Travelling Light

George Monbiot, in a nice piece on airships, points out a neat solution to the problem of hydrogen fuel storage:

Traveling Light
Even when burning fossil fuels, the total climate-changing impact of an airship, according to researchers at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, is 80-90% smaller than that of ordinary aircraft. But the airship is also the only form of transport which can easily store hydrogen: you could inflate a hydrogen bladder inside the helium balloon. There might be a neat synergy here: one of the problems with airships is that they become lighter – and therefore harder to control – as the fuel is consumed. In this case they become heavier. Michael Stewart of the company World SkyCat suggests burning both gaseous and liquid hydrogen to keep the weight of the craft constant.

I like the idea of airships as an alternative to ground transport–cars, trucks, rail. If you’ve ever traveled a significant distance by small plane, you know that the scenic opportunities are vastly better than high-altitude airliner travel. And of course no roads or rails are required.

Book me a ticket.

Global warming disaster scenarios

Deep Antarctic waters freshening
April 18, 2008
Sydney Daily Telegraph

Scientists studying the icy depths of the sea around Antarctica have detected changes in salinity that could have profound effects on the world’s climate and ocean currents. . . Voyage leader Steve Rintoul said his team found that salty, dense water that sinks near the edge of Antarctica to the bottom of the ocean about 5 km down was becoming fresher and more buoyant. So-called Antarctic bottom water helps power the great ocean conveyor belt, a system of currents spanning the Southern, Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans that shifts heat around the globe.

“The main reason we’re paying attention to this is because it is one of the switches in the climate system and we need to know if we are about to flip that switch or not,” said Rintoul of Australia’s government-backed research arm the CSIRO. “If that freshening trend continues for long enough, eventually the water near Antarctica would be too light, too buoyant to sink and that limb of the global-scale circulation would shut down,” he said on Friday.

Cold, salty water also sinks to the depths in the far north Atlantic Ocean near Greenland and, together with the vast amount of water that sinks off Antarctica, this drives the ocean conveyor belt. This system brings warm water into the far north Atlantic, making Europe warmer than it would otherwise be, and also drives the large flow of upper ocean water from the tropical Pacific to the Indian Ocean through the Indonesia Archipelago. If these currents were to slow or stop, the world’s climate would eventually be thrown into chaos.

“We don’t see any evidence yet that the amount of bottom water that’s sinking has declined. But by becoming fresher and less dense it’s moving in the direction of an ultimate shutdown.”

What is the proper response to these disaster scenarios? As even the Bush administration begins to concede that global warming is not only real but anthropogenic, the next debate becomes one over potential consequences and justified responses.

To the extent that these disaster scenarios are plausible, adaptationist responses are not. And “plausible” clearly need not mean “provable”; we have a strong motivation to prevent a low-probability outcome if that outcome is sufficiently bad. Adaptationism assumes a gradual and continous process: slow warming, slow ocean rise, etc. But the prospect of a chaotic catastrophe requires prevention, not adaptation.

Via Sam Smith

Mailx, a NetNewsWire style

Mailx is a simple NetNewsWire style based on Chris Clark’s Mail style, with readability enhancements. Thanks to Oliver Boermans for some of the ideas.

My aim was to display all the relevant meta-information cleanly, and specify enough leading to improve readability, but no so much as to waste too much screen real estate. It works especially well in Widescreen View (not surprisingly, since that’s what I use).

Download Mailx here, put the unzipped style in ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/StyleSheets/, restart NNW, and select Mailx as your style.

Update: thanks to Isaac for pointing out that installation is easier than my instructions: unzip and double-click; NNW will do the rest.

Update 2: I’ve added a bar on the right of blockquotes to make them more obvious when there’s an image on the left that obscures the left bar. 

Update 3: I tweaked the colors just a bit for compatibility with the rest of NNW’s appearance.

Update 4: I added a little left & right margin to images.

Try it; you might like it.

