Predisposition and causation

Study finds genetic links between schizophrenia and cannabis use | Reuters

Some pro-legalisation people will probably think this study helps throw doubt on cannabis as a cause of schizophrenia:

 The results chime with previous studies linking schizophrenia and cannabis, but suggest the association may be due to common genes and might not be a causal relationship where
cannabis use leads to increased schizophrenia risk.Cannabis is the most widely used illicit drug in the world, and its use ishigher among people with schizophrenia than in the general population.

"We know that cannabis increases the risk of schizophrenia. Our study certainly does not rule this out, but it suggests that there is likely to be an association in the other direction as well – that a pre-disposition to schizophrenia also increases your likelihood of cannabis use," said Robert Power, who led the study at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London.

But isn't the point this:  even if you are genetically predisposed to both use cannabis and get schizophrenia, does actually using cannabis help bring on the schizophrenia you're genetically predisposed to get?  

And as for the finding itself, I think it's hardly surprising.

Harry Clarke comments

From his blog, talking about the suggestion that ABC iView move to a user pays model:

The Australian might argue that the ABC gets unfair public funding which disadvantages those private media suppliers who must make a buck.  There is some truth to this but The Australian anyway services a different market to the ABC. The Australian services primarily  - the right-wing loony market of cretinous IPA/libertarian types.  The ABC has a more balanced view of the world.

Heh.  

An assessment of the IPA hard to disagree with

Detritus — Thankyou note to John Roskam
(OK, maybe a couple of lines are too harsh, but I'm right up there with the general sentiment.)

Folks are dumb where I come from

Look, it's a clear as anything that Clive Palmer gets votes by being the anti-politician politician, and as such his support is from the politically un-engaged.   We seem to have a lot of those in Queensland, where Palmer polls an extraordinary 14%.

Still, as with Pauline Hanson, it can't last.   The flakiness and insubstantiality eventually seeps through into enough of the electorate, although with Hanson it was perhaps the impression that she was a mere dumb puppet for the men around her who wanted to get ahead that caused her downfall. 

The problem is Clive is the opposite - he uses others as puppets, up to and including visiting US (former) Vice Presidents, and we have to wait for the breakup of his Senators into a fractious disunity, with inside stories of Clive behind the scenes, to see his downfall. 

Well, that's how I think it will go.   Labor doesn't seem quite up to raising money to fund the jailing of a political opponent, as Tony Abbott did.

Salt on Piketty

What a lightweight and snide discussion of Piketty by Bernard Salt in The Australian today.   I've never read Salt's column's much - I found most of them boring - but I didn't really know his political leanings til now.

Also on Piketty, I was interested to read this blog entry on debate now going on about inheritance and wealth taxes.   As I have written before, I had not even realised that the US had such a tax, but the blog entry explains why that may be - very few people pay it.  The British inheritance tax is much larger (I think), but how many people may escape it by positioning money in off shore accounts is something I don't know.

I presume there has been a lot of economic work done on inheritance tax (in fact, I see there was a 2013 paper co-authored by Piketty with the alluring title "A Theory of Optimal Inheritance Tax") , but it's something we never hear about as a prospect for Australia. 

Perhaps that should change?

Bell's theorem confusion

I'm pretty sure that the interpretation of Bell's Theorem in the popular physics books I read in the 1980's (written after the Alain Aspect experiments) was pretty consistent - that it showed reality was "non local".

But this article in Nature, which is not easy to follow but worth reading to get an idea of the continuing debate amongst physicists about some very fundamental concepts, goes into the alternative interpretation, and how the experiments still have unresolved "loopholes".   (Interesting, the suggestion at the end is that the loopholes may be experimentally covered by putting one end of the set up with a human on the Moon!)

Progress in this matter of resolving the very meaning of basic concepts in physics does seem very slow.

Yet another remarkable Jewish story from WW2

Surviving the Black Sea: An appreciation of David Stoliar, the sole survivor of the 1942 Struma disaster | The Los Angeles Review of Books

Read this lengthy review that tells the tragic story of the sinking of a ship in the Black Sea, full of Jews trying to get to Palestine, in 1942.

