Bioblog by Biotunes

Most inopportune referendum

noreply@blogger.com (Biotunes) — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 22:58:00 +0000

Not to belabor the politics, but 'tis the season. Montana must get the award for the Least Likely to Pass ballot initiative in this Tuesday's election: "C-44: Investment of Public Funds in Private Corporate Capital Stock."

This would amend Montana's constitution to allow up to 25% of government funds to be invested in the stock market.

I think there should be a pool on the number of votes this brilliant proposal will attract. Any guesses?

UPDATE: The final tally was an astonishing 26.4% in favor of investing public funds in the stock market. At least, it seems astonishing until one remembers that this number is almost exactly President Bush's current approval rating. One assumes these two groups of La-La Land voters are fairly strongly overlapping.

Could all states be swing states?

noreply@blogger.com (Biotunes) — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 22:04:00 +0000

This is not a political blog, and the topic has nothing to do with biology or music, but a few days from a presidential election, it is more topical to mull over campaign money and where we go from here, now that public finance is clearly dead in presidential elections.

Ever since 2000, many of us have thought that the electoral college is a problem in U.S. presidential elections. Not only can a candidate win the election without winning the popular vote, but perhaps more important was the fact that all the campaigning has recently been done in just a dozen or so "swing states," making a large number of voters in the country frustrated that their vote does not count.

What happened this year was that Barack Obama changed all that, by spending a ton of money. The number of states he campaigned in this year was not 50, but it was a lot greater than those he ignored. And the campaigning has not been haphazard, but involves lots of highly organized offices and ground operations. His vast resources have allowed him to campaign not only for the electoral college vote, but for the popular vote as well, which is crucial to his big-tent message.

It's an interesting quandary. There has been some grousing about how Obama's money gives him a big advantage, but not much, because of course it has always been the republicans who have argued most strongly against limits. Many people are generally in favor of campaign finance reform, because the amount of money spent and how it is spent (even forgetting $150,000 wardrobes and $400 haircuts) seems obscene even in flusher economic times. Other people make the reasonable argument that restrictive laws conflict with constitutional free speech. And, there is no doubt that it was the rejection of public money spending limits by Obama that caused my state of Montana to be in play this year.

Is it possible to stay on this trajectory of a truly national election without donors buying candidates? Obama does have a point when he shows the large number of donations he has received under $200, a benefit of the Internet age, but the truth is both campaigns continue to rely on the big donors and "bundlers" for a large chunk of their operations. Perhaps instead of legislating restrictions that always have loopholes, and may be unconstitutional anyway, we could instead legislate incentives to redirect money in directions which might enhance participation in democracy, rather than stifle it as has been the case in the last couple of elections before this one.

One obvious way to go would be to allocate a bigger chunk of the public airwaves (television and radio) to public service, which in election years could be divided up among the major candidates. Obama's infomercial brings this issue to the forefront. It should have been free, and McCain should have had equal prime time to make his own case. It simply is not right that a democratic nation should require candidates to pay businesses to get their message across, when the airwaves are really owned by the public. Who decides how to allocate the space? The Commission on Presidential Debates decides who gets to debate, and they could use the same criteria for broadcast time. (Although some might certainly argue that the CPD is too biased against third-party candidates, that is a separate issue.)

It would be really nice for most of us if, in exchange for this time, the candidates or parties were not allowed to buy additional commercial advertising time, but this bumps up against those pesky first amendment considerations. So the endless attack ads should be allowed to continue even under the above system.

As for the mountains of fliers in the mail, everyone sending unsolicited junk mail should be required to pay a landfill tax whose rate is based on the volume they send. Without in any way infringing on free speech, this would more fairly balance the cost/benefit ratio of bulk mail because individuals and communities now must pay the disposal cost, without incurring any benefit. In a political campaign, it might create an incentive to spend the money somewhere else, such as in local campaign offices.

Finally, there should be a tax on total campaign spending that goes directly in a per-capita allocation to local nonpartisan election commissions for get-out-the-vote efforts. If counties had the money to do more active voter registration, we would have less need for organizations (such as the much maligned ACORN) that are funded by private donations. Under such a system, a movement toward standardization of registration procedures across states and counties could be more easily encouraged and implemented. Perhaps the controversies surrounding voter registration, whether real or imagined, could then be mitigated somewhat.

There is no way to get the money out of political campaigns. True reform should promote a level playing field through how money is spent, rather than how much. Done right, this could promote engagement rather than disenfranchisement in the democratic process, in a way that simple donation and spending limits cannot.

Into the Woods

noreply@blogger.com (Biotunes) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 23:07:00 +0000

Astute readers of this blog (those who are left) have noticed a long hiatus in posts. This has been due to medical reasons, and also because of these, most future posts for awhile will be cancer-themed. Perhaps research summarized here may help others also looking for information to help them with difficult decisions about their treatment.

But today is a biotune day. I am a huge Stephen Sondheim fan, and spent the last couple nights watching separately the first and second acts of one of his best, "Into the Woods." As a kid I worked through all the fairy tale books in our elementary school library at about the same time that other girls were working their way through all the horse books. I enjoy not only the traditional originals, but creatively reworked versions as well (which to be clear does not apply to much of anything out of Disney studios).

"Into the Woods" was constructed similarly to Sondheim's previous musical, also brilliant, called "Sunday in the Park with George." Its theme was the lonely isolationism of the driven artist, but the two acts creatively contrasted the difficulties of the art business a hundred years ago versus in modern times.

"Into the Woods" makes even more of a thematic leap between its two acts. The first act is an intertwining of several well known fairly tales into one interlocking story, in which the characters all interact with one another in clever new ways. It addresses the simple, traditional fairy tale theme of overcoming a difficult challenge (represented by having to go "into the woods"), after which the main characters live "happily ever after." Even in the brutal original versions of the Grimm tales, usually someone we are rooting for comes out on top in the end. At the end of Sondheim's first act, the convoluted plot leads us eventually to the familiar happy endings - Cinderella gets her prince, Rapunzel and her prince are reunited, Red Riding Hood and her grandmother are saved from the wolf, and Jack kills the giant by chopping down the beanstalk.

The second act, however, takes a right turn by introducing the idea that actually, there is no such thing as "happily ever after." In real life, there will continually be obstacles to overcome - and not only the relatively minor obstacles that pepper the tales in the first act, but major obstacles that force us to face intense suffering and grief head-on. After the wife of Jack's slain giant goes on a rampage, killing several of the characters, the culminating, haunting song, "No One is Alone," is sung by the remaining grown-ups to the children Red Riding Hood and Jack, to explain to them that despite the harsh realities of life, we can find a way to move on. It always made me a bit weepy from the first time I heard it twenty years ago, but it now takes on a new poignance as I head deep into the woods myself. (Here are the lyrics, with the caveat that lyrics without music are a poor substitute for the real thing.)

But the simple, final lyrics of the show are the most applicable for anyone hitting a bump in the road:

"Into the woods, then out of the woods, and home before dark."

Rational decision making

noreply@blogger.com (Biotunes) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 02:31:00 +0000

In light of several comments on a recent post, it seems as though a more complete discussion of cost-benefit analysis might be useful. It is a process that is useful in many aspects of biology, from resource management to health issues.

The basic premise is that to make decisions, you need to estimate both qualitatively and quantitatively the potential costs and benefits of the possible choices, and use that information to make the best choice. The magnitudes of both cost and benefits are important, because balancing a large cost against a small benefit will result in a different choice than when the cost is small but the benefit is large.

The mistake most people make when making choices is to consider only the potential benefits, or the costs, but not both simultaneously. For example, the anti-vaccine movement exists mainly because of fears of side effects, specifically autism (a link which has not been established). Yet even if all the potential side effects do occur, they are extremely rare, relative to the benefit received in resistance to disease, many of which can be fatal. True, if only a few school children are unvaccinated they may get by given that disease is less likely to travel through a group that is mostly vaccinated. But this cheating can be harmful even for some vaccinated children, for vaccines that are not 100% effective (such as whooping cough).

The point is that to focus on a vanishingly small cost to vaccination which confers a huge benefit in protection from common disease is a completely irrational choice.

