Tag Archives: research

A climate research expedition was halted by … climate change.

by TrudiNeubauer Posted on June 13, 2017

There’s been much high-profile gushing over the spaceship-in-Eden–themed campus that Apple spent six years and $5 billion building in Silicon Valley, but it turns out techno-utopias don’t make great neighbors.

“Apple’s new HQ is a retrograde, literally inward-looking building with contempt for the city where it lives and cities in general,” writes Adam Rogers at Wired, in an indictment of the company’s approach to transportation, housing, and economics in the Bay Area.

The Ring — well, they can’t call it The Circle — is a solar-powered, passively cooled marvel of engineering, sure. But when it opens, it will house 12,000 Apple employees, 90 percent of whom will be making lengthy commutes to Cupertino and back every day. (San Francisco is 45 miles away.)

To accommodate that, Apple Park features a whopping 9,000 parking spots (presumably the other 3,000 employees will use the private shuttle bus instead). Those 9,000 cars will be an added burden on the region’s traffic problems, as Wired reports, not to mention that whole global carbon pollution thing.

You can read Roger’s full piece here, but the takeaway is simple: With so much money, Apple could have made meaningful improvements to the community — building state-of-the-art mass transit, for example — but chose to make a sparkly, exclusionary statement instead.

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A climate research expedition was halted by … climate change.

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Check out what career government staff is doing to fly under Trump’s radar.

by itsmejenny Posted on May 26, 2017

A report on the employment practices of green groups finds that the sector, despite its socially progressive reputation, is still overwhelmingly the bastion of white men.

According to the study, released by Green 2.0, roughly 3 out of 10 people at environmental organizations are people of color, but at the senior staff level, the figure drops closer to 1 out of 10. And at all levels, from full-time employees to board members, men make up three-quarters or more of NGO staffs.

Click to embiggen.Green 2.0

The new report, titled “Beyond Diversity: A Roadmap to Building an Inclusive Organization,” relied on more than 85 interviews of executives and HR reps and recruiters at environmental organizations.

Representatives of NGOs and foundations largely agreed on the benefits of having a more diverse workforce, from the added perspectives in addressing environmental problems to a deeper focus on environmental justice to allowing the movement to engage a wider audience.

The most worrisome finding is that fewer than 40 percent of environmental groups even had diversity plans in place to ensure they’re more inclusive. According to the report, “Research shows that diversity plans increases the odds of black men in management positions significantly.”

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Check out what career government staff is doing to fly under Trump’s radar.

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A Cup of Tea for Your Garden: How & Why to Make Compost Tea

by GradySiler Posted on May 13, 2017

Compost tea is an easy, organic way to enhance your soil. It is rich in nutrients and microorganisms vital for plant and soil health. Compost tea is made by soaking composted materials in water, and then using the water in your garden.

There are a few different methods of making compost tea. Each one needs a relatively small amount of organic matter, and only takes a few days, or less, of brewing. Many gardeners find the benefits for their gardens are worth the little extra effort of brewing compost tea.

Benefits of Compost Tea

1. Provides a wide range of nutrients.

Compost tea contains all the water-soluble nutrients from your compost. This means that the richer your compost is, the more nutritious your tea will be.

The nutrients will naturally be more diluted than in straight compost, so there is no danger of harming your plants by over-fertilizing. You can give your plants compost tea regularly for gentle, ongoing nutrition support.

2. Boosts soil microorganisms.

Beneficial fungi, bacteria, nematodes and protozoa all naturally live in a healthy compost pile. Many of these microorganisms will multiply in a compost tea.

Microorganisms are what keep soils, and what grows in them, alive. A small particle of soil can contain thousands of different species of microbes. They break down organic matter, recycle nutrients, maintain soil structure, promote plant growth and control pests.

When you apply the high numbers of microbes typically found in compost tea, it will help the local plants and ecosystem literally from the ground up.

3. Suppresses diseases

Theres increasing evidence that plant diseases can be suppressed by treating plants with compost teas. Teas brewed from all different methods appear to have benefits.

This is most likely due to the enhanced microbial populations. They support plant health, and stronger plants are less disease-prone. Also, the beneficial microorganisms can out-compete and inhibit the harmful species both above and below ground.

