Continuous Productivity

Truth Serum and Michael Jackson

A wonderful post at the Psychology Today blog rehashing some of the major gaps in the child molestation charges against Michael Jackson:

One of the two charges that received the most press coverage surfaced in 1993, when Evan Chandler filed a lawsuit against Jackson for sexually abusing his 13 year old son, Jordan. At the time, the news media reported widely that Jordan Chandler accused Jackson of performing oral sex on him, and that Chandler provided law enforcement authorities with a description of Jackson's genitalia. Eventually, Jackson settled this case out of court for $22 million; some have argued that this settlement is prima facie evidence of his guilt, whereas others have argued that Jackson understandably wanted to avoid a prolonged and emotionally grueling civil trial. I do not know which side is right, so I will withhold judgment on that issue here.

So what crucial fact has most of the press coverage omitted? It's that Jordan Chandler apparently never made any accusations against Jackson until his father, a registered dentist, gave him sodium amytal during a tooth extraction. Only then did Jackson's purported sexual abuse emerge; Jordan Chandler's reports became more elaborated and embellished during a later session with a psychiatrist.

Sodium amytal is a barbiturate and one of the most commonly used variants of what is popularly known as "truth serum," which is a spectacular misnomer. There's no scientific evidence that Sodium amytal or other supposed truth serums increase the accuracy of memories. To the contrary, as psychiatrist August Piper has observed, there's good reason to believe that truth serums merely lower the threshold for reporting virtually all information, both true and false. As a consequence, like other suggestive therapeutic procedures, such as guided imagery, repeated prompting, hypnosis, and journaling, truth serums can actually increase the risk of false memories - memories of events that never occurred, but are held with great conviction.

In fact, because the physiological actions of barbiturates are similar in many ways to that of alcohol, the effects of ingesting Sodium amytal are probably similar to those of imbibing a few stiff drinks. When we're rip-roaring drunk, we're more likely than when sober to say lots of things, only some of them accurate. Moreover, as Piper notes, there's overwhelming evidence that people can distort the truth or lie while under the influence of truth serum.

Whether Jackson molested children or not, it a minimum the case shows how easy it is to feed a media base dying for objectionable news.

Manufacture a Baby

A company out in California is allowing you to pick the traits of your next child:

...a couple might want to have a baby with a darker complexion to help guard against a skin cancer if they already had a child who had developed a melanoma. But others might just want a boy with blonde hair.

His clinic is offering this cosmetic selection to patients already having genetic screening for abnormal chromosome conditions in their embryos.

Some More Red and Blue Light

In early September, when Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for Vice-President, announced that her unwed seventeen-year-old daughter, Bristol, was pregnant, many liberals were shocked, not by the revelation but by the reaction to it. They expected the news to dismay the evangelical voters that John McCain was courting with his choice of Palin. Yet reports from the floor of the Republican Convention, in St. Paul, quoted dozens of delegates who seemed unfazed, or even buoyed, by the news. A delegate from Louisiana told CBS News, “Like so many other American families who are in the same situation, I think it’s great that she instilled in her daughter the values to have the child and not to sneak off someplace and have an abortion.” A Mississippi delegate claimed that “even though young children are making that decision to become pregnant, they’ve also decided to take responsibility for their actions and decided to follow up with that and get married and raise this child.” Palin’s family drama, delegates said, was similar to the experience of many socially conservative Christian families. As Marlys Popma, the head of evangelical outreach for the McCain campaign, told National Review, “There hasn’t been one evangelical family that hasn’t gone through some sort of situation.” In fact, it was Popma’s own “crisis pregnancy” that had brought her into the movement in the first place.

During the campaign, the media has largely respected calls to treat Bristol Palin’s pregnancy as a private matter. But the reactions to it have exposed a cultural rift that mirrors America’s dominant political divide. Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.

A very good article at The New Yorker outlining the paradoxical views on sex of evangelicals.

