Sharing and Equal Justice

CIP's post on sharing help crystallize one intuition about the wrongness of this.  To remind you, and admired cultural figure asked a college student to take the drug Molly:

At a party not long ago in Park Slope, Brooklyn, Kaitlin, a 22-year-old senior at Columbia University, was recalling the first time she was offered a drug called Molly, at the elegant Brooklyn home of a cultural figure she admired. “She was, like, 50, and she had been written about in the Talk of the Town,” said Kaitlin, who was wearing black skinny jeans and a tank top. “This woman was very smart and impressive.”

Just as part of community is paying taxes, part of community is to be and to set an example.  Admired figures of the elite who choose to live in the public eye are obliged to set and be examples for the rest of community, just as the rich are obliged to pay taxes (of course, taxes are a legal requirement, too, but I mean the ethical obligation).   The violation of this obligation bothers me.

V.I. Arnold: On Teaching Mathematics

Here.

Safe copy under the fold.

With Equal Justice For All

Per here:

An arrest for possessing less than 25 mg of ecstasy is classified as criminal possession in the 7th degree (New York State Penal Law § 220.03), a Class A misdemeanor which carries a penalty of up to one year in jail.

Ecstasy is a drug - its active ingredient is MDMA, or 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine.

A purer MDMA concoction, Molly, featured in a New York Times article yesterday.

At a party not long ago in Park Slope, Brooklyn, Kaitlin, a 22-year-old senior at Columbia University, was recalling the first time she was offered a drug called Molly, at the elegant Brooklyn home of a cultural figure she admired. “She was, like, 50, and she had been written about in the Talk of the Town,” said Kaitlin, who was wearing black skinny jeans and a tank top. “This woman was very smart and impressive.”

At one point, the hostess pulled Kaitlin aside and asked if she had ever tried the drug, which is said to be pure MDMA, the ingredient typically combined with other substances in Ecstasy pills. “She said that it wasn’t cut with anything and that I had nothing to worry about,” said Kaitlin, who declined to give her last name because she is applying for jobs and does not want her association with the drug to scare off potential employers. “And then everyone at the party took it.”

Basically, be rich or an "admired cultural figure" and what is criminal for others is not for you.  Yet millions recite that pledge of allegiance every day "with liberty and justice for all".  Where is the justice for all?

PS: It is the double standard that I cannot tolerate.  

On evolutionary trees

In a previous post, I had shown this diagram from a paper in Nature, showing this diagram of the evolutionary relationship between bonobos (B), chimpanzees (C) and humans (H).

What I find fascinating is that within the H line, we know with good precision of this complexity (based on these well-worth reading Smithsonian Institute pages).

What the crude graphic attempts to portray, is that modern humans and Neanderthals had a common ancestor somewhere around 600,000 years ago.   Then about 130,000 years ago, modern humans began their last round of migration from Africa, with A representing African humans and B representing out-of-Africa humans.  Neanderthals - N - became extinct some 35,000 years ago, but not before exchanging genes with the out-of-Africa humans.  Some 2.5% of the out-of-African humans genome is supposedly Neanderthal in origin.

So that nice tree isn't really a tree at all, not at this level of resolution.  Further, we are just lucky to know about the Neanderthal-human interbreeding, likely there are other now-extinct populations with whom genetic exchanges happened.   And all this is in just half the time of the 1Myr of the first diagram. 

We have some hope of deciphering some of this non-tree nature because the genome is huge,  some three billion base pairs in which the evolutionary changes can be traced.  When it comes to language and the construction of language trees, we have much less data.  The ancient Rg Veda gives us a vocabulary of a few thousand words in 10,552 verses; and the Rg Veda is the exception, not the rule, about ancient texts.   Something like the Behistun Inscription has perhaps 500 lines, I'm not sure how many unique words it has.  Tracing language family trees requires cognate words to be present in the two languages, which greatly reduces the number of relevant words based on which family trees are built. We have just about enough data to infer a family tree, but not the cross-linkings that likely occurred, which IMO, are much more probable with languages than with genes.

We have to understand the tree diagrams to be an approximation, a model of reality only, not reality; and with limited data we cannot do any better. 

Another just-so story

(Long) This one starting with Charles Darwin himself.

Pay attention to the source of the essay though.  But I don't see how pages 1-17 could be total misrepresentations.

Stable social equilibria

Rajan Parrikar sent me this news-story:

Riot after Chinese teachers try to stop pupils cheating
What should have been a hushed scene of 800 Chinese students diligently sitting their university entrance exams erupted into siege warfare after invigilators tried to stop them from cheating.

Suppose a people are embedded in a situation where cheating is norm, the equilibrium situation. Unless there is isolation where a change can incubate or else a universal impetus to change, it is very difficult to move to the other equilibrium, where cheating is the exception.

