Jim Johnson's List: Trends

• Second Amendment
• the idea of a fully 3D-printable gun now seems inevitable. Last year, 3D CAD models of a lower receiver for a semiautomatic rifle sparked controversy when they popped up online. Then a gun enthusiast tried - and succeeded - to use one to fire 200 rounds of ammunition. 
• It is lawful to build a firearm for personal use in the U.S., but making one out of plastic may violate a 1988 law designed to prevent people from sneaking such guns through airport security

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• The link between childhood trauma and adult outcomes was striking.
• In Paul Tough's essential book, "How Children Succeed," he describes what's going on. Childhood stress can have long-lasting neural effects, making it harder to exercise self-control, focus attention, delay gratification and do many of the other things that contribute to a happy life.
• In the past several decades, policy makers have focused on the material and bureaucratic things that correlate to school failure
• But, more recently, attention has shifted to the psychological reactions that impede learning -- the ones that flow from insecure relationships, constant movement and economic anxiety.
• Attention has shifted toward the psychological for several reasons. First, it's become increasingly clear that social and emotional deficits can trump material or even intellectual progress.
• Second, over the past few years, an array of psychological researchers have taught us that motivation, self-control and resilience are together as important as raw IQ and are probably more malleable.
• Finally, pop culture has been far out front of policy makers in showing how social dysfunction can ruin lives.

• Schools are now casting about, trying to find psychological programs that will help students work on resilience, equanimity and self-control. Some schools give two sets of grades -- one for academic work and one for deportment.

  And it's not just schools that are veering deeper into the psychological realms. Health care systems are going the same way, tracing obesity and self-destructive habits back to social breakdown and stress.
• But, in their disjointed ways, they are all dealing with the same problem
• Maybe it's time for people in all these different fields to get together in a room and make a concerted push against the psychological barriers to success.

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• The share of American households with guns has declined over the past four decades, a national survey shows, with some of the most surprising drops in the South and the Western mountain states, where guns are deeply embedded in the culture.

  The gun ownership rate has fallen across a broad cross section of households since the early 1970s
• The household gun ownership rate has fallen from an average of 50 percent in the 1970s to 49 percent in the 1980s, 43 percent in the 1990s and 35 percent in the 2000s

• Measuring the level of gun ownership can be a vexing problem, with various recent national polls reporting rates between 35 percent and 52 percent. Responses can vary because the survey designs and the wording of questions differ.

  But researchers say the survey done by the center at the University of Chicago is crucial because it has consistently tracked gun ownership since 1973, asking if respondents "happen to have in your home (or garage) any guns or revolvers."

  The 2012 survey, conducted mostly in person but also by phone, involved interviews with about 2,000 people from March to September and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

  Gallup, which asks a similar question but has a different survey design, shows a higher ownership rate and a more moderate decrease. No national survey tracks the number of guns within households.

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• Climatologist Michael Mann’s bombshell study from years back created the “hockey stick” graph, showing that in the past century, the Earth’s overall temperature spiked, like a case of planetary flu. This study was immediately attacked by climate change deniers, who continue to flail away at it today.
• now, a new study shows that this spike in temperatures is unprecedented going back over one hundred centuries.
• What they found is simply stunning: The rate at which the globe is warming right now is far, far faster than it ever has going back as far as they could measure, up to 11,300 years ago.
• In fact, over the past 5000 years, the Earth actually cooled by about 1.3°F…until the last 100 years, when our temperature spiked upwards by about the same amount.
• Unfortunately, there’s worse news: Pretty much every prediction by climate scientists shows that this rate will not slow, and in fact may have been underestimated.

• The predicted ~8° F rise is not a joke, nor is it some sort of exaggeration for effect. It’s the result of several studies showing just how much human activity is affecting our planet. We’re pumping 30 billion tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere every year—100 times as much as all volcanoes combined—and all that carbon dioxide is upsetting the heat balance in our atmosphere. We retain more of the heat from sunlight, and that warms us up. It’s really that simple, despite the frothing from the deny-o-sphere.

     

        

      

  And of course, the usual suspects are already trying to decry this new study, but as they always do they have to resort to twisting reality into a Möbius strip. But this is nothing new when it comes to denier claims. Their methods are always the same: cherry-picking data that supports their argument but ignores huge amounts of evidence refuting them, displaying misleading graphs, and out-and-out witch hunts and attacks. If you can’t attack the science, don’t worry, just keep attacking anyway.

