Monthly Archives: November 2015

Steve Benen @ MaddowBog constructs a graph illustrating the literacy of the various candidates for President in the area of climate change, based on an Associated Press survey of scientists, given a set of anonymized statements.  Best quote:

All eight evaluators placed Cruz dead last. Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University meteorology professor, wrote of Cruz’s statements: “This individual understands less about science (and climate change) than the average kindergartner.”

This is the guy who’s surging in the Iowa polls due to his popularity with the evangelical crowd.  And the graph?

Sometimes computer folks simply see the world a little differently than everyone else.  NewScientist (14 November 2015, paywall) reports on the latest attempt to do something serious in the world of politics with Big Data:

There is a long history of companies and other vested interests influencing legislation by lobbying politicians. So researchers at the University of Chicago’s Data Science for Social Good programme have created the Legislative Influence Detector. This scours the text of US bills, searching for passages that have been cribbed from lobbyists or the legislatures of other states.

“Our hope is that the public can use this to keep the government accountable,” says team member Julian Katz-Samuels, now a graduate student at the University of Michigan.

To get the real story behind a bill, the software digs through 500,000 state bills, as well as thousands of pieces of text drafted by lobbyist groups that were saved into a database. An algorithm then calculates the top 100 documents most relevant to the bill in question before examining each one more closely, searching for passages the two have in common.

What this reveals can be telling, says Katz-Samuels. The software can turn up lines of text originally written by activists and special interest groups. Or it might find that the bill borrows largely from laws already in place elsewhere, giving concerned citizens the chance to explore how the policy worked out there.

The Legislative Influence Detector project is located here.  They explain:

To solve this problem, we have created a tool we call the “Legislative Influence Detector” (LID, for short). LID helps watchdogs turn a mountain of text into digestible insights about the origin and diffusion of policy ideas and the real influence of various lobbying organizations. LID draws on more than 500,000 state bills (collected by the Sunlight Foundation) and 2,400 pieces of model legislation written by lobbyists (collected by us, ALEC Exposed, and other groups), searches for similarities, and flags them for review. LID users can then investigate the matches to look for possible lobbyist and special interest influence.

The screenshot below shows LID at work. On the left-hand side is text from Wisconsin Senate Bill 179 (2015), which bans most abortions past the 19th week of pregnancy. On the right-hand side, LID found and presented SB 179’s highest-ranked match, Louisiana Senate Bill 593 (2012). The highlighting shows that these text sections match each other almost perfectly. Where differences exist, they are usually misspellings like “neurodeveolopmental” or formatting differences like “16”/“sixteen”.

LID finds legislative influence more quickly and easily than other tools. Reading bills manually takes too long. Google helps, but users can only search for short strings, not complete documents, and they must weed through many non-legislative results to find good matches. Inspired by Wilkerson, Smith, and Stramp (2015) and Hertel-Fernandez and Kashin, LID takes seconds to use, searches the entire document for matches, and returns only state bills and model legislation in the results.

Will this have an appreciable effect?  Hard to say.  I’m not feeling the love, but I’m self-aware enough to know that sometimes my skepticism is ill-worn.  So if we think about this, this will be very dependent on the quality of the data it is working from: while the text of most or all laws (proposed and passed) are available online from known sources, other sources, such as ALEC, will not be as freely available – and those will be the important ones if you want to find the “silent influencers”.  I’d say, in fact, that finding similar laws will be in everyone’s interests, while those from corporate, foreign, and other sources will not want to be known as they try to manipulate laws to their personal benefit. The ability of LID to determine a collection of disparate bills might have a common source, and then begin deducing what that source might be, could be an interesting future phase for the project.

They do complain about performance problems of their software.  I wonder how they’ve coded this baby up …

Sunday I was listening to MPR’s Live Wire Radio and, lacking a transcript of the show, am forced to paraphrase something said: they asked a famous person, some musician I believe, if he had read the primary guest’s latest novel, and he replied “No, I don’t read fiction because in the back of my mind I’m saying ‘No, this is not real!'”

(The reaction of the guest was an enthusiastic non-sequitur, insofar as I could see hear.)

This served to remind me of some totally untrained speculation I’ve indulged in over the years concerning, for lack of a better term, Theory of Story.  Not Storytelling, because that glues us to the perspective of, say, the novelist; I’m really speaking to the obverse side of the coin, the reader, the (graceless phrase) movie-goer, the audience – that person, for whom I lack a good generic-equivalent to storyteller, who likes stories in any of its forms, and so I’m left with the somewhat ambivalent phrase Theory of Story.

A theory of story (discarding the capitals which lent an air of self-importance, which I find slightly laughable) should give us a reason for pursuing stories; by having such a theory, those involved in the production of stories, which includes the primary content generator, as well as the support staff and the independent critics, stand a better chance at success by understanding the territory they tread.

Now, I’m sure such a theory already exists; but I didn’t run into it during my college days, being a computer science dude.  Nor have I run across it since, except in a book by Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction, which I bought a few years ago upon hearing that it seemed congruent with my thoughts.  Being the scattered sort, I read the first chapter or two, nodded to myself, and then wandered off on some other tangent; I should get back to it.  Perhaps she connects it as I do.

But.  I do value the occasional insight of the ignorant outsider.  Not that they are many, but, to draw an analogy from programming, sometimes a new set of eyes sees the problems the old eyes avoid: bringing a viewpoint NOT steeped in the study of Literature might lend some insights.  Or a good laugh, which is worthwhile in and of itself.

So, here I am, a science groupy.  Why does most of humanity prefer a good story?  I find it compelling to connect it to survival strategies.  Survival may not seem an everyday struggle to us, yet it is, because survival is the prerequisite to reproduction, a primitive, fundamental drive.  In these days of specialization, it’s not necessary for everyone to reproduce, but in order to specialize and contribute to society, survival is still necessary.

So what does the story bring to the survival game?  It brings knowledge, both subtle and vulgar, in many forms, but perhaps at its most basic lesson: how people react have consequences.  One of the favorite generic plots of all time is to dump your neighbor Fred (or call him Odysseus if you like) into an impossible situation, watch him struggle with it, perhaps even wriggle out of the handcuffs dangling over the molten lava and get away.  We often talk about how you learn from your mistakes in real life, but there are some mistakes which are fatal to make – but if a fictional character makes the mistake, then no one is really hurt.  Through these lessons conveyed through stories, we learn, for future reference, how one action leads down one path, while another leads down another – and how one enhances your chances at survival, while the other does not, if only by implication.

