The American white male mid-life crisis

Prospect has a lengthy article about a new paper showing a significant rise in white male (usually with low level of education) deaths in the US in the period 1999 - 2013.  Yeah, it is startling when you see this graph:

As Prospect says:

To conservatives, the white midlife mortality reversal in the United States may initially seem to confirm Murray’s argument about moral decay caused by the welfare state. But that interpretation runs into an obvious objection: Similar trends are not evident in the European countries that have even more generous systems of social protection than the United States does.

Although Case and Deaton are cautious about interpreting the data, they single out two possible causes of the mortality reversal. The first relates specifically to the timing of increased drug-related deaths: the introduction and ready availability of opioid prescription painkillers (such as Oxycontin) beginning in the late 1990s, followed by a shift to heroin, both directly linked to rising death rates among whites over the 1999-2013 period. But it is not clear, Case and Deaton point out, whether rising drug use is a response to an “epidemic of pain,” or whether the introduction and distribution of new prescription painkillers played an independent, causal role. One way or the other, however, Case and Deaton’s study puts in bold relief the sheer magnitude of the consequences of today’s drug plague.

A second potential cause highlighted by Case and Deaton (and possibly related to the first) is stress from economic change resulting from slower economic growth and rising inequality. “Many of the baby-boom generation,” they note, “are the first to find, in midlife, that they will not be better off than were their parents. Growth in real median earnings has been slow for this group, especially those with only a high school education.” But they also observe that some other rich countries have seen “even slower growth in median earnings than the United States, yet none have had the same mortality experience.”

 It seems so very clear that the American experience with prescription painkillers and addiction has been a real disaster, yet it still seems one that attracts inadequate attention.

The magazine thinks this says a lot about the American welfare system:

Here is where the stronger systems of social protection in other countries may play a role in both reducing inequality and cushioning people from the adverse social psychological consequences of wage stagnation. One key difference potentially affecting people in midlife, as Case and Deaton point out, is that the other rich countries have maintained defined-benefit pensions, while employers in the United States have shifted increasingly to defined-contribution pensions (such as 401(k) plans) that do not provide the same degree of security. As a result, many Americans with only a high-school education not only lack the skills in midlife to find good jobs or even to stay employed but also face the likelihood of destitution in old age.

These trends put new light on current debates about disability insurance and retirement policy. Contrary to those like Murray who attribute the growth in Social Security Disability Insurance to a decline in the work ethic, Case and Deaton’s data suggest that the increased number of beneficiaries reflects a real deterioration of health in middle age. Raising the Social Security retirement age may seem to be no problem for the educated and affluent who are in good health and do little physical labor, but delaying retirement poses a much bigger problem for workers who are experiencing increased burdens of pain and disability in midlife.

We'll be reading a lot more about this study, I bet...

And by the way:   I reckon it indicates nothing good for the practical consequences of more libertarian views on social and economic issues.

Forgotten proto-hippies

I for one had never heard of a English arty-hippy-magical youth movement from the 1920's called the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift (makes me think of "kibble"),  but The Guardian has remedied that.

It's a good read, with some amusing photos too.  (George Orwell dismissal of them as sex maniacs gets a mention, too, and I can't help but wonder if they somehow had a role in his idea for the Anti Sex League in 1984.)

Speaking of Orwell, I just found this from The Cambridge Introduction to George Orwell:

Don't think I knew of the CIA involvement before....

An Antarctic surprise

For an organisation that climate change deniers have claimed is part of the self serving conspiracy to convince the world that it is heating up probelmatically, NASA sure doesn't know how to hide research that they know said deniers are going to leap on with joy.

So the Antarctic land ice sheet might (for now) still be putting on weight overall, not loosing it?   As a researcher says, though, this does raise an interesting question about the tricky field of sea level rise:

"The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away," Zwally said. "But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for."

Anyhow, I'd be sure that there is more to come from Real Climate and others about this.  

