Life Imitates Art, Titanic Edition

Morgan Robertson's novella titled . . . "Futility, or The Wreck of the Titan" recounts many of the elements that makes Titanic a truly epic story -- the iceberg, the lack of lifeboats, the number that perished. But the most spectacular detail of Robertson's retelling of the Titanic story is that it was written in 1898, a full fourteen years before the actual event!

More details: here.

Was it merely the kind of informed predictions you read at this blog on a regular basis?

Jules Verne, writing at about the same time as Robertson, had a number of stories that turned out to be similarly predictive. A good modern example of the same kind of fictional prediction is a book by Tom Clancy that set forth events quite similar to the 9-11 attacks, with a commercial jet used as a weapon to inflict mass death by flying into a national landmark.

Or was it genuine supernatural prescience?

Denver, via Molly Brown, our own plucky home town Titanic survivor, has always felt a close tie to list historical event, and the link above to the Denver Public Library website is part of a major effort in town to remember the 100th anniversary of that most famous of 20th century shipwrecks this month.

The Two Most Dangerous Six Months Of Your Life

There are two six month periods in your life where your risk of death are extremely high. Greater than the risk of death of an active duty Army soldier or Marine during a war. At least comparable to the risk associated with being someone who rides a motorcycle for long distances on a daily basis. On a par with driving a just above the legal limit for drunk driving every weekend. Comparable on a per day basis to playing golf on hilly treeless golf courses during lightning storms. More dangerous than being a beat cop in a high crime neighborhood, or working on a fire crew against a wildfire.

If you are reading this post, you survived on of them, the first six months of your life, when there are a large number of deaths in connection with child birth, from congenital abnormalities, and from the fragilities of infancy that open the door to causes of death like sudden infant death syndrome. Parents with newborns are also the least expert in caring for them and are prone to engaging in child abuse or child neglect flowing from frustration with not knowing how to handle a newborn, hence you see things like instances of shaken baby syndrome when a new parent doesn't stop crying and a new parent doesn't emotionally as well as intellectually know better, or instances of an infant being left alone in a situation where the infant shouldn't be left alone because the new parent hasn't fully assimilated the idea that infants require almost constant attention.

The other most dangerous six months of your life is the six month period after your spouse dies. Surviving spouses have a greatly elevated risk of death. Part of this is random chance. New widows and widowers are much older than the general population and being old increases your risk of death. But there is more to it.

The death of a spouse is the most stressful event, by a huge margin, on scale established to measure the statistical impact of stressful events on the odds that you will get sick. The loss of a spouse is immune system suppressing.

The grief associated with the death of a spouse so routinely causes systems that would otherwise be consider clinical depression calling for professional treatment that a proposal to remove a "grief exception" from the diagnostic criteria for clinical depression is a controversial one. Those arguing for the elimination argue that the symptoms are the same and the evidence suggests that grief related unipolar depression responds to depression treatments in pretty much the same way that other unipolar depression episodes do. Those arguing against this historical exception (which was not made based on empirical studies), argue that the DSM-5 is trying to capture mental health conditions that are pathological and that such a natural and common place human response to a death is not a pathology.

There are a lot of ways that the depression of grief can cause death that aren't listed as suicide (or "heart break") on a death certificate but can being the moral equivalent of the same thing. Someone can "accidentally" take too much of a prescribed, or non-prescribed prescription drug. Someone can be indifferent to and careless to basic safe care measures from taking life preserving drugs to driving carefully to evaluating risks of accidents in daily life appropriately. One can abandon the attitude of a commitment to survive that seems to be part of the mind-body system that keeps the body focused on actively making immune and physiological efforts to fight off pathogens and maintain the functioning of moving parts like hearts and lungs necessary for the sustainance of life.

The United Kingdom and a lot of other places more enlightened than the United States recognize the vulnerability of newborn infants and provide for all new mothers and their infants to automatically receive nurse visits during that time period, something that has been shown empirically to significantly mitigate the risk of infant mortality, neglect and abuse in this special time which is much more dangerous than most people realize. If U.S. jurisdictions did the same, it would be a major step forward in public health in the United States.

It would also make a great deal of sense for there to be automatic and pro-active supportive intervention for people experiencing extreme grief events like the loss of a spouse or the loss of a child. The ordinary assumption that people will carry on as usually without the help of others at these times the way adults in ordinary circumstances do is not well founded in these situations.

Historically, this has been done through a variety of community norms and traditions. Families gather together and spend additional time together and often rearrange their lives to facilitate providing extra support to someone who has suffered a great loss. Friends and neighbors bring food without being asked. Anyone in the community who knows expresses sympathy and gives the grieving person slack. Employers make allowances and permit time off. Airlines cut people breaks on airfares. When someone dies abroad, the State Department routinely deploys a junior diplomat to assist the bereaved. Churches get whole communities of people who knew the deceased and the survivors together for memorial services and wakes and viewing and receptions to help them support each other. Even financial institutions and the legal system put in place rituals and routines in which professionals who deal with these situations routinely and are trained in how to do so ethically are on hand to facilitate the process of dealing with a death.

But, tradition and community norms are in flux, extended family ties have grown weaker while families have grown smaller, and even nuclear families are more geographically far flung in many instances. Fewer people are actively involved in churches or any form of civic involvement that provides regular, in person time with other people. So, maybe we must devise a better formal safety net as the informal one has frayed.

