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If Bing Wants to Attract Power Users, It Needs an Advanced Search Page

by Rad7edzw Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Matt Yglesias embarks on a short tour d’horizon of Microsoft’s future today and ends with Redmond’s white whale of a search engine:

And then there’s Bing. I am obsessed with Bing. Not because I use Bing or because Bing is a commercially important product but because Bing is a socially important product. Steve Ballmer’s heroic determination to compete with Google on search has helped us resolve a lot of very thorny issues that would arise if Google Web Search became a monopoly product. But while we all (in some ways even including Google) owe Ballmer a debt of thanks for doing this, it’s far from clear that it’s been a smart business decision for Microsoft. All the “Scroogled” ads in the world aren’t going to turn this into a market-leading product, and Google at this point seems to be benefiting from both superior engineering and strong network effects. But what will we do if Bing goes away?

I’ve used Bing. It works fine. In some ways it’s better than Google. In others it’s not. But there’s a very specific reason I’ve never switched: Bing has no advanced search page. Oh, you can do an advanced search if you care to remember the syntax for all the operators, but like millions of other people, I don’t care to do that. Google, conversely, makes it easy for me to do an advanced search. They also allow me to restrict a search to a date range, which is very, very handy.

Now, it’s true that most people don’t ever do an advanced search of any kind. They just type a few words into the search box and press Enter, which is one of the reasons that 99 percent of the world is hopelessly incompetent at searching the internet. But serious users use it, and it’s serious users who can end up being evangelists for your products. So why not add an advanced search page? The cost is basically zero, so it’s not like there’s really any downside. What’s the holdup?

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If Bing Wants to Attract Power Users, It Needs an Advanced Search Page

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Here’s Yet Another Obamacare Non-Horror Story

by ConnorWattersto Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here in California, we keep feeling the hammer blows of Obamacare. Thanks to the new law, our state’s largest individual health insurer is being forced to jack up insurance premiums for thousands of — oh wait. Let’s read the fine print here:

Thousands of Anthem Blue Cross individual customers with older insurance policies untouched by Obamacare are getting some jarring news: Their premiums are going up as much as 25%….Anthem Blue Cross said its plan to raise rates reflects that escalating healthcare costs are an economic reality industrywide.

The company said customers do have new options thanks to the healthcare law. “Many of the members affected here may be eligible for federal subsidies via the Covered California exchange and may have lower premiums if they decide to switch to an Affordable Care Act-compliant policy,” company spokesman Darrel Ng said.

Roger that. Premiums are skyrocketing for policies that have nothing to do with Obamacare. What’s more, Anthem Blue Cross is recommending that affected customers might want to check out the Obamacare exchange to see if they can get a better deal there.

This is yet another reason to be skeptical of claims that Obamacare is responsible for rate shock all over the country. It’s not a myth. It really has happened to some people. But the truth is that it affects only a small number of people; the horror story anecdotes routinely turn out to be either exaggerated or flatly false; and insurance companies have been jacking up rates for years anyway. They were going to do it in 2014 whether Obamacare existed or not.

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Here’s Yet Another Obamacare Non-Horror Story

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Here’s a New Attempt to Fight the Scourge of Publication Bias

by BennieW87ooqw Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tyler Cowen points today to a wonky but interesting new paper about publication bias. This is a problem endemic to scientific research that’s based on statistical analysis. Basically, researchers only publish something if their results are positive and significant. If their results are in the very large “can’t really tell for sure if anything is happening” space, they shove the paper in a file drawer and it never sees the light of day.

Here’s an example. Suppose several teams coincidentally decide to study the effect of carrots on baldness. Most of the teams find no effect and give up. But by chance, one team happens to find an effect. These statistical outliers happen occasionally, after all. So they publish. And since that’s the only study anyone ever sees, suddenly there’s a flurry of interest in using carrots to treat baldness.

The authors of the new paper apply a statistical insight that corrects for this by creating something called a p-curve. Their idea is that if the true effect of something is X, and you do a bunch of studies, then statistical chance means that you’ll get a range of results arrayed along a curve and centering on X. However, if you look at the published literature, you’ll never see the full curve. You’ll see only a subset of the curve that contains the results that were positive and significant.

But this is enough: “Because the shape of p-curve is a function exclusively of sample size and effect size, and sample size is observed, we simply find the free parameter that obtains the best overall fit.” What this means is that because p-curves have a known shape, just looking at the small section of the p-curve that’s visible allows you to estimate the size of the full curve. And this in turn allows you to estimate the true effect size just as if you had read all the studies, not just the ones that got published.