Suggestions for replacing the "honour killings are morally justified" talk

I don't know:  the Festival of Dangerous Ideas might have got away with a talk by a Caliphate favouring Islamist if they had called it "Understanding honour killings from within the culture," or some such;  but going with "Honour Killings are Morally Justified" was an absurd and offensive bit of trolling for attention. 

Now that the Festival has a gap in the program, I've been trying to think of alternative "dangerous" talk titles:

"Between Clive and the Buffet Table - a caterer reminisces"

"A Rinehart Family Christmas"

"The case for compulsory circumcision"

"The Phil Neitszke Guided Tour of Switzerland"

I'll keep working on it....

Mercury in fish, revisited

The Mercury-Laden Fish Floated for School Lunches | DiscoverMagazine.com

I've posted quite a few times over the years about mercury in fish, mainly because it seems to be a topic they follow closely in the US, but less so here.

At the link is a lengthy article looking at the issue with regard to the dogfish, a type of shark that the US government is looking at using in school lunches and prisons, but not everyone thinks it's a good idea.

Interestingly, I see that the article indicates that Spanish mackerel is pretty high on the list of mercury affected fish too, above tuna, which I don't think I realised before.  I don't mind a bit of mackerel every now and again.  Certainly, our more premium white fish have now become ridiculously expensive. 

Higgs causes confusion

Should the Higgs boson have caused our Universe to collapse?

British cosmologists are puzzled: they predict that the Universe should not have lasted for more than a second. This startling conclusion is the result of combining the latest observations of the sky with the recent discovery of the Higgs boson. Robert Hogan of King's College London (KCL) will present the new research on 24 June at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Portsmouth.

Andrew Bolt: tired and emotional

Most fair minded people will be rather surprised at the jury verdict in favour of Rebekah Brooks, given that it was looking pretty obvious to readers, let alone the papers' editors, that the London tabloid staff must have been illegally hacking into private phones.     (Also, her sometimes lover was convicted, as well as 3 senior journalists who already pleaded guilty, and another 15 journalists apparently yet to go to trial.)  

Yet an apparently tired and emotional Andrew Bolt's reaction?:

May the Murdoch haters choke on their vomit at this result. 

Ha!  Yes, Andrew, it's like a complete vindication of everything good and noble about Murdochworld.

Oh - and who should join in - the hive mind of Catallaxy.  Sinclair Davidson thinks Andrew "sums it up nicely."

Look, fellas, I know you were at that big IPA shindig with Rupert as Guest of Honour last year, but wipe that gold dust from your eyes and get a grip, will you?  

*  If I were on the jury, I would have been tempted to convict her just for having such an annoyingly wild and woolly hair do.

More conscious coupling needed

For millennials, out-of-wedlock childbirth is the norm. Now what?

Interesting story at Slate at the strange state of US society regarding "out-of-wedlock" childbirth (and especially single motherhood.)  Although the outcome is not good from a poverty/social point of view, the suggestion is that no one knows what to do about it anyway:

The conservative response to this web of issues is to say we need to encourage more marriages. But evidence suggests that single mothers who later wed usually end up divorced and worse off financially than before. And as I’ve written, even if marriage promotion is a generally worthwhile goal, the government still has no real idea how to achieve it.
So far, federally funded programs designed to encourage matrimony have delivered weak results, and even where they’ve had a positive impact, the change hasn’t been nearly enough to make a significant dent in poverty. Meanwhile, cutting back on welfare for single mothers doesn’t shrink their numbers.

News spreads slow in the denier community

It seems like Andrew Bolt's climate denier reading is very limited.  He's relying on a Christopher Booker column which in turn is relying on Steven Goddard analysis of temperature adjustments.

I would say it's pretty clear that Bolt does not know that Steven Goddard made so many mistakes and refused to acknowledge them that Anthony Watts will not run any of his material at Watts Up With That.  Furthermore, a recent specific series of Goddard posts on the US temperature record was taken apart as being plainly in error at Lucia's Blackboard.  (In fact, it was there that Watts dropped by to confirm he would have nothing of Goddard's on his blog, and this has been the case for a year or two now.)

