Virginia Hughes

I’m not the only one obsessed with this video: It’s almost hit 48 million views on YouTube.

I found a delicious historical nugget tonight while researching for an article-in-progress about the link between autism and prenatal infection.

In 1971, Stella Chess published a paper about the 1964 rubella epidemic in New York City. She found that an unusually high number of kids with autism in 1970 were born to women who had been infected with rubella. That’s interesting (especially for my article). But what really shocked me was something Chess mentioned briefly at the end of the introduction:

A 1964 British survey of children in Middlesex aged 8 to 10 years found that 4.5 per 10,000 children were autistic….We recognize that the diagnosis of autism requires rigorous justification. The condition is often loosely defined and overdiagnosed.

Wait a minute…4.5 per 10,000 and she thought doctors were overdiagnosing? Now a half-century since that survey, autism is found in about 1 of every 150 kids, and most researchers I’ve interviewed say that even that is probably an underestimate.

Of course, now I’m going to get a few anti-vaxers in the comments telling me that this is evidence of an “autism epidemic” in the last few decades. This is almost certainly not true, as I’ve reported twice. Still, it’s interesting to see how the field’s perspective has changed since then. And how it hasn’t: Autism, unfortunately, is still “often loosely defined.”

You’ll never guess what’s in this photo:

From the NYT:

The black and green spheres are tiny particles of gunshot residue nestled among fibers of a cotton T-shirt, magnified 200 times. The black residue particle is roughly one-twentieth the size of the period at the end of this sentence. In research presented at an American Chemical Society meeting in New Orleans, Garrett Lee Burleson and Jorn Chi Chung of Sam Houston State University in Texas have developed a test that can identify gunshot residues from a single particle. Some current tests rely on the presence of lead, which is being phased out of ammunition in some places because of environmental concerns; other tests can result in many false positives.

“At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot,” writes Rachel Donadio in a recent piece in the Times Book Review, “literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility.”

Soooo true. During my rather long stint with Match.com last year, friends thought I was pretty open-minded. He’s an obsessive marathon runner? No problem. Only wears metrosexual embroidered dress shirts two sizes too small? Why not? Seventy-plus pounds heavier than “About Average” (and thus, not only obese, but a liar)? Well, you never know.

But no matter how otherwise good-looking, articulate, or humorous a potential match’s profile, his response in the “Last Read” field was make-or-break. The Da Vinci Code was a deal breaker.

Donadio claims it’s a gender issue:

Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.) After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West, an author of “Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives.” Jessa Crispin, a blogger at the literary site Bookslut.com, agrees. “Most of my friends and men in my life are nonreaders,” she said, but “now that you mention it, if I went over to a man’s house and there were those books about life’s lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.”

However comforting/nauseating it may be to think that girls are brainier/more sensitive than boys, I know plenty of guys who care about books, and their girlfriend’s taste in books.

On her blog, Donadio asked readers to submit their own literary deal breakers. A few dozen of the 388 agreed with me about The Da Vinci Code (and other Dan Brown books). A few dozen more listed Ayn Rand, Danielle Steel, and Ann Coulter. But the vast majority were readers appalled at this kind of dating discrimination, calling people who do it: “petty;” “pretentious;” “judgmental;” “unoriginal, elite, and self-important;” “absurdly stereotypical;” etc.

For me (and probably for Donadio and the sources in her article), the aversion to bad writing has more to do with common values than pretension. I’m a writer, I value good writing, and probably wouldn’t get along with someone who didn’t.

(Anybody have an atypical literary deal breaker, preferably with an interesting back story? I’d love to hear about it…)

Orac can’t decide what side of the ID debate the creators of this video are on. Me neither. Regardless, I love da hook: “Dic to the Doc to the PhD, he’s smarter than you—he’s got a science degree.”

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This video shows you how to fold the MIT logo in three easy steps.

One piece of paper. One origami expert. Ten hours. Incredible.

Click To Play

(Hat tip: Maywa)

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How can we encourage large corporations, or small families, to conserve energy? Or Harley Davidson types to wear helmets? What about getting my mom to kick her smoking habit? University of Chicago economist Richard H. Thaler and law professor Cass Sunstein say that all it takes is a little nudge.

Thaler and Sunstein believe that “choice architecture”—usually not in the form of explicit regulations or laws—”can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions without restricting freedom of choice.”

John Tierney has an article about the idea as it relates to carbon footprints in the NYT today. I wasn’t particularly convinced until I read, linked in his accompanying blog post, a chapter called “A Dozen Nudges” from Thaler and Sunstein’s book, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Wealth, Health and Happiness. The chapter lists a dozen proposed nudging programs, many of them already up and running. Here are three that I find particularly smart (notice that these are all completely voluntary…which is not the case for all of the duo’s suggestions):

Stickk.com. Committing oneself to a specific action is one way to improve the odds of success. Sometimes it is easy to make a commitment, as, for example, by cutting up your credit cards…Other times it is hard. Dean Karlan, now a Yale economics professor, has teamed up with his Yale colleague Ian Ayres to propose a Web-based business [called] Stickk.com.