So how good is this? “As one may expect,” say the authors, “p-curve is more precise when it is based on studies with more observations and when it is based on more studies.” So if there’s only one study, it doesn’t do you much good. Left unsaid is that this technique also depends on whether nonsignificant results are routinely refused publication. One of the examples they use is studies of whether raising the minimum wage increases unemployment, and they conclude that once you correct for publication bias, the literature finds no effect at all (red bar). But as Cowen points out, “I am not sure the minimum wage is the best example here, since a ‘no result’ paper on that question seems to me entirely publishable these days and indeed for some while.” In other words, if a paper that finds no effect is as publishable as one that does, there might be no publication bias to correct.

Still, the whole thing is interesting. The bottom line is that in many cases, it’s fairly safe to assume that nonsignificant results aren’t being published, and that in turn means that you can extrapolate the p-curve to estimate the actual average of all the studies that have been conducted. And when you do, the average effect size almost always goes down. It’s yet another reason to be cautious about accepting statistical results until they’ve been widely replicated. For even more reasons to be skeptical, see here.

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Here’s a New Attempt to Fight the Scourge of Publication Bias

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MythBusters’ Kari Byron Explains How to Safely Blow Stuff Up When You’re Pregnant

by WillardDulhunty Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Most expecting women ask their doctors whether it’s okay to eat blue cheese, or have the odd glass of wine, while they’re pregnant. Or maybe whether to stay away from fish, because of the mercury. When she was pregnant with her daughter several years ago, though, MythBusters’ Kari Byron took her maternal Q & A to a whole different level.

“I’d be going to my doctor saying, ‘All right, so, when do I have to stop shooting guns because she has ears?'” recalls Byron on the latest installment of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “And the doctor would say, ‘Hmm, I have never, ever had that question before. I’ll get back to you.’ I come back a little later: ‘How far away do I need to be from an explosion of this much C-4?’ ‘Huh, I’ve never had that question asked. I have no idea, I don’t even know where to refer you right now, I’ll get back to you.'”

As a co-host of arguably the most successful science-based show on television, Byron has developed a reputation as a courageous and fun-loving guide to testing the truth behind so many ideas that we take for granted. Airing on the Discovery Channel since 2003, MythBusters seeks to either validate or bust myths, rumors and folk wisdom—and has managed to find that sweet spot where curiosity meets creativity, and plenty of stuff gets blown up. (The show boasts of over 750 detonations, “and counting.”) “The whole idea behind the show is that we’re not scientists,” says Byron. “It’s not a talking head telling you facts, it’s watching regular Joes experience the problem. And it just happens to be that the best way to explore myth is the scientific method, it’s the perfect narrative.”

In this mix, Byron has a special place: She’s the only female MythBusters co-host in a field, science entertainment, where women are all too often relegated to bit parts. Insofar as MythBusters is one of the few shows on television that increase rather than diminish our intelligence, Byron’s presence as a high-profile female role model promoting critical thinking and making science accessible is vitally important.

The MythBusters gang at the 2010 Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards in Los Angeles. Michael Germana/Globe Photos/ZUMA

She didn’t start out there: Byron originally wanted to make a living as a sculptor, but found herself working instead as a receptionist at an ad agency. “I was trying to figure out a way to be artistic, but still not be starving, because nobody was actually buying my sculptures,” she laughs. “They were a little dark.” That’s when a tour of MythBusters host Jamie Hyneman’s special effects workshop, M5 Industries, introduced her to a very different use of artistic materials. She begged for an internship and got it. “Not long after, they just pulled me onto the show,” she remembers.

Nowadays Byron is part of the MythBusters’ “Build Team,” a trio that includes herself, model-builder Tory Belleci, and electronics expert Grant Imahara. The Build Team often works separately from the original hosts, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman. Here’s a video of Byron and Imahara demonstrating just how loud the show’s detonations can be:

And here’s Byron on a recent myth test. The goal was to determine whether or not humans can outrun a horde of zombies. More specifically, how many zombies must there be in a given area (here, the size of a football field) before a human can no longer elude them, assuming the zombies can only move at about 2 miles per hour? Watch:

Asked about her favorite myths (either busted or proved true), Byron remembers one particularly scary one: Diving with sharks, with and without lights, to try to see if the sharks were drawn to flashlights (as many divers report). “And yes, they were attracted to flashlights,” Byron says. Maybe too much so: The team had to get out of the water on the flashlight dive for safety reasons.

