Haircuts From Hell

In the biblical story of Samson & Delilah, the Philistines managed to take away Samson's superhuman strength by having the beautiful Delilah coax him to reveal the secret of his power -- his hair.  They shaved his head while he was sleeping, gouged out his eyes and turned him into a slave.

Two of the lessons that can be learned from this tale are these: (1) Hair is really, really important and (2) a bad haircut can totally ruin your day.

Since Samson's times people have invested a great deal of  time, effort, and money in their hair.  There is little doubt that hair wields power -- perhaps not in terms of physical strength but in its influence on perceptions of attractiveness and the associated social benefits that can bring.  The effects of a bad haircut on self-esteem and self-confidence can be devastating, as they were for Samson, but a good one can dramatically improve our self perceptions.  The search for the perfect cut is a modern quest for the Holy Grail.  And for some of us just as elusive.

Hair is very big business. Americans spend about $20 billion per year on hair care (Small Business Development Center Network, 2014) and the global total is about $80 billion (Statistica, 2014). The average male in the U.S. spends $28 per haircut, and the average woman spends $44 (U.S. News & World Report, 2014).  My own haircuts currently cost $25 including tip. 

About 12 years ago I found a barber/stylist that comes as close to giving me the perfect haircut reliably as any I've encountered.  She was working in a local barber shop as one of several barbers.  This was a place where you don't make an appointment, you just show up.  If your favorite person is free, fine.  If not you can either wait your turn or take the next available barber.  She was new and didn't have many regular customers, so she was available one day when the guy I had been going to (with mixed results) was busy, so I decided to give her a shot.  I explained my unique problems and preferences which usually flummox barbers, even though they pretend to know just what to do to accommodate them.  Not only did she listen and understand, but she followed through with one of the best haircuts in a long time.

Naturally I sought her out the next time, but my hopes weren't terrifically high.  Experience has taught me that even the same barber often follows a good haircut with a "haircut from hell."  For example, before I moved here I went to a barber in Ohio for many years whose overall percentage was pretty good, but the quality varied a lot depending on how wrapped up he got in his hunting stories or his political tirades.  Lo and behold, the second haircut from my new barber was also good,  as were the next dozen or so.

When she moved to a beauty salon a few doors down from the barber shop I moved too.  Then that shop found new quarters a short distance away and again I followed.  Then she moved to a salon closer to where she lived but about 10 miles away for me.  Didn't matter, I made the monthly pilgrimage.  Then she went into business for herself and opened a hair salon with a partner that is located a bit closer to me but still 5 miles away.  I followed along.  I remain fiercely loyal and I just hope she doesn't retire soon and that when she does I won't have any hair left anyway.  Occasionally she messes up but the ratio of good cuts to bad is so high I don't mind.

My wife has not been so lucky.  In fact, in our 45+ years of marriage I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she has returned from a stylist happy with the result.  She always has such high hopes when she leaves for her appointment and they are almost always dashed.  I have learned to keep a low profile when she returns lest I get trapped into the husband's nightmare question, "how does it look?"

Much of the problem is that both of us have naturally curly hair.  Those of you who have straight hair often tell us you are envious and wish you had hair that was naturally curly.  No. Trust me, you don't.  What you don't realize is that our hair has a mind of its own that couldn't care less about things like symmetry or homogeneity.  In other words, it does whatever IT wants to do, even if that makes you look like a first class dufus.  For example, I have a wave in the front top area of my head that -- if cut improperly -- will rise up like a cobra searching for something to strike.  My wife's curls are tighter in some areas than others, sometimes giving her a hair profile that looks a bit like a potato that has been too long in a microwave.

These are challenges that very few barbers can handle effectively and consistently. To do so requires being something of a "hair whisperer,"  a person who can determine the nuances of curls and waves and project how they will react to a snip here and a snip there.  It also requires understanding that wavy/curly hair of varying lengths reacts dynamically to climatic conditions of humidity and heat by tightening and relaxing to varying degrees.  What looks like a good cut leaving the shop can easily become a scary mess the next day. You can see why I'm so dedicated to my current barber, who is all the more praiseworthy because she herself has straight hair.

Small children often cry when they are taken for their first haircut, and they are entirely justified.  They may be sensing the lesson of Samson and lifetime of "hair angst" that lies ahead.

Still Love Those Changes of Seasons????

I'm mean.  As I sit here in the Hawai'i sunshine sipping my coffee on my lanai watching humpback whales splashing in the bay below my house, I can't help but think of all the poor souls on the mainland suffering from this winter of '15.  I'm mean because I am gloating and snickering and want to rub it in.....

To quickly review, I was born and raised on the mainland U.S. and spent the last 30 years before retirement in Ohio, where the winters were...well, not as nice as they are here in Hawai'i.  About six years ago I ran across the following parody of a yuppy diary that is about those wonderful changes of seasons (which I don't miss at all -- see What Do Snowbirds, Humpbacks, and Cruise Ships Have In Common?) and it seems like the right time to reprint it.  I suspect those of you in or near the Boston area may particularly identify with the sentiment being expressed, given you are having one of the worst winters on record.

Enjoy!  (heh, heh....)

“Dear Diary: Ohio Winters:

Aug. 12 - Moved into our new home in Ohio. It is so beautiful here. The hills and river valleys are so picturesque. I have a beautiful old oak tree in my front yard. Can hardly wait to see the change in the seasons. This is truly God's Country.

