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Obama’s Trip to India Shortened His Life by 6 Hours

by OlenMayorga Posted on January 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Over the weekend President Barack Obama was in India for talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on nuclear power, trade, climate change, and other topics. The climate piece was, if not necessarily a letdown, certainly less exciting than Obama’s wide-reaching deal with China in November. Crucially, the China deal included specific carbon emissions reduction targets; those were left out in India over Modi’s (arguably justifiable) insistence that the country be able to aggressively expand its electricity infrastructure to fight poverty.

Instead, India committed to expand its solar power capacity by 33-fold within seven years, and to work closely with the United States in advance of major UN climate talks in Paris in December. (India’s participation will be vital for the summit to produce a meaningful international agreement.)

As Bloomberg‘s Natalie Obiko Pearson noted, Obama got a first-hand taste in the trip of how important it is for India to fuel its growth with clean energy sources. India is already the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas emitter behind China and the US, and air pollution in many of its cities far exceeds even the infamous levels in Beijing and other Chinese megalopolises.

In fact, Delhi—the capital city where Obama’s meetings took place—has the world’s highest concentration of PM 2.5, according to the UN. These tiny airborne particulates can increase the risk of heart disease and a host of really awful respiratory ailments. The PM 2.5 levels in Delhi are so insanely bad that breathing the air for only a few hours can have irreversible health impacts…even on the leader of the free world.

From Bloomberg:

During Obama’s three-day visit, PM2.5 levels in Delhi have averaged between 76 to 84 micrograms per cubic meter, according to data collected by India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences…Those levels translate roughly into an estimated loss of 2 hours a day in life expectancy, said David Spiegelhalter, a statistician at the University of Cambridge, who specializes in quantifying risk in a way that is understandable to the public.

Obama was there for three days, so that’s six hours off his life. That is profoundly terrifying. It also underscores how, for developing countries, the need to stem pollution from power plants is about much more than solving the long-term problem of global warming. It’s about addressing an urgent pubic health crisis.

This post has been updated.

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Obama’s Trip to India Shortened His Life by 6 Hours

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Two Promising Factlets About American Schools

by WDCIsmaeltjydj Posted on January 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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So how are our schools doing? Here are two factlets that crossed my radar yesterday.

First: Neerav Kingsland says that SAT scores of new teachers are rising and that most of them are staying in teaching for at least five years. He comments: “If I was going to bet on whether American education will improver, flatline, or get worse — I would look very hard at the academic performance of teachers entering the profession, as well as how long these better qualified teachers stayed in the classroom. The aforementioned data makes me more bullish on American education.”

Second: Adam Ozimek says we’re selling charter schools short when we say that on average they do about as well as public schools. That’s true, but there’s more to it:

I would like to propose a better conventional wisdom: “some charter schools appear to do very well, and on average charters do better at educating poor students and black students”. If the same evidence existed for some policy other than charter schools, I believe this would be the conventional wisdom.

….The charter sectors’ ability to do better for poor students and black students is important given that they disproportionately serve them….53% of charter students are in poverty compared 48% for public schools. Charters also serve more minority students than public schools: charters are 29% black, while public schools are 16%. So not only do they serve more poor students and black students, but for this group they relatively consistently outperform public schools.

It’s been a while since I took a dive into the data on charter schools, so I’m passing this along without comment. But it sounds right. I continue to believe that as long as they’re properly regulated, charter schools show substantial promise.

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Two Promising Factlets About American Schools

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It’s Official: 2014 Was the Hottest Year on Record

by PTXKatheri Posted on January 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA)

For many Americans, 2014 will be remembered for its multiple blasts of Arctic air and bitter winters. And this week, another bout of freezing temperatures is marching east across the country, in the first major thermometer plunge of the season.

But as cold as you may have been last year, it’s now official that 2014 was actually the hottest year globally since record-keeping began. So confirmed the Japan Meteorological Agency in preliminary data released Monday.

The Japanese government agency monitors and records the long-term change of the global average surface temperatures and found that 2014 was far warmer than previous years. How much warmer? 2014 exceeded the 1981-2010 temperature average by 0.27 degrees Celsius (or 0.49 degrees Fahrenheit). There was unusually warm weather all around the world, from a record-breaking heat wave in Australia to the hottest European summer in 500 years.