A more recent episode, meanwhile, involved testing out strategies for deterring unwanted animals: from kittens, to snakes, to grizzly bears. When it comes to bears, it turns out cayenne pepper worked great. “The bear didn’t like that at all,” says Byron, “it was sneezing all over the place.” Later, Byron put the bear mace on her keychain for safety, and had it with her on a camping trip with her sister and brother-in-law. “And at one point,” she says, “I had gone to take a nap in the tent with my baby, and I hear my brother in law sort of freaking out. He’s like, ‘Wait, is this, this sunscreen on this keychain, this red stuff, it’s starting to burn!’ He had sprayed it all over his arms and rubbed it in, not realizing it was bear mace pepper spray. And he started running around, screaming, looking for things to pour on it. So, it also works on brother-in-laws.”

Here’s an aftershow of Byron and her co-hosts discussing what they found out about animal-repelling strategies:

Of course, Byron is also interested in—or, worried about—some more socially consequential myths. As a mom, she’s particularly appalled by the myth that vaccines cause autism. “It really frustrates me that things like this get propagated, this sort of pseudoscience, and still to this day get propagated,” she says.

Which gets back to why MythBusters isn’t just about running from zombies or swimming with sharks: It’s about a style of thinking, and a celebration of what we can do with our brains once we set up some reliable guidelines for using them. What’s more, if you combine together critical thinking lessons with actual mass entertainment in the way that MythBusters does, then you start to actually make a difference. The public response that Byron receives demonstrates just that.

“I’ve met so many mothers who were telling me that their girl was interested because I was on the show,” says Byron. “And that really touched me, because when I was 12 years old, I kind of stopped being interested in science. It wasn’t something that could compete with boys and rock stars and MTV. You didn’t have role models. Even on TV, the doctors were all men.”

So now, with MythBusters, with her recent show Head Rush on the Science Channel, and with future projects, Byron says her goal is to “find that 12 year old girl that I was, and keep her interested in science.”

What she can’t do, though, is guess ahead of time, without any investigation, which myths are true and which aren’t. “People think that I just have like the Webster’s of all myth knowledge,” she says.

“And I’m like, ‘I don’t know. I’d have to test that.'”

To listen to the full interview with Kari Byron you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a report by Mother Jones’ Brett Brownell on our growing ability to detect extra-solar planets, and a discussion of, yes, the myth that antioxidant vitamins protect against cancer.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” shows on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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MythBusters’ Kari Byron Explains How to Safely Blow Stuff Up When You’re Pregnant

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Economy Grows Fairly Decently in Q4

by Teofilnpc Posted on January 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Economic growth slowed down a bit in Q4, but remained fairly healthy. The BEA announced today that real GDP increased 3.2 percent last quarter, due almost entirely to private sector growth. Slowdowns in federal spending actually cut GDP growth by 0.98 percent—about two-thirds due to cuts in defense spending and one-third due to cuts in domestic spending. This is the price of austerity: if federal spending were growing at a normal rate at this point in a recovery, GDP growth last quarter probably would have stood at around 4.5 percent or so.

Everything else was pretty positive:

The increase in real GDP in the fourth quarter primarily reflected positive contributions from personal consumption expenditures (PCE), exports, nonresidential fixed investment, private inventory investment, and state and local government spending that were partly offset by negative contributions from federal government spending and residential fixed investment. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased.

Consumer spending increased decently, and inflation was extremely subdued at 1.2 percent. All in all, a decent report, if not a spectacular one. Now we all get to wait and see if it’s good enough to offset all the turmoil in emerging markets that’s got everyone so jittery.

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Economy Grows Fairly Decently in Q4

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Therapist to the 1 Percent Weighs in on the Psychological Hardship of Being Rich

by MichelineConte Posted on January 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last week, billionaire investor Tom Perkins of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers sent a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal likening criticism of the 1 percent to Nazi attacks on the Jews. He’s not an outlier. As Paul Krugman pointed out on Sunday, the rich have been lamenting the “demonizing” and “vilifying” of the 1 percent for years. “I…suspect that today’s Masters of the Universe are insecure about the nature of their success,” Krugman wrote. But the wealthy are not just afraid of losing their money to an angry middle class. Class warfare also makes the rich uncomfortable because they worry the non-rich are judging their character and personality by how much money they have, according to therapists who counsel the rich.

“I think that with Occupy Wall Street there was a sense of the heat getting turned up and a feeling of vilification and potential danger,” Jamie Traeger-Muney, a psychologist who counsels people who earn tens of millions of dollars a year, told Politico on Thursday. “There is a worry among our clients that they are being judged and people are making assumptions about who they are based on their wealth.”

