Smooth Pebbles

Holiday break

Though it's likely become obvious already, I thought I should give notice I'll be blogging little if at all during this holiday week.

Enjoy it, and I'll see you in the new year (if note before).

The walkable city

Leon Krier, from "The City Within the City".:

THE QUARTERS.

A city can only be reconstructed in the form of urban quarters. A large or a small city can only be reorganized as a large or a small number of urban quarters; as a federation of autonomous quarters. Each quarter must have its own center, periphery and limit. Each quarter must be A CITY WITHIN A CITY. The quarter must integrate all daily functions of urban life (dwelling, working, leisure) within a territory dimensioned on the basis of the comfort of a walking person; not exceeding 35 hectares (80 acres) in surface and 15,000 inhabitants. Tiredness sets a natural limit to what a human being is prepared to walk daily and this limit has taught mankind all through history the size of rural or urban communities.

One of the attractions of my own city, Montpelier, is that I can walk across it comfortably in well under half a day -- and can walk out of it, and into the countryside, in about 10 minutes, which is also how long it takes me to reach the city center. Despite that there is little mass transit, I rarely use a car.

Krier's point about quarters -- that they must integrate all daily functions of urbain life -- seems spot on to me when I think of the cities (and parts of cities) that I've found most agreeable.

For more along these lines, check out James Howard Kuntsler's website and Steven J. Dubner's Freakonomic's blog entry on the future of suburbia.

E.J. Dionne on the Arne Duncan choice

E.J. Dionne makes an interesting observation about Obama's pick of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education.

Because Duncan gets along with teachers unions but is also seen as a reformer, his selection was interpreted as a politically shrewd, split-the-difference choice. But that is not the whole story. Lurking behind Obama's talk about getting beyond ideology and stale disputes is an effort to undercut the success that conservatives have enjoyed in framing arguments that leave Democrats and liberals at an automatic disadvantage.

To declare that the only test of a politician's commitment to reform is a willingness to break with unions creates a no-win choice for Democrats. They must either betray long- standing allies or face condemnation as the captives of special interests.

Obama, said Diane Ravitch, an assistant secretary of education in the administration of George H.W. Bush, is trying to "break out" of a definition of reform drawn almost entirely from "the Republican agenda." That agenda focuses on "being tough on the unions, offering more choices, and pushing for more accountability." While reformers of all stripes support accountability, this list actually constrains the options for those who would improve the public schools.

Duncan has already made clear that he refuses to abide by the conventions of the current education debate. When the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal and pro-labor think tank, circulated an education manifesto that focused on expanding the services for poor children available at public schools, Duncan signed on.

This seems to me a sharp-eyed take. Obama's effort to be post-partisan, as it were, is not merely an attempt to split differences or accommodate both sides of an argument. He seeks to change the terms of the argument, just as he did in both the primary and general elections.

A highly interesting review of Gladwell's "Outliers"

Micheal Nielsen gets swiftly to a problem many scientists (and not a few writers) have with Gladwell's books -- and highlights their redeeming factors as well:

All three of Malcolm Gladwell's books pose a conundrum for the would-be reviewer. The conundrum is this: while the books have many virtues, none of the books make a watertight argument for their central claims. Many scientists, trained to respect standards of proof above all else, don't like this style. A colleague I greatly respect told me he thought Gladwell's previous book, Blink , was "terrible"; it didn't meet his standards of proof. Judge Richard Posner wrote a scathing review criticizing Blink on the same grounds.

Gladwell's gift as a writer is not for justification and proof of his claims. What Gladwell does have is an extraordinary gift to use stories to explain abstract ideas in a way that is vivid and memorable, a way that brings those abstract ideas quickly to mind at later need. This shamanic gift is dangerous, for if you read his books credulously, it leaves you open to believing ideas that may be false. It%u2019s also incredibly valuable, for what you learn you internalize deeply. In my opinion, this more than makes up for whatever Gladwell's books lack in rigorous justification.

Hat tip: Neuronarrative

Technorati Tags:
Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers

Rumblings and worries about Obama's FDA options

As Obama solidifies his teams on science, education, and environment, attention -- and not a little worry from the drug industry -- is turning toward his hunt for a new FDA commissioner. The WSJ Health Blog reports that the FDA Commissioner Coalition, which is heavy with groups financed by the drug industry, appears increasingly concerned that Obama will appoint outspoken critics of drugmakers and the FDA, such as Cleveland Clinic cardiologist Steven Nissen or Baltimore health commissioner Joshua Sharfstein, who is heading Obama's FDA assessment team.

