Boing Boing » policy

Bang bang: Science, violence, and public policy

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 14:39:07 +0000

I was on CBC Radio 1's Day 6 last weekend, talking about some of the reasons why scientists can't answer key questions about guns — whether current gun policies do anything to reduce violent crime, for instance, or whether more guns cause less (or more) violence. In a related debate, you should also read the article on the science of video games and real-life violence that Brandon Keim wrote for PBS' NOVA. The truth is that this branch of science also has big problems connecting cause and effect and, as with gun policy research, the best kinds of experiments can't really be done for logistical and ethical reasons.

More accurate, but less reliable

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 16:44:53 +0000

This is a fascinating problem that affects a lot of scientific modeling (in fact, I'll be talking about this in the second part of my series on gun violence research) — the more specific and accurate your predictions, the less reliable they sometimes become. Think about climate science. When you read the IPCC reports, what you see are predictions about what is likely to happen on a global basis, and those predictions come in the form of a range of possible outcomes. Results like that are reliable — i.e, they've matched up with observed changes. But they aren't super accurate — i.e., they don't tell you exactly what will happen, and they generally don't tell you much about what might happen in your city or your state. We have tools that can increase the specificity and accuracy, but those same tools also seem to reduce the reliability of the outcomes. At The Curious Wavefunction, Ashutosh Jogalekar explains the problem in more detail and talks about how it affects scientist's ability to give politicians and the public the kind of absolute, detailed, specific answers they really want.

Science and gun violence: why is the research so weak?

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 13:40:56 +0000

“Our daughter lives about a mile from us, in a rural area. One night, while her son and husband were away, she comes over to visit. She’s over 40 now, but still, when she leaves, I say, ‘give me a call when you get home’.”

Charles Wellford is a professor of criminology and criminal justice at The University of Maryland. He’s a scientist who studies how social systems work, an expert in the process of homicide investigations. He knows far more about crime than the average American, but that doesn’t stop him from being scared in a very normal, average way.

On this particular night, Wellford waited the 10 minutes he thought it would take his daughter to get home, but he didn’t hear anything. At first, he figured it was no big deal. He rationalized that she must have gotten delayed. But then 20 minutes, went by and the phone was still silent. At 30 minutes, Wellford tried calling his daughter. Nobody answered. He waited a few minutes and dialed the number a second time. The phone rang. The voicemail picked up. This was the point where Charles Wellford really started to worry.

“So I went upstairs and I got a revolver and got in my car and drove out there,” he told me. “I pull up, and her car is there and all the lights are on everywhere. Now I’m convinced – somebody was in the house. Someone else was there when she got home. I get the gun and I start walking towards the house. And that’s when my daughter comes out of the barn,” he said.

“She’d just started doing chores and she’d forgotten to call.”

This is more than just a story about a jumpy father, worried for his child’s safety. It’s a story that illustrates how complicated and flawed the science on gun use and gun violence is in the United States.

If you were studying gun use, and you wanted to know how often guns were used in self-defense, how would you categorize Charles Wellford’s experience?

If you look at real-world research, Wellford said, the answer is far from consistent. Some research papers would classify his story an example of defensive gun use. Others wouldn’t. And that difference in definitions is part of why we don’t have solid answers to the big questions about gun violence, gun ownership, and the effects of gun laws.

Wellford doesn’t study guns, himself.. But in 2004, he served as the chairman on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed a huge amount of gun violence research and presented a sort of “state-of-the-field” report summarizing what we know, what we don’t know, and why.

The results were less than glowing. In the executive summary, the committee wrote that, despite lots of research, it was still impossible to answer some of the most pressing questions surrounding gun violence. The paper does its best to praise researchers for the good work they have produced – this isn’t a situation where we know absolutely nothing about gun use, gun ownership, and the impact of gun laws. But the committee members I spoke with were also critical of the field, and say that the confidence politicians, lobbyists, and activists put in this research is seriously premature.. Gun violence research suffers from a lack of consistently recorded data and, for that matter, a lack of data, in general. As John Pepper, associate economics professor at The University of Virginia and the study director on the 2004 report, put it, “The data are just terrible.”

Worse, critics say the methods used to analyze that data are also deeply flawed in many cases. What you end up with, researchers told me, is a field where key pieces of the puzzle are missing entirely and where multiple scientists are reaching wildly different conclusions from the exact same data sets. For instance, because of those differences in the definition of “defensive gun use” some researchers will tell you that Americans use a gun to defend themselves something like 1.5 million times every year. Others say it happens maybe 200,000 times annually.

That kind of variability does not create an environment where it is easy to craft evidence-based policy, and the situation has not improved since 2004, Wellford said.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a short piece here at BoingBoing, briefly addressing these issues. That piece was written quickly, mostly by reading a few review analyses. Because gun violence – and how to deal with it – continues to be a major issue in our society, I wanted to come back to these questions and dig a little deeper. We know that gun violence research is deeply flawed. We know that it cannot currently answer the questions we need it to answer. But why? What, specifically, is missing? What about this field is broken? And how do we fix it?

According to scientists who do gun research, scientists who were involved in the National Academies review, and scientists who study the way other scientists do research, there are two key problems. First is the issue of missing and poorly matched data. Second, there are also serious problems with the mathematical models scientists use to analyze that data, and with the type of conclusions they attempt to draw from it. In this first of a two-part series, I’m going to focus on the data.

About 11,000 Americans died at the end of a gun in 2010. We know that because the basic, Clue-esque information on who is killed, where, and with what gets documented by local law enforcement agencies – all of which is, in turn, compiled by the FBI into the Uniform Crime Report. This system has been around since 1930.

