Is Global Warming Killing Turtles?

Image by Paul Mannix

"Turtles Are Casualties of Warming in Costa Rica" is the title of a recent New York Times article.

Reporters and environmentalists and climate-change-deniers all like to cherry-pick evidence to support their article or point of view. Hotter than average summer? Must be global warming! Cooler than average summer? Global warming must be bunk! Leatherback turtles dying? Global Warming! Atlantic turtles thriving? See! Not Global Warming!

They're all wrong, of course. Nature is usually complicated and messy.

Anyway, back to the turtles: as usual, the headline is more sensationalistic than the article. The article says:

...haphazard development, in tandem with warmer temperatures and rising seas that many scientists link to global warming, have vastly diminished the Pacific turtle population.

I agree that the headline "Turtles Are Casualties of Development and Maybe Warming" isn't as catchy. The article goes on to talk about how turtle nesting habitat is being destroyed by hotels and increasing population and how people used to freely dig up the nests and eat the eggs (and still do, illegally).

Maybe my contrarian-bias is shining through, but a little research into how global warming will affect leatherback turtle habitat made me more optimistic about the turtles' chances:

We used long-term satellite telemetry to define the habitat utilization of this species. We show that the northerly distribution limit of this species can essentially be encapsulated by the position of the 15°C isotherm and that the summer position of this isotherm has moved north by 330 km in the North Atlantic in the last 17 years. Consequently, conservation measures will need to operate over ever-widening areas to accommodate this range extension.
-- Thermal niche, large-scale movements and implications of climate change for a critically endangered marine vertebrate

It seems like the authors of this paper are taking a very positive piece of news (that global warming is expanding the range of an endangered sea turtle) and putting a negative spin on it (conservation efforts will have to be spread out over a larger area).

They probably didn't want the Wall Street Journal to run an article with the headline "Turtles Benefit from Global Warming."

Flu vaccine costs and benefits

I was surprised to find out that getting a seasonal flu shot isn't the slam-dunk, you're-dumb-if-you-don't-do-it decision that I assumed it was.

I think I was confounding what I know about childhood vaccines (which are a don't-be-an-idiot-and-just-get-them kinda thing) with the flu vaccine. There are good discussions on the Overcoming Bias and Science-Based Medicine blogs, prompted by an article in Atlantic Magazine.

I'm not really concerned with the big public-policy debate over whether or not the H1N1 and/or seasonal flu vaccines save lives (or whether they save enough lives to justify the cost of a public vaccination program). For me, this was the key sentence in the Atlantic article:

Studies show that young, healthy people mount a glorious immune response to seasonal flu vaccine, and their response reduces their chances of getting the flu and may lessen the severity of symptoms if they do get it.

I HATE having the flu; I'd much rather spend 2 hours waiting in line than 2 hours of having the flu. In fact, I'd give it about a 3-to-1 ratio; I'd spend 3 hours waiting to get the flu shot to avoid 1 hour of being sick and miserable.

Now the flu vaccine isn't 100% effective. And I'm not 100% guaranteed to get it. So the cost/benefit calculations get a tiny bit tricky; here's what I figure, before factoring in my preference for waiting in the doctor's office to lying feverish in bed:

Cost of getting H1N1 : ~5 days (120 hours) of misery
Cost of getting vaccinated : 2 hours of my time
Chance of catching H1N1 : 20%
Effectiveness of vaccine: 50%
Cost/benefit ratio is : 2*(1/.5)*(1/.2) / 120 = 1 / 15

So the H1N1 vaccine is a clear winner from a cost/benefit point of view. The numbers for the normal seasonal flu are different:

Cost of getting season flu: 120 hours of misery
Cost of getting vaccinated: 1 hour
Chance of getting the seasonal flu: 2%
Effectiveness of vaccine: 20%
Cost/benefit: 1*(1/.02)*(1/.2) / 120 = 250 / 120 or about 2 / 1

Most years it is quicker to get a flu shot, and most years only about 1% of the population gets the flu (I doubled my chances because the kids pick up pretty much anything going around). But most years they have to guess about which strain of flu will be going around, and they often guess wrong.

The 2/1 cost/benefit result surprises me. If I valued an hour spent sick in bed the same as an hour waiting in a doctor's office then the seasonal flu shot probably doesn't pass the cost/benefit test. I'm going to keep getting seasonal flu shots because I'm a big baby and really don't like being sick.

I haven't factored in the fact that even if the flu shot doesn't prevent me from getting the flu, it might help me recover faster. Then again, I haven't factored in the fact that I might catch a cold or another virus from somebody waiting in line with me to get a flu shot...

Swap Houses and Profit!

Can anybody point me to a respected economist (meaning one who isn't employed by the National Association of Realtors/Homebuilders) who thinks that extending the first-time-homebuyer tax credit is a good idea?

It's a bad idea on so many levels. Its regressive (homeowners are richer than the average taxpayer), its environmentally-unfriendly (homes are less efficient than apartments), and it does nothing but create artificial demand for a product that people have said they don't really want.

And in the latest incarnation it seems way too easy to game the system.

We've owned our house for more than five years, so if we sell it and buy another we'd qualify for the $6,500 existing homeowner tax credit.

It's awfully tempting to find somebody else who owns a similar house, and then swap houses. I sell to them, they sell to me, and we each pocket $6,500 dollars. If we were 100% honest (or worried about the IRS doing bed-checks) we'd actually pick up and move.

