various parts of the brain and of changes in performance and times involving the tasks.

Before and after results were dramatic in ventral regions of the brain, said lead author Kirk I. Erickson, a psychology postdoctoral research associate.

“You can see,” Erickson said as he pointed to graphs showing results of activity in the left ventral region, “that even though the older adults start out with a lower amount of activation before training, those who were trained actually increased the amount of activity. You see a convergence with the young people. After training there are less age-related differences. Older adults begin to look more like the younger adults in brain activation.”

This is big news to people like me. Where can we learn these exercises? I can tell the difference between green and yellow. Hook me up!

Like magic, the consumer market responds. Specifically… Nintendo. The Mario Brothers guys. The study isn’t even officially published yet, but…

Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day for Nintendo DS is a fun, rewarding form of entertainment everyone can enjoy, as it helps players flex their mental muscles. Brain Age is inspired by the research of Professor Ryuta Kawashima, a prominent Japanese neuroscientist. His studies evaluated the impact of performing certain reading and mathematic exercises to help stimulate the brain.

Brain Age presents quick mental activities that help keep your DS brain in shape. Activities include quickly solving simple math problems, counting people going in and out of a house simultaneously, drawing pictures on the Touch Screen, reading classic literature out loud, and more. You can also play sudoku, the number puzzle game which has become an extremely popular feature in U.S. newspapers.

On your first day of exercise, you will take a series of tests and get a score that determines how old your brain is. This number is called your “DS Brain Age”. By performing daily exercises just minutes a day over weeks and months, the better you’ll get at the exercises and the lower your DS Brain Age will become.

Of course, baby boomers, the most paranoid about losing our edge, aren’t big users of electronic game consoles. They came on the pop culture scene a little late for us. But Nintendo has sure figured out a way to get our attention, haven’t they? And for those of us with kids, what are we supposed to say now?

“Kid, turn that infernal machine off and do your homework.”

“Dad, don’t bug me. I’m training my brain.”

“D’oh! Move over son…”

I’m sure more products like this are on their way. These next few years are going to be very surreal as consumer marketers start handing us new tools for self-transformation.

Quick. What Do You Think of This Post?

First, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Now this. As a society, are we really ready to discard the use of reason and logic in our decisions?

In a series of experiments reported last week in the journal Science, a team of Dutch psychologists found that people struggling to make complex decisions did best when they were distracted and were not able to think consciously about the choice at all.

The research not only backs up the common advice to “sleep on it” when facing difficult choices, but it also suggests that the unconscious brain can actively reason as well as produce weird dreams and Freudian slips.

(snip)

Psychologists have known for years that people process an enormous amount of information unconsciously — for example, when they hear their names pop up in a conversation across the room that they were not consciously listening to. But the new report suggests that people take this wealth of under-the-radar information, combine it with deliberately studied facts and impressions and then make astute judgments that they would not otherwise form.

Between Jimmy Carter’s agonizing search for the optimum allocation of tennis court time at the White House, and George W. Bush’s flashes of divine inspiration — which resembles the “distracted…not able to think consciously” model described above — there must be a happy medium for making important decisions.

But on the other hand: In life, we all have known people whose “gut instincts” were more reliable than most. Are such people in better touch with their subconscious reasoning power? Or do they just have bigger brains?

So, from now on, if you ask a colleague a question, and they say, “I’ll get back to you on that,” maybe you should thank them for not thinking about your problem.

P.S. Thanks to Ann Althouse for the link. Writing as a law professor, she applies this study to her field in a fascinating way:

What does this (study) say about judicial decisionmaking? Judges take in a lot of information. They make a decision and must put their reasons in a piece of writing that we sometimes casually call the “decision,” but we know they can’t transcribe their actual decision. You can try to reconstruct how you made a complex decision, but you can’t really even know the answer yourself. That’s one of the reasons it’s so endlessly fascinating to read judicial opinions. You know the real reasons exist at some deeper level, no matter how forthright the judge is.

Let’s face this fact: Appellate judges probably know what decision they want to render, and then find the citations to justify it. They will all say their decisions are rooted in the law and the constitution. How could they call themselves judges if they didn’t believe that? But it’s their gut that drives them. That’s why appellate court decisions are only occasionally unanimous.