What to Put in Your Compost Tea

The most important ingredient is, of course, high-quality compost. Compost made from diverse, healthy organic matter will give you the best compost tea. Well-aged compost is also preferable because the older it is, the more microorganisms it will have. It should have been decomposing for at least a few months.

The particles in your compost should be small and well broken down. This will make the nutrients and microorganisms more easily available to be released into the water.

If you have a worm box, worm castings also make excellent compost tea.

Its best to use well water or rain water if possible. If youre using tap water that contains chlorine, let it sit overnight for the chlorine to dissipate.

Manure isnt ideal for tea because its not as nutritionally well-balanced as a good compost. Research manure tea brewing before attempting it to make sure you dont spread possible manure-borne diseases.

Also, be cautious about adding extra ingredients to your compost tea. Plain compost naturally goes through a period of high temperatures as it decomposes. This will usually kill most pathogens.

But, some compost tea brewers recommend adding ingredients to increase the bacteria diversity in the tea. This is more common in aerated teas, which may add molasses, kelp, humic acid, fish hydrolase or other products.

These additives have not been heat-treated like compost and are shown to potentially increase dangerous bacteria like E. coli and Salmonella in compost teas. If youre using additives in your teas, avoid applying them to food crops.

Brewing Methods

One of the most important factors for a healthy compost tea is air. The beneficial microbes need oxygen in the water to reproduce. If you allow a tea to become stagnant, it promotes anaerobic, potentially harmful microbes to take hold.

You can maintain oxygen in your tea by either hand-stirring or installing an electric bubbler. Both methods are described below.

1. Anaerobic

This is the easiest method. You simply need to put some compost in a bucket, add water and let it steep for up to three weeks. Stirring it a couple times a day will help keep it oxygenated.

Any size of bucket or container will work, depending on how much compost tea you need. A good ratio is around one part compost to 3-10 parts water. If you make a more concentrated batch, you can dilute it more as you apply it.

Leaving your tea to steep longer will give the beneficial microorganisms more time to multiply. But dont leave your tea for much longer than three weeks, because it can start to stagnate and kill the beneficial microbes.

CaliKim has a great video that goes over the basics of anaerobic brewing.

2. Aerobic

Anaerobic teas have been brewed for centuries, but aerobic teas are a modern invention. They involve inserting an aeration device into your brewing compost tea, such as an aquarium pump. This will provide much more oxygen than simply stirring an anaerobic tea.

Instead of mixing compost directly into the water, it is suspended in a porous bag. This makes it easier to run a bubbler through the water. The nutrients and microbes will slowly leach out of the compost and into the water. It is only brewed for up to 24 hours.

A ratio of one part compost to 10-50 parts water is recommended, which is less than an anaerobic tea. This means the nutrients will be more dilute as there is less organic matter in the solution.

Its said this increased oxygen will produce more and better microbe populations. Currently, there is limited research to prove whether or not this is true. In fact, anaerobic compost teas are shown to have somewhat better disease controlling effects.

The only way to find out for sure is by experimenting with it in your own yard. If youd like to make your own aerated compost, Fine Gardening has an excellent description of how to set up a home bubbler system.

Many pre-made systems are available commercially if you dont want to make your own. Ask your local garden center if they can recommend one, or find one online.

You can also buy fresh compost tea at many garden centers. These are a good option if you dont have the time or interest in brewing your own.

Pre-packaged compost teas are available as well, although their quality is questionable. Alive and active microorganisms are a vital part of compost tea. These would be difficult to package for any length of time.

Using Your Compost Tea

Compost tea can be applied to any plants, either in the ground or in containers. Use it freely on your vegetables, flowering plants, trees, shrubs or lawn.

Most compost tea wont need dilution, unless you only have a small amount and want to make it go farther.

You can use compost tea as a drench by simply watering your plants with it.

Compost tea can also be applied as a foliar spray. Strain your tea through cheese cloth or a fine sieve first to remove any particles that could clog your sprayer. Adding a couple drops of mild dishwashing liquid will help the tea adhere to leaves better.

Foliar feeding with compost tea is shown to boost a plants immediate uptake of nutrients. Although, it doesnt appear to have any benefit on long-term soil fertility.

Make sure you use your tea as soon as its finished brewing to prevent any pathogen growth. If your compost tea smells bad, this likely means it hasnt gotten enough oxygen. Pour any rancid tea into an unused area of your compost and start a new batch of fresh tea.

