Google and Gingrich--They Don't Get Me At All

Some people who live on remote mountain ridges worry about the government tracking their movements and infringing their rights. I assume that's why Newt Gingrich called me on behalf of the NRA a few days ago, to warn me that "Obama's gonna take your guns." (His elocution was a little more sophisticated, but he was just echoing the same old theme I've been hearing since 2008.) Of course, I asked Newt why Obama hasn't gotten it done yet, but, being a robo-call, Newt didn't answer.

I'm more concerned about giant corporations than intrusive government. When I found this link to Google's ad targeting data based on my searches, I expected them to know things about me I feared to admit even to myself. I imagined an ominous combination of Santa Claus and Orwell's Big Brother. Instead, it seems, Big Brother doesn't get me at all. Here's how Google sees me:

Your categories:
Business & Industrial
Computers & Electronics - Software
Computers & Electronics - Software - Operating Systems - Linux & Unix
Shopping - Apparel
Localities - North America-USA-South(USA)-West Virginia

Your demographics:
We infer your age and gender based on the websites 
you've visited. You can remove or edit these at 
any time.
Age: 35-44
Gender: Male

I expected all those searches for antique crochet patterns and sewing supplies would have given a different demographic profile. But perhaps midlife male computer nerds are exploring their softer side with vintage-styled handmade lace. And, from an advertiser's viewpoint, Wal-Mart is the only place in our area where you can buy steel crochet hooks and computer hardware.

To see how Google identifies you as an advertising target, you can visit Google's Ads on the Web.

CS 101: Classroom Droop Mountain

I was excited to read this last week: Udacity and the future of online universities by Felix Salmon. Speaking of Sebastian Thrun, Salmon writes:

... It started as a way of putting his Stanford course online--he was going to teach the whole thing, for free, to anybody in the world who wanted it. With quizzes and grades and a final certificate, in parallel with the in-person course he was giving his Stanford undergrad students. He sent out one email to announce the class, and from that one email there was ultimately an enrollment of 160,000 students....

Thrun was eloquent on the subject of how he realized that he had been running "weeder" classes, designed to be tough and make students fail and make himself, the professor, look good. Going forwards, he said, he wanted to learn from Khan Academy and build courses designed to make as many students as possible succeed--by revisiting classes and tests as many times as necessary until they really master the material.

.... he concluded that "I can't teach at Stanford again." He's given up his tenure at Stanford, and he's started a new online university called Udacity. He wants to enroll 500,000 students for his first course, on how to build a search engine--and of course it's all going to be free.

Here's the Website for the Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class that started it all, and here's the Udacity site, which is preparing to offer two more computer classes free on the Web. They say:

We believe university-level education can be both high quality and low cost. Using the economics of the Internet, we've connected some of the greatest teachers to hundreds of thousands of students all over the world.

I've signed up for "CS 101: Building a Search Engine" to learn Python. Aside from my FORTRAN course in 1976, everything I've ever learned about computers has been self-taught and ad hoc. I'd love to try it in a structured environment. (I enjoyed my FORTRAN course, but the Computer Science department at my alma mater made it really clear they didn't want a bunch of ladies running around their nice clean building.) Classes start February 20!

Don't Live Like a Lab Rat!

Earlier this week, Terry blogged about a Princeton study showing that All sweeteners are not created Equal. (Thanks, Terry!) The press release she cited begins:

A Princeton University research team has demonstrated that all sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.

In addition to causing significant weight gain in lab animals, long-term consumption of high-fructose corn syrup also led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides. The researchers say the work sheds light on the factors contributing to obesity trends in the United States.

I was rather excited about this--I sometimes teach simultaneous biochemistry and statistics courses for nursing students, and a paper like this would be ideal--combining carbohydrate chemistry, data analysis, and dieting. It would be bound to pique their interest.

Unfortunately for my purposes, the press release veered into diet-guru pseudoscience right away, speculating that

as a result of the manufacturing process for high-fructose corn syrup, the fructose molecules in the sweetener are free and unbound, ready for absorption and utilization. In contrast, every fructose molecule in sucrose that comes from cane sugar or beet sugar is bound to a corresponding glucose molecule and must go through an extra metabolic step before it can be utilized.

Really, that's their explanation? Hydrolysis is an extra metabolic step here? I suspected that the researchers were not responsible for the flaky press release, so the next step should be the actual article. The press release said the article was published online Feb. 26, but it provided no link. Still, search engines soon took me to the abstract: High-fructose corn syrup causes characteristics of obesity in rats: Increased body weight, body fat and triglyceride levels. The abstract seems reasonable enough--no speculation about metabolic pathways, no suggestions that fructose calories are qualitatively different than sucrose calories. Unfortunately, the abstract is all you get from the publisher, unless you wish to purchase the full text for $31.50 USD. My adjunct professor status doesn't cover such costs.

