Category Archives: Web Article Review

what’s new with cancer?

This article is critical of the focus on new treatments for cancer, saying prevention should be more of a focus.

Up to 40% of cancers could be prevented by reducing the consumption of highly processed foods, high-calorie diets, and certain fats, increasing consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables, and getting people to be more physically active. Alcohol consumption increases the risk of several types of cancer and accounts for 19,500 cancer deaths a year. Air pollution is a major cause of lung cancer and may also increase bladder and breast cancer. And one study found that pollution in U.S. drinking water could have caused 100,000 cancer cases between 2010 and 2017…

The human costs of allowing businesses rather than scientists and doctors to shape cancer research are high. By pursuing cancer treatment options that are the most profitable rather than the most effective for the largest number of people, the medical enterprise misses opportunities to make more substantial progress…

By proposing additional measures to make prevention the priority, tackle commercial determinants of cancer, and avoid the technological quick fix suggested by war and moonshot metaphors, those seeking to reduce the burden of cancer can develop more effective and equitable approaches.

STAT

I had the impression that, smoking, air pollution, and lack of sunscreen aside (okay, those are actually three big ones), the causes of cancer were still murky, with a suspected role for various chemicals in consumer products, food, water, and the environment, but not much known for sure and luck still playing a big role. This article seems to suggest a lot more is known about the causes of cancer than I thought. That big business has captured and corrupted our government is not news, however.

QBism

According to Scientific American, QBism is an idea stemming from quantum physics that objective reality does not exist, and rather the only true reality is that experienced from the point of view of each of our individual minds.

I happen to be reading The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene, which is about parallel universes. One (of many, many) things he talks about is the “anthropic principle”. The anthropic principle says that the answer to the question “why are we here” (humans, on Earth), is that Earth is the one out of countless planets and countless solar systems and galaxies that happens to have the conditions allowing us to be here and ask the question. This goes even farther if we accept the idea of parallel universes, to say that the reason we are here in this universe, which has all the right physical constants etc. for us to exist, is that this is the universe where we are able to exist and ask the questions. In this view, the number of universes is so large that there essentially has to be at least one allowing us to exist.

There is another theory that the entire universe exists inside a multidimensional “super string”, there are many of these floating around in the ether somehow, and two of them can keep colliding and drawing apart in an endless cycle that has no end or beginning – this would be an explanation for the big bang.

So to people who say science can’t answer the “why” questions, you don’t have to accept these answers, but they are at least plausible and possible. They may not be testable with our current knowledge and technology, but they can be investigated by continuing to establish the building blocks that would allow us to test them some day.

And none of this really matters to the daily experience of being inside an individual human mind, which brings us back to where we started.

green ammonia

The idea behind green ammonia is to use renewable energy (solar, wind, etc.) to electrolyze water and produce hydrogen. The hydrogen can then be combined with nitrogen gas from the air in the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia. This is the same as what is done now, except that the most common process is to split the hydrogen off from natural gas, which results in carbon dioxide emissions.

Ammonia is used on a large scale as a fertilizer, so switching to this process would reduce emissions (and wouldn’t make the problem of excess nitrogen reaching our groundwater and surface water any worse, or better). I didn’t realize that ammonia could be burned for fuel. This article explains that even though burning it is less efficient than just burning the hydrogen gas, it is easier to move and store than hydrogen. Burning it does produce nitrogen oxide, which is also a greenhouse gas, but you can use a catalytic convertor to remove that.

It’s not mentioned in this article, but it should also be possible in principle to extract either nitrogen gas or ammonia directly from wastewater and farm waste, which if used as fertilizer would create a closed loop and actually help our ground and surface water at the same time it is helping our atmosphere. This sounds like a win-win-win for me, but it would have a cost, and the cost would have to be paid by the parties producing the pollution now rather than paid by all of us collectively in the future as we are impacted by the pollution, and that is the hard thing to explain and build political support behind.

Zillow’s house flipping debacle

Since I mentioned Zillow’s attempt to use big data to profit on house flipping recently, here is an article on that.

The United States is in the midst of the biggest house price boom ever. The Case-Shiller National Home Price Index was up nearly 20% in the 12 months ended in August, the biggest one-year increase in the history of that index.

Yet one of the biggest real estate brands in the world has seen its stock fall nearly 70% since mid-February. Zillow has gotten hammered after bungling its iBuyer program just three short years after getting into the house-flipping business. The company announced it is shuttering the platform, selling the rest of its housing inventory, and laying off up 25% of its staff.

awealthofcommonsense.com

The housing market has huge inefficiencies, huge transactions costs, and is somewhat corrupt. The algorithms apparently couldn’t account for those factors. The only silver lining is that when you have a big chunk of wealth sunk in the family home, you typically don’t experience huge swings in value on a regular basis.

My Dear Watson

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Watson was, in fact, a medical doctor. IBM’s Watson is not a doctor, but tried to play one in real life, and apparently failed. The idea was to use machine learning to crunch huge amounts of medical records and treatment data, and provide recommendations to real doctors treating real patients. And according to this article in Slate, it just didn’t work and the division is being “sold for parts”. I assume this means part of the IBM company legal entity and/or its “intellectual property” being sold, not the actual computer hardware which must be obsolete by now?

