Rants – Page 55 – a sibilant intake of breath

Treason

In the spirit of short entries, I have a confession to make: I am not a social scientist. Even worse, I don’t believe in social ‘science.’ Science is about things where you can access physical reality closely enough that you can be decisively proved wrong. Science is about improving our ability to act usefully in the world. Adding a bunch of regressions to your study on civil wars does not accomplish that.

PS. Political theory is about a million times more interesting than international relations theory.

[Update: 2 August] This entry doesn’t quite say what I mean, especially as regards the definition of science. It will need to be revisited when the ideas are clearer in my mind.

You think you’re so clever, but you forget about the VAT

So much for saving money by using price differences between the US and UK version of Amazon. Today, I received not my headphones, but the duty bill for them:

Cost of headphones from Amazon.com: US$75 (C$85) (£40)
Shipping from USA to UK: US$26 (C$29)
UK Value Added Tax: £12 (C$25)
UK Parcelforce Clearance Fee: £14 (C$30)
Total: C$169 (Ack! Ack!)
Delivery time: about five weeks

Cost on Amazon.co.uk (with all taxes and shipping): £74 (C$156)
Delivery time: 4-6 days

In any case, I suppose I will cycle the five miles or so out to Kidlington (where the depot is) to pick them up either after my tutorials today or tomorrow. Many thanks to Jessica for her help with the ungainly trans-shipment process above.

The moral of the story: ye who think you can get $160 headphones for $85 are probably mistaken.

[Update: 9:01pm] I rode the six and a half miles to the pickup depot. I paid the $100 in taxes. I put in the headphones with the flanged eartips… and was disappointed. It sounded more precise than the default iPod earphones, but not enormously better. An hour later, I tried the foam eartips and I understood. Tori has never sounded more astounding. If it keeps up for a few years, the Etymotic ER6i headphones will have been worth every cent.

[Update: 2 August] It should be further noted that the Etymotic customer service people are unusually polite and helpful. I wanted to order the larger flanged tips to see if they work as well as the medium foam tips. There was no time spent on hold at all, and I was immediately put in touch with someone who is going to send me the large flanged eartips internationally for free. Such things are always pleasant surprises.

[Update: 8 August] I got the larger and smaller alternative eartips for the Etymotics today. The large flanged ones work much better than the normal flanged ones, but don’t sound quite as good as the normal foam eartips. That said, the normal foam ones get somewhat gross quite quickly and are hard to clean. I think I will mostly stick with the large flanged eartips.

[Update: 30 January 2007] I had a few minutes of abject panic today, when it seemed that the right earbud in my pair of excellent but expensive Etymotic ER6i headphones had dropped to 10% of its original volume. I had been listening for a few straight hours, working on a paper, and found myself wondering why the song I was listening to was so biased to the left. Thankfully, when I called their very helpful tech support people, we realized that it was just a clogged filter. I replaced it with one of the replacements included in the original set and all is well. (Actually, the right side is a bit louder now, but the filters are $2.50 each and I should wait until the other is more clogged).

Frontier justice

In other depressing news, there are apparently two Americans: Daniel Strauss and Shanti Sellz, who are being charged for transporting three illegal migrants trying to cross the US-Mexico border to a hospital, when they were dying of thirst. They face up to 15 years in prison and $500,000 in fines.

Legally, the case seems quite clear cut. The defence of necessity allows you to break the law when doing so serves some over-riding purpose. Someone with a suspended license can drive their critically injured child to the hospital, then get off the charge of violating the suspension by claiming that is was necessary to avert a far greater evil. Preventing three people from dying in the desert obviously overrides questions about the legality of assisting those attempting to migrate illegally.

What is most ironic is that the people prosecuting this case would almost certainly defend themselves as Christians – given that the prosecution can only be motivated by a desire for political point-scoring, and not being religious in America is politically suicidal. For would not Jesus himself have argued that if you come across a man dying of thirst in the desert, it is your Christian duty to report him to the proper authorities?

It amazes me that neighbouring democratic states with an increasing number of economic and institutional connections can nonetheless completely fail to accord the most basic ethic of due consideration to each other’s citizens. The prosecutors should be ashamed of themselves, and these charges should be summarily dismissed.

PS. Amnesty International has a campaign on this.
It is also being discussed on MetaFilter.

Potentially misleading statistics

How frequently do you see in the headlines that scientists have discovered that tomato juice reduces the chances of Parkinson’s disease, that red wine does or does not reduce the risk of heart disease, or that salmon is good for your brain? While statements like these may well be true, they tend to come together as a random collection of disconnected datasets assessed using standard statistical tools.