Oct. 14 - Ohio is such a gorgeous place to live, one of the real special places on Earth. The leaves are turning a multitude of different colors. I love all of the shades of
reds, oranges and yellows, they are so bright. I want to walk through all of the beautiful hills and spot some white tail deer. They are so graceful; certainly they must be the most peaceful creatures on Earth. This must be paradise.

Nov. 11 - Deer season opens this week. I can't imagine why anyone would want to shoot these elegant animals. They are the very symbol of peace and tranquility here in Ohio. I hope it snows soon. I love it here!

Dec. 2 - It snowed last night. I woke to the usual wonderful sight: everything covered in a beautiful blanket of white.The oak tree is magnificent. It looks like a postcard. We went out and swept the snow from the steps and driveway.The air is so crisp, clean and refreshing. We had a snowball fight. I won, and the snowplow came down the street. He must have gotten too close to the driveway because we had to go out and shovel the end of the driveway again. What a beautiful place. Nature in harmony. I love it here!

Dec. 12 - More snow last night. I love it! The plow did his cute little trick again. What a rascal. A winter wonderland. I love it here!

Dec. 19 - More snow - couldn't get out of the driveway to get to work in time. I'm exhausted from all of the shoveling. And that snowplow!

Dec. 21 - More of that white shit coming down. I've got blisters on my hands and a kink in my back. I think that the snowplow driver waits around the corner until I'm done shoveling the driveway. Asshole.

Dec. 25 - White Christmas? More freakin’ snow. If I ever get my hands on the sonofabitch who drives that snowplow, I swear I'll castrate him. And why don't
they use more salt on these roads to melt this crap??

Dec. 28 - It hasn't stopped snowing since Christmas. I have been inside since then, except of course when that SOB "Snowplow Harry" comes by. Can't go anywhere, cars are buried up to the windows. Weather man says to expect another 10 inches. Do you have any idea how many shovelfuls 10 inches is??

Jan. 1 - Happy New Year? The way it’s coming down it won't melt until the 4th of  July! The snowplow got stuck down the road and the shithead actually had the balls to come and ask to borrow a shovel! I told him I'd broken 6 already this season.

Jan. 4 - Finally got out of the house. We went to the store to get some food and a goddamn deer ran out in front of my car and I hit the bastard. It did $3,000 in damage to the car. Those beasts ought to be killed. The hunters should have a longer season if you ask me.


Jan. 27 - Warmed up a little and rained today. The rain turned the snow into ice and the weight of it broke the main limb of the oak tree in the front yard and it went through the roof. I should have cut that old piece of shit into fireplace wood when I had the chance.


March 23 - Took my car to the local garage. Would you believe the whole underside of the car is rusted away from all of that damn salt they dump on the road? Car looks like a bashed up heap of rusted cow shit.

May 10 - Sold the car, the house, and moved to Florida. I can't imagine why anyone in their freakin' mind would ever want to live in the God forsaken State of Ohio”

Like I said, I'm mean.

In Honor Of Funny Made-Up Words

Ok, time for another dose of my warped sense of humor.  Past installments have included confessions that probably fall in the realm of inappropriate sharing, or TMI (see list at the end for documentation), and so does this one.  But then, what's a blog for if not to bore, repulse, and dismay one's readers?

One category of humor that tickles me is funny made-up words or neologisms.  Several years ago I gave some examples of this in my blog, "Does Your Pokemon Have Rectitude?"  At that time I was quite intellectual about it, referring to a weekly feature by the Washington Post called Style Invitational, in which readers are invited to take part in various word-play contests.  This naturally attracts people with pretty good vocabularies and highly developed verbal abilities.  For example, in one contest  participants took ordinary words, changed them by adding, subtracting or substituting one letter and coming up with a new definition, such as:

• Ignoranus (n.): A person who is both stupid and an asshole.
• Intaxication (n.): Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
• Dopeler Effect (n.): The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
• Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.  

In another contest the challenge was to supply clever and humorous new definitions for existing words, for example a Pokemon redefined as a Rastafarian word for proctologist and Rectitude as the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.  

Of course, some might argue that although these examples require a certain degree of intellect to create and to understand, they also require a certain degree of mental disturbance to find them funny.  Yup, c'est moi, and today we're going to lower the bar considerably.  Be warned.

A number of years ago my wife and I received a forwarded email that contained a list of made-up words for things that "needed" to be in the dictionary.  For example, the new word that was offered for that stuff on the inside of a window where a cat or a dog sits looking out and touches the glass with its nose was  "Snotkiss."  And the experience of walking through your house but forgetting where you are going as "Destinesia."  

There were many others but now we can't find the list and don't recall other examples. However, a little searching on the internet produces many sources of new words that offer a rich supply of this kind of humor. (See, for example,  Rich Hall's collections of what he dubbed "Sniglets.")  In the examples that follow I won't give the source of each word in order to make for easier chuckling -- I'll give the links at the end instead.  A few of them I've tweaked and modified a little, and some I even made up myself, but I won't admit which ones......

