Freakonomics looks at doctors handwashing

Selling Soap - New York Times

A fun read from the NYT about the famous Cedars-Sinai Medical Centres efforts to increase doctors' hand washing habits.

Amongst other measures:

They started a Hand Hygiene Safety Posse that roamed the wards and let it be known that this posse preferred using carrots to sticks: rather than searching for doctors who weren’t compliant, they’d try to “catch” a doctor who was washing up, giving him a $10 Starbucks card as reward. You might think that the highest earners in a hospital wouldn’t much care about a $10 incentive — “but none of them turned down the card,” Silka says.

They then moved onto doing an agar plate culture of some doctors' hands after lunch:

The resulting images, Silka says, “were disgusting and striking, with gobs of colonies of bacteria.”

The administration then decided to harness the power of such a disgusting image. One photograph was made into a screen saver that haunted every computer in Cedars-Sinai.

A nicely creative approach.

Jim Holt on the problems of string theory

The New Yorker: The Critics: A Critic At Large

Jim Holt is an excellent science writer. (His old articles in Slate are well worth looking up.)

In the New Yorker, he has a long review of the 2 anti string theory books out recently, and it is very good reading. (Peter Woit, who wrote one of the books, likes this review much better than the one in Slate that I mentioned some posts back.)

The difficulties of anti drug programs

A White House drug deal gone bad. By Ryan Grim - Slate Magazine

Better late than never. I missed this a few weeks ago, but the article talks about the contradictory effects of anti drug programs in America. (They either don't work or actually seem to result in more use.)

I had heard of such research before, but have never gone looking for more information. It does cross my mind often, however, especially when I take calls at my office from the some group seeking donations to help its anti-drugs educational program in schools here. (I think the police visit and distribute an anti-drugs booklet.) They probably would not appreciate me advising them that their efforts may well be counterproductive.

Controlling the behaviour of people is such tricky business, isn't it?

Poor rats

Future Mars astronauts have radiation on their minds - space - 25 September 2006 - New Scientist Space

The likely serious problems with cosmic radiation on the long trip to Mars is, by my reckoning, good reason to be concentrating on settling the Moon underground first. (Provided that the effect of low lunar gravity can be shown to be less serious than radiation effects.)

Some rats are already being irradiated to see what happens:

These are more difficult to shield against than lighter elements, and Rabin's studies suggest that they are more potent in affecting the brain. The team beams heavy particles into the brains of rats using particle accelerators, then tests the rats to see how the radiation affects their cognitive abilities.

Rats whose brains have been exposed to heavy particle radiation perform more poorly in navigating mazes and have a harder time learning to press a button to get a food pellet. They also are more easily distracted and experience more anxiety in stressful situations.

Maybe in the future, snobby earthlings will deride the intelligence of space settlers in much the same way jokes are made here about settlers inbreeding in remote areas.

As I have mentioned before, one of the first things I want to see done back on the moon is a breeding colony of rats to see how the low gravity affects their offspring.

Bad news for Iran?

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israel 'holds secret Saudi talks'

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has held an unprecedented meeting with a senior member of the Saudi royal family, Israeli officials say.

The meeting 12 days ago has not been confirmed by Saudi Arabia, which has no official contacts with Israel.

Israeli media say they discussed Iran's nuclear programme and a Saudi peace plan adopted by Arab states in 2002.

Barry Cohen's lunch with Mark Latham

Barry Cohen: Prepare to be blessed with a new Marksism fantasy | Opinion | The Australian

Don't you love it when former supporters of Latham tell personal anecdotes of Mark's behaviour? For the amusement of the nation, Latham should continue with this self defeating series of books at the rate of one a year.

From Cohen's column:

I was alerted that I had been given a spray in The Latham Diaries when it was released late last year. As a friend and supporter for many years, guest speaker at a dinner in his honour and having been publicly thanked by him for urging him to run for the leadership, one would expect nothing less.

Stadiums and storms

News in Science - Sports stadiums may focus lightning damage - 20/09/2006

Some time ago I promised my story of stupid behaviour in storms. It's still on its way.

Fiddling with the atmosphere

Fake volcanoes could combat global warming | COSMOS magazine

When it says "fake volcanoes" I'm not sure exactly what mechanism it suggests to get the sulfates into the high atmosphere. (I have suggested before nuking volcanoes that no one wants, but no one pays any attention to me!)