If this kind of research becomes commonly accepted wisdom, maybe all job interviews and judicial confirmation processes will become efforts to probe the applicants’ subconscious mind.

I’d also be curious to hear what marketing/PR people think about this study. Perhaps it confirms Edward Bernays’ original conception of public relations as propaganda — social science and psychology applied to the art of subtle persuasion. To boost sales, or get votes, don’t try to reason with people. Approach their subconscious minds, and do your persuading there.

Brr.

East Coast Ice v. West Coast Kelp

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has been living large in St. Louis the past few days, with scholars and educators attending its annual meeting getting not one, but two new explanations for how and why human beings occupy the North American continent.

According to this story on LiveScience.com, the concept most of us vaguely have in our minds — that the Americas were first populated via a land-ice bridge across the Bering Strait and then gradually moved south — might be wrong. The glaciers began melting 17,000 years ago, recent studies show, rendering that transitway impossible. But also:

(W)hen archaeologist Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution places American spearheads, called Clovis points, side-by-side with Siberian points, he sees a divergence of many characteristics.

Instead, Stanford said today, Clovis points match up much closer with Solutrean style tools, which researchers date to about 19,000 years ago. This suggests that the American people making Clovis points made Solutrean points before that.

There’s just one problem with this hypothesis—Solutrean toolmakers lived in France and Spain. Scientists know of no land-ice bridge that spanned that entire gap.

Stanford has an idea for how humans crossed the Atlantic, though—boats. Art from that era indicates that Solutrean populations in northern Spain were hunting marine animals, such as seals, walrus, and tuna.

They may have even made their way into the floating ice chunks that unite immense harp seal populations in Canada and Europe each year. Four million seals, Stanford said, would look like a pretty good meal to hungry European hunters, who might have ventured into the ice flows much the same way that the Inuit in Alaska and Greenland do today.

But wait! Couldn’t Asia’s ancients use boats too? According to another anthropologist’s study (also summarized on LiveScience), humans from Asia might have followed an “ocean highway” made of dense kelp. Jon Erlandson of the University of Oregon found:

Today, a nearly continuous “kelp highway” stretches from Japan, up along Siberia, across the Bering Strait to Alaska, and down again along the California coastline, Erlandson said.

Kelp forests are some of the world’s richest ecosystems. They are homes to seals, sea otters, hundreds of species of fish, sea urchins and abalone, all of which would have been important food and material sources for maritime people.

Although the coastal migration theory has yet to be proven with hard evidence, it is known that seafaring peoples lived in the Ryukyu Islands near Japan during the height of the last glacial period, about 35,000 to 15,000 years ago. These peoples may have traveled 90 or more miles at a time between islands.

Some scientists believe that maritime people boated from Japan to Alaska along the Aleutian and Kurile Islands around 16,000 years ago. Before that, people may have island-hopped their way to Australia 50,000 to 60,000 years ago.

Scientists have discovered settlements 11,500 to 9,000 years old along the coasts of some of these Pacific islands, which also have ecologically-rich kelp forests nearby that Erlandson believes existed when people were island hopping. The remains of kelp resources have been discovered in a settlement in Daisy Cave in the Channel Islands off southern California, dated to about 9,800 years ago.

“The fact that productive kelp forests are found adjacent to some of the earliest coastal archaeological sites in the Americas supports the idea that such forests may have facilitated human coastal migrations around the Pacific Rim near the end of the last glacial period,” Erlandson said. “In essence, they may have acted as a sort of kelp highway.”

Kelp forests also provide a barrier between coastal settlements and the rough open seas and lessen the wave forces on beach-side settlements. Sometimes the kelp washes up on land, where land animals, which humans could kill and eat, can munch on it.

These were just two of hundreds of papers presented in St. Louis over the weekend (where it’s been in the 20s overnight and topping out in the low 40s during the day. Was the LA Convention Center booked up?) AAAS’s Board of Directors took the occasion to denounce legislation and policies that would “deprive students of the education they need to be informed and productive citizens in an increasingly technological, global community.” Among the states considering anti-evolution legislation: Missouri. According to a release on the AAAS website:

Some of these bills would seek to discredit evolution by emphasizing “flaws” in the theory of evolution, or “disagreements” within the scientific community, the AAAS Board noted. Other bills would encourage teachers and students to explore the concept of intelligent design or other non-scientific “alternatives” to evolution, or to “critically analyze” evolution and “the controversy”. But, AAAS emphasized, “There is no significant controversy within the scientific community about the validity of evolution.”