Progress Made In ADHD Subtyping

It has long been known that not all ADHD cases exhibit the same symptoms. Most schemes look at either three types, predominantly hyperactive, combined type and predominantly inattentive, or two types that blur predominantly hyperactive and combined types together. A new effort looked at more differentiation between a group of ADHD subjects and a control group and came up with a more nuanced evaluation. Here's the abstract (there is also supplemental data):

Research and clinical investigations in psychiatry largely rely on the de facto assumption that the diagnostic categories identified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) represent homogeneous syndromes. However, the mechanistic heterogeneity that potentially underlies the existing classification scheme might limit discovery of etiology for most developmental psychiatric disorders. Another, perhaps less palpable, reality may also be interfering with progress—heterogeneity in typically developing populations. In this report we attempt to clarify neuropsychological heterogeneity in a large dataset of typically developing youth and youth with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), using graph theory and community detection. We sought to determine whether data-driven neuropsychological subtypes could be discerned in children with and without the disorder. Because individual classification is the sine qua non for eventual clinical translation, we also apply support vector machine-based multivariate pattern analysis to identify how well ADHD status in individual children can be identified as defined by the community detection delineated subtypes. The analysis yielded several unique, but similar subtypes across both populations. Just as importantly, comparing typically developing children with ADHD children within each of these distinct subgroups increased diagnostic accuracy. Two important principles were identified that have the potential to advance our understanding of typical development and developmental neuropsychiatric disorders. The first tenet suggests that typically developing children can be classified into distinct neuropsychological subgroups with high precision. The second tenet proposes that some of the heterogeneity in individuals with ADHD might be “nested” in this normal variation.

The paper is: D. A. Fair, D. Bathula, M. A. Nikolas, J. T. Nigg. "Distinct neuropsychological subgroups in typically developing youth inform heterogeneity in children with ADHD." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1115365109

The study broke the control group into four different psychological clusters based on the outcome of half a dozen psychological tests ("The testing focused on memory, inhibition, attention, comprehension, and several other categories."), and then broke the ADHD subjects into four analogous clusters to those in the control group although two of the four clusters in the ADHD subjects had two subclusters each. The ADHD diagnosis that this cluster system was compared to was a two subtype (predominantly inattentive and combined type), rather than a three subtype system.

The glorified press release story at Science Daily makes the rather unappetizing and largely uninformative comparison of ADHD subtypes and cancer subtypes, but also explains a bit more how the study was conducted.

Beyond Christianity In Denver-Boulder-Co. Springs

According to a poll commissioned by 5280 magazine for its April 2012 issue, of 408 people in the Denver-Boulder-Colorado Springs "triangle" suggests that a huge proportion (compared to other historical surveys) are not Christian.

* 60% are Christian (excluding Mormon, Religious Science and Seventh Day Adventist)
* Less than 1% of Mormon
* Less than 1% of Muslim
* Less than 1% of Hindu
* 4% are Jewish
* 2% are Buddhist
* 13% are agnostic
* 7% are atheist
* 12% are "Other" (Tao'ism, Bahai, Living Light, Metaphysical, Shinto, Unitarian, Native American/earth religions, pagan, Religious Science, Scientology, Seventh-Day Adventist, Shamanism, Wiccan, yogic philosophy).

My basic reaction to this is "I wish." There is no way on this earth that 36%-40% of people in this region do not identify as Christian. Boulder, maybe, but not Boulder-Denver-Colorado Springs. I've seen half a dozen other sets of statistics on essentially the same issues and this is not their conclusion. The statistics might be a representative sample of 5280 readers, but not of adults in this region.

Also, self-described atheists and agnostics almost never make up that share of the the non-Christian population. In almost every other survey the largest category of non-Christians is "not religious" and does not attend church services but is "spiritual", often marginally theistic in a generalized way, and rarely self-identified as atheist or agnostic, some of which may be picked up in "other" but which is rarely as organized as the description of "other" implies.

Mormons (at least two denominations are active in Denver) and Seventh-Day Adventists (whose regional headquarters is in Denver across the street from the Adventist Hospital), both of whom absolutely self-identify as Christians, also probably don't like being treated separately from other Christians.

The 5280 story is an entertaining read with interesting insights, but it would be a mistake to afford much credibility at all to its statistics. The sample, however it was drawn, is clearly not randomly drawn or representative.

Another World Of The Future Wish List

It's that one day of the year where statements of fact are not reliable, so another list of discoveries and advances that I'd like to see, whether or not they are likely or viable, seemed to be in order:

* Common source purging news Internet searches. If you've ever done a Google search of a news story, you quickly discover that there are vast numbers of hits that do essentially nothing but restate a single news story that is the common source of vast numbers of hits with longer or shorter quotations from it. In a better world, all of that would be swiftly purged so that out of all those hits, only the common source would come up, and independent sources about the same story which offer additional information would all appear at the top of the results next to each other in reverse chronological order. It is possible to do this by hand, and now and again I do it, but a lot of its seems succeptible to automation.

* Free online white pages type information. One area where the Internet is vastly worse than the pre-Internet era is in finding the telephone number and address of someone whose name and general place of residence you know. The white pages of the telephone directory used to do this very effectively for free. Now, any Internet search seems to turn up only a mountain of fee for service companies selling information that isn't even protected by copyright. Would it be so impossible to type in a name and a city and to expect a white pages directory listing to show up for free?

* Widespread predictive genotyping Imagine if all genotype profiles with interesting known or suspected phenotypic consequences were easily and cheaply available and if those profiles included major personality and mental health related genes, genes related to physical development and appearance, and genes related medical health. Wouldn't it be nice to know yourself better?

* "Scientific education" For all of the research that has been done in educational psychology and instructional methods, you'd think that it would have had some impact on actual pedagogy. Yet, the vast numbers of publications in the area, thousand of PhDs in pertinent fields, and substantial efforts devoted to research don't seem to have had much practical impact. Even in fields where the bottom line conclusions seem clear (e.g. foreign language instruction is more effective in immersion like experience for K-12 aged people than it is in classroom type instruction for college students or worse yet, graduate students), nobody seems to be doing anything about it. Wouldn't it be amazing if some strongly empirically supported conclusions could be collected, used to generate a new consensus on how we educate people, and synthesized into a new standard that was widely adopted and actually improve the quality of education for most people?

