Karl Rove, Booing and Laughter

First, some laughter:

* The concept of laughter as a cure for disease lacks scientific support, but humor may indeed have significant effects on the psyche.
* Laughter relaxes us and improves our mood, and hearing jokes may ease anxiety. Amusement can also counteract pain.
* Cheerfulness, a trait that makes people respond more readily to humor, is linked to emotional resilience—the ability to keep a level head in difficult circumstances—and to close relationships. Life satisfaction may increase with the ability to laugh.

[...]

Additional studies have shown that laughing at a funny film can cause a drop in the blood’s concentration of the stress hormone cortisol (although other stress hormones appear to be unaffected). Because chronically elevated cortisol levels have been shown to weaken the immune system, this mechanism could conceivably help ward off disease. Indeed, experiments have indicated that laughter increases the activity of immune cells called natural killer cells in saliva in healthy subjects.

In some cases, though, laughter may dampen inappropriate immune responses. In a 2007 study allergy researcher Hajime Kimata of Moriguchi-Keijinkai Hospital in Japan measured levels of the hormone melatonin in the breast milk of nursing mothers before and after the subjects watched either a comic Charlie Chaplin video or an ordinary weather report. Melatonin regulates the sleep-wake cycle and is often disturbed in the allergic skin condition atopic eczema, which all of the 48 babies in the study had. Kimata found that laughing at the funny film, but not hearing the weather report, increased the amount of melatonin in the mothers’ milk. In addition, the laughter-fortified breast milk reduced the allergic responses to latex and house dust mites in the infants. Thus, making a nursing mom laugh might sometimes serve as an allergy remedy for her baby. [...]

Humor’s analgesic effect requires enjoyment but not necessarily laughter, according to a 2004 study by Ruch, along with his then graduate students Karen Zweyer and Barbara Velker. The researchers asked 56 women to submerge a hand in ice-cold water before, immediately after and 20 minutes after a funny seven-minute film. In response to the film, some of the women were instructed to get into a cheerful mood without smiling or laughing; others were asked to smile and laugh a lot; the rest were told to create humorous verbal commentaries on the film while watching it.

As expected, seeing the funny film did boost pain tolerance in all the women: after exposure to the comedy, all the participants required a longer exposure to the water to feel pain and could tolerate longer submersions before pulling their hand out. These changes in pain perception were lasting, persisting for 20 minutes after the film ended. Smiling, but not necessarily laughter, seemed to be most important for the pain-suppressing effect. The women who were asked to refrain from smiling in response to the film generally felt the most pain, and the members of that group who failed to suppress a grin showed more pain tolerance than the others did.

I’ll have to keep that in mind this weekend.

(hat tip: 3 quarks daily)

Booing: 3-quarks daily points to an article which discusses booing at the end of theater productions. This part is interesting:

Booing, on the other hand, sends a different message, one that isn’t necessarily all bad. Francesca Zambello’s deliberately provocative Met production of “Lucia di Lammermoor” was booed when it opened in 1992. “It isn’t fun to be booed,” Ms. Zambello later told me, “but sometimes it’s also a badge of success.” Why? Because the people who booed Ms. Zambello’s “Lucia” and Ms. Zimmerman’s “Sonnambula,” unlike the ones who spring to their feet at the end of a third-rate musical, were making it clear that they’d paid attention to what they saw and heard. No, they didn’t care for it, but at least they were involved with it, and such involvement can be the first step toward a deeper, more thoughtful response. “As soon as I detest something,” the music critic Hans Keller once said, “I ask myself why I like it.” Keller’s words may seem paradoxical, but in fact they’re wise. While anger may turn out to be love in disguise, indifference is rarely anything more than indifference.

I hasten to acknowledge, however, that booing can hurt. Few artists are thick-skinned enough not to be stung to the quick by public rejection. Henry James was so devastated by what he described as the “hoots and jeers and catcalls of the roughs” that greeted the 1895 premiere of “Guy Domville,” his most ambitious play, that he turned his back on the stage to concentrate once again on the writing of novels. “You must spare my going over again that horrid hour, or those of disappointment or depression that have followed it,” he wrote to his brother William four days later. We know now, of course, that James made the right decision, but might he possibly have gone on to write a first-rate play had he not been crushed by the boos that greeted “Guy Domville”? We’ll never know.

