Fatherhood lowers testosterone: Ingeneous, Mr Evolution!

Cross-species comparisons suggest that if paternal care is indeed an evolved behavior in humans, men’s biology would likely accommodate the transition to fatherhood/caregiving in specific ways, including changes in testosterone.

http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2011/12/14/on-testosterone-and-real-men-an-interview-with-lee-gettler/

The Real Global Warming Signal

Foster & Rahmstorf compare five different 30 year global temperature records and use a regression to remove most of the effect three big interfering variables: the el Nino southern oscillation, atmospheric aerosols (mostly from volcanic eruptions), and variations in solar energy received by the earth.  The temperature records use different source data sets and measure somewhat different things, eg, surface v lower atmosphere temperature.

The result:

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/the-real-global-warming-signal/

Bitcoin, libertarianism v the real world

A young bitcoiner, The Real Plato, brought On the Road into the new millennium by video-blogging a cross-country car trip during which he spent only bitcoins.

The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/mf_bitcoin/

Water and Other Toxins

http://puffthemutantdragon.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/from-salami-to-soda-pop-what-does-toxic-really-mean/

She was found dead that afternoon; poisoned by water.

Shortest abstract ever?

http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.2832

Promiscuity goes with Inbreeding

"Researchers from the U.K. set out to test this idea, and the results were pretty conclusive. Red flour beetles were mated sibling-to-sibling for fifteen generations, effectively creating a “genetic bottleneck,” before being compared to their non-inbred (i.e., outbred) counterparts. Inbred and outbred females were offered 10 virgin males to mate with (insert joke I don’t have the guts to make), and the inbred females were more promiscuous by all measures:"

Read the whole blog here: http://trynerdy.com/?p=1177

The evolution of overconfidence (abstract)

The evolution of overconfidence

Dominic D. P. Johnson & James H. Fowler

Nature 477,317–320(15 September 2011)

Abstract

Confidence is an essential ingredient of success in a wide range of domains ranging from job performance and mental health to sports, business and combat. Some authors have suggested that not just confidence but overconfidence—believing you are better than you are in reality—is advantageous because it serves to increase ambition, morale, resolve, persistence or the credibility of bluffing, generating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which exaggerated confidence actually increases the probability of success. However, overconfidence also leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations and hazardous decisions, so it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing strategies that include accurate, unbiased beliefs. Here we present an evolutionary model showing that, counterintuitively, overconfidence maximizes individual fitness and populations tend to become overconfident, as long as benefits from contested resources are sufficiently large compared with the cost of competition. In contrast, unbiased strategies are only stable under limited conditions. The fact that overconfident populations are evolutionarily stable in a wide range of environments may help to explain why overconfidence remains prevalent today, even if it contributes to hubris, market bubbles, financial collapses, policy failures, disasters and costly wars.

AIDS Vaccine

from http://www.abc.net.au/rn/healthreport/stories/2011/3303085.htm

 Dr David Cook, who is the Executive Vice President of IAVI, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, interviewed by Norman Swan:

David Cook: We have and in fact the early promise that people were making that a vaccine would come in three years, it's obviously now 30 years since the epidemic. I think though that the last 2 years have seen progress unlike the last 20 and we now have evidence that a vaccine can actually work in humans. We've had some recent early breakthroughs in vaccine design and so I think the betting crowd would say in the next 10 to the outside 15 years we'll have a vaccine.
...
Norman Swan: So what's the bill for developing an HIV vaccine over the next 10 years?
David Cook: Currently we spend about $850 million globally, that's all the agencies.
Norman Swan: A year?
David Cook: A year, so it's a substantial bill but if you compare that to the actual cost of treatment, the projected cost of treatment by the year 2032 or so is in the order of $30 to $35 billion per year and that bill doesn't go away because you're treating people with lifetime infections. If you believe that you can get to a vaccine in the next 10 years at $800 million a year it turns out it's a relative bargain for all the infections you can avoid.

