Bias in science: not the gender, the children?

We recently had the opportunity to chat with some young academic scientists. They love their work and their world, but it's very different from the professional trades and corporate worlds I've known. The differences may be most obvious to an ancient outsider like myself.

I was left with the dawning recognition that the debates about gender bias in science may, like most passionate debates, be talking around the elephant in the room. The baby elephant, that is.

That's not to exclude a direct bias against the XX chromosome, but even there I wonder if the bias isn't opportunistic. The modern life sciences have been brutally competitive for decades, and globalization is increasing that competition. Any opportunity to eliminate a rival may be used, and XX might come in handy.

Even so, what I read and hear suggests the direct bias is against distractions, and parenting is a major distraction -- especially for women. The productive lifespan of a scientist is as short as the major league baseball career, and it coincides with peak fertility periods. Competition is severe and resources are tight -- it's logical that parenting should be recognized as a fatal weakness.

If parenting could be outsourced completely I think science might accept that, but scientists are trained to be realists. They know mothers are prone to fall in love with their dependents, and thus to become distracted.

In this matter science seems to have rationally abandoned the pro-parenting bias that is common in other worlds, such as primary care medicine and even corporations. I work for a very typical large publicly traded company, and our divisional leader is a mother (though her children are grown of course). The distinction, I think, is that executive skills don't deteriorate as quickly as scientific skills. There's a potentially longer productive career, and there are a larger number of intermediate slots. A corporation will be "happy" to pay a "CEO-capable" mother a relative pittance to take a mid-level management position that's compatible with childcare. The most senior people of both genders, however, are not distracted by children. Their children are grown, or managed by a (female) spouse, or they are childless (often by choice).

If I'm right, and this may be a testable hypothesis, then the prospects for change are very limited. We would need to change the global competitive imperative, shift fertility into the 40s and 50s, or extend the lifespan of the brain to escape this emergent trap.

The Economist is doing day passes now ...

The Economist is now doing Salon-style day passes. I gave up on them last year after 20+ years of dedicated reading, but even in their dotage they still have a few excellent articles in each issue. The ads are quick to click through, so I'll be catching up a bit now.

I can't image their readership is suffering; they've been successfully targeting fans of the WSJ editorial page. I wonder why they're bothering...

Iraq, the GOP, Memorial day and I don't have anything to say

Behind the NYT paywall Frank Rich adds the denial of Iraqi refugees to the usual list of GOP/Cheney/Bush crimes and the occasionally relevant Dowd points out yet again that Bush has no credibility and no plan.

A few weeks back Kristoff railed against inaction on Darfur. Bush/GOP/Cheney again.

All true. All relevant every day and especially Memorial day.

What's left to say? America is a troubled nation that reelected a man who'd have been a mediocre leader in normal times, but has been a historic catastrophe in our times. Maybe we'll teeter away from disaster in two years, but we'll still be on the brink.

How do we reach Americans?

Doonesbury.com: denial of service attack?

I read Doonesbury on the web daily. For the past two days Doonesbury.com has returned:

www.doonesbury.com could not be found. Please check the name and try again.

It's Memorial Day weekend, and it's likely that Trudeau Inc will be commenting on the GOP's war.

Coincidence or a denial of service attack?

One way to defeat a DOS attack is to redistribute the "offending" material to multiple distributed servers. This turns the attack into a promotion. Media syndicates, of course, don't want to do this. It dilutes their IP ownership.

Maybe it's time they thought this over ...

Pursuing the evolution of the philosophy of quantum physics

This post is partly a pursuit of my ongoing interest in the philosophical interpretations of quantum reality, but it's mostly a story of how radically the world is changing. I still remember paging through volumes of the Index Medicus in our library -- a task as far removed from today's world as using a book to look up a logarithm (yes, I learned that too ...).

Recently, when searching for post of mine on a related topic, I came across one from 2004 about a research paper on the "emergence" of consensus reality as a result of multiple observations selecting for a "pointer" (stable) macro state. (Quantum Darwinism.)