Karl Rove: Rove is one of the most skillful liars that I’ve ever seen. Here is one of his latest articles:

By KARL ROVE

The Pew Research Center reported last week that President Barack Obama “has the most polarized early job approval of any president” since surveys began tracking this 40 years ago. The gap between Mr. Obama’s approval rating among Democrats (88%) and Republicans (27%) is 61 points. This “approval gap” is 10 points bigger than George W. Bush’s at this point in his presidency, despite Mr. Bush winning a bitterly contested election.

Part of Mr. Obama’s polarized standing can be attributed to a long-term trend. University of Missouri political scientist John Petrocik points out that since 1980, each successive first term president has had more polarized support than his predecessor with the exception of 1989, when George H.W. Bush enjoyed a modest improvement over Ronald Reagan’s 1981 standing.

But rather than end or ameliorate that trend, Mr. Obama’s actions and rhetoric have accelerated it. His campaign promised post-partisanship, but since taking office Mr. Obama has frozen Republicans out of the deliberative process, and his response to their suggestions has been a brusque dismissal that “I won.”

Compare this with Mr. Bush’s actions in the aftermath of his election. Among his first appointments were Democratic judicial nominees who had been blocked by Republicans under President Bill Clinton. The Bush White House joined with Democratic and Republican leaders to draft education reform legislation. And Mr. Bush worked with Republican Chuck Grassley to cut a deal with Democrat Max Baucus to win bipartisan passage of a big tax cut in a Senate split 50-50 after the 2000 election.

Mr. Obama has hastened the decline of Republican support with petty attacks on his critics and predecessor.

Petty attacks? President Obama saying “hey, I won”?

Here is a little reminder (video)

(text)

Rove, the architect behind President Bush’s election victories, on Wednesday night told a gathering of the New York Conservative Party that “Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.” Conservatives, he said, “saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war.”

And remember President Bush’s remarkable claims about “spending his political capital” after his oh-so-narrow victory in 2004?

Re-elected US president George Bush today said he intended to spend the “political capital” he earned campaigning for the White House.

In his first press conference since the election he acknowledged he had to “explain the decisions I make” but said he had every intention of following through with a second term agenda stretching from an overhaul of the tax system to “spreading freedom” in the Middle East.

“The people made it clear what they wanted,” he said. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and I intend to spend it.”

Gee, how did the 2004 election turn out?

Electoral College: 286-251, or 62 million to 59 million.

The 2008 election:
Electoral College: 365-173, or 69.5 million to 59.9 million.

Obama’s margin was THREE TIMES LARGER than Bush’s.

So, we know that Mr. Rove is an unrepentant hypocrite.

But you know what else? His analysis is very faulty, though he makes some factually accurate statements.

About that approval rating break down:

The latest CBS News/New York Times poll showed President Obama receiving a 66 percent approval rating from the public, his highest since taking office in January. How does that compare to other presidents’ approval ratings?

It is certainly higher than the approval ratings of recent Presidents George W. Bush (53 percent) and Bill Clinton (55 percent) at this point in their presidencies, but it is by no means the highest that polls have recorded. Presidents Reagan, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower and Truman all received higher marks than President Obama at comparably early points in their presidencies.

EARLY JOB APPROVAL RATINGS

Barack Obama (4/2009) ……….66%
George W. Bush (4/2001) …….53%
Bill Clinton (3/1993) ………………55%
George H. W. Bush (4/1989) …61%
Ronald Reagan (4/1981) ………67%
Jimmy Carter (4/1977) …………..64%
Gerald Ford* (11/1974) ………….47%
Richard Nixon* (4/1969) ………..61%
Lyndon Johnson* (1/1964) …….76%
John Kennedy* (4/1961) ………..78%
Dwight Eisenhower* (4/1953) ..73%
Harry Truman* (10/1945) ……….82%

(* Gallup data)

Not all Americans are fans of the new president. Just 31 percent of Republicans now approve of the job President Obama is doing, and a CBS News poll conducted just after the president took office found only 36 percent of Republicans approving. President Obama’s high approval rating is the result of widespread approval among Democrats and strong approval from independents.

There is also data from a Pew Poll which is similar:

So, Rove is right about President Obama being more partisan than President Bush?

Well not so fast: here is another factor:

The balance of party identification in the American electorate now favors the Democratic Party by a decidedly larger margin than in either of the two previous presidential election cycles.

