The Liberal Order

Predicting Criminal Behavior

Who's most likely to commit the next violent crime?

University of Pennsylvania criminologist Richard Berk, a trained statistician, never met a data set he didn't like.

Now, using fresh data from the Philadelphia probation department, Berk and three colleagues have built an innovative model for predicting which troublemakers already in the system are most likely to kill or attempt a killing.

What's the most relevant predictor?

Though it is well known that the probability of becoming a killer falls off with age, especially between 18 and 30, Berk's innovation is that he uses the relatively new statistical technique called "step-function" analysis to show how fast and when the dropoffs occur.

"In reality the risk doesn't decline in a smooth, straight line" but falls precipitously at certain points for certain reasons, he said.

The tool works by plugging 30 to 40 variables into a computerized checklist, which in turn produces a score associated with future lethality.

"You can imagine the indicators that might incline someone toward violence: youth; having committed a serious crime at an early age; being a man rather than a woman, and so on. Each, by itself, probably isn't going to make a person pull the trigger. But put them all together and you've got a perfect storm of forces for violence," Berk said.

Asked which, if any, indicators stood out as reliable predicators of homicide, Berk pointed to one in particular: youthful exposure to violence.

Signals and Sexuality

A study of young college women showed they frequently wore more fashionable or flashier clothing and jewellery when they were ovulating, as assessed by a panel of men and women looking at their photographs.

"They tend to put on skirts instead of pants, show more skin and generally dress more fashionably," said Martie Haselton, a communication studies and psychology expert at the University of California Los Angeles who led the study.

Story here.

Teen Views of the Future

The 2006 Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, which gauges Americans' attitudes toward invention and innovation, found that a third of teens (33 percent) predict the demise of gasoline-powered cars by the year 2015. One in four teens (26 percent) expects compact discs to be obsolete within the next decade, and roughly another one in five (22 percent) predicts desktop computers will be a thing of the past.

Teens are also optimistic that new inventions and innovations can solve important global issues, such as clean water (91 percent), world hunger (89 percent), disease eradication (88 percent), pollution reduction (84 percent) and energy conservation (82 percent).

"Perhaps more than any preceding generation, today's young people are completely comfortable with rapid technological change," Lemelson-MIT Program Director Merton Flemings said. "The rate of innovation, as reflected in U.S. patent applications, has more than doubled during their lifetime."

"Teens' belief that science and technology may hold the answers to our biggest societal challenges is encouraging," Flemings added, "but it also begs the question: Is this generation properly equipped and motivated to invent solutions to these mind-boggling challenges?"

Story here. HT Autoblog.

Do We Inherit Our Taste for Music?

From the perspective of cognitive science, music ranks among the most bizarre and fascinating features of human culture. Music is apparently a signature feature of human culture, being found in every known society, past and present. It is incorporated into a vast array of cultural events, including weddings and funerals, religious services, dances and sporting events, as well as solitary listening sessions. It can make people feel happy or sad, so much so that music is central to modern advertising campaigns. And people throughout the world spend billions of dollars annually on the music and clubbing industries. Despite this central role in human culture, the origins and adaptive function of music remain virtually a complete mystery. Music stands in sharp contrast to most other enjoyable human behaviors (eating, sleeping, talking, sex) in that it yields no obvious benefits to those who partake of it. Music perception has thus puzzled scientists and philosophers alike for thousands of years.

Many questions about music perception center around universality. To what extent are various aspects of music perception shared across cultures, and age groups, and therefore innate? Web-based psychology tests provide a powerful tool with which to efficiently collect data from thousands of people from all areas of the world and all walks of life. Here on our web site internet users can listen to brief clips of music and music-related stimuli, and then answer questions about them. The questions involve musical preferences, the perception of emotion in music, and the perception of tension and resolution. This methodology provides a way to both collect huge amounts of data, and to collect data from people living in distant parts of the world with relative ease.

It is our hope that the data we collect will help to reveal which aspects of music perception are universal, and which vary with culture and musical exposure. The test can be taken by anyone, and takes less than 15 minutes to complete. Participation is voluntary and responses are kept completely confidential.

Here's the site with a link to take the survey. Here's a new story discussing the research.

The Science of Thunderstorms

During any given minute, there are more than a thousand thunderstorms around the Earth causing some 6,000 flashes of lightning. Every minute!

Story here.

Visualizing Trust

A fascinating breakthrough on the study of trust relationships.

In the study, pairs of anonymous subjects were strapped into magnetic resonance imaging scanners 1,500 miles apart. The participants played 10 consecutive rounds of a risk-taking game that involved balancing monetary profit and trust. While they played, the scanners, synchronized through the Internet, measured how the subjects' brains reacted.