It's interesting stuff, but how do I pursue it further? Turns out, it's not so hard.

My blog post pointed to the Nature article. That pointed to a PubMed (med?!) citation, and related articles, including one on quantum coherence in biological systems. (Is the human brain a quantum computer? It's fun to ask such questions, though I suspect it is not.) Note that these PubMed queries have an RSS feed, so I can track activity via Bloglines.

Next I took the title from the PubMed citation and plugged it into Google Scholar; this produces an interesting result set with links to yet more related articles.

Today most of the endpoints are dead-ends (pay-per-view journals), but more and more science is being published in open journals. We're not far from a world in which the queries I did (they took far less time to do than to describe) will end in readable journal articles, such as D Poulin's 2004 Physics thesis. (PDF btw, Google tries to render an HTML version, but it chokes on the equations).

Incidentally, it does appear that realism (observer-independent reality) has joined locality ("things" are bounded by space) in the dustbin of history. Our university is deeply quantum, and the seeming persistence of everyday reality is an emergent result ...

PS. There's a wee bit of whackiness in some of the results I found.

The Clinton's sleazy donor - InfoUSA

Ouch. Ouch.

Hilary and Bill Clinton trn out to have an old "friend" and multi-million dollar "donor" who runs a sleazy business. Vinod Gupta is the CEO of InfoUSA, a company known for the information they provide to the highest bidder:

... InfoUSA advertised lists of “Elderly Opportunity Seekers,” 3.3 million older people “looking for ways to make money,” and “Suffering Seniors,” 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. “Oldies but Goodies” contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents apiece. One list said: “These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change.”..

Gupta's been gifting millions to the Clintons for years:

...Gupta has steadfastly believed that to get what you want done in America, you have to put your money where your mouth is.

He held a $1000-a-person fundraiser last March at his home in Omaha, Nebraska, for Hillary Clinton that raised $100,000 for her senate campaign.

He also raised $500,000 for a large party last May for Clinton and Al Gore. His political contributions put him in the company of entertainment moguls like Steven Spielberg and Haim Saban...

He's a big donor. I wonder what Hilary's real record is on consumer privacy detection, and the management of abuses by companies like InfoUSA.

Recently, the same newspaper that exposed InfoUSA's profitable relationship with international criminals preying the elderly had some more on InfoUSA's relationship with the Clintons (emphases mine)...

Suit Sheds Light on Clintons’ Ties to a Benefactor - New York Times
May 26, 2007 By MIKE McINTIRE

When former President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton took a family vacation in January 2002 to Acapulco, Mexico, one of their longtime supporters, Vinod Gupta, provided his company’s private jet to fly them there.

The company, infoUSA, one of the nation’s largest brokers of information on consumers, paid $146,866 to ferry the Clintons, Mr. Gupta and others to Acapulco and back, court records show. During the next four years, infoUSA paid Mr. Clinton more than $2 million for consulting services, and spent almost $900,000 to fly him around the world for his presidential foundation work and to fly Mrs. Clinton to campaign events.

Those expenses are cited in a lawsuit filed late last year in a Delaware court by angry shareholders of infoUSA, who assert that Mr. Gupta wasted the company’s money trying “to ingratiate himself” with his high-profile guests.

The disclosure of the trips and the consulting fees is just a small part of a broader complaint about the way Mr. Gupta has managed his company. But for the former president, and for the senator who would become president, it offers significant new details about their relationship with an unusually generous benefactor whose business practices have lately come under scrutiny.

In addition to the shareholder accusations, The New York Times reported last Sunday that an investigation by the authorities in Iowa found that infoUSA sold consumer data several years ago to telemarketing criminals who used it to steal money from elderly Americans. It advertised call lists with titles like “Elderly Opportunity Seekers” or “Suffering Seniors,” a compilation of people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. The company called the episodes an aberration and pledged that it would not happen again.

