Delicious LiveJournal Links for 3-10-2010

[andrewducker]

• Who's Judging? - on coming out repeatedly.
  (tags: homosexuality lesbians society culture)
• LHC to shut down for a year to address safety concerns
  (tags: cern lhc physics)
• You need a paper licence to link to the Royal Mail website - and it goes downhill from there...
  (tags: royalmail EpicFail)
• Genetic Influence on Human Psychological Traits - the table on page 3 is fascinating!
  (tags: psychology genetics intelligence)
• Chile Earthquake Moved Entire City 10 Feet to the West
  (tags: environment science gps chile)

Comments

[mooism.livejournal.com]

@ProfBrianCox (http://twitter.com/ProfBrianCox):

There is nothing wrong with LHC - lazy journalism. Schedule announced in Jan, 18 months physics, 12 month engineering shutdown afterwards

I just saw the BBC "news" story about LHC schedule - I know I'm a BBC person but it's really shoddy! This kind of thing really annoys me.

ALL particle accelerators have 6 - 12 month regular shutdowns for maintenance and upgrades. That's how complex machines are operated !

I repeat: #LHC will run for 12 - 18 months now. It will then shut down, AS ACCELERATORS DO, for maintenance and upgrades. ENGINEERING !!!

[andrewducker]

In which case the article is misreprsenting, and possibly misquoting:

"Dr Steve Myers told BBC News the faults will delay the machine reaching its full potential for two years."

Either this is an anticipated situation, and there's no delay, or there is a delay to the original schedule.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

@guardianscience:

Not sure why the LHC closure became a story. We've known it was going to shut for a year around 2012 since at least January...

Myers again:

I wouldn't call it a design flaw. It is just that some of the copper stabilisers are not up to the quality needed to go to the full energy level.

Here's a better article from the Times.

Can the link thing be legally enforced?

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

It strikes me as very odd indeed.

[simont]

The odd thing is, if you wanted to enforce the same restriction technically, I can think of several halfway plausible ways it could be done. Seems particularly strange to go for the legal approach given that.

[broin.livejournal.com]

Bounce all incoming links to a notice page? Random URLs?

[andrewducker]

Yeah, bounce everything with external referrers would be the solution I'd go for if I actually cared. Dunno why they'd care though.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

If they were tech savvy enough to realise they could do that, they'd probably also probably be savvy enough to realise the whole thing is idiotic however you approach it.

Re: Can the link thing be legally enforced?

[andrewducker]

I'd be surprised if it could be legally enforced, but IANAL.

[ladysisyphus.livejournal.com]

Oof, I actually had to put the 'Who's Judging?' article down and walk away for a bit before finishing it; it hit a little close to home.

It's awful enough trying to negotiate the landscape with casual strangers, but I find the biggest hurdles with two groups: my college students, and the parents of the kids I teach. With the college students, sometimes it's fine, and sometimes I get end-of-year evaluations like this.

With the parents of the kids I teach, well, if they're a friendly sort, they usually talk with all of us about lives and families and the what-not, and the other (het) women talk about their husbands and boyfriends, and I have to gauge whether or not this time I open my big mouth will be the time I send a parent off screaming that I shouldn't be allowed near their precious little unspoiled darling. The worry spills over into the kids themselves when they get into their later teens; they hang around for lunch and get to hear us talk about our lives, and I find myself repeatedly censoring myself whenever they're in earshot.

I'm even a little more confrontational about it than drmoonpants is; even in definitively safe spaces, she'll say 'partner' when I say 'wife'.

tl;dr suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck

[broin.livejournal.com]

.... a college student wrote that review of you? Aged 18-22?

Oy.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

'Too much posting'? Do you go to the letter box a lot during lectures?

[andrewducker]

Gah - yes. Worse, so far as I can tell, in the USA than it is in the UK, not that it's anywhere near as good over here as it could be.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

There was something I was going to suggest that we ALL do out of pique the other day, but it involved cost. Can't remember what it was.

In this case though, let's ALL link to the Royal Mail website. Idiots!