Maybe transaction costs on selling a house are high enough that this won't actually happen, or maybe the law is written so doing this is illegal.

But given the amount of fraud that happened the first time around, I bet there will be a lot of house swapping going on in the next year.

Stupid google

The Happy Kamper points to a funny Slate article about Google's auto-suggest feature. Turns out if you talk pretty, you get fancy suggestions. And if you don't, you get suggestions about growing weed or Jon and Kate.

The phrase "stupid is as stupid does" immediately sprang to mind. Ask Mr. Google to suggest queries starting with "stupid is" and here's what you get:


I like the irony of people asking "stupid is as stupid does what does it mean" ...

Education Reform: Lessons from the UK

The Center for American Progress (a lefty think tank) organized "an insightful conversation about the community schools strategy and how federal policy can encourage the growth of community schools across the country" a few days ago. You can watch the whole thing on their website (or you can get just the audio by subscribing to their events podcast, which is where I heard it).

If you have the time and you're interested in education policy I'd highly recommend watching or listening to the first 40 minutes or so where Tony Blair (former Prime Minister of the UK) describes how his administration successfully reformed the UK public school system. He says that we actually do know what needs to be done to make the education system better; it's just really hard to do. I agree.

I'm going to cherry-pick a few things that I didn't think I'd ever hear a leader of a center-left political party say; listen to his whole talk for the proper context:

• The teacher's unions are a challenge; they must be a partner, but must not be given veto power over reforms.


• Successful schools have an identity-- an "independent ethos" -- and everybody involved feels pride in the school. That requires strong leadership at the school. Academy schools (charter schools in the US) are one way to get that strong identity. Extended schools (community schools here) are another way; they become the hub for the whole community.


• Bad teachers shouldn't be teaching. Fire them.


• Bad schools shouldn't be tolerated. And "coasting" schools are a big problem, too. Track performance and act fast.


• Structure matters; set up non-bureaucratic, decentralized structures and give them support, but throw the system open to new providers and new ideas.

Tony Blair may have been astoundingly wrong for supporting the US-led invasion of Iraq, but he is absolutely right about how to reform education.

Between 2001 and 2005 what Blair increasingly hankered after was a way of improving the education system that didn't need to be constantly driven by government. He wanted to develop self-sustaining, self-improving systems, and that led him to look into how to change not just the standards and the quality of teaching, but the structures and incentives. Essentially it's about creating different forms of a quasi-market in public services, exploiting the power of choice, competition, transparency and incentives, and that's really where the education debate is going now.
--Sir Michael Barber (this whole interview is interesting)

After Mr. Blair's talk he and Arne Duncan (current US Education Secretary) sat down and had a conversation about community schools. I'm cautiously optimistic that the Obama administration might actually implement some real, effective reforms, but real reform would require changes on the local, state and federal levels.

Unfortunately, I don't think the Center for American Progress gets it. They are very excited about the "community schools" concept (extending the school day to better serve students and parents and making the schools the center of delivery of all sorts of social services), but don't talk at all about avoiding heavy-handed central bureaucracies or allowing new providers to inject fresh ideas and energy into our 19'th century, designed-for-the-agrarian-economy public school system.

Article 14

Should Amherst Town Meeting:

1) Urge Congress to repeal the ban on releasing cleared [Guantanamo] detainees into the United States and
2) Welcome such cleared detainees into our community as soon as the ban is lifted

I'd say No, and Yes.

"No" because I'm a big fan in individuals standing up for what they believe in. Not so much for a group of people to get together, vote, and then pretend that just because a majority of the people voted a certain way EVERYBODY agrees. Or, worse, that a whole town agrees.

Yeah, yeah, I know, it's a grand Town Meeting tradition going back hundreds of years to express collective opinions on all sorts of issues. There are lots of grand old traditions that I disagree with ("marriage is for a man and a woman," for example).

"Yes" because if they've done nothing illegal then they should be free. I might not invite them over to dinner, so "welcome" might not be exactly the right word, but there are lots of people who live in Amherst already that I wouldn't invite over to dinner-- religious zealots of all flavors, obnoxious frat boys and 9/11 truthers spring to mind.

I'll miss Zone-A-Palooza 2009

Fall Town Meeting starts up in a couple of weeks, and I'll be unable to attend. I couldn't resist looking through the warrant, though.

There's a lot of stuff in there; 23 pages of mostly zoning changes. Lots of reasonable changes to Amherst's crazy zoning laws (including things that seem obvious to me, like saying that the surface area of a sign doesn't include the sticks you use to hold up the sign or that an office shared by two doctors is NOT the same as a "medical center").

I'm kinda bothered that the crazy zoning laws will get a little bit crazier; half of the warrant (12 pages) describes a brand-new zoning district ("Business-Neighborhood"). Do we really need another zoning district? We've got 15 already, including five different business districts. Maybe it's not completely crazy; Northampton's got 15 zoning districts, too; if the B-N zone passes, Amherst will be one better!

If I were at the TM vote on this, I'd probably abstain. I don't have any evidence that adding yet another zoning district would do any harm; maybe giving planners (and Town Meeting) lots of zoning options so they can pick exactly the right set of regulations for any given piece of land makes the Town a better place.

But I doubt it. I think making the zoning laws more complicated will just make lawyers richer and will decrease the number of people who understand what is allowed where. And will make Town Meeting even more annoying, as we all wonder "what's the difference between the B-N and B-VC districts?" for the seventeenth time.