Why TSA needs to change

A bladder cancer survivor has his urostomy bag ripped open by a TSA agent untrained to recognize such objects, and the cancer survivor is soaked in his own urine as a result; a TSA representative then insults him on television. A frightened, shy 1o year-old boy resists a TSA screening, and has his shirt taken off in public. An ABC producer reporters that she was groped inside her underwear. Victims of sexual assault report that the aggressive, invasive probes they receive at the hands of TSA agents are bringing back flashbacks of their assaults.

Something is deeply broken with our passenger screening process--and this new process does nothing to keep us safer.

According to Isaac Yeffet, former head of security for Israel's El Al airlines, these invasive patdowns are pointless and a waste of time. El Al knows a thing or two about security; Israel faces much greater daily threats of attack than the United States. Yet despite the danger Israeli airlines face, El Al's remarkably effective techniques do not involve "touching the junk" of passengers. We should consider learning from what works.

Flying involves lying to passengers. Every flight begins with a ridiculous video about exit procedures, and the location of floatation devices in the event of a "water landing." A water landing is otherwise known as crashing into the ocean. With the exception of Captain Sully's famous landing, and one other such event in the 1950s, every other such landing has been fatal to everyone on the plane. And in the case of Sully's landing, people did not rely on floatation devices. So untold hours have been wasted on the tarmac listening to an absurd broadcast about a scenario that has almost zero chance of happening.

One of the most pernicious lies, however, is that our checked baggage and shipping parcels have been adequately screen. As we learned from the recent Yemeni bombs, it is relatively easy to get timed bombs on planes In the case of the Yemeni bombs, they were only detected because of an tip from the Saudis--hardly an intelligence resource we can rely on in the future.

TSA needs to consider the needs of sexual assault victims. TSA needs to guarantee that those who are viewing images of naked Americans, including American children, have been screened for pedophilia. As things stand now, it's like the Wild West has taken over our airports, and no one is accountable for the indignities visited upon those with the temerity to want to travel in their own country.

Today's strangeness comes courtesy of Treeosaur.com, a site which expounds on the idea that theropod dinosaurs hunted by blending in with trees.

Okaaay then.

Money Well Spent

When Ronald Reagan was governor of California, he famously declared that the University of California system should not subsidize intellectual curiosity. What he meant is that taxpayers should not pay for the education of California students.

Several years later, Sen. Proxmire of Wisconsin began his annual "Golden Fleece" awards, where he pointed to what he considered to be examples of wasteful federal spending. These examples sometimes included scientific research, and in this vein Senators Tom Coburn and John McCain have released a new report, titled "Summertime Blues: 100 Projects that give taxpayers the blues."

First, the word "taxpayer" is often trotted out as if had magical power. The phrase "as a taxpayer..." is spoken as if this incantation conferred special rights. But everyone is a taxpayer, and if everyone is part of a group, then no one individual in that group has any special claim.

The use of "taxpayer" is meant to stake a claim that as someone who has money automatically taken out of your paycheck, you have a right to decide how that money is spent. Nothing could be further from the truth. While you nominally have power to elect someone to decide how your tax money is spent, in reality unless you are a corporation capable of making substantial donations to PACs, then you have no say about how your money is spent, and no influence on who your elected official is. So right at the outset we should dispense with the fiction that "taxpayers" have some sort

Second, the Coburn/McCain report harps upon job creation as the standard for usefulness. In section after section, the report mocks expenditures in areas with unemployment, without mentioning the rather obvious point that this money is employing people. For almost every conceivable project, payroll expenditures constitute the majority of the budget. So criticizing such projects for not creating jobs is simply untrue.

Third, much of what is in the Coburn/McCain report is legitimate, useful scientific research. Here are some examples:

The California Academy of Sciences is receiving nearly $2 million to send researchers to the Southwest Indian Ocean Islands and east Africa, to capture, photograph, and analyze thousands of exotic ants.

...has received a stimulus grant for an experimental applied science project to assist indigenous Siberian communities in engaging Russian policymakers in local civic and environmental issues.

...$435,271 to develop iPod Touch or smartphone apps to teach introductory biology to high school students

...$266,505 in stimulus funds to continue its annual science education workshops for reporters

...MSU received a grant to send students to work with researchers at the Natural History Museum in Hangzhou studying various dinosaur eggs and other fossils.

...$300,000 in stimulus grant money to examine computer simulations to follow the formation of galaxies through the period 1-2 billion years after the Big Bang.

Really? Researching the Big Bang and the evolution of our universe is somehow unworthy of support? Sending kids to study dinosaurs, and possibly inspiring them into a career in science, is a wasteful expenditure? We should not fund workshops for reporters to communicate science better? We shouldn't explore using new technology to teach biology?

I could go on and on, but I'll leave you to read the Coburn/McCain report for yourself. It is a damning documentation of manifest philistine contempt for education, for learning, and most of all, for science itself.

Anti-Vaxxers Showing True Color

Anti-vaccination groups have reached a new low. The Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) is a group of conspiratorially-minded science deniers so intent on keeping people from getting vaccines that they have now stooped to harassing the parents of a baby who died of whooping cough:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/07/12/2951629.htm

According to this article, 32-day-old Dana McCaffery died last year due to pertussis. She was too young to have received the vaccine, although her parents later came out in support of other children being vaccinated. That was too much for AVN, which started harassing the parents, and sought to prove that pertussis could not have been the cause. It might have beens something else, they claimed, another disease that was now being hidden so that young Dana might be used as a poster child for pro-vaccination forces.