Moreover, “Evolution is one of the most robust and widely accepted principles of modern science,” the AAAS Board concluded, reconfirming its October 18, 2002 statement, as well as the December 2005 ruling of federal District Court Judge John E. Jones III, who found that intelligent design is based on religion, not science.

I can’t find the citations right now, but from what I’ve read on a few conservative sites (especially on The Corner), Judge Jones’ smackdown of Intelligent Design is going to cause political ripples. It’s apparent that the Republican Party’s supporters in the religious right continue to see Intelligent Design as occupying a legitimate place in the classroom, and don’t take kindly to Republicans who admit they think it’s hooey.

From the tone of the attacks on the conservative pundits who dared to admit they found Intelligent Design an intellectual embarassment — and from the rapid “I never meant to suggest” backfilling that followed — anti-evolution is fast becoming a religious right litmus test on the same level as anti-choice and anti-gay marriage.

As the east-coast/west-coast migration theories show, there is plenty of room for debate about how we got here and who we are. To paraphrase former President Clinton, we don’t have the brain cells to waste on debating settled matters.

Bottled Water Isn’t Good for You…

…according to the Earth Policy Institute, citing environmental costs and the strain on family budgets.  Ounce for ounce, a bottle of water can be 10,000 times more expensive than what most Americans can safely get out of a tap.

Some of these numbers are startling: 

The study said that demand for bottled water soared in developing countries between 1999 and 2004 with consumption tripling in India and more than doubling in China during that period.

That has translated into massive costs in packaging the water, usually in plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) which is derived from crude oil, and then transporting it by boat, train or on land.

“Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 US cars for a year,” according to the study. “Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year.”

Once the water is consumed, disposing the plastic bottles poses an environmental risk.

The study, citing the Container Recycling Institute, said that 86 percent of plastic water bottles in the United States end up as garbage and those buried can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade.

In addition, some 40 percent of the PET bottles deposited for recycling in the United States in 2004 ended up being shipped to China.

The study warned that the rapid growth in the industry has also ironically led to water shortages in some areas, including India where bottling of Dasani water and other drinks by the Coca-Cola company has caused shortages in more than 50 villages.

It said that while consumers tend to link bottled water with healthy living, tap water can be just as healthy and is subject to more stringent regulations than bottled water in many regions, including Europe and the United States.

On first blush, I’m sympathetic to this study’s findings. The fear so many people have of their municipal tap water is absurd.  We spend billions removing contaminants from water supplies, and the environmental regulations applying to water have only gotten tighter during the past 20 years.

Water that is safe enough for newborn infants to drink is mostly used to irrigate lawns, wash clothes and cool industrial motors.  That’s how committed our society is to healthful water. It seems wasteful to avoid drinking it.

Then I started thinking:  How much of the increased bottled water sales merely replaced sales of other beverages?  It seems to me that products like Dasani and Aquafina were Coke and Pepsi’s response to losing market share to Evian and Calistoga.

You can only hold so much fluid in your body. Are people drinking bottled water and soda pop?  Doubtful. If people shift from sugary, chemical-spiked sodas to water, that’s a healthier choice.

A better study might be to look at the total consumption of bottled beverages. Has it changed, per capita, since the bottled-water fad took hold? 

The education campaign we ought to have is: If you’re thirsty, nothing is more refreshing than tap water. We know, scientifically, that’s true. Sodas just make your thirstier. If they’re sweetened with sugar, they can make you fat and trigger diabetes.  If sweetened artificially, you become a lab rat in a giant bio-chemical experiment. Water is the most efficient and healthful way to hydrate your body.

Maybe the real issue is how to make potable tap water portable, since the fundamental environmental problem is the disposal of all that plastic.  

Let’s make canteens cool  Canteens: Not just for backpackers, Boy Scouts and survivalists anymore. 

We should engage top fashion designers to create colorful, stylish canteens, and have flashy models carry them over their shoulders on the runway. Maybe Prada could come up with a combination canteen/purse. Imagine the impact on the environment if you could publicize a picture of Beyonce carrying around a hot pink, bling-studded canteen.

