Afternoon roundup

More bits as I clear through the tabs. 

• Kevin Rudd's view on south Pacific security.
• 20,000 hard refusals on the 2023 census, up from 6000 in 2018.
• Andrew Heaton talks with Zach Weinersmith about space settlements.
• General Practitioners really ought to be allowed to prescribe for ADD/ADHD. 
• TVNZ in financial trouble, but still doesn't offer a subscription-version of its streaming offering for those who can't abide the ads. 
• The demographics of Parliament
• Climate Commission recognising potential for carbon sequestration through reinjection in geothermal wells. Excellent. 
• The Gods of the Copybook Headings always slouch up to explain it once more. They've been explaining it in education system results. Good that we're starting to recognise it. 
• If there's a right to be protected from the effects of climate change...
• Infrastructure Commission doesn't mince words on Auckland light rail. 

Scurvy Dogs?

Dogs don't get scurvy. Guinea pigs do. And polar bears are more like lemons than limes are like lemons, on one important margin. 

Reality can be weird.

A fun imagined dialogue, where Forlich is right, but looks completely crazy, because reality can be weird.

Let’s imagine a version of history where the guinea pigs did indeed get lost in the Norwegian mail, so Holst and Frolich only tested dogs, and found no sign of scurvy. Let’s further imagine that Frolich has been struck by inspiration, and through pure intuition has figured out exactly what is going on. 

—

Frolich: You know Holst, I think old James Lind was right. I think scurvy really is a disease of deficiency, that there’s something in citrus fruits and cabbages that the human body needs, and that you can’t go too long without. 

Holst: Frolich, what are you talking about? That doesn’t make any sense.

Frolich: No, I think it makes very good sense. People who have scurvy and eat citrus, or potatoes, or many other foods, are always cured.

Holst: Look, we know that can’t be right. George Nares had plenty of lime juice when he led his expedition to the North Pole, but they all got scurvy in a couple weeks. The same thing happened in the Expedition to Franz-Josef Land in 1894. They had high-quality lime juice, everyone took their doses, but everyone got scurvy. It can’t be citrus.

Frolich: Maybe some citrus fruits contain the antiscorbutic [scurvy-curing] property and others don’t. Maybe the British Royal Navy used one kind of lime back when Lind did his research but gave a different kind of lime to Nares and the others on their Arctic expeditions. Or maybe they did something to the lime juice that removed the antiscorbutic property. Maybe they boiled it, or ran it through copper piping or something, and that ruined it.

Holst: Two different kinds of limes? Frolich, you gotta get a hold of yourself. Besides, the polar explorers found that fresh meat also cures scurvy. They would kill a polar bear or some seals, have the meat for dinner, and then they would be fine. You expect me to believe that this antiscorbutic property is found in both polar bear meat AND some kinds of citrus fruits, but not in other kinds of citrus?

Frolich: You have to agree that it’s possible. Why can’t the property be in some foods and not others? 

Holst: It’s possible, but it seems really unlikely. Different varieties of limes are way more similar to one another than they are to polar bear meat. I guess what you describe fits the evidence, but it really sounds like you made it up just to save your favorite theory. 

Frolich: Look, it’s still consistent with what we know. It would also explain why Lind says that citrus cures scurvy, even though it clearly didn’t cure scurvy in the polar expeditions. All you need is different kinds of citrus, or something in the preparation that ruined it — or both! 

Holst: What about our research? We fed those dogs nothing but grain for weeks. They didn’t like it, but they didn’t get scurvy. We know that grain isn’t enough to keep sailors from getting scurvy, so if scurvy is about not getting enough of something in your diet, those dogs should have gotten scurvy too.

Frolich: Maybe only a few kinds of animals need the antiscorbutic property in their food. Maybe humans need it, but dogs don’t. I bet if those guinea pigs hadn’t gotten lost in the mail, and we had run our study on guinea pigs instead of dogs, the guinea pigs would have developed scurvy.

Holst: Let me get this straight, you think there’s this magical ingredient, totally essential to human life, but other animals don’t need it at all? That we would have seen something entirely different if we had used guinea pigs or rats or squirrels or bats or beavers?

Frolich: Yeah basically. I bet most animals don’t need this “ingredient”, but humans do, and maybe a few others. So we won’t see scurvy in our studies unless we happen to choose the right animal, and we just picked the wrong animal when we decided to study dogs. If we had gotten those guinea pigs, things would have turned out different.

Science funding

Michael Cameron at Waikato has a great post up on the state of social science research, the government's Green Paper on research funding, and an old report I'd missed from Superu's David Preston. 

Probably the key thing that stands out from this report (aside from the fact that it is clearly a parting shot from Superu, which funded the report), is the highly political nature of social science funding. For example, Preston notes the problems associated with multi-sector research institutions that sit outside of core government services:

While this position outside of government proper gives the institution more independence, it also makes the entity more vulnerable to unfavourable reactions from the government of the day. This is especially so if it is providing advice or information on politically sensitive issues. The government cannot do without its core government departments, but it can do without particular advisory bodies or research institutions.

A related example is the closure of the Social Policy Journal of New Zealand, which had been set up and run by the Social Policy Agency, part of the Department of Social Welfare:

No official reason was ever given for the closure of the Journal. However, informal sources commented that an article about to be published included information which indicated that a statement made by a Minister was inaccurate. Publication of the issue was delayed until public interest in the topic died down and it was decided to cease publication of the Journal, apparently to avoid future difficulties with Ministers.

The development indicates the difficulties of maintaining the ability to publish research findings within a politically sensitive environment in a government department.