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Genetic Influence on Human Psychological Traits

I'm exceptionally dubious. I want to see the sample size and methodology, and all I get instead is the following:

"Studies of human twins and adoptees, often called behavior genetic studies, allow us to estimate the heritability of various traits. The name behavior genetic studies is an unfortunate misnomer, however, as such studies are neutral regarding both environmental and genetic influences. That they repeatedly and reliably reveal significant heritability for psychological traits is an empirical fact, and not one unique to humans"

I have yet to see a study involving inherited behavior and twins that wasn't utter junk, and this very much looks like more of the same.

[andrewducker]

Cite!

(Or, alternatively, I don't share your scepticism of twin studies in the slightest, and I'd like you to back up your assertions with some studies).

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I thought that I'd mentioned this before. Twin studies usually use sets of identical twins who were raised separately. There are two obvious problems with this. The first is simply that this is far from a common occurrence, and so most of these studies have used the exact same 20-some pairs of separated twins, so you have a very small and repeating sample.

Also, and more importantly, in all cases, what you have is twins who were raised apart but who were later reunited - before any of these studies were done. So, you have both the twins unconsciously trying to model their behavior on each other due to assumptions about twins being similar, and you also have the perceptions of others who are doing the same thing.

OTOH, if the twins are raised together, what you have is an even greater cultural pressure to be identical. So, in these cases, separating out the huge degree of culture pressure for similarity is likely impossible. Here's one citation about problems with these studies. My general assumption is if I see a behavioral study that uses twins, is that the people doing the study are either idiots or are to some degree aware of and fine with using highly suspect data, simply because it helps prove their point.

[andrewducker]

Wow. You come across as incredibly biased there. First in assuming that because there are going to be both social and genetic influences in twins therefore it must be social influences making all the difference, and secondly in assuming that because some twin studies have problems therefore all twin studies are being done by people who are either idiots or frauds.

I don't really see any point in arguing with that level of bias.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

OK, I may have overstated the case wrt studies involving non-seperated twins, but it's still fairly dodgey, because there is a lot of social pressure for twins to be very similar, and so in the absence of other evidence I don't see any reason to see behavioral similarities as due to any other cause. That doesn't mean these similarities aren't genetic, but how can someone use a twin study to prove that they are? Also, for seperated twins, the tiny sample size (that's repeatedly used from one study to the next) combined with the problems of them having been reunited for a fair length of time before the study means that these studies are junk.

[andrewducker]

That's fair enough :->

I'll have to do some digging and see what I think, which means no quick reply - I'm horrifically busy at work at the mo, and out tonight, then off to my brother's for three days.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

Hmm I think all these "studies are junk" is perhaps more than a little unfair.

There is evidence from other sources that suggests there are heritable traits other than "cultural" ones. There are a number of human emotions that are universal as well as a whole raft of other things uncovered from cross-cultural research and experimentation.

Language is a very good example of the nature/nurture thing: we are all predisposed to learn a language and a grammer but it is our enviorment that dictates which one.

I think I mentioned samples sizes in a similar discussion to this on perhaps this very same journal.

Ultimatly a purely cultural explanation is dissatisfying: if not just because if twins are conforming to social pressures to be alike you would expect twins to be conformist in other ways.

Is this generally seen with identical twins? Do they tend to conform to social norms more than non-twins?

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Ultimatly a purely cultural explanation is dissatisfying: if not just because if twins are conforming to social pressures to be alike you would expect twins to be conformist in other ways.

Why? It's common for parents to dress twins alike, and for other people to treat them as identical or interchangeable, at least when they are young. This sort of treatment has a strong impact on people and has nothing to do with them being conformist in other ways. Everyone expects twins to be alike.

The case is sometimes even stronger with twins who have been separated, since there is a strong internal and external pressure for both individuals to find points of similarity with their twin. After this process has been going on for several years (which is pretty much the earliest that studies find such twins) the twins are going to be a lot more similar than they were before. Personality and memory are both exceedingly malleable given the right circumstances, and it seems to me that suddenly finding someone who your culture (and also science) says is identical to you is a pretty powerful circumstance.

Sure, there may be a genetic component to some of their similarities, but my point is that there's no useful way to separate this from cultural pressures & internal desires to be similar. Researchers can assume that X% of any similarities they observe are genetic, but in doing so they are simply making up a number without basis.