Yesterday’s vote only closed out some amendments and took a preliminary vote on the “strengths and weaknesses” doctrine that the creationist zealots are attempting to preserve. The final vote will happen today, and include a board member who was absent yesterday. We can all hope this goes the way it should - with science education coming out ahead of fundamentalist claptrap.

That aside, I want to focus on the utterly horrible reporting by one Gary Scharrer at the San Antonio Express News. Look at this section, which quotes only creationist nuts and contains absolutely nothing refuting their spurious, misinformed opinions:

Scientists and more than 50 national and state science organizations urged the 15-member board Thursday not to include references “to creationist-fabricated ‘weaknesses’ or other attempts to undermine instruction on evolution.”

Many scientists contend basic evolutionary theory at the high school level has no weaknesses, and to suggest it does would confuse students.

However, Ken Mercer, R-San Antonio, fought to restore the “strengths and weaknesses” clause, which board-appointed science experts removed from the proposed standards. The board’s seven social conservative members supported that effort but fell one vote short.

Not all scientists agree about evolution, Mercer argued.

“There are questions about evolution. … There are weaknesses,” he said.

Darwin’s theory of evolution posits that all life is descended from a common ancestor.

The theory is not without its critics. Darwinists try to conceal some of the weaknesses and fallacies of evolution theory, said Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands.

“They are not the sole possessors of truth. Our schoolchildren belong to the parents, and they want their children educated,” she said. “They don’t want them indoctrinated with one side. They know that evolution has weaknesses.”

First of all, it isn’t “Darwin’s theory of evolution” anymore. It is the theory of evolution, the foundations of which Darwin was the first to publish. But even his work didn’t come out of the air - there were years of work by other naturalists and scientists behind it. And a lot of what Darwin published 150 years ago was flat wrong, and we know that now because of further investigation. For instance, his proposed mechanism for inheritence and gamete formation was WRONG WRONG WRONG. Hilarious, google “gemmule”, fun times ahead.

And as for Ken Mercer, well, the facile statement that “not all scientists agree about evolution” is true depending on what you mean — there are disagreements in the scientific community about specific mechanisms for evolution and those sorts of things, but no scientist doubts the fundamentals: life evolved from a common origin over billions of years through random mutation and natural selection. The only people you find trying to push controversy over that are religious fundamentalists and the charlatans at the Discovery Institute. People like Barbara Cargill who obviously cares more about preserving her minor position of authority by manipulating the passions of District 8’s ignorant electorate than she does about really giving Texas students science education.

But, that aside, I’m livid that a reporter managed to quote those two nuts without getting anything from the pro-science side of the board. This shoddy kind of work makes me pretty pleased that the Express News, easily the worst major metro daily I’ve ever read, is going the way of the dodo. Well, maybe that’s unfair, I suppose I’ll just hope that they’ll get new management that will improve the quality of their reporting.

2,194 households containing 2,592 Ghanaian children under 5 y old were randomised into a prepayment scheme allowing free primary care including drugs, or to a control group whose families paid user fees for health care (normal practice); 165 children whose families had previously paid to enrol in the prepayment scheme formed an observational arm. The primary outcome was moderate anaemia (haemoglobin [Hb] < 8 g/dl); major secondary outcomes were health care utilisation, severe anaemia, and mortality. At baseline the randomised groups were similar. Introducing free primary health care altered the health care seeking behaviour of households; those randomised to the intervention arm used formal health care more and nonformal care less than the control group. Introducing free primary health care did not lead to any measurable difference in any health outcome. The primary outcome of moderate anaemia was detected in 37 (3.1%) children in the control and 36 children (3.2%) in the intervention arm (adjusted odds ratio 1.05, 95% confidence interval 0.66–1.67). There were four deaths in the control and five in the intervention group. Mean Hb concentration, severe anaemia, parasite prevalence, and anthropometric measurements were similar in each group. Families who previously self-enrolled in the prepayment scheme were significantly less poor, had better health measures, and used services more frequently than those in the randomised group.

I have to say I’m a lot less surprised at this outcome than McArdle is, for a few reasons.

