Since you’re busy and I’m not, I try to survey the arcane world of bleeding-edge research and abstract the few key findings worth your attention. The following are sourced from Science, the publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Science, of which I am a member until one of their editors stumbles onto this website.
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Brown Mustard on Mars
Commenting on the resignation of Alan Stern from NASA in protest of that agency’s cronyism and politicized decision making favoring Mars exploration and JPL: “ ‘Stern wanted to strangle Mars to pay for other things,’ says John Mustard, a planetary scientist at Brown University.”
We attempted to contact Brown’s Mustard but were told he was in Dijon.
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Bacteria Feast on Antibiotics
During my brief stint in the military, we were issued bottles of yellowish insect repellent to use on bivouac, and one day somebody dropped his bottle and it broke. Within 15 minutes, every mosquito, ant, beetle, and hornet for miles around had converged on the puddle in a feeding frenzy.
Now a team from Harvard Medical School and its Biophysics Program has at last caught up with that seminal research performed by the 304th Tank Battalion.
They tested 18 chemicals representing eight major classes of natural and synthetic antibiotics on various types of soil bacteria, some of them closely related to human pathogens. The antibiotics not only didn’t kill the microbes, most of them actually supported the growth of clonal bacteria from each of 11 diverse soils.
Resistant? The bacteria react to antibiotics much as humans react to Snickers bars.
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Space Whiskers
Studying 4.6 billion year old meteorites, formed from the solar accretion disk even before the planets, researchers from the Imperial College of London are finding graphite whiskers. This form of carbon is believed to be present in the interstellar – possibly even intergalactic – dust, where they would absorb light and possibly distort observations from earth of the most distant galaxies. Some theorists believe this could be an alternative explanation for what otherwise appears to be the accelerating expansion of the universe.
Silly Brits. After God created the universe, he showered and shaved – wouldn’t you? — and the graphite whiskers are what’s left.
Why didn’t he clean them up? He did. He washed them down the drain, which is where we live.
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Gamblers No Good at Cards
Psychiatric investigators at the University of Pisa tested groups of subjects on their ability to find the patterns in a special deck of cards – a measure of “executive function.” A group of addicted gamblers proved particularly inept. Not only were they bad, they actually got worse with practice.
Research in Pisa isn’t what it used to be.
I am a huge fan of Talking Points Memo and, in particular, TPM Election Central, so the following must be taken in the spirit of admiration and bonhomie in which it is offered:
You guys don’t know how to report on polls. Seriously. You’re utterly clueless.
All it takes is a shiny new press release to prompt the TPM guys to slap up a 48-point headline announcing the latest devastating news from the front lines of the electoral process.
The problem is that these polls do not share a common methodology and are often of uncertain provenance, so they aren’t measuring the same thing (and often, I suspect, aren’t even measuring the things they intend to), yet they are paraded across the screen to the viewer as though they represent succeeding chapters of a coherent narrative.
In the recently completed PA Primary, for example, TPM reported on poll results from no fewer than 78 polls over the course of the contest.
6 of these polls were one-time wonders. Although sometimes by a recognizable media outlet, a one time poll is as useless as a Greenpeace bumper sticker on Dick Cheney’s limo. Without a couple of attempts, you can’t even tell if the polling methodology is stable. These were:
EMILY’s List (Ed. Note: Seriously, WTF?)
Mason-Dixon
Suffolk
Temple
TIME
Times/Bloomberg
The following chart summarizes the remainder. Comparing to the final results of the contest (54.5% HRC, 45.4% BHO), the metrics you want to check are A) who got the spread about right, as close as possible to a 9.1 point spread (note to TPM: 9.1 is not 10, you can look that up), and you also want to see B) who had the smallest margin of ‘Undecideds’ … we are trying to project how people will vote, not how long they can dither. The gray semicircle on the y-axis represents the Actual finish (centers on the 9.1 point spread … Undecideds are Zero on election day).
The winners are Quinnipac, SurveyUSA, and Zogby/Newsmax. The lesson here is that whoever is covering the News Desk should consider not publishing anybody that hasn’t yet got at least a little bit of history, like this, of doing well.
The losers show a variety of problems. By 4/20, PPP had somehow determined that the race was going to Obama. In a dead heat that is an excusable mistake, but HRC won by over 9 points! Similarly, ARG’s bubble seems to be filled with helium. Muhlenberg was actually on its way to nailing it, but their last poll was on 4/2. The intern must have gone on spring break.