The other primary source of this kind of information is the CDC’s National Violent Death Reporting System. It’s been around since 2002 and collects more-detailed information than the Uniform Crime Report. For one thing, it includes suicides. When I say that guns killed 11,000 people in 2010, I’m only talking about deaths that were classified as homicides. Another thing the CDC records do is link deaths to other pieces of information – like previous domestic violence calls -- that can help researchers understand what lead up to the death. Unfortunately, only 18 states participate in that system.

In 1989, the FBI also started collecting more-detailed reports of crimes – including crimes that might involve a gun, but not be homicides – as part of the National Incident Based Reporting System. But that system is still used by only a small minority of law enforcement agencies.

Taken all together, these reporting systems give scientists a place to start. But it’s just that. A place to start. It’s a nice diagram of your street. It’s not a road map showing you the way to your cousin’s house in Cleveland.

One of the big problems is something that you’ve already seen here – definitions. How one person collecting data classifies a type of crime can be different from how somebody else does it, and neither of those might really capture the details of specific cases.

Mark Hoekstra is an associate professor of economics at Texas A&M University. He’s been studying the effects of stand-your-ground laws – legislation that changes the way the law expects people to act when they feel threatened. Historically (and this is dating back to English common law), you were expected to remove yourself from a threatening situation, rather than attacking the person you felt threatened by … unless the situation happened within your own home. Stand-your-ground laws basically expand the places and situations where it’s legally acceptable to go straight to “fight” without first attempting “flight”.

So what happens when a state institutes a stand-your-ground law? A good way to study this, as you might guess, is to start by looking at the rates of justifiable homicides and the rates of criminal homicides and see how each change after the law takes effect. The good news is that the FBI has a standardized definition of what “justifiable homicide” means.

The problem: The FBI definition doesn’t necessarily capture the full story of what’s going on. The FBI calls justifiable homicide “the killing of a felon during commission of a felony”, Hoekstra said. There are only about 200-300 of those reported annually in the entire country, he said. But nobody knows whether that is because justifiable homicide is actually rare, or whether it’s more common, but not captured by the reporting system. Remember, what’s happening here is that somebody puts another tick mark under one category or another. The details of how specific shootings happened and why don’t usually make it into the record.

It’s easy to imagine lots of situations that wouldn’t fit neatly into the FBI definitions. “Like one guy breaks a beer bottle and hits the other guy with it, and the guy who got hit shoots and kills the first guy,” Hoekstra said. “According to the FBI handbook, that’s not legally justifiable. But you don’t know the specific details of the case. In reality, you can imagine a situation where that scenario was deemed justifiable. You can also imagine a situation where it would be criminal and the guy would go to prison.”

That makes it difficult for people like Hoekstra to study justifiable homicide, and it makes it difficult for lay people, like you and I, to understand what’s going on when we hear about stuff like this in the news or see statistics repeated on a Facebook JPEG. There’s a lot of room for people and organizations to take a concept – what happens when states institute stand-your-ground laws, say – and fiddle with different ways of counting until they end up being able to make the statement they want to make. What’s more, those folks can all probably make a decent case for why they chose to tally up the numbers the way they did. It’s not really as simple as someone lying to you and someone not. At least, not always. When data and definitions don’t capture the full story, it leaves room for reasonable (and unreasonable) people to group the numbers in different ways.

Whether you think it’s the guns or the people that kill people, you’re bound to agree that homicide isn’t the only kind of violence guns end up involved in. Guns are part of burglaries. They’re used as a threat in of some kinds of rape. They’re used to harass and intimidate victims of domestic violence. Sometimes, people who are shot with guns don’t die. Sometimes, people shoot themselves, whether accidentally or intentionally.

All of those things are, presumably, affected in some way by the availability of guns and by the regulations that we place on guns. This isn’t just about people killing one another. But research on gun violence tends to focus on homicide. And there’s a very good reason for that.

“Start with deaths and go down from there to shooting yourself in the hand,” Charles Wellford explained. “As you go down that continuum, the comprehensiveness and quality of the data decreases.”

There’s a lot we just don’t know when it comes to how guns are used and misused in a whole range of violent events. The simple explanation is that a dead body is hard to hide. Murders get reported to police. The police generally follow up on those cases and report them to the FBI. Other crimes are much more of a patchwork, said John Donohue, professor of law at Stanford Law School. People may or may not call the cops to report domestic violence or an assault by someone they know. If the cops are called, the situation may or may not be taken seriously enough that it’s logged in any meaningful way. And if the violent incident in question isn’t technically a crime – shooting yourself in the foot, for instance, or drunkenly blowing a hole in your mother-in-law’s garage on the 4^th of July – there’s no reason why that information would be reported to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, to begin with.

All those things matter very much to the people who are trying to figure out how guns are used in our society and how gun use changes over time. But there’s not really a solid, nation-wide, uniform way of tracking any of it. So what we say we know about gun violence is almost always just a synonym for what we know about gun murders.

And that’s not the only information that is just flat-out missing.

Think about right-to-carry laws, which allow licensed individuals to pack heat in a holster or handbag, or even just slung over their shoulder at a JC Penny. Scientists like Donohue and Hoekstra study the effects of those laws by analyzing data on crime statistics – murders, and whatever else happens to be available in the states they’re researching. That information can help them get an idea of what’s going on. But to really understand how the specific conceal-carry laws affect those crime statistics you would need to know what people are actually doing with their newfound rights. How many people were carrying guns last year? How about this year? How often do they carry them? Where do they take them? That data simply doesn’t exist, Wellford told me.

Another thing we don’t have is reliable, long-term data on where the guns that are actually used in crimes come from. One of the ways we legislate gun use is through registration programs and systems that limit who can buy a gun legally. But if we don’t know whether guns used in crimes are purchased legally, illegally, or purchased legally and then sold or given illegally to a third party, we have no idea how to craft those laws or even if they make any difference at all.