From this general observation many explanations can be drawn.  For example, the believability of a character becomes important because that correlates with the applicability of the experience and choices.  Backstory may be explained as delineating the background of a character in order to explain the choices they are making with which the reader may not agree – or even understand.

I hesitate to plunge along to suggesting that stories are about teaching, although I suppose, in the end, it’s true in some sense.  They are not didactic writing; they are, in many ways, exercises in sensuality, as the human animal thinks without necessarily rationality, or logic; and then it uses the entire body in the act of thinking, not just the brain.

So next time you’re reading fiction, consider if you’re learning from the choices of the characters in the story, given their backgrounds, predilections, and other provided evidence.

Sometimes a deal delayed is a deal unconsummated.  American firms bidding to supply nuclear power plants to India have been hung up on liability laws passed in the wake of the Bhopal disaster and other catastrophes.  Reuters covered the issue back in 2010:

A stalled nuclear liability bill, delays in land acquisition and political squabbling are hobbling foreign investors keen for a share of India’s newly opened civilian nuclear energy market worth about $150 billion.

Since a 2008 U.S. deal ended India’s nuclear isolation of more than three decades, firms in the United States, Russia, France, Canada and Britian have scrambled for a foothold in the energy-starved country, which aims to double the share of nuclear power on its grid to more than 8 percent over two decades. …

But protests over the liability bill seeking to limit damages to private nuclear operators and suppliers in case of an accidents has put the government on the backfoot, and delayed the entry of U.S. commercial nuclear firms.

Earlier this year a breakthrough was announced through some creative reading of the law, as reported in The Hindu:

Two weeks after U.S. President Obama announced that India and the U.S. have reached a “breakthrough understanding” on the civil nuclear deal, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) put out a press release to explain the agreement that India and the U.S. have reached, in order to enable commercial negotiations to begin.

In a press release, the Ministry has answered 19 frequently asked questions (FAQs) that make it clear that the government is not making changes to the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damages Act (CLND) 2010, but will read the Act to mean that supplier’s liability is not a mandatory part of the contracts to be signed.

The need for supplier’s liability has been raised in the recent past after the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in Japan raised questions about the manufacture of the reactor and parts, and the possible damages of as much as $200 billion. However U.S. manufacturers and even Indian suppliers have raised concerns over India’s CLND law saying that it would be unviable for them to conduct nuclear business in India with the risk of that kind of liability being “channelled” to the suppliers.

The Ministry of External Affairs makes it clear that immediate liability for any incident would be channelled only to the operator, in this case PSU Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd. (NPCIL).

Now WorldPress.org reprints an article from Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations, by Amit Bhandari, suggesting it may be too late for the suppliers of nuclear power because of that upstart, solar power:

Hard on the heels of falling oil prices and affordable shale comes another dramatic energy change for the industry: the falling cost of solar energy. This has many implications, but the most immediate impact is on the nuclear power industry, large parts of which may have just become obsolete. This means that the new nuclear power plants being planned by India, especially those with foreign collaboration, must be reconsidered and scrapped if they are financially unviable.

Most significant is the impact on the India-U.S. nuclear deal, held up by the liability clause to enable these reactors, and a sticking point in the bilateral negotiations for several years. Technological advances have addressed an issue that negotiators couldn’t resolve.

This transformation environment is the result of U.S.-based renewable energy major SunEdison winning, on Nov. 4, the bid to supply solar electricity in India at a record-low price of Rs 4.63 per kilowatt-hour (kWh). News reports indicate that as many as nine companies offered to supply solar electricity for less than Rs 5 per kWh, indicating this isn’t a one-off bid delinked from market prices. This price is still some way off from the cost of electricity supplied by government-owned utilities such as National Thermal Power Corporation, National Hydel Power Corporation and the Nuclear Power Corporation of India—which sell electricity at prices ranging from Rs 2.7 to 3.3 per kWh. However, NTPC, NHPC and NPCIL have lower electricity costs because many of their plants are old and fully depreciated, bringing down the fixed costs and therefore the average cost of supply. These utilities are also the lowest-cost suppliers of electricity in India.

With other suppliers and newer power plants, especially nuclear, the equation is reversed. The electricity tariff from the under-construction Units 3 and 4 of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project will be Rs 6.3 per kWh. The latter price can increase in case of cost and/or time overruns, which are common in nuclear power projects globally and in India.

The turbulence in the general power industry has been fascinating, even as American gas prices fall to unforeseen lows due to Saudi Arabian production levels.  In this case, nuclear power suppliers may find themselves without a market if India can make solar work.  Certainly during some seasons, such as winter, generally the sun is not obscured much by clouds; but during the monsoon season, will it work?  If, of course, the monsoon stays on schedule; my work colleagues in Pune (3 hours out of Mumbai) have told me that the monsoon is less dependable than it used to be.  It may be wiser to have nuclear in hopes that they do receive the rains they depend upon for crops.  On the other hand, given the limited liability demanded by the suppliers, it’s a little difficult to justify such a proposal – if the suppliers are not on the financial hook, why should they be trusted?  Given the Bhopal disaster, it’s easy to understand Indian distrust.

The marijuana story continues to evolve as Mexico declares it’s legal for four Mexican nationals to have it, opening the door possibly for more.  NewScientist (14 November 2015, paywall) gives an overview:

The Mexican Supreme Court ruled by 4 to 1 that banning the consumption and cultivation of cannabis for personal use violates the human right to free development of one’s personality.

A distinctly individualistic approach to the issue, without regard for damage, or advantage, for the greater societal structure.  An analogous analysis with alcohol would be to ask about how many deaths are caused by inebriated individuals.  CIP Americas‘ Simon Schatzberg covers the decision in more depth:

The Court’s decision, written by Justice Arturo Zaldívar Lalo de Larrea, tests the law prohibiting marijuana for proportionality and necessity. After quantifying the harm caused by marijuana use and balancing it with the level of intrusion into personal liberty that prohibition implies, the decision found that the intrusion is disproportionate. Furthermore, the decision found that such intrusions are “unnecessary,” considering that the harmful effects of marijuana could be mitigated through forms of state action that are less intrusive than prohibition.