Of course, therein lies at least one major rub inherent to this piecemeal approach. If I come up with twenty newsworthy illnesses and then devise one clinical trial to assess the effectiveness of some substance for fighting them, I am highly likely to come up with a statistically valid result. This is in fact true even if the substance I am providing does absolutely nothing. While the placebo effect could account for this, the more important reason is much more basic:

Statistical evaluation in clinical trials is done using a method called hypothesis testing. Let’s say I want to evaluate the effect of pomegranate juice on memory. I come up with two groups of volunteers and some kind of memory test, then give the juice to half the volunteers and a placebo that is somehow indistinguishable to the others. Then, I give out the tests and collect scores. Now, it is possible that – entirely by chance – one group will outperform the other, even if they are both randomly selected and all the trials are done double-blind. As such, what statisticians do is start with the hypothesis that pomegranate juice does nothing: this is called the null hypothesis. Then, you look at the data and decide how likely it is that you got the data you did, even if pomegranate juice does nothing. The more unlikely it is that your null hypothesis is false, given the data, the more likely the converse is true.

If, for instance, we gave this test to two million people, all randomly selected, and the ones who got the pomegranate juice did twice as well in almost every case, it would seem very unlikely that pomegranate juice has no effect. The question, then, is where to set the boundary between data that is consistent with the null hypothesis and data that allows us to reject it. For largely arbitrary reasons, it is usually set at 95%. That means, there is a chance of 5% or less that the null hypothesis is true – pomegranate juice does nothing – in spite of the data which seem to indicate the converse.

More simply, let’s imagine that we are rolling a die and trying to evaluate whether it is fair or not. If we roll it twice and get two sixes, we might be a little bit suspicious. If we roll it one hundred times and get all sixes, we will become increasingly convinced the die is rigged. It’s always possible that we keep getting sixes by random chance, the the probability falls with each additional piece of data we collect that indicates otherwise. The number of trials we do before the decide that the die is rigged is the basis for our confidence level.¹

The upshot of this, going back to my twenty diseases, is that if you do these kinds of studies over and over again, you will incorrectly identify a statistically significant effect 5% of the time. Because that’s the confidence level you have chosen, you will always get that many false positives (instances where you identify an effect that doesn’t actually exist). You could set the confidence level higher, but that requires larger and more expensive studies. Indeed, moving from 95% confidence to 99% of higher can often require increasing the sample size by one hundred-fold or more. That is cheap enough when you’re rolling dice, but it gets extremely costly when you have hundreds of people being experimented upon.

My response to all of this is to demand the presence of some comprehensible causal mechanism. If we test twenty different kinds of crystals to see if adhering one to a person’s forehead helps their memory, we should find that one in twenty works, based on a 95% confidence level. That said, we don’t have any reasonable scientific explanation of why this should be so. If we have a statistically established correlation but no causal understanding, we should be cautious indeed. Of course, it’s difficult to learn these kinds of things from the sort of news story I was describing at the outset.

[1] If you’re interested in the mathematics behind all of this, just take a look at the first couple of chapters of any undergraduate statistics book. As soon as I broke out any math here, I’d be liable to scare off the kind of people who I am trying to teach this to – people absolutely clever enough to understand these concepts, but who feel intimidated by them.

Lomborg on fish

I just re-read the short section on world fisheries in Bjorn Lomborg’s Skeptical Environmentalist, and noted that the level of analysis shown there is low enough to cast doubt on the rest of the book. He basically argues that:

The global fish catch is increasing.
We can always farm our way out of trouble.
Fish aren’t that important anyhow (only 1% of human calories, 6% of protein).

He is seriously wrong on all three counts. On the matter of overall catch, that is a misleading figure, because it doesn’t take into account the effort involved in catching the fish. You could be catching more because you’re building more ships, using more fuel, etc. As long as subsidy structures like those in the EU and Japan remain, this is inevitable. While such technological advances can conceal the depletion of fish stocks, the reality remains. If we’re fishing above the rate at which a fishery can replenish itself, it doesn’t matter whether our catches are increasing or not. Or rather, it does insofar as it helps to determine how long it will be before the fishery collapses, like the cod fisheries of Newfoundland and the North Sea already have. Fisheries are also complex things. Catching X fish and waiting Y time doesn’t necessarily mean that you will have X fish to catch again. Much has to do with the structure of food webs, and thus energy flows within the ecosystem.