First of all, paying for healthcare is not the only variable (and in my mind, though I’m certainly no expert) the primary driver of health outcomes in the third world. Anaemia has many causes, malaria being only one, and infection with the malaria parasite is only a matter of time in Africa if you’re not on anti-malarial medication at all times. From reading the entire study it looks like (quell surprise!) that they did a rather good job of controlling for that kind of thing, but in reading a little further of the 71 anaemic patients at study end 28 had a worm infection and one had a genetic defect. So, on the order of 40% had some cause other than malaria as a plausible cause.

But, secondly, aside from the conditions that can lead to those kinds of health outcomes there are very real non-monetary costs associated with traveling to receive care. If you’re an African peasant and you don’t live within a few miles of a hospital, it costs you a lot simply to go to the doctor even if there is no direct fee. Even if you’re close to a hospital you miss work, and that costs you money, and that matters when you’re poor. A lot. We see that kind of thing here in the US, in San Antonio in particular, and the poor in the US are much better served than the poor in Africa.

A while back I went to a very interesting talk about third-world treatment issues by Paul Farmer of Partners In Health and one of the things he talked about what the multifaceted nature of the problem. Just giving medical care away doesn’t work, just providing clean water doesn’t work, just education doesn’t work…you have to do all these things in some way at the same time. The problems are all connected - people face opportunity costs for medical care, and they don’t understand how modern medicine can help them, and they can’t afford it, and their water is dirty, and they have parasites…it’s a mess. Plus, most of the time, their future is being stolen by some tin-horn dictator with a god complex.

I don’t think the solution is government, and I’m not much on the “social justice” bandwagon, but I do find it immensely troubling that the wealth and beauty of the world passes so many people by solely because of where they were born. I’m all for private charity, and I’m all for real solutions that don’t involve holding a gun to anyone’s head - there must be a way to slowly, with effort, bring the third world into the global economy and let them reap the benefits we do. One small part of that is preventing people from dying of treatable, easily cured diseases.

Specifically, the second law deals with Entropy, which has unfortunately come to be known as “disorder” or “chaos” in the common lexicon, but is really a measure (in physics anyway) of how unavailable a system’s energy is to do work. In chemistry we’re usually talking about the number of states that the system can take on*. I tend to think of it similarly to adding more tumblers to a lock, or making the size of your selection for permutations or combinations larger. The point is that Entropy in the universe increases over time - the universe can take on more states as a result of changes in it.

That says nothing about the Entropy change in the system in question. You can think of the Earth as a system and the rest of the cosmos as the surroundings — suddenly spontaneous evolution doesn’t seem like such a big hairy thermodynamic deal. It’s also helpful to remember that energetically speaking the Earth is not a closed system and that Entropy is not the only thing considered when looking at whether a reaction will proceed spontaneously.

The above wikipedia link contains the Gibbs Free Energy Equation, one version of it, anyway. Gibbs free energy is used to figure out if a reaction is spontaneous (that is, proceeds without you poking at it). It looks like this:

Where ΔG is the free energy, ΔH is the enthalpy change (change in heat), T is the temperature in Kelvin and ΔS is the entropy change.** Spontaneous processes release rather than absorb energy, which means that for anything spontaneous the free energy (ΔG) is less than zero. So, when determining whether or not a process will proceed on its own (irrespective of the rate at which it does so) you look to see how much heat is released or absorbed, then subtract from that the entropy times the temperature in Kelvin.

Here’s the rub, though: in most cases the entropy component of the equation is insignificant to the direction of the free energy. In organic chemistry it’s often ignored completely with chemists assuming for the sake of ease that ΔG = ΔH. Now the physical chemists will get all up on you about that, but in most organic reactions that assumption will serve you well enough. Let me repeat that: The entropy change is almost always irrelevant when determining whether or not an organic reaction will proceed spontaneously.

Organic chemistry is the basis of life - proteins, enzymes, DNA, RNA, carboxy acids, sugars, carbohydrates - these are all organic compounds and whether or not their reactions will happen without outside influence is not dependent upon entropy in any meaningful way! So, creationists, SHUT UP ABOUT THIS! I’ve taken four semesters of chemistry, that’s it, and this is a bloody obvious point. Gibbs free energy is first semester Gen Chem. Oy.

* EX - Breaking bonds increases Entropy, making bonds decreases it. That implies that larger molecules are entropically disfavored, but that’s not the only consideration.
** If the characters in front of the letters aren’t rendering correctly for you, imagine that they are capital deltas.