* Politically punishing candiates for idiotic ideas and ideas contrary to the rule of law. Wouldn't it be great if the major political parties each developed effective means to politically punish candidates who support ideas that are wildly off base? Imagine a world where it would be political suicide to suggest that judges should be arrested for writing legal opinions that the candidate disagreed with, or suggesting that a U.S. state's secession from the United States was a good idea. Imagine a world where people who suggested that lowering taxes would increase long term tax collections would receive the ridicule they deserved. Imagine a world where people who simultaneously proposed more spending, lower taxes and reducing the deficit would be told to take remedial math classes instead of elevated to positions of power. Imagine a world where suggesting that Iraq's regime was behind 9-11, or that President Obama was not a U.S. citizen or was a Muslim would be a sure ticket to a dead end political career. Imagine a world where people cared more about offending the 95% of the population that uses birth control and not the 5% of the population that is anti-birth control. Imagine a world where it wasn't so hard to acknowledge that equal quantities of crack cocaine and powder cocaine are equivalent drugs. Imagine a world where calls to violence directed a political opponents undermined a candidate's political support. Imagine a world where the Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks of the world were irrelevant crackpots who couldn't get anyone to pay to listen to them rather than massively influential political forces.

Yes, to a great extent, we elect politicians who make stupid proposals because "we the people" are stupid. But, is it so impossible to design a political system that creates incentives for politicians not to adhere to proveably stupid ideas? Is it impossible to imagine a more reality based, rule of law rooted, humane political discourse emerging?

I'm not asking for differences in political ideology to disappear. I'm not asking for a world where people are always nice to each other (although some veneer of civility would be pleasant) and certainly not for an end to negative advertising or legal prohibitions on certain points of view that send people to jail. I'm just asking for the political system itself to be better at imposing political consequences for certain kinds of rhetoric in a way that would reshape our political culture, and a world where the prejudices and ignorance of the least of us would not be the driving force behind our leaders.

I'm honestly quite unsure what precisely would have to change to make that kind of a regime work, but it would be worth a lot to find out.

* Creationism and similar counterfactual religious ideas cease to be respectible. I don't think we should persecute people who hold weird religious beliefs. But, I do think it would be wonderful if blatantly counterfactual religious beliefs became less popular to the point of being unrespectible in the absence of government coercion. Wouldn't it be great if young earth creationism were as rare a belief in the United States as it is in Europe or China? Wouldn't it be great if belief in an actual global Noahic flood as a historic event was largely confined to ranting loonies in communes hidden away in the wilderness and divorced from the world? I don't have any real hope even that the world become truly secular, but it would be nice if some of the more crazy ideas would collapse under their own weight among members of the general public. Wouldn't it be great if supporting creationism was political suicide for a candidate?

* Incarceration is used more selectively. Wouldn't it be great if drug users were directed to effective treatment rather than having their lives ruined? Wouldn't it be great if we could manage in a society that didn't lock people who were minor participants in a robbery or burglary where they didn't kill anyone, ask that anyone be killed or expect someone to be killed to be punished for robbery or burglary instead of murder if someone else they associated with killed someone? Wouldn't it be great if we didn't send people to prison for decades for being negligent parents who were genuinely heartbroken at their children's deaths or serious injuries and regretted their mistakes? Must we continue to sentence people who consume child pornography to longer prison sentences than people who personally molest children?

* More Entitled Orphans Most modern orphans (i.e. currently legally parentless minors) aren't people whose parents are both dead while they are still minors. They are people for whom one or both parents have had their parental rights terminated by the state for abuse or neglect. They are victims. Some are swiftly adopted, but many aren't.

Yet, the foster care system into which we dump them into typically provides them the bare minimum of fiscal resources until they are left to fend for themselves upon attaining an age of majority if they aren't adopted. Don't we owe people whom the state have declared to have been victimized and who generally inherit nothing in terms of property from their parents a better deal than what we give them now? Since we have made them orphans, shouldn't we take responsibility for leaving these kids who have been through more than the average kid better off materially than the average kid once we find replacement care for them? Shouldn't we have an even higher imperative to prevent them from being revictimized in their new situations than we did to remove them from the situation we declared to be intolerable in the first place? Along the same lines see this law review article: Barbara Bennett Woodhouse, ""State Orphans" in the United States: A Failure of Intergenerational Solidarity."

We are talking about less than 409,000 kids in foster care at any one time, of whom about 64,000 were legal orphans, in a country will more than 300 million people. Would it kill us as a society to be a little more generous towards them?

Indiana Still Backward

A geeky looking seventeen year old high school senior, Austin Carroll, in Garrett, Indiana was EXPELLED from school, (really) from making a cute little tweet joke about the many linguistic uses of the word "Fuck" on a private twitter account while not at school at 2:30 a.m. (the school claims it was tweeted from a school computer, but "The principal at Garrett High School claims their system tracks all the tweets on Twitter when a student logs in, meaning even if he did tweet it from home their system could have recognized it when he logged in again at school.", and why expel someone for that ever, in any case?).

Let me restate that again, in case you weren't paying attention. This kid was kicked out of school permanently, not for having a gun, or raping someone, or dealing drugs, or being truant, but for making a half-intellectual tweet. He has to attend an alternative school in order to earn his diploma, for the next three months.

It makes the town in the movie "Footloose" (1984) that banned dancing look permissive by comparison.

The batshit crazy principal at Garrett High School who made the call appears to be a fellow by the name of Matt Smith. It certainly isn't obvious from the student handbook at Garrett High School for the school that this kind of conduct would be a ground for expulsion (although one can twist the language to come to the conclusion that it could be possible).

What they fuck was he thinking? Seriously. Courts have frowned on this kind of disciplinary action by schools. But, more importantly, it just doesn't make any kind of sense whatsoever. This Matt Smith guy reminds me of the Jet Blue pilot who flipped out and had to be restrained from trying to re-enter the cockpit by the flight attendants and passengers earlier this week. An authority figure who just disconnected from reality all the sudden.

Notably, this same principal said upon taking the job in 2007 (his second administrative post) that:

Mr. Smith always encouraged his three priorities, which are God, family, and career.