Bolt also quotes from Jennifer Marohasy - the Australia scientist whose credibility seems to have dwindled away, more due to her work on the Murray Darling, as far as I can tell.

Here's a hint Andrew:  if a pretend scientist has made so many wrong claims that even Anthony Watts stops using his material, he is not to be trusted on anything.

Do try to keep up to date on the current state of denialism, won't you?

I must be Swedish

Given that many people in the West are busy promoting the idea of drug law liberalisation, I had been meaning to look at the matter of one European nation which has, pretty much, had a very successful war on illicit drugs, but it seems to be pretty rarely spoken about.   (Instead, both Libertarians and Lefties like to talk about Portugal, which has seen drug use and harm reduce by way of de-criminalising personal use combined with a very un-Libertarian system of tribunals which deal with users.)  

I'm talking Sweden: the rich, successful little nation of pop, IKEA and blond women which has an attitude towards illicit drugs that makes me wonder if somewhere on my father's side some Swedish blood has crept into my genetic profile.  A recent article which appears to be from that country sums it up:

Cocaine, ecstasy and even cannabis are rarely seen in streets and clubs in line with Sweden's official "zero tolerance" approach. The ambitious target is clear.

"The overarching goal: a society free from illegal drugs," it states.

Sweden criminalized illicit drug use in 1988, thanks in large part to a two-decade campaign by a group called the Swedish National Association for a Drug-free Society (RNS). It followed a two-year attempt to introduce a more tolerant approach that was considered a failure by authorities.

"The most important link in the chain when it comes to the drug problem is the use of drugs, the demand that comes from the individual user," said RNS secretary general Per Johansson.

"If you don't focus on the demand you will never be effective combatting the supply of drugs." 

Sweden also puts strong emphasis on prevention, with extensive drug awareness programmes in schools and even preschools. The country now has some of the continent's lowest rates of drug consumption among students aged 15 and 16.

According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), only nine percent of the Swedish school population had tried cannabis, compared to 39 percent in France, 42 percent in the Czech Republic and around 25 percent in Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands.

'Something not Swedish'

A survey by the Swedish Drug Users Union in 2008 showed that a majority of the population supports the strict policy. Every other Swede said that possession or cultivation of cannabis for personal use should be punished with prison, and six in 10 believed that a "total war" on cannabis  -- which the survey defined as arresting and jailing all dealers and users -- was the best tactic.

"Drugs have always been seen as something not Swedish, like something foreign," said Börje Olsson, a sociology professor at Stockholm University.

"They are not part of the Swedish morals. People think 'this has nothing to do with us'." 

The latest EMCDDA data shows that the number of Swedish adults between 15 and 64 who had consumed cocaine during the last year was almost five times smaller than the biggest consumer, Spain.

For ecstasy, consumption figures in Britain and the Netherlands were 14 times higher than in Sweden.

Police play a key role in enforcement. Anyone even suspected of being "high" can be detained and given a compulsory urine test. If positive, they are slapped with a criminal charge and must stand trial. 

 It shows a few thing, I think.   Firstly, it appears that a key thing as to how seriously and successfully a nation takes on their "drug war" is cultural, and the cultural attitude does not uniformly run along the Left/Right divide.   (Compare other successful drug fighting nations such as Japan and Singapore.) 

Secondly, I think I have read that in Australia, at least, there is concern that drug education in high school may have the unintended effect of increasing curiosity and experimentation for those inclined to do so.   That doesn't seem to be the case in Sweden.

Thirdly, I am curious as to how drug use is co-related across Europe in terms of economic success.

I also note that drug use follows weird patterns across various nations.  Form the BBC report I just linked to, on why the UK doesn't have a crystal meth problem:

New figures from the Home Office estimate that in the past year about 17,000 people aged 16-59 in England and Wales took methamphetamine - fewer than for any other drug recorded. About 27,000 people had used heroin, 47,000 crack cocaine, 120,000 ketamine and two million cannabis. 