The idea that farming can be the answer is also seriously misleading. First and foremost, farmed fish are almost exclusively carnivorous. That means they need to be fed uglier, less tasty fish in order to grow. Since they aren’t 100% efficient at turning food into flesh, there is an automatic loss there. More importantly, if we begin fishing other stocks into decline in order to farm fish, we will just have spread the problem around, not created any kind of sustainable solution. As I have written about here before, serious pressure already exists on a number of species that are ground into meal for fish-farming. There are also the matters of how fish farms produce large amount of waste that then leaches out into the sea: biological wastes from the fish, leftover hormones and antibiotics from the flood of both used to make the fish grow faster and get sick less often in such tight proximity, and the occasional seriously diseased of genetically damaged fish escaping to join the gene pool.

I can only assume that Lomborg is right to say that “fish constitutes a vanishingly small part of our total calorie consumption – less than 1 percent – and only 6 percent of our protein intake.” Even so, that doesn’t mean that losing fisheries as a viable source of calories and protein would not be a terrible event. Humanity overall may not be terribly dependent, but certain groups of individuals are critically dependent. Moreover, the “it’s not all that important a resource anyway, so who cares if it goes?” attitude that is implied in Lomborg’s assessment fails to consider the ramifications that continuing to fish as we are could have for marine ecosystems in general and the future welfare of humanity.

One last item to identify is the fallacious nature of the 100 million tons a year of fish we can “harvest for free.” This is his estimate of the sustainable catch, and he then notes that we are only catching 90 million tons. He goes on to say that “we would love to get our hands on that extra 10 million tons.” First off, the distribution here matters. If the sustainable catch for salmon is five million tons and we are catching twenty, the overall figure doesn’t reflect the fact that salmon stocks will be rapidly destroyed. If we’re burning our way through, species by species (look at the wide variety of fish now served as ‘cod’ in the UK), then even a total catch below the aggregated potential sustainable yield could be doing irreparable harm. Secondly, we have shown no capacity for restraint as a species. Just looking at what Canada has done within its own territorial waters demonstrates that even rich governments with good scientists can make ruinous policy choices for political or other kinds of reasons.

All in all, Lomborg’s analysis is seriously misleading and lacks comprehension of the dynamics that underlie marine ecology and the human interaction with it that takes place. While my research project for the thesis partly involves examining the controversy surrounding Lomborg, I am not planning to critique his statements directly in the thesis. With passages like this included, I may be tempted.

On television licensing

Apparently, the BBC has claimed that anyone who watches video clips from their website online must have a television license, or be liable to prosecution and fine. As a North American, I find the very idea of a television license offensive. Our flat has received a notice that an inspector will be coming at some future point to look for televisions. The letter reads, in part:

Your address is now on our priority list and an Enforcement Officer is planning to visit you shortly. [Emphasis theirs]

My personal inclination would be to refuse to consent to having our premisses searched – despite the fact that we have no televisions – because there is no probable cause under which to search us, and no warrant to do so issued. In the United States, I would expect such a search to be a violation of the Fourth Amendment. In Canada, I would expect it to be a violation of Section 8 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Of course, that intuition is not grounded in any familiarity in British law. I assume that these inspectors do have the legal right to search a flat without consent or a warrant. It couldn’t hurt to issue a verbal refusal, at least.

The idea that the state has the right to search your home on suspicion of owning a television, then fine you if you don’t already have a license seems preposterous. The courts in Canada and the United States have generally considered the searching of a home to be a serious legal action that generally requires a warrant. To do so in order to uphold the fiscal solvency of a public broadcaster seems like a serious confusion of priorities. I understand the need to fund the BBC, but this seems like an unjustifiable imposition.

That is especially true once extended to computers which may or may not be used to watch television programs. In 2004, the Secretary of State ruled in the Television Licensing Regulations that:

“‘Television receiver’ means any apparatus installed or used for the purpose of receiving (whether by means of wireless telegraphy or otherwise) any television programme service, whether or not it is installed or used for any other purpose.”

Using my iBook to watch “The Daily Show” would appear to make it a ‘television receiver’ under this definition. When the BBC chose to put video online, it couldn’t legitimately claim to have thereby unilaterally extended the requirement for television license to all people in the UK with computers capable of viewing the information. If they made headlines available by text message, could they begin taxing anyone with a cellular phone? Can they tax people whose cellular phones can access the internet now?

I do see value in public broadcasting, insofar as it can serve some purposes that the mainstream media does not. That value does not, in my mind, justify the kind of threats that are being made.

Pringle-saturated satirical news

The Comedy Central website – once a much prized source of Daily Show and Colbert Report clips – has become unusable. Now, every single clip is preceded by a truly insipid 30-second Pringles commercial: the same ad for every clip. Given that both The Colbert Report and The Daily Show post about 6-7 one-minute clips on each day from Monday to Friday, watching them all would involve watching that Pringles video more than ten times in a half hour period: something I am not willing to put up with.

