Suicide and IQ

The Audacious Epigone has an interesting post investigating whether suicide and IQ are correlated. It turns out you can find a relationship at the international level, but as you get more specific data (using only comparable countries, looking at U.S. state data), the link disappears. I'd suspect that richer countries have both higher IQs and higher suicide rates, but development itself causes both -- better environments make better IQs, and people rarely kill themselves when they're fighting for survival.

I thought an individual analysis might shed some more light on the problem. Unfortunately, the General Social Survey only interviews people who are alive, but it does ask them how many people they know who've committed suicide in the past year. Presumably, people who hang out with people who've killed themselves are the most likely to do so themselves -- humans segregate themselves by attitude and temperament to some degree. Also, people tend to have friends and family with similar IQs, so it serves as a proxy in that way, too. If anything, people with higher IQs might tend to know more people, so this should bias the results toward saying that high IQ and suicide are related.

But in fact, there's a statistically insignificant but negative correlation (-.038, sig .1) between the number of suicide victims one knows and the number of words one gets right on the vocabulary test. There's another insignificant, but positive, correlation (.021, sig .255) between years of school completed and suicide victims known. Between this analysis and AE's, I'd say there's no evidence that IQ itself affects suicide at all.

You say you wanted evolution, the ape was a great big hit

The National Academy of Sciences has released a brief document arguing against creationism. Unfortunately, it doesn't respond well to the critiques leveled by the Intelligent Design crowd.

(For the record, my stance on ID is that its practitioners do a good job of pointing out phenomena that evolutionists wish they could explain but can't. However, it's not logical to assume that because current science can't explain something, it must have happened by design.)

It makes a number of assertions that, simply put, no one seriously disputes. It talks about how, on the micro level (changing traits within a species), mutation and selection can create evolution -- that is, if all the slow runners die, and a given gene makes people run fast, that gene with become more prominent with each generation. Duh. It also presents the genetic and fossil records for common descent and evolution-as-a-fact.

But, as even Stephen Jay Gould once wrote, evolution is not just a fact but also a theory. The fact is that evolution happened, with various species developing from each other over massive amounts of time. The theory is that this happened exclusively through genetic mutation and natural selection, with no other processes contributing.

I'm no scientist, but I've looked into this to a decent degree, and no one's been able to prove to me that pure Darwinian processes could create what we see around us every day. I certainly concede it's possible, but I think it's equally possible that future study into evolution will reveal additional processes -- even if these processes are completely secular, it will confirm the ID charge that the current theory doesn't explain everything.

This new report doesn't begin to change my mind. Its only real argument, that scientists have found intermediate stages of the bacterial flagellum (a complicated structure ID people often claim couldn't have happened randomly), is nice, but it falls far short of proving that the flagellum's many complex parts could have come about separately and at random. And after claiming that science has debunked this claim of ID, the report turns around and asserts, "Because science has no way to accept or refute creationists' assertions, creationist beliefs should not be presented in science classrooms alongside teaching about evolution."

It's not falsifiable, but it's been proven false!

Lent already?

Megan McArdle asks, "Why would an agnotheist observe lent?"

I dunno, but I've given up hookers and cocaine for, like, six years in a row now. I can imbibe for a month yet.

BREAKING: People who are less stressed out are less stressed out

From Reuters:

In a study of nearly 3,000 healthy British adults, lead by Dr. Andrew Steptoe of University College London, found that those who reported upbeat moods had lower levels of cortisol -- a "stress" hormone that, when chronically elevated, may contribute to high blood pressure, abdominal obesity and dampened immune function, among other problems.

That's right! If you're less stressed out, you probably have less of a hormone that stress causes!

How much longer do compact fluorescent bulbs last?

Though a CFL bulb costs more than a standard light bulb, it has two features that make it cheaper in the long run: It uses less electricity per hour of use, and it burns for more hours before dying. I had been under the impression that both of these features would, in and of themselves, save enough to make up for the initial higher price -- this makes them doubly a good deal.

The electricity argument is true so far as I can tell, but a new Wall Street Journal piece claims that "The light bulb that costs 10 times as much does, it is true, last four times as long." This itself deviates from numbers from earlier in the article, which said regular bulbs cost 50 cents, as opposed to $3 for CFLs (six times the cost, not 10).

Wikipedia seems to agree with my initial impression:

Modern CFLs typically have a life span of between 6,000 and 15,000 hours, whereas incandescent lamps are usually manufactured to have a life span of 750 hours or 1000 hours.

