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"Got Milk?" Not early humans.
February 28, 2007 09:53 AM
Very informative article about gene selection in the neolithic Scientific American.
It seems there was severe environmental and evolutionary pressure to select for lactose tolerance in the Neolithic.
LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (1)
Seeing things at Disney before they got rid of Eisner
I wrote this as an Op Ed to the LA Times back in 2002. They declined to publish it and I can see why. It was not so long after this that Eisner was removed as Chairman. But, the malaise still lingers and, more troubling, financial markets still over react to forecasts of earnings and "earnings disappointments." They ought to fire the forecasters.
As I write this, Disney is downgrading its quarterly earnings forecasts because its animated motion picture Treasure Planet opened to lower than expected revenues. This event reveals the depth of the troubles at Disney and more---revised earnings estimates and tumbling stock prices have become a common occurrence in financial markets. In light of recent revelations of the errors and misdeeds of financial analysts, I have to ask: when did a company like Disney and when did financial markets generally adopt the belief that financial forecasts are infallible?
In science when a model predicts incorrectly you get rid of the model and look for a better one. And, you don't allow yourself to be fooled by randomness. What Disney did was shoot their movie rather than their financial analysts when they got the forecast wrong. It isn't the movie's fault the forecasters got it wrong and every forecast has an error band around it that should be acknowledged. But Disney chose to announce their forecasting error as a ``disappointment'' in Treasure Planet's opening gross, elevating the model to infallibility and ignoring randomness. The irony is that what began as a forecast error may become a self-fulfilling prophesy if Disney's actions make people believe Disney doesn't think the movie is any good.
The syllogism is strange. Let me see if I can get it down right. First, the accountants or forecasters at Disney predict opening revenues and get it wrong. Then, rather than acknowledging that the model was wrong, they say they are ``dissappointed'' in Treasure Planet's opening. This shifts the blame from the model, where it belongs, to the movie, where it doesn't. Then they use this model (that got it wrong at the opening) to forecast revenue far into the future, predicting all of Treasure Planet's theater revenues through its run, compounding the initial error exponentially. This series of errors then becomes the basis for revising Disney's expected earnings downward.
This is troubling because these kinds of mistakes are made at other studios too and in financial markets in general. First, financial models are not very good at forecasting earnings and they become worse the farther into the future they project. Second, financial variables are volatile. This means that the models will often be wrong because of randomness rather than changing fundamentals. Third, financial models fail miserably when it comes to forecasting motion picture revenues because even God Almighty doesn't know what a motion picture will gross.
On these grounds, there is little basis for Disney's announcement that they were revising their earnings estimates downward and less reason for the price of its stock to move. Since the stock price is the discounted present value of a company's future earnings, a random variation or forecasting error for one quarter's earnings should have little effect on the share price. This could only happen revised earnings estimates for one quarter significantly altered expectations over a long future. But, Bayes theorem tells us that a random variation in one quarter's earnings shouldn't carry much weight. This fundamental analysis suggests there is altogether too much reaction in financial markets to ``disappointing news.''
Where Disney went wrong is in having too much faith in their financial analysts. No one knows what a movie will gross. My research (Hollywood Economics: Chaos in the Film Industry) shows (and every movie fan knows) that motion picture revenues are not forecastable; the forecast error is infinite. There is no correlation between opening revenues and total revenues for any movies that are successful. Opening revenue is only a good predictor of total revenue for movies that die in their second or third week. All successful Disney movies (most of the animated ones are) enjoy long runs so that opening revenues become a small portion of their total revenue. And, all successful movies reach a point (about four or five weeks into the run) where they separate rapidly from the pack. This bifurcation point in the mapping is a signature of chaos in the non-linear dynamics of motion picture revenues.
Given how little information is contained in a movie's opening, the weight studios place on it is troubling, particularly at Disney which is a studio where film revenues depend on long runs. Disney movies endure and do not have to open big. The difference between opening big and enduring is like the difference between a one-night stand and a long relationship.
