Neo-Malthusianism vs. Anti-Malthusianism: Can Humans Survive?

I think I may fairly make two postulata.

First, That food is necessary to the existence of man.

Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state. _Thomas Malthus Essay pub. 1798

From those postulates, Malthus argues that population grows exponentially while food production can only grow in a linear fashion.

Keith MontgomeryOur first indication that something may be wrong with Malthus' argument lies in the colours in the map above.

If population growth were necessarily exponential as Malthus argues, the colors on the map above would be uniformly pink to red, indicating high fertility and likely geometric population growth -- as in Sub Saharan Africa. The fact that several relatively prosperous countries exhibit either very low -- and even negative -- population growth suggests that the Malthusian and neo-Malthusian thesis may be in error.

Edward Morgan 5 Stage Demographic Transition
And indeed, if we look at the 5 stage demographic transition graphic above (extended from Warren Thompson's 4 stage demographic transition graphic seen below), we see what happens when Malthusian man meets post-Malthusian woman, and very low fertility rates appear to reverse the earlier Malthusian exponential growth.

Some current trends lead to some fascinating projections of the future demographic make-up of the most technologically advanced factions of our global society. The low birth rate, especially in Europe, has allowed for an empowerment of women unseen before in history. Many are essentially swapping children for careers. _NewGeography

Keith Montgomery: Warren Thompson's 4 Stage Demographic TransitionWarren Thompson's 4 stage demographic transition model, seen above, was devised in 1929 -- long before the invention of modern contraception, and the modern demographic collapse. Thompson's model suggests that as societies move through industrialisation and into a post-industrial state, that death rates and birth rates will converge, leading to a stable population.

Despite modern contraceptive methods, and the ongoing demographic collapse of Russia, Japan, and the greater part of Europe, neo-Malthusian doomsterism is alive and well. Mish's Global Economic Analysis presents an extremely coherent and up to date version of the neo-Malthusian vision only today. As you can see from Mish's piece, peak oil (and many other forms of) doomerism is closely tied to the neo-Malthusian vision.

Each of the global problems we face today is the result of too many people using too much of our planet's finite, non-renewable resources and filling its waste repositories of land, water and air to overflowing. The true danger posed by our exploding population is not our absolute numbers but the inability of our environment to cope with so many of us doing what we do... _Mish

Such thoughts must have occurred to melancholic misanthropes since the coming of Australopithecus, although not in so many words (modern human language not having originated yet).

The neo-Malthusian website of Paul Chefurka is an abbreviated version of what you can find in much more detail at dieoff.org. Wherever you look, such doomerism is solidly based upon Thomas Malthus' kindly but jaundiced vision. Such authors appear not to have noticed the rapid fall in fertility across the developed world. Not having noticed the demographic transition, they are not forced to confront the implications.

We should also mention the anti-Malthusians, who feel that the growth of human populations can be a good thing, rather than an unmitigated evil -- as the neo-Malthusians appear to view population growth.

population is not just a factor in consumption. It is the basis for “human capital.” No humans, no human capital. Humans are not just mouths, but also hands and brains. As famously noted by Julian Simon, they are the Ultimate Resource. This is something Neo-Malthusians have difficulty in comprehending. _Indur Goklany

But at this point in time, both the neo-Malthusian doomers and the anti-Malthusian cornucopians may be overlooking important details. Human populations are not uniform in their history of invention, innovative progress, and the creation of widespread health and prosperity. And judging by the map above, it is the populations that have failed most dismally to create prosperity and progress which are reproducing the most rapidly. Given the critical dependency of these rapidly reproducing populations upon the largesse and technological savvy of other populations which are in fact decreasing in fertility, some of the glow could easily pass from the anti-Malthusian rose very rapidly.

In fact, anti-Malthusian cornucopianism applies largely to higher-IQ societies which have the human capital to create prosperity in the first place. Neo-Malthusian doomerism applies largely to lower-IQ societies which are dependent upon other, higher IQ populations for their own ability to reproduce beyond their own ability to feed, energise, and otherwise support themselves.

Here is the crux of the matter: The elite within several advanced societies have uncritically adopted the dismal neo-Malthusian vision -- including peak oil doom, carbon hysteria, overpopulation doom etc. -- despite its many failings when applied to intelligent and advanced populations. The neo-Malthusian policy prescriptions which are being progressively loaded onto the backs of the citizens of these advanced societies are creating a situation of self-fulfilling doom prediction. In other words, neo-Malthusian "solutions" are worse than the original problem would have been, had it been left to human ingenuity to solve.

The anti-nuclear (and anti-coal, anti-oil, anti-oil sands, anti-shale) policies currently in vogue in much of Europe, in Japan, and popular among many pseudo-intellectuals of North America and Oceania, cause government policy-makers to pursue unreliable, exorbitantly expensive, and ultimately destructive power sources such as big wind and big solar. With government policies such as that, there is no need for actual peak oil from resource depletion. "Political peak oil" will do just as well or better in terms of destroying a society's prosperity, competitiveness, and morale, as the real thing would have done, had it existed.

When government policy is based upon models which are not good at matching the realities in the outside world, the end result is likely to be disastrous.

The map is not the territory. The model is not the reality. Your solutions are likely to be worse than the problem. Everything you think you know, just ain't so.

But there is still time for certain enclaves within the more developed world to innovate their way into long-term prosperity, riding the current wave of rapid scientific and technological advances. For these enclaves to escape the destructiveness of the more likely occurrences of neo-Malthusian doom (the coming anarchy), they will need to be areas of relatively high average population IQ and high trust among citizens, which requires relative homogeneity of culture and language. They will also need abundant reliable affordable energy supplies. And those are only a few of the crucial things to consider, if you are thinking about relocating.

Things can go very badly for most of the planet -- largely due to political ineptness and corruption -- and yet things can turn out well for humanity in the end.

Hope for the best. Plan for the worst.

Brain Waves and the Limits of Short Term Memory

Capacity of short-term memory impacts the effects of reasoning -- the greater the capacity, the better the effects. Currently researchers conduct studies on developing the most effective ways of training short-term memory.

...In 1995 researchers from Brandeis University in Waltham suggested that the capacity of short-term memory could depend on two bands of brain's electric activity: theta and gamma waves..."The hypothesis formulated by Lisman and Idiart in 1995 assumes that we are able to memorise as many 'bites' of information, as there are gamma cycles for one theta cycle. Research to date provided only indirect support for this hypothesis," say psychologist Jan Kamiński, PhD student from the Nencki Institute... _SD

Most neurocognitivists are slowly coming around to the idea that the "language of mind" is carried via modulated brain waves. The interaction of gamma waves (30Hz and above) and theta waves (4 to 7 Hz) is a particularly intense focus of research into neurocognition.

Recent research at the Nencki Institute in Warsaw suggests that a person's crucial short term memory capacity may be limited by the number of gamma cycles which fall on each theta cycle.

A 'bite' of information refers to its portion in memory. A 'bite' may be a number, letter, idea, situation, picture or smell. "Designing experiments on the capacity of memory one needs to be very careful not to make it too easy for the subject to group many 'bites' into one," stresses Kamiński and as an example gives the following sequence of letters: 2, 0, 1, 1. "Such four 'bites' of information are easy to group into the number corresponding to current year. Instead of four bites of information we are left with just one."

Interpreting the length of theta and gamma waves from EEG recording is not easy either. These waves are not directly visible in the EEG signal. Kamiński proposed a new method of determining them. Researchers recorded brain's electric activity in seventeen volunteers resting with closed eyes for five minutes. Next they filtered the signals and analysed not the cycles themselves but their correlations. Only based on discovered correlations the ratio of the length of theta wave to gamma wave was determined and the likely capacity of verbal short-term memory was determined.

Following the EEG recording, the volunteers, were subjected to classic short-term memory capacity test. It consisted of repeated display of longer and longer sequences of numbers. Each number was presented for one second. Then volunteers had to reconstruct the sequence from memory. At first the sequence consisted of three numbers but at the end of the exam of as many as nine. "We have observed that the longer the theta cycles, the more information 'bites' the subject was able to remember; the longer the gamma cycle, the less the subject remembered. Next we determined the correlation between the results of the tests and estimates from the EEG measurements. Just as expected the correlation turned out to be very high and it confirmed the hypothesis of Lisman and Idiart," says Kamiński._SD

Article abstract...Neurobiology of Learning and Memory

A look at Beta band oscillations and alertness, by the same authors... International Journal of Psychophysiology

And then there is this research into a "master control gene" of memory which may control as many as hundreds of other genes in the brain -- particularly the hippocampus -- which provides a much lower-level glimpse into the machinery of learning and behaviour. All levels of brain function, from the molecular to the behavioural, are important -- although it can be difficult to focus on all of them at the same time.