Another context where cost-benefit analysis applies is in the area of climate change. Here, the problem is a bit tougher, because the costs and benefits of trying to do something about it, versus not doing anything, are harder to estimate. One major consideration in this case, of course, is that we only get one chance to do something (and the opportunity to do it may already be vanishing rapidly). We don't get to figure out what we did wrong this time and fix it the next. So what do we do? We first must acknowledge the possibility that climate change could be catastrophic, no matter how small. This is a potentially huge cost to ignoring the issue. The benefit to ignoring it is easier to grasp - short term economic pains in readjusting our energy usage around the world, which is clearly a monumental task, would be avoided.

The benefit to doing all we can to avert a possible worldwide catastrophe is two-fold; first, we potentially save a lot of the planet, and second, many of the measures taken could have positive geopolitical results as well, e.g. reduction in demand for oil, and spurring economic growth in new alternative-energy industries. The cost mirrors the benefit for not doing anything - it is the difficult inertia needed to radically change the way we produce and use energy. The biggest part of the problem in looking at these costs and benefits is that if we choose to do something, the costs are biggest here and now, while the benefit seems far down the road. Most of the people setting policy in the powerful industrial countries that could take a stronger lead on this will likely be dead before the jury comes in on the outcome.

This video goes into more detail about these trade-offs, and convincingly makes the argument that the eventual benefits of doing something now outweigh the costs.

A similar case involves the control of invasive species. Even though most of the time the benefit in controlling them early far outweighs the potential cost of doing nothing, and having to control them later, we still tend to ignore them until they are too late to control. The reason for this is that our political system for government (which is responsible for making and acting on these decisions) overly discounts future benefits. So, time after time, we wait to see whether an introduced species gets out of control before we do anything to control it, and end up spending millions more than it would have cost to control it early on.

Another health example is cancer treatment. With all the progress that has been made, we still know very little about what we are doing in this area. In this case, people tend to focus on hoping for a strong benefit, and accept all sorts of hellish treatment (a significant cost) that may or may not benefit them. But this is one case in which it is very difficult to be objective, because we are dealing with our own mortality, and we buy into the idea that anything that can possibly help is worth doing. Is it possible to make a rational decision? For some people it is, but they are in the minority.

And come to think of it, it is way too much to ask the multi-headed government beast to be rational too. At least it is easy to make the rational choice about anti-bacterial soap.

Insect Jazz

noreply@blogger.com (Biotunes) — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:16:00 +0000

It's been a busy week for music - my jazz band performed three times in eight days. One tune especially satisfied the requirements of this blog quite nicely: "Inchworm." Jazz aficionados will recognize this tune as a Coltrane standard.

But I never liked the fact that Coltrane only played one of the two counter-melodies in the song, which originated from the movie musical "Hans Christian Anderson," starring Danny Kaye. The song starts as children in a school house chant addition in a rather haunting melody, which Kaye then sings against as he watches a caterpillar crawling on a plant. (See the scene on YouTube here, and the more complete version of the song with the muppets - including muppet inchworm - here.)

So, I did a new jazz arrangement that includes both melodies. In addition to the sung counter-melodies, there is a third counter-melody in the strings that I decided to add to the jazz version as well. Thus, with three saxes and two vocalists, we covered it all.

"Inchworm", by the way, is the common name for moths in the family Geometridae, of which some in Hawaii are sit-and-wait predators. But the family is cosmopolitan, and recognizable in the caterpillar because unlike other families they only have prolegs at the back end of their abdomen, resulting in their distinctive inching walk. Many species are also known as "loopers" for the same reason.

Stop using antibacterial soaps now. Really.

noreply@blogger.com (Biotunes) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 21:34:00 +0000

In recent years, there has been a small bit of backlash against the ubiquitous use of antibacterial soaps. Indeed, research beginning in 2002 has continued to confirm that based on both effectiveness and potential negative side effects, there really is no reason to use these soaps and plenty of reasons not to.

The active antibacterial agent in question is triclosan. The only real question that can result from numerous scientific studies about triclosan is whether or not its potential negatives are strong enough to stop using it. (Indeed, the only piece (opinion) questioning the validity of the research showing both potential resistance problems and toxic byproducts of triclosan (Swofford, 2005) was written by a member of the soap industry.) However, given unambiguous results showing that soap containing triclosan is indistinguishable in its effectiveness against bacteria as regular soap (and, frankly, given that most illnesses most household users of antibacterial soaps are concerned about are actually caused by viruses, which do not respond to antibacterials) any potentially negative side-effects of its use should be unacceptable.

Here is the problem. Humans are dumping all kinds of chemicals into our (and other organisms') water supply, that are not removed during sewage treatment (even when the water properly goes through sewage treatment). Among these is triclosan (Gomez et al., 2007), which has been found in large proportions of human urinary samples (Calafat et al., 2008). Not only do we know nothing about how ingesting all these various chemicals may be affecting us over the long term, we cannot begin to know the complex ways in which they are interacting with each other to create new, and potentially more toxic compounds. Both laboratory (DeLorenzo et al., 2008) and field research (Kinney et al., 2008) suggests that triclosan bioaccumulates, which means its concentration could increase up the food chain (the same phenomenon responsible for the crash of bald eagle populations a few decades ago, due to DDT). Other laboratory studies suggest that it reacts with light and chlorine (ubiquitous in our drinking water) to form types of dioxin, a toxic compound (Sanchez-Prado et al., 2006). These studies are just scratching the surface of potential interactions between triclosan and other ubiquitous pharmaceuticals such as painkillers and sex hormones from birth control. Laboratory studies have also demonstrated that bacteria such as E coli and Salmonella can become resistant to triclosan (Yazdankhah et al., 2006).

Proponents of antibacterial soaps claim that none of these studies have shown that toxicity is common in the field, and resistance also has only been shown in the laboratory. So, let's get this straight: we should continue to use this completely useless agent, because research has not yet shown that it is definitely harmful in the short term. Brilliant reasoning. The abstract of a recent review paper sums up the state of our knowledge quite nicely:

Abstract (Aiello et al., 2007)
Background. Much has been written recently about the potential hazards versus benefits of antibacterial (biocide)-containing soaps. The purpose of this systematic literature review was to assess the studies that have examined the efficacy of products containing triclosan, compared with that of plain soap, in the community setting, as well as to evaluate findings that address potential hazards of this use-namely, the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Methods. The PubMed database was searched for English-language articles, using relevant keyword combinations for articles published between 1980 and 2006. Twenty-seven studies were eventually identified as being relevant to the review. Results. Soaps containing triclosan within the range of concentrations commonly used in the community setting (0.1%-0.45% wt/vol) were no more effective than plain soap at preventing infectious illness symptoms and reducing bacterial levels on the hands. Several laboratory studies demonstrated evidence of triclosan-adapted cross-resistance to antibiotics among different species of bacteria. Conclusions. The lack of an additional health benefit associated with the use of triclosan-containing consumer soaps over regular soap, coupled with laboratory data demonstrating a potential risk of selecting for drug resistance, warrants further evaluation by governmental regulators regarding antibacterial product claims and advertising. Further studies of this issue are encouraged.

If the only weapon we have to stop this idiotic dumping of even a potentially harmful chemical into our water systems and environment is consumer demand, then let's use it. Stop using anti-bacterial soaps now, and maybe the fools producing them will stop, because it is no longer profitable.

References

Aiello, A.E., Larson, E.L. & Levy, S.B. (2007) Consumer antibacterial soaps: Effective or just risky? Clinical Infectious Diseases, 45:S137-S147.

Calafat, A.M., Ye, X., Wong, L.Y., Reidy, J.A. & Needham, L.L. (2008) Urinary concentrations of Triclosan in the US population: 2003-2004. Environmental Health Perspectives, 116:303-307.

DeLorenzo, M.E., Keller, J.M., Arthur, C.D., Finnegan, M.C., Harper, H.E., Winder, V.L. & Zdankiewicz, D.L. (2008) Toxicity of the antimicrobial compound triclosan and formation of the metabolite methyl-triclosan in estuarine systems. Environmental Toxicology, 23:224-232.