In 5,566 interviews with registered voters conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press during the first two months of 2008, 36% identify themselves as Democrats, and just 27% as Republicans.

The share of voters who call themselves Republicans has declined by six points since 2004, and represents, on an annualized basis, the lowest percentage of self-identified Republican voters in 16 years of polling by the Center.

The Democratic Party has also built a substantial edge among independent voters. Of the 37% who claim no party identification, 15% lean Democratic, 10% lean Republican, and 12% have no leaning either way.

By comparison, in 2004 about equal numbers of independents leaned toward both parties. When “leaners” are combined with partisans, however, the Democratic Party now holds a 14-point advantage among voters nationwide (51% Dem/lean-Dem to 37% Rep/lean-Rep), up from a three-point advantage four years ago.

In short, now 27 percent describe themselves as Republcian whereas in 2004, 33 percent did.
That is, the current Republicans are going to be more extreme in their views than the ones in 2004 were. On the other hand, the percent calling themselves Democrats has remained mostly constant (35 percent in 2004, 36 percent in 2008; the change is well within margin-of-error).

That explains this phenomenon better than anything else I’ve seen.

Update:

Day Prior…9 April 2009

Workout notes 2 mile walk last night (easy); stretching this morning.

Science

Conservation Report: has an interesting article about an isolated population of wolves. Evidently inbreeding has lead to a sharp increase in the percentage of birth defects, and scientists are weighing the possibility of introducing new wolves to the population to help things out. On another note, the warmer weather has lead to weaker moose hence the moose are being hunted more successfully by the wolves.

Lungless Frog: Jerry Coyne’s blog has an interesting article about a frog having evolved so as to lose its lungs. It breathes though it skin; other frogs can do this but this frog breathes this way exclusively.

Religion This article contains a video (and I can’t seem to embed MSNBC videos) where Christopher Hitchens debates a right wing fundamentalist about the nature of religion in today’s US society. The wingnut doesn’t seem to understand that the US was founded as a secular state, though many of the early Americans were indeed Christian.

Politics We will be watching the tea-baggers, mostly to make fun of them.

Inhofe: the Dumbest Member of the US Senate

Listen to Senator Inhofe: (R-Oklahoma)

Inhofe bellows on about the cut in defense spending. There are a couple of problems:

1. It isn’t true.

The big news from yesterday (still settling in across Washington) is that President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates teamed up to propose a sweeping overhaul of the defense budget–calling for the elimination of unnecessary systems and spending the savings on special forces, intelligence equipment, and other tools of counterinsurgent warfare.

In other words, by retooling the Pentagon, Obama and Gates plan to move a lot of money around, but they also plan to increase the overall defense budget. In the final year of the Bush administration (and excluding the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) the defense budget was $513 billion. In FY 2010, if Gates and Obama get their way, it will be $534 billion–$534 billion that will be spent much differently than last year’s outlays were.

2. The wars themselves are budgeted differently

On September 12, the Senate Appropriations Committee will consider the fiscal year (FY) 2008 Defense Appropriations bill, which funds the Pentagon’s annual basic operations. The House has already passed its version of this legislation (H.R. 3222), which includes $460 billion for the Department of Defense, $3.5 billion below the Bush Administration’s request and nearly $40 billion above current levels. Like the House, the Senate is NOT planning to include any additional funding to support combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in this legislation.

Traditionally, wars are funded outside the normal annual appropriations process. This is because the federal budget process, which can take well over two years to enact funding for a single year, is simply too cumbersome to respond to unanticipated emergency spending needs, such as disaster assistance and wars. But last year, Congress required the Administration to include the costs of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of their annual budget request, arguing that after five years in Afghanistan and three years in Iraq the Pentagon should have at least some idea of the costs of these operations. The request for war-related costs for FY 2008, which begins on October 1, was estimated by the White House back in February at roughly $142 billion.

The decision by Senate Defense Appropriations subcommittee chairman Daniel Inouye (D-HI) to follow the example set by his House counterpart Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) and separate out Iraq funding from the DoD base budget spending bill means the appropriations bill should be able to move smoothly through Congress, possibly before the end of the fiscal year on September 30. Meanwhile, the Iraq debate will be focused on the additional supplemental funding bill, which Sen. Inouye and Rep. Murtha believe will begin moving in mid-October after current funding legislation expires.