30E9 / 800E6 = 37.5 

Essentialism and Evolution

Bloom’s idea is that we are all essentialists. That is, we pay special attention to the history of an object – where it has been, what it has touched, and who has touched it. As Bloom explains, we subscribe to “the notion that things have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly and it is this hidden nature that really matters.” And, moreover, “the pleasure we get from many things and activities is based in part on what we see as their essences.”

Why are we essentialists?

McNerney: Is there an evolutionary advantage of being an essentialist?
Bloom: I think the case is most obviously made about other people. If I want to safely interact with you, I must be cautious of your history. For example, it is advantageous for me to know how you’ve treated me in the past, who your friends are, who you know and what you know. There is a long list of things that are invisible but are part of you, and they could be important for, say, my survival.

McNerney: So you could say that when we assess others we look at them physically, but we also examine their “resumes,” if you will.
Bloom: Exactly, that’s right. And the same is true with animals. You want to know more than just the physical – the history is important too. For example, is it dangerous? Does it tend to move quickly? Likewise for food, you want to know its history and what it has touched before you eat it.

McNerney: So evolution did not favor people who weren’t able to think as essentialists?
Bloom: Yes, think about what a disadvantage it would be if you only assess things as they are. Here’s the interesting part, you could argue that humans have taken it too far. We are so caught up in history that we collect irrelevant things. We care about the difference between an original and a forgery.

[from http://whywereason.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/the-psychology-of-pleasure-interview-with-paul-bloom/]

The Jolly Captain of Fate

Itzhak Fried, Roy Mukamel and Gabriel Kreiman have extended earlier work of Freid et al into the relationship between intention and consciousness:

Some researchers have literally gone deeper into the brain. One of those is Itzhak Fried, a neuroscientist and surgeon at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Tel Aviv Medical Center in Israel. He studied individuals with electrodes implanted in their brains as part of a surgical procedure to treat epilepsy4. Recording from single neurons in this way gives scientists a much more precise picture of brain activity than fMRI or EEG. Fried's experiments showed that there was activity in individual neurons of particular brain areas about a second and a half before the subject made a conscious decision to press a button. With about 700 milliseconds to go, the researchers could predict the timing of that decision with more than 80% accuracy. "At some point, things that are predetermined are admitted into consciousness," says Fried. The conscious will might be added on to a decision at a later stage, he suggests.

http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273%2810%2901082-2?script=true

The psychology of dealing with things going wrong

Over the weekend I auditioned for a pantomime, and narrowly missed out on the role of the pantomime dame. Unfortunately, a friend of mine got another lead role, leading to more jealousy than I am comfortable with, and my thoughts have gone to the psychology of dealing with things going wrong: something we all have to be familiar with in the course of our careers when we fail to get a promotion, or are beaten onto a good project by someone else.

According to Zuckerman (1979) we take credit for our successes but deny blame for our failures. I’ve certainly been doing that today – I have preferred to blame the heat of the rehearsal room, when in fact in all likelihood I just wasn’t right for the role. This is the same reason we attribute luck to someone else beating us.

There is a huge amount of fascinating reading out there about how we cope with failures, and one of the areas I find particularly interesting is the effect of self-esteem. People with high self-esteem will follow the pattern above.

Conversely, people with low self-esteem will typically enter a cycle of self-blame, reinforcement and repetition. The phrase “I must have done something wrong” comes into their heads.

In real life, of course, we don’t have “high” or “low” self-esteem, we sit somewhere on a spectrum. And there are advantages to different positions – lower self-esteem will at least open ones eyes to the opportunity of learning from mistakes (and as an introvert with not especially high or low self-esteem, I self-reflect regularly) while higher self-esteem leads us to taking care of ourselves better (see Harris and Napper, 2005).

http://www.setsights.co.uk/2011/09/11/i%E2%80%99m-good-you%E2%80%99re-lucky/

Attabad Landslide

Close enough

 Amazing photo set:  On January 4th, 2010 in the remote Hunza River Valley of northern Pakistan, a massive landslide buried the village of Attabad, destroying 26 homes, killing 20 people, and damming up the Hunza River.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/06/landslide_lake_in_pakistan.html

Google+ names and reputation

Martin Nowak's work on the evolution of cooperation imply that large communities are likely to be destroyed by free riders without  mechanisms for creating and advertising personal reputation.   This is a result based on solid mathematics and validated by simulation experiments.  I regard these kind of results as a lot more robust than listening to the opinions of the day.  (Anyone who is interested should read Nowak's book, Supercooperators, for a review of his and others work in this field.)