Our unconscious minds -- including the underpinnings of our short term memories -- function on a parallel basis. Our conscious minds tend to function on a serial -- one thing at a time -- basis. Better educational methods might take those differences into account.

Causation vs. Correlation: A Real World Example

Blogger Dennis Mangan points to a study that suggests the US may have suffered almost 14,000 excess deaths as a result of nuclear fallout (PDF) from the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear core meltdown. Here is the story as it originally appeared in the June 10-12 Weekend Edition of Counterpunch. Although this does not necessarily discredit the authors of the "study," you should probably be aware that Joseph J Mangano (MPH, MBA) and Janette D Sherman (MD), have been involved for many years in anti-nuclear activism.

Here is the abstract of the article as it appeared in the International Journal of Health Services:

The multiple nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima plants beginning on March 11, 2011, are releasing large amounts of airborne radioactivity that has spread throughout Japan and to other nations; thus, studies of contamination and health hazards are merited. In the United States, Fukushima fallout arrived just six days after the earthquake, tsunami, and meltdowns. Some samples of radioactivity in precipitation, air, water, and milk, taken by the U.S. government, showed levels hundreds of times above normal; however, the small number of samples prohibits any credible analysis of temporal trends and spatial comparisons. U.S. health officials report weekly deaths by age in 122 cities, about 25 to 35 percent of the national total. Deaths rose 4.46 percent from 2010 to 2011 in the 14 weeks after the arrival of Japanese fallout, compared with a 2.34 percent increase in the prior 14 weeks. The number of infant deaths after Fukushima rose 1.80 percent, compared with a previous 8.37 percent decrease. Projecting these figures for the entire United States yields 13,983 total deaths and 822 infant deaths in excess of the expected. These preliminary data need to be followed up, especially in the light of similar preliminary U.S. mortality findings for the four months after Chernobyl fallout arrived in 1986, which approximated final figures. _Source (PDF)

The basic thesis is fairly simple: The authors claim that a comparison of CDC weekly death rates for a select group of US cities -- from just before and just after the Fukushima meltdown -- will provide a valid picture of the fatal effects of fallout from the Japanese nuclear plant on these US cities of the Pacific Northwest.

We will look at this thesis from the standpoint of Hill's Criteria of Causation, recently considered in this Al Fin blog post.

1. Temporal Relationship
The authors do present a "before exposure" vs "after exposure" scenario, which they claim demonstrates a significant rise in deaths in the US Pacific Northwest, thousands of miles downwind in the weeks just after the Japanese incident.
2. Strength
The authors claim nearly 14,000 excess deaths in the US in the 14 weeks after the detection of excess radiation, one week after the meltdown incident.
3. Dose Response Relationship
The authors are unable to present reliable graduated exposure data which might prove or disprove a "dose-response relationship."
4. Consistency
The author's claim that the rate of excess US deaths which they detected for the 14 weeks after Fukushima, is comparable to the rate of excess US deaths detected by US researchers in the first 4 months after the Chernobyl explosion and meltdown in 1986.
5. Plausibility
There is no known biological mechanism to explain this number of excess deaths so quickly, from such relatively low levels of possible radiation exposure. The excess mortality as reported by the CDC were attributed to seasonal infections and SIDS deaths.
6. Considerations of Alternate Explanations
There is no indication that the authors considered alternate explanations for their findings.
7. Experiment
An experimental design to test this hypothesis in humans would encounter ethical difficulties. Animal testing up to this point is unlikely to explain how such low levels of excess radiation could lead to such a rapid elevation of death rates.
8. Specificity
There is no specificity relationship that is detectable in this data. In other words, there is no logical connection between these "excess deaths" and possible exposure to low levels of excess radiation.
9. Coherence
The claims of the authors are not consistent with the existing body of knowledge in regard to human health responses to transitory, relatively low radiation exposures.

A far more devastating criticism of the authors' thesis can be found here.

.....there are several conclusions to be drawn here:
-- There is no spike in infant mortality due to Fukushima. Instead there is an accidental dip during the 4 weeks before the radioactive releases reached the U.S. west coast.
-- The infant mortality rate in the northwest U.S. was actually 23% higher in the first 7 weeks of 2011 than after Fukushima, 108 cases in 7 weeks give a weekly ratio of 15.43. We can thus say, by using Sherman and Mangano's own way of phrasing it, that this amounts to a decrease of 23% and is statistically significant.
-- The data for the full time period of weeks 1 - 21 amount to 272 infant deaths over 21 weeks, i.e. a weekly rate of 12.95. This is slightly higher than the weekly rate after Fukushima (12.50).
-- Janette Sherman and Joseph Mangano have a lot to explain for us...if anybody cares to listen to them after this low point in their so called scientific careers. _Source

Source
Excess deaths from relatively low, transitory radiation exposures should only show up years after the exposure. One would not reasonably expect to find "instant deaths" from such low level, short term exposures. And yet, that seems to be what the authors were trying to find, using quite noisy data from the CDC which was never meant for this type of comparative analysis.

But what is the question that everyone should be asking of the authors? "What does your follow-up data show, over the subsequent time period since the Fukushima event?"

A quick check of the most recent CDC MMWR of 6 Jan 2012 (PDF) shows a total death count for the sample 122 cities, as 9,530. This is down by over a thousand from the 3 June 2011 MMWR (PDF) which shows a death count of 10,839, for the sample 122 cities. Should I then claim that radiation from the Fukushima incident was beneficial to the health of US residents, since the US death rate has declined over time since the meltdown? Of course not. The data bounces up and down every week, for a large number of reasons. Simple correlational studies based upon this type of data should never be used to prove causation.

Index for all MMWRs in 2011, where you can find the tables for each week of 2011.

The remarkable aspect of Mangano and Sherman's paper, is the number of people who were taken in by their shoddy "research." This includes the International Journal of Health Services, as well as a wide range of "green" and anti-nuclear political sites. One of the most disheartening articles linked to this issue is this article in Oilprice.com, by John Daly.

In the real world, people are paid a lot of money to generate such pseudo-scientific "studies", "surveys," opinion polls, marketing research, and the like. Billions of dollars can change hands based upon the results of such shoddy analysis. In the case of the UN's IPCC and global climate policy, monetary redistribution into the $trillions might be easily achieved, by "scientific" methods no more valid than those used by Mangano and Sherman.

At this point in time, most of the global media is willing to cut corners on fact-checking, for the sake of "a good story," or for the sake of "advancing the agenda."

The book, How to Lie With Statistics, is as timely now as ever. If you read it and understand it, you are likely to grow angry more frequently when consuming media pieces. If you prefer bliss, you should probably choose ignorance, like most folks.

More: A quick and dirty takedown of the Mangano / Sherman "study" by Scientific American Technology Fellow Michael Moyers

Is Giant Russia a Dying Bear?

The people won't be fooled again. The demonstrations have been going on since December, and despite hundreds of arrests, the people keep coming out... Putin is...finding that many of his publicity and information management techniques that had served him so well for over two decades, no longer work. It was that damn Internet again, where a lot of smart Russians had collaborated to pick apart the reality from the myth that Putin had created in the media. There are many real problems in Russia and the Internet has allowed details, and names, to be collected and made available to all. _StrategyPage

Russia is in decline on several fronts:

• The very high death rates for men reflects a horrendous public health situation in Russia.
• The core population of Russia -- ethnic Russians -- continue to die faster than they can reproduce
• Russia is losing a large proportion of its best people via emigration to countries offering higher wages and greater opportunities to achieve
• Russia's educational system is in free-fall collapse
• Capital flight out of Russia continues to grow
• The Russian military is in decline in terms of both human capital and weapons competence
• Russia is declining in power and population at the same time that its neighbor China seems to be growing in power economically, politically, and militarily.
• Russia's economic trump card -- its oil and gas reserves -- are doomed to decline in importance as some of its best customers discover and learn to exploit massive reserves of unconventional hydrocarbons within their own borders.

There have been many attempts to deny the ongoing and accelerating decline of Russia as a world power, but these have not been convincing. The main reason for this is that such Russian apologists are typically reduced to comparing Russia with its Eastern European neighbors, rather than comparing Russia with genuine world powers. Such irrelevant comparisons should not even be printed in reputable media outlets.