Joseph E. Levine was the master of the one-night stand. Levine promoted his movies heavily so they opened big (pumping up the yokels it was called). By the time the audience found out it was a stinker, the movie was out of town. The movie ``road-showed'' in a series of one-night stands with the usual results: big expectations, short runs, and broken hearts. Disney movies have never been like one-night stands; they bond with the audience in a long-term relationship and do a lot of repeat business.
There is a difference between a movie that opens big and a movie that is good and enduring. If Disney is trying to make movies that open big, then its heritage is at risk. So it is troubling and, perhaps, symbolic of Disney's malaise that some bean counter there is writing off a \$140 million movie in its first week and management is falling for it. When the message is wrong, shoot the messenger not the movie. And, don't be fooled by randomness.
LINK · The Movie Business · Comments (1)
A New Workout
February 27, 2007 08:43 PM
I have been doing something rather new in the gym lately. Just getting into it so I am not sure how it will work, but it is a take off on my old idea of Alactic Workouts, which I also called One Fives in my Essay.
If you recall that part of the Essay, I described alactic workouts as workouts that did not produce the abundance of lactic acid that my Hierarchical sets were intended to do. After a warm up on the particular exercise to lube the joints and get the muscles ready, I do 5 one reps separated by a 5 second pause. That means I lift a heavy weight one time, put it down, rest 5 seconds, and then do another rep. I continue until I have done 5-1 reps in all. Then I move to the next exercise.
When you first begin working out this way you may need 15 or 20 seconds to recover before you do another rep. Be sure you are ready for this. Nothing very heavy to begin. Practice excellent form.
I have lately seen this protocol mentioned elsewhere, though I forget where. It is an old idea if you know Evolutionary Fitness, but it now seems to be catching on a bit.
The theory and science behind this is to avoid the fatigue that comes with the build up of lactic acid in the muscle so that each rep is performed with little or no fatigue. This permits perfect form, quick movements, and the handling of heavy weight in a very safe manner. In my view, there is little meaning to the counting of reps. It is the quality of the movement and the execution of perfect form without fatigue that counts. And the challenge of recovering quickly from a strong exertion. If I want to lean out, then I use the hierarchical sets (15, 8, and 4 reps of the same exercise at progressively higher weight to release lactic acid and HGH). I am so lean now that I want muscle quality and power. So, I am doing 5-1 reps on all my exercises, followed by a negative for certain muscles.
This kind of workout is over in very little time and I find it to be immensely productive. It is a bit advanced, so you should introduce 5-1s gradually into your workouts.
Here is roughly what I am doing now (it always varies). As always, do this only if you feel you can do so safely and feel you are ready to handle it. In truth, this method is far safer than going to failure or forcing reps when your muscles are fatigued with lactic acid build up.
Read More »LINK · Evolutionary Fitness ~ · Sports · Comments (5)
Music
February 26, 2007 10:09 AM
I have music on most of the time in my home and in my car. Usually, it is jazz or a bit of country, with Sinatra and classical music mixed in. I am not sure why, but have often speculated that I am working my motor systems by practicing movements even when still. I surely do this when I simulate a baseball or golf swing in my mind or see a curve I follow on a motorcycle.
New research shows that when listening to music the motor areas of the brain are indeed active. Have a look at one of my favorite sites SfN.
LINK · Evolutionary Fitness ~ · Sports · Comments (2)
Climate Police
February 25, 2007 08:35 PM
This website will take the place of my posts on climate change Climate Police. There is much scientific research here to show that there is no consensus on the topic and that natural variation is large, so large that current models (which assume damped variation and only derive their variation by altering model assumptions rather than incorporating the stochastic processes themselves) are off by a wide mark.
I remind you that this is not a political issue, but a scientific one. Those of you who think you know my politics are missing the point, and also wrong. I scarcely have a politics and happen to despise politics and most politicians. I value freedom and truth and skepticism.