Finally, consider the question of whether more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens serves as a deterrent to criminals. That’s a pretty basic argument that many people make, and scientists try to answer that question using lots of different methods. (For the record, the National Academies report came to the conclusion that the research is currently inconclusive on this. Right now, we don’t know whether having more guns means less crime, or more crime, or whether it has any effect at all. The research is all over the place and nobody has made a strong enough case to be conclusive.)

But here’s one thing nobody has ever done: Find out what the criminals think. That same issue also came up when John Pepper was involved in a National Academies panel considering research on the death penalty. “If you think about whether it has a deterrent effect, we know almost nothing, because we know almost nothing about how offenders perceive the risk of execution,” he told me. And the same is true of the risk of being shot by a potential victim.

Sixty years ago, nobody really knew how America had sex. Sure, scientists could guess sex was happening, based on the basic population numbers collected in the census. But who was doing it, when, with whom … that was all lost in the mists of incredibly awkward conversations that nobody wanted to have. Figuring out ways to collect and compile that data was a daunting task. And, in fact, a lot of people likely would have thought it was pretty invasive for scientists and government entities like the CDC to even want to know the answers to those questions.

But here we are, in 2013, and even if we don’t know exactly what people get up to between 9:35 and 9:37 on a Wednesday night, we do know a lot more about American sex habits. More importantly, we know how those sex habits affect other parts of people’s lives, and we know a lot more about how public policy affects both sex and quality of life. That matters. It’s uncomfortable, potentially invasive research that actually makes us aware of rapes and sexual assaults that go unreported in crime statistics. It’s that research that helps us track STD rates, and makes sure we notice when those patterns change for the better or worse. Research on sex means that we know more about teen sex, teen pregnancy rates, and how to reduce the latter.

“We made progress,” Charles Wellford told me. “There are lots of examples of difficult measurement issues and we didn’t just throw our hands up and walk away from them.”

We can solve the problems with gun violence data, scientists say, but it’s going to take funding and it’s going to take political willpower. There are a few key solutions that the researchers I spoke with suggested.

First, we need to expand the crime reporting systems that track a broader range of incidents and collect more detailed accounts of what actually happened in those incidents. That means expanding the CDC’s National Violent Death Reporting System from 18 states to 50. And it means getting more local law enforcement agencies using the FBI’s National Incident Based Reporting System. The basic Uniform Crime Report has been useful, they say, but it’s time to bring this kind of reporting into the 21^st century.

The harder task is going to be finding ways to collect a new kind of data. Wellford calls it the “left side variables”. If you think about the relationship between crime and guns as an equation, he said, all we really have right now is the information in the right-hand side of that equation. We have data on the occurrence of gun violence. What we’re missing is all the stuff that connects people to those guns.

“None of the surveys used to study other crimes, where you could include information about guns and then link that up to other things we care about like crime, labor markets, schooling outcomes … we just don’t have the data,” John Pepper said. “Take a simple question about correlation between gun ownership and crime, or gun ownership and suicide. We can’t even answer that.”

There are two ways to study questions like those. If you had a survey or some reports that could tell you how many gun owners in the state of Virginia had committed suicide, then you could compare that to suicides among people in Virginia who didn’t own guns. Alternately, you could take broadly aggregated data about how many suicides happen in the state of Virginia and broadly aggregated data about gun ownership rates in the state of Virginia, and you can compare those statistics to other states. You can easily tell that the former method is going to produce a much more accurate estimate of the relationship between gun ownership and suicide than the latter. But we have no way to do that.

Creating a system that allows scientists to gather that data might be objectionable to some people who own guns. But think of it this way. Right now, whatever your beliefs on guns happen to be, it’s incredibly difficult to back them up with solid science. If you want to be able to make any kind of statement about gun ownership and the effects thereof – and have anybody who doesn’t agree with you 100% actually take you seriously – then you should support better data. This should be the first step. Because right now, we don’t know enough to know definitively what effects guns have, or what effects gun policies have.

Better data would help that. But, unfortunately, it’s not the only thing that needs fixing. In my next post on gun violence research, I’ll focus in on the way scientists analyze data. To avoid misleading conclusions, we need good mathematical models. But some experts say we don’t have those. So what does that mean for the research scientists are publishing? And what does it tell us about the usefulness of evidence-based policy making, in general? Stay tuned.

Playing politics

This is a story about science, a peek behind-the-scenes at some of the factors that make it difficult for experts to come to definitive conclusions about how gun ownership and gun laws affect crime, violence, and self-defense. But, in a lot ways, it’s impossible to separate that from politics. Data and methodology are the gooey filling. Politics is the crust. It’s all one pie.

In particular, it’s important to acknowledge that politics is a big part of why some of the missing data discussed here is actually missing. This issue goes far beyond a simple lack of funding for the expansion of improved crime reporting systems.

For instance, in this piece, I mentioned that social scientists don’t have a good way to track where a gun used in a crime came from. And that problem isn’t unique to science – local law enforcement runs into the same roadblocks. From a practical perspective, this is an easy problem to solve. From a political perspective, it’s not – the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms is prohibited by law from setting up a national, centralized gun tracking system. While the agency does collect data on gun sales and background checks, it’s forced to regularly destroy some of that information. And it can’t share the information it does retain with any member of the public. This was a key complaint voiced by Charles Wellford and other scientists, who count as members of the public.

Another key problem, at least in the eyes of the researchers I spoke with, was the existence of Public Law 104-208 and Public Law 112-74. Passed in 1996 and 2011, respectively, these pieces of legislation included provisions that prevented first the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and then all Department of Health and Human Services agencies, from using federal funding to advocate or promote gun control. The language used in this legislation was both broad and vague. According to researchers I spoke with, those laws have had a chilling effect on government-funded scientists, who worried any research they did could be construed as gun-control advocacy if legislators didn’t like the results.