With the development of trusting feelings, increased blood flow occurred in the caudate nucleus, an area in the rear part of the brain that is involved in processing rewards. Over time, this increased blood flow appeared earlier as an expectation of trustworthiness was established.

It's indeed interesting, but I'm more interested in explanations of why people are trustworthy.

Thanks to Carol for the link.

Update: The paper is available here (pdf file) and is an excellent read. The press release from Caltech is here and offers a better understanding of the study than does the NYTimes article.

Of note (from the press release:

"Neoclassical economics starts with the assumption that rational self-interest is the motivator of all our economic behavior," says Quartz. "The further assumption is that you can only get trust if you penalize people for non-cooperation, but these results show that you can build trust through social interaction, and question the traditional model of economic man."

"The results show that you can trust people for a fair amount of time, which contradicts the assumptions of classical economics," Camerer adds.

The results do show that a tit-for-tat strategy emerges, but that trust actually emerges from patterned learning. Because we anticipate the gains from trusting another we extend trust despite uncertainty. This pattern is subsequently repeated. The conclusion is that we tend to view people as trustworthy and will therefore afford them our trust, even to strangers, unless he or she gives us a reason to doubt their intent to reciprocate.

But experimental studies reveal how people behave for strategic reasons, not for moral and ethical reasons. In other words, they reveal action based on external constraints that  are devised to induce cooperation. They don't, however, reveal how internal constraints such as moral and ethical values that induce cooperation. It's from the division of labor that the human condition has improved so dramatically over the history of mankind. Certainly the fruits from such specialization induce cooperation. But society as we know it would not exist without widespread adherence to moral and ethical norms. That's not easily measured; but it's importance is still relevant to understanding cooperation and social control.

Bill Nye

Bill Nye is making a return. Here's his website. Here's a schedule of his television show that will begin airing in April.

IMAX and Evolution

Pietro Serapiglia, who handles distribution for the producer Stephen Low of Montreal, whose company made the film [Volcanoes], said officials at other theaters told him they could not book the movie "for religious reasons," because it had "evolutionary overtones" or "would not go well with the Christian community" or because "the evolution stuff is a problem."

Hyman Field, who as a science foundation official had a role in the financing of "Volcanoes," said he understood that theaters must be responsive to their audiences. But Dr. Field he said he was "furious" that a science museum would decide not to show a scientifically accurate documentary like "Volcanoes" because it mentioned evolution.

"It's very alarming," he said, "all of this pressure being put on a lot of the public institutions by the fundamentalists."

Science and religion do not have to be adversaries. They approach things from different perspectives--a pursuit of truth through scientific discovery versus faith--that could produce complementary relationships if desired. This story gives me little hope of understanding, however, and once again some in the religious community seek to imprison Copernicus?

Steve Olson offers his take of the argument here.

If the proponents of creationism uncovered some facet of the biological world that contradicted the theory of evolution, some scientists  --  though perhaps not all  --  would be intensely interested. Coming across an anomaly in science is like winning the lottery. Unexplained findings can offer a shortcut to scientific fame, as when Alexander Fleming noticed that mold was preventing the growth of staph bacteria in culture. But creationists have not come up with a single scientific observation that undercuts evolution. Biologists have demolished the few arguments that creationists have proposed, such as the idea of "irreducible complexity." And at this point, creationist organizations such as the Discovery Institute in Seattle are spending most of their money on public relations rather than research.

Behe on Intelligent Design

Friedrich Hayek wrote that the market is such a marvelous construction that had it been designed it would certainly be the most splendiferous achievement of mankind. Of course Hayek knew that market order is not the product of design, but instead is derived from the
spontaneous order of creative forces. Markets are the result “of human action, not of human design.” In other words, the complex nature of social order makes its rational construction by any individual or group of individuals impossible. The knowledge problem is insurmountable for any individual or group of individuals to rationally construct a stable social order.

Hayek’s idea was not new, and in fact derived from Adam Smith’s concept of the invisible hand. Smith explained that nobody need direct the members of society to act in specific manners to promote social welfare. Instead, when government provides minimal institutional support by securing property and guarding against fraud, individuals pursuing their self-interest through specialization and exchange, like an invisible hand will promote the interests of society as well.

Charles Darwin was so influenced by Smith’s description of spontaneous order that he adapted it to the biological world of species evolution. His theory postulated that through natural selection our world evolved spontaneously over millions of years.