Anyway, the idea of deliberately polluting the high atmosphere to help fight global warming must horrify Greenies.

Stephen Hayes on Saddam & al Qaeda

How Bad Is the Senate
Intelligence Report?

See above for a very lengthy and detailed Stephen Hayes article criticising the Senate report which claimed no connection between Saddam and al Qaeda.

Mark Steyn on the UN follies

U.N. shows why it's incapable of reform

An amusing and interesting Steyn column on recent appearances at the UN.

A funny line about Chomsky:

He [Chavez] denounced Bush as an "imperialist, fascist, assassin, genocidal" and also "the devil," he held up a copy of some unreadable Noam Chomsky book, gave it a big plug and subsequently regretted that he couldn't meet with the late Professor Chomsky. Chomsky isn't late, he's alive and well. Granted, it's easy to get the impression he's been dead for 30 years, since he hasn't had a new idea since the early '70s.

Skepticism on Netroots

TIME.com: The Netroots Hit Their Limits -- Oct. 2, 2006 -- Page 1

This article expressing scepticism on how far the Netroots movement in the States can go is interesting.

The oddest part is this:

...Markos Moulitsas, who runs Daily Kos, is talking about building real, bricks-and-mortar gathering halls where progressives can meet and organize political activities in person.

There's a shortage of "gathering halls" in America? Or is it that netroots need dedicated halls that are unsullied by too many people of other ideologies having met there in the past? Some further checking about this would be interesting, but no time right now.

For those with an interest in the 60's

For Pete's sake - Sunday Times - Times Online

This is an extract from a new book by the former wife of English comedian Peter Cook.

Lots of name dropping of 1960's famous people. Lots of easy sex with men that left the women sad and feeling exploited. (Given how often that is acknowledged now it's amazing it took the fast women of that time a decade or so to realise it.)

But for me the most surprising thing is that the former Mrs Cook suspects that there was a brief fling between Jackie Kennedy (while still with the President, it seems) and Peter Cook!

I find it hard to imagine an odder coupling.

The Sun goes quiet?

The Observer | UK News | Cooling Sun brings relief to sweltering Earth

Slattsnews has already spotted this article. I meant to post about the topic last week, when the New Scientist paper edition carried an article about it. (It was only available on line to subscribers.)

Anyway, the point is that it is believed by several credible scientists that the Sun is about to go into one of its quieter periods, which means few sunspots, and although the exact mechanism is not certain (more cosmic rays causing more clouds is the main theory,) this seems to coincide with periods of global cooling.

The great advantage is that, just when the earth may be starting to heat up from greenhouse gases, the sun may give us 50 to 100 years of cooler weather to get our low emission technology on line. (To ignore greenhouse gases in that period could be a big mistake, as the sunspots and "normal" weather will return sooner or later.)

Over at Real Climate, they seem to rather downplay the importance of this, as evidenced by this recent post. However, if we have the Thames freezing over again within 5 years, the public will be paying a lot of attention!

Mark Latham's wit and wisedom - Phwaw

Look out, toss-bags, Latham's back - National - smh.com.au

From the above article about Lathams new book:

Conga Line is revealing for what its choice of material tells us about Labor's fallen idol. Latham has a particular fixation with Richard Nixon and this shows in the frequency of entries for the Watergate president.

And under "Women" there are five entries, two belittling the female brain, one extolling a woman's place in the home and two reminding us of the origins of the phrases "damned whores" and "God's police", used by the feminist Anne Summers as the title of her watershed book.

I hope Julia Gillard is rushing out to buy a copy. (Maybe Mark sent her one as a gift.)

Mark himself is given a column in the SMH this morning, in which he says:

Even the title of this book is under attack. Writing in one of Rupert Murdoch's American rags earlier this year, the neo-conservative Christian commentator Paul Gray described "a conga line of suckholes" as "possibly the ugliest expression used by an Australian MP". Poor, prissy Paul had better not read the rest of this book. It has too many dinky-di, ridgy-didge Australian expressions for this politically correct petal to absorb.

It's probably not the ugliest expression ever used by an MP, at least in private. It would, however, have to be right up there with anything used by an Australian MP in Parliament.

