Something wrong with the universe?

This intriguing article “The Truth Wears Off”appeared in the New Yorker before Christmas, but I’ve only just read it.

It’s all about the “decline effect”, whereby effects that initially appear strong in experimental studies seem to start declining in effectiveness as more and more scientists try to replicate the original findings.

Some (or all) of this is understandable in terms of better experimental set ups, and publication bias, which means that it’s much easier to get an apparently new effect published than a study that has a negative result.

But the article is of most interest when discussing cases where the scientists who first made a positive finding discover that they can’t replicate it themselves. A good example is given from parapsychology, where pioneer JB Rhine initially seemed to have a star subject, but he subsequently seemed to lose all of his ESP powers. Sure, the simple explanation may be that, even though Rhine may have thought the replication set up was identical with the previous one, it really wasn’t, and a trick the subject was previously using subsequently failed him. But it does seem a little odd to me that Rhine wouldn’t find the trick in a case like this: one feels sure that this would be more satisfying in its own way than admitting that he can’t explain why a subject lost his power.

There are other examples of this given in the article, and from less contentious fields than parapsychology. It’s well worth a read.

Talk of all this couldn’t help but remind me of Rupert Sheldrake and his odd morphic resonance idea. In short, he believes that you can scientifically show that it becomes easier to acquire knowledge as more and more subjects learn it, be they birds, dogs or humans. (And, of course, in his theory, it’s not via simple imitation of the first creature who learnt the talent.) A genuine decline effect would seem to be the opposite of that.

A possible example of the decline effect that came to my mind was the original cold fusion experiments, and perhaps some of the subsequent ones too. These are not mentioned in the article, however.

If it were true (the decline effect) I guess it could be explicable (warning: wild speculation about to embarked upon) by either:

a. the universe really being a computer simulation game run by a mega intelligence that changes the rules for some obscure purpose while the program runs; or

b. God, his opposite number, or aliens (take your pick) finding it important that certain things not be discovered by humans until the time is right. I personally like the idea of undercover teams of angels, demons, aliens or Men in Black interfering with important experiments in very subtle ways to confound humans at particular points in time. Of course, this may make “sense” for something fundamentally groundbreaking like the discovery of ESP, or perhaps cold fusion, but why it should apply to the effects of antipsychotic drugs would be rather harder to explain.

I guess there is probably some science fiction (or supernatural fiction) that has been written along the lines of b, but I can’t bring any to mind. The nearest may be the idea in the Day the Earth Stood Still that aliens would give us a warning to mend our ways by one spectacular demonstration of their power. But that was far from an discrete way of interfering. And I do recall David Brin wrote “The Practice Effect”, in which inanimate objects get better with “practice”, but again that is more akin to Sheldrake’s idea than a decline effect.

A decline effect has better fiction possibilities than morphic resonance, and maybe that is its most endearing feature.

Mochi deaths 2011 (this year with video, and other “Japan is shrinking” news)

Happy New Year, everyone, and once again, condolences are due to those in Japan who just lost someone due to the annual New Year’s mochi eating habit.

Yes, as my Google search ranking for “mochi deaths” remains very high (number one in fact, something I acknowledge as a dubious distinction), I know that I have visitors waiting for this annual post.

But as with last year, it seems that the English Japanese news media have lost interest in providing the numbers of (usually elderly) Japanese residents who choke on their New Years mochi.

So again I have had to resort to searching in Japanese, this time with the ever helpful Google translate. It seems the numbers in the Tokyo area (see 3rd story at the linked page to Yomiuri Shimbun), at least, are pretty much as high as ever:

Between one or two days in Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama, Chiba, and Wakayama prefectures of five, died choke on rice cakes from a total of 10 elderly people.

Tokyo Fire Department is "good hair cut is a small cake, for the elderly and children, accompanied by family members want," and has called for.

According to the agency, in Tokyo, the 24 people taken to the hospital by 8:00 pm two days, killing six of them. The 70 year-old woman died and five 95-year-old man 82. Five of them were at home eating rice cake.

In the other 4 provinces, 61 hours a day to choke on rice cakes 89-year-old male and female four people died.

So, the take home message from that seems to be: 10 dead, at least 24 taken to hospital. You can watch video of this deadly New Year's treat here at the link to Fuji TV. Fortunately, none of the participants keel over and die for the crew filming it.

