November 2015 Archives

Wed Nov 25 21:11:28 EST 2015

Items of Interest

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

  • Glenn Greenwald: Why the CIA is smearing Edward Snowden after the Paris attacks

    The real objective is to depict Silicon Valley as terrorist-helpers for the crime of offering privacy protections to Internet users.

    The CIA's blame-shifting game, aside from being self-serving, was deceitful in the extreme. To begin with, there still is no evidence that the perpetrators in Paris used the Internet to plot their attacks, let alone used encryption technology.
    ...
    The claim that the Paris attackers learned to use encryption from Snowden is even more misleading. For many years before anyone heard of Snowden, the U.S. government repeatedly warned that terrorists were using highly advanced means of evading American surveillance.

  • Foolproof by Greg Ip -- book review

    The biggest risk we can take is to allow ourselves to feel safe

    Constructing giant levees to contain mighty rivers makes people feel safe enough to build on the floodplain, making the consequences of future floods far worse. Introducing helmets and face masks in American football has increased some kinds of injury, because players can use their heads as a battering ram.

    More, including a presentation with slides, at Why Safety Can Be Dangerous: A Conversation with Gregory Ip.

    In Foolproof, Ip looks at how we often force new, unexpected risks to develop in unexpected places as we seek to minimize risk from crises like financial downturns and natural disasters. This is a phenomenon only likely to increase as our financial systems and cities become more complex and interconnected, but Ip concludes that these crises actually benefit society.

  • Agriculture Linked to DNA Changes in Ancient Europe

    The agricultural revolution was one of the most profound events in human history, leading to the rise of modern civilization. Now, in the first study of its kind, an international team of scientists has found that after agriculture arrived in Europe 8,500 years ago, people's DNA underwent widespread changes, altering their height, digestion, immune system and skin color.

    What's the significance of that for current paleo diet mythology?

  • The Algorithm That Creates Diets That Work for You

    It crunches hundreds of factors to make personalized plans for controlling blood sugar. Some people even get cake and cookies.

    The team found a huge amount of variation between the volunteers. The same food would cause huge sugar spikes in some people but tiny blips in others. The volunteers also differed substantially in the foods that triggered the sharpest spikes: Participant 445, for example, reacted strongly to bananas, while participant 644 spiked heavily post-cookies.
    ...
    Zeevi and Korem showed that these personal differences were influenced by familiar factors like age and body mass index, and also less familiar ones like gut microbes. They found several groups of bacteria, and families of bacterial genes, that were linked to stronger PPGRs (postprandial glycemic responses).

  • AMA Calls for Ban on Direct to Consumer Advertising of Prescription Drugs and Medical Devices

    "Today's vote in support of an advertising ban reflects concerns among physicians about the negative impact of commercially-driven promotions, and the role that marketing costs play in fueling escalating drug prices," said AMA Board Chair-elect Patrice A. Harris, M.D., M.A. "Direct-to-consumer advertising also inflates demand for new and more expensive drugs, even when these drugs may not be appropriate."

    Why was this ever allowed in the first place?

  • Single course of antibiotics can mess up the gut microbiome for a year

    Mouth microbes, on the other hand, don't seem to care.

    Gut microbial diversity was significantly altered by all four kinds of antibiotics, which lasted for months. In participants that took ciprofloxacin, microbial diversity was altered for up to 12 months. The antibiotic treatments also caused a spike in genes associated with antibiotic resistance. Lastly, the researchers noted that clindamycin killed off microbes that produce butyrate, a short-chain fatty acid that inhibit inflammation, carcinogenesis, and oxidative stress in the gut.

  • Scientists Confirm There's Nothing But Misinformation On Anti-Vax Sites

    Even when sites did cite peer-reviewed studies, their interpretations were flawed.

    For example, of the nearly 500 anti-vaccination websites examined in the study, nearly two-thirds claimed that vaccines cause autism, the researchers found. However, multiple studies have shown that there is no link between vaccines and autism.
    ...
    About two-thirds of the websites used information that they represented as scientific evidence, but in fact was not, to support their claims that vaccines are dangerous, and about one-third used people's anecdotes to reinforce those claims, the scientists found.
    ...
    Some websites also cited actual peer-reviewed studies as their sources of information, but they misinterpreted and misrepresented the findings of these studies.

  • Big Sugar and Big Corn settle bitter battle over sweeteners outside court

    terms kept secret

    The deal midway through a trial in Los Angeles federal court was announced in a short statement that sugar-coated the hostility that emerged from dueling lawsuits over losses each side blamed on efforts by their rival to win over consumers.
    ...
    Sugar processors had sought $1.5 billion in a false-advertising claim against corn refiners and agribusinesses giants Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill and other companies after they tried to rebrand their publicity-plagued product as "corn sugar."
    ...
    Corn refiners and the companies countersued for $530 million, saying they suffered after the sugar industry made false and misleading statements that included a comment that high fructose corn syrup was as addictive as crack cocaine.