Note: the article that I am quoting for is critical of Democrats in Congress. But the point was to show that the defense bill that Senator Inhofe was complaining about isn’t the bill that funds military operations in war.

Baracknophobia: Hannity, Bachmann, And Beck Terrified Of Obama (VIDEO)

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Why does anyone take Republicans seriously anymore?

Wingnuts in their Own Words; and some Strings.

Gee, whatever happened to the days in which you had the RIGHT to have public approval for your bigotry?

(hat tip: right wing watch)

Of course, I should post a good video to counteract the breath-taking stupidity of the above video:

For those in the Reality Based Community

Somewhere someone is slacking on their medications:

Is this satire? It is hard to tell.

True, so True….

(hat tip: Evolved Rational)

Fox News: On top of the Big Stories!

I was amused at reading the title of this “recommended” blog:

BILL SAMMON: When Will Obama Go to Church?

By Bill Sammon
Managing Editor, Washington Bureau, FOX News Channel

President Obama has not attended church services on any of the 11 Sundays since he took office, despite his pledge to find a new church after quitting Trinity United nearly a year ago because of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s incendiary rhetoric.

“We probably won’t make any firm decision on this until January, when we know what our lives our going to be like,” Obama told reporters last May at a press conference that he called to announce his break with Trinity.

By this point in former President George W. Bush’s tenure, the president had spent several Sunday mornings attending services at St. John’s Episcopal Church, which is located opposite the White House off of Lafayette Park.

But the president made no decision in January, February or March. And now, with Easter just days away, Obama has yet to reveal what church he may have chosen or when he might attend his first Sunday services as president.

Oh My Goodness. We are supposed to take the Fox News imbeciles seriously?

8 April 2009

Workout notes 1800 yard swim; included was 1000 in 16:31 (4:07/08/08/08).
Weight: 182-183.5 (gym-home)

Issues

Church/State: an Army Chaplain really stepped in it:

The U.S. Army’s Chief of Chaplains, Maj. Gen. Douglas L. Carver, has decided to proclaim today a “Day of Prayer and Fasting” (PDF)

Whereas the Chaplaincy, as spiritual leaders, model faith and belief in the Hand of God to intervene in the course of history and individual lives;

I therefore call the Chaplaincy to a Day of Prayer and Fasting…

It’s not just that an army representative of all faiths and no faith is calling today a Day of Prayer — it’s that he is calling for this day to happen on one of the holiest of Jewish holidays:

One Jewish member of the Army who received Carver’s proclamation said it is “an insult to all Jews.”

“Asking Jewish members of the armed forces to fast on that day displays unconscionable arrogance by the Army Chief of Chaplains,” said this person, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution.

This shows why “church/state” issues are almost more important to believers than to people like me. I frankly don’t care what sort of nonsense people are going to celebrate but the religious types don’t want their religious holidays/traditions stepped on.

Oklahoma yet again: 10 Commandments:

Just how stupid can the religious right get? This stupid:

This week, a far-right state legislator in Oklahoma pushed a measure to have a Ten Commandments monument placed on the Capitol grounds. Asked which version of the Decalogue would receive the state’s endorsement — Catholics, Protestants, and Jews list the Commandments differently — state Sen. Randy Brogdon (R) said, “Probably an Oklahoma version.” I don’t think he was kidding

Typical. I’ll bet he can’t even name the 10 Commandments.

Of course the Jews have their “version” (sort of); the Catholics have theirs and the Protestants theirs. Jesus quoted a slightly different version (including “you shall not defraud”).

But the “Oklahoma version”: “Under pain of death thou shall not ever cheer for Texas”?

Civil Liberties: Jewel vs. NSA case. Yes, this is a leftover from the Bush administration but it is tarring the Obama administration:

Oops, they did it again: lawyers for Barack Obama’s Department of Justice have invoked the “state secrets” privilege to block a lawsuit seeking to reverse one of the most scandalous policies of the Bush administration.

In a motion filed in a San Francisco court on Friday, attorneys for the Obama administration moved to dismiss a challenge to the National Security Agency’s notorious warrantless wiretapping program. “The information implicated by this case, which concerns how the United States seeks to detect and prevent terrorist attacks, would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security,” DOJ lawyers argued in the 36-page brief, echoing an argument made ad nauseum by the Bush administration.