The lower-end difference is eight times; the higher-end is 15 times. Both are higher than six times.

Every source I can find says that CFLs last longer to at least (approximately) the degree they cost more. Consumer Reports says the initial cost is closer to $2 per CFL. The American Lighting Association says CFLs both cost and last 10 to 15 times what normal bulbs do. The government says CFLs last up to 10 times longer.

Where did the WSJ get its numbers?

UPDATE: In The Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson writes, "With proper care and moderate use, they can last as much as six times longer than a typical incandescent. Even if you consider their higher purchase price--six or seven times the price of a traditional bulb--CFLs can lower your monthly lighting bill by as much as 20 percent." No citation there either, but that sounds more reasonable. (There's some mercury hysteria in the piece, though. Some states in fact allow CFL disposal in regular garbage, and the options for recycling are growing as CFLs become more popular. 3 mg of mercury will not kill you, so calm down.)

I totally beat The New York Times

With this article from The American about the Wii's exercise potential. A new study shows that the Wii burns more calories than other video game systems do, but that it (shocker!) doesn't burn the same calories as actually playing the sports the games imitate would.

In fact, I think I'm still one step ahead of the NYT: Like the study I cited in my piece (contrary to what the NYT says, data was not "lacking" until now), the new one used Wii Sports, which demands an unusual amount of movement for a Wii game. With most other games, you point the controller at the screen and push some buttons, as opposed to moving around and acting out sports maneuvers. Thus Wii-playing in general isn't all that great for your health, and the story totally misses the boat.

Finally, I have a hard time believing that tennis is the "most active" Wii Sports game -- for me, boxing caused a lot more aches and pains.

Mercury = death!

I hate environmental crusades as much as the next guy, but the right-wing attempt to vilify compact fluorescent light bulbs is starting to grate on me. Numerous times in the past few weeks I've read about how, because the bulbs contain a little bit of mercury, you'll have to call in the authorities! if you ever happen to break one.

It's too bad, because usually it's conservatives who put chemical risks in perspective: The dose makes the poison. There's about 3 mg worth of mercury in a bulb, about enough to cover the ball point of a pen. If you break a bulb, all you have to do is open a few windows, sweep it up and wipe the area with a damp cloth. Not a big deal, and not a deal at all if you don't break your light bulb.

Let's put that in perspective. A common guideline for fish is that you can have .5 mg of mercury for each kg (1,000,000 mg) of fish. A 6-oz can of tuna converts to 170,000 mg. A back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that, if you consume a can of maximum-allowed-mercury tuna once a week for two years, you will have eaten the amount of mercury that's in that light bulb. Certainly it won't kill you to simply handle it for a bit.

Rather than pretending CFLs are a bad idea on net, conservatives should lobby against making them mandatory. Competing with standard light bulbs forces CFL makers to (A) convince the American people of the substantial cost benefits, (B) find ways to make the product cheaper and (C) work to cut down on the annoying brightness some (in particular, morons who can't spell "fluorescent") find with the bulbs.

UPDATE: I guess I missed this American Spectator piece when it came out, but it's about perfect on the issue.

RIAA vs. CD ripping article up at The American Spectator

Here it is. Basically, the RIAA is in the right on music piracy -- but it's going too far in saying that ripping your own CDs without sharing them is illegal.

UPDATE: The Washington Post story this article was based on was, according to the RIAA press office, wrong. Though the brief calls the ripped files "unauthorized copies," apparently it was intended to mean that a file becomes unauthorized when moved into a filesharing folder, not that all ripped files are unauthorized.

Guns and the election article up at The American Spectator

Here it is.

Main point:

When Americans nominate their presidential candidates next year, the Second Amendment won't be the first thing on their minds. The issue didn't even appear in a recent CNN poll that found that the economy, Iraq, health care, immigration, and terrorism are the nation's biggest concerns.

But in a country where 36 percent of Democrats and 48 percent of Republicans have firearms in their homes, the issue is still a locked and loaded one for candidates of both parties.

Me: The remasters

Thanks to some very nice Christmas gifts, I'm the proud owner of the Voxengo plug-ins Soniformer, CurveEQ and Elephant, as well as the book Home Recording for Musicians for Dummies. I've remixed and remastered "Complete," "Blood in the Water" and "Dining Alone," and you can hear the new versions on my MySpace page. (I'm an amateur, and the MySpace player isn't exactly high definition, so don't take my hobby as the ultimate manifestation of what these plug-ins and this book can do.)