    In a battle against an infection, antibiotics can bring victory over enemy germs. Yet that war-winning aid can come with significant collateral damage; microbial allies and innocents are killed off, too. Such casualties may be unavoidable in some cases, but a lot of people take antibiotics when they're not necessary or appropriate. And the toll of antibiotics on a healthy microbiome can, in some places, be serious, a new study suggests.

  • Population Implosion: How Demographics Rule the Global Economy

    The developed world's workforce will start to decline next year, threatening future global growth

    Ever since the global financial crisis, economists have groped for reasons to explain why growth in the U.S. and abroad has repeatedly disappointed, citing everything from fiscal austerity to the euro meltdown. They are now coming to realize that one of the stiffest headwinds is also one of the hardest to overcome: demographics.

  • How Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name

    by Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini

    Now, although the products are indeed even more beautiful than before, that beauty has come at a great price. Gone are the fundamental principles of good design: discoverability, feedback, recovery, and so on. Instead, Apple has, in striving for beauty, created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read. We have obscure gestures that are beyond even the developer's ability to remember. We have great features that most people don't realize exist.

  • Scan a book in five minutes?

    'Smart scanner' with foot pedal and WiFi support

    Not available yet and a gamble, but:

    The Czur's creators at CzurTek describe their baby as "the world's first true smart scanner... Czur can scan books easily and connect to WiFi. Czur is faster than any scanner in the world, and also is a video projector." A 32-bit MIPS CPU and fast software for scanning and correction allow you to do the job at a clip of a page a second or so, aided by a foot pedal included with the scanner. Yes, there's supposed to be first-rate OCR. The Czur also stands out because of the WiFi capabilities you can use to create a book cloud for tablet, e-reader or cell phone, as well as for the visual presentation capabilities, complete with an HDMI port for direct connection to a projector.

  • Open Payments Data

    Includes an online search tool to discover how much drug companies are paying your doctor.

  • Personal Essay on Bell Telephone Laboratories

    by A. Michael Noll (April 8, 2012)

    It is impossible to obtain a feel for what it was like at Bell Telephone Laboratories by looking at memos and other archival documents. You had to be there. This article reports my experiences in working there in the research area during the 1960s--a period that is considered to be part of its golden years.
    ...
    Less than 10 percent of the work done at Bell Telephone Laboratories was basic or fundamental research (performed mostly at the Murray Hill, NJ facility). But that research had significant impact on today's world of communication. Of the roughly 22,000 people who worked there in the early 1980s, about 1500 were in the research area. The cost of the research portion of the R&D work was about only one-tenth of the average phone bill--a real bargain.

  • Tangled Up in Entanglement

    By Lawrence M. Krauss

    Unfortunately for Einstein, entanglement, "spooky" or not, is apparently real, as researchers in the Netherlands demonstrated last week, just in time for Halloween. In doing so, the researchers affirmed once again that quantum mechanics, as strange as it may seem, works in every way we can test it.
    ...
    Quantum theory, however, suggests that objects which have been carefully prepared together and placed into a combined quantum state can, even when separated across the galaxy, remain "entangled," as long as neither has any significant interactions with other objects to break the entanglement. If I perform a measurement on one of two entangled objects, the state of the other object will be instantaneously affected, no matter how far apart the two objects are.


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Thu Nov 19 17:19:32 EST 2015

Inequality

  • Economic and Political Inequality

    From the Seven Pillars Institute (SPI), a five part balanced overview on the topic of inequality.
  • Income and Wealth Inequality in the United States: Evidence, Causes and Solutions

    Debate: J. Bradford DeLong and R. Glenn Hubbard

    Video of public debate held February 3 2015 at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy featuring R. Glenn Hubbard, Ph.D., Dean and Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics, Columbia Business School versus J. Bradford DeLong, Ph.D., Professor of Economics, University of California, Berkeley.

  • The Poor in the US Are Richer than the Middle Class in Much of Europe

    We get much more insight, though, once we have a look at what UNICEF means by "poverty rate." In this case, UNICEF (and many other organizations) measure the poverty rate as a percentage of the national median household income. UNICEF uses 60% of median as the cut off. So, if you're in Portugal, and your household earns under 60% of the median income in Portugal, you are poor. If you are in the US and you earn under 60% of the US median income, then you are also poor.

    The problem here, of course, is that median household incomes -- and what they can buy -- differs greatly between the US and Portugal. In relation to the cost of living, the median income in the US is much higher than the median income in much of Europe. So, even someone who earns under 60% of the median income in the US will, in many cases, have higher income than someone who earns the median income in, say, Portugal.
    ...
    So, yes, the US has a higher poverty rate than many other countries, but the standard of living available to a person at poverty levels in the US is higher than it is to a person at poverty levels in places like the UK, Spain, Italy, France, Japan, New Zealand, and others.

  • The End of Outrage?