Update:  here's a post at Hotwhopper that puts some perspective on this (including how it is a quite different different result from some other, recent work.)   It's all to do with the complexities of using satellites that measure different things, over different periods.  I would have guessed that the GRACE satellite that measures mass via changes in the gravity field would be the most reliable for working out the ice sheet balance, but this latest study (I think) doesn't use it. 

More about that passing Halloween asteroid

Radar images from those observations revealed asteroid 2015 TB145 true size (it's a bit larger than previously thought) and its speed. The asteroid is hurtling through space at a whopping 78,293 mph (126,000 km/h).

"This would generate a 6-mile-wide crater if it were to the Earth, something of this size and speed," asteroid impact expert Mark Boslough, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, said in the Slooh webcast. He was also impressed by the early radar images of the 2015 TB145.

And it was only found a few weeks before its close fly by.  Link.

The modern blight of smoking

Meet the Melbourne oncologist now at the centre of Big Tobacco’s dartboard

Simon Chapman (the mortal enemy of Sinclair Davidson, incidentally - I suspect they are both in comic book costumes chasing each other around the city at night, such is the depth of their mutual disdain) has an interesting post up which references the way lung cancer really took off in the 20th century.  I remember Paul Johnson wrote about how the modern cigarette really sent smoking rates through the roof in the early 20th century, but I am curious as to the smoking rate in the earlier centuries.

Stick a fork in it

Well, it's amusing watching the hair pulling and shirt (and blouse) rending that is still going on at Catallaxy over the replacement of Tony Abbott with the popular (to normal people) Malcolm Turnbull.   I see that now that the obnoxious Jim Allen has joined in  with a post that spends a great deal of time complaining about the fact that a pro Turnbull challenge post was written by an anonymous contributor.  (Seriously, who cares?)  Earlier, Sinclair had called the Abbott whiners "unmanly" (?, given most male Abbott supporters there are ones who deride homosexuality routinely), leading to a complaint or 20 from some of his long standing supporters.   He in turn complained about getting sick of the criticism that he was stifling free speech on the topic, etc etc.

All highly amusing to see a site which, as far as I can tell, is unified only in its refusal to accept AGW, finding nothing else they can agree upon. 

The incredibly hard to please Kenny

Two decades of Media Watch abstinence | The Australian

I saw Media Watch last week and thought its position on Kenny was probably more than fair.   But according to Kenny, a media show cannot report on a media controversy (an allegation about Kenny which the show noted was hotly denied by Kenny) because it repeats an allegation.

The funny thing is, because of the Australian's paywall, a lot of people (like me) know nothing about what he wrote as a result of his visit to Nauru.

And his extremely politically partisan performance in commentary over the last decade would make every reasonable person question whether his reporting on this white hot issue was balanced, and give it a miss for that reason alone.

That said, I had forgotten that he had been a key figure in the Hindmarsh Island affair, which really was a left wing scandal.  But did he give up journalism for mere commentary and now wants to be seen as a journalist again?

Update:  Media Watch under Paul Barry also fully took Kenny's side in his big defamation complaint against the ABC, too.   (Even though I thought it wasn't really defamatory - just an unfunny joke in very poor taste.)  

Always had a soft spot for ELO

Jeff Lynne launches into new orbit with ELO's 'Alone in the Universe' - LA Times

I noticed an ELO video clip up on Vimeo yesterday, but didn't watch it all due to a stuttering connection.  So, the master of overproduction, Jeff Lynne, is still making music.   I suspect that even if one is not keen on his style, it's hard to positively dislike his music.  

Even Nature got into the Halloween spirit

Zombie physics: 6 baffling results that just won't die : Nature News & Comment

Don't look! - the most disturbing Halloween photo ever published...

(OK, that joke has probably already been done 200 times on twitter and the web before me, but still...)

The comments in The Guardian following this story (Rupert and Jerry Hall now "out" about their dating) are pretty funny.

For Halloween

I recently talked about re-discovering the greatness of The Shining (movie, not the book), and now I see via Open Culture a fascinating half hour documentary on its making.   (Not sure, but I think I have seen this years ago, perhaps on TV.)  It is extraordinary to be reminded that the interior of the hotel is in fact a gigantic set in England.  (And even the exterior in most shots is a mere facade.) 