Here, for comparison, are Mailx and Mail. The font is Lucida Grande.

mailx1.gif

mail.gif

65? Huh?

For those who were, like me, scratching their head over the number of teams in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, this from Wikipedia explains the number, if not the apparently arbitrary reasoning behind it.

Two low-seeded teams (typically teams with poor records that qualified by winning their conference tournament championships) play the “opening round” game to determine which will advance into the first round of the tournament, with the winner advancing to play the top seed in one of the four regions. The opening Round game was added in 2001 and has been played in University of Dayton Arena in Dayton, Ohio each subsequent year. The opening round is considered part of the tournament and is often referred to as a “play-in” game.

There have been 64 teams since 1985, with the 65-team “play-in” format since 2001. The women’s tournament has 64 teams, so no play-in game.

The smell of rain

Wikipedia:

Petrichor (from Greek petros, “stone” + ichor) is the name of the familiar scent of rain on dry earth.

The term was coined in 1964 by two Australian researchers, Bear and Thomas, for an article in the journal Nature. In the article, the authors describe how the smell derives from an oil exuded by certain plants during dry periods, whereupon it is adsorbed by clay-based soils and rocks. During rain, the oil is released into the air along with another compound, geosmin, producing the distinctive scent. In a follow-up paper, Bear and Thomas (1965) showed that the oil retards seed germination and early plant growth.

The scent is generally regarded as pleasant and refreshing, and is one of the most frequently cited “favorite smells”. In desert regions, the smell is especially strong during the first rain after a long dry spell. The oil yielding the scent can be collected from rocks and concentrated to produce perfume. However, it has yet to be synthesized, perhaps due to its complexity. It is composed of more than fifty distinct chemical substances.

Harder to find: the smell of sheets just off the clothesline, and the smell of ironing. Still looking….

PhRMA is making new friends in Congress

Jeffrey Birnbaum in the Washington Post. No comment is really required, is it?

The pharmaceutical industry, long an ally of Republicans, has increasingly worked itself into the good graces of the Democratic Party and by doing so has helped block the Democrats’ top prescription-drug initiatives.

In the year since they took over on Capitol Hill, Democratic leaders have been unable to pass either a bill allowing reimportation of drugs from Canada or a measure requiring negotiation of drug prices under Medicare. Neither is likely to reach the president’s desk this year. Lawmakers on both sides of these issues say the primary reason is the influence, now redirected, of the drug lobby.

Drug companies have gone on a hiring binge, retaining Democratic lobbyists in dozens of major firms. This strategy, which K Streeters call “clogging the system,” prevents adversaries from hiring anyone from those consultancies.
…
In years past, when pharmaceuticals leaned heavily Republican, Democrats did not have much reason to cut them a break or side with them on policy. Democrats won control of Congress in 2006 in part by accusing Republicans of being too close to drug companies and other “special interests.” But now that pharmaceutical money is available to both parties, the drug companies have reason to hope for better treatment.

The Democratic takeover of Congress means “we just have more friends than we used to have,” said PhRMA President W.J. “Billy” Tauzin, a former Republican congressman from Louisiana. “We’re trying to find more.”

Wordplay

I was reminded the other day, why I no longer remember, of a bit of wordplay that was popular in some circles a few decades ago.

The only one I can remember:

Will and Ariel Rogers

I can’t quite say why that one struck me as particularly funny, but I think it was picturing Will Rogers and Ariel Durant as a pair.

In a similar vein, but years later, I got this one from my late father in law. It may have been original with him.

Peter Paul and Mary Ford

I think all those names are sufficiently embedded in the cultural mainstream that you don’t have to be of a Certain Age to get them.

W&AR doesn’t show up on Google at all. PP&MF does, but it doesn’t look deliberate to me. Hence this post: let’s get them onto the web, and see what happens.

Lobitos Weather Project

For those of us with slightly more than a casual interest in weather forecasts, the National Weather Service’s Area Forecast Discussions are a most valuable resource.