“I chose God as my first priority because I feel it’s important to be a servant leader and help people become the best they can be,” said Smith.

To help his students become the best they can be, Mr. Smith treats those students, he comes in contact with, the way he would treat his own family.

“Instead of issuing punishment, I try to focus on the student and building a relationship with that student,” he said. Mr. Smith said he does the same with his own children.

One of Mr. Smith’s goals this year is focusing on Garrett becoming the best school that it can be.

“I am going to try to do everything I can to make this school the best school in the state,” he said. “We are labeled a small, blue collar community, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t be the best.”

Clearly, Jesus would expel a high school senior for making a tweet that used the word fuck in a non-sexual way at 2:30 a.m. from home.

District Superintendent Dennis L. Stockdale apparantly lacked the presence of mind to realize that his subordinate, Matt Smith, was an idiot, and has backed the decision. In an interview, he revealed that:

Garrett schools Superintendent Dennis Stockdale tells The Journal Gazette he cannot comment on any student's case. But he says the school has never disciplined any student for anything they posted online using their own computer outside the school's network.

Until now, that is. A couple more points from another account of the story:

Carroll’s mother, Pam Smith, told KPC News that her son will not be able to finish his senior year with classmates, can't attend the senior prom nor attend commencement practices. He will be allowed to participate in graduation, but will receive a blank diploma that night. Stockdale will give him the signed document following the ceremony. . . . Smith and her son were called to the school principal’s office March 12 regarding the incident, and administrators showed her printouts of the tweets. Smith said she has not seen complete documentation regarding IP reports and times.

Stockdale said federal law allows the school to filter content used by students.

The final decision on punishment is made by the superintendent, at the recommendation of the student’s building principal, according to Stockdale.

Parents can request a hearing with a hearing officer to appeal a decision. Stockdale said during his five years as superintendent, three or four hearings have been held.

Smith said she waived the opportunity for a hearing because she didn't fully understand the process at the time.

Carroll posted on his Facebook page Monday: “I agree with the administration that what I did was wrong and I shouldn’t have done it,” he wrote. “But the punishments they put me through were way too harsh. I shouldn’t have gotten in trouble at all. It wasn’t the school as a whole that did it, though. I love Garrett Schools with all my heart. The students and teachers are the best ever. They think of one another as family,” Carroll’s post said.

There is also some history to the case. But, it is harmless stuff:

Last October, Garrett High School senior Austin Carroll got into a rub with school officials after he used his school-issued computer to post an online comment via Twitter that contained obscenities.

Carroll was given an in-school suspension and, according to his mother, quickly learned that he should use the school-issued laptop strictly for homework assignments.

Meanwhile, Carroll continued to get into almost silly conflicts. He wore a kilt to school one day but was ordered by the principal to change. His mother, Pam Smith, said she argued that the kilt was no more of a distraction than girls with short skirts or low-cut tops. Later, the superintendent agreed that Carroll would be permitted to wear a kilt on Irish holidays.

This month, Carroll’s mother was called to the school to discuss her son’s attendance. Carroll, she said, suffers from migraines and other health issues and does miss school often.

At the meeting, though, the topic wasn’t attendance but Carroll’s Twitter posts. School officials, she said, had print-outs of some tweets that contained more obscenities. School officials wanted to expel Carroll.

Smith said she objected. The tweets had been sent from his home computer at 2:30 a.m. While she doesn’t approve of the obscene language and said she confronted him, what he does on his home computer in the middle of the night is his business.

But school officials said the tweets had the school’s IP address. She said she was told that if Carroll had his school laptop running, it would appear the tweet came from the school computer.

The bottom line, still remains, what kind of brainless fools are Matt Smith and Dennis Stockdale, and why can't they just learn to admit that they screwed up?

People like Matt Smith and Dennis Stockdale do not deserve to be trusted around children. They should find a new line of work, in an S&M club maybe. If I were on the school board, I'd vote to immediately fire both of them for proving that they have no sense of good judgment whatsoever, shaming their school, their town, and their state in the process. Small minded people like them in positions of power are the kind of blight that mains our country and our future. (Colorado has them too).

Is Creativity Domain Specific?

What is creativity?

There is considerable psychological consensus on how to go about measuring the psychological trait called IQ. There is less consensus about how to measure creativity, and even the lay meaning of the term often starts to break down when one tries to find the devil in the details.

There are multiple dimensions to the psychological and psychometric construction of "creativity" that are contentious.

One addressed in a recent post at Marginal Revolution, is whether creativity is a general trait, or a domain specific one. Maybe there is no relationship at all between verbal creativity and visual creativity, for example. The evidence cited in the post suggests that creativity may be domain specific (although an alternate hypothesis would be that it was a general trait that only expresses well in combination with other traits like verbal or visual aptitudes).

Another dimension, not discussed in the post, is whether creativity has more to do with the originality of one's ideas, or one's output of ideas, even if most of those ideas are mediocre, or at least, unexceptional.

The Johnson O'Connor Foundation, for example, which focuses on psychometrics, originally as a personnel management tool and more recently with an eye towards career counseling, calls its creativity test a measure of "Ideaphoria", i.e. raw volume of idea output. The operational test they used for the trait involved (maybe it still does) writing down as many responses as possible to a prompt in a set time period - the more responses one writes, the higher the score.

Other common tests, such as one often used to determine if someone is eligible to enter a gifted and talented program that is seeking to be inclusive of creative talent, try to measure divergent thinking rather than idea volume, and one of the most common ones arguably blends to separate traits in an incoherent way:

Efforts to assess creativity have been plagued by supposedly domain-general divergent-thinking tests like the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, although even Torrance knew they were measuring domain-specific skills. (He create two different versions of the test, one that used verbal tasks and another that used visual tasks. He found that scores on the two tests were unrelated —they had a correlation of just .06—so they could not be measuring a single skill or set of skills. They were—and still are—measuring two entirely different things.)