In practice, the negative effect of the lack of a reputation process is clearly present on the net.  We only need compare the average quality and civility of anonymous versus named commentators on blogs for a vivid demonstration of this.  Outfits like eBay use reputation to weed out crooks and incompetents and we have probably all seen the strenuous attempts of eBay sellers to protect their reputation.  This is the theory of cooperation in living detail.

Google's policy seems to me to be fundamentally good for the future of the Internet.  I expect to see a time where groups will only allow interactions with people who have a good online reputation, for example, discussion groups only open to people with a G+ or similar validated identity and history.  In future, I see systems evolving that allow a reputation to receive negative and positive points and for those attributions to be sourced to known individuals, so that an attribution is rated by the reputation of the giver.  The maths and the systems are complex and will need to evolve but the potential benefits are enormous, and probably essential.  The members of a traditional village can learn each other's reputation and protect and extend themselves appropriately for the interaction; a global village requires more sophisticated mechanisms.

As for the supposed attack on liberty, I'd say this:  Liberty won't survive without good systems to protect it.  Free riders will always have payoffs to rort large open systems unless they are detected and advertised.  Google's real name policy does benefit Google but in the long run these approaches are critical for us punters too.  I'm happy for the monitoring and limiting of Google's use of our identities (and, despite the target size, I'd generally rate Google's behaviour at the pretty good) but mechanisms of reputation are intrinsic to the survival of liberty.  We all want the abilty to free ride when it suits us, and generosity is required for cooperation to persist, but it should be given by choice, not taken at will.

[repost of comment to The Register; http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/30/google_plus_anonymity_ban/]

Pas d'armes

The pas d'armes or passage of arms was a type of chivalric practice that evolved in the late 14th century and remained popular through the 15th century. It involved a knight or group of knights (tenans) who would stake out a travelled spot, such as a bridge or city gate, and let it be known that any other knight who wished to pass (venans or "comers") must first fight, or be disgraced.

Why not?

High arousal positive v Low arousal positive

Rock climbing or walking in a glade?
Sex or read a book?
Dancing or cup of tea?
Pary or dinner party?


If you chose mostly the second option, you may tend to prefer low arousal positive (LAP) emotional states. In other words, you like to feel relaxed, calm, and peaceful.  If you chose first options, you may tend to prefer high arousal positive (HAP) states, like enthusiasm, excitement, and elation.

Differences can be personal but for populations they may derived from cultural ideas.  Asian cultures tends to be LAP, American is HAP.  Some psychological scales appear to rate LAP preferences as depression.

From Psych Your Mind Blog

Steven Pearlstein blames the corporate lobby, I agree.

Somewhere along the way, however, this effort took on a life of its own. What started as a reasonable attempt at political rebalancing turned into a jihad against all regulation, all taxes and all government, waged by right-wing zealots who want to privatize the public schools that educate your workers, cut back on the basic research on which your products are based, shut down the regulatory agencies that protect you from unscrupulous competitors and privatize the public infrastructure that transports your supplies and your finished goods. For them, this isn’t just a tactic to brush back government. It’s a holy war to destroy it — and one that is now out of your control.

[My emphasis]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/steven-pearlstein-blame-for-financial-mess-starts-with-the-corporate-lobby/2011/08/08/gIQA3zMlDJ_story.html

I couldn't agree more.  I'm happy with just about any regulation lobbyists short of public hanging.

Personal names around the world

A guide to different personal naming conventions around the world:

http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

eg,

Mao Ze Dong = Mao (family) Ze (generational) Dong (given)

Friends would use the generational name and the given name: Hey, Ze Dong, fancy a game of backgammon?