Meanwhile, everywhere I looked, there were blog posts and science news articles concluding that if we switch to soda pop sweetened with sucrose, it will keep us from getting fat. Much as I would like to eat more sugar and lose weight, I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen.

As I went about trying to sort out this puzzle without spending $31.50, I found some helpful and interesting discussions of the article (listed in the links below), and this afternoon a Slashdot commenter provided a pre-print of the actual paper.

The press release conflated the two experiments described in the article, overstated the differences in weight gain, left out the data from female rats (which seemed to contradict the male rat results) and didn't mention how small (eight rats per group) the treatment groups were in the long term study. If you look at the table of final weights for the short-term study, the rats that had sucrose to drink 12 hours a day had the same mean final weight as the 24-hour-a-day corn-syrup drinkers. The group with a statistically significant difference was the 12-hour-a-day corn syrup drinkers, and their standard error bars came very close to overlap. Given that there were only 10 rats per treatment, I'd hardly call this a definitive finding.

The graph on the right shows the inconclusive results in female rats in the 6-month study. Over all, I'd say this is an interesting little study over-hyped by Princeton's PR department. If it's now true in science, as in Hollywood, that there is no such thing as bad publicity, these researchers can look forward to some more funding.

Here are some of the links I found informative or interesting.

• High-fructose corn syrup causes characteristics of obesity in rats: Increased body weight, body fat and triglyceride levels. by Miriam E. Bocarsly, Elyse S. Powell, Nicole M. Avena, and Bartley G. Hoebel. Also available: pre-print of the actual paper.
• The press release: A sweet problem: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain
• The Industry Response: Gross Errors in Princeton Animal Study on Obesity and High Fructose Corn Syrup Research in Humans Discredits Princeton Study from the Corn Refiners Association. The "gross errors" they mention are in the press release, not the study, but hey, it's PR--who cares if it's true?
• High Fructose Corn Syrup Causes Bigger Weight Gain In Rats at Slashdot. The comments were very helpful. Here's where I found links to the full text of the article (without paying $31.50) and also the Ars Technica and LA Times critiques. There were some nice technical discussions of the enzymatic pathways involved in fructose vs. glucose metabolism, some pseudo-scientific rants, and some funny comments as well. Slashdot can be so great.
• Does high-fructose corn syrup make you fatter? Ars Technica is more harshly critical of the original article than I am. Really, it's a fine line between convincing editors to publish and overstating your results.
• A not-so-convincing case that high fructose corn syrup is worse for you than sugar. The LA Times also finds fault with the study.

DIY Book Scanner--Piracy or Not?

For the past 18 months I've been working on a digitization project for local history materials. (Hence my unhealthy co-dependent relationship with the Reverend William T. Price.) That's how I came to follow Digitization Blog's RSS feed, and discover Wired Magazine's article: DIY Book Scanners Turn Your Books Into Bytes.

For nearly two years, Daniel Reetz dreamed of a book scanner that could crunch textbooks and spit out digital files he could then read on his PC.

Book scanners, like the ones Google is using in its Google Books project, run into thousands of dollars, putting them out of the reach of a graduate student like Reetz. But in January, when textbook prices for the semester were listed, Reetz decided he would make a book scanner that would cost a fraction of commercially available products....

"The hardware is ridiculously simple as long as you are not demanding archival quality," he says. "A dumpster full of building materials, really cheap cameras and outrageous textbook prices was all I needed to do it."

Reetz went on to upload a 79-step how-to guide for building a book scanner (.pdf). The guide has sparked more than 400 comments. It has also spawned a website, DIYbookscanner.org, where more than 50 independent book scanners spread across countries such as Indonesia, Russia and Britain have contributed hardware refinements and software programs....

For details on the "how-to" of it, you can visit DIY Book Scanning news and forum, or download the 79-step how-to guide for building a book scanner (.pdf). The Wired article focuses more on the "whys" and "why nots" of do-it-yourself digitization.

Reetz says the DIY book-scanning forum isn't about distributing pirated content, but he can see the temptation. "My project was founded in angry desperation," he says. "It was a watershed moment when I realized getting an 8-megapixel Canon camera was cheaper than buying a bunch of textbooks."

