Link Banana

I’ve been waiting for a story like this. I thought maybe this from Spiked! would work, but its overwrought climate-change denialism made me discard it. This piece, which may be a little overlong and focus a little too much on statistics, feels good enough to make one consider the idea seriously.

Ioannidis claimed to prove that more than half of published findings are false, but his analysis came under fire for statistical shortcomings of its own. “It may be true, but he didn’t prove it,” says biostatistician Steven Goodman of the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health. On the other hand, says Goodman, the basic message stands. “There are more false claims made in the medical literature than anybody appreciates,” he says. “There’s no question about that.”

(via 3qd)

In high school I remember somewhat regularly arguing, with unfounded certainty, that by coddling the weak (and everyone else), civilization had broken evolution. Some scientists are now offering the inverse: that culture is shaping the course of our evolution.

The best evidence available to Dr. Boyd and Dr. Richerson for culture being a selective force was the lactose tolerance found in many northern Europeans. Most people switch off the gene that digests the lactose in milk shortly after they are weaned, but in northern Europeans — the descendants of an ancient cattle-rearing culture that emerged in the region some 6,000 years ago — the gene is kept switched on in adulthood. Lactose tolerance is now well recognized as a case in which a cultural practice — drinking raw milk — has caused an evolutionary change in the human genome.

(via ALD)

This story — provoked by and about an event mostly unknown outside of Britain — isn’t for the faint-hearted, but the conclusion’s useful for all:

[I]ndignation is relatively easy to satisfy, and demands no sacrifice, no exposure to horrid experience, no damage to the soul. To continue feeding indignation against a 10-year-old boy who glimpsed Hell, and who knew it, is at best unworthy, and at worst is itself a manifestation of wickedness.

(via Lloyd, who calls it “Best & worst thing I’ve read in a very long time.”)

Everything about this article feels obvious, but I’ve never seen it articulated so well:

Being intelligent is like having a knife. If you train every day in using the knife, you will be invincible. If you think that just having a knife will make you win any battle you fight, then you will fail.

(via @scrivs)

Grain of salt and all that, but this is in line with what I’ve thought for years:

A Columbia University study also found no reduction in common infections among inner-city families given free antibacterial hand soap, detergent, and cleaning supplies. The same year, University of Michigan epidemiologist Allison Aiello summarized data on hand hygiene for the FDA and pointed out that three out of four studies showed that alcohol-based hand sanitizers didn’t prevent respiratory infections.

One issue: they could (should) have been most explicit on the differences between hand washing, which I like, and hand sanitizers, which I loathe.

This article, unlike most newspaper reports of study data, wonders aloud about the data’s applicability. In fact, Tierney’s entire point is that maybe scientist haven’t wondered enough about the dietary reality of salt consumption.

“When you reduce salt,” Dr. Alderman said, “you reduce blood pressure, but there can also be other adverse and unintended consequences. As more data have accumulated, it’s less and less supportive of the case for salt reduction, but the advocates seem more determined than ever to change policy.”

(via @cpkimball)

I thought seriously about linking to David Brooks’s column about the story behind Hannakah. But then The Awl juxtaposed his words with those of Sarah Palin and I decided I’d go with that.

While there’s a lot in Drake Bennet’s piece about the Berlin Wall that would have a high school history student slapping their head — really, Mr. Bennett, no historical event has a single cause? — this bit caught my eye:

According to Suri, there are three major factors that determine how a government, especially an authoritarian government, responds to this sort of popular protest. The first is how effective the traditional organs of state power and repression are - everything from the police and military to the state-run media. The second is the sort of international obligations the government has: In 1989 the Soviet Union was deeply indebted to the United States and Western European countries, and Gorbachev, he argues, had much to lose by alienating them, while China’s government had more faith in its economy’s ability to survive as an international pariah. And the third is simply how comfortable, all things being equal, the country’s leadership is with violence.

The idea that any “invasive,” which is to say non-native at the time that people started cataloging an ecosystem, species of plants or animals is clearly bad and dangerous always stuck me as a little silly. Surely there are clear-cut edge cases — Australia’s rabbits spring immediately to mind — but Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow explains how they’re clearly not all bad.

Tamarisk, a Eurasian shrub, is your classic invasive species—designated one of America’s “least wanted” plants by the National Parks Service. … A few years ago, the USDA let loose thousands of leaf-eating Asian beetles in order to sic them on tamarisks, which die from the defoliation.

But these efforts to oust the intruder have encountered a glitch. It turns out that a charismatic endangered bird—the southwestern willow flycatcher—is known to nest in the offending shrubs.

Widely reviled by assholes who interrupt every conversation about it with “Oh, I don’t have a TV,” Charles Kenny makes the case that the spread of television in the developing world can have positive effects:

The introduction of cable or satellite services in a village … goes along with higher girls’ school enrollment rates and increased female autonomy. Within two years of getting cable or satellite, between 45 and 70 percent of the difference between urban and rural areas on these measures disappears. In Brazil, it wasn’t just birthrates that changed as Globo’s signal spread — divorce rates went up, too.