Russia is likely to remain a net mortality society for the foreseeable future.Official Russian statistics anticipate a continuing and widening gap separating deaths and births between now and 2030. Rosstat envisions a surfeit of 205,000 deaths over births for 2011, rising to more than 725,000 in 2030, with a cumulative total of 9.5 million more deaths than births between 2011 and 2030. Even in Rosstat’s most optimistic scenario, the agency projects a mortality surfeit of 2.7 million between 2011 and 2025, reaching 4.7 million by 2030. In these official Russian forecasts, further depopulation can be fore-stalled only by massive immigration from abroad.

Russia has certainly benefited over the past two decades from a net influx of millions of workers, most of whom hail from former Soviet states in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

...Although Russia today accounts for about six percent of the world’s population with a post-secondary education, barely 0.1 percent of the worldwide patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office over the last decade and a half were awarded to Russians. This is not some U.S. conspiracy against Russian inventors: the records of the UN’s World Intellectual property Organization show that Russia’s share of out-of-country patent applications over that same period was less than 0.2 percent of the global total. The picture is hardly better when it comes to the output of scientific papers: the number of articles by Russians in peer-reviewed journals was no higher in 2008 than it had been in 1990,whereas output almost everywhere else in the world rose over those same years. By 2008, Russian authors were publishing far fewer scientific papers than the authors of Russia’s bric peers: Brazil, China, and India. In effect, Russia stands as a new and disturbing wonder in today’s globalized world: a society characterized by high levels of schooling but low levels of health, knowledge, and education.

...Unlike Beijing, which is committed to military modernization in the coming decades, Moscow is in effect preparing to fight this century’s wars with last century’s technology. In fact, as the Russia analysts Anders Aslund and Andrew Kuchins noted in 2009, as China’s military capabilities have improved, Beijing has reduced its imports of Russian military technology and even exports its own versions to traditional Russian clientssuch as Angola,Ethiopia and Syria. Russia’s dwindling conventional military is on track to become the Polish cavalry of coming generations. _AEI Dying Bear PDF

Putin is taking Russia in exactly the wrong direction. Instead of giving Russians greater opportunities and more reasons to form families and build a better Russia from the bottom up, Putin is moving the nation back toward a Soviet style of authoritarianism and hyper-centralisation that will only accelerate the nations decline and dissolution.

Eventually, Russians will grow tired of being manipulated by Putin's and the communist's endless paranoid ravings about "western foreign provocateurs," and will begin to look much closer to home for the sources of Russia's accelerating decline.

Overturning Feminist Dogma: Massive Gender Gap Measured

Men and women have large differences in personality, according to a new study published Jan. 4 in the online journal PLoS ONE....The researchers used personality measurements from more than 10,000 people, approximately half men and half women. The personality test included 15 personality scales, including such traits as warmth, sensitivity, and perfectionism. When comparing men's and women's overall personality profiles, which take multiple traits into account, very large differences between the sexes became apparent, even though differences look much smaller when each trait is considered separately. _SD

In a promising sign of things to come, scientists from Italy and the UK have overturned an important block in the foundation of modern radical feminist dogma. Using new techniques of measuring personality, and taking greater care to compensate for measurement error, the researchers discovered important statistical differences in the personalities of men and women.

These findings could go a long way to explain the different types of personal and career choices which men and women tend to make.

In addition to their direct influences on mating processes, personality traits correlate with many other sexually selected behaviors, such as status-seeking and risk-taking (see e.g., [20], [34], [35]). Thus, in an evolutionary perspective, personality traits are definitely not neutral with respect to sexual selection. Instead, there are grounds to expect robust and wide-ranging sex differences in this area, resulting in strongly sexually differentiated patterns of emotion, thought, and behavior – as if there were “two human natures”, as effectively put by Davies and Shackelford [15]. _PLoSOne

Differences in status seeking and risk taking behaviours help to explain why males are willing to work more dangerous jobs and much longer hours in order to achieve material success and to attain higher status.

While feminist dogma blames sexist discrimination for the greater prevalence of men at the top of the professional and executive ladders of many occupations, arts, and industries, scientific research helps us to understand the truer and more general underpinnings of such differences in accomplishment.

As more research helps to round and fill in our understanding of important gender differences, we will be less likely to resort to government regulation, mandate, and legislation in order to "correct for" things that are actually intrinsic in the nature of human animals.

PLoSOne Study:

In conclusion, we believe we made it clear that the true extent of sex differences in human personality has been consistently underestimated. While our current estimate represents a substantial improvement on the existing literature, we urge researchers to replicate this type of analysis with other datasets and different personality measures. An especially critical task will be to compare self-reported personality with observer ratings and other, more objective evaluation methods. Of course, the methodological guidelines presented in this paper can and should be applied to domains of individual differences other than personality, including vocational interests, cognitive abilities, creativity, and so forth. Moreover, the pattern of global sex differences in these domains may help elucidate the meaning and generality of the broad dimension of individual differences known as “masculinity-femininity” [11]. In this way, it will be possible to build a solid foundation for the scientific study of psychological sex differences and their biological and cultural origins.

Pay close attention to how deeply feminist dogma has penetrated the skankstream media: compare media coverage of important research of this type with the hyperbolic coverage that is routinely given to "meta analysis studies" which deny important gender differences in specific preferences or aptitudes. It can be an enlightening experience.

The Backward Arab World Grows Even More Backward

Between 1980 and 2000, Korea granted 16,328 patents, while nine Arab countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E., granted a combined total of only 370, many of them registered by foreigners. A study in 1989 found that in one year, the United States published 10,481 scientific papers that were frequently cited, while the entire Arab world published only four. This may sound like the punch line of a bad joke, but when Nature magazine published a sketch of science in the Arab world in 2002, its reporter identified just three scientific areas in which Islamic countries excel: desalination, falconry, and camel reproduction. The recent push to establish new research and science institutions in the Arab world...clearly still has a long way to go. _NewAtlantis

The Arabian "Golden Age" and the Arabian empire, were always more dependent upon the abilities and energies of the conquered peoples, than on the abilities of the Arab conquerors. The Arabian hegemony from central Asia to North Africa and southern Spain, allowed a commingling of the wisdom of the East, Middle East, and the remnants of ancient Greek learning. The so-called "golden age of Islam" was the result of the symbiotic knowledge explosion that occurred when multiple traditions of knowledge collided within an environment that was tolerant of mathematical and scientific ideas. But that tolerance did not last forever, as Islam never remains tolerant for very long.

By the year 750, the Arabs had conquered Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, and much of North Africa, Central Asia, Spain, and the fringes of China and India. Newly opened routes connecting India and the Eastern Mediterranean spurred an explosion of wealth through trade, as well as an agricultural revolution...The spread of empire brought urbanization, commerce, and wealth that helped spur intellectual collaboration. Maarten Bosker of Utrecht University and his colleagues explain that in the year 800, while the Latin West (with the exception of Italy) was “relatively backward,” the Arab world was highly urbanized, with twice the urban population of the West. Several large metropolises — including Baghdad, Basra, Wasit, and Kufa — were unified under the Abbasids; they shared a single spoken language and brisk trade via a network of caravan roads. Baghdad in particular, the Abbasid capital, was home to palaces, mosques, joint-stock companies, banks, schools, and hospitals; by the tenth century, it was the largest city in the world.

...the single most significant reason that Arabic science thrived was the absorption and assimilation of the Greek heritage — a development fueled by the translation movement in Abbasid Baghdad....the Abbasids found scientific Greek texts immensely useful for a sort of technological progress — solving common problems to make daily life easier. The Abbasids did not bother translating works in subjects such as poetry, history, or drama, which they regarded as useless or inferior. Indeed, science under Islam, although in part an extension of Greek science, was much less theoretical than that of the ancients. Translated works in mathematics, for example, were eventually used for engineering and irrigation, as well as in calculation for intricate inheritance laws. And translating Greek works on medicine had obvious practical use.

...The second factor central to the rise of the translation movement was that Greek thought had already been diffused in the region, slowly and over a long period, before the Abbasids and indeed before the advent of Islam. Partly for this reason, the Abbasid Baghdad translation movement was not like the West’s subsequent rediscovery of ancient Athens, in that it was in some respects a continuation of Middle Eastern Hellenism. Greek thought spread as early as Alexander the Great’s conquests of Asia and North Africa in the 300s b.c., and Greek centers, such as in Alexandria and the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom (238-140 b.c., in what is now Afghanistan), were productive centers of learning even amid Roman conquest. By the time of the Arab conquests, the Greek tongue was known throughout the vast region, and it was the administrative language of Syria and Egypt. After the arrival of Christianity, Greek thought was spread further by missionary activity, especially by Nestorian Christians. Centuries later, well into the rule of the Abbasids in Baghdad, many of these Nestorians — some of them Arabs and Arabized Persians who eventually converted to Islam — contributed technical skill for the Greek-Arabic translation movement, and even filled many translation-oriented administrative posts in the Abbasid government.