     

        

      

  The bottom line here is the same as it has been for a long, long time: The planet is warming up. The rate at which the temperature is rising took a huge leap starting a century ago, and it’s due to human activity. We’re seeing the effects now, from the ice caps melting to changes in vegetation growth rates. There is no scientific controversy here, just a manufactured political and ideological one.

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• About two years ago, the folks at Google released a database of 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008. You can type a search word into the database and find out how frequently different words were used at different epochs.
• I'd like to tell a story about the last half-century, based on studies done with this search engine
• So the story I'd like to tell is this: Over the past half-century, society has become more individualistic. As it has become more individualistic, it has also become less morally aware, because social and moral fabrics are inextricably linked.
• Conservatives sometimes argue that if we could just reduce government to the size it was back in, say, the 1950s, then America would be vibrant and free again. But the underlying sociology and moral culture is just not there anymore. Government could be smaller when the social fabric was more tightly knit, but small government will have different and more cataclysmic effects today when it is not.
• Liberals sometimes argue that our main problems come from the top: a self-dealing elite, the oligarchic bankers. But the evidence suggests that individualism and demoralization are pervasive up and down society, and may be even more pervasive at the bottom. Liberals also sometimes talk as if our problems are fundamentally economic and can be addressed politically, through redistribution. But maybe the root of the problem is also cultural. The social and moral trends swamp the proposed redistributive remedies.
• Evidence from crude data sets like these are prone to confirmation bias. People see patterns they already believe in.

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• The Pew Research Center recently found that four in 10 American households with children under age 18 include a mother who is either the primary breadwinner or the sole earner (quadruple the share in 1960). The latter category is largely owing to the surge in single-mother households.

• single mothers are more likely to be younger, black or Hispanic, and less educated, according to Pew, and they have a median family income of $23,000. In those families where married women earn more than their husbands, the woman is more often white, older and college educated and the median household income is $80,000.

  In discussions of Pew's findings, conversations the past few days have veered toward practical questions of men's value.
• The ladies worked earnestly to find positive roles for their hirsute colleagues, noting that men can be useful in family planning, child care sharing, working as part of a team. Although a man's presence was implicit in the hypothetical household, I waited futilely for emphasis to shift to the importance of fathers to their children's well-being.
• Because, simply, children need a father. That not all get a good one is no argument against what is true and irrevocable and everlasting. Deep in the marrow of every human child burbles a question far more profound than those currently occupying coffee klatches: Who is my daddy?

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• Two years ago, the journal Nature reported a startling spike in the number of scientific research papers that were being retracted.

  Between 2000 and 2010, the number of papers retracted shot up tenfold, while the total number published climbed only 44 percent, the journal reported.

  Most of the papers were pulled because of honest mistakes or failure to replicate results, but nearly half were withdrawn because of outright cheating -- falsification of results or plagiarism from another researcher.

• Dr. Fang said.

  Recent research he's done suggests the number of papers being retracted is leveling off, Dr. Fang said, but the bigger problems that have driven the increase in scientific misconduct still exist.

  He pointed to at least three issues: scientists chasing increasingly less research money, too much emphasis on individual achievement even though most research today is done by groups, and heavy reliance by universities on research grants to pay for faculty salaries.

  After a big increase in biomedical funding about 15 years ago, the National Institutes of Health's budget in real dollars has declined over the past decade and is particularly tight now because of the federal budget sequester. At the same time, the percentage of initial basic research grants approved has plummeted over the past 50 years, from about 60 percent in 1963 to less than 20 percent in 2010.
• Researchers also are more likely to cheat if they think their colleagues are doing so, Dr. Fang added.

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• These days one often hears people conflate not only “amount” and “number” but also “less” and “fewer,” as in “There were less students in class today.”
• The fundamental distinction that is glossed over in that usage is the one between the continuous and the discrete.
• Simply put, if someone says, for example, that she has worked continuously for twenty years in a particular office, she means that there were no breaks or gaps in her service at that office during that twenty-year period.
• The meaning of “discrete” becomes clear, however, when one uses it in an example: one has one child, two or more children, or none at all. One instinctively understands that it is absurd to talk about 1.2 or 3.5 children. The same thing applies to apples or oranges in a basket.
• Discrete objects are counted, while continuous ones are measured.

• One often hears that ours is the digital age. What does it mean? It means, for example, that music recorded in the old days was analog, meaning that the signals were continuous.