Asked to describe Mr. Clinton’s consulting services, an infoUSA official said they were limited to making appearances at one or two company events each year. Jay Carson, a spokesman for Mr. Clinton, would not elaborate on what the former president does for infoUSA, but said that he shared the public’s concern about misuse of personal information.

“It goes without saying that any suggestion that seniors are being preyed upon should be fully investigated and addressed by the appropriate agencies,” Mr. Carson said.

Aides to Mrs. Clinton were at pains to distance her from infoUSA, pointing out that she had sponsored legislation that would strengthen privacy rights of consumers. As for the flights on infoUSA’s plane, Phil Singer, Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman, said the senator “complied with all the relevant ethics rules” on accepting private air travel.

Ethics rules for senators and candidates require only that the recipient of a flight make reimbursement at a rate equal to that of a first-class ticket, a long-derided loophole that allows special interests to provide de facto gifts of expensive private air travel, which generally costs far more than commercial fares. Mr. Singer would not say what Mrs. Clinton paid for her flights...

...“When the C.E.O. of a publicly traded company can say with a straight face that the shareholders benefit from having a yacht with an all-female crew stationed in the Virgin Islands, then you’ve got a problem,” Mr. Denton said...

...InfoUSA made $2.1 million in quarterly payments to Mr. Clinton from July 2003 to April 2005, and in October 2005 entered into a new three-year agreement to pay him $1.2 million. It also gave him an option to buy 100,000 shares of infoUSA stock, with no expiration date....

...Mr. Clinton normally commands $125,000 to $300,000 for the many speeches he gives each year, and has earned almost $40 million on the lecture circuit since leaving office...

Mr. Dean also said that the numerous flights infoUSA provided for Mr. Clinton’s nonprofit foundation activities constituted charitable donations, for which the company was entitled to a tax deduction. The flights included trips to European capitals, Alaska, Florida, Hawaii and Mr. Clinton’s home state of Arkansas...

The thought of Bill Clinton on all female yacht in the Virgin Islands is irresistible.

Edwards looks better all the time.

Prozac retrospective

The history of Prozac is recommended reading for any physician. I particularly liked the story of how the drug found an indication.

The promise of pharmacogenomics is that we'll be better able to tell who will benefit from Prozac and who won't.

Emergence, unanticipated consequences, and hidden inflation

I've been interested lately in emergence and natural selection in non-biologic systems. There are surprisingly common applications in every day life. In the corporate world technical accounting rules and cash flow incentives can cause an emergent attack on an entire product line -- without anyone realizing why they're making bad choices.

In academia certain kinds of results are highly grantable, so the research program is pursued even though many believe it's misdirected. In time papers spawn papers and a new, regrettably false, dogma is born.

In all these cases the behavior is a result of incentives changing the "ecosystem", and organisms (people) evolving (adapting) to the new environment.

Which brings me to our X-ACTO electric pencil sharpener. It never worked properly, and after months of chewed up pencils we came to our senses and tossed it out. Another defective product, broken by design. Just like our DVD/VCRs, toasters, etc.

If we were to replace the X-ACTO with a similar model, our yearly cost of pencil sharpening would double or triple. Gee, that sounds like inflation -- except, of course, the price of the sharpener is stable or falling. Hmm. Rising cost of pencil sharpening, falling costs of sharpeners ... So is inflation really 3.5%, or is it perhaps 7%?

Imagine a system in which all the economic pressures that once created inflation still exist, but we've figured out how to block the traditional expression of inflation. Pressure. No outlet. Where will it go? It will find a way out, an emergent solution. A solution like products that are cheap but have very short lifespans.

The Federal reserve, of course, is oblivious. Their instruments can't spot the problem, they're looking in the wrong direction. In the meantime the cost of sharpening keeps rising ...

MySpace and sex offenders -- can this get any more ridiculous?

I created a MySpace page once, just to see what the fuss was about. Hint, it's about a fundamental biological activity that's not eating, sleeping, or breathing. Most of the profiles are of people from ages 15 to 25.