Of course, when a measurement tool used widely in research and application is deeply flawed, it can put a damper on the credibility of the entire undertaking, extracting systemic degradation in the quality of the work done across the field. It is a classic case of the perils of academic group think. Criticisms of other widespread psychological constructs used to operationalize ideas like personality and deviance consistently (e.g. the Five Factor Model of personality, and the DSM-IV), have some of these concerns at their root.

The Johnson O'Connor Foundation focused on idea volume rather than divergent thinking based upon the observation that idea volume was more consistently linked to professions commonly considered to be "creative professions" than other measures of creativity based on divergent thinking.

It also observed that lack of "ideaphoria" (like most personality traits) isn't necessarily a bad thing. Creativity can be a hindrance in vocations where consistency and "steadiness" are virtues like dentistry or accounting or managing a stable organization. Interestingly, it found that sales was a field where extroversion and creativity were both critical, while vocabulary (a good proxy for education and IQ), which was important in economic success in almost every other field didn't matter much. They also identified a "group influencing" cluster of personality traits (extroversion, creativity, and high reasoning ability) associated with professions, like teaching and politics, that revolve around influencing groups of people in public forums.

Many top talents in creative fields, Shakespeare, for example, are notorious for using immense amounts of borrowed or derivative material and breathing new life into it, while stage actors and musicians, often are tasked with bringing only new nuance into a predetermined and tightly determined sequence of dialog lines or musical notes invented by someone else.

Similarly, while most people consider reasoning ability to be a good thing, low levels of the trait were valuable in fields where insisting on evidence rather than inferrence is important, and where the systems one deals with are too complex to reduce to systemic rules.

Studies that have looked at "plus factors" that influence real world success after controlling for IQ, have largely focused on variants on the Big Five traits of conscientiousness and extroversion. The former sometimes gets described as "attention to detail", being a "self-starter", "self-discipline," being hard working and diligent as opposed to lazy, and having "grit." The latter is sometimes expressed in terms of having "people skills," having "empathy" or "emotional intelligence," being "energetic", being a "team player," and being a good "networker." But, creativity hasn't received as much systematic study, in part due to a lack of a definitional consensus about how to model it psychologically.

Of course, the perennial nature v. nurture debate also comes out in the discussions of the psychology of creativity. Is creativity something you are born with, or is it something that you develop with practice and even training? A domain specific creativity construct favors thinking of creativity as a form of "expertise" not just in the sense that it is not general to all fields, but also in the sense that it is acquired rather than inborn.

For example, are great composers distinguished by their great musical talent, that opens up the door to more possibilities to them than to lesser lights, or by a genuinely greater flow or more innovative flow of ideas?

Often ideas flowing from broader experience can look creative to people who don't have the same experiences, even if the person with the ideas doesn't have more or different ideas than someone with similar experiences. Patent law, for example, talks about inventions that are not obvious to people skilled in the field where the innovation takes place, even if they would be non-obvious to a non-expert. Similarly, when a chess master makes what looks like amazingly creative moves, this often has more to do with simply having a greater repertoire of options in the master's experience to draw from than from innovation, per se. A personal trainer who memorized more different exercises may look more creative than one who does not, because the personal trainer who knows more exercises can vary a routine more easily.

Given that greatly knowledge and experience and expertise in a domain can "look creative" the question then is whether once that effect is stripped away, there is any meaningful residual of a personality trait called "creativity" that is left, and if so, what that diminished psychological construct that is still left with some kind of meaning amounts to at that point.

Orchid Children

David Dobbs has a nice article at Wired on gene x enviromental interactions in the context of the orchid and dandeloin children hypothesis.

In a nutshell, this hypothesis re-evaluates what genes like "DRD4 [a dopamine processing gene] . . . the serotonin transporter gene (also known as SERT or 5HTTLPR), the short variant of which is often blamed for depression and anxiety disorders, and a variant of MAOA, the monoamine oxidase A gene, that some studies associated with aggression or violence." The hypothesis argues that rather than being genes that per se reflect negative behaviors, they actually reflect sensitivity to parenting quality.

This revisionist hypothesis is known variously as the sensitivity hypothesis, the differential susceptibility hypothesis, or the orchid-dandelion hypothesis — a term that Thomas Boyce and Bruce Ellis coined based on the vernacular Swedish term “dandelion children,” who seem to grow up okay in almost any environment; to that they added “orchid children,” who thrive under good care but wilt under bad.

Dobbs cites a 2010 study by Jay Belsky and Kevin Beaver that looked at both parenting quality and genotype that support this interpretation. The self-control and self-regulation of children with none of the variants, and of girls, was indifferent to parenting style. But, the more variants of these genes that a boy had, the more their self-control varied with parenting style. Boys with lots of these variants and "good parents" had above average self-control, while boys with few of these variants and "bad parents" had below average self-control.

The case that these genes have some positive function is supported by indications that they have been fitness enhancing targets of natural selection in humans:

These variants, Belsky and others note, appear to have emerged and then rapidly expanded through humankind over the last 50,000 to 100,000 years. Of the leading orchid-gene variants — the short SERT, the 7R DRD4, the more plastic version of the MAOA gene — none existed in humans 80,000 years ago. But since emerging through mutation (or, possibly, through interbreeding with other hominids), they have spread into 20 to 35% of the population.

“That’s not random drift,” says evolutionary anthropologist John Hawks. “They’re being selected for.”

Of course, it doesn't necessarily follow that just because genes were fitness enhancing in the Upper Paleolithic era that they are fitness enhancing in a modern technological 21st century society.

This research also suggests candidates for genes that might influence personality more generally, and just how subtle those genetic connections might be when environment also has to be factored into consideration. Many personality models treat self-control or something like it as a simple personality trait caused by genes, but in an Orchid Children Hypothesis, an effort to link the genes that actually seem to be involved with the self-control personality type will not see a genetic association, even though there is a complex but important one that appears to be involved.