All of this suggests that social science research institutions are always in a precarious position, reliant on short-term funding sources and beholden to the political whims of government. Preston summarises the various reviews of social science research that have been undertaken since the 1970s (of which there have been many). One common theme across those reviews is the need for a social science research institution with a sufficient level of baseline funding to maintain core research activity. Preston uses the example of the Brookings Institution from the U.S., which admittedly is not funded by the government, but has had a lasting impact on policy development and is generally well respected.

I take as conclusion that the NZ Initiative should be about four times bigger than it is, and that Motu could be a little bit bigger too. 

Against Jargon: Feynman edition

Jargon is good for two things. The first is a good one; the second, not so much.

Let's start with the good. Jargon is a convenient shorthand among experts, allowing them to convey a complicated and lengthy idea in a single word. Within an established community of experts, you don't need to reconvey the whole parable or theorem each time. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra is sufficient: everybody who matters knows what you mean, and you can just get on with things.

But when that shorthand exists for complicated concepts, they'll get appropriated by folks who want to sound like they know what they're talking about but who really don't.*

And so we come to Feynman:

I think for lesson number one, to learn a mystic formula for answering questions is very bad. The book has some others: 'gravity makes it fall;' 'the soles of your shoes wear out because of friction.' Shoe leather wears out because it rubs against the sidewalk and the little notches and bumps on the sidewalk grab pieces and pull them off. To simply say it is because of friction, is sad, because it's not science.”

Feynman’s parable about the meaning of science is a valuable way of testing ourselves on whether we have really learned something, or whether we just think we have learned something, but it is equally useful for testing the claims of others. If someone cannot explain something in plain English, then we should question whether they really do themselves understand what they profess. If the person in question is communicating ostensibly to a non-specialist audience using specialist terms out of context, the first question on our lips should be: "Why?" In the words of Feyman, “It is possible to follow form and call it science, but that is pseudoscience.”

Be cautious with jargon.

* Like when public health people use the term market failure. 

Pining for the newsmagazine programmes

Massey statistics lecturer Adam Smith dissects 3D's infotainment piece on the dangers of Gardasil vaccination.

3D's 22-minute piece, entitled Cause or coincidence, focused on four unfortunate young women with crippling diseases, and two who had died. They, like thousands of other girls in NZ, have had the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, which reduces the risk of cervical cancer. The majority of the piece is taken up with Paula Penfold interviewing the girls and their families.

It was shocking and sad, in more ways than one. When asked, some of the girls and parents were convinced that the vaccine was the cause, though some weren't. Either way, as much as we feel for them, they are not qualified to make that judgement. Regardless, Paula Penfold seemed very intent on obtaining these emotive sound bites.

The science, on the other hand, barely got a mention.

...

Even if TV3 were intent on ignoring the science, why not provide some balance by interviewing families grieving for those lost to cervical cancer? How about mentioning the thousands of non-vaccinated girls with the same diseases as those in the story?

...

I urge the New Zealand public, when deciding on what to believe and whether to vaccinate your children, to place greater weight on the scientific evidence. The evidence here is quite clear, and it comes from literally over a million cases. In the face of it, a few emotive, cherry-picked anecdotes should not persuade you.

Cause or coincidence? TV3's story barely establishes coincidence. It certainly doesn't show correlation. The idea of cause is laughable.

If this is the quality of so-called investigative journalism on TV3, we're better off without it and we should let it die. The sad reality is that this shoddy journalism will likely result in some avoidable cases of cervical cancer, which may lead to the same fate.

You could maybe pin it on a declining media market and newsmagazine programmes having to go for anything that'll draw ratings, but it doesn't seem that new a phenomenon. Campbell Live's pieces on legal highs were every bit as educational as this 3D one.

The original programme is here.

3D's Twitter feed is interesting too:

@vincristine @paulapenfold @michaeltarry we all hear what we want to hear. You'll be pleased to hear those who hold the anecdotes ..

— 3D (@3D_TV3) November 9, 2015

@vincristine @paulapenfold @michaeltarry .. Thought we ignored their science.

— 3D (@3D_TV3) November 9, 2015

Well I guess that makes it balanced.

Innovations unlikely to happen here

There's just so much promise in GE research. A 2012 paper showing longevity benefits in mice subsequent to gene modification has led to experimental trials on people - in South America. They use genetically modified viruses to spread genes for longer telomeres to reduce ageing.

Meanwhile, in New Zealand, the Greens' Steffan Browning is angry that some schools are ordering a $354 biochemistry set that lets them run small in-class GE experiments: introducing a bioluminescence gene from jellyfish into bacteria. From the product website:

Genetic engineering is the process of manipulating the genetic material of an organism — often to include the DNA from a foreign organism. Using the classic pGLO Bacterial Transformation Kit, students transform bacteria by introducing a gene from the bioluminescent jellyfish Aequorea victoria. The same procedure has been used to create "designer proteins" which have led to the explosion of new health treatments, agricultural applications, and environmental solutions.

Features and Benefits

• Aligns with AP Biology Big Idea 3, Lab 8
• Transforms bacteria with a jellyfish gene
• Turns the gene on and off for the study of gene regulation

I wonder how many fewer chemists we'd have if we'd banned chemistry sets. While the set here isn't banned, using it looks to be:

According to Bio-Rad's website, the kits allow students to transform bacteria by introducing a gene from the bioluminescent jellyfish, Aequorea victoria, making them glow fluorescent green under ultra-violet light.

"The same procedure has been used to create 'designer proteins' which have led to the explosion of new health treatments, agricultural applications, and environmental solutions," the United States-based company says.

According to MPI's investigation, there was nothing wrong with importing the kits.

But they contained materials that, when put together correctly, produced a modified strain of E coli.

This counted as new organism under New Zealand's Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act, MPI said.