Related
Which Type of Mulch is Best for Your Garden?
25+ Beneficial Plants That Ward Off Pests and Protect Your Garden
9 Beneficial Bugs and Insects to Welcome in the Garden

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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A Cup of Tea for Your Garden: How & Why to Make Compost Tea

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Trump Just Picked a Contraception Skeptic to Head Federal Family Planning Efforts

by BerniceD49 Posted on May 1, 2017

Mother Jones

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After appointing the former president of a powerful anti-abortion group to head public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, the Trump administration plans to bring another anti-abortion advocate into the ranks at HHS—this time to oversee the Title X program, which allocates nearly $300 million per year in family planning funds to providers across the country and shapes policy and regulation about topics like contraception and teen pregnancy.

Politico reported on Monday that the administration has tapped Teresa Manning, a law professor and former employee of two anti-abortion groups, to be the deputy assistant secretary of the Office of Population Affairs, the department within HHS that oversees Title X. Manning is currently listed in the HHS employee directory, although the White House did not confirm the appointment to Politico. Manning, an adjunct professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, was formerly a legislative analyst at the conservative Family Research Council and a lobbyist for the National Right to Life Committee, the largest US organization opposing abortion.

Manning has questioned the efficacy of contraception in preventing pregnancy, and also said the government shouldn’t play a role in family planning—the foundational ideas behind the federal family planning program she will now be tasked with overseeing. In a 2003 radio interview, Manning noted that pro-choice advocates “promote contraception and birth control as a way to reduce the incidence of abortion. There really is no evidence to support that. In fact, the incidence of contraception use and the incidence of abortion go up hand in hand.” She also said that pro-choice advocates view abortion as a backup form of contraception for when birth control fails (oral contraception is effective over 99 percent of the time when taken properly): “Of course, contraception doesn’t work. Its efficacy is very low especially when you consider over years,” she said. Manning continued: “The prospect that contraception would always prevent the conception of a child is preposterous.”

Manning (who at the time had the last name Wagner) was quoted in a 2001 press release opposing the distribution of the morning-after pill over the counter, claiming the pills are abortifacients that “destroy the human life already conceived.” (Medical consensus disagrees, as the pills only prevent fertilization.) Manning also authored a 1999 article for the Family Research Council titled “The Empty Promise of Contraception.” The head of Trump’s HHS, former Georgia congressman Tom Price, also has a long history of opposing contraceptive access, including Obamacare’s mandate that health insurance cover birth control costs.

“I always shake my head. You know, family planning is what occurs between a husband and a wife and God,” Manning said during a 2003 panel about a book she edited. “And it doesn’t really involve the federal government, much less the United Nations, where we hear about family planning all the time. What are they doing in that business?”

In her new job at HHS, Manning will oversee a program that provides funding for contraception, STI testing, and other reproductive medical care for low-income and uninsured men and women across the country. According to the Guttmacher Institute, which provides research on reproductive health care, in 2015 Title X-funded clinics helped women avoid 822,300 unintended pregnancies.

“It is a cruel irony to appoint an opponent of birth control to oversee the nation’s only federal program dedicated to family planning,” said Dawn Laguens, the executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, in an emailed statement. “We are at the lowest rate of unintended pregnancy in 30 years and a historic low for teen pregnancy because of access to birth control. Someone who promotes myths about birth control and reproductive care should not be in charge of the office that is responsible for family planning at HHS.”

By law, Title X cannot fund abortion services, but the program has been swept up in the new administration’s efforts to signal a hard anti-abortion stance. Trump signed a law last month that would allow states to withhold Title X funds from reproductive health care providers who also offer abortions.

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Trump Just Picked a Contraception Skeptic to Head Federal Family Planning Efforts

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The Times is now publishing climate denial. Scientists are not having it.

by SelenaMaria01 Posted on April 28, 2017

Two weeks ago, the New York Times took on Bret Stephens — who once called climate change an “imaginary” problem — as an op-ed columnist in an effort to reflect more political perspectives.

His first column came out on Friday, and — surprise — it casts doubt on the certainty of the scientific consensus on climate.

Previously, while some readers had threatened to cancel their subscriptions as a result of his controversial stances on science, Muslims, and campus rape, “relatively few” had done so, wrote Liz Spayd, the Times’ public editor.

The backlash to Spayd’s piece was real. Climatologist Michael Mann canceled his subscription and started the Twitter hashtag #ShowYourCancellation.