A sensitivity model also doesn't just come into play in the personality trait of self-control. For example, one of the genetic traits hypothesized to be linked to pre-disposition to alcoholism basically comes down to a physiological trait that influences how easily you get drunk. Easy drunks are not prone to be alcoholics, because they can get a buzz with just a little alcohol and the effect is so strong that they tend to avoid it. People who hold their liquor too well, in contrast, need to drink large amounts to get a buzz and are prone to get into the habit of regular heavy drinking as a result.

The practical implications of Orchid v. Dandelion genes in children as genotyping grows ever less expensive are quite straightforward for parents. Parents with dandelion kids can rest easy knowing that their own parenting mistakes won't have as much of an impact on their children's development. Parents with boys who are orchid children, in contrast, would be under immense pressure to consider what kind of parenting practices they employ. The Freudian psychology instinct to look at childhood experience and parenting as a source of adult behavior may simultaneously be wrong and right. For most people the connection may be almost entirely absent, but for a minority, the connection may be profound.

About Obamacare

There is a reason that Democrats worked long and hard for the health care reform act which has been dubbed Obamacare.

The real problem in this country is not that people might have to pay a small tax penalty (far less than the cost of buying health insurance) for failing to buy health insurance which they have the ability to buy.

The real problem in this country is that something on the order of one out of six, or one out of seven people at some point in any given year, don't have health insurance and can't afford to pay to receive the health care that they need - something that is sometimes a matter of life, death, or lifetime disability if not addressed promptly.

Obamacare addresses about 90%+ of the problem, mostly by creating strong incentives (most via the tax code) for businesses to provide private health insurance for their employees and for families who don't have employer provided private health insurance to buy individual coverage with private health insurance. This mostly takes effect in 2014.

Higher income people still Republicans

Razib refutes the latest silliness of the argument that the upper class in America is Democratic leaning in its politics:

A few months ago I listened to Frank Newport of Gallup tell Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace that upper class Americans tend to be Democrats. Ryssdal was skeptical, but Newport reiterated himself, and explained that’s just how the numbers shook out. This is important because Newport shows up every now and then to offer up numbers from Gallup to get a pulse of the American nation.

Frankly, Newport was just full of crap. . . . the more income a family has, the more likely they are to be Republican.

Those with higher levels levels of income in every educational category are more likely to vote Republican than those with lower levels of income. Those with graduate degrees are less likely to vote Republican than those with mere college degrees of the same incomes, but the same more income favors more Republican voting trend is there, and the liberal streak seen in graduate educated people v. those will less education is numerically overwhelmed, even among those with high incomes, by their college educated (or less) peers. (The is a bit of a fluke in the tiny category of high income people who are not high school graduates, but that category is still more Republican than Democratic.)

The biggest issue in the numbers of that there may be regional variation between Southern whites and other demographics. As one person making a comment to the post linked above notes: "From 1952 to 2004, the working-class white vote in the South shifted to be 20% more Republican. In the rest of the country – only 1% more Republican!"

As Karl Zimmerman notes in a comment at that post:

Such a study has already been done.“Blue” states show little correlation between income and voting patterns, while “red” states show a high correlation. Even though rich people in all states are more likely to support Republicans than poor people, a larger minority in states like Connecticut support Democrats than in states like Mississippi, which explains why higher-income states overall now tilt to the Democrats.

John Emerson also makes some good comments, including the following:

3. The culture war is between two different groups of well-off people. This squares with other findings showing that the opinions of the poorest third, who vote least and contribute the least money, are scarcely taken into account at all by elected officials.

4. Both rich Republicans and rich Democrats are more socially liberal than they are economically liberal, and poor Democrats are less culturally liberal than economically liberal. So the cultural issues work as a wedge issue.

There’s another definition of class (Ruy Texeira’s) in terms of education. From that point of view, the top tenth is strongly Democratic, but the bottom tenth (all races) is even more strongly Democratic. It’s just less-educated whites that the Democrats have problems with.

80% of the population isn’t really rich or poor, and neither has an advanced degree nor is a HS dropout. That’s where the electoral battle is.

The regional issue also helps to explain why "class warfare" is a resonnant issue in Republican strongholds, where income has a dramatic impact on voting behavior, while sounding tone deaf elsewhere, where income is less strongly tied to political preferences.

The Post-Colonial Stagnation In Africa

Over centuries, bit by bit, most of Africa was placed under colonial rule for European powers, with England, France and Portugal being among the more prominent colonial powers. By the time World War I arrived, almost all of Africa was under colonial rule, and it mostly stayed that way until well after World War II. When decolonialization arrived, it mostly happened all at once as a collective policy decision of the colonial powers fostered to a great extent as an early initiative of the United Nations. The year 1960 was the modal year, when more African countries were granted independence than any other.

The pattern of decolonialization was depressingly familiar. The country declaring independence, within boundaries set based on administrative convenience by colonial powers during the colonial era enacted a constitution establishing Western style representative democracy, a Western style court system, and a wide set of guaranteed rights. A thin local elite, educated by the colonial power during the colonial period attempted to conduct government under this system, but were inept, corrupt, and lacked a widely accepted legitimacy in the countries they were given to rule. In short order some combination of military coups (often multiple coups), abrogation of constitutions by current leaders who became dicatators and established cults of personality, or one party political systems modeled on Russia and/or China emerged. Wars, both civil and international raged intermittently in most of the continent. Mass starvation and public health disasters followed. Non-democratic government was the norm for at least a generation or two in most of the continent. Only in the last decade or two had Western style democratic self-government really taken hold. And, Africa has not been exceptional in this regard. Almost all post-colonial regimes have experienced something generally similar.

The economics of the post-colonial era in Africa have reflected this reality, with modest GDP growth at times in some countries masking a genuine deterioration in Africa's economic health.

"The paper [by John Page] shows that between 1975 and 2005 the size, diversity and sophistication of industry in Africa have all declined." . . . The growth has come largely through commodities.