Charles Wellford described a meeting he attended he chaired recently, aimed at formulating research goals and figuring out how to fill in some of the most important blanks in gun violence research. Of the 15 people at the meeting, one was from the CDC. Throughout the meeting, the man began nearly every statement he made by first hedging, explaining that he didn’t want ideas attributed to him and that the CDC would never consider research directions he might personally recommend. “[That legislation] doesn’t say we can’t do research on, say, whether someone has a gun in their home, but careers were damaged and people lost jobs and that has a lasting effect,” Wellford said.

Not all research is done the same way or with an equal level of quality. John Pepper, for instance, was very critical of the gun violence research coming out of the public health sector, which would include work being done by the CDC. This kind of research often matches populations of people who have been subjected to violence to populations that have not and looks for commonalities and differences between them. But that perspective is based on modeling the spread of disease, not on modeling complex behaviors and decisions, Pepper said. He didn’t think it did a good job of dealing with questions of correlation vs. causation. “A gun isn’t a virus,” he said.

But, even so, Pepper thought the legal restrictions were unreasonable, and he thought they had a detrimental effect on gun violence research, in general, not just on the research coming out the public health tradition. For instance, some of the important work the CDC used to do, he said, included adding questions about gun ownership and gun violence to national surveys that tracked a wide variety of health issues and outcomes – data that would have been useful to social scientists and public health experts, alike.

Some of this may change in the future. On January 16^th, President Obama issued an executive action authorizing (and, in fact, mandating) the CDC to do gun violence research and collect better crime data. But the pesky money problem still exists. The action called for $10 million in funding for research and another $20 million in funding to expand the National Violent Death Reporting System. That cash, however, has to come from congress. And if there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that this is probably not the ideal time to push large spending bills through Capitol Hill.

For further reading on the political side of gun research:

• A New York Times story by Erica Goode and Sheryl Gay Stolberg that digs into the restrictions placed on the ATF.
• Justin George of The Baltimore Sun writes about the ATF restrictions and the problems this presents for policy making.
• A CBS Evening News report by Mark Strassman on the legislation that blocked gun research at the CDC.

Stanford Robotics and the Law Conference call for papers

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 19:56:51 +0000

I'm late getting to this (my own fault, I missed an important email), but We: Robot, the Robotics and the Law Conference at Stanford Law School is still accepting papers until Jan 18. Last year's event was apparently smashing, and this year's CFP is quite enticing:

The following list is by no means exhaustive, but rather meant as an elaboration on conference themes:
* Legal and policy responses to likely effects of robotics on manufacturing or the environment
* Perspectives on the interplay between legal frameworks and robotic software and hardware
* Intellectual property issues raised by collaboration within robotics (or with robots)
* Perspectives on collaboration between legal and technical communities
* Tort law issues, including product liability, professional malpractice, and the calculation of damages
* Administrative law issues, including FDA or FAA approval
* Privacy law and privacy enhancing technologies
* Comparative/international perspectives on robotics law
* Issues of legal and economic policy, including tax, employment, and corporate governance
In addition to scholarly papers, we invite proposals for demos of cutting-edge commercial applications of robotics or recent technical research that speaks one way or another to the immediate commercial prospects of robots.

Call For Papers: Robotics and the Law Conference at Stanford Law School

Clean rivers: A 20th/21st century miracle

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 23:01:34 +0000

I was born in 1981 and, because of that, I largely missed the part of American history where our rivers were so polluted that they did things like, you know, catch fire. But it happened. And, all things considered, it didn't happen that long ago. The newspaper clippings above are from a 1952 fire on Ohio's Cuyahoga river. Between 1868 and 1969 that river burned at least 13 times.

That's something worth remembering — not just that we once let our waterways get that trashed, but also the fact that we've gone a long way towards fixing it. We took 200 years of accumulating sewage and industrial degradation and cleaned it up in the span of a single generation. At Slate, James Salzman writes about that reversal of environmental fortune, a shift so pronounced — and so dependent upon a functioning government in which a diverse spectrum of politicians recognize the importance of investing in our country's future — that it seems damned-near impossible today.

... discharging raw sewage and pollution into our harbors and rivers has been common practice for most of the nation’s history, with devastating results. By the late 1960s, Lake Erie had become so polluted that Time magazine described it as dead. Bacteria levels in the Hudson River were 170 times above the safe limit. I can attest to the state of the Charles River in Boston. While sailing in the 1970s, I capsized and had to be treated by a dermatologist for rashes caused by contact with the germ-laden waters.

In 1972, a landmark law reversed the course of this filthy tide. Today, four decades later, the Clean Water Act stands as one of the great success stories of environmental law. Supported by Republicans and Democrats alike, the act took a completely new approach to environmental protection. The law flatly stated there would be no discharge of pollutants from a point source (a pipe or ditch) into navigable waters without a permit. No more open sewers dumping crud into the local stream or bay. Permits would be issued by environmental officials and require the installation of the best available pollution-control technologies.

The waste flushed down drains and toilets needed a different approach, so the Clean Water Act provided for billions of dollars in grants to construct and upgrade publicly owned sewage-treatment works around the nation. To protect the lands that filter and purify water as it flows by, permits were also required for draining and filling wetlands.

Read the rest of the story

Image from the Blog on Smog, which also has a really nice timeline of cleanup on the Cuyahoga.

Via Laura Helmuth

In America, prostate cancer patients suffer when profit comes first

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 18:05:38 +0000

It's a familiar story line in America: the type of medical care people receive suffers because doctors are pressured to put profit before patients. In this Businessweek article, a closer look at how many prostate cancer patients may not be receiving the optimal course of treatment for their disease, because care providers can bill more for certain forms of treatment. The article begins with the story of Max Calderon, who was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2010. His urologist recommended radiation therapy at a clinic in Salinas, CA. Calderon was 77 years old, lab tests suggested that his cancer had metastasized, and he was not the ideal candidate profile for the specific kind of treatment he was going to receive.