“There is no left-leaning or right-leaning climate science, just as there is no Democrat or Republican theory of gravity,” wrote Stefan Rahmstorf, head of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, in his cancellation letter.

Other scientists joined in:

James Bennet, the paper’s editorial page editor, defended the decision to hire Stephens. We shouldn’t ignore the perspective of the “millions of people who agree with him,” he told HuffPost.

Well, yes — but millions of people have been wrong before. That doesn’t mean alternative facts should be given a platform.

Now that Stephens’ first piece is up, we’ll see if more cancellations follow.

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The Times is now publishing climate denial. Scientists are not having it.

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Trump Has Okayed a Pesticide That Terrifies These Families

by PatriciKAV Posted on April 19, 2017

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A white cloud of pesticides had drifted into Fidelia Morales’s back yard, coating her children’s swing set.

The 40-year-old mother of five gestured toward the citrus groves that surround her house in California’s Central Valley as she recounted when an air blast sprayer sent chemicals floating onto her property last year – landing on her family’s red and blue jungle gym.

“We know this is dangerous for the kids, but what are we supposed to do?” she said on a recent afternoon, speaking in Spanish through a translator. Morales said she fears that these kinds of drifts, as well as long-term exposure to a variety of chemicals in the air, have hurt her children, ages 9 to 20, who have struggled to focus in school and have suffered from bronchitis, asthma and other chronic illnesses.

Under Barack Obama, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed an agricultural ban on chlorpyrifos, one pesticide widely used in her region, based on the growing body of research documenting the risks for farm workers and communities, including links to brain damage in children.

Donald Trump’s administration, however, has rejected the science, announcing a reversal of the ban. That means that despite recent victories for families and environmentalists who have fought for more than a decade for protections from the insecticide, widespread use will continue in California, where a majority of the fruits and nuts in the US are grown.

“There’s a sense of helplessness,” said Luis Medellin, a 30-year-old dairy worker, sitting with his three younger sisters at his family’s home in the small agricultural town of Lindsay. “I’m being poisoned and I can’t do anything about it. It’s like a slow death.”

More than a dozen Latino residents in Tulare County, a rural farming community three hours north of Los Angeles, shared stories with the Guardian of direct pesticide poisonings from drifts and the long-term health challenges that they believe are linked to chronic exposure. They described children vomiting, suffering painful skin irritations, debilitating headaches and dizziness, as well as developing autism, learning problems, attention deficit disorders and respiratory ailments.

It’s difficult to conclusively determine how chlorpyrifos may have contributed to individual children’s conditions, but epidemiological studies have found links between the pesticide and a number of health conditions – research that led EPA officials to recommend the ban in 2015. Manufacturers and growers continue to assert that the chemical is safe and say that the studies are flawed.

Pregnant women who lived near fields and farms that use chlorpyrifos experienced an increased risk of having a child with autism, according to a University of California at Davis study. Low to moderate levels of chlorpyrifos exposure during pregnancy were also linked to lower IQs and memory problems, according to researchers at Columbia and UC Berkeley. Studies have further raised concerns about decreased lung function and reduced fertility.

Chlorpyrifos – a neurotoxic pesticide widely used to kill insects in almond, walnut, orange, grape, broccoli and other crop farming – was banned for residential use in 2000 because of environmental and health concerns.

The EPA’s prior move to prohibit the pesticide in agriculture stemmed from a decade-long legal fight with environmental groups, which are continuing to push for the ban in court. Under the new policy, the EPA won’t have to re-evaluate health risks of the chemical for another five years and its use will continue.

In California, Latino children are 91% more likely than white students to attend schools near heavy pesticide use, according to state data. Tulare County is also located in a region considered to have the highest poverty rate in the state and the worst air pollution in the US.

“We are very sick,” said Irma Medellin, community organizer with El Quinto Sol de America, a Lindsay-based advocacy group that has studied chlorpyrifos exposure and advocated for the ban. “Everyone who lives in this community is affected.”

In Tulare County, growers applied more than 1m pounds of chlorpyrifos in a five-year period, according to state data. A 2014 state report found that in one year, farmers applied more than 750 pounds of the pesticide within one-quarter of a mile of four different public schools.

