Category: General

Evangelical teen sex

Read all about it. Andrew Brown.

Teenage sex among American evangelicals: who knew?

Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas in Austin, conducted a survey of 3,400 American teens from which it emerged that white evangelical Protestants have sex younger than any other religious group but black Protestants. They are also less likely to use contraception than other groups, especially secular ones.

Other sociologists turned up some fascinating facts about the “purity pledge” movement, an occasionally creepy attempt to get teens to pledge themselves to virginity until they marry. It does, sort of, work for a while: it seems to postpone sexual activity for 18 months on average, and when I was a teenager that would have seemed several lifetimes. But this only happens when the pledgers are a minority who can feel themselves superior. Once the proportion of pledgers in a school rises above 30%, the success rate for all of them shoots right down (or up, depending on how you count).

The New Yorker has the story.

2008 SNCA

I’ve been on the road, so my long-anticipated first taste of this year’s B6246254-5E41-4D54-9096-2D5FF5614E0C.jpgSierra Nevada Celebration Ale was a little late this year. SNCA is Sierra Nevada’s seasonal IPA, and each year we have a small variation on a familiar theme. This year’s SNCA is the most intense I can remember.

Pick some up for election day, either for its nominal purpose or to drown your sorrows. You won’t regret it.

Minnesota apples

HoneycrispOne of the pleasures of an October visit to Minnesota is a visit to the local apple orchards. In large part, this is due to a century of apple breeding at the University of Minnesota, whose apple program reminds me of the wine-grape-breeding program at UC Davis, closer to where I live.

UMN’s latest blockbuster variety is the Honeycrisp, which showed up in California supermarkets last year, but was already well-known in the midwest.

My personal favorite, though, is the Prairie Spy, which dates back to the 1940s. My taste here runs to a hard, tart apple, not all that sweet; I seem to be in a minority. I’ve got no quarrel with the Honeycrisp, though, which manages to be sweetly tart and, well, nicely apple-flavored.

There are plenty of orchards around here (I’m writing in St Louis Park, just west of Minneapolis) where you can sample dozens of variety and take your favorites home. I’ll be visiting Sponsel’s Minnesota Harvest this afternoon, one of my favorites, with a stunning variety of apple varieties on offer.

What, me? Tasteful?

Well, so says the estimable and eclectic Jorn Barger of Robot Wisdom, characterizing Pragmatos as a “Tasteful econ and lit blog” (for which thanks).

Frankly, it’s the the way I would have described it, but looking back on my recent postings, I’m obliged to admit that it’s a fair cop.

As to the econ aspect, Jorn’s mention spurs me to observe that there’s an abundance of good and accessible economics writing on the net these days, from a wide range of more-than-respectable economists who are prepared to make their work comprehensible to a general readership. An interest in matters economic seems to be a prominent part of the 21C Zeitgeist, and the fact that good economists can’t seem to agree on even simple propositions makes the discussion more interesting. Economics isn’t physics, but its debates bear more than a passing resemblance to some of the outer reaches of current physics (cosmology springs to mind; there are other topics as well). Economists can’t agree on the effect of a rise in the minimum wage? Well, medical researchers can’t agree on the role of salt in hypertension. These are complex subjects.

Some of my favorites are blogger and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman; Dean Baker; Mark Thoma; Brad DeLong; James Hamilton; and several others, including a number of posters at Angry Bear.

Joseph Stiglitz and James Galbraith don’t blog regularly (if I’m wrong, please let me know), but their stuff shows up frequently in other forums, and is generally linked by one of the above blogs

Which reminds me: this is a community of interest, with cross-blog debates and lively and even informed comments.

Oh, and charts. Economists like illuminating charts, and so do I. Here’s one from Zubin Jelveh, via Kevin Drum: S&P 500 final-hour volatility.

S&P 500 final-hour volatility

Anyway, thanks, Jorn.

Ecstatic complexity

Isn’t that a nice turn of phrase?

