Feds Take Aim At Investment Banks

The National Credit Union Administration is a federal regulatory institution for credit unions roughly analogous to the FDIC for commercial banks. The credit union industry is structured in two main tiers. As the Wall Street Journal explains today:

The wholesale credit unions, also known as corporate credit unions, are at the heart of the nation's credit-union system. They not only invest customer deposits but also provide services such as check clearing for nearly 8,000 "retail" credit unions—member-owned cooperatives that act somewhat like banks for firefighters, teachers and other workers who have something in common. Such customers have a total of about $680 billion in deposits at credit unions.

In reality, the strength of the tie between what customers of credit union members have in common has declined for years. For example, I am a member of the Security Services Federal Credit Union, despite the fact that the only paying jobs that I have ever held in my life have been as a newspaper delivery boy, as a freight unloader in a university kitchen, as a tutor, as a math homework grader, as a continuing education instructor, as a professor, as a reporter and as a lawyer, none of which rightly qualify as security services unless you include the occassions when I've acted as bouncer at law firms where I have been employed. But, they remain member owned and tend to be more conservative in their lending and investments than commercial banks.

The NCUA put five wholesale credit unions into receivership as a result of the financial crisis. The Wall Street Journal, summed up the impact of those receiverships, three of which took place in September of 2010, and the other two of which were earlier.

Bad bets on mortgage-backed securities have now killed five of the nation's 27 wholesale credit unions since March 2009. The federal government, which now controls about 70% of the total assets at such credit unions, said the surviving institutions will be reined in so that they take fewer risks with their investments. . . . Members United Corporate Federal Credit Union in Warrenville, Ill., Southwest Corporate Federal Credit Union of Plano, Texas, and Constitution Corporate Federal Credit Union, Wallingford, Conn., which had a total of $19.67 billion in assets as of July, were taken into conservatorship by federal regulators. . . . Since the start of 2008, 66 retail unions have failed, compared with more than 290 banks or savings institutions. . . . Last year, regulators seized the two largest wholesale credit unions, U.S. Central Federal Credit Union, based in Lenexa, Kansas, and Western Corporate Federal Credit Union, San Dimas, Calif., after finding their losses were much larger than previously reported.

Losses on the mortgage-backed securities held by the five seized credit unions are expected by regulators to total about $15 billion. Wiping out the capital of the failed institutions will cover a chunk of those losses. But the remaining $7 billion to $9.2 billion eventually will be passed along to the nation's 7,445 federally insured credit unions in the form of future assessments.

The total number of failed banks and S&Ls has now risen to more than 350.

The $50 billion of mortgage backed securities bought by the wholesale credit unions which placed into receivership are now worth about $25 billion. WesCorp, which had 74% of its investments in mortgage backed securities has suffered a 31% on its mortgage backed security portfolio, the other four wholesale credit unions suffered losses of 10% to 16% on their mortgage backed securities portfolio which made up 31% to 57% of their respective portfolios of investments.

Of hundreds of bonds inherited by the NCUA in its rescues of wholesale credit unions, many were packed with subprime mortgages, interest-only loans or mortgages with other risky characteristics such as not requiring income verification. The mortgage-backed securities often carried Triple-A credit ratings at first. Many now have junk ratings.

Now, the NCUA and other federal agencies stuck with the bad loans are threatening suits to strike back at the investment banks that overhyped these mortgage backed securities:

The NCUA is accusing Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Bank of America Corp.'s Merrill Lynch unit, Citigroup Inc. and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. of misrepresenting the risks of the bonds to wholesale credit unions. . . . agency officials recently issued an ultimatum to several firms that churned out the bonds: Either refund every dollar spent to buy the bonds when they were issued or face lawsuits seeking to recover the money. In a securities filing this month, Goldman said the NCUA "has stated that it intends to pursue. . . on behalf of certain credit unions for which it acts as conservator" claims that offering documents for certain securities Goldman sold "contained untrue statements of material facts and material omissions."

The NCUA claim is the classic securities fraud 10b-5 suit. The NCUA is claiming that the investment banks had to lie in very specific disclosure document in order to sell their bonds.

But, the economics involved in a securities fraud suit against an investment bank based on bond issuances are very different than the economics involved in the more typical securities fraud suit against a corporation brought by shareholders of that corporation based on stock issued long ago and were trading in the secondary market when the person who is suing bought them.

In a suit by a bondholder, the situation is very similar to an ordinary fraud suit where someone selling something lies about it to make a sale in exchange for immediate payment in which the seller has a direct and immediate financial interest. And, the pot of money from which recovery is sought is different from the one owned by the people bringing the suit.

The FDIC, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, each of which holds similar securities acquired in the course of the bailout for which similar representations were made could bring similar suits.

[T]he Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.'s board has authorized the filing of lawsuits seeking to recover more than $3.5 billion from officers and directors at failed U.S. banks.

Last week, the FDIC accused the wives of Washington Mutual Inc.'s two top executives at the time of the big thrift's 2008 collapse of illegally moving cash and houses into trusts to shield the assets.

The executives called the suit seeking over $900 million baseless. . . .

Last year, the FDIC took over as plaintiff in a suit filed by Riverside National Bank of Florida, a bank in Fort Pierce that, before failing in April, had stuffed its portfolio with 27 collateralized debt obligations, or slices of bond pools. Riverside accused more than a dozen firms of misrepresenting the CDOs' value. At the time the FDIC stepped in, it owned parts of over 250 CDOs bought by small banks that subsequently failed.

Of course, investment bankers were the only one's at fault:

In November, an audit by the NCUA's inspector general concluded that the management and board of one wholesale credit union, called Western Corporate Federal Credit Union, or WesCorp, didn't properly manage the risk of its portfolio and bought too many mortgage securities. . . . The inspector general's review didn't analyze the possible role of underwriters, issuers or credit-ratings firms.

It isn't entirely clear from the newspaper report whether the investment banks were acting and underwriters or issuers in these sales. Credit ratings themselves are considered "opinions" which do not give rise to fraud liability, even though most bond traders rely on those ratings almost completely to the exclusion of prospectuses, and even though a triple-A rating was in fact completely inappropriate for securities that were as risky as the entire class of mortgage backed securities that were issued actually were in hindsight.

Establishing that facts in the prospectus were false or that facts existed that were omitted from the prospectus, and that those facts had a material impact on the value of the securities, is generally straightforward legally now that investigations have revealed what when wrong with these securities.

The unknowns in suits against investment banks are establishing that the investments banks a the proper parties to sue, rather than special purpose companies set up to issue the securities, because securities laws do not generally recognize "aider and abettor" liability for securities fraud. And, the party bringing the suit also has to establishing "scienter" at the time that the prospectus containing material fact or omitting material facts was prepared. In other words, it isn't enough to show that a statement included a false statement or omitted a material statement, the suit has to show that the company making the statement knew at the time that it was stating something that was untrue and material, or omitting a fact known to be material.

In defending the suits, the investment banks can either claim that it didn't know about the ugly details, or that they believed that the facts were not material because features of the bonds like guarantees from loan originators and credit default swap derivatives made problem with the underlying bonds irrelevant, and nobody realized that "counterparty risk" in these guarantees was as serious as it actually turned out to be in hindsight.

If a court finds that they lied, the investment banks are on the hook and their newfound post-financial crisis profits could evaporate. But, if a court finds that they weren't aware of the problems with their prospectuses, then they are off the hook. Post-financial crisis investigations which seem to show that there were insider communications showing that insiders at major investment banks knew that mortgage backed securities were really junk weaken the case of the investment banks on the merits, if they are not mere "aiders and abetters." Revisions to the bankruptcy code made in 2005 also makes it much harder for investment bankers found to have lied to protect their assets from those who prevail in securities fraud lawsuits.

Moreover, if one federal agency prevails in a securities fraud suit from a particular bond issuance, and appellate courts set precedents that clear legal obstacles to that theory of recovery by affirming those wins, other federal agencies and private bondholders who took losses in the same or similar deals can walk into court using the doctrine of collateral estoppel to apply the first winner's success to their own cases, leaving little more to be proved. As a result, there are huge incentive beyond those in these particular NCUA lawsuit for the investment banks to settle the cases to avoid setting a precedent to could be applied in many other cases.

Thus, it is very likely that the investment banks will have to pay record settlements that reduce taxpayer and innocent investor losses at the expense of the investment banks before the aftermath of the financial crisis is complete.

Bailouts Were Cheap; Stimulus Was Expensive

The bailout programs of the financial crisis are turning out to be much cheaper than expected in the long run. Stimulus packages for the financial crisis so far have cost about $1,253 billion. All of the bailouts combined have cost taxpayers under $50 billion.

How costly were these programs?