I can understand the need to pay for bandwidth, but this is just too annoying a way to pull it off.

PS. The Show and The Report are also under discussion here, at the moment.

Media idiocy

One of the BBC top stories right now: “Mobile phone risk during storms.” I am not going to link it, because they don’t deserve traffic for publishing something so asinine. The crux of the article is that people who get struck by lightning while using a metal mobile phone are more likely to be injured than people just standing there. The article doesn’t indicate that your chances of getting struck by lightning while talking on the phone are any higher. Indeed, I would posit that you would be less likely to be standing around outside in a thunderstorm if you had your expensive and almost certainly non-waterproof mobile phone pressed against your ear. And whose mobile phone is made of metal anyhow?

According to scientist Paul Taylor: “I would treat a mobile phone as yet another piece of metal that people tend to carry on their persons like coins and rings.” Do they advise not wearing rings or carrying change during thunderstorms? Of course not. That would be absurd.

Sometimes, the enthusiasm of the media to scare people on the basis of incredibly improbable events is so frustrating I don’t know what to do. They would have you believe that strangers will poison your child’s Halloween candy (all known cases of poisoning by this route were committed by the parents of the child). Everything from shark attacks to terrorist incidents gets presented as far more common than they really are, in a world of six billion with a media likely to report every incident of each. A really brilliant essay by Jack Gordon on this kind of fear-mongering can be found here. The best paragraph reads:

It is fashionable to remark that America “lost its innocence” on September 11th. This is balderdash. Our innocence is too deep and intractable for that. The thing we’ve really lost doesn’t even deserve the name of bravery. We’ve lost the ability to come to grips with the simple fact that life is not a safe proposition—that life will kill us all by and by, regardless. And as a society, we’ve just about lost the sense that until life does kill us, there are values aside from brute longevity that can shape the way we choose to live.

This essay won a contest by Shell and The Economist on the topic “How much liberty should we trade for security.” It is well worth a look; it’s enormously more deserving, I would say, than the BBC article of comparable length. The basic point: we need to acknowledge the existence of risk and deal with it intelligently. We can never be perfectly safe, and we shouldn’t try to be. We can never do otherwise than balance risks against benefits.

Hard to track friends

You would be fairly hard pressed to find a group that relocates as extensively and often as my friends do. I suppose that’s not unusual for students, especially students of international relations who are mostly in the undergrad to internship/job/grad school juncture.

Personally, since starting university I have lived in two different houses of Totem Park, three different Fairview Crescent units, my parents’ house in North Vancouver, one residence of l’Universite de Montreal, Library Court of Wadham College, and in the pleasantly cool basement flat that is my present domain. (Such welcome solace from the heat and sun outside.) As a result of the fact that I can never really count on the address I have written down for many friends to be a current one, I need verify it every time I want to sent something: a requirement that can rather ruin the surprise. It’s better than making further contributions to the dead letter offices of the world, I suppose.

PS. Anything getting sent to me in the UK should be sent care of Wadham College, Oxford, OX1 3PN. Wherever in Oxford I am living, I will check my box there nearly every day.

Sony headphones, cont.

In response to my complaints by letter and phone, as well as sending back the broken old pair, Sony sent me a new set of MDR-EX71SL Fontopia earbuds (£25.67 on Amazon). While this is welcome, I would have preferred to have them send me a refund. On past form, the new pair will only last about three months before completely falling apart due to cheap materials and shoddy construction. My earlier complaint about them is here. To anyone considering buying Sony Fontopia earbuds: don’t. They are no longer the nice-sounding, solid things they were back in 2000 or so. Now, they are made of plastic so soft, you can literally peel it off the wires gently with your fingers. It is less tough than the brand-new shoestring licorices that you are surprised to bite into and not find toughened by months of exposure to 7-11 air and fluorescent lighting.

Rather than put the refund towards new Sony headphones, I would probably have gone with either the Shure E2Cs (£51.49) or Etymotic ER6Is (£68.51), which many people have told me are more durable and have better sound. They need to be earbuds, because I want to be able to wear them under a bike helmet and carry them virtually everywhere. While big ear-covering headphones would be great for my room, they hardly work with bikes and iPod Shuffles.

Since the replacement EX71s are new and in the original packaging, I could try selling them online somewhere, thereby generating some funds to put towards a better set. Of course, that would mean at least another couple of weeks with ear canals aching from button-shaped and unyielding hard white generic Apple headphones. What do cost-conscious audiophiles suggest?