STEM, Gender and AP

                            STEM, Gender, and AP

Discrimination in its numerous subtle guises is offered to explain the differences in STEM gender disparities. But here’s another possible explanation for the female shortages in STEM and economics starting in high school: Boys have a greater interest than their female counterparts in STEM and economics and demonstrate a higher level of aptitude in STEM and economics. In all 14 STEM and economics AP subjects as shown in the top two graphs, high school boys out-perform high school girls based on average test scores in 2019. More high school boys than girls received scores of 5 (the highest score) in the 13 subjects, and in some cases (three of the physics subjects) the male-female ratio was more than 4-to-1. In other subjects (Microeconomics, Computer Science and Physics Mechanics), the male-female ratio was greater than 2-to-1.

These graphs are from Perry.

Tweaking the Scales

                     Tweaking the Scales

Britain’s Prince Andrew has provided “zero cooperation” to the American investigators who want to interview him as part of their sex trafficking probe into Jeffrey Epstein, a U.S. prosecutor said Monday. Speaking at a news conference outside Epstein’s New York mansion, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said prosecutors and the FBI had contacted Andrew’s lawyers and asked to interview him. “To date, Prince Andrew has provided zero cooperation,” said Berman, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan.

Buckingham Palace declined to comment.

At a news conference outside Epstein’s New York mansion? Why is that? And why was there a news conference at all? Aren't there well-worn pathways for the wagon wheels of justice to follow? Procedures and policies? Cautious and constitutionally sensitive routines to pursue in investigations?

Or is this just Schiff-like tropism, seeking the light of the camera?

It sounds like more, more than just self-aggrandizing or an hour to make the wife proud. Outside Epstein’s New York mansion? It sounds like a planned effort to garner publicity. The Feds are doing publicity stunts?

Putting aside the theoretical problems of influencing potential jurors, is this what we want? Having the Feds scrounging some downtime in the very free press to hype an investigation? Or, as Chris argues, is the system--and the Press--so corrupt and in thrall to political and financial interest that Justice needs the help?

Bringing Back the Stone Age

                      Bringing Back the Stone Age

Clean-burning natural gas has reduced CO2 emissions in the U.S. back to levels experienced in the early 1990s, yielding a 15% reduction in overall U.S. carbon emissions, more than any other country. This with a growing population and an exploding economy. It would be interesting to see how those results compare to the signers of the Paris Accord. Yet almost the entire Democratic field for president wants to dismantle and destroy the industry that has done more for middle-class Americans than any other over the past 10 years. U.S. electricity costs are the envy of the industrialized world. Subsidized energy alternative energy sources are a source of tremendous domestic disruption in France and Germany. Russia has a major disinformation campaign about fracking in Europe to reduce fracking competition for their gas.

Lower energy prices are like a progressive tax cut that helps the poorest households most. But Democrats would reverse all of it. A bill introduced last week by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) with help from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) would ban hydraulic fracking nationwide by 2025. That ban would increase CO2 emissions and restore Russia as the world’s top energy superpower. And it would raise baseline budgets across the country.

Incompetence usually trumps malice in government but this kind of thinking is hard to place in a reasonable context. On the other hand, maybe standing in front of a freight train of progress is mainly posturing. And fatal.

SOTU

                                                    SOTU

I rarely watch the SOTU but, after Iowa, I did. It was astonishing. Somehow Trump, on some primal level, understands these political people and holds a mirror up to them; what they see drives them nuts.

Trump spent the evening listing his accomplishments. The point in this country, of course, is the achievements of the State within clear borders defined by the Constitution, but no politician cares about that. The list was long but, amazingly,  locked in to their political hardware, the Democrat counter-speech emphasized "accomplishments," like fixing potholes.

Trump filled the evening with political handouts, real time awards a la Oprah, patriotic bravado and schmaltz as if plagiarized from the Democrat playbook. The Dems responded with pouting and, in a rare look behind Pelosi's curtain, gross petulance. JLo and Shakira did not appear.

An evening of theatrical posturing, insincerity and childishness with Trump looking like the grownup.

The political class may never recover.

Trust vs. Reliance

                          Trust vs. Reliance

Declines in trust of government correlate strongly with calls for more government regulation in more parts of our lives. "Individuals in low-trust countries want more government intervention even though they know the government is corrupt," explain the authors of a 2010 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper. That's certainly the case in the United States, where the size, scope, and spending of government has vastly increased over exactly the same period in which trust and confidence in the government has cratered. In 2018, one of the paper's authors, Andrei Shleifer, a Harvard economist who grew up in the Soviet Union before coming to America, was asked, why do citizens ask a government they don't believe in to bring order? "They want regulation," he said. "They want a dictator who will bring back order."

While this might be a simplistic--or Russian--explanation, the correlation is curious.

Counterintuitively, the relative size and spending of government in the United States actually flattened or dipped during periods when trust and confidence in government picked up:

From 1994 to 2001, Pew data show upticks in the number of people who trust the government to mostly do the right thing…. Using inflation-adjusted dollars, the feds spent about $250 billion more in [Bill] Clinton's last year than in his first, a small increase compared to the spending surges seen under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Viewed as a percentage of GDP, federal spending fell significantly during that period. In 1991, it equaled 21 percent. By 2001, it equaled just 17.5 percent.

It could also be that lack of confidence in government is taught, that it rises when government action is more prominent. On the other hand, in a crisis people may just turn to the seemingly strongest solution.

Bad Rumors, Righteous Responses

                            Bad Rumors, Righteous Responses


Facebook Inc said it will take down misinformation about China’s fast-spreading coronavirus, in a rare departure from its usual approach to dubious health content that is presenting a fresh challenge for social media companies. How "dubious" is defined is anyone's guess.

Here is a particularly delicious one.

There is a theory that China obtained the coronavirus via a Canadian research program, and started molding it into a bioweapon at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan.

The narrative is that the virus, which was developed by infectious disease experts, may have originated in the Wuhan-based lab of Dr. Peng Zhou, China's preeminent researcher of bat immune systems. The lab specializes in how bat immune systems adapt to the presence of viruses like coronavirus and other destructive viruses. Somehow, the virus escaped from the lab, and the Hunan fish market where the virus supposedly originated is merely a ruse.

Now, a respected epidemiologist, who recently caught flack for claiming in a twitter threat that the virus appeared to be much more contagious than initially believed, is pointing out irregularities in the virus's genome that suggests it might have been genetically engineered for the purposes of a weapon, and not just any weapon but a really deadly one.

In "Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag", Indian researchers are baffled by segments of the virus's RNA that have no relation to other coronaviruses like SARS, and instead appear to be closer to HIV. The virus even responds to treatment by HIV medications.

Just as if it were built.

Graphs and Art

                              Graphs and Art

After increasing about three-fold between 1950 and 2000 at an average rate of about 2.3% per year, total US energy consumption peaked in about 2000 at around 100,000 trillion BTUs and has been flat for about the last two decades. And over that 20-year period, US real GDP has increased by almost 50%! CO2 emissions in the US over the next decade are expected to continue a downward trend that started in 2007, and by 2030 will fall to the lowest level since 1986 and 22% below the 2007 peak.


US energy production as a share of energy consumption topped 100% for the first time since 1956 as America was actually a net energy exporter for the first time in more than 60 years. In 2005 the US produced less than 70% of its energy consumed as the country’s energy self-sufficiency reached an all-time low.



Japanese artist Kumi Yamashita winds a single black thread around a grid of nails on a wooden board to create intricate portraits.

The Coronavirus is less lethal but more communicable than SARS.

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10:12 AM - Jan 31, 2020