It was illegal to produce a new organism without a containment facility and approvals from MPI and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

We have endless handwringing from government about how the economy isn't as diversified as they'd like and how there isn't enough R&D relative to somebody's preferred amount of it. Then the government makes it too hard to do IT research in New Zealand that might require GCSB approval under TICS, and requires MPI approval for any new organism, hindering GE research.

But Otago University microbiology and immunology professor Clive Ronson said the base E coli strain involved was "very benign" and even scientists would find it impossible to create a dangerous strain with the kits.

New Zealand was out of step with the rest of the world because it insisted that anything altered through DNA manipulation was a new organism and needed approval.

According to the EPA, all known kits were traced and destroyed.

"It is unlikely that such a lab-adapted strain would be able to survive outside laboratory conditions."

MPI wouldn't name the educational institutes that had "inadvertently" broken the law.

They hunted down and destroyed classroom chemistry sets. And Kiwis make fun of Kansas classroom creationists.

It really doesn't bother me if Steffan Browning doesn't want the life-extension therapy. I'm young enough (for now) to be able to wait a bit to see how the South American trials pan out. If I were in my 70s, I'd be a lot angrier about policies blocking this kind of research.

Update: See Siouxsie about the kits, and with further discussion of NZ's absurdities, here:

If an organism is not on any database or listed in a paper as showing it was present in NZ before 29 July 1998, its considered a new organism. I’m told the first time NZ researchers sequenced the gut microbiome of a person in NZ, they came across a whole heap of microbes that according to the law didn’t exist in NZ. Seriously. The flip side to this of course, is that each time anyone comes here from overseas, be it a holiday-maker or NZ resident returning from a trip, they are likely bringing in a whole heap of new (micro)organisms in or on their person. And there’s not much the government can do about that!

Scholarly outliers

A plucky group of scientific outsiders, presenting results outside of the mainstream consensus, hosts its own conference with presentations mostly from those in their heterodox club. They present themselves as providing the truth that is much opposed by big moneyed interests. They're celebrated in a reception hosted in Parliament by one of the political parties. The media is expected to highlight their alternative take on reality, with perhaps some offsetting commentary from those in the mainstream; the overall effect, though, is to stoke and legitimise popular misunderstandings.

Without any further detail, what are your priors? Is this something to welcome?

Now let's make it multichoice. Do you update if it's any of these?

1. A holistic medicine conference talking up the merits of homeopathy, hosted by the Greens?
2. An anti-vaccination conference with Wakefield-group presenters, hosted possibly by the Greens or Maori Party?
3. A Lord Monckton shin-dig with his preferred researchers on global warming, hosted then either by ACT or maybe National?
4. An anti-GMO conference on the evils of Big Corporate Agriculture, hosted by the Greens?
5. A conference on how mainstream economics is all wrong, highlighting heterodox insights about how people do not respond to incentives, hosted by the Greens and Mana?

This weekend brings GMO-sceptics to Wellington. Presentations include "Pesticides: scilencing the ecosystem and silencing our children" and "Overweight, undernourished, sterile and dying of cancer. Our food is it sealing the fate of humanity?"

And the Greens are hosting them in Parliament:

A few further notes:

• The keynote speaker, Gilles-Eric Seralini, found tumours in mice fed GM crops. But his paper was retracted due to concerns like these. It was later elsewhere republished in a friendlier outlet.
• Vandana Shiva, also there speaking, earned this profile in the New Yorker, which concluded:

  When Shiva writes that “Golden Rice will make the malnutrition crisis worse” and that it will kill people, she reinforces the worst fears of her largely Western audience. Much of what she says resonates with the many people who feel that profit-seeking corporations hold too much power over the food they eat. Theirs is an argument well worth making. But her statements are rarely supported by data, and her positions often seem more like those of an end-of-days mystic than like those of a scientist.

• On 29 January this year, the American Association for the Advancement of Science released a rather timely survey on scientific support for use of genetic modification techniques in food. Huffington has the summary: 

  In sharp contrast to public views about GMOs, 89% of scientists believe genetically modified foods are safe.
  
  That's the most eye-opening finding in a Pew Research Center study on science literacy, undertaken in cooperation with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and released on January 29.
  
  The overwhelming scientific consensus exceeds the percentage of scientists, 88%, who think humans are mostly responsible for climate change. However, the public appears far more suspicious of scientific claims about GMO safety than they do about the consensus on global warming.
  
  Some 57% of Americans say GM foods are unsafe and a startling 67% do not trust scientists, believing they don't understand the science behind GMOs. AAAS researchers blame poor reporting by mainstream scientists for the trust and literacy gaps.
  
  The survey also contrasts sharply with a statement published earlier this week in a pay-for-play European journal by a group of anti-GMO scientists and activists, including Michael Hansen of the Center for Food Safety, and philosopher Vandana Shiva, claiming, "no scientific consensus on GMO safety."

The scientific consensus on GMOs is as strong as the scientific consensus on climate change. Will Browning have to retract this like he had to pull back from endorsing homeopathy for Ebola?

The Greens could play at highlighting the heterodox views on GMOs a couple years ago. But when 89% of scientists say GMO food is safe?

If it scares, it leads

I can't really blame the journalists. They're effectively in the infotainment business. And if punters are more likely to buy newspapers with scary stories about genetically modified crops than newspapers taking the consensus of scientists that the GMOs that have made it through the regulatory approval processes have had a far more thorough going-over than ones that have used other mutagenic techniques, well, we can't really blame them too much.

It can screw up policy though. There's a pretty serious externality through the political system where bogus scare stories whip up demand for regulatory regimes. Politicians cater to those demands.