The Earth is an open complex system operating far from equilibrium, just as humans are. The order comes from the dynamics. No model captures this chaotic form of order. The variation is part of the organizing process. If you look at any of the data (and I have modeled some of these series) you will see that they are fractal processes with a natural variation that is typical of a self-organized and complex process. These are the same principles you will find at the heart of Evolutionary Fitness and that are lacking in the monotonous and over-managed approaches you may have come to see as inappropriate to a complex human organism.
LINK · Uncertainty · Comments (1)
Brain Nourishment
My daughter-in-law Christine sent me a very informative link to a Guardian news report on research investigating brain biochemistry and violent behavior. Many of the points raised by researchers will be familiar to readers, as I have written about them before. The crowding out over metabolic pathways and the importance of retaining membrane flexibility to maintain a healthy brain are key points of course. So is the unstated relation between membrane fluidity and insulin sensitivity. Even the brain becomes insulin resistant and thus Omega 3 intake is crucial to good nourishment through this mechanism. Earlier research, some of it done at UCI by colleagues, seemed to point to an imbalance of minerals in the brain, particularly of manganese, and violent behavior. Even this link may relate to fatty acid intake for minerals must enter the brain through the membranes and will be deficient if the membrane is not permeable.
I get my Omega 3s in fish and cod liver oil, though I do take Mark Sisson's Omega 3 tablets when I don't eat fish.
LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (2)
Gored
February 23, 2007 10:01 AM
My idea of hell would be to be locked in a room and forced to listen to Al Gore speeches over and over again. The upcoming Academy Awards look to be a Gore fest and I will pass on watching them. The best part is Joan Rivers cutting up attendees anyway and that precedes the ceremony.
It is striking how some pictures of him speaking look like Hitler; veins popping, mouth in a full scream, and fists clenched. He is a fascist sort of character, bent on his own truth and brooking no criticism. He is green on the outside and red on the inside as his agenda for leveraging environmental concerns and promoting fear is aimed directly at centralized government control of the US economy and subservience to a world government.
Watch as Congress jumps on this wagon to pass or threaten laws that will fill their reelection campaign coffers with funds. Long-lasting incumbency is one of the most pernicious aspects of our government. Civil service protections are also deleterious because the bureaucrats run most of the real show beneath these protections. Presidents have almost no power over them. They can sabotage policy.
There is a nice summary of the errors in Gore's movie at this Wrong, but Red.
Be sure to read Dr. Spencer's questions for Gore. Note also, as I have often said, the natural variation in CO2 in the Hawaii data is so large that any changes that can be measured are dominated by the variation. When the variations are on the order of 50% of the average, the average conveys almost no information.
LINK · Uncertainty · Comments (7)
Way Too Much Food
February 20, 2007 09:00 AM
An amusing, but ominous, prediction of the progress of the War on Fat from Way too much.
Off for a few days to ride my KTM 525 in the mountains of Eastern Nevada. Great discussion on failure and related things. Don't go to failure, it teaches failure, There is no failure, only feedback.
LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (7)
A Real Journalist's Skepticism on Global Warming
February 15, 2007 05:02 PM
Maybe the consensus is breaking a bit, or maybe not. Journalists are buying UN propaganda without the skepticism they would ordinarily show over an eye witness to a crime or other event. It is an agenda, not news. Many of our journalists are of the 1960's era. It happens that this is one of the most uneducated cohorts to live in the United States. This is true for two reasons: one this generation attended college at a lesser rate than any cohorts before or since for many decades (this fact was noted by Chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisors Ed Lazeer in his recent discussion of the Report of the Council) and two, what education they did receive was watered down and instilled with antiwar and revolutionary content. (I was at a university in the latter part of this time frame where faculty meetings were interrupted by communist sympathizing students and antiwar protesters).
Finally, here is a journalist who puts some of this global warming hype by the press in context Reporters Who Lack Skepticism.