In 2012, Mother Jones reported on how banks, including Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley, are increasingly hiring psychotherapists like Traeger-Muney to help their extremely wealthy clients deal with the complications that come with being extremely wealthy. Here’s a bit more of what wealth therapists can tell us about how the rich may be feeling right now:

Although wealth counseling has existed for years, the 2008 financial crisis really sent the aristocracy sprinting for the therapist’s chair. The 2010 Capgemini/Merrill Lynch World Wealth Report, a survey that takes the pulse of zillionaires around the world, found that after the crisis, spooked clients were demanding “specialized advice.” Financial advisers must “truly understand the emotional aspects of client behavior,” the report warned…

“Any time there’s an outside focus on wealth,” it’s not fun for the wealthy, Traeger-Muney says. Heirs, she adds, have it the worst: “They feel like they’re in this 1 percent position. They get bad press from people who make fun of them. It feels like their worst nightmare coming true: the idea that they’re now responsible for other people’s unhappiness and lack of wealth, when they didn’t ask for their millions.”

Ultimately, having lots of money shouldn’t be cause for alarm. “There’s a difference between money causing problems and a lack of ability to explore feelings around money,” Traeger-Muney says. “That’s what leads to psychological issues.” She just tries to get her clients to acknowledge the fact that they’re rolling in dough and learn how to enjoy it. “What would life be like if they didn’t have any restraints and could really create what they wanted?”

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Therapist to the 1 Percent Weighs in on the Psychological Hardship of Being Rich

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Monarch Butterflies Can Survive the World’s Most Amazing Migration—But GMOs Are Wiping Them Out

by Michalak876 Posted on January 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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The monarch butterfly is a magnificent and unique beast—the globe’s only butterfly species that embarks on an annual round-trip migration spanning thousands of miles, from the northern US and Canada to central Mexico. And monarchs aren’t just a gorgeous bug; they’re also pollinators, meaning they help keep land-based ecosystems humming. Their populations have been plunging for years, and the number of them hibernating in Mexico last year hit an all-time low, reports University of Minnesota ecologist Karen Oberhauser. Why? Here’s Oberhauser:

Tragically, much of their breeding habitat in this region the US and Canada has been lost to changing agricultural practices, primarily the exploding adoption of genetically modified, herbicide-tolerant crops in the late 20th and early 21st centuries … These crops allow post-emergence treatment with herbicides, and have resulted in the extermination of milkweed from agricultural habitats.

In a 2012 post, I teased out how crops engineered for herbicide tolerance wipe out milkweed, the monarch’s main source of food, and lead to the charismatic specie’s decline. And here’s the peer-reviewed paper, co-authored by Oberhauser, that documents the trend.

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Monarch Butterflies Can Survive the World’s Most Amazing Migration—But GMOs Are Wiping Them Out

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Republicans Just Won the Food Stamp War

by InaHeardql Posted on January 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday morning, Republicans won a years-long battle over whether to slash or spare food stamps when the House passed the farm bill, a $500 billion piece of legislation that funds nutrition and agriculture programs for the next five years.

The farm bill has been delayed for more than two years because of a fight over cuts to the food stamp program, which is called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Last June, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) forced a vote on a bill that would have cut $20 billion from SNAP. But conservatives said the cuts were not deep enough, Democrats said they were far too deep, and the bill failed, 234-195. That September, House Republicans drafted new legislation slashing $40 billion from the food stamp program. That bill passed the House with Republican votes only. After months of negotiations with the Democrat-controlled Senate, which wanted much lower cuts of around $4 billion, the House finally passed a farm bill 251-166 Wednesday that contains a “compromise” $9 billion in reductions to the food stamp program.

Both the Senate and President Barack Obama are expected to approve the legislation.

Here’s why the compromise level of cuts is a Republican win: In addition to the $9 billion in food stamp cuts in this five-year farm bill, another $11 billion will be slashed over three years as stimulus funding for the program expires. The first $5 billion of that stimulus money expired in October; the rest will disappear by 2016. In the months since the first $5 billion in stimulus funding was cut, food pantries have been struggling to provide enough food for the hungry. Poverty remains at record high levels, and three job applicants compete for every job opening.

And yet, despite the $5 billion in cuts that already happened and the guarantee of $6 billion more, Republicans succeeded in getting their Democratic peers to cut food stamps further. This is the first time in history that a Democratic Senate has even proposed cutting the program. Now the upper chamber is expected to pass cuts twice the level it approved last year.

“It’s a net loss for Democrats,” Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, tells Mother Jones. “It’s absolutely a GOP win,” agrees a House Democratic aide.

How did the GOP do it? In November, Dems said that Boehner was interfering with House-Senate negotiations on the farm bill, rejecting proposed legislation that contained shallower food stamps cuts. (Boehner’s office denies this.)

