Now that's Old

Mind-blower of the day, from MIT Technology Review:

As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially. And as with Moore's Law, which says the speed of computers will double every two years, you can run that increase backward to figure out when life, or computers, started.

Now a couple of geneticists have done just that, extrapolating the trend backwards. The doubling time is 376 million years instead of two, but the principle is the same.

Their conclusion? Life is older than the Earth itself.

“Linear regression of genetic complexity (on a log scale) extrapolated back to just one base pair suggests the time of the origin of life = 9.7 ± 2.5 billion years ago,” they say.

And since the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old, that raises a whole series of other questions. Not least of these is how and where did life begin....

Sharov and Gordon say their interpretation also explains the Fermi paradox, which raises the question that if the universe is filled with intelligent life, why can’t we see evidence of it.

However, if life takes 10 billion years to evolve to the level of complexity associated with humans, then we may be among the first, if not the first, intelligent civilisation in our galaxy. And this is the reason why when we gaze into space, we do not yet see signs of other intelligent species.

Via kottke.org

The No-Brand Brand

I feel bad for the hotel on Minneapolis's West Bank, near the University of Minnesota. I think it used to be a Radisson and/or a Holiday Inn at some point. But now it appears it is just a Hotel.


A big pile o' bricks with a function but no identity. Looking into it a little further, I found out it's called the Hotel Minneapolis Metrodome, referring to a nearby building that is not long for this town.

Maybe they're keeping their options open by not replacing the expensive lit sign.

Is There Anything Better than an Estes Truck?

If climate change and peak oil weren't real, and if I could ever retire, one thing I'd like to do is drive all over the U.S. taking pictures of the graphics on tractor-trailers. Yes, really.

Some are dreadful, some are okay, but there are a few that make the heart of a designer sing. Estes is one such design.


The red wheels, goldenrod tractor body and back door, and beautiful mid-century-inspired logo make me smile every time I see one.


Why is it so hard for the average company of any kind (not just trucking) to make their public face this attractive? There's so much unintended visual pollution.

If I had my wish and could travel the country in search of trucks, I doubt I'd see anything better than Estes, but that's exactly why I'd like to do it. Because you never know.

A Quilt with a Message

Yesterday I got to see the climate solutions quilt. It was begun by a woman named Ulla Nilsen, with over a hundred people contributing squares.


It's a very large quilt, which means it's hard to see all of it up close when it's hanging on a wall, but here are some close-ups.

Thanks to Ulla for the inspiration and drive to finish it. Seeing it made my day.

Pacific Standard and Why Americans Are Outliers

I'm not sure where I got the link to this article on a site called Pacific Standard (psmag.com). Maybe it was Maggie Koerth-Baker or someone else I follow on Twitter.

The story sat open in a browser tab for weeks. It's very long, and even the headline, lead in, and first several paragraphs didn't tell me what it was about enough to summarize it when I did a recent too-many-tabs round up.



Yesterday while watching the mop-up on the Boston bomber manhunt, though, I finally dove into its depths. But first, a message about its sponsor.

What is Pacific Standard magazine?

The site is attractive and professional-looking and the article seemed authoritative, but who are these people and why should I trust what they say?

Like all good web sources, they have an About link (at the bottom of the page) and I soon found out the print magazine has been around for six years. It's published by the Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media and Public Policy, which was created by the founder of SAGE Publications, Sara Miller McCune. SAGE is the publisher of a lot of social science journals, from political science to education, sociology, and psychology.

She says,

Over the years, as one trailblazing article or book after another came across my desk at SAGE Publications, I would worry about how to get these important ideas to a wider audience. I founded the Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media and Public Policy to do just that by pairing experienced journalists with the researchers and experts who scientifically scrutinize the nation’s biggest issues relating to education, justice, the environment, and the economy….

Pacific Standard’s goal is to be the publication that explains the deeply researched work that is, and that should be, changing policy. We endeavor to give our readers the tools—in the form of lively reportage and robust research findings—to answer the most vexing problems facing the world today.

So Pacific Standard is a popularizing magazine for academic research in the social sciences, work that has implications for public policy. While the academic publishing industry is far from perfect (it's created by humans, after all), I like to think that it's closer to a model that works than many other human institutions. So why not have good writers synthesize and report on the findings of a range of interdisciplinary social science publications?

Sort of like Malcolm Gladwell or Jonah Lehrer with better references.

