bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • Let’s not judge sex-ed effectiveness on teen pregnancy alone.

    Tom at Family Scholars Blog writes:

    Given that everyone wants to reduce teen pregnancy, why can’t we just agree to go with what has been shown to work? Increasingly, I see earmarked funds for abstinence-only education as financial handouts to the Bush Administration’s social conservative base. To be sure, I don’t support throwing condoms at kids. Comprehensive sex-ed programs that don’t work should not be supported, either. But there has been a fair amount of research as to what works. We should use this knowledge. Believe me, if there was any convincing evidence that abstinence-only programs worked, I’d support them.

    With the caveat that parents should be able to expect transparency and some degree of control over the curriculum presented to their own children, public policy should definitely throw its weight behind programs that are proven to further public goals.  And reducing teenage pregnancy is indeed a laudable public-health goal.

    I have two questions for Tom about the specific programs that are shown to reduce teenage pregnancy:

    1. Are these same programs also proven to reduce rates of sexually transmitted infections among teenagers? Surely this is an equally laudable public-health goal.
    2. How do these programs affect the age of onset of sexual behavior, compared to other programs? Surely delaying the onset of sexual behavior is also a laudable goal, if perhaps not as urgent (from a public health standpoint) as reducing teen pregnancies and STIs.

    It isn’t self-evident that the programs that best reduce teenage pregnancy are the same programs that best reduce STI rates, because these different results are produced by different behavior sets.   A decrease in teen pregnancy could be caused by increased use of oral or injectable contraceptives, neither of which offers any protection whatsoever against STIs.  And even condoms are not very effective against the transmission of human papilloma virus (HPV) or herpes, both of which have lifelong consequences.

    Nor is it self-evident that declines in teen pregnancy correspond to children waiting longer before becoming sexually active.  Perhaps they are substituting oral and anal intercourse for vaginal intercourse.  Perhaps they are using contraceptives more frequently.  These do not protect against emotional entanglements too complex for their maturity level.

    So I’m curious if one class of programs is effective in all three of these areas. Teen pregnancy isn’t the only measure worth studying.

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  • Peer pressure and poverty.

    "Jane Galt"  over at Asymmetrical Information makes a point that has provoked heated discussion in the comments:

    I don’t know about the rest of you, but when I was eighteen, if my peer group had taken up swallowing razor blades I would have been happily killed myself trying to set a world record. And if they had thought school was for losers and the cool thing to do was to hang out all day listening to music and running dime bags for the local narcotics emporium, I would have been right there with them. Lucky for me, my peer group thought that the most important thing in the entire world was to get an ivy league diploma, so I went to Penn and ended up shilling for drug companies on my blog.

    Maybe you were different. But think back to the times–and you know there were times–when trying to win the approval of your peers convinced you to do things that were stupid, wrong, or both. Remember what it felt like to be sixteen and skinny and maybe not as charming and self confident as others around you, and ask yourself if you’d really be able to withstand their derision in order to go to college–especially if you didn’t even know anyone who’d ever been to college, or have any but the haziest idea of what one might do when one got out. Try to imagine deciding to get a BA when doing so means cutting yourself off from the only world you know and launching yourself into a scary new place where everyone’s wealthier, better educated, and more assured than you are.

    Or take a minute right now and try to imagine how your friends would react if you announced that you’d decided to quit work, have a baby, and go on welfare. They’d make you feel like an outsider, wouldn’t they? And isn’t that at least part of the reason that you don’t step outside of any of the behavioural boundaries that the middle class has set for itself?

    Bad peer groups, like good ones, create their own equilibrium. Doing things that prevent you from attaining material success outside the group can become an important sign off loyalty to the group, which of course just makes it harder to break out of a group, even if it is destined for prison and/or poverty. I think it is fine, even necessary, to recognize that these groups have value systems which make it very difficult for individual members to get a foothold on the economic ladder. But I think conservatives need to be a lot more humble about how easily they would break out of such groups if that is where they had happened to be born.

    I had a lot of peer pressure when I was growing up:  some negative, most what the majority of middle-to-upper-class people would call "positive."  It’s amazing to look back now at how beholden to my peer group I was.

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  • Bad Science: the definitive piece?

    There’s a piece by Ben Goldacre in Thursday’s Guardian that I can’t really add much to.  I wish I’d written it.  I’ll excerpt:

    Why is science in the media so often pointless, simplistic, boring, or just plain wrong? Like a proper little Darwin, I’ve been collecting specimens, making careful observations, and now I’m ready to present my theory.

    It is my hypothesis that in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science, for their own means. They then attack this parody as if they were critiquing science….

    Goldacre gives three classes of bad science journalism pieces, with examples.  They are the "wacky story," the "scare story," and the "breakthrough story."

    But enough on what they choose to cover. What’s wrong with the coverage itself? The problems here all stem from one central theme: there is no useful information in most science stories.