First off are some examples that relate to cognitive malfunction (more common among Geezers), along the lines of Destinesia:

• Cranial Flatulence:  Condition of the brain to cease functioning mid-sentence, leaving the user of said brain with a blank stare.
• Linguistinosis:  In a conversation, knowing that you wanted to say something a few moments ago but not being able to recall what the heck it was when it is your turn to speak.  Distinct from Cranial Flatulence by being less embarrassing as long as you don't admit it.
• Taskensia:  (a) Closely related to destinesia, the experience of arriving somewhere in order to accomplish a task, but not being able to remember what the task was. (b) Attempting to resume a task but being unable to remember where you left off.
• Blinknesia: Leaving a car blinker on after completing a turn or lane change. Often a sign of oblivity (see below).
• Mallzheimer's:  The state of confusion that is produced by entering a shopping mall wherein one forgets the reason they came, their place in the world, and possibly their very identity. 
• Mallnesia:  A possible precursor to Mallzheimer's.  The phenomenon that occurs when you walk out of a store in the mall and have no idea which way you came from.
• Parkinesia:  Having no idea where you parked the car.  Often occurs in conjunction with Mallnesia.
• Confrazzled: The state of being simultaneously confused and at the end of one's wits.
• Wahoozled:  The state of being simultaneously awed and confused.
• Confuzzled:  Just plain confused.

Here are some that refer to more general social and cognitive abilities and states, including so-called "social intelligence."

• Alchological: Things that seem logical only after consuming large amounts of alcohol.
• Mouse Potato:  A person who is the online equivalent of a couch potato.
• Moronasaurus:  Someone whose stupidity has, or should have, caused them to become extinct.
• Bozone: The substance surrounding willfully ignorant people that stops facts and bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future and may be increasing in prevalence and density.
• Hypothecary: A person so convinced of his or her own intellectual superiority that he or she feels things like the truth are beneath them. Often attempts to expound their own virtue with so-called hypotheses that bear only superficial resemblance to logic, science, or reality.  Politicians, college professors, and religious fanatics are often hypothecaries and have very thick bozone layers.
• Obliviot:  (a) Someone who is completely unaware of their surroundings. (b) Someone who lacks any insight about their ignorance on a topic despite ample evidence provided to them by others. (c) Someone who seems completely unaware of what others in a conversation have just said.  (d) A person unaware of the beliefs, attitudes, and personality qualities of someone they are interacting with, even when those are perfectly obvious and important.
• Oblivity:  (a) The defining quality of an obliviot.  (b) The degree of one's lack of attention to immediate physical and social surroundings.  Usually quite high during cell phone use.

A few pertinent to businesses and other organizations:

•  Adminisphere: The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve but require great amounts time and effort to enact.
• Assmosis:  the process of seeking or obtaining advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than by working hard.

• Deficacious: Possessing the quality of seeming to be effective, but actually just full of crap, mierda, shiznit, and the like.  Most committees and organizational self-studies are deficacious.

• Jobfusticate: To arrange matters such that to other people your job appears to be so complex and technical that nobody else (least of all your boss) can understand exactly what it is you do, thus leaving you to do pretty much what you want the way you want to do it.
• Lingoist: An individual who speaks expertly within a specific field of interest, to the exclusion of layman terminology, making it difficult for ordinary individuals who are less knowledgeable in the field to understand.  Often lingoists are very good at jobfuscation.
• Metabusy:  Engaged in activity directed at becoming busy, usually arising from an inability to complete a primary task given the current situation.  Many committees, managers and administrators are metabusy to avoid being detected as deficacious.

Of course there's a very large category of words that pertain to miscellaneous items in everyday life.  I'll end with this one because I sense your patience is wearing very thin:

• Dallywaddle:  To take an excessively long time, especially involving motion on foot; to dilly-dally in going somewhere; to drag one's feet.
• Strumble: The invisible object that someone uses to cover up the fact that they really tripped due to their own clumsiness.
• Trilemma:  A problem whereby you have three possibilities to consider instead of two.

• Ohnosecond: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you’ve just made a BIG mistake.

   Ludicrism: A distinctive doctrine, system, or theory of laughable or hilarious nature because of obvious absurdity or insinuation.  Unfortunately ludicrisms are often adopted as truth if repeated often enough, particularly by ignoranuses and hypthecaries.

•  Irritainment: Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying but you find yourself unable to stop watching them.
• Accidue: Small pieces of broken glass, metal and other debris that remain at the scene of an accident for months after.
• Accidon't : To avoid accidue.

And now that your brain is about to turn to mush, here's the grand finale:

• Manabananabulimichick:  A bulimic rooster that likes bananas.

If you have your own favorites, please feel free to offer them in the comments or email them to me and I'll include them just to show that my derangement has company.....

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Sources and Resources
Sniglets-- Rich Hall
Unwords.Com
Urban Dictionary.Com
Unusual Words and Definitions
Cool Words
Jasperfforde.Com--Made-Up Words

Previous Snow Crash Entries Documenting Derangement
"I'll Be Right Back" -- And Other Famous Last Words...
It's a Guy Thing
What, Me Worry?
Why I Hate Liver
Geezer Olympics: Competitive Complaining

What's Fair? Perceptions and Realities of Income Inequality

In 2012 the median income for CEO's at S&P 500 companies was $11,952,669 and $8,124,542 for those at Russell 1000 businesses (Governance Metrics International, 2013). These figures are total compensation, including base salary, bonuses, vested stock options, company contributions to retirement accounts, and other perks.  The overall 2012 ratio of CEO income to that of the average worker was 354:1, up rather dramatically from a ratio of 20:1 in 1965 (Kiatpongsan & Norton, 2014).