Astonishingly some of the clientele tend to be ... on the prowl. I thought that was kind of the point, but some are nastier prowlers than others. Recently MySpace decided it was going to try to screen out members who've been convicted of "sex crimes". Now, how are they going to do that?

This is known in my day job as a problem in "patient matching". In the absence of a unique identifier, how can you tell two people are the same? Well, it's not easy -- even if your population is cooperating. Matching is statistical. If the gender, us-legal-names, address history, birth dates, etc more or less match, then you assume the two people are the same. A social security number is often (mis)used in healthcare matching, but a phone number can do almost as well. Sooner or later you do get a false match, but, if people aren't trying to hide their identity and you can ask for a SSN or phone number, you can do pretty well. All of these obvious matching algorithms, by the way, are patented.

Homeland security tries to do the same thing with less data. They probably severely inconvenience over a thousand innocent people for every bad actor they may deter. It's completely pointless.

So, what did MySpace do? They hired a company that tries to track felons based on a (probably patent violating) matching algorithm. MySpace doesn't have a SSN though, so the matches are highly problematic. Not to mention that any "predator" who ever entered correct data has now changed it. Oh, and do you think the birth dates on MySpace are accurate?

The company had to find some matches, so they relaxed their algorithm a tad ...

ABC News: MySpace Error: Woman No Sex Offender:

... 'The Jessica Davis in question is absolutely not a sex offender,' Cardillo told ABCNEWS.com, explaining that beyond sharing a similar and common name, Jessica Davis the non-sex offender and Jessica Dawn Davis the sex offender also had birthdays two days off as well as two years off and had lived in Florida at roughly the same time.

Cardillo, who called the initial match an'unfortunate circumstance,' said that the database worked exactly as intended.

'It was so close,' Cardillo told ABCNEWS.com. 'It was one of those rare instances where there was nothing else we could have done but flag her. If we get an offender and I'm looking at a date of birth that's two days off, we're going to assume were dealing with the offender.'"

In other words, they deliberately err on the side of false positives. There's no appeal process, MySpace simply deletes the user's profile page and all their content. I'll bet, even considering that the MySpace user base almost certainly has a higher than average concentration of bad actors, that the majority of their matches are false positives. Wait until MySpace then turns over the names and addresses of their "matches" to the police.

Sigh.

The ancients on intellectual property and copyright

ML quotes Packbat interpeting Thomas Macauley's 1941 speeches to the British Parliament ...

Making Light: This is not about "intellectual property"

1. The copyright is not an innate right, but a creation of human government.
2. A copyright is a form of monopoly, and therefore effectively a tax on the public—thus, it should be restricted to precisely as long a term as would make equivalent the harm done to the public by monopoly and the good provided by encouraging the creation of new works.
3. The prospect of income from a property a long time after one’s death is no incentive whatsoever to the creation of new works.
4. The probability that the persons for whom the author might have concern will own the copyright a long time after one’s death is minute.
5. The probability that the copyright owner might suppress the works, for whatever reason, is great.

See also a prescient short story on the topic. Recently the NYT published an editorial calling for even longer persistence of copyright. I didn't have the heart to read it.

The seas of Titan

 Click on the small JPG to see a larger image. Look at it and try to imagine how far away Titan is, and imagine our miniscule orbiter circling about, taking pictures of the seas of methane sloshing around a cold, cold coast ...

Catalog Page for PIA09211

On May 12, 2007, Cassini completed its 31st flyby of Saturn's moon Titan ... The radar instrument obtained this image showing the coastline and numerous island groups of a portion of a large sea, consistent with the larger sea seen by the Cassini imaging instrument...

Like other bodies of liquid seen on Titan, this feature reveals channels, islands, bays, and other features typical of terrestrial coastlines, and the liquid, most likely a combination of methane and ethane, appears very dark to the radar instrument. What is striking about this portion of the sea compared to other liquid bodies on Titan is the relative absence of brighter regions within it, suggesting that the depth of the liquid here exceeds tens of meters ..