There is another TV news story (see link to Japan TV NNN) about it, sadly showing an elderly person in a nursing home, by the looks, not being fed mochi. It is, I suppose, a hard story to illustrate well, but still I wish they had come up with something better than this.

Anyhow, my searching around hasn’t found any obvious links to the national mochi death toll this year, but if there were 10 dead around Tokyo, the total for the entire country must be considerably higher.

It’s no wonder that articles like this, warning of the danger, appear just before New Years. Incidentally, maybe this gives an indication of how many people die nationally from mochi, if I can trust Google Translate:

According to the Tokyo Fire Department, four years until 2009, the number of cases in food spending by 4719 the risk of suffocation. Of these, 444 of rice accounts for about 10 percent, are concentrated in the month of January to about 40% of the 171. The ratio becomes more severe 53%, and 70 years or older in most cases by a lot of food.

The Cabinet Office Food Safety Commission in June this year, the probability of risk of suffocation on food, and summarizes the results of the cake at highest risk. And is calculated by assuming 100 million people took a bite, the cake is to be up to 7.6 at the frequency of accidents….

According to the Ministry of Health, Vital Statistics, the number of deaths due to suffocation incidents of food in 2009 4679 people. Account for nearly 90 percent of those over 65.

So, if Tokyo Fire Department has about 4,719 deaths over four years from all choking, and the total national figure is about the same per year, maybe we can assume the national New Year's mochi death toll is about 3 to 4 times the Tokyo average? Well, someone with actual Japanese ability can correct me, but it seems a fair guess.

Onto more death in Japan news, the Japan Times notes the following:

A total of 4,863 people died from traffic accidents in 2010, down 51 from the previous year, according to preliminary data from the NPA.

So, roughly the same amount of Japanese die annually in car accidents as from choking? How does that compare to other countries? Well, it appears well above the American choking rate:

According to the National Safety Council, choking remained the fourth leading cause of unintentional injury death in the United States as of 2004. In 2006, a total of 4,100 deaths (1.4 deaths per 100,000 population) from unintentional ingestion or inhalation of food or other objects resulting in airway obstruction was reported.

But the real point I was linking to the Japan Times article was due to the coverage on the shrinking Japanese population generally:

Death record reset KYODO An estimated 1,194,000 Japanese died last year, the most since record-keeping began in 1947, according to the latest health ministry data.

The data also said an estimated 1,071,000 babies were born 2010, up slightly from 2009.

The difference between births and deaths — 123,000 — also set a record high, blowing by the previous record of 71,830 set in 2009.

"The number of deaths is on the rise due to aging and the number of births will not grow because of a decline in the population of women who give birth," a Health, Labor and Welfare ministry official said.

The difference "will continue to be greater in the future," the official said.

In 2009, total deaths fell by 542 from 2008 to stand at 1,141,865. In 2010, however, total deaths surged by around 52,000 as elderly people succumbed to the hottest summer on record, the official said.

Japan's population decline has certainly taken a surge for the worse, by the sounds. (It's also interesting to note how many deaths they blame on the hot summer, even in a country where small houses and apartments make air conditioning easier and more economical than in countries like Australia.)

The Japan Times also recently ran an interesting opinion piece noting that Japan's fertility decline was by no means unique, being shared by other East Asian countries (Korea and Taiwan both, oddly enough) as well as strong welfare state countries such as in Scandinavia. This is true enough, but it still doesn't address the major issue of Japan being reluctant to take substantial immigration. It's not like they're going to be short of houses anytime soon.

1980’s justified

Long term readers may recall that, apart from They Might be Giants, my other main pop music interest has been David Byrne and Talking Heads.

Tonight, I was looking at a Youtube of Once in a Lifetime, as I was going to show it my son.  But he was too busy hunting dinosaurs on the iPad, so he didn’t pay much attention.  I’ll get him to watch it yet.

But the thing of interest is that this upload of the clip (done in Jan 2010) is still attracting recent comments.  (I presume it must the version that everyone watches when they search for it.)

And generally speaking, nearly everyone commenting seems young, but very appreciative.   I like this one:

my parents will do the arm thing and say "same as it ever was" all the time!! LOLOL

And this comment:

Such a cool video even till today

and

 Best. Video. Ever

That’s nice.  I feel the 1980's doesn't have much to be ashamed of after all.