Very Sad Update

Kaushik Patel, the man who burned his two children has pled not guilty, while the prosecutors will seek the death penalty:

The 34-year-old man is charged with causing the fatal injuries Nov. 18 after luring his sons with new toy cars into a bathroom of their home on the 1800 block of Harvest Lane and setting them on fire, police said. The boys' mother, Nishaben, was not home when the fire broke out. Afterward, Kaushik Patel buckled his children into the back seat of his car and drove them to his older brother's house about five miles away in Hanover Park. A relative called 911. The boys weren't expected to survive that first night, but they fought for months inside Loyola Medical Center's burn unit in Maywood. The youngest child, Om, 4, was the first to die, on Jan. 17. Vishv, 7, survived several surgeries but took a sudden turn for the worse and died Feb. 19.

Numbnut

The Earth is Still Flat

Despite a court-ordered ban on the teaching of creationism in US schools, about one in eight high-school biology teachers still teach it as valid science, a survey reveals. And, although almost all teachers also taught evolution, those with less training in science – and especially evolutionary biology – tend to devote less class time to Darwinian principles.

Unbelievable as it seems, it does not surprise me.  It's a shame that 16% of the educators that are responsible for teaching our children scientific fact don't believe it themselves. 

Warm

John is a kid with cancer, a senior at Freedom in Beaver County who was told a few weeks ago by doctors that cancer was winning and it was close to the end. The disease that started in his liver was now taking over his lungs.

"They said it could be only two months," he said, fighting back tears.

He paused before his seemingly never-ending optimism came through again.

"I told my mom I still think I can get two more years."

But his story isn't about dying. It's about inspiring.

I would suggest reading the entire article about an 18-year-old dying from cancer. He doesn't have much time to live, but quotes like this show that he understands how valuable the time he has left is:

"I used to be afraid, but I'm not afraid of dying now, if that's what you want to know," he said. "Because life ain't about how many breaths you take. It's what you do with those breaths."

Happy Meal Bad?

Be careful what you eat as a kid, because those extra fries could make it harder to shed pounds years later in life.

A team of Swedish researchers has found that humans determine their total number of fat cells in childhood. New cells spring up and old ones perish, but their numbers change little after adolescence.

By measuring radiation absorbed after nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s and 60s, researchers found that our fat cells quickly regenerate.

But obese people turn over far more fat cells than others, says Kirsty Spalding, a biologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The difference could explain why people battle to keep weight off after a diet.

"The take-home message is be careful what you feed your child," Spalding says. "Do everything you can to make sure you don't blow out your fat cell number when you are young."

Well, it certainly makes sense that we should watch what our children eat. Now, we have some evidence.

Time Surplus is Real

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

I would highly encourage reading the entire post. It's a common notion amongst people that if only I had the time, I would do x, y, and z. But, Clay Shirky eloquently (in economic terms, nonetheless) points out that the time surplus is there and it is real:

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

Roger Clemens and Teenagers

The more we learn about Roger Clemens, the more we realize how much of a lowlife he is:

Roger Clemens carried on a decade-long affair with country star Mindy McCready, a romance that began when McCready was a 15-year-old aspiring singer performing in a karaoke bar and Clemens was a 28-year-old Red Sox ace and married father of two, several sources have told the Daily News.

Roger Clemens has some serious delusional issues about his infallibility. He is clearly grasping at straws instead of letting this situation just go away. He has made a fool of himself, has opened himself up to perjury charges, and now:

"The issue in Roger's suit against McNamee is Roger's reputation and how it has been damaged," said Richard Emery, one of McNamee's lawyers who is handling the defamation suit. "If it's proved that he's a philanderer, his reputation is already damaged. When you sue for defamation, you put your whole reputation in the community at issue. Anything is fair game, including his claim of sanctimonious purity. We would cross-examine him and other witnesses who might impact on his alleged behavior. We would probably subpoena her and witnesses who knew [of the relationship]. He's a 'family man' - he implies that. It's about what his damages are. All is fair game."