The data shows that four out of the five hottest years on record have occurred in the last decade: In second place is 1998, then 2010 and 2013 tied for third, and 2005 in fifth place. The new numbers reveal that the world has been warming at an average rate of 0.7 degrees Celsius (or 1.26 degrees Fahrenheit) per century since records began.

Two US government agencies, NOAA and NASA, are expected to confirm the results of the Japanese observations in the coming weeks.

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It’s Official: 2014 Was the Hottest Year on Record

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In Police-Civilian Encounters, Your Eyes May Be Your Worst Enemy

by KristenWhatley Posted on December 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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Dan Kahan flags a recent bit of research about cognitive biases as a “run-away winner” in the contest for coolest study of the year. That might be a stretch, but it is pretty interesting.

Basically, it’s about whether police bodycams will help resolve disputes about what really happened in encounters between cops and civilians. There are reasons to think their effectiveness will be limited because even with video evidence, we tend to interpret ambiguous events to fit our preconceived biases. This is similar to the way sports fans interpret instant replays of penalties in ways that favor their home team, and it goes under the generic name of “motivated reasoning.”

So far, so boring. But conventional wisdom and common sense tells us that the way motivated reasoning works is simple: we view the events, and then we interpret them in light of our biases. That turns out not to be the case. The researchers performed a couple of studies based on video clips, one a citizen-police encounter and the other a brawl between two private citizens who wore different colored-shirts. In each case, the test subjects sympathized with one actor vs the other (police officer or suspect in study 1, green-shirt or blue-shirt in study 2). And it turns that motivated reasoning happens way earlier and is even more unconscious than we thought:

The super cool part of the study was that the researchers used an eye-tracking instrument to assess the predicted influence of motivated reasoning on the perceptions of the subjects. Collected without the subjects’ awareness, the eye-tracking data showed that subjects fixed their attention disproportionately on the actor they were motivated to see as the wrongdoer—e.g., the police officer in the case of subjects predisposed to distrust the police in study 1, or the citizen identified as an “out-group” member in study 2.

Wow!

Before reading this study, I would have assumed the effect of cultural cognition was generated in the process of recollection….But GBST’s findings suggest the dynamic that generates opposing perceptions in these cases commences much earlier, before the subjects even take in the visual images.

The identity-protective impressions people form originate in a kind of biased sampling: by training their attention on the actor who they have the greatest stake in identifying as the wrongdoer, people are—without giving it a conscious thought, of course—prospecting in that portion of the visual landscape most likely to contain veins of data that fit their preconceptions.

Kahan suggests that this study “comes at the cost of intensified despair over the prospects for resolving societal conflicts over the appropriateness of the use of violent force by the police.” Perhaps so. Certainly facts and evidence have a poor track record of changing minds, especially when it comes to emotionally charged events that affect our essential worldview. Still, I suspect that if bodycams become widespread, they’ll change minds slowly but steadily. In the same way that years of exposure to TV and movies have turned us into more sophisticated consumers of narrative video, years of regular exposure to bodycam footage may turn us into more sophisticated viewers of police-civilian encounters. We’ll probably know sometime around 2030 or so.

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In Police-Civilian Encounters, Your Eyes May Be Your Worst Enemy

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Lefties Earn 10% Less Than Righties

by au87rr Posted on December 5, 2014

Mother Jones

Well, this is weird. Danielle Kurtzleben summarizes a new study called “The Wages of Sinistrality”:

In the data, around 11 to 13 percent of the population was left-handed. And when broken down by gender — that is, comparing women to women and men to men — those lefties have annual earnings around 10 to 12 percent lower than those of righties, Goodman writes, which is equal to around a year of schooling. (That gap varied by survey and by gender, however.) Most of this gap can be attributed to “observed differences in cognitive skills and emotional or behavioral problems,” he writes, adding that since lefties tend to do more manual work than right-handers, the gap appears to be due to differences in cognitive abilities, not physical.

Apparently the cognitive differences were already well known (though I didn’t know about them), but this paper is the first to document the earnings gap. It’s surprisingly large. So if you’re a lefty and you’re doing well, congratulations! You’ve beaten the odds.