Juan Francisco Torres, a 50-year-old lawyer who is one of the people who was granted an injunction, believes that the ruling is a “historic step,” but the first of many. “Today there are four of us, but tomorrow there could be 120 million,” Torres said after the ruling. “Today we achieved something enormous for human rights, for individuality and for liberty.”

The four plaintiffs are members of Mexicans United Against Crime (MUCD), an organization founded by family members of victims of the drug war that works to end the violence associated with crime in Mexico. To push for marijuana legalization in the courts, members of MUCD created the Mexican Society for Responsible Consumption (SMART). After being denied permission to grow and smoke marijuana from a federal health agency, members of SMART requested injunctive relief on constitutional grounds. A district judge denied that relief, and SMART appealed to the Supreme Court.

So it appears to be a classic approach to crime – remove the profit motive and hope the gangs break up.  Marco Torres at PreventDisease.com has some assertions:

We now know that accepting and promoting the powerful health benefits of marijuana would instantly cut huge profits geared towards cancer treatment and the U.S. would have to admit it imprisons the population for no cause. Nearly half of all drug arrests in the United States are for marijuana.

Bills to legalise cannabis for medical use are under debate in Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Costa Rica. The world is moving towards its inhabitants finally being able to once again possess, sell, transport and cultivate the plant.

Several other countries have moved towards more lenient laws on cannabis use, but none have done so solely on the basis of human rights. Most, like Ireland, which in early November moved towards legalising supervised heroin use and possible decriminalisation of other drugs, have cited health, compassionate and economic grounds.

I recall reading something somewhere (a classic inside view of my brain), probably WHOLE EARTH REVIEW, where the remark was essentially that drugs were mankind’s approach to reaching out to God; those who were the gatekeepers of God didn’t like being bypassed.  I wonder if this was ever true, and if it’s changing.

Surprising enough, tonight’s offering, THE KILLER SHREWS (1959), does not have it all.  Some bad, bad acting, but just a little touch of barely adequate acting.  The lone female is NOT a goody two shoes daughter, looking for a hubby and that’s all, but is a zoologist … still a daughter looking for a hubby and to get away from the horror her work may have created, but with an offputting accent.  The shrews are not metaphorical, but monstrous versions of the little critters, and, en masse, they’re clearly dogs (Airedales, we speculated) with some shameful costumes; but, in close up, they were actually just a trifle upsetting.  And for all that the idea that shrews could grow to this side is silly, my idle auditing of the science is that the plot’s idea of human motivation is a lot worse than the actual cited science in this sordid spectacle of drunken jealousy, all set to encompassing terror of a punchless hurricane that does little more than drive the sad first mate of the boat to his doom (presumably to be licked to death by the aforementioned Airedales).

Despite all these positive attributes, I find it difficult to recommend this obscure tale.  Being a bit of a story junky, it was disappointing, and while I was riveted, it was only for the next laugh at the bad plot.  Although I will grant the idea used to escape the plague of rodents was unusual – which, being American, means I had to like the novelty of it all.

And I gotta say the daughter really put out at the end.  So to speak.

The story concerning KIC 8462852 appears to be moving away from alien megastructures and onward to …

Just when the world thought that signs of life outside of Earth have already been found, experts have to cut the excitement short. In a new study, astronomers found that the so-called alien megastructure orbiting around star KIC 8462852 is most probably just a swarm of comets. …

Now, in a new study from Iowa University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, researchers found that the most acceptable explanation for the unusual dimming of KIC 8462852 is the destruction of a cluster of comets.

The investigation involved two different types of infrared wavelengths. The first one was shorter and was consistent with a common star. The second one is longer and exuded infrared components but are not sufficient to achieve detection threshold.

The scientists found that there were no additional infrared emissions thus warranting that neither an asteroid belt collision, huge impacts on a planet nor clouds of debris and rock were present.

The researchers further explained that the comet fragments that come swiftly at an elliptical and arduous orbit form huge clouds of debris, are dimming the star. The clouds created will then move, thus bringing back the star’s original brightness and leaving no signs or evidence of excess infrared light.

(Tech Times)

Crossing my desk is a petition from Change.org:

Kill the Bill H.R. 2232 (114th Congress) “Vaccinate All Children Act of 2015”

A petition to not force parents to have their children vaccinated.  This controversy has been bubbling along for years, but it’s instructive to decompose a petition for insight into at least one objector’s reasoning.  The contents of the petition are as follows, somewhat abbreviated (misspellings retained):

>This bill is a violation of a number of our natural, God given rights protected by the Constitution.

–Since no provision is given in this bill for religious exemption, the first right infringed upon is the right to the free exercise of religion. For those who believe, according to their religion, that putting certain substances into their bodies is sinful, to have that mandated by the government without possibility of exemption, is a clear and direct violation of this first amendment right. …

However, all rights are limited.  Religious rights, for example, do not include the right to human or animal sacrifice.

–This bill violates the fourth amendment right of the people to be secure in their persons…and other natural rights as covered in the ninth amendment: The enumeration in the Constitution, certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Two points.  First, the minor point of slipping in the phrase “natural rights”.  There really is no such thing.  There are simply the rights negotiated between the governors and the governed; they are arrived at through mediation, laws, riots, wars, etc.

Secondly, and more importantly, is the refusal to recognize that the fourth amendment applies to everyone, and is in itself, because of this requirement, a limited right.  Let us honestly assess reality: we are not independent islands, inviolably separate from each other.  Along with voluntary bonds which we often assume with each other through association, contract, and other forms, there are also the involuntary bonds over which we have no control, as we share the resources of this reality, amongst which we can enumerate air and water.  Because of these involuntary bonds through which pathogens travel, we are vulnerable to the illnesses of the age: mumps, measles, etc. — their names are legion.

When I say the Fourth Amendment applies to everyone, I mean that I and my progeny have an equal right to protection under the Amendment, and that protection, in my case, is from easily propagated disease.  Here we see the tension to which I alluded: I do not wish to become infected with a pathogen which can cause severe damage or death, yet is easily negated.  The author of the petition does not wish to accept the vaccination.  The tension comes in the fact that we have unavoidably shared resources (air, water. etc.) through which many pathogens travel to infect a new victim.

How to resolve this tension?  The petitioner calls for a religious exemption; but such an exemption leaves all unvaccinated persons carrying the entire burden of their exemption.  These may be partially enumerated: other users of the exemption, infants too young to be vaccinated, other persons to whom the vaccination may be dangerous (typically, people with repressed immune systems, less likely would be a negative response to the agent, or possibly the very aged).  The ideal of a safe and prosperous society is therefore endangered, so a religious exemption is in doubt.