Baseball and August

If you want your kid to be a baseball player, make sure he is (was) born in August:

For more than 55 years, July 31 has been the age-cutoff date used by virtually all nonschool-affiliated baseball leagues in the United States. Youth baseball organizations including Little League, Cal Ripken/Babe Ruth, PONY, Dixie Youth, Hap Dumont, Dizzy Dean, American Legion, and more have long used that date to determine which players are eligible for which levels of play. (There is no such commonly used cutoff date in Latin America.) The result: In almost every American youth league, the oldest players are the ones born in August, and the youngest are those with July birthdays. For example, someone born on July 31, 1990, would almost certainly have been the youngest player on his youth team in 2001, his first year playing in the 11-and-12-year-olds league, and of average age in 2002, his second year in the same league. Someone born on Aug. 1, 1989, by contrast, would have been of average age in 2001, his first year playing in the 11-and-12-year-olds division, and would almost certainly be the oldest player in the league in 2002.

Twelve full months of development makes a huge difference for an 11- or 12-year-old. The player who is 12 months older will, on average, be bigger, stronger, and more coordinated than his younger counterpart, not to mention more experienced. And those bigger, better players are the ones given opportunities for further advancement. Other players, who are just as skilled for their age, are less likely to be given those same opportunities simply because of when they were born. Alex Rodriguez would've been a star no matter his birth month, but a player like Juan Pierre, who has less natural aptitude for the sport, might have gotten a small leg up over similarly skilled players because he's an August baby. It's clear from the chart above that this small advantage can have an impact that lasts a lifetime.

Read the entire article.  It highlights a much broader concept of how a decision that seems static can have a very dynamic result in the long-run.  It's fascinating how something arbitrary like a cut-off date can have such a huge impact on an entire industry. 

The Contrast That is India

We all know about India's economic growth and the amazing engineering and business talent.  But, what often gets overlooked is that India is still a third-world country with deep and, oftentimes, very backward beliefs and traditions:

In villages and cities across India, parents are aborting girls more often than at any time in history, doctors and children's rights groups say. In some rural areas, girls are also being killed after they are born. It all adds up to a dramatically skewed national ratio of females to males: 954 girls are born for every 1,000 boys, according to the government's 2001 census. In the United States, there are 1,050 newborn girls for every 1,000 newborn boys.

Due to this amazing disparity, the government is incorporating an incentive system that pays families to raise a girl:

Give birth to a daughter, and the family gets cash. Vaccinate her, more cash. Send her to school, feed her, delay her marriage, cash payment for each step.

The staggered payments will be handed out in seven, mostly rural states, beginning at $400 and extending up to an additional $2,500. They will "force the families to look upon the girl as an asset rather than a liability, since her very existence would lead to cash inflow to the family," Renuka Chowdhury, women and children development minister, told reporters earlier this week.

I love how they have reversed the traditional economic model of child as labor and turned a "liability" into an "asset."  Go on and read the entire article- it details the economics of the doctors that perform these abortions, whether this plan will work, and other cultural implications.

What Causes Divorce?

A nice synopsis of the root causes of divorce at EconLog.  I found the following most interesting, but you should head over and check out the entire post:

3.  Defection due to expected divergence in mate value. As evolutionary psychologists will tell you, female mate value peaks and starts to decline at a much earlier age than male mate value: It's a lot easier for a 45-year-old man to remarry than a 45-year-old woman. This creates a big incentive for men to promise lifetime fidelity, then jump ship.

4.  Defection due to unexpected non-culpable divergence in mate value. Remember the part of the contract that says "for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health"? When one partner experiences an unexpected rise in mate value (e.g. one becomes a successful novelist) or experiences an unexpected fall (e.g. develops a horrible disease), one of the parties has a temptation to back out - and some do.

6.  Punishment for unexpected and culpable decline in mate value - or in plain English, "You let yourself go!" The marriage contract may not explicitly say that you can't become a bum or morbidly obese or perpetually bitter. But you've heard about incomplete contracts, right? When one party falls far short of expected mate value due to deliberate action or inaction, divorce is not only likely, but easy for neutral outside observers to understand.