"The prevalence has been pretty much confined to the male gay scene and even within that what you might call the heavy-end party scene of injecting crystal meth and promiscuous sexual activity," says Harry Shapiro of the charity Drugscope. 

In the UK the drug is often used at sex parties and combined with others like Viagra and GBL, says Dr Owen Bowden-Jones, consultant psychiatrist at the Club Drug Clinic in central London. 

Most of its 300 or so referrals for using crystal meth are from London, but some are starting to come from other cities like Manchester. A small number are from the straight clubbing community, but they remain the exception, says Bowden-Jones.

"On the West Coast of America it's a drug of deprivation, in London it seems to be a drug of affluent gay men and in Eastern Europe it's associated with prostitution."

And yet in Australia, it is thought to be particularly popular in rural area.

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, the alliance of Left and Libertarianism which is promoting a softening of cultural attitudes towards drug use in the US and Australia is not good for the countries in the long run.

Japan on ice

A few years ago, devoted readers would have seen my post showing photos of various Antarctic national stations. (Quite a good post for its combination of curiosity, education and entertainment, if I do say so myself.)

Today, I read that Japan is thinking of building a new Antarctic station to continue its work of drilling into deep, deep ice, for the purpose of investigating the ancient atmosphere for climate research.

The article doesn't say exactly where the new station would be, but notes that if you're really desperate for a place to sleep, you may find an empty Japanese building in Antarctica:

Tokyo already has four stations on the frozen continent, two of which are currently in use—the Syowa Station on the coast and the Dome Fuji Station inland.

Japanese research teams at Dome Fuji Station have sampled air captured in ice as long ago as 720,000 years, after drilling down 3,000 metres (1.86 miles).

At the proposed new base, scientists would be able to drill down to reach ice that formed 1 million years ago, beating the current sampling record held by a European team, which has looked at 800,000-year-old ice.

So, what does the Dome Fuji Station look like?  It didn't feature in my previous post, probably because it's rather dull:

  

In fact, the Japanese National Institute of Polar Research website that that photo came from indicates nothing much is going on right now at the station:

Dome-Fuji Station was established in January, 1995 to conduct deep ice-core drilling at the highest dome of Dronning Maud Land, some 1000 km away from Syowa Station. After completing 3035 m deep drilling, the station is being closed temporarily.

But there is a more entertaining photo to be found about it, on what appears to be a Japanese guy's  Flickr feed:

That's an amusingly Japanese photo, even if I have no idea exactly what they are doing.   (I also wonder if the middle two guys are from that country.)  The caption beside the photo notes this:

Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition 35th members welcomed the arrival of those of 36th after 4 months construction work for Dome Fuji Station. The station became famous later thanks to a popular cinema movie "南極料理人 (Antarctic Chef)" and we are happy if you recall the station was constructed by us in such a harsh environment (altitude 3820 m; max air temperature -29 degree C; atmospheric pressure around 750 hPa) without taking a bath for 4 months.

 Well, it sounds like the movie might be worth tracking down.

By the way, I have no clear  idea what the Japanese man on whose flickr account this appears does for a living.  He certainly takes a heck of a lot of photos of what looks like cycling races, interspersed with graphs, and the occasional photo of him doing something science-y looking. 

Where's a lorry full of gravy when you need it?

Mashed potato spillage closes Yorkshire road for five hours

The fickle public on side again?

I've long thought it likely that public sentiment towards climate change varies with the weather, and as this poll was apparently taken recently, this may well explain the apparent increased public approval of carbon pricing and belief in climate change.

Certainly, in the last couple of months, the Australian public must be noticing the remarkable warmth for the time of year.

In Brisbane, where roses only lie dormant for a relatively short time anyway, they are really very confused about the warm autumn and winter.   But it's not only them - I'm sure lots of other plants are flowering when they wouldn't normally.  It is very noticeable.

But this poll was an on line one - which I never take all that seriously. 

Still any move in the public sentiment towards accepting reality and approving carbon pricing is welcome.

Poor misunderstood tobacco company

Is this the end of the tobacco war?