Mark Penn has demonstrated that numbers are more often than not a favorite weapon of flim-flam men and charlatans. Which is a shame, because basic statistics can be a great revealer of truth, but only if shared by a fourth estate that knows how to select and report on a quality product.
Dr. Steve, our best and bravest battlefield reporter, filed this report on Monday.
I am glad you are in Pennsylvania to hear constant hilaryobamabill stuff and i know you will help obama carry pa and end hilary’s agony. How could they have 106 million dollars. LBJ also made a lot of money during and after his presidency.
We were birding in Texas and went to a bat cave and at dusk saw 13 million bats leave. Give or take a few. The guides told us that as bats leave the cave, they pee. It smelled like urine. It never occurred to me–why would it–that bats and people have the same smelling pee.
These bats are all female and eat moths, not mosquitos. And they are Mexican bats, here with no documentation. Hence, the pee. That very cave served as a source of gunpowder during the civil war, as the guano was boiled and made into nitrites, etc. The people who went into the cave to shovel the guano had one thing in common. They were all black and were digging for the confederancy.
We did see a lot of birds including the black capped vireo. And the golden cheek warbler. You would have to be there.
Now I know how Gregor Samsa must have felt.
It’s a terrible thing, waking up in the morning to realize that overnight you have metamorphosed into a conservative. How do you face your family?
I was shocked…shocked, to realize suddenly that I hate entitlements. It’s conservatives who preach against entitlements, right?
But there’s Boeing — feeling entitled to the $40 billion refueling tanker deal? They’re running full-page ads saying it’s not fair they didn’t get it.
And Billary is entitled to the White House?
John McCain is entitled to a free pass?
Stanley O’Neal steered Merrill Lynch into $27 billion in writedowns, and he’s entitled to a $160 million golden parachute?
James Cayne piloted Bear Stearns down from $170 a share to $2 a share, so he’s entitled to walk away with $40 million cash compensation plus $60 million more from selling his stock? That entitles him to a $26 million apartment in the Plaza.
And then the Fed arranges a Bear Stearns rescue, so you and I are entitled to pay for the whole mess with our tax dollars – even though the shareholders already paid for it with losses. That entitlement is so good we pay for it twice.
Logging companies are entitled to cut-rate leases for decimating old growth timber on Federal parklands?
Oil and gas companies are entitled to very cut-rate drilling leases? And then the oil company stooges in the Bush Bureau of Land Management forget to collect even that pittance?
Hedge fund managers are entitled to count billions of dollars of income as capital gains so that they can pay a lower tax rate than your mailman?
And conservatives are still entitled to wail in pious outrage against entitlements?
They cheat people who really need welfare, and then they turn out to be the biggest (and least deserving) welfare recipients of all.
I just looked again. I haven’t turned into Kafka’s cockroach after all.
They have.
FREE! BILLION DOLLAR MARKETING IDEAS!
For Orkin pest control — introduce the B/C Scrub. For $200 ($300 for large-format flat panel TVs), you treat the customer’s television set so that it’s completely free of Bushes and Clintons for eight years.
For newspapers, to reverse the decline in circulation:
Premium subscribers get a B/C-free edition guaranteed to carry no mention or image of a Bush or a Clinton, ever.
For network news, to reverse the shrinkage of audiences, ratings, and revenues: same deal – no Clintons, no Bushes, no problem. Family dinner will be reinstated, and everyone will watch the evening news. We may even reactivate Walter Cronkite.
It’s a classic principle of free enterprise and American marketing know-how: stop making your customers sick at the stomach, and maybe they’ll buy your product.
And the corollary to that principle: we customers will take our dollars where they are decently treated, and right now none of you guys qualify. Except Orkin. They, at least, know a bedbug when they see one.
For seven years our papers and our channels were filled with Karl Rove talking points and Bush administration talking heads, and now they’re spewing out Clinton talking points and dumping them into our living rooms.
Enough is enough.
Oh, yes, and for an extra five bucks, you take McCain prisoner again.
A Republican’s version of economic stimulus is to take a fat wad of bills out of the right-hand pants pocket and shove it into the left-hand pants pocket while drooling.
(If you recognize that last paragraph as a polite euphemism for autoerotic economic stimulation, please don’t tell anybody.)
