Study of birds shows that corrections to air pollution start before 1950, as we already knew but couldn't measure

Bird specimens track 135 years of atmospheric black carbon and environmental policy. Shane G. DuBay and Carl C. Fuldner. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Early Edition, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1710239114



Significance: Emission inventories of major climate-forcing agents like black carbon suffer high uncertainty for the early industrial era, thereby limiting their utility for extracting past climate sensitivity to atmospheric pollutants. We identify bird specimens as incidental records of atmospheric black carbon, filling a major historical sampling gap. We find that prevailing emission inventories underestimate black carbon levels in the United States through the first decades of the 20th century, suggesting that black carbon’s contribution to past climate forcing may also be underestimated. This study builds toward a robust, spatially dynamic inventory of atmospheric black carbon, highlighting the value of natural history collections as a resource for addressing present-day environmental challenges.

Abstract: Atmospheric black carbon has long been recognized as a public health and environmental concern. More recently, black carbon has been identified as a major, ongoing contributor to anthropogenic climate change, thus making historical emission inventories of black carbon an essential tool for assessing past climate sensitivity and modeling future climate scenarios. Current estimates of black carbon emissions for the early industrial era have high uncertainty, however, because direct environmental sampling is sparse before the mid-1950s. Using photometric reflectance data of >1,300 bird specimens drawn from natural history collections, we track relative ambient concentrations of atmospheric black carbon between 1880 and 2015 within the US Manufacturing Belt, a region historically reliant on coal and dense with industry. Our data show that black carbon levels within the region peaked during the first decade of the 20th century. Following this peak, black carbon levels were positively correlated with coal consumption through midcentury, after which they decoupled, with black carbon concentrations declining as consumption continued to rise. The precipitous drop in atmospheric black carbon at midcentury reflects policies promoting burning efficiency and fuel transitions rather than regulating emissions alone. Our findings suggest that current emission inventories based on predictive modeling underestimate levels of atmospheric black carbon for the early industrial era, suggesting that the contribution of black carbon to past climate forcing may also be underestimated. These findings build toward a spatially dynamic emission inventory of black carbon based on direct environmental sampling.

Draft -- Teodoro León's "Las mentiras deliberadas de Podemos", militant views and political combativeness

Draft review of "Las mentiras deliberadas de Podemos" [1], published El País newspaper (EP), Oct 22 2017. First paragraph of [1]:

"En un estudio reciente de psicología cognitiva, Briony Swire-Thompson (Western Australia University) planteó a dos millares de ciudadanos estadounidenses un par de afirmaciones sobre una creencia absurda: ‘Las vacunas provocan autismo’ y ‘Donald Trump afirma que las vacunas provocan autismo’. Los partidarios de Donald Trump asumían la afirmación con una convicción plena cuando llevaba el nombre de su ídolo político. Al hacerles comprender su inconsistencia, rectificaban, pero unas semanas después, tras volver a plantearles la cuestión, de nuevo creían ciegamente en las palabras de Trump. El estudio de Swire-Thompson documenta, como concluye Yudhijit Bhattacharjee en National Geographic, “la ineficacia de la información”. Y esto es lo que inquieta ante mentiras como la campaña de Podemos sobre el Procés. No que mientan con un descaro equivalente al de Trump sobre las vacunas, sino que hay cinco millones de almas dispuestos a creer aquello que enarbolen Iglesias y sus pretorianos.!

Some comments:

1  There were not 2000 people in the study [2] (by Briony Swire and three other authors, although the writer in EP writes Briony Swire-Thompson and mentions her only), there were 247 left out of the analysis for their not having political label or not doing the tasks well.

2  Of the resulting 1776, about two thirds, 1015, were democrats and about a third, 535, republicans. It would be more representative to have something close to what really happened in the election.

3  To compound more the sample's low quality, of those 535 Republicans, only 323 are Trump supporters. There are also 99 democrats who supported Trump. So, to summarize, of about 2000 people they tell us were part of the study, 422 are Trump supporters and 1127 are Trump non-supporters (non-supporters are more than 2.5 times the supporters).

4  Also, people of more age are more skeptical and have better detectors of misinformation [3], but these older people were excluded to an unknown rate because the subjects were recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which excludes access to lots of people above 55 that do not handle computers well enough.

5  Those people were not presented only, as it is suggested, with a couple of absurd quotes, but a total of eight statements, four misinformation quotes attributed to Trump (I didn't very what he said and what not), and four true statements attributed to him (again, I didn't verify those).

Also, the article [1] plainly says that the ones with problems were the Trump supporters. But non-supporters do the same, see 8.1 below.

6  I dare to say that all the misinformation quotes were debatable and could be supported to some degree (the Trump supporters were not idiots, and were relatively rational), and all statements deemed as true could be debated too (the non-supporters were not idiots nor robots, but relatively rational too).