Further, and as an agnostic, I suggest that realizing that science does not sanction absolute doubt as to the administration of vaccination agents must take precedence over religious doubts.  Insofar as the medicine is evidence-based, (i.e., based in science, which is the study of reality) it should move us toward the short-term tangible goal of a happier society.  Religious exemptions are inevitably based on faith, which by definition, has little basis in reality.  Given the stronger call that science has on being correct, I believe a religious exemption is inappropriate.

–Another of those natural rights is the rights of parents to raise their children in the way they believe to be best. This bill, among many other activities in recent decades, seeks to erode the foundational unit of any nation, the family, and diminish the importance of the individual in favor of the state. Parents, not the government, have the natural right given by our Creator, to raise their children by virtue of being the ones to have conceived and given birth to, or adopted them.

I take offense at the suggestion that this bill “seeks to erode the foundational unit of any nation”.  It should be obvious that a family wracked by death due to avoidable disease is not a functional family; beset by grief and loss of resources (i.e., mother, father, children), it is ENDANGERED by this petition, not strengthened.  The petitioner should be embarrassed to have even written this paragraph; instead, it reads as one of the virulent anti-government memes spread by fringe thinkers (of virtually any particular political stripe).

On a lesser note, the suggestion that a couple of 20 year olds have enough knowledge and wisdom to raise a child wisely is laughable on its face.  In an uncorrupt world, the government constitutes a collection of settled decisions from which parents can take direction on subjects outside of easy comprehension: medicine, for example.  Even in our world, parents, young and old, should understand that they do not have any sort of claim of unlimited knowledge; qualified help should be welcomed, and admissions of ignorance, not to mention bewilderment and frustration, are not a sign of weakness, but of strength.  Any other sort of attitude smacks of unwarranted pride regressive to one’s reputation – not to mention the overall health of one’s children.

2> This bill holds states hostage in terms of funding, forcing already financially strapped educational institutions to choose between equitable education for their students and holding to values their individual communities believe. It is essentially using our children as a bargaining tool for political maneuvering and increasing government control of the people.

Or, sometimes folks are stubborn in the face of reason and need to be whacked upside the head.

3> The federal government (and this should apply to all governments) was intended to be a negative force, protecting the rights of one entity (especially individuals) from violation by another entity. The government was not established and should not exist as a positive force requiring action on the part of individuals that has nothing to do with ceasing to violate the rights of another.

This sounds good until an analysis of the situation, in-depth, is presented, as above, and then we realize this simply evaporates into the air that destroys it, as in the common resource through which pathogens are communicated.

As a general philosophy, I think addressing this is outside of the scope of this posting.  But, briefly, as a simple post facto finding, the US government has long functioned as a positive force in the area of scientific and technological development through the funding of basic research.  Without such funding, we’d still be riding horses and maybe using a telegraph once a year, despite the claims of libertarians of the free market cure-all (I speak as a reader of REASON Magazine for 20+ years).  Also consider the thoughts presented a few moments ago on the function of government in an incorrupt world, as I think it gives a different way to consider government in a world where institutions are cooperatively designed and used, rather than coercively applied.

4> The exception for child’s health as outlined in the bill is not sufficient. It reads, “certifying that, in the physician’s opinion, the physical condition of the student is such that the student’s health would be endangered by the vaccination involved; and demonstrating (to the satisfaction of the individual in charge of the health program at the student’s school) that the physician’s opinion conforms to the accepted standard of medical care.”

–Many Physician’s are unaware of the the adverse reaction’s risk of those with certain genetic mutations, such as MTFHR that comes with significant risk as sited by Pubmed.

No comment.  It sounds like an objection on medical grounds, and I’ll leave that to the professionals.

–An Allopathic Doctor’s philosophy on medicine and healing is directly tied to the Pharmaceutical companies that manufacture prescriptions and vaccines since their human resource representatives educate them directly on which prescriptions to use and how often to administer vaccines. Their lack of agreeing upon risk factors is biased. A Naturopathic Doctor should be a viable opinion as well. The revolving door between the CDC and the Pharmaceutical Industries is transparent and a conflict of interest related to public health.

This, on the other hand, is a dig at mainstream medicine.  From Wikipedia:

Allopathic medicine is an expression commonly used by homeopaths and proponents of other forms of alternative medicine to refer to mainstream medical use of pharmacologically active agents or physical interventions to treat or suppress symptoms or pathophysiologic processes of diseases or conditions.

The petitioners have an opinion; they find that mainstream medicine threatens the validity of that opinion– rather than examine the reasons for mainstream medicine’s critique of their opinion, they instead indulge in a form of ad hominem argument as old as the hills. The petitioners may actually believe it, as any argument confirming their bias, reasonable or unreasonable, is naturally more welcome than a challenging opinion.

But the simple fact of the matter is that an ad hominem argument, with little supporting evidence, is not valid.  Worse yet, the rise of evidence-based medicine, even as haphazard as it sometimes appears, and the number of maladies that have gone from terrifying reality to historical curiosity, should confirm to the most casual observer that there really is something to “allopathic medicine” – and the relentless failures of “alternative medicine”, concealed and explained away as they may be, should be taken as a caution.  With regard to the latter point, I will lend a sympathetic ear, as the proper evaluation of therapies is difficult at best; attempting to evaluate therapies on the order of, say, prayer therapy (from The Skeptic’s Dictionary) is very, very hard.

5> The wording in the bill “to the satisfaction of the individual in charge of the health program at the student’s school” gives the school nurse more power than the licensed Physician that has a more thorough knowledge of each child’s health history. It is also a conflict of interest which places pressure upon the school nurse to dismiss validated concerns for vaccine injury in order to obtain funding for the school and possibly retain their position and means to earn a living.

Without being completely familiar with 42 U.S.C. 247b, the law that this bill amends, it’s difficult to speak with confidence.  I’ll note, however, that the law should not permit the administration of vaccines that do have “validated concerns”.  This may be the paragraph of concern:

“(C) demonstrating (to the satisfaction of the individual in charge of the health program at the student’s school) that the physician’s opinion conforms to the accepted standard of medical care.