George Bush’s idea of a rescue package is for Daddy and his friends to save him from military service, bankruptcy, or jail. After all, he’s not some undeserving welfare cheater is he? Is he?
So it’s no surprise that the Republican idea of a stimulus and rescue package would do little to stimulate the economy and nothing to rescue the folks who most need help.
What is surprising is how timidly the congressional Democrats caved in to this twisted distortion of what they had promised to do. No increase in food stamps (Both Bernanke and the Congressional Budget Office liked that idea – real help, and real stimulus). No extension of unemployment insurance. No help for people facing foreclosure or unable to pay skyrocketing fuel and heating bills. No aid for strapped state governments to save people’s jobs and create new ones. No job-creating acceleration of public works projects, desperately needed with or without a recession to repair our decrepit bridges, electrical grids, water and sewer systems.
Just trifling rebates, and most of that to people who don’t really need it and won’t spend any more because of it.
It’s small and bitter consolation, but the result may well be a truly miserable recession which, by November, will stimulate voters to throw Republicans out of office by the reeking, oinking carload.
Headline from the Sunday Times:
The Two Paths to Wealth: Earn More, Spend Less
See, that’s why college graduates earn higher incomes. They can grasp powerful but subtle concepts beyond the reach of the commoner.
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Bonuses in the News
Stanley O’Neal steps down as head of Merrill Lynch after leading the company to an $8.4 billion writedown in the fourth quarter and a rumored $15 billion loss still to come. He leaves with a severance package worth $161 million. (Had they spent that to send him packing a year ago, it might have been worth it – to head off the $23 billion mistake.)
Timing, as someone said, is the difference between salad and garbage.
Charles O. Prince III steps down as head of Citigroup after losing $64 billion in the company’s market value. He gets $68 million plus a cash bonus of $12 million and an office, car, and driver for the next five years – no, not a Tata Nano.
And Angelo Mozillo, who wrecked Countrywide Mortgages (and a fair percentage of its home buyer customers and its stockholders) gets to leave with $110 million or so after Bank of America acquired Countrywide’s so-called assets for pennies on the dollar (which is like buying the Iraq war on the cheap because nobody else wants it).
The victims lose their homes. The perpetrators walk away with enough money to save at least 15,000 people from foreclosure (my calculations), but you can bet that’s not what they’ll do with it.
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Why do corporate execs get such lavish pay packages?
Are they much smarter than CEOs of the past? Do they work longer hours?
No, but they hire compensation consultants like Towers Perrin, Marsh & McLennan, Hewitt, or Mercer. If the execs take a shine to the consultants, there are many more millions in consulting contracts — for training, marketing, management, logistics, cost control, etc. So the consultants recommend princely compensation packages to directors on the company’s board. The board can’t be faulted for approving such mighty advice, the executives get fabulously rich, and the consultants get tons of additional business. Everybody wins. Except the shareholders. And the rest of us.
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Robert M. Lawless is a professor of law at the University of Illinois law school. He might have changed his name to Lawful, but that rhymes with awful.
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Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder.
The verdict is in on the federal programs now burning up $176 million a year to reduce teen pregnancies by preaching abstinence.
It doesn’t work. Teenage pregnancies are up.
And word on the street is that God said he hates the program and everyone who pushes it – which they do not only in the U.S. but also in other countries, as a condition of foreign aid. If they use condoms, we bomb them.
A new study showed that while President Bush was bragging in 2006 about the decline in teenage pregnancies, they were actually rising by 3% a year after declining during the 1990s, before Bush.
Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation disputed the findings and said that blaming Abstinence-only programs was “stupid.” Actually, it’s Mr. Rector who is stupid; but that’s understandable because at the Heritage Foundation you’re paid to be stupid.
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Politicians make lousy economists…
Investment analyst John Mauldin dubs Senators Shumer and Graham as “bipartisan economic illiterates.” The two have been urging the U.S. to insist that China raise the value of the yuan by 30% to reduce our trade deficit. Mauldin points out, first, that the Chinese are already raising the yuan’s value – gradually, to preserve their own banking system – and, meanwhile, the dollar is sliding downwards. By the time a new congress takes office, the 30% will have been achieved without any help from the tough-talking senators.
But that won’t lower the trade deficit. The Canadian dollar has risen much more than 30%, and our trade deficit with Canada has hardly budged.