I've spent a fair bit of time at Offsetting hitting on this kind of theme around bogus studies of the social costs of alcohol that do much to inflame public sentiment against consumption but little to inform.

Today's edition: GMOs. A paper in Cell Research last year suggested that bits of microRNA from food could migrate into people and so GMO bits could be dangerous. Canterbury biologist Jack Heinemann then put out a paper arguing, as I understand things, that if the Cell Research paper were right, then GMO wheat could also affect gene expression in people via the same mechanism. Most scientists working in the area thought this nonsense; the Science Media Centre put out a few rebuttals.

Paul Gorman at the Christchurch Press covered the controversy, highlighting all the scary bits.

• Lax GM rules may bite back - scientists: the gene silencing mechanism (noted in Cell Research) could yield scary results in people, FSANZ needs to prove that it doesn't, etc.
• Greens challenge criticism of scientists over GM. Gorman paints it as scientists against Food Standards Australia-New Zealand, but lots of play for the Green Party's critique of FSANZ's competence.
• Scientists fall out over GM research. Gorman highlights accusations of bias on the part of the Science Media Centre, continues to portray FSANZ as incompetent.

The Heinemann paper and the reporting on it have yielded some pressure on the government to take action.

The latest issue of Nature Biotechnology features a replication of the Zhang et al paper in Cell Research on which Heinemann's results built. The Zhang paper didn't replicate. From the accompanying Nature Biotechnology editorial:

In contrast to these findings, the report on p. 965 finds no evidence for uptake of plant miRNA168a in the plasma and liver of mice fed a rice diet. Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay data from the current study also contradict western blots from the Zhang paper that suggested miR168a directly suppressed levels of low-density lipoprotein receptor adapter protein 1 (LDLRAP1) in mice. Finally, the miRagen study suggests differences in diet composition, rather than miRNA-mediated cross-kingdom gene regulation, likely account for alterations in low-density lipoprotein in mouse plasma.

But why put the paper in Nature Biotechnology rather than Cell Research, where the original report was published? In fact, the miRagen investigators did submit their paper to that journal but were told that “it is a bit hard to publish a paper of which the results are largely negative.”

We differ with this assessment and believe the paper is worthy of publication precisely because it is a negative result throwing light on a key research question.

The original finding from Zhang and colleagues that plant miRNAs are capable of cross-kingdom gene regulation was an extraordinary claim. It went against a large body of research in which the systemic administration of double-stranded RNAs was shown incapable of triggering the RNA interference pathway in humans (and mice). It also raised concerns that plant miRNAs could pose health risks to humans. Indeed, last March, an article published in Environment International (55, 43–55, 2013) went so far as to claim that gene modification of plants using gene silencing mechanisms raises concerns for human health and that these concerns are not adequately considered in food safety assessments. This prompted the regulator Food Standards Australia New Zealand to undertake an assessment of the scientific literature on the issue and to publish a position statement on the regulation of genetically modified crops developed using gene silencing.

Bottom line seems to be that FSANZ and the Science Media Centre were right, the Greens (again) were latching on to fringe findings that supported their priors, and the media ran a scare campaign.

The whole Nature Biotechnology editorial is worth reading. They worry a lot about publication incentives and replication work.

Forbes comments on it here:

A great illustration of the challenge of controlling ‘metastasizing misinformation’ has emerged with the publication of a fascinating and important article in Nature Biotechnology that sharply challenges a study that had made controversial claims that dramatically raised the fear factor about GMOs.

The backstory provides an intriguing look at how the anti-GMO industry and sycophant journalists work—and the consequences of flogging single studies to score ideological points.

...

Since the publication of the original Zhang et al. study, similar research has appeared and the paper itself has been scrutinized—and the results are devastating. In May, researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Bostonfound that healthy athletes did not carry detectable levels of plant miRNAs in their blood after eating fruit filled with these molecules, and struck out in finding traces in mice or bees. “We conclude,” wrote the authors, “that horizontal delivery of microRNAs via typical dietary ingestion is neither a robust nor a frequent mechanism.”

Then in June, a research team from Johns Hopkins University writing in RNA Biology reported that the results were likely a false positive that resulted from the technique his group used, bolstering the case of skeptics who argued that genetic material from food would have little chance of surviving the digestive system, much less crossing the intestinal lining to enter the bloodstream.

The knockout blow came last week with the release of a replication study published in Nature Biotechnology. A team of scientists led by research scientist Brent Dickinson, using proper controls, could not detect the same microRNA reported by Zhang et al. Bottom line, there was almost none of the original culprit, miR168a, identified (one found in every million miRNAs).  Moreover, they repeated the rice feeding experiment, saw the decrease in LDL that Zhang et al. had found and the changes in LDL did not depend on the availability of miR168a. Instead, the authors added another treatment that corrected an energy/protein imbalance caused by the all-rice diet and the LDL effect went away. In turns out that the LDL effect was a nutrition effect. Mystery solved.”

Ignoring the basic science—few scientists embraced the original Zhang et al. study as it contradicted the logic of previous findings—professional antis will no doubt criticize the replication study as an industry apologia. “Many will dismiss this study because it was done with cooperation from Monsanto,”Folta wrote in his analysis of the newly released paper.  On the other hand, the other cooperator was miRagen [Therapuetics], a company interested in small RNAs for therapies.  They have a vested interest in identifying mechanisms to orally administer miRNA and detect physiological outcomes. If they repeated Zhang et al.’s work it would have been a positive finding for their company, as I’m sure they get plenty of criticism for the viability of their potential therapies.”

...