As adjunct faculty at a couple of colleges, I sometimes teach science, math and computer classes, and I can tell you the cost of textbooks will make your hair stand on end (even at the intro level, where economies of scale could keep expenses in check). The schools won't let the students see the ISBN numbers of the required texts, to prevent them from shopping online for second-hand books, and they even forbid cell-phones in the campus bookstores, lest price-conscious students photograph shrink-wrapped book covers. Patently unfair practices like these seem designed to encourage piracy.

So are Reetz and the builders of the DIY scanner pirates? That would depend on who you talk to, says Pamela Samuelson, a professor at University of California at Berkeley, who specializes in digital-copyright law. Trade publishers are almost certain to cry copyright infringement, she says, though it may not necessarily be the case.

....If you scan a book that you have already purchased, it is "fine, and fair use," she says. "Personal-use copying should be deemed to be fair, unless there is a demonstrable showing of harm to the market for the copyright at work," says Samuelson. But not so individual users who already own the book....For publishers, though, the growth of the DIY scanning community could hurt. Publishers today sell digital versions to customers who already own hardcover or paperback versions of the same book.

"You cannot look at this idea from the perspective of whether the publisher can make extra money," says Samuelson. "Publishers would love it if you can't resell books either, but that's not going to happen."

Physics for Fido

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog by Chad Orzel--This is chapter 3, "Schrodinger's Dog." It's wonderful.

I can't tell you exactly how I came upon this--I know I started at Sherry Chandler's blog, followed a link, and another link...and there I was, reading Orzel's bitter complaint about a New York Times movie reviewer who proudly displays his ignorance of physics. A physicist and college professor, Dr. Orzel is often irritated by The Innumeracy of Intellectuals. Sadly, indifference to math is not limited the the intelligentsia. Adult basic education students, school children, and college freshmen all use a smug tone to tell me they "are no good at math," meaning "Get out of my face with that stuff, I can't be bothered." In contrast, people who can't read well generally try to cover up and fake it. I don't get it, but the reason I often end up teaching math to the unwilling is the scarcity of teachers willing and able to take on those classes.

I'm looking forward to reading the whole canine physics course--we never got to quantum mechanics in my undergraduate physics class, because the physics department thought it was "too hard for biologists." I wish I'd had Dr. Orzel!

Fun With Spreadsheets--Student Resources

I don't use Microsoft products myself, but I recently put together some training sessions on Excel spreadsheets. Here's the list of free resources I handed out to my students. Everything here will also work with OpenOffice's Calc.

• Excel 2000 Intermediate by Patrick J. Murphy, Academic Computing and Communications Center. This seminar covers different features of Microsoft Excel 2000. Importing a file, Excel databases, one-input tables, scenarios, the LOOKUP function, and linking files will be included.
• Excel and Word Tutorial Sites from Bean Counter's collection of bookkeeping resources
• Microsoft Excel Handouts from the Davis School District of Farmington, Utah.
• Charting in Microsoft Excel from Microsoft Excel Tips and Tricks on "John's Excel Page"
• Excel 2003 Chart Wizard Tutorial, from About.com: Spreadsheets
• List of Free Excel Templates
• Templates from Microsoft Office Online
• Excel Lessons from R. S. Schaefer, from the Math Department at Kutztown University. PDF handouts for in-class Excel projects. Very nice!
• Microsoft Excel Modules from Internet 4 Classrooms
• Georgia Perimeter College Instructional Technology Service handouts for all sorts of software, including Excel. The pdf's I've opened are really well-done!
• Class Training handouts from Akron-Summit County Public Library. Very nice pdf handouts on a variety of Microsoft Office products.

Amazing Camouflage Paint Job

I've finished grading chemistry exams and otherwise preparing for the classes I'm teaching tonight in Beckley, and, on an apparently unrelated topic, I want to pass along this amazing camouflage job: Art student's car vanishing act.

A design student made a battered old Skoda "disappear" by painting it to merge with the surrounding car park. Sara Watson, who is studying drawing at the University of Central Lancashire (Uclan), took three weeks to transform the car's appearance. She created the illusion in the car park outside her studio at Uclan's Hanover Building in Preston.

There's a short video of Ms. Watson and the car accompanying the BBC article.

Mental Fragments, Mental Fractals....

The last few days, I've been converting an OCR'ed text of William Price's Historical Sketches of Pocahontas County into sensible and legible text, then loading it into Drupal a bit at a time at Pocahontas County History. I'm working my way through the 400-plus pages of genealogical information first, because that is the portion most desired by genealogists and least accessible to Internet search engines. It's also the least enjoyable reading for those of us not seeking to understand a particular family's ancestral relationships. Lists of marriages, sons and daughters, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, interspersed with the unfortunate fatal accidents and illnesses which ended their various lives...it's not as much fun as you might imagine.

