The evidence that adult IQ is unrelated to postnatal environment

I've seen this mentioned several times. I don't know how good the evidence base is; we've seen similar results turn out to be based on very little data.

If it's true, it's rather convincing evidence that adult intellectual ability is not much affected by postnatal life, and is probably almost entirely innate.

Searching for Intelligence in Our Genes: Scientific American:

... “Two people with the same genes correlate as much as a person does with himself a year later,” Plomin says. “Identical twins reared apart are almost as similar as identical twins reared together.” But these similarities also take time to emerge. “By the age of 16 these adopted-away children resemble their biological parents’ IQ just as much as kids do who are reared by their biological parents,” Plomin adds...

The corollary is that IQ results are impacted by environment prior to age 16.

I would like to know how good the evidence base for this really is.

On a related topic, we know that the brain is extensively transformed during adolescence. Is this when the innate IQ "reset" occurs?

Fox News jumps the shark?

Has Fox News, driven to frothing madness by Sarah Lynch Mob Peron, finally jumped the shark?

Op-Ed Columnist - Clearing the Ayers - NYTimes.com

… In my experience, most State Senate hopefuls are so thrilled at any sign of interest that they would happily attend a reception given by a homeless couple in their cardboard box. But even though Obama was 8 years old at the time the Weathermen were in the news, that house party puts all their misdeeds on his platter. Sarah Palin has been telling her increasingly scary rallies that he is somebody “who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists.”

Fox News, in a one-hour special on Obama’s associates hosted by Sean Hannity, came up with an “Internet journalist” named Andy Martin who has spent his life running bizarre political campaigns with occasional detours into the clink and filing lawsuits laced with paranoia and anti-Semitism. Based on this expertise, Martin deduced that Ayers was the puppet master of Obama’s rise in politics and that Obama’s community-organizer gig was actually training for “a radical overthrow of the government.”

Before we go any further, I have a confession to make. When I was a college student, I believe I attended a party with Bernardine Dohrn. This was pre-Weather, when Dohrn was a leader of the Students for a Democratic Society, better known as S.D.S. Some of my friends wanted to meet her because they were interested in establishing an S.D.S. chapter at our campus. I was opposed, under the presumption that S.D.S. meant Students for Decent Styles, a group that had been active in fighting spaghetti-strap dresses at my high school.

Still, under the new rules, I believe I may now be held partly responsible for all of Dohrn’s misdeeds, including aggravated battery, bail jumping, the Days of Rage and unreadable political tracts.

McCain’s favorite supporter, Senator Joseph Lieberman, recently called the Obama-Ayers connection “fair game.” This reminded me that Lieberman once came to a party at my house. It was years ago, when he was still a Connecticut state senator, and we have already established that state senators will go to anything. Still, I can’t help but feel that I am not only a potential victim of the new guilt-by-association standard, I am also somewhat complicit in establishing it.

Obama’s retaliation for the Ayers assault has been to remind voters that many years ago McCain was censured in the Senate for his relationship with Charles Keating, the rogue banker whose failed Lincoln Savings and Loan cost the taxpayers $2.6 billion at a time when $2.6 billion was really worth something.

When I was a teenager, Keating came to my Catholic girls high school in Cincinnati in his capacity as the founder of Citizens for Decent Literature, an anti-pornography group. His theme was the evil of wearing shorts in the summertime.

Keating said he knew a young mother who took her child for a walk while wearing Bermuda shorts. A motorist, overwhelmed with lust at the sight of the back of her uncovered calves, lost control of his car and slammed into them. Everybody was killed, and it was all her fault. We were then asked to sign pledge cards promising to conform to standards of modesty that would have satisfied the Taliban.

True, none of this really proves that I was responsible for the banking scandals of the 1980s. But if Barack Obama is responsible for the Weather Underground, and if the mother in Bermuda shorts was responsible for the car crash, I am pretty sure that I am on the hook as well.

Obama can’t say it of course, but the biggest American terrorists of the past 30 years were all on the right. They burned abortion clinics, and they blew up the Murrah building. In terms of terrorist associations, I suspect we’ll find McCain has more than a few in his closet – not even counting foreign leaders he’s worked with when he was more than 8 years old.

What will happen to Fox News if, though I think this is very unlikely, Obama wins?