Don’t hold your breath for rollbacks of their disgraceful journalism and public comments by LeVeaux, Laskway, Gurian-Sherman, Hansen and others whose statements have ranged from credulous to intellectually dishonest to fraudulent manipulation and misrepresentation of results. Expect chief GMO demonizer Jeffrey Smith—who is a charlatan—to continue to hype this unproven danger in his “analysis” of the “dangers” of GMOs. They are single study syndrome sycophants. As a group—and this includes a sizable cadre of web activists, organic extremists, foodie journalists and campaigning scientists—they cherry pick the handful of papers that support their point of view and ignore the vast majority of research that disagrees. Some might call them professional fear mongerers.

I continue to see no scientific basis for demands that GMO foods be labelled. It just feeds the panic. And I continue to update my priors on those who take the GMO fearmongering seriously. There are real social costs to feeding this kind of nonsense. Jenny McCarthy has much for which to answer; so too do the GMO-worriers.

More scientists?

I like science. But I'm not convinced that pouring money into producing more scientists is the most effective way of generating the great things that come from science.

Economists typically recommend "keyhole" interventions. If there's some market failure, intervene at the most direct level to fix it. It's plausible that basic scientific discoveries - the kind that aren't really patentable but that can yield all kinds of later commercial applications - are underprovided relative to some ideal. There are then a few policy options:

• Award prizes for those making worthy discoveries.
• But, if the basic research is expensive and if research teams have a hard time getting investor funding for prize-seeking, then this may still underprovide discoveries. Prizes are great when you know what achievement you'd like to fund but you don't know who's best-placed to provide it.
• Award grants to research teams likely to provide discoveries.
• This requires the granting agency to be able to pick winning teams and, in small countries, can yield nasty procedural tradeoffs between nepotism (the awards committee gives money just to their friends or to people doing politically favourable work) and administratively expensive application methods. 
• Be really generous with baseline University funding, then revise slowly over time to focus funding towards institutions that produce a lot of discoveries so that Universities sharpen incentives.
• We've moved toward this in New Zealand with PBRF, but the whole process is ridiculously administratively burdensome, the amount of money at stake is pretty small relative to overall University budgets, and because new and important discoveries are pretty rare, the whole thing seems to reward number of journal articles. If one University produced two field medalists, that would get it a couple of PBRF As, but plenty of other places will get plenty of As without field medals. There's basically a big upperbound truncation problem where truly stellar work - the kind that should wind up getting the really big prizes - is under-rewarded. 
• Encourage lots of kids to take science degrees. Encourage the Universities to expand their science offerings by paying them extra for kids taking science courses and for degree completion in the sciences as compared to arts or commerce. 
• Increasing the supply of scientists could reduce the cost of scientists and thereby increase the supply of discoveries from those places that hire scientists. In a small country, you cannot really have much of an effect on equilibrium wages in science as you'll just induce post-degree out-migration. And to the extent that science grads get hired in applied shops that, while great, largely internalise the benefits of what they're doing, you've not done as much to get the new discoveries.

I expect that optimal policy would involve some combination of the first three mechanisms. Prizes in combination with baseline university research funding would solve some of the problems we'd otherwise have in providing extra rewards for truly top-notch stuff. And grants can help if there are particular things you want done and you think you know who can do it. If those together work to build demand for scientists, then that can automatically start pulling more kids into science when they see rising salaries and better job prospects.

What do we get when we push a lot of kids through general science degrees instead? Andrew Norton at The Gratten Institute has a few numbers for Australia.

The annual Graduate Destination Survey (GDS) of people with recently completed bachelor degrees consistently finds that people with science qualifications have above-average difficulty finding work. The only exception is for people with degrees in the geological sciences.

Three years on from the GDS, the Beyond Graduation Survey shows that the job outlook of science graduates improves with time. After a slow start their employment rate is only slightly below average.

But this is not evidence of strong demand for specific scientific knowledge. Only 57% of science graduates say their qualification is important or a formal requirement for their job. It is the second lowest match between qualification and discipline.

Norton concludes:

Nobody doubts that science and maths skills are important to Australia’s future. In some specialised areas, employers might struggle to find suitable graduates. But no enrolment or employment data suggests that we are headed for general shortages of science and maths graduates.

The science applications boom may turn out to be a higher education bubble waiting to burst. If it does, thousands of intelligent and capable young people may be left with qualifications that hamper their ability to find meaningful and rewarding work.

Note here that the point isn't that "being employed in a directly relevant profession" is an important measure of a degree's fitness - in that case, dentistry would be the best degree ever. Rather, it speaks to whether there's any great shortage. Were there a generalised shortage of scientists, we would expect most graduating scientists to be snapped up by employers desperate for scientists. Instead, if we look at the underlying data, we see that only 63% of those graduating with life sciences degree and 65% of those graduating with a degree in the physical sciences say that their qualification is either a formal requirement or "important" for their job. 24% of those with a life sciences degree and 19% of those graduating in the physical sciences say their degree is not important for their job; the rest say "somewhat important."

I wonder what the NZ numbers would look like.

The running joke on Big Bang Theory is that scientists make little unless they manage to luck into a good job with Pharma. Bernadette waited tables while doing her PhD. Two young physics faculty members share an apartment; their neighbour, a waitress, hasn't got a roommate and consequently has more substantial money problems. Another physicist only has any money because his father sends him remittances from India. A university engineering technician doing NASA-level work lives with his Mom. Closer to real life, Noah Smith explained grad school in the bench sciences.

Want more of the good stuff that comes from basic science? Find better ways of funding basic science.

Morning roundup

Item the first: New York Supreme Court Judge Milton Tingling blocked Bloomberg's ban on Big Gulps. I agree with the Judge here:

Judge Tingling found the Board of Health's mission is to protect New Yorkers by providing regulations that prevent and protect against diseases. Those powers, he argued, don't include the authority to "limit or ban a legal item under the guise of 'controlling chronic disease.' "

The board may supervise and regulate the city's food supply when it affects public health, but the City Charter clearly outlines when such steps may be taken: According to Judge Tingling, the city must face imminent danger due to disease.

