Giant stuffed microbes make the lethal loveable

The alphabet soup of naming new viruses rivals Pentagonese. AIDS. SARS. MRSA. Where do these names come from? One major source of influence in this area is the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV).

Their latest innovation is MERS, referring to a new form of coronavirus that was first reported in September, 2012. In the meantime the virus has gone by the various abbreviations hCov-EMC, HCOV, NCoV, and nCoV (the last two referring to a “novel coronavirus”).

Coming up with a good name is tricky. It should be descriptive and memorable, but naming a virus after a geographic area has major downsides:

Historically, many infectious disease agents—or the diseases themselves—have been named after the place where they were first found. But increasingly, scientists and public health officials have shied away from that system to avoid stigmatizing a particular country or city. When a serious new type of pneumonia started spreading from Asia in 2003, officials at WHO coined the term severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) to prevent the disease from being named “Chinese flu” or something similar. (As it happened, the name ruffled feathers in Hong Kong anyway, because the city’s official name is Hong Kong SAR, for special administrative region—a fact that WHO had overlooked.)…

The new name is only a recommendation—one which the study group hopes will be adopted widely but which it has no power to enforce, Gorbalenya says. That’s because ICTV has the authority only to classify and name entire virus species

For more, check out this post from Science.

Popular Durham-area food truck Chirba Chirba serves dumplings. Photo via livewell.

More on the plight of food truck operators in NYC, from the Times:

There are numerous (and sometimes conflicting) regulations required by the departments of Health, Sanitation, Transportation and Consumer Affairs. These rules are enforced, with varying consistency, by the New York Police Department. As a result, according to City Councilman Dan Garodnick, it’s nearly impossible (even if you fill out the right paperwork) to operate a truck without breaking some law. Trucks can’t sell food if they’re parked in a metered space . . . or if they’re within 200 feet of a school . . . or within 500 feet of a public market . . . and so on.

Enforcement is erratic. Trucks in Chelsea are rarely bothered, Nafziger said. In Midtown South, where I work and can attest to the desperate need for more lunch options, the N.Y.P.D. has a dedicated team of vendor-busting cops. “One month, we get no tickets,” Thomas DeGeest, the founder of Wafels & Dinges, a popular mobile-food businesses that sells waffles and things, told me. “The next month, we get tickets every day.” DeGeest had two trucks and five carts when he decided he couldn’t keep investing in a business that was so vulnerable to overzealous cops or city bureaucracy. Instead, DeGeest reluctantly decided to open a regular old stationary restaurant.

We’ve discussed food truck regulations and the competition between vendors before. There is certainly a place for regulation, but inconsistent and seemingly arbitrary enforcement undermines the goal of clarifying expectations between all parties.

Image via TheNextWeb

What is net neutrality? It’s the idea that Internet service providers (ISPs) should treat all traffic equally, not giving preferential treatment to certain users, types of data, or equipment. With FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski on the way out, nominee Tom Wheeler may not be able to avoid this fight if he succeeds Genachowski.

Here’s the Tim Wu of the New Yorker on the essence of the issue:

An important aspect of the Internet’s original design is that many prices were set at zero—what have been called zero-price rules. The price to join the network is zero. The price that users and sites pay to reach others is zero: a blogger doesn’t need to pay to reach Comcast’s customers. And the price that big Web sites charge broadband operators to carry their content is also zero. It’s a subtle point, but these three zeros are a large part of what makes the Internet what it is. If net neutrality goes away, so does the agreement to freeze prices at zero….

Admittedly, it is hard to know exactly how things would work out if the zero-price rules are abandoned. Cable still has serious market power, and might, on balance, be able to charge more than it gets charged. But if you’re a cable operator, why take that bet when you’re already sitting on giant profit margins? Why risk the best business going? Beyond cable operators, a battle royale over Internet programming and termination fees would ultimately be terrible for consumers; the Internet would start to get both worse and more expensive.

Think of it this way: net neutrality, which sets all these prices at zero, is effectively a grand truce between the big app firms and the infrastructure providers. It eliminates an unnecessary middleman: consumers deal directly with content vendors and app firms. That’s a much healthier market dynamic than one driven by hidden, passed-on costs. If cable TV isn’t a good enough example, consider the dysfunction of the health-care industry, where consumers never see what they are paying for. That’s what the present rule avoids.

YSPR will continue to monitor this issue and provide updates here.

If you live in Australia, Canada, or another jurisdiction outside the US, you can already get the book through sites like Project Gutenberg Australia. US residents should not click that link–had SOPA been passed, this site could have been censored for even providing the link. In these United States, however, Gatsby is still not in the public domain.