3 virtues of a programmer

According to Larry Wall, the original author of the Perl programming language, there are three great virtues of a programmer: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris

Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.

Impatience: The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to.

Hubris: The quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about.

Sonority and Sex!

The idea is that sexual inhibition discourages speaking with a wide open mouth.
why-smaller-communities-are-louder

Health Supplement Efficacy Visualised

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/snake-oil-supplements/

Strong evidence includes:

• folic acid for certain birth defects
• green tea for cholestrol
• probiotics for digestive health
• vitamin D for general health
• fish oil for blood pressure and secondary heart disease
• st john's wort for depression

Slight or none:

• dandeline
• flaxseed oil
• ginkgo bilboa
• vitamin A
• etc, etc, etc

Dutton's cross-cultural cluster criteria for art

1. Direct pleasure - valued as a source of immediate experience
2. Skill and Virtuosity - demonstrates specialized skills
3. Style - made according to rules of form, composition and expression (while usually allowing or  celebrating departures)
   
4. Novelty or Creativity - Valued and praised for originality.  Kitsch and craft use the style in an uncreative way.
   
5. Criticism - artistic forms exist with parallel discourses of appreciation and judgement.
   
6. Representation - In wildly varying degrees of naturalism, art objects represent real or imaginary experiences of the world.
   
7. Special focus - art is bracketed off from ordinary life, "made special" by location, time,appurtenance, rituals, e.g. art gallery, opening, picture frame.
   
8. Expressive individuality - potential to express individual personality through the work.
   
9. Emotional saturation - not only the emotion of the content but the emotional tone of the work or performance.
   
10. Intellectual challenge - utilize the combined variety of perceptual and intellectual capacities at a high level.
    
11. Art traditions and institutions - works of art gain value from positions in the history of their traditions.
12. Imaginative experience - (most importantly) artworks provide an imaginative experience for their makers and their audience.

Not all artwork will have all characteristics but they will generally show most.

from Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct

Precision Planning

Leap seconds: By international convention, UTC (which is an arbitrary human invention) is kept within 0.9 seconds of physical reality (UT1, which is a measure of solar time) by introducing a "leap second" in the last minute of the UTC year, or in the last minute of June.  [The deviation from UT1 varies "erratically" with changes in things like positions of planets, tides, weather, and ocean currents, which cause slight in the mass/angular momentum distribution of the earth.]

Leap seconds don't have to be announced much more than six months before they happen. This is a problem if you need second-accurate planning beyond six months.

 I can cope.

(from http://unix4lyfe.org/time)

Don't answer that phone!

http://ashartus.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/cell-phones-and-cancer-revisited/

"Ashartus" reviews two recent meta-analyses of mobile phone cancer risk.  One study found increased risk in the highest dosage group - extreme phoners - but lowered risk elsewhere.  This lowered risk is likely an artifact (we would think.)  The second study found no increased risk.  The data sets had various problems like self selection, self estimation and classification problems.  Some of the best data showed no risk and the epidemiology of the increased risk isn't quite as expected.

Overall, I stand by my original conclusion that there is no reason to panic unless brain cancer incidence rates start to increase, but at the same time if you’re an extremely heavy user of cell phones it probably wouldn’t hurt to take at least minimal precautions. Also of note, the IARC evaluation mentions that the electromagnetic field exposure from newer 3G phones (or from Bluetooth headsets) is about 100 times lower than for traditional cell phones, which means that even if the amount of cell phone usage continues to increase, exposure will likely decrease.

Correlation is Not a Cause (CINAC)

One interesting (off topic) thing about CINAC thinking is that it breaks down in basic physics.  We think of causation with an implicit forwards time direction, for example, we wouldn't say that eating a cake tomorrow can't cause it to be baked yesterday.

However, this asymmetry of time doesn't apply at the particle level where interactions are symmetric in time.  An electron accelerates sideways when it absorbs a photon; later it might emit a photon and accelerates the other way, just like rolling the film backwards.  When we speak of cause and effect  and assume that time runs only one way but at the micro level since interactions are symmetric, causality itself becomes hard to pin down. 