LINK · Uncertainty · Comments (0)
Independent Assessment of the IPCC Summary
February 14, 2007 05:18 PM
We can wrap up this topic for a while as the independent assessment of the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers is now available at this link. I was one of the reviewers and thought the report was a good representation of the science, even though, in my opinion, it did not reveal the real extent of uncertainty of the estimates. It might also have shown even more how different are the estimates of the various and over-many models of the Earth's environment and its place in the cosmos (did you ever think how ridiculous the aims of these models are?).
My own opinion on this issue? Scientific consensus is meaningless; only the facts matter at this stage and they are completely inconclusive. Nobody adequately deals with the complexity of these natural processes. The models surely do not and they will be gone if someone pulls the plug on the socialist agenda of the UN. No funding ought to go to schemes that fail to address the commons problem I alluded to before.
Create more secure property regimes and market incentives to permit flexibility and incentives for good solutions to the environmental commons problem (nobody owns any of the mediums through which pollution occurs). The UN schemes and of the socialist planners will make an East Germany of our entire planet. This is by far the greater danger.
Clean up the world with secure property systems that are more inclusive of environmental dimensions, private incentives, and market systems. The contribution of man to global warming is minute at best and uncertain. If we clean up the planet, even that questionable contribution will be diminished to inconsequential.
LINK · Uncertainty · Comments (12)
The Omnicompetent State
February 13, 2007 02:55 PM
Theodore Dalrymple exposes the rot at the core of British government and its demoralizing and dehumanizing of the British population and its ethics. Dalrymple.
LINK · Complex Systems · Comments (3)
The Glaciers are Melting (NOT)
Three scientists discuss the glaciers of India
They haven't really changed and are very different, being on high ground, from others. Natural variation is present and relatively high, so persistent loss or gain is difficult to detect over short time periods.
LINK · Uncertainty · Comments (0)
Environmentalism as Central Planning
Claudia Rossett picked up the same interview I read yesterday with the Czech president Vaclav Klaus comparing the UN-promotion of global warming to a drive to central planning. See her comments and then UN promoting planning.
Klaus is smart and biting in his comments and he is right, far more could be done to improve the environment through reforms in property rights. Not just property rights in the land, but in property rights in air and water. Both are now commons under implicit government ownership, so there is no owner. The result is these resources are over used as disposal sites for a large range of pollutants, an environmental version of the tragedy of the commons.
LINK · Uncertainty · Comments (0)
Cosmic Rays
February 12, 2007 08:35 AM
A bit more evidence and an elaboration of the sun's effect on cloud formation.
I find it very interesting that the publication of the original research was delayed for years (something I have experienced when I showed the the Herfindahl Index on which game theoretic models of "concentrated" industries does not exist when you recognize the volatility of market shares). Similarly, McKitrick and Patrick's refutation of the Hockey Stick was years in the journal pipelines before it was published and later confirmed by many other studies.
There are a lot of open questions and missing feedbacks in these super-sized, who knows what is really going on, climate models. Economics may have lost a generation of modelers and econometricians during its infatuation with huge models of the economy. It seems to me that a similar episode of unexplored new ideas are being left on the table in the rush to garner grant dollars for climate research under the greenhouse impetus.
LINK · Uncertainty · Comments (1)
At the center of UN Networks of Corruption
February 8, 2007 08:10 AM
Claudia Rossett is one impressive reporter. Here is her work reporting on Michael Strong's role in many UN shady enterprises.
I came across this looking for the UN's environmental programs. It turns out the Strong is the lead person here too. He chaired the UN Rio Conference.
I suggest we all read the IPCC Assessment written by the scientists which comes out next month rather than the summary written by UN personnel.
LINK · Everything · Comments (0)
My Expert Can Beat Up Your Expert
February 7, 2007 10:00 PM
The debate among persons taking one position or the other on global warming/climate change/government action/and what have you often takes the form of "My expert is smarter or more distinguished than your expert."
So, we line up the experts and see which side has more clout. I have been in many litigation trials where that was the main argument or other cases where one lawyer was "smarter" or from a more prestigious firm than yours.