About the story

Called We Aren't the World by Ethan Watters, it reports on the work of Joe Henrich. He was an anthropology graduate student in the mid-1990s, who went to study the Machiguenga of Peru, a hunter-farmer people who had had little contact with outside cultures. But instead of carrying out traditional ethnographic study, Henrich administered a series of "ultimatum tests" with inhabitants.

This test is given to two people at once. One person gets an amount of money and is told that s/he should offer any amount of the money s/he wishes to the other person. The other person can accept or reject it. But the catch is, if the second person rejects it, neither person gets anything, so there is a clear incentive to offer at least something.

This test has been given many times to college students in the U.S. as part of psychological and economics research, but it had rarely been tried anywhere else. Behavioral economists love this test because traditional economics says that rational people should offer as little money as possible, and accept even the smallest amount offered, since no matter what, you come out ahead of where you started.

But that's not what has been found when studying Americans. We generally offer about half the money, and if we don't, the other person rejects the offer.

Wow, say the behavioral economists, people are irrational and they expect fairness. What a finding!

Did that finding hold up among the Machiguenga? Nope. What Henrich found was that the Machiguenga thought the test was absurd:

When he began to run the game it became immediately clear that Machiguengan behavior was dramatically different from that of the average North American. To begin with, the offers from the first player were much lower. In addition, when on the receiving end of the game, the Machiguenga rarely refused even the lowest possible amount. “It just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of free money,” says Henrich. “They just didn’t understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to play the other role in the game.”

Other cultures whose members were later tested had even more divergent results from Americans -- from giving almost nothing to gift-giving cultures where the giver would offer 60 percent and the other person would reject it because s/he didn't want to feel beholden.

Basically, there was no "human" truth about behavior in this test.

What happened to Henrich?

Joe Henrich finished his research and tried to get an academic teaching position in anthropology. He ran into trouble with potential colleagues who questioned his methods. So he ended up being offered an interdisciplinary position at the University of British Columbia in economics and psychology instead, and found two colleague there with whom he has since published, Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan.

What they have proceeded to find is that Americans are outliers on almost every test you can give to humans. From the Muller-Lyer Illusion to rerunning the work of Soloman Asch, they found that Americans are at one end of the human spectrum:

Asch had discovered that test subjects were often willing to make incorrect judgments on simple perception tests to conform with group pressure. When the test was performed across 17 societies, however, it turned out that group pressure had a range of influence. Americans were again at the far end of the scale, in this case showing the least tendency to conform to group belief.

The paper Henrich and his colleagues wrote ended up being titled The Weirdest People in the World, where weird is an acronym for Western Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. "Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds."

There's a lot more in the article, but I'll leave it for you to read.

Back to Pacific Standard

That's just one article from the magazine.

The site looks incredible and I'll be returning regularly to see what they turn up.

I'm a little scared of it, honestly, because I've got enough to read already. But it's probably a good idea to read less news so I have time for more thought. Maybe I'll even subscribe, both to support their work and to get the advantage of reading it on paper, the better to underline to my heart's content.

Twitter Covers Boston

Like most everyone else, I woke up this morning to hear (on NPR) what was happening in Boston -- one suspect dead, one on the loose, Boston in lockdown, SWAT teams everywhere.

Looking at Twitter for the night's timeline was enlightening about how it unfolded. I'm glad I went to bed when I did, because what good does it do you to follow these things minute by minute? We should all go read this piece from the Guardian called News Is Bad for You -- and Giving Up Reading It Will Make You Happier. And reading news, in my opinion, is not nearly as bad as watching it on television, when it comes to making you anxious.

So I found these couple of tweets from last night particularly interesting. People were complaining that the national/cable news channels weren't on the scene:




This was at midnight my time -- so 1 a.m. on the East Coast. And these jokers expected CNN and the networks to be ready with a crew in Cambridge at the drop of a hat. And they think that would be helpful to the police who are busy trying to catch a couple of guys tossing grenades out the window.

Why does everyone need to know what's going on just as it happens? It won't be accurate even if there is reporting. Don't you have a life?

The citizens who reported what they were seeing on their streets were a bit more informative, it appears, than any official reporter could have been.

Then there was this:

Which was a good reminder. And then this, from a few hours later:


Which shows that local news people were on this story. Lots of people were also following the Boston police scanners through a web-hosted stream. I wonder how long that will last, since it led to this:


One more day in the bizarre age we live in.