His urologist, Amir Saffarian, didn’t mention alternatives, Calderon said. So he made 47 trips to the clinic, 28 miles from his home, where medical technicians fired radiation beams at his prostate. Calderon said he never saw Saffarian there -- even though the urologist billed Medicare and Medicaid $30,000 for the treatment, his records show.
“The way they do their business, there’s something fishy going on,” Calderon said in an interview before his death in August at age 79, after the cancer metastasized.
Investigators with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services are examining Calderon’s case history, and others, to see whether the Salinas clinic and doctors who send patients there are violating laws against making referrals chiefly for financial gain, according to people familiar with the matter.

Read the rest. Reminds me a lot of the PBS Frontline "Dollars and Dentists" documentary Miles O'Brien did recently.

(thanks, subatomicdoc!)

Radio documentary on elections and America's energy future: The Power of One, with Alex Chadwick

Xeni Jardin — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 12:28:37 +0000

BURN: An Energy Journal, the radio documentary series hosted by former NPR journalist Alex Chadwick, has a 2-hour election special out. It's the most powerful piece of radio journalism I've listened to since—well, since the last episode they put out. You really must do yourself a favor and set aside some time this weekend to listen to “The Power of One.”

Energy policy, defining how we use energy to power our economy and our lives, is among the most pressing issues for the next four years. In this special two-hour edition of BURN, stories about the power of one: how, in this election season, a single person, place, policy or idea can — with a boost from science — affect the nation’s search for greater energy independence.

The documentary examines how "individuals, new scientific ideas, grassroots initiatives and potentially game-changing inventions are informing the energy debate in this Presidential Election year, and redefining America’s quest for greater energy independence." It was completed and hit the air before Hurricane Sandy, but the energy issues illuminated by that disaster (blackouts, gas shortage, grid failure, backup power failure at hospitals) further underscore the urgency.

Chadwick and a team of reporters do this through a series of "intimate, human-scale stories," traveling to the energy frontier of the Arctic Ocean, to Pennsylvania’s natural gas-rich “Marcellus Shale” region where the national “fracking” controversy runs deep, and a university lab in Colorado where a female scientist is building a battery that aspires to be the “Holy Grail of green technology.”

“Energy and climate are such big stories – there is a reason that both campaigns often talk about the economy, jobs and energy all tied together,” says Alex. “It’s easy to get overwhelmed by how big these topics are. What BURN tries to do is tell smaller stories that provide insight into how people’s lives are changed by the energy choices they and others around them make. ‘The Power of One’ is about how individuals can make a difference, even in something so globally immense as energy.”

The website for the series is here, and includes all sorts of compelling side stories, like this photo-essay about a mobile home community torn apart by a shale gas project: the Riverdale mobile home park, which once sat on the banks of the Susquehanna River in north-central Pennsylvania.

"Earlier this year, all the Riverdale trailer families were evicted to make room for a pump station and pipeline that would move Susquehanna water to fracking sites elsewhere in the state."

Alex visited Riverdale with freelance photographer and Pennsylvania resident Lynn Johnson, who works on assignment for National Geographic. Two of Lynn's images, below.

Deb Eck, with her twin daughters, works long hours managing a retail store. She became a reluctant movement leader. (Lynn Johnson)

The new owners erected chain link fencing around what was becoming adisputed construction zone. The fence separated residents who remained from those who had become their advocates. (Lynn Johnson)

Images at top of post, L-R: Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, Getty Images; A burn-off from a fracking site illuminates the Pennsylvania sky, photo by Les Stone; part of a wind farm in Gratiot County, Michigan, photo by Scott Carrier.

Must-listen radio: "Nuclear Power After Fukushima," documentary ...

Sequel to my "General Purpose Computation" talk coming up in Vegas, San Francisco

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 21:07:50 +0000

I've written a sequel to my talk The Coming War on General Purpose Computing, called "The Coming Civil War Over General-Purpose Computing," which I'll be delivering twice this summer: first on July 28 at DEFCON in Las Vegas, and then on July 31 in San Francisco at a Long Now Foundation SALT talk, jointly presented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. As far as I know, both talks will be online, along with slides (a rarity for me -- I normally hate doing slides, but I had a good time with it this time around).

Test, Learn, Adapt: using randomized trials to improve government policy

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:51:32 +0000

"Test, Learn, Adapt" is a new white paper documenting the ultimate in evidence-based-policy: government policies that are improved through randomized trials. It's co-authored by Laura Haynes, Owain Service, Ben Goldacre and David Torgerson. Ben Goldacre elaborates:

We also address – and demolish – the spurious objections that people often raise against doing trials of policy (like: “surely it’s unfair to withold a new intervention from half the people in your trial?”).
Trials are widely used in medicine, in business, in international development, and even in web design. The barriers to using them in UK policy are more cultural than practical, and this document will, I hope, be a small part of a bigger battle to get better evidence into government.
More than that, the paper describes several fun examples of trials that have been conducted in UK government over just the past year, reporting both positive and negative findings. The tide is turning, and there are lots of smart people in the civil service.
Anyway, I think (I hope!) that the paper is readable and straightforward, like the Ladybird Book of Randomised Policy Trials, and I really hope you’ll enjoy reading it.
It’s free to download here.

Here’s a Cabinet Office paper I co-authored about Randomised Trials of Government Policies

A quick and dirty education in fossil fuel subsidies

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 18:48:29 +0000

How much do you know about energy subsidies? National Geographic has a really interesting quiz that covers some of the basics, as well as a few interesting background details. Here's one freebie: The first fossil fuel subsidy in America was instituted by George Washington. It was a 10% tariff on imported coal, aimed at making American coal competitive in comparison to British coal. (Via Matt McDermott)

Behind the scenes of a city: Trash in L.A.