Obama throws down: Say it to My Face

Slap, as in a challenging a dishonorable cowardly liar to a duel:

Talking Points Memo | Slap

... "I am surprised that, you know, we've been seeing some pretty over-the-top attacks coming out of the McCain campaign over the last several days, that he wasn't willing to say it to my face. But I guess we've got one last debate. So presumably, if he ends up feeling that he needs to, he will raise it during the debate.'

Calm, cool, and courageous. Well said.

NPR and the annals of false equivalency

When it comes to radio, my "dial" pretty much stays at National Public Radio. (Anyone remember dials? Ok, I digress.) Of course these days I listen to more podcasts (In Our Time) than radio, but I don't think I'd want NPR to vanish.

Mostly, I don't.

Sometimes, though, I wonder. Yesterday a piece on campaign propaganda featured a wonderful bit of false equivalency.

On the one side - McCain is accused of an erratic response to the financial crisis.

On the other side - Obama wants to teach sex to six year olds.

The thesis is they're both equally untrue. Never mind that even David Brooks, propagandist for the GOP, thinks McCain's response to the finance bust was ... well ... erratic. Or that even the WSJ struggles to repeat the sex lie.

These false equivalencies are much worse coming from a "respected" voice.

Now that the NYT is weaning itself from the GOP's very effective equivalency game, NPR is still stuck. Maybe that has something to do with their funding, maybe it's the people.

Fund raising is coming up again. Maybe I'll give the money to CARE this year.

Norm Coleman's pants and the angry bloggers

Nobody here gave Al Franken much of a chance against Norm Coleman - a smart and slippery GOP Senator. Lately though the polls have been getting closer.

Now "angry bloggers" are getting in Coleman's pants ....

Talking Points Memo | (Free) Empty Suit?

... We know Sen. Norm Coleman gets a special deal on his Capitol Hill pad. And a few days ago, Harper's Ken Silverstein got word that another one of his supporters, Nasser Kezeminy, covers the tab for Coleman's clothing budget.

This week a campaign tracker tried to get Coleman to say whether it was true. The answer? It's all about the angry bloggers ..."

Pantsgate. I like it.

I can see the Franken ads now.

We must resist hope. Now is not a time to rest.

Now is the most dangerous time.

McCain needed a knockout, and he didn't get it. - By John Dickerson - Slate Magazine

.... After their second debate, both Barack Obama and John McCain shook hands with the Nashville audience of 80 uncommitted voters. Both were well-received. But Obama stayed longer, and with McCain out of the room, the affection from the swing voters increased. He was mobbed, patted, beamed at, embraced. One woman wiggled up next to him. At one point, about 15 voters posed for a group picture like it was the last day of camp. The 'Nashville '08 Debate' T-shirts are in the mail.

These uncommitted voters wanted to be next to Barack Obama, and the adulation from the audience helps explain why he won the debate. In the post-debate polls on CNN and CBS, he was the clear winner, and he also won Fox's focus group....

Now is when people begin to daydream. Now is when people start talking about who would serve in an Obama administration.

Wrong. The worst possible mistake.

We should be acting like Obama is, at best, tied. Because, I believe, that is, at best, the truth.

The GOP's back is to the wall, and they will fight like cornered rats. This will get fouler than most of us can imagine. If Obama wins it will be decided by the narrowest of margins. There will be voter fraud. There will be court challenges. The Supreme Court may again choose the winner.

Don't let go of The Fear, make it drive you. Donate money.

Do not feel hope.

The Sun rises in the East and Data Mining doesn't work

Remember the Do Not Fly list and all the other data mined lists that our Beloved Leader and his Righteous Deputies have been using to Protect us from Evil the past 8 years? God told them it would work. They had no need of reason or logic, they Knew It Was Good.

Shockingly, and I'm not joking now, someone in power actually involved the National Research Council to see if God was telling the truth to His One True Disciple.

Even more shockingly, after years of what must have been very strenuous blocking efforts, the report is being released.

Only mildly astoundingly, it's not a forgery.

As certainly as the Sun rises in the East, the data mining efforts produce too many false positive results. They do not work for the purpose for which they were created.

Government report: Data mining doesn't work well | Politics and Law - CNET News

The most extensive government report to date on whether terrorists can be identified through data mining has yielded an important conclusion: It doesn't really work.