The case, Jewel v. NSA, was filed in September of 2008 on behalf of five AT&T customers “to stop the illegal, unconstitutional, and ongoing dragnet surveillance of their communications and communications records,” according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the civil liberties organization that brought forth the suit. “Evidence in the case includes undisputed documents provided by former AT&T telecommunications technician Mark Klein showing AT&T has routed copies of Internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco controlled by the NSA.”

Klein, the whistleblower who blew the lid off AT&T’s participation in the NSA spying program, was an employee at AT&T for 22 years but showed no qualms about exposing the company. “If they’ve done something massively illegal and unconstitutional — well, they should suffer the consequences,” Klein told the Washington Post in 2007. Teaming up with EFF, Klein has played a critical role in furnishing the evidence for multiple lawsuits brought against the NSA’s spying program, including Hepting v. AT&T, a class-action lawsuit against AT&T itself. (That case was brought forth in 2006, before Congress passed legislation granting immunity to telecoms that participated in the government’s warrantless wiretapping program.)

Although Jewel v. NSA is not a lawsuit against AT&T, the DOJ’s court motion displays its full support for the company. “All of plaintiffs’ claims require the disclosure of whether or not AT&T assisted the Government in alleged intelligence activities, and the (Director of National Intelligence) again has demonstrated that disclosure of whether the NSA has an intelligence relationship with a particular private company would also cause exceptional harm to national security”

There is the “state sovereignty” defense too, which is troubling:

That is: the NSA could be sued only if they USED the information; not merely for gathering it.

One quibble: as far as the Constitution goes, it is fluid, or at least has to be. Remember that it once allowed for slavery and for the women not to be able to vote.

Update: at Daily Kos, an attorney gives some perspective:

Fact #4: Asserting a defense in a lawsuit does not in any way equate official government policy. Trust me on this one. I’ve had to assert defenses to lawsuits early on in the stages of litigation, as is the case in the FISA lawsuit. And it does NOT mean in any way that it is some sort of policy declaration. It is doing what is necessary to defend my client from the relief sought by the Plaintiff. Plain and simple. And that is especially true at the Motion to Dismiss stage. Indeed, these issues are going to be litigated not only at the trial stage, but at the appellate stage. And believe me, DOJ is going to continue argue immunities, because that’s their job. Not only in this lawsuit but in all future lawsuits. It is their job not to create policy, but to defend their client. They are not simply going to roll over and say, “OK, you win, we’ll pay you a truckload of money.” Not going to happen. And certainly not going to happen at this early stage of the game.

Now, it has been suggested that someone the new assertion of sovereign immunity made via the Patriot Act, FISA, etc. is breathtaking and such, but I just don’t see it the way others do. I look at it from the perspective of the government lawyer, and if there is another argument to be advanced to defend my client on immunity grounds, even if that argument hasn’t been advanced before, I’m going to use it. And I’m reasonably certain that is what the DOJ attorneys are doing…their job to defend their client. It has also been suggested that Congress, in passing the telecom immunity in the FISA revision claimed “Well, you can always sue the individual government actors,” and that somehow, this Motion goes against the grain of that claim. This Motion doesn’t change that one iota. Again, this is a Motion filed on behalf of the United States of America and related government Defendants, in their official capacity. If a Plaintiff finds that Wendy Wiretapper, working for NSA, violated a Plaintiff’s civil rights, that lawsuit can still continue, but still be subject to personal immunities for official acts.

I am still wary of where this is going. Clearly, I’d like some more policy assurances from the Obama administration with respect to the wiretapping issue, and changes in the law.

But you can’t blame the lawyers for defending their client. And you can’t translate what they are doing to defend their client as a policy decision. At least not yet.

UPDATE: Some people have stated that “why doesn’t DOJ simply settle the case” or something to that effect. Just wanted to point out that this is the BEGINNING of the lawsuit, not the END. In fact, should DOJ’s Motion get denied, we have no idea where this lawsuit goes. There may be more incentive to settle at that point. Fact is, we just don’t know at this point. But I would NOT expect them merely to settle the case just off the bat. That is rarely, rarely done.

Read the whole post.

Humor: Evidently someone snapped this photo of his girlfriend while she was stretching (safe for work; no nudity).