Dr Who Christmas

I'm not the world's biggest Dr Who fan, but still, I like to comment on it sometimes.

This year's Christmas special was, I thought, a very pleasing combination of mad, clever, funny and touching. It was also, I thought, much better directed than some of the previous season; it hung together pretty well.

Let's hope the forthcoming season works a tad better than the last, which had it moments, but not quite enough of them.

Must catch up with TMBG

My favourite band, They Might be Giants, spend a lot of time doing kids albums lately, which I don’t usually buy, even though they write some pretty catchy stuff that usually gets them a Grammy nomination.

But I think I will get the current one: Here Comes Science. Most of the songs seem to be up on Youtube, and I like many, including this one:

And I’ve also found a video for another song of there’s from a couple of years ago. Since we all like drinking and smoking puppets, it’s worth a look:

Watch it while you can

It was a couple of years ago that I mentioned I had seen (and then bought) the DVD for the 1999 "movie" of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. As that happened around Christmas, it's become a minor family tradition to watch it at the this time of year; hey, it might not be Christian, but the story is not inappropriate for the season.

We all still really like it: as I've said before, I think it does a filmed musical stage production in about as perfect a way as I can imagine.

As for the musical highlight, I've always really liked this song (A Pharoah
Story) at the start of the second act, sung here by the lovely Maria Friedman. While this part is not staged in any way to give you an impression of what the rest of the DVD production looks like, it sounded pretty good through my computer speakers, so have a look.

I see that an earlier Youtube I had up has been pulled for breach of copyright. I expect the same fate this one too, especially as the guy seems to have put the whole movie on Youtube. That really must push the patience of Mr Lloyd Webber. So enjoy while you can:

Christmas Greetings 2010

Three videos

1. Sega can be played in all sorts of places now (read the comments following this post too: quite witty.)



2. The funniest ads I saw all year, from Gruen Transfer.

3. I never cared for Rudolph anyway (you can skip through the first minute or so)

Not exactly Christmassy

I’ve been looking around The Guardian’s Comment is Free Belief section, and it’s pretty good.  (Generally speaking, I preferred The Guardian’s website when they gave more prominence to CIF articles on their main page.  Now you have to make the extra click, and I miss a lot of stuff there.)

This article about modernising Hinduism is pretty interesting.  Apparently, the Hindu America Foundation has a report that tackles the caste system head on.  I was interested to read this part:

Noting that there are defenders of the caste system, not just the curmudgeon and cruel among Hindus, but the likes of Voltaire and Diderot who fought against the monotheistic intolerance of Christians and Muslims, to sociologists like Louis Dumont who argued that the "distribution of functions leads to exchanges", to the great Indophile, Alain Daniélou who argued that caste does not equate to "racist inequality but… a natural ordering of diversity," the HAF report argues that a birth-based hierarchy is unacceptable, that inequities against and the abuse of the Dalits/SCs is a human rights issue, and that the solution to this social ill is available within Hindu sacred texts themselves, and that Hindus should be at the forefront of putting an end to the system of birth-based hierarchy as well as taking the lead in energising the Dalit community to fight discrimination.

It's always good to see how outsider intellectuals justified crap systems.

Another ocean issue

Oh, that's good. [Sarcasm] Another way in which ocean pH may be a problem:

Scientists already know that a drop in ocean pH affects the carbon cycle, reducing the carbonate ions that organisms like corals, mollusks and crustaceans use to build shells and external skeletons. Now, a new study shows that a CO2-induced increase in acidity also appears to disrupt the marine nitrogen cycle. The finding, to be published December 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could have ramifications for the entire ocean food web.

But what practical effect this may have is completely unclear:

Nitrification decreased, compared to controls, in all experimental cases, with the effect ranging from an 8 percent reduction to a 38 percent reduction. "What we saw is almost uniform across the ocean, or at least in all the experiments we conducted, which seems to suggest this is fairly consistent effect," says Beman. Importantly, in some cases the change was quite large. "So it could have a pretty substantial effect on how nitrogen is cycled in the ocean," he says.