* The total cost of all of the bailouts combined is under $50 billion.

* The U.S. Treasury Department is on track to make a $10+ billion profit on its controversial TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) bailout.

* The AIG bailout is on track to produce at $20 billion profit.

* "the Treasury said it had earned a profit of $2.25 billion on the sale of Citigroup Inc securities it received in exchange for a $5 billion guarantee on a portfolio of potentially toxic assets. The guarantee was canceled with no losses."

* The General Motors bailout is on track to cost the taxpayers $9 billion at the first GM IPO price, but could recoup its entire investment if GM shares reach $50 a share. The combined auto industry bailout cost was most recently estimated to be about $17 billion.

The U.S. would have lost $28.6 billion in spending on social services and missing tax revenue if not for the bailout of GM, its former lending arm and Chrysler Group LLC, according to a study released Nov. 17 by the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

* The FDIC has a reserve balance deficit of $8 billion, and expects to incur more losses in 2011, but this will be replenished from future insured bank premiums.

* The Treasury didn't lose money in its brief participation in the commercial paper market which is now largely terminated.

* The U.S. government did not lose money when it guaranteed privately insured money market funds that were breaking the buck because of their exposure to AIG, in the face of doubts about the capacity of private insurers to cover the loses.

* There are $30 billion of the $245 billion of financial crisis loans to banks still outstanding, but the program overall is on track to make a $20 billion profit, and most of the funds outstanding are owed by profitable banks.

One missing piece: The Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac losses to the taxpayers.

Incidentally, in most of the cases of bailed out companies, shareholders lost nearly everything and so did most non-priority bondholders.

How Much Did The Stimulus Package Cost?

The economic stimulus package was much more expensive.

The Bush Stimulus Packages

In early 2008, "President George W. Bush and Congress agreed on a $268 billion plan consisting mostly of tax cuts" and "the $158 billion stimulus bill signed by President George W. Bush in the spring of 2008."

The First Obama Stimulus Package

In February 2009, during the Obama administration, Congress enacted a stimulus package estimated to cost $787 billion (revised to $814 billion as of August 2010).

The final bill includes $507 billion in spending programs and $282 billion in tax relief, including a scaled-back version of Mr. Obama's middle-class tax cut proposal, which would give credits of up to $400 for individuals and $800 for families within certain income limits. It will also provide a one-time payment of $250 to recipients of Social Security and government disability support.

The bill contains more than $150 billion in public works projects for transportation, energy and technology, and $87 billion to help states meet rising Medicaid costs. Despite intense lobbying by governors around the country, the final deal slashed $25 billion from a proposed state fiscal stabilization fund, eliminated a $16 billion line item for school construction and sharply curtailed spending to provide health insurance for the unemployed.

In driving down the total cost — from $838 billion for the Senate stimulus bill and $820 billion for the House-passed measure — lawmakers also reduced the Senate's proposed tax incentives for buyers of homes and cars. The final agreement retained a $70 billion tax break to spare millions of middle-income Americans from paying the alternative minimum tax in 2009.

It also created a new tax credit for 95 percent of working families at a cost of $116 billion. To the administration's chagrin, this became the tax cut that no one noticed.

In retrospect, the tax incentives for buyers of homes and cars was highly ineffective. The Cash for Clunkers program cost about $3 billion and cost about $24,000 per addition car sale induced. The Homebuyer Tax Credit program cost about $16 billion (and the final total isn't in yet), which works out to more than $100,000 per additional home sold: “'We paid $8,000 to at least 1.5 million people to do something they were going to do anyway,' [think tank economist Andrew] Jakabovics says."

The Most Recent Stimulus Bills

Another stimulus bill was passed last week that included:

[A] $13 billion plan to give companies who hire unemployed Americans an exemption from paying payroll taxes on those workers through the end of 2010. It also provides a $1,000 tax credit to employers who keep new workers on the payroll for at least for 52 weeks. . . . The law provides an exemption from the 6.2 percent Social Security payroll tax for every worker who has been unemployed at least 60 days and is hired after Feb. 3 through the end of this year. Employers will get an additional $1,000 income tax credit for new employees retained for at least a year. The Senate estimated the measure will cost $13 billion over 10 years, though most of the cost will be in the first two years.

Also:

With the help of two Republican votes, Congress passed legislation that would create a $30 billion loan fund for small businesses and provide other tax incentives to encourage hiring and stimulate growth[.]

A Fourth Domain? A Fifth? UPDATED.

Carl Zimmer at Loom discusses (see also here) mounting evidence from genetics for a new "domain" in the family three of life to rival the current three: Eucarya (animals, plants, fungi, and some of their invertebrate ancestors), Bacteria, and Archaea (mostly extremophiles in thermal vents and the like).

The new kid on the block? Giant viruses.

[O]fficially called Nucleocytoplasmic Large DNA Viruses (NCLDV). I’m just going to call them giant viruses, because they are quite huge. Grotesquely so. As I write in my upcoming book, A Planet of Viruses, they were mistaken for years as bacteria. They were a hundred times bigger than any virus known at the time.. Giant viruses are indeed viruses, however. They hijack host cells the way all viruses do, for example.

But giant viruses also explode a lot of conventional ideas of what viruses are supposed to be. Not only are giant viruses monstrously big, but they are overloaded with genes. A flu virus has just ten genes, for example, but a number of giant viruses have well over a thousand. Giant viruses even get infected by viruses of their own.

Studies of DNA chunks disaggregated from particularly organisms in sea water even suggest that there might be a fifth domain:

[T]hey compare versions of the RpoB gene in giant viruses, bacteria, eukaryotes, and archaea. Two branches that turned up in the global ocean survey are . . .Unknown 2 [which] seems to be like the giant viruses, but Unknown 1 is just off the map.

Looking at the chart above showing the genes, one could imagine Unknown 1 being a divergent branch of bacteria.



Another chart, above, from the recently published paper, similarly makes "Unknown 1" look like a basal branch of bacteria, while Unknown 2 is a harder fit.

A final chart from the study (which I can't seem to manage to upload), suggesting a more distant relationship between Bacteria and "Unknown 1",but a closer relationship between giant bacteria and Unknown 2, is found here

UPDATE (March 23, 2011):

An author of the study has provided the following comment to the original post:

Jonathan Eisen said...

It is hard to tell what these Unknown groups are -- and there is one problem we did not discuss in our paper which is where we placed the root in the trees we drew. Technically, these trees should have been drawn unrooted, as one of the trees is in the linked paper on Google Knol. We drew them in the papers as rooted in part because some people I sent the paper to said that most people have trouble interpreting unrooted trees.

So it is possible with some of the rootings that some of our unknown groups could represent VERY divergence members of the bacteria, for example. I think this is unlikely b/c the unknown groups seem to be quite distant from bacteria. We are working on new analyses to try and pin down the positions of these groups more accurately ...

3/22/2011 8:58 PM

Interesting Studies

* A new study predicts the extinction of religion in nine countries using models similar to those to predict language extinction. (See also here on language extinction: 6% of the world's languages are spoken by 94% of the world's population. The remaining 94% of languages are spoken by only 6% of the population. 133 languages are spoken by fewer than 10 people.) "The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland." The key constant in their model in all of the studied countries was a best fit to a value that would lead to completely secular beliefs in the long run.

Daniel M. Abrams, Haley A. Yaple, Richard J. Wiener, "A mathematical model of social group competition with application to the growth of religious non-affiliation."

The model looks at the proportion of people who are religious, the proportion of people who are non-religious, and assumes that conversion rates in each direction are a function of the proportion of the population that belongs to that group and a constant called "u" for the perceived utility of membership in that group. This probability they put in the form: "c(x^a)(u), where c and a are constants that scale time and determine the relative importance of x and u in attracting converts, respectively." Using 85 sets of long term census data they found that the best fit to "a" was 1, that c is also succeptible to global fits, and that u varies from place to place. When they solve the equations on this basis they find:

The behavior of the model can be understood analytically for a = 1, in which case we have dx/dt=cx(1-x)(2u-1): logistic growth. An analysis of the fixed points of this equation tells us that religion will disappear if its perceived utility is less than that of non-affiliation [i.e. u is greater than 0.5], regardless of how large a fraction initially adheres to a religion. However, if a is less than but close to one, a small social group can indefinitely coexist with a large social group.

The study estimated the constant "u" from census of religion data for "(a) the autonomous Aland islands region of Finland, (b) Schwyz Canton in Switzerland, (c) Vienna Province in Austria, (d) the Netherlands. . . . Relative utilities for the religiously unaffiliated populations as determined by model . . . were u = 0:63; 0:70; 0:58; 0:56."