Along with the recent Zillow house flipping failure, this seems like another high profile failure for machine learning/AI-based business plans. It might be that the business plans are ahead of the technology, or the technology is ahead of the data (one gets tired of the phrase “garbage in, garbage out”, but it is a real thing – a lot of what is in my medical records is garbage, anyway), or both.

more numbers on Philadelphia shootings

A report commissioned by the Philadelphia has some facts and figures on shootings, both fatal (the layman might refer to these as “murders”) and non-fatal. Here are just a few that caught my eye:

  • For every fatal shooting, 3-4 people are shot non-fatally
  • Arguments are cited as the cause of 50% of shootings, while drug-related issues are cited in 18%. (My thinking on this is slowly evolving, because previously I had assumed the drug economy was at the root of much of the violence. I still wonder if the drug economy factors in some way into many of the arguments if you trace them back far enough, and maybe arguments just take on a life of their own at some point.)
  • 37% of fatal shootings from 2020 have been cleared as of January 2022, where “cleared” generally means an arrest has been made. I wondered how many cases might still be open from 2020 that might still be cleared, but the report says that when an arrest is going to be made, 75% of the time it will be made within about three months.
  • Conviction rates in fatal shooting cases ranged from 96% in 2016 to 80% in 2020.

The book Ghettoside referred to a 40% clearance rate in Los Angeles during the height of the 1990s murder surge there. It is remarkable how similar the 37% number above is. Doing the math, the chances of a murderer being caught and convicted is something like 1 in 3. Again, in a surprising echo of what that book discussed, the recommendations of this report mostly talk about crime prevention and suppression strategies. They specifically talk about dedicating more resources to investigation of non-fatal shootings, but they do not recommend increasing the number of homicide detectives or improving their training.

U.S. labor market growth

Axios has a brief piece on the demographics of the labor force in the U.S. A tight labor market is not just a short-term phenomenon during the pandemic recovery.

In the 2010s, the massive millennial generation was entering the workforce, the massive baby bo0m generation was still hard at work, and there was a multi-year hangover from the deep recession caused by the global financial crisis. But now, boomers are retiring, millennials are approaching middle age, and the Gen Z that follows them is comparatively small.

Axios

So combine this trend with anti-immigrant politics, and we may have a problem. It could lead to the double-edged sword of higher wages and inflation, a trend toward toward greater automation and technological innovation, a general drag on economic growth (which could ultimately lead to deflation), left wing politics, right wing politics, business pressure for more globalization/offshoring, or some combination of any of these (other than inflation and deflation, but maybe it is possible to have a sudden reversal between these and hard for policy to react quickly even if we knew what to do). It is hard to know what to do, but rational immigration policies based on skills and education to fill jobs available would be a start.

LED lighting vs. windows

Treehugger asks if LED lighting is more efficient than daylight. It seems like a dumb question at first because isn’t daylight free? But the problem inside buildings is that windows allow heat to come and go in addition to light, and LEDs have gotten so efficient that it is not an easy question to answer whether bricking up a window and replacing the light with LEDs would be more or less energy efficient. They conclude that windows should be designed with human comfort and happiness in mind.

Is the Pope the king of Italy?

Just kidding, I’m not that ignorant. That headline was just to get your attention. But then again, I don’t think about the political system in Italy often, so you could say I am ignorant of it. The politics of Italy obviously matters to Italians, but does it matter to the rest of us? Well, there was a guy named Mussolini, but that was quite awhile ago… There’s also a guy called the Pope, who’s not part of the Italian government but has some political power and sway on a global scale. As far as the actual modern government, it’s just a typical European parliamentary democracy, we assume? Well, there is no Italian king, but…

On January 24, when Sergio Mattarella’s seven-year term comes to an end, the Italian parliament and its regional representatives will hold a secret ballot to elect the country’s new president and official head of state…

And yet, in his official capacity as the “guarantor” or “guardian” of the constitution, the president holds considerable power: governments are required to obtain the “approval” of the president, who also nominates (“approves”) the prime minister and his cabinet ministers. Moreover, all laws passed by parliament have to be approved by the president, and he or she is also charged with signing off the dissolution of parliament, for example following a government crisis and loss of parliamentary majority. This means the president effectively decides whether elections should be held or not.

Nor does the president’s power stop there: the incumbent also ratifies all international treaties, and serves as commander-in-chief of the army and as the head of the governing body of the judiciary. The president also wields influence through the technocratic structures of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, particularly the all-powerful Accounting Office (Ragioneria Generale dello Stato) and the Bank of Italy.

Unherd.com

So Italy is at least a Republic of sorts if its head of state is elected by its legislature, which is in turn elected by the people. But the actual powers of the president almost sound like…an ayatollah? In practice, the head of government (i.e. prime minister) may not defer to the President, but it sounds like that balance of power could potentially change with time. And if the President has the ability to dissolve parliament and delay elections during an emergency, the conditions for a potential loss of democracy would seem to be there, at least according to this article.