A National Research Council report, years in the making and scheduled to be released Tuesday, concludes that automated identification of terrorists through data mining or any other mechanism "is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts." Inevitable false positives will result in "ordinary, law-abiding citizens and businesses" being incorrectly flagged as suspects.

The whopping 352-page report, called "Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists," amounts to at least a partial repudiation of the Defense Department's controversial data-mining program called Total Information Awareness, which was limited by Congress in 2003.

But the ambition of the report's authors is far broader than just revisiting the problems of the TIA program and its successors. Instead, they aim to produce a scholarly evaluation of the current technologies that exist for data mining, their effectiveness, and how government agencies should use them to limit false positives--of the sort that can result in situations like heavily-armed SWAT teams raiding someone's home and shooting their dogs based on the false belief that they were part of a drug ring.

The report was written by a committee whose members include William Perry, a professor at Stanford University; Charles Vest, the former president of MIT; W. Earl Boebert, a retired senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories; Cynthia Dwork of Microsoft Research; R. Gil Kerlikowske, Seattle's police chief; and Daryl Pregibon, a research scientist at Google.

They admit that far more Americans live their lives online, using everything from VoIP phones to Facebook to RFID tags in automobiles, than a decade ago, and the databases created by those activities are tempting targets for federal agencies. And they draw a distinction between subject-based data mining (starting with one individual and looking for connections) compared with pattern-based data mining (looking for anomalous activities that could show illegal activities).

But the authors conclude the type of data mining that government bureaucrats would like to do [jf: What do you mean "would like to do"?! They've been doing this for 8 years] --perhaps inspired by watching too many episodes of the Fox series 24--can't work. "If it were possible to automatically find the digital tracks of terrorists and automatically monitor only the communications of terrorists, public policy choices in this domain would be much simpler. But it is not possible to do so."

A summary of the recommendations:

* U.S. government agencies should be required to follow a systematic process to evaluate the effectiveness, lawfulness, and consistency with U.S. values of every information-based program, whether classified or unclassified, for detecting and countering terrorists before it can be deployed, and periodically thereafter.

* Periodically after a program has been operationally deployed, and in particular before a program enters a new phase in its life cycle, policy makers should (carefully review) the program before allowing it to continue operations or to proceed to the next phase.

* To protect the privacy of innocent people, the research and development of any information-based counterterrorism program should be conducted with synthetic population data... At all stages of a phased deployment, data about individuals should be rigorously subjected to the full safeguards of the framework.

* Any information-based counterterrorism program of the U.S. government should be subjected to robust, independent oversight of the operations of that program, a part of which would entail a practice of using the same data mining technologies to "mine the miners and track the trackers."

* Counterterrorism programs should provide meaningful redress to any individuals inappropriately harmed by their operation.

* The U.S. government should periodically review the nation's laws, policies, and procedures that protect individuals' private information for relevance and effectiveness in light of changing technologies and circumstances. In particular, Congress should re-examine existing law to consider how privacy should be protected in the context of information-based programs (e.g., data mining) for counterterrorism.

By itself, of course, this is merely a report with non-binding recommendations that Congress and the executive branch could ignore. But NRC reports are not radical treatises written by an advocacy group; they tend to represent a working consensus of technologists and lawyers.

The great encryption debate of the 1990s was one example. The NRC's so-called CRISIS report on encryption in 1996 concluded export controls--that treated software like Web browsers and PGP as munitions--were a failure and should be relaxed. That eventually happened two years later.

Asking this NRC group to write this report is like using a neutron bomb to kill a fly. I guess that's what it takes to stand up to a television show and God's One True Disciple.

As noted above this is not to say that the same data mining techniques could not "work" for other purposes. A medical test, for example, that's worse than useless for identifying disease in a patient may be useful for estimating the prevalence of a disease in a larger population ("pattern-based data mining" equivalent).

The key to deciding what works is to apply trivial statistic tests that have been well understood for decades using math that was old when Newton was young. Tests like sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, response-operator curves and so on.

Tests are good or bad based on their properties in context.

This is excruciatingly basic science.

It is a measure of the despair of our nation that it took a report from National Research Council, for the Love of Reason, to tell us what every medical student gets beaten into their heads (ok, so it doesn't always take).