At the macro level things don't work like that: shattered vases don't unshatter.  Heat always flows from hot to cold.  Even though many individual particle collisions will transfer energy against the gradient, the net effect over zillions of of interactions is for heat - molecular kinetic energy - to always flow down the gradient.

Some physicist have looked to the micro level symmetry for an explanation of entanglement ("spooky action at a distance") where two particles interact then move apart with some indeterminate properties.  When a property is measured on one particle a corresponding property is instantaneously changed on the other particle even though the particles may have moved a long way apart, ie, without any possibility of normal information exchange.  A mooted explanation is for the "cause" to propagate backwards in time from the measured particle to the original interaction then forwards to the second particle.  This contradict our intuitions of causes occurring before their effect but this may be ok since our idea of cause and effect is generated in our macro structure, based on the intuitions gained from in the macro world where time "flows", and only one way.

(comment at Mindblog)

Straw Dogs

"Heaven and Earth are heartless
treating creatures like straw dogs".
-- Tao Te Ching, Chapter 5

Straw dogs were used as ceremonial objects in ancient China.

Su Ch'e comments "Heaven and Earth are not partial. They do not kill living things out of cruelty or give them birth out of kindness. We do the same when we make straw dogs to use in sacrifices. We dress them up and put them on the altar, but not because we love them. And when the ceremony is over, we throw them into the street, but not because we hate them."

Sam Pekinpahs movie "Straw Dogs" takes its title from this.  It ends up with a number of bodies scattered around the home.

Dutton/Carrol on Darwinian literary theory

Interesting review from Denis Dutton of Joseph Carroll's Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature.

Taster:

Carroll holds that the only way to attain a general theory of literature is through an account of human nature that builds from the ground up, from the most basic conditions for the evolution of the human species. A Darwinian literary theory first needs a Darwinian psychology. Once we have a basic Darwinian psychology in place, we can see that the narrative proclivities of human beings, far from being an incidental by-product of the evolved mind, are central to some of its most human functions. The structures of basic motives and dispositions are what would be appropriate for a species, as Carroll describes it, that “is highly social and mildly polygynous, that displays concealed ovulation, continuous female receptivity, and post-menopausal life expectancy corresponding to a uniquely extended period of childhood development, that has extraordinary aptitudes for technology, that has developed language and the capacity for peering into the minds of its conspecifics, and that displays a unique disposition for fabricating and consuming aesthetic and imaginative artefacts.” Such a list alone, he contends, would make it impossible to imagine a blank-slate view of the mind, in which the mind evolves in a vacuum, goes onto produce culture, which then gives back to the mind all content and structure. 

http://denisdutton.com/carroll_review.htm

Supernatural Policing

Jeffrey Schloss and Michael Murray examine the idea that belief in supernatural agents is adaptive because these agents are punishers: supernatural policeman if you will. This policing can have two effects. First, belief in supernatural punishment can enhance within group cooperation. Second, it can reduce cheating or free-riding.

However :

Aguair and Cronk observe that judgmental gods or policing spirits are historically recent: “Considerable evidence exists that such beliefs are rare among hunter-gatherer, smallscale, and egalitarian societies, and common among food producing, large-scale, and hierarchical societies.”

We cannot simply assume that because supernatural watchers-punishers exist and have utility in post-Neolithic or complex societies, the same was true during the Paleolithic. Although the ethnographic and ethnohistoric hunter-gatherer record is an imperfect guide, it strongly suggests that supernatural watching-punishing is a recent invention.

Teratoma associated encephalitis

Health Report 2011-06-06:

A mysterious and often life threatening disease affects the lives of mostly young women. These patients often end up in psychiatric hospitals misdiagnosed or in intensive care units with bizarre behaviour and metabolic meltdown. It's been discovered that these patients had a benign tumour in the ovary called teratoma. A teratoma can contain teeth, hair and most significantly for the women suffering from this condition, brain tissue. The body sees this tumour like a foreign type of tissue and mounts an attack, an immune response against these brain cells that are in the tumour. However, the immunological system is also attacks the brain of the patients.