No estimate of the key constant was made for the United States, which is far less secular than the countries studied, but has a growing non-religious population. There is also good reason to wonder if the either or model used in the study (in which religious or non-religious were the only categories) makes sense in a nation without a tradition of an established or locally dominant religion as found in most of the studied areas.

The general empirical trend in the study of American religious affiliation has been a candle burning at both ends result, with both more demanding religious faiths and secular beliefs growing at the expensive of mainline moderate religious belief. Similarly, in Latin America, the trend has been to see a growth in both Pentacostal faiths and secularism at the expensive the Roman Catholicism which is the dominant established church. In sub-Saharan Africa, the trend has been for conversion from animism to Christianity, with a minor growth factor (partially demic and partially from conversion) for Islam, while secular views have not been particularly notable as a share of the population.

Put another way, there is a lot to be said for a logistic model to explain trendlines in religious affiliation, but the model does nothing to explain what drives changes in the key constant "u" that drives these trends. By analogy, is is compable to looking at politics at an electoral level without really examining the movement politics that cause political views to change in the general population over time.

This model is a good antidote, however, to purely population genetic models that start from the assumption that children will share the faith of their parents, rather than attempting to quantify propensities to convert from one faith to another in a meaningful fashion. To some extent, by deriving empirical constants in the model from data, it glosses over these theoretical objections in a robust way. The constant "u" effectively subsumes both conversion propensities and reproduction rates. But, near the extremes, it becomes more and more important to recognize the relevance of subgroup membership, subgroup coherence, and reproduction rates, although its constant "a" can help mediate that result.

For example, in the sample "a" equals 1 model, it can't explain the persistence, and even growth, of faiths that Judaism and the Amish, in the face over overwhelming minority status for thousands of years and hundreds of years respectively. More generally, a more realistic model would assume a hetrogeneous propensity to convert which might very well have a hereditary component (due to psychological tendencies to take certain approaches to tradition and authority selected for heavily through religious endogamy when a religion is in the minority).

In more complex models, some religious populations and some personality types might be slow to convert, while others might convert more rapidly, and if the populations slow to convert also have more children and have children younger, you might end up with a bimodal outcome with a stable, fertile religious segment and a stable less fertile non-religious segment. It isn't hard to imagine the United States and Latin America evolving into this kind of equalibrium. And, while Turkey is nominally 99% Muslim, its division into different varieties of Islam arguably reflects this kind of balance.

* In a decidely participant-ethnographic investigation, New York City dezinens have discovered that godless people who get together in clubs are happier.

* A parasitic factor in mental illness may have been located:

Toxoplasma gondii infects approximately 25 percent of the human population. The protozoan parasite is noted for altering the behavior of infected hosts. . . .

"It is noteworthy that we found vasoactive intestinal peptide receptor 2 (VIPR2) was upregulated by all three Toxoplasma strains," says Xiao. VIPR2 "is linked to schizophrenia in some recent publications. Since the tropism of Toxoplasma for brain has been linked with specific behavioral changes and psychosis in humans, this finding will have some fundamental significance for understanding the correlation between Toxoplasma and psychosis."

The report based on the study by J. Xiao, L. Jones-Brando, C. C. Talbot, R. H. Yolken. "Differential Effects of Three Canonical Toxoplasma Strains on Gene Expression in Human Neuroepithelial Cells." Infection and Immunity, 2010; 79 (3): 1363 DOI: 10.1128/IAI.00947-10 suggests from a mouse model that there may be an important subclass of mental health conditions with a parasitic infectious agent as a cause or trigger.

* There may be a quick and easy vaccine cure for a complication of dust mite allergies:

Monash University researchers are working on a vaccine that could completely cure asthma brought on by house dust mite allergies. If successful, the vaccine would have the potential to cure sufferers in two to three doses. . . . Professor O'Hehir has also made significant gains in developing a vaccine for people with peanut allergies. Currently there is no specific treatment for peanut allergy with avoidance and emergency treatment of anaphylaxis with adrenaline as the only options. Allergen immunotherapy is available for selected patients with house dust mite allergy but typically injections need to be given regularly for three to five years.

I've never been diagnosed with asthma, but do have a dust mite allergy and have had subclinical asthma-like symptoms, so this is naturally of great interest to me.

* Native Americans had big influences on the environment of the Americas beyond a megafauna extinction, in the Everglades:

Tree islands are patches of relatively high and dry ground that dot the marshes of the Everglades. Typically a meter (3.3 feet) or so high, many of them are elevated enough to allow trees to grow. They provide a nesting site for alligators and a refuge for birds, panthers, and other wildlife.

Scientists have thought for many years that the so-called fixed tree islands (a larger type of tree island frequently found in the Everglades' main channel, Shark River Slough) developed on protrusions from the rocky layer of a mineral called carbonate that sits beneath the marsh. Now, new research indicates that the real trigger for island development might have been middens, or trash piles left behind from human settlements that date to about 5,000 years ago.

These middens, a mixture of bones, food discards, charcoal, and human artifacts (such as clay pots and shell tools), would have provided an elevated area, drier than the surrounding marsh, allowing trees and other vegetation to grow. Bones also leaked phosphorus, a nutrient for plants that is otherwise scarce in the Everglades.

And, in the Eastern United States where "prehistoric people decreased forest cover to reorient their settlements and intensify corn production. They also contributed to increased sedimentation in valley bottoms about 700 to 1,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought. The findings suggest that prehistoric land use was the initial cause of increased sedimentation in the valley bottoms, and sedimentation was later amplified by wetter and stormier conditions."

* Unimpressive social science discovery of the week: Subjects in psychology experiments distinguish between real human beings and mere video recordings of human beings.

* Traits that cause organisms to disperse rapidly in space lead to selective evolution without regard to other measures of biological fitness.

* We know more about the apes of Europe and Asia tens of millions of years ago than we used to know:

Extant apes (Primates: Hominoidea) are the relics of a group that was much more diverse in the past. They originated in Africa around the Oligocene/Miocene boundary, but by the beginning of the Middle Miocene they expanded their range into Eurasia, where they experienced a far-reaching evolutionary radiation. . . Here we provide an updated chronology that incorporates recently discovered Iberian taxa and further reevaluates the age of many previously known sites on the basis of local biostratigraphic scales and magnetostratigraphic data. Our results show that identifiable Eurasian kenyapithecins (Griphopithecus and Kenyapithecus) are much younger than previously thought (ca. 14 Ma instead of 16 Ma), which casts serious doubts on the attribution of the hominoid tooth from Engelswies (16.3–16.5 Ma) to cf. Griphopithecus.

Defining God

Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance, in an essay entitled "Does the Universe Need God?", highlights a definition of God and picks at it:

[T]he God hypothesis seems simple and precise – an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being. (There are other definitions, but they are usually comparably terse.)

In the comments, I suggest an alternative definition, and restate (with edits and some expansion) here:

Definitionally, a definition of God as "an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being" while traditional (was it Aquinas that made it a standard?), isn't a very good operational definition of how we separate religious and non-religious thinking. It is a poor fit to polythesism, animism, or many Eastern religious concepts like Tao and Kharma.

More useful as an operational definition of that which is divine would be "some being or power that acts with moral purpose or an agenda for human events, in the lives of humans, that is not human, a human creation, or an ordinary animal." One can worry the "ordinary" part of animal a bit, but the notion is to exclude the moral acts of gorillas and dolphins and dogs and cats and the like, without necessarily ruling out the like of angels, demons, jinn, ghosts, Gaia, and so on. Charlotte of Charlotte's Web is perhaps a gray area in this definition -- she being no ordinary spider.

Under this operational definition, the deist conception of a Newtonian clockmaker God, reimagined as something setting the Big Bang in motion and fixing the laws of nature, without more, would not constitute God, even if it were done by some gray haired titan surrounded by an Army of angels. This operational definition also excludes a truly pure version of a scorekeeper God, one who rewards and punishes us solely in the afterlife, but unlike the Abrahamic Gods, does not tell anyone what the rules by which God keeps score happen to be.

On the other hand, it would include the Star Wars saga's mitcholorians, or some supernatural ancient astronauts who brought humanity to a next stage of consciousness and influenced our evolution, even if these being themselves have an evolutionary history of their own (a la Arthus C. Clark's "2001"). It also permits gods of less than infinite power who are not "omnipotent" or "omniscient" (such as the Greek pantheon, and even the Judeo-Christian God in Genesis who sometimes lacks knowledge of what the humans are up to until he pays attention and discovers their acts), cruel gods who are not "omnibenevolent" (e.g. Satan or the Zoroastrian force of evil), or divine forces who seek balance rather than good (e.g. Taoist conceptions of the divine), or minor divinities like fairies, who may be neither actively good nor bad, but simply like to screw with us to see what happens (a bit like the relationship of scientists and lab rats from the rat's persecptive).