One potentially positive effect could be a reduction of nitrous oxide—marine nitrification is a relatively big source of this greenhouse gas. "But the larger, much more difficult things to predict are the connections to other organisms and processes," says Beman. Less nitrification would make fewer nitrates available to the plants and other organisms that use them to make vital proteins, making it more difficult for them to thrive. This in turn means less food would be available to the animals that eat those nitrate-using organisms, and so on up the food web.

Oyster and coral alert

Time for some ocean acidification news.

Oysters grown on the West coast of American have been having a hard time.  As this story noted in 2009:

In 2005, when most of the millions of Pacific oysters in this tree-lined estuary failed to reproduce, Washington’s shellfish growers largely shrugged it off.

In a region that provides one-sixth of the nation’s oysters – the epicenter of the West Coast’s $111 million oyster industry – everyone knows nature can be fickle.

But then the failure was repeated in 2006, 2007 and 2008. It spread to an Oregon hatchery that supplies baby oysters to shellfish nurseries from Puget Sound to Los Angeles. Eighty percent of that hatchery’s oyster larvae died, too.

Now, as the oyster industry heads into the fifth summer of its most unnerving crisis in decades, scientists are pondering a disturbing theory. They suspect water that rises from deep in the Pacific Ocean – icy seawater that surges into Willapa Bay and gets pumped into seaside hatcheries – may be corrosive enough to kill baby oysters.

Well, now it seems the suspicions of high CO2 having something to do with this may have been confirmed.  Someone had the good idea to actually takes measurements of the water used:

Increased pCO2 and decreased pH have been shown to negatively impact larval development in C. gigas (Kurihara, 2007). Periods of elevated pCO2 in May and June 2010 correlated with commercial losses at WCH.

In another study, decreased pH was shown to decrease shell strength of pearl oysters (although it doesn’t appear that they looked at the pearls themselves.)

And for corals, another recent study indicated that a combination of even modest water temperature increase and lower pH has a big effect on coral growth and survival:

Holger babysat 40 of the baby corals for 42 days under four different conditions: In the first tank, the researchers simulated 1C of ocean warming; in the next, they simulated ocean acidification by bubbling carbon dioxide through the tank to lower the pH by 0.25; the third combined this warming and acidification; and a fourth tank maintained current ocean conditions as a control.

“The different conditions had absolutely no effect on the ability of the larva to settle – to stick to the rock surface – which may be good news for people who are trying to grow coral gardens,” Aaron says.

But post-settlement, some of the young coral polyps were showing the effects ‘global warming’.

“The biggest surprise was that neither temperature alone, nor acidification alone had a big effect on the growth or survival rate [95%] of the coral, even though the warming prompted zooxanthallae expulsion as expected,” Aaron says. “Once we combined this moderate warming and acidification, though, we saw significant impacts: growth rate of the polyps – for both the skeletal and soft pulpy mass – plummeted to almost half of the rate seen under the other three conditions, and they were twice as likely to die [90% survival rate].”

The link to the actual study abstact is here.

And finally, if these Europeans have it right, the decrease in aragonite saturation (important for some corals and shellfish) is going to be on a rapid downward spiral this century right around the world:

If you want to read the tiny words, and look in more detail at the original, go here.

Sweet bug

It seems this has been on Youtube for a while, but it just made an appearance on Cute Overload.

I reckon it looks remarkably like how you would expect a kitten to act. (In reality, as some people at Youtube have noted, it was probably thinking they were aphids it was trying to kill. But then, kitten play is just build up to backyard wildlife murder, so what the hey...)

Seems a nice man

I recently mentioned Geoffrey Rush as an Australian actor who actually doesn’t bother me.  (He has managed to get through the insidious effects Australian films have on me.)  I see today that he has an interview in LA Times which is pretty interesting.  I liked this part about his first (short) trip to LA:

Tell me about the first time you ever set foot in L.A.
It was in 1996. James L. Brooks had seen a copy of Shine before it was released, and he asked to meet with me. So I flew over and spent six hours with him. He had a little camera, and I read and did improv, and then I just got back on the plane and came home. It was weird—there was a limo waiting to take me to my $500-a-week theater job.

What was your impression of the city from those six hours?
Well, I’m suddenly driving down Pico Boulevard. You see the palm trees, and you think, Oh my God, it’s just like Brisbane but bigger! It didn’t seem unfamiliar, because it’s known to us through so many movies. It just had a complete air of unreality, and I thought, This is kind of an adventure. [Brooks] gave me some Simpsons booty to bring back. I got [an animation] cel and some shirts and stuff. It was a fun, amazing weekend.