The Artist of Bullshit

“If you can lie, you can act,” Brando told Jod Kaftan, a writer for Rolling Stone and one of the few people to have viewed the footage. “Are you good at lying?” asked Kaftan. “Jesus,” said Brando, “I’m fabulous at it.”

http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/ian-leslie/are-artists-liars?page=full
Book:  Born Liars: Why We Can’t Live Without Deceit Ian Leslie

More Vaccine and Autism Crap

From Neuroskeptic:

Vaccines Cause Autism, Until You Look At The Data

Sounds rather scary. Until you look at the data, helpfully provided in the paper
....
My conclusion is that this dataset shows no evidence of any association. The author nonetheless found one. How? By doing some statistical wizardry.

 

Evolution and Argument

[From www.edge.org]

One of the papers "Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory," published by Behavioral and Brain Sciences, was by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. "The article,” Haidt said, "is a review of a puzzle that has bedeviled researchers in cognitive psychology and social cognition for a long time. The puzzle is, why are humans so amazingly bad at reasoning in some contexts, and so amazingly good in others?"

"Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. That's why they call it The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning. So, as they put it, "The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things."

 I've probably wasted a lot of breath while suffering from the illusion that arguments were a search for the truth...

Xpost @ johnquiggin.com
There's a simpler but also more seductive quality with argument from authority.  In simple biological terms, gaining knowledge requires energy expenditure.  This means that the value of any knowledge gained must be totted up against the energy expended to produce it.  In our evolutionary history - ie the integrated period of our brain evolution - starvation was a regular threat.  Simply running a large brain requires 20% of our energy, many other very successful mammals use considerably less.  This produces a quite different knowledge strategy to what you might find in an epistemology text.

We prize cheap information.  We congratulate ourselves in having got to the "gist" of a situation on very limited information.  The Climategate emails was a perfect example of this: virtually no one read the thousands of emails involved but a lot of people were willing to regard the three words "hide the decline" - without context - as as incontrovertible proof that the researchers involved were crooks, and QED that the other thousands of climate researchers were too.  No doubt they congratulated themselves on their incisive intellectual capabilities in forming this judgement.  This is "gisting" gone crazy.  If it weren't so tragic it might be funny.

Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is not limited to anti-AGW types, it's everywhere. 

This is also the key reason why science took so long to get off the ground: sitting around for days, months or years try to find outliers that disprove hypotheses just isn't on in a nutritionally limited environment.  Our brains contain Baysian inference circuitry gated by some pretty worldwise energy expenditure calculations.

The argument from authority strategy is an energy saving knowledge strategy that is built-in or natural to us.  The basic logic: "X says so, X has a pile of goodies/status, therefore X is probably right" is obviously logical piffle but is a reasonable biological strategy, in an evolutionary sense.  Unfortunately, we (in general, not you or I :) are not that good at distinguishing where the pile of goodies came from and whether obtaining them required any relevant mental or physical effort at all.

Personality traits are continuous with mental illnesses

Geoffrey Miller: Personality traits are continuous with mental illnesses

Our instinctive way of thinking about insanity — our intuitive psychiatry — is dead wrong... There's a scientific consensus that personality traits can be well-described by five main dimensions of variation. These "Big Five" personality traits are called openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability. The Big Five are all normally distributed in a bell curve, statistically independent of each other, genetically heritable, stable across the life-course, unconsciously judged when choosing mates or friends, and found in other species such as chimpanzees. They predict a wide range of behavior in school, work, marriage, parenting, crime, economics, and politics.