7  The author of the Spanish piece of reporting editorial writing is in a deep state of shock with the guys he "studies," which are Podemos and the "souls" that support the party, making use of sentences like "The lies said on purpose by" ("Las mentiras deliberadas de"), "it crosses the red lines" ("cruza todas las líneas"), "they made it up" ("se inventa"), "they blatantly lie with a cheekiness like that of Trump" ("que mientan con un descaro equivalente al de Trump"), "in this case it is amazing the scale and cold pragmatism" ("sorprende en este caso [...] la escala y el pragmatismo frío"), "they crossed all the red lines" ("Han cruzado todas las líneas rojas"), cadres of the group are praetorians ("pretorianos"), etc.

All this "lingua florentis" (pardon the bad declination) is not printed with bad purposes... Both his side and Podemos' side are well-intentioned (a small part in each side is completely cynical and devoted only to their stomachs, but we cannot know who they are   :-)   ).

8  The real lessons of what we know and of the article [1] and the paper [2] are, IMHO, these:

8.1  most Republican supporters in the sample believed all or most the statements attributed to Trump, AND (I am sure that to great surprise of the EP newspaper's readers and editors) most democrats and other non-supporters in the study believed not a single one or almost none when attributed to Trump (to varying degrees, of course, depending on the question) [2].

Applied to the writer in EP, he is doing the same that his enemies do. All with a good aim.

Making a caricature of themselves, the author and editors of EP behave as the infamous Trump and his supporters, unknown to them that they are like the other half of paper [2], real believers in a cause, regardless of reason and reasons.


8.2  this Spanish newspaper and the contributor's hit piece is one more proof of this characterization: most newspapers are, more than not, strongly politicized and partial, IMHO; the contributors are mostly sincere but write to earn a living and exaggerate statements to make themselves more acceptable to readers and editors, guaranteeing their continued publishing or enhancing their reputation (most of the reputation is of use only in our own circles, but some is of use to build among the enemy the image of a formidable fighter); and readers select what supports their views, held before finding articles in support of those views [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9].

8.3  IMHO, this piece of propaganda is created and published by the panic author and editors feel believing that propaganda (that of the enemy, since one do not do such things :-) ) works [10, 11, 12, 13]. The author and the editors believe that they need to balance the statements made by the enemy, even at the cost of publishing very weak propaganda themselves.

8.4  in the end, all this doesn't work... We first have sentiments/feelings, and then read mostly those things that confirm our feelings. So Trump or Clinton supporters use most of the time finding excuses in the data to attack and counter-attack the others, but they cannot change opinion  [4, 14] unless enough time passes and enough discrediting information appears.


9  Final considerations to make sense of the discussion about truth, post-truth, untruth, etc.:

9.1  We all use misleading statements all the time (not to speak of lottery vendors, who promise to win the prize if one buys their tickets)

9.2  But we are not monsters, it is supposed that those hearing or reading us will have enough brains to separate banter, exaggeration, excessively condensed information, etc., from slightly false statements by accidental reasons, a little more than slightly-false statements, those that are mostly false but were not intented to be so, and those blantant lies made public on purpose to denigrate others or to attack positions.

So, when one say "vaccines cause autism," he is not saying "if one duplicates doses, there are twice autism patients," but that autism incidence increases somewhat, to a not well determined degree. When one says "vaccines do not cause harm," one is not saying that there are not health problems (and even deaths) due to vaccination, but that the harm is 1  unintentional and 2  very, very small relative to the enormous amounts of vaccines deployed.

My last line is to ask for calm and moderation. We all say things that are not right, and most of the time our intention is good or at least neutral. Let's not take things in the worst possible light.

--
Notes

[1]  Teodoro León: Las mentiras deliberadas de Podemos. El País, Oct 22 2017. https://elpais.com/elpais/2017/10/21/opinion/1508608410_870485.html

[2]  Processing political misinformation: comprehending the Trump phenomenon. Briony Swire, Adam J. Berinsky, Stephan Lewandowsky, Ullrich K. H. Ecker. Royal Society Open Science, published on-line March 01 2017. DOI: 10.1098/rsos.160802, http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/4/3/160802

[3]  Competing cues: Older adults rely on knowledge in the face of fluency. By Brashier, Nadia M.; Umanath, Sharda; Cabeza, Roberto; Marsh, Elizabeth J. Psychology and Aging, Vol 32(4), Jun 2017, 331-337. http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/07/competing-cues-older-adults-rely-on.html

[4]  Stanley, M. L., Dougherty, A. M., Yang, B. W., Henne, P., & De Brigard, F. (2017). Reasons Probably Won’t Change Your Mind: The Role of Reasons in Revising Moral Decisions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/09/reasons-probably-wont-change-your-mind.html

[5]  Science Denial Across the Political Divide -- Liberals and Conservatives Are Similarly Motivated to Deny Attitude-Inconsistent Science. Anthony N. Washburn, Linda J. Skitka. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10.1177/1948550617731500. http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/09/liberals-and-conservatives-are.html

[6]  Biased Policy Professionals. Sheheryar Banuri, Stefan Dercon, and Varun Gauri. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 8113. http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/08/biased-policy-professionals-world-bank.html