Ridgely’s point is that the reason students do poorly on standardized tests in comparison to their class grades is that classes are graded incredibly easily. For the most part, I think he’s probably right. My elementary school didn’t even have letter grades until you hit sixth grade, and I went to a public school in the Portland, OR suburbs. Also, like Ridgely, I have always done extremely well on standardized tests: never below the 92nd percentile on anything, and the only time I was below the 95th was on a math test in third grade. I scored 1360 on the SAT without prepping, I got a four on the AP English exam without ever taking an advanced English course in high school, again without study. On the other hand, I was always a middling student. My GPA in high school was just a hair below 3.0 because, frankly, I didn’t care. School, especially once you realize that the rules are arbitrary and capriciously enforced, is often useless and usually tedious. I didn’t learn anything in my US History course my Junior year that I hadn’t learned during the US History course I took in 8th grade, I learned little in my Sophomore Government course that I hadn’t learned in Government in 7th. Primary and secondary education is more about keeping kids in line, making them behave, and getting them to conform to the whim of authority than it is about teaching them anything.

Is it any wonder that teachers give up and start handing out grades kids don’t deserve? I’m sure most teachers, especially in the public schools, feel brow-beaten and unappreciated. There’s no meritocracy, you can’t teach the way you want to, and to top it all off if you give little Biff a bad grade his lawyer mommy will come down and yell at you on your time off. So you give the kid a B and you shuffle him along.

This system serves no one: kids are bored and uneducated, parents are frustrated, teachers are at their wit’s end. Short of a massive structural change in the way we think about education (hint, I think cutting administration, reducing centralized planning and giving teachers more autonomy can’t hurt) we’ll continue to face exactly the same issues. Granted, in Libertopia there wouldn’t be compulsory education or public schools…but given that there will be, because they are extremely cherished if extremely faulty, there simply must be a better way. In my opinion, the best solution is to let failure happen. When there are consequences for failure, things start to shape up pretty quick.

From the article:

Big Brother is not only watching you - now he’s barking orders too. Britain’s first ‘talking’ CCTV cameras have arrived, publicly berating bad behaviour and shaming offenders into acting more responsibly.

The system allows control room operators who spot any anti-social acts - from dropping litter to late-night brawls - to send out a verbal warning: ‘We are watching you’.

That the cameras are present is enough to give anyone pause, who wants to be observed by the state at all times when wandering around on the streets? However, that the cameras are now shouting orders at people is perhaps the most frightening thing short of equipping them with automated weapons of some kind. Actually, given that most of we libertarians “crazy” fears tend to come true in one fashion or another, I’m going to speculate that within my lifetime there will be cameras on the street that tazer people.

I’ve always thought that the kind of future described in Brave New World was much more plausible than that of 1984, but given this development I’m not so certain of that anymore. Especially given perceptions from the “law-abiding majority”:

Law-abiding shopper Karen Margery, 40, was shocked to hear the speakers spring into action as she walked past them.

Afterwards she said: ‘It’s quite scary to realise that your every move could be monitored - it really is like Big Brother.

‘But Middlesbrough does have a big problem with anti-social behaviour, so it is very reassuring.’

And this is the problem that civil libertarians face going forward: most people are more than willing to trade freedom and privacy for security or the perception of same. The CCTV cameras were supposed to curb anti-social behavior, and that didn’t work well enough so they decided to give them speakers, and when that doesn’t work they’ll try something else. This is the same problem that we Americans are having at airports.

There were holes in the old system, so the government took over and instituted a new system…which was equally full of holes. When one of those holes, a small one that was unlikely to work, was exposed they tried to close it up by banning beverages. But you can still bring on other liquids and gels. Actually, “personal lubricant” is on the list but toothpaste is banned, so if you’re going to join the Mile High Club, well, your breath might stink but at least you’ll be adequately lubricated. And yet my family tells me to “get used to it” and my girlfriend sometimes chuckles about how much these sorts of things upset me.

And that’s the problem we face: liberty dies in plain view of all.