While the coalition prominently talks about the need for an FDA chief who can withstand some kinds of outside pressure, there’s no mention of an ability to withstand pressure from industry. Yet undue industry influence is at the heart of concerns from both parties in both houses of Congress, from FDA officials, from doctors and many medical researchers.

A copy of the Coalition's letter (to Secretary of Health Designate Tom Daschle) can be found at Pharmalot.

WIll Smith schools Rubik's Cube

One more reason to like Will Smith.

Hat tip to kottke, who links to some other amazing Rubikiean feats.

6 medical myths debunked - just in time for the holidays

Scientificblogging, drawing on apparently credible medical expertise, deflates six common med myths.

My wife will love this. I've cited #4 to her a million times.

6 Medical Myths Debunked For Christmas:

1. Sugar makes kids hyperactive.

2. Suicides increase over the holidays.

3. Poinsettias are toxic.

4. You lose most of your body heat through your head.

5. Eating at night makes you fat.

6. You can cure a hangover with%u2026

Great fodder for Christmas parties.

Encouraging sign that government may be going all empirical on us

Atop other Obama appointments, this is one I suspect America's scientists will welcome. From the Washington Post:

Report: Holdren to Lead White House Science Policy

By Joel Achenbach

President-elect Obama will announce this weekend that he has selected physicist John Holdren, who has devoted much of his career to energy and environmental research, as his White House science adviser, according to a published report today.

The Obama transition office would not confirm Holdren's selection. Last night, asked by The Post to comment on the science adviser search, Holdren responded by e-mail that he would be unable to comment because of his work with the Obama transition team.

The report today appeared online at ScienceInsider, a news blog published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Holdren served as president of AAAS in 2006.

More at Politico.com, Science, and Discover, and Dot Earth.

Free-range chimp research, Christmas tree clusters, gastrectomies, et alia

Other deadlines bar elaboration, but I wanted to draw attention to some worthwhile reading:

A good Wired Science story explores how "Free Range Research Could Save Chimps, the notion that Oil is Not the Climage Change Culprit -- It's All About Coal, and the Christmas Tree Cluster (of stars).

The Sterile Eye posts a video of a total gastrectomy.

World of Psychology has a particularly good "Mental Health Year in Review" article that reviews research highlights, the flaps over conflicts of interest and disclosure, the controversy over the legitimacy of the pediatric bipolar disorder diagnosis, and a few other tidbits. The Wall Street Journal and several other places note that the FDA is putting suicide warnings on the epilepsy drugs often used to treat bipolar disorder. And Neuronarrative calls attention to a mouse agility website. A St. Petersburg Times story -- it's wonderful to see ambitious reporting like this from a "smaller" newspaper -- runs an unsettling story on drug trials being outsourced to India.

And a McKinsey report (that's McKinsey, not Kinsey) explores why the U.S. spends $650 million a year more on health care than one would expect for a country with our population and GDP. "This picture suggests a clear opportunity for improvement," the authors note. Let's hope. (Hat tip: Wall Street Journal Health Blog)

And oh yes, that photo at the top is from Seed's portfolio of images taken from the spreads it runs in its print edtion. Seriously gorgeous.

And oh yes yes yes: Overgrown Path riffs off the fact that Hendrix lived next to Handel. Foxy.

Study: Internet addiction a bunch of bunk

Is there such a thing as internet addiction? Mind Hacks says the debate should be over:

A study just published in the journal CyberPsychology and Behavior has reviewed all of the available scientific studies on internet addiction and found them to be mostly crap. And not just slightly lacking, really pretty awful.

To quote from the research summary:

The analysis showed that previous studies have utilized inconsistent criteria to define Internet addicts, applied recruiting methods that may cause serious sampling bias, and examined data using primarily exploratory rather than confirmatory data analysis techniques to investigate the degree of association rather than causal relationships among variables.

Rather disappointingly though, the authors just suggest that better research is needed when it's quite obvious that the whole concept is fundamentally flawed.>

Whole (not very long) post is worth a read, as is most everything at MH.