Africa's industrial production, outside of South Africa, is marginal, as the paper explains:

The 1980s and 1990s were marked by a shift of manufacturing production out of Africa. Excluding South Africa, the region’s share of global manufacturing production fell from 0.4 per cent in 1980 to 0.3 per cent in 2005, and its share of world manufactured exports from 0.3 to 0.2 per cent (UNIDO 2009). . . . The share of manufacturing in GDP is about one third of the average for developing countries, and in contrast with developing countries as a whole, it is declining. Per capita manufactured output and exports are less than 20 and 10 per cent of the developing country average, respectively. . . .

Africa’s skills gap with the rest of the world is large and growing. While East Asian countries increased secondary enrolment rates by 21 percentage points and tertiary enrolment rates by 12 percentage points between 1990 and 2002, Africa raised its secondary rates by seven percentage points and its tertiary rates by only one percentage point. Real expenditure on tertiary education in Africa fell by about 28 per cent between 1990 and 2002, and expenditure per pupil declined from US $6,800 in 1989 to US $1,200 in 2002. Staff student ratios in West African universities increased from 1:16 in 1990 to 1:32 in 2007 (World Bank 2007b).

Needless to say, the baselines of secondary (i.e. high school) and (tertiary) (i.e. college) enrollment rates were never very high to start with in Africa.

The average Sub-Saharan African business suffers 91 days of electrical outages and 28 days of telephone outages per year, and it takes an average of 80 days to set up new electrical service and 97 days to set up a new landline telephone.

Atrocities from Africa often resemble situations in the Americas and elsehwere sufficiently distant in our historical memory that we like to forget that they ever existed.

For example, Mauritania, while it banned slavery a couple of decades ago, and criminalized keeping slaves in 2007, still has an ongoing institution of slavery that neither government interest nor private activism has been sufficient to halt. According to CNN, in a report earlier this month, in Mauritania, "An estimated 10% to 20% of the population lives in slavery." People still actively kill people for being witches in Nigeria. Since South Sudan gained independence this past summer, its elite, many of whom served as child soldiers themselves, is trying to figure out how to run a national military force comprised only of adults.

In multiple countries in Africa, the average woman has six, seven or eight children in a lifetime, and there are extremely high levels of infant mortality, something that remains the case outside of Africa only in Afghanistan.

The policy recommendations made in Page's twenty-four page discussion of the question "Should Africa Industrialize?", don't obviously improve on the prior literature which hasn't produced result, but the bare factual observations that he makes, that Africa's industrial and higher education sectors has spent the last few decades getting weaker rather than stronger is the take away point that is notable.

While Africa now is close to a low point in terms of internal armed conflict (although there are multiple armed conflicts and deadly insurgencies brewing in Africa as I write this post, for example, in Somolia, Uganda, Northern Nigeria and most recently Mali where coups and possible counter coups of broken out in the past week), and is also at or near a high water mark in terms of the share of the continent that has civilian, democratic self-government, these developments merely establish pre-conditions to meaningful economic development.

Scalia on Rehabilitation

Modern penology has abandoned that rehabilitation thing.

- Justice Antonin Scalia (oral argument on March 20, 2012 in Alabama v. Miller).

There are lots of relevant posts at the Sentencing Law and Policy blog.

(Updated to correct misattribution on April 1, 2012.)

Romney Delegate Trendline Portends Brokered Convention

Seth at Enik Rising has committed the grievous sin of burying the lede in his very interesting coverage of the rate at which Romney is securing delegates in the 2012 race for the Republican Party Presidential nomination. The money quote, halfway into the long post, is this:

Romney will not get to 1,144 delegates (a majority) by the end of the primaries and caucuses assuming he keeps accumulating delegates at his current pace.

Now, good academic that he is, Seth immediately assures us that this trendline is not a prediction. Why?

There's no real reason to believe Romney will continue to acquire delegates at this same pace this year. Romney looks likely to do well in Illinois tomorrow, as well as in some large winner-take-all states like New Jersey and California* later on. (And I like him for the winner-take-all Utah primary.) [*Note: California's primary is winner-take-all by state and congressional district. . . .]

So my expectation is still that Romney will have this thing wrapped up before the primaries and caucuses are over. But it may take some time -- NJ and CA aren't until June 5th.

In an update later in his post, he notes that Illinois didn't make much of a dent to the trendline.

Seth also mentions that having multiple candidates, particularly Gingrich, stay in the race has extended the time it takes for any one candidate to win a majority. But, he fails to make the critical follow-up point to that musing:

If Gingrich had left the race, Romney would not have nearly the lead that he does right now. And, when and if Gingrich leaves the race, Santorum's position in the remaining primaries and caucuses will be strengthened.

Gingrich's effect on this race has been to split the conservative vote which would otherwise be great enough to defeat Romney. If Gingrich gets out, most of his supporters will back Santorum unless Romney looks completely inevitable (e.g. if Romney already has enough delegates to win the race). Santorum doesn't have to play to win. He simply has to play to deny Romney a majority in Tampa at the first ballot. If Santorum succeeds in that task, the Republicans will have a brokered convention and all bets are off.

I'm not sure that I think that there will be a brokered convention in Tampa either. But, it is quite a bit more likely than Seth suggests.

Denver Post Continues Long Painful Newspaper Death March

The Denver Post has cut $500,000 from newsroom and editorial staff in yet another round of layoffs, this time including two of its star columnists, Mike Littwin and Penny Parker. The layoffs notice started going out yesterday and are continuing today.

A few years ago, Denver had two ordinary daily newspapers, the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, and a free dail as well, the Denver Daily News. The Post and the Rocky first formed a joint operating agreement allowing for two separate papers with consolidated business operations. Then, the Rocky Mountain News died. Then the Denver Daily News died.

The Denver Post, over time, has reduced materially what it offers readers in content as advertising revenues has dried up and circulations have been stagnant or falling. There are fewer news sections (sometimes shorter ones consolidated where once there was a section for each part), there is less content, there is less original reporting, there are fewer comics, and the ads have become more obnoxious (like sticky notes on the front page and wrap around half pages). Subscription rates have gone up in the absence of competition. Behind there scenes, there have been bankrupticies, conslidation in the industry, and debt reorganizations.

