Cursive

Remember the testimony with the woman witness in the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case who supposedly wrote a letter to Martin's mother? Rachel Jeantel, Martin’s girlfriend, said, when presented with the letter in court, "I don’t read cursive." It was a great victory for the Zimmerman side as it cast doubt upon the sincerity of the Martin side testimony.
A peripheral story was that a nineteen year old woman in the United States can not read cursive. The reason is that many schools have stopped teaching it in favor of printing, which mirrors their computer experience.

"Quartz" has an article on cursive handwriting. Many schools that stopped teaching cursive are beginning to wonder if that was a mistake.

Research shows that writing by hand actually helps your brain work better. The reasons for taking handwriting seriously are worth considering even if you’re not a kid or a parent worried about education. Anyone can benefit from penmanship’s cognitive benefits, whether you’re taking notes at a meeting or just trying to figure out what you think. Brain scans during the two activities also show that forming words by hand as opposed to on a keyboard leads to increased brain activity. Scientific studies of children and adults show that wielding a pen when taking notes, rather than typing, is associated with improved long-term information retention, better thought organization, and increased ability to generate ideas.

So advances are not always advances. And unintended consequences are still consequences regardless of intent.

Hendrickson

Most wanderers make no mark.

Sue Hendrickson is a wanderer. She has been a diver, an explorer, and a collector of insects encased in amber (a la Jurassic Park) many of which have wound up in the collections of natural history museums and universities around the world.

 

In 1990 she was a fossil hunter. She was near Faith, South Dakota hunting fossils where she found three large bones sticking out of a cliff. At the time she was working for the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research. Further evaluation revealed a large skeleton, over 90 per cent complete, of a T. Rex.  Black Hills Institute of Geological Research paid $5,000 to the land owner, Maurice Williams, for the right to excavate the dinosaur skeleton, which was cleaned and transported to the company headquarters in Hill City. They named the dinosaur "Sue," after her. It was the largest Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever discovered.

 

In 1992, a long legal battle began over Sue. The U.S. Attorney’s Office claimed Sue’s bones had been seized from federal land and were therefore government property. It was eventually found that Williams, a part-Native American and member of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe, had traded his land to the tribe two decades earlier to avoid paying property taxes, and thus his sale of excavation rights to Black Hills had been invalid.

 

When ownership was finally awarded to Williams after a protracted legal battle he put the skeleton up for auction. In October 1997, Chicago’s Field Museum purchased Sue at public auction at Sotheby’s in New York City for $8.36 million. Sue’s skeleton went on display at the Field Museum in May 2000. The tremendous T. rex skeleton–13 feet high at the hips and 42 feet long from head to toe–is displayed in one of the museum’s main halls.

Sue’s extraordinarily well-preserved bones have allowed scientists to determine many things about the life of T. rex. They have determined that the carnivorous dinosaur had an incredible sense of smell, as the olfactory bulbs were each bigger than the cerebrum, the thinking part of the brain. In addition, Sue was the first T. rex skeleton to be discovered with a wishbone, a crucial discovery that provided support for scientists’ theory that birds are a type of living dinosaur.

 

The original discoverer, Hendrickson, and the original  researchers, the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, got nothing out of all this.
In 2005, Glamour magazine honored Hendrickson in their "Glamour Woman of the Year Awards."

Ebola and The Profit Motive

"Until this west African epidemic, Ebola was not a public health problem and (was) a really rare disease."
So says Professor Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who co-discovered the Ebola virus in 1976. This fits hand-in-glove with the general belief that the profit motive is an inefficient and blind method for development. While this flies in the face of the growth of the West in the last centuries, it is a convenient saw for many politicized observers. But is it true? Two infected American missionaries were brought to the U.S. and cured in two weeks, cured of a disease these people are saying that no one has a motive to cure. (Only money has been the motive so far; race is probably next.)
Such a remarkable result simply does not fit with the criticism. Now there is another explanation, of course, scientific curiosity and intellectual challenge aside (factors notoriously omitted in analysis, by the way.) Ever since the early 1970s, the Russians, that symbol of international brotherhood and kindness, has been working on bio-weapons through their extremely well funded Biopreparate arm. Everyone knew this. Their favorite combination, their most fervent hope, was to link Ebola and Smallpox to give their idea of the best combination of infectivity and lethality.
Perhaps that was an adequate "non-financial" motive for support.

Reinhart, Rogoff and Repudiation by Association

Reinhart and Rogoff recently published a paper that was ignored until it was refuted. Then everyone lost their minds.

The conclusion of the paper was that high levels of debt, particularly 90% of GDP, resulted in slower GDP growth. But a University of Massachusetts paper later argued that some of their formats were in error. Those errors did not reverse their conclusions--the conclusions stood--but errors in the paper did exist.