Other commentary (also via Hacks) resides at Dr. Shock and PsychCentral. The study is here.

Oops -- make that "garters!" Media errors corrected

Via Kottke

Regret the Error has released their annual roundup of media errors and corrections for 2008. The absurd corrections are always the best:

We have been asked to point out that Stuart Kennedy, of Flat E, 38 Don Street, Aberdeen, who appeared at Peterhead Sheriff Court on Monday, had 316 pink, frilly garters confiscated not 316 pink, frilly knickers.

And this:

A film review on Sept. 5 about "Save Me" confused some characters and actors. It is Mark, not Chad, who is sent to the Genesis House retreat for converting gay men to heterosexuality. (Mark is played by Chad Allen; there is no character named Chad). The hunky fellow resident is Scott (played by Robert Gant), not Ted (Stephen Lang). And it is Mark and Scott -- not "Chad and Ted" -- who partake of cigarettes and "furtive man-on-man action."

Zimmer on brain-changing parasites

Good stuff from Zimmer:

You go for a swim, and you don't even notice the tiny worm that burrows into your skin. It slips into a vein and surges along through the blood for a while. Eventually it leaves your blood vessels and starts creeping up your spinal cord. Creep creep creep, it goes, until it reaches your head. It curls up on the surface of your brain, forming a hard cyst. But it is not alone%u2013every time you've gone for swim, worms have slithered into you, and now there are thousands of cysts peppering your brain.

And they are all making drugs that are seeping into your neurons. These drugs are a bit like Prozac, except far more sophisticated. They target certain neurons in certain parts of the brain, altering your behavior surgically, without unwanted side effects.

You don't know what's happening to you. But in situations in which you'd expect to feel scared or stressed, you just want to race around. You whirl in circles, doing whatever is necessary to get the attention of the very thing that terrifies you. Thanks to your uncontrollable flailing, that terror finds you, and you are destroyed.

This is how I imagine you'd feel if you were a fish infected by a parasitic worm called Euhaplorchis californiensis.

Beethoven's 9th, on his 238th

Beethoven showed up 238 years ago today. No one else, no one else ...

My violin teacher used to tell me, "You paid for the whole bow; use all of it." Those violinists aren't wasting any bow money.

NB: earlier title said "Beethoven's 7th, on his 238th". I do know the difference! ... but had begun to post the 7th and changed my mind but not my title.

Education chief Arne Duncan has his work cut out

The Washington Post, in a story fairly typical of other coverage, says that Obama's pick for Secretary of Education will "reach out to unions, school reform gorups" and "bridge the divides among education advocates, teachers unions and civil rights groups over how to fix America's school." Or as another syndicated WaPo story put it, "Duncan is embraced by the teachers unions, which have been concerned about high-stakes testing and worry about merit pay being tied to test scores, as well as reformers, who favor charter schools and tougher standards."

Apparently at least some from the teachers'-union end of this debate are offering an embrace not exactly friendly:

To portray Arne Duncan as anything other than a privatizer, union buster, and corporate stooge is to simply lie.

That's George Schmidt, editor of Substance News, in an essay posted at Schools Matter.

Catalyst Chicago, which claims it offers "independent reporting on school reformi," offers a rundown of Duncan's track record as CEO of Chicago's schools.

World of Warcraft -- Obama hires where others fear to tread

I don't play no stinkin' video games, but this is odd enough to be interesting Boing Boing reports, in two different posts, that

a) Some employers are apparently discriminating against World of Warcraft players on the grounds that their heads are always within the WoW and not fully in this one (a stance that some WoW players agree with),

but

b) Obama is apparently NOT one of those employers, as he hired at least one WoW player -- Kevin Werbach (aka Supernovan Jenkins to WoWers -- to head his FCC transition team.

I'm not brave enough to speculate on what this means.

Technorati Tags:
World of Warcraft, Kevin Werbach

Sullivan on death of newspapers

Forgive if I'm obsessed with this death-of-journalism thingn -- Andrew Sullivan has a nice piece in the Times of London about dying newspapers. Like Surowiecki, he fears the loss of the deep reporting that newspapers are already doing less of, and for which so far we have no real replacement venue.