While CEO compensation has increased over the years, the average income of workers has not, and in fact the average household income has declined 9% from its peak in 1999.  From 2011 to 2012 the income of average workers increased hardly at all, whereas the compensation for S&P 500 CEO's rose by 19.65%  and by 15.74% for Russell 1000 CEO's (Governance Metrics International, 2013).  During the 2009-2012 recession recovery period, incomes for 99% of the workforce rose less than 1%, whereas incomes for the top 1% grew by 31.4% (Saez & Zucman, 2014).  In 2010, nearly half of the income in the U.S. went to just the top 10% (Piketty & Saez, 2014).

Of course, income translates into wealth in terms of savings, possessions, and investments.  In a thorough analysis of wealth trends over the years, Berkley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman show that the income gap parallels the gap in overall wealth owned by different segments of society:

Despite an average growth rate of wealth per family of 1.9% per year, for 90% of U.S. families wealth has not grown at all over the 1986-2012 period. This situation contrasts with the dynamics of the average wealth of the top 1%, which was almost multiplied by 3 from the mid-1980s (about $5 million) to 2012 ($14 million), fell by about 20% from mid-2007 to mid-2009, but quickly recovered thereafter (Saez & Zucman, 2014, p. 24).

With respect to the middle class, their analysis is equally sobering:

Contrary to a widespread view, we find that despite the rise in pensions and home ownership rates, the middle class does not own a significantly greater share of total wealth today than 70 years ago.The share of wealth owned by the middle class has followed an inverted-U shape evolution: it first increased from the early 1930s to the 1980s, peaked in the mid-1980s, and has continuously declined since then...(Saez & Zucman, 2014, p. 24).

A few years ago I presented research that documented widely held misperceptions of how wealth in America is distributed (Misperceiving Wealth in America, 7/2/11 ).  Specifically, people tend to greatly underestimate the difference between the wealthiest and those with less economic means (Norton & Ariely, 2011)  -- the actual gap in wealth distribution is more than three times the size people think it is. The source of the error is that people believe the wealthy control less wealth than they actually do (59% versus 85%) and that the large middle class own more than is really the case (37% versus just 15%).

What about people's perceptions of the income gap?  Do they misperceive the size of it as well, perhaps by  underestimating the size of the gap? Also, a related question that seems relevant to informing economic policy regarding the gap is what difference in income levels do most people perceive as fair and reasonable?  Finally, do Americans differ in their perceptions from those in other countries?

These questions have recently been investigated by Michael Norton of the Harvard Business School and Sorapop Kiatpongsan of the Graduate Institute of Business Administration of Thailand's Chulalongkorn University (Norton & Kiatpongsan, 2014) and their results appear in the November 2014 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science. Norton & Kiatpongsan surveyed 55,000 people in 40 countries and asked them to estimate average incomes for CEO's  and unskilled workers. The respondents also gave estimates of how much they thought those in each group should earn. Norton & Kiatpongsan then calculated the ratio of estimates of CEO to worker income and also the ratio of estimates of ideal incomes.

Estimated pay ratios of CEOs to unskilled workers ranged from 3.7:1 in Denmark to 41.7:1 in South Korea, whereas ideal ratios ranged from 2.0:1 in Denmark to 20.0:1 in Taiwan.  Despite this variation in estimates of pay differences, in all 16 countries for which actual income data were available, the estimated ratio was significantly smaller than the actual ratios.  This was particularly true in the U.S., where the estimated ratio of  29.6:1 was considerably less than the actual ratio of 354:1.  Americans clearly think the income gap is smaller than it really is, underestimating its size by more than a factor of 10.

In terms of ideal income ratios, in all 40 countries these were significantly lower than the estimated ratios, and significantly lower than actual ratios for the 16 countries with income data, including the U.S.  This suggests that the current income gap -- estimated or actual -- is seen as far from ideal.  Norton & Kiatpongsan found that the differences between people's estimates of actual and ideal pay levels held across demographic groups (age, education level, and socioeconomic status), political beliefs (left, center, right), and beliefs about what factors influence income (level of responsibility, competence, effort).  Note that this doesn't mean that everyone agrees on what the size of the income gap should be, but it does indicate that there is a strong international consensus that it should be smaller than it is now. And the fact that ideal ratios are smaller than estimated ratios even for those at higher socioeconomic levels reveals that this phenomenon isn't just a reflection of those who are less well off wanting to take away the wealth of the rich.  As Norton & Kiatpongsan put it: "These results suggest that—in contrast to a belief that only the poor and members of left-wing political parties desire greater income equality—people all over the world and from all walks of life would prefer smaller pay gaps between the rich and poor."

The question of how to reduce the income gap is a difficult one and likely will involve considerable political debate, as it has begun to do so in the U.S. with calls to raise the minimum wage, place caps on executive compensation, restructure income taxes, etc.  It is nevertheless an important issue affecting not only worker morale and productivity, but possibly overall economic growth, as suggested by a recent analysis of historical data on the impact of efforts to reduce income inequality.  The authors of the study, economists at the International Monetary Fund, concluded that :..lower net inequality is robustly correlated with faster and more durable growth..." and "...the combined direct and indirect effects of redistribution -- including the growth effects of the resulting lower inequality are on average pro-growth."  It seems to make sense that a healthy economy needs people with enough money to make capital investments that create jobs, but it also needs those who fill those jobs to have enough income to buy the products and services that are created. 