Gomez, M.J., Bueno, M.J.M., Lacorte, S., Fernandez-Alba, A.R. & Aguera, A. (2007) Pilot survey monitoring pharmaceuticals and related compounds in a sewage treatment plant located on the Mediterranean coast. Chemosphere, 66:993-1002.

Kinney, C.A., Furlong, E.T., Kolpin, D.W., Burkhardt, M.R., Zaugg, S.D., Werner, S.L., Bossio, J.P. & Benotti, M.J. (2008) Bioaccumulation of pharmaceuticals and other anthropogenic waste indicators in earthworms from agricultural soil amended with biosolid or swine manure. Environmental Science & Technology, 42:1863-1870.

Sanchez-Prado, L., Llompart, M., Lores, M., Fernandez-Alvarez, M., Garcia-Jares, C. & Cela, R. (2006) Further research on the photo-SPME of triclosan. Analytical And Bioanalytical Chemistry, 384:1548-1557.

Swofford, W. (2005) Triclosan research misreported? Environmental Science & Technology, 39:271A-272A.

Yazdankhah, S.P., Scheie, A.A., Hoiby, E.A., Lunestad, B.T., Heir, E., Fotland, T.O., Naterstad, K. & Kruse, H. (2006) Triclosan and antimicrobial resistance in bacteria: An overview. Microbial Drug Resistance-Mechanisms Epidemiology and Disease, 12:83-90.

Merck's "fraud" is standard industry practice

noreply@blogger.com (Biotunes) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 21:36:00 +0000

This is a comment, based on personal experience in this area, on the latest news about Vioxx - that Merck hired "ghostwriters" to write the scientific papers about Vioxx and thus were perpetrating "fraud."

A new freely available report (Ross, J.S., MD, MHS; K.P. Hill, MD, MHS; D.S. Egilman, MD, MPH; H.M. Krumholz, MD, SM. 2008. Guest authorship and ghostwriting in publications related to Rofecoxib: A case study of industry documents From rofecoxib litigation. Journal of the American Medical Association 299(15):1800-1812) suggests that methods employed by Merck to use scientific journals to promote its products show just how scummy this company is, in case you didn't already believe it.

This is an issue that interests me because I was once a paid ghostwriter of a paper for a biotech company (which shortly after went belly up, and apparently the paper was never published). Based on the report's definition, ("Ghostwriting has been defined as the failure to designate an individual (as an author) who has made a substantial contribution to the research or writing of a manuscript") it is my impression from my own experience that biotech companies (including pharmaceutical) routinely pay "ghostwriters" to write papers intended for publication in medical journals. In my own case, the doctor whose name was to go on the paper did supposedly collect the data, and I was provided with a brief summary of the findings which I expanded into a full paper, which was then edited further by staff at the company.

Is such a process unethical? The way I saw it at the time, it was more an instance of the doctors collecting the data being too busy and/or subpar writers who could not be depended on to get the research written up and submitted to a journal for review in a timely manner, which is in the interest of the company promoting the product. On the one hand, this didn't seem to be a big deal given that the doctor who "authored" the paper did actually collect the data, and even contributed discussion points in the summary, which made him a valid author on the paper. On the other hand, the experience did make me cynical about papers in medical journals, which from then on I viewed as rather poorly conducted and reviewed advertisements for industry products (a common theme on this blog). In my mind, the question of who actually wrote the words of the paper to present the data is insignificant compared to the fact that papers published in medical journals are held to an incredibly low standard of scientific rigor compared to, say, those published in ecology journals. Part of the reason for this is obvious - scientific rigor is much more difficult in human studies, in which researchers are ethically more limited than ecologists in the types of manipulations available. Somewhat of a lower standard is probably necessary for progress in the field.

But another reason never discussed for poor medical studies is that journals and the medical industry seem to have a reciprocal back-scratching arrangement: the journal gets a lot of press coverage when it publishes yet another "significant" paper, and the biotech industry gets the promotion of their products. The authors and reviewers, by the way, are tied up in the same knot as well; they are scientists who need to publish to progress in their career, and are also often funded by the biotech industry. "Conflict of interest" probably doesn't begin to describe the complex web of interactions among all these parties.

A big problem with this system is that it creates a slippery slope. There certainly may have been instances when Merck's methods were less defensible, for example:

Documents were found describing Merck compensating investigators with honoraria for agreeing to serve as authors on review manuscripts ghostwritten on their behalf by medical publishing companies. Honoraria varied, ranging from $750 to $2500. One author refused his honorarium from Scientific Therapeutics Information stating, "I really do not feel it is appropriate to be paid for this type of effort."

Unfortunately, when you are so close to the line to begin with, crossing it becomes almost unavoidable. Paying the printed authors to put their name on any publication would certainly be crossing it.

Still, one wonders what planet Dr. Ross and the other authors have been on, given that they seem to imply that Merck should be singled out for using these methods to promote its products - they are shocked, shocked! to find what they did. Perhaps their disclosure statement sheds some light:

Although every effort was made to present this information objectively and fairly, it is important to note that all of the authors of this article have been compensated for their work as consultants/expert witnesses at the request of plaintiffs in litigation against Merck related to rofecoxib [Vioxx].

OK, they finally then admit that they may have heard of something like this before:

...it is reasonable to expect that the authorship practices observed in this case study may be used by other pharmaceutical companies as well. A recent press account seems to confirm as much, as does the presence of an industry specializing in medical writing.

They end with the extremely ironic statement, "We are hopeful that our findings encourage discussion of ways in which to improve the integrity of research." Simply, the "integrity" of medical research is a joke, and has been for a long time. Companies and journals will continue this charade as long as it stays profitable.

Your high-fish diet will soon be a thing of the past

noreply@blogger.com (Biotunes) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 04:13:00 +0000

Time to start getting your omega-3's from plants. We are long past the golden age of fish production and quickly approaching a complete crash of most fisheries, in case you had not noticed. Probably it was inevitable, but over a decade ago, a couple of biologists figured it was worth a shot to point out that policy changes actually taking the future into account, rather than simply pretending to, needed to be made. (Roughgarden J, Smith F, 1996. Why fisheries collapse and what to do about it. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science U S A. 93(10):5078-83 [open access].)

Apparently no one making the regulations even tried to implement their idea, which admittedly would probably not go over well in the real world, because it involved taxing, rather than subsidizing, fishermen.

To make their point, the authors first list some of the various rationalizations for the collapse of the Newfoundland cod industry:

Many causes have been cited for this collapse, including a lack of political will to impose adequate quotas, overoptimistic stock assessments by fishery scientists, poaching from foreign fleets, exceptional mortality from natural predators, climate change, subsidies to fishers, and overcapitalization...

Do any of these sound familiar to those reading a recent NY Times article about chinook salmon?

Of course this problem with the salmon fishery is not an isolated crisis in which we cannot possibly imagine the causes, despite such mind bogglingly out-of-touch utterances as this: "It's unprecedented that this fishery is in this kind of shape," said Donald McIsaac, executive director of the [Pacific Fisheries Management] council, which is organized under the auspices of the Commerce Department.

Perhaps it is unprecedented for that particular fishery, but why would anyone expect an outcome different from nearly every other heavily exploited fish species? For example, consider the crashed Newfoundland cod - historically it was one of the most abundant fisheries. No one could imagine the possibility of depleting it. There are now also warnings about tuna, another historically abundant species.

Ultiimately the issues cropping up are probably the tip of an iceberg that has repercussions not just for mere fisheries, but for the health of the entire planet, which remember is mostly ocean. This leads some to pin the blame on climate change for crashing fisheries. But they are missing the point. The problem specific to fisheries remains one of overexploitation - it just has not been correctly defined.

We now must face up to admitting that fishing limits, even those that have been faithfully adhered to, have been based at best on significant lack of ecological information, and at worst, on mostly short-term economic criteria.

As Roughgarden and Smith point out:

May et al. (May, R. M., J. R. Beddington, J. W. Horwood, and J. G. Shepherd. 1978. Exploiting natural populations in an uncertain world. Mathematical Biosciences 42:219-252) concluded that "What seems really needed is not further mathematical refinement, but rather robustly self-correcting strategies that can operate with only fuzzy knowledge about stock levels and recruitment curves."