Now, I mostly think that post is eye-rollingly myopic but, as the Blog PI notes, much of the blogosphere came down like the hammer of Thor. The most hilarious part of the original post was the Hot or Not reference, the totally unironic Hot or Not reference. Yeah. Anyway, The PI took the liberty of posting a less-flattering photo of Ms Passey for the scrutiny of the unwashed masses. As of now, that photo is pulling in a whopping 5.2 [image below the fold]. Which, frankly, is about in line with my assessment of “The Jackie”. I commented to a friend that she would be in the top half of women I know personally, but only just. And definitely not within the top third.

And this brings me around to my biggest point: You’re only as attractive as you look when you’re not trying. The dolled-up photo at the top of JMPP does make her look like about a 7.5 or so, but the everyday photos that are evident from the photo albums plainly available on the left side-bar of her site make clear that she’s really quite average looking. And, if you scroll down to the bottom of Ace’s long post, you’ll see her wearing what appears to be some sort of Victorian-era window covering. Or maybe it’s a coffin lining, I’m really not so very sure.

She’s certainly not the only person in the world whose looks vary day-to-day, but its fairly egotistical to take the best possible look at say “I am clearly THIS attractive”. Whichever man she ends up with next is not going to get the Glamorshots version every day, he’s going to get the “this frog peed in my hair” version, men know this. Hell, women know this about men. My girlfriend doesn’t get the suave black-tie me every day; she gets the somewhat bedraggled, flew across the country to see her me. Now, which is a more accurate way for me to rate myself? As a suave Tuxedo man or as a guy who’s all right looking but cleans up pretty well? I’m going to go with option #2, thanks. Firstly, it’s much more accurate, and secondly it doesn’t make my ego any bigger. Because, trust me, my ego is not something that needs help getting bigger.

In any case, I managed to sort of stumble upon this working paper by Oguzhan C. Dincer, Christopher J. Ellis and Glen R. Waddell. Full disclosure, I checked the UO Economics website because Professor Ellis once mentioned to me he was doing some work on kleptocracy and I started wondering what ever became of it. The working paper linked above is on the negative relationship between corruption and decentralization of the power to tax and spend. That is, as power is decentralized there appears to be less corruption. From the introduction:

Recent works by several contributors point to a significant negative relationship between the degree to which the powers to tax and spend are decentralized in an economy, and the overall level of governmental corruption (e.g., Treisman, 2000; de Mello, 2000; de Mello and M. Barenstein, 2001; Fisman and Gatti, 2002a; Arikan, 2004).1 On the surface this is quite surprising, as it might be anticipated that local politicians or bureaucrats would possess detailed knowledge of any opportunities for corruption that might arise in their jurisdictions. They might thus be expected to extract any corruption rents available more efficiently than less well informed national counterparts.

In what follows, we both propose a theoretical explanation for, and find further evidence in support of, a negative correlation between empirical measures of corruption and decentralization. We argue that because there are more independent taxation and expenditure decisions made in a decentralized economy, there are more opportunities for local populations to make cross-jurisdictional comparisons of politician or bureaucrat performance. The poor performance of a government in one jurisdiction might be attributed to a number of factors including corruption. An increase in the number of comparative observations made by the populations of jurisdictions has two effects relevant to the relationship between corruption and decentralization. First, as the number of comparative observations made by a jurisdiction’s population increases the inferences they make about the causes of a particular observed outcome become increasingly precise. Second, as the number of observations increase the likelihood that particular inferences will be arrived at also change. As we shall subsequently see, this latter effect proves to be crucial in generating a negative theoretical relationship between corruption and decentralization.

The rest of the paper goes on to outline the theoretical and empirical case for lower levels of corruption as power becomes more decentralized. This is relevant to libertarians in that it lends verifiable data to our claim that a minimal state with many decentralized branches of power will likely result in the best outcomes. Personally, I also don’t find the conclusion particularly shocking.

I’m sure this has been address elsewhere, but I don’t exactly have the time this evening to educate myself on the last 10 years of kleptocracy research, but I would suspect that centralized authorities would be a bit easier to bribe because you can get more for your marginal corruption dollar. If you have a fixed amount to spend on bribe money, and a whole host of petty bureaucrats to bribe you’ll, obviously, be able to spend less per bureaucrat and thusly have a harder time achieving your ends than you would if you could spend the entire graft budget on the one fellow in charge.