...As the Middle Ages progressed, Arabic civilization began to run out of steam. After the twelfth century, Europe had more significant scientific scholars than the Arabic world, as Harvard historian George Sarton noted in his Introduction to the History of Science (1927-48). After the fourteenth century, the Arab world saw very few innovations in fields that it had previously dominated, such as optics and medicine; henceforth, its innovations were for the most part not in the realm of metaphysics or science, but were more narrowly practical inventions like vaccines. “The Renaissance, the Reformation, even the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, passed unnoticed in the Muslim world,” Bernard Lewis remarks in Islam and the West (1993)....Islamic civilization did not have a culture hospitable to the advancement of science, while medieval Europe did.

...In trying to explain the Islamic world’s intellectual laggardness, it is tempting to point to the obvious factors: authoritarianism, bad education, and underfunding (Muslim states spend significantly less than developed states on research and development as a percentage of GDP). But these reasons are all broad and somewhat crude, and raise more questions than answers. At a deeper level, Islam lags because it failed to offer a way to institutionalize free inquiry. That, in turn, is attributable to its failure to reconcile faith and reason.

...most criticism in the Muslim world is directed outward, at the West. This prejudice — what Fouad Ajami has called (referring to the Arab world) “a political tradition of belligerent self-pity” — is undoubtedly one of Islam’s biggest obstacles. It makes information that contradicts orthodox belief irrelevant, and it closes off debate about the nature and history of Islam. _NewAtlantis

A very interesting article, all in all.

But it fails to bring out the genetic decline within the Arab world caused by inbreeding -- first cousin marriages being one widespread offense against wise genetics. A resulting low average IQ in the Arab world -- with a mean IQ of roughly 85 (the same as the average African American IQ) -- places limits on the scientific and intellectual accomplishments of the Arab world which no outside enemy could ever place. (see Wikipedia IQ and the Wealth of Nations)

The relative intolerance and hatred toward outsiders which is so common in Arab Islam is an additional limiting factor. The unwillingness to learn from the experience of others dooms Arab Muslims to persist in making the same fatal mistakes over and over. The underlying source of this Arab xenophobia is likely to be found in tribal tradition, religious tradition, and underlying genetic complement.

Arabs who immigrate to the west are likely to occupy the upper end of the bell curve, and present a misleading picture to western observers, of what they should expect from Arabs as a whole.

There is no indication that any of the efforts to boost higher learning and scientific accomplishment in the Arab lands, will have more than a temporary or superficial impact. The hold of stone-age Islam is simply too strong -- as was seen in the "Arab Spring" movement which quickly devolved into a fundamentalist Muslim hatefest against all "others."

Arab populations are more intelligent and less backward, on average, than SubSaharan African populations. And SubSaharan African populations are typically less backward than Australian Aboriginal populations. That is simply what one would expect from comparing psychometric studies for the respective groups.

Any truly benevolent friend of Arabs as a people, would want to face the facts clearly and without excuses. And he would look to the foundations of Arab backwardness in order to find a solution, and a way to benefit Arabs as a whole.

How Humans Cause Earthquakes

The best-known case is the earthquake caused by the Zipingpu Dam, in China’s Sichuan province, in 2008. Zipingpu held 42.3 billion cubic feet of water, the weight of which precipitated what Klose says is the largest human-triggered earthquake to date: a 7.9-magnitude quake that killed nearly 80,000 people. Klose estimates that Zipingpu, with nearly 320 million tons of water pressing down on a fault line, contributed enough stress to trigger the quake through a process called impoundment. “If you push your finger on top of a paper plate, the plate will bend,” he says. “That same effect works on all the tectonic plates on the Earth’s crust.” The quake occurred two years after the dam’s completion, and its epicenter was a mere three miles from the structure.

Authorities in Basel, Switzerland, shut down the city’s geothermal plant after a 3.4 quake in 2006. Tapping geothermal energy involves boring into rock miles beneath the Earth’s crust in search of steam as a source of energy. Engineers in areas without much water, such as Basel, sometimes create boreholes by way of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which involves forcefully injecting water to create fissures. Fracking can generate small tremors, but the real damage may happen as excess liquid pools in the cracks between rocks, making them less stable. Although dams have caused some 76 earthquakes, mining is responsible for at least 137 earthquakes, over half the number of man-made quakes to date.

In 1989 a 5.6-magnitude earthquake hit Newcastle, Australia, the direct result of coal mining. Extracting millions of tons of coal added stress to the fault lines, but the real danger resulted from the water that was extracted during mining. For each ton of coal produced, Klose estimates, 4.3 times as much water was pumped out of the ground, a necessary step to prevent flooding inside the mine. But removing so much water dramatically altered the stability of the earth surrounding the mine. Klose says the earthquake caused $3.5 billion in damage—an amount that nearly equaled the profit of all the coal produced by the mine over its 200-year history. _PopSci

More here

Other human-caused micro-quakes have occurred via deep well injection of fluids, and by experimental deep hydraulic fracturing into crystalline rock (such as granite) near faults. It should be noted that shale fracturing -- such as is done for oil & gas production -- has not produced a causal link to earthquakes.

The recent small quakes in the Youngstown, Ohio area are associated with deep well injection of waste fluids -- a completely different process from shale fracturing.

Unfortunately, a large part of the news media has reported the quakes as having been caused by shale fracturing -- which is not the case. This type of skanky behaviour by news media is nothing new, but one has to wonder whether it is caused by ignorance or by willful deception.

We expect the faux environmental and green sites to misreport such events -- out of both ignorance and willful deception, depending upon the outlet. But in the case of the Ohio micro-quakes, normally careful sites such as oilprice.com, slate.com, and other mainstream outlets produced news copy that was not fit for a third grade newsletter, due to the inaccuracies. This is a troubling trend that should be watched very carefully.

It has been shown for decades that deep fluid injection into the crust can induce micro-quakes, if it takes place near known and discovered faults. And of all energy-related drilling, the type most closely associated with inducing micro-quakes is geothermal -- both enhanced and the geyser type. Deep CO2 injection is likewise liable to induce micro-quakes. Shale fracturing is probably the least likely cause of micro-quakes due to the more shallow nature and due to the type of rock involved.

But if one wishes to be absolutely sure that one is not performing shale fracturing near a fault zone, a thorough seismic survey (for about $10 million) can be done prior to any drilling. Clearly a less expensive method of reassuring the panicky public, skankstream media, and less than honest environmental media is needed.

Scientific research is the best antidote to the type of superstitions being purveyed by the modern skankstream.

Some European experience:

The data generally support the view that injection in sedimentary rocks tends to be less seismogenic than in crystalline rocks. In both cases, the presence of faults near the wells that allow pressures to penetrate significant distances vertically and laterally can be expected to increase the risk of producing felt events. All cases of injection into crystalline rocks produce seismic events, albeit usually of non-damaging magnitudes, and all crystalline rock masses were found to be critically stressed, regardless of the strength of their seismogenic responses to injection. Thus, these data suggest that criticality of stress, whilst a necessary condition for producing earthquakes that would disturb (or be felt by) the local population, is not a sufficient condition. The data considered here are not fully consistent with the concept that injection into deeper crystalline formations tends to produce larger magnitude events. The data are too few to evaluate the combined effect of depth and injected fluid volume on the size of the largest events. Injection at sites with low natural seismicity, defined by the expectation that the local peak ground acceleration has less than a 10% chance of exceeding 0.07 g in 50 years, has not produced felt events. _Geothermics

Enhanced geothermal drilling is a far greater micro-earthquake hazard than is any drilling or fracturing in porous shale for oil & gas. But even so, it is best to avoid overreacting to the risk, but rather to plan deep drilling and hydraulic fracturing of crystalline rock very carefully, to minimise risks.

The risk of overreaction to the risks inherent in deep geothermal projects is very real. The establishment of an overly harsh regulatory framework would penalize the geothermal industry in comparison to other energy sectors that carry a recognized risk of inducing seismicity, such as gas extraction or coal mining.