For thirty years at least, it has been clear that fishery management has needed to focus on how to incorporate ecological complexity (compounded by complexity introduced by detrimental environmental impacts by all sorts of human activity), rather than crunch numbers based on the last available year of data for catch. Is there truly anyone in this business who can possibly be surprised that any fishery is collapsing now?

Of course, Roughgarden and Smith's analysis is naive in its economic assumptions such as this, when they state that after a crash "...the industry must contract anyway, and by managing for ecological stability the prospects of subsequent collapses are minimized." Unfortunately, for most natural resources, long-term gain is completely overshadowed by short-term profit, to an irrational degree, which will not emerge out of traditional economic models.

Still, the authors have a proposal that makes a little more sense for helping fisheries last a little longer:

(i) Establish a target stock at 3/4 of the average unharvested abundance [i.e., harvest much less than what appears to be ecologically sustainable].
(ii) Tax the revenues from any fish caught when the stock is below target.

As they discuss it, condition (1) essentially builds in insurance for fisheries, which only makes sense given our deep and continuing lack of understanding of the complex interactions of habitat loss and climate change, combined with only vague estimates for rates of increase, habitat carrying capacity, amount of predation, etc. And yet current practice ignores the environmental factors, and pretends that our numbers for the rest are accurate.

Condition (2) makes sense too, but seems unlikely to be successfully implemented. The point of it is to make it more costly, rather than more profitable, to fish when stocks are depleted below a sustainable level. Unfortunately, the current situation is that the harder it becomes to catch a certain species of fish, i.e. as it becomes depleted, the more rare it becomes, and thus more expensive. A tax would have to be severe indeed to cut into the profits of fishers catching the rarest fish, and thus politically probably impossible. If implemented it would surely increase poaching and the black market even beyond what it already is.

The damage is done. Fishing limits have been set historically (when they were set at all, usually belatedly) based on faulty ecological assumptions influenced by strong economic pressures, while ignoring the continuing fluctuations (many with unknown cause, such as in the case of the chinook salmon) that change the sustainable catch - and thus can crash a seemingly healthy fishery quickly after a series of below-normal population years. The mistake is similar to that made by authorities making Western water allocations during an unusually wet period there, and steadfastedly sticking by them even when a fraction of that water is now available. Perhaps moratoriums on fishing some populations such as the Newfoundland cod will give us a second chance to make saner policy. But it would be a foolish bet to make.

Economics and the environment, part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Biotunes) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 21:37:00 +0000

There is a fallacious argument commonly held and cited by pro-private-property advocates. The argument goes that interested parties having private property results in the reverse of the "tragedy of the commons," which holds that public resources are over-exploited because they belong to nobody, and thus are not worth protecting; if I do not grab the resource now, someone else will. The reverse argument is thus that if I alone hold the resources and their future value is also mine alone, then it is worth my while to protect them and not overexploit them.

Of course the main problem with this argument is that it assumes rational economic behavior by human beings, which over the last decade or so has been increasingly shown to be a false assumption. Economic models thus have to be rewritten to take into account that most of us do not act in our best interest, a lot of the time.

This is true in many arenas. There are many versions of the following experiment:

...the ultimatum game. You are given $100 to split between yourself and your game partner. Whatever division of the money you propose, if your partner accepts it, you each get to keep your share. If, however, your partner rejects it, neither of you gets any money.

How much should you offer? Why not suggest a $90-$10 split? If your game partner is a rational, self-interested money-maximizer -- the very embodiment of Homo economicus -- he isn't going to turn down a free 10 bucks, is he? He is. Research shows that proposals that offer much less than a $70-$30 split are usually rejected.

Meaning: humans are a social species, and no one lives in a bubble. Context is everything, even when it comes to financial gain.

Land-use is a different matter however. Private-property enthusiasts will assert that a rancher will happily overgraze public land he is leasing. But if his ranch is all private, he will manage it to ensure a healthier ecosystem, because this makes sense for the long term, right?

In practice this is not so. Certainly, the tragedy of the commons does hold here; public land is routinely overgrazed. But the opposite is not true, because ranchers routinely overgraze their own land, too, even though that is clearly bad for ranch productivity in the long term. Why does this happen?

It happens because decisions regarding land-use are much more complex than a simple formula for maximizing profits over the long term. First of all, ranchers behave as if their leased public land is private anyway; usually these leases have been in place for generations, and are essentially giveaways (often $1/acre), and thus the ranchers have a strong sense of entitlement to the land. Any attempt by the feds to change anything about how the leases currently work is met with outrage because the government is going to "ruin" the rancher. Nowhere is there any publicly stated acknowledgment that the rancher is getting a great deal.

Second, ranching practices (at least in the northwest) have been handed down for generations after being developed in a much wetter era. Economic theory predicting rational behavior makes the enormous assumption that the knowledge is available to make rational decisions. A few progressive ranchers in this area are waking up to the fact that the "drought" the west is suffering is here to stay, and are learning how to change their methods to keep the land healthy in the current environment. For many ranches, this can be as simple as changing grazing practices from using fences to using herders. But for those who do not have the cultural knowledge, this can be a daunting shift.

On top of this, any subsistence ranching or farming is concerned much more with maximizing profits in the immediate future, without worrying about the long term. The most obvious example of this is farms in the deforested tropics. Everyone knows the soil in tropical forests is extremely poor, and after just a couple years of farming, the nutrients are fully depleted and the farms are abandoned. Does this keep people from cutting down forests for subsistence farms? No, because when you are living hand-to-mouth, you are focused on getting through the current year. Economists call this "discounting" the long term effects of decisions, so that a benefit obtained years from now is worth much less than one obtained now. This is a rational position, but it is arguable that for most people (such as those who obtained adjustable-rate mortgages in the last few years) the future is discounted much more highly than is mathematically "rational."

Although the threats facing ranchers are not equally severe, the idea of having to quit production on a family ranch that has been working for generations is nothing less than disaster to those who face it. Their culture and tradition, and thus their entire sense of self, is wrapped up in that ranch. In Texas, for example, it is common for a "rancher" to keep a few cows on an overgrazed piece of family-owned land at a loss, while working a full time job in the city to actually make a living. It makes no financial sense to keep the ranch going, but it saves cultural face which is obviously much more important.

Finally, there is the obvious difference between individuals trying to make a living and corporations which need to maximize short-term profits at all costs. Our financial system seems to reward this corporate strategy, because the actual individual making a decision can jump ship before it is time to pay the piper for a bad one. They themselves do not own the resources they are exploiting, so making the resources privately owned (by the corporation) makes no difference to their protection. It is much easier for a corporation to run a ranch into the ground and then sell it off in parcels for development (although many private ranch owners do the same thing eventually) because a corporation has no cultural connection to the land.

The value of federal lands is that although they can be overexploited, there are mechanisms in place, such as regulation and public comment, to put a halt to their destruction. A hundred years ago, certainly the attitude was that the National Forests were there precisely for maximizing exploitation - after all, some private landowners might not want their land to be logged. Today, though, the ethic is different. Ecosystems have an inherent value to many more people than they once did, and this has changed forest service policy to include preservation as a mandate. Though the inertia to bring it about might be extreme, there is at least the possibility that public pressure can change federal land-use policy to better reflect the majority's conservation values. Naturally, those who make a living exploiting federal land view such policy changes as a "taking." But it is really a taking-back for the taxpayers who supplied that land for free in the first place.

Heterosexual marriage should not be legal

noreply@blogger.com (Biotunes) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:28:00 +0000

Our slightly tangential question today is, why are people so irrational about marriage? There have been cultures and times when legal marriage was important, and others when it was not. But there will always be people who are convinced that marriage is somehow a magic bullet for our social problems. Missives such as this one from otherwise intelligent columnists (in this case Emily Yoffe) show how weighed down with the baggage of "morality" the issue of marriage is. Yes, morality is involved; unfortunately, it is the definition of what morality is that gets confused and leads to calls for laws and policy that treat symptoms, rather than the underlying condition.