Zenaida Muñoz, a 32-year-old mother of three, said she used to walk through the orange groves on a daily basis for exercise when she was pregnant with one of her sons, who is now nine years old. After he was born, he struggled to speak for several years and he had behavioral problems at home and in school. He was later diagnosed with autism.

Chlorpyrifos is frequently used on oranges.

“I never realized these chemicals could potentially cause harm,” she said, seated in her house in a small town called Cutler, as she clutched her newborn baby. Her son, now in the third grade, ran up to her with a squirt gun, begging to go play outside.

Muñoz said she now avoids the local orchards, especially when she can smell recently sprayed pesticide – a stench that makes her want to throw up.

Families that live across from the crops should consider moving, she added: “Even if it seems like they’re not impacted, they are.”

Domitila Lemus, 68, recalled an episode when a pesticide spray drifted toward a group of students on a school playground, including her eight-year-old granddaughter.

“They were out of breath. Some were throwing up,” Lemus recalled. “The children had teary eyes … It’s a strong smell that gets into your head and hurts your brain.”

Jannet Rodriguez, whose husband works in citrus, said workers were afraid to speak up: “They feel they’ll lose their jobs.” When she worked in agriculture, she said posted warning signs about the dangers of pesticides were never clear to her and other Mexican immigrants, many of whom don’t speak English. “They never told us what these signs meant.”

When Trump’s EPA head, Scott Pruitt, undid activists’ efforts one month after his confirmation – with a statement praising a return to “using sound science in decision-making” – families in Tulare County were devastated.

“It was pain in my heart,” said Amy Huerta, a 20-year-old college student who grew up in a trailer park in Lindsay where pesticides would often drift into their home. “Now we have to start all over again.”

One study detected chlorpyrifos in three-quarters of air samples in Lindsay – 11% above levels deemed “acceptable” by the EPA for 24-hour exposure by children.

Huerta recalled sharing a bed with her younger sister who would scratch herself bloody. Huerta said it was because of pesticides irritating her skin.

Morales said her nine-year-old son has trouble concentrating in school and staying seated in class—and that she suspects chlorpyrifos is likely to blame given the family’s proximity to citrus fields. Marianna Santos, pesticide supervisor in the Tulare County agricultural commissioner’s office, said the drift incident Morales described was under investigation, but that it did not appear chlorpyrifos was involved in that spray.

Bob Blakely, vice-president of California Citrus Mutual, a Tulare County industry group that supports chlorpyrifos, said growers were dependent on the chemical and claimed that its application is highly controlled in the state. “We’re very heavily regulated. I’d be more concerned about children not eating fresh fruits and vegetables.”

Dow AgroSciences, which manufactures the pesticide under the name Lorsban, has consistently argued that studies raising concerns are flawed and that Carol Burns, a Dow epidemiology consultant, criticized the UC and Columbia studies in an email, claiming that other research suggests there are “no significant associations between possible exposure to chlorpyrifos and any health effects in the children”.

The EPA did not respond to requests for comment.

Angel Garcia, El Quinto Sol community organizer and founder of the Coalition for Advocating for Pesticide Safety, said organizing against powerful agricultural interests was difficult in California and particularly in Tulare County.

“Money is the law here,” the Lindsay native said as he drove past a row of citrus groves. He and other activists are pushing California to be a leader in the resistance to Trump and ban chlorpyrifos in the absence of EPA’s inaction.

But it’s unclear if the state will take on that role. Asked about the calls for state prohibition, Charlotte Fadipe, a spokeswoman for the California department of pesticide regulation (DPR), said the agency was “looking at how this pesticide is used and if further restrictions on its use are warranted”.

“But,” she added, “that is not the same as an all-out ban.”

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Trump Has Okayed a Pesticide That Terrifies These Families

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Immigration and Crime: A Mini Data Dive

by ThorsteDailey Posted on March 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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This post is longish and doesn’t really have much payoff at the end. It’s just something that turned into a bit of snark hunt, so I figured I’d document it. You have been warned.

It starts with a column by Mona Chalabi, the Guardian’s “data editor,” which claims to outline her research on the question of whether illegal immigrants commit more crimes than native-born Americans. It’s faintly ridiculous and I’m a little annoyed by it, but then I come to this:

I find a study by Bianca E Bersani. I look her up — she’s a associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Using numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, her study finds that about 17% of all first-generation immigrants who are age 16 have committed a crime in the past 12 months….But wait. Is that number high or low? I decide to find out how often native-born people in the US commit crimes. Luckily, her study has that too. It’s higher: about 25% of all native-born people in the US who are 16 have committed a crime in the past 12 months.