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 08 May 2012 18:45:25 +0000

The video, made by Mae Ryan for Los Angeles public radio KPCC, traces trash from a burger lunch to its ultimate fate in a landfill. It reminds me of those great, old Sesame Street videos where you got to see what goes on inside crayon factories and peanut butter processing plants. Which is to say that it is awesome.

The process you see here, though, is L.A.-centric, which started me wondering: How much does the trash system differ from one place to another in the United States?

Over the last couple years, as I researched my book on the electric system, I spent a lot of time learning about how different infrastructures developed in this country. If there's one thing I've picked up it's the simple lesson that these systems—which we are utterly dependent upon—were seldom designed. Instead, the infrastructures we use today are often the result of something more akin to evolution ... or to a house that's been remodeled and upgraded by five or six different owners. Watching this video it occurred to me that there's no reason to think that the trash system in place in L.A. has all that much in common with the one in Minneapolis. In fact, it could well be completely different from the trash system in San Francisco.

I'd love to see more videos showing the same story in different places. Know of any others you can point me toward?

Suggested by maeryan on Submitterator

Video Link

We Robot conference: legal and policy issues related to robotics

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:58:46 +0000

Lee sez, "The next generation of robots will be in homes, offices and hospitals, not to mention driving cars, flying around as drones, and, yes, working as prison wardens. Robots will be programmed to learn, and will exhibit emergent behavior not necessarily contemplated by their designers. What happens when good robots do bad things? Who is responsible? And what ethical and legal constraints should be considered at the design stage so that the robotics industry does not become the next full employment opportunity for lawyers? What kinds of public policies should we put in place to encourage the smart deployment of robots, striking the right balance between encouraging innovation and safety? These are the kinds of questions to be examined at We Robot, "an inaugural conference on law and policy relating to robotics" at the University of Miami School of Law on April 21 & 22, 2012. The We Robot call for papers, and a parallel call for live-from-the-frontlines-of-design reports from robot-makers, is open for initial expressions of interest until Jan. 12, 2012.

Topics of interest for the scholarly paper portion of the conference include but are not limited to:
* Effect of robotics on the workplace, e.g. small businesses, hospitals, and other contexts where robots and humans work side-by-side.
* Regulatory and licensing issues raised by robots in the home, the office, in public spaces (e.g. roads), and in specialized environments such as hospitals.
* Design of legal rules that will strike the right balance between encouraging innovation and safety, particularly in the context of autonomous robots.
* Issues of legal or moral responsibility, e.g. relating to autonomous robots or robots capable of exhibiting emergent behavior.
* Issues relating to robotic prosthetics (e.g. access equity issues, liability for actions activated by conscious or unconscious mental commands).
* Relevant differences between virtual and physical robots.

We Robot 2012: Setting the Agenda (Thanks, Lee!)

Evidence-based copyright: UK online movie marketplace is expensive, broken, patchy

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:08:40 +0000

My latest Guardian column is "Movie fans turn to piracy when the online cupboard is bare," a report on the Open Rights Group's study of the lawful options for people who want to watch great British movies online. The UK government and courts keep ratcheting up Internet censorship proposals because they say that there are so many lawful marketplaces that there's no excuse for "piracy." But ORG's research shows that large swathes of critical material isn't available for sale. And as we saw when major rightsholders pulled out of Hulu and iTunes before, the availability of their material on BitTorrent spiked -- if you don't offer lawful channels, you drive customers to unlawful markets.

Here's what ORG found: though close to 100% of their sample were available as DVDs, more than half of the top 50 UK films of all time were not available as downloads. The numbers are only slightly better for Bafta winners: just 58% of Bafta best film winners since 1960 can be bought or rented as digital downloads (the bulk of these are through iTunes – take away the iTunes marketplace, which isn't available unless you use Mac or Windows, and only 27% of the Bafta winners can be had legally).
And while recent blockbusters fare better, it's still a patchwork, requiring the public to open accounts with several services to access the whole catalogue (which still has many important omissions).
But even in those marketplaces, movies are a bad deal – movie prices are about 30% to 50% higher when downloaded over the internet versus buying the same movies on DVDs. Some entertainment industry insiders argue that DVDs, boxes and so forth add negligible expense to their bottom line, but it's hard to see how movie could cost less on physical DVDs than as ethereal bits, unless the explanation is price-gouging. To add insult to injury, the high-priced online versions are often sold at lower resolutions than the same movies on cheap DVDs.

Movie fans turn to piracy when the online cupboard is bare

Policy-by-nudging unsupported by evidence, and undemocratic

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 14:53:45 +0000

In a New Scientist op-ed, Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi take aim at the trendy idea of "nudging" people towards healthy, socially beneficial choices. The authors find the evidence for the effectiveness of nudging isn't supported by the literature, and policy-by-nudging misses the key to good governance: an informed citizenry who are part of the solution, not the problem to be solved.

This points to the key problem with "nudge" style paternalism: presuming that technocrats understand what ordinary people want better than the people themselves. There is no reason to think technocrats know better, especially since Thaler and Sunstein offer no means for ordinary people to comment on, let alone correct, the technocrats' prescriptions. This leaves the technocrats with no systematic way of detecting their own errors, correcting them, or learning from them. And technocracy is bound to blunder, especially when it is not democratically accountable.
As political scientist Suzanne Mettler, from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, argues, libertarian paternalism treats people as consumers rather than citizens. It either fails to tell people why choices are set up in particular ways, or actively seeks to conceal the rationale. When, for example, Obama's administration temporarily cut taxes to stimulate the economy, it did so semi-surreptitiously to encourage people to spend rather than save.
Mettler uses experiments to show how ordinary people can understand complicated policy questions and reach considered conclusions, as long as they get enough information. This suggests a far stronger role for democratic decision-making than libertarian paternalism allows. People should be given information, and allowed to reach conclusions about their own interests, and how to structure choices to protect those interests. By all means consult experts, but the dialogue should go both ways.