I wonder if Kubrick, if he were making movies today, could ever warm to the remarkably life like digital sets that are now just standard fare.  I like those videos that show all the green screen use in film and TV. Here's the one for The Martian:



But I digress. Here's the doco on The Shining:

VIEW FROM THE OVERLOOK: Crafting The Shining (30 min) Directed by Gary Leva from Gary Leva on Vimeo.

Not a great idea

Labor promises to lower voting age to 16 or 17 if it wins next election | Australia news | The Guardian

Alan loves Putin

Vladimir Putin: Global Warming 'A Fraud' | The Daily Caller

Ha.  The former IPA anti-renewables mouthpiece Alan Moran turns up at Catallaxy again noting that Putin "appears to be one world statesman willing to call the scam [global warming] for what it is".  (See link above.)

Yes, of course, Alan.  The one world stateman most noted for conducting himself with so much self interest that he makes excuses for local invasions and passenger planes being shot out of the sky and who has a lot of fossil fuels to sell would be the one I would expect to be on your side.   No big surprise, and great company you keep.

More about that annoying company

Apple Doesn't Sell All the Phones. But It Makes All the Money | WIRED

Yes, people keep forgetting that Samsung usually sells many more phones than Apple.  But, with my $59 cheapo Sony Android in my pocket, I guess I am part of the reason why making monies from smartphones is so hard for Android using companies.  (I am thinking of upgrading to a Samsung, but not paying more than $180.)

Cod don't care for warmer water

Warming waters a major factor in the collapse of New England cod, study finds

When not to trust scientists

Forensic DNA evidence is not infallible : Nature News & Comment

Given that it infuriates me that a substantial slab of people do not believe that those who work in the physical sciences are competent when working out things like a temperature record, or the effects of a gas in an atmosphere, I suppose I give the impression much of the time that I never question scientists of any stripe.

But when it comes to the biomedical sciences:  yes, there are many examples of scientists leaping in when they should be more cautious.

And when they get caught up in a court case, they are particularly prone to giving up caution, presumably  because they think they are promoting a good outcome.

This article in Nature shows the danger:

The term 'touch DNA' conveys to a courtroom that biological material
found on an object is the result of direct contact. In fact, forensic
scientists have no way of knowing whether the DNA was left behind
through such primary, direct transfer. It could also have been deposited
by secondary transfer, through an intermediary. (If I shake your hand
then I could pass some of your skin cells onto something that I touch
next.)

Contamination from secondary DNA transfer was raised as a possible problem in Nature in 1997 (R. A. H. van Oorschot and M. K. Jones Nature 387, 767; 1997).
It is known to happen, but has largely been dismissed by legal experts
as being rare outside the conditions of a laboratory. Experiments done
in real-world conditions seemed to support this, and concluded that
secondary DNA transfer would have little impact on interpretation of the
genetic profile.

It is important to recognize that DNA amplification kits have become
much more sensitive than they were in the past. As a result, the types
of samples being analysed have expanded. Investigators no longer need to
identify and request analysis of body fluids such as blood, semen and
saliva. They can swab surfaces for otherwise invisible cells left
behind, on the handle of a weapon or on a windowsill, perhaps, and ask
labs to generate a DNA profile from them. The new kits can generate a
full genetic profile of a suspect from as little as 100 picograms
(trillionths of a gram) of DNA.

These subtleties are not usually explained in court. Instead, a jury is told
that there is a one-in-a-quadrillion chance that the evidence retrieved
from the crime scene did not come from a defendant. Naturally, the
jurors assume that the defendant must have been there.

Given  the power of modern forensic techniques to pull a DNA profile from a
smudge of cells, secondary DNA transfer is no longer a purely
theoretical risk. In California in 2013, a man called Lukis Anderson was
arrested, held for four months and charged with murder after his DNA
was found under the fingernails of a homicide victim.