I have to say I love all of them. The Soniformer is a 32-band compressor, completely eliminating the "gain pumping" problem most compressors have at high settings. It makes everything sound polished and professional, and I love the way you can make different settings for each band, but you arrange them like a curve rather than tweaking each control separately. (For example, if you want a higher compression ratio for the bass frequencies, you just make a curve that slopes from more to less compression as the frequencies get higher. Simple, fast and intuitive.) Finally, it features a stereo widening setting, which I'm still learning to use right, and because you can set the threshold for each band, it gets your EQ spectrum ready for fine tuning...

....with CurveEQ, which has a terrific matching mode -- play a sound you like for it (just don't rip a CD to do it!), and then play the song you're mastering, and it will match the second EQ curve to the first. It takes the mystery out of mastering EQ and sounds great, provided you do a good job of picking sections to match to and from. It also has a "what you see is what you get" mode, so you can draw your own EQ curve instead of messing around with control points (I HATE it when I can't get my boosts and cuts to line up how I want on other EQs).

Elephant brings your mix up to commercial volume without hurting the sound. My only complaint is that the "In Gain" tends to sap the bass, but I solved this by leaving it set to 0 and increasing the volume with the CurveEQ's out gain instead. (Also, I found I get the hottest levels with the fewest problems using EL-1 mode with stereo linking off.)

I recommend all three (put them in the order compressor-EQ-limiter), and they're still on sale as of today. When I e-mailed customer service they were terrific, and they have a bunch of free plug-ins if you're cash-strapped, so check out their site.

(Also try the free X-Cita -- most commercial CDs have more high end than you get naturally, and if you just use CurveEQ to boost it, it sounds tinny. An exciter adds harmonics to the treble frequencies so they're bearable when you turn them up. I just use the "medium excitation" setting as a send effect and blend a little bit in.)

Regarding the book, I've read most of it, and my favorite aspect is that the author stays away from the "do whatever sounds good!" BS you get so much today. He provides very specific settings for EQing and compressing each instrument. They're just starting points, yes, but they work very well. The most important thing the book has done for me so far is to make the bass sit better in my mixes -- the EQ curve he suggested worked wonders, and it turns out I had too fast an attack setting on the compression, throwing each note's enunciation off.

Is ripping CDs illegal?

I've been pretty steadfastly supportive of the RIAA when it comes to music downloading -- when you create something, it's yours, and you get to decide on what terms other people can use it. There is absolutely no way to reconcile free downloading with intellectual property rights (unless, of course, the copyright owner says it's OK, as I do).

But this seems like a bit much:

The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

For crying out loud. The guy bought their product and didn't give free copies to anyone else. How can you conceivably build a case that he injured the recording industry in any way? And if the files weren't transfered online anywhere, how the hell did the RIAA even find out about it?

This worries me. Overzealous prosecutions like this will bring public sentiment even closer in alignment to "give me something for nothing!" than it already is. And on a personal level, I myself occasionally put songs on my computer to see what their EQ curves look like.

On a side note, of course the absurd Washington Post writer has to chime in:

The RIAA's legal crusade against its customers is a classic example of an old media company clinging to a business model that has collapsed. Four years of a failed strategy has only "created a whole market of people who specifically look to buy independent goods so as not to deal with the big record companies," Beckerman says. "Every problem they're trying to solve is worse now than when they started."

Creating something people want and selling it to them is a business model that has collapsed? No, it's been destroyed by theft.

And as I've pointed out before, the notion that the sales decline is due to quality decline rather than downloading is stupid. (A) If people don't want songs from the bands modern labels sign, why do they download them, and (B) if quality has indeed gone down, isn't it entirely possible that, due to revenue loss from downloading, labels no longer have the cash on hand to sign risky bands?

Through all of recorded-sound history, most bands have flopped, and labels have made up the loss on occasional big successes. When sales in general go down, they have to be more sure each signed band can pull its weight, so they stick to familiar sounds that people will buy.

UPDATE: Boy, is the WP story misleading. It turns out that, while the suit does claim ripping CDs is illegal, the actual lawsuit stems from an allegation of downloading, not ripping.

UPDATE II: Some are saying that the suit doesn't even say ripping is illegal, but I disagree.