From their outset, EGS projects need to be thought of both as pilot projects with scientific unknowns and as commercial ventures with technological and financial risks. Companies need to have allocated enough of their budget to scientific investigations not directly related to the exploitation of heat. Local authorities need to avoid being enticed by the promises of alternative energy, and to remember to ask the right questions. Risk evaluations need to be done before — not after — these projects begin. _Nature

In such cases where the risks are small but clear, appropriate care must be used in conjunction with any deep geothermal drilling, or deep well injections -- particularly near fault zones.

But the risks of shale drilling and fracturing are completely different -- and orders of magnitude smaller -- than the risks of drilling and fracturing crystalline rock such as granite. If regulatory agencies rush in to ban economically important procedures which have been demonstrated to be safe over decades of experience and geological testing, they will be doing a grave disservice to their constituents.

Cross-posted from an orignal Al Fin Energy article

It should be noted that by inducing multiple small quakes, built-up stresses within faults can be slowly dissipated over time -- theoretically reducing the devastation caused by later earthquakes. This is an area of science begging for funding. Perhaps the many billions that have been mis-allocated to carbon hysteria research would be better spent on genuinely important research such as this.

Unconscious Pathways to a More Creative World

Creativity is one of our most valued human traits. It has given human beings the ability to change the world that they live in; and it has also, paradoxically, given them the ability to adapt to changes in the world over which they have no control. Our highly developed capacity to develop and implement new ideas arises from our highly developed human brain. Understanding how creative ideas arise from the brain is one of the most fascinating challenges of contemporary neuroscience. _Journey Into Chaos

Creativity makes our lives richer in many ways, but it cannot be easily explained by ordinary conscious thinking or decision making. Creativity is not the same thing as intelligence, since people with very high intelligence do not tend to have a high creative output on average. Persons of greatest creative achievement appear to have IQs that cluster near the 120s -- above average, but not genius level. (Andreasen 1987, MacKinnon 1965)

If creativity is not equivalent to a high IQ, then how else might it be defined and measured? Several different approaches have been taken to address this question. One has been to develop tests specifically designed to measure creativity and to designate people who achieve high scores on these tests as creative. The basic assumption behind most such tests is that creativity can be defined as having a capacity for achieving a high level of divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is defined as the ability to come up with a large number of responses to an open-ended probe; it is contrasted with convergent thinking, which tends to apply a sequential series of steps to answer a question that has only one possible solution (Runco and Marz, 1992). An example of a probe used to assess divergent thinking is asking: How many uses can you think of for a brick? A series of similar questions can be asked and then used to create a score that is a continuous measurement of divergent thinking (Torrance, 1998). This approach is favoured by some psychologists as a way of achieving an objective measure of creativity.

An alternative approach is to define creativity operationally. That is, people who have produced some type of creative output are designated as creative based on their achievements. When this method is used, it is typically in conjunction with an approach known as the “case study method.” People are selected because they have achieved a high level of success and recognition in fields such as architecture, writing, mathematics and physics. Often a specific criterion of success is used, such as having won a major prize or award (e.g., Fields Medal, Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Lasker Award). These people are further assessed using structured interviews about their work habits and thought processes, personality tests and measures of cognition. The commonalities that they share are considered to be characteristics of creative people and their cognitive style. An important recent spin-off of this approach is to conduct neuroimaging studies of such people in order to examine the neural basis of creativity. _Mens Sana Monograph...Chaos, Creativity, and the Unconscious

Creativity may be able to tap into deeper wells of thought than are available to the conscious mind in the setting of a timed, structured IQ test.

Creativity involves both the creation of novel ideas, and the selection of the best of these novel ideas for further development. It has been generally felt that the unconscious participates most in the stage of novel creation, rather than in the selection stage. But recent research suggests that the second stage -- selectively choosing the best creative ideas -- is also an area of unconscious expertise.

Today's world of continuous change thrives on creative individuals. Anecdotal reports suggest that creative performance benefits from unconscious processes. Empirical research on the role of the unconscious in creativity, though, is inconsistent and thus far has focused mainly on one aspect of the creative process – idea generation. This is the first study to assess the role of the unconscious mind for both idea generation and idea selection. Participants generated creative ideas immediately, after conscious thought, or after a period of distraction during which unconscious thought was hypothesized to take place. After having listed their ideas, participants selected their most creative idea. Performance in idea generation was similar between conscious and unconscious thought; however, individuals who had unconsciously thought about ideas were better in selecting their most creative idea. These findings shed more light on the role of unconscious processes in creativity, and provide a means to enhance creative performance. _Thinking Skills & Creativity

Here is a plain language explanation of this research

Although the authors of the above study make an excellent point regarding the value of the unconscious in selecting between creative ideas, they appear to understate the value of the unconscious mind in generating creative ideas. More on this later.

Interestingly, the unconscious also seems to play a role in improving economic decision-making:

...a more rational and optimal approach to financial decision making than is proposed by finance theories alone would be that includes unconsciousness into the process. The total cognitive decision making capacity of an individual is comprised of both a conscious component and an unconscious component; and these two components are complementary and compensatory to each another. A decision-making process that integrates these two components would, therefore, first generally improve the quality of decisions, and second reduce the unfavorable impact of behavioral biases (with overconfidence, heuristics, etc as examples) on decision making. _(Abstract) Journal of Behavioral Finance

It is important not to underestimate the role of the unconscious in the generating of novel and creative ideas, however. Successful induction of creative mind states almost invariably calls on the unconscious -- as if in the conjuring of spirits. When conjuring the creative unconscious spirits of one's own mind, it is best to adopt a humble attitude. The conscious mind thinks of itself as the star of the show, and often struggles for dominance as if it were a question of survival.

The unconscious mind will make its creativity known, if allowed to. Suppression of the conscious mind occurs automatically during sleep, and much creativity occurs in that state. We cannot access this creativity, however, except during specific stages of transition between sleep and wakefulness -- the hypnagogic states.

If you want to be creative without falling asleep, you will have to find other ways to temporarily suppress the conscious mind, at least partially. Several methods have been devised, including Edward de Bono's "Lateral Thinking" method, and John David Garcia's powerful "Autopoiesis" method. Few of these methods are widely used either by professional writers, musicians, inventors etc., or by educational institutions.

Many creative persons suppress their conscious minds with chemicals, such as alcohol, opiates, or sometimes hallucinogenics. While it is possible to function creatively under the influence of moderate quantities of alcohol or opiates, the creative benefit of hallucinogens is often not experienced until after one has mostly emerged from the hallucinogenic state.

Deep relaxation or meditation can sometimes induce more creative quasi-unconscious mental activity as well, as can deep laughter. But as with the hallucinogens, an enhanced productive creativity may only be accessible as one emerges from the meditative state.

Once one has generated a wealth of creative ideas, and selected the most promising among them, actual creative production can be enhanced by stimulating other parts of the unconscious mind, which drive semi-rote behaviours. These highly automatised unconscious processes can be induced by caffeine and other stimulants such as amphetamines, as well as by rather light doses of alcohol.

One of the best all-around mental exercises for enhanced creativity, is the use of Manfred Clynes' Sentic Cycles (PDF). These cycles are not generally promoted as creativity enhancers, but it is likely that the best ways of enhancing creativity are those that are not yet recognised as such.

More aspects of the unconscious mind are being discovered

Exciting and Powerful New Method of Learning a Foreign Language

It has previously been demonstrated that enactment (i.e., performing representative gestures during encoding) enhances memory for concrete words, in particular action words. Here, we investigate the impact of enactment on abstract word learning in a foreign language. We further ask if learning novel words with gestures facilitates sentence production. In a within-subjects paradigm, participants first learned 32 abstract sentences from an artificial corpus conforming with Italian phonotactics. Sixteen sentences were encoded audiovisually. Another set of 16 sentences was also encoded audiovisually, but, in addition, each single word was accompanied by a symbolic gesture. Participants were trained for 6 days. Memory performance was assessed daily using different tests. The overall results support the prediction that learners have better memory for words encoded with gestures. In a transfer test, participants produced new sentences with the words they had acquired. Items encoded through gestures were used more frequently, demonstrating their enhanced accessibility in memory. The results are interpreted in terms of embodied cognition. Implications for teaching and learning are suggested. _Mind, Brain, and Education

Manuela Macedonia, Max Planck Institute PDF
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute are discovering that the adult brain learns foreign languages better, when physical gesturing is incorporated into the training, to assist brain encoding.

Manuela Macedonia and Thomas Knösche at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, enrolled 20 volunteers on a six-day course to learn "Vimmi", an artificial language designed to make study results easier to interpret. Half of the material was taught using spoken and written instructions and exercises, while the other half was taught with body movements to accompany each word, which the students were asked to act out.