Next thing you know someone will point out that the Orange Alert sign I see every time I drive by the airport is, you know ... a complete waste of electrons.

Reason. Logic.

I could cry.

Does this mean Obama stands a chance? That we're emerging from the Long Dark?

No. I am sure McCain/Palin will win. I am sure. Sure. Must not allow hope to emerge, down hope, keep back ...

Terry Pratchett and Google Book Library with local library link

I know there are five or six Pratchett books still waiting for me. I've only ready 32 or so, albeit several of them many times.

There are still a few I am saving for when I really need them.

The simple truth is that Pratchett is an extremely gifted man who works very, very hard. He's somewhere between Tolkien and Jonathon Swift - no mean company.

In most libraries he's found in the "fantasy section". I don't think he objects, it's a fair place for books of an imaginary world featuring Cohen the Barbarian, DEATH, Wizards, Witches, and Werewolves. You can read his books as lighthearted fantasy with intermittent dark bits and remarkably good writing.

Or you can read his books as page turning thrillers that will grab you by the throat while the children cry for food and your eyes bleed for lack of sleep.

Or you can read the books as satire, sometimes dark satire, but always compassionate. Even the Auditors have moments, typically before they self-destruct, of sympathy.

Or you can read them as meditations on suffering, mortality, pride, the just life, death, religion and the nature of evil. These topics crush many a fine writer, but Pratchett weaves them in his tales with a deceptively distracting leavening of English humor.

You owe it to yourself to read him. You can start anywhere, though I have a soft spot for Small Gods, Mort, Lords and Ladies, and Night Watch. Pratchett doesn't weaken over time, he just changes his focus. Good all the way through.

Incidentally, although he's been popular for years and is justly wealthy from his work, I only found Pratchett through reading Vinge's Rainbows End. Vinge's protagonist is recovering from Alzheimer's disease, and gets entangled in a meme war between Pratchett's progeny and lesser imaginations. Vinge is a Pratchett fan, I like Vinge, so I tried Pratchett. Thanks Verner.

Which is where the circle closes. I've been meaning to write this post for a while but it was a post by another guy I read that brought it out. John Hawks likes Pratchett, and he writes about how Terry Pratchett describes his Alzheimer's. Yeah, Pratchett has the same affliction as Vinge's character.

Great writer, mortal man, the books live on.

Oh, and to help you get started. Try this. It's the library associated with my Google Profile. Click on a book. On the right side, see the link to find the book in a library. That takes you to a WorldCat page (might have to register for a WorldCat account, it's free). There I see it's not in our Saint Paul system, but I can pick it up from the Minneapolis system. (We're all integrated here.)

Bet you didn't know you could use Google Books to order pickups from your local library. Even I'd forgotten -- until now.

The spittle factor: publicizing Palin's supporters

By their supporters ye shall know them...

Talking Points Memo | Her Bile Bubbles Over

.... Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, 'Sit down, boy.'...

Palin is gathering a nice slice of the nastiest bits of America. I wonder how that sits with the religious right?

Sure, we know the religious right has a lot of nasties. It's not been that long since "religious" leaders were signaling approval of fire bombing abortion clinics. (Terrorism, technically.)

They're not all nasty though. Palin's supporters are going to turn some stomachs. It won't convert them into Obama supporters, but it may convert them into non-voters.

This would be a good time for videographers to put Palin supporters on YouTube. The more spittle covered the better.

The problem with town hall debates: "uncommitted"?

I grew up in Canada, so as an American it's been relatively easy for me to avoid presidential debates. I don't have the habit, and the debates annoy me. They're a political test for sure, but I'm no judge of what appeals to voters. If I cared, I could best assess those traits by reading post-debate polls rather than watching the debates.

Now I have one more reason to dislike presidential debates ...

BBC NEWS | Americas | Race turns bitter as debate looms

... He will select only six or seven e-mailed questions, as well around a dozen from the studio audience of 80 uncommitted voters....

Uncommitted?! At this point?

So the audience is made up of 80 people who are either fabulously clueless or lying. They get to select the questions.

Hmm. Clueless or lying. I think I see why McCain likes the format.

The New Yorker: Obama for reasons of character

Of course the New Yorker favors Obama over McCain. It's remarkable, though, how long their list of Obama's advantages is. It's piling on, really.