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Lefties Earn 10% Less Than Righties

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After Supreme Court Decision, Patent Trolls Getting Cold Feet?

by CamilleDby Posted on October 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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A few months ago, in Alice v. CLS Bank, the Supreme Court struck a modest blow against patent trolls. The court ruled that merely programming a computer to carry out a well-known process isn’t enough to qualify for a patent. There has to be more to it.

So how has that affected the patent troll business? Joff Wild reports on a new analysis of third-quarter patent litigation activity:

According to the research, which covers the third quarter of this year (June to September), there was a 23% drop in the number of suits filed compared to the second quarter, and a 27% year-on-year reduction.

The findings come just weeks after data released by Lex Machina showed that there had been a 40% fall in patent suits in September 2014 as compared to the same month in the previous year….The data shows that the decline can be almost completely explained by a drop-off in NPE suits in the high-tech sector. Litigation initiated by operating companies fell by just 19 quarter on quarter, but actions launched by NPEs dropped by 301, from 885 in Q2 to 554 — a fall of 35%.

An NPE is a “non-practicing entity”—that is, a company that doesn’t actually make use of a patent in a product of its own, but has merely purchased it for the purpose of strong-arming payments out of other users. In other words, a patent troll. So what these numbers show is that generic patent litigation fell a bit in Q3, but that patent troll litigation fell by a lot.

It’s too early to jump to conclusions about this, but it seems reasonable that this decline is at least partly related to Alice. This is good news, though Alex Tabarrok sensibly warns that before long there will probably be an uptick in patent suits as people learn the new system. So hold off on the cheering.

Still, we’ll take good news where we can get it, and this is a step in the right direction. It will be even better if Alice is a sign that the Supreme Court plans to rein in the federal circuit court that handles patents, which in recent years seems to have been far more friendly toward software patents than the Supreme Court ever intended. Stay tuned.

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After Supreme Court Decision, Patent Trolls Getting Cold Feet?

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China’s coal use is actually dropping for the first time this century

by RoseCableflsy Posted on October 22, 2014

China’s coal use is actually dropping for the first time this century

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22 Oct 2014 4:27 PM

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We told you last week that the Chinese people are concerned about pollution — according to Pew, they care about it more than we Americans do. And their leaders have been saying, somewhat vaguely, that the country is going to take action and do something about it.

Now, an analysis by Greenpeace suggests that China’s coal use may actually be falling — for the first time this century.

Any kind of decrease in China’s use of coal is a big deal. In large part because of coal, the country’s CO2 emissions have grown rapidly since the beginning of the last decade. In 2007, China surpassed the U.S. to become the world’s biggest emitter. In fact, over the last 15 years, China’s emissions were in large part responsible for the increase in emissions globally. So today’s news is a nice surprise.

Greenpeace’s Lauri Myllyvirta writes:

The data suggests the world’s largest economy is finally starting to radically slow down its emission growth, and it comes ahead of key talks next year on a new global climate and energy deal.

The latest 3rd quarter data reinforces a trend towards falling coal use which started in the second quarter of 2014 and suggests China’s annual coal use may end up down on the previous year.

Significantly the latest data showed that even as power consumption grew by 4% (based on government data) coal demand for power generation actually fell by 1%.

Myllyvirta does note that these data are volatile. And China has plans to bring more than 60 coal-to-gas plants online, which, according to a separate Greenpeace analysis, would spew a huge amount of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.

Still, China’s economy isn’t shrinking, and neither is its energy consumption. So this data showing that coal use is declining is a hopeful reminder that a growing China does not have to come hand-in-hand with growing emissions.

That should be happy news for climate hawks in the U.S. — particularly those seeking to block coal exports from North America’s west coast to Asia.

But, it’s a win-some, lose-some kind of news day: The U.S. Energy Information Administration just released data today showing that our energy-related emissions grew by 2.5 percent last year — that’s a fairly significant increase. And U.S. power plants upped their use of coal by 4.8 percent. Ironically, you can blame increased demand for heating during the polar vortex — which was itself likely the result of climate change — for the uptick in our emissions.