Stunning stat from the story: The Baltimore Sun, a pretty big and renowned paper (and the basis for The Wire) gets about 17.5 million page views a month. Sullivan's blog at Atlantic gets 23 million:

The operation largely run out of my spare room reached many more online readers than some of the biggest and most loss-making papers in the country. The economics are remorseless: as news goes online, the economic model for papers cannot survive. If advertising follows page views, the game will shortly be over.

The terrifying problem is that a one-man blog cannot begin to do the necessary labour-intensive, skilled reporting that a good newspaper sponsors and pioneers. A world in which reporting becomes even more minimal and opinion gets even more vacuous and unending is not a healthy one for a democracy. Perhaps private philanthropists will step in and finance not-for-profit journalistic centres, where investigative and foreign reporting can be invested in and disseminated by blogs and online sites. Maybe reporter-bloggers will start rivalling opinion-mongers such as me and give the whole enterprise some substance. Maybe papers can slim down sufficiently to produce a luxury print issue and a viable online product. There’s always a hunger for news, after all.

Technorati Tags:
Andrew Sullivan, journalism

Tierney asks: Science or Garbage

A teacher in West Virginia rallied her students to fight to keep the right to recycle -- presumably for the civic (and eco) learning experience. John Tierney argues she's missing a better teaching opportunity:

If we want our children to be scientifically literate and get good jobs in the future, why are we spending precious hours in school teaching them to be garbage collectors?

That’s the question that occurred to me after reading about the second-graders in West Virginia who fought for the right to keep recycling trash even after it became so uneconomical that public officials tried to stop the program. As my colleague Kate Galbraith reports, their teacher was proud of them for all the time they spent campaigning to keep the recycling program alive.

My colleague Andy Revkin suggests that the West Virginia students might be learning something useful about the interplay of economics and ecology, but I fear they and their teacher have missed the lesson

Technorati Tags:
recycling, education, economics, John Tierney, TierneyLab

Did the shoe-thrower go doolally, or was he acting rationally?

I won't replicate the Word-of-the-Day email every day, but this was too good not to pass on. "The Dingle duo are seriously concerned that Jasmine's about to go doolally."

doolally

PRONUNCIATION:
(DU-lah-lee)

MEANING:
adjective: Irrational, deranged, or insane.

ETYMOLOGY:

After Deolali, a small town in western India. It's about 100 miles from Mumbai with an unusual claim to fame. It's where British soldiers who had completed their tour of duty were sent to await transportation home. It was a long wait -- often many months -- before they were to be picked up by ships to take them to England. Consequent boredom, and heat, turned many a soldier insane, and the word doolally was coined. At least that's the story.

More likely, soldiers who were going soft in the head were sent to the sanatorium there. At first the term was used in the form "He's got the Doo-lally tap", from Sanskrit tapa (heat) meaning one has caught doolally fever but now it's mostly heard as in "to go doolally". In Australia, they say "Calm down, don't do your lolly".

USAGE:
"The Dingle duo are seriously concerned that Jasmine's about to go doolally."
Mike Ward; What's Hot to Watch Today; Daily Star (UK); Dec 5, 2008.

You can subscribe here.

Lost news, who loses, and the end of the world

James Surowiecki gives us the bad news and the bad news about newspapers. After noting that ad revenue dropped 18 percent in the third quarter alone, he gets on to causes and ultimate effects:

People don’t use the Times less than they did a decade ago. They use it more. The difference is that today they don’t have to pay for it. The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn’t the Internet; it’s us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free. That’s a consumer’s dream, but eventually it’s going to collide with reality: if newspapers’ profits vanish, so will their product....

For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime—intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on—and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.

Crows & vending machines

How did I miss this for 24 hours? From the Times Magazine's 8th Annual Year in Ideas issue - Vending Machine for Crows:

In June, Josh Klein revealed his master's-thesis project to a flock of crows at the Binghamton Zoo in south-central New York State. The New York University graduate student offered the birds coins and peanuts from a dish attached to a vending machine he'd created, then took the peanuts away. Klein designed the machine so that when the crows searched for the missing peanuts, they pushed the coins out of a dish into a slot, causing more peanuts to be released into the dish. The Binghamton crows quickly learned that dropping nickels and dimes into the slot produced peanuts, and the most resourceful members of the flock began looking for more coins. Within a month, Klein had a flock of crows scouring the ground for loose change.