Lombardi was indeed an enthusiastic student of information design, a reader of Edward Tufte and a collector of the charts of Nigel Holmes. But if the goal of information design is to make things clear, Lombardi’s drawings, in fact, do the opposite. The hypnotic miasma of names, institutions, corporations and locations that envelop each drawing demonstrates nothing if not the inherent — the intentional — unknowability of each of these networks. Like Rube Goldberg devices, their only meaning is their ecstatic complexity; like Hitchcockian McGuffins, understanding them is less important than simply knowing they exist.

That’s Michael Bierut in his essay Mark Lombardi and the Ecstasy of Conspiracy; I’ve been reading his collection of design-related essays, and it turned out this one is online at his blog (lots of other nice posts too, and great images).

I wish I could do that. My all-time favorite adjective-noun phrase is dusty death, but I’d settle for being able to come up with “ecstatic complexity”. I specifically mean the interplay of senses, rather than the sound (I’ve never see the attraction of cellar door, by the way), though Shakespeare of course manages to do both at once.

The Psychological Consequences of Money

I’ve had this post waiting in draft form for quite a while (the article in question appeared almost two years ago). It seems apropos to my last post, so no more procrastinating (on this post, anyway).

In a fascinating paper published at the end of 2006 in Science, Kathleen Vohs et al report on nine experiments regarding the influence of money on our behavior. The rather dry abstract doesn’t begin to do justice to the content.

Money has been said to change people’s motivation (mainly for the better) and their behavior toward others (mainly for the worse). The results of nine experiments suggest that money brings about a self-sufficient orientation in which people prefer to be free of dependency and dependents. Reminders of money, relative to nonmoney reminders, led to reduced requests for help and reduced helpfulness toward others. Relative to participants primed with neutral concepts, participants primed with money preferred to play alone, work alone, and put more physical distance between themselves and a new acquaintance.

The article itself is, I think, available only to AAAS members; one of the experiments will give a better idea of what the rest of the article is about.

In Experiment 5, we wanted to give money-primed participants a helping opportunity that required no skill or expertise, given that the help that was needed in the two previous experiments may have been perceived as requiring knowledge or special skill to enact. The opportunity to help in the current experiment was quite easy and obvious, in that it involved helping a person who spilled a box of pencils.

Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions that were manipulated in two steps. Each participant first played the board game Monopoly with a confederate (who was blind to the participant’s condition) posing as another participant. After 7 min, the game was cleared except for differing amounts of play money. Participants in the high-money condition were left with $4000, which is a large amount of Monopoly money. Participants in the low-money condition were left with $200. Control condition participants were left with no money. For high- and low-money participants, the play money remained in view for the second part of the manipulation. At this step, participants were asked to imagine a future with abundant finances (high money), with strained finances (low money), or their plans for tomorrow (control).

Next, a staged accident provided the opportunity to help. A new confederate (who was blind to the participant’s priming condition) walked across the laboratory holding a folder of papers and a box of pencils, and spilled the pencils in front of the participant. The number of pencils picked up (out of 27 total) was the measure of helpfulness.

The result? “Even though gathering pencils was an action that all participants could perform, participants reminded of financial wealth were unhelpful.” And this was the consistent result across nine rather imaginative experiments.

In one of the experiments, all it took to create the money-primed selfish bias was exposure to a poster of currency on the wall (controls saw a poster of a seascape or a flower garden). In another, subjects “happened” to be in front of a computer screen while filling out a questionnaire.

Participants in the money condition saw a screensaver depicting various denominations of currency floating underwater . Participants in the fish condition saw a screensaver with fish swimming underwater. Participants in the no-screensaver condition saw a blank screen.

As Sharif Abdullah says, “we are lined up at the same trough”; we can’t help ourselves.

What might prime us in the other direction, I wonder?

Sunday Godblogging (special Wednesday edition)

Did God cause the subprime meltdown?