Gods that people care about, fear, love and worship, the kind that act with moral purpose or an agenda for human events of their own, might very well be entirely separate and unrelated to gods that establish laws of the universe. They also give a very real meaning to the notion of playing God, either by changing the ammoral course of nature, or by intervening in human affairs of people in general from some position of power with some sort of agenda in ways that change their lives.

Under this conception of God, we can reason directly that none of the known inviolate laws of nature have any apparent moral purpose or agenda for human events, at least on their face. They may, as an anthropomorphic principle does, include a purpose that makes it possible for human beings to exist, but the have no preference for good or evil or anything else we do in human affairs; they are nihilist.

Thus, for this conception of the divine, we must assume that God is a "god of the gaps" who is very shy and acts only through an exquisitely balanced manipulation of random quantum events, and that such a god would be particularly invisible in quantum events measured in laboratories or observations of distant stars, because in such events outcomes have no moral purpose or agenda for human events for God to implement. This kind of divinity looks more like a morally purposive fate ("cruel fate"), like kharma, like a luck in a sense that has favorites rather than being truly random.

Cats Worse Than Windmills For Birds

The Denver Post (hard copy, not local work product) reports that about 80% of songbirds are killed by predators, and that in particular 47% of singbirds are killed by cats (about equal numbers of feral and domesticated cats). This works out to 500,000,000 songbirds killed by cats each year v. 400,000 killed by windmills. Thus, windmills kill less than one-half of a percent of all songbirds.

Also on the topic of cats, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has determined that the Eastern Cougar is extinct, and that people who see cougars in the East are merely seeing Western Cougars who have migrated to the East or escapees from captivity. The practical upshot of this (and the reason not to necessarily trust the conclusion) is that Eastern states where the Eastern Cougar was once native, don't have to establish endangered species plans for cougars, because officially speaking, anyway, they don't exist. Habitat protection plans for Eastern Cougars would have been a major blow to timber interests and real estate developers in the forested rural east.

Incidentally, the great scarcity of non-human megafauna, such as cougars and bears, in much of North America means that in much of these region the top non-human predators in the ecosystem are domestic cats, lynx, dogs, foxes, wolves, and a few birds of prey, a status that elevates their importance in the ecosystem relative to the days when larger predators roamed the land. The largest birds of prey are only about 33 pounds, the largest domestic cats and lynxes and foxes aren't all that much bigger, and few dogs and wolves are larger than a deer (about the weight of an adult human). A larger crocodiles and alligators are found in warmer climes, and some aquatic species are also larger (e.g. the Orca and Great White Shark).

Fundamental Particle Spin As Emergent

Professor Chris Regan and graduate student Matthew Mecklenburg, in a March 18 article in the journal Physical Review Letters, drawing on their discoveries in graphene properties, suggest note that a particle acquires apparent spin in a medium of light and dark tiles where the tiles are so close that their separation cannot be detected. They reason from there that:

"An electron's spin might arise because space at very small distances is not smooth, but rather segmented, like a chessboard," Regan said. . . .

In 1928, British physicist Paul Dirac showed that the spin of the electron is intimately related to the structure of space-time. His elegant argument combined quantum mechanics with special relativity, Einstein's theory of space-time (famously represented by the equation E=mc2).

Dirac's equation, far from merely accommodating spin, actually demands it. But while showing that relativistic quantum mechanics requires spin, the equation does not give a mechanical picture explaining how a point particle manages to carry angular momentum, nor why this spin is two-valued.

Unveiling a concept that is at once novel and deceptively simple, Regan and Mecklenburg found that electrons' two-valued spin can arise from having two types of tiles -- light and dark -- in a chessboard-like space.

The implication would seem to favor the program of loop quantum gravity, which attempts to derive general relativity and other fundamental properties of physics, such as the number of space-time dimensions from a simple model which has as a core premise, the notion that space-time is discrete rather than continuous.

If fundamental particle spin could be shown to be emergent from this model, this would be a major breakthrough in developing a quantum theory of gravity.

Righthaven Loses Fair Use Suit At Trial Court Level

Steve Green reports in the Las Vegas Sun that US District Judge James Mahan has ruled that the Center for Intercultural Organizing, an Oregon nonprofit, did not infringe on copyrights when it posted an entire Las Vegas Review-Journal story on its website without authorization and that there was no harm to the market for the story.

Mahan stressed that his ruling hinged largely on the CIO's nonprofit status and said the copyright lawsuit would be dismissed because the nonprofit used it in an educational way, didn't try to use the story to raise money, and because the story in question was primarily factual as opposed to being creative. 'The market (served by the CIO) is not the R-J's market,' says Mahan.

This is the second fair use defeat for Righthaven and is significant since it involved an entire story post rather than a partial story post. Green says that Righthaven's strategy of suing 250 web site and demanding $150,000 in damages plus forfeiture of the web site's domain name has clearly backfired and now Righthaven, the self-appointed protector of the newspaper industry, has left the newspaper industry with less copyright protection than if they never filed their lawsuits at all.

Slashdot summarizes the story here. (Hat Tip: Colorado Pols).

Righthaven is also making aggressive efforts using the same business model with regard to quotations from Denver Post articles.

This is a positive development for a blogger being sued for the non-commercial use of a single Denver Post photo, where attorneys' pressing copyright violation suits argue that use of a complete picture, even if it is only one in the context of a periodical full of pictures, can never constitute fair use. Text is much more easily excerpted.

Of course, since this ruling is simply a trial court ruling, Righthaven can, and surely will, appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. At that point, the 9th Circuit will evaluate the case under the applicable law given the facts found by the trial court.

A prior motion to dismiss defeat for Righthaven is discussed here.

War

U.S. military involvement in the civil war in Libya began today, as part of a coalition of forces including Britain and France.

More than 110 Tomahawk missiles fired from American and British ships and submarines hit about 20 Libyan air and missile defense targets in western portions of the country, U.S. Vice Adm. William Gortney said at a Pentagon briefing. . . . The salvo, in an operation dubbed "Odyssey Dawn," was meant "to deny the Libyan regime from using force against its own people," said Gortney. . . .

Earlier, French fighter jets deployed over Libya fired at a military vehicle Saturday, the first strike against Gadhafi's military forces, which earlier attacked the rebel stronghold of Benghazi.

Prime Minister David Cameron said late Saturday that British forces also are in action over Libya. . . . British Defense Secretary Liam Fox said the Royal Air Force deployed Tornado GR4 fast jets, which flew 3,000 miles from the United Kingdom and back, "making this the longest-range bombing mission conducted by the RAF since the (1982) Falklands conflict."

While there were no U.S. warplanes flying over Libya late Saturday, the coalition was softening Libyan positions before enforcing a no-fly zone, Gortney said. . . .

Obama is planning for the U.S. portion of the military action in Libya to only last for a few days, according to a senior administration official, who was not authorized to speak about sensitive military matters. "After that we'll take more of a supporting role," the senior official said.

Obama authorized U.S. military force from Brazil on what happened to be the eighth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq. . . .

Earlier Saturday, incoming artillery rounds landed inside Benghazi, and pro-Gadhafi tanks rolled into the town firing rounds, witnesses said. A flaming fighter jet plummeted from the sky, nose-diving to the ground. Khaled el-Sayeh, the opposition military spokesman, said the plane was an old MiG-23 that belonged to the rebels.

As night fell over Benghazi on Saturday, the city became quiet and calm. While plumes of smoke could be spotted, the pro-Gadhafi tanks seen earlier were not in sight. . . . Gadhafi forces had withdrawn from the city and that they were positioned 50 kilometers (31 miles) outside Benghazi.

The war in Libya joins the ongoing active military operations of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, although the operation in Iraq is winding down. So far, the Libya operation does not involve significant numbers of U.S. ground troops, who are taxed from other operations, instead relying mostly on U.S. Navy and Air Force resources, which are far less strained.

The prevailing assumption behind the outside intervention, authorized by the United Nations Security Council, is that it will decisively shift the course of the conflict in Libya by denying Gaddafi the one edge he has in hte conflict, superior access to heavy weapontry, such as fighter jets, helicopters, artillery batteries and tanks. Another possible but not certain possibility is that senior Gaddafi supporters, particularly those in the military, will see that their plight is hopeless and abandon his regime.

Bullies

Earlier this week, I went to my son's elementary school play. It was a series of skits put together by groups of several kids each in the drama class as part of the bullying prevention program at the school (with vocal and instrumental renditions of "Stand by me" as an intermezzo between each one).