I once saw my wife doing this but couldn’t get to my camera quickly enough. I did catch her in the garden though.
I won’t post the photo as I really want her to be nice to me this coming weekend; more details on that later.

Countdown video : Obama sides with Bush on wiretaps

If anyone thinks that President Obama is getting a free pass from the liberal media, think again.

Check out this Kieth Olberman section (video).

Note: before you overreact, I highly recommend reading this post (made by a government attorney)

On other topics

Can a computer program make an observation which deduces the laws of physics? 3-quarks daily points this to this article:

In just over a day, a powerful computer program accomplished a feat that took physicists centuries to complete: extrapolating the laws of motion from a pendulum’s swings.

Developed by Cornell researchers, the program deduced the natural laws without a shred of knowledge about physics or geometry.

The research is being heralded as a potential breakthrough for science in the Petabyte Age, where computers try to find regularities in massive datasets that are too big and complex for the human mind. (See Wired magazine’s July 2008 cover story on “The End of Science.”)

“One of the biggest problems in science today is moving forward and finding the underlying principles in areas where there is lots and lots of data, but there’s a theoretical gap. We don’t know how things work,” said Hod Lipson, the Cornell University computational researcher who co-wrote the program. “I think this is going to be an important tool.” [...]

The program started with near-random combinations of basic mathematical processes — addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and a few algebraic operators.

Initially, the equations generated by the program failed to explain the data, but some failures were slightly less wrong than others. Using a genetic algorithm, the program modified the most promising failures, tested them again, chose the best, and repeated the process until a set of equations evolved to describe the systems. Turns out, some of these equations were very familiar: the law of conservation of momentum, and Newton’s second law of motion.

“It’s a powerful approach,” said University of Michigan computer scientist Martha Pollack, with “the potential to apply to any type of dynamical system.” As possible fields of application, Pollack named environmental systems, weather patterns, population genetics, cosmology and oceanography. “Just about any natural science has the type of structure that would be amenable,” she said.

Compared to laws likely to govern the brain or genome, the laws of motion discovered by the program are extremely simple. But the principles of Lipson and Schmidt’s program should work at higher scales.

The researchers have already applied the program to recordings of individuals’ physiological states and their levels of metabolites, the cellular proteins that collectively run our bodies but remain, molecule by molecule, largely uncharacterized — a perfect example of data lacking a theory.

Their results are still unpublished, but “we’ve found some interesting laws already, some laws that are not known,” said Lipson. “What we’re working on now is the next step — ways in which we can try to explain these equations, correlate them with existing knowledge, try to break these things down into components for which we have clues.”

I’ve only posted a small bit of the article.

Evolution From Jerry Coyne’s blog whyevolutionistrue: It is well known that certain pests evolve a immunity to pesticides; the idea is that the pests that have immunity to a pesticide live in greater numbers to reproduce offspring which has this immunity.

One novel solution to this is to find a pesticide that kills the females only after they have had their offspring; hence there is no greater propensity to pass along “immune” genes.

One of the interesting things about aging is that once you stop reproducing, your genes cannot be ’seen’ by natural selection. Whatever choices you make – where to eat if you’re an animal, what to eat if you’re a human animal – it cannot have a direct effect on the survival of your genes in the next generation, because you’ve already passed them on. [...]

In an article that has just appeared in the Open Access journal PLoS Biology (’Open Access’ means it is free to read for everyone), researchers from Penn State University and the Open University, UK, suggest that this evolution of insecticide resistance could be avoided if the mosquitoes were killed after they had reproduced. In other words, at a period of their life when natural selection couldn’t ’see’ them.

This idea is not as far-fetched as it might seem – in general the mosquitoes that bite and transmit malaria are the older females, who have already laid their eggs. As the authors put it “Thus, in principle at least, public health advances can be achieved with minimal selection for resistance by an insecticide that kills after the majority of mosquito reproduction has occurred but before malaria parasites are infectious.”

So how do they propose to blindside the mosquitoes and get round natural selection? They put forward several ideas, from slowly-accumulating pesticides to fungal infections that would gradually kill the mosquitoes, hitting the most lethal phase just as they begin to bite.

As a bonus, human female menopause is discussed; Coyne notes that, while a post menopausal woman can’t reproduce, she can provide valuable contributions to the well being of her kids and grandchildren; hence living longer might help the reproductive success of her genes down the road.