At the same time I've been doing some supplemental reading for the chemistry course I'm teaching. (Fragmented? I try to tell myself it's my free-ranging intellect, but I keep picturing free-ranging chickens....)

In any case, I read this very exciting article: Can fractals make sense of the quantum world? illustrated with the pretty cauliflower picture above. I believe it's there to illustrate a fractal pattern rather than quantum mechanics, but according to Dr. Tim Palmer, fractal mathematics may eventually resolve the puzzles that quantum theory poses.

Quantum theory just seems too weird to believe. Particles can be in more than one place at a time. They don't exist until you measure them. Spookier still, they can even stay in touch when they are separated by great distances.

Einstein thought this was all a bit much, believing it to be evidence of major problems with the theory, as many critics still suspect today. Quantum enthusiasts point to the theory's extraordinary success in explaining the behaviour of atoms, electrons and other quantum systems. They insist we have to accept the theory as it is, however strange it may seem.

But what if there were a way to reconcile these two opposing views, by showing how quantum theory might emerge from a deeper level of non-weird physics?

If you listen to physicist Tim Palmer, it begins to sound plausible. What has been missing, he argues, are some key ideas from an area of science that most quantum physicists have ignored: the science of fractals, those intricate patterns found in everything from fractured surfaces to oceanic flows....

Take the mathematics of fractals into account, says Palmer, and the long-standing puzzles of quantum theory may be much easier to understand. They might even dissolve away....

It is an argument that is drawing attention from physicists around the world. "His approach is very interesting and refreshingly different," says physicist Robert Spekkens of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. "He's not just trying to reinterpret the usual quantum formalism, but actually to derive it from something deeper."

That Palmer is making this argument may seem a little odd, given that he is a climate scientist working at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting in Reading, UK. It makes more sense when you learn that Palmer studied general relativity at the University of Oxford, working under the same PhD adviser as Stephen Hawking....

"It has taken 20 years of thinking," says Palmer, "but I do think that most of the paradoxes of quantum theory may well have a simple and comprehensible resolution."

Gear Shifting and Fragmentation

I've never been great at shifting gears mentally, so my current work configuration offers me a real challenge. I'm teaching courses in chemistry, statistics, and Microsoft Word 2007, while developing a new course for beginners in Excel spreadsheets. Meanwhile, I'm still the county historic preservation officer, which means I'm maintaining two online databases, digitizing content, looking for grants, and planning museum and archive curation. These are part-time jobs, and don't, in theory, add up to more than a 45-50 hour work week.

In theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, they are different. In practice, I have a hard time thinking, "OK, that's it for biochemistry this week. Now I'm going to update Drupal and proof-read a genealogy text. After that, I'll write an exam for the junior college computer students, and then, cook supper." It should work, but it doesn't. I'm still thinking about gene promoter and enhancer sequences as I retype sections of the "The Descendants of Thomas Galford." Later, I'll be thinking about the ravages of the Civil War on the Allegheny Front's inhabitants as I try and think how to test students' understanding of formatting features in word processing. And eventually, as I think about hanging intents and margins, I'll probably dump too much pepper in the mashed potatoes again.

I shouldn't complain about having paying jobs, and I do like variety. Nevertheless, I feel as if my mental gears are in danger of being stripped.

A Primer On Financial Woes

I'm not sure when the Washington Post started doing this, (I read it using RSS feeds, so I miss things), but they've assembled their economics articles from the last few months into a sort of primer, which they call: The Crash: What Went Wrong? How did the most dynamic and sophisticated financial markets in the world come to the brink of collapse? The Washington Post examines how Wall Street innovation outpaced Washington regulation. Some of these articles I'd read, others I'd missed until now, but it's quite helpful to have them all in one place.

Database Turns Citizens to Terrorists

I'm not surprised by stories detailing how our government spies on citizens. It was going on when I first learned to read the newspapers, and the last few years have seen it ramp up once again. The reason this story caught my attention is the way a computer database program (or more accurately, police officers using the wrong database for their purpose) exacerbated the situation. Here's the Washington Post article: More Groups Than Thought Monitored in Police Spying: New Documents Reveal Md. Program's Reach, by Lisa Rein and Josh White, January 4, 2009.

The Maryland State Police surveillance of advocacy groups was far more extensive than previously acknowledged, with records showing that troopers monitored -- and labeled as terrorists -- activists devoted to such wide-ranging causes as promoting human rights and establishing bike lanes.