    A piece in the Independent on Sunday from January 11 2004 suggested that mail-order Viagra is a rip-off because it does not contain the "correct form" of the drug. I don’t use the stuff, but there were 1,147 words in that piece. Just tell me: was it a different salt, a different preparation, a different isomer, a related molecule, a completely different drug? No idea. No room for that one bit of information…

    Why? Because papers think you won’t understand the "science bit", all stories involving science must be dumbed down, leaving pieces without enough content to stimulate the only people who are actually going to read them – that is, the people who know a bit about science.

    Statistics are what causes the most fear for reporters, and so they are usually just edited out, with interesting consequences. Because science isn’t about something being true or not true: that’s a humanities graduate parody. It’s about the error bar, statistical significance, it’s about how reliable and valid the experiment was, it’s about coming to a verdict, about a hypothesis, on the back of lots of bits of evidence…

    So how do the media work around their inability to deliver scientific evidence? They use authority figures, the very antithesis of what science is about, as if they were priests, or politicians, or parent figures. "Scientists today said … scientists revealed … scientists warned."

    …The danger of authority figure coverage, in the absence of real evidence, is that it leaves the field wide open for questionable authority figures to waltz in.

    …But it also reinforces the humanities graduate journalists’ parody of science, for which we now have all the ingredients: science is about groundless, incomprehensible, didactic truth statements from scientists, who themselves are socially powerful, arbitrary, unelected authority figures. They are detached from reality: they do work that is either wacky, or dangerous, but either way, everything in science is tenuous, contradictory and, most ridiculously, "hard to understand".

    Apparently Bad Science is a regular feature at The Guardian.  I will have to bookmark it.

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  • Suburban police kept New Orleans residents from fleeing on foot into the suburb.

    I. Kid. You. Not.   From Workbench:

    In an interview with UPI, Gretna Police Chief Arthur Lawson confirmed that his department shut down the bridge to pedestrians: "If we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now: looted, burned and pillaged."

    The Gretna police were blocking one of the only ways to get out of New Orleans on foot.

    The paramedics believe that race played a factor in the decision to block evacuees on foot. Gretna’s population is 56 percent white and 36 percent black, according to the 2000 U.S. Census.

    Ya think?  H/t Instapundit, again.

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  • I wish I had been able to do this when I was studying for my oral prelim.

    Going through our homemade phonics flashcards today:  ou,  ie,  th,  ck,  ch,  oy,  oe,  or,  ar.

    ou  as in "pronounce" was a new one, introduced yesterday.  Oscar turned it over and stared at it for several seconds.  I started to give him the answer and he held up a hand to stop me, screwing up his face silently.  I waited.  After almost a minute he looked up and pronounced, "/ou/!"

    Hey, you got it!  I said. 

    I didn’t get it, and then I thinked hard about it in my head!  he said, jumping up and down.

    You thought really hard about it in your brain until you remembered?

    I thinked about it in my head and my heart and my brain!  I thinked about it with MY WHOLE BODY and then I can remember everything!

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  • A sad day for homeschooling Lileks fans.

    James Lileks, halfway down the page:

    Gnat had her first day of kindergarten today. [There’s a pic, too–Erin ]

    We waited for the bus – it was late – and the handoff was less painful than I anticipated. I’ve put her on buses before. I anticipate many mornings like this, the two of us standing outside in the drizzle of fall, the bone-cracking cold of winter, the first warm spring morning, waiting, looking up the street, chatting. She clambered up on the bus without looking back, and for that I’m glad; while this is a bittersweet transition for me, it’s all good for her, and I can only applaud and sigh with relief.

    I live in Minneapolis, subscribe to the Star Tribune, and I read the BackFence and later the Bleat before I ever read any blogs.  (I still remember the uneasy surprise of discovering that The Bleat was, um, a big deal in the blogosphere.  Until then I thought of Lileks as this one local guy.) 

    One of the things about the columns and the Bleat that endeared it to me:  Gnat was born the same week my first son was born.   All the writing about his daughter’s milestones was especially fun for me to read, because we were going through a lot of the same things around here (minus Hello Kitty and My Little Pony; plus swords and guns and bows and arrows, and eventually, a little brother and the proliferation of the swords and guns and bows and arrows).    

    I know most blog-readers who read Lileks do so because of his political and social commentary, and the humor, and I do too, but the writing about his family is really my favorite part.   It has always been so palpable, how much he loves his daughter’s company.  And isn’t that the best part about caring for your kids?  Learning to love their company—their presence as people in your life?

    So it’s just a little teeny bit bittersweet for me to note the divergence of the paths of these two kids who’ve never met and probably never will. 

    ‘Cause I didn’t put Oscar on the school bus today.

    Last Thursday my family went to the State Fair, which happened to be the same day Lileks was making his Official Appearance at the Star Tribune booth.  It wasn’t crowded.  We stopped by.  I waited my turn and introduced myself with  "Hey, you’re my blogfather!" 

    During the short fangrrl conversation that ensued, in which I received an autographed moist towelette (the pleading of a Star Tribune Booth Staffer that he should autograph the thoughtfully provided Star Tribune Logo State Fair Maps fell on deaf ears), I said I was going to chair the blogosphere committee to convince him to homeschool Gnat.  You know you want to!

    She’s very social, he said.