Unfortunately, the NWS AFDs have their drawbacks. They’re nearly unreadable, if you’re not a total weather geek, and there’s no RSS.

Well, all that’s changed now. Visit the Lobitos Weather Project home page and let it serve up your (US only) weather forecasts and forecast discussions.

SF weather link

There’s a new link over there on the left to a nice (if I say so myself) SF Bay Area weather page.

The National Weather Service has a lot of useful information, but my favorite, the Area Forecast Discussion, can be pretty hard to read until you get accustomed to its all-caps (and sometimes rather abbreviated) format. I’ve combined the AFD with the SF Zone Forecast, and reformatted them into a single more readable page (especially on a small screen). At the bottom of the page you’ll find links to some other relevant NWS pages.

You’ll see some words and phrases in blue; mouse over them, and you’ll see a brief gloss.

Feedback is welcome, especially if you see formatting and capitalization errors. Paste the error into your email, since the page may have changed by the time I see it.

If you’re not in the SF Bay Area, well, sorry. Unfortunately, much of the formatting is highly localized, especially place names.

And if you don’t like the weather, go out and make some of your own.

Update: I’ve generalized the software to provide weather pages for the entire US. Just enter a zip code. See the announcement post or visit the Lobitos Weather Project.

Kenneth Arrow on cutting emissions

I’m a month late posting this, but here we are. Kenneth Arrow (yes, that Kenneth Arrow) weighs in on the economics of mitigating climate change sooner rather than later. It’s particularly relevant as climate-change deniers shift from “it’s not happening” to “it’s too late (or too expensive) to do anything about it.”

The case for cutting emissions

Last fall, the UK issued a major government report on global climate change directed by Sir Nicholas Stern, a top-flight economist. The Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change amounts to a call to action: It argues that huge future costs of global warming can be avoided by incurring relatively modest cost today.

Critics of the report don’t think serious action to limit carbon dioxide emissions is justified, because there remains substantial uncertainty about the extent of the costs of global climate change, and because these costs will be incurred far in the future.

However, I believe that Stern’s fundamental conclusion is justified: We are much better off reducing carbon dioxide emissions substantially than risking the consequences of failing to act, even if, unlike Stern, one heavily discounts uncertainty and the future.

Two factors differentiate global climate change from other environmental problems.

First, whereas most environmental insults — for example, water pollution, acid rain, or sulfur dioxide emissions — are mitigated promptly or in fairly short order when the source is cleaned up, emissions of carbon dioxide and other trace gases remain in the atmosphere for centuries. So reducing emissions today is very valuable to humanity in the distant future.

Second, the externality is truly global in scale, because greenhouse gases travel around the world in a few days. As a result, the nation-state and its subsidiaries, the typical loci for internalizing externalities, are limited in their remedial capacity. (However, since the US contributes about 25 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, its own policy could make a large difference.) Thus, global climate change is a public “good” — as defined in economic terms — on an enormous scale.
…
A straightforward calculation shows that mitigation is better than business as usual — that is, the present value of the benefits exceeds the present value of the costs — for any social rate of time preference less than 8.5 percent. No estimate of the pure rate of time preference, even by those who believe in relatively strong discounting of the future, has ever approached 8.5 percent.

These calculations indicate that, even with higher discounting, the Stern Review estimates of future benefits and costs imply that mitigation makes economic sense. These calculations rely on the report’s projected time profiles for benefits and its estimate of annual costs, about which there is much disagreement. Still, I believe there can be little serious argument about the importance of a policy aimed at avoiding major further increases in carbon dioxide emissions.

Democracy by Other Means

Aidan Hartley in the NY TImes.

John Stuart Mill addresses this problem in Representative Government, sounding, to our ears, more than a little paternalistic. But surely it’s also true that elections are a necessary but not sufficient element of a democratic society.