Intelligent design, often considered as creationism in pursuit of scientific credibility, repudiates Darwinian evolutionary theory. Postulating that the human species is far too complex to have originated spontaneously, the human body is the product of design by an intelligent agent. Michael Behe, probably the most well known advocate of ID theory, makes his case in the New York Times. But it is this type of comment that makes me skeptical of ID proponents.

First, what it isn't: the theory of intelligent design is not a religiously based idea, even though devout people opposed to the teaching of evolution cite it in their arguments. For example, a critic recently caricatured intelligent design as the belief that if evolution occurred at all it could never be explained by Darwinian natural selection and could only have been directed at every stage by an omniscient creator. That's misleading. Intelligent design proponents do question whether random mutation and natural selection completely explain the deep structure of life. But they do not doubt that evolution occurred. And intelligent design itself says nothing about the religious concept of a creator.

Then who was the creator? ID theory is premised on shaky ground to begin with, and then in an attempt to gain respectability, they shun any notion that the creator has some "religious concept."

Thanks to Bob Subrick for the Behe lead.

Evolutionary Divide

Georgia is still debating whether evolution or creationism (or both) should be taught in their government schools.

The federal lawsuit being heard this week in Atlanta concerns whether the constitutional separation of church and state was violated when suburban Cobb County school officials placed the disclaimer stickers in high school biology texts in 2002. The stickers say evolution should be "critically considered." (MS: Actually, all academic instruction should be "critically considered." But with our educational system becoming more and more of an ideological battleground critical thinking skills are the first casualty.)

Earlier this year, science teachers howled when state Schools Superintendent Kathy Cox proposed a new science curriculum that dropped the word "evolution" in favor of "changes over time."

That plan was quickly dropped, but comic Jimmy Fallon still cracked wise on "Saturday Night Live": "As a compromise, dinosaurs are now called `Jesus Horses'."

Those who support the Cobb County stickers testified this week that they are aiming for a more open-minded education for students.

"I think the (evolution) theory is atheistic. And it's all that's presented. It's an insult to their intelligence that they're only taught evolution," said Marjorie Rogers, the parent who first complained about the biology texts.

Some scientists say they are frustrated the issue is still around nearly 80 years since the Scopes Monkey Trial — the historic case heard in neighboring Tennessee over the teaching of evolution instead of the biblical story of creation.

I know many very religious people who teach science and accept evolution as scientifically factual. They are neither atheists nor do they approach their teachings as such.

Science consists of theories that are falsifiable and subject to revisions as new information is discovered. In fact, their job as scientists is to falsify their theories--to disprove them by constantly testing their hypotheses.

Religion, on the other hand, is a faith, a belief that something exists and is therefore not subject to critical analysis; it is neither falsifiable nor are religious beliefs likely to change with the discovery of new information.

Evolution, therefore, belongs in the science curriculum while creationism (or intelligent design) belongs in the philosophy and religion curriculum. The fact that current interpretations of the U.S. Constitution forbid teaching of religion in government schools does not open a back door to the teaching of creationism as science in our science departments.

Update: Dover, PA school district takes a more radical stance on the subject.

Last month, this rural south-central Pennsylvania community became first in the nation to mandate the teaching of "intelligent design," which holds that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by an unspecified higher power.

Last month, the Dover Area School District board voted to overhaul its ninth-grade biology curriculum. It now requires students to learn about alternate theories to evolution, which holds that Earth is billions of years old and that life forms developed over millions of years.

Critics say it's a veiled attempt to require public school children to learn creationism, a biblical-based view that credits the origin of species to God.

And then:

The revision was spearheaded by school board member William Buckingham, who heads the board's curriculum committee.

"I think it's a downright fraud to perpetrate on the students of this district, to portray one theory over and over," said Buckingham. "What we wanted was a balanced presentation."

Buckingham wanted the board to adopt an intelligent-design textbook, "Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins," as a supplement to the traditional biology book, but no vote was ever taken. A few weeks before the new science curriculum was approved, 50 copies were anonymously donated to the high school.

Although Buckingham describes himself as a born-again Christian and believes in creationism, "This is not an attempt to impose my views on anyone else," he said.

There is strong disagreement among the social sciences, most notable among them is that psychologists have for years argued that economists overstate rationality in the study of human action and understate the importance of emotions. (Although there is a greater connection between economics and psychology now, at least among some economists, it is only because new information has been discovered that reveals a greater importance of emotional influences in human decision making than economists had previously accepted.)

This doesn't mean, however, that economists now, under the guise of fairness, must include psychology in their curriculum. Economic theory is premised on the assumption of rational choice; psychology studies human emotions. They deal with different subject matters, employing different methodologies and premises. The same is with the sciences and religion--with evolution and creationism--but even more so. One is a science the other is a faith.