   

  In contrast, when music is digitized, the signals are sampled at distinct points in time. Yet if the number of sampling points is large enough, and the duration between successive sampling points very close to, but distinct from, zero, then our ears cannot distinguish between the continuous and discrete signals. In other words, it is beyond our powers of resolution. And this sampling at discrete time or space intervals is at the heart of digital technology, the hallmark of our times. Thus when we confound the continuous and the discrete and speak of the “amount” of people, for example, we are in effect saying that digital and analog technologies are the same. Of course, in mathematics itself, there are entirely different sets of ideas and techniques for dealing with continuous as opposed to discrete problems. Any mathematician worth her salt will tell you that they are very different ways of mathematical thinking. (The two points of view meet, however, when one considers asymptotics, i.e. what happens in the long run. This is rather like two parallel lines meeting in the far distance, at what mathematicians call the point at infinity.)

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• Rapid advances in technology have long represented a serious potential threat to many jobs ordinarily performed by people.

  A recent report (which is not online, but summarized here) from the Oxford Martin School’s Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology attempts to quantify the extent of that threat. It concludes that 45 percent of American jobs are at high risk of being taken by computers within the next two decades.
• The authors believe this takeover will happen in two stages. First, computers will start replacing people in especially vulnerable fields like transportation/logistics, production labor, and administrative support. Jobs in services, sales, and construction may also be lost in this first stage. Then, the rate of replacement will slow down due to bottlenecks in harder-to-automate fields such engineering. This “technological plateau” will be followed by a second wave of computerization, dependent upon the development of good artificial intelligence. This could next put jobs in management, science and engineering, and the arts at risk.

• As the lives of many Americans today fill up with sporting events, kids’ activities and answering email, studies suggest we’re squeezing in religion how and when it’s convenient — if at all.
• Study after study tells us that Americans are less religious than we used to be
• Recently, a survey of 804 children by the Bible Society found young people had little understanding of the true meaning of Easter, or of the Bible itself.
• The percentage of Americans who say they “seldom” or “never” attend religious services has risen in the past decade — to 29 percent from 25 percent a decade ago
• One-fifth of all Americans — a significant number from anyone’s perspective — claim no affiliation when asked to state their religious preference. The number of people without religious affiliation has doubled in the past two decades. This is particularly true of millennials, our young generation and the nation’s future parents.
• Meanwhile, some religious institutions are trying to evolve
• They want to pick and choose what’s convenient and to do so in way similar to going to restaurant and ordering a la carte.”
• people no longer feel compelled to build their personal schedules around attending religious services. They no longer feel “expected” to go to church on Sundays, nor compelled to go for a sense of community.

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• Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia.

  “I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing,”
• Word lovers and scientists have called for a “slow reading” movement, taking a branding cue from the “slow food” movement.
• Researchers are working to get a clearer sense of the differences between online and print reading — comprehension, for starters, seems better with paper — and are grappling with what these differences could mean not only for enjoying the latest Pat Conroy novel but for understanding difficult material at work and school. There is concern that young children’s affinity and often mastery of their parents’ devices could stunt the development of deep reading skills.

• The brain was not designed for reading. There are no genes for reading like there are for language or vision. But spurred by the emergence of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Phoenician alphabet, Chinese paper and, finally, the Gutenberg press, the brain has adapted to read.

  Before the Internet, the brain read mostly in linear ways — one page led to the next page, and so on. Sure, there might be pictures mixed in with the text, but there didn’t tend to be many distractions.
• The Internet is different. With so much information, hyperlinked text, videos alongside words and interactivity everywhere, our brains form shortcuts to deal with it all — scanning, searching for key words, scrolling up and down quickly. This is nonlinear reading, and it has been documented in academic studies. Some researchers believe that for many people, this style of reading is beginning to invade when dealing with other mediums as well.
• Online sentences tend to be shorter, and the ones containing complicated information tend to link to helpful background material.
• Researchers say that the differences between text and screen reading should be studied more thoroughly and that the differences should be dealt with in education, particularly with school-aged children. There are advantages to both ways of reading. There is potential for a bi-literate brain.

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• The Plaintiffs' desire to publicly declare their vows of commitment and support to each other is a testament to the strength of marriage in society, not a sign that, by opening its doors to all individuals, it is in danger of collapse
• A marriage license is a civil document and is not, nor can it be, based upon any particular faith. Same-sex couples are a morally disliked minority and the constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages is driven by animus rather than a rational basis. This violates the United States Constitution.

• the Motion Picture Association of America, which is the trade organization of the film industry, claims that the reason that's happening is because parents are becoming more accepting.
• the MPAA relies on parents' recommendations for its ratings.
• Romer thinks it might be time for movies to be rated by an independent panel that could push back against was called ratings creep. The clips he showed parents from the original "Terminator" and "Die Hard" were rated R. Clips he showed form more recent "Die Hard" and "Terminator" movies were just as violent, but rated PG-13.

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