    If inequality is such a growing concern, why are no Americans taking to the streets?

    In a provocative new book, the critic and historian Steve Fraser tries to explain why mass protest on the left has become so scarce in what he aptly calls The Age of Acquiescence. For Fraser, the main culprits are not such usual suspects as right-wing politicians and the market power of global corporations but public admiration for workaholic entrepreneurs whose self-serving definition of freedom legitimizes their reign.
    ... Fraser describes how freedom, which bygone progressive movements and liberal icons like Franklin Roosevelt defined as a collective goal ("freedom from want," "freedom from fear," etc.), has now become synonymous with the "free market" in which every man and woman supposedly has the same chance to rise or go under.

  • Why Americans Don't Want to Soak the Rich

    With rising income inequality in the United States, you might expect more and more people to conclude that it's time to soak the rich. Here's a puzzle, though: Over the last several decades, close to the opposite has happened.

    In other words, respondents favored less redistribution if they believed that the person had already grown accustomed to a higher income. The psychology seems to be something like this: Rich people who have been rich for a while have gotten used to their money, so it would be unfair to tax them heavily. But people who have just gotten rich have not become accustomed to higher levels of after-tax income, so it wouldn't be as harmful to raise their taxes in the interest of greater equality.
    ... The shift away from a belief in redistribution has been stronger among older Americans than any other age group.

  • Why Inequality Persists in America - The New Yorker

    Richer and Poorer: Accounting for inequality

    Income inequality is greater in the United States than in any other democracy in the developed world.
    ...
    The causes of income inequality are much disputed; so are its costs. And knowing the numbers doesn't appear to be changing anyone's mind about what, if anything, should be done about it.

  • Low hanging fruit and the inequality question

    Scott Sumner

    We did have a tax on luxury goods, which seems like a really good idea if you are worried about inequality.
    ... So the tax was a huge success, which reduced the only kind of inequality that matters, consumption inequality. But apparently some progressives who supported the tax had hoped that it could raise lots of revenue for the government without actually depressing the living standards of America's rich. That would occur, of course, only if the rich maintained their living standards by donating less money to charity and investing less money in new capital formation. Instead, the rich actually did reduce their living standards, and America was on the road to greater economic equality. Senator Kennedy, et al, reacted in shock and horror and had the bill repealed. Meanwhile Massachusetts is among the leaders in taxing the poor via the lottery and cigarettes.

  • Inequality v growth

    Up to a point, redistributing income to fight inequality can lift growth

    Some inequality is needed to propel growth, economists reckon. Without the carrot of large financial rewards, risky entrepreneurship and innovation would grind to a halt. In 1975 Arthur Okun, an American economist, argued that societies cannot have both perfect equality and perfect efficiency and must choose how much of one to sacrifice for the other.
    While most economists continue to hold that view, the recent rise in inequality has prompted a new look at its economic costs. Inequality could impair growth if those with low incomes suffer poor health and low productivity as a result. It could threaten public confidence in growth-boosting policies like free trade, reckons Dani Rodrik, of the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton. Or it could sow the seeds of crisis. In a 2010 book Raghuram Rajan, now governor of the Reserve Bank of India, argued that governments often respond to inequality by easing the flow of credit to poorer households. When the borrowing binge ends everyone suffers.

  • Tyler Cowen's Three-Card Monte on Inequality

    Tyler Cowen used his Upshot piece this week to tell us that the real issue is not inequality, but rather mobility. We want to make sure that our children have the opportunity to enjoy better lives than we do. And for this we should focus on productivity growth which is the main determinant of wealth in the long-run.
    This piece ranks high in terms of being misleading. First, even though productivity growth has been relatively slow since 1973, the key point is that most of the population has seen few of the gains of the productivity growth that we have seen over the last forty years. Had they shared equally in the productivity gains over this period, the median wage would be close to 50 percent higher than it is today. The minimum wage would be more than twice as high. If we have more rapid productivity growth over the next four decades, but we see the top 1.0 percent again getting the same share as it has since 1980, then most people will benefit little from this growth.

    The next point that comes directly from this first point is that it is far from clear that inequality does not itself impede productivity growth. While it can of course be coincidence, it is striking that the period of rapid productivity growth was a period of relative equality. At the very least it is hard to make the case that we have experienced some productivity dividend from the inequality of the post-1980 period.

  • No, The Decline in Marriage Did Not Increase Inequality

    Sean McElwee and Marshall I. Steinbaum: The New York Times' David Leonhardt gets it wrong.

    It is facile to divide rising inequality into "between" and "within" effects with respect to household types, and to argue that since inequality between types has grown and more households are now in worse-off types, changing family structure has caused inequality to increase. The evidence shows that family structure has changed because economic opportunities for most people have worsened. Why has that happened? There are some suggestive answers, but much more research is necessary. Leonhardt's claim that changing family structure causes rising inequality simply doesn't hold up.


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