This may be seen as tying school medical personnel to accepted medical procedures, which are unacceptable when one’s opinion of those procedures is negative.

In general, any epidemiologist will testify that vaccines have been one of the greatest advances in the history of health care, but they are not perfect – like all human endeavors.  That they are not perfect is not a reason for rejecting them, especially as they are the best we have for protecting the greater community.

Faig Ahmed via Smithsonian Magazine.

Alberta, a primary source of fossil fuels in Canada, has announced plans, as reported by CBC News, to -slowly- move away from fossil fuels.

“Our goal is to become one of the world’s most progressive and forward-looking energy producers,” said Premier Rachel Notley. “We are turning the page on the mistaken policies of the past, policies that have failed to provide the leadership our province needed.”

Wind will be emphasized, carbon will be taxed.  The Canadian oilsands industry backs the move:

Steve Williams, CEO of Suncor, shared Edwards’ enthusiasm.

“This plan will make one of the world’s largest oil-producing regions a leader in addressing the climate change challenge,” he said.

But not everyone is a fan:

One of the few dissenting voices came from the opposition Wildrose Party.

Leader Brian Jean said Albertans face job losses and economic uncertainty.

“This new carbon tax will make almost every single Alberta family poorer, while accelerated plans to shut down coal plants will lead to higher power prices and further jobs losses,” he said in a news release.

The Wildrose website is here. Wikipedia characterizes Wildrose as “a conservative provincial political party”, but it’s not clear if they have an official policy vis a vis climate change.

The Edmonton Sun has a few more details:

* Close the Coal-Fired Plants: The plan calls for the province’s 18 coal-fired electricity plants to be shuttered by 2030 with two-thirds of their former generation replaced by renewable energy, mostly wind generation. Renewable energy is expected to make up 30 per cent of Alberta’s electricity generation by 2030.

* A Carbon Tax on Everyone: The plan introduces a carbon tax of $20 per tonne in 2017 increasing to $30 per tonne in 2018. Expected to raise $3 billion a year, the tax would mean the price of gas at the pump will jump by 4.7 cents per litre and home heating costs will rise by $320 per year by 2017 and $470 by 2018. Albertans will be eligible for some form of rebate.

* An Oilsands Emissions Cap: The government says it will introduce a 100-megatonne cap on emissions from the oilsands. With the current projects operated by oilsands energy producers producing 70 megatonnes, the government says the cap allows the industry to continue to grow while providing time for it to find new ways to reduce the per-barrel emissions of oil production.

* Methane: The plan proposes Alberta implement a methane reduction strategy to reduce emissions by 45 per cent from 2014 levels by 2025. The methane reduction would be achieved in collaboration with industry, environmental organizations and First Nations groups.

So it appears support from oilsands was achieved by not hurting them immediately.

(h/t Sami Grover @ Treehugger.com)

Or at least so I hope.  Context?  Oh, sure.  Right Wing Watch reports on major GOP Presidential candidates courting an organization which, frankly, sounds like it’s way off in left field.

Right field.  Sorry.

But to get [the endorsement of Bob Vander Plaats, leader of The Family Leader, a social conservative group], candidates must cater to an activist far the right of mainstream voters. Not only does Vander Plaats want to remove from office or defund the courts of judges who find in favor of marriage equality, he believes that anything, like gay marriage, that “goes against the law of nature” is by definition unconstitutional . He argues that the government is an institution of God and therefor its purpose is “to promote righteousness” and to apply “God’s principles and precepts.” He once warned that God might withdraw his blessing from America because of a Wiccan prayer at the Iowa state capitol.

It’s a dispiriting simply to contemplate the lack of historical awareness exhibited by anyone at all who pays attention to someone who’s making these sorts of statements.  I can’t help but note the symptoms of power-mongering in these statements:

1. Defund those courts whose interpretation of the law clashes with yours: I am more important than the law, so when the law fails me, I remove its support.  A failure to submit to the law is certainly a popular way to start a war; base it on religious precepts, and we’re all the way back to Henry VIII.
2. Relying on “laws of nature”, which, outside of science, are notoriously slippery and open to convenient definitions designed to benefit those who define them.  Once again, I am more important than any definition which doesn’t benefit me.  (And believe me, as a science groupy, you don’t want to try this argument using the science version of the laws of nature … because those laws include cannibalism, lesbianism, and self-fertilization, amongst the more common-place behaviors.)
3. Government is an institution of God … not this one.  The United States system of government is, in fact, an emphatic rejection of the very notion.  How do we know this?  It’s irrefutable: Divine Monarchies, such as Henry VIII’s and any number of other monarchies, from England to Japan, were the system of government handed down from heaven.  How do we know this?  The same way Bob thinks he knows it.  But he came late, and as we all know, God doesn’t make mistakes, so this must be Bob’s error.  In fact, a reasonable citizen might suspect Bob is grasping for power again.

The thought that a substantial number of people pay attention this this guy, rather than to important issues of justice, is too discouraging to contemplate; so, if only in self-defense, I’ll suppose, both for myself and for the self-respect of our brothers in Iowa, that these Presidential candidates haven’t a scad of the sense their mothers should have gifted them with and are pursuing the votes of every last voter, rather than addressing issues such as honesty and sobriety in American politics.

(h/t Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog)

Speaking of laws which seem ridiculous in the face of advancing technology, Lawfare‘s Timothy Edgar cites American surveillance laws:

As it turns out, the widely-held theory that the NSA had figured out another way to obtain the data [concerning bulk collection of Internet metadata within the United States] – with less oversight – is correct.  According to a new document obtained under FOIA by New York Times reporter Charlie Savage:

The report explained that there were two other legal ways to get such data. One was the collection of bulk data that had been gathered in other countries, where the N.S.A.’s activities are largely not subject to regulation by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and oversight by the intelligence court.  . . .

The N.S.A. had long barred analysts from using Americans’ data that had been swept up abroad, but in November 2010 it changed that rule, documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden have shown. The inspector general report cited that change to the N.S.A.’s internal procedures.

The other replacement source for the data was collection under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which permits warrantless surveillance on domestic soil that targets specific noncitizens abroad, including their new or stored emails to or from Americans.

Mr. Edgar concludes:

The lawfulness of bulk collection and applicable privacy rules should not depend on the technical details of the NSA’s collection – such as where the data is collected and exactly what fields are obtained – that have nothing to do with the privacy interests involved.  But this is exactly how the law works today.  Savage’s piece is a further reminder of just how incoherent our surveillance laws have become.