At last they get to character ...

The Choice: Comment: The New Yorker

.... What most distinguishes the candidates, however, is character—and here, contrary to conventional wisdom, Obama is clearly the stronger of the two. Not long ago, Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, said, “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” The view that this election is about personalities leaves out policy, complexity, and accountability. Even so, there’s some truth in what Davis said––but it hardly points to the conclusion that he intended.

Echoing Obama, McCain has made “change” one of his campaign mantras. But the change he has actually provided has been in himself, and it is not just a matter of altering his positions. A willingness to pander and even lie has come to define his Presidential campaign and its televised advertisements. A contemptuous duplicity, a meanness, has entered his talk on the stump—so much so that it seems obvious that, in the drive for victory, he is willing to replicate some of the same underhanded methods that defeated him eight years ago in South Carolina.

Perhaps nothing revealed McCain’s cynicism more than his choice of Sarah Palin ...
The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a “maverick” senator. But in a President they would be a menace.

By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness...

McCain is half way to frothing loon. Ok, 75% of the way. Palin is showing a pretty nasty lying streak of her own, one that fits what we've read of her political rise. The resemblance to Cheney is pretty creepy.

And yet, I still think America will elect McCain and Palin...

Donate to Obama.

Good news: McCain/Palin play the Ayers Card

The timing of McCain/Peron'sPalin's "Ayers attack" is good news ...

Palin, on Offensive, Attacks Obama’s Ties to ’60s Radical - NYTimes.com

.... The article to which she referred, in The New York Times on Saturday, traced Mr. Obama’s sporadic interactions with Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weathermen who later became an education professor in Chicago and worked on education projects there with Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee for president.

The article said: “A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers.”..

No surprise here, though they'd probably have preferred that Ayers weren't a relatively respectable tenured professor. Obama, of course, was a toddler when Ayers was in trouble. McCain has buddied up with nastier foreign leaders as a grown man.

We should expect lots of "Osama oops I meant Obama" slips of the tongue and a 100% increase in lying during this predictable smear campaign.

The good news is the timing. They would normally keep this one until about 1-2 weeks before a close election, then hammer it hard giving no time for the lies to fall flat. McCain would only play this now if he felt he was going to lose.

So the timing is good news.

That doesn't mean it won't work. This country almost elected Bush over Gore (with ample help from the GOP's Ralph Nader), and we elected a 2nd term Bush over Kerry (with less help from the GOP's Nader).

I predict we'll elect McCain/Palin. McCain, whose medical records have not been released and who has had no known cognitive testing, will be found to have early dementia and recurrent melanoma. President Palin will take office in late 2009.

I'm kind of hoping Minnesota, Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula will find a way to join up with Canada ...

Rolling Stone on John McCain

There's not much left of him by the time the story's done: Make-Believe Maverick : Rolling Stone.

Google needs customer service

Google is too important now to run without customer service:

Gordon's Tech: Reconsidering Google

... Kudos to this journalist for noting that anyone who fears losing their account won't use Google's obscenely inane security question, but if you don't answer the question then you have no hope of account recovery. (I've gone to my Gmail account and answered the question with a password-like string I now store with in my backed-up password database.)

I might upgrade our family domain just to get support services. That's not an option for my personal gmail account though. Google should offer a support service with enhanced user authentication procedures for a fee of $25 a year, and bundle it with an extra 5-10GB of storage.

If they don't do that, I'm going to have to reevaluate my Google relationship."

Charge for it, but provide the option. Bundle it with enhanced security (certificate stores? two factor identification options) and storage. $25 per single account, $40 for a family account, $50 (as now) for enhanced Google Apps.

Sarah Peron Cheney. America could do it.

The comparison to Eva Peron is inescapable. Now add Cheney ...

Dick Cheney, Role Model - Editorial - NYTimes.com

.... In Thursday night’s debate, Ms. Palin was asked about the vice president’s role in government. She said she agreed with Dick Cheney that “we have a lot of flexibility in there” under the Constitution. And she declared that she was “thankful that the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president also, if that vice president so chose to exert it.”...

It's a walking nightmare that McCain/Palin are polling above 10%.

If I were running China's trillion dollar investments in America I'd be moving my family to Switzerland.