Must be a fantastic Happy Meal toy this week

Mum gives birth at Geelong McDonald's restaurant

Climate notes from all over

Yes, it's cold in England and much of Europe, and climate change skeptics are poking fun at those who in the last decade predicted the virtual end of winter snow for those countries currently under a lot of it.

Yet, Real Climate has a post about the ways that it may indeed be all related to AGW, and in particular to do with sea ice over Canada way. But it's all very complicated and no one knows for sure.

Now, 2010 is bound to be high on global average temperatures, but it does seem a year most notable for sudden extremes in all aspects of weather - the Russian heatwave, the Pakistan floods, the one in a 1000 year flood of Tennessee. And now England and Europe being unusually cold.

Given the slow but (on the longer scale) steady progress of global temperatures (Tamino has an excellent post showing how all the temperature data sets collected and calculated in different ways are still all following the same path,) it will be interesting to see whether the public over the next year or two becomes convinced of global warming not so much due to high local temperatures, but more because of erratic weather swings.

Meanwhile, Judith Curry's blog continues to be a big puzzle. As someone commented somewhere, it's like she decided to rebuild climate science from the ground up. On the positive side, she doesn't dispute the very, very basics of CO2 as a greenhouse gas, but when she gets into anything else, it's actually very hard to tell where she is going. (In fact, some posts, talking about science generally, give the impression she is seeking to rebuild science itself from the ground up.) She seems to find many things "interesting" and worthy of her looking into further, but at this rate is seems she will come to some conclusion by about 2020.

None of her mainstream climate critics have said much about her lately, a bit to my surprise, but Judith went to the AGU meeting last week in San Francisco, and her post showing her slides ends with these two:

Slide 14

In conclusion: The drive to reduce scientific uncertainty in support of precautionary and optimal decision making strategies regarding CO2 mitigation has arguably resulted in:

• unwarranted high confidence in assessments of climate change attribution, sensitivity and projections
• relative neglect of defining and understanding the plausible and possible worst case scenarios
• relative neglect of decadal and longer scale modes of natural climate variability
• and conflicting “certainties” that result in policy inaction

Slide 15

A way forward is the decision analytic framework of robust decision making under deep uncertainty, which emphasizes scenario discovery and uncertainty analysis and identifying a broad range of robust decision strategies.

Implications of such a strategy for climate research are an increased emphasis on:

• exploring and understanding the full range of uncertainty
• scenario discovery using a broader range of approaches
• natural climate variability, abrupt climate change, and regional climate variability

Clear? No, it wasn't to me either.

But - I am happy to see that James Annan, who was strongly critical of Curry's "Italian flag" post several weeks ago (I don't think she has finished talking about them yet) saw her AGU talk, and has this to say about it:

He also emphasised the importance of only speaking in areas where you had earnt credibility based on your published record, which formed an interesting backdrop to Judith Curry's talk later that day. She devoted her time to accusing the IPCC of ignoring the tails of the pdfs of climate sensitivity that were clearly presented in the very figure that she repeatedly referred to and explicitly emphasised in the summary ("values substantially higher than 4.5C cannot be excluded"), then read out a few cartoons and finally, literally out of nowhere, concluded that therefore they had underestimated the magnitude of decadal variability and that their detection and attribution results were unsound! Really, I'm not making this up, it was actually how it happened. These latter topics were first introduced on her concluding slide and there was no hint of supporting argument. She also talked about the "modal falsification" of Betz 2009, (which I haven't read but just googled now, is there a free version somewhere?) so I asked if and how this "falsification" (and she used the scare quotes herself) was distinct from assigning a low posterior probability in a Bayesian sense. She replied that it could be considered the same, at which point some of the audience were shaking their heads and others were nodding in agreement. From which I conclude that nobody, including Judith, knows what Judith means. Unfortunately, she didn't seem to be anywhere to be found at the end of the session and I didn't see her at any of the other relevant sessions where people actually dealing with these sorts of issues were actually presenting concrete results.

So, I am not alone in not being able to make head nor tail of Curry, and my lack of science qualifications are not the reason why. Romm's description of her as a "confusionist" seems as apt as ever.