Peter Martin notes:

Added to the Health Department's website quietly last week amid debate over the effectiveness of plain packaging, the Treasury data shows 3.4 per cent fewer cigarettes were sold in 2013 than 2012. Plain packaging became mandatory on December 1, 2012.

The Treasury data is consistent with national accounts data that shows a decline of 0.9 per cent in the amount of tobacco and cigarettes sold between 2012 and 2013. The national accounts show a further slide of 7.6 per cent in the three months to March after the first of a number of big increases in tobacco excise announced late last year.

The Bureau of Statistics bases the national accounts measure on a survey of households, whereas the Treasury collects information on every stick and pouch of tobacco sold.

The Treasury data suggests that, adjusted for population growth of 1.7 per cent, the number of sticks sold per person slid about 5 per cent between 2012 and 2013.

Gee, no wonder Sinclair Davidson did some backtracking at Catallaxy when posting on the topic.  Will he still defend the "it's a disaster!" line he took at the first tobacco company suggestion that they were selling more?   (By the way, the three year anniversary of his "stagflation" warning is fast approaching.   I'm planning a party.)

And what will the economist wonder woman Judith Sloan say about it?  Attack the Treasury figures?  Who knows.  I see that Henry Ergas' Saturday position was that it "may" increase smoking:  I think of the three, it was probably Sloan who nailed her credibility highest to the mast on it clearly increasing tobacco consumption.

About the only tactic they have left to argue that smoking has not gone down is to say that illegal tobacco has replaced legal sales.   I think anyone sensible would allow that there may be some substitution going on, at least amongst well established smokers.   But I think it unlikely that new, teenage smokers would be seeking out the illegal product, and as such, the amount of substitution may well diminish within a relatively short time.

But the funniest thing in Martin's report is this comment at the end:

British American Tobacco spokesman Scott McIntyre said: "Smoking rates have been declining in Australia for a very very long time but since plain packaging the rate of decline has halved. That's what we are arguing." he said.

Have we all been misreading the tobacco companies?   I now understand their position to be that they would like the previous (alleged) higher rate of smoking decline to be reinstated by removing plain packaging.

They're a noble industry after all.   Or liars.  One or the other.

Don't mention the potty training

This article in the Atlantic on the (modern) history of potty training notes that Freud's elaborate theorising on the "anal phase" led to some fairly unusual wartime theories:

American anthropologists turned to potty training in the early 1940s, while studying what they believed to be the particular aggressiveness of Japanese soldiers. Could this aggression, asked noted scholars like Margaret Mead, be caused by premature toilet training? Anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer thought so. He argued (as it turns out, falsely) that Japanese parents potty train their babies earlier than Western parents do—and that this accounted for “the overwhelming brutality and sadism of the Japanese at war.” Gorer’s reasoning was that premature toilet training forced Japanese babies to control their sphincters before important muscular development had taken place. This caused intense rage, which the infants soon repressed. This repression, in turn, gave rise to severe and compulsive personalities.

Some of this psychoanalysis was done in the service of the American war effort. In the early 40’s, Geoffrey Gorer and some of his like-minded colleagues were hired as analysts by the U.S. Office of War Information’s Foreign Morale Analysis Division. There, they attempted to build basic personality profiles of foreign nation-states. (In a related project, Gorer linked infant swaddling in Russia to manic-depressive personality disorders.) Gorer’s research on Japan would expand, but he always insisted: “Early and severe toilet training is the most important single influence in the formation of the adult Japanese character.”

This raises the crucial question:  at what age would Hitler have been potty trained?

A Pope on my side

Pope Francis warns on 'evil' of drugs, opposes legalization | Reuters

Yay.

I was thinking while watching Four Corners last week (about the prostitution, drug use and poverty in Brazil in close proximity to the World Cup) that the drug dealers who trade with the poor in such countries are utterly despicable.   I wouldn't mind betting that this Pope's strong views on the matter are due to his familiarity with the society wide problems caused by illicit drug use in his home continent, particularly amongst the poor.  Popes from Europe would not have had the same exposure to the issue, and maybe that's why I cannot recall it being mentioned much by them.