But perhaps in our desire not to make moral judgments about personal choices, young women wholly unprepared to be mothers are not getting the message that there are dire consequences of having (unprotected) sex with guys too lame to be fathers.

Yes, there are extremist meddlers who think truly personal choices should be legislated because God said so. But anyone who actually thinks that everyone living in society should be free to make all kinds of choices that negatively impact society is an extremist in the opposite direction. After all, morality actually is a mechanism for individuals living in societies to interact positively with other members of society, so that they will interact positively with you, which is all to your benefit. Society breaks down when personal desires and needs always take precedence over those of others. Once a critical number of people ignore the children they have and just keep on making more, there is no incentive to do otherwise because everyone is just out for himself anyway - the mark of a dysfunctional society.

Studies have found that children born to single mothers are vastly more likely to be poor, have behavioral and psychological problems, drop out of high school, and themselves go on to have out-of-wedlock children.

Of course, since we don't have any single-mom laboratory manipulation studies, the only information we have is correlational, not causal. Very likely a lot of the single moms were poor before they had a kid, and in no position to raise one successfully - meaning to produce a contributing member of society, rather than a drain on it who will likely not raise kids successfully because she does not have the experience to know what that means. But the problem is not that the moms aren't married to the kids' fathers, it is that they had kids at all.

Yoffe points out that "one key to effective fatherhood is first becoming a husband." But she is misdirected by her own definition of "husband," which in her mind, means a legally married man. She would be absolutely right if she defined "husband" as a man committed to one woman, emotionally and financially. When two people are able to commit to each other over the long term, they are much more likely to be successful parents, because they understand how society works - through the establishment and maintenance of relationships which in turn produces "moral" behavior. Thus they can raise their children to understand the importance of relationships, which is the key to avoiding dysfunctional behavior.

Marriage itself is actually a different issue altogether - or at least it would be if meddling politicians didn't think it was government's job to legislate morality. But the only true way to legislate morality is to remove dysfunctional people from society - which we pretty much do (albeit imprecisely) with laws against destructive behavior such as murder, theft, etc. Unfortunately tax code, welfare law, benefits rules, etc. put married people in a different economic category than unmarried people, which depending on your situation, either encourages you or discourages you to be married. Thus marriage is often driven by legal rather than personal considerations.

Marriage should be an entirely personal, not legal, decision. All the arguments about gay marriage are absurd because the idea that two people cannot declare themselves "married" if they want to is absurd. The reason that gays feel they have to fight for marriage is because policy makers have forced them to. If people don't want gays to be legally "married" then fine; fix the system so that there is no benefit to being married. If people want to avoid legal problems to do with benefits, alimony, inheritance, end-of-life issues, etc., there is all kinds of paperwork they can fill out. Legal marriage itself does not solve all of these problems anyway, so it is not clear why it exists, other than to legislate someone's particular "morality" that is not true morality.

In any case, you cannot legislate emotional commitment. The fact of "marriage" can make it easier to hide or ignore lack of long term emotional commitment, which can in turn lead to unwanted children anyway. Yoffe, as a child of bitter divorce, understands enough to know that marriage just for the sake of marriage makes no sense; but she seems to think that for a truly emotionally committed couple, marriage will somehow make their kids turn out better. But what is it that the kids have for their role model? The actual day-to-day relationship of their parents, or the certificate in their safe-deposit box? Those who argue that the legal hurdle of divorce will somehow force people to reconcile who might have otherwise split up has not checked divorce rates lately. If the emotional commitment is gone, no mere piece of paper is going to conjure it up again.

Save marriage for a symbol of personal commitment. To ceremonially bond with another human certainly has the impact of saying to society that "we are engaging in society through our relationship to each other." Therefore marriage certainly has societal value. But legally, it continues to be a pointless exercise at best and at worst confuses people about what is actually important.

Don't blame lack of marriage for the plight of poor neglected kids. Blame the parents who should have used birth control. The way to solve a lot of societal problems is to sterilize immediately anyone who has shown him or herself to be an unfit parent after the first kid. But we could never do that. It would be immoral.

We won't fix math education without fixing math stigma

noreply@blogger.com (Biotunes) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 01:58:00 +0000

Isn't it ever so satisfying when your hard-earned taxes are spent on something useful and constructive, such as the report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, which was charged with answering the question of why American students are falling behind the rest of the world in mathematical preparation. Of course, enormous piles of research has been done on mathematics education, and any math or science professor can tell you about the abysmal preparation of students who have gotten into college (and who are thus high school graduates).

The task of the advisory panel was basically to collate all the knowledge out there into a plan of action for fixing the disaster of math education in this country. Wouldn't it have been nice if math education researchers themselves brought all this knowledge together? Indeed, the mere existence of the panel shows that our problems go much, much deeper than any set of recommendations in a report can solve.

Fixing the problems with math education in this country will involve breaking a cycle that goes back decades at least. Until education professors face up to the elephant in the room, that poor students find an elementary education major an easy alternative, a million reports and recommendations like this one will be meaningless. All the experts in the world can make absolutely correct statements such as this:

Teachers and other educational leaders should consistently help students and parents to understand that an increased emphasis on the importance of effort is related to improved mathematics performance. This is a critical point because much of the public's self-evident resignation about mathematics education (together with the common tendencies to dismiss weak achievement and to give up early) seems rooted in the erroneous idea that success is largely a matter of inherent talent or ability, not effort.

But if elementary teachers consider themselves inherently "bad" at math, as I guarantee you many (if not most) of them do, they cannot possibly make their students understand that no one is just born bad at math.

There is a fundamental problem that has created this crisis to the point where any solution is at best decades away, if it is possible at all. Culturally, math illiteracy is not considered a deficiency. In fact, many people (including undergraduates taking required math courses) seem to wear it as a badge of honor. How did it get this way? We seem to take language illiteracy much more seriously (which is not to say that students are adequately prepared in reading and writing either). After all, while I have heard dozens of people proclaim their math illiteracy, I have never heard one person proudly announce that they cannot read or write. Parents don't think math is important, so their kids don't. Some of those kids go on to be elementary teachers. How do they get the degree when they continue to be illiterate in math? They do it within a system that gets many of the worst students, because instead of making them meet high standards, it accepts them adjusts courses accordingly. Minimum grade levels to graduate are meaningless; they just result in grade inflation. Programs focus more time on "methods" teaching than on content; even while all the skills in teaching methods in the world are useless if you do not have a firm grasp of what you are teaching.

Why are we passing poor math students through unchallenging courses that result in teaching degrees? One, because of the cultural stigma tied to proficiency in math. Two, because the profession of teaching today provides little rewards, even for the saints among us, which results in a high demand due to high turnover. Most teachers will tell you that it is not even about the pay and benefits - although the pay discrepancy between the teachers and administrators is a travesty. It is about a lack of autonomy in the classroom - due to government's and administration's love of relentless standardized materials and testing, which prevents even the smartest and most motivated teachers from using their abilities to teach creatively. It is also about parents who think schools are daycares for their snotty, insolent, bored-without-TV brats, instead of a controlled environment for children who have been taught respect to participate in the excitement of learning.

Thus, we have classrooms of teachers who know little content in certain areas and are even taught about teaching math in a way that reinforces its stigma:

Teachers and developers of instructional materials [added emphasis] sometimes assume that students need to be a certain age to learn certain mathematical ideas. However, a major research finding is that what is developmentally
appropriate is largely contingent on prior opportunities to learn. Claims based on theories that children of particular ages cannot learn certain content because they are "too young," "not in the appropriate stage," or "not ready" have consistently been shown to be wrong.

How is it that the people creating instructional materials have no idea what all the research has been telling us for years? This is a fundamental disconnect in most areas of education. The educational research that has been done decades ago and today is emphatically ignored by the people charged with actual education, such as school boards and administrators. For example, everyone knows that the best time for language acquisition (single or multiple) is early childhood. Yet, when is foreign language instruction begun in the U.S.? High school.

Another fairly futile recommendation:

...teachers must know in detail and from a more advanced perspective the mathematical content they are responsible for teaching and the connections of that content to other important mathematics, both prior to and beyond the level they are assigned to teach.