Here’s Duke’s Kevin Smith (who we’ve talked to before) on the convoluted reasoning behind this:

Let’s look for a minute at F. Scott.  Because he died in December of 1940, his unpublished works do enter the public domain in the United States as of 1/1/11.  His published works, however, are another story.  If a Fitzgerald work was published between 1920 and 1922, as This Side of Paradise was, for example, it is in the public domain.  But any works published in 1923 0r later, such as The Great Gatsby, are still protected.  After 1922 (and prior to 1963), a work that was published with copyright notice  and the copyright in which was renewed is given a term of 95 years from publication (the initial 28 year term plus a renewal term, after the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, of 67 years).  Thus published works from this time period are protected until at least 2019; — 1923 plus 95 years equals 2018, so works published that year will rise into the public domain on 1/1/2019.  The author’s date of death does not make any difference for these works.

This distinction seems designed to confuse librarians and other users of works.  An archive of Fitzgerald manuscripts, for example, could digitize and make available those items that were never published, or that were published earlier in F. Scott’s career (like Tales of the Jazz Age).  But a manuscript of Gatsby or Tender is the Night is still subject to protection.

The EFF had a nice explainer on this topic recently as well. Copyright restrictions aren’t just tougher in the US, they’re also subject to the whims of Congress. Congressional action can remove books from the public domain even after they’re put there by law, thanks to this Supreme Court decision.

How does this regulation affect the availability of books? Rebecca Rosen of The Atlantic called it the “missing 20th century” based on Paul Heald’s study, ”Do Bad Things Happen When Works Fall Into the Public Domain?” Here’s a chart of books available from Amazon by decade of publication:

Continuing to extend copyright protection every time Mickey Mouse gets close to being put in the public domain helps Disney, but it does not help the spread of knowledge. Don’t get me started on Hollywood, though–I’m off to see the movie.

What’s the current state of sales tax law? 

In the US Supreme Court’s last major decision on the issue (Quill Corp. v. North Dakota), it ruled that a retailer must have a physical presence in a state in order to be required to collect sales taxes in that state. Technically you are required to pay a use tax by your state if you order online from another state–just as you would be required to do so when purchasing physical goods outside your home state. But who actually does that? Virtually no one.

How much revenue would an online sales tax bring in?

The National Conference of State Legislatures estimated that states could gain $23 billion from sales taxes on internet commerce.

What’s going to change, and when? 

Last week the Senate voted 69-27 in favor of the so-called Marketplace Fairness Act. It now has to pass the House, where it will likely face more resistance. The Obama administration supports the bill, so if it passes the House it will become law. Even if passed the changes will go into effect no earlier than October 1, 2013. If you have any major online purchases in mind you may want to make them before then–another stimulus of sorts.

Cartoon gypsy Esmerelda in Disney’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”

Forthcoming from Peter Leeson (who previously brought us an analysis of pirate democracy), a new paper on self-governance among Gypsies (via Mike Munger):

Gypsies are nomads. They’re often separated from one another, which precludes direct monitoring. Further, Gypsies’ locations are changing continuously. In the past Gypsies arranged debris on roadsides and configured bits of torn cloth in nearby tree branches to communicate messages to passing fellow Roms (Yoors 1967: 126). Still, “As most of these Roms” were “constantly travelling about, the problem of communication with one another [was] a serious one” (Brown 1929: 158). Nomadism rendered direct monitoring impossible for all but a few and made society-wide communication very expensive for Gypsies. (pp. 12-13)

Gypsies’ inability to rely on government for many of their most important relationships means not only that they must enforce social rules regulating such relationships privately. More fundamentally still, they must create those rules in the first place. Romaniya superstition achieves this by folding worldly crimes—traditional antisocial behaviors, such as theft and contractual breach—into its “spiritual” crimes, such as using the wrong bar of soap to clean one’s head. Thus the “unbending notion of purity (and impurity) which governs most [of Gypsies’] behaviour” described above has two meanings: one “spiritual” and the other very much of this world (Liégeois 1986: 84). (pp. 15-16)

David Myers was the first to raise this possibility in a December, 2001, essay. In 2004, Gerd Gigerenzer collected data and estimated the 350 deaths figure, resulting from what he called “dread risk”:

People tend to fear dread risks, that is, low-probability, high-consequence events, such as the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. If Americans avoided the dread risk of flying after the attack and instead drove some of the unflown miles, one would expect an increase in traffic fatalities. This hypothesis was tested by analyzing data from the U.S. Department of Transportation for the 3 months following September 11. The analysis suggests that the number of Americans who lost their lives on the road by avoiding the risk of flying was higher than the total number of passengers killed on the four fatal flights. I conclude that informing the public about psychological research concerning dread risks could possibly save lives.

Does the same effect carry over to other countries and attacks? Alejandro López-Rousseau looked at how Spaniards responded to the March 11, 2004, train bombings in Madrid. He found that activity across all forms of transportation decreased–travelers did not substitute driving for riding the train.

What could explain these differences? One could be that Americans are less willing to forego travel than Spaniards. Perhaps more travel is for business reasons and cannot be delayed. Another possibility is that Spanish citizens are more accustomed to terrorist attacks and understand that substituting driving is more risky than continuing to take the train. There are many other differences that we have not considered here–the magnitude of the two attacks, feelings of being “in control” while driving, varying cultural attitudes.