Democracy by Other Means

Kenyan democracy has failed because ordinary people were encouraged to believe that the process in and of itself could bring change. So Kenya’s leaders — and often international observers — interpret democracy simply in terms of the ceremony of multiparty elections. Polls bestow legitimacy on politicians to pillage for five years until the next depressing cycle begins.

In the campaign rallies I attended, I saw no debate about policies, despite the country’s immense health, education, crime and poverty problems. The Big Men arrived by helicopter to address the voters in slums and forest clearings. When they spoke English for the Western news media’s benefit, they talked of human rights and democracy. But when they switched to local languages, it was pure venom and ethnic chauvinism. Praise-singers kowtowed to the candidates, who dozed, talked on their mobile phones and then waddled back to their helicopters, which blew dust into the faces of the poor on takeoff.

Dean Baker on predicting recessions

Does this apply to predicions about the mortgage meltdown (or otherwise)? I suppose so.

Economists Don’t Predict Recessions:

It would be helpful if the many articles reporting on economists’ predictions about the future state of the economy reminded readers that economists do not forecast recessions. For whatever reason (I don’t care to speculate), economists are notoriously bad at seeing recessions coming, even when they are right in front of their face.

In the fall of 2000, not one of the “Blue Chip 50” forecasters saw the 2001 recession coming. The Philadelphia Fed’s Livingstone Survey in December of 2001 saw nothing but clear skies ahead. Even in June of 2001, three months after the recession is now dated as having begun, the wise forecasters still saw a relatively healthy scenario, including a 1455 S&P 500 by the end of 2002 (try 900).

One of my favorite Greenspan moments was when he spoke confidently at a Fed meeting in July of 1990 that the economy looked healthy for the immediate future. The recession is now dated as having begun in June of 1990.

The point here is that there is an incredible bias among economists that prevents them from seeing recessions until they are well underway. (I’m the only one that predicts recessions that don’t happen.) This information should be included in a cautionary note in articles on economic forecasts.

–Dean Baker

(Via Beat the Press)

Getting COLA right?

A while back, Dean Baker wrote a piece in response to a NY Times review of Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capital. It’s all worth reading (as usual), but along the way Baker touches on the claim, made in the context of various attempts to “reform” Social Security, that the CPI has been overstating SS’s cost of living increases by a percent or so, and that scaling the COLA back would help “save” the program.

Did it seem plausible to you at the time? Baker thinks it shouldn’t have.

The Social Security debate provides the most obvious example. Consider the effort to change the post-retirement indexation formula in the mid-nineties, which had support from the Clinton administration, many prominent members of Congress (Senator Daniel Moynihan led the crusade), and many of the country’s most respected economists.

The argument was that the consumer price index (CPI) overstated the true rate of inflation by approximately 1 percentage point, so therefore Social Security benefits to retirees should rise each year by approximately 1 percentage point less than the rate of inflation shown by the CPI, rather than the CPI, as is the case under current law.

While the evidence for their claim was weak as I argued in my book, Getting Prices Right: The Debate Over the Consumer Price Index, there was a more basic issue that there were huge and unavoidable implications of this claim that none of its advocates were willing to accept. Specifically, if their claim was true, then most of the people who would see their benefits cut by the change in the indexation formula had grown up in poverty. Furthermore, the future generations who they wanted to protect by reducing the deficit were actually going to be far richer than we could possibly have imagined.

The logic is simple. If the CPI overstated inflation by 1 percentage point annually, then real incomes had been rising much more rapidly than the official data show. Instead of rising by about 2.0 percent annually over the prior forty years, if inflation had been overstated by 1.0 percentage point, real per capita income had actually risen by 3.0 percent annually. (That’s arithmetic – if nominal income had risen by 5.0 percent, and the real inflation rate was 2.0 percent, rather than the 3.0 percent shown by the CPI, then real income rose by 3.0 percent.) If real income had been rising by 3.0 percent instead of 2.0 percent, then we were much poorer 40 years ago relative to the present than the official data show. In fact, if we go back 40 to 50 years with this adjustment, the median family was below the current poverty line.