It was if a nun had been raped; part destroyed, all destroyed. People opposed to the results of the paper attacked the paper, the researchers, their integrity and their credentials. The researchers  received   hate-mail, some blaming them for layoffs of public employees, cutbacks in government services and tax increases.

Economics is a soft science at its very best. But we are not living in times of understanding and acceptance of limits.

Everything is war to the armies of the night.

If It Is Needed, It Will Work

The number of Americans who are considered obese, a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or higher, has tripled since 1960, while those considered morbidly obese (BMI above 40) has increased six fold. A study completed by researchers from the Mayo Clinic last year showed that obese people on average pay $1,850 more in health costs a year, while the morbidly obese saw costs soar an additional $5,500 a year. "Smoking added about 20 percent a year to medical costs," said Mayo's James Naessens. "Obesity was similar, but morbid obesity increased those costs by 50 percent a year."

Several proposed solutions to obesity have moved to the investment forefront, a pill by Vivvus and an implantable device, the VBLOC by EnteroMedics Inc, which purports to block the vagus nerves to suppress appetite. The surgically implanted device uses electrical pulses to block that nerve regulating digestion. Unlike pacemakers, patients power the EnteroMedics' VBLOC device on and off with a control belt worn around the waist. When VBLOC is on, patients are supposed to feel less hungry, eat less and lose weight.

Success or failure of such therapies is measured by "EWL", calculated as a percentage equal to total weight loss in the trial (the numerator) divided by the difference in baseline weight and "ideal weight" using a BMI of 25 (the denominator.)
Gastric bypass surgery patients lose an average of 28% of their body weight. For the sample female patient standing 5' 4" and weighing 240 pounds, that equates to 67 pounds or an EWL of 70%.

The EWL for VBLOC-treated patients was 17% compared to 16% for control patients. Clearly, there was no statistically significant difference at all in excess weight loss between the two groups. The result missed statistical significance by a wide margin, with a p value of 0.70. From an investigative perspective, this was a disaster showing little distinction between the device and placebo. The share value of the company plummeted appropriately.

 

But the stock is coming back. Investors are buying the company now and have been advised to do so by someone as cautious as Andrew Tobias. Why? Because the obesity problem is a big national expense and something, anything, must be done. These investors are betting the FDA will approve the device in spite of the fact there is no evidence of its effectiveness because "we must do something."

It will be interesting to see if the investors profit by investing against the FDA's integrity (and on bureaucratic desperation.) And it will be an interesting and revealing insight into the thinking of government.

Nyasasaurus parringtoni

There is a scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" where the Arc is being moved down a long warehouse corridor to be stored in anonymity and obscurity for ever more. It got a laugh because the audience knew it was completely outlandish but consistent with every one's idea of a bureaucracy. Now come the intrepid dinosaur hunters. Where are they hunting? Museums.

A dinosaur, likely the oldest dinosaur ever found, has been discovered. Or rediscovered. The animal lived about 245 million years ago, 10 million to 15 million years earlier than any previously discovered fossils, when Pangaea existed before separating into Africa, South America, Antarctica and Australia. Called Nyasasaurus parringtoni after southern Africa's Lake Nyasa where it was found (now called Lake Malawi) it was about 3 feet at the hip, 2 to 3 times as long head to tail, and weighed about 44 to 130 pounds.

The problem is it was discovered and retrieved in the 1930's, packed and stored in London's Natural History Museum and only recently recognized for what it was.

Sterling Nesbitt at the University of Washington in Seattle who led the study said: "Found in the '30s, first described in the 1950s … Now 80 years later, we're putting it all together."

Doesn't this sound a bit vague and disordered, even for university professors? Doesn't this make "hiding in plain sight" somewhat inadequate?

Has our search for knowledge turned into some weird self irony where even when we find significance we either don't recognize it or we forget it?

Money for Nothing

An interesting number came out of a discussion with a friend recently. In the last year Penn State University received 780 million dollars in research grants. $780 million. (This is not going where you think.) The number of private companies spun out of Penn State in the last year: One.

In a culture that has a fetish about small business and capital development this is a surprising number. And Lee Hood's experience with CalTech comes to mind. When he was developing his protein synthesizer at Caltech he approached the president of the university with the prospect of doing a joint venture. The president not only declined, he was miffed. He did not think it proper for the university to sully its hands in so plebeian a thing as a for-profit company.

So the university is an island of reflective purity in this bustling work-a-day world. Aside from the obvious silliness of this conceit, there may be some useful information here. Perhaps the university's distance from the community is doing a disservice to its students, its community and its culture. The students might benefit from a bit of reality when they transition from the student world to the workplace. The university might benefit from a little feedback. And the society should be able to take advantage of all that research money in some tangible way.

Otherwise the culture might start thinking of its educational institutions as separate. As a distinct and self contained entity that has only its own survival and comfort in mind. Like a parasite, for example.