Monday Miscellany

  • What are the chances of this "remarkable piece of epidemiological luck" in studying PTSD? Researchers were looking for risk factors that might predispose someone to experience PTSD after a traumatic event, but obviously they couldn't assign people to groups to receive a traumatic stimulus or a placebo. Then, 51 police officers helped recover 73 bodies after an oil rig disaster with responsibilities including "the stripping, washing, and photographing of recovered bodies." But just before the disaster, someone had "assessed many of the officers in an occupational health study using standardized measures: the Hospital Anxiety and Depression (HAD) scale and the Eyesneck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ)." They even had data on officers not involved in the recovery efforts which they used as matched controls. That and much more in "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Persistent Diagnostic Challenge" (PDF) by Hamid Tavakoli.
  • Timur Kuran's "Now Out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989" (PDF)
  • "We don't know how to solve global poverty, and that's a good thing": London School of Economics lecture by Bill Easterly available as a podcast. Basically, a lot of bad things have happened in the past when we were certain we knew the solution to global poverty and implemented drastic solutions with authoritarian tactics.
  • The LA Times has a Q&A with Paul Farmer and Ophelia Dahl on Haiti, Baby Doc, cholera vaccine, and more. Here's the last bit:

Q: Will the return of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier have any impact on the work you do and the reconstruction?

Farmer: I have no idea. It just seems to add more turmoil. I can’t see anything good that would come out of it unless there’s accounting for crimes.

Dahl: It doesn’t take a lot to mess with a fragile system. Finding ways to support democracy would be the most useful thing anybody can do. He doesn’t have a history of wanting to support democracy or not sabotage it.

I keep thinking about that famous photograph of Baby Doc, him and Michele Bennett driving out in that car, speeding out of Port Au Prince and she’s smoking like she’s going to a hair appointment. And that was so huge for Haiti. And I just didn’t think I would ...

Farmer: Live to see it?

Dahl: No, I didn’t.

Q: How can a person living in Los Angeles without contacts in Haiti help?

Dahl: Doing a little bit of research into the organizations you’re giving your resources to. Don’t go down and dig pit latrines -- Haitians need those jobs.

Farmer: Some of these camps, in Parc Jean-Marie Vincent, which is about 51,000 people in one little tiny space, they have 286 latrines. Plus, it’s dangerous for women to go to them at night. In Port Au Prince. The numbers are pretty scary. Like with vaccine production, can’t there be a much more ambitious endeavor? We keep talking about Depression-era interventions -- WPA, Civilian Conservation Corps -- that engaged millions of people otherwise idle in public good. Even if half the aid pledge gets in, imagine if that money could go towards creating jobs for people. ... We’re all for moving capital back to Haiti -- the way it’s done is what’s important. If you had to choose between conventional aid programs with a lot of use of contractors, lots of overhead, dumb trainings. If you had to choose between that and lots of money going into creating jobs for Haitians, we obviously vote for the latter. If you want to support good work in a place that’s troubled, you have to do some homework.

Monday Miscellany

Happy 2011! My first posting of the new decade (yes, they start in 2001, 2011, etc) will be a bit about my blog's new look, and then some links. I tend to only highlight a few links in blog postings like these, often when I have something short I want to say but not enough to flesh out into a full-length post. If you like the links I share, you can follow my Google Reader feed at this URL, and/or let me know if you have a public feed as well. Some of the most interesting reading material I come across is from shared feeds through Reader -- it's a great way to manage your information flow. Now the miscellany:

