Lots of things happen when new niches open up

Mammals Grew 1,000 Times Larger After the Demise of the Dinosaurs
[Via NSF News]

Researchers have demonstrated that the extinction of dinosaurs some 65 million years ago paved the way for mammals to get bigger, about a thousand times larger than they had been when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The study, released today in the journal Science, is the first to quantitatively document the patterns of body size of mammals after the existence of dinosaurs.

The research, funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Coordination Network (RCN) grant, led …

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Conditions that permit large herbivores and carnivores were still around. There were just no more dinosaurs that filled that niche. Now mammals could fill them.

Darwin used the metaphor of a piece of wood to represent the ecosystem. Wedges, representing animals, were driven into the wood. In a complex, diverse ecosystem, there was little room between wedges and all of the wood was occupied.

Following a mass extinction, the wood had many bare spots where there were no wedges. Other wedges – animals – could then move in and fill those spaces.

Why we have security theater

TSA’s Failure Based On The Myth Of Perfect Security
[Via Techdirt]

As the complaints against the TSA ratchet up, various people are finally starting to point out why the whole concept of security theater is a farce. The entire setup is based on the idea that you can have “perfect security.” But, if you wanted perfect security, the only way to do that is to not let anyone fly, ever. As James Fallows notes it doesn’t make much sense to “spend limitlessly toward the impossible end of reducing the risk to zero.” As he notes:

Every society accepts some risks as part of its overall social contract. People die when they drive cars, they die when they drink, they die from crime, they die when planes go down, they die on bikes. The only way to eliminate the risks would be to eliminate the activities — no driving, no drinking, no weapons of any kind, no planes or bikes. While risk/reward tradeoffs vary between, say, Sweden and China, no nation accepts the total social controls that would be necessary to eliminate risk altogether.

Yet when it comes to dealing with terrorism, politicians know that they will not be judged on the basis of an “acceptable level of risk.” They know that they can’t even use that term when discussing the issue. (“Senator Flaccid thinks it’s ‘acceptable’ for terrorists to blow up planes. On Election Day, show him that politicians who give in to terror are ‘unacceptable’ to us.”) And they know for certain that if — when — a plane blows up with Americans aboard, then cable news, their political opponents, Congressional investigators, and everyone else will hunt down any person who ever said that any security measure should be relaxed.

This is the political tragedy of “security theater.”

Along those lines, the Unqualified Offerings blog (via Julian Sanchez) does a nice job explaining how the incentives line up to create this ridiculous situation. Basically, he notes that a terrorist attack on an airplane will happen. Some day. No matter what we do to try to prevent it. But once that happens, the response is going to be obvious: those who pushed hard for more ridiculous security theater that wasn’t implemented will keep their jobs and retain power. Those who pushed for more reasonable solutions will be vilified.

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And it will get worse. There is no sign that this one-way ratchet will ever be released. It simply leads to more power for some and weaker rights for the rest of us.

We have done much worse in our past when we were afraid.

We banned an entire group of people from our West coast to prevent attacks that never happened. 80,000 American citizens were simply banned. Carted off to internment camps for three years. The Supreme Court said that this exclusion was legal.

Ay some point in this forever war, we will see the call to ban certain people from American life. When The Siege first came out, I thought it was over the top and just wrong regarding internment of muslims or the torture of captives. Not any more. It could happen.

As long as we have people who are afraid and childishly want to be absolutely safe. And leaders who pander to that fear for their own aggrandizement.

Why the Peter Principle does not destroy organizations

I happened to run across a link to this paper – The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study.

The Peter Principle describes how people are promoted from one level to another, not based on how well they do at the new level but how they did at the old level. Thus, the conclusion would be that people would be promoted to their level of incompetence and then stop.

These researchers created a simulation to look at this. As their abstract states, “not only is the Peter principle unavoidable, but also it yields in turn a significant reduction of the global efficiency of the organization.”

But a reduction in a corporation’s efficiency would seem to be a large deterrent for success or survival. So the researchers ran other simulations to see if there was a successful strategy and they found one – random promotions.

A company where people are promoted randomly will be more efficient under more scenarios than one where people are promted based on previous competence. Promoting the most competent can be better under some circumstances but be horrendous under others. Promoting randomly provides the best average efficiency over all the scenarios.

This explains so much. all of us have seen how so many promotions seem to be random with little regard to actual competency.

Any organization that has been around for a while will have internalized this approach. It would have to in order to be competitive at all. People get promoted for random reasons that are then rationalized to be based on something reasonable.

Getting rid of the gender gap

15-minute writing exercise closes the gender gap in university-level physics
[Via Not Exactly Rocket Science]

Think about the things that are important to you. Perhaps you care about creativity, family relationships, your career, or having a sense of humour. Pick two or three of these values and write a few sentences about why they are important to you. You have fifteen minutes. It could change your life.

This simple writing exercise may not seem like anything ground-breaking, but its effects speak for themselves. In a university physics class, Akira Miyake from the University of Colorado used it to close the gap between male and female performance. In the university’s physics course, men typically do better than women but Miyake’s study shows that this has nothing to do with innate ability. With nothing but his fifteen-minute exercise, performed twice at the beginning of the year, he virtually abolished the gender divide and allowed the female physicists to challenge their male peers.

The exercise is designed to affirm a person’s values, boosting their sense of self-worth and integrity, and reinforcing their belief in themselves. For people who suffer from negative stereotypes, this can make all the difference between success and failure.

Aspiring female scientists and mathematicians still have to contend with the inaccurate stereotype that men are innately better at them in their chosen fields. On top of the challenging nature of their subject, they also have to deal with the dispiriting nature of the stereotype, and the fear that they might live up to it. This problem of “stereotype threat” is well known. It catches people in a vicious cycle, where poor performance leads to greater stress, which leads to poorer performance and even greater stress, and so on. Miyake’s exercise is designed to break that cycle.

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A really interesting exercise. The data indicate it is quite an effective tool. And it seems pretty easy to implement. I’d like to see more attempts.