Mental disorders are often associated with maladaptive extremes of the Big Five traits. Over-conscientiousness predicts obsessive-compulsive disorder, whereas low conscientiousness predicts drug addiction and other "impulse control disorders". Low emotional stability predicts depression, anxiety, bipolar, borderline, and histrionic disorders. Low extraversion predicts avoidant and schizoid personality disorders. Low agreeableness predicts psychopathy and paranoid personality disorder. High openness is on a continuum with schizotypy and schizophrenia. Twin studies show that these links between personality traits and mental illnesses exist not just at the behavioral level, but at the genetic level. And parents who are somewhat extreme on a personality trait are much more likely to have a child with the associated mental illness.

Nuclear deaths, revised

This article from The New Matilda estimates Chernobly related deaths at between 15,000 and 60,000 on the basis of  that cancers are linear to exposure and that there is no safe low exposure level as assumed by some of the more extreme positions on the pro-nuclear side:

The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates a total collective dose of 600,000 person-Sieverts over 50 years from Chernobyl fallout (see the IAEA Bulletin, Vol.38, No.1, 1996). A standard risk estimate from the International Commission on Radiological Protection is 0.05 fatal cancers per Sievert. Multiply those figures and we get an estimated 30,000 fatal cancers. Now let’s recall that, according to the BEIR report, the LNT model may overstate risks or understate them by a factor of two. Thus the estimated death toll ranges from something less than 30,000 — up to 60,000.

http://newmatilda.com/2011/04/07/do-we-know-chernobyl-death-toll

This kinda fries the graph I quoted in the previous post.

 

Deaths from different types of energy production

Chart of death per energy unit (TWh) produced:


Taken from Edge 341 quote an unreferenced Swedish government report. Undated.  No idea on methodology etc but I'd presume it's within cooee.

Solar is missing, probably because it's very small.

I guess nuclear has upside potential on black swans events but it remains tiny compared to coal and oil.

Women's Underrepresentation in Science

According to this paper the problem isn't discrimination (mild positive discrimination was found at times) it's more to do with women's coice of having kids at the time when men are pumping their careers along.

"Addressing today's causes of underrepresentation requires focusing on education and policy changes that will make institutions responsive to differing biological realities of the sexes."


Understanding current causes of women's underrepresentation in science
Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams
http://www.pnas.org/content/108/8/3157.full

Obesity

Population studies that try to link average life duration and average obesity are confouded by numerous factors, especially medical progress. However, virtually every study that I have seen that correlates body weight with disease prevalence finds a U shaped curve with minimum incidence rates at a BMI of about 22/23. Lower than this you are probably starving yourself or sick; higher and you are hurting yourself. Besides the usual cardiovasular and diabetes these results are common across many cancers, a range of other diseases and aging in general. These results are backed up by physiological evidence of cumulative negative impacts of bloated fat cells on the body.

There are some considerations that that weaken these results, especially the correlation between BMI and sedentry lifestyle. On the other hand, while BMI is easy to measure, it is an imperfect measure of obesity. Body shapes vary and research is indicating that it’s fat around the gut – aka “male fat” that is the problem more than distributed fat. (Or female fat on the breasts and hip which requires physiological effort to maintain so is a sign of youthful good health.) If a better fat measurements were used the impact of obesity on disease would probably increase.

None of this stuff is completely rock solid but the indications are pretty plain. The fact that you might now have an increased life expectancy despite being overweight doesn’t mean that much if the extra life is spent in a poor state of health, unable to do much, and kept alive by drugs. I aim to get as close you can reasonably manage to a BMI around 23 while maintaining activity and equanimity. People should take general body shape and fat distribution into account as well as the simple number.

(crossposted comment at johnquiggin.com)

Pedal Power

Portable Pedal Machines May Help Counter Harmful Effects of Sedentary Jobs!

Maybe I need one of these gizmos.  Desk workers do too many sedentry hours...

Polarising debates

The Cultural Cognition Project at Yale looks at the cause of polarizing debates such as: global warming, gun ownership, school shootings, terrorism, nanotechnology, public health, nuclear power, foreign wars and just about every heated thread in Internet history. In short, the polarizing issue is "risk"- the perception of risk, and the proposed solutions to risk. It turns out people see risk in polarizing ways according to where they stand on a scale of cultural beliefs.