While researching a book on black televangelism, says Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the University of California at Riverside, he realized that Prosperity’s central promise — that God will “make a way” for poor people to enjoy the better things in life — had developed an additional, dangerous expression during the subprime-lending boom. Walton says that this encouraged congregants who got dicey mortgages to believe “God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and blessed me with my first house.” The results, he says, “were disastrous, because they pretty much turned parishioners into prey for greedy brokers.”

via Andrew Brown

BBC: Why the Queen had 2,000 pints of lager delivered to her doorstep

Royal mix-up over lager delivery

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Twelve barrels of lager destined for a pub called The Windsor Castle were delivered to the Queen’s Berkshire residence by mistake.

A lorry carrying 2,000 pints, ready for England’s football match with Croatia, turned up at the real Windsor Castle.

Accidents will happen

Economist.com’s Daily chart yesterday is an odd mix of the obvious and a few head-scratchers. Is poisoning really a more common cause of death than car accidents? Apparently.

Some causes depend, one supposes, on exposure and vulnerability; the risk of bee stings to the allergic is presumably higher than indicated, and to the rest of us lower. I take showers, mostly, so am relatively immune to drowning in a bathtub. And being the cautious sort, I refuse to wear pajamas.

What are the odds of dying in an accident?

AMERICA is regarded by some as a wild and dangerous place. But violent inner cities and beasts roaming the great outdoors are just some of the potentially fatal situations that the average American faces. The National Safety Council has compiled a list of the odds of perishing in a variety of accidents which makes for sobering reading. Among the perils that could claim a life, poisoning is surprisingly likely. But don’t imagine that bees, flammable nightwear or fireworks are without their (admittedly more remote) dangers too.

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John Wells’s phonetic blog

Via Language Log, we have John Wells’s phonetic blog. Here’s a sample.

More mysterious epenthesis

Next question: why is someone from St Kitts in the Caribbean known as a Kittitian kɪˈtɪʃn?

Answer: I don’t know, and I suspect the OED doesn’t really know either, though it suggests that Kittitian is modelled on Haitian. (But Kitts : Kittitian is not really like Haiti : Haitian.)

And why are purveyors of tobacco known as tobacconists? Or for that matter people from Toronto as Torontonians? While members of LASSO, the Linguistic Association of the Southwest (US), according to Ryan Denzer-King, are addressed as Lassovians, and, as Nigel Greenwood points out, old boys of Stowe (public school) are simply known as Stoics.

Nigel Greenwood suggests that Shanghainese, from Shanghai, is presumably by analogy with Chinese (although I have to point out that the base form China contains an n, whereas Shanghai doesn’t, or at least not in the right place). In the east Asia area there are also Java – Javanese, Sunda – Sundanese, and Bali – Balinese, all with an n of no obvious origin unless indeed China – Chinese is somehow responsible.

The OED speculates that tobacconist, with -n- inserted between tobacco and -ist, is “perh. suggested by such words as Platonist, with etymological n”. For Torontonian it merely says “f. Toronto, capital of the province of Ontario in Canada + -n- + -IAN”.

Yeah, right.*

*(the phrase that proves that two positives make a rather negative evaluation)

Hesperus is Phosphorus

The line is from Gottlob Frege, I gather, though I just now came across it while reading David Chalmers. It’s new to me, though my brief career in academic philosophy centered on Wittgenstein, an admirer of Herr Frege.

Hesperus and Phosphorus are the latinized forms of the Greek personifications of the Evening and Morning Stars, respectively. (Frege’s point was roughly that “Hesperus is Phosphorus” might convey information—the Morning and Evening Stars are in fact the same planet—or might be tautological—Venus is Venus.)

Hesperus is the Roman Vesper, evening (and so vespers). Phosphorus is “bearer of light” (a form of the chemical element phosphorus glows as it reacts with oxygen). The Roman Phosphorus is Lucifer. (And -fer, “bearer” or “bringer”, also shows up in aquifer, conifer, Christopher (St Christopher carried a disguised Christ across a river), and so on.)