I especially like the incentive/economics angle in the above root causes.

Being Famous Helps

Romeo Miller is a 5-foot-10 point guard with a bad knee. He has never played a full season of high-school basketball. This season, he averaged 8.6 points a game for Beverly Hills High School, which finished last in its league.

But next fall, the 18-year-old will suit up for the University of Southern California, a program in the tough Pac-10 conference. And he will receive a full basketball scholarship valued at $44,400 a year.

Romeo Miller is Lil' Romeo, the son of music mogul Percy Miller better known as Master P.  The controversy behind the scholarship offer is that there are a limited number of scholarships a school can offer.  Given Romeo's (lack of) talent, some are concerned whether it is taking away from a more deserving (and underprivileged) athlete.

The reality is that there should be no controversy given the scholarship market.  It's such a limited supply with such a high demand that a kid that gets overlooked at USC will easily get a scholarship elsewhere.  That is, it's not really taking away from a deserving kid, but rather the argument can be made that USC is "wasting" a scholarship on a player that won't provide much "utility". 

Ah, but Tim Floyd, USC's coach, ever a savvy businessman, has already thought that through and will extract a different utility from Lil' Romeo:

Yet the school broke no rules, and Tim Floyd, USC's basketball coach, makes no apologies about Mr. Miller's potential to sell tickets. "We may have more 11- to 17-year-old girls in the stands than we've had in the past," he says.

Rupert the Ruthless

Vintage Rupert Murdoch in this Portfolio profile.  He didn't seem to have a second thought about naming an aspiring opera singer to his board of directors at News Corp after the Dow Jones acquisition:

The appointment [of Natalie Bancroft to the News Corp. board] looked like a classic last-minute end run by Murdoch around the Bancrofts. The family had owned Dow Jones since 1928, when Hugh Bancroft, Natalie's great-grandfather, inherited the Journal from his father-in-law, Clarence Walker Barron. (The former Boston-based correspondent had bought the company from its founders in 1902.) Although Murdoch's bid represented a 65 percent premium over Dow Jones stock, the family spent months bickering and soul-searching before it agreed to sell. One factor that gave the Bancrofts comfort was Murdoch's offer to create a News Corp. board position for a family representative. The Bancrofts thought it would be a way to help them keep a hand in the business, and they believed that they would have a say in the board-selection process. Instead, Murdoch didn't even interview their nominees; he simply handed the job to Natalie. Not only did she lack support from her relatives, she had little history of involvement with Dow Jones and no business or professional journalism experience.

This wouldn't be the first time that Murdoch has been ruthless in his business decisions.  It just strikes me as ironic that the Bancroft family (assuming that they really wanted to keep a hand in the business) wouldn't include a clause about whom from the family could be named.  It's also quite amusing that Murdoch seems to have gone out of his way to name the least qualified Bancroft to the position:

"I know that me as a choice was kind of scandalous—this 27-year-old opera singer that no one knows anything about," Bancroft says. While bloggers and newspaper journalists were debating her qualifications, Bancroft, who lives in London, declined all interview requests. Now she wants to set the record straight. "There's been people saying, 'She's going to be a potted plant and a pushover.' The last thing I am is a pushover," she says. "I'm not just some idiotic girl in piggytails yodeling."

The irony of the follow-up quote can't be overlooked:

She also says she is multilingual and routinely reads foreign-language newspapers. Instead of being intimidated by the accomplished men who will be her colleagues, she says the prospect thrills her: "I have a much easier time understanding men. I was a tomboy. I love camping. I love sailing. I love doing boy stuff."

Is she planning to get an M.B.A. to help prepare for the position? "In journalism?" she asks.

Obesity Genetic?

University College London researchers examined more than 5,000 pairs of identical and non-identical twins.

