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Bailing out banks

Last week the US congress agreed to a US$7 billion bail-out for the banking sector. This Tuesday, the UK government followed suit with its own bail-out – though with some fairly serious strings attached. In the US case in particular, there was some strong public opposition to the bail-out, with many people claiming that bankers should be made to feel the consequences of their own bad decisions. In response, those who favoured the bail-out tended to make one or both of two main responses. First, they claimed that the bail-out would make everyone better off, and/or second, they implied that the feelings of resentment which many harbour towards bankers are not really the sort of consideration on which economic policy should be based.

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Fishing outside the reef: the illusion of control and finance

Humans regularly see patterns where there are none, but stress makes this tendency worse. Some new studies suggest this may be making the current market troubles worse. Jennifer Whitson and Adam Galinsky (Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception, Science 3 October 2008 Vol. 322. no. 5898, pp. 115-117) demonstrated that when people feel they lack control, they see more  illusory patterns in noise and stock market information, perceive conspiracies and accept superstitions more readily. But is this the key to understanding the financial turmoil?

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Refusing to refer: thus conscience doth make cowards of us all

In the Australian state of Victoria next week a proposal to make abortion legal in certain
circumstances is due to be voted on by the upper house. Some doctors,
as well as the Catholic church, have attacked one clause in that
legislation, as it is said to deny doctors the right to conscientiously
object to abortion. But what is the proper role of the doctor’s
conscience in medical care, and how should it be taken into account
when it conflicts with the conscience of the patient?

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Publishing Negative Research Results

Ben Goldacre, in the Guardian this weekend, noticed the range of headlines on health and health risks that are to be found in the media. He mentions, among others, the rise of ‘manorexia’, the failure of water to induce weight loss and the dangers of antibiotics to prevent premature birth. I found a couple more: It turns out that dark chocolate can reduce the risk of heart attacks, vegetable rich diets and in particular vegetables like broccoli reduce the chance of heart disease and stroke and turmeric, the spice that makes curries yellow, can reduce the size of hemorrhagic stroke.

It’s quite striking what research is done!

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DON’T PANIC

It has been an extraordinary week in the financial markets of the
world. With the collapse of major international financial institutions,
and governments forced to intervene by propping up ailing insurers or
authorising the merger of banks, newspaper headlines have competed to
convey the scale and significance of the crisis. But there is a
difficult line for newspaper editors and sub-editors to tread between
accurately reflecting the enormity of the market upheavals, and
contributing to the crisis. Should newspapers be censored, or censor
themselves at times of great market sensitivity or do they have a duty
to their readers to speak the truth?

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Cognitive Science Advice for Republicans and Democrats?

The upcoming US elections have revived the culture wars but so far controversy about science and biotechnology has not taken centre stage, as both candidates support stem cell research. But science is still playing a minor role in the discussion. Writing in the New York Times, the influential conservative pundit David Brooks recently gave advice to his fellow Republicans. In recent years, he argues, they have come to endorse a rampant libertarian individualism and forgotten about the importance of social connections and bonds, once a core conservative value. This form of criticism is old and familiar. What is new is the form it now takes. What is wrong is wrong about the individualist outlook, Brooks argues, is that it is false to human nature, a fact apparently revealed by recent research in cognitive science, neuroscience, genetics, and behavioural economics, which has rediscovered the ‘old truth’—“that we are intensely social creatures, deeply interconnected with one another and the idea of the lone individual rationally and willfully steering his own life course is often an illusion.”

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I suggest it was Professor Plum, in the library, with the arsenic: the unreliability of brain experience detection

A woman has been convicted in Mumbai for murder, based on a new brain-based experience detection technology. As can be predicted, many regard this as Orwellian while others hope technologies like this could transform the courtroom "as much as DNA evidence has". But there are big problems. The most obvious one is the question of whether the technology actually works, let alone works well enough to be suitable for convicting somebody. The analogy with DNA evidence points at the second big problem: the legal institutions need to learn how to use it well. There are very good reasons for experts in psychology, neuroscience and forensics are troubled by this case.

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Needles in Haystacks and Individuals in DNA Pools

An article recently published on PLOS Genetics showing that (and how) individuals can be identified by their DNA within large publicly accessible pools DNA has led to genetic data being removed from publicly accessible websites by the NIH and the Wellcome Trust. As one geneticist quoted in Science put it “We have a false sense of security with pooled data.”

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National Borders

An eight-year-old Iranian boy has been released after spending nearly two months in Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/sep/06/immigration.humanrights). Child M, as he’s known, has been given body searches and now, unsurprisingly, seems to have various physical and psychiatric problems. His case is an especially clear example of the effects of national borders, and border controls, on people’s lives.

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‘Anyone who thinks the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world is a t**t.’

This week is Big Bang Week at the BBC, with various programmes devoted to the switch-on of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on Wednesday morning.  Many of these programmes are covered in this week’s issue of the Radio Times—the BBC’s listings magazine—which also features a short interview with Professor Brian Cox, chair of particle physics at the University of Manchester.  Asked about concerns that the LHC could destroy the earth, he replies:

‘The nonsense you find on the web about “doomsday scenarios” is conspiracy theory rubbish generated by a small group of nutters, primarily on the other side of the Atlantic.  These people also think that the Theory of Relativity is a Jewish conspiracy and that America didn’t land on the Moon.  Both are more likely, by the way, than the LHC destroying the world.  I’m slightly irritated, because this non-story is symptomatic of a larger mistrust in science, particularly in the US, which includes things like intelligent design. [… A]nyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a t**t.’ (Final word censored by Radio Times.) [1]

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