[7]  Dispelling the Myth: Training in Education or Neuroscience Decreases but Does Not Eliminate Beliefs in Neuromyths. Kelly Macdonald et al. Frontiers in Psychology, Aug 10 2017. http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/08/training-in-education-or-neuroscience.html

[8]  Individuals with greater science literacy and education have more polarized beliefs on controversial science topics. Caitlin Drummond and Baruch Fischhoff. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 114 no. 36, pp 9587–9592, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1704882114, http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/09/individuals-with-greater-science.html

[9]  Expert ability can actually impair the accuracy of expert perception when judging others' performance: Adaptation and fallibility in experts' judgments of novice performers. By Larson, J. S., & Billeter, D. M. (2017). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 43(2), 271–288. http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/06/expert-ability-can-actually-impair.html

[10]  Public Perceptions of Partisan Selective Exposure. Perryman, Mallory R. The University of Wisconsin - Madison, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2017. 10607943. http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/10/citizens-believe-others-especially.html

[11]  The Myth of Partisan Selective Exposure: A Portrait of the Online Political News Audience. Jacob L. Nelson, and James G. Webster. Social Media + Society, http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/09/the-myth-of-partisan-selective-exposure.html

[12]  Echo Chamber? What Echo Chamber? Reviewing the Evidence. Axel Bruns. Future of Journalism 2017 Conference. http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/09/echo-chamber-what-echo-chamber.html

[13]  Fake news and post-truth pronouncements in general and in early human development. Victor Grech. Early Human Development, http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/09/fake-news-and-post-truth-pronouncements.html

[14]  Consumption of fake news is a consequence, not a cause of their readers’ voting preferences
Kahan, Dan M., Misinformation and Identity-Protective Cognition (October 2, 2017). Social Science Research Network, http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/10/consumption-of-fake-news-is-consequence.html

While cannabis users appear to demonstrate enhanced creativity, these effects are an artifact of their heightened openness levels

Inspired by Mary Jane? Mechanisms underlying enhanced creativity in cannabis users. Emily M. LaFrance, Carrie Cuttler. Consciousness and Cognition, Volume 56, November 2017, Pages 68–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2017.10.009

Highlights
•    Sober cannabis users showed enhanced self-reported creativity to non-users.
•    Sober cannabis users demonstrated superior convergent thinking ability to non-users.
•    Cannabis users were more extraverted, open to experience and less conscientious.
•    Differences in openness to experience explained cannabis users’ enhanced creativity.

Abstract: Previous research suggests cannabis may enhance some aspects of creativity, although the results remain somewhat equivocal. Moreover, it is unclear whether differences in cannabis users’ personalities may account for any potentially beneficial effects of cannabis on creativity. This study was designed to examine whether sober cannabis users demonstrate superior self-reported and objective creativity test performance relative to non-users, and to determine whether any of the Big 5 personality domains underlie these effects. A sample of sober cannabis users (n = 412) and non-users (n = 309) completed measures of cannabis consumption, personality, self-reported and objective creativity. Relative to non-users, sober cannabis users self-reported higher creativity, and performed significantly better on a measure of convergent thinking. Controlling for cannabis users’ higher levels of openness to experience abolished these effects. Therefore, while cannabis users appear to demonstrate enhanced creativity, these effects are an artifact of their heightened levels of openness to experience.

Keywords: Cannabis; Creativity; Divergent thinking; Convergent thinking; Openness to experience; Big 5 personality

Those who monitored their heart rate using a wearable tracker had lower belief in free will

Wearables and User Interface Design: Impacts on Belief in Free Will. D. A. Baker. In: International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction HCI 2017 – Posters' Extended Abstracts pp 210-217, Conference paper. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-58750-9_30

Abstract: This research investigates the social implications of sensor driven self-quantification technologies designed to direct user behaviors. These self-sensoring prescriptive applications (SSPA’s), often referred to as “wearables,” have a strong presence in healthcare as a means to monitor and improve health, modify behavior, and reduce medical costs. However, the commercial sector is quickly adopting SSPA’s to monitor and/or modify consumer behaviors as well [1, 2, 3]. Interestingly, the direct impact biosensor data have on user decision making, attitude formation, and behavior has not been well researched. SSPA’s offer an opportunity for users to monitor the “self” in terms of quantitative, objective, biological terms that may be beyond the user’s control. Research suggests some states of the body (e.g. chronic pain, hunger) can affect underlying beliefs in free will (BFW), finding that the less control a person has over those physical states, the weaker their BFW [4]. It is not known, however, whether reminders about physical states of the body, such as heart rate monitors used during exercise, may also serve to reduce BFW. This is an important gap in knowledge when considering that reduced BFW can have numerous negative impacts on individual behavior [5, 6, 7]. This preliminary work examined the impact of such technologies on underlying BFW. Participants who monitored their heart rate during a short walk using a wearable heart rate and activity tracker had lower BFW than participants who merely look at the device’s various tracking features and participants in the control condition.