It doesn't matter. When the science is incomplete, there are no decisive experts. And when few of the models account for natural variation, or rely on dumb tests of statistical significance (an artifact of earlier statistics that fails to account for the social significance of events) then no body really knows much.
It is clear that the IPCC summary of the fourth assessment is both a scientific and a political entity and the summary recently released glosses over uncertainties that are in the full report by the scientists, to be released later. It is also clear, if you care about who is on whose payroll, that the UN staff are paid by one of the most corrupt and wholly unaccountable organizations in the world. And, most of the climate scientists depend on government grants. So, there are few disinterested individuals in this discussion on either side. And there are many sides to the discussion, not just for or against massive government involvement in our lives.
The governor of Oregon wants to fire or change the name of the Oregon Climate Scientist because he thinks the debate is unsettled because it fails to account for the natural variation in the climate. This is close to my position. The Earth is warming, but not unusually so and wholly within natural variations revealed in the historical data. The governor thinks that the paid scientist should reflect the position of the government of Oregon.
So, it is of little use to line up your experts against someone else's. Let's continue the debate without drawing conclusions. There is no rush, but many economic interests are at stake and you can see them by the way politicians and corporations are lining up behind ethanol and alternative energy sources, none of which compare to natural gas and oil in efficiency.
By the time the evidence is settled (if ever), we may see large scale cooling if the solar cycles hypothesis is true. Kyoto will not make any contribution to reducing emissions, but it does give Russia, India, and China a free hand and pushes the burden onto others.
There are lot of other problems more serious than climate change, but the money isn't there and the political power is not there. So, genocide, aids, sanitation, free trade and promoting freedom fall by the wayside while we are stuck in this unproductive and completely unsettled debate. It seems to be more about establishing your own sense of morality to many; I believe in global warming and am therefore more virtuous than you. Or something like that.
LINK · Uncertainty · Comments (18)
Mark Steyn on "Global Warming"
February 5, 2007 06:47 AM
This topic is so interesting that I can't resist putting Mark's comment on the global warming science and the crowd pushing it. Some Like it Hot.
I estimated the distribution of rain fall from ice core data for my own interest. I found it is a fractal distribution with an infinite variance and an infinite mean. That means there isn't even a 100 year flood plain, as our experts claim and our mortgage companies worry about. And it is known that 40% of the erosion damage in a decade is caused by a single rain storm. Moreover, in my Economics of Extreme Events course at UCI, students verified the large natural variation of tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes. All this implies that the natural variation in the "climate" is very large and that few if any conclusions regarding "change" can be supported by the statistics.
Steyn is right to pinpoint how the hypothesis mutates from "cooling", to "warming" and then the safer "change", which is harder to falsify. But, remember, change in the statistical sense is a deviation far out in the tail of deviations. To test that, you need to know the natural deviation and it is so large and unaccounted for that few if any of the studies have documented change, which in this case must a series of deviations so large and sustained they signal a shift in the underlying distribution.
LINK · Uncertainty · Comments (6)
A Physcists View on Global Warming and Man's Contribution
February 4, 2007 03:09 PM
This view is more consistent with how I see the evidence and of the scientists whose work I reviewed prior to the release of their comment on the Fourth Assessment.
It is sheer speculation to say that man has warmed or cooled the Earth through our emission of "greenhouse" gasses. By the way, there is no greenhouse effect of the sort typically used to describe the effect of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Be sure to read the other articles in the series to get a view of the distinguished scientists who find other mechanisms drive the Earth's climate, particularly the Sun. Mars is warming too and the simultaneous warming of both planets can is only consistent with a common driving external source, solar and more distant star irradiation.
More than a few of the articles point to coercion and misrepresentation of scientists who cast doubt on the central dogma of climate alarmists.
From a decision theoretic point of view, you do not have enough evidence or underlying physics to accept an hypothesis on the linkage between policy actions and outcomes.
There are other sites that are more effective forums for this topic; aside from posting the summary of the science that I recently reviewed and some links, I will return to my more customary topics.
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