A Latham Prime Ministership would have been rather like having Sir Les Patterson as leader.

Steyn (and me) on the 9/11 conspiracies

Macleans.ca | Culture | Books | Call me crazy. I blame terrorists.

I missed Mark Steyn's column a few weeks ago about this. I had not realised that the theories had become quite as loopy as those he cites.

The apparent popularity of the 9/11 conspiracies should, I think, be of greater concern to Western governments than it apparently is.

That many in the Islamic world should refuse to believe the "official version" is one thing; after all, there the ongoing promotion of centuries old conspiracy theories against the Jews is a solid groundwork for disbelief of any government that supports Israel.

But for Western nations to have a substantial proportion of its own citizens preferring fantasy over reality is surely corrosive to those nations' democracy. Moreover, Islamic conspiracy believers would doubtless take encouragement from this too.

My feeling is that this is serious enough that it should not be simply ignored, or left to the private market to deal with the matter. (Such as the worthwhile work Popular Mechanics has put into this.) I think there is a justifiable role for government in this, to support publicly the work of anti-conspiracists, and to make plain statements that conspiracy theorists are causing harm, whatever their intentions may be.

Sure, such an active government role would be cited by some as further evidence of the conspiracy. But one would hope that the government explaining its reasons for getting involved in the argument (to the help preserve and better serve the very democracy under which the conspiracy theorists live) would persuade most. In any event, I find it hard to believe that active government role would cause more people to fall under the sway of conspiracy theorists than exist already.

UPDATE: I have just read this excellent and thought provoking article from Tech Central Station about why conspiracy theories are so popular. It's quite long, but well worth reading in full.

Here's the final couple of paragraphs, if you don't have time to look at it all:

I would suggest, then, that the post-Enlightenment pretense of hostility to authority, tradition, and common sense as such, and especially the extreme form of it represented by the likes of Marx and Nietzsche, is what really underlies the popularity of conspiracy theories, particularly those involving 9/11. The absurd idea that to be intelligent, scientific, and intellectually honest requires a distrust for all authority per se and a contempt for the opinions of the average person, has so deeply permeated the modern Western consciousness that conspiratorial thinking has for many people come to seem the rational default position. And it also explains why even mainstream outlets like Time and Vanity Fair, while by no means endorsing the views of the conspiracy theorists, have tended to treat them with kid gloves, as if they were harmless and well-meaning eccentrics instead of shrill and hate-filled crackpots. The belief that extremism in the attack on authority is no vice has a powerful appeal even for suit-wearing journalists and media executives (especially if they are liberals), even if they have too much sense to follow it out consistently.

Yet no civilization can be healthy which nurtures such delusions, for they strike at the very heart of a society's core institutions - family, religion, schools, political institutions, and so forth - and replace the (sometimes critical) allegiance we should feel for them with a corrosive skepticism. Conspiracy theories are only the most extreme symptom of this disease. Less dramatic, but in the long run more dangerous, is the relentless tendency of the Western intelligentsia to denigrate the Western past and present, massively exaggerating the vices of their own civilization and the virtues of its competitors, and putting the worst possible spin on the motives and policies of its current leaders while minimizing or excusing the crimes of its enemies. This would be dangerous under the best of circumstances. It is doubly so while we are at war with enemies who know no such self-doubt and self-hatred.

Why micro black holes might be safe, but I am not relaxed and comfortable yet

LiveScience.com - Despite Rumors, Black Hole Factory Will Not Destroy Earth

Greg Landsberg, a physicist who actually did bother corresponding with James Blodgett (who runs the "Risk Evaluation Forum" that got me interested in possible danger from micro black holes) gives this recent explanation as to why he thinks any MBH created at CERN will not be any danger to the Earth:

"Still, let's assume that even if Hawking is a genius, he's wrong, and that such black holes are more stable," Landsberg said. Nearly all of the black holes will be traveling fast enough from the accelerator to escape Earth's gravity. "Even if you produced 10 million black holes a year, only 10 would basically get trapped, orbiting around its center," Landsberg said.

However, such trapped black holes are so tiny, they could pass through a block of iron the distance from the Earth to the Moon and not hit anything. They would each take about 100 hours to gobble up one proton.