(via Idea of the Day)

Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer offer another of the innumerable “correlation is not causation” arguments, this one against flu vaccinations and antivirals (e.g. Tamiflu):

The estimate of 50 percent mortality reduction is based on “cohort studies,” which compare death rates in large groups, or cohorts, of people who choose to be vaccinated, against death rates in groups who don’t. But people who choose to be vaccinated may differ in many important respects from people who go unvaccinated—and those differences can influence the chance of death during flu season. Education, lifestyle, income, and many other “confounding” factors can come into play, and as a result, cohort studies are notoriously prone to bias.

(via GMSTR)

There’s little new in this Lexington column, but this bit was good:

Belief in conspiracy theories can be comforting. If everything that goes wrong is the fault of a secret cabal, that relieves you of the tedious necessity of trying to understand how a complex world really works. And you can feel smug that you are smart enough to “see through” the official version of events.

Very much so, though I would extend this basic formula far beyond conspiracies, which are just one version of absurdly simplified world views.  My mother offhandedly dismisses everything Democrats do as a method get further into her pocket book. Many lefties I know see every Republican as greedy and warmongering. A lot of people dismiss everything the Chinese government does as either aggressive or Communistic. And don’t get them started on the Mexicans (who hail from all countries south of the United States, naturally).

(via Marco)

Because of my fairly strong revulsion at any mustache worn for any reason (but especially irony), this piece’s title caught my attention. That said, I’m ambivalent about the argument itself:

There’s an unapologetic ruggedness to the mustache that’s been gradually chastened and civilized out of popular American culture. Americans just aren’t as comfortable with masculinity as they were 30 years ago.

Though Drake Bennet’s piece feels a little shallow — like he’s pointing to this really interesting thing and rather than explain it is merely puzzling at it beside you — he does a good job gathering a number of recent studies demonstrating the link between metaphorical and real concepts. You’ve probably heard at least one of these studies — people holding warm things think the people around them are nicer, people using a heavier clipboard think more seriously about the survey they’re filling out — but the idea that these results are not one-off flukes but the foundation of abstraction is eye-opening.

It’s also worth noting the sidebar to that article, which addresses the inverse possibility: that we subconsciously physicalize the metaphors we know.

It’s an enticing idea, shoehorning a standards-compliant browser into Internet Explorer, but I have to agree with Dan Nguyen:

How many of the IT departments that refuse to upgrade from IE6 allow their users to install some crazy Google plug-in?

UPDATE (9/23/09): Roy Tanck hashes out the problem a bit better, while jimray tells you most everything you might be wondering about how it works.

I feel — and I’m not an economist — that this analysis is probably oversimplified, but I can’t tell quite how.

Why is China [forcing its economy to grow]? It doesn’t have the kind of social safety net one sees in the developed world, so it needs to keep its economy going at any cost. Millions of people have migrated to its cities, and now they’re hungry and unemployed. People without food or work tend to riot. To keep that from happening, the government is more than willing to artificially stimulate the economy, in the hopes of buying time until the global system stabilizes. It’s literally forcing banks to lend — which will create a huge pile of horrible loans on top of the ones they’ve originated over the last decade.

(via Ideas)

Paul Krugman isn’t my favorite anything, and I’d never heard of Charles Stross, but their discussion of technology and the future is wide-ranging and imagination-tickling.

(via Big Contrarian)

I was kind of shocked that I hadn’t posted about this before, and then I realized that my original exposure to the topic came from the constantly solid audio program, Radiolab. If you prefer text, Keith O’Brien’s story (title link)  is what reminded me of the idea. From him I take this summary of the issue:

What he’d like to see more of, however, is in-depth discussion about animal welfare, how to best gauge it, and what to do about it if zoos are falling short of meeting animals’ needs. It’s a discussion that may lead to the conclusion that the zoos’ ultimate mission means giving up more of its animals, but Kagan’s all right with that.

Though The Economist’s attack on America’s sex offender laws is shot through with outrageous examples from Georgia that most Americans also find absurd, this was rather shocking:

Every American state keeps a register of sex offenders. Many people assume that anyone listed on a sex-offender registry must be a rapist or a child molester. But most states spread the net much more widely. A report by Sarah Tofte of Human Rights Watch, a pressure group, found that at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes. At least 13 required it for urinating in public (in two of which, only if a child was present). No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered flashers and streakers.

(via The Awl, where you’ll find this excellent comment)

An interesting idea. Gallup just released a chart of approval ratings of the leadership of former Soviet Republics. While governments in Ukraine and Georgia did poorly, with under a quarter approving, Armenia and Azerbijan both finished with well over 50%. But in at least one person’s opinion:

The Gallup chart is actually an index of fear. What it reflects is not so much attitudes toward the government as a willingness to openly express one’s attitudes toward the government. As one member of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Azerbaijan Service told me, “If someone walked up to me in Baku and asked me what I thought about the government, I’d say it was great too.”

(via Passport)