That seems kind of high, doesn’t it? Then again, “committed a crime” could encompass things like smoking a joint or stealing a box of paper clips from school, so who knows? The data comes from a paper called “A Game of Catch-Up? The Offending Experience of Second-Generation Immigrants,” so I check it out. But there’s nothing there. The paper has nothing whatsoever to say about either 16-year-olds or first-generation immigrants. What’s going on? Here’s the chart Chalabi presents:

This is a little odd. It suggests that 25 percent of 16-year-olds have committed a crime in the past year, but only 20% of 17-year-olds. That doesn’t jibe with what I know about crime rates. And the source is Pew Research. So let’s go look at the Pew article. It’s a lengthy description of Bersani’s article, and it includes this chart:

This is odd again. It’s the same chart, all right, and the author spends a lot of time describing “A Game of Catch-Up?” But as I mentioned above, that article contains nothing like this at all. What’s more, it appeared in Crime and Delinquency, but the chart is sourced to Justice Quarterly.

So now it’s off to Justice Quarterly. It turns out that everyone is describing the wrong article. I wonder if any of them actually read it? The correct article is “An Examination of First and Second Generation Immigrant Offending Trajectories,” also by Bianca Bersani. Fine. What does that article say? Here is Bersani’s chart, colorized for your viewing enjoyment:

It appears that everyone has been copying the chart properly. For what it’s worth, though, I’d make a few comments:

This data is for all immigrants. Donald Trump’s focus is solely on illegal immigrant crime.

Bersani’s data is from 1997-2005. That’s pretty old. Crime and arrest rates of juveniles have gone down more than 50 percent since then, and the population of illegal immigrants has gone up more than 50 percent since then. I don’t know if that changes the relative values in this chart, but it would certainly change the absolute values.

The data comes from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which uses a very large oversample of Hispanic and black youth. Bersani appears to be using the full sample, and since Hispanic and black adolescents commit crimes at higher rates than whites, it means the numbers for native-born Americans are exaggerated. At a guess, the real figures are 2-3 percentage points lower.

The NLSY97 data includes six types of crime that were included in Bersani’s study: (1) damaging property, (2 and 3) stealing less or more than $50, (4) other property crimes, (5) assault/serious fighting, and (6) selling drugs. By far the biggest contributors were property damage and petty theft, with fighting in third place and the others far behind. Auto theft and using a gun to steal (not included in Bersani’s study) were minuscule:
Since the vast majority of the crimes in this study are minor—and we can assume that serious violent crime is even less prevalent—it’s not clear how much this tells us. I don’t think anyone cares much whether immigrant teenagers steal six packs of beer at a greater rate than native-born Americans. We mainly care about more serious violent crimes: robbery, rape, murder, and aggravated assault. Those aren’t addressed at all.

I’d add that Bersani didn’t just add up all the crimes committed by various groups. Her methodology is pretty impenetrable to anyone who’s not an expert:

I use group-based trajectory modeling…identifies clusters of individuals who display similar behavioral trajectories over a period of time…Nagin and Land’s (1993) semiparametric group-based modeling approach…estimated using a zero-inflated Poisson form of a group-based trajectory model:

where ln(kjit) is the natural logarithm of the number of total crimes for persons i in group j at each age t. The equation specified above follows a quadratic function of age (age and age2)….

I have no idea what this means or whether it’s appropriate, but I’m a little skeptical about a model that suggests that 17- and 18-year-olds commit crimes at lower rates than 16-year-olds. Most crime data I’ve seen shows the opposite. Then again, most crime data doesn’t include extremely minor crimes like shoplifting and property destruction. It’s possible that adolescents age out of that stuff pretty early.

Long story short, I wouldn’t draw too many conclusions from this study. The data is old; it’s not limited to illegal immigrants; it looks only at adolescents; the crimes under consideration are pretty minor; and the methodology is probably OK, but who knows? Put it all together, and I’d say it doesn’t tell us too much one way or the other about the serious crime rate of illegal immigrants as a whole.