In other words, your privacy is at risk if your Internet sojourns take your data streams out of the United States, which, when put that way, have a certain poetic propriety which I find appealing, for, with the exception of certain diplomatic personnel, an American in another country is not immune to the laws of that country, but subject to them.  Nevertheless, Mr. Edgar’s comments are of a more serious nature.

With regard to location, it’s an interesting question – when your data stream is outside the United States, can an agency forbidden from collecting data about you ignore that law?  I’m no lawyer, so I can only claim that it seems like common sense to say the answer should be ‘No’ – as the implications of the statement is that a goal is denied to the NSA, not a method.

With regard to the fields collected, I’m not certain this is a technicality so much as it defines the issue.  How about anonymous collection of metadata?  Is that illegal?  I suppose I’m not up enough on the controversy to understand the implications at question.

Nor can I think of analogous situations from pre-Internet era.

More at Fran Rubia’s site.

NewScientist gives a longish article (“Police forces turn to science to put their tactics on trial“, 7 November 2015, paywall) on reforming police practices to be more like, well, conventional medicine – that is, evidence based:

For thousands of years, law enforcers have trusted their intuition and instincts. But one in every 26 police efforts to reduce crime actually have the effect of increasing crime, says Lawrence Sherman, director of the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge. “To do things without knowing the consequences is to act unethically,” he says.

Only one in 26?  Is that a typo?  3.8 percent of efforts backfire?  I am not appalled by that statistic.  I also suspect he was quoted slightly out of context, as a literal reading of his quote would ban all experimentation.

Now, new police officers across the UK will be taught how to understand and implement scientific evidence in policing, and how to run their own experiments and trials – made possible in part by a £10 million injection of cash from the UK government and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The US has also begun to push for a more scientific approach to policing with the recent launch of the American Society of Evidence-Based Policing (ASEBP).

Early results from several trials show that some common police practices are ineffective, or even harmful, while others highlight ways to ensure that people are all treated fairly.

Despite my earlier comment, this is actually good news.  For a past example of a semi-random policy implemented by police, consider the New York City Guiliani-era “broken windows” policy, as defined and examined by The National Bureau of Economic Research:

During the 1990s, crime rates in New York City dropped dramatically, even more than in the United States as a whole. Violent crime declined by more than 56 percent in the City, compared to about 28 percent in the nation as whole. Property crimes tumbled by about 65 percent, but fell only 26 percent nationally.

Many attribute New York’s crime reduction to specific “get-tough” policies carried out by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s administration. The most prominent of his policy changes was the aggressive policing of lower-level crimes, a policy which has been dubbed the “broken windows” approach to law enforcement. In this view, small disorders lead to larger ones and perhaps even to crime. As Mr. Guiliani told the press in 1998, “Obviously murder and graffiti are two vastly different crimes. But they are part of the same continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely to tolerate the other.”

In Carrots, Sticks and Broken Windows (NBER Working Paper No. 9061), co-authors Hope Corman and Naci Mocan find that the “broken windows” approach does not deter as much crime as some advocates argue, but it does have an effect, particularly on robbery and motor vehicle theft. They use misdemeanor arrests as a measure of broken windows policing.

Over the 1990s, misdemeanor arrests increased 70 percent in New York City. When arrests for misdemeanors had risen by 10 percent, indicating increased use of the “broken windows” method, robberies dropped 2.5 to 3.2 percent, and motor vehicle theft declined by 1.6 to 2.1 percent. But this decline was not the result of more of those involved in misdemeanors being incapacitated from further crimes by being in prison: prison stays for misdemeanors are short and only 9.4 percent of misdemeanor arrests result in a jail sentence, the authors note. Furthermore, an increase in misdemeanor arrests has no impact on the number of murder, assault, and burglary cases, the authors finds.

Their research is important because such policies, regardless of efficacy, are touted by their promulgators as their credentials for other political offices; evaluation of results is important.  But that’s not the point of the NewScientist article; the researchers want to conduct small field studies which can then be analyzed to create policies used nation-wide that they have good reason to believe will be effective.

There’ll be resistance from established power structures, I should think, based on protecting power and privilege, but for those who are more idealistic, learning how to properly construct field trials and interpret resultant statistics to give a final evaluation to a proposed new policy will be a critical component of this approach.

In some ways, I see this as an extension of the Enlightenment.  The Enlightenment was about the use of reason, of rationality, when pursuing, in barest essence, questions about courses of action.  Back then, they were more concerned about politics and science – has the king been selected by God, or just why should he be obeyed?  The use of observation and reasoning to discover that water could be the source of disease, and then that disease is caused by germs, and not malevolent daemons.  But the use of statistical methods have come later to some fields; indeed, the very term evidence-based medicine is somewhat shocking in the implications that some activities that bill themselves as medicine not only lack any sort of evidence as to their efficacy, but may bill themselves as effective due to effects not supported by science itself.

Evidence-based policing may not have the same outré implications, but the existence of the term (and associated supporting organization, mentioned above) does serve to remind us that one of the most critical functions of government may not have benefited as much, in terms of ideal efficiency, as has other sectors of society.  Recent unrest between community and law enforcement in Ferguson, MO, have served to stir up calls for reform of law enforcement, but popular calls for reform neglect to precisely specify what makes for effective reform.  Will a similar, evidence-based effort for police reform be available to those who are eventually handed the task?  Or will we merely hope the recipients of the task have the wisdom, acquired from who knows where, to reform organizations possessing woes the origin of which are not formally researched and recognized – i.e., the Great Man approach to solving problems.

As (to borrow a phrase from my sister) a story-junkie, there’s great attraction in the Great Man approach, but as a science groupy, I must deride that inclination and hope someone has done the necessary, arduous (or an even stronger adjective) research to discover how to best reform a police organization.  Otherwise, we can only hope someone gets it right.

The buried ocean of Europa may not require drilling if NewScientist‘s report (7 November 2015, paywall) is accurate:

Observations from the Galileo spacecraft, which visited the Jupiter system in the 1990s, found that the moon hosts an ocean covered in water ice. Sulphur and oxygen from volcanoes on the nearby moon Io also fall onto Europa’s surface, where they combine to make magnesium sulphate. Now a new analysis has found an unidentified material that only shows up in fractured terrain. This could mean the buried ocean is breaching the surface.