And here’s Isaiah 14:12:

When the Lord has given you rest from your pain and turmoil and the hard service with which you were made to serve, you will take up this taunt against the king of Babylon: How the oppressor has ceased! How his insolence has ceased! … How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! You said in your heart, “I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit on the mount of assembly on the heights of Zaphon; I will ascend to the tops of the clouds, I will make myself like the Most High.” But you are brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the Pit. Those who see you will stare at you, and ponder over you: “Is this the man who made the earth tremble, who shook kingdoms, who made the world like a desert and overthrew its cities, who would not let his prisoners go home?”

Isaiah is talking about a Babylonian king, but the passage was later applied to Satan. I like the image of Lucifer, the Day Star, appearing as the brightest object in the pre-dawn sky, only to be eclipsed by the overwhelming brilliance of the Sun God.

Sucker bets, nontransitivity, and the Marquis de Condorcet

So, this came up yesterday as we were drinking a little bubbly before (or was it after?) a performance of All’s Well That Ends Well at Shakespeare Santa Cruz. It’s an apparent paradox that shows up in some kinds of voting methods as well. I say “apparent” because we’re merely fooled by our assumption that some non-transitive relationships are transitive.

What do we mean by a transitive relationship? Here’s and example. 5 is greater than 4; 4 is greater than 3; by transitivity, 5 is greater than 3.

Here’s the sucker-bet version of the problem in, I think, its simplest form. Suppose I have nine playing cards, A-9, ace low, and arrange them into three piles of three cards each. The game is that you pick a card from one pile, I pick one from a different pile, and high card wins. Our assumption of transitivity leads us to assume that there’s a “best pile”. For example, a pile with the 987 cards would always win. 

We can arrange the cards, though, so that no matter which pile you choose from, I can choose from a pile that gives me a 5/9 chance of winning. I won’t win every time, but in the long run I’ll clean up. Here are the piles:

A68  357  249

The A68 pile beats 357 five times out of nine; likewise 357 beats 249; and 249 beats A68!

(This particular example comes from The Math Factor; recommended.)

For the voting version of this “paradox”, let’s turn to Wikipedia.

The voting paradox (also known as Condorcet’s paradox or the paradox of voting) is a situation noted by the Marquis de Condorcet in the late 18th century, in which collective preferences can be cyclic (i.e. not transitive), even if the preferences of individual voters are not. This is paradoxical, because it means that majority wishes can be in conflict with each other. When this occurs, it is because the conflicting majorities are each made up of different groups of individuals. For example, suppose we have three candidates, A, B and C, and that there are three voters with preferences as follows (candidates being listed in decreasing order of preference):

Voter 1: A B C
Voter 2: B C A
Voter 3: C A B

If C is chosen as the winner, it can be argued that B should win instead, since two voters (1 and 2) prefer B to C and only one voter (3) prefers C to B. However, by the same argument A is preferred to B, and C is preferred to A, by a margin of two to one on each occasion. The requirement of majority rule then provides no clear winner.

Voting methods that use this kind of pairwise counting, sometimes called Condorcet methods, don’t always show these cycles, of course, but when they do the cycle must be broken in order to come up with a winner. In the example above, we have a strong tie; there’s no basis in the voter preferences to choose a winner, so we have to go beyond the ballots to pick the winner; drawing lots is one way. In most cases, though, there’s some other cycle-breaking method that gives us a winner based on some reasonable interpretation of voter preferences as shown by the ballots. Follow the Condorcet methods link to Wikipedia for examples.

Pet dogs can ‘catch’ human yawns

From the BBC (among others):

Yawning is known to be contagious in humans but now scientists have shown that pet dogs can catch a yawn, too.

Science News has it too:

Dogs watching a person yawn repeatedly will yawn themselves, says Atsushi Senju of Birkbeck, University ofLondon. Just as that big jaw-stretch spreads contagiously from person to person, it spreads from person to dog, he and his colleagues report in an upcoming Biology Letters.

There’s a short video (click the photo).

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