'Nudge' policies are another name for coercion

A must-read for college students and professors

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 15:29:23 +0000

As much as 40 percent of the people who start out majoring in science and engineering end up switching to other degrees. Why? The answers are complex, and the people who drop out are often the best-of-the-best. The New York Times looks at why college students leave science majors and what can be done to change that.

Energy policy is leaving the middle class behind

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 02:30:06 +0000

If you've paid much attention to policy in general, you won't be too surprised by what I'm about to tell you about energy policy. Many of our well-meaning public programs use tax dollars for the near-exclusive benefit of the wealthy—the group of people who need those shared funds the least.

Today I spoke at "What Will Turn Us On in 2030?", a conference about the short-term future of energy in the United States. At the conference, I met Lisa Margonelli, director of the Energy Policy Initiative at the New America Foundation. Margonelli has spent the last year researching the effects of high gasoline prices on middle class and working class families. (I'll be posting some more about that project later.) Along the way, she noticed some serious problems with the way we're currently trying to change energy systems in the U.S.—problems that actually endanger our ability to make real, long-term change.

The green policies put in place by the Bush and Obama administrations are not only not aimed at the middle class; they’re benefitting the wealthy at precisely the moment that high gas prices have slammed the lower middle class.

Consider the flashiest green support for consumers at the moment: tax credits for the purchase of electric cars and solar panels. Buy an electric car (more than $40,000) or a solar array (more than $20,000) and get a tax credit. But most American families making the median income (about $50,000) spend more per year on their old used cars and fuel ($7,900) than they do on taxes ($6,000). So a tax credit effectively steers the taxes they do pay toward those in the upper income brackets.

... Green products and technology need government support. We’ve given so much to high-carbon fuels and infrastructure that they have a built-in advantage, but we can’t afford to depend upon them in the future. If we want to give green energy real political legs, policymakers need to be sure that the middle class gets some of the green goodies that can save money: more efficient vehicles, household solar panels or water heaters, energy-efficiency upgrades. In fact, making sure that there's a middle class market for these goods is part of actually building a strong U.S. green industry—in much the way we built markets for cars, for houses after World War II, and even for home appliances. It’s actually a lot easier to build smart policies than it is to build a killer electric car or a scalable biofuel. But for some reason, we’re not doing it.

What makes us worth defending

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 19:26:15 +0000

Senator John Pastore: “Is there anything connected with the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country?”

Physicist Robert Rathburn Wilson: “No sir, I don’t believe so.”

Pastore: “Nothing at all?”

Wilson: “Nothing at all.”

Pastore: “It has no value in that respect?”

Wilson: “It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of man, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.”

— From the testimony of Robert Rathburn Wilson before the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, 1969. As quoted in a lovely memorial to Wilson and the Fermi National Laboratory's Tevatron by science blogger Jennifer Ouellette

The Tevatron is set for shutdown on September 30. The point here, I think, is not that the Tevatron, specifically, must be kept alive at all costs. But rather that the willingness to fund curiosity-driven research is one of our better angels. Humanity benefits from knowledge, even if that knowledge doesn't immediately and directly lead to cool gadgets, bigger bombs, or a cure for cancer. And it benefits the United States to be the sort of place that contributes to the betterment of humanity.

Science museums are failing grown-ups

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 18:50:10 +0000

Last month, Armando Herrera Corral was wounded when a package delivered to his office at Mexico’s Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education turned out to be a bomb. Nobody knows who sent the package. But someone posted a manifesto online, taking credit for the attack and explaining why they targeted Corral.

The terrorists, by their own account, acted out of fear—of “grey goo,” the sci-fi scenario where sentient nanotech robots replicate themselves to the point that they devour everything on Earth. If you believe that threat is imminent, you have no choice but to defend humanity. Even if that means trying to kill people like Corral, director of a technology transfer center at the Monterrey Institute.

But how does somebody’s perception of science, and scientists, get so screwed up?

This isn’t that hard to understand. In fact, if you think about how little time most adults have spent actively learning accurate information about science and scientists, it’s a little amazing that more people aren’t equally confused.

Make no mistake, the attack on Armando Corral is an issue of education and confusion. According to John Falk, Sea Grant professor of Free Choice Learning at Oregon State University, Americans spend less than 5% of their lives in classrooms—and even less of that time learning science.

We graduate high school knowing that Issac Newton discovered gravity, the general anatomical location of our stomachs relative to our hearts, and what happens when a car travelling 30 miles per hour crashes into a brick wall. At some point, probably in grade school, somebody told us about the scientific method, but not how that actually plays out in the real world. We learn the basics. We memorize some charts.

And then we live our lives in a world where science is much more complicated, and constantly changing.

Of the emerging technologies that New Scientist believes will be vitally important during the next 30 years, not one is something I learned anything about in school. Synthetic biology, remote sensing, machine language translation, artificial intelligence, and, yes, nanobots.

What bridges the gap between that stuff and the basics we learned during our formal education? What do we toss into that chasm when we don’t have a textbook? Something we heard about in a chat room? Half-remembered facts from the news? Science fiction?

There are some sources of science education outside school. Journalism, for one, when it’s done right. And museums. Of the two, people trust the museums more. But, of the two, museums do less to address adult science education. I think that’s a problem. Earlier this month, I got a chance to speak at the 6th Science Center World Congress in Cape Town, South Africa, about why I think museums are failing adults, and what to do about that problem.

"My son is now a bit too old for the science center"

Right now, science museums are not bad places for adults. And they don’t ignore adults completely. I don’t want to imply that. Evidence shows that adults visit these museums and learn from them. But there are problems with the status quo and those show through in the evidence, as well.