It’s my impression the bottled-water trend really got going in Los Angeles. I recall  Nora Ephron writing many years ago that the way you knew if someone was from Los Angeles was that they carried around a bottle of water. Now, perhaps, LA can lead the way with designer canteens. 

Go ahead, use my idea.  Pay me whatever you think it’s worth.

Attention Music Marketers: Don’t Read This!

I have to assume today’s teenagers are just as intelligent as the kids I grew up with. I know they’re far more worldly. The ones who read, read interesting books. Electronic games are hellishly complex and require rapid analytical skills. Even some of their favorite TV shows are pretty hip.

So why is this generation stuck with such horrible pop music? Science might have the answer, and it’s a depressing answer indeed:

A new study reveals that we make our music purchases based partly on our perceived preferences of others.

Researchers created an artificial “music market” of 14,341 participants drawn from a teen-interest Web site. Upon entering the study’s Internet market, the participants were randomly, and unknowingly, assigned to either an “independent” group or a “social influence” group.

Participants could then browse through a collection of unknown songs by unknown bands.

In the independent condition, participants chose which songs to listen to based solely on the names of the bands and their songs. While listening to the song, they were asked to rate it from one star (“I hate it”) to five stars (“I love it”). They were also given the option of downloading the song for keeps.

“This condition measured the quality of the songs and allowed us to see what outcome would result in the absence of social influence,” said study co-author Matthew Salganik, a sociologist at Columbia University.

In the social influence group, participants were provided with the same song list, but could also see how many times each song had been downloaded.

Researchers found that popular songs were popular and unpopular songs were unpopular, regardless of their quality established by the other group. They also found that as a particular songs’ popularity increased, participants selected it more often.

So, obviously, the trick to success in pop music is to create the perception that everyone else likes a song before anyone even hears it. That must be why payola is so hard to stamp out. You can’t count on songs rising on merit. Better to manufacture popularity than have to wait for it.

I know, payola ruled in my day, too. God bless the mobsters of 1967 who got the Young Rascals, Aretha Franklin, and the Doors to the top of the charts, is all I can say.

(This story came from LiveScience.com)

Update 2/10/06: I guess payola is alive and well.  See the post immediately above.

Busting Light Bulbs

One of Los Angeles’ most consequential environmental organizations over the past 25 years is Heal the Bay. It’s because of Heal the Bay and its allies that Los Angeles’ coastal waters today are significantly cleaner than they have been in, perhaps, a century.

The pressure the organization could apply was due, in part, to the simple elegance of the organization’s name. Founder Dorothy Green was a communications genius, and that sort of genius sometimes makes a difference. Polluted runoff and under-treated sewage was making the Santa Monica Bay sick. But if you joined up with Dorothy Green, you could help heal it. Who could oppose that?

Dr. Matt Prescott could be Dorothy Green’s heir. The organizer of the Oxford Earth Summit, this Britisher founded Ban the Bulb, which has a simple, elegant mission to, you guessed it, ban all conventional incandescent lightbulbs by a date certain, and replace them with compact-flourescents. In an essay on the BBC’s website, Prescott says,

One quick and simple option for improving energy efficiency would be to make greater use of compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Each one of these bulbs produces the same amount of light as an incandescent light bulb whilst being responsible for the emission of 70% less carbon dioxide.

It also saves money; about £7 ($12) per year in the UK, more or less in other countries depending on electricity prices.

So why not just ban incandescent bulbs – why not make them illegal?

They waste so much energy that if they were invented today, it is highly unlikely they would be allowed onto the market.

Nobody would suffer; every energy-saving bulb would save money and help to curb climate change.

It is truly a win-win solution.

Although compact flourescent bulbs save money long-term, at the point of purchase, they are more expensive, as Prescott admits. Prescott thus concludes, “many seem to feel they are entitled to pollute the Earth’s atmosphere without worrying about the consequences.”

If we cannot deny ourselves incandescent light bulbs, which would require minimal sacrifice, how are we ever going to do the really difficult things such as cutting our reliance on fossil fuels, buying smaller cars or reducing our use of finite natural resources?

Pow! This kind of “we have met the enemy and he is us” rhetoric has long gone out of style in American environmental discourse. Shame is, like, too judgemental, dude.