Their American Journal of Clinical Nutrition study found that differences in body mass index and waist size were 77% governed by genes.

I am always intrigued by nature vs nurture studies that use twins.  Whether they be identical or fraternal, you can really isolate either the "nature" or "nurture" variable:

Identical twins have exactly the same genes, while non-identical twins are genetically different, like brother and sister.

However, because they were born at the same time, and raised in the same household, they can be assumed to have roughly similar upbringing in terms of food.

This allows scientists to measure differences in weight and calculate how much of that difference can be blamed on environment, and how much on genes, even though it doesn't identify individual genes which might be linked to obesity.

Autism Video

I was recently forwarded this video by a loyal reader:

It's a sad and real problem.  What's striking that even in this day and age, autism affects 1 in 150 children.

Saddest Thing I Have Read in a While

Apparently, a man babysitting a child threw him on the freeway.

Being Born Short can be Bad

Very interesting study about the increased propensity to commit violent suicide if born short:

Males that are born short have two and a half times the risk of attempting a violent suicide when adults than average length babies, a new study suggests.

And catch-up growth during childhood does not change this, say the researchers.

I think that last part is the most unnerving.  It seems to indicate that whatever happens to the baby in the womb that leads to being born short, might be a cause of the behavior:

Mittendorfer-Rutz says the research shows that violent suicide attempts were more strongly linked to the period in-utero than non-violent attempts.

The possible links are the usual suspects:

...maternal alcohol, drug abuse, or smoking during pregnancy that can lead to fetal growth restriction or preterm birth and so increase their child’s risk of suicidal behaviour and mental disorders later on, she adds.

Does this Surprise Anybody?

Children hate clowns.

Daddy's Getting Old

Via Chicago-based RealClearPolitics.com, some very interesting information that is oftentimes forgotten during election years:

Our children face a future of rising taxes, squeezed -- and perhaps falling -- public services, and aging -- perhaps deteriorating -- public infrastructure (roads, sewers, transit systems). Today's young workers and children are about to be engulfed by a massive income transfer from young to old that will perversely make it harder for them to afford their own children.

It is an unwritten rule in politics that one must pander to what the masses want to hear rather than discuss or effectuate real change.  As such it is not surprising that:

No major candidate of either party proposes to do much about [the aforementioned problems] even though the facts are well-known.

Spending for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- three programs that go overwhelmingly to older Americans -- already represents more than 40 percent of federal spending. A new report from the Congressional Budget Office projects these programs could equal about 70 percent of the present budget by 2030. Without implausibly large budget deficits, the only way to preserve most other government programs would be huge tax increases (about 40 percent from today's levels). Avoiding the tax increases would require draconian cuts in other programs (about 60 percent). Workers and young families, not retirees, would bear the brunt of either higher taxes or degraded public services.

The numbers mentioned above, at least to this observer, are utterly shocking.  70% of our budget will go on spending for the dirty three.  40% tax increases or 60% cuts in other programs just to keep the dirty three breathing. 

As much as I loathe the Bush administration, I have to admit they have at least attempted (or least embodied the perception) to address these prickly problems.  Of course, like everything else the administration has attempted, it failed miserably.  I suppose they don't award brownie points for trying.

As a young American, one of the most disheartening aspects of how the dirty three were dealt with is that they were NOT dealt with:

Ideally, prospective retirees would have received several decades' warning; but we've delayed too long. We need to cut benefits for baby boomers and even some existing retirees. They are the source of mounting costs.

I understand, oftentimes procrastination is unavoidable and probably innate, but it certainly should not be in the milieu of our politics.  We, rightfully, expect more from our leaders and instead it seems that we are going to be left holding the bag because they were afraid to tell Daddy (baby boomers) about the bad report card.  Not only did they not tell Daddy, our politicians acted as if the problem didn't exist and would go away on its own.  Oh, and guess what, just when it is absolutely urgent to cut these benefits, the size of the boomers is going to double.  You don't need me to do the math of how vexing an economic problem this is.