Wages and discrimination

I'm going to post more on this study when I've read the whole thing, but here's the key part:

...we show that, relative to white wages, black wages: (a) vary negatively with a measure of the prejudice of the "marginal" white in a state; (b) vary negatively with the prejudice in the lower tail of the prejudice distribution, but are unaffected by the prejudice of the most prejudiced persons in a state; and (c) vary negatively with the fraction of a state that is black. We show that these results are robust to a variety of extensions, including directly controlling for racial skill quality differences and instrumental variables estimates. We present some initial evidence to show that racial wage gaps are larger the more racially integrated is a state's workforce, also as Becker's model predicts.

One thing I found interesting is that the more blacks there are in a state, the greater the wage gap. This could be due to rational discrimination, which I wrote about in this Doublethink piece -- statistically, in some areas, blacks are more likely than whites to be bad employees, so when white business owners figure that out, they're less likely to hire them. The more blacks a white person comes into contact with, the more likely this is.

Of course, this is ridiculously unfair and amounts to judging an individual by his group's average characteristics, but it doesn't run against economic efficiency, so the "Becker thesis" -- that free markets kill racism -- doesn't hold up.

I should note they did control for the skill gap between races. However, there's more to employee quality than just skill.

UPDATE: OK, read it. A few interesting concepts here.

--Recall the Becker hypothesis, which contends that employers who irrationally discriminate operate less efficiently, and thus risk being bought out or put out of business by more-efficient competitors. The authors here point out that someone who leaves a job where he's making hiring decisions will have to get a job elsewhere, and he'll often have to put up with roughly the same number of blacks. So when he has a choice, he'll sometimes just stay open and keep discriminating. There's an empirical link between prejudiced employers staying open and high integration in the economy as a whole -- they'll sell, but only if they can find a job without black coworkers.

This makes sense, but they overstate their case with "Our analysis shows that, in fact, discriminators are driven out of the market only if market conditions are such that every rational prejudiced employer can expect to find an alternative job in which fewer blacks are employed as workers." They seem to ignore the fact that a business can't exist if it's losing money. Certainly, in some cases, irrational discrimination forces racists out of business. It isn't always a choice.

--In the post above I pointed out that skill isn't all there is to employee quality -- if you pick 100 whites and 100 blacks randomly, but within a given skill/education level, one group or the other might still be more likely to cheat, steal, come in late, etc. This could vary by region. Therefore, in some areas there might be a wage gap without racial discrimination, or a race gap due to rational discrimination. (Say I know 75 percent of blacks and 85 percent of whites, within the necessary skill and education levels, would make good employees, and I have to be 95 percent sure someone will be a good employee before I risk hiring them. If a black applicant and a white applicant are equally qualified, the black applicant will have to do twice as much convincing during the interview to get to 95 percent.)

Upon further inspection, this is pretty much a fatal flaw to the research. The authors themselves point this out: "A valid concern one might raise after viewing the preceding results is that regions with more severe measured prejudice also have other unobserved characteristics that negatively affect black wages more than white wages. Though we control for the most obvious suspects, such as differences in education levels, there are always other possibilities." They claim this paragraph might solve the problem, but I don't see how:

The specifications that include both the average and marginal indices provide a potential solution to this problem. In each of these specifications, we include a control for the average level of prejudice in the census division. Becker pointed out that these variables should not affect relative wages of blacks and whites in a direct way. They should, however, be correlated with the unobservables just described (for instance, because they represent the prejudice of the median voter). The results in columns 2-4 of table 4 show that black relative wages are related to the prejudice of Becker's marginal discriminator, even conditional on average prejudice levels in the region.

What exact unobserved differences does this account for? I'm having trouble wading through the lingo, but I just don't see it.

Parenting and school performance

The Freakonomics blog has a post from Ian Ayres, who observes from a New York Times article:

...researchers used four variables that are beyond the control of schools: the percentage of children living with one parent; the percentage of eighth graders absent from school at least three times a month; the percentage of children age 5 or younger whose parents read to them daily; and the percentage of eighth graders who watch five or more hours of TV a day. Using just those four variables, the researchers were able to predict each state's results on the federal eighth-grade reading test with impressive accuracy.

It turns out that, in this regression, single-parent families have no significant correlation with test scores, and that's the point of Ayres's post. But of course, no one bothered to factor in something else schools can't control: students' races. I did so, expecting to find that, as usual, race is the elephant in the room. I was largely wrong.