Maybe we're only an eyeblink in the evolutionary history of the earth, a miniscule layer of contaminated sediment eons from now. Maybe we won't make it through the next 60 years. But by golly, we took pictures of the seas of Titan. We'll have gone out swinging ...

How the Bushies control the news

They reward their friends and they punish their critics ...

McClatchy's D.C. Bureau Claims It's Barred From Defense Secretary Plane:

... Bureau Chief John Walcott and current and former McClatchy Pentagon correspondents say they have not been allowed on the Defense Secretary's plane for at least three years, claiming the news company is being retaliated against for its reporting.

'It is because our coverage of Iraq policy has been quite critical,' Walcott told E&P. He added, 'I think the idea of public officials barring coverage by people they've decided they don't like is at best unprofessional, at worst undemocratic and petty.'

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman called such assertions "absurd," adding, "There is no basis of fact for that allegation. It is not true. There are always more people who would like to travel with the secretary than seats available."...

Suurre. It's just a 3 year coincidence that Fox has a seat ...

Rewarding friends and punishing critics is a fine way to run a corporation or a dictatorship. It's no way to run a democracy. Bush has earned his place in history.

Climate Change and the Black Plague

I was in Denver recently, where a zoo primate recently died from bubonic plague (Yersinia pestis infection). The animal probably ate an infected squirrel. Bubonic plague is endemic in the American west, but it doesn't get much attention. Human cases are uncommon and usually treatable.

When I read the story I wondered about the intersection of climate and disease. Why does Yersinia pestis infection become epidemic? Why was it a recurrent catastrophe throughout medieval european history?

In the old days I'd wonder if this hypothesis had been studied much, then forget about it. Nowadays, of course, I simply presume someone's studied it and I ask Google. Here's an excerpt from a coincidentally recent review for the layperson (emphases mine):

Geotimes - May 2007 - The Plague: Could It Happen Again?

...The 14th through 19th centuries were challenging times in Europe. Winters were harsh, filled with heavy snowfalls that lasted late into spring and ice that perpetually covered mountaintops and pushed into settled valleys. Springs and summers were so cold and wet that crops would not grow, or became moldy before they could be consumed. People and livestock starved. Wars were fought over scant resources as people traveled farther than before, searching for food and better conditions and colliding with anyone who got in their way.

These desolate conditions forced people to leave their homes and rotting fields in the countryside and head for cities, where crowding and poor sanitation were the rule. Meanwhile, international trade greatly expanded, as ships and caravans brought goods from Asia into European cities. Trade brought more than just goods, however: It also brought diseases.

During these 500 years of cold, extreme and unpredictable weather in Europe, temperatures rose slightly for brief periods of time. But rather than providing a respite from the cold, the warmer temperatures actually promoted the proliferation of infectious diseases. Chief among them was plague. Estimates suggest that up to half of Europe’s already weakened population was wiped out by devastating epidemics, including the infamous Black Death that began in 1347 and the Great Plague of London in 1665, when people died so quickly that bodies piled up on the sidewalks...

... Bubonic plague is “a disease of nature,” Engelthaler says, meaning that climate and landscape play a vital role in the survival and spread of the bacterium that causes the disease. Rodent and flea population dynamics are driven by many factors, Gage adds, including food availability, disease and climate variables, namely precipitation and temperature. In studies published over the last five years, models and observations have shown that precipitation and temperature strongly influence the spread of plague.

The most important factor in the disease, besides the bacterium, Engelthaler says, is the flea that carries and transmits the disease. Not all species of flea will transfer or maintain the bacterium, and some transmit it better than others. The type of flea that lives on cats, for example, is not a good vector, he says. But the fleas that live on black rats and ground squirrels are great vectors. Furthermore, the fleas that carry Yersinia pestis can only survive for long periods in “optimal” conditions, including warm but not hot temperatures and wet environments. And they can only transmit the bacterium under even more specific conditions, he says. If temperatures get too hot, the biology of the bacterium stops it from spreading, by breaking down the bacterial blockages that have built up in the flea vector’s gut and are considered essential for efficient transmission.