The only thing that can lower the trade deficit is for U.S. consumers to save more and spend less. Not an appealing solution for a politician, but it may happen anyway if we’re heading into a recession.
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…And so do economists
Alan Greenspan kept lowering rates and flooding the financial system with liquidity, creating the housing bubble, then refused to tighten restrictions on home loans – denying until the bitter end that there was a housing bubble.
If, as a result, Ben Bernanke has to keep lowering the Fed funds rate to save the economy, then another flood of liquidity will set the stage for an outbreak of inflation and/or the next bubble.
I give up. Just tell me where the next bubble will be, and I’ll invest in it.
And we are here as on a darkling plain,
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night
- Matthew Arnold (”Dover Beach”)
Frantic analysts are scrambling today to rationalize the complete failure of the pollsters to call the Clinton victory in the NH primary. Here is the actual rationalization. They all got it wrong because they were all measuring the wrong thing.
This sounds trite, but it is a mistake made constantly. Statistical models are based on three very basic assumptions. A) That you have a clear understanding of how a mechanism worked for the period of time you are studying, B) That you have clean data measuring the major components of that mechanism, and C) That this phenomenon will continue to work the same way in the future.
The fact that there are dozens of polls, each with different results for the same phenomenon, demonstrates that there is often disagreement about A.
Everybody’s got a theory, and these range from careful deduction to wild-eyed wishful thinking – and sometimes a dash of outright fraud attempting to create a bandwagon effect in the me-too media or to sow the seeds of panic in the enemy camp. All of these models attempt to represent a different mechanism. For this reason alone, at least the better political blogs need to stop running minute-by-minute headlines of the every latest poll’s findings. It lends to the idea that they are all comparable, and they aren’t.
B, collection of clean data, is the bugaboo of statistics. Hard to do well, and often assigned as a menial task to luckless souls without the capacity, means, or context to do it well. Sets of non-homogeneous garbage data are routinely gathered up and analyzed, and the most sophisticated statistical tests to find a trend or patterned distribution among them are about as effective as taking an aspirin for a case of bubonic plague. Garbage in, Garbage out.
C is the most insidious of all. That the mechanism will work the same in the future is the idiot assumption behind almost every financial, economic, and political projection you will ever see. Idiot, because bundled into the reason for even DOING the projection is that, if you don’t like where the trend is heading (and in a political contest, wherever it’s heading is bad news for somebody), you can DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT. The forecast carries with it the seeds of its own undoing.
Team Hillary saw that terrible gap and they responded. I don’t always agree with the woman, but she and her staff are no dummies, and when Loss reared its head, they busily worked to change the game. Their opponents seemed eager to add their own ill-considered actions into the mix, the media was trumpeting each and every statement over the airwaves with the authority of Jove and the experienced news judgment of a pigeon … all of which creates a volatile mix in which surprising, and certainly unmodeled, things can happen.
I don’t argue that forecasts are meaningless, but they are not reality. They are mathematical tools normally far removed from their strictly defined mathematical aquariums, attempting to model phenomena usually not easily quantified. They are invaluable tools within the context of the Scientific Method, but outside a laboratory, they are ALL suspect, and we should treat them with the skepticism they deserve.
If you don’t ingest anything else from the news media this month (and who could blame you?) at least read Frank Rich in the Sunday Times Op-Ed pages: “Latter-Day Republicans and the Church of Oprah.” (You no longer have to be a subscriber to access NYTimes.com)
Some quick quotes:
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referring to The McLaughlin Group:
“…one of the Beltway’s more repellent Sunday bloviations.”
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“When I wrote here two weeks ago that racism is the dog that hasn’t barked in this campaign, some readers wrote in to say that only a fool would believe that white Americans would ever elect an African-American president, no matter what polls indicate. We’ll find out soon enough. If that’s the case, Mr. Obama can’t win in Iowa, which roughly 95 percent white, or in New Hampshire, which is 96 percent white.”
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“After hearing someone like Mitt Romney preach his narrow, exclusionist idea of ‘Faith in America,’ some Americans may simply see a vote for Mr. Obama as a vote for faith in America itself.”
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“This country has had its fill of often hypocritical family-values politicians dictating what is and is not acceptable religious and moral practice. Instead of handing down tablets of what constitutes faith in America, Romney-style, the Oprah-Obama movement practices an American form of ecumenicalism. It preaches a bit of heaven on earth in the form of a unified, live-and-let-live democracy…”