    Standard boilerplate.  I don’t doubt it.  Aren’t they all?  All kids are social! 

    That’s the point.

    Anyway.   I wonder what it will be like, continuing to read about Gnat’s life, as it becomes increasingly different from Oscar’s life.  (More importantly for her family:  as it becomes increasingly different from the life of her own home.)  I suppose it will be a tiny window into one universe out of this alternate universe, the one I’ve been telling people we’ve stepped into this week.   In the one we might have chosen, we do the expected instead of the unexpected.  In the one we did choose, he’s saying, "MOM.  Turn off the computer.  I want to do my schoolwork on the couch."

    Best wishes, Gnat.

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  • One Irish columnist on the politics of Katrina.

    Northern Ireland blogger Slugger O’Toole says,

    Newton Emerson is on great form in the Irish Times today. Since it deserves a much wider play on the Internet. I have permission from him to republish it on the net. It’s a rhetorical gem.

    That it is.  Regardless of what you think of the political predictions — personally, I think he’s right on — it’s a well-crafted piece of writing.   Check it out, via the link above.

    (h/t Instapundit, of course)

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  • And I so wanted to make it to 2065.

    Here’s an interesting mortality calculator.  Not only does it tell you how long you’re slated to live, it tells you how much you could increase that by changing certain habits.

    I’m supposed to last until mid-2063, when I’m nearly 89 years old.  This is a bit less than the median (the median survival age of the general population, or of those taking the test?)  I blame my parents.

    Apparently I could live about eight months longer if I stopped driving, avoided all major stress (at least in the last year of my life), became a conditioning exerciser instead of just an "occasional" exerciser, and stopped having sex.   Six of those months come from exercising.  Apparently avoiding driving is only good for about ten days, and stress for three weeks.   Sex is costing me two whole weeks of my life!

    For some odd reason, the model also cheerfully informs me that if I don’t mind cutting my life short by 0.34 years, I can increase my alcohol consumption to 2-3 drinks per day.  Is that good news?

    h/t Clinical Cases and Images blog, via Grand Rounds.

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  • Another reason why I love blogs.

    This whole post at Instapundit is interesting:  check out the many updates taken from reader e-mail. 

    The update from "Reader Jeff Cook" (several pages of scrolldown) is the one that prompted me to make the post, but it’s all good.

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  • Whatever happened to…

    Also from the SciAm article linked in the previous post:

    When Allison, the first tropical storm of the 2001 hurricane season, dumped five inches of rain a day on New Orleans for a week in June, it nearly maxed out the pumping system. [Walter] Maestri [a local emergency management director], spent his nights in a flood-proof command bunker built underground to evade storm winds; from there he dispatched police, EMTs, firefighters and National Guardsmen.

    Is Mr. Maestri still around?  Yep—he’s the Director of Emergency Management, and it looks like he’s been speaking to the press about the possibility of a New Orleans hurricane for several years.

    Wonder if that bunker survived.

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  • John Rennie of SciAm on the levees.

    PBS interviewed John Rennie, the editor of Scientific American magazine, and got a somewhat better answer, if an obvious one.

    In this case, unfortunately, what happened was that the surge of water associated with Hurricane Katrina moved through the lake, struck the levees and opened up these holes in a few places allowing the waters from the lake to then start to flow down into the city…

    New Orleans has been hit by a lot of hurricanes over the years and the levees really are constructed so that they can withstand a lot of the sorts of pressures and strains associated with typical hurricanes.

    The fact is that even if Katrina had really hit New Orleans dead on and if we’d seen the kind of 25-foot surge that was associated with other parts in the worst part of the storm, if that had hit New Orleans, even if the levees had held up, an enormous amount of water would have still spilled over them and flooded the city.

    So really nothing is built to withstand something the strength of Katrina. But the fact is that in practice, New Orleans didn’t have to experience that extraordinary level of force. It was still enough though to break open these areas of the levees.

    The interview pointed me to this article detailing how New Orleans got into this mess, and how a $14 billion marsh-restoration project might have started getting it out:

    Restoring coastal Louisiana would protect the country’s seafood and shipping industries and its oil and natural-gas supply. It would also save America’s largest wetlands, a bold environmental stroke. And without action, the million people outside New Orleans would have to relocate. The other million inside the bowl would live at the bottom of a sinking crater, surrounded by ever higher walls, trapped in a terminally ill city dependent on nonstop pumping to keep it alive.

    "Terminally ill" sounds about right.

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  • Physical failure of the levees.

    This report indicates that the storm surge that hit New Orleans was larger than its classification (by wind speed) as a Category 4 storm would indicate:

    Katrina weakened slightly to a Category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained winds estimated at 145 mph as it made landfall early Monday, but it maintained a storm surge that is only generally found in category 5 storms.

    It’s the storm surge, not the wind, that is most relevant to the levee breaks.  So the levees, which were meant to withstand a Category 3 storm, really got a Category-5-type beating.

    Some numbers begin to appear:

    The lake, which normally is 1 foot above sea level, peaked at 8.6 feet above sea level, said English.

    How tall are the levees?

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