Last year, the city {Zhongxiang in Hubei province in China} received a slap on the wrist from the province's Education department after it discovered 99 identical papers in one subject. Forty five examiners were "harshly criticised" for allowing cheats to prosper.

So this year, a new pilot scheme was introduced to strictly enforce the rules.
...
...
According to the protesters, cheating is endemic in China, so being forced to sit the exams without help put their children at a disadvantage.

A pilot scheme won't cut it. I do think it is plausible that with a determined national effort, China could move to the other equilibrium.

My point however is that modern pseudo-scientific observers of behavior would however, seek an evolutionary and genetic explanation for an observed equilibrium in the social behavior of a species (say, baboons) without even asking whether the very same species could be tipped to another rather different equilibrium, without any genetic change.

If the evolutionary and genetic explanation actually predict the other equilibrium, or else correctly rule out any other equilibrium for the given species, then they are indeed explanations. Otherwise, they are a just-so story, in exactly the same way some superstring theorists claim that every phenomenon can be explained by string theory - it is a theory of everything - which may even eventually turn out to be true, but the explanation is lacking. From the pre-scientific age, it is like explanations based on an unknowable Will of God, or unknowable karma from past lives.

The Scientific Study of Human Nature

I'm sure that the scientific study of human nature is being undertaken in various research universities and laboratories all over the world.  But take a look at the scientifically literate (but not formal science) writings, I think they are decidedly unscientific.

Let's look at a couple of articles.   First,

Male chimps and humans are genetically violent---NOT! 

Is violence in our genes?

Published on March 29, 2011 by Darcia Narvaez, Ph.D. 

Narvaez asks:

Do chimpanzees in the wild want to kill others? Is murder common among wild chimpanzees? Do male chimps (and their cousin male humans) have "killer" "demonic" instincts towards their fellows? If you look at the data, the answer to these questions is a resounding NO! But these beliefs are "gospel" in much of popular science. This misinformation colors our view of humans and human nature. What are the ramifications?

US,Sr.

Read this and decide for yourself, what nation does this resemble?

Performance of India's MNREGA program

The Government Auditor has dinged the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act program.
http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/government-auditor-s-cag-report-says-funds-bungled-in-flagship-rural-employment-scheme-357790

Also see this assessment of MNREGA impact on another program, UPP.

Difference between SNAP and Indian Public Distribution System for Food

In the US food assistance program, the recipients receive coupons which they can redeem for food at qualified retailers.  The retailers get paid by the government for the coupons they collect.

In the Indian Public Distribution System for food, the government gets involved at every step from procuring foodgrains from the farmer, to transport, storage and distribution to retail stores.   There is a massive market intervention in the procurement process, and there is leakage at every step of the way whether it is wastage and rats at storage depots or corrupt officials (e.g., just read this from the tiny state of Arunchal Pradesh).

It has been repeatedly calculated that it would be much more efficient to make direct payments from a central government authority to the end-recipients and cut out all the middlemen.  The recipients would use the cash they receive to purchase food or whatever else they want. 

As Nitin Pai argues here in 2010,  (UID = Unique Identification, a system of universal ID)

The ultimate social welfare programme is a system of targeted cash-transfers to the genuinely needy. The UID project, if implemented properly can make such a programme technically feasible. It requires a high degree of incredulity to believe, however, that technical feasibility is the only, or even the main problem, holding this proposal back.

 and

If the state retreats from the business of buying, storing, transporting and retailing groceries, it will certainly hurt socialism. It won’t necessarily hurt development.

Koch Brothers?

The US food stamp program has a fraud rate of about one cent on the dollar.  http://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/fraud/fraud_2.htm

But let's be skeptical, and multiply that by 5.

Now think of a government run public food distribution system where the fraud rate is 10 times that. A Nobel laureate economist is in favor of it.  Criticizing him and the system makes one into the Koch brothers?.  

Some reading

http://acorn.nationalinterest.in/2012/11/28/cash-transfers-will-work-if/

http://acorn.nationalinterest.in/2012/02/21/cheap-tablet-unaffordable-mistake/

http://acorn.nationalinterest.in/2011/05/11/garibi-hatao-hatao/

Paths through Caltech Ma1a

 Quote: (emphasis added)

Ma1a. Introduction to the Mathematical method via one‐variable Calculus
(From Dinakar Ramakrishnan)

Goal: Develop the central results of one‐variable Calculus, explaining why they hold, and under which hypotheses, illustrated with examples; also delineate how to write logically correct arguments.

Emphasize critical thinking.

This course forms the basis of all the Math courses; AP Calculus‐BC is no substitute.

PATHS

There are two main Paths in Ma1a. Path 1 can only be taken by those students who pass the Diagnostic test, while Path 2 will be for those who either don’t pass the Diagnostic test (by either not taking it or not doing sufficiently well in it) or else just want to see the material covered at a slower pace with more examples.