Intelligence officers created a voluminous file on Norfolk-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, calling the group a "security threat" because of concerns that members would disrupt the circus. Angry consumers fighting a 72 percent electricity rate increase in 2006 were targeted. The DC Anti-War Network, which opposes the Iraq war, was designated a white supremacist group, without explanation.

....The operation has been called a "waste of resources" by the current police superintendent and "undemocratic" by the governor.

Here's where the database program enters the story. Until this point, the Washington Post story follows a novice undercover cop infiltrating innocuous community organizations. Her bosses considered it training for real, necessary undercover work. But then they got a computer program, for free!

Police had turned to the database in a low-cost effort to replace antiquated file cabinets. The Washington High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a regional clearinghouse for drug-related criminal information, offered its software for free.

But the database did not include categories that fit the nature of the protest-group investigations. So police created "terrorism" categories to track the activists, according to the state review. Some information was sent directly to HIDTA's main database as part of an agreement to share information.

....The activists fear that they will land on federal watch lists, in part because the police shared their intelligence information with at least seven area law enforcement agencies.

The police didn't consider the activists they were watching potential terrorists. However, they had data, and nowhere appropriate to put it. They did what most people would do--they shoehorned it into a place they thought it might fit. Too bad they shared it around the nation. There's no telling where it will turn up.

Antikythera Device--The Ancients Knew More Than We Credit

Reproduction of 2,100-year-old calculator deepens mystery: The model of the Antikythera Device is based on the latest discoveries of the mysterious mechanism. I remember reading about the Antikythera device many years ago, in the sort of periodical devoted to Roswell cover-ups, alien encounters, and the evidence about the lost continent of Atlantis. I was really surprised to hear about it again a couple of years ago, and this year, a new article in Nature has prompted a string of articles, and this amazing video. Remember, the original object is 2000 years old!

I've put together a list of links about the Antikythera device below. It's so cool, you'll have to read more about it. My favorite observation comes from New Scientist's December 12 article, Archimedes and the 2000-year-old computer:

Historians have often scoffed at the Greeks for wasting their technology on toys rather than doing anything useful with it. If they had the steam engine, why not use it to do work? If they had clockwork, why not build clocks? Many centuries later, such technology led to the industrial revolution in Europe, ushering in our automated modern world. Why did it not do the same for the Greeks?

The answer has a lot to do with what the Greeks would have regarded as useful. Models of people and animals, like those of the cosmos, affirmed their idea of a divine order. Gadgets like Hero's were also used to demonstrate basic physical laws in pneumatics and hydraulics....

Rather than being toys, devices like the Antikythera mechanism were seen as a route to understanding and demonstrating the nature of the universe - a way to get closer to the true meaning of things. To what better use could technology be put?

• The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project--the project's home page.
• July, 2008 article in Nature, Calendars with Olympiad display and eclipse prediction on the Antikythera Mechanism. You can only read the abstract here without paying US$32, but you can download a download a 44 page pdf of "supplementary notes," which probably rivals or surpasses the costly but prestigious Nature article.
• Reproduction of 2,100-year-old calculator deepens mystery, by John Cox, December 17, 2008, Network World
• Archimedes and the 2000-year-old computer . This New Scientist article by Jo Marchant (reference below) gives historical context on the ancient Greeks' inventions as well as a synopsis of modern thought on the device. It's no accident I first read about the device in "Believe It or Nuts!" sort of publication.
• Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old Computer--and the Century-Long Search to Discover Its Secrets, a book about the device by Jo Marchant. There's also a website for the book.

Ponzi

I don't know where I got the wrong idea, but somehow, I thought that "Ponzi" was a mathematician or economist who described the swindle, maybe in the 18th or 19th century, some early student of probability and statistics. The Washington Post set me right with this interesting feature: One Name Stands Alone in The Grand Scheme of It All--Madoff? Meh. History Put Its Money on Ponzi.

Florence Nightingale's Graphical Presentation of Data

She's remembered as a nurse, public health advocate, and career-minded woman in a patriarchal society, but I was fascinated to learn that Florence Nightingale was a statistician!

Through her work as a nurse in the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale was a pioneer in establishing the importance of sanitation in hospitals. She meticulously gathered data on relating death tolls in hospitals to cleanliness, and, because of her novel methods of communicating this data, she was also a pioneer in applied statistics. We explore the work of Nightingale, and in particular focus on her use of certain graphs which, following misreading of her work, are now commonly known as 'coxcombs'.