I have yet to see a study that persuasively suggests a higher crime rate for immigrants than for anyone else. Let’s face it: if there’s anything we native-born Americans excel at, it’s crime. That said, the Guardian’s data editor should have known better. There are tons of studies out there that try to estimate the relative crime rates of native-born Americans compared to undocumented immigrants, and cherry picking this particular one makes no sense. It does provide a rough data point suggesting that crime rates of immigrants aren’t any different from the rest of the population, but it’s nowhere near the best study out there. Citing this one and calling it a day is a real disservice.

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Immigration and Crime: A Mini Data Dive

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Fast-Food-Loving Cornell Prof Faces Ethical Scrutiny

by AshleaMelina844 Posted on March 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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In 2014, I profiled Brian Wansink, a behavioral psychologist who studies how our surroundings affect our eating habits. Wansink runs Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab, a prolific group known for its clever dining research—one widely cited study, for example, found that people who keep their breakfast cereal in a cabinet weighed 21 pounds less on average than those who keep it on the counter; another showed that diners who sit near a restaurant’s entrance are 73 percent less likely to order dessert than those who sit in the restaurant’s interior.

I wasn’t the only one who thought Wansink’s work was cool. His research—some 200 studies since 2005—regularly makes headlines. But in January, a team of researchers reanalyzed the data from four of the Food and Brand Lab’s studies about pizza and turned up what appear to be serious problems: The researchers spotted 150 data inconsistencies. As Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman put it in a blog post: “Although the four papers were all based on the same data, they differed in all sorts of detail, which suggested that the authors opportunistically used data exclusion, data coding, and data analysis choices to obtain publishable (that is, p less than .05) results.”

In a blog post on Thursday, one of the researchers, University of Groningen Ph.D. student Nick Brown, pointed to what appear to be several incidences of self-plagiarism in Wansink’s writing. Brown also found that the data from two of Wansink’s studies—one from 2001 and another from 2003 “appear to be almost identical, despite purportedly reporting the results of two completely different studies.”

Wansink declined to comment on the accusations. Instead, he pointed to a statement on the lab’s website, where he writes, “We are currently conducting a full review of studies in question, preparing comprehensive data which will be shared and establishing new standards for future operations at the lab which will include how we respond to requests for research information.”

The statement also notes that Wansink has enlisted a Food and Brand lab member who wasn’t involved in the studies to reanalyze the data in question. This move has raised some eyebrows in the scientific community: Why not hire an independent researcher? Here’s how Wansink answered that question in a Q&A with the scientific integrity watchdog blog Retraction Watch:

That’s a great question, and we thought a lot about that. In the end, we want to do this as quickly and accurately as possible—get the scripts written up, state the rationale (i.e., why we made particular choices in the original paper), and post it on a public website. Also, because this same researcher will also be deidentifying the data, it’s important to keep everything corralled together until all of this gets done.

But before we post the data and scripts, we also plan on getting some other statisticians to look at the papers and the scripts. These will most likely be stats profs who are at Cornell but not in my lab. We’ve already requested one addition to the Institutional Review Board (IRB), so that’s speeding ahead.

But even though someone in my lab is doing the analyses, like I said, we’re going to post the deidentified data, the analysis scripts (as in, how everyone is coded), tables, and log files. That way everyone knows exactly how it’s analyzed and they can rerun it on different stats programs, like SPSS or STATA or SAS, or whatever. It will be open to anyone. I’m also going to use this data for some stat analysis exercises into one of my courses. Yet another reason to get it up as fast as possible—before the course is over.

In the same Q&A, Wansink defended his work on methodological grounds. “These sorts of studies are either first steps, or sometimes they’re real-world demonstrations of existing lab findings,” he said. “They aren’t intended to be the first and last word about a social science issue. Social science isn’t definitive like chemistry. Like Jim Morrison said, ‘People are strange.’ In a good way.”

Cornell has declined to intervene. In a statement to New York magazine, John J. Carberry, the university’s head of media relations, wrote, “While Cornell encourages transparent responses to scientific critique, we respect our faculty’s role as independent investigators to determine the most appropriate response to such requests, absent claims of misconduct or data sharing agreements.”

I’ll be tracking this story, and we will post updates as they occur.

Continued: 

Fast-Food-Loving Cornell Prof Faces Ethical Scrutiny

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Trump’s Other Executive Orders That May Target Immigrants

by BethanyMcCary Posted on February 23, 2017

Mother Jones

Controversy continues to boil over President Trump’s executive order imposing an immigration ban and his policies aimed at aggressively deporting undocumented immigrants. Two other executive orders signed by Trump earlier this month, focused on fighting crime, have gotten less attention—but sections of them also appear to target America’s immigrant population, a former Justice Department official says.