Stickk offers two ways to make commitments: financial and nonfinancial. With financial commitments, an individual puts up money and agrees to accomplish a goal by a certain date. He also specifies how to verify that he has met his goal. For example, he might agree to a weigh-in at a doctor’s office or a friend’s house; a urine test for nicotine at a clinic; or an honor-system verification. If the person reaches his goal, he gets his money back. If he fails, the money goes to charity. He also has the option to enter into a group financial commitment, in which the group’s pooled money is divided among those members of the group who reach their goals.

Quit smoking without a patch. CARES (Committed Action to Reduce and End Smoking) is a savings program offered by the Green Bank of Caraga in Mindanao, Philippines. A would-be nonsmoker opens an account with a minimum balance of one dollar. For six months, she deposits the amount of money she would otherwise spend on cigarettes into the account. (In some cases, a representative of the bank visits every week to collect the deposits.) After six months, the client takes a urine test to confirm that she has not smoked recently. If she passes the test, she gets her money back. If she fails the test, the account is closed and the money is donated to a charity.

The early results from this program have been evaluated by MIT’s Poverty Action Lab and look very good. Opening up an account makes those who want to quit 53 percent more likely to achieve their goal. No other antismoking tactic, not even the nicotine patch, appears to have been so successful.

The Automatic Tax Return. No sensible choice architect would design the current income tax system, which is famous for its complexity. Withholding was a major advance that simplified life for everyone. Ordinary people and the Internal Revenue Service would benefit even more if the process could be made more automatic. A simple step, suggested by the economist Austan Goolsbee, is the Automatic Tax Return. Under this approach, anyone who does not itemize deductions and has no income (such as tips) that is not reported to the IRS would receive a tax return that is already filled out. To file, the taxpayer would need only to sign it and mail it (or, even better, go to a secure IRS Web site, sign in and click). (Of course, the taxpayer would be required to make changes if her status changed, or if she started receiving unreported income.)

Goolsbee estimates that this proposal would save taxpayers up to 225 million hours of tax preparation time and more than $2 billion a year in tax preparation fees. True, many people don’t trust the IRS, so here’s one way to assure them that our tax collectors are honest: if there’s an error, you get the money back, plus a bonus (say, $100).

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Hat tip: Kambiz

I was deeply saddened to read today that my psychological hero (and Britney’s), Dr. Phil McGraw, just got some bad news:

…Read the rest here.

Dave Ng, you rock.

In case you had any doubt, Eliot Spitzer’s resignation now confirms that adultery is the fastest way for American politicians to lose public approval. Don’t get me wrong, the salacious details of the “Kristen” scandal—it was 10 p.m., on the night before Valentine’s Day, in a Washington hotel; she was a 5′5″ brunette; he asked her to, “do things that, like, you might not think were safe”—sicken me, too. I’m glad he’s out of Albany.

Evolutionary biologist David Barash is using the scandal as evidence that men (especially powerful men) are, like most other mammals, not meant to be monogamous. As he espoused in today’s LA Times:

But even a smidgen of evolutionary insight suggests that maleness plus money plus political power isn’t likely to add up to the kind of sexual restraint that the public expects. A concluding word, therefore, to the outraged voters of New York state: You want monogamy? Elect a swan. Or better yet, a Diplozöon paradoxum. [That's a monogamous species of worm.]

I agree: some knowledge of basic evolutionary biology would do our species a whole lotta good. As Barash explains, because sperm is so cheap, evolutionary drivers push men to be “aggressive sexual adventurers, inclined to engage in sex with multiple partners when they can.” Those same drivers push females—who will need protection and resources in order to successfully carry and raise a child—toward powerful men. (Which, he states wryly, “contributes to the apparent sex appeal of such less-than-stunning physical specimens as Kissinger, Woody Allen and Bill Clinton.”)

So, maybe Barash is right, and with a little bit of biology education the Puritanical public wouldn’t expect politicians to exhibit “sexual restraint.” I’m appalled at the weight of the scandal in media outlets throughout the world. Spitzer has been on the homepage of BBC Russia, of all places, for two days straight. OK, so the governor of New York hired prostitutes. Often. Is that really the newsiest thing Russia could come up with?

All that said, let’s back the determinism truck up for a second. Spitzer was guilty of more than infidelity. He didn’t just have a mistress, or 12. He paid women ($4,300 to Kristen, and at least $80,000 in total) for sex, thus breaking the same federal laws that he enforced so gleefully in his days as a prosecutor.

Even Barash concedes: “People have the unique capacity to act contrary to their biologically given inclinations. Maybe, in fact, it is what makes us human.” Spitzer, as not only a human, but a husband, a father of three teenaged girls, a member of the Bar Association, and governor of one of the most powerful states in the country, arguably felt much more moral (or “cultural,” if you prefer) pressure to reject these “biologically given inclinations” than the average cheatin’ man. Good riddance.

(Hat Tip: Jonah)

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