The spectrum, or chemical signature, of the material has so far defied identification. “It looks like the spectrum of water ice except that it’s distorted,” says Patrick Fischer at the California Institute of Technology. The team hasn’t been able to reproduce it using a library of known chemicals – although they can rule out sulphates, which researchers expected to see.

One possibility is an unknown blend of potassium or sodium chloride. This would mean these regions are salt flats left behind when ocean water burbled up and then evaporated (Astronomical Journal, in press). “We can guess that the spectrum we’re seeing is probably evaporate deposits of salt left over from the ocean,” Fischer says.

Just land and scoop.  And take off.  And fly back.

OK, not that easy.

NewScientist is plenty mad at the UK’s current government as described in the 7 November 2015 leader.  After a lovely rant about some nonsensical proposed bill dubbed the “snooper’s charter”, as promoted by the Brits’ spooks, they turn to some other amateurish bills:

The government also seems to think it can legislate chemistry. Its Psychoactive Substances Bill proposes to ban any substance that alters mental state. Taken at face value, that’s everything from chocolate to flowers. As the deep absurdity of this has sunk in, the government has drafted a list of exempt substances. Homeopathic pills will be on it, we are assured: caffeine products are fine, too, as long as they contain both caffeine and, somehow, “no psychoactive substance”.

This pattern of ill-conceived pledges followed by impractical legislation looks ominously as though it will be repeated in energy and education. That suggests the government is either scientifically illiterate or believes it can get its way by assuming its citizens are. Perhaps it can. Its ideological stances on terrorism and drugs may win wide support even if they don’t make sense.

With a painful grin, we again encounter the conundrum of the amateur legislators – the immensely complex task of governance handed to those who have little training or experience.  The sad part, of course, is that there’s plenty of scientific expertise available for issues such as those animating NewScientist is this editorial.  The UK government should be bright enough to at least ask for help when confronted with very complex issues such as counter-espionage, regulation of new recreational drugs, and many other fundamentally technological issues.

As a non-Brit not living in the UK, I have to wonder if the governing Conservatives are permitting ideology to come before reality.

NewScientist (31 October 2015, paywall) reports exciting news, if you’re a rat:

A drug called montelukast (Singulair), regularly prescribed for asthma and allergic rhinitis, blocks these receptors, so Aigner and his colleagues tested it on young and old rats. The team used oral doses equivalent to those taken by people with asthma. The older animals were 20 months old – perhaps between 65 and 75 in human years. The younger rats were 4 months old – roughly the equivalent of 17 human years. The animals were fed the drug daily for six weeks, while another set of young and old rats were left untreated. There were 20 young and 14 old rats in total.

The rats took part in a range of learning and memory tests. One of these involved the rats being placed in a pool of water with a hidden escape platform. At the start of the study, untreated young rats learned to recognise landmarks and quickly find their way to the platform, while the untreated older animals struggled at the task.

By the end of their six-week drug regime, though, old animals performed as well as their younger companions. “We restored learning and memory 100 per cent, to a level comparable with youth,” says [Ludwig] Aigner [at Paracelsus Medical University Salzburg in Austria]. He presented his findings earlier this month at the Neuroscience 2015 meeting in Chicago.

You’d think an affect on humans would have been reported, though.

“I wanna leave some money with the purser,” says the disappearing new husband in Dangerous Crossing (1953), leaving Ruth Stanton, heiress and former mental patient, due to overwhelming grief, to ponder his whereabouts.  In this tense, yet surprisingly forgettable drama, the four stack ocean liner continues on its appointed path, unswayed by the unbalanced doings of the critters that happen to inhabit it, a metaphor of the underlying reality which Ruth is trying to discern.  Perhaps she didn’t really marry?  Her maiden name is in the ship’s roster, much to her distress; her husband’s luggage, gone; the ship’s officers express skepticism, nay, they even express alcohol and drugs, so to speak, as a remedy for her trauma.

And then – her husband calls.

Such is the nature of reality, as any physicist will tell you.  One moment, you think you understand just what those quarks will do, and the next thing you know, the quarks are doing a gnarly wave through a slit and you’re left with your eyeballs starting from their sockets, trying to understand how something can be two things at once.

The danger is great, both physicists and the husband express.  The ship’s doctor, he of the rugged countenance and pragmatic care policies, expresses concern until, in a schizophrenic turn, slaps her in a barbaric attempt to reorient her to reality, as if he has a firm grip on this most slippery of concepts!  But no!

It’s another phone call!  She clings to her version of reality, whether it be sane or not; the doctor, impossibly tall and good looking, insists on medicating her some more.

And then, the climax, as the doctor wrestles with the villain of the piece, the wastrel younger brother of the now-deceased father …. behind whose face did he conceal himself??

Much like old, misbegotten phlogiston theory, the movie wallows with obsolete tropes concerning the weakness of the female of the species, and this hurts what is otherwise a tense, well-thought out drama.  True, it doesn’t have the engaging chemistry and patter of the old classic The Thin Man, but there is certainly some slight charm, better pacing than some movies of the ’50s, and if you permit yourself to be pulled in, the questions begin piling up as the story-telling deceit builds to a good, if not great, climax.

We all know Hollywood would insert some horrid love story if they were to do it today.  Bodies would pile up, and we’d see it in exquisite detail.  A movie in which certain unpleasant subjects are merely referenced has a certain charm and clarity lost, sometimes, in modern movies.

To put an exclamation point on the importance of bees, NewScientist (31 October 2015, paywall) is now reporting using them for spreading anti-pathogens:

The idea involves placing a tray of organic pesticide powder inside a commercially bred hive. The powder contains a substance to help it stick to bees’ legs and a strain of Clonostachys rosea fungus that is harmless to these insects but attacks crop diseases and pests. “It’s a perfectly natural fungus found very commonly throughout the world. We’ve just developed a way to grow and harvest it efficiently,” says Michael Collinson, CEO of BVT.

The bumblebees walk through the powder as they leave the hive. When they land on flowers to gather nectar and pollen, they leave a dusting of pesticide to protect the plant and future fruit.

Many crops can be protected this way, including blueberries and bell peppers. BVT plans to provide its dispensing system to a number of companies that have developed biological controls for other pests such as fireblight, which affects apples and pears. “Farmers usually spray the whole orchard and 99 per cent of it ends up in the wrong place,” says Collinson. “We can deliver it locally and use 20 grams as opposed to 2 kilograms. It’s much better for the environment.”