Economy: Stock and statistics: Nate Silver ponders why certain obvious statistical relationships are often overlooked by investors. One example of that is the price to earnings ratio of stock:

the notion that “no one is able to time market turns” is not really true. It is notoriously difficult to predict whether the market will go up or down tomorrow. But it is not necessarily all that difficult to predict whether an above-average or below-average return can be anticipated from the market over the medium-to-long term. As Shiller demonstrated in Irrational Exuberance, there has in fact been a fairly strong predictive relationship between the price-to-earnings ratio exhibited by the market at any given time and its long-term average return:[...]

There really are times when stocks are cheap and expensive. When P/E ratios are low, one tends to make a better return in the market; when they are high, one tends to earn a lesser one (though not necessarily to take a loss). The mystery that Shiller is trying to solve is how a pattern like this can manage to sustain itself. It is a mystery precisely because the patterns are relatively obvious

Surf to the article to see a graph and to read a discussion on the housing bubble and its collapse.

Human Relationships and Society: 3-quarks daily points us to an interesting article about human pride:

Look around you. On the train platform, at the bus stop, in the car pool lane: these days someone there is probably faking it, maintaining a job routine without having a job to go to.

The Wall Street type in suspenders, with his bulging briefcase; the woman in pearls, thumbing her BlackBerry; the builder in his work boots and tool belt — they could all be headed for the same coffee shop, or bar, for the day.

“I have a new client, a laid-off lawyer, who’s commuting in every day — to his Starbucks,” said Robert C. Chope, a professor of counseling at San Francisco State University and president of the employment division of the American Counseling Association. “He gets dressed up, meets with colleagues, networks; he calls it his Western White House. I have encouraged him to keep his routine.”

The fine art of keeping up appearances may seem shallow and deceitful, the very embodiment of denial. But many psychologists beg to differ.

To the extent that it sustains good habits and reflects personal pride, they say, this kind of play-acting can be an extremely effective social strategy, especially in uncertain times. [...]

In one continuing experiment, Dr. Tracy, along with Azim Shariff, a doctoral student at British Columbia, have found that people tend to associate an expression of pride with high status — even when they know that the person wearing it is low on the ladder. In their study, participants impulsively assigned higher status to a prideful water boy than to a team captain who looked ashamed.

The implications of this are hard to exaggerate. Researchers tend to split pride into at least two broad categories. So-called authentic pride flows from real accomplishments, like raising a difficult child, starting a company or rebuilding an engine. Hubristic pride, as Dr. Tracy calls it, is closer to arrogance or narcissism, pride without substantial foundation. The act of putting on a good face may draw on elements of both.

But no one can tell the difference from the outside. Expressions of pride, whatever their source, look the same. “So as long as you’re a decent actor, and people don’t know too much about your situation, all systems are go,” said Lisa A. Williams, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Northeastern University.

The various flavors of pride may even feel similar on the inside, when the stakes are high enough. “She was always scrupulous about keeping up appearances to herself,” wrote Edith Wharton of her tragic heroine Lily Bart in “The House of Mirth.” “Her personal fastidiousness had a moral equivalent, and when she made a tour of inspection in her own mind there were certain closed doors she did not open.” If you believe it, so will they.
[...]
Therapists say that in time, people usually do better when they come clean. “In some ways it’s easier to do this now, with so many people out of work,” said Michael C. Lazarchick, an employment counselor in southern New Jersey. “You may very well find out that others are going through the same thing, or something like it — ‘Oh yeah, I just took a big cut in pay.’ ”

But in the short term, projecting pride may do more than help manage others’ impressions. Psychologists have found that wearing a sad or happy face can have a top-down effect on how a person feels: Smile and you may feel fleetingly happier. The same most likely is true for an expression of pride. In a 2008 study, the Northeastern researchers found that inducing a feeling of pride in people solving spatial puzzles motivated them to try harder when they tackled the next round.

Pride, in short, begets perseverance. All of which may explain why, when the repo man is at the door, people so often remind themselves that they still have theirs, and that it’s worth something. Because they do, and because it is.

I have to admit that I’ve seen instances of this on the campuses of small colleges: professors who have either published little or have published a ton of mostly mediocre stuff see themselves as being peers to the big guns at MIT or Harvard. I can’t do that; I envy (sort of) those who can.