Students remembered significantly more of the words taught with movement, and used them more readily when creating new sentences (Mind, Brain and Education, DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-228X.2011.01129.x).


Whilst this may seem intuitive for words that have a physical counterpart, like "cut", the pair were surprised to find the trick also worked for abstract words like "rather" that have no obvious gestural equivalent.


Based on fMRI scans, the pair argue that enactment helps memory by creating a more complex representation of the word that makes it more easily retrieved. Unpublished results from tests in real language classes suggest that the method "could really speed up foreign language learning in schools", says Macedonia. _NewScientist

The concept is not difficult to accept. But devising the best accompanying gestures to best assist brain encoding of a foreign language, may take some time to work out.

Here is an image-rich explanation of the concept (PDF), demonstrating examples of gestures, accompanying MRI scans, and a data analysis of the study results.

A Declining America Under Obama: Dealing With the Aftermath

Not so long ago, a high-ranking Chinese official, who obviously had concluded that America's decline and China's rise were both inevitable, noted in a burst of candor to a senior U.S. official: "But, please, let America not decline too quickly." Although the inevitability of the Chinese leader's expectation is still far from certain, he was right to be cautious when looking forward to America's demise.

For if America falters, the world is unlikely to be dominated by a single preeminent successor -- not even China. International uncertainty, increased tension among global competitors, and even outright chaos would be far more likely outcomes. _FP

The accelerating decline of America under Obama is not coincidental. It is an active process originating in the White House, working its way down the federal bureaucracy to impair virtually every function of the US economy and private sector, starting with energy.

“For the first time in U.S. history, net coal capacity is in decline. On top of 38 gigawatts of generation that is already being run below normal levels or slated for early retirement, NERC predicts another 36 to 59 gigawatts will come offline by 2018, depending on the ‘scope and timing’ of EPA demands. That could mean nearly a quarter of all coal-fired capacity.”

It is coal-fired plants that currently provide fifty percent of all the electricity generated in America! The EPA is feverishly trying to force a quarter of that capacity offline. Why? Because the EPA claims that these plants are “polluting” the air. The air in America has never been cleaner. _CFP

Besides shutting down the coal industry, Obama has blocked offshore oil drilling, blocked the Keystone pipeline for Canadian oilsands, threatened to abort the shale oil & gas bonanza, impeded development of safer, more advanced nuclear power, and shunted billions of dollars of funding to political cronies who are backing unreliable and exorbitantly expensive big wind and big solar projects.

As a result, the cost of energy in America is getting set to rise at the same time that the availability of energy is set to decline. Added to all the other economic burdens under Obama, and the US private sector will have good reason to cry.

When America's energy declines, American industry and commerce will also decline. As economic conditions at the grass roots level continue to degenerate under Obama, incidents of civil disorder and disobedience are likely to occur in multiple locations, manifesting in multiple ways.

The re-election of Obama in 2012 would allow a further accelerated decline in the quality and reliability of US energy and electrical power infrastructure. Obama's wholesale attack against the US private sector would be amplified, in order to remove the source of funding for the opposition to the political power elite. With a further breakdown in the private sector economy, conditions leading to civil disorder would be expanded to more parts of the country.

Living in an urban setting would become even more hazardous, as the decline of "the commons" accelerates. The dividing line between public employees and private citizens will grow more stark, as public sector union pensions and benefits create a new elite, at the expense of a shrinking group of private taxpayers. This will lead to a growing antipathy toward government and government employees at all levels -- a very dangerous and unstable situation. (see pensiontsunami.com) The longer that President Obama remains in office, the longer it will take to come to grips with this "under the radar" problem.

US military and law enforcement have devoted a good deal of thought to how they will deal with widespread outbreaks of civil disorder in the US. The development of "non-lethal" weaponry is one response to the growing threat, under Obama. This PDF download (h/t Wired) is a report on some of the latest types of non-lethal weapons, which has been released to US government agencies for discussion and planning. While these weapons are nominally considered "non-lethal," in practise a certain number of deaths and disability injuries are likely.

Of course, as the US government continues its decline under Obama, weapons which were meant for the exclusive use of official US government agencies, will eventually fall into the hands of other groups, organisations, and individuals. That means that a wide range of criminal and quasi-criminal groups are likely to obtain powerful weapons of both lethal and "non-lethal" varieties -- although the non-lethal variety would likely be easier to obtain. Possessing both types of weapons would allow groups a wider latitude of strategies and tactics.

If President Obama remains in office for much longer, he may need to withdraw all overseas US troops just to deal with the growing civil disorder within US borders. Mr. Obama is not likely to be bothered by petty issues of posse comitatus or the like, if he sees his power base coming under threat.

Mr. Obama has taken a bad situation -- decades in the making -- and made it incalculably worse. And he will continue making it worse as long as US voters allow him to. The aftermath is likely to be explosive -- not only for America.

Another consequence of American decline could be a corrosion of the generally cooperative management of the global commons -- shared interests such as sea lanes, space, cyberspace, and the environment, whose protection is imperative to the long-term growth of the global economy and the continuation of basic geopolitical stability. In almost every case, the potential absence of a constructive and influential U.S. role would fatally undermine the essential communality of the global commons because the superiority and ubiquity of American power creates order where there would normally be conflict. _FP

The accelerating decline of America under Obama is likely to result in civil disorder within the US, and global war outside the US.

Elections have consequences.

Preventing Large Earthquakes by Intentional Triggering of Small Quakes

Scientists are continuously thinking of ways to try and reduce earthquake power. Some are trying to lessen the friction between colliding plates. They poured water down a fault where two plates were grinding together. The water “lubricated” the fault, letting one piece jerk free with a number of little earthquakes and preventing a large tremor. _EarthquakePrevention

Large earthquakes have killed millions of people, and are a constant threat to hundreds of millions of people living in cities within prominent seismic zones. If there were any possible way to reduce the deadly danger in which these people are living, earth science must investigate the possibility.

Deep injection of fluids into the Earth's crust has the potential to trigger earthquakes, typically small, multiple quakes. Do not confuse this type of deep fluid injection with fracking for oil or gas. The two things are not the same at all.

"Injection induced earthquakes" are NOT caused by hydrofracturing. Injection of fluids for the purpose of waste disposal or well stimulation is NOT "fracking." Injection of fluids CAN induce earthquakes in some circumstances. Hydrofracturing has NOT been found to induce earthquakes. _Injection Induced Earthquakes Reference

An interesting case mentioned in the New York Times of 1 Jan 2012 (yesterday), is a series of small earthquakes in the Youngstown, Ohio, area, associated with the deep injection of waste fluids into the Earth's crust:

An official in Ohio said on Sunday that the underground disposal of wastewater from natural-gas drilling operations would remain halted in the Youngstown area until scientists could analyze data from the most recent of a string of earthquakes there.

The latest quake, the 11th since mid-March, occurred Saturday afternoon and with a magnitude of 4.0 was the strongest yet....a 2.7-magnitude temblor on Dec. 24, showed that it occurred less than 2,000 feet below the well. Because of a lack of data, depth estimates of earlier earthquakes had been far less precise.

... Scientists had suspected that some of the wastewater might have migrated into deeper rock formations, allowing an ancient fault to slip. Similar links between disposal wells and earthquakes have been suspected in Arkansas and Texas. _NYT

Injection-induced earthquakes have been noted in Germany in 1997, in Colorado in the 1990s, in Texas, and Arkansas.

This reference website contains over 130 references to reports of injection associated quakes. The association between deep crust fluid injection and small earthquakes appears to be well founded. But it is important to note that there is no such association between fracking and earthquakes. Keep that distinction in mind.

Geothermal power at the Geysers in Lake County, California, has been associated with thousands of tiny earthquakes above magnitude 1 since 1975 when the resource was tapped.

Earthquakes are triggered by a number of different things, including the construction of hydroelectric dams.

Depth of the reservoir is the most important factor, but the volume of water also plays a significant role in triggering earthquakes.

RIS [Reservoir Induced Seismicity] can be immediately noticed during filling periods of reservoirs.

RIS can happen immediately after the filling of a reservoir or after a certain time lag.

It would be best for humans to invest in the best accelerated research possible to clearly and unequivocally define the risks and benefits of small scale induced seismicity. One of the best ways of doing this would be for seismic scientists to work closely with deep drilling enterprises which also involve the deep injection of fluids into the earth's crust. By piggy-backing onto economic activity which is already being done, seismologists can increase the detail of their seismic maps, and can also collect abundant data on the impact of deep crustal fluid injection into different fault configurations.