American green groups apparently figured out they can raise more money blaming Dick Cheney for everything. We’ve allowed Arianna Huffington and assorted celebrities with fat wallets to take point on controversial issues, leaving them and the environmental movement open to charges of hypocrisy when their foes find out how many miles Huffington logs on private planes, how much Barbra Streisand pays to air-condition her homes or what a NIMBY Robert Kennedy, Jr. is about a wind energy project on his yachting route.

Anyway –to get off that soapbox and back onto Prescott’s — his idea is that nuclear power and coal production enjoy massive subsidies, and that a fraction of those funds could be directed to offset some of the cost of buying the new bulbs.

It must have been 15 years ago when utilities in Southern California began giving away compact-flourescents. Maybe giveaways weren’t such a great strategy. They conditioned the public to think that using such bulbs was a government program that government was responsible for. If the bulbs weren’t supplied free of charge every time you needed one, it was a signal the program no longer mattered.

Plus, electric utilities have conflicting incentives on efficiency issues. As long as they can get the power, they’d prefer to sell it than conserve it. They’re happy to help you conserve energy in one part of your house, but they’d prefer you shifted your energy consumption to other products. Utilities, both public and private, run on a lot of borrowed money, and they need cash to keep the bondholders comfortable.

Considering all these different factors, I have to say, I think Prescott is onto something. If cheaper bulbs remain available, people will buy them, because the cost in higher utility bills is not sufficiently visible. Taking them off the shelves is what’s needed.

Instead of giving the more expensive compact flourescents away to everybody, one time, as a green-on-my-sleeve PR gesture, utilities could commit to a plan to supply them with regularity to low-income households.

Replacing just three bulbs that burn five hours a day would — according to a study Prescott sites — reduce electricity demand by the equivalent of 11 coal-fired power stations, save $1.8 billion, and cut carbon dioxide emissions by 23 million tons.

P.S. Here’s something celebrities can do. To make films, you need light. Anything on a stage needs light. Will compact flourescents work for entertainment-related illumination needs? Celebrities should demand it.

(Thanks to documentary filmmaker Todd Mason for the tip.)

Update 2/9/06:  I’ve been set straight on movie lighting. After accusing me of goading the “America-hating-Hollywood crowd (into) putting their mouth where their butt is, or something,” which I swear I wasn’t doing, at least not consciously (although I admit I was very tired when I first wrote the post, so it’s possible that a form of automatic writing took over), Todd provided this helpful explanation:

(S)tudio lighting requires the full range of light spectrum that only incandescent light offers. Otherwise, all your favorite movies and TV shows would look like green-tinted, pirated, low resolution crap (flourescent is heavy on the green which is the worst color for film or video light).

After that painful woodshedding, I will now move on to another target for excessive use of energy for lighting.

The Partisan Brain, Studied

This explains a lot!

Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting the facts get in the way, a new study shows.

And they get quite a rush from ignoring information that’s contrary to their point of view.

Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects’ brains were monitored while they pondered.

The results were announced today.

“We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,” said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. “What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts.”

The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say.

Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

All-righty then!

Please, read the whole thing. Then fall to your knees and thank God for His continued blessing of America, despite everything.

(From LiveScience.Com. The Emory researchers present these findings January 28 at the Annual Conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Here’s the New York Times’ coverage of the same study.)

They’re Tiny, They Run on Sunlight, Here Come the Nanomotors!

In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, news about a very, very small engine that runs without producing any waste. From LiveScience.com’s story:

Scientists have developed tiny four-stroke engines that run on sunlight.

The nanomotors—so small that 3.8 million of them lined up end-to-end would barely span the width of a penny—generate absolutely no waste.

Each little motor is just 5 nanometers in length, macaroni-like in shape, and has a ringed structure at one end that moves back-and-forth like the pistons under your car’s hood.

Energy, in the form of photons from sunlight, excites one end of the molecule, which sets off a four-step process. Electrons are transferred along the molecule until they reach the ring structure, causing it to slide 1.3 nanometers forward on the molecule.

As the electron continues its path, it reaches a section that recycles it back to the beginning. This causes the molecule to “reset,” and the ring returns, piston-like, to its original position.

The whole process takes about 100 microseconds.

Each step is similar to the mechanical functions of the four-stroke engine that powers a car down the road—fuel injection and combustion, piston displacement, exhaust removal, and piston replacement.