Source:
China’s coal use actually falling now (for the first time this century)

, Greenpeace.

China’s coal use falls for first time this century, analysis suggests

, The Guardian.

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China’s coal use is actually dropping for the first time this century

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How Superbugs Hitch a Ride From Hog Farms Into Your Community

by MittieAvila Posted on September 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Factory-scale farms don’t just house hundreds of genetically similar animals in tight quarters over vast cesspools collecting their waste. They also house a variety of bacteria that live within those unfortunate beasts’ guts. And when you dose the animals daily with small amounts of antibiotics—a common practice—the bacteria strains in these vast germ reservoirs quite naturally develop the ability to withstand anti-bacterial treatments.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria leave these facilities in two main ways. The obvious one is meat: As Food and Drug Administration data show, the pork chops, chicken parts, and ground beef you find on supermarket shelves routinely carry resistant bacteria strains. But there’s another, more subtle way: through the people who work on these operations.

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How Superbugs Hitch a Ride From Hog Farms Into Your Community

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In the Restaurant Biz, It Pays To Be a Man

by BrendanMauger Posted on August 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via Wonkblog, here’s a chart showing the pay gap between men and women in the restaurant industry. It comes from a recently released EPI report, and as you can see, not only are men better paid in virtually every category, but the premium goes up for the highest paying jobs. Bussers and cashiers are paid nearly the same regardless of gender. But when you move up to cooks, bartenders, and managers, the premium ranges from 10-20 percent.

This data isn’t conclusive. There are other reasons besides gender for pay gaps, and the EPI report lists several of them. Whites make more than blacks. High school grads make more than dropouts. Older workers make more than younger ones. You’d need to control for all this and more to get a more accurate picture of the gender gap.

But in a way, that misses the point. There are lots of reasons for the gender gap in pay. Some is just plain discrimination. Some is because women take off more time to raise children. Some is because women are encouraged to take different kinds of jobs. But all of these are symptoms of the same thing. In a myriad of ways, women still don’t get a fair shake.

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In the Restaurant Biz, It Pays To Be a Man

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Most Songs are Three Minutes Long Because That’s How Most of Us Like Them

by JayEastham Posted on August 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Kelsey McKinney asks today why popular songs are almost all 3-5 minutes long. The historical basis for this is obvious: 45 rpm singles hold about three minutes of music, so modern pop music was born in an era when technology limited songs to about three minutes or so. But what about more recently?

It makes sense to assume that since the basis of the three-minute song was the 78 and then 45 rpm single, then songs would become longer as technology evolved….But the length of songs had its biggest jump, according to this data, between the ’60s and ’80s, and very little has changed from the ’90s to 2008, a time period when the technology of music changed drastically.

“What drives what is heard on the radio is an artist’s desire to have their music hit the mainstream, and a record label’s desire to profit from that,” Steve Jones, vice president at the Canadian radio firm Newcap, told NPR….Jones is right. The length of a song on an album doesn’t matter for anyone except for the artist and fans, but a song that hopes to make money and be played on the radio simply has to be a certain length. Either that, or radio stations will edit the song down to the standard, making it three to four minutes, just like the 45.

But this begs the question. Why do radio stations insist on three minutes? They don’t run ads after literally every song, so it’s not because advertisers demand it. The obvious answer is that this is, in fact, what most fans want.

The core explanation, I think, is that most popular music simply doesn’t have the complexity to sustain itself beyond a few minutes. Both the lyrics and the melodies tend to be fairly simple, and after a few minutes they’ve exhausted their potential. Compare this to classical music and you see it more clearly. Most classical music is considerably more complex than your average pop song, but even so a single movement of a sonata or a symphony usually clocks in at no more than ten minutes or so. Opera arias—which developed in a pre-technological age and with much more patient audiences—are closer in length to modern pop songs, typically lasting 3-7 minutes.

Obviously there are exceptions to this. There are plenty of examples of longish pop songs, just as there are examples of classical pieces longer than ten minutes. But generally speaking, you need a fair amount of complexity to sustain these lengths, and that’s not what most people want. They want simple and hummable, and that means not too long.

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Most Songs are Three Minutes Long Because That’s How Most of Us Like Them

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