The Salton Sea is a disaster in the making. California isn’t doing anything to stop it
"California’s largest internal body of water is steadily drying up, exposing a lake bed that threatens to trigger toxic dust storms and exacerbate already high levels of asthma and other respiratory diseases in Southern California.
Yet there is something about the Salton Sea that leads many lawmakers to ignore the urgency and put off remediation programs. It’s just so far south — off the mental map of officials who represent more densely populated urban areas to the north, like Los Angeles. It is hydrologically unconnected to the Bay Area and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, which supplies water for so much of the state’s agricultural and residential use. It is a disaster in the making, yet it is an afterthought."
|  | The Salton Sea is a disaster in the making. California isn’t doing anyth...The Times Editorial Board As the California Water Resources Board met at the Salton Sea lakeshore to discuss the remediation program’s pro... |
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Researchers replicate just 13 of 21 social science experiments published in top journals
"The "reproducibility crisis" in science is erupting again. A research project attempted to replicate 21 social science experiments published between 2010 and 2015 in the prestigious journals Science and Nature. Only 13 replication attempts succeeded. The other eight were duds, with no observed effects consistent with the original findings.
The failures do not necessarily mean the original results were erroneous, as the authors of this latest replication effort note. There could have been gremlins of some type in the second try. But the authors also noted that even in the replications that succeeded, the observed effect was on average only about 75 percent as large as the first time around.
The researchers conclude that there is a systematic bias in published findings, “partly due to false positives and partly due to the overestimated effect sizes of true positives.”
The two-year replication project, published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, is likely to roil research institutions and scientific journals that in recent years have grappled with reproducibility issues. The ability to replicate a finding is fundamental to experimental science. This latest project provides a reminder that the publication of a finding in a peer-reviewed journal does not make it true."
|  | Researchers replicate just 13 of 21 social science experiments published...A study suggests scientists need to up their game on experimental design and statistical analysis. |
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| | The Cooper’s Hawk | The Outside StoryOnce, when I was living in a house on the edge of a forest in Western Massachusetts, an early-spring storm blew ... |
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"We ought to recognize that our own claims of truthfulness are situated in a belief system that is about values, too, not just about facts."
Facts have a history, and we ought to admit it. In op-eds, public lectures, and social media, historians take great pains to correct falsehoods about the past and the present (especially in my field, immigration history). But the basis of much of our profession’s outrage—that policy should be based on a certain kind of fact—itself has a history.
The Dillingham Commission had nine appointed members: three senators, three congressmen, and three “experts” chosen by President Theodore Roosevelt. Jeremiah Jenks, a professor of economics at Cornell University, organized much of the work and has been called by historians of social science the first “government expert.” The commission and its staff visited or gathered data on all 46 states and several territories. A staff of more than 300 men and women compiled 41 volumes of reports, including a potent set of recommendations that shaped immigration policy for generations to come. The commission’s agents had advanced degrees from the Ivy Leagues and large public research institutions like Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio State, and Berkeley. Economics degrees dominated, though others had degrees in sociology, law, medicine, political science, and anthropology (including Franz Boas, who wrote an important treatise on new immigrants’ bodies and head shapes for the commission). Twenty reports on immigrants in American industries formed the bulk of the work, but other volumes considered everything from conditions on transatlantic steamships to prostitution, debt peonage, crime, schools, agriculture, philanthropic societies, other countries’ immigration laws, and immigrant women’s “fecundity.” ...
Yet the Dillingham Commission’s utter wrongness—that Asians and eastern and southern Europeans would not assimilate, that they were a “problem” in the first place—ought to give us all pause, too. We ought to recognize that our own claims of truthfulness are situated in a belief system that is about values, too, not just about facts. It is telling—and salutary—that the AHA’s 2013 tuning of the history discipline lists empathy as one of the essential components of historical practice. To practice empathy is to be sympathetic and mindful of the complexity of our subjects and, I would argue, the limits of our own and others’ expertise. The burgeoning authority of social science and certitude in its modern facts encouraged statist solutions to social problems. In turn, it bolstered support for the very governmental overreaches in immigration policy at which President Trump lunges.
Historians should, of course, continue to call out the falsehoods and vitriol that are today presented as public discourse. But we should also recognize that our professional status has a history, rooted in the Progressive Era’s invention of credentialed experts, whose own hubris became baked into the rise of the administrative state. If the administrative state is part of the immigration “problem,” and it was in some sense created by our social science forebears, then we need to recognize that we are living out a paradox that no call for reason based on facts can unravel."
| | Not So EvidentHow social science experts helped create the idea that immigration was a problem for the federal government to fix. |
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The Day the Dinosaurs Died
"A young paleontologist may have discovered a record of the most significant event in the history of life on Earth."
|  | The Day the Dinosaurs DiedA young paleontologist may have discovered a record of the most significant event in the history of life on Earth. |
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Sum-of-Three-Cubes Problem Solved for ‘Stubborn’ Number 33
A number theorist with programming prowess has found a solution to 33 = x³ + y³ + z³, a much-studied equation that went unsolved for 64 years.
| | Sum-of-Three-Cubes Problem Solved for ‘Stubborn’ Number 33 | Quanta Maga...A number theorist with programming prowess has found a solution to 33 = x³ + y³ + z³, a much-studied equation th... |
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