Links for November 2015

Finally someone wrote the article I wanted written about one of the infuriating parts of living in NYC: no countdown clocks for subway trains, for no good reason.

That’s why the MTA has tried to associate CBTC [a enormous overhaul of the signal system for the subway] with countdown clocks. New York riders crave realtime information about trains. They don’t care how they get it. So when Transit wants to drum up support for an obscure, costly, many-decades-long capital project to upgrade to CBTC, they always point to the clocks. (“Sustained Investment Makes Real-Time Information Possible,” declares one 2012 press release.) Reporters, struggling to make sense of a half-dozen interrelated projects, follow the MTA’s lead and assume that realtime train-location information depends on signal upgrades.

But that would make for some pretty expensive clocks, and it would make them awfully long in arriving. The F train, for instance, if it had to wait for CBTC to get realtime arrival information, wouldn’t see it until 2035.

It’s a misleading narrative. You can get countdown clocks without touching the signals. The MTA knows this.

An embarrassing symptom of municipal sclerosis.

I think this is defeatism, perhaps combined with an unwillingness to face up to how poor our assessment mechanisms are. Have each candidate select their single best paper and read those. If it’s still too many papers, then literally choose N candidates at random, where N is the max number of papers you are willing to read, and throw the rest away. This is still a better method than using impact factors (although I can think of better ones). At least a random filter doesn’t distort incentives.

I’m pretty impressed with the claimed 10 minutes of flight time. I didn’t really think that was possible because of the weight of the fuel with a simple chemical propellants like kerosene. The fuel only weighs about 65 pounds, so it seems like you could extend the flight time by at least 50% using external fuel tanks. 15 minutes is a seriously long jet pack flight.

I like to point to conservations laws (as suggested to me by someone I can’t remember) as a sort of super determinism that would seem like a ridiculous supposition if you first noticed them indirectly. “You’re telling me that if I compute some complicated function of velocities for N>>1 particles at some time, then let them interact chaotically, the function will take the same value later — completely fixing the speed of the final measured particle — even though the velocities are completely different!?! It would have to be a conspiracy!”

Faced with a local internet service provider that couldn’t provide modern broadband, Orcas Island residents designed their own network and built it themselves. The nonprofit Doe Bay Internet Users Association (DBIUA), founded by Sutton, Brems, and a few friends, now provide Internet service to a portion of the island. It’s a wireless network with radios installed on trees and houses in the Doe Bay portion of Orcas Island. Those radios get signals from radios on top of a water tower, which in turn receive a signal from a microwave tower across the water in Mount Vernon, Washington.

Does formal schooling contribute to individual labor market productivity or does it act as a signal to employers of predetermined labor market skills? We test for whether employers statistically discriminate between workers on the basis of their schooling, by assuming we can observe a proxy for worker productivity that the employer cannot – father, brother and co-twin earnings. Using population-based Danish administrative data, we find that employers initially statistically discriminate between workers on the basis of schooling, but schooling earnings differentials fall over time as employers learn about worker productivity. We further propose a novel test for job market signaling using differences in twin pair earnings growth, and find that signaling is important at the upper end of the schooling distribution – explaining a large proportion of the college wage premium.”

(H/t Gwern.)

Summary: Selective breeding, drugs, and altered diets have greatly increased the quantity of milk, meat, and eggs produced per year of farmed animal life for multiple species, creating side effects that lowered the quality of life of farmed animals, and increasing consumption through lower prices. In the United States it appears that for some agricultural industries productivity increases since 1950 might have reduced farmed animal-years enough to outweigh the effect of falling prices. These include dairy, beef, and eggs. However, total animal-years of chickens raised for meat, the most populous farmed land animal, increased dramatically in total and per capita, despite a severalfold reduction in chicken-years per kg of meat sold. Increases in production efficiency may reduce demand for farmed animal-years in some mature developed country markets, while increasing demand in larger emerging markets. Further analysis using detailed income and price elasticity information, as well as welfare effects of overbreeding, could estimate net effects of technological change on animal welfare.

After pulling into a handicapped parking space, Williams unplugs his [artifical] heart’s air-compressor from the car’s charger, straps on a backpack that weighs roughly 14 pounds, and steps into the Southern California sun. As he walks up a wheelchair ramp to the coastal path, a man in an army fatigue hat and board shorts yells: “What are you doing, you’re not handicapped!” Williams stops and locks eyes with the pedestrian. “I don’t have a heart,” he responds, noticeably flustered. “What’s your disability?”

…the main reason why I think that philosophy is a high-impact area for research is that there are so many open questions that would radically change the value of all our activities. If non-human animals have similar moral status as humans do, or if we should think it’s morally important to create happy people, then the world’s moral priorities look radically different than we might have thought. We might be living in a moral catastrophe and not even know it; we need people to try to figure out if this really is the case. There are few other fields where conclusions in those fields can radically change your views on how you should live your life in the way that moral philosophy can. Moreover, compared to other areas of intellectual inquiry, the number of philosophers is very small. In some areas, at least, there seems to be significant potential to make progress on topics that would not otherwise have been addressed.

I agree with them, but note their philosophical background and connections potentially make them very biased.

Animal cells tend to be able to dehydrate and survive but if they over-hydrate they die, whereas plant cells are the opposite. When plant cells over-hydrate the cell wall keeps them intact while animal cells simply burst, however if plant cells dehydrate the cell membrane shrivels up and rips away from the cell wall causing death while animal cells can shrivel up and often survive until they are rehydrated.

Many of the author’s suggestions don’t seem that practical, though, especially about trying to get different nursing assistants to come in the room at the same time. (This will obviously cause them to waste lots of time sitting around waiting for their colleague to arrive.) The best suggestion seems to be to make “sleep protocol”, which I guess physicians can request, the default case for non-ICU patients.

However, I think completely autonomous vital signs would be totally do-able and would reduce, rather than increase, the burden on nurses. The vital signs in most US hospitals are: temperature, blood oxygenation, pulse rate, respiration rate, and blood pressure. It is feasible for all of these to be monitored continuously and autonomously with only very small amounts of new technology. In particular, temperature, pulse rate, and respiration rate should be detectable with infrared and visible cameras, while blood oxygenation and pressure should require no more than a finger sleeve or wrist strap.

The analysis also suggests that negative citations are most likely to come from other researchers who are close in disciplinary affiliation and “social distance” to the critiqued authors — which is probably no surprise — but relatively far in geographical distance. The latter suggests that social factors — the awkwardness of contradicting someone whom you are likely to bump into in person — may play a part in science’s self-scrutiny.