Where Should Sex Offenders Live?

The Star Tribune's big cover story from Sunday seemed like a typical piece of muckraking: Sex Offenders Up, Down the Street, said the headline. And the story pointed out the important fact that Minneapolis neighborhoods provide homes to a disproportionate share of Level 3 sex offenders. The city has 7 percent of the state's population, but 44 percent of the highest-risk offenders.

All true, and disturbing. But what the story did next, in going beyond those facts, was refreshing. The writers, Brandon Stahl and Maya Rao, made the case for housing sex offenders:

Despite the law, concentrating sex offenders actually has advantages, some corrections officials say.

One Hennepin County official pointed to a 2004 Colorado study showing that high-risk offenders are less likely to commit more crimes if they live in the same dwelling. A 2008 analysis by the Minnesota Department of Corrections found only a 5 percent reoffend rate for Level Threes, lower than other sex offenders.

“They hold each other accountable,” said Hana O’Neil, sex-offender supervisor for Hennepin County Community Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Putting sex offenders in the same house, or the same neighborhood, can also make it easier to track them.

Most of them are under intense supervision and get daily to weekly check-ins by police and probation agents. Any slip-up, from drinking to having the wrong store catalog to losing their job so they can’t afford rent, can result in being sent back to prison.

It’s why Cheryl McCluskey, the landlord of the Golden Valley Road and Thomas Avenue apartment buildings, calls sex offenders “my better residents” in the past four years she’s rented to them.

Two offenders interviewed at one of her buildings said they felt more comfortable living in the relative anonymity of the North Side, rather than face the public shaming that other sex offenders did when they tried to move to wealthier neighborhoods.

Then there is this stark reality, said John Menke, the assistant director for the Ramsey County Community Corrections Department: Finding any home for sex offenders, even if that means putting them in just a few neighborhoods, is safer than having them homeless. As of last week, 33 Level Three offenders had no place to live, could go anywhere they wanted in the state, and were unmonitored, save for a weekly check-in with law enforcement.

“The worst thing in the world is to not know where they are,” Menke said.

Thanks to the Star Tribune, Stahl, and Rao for showing how complicated this problem is.

The Wrong Kind of Incentives

Structuring incentives to work for the good of society instead of against it is a key part of reconfiguring the prisoner's dilemma we call modern life. But when many people talk about incentives, they mean overt incentives, as in merit pay for teachers.

Cornell law professor Lynn Stout recently had an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times (reprinted in the Star Tribune) that showed why incentivize is an ugly word and a dubious idea. (All emphasis is added.)

Explicit incentives work for simple tasks where an employee controls the outcome and where product quality is easily assessed — for example, offering employees of a moving company $20 for every sofa they move in an hour without damage. It’s pretty clear whether the sofas got moved, and whether they got damaged.

But what about complex, hard-to-monitor tasks where the desired outcome is difficult to measure and subject to influences outside the employee’s control — such as educating a child or restoring a patient to health? It is almost impossible to design objective performance metrics that can’t be met through illegal or undesirable behavior. In the case of education, it could be falsifying student test scores; in the case of health care, it could be controlling blood pressure through medications that make patients feel sick instead of persuading patients to exercise. And when you create a system that inadvertently incentivizes illegal or undesirable behavior, you get more of it.

Stout goes on to describe the alternative to pay for performance:

flat salaries and modest bonuses adjusted annually according to the employer’s opinion of whether the employee had done well. The system relied on subjective, after-the-fact rewards more than objective, predetermined incentives. That required a fair amount of trust and a sense of mutual obligation. Employers had to trust employees to work to earn their predetermined salaries rather than loafing. (Bad employees can be fired, but this solution costs the employer, too.) Employees had to trust that if they stuck around and did a great job, their employers would recognize and reward them.

Standard economic theory predicts that systems based on mutual trust and respect between employer and employee shouldn’t work. But innumerable behavioral studies prove trust is a real phenomenon, and history shows it can indeed motivate employees.

For example, before Congress changed the tax code in 1993 to tie executive pay to objective performance metrics, boards paid CEOs far less. Yet investors enjoyed higher stock market returns than today.

 And that's without even getting into the critiques extrinsic motivation from scholars like Dan Ariely.