This seems to be a bizarre concept to students in math education. Even those at my campus planning to teach high school math - and thus who are essentially getting a content degree in mathematics with a few education courses - are known to complain, "why should I have to take this high-level math course when I will never teach this material?" The utter lack of interest in their major subject is astounding. Why are they math majors then? Because with such a shortage of math teachers, they are certain to get a job. And with teachers relatively uninterested in the subject they are teaching, the cycle of poor preparation continues.

And let's not forget that there is seemingly always a role played by big business when policy makes no sense:

Mathematics textbooks are much smaller in many nations with higher mathematics achievement than the U.S., thus demonstrating that the great length of our textbooks is not necessary for high achievement. Representatives of several publishing companies who testified before the Panel indicated that one substantial contributor to the length of the books
was the demand of meeting varying state standards for what should be taught in each grade. Other major causes of the extreme length of U.S. mathematics textbooks include the many photographs, motivational stories, and other nonmathematical content that the books include.

Why all the extra garbage in these math books? (For an extreme example of textbooks with gratuitous material that schools should definitely avoid, see this YouTube video.) Interestingly, the panel's report does not spell out the obvious reason: publishers' profits. The textbook industry has gotten completely out of control, filling books with junk to make them longer to justify the cost, and coming out with new editions every couple of years, which forces school districts to spend the money to replace their entire inventory, rather than order a few replacement books. In science, this can be justifiable given the rapid increase in knowledge and thinking that occurs - textbooks that define only two biological kingdoms, for example, would not be useful in preparing students in biology. But school-level math has been the same for decades, if not centuries. Discoveries on the frontiers of mathematics do not change how you do long division.

There are so many problems that the panel's report goes on and on. One suggestion the panel makes that has merit is the idea of having math specialists teaching at the elementary level. Like art and music teachers, they would travel from class to class an alleviate the burden of teaching math from all the teachers who hate it. The only way to break our current cycle of math phobics creating more math phobics is for kids to realize at an early age that math is interesting, and fun for everyone, not just for geeks. Math is part of what makes us human.

Another more radical suggestion is that there be no mathematics teaching at all until middle school. This may seem counterintuitive to the recommendations of the panel, but the main reason most students are terrible in math when they get to middle school is that their aversions have been so reinforced they are already lost causes - poor teaching at the elementary level has already convinced them they are no good at math so they don't even try. What if we waited to teach math, so that students haven't already closed their minds before they have a teacher who is actually interested in math? Why not use the time in elementary school to teach a foreign language? Since many current college students today cannot do middle-school-level math, no one can claim that it would be impossible for students to catch up at that point. As the report points out, the same simple concept is often taught year after year after year in elementary school, which adds to the boredom factor.

Whatever we do, it must somehow involve changing the greater American culture that looks down on the enjoyment of math as geeky, and the hatred of math as cool. Maybe someone could make some Einstein and Von Neumann action figures for Happy Meals. If the culture does not change, the performance of American students in math will not either.

Economics and the environment, part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Biotunes) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:57:00 +0000

There is a tendency or those on the political right to invoke economic theory when developing or critiquing environmental policy. This can make sense or not, depending on the context. For example, a cap-and-trade system for dealing with the emissions causing acid rain (sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides) has contributed to significant reductions (though of course not elimination) of these pollutants, and as a result acid rain is currently less of a threat to northeastern U.S. ecosystems than it once was. So, many advocate a similar system to control carbon dioxide, which has recently become recognized as a pollutant for its role in exacerbating global climate change.

The basic premise of cap-and-trade is that government - such as the E.P.A. in the U.S., or state government - sets a total cap on allowed emissions for the whole country or region within it. They then issue a set number of licenses totaling that cap. These licenses can then be traded on the open market, so that companies emitting CO2 can either spend money reducing their emissions, or buying more licenses - whichever makes more financial sense. If the cost of reducing emissions (through special technology or alternative energy production, for example) is low for most companies, the price of the licenses will drop. If, however, the cost is high, licenses will go up too. because of the increased demand. Advocates of the approach support its reliance on the free market rather than excessive top-down regulation.

There are problems as well. For the system to accomplish its intended purpose, the cap must be set using the most objective scientific means possible, which seems an unlikely prospect, especially given the current political climate. But even if science is given a chance, CO2 is a global pollutant. That is, everyone's CO2 emissions affect everyone else. By contrast, acid rain in the northeastern U.S. was easily traceable mainly to coal-burning power plants in the east and Midwest, and thus the emissions were a local problem solvable by local policy. The harm done by carbon dioxide is genuine, but much less tangible and not at all direct. This is used by those opposed to emissions caps to insist that capping our own country's CO2 would be meaningless if other countries do not do the same, and it would somehow destroy our economy to do so. (This is despite the obvious counter argument that a genuine government mandate to develop alternative energy sources would spur a whole new economy for the U.S. However, the tangible economic benefits would not be immediate, but long term, which does not play well in capitalist societies.)

Of course, this is the point of the Kyoto treaty - to get as many countries on board as possible. Kyoto is a necessary first step because in practicality countries do have different levels of wealth and technological ability to control emissions, so to expect them to do so equally off the bat is absurd. The idea is that asking more of the fully technological countries will motivate the development of alternatives to greenhouse-gas-producing energy, that could then be implemented in other countries as well. But without the world's biggest emitter on board, it all breaks down completely.

We all know that getting the world to agree on scientifically reasonable global carbon dioxide limits is somewhat less likely than the proverbial snowball in hell. More recent coverage will give cap opponents more ammunition to argue there is no point in even trying. Should we really use the problems to excuse a mentality of "winner take all, and who gives a damn what the world is like in a few decades, after I am gone?" What if instead, the U.S. (as suggested often by Thomas Friedman) made a conscious decision to be a world leader in alternative technologies? (Mandating ethanol production from corn to justify huge taxpayer giveaways to corporate agriculture does not count.) What if the U.S.'s mantra turned into, "this is a great opportunity to show the world's people, most of whom hate our guts right now for our arrogance, greed, and imperialism, that we are the leader for remaking our planet's future." Even the cynics who only care about money surely see the benefits of replacing foreign oil, the defense of which has cost enormous amounts of resources and lives over the years, with foreign good will, which is a benefit?

There are times in history when what we really need is a little more government in select areas, not less. Since the "anti-government" crowd happily uses fear to justify the invasion of personal privacy, why isn't there, in vocal opposition, an actively pro-government voice that uses hope to stop the sub-prime mortgaging of our future? Probably because bringing up difficult truths doesn't win elections.

Adapt public education to individuals, not demographics

noreply@blogger.com (Biotunes) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:21:00 +0000

The genetics-solves-everything crowd is continuing to have an influence on society that threatens to set Americans' notions of equality back decades. I still believe these attitudes are cyclical, but it is always depressing and disturbing to be in the regressive part of the cycle, with no hint of change in sight. The target now of course is public education - always in the sights of extremists, whether it involves adding prayer, subtracting science, or the current fad, teaching kids their gender roles, as if society weren't taking care of all of these things adequately outside the classroom.

Dr. Leonard Sax's website is called "Why Gender Matters". His publications have such objective scholarly titles as "Reclaiming Kindergarten: making kindergarten less harmful to boys" (Psychology of Men and Masculinity, American Psychological Association, 2(1):3-12, 2001), which like his other writings set up an absurd dichotomy between boys and girls as if they are unrelated species. He claims that for boys, but not girls, kindergarten is "a series of alienating failures and humiliations" and implies it is thus the end of their academic careers. Many women competing for professional jobs (requiring extended education) with men would be surprised to hear that all males' spirits were crushed in kindergarten, given that they are still pretty much running society.

The problem with our educational system is not that "no one is teaching them how to be men and women" (from Sax's website) but that we are using blunt instruments, such as standardized testing, which saps what little autonomy teachers had in the classroom before NCLB. This means they are unable to address differences among individual students in development times of different skills. Yes, that variation exists, but using gender as the blunt instrument to guide education reform is even worse than using a standardized test. On top of it being a pointless exercise to assume anyone's academic strengths and weaknesses at a given age can be assessed using their appearance, it also reinforces so many stereotypes that so many of us had finally begun to move past, and furthermore gives them false "scientific" credibility. This type of "science" is no different from attempts a century ago to demonstrate through physical qualities that blacks were less intelligent than whites.