It is also a matter of fairness. As Deborah Hargreaves of London's High Pay Center has put it, "Top chief executives worldwide often take home far more in one year than most people will earn in their entire lifetime...It is important that we put pressure on businesses and policy makers to develop measures to stop pay gaps opening up even further, and to share the rewards of success more fairly — for everyone’s benefit" (New York Times Opinion Piece, 2014).  This may sound like a conservative's worst nightmare -- some socialistic/communistic forcible redistribution of the income and accumulated wealth of the rich to the (undeserving) poor.  But a fair society isn't necessarily one where there is no income gap.  It is one in which inequality exists without disadvantaging or exploiting any segment of society and in which all citizens have the opportunity to live satisfying and enriching lives.

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Sources and Resources:

Misperceiving Wealth in America,  Snow Crash, 7/2/11

2013 CEO Pay Survey - Governance Metrics International Ratings

"Wealth Inequality in the United States Since 1913:  Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data."Emmanuel Saez &Gabriel Zucman.  National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper.

How Much (More) Should CEOs Make? A Universal Desire for More Equal Pay.  Sorapop Kiatpongsan & Michael I. Norton. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2014.

Income Inequality in The Long Run. Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.  2014 Science article.

Redistribution, Inequality, and Growth.  Discussion Note of International Monetary Fund, 2014. Jonathan D. Ostry, Andrew Berg,  & Charalambos G. Tsangarides

Can We Close the Pay Gap?  New York Times Opinion Piece, 2014, by Deborah Hargreaves.

US CEOs break pay record as top 10 earners take home at least $100m each | Business | The Guardian, 10/22/13.

Some Christmas Cheer: Liters of Light

Finally, another in my "Ray of Sunshine" series!  Suitable topics have been very hard to come by recently, buried deep in all the bad news about wars, political meltdowns, scandals, natural and unnatural disasters, etc., etc.  But here's something to fit the spirit of the season and counter some of that negativity.  It is about efforts to provide disadvantaged people around the world with a low-cost, environmentally friendly, and ecologically sustainable source of  interior lighting for their homes, schools, and businesses.  The impact on their lives is heart-warming -- and literally a "ray of sunshine."

BBC News Photo

"Liter of Light" refers to the main material used to create the lights -- discarded plastic liter bottles.  The bottles are filled with water plus a little chlorine to prevent algae growth, and then sealed into a hole cut in the roof with the majority of the bottle protruding below into the building.  Sunlight hitting the bottle is refracted into the space at about the same brightness as a 50-watt light bulb. The inventor of this device is Brazilian Alfredo Moser, who came up with the idea in 2002.  Although the original version works only during the day, a simple solar storage system has been developed that provides light at night as well, using a small photovoltaic panel and a battery attached to the plastic bottle.

Light is one of those things that we who are fortunate enough to live in countries with highly developed infrastructures take for granted, along with other niceties like clean running water, roads with only a few potholes, and centralized sewage treatment systems.  But the fact is that much of the world lives in conditions where none of these are the norm, including reliable lighting. Not having adequate interior light is perhaps hard for us to imagine, but it poses great difficulties for many people around the world for whom it is a fact of everyday life.

BBC News Photo

In Bangladesh, for example, daytime power outages are common in poor areas like Dhaka, leaving schools, homes, and small businesses in the dark.  As one student described the conditions before the bottle lights were installed in his school, "During power outages, our classrooms became so dark that our teachers often had to take us out into the corridor where we read under a bit of sunlight that managed to creep in."  The school could not afford a costly back-up generator, and kerosene lamps and candles were expensive, ineffective, and unsafe.  After a local organization called CHANGE installed Moser's low-cost bottle lights in the school the situation improved dramatically.  According to the same student, "We can now read and write under the solar-powered lights during the day, despite power outages or bad weather."  Other lights have enabled small business owners to be more productive during outages.  "It's helped hundreds of people - including sari makers and rickshaw repairers - whose livelihoods depend on having sufficient light" (BBC News).  A simple device made from trash, affordable by even the poorest, can make a huge difference in the quality of people's lives.

Even in situations where electricity is reliable, the savings in energy costs to people with meager incomes can provide much needed extra money.  Moser recounts "There was one man who installed the lights and within a month he had saved enough to pay for the essential things for his child, who was about to be born. Can you imagine?" (BBC News)  And there is a savings in terms of the carbon footprint of the bottle of light versus incandescent bulbs.  Being made from discarded material, the bottle lights require no significant energy to create and no CO2 is associated with their operation. In contrast, the carbon footprint of the manufacture of one incandescent bulb is 0.45kg CO2, and a 50-watt light bulb running for 14 hours a day for a year has a carbon footprint of nearly 200kg CO2 (BBC News).

Alfredo Moser

The impact of such a simple idea on the environment and on improving people's lives around the world is remarkable. Moser's invention has been adopted by organizations in at least 15 countries other than Brazil, from India and Bangladesh to Tanzania, Argentina and Fiji, and bottle lights have now been installed in hundreds of thousands of homes.  As Illac Angelo Diaz, executive director of the MyShelter Foundation in the Philippines put it, "Alfredo Moser has changed the lives of a tremendous number of people, I think forever." (BBC News) Thanks for the ray of sunshine, Alfredo......