A pattern illustrating the operational lesson that the children had learned from the program quickly emerged. A kid ("the target"), usually alone, gets bullied, sometimes by a bully alone, and sometimes by a ring leader and some henchmen. While alone, that kid can't win. But, another kid or group of kids intervenes on behalf of the kid being bullied and prevail - sometimes by force of numbers and sometimes combined with an appeal to authority (the principal or in a particularly overwhelming situation, a cell phone call to the cops).

The lesson seemed to be that you can't stop a bully alone, and when you are being bullied are often in a poor position to help yourself without assistance. After all, you were singled out when you were alone precisely because you were perceived in the first place, often accurately, as vulnerable. But, the program argues, you as a member of the school community have a moral obligation to help out your fellow students when they are in this kind of bind, because the secret to overcoming a bully is to have allies. The key ingredient that the program seeks to internalize in the kids and drill into their consciousness by repetition is that there is a moral duty to intervene on behalf of kids who are being bullied. Kids need to stand by each other to stay safe.

While the scenes weren't very realistic, the basic strategy that was proposed is plausible and the virtue of seeing a solution to the problem in terms of social context and personal obligation to others in the community is a refreshing and useful lesson for the kids that can extend far beyond the school yard.

As a practical matter, resorting to authority without peer support is often not very effective, and the old standby of the last generation - learning to box or do karate, reinstated into the debate by a Chinese setting remake of the Karate Kid movie, also doesn't work that well in real life. But, peer support does work, and the intervention of someone else on your behalf can make all the difference and resolve the problem in a stable way.

Moreover, this kind of strategy doesn't have to be completely successful to its full extent to work. As long as a small minority of kids in stronger positions than the target of the bullying are induced to intervene when necessary, and a great majority are induced to be less inclined to encourage or support the bullies, the strategy will work. A community in which a significant minority of kids who are in reasonably secure social positions feel a moral obligation to stand by isolated vulnerable kids who are being bullied and are ready to act on it is a community in which bullying is likely to become an undesirable option for would be bullies.

Bullies and Foreign Affairs

A natural analog to this view is what I see as an emerging conventional wisdom in foreign policy and military affairs. The single most decisive factor in determining the outcome of wars is who each side has as allies are in the conflict, and who watches without getting involved. Similarly, cops almost always win in individual confrontations with criminals because they can resort to the resources of a much larger and more cohesive team. Only when criminals band together into gangs, or organized crime families or cartels do they pose a serious challenge to police authority.

The protesters in Egypt and Tunisia couldn't have prevailed if the armed forces in those countries hadn't refused to back the current dictator. Protesters in Bahrain look doomed to failure because Saudi Arabia and other little Gulf monarchies have sent in troops to back that regime.

Protesters in Libya had a harder go of it because Gaddafi was able to utilize family ties and mercenaries to secure greater loyalty from his troops. The willingness of the French to stick out their neck and recognize the rebels in Libya as the legitimate government of Libya, an international consensus to freeze sovereign wealth and leadership group wealth, and yesterday's UN Security Council vote to authorize military force against Gaddafi (with usually anti-interventionist permanent members of the Security Council abstaining rather than vetoing the action) supported by the Arab League, British and French and American military might, and Qatar has changed that game, forcing Gaddafi to reverse his course of action by declaring a cease fire and probably insuring victory for the rebels, at least in the Eastern Benghazi area.

The Taliban were swiftly removed from power because they too found no international allies in the wake of 9-11. Serbia, in contrast, was able to maintain its control over Kosovo for much longer, with Russian backing, and Russian backing has been key to determining who prevails and who does not in conflicts over control in the Caucasus republics. Iraq's lack of allies against broad international coalitions in both the first Gulf War and the Iraq War, led to its defeat in each. Kuwait's ability to secure allies allowed it to resurface despite the fact that it had been crushed militarily and occupied by Iraq.

Tibet fell because no one inside our outside the Chinese government intervened on its behalf against China in 1959. Hungarian reformers in the 1950s, Czech reformers in the wake of the Prague Spring, and Chinese protesters in Beijing were defeated for the same reasons. Outside support from France was important to the success of the Americans in the American revolution. In World War II, decision of the United States to stop sitting on the sidelines was pivotal to the resolution of the conflict.

Until a couple of generations ago, the basic public policy stance on domestic violence was that "what happens in the home is not anyone else's business." And, the basic public policy stance on foreign affairs was that sovereignty provided local political leaders absolute authority to run their domestic affairs as they saw fit.

The attitude towards domestic violence has changed. Now, we arrest people who beat their wives and kids, and people who know about it feel some moral responsibility to summon outside intervention.

The attitude towards sovereignty has changed too, albeit more slowly. The Holocaust, reinforced by examples like genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda and Cambodia, and the rediscovery of the Armenian genocide in Anatolia, have helped shape that attitude. In U.S. history, something akin to this view (i.e. that the Civil War was justified because it freed the slaves) legitimatizes the U.S. Civil War. We no longer trust that those in political power will show enough restraint to prevent epic catastrophes in the absence of outside intervention. Increasingly, the international community feels that political leaders for show excessive brutality towards their own people forfeit their sovereign immunity from outside intervention. The international community increasingly feels a moral obligation to intervene on behalf of nations that are being bullied by their neighbors and domestic populations that are being bullied by their leaders.

Even Russia and China have reached a point where they are not going to object to international military intervention when a leader who has lost the support of half of his own military and many of his senior civil servants starts attacking his own people with jet fighters, and promising to slaughter whole cities that have risen up against him. And, even now, this support comes only with the implicit understanding that the international community is intervening only to the extent necessary to prevent mass slaughter of civilians and level the playing field.

Sovereignty still trumps a wide panoply of repressions. Apartheid was sanctioned, but direct intervention wasn't taken; the international community waited for it to collapse from within. Isolated unjustified killings of individuals aren't enough to forfeit it. Very repressive regimes, like those of Burma and North Korea are tolerated. Disregard for electoral outcomes or electoral fraud don't provoke international intervention, nor do illegal coups. But, we have at least reached the point where large scale killings of one's own people crosses a line, after which outside intervention is viewed as acceptable if anyone can be found to volunteer to take on the task.

The citizens of nation that is repressed can secure meaningful international intervention only by taking to the streets or taking up arms, and producing a response from the leaders of that nation that crosses the line.

Still, the international community has advanced from a situation where there truly wasn't any authority beyond the sovereign to one a bit like Medieval Iceland, which had courts to adjudicate when someone's misdeeds rose to the level that justified action, because executing that order, once rendered, was a private affair to be organized and financed by those who show an interest in taking action. Similarly, off the coast of Somalia, the international community has reached a consensus that Somali pirates are legitimate targets, but this determination is being enforced by a loose knit collection of national naval assets.

Excessive isolationism and respect for sovereignty sends a message that greater misconduct by national leaders will be tolerated; while an international community in which some kinds of domestic conduct is viewed as unacceptable and likely to provoke international intervention with real consequences discourages this kind of misconduct by national leaders.

The Economics of Operatic Geography

Like Italy, Germany was a loose collection of independent fiefs until the middle of the 19th century. Music was a weapon in the aristocrats’ fierce competition for prestige, helping to account for the disproportionate number of Baroque operas from German and Italian composers as compared with France, which was more centralized.

From here.

The pre-industrial revolution investments made in a Baroque opera houses was shown in a recent study to continue to be a factor in attracting top talent to European cities.

Will the relatively unified United States, European Union, China and India suffer relatively to places like Africa, Arabia, Southeast Asia and Latin America in terms of cultural innovation in the century to come for similar reasons?

Boulder, Colorado Is America's Happiest City

and Fort Collins is number three, per Richard Florida's blog. Provo, Utah also comes out at the top of the pack.

Boulder also came out on top in the subcategory of physical health, which is unsurprising as Colorado as the least obese state in the nation.

Ohio is home to two of the least happy cities in the nation, Ashland and Youngstown. Shreveport, Louisiana; Myrtle Beach, North Carolina; and McAllen, Texas were also dismal in the happiness index.

College towns dominate the top of the list; the Rust Belt fills the bottom.

Reactor Data Suggest Sterile Neutrinos

Many people expected that physicists would discover a new particle in 2011. But, most people thought it would happen at the newly opened Large Hadron Collider, not in obscure neutrino experiments.

Researchers at the Neutel Conference have announced that it looks like they have discovered new non-Standard Model particles, most likely two of them given their data so far, called sterile neutrinos. The result isn't rock solid, but it does appear for the first time, that the experimental data make the existence of sterile neutrinos the most likely possibility rather than a mere theoretical pipe dream with some marginal data to support it.

The last times that similarly Standard Model changing developments have been announced with such relatively weak theoretical consensus anticipating the discovery were when the first of the third generations fermions was discovered (the tau in 1974) and when the charm quark was discovered in 1970, respectively. The other third generation fermion discoveries and the other boson discoveries were widely expected by a consensus of physicists by that time that their experimental detection was announced.

