Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
In 2012, voters in California approved a measure to raise taxes on millionaires, bringing their top state income tax rate to 13.3 percent, the highest in the nation. Conservative economists predicted calamity, or at least a big slowdown in growth. Also that year, the governor of Kansas signed a series of changes to the state's tax code, including reducing income and sales tax rates. Conservative economists predicted a boom.
Neither of those predictions came true. Not right away -- California grew just fine in the year the tax hikes took effect -- and especially not in the medium term, as new economic data showed this week.
Now, correlation does not, as they say, equal causation, and two examples are but a small sample. But the divergent experiences of California and Kansas run counter to a popular view, particularly among conservative economists, that tax cuts tend to supercharge growth and tax increases chill it.
Sampling bias and a belief in malleable intelligence may be behind small IQ changes.
In a study designed to assess the experimental methods of earlier brain-training studies, researchers found that sampling bias and the placebo effect explained the positive results seen in the past. "Indeed, to our knowledge, the rigor of double-blind randomized clinical trials is nonexistent in this research area," the authors report. They even suggest that the overblown claims from brain training companies may have created a positive feedback loop, convincing people that brain training works and biasing follow-up research on the topic.
"The specter of a placebo may arise in any intervention when the
desired outcome is known to the participant--an intervention like
cognitive training," the authors note. Coupled with evidence that
"people tend to hold strong implicit beliefs regarding whether
or not intelligence is malleable" and that those beliefs may
skew research findings, the authors conclude that past research is
basically bunk.
...
Such a placebo effect isn't worthless, the authors caution.
It may be useful for future studies to assess how far the placebo effect
could get brain training-believers. But to truly assess effects of the
training, researchers need to turn to trials where participants don't
self-select their group or know the point of the study--randomized,
controlled studies. "By using such methods, we can begin to understand
whether true training effects exist and are generalizable to samples
(and perhaps populations) beyond those who expect to improve,"
the authors argue.
The new NIH rules are a step in the right direction but clearly don't go far enough. I don't believe that reproducibility in science is in "crisis," as so many are claiming, but I do believe it's a significant problem that needs to be addressed in a thoughtful way. I also have to concede that it's scientists' fault that we're in the mess we're in and that we haven't addressed problems with reproducibility more robustly before now, given that this problem has been festering for a while. If it takes labeling the problem as a "crisis" to get some action, I suppose I can live with that.
In considering how to encourage good science and discourage bad science, it is important to note that not all science, particularly biomedical science, should be assumed or expected to result in findings that have direct applications or to result in treatments for humans. As Ioannidis and Begley put it, an efficacy "of 100% and waste of 0% is unlikely to be achievable", even as they note that there is "probably substantial room for improvement." It is also important to note that, contrary to the way some paint this problem, the concerns about reproducibility in science don't invalidate the scientific method itself nor disprove "scientism." Science-based medicine has yielded incredible benefits to human health over the last 150 years. Indeed, the solutions to this problem being proposed are intended to enhance the rigorous application of science, not to abandon it. Finally, I can't help but note that it is scientists themselves who are being openly self-critical and debating how to fix perceived problems in science. That is a major strength, not weakness, of science.
Atul Gawande commencement address at the California Institute of Technology
Today, you become part of the scientific community, arguably the most powerful collective enterprise in human history. In doing so, you also inherit a role in explaining it and helping it reclaim territory of trust at a time when that territory has been shrinking. In my clinic and my work in public health, I regularly encounter people who are deeply skeptical of even the most basic knowledge established by what journalists label "mainstream" science (as if the other thing is anything like science)--whether it's facts about physiology, nutrition, disease, medicines, you name it. The doubting is usually among my most, not least, educated patients. Education may expose people to science, but it has a countervailing effect as well, leading people to be more individualistic and ideological.
The mistake, then, is to believe that the educational credentials you get today give you any special authority on truth. What you have gained is far more important: an understanding of what real truth-seeking looks like. It is the effort not of a single person but of a group of people--the bigger the better--pursuing ideas with curiosity, inquisitiveness, openness, and discipline. As scientists, in other words.
Angus Deaton
Huge strides have undoubtedly been made in reducing global poverty, more through growth and globalization than through aid from abroad. The number of poor people has fallen in the past 40 years from more than two billion to just under one billion -- a remarkable feat, given the increase in world population and the long-term slowing of global economic growth, especially since 2008.
While impressive and wholly welcome, poverty reduction has not come without a cost. The globalization that has rescued so many in poor countries has harmed some people in rich countries, as factories and jobs migrated to where labor is cheaper.
Hill and the other four African-American women who graduated from
Wellesley's four-hundred-and-twenty-person class of 1969 remember
Clinton, with whom many of them still communicate, fondly.
...
At graduation in 1969, the entire class, many parents, and faculty
members watched as Clinton rebuked a sitting Republican senator,
Edward Brooke, of Massachusetts, during her now famous, largely
improvised commencement speech. (Earlier this month, Wellesley
posted an audio clip of the speech on YouTube.) Students stood and
cheered when it was over. Faculty and parents mostly remained in
their seats. It was the last time a student spoke after a visiting
commencement speaker. "Did she move over the course of four years
from being a Republican to a Democrat? Yes," Wilson said. "But
I don't think any of us saw her as a radical. In her speech,
she was provoked by Senator Brooke's endorsement of the war and
the fact that he was rather patronizing."