This blog has previously summarized the alarming trend of claiming genetic origin for every trait anyone can think of, and why the papers supporting these ideas tell us absolutely nothing. The problem of the other type of research cherry-picked by Sax to support his agenda is that it studies already-developed human beings. Anyone who has raised a child should understand the intellectual dishonesty of claiming that behavioral traits possessed by a baby or toddler are clearly genetic. Humans are social creatures, programmed from birth to learn from other humans how they should behave. That includes identification with a particular gender, and all the traits associated with it in a particular society. Brain development does not occur in a vacuum, but is affected by experience. Brain-scan differences even in a newborn can not be determined to be genetic, because the newborn's brain started developing nine months before.

Most important though, the differences found are minor and slight - meaning it is unlikely that they are biologically significant. From the Times magazine article:

Sax initially built his argument that girls hear better than boys on two papers published in 1959 and 1963 by a psychologist named John Corso. Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent a fair amount of energy examining the original research behind Sax's claims. In Corso's 1959 study, for example, Corso didn't look at children; he looked at adults. And he found only between one-quarter and one-half of a standard deviation in male and female hearing thresholds. What this means, Liberman says, is that if you choose a man and a woman at random, the chances are about 6 in 10 that the woman's hearing will be more sensitive and about 4 in 10 that the man's hearing will be more sensitive. Sax uses several other hearing studies to make his case that a teacher who is audible to boys will sound too loud to girls. But Liberman says that if you really look at this research, it shows that girls' and boys' hearing is much more similar than different. What's more, the sample sizes in those studies are far too small to make meaningful conclusions about gender differences in the classroom.

Why is it now acceptable to use "science" to foster people's underlying prejudices about gender, but no longer about race? Apparently there is some sort of hair-splitting going on in the minds of these "scientists" that of course skin color and other associated traits tell you nothing about what is going on in someone's brain, we know that now, so forget about that. But different genitals, now that clearly must be correlated with brain function. Especially the genitals of pre-pubescent humans!

It is especially insidious that the idea being promoted is just a new version of "separate but equal", which as anyone knows who is at all familiar with history, means anything but. Sax's motivation is clear. He has been on a crusade for years to convince people that public education is biased against boys because most of the teachers are women. (Of course, who is responsible for that? Surely not the men who over the ages told women that the only profession they could have was teaching, since obviously it is such an undesirable job. Surely not the principals and superintendents who for some reason are still overwhelmingly male, and oversee overwhelmingly female teaching staffs. But I digress.) He does a clever job of convincing people that he cares about girls too, but this concern is nothing but pandering to get people to buy into his system of segregation.

It's truly a shame, because for completely opposite reasons, single sex classrooms in public schools can be a good idea. For instance, in the context in which many kids are more interested in what the kids of the other gender think of them than the academics going on in class, single-sex classrooms can remove a major distraction. Because it's a good idea for kids to learn to relate to the other gender socially, it seems that the best situation is some, perhaps not all, single-sex classes in coed schools. It also does help remove some teacher biases which have usually been documented to favor boys (not girls, as Dr. Sax claims) in their participation. But if, as Dr. Sax claims, the majority of schools going to single-sex classes are basing their new paradigm on his "genetics" theories, then we are in big trouble, because it will make many of the gender prejudices that have sunk below consciousness openly acceptable again.

Teen sex - is it bad or good for society?

noreply@blogger.com (Biotunes) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:23:00 +0000

Apparently it has been an assumption for a long time in some circles that early sex by teenagers results in their later delinquency. Two recent papers demonstrate just how muddled this theory is (along with most theories generalizing about human behavior), because they differ in their conclusions based on how the data were analyzed. The first paper's ( Armour, S. and D.L. Haynie, 2007. Adolescent sexual debut and later delinquency. Journal of Youth Adolescence 36:141-152) purpose was to use data to support the theory, which it does. The second paper (Harden, K.P., J. Mendle, J. E. Hill, E. Turkheimer and R.E. Emery, 2008. Rethinking timing of first sex and delinquency. Journal of Youth Adolescence, in press) uses the same dataset to reach the opposite conclusion, that earlier sex reduces future delinquency.

The second group of authors of course claim that their analysis is the better one, and in this case it is true. These papers, in fact, are a good demonstration of one of the major problems of large-dataset human studies, which is that they only control for factors (in this case, survey responses about race, income, parent's education, GPA, drug use, etc.) that the researchers imagine could affect the data, and not all the other hundreds of factors that also could but are ignored out of practicality or researcher bias. The authors' hope is that their use of a giant dataset will obscure the fact that important information is lacking.

(Once again, we will put aside the first major problem of such studies, the use of self-reporting data. Of course since both groups of authors rely on them, neither mentions how unreliable they are, especially, one might assume, with regard to sexual experience. And one might also imagine that the group of people who are most likely to lie about sexual experience is teenagers.)

The reason the second study is the better analysis is because the authors recognize that pooling all the data loses important information. Meaningless averages are calculated by pooling teenagers from all cultures and walks of life. To a repeat a very nice analogy used by the authors of the second paper: if you wish to correlate meat consumption with life expectancy, and you compare two countries, one primarily meat-eating and another not, you find a positive relationship - higher meat-eating correlates with higher life expectancy. But a third ignored variable also correlates positively with meat-eating, and that is level of industrialization. So to truly understand the relationship between meat-eating and life expectancy, you must control for industrialization. When the analysis is rerun within one country, the correlation between meat-eating and life expectancy is negative.

In addition, what is found in both papers is simply correlation, not causation (a trap that first-year undergraduates are taught to avoid, and yet catches so many human-behavior researchers). That is, the only information one has after the meat study is that meat-eating is associated with lower life expectancy. The study has not shown that meat-eating causes lower life-expectancy.

These were the two main problems with the first paper. The authors pool individuals across a wide range of cultural norms, which gives them a spurious result, and then conclude that early teen sex causes delinquency when the two are only correlated. Even though they use a crude control for cultural influence (average reported age of first sex for a given teenager's high school) they ignore any potential unstudied factor that could cause both (just as industrialization causes both higher life expectancy, and more meat-eating), obscuring the results for individuals.

The second paper solves that problem by analyzing only the identical twins in the dataset (which was large enough for them to have data for 289 twin pairs), and therefore controlling for both genetics (which the twins share exactly) and environment (which twins living in the same household largely share). This is an appropriate twin analysis because (for this main point at least) the authors don't care about trying to separate genetics and environment to answer their question. (Twin studies that do confound objective data with subjective assumptions.)

On top of all this, though, is another major flaw in the dataset, which the second group of authors strangely acknowledge despite their analysis. The supposedly "independent" (time of first sex) and "dependent" (delinquency) variables are by definition related from the start, because in much of American society, teen sex itself is considered delinquent behavior. What they are doing is a bit like asking whether or not shoplifting is correlated with delinquency. This certainly confounds the first study.

What does it mean that the second study found that identical twins who have their first sexual experience earlier than their siblings are less likely to engage in delinquent behavior? The authors seem to feel they have no choice but to conclude that there is probably no relationship between these factors at all. Perhaps that is exactly what they would have found statistically if they had used a Bonferroni correction for their dozen or so analyses. Either that, or delinquency is caused by sexual frustration, and the problem of misbehaving teens is now solved.

Diet Soda is Clearly an Evil Plot to Kill Us All

noreply@blogger.com (Biotunes) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:51:00 +0000

One common theme of this blog recognizable to regular readers is that medical studies based on giant data sets, especially those including self-reporting data, are quite limited in their implications for how an individual should live his or her life to promote optimum health. A recent article publicized as linking diet soda consumption to greater risk of diabetes and heart disease, and mortality in general, is a good example of this.

The problem with the study (Lutsey, P.L., L.M. Steffen and J. Stevens, 2008. Dietary intake and the development of the metabolic syndrome: The atherosclerosis risk in communities study. Circulation 117:754-761) is not that it is necessarily wrong. It is that it is too hard to tell what importance the findings have in the context of all the other health information with which we are bombarded daily.