In addition, there are auxiliary paths for those who place out of Math 1a.

US: Deficiencies in High School Mathematics

Previously referred to, this document from Caltech, not only talks about deficiencies in US high school mathematics instruction, but also the remedial measures Caltech is taking.

To remind you:

The transition from high school to college presents problems for all students, but for some students it is particularly challenging. At Caltech, many newly admitted students lack the background in mathematics that is necessary to succeed in Ma 1a. Unfortunately, few of them are even aware that their background in mathematics is deficient. This is not their fault. The mathematics curriculum in high schools is less rigorous than it was even a few decades ago. In conversations with Caltech students who have struggled with freshman mathematics, most report that they were star math students in high school, which of course is a major reason why they were offered admission to Caltech in the first place. Many of them, however, have never seen mathematics as it is taught at Caltech.

The following is how Caltech is making up for the deficiency, so that there is no need to speculate on what the deficiencies are.

Dean Kiewiet contacted Professor Roberto Pelayo, a Caltech Ph.D. in mathematics who is currently on the faculty of the University of Hawaii and who, for the past several years, has taught in the Caltech Freshman Summer Research Institute. The outline for an online course, Transition to Mathematical Proofs (TMP) that incoming freshmen could take at home this summer before their arrival at Caltech.

The TMP course outline is as follows:

Tragedy

From dailykos.com  

After noting another accident, and that

the odds are that this good guy with a gun would have sworn on a stack of bibles last week that he was a Responsible Gun Owner.^TM And now, suddenly, he's not. Instead, he's just a really, really sorry gun owner. 

we get to this story:

Quote:

The Albemarle County Commonwealth's Attorney has decided not to file any charges in the late May case of the 10-year-old Crozet, Virginia, girl documented in GunFAIL XIX. The case is noteworthy because the girl was killed by her 13-year-old brother, while the five children were home alone that Tuesday morning. Seems Pastor Paul Hollifield and his wife home school their children, so it's not unusual for them to be home alone in the mornings, when they are expected to be self-starters when it comes to school work. On this particular Tuesday, however, their 13-year-old boy decided that 10AM on Tuesday would be a fine time to clean and repair the shotgun he'd been given as a gift after passing a hunter's safety course the previous year.

The gun hadn’t been working properly, and he had taken it apart, cleaned it, and put it back together the night before, leaving it in the living room with the safety engaged. He had taken two shells out, but forgot the one in the chamber, the statement said. While he was testing out his repairs in the morning with the gun raised to eye level and the safety off, he apparently accidentally pulled the trigger.

The shotgun was pointed in the direction of the living room’s loveseat and down a hallway, according to the statement. Maggie Hollifield was standing behind the loveseat, and her 9-year-old sibling was seated.

[...]

The 13-year-old “had been schooled in the responsible use and care of the firearm and had demonstrated his knowledge of and adherence to the requirements of responsible gun ownership,” she said.

And there you have it. He passed his safety course, and "had been schooled in the responsible use and care of the firearm," etc., etc., etc. And yet, he forgot a shell in the chamber of his shotgun, and evidently figured that meant that a "safe direction" for pointing it was ... the living room loveseat occupied by his 9 and 10-year-old sisters. The stack of bibles once again fails us.

End quote.

Gaming: E3 : Sony humiliates Microsoft

http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/06/11/playstation-4s-price-and-policies-humiliate-microsofts-xbox-one-at-e3/?partner=yahootix

QOTD

Robert Reich

Last November’s elections resulted in one-party control of both the legislatures and governor’s offices in all but 13 states — the most single-party dominance in decades. This means many blue states are moving further left, while red states are heading rightward. In effect, America is splitting apart without going through all the trouble of a civil war.

On the origins of language

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3662928.stm

Read the above, and contemplate.  What the story shows is a way of learning within a group.  Certainly not a phenomenon of an individual.  Also, play dumb charades for a while, and watch the efficiency with which you communicate go up.  That this tells us something about the evolutionary roots of language, I think not.

On evolutionary explanations of behavior

The plasticity of primate behavior is quite high.  Baboon aggression may be cultural in origin.  So what to say of humans, whose behavior is so much more plastic than baboons?  Yet people look for the roots of murder and rape in human societies in evolution and genetics.   And they miss the more interesting thing that is to be explained: the origin of the plasticity of behavior.   Considering how stuck in a rigid determinism that these evolutionary behaviorists are, one would think that this would be their supreme puzzle: how do deterministic parts combine to produce an organism with such an enormous ability to learn?

Why most published research findings are false.

Via Nate Silver's book, The Signal and the Noise.
Here.

The implications for the practice of science are interesting to contemplate.