The article includes links to several interesting sources on Florence Nightingale. I found this November 11 blog post from Understanding Uncertainty via Slashdot (/.), which pointed to Florence Nightingale: The passionate statistician By Julie Rehmeyer, published November 26, 2008 in Science News. This column didn't actually reference Understanding Uncertainty, except in an incorrect URL crediting a graphic, but the whole Science News column seems to be based on the Understanding Uncertainty posting.

Understanding Uncertainty is well worth a visit. Their mission is to help improve the way that uncertainty and risk are discussed in society, and show how probability and statistics can be both useful and entertaining! and I found plenty to entertain and instruct. Like Slow Food and Slow Bloggers, they even have a manifesto: Manifesto for a statistically literate public. They appear to be using Drupal in a fairly straightforward way, so I'm learning something from their site design, too.

Visualizing a Fourth Dimension

I've intended to post these amazing links for some time now: Seeing in four dimensions by Julie Rehmeyer in Science News describes a new series of videos to help people visualize complex mathematical concepts. This is the trailer:

The trailer shows some snippets from the Nine chapters, two hours of maths, that take you gradually up to the fourth dimension. Mathematical vertigo guaranteed! offered on Dimensions: A Walk Through Mathematics. I won't pretend to explain the fourth dimension as a mathematical concept, but there is text that accompanies the nine "chapters" of the film. I don't know if repeated viewings will allow me to absorb the ideas, but it's so engaging visually that I almost don't care. When Hutchinson described an ecological niche as "a multidimensional hyperspace," I wonder if he had any concept of what even one "extra" dimension would "look like."

Here are the credits for Dimensions: A Walk Through Mathematics: This film is the result of the collaboration of three enthusiasts who worked together on all aspects of the project: Jos Leys, engineer turned computer graphics enthusiast, specializing in mathematical imagery (Antwerp, Belgium); Étienne Ghys, CNRS senior researcher, working at the ENS-Lyon, mathematics and the scenario; and Aurélien Alvarez, ENS-Lyon graduate student, technical aspects, and computation of images.

Meetings: Practical Alternative To Work

This cartoon made the rounds at the middle school this past spring. I traced it to Johnnie Moore's Weblog on marketing and other business-related matters that I seldom read about. I'm not sure if it's Mr. Moore's own cartoon or if it comes from the (now moribund) site he links to in this post. Whatever its origin, most of us can agree that a chance to point with a stick and eat donuts is not to be missed.

The Rural South--Epidemiological Reality

Recently, our local TV news has been reporting a new study indicating that life expectancies for rural Appalachian women have decreased in the last twenty years. They have accompanied this with the usual admonitions to eat healthful foods, exercise, and quit smoking. I was interested to read this newspaper story, Southwest Va.'s Mortality Mystery--More Than Diet Behind Women's Sharp Life Expectancy Drop by Theresa Vargas,Washington Post, April 26, 2008, and to follow its link to the original story, Eight Americas: Investigating Mortality Disparities across Races, Counties, and Race-Counties in the United States.

The Washington Post article features a discussion of the usual "lifestyle-related" mortality risks but also notes:

Residents will tell you little distinguishes the city of Radford and neighboring Pulaski County from elsewhere in rural America. That is what troubles health-care workers here most about a new study that found a sharp drop in life expectancy for women in the two communities.

According to the study, life expectancy for women dropped in nearly 1,000 counties but fell most in Radford and Pulaski. In 1983, life expectancy for women in the two jurisdictions was about 84 years. By 1999, it had dropped 5.8 years, to 78. No other jurisdiction in the nation had a decrease of more than 3.3 years.

This begins to get at what is surprising about the "Eight Americas" study. It looks at mortality data county by county over 20 years, for the entire United States, and identifies eight economic-geographic-racial clusterings. Since the article is in the open-source journal PLoS Medicine, you can look at a detailed data summary, the entire article, and all the figures and maps.

The eight Americas classification reveals that within the white population there is a wide variation in health experience that cannot be explained by differences in average income: low-income white rural populations in Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa, Montana, and Nebraska (America 2), with a life expectancy of 76.2 and 81.8 y for males and females, respectively, have a substantial advantage over the rest of white America, despite a large income disadvantage. Low-income whites in Appalachia and the Mississippi Valley (America 4), with an average income level similar to that of America 2, have a life expectancy equal to those of Mexico and Panama. The life expectancy gap between whites in America 2 and America 4 was 4.2 and 3.8 y in 2001 for males and females, respectively, comparable to the 6.4- and 4.6-y gaps between whites and blacks as a whole. The gap between whites in America 2 and America 4 has in fact increased since 1982, when it was 3.0 and 2.4 y for males and females respectively; between 1982 and 2001 life expectancy among females in America 4 declined from 78.2 y to 78.1 y.