Reach Advisors is a firm that focuses on museum audience research. In a 2008 survey of adult American museum visitors, they found that more than 80% of the respondents to a multiple choice survey said science museums best served children and families. And 59% said the museums best served school groups. Just 22% said adults were best served, and only 17% said teens.

In that same survey, the respondents gave answers that implied they felt the science museum was for children, not for them. They talked about their kids becoming “too old for the science museum.” They expressed surprise that the museum was supposed to be a place where they learned something, too.

And there are good reasons for people feel that way. Many, many science museums in the United States, and abroad, base their image and advertising around bright, primary colors and kid-centric messages. They’re filled with large, loud rooms where packs of children run from one station to another punching buttons. And they feature exhibits that focus on the same kind of timeless science basics taught in school. More importantly, they don’t reliably connect the science back to real-life issues, ongoing controversies, and the news that adults see every day.

The Reach Advisors survey shows how these trends impact the way adults feel about science museums. An informal Q&A with my Google+ circles turned up the same sentiments. Adults don’t like spending time in science museums. They don’t think it’s for them. They feel weird being there. They wish more exhibits had information they found challenging and useful.

Science museums do intend to reach adults. But it doesn’t matter what message you mean to convey, if what people hear is, “Science museums are kid stuff.” And when the museums fail them, and science journalism isn’t trusted*, we can’t be surprised when adults wildly misinterpret the reality of science.

We all scream for ice cream

So what do we do about it?

The good news is that this is not about fun versus serious business. I’m not here to tell you that grown ups really dig lots of signs with tiny font print. Over the past few months, I visited several science museums in the Midwest. I read a lot of literature on adult museum visitors. And at the Congress, I was introduced to some cool examples of museums getting this stuff right. The truth is: There are ways to engage adults and kids at the same time, create comfortable environments, and add depth and relevancy to the regular exhibits.

• At the Iowa Science Center in Des Moines, they've got an exhibit that's fun, and very hands on, but also teaches something fundamental about how science works. It's called "When Things Get Moving" and it's one of those big rooms full of physics demonstrations. But it has a deeper purpose. Instead of just hitting a button and seeing what happens, you're challenged to take a problem and try to solve it. More importantly, you're encouraged to compete against other people to see who can come up with the best solution. Build a rocket that flies the farthest. Create a hydroelectric dam that produces the most energy. It's really a clever way to teach people the scientific method—if your first hypothesis didn't work, come up with a new one. And it engages adults because we aren't told how to solve the problem. We have to experiment, too. This is what interactivity looks like done right.

• The Ontario Science Center has an exhibit called "A Question of Truth," which is all about how the way we perceive the world—and even the way we do science—can be twisted by personal biases and deeply held beliefs. In fact, it used to be the first thing you walked through upon entering that museum. When I found out this exhibit existed, I had to pick my jaw up off the floor. This exhibit talks about uncertainty in data and how scientists deal with the possibility that the evidence they've collected could be misleading, and acknowledges times in not-so-far-off history when scientists allowed their own racism to warp their findings. That's the kind of challenge, and the kind of context, I'm looking for as an adult. That's the kind of thing that helps adults better understand their world.

• You've probably noticed that more museums are having "grown-up nights" with booze and more advanced demonstrations. Some have also started hosted hackerspaces. That's awesome. And it's something that the adults I've talked to want to see even more of. More special events. More clubs and classes. More interaction with the DIY and citizen science communities.

So if stuff like this is happening, why do I think science museums are still failing adults? And why do surveys reflect such serious dissatisfaction?

I think this is a sundae problem.

A sundae is a bowl full of ice cream. You put some stuff on top of it, but it remains, fundamentally, a bowl full of ice cream. And when I talk about examples of really great adult engagement in science museums, I am, generally, talking about the sprinkles, not the ice cream. The museums acknowledge the problem, but they’re dealing with it by adding in a couple of things here and there. A traveling exhibit. One exhibit out of the whole museum. One night a month. What they really need are serious changes to the bulk of the experience.

When I spoke at the 6th Science Center World Congress, here’s what I heard, over and over: “Oh, yeah, you’re totally right. Other museums need to get on that. But our museum has taken care of the problem already because we did this one thing.”

But the sprinkles are not enough.

Not for average adults, who just want help making sense of the technologies and choices that are part of everyday life. Not for anyone who wants to see science discussed in a saner way in Washington, D.C. And definitely not for the people who have been scared, by confusing information, into thinking that the only way to save humanity is to attack scientists.

For some more good sources on this, I recommend:
•Designs for Learning; Studying Science Museums that Do More Than Entertain by Sue Allen
• The Unintended Effects of Interactive Objects and Labels in the Science Museum by Leslie Atkins, et. al.
• Beyond Science Literacy: Science and the Public by Xinfeng Liu
• Nina Simon's Museum 2.0 blog
• The 95% Solution by John Falk
• All the PowerPoint presentations from the 6th Science Center World Congress are available online. You can search the list of sessions by title. There's some really interesting stuff in here about addressing controversial topics, science and religion, and science and indigenous communities. Unfortunately, there's no video of the sessions.

*For good reasons, in some cases. But that’s a whole other post. I don’t want you to think that I think science journalism isn’t dropping the ball in some ways, too. Just one thing at a time.
Image: Science Museum, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from pahudson's photostream

What's it take to get off nuclear power?

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 14:07:02 +0000

To get off nuclear power, Germany plans to make its electricity system 80% renewable by 2050. That's not going to be easy. Just to reach the first milestone of that goal—35% renewable capacity by 2020—the country will have to build 2,800 miles of new, high-voltage transmission lines. Although, one significant thing missing from this story: How many miles of transmission lines Germany would have normally built during that time. Even so, watch this space for financing debates, NIMBY wars, and what promises to be some really fascinating problem solving. (Via Michael Noble and thanks to Chris Baker!)