"That has not been demonstrated," he wrote.

Judge Tingling also suggested that Mr. Bloomberg overstepped his powers by bringing the sugary drink rules before the Board of Health, which is solely appointed by him. The City Council, he wrote, is the legislative body "and it alone has the authority to legislate as the board seeks to do here."

But a malicious part of me really wishes this had gone ahead. The ban looked to be an intractable nightmare that New York, having elected Bloomberg, really deserved to endure. They could have served as example unto others. Instead, the lesson is that judges will bat back things that are entirely too crazy, so there's no harm in electing Bloombergs. Sometimes, the electorate does deserve to get what it wants, and that right hard.

Item the Second: Rasmussen polls show 36% of Americans think it's at least somewhat likely that Fukushima radiation "did significant harm to the United States." I would bet that a survey of scientists specialising in radiation would find no more than 1-2% thinking it did significant harm to the US, and those would be saying that the negative effects were through reduced public acceptance of nuclear power. I really really wish that polls of this sort, where there is a right scientific answer, or at least a likely strong consensus among scientists, would mention it. The survey doesn't mean that there's a 36% chance that it did harm, it means that 36% of Americans are scientifically illiterate.

Rationalist reading

It's hard to fit magic into the rational universe. What happens to the laws of physics around conservation of mass if a wizard can turn herself into a cat?

I'd missed this one when it came out: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. [HT: Aimee on the SciBlogs Google group]

Half-way down the first page, it started sounding an awful lot like Eliezer Yudkowsky. After this bit from the second chapter, it would have been shocking had it been anyone other than Eliezer.

The witch-lady was smiling benevolently upon them, looking quite amused. "Would you like a further demonstration, Mr. Potter?"
"You don't have to," Harry said. "We've performed a definitive experiment. But..." Harry hesitated. He couldn't help himself. Actually, under the circumstances, he shouldn't be helping himself. It was right and proper to be curious. "What else can you do?"
Professor McGonagall turned into a cat.
Harry scrambled back unthinkingly, backpedalling so fast that he tripped over a stray stack of books and landed hard on his bottom with a thwack. His hands came down to catch himself without quite reaching properly, and there was a warning twinge in his shoulder as the weight came down unbraced.
At once the small tabby cat morphed back up into a robed woman. "I'm sorry, Mr. Potter," said the witch, sounding sincere, though the corners of her lips were twitching upwards. "I should have warned you."
Harry was breathing in short gasps. His voice came out choked. "You can't DO that!""It's only a Transfiguration," said Professor McGonagall. "An Animagus transformation, to be exact."
"You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signalling! And cats are COMPLICATED! A human mind can't just visualise a whole cat's anatomy and, and all the cat biochemistry, and what about the neurology? How can you go on thinking using a cat-sized brain?"
Professor McGonagall's lips were twitching harder now. "Magic."
"Magic isn't enough to do that! You'd have to be a god!"
Professor McGonagall blinked. "That's the first time I've ever been called that."
A blur was coming over Harry's vision, as his brain started to comprehend what had just broken. The whole idea of a unified universe with mathematically regular laws, that was what had been flushed down the toilet; the whole notion of physics. Three thousand years of resolving big complicated things into smaller pieces, discovering that the music of the planets was the same tune as a falling apple, finding that the true laws were perfectly universal and had no exceptions anywhere and took the form of simple maths governing the smallest parts, not to mention that the mind was the brain and the brain was made of neurons, a brain was what a person was -
And then a woman turned into a cat, so much for all that.

I'm enjoying this far more than I've enjoyed any part of the original Potter series (full disclosure: movies only, sorry). Watch especially for Harry's imagining how to arbitrage between Muggle-land and Hogwarts' where the latter runs a bimetalllic currency at a fixed exchange rate that differs from our price ratio. And fixing Quidditch.

The Last Ringbearer similarly dominates The Lord of The Rings. Hoorah for those authors (and their estates) who don't prosecute those creating fan faction!

Economic Dilettantism

Bill Kaye-Blake takes a Rothbardian turn!*

Rothbard wrote:

“It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.” 

Bill takes on the disappointing proclivity of New Zealand's bench scientists to opine on economics.

In the June issue of AgScience, Prof Shaun Hendy has an article entitled, ‘New Zealand’s voyage of economic self-discovery’. He also has a post with the same title over a Sciblogs. Before I get too wound up, I should give Prof Hendy his dues. He does do fieldwork amongst economists in their native habitat. But in the end, it is dilettantism.

The article sounds impressive — we have a new approach! we have pretty pictures! Nokia! But really, what he is able to tell us is:

• New Zealand is small and distant
• its economy is based on what has worked in the past
• scale is important
• we should be more productive.

He isn’t telling us anything new. No, really, there is nothing new there. And what is there is either useless or confused.

Bill goes on, citing underpants-gnome theories. He concludes:

But then I’m just an economist. Maybe Prof Hendy would like to hear my thoughts on the Higgs boson. After all, I’ve been watching The Big Bang Theory.

While I agree with Bill, I'm somewhat less annoyed by the Hendy piece's content than he is; the bits from the article that aren't new aren't useless either. It's worth emphasizing that a fair bit of New Zealand's lagging performance comes from being small and distant rather from particular policy failures. We can always do better, but there aren't a whole ton of low-hanging policy fruit around waiting to be picked. Land use policy, the RMA, and immigration would be the first places I'd look for gains. But it would be pretty optimistic to expect large or quick improvements from any of them.