Both white and black low-income rural Southern populations have a shorter life expectancy than their more affluent counterparts ("White Middle America" and "Black Middle America") in other areas of the US, but there is one white, rural, low-income population that has a longer life expectancy than "White Middle America." Low income, chemical exposure, and inconvenient access to health care are not the only reasons America 4 fares worse than America 2. To my mind, the study identifies rural white Southerners and rural black Southerners, as epidemiologically distinct groups, separate and unequal from their counterparts in other parts of the United States. Where Lillian Smith and W.J. Cash critiqued Southern cultural identity, this study identifies a biological definition for the region distinct from income and population density.

The traditional emphasis of the US health system has been on children and the elderly, as, for example, illustrated by the low levels of resources devoted to injury prevention and tobacco control compared with immunization. This emphasis may have partly contributed to substantially lower disparities in these age groups relative to young and middle-aged adults. On the other hand, the emphasis on children and the elderly has treated many of the diseases that are important contributors to young and middle-aged adult health disparities, and their risk factors, as either the responsibilities of individuals (alcohol, tobacco, obesity, and dietary determinants of blood pressure and cholesterol, like salt) or in the domain of clinical care (blood pressure and cholesterol)....It is when the public, community and professional groups, media, and politicians focus attention on what is being achieved, and why efforts are working in some places and not others, that the culture of accountability for health outcomes will be strengthened.

The study is an interesting data-mining exercise, intended to point the way to more intensive public health research. I grew up in a county included in "America 2," and now I live in a different rural area in "America 4." I had always thought, terrain aside, that southwestern Iowa was surprisingly similar to Pocahontas County. Now I'm wondering whether I shouldn't be trying to identify the differences.

In case you're interested, here's the abstract for the article:

Eight Americas: Investigating Mortality Disparities across Races, Counties, and Race-Counties in the United States Murray CJL, Kulkarni SC, Michaud C, Tomijima N, Bulzacchelli MT, et al. PLoS Medicine Vol. 3, No. 9, e260 doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0030260

Background

The gap between the highest and lowest life expectancies for race-county combinations in the United States is over 35 y. We divided the race-county combinations of the US population into eight distinct groups, referred to as the "eight Americas," to explore the causes of the disparities that can inform specific public health intervention policies and programs.

Methods and Findings

The eight Americas were defined based on race, location of the county of residence, population density, race-specific county-level per capita income, and cumulative homicide rate. Data sources for population and mortality figures were the Bureau of the Census and the National Center for Health Statistics. We estimated life expectancy, the risk of mortality from specific diseases, health insurance, and health-care utilization for the eight Americas. The life expectancy gap between the 3.4 million high-risk urban black males and the 5.6 million Asian females was 20.7 y in 2001. Within the sexes, the life expectancy gap between the best-off and the worst-off groups was 15.4 y for males (Asians versus high-risk urban blacks) and 12.8 y for females (Asians versus low-income southern rural blacks). Mortality disparities among the eight Americas were largest for young (15-44 y) and middle-aged (45-59 y) adults, especially for men. The disparities were caused primarily by a number of chronic diseases and injuries with well-established risk factors. Between 1982 and 2001, the ordering of life expectancy among the eight Americas and the absolute difference between the advantaged and disadvantaged groups remained largely unchanged. Self-reported health plan coverage was lowest for western Native Americans and low-income southern rural blacks. Crude self-reported health-care utilization, however, was slightly higher for the more disadvantaged populations.

Conclusions

Disparities in mortality across the eight Americas, each consisting of millions or tens of millions of Americans, are enormous by all international standards. The observed disparities in life expectancy cannot be explained by race, income, or basic health-care access and utilization alone. Because policies aimed at reducing fundamental socioeconomic inequalities are currently practically absent in the US, health disparities will have to be at least partly addressed through public health strategies that reduce risk factors for chronic diseases and injuries.

Modeling Carbon Dioxide Emission in North America

I found this amazing set of data anamations via Dvorak Uncensored. I wasn't profoundly surprised by the carbon dioxide production patterns, but the data presentation is fascinating. You can find a text presentation at 'Revolutionary' CO2 maps zoom in on greenhouse gas sources.

Researchers now have a better view of where carbon dioxide is being emitted thanks to Vulcan, a research project led by Kevin Gurney, an assistant professor at Purdue. This map shows where CO2 is being emitted in the continental United States in 10-kilometer grids and combines data from sources including factories, automobiles on highways and power plants. The map offers more than 100 times the detail of previous inventories of carbon dioxide. The image displays metric tons of carbon per year per grid in a logarithmic base-10 scale. (Purdue University image/Kevin Gurney)

Wonder What the Richistanis Are Doing?