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For More Information:
A Liter of Light Organization Website
Alfredo Moser: Bottle light inventor proud to be poor.  BBC World Service, Uberaba, Brazil
Liter of Light Wikipedia Entry 
Bottle Lights Brighten Lives in Bangladesh.  Aljazeera News

Dying to Know Why We Die?

First, an important disclaimer.  This is NOT a discussion of deeply religious or philosophical questions, like do we really die when our bodies give out?  I'll just note that physical aging and death is something most of us are quite ambivalent about. We acknowledge it will happen eventually, but we view it as something terrifyingly unnatural and maybe, just maybe, it can be escaped somehow -- if not physically then through some philosophical or religious mechanism. But notions like the immortality of the soul, kharmic continuation, and unembodied consciousness assimilation will be left for another time, maybe to be discussed over several pints of good beer.

My focus is more down to earth (so to speak) -- why do our bodies get old and die? Why is death inevitable?  Why, exactly do we die?  As difficult as these questions may seem, there has been some rather impressive progress in the last few decades in answering them from a scientific perspective. However, before examining the most current thinking on aging and dying that has come from the scientific study of aging processes let's consider some more informal notions that I've heard friends express, and my own pet theory of death which I acknowledge in advance as being quite preposterous.

Crackpot Theories of Aging: Fine Wine, Black Holes, Leaky Buckets and Heartbeat Banks

Unencumbered by the scientific requirements of reliable evidence, logical consistency, and demonstrated generalizability, people naturally come up with their own explanations of any phenomenon, judging them as acceptable mainly if they meet the "sounds-good-to-me" test.  Generally these explanations rely heavily on reasoning by analogy ("it's like....").  Some are more sophisticated, resting the analysis on some kernel of scientific truth and then distorting and overextending the principles to make unwarranted assertions.  Naturally, I favor the second, pseudo-scientific type.

An example of the "It's like...." category is the Fine Wine Theory.  Aging is like producing fine wine -- at first the wine is young, strong, and rather too sharp and unruly on the tongue, but then as it ages through natural chemical processes it becomes better and better, developing complexity, sophistication and substance.  However, after a certain point all wine goes bad, and the chemical processes finally lead to its destruction, leaving only foul-tasting vinegar. I suspect geezers from California favor this explanation because it can justify a "drink-the-wine-while-there's-still-time" lifestyle.

A sub-category of the analogy type of theory are those that are based on the idea that life is determined by some sort of finite resource that is slowly depleted until it's gone.  The Leaky Bucket Theory is an example, and the name says it all -- we're born with full buckets of vital essence but they have holes that slowly drain the life force until...well, you know. The Heartbeat Bank is a variation on this that years ago a friend suggested to me.  His idea was that we're each born with a certain number of heartbeats to our "account"  and when they're used up our accounts are closed, along with the lid to our casket.  This idea has great appeal to couch potatoes who can argue that they are simply being frugal with their heartbeats. To them athletes are squandering their allotment and will probably die an early death.  Notice how unencumbered this one is with the mountain of evidence that has now accumulated indicating just the opposite is true -- exercise lengthens life and shortens morbidity (see my earlier blog, "How To Compress Your Morbidity").

My own pet theory is an example of the pseudo-scientific category of lay theories.  These generally sound authoritative but if examined closely they are empirically unsupported and in my case, logically absurd.  My theory is that we are each born with an accompanying teensy black hole that follows us throughout our lifetimes, getting bigger and more powerful with each passing day.  Being tuned to our personal electromagnetic auras it begins to entrap our belongings, our bodies, our energy, and finally our entire life force, though things can temporarily escape back into our realm until the final total crossing of the event horizon. Note that this theory satisfactorily explains the common geezer experience of objects blinking in and out of existence. You know, those car keys, cell phone, t.v. remote, hat, tool, false teeth, etc. that suddenly disappear -- only to reappear some time later in the exact same spot you had looked ten times.  What else could it be??

Serious and Scientific Theories of Aging and Death

Needless to say, my Black Hole theory didn't entirely satisfy my desire for an authoritative explanation of aging and death.  In my search for something more intellectually and scientifically substantive, the best source of up-to-date, readable, and thorough information that I found is presented by the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR) and in particular their InfoAging Guide on Theories of Aging, published in 2011.  I highly recommend it.  Another excellent source is a 2010 special issue of the journal Aging and Disease, in particular the introduction by Kulin Jin.

The AFAR guide makes the distinction between theories of why we age, which are generally broad and overarching explanations, and more specific hypotheses about how we age, which are proposals about the particular mechanisms and processes of aging.  Theories about why we age tend to be mutually exclusive and contradictory, suggesting that not all of them can be true, whereas particular hypotheses about mechanisms of aging do not necessarily conflict and a number of these might be simultaneously correct.

