Your Tax Dollars At Work, Part 546,232...

Forgive me...

Mind Blowing Science...

Here's one of those science and technology advances that just plain blows my mind: we can now image individual molecules and atoms as they participate in chemical reactions. 

When I was first learning about science, in the '50s and '60s, I'm sure most scientists would have flatly stated that such a thing was impossible.  Most likely they'd cite the fact that the atoms and (most) molecules were smaller than the wavelength of any conceivable radiation that might be used to image them (and certainly smaller than the wavelength of visible light).  Therefore imaging wasn't possible.  Simple!

But wrong.  The advent of atomic force microscopes (which don't use any radiation to create their images) completely changed the context – and the impossible became possible.  Now you can buy such a microscope, if you've got a few hundred thousand dollars to spare (though I did find a used one for just $32,500). 

Awesome!

War on Drugs...

Megan McArdle (on a roll yesterday) with a piece on the efficacy of the War on Drugs.  She's reacting to the graph at right, showing that despite all the costs of the War on Drugs, and despite the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of drug offenders...the price of illicit drugs just keeps on falling.

As usual, Ms. McArdle finds some unobvious angles to ponder...

About Those White House Visits...

Douglas Schulman, the former head of the IRS, visited the White House over a hundred times – more often than any other Obama administration official.  Why?  We're not being told, and this little factoid is causing a bit of a kerfuffle at the moment.  The best analysis I've seen is from the always-interesting Megan McArdle (the world's tallest female econo-blogger).

Peer-Review Effectiveness...

Traditional peer review is still an important part of most branches of science.  There are some branches where other mechanisms are advancing (especially in physics, where "crowd sourced" review is making big inroads).  The idea behind peer review is simple enough: anonymous, qualified reviewers analyze papers before they are published.  If a paper passes review (perhaps with changes or corrections), then it is published; otherwise, it isn't.

But the peer review process itself is obviously not perfect.  It has lots of room for bias and subjective decision-making, and a strong bias toward orthodoxy.  There have been some studies of the peer review process in the past, and they have shown some problems.  Now there's a new study, quite clever, that shows quite convincingly the existence of a bias favoring prestigious institutions and individuals – a very human bias, one we can all understand, but simultaneously one we'd hope science would be free of.

This study started with a group of papers published in prestigious journals, written by the psych departments of prestigious institutions.  These papers were modified to show them as coming from fictitious institutions and individuals.  No part of the substance of the study was changed, not a word.  Then these modified papers were submitted for publication to the same journal that had originally published them.

The first interesting result was that only 8% of the submissions were detected as duplicates.  The screening process obviously isn't very robust.

The second interesting result is that 89% of the resubmitted papers were rejected.  The primary reason given: “serious methodological flaws”.  The simplest explanation for this result is that the prestige of the original submitters affected the reviewer's judgment – exactly that bias that we'd wish wasn't there.

Scientists are humans, too.  And peer review isn't all that great a process...

The Real Cost of Easy Student Loans...

From Cato:

Federal aid for college students, it’s really no secret, is driven by what works politically, not what’s best for students. While logic and evidence strongly suggest that aid mainly enables colleges to raise their prices at breakneck speeds, politicians talk nonstop about aid making college “affordable.” Financial reality simply does not trump appearing to “care.” But on Friday, the Obama administration appears poised to take aid exploitation to a new level.

I've written before about the unintended consequences of easy-to-obtain student loans, but here it's been quantified.  Note how the costs of universities (both public and private) rises steadily as the amount of aid to students increases.  Numerous pieces of evidence (follow the links) provide a compelling case that the easy loans directly increase those education costs.  The main driver is simple marketplace economics: the universities compete with each other to attract students, who are, of course, the source of revenue for them.  The main way they attract students is to add amenities - and those cost money.  To pay for the amenities, they raise prices.  This is all basic capitalism, but the government has their thumb on the scale - by providing all that easy money, they've grossly distorted the “buying decision”.  Students and their parents don't have to make tough, financial-based decisions about where to go to school, as almost everyone can borrow enough money to go almost anywhere, if they can get accepted...