Similarly, a discovery of a light Higgs boson at the LHC, even it made, would be a discovery that was widely anticipated. This discovery, while it has been discussed for many years, was not nearly so widely expected in the community of physicists, who have been focused on the possible discovery of a Higgs boson and possibly a lightest supersymmetric particle.

What is a sterile neutrino?

Unlike three flavors (aka generations) of up quarks, down quarks and electrons in Standard Model, each of which come in four varieties (left handed, right handed, left handed state anti-particles, and right handed state anti-particles), the three flavors of neutrinos come in only two varieties each (left handed state neutrinos and right handed state anti-neutrinos). Thus, one might expect sterile neutrinos to fill that slots in the table of Standard Model fermions for right handed and left handed anti-neutrinos.

Fermions basically fit an ordinary lay understanding a "matter" while the other kind of Standard Model particles called "bosons" such as photons, gluons and proposed gravitons, are massless, with the exception of the ephmeral and massive weak nuclear force bosons and composite "glueballs," made of multiple gluons; bosons are the particles that carry non-contact forces between fermionos in the Standard Model. Within the taxonomy of fermions, there are quarks (which are the constituent components of protons and neutrons) and leptons (electrons and neutrinos).

The "sterile neutrino" experimenters are searching for is defined as a "light" (i.e. lepton mass sized), electrically neutral, left handed state anti-neutrino (which is the anti-particle of a right handed neutrino).

Why call them "sterile" neutrinos?

1. All neutrinos lack electrical charge (hence the root of the name meaning "neutral"), so they don't interact electo-magnetically.

2. The weak nuclear force interaction acts only on left-handed particles (and right-handed state antiparticles). So right handed neutrinos and their left handed state anti-particles wouldn't interact with it.

3. The strong nuclear force interacts only with quarks and gluons, not leptons or the carrier bosons of the electro-weak interactions (the photon, the W+ boson, the W- boson and the Z boson).

Thus, sterile neutrinos interact only with gravity and even then, they are lighter than all other particles that have mass.

In the sterile neutrino model used by the neutrino researchers I discuss today, normal neutrinos can oscillate into sterile neutrinos (and thus become invisible to devices designed to observe normal neutrinos through weak force interactions), presumably via the weak nuclear force.

What new experimental data about neutrinos was announced today?

Reanalysis of data from experiments studying neutrinos generated in beta decay at nuclear fission reactors show that previous studies showing experiment to match theory was wrong. Instead, 3% fewer neutrinos were detected than theory predicted. So, alternative theories that could explain this data have been considered. What is the bottom line? (Punctuation and grammar errors by the non-native English speaker author of the quoted post corrected without notation in the block quote).

For the first time, a neutrino model that includes sterile neutrinos provides a better fit to the global world data on neutrino oscillations than the conventional three active neutrino model. . . . Furthermore, the model with two sterile neutrinos is definitely better than the model with just one. More steriles or other exotic ingredients, like non-standard neutrino interactions or CPT violation, don't seem to be necessary. . . . Piece by piece, the evidence in favor of sterile neutrinos are not that great (they are considered anomalies rather than evidences), but the overall picture now favors sterile neutrinos.

How heavy are the predicted sterile neutrinos?

At a 95% confidence level, the combined experimental evidence best fits sterile neutrinos with the sum of their masses being less than 0.70 eV. Thus, they would be lighter than any non-neutrino fermion, but much heavier than ordinary neutrinos.

Early in the conference, the best available data put the rest mass of tau neutrinos is on the order of 0.04 eV and the rest mass of ordinary neutrinos is on the order of 0.0009 eV (the experimental data only directly measured the mass differences between neutrino types, rather than the absolute values, so these are only order of magnitude approximations).

Upper limits on these rest masses in absolute terms could be significantly higher if they have similar masses, perhaps as great as 0.28 eV for ordinary neutrinos based on galactic level measurements reported in the summer of 2010.

How many kinds of sterile neutrinos have been observed?

At a 95% confidence level, the combined experimental evidence best fits 1.62 (0.7 to 2.54) kinds of sterile neutrinos, in addition to the three ordinary ones and their antiparticles.

What could that raw data concerning the best fit number of sterile neutrinos mean?

Of course, we actually expect the number of kinds of sterile neutrinos to be a whole number like 0, 1, 2, 3 or some larger number, rather than a decimal, so reporting the data in decimal form is a bit odd, despite being standard practice for particle searches in physics. I presume that particle physicists simply aren't very comfortable with statistical distributions designed to force probabilities into discrete whole number bins like the Poisson distribution does, relative to the tried and true normal distributions that they are more familiar with using and understand better, even when the theoretical motivation for using a discrete set of data bins is very strong. After all, physicists are already overwhelmed with mathematics pre-requisites and have little time for "extras."

The data fit a model with two sterile neutrinos better than any other number, although it is only slightly favored relative to a one sterile neutrino model. A two sterile neutrino result is about 0.83 sigma from the mean, while a one sterile neutrino result is about 1.34 sigma from the mean.

This is surprising.

The most natural expectation would be that there would be three kinds of sterile neutrinos, exactly filling the gap in the Standard Model fermion table, just as there are exactly three generations of every other known kind of fermion. The next most common theoretical expectation had been that there would be just one kind of sterile neutrino analogous to, but not quite the same as a fourth generation neutrino (a true fourth generation neutrino would not be sterile).

The hypothesis that there are sterile neutrinos, relative to the null hypothesis that there are no sterile neutrinos, is supported by the data at roughly a 3.5 sigma level - not quite the 5 sigma that physicists use as a rule of thumb to say that they are really sure that they have discovered new physics, but well about the 2 sigma level that physicists routinely ignore as fluke results unless they have very strong theoretical motivations to suspect otherwise. A hypothesis that there are three sterile neutrinos is disfavored by this data at roughly a 3.0 sigma level - more likely than no neutrinos, but only barely.

However, this probability analysis is really skewed a little against a finding of three sterile neutrinos and towards finding zero sterile neutrinos, for at least two reasons.

First, because conservation of mass-energy suppressed oscillation into heavier neutrinos if the reaction that is generating them isn't energetic enough, but no similar constraint suppresses data in favor of a zero sterile neutrino hypothesis.

Second, since the probability of third generation fermion production is always lower than the probability of first and second generation fermion production, production of higher generation fermions is flukier than production of lower generation fermions. In other words, the law of averages keeps the expected result proportionately closer to the average result for more common events than it does for less common events. So, it is harder to get statistically significant numbers of events to confirm the existence of a third generation of any kind of fermion than it is to confirm the existence of the first two generations of those fermions. Put another way, this report's use of the same upside and downside variation from the mean to establish a confidence interval, as the presentation at the Neutel conference did, is actually a sloppy way to state the statistical confidence interval that isn't entirely accurate. Done more rigorously, the low end confidence interval is almost certainly smaller than the high end confidence interval.

We know from historical experience that it is much easier to detect that first two generations of any given kind of fermion experimentally than it is to find experimental evidence for a third generation of the same fermion. Indeed, we have just recently established with confidence experimentally that there really is indeed a third generation of neutrino at all, in 2000, despite the fact that it has been assumed theoretically to exist ever since the top quark, bottom quark (1977) and tau (1974) were discovered. Even in the case of regular neutrinos, where we are pretty confident that there are three different kinds of them, some experimental papers at this year's Neutel conference fit their data to a two neutrino oscillation model because the math is easier and it doesn't change the end result much.

To make a long story short, while the best fit to this round of data in the first paper that really strongly shows the existence of sterile neutrinos at all shows that two sterile neutrinos are most likely, on theoretical grounds and given the history of particle physics, there is good reason to believe that further analysis and experiments will show either that (1) there are no sterile neutrinos and that there was some flaw in the reactor data analysis that now undermines this hypothesis, or (2) there are three sterile neutrinos. A single sterile neutrino is probably the third most likely possibility, on theoretical grounds and because the data only weakly prefer a two sterile neutrino model over a one sterile neutrino model. Thus, it is not unlikely that the initial finding that there are probably two sterile neutrinos will not survive the test of time.

Further, Less Neutral, Analysis

Forced to bet on the matter, I would bet that there are three sterile neutrinos, in electron, muon and tau generations, with a similar mass hierarchy but heavier than ordinary neutrinos, that differ from ordinary neutrinos and their anti-particles only in mass.