Two Hyphens for a Cowboy-Hat-Wearing Hero

I am a fan of hyphens. I've even written about multi-word adjectival phrases that needed two hyphens. (Or should that be a hyphen and an en dash? That's one bit of detail I never adhere to.)

Today, in the midst of the Twitter storm around the Boston bombing, I saw this:


This fine example of the need for two hyphens brought to you by Andy Kroll, one of my favorite reporters at Mother Jones magazine. He reports the stories and lets others worry about the hyphens, which is fine by me.

Two Photos from Boston on Another Day

Two photos from Boston that have nothing to do with bombs:


Sidewalk art marking the location of the first public school in the country. (Click for a larger version.)


Make Way for Ducklings! statues in Boston Common.

Tab Overload

The tabs in my browser have overrun the space available. My computer is threatening to shrivel up and roll under the desk, so it's time to clear out some of them. 

From the New York Times, Life After Oil and Gas:

We will need fossil fuels like oil and gas for the foreseeable future. So there’s really little choice (sigh). We have to press ahead with fracking for natural gas. We must approve the Keystone XL pipeline to get Canadian oil.

This mantra, repeated on TV ads and in political debates, is punctuated with a tinge of inevitability and regret. But, increasingly, scientific research and the experience of other countries should prompt us to ask: To what extent will we really “need” fossil fuel in the years to come? To what extent is it a choice?

How Health Research Misdirects Us: "Improving one isolated health parameter such as blood pressure does not necessarily make us healthier overall. Studies will not supplant the basic principles of living well." From the Atlantic.

Are GMOs necessary to feed the world? "An objective review of current knowledge places GM crops far down the list of potential solutions in the coming decades. We conclude that much of the research funding currently available for the development of GM crops would be much better spent in other research areas of plant science, e.g., nutrition, policy research, governance, and solutions close to local market conditions if the goal is to provide sufficient food for the world’s growing population in a sustainable way."

New Discovery Could Mean Making Fuel From CO2 In The Atmosphere: “Basically, what we have done is create a microorganism that does with carbon dioxide exactly what plants do-absorb it and generate something useful.” At the heart of it all is a tiny micro-organism called Pyrococcus furiosus, or “rushing fireball.”

Climate scientist Michael Mann, he of the hockey-stick graph, talks about being a target of the extra-crazy wing of the climate change denial movement.

My new favorite comedian, W. Kamau Bell, visited Minnesota recently, including an appearance on The Daily Circuit.

Charles C. Mann, author of 1491 and 1493, was nominated for a National Magazine Award for State of the Species. It's subtitled "Does success spell doom for Homo sapiens?" Haven't read it all yet, but the beginning is very intriguing.

Free Public Transit critiques both Keynesians and "austerians," writing:

The debate we should be having is not whether government should build infrastructure, but rather which infrastructure it should build. Here is our plan for transition to permaculture:

make public transit fare free
gradually make cities car free
educate all children
full equality for women
gradually convert the suburbs to organic farms
keep the social safety net

Participatory budgeting on the federal level. Let's give it a try. Once people understand their taxes aren't spent half on foreign aid and half on "welfare," they become pretty reasonable.

Who knew? There is no average appearance to female genitalia.

How to Get a Black Woman Fired in Six Tired Steps -- Colorlines on the Adria Richards / PyCon / Twitter / SendGrid story.

The Atlantic gives the case against saving midcentury office buildings.

Why we should be expanding Social Security in this age of cutbacks.

Two pieces from the Inequalities blog. First, How Did Kools Become Black and Marlboros Become White? And Is There Life After Work? The Welfare State in a Future Without Jobs. What a great blog. Worth checking it out every week.

Food-waste-to-fuel infographic:



More on the Social Security disability story from NPR: This American Life Features Error-Riddled Story on Disability and Children.

Frackers are losing $1.5 billion a year to leaks. And those leaks aren't just money -- they're also methane, among the most potent of greenhouse gases.

Larry Lessig, a shining light of legal theory, presented a TED talk on his latest work on campaign finance reform and reclaiming the republic.

From the Pew Research Center: Why do people own guns? Self-protection is now the number-one reason, rather than hunting, which has always topped the list in the past. Fear rules as crime declines, despite the fact that people with guns in their homes are more likely to be shot with them than protected by them. Who does that serve?

From Scientific American: Turn Up the Juice: New Flywheel Raises Hopes for Energy Storage Breakthrough.