Except in this case, the exhaust is an electron, not smog-producing pollutants.The molecule, called rotaxane, forms naturally. It’s also autonomous, meaning that it will continue operating as long as energy is available.

It can work with others, or function all by itself. It can be driven at high frequency, and in mild environmental conditions it is quite durable, staying stable for at least 1,000 cycles.

While the nanomotor is less efficient than some fuel-powered engines—it has an efficiency of only 2 to 12 percent—the researchers point out that it doesn’t need refueling and that sunlight is free.

Well…”from small things, mama, big things one day come!”

Not Enough Metal

Here’s something new to worry about. According to a study led by Thomas Graedel of Yale University, the Earth is running out of metal:

Using copper stocks in North America as a starting point, the researchers tracked the evolution of copper mining, use and loss during the 20th century. They then combined this information with other data to estimate what the global demand for copper and other metals would be if all nations were fully developed and using modern technologies.

According to the study, all of the copper in ore, plus all of the copper currently in use, would be required to bring the world to the level of the developed nations for power transmission, construction and other services and products that depend on the metal.

As is the case with oil and natural gas, the cause of all this is development in formerly underdeveloped nations. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and discussed in livescience.com, should concern those of us who believe fuel cells will soon emerge as a cleaner energy alternative:

(S)carce metals, such as platinum, face depletion risks this century because of the lack of suitable substitutes in such devices as catalytic converters and hydrogen fuel cells.

(To be fair, keep in mind that forecasts like this have been made before. In 1980, economist Julian Simon bet population biologist Paul Erlich that any ten natural resources of Erlich’s choosing would go down in price over a ten-year period.  Simon won the bet, which he said demonstrated that markets take care of problems caused by increased population and rising demand for limited resources.  You could make that bet today, and possibly lose again in ten years, human ingenuity being what it is.  But nothing lasts forever.)

The Biggest Under-Reported Story of All Time…

…would have to be this one, which was buried on page A9 of Tuesday’s New York Times:

A previously unrecognized galaxy appears to be merging with the Milky Way, bringing hundreds of thousands of stars into our home galaxy that no one has noticed until now, astronomers said Monday. A survey of the northern sky has detected a huge and diffuse structure within the confines of the Milky Way that does not seem to fit in with other parts of the galaxy that contains our solar system.

Robert H. Lupton of Princeton University told a meeting of the American Astronomical Society that the large, faint collection of stars rises almost perpendicular to the flat, spiral disk of the Milky Way. The most likely interpretation of the structure, the astronomer said, is that it is a dwarf galaxy that has been merging with our galaxy….

The latest study, which has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal for publication, shows that the Milky Way is still changing and evolving, said Mario Juric, a Princeton graduate student who is the principal author of the report. “It looks as though the Milky Way is still growing, by cannibalizing smaller galaxies that fall into it,” Mr. Juric said in a statement.

New galaxies falling into ours? To me, that’s news. Then, buried underneath that mind-bending revelation came this one:

Reporting at the same meeting, another group of researchers said they had an explanation for a mysterious warp in the disk of the Milky Way that has baffled scientists for decades.

Leo Blitz, professor of astronomy at the University of California, and his colleagues Evan Levine and Carl Heiles charted the warp and found evidence that it is a ripple or vibration set up by two small galaxies that circle the Milky Way. These satellite galaxies, called the Magellanic Clouds, cause vibrations at certain frequencies as they pass though the edges of the Milky Way, the researchers said.

It was previously believed, Dr. Blitz said, that the Magellanic Clouds, with their combined mass being only 2 percent that of the Milky Way, were too small to influence their neighboring galaxy. However, he said, when the Milky Way’s dark matter is taken into account, the motion of the small galaxies can create a wake that influences the larger one.

Dark matter, invisible material that accounts for most of the universe’s mass, is 20 times more massive in the Milky Way than all visible material, including stars. According to a computer model created with Martin Weinberg, an astronomy theorist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, dark matter spreading from the Milky Way disk with the gas layer can enhance the gravitational influence of the Magellanic Clouds as they pass through it.

A wake??  Better get out the seasick pills.  With apologies to Mark Twain: Everybody talks about dark matter, but nobody ever does anything about it.