This would be a departure from the rest of the Standard Model, in which left handed, right handed, left handed state antiparticles, and right handed state antiparticles all have precisely the same masses. But, since neutrinos lack charge, which is present in quarks and electrons, if sterile neutrinos and ordinary neutrinos had the same mass, it would otherwise be impossible to distinguish a left hand state anti-sterile neutrino and a left hand state ordinary neutrino. Similarly, if neutrinos and anti-neutrinos had the same mass, it would otherwise be impossible to distinguish a right hand state ordinary anti-neutrino from a right hand sterile neutrino.

The estimated mass of these sterile neutrinos is a departure from the expectation of one of the most popular theories to explain mass generation in neutrinos, call the see-saw mechanism for generating Majorana mass:

The minimal scenario is the type I See-Saw in which three RH neutrinos are responsible for the smallness of the light neutrino masses. In the standard type I See-Saw, the mass of these RH neutrinos should be very large, more than 10^9 GeV.

Thus, if these sterile neutrinos are indeed the missing Standard Model right handed neutrinos, both particles would probably have Dirac mass (like all other fermions) rather than Majorana mass and they would not be their own antiparticles, even though we have no widely accepted reason to explain why they are so much lighter than other fermions.

A general analysis of neutrino mass issues from 2002, can be found here.

While the neutrino was proposed theoretically in 1930, and discovered experimentally in 1956, neutrino mass wasn't definitely established by experiment until 1998 (prior to that point in time the Standard Model assumed that neutrinos had no mass).

Also, if electro-weak interactions have something to do with mass generation in other leptons, it wouldn't be surprising for sterile neutrinos, which don't experience those interactions, to have a different mass hierarchy. We don't have any generally accepted and experimentally supported theories for how fermions get the particular masses that they do in the Standard Model anyway. Yes, it happens via a Higgs field interaction, but that doesn't tell us, for example, why a top quark has precisely the rest mass that it does relative to an electron. In other words, it doesn't tell us why particular particles interact with a scalar Higgs field at the strength that they do.

Furthermore, supposing that there are sterile neutrinos in a place where there is a possible hole in the fermion table in the Standard Model, is on the whole, far less dramatic a conclusion than a proposal that involves a new kind of fermion that doesn't have a place on the Standard Model fermion chart at all, or CPT symmetry violation. Indeed, we have not only a Standard Model fermion table hole, we also have compelling data from astronomy to suggest that dark matter exists, and sterile neutrinos can fill part of that whole.

Another possibility is that we are seeing signatures of fourth and fifth generation ordinary neutrinos. The data come from missing neutrinos in detectors, rather than direct observation. So, it is conceivable that the detectors simply aren't tuned property to see the signal that fourth and fifth generation ordinary neutrinos are generating. This interpretation would be even more profound.

Sterile Neutrinos As A Dark Matter Candidate

Indeed, if weak nuclear force decay can generate sterile neutrinos, which don't interact except through gravity, and there is no corresponding force to turn sterile neutrinos into non-sterile matter, we have a natural candidate to produce a steadily increasing amount of dark matter in the universe, and a natural reason for that dark matter, which is produced in nuclear reactions such as those taking place in stars, to have the kind of strictly defined distribution relative to the luminous matter in a galaxy, since the luminous matter is made up of stars whose nuclear reactions are an important source of that dark matter.

It should be possible with back of napkin calculations based on the empirically observed result that sterile neutrino production appears to account for a 3% reduction from the expected value of neutrino production in nuclear reactors, the age of the universe, and pre-existing baryogenesis and leptogenesis models in cosmology, to make a pretty good estimate of the amount of dark matter in the universe today that can be expected to have arisen from nuclear reactions in that time period, and also to estimate the amount of leptogensis in the very early moments after the Big Bang that created sterile neutrinos. This, in turn, should make it possible to infer what percentage of the dark matter in the universe can be attributed to sterile neutrinos.

Once mainstream dark matter proportion estimates are adjusted to reflect sterile neutrinos and previous great underestimates of the amount of ordinary matter in elliptical galaxies (that bring the ratio of ordinary matter to dark matter to something closer to 50-50) the target amount of remaining missing mass will be easier to determine.

Previous speculative research has largely downplayed sterile neutrinos as plausible dark matter candidate, but that was before we had a sufficiently experiementally well defined particle that acts like dark matter to work with when making that analysis. Of course, the existence of sterile neutrino dark matter doesn't imply that there can't be other kinds of dark matter in existence as well. Indeed, I strongly suspect that the back of napkin calculations that I suggest above would not produce enough sterile neutrinos to enitrely fill the dark matter gap by themselves.

Footnote on flavor-changing neutral currents

As I noted above, the weak nuclear force acts only on left handed particles and their right handed anti-particles. The strong nuclear force, the electro-magnetic force and gravity, in contrast, do not change the flavor (aka generation) of a fermion. Bosons don't appear to have different flavors. Photons of a particular frequency/wave length can be more or less energetic in multiple of Plank's constant, but we don't consider these different energy states to be different flavors of a photon.

So far as I know, left handed and right handed quarks, electrons, muons and taus are equally common (although neutrinos are all lefted handed), although I don't know this with any great certainty.

Also, we know that second and third generation quarks and electrons decay into lighter particles, even if they are right handed particles. There is no such thing as a stable, right handed top quark, charm quark, bottom quark, strange quark, tau, or muon. So far as I know, left handed and right handed second and third generation quarks and electrons decay into lighter particles at precisely the same rate.

This is an apparent contradiction. If a right handed top quark doesn't interact via the weak nuclear force, how does it change flavors?

I believe, but I am not really expert enough to know, that these kinds of events are called Flavor changing neutral currents. But, clearly, I need a better understanding of the weak nuclear nuclear force in relation to parity and flavor changing.

Other News

The probability of the rate of electron neutrinos directly oscillating to tau neutrinos, which is determined by sin squared theta 13, is in the vincinity of 0.1 to 0.3.

MINOS is showing apparent differences between the mass of neutrinos and anti-neutrinos.

A new study at Fermilab has found a two standard deviation difference between the mass of the top quark and its anti-quark. CPT symmetry would expect the masses of the top quark and the anti-top quark to be identical.

Metro State To Become Denver State University

Whatever. The Denver Urbanism blog has the story.

From the Management

If your user name has "Viagra" in it you are not permitted to post comments at this blog. You should also probably be exiled to Siberia and denied an Internet connection and telephone connection for the rest of your life and have "spammer" spray painted on your house and your car in seventeen languages.

Gun Violence Victimization Predictable

Risk of gunshot injuries in urban areas is more greatly concentrated than previously thought. While individual and neighborhood level risk factors contribute to the aggregate rates of violence, this study suggests that most of the actual risk of gun violence is concentrated in a small social network of identifiable individuals.

From here.

Federal Criminal Prosecutions Waste Money

How are we using federal criminal justice resources?

Filings in the regional courts of appeals dropped 3 percent to 55,992 in FY 2010, due to a 7 percent drop in criminal appeals to 12,797 and a 9 percent drop in administrative agency appeals to 7,813.... Prisoner petitions fell 3 percent to 15,789. Appeals involving pro se litigants declined 2 percent to 27,209....

Filings of criminal cases (including transfers) increased 2 percent to 78,428. The number of criminal defendants (including transfers) also rose 2 percent to 100,366, surpassing the previous record of 97,982 set in 2009. Proceedings were concluded against 98,311 defendants, 91 percent of whom were convicted, with 89 percent pleading guilty.

Immigration cases, which climbed 9 percent to 28,046, constituted 36 percent of all criminal cases filed, compared to 34 percent in 2009. The majority of immigration filings involved improper reentry of aliens, and 73 percent of all immigration cases were filed in the District of Arizona, the Southern District of California, the District of New Mexico, and the Southern and Western Districts of Texas.

Filings addressing fraud grew 12 percent to 9,371 for cases, and rose 13 percent to 12,639 for defendants in these cases.

Twenty percent of all criminal cases were drug offenses, compared to 22 percent in 2009. Cases involving drug offenses decreased 5 percent to 15,785, and defendants in those cases declined 2 percent to 29,410. Marijuana cases dropped 10 percent overall, but filings related to possession of marijuana increased, with cases climbing 26 percent to 1,248 and defendants rising 28 percent to 1,305. Drug cases involving non-marijuana offenses declined 3 percent to 10,817, and defendants in those cases fell 2 percent to 21,918.

Firearms and explosives cases, which account for 9 percent of total criminal case filings, declined 7 percent to 7,248. Defendants in those cases dropped 6 percent to 8,376.

Prosecuting and incarcerating someone whose only crime is being a repeat illegal immigrant at $30,000 per person per year, rather than simply deporting them at a cost of a few hundred bucks, or less, makes no sense. Neither does devoting federal criminal justice resources to marijuana possession cases. Drug possession generally is an issue that state courts are well equipped to handle. Nor does devoting substantial federal resources to very long prison terms for dirty old men with no prior criminal records who download child porn for free off the Internet (as the U.S. government does, despite its lack of mention in the statistics above), but have never actually harmed a child.