PBS's John Merrow probably regrets the somewhat fluffy profile he did of Michelle Rhee, now that he's found a memo that confirms she knew cheating was happening at 70 schools during her time as head of schools in Washington, D.C.

From the New Yorker: The Cultural Fight for Guns by Adam Gopnik. "Everyone, men especially, needs ego-accessories, and they are most often irrationally chosen."

From Science News: Discovery Opens Door to Efficiently Storing and Reusing Renewable Energy. "Electrolyzer devices use catalysts to drive a chemical reaction that converts electricity into chemical energy by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen fuels. These fuels can then be stored and re-converted to electricity for use whenever wanted."

It's not too many people -- it's too much consumption. "Two German shepherds kept as pets in Europe or the U.S. use more resources in a year than the average person living in Bangladesh." Want to make a bet that one German shepherd in the U.S. uses more than the two Europeans?

Food for the future: Perennial vegetables and grains. Watch for more on these as the years go by. From ensia.com, the new environmental science emag at the University of Minnesota.

What if they could take the water out of fracking? From technologyreview.com.

Maybe He Was Just Horsing Around

Both local newspapers fell for the photo opp offered by the Saint Paul police department on Friday: Six officers were graduating, with their horses, to become the city's new mounted patrol unit. What could be better than a shot of our four-footed friends being put through their paces by uniformed officers?

The Pioneer Press went with color, while the Star Tribune settled for black and white. And the PiPress wins the contest on writing a more appropriate headline.


This combination of headline and photo makes sense -- descriptive of what their jobs will be, action-oriented, with some nice pops of color.


The Strib, on the other hand, went with the odd headline "Time for horseplay" juxtaposed with a photo of a cop macing a person standing on the street. That's my idea of horseplay, all right (even if it's fake mace in the exercise).

One further bit of juxtaposition: both papers located the horse photos next to their coverage of the trial of an off-duty SWAT cop who slugged a guy in a bar, causing permanent brain injury. Sargent David Clifford is awaiting a jury verdict on felony assault charges and faces up to seven years in jail for hitting a drunk guy and then fleeing the scene.

The crux of the case appears to rest on whether the victim was preparing to hit Clifford or not, and therefore whether Clifford was acting in self-defense. No witnesses present thought the victim was going to throw a punch, and Clifford never claimed that in his initial statements to police. But once defense lawyer Fred Bruno got involved, Clifford's story "evolved."

As with other cases of "standing your ground," there's only one solution once an altercation gets going: violence. As the Strib's story put it,

[Prosecutor] Buccicone asked why Clifford didn't just walk away in the first place, instead of throwing a punch.

"He's not trained to do that," the prosecutor said. "He's trained to win."

(The Strib story as it ran this morning is no longer on their website; here's the updated version.)

The PiPress quoted Clifford's lawyer as basically agreeing with that characterization:

"This is a guy so highly trained it's difficult for the rest of us to understand how sharp his perceptions are," Fred Bruno, Clifford's defense attorney, said of his client.

The moment before, Clifford was just a guy out for a casual drink at a bar with his wife and neighbors... "But the moment Brian Vander Lee went to punch  him with his left hook, he became Sgt. David Clifford, executive officer of the Minneapolis SWAT team...a person whose training could do nothing but kick in at the moment of this attack..."

Too bad none of the mere mortals who were present perceived an attack and Clifford didn't remember the "left hook" when he first talked to investigators. If Clifford was being bothered by the loud behavior of Vander Lee, all he had to do, as the prosecutor pointed out, was ask to be moved to another table or complain to the restaurant staff. But instead he accosted Vander Lee and set up a situation that spiraled out of control.

Is this how cops are taught to deal with the public? If you ask me, a trained peace officer should be less likely to slug a drunk guy than an average bar patron, not more likely to.

But when we have images of cops on horseback macing a bystander, accompanied by headlines like "Time for Horseplay," maybe it's understandable that the cops think they can get away with it.

______

Update: As I finished writing, the jury returned a verdict: Clifford was found guilty on three charges of 1st, 3rd and 5th degree assault. According to the PiPress, "The presumptive sentence for a person convicted of first-degree assault with no criminal history is between 81 and 91 months in prison, according to Assistant Anoka County Attorney Paul Young. He added that departures from sentencing guidelines are not uncommon."