At that rate, even if one did not take into account the fact that each black hole would slow down every time it gobbled up a proton, and thus suck down matter at an even slower rate, "about 100 protons would be destroyed every year by such a black hole, so it would take much more than the age of universe to destroy even one milligram of Earth material," Landsberg concluded. "It's quite hard to destroy the Earth."

These figures sound good, but I tend to worry that they may be made on a set of expected results (regarding, for example, the number that would have earth escaping velocity, the exact dimensions and behaviour of MBH, the conditions inside the Earth where the slow ones stay, and possible interactions with each other) which are far from worst possible estimates.

Given that its the fate of the earth at issue, it seems to me that some calculations should be done on worst case scenarios to be confident of the outcome.

I suppose it is possible that Landsberg has done that, but I am somewhat suspicious that he hasn't. After all, he really believes there is no reason to doubt Hawking Radiation will take care of the problem, so this further exercise is perhaps done on the basis that you don't really have to take it too seriously.

One thing I also don't understand is why it takes an estimated 100 hours for a MBH to absorb a proton.

Maybe it irritates physicists to have a lay person doubting their figures, but I feel it is worth pressing on with the issue none the less.

The fact that there is a lot of uncertainty about the expected precise behaviour of MBH can easily be seen by the number of papers that show up on an arxiv search for "black holes".

On the loss of will in Europe

Confronted by the Islamist threat on all sides, Europe pathetically caves in - Comment - Times Online

It could almost have been written by Mark Steyn, but this column about European "loss of will" is good stuff.

In relation to the Pope, I like this paragraph:

I actually heard a senior member of the British Government chide the Pope this week for what he described as his unhelpful comments. This minister went on to say that the Pope should keep quiet about Islamic violence because of the Crusades.

It was a jaw-dropping observation. If it was meant seriously its import is that, because of violence perpetrated in the name of Christ 900 years ago, today’s Church, and presumably today’s European governments (who, after all, were eager participants in the Crusades) should forever hold their peace on the subject of religious fanaticism. In this view the Church’s repeated apologies for the sins committed in its name apparently are not enough. The Pope has no right, even in a lengthy disquisition on the complexities of faith and reason, to say anything about the religious role in Islamic terrorism.

Well worth reading all of it.

Conflict and Islam

A few weeks ago, prior to the Pope's recent speech, there was an interview on ABC Religion Report with an Australian Catholic priest who lives in Pakistan. The transcript is here.

The whole interview was very interesting. This priest believes that the conflict between Sunni and Shia branches of Islam is going to be a major issue in future, as is evident within Iraq (and also Pakistan.) Also, the issue of the use of the Koran in relation to violence gets an airing:

Stephen Crittenden: I'd be very interested to hear what you have to say about the comments that George Pell made recently, saying 'As an exercise I read through the Qu'ran and I put it down eventually, page after page after page of exhortation to violence.' He's right, isn't he?

Robert McCulloch: Well if you look in Sura 5 , you've got the statement the Muslim take neither Christian nor Jew for friend. Now we can see that certainly as Christians in the Bible there are similar sort of conflictual statements, especially in the Old Testament, but we can put them within the context of when the text was written and exegeses accordingly. But when you have fundamentalist preachers picking up this text, as they do in Karachi, one hears it every Friday in the preaching, in the afternoon. They hear the text, well if these people can't be your friends, it means they're your enemies. If they're your enemies, they must be God's enemies, and if they're God's enemies, well what must we do with them?

That of course is not what all Muslims hold, but I mean one hears it. It's part of the dynamic of threat, fear, which seeps in as you asked right at the beginning, that seeps into the fabric of the society. And I wouldn't like to say because there's violence there, I wouldn't like to be giving the impression that this is a horrible place to live. I've lived there for 28 years, and I look forward to going back there. It's a place of blessing as well, it's a place of violence but it's a place of blessing.

As someone who has lived there for 28 years, he would seem a very credible voice to listen to.

Neo-neocon on Chavez

neo-neocon: A psychiatrist for Chavez:

An amusing post by neo-neocon on that Chavez speech in the UN.

New nuclear reactors, again

Popular Mechanics - The Next Atomic Age

Found via Pajama Media, this Popular Mechanics article talks about new nuclear reactor designs, including my favourite, the Pebble Bed.