* The position is hardly unique to Rothbard; he just said it well. But I do think it's fun to paint Bill as agreeing with Rothbard.

Anti-tobacco virus

SciBlogs (US) reports that gene therapy for tobacco addiction may be around the corner. Code a virus to produce an antibody that neutralizes nicotine, inject, and there's no longer any buzz from smoking. Apparently the tests in mice have worked.

A couple of thoughts:

• An injectable treatment available as a choice for smokers who wish to quit has to be good.
• The availability of such a choice also makes more desirable a strategy of "I'll smoke 'till I'm 25, enjoy being cooler than other people, and then take the treatment before I do any long-term damage." Just as barriers to exit are barriers to entry, things that facilitate exit also facilitate entry in a rational addiction model. This doesn't bother me, but it might bother others. 
• It's hard to imagine the vaccine being made mandatory. But what happens when some fanatic decides to build it into something that can be spread by sneezing? Lower vaccine distribution costs than injection. But egads.

Science Experts

Yesterday's budget included a rather large increase in tobacco excise along with a promise to keep increasing excise over the next few years. So, who does the New Zealand Science Media Centre go to for expert commentary on excise tax increases? You'd expect to see a mix of economists (tax experts, health economists) and a few of the healthists, right? Sorry.

First there's Otago's Professor of Marketing Janet Hoek. She's an expert on smoking as she was lead author on a study that drew strong policy conclusions from a sample of 13 Facebook users.

Next, there's Otago Public Health Senior Research Fellow George Thomson. Thomson coauthored a report on the social costs of smoking with health economist Des O'Dea, so that's only one degree of separation. Thomson mixes some reasonable commentary on the effects of price rises on consumption with scientific discussion of the ethics of "imposing extra costs on addicted individuals."

At least they link to the Treasury RIS.

It's pretty reasonable to conclude that, as far as the Science Media Centre is concerned, economics doesn't make the cut. At least given this reply when I asked why they didn't think of asking economists about a tax question.

@EricCrampton that would be because we are the "Science" media centre. The economic tobacco discussion gets plenty of play elsewhere.
— Science Media Centre (@smcnz) May 24, 2012

NZ Drug read their response the same way I did:

@smcnz @EricCrampton Burn!Economics isn't a science says Science Media Centre. Don't tell me it's an "art".
— NZ Drug Foundation (@nzdrug) May 24, 2012

The Science Media Centre is an arm of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Odd that the Royal Society admitted economist Les Oxley as Fellow if economics isn't a science. And even odder that the Science Media Centre went to a Prof of Marketing when I (quite properly) can't find a single reference to a marketing academic in the Royal Society of New Zealand's roster. Economics degrees are awarded in Faculties of Science around the world; I'm not sure if you could find a single Marketing department able to award Science degrees. [I had mistakenly thought Marketing was exceedingly uncommon in Faculties of Science; turns out, there are more than a few around. Just not in New Zealand or Canada, the two systems with which I'm most familiar. Marketing, done properly like Google's ad placement work, is very much science. I'm less sure that NZ offers that kind of marketing degree. Thanks to Phil, in comments, for correction.]


Last time I wondered about the Science Media Centre's going to healthists rather than economists to ask questions about the GST, they claimed they couldn't find an economist ready to comment. Now they say instead that economics isn't a science. Lovely.

Luddites

Boy is it depressing that it's come to this: scientists at the Rothamsted Institute pleading on YouTube that enviro-Luddites not destroy their research.



The Rothamsted scientists' plea is pretty compelling. Here's the Luddites' call for destroying scientific trials.

New Zealand trials of GM radiata pine were destroyed by local Luddites last month.

GE Free NZ disclaimed responsibility for that attack, but didn't exactly go out of their way to condemn the destruction of scientific knowledge:

President of GE Free NZ, Claire Bleakley, told Radio New Zealand she had "absolutely no idea at all" who was responsible and doubted the person was connected to the organisation.

"This is really the responsibility of a person who is obviously so disfranchised by the ERMA process and their anger at having GE trees regardless of the 95 per cent submissions against it to ERMA.

"The people already done it before and are obviously very concerned GE trees. This isn't an act of vandalism, this is an act of ridiculousness that Scion is going forward with taxpayers money."

Putting a human face on the destruction helps build public support for science; Scion, ran the trials in NZ, could look to Rothamsted as example.

How Beer Created the World

From the "If it's on the Discovery Channel, it must be true" file.



They argue we moved to agriculture in order to get beer.

My biggest complaint? They forget that beer also gave us modern hypothesis testing: Student's t-distribution wasn't given its name because it's useful in undergraduate econometrics; it's the pseudonym that was used by William Sealy Gosset when he published his statistical results. Gosset was a brewer and chemist working for Guinness who needed to know how many trials he needed to run to be confident in his results. And so we have the t-distribution.

I don't put huge confidence in each and every claim, and a lot of the innovations that were pushed by brewing likely would have come anyway for other reasons; it's implausible that somebody wouldn't have figured out refrigeration even if Pilsner had never existed. But would we be so wrong to claim that people who hate beer must also hate civilisation itself?

HT: @MitchellHall

Science Status

One way of breaking out of the Great Stagnation: raise the social status of scientists such that more folks pick science over, say, law. Here's the Forbes piece on Cowen from last year:

Raising the social status of scientists

Cowen’s only concrete recommendation to improve the great stagnation is to “raise the social status of scientists”.  He says: “I don’t want a bunch of extra science prizes given out by the White House; what I want is that most people really care about science and view scientific achievement as a pinnacle of our best qualities as leaders of Western civilization.”