While Stern and Guzman show that high-growth firms are being formed as actively as ever, they also find that these companies are not succeeding as often as such companies once did. As the researchers put it, "Even as the number of new ideas and potential for innovation is increasing, there seems to be a reduction in the ability of companies to scale in a meaningful and systematic way." As many seeds as ever are being planted. But fewer trees are growing to the sky.
Stern and Guzman are agnostic about why this is happening. But one obvious answer suggests itself: the increased power of established incumbents. We may think that we have been living in a business world in which incumbents are always on the verge of being toppled and competitive advantage is more fragile than ever. And clearly there are industries in which that has been the case--think of how Amazon transformed book retailing, or how digital downloads and streaming disrupted the music business. But as Hathaway and Litan document, American industry has grown more concentrated over the last 30 years, and incumbents have become more powerful in almost every business sector. As they put it, "it has become increasingly advantageous to be an incumbent, and less advantageous to be a new entrant." Even in tech, the contrast is striking between the ferment of the late 1990s, when many sectors had myriad players struggling for share, and the seeming stability of today's Google/Amazon/Facebook-dominated world.
Over the past seven years, Google has created a remarkable partnership
with the Obama White House, providing expertise, services, advice,
and personnel for vital government projects.
...
As the interactive charts accompanying this article show,
Google representatives attended White House meetings more than
once a week, on average, from the beginning of Obama's presidency
through October 2015. Nearly 250 people have shuttled from government
service to Google employment or vice versa over the course
of his administration.
A chart of lobbyists' White House visits reveals its close ties with Google
Podcasting is giving me a case of déjà vu…
The variety and quality of work being done is thrilling;
outside attention is growing; new formats are evolving.
We're seeing the same unlocking of creative potential we saw with
blogging, and there's far more good work being produced than anyone
has time to take in. The question now is whether podcasting's
future will play out as the last decade of blogging has.
...
A major challenge in podcast monetization is the complete lack of data:
listeners still download MP3s and that's the end of it; podcasters
can measure downloads, but have no idea if the episode is actually
listened to, for how long, or whether or not the ads are skipped.
In a complete reversal from the online world of text, the measurement
system is a big step backwards from what came before:
both radio and TV have an established measurement system for what shows
are watched, and the scale of advertising is such that surveys can measure
advertising effectiveness. Thus the direct marketing advertisers:
they can simply do the measurement themselves through coupon codes
or special URLs that measure how many people responded to a podcast ad.
It's not totally efficient -- some number of conversions forget the
code or URL -- but it's something.
RentAFriend.com has Friends from around the world available for hire. Rent a Friend to attend a social event, wedding, or party with you. Hire someone to introduce you to new people, or someone to go to a movie or a restaurant with. Hire a Friend to show you around a new town, teach you a new skill/hobby, or just someone for companionship.
Insights into the phenomenon dubbed the 'Nordic paradox'
The Nordic countries are the most gender equal nations in the world, but at the same time, they also have a disproportionately high rate of intimate partner violence against women. This is perplexing because logically violence against women would be expected to drop as women gained equal status in a society. A new study explores this contradictory situation, which has been labeled the 'Nordic paradox.'
The AR-15 is less a model of rifle than it is an open-source,
modular weapons platform that can be customized for a whole range of
applications, from small pest control to taking out 500-pound feral
hogs to urban combat. Everything about an individual AR-15 can be
changed with aftermarket parts -- the caliber of ammunition,
recoil, range, weight, length, hold and grip, and on and on.
...
For what it's worth, I do actually believe the fact that this
violent nutjob who had been interviewed by the FBI three times was
able to get a gun is so obviously messed up that it's foolish
to suggest otherwise. In an even slightly less crazy world, this
guy would never have had a weapon -- not even a Cricket children's rifle.
Because 1,189 told us what they thought about Goldwater.
In the aftermath, Goldwater sued Fact (and won), Fact went defunct, and the American Psychiatric Association tried to make sure that none of this would ever happen again. The result was Section 7.3 of the APA's Principles of Medical Ethics
A recent little sensation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
delights and bemuses. Two teen-age boys from San Jose were perusing,
with perplexity, the museum's exhibits of contemporary art when they
had a notion. One of them, Kevin Nguyen, sixteen, set his opened
eyeglasses on the floor, neatly perpendicular to a nearby wall.
He and T. J. Khayatan, seventeen, then stood back to watch what ensued:
viewers observing the glasses with the curiosity and respect befitting
a work of art--which, under the circumstances, they were.
...
But consider: an object manufactured to enhance seeing, presented
as something to see. By being underfoot, the glasses were divorced
from their function and protected only by the don't-touch protocol
of museums. They might have seemed, to a suggestible audience,
to be about being-in-a-museum--and that audience could have included me.
Suggestibility, undaunted by fear of proving foolish,
is essential to art love.
In April, the internet seemed to abruptly discover a trend
that had been lurking in its midst for years:
Brutalism, an aesthetic borrowed from architecture and
applied to minimally designed, bare-knuckle websites.
...
As a descriptor, "Brutalist" seems to imply that the sites
are somehow ugly or offensive to the viewer,
but this isn't always the case. Often, it just means
a website is constructed from essential coding elements
and very little else -- no frills, redundant images, or advertising.