The cuts haven't solved the problem, and so there are more cuts. Even some of the nation's most esteemed and widest circulation newspapers are only marginally profitable or incur losses. The Denver Post and its parent company are feeling it along with the rest of the industry.

In the immediate term, there are complaints that the Denver Post could have handled its layoffs in a more graceful way, rather than the usual heartless corporate mindless indifference, but it didn't.

The longer term issue is that nobody has a viable business model for running a major metropolitan daily newspaper even though many people enjoy the service and are willing to pay something for it. The traditional system, in which distribution is sold at distribution cost, and funds to cover operations and profits are derived from advertising revenue seems to be dying a slow and painful death.

Technological changes like the Internet are no doubt a big drive of the change. But, it makes no sense to abolish the Internet to save the pre-Internet newspaper business model.

Honestly, I doubt that a "for profit" model for gathering and distributing news has much of a future in any case. Without people who pay premium prices for the same services and grants, like most arts and cultural non-profits, I don't see much of a future for newspapers.

Spring Finally Arrives

The Spring equinox is today (at about 5 a.m. GMT).

Oh The Humanity!

Who is speaking up for the mothers who, under HHS mandate [that insurance policies cover oral contraception], have been falsely coerced into feeling that to be a woman means to have “control” of their own bodies?

From Joshua Genig, pastor of The Lutheran Church of the Ascension (L.C.M.S.) in Atlanta, Georgia (currently in exile in Scotland studying theology at the University of St. Andrews, and presumably improving his golf game as well).

Who knew that President Obama was nefariously plotting to forcibly deny women their right to be raped and to bear somebody else's children without their consent?

One of the reliable ways to distinguish rights that conservatives push for from rights that liberals push for is that conservatives relentlessly push for rights that no sane human being would actually want.

Consider some of the rights conservatives strongly favor:

The right to not have access to health care, the right to not have control over your own body, the right to be poor, the right to pay rent for cockroach infested structurally unsound apartments, the right to let the felon next door intimate you with a gun, the right to receive incompetent professional services, the right to let your democratically elected officials make obviously bad policy decisions, the right to execute innocent people who had fair trials that reached incorrect results, the right to abuse your children, the right to breath dirty air, the right to flood the Everglades, the right to poison your neighbor's wells, the right of policemen to beat up or kill innnocent citizens without justification, the right to have your disputes with a business resolved by someone chosen by the business according to rules chosen by the business, the right to have no job security, the right to squander your Social Security contributions with bad investments in the stock market, the right to live in a city without streetlights, the right to accidentally injure people with impunity, the right to persecute people because they are gay, the right to declare your city, state and nation to be governed by your religion, the right of rich people to pay lower tax rates than poor people.

On what sick planet did conservatives come up with this agenda? Who wants these rights? Why should we care about these people?

Randy E. Barnett Acknowledges His Jurisprudence Is Reality Challenged

Barnett is a right wing fantasy constitution advocate at Georgetown University. But, he knows that his castles in the clouds have little to do with the actual law and amount merely to political advocacy. As he notes in an abstract to a new article:

Judges appointed by both Republican and Democratic presidents largely operate within what academics call the "New Deal settlement." By this it is meant that the courts allow Congress to exercise unchecked power over the national economy and everything that may affect it, limited only by the express guarantees of the Bill of Rights. In this arena, with some exceptions, the post-New Deal judiciary disagrees only on whether other unenumerated rights may also receive protection and, if so, which ones. But whatever few additional "fundamental" rights may be recognized, they do not include the protection of any so-called "economic liberty" that might inhibit the national regime of economic regulation.

Finally, a job you are qualified for

Are you a young lawyer? Are you looking for a job? This job may be for you.

Candidates from . . . top firms, could be a good fit for this role. Significant debt experience is key. Compensation is very competitive with what one would find at same level at a top Wall St. firm in HK / China (all in, including expat/cola).

Trust funders need not apply.

Wisconsin Still Screwed Up

Above The Law nicely sums up the unsatisfactory character of Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser. Also, a quarter of the circuit court judges in Milwaukee and dozens statewide signed a petition to recall the Governor.

Douglas A. Kahn On Taxing Homemakers and Baby Sitting Favors

My law school tax professor's articles are often dry and technical, but his latest article is a thoughtful examination of deep legal theory issues within tax law. Douglas A. Kahn (Michigan) has posted Exclusion from Income of Compensation for Services and Pooling of Labor Occuring in a Noncommercial Setting, 11 Fla. Tax Rev. ___ (2011), on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Compensation for services, regardless of the form, constitutes income to the recipient. Consequently, the exchange of services by two individuals is treated as income to each. However, there are numerous examples of an exchange of services that the IRS has never sought to tax. The most common example is an exchange of services by a married couple who divide the household chores between them. The focus of this article is to propose a principled reason for not taxing those exchanges and to explore the limits of that exclusion. The author contends that the income tax operates exclusively on commercial transactions, and so income derived from a noncommercial activity is not taxable. The article explores what types of activities can be classified as noncommercial for this purpose.

As a corollary to the proposed noncommercial rule, the article contends that the income tax does not apply to individuals who pool their labor to obtain a common goal. The resulting exchange of services are not taxable. The article considers the question of how broadly a common goal can be defined for this purpose. The article examines several specific activities in which services are exchanged and which should not be taxable. Specifically, among others the article examines: baby sitting barter clubs, cooperative nursery schools, and home schooling.

Verbatim from the Tax Prof Blog.

Near the top of the unstated issues at stake in the analysis is the taxation of families who do not consist of married couples but share a household, but the article also takes on children's allowances.

One reason that article is notable is that we managed so long without it. All of the activities discusses are commonplace and long standing, yet the nation's tax administration has managed without any coherent theory to explain its everyday practice somehow, without mishap. The situation is actually surprisingly common in American law, where the focus is on the close calls and not the easy ones.