This shows the anti-vaxxers true colors: they are willing to exploit suffering of all kinds, and to wish for more of that suffering in the world, in pursuit of their irrational, anti-scientific, paranoid mission.

cool slow-mo landslide

A very cool video of a slow-moving landslide:

http://sorisomail.com/email/42722/ja-viram-desmoranar-uma-montanha.html

Serpentinite Expelled?

Oh noes! Teh iz coming foar mah rx!

"California may drop rock, and geologists feel the pain." As amazing as it sounds, the official state rock of California, serpentinite, is in jeopardy of losing its status, due to a bill by LA Democrat Gloria Romero. Romero rightly points out that California's state rock is chock-full of chrysotile asbestos, and for this reason she finds it inappropriate for this lovely, lime-green rock to be so honored by the Golden State.

The New York Times article on this--which repeats the common mistake of referring to the rock (serpentinite) by its group of mineral (serpentine)--correctly quotes a USGS geologist as saying, "There is no way anyone is going to get bothered by casual exposure to that kind of rock."

People have a hard time getting their minds around this, but we Californians are frequently exposed to asbestos fibers without demonstrably increased rates of cancer. This is especially true in the serpentinite-rich Bay Area (the alleged elevated breast cancer rates in Marin are not connected with this fact). But if we're breathing asbestos in normal air, why aren't Californians who don't smoke dropping dead of lung cancer?

For one thing, chrysotile asbestos is not the most carcinogenic asbestiform mineral--that honor goes to "blue asbestos," crocidolite, and "brown asbestos," amosite.

But unlike these two forms, chrysotile's fibers are slightly curved, meaning that they cannot penetrate quite so deeply into the small passages of the lungs. When lungs are exposed to mineral particles, they react as if these particles were viruses or bacteria; a robust immune system attacks these particles with a toxic brew of chemicals. In a way, our immune system is too good at doing this, because in the process of trying to "kill" the mineral, neighboring cells are damaged in ways that, given enough time, can turn them cancerous. The longer mineral particles remain, the longer the immune reaction occurs; the problem with asbestos fibers is that they lodge so deeply, it is very difficult for them to be dislodged.

I don't want to minimize the health hazards of asbestos, or imply that it does not cause cancer. But it's important not to exaggerate the ill effects of hazardous substances, and to understand what actually does cause harm. It should be noted that one of the more inert substances in nature--silicon dioxide, which in a mineral form is quartz--can also cause a particularly vicious lung disease called silicosis. The bottom line is that you don't want to inhale any mineral particles if you can help it; asbestiform minerals are particularly bad to inhale, and within this mineral group, amosite and crocidolite are the worst. Since most industrial asbestos was chrysotile, this means that the efforts to remove all asbestos from places such as schools has been largely an unnecessary effort, meant to placate fears more than actually protect people. Sure, less exposure is better--although by removing the material, that increases its dispersion and people's exposure.

On a side note, the first half of the South Tower of the World Trade Center had its beams wrapped in asbestos fibers. (This fact alone shows the lie in the EPA's post 9/11 statement that the air quality was non-hazardous.) This fireproofing could be literally sewn around beams in such a way that a sudden jolt--such as an earthquake or a plane

impact--would not knock it off. While the WTC was being built, however, the use of asbestos was discontinued. The North Tower and the upper portions of the South Tower were sprayed instead with a fireproofing foam. There wasn't much science to the amount added; workers recalled that they were instructed to just eye-ball it. No one expected that something would happen to the towers that would knock this insulation off the support beams, exposing them directly to fire. Had they been wrapped in asbestos sheets, this would not have happened. Can we infer therefore that asbestos insulation would have saved the WTC? No, that goes too far--but it might have bought a little more time before the collapses.

Romero's bill has good intentions, but does not take good science into account, but instead plays upon people's fears of a substance they little understand. Moreover, it overturns a tradition, and for that reason if for nothing else, it deserves not to pass.

Why Aren't Students Studying?

According to recent research by UCSB economists Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks, the amount of time spent by college students studying has dropped:

1961: 24 hours/week

2009: 14 hours/week

Moreover, the total time spend on school (attending classes + studying) has likewise diminished:

1961: 40 hours/week

2009: 27 hours/week

What's gong on here?

As every college counsellor tells students, they should expect to be responsible for studying 3 hours for every hour in class. At many schools, students are considered full-time with as few as 12 units/week, which translates roughly (not counting labs) as 12 classroom hours per week. At 12 hours/week, the 3x multiple works out to only 36 hours. Added to 12 hours, this means a total time spend on school of only 48 hours/week.

This squares with my experiencing teaching undergraduates. Assign reading, and 90% will not do it. Test on this required reading, and still 90% will not do it. I get the sense, while grading midterms, that the majority of the class has spend less than one hour preparing for the exam. There are good students, students who diligently study, even in freshmen classes. But they are quite the rarity.

It seems to be the diminished number of hours actually spent studying may have a lot to do with declining academic standards, which are hidden only the band-aid of grade inflation. There is something seriously wrong going on here.