But Dems deserve much of the blame, the Democratic aide says. Last year, House liberals were scheming to get progressives to vote against any farm bill that contained SNAP cuts. The idea was that if enough progressives voted no along with the House conservatives who think the cuts are too low, Democrats could defeat the bill. In that case, food stamp funding would be preserved at current levels. A “$9 billion cut is too much…It hits in the gut,” Rep. Gwen Moore (R-Wis.) told Mother Jones earlier this month.

When the final bill came up for a vote in the House, the Congressional Progressive Caucus advised its 76 members to vote against the bill. But not enough Dems voted to block the cuts. One hundred three Democrats voted against the farm bill, but 89 voted in favor. If 43 more Democrats had voted no, the farm bill would have failed. “Dems are…complicit in changing the law, when they could just block the bill and let that status quo continue,” the Democratic aide says.

Democrats in the House and Senate agreed to cut nutrition aid for poor Americans because they “have shifted to the right on SNAP politically,” the staffer adds. “If Dems were as absolutist as the tea party, this bill would be dead on arrival and SNAP would continue as is.”

But the assault on the food stamp program “could have been much, much worse,” argues Ross Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University. Stacy Dean, the vice president for food assistance policy at the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), agrees. Democrats succeeded in stripping many draconian GOP provisions from the bill. Republicans wanted to impose new work requirements on food stamp recipients; allow states to require drug testing for food stamps beneficiaries; ban ex-felons from ever receiving nutrition aid; and award states financial incentives to kick people off the program. None of those measures were in the final legislation, Dean notes.

The cuts to the food stamp program come from closing a loophole that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agreed needed to be addressed. A household’s level of monthly food stamps benefits is determined by how much disposable income a family has after rent, utilities, and other expenses are deducted. Some states allow beneficiaries to deduct a standard utility charge from their income if they qualify for a federal heating aid program called the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, even if they only receive a few dollars per year in heating aid. The arrangement results in about 850,000 households getting a utility deduction that is much larger than their actual utility bill. Because the deduction makes these families’ disposable income appear to be lower than it actually is, they get more food stamp money each month. The farm bill that passed the House on Wednesday saves $9 billion by closing that loophole.

The savings from closing the heating aid loophole could have been returned to the food stamp program. Instead, Republicans succeeded in prodding Dems to accept $9 billion in new cuts on top of the $11 billion in expiring stimulus funds. That extra $9 billion in cuts means that close to a million households will see their benefits slashed by about $90 a month—enough to pay for a week’s worth of cheap groceries for a family of four.

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Republicans Just Won the Food Stamp War

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Milk Doesn’t Do a Body So Good After All

by ild4sho Posted on January 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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When I was a teenager, I drank a lot of milk. That made my bones strong, which is why I’ve been able to avoid fracturing my hip now that I’m over 50. Hooray for milk!

Except wait. Science™ has intruded on this idyllic marketing fantasy:

Researchers followed people for 22 years to see if drinking milk as a teenager affected the rate of hip fractures during the study period. What did they find? There were more than 1200 hip fractures in women and almost 500 hip fractures in men in the follow-up period. But it turns out that each additional glass of milk per day as teenagers was associated with a 9% HIGHER risk of hip fractures in men later in life. Drinking more milk had no effect in women.

In other words, regardless of what the ads say, as a teen there’s no protective effect of your “bones getting stronger” in terms of preventing hip fractures later in life by drinking milk. In fact, the evidence shows that it may make it more likely that males will develop hip fractures.

That’s a helluva thing, isn’t it? That Aaron Carroll is a real killjoy.

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Milk Doesn’t Do a Body So Good After All

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If Obama’s For It, It Must Be Bad, Part 3,476

by FranciscaDGY Posted on January 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Dave Weigel points today to a perfect distillation of one of the most important political dynamics in Washington DC right now:

Not everybody wants Obama to notice them. Advocates for Common Core standards — which guide guide math and language arts instruction from kindergarten through high school — would rather the president take a pass.

Common Core was developed by associations of state officials and nonprofit groups. But once Obama embraced it and had given states financial and policy incentives to adopt it, it immediately sparked a backlash….“It’s imperative that the president not say anything about the Common Core State Standards,” said Michael Petrilli, executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “For two years running, he’s taken credit for the adoption of these standards, which has only fueled critics on the right who see this effort as a way for the federal government to take over control of the schools.

“If he cares more about the success of this initiative than credit-taking, he will skip over it.”

There you have it. If Obama’s for it, tea partiers are against it. It doesn’t really matter whose idea it was in the first place.

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If Obama’s For It, It Must Be Bad, Part 3,476

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