This post is simply meant to make three points. First, reactions to terrorism can cause additional deaths if relative risks are not taken into account. Cultures also respond to terrorism in different ways, perhaps depending on their previous exposure to violent extremism. Finally, the task of explaining differences is far more difficult than establishing patterns of facts.

(For more on the final point check out Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, which motivated this post.)

Class participants were expected to have a basic familiarity with Python from going through Zed Shaw’s book over Christmas break outside of class. Each Tuesday Josh would walk them through a new computer science concept and explain how it could be used for social science research. These topics included databases, networks, web scraping, and linear programming. On Thursdays they would come to a lab session and work together in small groups to solve problems or answer questions based on some starter code that I supplied. I generally tried to make the examples relevant and fun but you would have to ask them whether I succeeded.

The class ended this past Saturday with final presentations, which were all great. The first project scraped data from the UN Millenium Development Goal reports and World Bank statistics to compare measures of maternal mortality in five African countries and show how they differed–within the same country! This reminded me of Morten Jerven’s book Poor Numbers on the inaccuracy of African development statistics (interview here).

In the second presentation, simulated students were treated with one of several education interventions to see how their abilities changed over time. These interventions could be applied uniformly to everyone or targeted at those in the bottom half of the distribution. Each child in the model had three abilities that interacted in different ways, and interventions could target just one of these abilities or several in combination. Combining these models with empirical data on programs like Head Start is an interesting research program.

The third presentation also used a computational model. Finding equilibrium networks of interstate alliances is incredibly difficult (if not impossible) to do analytically when the number of states is large. The model starts with pre-specified utility functions and runs until the network hits an equilibria. Changing starting values allows for the discovery of multiple equilibria. This model will also be combined with empirical data in the future.

For the fourth and final presentation, one participant collected data on campaign events in Germany for each of the political parties during the current election cycle. This reminded me of a Washington Post website (now taken down) detailing campaign visits in 2008 that I scraped last year and used in lab once this semester.

These examples show the wide variety of uses for programming in social science. From saving time in data collection to generating models that could not be done without the help of algorithms, a little bit of programming knowledge goes a long way. Hopefully courses like this will become more prominent in social science graduate (and undergraduate) programs over the coming years. Thanks to Josh and all the class participants for making it a great semester!

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Note: I am happy to give each of the presenters credit for their work, but did not want to reveal their names here due to privacy concerns. If you have questions about any of the presentations I can put you in touch with their authors via email.

Reading a newspaper while boating is not endorsed by the author or this website

For much of European history it was common to sleep in two chunks of about four hours each, separated by a one- to two-hour period of waking activity:

[Historian Roger] Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society.

By the 1920s the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness.

He attributes the initial shift to improvements in street lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in coffee houses – which were sometimes open all night. As the night became a place for legitimate activity and as that activity increased, the length of time people could dedicate to rest dwindled.

In some Asian and Latin cultures an after-lunch siesta is common, leaving less of a need for a full eight hours at night. David Randall suggests rethinking sleep, drawing on examples of flexible schedules from Google and Major League Baseball:

Rather than helping us to get more rest, the tyranny of the eight-hour block reinforces a narrow conception of sleep and how we should approach it. Some of the time we spend tossing and turning may even result from misconceptions about sleep and our bodily needs: in fact neither our bodies nor our brains are built for the roughly one-third of our lives that we spend in bed….

Several Major League Baseball teams have adapted to the demands of a long season by changing their sleep patterns. Fernando Montes, the former strength and conditioning coach for the Texas Rangers, counseled his players to fall asleep with the curtains in their hotel rooms open so that they would naturally wake up at sunrise no matter what time zone they were in — even if it meant cutting into an eight-hour sleeping block. Once they arrived at the ballpark, Montes would set up a quiet area where they could sleep before the game. Players said that, thanks to this schedule, they felt great both physically and mentally over the long haul.

Social norms spread in interesting and surprising ways. This can often make us better off as individuals and a society. But when it invades one’s private life, rest, and even your dreams it has gone too far. Let your body be the one to tell you when to sleep.

See also: Sleep deficits may be associated with ADHD.

From the NYT, a while back:

The idea that all employees should sit in the same place for eight hours a day, five days a week, seemed maddeningly inefficient to me. I knew that I was at peak productivity at certain times throughout the day, with regular lulls in between. The flexibility to determine when and where I worked made me a better worker….

In today’s world, where we are constantly connected, the office should be reconceived as a gathering place to communicate ideas and to reinforce personal bonds. Beyond that, employees should be given the respect, and the responsibility, to manage their own schedules and complete their work on their own time, from wherever they choose. This is the principle we followed in my business, called Khush. We came to the office three days a week for five hours a day, starting around noon.

Of course this would not work for some jobs, where the work is dependent on a physical location, public convenience, or tools in a fixed location. Construction workers, gas station attendants, and barbers, for example, will never work from home–nor would I want them to.

This raises a larger point: people don’t want jobs, they want what jobs provide. Money and a way to pass the time. A social network, perhaps. A sense of accomplishment. But not work for its own sake.