Such a raise in status is devoutly to be wished, particularly the rise in the status of scientists relative to overpaid executives in the financial sector. However such a rise in status is unlikely to have any immediate impact on innovation or growth.

Innovation depends not on how many scientific ideas are out there. It depends on how quickly the already abundant ideas are implemented in the marketplace.

New Zealand columnist Rosemary McLeod also points to the problem, although without any concrete solution:

By contrast to Deen, I doubt very much that any women pant after Stephen Wolfram, the balding and totally average-looking maths genius, now middle-aged, who wrote his first book on particle physics at the age of 14 and had a PhD at 20.

I mention this because somewhere in the great system of evolution there is a definite glitch that needs to be explained in a hurry if our species is to work out how to survive in this world we currently make such a mess of.

It is the likes of Wolfram we should be aiming our simpering selves at, surely, rather than an average Joe with a single, rather common ability that requires almost no IQ.

We should be wanting to breed - if sex still has any relation to reproduction - with blokes who are not only clever, but also rich.

We should thrill to words like "cosmology" and "quantum field theory", then, for the very good reason that we haven't a clue what they mean, but guess that they may come in handy one day.

A lot of should, but no way of getting there from here. Science, alas, isn't generally seen as all that alpha in the only metric that matters in the long run.

Rugby, on the other hand, does not lack for social approbation.

On Saturday, New Zealand learned that we had lost one of our greatest minds.  Sir Paul Callaghan, the 2011 New Zealander of the Year, held many accolades including being a Principal Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.  His list of credentials are as long as they are impressive.  However, despite this, his death and ultimate loss to New Zealand was relegated to the fourth most important news item on both One News and 3 News, something I thought was worth lamenting.

Only 11 days earlier, another Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit member passed away.  His death lead both bulletins.  This of course was Jock Hobbs: former All Black and the man who has been bestowed the honor of saving New Zealand rugby and of securing the 2011 Rugby World Cup hosting rights.

On the day the Jock Hobbs died, both networks deemed the story as being more ‘important’ (i.e. higher up in the bulletin) than news of a major breach of privacy at ACC, the conflict in Syria, the Urewera 4 trial, Asia Air X ending its service to Christchurch, the Ports of Auckland strike and the Chris Cairns libel case.

Compare this to when Sir Paul Callaghan passed away, One News thought the return of a sporting event to Christchurch, the refit of a sports stadium and an incident involving a hot air balloon in which everyone was safe were more important. 3 News had the jailing of a Kiwi duped into smuggling cocaine in Argentina, the cost to rent a house in Auckland and President Obama’s statement about a killed teenager in Florida.

Re-read that list of stories again.  Is it not appalling?  Is it not disrespectful?  Could you go as far as asking if it’s fair, balanced or even reasonable?

It's lamentable, but perfectly understandable. Media plays to what the public wants in a competitive marketplace. And here they want rugby and mostly reckon scientists a bunch of tosser eggheads who should be forced to find real jobs. Not that it's particularly better anywhere else.

We'll know things have changed when scientists have groupies. I'm not betting on its ever happening. I remember stories about one socially obtuse grad student (a few years ahead of me in school, and who will remain nameless) who went around introducing himself to ladies saying "Hi! I just had this paper published! I wrote this!" He was, unsurprisingly, unsuccessful. But I'd expect an athlete of similarly poor social skills would have found more success by saying "Hi! Look at my MVP ring!"

It's sciency!

Start by constructing good and bad explanations for psychological phenomena, with the latter just being circular restatements of the phenomenon. See how well a control test pool can distinguish good from bad explanations. Add irrelevant neuroscience jargon to both explanations without altering the form of either explanation. Surprise! Adding the sciency flavour makes it harder to distinguish good from bad explanations.

Our most important finding concerns the effect that explanatorily irrelevant neuroscience information has on subject’s judgments of the explanations. For novices and students, the addition of such neuroscience information encouraged them to judge the explanations more favorably, particularly the bad explanations. That is, extraneous neuroscience information makes explanations look more satisfying than they actually are, or at least more satisfying than they otherwise would be judged to be. The students in the cognitive neuroscience class showed no benefit of training, demonstrating that only a semester’s worth of instruction is not enough to dispel the effect of neuroscience information on judgments of explanations. Many people thus systematically misunderstand the role that neuroscience should and should not play in psychological explanations, revealing that logically irrelevant neuroscience information can be seductive—it can have much more of an impact on participants’ judgments than it ought to.
...
Regardless of the breadth of our effect or the mechanism by which it occurs, the mere fact that irrelevant information can interfere with people’s judgments of explanations has implications for how neuroscience information in particular, and scientific information in general, is viewed and used outside of the laboratory. Neuroscience research has the potential to change our views of personal responsibility, legal regulation, education, and even the nature of the self (Farah, 2005; Bloom, 2004b). To take a recent example, some legal scholars have suggested that neuroimaging technology could be used in jury selection, to ensure that jurors are free of bias, or in questioning suspects, to ensure that they are not lying (Rosen, 2007). Given the results reported here, such evidence presented in a courtroom, a classroom, or a political debate, regardless of the scientific status or relevance of this evidence, could strongly sway opinion, beyond what the evidence can support (see Feigenson, 2006). We have shown that people seem all too ready to accept explanations that allude to neuroscience, even if they are not accurate reflections of the scientific data, and even if they would otherwise be seen as far less satisfying. Because it is unlikely that the popularity of neuroscience findings in the public sphere will wane any time soon, we see in the current results more reasons for caution when applying neuroscientific findings to social issues. Even if expert practitioners can easily distinguish good neuroscience explanations from bad, they must not assume that those outside the discipline will be as discriminating.

There's a reason that folks try to make their prescriptions look more sciency.