The risk of causing small earthquakes associated with deep geothermal drilling for enhanced geothermal power, and in CO2 sequestration injection into the crust, are both real -- although perhaps minimal. Whether such injections will serve to reduce the risk of later larger earthquakes is something that needs to be determined.

One thing is very clear, however: While lefty-Luddite greens of the energy-starvationist persuasion are screaming about the unlikely possibility that fracking might conceivably cause small earthquakes, the very real possibility that deep injection CO2 sequestration will likely cause small quakes is ignored by the same activists.

If there is a way to prevent large, destructive earthquakes by triggering multiple smaller quakes in a prophylactic manner, such technologies should be studied very carefully and expeditiously.

Part of this article was taken from a previous article at Al Fin Energy.

Complexity, Causation, and Crucial Failures of Science

Khan Academy Video: Correlation and Causality
The confusion of correlation with causation is a common mistake among journalists, celebrities, academics, and political activists -- not to mention ordinary people. It is difficult to blame one for making this mistake, since modern media -- even much of "scientific media" -- is drowning in this error.

If you do not have a grip on the distinction between correlation and causation, then you do not have a prayer of understanding the deeper issues that will be touched on here. Therefore, we will take a look at "Hill's Criteria of Causation," which are applied to possible causal links in the field of medicine and public health.

1. Temporal Relationship:

Exposure always precedes the outcome. If factor "A" is believed to cause a disease, then it is clear that factor "A" must necessarily always precede the occurrence of the disease. This is the only absolutely essential criterion. This criterion negates the validity of all functional explanations used in the social sciences, including the functionalist explanations that dominated British social anthropology for so many years and the ecological functionalism that pervades much American cultural ecology.


2. Strength:

This is defined by the size of the association as measured by appropriate statistical tests. The stronger the association, the more likely it is that the relation of "A" to "B" is causal. For example, the more highly correlated hypertension is with a high sodium diet, the stronger is the relation between sodium and hypertension. Similarly, the higher the correlation between patrilocal residence and the practice of male circumcision, the stronger is the relation between the two social practices.


3. Dose-Response Relationship:

An increasing amount of exposure increases the risk. If a dose-response relationship is present, it is strong evidence for a causal relationship. However, as with specificity (see below), the absence of a dose-response relationship does not rule out a causal relationship. A threshold may exist above which a relationship may develop. At the same time, if a specific factor is the cause of a disease, the incidence of the disease should decline when exposure to the factor is reduced or eliminated. An anthropological example of this would be the relationship between population growth and agricultural intensification. If population growth is a cause of agricultural intensification, then an increase in the size of a population within a given area should result in a commensurate increase in the amount of energy and resources invested in agricultural production. Conversely, when a population decrease occurs, we should see a commensurate reduction in the investment of energy and resources per acre. This is precisely what happened in Europe before and after the Black Plague. The same analogy can be applied to global temperatures. If increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere causes increasing global temperatures, then "other things being equal", we should see both a commensurate increase and a commensurate decrease in global temperatures following an increase or decrease respectively in CO2 levels in the atmosphere.


4. Consistency:

The association is consistent when results are replicated in studies in different settings using different methods. That is, if a relationship is causal, we would expect to find it consistently in different studies and among different populations. This is why numerous experiments have to be done before meaningful statements can be made about the causal relationship between two or more factors. For example, it required thousands of highly technical studies of the relationship between cigarette smoking and cancer before a definitive conclusion could be made that cigarette smoking increases the risk of (but does not cause) cancer. Similarly, it would require numerous studies of the difference between male and female performance of specific behaviors by a number of different researchers and under a variety of different circumstances before a conclusion could be made regarding whether a gender difference exists in the performance of such behaviors.


5. Plausibility:

The association agrees with currently accepted understanding of pathological processes. In other words, there needs to be some theoretical basis for positing an association between a vector and disease, or one social phenomenon and another. One may, by chance, discover a correlation between the price of bananas and the election of dog catchers in a particular community, but there is not likely to be any logical connection between the two phenomena. On the other hand, the discovery of a correlation between population growth and the incidence of warfare among Yanomamo villages would fit well with ecological theories of conflict under conditions of increasing competition over resources. At the same time, research that disagrees with established theory is not necessarily false; it may, in fact, force a reconsideration of accepted beliefs and principles.


6. Consideration of Alternate Explanations:

In judging whether a reported association is causal, it is necessary to determine the extent to which researchers have taken other possible explanations into account and have effectively ruled out such alternate explanations. In other words, it is always necessary to consider multiple hypotheses before making conclusions about the causal relationship between any two items under investigation.


7. Experiment:

The condition can be altered (prevented or ameliorated) by an appropriate experimental regimen.


8. Specificity:

This is established when a single putative cause produces a specific effect. This is considered by some to be the weakest of all the criteria. The diseases attributed to cigarette smoking, for example, do not meet this criteria. When specificity of an association is found, it provides additional support for a causal relationship. However, absence of specificity in no way negates a causal relationship. Because outcomes (be they the spread of a disease, the incidence of a specific human social behavior or changes in global temperature) are likely to have multiple factors influencing them, it is highly unlikely that we will find a one-to-one cause-effect relationship between two phenomena. Causality is most often multiple. Therefore, it is necessary to examine specific causal relationships within a larger systemic perspective.


9. Coherence:

The association should be compatible with existing theory and knowledge. In other words, it is necessary to evaluate claims of causality within the context of the current state of knowledge within a given field and in related fields. What do we have to sacrifice about what we currently know in order to accept a particular claim of causality. What, for example, do we have to reject regarding our current knowledge in geography, physics, biology and anthropology in order to accept the Creationist claim that the world was created as described in the Bible a few thousand years ago? Similarly, how consistent are racist and sexist theories of intelligence with our current understanding of how genes work and how they are inherited from one generation to the next? However, as with the issue of plausibility, research that disagrees with established theory and knowledge are not automatically false. They may, in fact, force a reconsideration of accepted beliefs and principles. All currently accepted theories, including Evolution, Relativity and non-Malthusian population ecology, were at one time new ideas that challenged orthodoxy. Thomas Kuhn has referred to such changes in accepted theories as "Paradigm Shifts". _Hill's Criteria of Causation

This is basic stuff which most basic and clinical scientists and physicians studied in the early stages of their training. But there is little evidence that many science journalists have given these criteria any thought, to judge by what they write.

All of the preceding is by way of introduction to the phenomenon where science gets bogged down by complexity and by a confusion of logical levels -- or a failure to recognise "emergent phenomena." (PDF)

An example of this type of science failure is presented in a Wired.com article written about a cholesterol drug which ended up making the heart disease in patients worse, rather than better -- even to the point of killing some of them. This happens sometimes in medicine, where all logic and data suggests that a treatment is most likely to be highly beneficial -- but it ends up being worthless or worse.

The story of torcetrapib is a tale of mistaken causation. Pfizer was operating on the assumption that raising levels of HDL cholesterol and lowering LDL would lead to a predictable outcome: Improved cardiovascular health. Less arterial plaque. Cleaner pipes. But that didn’t happen.

Such failures occur all the time in the drug industry. (According to one recent analysis, more than 40 percent of drugs fail Phase III clinical trials.) And yet there is something particularly disturbing about the failure of torcetrapib. After all, a bet on this compound wasn’t supposed to be risky. For Pfizer, torcetrapib was the payoff for decades of research. Little wonder that the company was so confident about its clinical trials, which involved a total of 25,000 volunteers. Pfizer invested more than $1 billion in the development of the drug and $90 million to expand the factory that would manufacture the compound. Because scientists understood the individual steps of the cholesterol pathway at such a precise level, they assumed they also understood how it worked as a whole.

This assumption—that understanding a system’s constituent parts means we also understand the causes within the system—is not limited to the pharmaceutical industry or even to biology. It defines modern science. In general, we believe that the so-called problem of causation can be cured by more information, by our ceaseless accumulation of facts. Scientists refer to this process as reductionism. By breaking down a process, we can see how everything fits together; the complex mystery is distilled into a list of ingredients. And so the question of cholesterol—what is its relationship to heart disease?—becomes a predictable loop of proteins tweaking proteins, acronyms altering one another. Modern medicine is particularly reliant on this approach. Every year, nearly $100 billion is invested in biomedical research in the US, all of it aimed at teasing apart the invisible bits of the body. We assume that these new details will finally reveal the causes of illness, pinning our maladies on small molecules and errant snippets of DNA. Once we find the cause, of course, we can begin working on a cure.