Research regarding hypotheses of aging mechanisms has yielded a great deal of substantive knowledge on ways to slow aging and even prevent certain destructive processes altogether.  The following hypotheses have received at least some empirical support and consequently enough media coverage that they may be familiar:

• Free Radicals Bad, Anti-Oxidants Good.  Free radicals are destructive by-products of normal cellular activity and when we are young our bodies produce substances called anti-oxidants which repair most of the damage caused by free-radicals.  With age more damage accumulates, however, eventually destroying cells altogether.  Diet fads for increasing our intake of anti-oxidants were based on early research that suggested food high in these substances increased the longevity of laboratory animals.  Unfortunately more recent experiments "...have not yeilded conclusive results..." and experiments "...attempting to reverse the effects of oxidative damage by feeding experimental animals dietary antioxidants...have not yielded conclusive results" (AFAR -- see also Guide to Oxidative Damage and Aging).  Still, high-anti-oxidant foods include chocolate and red wine, so why not cover your bases, right?
• Your DNA dipstick is getting shorter and shorter. Called by scientists the Replicative Senescence Hypothesis, the idea here is that with each cell division, the protective caps on chromosomes, called telomeres, get shorter and shorter until the cell can no longer divide.  It isn't dead, but can no longer contribute to renewing the organ of which it is a part.  Although an important factor in aging, the telomere hypothesis has shortcomings as an overall theory because not all cells divide (e.g, neurons and heart muscle), and not all organisms have cells that replicate enough to produce senescence. 
• Starve yourself into immortality. Called the Caloric Restriction Hypothesis, the idea is that by reducing excess calories burned, less oxidation damage occurs. The operative word here is "excess" because experimental findings indicate that caloric restriction in which laboratory animals are maintained on balanced diets with 30-40% fewer calories doesn't change metabolic rate, but reliably increases their life span and "...retards almost all of the age-related changes mice normally undergo, including the onset of age-related diseases" (AFAR).  There's just one teensy little problem: "Rodents maintained on calorically restricted diets are thin, cold, stunted, and sometimes sterile. It is likely that such animals, although they survive to a ripe old age in the laboratory, would never stand a chance in the wild."  This makes immortality a lot less attractive to me, thank you.
• It's all in your genes: There has been encouraging research showing that altering certain genes of organisms can increase longevity.  For example, genetic alterations that reduce the amount of the growth hormone IGF-1 can extend the lives of mice, and alteration of one specific gene in the roundworm species, C. elegans, can significantly extend its lifespan. It is tempting to interpret this as evidence that aging is a programmed process that differs in timing from individual to individual because of variations in genetic expression and that genetic alteration holds the key to successfully extending our lives.  However, it's not so simple or rosy a picture as it seems.  Those genetically altered mice live a long time but are sterile and inactive, and the long-lived roundworms exhibit defects such as "...reduced ability to enter a protective dauer stage (a developmental state in which worm larvae can better survive harsh conditions), delayed development, and impaired reproduction" (AFAR). Finally, a recent Stanford University study in which the genomes of very long-lived humans were mapped failed to find any "longevity gene" that set them apart. According to one of the scientists who conducted the study, Stuart Kim, this means the genetic effect on aging "must be complex."

Note that many of these findings have a common element -- interventions that seem to prolong life do so at a cost to the organism's overall health and in particular to its reproductive ability. This means that its genes have less likelihood of being passed on compared to those of healthier yet shorter-lived individuals -- natural selection seems to have favored cellular processes that lead to declining health in older individuals and thereby to finite lifetimes.  According to AFAR, "...it is likely that tinkering with genes to improve late-life fitness could have a detrimental effect on health at younger ages." And as long as the detrimental effects do not prevent reproductive success, they could be passed on to future generations -- definitely a bad thing.

The most widely accepted overall theory of why we age and die is based on these principles of adaptation and selection.  Called the Evolutionary Senescence Theory of aging, the central premise is that "...Natural selection, because it operates via reproduction, can have little effect on later life. In the wild, predation and accidents guarantee that there are always more younger individuals reproducing than older ones. Genes and mutations that have harmful effects but appear only after reproduction is over do not affect reproductive success and therefore can be passed on to future generations"  (AFAR).  Not only that, evidence now indicates that certain genetic traits may have positive effects when we are young but are actually harmful in later years.  An example is gene p53, a gene that directs damaged cells to stop reproducing or die. This helps prevent cancerous growths in younger people, but may contribute to aging and death by impairing the body’s ability to renew deteriorating tissues as we get old..

The Evolutionary Senescence Theory is supported by considerable research and although it continues to be tested and refined, it remains the best explanation for why all organisms age and die. It also makes clear the care with which we should approach genetic modifications intended to make us live longer. 

Geezerhood, Ho!

Assessing Ebola Risk: Unbounded Irrationality?

In the mid-1950's cognitive psychologist and economist Herbert Simon coined the term "Bounded Rationality" to refer to the suboptimal way people sometimes reach decisions and assess risk.  Simon's analysis and complementary work by Paul Slovic, Amos Tversky, Noble Prize-winner Daniel Kahnemann and others has led to decades of careful research that clearly establishes the limits of our rational evaluation of information in making judgments about a wide variety of topics, including investment decisions, environmental threats, and health risks.

For example, our limited cognitive resources often lead us to rely on mental shortcuts and intuitive processes rather than careful, rational analysis, and this can lead to errors in judgements and decisions. One such shortcut that often comes into play is judging risk based upon the ease with which relevant instances comes to mind, the Availability Heuristic -- a potential event seems more likely if we can easily bring to mind examples of its attributes. Availability of information in memory can be influenced by many things: its recency of having been accessed, its vividness when initially encountered, its emotional intensity, or the frequency with which a person has been exposed to it.