Anderson had never met the victim and was severely intoxicated and in hospital
when the man was killed. The same paramedics who took Anderson to
hospital responded to the murder. Most likely, the paramedics were
covered in Anderson's DNA, which they then inadvertently transferred.
The charges were dropped.

Experiments in our labs, under the supervision of forensic anthropologist Krista Latham,
show how easily DNA can be transferred to an object.

We asked pairs of people to shake hands for two minutes and then each
individual handled a separate knife. In 85% of cases, the DNA of the
other person was transferred to the knife and profiled. In one-fifth of
the samples, the DNA analysis identified this other person as the main
or only contributor of DNA to the 'weapon' (C. M. Cale et al. J. Forensic Sci. http://doi.org/8j2; 2015).

How significant is the result of a single study? Other analyses have shown
that DNA transfer can be unpredictable and can depend on environmental
conditions. We need more research on when and how secondary transfer can
occur.

Republican hopelessness

So, Ohio Governor John Kasich recognizes the complete policy nuttiness of Trump and Carson:

"I've about had it with these people," Kasich said at the rally in Westerville, Ohio. "We got one candidate that says we ought to abolish Medicaid and Medicare. You ever heard of anything so crazy as that? Telling our people in this country who are seniors, who are about to be seniors that we're going to abolish Medicaid and Medicare?"
Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson has acknowledged that he would like to gut Medicare.
Kasich went on, saying, "We got one person saying we ought to have a 10 percent flat tax that will drive up the deficit in this country by trillions of dollars" and there's another challenger in the field who "says we ought to take 10 or 11 [million] people and pick them up — I don't know where we're going to go, their homes, their apartments — we're going to pick them up and scream at them to get out of our country. That's crazy. That is just crazy."
Donald Trump has expressed support for deporting immigrants living in the country illegally.
"We got people proposing health care reform that's going to leave, I believe, millions of people without adequate health insurance," Kasich says. "What has happened to our party? What has happened the conservative movement?"

But his own plans for tax and finances?  (my bold):

Mr. Kasich’s tax plan -- which would cut the top individual income-tax rate to 28% from 39.6% and provide more relief for lower-income people through the Earned Income Tax Credit -- is the latest offering in an array of tax cuts proposed by Republican presidential candidates.
Mr. Kasich’s proposal isn’t the largest or most radical reduction on the GOP table, but it is being offered as part of one of the most specific plans to eliminate the deficit. It is still short on many details about how the budget would be balanced but calls for drastic policy changes such as transferring responsibility for Medicaid, welfare and highway-construction funding to the states.

The old "we must cut taxes on the rich to make the budget balance" line, hey?  (And let other governments work out how to raise money for services and infrastructure.)

Sorry, he may be less nuts than the populist leaders (who no one expects to last), but his views still show all the deficiencies that have been plaguing the Republican Party for years.

And how's that Laffer endorsed Kansas going:

“These things take some time,” Brownback said not long ago when asked whether his king-size income tax cuts have had the desired effect.
The key, he said, is patience.
Arthur Laffer wants more time too. He’s the philosophical architect of the Kansas income tax cuts.
“You have to view this over 10 years,” Laffer said. “It will work in Kansas.”
But that’s one point of view. As Kansas struggles with higher sales taxes and slashed budgets, I wondered what economists who focus on this stuff would say.
It’s been nearly three years since the state slashed income tax rates and took scores of businesses off the tax rolls. To be exact, it’s been two years, nine months and 23 days.
How much time do we have to wait for the promised “shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy” that Brownback promised?
I randomly called half a dozen economists from around the country. They’re at major think tanks and major universities far from Kansas, and they don’t have any dog in the Kansas dispute. I asked this: Have the tax cuts had enough time to work?
Economists don’t agree on much, but they agreed on this, and they were unanimous: Yes, the tax cuts have had plenty of time. No question about it.

Ha!   Will Laffer still be around in 10 years to claim victory?

Update:  just noticed this from a live blog of the 3rd GOP presidential candidate debate:

Nobody is doing better on the debate stage tonight than Ted Cruz. He won the biggest applause of the night with his attack on the press, and now he gets an appeal to Ron Paul libertarian voters by professing himself in favor of a return to the gold standard and a call to audit the Federal Reserve.

