Diversity and its Champions

From a  study written by Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA) on discrimination in the Public Services:

"What we found is that de-identifying applications at the shortlisting stage of recruitment does not appear to assist in promoting diversity in hiring. In fact, in the trial we found that overall, APS [Australian Public Service] officers generally discriminated in favour of female and minority candidates."

Their conclusion:

"This suggests that the APS has been successful to some degree in efforts to promote awareness and support for diversity among senior staff."

Would that have been your conclusion?

The Millennial Success Sequence

Among today's young adults, the "success sequence" is insurance against poverty. The evidence is in "The Millennial Success Sequence" published by the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies and written by Wendy Wang of the IFS and W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia and AEI.

The success sequence, previously suggested in research by, among others, Ron Haskins of the Urban Institute and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution, is this: First get at least a high school diploma, then get a job, then get married, and only then have children. Wang and Wilcox, focusing on millennials ages 28 to 34, the oldest members of the nation's largest generation, have found that only 3% who follow this sequence are poor. And you have only a 5% chance of ever living in poverty.

A comparably stunning 55% of this age cohort have had children before marriage. Only 25% of the youngest baby boomers (those born between 1957 and 1964) did that. Eighty-six percent of the Wang-Wilcox millennials who put "marriage before the baby carriage" have family incomes in the middle or top third of incomes and have never been in poverty. Forty-seven percent who did not follow the sequence are in the bottom third.

One problem today, Wilcox says, is the "soul-mate model of marriage," a self-centered approach that regards marriage primarily as an opportunity for personal growth and fulfillment rather than as a way to form a family. Another problem is that some of the intelligentsia see the success sequence as middle-class norms to be disparaged for being middle-class norms. And as AEI social scientist Charles Murray says, too many of the successful classes, who followed the success sequence, do not preach what they practice, preferring "ecumenical niceness" to being judgmental.

(from Will)

Sunday/Soldiers

In today's gospel, people ask John the Baptist, "What are we to do?" The basic question.

Generally, the answer is "share." But then some specifics are asked: What does the tax collector do?  (Don't steal.) Then, the soldier. What should the soldier do? “Do not practice extortion,
do not falsely accuse anyone, and be satisfied with your wages.”

What? Not "lay down your arms?" Not "turn your weapons into plowshares?" Instead they are told to be honest and fair.

That is, they are not told to be--or expected to be--un-human.

 

Alzheimer's and Research

A lot is known about the molecules involved in Alzheimer’s disease and the genes that increase its risk, but less is known about how it affects the brain as a system. It was known that in later stages of the disease, when sticky amyloid plaques have already built up in the brain, the brain’s gamma waves lose their strength. Gamma waves ripple across the brain about 40 times per second and appear when the brain is doing attentive work, such as forming memories or solving problems.

Looking for new ideas addressing Alzheimer’s and dementia, MIT formed the Aging Brain Initiative, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches.

Recordings of neural signals in the mice performed by co-first author Annabelle Singer showed weak gamma signals compared to mice without the disease. “The first thing we asked when we saw that was, what happens if you bring gamma back?” says  MIT neuroscientist Li-Huei Tsai, director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Picower Professor of Neuroscience.

They stimulated  neurons in the hippocampus, the seat of memory in the brain, to respond to laser light, with light passed through fibers implanted in the brain, testing different rates of flickering. When the light flickered at 40 flashes a second, the stimulated cells responded and induced gamma waves in the brain.

What they found was that gamma oscillations change the behavior of immune cells called microglia, which are responsible for clearing proteins such as amyloid. These cells increase in number with increased gamma strength and become bigger and more active. “This experiment really paid off,” says Tsai.

Ed Boyden’s team used their engineering expertise to fashion a control- lable flickering LED. Tsai’s team studied the effects of the strobe on the visual cortex. “At this point, the project had become very multidisciplinary,” says Tsai.

The intervention not only halved amyloid levels in mice with early stage Alzheimer’s—it also reduced plaques that form in later stages. This finding, which was published along with the team’s other results in Nature in December 2016, makes the intervention potentially relevant for humans. Alzheimer’s symptoms typically do not appear until after plaques have formed. “Most human patients will have plaques in their brains already,” says Tsai.

(from Elizabeth Dougherty writing in Spectrum)

So, maybe light flashing at 40/seconds might be good for you. At other speeds is it bad for you? Are some workplace lights harming us? Are the Notrth Koreans developing flashing lights to make us stupid?

Margin of Disease

Long-term follow-up results from the phase III Prostate Cancer Intervention Versus Observation Trial (PIVOT) indicated that radical prostatectomy does not significantly reduce all-cause or prostate cancer mortality compared with observation through nearly 20 years, according to findings presented at the 2017 American Urological Association Annual Meeting. The results demonstrated that there was not a statistically significant difference in all-cause mortality between patients who received surgery and those who were kept under observation (P = .06).