Aside from the problems inherent in self-reporting diet data -- which the authors acknowledge in the discussion but which obviously had no effect on likelihood of publication or promotion of the press release -- the authors reveal a troubling bias in their assumptions and use of terminology. They conducted a factor analysis on dietary components in an attempt to see which parts of a diet are more highly correlated with a condition called metabolic syndrome (fat, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, etc.) or "MetSyn". So far so good. But the next problem here is that human beings had to classify the types of food people ate, and these classifications are based on assumptions already about what foods are good and bad for you. For example, "red meat" of course does not take into account what species of mammal was eaten, or the conditions under which it was raised, which surely affect its nutritional and fat content. They use a category "low-fat diary" because they believe there is a reason to distinguish it from non-low-fat dairy.

The use of categories is necessary for their methodology, but it illustrates the problem with nutritional data collection which to this point is always colored by currently held biases about good and bad food. To make matters worse, when their factor analysis revealed two broad dietary patterns (based on their categories) among the people studied, they chose to label these "Western" and "Prudent" dietary patterns. Guess which dietary pattern they have already decided is bad for you, and likely to cause MetSyn?

Although their results showing more people on the "Western" diet to acquire "MetSyn" show a correlation, they are quick to label certain food groups (e.g. dairy) as "protective". But of course this is based on the studies in the past that have shown certain types of food to have negative effects on human health (usually, though, only when consumed in high quantities). Of course then none of the results were too surprising, except for the finding of diet soda, consumption of which in their model increased risk for MetSyn even more than consumption of sweetened drinks. This was the splashy result that got the newspaper headline.

I have no problem with their explanation, it makes perfect sense. They first admit that the data might be confounded, because diabetics are more likely to drink diet soda than nondiabetics, so which came first? But they also cite a rat study which suggested that artificial sweetener screws up our body's ability to determine the caloric content of what we are consuming - our mouth says "caloric" and our body says "not" and thus our body may simply stop trusting our mouth. It's a much more interesting explanation, and makes some intuitive sense, so that makes it easy to ignore the explanation that the data are confounded. The study gets published anyway, and promoters at the journal find the line in the results and discussion that will attract media attention, and bingo.

Those of us who think artificial (= man made) sweetners are potentially nasty unknowns to be avoided if possible, love a result like this. But that still doesn't mean that if you drink a lot of diet soda you are doomed to be fat and get diabetes. Even when we really know very little about what we are studying, even when our methods are poor, and the results questionable (in some cases contradicted by other studies, as the authors cite), and based on broad assumptions, these studies get published, because they get headlines. Bad methods are considered acceptable to medical journals because there are not necessarily feasible methods that are valid. Assumptions may be based in part on established medical knowledge, but they are mostly based on previous, poorly conducted studies such as this one, not to mention constant propaganda from our media and government about what is good for us, and which is so obviously correct that they completely revamp the propaganda every couple of decades or so. We think we are learning more and more and more when we "confirm" these same assumptions, yet in truth we haven't even begun to understand the complexity and variation in the human body. Just ask a scientist researching disease cures, who actually has to get it right for anyone to care about her research. Eating dairy products is "protective"? Check that with someone from a genetic heritage of lactose intolerance.

Never forget that these studies are blunt, blunt instruments, that tell us nothing about what works for an individual. A good rule of thumb for most diets is, simply, variety, and not too much of any one thing. That, not forcing down a gallon of skim milk every day, should be the first step for anyone trying to feel better through a diet better suited to his body.

The biofuels problem explained - Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Biotunes) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 23:17:00 +0000

As suggested in my previous post, it seems unlikely that the clear results of the Science studies will actually affect policy given the hard-to-crack corporate influence on government. Fargione et al. point out that "the recently enacted US Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 specifies reductions in life-cycle GHG emissions, including land use change, relative to a fossil fuel baseline."

Here are some relevant bits. The first is included under section on grants for biofuels research, amending Energy Policy Act of 2005:

(4) develop cellulosic and other feedstocks that are less resource and land intensive and that promote sustainable use of resources, including soil, water, energy, forests, and land, and ensure protection of air, water, and soil quality.

The second amends the Biomass Research and Development Act of 2000:

(5) the improvement and development of analytical tools to facilitate the analysis of life-cycle energy and greenhouse gas emissions, including emissions related to direct and indirect land use changes, attributable to all potential biofuel feedstocks and production processes; and

(6) the systematic evaluation of the impact of expanded biofuel production on the environment, including forest lands, and on the food supply for humans and animals.

Does the law take into account land use changes beyond those of the United States, in developing countries where the local impacts are much more distructive? There is another growing fear that conversion of food-crop land into biofuels production, which is more profitable due to international demand, could cause even more devastating famines in Africa (for example) than are already occurring on a regular basis. According to the African Biodiversity Network, a car tank of ethanol requires the amount of grain that could feed a child for a year (Bonn, 2008).

But there does not seem to be any specific provision in the law that will call a halt to the madness if the results in biofuels research that companies like ADM wants are not found.

And of course industry is not going to sit there and give any policy ground to actual scientists. From the Times article:

Industry groups, like the Renewable Fuels Association, immediately attacked the new studies as "simplistic," failing "to put the issue into context."

"While it is important to analyze the climate change consequences of differing energy strategies, we must all remember where we are today, how world demand for liquid fuels is growing, and what the realistic alternatives are to meet those growing demands," said Bob Dineen, the group's director, in a statement following the Science reports' release.

The laughable irony here is that it is industry and their governmental cronies who have not put it into context. They are the ones who promote this policy as a "green" solution, when it clearly is not, and has been known not to be for sometime.

But of course they are correct that there is a demand for alternatives to fossil fuels. Are those of us criticizing the ethanol policy just short-sighted and naive? Do we reject the need to find alternatives to Middle-Eastern oil? Not at all. It is the biofuels industry that is being disingenuous by suggesting that they are somehow energy saviors. Unfortunately, it is the silver-bullet approach, rarely effective for any complex problem, that sells in today's America.

The energy pundits and power brokers dismiss wind and solar because they cannot supply all our power needs. The environmentalists dismiss ANWR drilling because it would clearly supply our current needs for only a short time, while doing permanent damage. The pro-nukes camp suggests more nuclear plants in order to reduce CO2 emissions, and yet they have failed to solve the waste problem, which is a (albeit smaller) serious environmental problem in its own right. The laudable attempts to remove environmentally damaging dams do not focus on how hydroelectric power will be replaced in a way that does not damage the environment. What the media and all the energy extremists fail to acknowledge is that a combination of all of the currently known types of energy not only would diversify our energy in a way that would help mitigate problems caused by shortages of any one resource, not to mention eliminate massive region-wide blackouts, and make a wide-ranging terrorist attack on energy sources next to impossible (unlike the current situation we have seen in which one blown power plant blacks out the entire northeast).

The reason this approach has not been advanced by any policy maker is that it doesn't create nice simple soundbites that result in huge amounts of public money flowing into a few giant corporations. Ethanol is a good partial solution to our energy problems. Carried to the extreme it's being carried to is a humanitarian and ecological disaster in the making. Biodiesel in the form of used cooking oil is a great way to recycle and create energy at the same time. But if every car did it, it would be an emissions disaster. We need to have ethanol cars and electric cars and keep working on hydrogen cars. We need it all, and the U.S. could be a technological leader in giving the world it all, which would have the added effect of generating a lot of economy that cannot yet be outsourced, as Tom Friedman has tried to advocate. Oil and natural gas need to have the role of back-up to the other energy solutions. Then we will have them when we really need them.

The problem is, policy makers in the U.S. government don't actually give a damn about energy solutions or preventing terrorist attacks on obvious targets. They care about big, deficit-inflating handouts that enrich certain corporations at the expense of the rest of the world. The outrage is that they use feigned concern about the approaching energy/climate change crisis, and terrorism, to gain unquestioned public support for their objectives. Eventually, it will dawn on the public that years of so-called "energy" and "anti-terrorism" policy has only made their lives worse. But of course it will be too late. Maybe it already is.

References

Bonn, D. 2008. Call for moratorium on agrofuels in Africa. Dispatches, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6:6.