On the other side, if the yardstick against which we are measuring future income growth is overstating inflation by 1 percentage point annually, then we should adjust upward our projections for future income growth accordingly. This means that our children and grandchildren will be hugely richer than our current projections show – we can’t even think of any economic policies that we would expect to lift income growth by a full percentage point.

Anyhow, virtually all the leading lights of the economic profession were prepared to completely ignore the logical implication of their own claim about the CPI in the effort to force a reduction in Social Security benefits. The drive was only halted by the refusal of Richard Gephardt, then the leader of the Democrats in the House, to go along with the scheme. At the time Gephardt was considering a challenge to Vice-President Al Gore for the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination. There could have been no better issue for Gephardt in the Democratic primaries than the defense of Social Security against the guy who cut it. Therefore, the Clinton administration nixed the benefit cut.

Note that all the economists who lined up behind the cut to Social Security are not currently expressing concern about the enormous distortions in our official data that result from the fact that the CPI has not been “fixed.” (The CPI overstatement would contaminate all price and quantity data over time.) They also don’t adjust for this error in their own work.

Thinking bigger about schools

Bob Herbert in the NY Times:

Our Schools Must Do Better

The latest federal test results showed some improvement in public school math and reading scores, but there is no reason to celebrate these minuscule gains. We need so much more. A four-year college degree is now all but mandatory for building and sustaining a middle-class standard of living in the U.S.

Over the next 20 or 30 years, when today’s children are raising children of their own in an ever more technologically advanced and globalized society, the educational requirements will only grow more rigorous and unforgiving.

A one- or two-point gain in fourth grade test scores here or there is not meaningful in the face of that overarching 21st-century challenge.

What’s needed is a wholesale transformation of the public school system….

“We’re not good at thinking about magnitudes,” said Thomas Kane, a professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “We’ve got a bunch of little things that we think are moving in the right direction, but we haven’t stepped back and thought, ‘O.K., how big an improvement are we really talking about?’ ” Professor Kane and I were discussing what he believes are the two areas that have the greatest potential for radically improving the way children are taught in the U.S. Both are being neglected by the education establishment.

The first is teacher quality, a topic that gets talked about incessantly. It has been known for decades that some teachers have huge positive effects on student achievement, and that others do poorly. The positive effect of the highest performing teachers on underachieving students is startling.

What is counterintuitive, but well documented, is that paper qualifications, such as teacher certification, have very little to do with whatever it is that makes good teachers effective.

“Regrettably,” said Professor Kane, who has studied this issue extensively, “we’ve never taken that research fact seriously in our teacher policy. We’ve done just the opposite.”

The second area to be mined for potentially transformative effects is the wide and varied field of alternative school models. We should be rigorously studying those schools that appear to be having the biggest positive effects on student achievement. Are the effects real? If so, what accounts for them?

Adjusting for demographics, our local school district (Cabrillo Unified, on the California coast south of San Francisco) ranks just about average among California schools. California ranks close to last nationwide, so that’s no cause for celebration. And the US overall ranks well down the list of developed countries.

The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), to cite one example, is a charter school network that has consistently gotten extraordinary academic results from low-income students. It has worked in cities big and small, and in rural areas. Like other successful models, it has adopted a longer school day and places great demands on its teachers and students.

I know nothing about KIPP, but taking Herbert at face value, we shouldn’t be distracted by the “charter school” label. We know by now that charters do just about as well, or as badly, as our regular public schools. We should be verifying that models like this really work, and try to apply those models to more schools.

Said Professor Kane: “These alternative models that involve the longer school day and a much more dramatic intervention for kids are promising. If that’s what it takes, then we need to know that, and sooner rather than later.”

Judge Voids Election Because of E-Voting Snafus

From EFF: Judge Voids Election Because of E-Voting Snafus .