Ayres is nice enough to provide the spreadsheet with which he proved single-parent families to be statistically insignificant. Here's my update of it, using the three variables he found useful and adding Census figures for the percentage of kids who were black and Hispanic in 2006. Some of the states were not available in both data sets, so I removed them, leaving me with 44 observations. For some reason these tended to be whiter states with high test scores, so this could weaken the correlations with the racial variables.

(I used American Factfinder to make a state-level custom table of total males 10-14, black males 10-14 and Hispanic males 10-14, then divided blacks and Hispanics by the total. I'd have included all kids instead of just males, but I couldn't find that number already made, and it seemed silly to clutter up the spreadsheet with six more columns that are almost the same as three already there. The black male share of the 10-14 male population will be virtually equal to the black share of the total 10-14 population.)

The result: The two race variables alone explain .43 (adjusted r-squared) of the variation, statistically significant but worse than Ayres's .63. In fact, when you put all five variables in one regression, "percent black" and "percent read to" become statistically insignificant. I toyed around with the numbers quite a bit, and the best adjusted r-squared I can get where all the variables have statistically significant effects is .66, a two-variable one with TV watching and percent Hispanic -- these are the only two variables that stay significant no matter what they're paired with.

The key with the Hispanic data is to remember that the test is of reading, so students who grew up with Spanish are at a significant disadvantage. Thus their population explains much of the variation in state test scores.

Also, the information implies that heavily black states' low scores are explained better by parental behavior (especially monitoring the TV) than by race itself. State-level data can be tricky, so this is far from conclusive, but score another one for nurture over nature.

Merry Christmas from the AP

A reporter named Libby Quaid (or maybe her editor) writes:

"I'm on Social Security now, and I don't like the idea that it's going to immigrants when I paid in it all my life, and they just swam across," says [retiree Judie Cain of Council Bluffs ]. In fact, only legal immigrants are entitled to Social Security benefits, and illegal immigrants pay millions of dollars a year in Social Security taxes.

Not to go crazy over the media bias stuff (that's so five years ago), but I highly doubt, when talking to Democrats, an AP reporter would pick out a factually errant statement by someone outside the party apparatus -- Cain is just a regular voter -- and use it against her. If the Iowa Republican Party president says something stupid, by all means point it out, but otherwise, talk to some other people and get a quote you can use. In other words, do your job and stop using your position to insult people.

I don't do much interviewing now that I'm in opinion journalism, but as a newspaper and magazine reporter I heard plenty of people say plenty of stupid things, from both sides of the aisle. An honest journalist, and in fact anyone with any integrity, won't draw attention to non-media-savvy people's silly off-the-cuff remarks.

And it's not even that silly. Quaid's correction is true by and large, but there are exceptions within the Social Security system, and illegal immigrants get plenty of government benefits.

This is obnoxious

 I keep my headphones as quiet as possible, both for my hearing and for those around me, but I'd find this really annoying:

Amid growing fears that listeners could cause irreversible damage to their hearing - the highest setting is as loud as a chainsaw - Apple is developing an automatic volume control.

A new patent reveals that the next iPods and iPhones could automatically calculate how long a person has been listening and at what volume, before gradually reducing the sound level.

The device will also calculate the amount of "quiet time" between when the iPod is turned off and when it is restarted, allowing the volume to be increased again to a safe level.

I suppose this could get them out of lawsuits, though. If an iPod goes that loud, listening to it at that volume might constitute using the product as it was intended, making Apple liable. Different recordings are mastered to different volumes, so to work properly the device will have to measure the output volume, not just the position of the volume knob.

I'd like a CD player or iPod that has a different kind of automatic volume control: One that matches the headphone output to the surrounding noise; it would need a microphone. That way, it would turn itself up when subway noise got ridiculous, but it wouldn't inflict unnecessary noise on your eardrums once everything quieted down. It would also act as a compressor, bringing up the quiet parts of songs so you can hear them without making the loud parts even louder.*

I'd like a computer to substitute for me fiddling with the volume my whole trip home. I don't need a computer to tell me it's loud.

*On a total side note, another thing I'd like to see is separate masters for home stereos vs. headphones (it's Christmas time, so I'm all gimme-gimme-gimme). iPod listeners want the crap compressed out of their music (I'm talking audio compression, not computer file compression) for this very purpose -- a wide dynamic range means that in order to hear quiet parts through the din, you have to turn the volume up, which in turn kills your ears when everything gets loud again. By contrast, a home stereo has little else to compete with, so there's no need to sacrifice dynamic range for an all-the-time loud recording. This would be a nice ceasefire to the loudness wars.