 As I said, how utterly hopeless...

Update 2:  Vox has a good piece about Ted Cruz's attack.  The key points:

Cruz's attack on the moderators was smart politics — but it was almost precisely backwards. The questions in the CNBC debate, though relentlessly tough, were easily the most substantive of the debates so far. And the problem for Republicans is that substantive questions about their policy proposals end up sounding like hostile attacks — but that's because the policy proposals are ridiculous, not because the questions are actually unfair.

The Republican primary has thus far been a festival of outlandish policy. The candidates seem to be competing to craft the tax plan that gives the largest tax cut to the rich while blowing the biggest hole in the deficit (a competition that, as of tonight, Ted Cruz appears to be winning). And the problem is when you ask about those plans, simply stating the facts of the policies sounds like you're leveling a devastating attack....

 Cruz's strategy was smart, and he was arguably the debate's big winner. But it bespoke a deeper weakness. Republicans have boxed themselves into some truly bizarre policies — including a set of tax cuts that give so much money to the rich, and blow such huge holes in the deficit, that simply asking about them in any serious way seems like a vicious attack. Assailing the media is a good way to try to dodge those questions for a little while, but it won't work over the course of a long campaign.

When is a proof a proof?

The biggest mystery in mathematics: Shinichi Mochizuki and the impenetrable proof 

I don't often post about mathematics, but Peter Woit's blog had a link to this article in Nature about a lengthy proof that hardly anyone in the field can understand:

But almost everyone who tackled Mochizuki's proof found themselves floored. Some were bemused by the sweeping — almost messianic — language with which Mochizuki described some of his new theoretical instructions: he even called the field that he had created 'inter-universal geometry'. “Generally, mathematicians are very humble, not claiming that what they are doing is a revolution of the whole Universe,” says Oesterlé, at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, who made little headway in checking the proof.

The reason is that Mochizuki's work is so far removed from anything that had gone before. He is attempting to reform mathematics from the ground up, starting from its foundations in the theory of sets (familiar to many as Venn diagrams). And most mathematicians have been reluctant to invest the time necessary to understand the work because they see no clear reward: it is not obvious how the theoretical machinery that Mochizuki has invented could be used to do calculations. “I tried to read some of them and then, at some stage, I gave up. I don't understand what he's doing,” says Faltings.

Fesenko has studied Mochizuki's work in detail over the past year, visited him at RIMS again in the autumn of 2014 and says that he has now verified the proof. (The other three  mathematicians who say they have corroborated it have also spent considerable time working alongside Mochizuki in Japan.) The overarching theme of inter-universal geometry, as Fesenko describes it, is that one must look at whole numbers in a different
light — leaving addition aside and seeing the multiplication structure as something malleable and deformable. Standard multiplication would then be just one particular case of a family of structures, just as a circle is a special case of an ellipse. Fesenko says that Mochizuki compares himself to the mathematical giant Grothendieck — and it is no
immodest claim. “We had mathematics before Mochizuki's work — and now we have mathematics after Mochizuki's work,” Fesenko says.

But so far, the few who have understood the work have struggled to explain it to anyone else. “Everybody who I'm aware of who's come close to this stuff is quite reasonable, but afterwards they become incapable of communicating it,” says one mathematician who did not want his name to be mentioned. The situation, he says, reminds him of the Monty Python skit about a writer who jots down the world's funniest joke. Anyone who reads it dies from laughing and can never relate it to anyone else.

 All rather odd.

A sad McDonalds story

The night time 'McRefugees' of Hong Kong - BBC News

Management never asks the sleeping customers to leave?

Ridley wrong

Countering libertarian arguments against science funding | Science | The Guardian

Matt Ridley ran a bank into the ground, chose to blame "regulation", and now is a major player in the lukewarmer field, associating with wrongologist economist Richard Tol.

His latest book is not a hit with the reviewer from (of course) The Guardian, but also not even the one at The Spectator.

He is, generally speaking, a bit of a pillock who is best ignored.