...The truth is, our stories about causation are shadowed by all sorts of mental shortcuts. Most of the time, these shortcuts work well enough. They allow us to hit fastballs, discover the law of gravity, and design wondrous technologies. However, when it comes to reasoning about complex systems—say, the human body—these shortcuts go from being slickly efficient to outright misleading.

Consider a set of classic experiments designed by Belgian psychologist Albert Michotte, first conducted in the 1940s. The research featured a series of short films about a blue ball and a red ball. In the first film, the red ball races across the screen, touches the blue ball, and then stops. The blue ball, meanwhile, begins moving in the same basic direction as the red ball. When Michotte asked people to describe the film, they automatically lapsed into the language of causation. The red ball hit the blue ball, which caused it to move.

This is known as the launching effect, and it’s a universal property of visual perception. Although there was nothing about causation in the two-second film—it was just a montage of animated images—people couldn’t help but tell a story about what had happened. They translated their perceptions into causal beliefs.

...There are two lessons to be learned from these experiments. The first is that our theories about a particular cause and effect are inherently perceptual, infected by all the sensory cheats of vision. (Michotte compared causal beliefs to color perception: We apprehend what we perceive as a cause as automatically as we identify that a ball is red.) While Hume was right that causes are never seen, only inferred, the blunt truth is that we can’t tell the difference. And so we look at moving balls and automatically see causes, a melodrama of taps and collisions, chasing and fleeing.

The second lesson is that causal explanations are oversimplifications. This is what makes them useful—they help us grasp the world at a glance. For instance, after watching the short films, people immediately settled on the most straightforward explanation for the ricocheting objects. Although this account felt true, the brain wasn’t seeking the literal truth—it just wanted a plausible story that didn’t contradict observation.

This mental approach to causality is often effective, which is why it’s so deeply embedded in the brain. However, those same shortcuts get us into serious trouble in the modern world when we use our perceptual habits to explain events that we can’t perceive or easily understand. Rather than accept the complexity of a situation—say, that snarl of causal interactions in the cholesterol pathway—we persist in pretending that we’re staring at a blue ball and a red ball bouncing off each other. There’s a fundamental mismatch between how the world works and how we think about the world.

...Although modern pharmaceuticals are supposed to represent the practical payoff of basic research, the R&D to discover a promising new compound now costs about 100 times more (in inflation-adjusted dollars) than it did in 1950. (It also takes nearly three times as long.) This trend shows no sign of letting up: Industry forecasts suggest that once failures are taken into account, the average cost per approved molecule will top $3.8 billion by 2015. What’s worse, even these “successful” compounds don’t seem to be worth the investment. According to one internal estimate, approximately 85 percent of new prescription drugs approved by European regulators provide little to no new benefit. We are witnessing Moore’s law in reverse.

...Given the increasing difficulty of identifying and treating the causes of illness, it’s not surprising that some companies have responded by abandoning entire fields of research. Most recently, two leading drug firms, AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline, announced that they were scaling back research into the brain. The organ is simply too complicated, too full of networks we don’t comprehend. _Wired

The author of the Wired article, Jonah Lehrer, provides other examples where medical science has foundered on the rocks of complexity, in the full article. He also alludes to philosophical theories of causation -- particularly the ideas of David Hume -- to help the reader to get a better idea of the scale of the problem.

Most people have not thought too deeply about cause and effect. For most lives, such deep thinking is completely unnecessary -- and probably counter-productive. But if one wants to better understand what is happening when science butts its head against the wall -- as in the examples given by Jonah Lehrer -- such thinking becomes unavoidable. Here are a couple of web-based overviews which you may wish to look at after browsing through the Wikipedia entry "Causality:"

A brief overview of philosophical idas about causality from informationphilosopher.com

A look at the metaphysics of causation from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Here is the problem that human science faces, as I see it: We do not truly understand the mechanisms of what is happening within us and around us at any scale, but we wish to. In order to understand these underlying mechanisms -- in the absence of a valid overarching theory -- we are forced to collect a large amount of data, which we can only correlate in fairly crude ways.

Even as our computational machines improve along with our methods of correlation, we must still face up to the fact that "correlation is not causation." And even as we approach theories, hypotheses, and explanations which appear to be valid on one logical level, we are liable to be completely stymied when these explanations fail on higher and more emergent levels.

The intractability of many problems in science forced the reluctant, back-door acceptance by part of mainstream science, of some of the ideas of complexity, chaos, and paradoxical causality.

But most "bad science" of today is merely the failure of scientists to scrupulously stick to the rules of the scientific method. In other words, modern climate science is not unreliable and untrustworthy due to the chaotic nature of climate. Modern climate science is untrustworthy because the most powerful and best-connected of the group are willing to lie, obscure, strong-arm, and cover up the many weaknesses of their arguments and theories in order to enlarge their influence and power. That has everything to do with human weakness, greed, and immorality, and nothing to do with deep level difficulties in science.

Many observers of science -- and even many scientists -- feel that philosophy has been superceded by the power of modern science. But that is not actually true. In fact, the more powerful the science, the more it needs a sound philosophical underpinning. But that is easier said than done.

More on this topic -- including an attempt to clarify many of the most critical ideas in simpler language -- at a later date.

2012: Coming Up On the Future of Flight

Wired.co.uk Terrafugia Transition

100 Transitions have been reserved -- that's a backlog worth some $25 million (£16m). Terrafugia hopes to begin delivery of the flying cars late 2012, with a starting price around $279,000. _Wired.co.uk

Stratolaunch
Burt Rutan and Paul Allen aim to build a giant stratospheric space launch plane out of the parts of two used Boeing 747s. It will use 6 747 jet engines and will have the widest wing span of any plane in the air. Besides saving rocket fuel, an airborne mobile space launcher allows insertion into the widest range of Earth orbits available.

Stratolaunch

...Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, joins super-wealthy entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos in looking to the heavens for his next venture, as NASA turns to the private sector for help getting to space.

...Carrying a rocket to high altitude means it needs less fuel, thereby saving weight and money. Much of the fuel needed to launch a rocket is needed just to get above the dense lower levels of the atmosphere. At 30,000 feet more than half of the density of the atmosphere would be below the rocket. Beyond saving fuel, air-launching a rocket allows engineers to design more efficient rocket nozzles because they’re operating in the thinner parts of the atmosphere. _Wired

Besides supplying the rocket component of the Stratolaunch system, Elon Musk's SpaceX is moving ahead in the development of a fully reusable 3 stage ground based space launch system:

Fully Reusable SpaceX 3 Stage Launch System
Elon Musk wants to become an important supplier to the International Space Station, as well as a successful satellite launch company. And that's not all. Elon Musk wants to begin sending SpaceX missions to Mars in as early as 10 years time.

Here is a Space.com article looking at some other reusable rocket systems which are aiming to compete with SpaceX.

The "12 Most Anticipated Spaceflight-Associated Missions of 2012":

In 2012, the first of these private vehicles is set to make its maiden voyage to the orbiting laboratory [ISS]. The Dragon space capsule developed by Hawthorne, Calif., company Space Exploration Technology (SpaceX) is scheduled to launch atop the company's Falcon 9 rocket Feb. 7. A few days later, the craft is due to autonomously rendezvous with the space station. When it comes within range, the astronauts aboard the station will grab hold of it with the station's robotic arm and berth it to the outpost.

...Another burgeoning field of commercial spaceflight is the suborbital space tourist industry. A leader in this market is Mojave, Calif.-based Virgin Galactic, headed by British billionaire Sir Richard Branson. Virgin Galactic plans to fly paying passengers on suborbital joy rides to the edge of space and back, initially at $200,000 a pop.

Virgin Galactic's vehicles, the space plane SpaceShipTwo and its mothership WhiteKnightTwo, have so far made gliding test flights. The first powered flights have not been announced, but experts are hoping to see SpaceShipTwo's rocket engines ignited for flights sometime in 2012. These test flights will be a major step toward flying space tourists, more than 400 of whom have already paid in full.

...Twelve spaceflyers are scheduled to travel to the space station on four different launches in 2012. These men and women will spend around six months each living and working in space, performing experiments in a wide range of sciences inside humanity's only microgravity laboratory. _Space.com

And don't forget Robert Bigelow and his Bigelow Aerospace inflatable space habitats and hotels. Bigelow has already launched two small versions of his inflatable habitat, and is waiting for reliable private transport to space to get his space hotel business off the ground. In the meantime, he is collaborating with the Arab Emirates Institution for Advanced Science and Technology, to help advance human spaceflight.

Finally, here is a look at some lighter-than-air approaches to both orbital and sub-orbital flight, which may see some advancement during the year 2012.