  • First, my blog's new look: For those interested in the technical how-to, most of the changes result from a change in Wordpress themes to Carrington. I was inspired by the formatting of Chris Blattman's blog, which also uses Carrington -- especially the ability to include a blog roll and shared items feed from Google Reader in the sidebars, while still keeping a very clean, readable look to the main column. The new header image is a skyline of Baltimore, where I currently live, manipulated in GIMP (freeware Photoshop, more or less). I used an Emboss filter first (which makes everything grey-scale and highlights the image's lines and textures), then used the bucket fill tool (with varying thresholds) to selectively fill in contiguous areas in the embossed photo with black, white, and an orange-ish red that matches the link color in the Carrington theme.
  • I'm back to Twittering, occasionally, at @brettkeller, though I'm still not sure how this will (or should) fit in with other ways of sharing information for me. I stopped for quite a while after leaving my last job as an online organizer, where I think I got a bit burnt out on it. I'm finding the occasional usage refreshing, especially after reconfiguring who I'm following to match more with my current interests. Political news and online fundraising are out and the global health and international development twitterati are in.
  • We're getting closer to being able to build space elevators... but don't hold your breath. I've been fascinated with t his idea ever since reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, in which space elevators (and terrorist/freedom fighter attacks against them) feature prominently on both the Martian colony and its possessive mother planet Earth. I recently found a used copy of Arthur C Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise, a Hugo and Nebula award winning novel that is (as far as I know) the first science fiction work to focus on space elevators.
  • Jina Moore on "Why we should be worried about genocide in Cote d'Ivoire." I really want this to turn out OK, and am worried about the broader consequences for future conflicts if Gbagbo gets to stay, or the situation ends with more violence. In that sense, there's a lot more at stake here than just the current standoff, which even alone would be something to care about.
  • "Academic economists to consider an ethics code." It's kind of amazing that they don't have one already. Take this sentiment: "Mr. Lucas added: 'What disciplines economics, like any science, is whether your work can be replicated. It either stands up or it doesn’t. Your motivations and whatnot are secondary.'" You'd think that economists, of all people, would recognize how research and (more importantly in the context of the article) policy recommendations, can be shaped by outside incentives. Making big money from firms that might benefit from your policy recommendations if a huge incentive to consciously or unconsciously tweak your suggestions.

In short, there is an unholy dynamic of short-term trading and investing, backed up by bailouts and risk reduction from the government and the Federal Reserve. This is not good. “Going short on volatility” is a dangerous strategy from a social point of view. For one thing, in so-called normal times, the finance sector attracts a big chunk of the smartest, most hard-working and most talented individuals. That represents a huge human capital opportunity cost to society and the economy at large. But more immediate and more important, it means that banks take far too many risks and go way out on a limb, often in correlated fashion. When their bets turn sour, as they did in 2007–09, everyone else pays the price.

Monday Miscellany

  • More than I ever knew about Tycho Brahe. The possible death by mercury poisoning, the duel, the fake nose made of gold and silver, the clairvoyant dwarf jester under his table, and the pet elk.
  • Wikileaks is more a movement than a single site, as its model will outlive the shutdown of the site or event the death of its founder. From Foreign Policy: for better or worse, over 200 mirror sites have already been set up, and thousands of individuals have downloaded a heavily-encrypted "insurance" file with the State Department cables. Meanwhile, government workers were ordered not to read the cables...
  • The singularity is past.
  • Elizabeth Pisani on the myth of hypothesis-driven science.

Monday Miscellany

  • Alex Strick van Linschoten writes about "Five Things David Petraeus Wants You to Believe" about the war in Afghanistan. Van Linschoten's five things are: (spoiler: he doesn't think you should believe them) 1) The momentum has shifted in our favor, 2) "The Night Raids and Targeting of the Insurgency’s Leadership is an Effective Tool," 3) "The Military Effort is Subservient to Broader Political Goals," 4) "Mullah Mohammad Omar is irrelevant," 5) "Don’t mind the Afghan Government."
  • Patient safety is not improving at US hospitals despite lots of efforts to reverse the trend. Maybe the moral is that changing big institutions is really hard, even in a wealthy country that spends a huge chunk of its GDP on health care.
  • Roving Bandit writes about being censored for blogging about development work.
  • Chris Blattman on whether Brazil, China, India, and South Africa should get UN Security Council seats.
  • Ian Desai writes about the largely-hidden assistants who helped make Gandhi great.

Monday Miscellany

  • Stuxnet may be the first true cyberweapon -- a computer virus transmitted through USB drives (meaning that it can infect computers not connected to the 'Net) that targets computers controlling industrial systems. More here.
  • Which guy is more brave? The one who jumps on a grenade and shields his buddies from the explosion with his own body? Or the guy who jumps on the grenade to shield his friends, and then realized the grenade was a dud? How often do we judge actions using information we didn't have at the time?
  • Did you know that defenestration is the act of throwing something (or someone) out a window, and such acts sparked several wars? Wikipedia has a whole list of "notable defenestrations in history.
  • Dan Ariely writes about plagiarism and how he bought essays from several "essay mills."Teachers shouldn't be too worried about these, unless they can't distinguish text like this from their normal students' writing:

    "Cheating by healers. Healing is different. There is harmless healing, when healers-cheaters and wizards offer omens, lapels, damage to withdraw, the husband-wife back and stuff. We read in the newspaper and just smile. But these days fewer people believe in wizards."

Monday Miscellany

Stuff I like:

Monday Miscellany

Happy Labor Day: