Bikini Atoll, a tiny ring of islands halfway between Hawaii and Australia, is a world-class diving destination and home to one of the Pacific’s last great fishing grounds. So where are all the tourists? Welcome to heaven on earth, where the vestiges of hell lie just below the surface.
The allegedly poor performance of “the government” is a staple of conservative rhetoric, while progressives retort that private sector success is typically built on a solid foundation of public services and infrastructure. Common sense, however, suggests simply that the quality of government services varies. The United States Navy is a fantastically high-performing agency. When I visited Stockholm, employees of the metro system did a great job of helping me understand how to use the city’s bikeshare system, even though they had to speak in a foreign language and I was clearly not eligible to vote for their bosses. But when a few years back I needed to get a replacement recycling bin from the D.C. Department of Public Works, my then-roommates and I were plunged into a Kafkaesque nightmare. Even though these differences in performance level are clearly real, there’s very little effort to measure them.
A paper posted last week to the National Bureau of Economic Research website aims to counter that with a simple test. The vast majority of countries have signed international agreements committing them to the principle that undeliverable letter should be returned to their senders. So the researchers deliberately mailed letters to fake businesses around the world to see which postal agencies return them, and how promptly. Many of the results are about what you’d expect—Germany is efficient and well-governed—but there are some surprising high-performance standouts, including dark horses Uruguay and Algeria.
The methodology is straightforward. You take your subject and slide them into an fMRI machine, a humongous sleek, white ring, like a donut designed by Apple. Then you show the subject images of people engaging in social activities — shopping, talking, eating dinner. You flash 48 different photos in front of your subject’s eyes, and ask them to figure out what emotions the people in the photos were probably feeling. All in all, it’s a pretty basic neuroscience/psychology experiment. With one catch. The “subject” is a mature Atlantic salmon.
And it is dead.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a powerful tool that allows us to capture incredible amounts of information about what happens in our brains. It’s relatively new — neuroscientists began using fMRI in the early 1990s — and it produces colorful images that help bring numbers to life for the general public.
All of those things are strengths for fMRI. Unfortunately, they’re also all weaknesses. New tools vastly expand our understanding of the human body … but they also mean that we have to develop new standards so that different studies using the same tool can actually be compared to one another. Images of the human brain help make science more understandable … but they can also be incredibly misleading when the public doesn’t have a good idea of what the pictures show. Amassing vast quantities of information is great … but it also makes it easy to end up with false positives — coincidences of chance that look like something a lot more important.
Enter the dead salmon.
A fascinating interview that cleared up some misconceptions I had about fMRI.
The ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN today presented their latest results in the search for the long-sought Higgs boson. Both experiments see strong indications for the presence of a new particle, which could be the Higgs boson, in the mass region around 126 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).