Crawford Killian has an interesting book review, Rich as Hell: Richistan: A Journey through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich by Robert Frank in TheTyee.ca I'm a long-time fan of Killian's cluster of blogs, including Ask the English Teacher where he offers insights on many types of writing, Bridging the Income Gap, where he cross-posted this review, and Homage to Arrhenius, about climate change.

Frank approaches the Richistanis as a distinct nation. They aren't really living with ordinary Americans, physically or culturally. But most are emigres from America's middle class, the wealthiest parvenus in history. They are both a recent phenomenon and a familiar one: Frank sees them as the "Third Wave" of dramatic wealth-building, after the Gilded Age (1865-1890) and the Roaring Twenties (1918-1929). In those eras, the top one percent of Americans held almost half the nation's wealth.

But after the Depression and Second World War, wealth began to reach ordinary Americans. By 1975, the top one per cent could claim only 20 per cent of all American wealth. Those were the days when a one-income working family could support a stay-at-home spouse, buy a home and send the kids to college....

Ronald Reagan changed all that. By 1989, Frank says, the top one per cent held 30 per cent of U.S. wealth, and their share is now 33 per cent....

...[T]his is a readable, informative and insightful look at the biggest group of very rich people the world has ever seen. At some point a new war or depression may cause their government to redistribute Richistani wealth, as Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt did. The middle class may again see a golden age like that from V-J Day to Watergate, while the Richistanis worry about meeting their mortgage payments.

But I don't expect to live to see it.

Dropping Out of School

I read this article earlier this week: New Figures Show High Dropout Rate Federal Officials Say Problem Is Worst For Urban Schools, Minority Males by Daniel de Vise, Washington Post Staff Writer, Thursday, May 10, 2007. Although the Post focuses on urban problems, the study they cite has bad news for the entire country.

The statistics paint a dire portrait: Seventy percent of students nationwide earned diplomas in four years as of 2003, the latest data available nationally, a much lower rate than that reported by the vast majority of school systems....

The summit marks a growing national sense that high schools are facing a dropout crisis. The extent of the problem -- only two students in three graduate with their class -- has been clear for years within the education community but not among members of the general public, who, according to surveys, believe that nearly 90 percent of students graduate from high school.

The statistics come from edweek.org's New Graduation Rate Resource from the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, which gives "comparable, reliable data on graduation rates...for every school district in the country." The site was a little slow even with broadband, but I did find all the information promised, and the map interface is quite nice. Of course, I checked our local school system, and found that it is right at the national average, with a graduation rate of two out of three students. This corroborates statistics distributed by the West Virginia Adult Basic Education program, which used to employ me as a teacher.

Before I started teaching adult basic education, I never really thought about school dropouts, who they were, why they dropped out, or what their skills were. About 100 people passed through my classroom (some of them very briefly). None of them were members of minorities, but I can't think of any other generalization to make about them. I never asked anyone personal questions, but most of them wanted to explain why they dropped out of school. Their reasons were as varied as the students themselves.

Some of these drop-outs had excellent academic skills, others couldn't read at all. Some were there to please their probation officers and some had dropped out of school to care for sick family members. I learned that any teenager could drop out of school, given the wrong circumstances.

I also learned that even these new figures under-report the drop-out rate in that they only consider grades 9 through 12. If students turn 16 in the eighth grade, as quite a few do, they can drop out of school without counting toward the school district's dropout rate.

Failure to graduate cuts young people out of entry-level jobs, even jobs mucking out barns in Greenbrier County. More damaging than this is the sense of inferiority that so many kids feel. They may actually have better academic skills than kids who graduate, but they were "quitters," and a lot of them go on quitting at other things in their lives. It takes an enormous amount of effort to reverse this life pattern, and I've had many adult basic ed students with excellent skills find excuses to avoid taking the GED test. This is especially sad because there is a tremendous self-esteem boost that goes along with getting a GED.

My father finished the eighth grade in 1918, and that was considered a complete education for his time and place. He was a life-long reader, and could do enviable feats of mental calculation, including square roots and trigonometry. He could recite poems, and name all the townships in Union County and all the counties in Iowa. Many high school graduates today have less education than he did. It seems Americans are losing educational ground, that education is returning to its old status as a perk for the wealthy. Rhetoric like "no child left behind" masks the death of free public education for everyone.