Trump’s executive order concerning crime reduction and public safety instructs the Department of Justice to establish a new task force to crack down on illegal immigration, drug trafficking, and violent crime. Among its duties will be to “identify deficiencies” in existing laws, make legislative recommendations, and improve data collection on crime trends. Another Trump order, focused on combating international cartels that conduct human trafficking and drug smuggling, directs the DOJ to develop a strategy against these groups that “have spread throughout the nation” and “have been known to commit brutal murders and rapes,” driving “crime, corruption, violence, and misery.”

Thomas Abt, a criminologist at the Harvard Kennedy School and the former chief of staff for the DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs, says these executive orders involve the usual activities of the DOJ, but also imply strategic priorities that are misguided and troubling. “Here in the United States, I think a connection between immigration—legal or illegal—and violent crime is not one that there’s any evidence for,” says Abt. One order suggests that increased drug trafficking by cartels is responsible for a “resurgence in deadly drug abuse and a corresponding rise in violent crime,” but there’s little evidence to support that, says Abt. He notes that the current opioid and heroine crisis took hold well before the recent spike in violent crime in some US cities.

There is also no evidence to suggest that cartels are more active in the US now than they have been historically. And while mayhem from the drug cartels ravages Mexico and central American countries, and is played up by anti-immigration pundits, violence in the US connected to the cartels is nowhere near that scale. Research published in 2015, for example, found that even at the height of cartel violence in 2010, there was “no notable increase” in crime along the US side of the border that correlated with the spike in murders in Mexico.

“The way it’s being framed as this new Bogeyman is just not accurate,” Abt says. Moreover, the executive orders “suggest that what’s coming next is not a smart, data-driven approach to these issues. They suggest the beginning of a fear-based effort.”

Abt sees a potential return to 1980s and 1990s tough-on-crime policies—championed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions—that have been eschewed as ineffective by leading crime reduction experts. With the call to “assess” the allocation of money and resources to federal agencies’ for fighting international criminal orgs, Abt also says there could be a shifting of resources by the Trump administration from proven crime-reduction efforts to ideologically based efforts.

Perhaps most troubling, Abt says, is a Trump directive to publish a quarterly report on the criminal convictions of people involved with international criminal organizations. This could be used as a pretext to discriminate against immigrants—similar to how the threat of terrorism is being used to justify banning travel by immigrants from the seven Muslim-majority countries.

“It’s clearly designed to marshal public opinion,” Abt says. “This is Willy-Horton-style, everybody-get-scared type of politics.”

Continue reading here – 

Trump’s Other Executive Orders That May Target Immigrants

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Trump Will Require All EPA Science to Be Screened by Political Staffers

by yX8kD0qE3l Posted on January 25, 2017

Mother Jones

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The Trump administration is requiring that political appointees review all Environmental Protection Agency studies and data prior to public release, according to a report from the Associated Press. The controversial new rules, which will also apply to information displayed on the EPA’s website, have sparked outrage from scientists and journalists.

“We’re taking a look at everything on a case-by-case basis, including the web page and whether climate stuff will be taken down,” said Doug Ericksen, the communications director for the EPA transition team, in an interview with the AP. “Obviously with a new administration coming in, the transition time, we’ll be taking a look at the web pages and the Facebook pages and everything else involved here at EPA.”

Former EPA employees reportedly told the AP that the Trump administration’s rules “far exceed” those imposed by previous administrations:

George Gray, the assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Research and Development during the Republican administration of President George W. Bush, said scientific studies were reviewed usually at lower levels and even when they were reviewed at higher levels, it was to give officials notice about the studies—not for editing of content.

“Scientific studies would be reviewed at the level of a branch or a division or laboratory,” said Gray, now professor of public health at George Washington University. “Occasionally things that were known to be controversial would come up to me as assistant administrator and I was a political appointee. Nothing in my experience would go further than that.”

The EPA’s scientific integrity policy, which was created under former President Barack Obama, mandates that research and actions be “grounded, at a most fundamental level, in sound, high quality science” that is “free from political interference or personal motivations.”

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Trump Will Require All EPA Science to Be Screened by Political Staffers

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