Good news from California’s Alameda County — a judge has voided election results after the county botched its response to a contested race conducted on Diebold electronic voting machines. The judge ordered that the disputed Measure R — an initiative addressing the operation of medical marijuana dispensaries — go back on next year’s ballot.

Good news because it increases the burden on elections administrators to make sure they have adequate audit trails. It’s an unusual step: “This is only the second time in Californian history that a court has ordered than an election be rerun.” It represents a substantial expense to the county, and obviously would be a much bigger mess if we were dealing with a larger jurisdiction; what if the election in question were statewide, and the margin close enough that this county’s votes were enough to call the entire election into question.

And this was a ballot measure that could reasonably be revoted in a regularly scheduled upcoming election. An election for office would raise urgency issues not present here.

All news is gossip

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life – I wrote this some years ago – that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, – we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure, – news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelvemonth or twelve years beforehand with sufficient accuracy. As for Spain, for instance, if you know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta, and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to time in the right proportions, – they may have changed the names a little since I saw the papers, – and serve up a bull-fight when other entertainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the newspapers: and as for England, almost the last significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649; and if you have learned the history of her crops for an average year, you never need attend to that thing again, unless your speculations are of a merely pecuniary character. If one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a French revolution not excepted.”

Thoreau’s Walden, quoted (in part) by Judy Muller on NPR this morning.

One might reasonably conclude that Henry would not have been a big user of email or rss.

Children Left Behind

Derek Neal and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach (University of Chicago) discuss their recent paper, “Left Behind by Design: Proficiency Counts and Test-based Accountability”.

Roughly two decades ago, education policy makers in the United States began to rely more heavily on standardized test scores as performance metrics for teachers and schools. During the late 1980s and through the 1990s, many states adopted test-based accountability systems that spelled out rewards and sanctions for teachers and principals as a function of the performance of their students on standardized tests, and when the federal government adopted the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001, test-based accountability became a nation-wide policy. The proponents of this development cite the need to bring “business practices” into public schools and the need to make schools “data driven” in ways that mirror the practices of private-sector companies.
…
In recent work [1], we explore a different effect of test-based accountability systems on the allocation of teacher effort, and we find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that test-based accountability systems not only shape decisions of teachers concerning what to teach but also whom to teach. We show that even though advocates of NCLB offered it as a remedy for disadvantaged children who receive poor service from their public schools, the design of NCLB almost guarantees that the most academically disadvantaged children will not benefit from its implementation and may actually be harmed.
…
Recently, the federal Department of Education allowed a few states to calculate AYP based, in part, on growth in student achievement during a school year rather than levels only. This is a step in the right direction, but without careful design work, these systems may simply create a different set of unintended effort distortions among teachers. Knowledge does not come on a natural scale, and given any particular scale, gains of a given size may be easier to achieve at some points on the scale than others. Thus, something as apparently pedestrian as the scaling of exams could have significant and unintended consequences for the allocation of teacher effort to different types of students if states do not carefully design value-added versions of AYP.

Because teachers are charged with fostering knowledge, character, and other things that are hard to measure, it is not obvious that incentive systems built around objective performance measures are even desirable strategies for monitoring teachers. Test-based accountability systems have nonetheless enjoyed strong support because school principals and others who monitor the performance of teachers in public schools are seen as agents of large bureaucracies that, especially in cities, have a long record of disappointing results. Nonetheless, our empirical results and the insights gained from research on the economics of organizations suggest that policy makers must tackle difficult design questions in order to construct accountability systems that deliver quality instruction for all students regardless of their aptitude and prior achievement. Policy makers should either take these design issues more seriously or follow the lead of many private sector firms and look for other ways to monitor and motivate teachers.

(Via Mark Thoma)

Balkinization

Jack Balkin is not best pleased with the congressional Democrats:

The passage of the new FISA bill by the Senate and now the House demonstrates that the Democrats stand neither for defending civil liberties nor for checking executive power.

They stand for nothing at all.