Another instance of bounded rationality that seems relevant here is the context in which we think about a given potential event.  Research by Kahnemann and Tversky showed the dramatic effect that context can have on our judgments, which they called "Framing Effects" (this work is nicely summarized in Kahnemann's 2002 Nobel Prize acceptance speech).  In several studies they presented participants with simple thought exercises in which they were asked to choose which of two alternative courses of action they would prefer in hypothetical cases concerning, for example, an outbreak of an unusual Asian disease (substitute "African" for Asian and the parallel to our current situation with Ebola is particularly poignant)  One group of participants were given the following scenario:

Imagine that the United States is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimates of the consequences of the programs are as follows:

If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved

If Program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that 600 people will be saved and a two-thirds probability that no people will be saved
 
Which of the two programs would you favor? 

A substantial majority of respondents favor program A, choosing the certainty of saving 200 of the 600 people over the more uncertain possibility that all of them might be saved if Program B is adopted.

Another group of participants received the same background scenario (i.e., 600 are likely to die) but two different choices:

If Program A is adopted, 400 people will die
If Program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that nobody will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die

Note that in both cases the outcomes associated with the two choices are the same. If Choice A is adopted 200 people will be saved and 400 will die, but the outcomes are framed differently -- in the first case the certainty of 200 being saved is emphasized whereas in the second it is the certainty of 400 dying.  When presented with the second pair of choices, a clear majority of respondents favor program B, even though its adoption has a less certain outcome. As Kahnemann notes, "the certainty of saving people is disproportionately attractive, and the certainty of deaths is disproportionately aversive."

Paul Slovic's work also seems highly relevant to understanding the American public's reaction to Ebola.  His approach has focused on the factors that lead to people's emotional reactions to potential threats and that alter their tolerance for risk. Sara Gorman succinctly summarizes the results of Slovic's research as follows: "People tend to be intolerant of risks that they perceive as being uncontrollable, having catastrophic potential, having fatal consequences, or bearing an inequitable distribution of risks and benefits...The higher a hazard scores on these factors, the higher its perceived risk and the more people want to see the risk reduced, leading to calls for stricter regulation."  Note that it is the "dread factor" that leads to assessments of risk, and this may not be closely related to the objective probability of a hazard.

Is the current furor in the U.S. concerning the Ebola outbreak in west Africa a textbook example of bounded rationality?  

Health worker donning protective gear

From media coverage of the outbreak, you might expect that this would be the case, with Americans overestimating the risk and endorsing objectively ineffective extreme measures of protection to reduce the perceived threat. Media reporting of the outbreak has been vivid, frequent, and sensational, emphasizing the
highly infectious nature of Ebola, its deadliness, the horrible nature of the symptoms, and the fact that there is no known cure. This is this a news topic that is sure to grab people's attention and news organizations have been quick to exploit this, as they typically do with negative events. Far less coverage has emphasized the low probability of contagion in the U.S. because direct contact is required to pass the disease, and that the virus is short-lived outside of the host -- Ebola is highly infectious (a small amount of the live virus leads to illness) but not very contagious (easily passed from person to person).

CDC image of the virus

Paul Waldman of the Washington Post put this very bluntly with respect to television news: "...Ebola is a natural for cable news, where fear means viewers and it’s easy to tap into narratives we’ve seen play out in a dozen movies and television shows....There is sensationalist coverage everywhere, in which networks with time to fill spend hours on baseless speculation and nightmare scenarios...if you find yourself with symptoms including anxiety, sweating, and a clutching in your chest, you’ve probably been watching too much television." Print media is also vivid and dire in its coverage, with headlines like:  "Why Ebola is so dangerous"; "How Ebola sped out of control;" "Ebola outbreak: Why Obama is allowing Ebolaphobia to spread;" "New Ebola Cases May Soon Reach 10,000 a Week, Officials Predict;" "An epidemic of fear and anxiety hits Americans amid Ebola outbreak."

Surprisingly, despite the nature of this coverage, until recently Americans were relatively calm and rational about Ebola.  In a poll conducted by the venerable Pew Research Center in early October (2-5) only 32% were "very" or "somewhat" worried that they or a member of their family would be exposed to the Ebola virus, and most were confident (58%) in the government to prevent a major U.S. outbreak. However, this was before two cases were reported in the U.S. itself, and public opinion dramatically shifted just a short time later, as people began to focus on the certainty of death that these cases emphasized.  In an October 14th Washington Post-ABC News poll 43% were worried about "the possibility that you or someone in your immediate family might catch the Ebola virus" and 65% were concerned about "a widespread Ebola outbreak occurring in the United States."  Interestingly, most (62%) remained confident in the government's ability to respond to a potential outbreak.

Predictably, there seems to be stronger support for defensive policies that are perceived to mitigate the threat. These include some programs that objectively have a low probability of being effective and may even make matters worse, such as banning travelers to and from African nations hardest hit by the disease (see three excellent analyses of travel bans by Mukherjee, Garrett, and Wolfson).  Despite this, according to the Washington Post-ABC New poll, 67% of Americans now favor travel bans, which seems to demonstrate the power of the "dread" factor over rational analysis.

Perhaps the irony of the Information Age is that having more information hasn't necessarily led to wiser decisions -- in fact, rationality may be more difficult because it requires greater effort to evaluate and to integrate the vast amount of information that is available on virtually any topic. As the title of this blog suggests, we may be slipping into the age of "Unbounded Irrationality" -- unless we pay closer attention to the ways in which we reach conclusions and assess alternatives of action.