In addition to needing the right type of flea, the right type of host needs to be present to keep the cycle of transfer from flea to host and back to flea going, Engelthaler says. Black rats and prairie dogs die within days of being infected, so they might not be the best hosts, he says. Although ground squirrels also often die from plague, they can carry the bacterium around for months, allowing fleas to transfer the plague bacterium from their dying host to another unsuspecting host.

To get widespread epidemics of the disease, the density of host rodents must first reach a threshold level in a region, Gage says. Then the weather has to cooperate to keep it going and to increase the number of human cases, he says.

In the American Southwest, where plague is prevalent in wild rodents and an average of five to 15 people contract the disease each year, increasing rainfall in late winter and early spring leads to a sizable increase in plague 15 months later, Gage says, as seen in models and observations over the past 50 years. It works in a sort of “trophic cascade,” he says: “Heavy precipitation in early spring leads to more plant growth and more insects, which means more food for the rodents, which leads to more hosts for the [plague-bearing] fleas, and thus more plague.” The other important factor, he says, is lower summer temperatures.

The story is similar in Central Asia, says Nils Chr. Stenseth of the University of Oslo. Infection rates and climate data from 1949 to 1995 in Kazakhstan showed that with just a 1 degree Celsius increase in spring temperatures, plague prevalence in gerbils more than doubled a year or two later, Stenseth says. Wetter summers also led to an increase in plague prevalence the following fall, he says.

Ongoing research in China and other parts of the world is finding a similar trend, Stenseth says, though the exact mechanisms may be slightly different, such as whether spring or summer precipitation or temperature is the driving factor. And models are agreeing with the data. “The general message we’re seeing all over the world is that climate is important,” he says. “Furthermore, climate is changing in a way that will affect human plague cases.”

We don't expect to see plague recur, but it now appears likely that it was an interconnected combination of socioeconomic and climate change that led to the plagues that killed up to half of Europe. Now would be a good time to invest in this research domain.

Gore: Reason and America

There is a large part of American culture that distrusts logic, reason, and empiricism. This is George Bush's natural home, and it's not compatible with the survival of our civilization. Al Gore:

The Assault on Reason - Al Gore - Book - Review - New York Times

...Mr. Gore’s central argument is that “reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions” and that the country’s public discourse has become “less focused and clear, less reasoned.” This “assault on reason,” he suggests, is personified by the way the Bush White House operates. Echoing many reporters and former administration insiders, Mr. Gore says that the administration tends to ignore expert advice (be it on troop levels, global warming or the deficit), to circumvent the usual policy-making machinery of analysis and debate, and frequently to suppress or disdain the best evidence available on a given subject so it can promote predetermined, ideologically driven policies...

There's an obvious political problem with this book. Fundamentalism, both ideological and religious, is the opposite of reason. Even the Jesuits struggle at times with their relationship to science. America is a very religious country. This book may be Gore's way of making perfectly clear to the public what they'll get if he runs for office. It's not politic.

Unable to find the Sachs Reith Lectures? Izmi has them

I have been impressed with Sachs Reith Lectures, but the Radio 4 Download policy was absurdly restrictive. Lectures were available as mp3 for only 7 days. I've been too busy to sync my iPod regularly, so I only caught two by Podcast. I caught two more through an RSS feed, but somehow I missed number five. I was ready to fire up Audio Hijack Pro and capture the stream to aac, but similar complaints on a forum pointed instead to: an izimi - search. I got number five that way.

Izimi is a UK peer-to-peer file sharing site, with the one distinction that anyone can search the site by a web browser. Whatever their business model, I must thank them for making this material available. The BBC's attitude towards making this material available is laughably contrary to Sachs call for a new enlightenment. It's as though Radio Four is working for the forces of evil ...