However, prostate cancer mortality did vary based on tumor characteristics. Prostate cancer mortality was observed in 4.8% of low-risk patients, 12.2% of intermediate-risk patients, and 15.9% of high-risk patients.

This is a very difficult problem but this study raises insightful questions. Much of medicine is aimed at the margins of disease, that is those people whose disease is on the periphery of the generality. Many illnesses with relatively good general long term results have, in a certain percentage, significant risk. Medicine tends to treat the general group for that specific, small risk. As cost increase, look to this caution as an area for bureaucrats to attack.

Dawkins and The Tender Gene

Richard Dawkins taught zoology at the University of California at Berkeley and at Oxford University and is now the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, a position he has held since 1995. He writes on evolution and is part of the new atheism that is evangelical. He thinks all religious people are idiots and rather than go his own confident way, he engages theists and confronts them.

He is a missionary,  the Jehovah's Witness of atheism. 

His most famous books are probably The God Delusion and The Selfish Gene.

He once stated, "An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf." Dawkins says that even moderate religious people "make the world safe for extremists." He would be classified as a leftist: He is a supporter of the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats in Britain.

He is an equal opportunity scoffer. Here he is on Islam:

"I have criticised the appalling misogyny and homophobia of Islam, I have criticised the murdering of apostates for no crime other than their disbelief. ... Muslims themselves are the prime victims of the oppressive cruelties of Islamism."

Dawkins was scheduled to speak at an event with KPFA radio in Berkeley, California — until the local leftists realized that Dawkins had said some critical things about Islam. This is interesting because his anti-Christian sentiments are quite well known but apparently do not disqualify him from speaking at Berkeley. The station canceled the event, citing his "abusive speech." It explained: "We had booked this event based entirely on his excellent new book on science, when we didn't know he had offended and hurt — in his tweets and other comments on Islam, so many people. KPFA does not endorse hurtful speech."

CO2, Model Estimates and Observed Temperatures

Only one in 2500 molecules in air is CO2.
 
The theory of catastrophic man-made global warming is actually a two part theory.  In part one, which is essentially greenhouse gas theory, a doubling of CO2 warms the Earth by a bit over 1 degree Celsius.  But there is a second part of the theory, a theory that is entirely unrelated to greenhouse gas theory.  That theory states that the Earth's climate systems are dominated by positive feedbacks which multiply the initial warming from CO2 by 3- 5 times or more.

These feedback systems are both positive and negative, are complex and, of course, difficult to analyze as controlled experiments on gigantic unwieldy subjects the size of the world are all the more unreliable when the elements are not completely known or understood. And science is an evolving beast. So medical science for years treated peptic ulcer disease as a neurologically mediated gastric secretion illness --often treated with massive surgical attacks--when it was actually an infection cured with five days of tetracycline. (I should note in passing that those erroneous scientists, who included Cushing himself, were not pulled from their homes or their graves and abused by indignant truth-seeking Peptic Ulcer Enthusiasts. People are simply too invested in results anymore and too little interested in process.)

And ice cores from Antarctica show that at the end of recent ice ages, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere usually started to rise only after temperatures had begun to climb. There is uncertainty about the timings, partly because the air trapped in the cores is younger than the ice, but it appears the lags might sometimes have been 800 years or more. That is hard to square with the warming lobby but there are speculations as to why that could be reasonable and not invalidate the CO2 thesis.

Both the satellite and surface temperature records show warming since 1980. For all that some skeptics may want to criticize the authors of the surface temperature databases, and there indeed some grounds for criticism, these issues should not distract us from the basic fact that in every temperature record we have (including other technologies like radiosonde balloons), we see recent warming.
In terms of magnitude, the two indices do not show the same amount of warming -- since 1980 the satellite temperature record shows about 30% less warming than does  the surface temperature record for the same period. 
  

The surface temperature record shows only about half the warming, and the satellite record shows only about a third the warming, that Hansen predicted.   There is no justification for saying that recent warming rates have been higher than expected or forecast -- in fact, the exact opposite has been true. And the notion that it is accelerating, essential to the warming thesis, has been absent in the last 17 years.

Remember that balloon and atmospheric readings are relatively new and have no long term correlations to compare. Remember also that many surface sites have been influenced by changes in local population densities, a difficult curve in the collection technique to evaluate. Most importantly, remember that disagreements in results and/or opinions are heretical only in religious disputes, in science they are only fuel for discussion aimed at long-term resolution by well meaning thinkers.

This is a graph of the IPCC's predicted temperature changes from different times over the last few years and, within it, the actual, observed temperature ranges:

  

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report (TAR) was published in 2001, following the First Assessment Report (FAR) in 1990, and the Second Assessment Report (SAR) in 1995. AR4 is the Fourth Assessment.

It may be that human beings are destroying their world. That question should be taken seriously. Using observations that create models to predict the future, when wrong, should be taken seriously too.