I wonder if application only in those areas is effective against all pathogens.

A reader expresses incredulity about the booze:

Your final number is still 60% of the total population, not adults. I’m pretty sure that the percentage of drinkers under say age 14 is a fraction of 1%. So the final number per drinker is much higher.

But I always wonder about these kinds of estimates. If alcohol costs the U.S. $249 billion and tobacco costs $X billion and “danger Y” costs $Z billion, etc., what happens if you add up all those estimates, and discover they’re larger than the GDP or total wages paid or something like that? Which I suspect it would, instantly putting the lie to the estimates.

It would certainly explain our low savings rate, although at least it isn’t negative, as explained here by the St. Louis Fed Blog.

… courtesy the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera.

From The Journal of Preventive Medicine (November 2015):

Excessive drinking cost the U.S. $249.0 billion in 2010, or about $2.05 per drink. Government paid for $100.7 billion (40.4%) of these costs. Binge drinking accounted for $191.1 billion (76.7%) of costs; underage drinking $24.3 billion (9.7%) of costs; and drinking while pregnant $5.5 billion (2.2%) of costs. The median cost per state was $3.5 billion. Binge drinking was responsible for >70% of these costs in all states, and >40% of the binge drinking–related costs were paid by government.

Doing a little math here … US population in 2010 was 309.34 millions (courtesy a pastiche of data by Google) … so … divide the cost by the population to get … $804 per capita … and that, of course, is on the undifferentiated US population.  I, for example, have two-three glasses of wine per annum, no beer or other liquors.  I’m somewhat leary of counting children out of this study, though.  PopSugar.com reports on an National Center for Health Statistics study:

Six out of 10 adults drink alcohol, while nearly 25 percent responded that they were lifetime abstainers. Men are more likely to list themselves as current drinkers than women.

For our napkin math, we’ll go with the 60% figure, so 60% of 309.34 is 185.604 millions, changing our answer to … $1341, give or take.

Well, I thought $249 billion in booze damage was a little crazy, but broken down to a per drinker calculation, it’s not out of line.  Heart breaking, maybe, having lost my maternal grandparents to alcoholism and smoking, but not surprising.

(h/t NewScientist 24 October 2015)

On deck is a classic, The Grapes of Wrath (1940), a film exposing the ugly underside of human greed, and its associate, the free market.  The Joads, having lost the farm they rented during the Great Depression, are forced to search for work.  We see them forced from the land, their house destroyed by the landowner’s minions and enforced by the police, as son Tom (Henry Fonda) returns from prison, having killed a man and served his time.  Being tenant farmers, they have little right to the land they’ve worked for generations, nor do they have little other in the way of skills, and we see the human cost of ‘creative destruction’ – Grandpa dies first, distressed by the sheer trauma of losing his home through no fault of his own.  He’s buried by the side of the road, with a note of explanation.

(As an aside, today I attended a funeral for an elderly gentleman.  One of his daughters told me that the last straw, in her opinion, was putting the beloved family home up for sale.  The parallels are unmistakable and unsettling, and I cannot help but contemplate that unfettered competition inflicted upon those whose age has made them unable, or even uninterested, in the battle, hardly seems appropriate in a civilization claiming to for for those unable to protect themselves.)

Next pushed down the creek to the ocean of forever is Grandma, the loss of her husband and the road itself proving too much of a challenge for the elderly infirm.  Her last contribution to her beloved family is that her body, her staring eyes, a pitiable epitome of a victim of man’s greed, convinces police at a checkpoint to let the family through, where they might have otherwise been turned away from the land of manna.

And that would be California, where there is fruit to be picked and men to be lost!  Yes, sir, on the way to the fabled land of work and honey, the husband of one of the family daughters, she, naturally, in the family way, skips out, leaving her prostrate with grief.  His talk of pursuing a lucrative trade leaves us to wonder if his dismay at the travails of the family has pushed him away – or if he’ll just trade his wife for a taste of commerce with which to feed himself – and perhaps only himself.

But we’re not done yet disposing of this excess humanity!  A former pastor, Casy, played by the formidable John Carradine, joined the family caravan at the jumping off point.  Questioning his faith, unable to perform those spiritual duties of an informal spiritual leader, not feeling the spirit move him, he can work and fulfill his obligations, but in a world where all he knew and trusted no longer works, he’s at a loss.  But now, in California, as they work for wages that hover on the very edge between subsistence and starvation, Casy has discovered a new faith: labor unions.  In the dark of night, Tom, the former prisoner, seeks him out and finds him hiding from company enforcers.  Eventually, in a creek under a bridge, the enforcers find Casy, Tom, and others, and a single, symbolic clubbing sends Casy off to his maker; in vengeance, Tom becomes a recidivist, and one of the enforcers accompanies Casy on his last journey.

The Joads, carefully shielding Tom from view, move on to another job, and this is like heaven: the workers control the means of production, and how this farm is governed.  For a short while, peace reigns; then the free market, sensing apostasy, cancer, even kaiju (if you’ll forgive the shattering of conceptual walls), attempts, through the deceits of faux riots and corrupt lawmen, to dismember the farm; but the farmhands, sensing the forces of envious greed surrounding them, peacefully (more or less) nip Bud in the bud, and the lawmen, disgruntled, are forced to leave with their clubs unbloodied.

The final blow to the family is Tom, realizing his endangerment of the family, decides to leave them, proclaiming that, as an outlaw, he must now thrive in the land where the unfortunate are found, never to be on the good side of the law again.  His Ma shoulders this final burden, and vows she’ll feel fear no more; sans Tom they lower their heads to take Fortune’s hard shots, forced upon them by Man’s greed.

Is it a great movie?  Yes, marvelous performances, good writing, not really a spec of humor, so it’s a movie that’s also good for you.  If you’re not in the mood for that sort of thing, then perhaps this isn’t for you.

Concerning the effect of CO₂ on plants, a reader notes:

It seems the science on this is in its infancy. Where’s the evidence that plants are currently growth limited by carbon dioxide, for instance? There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that human height is oxygen limited within most normal ranges — or is there? Do people in South Carolina regularly grow taller than people in Colorado and Wyoming, because there’s more oxygen in the air at sea level?

No data found in 5 minutes of searching.