Notably, when gun toting, drug using judges are convicted of federal crimes, leniency is the rule.

Obama Copyright Proposals Counterproductive

When it comes to intellectual property, the Obama Administration has been captured by special interests and just doesn't get it. An administration white paper on the issue points entirely in the wrong direction.

Simply put, our nation's problem is not that punishments for non-violent offenders violating intellectual property laws are not harsh enough (if prison sentence of up to fifteen years won't encourage someone not to steal intellectual property, a twenty year prison sentence won't either, but the longer sentences will cost taxpayers a great deal of money), nor is our nation's problem the fact that we aren't punishing people who play broadcast radio for their customers.

Apparently the folks in copyright enforcement in the United States government don't realize that broadcast radio stations make their money from selling advertising based on their listenership, including non-paying customers of businesses, not by trying to make broadcast radio listeners pay royalties. Recording companies are getting paid for the people in bars and hair salons and in buses who are listening to their music on the radio, indirectly, through the impact that listenership has on advertising rates. In pay radio cases (like satellite radio), contract law provides a better solution the statutory copyright law enforcement.

When I ask myself, "what is wrong with public policy related to intellectual property in the United States?" I do not answer, "recording studios aren't making enough money from radio broadcasts," or "country music stars aren't making enough money." In my admittedly limited experience, it is the people who don't have recording contracts and aren't getting air play on the radio in the music business who are undercompensated, not the ones whose songs are played a dozen times a day on every radio station in their format.

Likewise, felony prison sentences rather than misdemeanor jail sentences for people who stream video illegally should not be a national priority, and devoting more federal resources to enforcing the legal rights of movie studios and recording companies that have ample resources to enforce their rights with private litigation does not make sense at a time when we are cutting the federal budget and reducing the size of the federal workforce. Allowing government officials to impose copyright law penalties without judicial involvement is also bad policy.

This plan was put together by:

[T]he U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) [Victoria Espinel] . . . in coordination with many Federal agencies, including the Departments of Commerce, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security (DHS), Justice (DOJ), and State, and the U.S. Trade Representative.

Simply put, the President should immediately fire everyone involved in preparing the plan who is a political appointee, and should reassign to new duties all of the senior civil servants involved in crafting it. The lot of them are pushing to shift our nation's laws in the wrong direction.

Excessive intellectual property protection is damaging our economy, and intellectual property penalties are already excessive. Broadening the scope of copyright and making punishments more harsh will not help our economy or create jobs.

Modern Continental Drift Rates

For future reference, continental drift in active faults like East Africa's Rift Valley or North America's Pacific Coast is on the order of ten to thirty feet per century; one hundred to three hundred feet per thousand years; about three hundred meters to a kilometer per per ten thousand years; and two to six miles overall since modern humans left Africa. In that time frame, the direction of fault movement has been essentially unchanged. (Links misplaced before I made this post.) The human impact of volcanos and earthquakes is generallly going to be more significant impacts of geological activity than continental drift in this time frame.

This isn't so small that it is entirely irrelevant in the time frame of hominin evolution, but is largely overshadowed by more dramatic changes in this time frame in sea levels and global climate.

The Japanese Business Model For Teacher Pay

There are lots of differences between the prevailing American model and the Japanese model for K-12 education. One of those differences is that Japanese schools often have class sizes that many U.S. schools would consider unacceptably large, but use these larger class sizes to make it feasible to pay teachers higher salaries and generally, to build up the prestige of teaching as a profession. Also, many tasks that would be done by paid staff in American schools, like a significant share of the janitorial work and photocopying, is done by students in Japan, again, freeing up resources for higher teacher salaries. American law professors routinely teach classes of ninety students. Almost no high school teachers in the United States do that, although such large class sizes are unheard of in Japan.

Nicholas Kristoff argues, reasonably, that teachers are underpaid:

Until a few decades ago, employment discrimination perversely strengthened our teaching force. Brilliant women became elementary school teachers, because better jobs weren’t open to them. It was profoundly unfair, but the discrimination did benefit America’s children.

These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers — and 47 percent of America’s kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores). The figure is from a study by McKinsey & Company, “Closing the Talent Gap.”

Changes in relative pay have reinforced the problem. In 1970, in New York City, a newly minted teacher at a public school earned about $2,000 less in salary than a starting lawyer at a prominent law firm. These days the lawyer takes home, including bonus, $115,000 more than the teacher, the McKinsey study found.

He also cites some studies that argue that good teachers produce good student results, although the general trend is that instructional inputs are related only dimly as second or third order effects to student academic performance and life success.

But, part of the reason that demonstrated results from instructional inputs are so equivocal, is because almost everybody is using the same basic model: 180 days a year of school for days of less than eight hours, modest amounts of homework, teachers mostly drawn from conventional teacher certification programs in public schools with reasonably similar class sizes, and low career long pay prospects for someone with a college degree. Private religious schools don't pay teachers very well either. There are differences, but those differences are mostly modest.

A few elite secular private schools pay teachers very well, but given the elite character of the incoming student body which is overwhelmingly either upper middle class, rich, or extremely academically talented, it is hard to tell if good teachers or good students are driving the results. Also, these schools typically have not only highly paid teachers but very modest class sizes, which make their model unattainable without immensely larger K-12 budgets.

The public will simply does not exist to pay for a system of public schools where the average student-teacher ratio is 8:1 and the average teacher makes $90,000 a year. The more typical story is like this one from today:

The fifth-largest school district in Colorado this afternoon expects to announce $30 million in cuts — including jobs and student activities, as well as increased class sizes — to meet its 2011-12 budget.

Today at 3:30 p.m., Adams 12 Five Star Superintendent Chris Gdowski will announce the proposed cuts, including an anticipated 185 job cuts. Last year, the district cut 188 full-time positions. Over the past five years, the district has cut $38 million from its budget.

For the 2010-11 school year, the operating budget was $268.8 million, about 88 percent of which was devoted to employee salaries and benefits.

Even if we did, we wouldn't get the results you see at Groton in classes full of kids who are two grade levels behind by the third grade, may not get a square meal on the weekends, have an older sibling in a gang, live in a single parent home with a parent who dropped out of high school, and are intermittently homeless. Government stinginess towards children in the United States is not limited to education spending.

On the other hand, the Detroit model: dramatically increasing class sizes while paying their teachers 30% below the going rate for teachers in the state, despite the fact that they are teaching students with the greatest educational needs, and simultaneously increasing commuting time for students on their way to and from school, is pretty surely not a good way to improve educational quality either. To some extent, you get what you pay for.

Nobody has ever tried in recent history for a sustained period to set up a K-12 education system in which entry level teachers teaching ordinary average neighborhood kids are paid as much as entry large law firm lawyers in the same area, and can expect to receive that kind of compensation for their entire careers, but teach very large classes by American standards with very little staff assistance.

Of course, it isn't at all easy to break out the impacts of particular parts of the Japanese or American models. The Japanese spend more days in school. A larger share of American kids are college bound than in Japan. Cram school for college entrance exams to supplement ordinary high school education are the norm. Japanese educators are less reluctant to use drill and kill instruction methods, and more liberal in putting social pressure on kids to perform though public disclosure of academic performance. Extra-curricular activity participation is more of an expectation in Japan. Many American kids have more educational choices that comparable Japanese kids. American higher education, particularly at the graduate level, has a better reputation for rigor than Japanese higher education. American teachers have a much larger proportion of very low income students and far more students who are non-native speakers of the language of instruction. Japan starts foreign language instruction sooner and has very little sex education.

Also, somewhat surprisingly, given the tendency of K-12 education systems to pay teachers of older students more than teachers of younger students, the evidence on educational performance and education seems to indicate that the importance of educational quality is greatest when kids are youngest and lower when kids are older. Kids who need remedial work upon entering college were mostly behind already by the time they were in the 6th grade.

If we are to set compensation based on potential lifetime educational performance impact (and no school system in the world does this, to the best of my knowledge, although many do mandate smaller class sizes for younger students), we should be paying the highest salaries to pre-school and kindergarten teachers, the next highest salaries to elementary school teachers, the next highest salaries to middle school teachers, and the lowest salaries to high school teachers. Instead, the pay of teachers seems more closely related to the proportion of the teachers who are men, which is greatest for the older ages. As usual in the American labor market, the supply of similarly skilled labor is more important in setting compensation levels than the value of what workers produce.

But, moving in the direction of the Japanese business model for teacher pay, and paying early education teachers much more than we do, is certainly something worth considering.